A/N: Several months after I started it, I have finally finished this 2,318 word fic. Just something that needed to be said in the wake of "I am Tetsuo." Enjoy.
…
Neo-Tokyo is sizzling the night after the Second Coming. It is August-hot, and fires are still burning-electricity flickering on and off in brilliant staccato bursts, flash-frying the eyes. And the body heat. People are packed in makeshift dwellings, rambling down the street, fighting, looting, killing, and dying inches from each other. Sweat and blood stench mingle with sewer smells to create a thick miasma over the dirty streets, muffling the sounds of shattering glass and sirens and screaming. It is a cyberpunk hell—neon lights and lasers instead of fire and brimstone—echoing with the cries of the damned. The army is in disarray, clashing with cultists and desperados and the simply desperate, struggling to impose a semblance of order in a city long broken. Somewhere in a tunnel-turned-bunker, a Colonel stands firm and watches the world he hates crumble. He feels no satisfaction. Somewhere, everywhere, people curse and scream and pray and praise on one word. One word.
A name.
Akira.
The crater that once held the beginnings of an Olympic stadium—a sham, a false dawn—steams slightly as water from the bay pours in, covering the remnants of a massive cryonic unit that once held the remains of a god. Wind pours in with the water, cutting the heat on the shore but dying when confronted with the hot megalithic towers of downtown. It is on that fell, far shore that Shotaro Kaneda closes his eyes and does not dream. Kei and Kai are there, on the edge of his consciousness. They make small talk, Kai explaining something about the bikes and Kei wondering if she could learn to ride. It is simple and pleasant—no mention of gung-ho spies or gangs or government or gods, and the distant screams are carried away by the wind and shush-shush of seawater on concrete. Normal human contact, face to face, word to word, none of that ephemeral touching of minds. Kaneda appreciates this, as he dozes. The past week—ever since the clash with the Clowns—the world had gone insane. Maybe it already had been slowly spiraling into madness, and he hadn't noticed until Neo-Tokyo had literally and figuratively exploded. And at the center of it was that word.
A name.
Akira.
Kaneda knows he's no genius, but he's got street smarts. That same sort of wisdom that lets him memorize Neo-Tokyo's streets lets him read people. And he's kicking himself for not bothering to read his friend. If he had known how Tetsuo felt, if he had seen the resentment, how much Yamgata's teasing had hurt—maybe he could have stopped it. What 'it' was, Kaneda wasn't sure. The explosion. The unearthing of Akira. His best friend from turning into a monster. It's a vague sort of guilt he feels—Tetsuo is gone (to a better world, to a different universe, whispers something deep in his mind) and the city has stopped falling apart in slow motion (it's sped up to falling apart real-time) and everything he once knew has changed (it always changes) but he knows he can't really be at fault. It's no one's fault really. Not the fallen government, not the cultists, not the citizens, not him.
Not Akira.
Even a god can't ever change human nature, only grow beyond it.
Which brings him to a strange thought. Tetsuo became the same as Akira there at the end—Kaneda felt it—so does that make his (ex? He's not sure-shooting someone with a laser kind of changes things, right?) best friend a god? When Kei had glazed over in that government cell, she had talked about amoebas gaining the abilities of humans, and humans evolving in a similar fashion. He knows that this evolution created Akira and the strange not-kids-trio; he saw it in the barrage of white light and images that had nearly carried him to his death. Tetsuo was different, that he knows as well; Tetsuo's transformation was sudden and forced—it was a spontaneous reactionary mutation (and man is he using big words as he not-dreams) when he crashed into that first weird, wrinkled kid-but-not (Takashi, the memories whisper) on the bridge. It was a forced evolution, but an evolution nonetheless. But it brings a question to Kaneda's troubled mind. In a natural evolution and a forced mutation, the results were the same—insane telekinetic and telepathic powers. Did that mean all humans are evolving to become like Akira?
He opens an eye and regards Kei.
Both Kei and Kai are fast asleep—Kai sprawled over his bike and Kei leaning back on the battered remains of Kaneda's. Her breathing is steady and deep, and he doubts that she is awake, but he can't be sure. She is (was?) a spy after all, and isn't that something else he had never thought he'd get tangled up in. But he had. And he wouldn't exactly take it back. Kaneda had been taken with her on sight, catching a bare glimpse of her in the crowd of the police station the night after the clash with the Clowns. He never did find out why she was there, but looking back, it probably had to do with Takashi's escape. Looking at her now, he can see what he had missed in that first glimpse. Her thin body was strong, her hands callused. Her beauty belied the sharpness of her frame—hers was the life and body of a soldier. And smart. Kei is scary smart, almost, to a boy who had never paid attention in school once in his life and took pride in that fact. He had wondered before, back when the world had still made at least a little sense, how she had gotten tied up in a spy network, but now he figures that she was smart enough to see what had been going on with the government enough to hate it.
Kei was amazing. And now she was… more.
She was the one who had pulled him out of the explosion. With her mind.
He had realized somewhere of the course of being captured by the government, escaping said government's secret facility, and surviving the ensuing battle—if you could call what happened a battle—that the strange little trio of (Espers, his mind provides) had been using Kei as some sort of medium to guide them against Tetsuo's rampage. But it was all her in his head when his world was being torn apart by white light and memories. Pure Kei, screaming his name without sound, her in his head—in his head!—calling to him, giving him a reason to let Tetsuo go. She had somehow developed that weird psychic power. Did she even know it? Surely, in some way she had to. He had felt her in his mind, so logically, she had felt him as well. It was strangely intimate, and if he was the Kaneda from five days ago (how he thinks he wishes), he would have been unbearably pleased that she reciprocated his feelings—and she did have feelings for him, because pulling someone out of a massive explosion with your mind is not something you do for casual acquaintances. Now, though, he is still satisfied, but more mystified. A girl felt for him in a way that was more than the shallow crushes the girls from school had on his gang. And with Neo-Tokyo the way it was now…
Kaneda is in love in a world that had just changed, where words like 'love' had gained new definitions simply because nothing could ever be as it was nor could it be as it had been ever again.
And the sad thing is, he knows he isn't worthy. Not in that semi-misogynistic tough-guy-can't-handle-a-tough-girl way, but in a way that he isn't sure that he isn't the insect to her goddess. He doesn't think he can deal with being less—it's the same thing that had driven him to fight Tetsuo. He couldn't let his friend go, he had to fight and claw and struggle and try and see if his friend could be human again. In the end, he had nearly died from not letting go. Kei had to pull him away, had to convince him. Akira hadn't even tried—he had simply smiled benevolently in Kaneda's mind like he knew something Kaneda did not, and damn if that didn't piss him off. What if Kei became like that? All-knowing, all-powerful? Selfishness keeps you alive on the streets of Neo-Tokyo—Kaneda learned this a long time ago—and he is selfish enough that he wants to keep her where she is, keep her with him. His humanity is precious to him now, more precious than he had held anything before up to and including his bike. And his humanity is calling him to hate what Kei is becoming. His heart is being torn in two directions, and he is afraid that he will simply be torn apart, the same way the Tetsuo's psychic backlash oh-so-nearly did.
And he is angry all over again, as his thoughts cycle back to Akira.
"Kaneda?" Kei's voice scatters those thoughts in an instant. She blinks at him, puzzlement etched into her features, and that feeling of she's-beautiful-and-she's-mine wells up in him, only to scatter into apprehension with her next words. "Were you saying something? It's so loud…" she trails off when she sees his face.
"I was just thinking," he says as softly as he can muster. "Once we stopped moving, everything that's happened just sort of…caught up with me." His eyes slide away from hers, pulled by the distant lights of burning, screaming Neo-Tokyo. He doesn't know if he can watch her face when she realizes what he had said-not-said.
"Kaneda," she says quietly.
It's okay, Kei. I know you can hear my thoughts. He cuts her off with his mind, concentrating only slightly to make the words take a form.
"Oh," breathes Kei. A soft sigh. "You aren't really okay with it, though, are you?"
"No," he admits. Truth only to someone who'd know a lie in an instant. Truth only to someone he cares about. "No, I'm not okay with it. It's weird, it's different, it's crazy. And I don't want what happened to Tetsuo to happen to you." He still can't meet her eyes.
"Kaneda, please…please look at me. I'm so…" Kei's breath hitches, her next words a whisper. "I'm so afraid Kaneda.
He turns and sees her, his strong beautiful spitfire of a spy-girl, curled up and hugging her knees, tears liquid diamond in the distant burning-city light as they streak down her face. And he knows that she could never be like Tetsuo, never be like Akira. Sure, Kei was brought up in a world where hate was easier than love, but she wasn't beaten down like Tetsuo, nor was she experimented on like Akira. She is human still, where it counts—more human than most of the insects that infest Neo-Tokyo could ever hope to be.
So Kaneda kneels down and takes her in his arms and kisses her diamond-tears away, and he thinks once upon all of the unthinkable thoughts he has thought of tonight, before choosing her—not Kei the Spy, nor Kei the Goddess, for though they are undeniable parts of her, they are parts that do not make a whole. Kei was simply Kei, and she loved him. He could feel it.
They fell asleep together against the battered contours of his bike, curled up like the children they once had been, so long ago. And they dreamed. And Neo-Tokyo burned. And the world turned.
In Kaneda's mind, his bike became what it had been, a stunning blur of fast-and-red-and-freedom, and he and Kei chased the horizon.
In Kei's mind, it was only her and Kaneda and the wind. Voices—in her head or otherwise—were unnecessary.
Kai left in the morning, eyeing the couple curled up and leaving a note saying 'I'll be back' in messy characters, and a faint impression of going back to my folks, going to my girl, getting a new bike, a new life—good luck, good luck.
Kaneda and Kei rose as one, long after sunlight had replaced the neon fire of the distant city. It danced off of the new bay's waves, sparkling in a way the children of Neo-Tokyo had never seen. Had never dreamed of.
They stood on that fell, far shore, breathing the fresh salt-smell, tasting the breeze.
Words were not necessary.
Together, they slid onto Kaneda's dream-bike, gleaming red and new as the dawn, and Kaneda chose that moment to recall that face.
That name.
Akira.
His benevolent smile, the screaming, the burning, of being torn apart on a molecular level. And he can't help but wonder. Is this what he saw?
Kei's smile is enough.
The motor purred like it hadn't been rebuilt by dream-hands the night before, and the young gods slid into the legend of the Second Coming, into the creation of a new world.
It was Tetsuo—bitter and angry, forced to change, forced to know, forced to be.
It was Kei—too smart, too idealistic, almost—almost- too beautiful to be real.
It was Kaneda—young, foolish, street-smart, broken, and in love.
It was Akira—blind white-hot fury and emotion and possessing of a god-like power it didn't care to understand.
But above all-
The sun was hot, sizzling off distant megalithic towers. Fires still burned. Streets were still smeared with blood. Broken glass sparkled in incomprehensible geometric patterns. But there was peace. A truce. Something had happened. The world had changed without them looking. And like babies, like flowers turning to face the sun, they took their first wavering steps into that world.
In the end, all of the cursing and screaming and praying and praising became something else. Became one word.
A name, almost.
Hope.