"Kotomi-chan!" Kaiba greeted her friend as she approached the lot, and Kotomi looked up from her van. She waved back with a wrench, then messed around a little bit more before she shut the hood, just clearing up anything that might cause a problem if she left it that way, and walked up to Kaiba, "How are things going with you and Sayaka?"
"Well," Kotomi wiped her forehead with a shrug, "I dunno. We're mostly getting along fine, but that kid is stubborn. She gets annoyed anytime I say that I'm worried about her at all. I tried to keep her from going with the rest of Tokyo's magica to check out the lead in Nagasaki, but she wouldn't listen at all. She probably wants to prove that she can go back there without freaking out."
"Of course she does," Kaiba laughed, leaning against the edge of the sparse chain-link which surrounded the lot, "Well, she'll be fine. How about you, though? How have you been in general?"
"Fine, I guess," Kotomi shrugged, stepping around to the other side of the fence to stand next to Kaiba, "I could never imagine going back to Korekara, you know."
"Me neither," Kaiba shook her head, then paused and corrected herself, "No, that's not quite right. I couldn't go back there, but if there was some reason that I needed to... If I had to do it to help somebody, I could. I wouldn't be okay after, though. And it isn't like I... was even as involved as she was."
"It's kind of weird to live alone, after having Sayaka-chan with me for a while," Kotomi groaned, looking up at the sky, "You wanna live with me while you're covering Tokyo, Kaiba-chan?"
"I thought you'd never offer. I mean, really, where'd your respect for your elders go anyway?" Kaiba laughed, slinging an arm over Kotomi's shoulders, "You're a good kid, Kotomi-chan."
"You say that to everybody."
"That's because it's what everybody I know needs to hear most."
~
Blade had never been more worried in its life, but even it was surprised by the panic that Oh One flew into when it finally decided to conference in that entire posse and inform them how it had absolutely lost track of their magica that it was supposedly keeping an eye on. It had tried searching on its own to resolve the situation for a good five days before it gave in and called. Still, it waited out its friends worry before it spoke again, "Oh One, I wouldn't usually tell you about this for posterity's sake. I'm only telling <i>all</i> of you because if one of you knows, the others deserve to. So, buddy, tell me. Can you still detect what country the magica are in?"
"Oh, right," Oh One stopped its hyperventilating in seconds, then spoke up again, "Okay, well, I can. They're still in Japan. The weird thing is that I'm not picking up on anything else abnormal in the country. Nobody new has arrived in the past month. Even Lionhardt's back in the states."
"That is strange," Blem added in, "I'm trying to think about who would have reason to do something like this. Marvelous, maybe?"
"Marvelous would make sense," Must Pope agreed.
SugarcaneSugarcane didn't, "There's no sign of our magica either, right Blade? If it were only Red, then I could blame it on Marvelous, but even as a magical boy he'd never be ambitious enough to kidnap multiple people."
"And how can you be sure of that?" Blade questioned. It was sliding its phone along the ground as it went, still searching as best as it could on foot.
"It's not like you're the only distributor who gets to know magica who don't belong to it," SugarcaneSugarcane answered, "I got to know Marvelous pretty well. Skorgles isn't against it. Well, it kind of encourages us to meet its magica, like somehow meeting them will make us give up on the rankings too? I can never figure out that thing's motivations. Anyway, the important part is just that he doesn't make sense to be the criminal in this situation."
Blade had to admit that SugarcaneSugarcane had a point, "Right, and if it was only Red who got kidnapped, the others would have let me know before they went looking for her on their own. One of them would at least send me a text, and that didn't happen. They all just sort of vanished into thin air. At least Oh One can still tell they exist. It's probably just something weird."
Oh One spoke up again, "Well... Maybe whatever's causing the others to be undetectable is also applying to a magica who decided to take ours hostage for some reason? I can't imagine why any of this would be happening, but that is a potential explanation for it."
Blade sighed, "Even if I found them, what could I do about it...? I just want them to come back safe."
------
Yuuri found himself in an absolutely empty landscape. There was nothing in any direction. He blinked a few times, took several deep breaths, then took a sweeping glance around before he simply shrugged and muttered to himself, "Well, okay."
It wasn't surprising to him that something like this would happen. Well, it wasn't as if he predicted suddenly waking up in a land without anything else, or that he could predict that, but it wasn't shocking. Not really. Something like this should happen to him, because things always happened to him.
Not that everything he suffered for was something which happened to him, of course. He knew this, he knew that he was just as likely to make himself suffer with a bad decision as something bad was to happen to him at no fault of his own. There was always somebody to blame, though. Yuuri decided in this case, that he would blame himself after all. It was most likely that this was limbo. Purgatory, an afterlife intended for anyone who wasn't especially good or especially bad.
Huh, funny. Yuuri always expected that if there was a middling level of the afterlife, he'd still fall short of it. Were Heaven and Hell the true and real concepts that his mother had taught him when he was young, and was there a limbo in between, Hellbound had always been his fate. That was what his mother told him. That was what he told himself, too.
It wasn't as if he'd grown into a fine young man who never sinned. It wasn't as if he was a very good kid to begin with. Still, he accepted limbo as a pleasant surprise, and sat down, crossing his legs. It wasn't like he had anything else to do, he may as well enjoy it. Nothing to do. No obligations and no entertainment, nothing either way. The idea of nothing was comforting, for a moment. Then it wasn't.
Being alone with his thoughts? This wasn't purgatory. It was Hell after all, a specific Hell for him and his own definition of torture. The traditional kind wouldn't work on him, after all he'd been through in life. Instead, he would have to think, without any distractions. No alcohol, no cigarettes, no fights to get in and no manga or trashy television. No monsters, no friends, no baking supplies.
It was really just him, and he got to wondering. How was it that he'd died? The last thing he remembered was the train ride, chatting with Kanoshi and Sayaka. She'd said that they reached their stop, stood up, then nothing. Yuuri did have memory lapses on a somewhat regular basis, so it didn't shock him that he'd forget what happened to kill him. Given the situation of his final memory, perhaps it had something to do with the train station. Had he fallen on the tracks?
Had he thrown himself onto them?
He wouldn't put it past himself, but there was one bit which didn't line up. He'd had an episode a week ago, so why exactly would he have another one so soon after? Sure, he felt bad that he'd accidentally insulted Tsukune, but not that bad. There wasn't anything he could recall which would have triggered a breakdown, but there was one thing he had to consider. The episode the previous week.
Yuuri remembered the pain he'd felt, and he remembered thinking in that moment that if he were to know how it felt to die, that moment had to be it. He'd been completely overcome; but one little scratch couldn't kill him, right? And it wasn't as if he'd die of shock. If he was the type to suffer a death like that, it would have happened the day he found out that his mother's actions were criminal. That he was allowed to feel anger towards her and towards those men she invited into his room.
Still, it made sense. If he'd died that night, then of course he would depart on a trip immediately after. These versions of her friends were figments of his imagination to ease his transition from being alive, to not being alive at all. Their stop was the afterlife, but... There was one flaw in that theory, too. Why would his imagination create a Tsukune who would become angry with him?
So that was wrong.
Nonetheless, Yuuri wasn't going to discard the notion that he'd died, but he decided to stop entertaining the potentials. Maybe he did throw himself in front of a train, for some reason, or maybe he died in some other way. The time he lost always came back to him eventually, he just spent a few days or weeks wondering what he did in those hours that were absent. It was a definitive absence, too, not just the vague concept of not knowing quite what he did between noon and six. It was a conscious feeling of having nothing between those hours on that day.
He'd remember it sometime. Did time even count here? He pulled out his phone to check. Well, the clock was still showing up. He waited a while to see if the number changed. It did, and didn't seem to be taking an especially long time to do so, either. Well, that proved that time passed. He checked while he was at it, but of course his phone couldn't get any type of connection either. That wasn't surprising.
He put his phone away, then sighed and stood back up. The least he could do was walk around, anyway. Maybe this place only looked empty, and there was some other torture awaiting him somewhere else. Even that would be better than just being left to his own mind like this.
And eventually, he did find something. Well, not exactly. He came across a slight difference in the landscape, that was all it seemed like at first. Rather than flat dirt, it was a field of stones, all oval-shaped, and looking as if they'd be a pain to try and traverse. He turned around, and the emptiness was broken. Before him stood the director of Aoba Public Middle, who addressed him immediately, "Ruka-kun. No wonder you never graduated high school, if you give up at such a small challenge as this."
"So I am dead. Figures we'd end up in the same Hell," Yuuri narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms, "I thought I was done with you."
The director stepped past him, toward the stones, "Right, after you ordered a hit on me of course. Too bad we've met again."
"I didn't order a hit on you," Yuuri protested, turning back to the stones. He didn't want to turn his back on this man, not anymore, not right now.
"Sure you didn't. What was it that the girl who killed me said? If you didn't want her to kill me, you wouldn't have admitted to her the full extent of what I did?" The director questioned, then crouched down to the rocks, "If you deny your flaws like that, you'll never pass this trial."
"Trial? I thought I was in Hell. What possible motivation could I have to do anything?" Yuuri questioned, glancing at the rocks for just a moment, and when he looked up the director of the school was gone. Vanished in a second. Yuuri groaned, and turned his attention back to the rocks, only to realize upon closer inspection that they had words written on the undersides. All sorts of words, though they all seemed to be some sort of descriptor.
Well, the motivation to do anything in Hell was for something to happen, he had to admit. Even something bad. Seeing the director of Aoba Public Middle was definitely not his idea of a good time, but at least that was something exterior he could direct his disdain toward. It took him a long while of thinking again to figure out what the words on the stones could mean, based on the hint he'd received. Denying his flaws. With that in mind, he decided, it made sense that he should be expected to search through the rocks and pull out any with words which described him.
The first one that he found was only a few rocks in. "Selfish". Well, he definitely wasn't a selfless and giving man by anybody's standards, so that was his to claim. He lifted it from the bed of rocks and set it to the side. Nothing happened, and he sort of assumed that something would if he picked up one which he wasn't supposed to. To test the theory, he reached for one which definitely didn't describe him. "Pacifist".
"Yeah, I don't think so," His mother's voice echoed around him and the rock flew back into the pile, hitting his arm as it went. So there was an indicator of how well he was doing, that was reassuring. Sure, it was a somewhat painful indicator, but that was better than nothing. If nothing happened, he was on the right track. If the rock flew back to the field, injuring him while his mother's voice expressed disgust, then he was wrong.
As he continued searching through the pile, he didn't pick any of the wrong ones again. It was pretty disappointing to him, that as he went along he was collecting primarily negative items. Actually, all negative items. Almost every negative phrase among the rocks was something that applied to him, though he didn't hesitate to grab them. Still, when he thought he'd exhausted everything that described him, nothing happened.
He took a deep breath, then started grabbing things which he didn't personally think described him, but that others may think of him, starting with "murderer". That one flew back to the pile, thank goodness. He continued on, but couldn't find any more negative items which described him. Did he miss a positive? He'd only grabbed three, maybe four, because he didn't see a lot to like about himself.
"Yuuri," His mother's voice interrupted his thoughts, and he turned to see her standing atop the pile of rocks he'd pulled aside as accurate descriptors. Well, it wasn't exactly her. There was something off; she looked younger, that's what it was. The woman who stood before him was his mother as she looked before she had children, "You know there's more than this."
"There really isn't," He shook his head, staring at the words. He'd overturned all the rocks so he could scan for words without picking each individual one up, "That... That pile is all that I am."
"Hardworking, Skilled, Merciful, and Team Player. Yeah, that's all you've got going for you?" Komaru questioned, stepping down from the pile, "Like you'd survive this long if you were this awful, with only those in your favor," She stepped past him, into the field, "But you know, I don't blame you for not picking up anything else. If you admit that you have a trait which you admire in others, then you're dragging them down to your level. If you can be as good as them, they can be as bad as you, yes?"
Yuuri refused to humor this apparition of his mother with an answer. She was right, of course she was. Yuuri didn't want to say that he was compassionate, because Kanoshi was compassionate. Even as he did some things just for the sake of kindness, Kanoshi always did more than him. Nonetheless, when he set the rock with compassionate written on it to the side, it didn't fly back out.
Likewise was loyalty. Yuuri wasn't sure that he considered himself loyal. He'd lay down his life for his friends, but they'd more likely do it for him. Kotomi and Sayaka both embodied the idea of loyalty so much more than he ever could, but he needed to stop comparing himself to others. if he was ever going to get an accurate picture of himself. After those two, he found another four, for a total of ten positive traits. That number was still dwarfed by the negative traits, but he was uncomfortable even accepting that much was admirable about him.
"Good," Komaru laughed, stepping up to him, "I think that's it, now. That's the thing to remember, though. Even bad people like you have something good going for them. I have my admirable traits. That poor man you got killed had some too. Everyone who ever hurt you had plenty of good things going for them. Some people probably think they're good people."
"How could you say that?" Yuuri questioned, standing up and walking toward her, "You're not a good person, and none of them are either!"
"It depends who you ask. Somebody who met me when I looked like this might think I was a good person. Somebody who met me now will think I'm a bad person. Someone who met me a long time ago and continues to know me now? Who knows what they'll think. It's all timing and priorities," Komaru moved closer to him with a cocky smirk, "But you wouldn't know about that, would you? Nobody's ever thought you're good."
"That's because I'm not a habitual liar. I don't spend my time trying to make people like me, or think that I'm something that I'm not. If anyone wants to like me in spite of my being a terrible person, then that's their loss," Yuuri answered, raising his eyebrows, "The only people who could ever think for even a second that I'm good are the customers at the grocery store where I work, who would never know anything about me."
"You keep acting like you're fine with being a bad person, but the fact that you went straight for the negatives... For someone your age to be so aware of your flaws really means that you hate yourself for them, right?" Komaru asked, tilting her head to the side, "It took me years to realize I was bad. And that's the thing to think about. You're bad. You will never be good."
"Of course I know that," Yuuri scoffed, slipping his hands into his pockets, "That doesn't mean I have to enjoy it. Hell, I would never enjoy it. I wish I could be different than this, but I can't change who I am."
"Yeah, Onii-chan?" Another voice spoke up, and Yuuri turned around to see Hikari standing there. Unlike the apparition of his younger mother, she seemed to have more of an air of reality to her. She appeared in the way that she likely would look at this point, at age seventeen, "I thought you blamed who you are on Mama."
 |
| Hikari Ruka |
"I would have ended up the same, if she didn't go to jail when she did. But the damage was already done," She got up on her toes and looked up at her brother, "But also, if she didn't go to jail when she did, you wouldn't have been free, right? I bet, Onii-chan, you would have been poisoned by the way she thinks. Maybe you would have even become so obedient that if she told you to, you'd kill someone."
Yuuri shook his head, "I wouldn't do that. I'd never do something like that, no matter what."
Hikari brought both hands to her face, covering her mouth as she giggled, "Never ever? But onii-chan, you didn't even know that Mama was doing something wrong in the first place! A few more years, and maybe you would have been the one who murdered me, instead of the Vagrant Killer. Don't you think it would have been more fitting if you got killed?"
"Of course I do," Yuuri nodded with a groan, "You never did anything wrong. Maybe... I could have been infected by her. Maybe you're right. Who knows what would have happened if..."
"That's the thing, though. There's no way to know what would have happened, all we can even begin to do is wonder at what could have happened," Hikari explained, then took a seat at the top of Yuuri's pile of descriptive rocks, crossing her legs, "What did happen was that Mama ruined your life, then got arrested, and I got killed. You were totally left alone to pick up the pieces."
"I had a bunch of bad luck," Yuuri agreed, "And a bunch of undeserved good luck. There were so many times that I should have died, and I didn't. And I don't know why that happened. Why I've survived so long. Why you got killed, and I didn't. Life's not fair. You'd have been better off surviving, but instead I'm just here, this walking disaster. I still don't even know how I ended up dying, but I'm not counting on it being anything other than self-inflicted."
"Onii-chan, I have a question for you," Hikari folded her hands in her lap, "What would you do if it turned out this isn't Hell? If as it turns out, you're alive? Are you actually going to do something with this experience, or just go back to your regular misery?"
"You already know the answer to that," Yuuri responded, sitting down next to her, "I won't. I've never done much of anything that's worthwhile, and I never will. I won't bother."
"Yeah, you won't," Hikari shrugged, "But there is one thing you should probably think about, okay? One rock which doesn't describe you, out of all of these, was murderer. You've never killed anyone, Onii-chan. That includes yourself."
"Huh. That's a good point," Yuuri nodded, leaning back. He looked up to the sky, noticing that there weren't any clouds, or a sun. It was just blue all the way, "I find it weird to think about, though, that it could be anyone's fault but my own. There'd be no such thing as an accident when it comes to me. If I fell or something like that, it would be a subconscious desire to be killed during the event."
Hikari closed her eyes, then slipped an arm onto her brother's shoulder, "That's the thing about dying. You can never even know if it really happened, or how, if it did."
"We're not talking about me anymore," Yuuri stood up and turned to look at her, "We're talking about you. I don't know if you're really dead, and it's never made sense that the Vagrant Killer would attack an innocent child. Three innocent children, with one of them showing up again?"
"I know what you're thinking," Hikari nodded, "I know that part of you thinks that I got killed, and another part is convinced that I ran away with my two best friends because unlike you, I couldn't handle the situation at all, in any way. I just ran away from the truth. You stayed and dealt with it."
"Physically, sure," Yuuri clicked his tongue, "In fact, that trip I was making out to Nagasaki was the first time that I've left the Tokyo area in my entire life. But... I've always been running away. I even ran away from my own thoughts when I got to this place. It's how I ended up here, with these rocks, and now it's all just making me confront my bullshit even more. I'm always just looking for ways not to have to think about any of it."
Hikari stood up as well, then walked out across the field of rocks, holding her arms behind her back as she went. She didn't say anything, but Yuuri followed her anyway. Now that he'd gathered everything which described him, the texture of the surface wasn't accurate to its appearance, as if a sheet of smooth glass had been laid down across the top of the rock field.
As Yuuri followed along behind his younger sister, he looked around at the landscape which continued to be desolate and empty. As soon as he looked back to her, she'd disappeared, and he was alone once more. He stopped walking, and sighed, dipping his head to look down at the leftover rocks beneath his feet. Well, he decided to at least get beyond the field. He continued walking, then stopped as soon as he was on dirt again, and aimed his gaze out at the horizon. There was still nothing out there.
There was never anything out there for him, was there?
He was afraid of that.
This whole time, he'd only been going on the idea that maybe by some miracle, there was something out there for him. Something better, something good and pure and more amazing than anything he'd ever had before, but that was a lie, and deep down he was afraid that was the case. It was the truth, though. There was always nothing.
That was why he became a magical boy, after all. Becoming a magica meant that your life was over, and he didn't even hesitate. His life had never even started, so he wasn't at all afraid to dive into something like this. It was a way of killing himself without really doing it. Someday, a monster or some other magica would kill him, and until then he was just pressing on to try and avoid being hurt again, searching for something he knew he'd never find.
He wasn't really dead.
Maybe the fact that he wasn't really dead was what scared him most. As a magical boy, wasn't he supposed to be able to avoid situations like this? If this wasn't Hell, it meant that somebody had gotten the better of him to trap him in this place. He hated that idea. He took a deep breath, then pulled the bandages off of his arm. His marking seemed unmarred, and he hoped there wasn't anything left of the injury. He willed a transformation, and it worked.
He felt a little more confident with his revolver in his hand. It helped, anyway. He took a deep breath, then continued walking forward. As he went, the hard dirt beneath his feet softened, eventually turning to sand. He looked down and confirmed that it was, indeed, sand. He kept moving, and looked up to see that there was an ocean out in front of him.
The empty landscape had given way to a beach, complete with seaweed and driftwood. Yuuri had never been to a beach like this. Not as far as he could remember, at least, though it was a rather generic beach that could easily be based on one he'd seen in a photograph or a movie. He sighed and, despite knowing that sand and leather was a very uncomfortable combination, sat down. The ocean was pure and blue before him, bright.
Out beyond it was something dark and shadowy, but he wasn't going to worry about that. Not right now. It was far away, and he was ready to face it if it got closer. He took a few deep breaths, then before he could think about anything else, found his head immersed in the sand. He forcibly sat back up, sputtering, then looked up the arm of the hand which had thrust him down, only to find that it belonged to somebody he didn't recognize at all. Somebody he'd never even met.
He was dressed in a rather standard business suit, the creases pressed to his form, and he wore a look of disdain as he, without even seeming to exert any force, pushed Yuuri down again. Yuuri fumbled for his revolver and pointed it straight at the mystery man, only to find that when he fired it, the man avoided it without much difficulty. Without any difficulty at all, actually. He fired one more time as his face was once more immersed in the sand.
He continued to struggle, but suddenly, he couldn't feel his right arm at all. It was numb; more than numb, it felt as if it wasn't there at all. Yuuri gasped for air and only got a mouthful of sand. He writhed under the hand of this mysterious man, trying and failing to get any traction against him. As he moved he only found he was burying himself deeper into the beach beneath him, until suddenly the pressure was gone and he sat back up.
The man who'd been holding him down was faceless; not in the meaning that he was insignificant to Yuuri, but there was a hole where his face should be, the edges of his flesh glowing like embers. Yuuri just breathed, trying to compose himself, then took a look around, hoping that whatever had stopped his attacker was not even more dangerous and out to get him next.
The weapon was nowhere to be seen, but the person responsible seemed to be the apparition of his mother, the youthful version. Nonetheless, the way that she was standing seemed off, an unbecoming posture of her, and when she spoke her voice belonged to somebody entirely different, "Now, Tatsuya. That's very unbecoming, even for you. Let's go, Yuuri-kun. It's about time that we blew this popsicle stand. In the figurative, metaphorical sense, if that wording's got you on edge."
"Who... Are you?" Yuuri questioned, getting to his feet and squinting at the figure who wasn't far away, but still had the very same appearance, with no flaws.
"It doesn't matter who I am, what matters is that I'm here. Follow me if you want to live. Or if you don't want to live, which seems more likely coming from you. Either way, you're coming with me."
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