Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ My Hereness, your Thereness ❯ Chapter 1

My hereness, your thereness



“Time to wake up.”

An uncertain moment, rope-balancing between oblivion and memory, then Mamoru opens his eyes and wipes the patch of moisture at the crook of his elbow, where his head had rested, for a little while.

“They’ve been waiting for you for over an hour. Would you like a glass of water?”

He nods. Nagi looks as frail as ever in the sheltering half-light of the office, a shadow hiding his mouth. Mamoru can’t avoid it sometimes, that need to reach out again, to touch another human being. Someone as lonely as himself appeared like a good option, until one night of alcohol-soaked embarrassment, pushing his tongue uninvited against clenched teeth, against a mouth so cold and hard it felt as he was desperately trying to kiss his own mirror reflection.

Nagi, who commands objects, seems to carry something of their irrevocable sadness and loneliness, the one of a lost hat tumbling along a wind-blown street, of a broken umbrella under empty metro seats, of old children’s clothes in the attic, still carrying the shape of the body that has outgrown them. An impossible, false sadness, because they feel nothing of the wind, the rain, the abandonment. Like Nagi. Or so Mamoru prefers to think.

But Nagi is good at what he does, intimidating enemies, separating flesh from bone, sometimes offering Mamoru a glass of water, and if Mamoru’s bedroom door will creak open by itself one night, he won’t stir, he has learned to stop waiting.

He takes the offered water and swallows it down carefully, both hands clutching the glass as the sleep-bitterness slides away to the back of his throat. Mamoru falls asleep all the time now, making up perhaps for all the nights he stayed awake to watch the flicker of his computer screen, or the neon of Tokyo from his room window above the Koneko, that window supposedly open to the miracles of the world.

Now he just sleeps, he’s tired. He wakes up on time though, to sign another death certificate, or missions as he officially calls them. The fifth Weiss group was formed the previous week, out of the remains of the fourth and some hopeful new debutantes. They don’t last.

The door opens and the Kritiker entourage waltzes in, armed to their teeth with files and briefcases. There’s a vase on his desk, the rotting stalks of lilies swimming in murky water. He once knew how to tend to flowers. But everything he abandoned, has abandoned him in return.

*

Omi dreams, the same repetitive scene, growing older with him over the years. A dark room, a pool table, and he’s waiting for his turn to play in the game against - his brothers? No.

Aya leans over the table to take his shot. The deep gash across his stomach, that has dyed his coat red, now drips over the green felt

“You always were the worst of us all,” he says.

Ken laughs at this, and with every new burst of laughter blood bubbles out of the corners of his mouth and the wound under his chin, where a prisoner inmate stabbed him with a fork.

“But you survived us all. Didn’t you?” Yohji smiles, grinding the gold-tipped butt of his cigarette against the side of the table.

Omi tries to speak, but there is something lodged at the back of his throat. Pushing two fingers into his mouth he pulls out pieces of paper, that flutter around him like paper butterflies. Then coins, then ribbons and pieces of black string, a broken thermometer that drips beads of mercury over his lips, a gutted clock, the head of a doll that slowly opens plastic eyelids to stare at him, and finally a long knife which he draws out of his mouth with great solemnity, like a circus performer. He still can’t talk because the lump of a sob is still there, at the back of his throat, and the question -was there a question? - remains unanswered.

“So you survived. Good for you.”

He expects them to come up against him now, the pool cues turning into guns and ripping bullet holes into him. He tries to back into the wall though there is no wall behind, just something that rustles like bed sheets, warm and bright. But amidst all that light, there is no mistaking the dark room with its shadowy figures, waiting around the table for the game he has left unfinished.

“Good for you, you filthy little rat,” Ken giggles.

*

“Balinese is alive.”

“Our agents tracked him down two weeks ago.”

“Balinese suffers from complete amnesia. According to the medical records, he remembers nothing.”

The first photographs in Mamoru’s hands are all snapshots. Yohji walking in the street, immersed in the flood of passers-by, or sitting on a park bench, his lunch spread out by his side. Yohji waiting at a bus stop, black umbrella, face blurred in the rain. Only the last one is different, stolen from a family album perhaps. His wife’s glossy hair shines as she smiles into the curve of his shoulder, the little girl with the chocolate-stained mouth on his lap is absorbed with her ice-cream cone. Only Yohji stares directly into the lens, eyes dilated, as if life caught him by surprise. He doesn’t wear a watch and Mamoru wonders if he sometimes rubs his wrist, absent-minded, tracing with calloused fingers that odd sensation of absence.

“Now? You found him now? And you dare to come to me with this? He has a family, a daughter.” He clutches the arms of his chair, white-knuckled.

The Kritiker officials back away at the tone of his voice. Their Persia is still so young, so terrifyingly young, that nobody doubts his age when he admits it, a lie would be preposterous. The back of his chair rising to swallow up his small frame, his thin wrists swimming in the cuffs of his suit have doomed him the boy tyrant, capable of absolute cruelty as only children can be. He doesn’t mind living up to their expectations.

“His amnesia is reversible, Sir.”

“The family obstacles can be easily removed.”

“Without his knowledge of the perpetrators of course.”

“It would be an additional motivation, to trigger his return. According to the history of his psychological profile--”

“I think you should better leave now,” Nagi interrupts quietly.

Mamoru closes his eyes, listens to the papery rustle of files, their murmured words, their hasty retreat, the sound of their footsteps receding into silence.

He wanted Yohji back. And for a moment, as they spoke, he had considered their offer. The thought terrifies him, a brand new fear. There’s nobody left in the room but Nagi now, so it’s easy for Mamoru to look at him, remember Schwarz, remember the back of his head cracking against a marble column while the world was ending, and earlier still, remember the kidnapper’s flashlight in his eyes as he slept, the taste of vomit behind the gag; and all those other, long-conquered fears.

Nagi offers himself to Mamoru’s fear and hatred as he did with all the other emotions Mamoru ever directed at him, with empty eyes and calm indifference. But as Mamoru begins to pick up the crumbled photographs spread over the desk, Nagi reaches out and touches the back of his hand with a single finger, trailing from wrist down to the knuckles.

*

Omi holds the steering wheel tightly as he swerves to avoid hill-high piles of trashcans and mannequin dolls, or corpses. The broken white lines of the road blink and vanish under the wheels.

“Shit, they’re closing in!” someone shouts from the crowded back seat. Aya? - no, Aya wasn’t there that night.

Helicopter engines roar in the ink-black sky above, Takatori’s soldiers are marching behind, and the windshield is cracked, breaking the once clear path ahead into a thousand wrong destinations. Something hits the side of the car, leaving five slimy fingerprints on the window glass. The tyres screech as Omi slams into the brakes and the car bumps into a halt.

“Come on, Omi,” Yohji says, “What are you waiting for? Let’s go outside.”

Cloud shadows chase each other across a hillside that smells of damp, fresh-cut grass; a summer day, lazy with unexpectations. Omi kills the engine and steps out of the car, shielding his eyes, sun-stupefied. He’s barefoot, walking over flowers with large, fleshy petals. Reeds and small stones graze the soles of his feet, but painless.

Birds are flying overhead in loops, writing something into the sky, undecipherable yet complete. Ken attempts a barrel roll and slams into Aya, toppling them both down on his back. Yohji has taken his coat off; his shirttails flap in the breeze as he stares ahead, where the sea gleams in the distance. Omi doesn’t look ahead. There isn’t anything to be found there, no fish-bones or ships at anchor, no coastline or waves, nothing. Happiness is a small thing, existing only because of its limitations.

“Time to wake up.”

It’s Nagi, leaning against the car hood, hands in pockets, head tipped back.

“You? What - what are you doing here?”

Nagi looks startled for a moment, then shame-faced, digging the tip of his shoe into the ground. “I wouldn’t, not normally - but it was just so beautiful here.”

The landscape has become transparent, through the gelatinous tree trunks Omi can glimpse the shelves at the other end of his office, with the books turning their backs at him.

“Just another moment,” he pleads, and the flowers he holds - when did he pick them up? - are streaking like watercolours across his palm, but for just another moment, they are still something that almost belongs to him.

The voices, the waves splashing, the whine of insects over the grass have blended together but echo still, incidental yet melodious, the bare bones of a tune he once knew how to whistle.