Some of the ugliest things took the longest time to make / and some of the easiest habits are the hardest ones to break
I can’t live in the past / and drown myself in memories
In Memory / Hell #1
I feel like…I feel like maybe I could disappear.
Shizuru had only thought this once before in her life, and it had come to her in the same way: In the midst of external chaos and internal peace. Not a lighthouse on the ocean at night, but a candle in the woods at dusk, not something to be guided by, but something to pay heed to nonetheless. Something not to let go.
And just as
do you hate me that much!
before, Shizuru felt as though she was grasping at straws to drink with as the river dried up in front of her. Trying to hang on to something she had held onto for a long time while the thing that she actually needed slipped away from her.
Chaos around her. Yes. Chaos. She was at utter peace during times of the greatest chaos. Those were the times when she knew precisely what to do. It was the rest of her life she had trouble with. Trying to balance school and work and
Natsuki
the things she wanted that had to do with neither. Shizuru felt her eyes slide shut, block out the clamor of the chaos around her. In doing this, she was able to see what she needed to see.
Natsuki. I feel like maybe I could disappear. It echoed in her mind, and as before, she clung onto it. Natsuki. I feel like maybe I could disappear.
Natsuki.
I feel like…
Disappear…
Natsuki…
Natsuki-Ru.
Ru.
--Ru?
“Shizuru?”
Shizuru blinked the world returned to her in a wave. Immediately, she found her vision unexpectedly, though not-unpleasantly filled with Natsuki’s large, green eyes. The chaos was still around her. Nothing had changed since she’d retreated into her own head, allowed herself that small, temporary respite. She blinked again.
“Yes?” she said, her voice just a little muddled, as though she’d been woken from a nap. After that, she spoke more slowly, to cover the effect. “I’m sorry. Did I drift off?”
Natsuki shook her head. “I’m not sure.” For a moment, Shizuru was certain of the presence of … something, some emotion that she couldn’t entirely place…in Natsuki’s voice, but in the next second, it was gone, replaced by the flat, slightly aloof tone that Natsuki used to separate herself from the rest of the world, usually right about when the rest of the world wanted something out of her. “I was just trying to get your attention.”
What did you want, Natsuki?
Did you want to tell me something?
“Oh,” Shizuru’s voice was still having that problem of being unable to sound as though she had been awake for more than a minute or two. “I’m sorry. Was it important?”
Natsuki shook her head. “It can wait.”
Shizuru looked straight into Natsuki’s eyes, and realized she couldn’t tell what exactly Natsuki meant by that. She couldn’t read her at all.
That had happened before.
That had happened most often around the same time she had been thinking about disappearing. Shizuru felt her chest shiver a little, as though she was cold in spite of the warmth of the sun, which was, little by little, fading into the horizon, dashing the ocean with just the faintest hint of pink.
The ocean is never really anything but transparent, she mused, her mind traveling off on a whim even as her subconscious took over for her actions, directing her to smile as Chie raced by with Aoi in hot pursuit; directed her to step aside as Mai and Mikoto blew past her, close to knocking her down. It’s nothing by itself; it forms its own color by absorbing other colors. What it doesn’t absorb is what we see painted on its surface.
Natsuki is nothing like the ocean.
She moved aside as Chie and Aoi looped around. Apparently, Chie was currently in possession of some personal article of Aoi’s, or possibly of Mai’s.
She absorbs what you don’t see. She absorbed all the bad things, and yet…
Natsuki was watching the quickly-developing race, seemingly uninterested. She didn’t notice Shizuru studying her.
Studying was perhaps not the right word; studying implied some science or method to the way Shizuru’s eyes traveled over Natsuki’s long, dark hair, catching the wind just so, so that the fine strands of hair blew back as one, framing her melancholy, light-skinned face.
Without meaning to, Shizuru found herself gazing at Natsuki’s lips. Small, pale, and
maybe…still a little moist
soft.
Before her gaze could travel any farther downwards, though, Natsuki’s eye twitched slightly, and Shizuru, already on edge, diverted her gaze towards the ocean immediately. As soon as she stopped being able to see Natsuki, however, it was like her vision ceased to be something worthy of her attention.
It is a beautiful thing to see only one person.
She was sure she had said that to somebody once.
“Shizuru?”
Shizuru reacted automatically, as though the voice coming seemingly out of nowhere—it was, in fact, coming from behind her—hadn’t surprised her: “Yes?” She turned around to find Reito standing there, and smiled without thinking about it.
Reito grinned at her like an affectionate, mildly concerned, brother; it was the same expression that had given half of Fuuka Academy’s student body the impression that he and Shizuru were dating, and, in some far-off corner of her brain, Shizuru understood why; it was a smile which broadcasted, sincerely, the emotions it was meant to imply. “Are you feeling all right?” Reito asked, his voice and tone just a little formal.
Shizuru wondered briefly if Reito had, at some point in his life, been honestly sincere about the feelings his smile put forth. If he had ever nursed some sort of attraction to her. It wasn’t the sort of thing Reito would do, to simply let it sit and breed, but Shizuru was still left wondering, if only because she had never really paid attention to it.
But in seeing only one person, you miss out on the cliff directly ahead of you.
Somebody had said that to her. She couldn’t remember who, but somebody had. It had been shortly after she had spoken of seeing only one person.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Shizuru said as though her little internal reverie was nothing more than a thought, to be blown away with the winds of the conversation. “I’m sorry, did I look unwell?” Privately, she marveled at how little she sounded like she was actually speaking to somebody when she addressed Reito. Marveled and cursed; they had never been intimate, but they had been close, and right at that moment, Shizuru felt a sort of wall blocking something between them; something necessary for easy communication.
She didn’t know, however, from where this wall had come.
And yet, Reito gave no sign that he was at all fazed by her severe formality. He just grinned and relaxed his own tone, as though in response. “You were just staring out at the ocean. I had called for you several times, actually.” Reito said it with just a touch of sheepishness, and Shizuru frowned. That wasn’t like her, and yet this was the second time it had happened to her in less than ten minutes. As though reading her thoughts, Reito continued, “If I interrupted you, I apologize.”
Shizuru smiled at him and said, “No, there’s nothing to apologize for,” even as she dug her nails into her palms, resisting the flow of helplessness that washed over her in the face of Reito’s near-perfect disingenuousness.
But, of course, she didn’t. She never did. Ever.
“Are you certain there’s nothing troubling you?” His tone was formal enough that he may as well have thrown a brick at her, reminding her, hey, talking behind a wall, remember?
The trouble is, Reito, I got something I’ve sought for a long, long time today. I got something from Natsuki, and I want to treasure it, store it, keep it somewhere in me where nobody else can have it, ever ever ever, but something in her eyes tells me that even if I have that, I don’t have her, and I know nobody’s supposed to possess anybody but I can’t help thinking that maybe if I just “Just reflecting on the sunset.”
After she said this, Shizuru’s mouth clenched itself shut.
Because she knew that she would have been able to tell Reito at least a part of that, some time ago. Back in the mythical back then, when everything was good and right and happy, because that was then but this was now, and nothing could ever be quite right now.
She looked up at Reito, and saw something guarded within his eyes: Concern.
Then it vanished as his eyes flicked upward, away from Shizuru and the ocean for a moment, towards something distant on the beach. Shizuru waited the requisite ten seconds, allowing the silence to settle in over them like dust after a sandstorm, and then flicked her own eyes to where Reito had, and saw what he had seen.
She saw Midori, chatting idly with Chie, who had Aoi in a half-headlock. Midori looked as carefree as she ever did, a sentiment that Shizuru was fully aware was a complete fabrication. As did, she suspected, all of the ex-HiME. It was impossible to say that somebody who fought with as much skill and vigor as Midori was carefree.
Then again, I suppose that makes it impossible to call me carefree, either.
After all, I did…
She closed her mind off before she remembered things that she most certainly did not want to remember.
“Shizuru?”
I did it again. I need to start pinching myself.
“Yes?” she asked with a smile that she had to drag, kicking and screaming, onto her face.
Reito’s eyes flicked upwards again, and Shizuru felt a pang inside of her.
“Would you like some tea in the cabin?”
Shizuru blinked. Before, when they had both attended the same school, that had been code for, we should talk. Privately. Whether it still was now, Shizuru couldn’t say. She stood anyway, and glanced at Natsuki.
Natsuki, who was still studying the sunset. Who, in that very singular moment, may as well have been the sunset.
Shizuru honestly didn’t know what that meant. She only knew that Natsuki, so utterly absorbed in what she saw, seemed unbearably far away. Shizuru could have reached out and touched her, stroked her hair, felt it flow between her fingertips, and it would have seemed no more real than grasping at the fading rays of the sun.
Shizuru shook her head and stood up. “Yes. That, I think, would be nice. Natsuki,” she said to nothing at all, “I’m going for a while.”
Natsuki nodded absently. Which meant that she was listening, and probably, Shizuru thought, that she was experiencing some sort of turmoil of her own.
Shizuru felt that she might never know what that turmoil was. And that thought alone was enough to make her want to start walking into the ocean, and not stop.
It was only a momentary thought, though. She forced it from her head and followed Reito to the cabin.
It was, after all, quite rare for a modern paramilitary organization to do battle with a group of ninja. While the man with the scratchy voice was not one to dwell upon fortune or glory, he recognized clearly the invaluable status such a victory would impart his organization. Those who may be his rivals sometime in the near future would be those who already knew of this clan of ninja, he speculated; and that would mean that they would know who defeated them. And then…
And then they would know who it is they should fear.
He thumbed his radio with some flourish. “All field units,” he rasped into the receiver, “we have an added objective: Observation and decimation of the intervening ninja. If you have a shot, gentlemen, please take it. You may not get a second one.”
There were no replies, no calls of roger to answer him. Hopefully, the man with the scratchy voice thought, this would mean that at least one of his units did have a shot.
Of course, James’ reflexes were still very good, as was his eye. He had taken the top prize in the West Virginia National Guard’s marksmanship competition in South Ashfield, three years in a row.
Ninja, however, were not big wood and metal targets, and, in the dark, hidden crevasses of his mind—the same ones where, nightly, he imagined that he finally got up the balls to cheat on Chandra with that girl, Yumiko, that he’d met at his hotel—he honestly had no idea whether he had been staring, through his scope, at a human or a blob of shadow cast by a tree for the past ten minutes. It was starting to scare him: Ninja weren’t even supposed to exist! Who was to say what this one, if it is one, could do to him?
Tear down this tree branch with a single stroke of his hand
That could well be him and he could just vanish as soon as I pull the trigger and give away my position and then who knows what could happen to me isn’t that what happened to that other guy
The wind started to blow at that point, and James cursed silently. James had cursed like a sailor back in South Ashfield. He had stopped after his first assignment, when his cursing reflex had nearly gotten him killed by an attentive perimeter guard on the outskirts of a Russian outpost somewhere just outside of Bumfuck, Yugoslavia. Maybe he would have cursed with more flourish if he’d known it was the last time he would ever get to do it.
The shadow shifted and James Sunderland, no longer possessing the reflexes of his youth, not yet having acquired the wisdom of age, hesitated for half a second and then pulled the trigger. His rifle hissed, solitary sound that, in his mind, echoed throughout the entire godforsaken forest around him. There was no cry of pain to signal a hit, but also no scrambling of feet to signal a near miss. He squeezed his left eye shut and pressed the scope to his right eye as hard as possible, as though trying to pop it through the glass and see just a little bit better.
Nothing was moving except the leaves.
He let out a long, deep sigh and relaxed his shoulders just a little.
Nothing there. Nothing at all. Just the wind casting some shadows; chances are I just scared the pants off of some poor animal is all.
After allowing himself a few more breaths; long and deep, just like the other, he shifted his position so that he was facing the camp where his marks were currently playing in the sand, having a merry old time that, under normal circumstances, would have made James a little jealous.
Ironically, James wasn’t jealous because, at that moment, he was just happy to be alive.
He peered through his scope again, trying to spot the one with the long, brown hair. It took him a few seconds to find her; she was half-obscured by a tree, talking with a taller, handsomer boy with darker hair wearing a fairly tasteful Hawaiian shirt. James found that to be a feat unto itself. Again, though, no jealousy. The air up by his branch was too damn sweet for that.
Hey, he thought as she began to follow him to the cabin, probably to go screw or something, maybe I’ll take her hint and go visit Yumiko tonight. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a
The knife pierced James Sunderland’s spinal cord at the base of his neck, in what was, in fact, only a millimeter off from where it had pierced the spine of Nori Ikimasu. His brain shut off immediately, before he had a chance to think, there had never been a ninja there. He set up a decoy to draw me out. There was nothing magical about it at all, he was just waiting for me in some other tree, something he undoubtedly would have considered given a little time. He was, after all, not too far off from the age where wisdom inevitably began to replace the void that his youthful reflexes had left long ago.
The ninja left him hanging there by the straps which secured him to the tree. It was a better hiding place for a body than any on the ground because, the ninja knew, man’s biggest weakness was that he considered the sky to be indefinitely out of reach, and as a result, he never looked up.
The ninja began moving, planning to report the kill and its implications back to Akira. He never got a chance.
Harry Townsend’s single, .308 caliber round did exactly what the field manual had said it would: It blew through the front of the ninja’s skull, made dogshit out of his brain, and then kept right on going, its vector altered slightly due to the angle of the target’s head. It wound up in a pile of leaves, probably half an inch under the ground, maybe less.
Not exactly as he’d have liked it, but he didn’t mind. The ninja’s body dropped to the ground, impacting with a thunk that, to Harry, was reminiscent of dropping a sack of potatoes off of a rooftop.
About time, too, Harry thought. I’d been aiming at that other fucker for at least an hour. I was starting to get sick of it. He didn’t suppose James would have appreciated being used as bait. But then, Harry supposed, he probably wasn’t going to catch any shit for it. Orders from the top, and all.
Just orders.
She supposed it would be time to talk to Minoru again. Apparently she had underestimated “scratch-ass.” She wouldn’t do that a second time.
Wasn’t exactly a Shiz/Nat chapter, huh. I found it interesting to get into Shizuru’s head, though. I plan on getting into Natsuki’s next time if I can, and I’m kinda curious to know what it is that Shizuru is talking about with Reito. Hopefully you’re as curious as I am!
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