Archive of Our Own ^beta

The water

Takasugi was lying on the bed, his eye wide open, counting the eerie dancing shadows cast by the trees and tens of other whatnots on the wall in front of him. It was a dimly lit night of the new moon, and yet the fading moonlight managed to sneak through the gaps in the curtains, bathing the room in its pale luminance.

There was the sound of water. 

Among the clock, the crickets and the rattles of the frayed apartment served as his temporary hideout, there was a foreign sound and it was what'd knocked him out of his sleep. Water. It wasn't the rain, nor the sewage that ran too close to his window, but more of a late-night shower from an apartment upstairs, which took place at a very questionable time and had lasted for an alarmingly long period. 

Takasugi turned to the side, his eye peeled and darted through the room, from the holes on the shadow-filled wall to the moonlight-bathed floor covered in dust and chunks of broken cement, from the bookshelf flooded with empty cans and bottles to the table standing on three legs, from the chair with layers of clothes that didn’t even belong to him to the nightstand where a clock sat, filling his ears and conscience with its never-ending tik-tok.

If the clock wasn’t broken, it would be three o'clock in the morning, on a normal Monday night, and his forecast said it didn’t look like raining for the whole week. The darkness told him that his estimation of the time was roughly accurate, while the moon and the wind let him know that his forecast wasn't far from right. It meant that nobody should be taking a shower, and there shouldn't be rain. 

Still, there were the sounds of water, falling, splashing, rippling, slowly, steadily, annoyingly, coming to him through the ceiling above his head.

Takasugi turned again, this time to the opposite side, only to find himself facing a worse distraction – the closed wardrobe door, dark and wooden, silent and looming over him, threatening like a wicked giant monster. Normally it wouldn't be enough to make him budge – it was him that the world should feel intimidated – and yet right at that moment, Takasugi could sense his skin jumping at the sight of an insignificant wardrobe.

He sighed, and returned to his back, lying face-up, eyeing the ceiling. He could vaguely picture the pipes hidden behind the wood and the cement, above his apartment but beneath the one upstairs, seeing with his imagination the water running through them and causing the noise that startled his sleep. He was in the middle of a nightmare and yanked back to reality when he heard it.  

His nightmare was far from pleasant, but right now he wanted nothing more than to be able to get back there. He was chased down by a group of monsters, leaping through the dark and sprinting into the void of nowhere. It was, by standard, something a sane person should avoid for the sake of their stable mind. But Takasugi wouldn't, knowing that whatever a nightmare had for him, reality always offered worse. 

So he tried to sleep, directing his hearing back to the relatively explainable sounds from his tattered surroundings, ignoring the fact that some of them could barely pass as usual or natural. It was an attempt in vain. The water was there, falling, splashing, rippling, running. It never faltered, and he was forced to stay awake, again, facing an infuriating process of water from a bathroom to the sewage and his own thoughts.

At night, his thoughts seemed scarier. They were terrifying during the days, but at least then he had the daylight and his pathetic existence, and the things to do to maintain it, as distractions. He only had himself at night, and himself made a horrible companion, full of pent-up rage and hatred, most of them were towards him, his life, his existence, and almost everything alive, breathing, moving, running, like the water up there. 

The water didn't stop. 

If anything, it only started to get louder, now that his focus was solely fixed on it. The splash of the shower hitting the floor, the glub of the flow going down the drain, the burbles when it ran through the pipes, the echo as it rippled above the ceiling, and then the repeat of the whole damned cycle, all of them were vibrant and vivid, ringing constantly in his ears. 

He had no idea why someone in their right mind would think of this as a good time for a shower, let alone one that had lasted for longer than necessary. None of them seemed to make any sense to him, and at some point, Takasugi felt the urge to go there to check if the resident above was alright enough to be let alone with a shower running freely for that long.

He did nothing, however. He knew that there was nobody upstairs to be crazy enough to take a shower; or nobody at all. He stayed inside the apartment, enveloped by the mess of the room, curling up into a ball and hanging onto the faint hope that the act could somehow muffle the foreign sound of water. Much to his surprise and dismay, it didn't, and his efforts had made the volume grow louder than before. 

He could feel his arms reaching up with the fingers spread out, instinctively, grabbing his earlobes and trying to block the sound away. It seemed like something a coward would do, but he didn't care. He let his ears be covered and closed his eye, in a failed attempt to escape reality and lure himself back to the nightmare, only to be stirred up and startled again, by the increasing volume of that damned cycle. 

Splash. Glub. Ripple. Echo. Splash. Glub. Ripple. Echo.

It wasn't until then did he realize that the water didn't sound like something from outside, but more like a reverberation of what seemed to be stored and buried inside of him. 

Takasugi didn't know how long he had stayed in that position, but as the realization made him swing off the blanket and sat up with his feet on the floor, his body was all sweaty. A wise man would call in, preferably the cops or the hospital, for an emergency. Takasugi did none of those. He wasn't stupid, but he wouldn't call his state wise, either. He didn't know what to do, so he did the only thing he could. 

He looked up above his head and waited, engulfing himself in the sound of water which stood out against the silence of his room, against anything that was a part of reality. He heard it loud and clear and felt every inch of his body clenching to it. His fingers were buried into the soft fabric of his mattress, his toes dug deeper into the wooden floor, his eye was urged to shut but stayed blankly open, his throat was stuffed with a lump, and his heart sank, almost as if it had stopped beating. 

And then, with almost an abrupt halt of the heartbeat, a missed blink of his dry and throbbing eye, without any sign, warning, or expectation, the water suddenly stopped. 

It happened without him even fully acknowledging it during the first seconds, and it took him a while to realize that the sound that knocked him out of his sleep was now gone. The usual silence of the night returned, so stark and clear that he could hear his unsettled heartbeats and ragged breath. Then the familiar crickets, wind rustles, and house rattles dominated his hearing again as if they hadn't been toppled just a few seconds earlier by the bizarre sound of a late-night bizarre shower. 

It seemed who–or what–ever decided to do it had realized the stupidity and health hazard of their action, so instead of going with the nonsense flow, they turned off the shower like a normal and functioning human who gave a damn about their wellbeing. They should be in bed then, now that he heard no noise that interfered with the usual and natural sounds of whatever coming to life at three-ish in the morning around a damaged apartment in the middle of nowhere. 

It should be the most probable thing to do at this hour, also the most logical explanation to what had taken place in the apartment upstairs, and yet something inside Takasugi wasn't fully convinced. His instinct spiked him here and there, trying to remind him of something he didn't want to remember, his eye still burned, his throat felt stuffy, and his heart remained seized with an invisible force he couldn't name. 

He ignored the feelings and released them, one by one, through his deep sighs as he collapsed on the mattress, letting his body be sucked into the sweaty pile of blanket and pillow. From the corner of his only working eye, Takasugi saw the clock on his nightstand. It was four in the morning, meaning roughly an hour had passed. 

Somebody upstairs, who shouldn’t have been there in the first place, had just taken an almost two-hour-long shower, letting the water flow constantly, and he had no idea why they abruptly ended it. More importantly, he couldn't help but notice that his heart sank and filled itself with sorrow in the absence of the water, which he just found irritating only a few seconds earlier.

The stain

Monochrome, stale, and severely lacking in joy, those were his descriptions of the sky, as Takasugi left his apartment for the first time in a while. It was, indeed, a picture-made-real of a countryside painting, not the dedicated work that required the well-mixed colors to naturalize the man-made objects, but the effortless one made by a bored child with nothing but a pen and paper within reach — someone like Takasugi himself when his world was much simpler. 

He once thought that he was lucky to always leave the hideout exactly when the sky reflected his feelings, but then he realized it was because the sky, in his eyes, would never appear any different. The vast blue yonder had stopped being blue ever since the many wars broke out and went on, and the clouds that once shaped up thousands of creative imaginations in his childhood were now stained in a sinister crimson, stank of blood, and never again represented hopes and dreams. 

He had forgotten how peace looked like, he had no interest in finding it again. He would probably show up when the people he cared about called for him, lending them the power of his ongoing rage and whatever was still there, but it wouldn't be now, or any time in the near future. 

Now wasn't the time for peace, peacemaking, or evil-killing and world-destroying, because all of them meant the same to Takasugi for that matter. Peace was never there when he needed it and now as he'd grown numb to the sake of the world, peace started to matter less than the dagger-edged pieces of his past, his fang-baring hatred aiming at no one but himself, and the constant reminder of what he'd lost on his way of pursuing peace. 

Now was the time for reality-coping, and by that, he meant covering his real pains under layers of made-up traumas, which included but weren't limited to killing time with troubled but uninterrupted sleep, hiding in consecutive nightmares, putting himself under the mercy of his twisted mind and getting bothered by paranormal activities, such as the probable existence of a ghost who loved to shower at the witching hour in the apartment upstairs.  

It'd started to become an annoying daily occurrence. Every night, around the same period, from two to roughly four in the morning, sometimes lasted longer until mostly five, the water fell, splashed, rippled, and ran through his ceiling. There was never any damage or leak — his apartment remained intact and dry, but he couldn't say the same for his sleep.

He'd been sleep-deprived ever since his first encounter with the water at night. It wasn't the noises — Takasugi used to fall asleep in the middle of a battlefield, where he and his comrades took turns to rest and guard — but rather his curiosity that kept him up, tossing and turning. He couldn't sleep uninterruptedly again if he never knew the root of it, so there he was, digging into the matter, hoping to find an answer.

As Takasugi took the first step on the moss-covered stair, a ray of sunshine managed to sneak through the leaden clouds and the wrecked concrete of the apartment complex, landed on the bandage of his left eye, and refused to leave. It gave him warmth, in a way he thought he'd never experience again. He'd forgotten how comfort felt, and he shook his head as the feeling crept up, trying to shrug it away. He shouldn't hang onto what he didn't deserve. 

He charged ahead, sprinting quickly through the staircase, ignoring the sudden sunlight, the slippery moss, the chipped and burned rails, and a dark shadow floating at a corner of the broad step. He reached the upper floor in no time, panting heavily as he stood at one end of the corridor, staring at the apartment one story over his own. 

There wasn't much for him to look at. The complex was small, each floor contained only two apartments, and the one closest to him was merely a hollow box of concrete frames outside piles of crushed bricks, woodchips, and disintegrated corpses. There was no bathroom or even water in the mess, erasing the theory about someone taking a shower at night in this remain.

That left the other one, at the other end of the corridor, also the most suspicious as it was directly above him. Takasugi wasn't sure if he blinked, but he felt distressed over his eyelids. If a harsh stare could set fire, he was sure that the apartment he was looking at now would be the same as a part of the one next to it, a complete ruin, with nothing else to examine. He breathed in, filling his lungs with the smell of ruins, burned furniture, and decaying corpses, fixed his posture, and went ahead. 

As Takasugi approached the door, he was half-expecting to see it unlocked, open, or mostly destroyed like the one in his apartment. It was none of those. The door remained shut and locked, and he didn't even need to touch it to tell. It was wrapped with chains and locks, firmly kept in an unbreakable protection. Whoever the owner of the apartment was, they'd made it extra unnecessarily sure to keep their place safe from intruders. 

This was a stupid effort, considering the window next to the door was made of glass, large enough for an adult to sneak in if, and someone had broken the majority of it, not ideally enough to fit a body, but if they weren't very intimidatingly-built, they knew how to wiggle and they didn't mind some scratches, they could make it through. 

As Takasugi reached closer, he found the broken glass stained with a dried red substance. He didn't have to look twice to tell it was blood, and he doubted that it belonged to the apartment owner. He examined the frame again, and before his logical conscience had a chance to frown upon him, Takasugi had put both of his hands on the window frame, pushed himself up, and slipped through the broken glass. 

His yukata was torn a bit, and he could feel the sting where the glass cut him, but he was inside without any remarkable wound. It was the same as the one he kept as a hideout, and so far he detected nothing out of the ordinary about its design. He walked into an empty kitchen and found himself facing two closed doors. The bathroom was the one to his left, also closed, shielded under a curtain.

The leftover sunlight he chased away earlier couldn't reach any corner in this apartment, making it drowned in disorganized patches of dark and darker, dusty and dustier, moldy and extremely moldier. There was also the faint smell of something rotten in the air, and Takasugi wouldn't be surprised if he found any half-decomposing dead body in one of the rooms. 

He swallowed and walked ahead, reaching one of the doors and flung it open. A grotesque stench attacked his nostrils, and, much to his disappointment, it came from a pile of bones and furs, which belong to some dead animals, probably rodents, rats, weasels, or all of them combined, considering the alarming number of leftovers. They were, indeed, half-decomposing corpses that caused the smell, but they were not anything that could explain the mystery of the witching-hour bath that he was desperate to know. 

At that moment, he heard a sound behind him, the unmistakable creaking of the floor. He turned around instinctively and found himself facing a living person.

It was a gloomy day when the sun found its way to the last person who wanted it and Takasugi found his way to the person who was the answer to a question that had been bothering his sleeping routine. Neither he nor the sunshine, so far, was satisfied with what took them a lot of effort to reach.  

He was facing a man in his thirties, whose figure gave out a faux impression that he wasn't that far from puberty, but age was disclosed by the huge amount of hair around his mouth which couldn't compensate for the emptiness of his head. He was wearing a dirty yukata of a suspicious red, which suggested that it had everything to do with the dead animals in the room. 

Something inside Takasugi had snapped at the sight of the dirty man, but he didn't have time to dwell on it. As soon as both of them seemed to have a full grasp of the situation, the dirty man made his first move. He shouted like an animal and lunged forward, his hands curled up into fists. The posture could be scary to a crying baby or a toddler, confusing to elementary kids, and probably pitiful to anyone older than that. To Takasugi, it looked like a joke. 

Takasugi dodged and swept aside to grab his opponent's wrist. He could tell a sudden pang of rampage had flared up in his stomach, an unmistakable call for blood from the gruesome beast that had been sleeping soundly inside of him. It seemed to have been awakened by the dirty man's bumbling attempts to attack, and there was no reason to put it on a leash now. 

So he let it out as it wanted. He wiped his opponent off with an elegant sweep of the feet, didn't take much effort to twist his wrists and ankles with a harsh grip of the hands, and smashed his head against the moldy, wooden floor. Blood quickly replaced the smell of ruins and molds in the air, and his monster was satisfied with the result.

But Takasugi wasn't. He could feel the monster drifting back to hibernation, leaving his true self to take control, and his true self was clouded with rage. That pathetic dirty man had snuck in and lived in that apartment, and although Takasugi couldn't explain why he took a shower at three in the morning or what took him so long for a shower, the sound of water at night was undoubtedly caused by him, meaning it was the work of a living human. 

It also meant that there was no such thing as the existence of ghosts. 

Takasugi threw a punch at the once person, now almost a corpse under him, feeling his madness welling up, coloring every fiber of his body with ominous shades of hysteria. The scarlet of anger, the ebony of hatred, the fiery ember of burning agony, the gray of disappointment, and several blue strokes of melancholy, all came together, forming a painting of demolition, transferring through not any pencil or paper, but punches, smashes, and curses. 

He heard a faint cry, followed by a loud thud. He vaguely felt his fist sinking into the flesh, touching the broken bones, his wrists were deluged by the moisture and warmth of the mess. He withdrew and leaned back, gasping in exhaustion. Even in his craziest days of youth, Takasugi never thought he could smash someone's skull with his bare hands, and yet he was now, doing it without even trying his best.

Beads of sweat started to form on his face, mingling with the blood splattered there and a burning drop from his eye, trickling down his cheeks and chin. He sniffed and licked his lips, consuming to memory the saltiness of the mixture, but wasn't sure which of them he was tasting. 

Takasugi wasn't the superstitious type, he considered himself an atheist and thought that imposing the involvement of any paranormal on their actions and consequences was blind and sheer stupid. Still, after the unexplainable incident with the water, he found himself tilting toward the possibility that there was a ghost, which, by definition, was a spirit of a person who was once alive. 

Many of the people in Takasugi's life were snatched away from his reach, by the clean cut of the Reaper. He used to think that it was final, but the thought had wavered recently. He had heard the water and he had no explanation for it. If someone who was killed a long time ago by a war could still take a bizarre two-hour-long shower at night, then someone who died in the same manner, but arguably more heroic and meaningful deaths, should also be existing somewhere in this cruel world, taking the same forms, of the ghosts, not the humans they used to be.

Whatever form they took, nonetheless, to him they were the same. It took more than years of suffering and torture to break them physically, and even then, the core of their souls remained strong, unbent, and starkly intact. The same logic should be applicable to their memories and emotions, and the feelings they had for him. If ghosts truly existed, so did the chance to meet them again.

Or at least it was what he'd thought a few minutes ago. Now he was sitting on the moldy floor of an empty apartment, reeking of decomposing meat, over a mess of a smashed skull attached to a lifeless body, his face drenched in substances of terror, his hand covered in blood, his nails stuffed with the victim's brain, his body sweaty and shaking, and his eye drifting into nowhere, seeing the chance of a reunion with his deceased beloved crumble into dust.

It was, in the end, the act of a human being, a pathetic living thing like Takasugi, serving no purpose in life other than raising false hopes and beliefs. It was the sounds of water that sowed the seed of having a reunion with the beloved people that Takasugi had lost, and it was the finding of the sounds that dug them up, burned them down, and scattered their ashes into the wind. 

Takasugi stood up, never mind the mess he had caused, stumbling towards the broken window and climbing out of the apartment. He dragged himself to the end of the corridor without looking back, although he could sense something tickling the back of his mind.  

It was never anything worth paying attention to, he whispered, to himself, but also for the words to be caught up by the wind and fly away, in the hope that some thing out there could hear it and send back a sign, letting him know that his hope wasn't delusional, regardless of what just happened. 

There was nothing as Takasugi walked the corridor and approached the stairs. There was no response as he slowly let his feet fall down, one after another, half-limping, half-slipping through the mossy steps. There was no sign of whatsoever out there that managed to catch his wind-scattered words, as he reached the broadstep and threw a quick glance to the dark shadow floating there. 

It startled him the first time he came to the apartment complex. The shadow never left her spot or even moved, and she remained the same even during the worst storms or the most steaming days of summer, always wearing the same kimono so black it blended into her jet-black hair. It was hard to tell where the hair started, however, as her head was upside down, the forehead was attached to her neck and the chin pointed upward, aiming straight to the sky. 

A strange woman, Takasugi would say. And–

He paused, hearing the wind howl, delivering the words he had said. He was looking for a sign that proved him wrong, that there was something worthy of his attention, wicked and terrorizing enough to confirm his slim belief in ghosts and the chance to meet again with the people who had left the world of the living. It was there, all along, and he almost missed it like an idiot.

Takasugi turned around, eyeing the woman. He realized just now, the smudges on the kimono where the color was darker, the red dripping under her unmoving helm, the wrecked head and the upward chin, and the trickle of a dark liquid falling from her upside-down eyes, forming two sinister streams on her forehead. Her eyelids moved, and before Takasugi had the time to think about it properly, the woman's gaze darted to him, to which he replied with a longing look.

It put his raging storm to rest and fueled up again the fire he had almost smothered. The woman was a ghost, a paranormal activity, a delineation of a horrible incident taking place here. The fact that he could see her and exchange eye contact with her meant that, somewhere out there, the people he once loved and lost were there for him to meet. 

The crowd

On that chilly afternoon, as the stench of the dead body upstairs vaguely became more obnoxious, Takasugi found a flare of post-meridiem sunlight as he was looking at himself in the broken glass cupboard. The blinding orange in it suggested that the day was a sunny one, and he had missed it by entrapping himself behind a closed door, the walls, and layers of thoughts. 

It was rare for him to see the sun here, probably because most of his time was spent locked up in the apartment, and most of his attention was on somewhere else, something else, lifetimes and thousands of regrets away. 

Still, the sun wasn't something he was excited to see. The gaze on the flare lasted almost three seconds before his eye dropped down. He didn't look up, deliberately trying to avoid the cupboard, peering into shards of a broken mirror on the floor. His reflection from that distance seemed pale and beaten, incompleted, shattered. He couldn't help cracking a smile at the corner of his lips. Shattered was the right description. 

The regular checking on his reflection reminded Takasugi about the people who checked their fridge constantly, even though they'd just done it a few minutes earlier and found nothing to eat. He knew that it wasn't the food that they needed, it was the reduction of dignity and standard, ignited by the frequent seek, to the point low enough for them to be pleased with whatever was within their grab, be it a bag of nearly expired cheese or a gross dried-out cucumber. 

Takasugi's mirror gaze was more or less the same. It wasn't his appearance that he wanted to care about, but the gradual draining of life, hope, and reasons for his existence. His mother, a gentle and sweet but highly superstitious woman, once told him that a person's reflection in the mirror was the honest telling of their life span. A still and clear reflection meant a stable life ahead, a faltering one meant Death was at their doors and if they weren't careful enough the doors would open, and no reflection meant they no longer lived. 

He wondered if his mother had seen herself faltering during the last of her days, but she probably didn't need it. Tuberculosis was enough of a sign and the fact that they couldn't even afford the means to save her because there was a war going on and on made it even more of an ironic death flag. He, on the other hand, never saw his reflection waver, not even once, no matter how many times he checked, and yet the life in him felt foreign, estrange, and unrealistic. 

It was almost as if this living span wasn't meant for him, and he was merely a deranged soul living through someone else's existence, persisting on regardless. It was almost as if Death was assigned to find him, some time earlier on that Amantoforsaken battlefield, except they had forgotten to do their job and let him remain, continuing to endure the agonies and the depression of living. 

But it was perhaps for the best. Takasugi might be the loneliest being in the whole universe, and most of the ones he was desperate to meet were now lying cold and breathless galaxies away, but it didn't mean he wished for death. Many people had died, and the man had thrown away his life, for Takasugi to be the person he was at the moment, and although he as himself was the opposite of someone worthy of their sacrifices, it was what they'd done and they couldn't take it back.  

It meant they had more hope in him being alive than dead. It seemed like a stupid hope, considering how he'd turned out, but Takasugi felt the responsibility of keeping it up. He had to live, no matter how long he suffered. He lived, so their deaths wouldn't be in vain. 

And for the sake of living, he needed something to eat. Normally, he could take one of the crows that visited his balcony quite often, and sometimes the tanuki's lurking under the basement of the apartment complex weren't that hard to catch. But today he craved something that wasn't a wild animal, something that required less killing and cooking. 

Frankly, it wasn't the killing or the cooking that bothered him. It was the stench of the dead animals that served as the reminder of the rotten smell from an apartment upstairs, of the encounter with a stranger, who, by now, should have been no more than a reeking stain on the ceiling of his apartment, and mostly, of the failed hope he gave about the existence of ghosts and the chance of Takasugi meeting his deceased loved ones again. 

But for the presence of the woman on the broad step, the reminder of that pathetic man would have become among the painful memories that Takasugi put away, locked up, and buried with regret and desperation. Luckily, he lived in a deserted place that used to be caught up in the middle of many wars, and when one ghost turned out to be an illusion, there was always another that showed up and nurtured his withering belief.

It could be thanks to the woman that Takasugi was feeling a bit relieved and the burden over his heart was partially lifted up, replaced by the new hope he decided to fixate upon. The fixation was far from being healthy, but if it was what it took to not burst over the place and be ruthless about everything, then let it be the straw of sanity for Takasugi to hold on, in his ocean of madness and misery.

With a deep breath, and another last look at himself, Takasugi opened the door of his apartment and walked down the stairs. He didn't forget to glance up to where he knew the woman stood, before stepping out on the street. He felt gusts of wind at his surroundings, ruffling through his hair and tingling the bare skin where his yukata failed to cover. It was an afternoon somewhere in late October, the wind wasn't meant to be that harsh, the air wasn't meant to be that cold, and he shouldn't feel that much regret for not putting on a haori. 

He decided to pay it no heed, thinking a few more steps of walking could heat up his body and get rid of the chill that started to creep down his spine. He turned to his left and started moving, letting himself be immersed by the wind and dragged passing a few blocks, taking random turns to the uncanny alleys and drifting through several unfamiliar corners. As expected, he felt warmer as his breath quickened, and soon, the cold wasn't bothering him any longer. 

It was, in fact, replaced by another peculiar and unexplainable irritation, but at that very moment, Takasugi told his instinct to shut up so that he could go along with it, unescorted by any logic, reason, or worry. 

The wind had accidentally brought him to the part of the area where there were other residents. 

It'd been a while since he last walked on a human-infested street or had any human interaction, although what he was having now was strictly limited to fortuitous eye contact and quickly sliding through a couple of strangers. It was enough, regardless, for a demon hiding away from the world in a tattered and haunted hideout that finally outed himself for the bare minimum of daily necessity, like decent processed food in the place of his feasts on wild animals. 

Admittedly, he never thought that humans would sound foreign to his ears, but he wasn't surprised when he heard them with a shiver. After all, he had spent months all by himself, munching on his loss and sadness, in a hideout where his other neighbors were corpses, a stain on his ceiling, and a woman with a reversed head. While loneliness was soothing and what he deserved, it would be a blatant lie to say he didn't miss the lively rumbles from living individuals of his kind.  

Takasugi didn't know why the street was flooded with that many people all of a sudden, however. He planned to go to an abandoned store and quickly grab a can of whatever with the least health-hazardous expiration date, but he was carried away and captured by the crowd, and before he realized it, his mind was cleared of the agony, his steps quickening to their pace, and, for once, he had put on a show of how to behave like a normal person. 

Perhaps his wandering thoughts had let him off the usual route, to the habitable part of the town, where the effect of the wars wasn't that severe, the soil wasn't that poisoned, the scene wasn't that traumatizing, and the casualty wasn't that enough to make ghosts roam and people stay away from the place. 

It was the most probable reason he could think of, but Takasugi wouldn't bother himself any further with an explanation. There he was, again, among other people, blending in just fine, as if the traumas gnawing on his nerves all the time were a nightmare that had finally met its end. He knew it wasn't true by the sting at the back of his head, where the pains piled up and constantly bit, but he allowed himself to not think about it now, for the sake of the pretense, a bit of his relief, and the residue of his mental stability.

That was when his gaze landed on a particular figure, startling his thoughts and his ideas about getting rid of insanity. It was a man, tall and stark, clad in teal, wearing a pair of headphones over his fuzzy hair, and carrying a shamisen on his shoulder. Takasugi didn’t know why he hadn’t seen the man earlier – it was almost impossible to not see someone like this first thing in a crowd – but he saw him now. 

For a second, Takasugi had thought it was the man he’d been dying to meet, but his logical conscience fixed him right as he was about to approach. 

It couldn't be him. The crowd around Takasugi was vibrant with breaths of life, the exact same thing to which the man had bid farewell on the day he decided to stay back on the battlefield so that Takasugi could escape to safety. It wasn’t a man that he saw, it was a shadow from the past, a reflection of his bygone days and his ongoing guilt, regrets, range and self-hatred, and dejection. 

With that in mind, Takasugi stopped. He was fighting the urge to march ahead, shove away the people that were blocking the man of teal from his sight, to grab his arm and turn him around and confirm that wasn’t the one he’d alter his ideology for the slim belief in meeting again. It would be stupid, as his logic was shouting at him, to reveal his face so recklessly, only for it to turn out to be a pointless encounter with a total stranger. 

But something inside of him, perhaps the broken parts that Takasugi pretended to not acknowledge, let him know that he wanted to be reckless. He wanted to at least have a strong confirmation of his delusion, a cold splash in the face by reality, that the man had no way of being here in this crowd of living people, a reason for the burning desire in his heart to stop fueling him up and stay quenched. He needed a wake-up call.

As the heat traveled from his chest to his throat, forming a lump there and causing him to tremble with agitation, Takasugi vaguely felt his feet moving again, his pace quickened, his hands pushing the people ahead of him to the sides. He didn’t know if any of them fell in the process, it was never the matter. The voice of his logical conscience was overwritten by the echo of his yearning, and the only thing his eye could see now was the tall man of teal carrying a shamisen. 

Much to Takasugi’s dismay, the crowd around him grew larger. As the sky turned grayer and the sunlight gradually faded away, more and more people showed up, blocking his view, making it twice harder to pave the way to the person he wanted to see. He had lost track of the man a few times, even almost giving up on the hope, only to be hyped up as the flash of teal emerged again. 

Just like a shadow, at arm’s length but always out of grasp, the teal wavered in Takasugi’s sight, tempting, alluring, appealing, and disappearing, only to show up again and repeat the cycle. Anytime he thought the man was within reach, somebody chipped in, cutting off his touch, and also his chance for a wake-up call.

At some point in the chase, Takasugi had told himself to give up, but then the illogical desire in him fuelled his steps from out of nowhere, and he kept moving ahead, sweating and panting. He could tell that it was no longer the man of teal or the splash of reality that he needed to catch, he was just running and exhausting himself for something even he couldn’t resonate. 

The notion forced Takasugi to slow down, and, for once, reluctantly put his yearning to rest and let his ration take control over his frantic head. It wasn’t easy, especially as his heart throbbed when the teal shadow, again, walked further away from his sight, but what was Takasugi good at then if not dealing with constant pain and pretending that they didn’t exist?

Think, was what he told himself, out loud, stooping down with his hands on his knees. Now as his rational mind was in charge, he could finally see everything more clearly. The sun was setting, casting its dying daylight through the people around him, forming bizarre shadows on the ground. They looked odd, like strips of paper cut and colored in the shape of humans' silhouettes, serving no significant purpose and leaving for the wind to blow away. 

Nothing about this, from the start, had made any sense. The sudden lots of people from out of nowhere, the presence of the man, the fact that Takasugi couldn’t reach him despite them being close to each other and he never seemed to make any progress further, and the unnatural increase of the crowd–

Takasugi blinked. If it felt wrong then, it felt extremely wrong now. He was in the middle of nowhere, a hideout in a war-wrecked and haunted town, a good-for-nothing place whose residents were dead, weirdos, criminals, ghosts, and even more broken criminals. A crowd was unlikely, a crowd of normal people was unorthodox, and the crowd that grew as it got darker was impossible.

That was when he looked to his left, for the first time of the whole looney and pointless walk, at the ruins on the side. They were all broken and burned down, suggesting no sign of living humans, let alone a crowd. He swallowed and shoved away the people passing by, limping ahead to one of the houses that still had a standing wall, on which mounted a glass window. 

He didn’t want to believe his eye, but he knew he had no other choice. The moment he looked at the window, which worked fine as a temporary makeshift mirror thanks to the darkness inside, Takasugi saw himself. While it was natural to expect his reflection in a mirror, it was outrageous to only see him and nobody else. 

There were many people marching on the street, and he could still hear their voices. He could also witness their shadows flickering in synchronization with their movements, and he could feel a whisk of life running through them. He looked at them again, seeing in the corner of his eye the man of teal, alive and breathing, oddly moving but at the same time remaining in his spot. He sighed, feeling the word jumping in his head.

A whisk. It was a large crowd, and yet the presence of life was just a whisk. He should have realized it sooner, the fact that he was never meant to fit in with those people. It wasn't because their lives were normal and his was filled with wicked thoughts and agonies, but because there was a thing called life for him and none of such for them, at least no longer. The whisk of life had always been solely his, hence the only reflection that could be seen was him.

A still and clear reflection meant a stable life ahead, a faltering one meant Death was at the door, and no reflection meant they no longer lived.

The realization came like a hammer, slamming on whatever scene those ghosts wanted him to see. As soon as Takasugi had a full grasp of the situation, the pretense collapsed, and the crowd on the street started to disperse, not in the normal manner where people left and went in separate ways to their different destinations, but in the paranormal one as each of them faded, melted, or blasted into ashes. 

It started with the people closest to Takasugi, then the others followed. There were disfigured heads, severed limbs, mouths that were enlarged to become a dark hollow before the whole body ripped off from there, eyeballs that fell out of the faces as the eyelids were no longer there to hold them, and blood and flesh flung randomly everywhere. The scene, sadly, looked rather funny than fearsome, in a wicked and sickening way, suited best for Takasugi's broken humor. 

But he couldn't laugh, as his eye landed on one person in the crowd. A tall figure clad in teal, with a shamisen hung over his shoulder. The upper part of his face was hidden under a pair of sunglasses, and the rest of it was blocked by a floating severed head that refused to disappear. Takasugi felt his heart thump as the man of teal's body started to dissipate. 

“No,” he felt his lips moving as he dashed to the departing ghosts, trying to part himself a way to him. His hands arched up, and right as he thought he could touch the man's face, cup his cheek and, at best, slapped him hard enough to send the sunglasses flying away and unveil the eyes underneath, the man took a step back, merging with the pace of the crowd. And just like that, with only a blink of an eye, he vanished. 

“No,” Takasugi cried out again and slumped on the hard pavement. He paid no attention to the dwindling ghosts, the howling wind that reverberated his internal screams, and the scalding trails of regrets and desperation trickling down his cheeks, sneaking through the gaps of his fingers. 

He didn't know how long he had been in that position, that spot, melting down and choking and weeping like the most pathetic being in the universe. When he finally drained the last of the tears and grievances he had left, and his head felt numb again, Takasugi stood up and realized it was dark. The pitch black of the night squirmed around him. It was gentle and uncanny, soothing and eerie at the same time, and whatever it was, it couldn't compare with the hollow inside his heart. 

That man of teal could probably not be the one Takasugi was looking for. And yet there was a slight chance that he was, and the fact that Takasugi lost him before a clear confirmation, in a crowd, where he constantly showed up and fell into his sight, was as strong as a final stroke on the pile of traumas Takasugi had gathered at the back of his head. 

If they were caged up there and controlled before, they were freed now. And even for someone who was used to dealing with his traumas roaming widely in his head on a daily basis, this was too much. 

Him

"Don’t turn around when you hear someone calling your name at night. It could be the voice of an evil spirit trying to trick you."

There was something irritating about this gloomy night when that random ghost story was brought up in the middle of his solitude stroll on the empty street. The snow rattled under his footsteps, the wind embraced him with its icy invisible arms, and the story clasped his heart with its claw-like fingers, all of them made him tremble like the jiggling street lanterns on both of his sides. 

It could be the wind that spooked the child in him that he always tried to keep hidden, it could be the low temperature that triggered the memory of the chills running down his spine during his younger days when someone told a ghost story. It could, and very much likely, be the hollow inside of him, the open-mouthed wound that he temporarily stitched up in vain, always on the edge of tearing itself larger apart, always spitting out random uneasy thoughts.  

Nonetheless, the night's atmosphere was perfect, and Takasugi hated to ruin it with nonsense tales. It was roughly mid-November, and yet the cold seemed to have found its way there ahead of time, powdering the pavement and making the air howl. The empty street resembled a stage under the snow-sprinkled curtain of the night, making it a magnificent show for the silhouettes and shadows, some were from reality, most were memory fragments visualized by a turmoil in his head, to swirl and waltz, here and there, sorrowfully, majestically, never following any order or pattern. 

He didn't complain as the snow started falling heavier, adding up to the performance of madness, and distracting him further from the spooky story. He didn't flinch as the wind quickened its pace and turned the embrace into a harsh squeeze. He didn't curse, frown, or mind as he charged ahead, stumbling and slipping, paving his way through the thickening snow. 

His heart was beating louder than the wind's growl, fueling up in him the excruciating pain that burned. Burning meant fire, and fire meant heat, and although it shouldn’t be the kind of heat one sought to stay warm, today it passed as enough. 

The street lantern over his head suddenly faltered, and in a second, the feeble light went away, plunging the road underneath into an unfamiliar patch of grayish black. It wasn’t dark, as the lights of other lanterns were there, but it was perplexing to see the street in such a state for the first time. The sudden scene made Takasugi stop, and before he could put his mind to it, the other lanterns went out. 

It started with the one to the left of the first, and then quickly spread through to the end of the street. One by one, their lights stammered, then vanished, shoving the part under them into the hand of darkness. The process took place fast and smoothly as if the lanterns were merely withering fire without a cover, and there was someone sneaking through and blowing them off at a gentle but rapid pace.

There was no one else on the street. This part of the country had been deserted ever since the wars broke out, wiped away half of its residents, and chased the other half away. A town stank of corpses and blood, burned down houses, and memories attached to them was the place for no living soul. 

No living soul but one, it seemed, also the one that kept lighting up the street lanterns in this no-man's area for no reason at all. A part of it had forever lain down on the battlefield the day Gintoki took Sensei’s head, another withered when they bid each other adieu, their voices contaminated with more spite and anger than what should have been there. Even the remainder of it was torn and broken, as he knew, a large portion was jerked away and destroyed at the death of (yet another) particular person, whose name was–

The wind leaned over and whispered in his ears, startling his thought in the process, at the exact mention of a name that sent an ocean of tears to the verge of breaking out from his eye. Takasugi turned around and found himself facing the lanterns he had passed. Their weakening lights were there, warm and yellow, vivid against the snow, and then they, too, were gradually vanquished. 

The night roared as soon as all of the lanterns went away, the shriek of the wind supported its voice. The white of the snow turned to black and the ground blended into one with the sky. The rattle under his steps sounded almost blaring, like an uneasy reminder. It was as if the dark had unleashed the most terrifying part of winter, where, among all of the sounds, he heard a voice from behind. A word. 

“Shinsuke.”

Takasugi was startled. The cold hadn't caught him earlier, and it couldn't get him now, but he was frozen in his spot, in the dark, empty street, caught up by the cry of the wind and the whine of reality, under a familiar voice that called out for him, and for once, not knowing what to do with everything taking place in his surroundings. 

“Shinsuke.”

The voice continued, echoing through the empty street, the wrecked pavement, the abandoned, half-burned-down houses, and the quivering dead lanterns. It was entangled with the roar of the night, barging into his ears and heads, merging with the inner scream he had tried to muffle, now was uncaged and let out to blare. 

Takasugi wanted to turn around and see where the voice came from, but his instinct insisted it wasn't a wise idea. And ever since the crowd incident, he had given it the power to be in total control, Takasugi found his own body, for the first time, refusing to move. His eye was fixed on the dark street, his head burned with the urge to turn around, and yet his feet were nailed to the ground, keeping him in one place. 

"Don’t turn around when you hear someone calling your name at night. It could be the voice of an evil spirit trying to trick you."

The story came back to him, hitting him harder in the face. If turning around was improbable before, it was undesirable now. There was no living soul in the forsaken area but his, but there should be thousands of dead ones. It used to be hit by the wars, where blood was shed, people were severed and slaughtered, battlecry was the only audible sound, and the one that claimed their utmost victory was Death.

It wouldn't be surprising to find a handful of evil, no longer living spirits in such a place. None of them ever hurt him before, and he had met quite a lot during his period of living here. But he guessed everything had a first, be it the early-coming snowfall mid-November, the sudden return of the fear that left with his bygone days, or the encounter with a damned, dead, terrifying entity capable of knowing his name and probably taking his life, the moment he turned to its call. 

He wasn’t sure about the last, however. Although his instinct told him to flee the street and never turn back, a small part of Takasugi insisted on staying. It was probably because he knew the voice, precisely the person it once belonged to. Right now, it was no longer a person, but one of those wandering spirits, perhaps even an evil one. His favorite subordinate was never a decent human being, he would make the worst spirit. 

But he knew the voice was of the man, the one and only. He had made a lot of mistakes in his life, but it wouldn't be something he could ever get mixed up. Nobody in the world called his name that dearly, with that much passion, nobody in the world let him be as it was – a simple Shinsuke and nothing else – and made him feel enough and treasured with just that.

He would give up everything in exchange for a chance to live them again, the moments alongside the man that once made his frozen heart want to sing, his deranged soul yearn for redemption, and his drought eye crave for tears of any emotions, joy and sadness alike. He would give up his own life to hear the man again, see him again, and say his name again with someone there to reply to his desperate calls, even when it was only an evil spirit, a broken echo coming from the throbbing desires that he failed to bury.

And yet, he couldn't even turn around, despite the urge from every single fiber of him. He couldn't face Bansai and see Bansai, or at least look in the direction where Bansai's voice came from, because of something even Takasugi himself didn't know. 

It wasn't fear or uneasiness, it wasn't due to any ghost story or horrible recall. It was more than that, locked up and hidden behind layers of emotions Takasugi had promised himself to never hatch. He could feel his mind steering around it, hearing the cracking sound of his promise being broken. The reason behind his inability to turn around had many names. 

Guilt was one of them. Hatred and rage were others, both aiming at Takasugi himself. There was also regret and penitence. And a vastness of longing for redemption. 

“Bansai,” he felt his mouth moving, and the corner of his eye burned. A drop of sorrow fell, trickled down his cheek, then came with it the saltiness lingering on his lips. Takasugi thought that all of his tears were dried out, long before the Kiheitai was formed, and a while after Sensei's death, he was proven wrong before and now he was glad that he was proven wrong again. It wasn't a proper cry, more like a reflection of something he used to do but was no longer capable of, but today, even that counted. 

“Shinsuke.”

The voice grew louder, like a soothing response to Takasugi's call. Takasugi gritted his teeth in desperation, trying to fight against his stiffened body. He recalled the ghost story and found himself smiling, against the screams from his instinct. His heart was beating with excitement, his eye flickered with tears, and he could feel an alien surge of warmth running through his body, despite the snow, the wind, the crispy air, and every existence of that mid-November frosty winter. 

The voice was louder, meaning who–or what–ever calling for him was approaching. Bansai was closer. Bansai never left him, even when the man was no longer alive, but a reflection of a horror story from Takasugi's past. Bansai was there, even when Takasugi was making the wrong call, fighting the wrong battle, and picking on the wrong enemies. Bansai was still there, even when Takasugi was merely a breathing body scared of his own thoughts. 

“Shinsuke.”

Bansai's voice was right over him now, and yet he still felt the space at his back hollow. There didn't seem to be a body attached to the voice, as the wind was free to squirm at Takasugi's back, and the scattering snow sometimes hit him with its icy fists. But the absence of his body was well compensated by the presence of his voice, warm and clear, with the syllables of Takasugi's name echoing within it, elegantly, longingly, lovingly. 

Something never changed, Takasugi thought and leaned back. He didn't turn around, but he could imagine where Bansai's shoulders were and pretended to rest his head over there. Dead or alive, good or bad, a living manslayer or an evil withering spirit, reality or the vague repetition of the memory, Takasugi loved that there was always one thing about Bansai that remained true and unchanged. 

He always felt safe and tranquil with Bansai around. Bansai was his love, his remedy, his safe place, and his chance for redemption. Even when he was no longer there, the feelings he planted in Takasugi's heart stayed unshakeable, unwavering, and no different from the moment they first crossed paths in that fortunate prison cell. 

In a country torn apart by blood and tears, there was a town. It used to be a peaceful place, blessed with joy and laughter, but now it was merely a cluster of ruins. The only residents there were several insignificant corpses, a woman wearing her head upside-down, a stain on a ceiling, and, on some looney occasions, a parade of the deceased spirits, a prowling penumbra of the town's good old days. 

But if one paid it enough attention and patience, they would see a man of purple that didn't fit in with the atmosphere. The man could be seen most of the time through the window of his apartment, sometimes lurking on the broad step of the staircase holding a kiseru in his hand, sometimes freezing on the street with his eyes closed, in a backward-leaning position, as if there was someone else holding him from behind. 

Whether there was anyone–or–thing for real, it didn't matter. It could be anything, a ghost that tricked him into believing in its existence, a random evil spirit that figured out what he wanted, the wandering soul of his beloved finally reuniting with him, or merely a made-alive memory fragment, a product of his madness and insanity. It didn't matter. 

As long as Takasugi had found his way to strengthen the belief that Bansai was there, Bansai would be there, stable than the truth, more real than reality, loving and caring, and, just like in their old days, keeping Takasugi safe in his embrace. 

- fin -