Upon preliminary research, I found that the Japanese legal system is heavily modeled after the American system, a reform which occurred shortly after World War 2. If the brief legal reference herein seems flawed to anybody, please let me know by messaging me.
Finally, it seems to me that this chapter will be largely a transitional chapter, going from point-A in Goza to point-B at the beach.
Pay no mind to the distant thunder / new day fills his head with wonder / says “it feels right this time”
Then it comes to be / that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel / is just a freight train coming your way
No-leaf clover
As odd as it was, Midori had never seen Natsuki pointing a real gun at somebody before. Sure, everybody had seen her with those shrimpy little ice-guns before, seen her use them to great effect. She had loved those little guns, and somehow, Midori couldn’t picture her using anything aside from them as weapons.
Obviously, this was impossible now, but it still struck Midori as odd to see her now, pointing what Midori judged (using her extensive knowledge of modern weaponry) to be a Big Freaking Hand Cannon at a man that she had never seen before. She wasn’t particularly shocked—she was, in fact, angry enough that she would have pulled the trigger herself at that moment, given the opportunity, just for the curiosity of seeing something aside from her emotional (and possibly hormonal) balance die a painful death—but it occurred to her in some far-off portion of her brain that there were a dozen or more cops not a block away from where they were. In a country in which a gun of any sort, much less a Big Freaking Hand Cannon, was illegal, this was a problem.
It actually took Midori a moment longer to realize that Natsuki was holding Shizuru in her arms. Somehow it made a smaller impact on her brain than the hand cannon, in spite of the fact that she really knew nothing of whatever dynamic existed between the two of them. (Though, being fair, nobody really knew much of anything about the dynamic between Shizuru and Natsuki. Not even Shizuru and Natsuki.)
It took her a moment longer to realize that the way in which Shizuru was being held was most definitely not one of undying friendship. Natsuki’s hand—the hand not pointing the gun at the man whose only crime appeared to Midori to be dressing badly—was pressed gently around the back of Shizuru’s neck, buried slightly under her hair. Shizuru had both of her hands around Natsuki’s lower waist. Both of them were way past that “friendly hug” line that separated the middle back from the place that a boyfriend might rest his hand to mark his territory in public.
Somehow, this didn’t entirely surprise her. All things considered, I probably should have caught on that there was something more than a mildly awkward friendship between the two of them, seeing as how she went half-batty as soon as she figured out that Shizuru had disappeared, Midori thought with a shockingly powerful feeling of detachment.
“Oi,” she called out. Her voice was remarkably apathetic, which surprised her. “Are you going to shoot him right out here?”
Natsuki was too busy trying alternative methods of murder—by way of glaring a hole through Minoru’s skull—to listen. Shizuru, however, turned her head to face Midori. She didn’t say anything; there wasn’t really much to say. She did, however, nod, and a moment later, she whispered something in Natsuki’s ear.
Natsuki didn’t visibly react, but she did lower her weapon after a moment. She didn’t relax.
Minoru didn’t, either. He was fingering something at his waist. It was like one of those American western-showdown movies, Midori thought.
“Why did you kidnap Shizuru?” Natsuki said, her voice loud enough to be imposing. Her gun was at her hip, loosely hanging near her holster. Shizuru shook her head, a little frustration showing through, but Minoru answered anyway.
“I had nothing to do with that,” he said, his voice equally imposing. “I was trying to keep that girl safe.”
“Safe? She was kidnapped by a bunch of cornpokes with shotguns! Are you trying to tell me that…”
Shizuru shook her head and whispered something else in Natsuki’s ear. Natsuki blinked once, twice, three times, and then shook her head.
“So then what are you doing with the stuff in that backpack? Or are you going to tell me that they’re just ‘tools’ as well?”
Midori had never seen Natsuki posture so much, so visibly defensive.
But then again, she had also never seen her playing grab-ass with another woman, so she supposed she shouldn’t allow it to take her too far off-guard.
Minoru sighed. “No, they’re not tools. If you’ll put your gun up, I think that we can talk this out without anybody else getting shot.”
Anybody else? Was somebody shot?
Midori’s brain, sharper than most but still a little too clogged with her own thoughts to be really attentive, struggled for a moment to cope with the flood of information that refused to organize itself fully in her head. What she managed to put into place looked like an outline, albeit a short one:
Point 1: Natsuki recently traveled back to the cabin, far out of her way, to retrieve an extremely large gun, stating that Shizuru had been kidnapped.
Point 2: Natsuki is holding a large, portable howitzer in her hand. Presumably, the same one she retrieved.
Point 3: Natsuki went fairly well out of her head, considering that she’s normally an even person, when Shizuru’s safety came into question.
Point 4: Natsuki is currently pointing the portable howitzer at a man that I’ve never seen before, while holding Shizuru.
Logical conclusion…
For a second, Midori refused to believe the obvious conclusion. Did Natsuki actually…I thought the gun was just for…Who did Natsuki shoot? she thought. Natsuki, however, reacted a little more violently; she raised her weapon immediately, trained it on his head again.
“Who said I shot anybody?” she said very, very calmly.
If Minoru hadn’t frozen so completely, Midori was sure that he would have been cursing himself pretty hard, judging by the look on his face. That neat little outline that she had made in her head not a moment before went all to shit.
That look on his face was the look of a man who had just been butchered on a witness stand at his own trial. A man who had tried to bluff his way out of the shit-hole and inadvertently confessed to his own crime in the process.
Between Shizuru and Natsuki, Shizuru was by and far the superior in cleverness and wit, and general school-learning. But with regards to things that you couldn’t learn without a gun in your hand and several people trying very hard to kill you, Natsuki surpassed Shizuru easily. Shizuru tried to tell Natsuki something, but Natsuki shook her head angrily. “This is the sniper, Shizuru. He was watching the whole time.”
Shizuru’s eyes widened in comprehension, and then narrowed again. She let go of Natsuki, (Finally, Midori thought) and turned to face him straight.
“You killed the men in the attic?” she asked. Her voice was clear and calm, which surprised Midori, who had expected her to be angrier, simply judging by her reaction.
Minoru nodded slowly, his face confused but mildly frightened, as though somebody had threatened to beat him for taking the bus home when it was raining out. “I did.”
“Why?”
“I was paid to,” Minoru said as though it was obvious; a display of insolence which, Natsuki thought, was more than a little bit out of place. “I was paid to…” he took a breath. “I was paid to observe you. To watch you. The same person who paid me to do that paid me to bail you out of the house.”
“Oh, you did a wonderful job at that,” Natsuki said angrily.
“That wasn’t my fault.” Minoru seemed angrier than he should have.
“And why not?”
Because the bastard is a motherfucking lunatic. “Because my…my employer decided that it would be a great idea to bullet through me. There’s no accounting for taste. I killed one of his men and had to run.”
“And yet, here you are.”
“And yet, here I am. Are you going to kill me?”
“I just might.” Natsuki’s grip on the gun tightened a little.
Reito’s voice came from behind Midori, startling the hell out of her. It was a good thing that she wasn’t the one holding the gun. “No, you’re not.” In spite of his willingness to yield to Midori’s overabundance of anger before, to back down, his voice was utterly firm. It left no room for argument, none at all. It wasn’t a voice that suggested an excess of ego…simply a lack of doubt. An abundance of certainty.
“Put your gun down, Natsuki,” Reito said with that voice. “And come
towards the front of the class to read us the introductory paragraph of your dissertation, miss Sugiura, if you’re so certain of its validity.”
Midori’s eyes widened and she spun, rounding on Reito, for an instant expecting to see a fairly well-aged fiftysomething wearing a rather abused old sport coat and a perpetually-inquisitional expression rather than a handsome nineteen year old boy with a serious expression that suggested an overall serenity about him.
For a moment, maybe she did.
Then there was just Reito Kanzaki.
“Butt out, Kanzaki,” Natsuki spat back. “This isn’t your business.”
Minoru’s expression suggested that he kind of hoped that she would listen to him.
“If you kill him here, then how do you plan on finding out why Shizuru was kidnapped?”
Natsuki said nothing, knowing he was right but not wanting to, at least immediately, concede.
“This is still none of your business.”
“If you want,” Reito said, his voice loosening a little. “But put your gun away.” A little.
Minoru said nothing, for fear of angering her index finger another quarter-inch.
“Natsuki,” Shizuru said. “Now.”
Natsuki sighed and lowered her gun.
“Put it up,” Minoru called hopefully. Natsuki shot him a look, and he added, “Please?”
She shook her head angrily and turned away, frustrated. Shizuru said, “Mister Alder, would you be kind enough to join us at our cabin? I think there are several matters that I would like to discuss with you.”
Something played on Minoru’s face—revulsion? only minus the illness—and he nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
“Thank you. You can come down now, Akira.”
As if from nowhere at all, Akira dropped from some perch above them all onto the ground behind Minoru. In another moment, she had dropped Minoru, numbing his arms and one leg by pinching his nerves, and had removed his weapons.
“Thank you very much,” Shizuru smiled at her. “Reito, would you please carry him to the van?”
Reito looked less fazed than he probably should have, and responded simply by nodding seriously. He seemed to have caught onto the seriousness of the situation remarkably quickly, and while he was, admittedly, frightened all to hell by the callus display of—very large—weaponry, he had remained fairly resolute throughout. He threw a small grin at Midori as he passed her, on his way to pick up a weakened, violently cursing Minoru Alder, and she shook her head.
She kept shaking it until she saw Reito again, and not a man three times his age with a temperament far closer to his than she would have easily admitted.
That wasn’t to say that Akane didn’t try her best. She did. She worked as hard as she could on any challenge that faced her, and for the most part, she conquered them fairly well with regard to mundane things; part-time jobs, school, even relationships. In all these things, Akane presented a levelheaded, eager face. It was one thing that he loved about her; one of the many.
But since that thing had happened to him, something had clicked off in her head. That thing that allowed her to deal with danger or death in any sort of rational way, and if there was one area in which Kazuya and Akane were not just different, but on opposite ends of a spectrum, it was this one. She was simply unable to deal with the prospect of death. Anybody’s death, really; but his especially. She had terrible, sometimes debilitating nightmares, even now, about what could not have been more than a ten minute experience in her life. On many of the nights that they had spent together, she had awoken just so; screaming and crying out for Kazuya. Something had been vaguely familiar to him about the way she screamed, but he couldn’t put his finger on it; a memory, just a fragment, that evaporated every time he came near it.
Kazuya was fairly even with regards to death and things generally so freakishly out of the ordinary that it would send most people screaming in the other direction.
He was also walking ahead of Akane that day, her hand clasped firmly in his, trying to get back to the main drag to find a toilet so that he could relieve himself of the soda he’d slugged down earlier.
Much later, looking back on it all, he was very, very grateful to that soda for working its way through to his bladder so quickly.
As they approached the main drag, Akane said, “Do you smell something funny, Kazu?”
Kazuya sniffed, smelled something a little off himself. A little bit like what it had smelled like in the kitchen of Linden Baum. He couldn’t put his finger on it.
He rounded the corner of a building—some old brick-and-mortar store, practically deserted on a day like today—and stopped, immediately, as he saw the now-thin mob of people around what he observed to be a burnt-out storefront. They were no more than fifty yards away from it.
Akane was his first and only thought, and, as if it were a set of instructions coded into a secret message, he read it and immediately turned and said, “Don’t move, Akane.”
It was cause for a momentary swell of pride in his belly that she stopped immediately, so trusting was she in his judgment. “What is it?”
“It’s…”
Lie or truth?
Kazuya was a simple sort of man. Things with him tended to boil down to what he regarded to be their basic elements; white and black, right and wrong, love and indifference. You loved somebody or you didn’t. There was no middle ground for “Well, I’d like to love you but that thing you do with your rabid mechanical dog really freaks me out,” in his mind. It was a good thing and a bad thing, usually in alternating periods, but it was the way he was.
Truth. Always.
“There’s a storefront out there, and,” he peered into the thinning crowd—by now, composed of only the older residents, the now empty-nested ex-stay-at-homes, and the town gossips were left staring at the firemen, the ambulances, which were now tagging the last of the ex-shoppers that hadn’t made it out of the store—and saw what he was afraid of: Corpses. Several of them. Burning meat, he thought. That’s what I smelled. “It looks like there was an explosion. And it looks like some people died. They’re—” Akane gave a small gasp, but held her composure, “getting rid of the people that died now. Can we just wait here a minute until they’re done?”
In a small, small voice, Akane said, “Don’t you have to…you know.” It was pretty apparent that it took a lot of courage for her to say that, to suggest that they go out anyway so that he could find a place to pee.
He turned around, walked back behind the building, and grinned. “I can hold it for a few more minutes, I think. Lets just wait here, okay?”
She nodded, and a sort of silent communication passed between them.
Thank you, Akane said, for understanding, and not thinking worse of me for it.
There’s nothing to thank me for, Kazuya replied. You are you, and you are how you are; that’s why I can be the best that I am.
“I love you,” Akane whispered, and Kazuya smiled as she pressed herself into him, suddenly shaking a little bit. He noticed she pressed her nose into the fabric of his shirt a little harder than was normal. Blocking out the smell.
“I love you,” he echoed, and held her there.
Maybe Kazuya wasn’t as stable as he thought he was. Maybe he was not possessed of a sense of sensibility, but of devotion. This occurred to him later, as did many other things in his life.
This occurred to him because of what he thought as he held Akane to him, shielding her from the fire as he had attempted to shield her from that monster before. He knew that if it came right down to it, and she had to fight for him again using some archaic power that he could never possess, she would. And he knew that he would do the same for her. And this is what he thought:
This, he thought, this here in my arms is something worth dying twice for.
He didn’t notice the shadow, but the shadow certainly noticed him.
She was too…too angry.
Yes, angry. That’s the word.
Angry at her
bastard
‘Big Brother.’
for being happy
For ignoring her.
Chie and Aoi looked like a pair of lovers at that point; Aoi had Chie’s hand clutched tightly in her own, and had taken to questioning Chie intently about what she remembered and what she didn’t, in the kind of carefully reckless, quizzical manner that Chie herself had refined to an art form, albeit an abstract one. In between dodging barrages of deadly, hollow-point, explosive-tipped questions, Chie had just enough time to feel a little proud of her “student.”
Shiho didn’t see Kazuya and Akane immediately, nor did she see the shadow hanging over their heads as soon as it became apparent. She wasn’t focusing on a pair of pseudo-familiar figures in what would have been the background of a canvas rendition of the rather gruesome scene; rather, she was focusing on Mai and Yuuichi, lost in their own little world, a world which they seemed to define solely by their shock and the slowly-decreasing distance between the two of them.
She wondered, somewhere in the very back of her head, if they were even aware that they were inching towards each other.
In the front of her mind, she was fully aware that she was not going to allow it. Their hands were, almost subtly, moving towards each other, attracted almost naturally, like hair to a balloon.
As soon as she made this comparison, she retracted it. Like it’s a law of nature of something.
She noticed Akane when it occurred to her, out of nowhere, that not even a year ago, she was making that comparison in reference to Yuuichi and herself. That it was the two of them that could be defined as only natural, as so good together. It was behind their backs, of course, and by her classmates, not his, but that didn’t bother her. Not at all.
Now she couldn’t even try to make the comparison. It didn’t feel right anymore. That was when she turned away from the two of them and saw Akane and Kazuya.
Saw Akane and Kazuya being watched by a man in a black sweater and ski mask, his head and the top of his shoulders hanging off of a low rooftop, observing. Neither big nor small, neither imposing nor unobtrusive. Simply a man—the shoulders were broad enough to suggest that if the figure was indeed a woman, she was still doing her a favor referring to her as the opposite—but not simply a man, all at once.
Maybe if it was just a man leaning his head out the window, Shiho wouldn’t have paid it any mind. Maybe the man could have merely had a good view of Akane’s cleavage, modest as it may be. Maybe he could have been looking to see if he could see the spectacle at the little strip mall. Maybe he could have just woken up; not a morning person, so to speak.
But it wasn’t just a man leaning out a window. It was a man leaning out a window with something in his hand. Shiho squinted to see what it was; long and black, with a long, parallel protrusion on the top…and a trigger...
GUN.
Shiho screamed, and the man’s head whipped around to face her.
The man’s eyes were ugly. Spiteful. Bitter. Even at a distance, Shiho could see these things, as his eyes locked directly onto hers.
For one solid second, she had the overwhelming feeling that she was going to die.
raises his gun and takes aim its like a firing squad out here theres nowhere to hide
cant run
somebody tells him to fire
squeezes the trigger and
cant run
like a law of nature those stuck in the open shall be
cant run
torn asunder no place to bury
cant run
my head
“Shiho!” Yuuichi’s voice. Yuuichi’s hand on her shoulder. Yuuichi’s hand is warm. It squeezes tight enough to let her know he’s
in pain he grits his teeth and bears the pain until he cant bear it anymore
TOKIHA
there.
She feels the instinct rise in her to move towards it. She feels another, something newer, fresher, tell her to recoil. She does neither, simply stands there. Behind her, Mai looks annoyed but concerned, a set of emotions difficult to pull off simultaneously. Annoyed because of the position she and Yuuichi were in.
Concerned because maybe, just maybe, she saw it too. Maybe her head whipped around at just the right time to see a gun barrel and a black-covered head vanish into a window just above Akane and Kazuya, caught in some cutsey position.
And maybe she took in more of what she saw than she thought she had.
Or maybe not.
Akane and Kazuya made their way back towards the group, looking hideously embarrassed; Akane was positively livid, convinced that it was the sight of herself and Kazuya, holding each other and about to…do things that would probably make a seventh-grader scream if she saw them, right?
Three months ago she would have believed that. Of late her sensibilities had become slightly less easily offended.
Soon, she promised him. Some day, but someday soon.
The look on her face, though…Akane, underneath all her horrified lividness, wanted desperately to believe that she was just shocked. She looked like she’d seen a murderer.
Mai set about convincing Akane that no, Shiho had just thought that she had seen something, that must have been it. Or maybe, privately confided, expressed in girlfriend code, she had been wanting not to see something else, you know how it is, yes I know how it is, but no, you didn’t embarrass her don’t worry about it, oh thank goodness.
Yuuichi’s hand was still on Shiho’s shoulder. Shiho found herself paralyzed, unable to move for fear that if she did, the hand would leave. Vanish. Mai looked angry. Angry at her, of course. Mai must hate her. She would never believe that there was a man with a gun watching Akane and Kazuya a floor above them. She would think it was all some rendition of Shiho’s mind, wouldn’t she?
And if she was such a
bitch
conniving bastard, wouldn’t Yuuichi believe the same thing?
“What did you see?” Yuuichi said quietly, dropping into a squat to bring himself down to her height. “Did you see something that scared you?”
such a
Shiho, very slowly, cautiously, like a raccoon caught stealing from a compost heap, turned around to face him. Carefully. Please god, don’t let this hand move.
It didn’t.
She nodded to him mutely. “I can’t tell you here.”
“Why not?”
She shook her head, meeting his eyes. No, her eyes said. Don’t ask me again.
He nodded. “You can tell me later.”
bitch
“Thank you,” she whispered, feeling her knees wobble a little; weakened by horror. At what she’d seen, of course; and at what Yuuichi had done.
He had been kind to her. Even though.
Even though.
Mai thought, This was supposed to be a fun thing; a way to get away, with more than a little regret.
More than a lot, even.
There was an odd package wrapped entirely in black cloth in the trunk, and Natsuki warned everybody, on penalty of death, away from it. Her voice carried an odd tone to it when she spoke. A tone that Mai hadn’t heard in
stay away from Fuuka Academy
a long time.
The drive back to the beach was long and silent.
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