He was across the road, waiting for someone and flitting his fingers idly back and forth, making eddies in the intervening passage of time that stood before him and the moment when the person he was waiting for would come and drag him away from the tedium of this gray Thursday morning. Understated white coat doing nothing to downplay the stark brightness of his pale blue hair, his eyes roved over and over everything, as if by pinning and marking the placement of the things around him he might affix them in the world, just so; his eyes were as blue as his hair. Left. Right. The woman with her too noisy child. A flickering yellow lamppost light. These things were trapped in his gaze and rested in it for the brief passage of eternity.
Ichigo had lost track of the innumerable number of times he and this man had crossed paths. He cast his eyes around, looking for the inevitable. Would it be the child? Or maybe the cyclist at the end of the road, hurtling towards his unseen and unannounced demise? The truck driver parked to the left of the lamppost was on the phone with his wife, his warm ecru brown eyes abounding with mirth—surely not him.
The screech of brakes pressed too late shredded the morning chatter.
Ichigo sprinted, stretched, screamed out. Too late. Always too late.
He reached the businessman on the ground with the peppered gray hair in time to meet his lined eyes as he breathed once, twice. Stopped.
The air around Ichigo pressed and squeezed and shifted as the blue haired man swept past the fallen ragdoll mimicry of a person, white coat flapping like the clapper of church funeral bells. Ichigo knew without looking to see his back that the blue haired man would have vanished already with his pocket-watch swinging, no more substantial than the whispered pleas of the hushed bystanders.
"Is that—"A trembling cough. "Am I…"
Ichigo opened his hand to the look-alike of the pepper haired businessman who gazed down at his body spread-eagled across the pavement with something akin to resignation, bred of long hours spent in a waking dream of grey.
"Why don't you come with me," Ichigo said. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions."
The two walked hand in hand away from the accident.
The crowd parted.
Quiet settled around them. The sharp smell of burnt rubber followed the Businessman. Ichigo said nothing.
A haze blurred the pair's surroundings, ferrying them through the morning rush as if Life itself drew a cloak around them, muting the acute stimulus and offering some semblance of privacy. Beginnings of questions and tail ends of accusations drifted listlessly from the Businessman's lips, but their weight dragged heavy at the querulous rasping of his breath, and so left it to itself so that they might settle in the dust of the road. The two men continued their course.
The happy little tress of the park swam into sight.
Words now held so much more meaning, this Ichigo knew. When people still had breath to deny what you said, any argument or outlandish claim from without seemed less immediate, less sure.
Nobody was quite so sure anymore once they had died.
As the pair wandered into the shade of the trees, the warmth of the sun burst forth from the sky and illuminated the ground around them, speckling it with what Ichigo had come to recognize as a Call. Singular blades of vibrant green grass jumped out in stark contrast to the gray haze that swaddled the pair up and swallowed them, hiding this most private of moments in the banality of early morning coffee and bleary eyes.
The air that sat next to the beams of visible music vibrated with an intensity that was only met by the inexorable pull from the light on those like the Businessman. A pull to where or to what, Ichigo had yet to find out, but it had been made clear to Ichigo before that the Businessman couldn't answer its voice without first being answered himself.
"Where are you taking me?"
Ah, the million dollar question. "I don't really know."
"You don't know? But you can see me." The Businessman's voice rose ever higher. "I don't, I haven't finished everything I wanted to do yet."
Pleas began to fall, "Please, please, my family, my child, oh my sweet baby," tumbling freely, steep bargains and baseless coercion following them until they all ceased, choked off with a whimper.
Ichigo studied his face. Studied his carefully maintained brogues. Studied the tight way he held his slack hands and noted the careworn skin around his eyes, the tie that hung just right of centre and clung to his neck with all the vivaciousness of a noose.
Ichigo shrugged.
The Businessman nodded to himself, a jerking staccato, as if he had come to some realization or had brokered peace with the craggily-toothed monster that had made its home in his suburban home closet. He took a deep breath. It left him, and then he and Ichigo were all that remained, gazing into each other's eyes, stripped bare to the other by the whipping wind of passing time and the honesty of death with no more diverting words behind which to take shelter.
There was nothing that was hidden to Ichigo about Hiroshi Yamada because in his eyes was the indescribable feeling of his daughter's first giggle, the hushed moments of quiet where he held hands with his wife in the dark—even the pizza boy Hiroshi only saw Saturday nights who wore his cap backwards so that his next regular, the boy with sandy hair and a crooked smile, would give his cap a grin, that pizza boy lived in his eyes too. Ichigo knew all these things that Hiroshi had collected in his mind as if they were Ichigo's very own.
Hiroshi's guilty pleasure of collecting seashells from all the beaches that he had visited was Ichigo's own pleasure for a moment, and the necklace that Hiroshi had made for his wife on their twenty-fifth anniversary felt slightly gritty between his fingers, despite the care that had been taken to clean it. The pendant, a shell from the beach the two had visited on their honeymoon, was gussied up with holes, carefully threaded with gold cord and painted in pastel swatches, carefully wrapped so that the missus might not find it while tidying up their home.
"What's next, Ichigo?"
They gazed at the grass that was lit up with sunlight.
"Because I'm not sure if I'm ready for it to all be over." Hiroshi chuckled as if to cover up something Ichigo had not already seen. "I don't believe in God or anything, but I hope there's…something after this."
"It'd be a quite a trick, wouldn't it, to create something that didn't believe in you just so you could break it and then show yourself afterwards," Hiroshi murmured. He looked to Ichigo, who only gazed back at him with the same level stare with which he had presented to the businessman at the time of their meeting.
"Better be going then," a shuffle of feet and the clearing of a choked throat. "Wouldn't want to keep The Man waiting."
He stepped into the sunlight.
Author's Note: I only have a vague idea for the plot line of this story, so if you have any smashing ideas about where this could go, please feel free to share them with me. Anything after this chapter is unwritten, so if you're ready for a super long wait time... hi :)
On that note, I hope you enjoyed (...?) and please have a lovely day. Or night.