The bells made him remember.
The rain made him raw.
He didn't normally stand on rooftops, be surrounded by rain. Have it drip down the hollows of his face in rivulets and saturate his hair and shirt, plastering them uncomfortably to his skin. He didn't normally feel so much he couldn't hold back. Or let himself feel. Or feel anything at all. But it wasn't his fault. The bells made him remember, and the rain made him raw.
He didn't normally consider such things.
He was a man of hard facts and cold analysis. Logical possibilities. He was a man of creativity too, and originality. Over-analysis when it mattered and under-analysis when it mattered even more. Remarkably mature and immature, gravitating towards extremes.
He had seen people die before and felt nothing. He had sentenced people to their deaths and felt nothing, come face to face with the most dangerous and twisted people of his time. But there had been nothing except cold hard facts and possibilities, and winning, which would almost satisfy him, but it was never quite enough to fill the void.
And now he did not understand how the simple tolling of a bell on a rooftop in the rain could make him feel, or even consider such ridiculous possibilities. Because whether it was a wedding or a funeral, well it wasn't even worth considering, because there was no way of knowing. His gut told him it was a funeral. He had learned to trust his gut.
The first time the bell tolled he saw his mother, pale skin stained by blood. The paramedics lifting her onto a stretcher, covering up her face, carrying her away. He never saw her again.
The second time it tolled there was A, body hanging limply from the rope around her neck.
It tolled again. Blaring televisions and Ukita lying died.
Dong. Beyond Birthday.
Dong. Watari.
He was eight years old and he was in the library. He was in the poetry section and he knew he would not be followed there by his living shadow, his unattractive umbra. He pulled a book off the shelf, The Poems, Works and Meditations of John Donne, and opened it with vague disinterest.
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but-"
His eye skipped over to a poem on the next page.
"No man is an island,
Entire of itself-"
He came upon the last lines of the poem.
"Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee."
It tolls for thee.