Chapter Text
One midnight in the huge town of Shibuya, a town adorned with tourists wearing the colors of death and residents who wear their protection charms like parts of their life forces are stored inside, Sakuraba Neku is wearing his usual violets like any other day, strolling downtown to Udagawa with chilling winds on his back and pumping beats into his head, pounding, pounding to the rhythm of his pace.
“Hey, so how were the sightings?”
Neku instinctively dodges back into the alley he comes out of, back pressed so tightly to the walls that he’s sure the cold of it seeps into his heartbeats.
Around the periphery of his sight, a small group of teens, who can’t be older than seventeen, are walking down the streets of Shibu-Q Heads, shaking their heads and lighting cigarettes and spitting out gum. Neku makes a mental note to try scraping the coffin clean of them. The Prince doesn’t like strawberry-flavored gum, as far as he remembers.
“I don’t know dude, it’s just… a boy lying down there? What’s so cool about this whole thing?” One guy, in a black hoodie and a plastic stick sticking out of his mouth, pops out the lollipop and mumbles with a dismissing shake of his head. “I just don’t get the hype of seeing a small boy sleeping inside a fucking coffin. Maybe the glass coffin’s pretty by Shibuya standards or something? I just don’t see the appeal at all.”
“To be completely honest? You might be right on that,” A girl wearing a pink hoodie with splashes of red and gold everywhere concurs. “It’s just a boy inside a glass coffin. Maybe it’s some kind of PR stunt? What is there to even promote?”
“Hmm, as far as I know though, this ‘boy in a coffin’ thing kind of just springs up in the middle of, like, last year? Some locals told me so, anyway,” Neku can barely keep track of the features of every speaker of the group, seeing only the remarkable red and black and nothing else. “It’s just… supposed to be some kind of miraculous thing or something. Shibuya has always been popular as a hotpot for trends, so it’s not like they really need that kind of, like, magical attention.”
“Spoken like the philosopher of our group! I bet after we left that boy would get up for dinner!” Cues the cackling laughter of a group of arrogant teens who are too foolish to see through the veneer, and the frightened sighs of one who can. Still, even as they have passed through, it’s hard to extinguish one from the other. “I hope that boy’s gonna be well! It’s not exactly pretty sleeping there the entire day getting garbage thrown everywhere around him!”
Sharp-edged pain unspools across Neku’s palms, and he made a conscious effort to unclench his fists, to not get angry at the very thought of all the insults flinged towards the Prince.
They don’t understand. But that’s okay.
.
Neku gets to the Udagawa Back Streets, turns a sharp corner into the showcase area behind the mural, and there he is.
The first thing he does notice is the severe lack of hygiene around the area; either the sanitation worker has been too tired to deal with the relentless stream of tourist garbage, or simply no one would be able to deal with it. There’s really never a shortage of idiots who come by to leave marks and muck up the place, so Neku understands that too.
It takes him an average of ten minutes to clean off all the bubblegum left sticking onto the pristine, clean cover of the coffin. Then it takes him another ten minutes to clean off all the candy wrappers, water bottles and whatnot lying around the coffin, as if a messy preparation for a ritual, to finally return the site back to its original state.
Well, as original as it could be.
Neku takes a general view of the site again. The display boards surrounding the coffin don’t have their lights turned on now, but even so Neku can still see the clear traces of all the chaotic ways the Prince has been described in. Some have described him to have risen from the earth itself. Some have speculated he is a monster defeated and cursed into an unending sleep.
Neku can still smell the deep stench of the Shibuya River off its lids.
Neku sits down to the left of the Prince, thighs nearly touching the freezing cover of the coffin. He hugs his legs tight to his chest, burying his face into their small wreath of warmth before turning to look at the Prince’s face.
“Hi. It’s been a week again. And I do think nothing has changed yet.”
The Prince exhibits zero response, zero change in his limbs and body and face and fixed closed eyes.
“I don’t know if you have heard that last time, or you are just playing dumb. Or you really are a locked-up monster good for nothing. There’s far more possible reasons that you are completely nothing, but at that time it looked like the right thing for me to do. It still looks like that now.”
Neku half-gets up, one hand pressed tight into the gorges of the cold asphalt to support his body. He stares deep into the coffin.
Studying the features of the Prince has never been a fashion going out of style for the residents for Shibuya. Even for Neku, who has always found the Music of Shibuya an unnecessarily loud stream of nothing, finds himself a strict adherer to this habit whenever he and his friend visited the coffin.
Just like any other day, They were wearing smiles during the first time they found the coffin together. It had felt naive, to think that this coffin and the Prince belonged only to them, just because they were the very first people to discover him, but it had felt like magic. It had still felt like magic.
The two of them have loved staring deep into the coffin, for the entire afternoon, pointing out things the other could not have noticed otherwise.
Look at his face. He does always have a sneaky smile just around the corners of his lips, don’t you think?
You are just projecting yourself because you smile all the time. Let me point out what actually looks different this time. Look at his hands. They are placed on his stomach instead of chest.
Hey! That’s cheating! That’s not saying anything at all!
And so on and so forth they have bantered.
Some other time, their descriptions are that of a more sentimental manner, in ways that seem to threaten to lacerate the thin veneer of happiness they barely maintain around each other.
The Prince isn’t smiling today. Look, see how his lips tug slightly downwards?
Slightly downwards? At this point you are just doing whatever necessary to keep winning against me.
… If you say so.
Before Neku could feel it, he has pressed his face onto the coffin, approximately the same place that overlook the Prince’s features.
He rapidly shakes himself off the coffin, nearly giving himself a nasty sprain of his ankles had he been less careful. Maybe staring that deeply into the Prince’s closed eyes risks some measures of his sanity, the same ways some kids did invite troubles to themselves when they have done something inexplicably immoral to the Prince, or the coffin. Some jerk jock from a pretty prestigious high school allegedly tried to crack open the coffin by drilling into it with some power tools. The next day, a storm ravaged his family’s vacation mansion in the mountains. It had felt like a karmic comedy in some ways, but hearing it recounted in anyone’s language, and you can hear the slight hint of fear they have towards the Prince.
Neku picks himself up from the ground, skin slightly cut here and there from the force hurtling him down onto the hard ground. But the pain is so, so far away when he has so much else on his mind.
He sits down hard next to the coffin again.
“Were you mad at me? Or did I just scare myself for no reasons?” A bitter laugh, accompanying a slight scent of incoming tears, tears barely held back. “Do you enjoy me visiting you here everyday, at least until you’ve completed your side of the contract?
Silence. The breezes mock Neku.
“I think I’ve complained to you for a lot of times about it already, but I really, really hope that blood pact wasn’t forged for nothing.”
The Prince sleeps on, and the coffin stays locked.
Neku stands up, despair roiling down the pit of his stomach. At this higher angle from which he looks down on the coffin again, the Prince’s features look far less peaceful, far less like a child locked up and more… more like a jester preparing for their next show.
It hadn’t felt like catharsis to look at him again. It had felt like reading a book detailing every single mistake Neku had ever made in his life uncomfortably.
“I’ll see you later.”