Animosity
Rating: PG-13 for some swearing
Warning: Spoilers for the end of the game and the secret reports.
Summary: Kousuke's your regular, average fifteen-year-old kid in a messed-up Shibuya. He likes listening to music, sleeps in on Sunday, and the wind is whispering nonsense to him.

Lesson One: Ears Hear All

Kousuke was fifteen when he first heard the wind. Well, he'd heard wind before, but on the day he turned fifteen his parents bought him an MP3 player and that's when he started hearing the wind talk to him.

He was walking back from school to his apartment, savouring the feeling of popularity that came with such a cool piece of technology. It was just starting to get a little dark when all of the sudden the wind picked up out of nowhere and rattled underneath his headphones.

Sa, it said. Saaaaaa.

'Sa'? As in 'help'? "Someone need help?"

Sa, it said, and it sounded like someone was crying.

He looked until the sun went down but couldn't find anyone. The sound followed him all the way home.

x x x

"Sa," he said. "That's all I hear, 'sa'. It's louder when I have headphones on- like it's trying to compete with the music."

"Interesting. What did you get for number seven?"

"The null space of the inverse matrix has a dimension of 4. Maybe I'm just imagining the whole thing."

"Maybe, maybe not. I got a dimension of 3, not 4. Are you sure you didn't miss a free variable?"

"Positive. Listen, Ri- I know it sounds weird, but someone's calling for help and I don't know who."

Risuna put down her pencil and looked at him square in the eye from across the table. "I'm not saying you're lying, Kousuke. When I'm outside at night, I hear a really soft voice saying 'me'. If they're saying 'help' to you and 'me' to me…maybe someone's asking us for help."

"'Help me'? That's half English, though. I just- I don't know."

"Maybe this whole thing is a giant prank. You make the matrix equal the zero column vector, not the zero row vector. That's why you got a messed-up answer."

"Thanks." He leaned back in his chair, tapping his pencil on the desk like a drumstick. Outside, the wind picked up. "Or maybe we're just going crazy."

x x x

He found the second hypothesis to pick up significant steam in the weeks to come. Risuna assured him that for her it was a whisper, a strained sound that she only heard if she concentrated hard enough. For him it was soon loud enough that he could hear it even when he was indoors, a constant wailing that pressed on his ears and kept him up at night.

The regular human can take sleepless nights only for so long. Eventually, in his delirium at another waking 3:00 AM he talked to it.

Sa, it said.

"Sa who?"

Sa, it replied, slightly more indignant. Tears of frustration crept up in his eyes. He threw off his covers, padded over to his window and threw it open.

"WHO?" His voice echoed through the empty streets; he was tired, frightened and alone. The streetlights pulsed with sudden intensity. "Who the fuck-" he broke down in sobs, tears running down his face. "-Who the fuck keeps calling me?"

There was a long period of silence, as though the voice was stunned by his sudden burst of emotion. Then it returned.

Koo, it said, finally. Saaaa kooooooo.

x x x

"How is he?"

"Still the same, I'm afraid. Brooding as usual."

"And Shibuya?"

"Hanging in there, but not for much longer."

"…Shit."

"But the kid's out there, we know that for sure. He answered last night."

"Do you know where he is?"

"No, the Imagination's not fully realized yet. Too weak to trace."

"We need to find him, don't we? To save Shibuya."

"…Yeah. Cats have nine lives, so I suppose this one can live again."

"I don't know what we'd do without you, Sanae."

x x x

Sa ku, he wrote, inside the covers of his books. Sa ku in the margins of his assignments. Sa ku elegantly scrawled, like graffiti, on walls and crevices and hiding places. It came as easily as writing his own name.

"Sa ku," he mumbled. "Help place? Helping place? Helping sentence?" He rubbed his eyes. The voice had started to, rather politely, step down after sunset and allow him to sleep. It seemed more strained now- like it was starting to die.

"Helping place what?" His English teacher was suddenly standing over his desk, looking down indignantly. "Kousuke, if you don't find my classroom a good 'helping place', might I suggest a detention as the next best option?"

"Sorry," he mumbled, and signed the detention slip Kousuke Sa ku.

x x x

"I'm thinking of running away from home," Risuna announced as they walked nowhere in particular, bookbags heavy on their backs.

Sa ku, said the wind.

"Why?" Kousuke kicked an unlucky can that happened to be near his foot. It clattered down the concrete steps in Udagawa. "What's wrong?"

"I want to be a fashion designer, but my parents think it's stupid. They want me to go to college and become a doctor."

He couldn't give her a satisfactory answer. She knew what she wanted to hear, and she knew what was right; though the two weren't mutually exclusive, they might as well have been for a fifteen-year-old. Sa ku. "Hey, it's getting louder. D'you hear it?"

She cupped her ears with her hands, skirt bustling in the rising wind. "Yeah, a little. How loud is this wind to you?"

"I- holy crap," he said, stopping dead in his tracks.

The graffiti in front of them was all new. Yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before it had all been mute and smudged, an elegy for a long-lost mural. Someone had come the night before and painted it over- the scent of fresh paint and something else hung in the air, but it looked dry.

In more colours than he could count, the painting looped and twisted and turned over and through itself; a symphony of colour and shape and dissonance. He was at once mesmerized and repulsed. His entire body was shaking. The wind was howling in his ears, compelling him to reach out and touch.

As soon as his fingertips brushed against the cool surface the entire world went white- and then in the space between breaths he witnessed the murder and the waking and the first week and the second week and the third week and fights and the deaths and the rebirths and the final, merciless, peaceful end of it all. He was barely aware that he was screaming, then gurgling, then vomiting and collapsing where the boy with the orange hair had once died, leaving a stunned Risuna to run for help while he counted the angel feathers that fell around him.

Saaaa koooo raaaa baaaa