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Oogai Aya does not burn. She crumbles into ash, without a bang, without fiery wrath, and her remains are indistinguishable from the gravel of the concrete jungle. They burn her into nothingness and resurrect her with a single name, a single idea.
She is an idea. A human being is just an idea. The soul is just an idea: it feeds and it grows into something humanlike.
At least, that’s the plan. Her life is an idea, and ideas rarely change when people are set in their ways; you will never be good as Fushimi Saruhiko. The blood running through her veins sings with mockery, the blood that she and her cousin share, and she wants to bring it to the surface so it can wash over the rest of her, too.
While she may one day beat him in academics, there is one thing she is sure she can beat him in. Saruhiko is lanky and grumpy and glares at everyone. Aya is cute and Aya is short (fun sized!) and Aya is energetic and Aya is liked more than her awkward, angry cousin. Aya has created a personality, to hide herself from prying eyes and to gather social support against Saruhiko.
(Just one person. Any person will do. Someone that will listen to her, and she’ll listen to them, and she can forget this competition so unfairly pushed on her, because Saruhiko never cared anyway—)
It’s easy. People are easy. People are predictable. People should like Aya, and Aya’s personality, and Aya’s looks, down to every single stitch that Aya has lovingly threaded to rest on top of Aya’s very being. If Aya is happy, and Aya is cheerful, and Aya is a little bit mischievous, Aya will be liked and Saruhiko will not be, and Saruhiko will be alone and Aya will not be.
Oogai Aya is an idea, and Fushimi Saruhiko is an ideal. She’s missing the L. Love, life. Lacking.
It backfires, spectacularly.
Oogai Aya is a monster, they all whisper. She wears a face that is not hers, stitching it onto her face with bloodied hands that will never clean. She peels her skin raw, never allowing it to reform. She falls apart at the seams as she tries to do and redo the stitches again, mask falling sloppily off her hollow being.
Oogai Aya is an idea, Fushimi Saruhiko is an ideal, but Yata Misaki is the most human of them all.
There is a boy, a short boy with hair that shines as bright as the sun itself. He clings to Saruhiko and Saruhiko doesn’t mind, and Aya feels something disgusting swirl to her very core. Saruhiko should be the most predictable of them all, but here he is, allowing himself to burn, for his wax wings to carry him closer to the unforgiving sun.
Disgusting. Fushimi Saruhiko should stay alone. (If she can’t win with people, neither can he.)
Yata Misaki just becomes another playing field, another dimension of the competition. She plans the trajectory of launch; close enough to enter the orbit, but far enough that it’ll sling her back out into space. She stays long enough to gather information needed, and then she never enters ever again.
That’s the plan. She crashes straight into the heart of the fiery sun.
Yata Misaki makes Fushimi Saruhiko laugh. He takes him to new places, drags him to new heights, almost completely unapologetic. He is entrancing, and he treats her like an actual human being, if she were ever such a thing.
It’s a straight nosedive into hell, and she pulls upwards on the yoke until she feels her very soul ripped away from her fingertips. But the sun and its system send out a final flare, reminding her she never belonged in the first place, to never meddle in the affairs of other worlds.
“I hate the society you strive to be a part of.” Harsh words as always, from Fushimi Saruhiko. The image she crafts falls apart in his hands, his hands that were only ever meant to destroy, and she stares at the remains falling through his fingertips. It never existed in the first place to him anyway, right?
I hate who you are. I hate who you’re trying to become. I hate who you’re doing it for.
The real game starts when Saruhiko and Yata leave to live on their own. The competition becomes less straightforward at that point; her life was set to check for Saruhiko’s performance and react accordingly. She does not have a try-catch built into her. She runs an error every time she tries to absorb the fact that Saruhiko is leaving.
Saruhiko is leaving. She only has one purpose in life, and it is to defeat Fushimi Saruhiko, to be smarter and more impressive and to rise above him. She cannot do this if he is no longer in school. She is built on something that has no regards for her, sees her more as a parasite on his foundation than anything else.
She is—she’s an outdated machine. She needs to create a new build. Oogai Aya, release version 3.0.0. She goes from playing along to playing dirty to plain disgusting—she’s got Fushimi blood in her, after all, and this bloodline bleeds black as sin.
<jungle> was a game, before, but now it’s a battlefield. Aya can make her way around a computer almost as well as Saruhiko can, and so she progresses further into the <jungle>. She unravels the mysteries of the kings, of powers, and she thinks, for once, that she might have a chance.
She might have wanted recognition, but when she is anonymous among ranks she feels more powerful than ever. Aya is no longer the only one who dons a mask; there are many of them, she engages in despicable acts, if only to taste the power of the Green King for a fleeting moment.
Sometimes she thinks she doesn’t even need the power. The anonymous crowd is powerful enough.
She catches wind of Fushimi Saruhiko and Yata Misaki engaging <jungle>. Morons. She grins, a sad and tired and malicious grin, and covers it with a mask before heading out into the crowd.
It’s a shame that Yata got involved, but it means that Saruhiko is not far behind. It’s not hard to find Saruhiko running among the crowd. He is refreshingly bare-faced, but the emotion behind his always always always stoic face has Aya’s nails digging so hard into her palm that they bleed.
Why Yata? Why do you care so much about this annoying boy over your own blood? (Then again, the Fushimi bloodline doesn’t have a particularly good track record.) She puts all her force into elbowing him in the neck, uncaring about the height difference; it hits the mark anyway.
Saruhiko, on the ground. Aya, peeling away her mask. It’s symbolic.
For once in her life, she sees an emotion on Saruhiko’s face directed at her because of her. She exists in that instant, for once. For once, she is seen as less of an annoyance and more of a threat. Saruhiko curses her out with feeling, for once.
Oogai Aya is an idea. Fushimi Saruhiko is an ideal.
Ideas are persistent. Ideals will topple.
The red clan and their king come to dissolve <jungle>, and Aya watches as Saruhiko is given another chance at life. Yata is crying. Saruhiko looks almost touched.
Disgusting. Revolting. It drives her insane.
(“Did you ever once look at me like Misaki does?” With eyes that glitter with excitement, with her entire being dedicated to Saruhiko, with encouragement, with confirmation that Saruhiko is important in this life?
I do. I did. I do. I did. I do. I did. I do. She carves the words into her arms and legs and paints a new mask with her blood, once again. I did. I do. I did. I do. I still am. I do. I did, I do, I am, I will.)
Fushimi Niki dies. Aya panics. Saruhiko has a chance at a life now. And she loves him, so she is happy. There’s always been a part of her that is nauseous at the way she has to see Saruhiko in order to survive among the family—if she channels her childhood innocence, she can channel Saruhiko’s, too.
He liked puzzles when they were younger. She’d always be a little slower at them, and—and he’d still run off to show Niki rather than her, but watching Saruhiko work from the sidelines struck awe into her. It’s effortless, for him, and people call her smart too, and so she thinks she has a fighting chance.
Niki destroys the thread connecting her and Saruhiko fantastically, setting it ablaze. She hangs onto the frayed remains, and Saruhiko only feels the feather-light touch disappear.
Anyway, Fushimi Niki. Fushimi Niki brings them back together, at his funeral. He’s laughing in his grave, she knows it, because Saruhiko doesn’t care and Aya cares too much.
He tells her of kings, of powers, to throw away the children’s games and her fantasies of having friends on <jungle>, because it’s dangerous. You’ve grown soft, Saruhiko, Aya tells herself, because if she tries to think too long about the fact that Saruhiko might… on some tiny level, actually care, everything she’s worked for to this point will collapse.
“Whatever. I know it’s, like, because Aya’s getting stronger on <jungle>, and like, you haven’t been on lately, right?” Her smirk is lopsided, marred by desperation. “You’re dead, Saruhiko.”
Saruhiko doesn’t look at her once. He continues to look at the blue sky up above. “I tried. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He walks away.
Aya wishes she could feel the Green King’s power snake around her fingers like vines, to destroy the back that walks away from her, but she is left powerless. And so as long as Saruhiko lives, she has a purpose to live.
She needs to destroy him. The Fushimi bloodline is good at destruction. It shouldn’t be that hard. (And then, what comes after?) (Nothing.) (She’s already destroyed herself as the first step.)
But Saruhiko has been unpredictable when involving Yata. Bringing in someone outside the Fushimis means that Saruhiko now has a bit of a buffer against his family. It means that he has a reference frame outside his own and outside Aya’s and outside Niki’s.
Bringing someone outside the family also makes them accustomed to the family. Yata approaches Aya, one last time. He’s in ratty clothes, and a raincoat that has seen better days, but the hair matted to his forehead from the rain hasn’t faded at all, still brilliant against the bleak landscape.
Yata Misaki cannot win. Oogai Aya defaults to academics—yeah, I’m—Aya’s in the best school of the region. But like, it’s not like it was hard. Like, the boys schools are harder than the one Aya’s gonna go to. I—Aya could’ve totally made it in, if they’d let Aya try.
She wants something, anything, recognition that Yata Misaki is not good enough for Fushimi Saruhiko, that although she is not Saruhiko, she is bright and smart and crafty in her own way—
“You don’t have to try and prove things to me, y’know.” Yata’s voice comes clear through the pouring rain. She feels a spike of panic run up her body, humiliation manifesting as burning red on her face. Yata can see right through her.
Oogai Aya is an idea. Ideas are born of and dissected by and executed for human minds, and Yata Misaki is the most human of them all.
“Things got bad, ‘cause you’re both too smart, but it turns out Fushimi’s kinda weak to honesty.” Yata’s smile is concerned, but Aya chooses to read it as pity, and her jaw sets painfully.
I hate who you are. I hate who you’re trying to become. I hate who you’re doing it for.
Aya was built to function as a human being. Of course her entire nature is a lie.
Yata’s back is towards her as he walks away. She is painfully torn between wishing Saruhiko a decent chance at life or razing to the ground the earth they’ve built their world on. In the end, she cries helplessly in the middle of the street, as her mother creates another story for her.
Her mom only listens to the things she wants to listen to, says only the things she wants to say. Her mother creates a life for Aya in order to give herself less work. If Aya is predictable, then it is easier to shape Aya, and it is easier to predict Aya.
This time, her mother says: “Are you sad because you’ll be graduating soon? You’ll make new friends, Aya.” A question and an answer, crafted for her. She updates. Oogai Aya 3.4.5.
She lets her life continue normally. Normally may be the wrong word. Perhaps as programmed would be appropriate.
“Aya, how was school today?”
“It was good. Miyu and Momoko and Aya studied for tomorrow’s English test during, like, lunch break.” (Shirotori Miyu and Satou Momoko took my notes and threw them off the roof of the school again.)
“Are you still talking like that? Aren’t you a little too old for that, now?”
“Aya g—I guess.” (Their insulting nicknames are getting more creative. It’s rather impressing.)
“Anyway, make sure you study hard so you can do well, alright? If Saruhiko ever comes back to school, he’ll give you a run for your money!”
“Mama, I do study hard!” (I thought about catching my notes in midair as they fell.)
“And your hair is a mess again, really, will anyone ever take you seriously if you go to school looking like that?”
“Remember Akira, mama? She likes braiding my hair, we left it in too long. (Yamaguchi Akira dragged me through the hallway by my pigtails again. She oinked the entire time, because that joke didn’t get old the first million times, and all of the teachers look away whenever I try to look at them. Oogai might be a prestigious name in its relation to Fushimi, but Yamaguchi money is no joking matter.)
So, Aya lives her life normally.
Saruhiko and Yata fall into a new pattern themselves. It’s almost comical how domestic it gets. Yata cooks all the meals, and Saruhiko turns into something more human. Something ugly, but ugliness is an inherent part of the human race.
Ideas were never persistent. It’s the humans that carry them that are persistent. An idea is nothing if not handled by human hands, and Yata is the one that introduces the idea of compassion to a cold ideal.
Disgusting. Revolting.
It’s been a while since Aya’s been able to keep down her food.
Fushimi Saruhiko allows himself to be haunted by ghosts, and Oogai Aya is long since dead.
Fushimi Saruhiko and Yata Misaki live their life in their apartment, doing whatever they do. Aya is set as surveillance on them, the only reason she was granted powers in the first place. She knows she is a pawn, but she gets a small thrill out of being to use Saruhiko as a pawn of hers, too.
She’s instructed to play the waiting game by the Green King, and her only mission is to break Fushimi Saruhiko down. It’s theoretically easy, of course; get to Yata Misaki, get to Fushimi Saruhiko, destroy both of them in one shot. Bring Saruhiko back alive, and make sure Misaki doesn’t talk about anything, and the easiest way to shut someone up is to destroy them so thoroughly they have nothing left.
Well, no rush. She profiles Fushimi Niki the way she remembers. Brilliant, calculating, fairly young to be a father. Died as he lived, treating Saruhiko as more of a game than a successor. Fushimi Niki is intrusive. Fushimi Niki is always ten steps ahead, and Fushimi Niki shows no weaknesses.
While naturally impossible through normal technological means, Aya has been blessed, for once in her wretched life, by the supernatural.
Picking apart the payload she's crafted does nothing; in function, the program periodically calls random locations in memory for a brief moment in time, slowing down performance by an egregious amount before returning it to normal. It’s nothing special, virtually undetectable by the untrained eye, and only serves as an annoyance to whoever it’s unleashed on.
Really, it’s nothing special. But through means unknown to her, Aya unleashes the green aura into the executable, watching it transform before her eyes. The green seeps through her machine like poison, dripping sickly sweet through every circuit and every node.
Within the code, nothing’s changed at all. The payload itself is the same, and it functionally does the same thing.
But the blinking cursor sitting at the end of all the lines of code feels different. It blinks similarly to the staccato laugh of Fushimi Niki, even from beyond the grave.
Ha, ha. Ha, ha. Ha, ha.
Aya swallows.
I’ve completed the program, she types to the Green King’s representative. It goes live soon.
She gets no response other than a seen message, and so she sends a text with the executable attached to Saruhiko, set to run on open and hiding itself as a background process.
His tone is unreadable through text, but she imagines it hasn’t taken on any sort of emotion at all, and it’s the final straw.
“Oogai. Do you enjoy alienating me from HOMRA?”
Saruhiko’s found her out, Saruhiko knows what she sent him, Saruhiko knows that she was the one behind the psychological torture unleashed on him.
(The program periodically calls random locations in memory and prints them. It slows down the machine’s performance and then reverts it to normal.) (Saruhiko is haunted by periodic hallucinations of his father, causing him to lash out and become paranoid and alienated, and it’s genius. It’s a crafty program in its simplicity, written by Oogai Aya and enhanced by <jungle>.)
But Saruhiko knows, and of course he does, because he’s a fucking genius and he’s smarter than I’ll ever be and what’s even the point? Her teeth grit as her hands generate a storm, thundering from the keyboard.
I was never happy, Saruhiko, every fucking facet of my life revolves around you! Green sparks from her fingertips and the room fills with the scent of burning plastic. Her final fortress breaks down, letters melting into the keyboard. Saruhiko this, Saruhiko that, every little goddamn thing I could have had turns into you!
Aya suddenly jumps at the feel of superheated plastic, and she bites back a scream as it burns her fingertips away. There is no more green left in her, and her computer has shut itself down. She leaves it untouched and sleeps with the burns on her hands as a reminder to never interfere with the games of kings and gods.
She reboots her computer again in the morning, before going to school and again pretending that she doesn’t live this life, has never lived it. Overnight, she’s received a cheery email saying that all traces of her account have been destroyed, and all associated IPs have been blacklisted.
Simple, informal, distant. The same stock email given to every permabanned user. Oogai Aya, who had once held a sliver of <jungle> in her hands, is back to square one.
Oogai Aya 00.0.0. She starts a clean build.
Aya is quiet at school, anyway, because no matter what she does, she will be singled out. While her silence is normally more deliberate, she walks into class feeling as though the earth underneath her feet will fall through at the slightest breath.
It’s a balance. Pretend you’re okay. Pretend you’re okay. Pretend you’re okay.
Without <jungle> to distract her, with no more updates on Fushimi Saruhiko’s life, she looks out the window. Shizume is a train ride away, and she can see the tallest buildings jut out from the horizon, and she wonders how tall the tallest buildings really are.
She is fifteen when her life ends. They are fifteen when their life begins.
She is a shell of a being, hollowed out and left to rot on the streets. There is nothing left for the vultures to pick at.
Oogai Aya 00.0.1.
She opens a new shell.
bash> (the fucking computer. Delete every trace of her foray into <jungle>, burn everything she’s ever built to fight against Saruhiko, wipe the hard drive. Send all past traces of her old life into oblivion, and compile the build anew.)
(the fucking computer. Delete every trace of her foray into <jungle>, burn everything she’s ever built to fight against Saruhiko, wipe the hard drive. Send all past traces of her old life into oblivion, and compile the build anew.): Command not found.
(Aya does not do that, cannot do that. Aya very calmly deletes every trace of <jungle> activity from her computer, anything that wasn’t already removed for her. She takes apart her machine. She goes down for dinner when her mother calls her. And tomorrow, she will wake up, and put on her uniform, and after school she will sell all her old computer parts and destroy the rest that is unsalvageable. And then, the day after that, she rebuilds.)
bash> sudo kill -9 1120
(There’s no point. There’s no point in anything. Why rebuild? What’s the point? Why pretend?)
(Aya has outlived her usefulness. She was not built to handle unpredictability. Machines do not like unpredictability.)
Aya is fifteen. Aya is a big girl, and Aya does not need to compare herself to any fucking Fushimi Saruhikos or Yata Misakis of the world, because Aya is her own fucking person, and Aya can get through life just fine without a purpose like that. Because isn’t it a sad life, to be written for only one person? (An ideal. He’s not a person. He’s an ideal.)
Aya says her name over and over again, burning it into Aya’s mind. Aya, Aya. Oogai Aya, Aya. Oogai. Aya. From today, this machine, this idea has a name. A non-referential name, a hard-coded name, the name Oogai Aya.
Names are a powerful thing, but hers only serves to make herself feel smaller.
Months pass by on autopilot. Aya is powerless. She always has been. She is pulled like a puppet by the gods, a machine created for amusement. A machine of the gods that fails is less than human, less than dirt, less than decay.
When her strings are cut, she falls uselessly into a life unplanned, no longer ruled by the kings and gods. She stands up and walks through these months, regaining footing on earth rather than the fantastical clouds of the heavens the gods created, and she crumbles under the pressure of gravity.
Face pressed against the grit of the urban wasteland, she realizes: I don’t want to be ordinary.
Aya falls into a routine; against what her very being screams, against her programming, she has made this routine as ordinary as she can.
She knows she can do better. But if her grades are too good, she’ll find new torment from the girls around her. She does enough to pass, enough so that the teachers can ignore her like usual, and she forges her grades to show her mother.
Oogai Aya flies under the radar. Old technology must be phased out to wait for the new ones to come in, and so she slowly removes every connection she has to anyone. She doesn’t resist. She does what is expected of her, so she is given more freedom. With more freedom, there is less worry, and one day there will be absolutely no worry at all.
There is nothing left of Oogai Aya, nothing she was ever truly proud of. And so, life is easy. With no friends, she dedicates her time to studies. By studying the bare minimum, she can work two part-time jobs. It’s the first step; she pays for what her mother normally would, gradually, until she’s buying her own groceries and no longer needs allowance.
Her mother plays along with her games, now. Aya is more compliant these days, leaves less reason to worry. She becomes more responsible, grows up a little, and the crease between her mother’s eyebrows smoothens out.
Aya never realized how tired her mother looked.
The autumn is a time of rest, of slow death. The chill creeps in under the cracks and calms everyone down from the restless energy of the summer sun. “Mama, I’m moving out. I’ve found a place and I’ve saved enough for the first four months of rent, and it’s closer to where I work. And where I plan to go to university.” The last part is a lie. She no longer has any sort of plans for that.
Her mother’s tiredness becomes more pronounced, but she gives her blessing either way.
Aya doesn’t know why she bothers moving forward, if she’ll never move up. But she is afraid to die. She is full of possibilities, none of which she recognizes as plausible, and yet she moves forward.
(She knows exactly why she moves forward, but she’s working on removing for Fushimi Saruhiko from her vocabulary.)
She finishes her school year at home first. The lease doesn’t sign her until mid-January, and so she plays the waiting game. Oogai Aya finishes her programmed commands until she powers down.
Her mother pretends that she is Oogai Aya, the almost-perfect daughter who is alright—not perfect, but she’ll do. When her mother is in control, Oogai Aya’s job is easy. She barely has to do anything. Her mother will speak for her. Her mother will ask questions and put the answers in her mouth, and all Aya has to do is repeat.
Her teachers ignore Oogai Aya. She’s doing fine, academically, and she works hard after school, and so her mother has nothing to worry about. She’s very headstrong, they say, not letting any of the silly bullying get to her. Girls will be girls, right?
Her classmates provoke Oogai Aya, and she has long since learnt to modify those modules and then, in the end, shut them down completely. There’s too much effort put into reacting to them, every single time, and when she’s quiet it’ll be easier to fade away anyway.
Aya only has a few boxes to move. She leaves most of her items at home under the guise that she’ll come home, mama, don’t worry about me. But the truth is simpler: she just doesn’t want the majority of her physical possessions.
In the January cold, lying in her futon, she is…
Stable.
(Inert may be the better word.)
The apartment is in the cheaper sides of Shizume. She leaves the door unlocked, because there is nothing valuable in her apartment. It’s one of Niki’s old practices, she knows, and she truly understands it now that she lives on her own.
She’s also somewhat hoping someone will come in while she’s sleeping and kill her. It’s easier to say things like that, these days. Aya is sixteen, and Aya wishes to die, but Aya doesn’t want to die. Humans are complicated things, if she were to be one.
Humans are creatures of habit, if she classified herself as human. When the snow dies down, she walks around Shizume until she feels numb, if only to exhaust herself enough to fall directly into uninterrupted sleep later that night. She still looks up to the sky, at where the blimp could have been, and her heart aches for Saruhiko and Yata in front of her (because they were never by her side, right?)
They wanted an adventure, didn’t they?
On top of the rooftop so long ago, she sits on the edge and dangles her feet. Her long hair whips at her face, and she wonders what the aircraft felt when it crashed so spectacularly onto the rooftops of Shizume.
On that roof some days, she catches an explosion of red, contained tactfully within alleyways. It’s those days, the days when she reaches out towards the auras, that she nearly tips over the edge of the rooftop.
There is no reason she should be alive. She contributes nothing to society except for menial labour.
She works at a coffee shop (cliché, she knows) some days and at a technological parts shop on others, the former because it is easy and the latter because she is experienced. She also practices in these environments, and these are the lessons she learns, every night:
- How to keep up a neutral face in every situation.
- How to handle insults with a smile.
- How to expose herself to people for hours on end while biting back unsatisfying feelings.
Through work, Aya hones her craft of maskmaking and hangs every single one upon her wall lovingly.
At night, when she is not tired enough from work, Aya wanders the streets. She is worse than a stray, because at least people will feed dogs and give them shelter.
A lifetime ago, her dream was to be on top of the world, with Saruhiko either below her or by her side. Now, all she wishes is to be dead in body, so it can join her spirit. Aya makes company with all the strays, and buries the carcasses when they have fully lived. It keeps her occupied, keeps her moving from day to day, knowing that somewhere out there are creatures that rely on her for something.
Her groceries shift to more digestible meals for the animals on the streets, and she whittles down to one meal a day—just one, at lunch, so she can keep up appearances at school.
The long nights get shorter with company. Sometimes, the dogs howl as Aya pets their matted fur to help them pretend they’re in a home, warm and loved and cared for and living for themselves rather than for survival. When she looks up to the sky, she spots something white and with blinking lights of green and red and blue.
How has the blimp returned? It’s along a different line than she remembers; she can crawl through these streets like a shadow, now, and she pointedly avoids every building they once visited together.
The dog licks at her palm and whines. A lifetime ago, she would have been revolted by the dirtiness, not allowing herself to be tainted, always trying to stay in top shape. Now, this is all she wishes for; living company on nights where the past drifts by, and she is unable to stop it.
Aya starts to bring a notebook with her. There is nothing quite like writing on paper for ideas, and her PDA is too easily trackable by anyone. (Not that anyone would put the effort into tracking her location.) Her nights among the strays turn into them following her around as she tries to look at different skies around the city, slowly but surely creating a mapped route of the mysterious aircraft.
There is no rush, this time. She takes little pieces of the city every day.
As Aya miraculously approaches seventeen, not having yet died or killed herself, she resigns to the routine she’s made for herself.
Oogai Aya wakes up to her apartment, as bare as it was almost a year and a half ago. She brushes her hair, pulls it into a more mature ponytail, now, and goes to school. She is always on time, and her notes are always organized, and she is an average student with an average life. Every reaction towards the girls’ torment has been shut down, but it continues even to this day.
She eats lunch alone in various places. Sometimes she is found, sometimes she is not. Mostly, she is not hungry. It’s second nature now for the girls to put their after school responsibilities on her, which she accepts. There are no emotions tied to it like gladly accepts or begrudgingly accepts; she simply does. The teachers have long since stopped trying to alert her mother, because Aya doesn’t seem to be bothered, anyway, and there are rowdier teenagers to look after.
There is no time to drop by “home” before work, and so she leaves her uniforms at her workplace. The parts shop is alright, because most everyone else is boys-who-leave-her-alone. The coffee shop is something else. Her eccentric (read: detached) behavior catches the attention of some of the other baristas, who are her age but much more well-adjusted (read: they can function as expected of human beings). She gains torment there, too, but she is too efficient at her job to be let go, and so she is shafted behind the scenes, almost as a demotion.
But they pay the bills, and it keeps her busy, and she doesn’t care, anymore.
(Why hasn’t she died, already?)
(Why is the phrase for Fushimi Saruhiko still prominent in her mind?)
It’s stupid, but the notebook she uses to track the aircraft is therapeutic. It’s purely an observation journal, but Aya’s fingers start to ache at the thought of programming a simulator for flight patterns based off the pre-determined flight path she’s found and the weight of the blimp and the weather systems of Shizume and everything she might have started were she a better person.
The aircraft is something nice to blindly follow, pretending as though she has a purpose in life. It’s like old habits: observe, calculate, (execute). She’s missing the final step, because there is no final step, so she stays in the intermediate ones for as long as she can.
Aya fills up one journal, and then another, and then another. There are journals that look from the ground up towards the aircraft, and there are journals that look down at the streets below her, a never-ending maze of chaos.
She knows where HOMRA is. She knows where their apartment is. She hasn’t managed to erase it from her days of <jungle>, and when HOMRA sends up sparks of angry red at least once a week across the cities, it’s hard to forget they exist.
There’s one particular building that’s her favourite; not quite the tallest, but nowhere near the shortest of the city. It’s on the edges of the urban jungle, and she can see the stretch of lights before her and she can maybe spot her school from behind her. It’s the best place to scribble maps, but the aircraft’s path is less clear cut.
Tomorrow is her birthday. She will spend the transition between days up here, on top of her favourite building, and she will draw herself a birthday cake on a page ripped out of her journal and she will set it on fire and blow it out to make a wish. (Spoiler: her wish is to become the ashes she will hold in her hands, blowing over the city as forgotten particles.)
Her PDA is at her apartment. Her mother knows better than to hope and message her to come home and celebrate.
Behind an alleyway, around the edges of the parking garage, up the emergency stairs—the broken ones that no one ever bothers with. If the building is not her first destination of the night, she can usually coerce a stray to come with her and sit at the foot of the rusted metal, quiet and patient. Her extra agility from her <jungle> days has long since left her, but she’s worked to compensate for it.
“Oi, what are you doing?”
A male voice startles her as she tries to jump from the first broken gap. She misses, and her arm is adorned with a new bloody gash against the metal as she falls towards the ground, and she thinks I wish this height were finally enough to kill me.
When one is in a dangerous situation, time seems to slow down, and one’s mind becomes clearer to process the event and aim for survival. Aya shuts this process down, wishes to die, but instead her feet land flat on the ground, gently.
There is a blue light that surrounds her, and it feels much like the green that used to fill her veins, but this one is all wrong, much colder, too unfamiliar. Her body rejects the feeling and she collapses onto her knees, staring up at him.
He’s tall, taller than Saruhiko was—but he must’ve grown by now, it’s been years—and his coat is a royal blue that shines repulsively under the yellow lights of the parking lot. His eyes are strong, like Yata’s, and his chestnut hair is jaundiced by the lighting.
He raises an eyebrow at her. “That’s trespassing.”
The uniform is that of Scepter 4’s, the blue clan. They’re essentially the police for the paranormal, and Aya was paranormal once. “I don’t give a fuck.”
He sighs and, inexplicably, sits down in front of her, cross legged. He motions for the dog and it comes reluctantly, and he allows it to lick his palm. “That cut could get infected.”
“I hope it kills me, then.”
The Scepter 4 officer starts petting the dog, scratching behind his ears, uncaring about the dirt underneath his fingernails. “I’d kinda not like to have a murder on my hands. Not part of the job description.”
“Fantastic, we have the fucking Pope here in Shizume. Bless us all with your unconditional kindness, why don’t you?” Aya sighs and lies back on the concrete, with the intention of rubbing the wound into the gravel. The young man pulls back on her with her other arm, and he levels a stare at her.
“Don’t be a moron. I was trying to lighten the mood.”
“What’s the point?”
“Well, I just wanted to see why you were trying to climb up a rusty old staircase,” he says, voice careful. “But if you talk to me like that, I’m not gonna wanna leave you alone.”
“So you’re trying to save me, is that it?” His eyes really remind her of Yata now, the way he’d look at Aya the day he first asked her where Saruhiko lived. “Fucking disgusting. I hope your ideals get you killed in the line of fire.”
“Look, I’m kinda trained for the possibility of being killed.” Aya feels the pressure loosen on her arm, and despite herself, she sits up. The young man releases his grip and sighs, scratching the back of his head. “I’ll leave you alone, but like, don’t die, then.”
This is fucking ridiculous. Somewhere tonight, Saruhiko’s second chances have given up and have been transferred to Aya. “Have you ever considered that I wanted to die?”
“You’ve made that very clear, yes.”
He’s a bit flippant, and she finds herself feeling irritated. (It’s been a while since she’s felt anything.) “Really, I should have been dead at least two years ago. Maybe more.”
He’s still sitting in front of her, caught in a comical half-squat; he was in the middle of walking away, but she keeps continuing the conversation. “How old are you, now?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“You look like a twelve-year old.”
“Give me a fucking break, you’re five years off.”
“Sorry, seven?”
Aya looks at him. He’s still got a serious look in his eyes, but he’s more relaxed, and there’s a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. It’s been years since anyone’s talked to her casually like this, if it ever happened at all, and her throat closes up and her eyes prick painfully with tears.
The dog under the young man’s hand crawls into her lap. She cries into its back, and the young man stays silent. She’s glad he doesn’t reach out to try and touch her.
When she’s reduced to hiccupping and gasping, the young man speaks up again. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were that upset about your age.”
This is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Oogai Aya is seventeen in less than ten minutes, has been dead for almost three years, and here is a young man who listens to the tip of this gargantuan iceberg and makes jokes about her being pre-pubescent. Her hiccups turn into laughter, almost manic, and on the night she turns seventeen she re-experiences emotion.
The young man has a bit of a relieved smile on his face too, even if her laugh isn’t the healthiest that’s ever graced the air. “So, what’s your name?”
Names are a powerful thing. She set her name again, all those years ago, but it’s never had an audience. She thinks that maybe, back then, she never tried to live again, that saying it out loud would imprint it in someone’s mind.
“Aya. Oogai Aya.” It’s unnatural in her mouth. It tastes ugly, it feels awkward, but she is a repulsive person. It’s very fitting, Oogai Aya. “It’s my birthday.”
“Well, shit, Oogai-chan, happy birthday.” The young man steals a glance at the building and back down to her arm. “No jumping off buildings tonight though, right?”
That wasn’t actually what she was planning, but considering their conversation, it wouldn’t have been too far-fetched.
“Hey, listen, the Scepter 4 van’s around the corner. I’m patrolling alone tonight, so lemme grab a first aid kit for you and patch up that nasty shit, ‘kay?” He gestures vaguely towards Aya’s arm stained red, and it’s as though all her nerves reconnect in that moment. Pain shoots up her arm and strangles her, and he notices.
“Whatever.”
He shrugs and stands up. “Well, you either follow me or you don’t. But if not, I can—I can try something. Only Munakata can kinda do this, but I’ll try anyway…” He mumbles words that mean nothing to her, and he walks up the staircase and draws out the blue aura.
The rusted, broken metal underneath him vibrates, but does nothing. Grumbling, he turns to the fixtures in the wall and envelops them in blue, all the way up to the rooftop. “I can’t full-on fix the stairs, but I’ve at least made the bolts sturdier. Technically, this is still trespassing, but fuck if I wasn’t a dumbass teenager when I was a teenager.” He frowns at his own words. “That was kinda redundant.”
The young man in the blue uniform jumps off the stairs and walks off, back facing her. She follows, and the dog does, and she feels more alive than ever at the brink of death.
He examines Aya’s arm in the back of the Scepter 4 van, a bright light finally illuminating the two of them. “Yeesh, that’s gonna need stitches.” She sees them in a small mirror off to the side; her face is pale, her hair has lost its colour, there are bags under her eyes. She’s seen better days. “Mind if I take you back to the S4 infirmary?”
Her breath catches. This one young man is okay, but she was heavily involved in <jungle>, one of the higher ranking members, and any sort of identification would lead her to questioning and puts her on the spot and she just wants to fade away, already. “I mind. I mind a lot.”
The young man lets out a long breath. “I could cauterize it. It’d be shitty.”
“I don’t care anymore.”
“How did I know you’d say that.” The blue hums around his fingertips again. “Well, ready when you are.”
“Just do it.”
The line up her arm melts into itself, and her free hand curls into a fist and slams against the counter. She bites her tongue so hard it almost bleeds, and he catches the look on her face. “Hey, stop biting, I’m not gonna cauterize your tongue, either.”
She laughs through her tears. He laughs at her, too. His PDA rings, and he curses as he picks it up. Flicking her arm a few times, she wanders around the back of the van.
“Hidaka Akira. Yeah. No… no. Okay, look, something came up. Yeah, I—” The young man, Hidaka, sets his jaw. “Yes, area 26B is clear. I’ll advance to 84A. What? Five minutes.” He looks at her out of the corner of his eye. She’s hovered over one of the monitors, her eyes widening, bloody fingertips reaching out to the keyboard before stopping herself. “Actually, no. Give me, like, ten.” He hangs up before anyone can complain, presumably, and he walks over to where she is.
“If you get blood on the keyboard, that’ll be a bit harder to explain than why this vehicle has been stationary for almost twenty minutes.”
“Shut up.” It lacks her usual bite. Aya looks at the light blue backlights of the keyboard, the startlingly familiar interface in front of her, and she feels a pull to her old life, briefly.
Her fingers twitch.
“Oogai Aya is kind of a familiar name, now that I think about it. One of the names implicated with <jungle>, right?”
Aya panics. She immediately jumps into action, running towards the exit of the van, when a burst of blue stops her. She turns around frantically, and Hidaka actually looks awkward. “No, shit, wait, you misunderstand me. I mean, like.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I can’t clear your files. But we’re always looking for new programmers, and Munakata—our Blue King, yeah, he’s made some admission decisions that make people scratch their heads sometimes, right? Like, the new kid we got, he’s probably your age too, defected from another clan and an antisocial piece of shit.” Despite the insult, he’s grinning. Aya tries to swallow down the feeling of this boy sounds all too familiar.
“But you seem bright, and you say you wanna die, but you’ve still got some drive left in you, right? So, basically,” he says, cringing, as if he were about to regret the words out of his own mouth. “I could refer you or whatever, and then you wouldn’t have to talk about dying all the time.”
Oogai Aya considers it. She really considers it.
Her old thoughts come up. She doesn’t want to be ordinary. She wants to be able to beat Saruhiko, once and for all, and Scepter 4 is no laughing matter. She’s got the skills they’re looking for—she’s rusty with her programming, but when she gets back in the practice she knows it’ll all come back.
But it’s much too late for something like that, now. She (thinks she) no longer wants to be a puppet of the gods, a machine of the humans, because this less than ideal life has become her routine, now. She has been struck down lower than she ever thought was possible, and the thought of being in the presence of power now brings her nothing but fear.
“I never want to get involved with Kings and their games ever again.” Every word digs its claws into her throat, begging not to be expelled, but she tears them out with great force.
Hidaka looks at her. A few seconds pass, and then a few more. He closes his eyes, and lets out a resigned sigh. (He sighs a lot. Aya thinks she makes people sigh a lot.) A small smile rests on his face afterwards. He doesn’t poke at her this time, because even he can tell how hard the rejection was on her and how much every fibre of her being fights against it.
Without a word, she turns around and hops out of the van, an almost childish-looking action. She straightens her backpack, feeling the journals rustle around.
“Hey.” His voice stops her, but it doesn’t turn her around. “If you’re ever in a pinch—well, I can’t say Scepter 4’ll be here for you, but if you wanna talk to someone and fly under the radar so bad, the Hidaka line is private.”
Aya lets out a noise of annoyance as Hidaka opens her bag briefly and puts a piece of paper in it. “Isn’t this some sort of breach of personal relations or something?”
“I like to think I’m better to talk to than dogs all day.” He chuckles and slams the back of the van. “Now scram, there’s only so much time I can explain away.”
Aya rounds the corner back into the parking lot, sticking to the shadows, and listens for the rumbling of the vehicle fade into the night.
She never enters the number into her PDA.
(But a few days later, she cleans herself up a bit, and then after school she buys computer parts to rebuild a PC.)
Her old empire builds again. Aya’s room becomes even more sparse as she sells off some old things to buy parts. She doesn’t know what she’ll do with her machine once she builds, but for now it passes the time and gives her something else to look forward to.
By day, she is Oogai Aya, release version 4.0.2. This Oogai Aya does what is told of her. She is quiet and she completes her homework and she answers software engineer on all the forms she is given when asked about her future.
When Oogai Aya 4.0.2 steps into her apartment, she drops everything and just becomes Aya. She peels off her uniform down to her loose shorts and a tank top in the heat of the summer and cracks open a window; cooling systems will only become important once she’s finished her machine. For now, she can save money and suffer.
When the sun sets and she has no more natural lighting, she throws on a hoodie and a pulls a cap over her head. Her backpack is getting heavy with journals and cans of the nicest cheap dog food she could find, and when she steps out into the heat, it feels like the town is hers.
Although she sticks to side streets, she sometimes allows herself to blend in the crowd at the heart of Shizume. And sometimes, she catches a glimpse of blue uniforms and an unmarked van, but she doesn’t chase.
She digs through the ground map journals and starts to trace another route among them—Scepter 4’s patrols, alongside the silver aircraft floating through the air.
On certain days, the paths follow each other. She feels a thrill at being able to connect something like this, even if she has nothing to do with the information, even if it’s meaningless in the end. Aya hasn’t played with puzzles in a very, very long time.
Along with the journals, Aya carries around the one lifeline she has. Her fingers start to smudge over the pencil of Hidaka’s messy numbers, but she has them committed to memory.
She’ll never call. She doesn’t want to be involved in kingdoms ever again, none but the castle she builds for herself. But it’s a nice physical thing to hold onto.
The parts she buys are by no means top notch. Hell, she dug through dumpsters around the commercial areas for her monitors. But the very first time she powers it up and everything flickers to life, she feels a small smile bloom across her lips.
It’s a whole rush of emotions. She feels dizzy as it powers up, the sinking feeling of her first fifteen years dragging its way back through her core. She’s prided herself in becoming numb to it, but with the machine in front of her it digs up old scars, and she realizes that her sentimentality never truly disappeared. The monitors flicker to life, and for a second she imagines it’s the murky depths of <jungle>, information flashing by her in mere seconds.
Aya’s ready to shut the entire thing down and destroy her PC again but there’s another old scar that rings as a reminder. She traces the messy scar along her left arm, as ragged as the maps she’s drawn and the vehicles she’s followed, and the little spark of adventure tickles her fingertips like the green once painted across her body.
No more kings, no more gods. Oogai Aya is an ordinary seventeen-year-old girl. But she can still build her own small world, lost in the corners of cyberspace.
She breathes, and her PC comes to life. She feels a little bit of her own energy come back to her, too.
Aya is a digital child; her spirit manifests as binary and so this is her home. She feels a little more alive than usual. She feels excitement as much as she feels anxious, and it’s harder to keep a straight face at school when she looks forward to coming home to her new routine.
It’s only something to pass the time for another year, though. It’s nothing quite as meaningful as a reason to live.
Aya’s plan this entire time was never to live past eighteen. She’d wait it out; see if anything got better, if everything started being less numb, and until then she’d go through the motions of a little girl blooming into a young woman. Mock entrance exams are easy, and she feels nothing about having to take them next year, because whether or not she fails she’ll be dead.
She begins the preparations now. The things still with her mother she won’t touch, in order not to raise suspicion. She hasn’t gathered a lot of things in her small apartment. She’ll take what’s left of the food and give the strays a meal. She’ll burn all her notebooks. The only thing she’ll leave behind is her castle of ancient metal, a fortress standing alone in the middle of a wasteland.
It’ll become her makeshift gravestone. Here lies Oogai Aya.
Her clothes, she’ll donate. They’re still neat and fairly untouched. And she might as well donate her hair too. It’ll be the final end to the life she’s been growing since she was six or seven. She cut it messily when she was young, to match Saruhiko’s unruly hair. From then, it flared out with static when she was in <jungle>, stung at her face when she ran through the streets with Saruhiko and Yata, clung to her face when Yata talked to her in the rain. She’s been dragged by it, has had it chewed by the dogs, and ties it back in different ways every time.
She leaves with a pixie cut, not caring about how she looks.
Her school year ends.
Her grades are slightly above average, but not enough to warrant investigation. She has filled countless journals with observations on anything and everything, now—with the people she sees, the patterns of a building’s lights between 10pm and 11pm, the different breeds of stray dogs and cats among the streets.
Christmas and New Year’s is spent at home, at her mother’s insistence. (Like mother, like daughter. Aya starts to hear only what she thinks her mother will say, and responds in the way she thinks her mother would be happy with.)
The day before Christmas Eve, before any of the horrendous family get-togethers, the two of them have dinner. Just the two of them. “Your grades look good, Aya. You’ve been thinking about university?”
“Yes, mama.” But not in the way you think. “One of those institutes for technology nearby, in the city. I’m thinking of doing something with computers again.”
“That’s good. They’d be lucky to have you.”
Aya’s head shoots up. In all the imagined iterations of this scenario, she never once considered that her mother would be encouraging without comparing her to anyone else, any unobtainable ideal. (That word is old, and it feels like sandpaper against her tongue.) “They would?”
Her mother sighs, and it loosens her posture. “Yes, Aya, they would. You’ve always been a bright child.” It’s the way of the Fushimis to never be straightforward with anything. While this sounds straightforward enough, Aya reads the meaning underneath as I’m sorry for what became of you and Saruhiko. “Just keep working hard, alright?”
She runs a hand through her short hair and feels something like guilt settle in every crevice of her body. “Of course, mama.”
There are many things left to be said, but this is good enough.
In a new journal, Aya makes a list of why she isn’t dead. It’s not the same list as why I’m still alive.
It’s different from what it was almost three years ago (and time really flies when you’re numb to everything). It looks something like this:
- I want to know where the aircraft goes one day.
- The strays get hungry.
- I need to get good enough to hack into Scepter 4 again. (she rubs at the scar on her arm when she thinks of this one.)
- Mama tries her best. I should too.
-
I want to apologize to Saruhiko.I want Saruhiko to apologize to me. We should talk.
Life is bearable, for now. Number three is the goal that fits the best with greater society; when she can accomplish it, she can leave Hidaka a message—hey, work on your security systems, really—and then finally disconnect herself from the world of the extraordinary and succumb to greater society’s whims.
But nothing ever goes right.
Aya is almost eighteen years old. In her final year of high school, she sits in the second last seat of the bus, and she leans her feet against the seat in front of her, in a farce of relaxation. She pointedly avoids everyone around her and stares to an unknown point outside the window.
In her hands, she holds her PDA. She carries it around with her for appearances, at least, but it is always off. She turns it over and over in her restless hands. There is somewhere to go, maybe, something to learn, and someone to meet, and yet she wants to forget all of it ever happened.
The turn of the phone in her hands gets more frantic as the bus makes a stop it’s not meant to. Roadblocks may happen all the time, but she’s got a bad feeling from this one. Any deviation from normality has the chance to get her re-involved with that life, and she wants nothing more than to reject the abnormality she still seeks from the very bottom of her heart.
There is commotion on the bus as the students gossip about the group of police officers around the roadblock. Aya knows better, of course; while similar, Scepter 4’s uniforms are much too garish to be the police.
There’s maybe twelve of them gathered a fair distance away from the bus. She sinks further into the seat but lets her eyes scan each of the Scepter 4 members from below the window.
One woman, tall and commanding, stands as straight as the blade that hangs off each of their hips. Each one of the men respects her, follows her words. A few of them are off to the side and glancing at the bus.
Aya’s face has become more gaunt rather than the slimming of a young girl into a woman, and her hair has been cut short, and she makes a point to keep glasses on (because that sort of thing always works in the movies, somehow, and it’s an extra layer between her and the world). But Hidaka recognizes her anyway, because it’s only been a year, and his eyes widen in surprise and he raises a quick hand of recognition.
It draws the attention of the other two he speaks with. There is absolutely not a third, with hair unruly as the man he inherited it from, eyes colder than the winter chill that sets into her unheated apartment, with a coat as deep as the blue sea and tinged with a mocking royal purple.
The third man does not see her, scoff in annoyance, and start slinking off to the bus entrance. Hidaka, however, sees her, but he wisely does not ask the third man about their relation.
The students turn from mindless chatter to dead silence; Aya can hear her heart drop as Saruhiko’s boots click across the metal. He walks past her, but she feels the seat next to her creak as he leans into it for support.
“Scram.”
His voice drips out of his mouth laced with disgust, and it’s the young man in the seat behind her that gets targeted. He panics as he collects his things and unceremoniously falls into another seat.
Aya does not look outside, where she can feel Hidaka’s gaze, and she doesn’t look behind her, and she doesn’t look anywhere but the phone in her palms, turning over and over and—
To her credit, she doesn’t scream. But a few people on the bus do when Saruhiko reinforces his leg with blue flames to kick at the back of Aya’s seat. It rings out like a gunshot and it makes her recoil like one, too, and her forehead slams painfully into the metal headrest in front of her.
Saruhiko sounds completely unaffected by the commotion around him or any of the public disturbance rules he could potentially be exempt from. “That’s it?” In response, Aya grits her teeth and wills the pinpricks of tears to go away, to just leave, already, leave me alone, I’m not weak to this, I’m not. “All that trouble and all you have to give me is silence?”
Saruhiko’s leg is fidgety, and he taps his foot repeatedly on the back of Aya’s seat. She feels small and pathetic and disgusting underneath his foot. She has always been a despicable person, always second best, and she nearly laughs when she realizes just how much she’s forgotten her place in this world; second best, the worst, undeserving, nothing. Aya is a mortal machine in the palace of the gods, and she has lived through so much that she had herself convinced of her own humanity.
She is a sinner that has fallen far from grace, and she nearly falls on her knees to pray. “I fucked up.” Her steady inhale releases itself in shaky bursts, but she continued. “I did things I shouldn’t have.”
The words are on the tip of her tongue, wanting to be free. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
“Funny that this comes from you, of all people. You should know better. In fact, you should have known best; you’re family, after all.” Saruhiko’s foot still hasn’t stopped tapping, and each motion chips away at what is left of her sanity.
He drops his voice while keeping the same tone, so only Aya can hear the words while everyone else hears the distaste. “You know what your mistake was? You let your emotions get to you. You’ll never be able to win against me like that.”
All these years. All these goddamn years Aya had spent building herself as cold and closed off and inhuman, and Saruhiko is here to destroy it all again. You’re too human to ever defeat me. It is, after all, the way of the Fushimis to never say what they mean.
“But.” His foot stops tapping. “On this bus, you’re on your way to school, aren’t you?” She feels his finger hook under the strap of her schoolbag experimentally, lifting it up before dropping back on her shoulder again. “That’s something in itself. I’m just an uneducated street thug with a revival story. You’re the one that made it past middle school,” her cousin says, with something like a sneer (aimed at her, or at himself, or—she doesn’t know, anymore), and she balls her fists and digs her knuckles into her thighs.
“Don’t fucking make fun of me,” she grits, and although it’s painful, she slams her back against the seat as violently as she can. It does nothing, of course, but she doesn’t get the contemptuous scoff she expects. “You don’t even believe your own fucking words. You ran away from HOMRA, and you abandoned Yata,” she laughs humourlessly. “You’d never done anything for him, in the end.”
Another gunshot; when Saruhiko kicks the seat again this time, she thinks she can feel the blue aura strike through her chest before it retracts. “Don’t act like you know anything about my reasons.”
Aya grins, manic, at the emotion that comes out of his voice. She feels as she did so many years ago, when she was still young and reckless and danced in the court of the gods. On impulse, she rises from her seat and stands next to Saruhiko’s, slamming her own leg against the side of it. But she falters.
“What?” There is fire in his eyes, dark and swirling as he glares at her. She lets her foot drop and the look fades, replaced with something more careful.
“Do you remember?” she asks, all of a sudden, as overcome with unexpected emotions as her cousin is. “When we were younger, and it was just the three of us. And we thought we could do anything, and so, with the blimp…” She left the bookbag in her seat, and she knows that one of the journals in there has the flight patterns of the aircraft still meticulously planned.
He makes a sound of annoyance. “Grow up, Oogai. Or do you plan on being a child forever?” The words are condescending at face value. But the look he gives her isn’t mocking or scornful or ridiculing; it’s pointedly very neutral, and she realizes with sudden clarity: he’s warning me. “The world we were looking for never existed. If we were to have boarded the aircraft, it would have taken us straight into the sun and let us burn.”
The rapping on the window by Saruhiko’s head is almost gentle in comparison to the gunfire between them. They both glance to the window; a young man with taupe hair in the same blue uniform cocks his head, gesturing towards the bus entrance.
Hidaka walks on and waits at the front of the bus for Saruhiko, pointedly avoiding eye contact with Aya. “Fushimi-san, have you finished inspection?”
“Mm.” Saruhiko’s sigh lasts as he lifts himself from the bus seat, seeming many years older than his barely seventeen. He makes no move to push Aya out of the way, and the two of them step around each other, avoiding contact.
“Oogai.” He speaks again. He’s full of surprises, isn’t he, Aya thinks bitterly. “You make assumptions about why I act the way I do. But in no way, shape, or form am I running away.” Loathing permeates the final words of his sentence, and Aya is filled with even more guilt at her actions, the way she’s lived, and who she’s become and always has been.
His back is straight, his head is up high, but from her angle Aya can see the turmoil in his expression, craftily hidden under a mask of his own. He breaks it when he tilts his head backward and looks at Aya from the corner of his eyes. His voice is unnervingly soft when he adds: “Build your own life, Oogai. You’re halfway there; you left your old life behind, didn’t you? Your life now only becomes a waste if you give up.
“At least, that’s what my pain-in-the-ass boss says, all the time.” The words are full of exasperation, but there’s a glint in her cousin’s eyes implying that he’s found something of worth in his current place in the world. It makes her heart sink to her stomach. Saruhiko has found something to live for.
Every click of her cousin’s boots drives the stake further into the ground, and he exits the bus without looking at anyone else. Hidaka only looks at her then, and she shakes her head before dropping into her seat.
(This is what does not happen.
Saruhiko’s words do not fill her with a new inspiration. His talk of building her own world into something she wants to live for does not wake her up from her deathly reverie, and she does not feel as though she has found something to live for.
She does not open the window, and she does not tell the truth about her dissatisfaction with her pathetic life. She does not surrender after years of grooming and genuine interest and admit that she has always admired Saruhiko, strived to be by his side.
For all the blood and bone and ash, she does not offer her most beloved cousin any genuine words, no semblance of affection or admiration.)
(Instead, as the bus drives away, she opens the window and makes eye contact with Saruhiko. Her mouth opens and she leans out, and he does not look away, mercifully, as her mouth forms clumsy shapes of words but doesn’t articulate.
In the end, she says nothing. But she thinks her cousin understands, anyway.)
At first, she is grateful. There is a sense of closure in that interaction.
But the looks directed at her from every corner of the school become more obvious again, and although her final year is quieter than it ever has been, she knows that the undercurrent of gossip has only grown stronger.
Then, she is scornful. It ruins the normality she rejects but is forced to live by. She is an anomaly again, and it makes it harder for her to phase out of life.
She recalls his words.
I’m just an uneducated street thug with a revival story. You’re the one that made it past middle school.
(But Aya has not forgotten a single word that Saruhiko has ever said to her.)
I hate the society you strive to be a part of.
(So his words turn mocking, in the end. “Congratulations, Oogai,” he seems to say, “you’ve never amounted to anything more than expected of you.”)
Build your own life, Oogai.
(Then, what is this? Is this encouragement? Are these words of wisdom, from one self-loathing mess to another? Does this mean that Saruhiko, her ideal, her reason for living, her reason for existence has faith in her?)
At least, that’s what my pain-in-the-ass boss says.
(What does it matter, if Saruhiko is happy? What does it matter, if Saruhiko creates closure when Aya is not ready? What does it matter, if Saruhiko can move on through his hardships and find a place where he belongs?)
Inexplicably, Aya makes it those last two weeks to eighteen years old.
On top of the same roof as last year, she is uninterrupted. She takes the paper Hidaka gave her a year ago and draws a birthday candle on it. She sets it on fire and allows it to burn to her fingertips.
(At 12:42am, the aircraft is approximately 36 degrees north, moving in a vaguely southwest direction. It’s a Thursday, so at 1:02am the Scepter 4 van will be on patrol somewhere east, where she sits. She can never see the vehicle itself, except for a tiny gap in between two buildings.)
Her kingdom come, her will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
(It’s like clockwork.)
The wind ruffles her hair, growing out now. It’s at an awkward in-between stage, and she thinks she might keep it at chin length, once it gets there. The strands sting her face as they blow into it, each point of contact like a pinprick.
(These days, blue smoke trails through the alleyways, intertwining with the red flashes. The red clan and the blue clan have become more energetic, lately.)
Some of the ash from the paper blows back into her eyes, and that is why she is crying. Her eyes are clouded and the city lights become floating orbs of colour beneath her, coming closer and closer—
(Her birthday wish is this: she falls off the edge, feeling the wind rush through her hair one last time, but she does not have a moment of stark realization of oh, maybe I should keep being alive. She does not become one with the pavement immediately after, and she is not picked up piece by piece in the morning.)
She rubs her eyes and rips every page she can out of her journals, setting each of them on fire, until her fingers are raw and soft and painful to every touch. She lights one page for each birthday, one page for each school year she’s been in, one for each year she’s known Saruhiko, one for every year she’s lived on her own, one for every arbitrary reason she can think of, until she tires herself out.
She still has more pages to burn. She pretends that the number of pages still left to burn is the amount of days she has until she dies.
She burns a single page, every day.
(The catch is: she never stops writing in her journals, either.)
(She knows she is not allowed to die.)
Aya was never a machine. Aya was human, and she felt pain and happiness and anger and nothing because she was alive.
She’s a machine now. She’s back on a leash, being pulled only in one direction—up. Up onto the surface of the earth, away from the swirling despair that lies beneath her. She cannot find solace in eternal sleep, because she is once again at the mercy of others.
More specifically, she is at Saruhiko’s mercy, once again.
(What would he say if Aya gave up now, after the motivation he gave her, after the sense of closure that yes, he was fully aware both of them got fucked over growing up, and no hard feelings, Oogai, don’t be a dropout like me, Oogai, you’re more successful than I am because you stayed in school, but I’m in Tokyo’s elite special forces with a team that respects me and—)
Oogai Aya has always lived a pathetic existence. But she waited too long, and now she’s trapped herself into living.
(The city becomes more turbulent in the next year. Or perhaps it’s just because Aya is now fully aware of Saruhiko’s involvement in it, as Scepter 4 rather than HOMRA, with Yata.
The city’s state of danger is nothing new. Oogai Aya knows that Shizume has never been anything safe, from the streets that weave through the buildings down to the microcosm of her own bedroom kingdom.
She still sits upon the roofs, on window ledges, and she observes the world through the flames she sets. The city lights up at night now, but with fire that licks along the alleyways from the depths of hell, and she knows that the hottest fires burn blue.
She rises again and again from the ashes she leaves behind. A new beginning. The same end.)
The next time spring rolls around, she is walking through the halls of her small university after hours; most students live in the area and have already gone home, or are quietly studying in lower classrooms, and so Aya is alone on the topmost floor.
The window opens with a groan; securing the glass, Aya climbs out of it, sitting on the edge, but with one hand firmly gripping the window frame. The cherry blossoms that sway underneath mockingly pastel and soft and everything her world is not, and petals rain around her to push the point further. She still juts out against the Shizume scenery, something that should have been long deleted but persisted, and she’s running out of things to track in her journal.
The sun sets, but Aya does not set with it. She waits as the city flickers to life in the night, and she pulls out one of her old journals and a lighter.
Hours feel like seconds when she waits; she has learnt how to keep herself busy, what to watch for until the night switches over to the next day. She lights exactly one page just after midnight, as she has every day for the past year.
Aya prepares the page to be burnt; it’s one half of the many aircraft maps she spent weeks tracking down to the exact locations, and she almost regrets that she rips this page out.
Her lighter clicks.
There is a low, rumbling noise from the heavens above her. Confused, Aya’s head shoots up, and her eyes widen. It is unmistakably the aircraft she’s tracked for years, the very same she’s followed meticulously, half-mapped onto the page she holds now.
The aircraft is wildly off course. Her mouth opens slightly in bewilderment as the aircraft floats leisurely, changing its course for the first time since she was thirteen, when she was watching it with Saruhiko and Misaki and thinking, for all the world, that she was alive.
Aya feels a spike of nauseousness at the rush of memories.
The night has only just begun; among the palace, the jesters are the catalysts for the merriment to come.
Along the uneven city horizon, she sees a sword rise above the heart of downtown Shizume, studded jewels glittering as dark as blood, and she knows that she has never for a second been dismissed from the wraith king’s court.