Archive of Our Own ^beta

This is how Neku met Joshua for the first time:

It was the first of April, 2003. Neku was twelve. He still had freckles because he still sometimes went outside. (I know it's very difficult to imagine, but if you'll just suspend your disbelief for a moment.) And for your information, he wasn't lost in Shibuya, he was just getting his bearings. His family had finished moving to Yotsuya, Tokyo from the boonies, Niigata less than a week ago, and Neku had woken up this morning and hitched the subway to Shibuya— alone— on a pilgrimage for a CAT piece he’d heard about on the internet. The school where Neku would be cannonballing into his first year of junior high didn’t start for two more weeks, so it wasn’t like he had anything else to do. The problem with his current plan, though, was that no one seemed to know where the mural he was looking for was. Neku had written down directions on his hand before he left home, but compared to his hometown, Shibuya was practically labyrinthine, and he’d finally spent enough time aimlessly wandering the streets for even he to admit he was lost. Retracing his steps, he’d ended up back in front of that weird statue...

Hachiko. It was about eleven in the morning on a Monday, so it was crowded, but not quite choked. People waiting for people. A mousy girl with a My Melody charm on her phone. A few feet away from the main circle, a boy in a yellow ski jacket reading manga on a bench. Neku was usually someone who lived in the cities built in his own head. But as he stood in place, puzzling over his instructions, there was this weird flash of light in his peripheral vision, like a reflection on a mirror.

Maybe it was because it was so hard to read the tiny, sweat-smeared letters on his palm. Maybe it was because he’d been up the better half of last night, tiring out his eyes, unpacking and sorting old art projects and boxes of supplies. Whatever the reason was, the light seemed blinding and was excruciatingly distracting. Neku’s head snapped up. Where was it coming from? He searched the square, irritated. There it was again! Where— his eyes traced lines through the empty air. Around the edges of the paved area, the shifting of thin green leaves, skinny trees with skinny branches, entwining and choking each other, planted artificially in expensive soil— up there. The source of the light. Stillness, nothing, and then something flashing, bright as a bomb. In the trees? No— a balcony, hidden behind them. Actually, a restaurant patio. For some reason Neku was extremely curious. He sidestepped to get a better look, without realizing in particular what he was doing.

A table. A boy. He was sitting alone. He looked like he needed a haircut the navy cardigan he was wearing accounted for about sixty percent of his weight. The sparkle was coming from something he was holding in his lap, intentionally— shielding— trying to keep attention from with his hand? What was it. Neku squinted. Something, a, a magnifying glass?

He either didn't see Neku or didn't think that he was worth paying extra attention to yet. Fine by him. Neku followed the boy's gaze to a different boy, sitting on a bench below. This boy was taller and built more like a soda machine, the one wearing a yellow ski jacket and a bad haircut. He was reading some manga Neku couldn't make out the title of— a girl with a sword and a short skirt on the cover. Looking closer, Neku saw the intense patch of light on one page of the boy's book.

Someone with an untrained eye would never have caught that.

The positioning was perfect, Neku realized instantly. From where the boy with the book was sitting, the cardigan boy would be invisible, obscured by the placement of the trees. If ski jacket was focused enough on what he was reading, which he was, then he wouldn't notice the intensifying sunlight on the page. Wait, wait.

Was he…

Neku didn’t really remember jumping the balcony, but he was sitting at the empty table next to Joshua’s before he knew it. His sneakers were scuffed at the toes and his left knee had suffered a minor scrape, but the shoes were old and the injury wasn’t anything to make you blink. A waiter doing his damndest to rock a handlebar moustache glared at Neku’s back, so he ordered a lemonade. He studied his mark. On his table was a single slice of cake, some exotic flavor that didn’t look too sweet, garnished with lavender flower petals. It sat on the plate nibbled at but mostly uneaten. Next to it, a 1,000 yen note had been laid out on the check holder, neat and straight as a coffin.

Up close now, Neku could see that the thing semi-concealed in Joshua's lap was indeed a magnifying lens. It looked like something that might come in the entomology kit of a child whose relatives had terrible taste in gifts. With its bold black rims it was out of place in the hand that held it, which was more like a thin, papery spider. As for the enigma in the chair himself, he looked like no one Neku had ever seen before. He was jagged, and the space around him formed the shape of teeth.

By now he boy knew that Neku knew what he was doing. He made no move whatever to acknowledge his acknowledgement— in fact, he never took his eyes off the page on his victim’s book— but understanding had lowered itself down into the air and settled there. The lack of response was not because he was so focused on his task that he had forgotten about his surroundings. He watched his work with a sharp readiness, a scarecrow trembling for the first sign of fire. He was as aware of the gangly kid who had just jumped the balcony to gawk at him as a cat is aware of a knife.

After watching in silence for a couple of minutes, Neku said, “Where did you learn how to do that?”

Joshua Kiryu, without very much moving his lips, said “I was one of those gross little kids who fried ants.” And he twisted the glass in his fingers slightly, throwing off another blinding glare.

Neku nodded, equal parts disgusted and enthralled. "Wait," he said. The boy threw him a glance to be quiet. Neku dug his hands into his pockets to keep still before continuing, his voice a tone quieter. "Wait, why?"

"... Because I have a control complex? I liked seeing them burn? I don't know. Why does anyone?" The boy spoke like a ventriloquist. His speech was soft and ambiguously feminine, like all his words were rolled in baby powder.

"No, why— why that guy? Why his book? Why do this? Is there a reason or are you just some particularly diabolical asshole, like, a serial book sniper, is this what you do on the weekends... You come here with your magnifying glass, you buy a weird pastry, you sit at your strategically located table and you just pick off whatever poor idiots come here to enjoy anything made of paper by lighting their reading material on fire, just one by one, is that who you are, is that— is that what you do? What's going on here? I need an explanation."

"I went to school with him last year." The way he said it implied that there was more to the thought.

"And?"

"And on the last day he called me a dicksucking Addams family reject and accidentally slammed my hand in the bathroom door." He held up his free hand; his wrist was mottled with reddish-purple splotches.

"Oh." Neku sat back down.

“Anyway, my turn. How did you notice?”

“I’m an artist.”

“Hmm.”

“I mean, I have to look closely at like, light, shadow, how the light hits things and where the shadows fall and stuff. When I draw. So I’m sensitive to stuff like that.” Neku suddenly felt stupid, but continued to speak regardless. “I mean, there was this glint in my eye, and I was like, what the hell, where’s that coming from. And then I saw you up there, and then the light falling on his book.”

The boy huffed softly, sounding amused. “Are you really into chiaroscuro, then?”

Neku hadn’t taken art history yet. “That sounds dirty.” The boy pressed the back of his hand against his own silent laughter. “What?”

“Nothing. Why did you come here today? I saw you wandering around down there. You looked lost.”

“I was— I am— looking for a piece of street art by this one artist—”

“You like street art?”

“I’m passionate about it,” said Neku. His expression was one of barefaced honesty. “It’s this one artist, I swear to God they’re gonna blow up one day but they’re still kinda underground right now, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them—”

“Does this mystery artist have a name?”

“They go by CAT.” Says Neku. “Do you know them?”

Something inscrutable changed about Joshua’s smile. “Not at all.”

"But I, uh, I'm not very familiar with the area, so I came to this big dog statue—"

"The statue of Hachiko, you mean."

"Is that what it's called?"

“What?” Said Joshua, clearly in shock. “You don’t know the Hachiko story?”

“There’s a story?”

“Did… did you move here from under a rock?” Joshua could sense that Neku was about to deck him, so he continued: “Never mind. I’ll tell you. I’m fond of stories.“

The book lit a few seconds after Joshua had finished speaking. Neku was beginning to doubt it would ever happen when it did. First the smoke began to rise like ink in water. And then, like a goldfish unswallowing itself, the flame flickered alive.

Joshua’s lips twitched; the faintest hint of a crooked smile. “I’m God,” he said, jokingly.

Ski jacket screamed, and Joshua jerked the magnifying lens away, hiding it inside his sweater. He stood up. Even as the fire slowly grew, his victim was beginning to look around in confusion. Cardigan drew away from the table, backwards; the trees would obscure him from sight for now, but not forever, and it was definitely best to get going. "We should run." He said.

"We?"

"He’s not quite as familiar with the concept of poetic justice as you or I. Lens or no lens, if he sees you up here looking suspicious, he's going to think it was you." He was picking up his tote bag and slinging it over his arm. The next thing he said as a joking insult, but Neku took it and he held it and that’s why everything happened: "Also, follow me. I know shortcuts and you were pretty lost before.”

Neku looked back down. Ski jacket’s eyes met his. The fire consumed the pages of the manga, now reaching almost to his fingertips. His eyes flickered and he did not shrink.

Neku was sprinting through the twisting backstreets of Shibuya with an unsettling and fascinating stranger. His sneakers popped against the asphalt. "I'm not a tourist," Neku shouted after him. "I just moved here."

"Mm?" The boy lilted. He was trying to hide it, but Neku could tell he was already out of breath. Interesting. “Getting to know your new town, then?”

“I told you, I came here to see—” Neku hooked a hard right to keep up, almost crashing into the wall he’d been racing towards. He was having a hard time keeping up casual conversation while also running at this speed. "Wait, where are you taking me?"

"A shortcut, I said. Were you listening?"

"Shortcut to where?"

“Somewhere interesting.”

From Hachiko they'd been running for several minutes, now, so many twists and turns that if Neku hadn't been lost before, he certainly was now. It occurred to him that they must have ditched the boy in the jacket a while back, so he wasn't sure why they were still running full speed. (He also wasn’t sure why he was continuing to follow him. But there he was. Following him.)

They zipped straight down two red brick alleys, and as they turned another corner, Joshua stopped all at once. Neku had to focus all his weight into not crashing into him, backpedaling on his feet inches away. “Hey— whoa! Watch where—"

And then Neku stopped, because there was the CAT mural.

The skull at the center of the piece caught his eye first, and then Neku was seeing it all at once, a million times more radiant than the computer screens had conveyed. He found himself pulled towards it as if by gravity. The piece was an explosion of concept caught on a wall. Rainbows, hands coming out of hands coming out of keyholes. Something unfurling. There were red roses. Neku’s heart pounded wildly. He couldn’t possibly look away.

He didn’t realize it for a very long time, but it was seeing this piece, right then, right there, on that day, that made Neku firm in his conviction that he wanted to be an artist. It couldn’t possibly have happened any other way. When he saw the mural, for just one moment he was sure: the reasons for every bite of misery, every moment of confusion and desperation, every bewildering and life-changing sorrow he’d ever had had been coded into a different pigment in a paint in a color on this wall, and if he worked at it, really threw himself into it and pored over it, for weeks, with endless piles of notebooks and worn stubs of pencils, mapping each hue to a different universal truth, he could come to know the reasons why those things had happened, because if he could just understand why, then he would finally be able to deal with them; and for just one moment, Neku couldn’t breathe.

“Oh my God…”

“It’s pretty nice, isn’t it?”

“Nice? It’s—” Neku had no idea what any of it meant but he wanted to dedicate his life to it. His blood felt like Italian soda drunk on the sunniest patio. “It’s.” He floundered for words. “Amazing.”

“It is very good,” Joshua said, seriously, “it’s just that I see it a lot, so I’m desensitized by now."

“Yeah, well, I… CAT is honestly probably one of my favorite, if not— wait, hey!” Neku quickly turned around to find his strange new friend laughing silently again in that odd way, with his hand pressed to his mouth. Something twinkled in his eyes that hadn’t been there on the cafe patio; he seemed more genuinely amused now than when he was lighting someone’s manga on fire with a magnifying glass. For some reason, Neku was laughing too. He had just met Joshua, but he felt like he had known him a very long time. "You knew the whole time, didn't you?!"

"Mm, did I?"

“Shut up! How did you…” but then Neku was distracted by the mural again and breathed out, smiling in awe. “Oh, man…”

Joshua was watching, clearly amused. “Hey, it’s been fun and all, but listen. I have to go.” Joshua said. He began climbing the rusted, red stairs of a fire escape hugging the wall on one of the buildings of the alley two at a time.

“Go?”

“Places to go, people to see. It’s—” the boy stopped, straightened up his shoulders for a moment. He turned around, looked at Neku with an odd expression— as though he’d only just remembered— and said “it’s my birthday. I’m twelve years old.”

Neku realized something. He had had fun. This boy was bizarre and evasive and had just almost got him beaten up and was insufferably irritating, but he was fun and funny and interesting and he liked CAT, and somehow— Neku had never met anyone his age like him before— he wasn’t terrifying to talk to. Neku was suddenly afraid. He was never good at reaching out to make friends. He was always anxious talking to other people. There couldn’t be very many other people like this boy, people Neku could be able to be friends with. Neku realized that he wouldn’t see him ever again. He shouted after him, “What is your name?”

But there was no response. The boy had already gone away running.

And so Neku never did see Joshua again.

Until April fourteenth, when classes resumed at Sakuragawa Junior High. Neku saw him with all the other first-years at the entrance ceremony. He was easy to notice. Neku thought he had never met someone so unusual-looking. It wasn't that Neku thought of him as particularly attractive or unattractive— yet, anyway— but had more to do with how his manner gave off the impression that his uniform was somehow ill-fitting despite the fact that the size was technically perfect. In conjunction with his thin and angular limbs and his cornsilk hair, he altogether threw off the air of a living scarecrow. Neku saw him and he stared the whole time they were singing the school song. He kept staring while the principal gave his speech. He stared and stared until Joshua noticed him staring, and when he did, he saw Joshua’s eyes go wide, then narrow again. A moment passed through during which the two only made direct, expressionless eye contact, the understanding between them only implied, until, like a signal, Neku smiled.

The universe imploded. Joshua smiled also.

Through the sheerest and dumbest of luck, the two both found their homerooms to be class 2-B. Neku wrote his name on the chalkboard at the front of the class and stood with his shoulders half-mast as he relayed the name of his hometown. During role-call and introductions, Neku learned scarecrow’s name— Yoshiya Kiryu— that he had been born in Tokyo, and that it was nice to meet you. He then sat down and pulled a novel out of his desk.

The seat next to him was empty. As Neku set his bag down, a breeze knocked loose a handful of pink blossoms from the tree outside the classroom window.

"I didn't know you were going here."

“I didn’t know you were going here.”

Joshua's pencil case was blue and white striped, with Mezzo Piano characters on it. "Cute," said Neku. Joshua rolled his eyes.

“...It’s not a sakura tree.”

“Huh?”

“The tree right out there.” Joshua gestured with his head towards the window. Neku looked at it. It was pink, but aside from that, it didn’t look like a sakura tree at all.

“Well, duh?”

“It’d be nice if it were a sakura tree. Then with the big window on the left wall there, the whole classroom would be laid out exactly how Black’s homeroom is in Tin Pin Slammurai.”

“What?” Said Neku.

“Nothing.” Joshua fiddled with the pencils in his case, staring into space. “It’s actually a Judas tree,” he said, absentmindedly.

“Hey,” said Neku suddenly. The title of the paperback peeking out of Joshua’s desk had caught his eye. “What’s that?”

”It’s called a book.”

“I know it’s a book, stupid, but is it— is that The Boy Detectives Club? By Edogawa Rampo?”

Joshua looked up. “Yes. Do you read?”

“I read Boy Detectives. It’s my favorite book. All Edogawa Rampo’s detective books are my favorite!” Said Neku. He was so enthusiastic. “Do you like it?!”

Joshua’s expression was unreadable. He almost looked as if he were in disbelief. “I… I really do like it.”

“Are you gonna join the literature club?”

“I’m probably going to join the going home after school club.” Joshua’s face cleared and he smiled wanly. “I don’t really talk to people.”

Neku tried to keep his expression under control and mostly he succeeded. But his eyes were sparkling.

He was going to make the first friend he had ever had in his life.

“Me neither.”

When he left school that day, Neku thought that walking the corridors of his new junior high when no else was there was like walking along the bottom of a bog made of air, the cool dusky greens of the shadows in recesses, the seemingly ancient floors made of dark, soft planks of hard wood. A few years later, this thought— one of the handful of memories from this period of Neku’s life that would not one day, inexplicably, become murky and oddly vague— would make the time Neku spent at this school seem even more like a murky dream held up to the light. A pale blue shoebox full of loose polaroids smudged with dust and fingerprints, everything blurred and overexposed until he could recognize it at a distance but couldn’t tell you the details; the hallways, the Judas tree, the ink silhouette of someone who once sat next to him in class, face smeared beyond recognition.

After school, Joshua headed home alone, as usual. He stopped at Wildkat on the way, as usual. The chime on the door jingled as it shut behind him, as usual, Joshua a shadow slipping into an empty room. Late afternoon’s a slow time of day for a coffee shop; Josh was the only customer there. Hanekoma was behind the counter, recognizing him before his eyes even left the cup he was cleaning. “‘Sup, J?”

“Mr. H.” Joshua drew up to the counter, pulling himself onto a stool. Hanekoma started pouring him his regular: medium roast, milk, no sugar. Joshua had been drinking coffee since he was eleven and a half. Hanekoma usually switched it with decaf without telling him.

“How was your first day of junior high?” Hanekoma asked, sympathetically, as he set the drink down in front of him.

“Mr. H.” Said Joshua. He spoke as if he was choosing his words carefully. “The boy from two weeks ago. The one who said he was a big fan—”

“Yeah, the one you told me about.”

“He sits next to me in class. And he says that The Boy Detectives Club is his favorite book.”

Hanekoma began to brew a new pot of coffee. The lights over the bar gleamed softly, as if bringing the cafe in and out of focus. When Joshua wasn’t watching, Hanekoma flipped the sign on the door to read CLOSED. Joshua talked and talked and talked. About Neku, who was the first person Joshua’s age to speak more than three sentences to him in years, about the book Joshua was reading, about the cartoon he’d been watching, just about anything. Hanekoma mostly listened. It was a rare thing for Joshua to talk this much at once. There was the sound of the percolator and the quiet jazz drifting in and out and there was the way the deep yellow of the light made everything look, the dusky illumination in the places where it hit and the way the shadow receded into places where it couldn’t. It was like the cafe had become, just for then, an oil painting. Late, late into the night, Joshua talked, about anything, about everything, there, inside of that oil painting.