Psychomancy (Or: Five Conversations We Had Over Coffee)
Greetings, Livejournal! Long time, no see. Life's been crazy.
I’ve been doing well, just. Incredibly. Busy. Holy crap. Last night I literally passed out at 11:00, intending to finish an online that was technically due this morning at 4, but. Slept the whole night and missed the lecture for the course for which I’ve now missed the quiz. It’s okay, though; he drops the two lowest marks, and at this point I honestly don’t really care about doing too well.
And the reason I’m not worried about how poorly I do is because I am done! With applications and such things! I’ve been accepted into the Outdoor and Experiential Education program track, which means that next year I’ll be getting my B.Ed with a specialization in outdoor education, which is. SO EXCITE. Asdfjkl; livejournal! I cannot express how exciting it is to know that I have something that I really and truly want to do, and that I’m on my way there. I’m also doing Outlook again this summer, because despite swearing to never do it again I found that I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. The weirdest things make me miss Outlook - specifically the taste of raspberries, and as I discovered today, the taste of pesto sauce. But I’m SUPER STOKED to do it, especially because my best friend from last year as well as our swim instructor are on board, and two really close friends are co-directors.
I can’t even. I just can’t even, Livejournal. It’s like, my entire life is right there, a month away from me. (as long as I survive next week. Holy shit, next week is legitimately going to be entirely without sleep.)
Well! In the month between my last post and now, there was:
- A fucking hilarious Pokemon DnD session with my brother and a friend, DM’d by my brother’s girlfriend. I played Brandon Walker, a blue-collar worker who is really rough around the edges and apparently has anger issues; our group was Brandon, a prissy exchange student named Marie La Fleur, and a surfer named Chad. Two minutes into the session we learned that we somehow ALL HAD FARFETCH’D, I DON’T EVEN, and hilariousness. Ensued. Also Brandon and Chad literally fought over every girl in the session, and at one point Brandon flipped a table and whipped his pocket knife at a Team Rocket guy. POKEMON: SRS BUSINESS???
- The Anime Club potluck! Which went surprisingly well. A bunch of us spent most of the night watching old 90s music videos and TV show openings. The nostalgia was intense.
- A laser tag birthday party! And a fantasy birthday party! (that kind fantasy; I went as a pleather cat girl. Nya) And an Outlook reunion! And all three original Star Wars movies! (Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker is my secret space boyfriend, except not so secret.)
- I sat on the Question and Answer panel for incoming Concurrent Education students! It was intense, they were such keeners, which is hilarious because I was such a keener four years ago when I seriously cared. But still. It was nice meeting them and answering their inane questions.
- Hngghh last weekend was so much fun, a legitimate two-and-a-half parties. Friday night I missed anime club because it was Con Ed Formal! There was a toucan piñata at the pre-drink which someone named Sam and brought as her boyfriend. The night went by. So quickly. (function of how drunk I was…) but! I won the Concurrent Education Students’ Association Achievement Award, which was COMPLETELY unexpected, as I’ve been almost entirely behind the scenes the whole time, so it was super nice! And the slideshow went over really well, and then the dance was. Amazing. They played our year song (Highway to Hell, but we say ‘highway to twelve’ because we’re the graduating class of 2012) and we were all jumping up and down and screaming and asdfjkl; And afterwards instead of going to the afterparty I met up with anime club people and we ended up at a friends’ place where we chilled for a while, and it was seriously awesome.
- Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day! I had to go to Aberdeen Street (the heart of the student village, where the party always gets intense) to pick up something I left at a friend’s house, and got pulled into the mad party. I’m not a super big partier, but I like to enjoy myself from time to time, and the thing I love about Queen’s students (and probably students in general) is that they’ll totally take you by the hand and give you a beer if you want to join in. We played Frisbee and threw about a football because it also happened to be the first really nice day of the year, weather-wise. After that I went home and sobered up and went over to friends’ for Star Wars, which was awesome fantastic.
- Wednesday was complete ugh. I had a paper due Thursday that I just couldn’t write, for some reason; I pulled and all-nighter to no effect, and eventually woke up at 7:00 and powered through for 11:00 when it was due. It’s a terrible paper, but it’s handed in, and I’m just happy about that. Yesterday night I went to the Queen’s Dance Club recital, but was pretty exhausted, which is why I fell asleep so early last night…
- Which brings us to today. Next week is literally insane, but I’ll survive somehow! Somehow…and then Gumdo Formal is on the 31st, I am literally dying of excite. And then it’s week 12, and then…and then…
So yeah. I feel like this is a good place to segue into a fic I’ve been writing over the last little while. It’s a TWEWY fic concurrent to the last one I posted, and it’s really important to me. As I worked through it I feel like I worked through my own issues with my family; I realized as I wrote it how much my parents being workaholics has really impacted me and how I relate to adults. Men becoming father figures for kids with absent parents is a seriously common trope in my fanfiction - looking back at the year I drabbled a day for 365 days, it’s hard to miss. (The Regal and Lloyd Do Manly Things Together saga is only one part of it.) I identify really strongly with protagonists who have lost or are separated from their fathers because my parents were (and still are) very absent from my life. I think they’re beginning to catch on because they’ve been trying really hard lately to reconnect with me, but it’s far too late. Not that my parents are bad people, or anything! They’re really nice as people, they just weren’t all that great as parents. My brother and I had all sorts of issues dealing with adults because of it, but I think that in the end it helped us mature really quickly once we moved away from home.
ANYWAYS this fic started as me trying to write Hanekoma and Neku into that father-son dynamic, and ended with…whatever this is. I feel like I’m changing, in all sorts of weird ways.
Psychomancy
Or: Five Conversations We Had Over Coffee
01. [GAME]
The first time Neku walked into WildKAT after the last Game, he was breathless from the distance he had crossed. It was his second time leaving the house after his post-Game recovery (the first being his meet-up with his new friends), and he was still anaemic, his body weak from the things it had done.
The café seemed a little more difficult to locate than he remembered, tucked away in an alleyway, and had it always been so shrouded in shadows? But every inch of the way there had been written into the soles of Neku’s feet, and he found it exactly where he expected it to be.
The decal was still there (he could not find the decal on any other store, with waking eyes) and he touched it as he approached, out of habit. He paused and took a deep breath before placing his hand on the doorknob, pushing it open with a soft jangle of a hand-rigged bell, and there was the man who was not the Composer, casually polishing a green mug behind the bar.
Neku found himself rooted to the ground; time slowed, and congealed, in the air around him. “Hey there,” CAT said, slowly tilting his head. He’d last spoken to the man - well, he’d been in bed for a week, and he’d not seen him at all the third week, and -
“Sixteen days, give or take a few hours.” Hanekoma put the newly-cleaned mug down on the bar, reached down and retrieved a coffee pot. With an adept hand and eye he poured it, then reached down again and placed a bowl of soup next to it. “Been a while. Looks like you could use something that sticks to your bones - c’mon in and eat, yeah?”
“I -” The room temperature returned to normal. “-I suppose. Yeah.”
And that was all that needed to be said.
02. [AND MOUSE]
Things of that nature get easier, slowly. But Neku had questions and Hanekoma was always short on time, which sped things up significantly.
On the fourth day after his recovery, Neku found his way back to the café, where Hanekoma was waiting for him, with another cup of coffee and a stack of pancakes. Neku knew better than to ask about the food; he sat down, had a mouthful.
“I saw you,” he said, to CAT’s back. Hanekoma looked over from the espresso machine. “Right at the end. There was a flash of white after I dropped the gun and before I blacked out, and I saw you and Joshua.”
“Well, I’m never one to turn down a kid in need of help,” was the reply. “But yeah, I was there.”
“ - But you’re not the Composer.”
“No.”
“ - And you’re not - whatever Shades was.”
“The Conductor? Nope.”
“But you know all about the Game. You told Shiki and me - way back then - that you were there to…watch over? Who - why?”
“Aah, now you’re wandering into secret territory. How ‘bout we change the subject?”
There is something dissonant going on in Neku’s brain, because he wants to trust the man with cool eyes more than anything, and yet in his nightmares he’s been breathless and dying on the rooftop of Pork City. So he changes the subject as asked, and the two chat about schoolwork and shopping until Neku has to go home.
(Those Secret Reports were not for Neku; they were for you, Player.)
03. [WE PLAY FOR KEEPS]
“All of them,” Neku says, sipping cautiously. “All of them were Players.”
“Except Joshua. And Megumi, come to think of it. Got that one straight from the RG.”
“…Really?”
“He was a lot like you,” Hanekoma says, wiping the countertop with a dirty rag, and the sound of his voice tells Neku that the line of conversation is finished. Once again, Neku wonders: was he suffering? Or was he too closed-off to know?
“…D’you lose your Entry Fee?”
“Yeah. - Usually, although there are sometimes…special circumstances. It takes a special kind of crazy to sign up for that sort of job, y’know?”
“I know. …Will you tell me what their Entry Fees were?”
Hanekoma sighs. “I s’ppose I owe you that much.” He puts down the rag and starts counting on his fingers. “Higashizawa was always thin and sickly, longed to be more - soldierly, yeah? They gave him that body of his, hoping he would understand that some things don’t come from your fists. He didn’t. Went mad with power and killed fifteen Players on his first day. Megumi hired him straight away. Kinda puts his obsession with Miss Misaki into perspective, eh?”
“…I guess.”
“Lessee. Uzuki had really pretty black hair, all the way down to her waist. Really pretty, really vain. They took that. Kariya - ”
“-Lollipop?”
“ - Yeah, he has - had - a really close friend. They took his memories of that friend, and the friend's memories of him. Uh, Konishi was exactly the person you remember her being, they made her all spaced-out and ditzy. Her and her Partner were about to go down fighting the GM when Megs offered her brain back if she’d kill her Partner as a declaration of loyalty. She did.”
“…Huh. What about Pi-Face?”
“Sho was - special.” Out of the corner of his eye, Neku notices that Hanekoma has braced himself on the bar. “He found this place all on his own, back when he was alive. Feisty even back then, but I liked him - used to tag over my murals with his own art. Kid was a genius. Thought about groomin’ him to take over the business, but he got hit by a car with his nose in an art book, and that’s life. ”
“I, uh.” Hanekoma is looking a little disturbed, an emotion crossing his face that Neku cannot name or place, and it troubles him greatly. “I’m - sorry?”
He shrugs. “They wanted to rip the create out of his brain, but all they did was give him a peek into the stuff our world is made of - the program, as it is. Gave him eyes that saw no beauty, only the code. The human brain can only take so much of that. A week of it left him in - well, in the state you found him in.”
“Crazy.”
“We were gonna revive him, but he begged us not too - couldn’t face the world, after what he’d been through. And all I could do was make sure he ended up a lion…”
Hanekoma seems drained, and the conversation moves to a safer place: Neku talks about something he saw on the way over, and Hanekoma polishes glasses and listens. He is very, very far away.
04. [EMPTINESS AND]
“Nah, not really,” Neku is saying. “He walked out on my mom when I was really young.”
“Ah.” Today they’re sharing shots of espresso. Neku thinks that Hanekoma is somewhere around his tenth, although he can’t quite tell - and he doesn’t know how healthy that is. Meanwhile, he’s still working on his first. “Shucks, Phones. That’s quite a downer.”
“I…don’t think about it too much.” Neku drinks, tastes bitterness and acceptance, someone trying to get away and not quite making it. And how can he put it in words, the way he feels when he talks to Mr. H? He thinks of Sunday school, God the Mother-Father, the nurturer and the judge, who would carry you on His back at one moment and rain fire on your home in the next.
And where does that leave Neku?
“Well, people can suck sometimes, eh?”
“-I had this weird dream, once,” Neku says, changing the subject rather suddenly. “I’m on the roof of Pork City, begging you to let me help you, and you -” Neku chokes, and the room goes very quiet. “-You said I would, and you took out two feathers, and -”
“-That’s enough, Neku.”
“-I just - don’t - know - who you are,” he says, through gritted teeth. “Are you a Reaper? Why can I see you? Are you a Composer like Joshua? Are you -”
“-That’s enough.” Hanekoma has come around the bar, to stand right beside Neku. “Lissen, Phones. Th’ world’s a great big place, and we all have a place in it. D’you know what we call your power?” He puts a hand on Neku’s head; it’s a startlingly intimate gesture, and when Neku looks up, he notices that Hanekoma has gold eyes with an incredibly dilated pupil. He’d never noticed that before. “We call it Psychomancy - speakin’ with the dead. It’s rare, and powerful, and unstable. All of us had our eyes on you for years, so when Joshua went on the offensive, I knew we had to do something…”
There is a shift in the air, a sudden drop in the temperature. “There are some things you may not know, even at the end of it all. - But you’ll have to make do with what you have. Remember what I told you, back then?”
“-Trust your partner?”
“No, the other one.”
“…‘Enjoy the moment’?”
Hanekoma shakes his head. Neku wrinkles his brow, confused, but a sudden rush of recognition rips through him like an electric shock. He sees an empty white space, an angel’s wing, and dark black blood. “…That the day would come sooner than either of us expect?”
“I came back for you,” Hanekoma says, ruffling Neku’s hair, and that is that.
05. [PSYCHOMANCY]
It is a painful decision, but Mr. H’s lease on the building technically has eight more months on it, and it would be a waste to let the place fade into nothingness. So Neku, winglets still tender in the wake of his second death, rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. At the very least the building can serve as a mausoleum.
“I still don’t know who you are,” Neku says, as he plugs in the coffee maker. By some miracle the plumbing is still working, despite the broken glass and scorched wood that marks Hanekoma’s final struggle, and he fills the machine enough to make two cups: one for him, one for the dead. He’s brought in a bag of pre-ground beans from a small stall in Dogenzaka. He pulls a feather from his back, chars it with a fistful of energy, and adds it to the mix; soon, the sound of percolation and the smell of coffee slides up the walls.
“…But I trust you.” And how could he not? Even after his disappearance, something about the man still lived on, in the way Shibuya breathed. Neku had taken to tagging the empty spaces on the walls and streets, if only to hear the last threads of Hanekoma’s mad song. He hears thoughts and rumours about CAT’s metamorphosis into something new. And while he’s not about to dispel those rumours, it makes him very, very sad.
“I think I understand, now,” he says, as he pours the brewed coffee into a mug he’s brought from home; it’s one of the few things Joshua allowed him to take from his old life. He pours a second cup, leaves it on the bar. “You told me that alone, we face limitations. And you knew your limitations, because you were alone. You were the loneliest guy in Shibuya. You were lonelier than I was, so you knew who I was.”
Even Joshua, it seemed, did not know much about the man who had lived and then died; he said as much, because Neku needed to know. “You…knew things. And you couldn’t tell anyone about them. So you looked at Pi-Face, and then at me, and saw people wrapped up inside their own heads, so much that you could trust yourself to talk to them.”
He takes a drink. He’ll never get it to taste exactly like Hanekoma’s brew, but such is life: everything changes, and nothing is truly lost. “…It’s bitter.” We sweeten things so we can choke them down. “You trusted us with your life.” And Neku knows that Hanekoma is gone forever, knows with the part of him that was born the moment he woke up in the Scramble Crossing, and he learned to speak with the dead. “You took your secrets with you, wherever you went.” And Neku knows that part of him will never be lost. Hanekoma is tattooed into his skin, printed on each one of his atoms: like the power series of real numbers between 0 and 1, he’s a handful of emptiness that’s bigger than the universe.
“Well, I’ll be enough for both of you,” Neku says, toasting to the empty air. “You guys were crazy. Thanks.”
The future you must choose is within you.
I am glad to have had the chance to meet you.
Secret Report 22
I’ve been doing well, just. Incredibly. Busy. Holy crap. Last night I literally passed out at 11:00, intending to finish an online that was technically due this morning at 4, but. Slept the whole night and missed the lecture for the course for which I’ve now missed the quiz. It’s okay, though; he drops the two lowest marks, and at this point I honestly don’t really care about doing too well.
And the reason I’m not worried about how poorly I do is because I am done! With applications and such things! I’ve been accepted into the Outdoor and Experiential Education program track, which means that next year I’ll be getting my B.Ed with a specialization in outdoor education, which is. SO EXCITE. Asdfjkl; livejournal! I cannot express how exciting it is to know that I have something that I really and truly want to do, and that I’m on my way there. I’m also doing Outlook again this summer, because despite swearing to never do it again I found that I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. The weirdest things make me miss Outlook - specifically the taste of raspberries, and as I discovered today, the taste of pesto sauce. But I’m SUPER STOKED to do it, especially because my best friend from last year as well as our swim instructor are on board, and two really close friends are co-directors.
I can’t even. I just can’t even, Livejournal. It’s like, my entire life is right there, a month away from me. (as long as I survive next week. Holy shit, next week is legitimately going to be entirely without sleep.)
Well! In the month between my last post and now, there was:
- A fucking hilarious Pokemon DnD session with my brother and a friend, DM’d by my brother’s girlfriend. I played Brandon Walker, a blue-collar worker who is really rough around the edges and apparently has anger issues; our group was Brandon, a prissy exchange student named Marie La Fleur, and a surfer named Chad. Two minutes into the session we learned that we somehow ALL HAD FARFETCH’D, I DON’T EVEN, and hilariousness. Ensued. Also Brandon and Chad literally fought over every girl in the session, and at one point Brandon flipped a table and whipped his pocket knife at a Team Rocket guy. POKEMON: SRS BUSINESS???
- The Anime Club potluck! Which went surprisingly well. A bunch of us spent most of the night watching old 90s music videos and TV show openings. The nostalgia was intense.
- A laser tag birthday party! And a fantasy birthday party! (that kind fantasy; I went as a pleather cat girl. Nya) And an Outlook reunion! And all three original Star Wars movies! (Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker is my secret space boyfriend, except not so secret.)
- I sat on the Question and Answer panel for incoming Concurrent Education students! It was intense, they were such keeners, which is hilarious because I was such a keener four years ago when I seriously cared. But still. It was nice meeting them and answering their inane questions.
- Hngghh last weekend was so much fun, a legitimate two-and-a-half parties. Friday night I missed anime club because it was Con Ed Formal! There was a toucan piñata at the pre-drink which someone named Sam and brought as her boyfriend. The night went by. So quickly. (function of how drunk I was…) but! I won the Concurrent Education Students’ Association Achievement Award, which was COMPLETELY unexpected, as I’ve been almost entirely behind the scenes the whole time, so it was super nice! And the slideshow went over really well, and then the dance was. Amazing. They played our year song (Highway to Hell, but we say ‘highway to twelve’ because we’re the graduating class of 2012) and we were all jumping up and down and screaming and asdfjkl; And afterwards instead of going to the afterparty I met up with anime club people and we ended up at a friends’ place where we chilled for a while, and it was seriously awesome.
- Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day! I had to go to Aberdeen Street (the heart of the student village, where the party always gets intense) to pick up something I left at a friend’s house, and got pulled into the mad party. I’m not a super big partier, but I like to enjoy myself from time to time, and the thing I love about Queen’s students (and probably students in general) is that they’ll totally take you by the hand and give you a beer if you want to join in. We played Frisbee and threw about a football because it also happened to be the first really nice day of the year, weather-wise. After that I went home and sobered up and went over to friends’ for Star Wars, which was awesome fantastic.
- Wednesday was complete ugh. I had a paper due Thursday that I just couldn’t write, for some reason; I pulled and all-nighter to no effect, and eventually woke up at 7:00 and powered through for 11:00 when it was due. It’s a terrible paper, but it’s handed in, and I’m just happy about that. Yesterday night I went to the Queen’s Dance Club recital, but was pretty exhausted, which is why I fell asleep so early last night…
- Which brings us to today. Next week is literally insane, but I’ll survive somehow! Somehow…and then Gumdo Formal is on the 31st, I am literally dying of excite. And then it’s week 12, and then…and then…
So yeah. I feel like this is a good place to segue into a fic I’ve been writing over the last little while. It’s a TWEWY fic concurrent to the last one I posted, and it’s really important to me. As I worked through it I feel like I worked through my own issues with my family; I realized as I wrote it how much my parents being workaholics has really impacted me and how I relate to adults. Men becoming father figures for kids with absent parents is a seriously common trope in my fanfiction - looking back at the year I drabbled a day for 365 days, it’s hard to miss. (The Regal and Lloyd Do Manly Things Together saga is only one part of it.) I identify really strongly with protagonists who have lost or are separated from their fathers because my parents were (and still are) very absent from my life. I think they’re beginning to catch on because they’ve been trying really hard lately to reconnect with me, but it’s far too late. Not that my parents are bad people, or anything! They’re really nice as people, they just weren’t all that great as parents. My brother and I had all sorts of issues dealing with adults because of it, but I think that in the end it helped us mature really quickly once we moved away from home.
ANYWAYS this fic started as me trying to write Hanekoma and Neku into that father-son dynamic, and ended with…whatever this is. I feel like I’m changing, in all sorts of weird ways.
Psychomancy
Or: Five Conversations We Had Over Coffee
01. [GAME]
The first time Neku walked into WildKAT after the last Game, he was breathless from the distance he had crossed. It was his second time leaving the house after his post-Game recovery (the first being his meet-up with his new friends), and he was still anaemic, his body weak from the things it had done.
The café seemed a little more difficult to locate than he remembered, tucked away in an alleyway, and had it always been so shrouded in shadows? But every inch of the way there had been written into the soles of Neku’s feet, and he found it exactly where he expected it to be.
The decal was still there (he could not find the decal on any other store, with waking eyes) and he touched it as he approached, out of habit. He paused and took a deep breath before placing his hand on the doorknob, pushing it open with a soft jangle of a hand-rigged bell, and there was the man who was not the Composer, casually polishing a green mug behind the bar.
Neku found himself rooted to the ground; time slowed, and congealed, in the air around him. “Hey there,” CAT said, slowly tilting his head. He’d last spoken to the man - well, he’d been in bed for a week, and he’d not seen him at all the third week, and -
“Sixteen days, give or take a few hours.” Hanekoma put the newly-cleaned mug down on the bar, reached down and retrieved a coffee pot. With an adept hand and eye he poured it, then reached down again and placed a bowl of soup next to it. “Been a while. Looks like you could use something that sticks to your bones - c’mon in and eat, yeah?”
“I -” The room temperature returned to normal. “-I suppose. Yeah.”
And that was all that needed to be said.
02. [AND MOUSE]
Things of that nature get easier, slowly. But Neku had questions and Hanekoma was always short on time, which sped things up significantly.
On the fourth day after his recovery, Neku found his way back to the café, where Hanekoma was waiting for him, with another cup of coffee and a stack of pancakes. Neku knew better than to ask about the food; he sat down, had a mouthful.
“I saw you,” he said, to CAT’s back. Hanekoma looked over from the espresso machine. “Right at the end. There was a flash of white after I dropped the gun and before I blacked out, and I saw you and Joshua.”
“Well, I’m never one to turn down a kid in need of help,” was the reply. “But yeah, I was there.”
“ - But you’re not the Composer.”
“No.”
“ - And you’re not - whatever Shades was.”
“The Conductor? Nope.”
“But you know all about the Game. You told Shiki and me - way back then - that you were there to…watch over? Who - why?”
“Aah, now you’re wandering into secret territory. How ‘bout we change the subject?”
There is something dissonant going on in Neku’s brain, because he wants to trust the man with cool eyes more than anything, and yet in his nightmares he’s been breathless and dying on the rooftop of Pork City. So he changes the subject as asked, and the two chat about schoolwork and shopping until Neku has to go home.
(Those Secret Reports were not for Neku; they were for you, Player.)
03. [WE PLAY FOR KEEPS]
“All of them,” Neku says, sipping cautiously. “All of them were Players.”
“Except Joshua. And Megumi, come to think of it. Got that one straight from the RG.”
“…Really?”
“He was a lot like you,” Hanekoma says, wiping the countertop with a dirty rag, and the sound of his voice tells Neku that the line of conversation is finished. Once again, Neku wonders: was he suffering? Or was he too closed-off to know?
“…D’you lose your Entry Fee?”
“Yeah. - Usually, although there are sometimes…special circumstances. It takes a special kind of crazy to sign up for that sort of job, y’know?”
“I know. …Will you tell me what their Entry Fees were?”
Hanekoma sighs. “I s’ppose I owe you that much.” He puts down the rag and starts counting on his fingers. “Higashizawa was always thin and sickly, longed to be more - soldierly, yeah? They gave him that body of his, hoping he would understand that some things don’t come from your fists. He didn’t. Went mad with power and killed fifteen Players on his first day. Megumi hired him straight away. Kinda puts his obsession with Miss Misaki into perspective, eh?”
“…I guess.”
“Lessee. Uzuki had really pretty black hair, all the way down to her waist. Really pretty, really vain. They took that. Kariya - ”
“-Lollipop?”
“ - Yeah, he has - had - a really close friend. They took his memories of that friend, and the friend's memories of him. Uh, Konishi was exactly the person you remember her being, they made her all spaced-out and ditzy. Her and her Partner were about to go down fighting the GM when Megs offered her brain back if she’d kill her Partner as a declaration of loyalty. She did.”
“…Huh. What about Pi-Face?”
“Sho was - special.” Out of the corner of his eye, Neku notices that Hanekoma has braced himself on the bar. “He found this place all on his own, back when he was alive. Feisty even back then, but I liked him - used to tag over my murals with his own art. Kid was a genius. Thought about groomin’ him to take over the business, but he got hit by a car with his nose in an art book, and that’s life. ”
“I, uh.” Hanekoma is looking a little disturbed, an emotion crossing his face that Neku cannot name or place, and it troubles him greatly. “I’m - sorry?”
He shrugs. “They wanted to rip the create out of his brain, but all they did was give him a peek into the stuff our world is made of - the program, as it is. Gave him eyes that saw no beauty, only the code. The human brain can only take so much of that. A week of it left him in - well, in the state you found him in.”
“Crazy.”
“We were gonna revive him, but he begged us not too - couldn’t face the world, after what he’d been through. And all I could do was make sure he ended up a lion…”
Hanekoma seems drained, and the conversation moves to a safer place: Neku talks about something he saw on the way over, and Hanekoma polishes glasses and listens. He is very, very far away.
04. [EMPTINESS AND]
“Nah, not really,” Neku is saying. “He walked out on my mom when I was really young.”
“Ah.” Today they’re sharing shots of espresso. Neku thinks that Hanekoma is somewhere around his tenth, although he can’t quite tell - and he doesn’t know how healthy that is. Meanwhile, he’s still working on his first. “Shucks, Phones. That’s quite a downer.”
“I…don’t think about it too much.” Neku drinks, tastes bitterness and acceptance, someone trying to get away and not quite making it. And how can he put it in words, the way he feels when he talks to Mr. H? He thinks of Sunday school, God the Mother-Father, the nurturer and the judge, who would carry you on His back at one moment and rain fire on your home in the next.
And where does that leave Neku?
“Well, people can suck sometimes, eh?”
“-I had this weird dream, once,” Neku says, changing the subject rather suddenly. “I’m on the roof of Pork City, begging you to let me help you, and you -” Neku chokes, and the room goes very quiet. “-You said I would, and you took out two feathers, and -”
“-That’s enough, Neku.”
“-I just - don’t - know - who you are,” he says, through gritted teeth. “Are you a Reaper? Why can I see you? Are you a Composer like Joshua? Are you -”
“-That’s enough.” Hanekoma has come around the bar, to stand right beside Neku. “Lissen, Phones. Th’ world’s a great big place, and we all have a place in it. D’you know what we call your power?” He puts a hand on Neku’s head; it’s a startlingly intimate gesture, and when Neku looks up, he notices that Hanekoma has gold eyes with an incredibly dilated pupil. He’d never noticed that before. “We call it Psychomancy - speakin’ with the dead. It’s rare, and powerful, and unstable. All of us had our eyes on you for years, so when Joshua went on the offensive, I knew we had to do something…”
There is a shift in the air, a sudden drop in the temperature. “There are some things you may not know, even at the end of it all. - But you’ll have to make do with what you have. Remember what I told you, back then?”
“-Trust your partner?”
“No, the other one.”
“…‘Enjoy the moment’?”
Hanekoma shakes his head. Neku wrinkles his brow, confused, but a sudden rush of recognition rips through him like an electric shock. He sees an empty white space, an angel’s wing, and dark black blood. “…That the day would come sooner than either of us expect?”
“I came back for you,” Hanekoma says, ruffling Neku’s hair, and that is that.
05. [PSYCHOMANCY]
It is a painful decision, but Mr. H’s lease on the building technically has eight more months on it, and it would be a waste to let the place fade into nothingness. So Neku, winglets still tender in the wake of his second death, rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. At the very least the building can serve as a mausoleum.
“I still don’t know who you are,” Neku says, as he plugs in the coffee maker. By some miracle the plumbing is still working, despite the broken glass and scorched wood that marks Hanekoma’s final struggle, and he fills the machine enough to make two cups: one for him, one for the dead. He’s brought in a bag of pre-ground beans from a small stall in Dogenzaka. He pulls a feather from his back, chars it with a fistful of energy, and adds it to the mix; soon, the sound of percolation and the smell of coffee slides up the walls.
“…But I trust you.” And how could he not? Even after his disappearance, something about the man still lived on, in the way Shibuya breathed. Neku had taken to tagging the empty spaces on the walls and streets, if only to hear the last threads of Hanekoma’s mad song. He hears thoughts and rumours about CAT’s metamorphosis into something new. And while he’s not about to dispel those rumours, it makes him very, very sad.
“I think I understand, now,” he says, as he pours the brewed coffee into a mug he’s brought from home; it’s one of the few things Joshua allowed him to take from his old life. He pours a second cup, leaves it on the bar. “You told me that alone, we face limitations. And you knew your limitations, because you were alone. You were the loneliest guy in Shibuya. You were lonelier than I was, so you knew who I was.”
Even Joshua, it seemed, did not know much about the man who had lived and then died; he said as much, because Neku needed to know. “You…knew things. And you couldn’t tell anyone about them. So you looked at Pi-Face, and then at me, and saw people wrapped up inside their own heads, so much that you could trust yourself to talk to them.”
He takes a drink. He’ll never get it to taste exactly like Hanekoma’s brew, but such is life: everything changes, and nothing is truly lost. “…It’s bitter.” We sweeten things so we can choke them down. “You trusted us with your life.” And Neku knows that Hanekoma is gone forever, knows with the part of him that was born the moment he woke up in the Scramble Crossing, and he learned to speak with the dead. “You took your secrets with you, wherever you went.” And Neku knows that part of him will never be lost. Hanekoma is tattooed into his skin, printed on each one of his atoms: like the power series of real numbers between 0 and 1, he’s a handful of emptiness that’s bigger than the universe.
“Well, I’ll be enough for both of you,” Neku says, toasting to the empty air. “You guys were crazy. Thanks.”
The future you must choose is within you.
I am glad to have had the chance to meet you.
Secret Report 22