Chapter 43
The Game – Chaos
Everything simmers. I am suffocating.
In the familiar grip of Yukio's arms, his turmoil meeting me in shocks of hopeless guilt; under the weight of Kizashi's gaze, years-old scars in the form of dirty handprints ripping all over me – I feel it burn, I feel it gnaw, as though I am being eaten from the inside out by creatures rabid and hungry.
I want to scream, but Yukio clings to me. My skin. My costume. My hands. Still a child, staring up with all the dull-eyed questioning for which I have no answers. "Everything's fine now, Rin-chan," he says, and it seems he's speaking to a doll. Beautiful heart. Disintegrating brain. "No one will hurt you anymore. No one's going to take you away."
My lungs refuse oxygen. It's my fault. My bones shatter within my limbs. It's all my fault. Kizashi is silent and smiling, watching – and I, choking against the cry that begs to escape, pull Yukio closer. Because for everything that has happened, he's a child still, and he's trembling even more than I am, and I have failed him so many times. I have failed. Because I swallowed down upon my childhood years ago, but now something cold and awful branches through my veins and within myself, I feel everything crumble.
And you – despite it all, you look at me with all that same softness. You are confused. You are angry. You told me you loved me.
"He can't hurt you anymore, Rin-chan," Yukio says.
And god, do I wish I could tell you how much I love you too.
With a flustered, miserable insistence, Yukio continued to mutter all sorts of things into the silence that had fallen upon them. Aizawa watched, watched as Rin ran her hands down Yukio's back. As she leaned her face into his and replied in tones too quiet to hear. Every now and then, her eyes would flit towards Aizawa once again, and then to Paper Cut – full of knowing, guarded against the moment he would pounce – and then back to Aizawa, smoldering richly in an enigmatic agony.
When Paper Cut spoke once more – "Yukio-kun," stepping closer, "Tell us again why Rin asked you to take away Aizawa-sensei's memories" – it seemed to pierce through both Rin and Yukio with matched intensity. Their spines went stiff, arms tensing around each other into awkward angles like cracks in glass. Yukio twisted his head on his shoulders in agitation, nuzzling himself against Rin's chest, and then grimaced away.
His hands hung in hers. He focused on the ground, pink hair looping against his forehead in dirty tufts. "She was scared," Yukio said, a melancholy hiss, and allowed his gaze to return to Rin's with greater confidence. "You were scared, Rin-chan. Of him. Right? You were scared."
Aizawa's grip upon his scarf, already having slackened, dropped with his heart.
Rin's voice came as a harsh rasp, "What?"
"You cried all the time, and you had lots of nightmares…" Moving his hand up her arm, slow and tentative until it came to rest next to her ribcage, Yukio flattened his palm with childish tenderness into the folds of Rin's clothing. His mouth curling sourly. Rin's own features freezing in an insipid, terrible mask of confusion and dismay as Yukio pressed onwards, "And bruises… And lots of sores…"
"That wasn't–"
"Because of him," Yukio spat, looking to Aizawa with a hatred freshly pure and luminous. "Him! He wouldn't leave you alone!" A maniacal quaver rose into his voice, and something flared in Aizawa's spine that wasn't quite pain or pleasure but instead the anaesthetized, distant tremble of panic. Of all the things not to remember! "You wouldn't leave us alone!"
In a flash of movement both graceful and thrown, Rin clutched Yukio's arms, pulling him sharply to face her once again. They stared at each other, Yukio's expression melting into shock in the face of Rin's new sternness, and she narrowed her eyes at him like an older sister terribly displeased. Saying his name, that practiced counsellor monotone which managed to threaten and soothe – she told him he'd made a mistake; she told him something wasn't right: no one in the world cared more for her than Aizawa. He'd never hurt her. He'd never hurt her. And in a sudden softening, dewy and mild with the sound of tears, Rin told Yukio she was sorry.
Sorry for what? Aizawa couldn't say.
It all met his ears in wavering, hollow distortions of sound, the syllables blending into the pain and both of those into the images he forced to mind. He imagined himself leaving bruises over her skin – calloused hands, bloodied teeth – or planting the searing heat of cigarettes up her side. He imagined her curled up next to him in the dead of night, crying without making a sound, hoping either that he wouldn't wake up or that she herself wouldn't. Scared because of him. Because of him. And though the thought left Aizawa squirming and hating himself – no; never; he could never have done such things – his mind refused to relent.
Pain. Clawing. Sinking its teeth. Leaving his hands limp at his sides while he watched through a spotty, white daze as Yukio shook his head at Rin. His lips moved in response to hers, the sounds of which failed to reach Aizawa in their entirety – No, Rin-chan, I don't understand. Doctor Voodoo wouldn't do that. He wouldn't. He promised. He promised! – and all the while, Paper Cut watched. Indeed, Aizawa felt the black gaze along his frame; he knew Paper Cut was waiting, waiting for just the right moment to strike; practiced astuteness; dreadful intentions; but Aizawa couldn't move.
He couldn't think. He couldn't breathe, overcome. Powerlessly, with Yukio's rising shrieks echoing between his ears, Aizawa sank into unseen waters – everything blackening, throbs of sensation and colour scorching in the corners of his vision in perfect unison with his heartbeat. The unseen thing crawled back upon his shoulders, gripping his throat between warm, pitiless hands – he gasped, but was being strangled; he pulled at his scarf in a bid for air.
Something like a bone splintered. Something snapped and slipped.
"But I don't understand," he heard Yukio say, echoing out in a confused, dogged obscuring. "You… And Eraser Head… I thought–"
Then came Rin, hushing, making Aizawa's heart thrash as though hearing her voice for the first time. "I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry this all got so confused."
"Doctor Voodoo said–"
"Doctor Voodoo lied." Slicing finality.
There was a pause. Squinting against the cosmic blurs which clouded his vision, nauseous as his head spun and slowed at impossible speeds, Aizawa mustered all his focus to watch as Yukio's attention dropped to the ground. Like the moment before an explosion, everything was agonizingly still. Silent. Slipping. Half-cradled in Rin's arms, half-falling out from her frail hold, Yukio stooped in an animal contortion to pluck a photo from the floor.
He stared. Stared for a long time. And for the most evanescent of moments, Aizawa's senses fell back into place. Rin's eye met his, her face peering over the mess of Yukio's hair. Exhausted hang about her features. Morbidly pale, she looked about ready to cry.
Breaking the silence, Yukio didn't glance up from the photo, but spoke again with the violent hiss of the demented. "Kizashi~"
"Yes, Yukio-kun?"
"You said I had to deliver a photo for Eraser Head," he said flatly. "A special photo… One of yours…"
A smirk curled itself into Kizashi's voice, honeyed and dark. "That's right."
Foreboding dread prickled up Aizawa's spine. So too, it seemed, up Rin's. Neither of them tore away their gaze, neither of them ventured to move – and with new intensity, a desire for her tore through Aizawa's heart. So many times before, they'd been under the secrecy of darkness quite the same as this: emotions just as heavy-laden, logic failing and at the same time prevailing, for never in Aizawa's life had he been so certain of anything as he'd been in the small circle of Rin's arms. Do you believe in fate? Nezu had asked him. He still wasn't sure; but he knew even now that loving Rin was the closest he'd ever come to believing in divine intervention.
Indeed, even now, while she looked haggard and worn out from all the secrecy uncovered. Within himself, Aizawa was angry, and part of it was because of her. Under the immensity of the silence, short-lived though it was, he considered with a piercing clear-headedness the sheer confusion of all the things he felt. No name could be put to it, and sadly no amount of rationality would allow him to dig himself from such a chasm.
Despite it all though – or perhaps because of it, weakened and vulnerable – Aizawa didn't particularly want to dig himself out. He wanted nothing more than her. To run away. Love her. Love her simply and without all of… this.
Out the corner of his eye, Aizawa noticed the photo drop down from Yukio's hand. Spinning in the air, landing face down atop the other photos. Paper Cut started to say something; however, before a coherent syllable could make its way out from his lips, Yukio let out an awful, animal cry.
Yukio paws at his eyes, and tears like molten silver begin to leak out from the edges.
He cries inconsolable cries, and I see it all: the bloodrush of memories back through his brain and chest, breaking out like undead claws through soil.
Shrill whimpers – "Everybody lies! Everybody– no, no, stop! Please stop! I don't want this!" – and it's as though insects crawl along his skin, the way he smacks and scratches at nothing. The way he begins to pull the uniform – blazer first, thrown to the floor over the photos (those sickening remnants of nights long-gone, glaring out at me in their haunting vileness), then his hands are at the shirt and at his hair – and he rubs, rubs, rubs raw over his own terrible, swelling scars.
The memories come back as they do in nightmares. His. Mine. I know, I see – for the first time, Yukio looks at me with fear. He has blue eyes. Irises shattering like ice, whites turned red with agony refusing to stop. He shakes. Shakes like his bones are breaking, though that is not the pain he has made himself forget, for it is not the pain of spoiled hands over baby clean flesh. It's not the same sort of anguish.
"Make it stop, Rin-chan." Snaking death envelops me from the inside. There's nothing I can do. "Please! Please! I don't want to remember."
Recollection.
The tears don't stop though his stare goes dull: a milky way glaze over his features, dewy with sweat even though wintery breezes slither against us. As he does in nightmares, Yukio goes limp in my arms – thrashing limbs and pulse slowing to burdened, miserable strokes – head wet and heavy into my chest. Can he hear how my heartbeat screeches to a halt? How it starts up again with the stuttering resistance of breaking machinery?
I cannot stop myself, though I see you flinch and hang your head. Though one half of me begs for you – let's run away! – my gaze falls and my lips meet Yukio's forehead, rooting me here. His hair sticks to his skin, twisting like lily roots atop pond waters. I taste salt. I feel the stick of raw flesh where Kizashi or Voodoo have pulled out clumps from his hair like grass from the dirt. My finger touches a scab across his cheek. All these little wounds! Inflicted by my own pride and selfishness and inadequacy. I couldn't protect him. Here because of me. Hurt because of me.
I couldn't protect him.
"Everything's fine. Everything's fine. I'm here, Yukio. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't find you. Everything's fine."
He heaves. He sobs.
And then from nowhere, upon a ghostly breeze with the smell of cigarette smoke – no, no, oh fuck, please no – Kizashi is at my back. Lips to my ear. Hand against mine where it lingers against Yukio's fragile shoulder. "See what happens when you keep secrets, Rin?" he asks me, whispering my name in all the same, scorching ways. "Innocent little boys get hurt."
You are a flash of movement – black and white, serpentine quickness – in the corner of my eye. My spine crumbles in my back. My heart pounds to life in my eyes, all colour no sound. By the time the knife has been slipped from its concealment in my costume, it's too late; and when Yukio strikes out from my arms to swing at Kizashi, all venom and twisted limbs like a snake's lashing tail, the metallic glint is like sunlight in my eyes. I turn too, reaching for Yukio – his name slips from my tongue – feeling the blood swell at my fingertips in soothing, queasy warmth.
Somehow though, I am being dragged in the opposite direction. Away, away as Yukio stabs through the air and as Kizashi dances in dodging. Watching. Watching me, white lips curling into that smile I know too well before he disappears behind corners of blackened walls. Walls so familiar. Walls so wrong.
Your hand is around my wrist. And you're running.
Rin's hand pawed at his, trying with a surprising strength to push him off. "Let go! Let go of me, Shouta!"
Beneath him, Aizawa's legs beat onwards through corridors he didn't know and down turns he didn't recognise. Entrances and exits loomed in his mind, all the escape plans he'd spent hours brooding over somehow now evading him. This way? It all looked quite the same as before: abandoned materials of boxes and cardboard along flimsy, dirty concrete. That way? Shadows. Same smells of grime and mustiness – and more faintly, growing more potent in its rotten strength by the minutes, blood. Full-bodied and carnal. Where from? There was no telling. But it seeped through Aizawa's senses, bathing them in quite the same way as the headache as it spread and receded and spread and receded.
Yukio's shrill little voice followed behind them in haunting echoes and indistinct wailings. Like a burned afterimage, the scene replayed itself behind Aizawa's eyes – how easily Yukio had slipped the blade from Rin's clothing, his fingers in the folds of material with practiced precision; how hatefully he'd struck at Kizashi, pale face engorged in redness, brandishing his teeth with the menace of a hyena. For a moment, Paper Cut had seemed surprised, and he'd jumped back from Yukio with what was distinctly alarm.
Aizawa didn't happen to see anything after that, too focused had he been on snatching Rin away. Let Yukio have his way with Paper Cut – after all, it didn't seem there was much of a mind in the boy's head for Paper Cut to pick away at. Rin didn't need to be involved any longer.
But still she dug her booted feet into the ground, pulling against Aizawa and stopping them in their tracks. Jolting, of course, for it had taken all Aizawa's strength to be able to run like this. Now though, against such resistance, his limbs went dead and his head lolled heavily along his shoulders as he twisted himself to look back at Rin.
"Stop this," he said. "Yukio will be–"
As though possessed, Rin paid no attention to him whatsoever. Instead, she stared past him. Quiet, breathing hard, blinking against the obscurity as though it were the sun or a phantom. Turning back, Aizawa tried to pinpoint what it was that gripped her so – but all he saw was a large, emptied space opening up from the corridor.
Cold. Everything is suddenly so cold, and the walls are too close, and your hand is too tight. Yukio still shouts behind us, but the sounds fade out in slow motion. You don't remember – I can see it in your face, how your features bend in struggling skepticism, how you lift your goggles as though in an attempt to get a better look.
But please don't look too closely. I can still see tiny shadows huddled in the corners. The dogs still bark – and bark, and bark – chained right next to where we stand. And still the blood is on the floor. A colour I couldn't believe. Oozing. Oozing towards my feet. All of it unchanged. All of it crashing down against us with the force of collapsing stars. A look crosses your face – do you see it? Do you remember? You let go of my wrist. And suddenly the memories rise up through my throat in acidic burning.
It was here.
My stomach crumples, and it threatens to spill like a confession.
Your arms around me. Hand in my hair. Saying something – I can't hear you. You're not real. Only the white ghost of a child, stark against the crimson as she watches me, is real. The quivering downturn to her mouth. The blood across her face. How rapidly her brain spins and fingers burn and organs tumble as though being eaten alive. She watches me. I know those eyes – I know the guilt inside them. I don't deserve this. I don't and didn't deserve the safety of you. Not while Yukio screams in an agony I couldn't stop. Not while the blood spreads under my soles from a body I couldn't fix.
"I'm sorry," Rin whispered, hands rising to clutch at Aizawa's scarf. She said it again, and the sound just barely met his ears. Far-off, speaking in jagged tones meant for somebody other than him. Listening, straining to hear her through the fog that continued to descend upon his senses. Aizawa held her more deeply against him, though he himself seemed to sink down down down, and offered no word of reply to the slow, slurred desperation of her words. "I didn't mean to. I'm sorry."
"Let's go, Rin," you say. You say my name just like all those years ago. "There's nothing here."
But there is, all these unconfessable things. You see it, don't you?
She didn't move, but between her words drew awful gasps as though bursting through water. Painfully aware of it as well as of how everything was suddenly plunged into silence – Yukio; a rising panic; where was Yukio? – Aizawa considered the space, finding a new and awful familiarity each time he glanced away from Rin. Its emptiness and expanse, hidden in the depths of the warehouse like a vault. Above them, it was possible to hear the pitter patter of birds, or rats, walking along unseen rafters. Around them, shadows seemed to move: hunched in corners, stretching out to meet them like hands gloved in black. Aizawa knew this place.
He couldn't call to mind its significance exactly, but it was not hard to picture. Had it been here? Here that he'd found her? Had it been in that corner or by that wall? What must it have felt like – like fate? Did planets collide and stars explode? In this dingy, rickety hole of a structure, could Aizawa, his younger self, possibly have imagined what sort of things were to come?
Into his neck, Rin murmured something. Footsteps were around the corner. They may have been out of sight but the safety was fleeting – or perhaps entirely an illusion, exposed as they were to the threat of the past. The sound drew closer, and as it did so Aizawa felt himself drop. Each footfall a new threat, inflicting greater waves of false sensation. From nowhere, Rin's hands were on his cheeks, and she was saying his name. Saying something. But the more she spoke, the closer everything came, and the more her face receded into the past.
Behind her, Paper Cut appeared once again. Cradled like a baby in his arms before being dropped in a heavy, fleshy thud to the ground was Yukio.
Aizawa's arms refused to hold Rin as he pleaded for them to. He could do nothing to stop her as she turned – and in doing so, she disappeared behind a thin curtain of mists and blurs. He heard her scream. He felt her vanish from him, surely towards the heap of Yukio's body as it bled out from the chest. Towards Paper Cut's feet, where that body now lay.
And just as the blood ran out from the fresh wound to Yukio's heart, so did the stabbing ache withdraw from Aizawa's skull. First with a sensation like his neck snapping. Then something much softer. Seeping. Ever out and down and up into numb, euphoric weightlessness.
The pain now lifted, images reeled through Aizawa's mind with the muted, colourless quality of film. The memories came back in a blurred distortion at first – after which the feelings came.
With all the horrifying, electrifying force of drowning beneath ocean waves, a colourful bombardment of everything pummeled Aizawa's heart and lungs, and in a silent state of powerlessness he didn't notice himself sink to the floor. Sinking, as though all beneath his feet had slipped away. Sinking into the black recesses of what had been lost and now regained, deep and far gone enough for him to only hear Rin through an echoing distance as she cried and cried and cried.
He remembered.
Oh… He remembered.
How years ago, a little girl's eyes had shaken him to the very core in their pleading, desperate glow. He'd been here. Here, in this very place. And a man's body had been spread across the floor like a pig at a buffet table, blood seeping out his very pores – ears, eyes, mouth – in terrible glossiness. The other children far away and frightened. Police dogs yapping. And she, small and completely alone as she watched it, the corpse, as though it were a thing of terrible fascination and terror. Green eyes glazed. Hardly saying anything. And Aizawa, his younger self, had pretended not to notice the blood. He'd pretended not to be sick to the core with disgust and horror, keeping his eyes on her alone as he told her she was safe now. She was safe now.
He remembered the weighty immensity of her tiny hand as it clutched his. He remembered the alarm that had crossed her face when he handed her over to the ambulance: a face that had haunted him in all the hours that followed. Please come with me, Eraser Head-san! Please! And oh, how the much younger him had gone weak in the knees for this little girl. So many afternoons, he'd passed away hours in the children's hospital. Talking to her. Enchanted by her need for him: her excitement when he arrived and her innocent despondence whenever he left.
The feeling was delicious. Addictive. Molten gold over the blackening stains of guilt he'd felt for years before – the guilt and the inadequacy, the shock of Shirakumo's crushed face before Aizawa's waking sight and in all his nightmares. It all gave way to the searing, exquisite image of that little girl's relief when she'd taken his hand. How she'd looked at him as though he could do anything – and indeed, it made him feel like he could. Made him want to do anything. For her. All for her.
And then she, that marvelous little creature, was whisked away to Miyazaki to live with her grandparents. And the matter of the dead body (one of the traffickers, Aizawa had later discovered) was dismissed as an accident none of the doctors could explain. His bloodstream had turned against itself, flowing backwards and sideways, veins bursting. An accident. One not particularly undeserved, some might have said.
But Aizawa knew. He always knew, and for years after the fact, he carried Rin in his heart like a secret.