mission report for nanyakanya (part 1 of 4)
Mission report for nanyakanya
Delivered by: moogle_tey
Title: While You Were Sleeping (Mutare)
Groups/Pairings: Main characters: Ryo and Yasu; Supporting characters: Junno, Massu, Yoko, Maru, Tsuyoshi, Ohkura, and others.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, some gore, strong language, dark/horror/supernatural themes, mature themes, medical themes, character death, lots of genre smashing, overly long and pretentious notes section.
Summary: Nishikido Ryo and Yasuda Shota are partners, two halves of a whole, doing very specific work for the government by "finding" persons of interest. At least, that's the skin deep version... No man is an island - unless he wants to be.
Notes: Dear nanyakanya - there were a lot of things in your sign up that interested me and don't often show up in fandom. I let that be my guide. There were a lot of unfamiliar new elements to deal with, so I hope discrepancies are at a minimum or are at least easily overlooked. I truly, truly hope you enjoy it - it's been massively fun to create. As for actual notes, there are several that I could add for geeky amusement, but I feel like they'd be too confusing/overwhelming/easily forgotten to warrant putting them in this section. I think there's only one that's truly necessary and that is to explain the difference between a coma and a persistent vegetative state just so that everyone's on the same page. To be in a coma, you must not be awake or aware, like being heavily asleep for several days at a time; natural comas rarely last more than a couple of weeks. A persistent vegetative state (PVS) patient is awake, but unaware - as the name "vegetative" might suggest - and the condition may last for a very, very long time. A patient has to be in a vegetative state for some time before they're considered "persistent" and the cause and duration determines likelihood of recovery. There's also a sort of sequence - sometimes coma patients wake up and recover, sometimes they move to PVS instead, sometimes they regress into brain death, etc. I could write an entire essay on the subject, but in short that's the reason "coma" rarely shows up in this fic. I think everything else is self-explanatory, although I know I threw around a lot of terms - hopefully that doesn't hinder comprehension. Geeky notes to come with repost, though. Title from an Elvis Perkins song and not a Sandra Bullock rom com. Why yes, this section, both in subject matter and verbosity, is a good indication of what's to come!
Lastly, thank you so much to the usual suspects, the extremely patient and wonderful mods and, of course, to my other half who pretty much does everything for me.
"Ryo, don't move."
Ryo stopped mid-step, groin-deep in muddy water and hair slick and matted from the latest rain, only a few minutes removed. From experience, it wouldn't be long before the rain started again and he was long over the idea. For a moment, everything was still - the sloshing sound and oscillating ripples from their crossing slowed and died. Whatever had spooked Yasu had scared away the animals around them too - Ryo could hear Yasu trying to quiet his breath in the silence entirely too well. "Don't move? Yasu?" He put out his hand, looking for its resting place on his partner's shoulder.
Yasu stood in front of him, watching the banks around them gather with aimed arrows and pipes - eyes trained on them, emerging from the foliage. He slowly reached up to his left shoulder where Ryo's hand was, taking it and pulling it down by his side, holding it.
Ryo turned his head back and forth, uselessly. "Did we find him?"
"I think he found us," Yasu whispered back.
With stillness, fish, or at least Ryo hoped they were fish, felt secure enough to swim closer to his legs and investigate. He could feel them gliding by, lightly grazing his pants before scurrying away - escaping possible retaliation - only to come back more brazen each time. It had been Yasu's suggestion that they cross by walking through the water; he assured Ryo that there wasn't a path around. With each increasing tap around his legs, he pulled on Yasu's hand harder, hoping to prompt some kind of response. He was going to start kicking soon - both the fish and maybe his partner.
"I think they want us to follow them," Yasu finally said, quietly confident.
"Who's 'they?'" He heard movement all around them and the crushing of plants under feet, suddenly picking up the smell of human sweat - belonging to neither Yasu nor himself - mixed with a confusion of metal and earth. "Hey," he called out to them. "Hey!"
Yasu nodded and with Ryo in tow, still barking, trudged through the rest of the water until he reached the first bank. He jumped up first, cautiously acknowledging their company before turning back to the lake. He had to crouch and lean over with his hand out until he reached Ryo, who instinctively smacked it away in panic before realizing who it belonged to and taking hold, climbing up with Yasu's help.
"Sorry," Ryo said, patting down his pants just in case something decided to come ashore with him. He rubbed his hand across his chest before hesitantly holding it out, waiting for Yasu to take it again. The hand holding used to bother him - then he got tired of tripping over everything and running into trees. Having an audience changed the dynamic again - he'd almost rather be laughed at crashing around than holding the hand of his partner like one would a date. As soon as Yasu clasped it in his own, Ryo used his other hand to pat up along his arm until he found Yasu's shoulders, letting go and grabbing on to them instead.
"We're looking for someone," Yasu asked their captors. He could tell they were as much a part of the jungle as any bird or insect they had come across. And they looked like Yasu would have imagined them - formed by the forest itself and mostly unclad to combat the rampant humidity. They kept a watchful eye on the two, but never replied in words or nods - they only pointed forward and moved as a pack to herd Yasu and Ryo along.
As they marched forward, following a path of trodden leaf litter that Yasu had somehow not been able to notice before, the sounds of the forest came back: birds calling out to each other and the rustling of leaves and branches. And the sharp gasping cries of spider monkeys that caused Ryo to dig his fingers into Yasu's shoulders a little too hard and mutter his own distress call of quiet curses. Their connection made them clumsy - anytime Yasu stumbled, Ryo would go with him. Any wrong step by Ryo, of which there were many by default, resulted in him smacking into Yasu's back.
"Are we almost there?" he finally asked, the impatience and growing mortification noticeable in his voice.
"How would I know?"
"Hey, Yasu. Yasu," Ryo said, quietly, pulling his chin close enough to rest it on his shoulder. It only made them more awkward, slower - jaw bone bouncing into muscle with each step and shoulder jerking into shoulder every time Ryo decided to swat at the insects buzzing around his head. "Are there leeches here?"
"I think so," he answered. "If he thinks so, there are."
"Shit."
"Why?"
"Would you look at something for me when we stop?"
Yasu glanced over his shoulder to see that Ryo had moved his hand to his waist, rubbing at the belt downward toward his groin. "No!"
"Come on!" Ryo prodded in a loud whisper. Thunder suddenly cracked above them, interrupting. "Great."
"I think we're here," Yasu replied, pulling his hand off. "I'll be right back."
A few steps before him, the rain forest parted to reveal a field sewn with people, like their captors but of all ages, roles and genders. They uniformly turned their heads in attention toward Yasu as he walked slowly out from the overgrowth. Regardless of action, each person stood up straight in response, moving backward to reveal a path to the staircase of a giant temple, a moss strewn shrine that he had to strain to see the top of. "You want me to go up there?" he asked.
No response. They continued to stare.
"Quit pushing," Ryo said, edging himself closer to Yasu as their captors herded him away from the jungle.
"He's up there," Yasu told him. "I think."
"Up where? Yasu? Yasu?" Ryo switched from annoyance to alarm as he felt hands pulling at his belt. "What are you doing?"
"You asked me to check for leeches," Yasu replied. "I'll do it before we go up-."
"Not right now!" Ryo yelled.
"But if I don't do it now-" His attention was diverted from Ryo's zipper by the collection of guards filing in behind them, pushing closer and closer and leaving little room to run back into the jungle. He felt like he had had enough time with them to get the gist of their very reserved method of communication - time to move on. "Okay," he said, taking a step back. "Would you mind helping my friend?" he asked.
Ryo's face distorted in mild panic. "That's not any- there's- not right now, okay? It's fine - it's fine!"
"He's blind, he won't be able to make it up the stairs alone," Yasu continued.
Ryo sighed out of relief. "Oh."
But soon let out another, "Oh," - this time in response to one of the largest guards putting an arm on his shoulders and another behind his knees, flipping and swinging him up into a hold. It was embarrassing, being carried like a rescued heroine in the arms of the hero - but after what seemed like the thirtieth or so stair up, Ryo told himself it was better than trying to navigate the climb on his own. Or, trying to do it based on Yasu's information. Worse yet, the guard could have slung him over his shoulder like a kill, or onto his back like a child. All in all, he decided he could live with the way it had turned out. By the time they reached the top and he was on his own feet again, all he could do was nod quickly, with a small shy smile and say, "Thanks." He could tell the guard was backing off. "Yasu?"
"I'm here," he replied, moving to Ryo's side and guiding him away from the edge. "We're at the top."
"Do you see him?"
"See who?" a new voice, curiously amused, asked.
There he was sitting before them, the obvious king in a throne made out of the bones of the jungle - both animal and plant - lounging with one leg over the side and the other tucked up to his chest, a childish, confident pose that somehow looked regal on his long limbs. Like the others, he wasn't wearing much on his torso, his feet bare - but there was a band around his forehead that connected gold in the front to a collection of large, long feathers in the back that were splayed out in a semi-circle, a halo of red and striped black that stood out from his shaggy brown hair. It looked heavy and cumbersome, yet he held his head straight without noticeable strain. The thunder crackled again and a group of fifteen serving girls began setting up wooden poles to stretch out a canopy made of hide to shield him from the oncoming weather.
Ryo took a step forward, not impressed by what he couldn't see. "Are you Taguchi Junnosuke?"
He widened his eyes and his smile, sitting up at attention. "Now that is interesting. Call me Junno."
"Finally," Ryo muttered in relief.
"We've been looking for you for two days," Yasu added in explanation.
"You must be hungry."
Ryo could barely wait for the last syllable to be fully uttered before answering an emphatic, "Yes!"
Junno looked over his shoulder, just in time to see one of the serving girls come to his side with a wicker platter full of fruit - most of which looked like brown apples covered in large scales. He picked out four, nodding to the girl and looking them over. "Where are you two from, the Midlands?"
"Ah, no," Yasu answered, considering the best way to bring up the topic at hand.
"Uplands? The Redlands?"
"Are you going to feed us?" Ryo asked.
Junno paused, then smiled and started to juggle the four pieces - the large feathers in his headdress waving back and forth as he quickly established a steady pace. "Eventually. It's good policy to find out why someone spent two days in a jungle looking for you before you feed them."
"About that," Yasu started.
Ryo was less patient. He didn't have an infinite resource to begin with, and his tolerance level was tested entirely too much between the insect bites and the hunger and the clammy humidity pooling on his skin, choking the air, tightening and dragging down his pants. And the monkeys. He was ready to write off the entire trip the minute Yasu told him there were monkeys watching them from the branches as they passed on the first day. "We were sent to find you, okay?"
"By whom?" Junno asked, speeding up his pace.
Yasu chewed on his lip. "That's a bit complicated."
It started to rain a fine mist and a couple of the serving girls ushered them to stand underneath the canopy they had just erected. Closer, Yasu was able to see that the girls weren't alone - behind Junno's throne was a collection of large animals, threatening and non - most of which he recognized, and Ryo would be unhappy to hear about later. They lay in wait, weaved through the rest of the servants. They watched as one, shifting slightly in the same direction, like they belonged to the same entity - a pumping lung or heart beating all in support of their living king.
As Ryo took a step forward, saying, "Look," the body of eyes focused on him. Yasu could see muscles tightening and the mass creeping forward just in case. He put a hand on his partner, pulling him back and orienting him in the right direction.
It didn't stop his mouth, though. "Do you remember how you almost died?"
"Ryo, I don't think that's a good idea," Yasu said quietly.
Junno pulled one of the fruits out of the cycle, tossing it Yasu's way before continuing on with the remaining three. "Can't say that I do."
The storm was in full swing and the mist turned into a steady rain, forcing Ryo to speak louder in order to compete with the backdrop splattering against the stone surfaces of the temple. "Really? You don't remember when you stopped breathing?"
"What he means is," Yasu interrupted, "do you remember being somewhere else? Somewhere completely different?"
"I've never been any other place," Junno answered, with a slight laugh. He stopped juggling, catching the fruit and holding it out to the side for one of the serving girls to take from him.
"No," Ryo replied, "I mean does he remember his lungs stopping."
"I don't think that's the best-"
"It's not a memory issue," Junno started.
"It doesn't matter, does it?" Ryo asked. "He doesn't remember either way so it doesn't matter if what we sa- what's that smell?"
Yasu shrugged. "This fruit?"
"He gave you fruit?"
Junno interrupted. "I don't think you quite understand."
"We understand just fine," Ryo answered. "You're going to share, right?"
"I don't really know how to peel it," Yasu said.
"How do you stop breathing air when you never breathed it in the first place?"
Ryo stopped, hoping the driving rain had garbled the words before they reached his ears. "What?"
"And how do you leave yourself?" Junno finished. "Whoever sent you apparently doesn't know much about gods."
Ryo rolled his blank eyes, sighing. "You're kidding, right?"
"Are you saying you didn't know?" Junno replied, genuinely shocked.
"Taguchi," Yasu said, "it's not that we don't believe you. But the people who sent us think you should...leave here."
"I am here - I can't leave it. All of these people- wait, I have a better idea," Junno told him. He waved one of the attendants to his side and with a soft smile, nodded at her in apology. "I'm sorry."
She was expressionless, accepting without so much as a nod or a blink. She shifted her weight, spreading her feet apart, and raised her skirt by sliding her hand up the inside of her right thigh until Yasu could see a strap wrapped around her flesh. She pulled something from it - a sharpened object, maybe rock - a dagger without metal - and held it out before him.
"What are you doing?" Yasu asked.
She raised the edge to her own neck.
"Wait," Yasu said, alarmed and moving to stop her. "Wait, you don't have to do that!"
"Do what?" Ryo asked. "Yasu, what's going on?"
It was already too late. In a swift, jerking move, she pulled the edge across her skin, ripping the muscle and tearing the artery at the side. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell to the floor in a crumpled heap, blood pooling out between convulsions - running along the stonework and mixing with the pounding rain.
"That wasn't necessary," Yasu commented, turning his head away from her.
Junno stood above her, looking down with concerned eyes. "It takes a minute before they bleed out."
The words slithered across Ryo - it was too cold a sentence not to understand what had happened, even without his eyesight.
Junno crouched next to her, inspecting her before picking up the dagger. "This takes a minute too," he explained. Two more girls came over and stretched out the body before him, laying the dead girl on her back with her arms folded over her chest. When all that remained from her neck were splashes from the downpour of rain, Junno put a hand to her forehead. The benevolent smile returned. He pulled the edge across his own forearm and let the blood trickle down. It fell on her face and instead of rolling on the skin, it vanished - absorbed immediately.
Ryo reached out until he found Yasu's shoulder and pulled himself closer. "What's happening now?"
Junno shook his arm, baptizing her with a last few drops and stood up. No one moved to stop the bleeding or bandage him. A gasp sounded out as the dead girl breathed in once more. She sat up, momentarily blinking in confusion before he offered her the dagger back. She took it quickly, putting it in the sheath under her skirt, and returned to her position beside his throne as if nothing had happened.
"He brought her back to life," Yasu whispered back.
"Great," Ryo answered.
"I gave her life to begin with," Junno replied.
"No, no you didn't," Ryo countered.
"Ryo-"
Junno looked unfazed as he sat back in his throne. "There was nothing here before me. When I came, the ground was dirt and scattered with the bones of the dead and when I bled on them they turned into flesh. I spent days spreading every piece of my skin until there was a nation at my feet and the jungle to keep them and the rain to feed them. If you want, I can show you again - with something older, maybe? A new creation? It's harder to bring them to life than to bring them back, but I wouldn't be a god if I couldn't do both."
"When you came," Yasu repeated, cautiously. "Which means you were somewhere else before."
"I left the sky," Junno answered.
"No, you didn't," Ryo said again.
"What was the sky like?" Yasu butted in, hoping it was the opportunity they needed.
"Empty," he said, with a half smile. "Of course."
"I'm getting tired of this," Ryo said.
"You said you were sent to find me," Junno replied. "You found me. So what were you supposed to do after that?"
"We're supposed to convince you to go back," Yasu answered.
"And," Junno finished, "you never answered my first question." He smiled with cheshire amusement. "I can't go somewhere you won't tell me about - and you two keep asking roundabout questions so you don't have to explicitly say. Or what it has to do with breathing."
"Okay," Ryo said, nodding and crossing his arms. "Fuck it."
The rain started to slow and the sun crept out enough to make the rising fog off of the land hazy outside the safety of the canopy. Yasu looked down and noticed that the guards from before were obscured, as were the edges of the temple they stood on. It seemed like there were ripples in the clouds around them, but the only thing that he could see clearly was Junno himself...and the mass of life behind him that seemed to have moved closer during their conversation. He thought Junno might be the type to take anything in stride, or at least laugh at part of it, regardless of nature. But just in case, Yasu pulled Ryo's arm out of its fold across his chest and made sure his hand was close by.
"This isn't real," Ryo finally said.
"I know," Junno replied, still smiling.
Ryo let out a small frustrated yell.
"You know?" Yasu asked. "That doesn't bother you?"
"Should it?" Junno asked.
"Yes," Ryo shot back. "You're lying in a hospital somewhere like a vegetable in real life."
"Ah! So that's where you're from!" He seemed entirely too pleased. "And that's where you want me to go?"
Yasu fumbled for the right words only to simply say, "Yes."
Junno nodded in thought. "You want me to leave this?"
"It's not real," Ryo argued.
"But there's an entire nation here that depends on me, that worships me. One that took a lot of time and effort to make."
"They're not real."
"Does it matter?" Junno asked. "You're telling me reality is a hospital bed?"
"Y-yes," Ryo said, backing off on his tone only momentarily.
"I should give up being god for a hospital bed," Junno repeated. "That's not a very convincing argument. The way I see it, there's not a lot going for your version of reality."
"Except that it's actually real, for one thing," Ryo continued.
"Oh, well, that makes it so much better."
"Look, if you don't come back, you're going to die."
Yasu nodded. "It's true."
Junno shrugged. "You have to go sometime - even gods. Change is good. I'll go back to the sky - maybe I'll become the stars."
"It's not change, stupid, it's death," Ryo argued, exhausted with frustration. "You won't become anything - you'll just die. If you stay here, it's all going to end - so you can go back, live the rest of your life-"
"No thanks," Junno replied.
"Taguchi," Yasu asked. "Are you sure you don't remember anything before you came here? Anyone that you miss - friends, family?"
"I'm sure there are," he said. "And if they're my family and friends, they'd be pleased to know that I'm happy, no matter where I am."
"You won't come back?" Yasu tried. "You won't reconsider?"
"No." His smile was kind and broad. "Being a god's kind of nice. You know how sometimes in life you feel uncomfortable in your skin?"
"Yes."
"That's long gone right now," Junno finished. "This skin feels really good."
"That's bullshit - you have to go back," Ryo continued, taking a step forward. "I don't care if this 'feels good' - you don't understand, you-"
"Have a choice, right? You realize that, don't you?"
"Not if you're going to make the wrong decision."
Junno paused, sighing quietly before the cheshire smile broke out again; an amusing solution to his problem presented itself. "You were in the jungle for two days?"
"Yeah? ...yeah, we were! We spent two days looking for you, so you have to-"
"So, you must have come across some of the lakes and rivers," he continued. "Feel anything in there? Something swimming past your leg?"
Ryo stopped and mentally told himself not to think back to the sensation of what could have easily been predatory fish swimming by, angling for the best way to take him down while they stood in the lake. He didn't really know a lot about animals or the geography of where he supposedly was, but there was at least one terrifying conclusion he could make. "P-piranha?"
"Oh, there are much worse things in the water than piranha." Junno's smile was unnervingly wide, his eyes soft. "I'm pretty amazing, but I don't know if I can bring you two back."
"Maybe we should leave," Yasu suggested. He watched the wall of creatures behind Junno pulsate out to reach the intruders with growing limbs of vines and outstretched hands, leering eyes and jaws slowly but steadily oozing toward them, obeying the whim of their god. He grabbed Ryo's hand in a tight grip. "Go."
Ryo started rocking his chest back and forth as hard as he could, whipping his head in sharp convulsions as if in the middle of a seizure.
"Ryo," Yasu pressed. Some of the girls removed the canopy and Junno stood up, his arms out to greet the sun in the last mists of rain. Down below, the nation of peoples cheered deafeningly at the sight of their leader...or possibly at the sharp teeth and hungry breath of animals they too should have feared. "Ryo!"
Ryo put his all of his violence into shaking himself - so much so that he could barely hang onto Yasu. "Come on!" he grunted out. "Come on!" Desperate thrashing. "Come on!"
Yasu saw one of the large cats readying its stance, quick shifts of weight from foot to foot, to pounce on them. And as it pushed its mass off of the stone to launch toward them, he blinked.
As he opened his eyes, the greys and greens of the temple and the jungle were gone - taken away in the mist - revealing the bland cream color walls of the hospital room. He blinked a few more times and started to smile when the beeping of monitors filled his ears. His shoulders fell in relief.
Yasu was quick to bounce back and orient himself to the surroundings. He looked over to see that he was still holding Ryo's arm and that Ryo was bent over the body, chest heaving as he struggled to catch his breath. Taguchi Junnosuke lay in the hospital bed, almost too tall for it, staring up at the ceiling. His chart said that he had a tendency to smile and Yasu could see a small one on his lips.
"Well?"
Behind them in the room, their supervisor, a man by the name of Domoto Tsuyoshi, put down the notebook he had been writing in and sat forward in his chair.
"You got bored," Yasu commented. "We must have been in there longer than I thought."
Ryo pushed away from the bed and rubbed his face, stopping to pull Yasu's hand off of his arm when he realized it was still there. "He's a goner."
"You didn't find him?" Domoto asked.
Ryo's skin was crawling - itchy from the memory of bug bites, a thousand bug bites, and the grimy clamminess of the constant humidity. The last thing he wanted was to be in more water, but the only thing that would wipe it all away was an instant shower. And there was still the feeling that something wasn't entirely copacetic about his crotch. Through blurry and still unadjusted eyes, he spotted the bathroom in the corner and started pulling his shirt off en route. "He's not coming back. Let him go." He slammed the door behind him, narrowly missing their staff nurse.
"Hey, hey," Nurse Ohkura said to the closed door. "Room facilities are for patients only." No answer. "Hey, how many times do I-"
"What'd he mean?" Domoto continued, standing up and disinterestedly looking for the paperwork he was supposed to have at all times. "What was this one like?"
As far as Yasu knew, Tsuyoshi kind of hated his job. It required him to endure a lot of regulations and procedures that he wasn't interested in - and it came with the least enviable job of making hard decisions. Although, if Yasu had to guess, the reason he got the position in the first place was entirely due to his ability to say what no one else would. There was one perk, though. The down time he faced as the government liaison while they worked with the patients - or the downtime between patients - allowed him to pursue other endeavors, more creative ones. Well, two perks. "A jungle," Yasu answered. "South American? Central? Not really sure." Tsuyoshi was always interested in hearing about the mindscapes - Yasu assumed they supplemented his imagination. A boring, hard job gave him the time and springboard for what he really wanted out of life.
"Jungle, hmm?" he said, finally finding the right page in the folder.
"Ryo's right, he won't come back," Yasu finished.
"You're sure?"
"He said he wouldn't," he answered. "I don't think he'll change his mind."
"Ever?"
Yasu mulled it over, working through his instinctive feelings. "He already knew it wasn't real," he explained. "Ryo sort of told him the consequences and he...felt okay with them. He was happy."
"Told him, huh?" Domoto said, jotting down notes in the file. "That was dumb."
"I don't think it mattered." He sighed. "He won't recover." He didn't say it lightly - he never said it lightly.
Domoto turned his bottom lip out - partly in concentration and partly in disappointment. "He had a shot." His pen lingered on the last line of the form before him, hovering between two check boxes - "active" and "passive" - as he ignored Yasu to favor his own thoughts instead.
"How did he drown?" Yasu asked. "Was there anything in his file?"
Nurse Ohkura, who had moved from glaring at the bathroom to recording post "exploration" vitals in the computer, replied without looking away from the screen. "An eyewitness said he was showing off for friends before he went under. He already had some damage from cerebral ischemia by the time they pulled him out." He stopped typing to look over at the patient's bed. "He's lucky they got him before it got any worse."
"Get the Potassium chloride," Domoto interrupted, clicking his pen to finally check the first box.
"Wait a minute," Ohkura protested. "His prognosis is really good - can't we start him on zolpidem and-"
"If he's against coming back, he'll just end up in the system for a long time," he replied. "I trust Yasuda."
"I do too," Ohkura slightly hurt. "But-"
"I'll call Koichi to come in and talk to the family."
As far as Yasu knew, the only person who hated his job more than Domoto Tsuyoshi was his subordinate, Domoto Koichi. Koichi had the burden of telling families that seemingly fine persistent vegetative state patients had suddenly taken a turn for the worse overnight - slipped into a coma, into brain death, cardiac arrest, whatever worked best for the situation. For some, the hope that their loved one would eventually return would be too great and they'd break down right then and there; for some, the relief that the decision was taken out of their hands would be too great and they'd immediately try to hide their sudden shame for feeling as much. Koichi didn't particularly like either reaction, Yasu had heard.
But before joining the government, apparently Koichi had been an aspiring actor searching at the wrong economic time for a steady job. He may have hated dealing with families, but he enjoyed being Dr. Domoto Koichi, Head Neurologist in the Division of Neurocritical Care - and other titles he could relay with enough gravitas to cover for his obvious lack of real medical education. It was certainly the most challenging role he could have asked for.
"But..." Ohkura had the least say in the fate of a patient, even though he was the one who had to take it into his hands. As a result, he usually had the most to say about Domoto's decisions, even if he understood and agreed with them. Yasu thought that was probably why Ohkura was a member of their team - anyone too complicit in euthanasia had no place administering it.
The room was silent, save the operating sounds of machines - machines designed to monitor patients' lives - and the muted spray of the shower from inside the bathroom that soon whined to a halt. Within minutes, Ryo exited, half of his clothes on. "I'm going home," he announced, continuing straight to the main door and out of the room.
"Rough night," Domoto commented, closing up the file and gathering his things. "You've got a few hours before the morning shift comes in," he told Ohkura.
"Where are you going?"
"Dinner," he answered as he headed out the door.
As soon as they were alone, Ohkura looked at Yasu and asked, "You're sure he's okay with it?"
Yasu stood next to Taguchi Junnosuke, who was still staring at the ceiling with a slight smirk on his face, and put a hand to his cheek. Soon he was beaming. "He's happy."
Ohkura sighed, taking the IV bag down off of the hook. "That makes it worse, I think."
Yasu said his goodbyes and left the room still radiating cheer. He was entirely aware that such a feeling clashed with the matter at hand - his thoughts on the matter at hand - but he couldn't help it. That's just the way Junno felt.
~
Ryo felt like he was going to pass out. And that was before the shaking started.
The shower had only done so much - the world around him still felt like jungle, still smelled like jungle, tasted like jungle. He kept scratching at his arms trying to rip out the stickiness. He was only half-paying attention to where he was going - at this point, it was mostly automatic anyway. It had to be or he'd never get home after work.
The lingering feeling of the mindscapes would have been bad enough, but whatever he encountered always came out with him as well, like a bad smell embedded in clothes. If he felt dirty in the mindscape, he'd be unable to get clean back in real life. If he got too hot, he couldn't cool down. If he spent what felt like two days roaming through bug-infested constant dampness and trudging through parasite filled mud without a hint of food... And physical memory had a long lifespan.
All of that would have been enough to make anyone cranky. But Ryo had to deal with the physical repercussions as well. Like a blood sugar crash, his body would slip out of his control - as if it rejected him being back in his own mind. His head felt light and hollow, making every step feel as it if were part of a dream. His skin felt bloodless, clammy - a particularly fun set of sensations this time given the humidity of the mindscape - as his temperature began to oscillate between too hot and too cold. The uncontrollable shaking and shivering. And mentally - just about everything irritated the hell out of him.
He was miserable. This was one of the worst crashes yet.
Ryo stumbled into his go-to convenience store, heading straight for the beer. After a couple of years of the same routine, the late night staff had gotten used to him - most of them thought he was a serious alcoholic dealing with dependency. Well, that wasn't too far from the truth.
At the cash register, with a case in his arms, he grabbed whatever was in his pocket and held it out.
The young girl smiled politely. "I'll have to break open a new roll of-"
"Whatever," he said, frustrated, leaving the money on the counter. "Just keep the change." He would be mad later at giving her such a tip, but at the moment, it couldn't be helped. The second he got out of the store, he pulled out a can and downed it as fast as he could. It was another five minutes to his place - another beer and he'd start in that direction, drinking as he walked along. If he timed it right, he could stumble into his apartment feeling considerably better and let alcohol fueled sleep do the rest. Just the thought of it lightened his mood. Well, that and beer number two.
The cashier came out just as he was about to leave with a plastic bag, mostly full of packages of onigiri. "You forgot this," she said, handing it to him.
He looked down at the ground as he took it from her, smiling slightly. "Thanks." He opened one up immediately - hunger was common, but this hunger was the worst he had felt in a lifetime - and with his mouth completely full of rice asked, "How much did I give you?!"
"You still have change coming," she answered. "Hey, what is it that you d-"
"Gotta run," he said, scooping up the case and jogging away with a small wave.
His apartment was empty and mostly bland. The walls were bare, he didn't keep any artwork or pictures around. There was hardly any furniture - the floor was good enough - and what he did have belied a strategy of grabbing what looked good first and running out of the store. He didn't bother checking his cell phone for messages since his contact list was sparse, and once the tv was on, along with every light he owned, he flopped down on the futon mattress and opened the next can of beer. Eating onigiri nicely solved the hunger issue - it obnoxiously derailed the process of getting drunk.
Worse yet, he wasn't nearly sleepy enough.
It had all started in middle school, as if things during that period of life weren't awkward enough. He was sitting in class during attendance, watching his teacher look at the register, pause, and then glance up at her students. He loved her - well, like every other boy loved her. She was pretty, affectionate toward him and, most importantly, there. Later on he'd realize she was nothing special, but at that point, he couldn't imagine how he'd deal with the next period with the frumpy math teacher standing in front of him, let alone the rest of his life, without her.
She was getting closer to his name - "Nakamura?"
Ryo lived for that moment. His seat was in the front row - a fortunate discovery he made during the first week of that year. Most kids didn't want to be that close, but soon, she'd call out his name and he'd answer and their eyes would meet - his proximity granting him the chance to connect, even for a brief moment. She'd call his name and look right at him and smile. That moment was everything - he'd developed an irritating habit of punctuality because of it. Even if he felt ill, he'd at least try to make it to home room for morning attendance.
"Nishikido?"
"He-"
He stopped mid-answer. At first Ryo thought maybe he was still asleep, merely dreaming of his teacher. Everything had gone pitch black and he was somehow standing, his desk nowhere around him. The idle chit chat of the other students during roll call was gone. He thought maybe he was in the process of waking up. But no matter how wide he opened his eyes, he couldn't see his ceiling or the covers over his head - just pitch black. Rapid blinking did nothing.
And it smelled. Not of breakfast, but of salt and mold. There was no alarm clock ringing in his ears, but a loud roaring of motion somewhere behind him. It was bitingly cold and the realization that he was neither dreaming nor in school caused him to panic until he had trouble breathing and fell to his knees, a sharp surface of exposed rock beneath them.
And then...he was back at his desk, staring at his teacher as she moved onto the next name.
He threw up everywhere.
He was sent home and for the rest of the week endured some lingering snickers from his classmates - after all, public vomiting was a serious offense in middle school. But these were small consequences and by the next week, Ryo had attributed it all to a passing bug.
The second time it happened, though, he was talking with a friend at lunch. It lasted for hours and left the taste of metal in his mouth - it cost him a few actual relationships. By the third, Ryo knew it wasn't some lingering virus - and so did everyone else. Other kids had noticed him blanking out; the school nurse highly suggested seeing a doctor.
The doctors thought it was neurological. At 15, they made him lie on a slab with an IV in his arm pumping in a radioactive dye that tasted worse than it smelled and that he could feel squeaking along in the veins in his neck. His head was sandwiched between two plastic barriers to keep him from moving and he was slowly pulled back into a tube of a machine. They had told him he could close his eyes during the test but at that point he was afraid to - he wanted to shut his eyes as little as possible, worried that he'd never get them open again.
To keep the machine cool, a constant blast of air conditioning was pumped in - he was just wearing a t-shirt. He couldn't stop shivering, despite the doctor coming on the intercom and asking him to stay still. The machine fired up, with loud, thunderous clacking, like being stuck in a tube in the middle of a noisy clock for fifteen minutes. The overwhelming sensations, between the noise and smell and taste and feel, reminded him a lot of what it was like to experience the episodes - except at least during an MRI, he could see. It wasn't particularly enjoyable.
The results showed nothing significant - the doctors suggested more tests: more scans and samples until they could pinpoint the cause of the hallucinations.
That's when Ryo went from being a fairly vocal and active pre-teen to a shy and awkward teenager who constantly feared that he'd black out at the worst times possible. He missed more and more school - purposely skipping when he didn't have to miss for a doctor's appointment - and by the time he realized it only ever happened around other people, he had quit school all together. By 16, his life had become a string of procedures trying to figure out what was wrong with his head.
Seven beers in that night, he was starting to slur just a bit and was staring up at the ceiling, ready to throw the remote at the tv for playing nothing but crap. The alcohol wasn't doing its job - he wasn't sleepy at all. And the last thing he wanted was to sit around, conscious, waiting with nothing to do but relive the mindscape and sweat through the crash until finally non-drug induced sleep came about, bringing with it vivid memory filled dreams. Drinking himself to sleep meant he'd be completely hungover in the morning, but no hangover ever felt as bad as what he had to endure otherwise. Hangovers were worth it if he could bypass the dreams. Hangovers were easy. Hangovers were routine.
It had become his habit to spend the next two to three days pumping up his adrenaline in every solitary way possible - riding motorcycles, going bungee jumping - creating a roller coaster of alcoholic lows and thrill-seeking highs until finally, he'd just about even out to normal life before being called in for the next patient. As miserable as Ryo felt after his work, he wasn't particularly bothered about the cycle that came with it. If anything, the routine and near constant stimulation was comforting.
To Ryo, it was just life.
Even with nothing good on, he left the tv playing. The noise usually provided a good backdrop, something for his brain to listen to so it stayed slightly distracted at all times. This time, it wasn't working either. Nothing was really going according to habit and it was pissing him off.
He had been the one to figure out what was really wrong with him, too. The side effect of isolation on a teenager was a shyness that he exhibited whenever speaking with people he couldn't avoid, like doctors. Staring at the ground or constantly glancing to the side at the wall just became the most comfortable way to communicate. And the more he did it, the fewer episodes he had.
"Feeling any different?" his doctor had asked during one appointment.
"Not really," he answered. "I think, maybe..."
"Hm?"
Ryo had to be sure. He looked up, caught the attention of the other man, eye to eye, and suddenly the world went black. Black and rotten smelling. Seven minutes later, he was blinking away the light of the examination room, immediately turning away from the doctor's expectant cough. "I think...it happens when I look people in the eyes," Ryo said.
His doctor continued to listen, writing as he went along. And after ten minutes of Ryo explaining how it made perfect sense and how things felt too real during each black-out to ever be the result of illness, he excused himself momentarily to get a sample of a new sleep medication he thought Ryo needed to try.
As soon as the door clicked, Ryo grabbed his file and looked over the notes. Might be psychological.
The next day he left home, moved from Osaka to Tokyo, and took a job as a night custodian in an office building.
It didn't click until sometime later that he wasn't just blacking out but actually going into people's minds. To be fair, he couldn't really understand that until he met Yasu.
And as he continued to stare at the ceiling that night, thinking about that day instead of falling asleep or zoning out to infomercials, Ryo decided he was drunk enough to break his routine even more. He got up, grabbed the remaining four beers and slammed the door carelessly behind him. By the time he crossed town and knocked on Yasu's door, he had already finished them and picked up another case.
"Ryo," Yasu said, surprised, stepping aside to let him in. "I didn't know you knew where I lived..."
"Yo!" Ryo giggled. "Oi, Yasu, let me in, it's fucking cold out here," he said, unnecessarily pushing his way past. He started to take his jacket off, only to realize that he had left it in the apartment - prompting another round of red-faced smirks. "Oh...no one's here?"
Yasu walked behind him, taking a moment out to push Ryo's shoes - which he had just kicked off without much thought - into alignment. "Nope," he stated simply.
"Oh." Ryo stopped to turn around and smile. "I just always thought- what's this?" he interrupted himself. He wasn't sure how drunk he was at that point, but walking down the hallway, which was plastered with brightly colored strange images on canvas paintings, was like stumbling through a cheap art house. It figured. Yasu almost always came into work wearing something odd - in complete contrast to Ryo's standard jeans, leather jacket and plain t-shirt. He said it helped him focus, a way to stand out, just in case, so that he never got lost in someone else's psyche - but Ryo had always suspected that he was just weird. The paintings only supported his theory. They were full of limbs and eyes and things Ryo thought he recognized, but couldn't quite tell given the abstract color schemes and the unusual, exaggerated style. They lined the hall, on both sides, hung on bright red walls.
Before Yasu could answer, Ryo had already moved onto something else. "You play?" He had made it to the main room, where all the standard furnishings had been replaced with art projects. Nothing looked normal - not even Ryo's version of normal, which in and of itself was a little off. Instead of a table, there was a desk full of half-written pages. Instead of a couch or chair, there was a wooden bench with an easel attached, surrounded by containers of paint and charcoal. And instead of a tv, there was an amp and three different guitars. Ryo set the case down on the floor to pick up the acoustic and immediately started to pick at the strings. The sound came out weakly, confused. He smiled again and blushed slightly. "I'm not that drunk, that's what it usually sounds like."
"You're not clamping down hard enough," Yasu replied.
"Oh," he answered, smiling, trying it again and laughing as it worked. "Oh, cool." He stopped to pull a can out and held it up to him. "Want one?"
"Sure."
They never really spent that much time together outside of work, and they had certainly never spent time hanging out in each other's personal living space. For a while, Yasu was happy to go back to the easel, taking a drink every now and again while Ryo continued to bang out notes, occasionally vocalizing his frustration when he couldn't remember the chord progression to his favorite songs. Dinner that night hadn't lasted long and the rest of Yasu's contact list of acquaintances were all either busy or already asleep. With nowhere to really go, he fell back on Plan B - home to a blank canvas that needed filling.
Which was good, he told himself. The longer he waited, the harder it was to imagine exactly what it was he wanted to paint. It was fortunate that it worked out that way and he had time when he needed it. Before Ryo showed up, he had already drawn out loose lines of a figure with a pencil and picked out the colors he wanted for later. Ryo's appearance was merely an added bonus.
"What is that?" Ryo asked, coming up behind him and leaning on his shoulder for a closer look. "Did you do all the stuff in the hallway too?"
"Most of them," Yasu replied. "It's from work."
"What?"
"He was wearing a really interesting headpiece today," Yasu replied, coolly, continuing to flesh out the picture with his pencil. "It was kind of like a movie, with all the mist and the sun breaking through on top of the temple, and the animals behind him. It felt like...I just liked it," he said, briefly turning to Ryo.
Who looked somewhat unnerved. "Animals behind him?"
Yasu nodded. "They were starting to come at us when we left - I think they were protecting him."
"Why didn't you tell me that?"
"I didn't want to scare you."
Ryo pushed him in the shoulder, but didn't say anything. Instead he sat down behind Yasu, squeezing onto the end of the bench and peered over to watch as the drawing continued. He didn't expect Yasu to capture the patient's likeness exactly - nor did he really think the sketch would fill him in on everything that he missed - but something about the way Yasu drew Taguchi seemed off. The face seemed wrong, distorted - and instead of standing upright like any normal man, the jungle king lacked the right spine. He was curved like a wave, with feathers surrounding his entire head without any noticeable headpiece. If anything, he thought Yasu was drawing him as he wanted to be remembered - a god - instead of what was actually in the mindscape. But there was no way for him to really know. The thought escaped his mouth. "That's really what he looked like?"
Yasu paused and very carefully nodded. "Sort of."
"Sort of?" Ryo laughed.
"When I get home, it all starts to skew and fade out," he answered. "It's the best I can remember - I look at it while we're there but when I try to think about it later, I know it's not quite right. It's like I can't take it with me."
"You're lucky." Ryo flopped on the floor and stretched out. "I think it's worse when I'm done."
"But that's great."
"No, it's not," Ryo complained. "You get to see everything and leave it at work. I go home and I still feel like I'm getting drenched when it's dry out."
"But you get to experience all those things," Yasu continued, turning around on the bench to face him. "I can't ever get back what I see in there. It's like..." He looked over at the acoustic guitar Ryo had abandoned earlier. "Have you ever struck the right chord? And the sound rings out and you could just crawl inside of it and stretch out across space and connect with everything? And then you suddenly pat down on the strings and kill the note? It's just gone."
Ryo stared at him with a slightly irritated expression. "No."
"You don't understand," Yasu said. "It's like how things are so much more intense in dreams."
"Exactly," Ryo answered, slightly frustrated. The only person who could ever possibly understand how he felt had no clue. "And it won't go away - it's a pain in the ass."
"Maybe," he conceded. "But it's better than suddenly feeling like you've been extinguished."
Even if he couldn't quite understand how anyone could be jealous of what he had to go through, Ryo at least knew what it felt like to have a vital part of life just suddenly turn off like a lightswitch: every day he went to work, he had to relearn how to function blind all over again. He couldn't begrudge Yasu feeling frustrated.
Ryo chewed on his bottom lip and then scooted closer to him, holding out his arm. "Go ahead."
Yasu hesitated and then nodded, touching his graphite smeared fingers to Ryo's wrist.
After a moment of silence, he finally asked, reluctantly, "Well?"
Yasu smiled, his cheeks flushing slightly.
Ryo pulled his arm away, flopping back on the floor. "Shut up," he muttered. "I'm not embarrassed."
It wasn't just embarrassment. The minute Yasu's skin touched Ryo's, he felt the warm mix of emotions slide up his arm until it settled into his chest, spreading out through his body like blood. He might have been frustrated earlier, he wasn't sure. He might have been disappointed. If he had been either, it didn't matter because now he definitely felt both, along with the embarrassment, a little bit of impatience and, surprisingly, sympathy and warmth.
Unlike Ryo, he couldn't remember a time when it was different, any sort of transition period. Ever since he was a kid, people commented on what a good friend he was, how caring he was, how Yasu could always read the mood and know exactly what to do. He was happy when he was with happy people; when people cried, he cried with them. People said he empathized well - but it wasn't just that. He didn't just understand what another person was feeling. He shared it. He synced up with it. It entered his body and became a part of him. And the closer the proximity, the more intense the connection.
Which made being alone without some sort of distraction almost unbearable. It wasn't that Yasu needed to tap into someone's emotions, like a drug fix to satisfy a physical craving. It was more like a security blanket. At night alone he would often lie in bed, waiting for his brain to turn off, and marvel at how empty everything was - how blank. When an emotion did creep in, he was never sure if it was actually his or just a matter of tapping into the feelings of a neighbor nearby - he never knew where he stopped and began. And with people around, the question was moot - Yasu liked it that way. It felt better - felt safe. With constant company, he'd never have to face the possibility that he really didn't have any emotions of his own - an idea that, if true, would be unbearable. He had long ago decided that being subject to the feelings of others was better than being subject to none at all
It was funny. Yasu always knew what a person was feeling, but he couldn't access much more than that. Ryo could go into someone's mind, but couldn't make sense of what was there. Ryo was blind without Yasu, and Yasu was grounded without Ryo. Two halves of a whole: Ryo was the doorway, Yasu the lightswitch.
"Thanks," Yasu said.
Ryo wanted to change the subject. "That guy really pissed me off," he said, yawning. He was still on the floor, stretched out - eyes heavy. He could barely get the words out. "Who purposely gives up like that? S' stupid."
Yasu looked back at the canvas and the outline of Taguchi's face and arms. Originally their job was just to "find" people, to go into a patient's mind for signs of hope - they weren't asked to try to bring anyone back. But it couldn't be helped. The economy was in jeopardy and the government needed to cut back; they were tired of subsidizing vegetative patients who might be hospitalized for decades with no hope of recovery. It was simply too expensive; a patient with no cognizance left wasn't worth the money to sustain, or resuscitate if they deteriorated into any sort of organ failure. Technically, Ryo and Yasu were hired as experts to help decide which "encumbrances" could be closed and taken off the books. But neither could simply go in and just come out when the consequence was death. And their department was fine with that - standard private medical policy was to let life persist as long as possible; their attempts made everyone else involved sleep a little better at night.
Which is what made Taguchi so frustrating. It wasn't the vegetative state itself that was the problem - but whatever caused it in the first place. And people didn't just magically fix themselves and wake up. The longer a patient was under, the smaller the chances of ever coming back. Ryo and Yasu had been working for three years with varying levels of severity and success - they got used to losing more than winning. They became as cold to the reality as they could manage in order to get through, in order to do their best. They knew, even agreed, that sometimes what seemed like the best option was the least kind.
But they had never seen anyone with as good of a chance as Taguchi.
"You think he was wrong?" Yasu asked.
Ryo wasn't sure how the government had known about him or how they found him or how they thought to team the two up - and he didn't really care. He never asked about it, not even what Yasu was doing before they found him too. He rolled over on his side, eyes closed and barely hanging on to consciousness.
Side effects withstanding, his job let him live how he wanted and it beat being a janitor, right? He drifted in and out, slurring through the last words before falling asleep: "I'm worried he's right."
Yasu looked at him. "Yeah, but, about what?" There was no response.
~
Part 2.
Delivered by: moogle_tey
Title: While You Were Sleeping (Mutare)
Groups/Pairings: Main characters: Ryo and Yasu; Supporting characters: Junno, Massu, Yoko, Maru, Tsuyoshi, Ohkura, and others.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, some gore, strong language, dark/horror/supernatural themes, mature themes, medical themes, character death, lots of genre smashing, overly long and pretentious notes section.
Summary: Nishikido Ryo and Yasuda Shota are partners, two halves of a whole, doing very specific work for the government by "finding" persons of interest. At least, that's the skin deep version... No man is an island - unless he wants to be.
Notes: Dear nanyakanya - there were a lot of things in your sign up that interested me and don't often show up in fandom. I let that be my guide. There were a lot of unfamiliar new elements to deal with, so I hope discrepancies are at a minimum or are at least easily overlooked. I truly, truly hope you enjoy it - it's been massively fun to create. As for actual notes, there are several that I could add for geeky amusement, but I feel like they'd be too confusing/overwhelming/easily forgotten to warrant putting them in this section. I think there's only one that's truly necessary and that is to explain the difference between a coma and a persistent vegetative state just so that everyone's on the same page. To be in a coma, you must not be awake or aware, like being heavily asleep for several days at a time; natural comas rarely last more than a couple of weeks. A persistent vegetative state (PVS) patient is awake, but unaware - as the name "vegetative" might suggest - and the condition may last for a very, very long time. A patient has to be in a vegetative state for some time before they're considered "persistent" and the cause and duration determines likelihood of recovery. There's also a sort of sequence - sometimes coma patients wake up and recover, sometimes they move to PVS instead, sometimes they regress into brain death, etc. I could write an entire essay on the subject, but in short that's the reason "coma" rarely shows up in this fic. I think everything else is self-explanatory, although I know I threw around a lot of terms - hopefully that doesn't hinder comprehension. Geeky notes to come with repost, though. Title from an Elvis Perkins song and not a Sandra Bullock rom com. Why yes, this section, both in subject matter and verbosity, is a good indication of what's to come!
Lastly, thank you so much to the usual suspects, the extremely patient and wonderful mods and, of course, to my other half who pretty much does everything for me.
"Ryo, don't move."
Ryo stopped mid-step, groin-deep in muddy water and hair slick and matted from the latest rain, only a few minutes removed. From experience, it wouldn't be long before the rain started again and he was long over the idea. For a moment, everything was still - the sloshing sound and oscillating ripples from their crossing slowed and died. Whatever had spooked Yasu had scared away the animals around them too - Ryo could hear Yasu trying to quiet his breath in the silence entirely too well. "Don't move? Yasu?" He put out his hand, looking for its resting place on his partner's shoulder.
Yasu stood in front of him, watching the banks around them gather with aimed arrows and pipes - eyes trained on them, emerging from the foliage. He slowly reached up to his left shoulder where Ryo's hand was, taking it and pulling it down by his side, holding it.
Ryo turned his head back and forth, uselessly. "Did we find him?"
"I think he found us," Yasu whispered back.
With stillness, fish, or at least Ryo hoped they were fish, felt secure enough to swim closer to his legs and investigate. He could feel them gliding by, lightly grazing his pants before scurrying away - escaping possible retaliation - only to come back more brazen each time. It had been Yasu's suggestion that they cross by walking through the water; he assured Ryo that there wasn't a path around. With each increasing tap around his legs, he pulled on Yasu's hand harder, hoping to prompt some kind of response. He was going to start kicking soon - both the fish and maybe his partner.
"I think they want us to follow them," Yasu finally said, quietly confident.
"Who's 'they?'" He heard movement all around them and the crushing of plants under feet, suddenly picking up the smell of human sweat - belonging to neither Yasu nor himself - mixed with a confusion of metal and earth. "Hey," he called out to them. "Hey!"
Yasu nodded and with Ryo in tow, still barking, trudged through the rest of the water until he reached the first bank. He jumped up first, cautiously acknowledging their company before turning back to the lake. He had to crouch and lean over with his hand out until he reached Ryo, who instinctively smacked it away in panic before realizing who it belonged to and taking hold, climbing up with Yasu's help.
"Sorry," Ryo said, patting down his pants just in case something decided to come ashore with him. He rubbed his hand across his chest before hesitantly holding it out, waiting for Yasu to take it again. The hand holding used to bother him - then he got tired of tripping over everything and running into trees. Having an audience changed the dynamic again - he'd almost rather be laughed at crashing around than holding the hand of his partner like one would a date. As soon as Yasu clasped it in his own, Ryo used his other hand to pat up along his arm until he found Yasu's shoulders, letting go and grabbing on to them instead.
"We're looking for someone," Yasu asked their captors. He could tell they were as much a part of the jungle as any bird or insect they had come across. And they looked like Yasu would have imagined them - formed by the forest itself and mostly unclad to combat the rampant humidity. They kept a watchful eye on the two, but never replied in words or nods - they only pointed forward and moved as a pack to herd Yasu and Ryo along.
As they marched forward, following a path of trodden leaf litter that Yasu had somehow not been able to notice before, the sounds of the forest came back: birds calling out to each other and the rustling of leaves and branches. And the sharp gasping cries of spider monkeys that caused Ryo to dig his fingers into Yasu's shoulders a little too hard and mutter his own distress call of quiet curses. Their connection made them clumsy - anytime Yasu stumbled, Ryo would go with him. Any wrong step by Ryo, of which there were many by default, resulted in him smacking into Yasu's back.
"Are we almost there?" he finally asked, the impatience and growing mortification noticeable in his voice.
"How would I know?"
"Hey, Yasu. Yasu," Ryo said, quietly, pulling his chin close enough to rest it on his shoulder. It only made them more awkward, slower - jaw bone bouncing into muscle with each step and shoulder jerking into shoulder every time Ryo decided to swat at the insects buzzing around his head. "Are there leeches here?"
"I think so," he answered. "If he thinks so, there are."
"Shit."
"Why?"
"Would you look at something for me when we stop?"
Yasu glanced over his shoulder to see that Ryo had moved his hand to his waist, rubbing at the belt downward toward his groin. "No!"
"Come on!" Ryo prodded in a loud whisper. Thunder suddenly cracked above them, interrupting. "Great."
"I think we're here," Yasu replied, pulling his hand off. "I'll be right back."
A few steps before him, the rain forest parted to reveal a field sewn with people, like their captors but of all ages, roles and genders. They uniformly turned their heads in attention toward Yasu as he walked slowly out from the overgrowth. Regardless of action, each person stood up straight in response, moving backward to reveal a path to the staircase of a giant temple, a moss strewn shrine that he had to strain to see the top of. "You want me to go up there?" he asked.
No response. They continued to stare.
"Quit pushing," Ryo said, edging himself closer to Yasu as their captors herded him away from the jungle.
"He's up there," Yasu told him. "I think."
"Up where? Yasu? Yasu?" Ryo switched from annoyance to alarm as he felt hands pulling at his belt. "What are you doing?"
"You asked me to check for leeches," Yasu replied. "I'll do it before we go up-."
"Not right now!" Ryo yelled.
"But if I don't do it now-" His attention was diverted from Ryo's zipper by the collection of guards filing in behind them, pushing closer and closer and leaving little room to run back into the jungle. He felt like he had had enough time with them to get the gist of their very reserved method of communication - time to move on. "Okay," he said, taking a step back. "Would you mind helping my friend?" he asked.
Ryo's face distorted in mild panic. "That's not any- there's- not right now, okay? It's fine - it's fine!"
"He's blind, he won't be able to make it up the stairs alone," Yasu continued.
Ryo sighed out of relief. "Oh."
But soon let out another, "Oh," - this time in response to one of the largest guards putting an arm on his shoulders and another behind his knees, flipping and swinging him up into a hold. It was embarrassing, being carried like a rescued heroine in the arms of the hero - but after what seemed like the thirtieth or so stair up, Ryo told himself it was better than trying to navigate the climb on his own. Or, trying to do it based on Yasu's information. Worse yet, the guard could have slung him over his shoulder like a kill, or onto his back like a child. All in all, he decided he could live with the way it had turned out. By the time they reached the top and he was on his own feet again, all he could do was nod quickly, with a small shy smile and say, "Thanks." He could tell the guard was backing off. "Yasu?"
"I'm here," he replied, moving to Ryo's side and guiding him away from the edge. "We're at the top."
"Do you see him?"
"See who?" a new voice, curiously amused, asked.
There he was sitting before them, the obvious king in a throne made out of the bones of the jungle - both animal and plant - lounging with one leg over the side and the other tucked up to his chest, a childish, confident pose that somehow looked regal on his long limbs. Like the others, he wasn't wearing much on his torso, his feet bare - but there was a band around his forehead that connected gold in the front to a collection of large, long feathers in the back that were splayed out in a semi-circle, a halo of red and striped black that stood out from his shaggy brown hair. It looked heavy and cumbersome, yet he held his head straight without noticeable strain. The thunder crackled again and a group of fifteen serving girls began setting up wooden poles to stretch out a canopy made of hide to shield him from the oncoming weather.
Ryo took a step forward, not impressed by what he couldn't see. "Are you Taguchi Junnosuke?"
He widened his eyes and his smile, sitting up at attention. "Now that is interesting. Call me Junno."
"Finally," Ryo muttered in relief.
"We've been looking for you for two days," Yasu added in explanation.
"You must be hungry."
Ryo could barely wait for the last syllable to be fully uttered before answering an emphatic, "Yes!"
Junno looked over his shoulder, just in time to see one of the serving girls come to his side with a wicker platter full of fruit - most of which looked like brown apples covered in large scales. He picked out four, nodding to the girl and looking them over. "Where are you two from, the Midlands?"
"Ah, no," Yasu answered, considering the best way to bring up the topic at hand.
"Uplands? The Redlands?"
"Are you going to feed us?" Ryo asked.
Junno paused, then smiled and started to juggle the four pieces - the large feathers in his headdress waving back and forth as he quickly established a steady pace. "Eventually. It's good policy to find out why someone spent two days in a jungle looking for you before you feed them."
"About that," Yasu started.
Ryo was less patient. He didn't have an infinite resource to begin with, and his tolerance level was tested entirely too much between the insect bites and the hunger and the clammy humidity pooling on his skin, choking the air, tightening and dragging down his pants. And the monkeys. He was ready to write off the entire trip the minute Yasu told him there were monkeys watching them from the branches as they passed on the first day. "We were sent to find you, okay?"
"By whom?" Junno asked, speeding up his pace.
Yasu chewed on his lip. "That's a bit complicated."
It started to rain a fine mist and a couple of the serving girls ushered them to stand underneath the canopy they had just erected. Closer, Yasu was able to see that the girls weren't alone - behind Junno's throne was a collection of large animals, threatening and non - most of which he recognized, and Ryo would be unhappy to hear about later. They lay in wait, weaved through the rest of the servants. They watched as one, shifting slightly in the same direction, like they belonged to the same entity - a pumping lung or heart beating all in support of their living king.
As Ryo took a step forward, saying, "Look," the body of eyes focused on him. Yasu could see muscles tightening and the mass creeping forward just in case. He put a hand on his partner, pulling him back and orienting him in the right direction.
It didn't stop his mouth, though. "Do you remember how you almost died?"
"Ryo, I don't think that's a good idea," Yasu said quietly.
Junno pulled one of the fruits out of the cycle, tossing it Yasu's way before continuing on with the remaining three. "Can't say that I do."
The storm was in full swing and the mist turned into a steady rain, forcing Ryo to speak louder in order to compete with the backdrop splattering against the stone surfaces of the temple. "Really? You don't remember when you stopped breathing?"
"What he means is," Yasu interrupted, "do you remember being somewhere else? Somewhere completely different?"
"I've never been any other place," Junno answered, with a slight laugh. He stopped juggling, catching the fruit and holding it out to the side for one of the serving girls to take from him.
"No," Ryo replied, "I mean does he remember his lungs stopping."
"I don't think that's the best-"
"It's not a memory issue," Junno started.
"It doesn't matter, does it?" Ryo asked. "He doesn't remember either way so it doesn't matter if what we sa- what's that smell?"
Yasu shrugged. "This fruit?"
"He gave you fruit?"
Junno interrupted. "I don't think you quite understand."
"We understand just fine," Ryo answered. "You're going to share, right?"
"I don't really know how to peel it," Yasu said.
"How do you stop breathing air when you never breathed it in the first place?"
Ryo stopped, hoping the driving rain had garbled the words before they reached his ears. "What?"
"And how do you leave yourself?" Junno finished. "Whoever sent you apparently doesn't know much about gods."
Ryo rolled his blank eyes, sighing. "You're kidding, right?"
"Are you saying you didn't know?" Junno replied, genuinely shocked.
"Taguchi," Yasu said, "it's not that we don't believe you. But the people who sent us think you should...leave here."
"I am here - I can't leave it. All of these people- wait, I have a better idea," Junno told him. He waved one of the attendants to his side and with a soft smile, nodded at her in apology. "I'm sorry."
She was expressionless, accepting without so much as a nod or a blink. She shifted her weight, spreading her feet apart, and raised her skirt by sliding her hand up the inside of her right thigh until Yasu could see a strap wrapped around her flesh. She pulled something from it - a sharpened object, maybe rock - a dagger without metal - and held it out before him.
"What are you doing?" Yasu asked.
She raised the edge to her own neck.
"Wait," Yasu said, alarmed and moving to stop her. "Wait, you don't have to do that!"
"Do what?" Ryo asked. "Yasu, what's going on?"
It was already too late. In a swift, jerking move, she pulled the edge across her skin, ripping the muscle and tearing the artery at the side. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell to the floor in a crumpled heap, blood pooling out between convulsions - running along the stonework and mixing with the pounding rain.
"That wasn't necessary," Yasu commented, turning his head away from her.
Junno stood above her, looking down with concerned eyes. "It takes a minute before they bleed out."
The words slithered across Ryo - it was too cold a sentence not to understand what had happened, even without his eyesight.
Junno crouched next to her, inspecting her before picking up the dagger. "This takes a minute too," he explained. Two more girls came over and stretched out the body before him, laying the dead girl on her back with her arms folded over her chest. When all that remained from her neck were splashes from the downpour of rain, Junno put a hand to her forehead. The benevolent smile returned. He pulled the edge across his own forearm and let the blood trickle down. It fell on her face and instead of rolling on the skin, it vanished - absorbed immediately.
Ryo reached out until he found Yasu's shoulder and pulled himself closer. "What's happening now?"
Junno shook his arm, baptizing her with a last few drops and stood up. No one moved to stop the bleeding or bandage him. A gasp sounded out as the dead girl breathed in once more. She sat up, momentarily blinking in confusion before he offered her the dagger back. She took it quickly, putting it in the sheath under her skirt, and returned to her position beside his throne as if nothing had happened.
"He brought her back to life," Yasu whispered back.
"Great," Ryo answered.
"I gave her life to begin with," Junno replied.
"No, no you didn't," Ryo countered.
"Ryo-"
Junno looked unfazed as he sat back in his throne. "There was nothing here before me. When I came, the ground was dirt and scattered with the bones of the dead and when I bled on them they turned into flesh. I spent days spreading every piece of my skin until there was a nation at my feet and the jungle to keep them and the rain to feed them. If you want, I can show you again - with something older, maybe? A new creation? It's harder to bring them to life than to bring them back, but I wouldn't be a god if I couldn't do both."
"When you came," Yasu repeated, cautiously. "Which means you were somewhere else before."
"I left the sky," Junno answered.
"No, you didn't," Ryo said again.
"What was the sky like?" Yasu butted in, hoping it was the opportunity they needed.
"Empty," he said, with a half smile. "Of course."
"I'm getting tired of this," Ryo said.
"You said you were sent to find me," Junno replied. "You found me. So what were you supposed to do after that?"
"We're supposed to convince you to go back," Yasu answered.
"And," Junno finished, "you never answered my first question." He smiled with cheshire amusement. "I can't go somewhere you won't tell me about - and you two keep asking roundabout questions so you don't have to explicitly say. Or what it has to do with breathing."
"Okay," Ryo said, nodding and crossing his arms. "Fuck it."
The rain started to slow and the sun crept out enough to make the rising fog off of the land hazy outside the safety of the canopy. Yasu looked down and noticed that the guards from before were obscured, as were the edges of the temple they stood on. It seemed like there were ripples in the clouds around them, but the only thing that he could see clearly was Junno himself...and the mass of life behind him that seemed to have moved closer during their conversation. He thought Junno might be the type to take anything in stride, or at least laugh at part of it, regardless of nature. But just in case, Yasu pulled Ryo's arm out of its fold across his chest and made sure his hand was close by.
"This isn't real," Ryo finally said.
"I know," Junno replied, still smiling.
Ryo let out a small frustrated yell.
"You know?" Yasu asked. "That doesn't bother you?"
"Should it?" Junno asked.
"Yes," Ryo shot back. "You're lying in a hospital somewhere like a vegetable in real life."
"Ah! So that's where you're from!" He seemed entirely too pleased. "And that's where you want me to go?"
Yasu fumbled for the right words only to simply say, "Yes."
Junno nodded in thought. "You want me to leave this?"
"It's not real," Ryo argued.
"But there's an entire nation here that depends on me, that worships me. One that took a lot of time and effort to make."
"They're not real."
"Does it matter?" Junno asked. "You're telling me reality is a hospital bed?"
"Y-yes," Ryo said, backing off on his tone only momentarily.
"I should give up being god for a hospital bed," Junno repeated. "That's not a very convincing argument. The way I see it, there's not a lot going for your version of reality."
"Except that it's actually real, for one thing," Ryo continued.
"Oh, well, that makes it so much better."
"Look, if you don't come back, you're going to die."
Yasu nodded. "It's true."
Junno shrugged. "You have to go sometime - even gods. Change is good. I'll go back to the sky - maybe I'll become the stars."
"It's not change, stupid, it's death," Ryo argued, exhausted with frustration. "You won't become anything - you'll just die. If you stay here, it's all going to end - so you can go back, live the rest of your life-"
"No thanks," Junno replied.
"Taguchi," Yasu asked. "Are you sure you don't remember anything before you came here? Anyone that you miss - friends, family?"
"I'm sure there are," he said. "And if they're my family and friends, they'd be pleased to know that I'm happy, no matter where I am."
"You won't come back?" Yasu tried. "You won't reconsider?"
"No." His smile was kind and broad. "Being a god's kind of nice. You know how sometimes in life you feel uncomfortable in your skin?"
"Yes."
"That's long gone right now," Junno finished. "This skin feels really good."
"That's bullshit - you have to go back," Ryo continued, taking a step forward. "I don't care if this 'feels good' - you don't understand, you-"
"Have a choice, right? You realize that, don't you?"
"Not if you're going to make the wrong decision."
Junno paused, sighing quietly before the cheshire smile broke out again; an amusing solution to his problem presented itself. "You were in the jungle for two days?"
"Yeah? ...yeah, we were! We spent two days looking for you, so you have to-"
"So, you must have come across some of the lakes and rivers," he continued. "Feel anything in there? Something swimming past your leg?"
Ryo stopped and mentally told himself not to think back to the sensation of what could have easily been predatory fish swimming by, angling for the best way to take him down while they stood in the lake. He didn't really know a lot about animals or the geography of where he supposedly was, but there was at least one terrifying conclusion he could make. "P-piranha?"
"Oh, there are much worse things in the water than piranha." Junno's smile was unnervingly wide, his eyes soft. "I'm pretty amazing, but I don't know if I can bring you two back."
"Maybe we should leave," Yasu suggested. He watched the wall of creatures behind Junno pulsate out to reach the intruders with growing limbs of vines and outstretched hands, leering eyes and jaws slowly but steadily oozing toward them, obeying the whim of their god. He grabbed Ryo's hand in a tight grip. "Go."
Ryo started rocking his chest back and forth as hard as he could, whipping his head in sharp convulsions as if in the middle of a seizure.
"Ryo," Yasu pressed. Some of the girls removed the canopy and Junno stood up, his arms out to greet the sun in the last mists of rain. Down below, the nation of peoples cheered deafeningly at the sight of their leader...or possibly at the sharp teeth and hungry breath of animals they too should have feared. "Ryo!"
Ryo put his all of his violence into shaking himself - so much so that he could barely hang onto Yasu. "Come on!" he grunted out. "Come on!" Desperate thrashing. "Come on!"
Yasu saw one of the large cats readying its stance, quick shifts of weight from foot to foot, to pounce on them. And as it pushed its mass off of the stone to launch toward them, he blinked.
As he opened his eyes, the greys and greens of the temple and the jungle were gone - taken away in the mist - revealing the bland cream color walls of the hospital room. He blinked a few more times and started to smile when the beeping of monitors filled his ears. His shoulders fell in relief.
Yasu was quick to bounce back and orient himself to the surroundings. He looked over to see that he was still holding Ryo's arm and that Ryo was bent over the body, chest heaving as he struggled to catch his breath. Taguchi Junnosuke lay in the hospital bed, almost too tall for it, staring up at the ceiling. His chart said that he had a tendency to smile and Yasu could see a small one on his lips.
"Well?"
Behind them in the room, their supervisor, a man by the name of Domoto Tsuyoshi, put down the notebook he had been writing in and sat forward in his chair.
"You got bored," Yasu commented. "We must have been in there longer than I thought."
Ryo pushed away from the bed and rubbed his face, stopping to pull Yasu's hand off of his arm when he realized it was still there. "He's a goner."
"You didn't find him?" Domoto asked.
Ryo's skin was crawling - itchy from the memory of bug bites, a thousand bug bites, and the grimy clamminess of the constant humidity. The last thing he wanted was to be in more water, but the only thing that would wipe it all away was an instant shower. And there was still the feeling that something wasn't entirely copacetic about his crotch. Through blurry and still unadjusted eyes, he spotted the bathroom in the corner and started pulling his shirt off en route. "He's not coming back. Let him go." He slammed the door behind him, narrowly missing their staff nurse.
"Hey, hey," Nurse Ohkura said to the closed door. "Room facilities are for patients only." No answer. "Hey, how many times do I-"
"What'd he mean?" Domoto continued, standing up and disinterestedly looking for the paperwork he was supposed to have at all times. "What was this one like?"
As far as Yasu knew, Tsuyoshi kind of hated his job. It required him to endure a lot of regulations and procedures that he wasn't interested in - and it came with the least enviable job of making hard decisions. Although, if Yasu had to guess, the reason he got the position in the first place was entirely due to his ability to say what no one else would. There was one perk, though. The down time he faced as the government liaison while they worked with the patients - or the downtime between patients - allowed him to pursue other endeavors, more creative ones. Well, two perks. "A jungle," Yasu answered. "South American? Central? Not really sure." Tsuyoshi was always interested in hearing about the mindscapes - Yasu assumed they supplemented his imagination. A boring, hard job gave him the time and springboard for what he really wanted out of life.
"Jungle, hmm?" he said, finally finding the right page in the folder.
"Ryo's right, he won't come back," Yasu finished.
"You're sure?"
"He said he wouldn't," he answered. "I don't think he'll change his mind."
"Ever?"
Yasu mulled it over, working through his instinctive feelings. "He already knew it wasn't real," he explained. "Ryo sort of told him the consequences and he...felt okay with them. He was happy."
"Told him, huh?" Domoto said, jotting down notes in the file. "That was dumb."
"I don't think it mattered." He sighed. "He won't recover." He didn't say it lightly - he never said it lightly.
Domoto turned his bottom lip out - partly in concentration and partly in disappointment. "He had a shot." His pen lingered on the last line of the form before him, hovering between two check boxes - "active" and "passive" - as he ignored Yasu to favor his own thoughts instead.
"How did he drown?" Yasu asked. "Was there anything in his file?"
Nurse Ohkura, who had moved from glaring at the bathroom to recording post "exploration" vitals in the computer, replied without looking away from the screen. "An eyewitness said he was showing off for friends before he went under. He already had some damage from cerebral ischemia by the time they pulled him out." He stopped typing to look over at the patient's bed. "He's lucky they got him before it got any worse."
"Get the Potassium chloride," Domoto interrupted, clicking his pen to finally check the first box.
"Wait a minute," Ohkura protested. "His prognosis is really good - can't we start him on zolpidem and-"
"If he's against coming back, he'll just end up in the system for a long time," he replied. "I trust Yasuda."
"I do too," Ohkura slightly hurt. "But-"
"I'll call Koichi to come in and talk to the family."
As far as Yasu knew, the only person who hated his job more than Domoto Tsuyoshi was his subordinate, Domoto Koichi. Koichi had the burden of telling families that seemingly fine persistent vegetative state patients had suddenly taken a turn for the worse overnight - slipped into a coma, into brain death, cardiac arrest, whatever worked best for the situation. For some, the hope that their loved one would eventually return would be too great and they'd break down right then and there; for some, the relief that the decision was taken out of their hands would be too great and they'd immediately try to hide their sudden shame for feeling as much. Koichi didn't particularly like either reaction, Yasu had heard.
But before joining the government, apparently Koichi had been an aspiring actor searching at the wrong economic time for a steady job. He may have hated dealing with families, but he enjoyed being Dr. Domoto Koichi, Head Neurologist in the Division of Neurocritical Care - and other titles he could relay with enough gravitas to cover for his obvious lack of real medical education. It was certainly the most challenging role he could have asked for.
"But..." Ohkura had the least say in the fate of a patient, even though he was the one who had to take it into his hands. As a result, he usually had the most to say about Domoto's decisions, even if he understood and agreed with them. Yasu thought that was probably why Ohkura was a member of their team - anyone too complicit in euthanasia had no place administering it.
The room was silent, save the operating sounds of machines - machines designed to monitor patients' lives - and the muted spray of the shower from inside the bathroom that soon whined to a halt. Within minutes, Ryo exited, half of his clothes on. "I'm going home," he announced, continuing straight to the main door and out of the room.
"Rough night," Domoto commented, closing up the file and gathering his things. "You've got a few hours before the morning shift comes in," he told Ohkura.
"Where are you going?"
"Dinner," he answered as he headed out the door.
As soon as they were alone, Ohkura looked at Yasu and asked, "You're sure he's okay with it?"
Yasu stood next to Taguchi Junnosuke, who was still staring at the ceiling with a slight smirk on his face, and put a hand to his cheek. Soon he was beaming. "He's happy."
Ohkura sighed, taking the IV bag down off of the hook. "That makes it worse, I think."
Yasu said his goodbyes and left the room still radiating cheer. He was entirely aware that such a feeling clashed with the matter at hand - his thoughts on the matter at hand - but he couldn't help it. That's just the way Junno felt.
~
Ryo felt like he was going to pass out. And that was before the shaking started.
The shower had only done so much - the world around him still felt like jungle, still smelled like jungle, tasted like jungle. He kept scratching at his arms trying to rip out the stickiness. He was only half-paying attention to where he was going - at this point, it was mostly automatic anyway. It had to be or he'd never get home after work.
The lingering feeling of the mindscapes would have been bad enough, but whatever he encountered always came out with him as well, like a bad smell embedded in clothes. If he felt dirty in the mindscape, he'd be unable to get clean back in real life. If he got too hot, he couldn't cool down. If he spent what felt like two days roaming through bug-infested constant dampness and trudging through parasite filled mud without a hint of food... And physical memory had a long lifespan.
All of that would have been enough to make anyone cranky. But Ryo had to deal with the physical repercussions as well. Like a blood sugar crash, his body would slip out of his control - as if it rejected him being back in his own mind. His head felt light and hollow, making every step feel as it if were part of a dream. His skin felt bloodless, clammy - a particularly fun set of sensations this time given the humidity of the mindscape - as his temperature began to oscillate between too hot and too cold. The uncontrollable shaking and shivering. And mentally - just about everything irritated the hell out of him.
He was miserable. This was one of the worst crashes yet.
Ryo stumbled into his go-to convenience store, heading straight for the beer. After a couple of years of the same routine, the late night staff had gotten used to him - most of them thought he was a serious alcoholic dealing with dependency. Well, that wasn't too far from the truth.
At the cash register, with a case in his arms, he grabbed whatever was in his pocket and held it out.
The young girl smiled politely. "I'll have to break open a new roll of-"
"Whatever," he said, frustrated, leaving the money on the counter. "Just keep the change." He would be mad later at giving her such a tip, but at the moment, it couldn't be helped. The second he got out of the store, he pulled out a can and downed it as fast as he could. It was another five minutes to his place - another beer and he'd start in that direction, drinking as he walked along. If he timed it right, he could stumble into his apartment feeling considerably better and let alcohol fueled sleep do the rest. Just the thought of it lightened his mood. Well, that and beer number two.
The cashier came out just as he was about to leave with a plastic bag, mostly full of packages of onigiri. "You forgot this," she said, handing it to him.
He looked down at the ground as he took it from her, smiling slightly. "Thanks." He opened one up immediately - hunger was common, but this hunger was the worst he had felt in a lifetime - and with his mouth completely full of rice asked, "How much did I give you?!"
"You still have change coming," she answered. "Hey, what is it that you d-"
"Gotta run," he said, scooping up the case and jogging away with a small wave.
His apartment was empty and mostly bland. The walls were bare, he didn't keep any artwork or pictures around. There was hardly any furniture - the floor was good enough - and what he did have belied a strategy of grabbing what looked good first and running out of the store. He didn't bother checking his cell phone for messages since his contact list was sparse, and once the tv was on, along with every light he owned, he flopped down on the futon mattress and opened the next can of beer. Eating onigiri nicely solved the hunger issue - it obnoxiously derailed the process of getting drunk.
Worse yet, he wasn't nearly sleepy enough.
It had all started in middle school, as if things during that period of life weren't awkward enough. He was sitting in class during attendance, watching his teacher look at the register, pause, and then glance up at her students. He loved her - well, like every other boy loved her. She was pretty, affectionate toward him and, most importantly, there. Later on he'd realize she was nothing special, but at that point, he couldn't imagine how he'd deal with the next period with the frumpy math teacher standing in front of him, let alone the rest of his life, without her.
She was getting closer to his name - "Nakamura?"
Ryo lived for that moment. His seat was in the front row - a fortunate discovery he made during the first week of that year. Most kids didn't want to be that close, but soon, she'd call out his name and he'd answer and their eyes would meet - his proximity granting him the chance to connect, even for a brief moment. She'd call his name and look right at him and smile. That moment was everything - he'd developed an irritating habit of punctuality because of it. Even if he felt ill, he'd at least try to make it to home room for morning attendance.
"Nishikido?"
"He-"
He stopped mid-answer. At first Ryo thought maybe he was still asleep, merely dreaming of his teacher. Everything had gone pitch black and he was somehow standing, his desk nowhere around him. The idle chit chat of the other students during roll call was gone. He thought maybe he was in the process of waking up. But no matter how wide he opened his eyes, he couldn't see his ceiling or the covers over his head - just pitch black. Rapid blinking did nothing.
And it smelled. Not of breakfast, but of salt and mold. There was no alarm clock ringing in his ears, but a loud roaring of motion somewhere behind him. It was bitingly cold and the realization that he was neither dreaming nor in school caused him to panic until he had trouble breathing and fell to his knees, a sharp surface of exposed rock beneath them.
And then...he was back at his desk, staring at his teacher as she moved onto the next name.
He threw up everywhere.
He was sent home and for the rest of the week endured some lingering snickers from his classmates - after all, public vomiting was a serious offense in middle school. But these were small consequences and by the next week, Ryo had attributed it all to a passing bug.
The second time it happened, though, he was talking with a friend at lunch. It lasted for hours and left the taste of metal in his mouth - it cost him a few actual relationships. By the third, Ryo knew it wasn't some lingering virus - and so did everyone else. Other kids had noticed him blanking out; the school nurse highly suggested seeing a doctor.
The doctors thought it was neurological. At 15, they made him lie on a slab with an IV in his arm pumping in a radioactive dye that tasted worse than it smelled and that he could feel squeaking along in the veins in his neck. His head was sandwiched between two plastic barriers to keep him from moving and he was slowly pulled back into a tube of a machine. They had told him he could close his eyes during the test but at that point he was afraid to - he wanted to shut his eyes as little as possible, worried that he'd never get them open again.
To keep the machine cool, a constant blast of air conditioning was pumped in - he was just wearing a t-shirt. He couldn't stop shivering, despite the doctor coming on the intercom and asking him to stay still. The machine fired up, with loud, thunderous clacking, like being stuck in a tube in the middle of a noisy clock for fifteen minutes. The overwhelming sensations, between the noise and smell and taste and feel, reminded him a lot of what it was like to experience the episodes - except at least during an MRI, he could see. It wasn't particularly enjoyable.
The results showed nothing significant - the doctors suggested more tests: more scans and samples until they could pinpoint the cause of the hallucinations.
That's when Ryo went from being a fairly vocal and active pre-teen to a shy and awkward teenager who constantly feared that he'd black out at the worst times possible. He missed more and more school - purposely skipping when he didn't have to miss for a doctor's appointment - and by the time he realized it only ever happened around other people, he had quit school all together. By 16, his life had become a string of procedures trying to figure out what was wrong with his head.
Seven beers in that night, he was starting to slur just a bit and was staring up at the ceiling, ready to throw the remote at the tv for playing nothing but crap. The alcohol wasn't doing its job - he wasn't sleepy at all. And the last thing he wanted was to sit around, conscious, waiting with nothing to do but relive the mindscape and sweat through the crash until finally non-drug induced sleep came about, bringing with it vivid memory filled dreams. Drinking himself to sleep meant he'd be completely hungover in the morning, but no hangover ever felt as bad as what he had to endure otherwise. Hangovers were worth it if he could bypass the dreams. Hangovers were easy. Hangovers were routine.
It had become his habit to spend the next two to three days pumping up his adrenaline in every solitary way possible - riding motorcycles, going bungee jumping - creating a roller coaster of alcoholic lows and thrill-seeking highs until finally, he'd just about even out to normal life before being called in for the next patient. As miserable as Ryo felt after his work, he wasn't particularly bothered about the cycle that came with it. If anything, the routine and near constant stimulation was comforting.
To Ryo, it was just life.
Even with nothing good on, he left the tv playing. The noise usually provided a good backdrop, something for his brain to listen to so it stayed slightly distracted at all times. This time, it wasn't working either. Nothing was really going according to habit and it was pissing him off.
He had been the one to figure out what was really wrong with him, too. The side effect of isolation on a teenager was a shyness that he exhibited whenever speaking with people he couldn't avoid, like doctors. Staring at the ground or constantly glancing to the side at the wall just became the most comfortable way to communicate. And the more he did it, the fewer episodes he had.
"Feeling any different?" his doctor had asked during one appointment.
"Not really," he answered. "I think, maybe..."
"Hm?"
Ryo had to be sure. He looked up, caught the attention of the other man, eye to eye, and suddenly the world went black. Black and rotten smelling. Seven minutes later, he was blinking away the light of the examination room, immediately turning away from the doctor's expectant cough. "I think...it happens when I look people in the eyes," Ryo said.
His doctor continued to listen, writing as he went along. And after ten minutes of Ryo explaining how it made perfect sense and how things felt too real during each black-out to ever be the result of illness, he excused himself momentarily to get a sample of a new sleep medication he thought Ryo needed to try.
As soon as the door clicked, Ryo grabbed his file and looked over the notes. Might be psychological.
The next day he left home, moved from Osaka to Tokyo, and took a job as a night custodian in an office building.
It didn't click until sometime later that he wasn't just blacking out but actually going into people's minds. To be fair, he couldn't really understand that until he met Yasu.
And as he continued to stare at the ceiling that night, thinking about that day instead of falling asleep or zoning out to infomercials, Ryo decided he was drunk enough to break his routine even more. He got up, grabbed the remaining four beers and slammed the door carelessly behind him. By the time he crossed town and knocked on Yasu's door, he had already finished them and picked up another case.
"Ryo," Yasu said, surprised, stepping aside to let him in. "I didn't know you knew where I lived..."
"Yo!" Ryo giggled. "Oi, Yasu, let me in, it's fucking cold out here," he said, unnecessarily pushing his way past. He started to take his jacket off, only to realize that he had left it in the apartment - prompting another round of red-faced smirks. "Oh...no one's here?"
Yasu walked behind him, taking a moment out to push Ryo's shoes - which he had just kicked off without much thought - into alignment. "Nope," he stated simply.
"Oh." Ryo stopped to turn around and smile. "I just always thought- what's this?" he interrupted himself. He wasn't sure how drunk he was at that point, but walking down the hallway, which was plastered with brightly colored strange images on canvas paintings, was like stumbling through a cheap art house. It figured. Yasu almost always came into work wearing something odd - in complete contrast to Ryo's standard jeans, leather jacket and plain t-shirt. He said it helped him focus, a way to stand out, just in case, so that he never got lost in someone else's psyche - but Ryo had always suspected that he was just weird. The paintings only supported his theory. They were full of limbs and eyes and things Ryo thought he recognized, but couldn't quite tell given the abstract color schemes and the unusual, exaggerated style. They lined the hall, on both sides, hung on bright red walls.
Before Yasu could answer, Ryo had already moved onto something else. "You play?" He had made it to the main room, where all the standard furnishings had been replaced with art projects. Nothing looked normal - not even Ryo's version of normal, which in and of itself was a little off. Instead of a table, there was a desk full of half-written pages. Instead of a couch or chair, there was a wooden bench with an easel attached, surrounded by containers of paint and charcoal. And instead of a tv, there was an amp and three different guitars. Ryo set the case down on the floor to pick up the acoustic and immediately started to pick at the strings. The sound came out weakly, confused. He smiled again and blushed slightly. "I'm not that drunk, that's what it usually sounds like."
"You're not clamping down hard enough," Yasu replied.
"Oh," he answered, smiling, trying it again and laughing as it worked. "Oh, cool." He stopped to pull a can out and held it up to him. "Want one?"
"Sure."
They never really spent that much time together outside of work, and they had certainly never spent time hanging out in each other's personal living space. For a while, Yasu was happy to go back to the easel, taking a drink every now and again while Ryo continued to bang out notes, occasionally vocalizing his frustration when he couldn't remember the chord progression to his favorite songs. Dinner that night hadn't lasted long and the rest of Yasu's contact list of acquaintances were all either busy or already asleep. With nowhere to really go, he fell back on Plan B - home to a blank canvas that needed filling.
Which was good, he told himself. The longer he waited, the harder it was to imagine exactly what it was he wanted to paint. It was fortunate that it worked out that way and he had time when he needed it. Before Ryo showed up, he had already drawn out loose lines of a figure with a pencil and picked out the colors he wanted for later. Ryo's appearance was merely an added bonus.
"What is that?" Ryo asked, coming up behind him and leaning on his shoulder for a closer look. "Did you do all the stuff in the hallway too?"
"Most of them," Yasu replied. "It's from work."
"What?"
"He was wearing a really interesting headpiece today," Yasu replied, coolly, continuing to flesh out the picture with his pencil. "It was kind of like a movie, with all the mist and the sun breaking through on top of the temple, and the animals behind him. It felt like...I just liked it," he said, briefly turning to Ryo.
Who looked somewhat unnerved. "Animals behind him?"
Yasu nodded. "They were starting to come at us when we left - I think they were protecting him."
"Why didn't you tell me that?"
"I didn't want to scare you."
Ryo pushed him in the shoulder, but didn't say anything. Instead he sat down behind Yasu, squeezing onto the end of the bench and peered over to watch as the drawing continued. He didn't expect Yasu to capture the patient's likeness exactly - nor did he really think the sketch would fill him in on everything that he missed - but something about the way Yasu drew Taguchi seemed off. The face seemed wrong, distorted - and instead of standing upright like any normal man, the jungle king lacked the right spine. He was curved like a wave, with feathers surrounding his entire head without any noticeable headpiece. If anything, he thought Yasu was drawing him as he wanted to be remembered - a god - instead of what was actually in the mindscape. But there was no way for him to really know. The thought escaped his mouth. "That's really what he looked like?"
Yasu paused and very carefully nodded. "Sort of."
"Sort of?" Ryo laughed.
"When I get home, it all starts to skew and fade out," he answered. "It's the best I can remember - I look at it while we're there but when I try to think about it later, I know it's not quite right. It's like I can't take it with me."
"You're lucky." Ryo flopped on the floor and stretched out. "I think it's worse when I'm done."
"But that's great."
"No, it's not," Ryo complained. "You get to see everything and leave it at work. I go home and I still feel like I'm getting drenched when it's dry out."
"But you get to experience all those things," Yasu continued, turning around on the bench to face him. "I can't ever get back what I see in there. It's like..." He looked over at the acoustic guitar Ryo had abandoned earlier. "Have you ever struck the right chord? And the sound rings out and you could just crawl inside of it and stretch out across space and connect with everything? And then you suddenly pat down on the strings and kill the note? It's just gone."
Ryo stared at him with a slightly irritated expression. "No."
"You don't understand," Yasu said. "It's like how things are so much more intense in dreams."
"Exactly," Ryo answered, slightly frustrated. The only person who could ever possibly understand how he felt had no clue. "And it won't go away - it's a pain in the ass."
"Maybe," he conceded. "But it's better than suddenly feeling like you've been extinguished."
Even if he couldn't quite understand how anyone could be jealous of what he had to go through, Ryo at least knew what it felt like to have a vital part of life just suddenly turn off like a lightswitch: every day he went to work, he had to relearn how to function blind all over again. He couldn't begrudge Yasu feeling frustrated.
Ryo chewed on his bottom lip and then scooted closer to him, holding out his arm. "Go ahead."
Yasu hesitated and then nodded, touching his graphite smeared fingers to Ryo's wrist.
After a moment of silence, he finally asked, reluctantly, "Well?"
Yasu smiled, his cheeks flushing slightly.
Ryo pulled his arm away, flopping back on the floor. "Shut up," he muttered. "I'm not embarrassed."
It wasn't just embarrassment. The minute Yasu's skin touched Ryo's, he felt the warm mix of emotions slide up his arm until it settled into his chest, spreading out through his body like blood. He might have been frustrated earlier, he wasn't sure. He might have been disappointed. If he had been either, it didn't matter because now he definitely felt both, along with the embarrassment, a little bit of impatience and, surprisingly, sympathy and warmth.
Unlike Ryo, he couldn't remember a time when it was different, any sort of transition period. Ever since he was a kid, people commented on what a good friend he was, how caring he was, how Yasu could always read the mood and know exactly what to do. He was happy when he was with happy people; when people cried, he cried with them. People said he empathized well - but it wasn't just that. He didn't just understand what another person was feeling. He shared it. He synced up with it. It entered his body and became a part of him. And the closer the proximity, the more intense the connection.
Which made being alone without some sort of distraction almost unbearable. It wasn't that Yasu needed to tap into someone's emotions, like a drug fix to satisfy a physical craving. It was more like a security blanket. At night alone he would often lie in bed, waiting for his brain to turn off, and marvel at how empty everything was - how blank. When an emotion did creep in, he was never sure if it was actually his or just a matter of tapping into the feelings of a neighbor nearby - he never knew where he stopped and began. And with people around, the question was moot - Yasu liked it that way. It felt better - felt safe. With constant company, he'd never have to face the possibility that he really didn't have any emotions of his own - an idea that, if true, would be unbearable. He had long ago decided that being subject to the feelings of others was better than being subject to none at all
It was funny. Yasu always knew what a person was feeling, but he couldn't access much more than that. Ryo could go into someone's mind, but couldn't make sense of what was there. Ryo was blind without Yasu, and Yasu was grounded without Ryo. Two halves of a whole: Ryo was the doorway, Yasu the lightswitch.
"Thanks," Yasu said.
Ryo wanted to change the subject. "That guy really pissed me off," he said, yawning. He was still on the floor, stretched out - eyes heavy. He could barely get the words out. "Who purposely gives up like that? S' stupid."
Yasu looked back at the canvas and the outline of Taguchi's face and arms. Originally their job was just to "find" people, to go into a patient's mind for signs of hope - they weren't asked to try to bring anyone back. But it couldn't be helped. The economy was in jeopardy and the government needed to cut back; they were tired of subsidizing vegetative patients who might be hospitalized for decades with no hope of recovery. It was simply too expensive; a patient with no cognizance left wasn't worth the money to sustain, or resuscitate if they deteriorated into any sort of organ failure. Technically, Ryo and Yasu were hired as experts to help decide which "encumbrances" could be closed and taken off the books. But neither could simply go in and just come out when the consequence was death. And their department was fine with that - standard private medical policy was to let life persist as long as possible; their attempts made everyone else involved sleep a little better at night.
Which is what made Taguchi so frustrating. It wasn't the vegetative state itself that was the problem - but whatever caused it in the first place. And people didn't just magically fix themselves and wake up. The longer a patient was under, the smaller the chances of ever coming back. Ryo and Yasu had been working for three years with varying levels of severity and success - they got used to losing more than winning. They became as cold to the reality as they could manage in order to get through, in order to do their best. They knew, even agreed, that sometimes what seemed like the best option was the least kind.
But they had never seen anyone with as good of a chance as Taguchi.
"You think he was wrong?" Yasu asked.
Ryo wasn't sure how the government had known about him or how they found him or how they thought to team the two up - and he didn't really care. He never asked about it, not even what Yasu was doing before they found him too. He rolled over on his side, eyes closed and barely hanging on to consciousness.
Side effects withstanding, his job let him live how he wanted and it beat being a janitor, right? He drifted in and out, slurring through the last words before falling asleep: "I'm worried he's right."
Yasu looked at him. "Yeah, but, about what?" There was no response.
~
Part 2.