Chapter 37
Dreams to be Had
It seeped, searing, along the walls of his skull in retribution. Puncturing. Piercing. Carving through him with a vengeance nauseating enough for tears to prickle in the corners of his eyes. White dots like amoebas dividing and merging beneath a microscope shimmered beneath the blackness of his closed lids – and even they, in their imaginary incandescence, burned through his brain's synapses with the same soldering brightness as the sun.
Aizawa didn't move. For a long time, he didn't move both out of fear and out of weakness – sapped by the turmoil in his head and heart; ruthlessly aware of the apartment's empty silence and the expanse of exposed bedsheet beside him. It hurt to breathe. Even the slightest twitch or twist in his neck delivered screaming agony into the base of his head. Obscure coordinates. Floating and inaccessible, immune to painkillers or coffee or the earlier desperation with which Aizawa had pressed his fingers into his eyes. He despaired. Passive and petrified, he'd been lying upon the bed for hours now. Hours. A lifetime.
And yet, it also seemed to him that only seconds had passed. He'd opened his palm and she, like the sand, had tumbled out from his grasp with the smooth grace of air. Then leave, and in hindsight he absolutely couldn't figure out why he'd said so. All along, he'd half-known the things Rin had told him; he'd suspected and shouldn't have been surprised, shouldn't have been angry. But the day, the last weeks, had all crashed down against him in that single, crucial moment and for the most evanescent second he had hated her with an exhausting, icy rationality. Then leave. And she'd left with nothing behind her. None of her clothes remained in the cupboards. None of her cooking was packaged and preserved in the fridge. Empty wine bottle in the bin.
Only a crystalline imprint: ghostly images of her floating before Aizawa's eyes as the headache had reared itself malevolently. He almost went after her. Almost rushed from his lonely place alongside the untouched cup of coffee on the table – to tell her what? To do what? Beg? He wasn't one to beg. But then he'd gone blind against the burning sensations and had groveled across the floor in an anguished search for the bedroom's coldness.
And in the darkness, in the chill which did nothing to soothe him as he writhed silently and motionlessly, Aizawa did his utmost to remember. Remember the things stolen from him – Rin in high school. And he did remember her, but in no new ways: shy and self-conscious, alone. Always alone. But now with a dream-like uncertainty, a false rendering, which Aizawa refused to accept. He counted days, looking for beginnings and endings in his consciousness. He analysed the vague, undetailed memories as one would analyse an old photograph.
All the while, the pain flared constantly. An abstract resistance seemed to pull at him – ever downwards into bloody blackness, the back of his head heavier than gold against the pillow and the ache battering at him in relentless, awful throbs. Each new beat seemed a single syllable. Stop. Stop. Stop. He tried to remember. Stop. Stop. Stop. He tried – and little things began to come to him: things of no significance which Aizawa agonized over laboriously and obsessively. StopStopStop!
She'd read a lot in high school. Aizawa remembered that.
She'd always worn her hair in a carelessly thrown ponytail, messier than the other girls' and very distracting in P.E. classes.
Aizawa-sensei, is it true that grasshoppers have ears on their knees? Aizawa-sensei, why do cats only meow at humans and not at other cats? Aizawa-sensei, does it hurt for you to blink after not blinking for such a long time ~ like, do the insides of your lids feel like sandpaper over your eyes when you close them? Sorry, it's a random question ~ but I have to know. Small, enchanting grin. Reading strange and endearing questions off of scrap pieces of paper – fading in and out, in and out repeatedly with the shifting, echoing quality of a badly done scene-change.
StopStopStop!
A claw to the top of his brain scraped at him, passionate and vindictive. Aizawa held his breath, feeling the pain dribble down into his chest like a potent medicine. It eased around his heart. It squeezed and poised itself with the hateful intention of a serpent – but still, oblivious to the hot path of a tear down his cheek, empty and unintended, Aizawa tried to remember. He thought for ages. He thought about her. Rin! There she was, staring out the classroom window in an absent dreaminess when she should have been paying attention; and then there she was, paying attention when nobody else bothered to. Skinny, white finger against her lip. Brow crinkled in thought. More bizarre, sometimes ominous, sometimes lovely questions – How low can the average heart rate go before it becomes dangerous? What's the world record for most cats owned? Do you like ice-cream, Aizawa-sensei? I don't like ice-cream.
She appeared and receded behind the hazy curtain of memory, luminous eyes of a younger, much younger girl. She wavered before him as though underwater, and the chime of innocent giggles was muffled against Aizawa's ears. He noticed the dramatic rise of a pulse, far-off at first, but then close – in his own chest; and he became aware that he was running. Running? Running.
Running as white walls passed him by, hazy in the corners of his eyes like fluttering sheets against a grey sky. He was going as fast as he could possibly bear. His feet pounded across tiled floor and released after themselves a clinical echo which bounced in repetitive softness before and behind him. Around the corners. Figures clad in green shuffled past, pausing to regard him though Aizawa took no notice of them. Blurs. Blurs of movement. Blurs of noise. He was breathing hard, and an unappetizing urgency – fright, panic – urged him onwards. Faster! Faster!
Around the corners. Hand on something smoothly cold before he could stop himself, and then he was through a door into greater brightness. Fluorescent lights. White sheets. And staring back at him, like a little ghost with purple circles around her eyes, was Rin. White hair. Dirty white cloud around her white face. Aizawa's head dipped and spun as he caught his breath, as he watched Rin's lips part into a hesitating smile. Something was off – he recognised the youthful awkwardness of her first year, fifteen, the meatless angularity and elfin oddity. A green tinge, glowing sickly. The smile vanished from her lips to be replaced by an awful horror – and then she jerked away from Aizawa as he stood in the mysterious doorway; jerked away and crumpled over and, with a dreadful retching, vomited into a bucket placed deftly against her lap.
"There, let it all out, dear." Recovery Girl? Recovery Girl was in the corner, tutting and shaking her head in that grandmotherly way. She glanced over Aizawa. Through the burning light, he could make out a fluctuating smile which wrinkled strangely at the corners. "Don't look so panicked, Eraser Head. She's going to be fine."
Deeper into the room, mysterious dread doing little to dissipate. Strong sting of puke's odour in his nose, a powerful overtone to the chemical perfumes. He went towards the bed, heart doing a vile spin about his chest, and eyed Rin's fragility beneath the thin layer of hospital gown. She twisted her head, made a pathetic crooning noise, and then sat once again to look innocently at Aizawa: so close and real, the familiarity striking enough to border on pain.
He heard his voice, felt the stricken tremble in his throat. "What on earth did you do to yourself, Hiruma?"
She blinked at him, cocking her head from side to side in the playful way of a kitten. The knotty disaster of her hair flopped against her nape. "I ~ uh ~ I was just, you know – I was curious."
"About what?"
Curt little shrug.
There came the raspy sound of Recovery Girl clearing her throat. "This little madam was curious about how quickly she'd be able to detox certain medications from her blood…" A meaningful look at and through Aizawa, making his stomach clench. Once again with the quality of misty sheens, Recovery Girl's image faltered and seemed to disappear for a moment before solidifying gain. "She reacted badly to one of them. One of the medications, that is. Hence the vomiting."
What Aizawa said next came as an inaudible tumble of noise. His following movements were instinctive and made Rin's eyes go wide – made her push out her bottom lip like a sulky child, the shape of it plump and candy pink. As though having been lifted through water Aizawa's hands were at her cheeks, hot despite their lack of colour, and he held her gaze with his glare. Touching her. Gently. So gently she could easily have pulled back. But she didn't. Soft and white and with something close to fascination, she didn't move as Aizawa demanded, "Are you an idiot?" Shake of her head between his palms. "Why would you do something so stupid, Hiruma? Hmm? Were you alone?"
A pause. She stared at him, and nodded her head slowly. Recovery Girl said something in turn but Aizawa didn't hear, the sound of it thin and faraway. He didn't care to listen. Rin could have killed herself and nothing in the world seemed more important – Rin, his student; Rin, more than just a student; Rin, shimmering and pale enough to be translucent, unreal. Was she real?
"Where did you get the medications, Hiruma?"
She swallowed, seemingly on her words, and then gasped them out. "I… asked a doctor." She bit her lip. "I mean, I asked him to write me a prescription."
"You asked a doctor? Just like that?"
"Yes, Aizawa-sensei."
"Did you even think for a moment that you could have died?"
Such a suggestion – death? – must have seemed absurd to her. She blinked those eyes. Pursed those lips in a screwed, colorless pout as she considered the reality of it. Mindlessly and imperceptibly, taken up by the peculiarity of her her her, Aizawa made the faintest circles with his thumbs against her cheeks. Ivory-smooth. Burning white with warmth.
At last, she said, "No, Aizawa-sensei. I didn't think." Shrinking, receding from him, the sensation filling Aizawa with an awe both terrible and euphoric. "I just wanted to see if I could do it." Her voice went small, straining, and when Aizawa looked away to Recovery Girl he was met only by an empty corner.
The hospital room warped, its white melting down into a pastel patterning Aizawa couldn't discern. An excess of light, yellower now and softer in its fluorescence, cast new forms of shadows across the space – more rows of beds, shrill noise like muffled chatter as little figures bopped about in the coloured sheets. There was a more sickly smell now, acrid like rotting berries, and Aizawa struggled to comprehend how he'd managed to return once again to the arch of the doorway. Rin was gone from him. Vanished. Just like that. For a long while he stood there, feeling unseen eyes fall upon him and then disappear again. Hoarse laugh, dying down soon after. A Cough. Sneeze. Aizawa stepped in and only managed to make out a boyish little voice from some unidentifiable source – "…but Mommy, these pajamas are itchy and I don't like..."
Aizawa held a teddy bear not much bigger than the size of his hand. Fluffy and white, pink bow tied around the neck as the beady black eyes glinted up at him. Slow, muted tap of his feet along the shiningly polished floor as he meandered down the length of the room. One bed. Two beds. Four. Floating past and melting away behind him. All the way to the end of the room, where a window overlooked a scape washed by blinding white. She was there, in the very last bed – her! Fiddling distractedly with a long stretch of bandage as it hung in loose, uncooperative folds around her neck like a scarf.
Her, but younger. Much younger. Aizawa heard himself say her name as he wandered ever towards the bed – throwing the bear from one hand to the other, ignoring the surrounding daze – and she looked up, and his heart swelled to feel the affectionate embrace of her gaze upon him. She looked up and smiled wider than Aizawa had ever seen anyone ever smile at him, the blackness of her eye's bruise shimmering dramatically against her childish pallour: porcelain with the blossomy blush over her cheeks, her nose; a sharp contrast to the sick swirls of purple and blue darkness. Three stitches in her cheek. A clean puff of hair around the soft, dewy features lacking in any of the familiar angles. Sweet. Beautiful as an angel haloed by the light.
"Eraser Head-san!" Her voice echoed with bell-like tenderness, as though they were under glass. Still clutching the ends of the bandages, little Rin wiggled out from under the sheet and flung her legs over the edge of the bed. "You're here~" her smile widened. "You came!"
"So I did." Under the pressure of her animated, slightly gapped-toothed grin, Aizawa felt his own lips' corners go upwards. He seated himself on the edge of the empty bed next to her, holding out the white bear. "This is for you."
"It's cute!"
"I'm glad you think so." Before this, at the toy store (when had he gone to the toy store? Was he dreaming?), he had debated between the teddy bear and a puppy plushy. But then he'd remembered she didn't like dogs. And as Rin grasped the teddy – such little hands! Bruises seeming to float across the knuckles in vanishing purples – her sudden steeliness, a certain fuzzy dismay hidden beneath the darling mask, made Aizawa wish he'd gotten her some other toy entirely. "Do you not like it, Rin-chan?"
Crinkling her nose, pursing her lips, she balanced the bear in her lap. "My dad used to give me lots of teddies."
"Where is your dad now?"
A lengthy silence – Aizawa thought perhaps she'd frozen, and he'd frozen, that a chasm had opened up through which they could neither hear nor see each other any longer. But after a moment's deliberation, Rin lifted a tiny finger and tapped the bear's heart-shaped nose. "Don't know," she said.
And though Aizawa knew this, it struck through him anew with a vigour both fresh and intense as though he were hearing it for the first time. "Are there other types of toys you like?"
Now she touched her finger to her own mouth. The hum which rose from her throat in breezy quietness reverberated through the entirety of Aizawa's bones. "Books."
"And do they have nice books here for you to read?"
"Not really~" she shrugged and, with the bear sitting comfortably in the folds of her grey pajama-dress, began to fidget once again with the bandage slung over her shoulders. "There are lots of books, but they're all boring and kind of dumb. Yukio-chan likes all of them a lot though, so sometimes I'll read for him when he can't sleep." Rin blinked at Aizawa, tilted her head in that way she had. "You're sitting on Yukio-chan's bed now. I don't know where he's gone."
Aizawa tilted his head right back at her. "I'm sure Yukio-chan won't mind if I sit on his bed for a little bit while I visit you."
"Will you leave when Yukio-chan comes back?"
"Possibly."
"But you'll definitely come back again?"
Somewhere in the distance, an odd buzz simmered upon the air. The ends of the room began to twist strangely, silvery and wrong. Though Aizawa noticed it, he paid no heed – only lifting his hand, touching the tip of his finger to Rin's sylphishly curving nose with a foreign, uncharacteristic affection. "I'll come as much as I can." The hum got louder, deafeningly so but failing to reach Aizawa's consciousness. The rows of beds fell away. Rin's own began to dissolve, dipping deeper into fading obscurity – but neither of them noticed, and little Rin smiled again with satisfied delight. A child. And then a teenager, disappearing behind a blackening curtain. And then–
There was darkness. Deathly silence. Aizawa's eyes drifted open lethargically to be greeted by shapes unrecognizable and blobby in their shadowings. A buzzing. It seemed to shake him to his very core, like bees in his chest – but from whence it came, it was hard to say. Wiping his hand across his forehead, surprised through his daze by the thin webbing of sweat upon his skin, he groaned. Sighed. Inched himself slowly upwards to sit.
The headache had disappeared, retreating like a sated predator into the depths of its hide. Aizawa remained hunched over upon the bed, still only vaguely aware of the disconcerting vibrations, rhythmic and frequent – under the bed. It was coming from under the bed, and Aizawa placed his still-socked feet onto the floor with no particular urgency. Bending down, stiff from his anxious state of rigor mortis, the change of position was both painful and exhilarating, pins and needles scurrying down the length of his spine in a lightning hot excitement.
Blue light illuminated the underside of the bedframe, a cellphone jolting itself to life with each buzz. A ring. A phonecall – Rin's cellphone, the shape of which sent sheer tremors of misery through Aizawa's body. Still with the sense that he was dreaming while also lucid enough to feel himself curl over inwardly with disdain – had she dropped it in her rush to leave? Forgotten it? Left it purposefully behind to thrill and torture? – he reached out to take the phone.
Her Grandmother was calling.