[Requiem] Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves)
Ueno was as good a place as any to wait for dawn. Already the streets were soaked with sake, the kine's joy permeating an atmostphere rich with flashing neon glow and the thunder of pachinko. A few hundred yards away, past a garbage-slick lake with cartoon warnings of death by drowning, lay Tokyo's zoo and priceless museums. Relics of bygone days he had witnessed first hand. But around him, in a bar with fawning waitresses dressed as French maids and grown men with wild, ridiculous hair, everything was modern. Current. Hip.
He could still taste the blood though; the rusty, sanguine scent of Christmas Day, 1941. He could still see the inky red seep into the golden sands of Repulse Bay, the flash of the samurai sword in the tropical moon as it had whipped down on the remnants of Hong Kong's defence. Some bloodstains never wash away; you could only laugh and smile and ignore them. His was a strange joss.
His face felt loose and uncomfortable without the mask, the stitches surprisingly raw, but it was a necessary step: he didn't want to spook the locals any more than necessary. His gravel-scratched tones were easily hid among the kareoke blur, and without his mask he was as human as a Nosferatu could appear. He could have worn a false face, but it felt a concession too far. After 150 years, the least he could do was meet his fate properly.
It had been a long, fruitless trip. He'd left Hong Kong on a container ship, caught a bullet train, found the small flat in Ginza where the old man had lived. It was a typical Tokyo building, he supposed; a crowded tenament rising to touch the sky, washing lines clustered out of windows, air conditioning units hanging from ledges as if they would fall at any moment. In the foyer, a perky girl in uniform and vending machines, endless vending machines, for everything from water to underwear. A broken lift, an ill-lit stairway, and corridors as narrow as dying breath. When he'd kicked down the door to the flat, he'd been amazed how anyone outside his clan could have lived there; it was a property shoebox. It was also a tomb.
Hideyoshi had been dead perhaps a week. His cat had already started to feast on his dessicated flesh, and the sweet, sickly corruption of human liquification filled the air. He stopped breathing to avoid the stench, and studied the corpse. The eyes were glassy, the flesh wrinkled and spoiled, but it was him. The bastard had cheated him.
Rikugan Chui Hideyoshi - the 'Young Wolf' of the 38th Division, 23rd Imperial Japanese Army. The man who had put his friends to death 70 years earlier on an empty beach in Hong Kong. The man who, so infuriated someone had dared surrender - had not faced him to the death - he considered them worse than dogs. The man who had taken out his sword and beheaded five prisoners of war 'for insolence' before the rest had been shipped off to build the Burma railway.
Hideyoshi, who had died, aged 94, in his own home, surrounded by pictures of children and grandchildren.
Bastard. He had left the wolf's corpse to the cat.
He tried to think of how he felt - whether he was sad or happy - and couldn't decide. He had put of revenge for decades; after all, what is a decade to the undead? And, now he had come to claim it, he had missed the victim by days. His was a strange joss.
So be it. It was the final debt to settle anyway; win some, lose some. Perhaps it was the Mother's way of telling him he didn't need to perform one final crucible before the sun's fires turned him to ash. She always did know best. The park lake would be a fitting place; his ash would look beautiful in the sunrise. He rose to depart.
Then he saw the other kindred, standing there in the club, as lost as he was. Evidently, he conceded, the Mother had other plans for him... his was a strange joss.