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There’s no two ways about it -- Neku can’t sew to save his life. He can do a lot of things with his hands, and plenty more now that he runs Dead People School, but he’s absolute garbage with a needle and thread.
Hence the meeting with Gatito’s creative director, a spunky upstart of a half-Japanese woman named Amani. She’d had this hip boutique on Cat Street where she’d built a name for herself as a stylist, custom-designing outfits for folks looking for an overhaul, until someone had decided to cut her success story short with a little arson.
“They took my arms as my entry fee, if you’d believe it,” she says, leading him down a flight of stairs tucked behind the rebuilt building, now a modeling agency. “I came back to life on this wild creative high, but everything I made looked like something CAT would turn out if they did t-shirts. Turns out death’s a hard thing to shake, eh? Sanae had been looking to expand into some new enterprises, y’know, beyond the music and graffiti. Needed someone who’d been on the other side to -- ah, understand -- his unique point of view. Figures CAT’d be a Reaper, yeah? After you.”
They’ve come to this unremarkable door, iron in the singed brick, tagged with his skull. Of course. Neku had worried about fiddling with his frequency, but Hanekoma’s still looking after him. He pushes it open. The room is surprisingly dull for the heart of Shibuya’s hottest label: exposed brick, fold-out tables, piles of fabric, messes of wires. It’s a pretty small operation, maybe fifteen patternmakers and folks chugging away at sewing machines, total.
“They, uh,” Amani leans close to Neku, whispering right into his ear. “They’re all regular living folk. None of them ever knew Sanae as CAT.” She moves away, addresses the throng. “Folks, this is, um...”
“Neku,” he says, raising a hand awkwardly as if to say hello.
“Neku, he’s the one responsible for all the new tags down in Miyashita. Say hi, everyone.”
Everyone says hi, then returns to their work. Amani takes Neku through the floor, shows him the new stuff they’re working on, like this minidress with a whole slew of fairy lights sewn into the bustier. It’s impractical, but he kind of likes the way it highlights the little details. Gatito’s always been about wearing a devil-may-care attitude, literally.
She takes him into a little back room, with a dusty old mattress and a grimy sink. Closes the door behind them. “I mean, he must have picked you for a reason, and I’ll trust that vision,” she says, as she rummages through the closet. There are paint brushes and articles of clothing everywhere. A couple of pins that make Neku’s hair stand on end when he touches them. “So, y’know, just send me some sketches every now and then. When the inspiration hits. I’ll get the team to turn ‘em into clothes, get ‘em into stockrooms. Just make sure you get something to us in the next two weeks, Pegaso Atelier has promised us window space for the new season. -- Oh, here we are.”
She’s holding a pair of blue jeans, pre-stressed, hand-painted. Shit, they’re gorgeous, Udagawa miniaturized in a pair of pants. But everyone’s there -- Angius and Leo and Tigris and Ovis, and Rhyme climbing up the left leg, and Mister Mew, and a hundred other small things he’d never forget.
“He finished these up the last time I saw him. Wanted you to have ’em.” Amani passes them to Neku and he kind of stares at them, not sure what to think. There was no reason for Hanekoma to make them, except as a gift. For him.
“I, um,” he says, trying not to get choked up. He’s really gone.
“It’s weird, isn’t it? That he just up and left like that.” She tucks a loose strand of hair into her headscarf. Neku wonders what kind of person it takes to reaffirm their faith after what they’d seen in the Reaper’s Game, and decides she must be tougher than hell itself. Probably what drew Hanekoma to her in the first place. And after all he’s learned, the fact that he had a secret lover doesn’t surprise him in the least.
Neku drags himself back to the Dead God’s Pad, tired in ways he can’t describe. There are lists for him to go through of potential Players, missions to consider implementing, Reapers up for a promotion. There should be enough decent candidates for a Game in two weeks, Neku’s first in this role, but the Reapers are getting antsy. Maybe he’ll be calling it early with a couple of wild cards. A job’s still a job even if you’re a psychopomp looking through lists of dead people.
The hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Something giggles.
“Nice pants,” Joshua says.
Thought I smelled a rat.
“Now, that’s no way to greet your boss.”
Neku bristles. “Enough with the mind-reading.”
“You know I can’t control it. Come, help me with my things.” Neku turns, finally. Joshua has a bag of pins and what appears to be groceries.
“What’s this?”
“Oh, I thought you would make me dinner, dear.”
“No, the --” Neku narrows his eyes. “-- The pins.”
Joshua huffs, and drops the bag on the bar, leeks spilling onto the counter. The pile of pins he pulls out and lays, gingerly, next to them. “I’ve been out collecting Sanae. It’s not my job, you know, picking up bits of Soul, but he’s tenacious. It’s irritating.”
Neku wants to say something, but the sight of Hanekoma as a pile of pins sucks the wind right out of him. There must be twenty pins on the table, all black and without design. Neku picks one up and finds himself standing in a grassy field, looking at the sky, waiting for the sun to rise…
The pin clatters to the ground.
“He had a habit of collecting the trees’ dreams,” Joshua says, off-handed. “Honestly, I don’t understand why they haven’t sent down a new Producer yet.”
“Producer?”
He grins. “Don’t think too hard on it. Now, how about that dinner you promised me?”
They don’t even need to eat.
He fixes up the tag in the station underpass one night in the witching hour, shifts his frequency so he’s just a buzz in the brains of passersby, takes some photos when he’s satisfied and sends them to Amani. A week later she sends him some photos back -- a brilliant set of separates, cropped tank and high-low hem on the skirt. His graffiti is nowhere to be seen but somehow he reads it in the way the model wears it. He sends back his approval. Pictures go up on Instagram and the internet loses its collective shit: Gatito’s back, and hotter than ever!
He drops by the showroom the afternoon before a major runway show and helps Amani dress models for the dry run. He’d been looking for a little closure, helps them into red headphones and fights with Amani over sunglasses. (“Definitely not,” she says. “I mean, if this were an accessory show, sure. But we’re doing threads, dude.”)
Neku pouts, but she’s right; instead he goes through the models one by one, and under the pretence of checking hems he imprints in each outfit.
“It shouldn’t be your job to imprint.”
“Whatever.”
“Oh, Neku. It’s still a lovely job.” They’re watching from the rafters, sitting on a lighting frame, out of sight of the crowd below. Kind of a shame that Gatito was overshadowing the Pavo Real floor show -- some really cool stuff happening with ear accessories on their end. “All I mean is that it shouldn’t have to fall in your court.”
Neku doesn’t bother to come up with a retort. He’s proud, and content, with the work he’s done. Then he notices someone familiar among the spectators -- still wearing her D&B digs, but shit, she’s gotten thin.
“Hey.” He points towards her.
Shiki’s sick.
A long silence hangs between them like a noose. A model comes out wearing black chiffon from neck to toe, a gloved dress with zippers marking her ribs, and gold glitter where pointed fingernails would be; give her some pink lipstick and she’d be Uzuki at a holiday party. Their attention is on Shiki: pale, lifeless, gaunt.
“I can’t let her play a second time,” Joshua says. “Rules are rules.”
“I played three times.”
“You don’t count, dear.”
From what Neku can tell she’s taking notes in a sketchbook. All he wants to do is swoop down and scoop her up, give her a night off from her ghosts. There are noise clinging to her, but there are noise clinging to everyone, baggage they drag with them every day, and whose post-traumatic stress is any worse than the person next to them?
“You can’t get attached,” Joshua says, quietly, much later on in the evening. They’re wandering behind Shibu-Q and nothing will ever be okay ever again. “We take memories when we can, but everyone takes a little bit of the game with them when they go back. Death isn’t a holiday. Second chances don’t always work out.”
“Oh, God,” Shiki says.
“Not quite,” Neku returns, before he’s able to stop himself. Shit, Joshua’s rubbing off on him. You make dumb jokes to ease the pain of time’s passage. “Can I, um --”
“ -- Yeah. Yeah, come in, sit down. Sorry about the mess.”
Neku hops in through the window. Shiki’s room is perfectly neat, almost absurdly spotless. She must know. Does she know? How long has this been going on?
“How long has this been going on?”
“How long has --”
“--This.”
Shiki looks around her room, then back to Neku. It’s ridiculous, really, the whole scene -- Neku in his J of the M shirt and hand-painted jeans, cowl neck highlighting eyes that are far too blue, Reaper wings, that uncanniness that surrounds undeath in the air about him; Shiki, in a little black dress and high heels, her school uniform neatly folded on her chair, red lips, dark circles under her eyes.
“I’m fine,” she says, her eyes welling up. “You should --” Her voice creeps up a few semitones. “--You should go.”
“I just want to make sure you’re actually fine.”
She wrinkles her nose hard, trying to stop tears from spilling over. There’s a redness in her face and Neku wants to tell her that this sucks more than dying. She balls her fists. “It’s not what it looks like. I, um, they said I didn’t have a face for fashion.”
Neku blinks. “What?”
“They said I didn’t have a face for fashion. The guys at D&B. They said they could get me work on notions, but that -- y’know, making appearances at fashion shows…”
“And so you’ve been…”
“It’s, um, it’s under control.” She tugs at the hem of her dress. “I’m just -- Neku, you disappeared. Didn’t even say goodbye. What if, what if I’m out of a job, and someone down there decides they want me? To sew zippers on Reapers’ jackets?”
Death’s no holiday. A person should never be an entry fee. “Nobody’s ever going to get you mixed up in this again.”
She sits down on her bed, heavy. “What about your mother, Neku? Is she as messed up about you as I am?”
“They took her memory. Of me.”
Shiki looks up at him. Her look hits him right in the bits of him he thought he’d lost. She speaks barely above a whisper. “Then why couldn’t you take mine?”
It happened like this; I swear, it was as simple as this.
Uzuki is in the Dead God’s Pad delivering her week-end report. She’d refused the position unless it was given to both her and Kariya, but a partnership among Game Masters struck Neku as too powerful for the Players to handle -- and so he’d had given them the authority to choose a pair of Players to be declared victorious at the end of each week. She’d taken the responsibility with gusto.
“Pretty tough pair of buggers,” she was saying, as Kariya leans on the bar, helping himself to a bowl of ramen. “That’s all.”
“No need to act so formal,” Neku says, gently. Uzuki’s eye twitches.
“Kitaniji was always so stiff about this kind of stuff,” she bristles. “Whatever. I don’t like it, answering to you.”
She turns and marches out, stiffly. Kariya pushes the bowl away. “Happy birthday, kid,” he says, saluting as he takes his leave behind her.
Neku watches the space they’d taken up, for a while. He doesn’t like it, either. And he’d forgotten that it was his birthday. How had Kariya figured that out?
“It was me,” Joshua says, from his spot on the couch. He’d been hiding, that bastard. “Put it in his head -- I figured you’d appreciate hearing it from someone else first.”
“Whatever.”
“Oh, don’t be so glum.” He floats to his feet, wanders around the bar to Kariya’s leftover ramen, and decides against it. “You know, Neku, we’ve been together for all these weeks and I still know so little about you.”
“Nothing much to say.” Sixteen years wasted alive.
“Well, I’ve met your mother – lovely young lady – but tell me about dear old father, why don’t you?”
He has so few memories of his father, all jumbled up in his head, and more and more the image of his father is being replaced in his mind with Hanekoma. Big hands. Lopsided smile. Dark black hair, glasses, an ease and a strong presence in his bearing.
“Dunno anything about him,” Neku says, sitting on the couch. He lies down, and Joshua absentmindedly starts stroking his hair. Whatever. This is all right. Above them Shibuya hums with the brute force of two hundred thousand dreamers. “Mom said he walked out when I was a kid, like, two years old. Just up and left one day. Didn’t even leave a note.”
Joshua’s hand stops. “Interesting.”
Neku lifts his head to look at Joshua. He never calls anything interesting without having a reason. Neku considers his options -- he could just let this one go -- but decides to bite. “Interesting why?”
Joshua looks down and to the left. “It’s been – ah, it’s been just about fourteen years since I persuaded Megumi to become my Conductor.”
Neku blinks several times. His veins go numb.
“Did you take an entry fee?” He feels himself standing up, lunges, grabs Joshua by his collar, burning his palms on angel dust. “Did you take his memory?” He howls from the pain. Joshua winces. “You rat bastard!” He must have known. “YOU KNEW!”
Of course Joshua had known. He’d known it right from the moment he’d found Neku. Saw all those chains that link things in his city together and realized it wasn’t an accident, that there was something about those men that made the future seem like something worth building. Spent hours and hours in that second week rehearsing the line, hey, Neku, that man with the shades…
And then in the end it had all been nothing. Kitaniji had died with a dream. Shibuya had been reborn through their Game.
If Joshua’s a little prickly it’s because Shibuya’s a little prickly, that stranger who’ll shove you aside to make it across the Scramble a little faster, but pay for your coffee the minute you open up to them. That’s the Composer: the product of one’s work. In his darkest hour, in a despair darker than death he’d decide to throw it all away, wash his hands clean, work on a new tune.
And yet -- there are folks all over the place now, walking around wearing Neku’s clothes, jamming to their own beat, making the kind of Shibuya Hanekoma had wanted. Makes Joshua feel something different. Something better than despair. Something like hope.
Neku stands in the middle of the Scramble and screams, and screams, and screams.
“Pretty great show, if I do say so myself,” Amani says, finishing up the zippers on Neku’s new coat. “You sure about this? The trenchcoat and jeans look is a little last season.”
“Yeah.” Reminds him of Minamimoto’s outfit. Neku wears memories like clothing; Gatito’s a brand all about the endless feedback loop of nostalgia for the here-and-now. Life is fleeting, so take it while it’s here. Enjoy the moment. “Congratulations, by the way.”
“Ah, well, it was all your vision…”
But vision’s not enough. Kitaniji died knowing that. You don’t tell people what to do and then sit back as they make a world for you; you put your feet on the ground and build it yourself. That’s Uzuki’s philosophy and Neku appreciates that about her. Kariya’s a bit more reluctant, but hell, nothing lasts forever, not an attitude, or an angel, or a grudge.
“-- I trust you,” he says. Amani looks up, her hands frozen at the zipper. “He trusted you, so I’ll trust you.” He smiles a little. One less thing on his plate. “People think CAT is a partnership, yeah? Let’s make this a partnership.”
“Just like the old days.”
“Partner.” They shake on it. “And I, um, I know of a girl who might be looking for work…”
they walk around wearing thoughts like clothes
this town is changing every day and so am i