His axe brushed against the surface of his skin like fingers.
Arrays of misunderstood teens held their ground in his lair as he littered the doorways of speakeasies and dirty rooms for rent. They played hooky; they came and they went. They were territorial out of habit and hardened out of fear, and they usually knew enough to leave him alone.
The days eventually became lost to Shinjiro, warping indistinguishably into one another as he wandered the cluttered streets. Port Island Station was his domain and everyone knew. His dark red peacoat was the last item of clothing he'd bought in two years. It was tight now, and dirty, and homely. His pockets jingled with the spare change he'd found on the street.
A thousand yen usually did it, for a quick one.
His heart skittered in his chest. A pill that suppressed his power, his demon, was one that the kids bought off of a dealer with a false prescription. And as he sat alone, clustered, holed up on that miserable stoop of his, he could feel the effects of the drug spreading across his chest, his stomach, his brain. He saw the dancing lights of the telephone poles with their fluorescent haloes, his man flipping back his hair and stepping back into the shadows where he belonged, where they both belonged, the Dark Hour passing over them.
He was dizzy. His man looked a lot like Jesus.
He was a little older, now. Aged to perfection. A tiny little blip on the hipster's radar, moving in and out of one's vision and consciousness like a recurring dream. The two spoke in slithers by the corner store, a short four-eyed scenester with a briefcase floating behind them all the while, checking his watch and his supply. The conversations were usually not so pleasant.
"I hear she's in the hospital now," Takaya drawled, his hand on his bare side like a woman. Tattoos glowing in the dark.
He didn't know nothing about that red-haired Lolita, Shinjiro had replied. Black beanie shadowing his slitted eyes. He had no reason to care what happened to her.
"Is that so."
He would never give in to filth.
---
"Shinji," he had muttered.
October 4, 2007.
"I think..."
Panting. An aftertaste.
"...Something's going to happen tonight. Something bad."
The ceiling fan wafted the scent of warm skin through the room. They sat on opposite sides of the mattress, Shinjiro clutching the wooden end of the bed. His rings clacked and rolled.
"...What makes you think that?"
Akihiko shrugged, moving a worn hand slowly across his naked chest, his shoulder. Stretching it all out. For once Shinjiro's eyes rested on him, unmet. "A shadow then, huh?"
The gray-haired youth with his perfect torso stared harder into the carpet, toes curling with the motor memory of minutes past. "We'd have to check with Mitsuru before we go out tonight. I just have a feeling in my gut. What else could it be?"
Shinjiro's brown hair was shorter then. Moving forward, he brushed it out of his eyes and smirked darkly into Akihiko's ear.
"Don't know. Perhaps round two."
---
The newspapers were cited the next day. A tragic accident, they said. She was a mother. His name was Ken. The poor, abandoned little fella.
Mitsuru and Akihiko glanced at each other with concerned grief. They shared a dorm, yet Shinjiro hadn't been seen for days, not even at school. Did he run off? Kill himself in his room? Her boots clacked against the wooden boards on the second story, heels muffled as they reached the rug spread longways before his door. Her arms were crossed, eyebrows furrowed with tense thought as she knocked. Silence. She wouldn't venture past calling his name once, before turning around and making her way slowly back down the stairs. She knew now why Akihiko had refused to do it.
Weeks passed; appearances had been made. Refusing to talk, he would merely wander slowly through the halls and out the door for the night, eyes bloodshot and darting around people's feet.
His friends from school stopped calling after a while. Maybe he moved, the gossips said, or maybe he was just sad. That happens sometimes, right? It was easy to go along with. Completely possible.
Akihiko and Mitsuru would eventually sit across from one another in the dorm lobby, grinding their teeth silently, avoiding eye contact. They had gotten their studies out of the way earlier, as always. A jittered foot. Her fingers drummed against her arm, flaming red hair trickling around her body like wine. Glancing at the clock, but it wasn't necessary; they could always tell when it was time to stand up, gloves stretched across his fingers and rapier behind her back, keys jingling against her popping hip. The giant, golden moon shining coldly upon them in the ominous night.
It sure was lonely, the two of them sometimes.
---
Akihiko went into Shinjiro's room after he left. His best friend never was one for personal decor; the walls stood as bare as they came, leaving that sense of characterized impermanence. A drawerful of old clothes that had turned useless; it wasn't like he wore more than that damn peacoat, anyway. The school would soon have people come and recover most of these things, and Akihiko had taken it upon himself to pile them neatly into cardboard boxes. It was as though Shinji had died. Shuffling through the unsorted items and accessories that filled the cramped closet, he suddenly recoiled at the sight of what slid forward against the webby wall.
An axe. It glinted in the light of a single bulb that hung low.
Akihiko's face was a golden dark. He reached for the weapon hesitantly, scarred knuckles curling over the handle. It was heavy, and old. The blood of the inhuman had been polished off meticulously out of an obsessive-compulsive tendency; its owner had few things that were important to him.
The familiar creak of the old bed springs, weighed down by the skin particles of Shinjiro and of a certain childhood friend. Akihiko's shoulders slumped, heavy thing still cradled in his hands, glancing at the door briefly to make sure that it was closed.
He shuddered, and he cried.
---
Before the school officials arrived that day to the abandoned room, Akihiko informed her of the thing he took, locking it safely within a drawer beneath his own bed. She nodded, before opening the front door.
"Follow me."
Two of them in collared shirts filed in after her. Akihiko watched them from his chair at the end of the lobby table, absentmindedly wrapping his fists in sports bandage, a cooling cup of ramen sitting before him.
They didn't go to Tartarus anymore, against Akihiko's wishes but not against his better judgment. Ikutsuki-san had insisted. It was disheartening, knowing they lacked the numbers they needed to continue their ascent.
"You're just going to end up getting hurt, and that won't do anyone any good," Mitsuru had argued.
He had lain in his bed, the ceiling fan switched on out of amusement. Its blades sliced through the thought bubbles that formed thickly over him like clouds. The back of his head was rested on his hands, his school clothes still applied to his body, more loosely now. Exams started in two days, and he couldn't waste any more time thinking about someone who was lost to them.
Resolving to get up and start training with a punching bag at the very least, he turned over and reached for the single drawer beneath the frame of his bed. Heart fluttering at the handle's easy submission, he jumped up to double-check its contents.
Empty.
---
The sky flashed with its special nightly glow again; clouds turned green, the water ran red. Coffins in the streets and in the houses, floating aimlessly and caught between time and space, their inhabitants alive and awake then as they ever were. He stood around in Port Island's back alley, as he always did. A shiver ran down his spine, as it always did. Smoke emanating from the crannies down the stairs, their puffs waning with the arrival of the Dark Hour.
He smirked darkly, and began to walk.
The streetlamps punctuated his path, arranged gridlike upon the stamp of Port Island's nests of concrete and thin glass. The few insects that sang lonely beneath bushes in the eveningtide had been silenced, and the staggeringly narrow streets stretched onward and outward into the slanting horizon. The clouds littered the collection of ever-sparkling eyes dangling from the sky, suspended in brilliant motion as they watched. A vibration rumbled throughout his body from his steel-clad punk fuck feet, kicking through the puddles glowing red in the ominous light.
He reveled secretly within it, the horror, the irony of life, the scenery carving itself ever further into the impressions of his mind. He could only be certain of that which became most familiar to him in these moments to himself, knowing that out there somewhere, someone he knew and loved was wide awake.
There was no saint out there to save them.
And as the drum of his drug-fueled heart pounded ever-quicker from within his quietly dying chest, Shinjiro was alone again, hand in one pocket and weapon dangling from the other, watching for the enemy, searching for Jesus, wandering, waiting, deeper and deeper into the night.