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A midsummer day, picturesque, with Shibuya as quiet as it gets; people sticking out their workday, school day, whatever other obligations they may have. Neku skips school in the middle of the week, middle of the day- the real dead hours- and adjusts the bag over his shoulder before stepping off of the subway.
The note clutched in his hand is crinkled at the corners, covered with Hanekoma’s messy penmanship. He’d offered no explanation when he’d pressed it into his palm, and at Neku’s surprised look, only shrugged, vanishing into wisps of light and echoing sound. Awkward, being left alone in someone else’s store- home?- and Neku had left without finishing his coffee once he’d realized what it was, the door locking itself behind him, the sign switched to CLOSED.
An address. Searching the internet proved useless, an afternoon spent scouring a digital map with nothing but errors to show for it. Even the directories he’d found at the library were curiously blank, no matter the decade, the building simply skipped over in the listings. Neku had flipped through a stack of them for the better part of an afternoon until he felt a pain blooming under his eyelids.
Whatever. The evasiveness shouldn’t surprise him. Maybe Joshua knows about this, his little excursion- maybe that’s why Hanekoma skipped out on him so quickly, off to a place where he’d be a little harder to track down, dodging a round of barbed, catty comments about useless sentimentality. He’d figured out the general area, found a subway stop nearby- Neku takes a deep breath as he stands in an unfamiliar part of the district, and starts down the sidewalk, address in hand.
:---:
It turns out to be an apartment building. Utterly abandoned, cracks in the glass and all along the sidewalk, weeds growing rampant in every inch of exposed dirt. The buildings around it have been renovated, retouched or repurposed, but something about this one keeps the crowds away, a pariah. Even though he stops and stands in the middle of the sidewalk, there's no one shoving past him with murmurs or dirty looks- they ignore him completely, in fact, ghosting past him without a second thought. The numbers stamped over the doorway match the ones written on the note and he looks with trepidation upon the scene. This is the place.
There’s a gap on one side; he steps carefully around the uneven ground and glances down what he finds to be a long, narrow alleyway. It’s surprisingly clean, as if untouched by the city grime, more weeds cluttered in the corners and ivy grown up the walls, loose stones scattered on the concrete. Some of the telephone wires have snapped, rubber and exposed wire dangling against the building’s facade. He ventures in further, about halfway through, until a force catches him like a hook, an invisible tether to an unassuming stretch of ground.
It could be his imagination, but he’s learned enough about that to know if it is, he ought to give it a little more credit. A quiet, discordant sound rings in his ears as he steps closer- the sound of teeth scraping, of chalk screeching on a chalkboard. Warning noises, telling him to go away , and he almost does, torn between instinct and intent, but it’s a long way back and he can’t quit now, not when he just got here. He shakes his head, fiddles with the strap on his bag before he decides to set it down on a patch of weeds, pulling out the contents and laying them neatly on the ground.
Electric energy prickles along his nerves, like a static charge, or a being watched in the dark. Residual Soul, is what it is, clinging to this particular spot. A particularly powerful change of frequency, so much so that the signature still lingered. Perhaps that's what kept strangers away, driven off by an echo of a feeling they couldn't quite place. Not quite negative, but powerful, devouring. A desperate, hungry anticipation.
It’s tall, the building. Stories tall. Enough to give him vertigo when he stares up and tries to peer to the rooftop, obscured by the brightness of the sun. He stares solemnly at the spot, overgrown and so small, so unassuming for what happened, for who had been here.
Some kind of marker. That’s what it needs. Hesitantly, ponderously, Neku wanders up and down the alley, gathering similar stones, stacking them into a pile as best he can. He feels silly, self-conscious, a day spent miles away from home, a ritual he’s only read about, for a person he barely knows. For a person , he thinks, the word stuck like barbs in his thoughts. This is for a person, someone who died , and he’s the only one who knows about it who’s mortal enough to care.
:---:
It had rattled around his head for months, the report. The Composer’s RG identity was secret, even to the Conductor, especially to all those below him, but here he was with Joshua’s face clear and prominent in his mind, whether he was supposed remember or not, and it made him curious, very curious- and curiosity made him bold.
He’d wrung enough out of Hanekoma on his many visits to put together a patchwork backstory, just enough information to spur the groundwork of a plan; the address pressed into his hand the last bit of resolve he had needed. Allowance saved up to buy some simple items: flowers, incense, a rag, a bowl and bottle of water. It felt voyeuristic to look, a breach of some secret, personal boundary, but he really couldn’t help it, and maybe he felt a little entitled after playing the Game against his will- but days of research brought up nothing, no record of Joshua’s death, let alone anything about his years alive. No papers, no funeral, no grave, and that to him had seemed so…
Maybe that’s what Joshua really needed. A little grounding, to keep perspective, that he had been part of this at one point, this living melody, that he can’t always be so above it all. It takes him three tries to strike the match, and two to get the incense lit into a steady smoulder, the smoke the same color as the crumbling walls and loosely paved ground. The vase he’d brought was a bright, luminous blue, like the sky, and the flowers a soft yellow; splashes of color for someone who had seemed too pale, too ghostly, too faded for what he was.
Alive, once, with a family, people who knew him, a flesh and blood body that left marks on the world, and it didn’t sit well with him, how evidence of that had been stripped from the world, whether it was Joshua’s choice or not, patterns on a cloth bleached away into a blank, white nothing. A bowl, simple white porcelain, is set out; Neku fills it with the water bottle, careful not to spill.
Oh- the candle, he remembers, rummaging through his bag- a taper of cream-colored wax pulled from the pocket a few seconds later. Carefully set aside of the incense and lit with another quick-burning match.
:----:
There we go.
Kneeling in front of the makeshift grave, he can’t help a tiny twist of his lips at his work. Something in him is fluttery, tense, but no spontaneous thunderstorms or earthquakes is a good enough sign for him that he’s doing something right. Neku ponders over the words of the prayer he’d memorized nearly a month before, licks his lips as he prepares to speak in the steadiest voice he can muster.
But something slithers up his skin, a crawling, needling sensation at the back of his neck, a chill down his spine and down to the bone and his heart is beating fast, when had that started? A tremble starts in his fingers and he presses them against his palms to steady himself, but it merely takes up residence elsewhere in his body, his teeth starting to chatter, stomach turning and legs gone numb underneath him-
- and as quickly as it comes, the anxiety subsides; a quiet melody rising through the air as a breeze blows through, rustling his hair, the petals, carrying a curl of scented smoke higher into the sky. Amidst the soft rhythms of his heart rings the gentle sound of wind chimes, bells and birdsong, and Neku is startled to discover, with a nervous glance over his shoulder, that he is not, actually, alone.
A fox noise sits at the back of the alleyway, statuesque and stoic as it watches. Not particularly large, with ashen grey fur and lithe, bony legs, the noise markings a brilliant white as they catch the sunlight, twisted into an array of nine tails, each tipped with shimmering lavender flames. Neku swallows thickly as they make eye contact- the same untouchable, scintillating white-and nearly flinches at the tiny twitch of its ears as it looks at the offerings he’d placed.
He’s alive still, certain of it, but the noise doesn't disappear when he rubs his eyes with a sweating palm, nor when he looks away for the briefest of seconds. It would make sense, the barrier between worlds thin and worn in this spot, a slow erosion from that lingering vital essence, the ground imbued over the years with a frequency a little higher, a little distorted, just close enough to the UG to allow him a glimpse into that strange, mirrored world.
“ Um,” hey, he tries, but his throat has locked up, and he makes nothing more than a quiet croak, a wheezing exhale stretched into an endless passing of time, the world frozen and dull and so, so silent, save for his heart and the crackle of tension between them, and high, piercing note of- what? Surprise, maybe, on both of their ends.
There’s a meaning in their meeting, a revelation to be had between him and this fantastical beast, but it slips through his comprehension, like trying to hold on to a handful of rushing water. Deliberately obscured, whatever significance the world is trying to show him, and is he even going to remember this when, when he steps out of this liminal space? When he goes home? It hadn’t occurred to him that for all his good intentions, Joshua could choose to draw this memory like a loose string from his mind, and toss it away, another part of his past stricken from the record.
(Or, perhaps it doesn’t matter- the Composer can’t erase his own memories, after all. If Neku forgets, Joshua will still remember, and maybe that’s been the point of this all along.)
The fox thinks little of it, at any rate. It stares for a few more long, poignant seconds before it yawns in a show of glimmering teeth, rises from its haunches, and walks away.