The vein pinched in this chapter is the Cephalic vein. It stretches from your heart into your shoulder, and then reaches down your arm in two parts, which reunite around your wrist—on the right side of your right arm and the left side of your left arm—and flow into your hand.
Finally, in the course of writing this chapter, I realized I needed to think of the noun for ‘simultaneous.’ After thinking for a few minutes, I felt something poking at the back of my ass. I reached down, grabbed whatever was poking its little head out of there, and came up with the word “simultaneity,” which proceeded to pass spell-check and I kick booty, and I thought you all should know that.
You will never need to recognize yourself / to deceive / to remove all chance of doubt and be received / with your lie / the deception is complete
All your belief cannot absolve your sin.
Believe
Reito set Minrou, who had become remarkably quiet considering his vulgar state not ten minutes before, down on the hard, grainy wood of the boys’ bedroom in their cabin. His actions were smooth and gentle, and Midori, who had followed them, was just a little impressed; Minoru was in relatively good physical shape, but he was also a middle-aged man, and as such had gone just a bit to pot, in the way that all middle-aged men do as their metabolisms unionize, and start demanding shorter hours and better pay. Midori smiled with appreciation as Reito stood up, massaging his back gently as he turned to face her, his small grin mirroring hers.
Their eyes met, and so began the most childishly awkward moment that Midori had experienced since being asked out by a cute, stupid boy during her final year in junior high. It lasted exactly seven seconds, during which Midori kept her eyes locked onto Reito’s, wanting desperately to look away but not quite knowing how. His eyes were gentle, sparkling with a sort of oh, Midori, humor that she didn’t quite appreciate.
The problem, she would later speculate, was that she wanted to thank him, but at the same time, she wanted his egotistical, womanizing face out of hers. The second problem was that he was neither egotistical nor womanizing, and she knew this quite well, and understood that she had made this description of him up on the spot. She did not want to admit this to herself at the moment, because that would feel a lot like letting her defenses down.
I don’t like him like I liked the professor. And he’s looking at me like I do.
This bothered Midori a whole hell of a lot less than she wanted to admit, and that bothered a whole hell of a lot more than she could adequately explain to any sort of guidance counselor.
And then the moment passed, and Reito shifted his focus to the wall behind and to the left of Midori’s head, his smile becoming a little less genuine, his eyes becoming a little less affectionate. “I’ll just wait outside,” he said quietly. “If you need anything, just shout.”
He almost seems angry.
Can you really be surprised at that?
“I will,” Midori nodded, and then said, with as big of a smile as she could force onto her face, “Thanks.”
This seemed to lighten his mood a lot. He grinned back, and nodded. “I’ll be outside.”
Then he was gone, and Minoru was looking at Midori with a kind of resigned apprehension: Hurry up and shoot me, I don’t have all day.
It almost seemed unnecessary, then, for Midori to say, “This is going to hurt,” but she did anyway, her voice manically cheery as she unrolled a length of medical tape that she produced from some pocket that he couldn’t see. “A lot.” Minoru didn’t particularly trust that voice—it was the voice of somebody who enjoyed every bit of their work, a voice that did not fit well on nurses, dentists, or lawyers.
It also did not fit well on somebody about to re-set your dislocated wrist. He was starting to have second thoughts about the whole endeavor—a lot of them, at that; as it was, he couldn’t feel his wrist, but it didn’t really hurt, either. He wasn’t any particular fan of agonizing pain, so he felt at that moment that he would have been more than happy to just live and let live.
Midori’s left hand was gripping Minoru’s dislocated hand firmly, holding it as though she was about to shake it, and she held his wrist loosely in her right. Apparently, her nurse friend had told her that her best shot at not irrevocably fucking his joint up was to make sure she didn’t touch the vein as she did it, which meant she would have to squeeze his wrist back together with one hand. Gently, unless it resisted. Then she was apparently to use all her strength, but do so gently. Always gently. Also, she had told Midori that it was going to hurt a lot. Him, not her.
“Grit your teeth, buddy,” she said. “Count of three, okay?”
“Could you wait just a second?” Minoru interrupted, his stomach churning suddenly with anticipation of the pain he was about to endure. She’s going to do it on one anyway. Nurses that enjoy their work always pull shit like that. “I’d like to get a last glimpse of the world before you—”
Midori’s hand clenched, a lot less gently than she’d intended, and the wave of sharp, burning pain that followed didn’t so much shoot through Minoru as rip his nerves out, bunch them up, and take a nice big bite out of them. He screamed—a little higher-pitched than Midori would have thought was possible from somebody with a voice as mid-ranged as his—and collapsed, slumped over practically on top of her as his voice cut out without warning. At the same time, his hand clenched up into a tight fist.
Midori felt a pang of shock sweep through her where the panic should have been, and she cursed to hserself. Oh, shit, she thought with a remarkable sense of calm. I must have pinched the vein even worse. She shouted, “Help me!” and immediately put her hand to his neck, trying to feel for a pulse.
No, not the neck. Check his wrist. If you really did pinch his nerve, you won’t be able to feel his pulse there.
The door opened almost immediately, and a second later, Reito knelt down next to her, his face calm but his eyes urgent. “What happened to him?”
He’s asking, what did you do to him? You fucked up, that’s what happened to him.
That little voice in the back of her head. Insecurity. That thing she had just beaten down.
You’re going to kill him.
Fuck you.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head to clear it of that stupid fucking insecurity. “I’m not sure. I set his wrist, and he just collapsed.”
She gripped his forearm, about a quarter of the way up from his wrist, and dug her finger, a little more powerfully than she’d probably intended, into the area between his tendon and his muscle, feeling a soft, gentle pulse on her fingertip. Immediately, some of her worry dissolved as she began to track his heartbeat as a little slow, but certainly present. She started moving her finger lower, tracking the vein down his wrist, as Reito pulled Minoru’s limp form off of her lap; at the base of the forearm, the pulse vanished.
I pinched the vein. The bottom dropped out of her stomach, and she looked up at Reito, her eyes wide.
“You pinched the vein?” he asked unnecessarily; she wished he hadn’t, but answered him anyway.
“I pinched the vein.”
“What now?”
“I have no fucking idea. I must have pinched it with the bone, so we have to loosen it.” Think. Think. THINK. You’re not a nurse, but you lived with one for years. Minoru’s hand was starting to turn an ugly shade of blue that made Reito’s eyes widen a bit.
Something she had once said to Youko came to mind immediately, but oddly enough, it had nothing to do with nursing or veins or anything: Sometimes, things just fall into place, but a lot of the time, they fall right on top of something important. Never trust anything to work itself out on its own.
At this, as if almost by instinct, she started rubbing at the vein, at the tendons around it, and the fist his hand had clenched so powerfully into started to loosen, and with it, his tendons.
In spite of her relationship with Youko, it was Reito who spotted first what was going on.
“His hand is starting to turn a little less blue,” he said quietly. Midori looked down at his hand and realized that Reito was right.
It’s too tight. His hand is too tight, and it’s cutting off the circulation to a vein that’s already crowded.
Things just fall into place, right on top of something.
Midori was by no means a stupid woman. She was, in fact, one of the brightest women in the Archaeology department; she was twenty-four and had been most of the way through graduate school when she was expelled; she was clever and she had a keen ability to observe a puzzle as a series of little pieces, and to see just where they should fall. Her ability to synthesize information from little clues and hints was near-nigh legendary among the other Masters’ candidates in the Archaeology department at Tokyo University; it was what made her good at her job. It was what had led her so close to the truth; to the truth at Fuuka Gakuen that had kept Mai alive in the end.
She had also spent many, many nights helping Youko study diagrams of the human anatomy, and had subsequently learned almost as much as her roommate had. She knew fairly well the structure of veins and tendons, bones and nerves.
Maybe, if this worked, she could stop paying Youko back for puking on her one night when she was holding up a diagram of a nerve structure for her to study for a midterm the next day.
Maybe.
“Reito,” she said urgently, “you know that tendon on your forearm that moves whenever you move your hand?” she pointed it out on her own arm, just next to the vein she’d pinched. “Dig your finger under it as hard as you can.”
He did what she asked without questioning it; this tugged more than it probably should have at her.
She grabbed his wrist, and without a second thought, squeezed it again. Reito frowned.
“I feel like I’m blocking something from moving.”
“You are,” she said. “Now, without moving your hand, try and unclench his fist.”
Reito did, and the fist broke into a flat palm with very little effort. Color started to return to the hand almost immediately, and Midori smiled, let a breath out. “Lucky,” she admitted.
“Was it?” Reito was visibly relieved; his face was actually sweating a little.
“I think so,” she said quietly. “Lucky that I didn’t just squish the vein in between his two pieces of wrist. Lucky that squeezing his wrist a second time actually did something. Lucky that a lot of things.”
“You think so?”
“I do.” She did; bones liked to be where they were supposed to be, but they couldn’t just be expected to go there on their own. Sometimes it took a gentle push.
“Did he just pass out from the shock?”
“I’ve got no idea,” Midori shrugged. “I think he’s okay, though.”
There was silence for a moment between them. Once again, an awkward moment between the two of them, but this time the moment began to stretch itself out, able to easily fill the space of a minute. Two minutes.
I feel as though something at this moment is missing. Both Midori and Reito thought this as one, neither of them aware of the simultaneity of the event.
Midori thought what was missing might have something to do with her, but Reito was certain of what the two of them lacked at that moment. Midori is missing a willingness to let her guard down around anybody, even just to say, “boy, am I relieved that that’s over. She’s more tense than she was when Minoru’s hand was about to explode. What is she afraid of?
He knew the answer to this almost offhand, of course. She was afraid of him.
But that didn’t explain her tension. Nor did it explain why the two of them were still sitting on the floor, trying to count the grains of wood on the walls. That didn’t explain why Reito could practically taste Midori’s discomfort: Not the discomfort that a little girl felt around her creepy uncle Kenichi, but the discomfort that a woman felt around the boy that she’d dumped and then wanted back, privately: That unwillingness to do anything, and that total commitment to stubbornly, miserably resist any advances he made on her.
But I’m not her ex-anything.
Carefully, oh-so-carefully, Reito turned his head so that he could see Midori in his peripheral vision, found her still counting grains, her eyes calm and unfocused. She was absently stroking Minoru’s head; Minoru who had entered their world not three hours ago; Minoru who was now tearing their nice, comfortable (if moderately dramatic) vacation into carefully-shredded scrap.
Reito wasn’t a writer, nor was he a poet, but he was a student, and he felt that he could fill up a good five-paragraph essay talking about how Midori looked right at that moment: Her red hair, hair that was normally elaborately put up in an extravagant ponytail, now draped around her shoulders, framing her sharp, determined face. About how…
Upon another moment’s reflection, mostly to do with just how un-romantic five-paragraph essays really were and how uncreative they became towards paragraph four, Reito decided to settle with she looks really beautiful.
And, he decided upon another moment’s consideration, she may be uncomfortable here, but I’m not.
I’m not at all.
That was close enough to the truth for Reito.
“Hey, Midori,” he said quietly, ending their unspoken grain-counting competition by twisting his head to look at her nonchalantly.
She looked up, startled, and caught his eye. “Mm?” Her eyes were a bit wide; his tone was soft and gentle, and his eyes were clear and confident as they met hers. Her stomach did a little flip, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to vomit or sing.
Oh, shit.
There were perhaps two people in the world who could have taken the near death of a complete stranger by wrist-dislocation induced shock and turned it into a topic of small talk about a mutual acquaintance, especially in a situation about a nanometer away from being romantic, but one of them was most certainly Reito Kanzaki: “I suppose you and Youko haven’t seen anything quite this interesting since grad school, and even then, it probably had something to do with a class.”
Words could not convey Midori’s shock. Small talk.
The son of a bitch is making small talk.
It’s because you’re uncomfortable, and he knows it. Something about being understood quite so thoroughly bothered Midori—it bothered her a lot. “I guess not.” Her tone was clipped, at best, which didn’t surprise Reito in the slightest. “Huh.”
Even so, she had shifted herself around to face him without realizing it. That could have been interpreted a lot of ways, all of which Reito catalogued and dismissed in the space of about a second. Instead, he just smiled at her. “Are you feeling any better?”
“Than what?” she said; it was a knee-jerk reaction that she found herself cursing a moment after she said it.
“Than before. You seemed very troubled back in Goza.”
You say troubled like I didn’t cuss you out.
You’re acting again.
“Yes,” she admitted with some difficulty. And then, with less difficulty, a lot less than she’d have expected: “I am. Thank you.” And oddly enough, she meant it. Even the last part.
“Then,” he said, his voice just as light as it had been a moment ago but his words infinitely more serious, “would you like to go back to Goza later tonight, if the situation allows?”
Midori froze for a moment, every muscle in her body tensing at once as her eyes widened a little bit, more in panic than in shock; not that she hadn’t been expecting this, only that she had absolutely no idea what to say now that it was upon her; a few hours ago, she’d have been able to cuss him out and leave. She couldn’t do that now, if only out of sheer
affection
gratitude—for his virtually unfaltering devotion to not letting up on her with his non-advances in spite of her unfaltering bitchery—which said nothing of her lighter mood; the anger that had let her do that had bled out of her earlier, and she wasn’t really sure if she could summon that kind of energy again.
She didn’t allow herself to stutter, to utter some series of incoherent syllables while her mind grappled violently with the simple yes-no dichotomy; she was no longer an awkward teenager as she once was. She was twenty fucking four years old, and damned if she was going to let some—admittedly handsome—nineteen year old reduce her to a puddle of monosyllabic goo.
In the end, it came down to one simple thing holding her back: If you decide to do this with him, you have to really do it. There will be no pussyfooting around.
He’s still a dick.
And I still don’t like him like that.
But she knew he deserved better, and that aside, she wondered how much longer she would be able to tell herself that before she had to address whatever was really in her heart, be it good or bad.
Then, I guess you deserve this. “Fine,” she said. “But on my terms.”
Reito’s mask was perfect; he didn’t even crack a grin at his sudden, unexpected victory. “Name them,” he said smoothly; if there was a negotiation afoot, he didn’t acknowledge it.
“No funny shit. No talking about the professor.” Her voice barely even cracked when she said that. That alone merited at least one drink. “And we get somebody to drive us home, and not because I don’t trust you to not get yourself as shitfaced as I undoubtedly will.”
But because you don’t trust me when you’re drunk, Reito thought. That’s fair. I don’t trust me when you’re drunk, either.
Ironically, their mutual lack of trust in Reito had nothing to do with the first condition and everything to do with the second.
Not that Midori thought that Reito wouldn’t take advantage of her when she was plastered—she was quite egotistical enough to think that he would. This, she had found, was true for at least four fifths of the male population; no reason it wouldn’t be true for him. She had no solid evidence, but she would, she supposed, shortly.
More silence. Theme of the hour with the two of us, Midori thought a touch sardonically. What a promising friendship this looks to become.
Before it could turn into something deafening, though, the thing she whose forehead she had been idly stroking, the limp, lifeless thing whose warmth she had been subconsciously relying on, spoke:
“That’s wonderful that you two are on good terms again; I’m glad,” as Minoru said it, Midori jumped in shock—she didn’t see Reito’s reaction, so she assumed, mostly for the sake of her pride, that he was also scared witless, “really, I am. But you, Reito,” it was a testament to Minoru’s sharp memory that he remembered this boy’s name when it hadn’t been mentioned any more specifically than in passing, “could you get off my leg before she has to crush that in her fist too?”
Reito moved without acknowledging that he’d done anything wrong in the first place, and without any sort of sheepishness. That boy is a smooth operator, Minoru understood immediately as he tested out first his leg, rolling his foot and tensing his calf and thigh muscles, and then his hand, moving his fingers slowly. The latter action hurt a little, and he felt a dull ache immediately flood the appendage; he understood that he’d probably have trouble with the hand until he saw a proper doctor about it, but for the time being he could use it for simple things without too much trouble. He could probably even snipe with it—he had once known a sniper with horrible arthritis in his non-trigger hand. If that bastard could do it, he could do it, and eat a banana doing it out of spite. He hadn’t liked that man.
“You’re awake,” Midori observed helpfully.
Minoru smiled a little too charmingly as he replied, “If that’s not true, this is probably the most pleasant state of unconsciousness I’ve ever experienced.”
In retrospect, he said it out of instinct rather than any specific attraction to Midori. That was not to say that the attraction wasn’t there; she was a very pretty girl. Rather that he sort of recognized that he didn’t know this girl, and she didn’t seem like the type to sleep with a man twice her age when she had just been flirt-angsting with another younger, handsomer boy.
Nonetheless, she smiled appreciatively. “Thank you,” she said; her voice matched her grin. This didn’t baffle Minoru or Reito nearly as much as it would have baffled most males their age. She looks to me, Minoru observed, like a woman who just doesn’t get told she’s pretty nearly often enough. He’d met a few of those, and he always told them they were pretty, and there ended their contact. He tended to like them too much to bed them.
Reito simply thought Minoru had said the right thing at the right time. Neither of them were particularly wrong.
After that, Minoru thanked Midori again. Midori just grinned and threw a wisecrack his way, which he fielded with grace befitting of a mildly disinterested forty year old. After that, he left, with a promise to return later.
Because as much as he would have liked to stay and chat with Midori, he understood that he needed to know why he was being targeted, and he needed to know before the next Foul Underling came to try and take his head off.
Before he left the cabin, though, he spotted his backpack resting on a wall; he opened it, spotted everything intact inside, including a Beretta M9 pistol and a holster with several spare clips. This made him a very happy man indeed, and he wondered how his karma had ever gotten so good as he strapped the pistol to his waist.
As he tried to holster his backpack with his bad hand, earning him a stab of pain, he remembered: It hadn’t.
Even so, he pressed valiantly forward and started hiking towards his first instinct, his old sniping position on the hill overlooking their cabin.
Even so.
The other is this author.
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