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These kids who have come into the hospital room scare Namatame Tarō.
They’re all teenagers, and he recognizes them; because some of them are the kids he tried to save, and some of them are the kids that seem to be the ones that glue the patchwork group together. But they’re all angry, spitting at him with a vitriol that not even the policeman who had been in charge of his interrogation could match.
And Namatame doesn’t quite understand what he’s done to earn their ire; splayed in front of him on their faces in such harsh lines and contours. Harsh flashes emotions and colors in their words that he’s honestly afraid to name.
Because to name it would be to know it. And it’s already breaking something in him, something that was already fragile and fraying, even as it’s currently the support beam that he’s been leaning the heaviest into ever since Mayumi’s corpse was called in. Hanging in the fog from the telephone wires, limp and smelling nothing like her pretty cherry blossom and sweet crème perfume. As if the stark contrast in that one consistent detail about her (and even among the many others, it was that one. The way that she smelled. He doesn’t know why) was meant to really accentuate it for him. That her short disappearance—which he had only learned was real after she had been strung up from the wires—had forced her to shed the scent for something different, something headier. Trading cherry blossoms and sweet crème for thick and metallic gun smoke and black coffee.
Mayumi had always hated black coffee. She had much preferred something with lots of cream but no sugar. The reverse of his own preference for lots of sugar but no cream.
Namatame’s nameless and most integral inner mental support is splintering under his brittle, metaphorical fingers, even with his deliberately ignorant knowledge of what that emotion, that intent, from those kids is. To know it only somewhere in the back of his mind is already costing him so much. So Namatame knows somewhere in himself, instinctively, that to name it would break it fully.
He is pressed between the wall and the hospital bed, cowering from the group of teens. The kids that fill him with both a deep sense of shame and a depthless terror. And he feels pathetic.
They’re all arguing, talking over each other, and while Namatame can’t understand the entirety of their conversation, he understands the general idea of it. That they think he was genuinely trying to send these children to their deaths, that he had killed the little girl. That they all think it’s his fault that Mayumi and that other girl, Konishi Saki, died. They think the same of Dōjima Nanako. That he’s responsible for their deaths.
He’s not.
He’s really not.
He didn’t kill them. He didn’t kill anyone.
The worst that he did was kidnap them in some kind of pitiful—and what he’s quickly piecing together to be, even in his terror—misguided attempt to provide shelter for them. So that they would survive, even if Mayumi and Konishi hadn’t.
He didn’t… he really…. Really…
But it’s not like anyone will listen to that. To him. The police had been drilling into him for a few days now, and he can’t offer anything better to these teenagers than what he did to the policemen. And he gets the distinct feeling, especially with all the emotion running high between them, that they won’t listen either. Sure, if he were to try to speak past the thick lump in his throat, sitting proud and heavy like stone, maybe they’d act like they’re listening. But they wouldn’t. Not really. There’d be something else going on behind their eyes to sow seeds of doubt into the land that is fertile for it; that long stretch of dirt that is his story.
They won’t listen even though they’re also the ones that have the best shot at understanding what he tries to say the best.
And it scares him, how these kids throw around these accusations at him like it’s already something preordained for him. Murderer. As though they’re convinced. Even if it isn’t true now, it will be, or so they seem to think. Because they’re already convinced that something is deeply wrong with him, and that much he won’t deny, but he’s not a murderer.
A cheater? Sure. A kidnapper? Absolutely. But not that. Not murderer.
He’s never killed anyone. At least not intentionally. The idea of doing that scares him more than the idea of killing himself. Which already scares him plenty, even with as often as the thought occurs to him. Just how easy it would be, because for all of the human body’s resilience and adaptability, it’s still so fragile.
As he takes in a shaking breath when the teens stop their arguing as he cowers in the corner. They all turn to stare at the one he can only guess is the leader, with shining silver hair and steel eyes.
He says something that Namatame doesn’t fully process before he’s grabbed by his shirt collar, yanked upward roughly. With no regard for the scramble for purchase that his shaking fingers fight for on the grey-haired teen’s arm, the hand in his collar transfers the responsibility for supporting his weight over to the other one—this time with busing fingers wrapping around his neck instead of in his shirt. He stares at the teen with panicked gasps pushing through his lips without a voice to put behind it, his pupils blown wide with the fear that won’t allow him to slow down to contextualize things anymore.
Fear that won’t allow him to think about anything at all, instead overloading every circuit in his brain all at once and just leaving him quiet and shaking. Loose fists circled around the wrist that belongs to the hand holding him by the neck loosely and bruisingly.
He’s sure that if he hadn’t gotten allowed to use the bathroom a mere two hours earlier (With the door open, of course. Though the police couldn’t afford to let him keep his dignity, they could afford to let him maintain his hygiene), he would have lost his bladder against the pure unadulterated hatred directed at him in the teen’s faces.
As much of an adult as Namatame is, and how juvenile seeing the pure and unfiltered loathing on their faces should seem to him as a result of that, he’s still already breaking mentally. He’s not even falling off of the fragile tightrope that he’s been walking to maintain some semblance of human functionality and stability. He’s just falling through it. The line and anchors that hold it snapping and breaking too quickly for him to really do anything other than start crying.
Because even though he doesn’t know what he’s done exactly to make them hate him so… unanimously, so wholeheartedly, but he does know what they think of him. The fact that he doesn’t really understand how they got tot he conclusion that they did is negated in the face of their unbridled and unparalleled hate. It’s edged with venom and something darker that he’s even more afraid to name than he was to name the underlying tone of their earlier anger.
And what makes everything worse is the fact that Namatame’s keenly aware that there are many more people who are angry with him than just these teens. Presumably, they are angry with the same fervor and devotion as these teens are, as well.
All his friends have either already cut their ties with him for the sake of their careers the moment his affair went public, or they’ve cut ties later, after they reaped all the amusement they could from his misery.
All his friends have proved to be flammable men, and the fire that’s called ‘The Public Opinion’ has already devoured them all. Swayed away from trying to keep in contact with him for the sake of maintaining a clean public image.
He feels his face both flush and drain itself of color. The paradox of his cheeks becoming flushed from crying and the fear draining him dry existing side by side are fighting for dominance in his face.
Namatame does. He does cry. He cries something thick and ugly, chest heaving but still without any sound other than a whisper-whine of his voice that’s caught in his clogged throat. It doesn’t get any louder, but he already knows that his face has gone beyond red, especially with the way those fingers flex into the sides of his neck and into his windpipe. As if to debate the merit of just crushing it instead of whatever other method the teens are deliberating to execute him.
And though their words are all something filled with unadulterated animosity, and something small and fragile inside him screams at him to listen and argue with them like it’s a political debate rather than what it really is—a one-sided accusation without evidence but seemingly all the circumstance, even if he doesn’t quite understand it.
He doesn’t know what connections they’ve drawn between the local news, Mayumi and Konishi’s murders, and his own desperate kidnappings, but they’ve drawn something. All Namatame wants to say, or at least, all that small part that hasn’t quite broken down yet wants to scream at them, even through the choking fingers, is that the doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t. He… He… He stopped watching the news after the local coverage almost exclusively became obsessed with Mayumi’s death. He couldn’t handle it. Wasn’t ready yet to splay out that wound to the world, held open and oozing, ready for every passerby to dump salt into it. Because if he knows anything about the public, it’s that a back-to-back scandal like this, his affair, then her death, it’s that they will be ruthless about it.
Everyone will be hunting for their chance to pour their own pitcher of salt into the wound. If not in it, then on it—around it. Even if they weren’t hunting before, they’ll be hunting now that he’s being detained for murder.
He cries harder, uglier, but none the louder, even as his captor changes from the silver teen to the one with the faun-brown dyed hair and the girl in the green jacket, their arms winding around his torso as the grey-haired teen releases him. The teenager, the leader, flexes his fingers as he stares somewhere off to the side, saying something like ‘do it’ with blazing eyes.
The arms around him tighten, as though he has any strength to make a break for it. He barely has the strength to stand up.
He just wishes someone would listen to him, or at least show some vague willingness to. He opens his mouth to wheeze out something, anything, to try and make them understand, but upon the first sound that’s louder than his quiet whines and wheezing, he gets a fist to his teeth, and it hurts.
The punch is given like some professional fighter, all in the knuckles, twisting as the body of the girl who gives it throws itself into the blow. Her brown pigtails flying as he feels something in his mouth crack with it.
Namatame crumples folding over himself as much as the arms restraining him will allow, hands trembling worse than leaves in the wind, and legs jerking in involuntary shudders from his fear.
The teens move, charging towards the T.V., and Namatame is forced to accept his fate as he stares at his own sobbing face in the dark reflection. Blocked and blotched red and pale, snot running out of his nose and spit from his lips, for all the heaving his chest is doing. Two of his front teeth knocked loose, one of his central incisors and the lateral incisor next to it. They are on the floor somewhere, presumably. Along with the blood that he must have spit out with them. Dropped from between his lips and onto the floor somewhere in his fog of terror. His cloud of fear and punishment.
They don’t throw him against the T.V. pane though. They just pause. Wait. Let him shake and quiver at his own reflection.
Something about the pause in their movements, just hovering there, as if to force him to try to comprehend where they’re sending him to, tips the anxiety building in him badly enough that whatever was still in his bladder finds itself making it’s way down the his legs and onto the floor.
But everything is hazed over by a cloud of deep, penetrating horror. He can’t scrape up enough of anything else to feel embarrassed.
It’s the same feeling that he used to get as a child on the swing set in the park nearest his childhood apartment, staring up at the sky with stars blotted out from smog. There was a sort of… inexplicable, noneucladian ethereallity to it all, staring at the smog smeared stars in that big, big sky.
Namatame had both felt like that those stars held all the answers to the universe, and that they all were crying for help, every twinkle a tear that hasn’t quite reached Earth yet.
Begging the universe to not let them die.
Begging for humanity to remember them, as humanity begs to be remembered by itself.
Because that’s how someone really makes their mark on the world. How they know that they really meant something. It’s all in the memory. The longevity of it. Even if it’s not a story told in history books, what matters is that someone remembers it. They remember it.
And because they remember it they share it with others. It doesn’t matter much if the story gets a little lost or embellished, because the memory is there, however small, alive and free and thriving. Embellishments tend to shine the most as details to help the brilliance of the life behind it, the story, rather than diminish it, anyway.
And the stars twinkle above the pollution. And somewhere, somewhere, they can be seen clearer than what Namatame is seeing now, but it’s all still so breathtakingly heartbreaking to him anyway. They can be seen, but not by all, and that means that they’ll only ever be remembered in all their splendor by a select few.
Their brilliance will be forgotten, ever so slightly, chip by chip, piece by piece. Drop by drop, forgotten, left behind, by humanity and the human condition that moves too fast for there to ever really be a pause left to really breathe. Suffocating in the same way that it’s exciting and freeing. When you can do almost anything, especially with the power of modern technology, it binds a man just as much as it liberates him.
Namatame can’t help but think, staring at the sky with too-wide eyes and parted lips as a teenager, later, that the stars know that. And that’s why they cry every night, a raging plea that bangs on the very roof of life itself and goes unheard… so unheard, in fact, that it might as well be silent.
The thought had filled him with some kind of irrational but ever-permeating fear. An amalgamation of anxiety and the concentrated nihilistic, cynical despair that the world could have been so much better.
He had thought, then, that the world still could be. That there could be someone to help it, make it better chip by chip, and return those once-lost but really just abandoned drops from the stars back to them. To cherish them and comfort them. To hear their cries and respond in kind, earnestly, honestly, faithfully. To really try and put in the effort to make the world better, even as Namatame can feel the pit of biting, tearing fear that any attempts he’ll put forward to be that person will inevitably come back to drown him.
As though it won’t really matter at all.
As though nothing will really ever change, because it can’t change, not really. It can’t change because human kind is a creature of habit, not a creature of change. Even though the elasticity of the identity intrinsically means that habit can be just as easily spun into change, if you know what to do and the right words to say, anyway.
There’s something ironic about the line of thought now.
Bitter and tasting too much like black coffee on his tongue, a flavor that he knows on an animalistic level is something that he’d never be able to scrub out of his mouth, no matter the soap used with it.
But here and now, Namatame is just mildly grateful, somewhere deep down and buried, that he already abandoned trying to maintain some semblance of dignity here. Shame can’t really flood him because it’s already been abandoned, suffocated, for the anxiety and fear. Something much more monstrous, mountainous, deep, dark, painful, and massive like the pits of Tartarus.
They heave forward, at that. The girl in the green jacket seemingly having enough of waiting with Namatame’s piss on the floor, and the T.V. screen bends with him, taking his body into it’s folds with a swirl of pixels. The world blurs together in a swirl of colors that makes Namatame think of a prismatic spinning top. Clear, reflective, and spitting out rainbows as the light hits it as it spins away on chipped asphalt.
Spinning, ballerina elegance and long neck reaching for a sky that it will never really touch. But the hope is there, and it still pukes it’s rainbows on the dark and grainy asphalt anyway. Grace that is, at least, there, defined and proud and reaching out, out and upward, until it hits a stray pebble that’s broken out of the asphalt itself and skids to a halt, toppling over with a deafening clatter of fragile glass against rock.
He lands badly, and feels something in his right leg snap and give out with it. He doesn’t even bother to look at his foot resting at it’s terribly wrong angle to know what it looks like.
Namatame breathes, harsh and quivering, as he just closes his eyes and presses his face into the cold tiles that he’s been met with inside the television. He doesn’t want to think about anything at all right now, and maybe that’s the first happy thought he’s had in a while. It feels like it is, at least.
He doesn’t know how long he lays there, unmoving. He had crawled a little ways past a few doors and halfway to another one, but he wonders if that really counts as moving in the end. Everything looks the same. But he does know when the fog finally leaves the area because the oppressive hefty smell of gasoline and tobacco smoke leaves with it. Thought the sticky feeling coating his skin, as though she’s been bathed in a tub filled with soft drinks, doesn’t leave with it.
He knows, rationally, that it won’t leave him. That feeling is his sweat, hot and sticky, from the humidity that’s been leaking into this place. It’s not something that will leave with the fog. He wishes, somewhere deep down, that it would, though.
Even if he’s dying, and that death is something far more pathetic and empty than anything he had hoped for and envisioned as a child… he still has some kind of unbreakable desire to be clean for it, at least. If he has to pass away, even like this, he’d like to feel… hygienic, at least. Like he’s had a shower before his departure to the spider lily field.
He’s already cried himself dry, wrung his emotions out to the state of empty apathy for the situation. Apathy for everything, except his lack of hygiene, it seems. He just knows that he smells terrible, and it pokes at something deep and painful within him.
Namatame can’t help but think that it’s funny. It’s funny that his last moments until death are filled more with ruing the fact that he police hadn’t let him shower before that group of kids had thrown him into the T.V.
It’s such a… mortal thing. Material. Tangible. His overwhelming fixation on it. The desire to shower.
That’s what he’ll leave the world with.
Wishing he could have showered, at least.
He’s not even sure why. There’s the vague thought that it would have been nice to greet Mayumi in the afterlife, clean, even if he’s beaten and bruised. He’d be clean, and he’d smell nice for her. And he’d love her, even if she still smells like gun smoke and black coffee. He’d be the one to smell nice, for the both of them, then. He’d stain himself in the smell of cherry blossoms and sweet crème that she loved for her.
Because at least that’d be the one thing that he could do for her. He’d never been able to do anything else, he thinks. At least it doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t feel like he’d ever done anything for her. Nothing worthy of her, anyway.
She’d given him everything. He just wants to repay that for her. In small things, meaningful things. Because she’d always complained about his cologne, which had smelled like a subdued version of fire smoke and cedar, but she loved her cherry blossom and sweet crème perfume. She’d even offered to lend him a bottle, once.
He hates that he declined her offer back then.
He wants it, more than anything, now.
He doesn’t even know if that desire, dragging it’s claws, long and deep, in the back of his brain is really the real reason why he wants to shower. Or wishes that he could have. He wants to know if that fantasy is more like a delusion he’s been feeding himself to rationalize the scorching desire that plagues him. Just like how hr had rationalized away kidnapping teenagers and one child to try and protect them from a threat that might as well not even be real, for all the good he obviously did for it. He didn’t protect anyone, not really.
So who’s to say that this lingering thought of Mayumi and her perfumes and shampoo is anything different?
He wants to shower.
He hates the smell of smoke. He hates the smell of black coffee. He hates the smell of gasoline. But he hates the smell of smoke more than anything else.
Maybe that’s worthless, though. Because he’s worthless. It’s a worthless gesture, a worthless sentiment, for a worthless man. And it’s even more worthless because Mayumi is dead, and Namatame definitely isn’t going to Heaven with her anyway. He’s done too many things to be allowed up there with here, in her benevolence, even if she had been biting at the end.
He knows it was his fault that she got so stressed and upset with him, by the end. He just wishes he had gathered himself enough to actually apologize to her before everything happened and he couldn’t do even that anymore.
The path to Hell is paved with good intentions, and Namatame feels it, the solid weight of the idea in him, that he’s the embodiment of that phrase.
So he waits, thinking about some kind of ideal shower in a shitty apartment with perpetually cold water and a low-budget version of Mayumi’s strawberry shampoo and conditioner. A bottle of her perfume, a loan not a gift, sitting on the cracked tile of the bathroom sink and waiting for him to put it on like it’s his cologne.
He thinks about how he’d be able to smile, because nothing smells like smoke, black coffee, or gasoline. There’d be no coffee in the house anymore, just soft drinks and tea. The tea would be in fruity flavors and floral ones, with plenty of things to add and ways to brew it. Because he knows that Mayumi loves milk tea and popping boba.
And Hiiragi Misuzu wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t even be a consideration.
Namatame’s stomach growls, then, loud and angry at him.
He just breathes out in a way that could be called a sigh, long and heavy. It’s something more punched out than it is calmly and consistently released. He wants it to end already, with those black amorphous lumps he’s spied passing him every now and then crawling around him to drown him in their oily masses.
Maybe they’re more acid than oil, though, so they’d leave him unrecognizable, large chunks of his body dissolved and others rendered maimed beyond repair.
He wonders what the point of debating the chemical make-up of these creatures, who might as well be from some kind of dark fantasy novel, is. Idle curiosity, he supposes. Maybe he’s ran out of things to think about, and he can’t return to his ivory tower fantasy. His stomach growled loud enough to break him out of his delirious fantasy where none of this happened and he never married Hiiragi.
He wonders if the day has passed yet, and the black sludge creatures just all somehow missed him. His blood has long since stopped flowing from his open wounds, and Namatame wonders if the Sludge (as he’s named them in his head), just can’t find him because he’s not bleeding anymore. And he’s dragged himself away from his initial drop-in location.
Maybe that was stupid of him, to move away from his sad puddle of blood and urine that had been created upon his first few hours in this part of the Television World.
It’s so different from the place that the little girl had created, too. Hers was… magical, whimsical, like some kind of fantasy depiction of Heaven. It was beautiful, and Namatame couldn’t hold down the desperate wish that Mayumi made her way into a Heaven that looks just like that.
His isn’t all that interesting, he thinks. It’s all fog and cracked linoleum tiles colored in garish magenta and blue. Everything else is just bathed in yellow and streaks of silver, like camera lighting poles have been periodically planted throughout the hallways. He’s not sure if the colors are supposed to symbolize anything, but he finds himself afraid of what they must symbolize, if anything at all.
If he knows himself at all, it’s nothing good. He knows at that much, at least.
The swinging spotlights above him continue to gain clarity as he rolls over onto his back to stare at the ceiling. And Namatame wonders if there really wasn’t a more suitable place for him than this garish, gaudy, almost childish and naive version of a broadcasting studio.
Namatame wonders if this is what Mayumi saw, too, when she was in here. Lost. Confused. Scared. She was probably more scared than he ever will be, and his heart squeezes painfully in his chest, as if to remind him that not everything is still defined by his newfound apathy from the past long little while.
It’s a little amusing, and strangely comforting, to think that Mayumi died to the same scenery he will.
Even if Namatame sincerely doubts that she did. She was so much more than her public face, after all. She was… she was so much more than that… so much more.
He’s actually not that sure on the exact dates for how long he’s been in here. Just that it’s more draining than it has any right to be for a man who only crawled a few rooms and about half a hallway away from where he had landed and cried. He’s not even sure that he can pin all the exhaustion as decompressing and accepting after emotional stress. Because it wasn’t that stressful, not compared to Mayumi and Konishi, each writhing in their respective agonies.
How terrible it must have been to be irreverently put on display to the audience that they couldn’t have even began to know was there.
He wonders if the band of teenagers would decide soon that they made the wrong decision and come and save him, too, like they did to everyone else who was thrown in here. Though he doubts it. He’s sure that they thoroughly convinced himself that he’s at fault for everything, careless of the truth.
He would call it atheistical if their obsession with having the facts and knowing the truth could be called religion. Though Namatame hits a strike upon the idea that maybe it was really only Shirogane Naoto who had cared that much, that deeply, about the truth. Shirogane had been the one to stubbornly keep the cases open after Kubo Mitsuo had framed himself, if he understands right.
He only knows that much because the police would not stop hounding him about Kubo. Asking what their relationship was and how he had convinced the teenager to go through with taking the fall. What he did to sway Kubo into killing Mooroka Kinshiro, if he’s sure that he really didn’t do anything at all… Because that’s such an awful thing for a child to do, isn’t it…? So unbelievable that Kubo did it on his own, without an adults direct influence, because he’s still a child to them.
Though maybe Kubo is still a child to Namatame, as well, despite it all. Because he tried to barter with the police to lift the kid’s sentence a little. To try and help alleviate the stain it’d leave on his record.
Though the police had stared at him like he had suddenly started sprouting extra limbs and eyes. Disturbed, a little confused and mystified, but mostly disbelieving.
As though they couldn’t fathom the idea of Namatame offering to serve a longer sentence, to have a bigger streak of thick grime on his record, in order to try and spare the kid, at least a little. But maybe it was more in the way that he had phrased it to them. Like he doesn’t know Kubo beyond what he’s been hearing in this very room on this very day, and he’s not trying to force the kid to play martyr for his sins in his place.
It’s a little funny, in a hollow and reedy way. Like the whistle through grass near a river during a slight wind is a little funny, sometimes. In the way that it requires a very specific mindset and a very specific situation to really laugh at it, anyway.
It’s funny in the same way that the fog, thick and white, fading back in around the studio lights is, to him. Brittle in the way that it’d never be funny to anyone else or in another situation. But it’s funny to him. He had thought that the Sludge would have damn near danced with joy at the fog lifting. It’d make their hunt so much easier to be able to see, and to be able to smell without that constant stench of heavy tobacco smoke and gasoline.
But he didn’t see a single one before the fog decided to return.
The only thing he dully notes as he watches the fog sink languidly, is that this one smells different, at least. Petrichor and pine needles, something subtle and floral lingering as a constant undertone that reminds him of big white flowers of some kind that he doesn’t actually know the name to.
The kind that always drop a few petals every time he accidentally bumps the vase with his elbow. And it occurs to him now, bitterly, that maybe that was the flower’s way to cry. Just as the stars twinkle for their tears, and Namatame’s face gets blochy red and swollen around his eyes, the flower sheds some petals. Dropping them in a beautiful and tragic statement of it’s anguish. Even though it’s unlikely that anyone will listen.
It’s white too, this fog, not a pale sickly yellow-green. But it’s still flecked with specks of black and grey floating around in it.
Namatame wonders if the fog changes those properties of itself every time it ascends out and then descends back down. It’s color and it’s smell, that is. He wonders if the fog ascending somewhere high above him that he can’t see is more about it purifying itself, because to exist in this world is to be tainted. Like it’s absorbing something in the air like the old miasma theory that hurts it, so it has to leave to heal for a while before coming back to grace the world with whatever salvation it whispers about in it’s wispy tendrils.
He wonders if he’s just reading too deeply into it.
But he likes the idea. He likes the idea that the fog is here to give aid instead of harm.
He hears some tapping somewhere both close and far as the fog nears the ground, and he turns his head towards the sound echoing somewhere over to his left. As if his limited sight would grant him the privilege of seeing the person walking toward him with light footsteps echoing off the empty walls of the hallway that Namatame decided was his deathbed.
A girl eventually comes into view, her dark and short cropped like Mayumi’s had been. Though she’s not Mayumi, even as his breath catches in his chest at the similarity. Her eyes are blue and icy, not brown and warm, and the cut of her hair is different from Mayumi’s.
She’s dressed in some kind of alt punk fashion that Namatame doesn’t have a name for off the tip of his tongue. Her arm sleeves are stripped black and red, a sleeveless white button up shirt, and a red plaid mini skirt. She’s not wearing shoes, but she does have white and black stripped thigh-high socks. Her hair falls away from her eyes as she leans over him, critically, and Namatame dully notes the one technicolor eye in contrast to the previously noted blue one.
He wonders if that technicolor eyes is a contact lens or if it’s real.
He thinks that she must be a teenager, but he didn’t see her with Amagi Yukiko, Tatsumi Kanji, Kujikawa Rise, and Shirogane and their friends, either. So he doesn’t know what her affiliation with them would be, if she even has one.
He wonders if she’s a new form of the Sludge that populates this world, or if she just exists in a way that allows her to be here without the fluttering television static announcing her arrival. Because someone did come in once, but they left just as quickly, and that was about the time that Namatame started to nurture the small hope in his chest that the angry teenagers decided to come back to take him out of here.
He wishes in himself, in a place loud and overwhelming, that they would come back. So he could huddle on his knees with his forehead pressed into the ugly tiles, prostrating in front of them as an apology and a plea. The fervent hope to communicate white hot and burning on his lips. To say that he didn’t know. He didn’t. He really didn’t. But he’s sorry all the same, even if that sorry fixes nothing, because not knowing does not absolve him from his crimes and sins. Not that he’d expect them to forgive him in any way that would truly levy that pure and putrid loathing out from their eyes, but maybe it’d exorcise at least a little of it.
He just wants to say, through the clog in his throat, that it’s okay to hate him for everything he’s done, every star in the sky knows he deserves it... but please don’t multiply that hatrid to accuse him of the things he hasn’t done.
Not that his plea would come off as anything better than something won for free from a magazine advertisement, though. Cool to have, sure, but minimial quality and trust in the product (in this case, his apology) is expected.
They’d probably feel like it was manufactured in a facotry anyway, with his background in debates and politics. He thinks that Shirogane would, at least. Or maybe that’s too harsh a judgement on the small boy’s character. Maybe Shirogane would be the only one to believe him and take him seriously. Because Shirogane loves facts and stories that line up to make sense. There’s no way that his reported alibi and devotion to Mayumi would have escaped him, even if Namatame’s genuine concern for Konishi might.
Maybe it’d soothe them, at least a little, to have him prostrated before them. Object of their anger and their hate, bowing his head to them and pleading. Doing his best to keep the tremor of fear out of his voice and the ugly sobbing to a minimum.
Because it’d probably disgust them to see that again. As if it’d humanize him too much to show his anguish. Because most people would rather see him as a husk and a doll of a man than a real one. Something to make it easier to hate him and blame him for things he hasn’t done.
The girl with the black hair and technicolor eye stares at him all the same.
Namatame wonders if she wants to see him grovel for her to save him.
And she stares at him, bathed in her silent sagisō white. Her clothes, her skin, the fog. It’s all pale. Ghastly looking in contrast to her dark hair and the darker feeling in her eyes.
She opens her mouth to speak, and it’s all running so slowly to Namatame that he wonders if time has been temporarily slowed down just for this.
“This is not meant to be your grave, shallow as it is, even if this is your shallow grave of choice.”
He blinks at her, slow and stupid. It takes him even longer to process her words than it takes her to start a new sentence, even at her lethargic pace. It’s been so long since he’s heard anyone actually speak, that the simple act of hearing it is something that over encumbers him on it’s own. His brain slowing to something even more lackadaisical than a snail, but still frantically clawing around in an attempt to force things to work faster. More efficiently. So he can understand. Even though he knows he can’t. Because how can he understand her when he can’t even begin to understand anyone else, either? The more normal people, like the policemen and those teenagers.
“Your fate is not sealed by the reaper’s eternal wax. Not like this, but it is sealed, much later down the life line.”
He tries to sit up at that, brows drawing to a questioning furrow. He doesn’t have the strength do do much more than flop there like a fish gasping for air, though. And the girl places her hand over his eyes to hold his head down, as though to dissuade him from trying again.
She stays like that, for a while, in silence, before lifting her hand again with a few words that Namatame doesn’t understand, “Adieu, au revoir... mon cheri.”
He stares at her with wide eyes and no understanding. There’s something that strikes at him in the back of his head like flint against steel, trying to light a fire of recognition. Because there is something here that he should know, that he should understand, but he’s missing it. He’s missing it.
“Ah, cet enfant… ce destin. Cette vie est trop tordue, elle est tortueuse, alors je suis désolé. Je suis désolé, même si tu ne le comprends pas… Ah, mon enfant bien-aimé, adieu, au revoir.”
She moves towards him in a fall; the movement is all in a unified flurry of arcs like falling camellia blooms. And her grace is swift, as is her ability to recapture her balance. She catches herself before he could have ever caught her, if he were in a state to do so. She turns on her heel with one last eternal look into his eyes, and she leaves him there. Alone. With those words that he doesn’t rightfully know how to interpret.
And all Namatame can think of, as he watches her back, shoulders pulled tight against her spine, the blue strap of her bag swinging in time with the pouch it keeps suspended from her shoulder, is that it’s funny. Maybe a little odd... that as she leaves, down what he can imagine as a moonlit street, she seems to take the fog with her.
The fog rolls out behind her, flanking her heels like a loyal hound. Even though the garish hallway is not quite as romantic as an unnamed moonlight street in some unnamed town in an unnamed place, somewhere.
Though he also thinks that anywhere would have been a better place, a better time, for first meetings than here.