pand [emonium]/[ora] (Tokyo Babylon/Sandman, Seishirou/Subaru)
So, uh, this exploded.
This was initially one of the Endless ficbits, but then it decided it didn't want to be a ficbit. So it isn't.
pand [emonium]/[ora]. Tokyo Bablyon/Sandman crossover, Seishirou/Subaru, Hokuto, Delirium, Barnabas. 3616 words, PG. No real spoilers for either canon.
What's happening now is what's supposed to.
“I’m fine,” Subaru says for the fifth or sixth time this afternoon. “Really, I’m fine, please don’t worry.” If he repeats it often enough, the words might stick. He can’t properly judge how warm his forehead is through his gloves because his hands are always flushed, perspiring, hotter than they should be. His teeth ache, but it’s dull, muted, the kind of low throbbing pulse he can put out of his mind if he needs to. It’s only background noise.
“Are you sure, Subaru-kun?” Seishirou bends in closer. The light hits his glasses at a funny angle and Subaru squints, tries to blink the glare away. His eyes water at the corners. “Your cheeks look red.”
“He’s probably all red because of you, Sei-chan!” Hokuto trills. She flings a wet sponge into the air with one hand and catches it with the other.
“Hokuto-chan-” The blood rushes straight to his ears, but it’s not because of Seishirou, it isn’t, it’s just-Hokuto knows how to make him blush. He tugs at his shirt collar, and a weak breeze stirs the hairs clinging to the back of his neck.
Seishirou looks over the top of his head. “He’s so cute when he blushes, isn’t he, Hokuto-chan?”
Subaru’s ears start to roar.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Seishirou rests the back of his hand to Subaru’s forehead, grabs him around the waist, and pulls him-pulls him in close. Very close. Seishirou’s chest presses up against his cheek. He’s warm, too; the heat from his skin rises straight through his shirt. He smells-is Seishirou wearing cologne? Something light, almost floral.
“You feel a little hot,” Seishirou continues. He pushes his thumb under Subaru’s chin, tilts it up. “Are you dizzy at all? Fatigued?”
Subaru swallows a few times to get the cotton ball taste out of his mouth. He shakes his head. “No, I’m-I’m all right.”
“Take him to bed, Sei-chan!”
The roaring in Subaru’s ears gets louder.
“Excellent idea,” Seishirou says, boosting Subaru up and into the air-it feels so effortless, the way he does it, so easy.
“W-wait!” The words come out garbled. “I’m probably just a little overheated, that’s all, you don’t need to worry-” He gulps down a breath and keeps going. “And we were supposed to go out to dinner tonight, and I know you made the reservations weeks ago, and I don’t want to waste your time…”
“Your health is more important to me than dinner reservations are,” Seishirou says. He’s still holding Subaru up, carrying him close to his chest. His hands, they’re-they’re staying where they should be, but-
“I’d like to go, though,” he says.
“He wants to go!” Hokuto repeats, punching her soapy fist into the air.
“If you still want to,” Subaru adds. He keeps his eyes glued to the floor, which looks like it’s starting to ripple, waver. Like the floorboards are breathing.
Seishirou smiles. “How can I resist such a cute face?” He lowers his voice. “I want you to promise me something, though, Subaru-kun.”
His tongue feels thick, heavy. “All-all right.”
“If you start to feel sick,” Seishirou says, his tone brightening, “tell me right away, and we’ll go home. And I’ll stay by your side until you feel better.”
“But you have work-” he starts to protest.
Hokuto drowns him out. “So romantic!”
“My love is more important than my career.” Seishirou lowers Subaru to the ground and sets him down on the balls of his feet. “Besides, I’m good at taking care of cute sick things.”
“Subaru isn’t a puppy, Sei-chan,” Hokuto says, wagging her finger back and forth.
“I know, but he’s just as adorable as one, isn’t he?”
Hokuto nods vigorously, and heat creeps back up Subaru’s neck. “Have a good time, you two,” she says. “And keep a close eye on Subaru, Seishirou-chan. You don’t want him to wander off in a delirious state, do you?”
“Perish the thought.” Seishirou clasps his hands to his heart.
The room lurches. Subaru stays standing.
***
The restaurant Seishirou picked is sandwiched between a karaoke club on one side and a bar on the other. A nightclub sits across the street, its doorway pulsing with pink lights and loud music, steady sequential booms that rush beneath the pavement and travel up through the soles of Subaru’s shoes. His teeth chatter with every reverberation of the bass line.
Seishirou takes his arm. He’s backlit by the pink glow, so his silhouette’s fuzzy around the edges, even after Subaru squints and blinks. “If you want to go home, I’ll understand.”
“I don’t,” he says. “I’m happy,” he adds, and repeats the phrase in his head in time to the throbbing of the music. I’m happy. I’m happy. The words gain something when he does that, some extra weight, some extra meaning. Or they should.
“If you’re happy, then I’m happy.” Seishirou steers him inside the restaurant, and the pounding fades, the echoes drain away from Subaru’s bones. The restaurant’s Western-style, not quite elegant but not a fast-food place, either. The napkins look like real linen. The walls are a polished kind of white: sterile, clean. Snippets of songs float past his ears, off-key on one side and polished-over and produced and remixed on the other. The noise overlaps with the piano music playing over the speakers; the sounds don’t cancel each other out, everything just stacks, mounts, overlays. The dissonance makes his temples twitch. He smiles up at Seishirou. He’s fine. He’s happy. He is.
The host ushers the two of them to a table in the corner. The walls hum, he can hear it, hear the noise riding along just below the surface. It’s-scratchy, somehow, an itch he can’t reach. He stares down at the menu and tries to make the characters come into focus.
“What do you want to order, Subaru-kun?”
“Something light, I think.” A wave of heat rises through his stomach. He pushes it back down. Little flecks of color dance at the corners of his eyes, just out of reach. He doesn’t rub them, though.
“You’re not hungry tonight?” Seishirou asks.
“Not very,” he says. Wait, that doesn’t sound right, it sounds like he’s being ungrateful, and he isn’t, he’s fine, he’s happy. “But I’m glad we came here, Seishirou-san.”
Seishirou raps his fork against the table. The clack of their contact rings out in Subaru’s head, repeats, collides with a sour shrill note coming from the karaoke next door.
“I’m glad we came here, too.” Seishirou leans across the table. “How was your day?”
“It wasn’t very eventful,” he says. “I cleansed an apartment in Shinjuku for a young couple, and then I went home for the day.” Because he’d started to feel dizzy, but he doesn’t mention that part. That makes two days he’s had to skip school this week-Seishirou might chide him about that, he knows, so he bites his lip. He grips his water glass, twists it around in his hands; some of the moisture seeps through his gloves and chills his skin.
“I helped a pregnant cat give birth today,” Seishirou’s saying.
Subaru blinks. Did he-? It feels like he missed something, like time jumped ahead somehow.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Subaru-kun?”
“I’m sure.” He clears his throat. “Thank you. I’m sorry, I think my mind must have wandered.”
“That’s all right.” Seishirou smiles at him again, and his stomach twists. “I was just telling you how my day went. Delivering the kittens was the most exciting part-until tonight, of course.”
“Hokuto-chan and I helped a stray cat give birth once.” Subaru looks into his water glass. His face swims on the surface, bobbing and weaving. There’s a chunk of ice floating where his eye should be, displacing his reflection. “I’m sorry, I’m interrupting.”
“You aren’t,” Seishirou says. “I haven’t heard this story before.”
“The cat did most of the work,” he admits. The colors flicker in front of his eyes again, orange and pink and green and a blend of all three at once. He grips the glass tighter, lets the water droplets bead on his fingertips.
“Mothers usually do.”
He nods-it sounds right, mothers are the workers and the caretakers, and the question slips out of his mouth before he realizes it: “Was your mother like that, Seishirou-san?”
Oh. Oh no. He claps his hand over his mouth. He shouldn’t have, Seishirou’s never talked about her and that means-that could mean a lot of things and he’s so stupid, so thoughtless for bringing it up-
The light from the ceiling globe overhead shifts, beams directly onto Seishirou’s glasses and makes his lenses shine headlight-bright. Subaru has to look away, it hurts too much if he doesn’t. “She passed away,” Seishirou says. “When I was about your age.”
“I’m so sorry.” He crumples his hands in his lap. His gloves feel soaked, heavy.
“It’s all right, Subaru-kun.” There’s-there’s something in his eyes, but Subaru can’t see what it is. “You couldn’t have known.”
Something else pulses across the street-no, not pulses, slams into the back of his mind and sends it reeling, spinning, whirling. Orange, bright oranges and greens and blues-they’re blazing with neon brightness in his mind, blinding, leaving afterimages trailing behind. Someone sets the world on its side and it fractures.
Subaru lurches to his feet.
“Subaru-kun-”
“There’s something in that nightclub,” he says through gritted teeth. He clenches his fists around the back of his chair. “A presence.” He can’t tell much more than that, it’s like trying to pin down water, it shifts away when he tries to hold it for too long. Slips right through his fingers.
Seishirou’s expression sobers. “Is it a malicious one?”
He shakes his head. “No. I don’t know, I can’t tell from here. I need to see.” Get closer.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Seishirou asks. “If you haven’t been feeling well-” He lets the sentence trail off.
“I can’t let anyone get hurt.” Can’t let it hurt anyone, whatever it is. Seishirou understands, doesn’t he? He knows. “I’m sorry about dinner.”
Seishirou’s hands grip his elbows, steer him towards the door past the steady rise and fall of voices in their wake, the sidelong looks, the scraping chairs. “Don’t worry too much about it,” he says. “I don’t want you to get wrinkles, after all.”
Subaru’s ears heat up.
“Let me go in there with you,” Seishirou says.
“I don’t want you to get hurt-”
Seishirou presses his hand against Subaru’s forehead. Blistering heat radiates from his fingertips, or maybe that’s just Subaru projecting, placing things where they aren’t. “And I’d be heartbroken if anything happened to you.”
Subaru nods, and they pass through the door and they’re outside now, both of them. The music pounds, swells. His head, it-fuzzy, his thoughts blur together. Even the night air isn’t helping to clear his head, the breeze is choked with the smells of exhaust and cheap beer and he lurches forward when the scent rolls over him, almost into the street.
“I’m fine,” he says before Seishirou can ask. “I can do this. Please don’t worry.”
“I have to,” Seishirou says as he helps Subaru stagger across the street. They weave around cars and taxis and ignore the horns blaring, the shouts filling the air. “I promised you I’d protect you.”
Don’t you remember, Subaru-kun?
Where did that come from?
The air shifts. He stands at the threshold of the club, beneath the flickering neon sign. PANDORA in English letters. The bouncer-or something in the shape of a bouncer, he’s composed of thick dark shadows and something else Subaru can’t name-stares down at him, and either he doesn’t have eyes or his eyes are tucked in the recesses of the shadows and Subaru just doesn’t know.
“Go ahead, Subaru-kun,” Seishirou says. “It’ll be all right.”
“Thank you,” he says or maybe just mouths, the words swim to the front of his mind but he’s not sure if they come out or not. The thing’s presence is strong enough to drown in now; it seeps through his pores, pools under his skin. He meanders through the hall-the walls close in around him and the hallway’s shape flattens, stretches out, stretches out forever. The doorway keeps receding before his eyes. He reaches into his pocket and touches an ofuda and pushes through. The illusion clings to him like a spiderweb; strands of it stick in his hair, snag his fingers. “Seishirou-san?” he calls, and thinks he hears a response, but the music’s deafening and he’s at the threshold now-he’s inside.
The world inverts, white into black.
It’s just the lights, Subaru tells himself. It’s just an illusion.
People around him, flocking to his side, pressing close. Tokyo in miniature: old men and young women, fat and thin, tall and short, fashion plates and vagrants, salarymen and university students, all of them swarming, laughing, swaying. Do they pass through him or by him? The lights and the smell, the burn of alcohol and sweat in his nostrils, he can’t tell what anything is anymore.
“Seishirou-san?”
A dog barks.
“Seishirou-san?”
“No,” the dog says, “I’m afraid that’s not me.”
Subaru rubs his fists over his eyes. The dog’s a mutt, black and grey shaggy fur, medium height, he’d be rangy-looking if he didn’t carry his head with such dignity, and he’s talking. Do any of the dancers overhear? No, they’re whirling past Subaru, blending into a wheel of color and sound.
“You appear to be lost,” the dog continues.
“Y-yes.” Subaru’s hands throb in time with the music. No, not his hands, something on his hands, the backs of his palms-something, the answer dangles over his head but he can’t reach it. “Do you, um, do you know where I am?”
“Physically,” the dog says, “you’re in Shinjuku, in a rather foul-smelling nightclub called PANDORA-and the name should be rendered entirely in capital letters, by the way. If you want to know more than that, she has a better idea of it than I do.” The dog inclines his head to the right. “Admittedly, her ideas aren’t much like yours. Or like mine, for that matter.”
Subaru follows the direction of the dog’s gaze. It sounds so odd when he thinks of it like that-he’s being guided, instructed by a dog (and not any of the varieties of inugami, either, unless he’s much mistaken)-but that’s what’s happening, or at least that’s what’s happening as best he can describe it, which isn’t quite the same thing here and now.
A girl about Hokuto’s height dances with her back to him, her multicolored locks of hair streaming behind her, writhing as though they’re alive, aware, and then she turns. She looks at him.
At him.
Her eyes-that’s what he sees first, he fixates on them, but her eyes aren’t fixed, no. They’re mismatched, emerald green and vein blue, and the silver specks in her emerald eye shift around when she sees him, cluster together around her pupil, and it-it makes something inside him lurch, slip. Her shadow falls across the dog; Subaru stretches his hand out and feels the shadow slide through his fingers, soft as old velvet.
“She does have that effect on people,” the dog says.
Subaru doesn’t. Say anything, that is.
“You don’t know what you’re looking for,” she says, and her voice twists around in his head, takes a different path through it than he expected it to, so he pitches forward, looks for something to brace against but there’s nothing, nothing but the lights and the swirls and the sounds. Closer now, closing in. He can’t find his breath.
Where is Seishirou? Seishirou should be-
“I didn’t know either until someone told me to look where I’d lost him. Last left him. What’s the difference?”
“Loss implies permanence,” the dog says, but the girl rambles on.
“Is left lost? When you lose left, does it become right?”
His head-her eyes-wrong-shifting-
“I can turn your thoughts into sixty-seven butterflies if you want and then they’d be very lovely,” she says.
“I don’t think that would help him escape his predicament,” the dog says.
“Well, or I can give him a color that’s pink and black at the same time. I can do a lot of things. Can I do what you want?”
“I don’t know-” He staggers backwards. The dog’s tail thumps against his ankles.
“Try not to fall on top of me,” the dog says.
He should-but this, her, she can’t be dispelled, she’s part of-she’s woven into the world and he can’t cut her loose and he shouldn’t try to but the lights hurt so much.
“I followed a rainbow to get here and this was at the end. But the colors were wrong so I fixed them. People say I can’t help but I can, I know, I see, and that’s why it hurts because the colors don’t stay where they should and only I can see them being wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG.”
The colors. They form a pinwheel in front of him. Blue and yellow and red and orange and indigo and violet and green. White, then black, then nothing.
“They’re the same. Everything’s the same. Circles. Lines are wrong. I want to get rid of them.”
“I’m not sure that’s feasible,” the dog interjects.
“Cycles,” he gasps, squeezing his eyes shut. The colors still hang in his vision and they stay suspended there when he opens his eyes. Hers stare deep into his. The dissonance-wrenches him, tips him over. “You’re talking about-I think-I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m feeling well-”
She leans in close. “What’s happening now is what’s supposed to,” she whispers.
Another shadow looms over him. Thick, dark, an absence of color-or is it white that’s the absence of color and black the one that’s all the colors mixed together? He can’t remember.
“Seishirou-san,” he says, but he can’t see-
***
She balances on the balls of her feet, rocks back and forth until she tires of it. “You,” she says. “You know who I am.”
Seishirou tucks his glasses into the breast pocket of his jacket. “I can guess,” he says. Subaru would be stammering a thousand politenesses now, if he knew. Seishirou doesn’t waste his time with them.
“And I know you.” She tilts her head to the side. Squints. He avoids her eyes; there’s enough vertigo in this club as it is. “I didn’t hurt him. I didn’t. I don’t do that.”
The dog growls, raises his hackles. Seishirou looks down at him. Neither retreats.
“It’s hard when you see things and nobody else understands,” she says.
“Yes.” He pulls a Mild Seven Select out of the carton in his pocket, lights it, breathes in. The smoke swirls around the crowd, trails after them in the wake of their dance. “I imagine. Nevertheless, it’s time to bring Subaru-kun home.”
“You people aren’t fun. You’re like my brother.”
“Considerably different, I think.” Considerably different from all her brothers.
“I know, I do, I do know things, I was just saying so can I tell you something?” she asks, without breath or pause.
He’s not sure if it’s a request or a command. He lifts Subaru-so light, nearly weightless, a nothing-and slings him over his shoulder as she stands on tiptoe to reach his ear, grows so she’s the appropriate height.
“I don’t like the way he smells,” the dog says.
It wouldn’t be wise to kill the creature, Seishirou reminds himself.
She cups her hands over her mouth and whispers in his ear.
…interesting.
***
This is what she whispers (and it’s a secret so you can’t tell anyone): “When you win, it’s the same as losing.”
***
Subaru wakes to pain flaring in his joints.
“You work too hard, Subaru,” Hokuto says, planting her fists on her hips.
“I’m sorry,” he says. His head still feels thick, sluggish; there’s sweat beading on his forehead, too, he can feel it. “I thought-”
Hokuto harrumphs. “You didn’t think at all. It’s a good thing you’re going to have Sei-chan to look after you after I get married, or else you’d run yourself into the ground in no time.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again. Then he remembers. “Seishirou-san, is he-?”
“I’m here.”
Subaru cranes his head back. Seishirou stands over his bed, holding flowers in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other. His ears turn red. Again.
“You fainted at the restaurant,” Seishirou tells him. “I swept you up and drove you home.”
“And he’s been here by your side all night,” Hokuto sighs. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Thank you,” he murmurs.
“It’s the least I could do,” Seishirou says.
He rubs his eyes. “I thought-I might have dreamed it, but I thought there was a nightclub, and a girl, and a dog…”
“Your fever was pretty high,” Seishirou says. “It broke just before Hokuto and I thought we had to take you to the hospital, luckily. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some unusually vivid dreams.”
He nods. “You’re right,” he says. Seishirou’s usually right about things. “I’m sorry for being a burden last night.”
Seishirou picks up Subaru’s wrist and turns it over-his fingertips are warm, trailing down the veins in Subaru’s arm, and Subaru shivers. “Try to sleep,” he says. “You’ve had a long night, and you need to get better. No more delirium.”
“No more delirium,” Subaru echoes.
This was initially one of the Endless ficbits, but then it decided it didn't want to be a ficbit. So it isn't.
pand [emonium]/[ora]. Tokyo Bablyon/Sandman crossover, Seishirou/Subaru, Hokuto, Delirium, Barnabas. 3616 words, PG. No real spoilers for either canon.
What's happening now is what's supposed to.
“I’m fine,” Subaru says for the fifth or sixth time this afternoon. “Really, I’m fine, please don’t worry.” If he repeats it often enough, the words might stick. He can’t properly judge how warm his forehead is through his gloves because his hands are always flushed, perspiring, hotter than they should be. His teeth ache, but it’s dull, muted, the kind of low throbbing pulse he can put out of his mind if he needs to. It’s only background noise.
“Are you sure, Subaru-kun?” Seishirou bends in closer. The light hits his glasses at a funny angle and Subaru squints, tries to blink the glare away. His eyes water at the corners. “Your cheeks look red.”
“He’s probably all red because of you, Sei-chan!” Hokuto trills. She flings a wet sponge into the air with one hand and catches it with the other.
“Hokuto-chan-” The blood rushes straight to his ears, but it’s not because of Seishirou, it isn’t, it’s just-Hokuto knows how to make him blush. He tugs at his shirt collar, and a weak breeze stirs the hairs clinging to the back of his neck.
Seishirou looks over the top of his head. “He’s so cute when he blushes, isn’t he, Hokuto-chan?”
Subaru’s ears start to roar.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Seishirou rests the back of his hand to Subaru’s forehead, grabs him around the waist, and pulls him-pulls him in close. Very close. Seishirou’s chest presses up against his cheek. He’s warm, too; the heat from his skin rises straight through his shirt. He smells-is Seishirou wearing cologne? Something light, almost floral.
“You feel a little hot,” Seishirou continues. He pushes his thumb under Subaru’s chin, tilts it up. “Are you dizzy at all? Fatigued?”
Subaru swallows a few times to get the cotton ball taste out of his mouth. He shakes his head. “No, I’m-I’m all right.”
“Take him to bed, Sei-chan!”
The roaring in Subaru’s ears gets louder.
“Excellent idea,” Seishirou says, boosting Subaru up and into the air-it feels so effortless, the way he does it, so easy.
“W-wait!” The words come out garbled. “I’m probably just a little overheated, that’s all, you don’t need to worry-” He gulps down a breath and keeps going. “And we were supposed to go out to dinner tonight, and I know you made the reservations weeks ago, and I don’t want to waste your time…”
“Your health is more important to me than dinner reservations are,” Seishirou says. He’s still holding Subaru up, carrying him close to his chest. His hands, they’re-they’re staying where they should be, but-
“I’d like to go, though,” he says.
“He wants to go!” Hokuto repeats, punching her soapy fist into the air.
“If you still want to,” Subaru adds. He keeps his eyes glued to the floor, which looks like it’s starting to ripple, waver. Like the floorboards are breathing.
Seishirou smiles. “How can I resist such a cute face?” He lowers his voice. “I want you to promise me something, though, Subaru-kun.”
His tongue feels thick, heavy. “All-all right.”
“If you start to feel sick,” Seishirou says, his tone brightening, “tell me right away, and we’ll go home. And I’ll stay by your side until you feel better.”
“But you have work-” he starts to protest.
Hokuto drowns him out. “So romantic!”
“My love is more important than my career.” Seishirou lowers Subaru to the ground and sets him down on the balls of his feet. “Besides, I’m good at taking care of cute sick things.”
“Subaru isn’t a puppy, Sei-chan,” Hokuto says, wagging her finger back and forth.
“I know, but he’s just as adorable as one, isn’t he?”
Hokuto nods vigorously, and heat creeps back up Subaru’s neck. “Have a good time, you two,” she says. “And keep a close eye on Subaru, Seishirou-chan. You don’t want him to wander off in a delirious state, do you?”
“Perish the thought.” Seishirou clasps his hands to his heart.
The room lurches. Subaru stays standing.
***
The restaurant Seishirou picked is sandwiched between a karaoke club on one side and a bar on the other. A nightclub sits across the street, its doorway pulsing with pink lights and loud music, steady sequential booms that rush beneath the pavement and travel up through the soles of Subaru’s shoes. His teeth chatter with every reverberation of the bass line.
Seishirou takes his arm. He’s backlit by the pink glow, so his silhouette’s fuzzy around the edges, even after Subaru squints and blinks. “If you want to go home, I’ll understand.”
“I don’t,” he says. “I’m happy,” he adds, and repeats the phrase in his head in time to the throbbing of the music. I’m happy. I’m happy. The words gain something when he does that, some extra weight, some extra meaning. Or they should.
“If you’re happy, then I’m happy.” Seishirou steers him inside the restaurant, and the pounding fades, the echoes drain away from Subaru’s bones. The restaurant’s Western-style, not quite elegant but not a fast-food place, either. The napkins look like real linen. The walls are a polished kind of white: sterile, clean. Snippets of songs float past his ears, off-key on one side and polished-over and produced and remixed on the other. The noise overlaps with the piano music playing over the speakers; the sounds don’t cancel each other out, everything just stacks, mounts, overlays. The dissonance makes his temples twitch. He smiles up at Seishirou. He’s fine. He’s happy. He is.
The host ushers the two of them to a table in the corner. The walls hum, he can hear it, hear the noise riding along just below the surface. It’s-scratchy, somehow, an itch he can’t reach. He stares down at the menu and tries to make the characters come into focus.
“What do you want to order, Subaru-kun?”
“Something light, I think.” A wave of heat rises through his stomach. He pushes it back down. Little flecks of color dance at the corners of his eyes, just out of reach. He doesn’t rub them, though.
“You’re not hungry tonight?” Seishirou asks.
“Not very,” he says. Wait, that doesn’t sound right, it sounds like he’s being ungrateful, and he isn’t, he’s fine, he’s happy. “But I’m glad we came here, Seishirou-san.”
Seishirou raps his fork against the table. The clack of their contact rings out in Subaru’s head, repeats, collides with a sour shrill note coming from the karaoke next door.
“I’m glad we came here, too.” Seishirou leans across the table. “How was your day?”
“It wasn’t very eventful,” he says. “I cleansed an apartment in Shinjuku for a young couple, and then I went home for the day.” Because he’d started to feel dizzy, but he doesn’t mention that part. That makes two days he’s had to skip school this week-Seishirou might chide him about that, he knows, so he bites his lip. He grips his water glass, twists it around in his hands; some of the moisture seeps through his gloves and chills his skin.
“I helped a pregnant cat give birth today,” Seishirou’s saying.
Subaru blinks. Did he-? It feels like he missed something, like time jumped ahead somehow.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Subaru-kun?”
“I’m sure.” He clears his throat. “Thank you. I’m sorry, I think my mind must have wandered.”
“That’s all right.” Seishirou smiles at him again, and his stomach twists. “I was just telling you how my day went. Delivering the kittens was the most exciting part-until tonight, of course.”
“Hokuto-chan and I helped a stray cat give birth once.” Subaru looks into his water glass. His face swims on the surface, bobbing and weaving. There’s a chunk of ice floating where his eye should be, displacing his reflection. “I’m sorry, I’m interrupting.”
“You aren’t,” Seishirou says. “I haven’t heard this story before.”
“The cat did most of the work,” he admits. The colors flicker in front of his eyes again, orange and pink and green and a blend of all three at once. He grips the glass tighter, lets the water droplets bead on his fingertips.
“Mothers usually do.”
He nods-it sounds right, mothers are the workers and the caretakers, and the question slips out of his mouth before he realizes it: “Was your mother like that, Seishirou-san?”
Oh. Oh no. He claps his hand over his mouth. He shouldn’t have, Seishirou’s never talked about her and that means-that could mean a lot of things and he’s so stupid, so thoughtless for bringing it up-
The light from the ceiling globe overhead shifts, beams directly onto Seishirou’s glasses and makes his lenses shine headlight-bright. Subaru has to look away, it hurts too much if he doesn’t. “She passed away,” Seishirou says. “When I was about your age.”
“I’m so sorry.” He crumples his hands in his lap. His gloves feel soaked, heavy.
“It’s all right, Subaru-kun.” There’s-there’s something in his eyes, but Subaru can’t see what it is. “You couldn’t have known.”
Something else pulses across the street-no, not pulses, slams into the back of his mind and sends it reeling, spinning, whirling. Orange, bright oranges and greens and blues-they’re blazing with neon brightness in his mind, blinding, leaving afterimages trailing behind. Someone sets the world on its side and it fractures.
Subaru lurches to his feet.
“Subaru-kun-”
“There’s something in that nightclub,” he says through gritted teeth. He clenches his fists around the back of his chair. “A presence.” He can’t tell much more than that, it’s like trying to pin down water, it shifts away when he tries to hold it for too long. Slips right through his fingers.
Seishirou’s expression sobers. “Is it a malicious one?”
He shakes his head. “No. I don’t know, I can’t tell from here. I need to see.” Get closer.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Seishirou asks. “If you haven’t been feeling well-” He lets the sentence trail off.
“I can’t let anyone get hurt.” Can’t let it hurt anyone, whatever it is. Seishirou understands, doesn’t he? He knows. “I’m sorry about dinner.”
Seishirou’s hands grip his elbows, steer him towards the door past the steady rise and fall of voices in their wake, the sidelong looks, the scraping chairs. “Don’t worry too much about it,” he says. “I don’t want you to get wrinkles, after all.”
Subaru’s ears heat up.
“Let me go in there with you,” Seishirou says.
“I don’t want you to get hurt-”
Seishirou presses his hand against Subaru’s forehead. Blistering heat radiates from his fingertips, or maybe that’s just Subaru projecting, placing things where they aren’t. “And I’d be heartbroken if anything happened to you.”
Subaru nods, and they pass through the door and they’re outside now, both of them. The music pounds, swells. His head, it-fuzzy, his thoughts blur together. Even the night air isn’t helping to clear his head, the breeze is choked with the smells of exhaust and cheap beer and he lurches forward when the scent rolls over him, almost into the street.
“I’m fine,” he says before Seishirou can ask. “I can do this. Please don’t worry.”
“I have to,” Seishirou says as he helps Subaru stagger across the street. They weave around cars and taxis and ignore the horns blaring, the shouts filling the air. “I promised you I’d protect you.”
Don’t you remember, Subaru-kun?
Where did that come from?
The air shifts. He stands at the threshold of the club, beneath the flickering neon sign. PANDORA in English letters. The bouncer-or something in the shape of a bouncer, he’s composed of thick dark shadows and something else Subaru can’t name-stares down at him, and either he doesn’t have eyes or his eyes are tucked in the recesses of the shadows and Subaru just doesn’t know.
“Go ahead, Subaru-kun,” Seishirou says. “It’ll be all right.”
“Thank you,” he says or maybe just mouths, the words swim to the front of his mind but he’s not sure if they come out or not. The thing’s presence is strong enough to drown in now; it seeps through his pores, pools under his skin. He meanders through the hall-the walls close in around him and the hallway’s shape flattens, stretches out, stretches out forever. The doorway keeps receding before his eyes. He reaches into his pocket and touches an ofuda and pushes through. The illusion clings to him like a spiderweb; strands of it stick in his hair, snag his fingers. “Seishirou-san?” he calls, and thinks he hears a response, but the music’s deafening and he’s at the threshold now-he’s inside.
The world inverts, white into black.
It’s just the lights, Subaru tells himself. It’s just an illusion.
People around him, flocking to his side, pressing close. Tokyo in miniature: old men and young women, fat and thin, tall and short, fashion plates and vagrants, salarymen and university students, all of them swarming, laughing, swaying. Do they pass through him or by him? The lights and the smell, the burn of alcohol and sweat in his nostrils, he can’t tell what anything is anymore.
“Seishirou-san?”
A dog barks.
“Seishirou-san?”
“No,” the dog says, “I’m afraid that’s not me.”
Subaru rubs his fists over his eyes. The dog’s a mutt, black and grey shaggy fur, medium height, he’d be rangy-looking if he didn’t carry his head with such dignity, and he’s talking. Do any of the dancers overhear? No, they’re whirling past Subaru, blending into a wheel of color and sound.
“You appear to be lost,” the dog continues.
“Y-yes.” Subaru’s hands throb in time with the music. No, not his hands, something on his hands, the backs of his palms-something, the answer dangles over his head but he can’t reach it. “Do you, um, do you know where I am?”
“Physically,” the dog says, “you’re in Shinjuku, in a rather foul-smelling nightclub called PANDORA-and the name should be rendered entirely in capital letters, by the way. If you want to know more than that, she has a better idea of it than I do.” The dog inclines his head to the right. “Admittedly, her ideas aren’t much like yours. Or like mine, for that matter.”
Subaru follows the direction of the dog’s gaze. It sounds so odd when he thinks of it like that-he’s being guided, instructed by a dog (and not any of the varieties of inugami, either, unless he’s much mistaken)-but that’s what’s happening, or at least that’s what’s happening as best he can describe it, which isn’t quite the same thing here and now.
A girl about Hokuto’s height dances with her back to him, her multicolored locks of hair streaming behind her, writhing as though they’re alive, aware, and then she turns. She looks at him.
At him.
Her eyes-that’s what he sees first, he fixates on them, but her eyes aren’t fixed, no. They’re mismatched, emerald green and vein blue, and the silver specks in her emerald eye shift around when she sees him, cluster together around her pupil, and it-it makes something inside him lurch, slip. Her shadow falls across the dog; Subaru stretches his hand out and feels the shadow slide through his fingers, soft as old velvet.
“She does have that effect on people,” the dog says.
Subaru doesn’t. Say anything, that is.
“You don’t know what you’re looking for,” she says, and her voice twists around in his head, takes a different path through it than he expected it to, so he pitches forward, looks for something to brace against but there’s nothing, nothing but the lights and the swirls and the sounds. Closer now, closing in. He can’t find his breath.
Where is Seishirou? Seishirou should be-
“I didn’t know either until someone told me to look where I’d lost him. Last left him. What’s the difference?”
“Loss implies permanence,” the dog says, but the girl rambles on.
“Is left lost? When you lose left, does it become right?”
His head-her eyes-wrong-shifting-
“I can turn your thoughts into sixty-seven butterflies if you want and then they’d be very lovely,” she says.
“I don’t think that would help him escape his predicament,” the dog says.
“Well, or I can give him a color that’s pink and black at the same time. I can do a lot of things. Can I do what you want?”
“I don’t know-” He staggers backwards. The dog’s tail thumps against his ankles.
“Try not to fall on top of me,” the dog says.
He should-but this, her, she can’t be dispelled, she’s part of-she’s woven into the world and he can’t cut her loose and he shouldn’t try to but the lights hurt so much.
“I followed a rainbow to get here and this was at the end. But the colors were wrong so I fixed them. People say I can’t help but I can, I know, I see, and that’s why it hurts because the colors don’t stay where they should and only I can see them being wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG.”
The colors. They form a pinwheel in front of him. Blue and yellow and red and orange and indigo and violet and green. White, then black, then nothing.
“They’re the same. Everything’s the same. Circles. Lines are wrong. I want to get rid of them.”
“I’m not sure that’s feasible,” the dog interjects.
“Cycles,” he gasps, squeezing his eyes shut. The colors still hang in his vision and they stay suspended there when he opens his eyes. Hers stare deep into his. The dissonance-wrenches him, tips him over. “You’re talking about-I think-I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m feeling well-”
She leans in close. “What’s happening now is what’s supposed to,” she whispers.
Another shadow looms over him. Thick, dark, an absence of color-or is it white that’s the absence of color and black the one that’s all the colors mixed together? He can’t remember.
“Seishirou-san,” he says, but he can’t see-
***
She balances on the balls of her feet, rocks back and forth until she tires of it. “You,” she says. “You know who I am.”
Seishirou tucks his glasses into the breast pocket of his jacket. “I can guess,” he says. Subaru would be stammering a thousand politenesses now, if he knew. Seishirou doesn’t waste his time with them.
“And I know you.” She tilts her head to the side. Squints. He avoids her eyes; there’s enough vertigo in this club as it is. “I didn’t hurt him. I didn’t. I don’t do that.”
The dog growls, raises his hackles. Seishirou looks down at him. Neither retreats.
“It’s hard when you see things and nobody else understands,” she says.
“Yes.” He pulls a Mild Seven Select out of the carton in his pocket, lights it, breathes in. The smoke swirls around the crowd, trails after them in the wake of their dance. “I imagine. Nevertheless, it’s time to bring Subaru-kun home.”
“You people aren’t fun. You’re like my brother.”
“Considerably different, I think.” Considerably different from all her brothers.
“I know, I do, I do know things, I was just saying so can I tell you something?” she asks, without breath or pause.
He’s not sure if it’s a request or a command. He lifts Subaru-so light, nearly weightless, a nothing-and slings him over his shoulder as she stands on tiptoe to reach his ear, grows so she’s the appropriate height.
“I don’t like the way he smells,” the dog says.
It wouldn’t be wise to kill the creature, Seishirou reminds himself.
She cups her hands over her mouth and whispers in his ear.
…interesting.
***
This is what she whispers (and it’s a secret so you can’t tell anyone): “When you win, it’s the same as losing.”
***
Subaru wakes to pain flaring in his joints.
“You work too hard, Subaru,” Hokuto says, planting her fists on her hips.
“I’m sorry,” he says. His head still feels thick, sluggish; there’s sweat beading on his forehead, too, he can feel it. “I thought-”
Hokuto harrumphs. “You didn’t think at all. It’s a good thing you’re going to have Sei-chan to look after you after I get married, or else you’d run yourself into the ground in no time.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again. Then he remembers. “Seishirou-san, is he-?”
“I’m here.”
Subaru cranes his head back. Seishirou stands over his bed, holding flowers in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other. His ears turn red. Again.
“You fainted at the restaurant,” Seishirou tells him. “I swept you up and drove you home.”
“And he’s been here by your side all night,” Hokuto sighs. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Thank you,” he murmurs.
“It’s the least I could do,” Seishirou says.
He rubs his eyes. “I thought-I might have dreamed it, but I thought there was a nightclub, and a girl, and a dog…”
“Your fever was pretty high,” Seishirou says. “It broke just before Hokuto and I thought we had to take you to the hospital, luckily. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some unusually vivid dreams.”
He nods. “You’re right,” he says. Seishirou’s usually right about things. “I’m sorry for being a burden last night.”
Seishirou picks up Subaru’s wrist and turns it over-his fingertips are warm, trailing down the veins in Subaru’s arm, and Subaru shivers. “Try to sleep,” he says. “You’ve had a long night, and you need to get better. No more delirium.”
“No more delirium,” Subaru echoes.