when there's nothing left to burn
i. potential
Ten years is a long time to be a Gatchaman. Maybe it's a long time to be anything, really.
It's the sort of thing he thinks about when it's four p.m. on a Friday afternoon and another week of meaningless municipal work is fading out. Or when it's some unspecified hour of the weekend and the day still stretches out before him, exhaustingly empty. Or now, when it's nearing midnight and he's shaving a few more months off his lifespan, cigarette in one hand and whisky glass in the other.
In other words, the sort of thing he thinks about all the time, lately.
His colleagues left some hours ago, and even Alan's given up on drawing him into conversation tonight. He's left with the electronic trill of the darts machines and the low drone of the television in the corner of the bar, both bland and familiar and insufficient distraction from his own thoughts.
Though those are familiar, too. What does it mean, any of it? The clockwork fights against inscrutable enemies, each defeat never seeming to dent their numbers. The endlessness of bureaucratic routine. He's seen comrades come and go, leaving behind missing numbers and empty seats in that impossible airborne arena; he's seen colleagues rise past him, that one prized exam result the ticket to a brighter future. To any future at all.
He's been a Gatchaman longer than he's been a civil servant, but both lives are their own sort of failure.
He grinds out what's left of his cigarette into the ashtray. Thinks about career ladders and dead-end jobs and burning out - about burning bright, burning up, going out in a blaze of glory. Lights going out.
He lights another cigarette.
ii. spark
When Berg-Katze turns up, something rekindles briefly inside him. He think it's anger, at first. Later, when he can be more honest with himself, he admits that some of it was the thrill of the fight, of finally doing something worthwhile.
Foolish, in retrospect, given how easily he's defeated. Still, he keeps up the charade in front of the others, talks as though there's a chance of winning. He knows it's stupid, of course, that's he's only the hero of a high-school boy whom he helped once, and not even in any profound way. That he's too old for this shit. This saving the world nonsense.
But Sugane still looks at him like he's someone worth looking up to. And so he tries. He gets reacquainted with the familiar feel of the suit, its red-hot promise of destruction and salvation. Days later, in a smoke-filled tunnel, he finds a more direct way to be of use. If he's going to do something with his life, he thinks, it might as well be this way: letting it bleed out of him and into someone else through Utsutsu's small hands.
And so he keeps walking the path between hope and disillusionment, nurtures that spark that stuttered back to life inside him, tries to believe that there's something he can do, that there's something the past ten years are leading up to. Even if only an ending.
iii. ignition
But of course the key to a suicide attack is the suicide, so maybe it doesn't matter that this is how it ends, maybe when that creature takes his Note between its claws and pulls - the wires stretching, snapping - there's something else being ripped loose, set free, beneath the blood and the pain and the sound of himself dying-
iv. ashes
When Monday rolls around, after everything, he's back in the office.
He hadn't wanted to wake up. But he had. And so he's here, because there isn't anywhere else to be, now; there isn't anyone else to be.
No one here expects more from him than a stack of completed paperwork at the end of the day, so the only mocking voice he hears is his own. He makes a cup of coffee and thinks, so that was all you were good for, in the end. He sends off another email to the litany of failure failure failure in his head. He lights a cigarette during his lunch break, lets it burn up alongside the ashes of old beliefs in childish things like heroes and goodness and meaning.
The day passes like any other, the hours indifferent to whatever it was that died that night, in that deserted park. He smiles when Suzuki from the neighbouring department drops by to hand him some old files. He makes small talk with Miyamoto and Sawamura about next weekend's plans. He tells himself it's okay, that this is the only person Hibiki Jou needs to be.
He doesn't believe that, either.