In a person of Akira

Author’s Notes: I don't understand how this came out quite so angsty or weird. Maybe it's just because I discovered that this character, who I formemerly thought was just bitchy and weird, was actually only bitchy and weird on the surface. The point about Akira seems to be that he just looks completely in control. For some reason this fic was very difficult to writre at first, it took me weeks to write the opening paragraphs, but I wrote the rest of it over a period of 24 hours - so if you ignore the bit where it took me ages to do the opening, this is probably one of the fastest fics I have ever written. Once I'd gotten properly started, it was kind of hard to stop, so this ended up going places I didn't expect it to, and I found myself writing a very different story to the one I had been intending to do, not that I'm really all that upset about it. In fact, I'm pretty pleased with this, for all that oddness abounds. Oh, and there's a slight lemon warning, but that too didn't come out quite the way I'd planned it. _____

“Will you answer the damn door?”

I know they’re hardly wild but they can’t be asleep already. It’s barely half ten for hell’s sake. Okay, Murasake’s probably asleep, he always goes to bed early if he freaks out during the day, which he did, but I am not going to believe that Aki’s asleep yet. Even if he is he can get up. He’s got my phone after all. I cannot believe that moron took it home with him, does it even look like his phone? Of course not, there’s not enough stickers on it. Maybe I need a new phone strap, problem is it’s damn hard to find one that doesn’t have some cavity-inducingly sweet cartoon character on it. Or hide, but they put hide on everything these days. Kimi says he’ll be a brand of jelly before too long. I wonder what flavor it would be. But that’s what you get for dying young and talented and famous. Maybe I should try it. At least it’s one way to avoid ‘didn’t you used to be…’ Not just yet, though. Life’s being sweet to me right now.

“Come on, Aki, get your ass out of bed will ya?”

Maybe they’re fucking, I think, then change my mind. That’s hardly very likely. Murasake’s practically asexual and the last thing he’d want to do today is get it on with Aki, he had a bad day and that means not tonight dear, I’ve got a headache. Jesus, is that what you get in relationships, sexual drought? No wonder I never bothered trying to have a decent one. Still, those two have it better than Kimi I-haven’t-dated-for-over-a-year Sasaki. I keep telling him he should have a one night stand before he forgets how to do it altogether but he always gives me this despairing look and then pretends that I didn’t say anything. I like Kimi but Jesus, he doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea about lust. Doesn’t he have a sex drive? No, probably not. And Hana seems to be trying to settle down which would be almost completely laughable if he didn’t seem to be taking it so seriously. So much for the rock n’ roll lifestyle.

Okay, plan B. I decide to stop ringing the doorbell intermittently and just press and hold. If I had my phone I’d ring them up. Aki has this weird antagonistic relationship with his phone after all and he’d answer even if he did curse the air blue for a bit beforehand. He calls it E.T. Instead I’m stood here with my palm pressed to the doorbell and I’m beginning to get pissed off. Sure, this isn’t a nice thing to do to someone who might be trying to sleep but then I never pretended to be a nice person now, did I? I’m not nice at all. In fact, I’m a total bitch and what’s more I know it. I wonder when the last time someone told me I was nice was? Except for Murasake of course, it’s really bloody odd the way he’s lived through all he has and is a paranoid wreck round strangers but still somehow manages to retain this weird belief that people are basically nice beneath it all, after all I haven’t had to deal with half of what he has and I think people are fundamentally programmed to be bastards. Last time he told me he was grateful to me for… well, something, can’t remember what it was, probably only important to his strange little self, I asked him what he’d put in his last cigarette. I’m not nice. I don’t do ‘nice’. Like I don’t do vulnerable, innocent or sweet… at least not knowingly. Never knowingly or visibly.

Oh. Aki. Finally.

“Oh, it’s you,” he says. “Don’t sound too pleased to see me then.” I fold my arms and shake my head slightly because my hair’s in my face again. One of these days I swear I’m cutting the whole lot off. One day. “And there’s no point pretending I woke you up because I know I didn’t, you don’t look nearly pissy enough.” “I wasn’t going to.” Aki replies with a giggle, then turns and looks round into the apartment. “You want your phone back, right?”

Aki's got his nightclothes on – I know them from seeing him stood in late night corridors at far too many hotels – and he’s holding a mug, probably got water in or cold tea or somesuch seeing as he was probably already in bed. Dunno where he found the tare panda mug. Chinatown? Aki's stuck on those cutesy little pandas. It's just a trait of his, but I won't say it isn’t an annoying one. Watch him off duty and he looks and acts just like a college kid, or maybe even a high school boy. Then again, so does Murasake so if it works for them… he hasn’t got his glasses on either and chances are that’s not because he’s wearing contacts, and he’s squinting slightly like he can’t really see what he’s doing.

Still. He’s not being very quiet for someone with a boyfriend trying to sleep next door. It's then I remember Murasake spends his nights in a drug-induced coma in order to get any rest at all. He'd probably sleep right through a tactical nuclear strike on the apartment next door (though not, obviously, on this one because the reason he wouldn't wake up then is because he'd be dead), those pills are that strong. He slept through a fire alarm going off one night in Kyoto; Aki had to carry him out. Luckily for the both of them there turned out to be no fire. I don’t think Murasake knows what ‘happy’ really is. Then again, I don’t think I do. Does anyone? No, probably not.

“Oh, here it is.” He walks back to the door and hands me the phone. “How many guys’ numbers do you have in there?” “Two hundred and seventy seven.” I reply. I’m lying, I don’t actually have a clue how many numbers there are in there, but I could tell you for sure that only eight of them are women’s phone numbers, and two of those women are Yuki: cell phone number, home phone number. To hell with the fact that the home phone number’s for the rest of the family too. “Only two hundred and seventy seven?” Aki blinks. “Well, you’ll let me know when you reach three hundred, won’t you?”

I laugh. I can’t help myself. The smile feels odd on my face.

I’m back outside again a few minutes later, Aki disappearing back into his bedroom bare moments after giving the phone back. It’s dark out, when you look up. Dark and wet and cold and the moon’s been chased behind the clouds, for what the moon counts for in this city of mine which isn’t a whole lot now or ever. You don’t get proper dark here, not unless you close your eyes. You don’t get stars either, not many. It’s a shame, really. From what I’ve seen of the stars, which isn’t much seeing as I was born and raised here, I like them. I like the night, period, but I’m just that kind of person. Thankfully, I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t need a whole lot of sleep or I’d not get to see it. Would you believe it’s still raining? It’s been raining all day. It’s like someone up there wants the world to drown, wants to recreate the biblical flood, submerge entire continents. I imagine the street beneath my feet as a new ocean floor, fish swimming between Tokyo tower blocks, the city as an artificial reef for another civilization to find and speculate about. The whole world as Atlantis…

I shake my head again, this time to clear it. My brain does this to me sometimes. Find a tangent and run with it until I drive myself crazy. Unless of course the whole reason it happens in the first place is because I’m crazy already. I don’t see things the way everyone else does, my perspective on life’s fractured. Great in a singer but lousy in a person, and I don’t want to be the singer tonight. I know I can’t let him go and I wouldn’t want to just in case I lost him for good and like it or not I need him, but I’d like him to stop looking at life through the eyes of a songwriter, stop trying to explain my personal world in a deliberately vague semi-poetic way. Just for tonight.

Here I go again. My brain does this to me sometimes.

The subway’s near here and I head towards it. You can’t get wistful over subways, there’s no Goth romance in them, so I know they’ll bring me back down to earth simply because I hate them, I hate their depressing functionality. I’m looking for life and noise and light and a way to block out the contents of my mind, the old standbys of music and drinking and strange men whose names I’ll never know and wouldn’t want to know. I’m like that. I’m about as close to a whore as you can get without actually being a whore, without actually charging for it. People tell me so all the time, like the man on the phone earlier this evening, like the ex-boyfriend I met last week who I couldn’t even remember meeting in the first place. But then I never pretended that I had anything other than waterfront morals. I never pretended to be something that I wasn’t. I always let them know what kind of a person I am when they meet me. It’s not my fault that they don’t always believe me.

The warmer air in the subway is almost cloying after the cool darkness out there and as I dig through my bag for my pass I almost regret that it’s too far for me to walk into the city. It’s not nice in here, the air smells stale, thrice-used, somehow indefinably dirty. Just stepping into the subways can make you feel soiled, like some kind of urban casualty. The subways seem to attract them, almost as if they held conventions or somesuch here. Maybe they do, I can’t think of a nicer place for creep conventions than the subways. I drop my pass back into my bag and keep my eyes and hands to myself. I’m not a woman, but it’s bad enough at this time of night for anyone, the drunks tend not to discriminate and I’ve had this problem before, though I’m not the type of demure little thing who just stands there and lets it happen.

More than once I just screamed, not because I was scared but because I’m good at it. I’m a singer, after all.

Almost as if they’re proving my point, a group of drunken college kids, boys and girls of about my age but with whom I’ve very little else in common, arrive on the platform a few moments after I do and a couple of them give me that assessing look I’ve come to absolutely loathe. I can imagine the kind of conversation they’re probably going to hold next. Firstly, I’m not stupid. Secondly, I’m a man myself, though they probably don’t realize it, maybe I really do need to cut my hair? And even in high heels I admit I’m not tall. Thirdly, I know Soujirou Sato and regardless of what he is now he’s found that girl of his, he was a very good example of the type these men embody. If any of these guys tries to talk to me and calls me sweetheart, or babe, or any of those stupid things that guys call people they like the look of whose names they don’t know, I just know I’ll lose it, find myself imagining ways to make them die, that kind of thing. I blame my brain, I really do.

Another thing I blame my brain for is this. After a few minutes one of the guys – the more attractive one from what I can make out, clearly being encouraged by his friend – leaves his gaggle of friends and walks over, dropping unceremoniously down on the other end of the bench I’ve been sat on since I got here. Now, I should have told him to fuck off when he started talking to me but I didn’t. I was going to, but I didn’t. And when he starts flirting in the clumsy way that young guys do when they’re drunk, I really should have got up and left. I didn’t.

My name’s Akira, I’m a music student. I’ve used this line before, or variants on it.

“You remind me of someone.” He says after a while. He’s frowning. I think I know who I remind him of. I remind him of Kurai. “Someone once told me I look a bit like Yoshiki.” I say. It’s not even a lie. Kimi said it when he saw the photos we did for the Alive lyrics book. The resemblance is mostly down to my hair, and a couple of my expressions, but apparently it’s there. I’m trying to make it sound like I want to be helpful but also I’m trying to stop him from realizing that I look like Kurai (in other words, hoping he won’t realize I look like myself, won’t realize who I actually am.) Thankfully, it works. This time. He blinks. “Yeah, that’s probably it.” “What about you?” I want to get off this topic. “What’s your name?”

I don’t quite catch his name. Something like Mitsuo or Masato. He’s studying Engineering and I look suitably impressed at this; Math was one of my worst subjects at school, never mind Physics. Engineering… it’s the kind of thing you major in after your body was taken over by aliens with a flair for logic and numbers and a deep love of porous circuits. The Invasion of the Engineers. Say it right and it sounds like a bad movie. Or something. I wouldn’t know. I’m a singer and I dropped out of junior high. He laughs when I say that’s impressive and he says he couldn’t read music if he tried so it’s all just a matter of what you’re used to. Occasionally, he looks back across at his friends, but doesn’t move, not until the train comes in when we both stand up.

“You know I’m a boy.” I say matter-of-factly when Mitsuo or Masato or whatever asks me if I want to tag along with him and his friends. It’s not even a question, just a statement. He blinks, looks at me again, but he doesn’t back off, doesn’t look embarrassed the way a lot of them do when I tell them that. He barely even looks surprised. “I do now.” He says, and laughs, a little drunkenly, then puts his arm round me, partly to steady himself. “You don’t care, do you?” This time it really is a question. They’re not all as open minded as this and, to be honest, I’m a little surprised. After all, he’s out with a crowd of friends of both sexes and he’s either too far gone to care that I’m not a girl or he wasn’t the type to care about it in the first place. Interesting. I wonder how many of his friends know about this. “Should I?” he asks, in tones of genuine surprise.

After that, it was easy. ____

It’s a different kind of darkness now, the willful, reckless darkness of club lighting. Mitsuo’s lost his friends, they drifted off to the bar or the dance floor or went looking to score and he hasn’t seen them since. We might have walked past them, but it’s hard to tell in here; club lighting has a way of homogenizing people. I probably wouldn’t recognize Hana if he was standing ten feet away right now. Well, not if he didn’t have his hair up, though his freakish tallness would make him stand out. Aki you could lose forever in a place like this. But not me. I look like a photograph from the Gothic Lolita Bible, or maybe one of the cosplayers in the back of Arena 37c. I couldn’t lose myself in here if I tried, I’m a dark spot in a sea of pastel and neon, I don’t fit in but offstage I seldom do.

It’s not really my kind of place. The music’s too soft and sweet, when you catch the lyrics they’re full of cloying sugar-pink sentiments, the kind that sound as if they should be sung by three practically identical girls in three practically identical pastel dresses even when they’re not. Most of the time they are. I try not to listen to the music and make a mental note never to come here again and scan the room for something to look at, someone to follow, whilst I wait for Mitsuo to come back from the bar himself. I’m not going to wait much longer.

Standing a few feet away there’s a man, a soberly-dressed twentysomething who immediately reminds me of Jiro, who looks almost as out of place here as I do and a hell of a lot less comfortable. I can tell from his stance that he’s waiting for something and I wonder what he’s doing here. He’s a gangster, I think. He’s been cheating his bosses and they want to see him and they told him to meet him here because there are so many people here that they won’t be noticed. He’s worried because he knows they know he’s been cheating them and he’s just waiting to see what they’re going to do to him. There’s a dragon under his shirt and it’s twisted round his throat, it’s slowly throttling him.

Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe he’s not a gangster at all; the dragon creeps away, reluctantly surrendering its prey. Now I’m picturing him in a nightmare of white picket-fence suburbia, a respectable man in a respectable neighborhood just like the one I grew up in, masking unspeakable perversions behind those wire-rimmed glasses and the sober suit. He’s nervous because the girl he’s with tonight, his latest victim though she doesn’t know it yet, has met a friend and is chatting. He’s worried she’ll say something incriminating and he wants her to come back so he can take her home and dispose of her before she says any more. In my mind he assumes the proportions of a Bluebeard, all the more sinister for being so thoroughly outwardly respectable. I imagine what he keeps in his basement. I imagine the police coming when a neighbor complains about the smell from the drains. It’s always the smell from the drains… Funny, I think, how people fear 'the other' when normally the ones you really have to watch look just like everyone else…

The fantasy's rendered even more perverse by the fact that it's not even his fantasy. It's someone else's. It’s mine, and I’m not even enjoying it. I’m staring at him now and I’ve frightened myself imagining what this no doubt mild-mannered, inoffensive man might be hiding. I feel positively wanton tonight.

Then Mitsuo’s back, squeezing back onto the seat next to me. He’s barely put the drinks down before he starts trying to slip his hand inside my shirt, cautious, furtive, worried about being seen and about my reaction. He can’t see my face, hasn’t noticed my largely vacant expression. I want to submit tonight, let someone else tell me what to do, the more completely the better. I’m just not sure Mitsuo’s up to the job. He seems a bit too considerate. I’d like to just tell him to do whatever he wants to and to hell with how I feel, but I can’t really believe that he would actually need me to give him a sign. That’s not how submission works…

“What’s wrong?” he says after a while, his voice slightly muffled. I can feel his breath on my neck. It’s really no wonder I can’t really hear what he’s saying, he’s talking into my shoulder, but he looks at me when he’s finished speaking; he looks concerned. That’s one of the problems with a lot of these young guys, they think too much, they’re worried about what people think of them, they don’t want to be seen as macho or inconsiderate. They don’t really know what they want. “Nothing.” I say, then add, ”It’s just too crowded here.” I’m resting one hand on his chest, the other on one of his arms, and I’m looking up at him. For some reason I’ve never been able to make out, a lot of guys seem to like it when I do that. My hair’s in my face again but this time I ignore it, I don’t have a free hand anyway and shaking my head right now would just be wrong. “Maybe we should find somewhere a bit quieter…” Mitsuo seems to visibly relax; I guess he must have thought that I wanted him to slow down, but I’ve been down this particular road enough times before to know that ‘let’s go somewhere a bit quieter’ is one of those phrases that doesn’t quite mean what it sounds like. Normally it doesn’t mean let’s go somewhere less crowded. It actually means, let’s find somewhere we can be alone.

Music and drinking and strange men. It’s all just routine. ____

Darkness, darkness, darkness. The club, the streets, the subway, this room. It’s tiny, the furniture making it feel rather like some kind of cell, there’s a slightly musty smell in the air as if it wasn’t aired often enough. A standardized room laid out in a standardized way, a cheap love hotel, as if love and what I’m here for weren’t totally oxymoronic. Hardly the stuff that dreams are made of.

The light from outside filters through the blinds; you can’t close them properly. It’s never properly dark in this city, not even at past midnight with the curtains drawn tightly shut. I can hear cars passing, so many cars going so many places and it’s late, late enough anyway. On the streets a group of girls, arm in arm in arm, are stumbling down the road and singing an Ayumi song at the tops of their voices, one of them trying out an improvised harmony which just renders the whole thing that one bit more appalling. I hate off-key singing. When I look round I can see Mitsuo, his eyes oddly bright in the darkness, specks of light, his body silhouetted against the wall. It’s not properly dark in here. I hate to admit it but I feel almost afraid, as if I’m waiting in a condemned cell for the arrival of an executioner. As if I’m about to get raped and know it.

I shift position slightly and the bedsprings creak slightly, an old, worn-out mattress in a cramped little room rented out by the hour. For some reason I shiver slightly, I’m cold? I didn’t even realize it at first. I shift again, curl up, shivering. My hair falls into my face for the hundredth time and he leans over me and brushes it away. It’s an oddly familiar gesture, too familiar for me to welcome it from this man. I don’t really know his name, I wouldn’t want to, but… I don’t want him to pretend there’s any kind of finer feeling here. It’s just sex with a stranger, totally loveless, perfunctory…

“Don’t do that.” “Why? Is something wro--” “No. Just don’t. Please.”

He straightens up again. He’s tired of talking. He turns me over with just a touch of casual brutality, as if it doesn’t really matter if I want him to or not. I’m lying on my back and he negligently pins my wrists above my head with one hand, holds them almost hard enough to hurt and I realize that yes, I am afraid of him. I don’t know him. I’m stupid. What if it wasn’t the man in the club at all, what if he’s the depraved pervert? I look up at my fingers; they look like they belong to somebody else, I barely recognize them. For some reason I don’t want to see his face. It’s not an unpleasant face but I don’t want to look at him. He kisses my neck and all I can do is lie there. All I can think of is that I’m probably going to have love bites in the morning and I just hope I can hide them before Kimi picks me up to take me into work. I don’t know why, but I always feel guilty when Kimi’s confronted with evidence of my one night stands. Always.

Closing my eyes I stifle a gasp. He’s on top of me, he’s knocking the breath out of me, this is what it means to submit, it no longer matters what I think of all this. But I asked for this, I wanted it, it feels wrong but there’s nothing going on here that I didn’t sign up for. Why do I do it when I don’t even like it that much? Because I can? Because it makes me feel in control? But I’m not in control here, am I? I’m almost completely at this man’s mercy and I don’t understand. If I understood, I probably wouldn’t have to do this, any of it. It’s a bizarre mix of pleasure and consenting pain and not enough of either. Maybe it’s different if there’s something else there. Maybe it’s not so… I don’t know. I’ve never felt it. It’s just an act, something I can go out and do. From the outside, it looks like I’m having the time of my life. I’m not, but I don’t know why I’m not…

I’m thinking of someone else. Very likely so is he. It’s tawdry, it’s horribly tawdry and I just want it all to be over.

That’s always been the way it goes. I’m a bit part player in other peoples’ lives. A fantasy figure, an object of vague, undefined and strictly impersonal lust which all but the most fanatical realize will never be sated, a convenient body to project dreams onto. Pick me up and put me down again when you’ve had enough of me. I’m a chameleon, we all are, I change my entire personality when I change my clothes. Now you see me, now you don’t. He isn’t seeing me, he’s seeing someone else, a classmate, a girl, an idealized lover made up of the bodies of countless other people. They don’t see me when I’m with them, they see what they want to see. I’m a doll, a composite, I don’t exist in my own right, not really. I don’t know who I am any more. I don’t think I ever did.

He rolls off me with a moan. Satiated. I’m restless, anxious, angry with him for doing this to me and with myself for letting him do it in the first place, biting my lip and almost wanting to make it bleed. Any minute now I think I’m going to cry.

“Hey. Are you okay? You don’t look…”

I say nothing. I get out of bed, pick up my clothes and walk into the tiny bathroom. I turn on the shower and just think thank god it’s over. Why do I do this when I don’t even like it? Why?

Fifteen minutes and I’m back in the bedroom, fully dressed and made-up, my hair damp and loosely plaited. I feel much more like myself, more confident, more quietly scornful, a professional cynic. It’s almost as if the last hour hadn’t happened, except that Mitsuo is still sprawled out on the bed; he’s barely moved, he’s half-asleep, he looks dissipated and a lot older in the room’s artificial twilight. I light a cigarette using one of the matches the hotel provided, drop the dead thing into the ashtray, watch him doze and try very hard not to feel slightly contemptuous, but it’s not easy. When it’s over, it’s over. Mitsuo might be Prince Charming underneath it all but I don’t care if I never see him again after tonight. I must look like a whore, standing brisk and businesslike and waiting to get paid whilst my trick sleeps it off. I don’t care even if I do.

A car’s headlights stab the darkness on the ceiling like daggers, twin lasers, a trick of the light. Another group of singing girls stagger slowly past, giggling and swaying on their way from late-night bar to all-night club. This time the song is a rock ballad, something by one of the groups Murasake likes, equally mutilated by the singers. They sound happy, but drunks often do. I knock the ash from the end of my cigarette and sigh. I think I might hate Mitsuo, I think if I don’t leave immediately I might just strangle him whilst he sleeps.

I stoop and pick up my bag, walk to the door, turn briefly when I get there knowing full well that after I walk out of here I will probably never see Mitsuo again and feeling only relief at the realization. I don’t want to ever see him again. In a week he’ll have forgotten my face, he’ll just remember spending a night, just that, with a boy who looked vaguely like Yoshiki. Who remembers the one night stands? I know I can barely remember mine. Why should Mitsuo be any different?

“Goodbye,” I say. Brisk, businesslike, quietly contemptuous. Quietly, I close the door behind me. I could hardly feel more like a whore if he’d paid me. ____

Looking blearily round the room for my alarm clock, I finally focus on the glowing green numbers on the nightstand and rub my eyes with one hand, with the other pushing back a tangle of hair from my face. I just knew I should have kept it plaited but then it would have been hellishly curly come the morning. Two forty-eight. I’ve only been asleep an hour and now I’ve been woken up again by… by what?

There’s a siren going off down the street, it keens and wails like a banshee. That must have been what woke me, it’s certainly loud enough and heaven knows I’m hardly a heavy sleeper. Pushing off the bedsheets, I walk across to my window, wondering why it seems so bright outside, considering it’s not even three o’clock yet, and tug the curtains open, lean out of the window and look down the street. It’s a lot noisier out here, that siren’s loud enough to wake the dead never mind a light sleeper like myself. It’s still drizzling and by rights it should be freezing, but the wind that tugs at my hair and scours my cheeks is warm, and the street itself looks like Dante’s Inferno, like an old European vision of Hell decided to manifest itself just a few hundred meters from my bedroom window. Just down the street, one of the apartment blocks on the other side of the road is on fire, spectacularly, dramatically on fire.

I wouldn’t be Kurai if I wasn’t fascinated by it. To me it’s almost beautiful, and the fact that it’s so terrible only makes it more beautiful, to my mind. I never claimed to be a nice person.

I run from the window, consider calling the fire brigade, but reasoned that someone else probably did that already and, what with people being stupid, they’d probably had at least a dozen similar calls reporting the same fire. I know I’m a ghoul so it doesn’t bother me if my current fascination seems completely out of place; I’m also only human and for some reason people are drawn by fire. It’s got to be some kind of primeval urge. I grab my door keys, slip on a pair of sandals and run out of my apartment, letting the door bang shut behind me. I’m not all that surprised when I run into a couple of my neighbors in the hallway, the young couple two doors down, abruptly half awake in bedroom slippers and dressing gowns, hurrying down the stairs a few feet in front of me and talking to one another in panicky, hushed whispers.

Fire. You’d almost think it was our fire the way we’re all running outside like this.

It feels like a summer night when we reach the streets, though the rain is still falling – not heavily, certainly nowhere near enough to make any impact on the fire. The air feels like the inside of an oven, dry heat, the raindrops are almost evaporated by the time they hit the pavement. It’s too hot out here, the air is smoky. The sky above the burning building has turned a burnished orange, this really is like some kind of modern-day vision of Hell, like a disaster movie, the Towering Inferno, the opening scenes to one of Aki’s postapocalyptic anime. It’s beautiful and horrifying at the same time, I’m drawn to it but I want to run away, I’m worried for myself and about the people in the building. I’m surprised that I’m worried. That doesn’t seem a normal feeling from an amoral bitch like myself but I’m getting caught up in the mood of the crowd. I should have known that something like this would happen. I suppose I’m like most people in that I imagine I’ll be the one who’s able to resist mass hysteria, but… I’m also like most people in that I just plain can’t. I can hear someone scream, a woman? Nearby, someone else begins to cry.

The young wife who lives two doors down from me is clinging to her husband; it’s almost enough to make me wish I had someone to cling to. For the second time tonight I’m feeling afraid and yet, oddly enough, I’m almost less apprehensive here than I was before I went to that hotel with Mitsuo and this could kill me. The building could collapse, it’s happened before, but the fire doesn’t seem quite that severe, in my opinion. I might be wrong. I push through the rapidly swelling crowd dragged from their beds by the spectacle, the sight of tragedy that is happening to someone else, horrified fascination or just drawn ghoulishly to the spectacle of someone else’s suffering. Murasake said a few months ago that the thing that had really confused him about the crowds that gather at these scenes is, what exactly are they hoping to see? A happy ending? Drama? Tragedy? Blood? Death? He hadn’t been specific, but of course he was thinking about something that had happened to him personally…

I’m running now, though I don’t know what I’m running to, I have no idea what I’m hoping to see. The hem of the robe I’m wearing is soaked, so are my sandals, my legs are splashed with water from the puddles; I’m going to need to take another shower. Surely I should be running away, shouldn’t we all be doing? Surely it’s not normal to run towards danger, even a sheep has the sense to run away from a threat… but humans don’t. I’m not alone here, I’m not the only one who’s standing on the street and staring up at a building which is committing a very dramatic public suicide.

The police have roped off the street so you can’t get too close. I’m almost relieved, and once again I’m surprised that I’m relieved. I apologize my way to the front of the crowd, stand and just stare at the fire. It really is beautiful, horribly so. I’ve got no right to think this way.

“What happened?” “Nobody knows… gas explosion, maybe?”

I’m trying to remember what this building was before. I must have walked past it daily on my way to the subway station – must have walked past it on my way back tonight… Gods, that feels really strange, I must have walked past this place not two hours ago! And there wasn’t any clue that this would happen – but I can’t for the life of me remember what it actually was. Apartments, that much I know, but there was a boutique on the ground floor, I never went in there though, and… was there a club or a bar of some sort? I can’t remember. The metamorphosis is so complete I can’t even begin to imagine what this place must have been like before the fire, and I walked past this building daily.

“How horrible! Do you think… do you think there are still people trapped in there?”

People. I shiver and it’s not from the cold. It’s not cold at all. It’s a spectacle because something like this happened in the night time, but it’s the worst time that it could have happened. The apartments must have been full, people would have been sleeping, there’d have ben no warning… just the alarms kicking into life, and for some, the realization that they were trapped. I didn’t want to imagine what must have been going on in that building, but my imagination has never been one to let me get off lightly. ‘Horrible’ is an understatement. I’ve always been terrified of burning to death. It’s one of the most appalling ways I can think of to die. I don’t want to imagine what it must be like to be trapped in that building, knowing that you’re almost certain to die slowly and terribly… it’s not my fault that I have a good imagination…

“Miss. Hey, miss! Are you all right?”

I must have looked pale, or… maybe I screamed or something, because the man behind me has reached out and touched my arm and is looking at me in consternation, worried that I’m about to do something weird, probably. He called me ‘miss’. Normally I’d be angry – I hate it when people call me ‘miss’ – but I don’t say anything; I’ve just realized what I must look like to this man. He wouldn’t see the boy here. There’s very little to see. So I won’t correct him. I Just don’t want to, not right now. Besides, boys aren’t meant to want to scream or whatever I just did.

“Yes… I think so.” I nod once. I’m almost more pleased that he asked me than annoyed that he thought I was a woman. Tragedy does that to people, it makes them more aware of others, more alert, in a strange kind of way, they worry about perfect strangers in a way they wouldn’t do normally. “That’s a relief.” He smiles. “Thought you were going to faint for a moment there.” He did? Now that would have been embarrassing. I laugh a little uncomfortably. “I’m fine now.” He pats my arm, gives me another reassuring smile and tells me it’ll be okay. I wonder what I did to make him think I was so upset. Probably nothing that I’d normally do in a million years. It’s been an odd night.

There are the firemen, carrying hoses coiled like thick dark snakes, whole teams of them wrestling with the coils whilst others, alien in respirators and heatproof clothes, storm the building like an invading army; besieging the fire, trapping it, holding it back. Already a few of them have emerged with survivors; it’s hard to describe how utterly relieved I felt the first time I saw that happen. The man next to me must have noticed because he smiled at me again. But it wasn’t just me, it was everyone here. Maybe I’m only feeling this way because I’m in a crowd, because mass hysteria is precisely that, because when you’re in a crowd like this common sense just gets swept out of the window. Kimi would probably understand, Kimi knows things like that about people.

My hair’s getting wet again, the robe I’m wearing is clinging to me; the spray from the hoses, it has to be. It’s funny, but I’m almost glad of it; it’s cooling the air down like a thunderstorm does after weeks of humidity and just as welcome. Though the fire’s nowhere near out, it’s reassuring just to know that somebody’s trying to do something. It’s the helplessness of it all, that must have been what got to me. It’s only in a film that one man can make a difference in a situation like this, but we’ve all been conditioned to just believe that it’s possible… just being a witness leaves you feeling almost as wrung out as actually having it happen. It’s the helplessness, that and the feeling that you should be doing something to help but haven’t done.

And the flames are still beautiful and terrifying, and the sky looks as if it’s on fire too… if you concentrate on the abstracts and try not to get involved, it’s so much easier to see the beauty in this. But you can’t help but get involved. Even a person like me can’t help but get involved. It’s at times like this that I remember I’m only human after all, when I stop scaring myself with the way I think I am.

I’m real. I exist. I can think and feel like everyone else out there. I get worried and scared and exhilarated, I’m not a marble angle, a beautiful monster, an emotionless doll-like creature. I’m not. It’s just… it’s so hard to remember that sometimes, when I seem to want to be… when I seem to spend so much time clinging to an image that even frightens myself sometimes. I just don’t know how to let go, I guess, because like it or not I need that image of myself.

I watch the flames and the water arcing towards them and I feel myself smile again, a smile that has no right to be on my face here and now. Nobody else here can see anything to smile about, nobody else is standing here and thinking that it’s beautiful, that maybe there’s a song in this, or an extended metaphor that would work as part of a song, or at the very least an idea for a PV. But I wouldn’t be Kurai if I couldn’t. Kurai, the person the world thinks I am, scares me a little, but I couldn’t imagine living without him. I couldn’t imagine waking up and discovering I’d forgotten how to be him. And I know that, in the morning, the fact that he is who he is and that he is also me won’t even bother me any more. It so rarely does. But it’s been an odd night by anyone’s standards, even by my own. Or Kurai’s own.

But then again, I am Kurai.

~owari~