The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories (draft) - Part 22
A little late this week, what with giant cons chewing up my weekend. Bit of a tricky chapter too - we're back in the present finally, but at the moment that means I'm finally into the build up for one of those rather more important story events and next week's only going to be even more so...
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Side Story 1
By the time he and Doumeki got back, Watanuki would have been just about ready to vault off the bike and go hunting for Kohane the moment they came to a stop - had she not been in immediate view just inside the edge of the camp well before they got there at all. She had two arms full of assorted clothing items when he got close enough to see - why wasn’t quite as obvious, but their campmates must’ve found something harmlessly domestic for her to do with herself. She stopped and waited where she was until the bike pulled up. She looked hopeful and pleased to see him back, but at the same time it was so painfully obvious that nothing unpleasant had happened to her while he was away that he felt momentarily foolish for letting his absence from the camp bother him so much.
“You had a successful trip?” she asked when he reached her.
“We did,” Watanuki confirmed. “We found what we were looking for, anyway, and we shouldn’t need a second trip this time.”
“Was it the ghost I saw following you before? The pale lady with the soft hair and the wings?”
“That was her,” said Watanuki, surprised though not displeased to be having this sort of conversation. If Sakura had ever seen any of his guides, she’d never brought it up, and she’d always seemed so uncomfortable about the whole subject of her ability that he hadn’t liked to raise it. He’d never even imagined being able to talk to someone about it like this. “She seemed sad but hopeful about something. She didn’t say much, but she was very polite.”
Kohane nodded, then looked downwards a trifle uncomfortably. “Kimihiro… could I talk to you about something?”
It wasn’t made to sound like a small kind of ‘something’.
Watanuki glanced back at the bike apprehensively. He should probably have been helping Doumeki store away their haul, but it wasn’t that large this time and didn’t really need to be a two person job. He could get away with sparing some time for whatever Kohane wanted to talk about, especially when she was still so new to their camp and had so much adjusting to do.
“Okay,” he said, only a little nervous. “We could go around the other side of the camp. We shouldn’t be bothered there.”
Kohane kept hold of her load of clothing as they moved to the new location and balanced it on her lap when they sat down. Chores were being postponed for this, but not abandoned.
“What was it you wanted to talk about?” Watanuki prompted her, after a moment’s silence.
Kohane took a small breath. “The Complex,” she said. “How it was destroyed.”
“Everyone is wondering about that,” said Watanuki. “We can’t help it. But when there’s so much we couldn’t know…”
But Kohane was shaking her head. “No, there are things I know that I hadn’t talked about. What happened… might have been because of me.”
Watanuki’s first impulse was to dismiss that was ridiculous - survivor’s guilt taken to an unhealthy extreme - but better judgement made himself clamp down on it before he blurted anything. He was in no position to try to assure her an event he hadn’t even been present for and had no hope of understanding didn’t involve her, not without making a fool of himself. There had to be more to what Kohane wanted to talk about, he realised, with a sinking feeling. “You’d better tell me the rest of what you mean,” he said carefully.
“I told you about how my mother got us into the Complex before,” Kohane began, eyes fixed firmly somewhere in the middle of the clothing pile on her lap. “They were interested in studying someone who could see ghosts. They thought that if they could understand how I did it, they could find a way to see them for themselves.”
“But why…?” was on the tip of Watanuki’s tongue before he bit down on that impulse too. Why should it even be a surprise? He was no stranger to the fascination people could develop for abilities like his, and Kohane had already told him that was how she’d been admitted to the Complex before. It simply hadn’t seemed right to ask for more details at the time, when memories of the alien world of the Complex were still fresh enough to haunt her.
“They spent a lot of time trying to understand how it worked,” Kohane went on, her story increasingly littered with awkward stops and starts as she put the words together . “They tried a lot of different things. They examined me over and over again - my whole body, but especially my eyes. They also had ways of looking inside my brain. It didn’t hurt,” she amended, seeing Watanuki’s expression. “Mostly, they’d hold my head in place and use some kind of machine that could see through my skull. They had other ways too. I don’t know what they were looking for, but they never found it.
“They’d also take me places - especially places they knew someone had died, and ask me if there were ghosts there and to describe whatever I saw. I told them the truth at first - that there are ghosts everywhere - but they didn’t like hearing it. I think they wanted to understand why some people become ghosts and others don’t, or what it’s like to be one - everything about them. They were trying to make machines or drugs - or something that would let them see what you and I can, but they hardly got them to work at all. Sometimes, the ghosts would even break their machines. They didn’t like them much.” She snuck a small glance at Watanuki here, but finding no sign of skepticism, she went on.
“It was like that every day - ever since my mother brought us to the Complex. I never saw anyone but the scientists and her. I thought that might be all I’d ever be allowed to do, and it - it scared me to think my life might go on forever like that. I was so tired of it - over and over and nothing ever changed. I wanted it to stop. I wanted to get out. That’s why… I did something I wasn’t supposed to do.
“A while ago, I stopped answering their questions. I’d tell them I couldn’t see any ghosts in the places they took me - anything just so they wouldn’t ask me any more. Soon, they got angry with me. Some of them guessed I was lying, some thought I’d lost my ability. Some thought it had all been a hoax from the beginning. My mother was furious too. She was terrified we’d be thrown out of the Complex if I wouldn’t do what they said. She knew I’d never felt like I belonged there, but she said I’d been too young to understand how terrible it could be outside. She hit me - a few times...”
“Your own mother…” Watanuki echoed in horror, unable to keep the silence he’d promised himself any longer. He could hardly even remember his own parents after all this time, but the childhood belief that if they’d only survived they’d have been able to fix things had stayed with him for a long time.
“She didn’t hit me hard. She just wanted me to understand how angry she was,” said Kohane, but her eyes remained cast downwards as she spoke.
“Later,” she continued, “they said that if I didn’t want to cooperate anymore they’d try something new - something that would mean it didn’t matter whether I wanted to behave. They tied me down - my whole body. There were more machines - new ones I hadn’t seen before. I thought - I mean, somehow it felt like they were going to try to pull everything that had ever let me see the ghosts right out of me. I was so scared…”
Kohane shivered then and trailed off. The unspoken volume of what she wouldn’t describe about the experience hung uncomfortably over them, so tangible that Watanuki would later be nearly convinced he’d honestly seen it writhing like a dark mass around the two of them. Kohane curled her fingers in the fabric pile on her lap for a few seconds before continuing, voice held carefully steady to the last.
“Maybe I was wrong - maybe they just wanted me scared for whatever they were trying to do, but I thought I was going to die. I think the ghosts thought so too. Even if they couldn’t speak to me, I meant something to them. They wanted to protect me more than they cared about anything else.
“I don’t remember properly what happened after that. It was all so confusing. But I’m sure that what really happened must have been because the ghosts were made so angry. They were the ones that destroyed the Complex… all for me.”
Watanuki listened through the last of the story in silence, a horrible sick feeling growing in the pit of his stomach and working its way upwards through his chest. A whole Complex decimated by ghosts - it should have seemed incredible, but instead there was something terribly inevitable about the way the image settled into his mind. For the first time since he’d set eyes on Doumeki and joined the camp, the incident that had destroyed his former gang paled in significance when held against a horror so great.
“They do things like that sometimes,” he heard himself say, weakly. “They get protective if they think the only people living who can see them might die. I never imagined it could get so bad they could ruin something that big, but I suppose… there are always so many of them. And some of them can do such terrible things.”
“I thought so,” said Kohane. “That really was why they Complex was destroyed.”
“But… that doesn’t mean it was your fault!” Watanuki rushed to add. “There was no way you could have known….”
“I didn’t know it could happen,” said Kohane, before he could go further. “I didn’t know what they were doing to me. I hated the Complex, but I never meant for anything like that to happen. But… I told lies. I did things my mother and everyone else I ever spoke to told me not to do, and if I hadn’t done that, so many people wouldn’t have had to die. Part of me wants to hate them all - to think that because they treated me badly everyone there deserved what happened. But it’s not like that. Most of them were ordinary people who had no idea what was happening to me. If I’d never gone to the Complex - if I’d never been born, that’s all it would have taken…”
A drop of moisture landed on the pile of clothes on Kohane’s lap leaving a tiny, darkened blotch, followed by a second and a third.
For Watanuki it was like the worst moments with Himawari all over again. To need to be able to make everything better for someone hurting that much - to see another so desperate to erase a hurt they’d never wanted to cause others, even wishing their own non-existence if only that would make some part of the world a better place… it was more than he could begin to know how to deal with. Watanuki had never wanted to be able to offer someone else comfort as much as he did in that moment, but there was nothing he could say that could fix something this bad.
Knowing Kohane didn’t expect him to do any more than be here for her didn’t help ease the feeling much. She was like another ghost - all he could do was listen to this terrible thing, and by doing so offer to share as much of that burden as he could take on.
***
Doumeki had hardly begun looking when Watanuki just about walked into him from the opposite direction. He looked… well, ‘preoccupied’ didn’t cover his expression; he looked miserable, and was hiding it badly.
“Weren’t you with Kohane?” Doumeki asked him.
Watanuki attempted a glare at him without making eye contact, which didn’t work. “That’s not any of your business, is it?” he said, unusually defensive.
“It was supposed to be why you weren’t helping me unload the bike,” Doumeki pointed out.
“So? There was only one pack, you didn’t need any help so I’m not shirking chores.”
Doumeki looked over Watanuki’s shoulder and around them, but found evidence in the form of Kohane herself nowhere to be found. Still… “Did she say something to you?”
“What? Even if she did, why would that be any of your business either?” The idea that Doumeki still existed and had the gall to try to take an interest in his life seemed to be irritating him even more than usual today.
Because whatever happened has you worried, was the answer to that, but Doumeki found himself keeping his silence. Watanuki did have the right to some privacy (Kohane too, though her newness to the camp made that more of a privilege), and it was painfully evident that whatever had upset Watanuki, he wasn’t ready to talk about it yet the way he’d talked about similar worries before. Doumeki had caught him at the wrong moment for this.
This would have been a far more satisfactory answer if there’d been anything much between them but a steady string of wrong moments lately. Even the mission to the Complex had come down to little more than a temporary truce.
“…if you say so,” said Doumeki instead, and with minimal difficulty made himself walk past and away.
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Side Story 1
By the time he and Doumeki got back, Watanuki would have been just about ready to vault off the bike and go hunting for Kohane the moment they came to a stop - had she not been in immediate view just inside the edge of the camp well before they got there at all. She had two arms full of assorted clothing items when he got close enough to see - why wasn’t quite as obvious, but their campmates must’ve found something harmlessly domestic for her to do with herself. She stopped and waited where she was until the bike pulled up. She looked hopeful and pleased to see him back, but at the same time it was so painfully obvious that nothing unpleasant had happened to her while he was away that he felt momentarily foolish for letting his absence from the camp bother him so much.
“You had a successful trip?” she asked when he reached her.
“We did,” Watanuki confirmed. “We found what we were looking for, anyway, and we shouldn’t need a second trip this time.”
“Was it the ghost I saw following you before? The pale lady with the soft hair and the wings?”
“That was her,” said Watanuki, surprised though not displeased to be having this sort of conversation. If Sakura had ever seen any of his guides, she’d never brought it up, and she’d always seemed so uncomfortable about the whole subject of her ability that he hadn’t liked to raise it. He’d never even imagined being able to talk to someone about it like this. “She seemed sad but hopeful about something. She didn’t say much, but she was very polite.”
Kohane nodded, then looked downwards a trifle uncomfortably. “Kimihiro… could I talk to you about something?”
It wasn’t made to sound like a small kind of ‘something’.
Watanuki glanced back at the bike apprehensively. He should probably have been helping Doumeki store away their haul, but it wasn’t that large this time and didn’t really need to be a two person job. He could get away with sparing some time for whatever Kohane wanted to talk about, especially when she was still so new to their camp and had so much adjusting to do.
“Okay,” he said, only a little nervous. “We could go around the other side of the camp. We shouldn’t be bothered there.”
Kohane kept hold of her load of clothing as they moved to the new location and balanced it on her lap when they sat down. Chores were being postponed for this, but not abandoned.
“What was it you wanted to talk about?” Watanuki prompted her, after a moment’s silence.
Kohane took a small breath. “The Complex,” she said. “How it was destroyed.”
“Everyone is wondering about that,” said Watanuki. “We can’t help it. But when there’s so much we couldn’t know…”
But Kohane was shaking her head. “No, there are things I know that I hadn’t talked about. What happened… might have been because of me.”
Watanuki’s first impulse was to dismiss that was ridiculous - survivor’s guilt taken to an unhealthy extreme - but better judgement made himself clamp down on it before he blurted anything. He was in no position to try to assure her an event he hadn’t even been present for and had no hope of understanding didn’t involve her, not without making a fool of himself. There had to be more to what Kohane wanted to talk about, he realised, with a sinking feeling. “You’d better tell me the rest of what you mean,” he said carefully.
“I told you about how my mother got us into the Complex before,” Kohane began, eyes fixed firmly somewhere in the middle of the clothing pile on her lap. “They were interested in studying someone who could see ghosts. They thought that if they could understand how I did it, they could find a way to see them for themselves.”
“But why…?” was on the tip of Watanuki’s tongue before he bit down on that impulse too. Why should it even be a surprise? He was no stranger to the fascination people could develop for abilities like his, and Kohane had already told him that was how she’d been admitted to the Complex before. It simply hadn’t seemed right to ask for more details at the time, when memories of the alien world of the Complex were still fresh enough to haunt her.
“They spent a lot of time trying to understand how it worked,” Kohane went on, her story increasingly littered with awkward stops and starts as she put the words together . “They tried a lot of different things. They examined me over and over again - my whole body, but especially my eyes. They also had ways of looking inside my brain. It didn’t hurt,” she amended, seeing Watanuki’s expression. “Mostly, they’d hold my head in place and use some kind of machine that could see through my skull. They had other ways too. I don’t know what they were looking for, but they never found it.
“They’d also take me places - especially places they knew someone had died, and ask me if there were ghosts there and to describe whatever I saw. I told them the truth at first - that there are ghosts everywhere - but they didn’t like hearing it. I think they wanted to understand why some people become ghosts and others don’t, or what it’s like to be one - everything about them. They were trying to make machines or drugs - or something that would let them see what you and I can, but they hardly got them to work at all. Sometimes, the ghosts would even break their machines. They didn’t like them much.” She snuck a small glance at Watanuki here, but finding no sign of skepticism, she went on.
“It was like that every day - ever since my mother brought us to the Complex. I never saw anyone but the scientists and her. I thought that might be all I’d ever be allowed to do, and it - it scared me to think my life might go on forever like that. I was so tired of it - over and over and nothing ever changed. I wanted it to stop. I wanted to get out. That’s why… I did something I wasn’t supposed to do.
“A while ago, I stopped answering their questions. I’d tell them I couldn’t see any ghosts in the places they took me - anything just so they wouldn’t ask me any more. Soon, they got angry with me. Some of them guessed I was lying, some thought I’d lost my ability. Some thought it had all been a hoax from the beginning. My mother was furious too. She was terrified we’d be thrown out of the Complex if I wouldn’t do what they said. She knew I’d never felt like I belonged there, but she said I’d been too young to understand how terrible it could be outside. She hit me - a few times...”
“Your own mother…” Watanuki echoed in horror, unable to keep the silence he’d promised himself any longer. He could hardly even remember his own parents after all this time, but the childhood belief that if they’d only survived they’d have been able to fix things had stayed with him for a long time.
“She didn’t hit me hard. She just wanted me to understand how angry she was,” said Kohane, but her eyes remained cast downwards as she spoke.
“Later,” she continued, “they said that if I didn’t want to cooperate anymore they’d try something new - something that would mean it didn’t matter whether I wanted to behave. They tied me down - my whole body. There were more machines - new ones I hadn’t seen before. I thought - I mean, somehow it felt like they were going to try to pull everything that had ever let me see the ghosts right out of me. I was so scared…”
Kohane shivered then and trailed off. The unspoken volume of what she wouldn’t describe about the experience hung uncomfortably over them, so tangible that Watanuki would later be nearly convinced he’d honestly seen it writhing like a dark mass around the two of them. Kohane curled her fingers in the fabric pile on her lap for a few seconds before continuing, voice held carefully steady to the last.
“Maybe I was wrong - maybe they just wanted me scared for whatever they were trying to do, but I thought I was going to die. I think the ghosts thought so too. Even if they couldn’t speak to me, I meant something to them. They wanted to protect me more than they cared about anything else.
“I don’t remember properly what happened after that. It was all so confusing. But I’m sure that what really happened must have been because the ghosts were made so angry. They were the ones that destroyed the Complex… all for me.”
Watanuki listened through the last of the story in silence, a horrible sick feeling growing in the pit of his stomach and working its way upwards through his chest. A whole Complex decimated by ghosts - it should have seemed incredible, but instead there was something terribly inevitable about the way the image settled into his mind. For the first time since he’d set eyes on Doumeki and joined the camp, the incident that had destroyed his former gang paled in significance when held against a horror so great.
“They do things like that sometimes,” he heard himself say, weakly. “They get protective if they think the only people living who can see them might die. I never imagined it could get so bad they could ruin something that big, but I suppose… there are always so many of them. And some of them can do such terrible things.”
“I thought so,” said Kohane. “That really was why they Complex was destroyed.”
“But… that doesn’t mean it was your fault!” Watanuki rushed to add. “There was no way you could have known….”
“I didn’t know it could happen,” said Kohane, before he could go further. “I didn’t know what they were doing to me. I hated the Complex, but I never meant for anything like that to happen. But… I told lies. I did things my mother and everyone else I ever spoke to told me not to do, and if I hadn’t done that, so many people wouldn’t have had to die. Part of me wants to hate them all - to think that because they treated me badly everyone there deserved what happened. But it’s not like that. Most of them were ordinary people who had no idea what was happening to me. If I’d never gone to the Complex - if I’d never been born, that’s all it would have taken…”
A drop of moisture landed on the pile of clothes on Kohane’s lap leaving a tiny, darkened blotch, followed by a second and a third.
For Watanuki it was like the worst moments with Himawari all over again. To need to be able to make everything better for someone hurting that much - to see another so desperate to erase a hurt they’d never wanted to cause others, even wishing their own non-existence if only that would make some part of the world a better place… it was more than he could begin to know how to deal with. Watanuki had never wanted to be able to offer someone else comfort as much as he did in that moment, but there was nothing he could say that could fix something this bad.
Knowing Kohane didn’t expect him to do any more than be here for her didn’t help ease the feeling much. She was like another ghost - all he could do was listen to this terrible thing, and by doing so offer to share as much of that burden as he could take on.
***
Doumeki had hardly begun looking when Watanuki just about walked into him from the opposite direction. He looked… well, ‘preoccupied’ didn’t cover his expression; he looked miserable, and was hiding it badly.
“Weren’t you with Kohane?” Doumeki asked him.
Watanuki attempted a glare at him without making eye contact, which didn’t work. “That’s not any of your business, is it?” he said, unusually defensive.
“It was supposed to be why you weren’t helping me unload the bike,” Doumeki pointed out.
“So? There was only one pack, you didn’t need any help so I’m not shirking chores.”
Doumeki looked over Watanuki’s shoulder and around them, but found evidence in the form of Kohane herself nowhere to be found. Still… “Did she say something to you?”
“What? Even if she did, why would that be any of your business either?” The idea that Doumeki still existed and had the gall to try to take an interest in his life seemed to be irritating him even more than usual today.
Because whatever happened has you worried, was the answer to that, but Doumeki found himself keeping his silence. Watanuki did have the right to some privacy (Kohane too, though her newness to the camp made that more of a privilege), and it was painfully evident that whatever had upset Watanuki, he wasn’t ready to talk about it yet the way he’d talked about similar worries before. Doumeki had caught him at the wrong moment for this.
This would have been a far more satisfactory answer if there’d been anything much between them but a steady string of wrong moments lately. Even the mission to the Complex had come down to little more than a temporary truce.
“…if you say so,” said Doumeki instead, and with minimal difficulty made himself walk past and away.