Syaoran had never been to Tokyo before.
He was not a city child. Suburbs, small towns, plenty of grass nearby and rivers and trees glinting gold in the sunlight, places where every person knew every other person by sight, where people saw him passing and shouted, "Ho, Syaoran-kun! How does Fujitaka-san today?" those were the places for him. Not this. Not the swirling, the noises, the black masses of people that were not people, people that flooded streets like a tide and swept past without ever turning back – and the buildings! What monsters of concrete, steel, titanium, rising so high to block out the sun! And between those colossal beings, in the tiny cracks of shade they left between them, the people flocked to and fro like scurrying ants.
Amidst all this, Syaoran stood. In raggedy clothes, barefooted, and clutching his blue saddle bag, he was painfully aware of how out of place he seemed, yet he schooled himself to keep his face calm. Horns honked, cars screeched, people thronged. Exhaling slowly, he turned and slipped into the flow of the crowd, melting into them like a drop of sweat on a hot sunny day.
One thing good about the city was that people did not see you, he reflected as he walked along. All around him the crowds surged, their shoulders brushing him in passing yet not a one giving him more a glance than they would a piece of brick. So many foreign faces, all chattering amongst their own groups of two, three, five, oblivious to the world around them.
Syaoran also noticed the persocoms.
Fujitaka-san had warned him about them, but he had not expected them to be so… humanoid. He had wondered about the people with strange, robotic looking devices over their ears, but dismissed them as fashion statements or some trend he was not aware of until he saw one girl asking her persocom for directions. He had stopped and stood very still, and his eyes had flashed and whirled as whatever electronic messages processed itself inside him, then he said, "This is the wrong street. The building you seek is located 5 streets down in the southeastern direction, roughly one kilometer from here." The girl groaned. Then as his eyes went back to normal they continued down the street, talking and laughing as though nothing had happened. And no one gave them a second glance.
And Syaoran began to notice that this was happening all over the place. Through the whirl of activity people were asking their persocoms to look up something for them, to check their email, to relate a message from their phone, all integrated seamlessly into the flow of natural conversation and city life. And he began to wonder how many of the people passing by breathed with real flesh and real blood, and how many more merely pretended to do so, electronic currents flowing through their computerized minds.
Finding the place was easy. Tokyo was a city full of signs. High, low, near, far, twisted loopy and upside-down, there glinted the signs. It made Syaoran glad Fujitaka-san had taught him how to read.
The apartment was located in a remote sector of the city, to Syaoran's relief. The doors were a coarse grey rimmed with white, and he let out a big sigh as they swung shut behind him. He took a moment to let the noises of the city fade away, shut out by the ancient grey doors, then looked down at his slip of paper. Top floor.
There was only one door there when he stepped out of the elevator, so he knocked.
The door clicked, then eased open. Syaoran peered cautiously in.
"Hello there," came a voice from his left, tinged with hints of a smile. Syaoran started. The door swung open and Syaoran found himself looking up at a lanky figure dressed in a sports jacket and stylish pants bearing a winged design Syaoran had never seen before. The man had white-blond hair and eyes as blue as the summer sky, and Syaoran found himself wondering what he was doing in Japan.
"Hello," he responded, still looking up at the figure. A blue earring glinted on one of the man's earlobes.
"May I ask your…?" the man hesitated. Syaoran suddenly realized he had not yet introduced himself.
"I'm Syaoran," he supplied hastily. "From Fujitaka-san," he added as explanation. "He says he has something for you."
"Ah, you come from Fujitaka Kinomoto." A light dawned in the blue eyes. Then it was all smiles and pleasantry again. "Do come in!"
Syaoran obliged, stepping into the apartment suite. It was larger than he had expected it to be, but impeccably clean. A small round table stood off to one side, a couch to the other, and half of the kitchen was just visible past the place where you would expect a television to be. Syaoran was just craning his head to see more when he was surprised by a gruff voice behind him.
"What's this kid doing here?" the voice growled.
Syaoran spun around to find another man glaring down on him, jaws set, arms crossed. He had jet black hair and – Syaoran noticed – red eyes.
"Kurogane…" the lanky figure seemed troubled. He ran a hand despairingly through his hair. "Won't you go inside for a moment?"
"No," said Kurogane. "Why is he here? Why did you let him in?"
"It's for…" the man started to speak, then checked himself. "I just need to talk to him about something. Just give us a moment."
"I'm not going in until you tell me what you have to talk about!" snapped Kurogane. He tilted his chin up and raised his eyes to the ceiling, obviously not planning to yield. Syaoran wondered how his eyes had come to be so red. Were they born that way? Did something happen to them once? Maybe it was just a trick of the light.
The other man cast his blue eyes down reluctantly and bit his lip. Then he said, "He comes from Fujitaka-san."
"Who's Fujitaka-san?" Kurogane demanded. "I've never heard of him before."
A spark of pain flashed across the blue eyes. "Someone," muttered the blond.
"Like who?" growled Kurogane. With two quick steps he crossed the distance between them, nearly pinning the other man back against the wall. "Why don't I know about him?" he hissed into the other man's ear.
Syaoran found this entire scene very uncomfortable and wasn't sure what to make of himself. "Stop it…" he heard the blond say in a strangled whisper. One of Kurogane's hands had gone around him and was now roughly clasping his back, and they seemed to be getting closer and closer to each other. The lanky man seemed completely helpless, pinned to the wall as he was, and Syaoran inherently felt that he should do something but didn't know what. Their lips were getting closer and closer, almost brushing now, and the blond half-closed his eyes…
And that was when Kurogane swayed, then sank to the ground lifelessly, landing with a soft thump.
"He'll be all right in a while," the lanky man told Syaoran shakily as they walked out of the bedroom. "This is a recurring problem of his. Don't worry about it."
The two of them had somehow between them managed to drag Kurogane's bulk into the bedroom and deposit him on the bed. Syaoran could not help noticing that there was only one bed in the room.
"What's wrong with him?" he asked, just to fill up the void of conversation.
"He has… amnesia," the blond man replied, and again Syaoran saw despair in his eyes. "It comes and goes. And he has those fainting spells. Normally he's not like this."
Amnesia. Syaoran thought back on the earlier conversation and wondered how this man ihad/i come to know Fujitaka-san. Who knows, perhaps Kurogane's suspicions had some merit. Certainly Fujitaka-san had never mentioned him to Syaoran before.
"Oh, I nearly forgot!" he said, starting. "I have…" he stopped. Where was his blue saddle bag? Ah, there, on that chair. "I have something…" he grabbed the saddle bag and began sifting through its contents. "…something… for you!" He flourished a white container triumphantly. It had, he suddenly noticed, the same winged design on it as the one on the stylish pants. "I don't know what's in it," he added, "but it's what Fujitaka-san told me to give to you."
"Ah," said the blond. His blue eyes gleamed. "Thank you."
Syaoran got out of the subway and began heading towards home, questions still echoing through his mind.
"He's a genius," Minoru had said. "The smartest bloody man I've ever met in my whole life. He's also crazy as a sack full of ferrets."
On the way out he had pressed L1 instead of L by accident, and the elevator took him to the basement. And, as if that weren't bad enough, the elevator had jammed.
Syaoran had had to try and make his way across the basement in the dark, without the least idea where the stairs might be and without a single light to guide him.
The basement had been full of wires and old boxes and computer chips and god knows what else hidden in the shadowy blackness, all stacked high as a man's head and covered with the dust of decades. Out of nowhere in the dark a big muffin creature had popped out at him, nearly killing him for a heart attack, and then kept bouncing around him cheerfully and going "Mokona! Mokona! Mokona!" at every turn until Syaoran was ready to kick it. Honestly, had those two not stumbled upon him he did not think he ever would have found his way out.
It was the girl who came down first. "Hello?" she called, voice reverberating through the darkness.
"Hello!" shouted Syaoran, nearly tripping in his excitement. "Hello, don't go, I'm down here!"
"Oh, there is someone!" she exclaimed. Then she called, "Hold on just a moment, I'll get a light!"
"Who is it, Yuzuki?" Another voice, farther away.
"I don't know," said the girl, "but someone's there."
The light revealed a tallish girl with long brown braids, smiling warmly, and next to her…
"Before you ask, yes, I'm in middle school," said the boy.
"I wasn't going to ask," said Syaoran.
"Ah, well, people usually do, so I thought I'd forestall you," said the boy.
That was how he met Minoru.
It turns out Minoru was also there to visit Fye D. Flourite, which was the name of the man Syaoran had just visited. He had come down to see what was wrong because the elevator light blinked L1 no matter how many times the "up" button was pressed.
They chatted. Syaoran found he got along with Minoru very well, despite his apparent impassivity to everything around him. Apparently people were always surprised to find out Minoru was in middle school because he was a persocom expert and people did not expect middle schoolers to be persocom experts.
"I design custom persocoms," he had said, offhandishly. "I'm pretty good at it."
"Oh?" asked Syaoran.
"…but not as good as Fye."
Syaoran had not wanted to go back up, because he felt Fye and Kurogane would want some time alone, and because the elevator was still broken and he did not want to climb the stairs. So he said his goodbyes to Minoru and Kaede and turned to leave. Minoru called him back and left him a phone number. He also told him to look up "M" on the BBS network when he had time, and Syaoran decided not to tell Minoru that he had no idea what a network was, much less BBS.
So they parted.
The grass and the trees were a welcome relief. So were the people greeting him on the streets, in the quiet little town where Syaoran lived, but Syaoran was too preoccupied to pause and chat with them. Instead, he hurried back to the little house where he lived with Fujitaka-san, his adopted father.
"Syaoran!" said Fujitaka Kinomoto, when he saw him come in. "I made a huge leap in the northern excavation site while you were gone—ah, how was Tokyo?"
Syaoran was silent a moment. Then he raised his head and looked straight at his stepfather. "What did you ask me to bring to that man?" he asked. "What was in that box?"
"Ah," said Fujitaka. He knit his brows in thought and for a second the room was shrouded in silence. Then he smiled that old familiar smile and his eyes crinkled at the edges and Syaoran felt warmth flood through him. Suddenly he knew he was home again and felt very, very tired. "Come," suggested Fujitaka gently, "why don't you tell me of your adventures first?"
Syaoran complied. How could he not?
After he did, Fujitaka went outside and looked up at the sky a long while, as if deep in thought. When he came back in he handed Syaoran a jacket and told him to follow him.
"Come," he said. "I have something to show you."
Syaoran followed, draped in the warm jacket, head stuffed full of Tokyo and winged patterns and mysteries. They walked far, way into the hills and the forests where Fujitaka had always forbidden him from going before. In the sky the birds sang and the wind hummed and moonlight peered tremulously down through the leaves to light the ground below.
"How far are we going?" he wanted to ask, but some impulse held the question back from his tongue. They made their way through the woods silently, step by step, enjoying the breeze and the moon and the chill night air.
Syaoran did not know how long they walked, but presently they came to a cemetery. Small, forgotten, in the middle of nowhere, it stood next to what might have once been a town but has long since crumbled into ashes and bricks and vine, burnt or earthquaked or hurricaned god knows how many years ago.
Fujitaka took him through the middle of the cemetery and stopped. Still they did not speak. They did not need to. On the tombstone in front of them, embellished with the same winged design that Syaoran had seen on the box, were engraved the words:
Kurogane Suwa