memento mori, Chapter One (X/Yami no Matsuei, Subaru, Tsuzuki, Hisoka)
So here it is.
After consulting with a few people, and after tearing my hair out over this thing for god knows how long, I've decided to make it chaptered and thus hopefully easier for readers to digest. It's going to be a monster, but I'm going to be damn proud of it. I already am.
This fic works if you know either Yami no Matsuei canon or X canon. I think. I hope. The two series do have similarities. For those wishing additional context, I direct you to Yami no Matsuei's wiki page and Wikipedia's summation of Subaru's story (or Tokyo Babylon and the Relevant Parts of X in Five Minutes, if you're feeling irreverent).
memento mori. X/Yami no Matsuei crossover, Subaru, Tsuzuki, and Hisoka. PG for this chapter, R for later ones. 4370 words thus far. Significant spoilers for the Kyoto arc of Yami no Matsuei and for post-Volume 18 of X.
On the eve of Shoro Nagashi, the second division of Enmacho dispatches its shinigami to halt a series of mysterious supernatural deaths; miles away, the Japanese government sends the newest Sakurazukamori to do the same. Three men, two investigations, one killer - how all are alike and unlike.
chapter one: Subaru extrapolates, or tries to, while Hisoka refuses to crack.
memento mori
Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur,
Mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur,
Omnia mors perimit et nulli miseretur.
Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus.
08.11.2000
Subaru wakes up, which means he must have gone to sleep last night. He wouldn’t say it surprises him; his body needs things, certain things to function, and these days his body takes what it needs and leaves his mind out of the equation, frees it to do whatever it is that it wants.
A network of cracks spiderwebs across his ceiling. He thinks the gaps have widened since last night, thinks he sees a thin trail of paint flecks cascading down from the largest of the faults. The paint dust gathers at the corner of his bed, piles there. He should clean it up. He should call his landlord. The cracks might mean that the structural integrity of the building’s weak, that the tenement could collapse at any moment. His ceiling could, at any rate, and then he’d be buried under rubble, ashy white dust and blocks of plaster. He should call his landlord before that happens.
The floorboards feel slick under his toes. The air conditioning stopped working last week. Subaru hasn’t called the landlord about that, either. He pulls on a pair of socks; they cling to his feet and stick to the wood, glued in place with sweat. He paces, makes a few circuits around the futon and towards the window and past his door and the bare floorboards make it seem like he’s walking more than he actually is, give this place the illusion of space, of air.
He’s accumulated some things in this room, of course, just from living. The futon. A wall calendar, plain and businesslike, certain characters scrawled on it in black ink and certain other characters in red. A bookshelf, bare save for a few necessary tools. (He tells himself he doesn’t have time to read for pleasure, and it’s true enough, or at least he believes it to be true. The two aren’t quite the same.) A computer. His cell phones: two different numbers, two different service providers. Nobody uses pagers anymore, they all carry cell phones. He wonders what they’ll use after they’ve tired of cell phones, and he’s not sure how he feels about the fact that he’ll probably live to see the change. Planned obsolescence, they call it.
There’s also a mirror. The mirror is a constant.
“Good morning, nee-san,” he says.
Subaru extrapolates, or tries to, pictures his nose and lips on a rounder version of his face, softer. Fuller hair, fuller curves. Would her taste in clothes have sobered at all by now? He doubts it. Her eyes remain blank in his mind, unfinished. He can’t draw from himself to create her eyes.
Shower. He twists the spigot for cold water and leaves the hot untouched. The chill envelopes him, drowns him, cascades down his skin. His eyes stay half-lidded to ward off the water and the wakefulness associated with it. He thinks he remembers to wash his hair. He watches the water swirl down the drain, past the faded pink ring circling it.
The stain won’t ever come out, he thinks. He turns the water off, pulls a towel around his hips, drips water onto the tile with each step he takes and leaves puddles stagnating behind him.
The Sakurazukamori’s cell phone hums. One new voice message. He punches in his password, holds the phone up to his ear, and listens.
It’s straightforward, succinct, not couched in metaphor or flowery phrases. It’s just what he has to do. The message tells him he has to go to Nagasaki, uncover the culprit behind a string of supernatural assaults and murders, and end it. End them. He erases the message. The words are seared into his memory.
Subaru braces his forearm on the wall, pillows his head in the crook of his elbow. In his mind’s eye, he sees the pink ring around his drain widening, flushing a darker red.
***
“They what?” Tsuzuki asks through a mouthful of chocolate cake, so it comes out more like “Thegg whuff?” He sprays crumbs all over the table, scatters them over Hisoka’s copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Hisoka shakes the book to get all the crumbs off-he doesn’t want any chocolate stains smearing the pages-bookmarks the page he’s on, and sets it down.
“The victims’ bodies are alive,” Chief Konoe repeats. “Some of them.”
“Technically,” Tatsumi adds.
Hisoka leans forward in his chair. Tsuzuki’s stopped eating, for once; looks like his brain’s finally caught up with his mouth. Even his emotions settle down a little, turn into background murmurs instead of giddy shouts. “Then why is this our jurisdiction, if they’re not dead?”
“Their spirits are gone,” Chief Konoe says. “As far as we can determine.”
“So they’re as good as dead,” Hisoka says.
“More to the point,” Tatsumi says, “their spirits are missing. They haven’t returned to their appropriate jurisdictions, and we’ve had no word from any of the other districts about them, or about where they might be. They’ve vanished.” He shoves his glasses further up his nose, hard enough to jam the wire bridge into his skin. A spike of emotion accompanies it-not annoyance, not quite, frustration, that’s more apt-strong enough to pierce through even Tatsumi’s reserves of control.
Hisoka knows how to read what’s unsaid. “Or they’ve been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” Tsuzuki swallows, frowns. “Not many things have the power to do that.”
Hisoka stares at his hands. Don’t have the power to, or don’t choose to? How hard is obliteration?
“Thankfully,” Tatsumi says. “But you’re right, it’s a possibility, and a sobering one.” He sighs. “The timing’s inconvenient, too. We have to commit most of our resources towards preparations for Shoro Nagashi, and after the festival concludes we’ll have our hands full processing the new arrivals.”
“So we get to avoid the Shoro Nagashi rush this year?” Tsuzuki rests his elbows on the table and-Hisoka’s not sure how a man of Tsuzuki’s age and size manages to bounce so well, but he’s definitely bouncing.
Chief Konoe kneads the thick lines in his forehead. “It’s imperative that you get to Nagasaki as fast as possible-”
Nagasaki. Everything in him clenches, contracts, tightens: his jaw, his fingers, his toes. His nails gouge his palm, but-no, it’s stupid. The marks aren’t prickling, just the hair on his arms.
“Hisoka.” Tsuzuki leans over, smiles, and Hisoka fights the impulse to jerk back in his seat away from him. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he says. Lies. He can’t tell if Tsuzuki knows that part; the same concern still radiates from him, but softer-there’s a real hesitance to Tsuzuki’s feelings sometimes, not subtlety, but hesitance-but he has to know, he’s not as stupid as he pretends to be. Not usually, anyway.
“We don’t have any suspects, do we?” Tsuzuki asks.
Irritation, beaded like sweat, breaks out over Chief Konoe’s brow. “That’s your job.”
Tsuzuki holds up his hands in surrender, laughs, and Hisoka pulls The Brothers Karamazov closer to him, thumbs the corner. It’s normal, or what passes for normal here. It’s a job. They’ll bring back kasutera for Chief Konoe and Tatsumi and bring back the soul they’re supposed to and Tsuzuki’s smile will be like glass veined with cracks the entire time but he’ll keep smiling because he has to, just like Hisoka has to call him an idiot because Tsuzuki wouldn’t believe him if Hisoka called him anything else.
“Three of the victims are at the National Nagasaki Medical Center,” Tatsumi says. “We’ve arranged permission for you to visit them, but we don’t expect you to stay there long.”
“Three of the victims,” Hisoka repeats. “How many people has this person killed?”
Tatsumi’s sigh is sharp, short. “We don’t know,” he says. “We know of at least four more missing spirits that might be tied to this. They’ve died, as far as we can determine, but we can’t find any traces of them.”
Hisoka sets The Brothers Karamazov aside for good, or at least for now. Since Tsuzuki hasn’t asked yet, he will. Tsuzuki almost never asks, he just works with what he’s given. “When were the three of them hospitalized?” he asks. “Was it before or after the other four disappeared?”
Chief Konoe’s mood darkens into a rolling cloud, thick and churning. Hisoka can’t quite penetrate its depths, not when he’s keeping his empathy as passive as it ever gets. “Before.”
Tsuzuki’s fork clatters against his plate. His voice comes back to the rest of them from somewhere far away. “So they learned how to kill…”
“Yeah,” Hisoka says. “So we need to find them before they do it again. Right?”
Tsuzuki smiles again, grins as wide as he can, but his heart went to the same place his voice did and it still hasn’t quite come back yet. “Right. And we’ll bring you back kasutera, Chief.”
***
08.12.2000
The National Nagasaki Medical Center’s symbol is simple, elegant, curved. A waterfowl with differently colored wings, pink for heartwarming care, blue for professionalism, and four waves rippling out from beneath it, representing the transmission of information to the rest of the world. Subaru finds this out from a pamphlet his employers enclosed in an unmarked white envelope, nestled next to his plane ticket. He finds out how many beds the hospital has available (six hundred fifty-six hundred ten general, forty psychiatric), the average length of a hospital stay at the National Nagasaki Medical Center (sixteen days), the number of surgeries the hospital performs (approximately four thousand a year). He learns about the hospital’s registered kidney transplant facility. He flips to a diagram of the inpatient treatment wards at the back and sees that they’ve named each ward after a flower: dandelions for the oncology ward, orchids for critical care, rhododendrons for orthopedics.
Sakura blossoms for neurological disease. That’s where Matsumoto-san will be.
He crumples the pamphlet in his fist and keeps it balled up in his hand for the duration of the flight. The flight attendant drones on about safety procedures and the cost of in-flight beverages and the couple in front of him chatters about the best places to see the woven boats drift down the river during Shoro Nagashi; Subaru crinkles the paper when they get too loud and listens to that instead. When he finally throws it away, pink and blue ink streaks across the palms of his gloves, smears together into a bruise-like purple. He ducks into the bathroom before he heads to the hospital and changes the soiled gloves for clean ones-his working gloves, he thinks of them as, though they’re the wrong texture for that.
The National Nagasaki Medical Center is clean, modern, white. Even the asymmetry’s chic: a covered walkway extends from the hospital proper into the parking lot, a sharp wedge of wall juts out from the auxiliary building in front and creates a triangular patch of green space, and the facility as a whole favors its right side. Subaru’s not sure what to make of the intersections of curves and angles. He’s ushered inside, gets the feeling he’s scuffing up the polished jade-green floors as he shuffles through them, makes a few appreciative noises about the tasteful wood paneling in the patients’ rooms, the skylights, the plants and the windows and the curtains and the view. The scent of flowers cloys the air in the wards, tries to overpower the twin odors of waste and death. Yes, it’s very picturesque. Yes, it’s far more pleasant than most of the hospitals he’s been in. Yes, he understands why the National Nagasaki Medical Center has the reputation it does.
No, he doesn’t know if he can make Matsumoto-san better. He’s not a doctor. “But I’ll try,” he says. They smile at him, polished and photogenic, and the lie twists in Subaru’s stomach, gnaws at his chest.
Seiji Matsumoto is forty-one, hair graying at the temples, a small roll of fat sagging around his middle, crow’s feet lining the corners of his eyes. He has a wife, two children (young, if the childish characters scrawled on the card resting by Matsumoto’s bed are any indication), and a good-sized apartment in Nagasaki-shi. Subaru looks at the man’s yellow-stained fingertips resting inert on the sheets. He pulls an ofuda out of his coat pocket, a white one, lays it against Matsumoto’s chest, concentrates. His hands know what positions to form, they’ve known since he was a child, so he leaves them be and probes for malignant spirits, the vestiges of possession. Nothing; the room’s as clean as it appears to be, starched walls and scoured wood.
Has Matsumoto gone Within? He glances at Matsumoto’s hospital records, thoughtfully arranged for him in a plastic folder. Very attractive presentation, if he cared about that sort of thing anymore. An ambulance picked him up in Saikai after they received a phone call from the Oshima Island Hotel. The report glosses over the circumstances under which he was staying there, but Subaru can guess, can imagine all the sordid possibilities. His wife-who must have wondered the same things, must have guessed even if she schooled herself not to think about sheets rank with sweat and furtive phone calls, and does it even matter what she thought? The result’s the same, no matter what the reality was-his wife had him transferred to the National Nagasaki Medical Center. He’s been comatose for seven days, a husk hooked to monitors. In some ways, Subaru envies him.
He presses his palm to Matsumoto’s forehead, can’t feel any change, doubts he’d feel anything even if he wasn’t wearing gloves. Separating his consciousness from his body is easy, easier now than it ever was. His limbs go slack without much encouragement. “Noubou akyasha,” he chants. “Kyarabaya on arikya maribori sowaka.” The words are monotone, colorless, some would say centered but he knows the truth. “Noubou akyasha kyarabaya on arikya maribori sowaka.”
The final syllable rings out in the flat air. The sound’s separate from him now, he’s separate from himself now, drifting down into Matsumoto. Matsumoto offers no resistance, yields his consciousness, or what remains of it, up to Subaru.
Noubou akyasha kyarabaya on arikaya maribori sowaka.
The ebb and tide and thought-eddies of consciousness don’t tug at Subaru as he submerges himself in Matsumoto’s mind. No barriers, no resistance. He searches for a pinprick of light on the horizon, the glimmer of another presence, but sees nothing. The darkness stretches, engulfs, beckons. He walks, can’t gauge his progress with nothing to mark it, but it’s better than staying still. He imagines his footsteps echoing, the sound swallowed by the ruins of Matsumoto’s awareness.
Ruins. He glances up, or in a direction close enough to it. No torn-down structures, no abandoned buildings, no piles of rubble-no sign of a struggle, only cessation, as if nothing here ever was in the first place. He walks and can’t tell the direction, searches and can’t see, can’t pierce the veil if there is indeed something to pierce. He’s beginning to doubt it.
Subaru calls to Matsumoto with his mind, sends his power rippling through the abyss. Not even echoes return to him. He pulls the threads of his consciousness back; it’s slow going, they want to keep extending forever, spiraling into nothingness. Subaru could lose himself here. (Or is he lost already?) He threads power between his fingertips, chants the sutras for finding, summoning, fetching. He seals the spell with an On powerful enough to make his teeth, or the impressions of his teeth, chatter. The spell curls out of his palms, rises higher and higher, stretches-vanishes.
“Matsumoto-san?” he calls. “Seiji-kun?” He silently apologizes for the familiarity, but it can’t be helped. Either way, it yields no response.
If he’s Within, he’s deep Within, further than Subaru’s gone before, further than he thought anyone could go, but humanity’s surprisingly adept at engineering descents, he thinks in a voice not his own. He weighs the risks: if he stays here, he’ll never find Matsumoto, but if he goes deeper, he might damage them both.
It doesn’t matter. He’ll live or he’ll die, and several somethings have a vested interest in keeping him alive so he doubts it’s the latter, and Matsumoto-san exists but Subaru can’t say much more for him than that, can’t see how the vaulting shadows around him can get any higher than they already are.
Noubou akyasha kyarabaya on arikaya maribori sowaka.
He descends, sinks through liquid layers of consciousness until his motion stills. He’s aware of himself only vaguely; at this level he’s a bundle of power and thought and little else. And the darkness yawns, cavernous, not sucking him under but simply-existing, hollow, it’s the architecture but not the substance. There is no substance here. There is nothing.
“Seiji-kun?” he calls, but the darkness swallows the sound whole.
Subaru concentrates and pulls the drifting fragments of himself back together, fights against the suggestion embedded in this place to expand and stretch and spread himself thin until there’s nothing left to link him together, until every part of him is lost and apart. He wonders how, if, that would feel different, or if the point is that he wouldn’t feel.
***
Tsuzuki hates hospitals. He doesn’t say as much, doesn’t have to, and Hisoka doesn’t need his empathy to see it, though the empathy helps or at least compounds things. His hands tighten, his smile strains, his shoulders stiffen, he’s laughing at some idiotic joke but words bubble up beneath it: no no no no no.
Shut up, Hisoka tells himself, forces down the rising tide of memories. This hospital’s different. And if he acts like he’s afraid, Tsuzuki will probably crack, too, and then they’ll have to spend even more time than they intended in this damn place.
The walls are starched white, scrubbed hard and stripped of color. Hisoka doesn’t look at them, ignores the lingering impressions too strong for bleach to scour away, or tries to. He’s learning; he creates a kind of filter for himself, separates the background emotional noise, the everyday chatter, from the real peaks and spikes of fear-panic-anger-sadness. Enough of them penetrate his defenses, though, enough of them are strong enough to-or he’s too weak to ward most of them away. He grinds his teeth together, rubs his forehead with the heel of his palm. The patients and staff look at the two of them briefly, but their gazes slide away after a few seconds, their attention diverted elsewhere. The windows stay bright, the potted plants grow, but the people wither, shrink and collapse in their wheelchairs and beds. Hisoka breathes in, breathes out and pushes the emotions back: his, theirs.
“We need to go to the sakura ward,” he says
“Right,” Tsuzuki says, still smiling, his hands shoved in his trenchcoat pockets like he’s a kid trying on his father’s coat for the first time. “I still think we could have passed ourselves off as doctors.”
“Idiot.” Hisoka scuffs the tile with the toe of his shoe, dulls the mirror-bright polish. “I look too young, and you don’t look like a doctor. Or act like one.”
“I could,” Tsuzuki says, but he’s happy enough to let the matter drop.
“The Gushoshin haven’t found anything to connect the victims yet, have they?” Hisoka asks as the elevator door dings shut behind them.
Tsuzuki shakes his head. “No. The three of them aren’t the same age, aren’t the same sex, don’t have similar occupations-not even close, one’s a salaryman and one’s a construction worker and the woman’s a teacher-and it doesn’t look like they’ve ever met before.”
“There has to be something,” Hisoka says. “Something tying them together. There always is, even if the connection doesn’t make sense to anyone else.”
Tsuzuki’s smile softens, flickers. “I know.” He pauses and runs his thumb over his lapel, smoothing it. “Hisoka, are you-”
“I’m fine.” He’s not going to wilt. He hates hospitals, fine, but he hates or at least really dislikes a lot of things and he manages to get through them without falling to pieces. “Where did they find the victims?”
Tsuzuki ticks them off. “They found Matsumoto-san in Saikai, Tanaka-san in Kinkai, and Nakamura-san in Nagayo.”
“So whoever’s doing this is moving.”
“It looks like it,” Tsuzuki agrees.
“Moving towards Nagasaki.” Hisoka stares at his reflection in the polished steel. Tsuzuki looks ready to respond, but the door dings open and cuts him off before he can-
-and Hisoka’s blasted with fearpainpleading, rushing towards him and spiraling and picking up enough strength to batter his defenses, wear them down, shred them-I don’t want to die I don’t want to die, the chant swells up in the background and Hisoka grips his head, staggers forward, falls-
Tsuzuki’s hand closes around his arm before he does, hauls him upright. His breath slams back into his lungs; he’s not leaning on Tsuzuki or anything like that, he just lets his head loll back and rest on Tsuzuki’s shoulder.
“Try to smile, okay?” he says. “Not enough people are smiling here.”
Hisoka moves away, scratches the back of his neck. “Matsumoto-san’s in a coma, he won’t notice who’s smiling and who isn’t.”
“Maybe he can feel it,” Tsuzuki says, “the way you can. Well, differently,” he amends, “I don’t think he’s an empath, but you don’t always need to be an empath.”
“I guess.”
so many people reliving so much, speeding through thousands of memories and searching for the meaning in all of them, in all of this, I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die, sharp shrill voices blending with quiet sobbing ones and they’re all saying the same thing-
“Room seven twenty-five,” he says. “The quicker we do this, the quicker we can leave.”
The sakura ward smells like it. Hisoka gags and bites his lip almost hard enough to draw blood. Tsuzuki’s presence at his back prods him forward, propels him towards room seven twenty-five. He just needs to reach room seven twenty-five, just needs to steer as clear as he can of the brains rotting and wasting away in the other rooms, of the lingering atrophy, of who they are being chipped away and worn down until there’s only a husk left.
Yeah, Hisoka hates hospitals. He squeaks his shoes against the tiles, tries to use that sound to jar the others out of his head. It sort of works.
Room seven twenty-five doesn’t look any different than the others. No name’s displayed outside the door, to preserve whatever privacy Matsumoto has left. Hisoka concentrates, acknowledges the presence of the other voices the way Chief Konoe told him to and lets them trickle away, resolve into the background. He keeps a thread of his awareness extended through the thick door-he can’t maintain this for long, but if he can at least get a sense of Matsumoto’s condition…
…sakura.
He flinches back, hisses and raises a hand to his cheek where the ghost of a petal sliced into it seconds ago. “There’s something in there,” he mutters to Tsuzuki. “I don’t think it’s Matsumoto-san.”
Tsuzuki draws an ofuda from his coat pocket, presses it to the door and begins to chant, white lines of power emanating from the paper. He’s not smiling now, but neither is Hisoka. An unearthly wind stirs his bangs, blows them back from his eyes, and sweat glimmers on his forehead. Something in the air breaks with a sickening snap.
“Whoever it is put up strong wards,” he says, his grin returning as he wipes his hand across his brow. “Wards to keep out the dead. They definitely knew what they were doing. I’m kind of winded.” He sounds like it, too. “Let’s go in.”
Hisoka nods, and Tsuzuki shoulders the door open.
A thin man somewhere in his twenties, eyes closed and pale face drawn, splays his palm across Matsumoto’s forehead. He doesn’t move when they enter, but the air in the room shifts: charged, cautious.
Tsuzuki draws two more ofuda. “Stay away from him!” he shouts, heedless of volume, he’s probably going to get the attention of the entire ward, and Hisoka-
Do you like the sakura?
-shakes his head to clear it. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s gone Within,” Tsuzuki says, the ofuda trembling in his hand. “I didn’t realize-if we attack, we could damage both of them.”
“How much more damage can we do to Matsumoto-san?” Hisoka starts to say, but he’s interrupted when the man stirs, draws himself upright, blinks his eyes open and stares at them.
His eyes. One green, one gold.
Different-real, fake, illusion-illusion and sakura-
“What did you do to him?” Tsuzuki asks the man; the sound’s muffled when it reaches Hisoka’s ears, like Tsuzuki’s speaking through cotton.
“He was in this state long before I arrived,” the man says. Low, husky, a smoker’s voice, and the sound of it triggers
a rush of petals, scalding burns and searing kisses…
Hisoka stumbles backwards; the man stretches forward and grabs his wrist, pulls him back to standing-
Do you like the sakura?
It’s because they drink the blood from the corpse underneath the tree. A girl, face like a china doll’s with blank glassy eyes and lips rounded in mild surprise, red dribbling down the front of her dress.
Marks searing the backs of his hands, throbbing, calling, I’ll make a bet with you-
The first stain, and others follow, the tarnish spreads from the first impurity and ruins-ruin-
Hisoka gulps, gasps, tries to force air into his lungs but can’t remember how.
fingers around his throat, blood and smoke and sakura, red raw want threaded with seeping black disgust, spiraling down and down and down and never falling far enough.
Pain, his skin’s alive with it, screaming with it, stabbing agony and it burns deeper than the curse does, wracks him with fever and fire and desire and-
Eyes. One gold, one milky-white, clouded, dead.
The world roars in Hisoka’s ears and goes static.
----
I expect I'll be posting new chapters on a weekly basis or thereabouts.
After consulting with a few people, and after tearing my hair out over this thing for god knows how long, I've decided to make it chaptered and thus hopefully easier for readers to digest. It's going to be a monster, but I'm going to be damn proud of it. I already am.
This fic works if you know either Yami no Matsuei canon or X canon. I think. I hope. The two series do have similarities. For those wishing additional context, I direct you to Yami no Matsuei's wiki page and Wikipedia's summation of Subaru's story (or Tokyo Babylon and the Relevant Parts of X in Five Minutes, if you're feeling irreverent).
memento mori. X/Yami no Matsuei crossover, Subaru, Tsuzuki, and Hisoka. PG for this chapter, R for later ones. 4370 words thus far. Significant spoilers for the Kyoto arc of Yami no Matsuei and for post-Volume 18 of X.
On the eve of Shoro Nagashi, the second division of Enmacho dispatches its shinigami to halt a series of mysterious supernatural deaths; miles away, the Japanese government sends the newest Sakurazukamori to do the same. Three men, two investigations, one killer - how all are alike and unlike.
chapter one: Subaru extrapolates, or tries to, while Hisoka refuses to crack.
memento mori
Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur,
Mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur,
Omnia mors perimit et nulli miseretur.
Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus.
08.11.2000
Subaru wakes up, which means he must have gone to sleep last night. He wouldn’t say it surprises him; his body needs things, certain things to function, and these days his body takes what it needs and leaves his mind out of the equation, frees it to do whatever it is that it wants.
A network of cracks spiderwebs across his ceiling. He thinks the gaps have widened since last night, thinks he sees a thin trail of paint flecks cascading down from the largest of the faults. The paint dust gathers at the corner of his bed, piles there. He should clean it up. He should call his landlord. The cracks might mean that the structural integrity of the building’s weak, that the tenement could collapse at any moment. His ceiling could, at any rate, and then he’d be buried under rubble, ashy white dust and blocks of plaster. He should call his landlord before that happens.
The floorboards feel slick under his toes. The air conditioning stopped working last week. Subaru hasn’t called the landlord about that, either. He pulls on a pair of socks; they cling to his feet and stick to the wood, glued in place with sweat. He paces, makes a few circuits around the futon and towards the window and past his door and the bare floorboards make it seem like he’s walking more than he actually is, give this place the illusion of space, of air.
He’s accumulated some things in this room, of course, just from living. The futon. A wall calendar, plain and businesslike, certain characters scrawled on it in black ink and certain other characters in red. A bookshelf, bare save for a few necessary tools. (He tells himself he doesn’t have time to read for pleasure, and it’s true enough, or at least he believes it to be true. The two aren’t quite the same.) A computer. His cell phones: two different numbers, two different service providers. Nobody uses pagers anymore, they all carry cell phones. He wonders what they’ll use after they’ve tired of cell phones, and he’s not sure how he feels about the fact that he’ll probably live to see the change. Planned obsolescence, they call it.
There’s also a mirror. The mirror is a constant.
“Good morning, nee-san,” he says.
Subaru extrapolates, or tries to, pictures his nose and lips on a rounder version of his face, softer. Fuller hair, fuller curves. Would her taste in clothes have sobered at all by now? He doubts it. Her eyes remain blank in his mind, unfinished. He can’t draw from himself to create her eyes.
Shower. He twists the spigot for cold water and leaves the hot untouched. The chill envelopes him, drowns him, cascades down his skin. His eyes stay half-lidded to ward off the water and the wakefulness associated with it. He thinks he remembers to wash his hair. He watches the water swirl down the drain, past the faded pink ring circling it.
The stain won’t ever come out, he thinks. He turns the water off, pulls a towel around his hips, drips water onto the tile with each step he takes and leaves puddles stagnating behind him.
The Sakurazukamori’s cell phone hums. One new voice message. He punches in his password, holds the phone up to his ear, and listens.
It’s straightforward, succinct, not couched in metaphor or flowery phrases. It’s just what he has to do. The message tells him he has to go to Nagasaki, uncover the culprit behind a string of supernatural assaults and murders, and end it. End them. He erases the message. The words are seared into his memory.
Subaru braces his forearm on the wall, pillows his head in the crook of his elbow. In his mind’s eye, he sees the pink ring around his drain widening, flushing a darker red.
***
“They what?” Tsuzuki asks through a mouthful of chocolate cake, so it comes out more like “Thegg whuff?” He sprays crumbs all over the table, scatters them over Hisoka’s copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Hisoka shakes the book to get all the crumbs off-he doesn’t want any chocolate stains smearing the pages-bookmarks the page he’s on, and sets it down.
“The victims’ bodies are alive,” Chief Konoe repeats. “Some of them.”
“Technically,” Tatsumi adds.
Hisoka leans forward in his chair. Tsuzuki’s stopped eating, for once; looks like his brain’s finally caught up with his mouth. Even his emotions settle down a little, turn into background murmurs instead of giddy shouts. “Then why is this our jurisdiction, if they’re not dead?”
“Their spirits are gone,” Chief Konoe says. “As far as we can determine.”
“So they’re as good as dead,” Hisoka says.
“More to the point,” Tatsumi says, “their spirits are missing. They haven’t returned to their appropriate jurisdictions, and we’ve had no word from any of the other districts about them, or about where they might be. They’ve vanished.” He shoves his glasses further up his nose, hard enough to jam the wire bridge into his skin. A spike of emotion accompanies it-not annoyance, not quite, frustration, that’s more apt-strong enough to pierce through even Tatsumi’s reserves of control.
Hisoka knows how to read what’s unsaid. “Or they’ve been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” Tsuzuki swallows, frowns. “Not many things have the power to do that.”
Hisoka stares at his hands. Don’t have the power to, or don’t choose to? How hard is obliteration?
“Thankfully,” Tatsumi says. “But you’re right, it’s a possibility, and a sobering one.” He sighs. “The timing’s inconvenient, too. We have to commit most of our resources towards preparations for Shoro Nagashi, and after the festival concludes we’ll have our hands full processing the new arrivals.”
“So we get to avoid the Shoro Nagashi rush this year?” Tsuzuki rests his elbows on the table and-Hisoka’s not sure how a man of Tsuzuki’s age and size manages to bounce so well, but he’s definitely bouncing.
Chief Konoe kneads the thick lines in his forehead. “It’s imperative that you get to Nagasaki as fast as possible-”
Nagasaki. Everything in him clenches, contracts, tightens: his jaw, his fingers, his toes. His nails gouge his palm, but-no, it’s stupid. The marks aren’t prickling, just the hair on his arms.
“Hisoka.” Tsuzuki leans over, smiles, and Hisoka fights the impulse to jerk back in his seat away from him. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he says. Lies. He can’t tell if Tsuzuki knows that part; the same concern still radiates from him, but softer-there’s a real hesitance to Tsuzuki’s feelings sometimes, not subtlety, but hesitance-but he has to know, he’s not as stupid as he pretends to be. Not usually, anyway.
“We don’t have any suspects, do we?” Tsuzuki asks.
Irritation, beaded like sweat, breaks out over Chief Konoe’s brow. “That’s your job.”
Tsuzuki holds up his hands in surrender, laughs, and Hisoka pulls The Brothers Karamazov closer to him, thumbs the corner. It’s normal, or what passes for normal here. It’s a job. They’ll bring back kasutera for Chief Konoe and Tatsumi and bring back the soul they’re supposed to and Tsuzuki’s smile will be like glass veined with cracks the entire time but he’ll keep smiling because he has to, just like Hisoka has to call him an idiot because Tsuzuki wouldn’t believe him if Hisoka called him anything else.
“Three of the victims are at the National Nagasaki Medical Center,” Tatsumi says. “We’ve arranged permission for you to visit them, but we don’t expect you to stay there long.”
“Three of the victims,” Hisoka repeats. “How many people has this person killed?”
Tatsumi’s sigh is sharp, short. “We don’t know,” he says. “We know of at least four more missing spirits that might be tied to this. They’ve died, as far as we can determine, but we can’t find any traces of them.”
Hisoka sets The Brothers Karamazov aside for good, or at least for now. Since Tsuzuki hasn’t asked yet, he will. Tsuzuki almost never asks, he just works with what he’s given. “When were the three of them hospitalized?” he asks. “Was it before or after the other four disappeared?”
Chief Konoe’s mood darkens into a rolling cloud, thick and churning. Hisoka can’t quite penetrate its depths, not when he’s keeping his empathy as passive as it ever gets. “Before.”
Tsuzuki’s fork clatters against his plate. His voice comes back to the rest of them from somewhere far away. “So they learned how to kill…”
“Yeah,” Hisoka says. “So we need to find them before they do it again. Right?”
Tsuzuki smiles again, grins as wide as he can, but his heart went to the same place his voice did and it still hasn’t quite come back yet. “Right. And we’ll bring you back kasutera, Chief.”
***
08.12.2000
The National Nagasaki Medical Center’s symbol is simple, elegant, curved. A waterfowl with differently colored wings, pink for heartwarming care, blue for professionalism, and four waves rippling out from beneath it, representing the transmission of information to the rest of the world. Subaru finds this out from a pamphlet his employers enclosed in an unmarked white envelope, nestled next to his plane ticket. He finds out how many beds the hospital has available (six hundred fifty-six hundred ten general, forty psychiatric), the average length of a hospital stay at the National Nagasaki Medical Center (sixteen days), the number of surgeries the hospital performs (approximately four thousand a year). He learns about the hospital’s registered kidney transplant facility. He flips to a diagram of the inpatient treatment wards at the back and sees that they’ve named each ward after a flower: dandelions for the oncology ward, orchids for critical care, rhododendrons for orthopedics.
Sakura blossoms for neurological disease. That’s where Matsumoto-san will be.
He crumples the pamphlet in his fist and keeps it balled up in his hand for the duration of the flight. The flight attendant drones on about safety procedures and the cost of in-flight beverages and the couple in front of him chatters about the best places to see the woven boats drift down the river during Shoro Nagashi; Subaru crinkles the paper when they get too loud and listens to that instead. When he finally throws it away, pink and blue ink streaks across the palms of his gloves, smears together into a bruise-like purple. He ducks into the bathroom before he heads to the hospital and changes the soiled gloves for clean ones-his working gloves, he thinks of them as, though they’re the wrong texture for that.
The National Nagasaki Medical Center is clean, modern, white. Even the asymmetry’s chic: a covered walkway extends from the hospital proper into the parking lot, a sharp wedge of wall juts out from the auxiliary building in front and creates a triangular patch of green space, and the facility as a whole favors its right side. Subaru’s not sure what to make of the intersections of curves and angles. He’s ushered inside, gets the feeling he’s scuffing up the polished jade-green floors as he shuffles through them, makes a few appreciative noises about the tasteful wood paneling in the patients’ rooms, the skylights, the plants and the windows and the curtains and the view. The scent of flowers cloys the air in the wards, tries to overpower the twin odors of waste and death. Yes, it’s very picturesque. Yes, it’s far more pleasant than most of the hospitals he’s been in. Yes, he understands why the National Nagasaki Medical Center has the reputation it does.
No, he doesn’t know if he can make Matsumoto-san better. He’s not a doctor. “But I’ll try,” he says. They smile at him, polished and photogenic, and the lie twists in Subaru’s stomach, gnaws at his chest.
Seiji Matsumoto is forty-one, hair graying at the temples, a small roll of fat sagging around his middle, crow’s feet lining the corners of his eyes. He has a wife, two children (young, if the childish characters scrawled on the card resting by Matsumoto’s bed are any indication), and a good-sized apartment in Nagasaki-shi. Subaru looks at the man’s yellow-stained fingertips resting inert on the sheets. He pulls an ofuda out of his coat pocket, a white one, lays it against Matsumoto’s chest, concentrates. His hands know what positions to form, they’ve known since he was a child, so he leaves them be and probes for malignant spirits, the vestiges of possession. Nothing; the room’s as clean as it appears to be, starched walls and scoured wood.
Has Matsumoto gone Within? He glances at Matsumoto’s hospital records, thoughtfully arranged for him in a plastic folder. Very attractive presentation, if he cared about that sort of thing anymore. An ambulance picked him up in Saikai after they received a phone call from the Oshima Island Hotel. The report glosses over the circumstances under which he was staying there, but Subaru can guess, can imagine all the sordid possibilities. His wife-who must have wondered the same things, must have guessed even if she schooled herself not to think about sheets rank with sweat and furtive phone calls, and does it even matter what she thought? The result’s the same, no matter what the reality was-his wife had him transferred to the National Nagasaki Medical Center. He’s been comatose for seven days, a husk hooked to monitors. In some ways, Subaru envies him.
He presses his palm to Matsumoto’s forehead, can’t feel any change, doubts he’d feel anything even if he wasn’t wearing gloves. Separating his consciousness from his body is easy, easier now than it ever was. His limbs go slack without much encouragement. “Noubou akyasha,” he chants. “Kyarabaya on arikya maribori sowaka.” The words are monotone, colorless, some would say centered but he knows the truth. “Noubou akyasha kyarabaya on arikya maribori sowaka.”
The final syllable rings out in the flat air. The sound’s separate from him now, he’s separate from himself now, drifting down into Matsumoto. Matsumoto offers no resistance, yields his consciousness, or what remains of it, up to Subaru.
Noubou akyasha kyarabaya on arikaya maribori sowaka.
The ebb and tide and thought-eddies of consciousness don’t tug at Subaru as he submerges himself in Matsumoto’s mind. No barriers, no resistance. He searches for a pinprick of light on the horizon, the glimmer of another presence, but sees nothing. The darkness stretches, engulfs, beckons. He walks, can’t gauge his progress with nothing to mark it, but it’s better than staying still. He imagines his footsteps echoing, the sound swallowed by the ruins of Matsumoto’s awareness.
Ruins. He glances up, or in a direction close enough to it. No torn-down structures, no abandoned buildings, no piles of rubble-no sign of a struggle, only cessation, as if nothing here ever was in the first place. He walks and can’t tell the direction, searches and can’t see, can’t pierce the veil if there is indeed something to pierce. He’s beginning to doubt it.
Subaru calls to Matsumoto with his mind, sends his power rippling through the abyss. Not even echoes return to him. He pulls the threads of his consciousness back; it’s slow going, they want to keep extending forever, spiraling into nothingness. Subaru could lose himself here. (Or is he lost already?) He threads power between his fingertips, chants the sutras for finding, summoning, fetching. He seals the spell with an On powerful enough to make his teeth, or the impressions of his teeth, chatter. The spell curls out of his palms, rises higher and higher, stretches-vanishes.
“Matsumoto-san?” he calls. “Seiji-kun?” He silently apologizes for the familiarity, but it can’t be helped. Either way, it yields no response.
If he’s Within, he’s deep Within, further than Subaru’s gone before, further than he thought anyone could go, but humanity’s surprisingly adept at engineering descents, he thinks in a voice not his own. He weighs the risks: if he stays here, he’ll never find Matsumoto, but if he goes deeper, he might damage them both.
It doesn’t matter. He’ll live or he’ll die, and several somethings have a vested interest in keeping him alive so he doubts it’s the latter, and Matsumoto-san exists but Subaru can’t say much more for him than that, can’t see how the vaulting shadows around him can get any higher than they already are.
Noubou akyasha kyarabaya on arikaya maribori sowaka.
He descends, sinks through liquid layers of consciousness until his motion stills. He’s aware of himself only vaguely; at this level he’s a bundle of power and thought and little else. And the darkness yawns, cavernous, not sucking him under but simply-existing, hollow, it’s the architecture but not the substance. There is no substance here. There is nothing.
“Seiji-kun?” he calls, but the darkness swallows the sound whole.
Subaru concentrates and pulls the drifting fragments of himself back together, fights against the suggestion embedded in this place to expand and stretch and spread himself thin until there’s nothing left to link him together, until every part of him is lost and apart. He wonders how, if, that would feel different, or if the point is that he wouldn’t feel.
***
Tsuzuki hates hospitals. He doesn’t say as much, doesn’t have to, and Hisoka doesn’t need his empathy to see it, though the empathy helps or at least compounds things. His hands tighten, his smile strains, his shoulders stiffen, he’s laughing at some idiotic joke but words bubble up beneath it: no no no no no.
Shut up, Hisoka tells himself, forces down the rising tide of memories. This hospital’s different. And if he acts like he’s afraid, Tsuzuki will probably crack, too, and then they’ll have to spend even more time than they intended in this damn place.
The walls are starched white, scrubbed hard and stripped of color. Hisoka doesn’t look at them, ignores the lingering impressions too strong for bleach to scour away, or tries to. He’s learning; he creates a kind of filter for himself, separates the background emotional noise, the everyday chatter, from the real peaks and spikes of fear-panic-anger-sadness. Enough of them penetrate his defenses, though, enough of them are strong enough to-or he’s too weak to ward most of them away. He grinds his teeth together, rubs his forehead with the heel of his palm. The patients and staff look at the two of them briefly, but their gazes slide away after a few seconds, their attention diverted elsewhere. The windows stay bright, the potted plants grow, but the people wither, shrink and collapse in their wheelchairs and beds. Hisoka breathes in, breathes out and pushes the emotions back: his, theirs.
“We need to go to the sakura ward,” he says
“Right,” Tsuzuki says, still smiling, his hands shoved in his trenchcoat pockets like he’s a kid trying on his father’s coat for the first time. “I still think we could have passed ourselves off as doctors.”
“Idiot.” Hisoka scuffs the tile with the toe of his shoe, dulls the mirror-bright polish. “I look too young, and you don’t look like a doctor. Or act like one.”
“I could,” Tsuzuki says, but he’s happy enough to let the matter drop.
“The Gushoshin haven’t found anything to connect the victims yet, have they?” Hisoka asks as the elevator door dings shut behind them.
Tsuzuki shakes his head. “No. The three of them aren’t the same age, aren’t the same sex, don’t have similar occupations-not even close, one’s a salaryman and one’s a construction worker and the woman’s a teacher-and it doesn’t look like they’ve ever met before.”
“There has to be something,” Hisoka says. “Something tying them together. There always is, even if the connection doesn’t make sense to anyone else.”
Tsuzuki’s smile softens, flickers. “I know.” He pauses and runs his thumb over his lapel, smoothing it. “Hisoka, are you-”
“I’m fine.” He’s not going to wilt. He hates hospitals, fine, but he hates or at least really dislikes a lot of things and he manages to get through them without falling to pieces. “Where did they find the victims?”
Tsuzuki ticks them off. “They found Matsumoto-san in Saikai, Tanaka-san in Kinkai, and Nakamura-san in Nagayo.”
“So whoever’s doing this is moving.”
“It looks like it,” Tsuzuki agrees.
“Moving towards Nagasaki.” Hisoka stares at his reflection in the polished steel. Tsuzuki looks ready to respond, but the door dings open and cuts him off before he can-
-and Hisoka’s blasted with fearpainpleading, rushing towards him and spiraling and picking up enough strength to batter his defenses, wear them down, shred them-I don’t want to die I don’t want to die, the chant swells up in the background and Hisoka grips his head, staggers forward, falls-
Tsuzuki’s hand closes around his arm before he does, hauls him upright. His breath slams back into his lungs; he’s not leaning on Tsuzuki or anything like that, he just lets his head loll back and rest on Tsuzuki’s shoulder.
“Try to smile, okay?” he says. “Not enough people are smiling here.”
Hisoka moves away, scratches the back of his neck. “Matsumoto-san’s in a coma, he won’t notice who’s smiling and who isn’t.”
“Maybe he can feel it,” Tsuzuki says, “the way you can. Well, differently,” he amends, “I don’t think he’s an empath, but you don’t always need to be an empath.”
“I guess.”
so many people reliving so much, speeding through thousands of memories and searching for the meaning in all of them, in all of this, I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die, sharp shrill voices blending with quiet sobbing ones and they’re all saying the same thing-
“Room seven twenty-five,” he says. “The quicker we do this, the quicker we can leave.”
The sakura ward smells like it. Hisoka gags and bites his lip almost hard enough to draw blood. Tsuzuki’s presence at his back prods him forward, propels him towards room seven twenty-five. He just needs to reach room seven twenty-five, just needs to steer as clear as he can of the brains rotting and wasting away in the other rooms, of the lingering atrophy, of who they are being chipped away and worn down until there’s only a husk left.
Yeah, Hisoka hates hospitals. He squeaks his shoes against the tiles, tries to use that sound to jar the others out of his head. It sort of works.
Room seven twenty-five doesn’t look any different than the others. No name’s displayed outside the door, to preserve whatever privacy Matsumoto has left. Hisoka concentrates, acknowledges the presence of the other voices the way Chief Konoe told him to and lets them trickle away, resolve into the background. He keeps a thread of his awareness extended through the thick door-he can’t maintain this for long, but if he can at least get a sense of Matsumoto’s condition…
…sakura.
He flinches back, hisses and raises a hand to his cheek where the ghost of a petal sliced into it seconds ago. “There’s something in there,” he mutters to Tsuzuki. “I don’t think it’s Matsumoto-san.”
Tsuzuki draws an ofuda from his coat pocket, presses it to the door and begins to chant, white lines of power emanating from the paper. He’s not smiling now, but neither is Hisoka. An unearthly wind stirs his bangs, blows them back from his eyes, and sweat glimmers on his forehead. Something in the air breaks with a sickening snap.
“Whoever it is put up strong wards,” he says, his grin returning as he wipes his hand across his brow. “Wards to keep out the dead. They definitely knew what they were doing. I’m kind of winded.” He sounds like it, too. “Let’s go in.”
Hisoka nods, and Tsuzuki shoulders the door open.
A thin man somewhere in his twenties, eyes closed and pale face drawn, splays his palm across Matsumoto’s forehead. He doesn’t move when they enter, but the air in the room shifts: charged, cautious.
Tsuzuki draws two more ofuda. “Stay away from him!” he shouts, heedless of volume, he’s probably going to get the attention of the entire ward, and Hisoka-
Do you like the sakura?
-shakes his head to clear it. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s gone Within,” Tsuzuki says, the ofuda trembling in his hand. “I didn’t realize-if we attack, we could damage both of them.”
“How much more damage can we do to Matsumoto-san?” Hisoka starts to say, but he’s interrupted when the man stirs, draws himself upright, blinks his eyes open and stares at them.
His eyes. One green, one gold.
Different-real, fake, illusion-illusion and sakura-
“What did you do to him?” Tsuzuki asks the man; the sound’s muffled when it reaches Hisoka’s ears, like Tsuzuki’s speaking through cotton.
“He was in this state long before I arrived,” the man says. Low, husky, a smoker’s voice, and the sound of it triggers
a rush of petals, scalding burns and searing kisses…
Hisoka stumbles backwards; the man stretches forward and grabs his wrist, pulls him back to standing-
Do you like the sakura?
It’s because they drink the blood from the corpse underneath the tree. A girl, face like a china doll’s with blank glassy eyes and lips rounded in mild surprise, red dribbling down the front of her dress.
Marks searing the backs of his hands, throbbing, calling, I’ll make a bet with you-
The first stain, and others follow, the tarnish spreads from the first impurity and ruins-ruin-
Hisoka gulps, gasps, tries to force air into his lungs but can’t remember how.
fingers around his throat, blood and smoke and sakura, red raw want threaded with seeping black disgust, spiraling down and down and down and never falling far enough.
Pain, his skin’s alive with it, screaming with it, stabbing agony and it burns deeper than the curse does, wracks him with fever and fire and desire and-
Eyes. One gold, one milky-white, clouded, dead.
The world roars in Hisoka’s ears and goes static.
----
I expect I'll be posting new chapters on a weekly basis or thereabouts.