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A bed, a chair, a window, a stand with a lamp -- all these are the first items he sees as he enters the hotel room. There is little more space to it but the bathroom; a luxury for all that. It would serve the purpose of sheltering him and providing a place to sleep and that's all Yukawa was expecting. He's slept in worse places.
My car is a favorite, isn't it, Yukawa-sensei? questions Utsumi's voice, quiet and amused, and despite the knowledge that she is not present, the clarity of the words -- the thought, his own and yet not -- is incisive. Yukawa breathes out through his nose, drops his satchel containing his laptop onto the bed, and falls back, his back flat across the coverlet, and his knees bent and aching a little. The long breath he takes catches in his throat, tickles there, and he clears it.
Not as young as you once were?
No, that's not it. He's tired, and a long day with too many pressures has just tipped some inner sense of balance over. Or perhaps, more rationally, that young policeman's naive sincerity has brought impressions of the past up from some buried place in his memory. She was once --
You just can't admit that you miss me.
Or perhaps the unanswered e-mail from meddlesome Kusanagi is to blame, opened and skimmed, as he'd struggled with being unable to ignore the masquerade of a misleading crime.
Oh, what did he say?
Yukawa covers his eyes with his arm. The words are easily recalled: 'Utsumi keeps sending me messages that she's carbon-copied you on, but you haven't even mentioned her much. It's none of my business, but you tend to get a narrow focus.'
He has one thing right -- it definitely is not any of Kusanagi's business.
But he's my friend, too. Aren't you being unfair to him?
Her voice feels embedded in his ear, and he can't shake it out, as though it were water. You wish you could be rid of me that easily. How long have we known each other? Six years? I've just rubbed off on you, don't you think? They say couples often take on the characteristics of each other. It's just a logical consequence of being in each other's company.
It's true. He can almost visualize a different scene, as though if he opens his eyes, she would be there, sitting in the solitary chair next to the window, her eyebrows bent into pique, and her jaw set in determination.
Kusanagi had said the same thing. 'You haven't noticed it, have you? She acts like you now, and you're much more expressive than you used to be. Her mannerisms are rubbing off on you. Don't tell her I said that.'
Yukawa rubs his eyes, fingertips pressing hard into the corners of them, sleep encroaching when he should just get up, move around, do something to push the confusion of thoughts away. Get something to eat, now that his focus isn't tangled in images he would rather forget, now that he can no longer push them aside to solve the puzzle, or burning up in reaction to the inexcusable rudeness of Kishitani Misa.
It's just you, you know. Get rest and all this will go away, but if I were you -- oh, what an irony -- I'd examine why you're following this train of thought.
Just him, only him, alone. He breathes, steady in and out, but it scrapes his throat, that breath. The last thing he needs is to be ill.
It almost feels as though the bed dips beside him, the weight of someone else sitting close to him, and then pressure from a hand on his head that flits away. You think you made the right choice, don't you?
You can't sleep here. She said that to him once, didn't she?
His instinctual reaction is denial. He checked in to this place. It's his bed.
Yukawa. Her voice chides him, but she's not there, and he's not ignorant of the necessity to examine one's actions, his tiredness overwhelming rational thought. Not the best of days. Too many little scratches on the surface of his equanimity. Too many decisions with no easy choice, but...
Of course he did. He made the right choice.
'I'm sorry,' she'd said to him. 'He'll get the death penalty.'
'I know,' he'd answered.
'I could go with you to visit him, before the execution, if you'd like.'
He'd nodded. Her face had been full of pain, but it wasn't for Ishigami. It was for him.
You probably think it was pity, but it wasn't.
He knew that -- knows that. Reassuring himself for the oft-considered thought is an on-going act of forgiveness.
He rolls over, cheek pressing against a scratchy cover, and his clothes are too much, hot and digging into his skin, and there's something heavy next to him as he tries to get comfortable, and in the dragging weight of sleep, a voice of condemnation twining around him.
It wasn't merciful, what you've done to them. You're always pretending your choices won't turn against you or other people.
No, it was the logical choice.
Is it really logical, if it's driven by a past mistake?
You're not here. I was alone.
So am I.
I would like to think you would have made the same choice. All she did was tamper with evidence.
You know full well I'll never have that luxury. What a choice you made for them. They -- and you -- will always have to keep that burden.
It's not pity. It's forgiveness. No one else will give it.
Your phone is buzzing. You should answer it.
It is, in his satchel beside him, and how could he think it was another person... his thought shies away from wishing... why does it feel like a loss? His shirt sticks to him, his neck damp and feverish. He fumbles for his phone, squints at the notification.
Utsumi. Mail. The coincidence vibrates shock through him, the difference between reality and dream blurring for a second.
He shoves the phone away, across the bed, but he still holds it, and the coolness of the screen is quick to grow warm under his fingertips. Where his neck is pressed against the firm mattress, his heartbeat thuds. Time passes as his pulse slows. He rolls over, pushing himself up, back to sitting. With his eyes closed, he clasps his throat with his hand, wipes at the sweat around his neck, drags his hand across his face. Water; he needs water.
'You still don't believe in ghosts, do you, Sensei?'
She'd expected an answer.
'Wait, I mean -- I don't mean literal ghosts. There are more ways to be haunted.'
Superstition says that if you feed ghosts, they will only return. Starve them of the attention they crave and you need never answer to them again. Close the door on them and never, ever, let them in.
'Do you ever regret telling me about Ishigami?' A gentle question; a careful probing. 'Sensei? Do you?'
It was her eyes that had made him unable to answer, the infinite knowledge that she already knew the answer, despite his silence. The bed creaks as he stands, and for a moment a subtle wave of vertigo sways him in the one step he makes, and then it's gone. And yet, he still stands, a little lost, before he can focus on what he wanted to do, sees the rest of the room for what it is, and the silence of him in it as what it is. There is a hanger on the wall, and the door to the bathroom, and he's still in need of rest and a change of clothes, so he removes his jacket and hangs it.
The bathroom mirror has flecks in the corners, places the paint has chipped away, empty black replacing the ability to reflect. He does not know what he expects to see in his face -- someone with darker circles under his eyes than he actually sees, perhaps.
He sighs, runs water into his hands.
He rinses his face, and walks to the bedroom again, but pauses, his hands in the inadequate plush of a towel, the sight of his phone stopping him.
He can't ignore her message forever; it will begin to gnaw at him. He can already pin labels to his reluctance to answer with brutal efficiency; he's being irrational, cowardly, desperate.
It will be some innocuous greeting, a way to remind him, all too well, that she's gone, and this encased wonder of microcircuitry is one of the few lines of communication left.
Her voice is remarkably quiet, because now the decision is his. He turns his phone over, before he sits on the side of the bed again, feels the weight of it, so different now to phones he used to have.
"In the morning," he says to the stale air.