Chapter 14! :D
It was shorter than some of the others, so I got done with it early. Saya and Tórir finally meet - and weird freaky shit happens. Expect angst, fluff and flashbacks. The First Act is coming to a close in the next few chapters! I'll likely take a break before getting started on Act II, so here's hoping it's not overly long...
As always, heaps of love for the feedback y'all are leaving this monstrosity. I do a little happy dance with each one! Your comments are so dear and delicious to me c:
Hope you enjoy, and don't forget to review!
The concert is held at the Shikinaen Royal Garden.
The University of Arts, in affiliation with the US Consulate, has set up brilliant white marquees across the space. The interiors of starcloth and chandeliers shed a crystalline glow across the elegant curls of chairs, the ivory tablecloths, the centerpieces of floating candle bowls with artfully arranged black-and-white roses.
The wide dais for the orchestra is outdoors, surrounded by lush grassland and cherry trees. Glimpsed among the silky pink boughs, the shell-shaped stage is a magnificent pièce de résistance.
Drifting through the crowds, Saya is too overwhelmed to take anything in. She's seen the memorabilia of the Philharmonic at the villa. She's watched old Youtube clips of interviews and concerts. She's pored through magazine clippings tucked into Kai's old albums.
Yet it doesn't prepare her for the scale of the event.
She is dumbstruck by the news-media crowding the parking-lot. Reporters and cameramen are everywhere. Chimera lights blaze; microphones and boom poles are arranged helter-skelter. The shouts in different languages create a claustrophobic haze where all communication is reduced to abbreviated sentences.
"The death of nuance," Haji calls it—a struggle not to be understood but simply heard.
No wonder Haji wanted me to arrive with Kai instead of him, Saya thinks. I'd be too freaked out by the attention.
Scratch that.
I already am.
In the gardens, it is thankfully private. Crowds of people eddy under the moonlight: brightly-dressed in gowns and dignified in tuxedos. The soft conversation floats skyward in an amorphous fog. Most of the audience is middle-aged, but Saya is startled to see several twentysomethings and teenagers.
Then again, the Philharmonic has always been a friend to post-millennials. Fearlessly forward-looking, they continue to spice up their diet of antique favorites, such as Barber's Adagio for Strings, with collaborations alongside up-and-coming artists.
Tonight, they will be performing, among the popular pieces in their repertoire, the works of a Japanese enfant terrible with a taste for rock opera. Haji has played her some of the recordings during the two-week rehearsal. Saya was entranced by it: twinges of bass guitar floating like ghostly blue static over shimmers of violin, playful arpeggios of piano undercut by the purity of their mezzo soprano's voice rising at a high C for several bars before the chorus begins.
"An avant garde migraine," Haji said, but with a smile.
He's playing off the concert as no big deal. But Saya can tell he is excited.
There has been a gleam to his eyes the last few days, a low-key intensity to his manner. She's often caught him in the music room at the tip of dawn, playing cello with a magician's meticulousness to get the timing right. Other nights, she's been roused awake to hear him on the cellphone with the composer, or having long-distance tryouts on remote software with bandmates. In the afternoons, he is often gone on rehearsals. But when he returns, he always greets her with kisses of exceptional ardor—even for him—before sweeping her upstairs.
Lying dazed and trembling in bed afterwards, Saya gets the sense that he derives from these comings-together the same inspiration as an artist with his muse. Sparks of creativity infusing his body with every touch, stoking the complex engine inside him to keep him going for the rest of day.
It gratifies her. Moreso because it means he's forgiven her for the attack in the training room. Yet, going over it, she still experiences a full-bodied spasm of chagrin. She remembers the liquid squelch of her blade passing through his chest. Remembers the shocky blankness in Haji's eyes—and the piercing shards of her own laughter.
Except it wasn't her laugh at all.
It was Diva's.
Since that night, tension has kept thrumming through her body. Nothing eases it: not sex, not swimming, not snacks, not swordplay, not solitude in the solarium. Her dreams make it worse: a riot of hissing snakes and burning-blue eyes, her skin caked in blood the color of tar.
Portent? Delirium?
She isn't sure. Plunked down in her family's midst after thirty years, her own strangeness seems more pronounced than ever. She can't remember the last time she's done something with the certainty that it's what she's meant to be doing.
She can't tell Haji that. It will only worry him, and make him cut his work short. He will once again start suggesting travel, or sessions with a counselor. If she told him right this moment she wanted them both to go home, he'd obey.
Haji is always like that. Always attentive to her whims, in a way that licks at her imperious streak, but also reminds her how far they still have to go to being true partners.
So stop self-obsessing, she thinks angrily. Just be happy for him.
She's made herself up with a jittery energy for the event. The twins have helped her: picking her jewelry, styling her hair, applying her make-up. Kai, upon glimpsing her outfit, has dubbed her Alice in Pepto-Bismol Land.
But Saya likes the gown. The embroidered bodice, low and fitted, gives way to a skirt that is all festive flounces and flowering fullness owing to the plethora of petticoats. The material stirs around her legs as she walks, as cool as Haji's skin. The twins have put her hair in corkscrew curls, tied back at the crown of her head with ornate pins. Modest make-up: just a dusting of sparkly pink lipstick.
Haji hasn't seen her yet. He'd left the villa three hours earlier, to meet the ensemble and get last-minute details sorted out with security. Still, she hopes he'll like how she looks. She wants to appear vibrant, happy. She's spent too much time moping lately. It's got to be taking a toll on Haji—even if he never shows it.
At her shoulder, Kai remarks, "Finally, he gets to show off to you."
Saya blinks. "What?"
Irritably, he tugs a finger at his suit collar. Black tie events are still his least favorite type. "Haji. He's never been this revved up about concerts before. Even the one he gave at the goddamn Met, way back 2026. I think he's just happy you're here."
She hadn't considered it from this angle. A pupil preening for their old teacher.
"Hai tai!"
She turns. Yumi and Yuri approach, tailed by their Chevaliers, and Deidra.
As always the twins are dressed as polar opposites. Yumi is in a bias-cut green silk that reminds Saya of a mermaid, her hair teased up into an impudently messy twist. In contrast, Yuri is a delicate vision in a pale blue sheath dress, an opalescent sheen to the fabric. String pearls dangle down her neck like chips of ice, parallel to her glossy straight hair.
Their Chevaliers, both in slim-cut suits similar to Kai's, seem hot and uncomfortable; V already has a mustard stain on his shirt, and Sachi has taken his jacket off and slung it over one shoulder. Deidra, behind them, looks both chic and practical in a burgundy pantsuit with black silk lapels. There is a daub of shimmering lipstick in the same shade on her mouth.
"Plenty of mosquitos here," she says, referring to the paparazzi. "Keep your guard up, Otonashi. Those fuckos try for upskirt shots. I'd rather not bodyslam anyone and ruin my suit."
Saya winces, "They'd do that?"
"They try anything to get a rise out of the ensemble," Yumi snorts. "It's why Haji stopped taking us on tours. One time, in New York, a reporter made some nasty remark while we were leaving the hotel. I don't remember if it was to me or Yuri, but..."
"Haji punched him," Yuri sighs. "And broke his nose."
"Oh yeah. I remember that legal rigmarole," Kai grumbles. "It's why he prefers staying in Okinawa. No reporters except when there's a high-profile scandal."
"Or an event like this," Dee says.
Saya frowns. This is a nasty underbelly of fame Haji hasn't mentioned. But he talks so rarely about the Philharmonic's heyday. Maybe he doesn't want to upset her with the negatives. Or maybe he doesn't want it to seem like the effort it obviously is.
Sprezzatura—isn't that what Joel used to call it? A nonchalance meant to disguise one's true thoughts behind the mask of effortless grace.
He's like that in other parts of his life too.
She hasn't considered that before. She'd been so swept up in the war. No thoughts beyond: Defeat Diva. No thoughts, certainly, of Haji, beyond his pragmatic utility.
But now, the balance is changing. In odd moments, Saya finds herself trying to pin down the elements that make Haji Haji.
She's known him since he was a boy. Yet even now, his subtle personality reveals itself in ways so minute they're almost imperceptible. Sometimes Saya thinks there is a vault in him, locking him from inside out, making an enigma of the true contours of his mind. Her oldest friend, the same face she's seen for decades over coffee, over war strategies, during train journeys, between firefights…Yet a part of him remains hidden, below the surface, beyond the radar.
A trick of survival? A disguise—even from her?
You're being silly.
You know him. All the important pieces of him.
His cello-playing. His faultless aim. His favorite symphonies. The laxness of his posture when his mind goes on standby. The steadiness of it when his interest is sparked. His loyalty. His patience. The silky length of his body. His scars, fine as Chantilly. The way he growls when she bites his neck, and the rest of him. The way his kisses taste of something sugar-heady or chillingy astringent depending on his lip salve. The smooth baritone of his singing voice, which comes out only when he is in the shower. His wry sense of humor, which only she is privy to. His protectiveness, which shows in his uncanny attunement to everything around him.
His love, which is the substructure that braids all the other elements together into the shape of Haji.
Yet there is so much more of him to unpack.
Maybe—here's a thought—he's waiting to follow her lead? Waiting for her to put down roots somewhere, so that he can do the same. Maybe, one-fifty years from now, they will feel safe enough to leave bits of themselves everywhere, without feeling under threat from all angles.
One-fifty years from now...
Saya marvels at the trend of her thoughts.
Behind her, the twins gasp as one. "It's started!"
The rig lights at the stage are dimming. The massive LED screens in the background flare to life. Saya is aware of an almost arboreal silence settling over the gardens.
At the shores of the shell-pale stage, the New Viennese Philharmonic float in like sea monkeys. There are thirty-five of them in all. Of the original ensemble, twenty, including Haji, still remain.
Saya finds her Chevalier in the first row. Like many of the ensemble, he's accessorized with a blood-red diego—Okinawa's national flower—pinned to his lapel. His black suit is a sharp-cut Fresco; beneath is a white shirt, silk and matte. His hair curls in tufts barely a degree more artful than when she tugs fistfuls of it in bed. They are styled to hide his scars; while he isn't self-conscious of them, he seldom cares to flaunt them in public.
Haji, with rarity, doesn't see her. He is busy tuning his cello with a mathematical precision. Eight of the twelve compositions feature his solos. Now, as then, he is one of the MVPs in the ensemble.
The second, a prodigy in her own right, is their soprano—a raven-haired beauty whom Saya vaguely recognizes from magazine covers and Youtube ads. Her voice has been lauded as this century's Maria Callas: she sings with the smoothness of a fife.
Heartsick, Saya thinks of another voice. A high, pure melody drifting from the Zoo's tower—one she'd first found serene, then terrifying. It still creeps into her dreams now and again.
But lately it is different. The most comforting song she knows.
She glances at Sayumi and Sayuri. Both girls' faces are uplifted to the stage. They look strikingly like Diva in that moment. But also like Riku: eyes wide and lips parted, childlike in their joy.
Gently, Saya twines her arms through both of theirs. She feels closer to Diva—to the stolen possibility of her—when the twins are beside her.
Their group moves with the flow of the crowd toward the tables. Saya and her party have front seats. Not the vantage Saya usually favors: she likes an unimpeded view of the territory, the entrances and exits. But this event, exclusive and deluxe, offers the kind of camera surveillance that tends to inhibit trouble.
Usually.
At the stage, the composer takes the podium. The music begins: a soaring rendition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. The sounds the ensemble make, amplified by the subtle acoustics of the stage, achieve a shimmering complexity that reminds Saya of a colorful rose blossoming in the darkness of space, each petal a different hue. And, laboring at their violins, harps, flutes and oboes, the Philharmonic's players are crofters, transforming the gardens into Elysian Fields.
"Damn," Kai mutters. "I forgot how good these guys are."
Good, Saya thinks, is an understatement.
She is transfixed by the luminous clarity of the sounds, by the dazzling close-ups and transitions on the screens. The Philharmonic seem less like a collection of people than oiled parts of an intricate machine. An illusion, she knows. According to Haji, rehearsals are an ordeal because there are members who will throw tantrums before even sitting next to each other.
But on stage, for the audience, they appear insulated from petty human emotions. All they exist to do is play, in perfect harmony.
Sprezzatura incarnate.
When Haji's solo begins, Saya breaks into goosebumps. Under the blazing lights, he is—as she recalls one article describing—Almost bewitchingly brilliant.
He plays the solo for the Dvořák Concerto op. 104. Foregoing the romantic frippery of the allegro, he plunges straight into the highwaters of the B and E major, lengthening them into a rapturous rise and fall, and then stirring up a stormy tempest in grandioso. His cello gleams with a rich luster, bow flashing. In the spotlights, across the screens, his hair is a baroque frame within which the picture of his face is redefined into the classic, brooding beauty indistinguishable from the music itself.
Then his blue gaze flicks upward, a smile flitting across his lips. A smile that Saya hopes is for her... but if charisma was shaped into arrowheads, half the women in the audience would drop dead in a swoon.
Later, with Victoire, he plays Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 by Heitor Villa Lobos. They harmonize gorgeously: Victoire's voice fluting to dizzying heights like a spire of light, chased by the abyssally dark sweetness of Haji's cello, before everything blurs together and explodes into glittery fragments of crescendo.
When the performance ends, Saya cries "Bravo!" along with everyone else. Standing among the crowd, she's almost forgotten her own disconsolations. She's even forgotten Haji, although she stares raptly as he rises to take a bow. His presence is incidental, just one piece in a marvelous architecture of music that rivals the Château de Versailles itself.
"Bravo!" she calls again, and the word is overlapped by a man standing beside her.
Blinking in surprise—how did he get so close?—she finds him smiling, not at her but at the stage.
He is tall. Nearly as tall as Haji, and as pale. Beard stubble glitters coppery red along his strong cheekbones, and his hair is the same shade, falling in a smoothly disheveled tumble around his face. His sharp-hewn, almost Nordic features remind Saya of the Viking romances she used to read at the Zoo. As does the body, concealed elegantly in a black tux, yet solid as a mountain range.
Most unusual are his eyes. In the multicolored LEDs, they glow two different wavelengths. One red like infrared beams, the other blue like ultraviolet radiance.
They are the most entrancing eyes Saya has seen.
"Bravo!" he says, clearly moved.
And, catching her gaze, he smiles.
Saya feels a frisson of something. Familiarity? She smiles back, uncertainly. Yet it seems like she is smiling at an old friend. Someone who understands everything there is to know about her, and is as intimate with her as...
"Divine, yes?" the man says in English. His voice, though masculine, is smooth and songlike. He carries a trace of accent that she can't place.
"Yes," she says. "It's my first time hearing them—" If not Haji "—in person."
"Mine as well." He sighs. "Not the finest stage. But ... does it matter when the talent is the finest of all?"
"That's true."
"Are you a friend of Haji's?"
"Wh-what?"
He smiles again. His mouth is a curious shade of pink. Full and plush and pretty, yet there something familiar about it too.
It is just like Diva's.
Disorientation knits itself inside her. It isn't the first time her mind has cobbled together Diva's features with those of a stranger's. She still spots her sister in crowds now and again: a girl on the streets with dark hair so glossy it is like a mirror, an overflowing laugh, a pale curve of arm or leg. Except it is never Diva.
Never like this.
"I-I'm not sure what you mean," she stammers.
The man's smile widens. "I spotted you with him earlier this week. At a boutique. I was running errands nearby."
"Oh." She isn't sure what to say to that. The man's gaze is a rueful acknowledgement that even if Naha is a big city, the world remains so very small. Clearing her throat, she says, "Do you—want his autograph?"
Chagrined, he shakes his head. "I-I would not dare! I've always believed... that is not the point of these events."
"Then what is?"
His grin is all toothy white irreverence. "Making 'joyful noise'. Is that not the phrase? The world is so full of ugliness. But it is good to remember that human beings can also come together and create beauty."
Saya finds herself smiling back. "That's a very philosophical attitude."
The man's eyes shade under a fringe of pale lashes. They remind Saya strangely of a spider's web. Stranger still is her impulse to trace a fingertip along the translucent spikes...
His voice calls her back to the moment: "You are quite cynical for one so young."
"I'm older than I look," she blurts, then wants to bite her tongue.
But the man doesn't follow up with the nosy So how old are you? He chuckles, an easy diffusion of the awkwardness. "Yes. I thought you might be."
The familiarity of his tone should be worrisome. He gives off an energy that is scintillating, volatile, wicked. Or maybe it's those mismatched eyes that make it so? The dark one seems alive and on fire, the blue one appearing to float in its orb, not quite moored, like a circlet of ice at sea.
"Wh-what do you mean?" she stammers.
"Something about your expression. It glazed over each time the ensemble played a new piece. But Orff, Dvořák, Chopin... your entire face came alive. Contemporary frivolity seems not for you."
He smiles again, and Saya feels a flustered blush creep in. Why does she have butterflies in her stomach? (Or is it the flutter of adrenalized acid?)
She draws herself up, arching a brow with as much spirit as she can muster. "Did you spend the entire performance studying my face? Or the stage?"
He mirrors the brow-quirk, a quiet Touché. "When distracted between two intriguing things, I have learnt to... to..." He pauses, searching for the word, "Multiplication-task?"
"Multi-task."
"Hm?"
"Multi-task. Not multiplication-task. I don't think the latter is a real skill."
"Spoken like a true hater of mathematics!" Then he chuckles, softening the remark. "Nor am I, truth be told. I prefer the languages. The more obscure, the better."
"Oh? Are you a linguist?"
"A stunted dream, sadly." A droll moue—half-farce, half-tragedy. "I am an internist by trade. Though I dreamt of being a polymath as a boy."
"Polymath?"
"Not a mathematician." He doesn't elaborate, but there is a creeping amusement in his eyes. As if they are playing a game. "Perhaps I have stumbled upon another. Tell me. Can you translate this? If-yay ou-yay standunder-yay, ay-say 'standunder-yay'. If-yay ou-yay on't-day standunder-yay, ay-say 'on't-day standunder-yay'. Ut-bay if-yay ou-yay standunder-yay and-yay ay-say 'on't-day standunder-yay', how oday iyay understandyay atthay ouyay understandyay Understandyay?"
It takes Saya only a moment to rearrange the jumble of words. Tongue twisters were an old favorite of hers at the Zoo. And Hog Latin is child's play to a girl weaned on French Louchébem—the best way for her and Haji to pass messages about future mischief under Joel's watch.
"If you understand, say 'understand'," she answers. "If you don't understand, say 'don't understand'. But if you understand and say 'don't understand', how do I understand that you understand? Understand."
He claps his hands together with a satirical solemnity. "Onderfulway . Iyay aketay ymay athay offyay otay ouyay." Clowning aside, the admiration is sincere. "That took you barely eight seconds. You have a marvelous command of the English language."
English is hardly the only language she is fluent in. More like the seventh. But she isn't going to tell a stranger that.
"So do you," she says, half reflex kindness, half sincerity. "The only words I hear from Americans lately seem to be 'Awesome' and 'So, like, basically.'"
The man throws his head back and laughs despite himself. The sound is like the audience's applause—a thunder-rumble of exuberant joy. "I will assume you are not American."
"Do I sound like it?"
"No." He tilts his head, a sharp-eyed scrutiny. "You sound like you are from nowhere at all. Or everywhere at once. It is curious."
The intensity of his gaze unsettles her. She fumbles for a reply. "I've… spent time overseas. You learn to blend in."
"Yes. The great talent of travelers." A beat. "Or troublemakers."
"Pardon?"
"People so careful about blending in are usually avoiding trouble. Or stirring it up." His eyes twinkle as if in a private joke. "Which are you, I wonder?"
"Both." It comes salted with humor, but thinly. He is getting too personal, too fast. Worse, she is permitting it. "Anyway. Sometimes trouble just finds you."
"So it does. Especially in times so troublesome to begin with." His humor fades. "Luckily, we have our consolations."
"Such as?"
"Food. Music. Nature." Softer, "Family."
She is struck by his brooding stare, as if he is trying to find his way safely through a trap opened between them: a pitfall of shared grief. Which makes no sense.
At the stage, the Philharmonic soak in the adulation of the crowd. The spectral stage lights lend a dreamy definition to the players and their instruments. And from that light, the trick of Haji's distant shape is celestial, almost intangible.
Someone who isn't from her world at all.
Her new acquaintance follows her gaze. "Brave."
"Hm?"
"Brave of him. To seem so at ease on the stage. Even with all those eyes on him." In wry wistfulness: "It brings to mind an old Italian word. I think they call it—"
"Sprezzatura?" It comes from her mouth with no anticipation.
"Yes! That's the one!" His pleased little smile is almost boyish. "The gift of making the impossible appear easy. A talent of courtiers in the old days. Except it was not only the Italians who favored the quality. The Great Bragi himself extolled the virtues of masking craft as spontaneity."
"Great Bragi?"
"My patron saint." He winks. "He was a bard in the Norse pantheon. The Giver of Inspiration and the Maker of Music. Not a warrior, but a peacekeeper. He wandered the Nine Worlds, instilling in his audience the ideals of cooperation."
Saya tips him a faint smile. "A philosopher, and a historian? Is that what a polymath is?"
"I-I never said I was a polymath!" Charming abashment shows on his face. "I simply enjoy the Philharmonic's oeuvre. In fact, it was Haji's solo—the Fantaisie Impromptu—that first drew me to classical music."
"I'm starting to think you want Haji's autograph after all."
"Far from it." He ducks his head, coppery hair swinging forward to shield his face. His pale cheekbones are mottled pink. Not as smooth an operator as he'd first come off, clearly. "The best way to honor Bragi is to not to pester, but to support those in the performing arts. That is the purpose of this event. Am I not correct?"
Against her will, Saya's smile deepens. Something about this man pulls her senses oddly off-kilter. Yet he has a timely way, whenever she suspects his machinations are less-than-pure, of tilting his head a degree to the right, so the gloss in his mismatched eyes softens, and the angles of his face rearrange themselves into a quirky moue of playfulness.
Briefly, she makes note of his hands. Unusually large, the knuckles ridged with a tracery of scars. A fighter's hands.
A superstitious chill sluices through her. She forces it down.
"Are you, um, a longtime resident?" she asks.
"A new arrival. I work at the Naval Hospital. Yourself?"
"I—" Have no idea what I do anymore. "I'm visiting family."
That, bittersweetly, is true.
He nods. "That would be the group there, yes? With the twin girls." He hooks a thumb at Sayumi and Sayuri. They are whooping loudly, caught up in the moment.
"Ye-es."
Why does she feel unsettled when he looks at the girls? As if she needs to protect them?
Then his mismatched eyes return to hers, and the strange feeling intensifies. "Lovely," he murmurs. "They resemble you. Your sisters?"
"No." Calling them her nieces is a stretch: the three of them appear the same age. What polite fiction would go over easier? "Cousins. First cousins."
"Have you any siblings of your own?"
"No." For a moment, the honeycomb cells of her brain dissolve, memories of Diva pouring in a sticky spill. She forces them down. "Only child." Then, in a polite deflection, "I don't think I caught your name?"
"Ah! Pardon my manners." He holds out a hand. "I am Tórir."
"Saya."
She is surprised by the way his palm envelops hers. It is cool like Haji's. Yet something about it sends a foreboding flicker through her.
Their eyes meet, and for a fraction of a second, Saya feels as if his consciousness is surging up to meet hers, a backwash as intensely black as ink. Her mind blurs with his, a porthole swinging open both ways, her memories swallowed by his own...
...An island at the icy zenith of the sea. Flakes of white snow and grass of such enchanted green that the rims of her eyes burn. The clouds shift over the sun; castles of white and black are dappled in shadow, monoliths like chess pieces piled together. Below, villages glow, heat radiating off them. Roomfuls of people laughing and drinking and singing. And screaming, screaming, screaming as the armies come, men on foot, men on horseback, men with wings, an eclipse of darkness fallen upon the land. Fathers cower, mothers sob, rows of young boys are lined up like toy soldiers. Some are chosen, tearful and trembling, dragged by ropes like livestock, their parents wailing and wild and reaching for one last touch. Other boys are slaughtered under swords, their broken bodies sprawled in the snow as blood falls red…
…Red as the eyes of the woman on a throne of oakwood etched with golden curlicues, her beauty that of animal cruelty, her silk gown a river of brilliant blue. Blue as the eyes of the woman twirling under the gray skies, the swish of her white skirts an arctic circle, a song rising from her throat until the airwaves resonate with her power. And then the same woman flung to a bed of dirty straw, chains at her wrists, her blue eyes reflecting shock and then nothing as six shadowy men surround her and someone's boot slams into her ribcage. And the woman with red eyes spinning to decapitate a swordsman, ducking to evade a spear, leaping to impale a soldier, her body a comet tearing through the battlefield and her face streaked with blood and her mouth open in a scream that becomes a throbbing red cyst in Saya's skull...
And slicing through the vision, the black snake. Its hiss fills her ears.
Saya.
Her fingers break away from Tórir's. Her consciousness floods back with a staticky abruptness.
Inhaling, Saya steadies herself. Ahead, Kai, the twins, even Dee are still enrapt on the stage. No one notices her lapse.
But Tórir is watching her strangely. "Are you all right?"
"Ye-es." She swallows. "Just a little zone."
"It might be all the flashing lights. They are quite overwhelming. Would you care to sit down?"
"No. It's—it's fine."
She takes a step back. Her knees wobble, and she nearly falls. Reflexively, Tórir grabs her elbow. No foreboding flash this time. His fingers curling across her skin are comforting. A caress.
"Miss Saya," he says. "I hope you have not been... what do the Americans call it? Hitting the sauce."
"Sauce?"
"You know. Soaked. Sozzled. Stewed. Schnockered."
Saya can't help it. She laughs—a wheezy, involuntary laugh, a release of the awful tension inside her.
"No," she says. "No sauce."
"Perhaps you should have some," he says, adopting a physicianly tone. "Actual sauce. With food. You may have low BP." He glances around. "They are serving rafute at the stalls. Perhaps I could..."
"Mr. Tórir," she says, caught between gratitude and exasperation. What is he, a Chevalier? "I'm okay."
"You will not fall?"
"Not hard enough to break anything."
She gives him a meaning nod. You can let go now.
He obeys, a smooth retreat of his body that makes hers retreat too, not like strangers forced away from unwelcome intimacy but like two old lovers dancing a gavotte. The air is buzzing with voices. Circles of light pulse in disorienting bursts on the stage.
Yet, staring into Tórir's blue-brown eyes, Saya is strangely, deathly calm.
Like an executioner readying their axe. Or a fallen monarch kneeling beneath it.
"Are you sure you are all right?" he asks.
She nods. There is an impulse, utterly bewildering, to place her forefinger to his lips and quieten him.
...As she has done many lifetimes before. Under the blue curve of the sky and in the cool darkness of the bedchamber. In affection, in anger. She has spoken of things both profound and paltry with him, has clashed with him in humor, in heat and finally in hatred, a mother seeking to destroy her corrupted child before he corrupted the entire world in turn...
The feeling passes, leaving Saya unsettled. Staring into the mismatched eyes of a man who is an absolute stranger—yet not.
"Saya."
She whirls.
Haji is there. From being an untouchable titan on the stage, he is all at once a gentle guardian right at her side. Their eyes meet. It is like a spell being broken: he fills her entire field of vision, and some dark thing inside her dissipates.
"Haji!"
"Are you all right?"
"I-I'm fine. How did you get here so fast?"
He hesitates. "It felt as if you were in distress."
"Not in distress." Not exactly. "I was just speaking with—"
She turns to introduce Tórir. But the space is empty.
Confusion laps at Saya. She glances around. But the man has melted into the crowd.
That's weird.
She barely gets a word in before the cameramen in the periphery spot Haji. Like a typhoon, they swoop in, thundering exclamations and raining camera-flashes.
Much to her family's dismay.
"Haji, what the hell?" Kai glowers at the flashbulbs. "You can't just fly in like that!"
"No one noticed," Haji says.
"The departure: no," Dee gripes. "The arrival: yeah."
Behind him, the twins cringe away from the cameras: Yuri under Sachi's jacket, Yumi behind V's massive shoulders. Spreading her arms out authoritatively, Dee shoulders between Saya and the photographers.
"No pictures, folks! Let the guy talk to his family!"
"Haji, can you confirm the rumors that the NVP are planning a new tour?"
"Haji-san! Koko de mite kudasai!"
"Est-ce que vous composez un nouveau record?"
"Oi, Haji! Kono josei wa gārufurendo desu ka?"
Dazed, Saya stumbles. Haji circles her in protectively.
"Forgive me, Saya," he whispers.
"Wh-what?"
"You will be in a few tabloid rags tomorrow."
Bit by bit, Dee steers the photographers away. Security arrives to take care of the rest. Saya's mind still goes snap-crackle-pop to afterimages of the cameras. But she welcomes it.
Anything is better than the disturbing vision earlier.
God, what's wrong with me?
Is this what it feels like to go insane? Or has madness—true, bone-deep lunacy—settled inside her the moment she'd killed Diva? Certainly, the guilt dogging her afterward feels like insanity itself, the cracks spreading outward so slowly she can almost forget they're there. Maybe that's how craziness takes hold: chunks of yourself breaking off not with a sense of menace but inevitability.
Saya closes her eyes. There is a temptation to glance around for Tórir. She resists. Tells herself that the strangeness of the encounter—like the vision itself—is just her imagination, and not a catastrophe which eludes understanding.
Until it is too late.
Hai tai: How the gals say 'Hello' in Okinawa. The male equivalent is 'Hai sai'
Next few chapters deal with Saya's ambivalence over Haji's fame - and her ambivalence with her new life in general. Expect Tórir to be slinking around in the sidelines, causing more trouble...
Hope y'all are liking the tale so far! If the chapter fell flat - or if you wish there's certain elements I'd explored, feel free to let me know! Feedback is yum! c: