He had just turned seventeen, almost two years without a word from the boy who'd turned his world upside down, shook it a bit and set it back again. Almost two years without the only person he ever felt like he could understand, who understood him. His footsteps dragged across the smooth laminate of his bedroom, toes scratching at knots in the wood. He never came. The fucker never came. Every week he waited at Hachiko, eyes fixed towards the underpass, every month he would wait in there too, hoping for a glimpse. Hanekoma had gone too; WildKat seemed to have deserted itself the week after the game finished, boarded up windows signalling that nothing had ever been in its place before.
Neku let himself crumple to the floor, head lolling against his bed. His hands sought for the feather he always wore about his neck, Joshua's last message to him. Fingers brushed at the soft tendrils as a breathy name left his mouth "Joshua…" Neku's grasp on sanity was failing and he knew it, his friends from the game long alienated, college long expelled from. The only thing that had him holding on now was the thought of Joshua, a hope he was finally accepting to be false. The feather, which had glowed brightly at first, had dimmed now so that Neku had to cup his hands tight around the delicate pendant to see anything at all. 'He isn't coming back. Not to see you, at least.'
Anger flushed through him now, the words finally sinking in through his mind. He had waited so long, so so long for the slightest glimpse, the faintest giggle and it never goddamn came. Rising up, the ginger boy felt his fists clenching, pulling back, colliding. The thin plasterboard of his walls buckled under the rage and gave way beneath his fist, cracking like a whip. Neku laughed, cackled at this. His voice cracking in his throat as tears slid down his cheeks. This was it, his last shred of normalcy, humanity crumbling like his bedroom wall. The window flung open, city air and bright lights filling his room, seventeen floors above the cacophony of his city. Neku Sakuraba stepped up to the sill, clenched his pendant… and flew.