Chapter Text
The lights are orange, yellow; the warm, steel glow of the city outlines Kaneda’s silhouette as bright as a traffic light, red and green and neon yellow bouncing off the black of his hair, as retroreflective as vinyl, flashing like a convex mirror as he lifts his head to the smoke-clogged sky. Tetsuo watches as he takes a drag of his cigarette, inhales deep, and breathes out pure, Neo-Tokyo-red.
“D’you ever think about it?” Kaneda murmurs, eyes closed. “Tokyo? No Neo-Tokyo, no—no twenty-first century, but before the crash, before everything… Just—just Tokyo?”
“What,” Tetsuo mumbles, cigarette burning to a stub between his own, still fingers. “What do you mean?”
Kaneda opens a lazy eye. “Neo means new,” he tells him, born only a year before Tetsuo but so, so much older.
“Tokyo wasn’t always like this,” he reminds Tetsuo, all ash and ablaze, and Tetsuo bites down something childish and scathing between his teeth, rolls it bitter around his mouth, swallows it harsh like a stone.
“I know that,” he says instead, grimacing as ash falls onto the vamp of his shoe. He leans down, dusts it off, finds remnants of it on his finger and smudges it between his index and thumb, watching it smear. Kaneda opens his other eye, just watching him.
“C’mon,” he says, finally. “Take a hit. I’ll help.”
Tetsuo shrugs, all Capsule and Kaneda, as calmly as he can muster. He puts the filter between his teeth, breathes in fast and deep, tastes the smoke like a vice in his mouth and lets it drift back out. He waits for the hit, for a moment, and for another moment he considers faking it, but Kaneda’s small laugh draws him out.
“You gotta inhale, dekosuke,” he says, curiously gentle. “Into your lungs.”
Tetsuo grumbles a curse.
“Only my okaa-san can call me that,” he tells Kaneda, who raises an eyebrow and responds with an easy, “What okaa-san? The one that left you behind?” and that shuts Tetsuo right up.
“Try again,” Kaneda says, and Tetsuo puts the cigarette back in his mouth.
“Breathe in, like you did,” Kaneda instructs, mimicking him with his own cigarette. “Hold it in your mouth for a second, and then—don’t—don’t let it go right away, just—breathe, deep. Pull in air, instead of letting it all go.”
Tetsuo tries to hold it in as long as he can, the cough twitching and scraping at the back of his throat, but Kaneda descends into a spiral of laughter nonetheless, hitching gulps fading endless into the Neo-Tokyo sky.
“You’ll get used to it,” Kaneda says, a twinkle in his eye.
“I know, nii-san,” Tetsuo mocks, voice hoarse, but the honorific tastes sour rather than derisive, and Tetsuo wonders, vaguely, whether he’s ever said that before, wonders if, by nature of not remembering his mother’s face, if there’s another part of her—another part of him—long lost from his memory. He tries to picture someone else by his side, someone older than him, wiser than him, a hand in his hair and a laugh deep in his throat, but all he can conjure is Kaneda, hazy in the Neo-Tokyo gloom. He takes another drag, throat itching with the weight. He breathes in, and breathes out Kaneda-red.
“I’ll get used to it,” he promises, into the space. He doesn’t. Later, years and worlds away, as the Japanese Self-Defense Forces take him far from prying eyes and pump him full of anesthesia until the world goes blurry, Tetsuo searches everything he knows and remembers this feeling of dizziness, of heaving, heaving weight, but the sky isn’t at an axis with no sky in sight, shielded close and secretive by a dark reinforced ceiling, and when his vision shakes and fades, he falls away with no family to catch him.
—
The first time Tetsuo ever got on a motorcycle, he made it fifteen feet before collapsing in a pile of steel, limping and cursing with an ache born barely ten seconds ago, yet bone-deep as if he had felt it all his life.
“Again?” Kaneda had asked, all smiles, propped neatly up on his own red bike.
“Again.”
The eighth time Tetsuo gets on a motorcycle, Kaneda takes him out, way out, a joyride to the outskirts of Neo-Tokyo. Tetsuo feels the ground shaking and undulating beneath his black, black wheels, and the highway drifts to streets, to roads, unpaved, and finally, to dirt, dark and loose and bleeding, unvandalized and untouched, the very last semblance of the life that the city once stood on. Tetsuo thinks of life, of plants and people and green, the infinity of the ground below him and the spite of the land it became, banishes the thought to his training school textbooks, and looks up.
He thought he was imagining it, drunk on the thrill and thrum of the bike beneath him, engine purring and roaring under the twitch of his fingers, the clench of his ankles, but no—Neo-Tokyo is alive. Long imprisoned and industrialized, lifeblood torn from the very veins of the city infrastructure and updated, installed, reconfigurated, replacing bones broken and bruised with steel, glinting and winking in the narrow light, the land had become as cruel and unfriendly as the people it housed. The simple truth, the only true word uttered in the last thirty-one years—the city’s own beating heart torn valve by valve apart and away, in its place something newer, faster, shinier—Tetsuo had long accepted that whatever he exhaled, gasping and breathing into the fumes of the city, Neo-Tokyo would spit it out gray and mechanical, breath tinged with metal and rust and something far, far more sinister. Yet, Tetsuo thinks, peering at the city dark on the horizon, yet—
Neo-Tokyo stands tall and aching against the thin line of the sky, escaping the stench of the city below in a bare graze of red before falling black to the infinite, merciless atmosphere. The sky is a shade that Tetsuo has never seen in his life, for the island that he has given what little life he has lived to—its inputs and outputs fast as lightning that can produce anything in the world Tetsuo would ever want to know—can only operate under existing, accessible data. All states of naturality have long been erased from the life that Tetsuo knows. All, except this.
Tetsuo has seen red all his life. Red, he knows, comes from ochre, cinnabar, carmine—from when foreign fauna was still a regular import; red is perched at the apex of traffic lights, neon and blinking; red gleams a wicked sheen across every inch of Kaneda’s bike as he leans proud across the leather seat, faux, like everything is; red gleams Kaneda himself in his clothes, shoes, eyes, as he gazes ever reverent at the sky before them; red, flowing and rushing and insistent, pumps heavy through the veins in Tetsuo’s arms, something he knows but cannot feel, the way he examines himself nightly to make sure he’s all still there and not just another piece of the city beneath him, at least not yet. Sometimes, he feels barely a missed breath away from becoming an electrical node, a slant of plumbing, switchboxes, wires, conduits that beat the city along just as much as the city beats them, or maybe that’s simply all he’s been this whole time. Tetsuo has seen red all his life, and yet, and yet, something about the air out here feels so raw, so fresh and new and real, like nothing is, so right like nothing is, and so horribly wrong too.
The sky, the dawn—the glow seems to come from within. It seems impossible to Tetsuo, that something may be created without input, that a product may form without labor, fuel, material, may pull from the earth something fresh with no professed consequence, but Tetsuo hasn’t felt the sun set or the moon rise any less than watching the clock, poised and dim, ticking past the days, and here, the sky is red. The sky is red, and Tetsuo sees it no more than lets it pass through his eyes, allows it to interact with the cone cells in his retinas and permit their light-responsive pigments to cooperate with his visual spectrum sectioned neatly into thirds, and he sees the color like he never has in his life.
“Isn’t it something?” Kaneda murmurs, arms crossed, gazing away with a carefulness that Tetsuo has never witnessed, and for a moment, Tetsuo doesn’t know if he’s talking about the sky or the rumbling city below.
Because the rumbling of it, Tetsuo thinks with a heave and a curse, an oath minced and ground to dust, is unmistakable—the underbelly of the city gasping and breaking, heaving and twisting like a lung, its grating infrastructure inhaling and exhaling, steely respiration shuddering with every heavy breath. For a moment, Tetsuo pictures the longbow island of Japan as a lumbering giant asleep beneath the ocean, waiting, just waiting to come alive, and he finds it duly unfair that he can only hear it all the way out here, the breathing, far from Neo-Tokyo’s own clawing, creaking reach.
He pulls his eyes from it, cursing the way his body refuses to budge, and looks beyond the island, beyond the ocean. He wonders if, out there, their cone cells respond to a different form of light, if red beyond his imagination is seared into their retinas, bold and bursting and unlike anything he has ever seen. He wants, Tetsuo realizes, to see it.
“Hey, Kaneda.”
“Hm?”
“Can I ride your bike back?”
A laugh. “Get lost, dekosuke.”
—
Tetsuo opens his eyes for what feels like the very first time, by Akira or otherwise, and sees everything, truly, everything, more than he has ever dreamed, yet dancing before him all along, capillaries and arteries, vacuoles and chloroplasts, molecules and atoms and life, so, so much life. Tetsuo stands still, for the first time in a long time, in the singularity of his own creation, and triggers the creation of a universe, careful, mechanical, a construction as he has always wanted and twice as he has ever dreamed, and curses how it was his own unmaking that forced him to realize it. He thinks that this time, it should be a true, true red.