Nakamura Shungiku's characters.
Day 1 (10:00 p.m.)
Saga looked out the window of his cheap, one room, tatami mat apartment. He only saw the sidewalk and the looming clouds that hovered over the city area, waiting.
He sighed and then clicked his pen. Tokyo…college, huh?
It had only started and now it all seemed so pointless.
He had made a phone call a while ago and found the person who had gone to the same cram school as...that boy. His mind still couldn't seem to wrap around the idea that the innocent younger boy would have had a fiancé.
It felt like he had been stabbed in the back, and every time he thought of Ritsu, he felt his heart throb, but from love or from pain, he didn't know. Saga was a fool to think it had been real. The boy had been able to leave without a word. It had been nothing in Ritsu's life, yet everything in Saga's. And Saga now...now, Saga felt like the boy hadn't even been real. Everything must have been a figment of his imagination. No traces were left, no proof, only an irritated voice over the phone that might have known him. He needed something to confirm those rose like memories, to give him hope. Because the insistent pain was no proof. It seemed to have always been there. Saga was used to that biting pain because it never left.
When Ritsu had first disappeared, he had been so hopeful, thinking he could easily find the boy. He had even thought about complaining, for once to his mother, about moving, but he had stayed silent. He hadn't even had the chance to look for Ritsu because of the move. But he hadn't wanted to stay either. Not in that lonely house that could only echo screams back at him: one booming, bitter male voice, one screeching female one. Saga could find no way to deal with his pain. And it lingered within him, mocking him.
Sometimes it would subside when he was distracted but it would always return home.
A sudden wind rushed into his room and he felt a slight dull tingle, but he had to stare out at the raindrops to confirm that it was rain. He got up and then the rain started pouring. The water slammed down onto the ground and somehow he remembered a documentary he had seen. It had shown water cutting through steel. He had stared, uninterested at the time. But he felt a curiosity ignite in him now. What would it feel like if that high pressured water sliced through him? Like a knife? Like a laser? Like millions of bullets? What would it feel like now when everything was so surreal?
In the few seconds that the rain had gone from a couple drops to a heavy downpour, it had drenched his room and the black-haired boy struggled to sluggishly close the old windows. He tugged the window, inch by inch to close it shut and in the few seconds when it was too late for him to react and stop himself from closing the window, he heard a voice. And then he had slammed the window shut. The room was quiet and his golden eyes peered out the window to see a figure in front of the gate.
The older man, maybe in his twenties, looked up at the dingy apartment complex. He stared straight at Saga's room, and stood there without moving, without a jacket or an umbrella, only a green cardigan. The man didn't move for a moment and then he looked around like he was guilty of something before running away.
The man was probably a former lover of the past owner of the room he had rented. He had heard rumors of the man being a playboy, with men and women. Not that he himself had been much better lately. He had been thinking about getting someone to come comfort him, but today, in the gloomy rain, he wanted to be alone, even if alone in his own dark dreams.
With a sigh, Saga sat down on his bed and then flopped back down. His hair, dripping with water, soaked the bed as he looked at the dingy ceiling with strange yellow stains.
Not that it mattered if the bed got wet.
He slowly closed his eyes and his long eyelashes made a slight shadow on his face.
And he thought of the boy whose eyes were bright emerald. Green, the color of life. Saga missed that vibrancy. He felt his eyes burn with water.
He reached out as though to touch the lively warmth that the boy held, but when the only thing he touched was his soaked table, dripping water, he flinched and withdrew his hand, curling up into a ball and falling asleep to the scent of wet tatami and wood.
(11:15 p.m.)
Saga woke up and felt his head pounding. The blood rushed to his head as he sluggishly got up and his eyes wavered in the blurry sight he saw. He wobbled before fainting on the tatami mat. Before his eyelids drooped, he heard a gentle voice of a boy call his name, and he tried to open his eyes and see, but then again, that must have been a dream.
( 11: 32 p.m.)
Saga opened his eyes and blinked. He coughed, and his whole body creaked and ached in pain from the vibrations. The only thing on his mind was the pain and the chill from his clothes. He wanted it to stop. He peeled off his wet clothing and then tried to roll into his bed, but it was still wet. In the end, he rolled into a small corner without any leaks in the roof above it and curled up again to sleep, naked except for his underwear. His body, pale and thin, shivered as he slept fitfully.
(11:57 p.m.)
Moonlight shone in and Saga's mind had cleared slightly. His pale lids had pulled back to reveal golden eyes that stared at the tan colored wall. He needed to buy some medicine. His body moved on its own as he receded into a dazed wrinkle in his brain where he rested. He didn't exist anymore.
He watched from far away as a raven-haired boy put on clothes and managed to put the right shoe on the right foot. The wobbling boy left his shoe laces untied. As the boy locked the door, for a moment, the boy wished for a hug, the warmth, the soft, silky brown hair, the soft, yet solidness of another person. Any person, but the boy was stopped at the same time by his disgust. The boy didn't want anyone. Nothing could fill that emptiness.
The moment he had stepped out of his door, the difference between the quiet, enclosed room and the noises of the lively night shocked him. It was too much for his senses. He started walking down the stairs and grabbed a hold of the railing, tightly, and he coughed again. Even the faint moon seemed too bright and the warm spring night air was too cold. He went, step by step, slowly. It seemed to take forever, but time went even slower as he tripped over his mud covered laces and waited for the sharp impact. He hit something solid. His mind recognized it. Something soft, yet solid.
"Ahh…a person," he thought before he closed his eyes completely and fainted. Maybe this person could help make it stop. Make everything stop.
Day 2 (7: 41 p.m.)
Saga blinked. He was lying on a soft, large bed, covered in blankets. Beside him, a dried towel and a glass of water lay on the table. The room was dark, but not pitch black. It was the sort of dark where the lights are off in that room, but was slightly lit by the light from another room. He blinked again, slowly, staring at the orange-yellow light leaking from the closed door that he was facing.
He wasn't in his house. He wasn't in his mother's house. He had pushed all his friends away except for Yokozawa, but Yokozawa had left Tokyo to go to his grandfather's funeral. So then, where was he exactly?
The room was dark, but he could see the figures of piles and piles of paper. There was a bedside table and a lamp, again both almost hidden behind papers…no, not just papers, but books. Piles of clothes had been flung across the room and the trash can was overflowing.
His mind suddenly cleared. He could be in danger. He sat up quickly only to groan from the dizziness and the pain that racked his brain, but instinctive fear made him push off the warm, thick tower of blankets and get up, placing his feet on the stone cold floor. Only to realize he was in only his underwear. It wasn't that he hadn't woken up in a similar situation before, but usually there was a human beside him and he hadn't been sick and vulnerable. But then again, it didn't really matter what happened to him anyway.
The door suddenly opened and yellow light filled the room.
Saga, like a deer in the headlights, froze.
A young man, maybe somewhere in his mid-twenties, had come in. His hair was light brown and his eyes were green. Saga flinched. It was just his luck to encounter someone with those same features when most of Japan was black-haired and brown-eyed. He rubbed his eyes and then tried to move, but when he started walking, his body swayed and he fell on a pile of clothes. He groaned and then felt an arm on his waist, lifting him up.
Worried green-eyes stared at him. "Saga-sempai, are you okay?"
Saga's sluggish mind took a moment to process the information. The man was older than him, but called him sempai. Saga still referred to himself as Saga, but official last name was Takano-san. And this man was a stranger but knew his name. Who was he? No...what was he thinking? Why did it matter? It didn't. There was no point in wasting his energy to wonder, so he just smiled a crooked, faint smile and said, "Nice to meet you. Do you have anything I could get drunk on?"