Submission #13 -- Grius, "Wishes Granted"
.
Title: Wishes Granted
Author: Gruis
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Life as the former antichrist can be strange. Happily, taking things out on innocent bystanders is still satisfying.
“They’re all dead now, of course,” he explained helpfully. “Angels and Seals, sinners and saints, the saved and the damned. It never made any difference, as far as I could see.”
He paused and thought that over.
“No, I tell a lie,” he mused. “Sometimes it did seem that the Angels had the advantage. We were the ones trying to destroy humanity, you know. Entropy, entropy always wins.” He tipped his head to gaze at his companion. “And yet here you all are.”
The young woman sitting next to him on the bench, for her part, was wondering how the hell all the crazy people managed to find her. Why her? Why every time?
She was also experimenting with the theory that staring fixedly straight ahead might cause him to go away and leave her alone. This tactic had never worked before, but today might just be the day.
“I was only doing what you all wanted,” the crazy man continued, now sounding sulky. “It’s not my fault you’re…collectively suicidal. You’d have been happier dead. You don’t know what you want.” He tsked.
She edged slightly away. He edged slightly toward her. She decided with growing irritation that if she got up and ran, he would probably run after her. Besides which, she wasn’t going to let crazy people drive her from her bench. This was her favorite bench, and some weirdo spilling his crazy all over the place wasn’t going to make her leave.
Her mother often said that this attitude was going to do her no favors in life.
“He didn’t know what he wanted,” the crazy man whispered, leaning uncomfortably close, eyeing her intently. ““He thought he wanted to live. “He thought he wanted me to love him. “He thought he wanted to save humanity. But he didn’t really want any of those things. Not until the very end, and then only the last.” He smiled fondly and leaned forward further until she was trapped between him and the back and arm of the bench. “He decided he wanted to save you, and he decided he wanted to save me. He always was a twisted little thing, even when we were children.” Frown, flicker of the eyes, smile. “I would have loved him if he’d let me.”
“That’s great,” she said firmly. She was sure she’d heard that humoring them sometimes got rid of them faster. It was worth a try; she certainly couldn’t expect any help from the passerby.
The problem with the crazy man, see, was that he didn’t look crazy. That was how she’d made the mistake of sitting next to him. He looked pretty normal: fairly young; attractive; clothes a little shabby, but nothing extreme-and yet, no. Crazy person.
To anyone walking past, this undoubtedly looked like some tastelessly public romantic interlude. On a bench, God how tacky, what if her mother heard?
“You should definitely love people whether they want you to love them or not,” she instructed him. “Unless you’re following them around, because that’s stalking. Pretty sure it’s illegal, or at least creepy. So, yeah. Love, but do not stalk. Love is great.”
Now he was looking at her like she was the crazy person. She figured turnabout was fair play.
He leaned back (success, success!) and started looking less crazy and more…really, crushingly sad, actually. Which wasn’t what she’d been aiming for.
“Love is a terrible thing,” he said. And he said it like his heart had been smashed into a thousand tiny pieces.
She really had to do something about her weakness for sad people, because (assuming the random hostility toward strangers didn’t beat it out) it was going to get her into serious trouble someday. Possibly today, even.
“Why…why do you say that?” she asked tentatively, silently damning sympathy.
“Because it’s true, little girl,” he answered, quirky and odd. And, hang on, little girl?
“Love is selfish, maybe the most selfish emotion there is,” he continued. “It’s worse than hate, because people are willing to share hate. Love is almost as destructive as fear. But then, in some ways, they’re the same thing.”
“They’re not the same thing,” she argued, proving that she was willing to waste her time bickering with crazy people on the street. New lows every day.
“They can be,” he insisted. “They’re tangled together. You can’t fear for something you don’t love, just as you can’t hate something you don’t fear. And it’s not always easy to tell whether you fear for something, or whether you just fear it.”
“I don’t think I understood all of that,” she said, “but what I did understand pretty much goes against everything I hold dear.” If you’re going to argue with crazy people, she figured, you might as well go all out.
But he didn’t play. Instead, he smiled at her and said, “Well, it would. That’s the kind of person you are.”
She scowled. “How would you know what kind of person I am, crazy man?” she demanded, then violently bit down on her tongue and wished herself mute. Being feisty with the crazy people? Yet another step down from arguing with them.
“Of course I know what kind of person you are,” he answered patiently. “You bring back a lot of memories. Your kind is the reason this planet will die.”
“I recycle!” she announced indignantly, then wondered what the hell she was saying, and whether insanity was catching. The crazy man, in the meantime, had started laughing at her.
“Of course you do!” he chortled. “But it won’t help. The thing I don’t understand is what he thought he was accomplishing.”
Whoever he was.
““He knew what the options were. It was never a question of saving humanity, not really. It was only a question of whether humans would take the earth down with them, and he decided that they would. Short-sighted. Hiding puppies from the rain.” Frown, flicker of the eyes, smile. “At any rate, at least it turned out well for you!”
“Nothing you have said this entire time has made any sense,” she muttered resentfully.
He tilted his head. “I didn’t do my job,” he said, as if that were an answer. “I failed. I was supposed to protect them from you.”
“Them?”
“Them.” He turned and reached a hand out to the branch of a nearby tree. For one eerie moment, it almost looked like the branch reached back.
So clearly the insanity was contagious.
“Monou-san, I think you’re scaring the lady,” said a man who had stopped in front of the bench. He’d stopped in front of the bench some time ago, actually. She’d been wondering if he was just planning to stand there and watch until she goaded the crazy man into killing her, but apparently not.
It didn’t please her as much as it might have. Now that she was giving her savior her full attention, she could tell that the smell of old blood that had been bothering her was, in fact, coming from him. The fact that he was movie-star gorgeous somehow made the overall effect even more disturbing.
Why me? Why do these people always, always happen to me?
Still, he’d distracted her crazy man. For that, she was willing to forgive a little reeking of blood. Unless he killed her, in which case there would be no forgiveness.
“Subaru!” the crazy man cried gleefully. “Why do you say things like that when I know that you know that I know you don’t care at all? Is it just habit?”
“It’s possible that it’s habit, Monou-san,” the creepy blood-smelling Subaru guy said politely. So politely that it actually seemed a bit hostile. “Shall we go? Director Imonoyama is waiting for us.”
“Imonoyama? What does he want us for?”
“The anniversary ceremony. He has some task for us; he says we owe him that much. I’m sure you were told.”
“I might’ve been. Owe him, huh? Why do you owe him? You didn’t do anything.”
“That’s right,” the Subaru guy agreed expressionlessly. “I didn’t do anything.” He stared blankly through the crazy man for an uncomfortably long moment, then continued. “It would be rude to arrive late, Monou-san.”
“Imonoyama would have us both killed in heartbeat if he thought Takamura would let him get away with it, Subaru,” my crazy man pointed out. “I hardly think a little rudeness could make things worse.”
Wait, they couldn’t be talking about that Imonoyama. No, surely not. Because there were things that were strange, and then there were things that were just absolutely impossible. If her crazy man-Monou?-was really on his way to an appointment with the director of the Imonoyama zaibatsu, then surely the world must have ended, and the reign of chaos begun.
“A bad history is no excuse for rudeness,” the Subaru guy was saying, looking vaguely toward the tree that had most certainly not been reaching for anyone.
“Well, you’re the expert on that,” Monou murmured.
“Yes,” Subaru hissed, his attention snapping back to Monou. “I am.”
It was the first time she’d seen him show emotion. Pity the first emotion he’d shown was terrifying rage.
“But I was having fun,” Monou pouted. How he could pout in the face of that look, she did not know. It must be nice to be crazy. “Imonoyama is no fun at all,” he continued. “And you’re no fun anymore. You used to call me Kamui.”
“You’re not Kamui anymore,” Subaru replied, looking away again, slipping easily back into apathy.
“But you’re still my Angel,” Monou cooed.
“There are no Angels,” Subaru said flatly, as if the response were as obvious and inevitable as death. She shivered.
On the list of conversations she’d heard that made absolutely no sense, this one ranked very high. That didn’t stop it from being really, really upsetting, however. All things considered, she’d liked it better when she was alone with crazy Monou.
Monou, who was hastily turning to her with a slightly demented look of concern.
“I don’t want you to be confused,” he informed her earnestly, and contrary to all previous evidence. “I told you that all the Angels were dead, didn’t I?”
He stared expectantly.
“That’s right,” she agreed. In for a penny.
He leaned in again. She was really coming to hate the leaning. “Look at him, really look at him,” the crazy man said. “He is dead.”
She glanced at the Subaru guy, and, sadly, she could see that crazy Monou had a point. Subaru watched her staring into his mismatched eyes with bottomless indifference. As if he couldn’t imagine caring about anything at all. As if every important part of him had been hacked away, and the rest was just a painful afterthought.
“Was he always like that?” she asked Monou.
“No. No, no, no, of course not.” He smiled a bleak smile. “Love is a terrible, terrible thing. I told you.”
“Shall we go, Monou-san?” Subaru asked again, looking like he’d be willing to stand there all day if necessary, asking if they could go at five minute intervals.
“Oh, if you insist, you formal thing,” Monou said, leaping up from the bench. She breathed a sigh of relief, and sat very still, in case movement might catch his eye and distract him from leaving.
They made it three steps before Monou turned back. She despaired a little.
“You never wanted to die,” he informed her with a grin. “I always liked that about you.”
From where he stood on the sidewalk, he didn’t look crazy at all, just as he hadn’t when she’d first seen him. He looked perfectly sane, though maybe a little sad.
“Hey, little girl,” he said. “Did you save your frog?”
“Monou-san,” Subaru said wearily.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Monou sing-songed, and the angle of the light changed, and he was just a crazy man again. The two of them turned away, fading into the bustle and shuffle of the city.
She sat very still and carefully rethought the whole…encounter. When she was sure that that last bit really meant what she thought it meant, she jumped up and called after them, but they were long gone by then. Swallowed by the crowd.
There was a story she told her nieces and nephews. She had told it to them again and again; so often that it was a part of them; so often that the story belonged as much to them as it did to her.
Once upon a time, when she was a little girl (back when the earthquakes were just earthquakes; back before they became the nightmare that razed Tokyo), she had met a man in Ebisu. He had played with her one afternoon (‘Was he funny, auntie?’ ‘He was as funny as your father.’ ‘No way!’), and he had bought her tea from a machine (‘Was it good tea?’ ‘It was the most delicious tea I’d ever had.’), and then at the end of the afternoon, he’d warned her. He’d told her to save herself and her mother. He’d told them to run.
(‘Grandma didn’t want to listen, did she?’ ‘No, she didn’t want to listen. But I knew I had to make her understand.’)
She got her mother out of Ebisu just before the earthquake hit. The idea that they had received some kind of divine warning frightened her mother badly enough that she bundled the entire household off to visit family in Nagoya. The day after they left Tokyo, their apartment, along with the rest of Shibuya, was destroyed.
(‘Was it really destroyed?’ ‘It really was destroyed. The old people said it was like the War had come again.’)
The rest of Tokyo hadn’t lasted much longer than Shibuya. If it hadn’t been for that man, she and her brother and their parents would all have died in 1999. If it hadn’t been for that man, her nieces and nephews would never have been born.
(‘So keep an eye out for him. Our family is in his debt. Do you promise to watch for him?’ ‘We promise, auntie.’)
She’d never mentioned the toy frog. She’d thought it made the story sound silly.
That man. Monou. She’d been wanting to meet him again for years.
Oh.
The modzukamori would like to apologize for the delay in getting this posted.
Title: Wishes Granted
Author: Gruis
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Life as the former antichrist can be strange. Happily, taking things out on innocent bystanders is still satisfying.
“They’re all dead now, of course,” he explained helpfully. “Angels and Seals, sinners and saints, the saved and the damned. It never made any difference, as far as I could see.”
He paused and thought that over.
“No, I tell a lie,” he mused. “Sometimes it did seem that the Angels had the advantage. We were the ones trying to destroy humanity, you know. Entropy, entropy always wins.” He tipped his head to gaze at his companion. “And yet here you all are.”
The young woman sitting next to him on the bench, for her part, was wondering how the hell all the crazy people managed to find her. Why her? Why every time?
She was also experimenting with the theory that staring fixedly straight ahead might cause him to go away and leave her alone. This tactic had never worked before, but today might just be the day.
“I was only doing what you all wanted,” the crazy man continued, now sounding sulky. “It’s not my fault you’re…collectively suicidal. You’d have been happier dead. You don’t know what you want.” He tsked.
She edged slightly away. He edged slightly toward her. She decided with growing irritation that if she got up and ran, he would probably run after her. Besides which, she wasn’t going to let crazy people drive her from her bench. This was her favorite bench, and some weirdo spilling his crazy all over the place wasn’t going to make her leave.
Her mother often said that this attitude was going to do her no favors in life.
“He didn’t know what he wanted,” the crazy man whispered, leaning uncomfortably close, eyeing her intently. ““He thought he wanted to live. “He thought he wanted me to love him. “He thought he wanted to save humanity. But he didn’t really want any of those things. Not until the very end, and then only the last.” He smiled fondly and leaned forward further until she was trapped between him and the back and arm of the bench. “He decided he wanted to save you, and he decided he wanted to save me. He always was a twisted little thing, even when we were children.” Frown, flicker of the eyes, smile. “I would have loved him if he’d let me.”
“That’s great,” she said firmly. She was sure she’d heard that humoring them sometimes got rid of them faster. It was worth a try; she certainly couldn’t expect any help from the passerby.
The problem with the crazy man, see, was that he didn’t look crazy. That was how she’d made the mistake of sitting next to him. He looked pretty normal: fairly young; attractive; clothes a little shabby, but nothing extreme-and yet, no. Crazy person.
To anyone walking past, this undoubtedly looked like some tastelessly public romantic interlude. On a bench, God how tacky, what if her mother heard?
“You should definitely love people whether they want you to love them or not,” she instructed him. “Unless you’re following them around, because that’s stalking. Pretty sure it’s illegal, or at least creepy. So, yeah. Love, but do not stalk. Love is great.”
Now he was looking at her like she was the crazy person. She figured turnabout was fair play.
He leaned back (success, success!) and started looking less crazy and more…really, crushingly sad, actually. Which wasn’t what she’d been aiming for.
“Love is a terrible thing,” he said. And he said it like his heart had been smashed into a thousand tiny pieces.
She really had to do something about her weakness for sad people, because (assuming the random hostility toward strangers didn’t beat it out) it was going to get her into serious trouble someday. Possibly today, even.
“Why…why do you say that?” she asked tentatively, silently damning sympathy.
“Because it’s true, little girl,” he answered, quirky and odd. And, hang on, little girl?
“Love is selfish, maybe the most selfish emotion there is,” he continued. “It’s worse than hate, because people are willing to share hate. Love is almost as destructive as fear. But then, in some ways, they’re the same thing.”
“They’re not the same thing,” she argued, proving that she was willing to waste her time bickering with crazy people on the street. New lows every day.
“They can be,” he insisted. “They’re tangled together. You can’t fear for something you don’t love, just as you can’t hate something you don’t fear. And it’s not always easy to tell whether you fear for something, or whether you just fear it.”
“I don’t think I understood all of that,” she said, “but what I did understand pretty much goes against everything I hold dear.” If you’re going to argue with crazy people, she figured, you might as well go all out.
But he didn’t play. Instead, he smiled at her and said, “Well, it would. That’s the kind of person you are.”
She scowled. “How would you know what kind of person I am, crazy man?” she demanded, then violently bit down on her tongue and wished herself mute. Being feisty with the crazy people? Yet another step down from arguing with them.
“Of course I know what kind of person you are,” he answered patiently. “You bring back a lot of memories. Your kind is the reason this planet will die.”
“I recycle!” she announced indignantly, then wondered what the hell she was saying, and whether insanity was catching. The crazy man, in the meantime, had started laughing at her.
“Of course you do!” he chortled. “But it won’t help. The thing I don’t understand is what he thought he was accomplishing.”
Whoever he was.
““He knew what the options were. It was never a question of saving humanity, not really. It was only a question of whether humans would take the earth down with them, and he decided that they would. Short-sighted. Hiding puppies from the rain.” Frown, flicker of the eyes, smile. “At any rate, at least it turned out well for you!”
“Nothing you have said this entire time has made any sense,” she muttered resentfully.
He tilted his head. “I didn’t do my job,” he said, as if that were an answer. “I failed. I was supposed to protect them from you.”
“Them?”
“Them.” He turned and reached a hand out to the branch of a nearby tree. For one eerie moment, it almost looked like the branch reached back.
So clearly the insanity was contagious.
“Monou-san, I think you’re scaring the lady,” said a man who had stopped in front of the bench. He’d stopped in front of the bench some time ago, actually. She’d been wondering if he was just planning to stand there and watch until she goaded the crazy man into killing her, but apparently not.
It didn’t please her as much as it might have. Now that she was giving her savior her full attention, she could tell that the smell of old blood that had been bothering her was, in fact, coming from him. The fact that he was movie-star gorgeous somehow made the overall effect even more disturbing.
Why me? Why do these people always, always happen to me?
Still, he’d distracted her crazy man. For that, she was willing to forgive a little reeking of blood. Unless he killed her, in which case there would be no forgiveness.
“Subaru!” the crazy man cried gleefully. “Why do you say things like that when I know that you know that I know you don’t care at all? Is it just habit?”
“It’s possible that it’s habit, Monou-san,” the creepy blood-smelling Subaru guy said politely. So politely that it actually seemed a bit hostile. “Shall we go? Director Imonoyama is waiting for us.”
“Imonoyama? What does he want us for?”
“The anniversary ceremony. He has some task for us; he says we owe him that much. I’m sure you were told.”
“I might’ve been. Owe him, huh? Why do you owe him? You didn’t do anything.”
“That’s right,” the Subaru guy agreed expressionlessly. “I didn’t do anything.” He stared blankly through the crazy man for an uncomfortably long moment, then continued. “It would be rude to arrive late, Monou-san.”
“Imonoyama would have us both killed in heartbeat if he thought Takamura would let him get away with it, Subaru,” my crazy man pointed out. “I hardly think a little rudeness could make things worse.”
Wait, they couldn’t be talking about that Imonoyama. No, surely not. Because there were things that were strange, and then there were things that were just absolutely impossible. If her crazy man-Monou?-was really on his way to an appointment with the director of the Imonoyama zaibatsu, then surely the world must have ended, and the reign of chaos begun.
“A bad history is no excuse for rudeness,” the Subaru guy was saying, looking vaguely toward the tree that had most certainly not been reaching for anyone.
“Well, you’re the expert on that,” Monou murmured.
“Yes,” Subaru hissed, his attention snapping back to Monou. “I am.”
It was the first time she’d seen him show emotion. Pity the first emotion he’d shown was terrifying rage.
“But I was having fun,” Monou pouted. How he could pout in the face of that look, she did not know. It must be nice to be crazy. “Imonoyama is no fun at all,” he continued. “And you’re no fun anymore. You used to call me Kamui.”
“You’re not Kamui anymore,” Subaru replied, looking away again, slipping easily back into apathy.
“But you’re still my Angel,” Monou cooed.
“There are no Angels,” Subaru said flatly, as if the response were as obvious and inevitable as death. She shivered.
On the list of conversations she’d heard that made absolutely no sense, this one ranked very high. That didn’t stop it from being really, really upsetting, however. All things considered, she’d liked it better when she was alone with crazy Monou.
Monou, who was hastily turning to her with a slightly demented look of concern.
“I don’t want you to be confused,” he informed her earnestly, and contrary to all previous evidence. “I told you that all the Angels were dead, didn’t I?”
He stared expectantly.
“That’s right,” she agreed. In for a penny.
He leaned in again. She was really coming to hate the leaning. “Look at him, really look at him,” the crazy man said. “He is dead.”
She glanced at the Subaru guy, and, sadly, she could see that crazy Monou had a point. Subaru watched her staring into his mismatched eyes with bottomless indifference. As if he couldn’t imagine caring about anything at all. As if every important part of him had been hacked away, and the rest was just a painful afterthought.
“Was he always like that?” she asked Monou.
“No. No, no, no, of course not.” He smiled a bleak smile. “Love is a terrible, terrible thing. I told you.”
“Shall we go, Monou-san?” Subaru asked again, looking like he’d be willing to stand there all day if necessary, asking if they could go at five minute intervals.
“Oh, if you insist, you formal thing,” Monou said, leaping up from the bench. She breathed a sigh of relief, and sat very still, in case movement might catch his eye and distract him from leaving.
They made it three steps before Monou turned back. She despaired a little.
“You never wanted to die,” he informed her with a grin. “I always liked that about you.”
From where he stood on the sidewalk, he didn’t look crazy at all, just as he hadn’t when she’d first seen him. He looked perfectly sane, though maybe a little sad.
“Hey, little girl,” he said. “Did you save your frog?”
“Monou-san,” Subaru said wearily.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Monou sing-songed, and the angle of the light changed, and he was just a crazy man again. The two of them turned away, fading into the bustle and shuffle of the city.
She sat very still and carefully rethought the whole…encounter. When she was sure that that last bit really meant what she thought it meant, she jumped up and called after them, but they were long gone by then. Swallowed by the crowd.
There was a story she told her nieces and nephews. She had told it to them again and again; so often that it was a part of them; so often that the story belonged as much to them as it did to her.
Once upon a time, when she was a little girl (back when the earthquakes were just earthquakes; back before they became the nightmare that razed Tokyo), she had met a man in Ebisu. He had played with her one afternoon (‘Was he funny, auntie?’ ‘He was as funny as your father.’ ‘No way!’), and he had bought her tea from a machine (‘Was it good tea?’ ‘It was the most delicious tea I’d ever had.’), and then at the end of the afternoon, he’d warned her. He’d told her to save herself and her mother. He’d told them to run.
(‘Grandma didn’t want to listen, did she?’ ‘No, she didn’t want to listen. But I knew I had to make her understand.’)
She got her mother out of Ebisu just before the earthquake hit. The idea that they had received some kind of divine warning frightened her mother badly enough that she bundled the entire household off to visit family in Nagoya. The day after they left Tokyo, their apartment, along with the rest of Shibuya, was destroyed.
(‘Was it really destroyed?’ ‘It really was destroyed. The old people said it was like the War had come again.’)
The rest of Tokyo hadn’t lasted much longer than Shibuya. If it hadn’t been for that man, she and her brother and their parents would all have died in 1999. If it hadn’t been for that man, her nieces and nephews would never have been born.
(‘So keep an eye out for him. Our family is in his debt. Do you promise to watch for him?’ ‘We promise, auntie.’)
She’d never mentioned the toy frog. She’d thought it made the story sound silly.
That man. Monou. She’d been wanting to meet him again for years.
Oh.
The modzukamori would like to apologize for the delay in getting this posted.