Two

The Impressionist: Prelude

The sun is shining bright the moment fifteen-year-old Hirano Ginta falls off his swivel chair, his body limp, his lifeless eyes wide as if he has just seen a ghost. It is 8-o'-clock in the morning, the second hand of the thrift store-bought watch on his wrist having just struck right on the hour, when he takes his last breath with nary a scream nor a thought.

(In his defense, it's a bit hard to think clear enough to scream when you're so suddenly dying.)

In the background, the faint buzz of Mizuki Nana's cloying voice emanates from the new, cherry-red Audio Technica headphones Ginta has spent two months skipping meals to save up for. It falls with his head, the left half shattering into pieces as it bears the brunt of the boy's sudden tumble to his death.

Not that any of that matters, his murderer thinks.

(Actually, Ginta's murderer does not think about him at all, which is rather the point.)

Ginta will remain unremembered, an unsung victim of an experiment (or a "crime," whatever, his murderer has long since given up on the semantics of a language that isn't even universal). Everybody around the world cries and moans and screams about the subjective thing that is "justice," everybody is too busy either lamenting or rejoicing the deaths of convicted criminals worldwide, nobody would think twice about a boring old Japanese teenager. Nobody would think it strange that this seemingly normal, seemingly healthy boy, has just died of a heart attack, seemingly out of nowhere, seemingly with no medical cause. Nobody would think his death mysterious at all. Or significant. Or even in any way interesting.

(Humans are such sensationalist creatures, his murderer thinks.)

People would stumble upon his name in the obituaries on the morning paper, sip some more tea (and remember that they need to buy more from the nearest convenience store, they're running a bit low on the stuff), and go on with their lives. Walk their kids to school. Do their daily morning ablutions before dressing up for work. So many people die every day, and nothing provides quite as much distance from the fact than it being said through small, nigh incomprehensible text on recycled paper that they use more for picking up pet droppings and swatting spiders than anything else related to truly understanding the world.

Or maybe they won't even know about this dead teenage stranger that nobody even cares about. Not everyone reads the papers.

(A pity, that. More people would have picked up on the fact that Kira wasn't the only one they needed to love/fear/hate/vilify/adore. Ginta's murderer is so much worse — or better, words are such tricky things — than Kira.)

The few people who do end up staring at Ginta's name on the obituaries for more than half a second would just blink and think, well, shit happens, and sometimes it happens when you least expect it to. And that, they would say, is that.

(It's the truth, in a way. Ginta was just a coincidental victim of an unfortunate circumstance that could have happened to anyone — anyone at all — only it happened to him. It's the truth, but at the same time it isn't.)

Things such as "significance" and "mystery" and "curiosity" are just like all words in that they are subjective, even quantifiably more so than their rather clinical counterparts: "purport," "conundrum" and "inquisitiveness." No two people share the exactly the same curiosities, find the same things mysterious, or see the same things as significant. There is common ground, of course, as humans are similar enough in their make up that they cannot be too different from one another, and yet they are different enough to be unique.

Though if this statement is twisted a certain way, viewed at just the right angle, one would realize that they are all of them equally unique so as to be generic.

But that is neither here nor there. Humanity is not the subject here.

Ginta's killer considers himself... well, not quite above humanity (he's not egotistical enough to think that), but not quite within it either. Rather he sees himself beside it; a silent observer who offers just the appropriate amount of interaction so as to not be viewed by it as alien, and yet is distant enough to actually be apart from it all. He is a minimally invasive entity that can somehow touch the wet clay that is humanity without altering its form.

Until he changes its mold irreparably.

But that's another story for later.

They would eventually call him The Impressionist. And to those with the appropriately — or inappropriately, as the case may be — macabre disposition, the reference would be obvious, readily apparent in its inexplicability. The Impressionist's works don't quite explain themselves so much as they just exist the way they do — in their utterly unforgettable and thought-provoking ways, able to evoke such horror with each splatter of congealing blood, each dollop of gray matter.

His story doesn't begin with Hirano Ginta though, as he would have you believe. It starts years before the unlucky boy's demise. It begins before The Impressionist found and used a leather-bound notebook named— yes, obviously — "Death Note." Before he established his drug cartels and multibillion-Yen businesses as an eleven-year-old. His story is a bit complicated and messed up, and in a way it's the kind of bullshit that people don't want to hear or read about, because who wants to start a story at its ending? Stories are supposed to make sense, supposed to start at the beginning, supposed to finish at the end. It's what makes stories appeal to the human mind; they resemble reality enough to be understood, enough for the reader to inject himself-herself into whichever character in whatever tale.

Which can't be said for his story.

Because his "reality" is different. His "reality" is complete, unadulterated horse shit.

So his story begins at the ending.

Well, her story, really. The Impressionist was never a he. Even before the end that was the beginning, even after the beginning that was the end, she has always been a she. But does that really matter when nobody knows who The Impressionist is, and nobody ever would?

"Hey, Aki, if a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it, what sound does it make?"

"Oh, Rei. Obviously there is no tree, and there is no forest, until we see and hear it ourselves. Reality is what you see and hear and feel, and reality is what I see and hear and feel. And if you see a forest where I see Shibuya, then that's just because reality's bullshit."

A/N: I am back! Sorry I took forever to update this little baby, my writing muse just escaped me (for, like, MONTHS). I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. Two words, beginning with a W and a B. Anyway, I'm not even sure if my writing mood is here to stay, it tends to run away a lot. Thanks again to my reviewers and favoriters and followers (and readers, in general). Feedback of any kind keeps me going.