Chapter One: Yet Do I Fear Thy Nature?

A young woman wearing a crepe-de-chine dress with light floral patterns stitched on to its hems sat waiting. She sat on the edge of a rocking chair as it creaked with each time she shifted her weight back and forth. Its sounds reverberated throughout the wooden floors and throughout the seemingly dead silence of the sparsely furnished room. The wooden rocking chair, the white couches, the gilded lamp shade, and the imposing frame of the oaken grandfather clock reflected off the polished floors that framed the interior. The woman sat alone. She stood up and turned slowly, her ebony hair shining through the soft sunlight that filtered through the curtains, and ushered Izumi-san to the kitchen of the house. They ambled in quietly.

In the corner, a pot simmered with what could be made out to be breakfast. Something sweet permeated the air and it smelled akin to that of the sugary scent of spiced apples that were often harvested during the fall season. Next to the stove, the linoleum walls of the kitchen space glared bright from the filtering sunlight that entered through the window panes. They were decorated with a plethora of shining silver utensils, quite lavish, with a small television set framed right in front of the brown kitchen table. The news was on.

There were moving images of a newscaster, preened to perfection with his hair slicked back and his suit too impossibly straight, sitting stoically behind a desk with his mouth moving in idiosyncratic words. There were bright images of new unsurprising deaths flashing across the screen.

It read: ALLEGED PARASITE SIGHTING, THREE DEATHS IN SHINJUKU DISTRICT.

She brought him upstairs after a breakfast of oatmeal and toast, Western... He thought, and lead him down the hall. Picture frames of images that could not be fully made out littered the walls as they passed two white doors that were closed shut. They walked in silence, much like the way they ate breakfast in silence, until she stopped in front of the last room. She opened the door. The room was cornflower blue and furnished with paraphernalia that one would associate with children.

Sudden awareness rushed through Izumi-san's conscious as his eyes scanned the changing station already set up with disposable diapers, baby wipes, and three tubes of cornstarch powder. In the middle of the room, stuffed toys were scattered on the carpet where a ruffled blanket with the image of a grinning bear holding a plethora of multicolored balloons laid crumpled on the middle. The sunlight seemed brighter than before and he could tell that the windows had been opened. He looked around. Once. Twice. Thrice. Now it seemed the walls were getting tighter. Closer than before, as if the room were growing smaller. And in between one of the four corners stood a single wooden crib.

He watched as the woman with the crepe-de-shine dress and the floral patterns stitched to its hems dipped her hands into it, bending slightly, before pulling up with a small brown haired baby dressed in yellow. She turned around, finally revealing her face, and a bitter smile appeared on her visage. It curved with her delicate features, porcelain skin and light pink lips, however it did not reach her brown eyes. She gingerly handed him the child and he took it in his arms without hesitation, confounding himself as he did this. He looked down upon the tiny body.

The baby's cheeks were plump and flushed slight with a pink tinge. Its eyes were closed and mouth slightly agape in deep slumber. He looked over it in awe and a sense of endearment flooded his thoughts, until his eyes reached his right hand. Unconsciously it rubbed the baby's head softly and for a moment he felt nothing. He continued to do this, feeling nothing but the softness of the child's hair on the pads of his digits.

The child fussed slightly in his arms and a slender hand reached forward to place itself on his own. Her skin was just as soft as it looked, comforting really, and the intimacy of the touch felt almost too familiar as if he felt it many times before. She pulled away and he found himself longing for the warmth of her skin again. Awareness rushed over his conscious once more and the hand that tenderly caressed the child moved on its own accord, with a single hazel eye peering out in curiosity on the skin of his own right hand.

His eyes widened.

Migi gazed back at him with blank eyes devoid of any emotion. He then diverted his gaze towards the child.

"Shinichi..." He heard someone hiss.

He continued to gape at Migi as the parasite continued to gently touch the child's head. It fussed once more.

"Shinichi..." The woman whispered in alarm and he looked up and stared directly into the face of Kimishima Kana.

Shinichi woke up with his body jolting into consciousness and a furious sweat building up on the back of his neck and on his forehead. He squinted at the sunlight that filtered through his blinds, recollected his senses, and brought his left hand out to wipe the sweat off of his forehead.

"I see you are awake. A nightmare perhaps?" Migi greeted him in his familiar monotonous voice from the corner of his bed.

"No..." He replied, still disheveled from his dream as he rubbed his eyes tiredly. "I'm not sure what it was..."

"I detect high levels of stress and anxiety in your stream of consciousness, you are not feeling well."

Migi reverted back into the shape of his right hand and stared up at him in curiosity. "Humans are very difficult to understand, however, I can tell that you are not fully capable in your mental state. Many emotions are jumbled in your mind and it is affecting you on a subconscious level. This anxiety is flooding towards me. Your nervousness is almost as palpable as your distressing dream."

"I dreamt of her again..." He conceded.

"The girl with the attuned senses? The one who died, yes?"

Shinichi pinched the bridge of his nose and fell back into the covers of his bed. He looked up towards the ceiling. His eyes traced patterns of the ridges that curved all around the blank white slate. He was trying to distract himself.

The hole in his heart ached slightly as he thought about her, it made his fingers curl and his throat constrict, but in a sense he still could not feel anything. It felt seemingly endless, the blackness that encumbered his heart, and it incited some feeling of perpetual falling. He was sinking further and further into his bed. The ceiling was drawing further and further away from him. Dropping slowly. Falling. These feelings were so intense he felt as if his lungs could not work.

"Shinichi..." He heard Migi calling out. And then a familiar numbness flooded his body and the ache disappeared just as fast as it came even though the image of brown eyes and ebony hair remained in his thoughts.

"You are thinking about her again..."

He sighed as he picked himself up from his bed. He stretched his back, attempting to rid himself of the knots on his shoulders. Then, he proceeded to roll his shoulder blades back and crack his neck. "It's been so long since she died... I don't know why I still think about her. Is it weird to think about someone like that? I cared for her, you know... But, but not like that. Not like how I... It was all so strange, I don't know why I had it."

"What are talking about? Your dream?"

"Yes. I dreamt of a house and she was in it. I dreamt of a life of domesticity and a child and... What the hell?" He finally had a grasp on the implications of his dreams.

"I believe I have read that human dreams are a way of their subconscious attempting to cope with something. I suspect that you are still harboring guilt from her death. It is to be expected."

"But why? Why would I dream of having a... I don't understand. I shouldn't... It's been nearly two years for kami's sake!"

"Even I do not understand why your subconscious conceived this dream. I for one do not have dreams, therefore I cannot fully comprehend the fundamentals of your thought process or the human thought process altogether," Migi returned indifferently.

"I shouldn't be dreaming about her..." He repeated.

"And yet you are."

"...The response signals down through the dendrites of the neuron to travel down to the cell body where the axon is attached to...according to your basic neuron anatomy discussed in unit one. The axon itself is surrounded by a multilayered membrane called the myelin sheath - it is essential to know that this sheath is comprised of proteins and lipids and in some genetic cases, when there is a deficiency in certain fatty acids, persons born with this have Adrenoleukodystrophy or ALD which all ties back to our last unit with Genetics... However, if the myelin sheath is completely in tact over the axon, that is where the input signal travels down to reach the synaptic terminal where the..." Shinichi sighed and closed his eyes, attempting to drown out his professor with meaningless thoughts as the man lectured on with a voice akin to Migi.

He felt his right hand twitch, knowing that Migi himself was currently listening intently to the lecture.

"The cell is polar on the outside with both cations and anions - there is a positive charge of sodium ions which is on the outside of the cell while the inside is negative with potassium ions. When a signal travels through the cell, a gradient is set up and because of this when the signal does travel through the cell body the charges become positive on the inside and negative on the outside making it inverse..."

Shinichi's eyes drooped and the image of the lecture hall, the rows of students, the electronic screen, and the professor's podium blurred in his sight until everything became white. He imagined the white linoleum walls of the kitchen again.

He imagined the shiny utensils and the wooden rocking chair and the grandfather clock that ticked with each second that passed by. Bells chimed and the image of Kana returned through the doorway of the living room. She held the baby again, but this time its eyes were open. They were brown, just as brown as his and hers. It smiled a toothless smile as its eyes met his and small digits reached towards him in a grabbing motion. The baby's hands opened and closed in a motion indicating for him to pick it up. And so he did. Kana frowned and handed him the child without hesitation and all three strolled into the kitchen. The television was on again, but a new headline flashed on the screen. He opted on not reading it however. His eyes diverted back towards the child in his arms whose mouth was currently latching on a bottle given to him by Kana. Kana herself was hustling and bustling in the kitchen with a new dress, light pink with an elaborate cutout on the back, flowing in the background. The grandfather clock rang, bells chiming at half past three and...

"Izumi-kun?" His professor shook him awake.

Shinichi jolted from his sleep and instinctively looked around the now empty lecture hall. "The whole class has left already. It's been nearly an hour since the lesson ended and I'm afraid that I have to collect my bearings for the next professor to set up for his class," the old man said with a slight smile.

"My apologies Yuzo-sensei," Shinichi muttered as he gathered his belongings. He checked his hand and found Migi to be completely asleep. "I'll see you next Tuesday."

He ambled out of the lecture hall, taking slow and careful strides when passing down the campus corridors and out towards the familiar streets of the Hokkaido district. His destination was only one place; Ishiya's.

The afternoons were when Shinichi would frequent the local cafe near his university. He almost always was by himself with the exception of Migi's company and would sit in a quiet corner drinking either coffee or milk tea while he stared out into the large glass windows. He would have liked to had someone to accompany him, someone more human for once, but he had not been in contact with anyone after he graduated high school.

Even Murano had left. She went to study abroad in Australia a year ago, leaving him altogether and with every case, all of his own classmates went their separate ways. His chest still ached every time he thought about Satomi's departure, but it had dulled in comparison to the pain he felt all those months ago when she initially did. She was an integral part of his life, of himself in all honesty, but he understood Murano's choice nonetheless and let her go. She wanted him to be truthful, she wanted him to be the way he used to be. However, he still could not conform to her wishes. There were too many inhibitions that he could not quite let go of, not yet. And if she was not satisfied with him or his rationale, then so be it. He loved her, but he realized if she could not accept his new change in attitude, then she could never fully return his feelings.

"Oi Izumi!" He heard through the many chattering voices of the cafe.

He was met with the sight of a grinning young man with an average face that mirrored half of the population of Japan - all brown eyes, light skin and brown hair. He wore a ruffled Hokkaido University sweatshirt and pair of dark jeans mirroring that of Shinichi's own ensemble. They were the epitome of typical college students. "Yo, Mitsuji. What's up?" Shinichi peered up from his drink to greet the man.

Mitsuji Ren was probably the only friend he ever made once he started Uni. He was cheerful and did not have the inclination of sticking his nose into Shinichi's business, therefore Shinichi decided to keep Ren as an ally because sometimes he needed human contact and Ren was the most non problematic person he knew. "I thought you'd be here," the man smiled before seating himself right across Shinichi . "I just finished my Bio-Chem class and decided to get a cup of coffee before heading to the library to study. My grades are plummeting man. I swear, sometimes I question whether or not I should drop that class!"

"I mean if you want to... Might as well not if you want to get full credit for that course. It is directed towards your major, right?" He shrugged.

"Yeah, but if I allow myself to continue with that class, I could put my graduation status in jeopardy since I'm nearly failing it. And with the upcoming unit test I don't think I can compensate with a good enough grade for the last test I completely bombed... And... Eh, screw it. I'm done with talking about school, let's talk about something interesting, eh? ... You hear about the decrease in parasite murders from the news this morning? The recent studies from Cambridge say that the decrease was due to some influx in a pollen in the air that researchers from the the UN's public health division believe to weaken the parasite's biological functions."

"That's a load of bullshit. Parasites have no known or proven weaknesses in their immune system. The World Health Organization just fabricated the existence of that pollen. Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford can pull out as much fallible studies they want, but the lack of evidence stands as a clear indication of the truth. They just want to justify some sort of reason in the decrease of attacks..."

"Really? Because the Japanese ministry of defense also supplemented the existence of this pollen with evidence from the -"

"Believe me. It's a load of crap. The decrease is there simply because there is a decrease. Nothing more nothing less," Shinichi crossed his arms smugly knowing exactly why the parasites have been less mobile these last couple of months. Both he and Migi had been successful in helping decrease the parasites in numbers all over Japan. As for the rest of the world, he simply guessed that their defense systems were just as efficient in ridding the monsters as well.

"Well, okay," the man shrugged in acceptance. "But why would the government let alone the UN lie about this stuff?"

"Think about it this way, if they're able to contain the masses, then the uproar from the media would slowly die down. They think that they can simply negate the problem by appeasing the public with the conception of some miracle pollen that can weaken the parasites when in all actuality the problem is alive and will still persist to exist. Those monsters will never go away, unless we eradicate them all through our own planned attacks, but it's not like the UN is looking for some way to weaponize a means of destroying these parasites. The only thing we can do now is wait until the Japanese government takes it into their own hands."

"Yeah, I've heard that the U.S. was able to contain some of their parasites and weaponize them for militant purposes. I think they're studying them too! I don't know how they got those things to cooperate with them, but who knows? Americans are always on top of these things, especially if it relates to finding some innovative way to weaponize anything and everything for the sake of war... Tch, Americans... Hey, maybe Japan should do the same thing..."

"Well, I've heard that parasites are intelligible species and are able to adapt with humanity. I'm not surprised that they were able to negotiate with them, but you know there will always be some ulterior motive. I still think we should kill them all to prevent any sort of genocide blown out of proportion. Have you forgot that they eat our kind?"

"N-No... I -"

"Well, then, why not eradicate them altogether? They pose as a threat to humanity regardless to what benefits they could offer us. The Americans were stupid for trying to weaponize them. How could they possibly find the audacity to actually socialize with those monsters when those monsters are constantly killing humans each day?"

"Well, yeah... I see your point. I do see why it's a bit absurd..."

"A bit? No, man! It's completely unethical. It goes against all fundamentals of humanity. Think history, whenever there was something that threatened us as humans, what did we do? We evolved and found ways to decimate what threatens us. Now why shouldn't we do the same to parasites? They're fragile, but more harmful in ways that we could ever imagine. They feed on us like fodder. We are their prey. The hunted never needs to stop and find ways to negotiate with the hunter. No. It's either kill or be killed and I don't want us to be on the receiving end even more than we already are."

"Wow Izumi, I always knew you never liked parasites, but I never knew you felt so strongly about them. It's pretty commendable!"

"I guess... I guess I just feel more strongly towards humanity. We need to protect ourselves, that's all."

"Yeah, now I'm really reconsidering my previous comments about doing the same thing as the U.S. If anything your argument was completely right!"

Shinichi yawned, stretching his back, before pushing himself up from his seat. "Well, sorry man, I gotta get going. I'll see you tomorrow at Econ okay?"

When he strolled down the streets leading back to his apartment, Migi finally made his appearance. "Your conversation about parasites was rather interesting. I am surprised that the humans have decided to fabricate the notion of a pollen that weakens our immune functions. After all their research, have they not grasped the idea that we only serve as hosts for a specific part of the body?"

"They're just trying to conceal your species existence all over again."

"Still, I find it fascinating as to how far your human leaders would go to prevent mass hysteria..."

"Yeah, me too," Shinichi muttered.

That night when Shinichi closed his eyes and when he finally succumbed to the deep dark abyss of sleep, he was met with the sight of the spectre with long ebony hair and porcelain skin once more...