A/N: Technically speaking this is the second part of a series, Kim's game, but the first part is a short one-shot prologue (At one evening in a convenience store). The first part mostly just shows the characters in their everyday activities, so reading it isn't needed to understand this.
The tags and the rating… I'd say the story falls between Teen and Up and Mature, so I rated it Mature, mostly because there is some dark-ish stuff I tagged as warnings. This isn't an angst fest by any means, but the whole style/genre 'mentally unstable or has paranormal abilities' comes with implications.
You can expect updates every week - every two weeks, but I promise nothing :)
A huge thanks to polynya, without whom the English version of this story wouldn't have happened. She sorted through not only the language (of the story, not these notes which I type as I go!) but also details that were off for reason or another.
Chapter 1
Kim's game: a memory game named after the novel 'Kim' (R. Kipling, 1901).
A player or players are shown items such as picture cards. One or more items are then removed in secret. The target of the game is to remember and name the item or items missing.
Click. Click. Click.
A quiet sound carried from the last row. A young man repeatedly pressed his pen on the table, loaded the spring and let the pen go. It jumped several centimeters every time.
If he had any concerns about his future beyond the current day's afternoon, he'd be making notes, not playing. Today's topic was not easy for him.
The lecturer was presenting an example of an initial value problem well suited for iterative methods. For a while now, the lecturer had been writing down something that felt like the mother of all expressions in small text and poor hand.
Every step was explained, but the lecturer's voice was that of an old academic: dry and somewhat cracking. Easy to listen to, easier to block out.
Outside, an almost unnaturally warm Indian summer had taken hold.
The pleasant weather was tempting. The summer had been cold and rainy. Only after the semester had started, had the first heat wave of the whole summer hit School Island.
The summertime promises of a new, disciplined life of study faded. Portable barbecues were popping out of every possible corner. The students walked from place to place with bags full of food and beer, skipping lectures without caring whether it was Friday or Wednesday.
The temptation of drink, sun, and girls in tiny bikinis felt especially difficult to resist during mathematics lectures. Staying indoors seemed like both a sin and a shame when it was so perfect outdoors.
Judging by the faces of the few students who had actually attended the lecture, this wasn't an unusual attitude.
Renji wasn't paying much attention to other students at the moment. He knew most of them by face and name, but only considered himself friends with two people in this group. They were Izuru, his friend since childhood, and Momo, both sitting one row ahead of him.
Renji wasn't paying much attention to the lecture either. He could hear the words but didn't grasp the meaning behind them.
The initial guess, blah blah, a system of equations can be formed, blah blah, the matrix, blah blah blah.
He threw the pen on the table in a bout of frustration. He had worked hard to be in the same university with his friend and planned to keep up the good work, but there were days he just couldn't find the motivation.
This was one of those days.
Renji closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the table. Apparently, Momo noticed the movement and turned to see the gesture. Her laughter, so quiet it was hardly audible, joined the chorus of clicks of pens and pained sighs.
Unlike the constant sighing, the laugh gained the lecturer's attention. He turned around to look the class. Momo moderated herself immediately.
"Do you think we should take a break?" the lecturer asked, assessing how deep the lack of interest ran in his students.
Sighs changed to murmurs of approval. Even Renji lifted his head.
"Cigarette-length one needed in here," he said aloud.
The lecturer agreed, with a recommendation to visit the coffee machine.
The students somewhat dragged their feet when walking out. Many put their books away with an obvious intent to cut the rest of the class.
Renji, Momo and Izuru decided to stay until the end, sweet or bitter.
All three bought a cup of coffee from an automate and steered towards the smoking area. They found that even it was more quiet than typical.
Only Renji lit up. Momo had never smoked and Izuru had quit it among most of his other bad habits when he had started dating Momo.
Renji, free from such pressure, had always failed in his attempts to quit. On vacation it was easy to pop nicotine tablets and to avoid smoking for weeks, but it always changed during a semester. Coffee and cigarettes became a small piece of heaven between lectures.
"What are you going to do after class?" Momo asked and took a step sideways to avoid the smoke. She disliked the smell more than she let on, Renji knew.
"No idea, but I'll lose it if I can't find something. Feels like I'm wasting what's left my youth."
"Don't even, you're younger than me or Momo," Izuru reminded, although their difference in age was mere months. "Have you talked to Rangiku? Maybe she's organizing something."
Momo gave a laugh, one of her quiet and gentle ones. "When isn't she?"
The question was fully rhetorical. Both Izuru and Renji smiled.
"Hey, that's her, now," Izuru said suddenly and waved to the blond walking towards the main door. Rangiku waved back and changed her course.
"Hi," she said when closer. "Nice earrings, Momo."
Momo lifted her hand to touch a small transparent stone attached to a silver chain and hook. The stone was cut to prisms. The bright daylight split to all the colors of a rainbow, dancing on her neck.
"Thank you so much. Izuru gave them to me as an anniversary present. Do you have a new necklace too?"
"Yeah," Rangiku said with wide grin and lifted her pendant to show it off better. It was a small glass vial, or maybe a stylized miniature bottle. Flakes of gold floated free in the transparent liquid.
"I got it from a man, too. He said he thought of me the moment he saw it."
"Oh, who? Are you together, like officially? Please tell me!"
Rangiku's innocent tone didn't even waver. "Gin, my cousin, send this back from his travels abroad. He said he thought I'd like this, the gold doesn't sink at all. I think it's some kind of a suspension."
Renji smirked. Rangiku liked to mislead, then tell the truth and get some laughs. One never knew what she was up to.
"What're you doing in here anyway?" Izuru changed the topic. "We thought you'd be planning a party."
"Oh, we are. I was just headed to the cafeteria, to grab a late lunch. Did you eat already?"
The others nodded. Rangiku's look turned to disappointment for a second, but then the delight was back. "Would you like to come this evening? I could use Renji. Hair down, wear a white T-shirt."
"What's the plan?"
Renji's voice carried suspicion. He generally liked Rangiku's antics, but once, when he had agreed without knowing what he was saying yes to, the ladies had honed their skills in hairdressing on him.
Voluminous curls and big pink bows simply hadn't looked good on him. The ladies had photos to prove it.
"Always thinking about the hairdo thing," Rangiku said with playfully pretended hurt. "But if you must know, some guys got this idea to have a Miss Wet T-Shirt competition. We girls, of course, thought it was disgustingly sexist."
"So you figured you needed a men's series too," Momo completed the thought. Four years ago, the thought alone would have made her blush, but her time at university had taught her more than how to solve initial value problems.
Rangiku nodded. "Mr. Wet T-Shirt is the first series. Renji should do well. All that ink… half hidden, half visible under the wet shirt, m-mm…"
"How do you know he has ink under his clothes?"
Rangiku lifted a finger on her lips and feigned thinking very carefully. Then she winked to the audience. "We went swimming last summer."
Momo and Izuru laughed. Renji took a look at the clock and put his cigarette out.
"Adventures in the Matrix, part N," he reminded everyone. "I'll be there, this evening."
"In a white T-shirt?" Rangiku made sure, when the empty coffee cups were thrown in the trash and the whole group headed into the school building.
The early evening didn't offer much relief in terms of temperature, but it helped wipe away all memories of the existence of mathematics.
Calculus had no room in Renji's mind when he sat on a bench on a grassy field, holding a can of beer in his hand and a half-burned corncob on his plate. The beer was cold, the corn reasonably close to warm, and the girls had screamed him to third place in the Mr. Wet T-shirt competition. He was fully enjoying this moment.
After receiving his prize (the half-burnt corncob), he had changed into dry clothes and came back to the field just in time to watch the women's series. Rangiku had won, no questions asked. The winner behaved more drunk than she was, Renji suspected, and she still wore the wet shirt. She, too, was clearly enjoying herself, and the undivided attention of most of the men in her close proximity.
"You gay or what?" a second year student suddenly asked when Renji's attention wandered from Rangiku.
At first Renji didn't even realize he was spoken to, but the man seemed to expect an answer.
"And if I am? The real question is why you're more interested in me than in looking at her."
The younger student looked back in confusion, lifted his beer and poured some in his already open mouth. His attention drifted back to Rangiku.
Renji felt like laughing. Some people were just too fun to confuse.
It wasn't that he didn't find Rangiku beautiful, but the Internet was full of pictures and videos of blonds even bustier than she was. Besides, she wasn't his type. She was too tall, too blond, and much, much too aware of her looks. Also, much too eager to use her looks for her benefit.
The sun set. The temperature drifted to the range more suitable for human life, and Rangiku vanished to change her clothes.
In Renji's sight, her form was replaced by another blond. Izuru wandered around the field, clearly drunk as a skunk.
He hadn't shaken all his bad habits, after all.
"W-where is Momo?" he asked after managing to wander to Renji. He had closed an eye, probably because it helped him to see things in sharper focus.
"Went to the locker room with Rangiku."
Izuru gave a careless nod and turned to face the building. He had taken more than a few steps before Renji decided that an intervention would be for the common good.
"Listen, Izuru?"
"Yeah?"
"It's women's locker room. No men allowed."
"Oh? Yeah. So."
Izuru sounded stunned and stopped on his feet, as if not knowing what to do.
Renji hmphed. He already knew how Izuru was going to spend the next day. "Wait here with me, she'll see us when they're ready. You can have what's left of my corn."
Izuru obeyed and started to eat eagerly. The fact the leftovers were more coal than corn didn't seem to hinder his appetite.
"Where did you lose Shuhei?" Renji asked, referring to a PhD student a couple of years older than they were.
Izuru hick-upped. "G-gave up. Went home. 'Cos puking."
"Already? It's nothing o'clock."
Izuru hick-upped again and Renji decided there was no trusting him. Momo wouldn't be happy when she returned.
In truth, Renji, too, was more than slightly irritated himself. He rarely went overboard with drinking these days, and couldn't help feeling that Shuhei and Izuru had never even tried learning to moderate.
It was in the genes, he sometimes thought, as both Izuru and Shuhei had ended in the children's home because of their parents' substance abuse issues. Renji himself was free of such baggage, being a foundling. A cleaning lady had found him as a newborn in an airport bathroom trash bin, or so it read in his file.
Whether genetics or just plain old fucking idiotic stupidity, Renji was starting to get tired of drunk Izuru and drunker Shuhei.
Izuru hick-upped for the third time. Renji looked at him with some caution.
"You aren't about to puke, too, are you?"
Izuru wasn't, not at the moment, at least, but he didn't answer either. Renji grabbed a new beer from the cooler and made some space between him and his friend. Just to be sure.
Izuru made poor company at the moment. Momo would likely take him home after getting back. If Shuhei had left too, Renji faced an evening alone, or at best with casual acquaintances. He could as well go back home and study initial value problems.
The mere thought of the topic made Renji remember why having some fun had felt so important.
Casual acquaintances were future friends, right? If no one else, Rangiku was there, and would be for foreseeable future.
He could feel his good mood coming back.
Then everything even resembling a good mood broke to pieces.
Just as Momo and Rangiku came out from the locker room, Renji felt. It was red and black and scorching hot, but so cold it made goose bumps rise on his skin. It like was a spiteful glare, or a malicious laugh echoing in an empty lobby. Nails on a chalkboard, a dentist's drill hitting a nerve.
Renji knew Rangiku, Momo and Izuru felt the same. Izuru turned his head so fast he almost fell from the bench, while Rangiku and Momo stopped and fell silent for a moment.
Some others felt similarly, too. No one else had ever said anything to Renji. Even now Momo and Rangiku looked each other, gave small laughs and continued as nothing had happened.
No one ever said a thing. No one wanted to be the crazy person.
Crazy or not, Renji, Shuhei and Izuru had started to feel after Rukia had gone missing. Renji had tried to convince the adults it was real, and the concerned employees of the children's home had sent him to a psychiatrist.
He had stopped talking about it, but had never stopped feeling it. As he got older, he realized that no one else had been idiotic enough to speak of it in the first place.
The sensation passed, taking the pieces of Renji's good mood with it. Unlike Rangiku and Momo, he couldn't simply push it from his mind. It made a home in the pit of his stomach and would keep eating him from the inside until he felt sick.
"Momo, hey," he yelled, when she came within hearing distance. She heard and turned to him.
"I'm going home," Renji continued. "Can you get Izuru home safely to sleep it off?"
Momo walked to them. Her face was somewhat sour and serious, but she nodded.
"I'll look after him. Are you ok, Renji? You look... kind of not good. Sorry."
"Nah", Renji answered, attempting a smile and failing. "No worries, Momo. I just think I'm about to have a migraine. I got zigzag's dancing in front of me like an epileptic stripper."
Momo ignored the joke. "That's too bad. Do you want painkillers? I think I have some Ibuprofen with me, if you want some."
"Thanks, but no, I have my own. Just see he gets home in one piece," Renji nodded in the general direction of Izuru, who seemed to be experiencing increasing difficulties just sitting on the bench. "Then I can heed home in clean conscience."
That sat well with Momo, and Renji was free to leave.
Before he was halfway there, he realized he didn't want to be home. He was too restless to make and eat an evening snack, brush his teeth and try to sleep on the cheap mattress that came with the rent.
Feeling had caused Renji's worst memories to surface. Once awakened, they simply refused to go. Without any desire to, Renji found himself thinking about the day that had flipped his life upside down.
It wasn't the day he had ended up in the children's home. He didn't even remember that, being practically newborn, and life in the home had been a lot better than books and TV usually made it seem. But the building itself had been big and old, full of history and ghost stories.
Inspired by one, the boys, meaning Renji, Izuru and Shuhei, had once convinced Rukia to enter the "haunted" laundry room at nighttime. They had stayed in the corridor, listening the slow steps of a young child who hugged her plush toy in fear.
The steps had made room for silence, and that silence was followed by a bloodcurdling scream, oh so full of fear. That was when Renji had felt for the first time. The boys had run to their room and left Rukia to her way back.
The next morning she had been nowhere to be found.
The employees had searched the home. After they got nothing, Shuhei had confessed, as was his responsibility as the oldest. After the search was concentrated to the laundry room, a broken window, few splashes of blood and black hair stuck on window handle had been found.
Then, the police came.
The guilt Renji carried had never truly faded, but he had learned how to live with it. He hadn't had much choice on that.
He walked the campus until he came across a soccer field. It had two locker rooms, men's and women's, and a smaller one for referees and likes. The referees' locker room stood next to women's', and Renji knew he could use it to climb on the higher roof.
When a teenager, he had spent serious amount of time on roof of a shabby, practicably abandoned locker room close to the children's home, smoking until his head spun or the packet was empty. These days there was not much point in it, but the impulse was there and he gave in.
Once he was up on the roof, Renji sat on its edge and looked out at the dark, empty field. The only lights he saw were the orange glow of his cigarette, the blueish white of the stars and the creamy yellow of the moon, although some light from the well-lit footpath behind him crept onto the field.
Despite it, the darkness was velvety and pleasant, that of a warm summer night.
But not deep enough to let the movement in the men's locker room to go unnoticed.
At first Renji watched with mild curiosity. Typically, the locker rooms were kept locked when not in use and clearly no one was having a nighttime soccer tournament, but whatever was going on wasn't his business. In truth, he didn't give a shit if some highschoolers had broken in to make out or sip beer, or whatever the kids did these days.
Then his whole being was cut through by it, the sheer strength of the sensation disorienting him.
After the night Rukia had gone missing, he hadn't felt it so strongly. He couldn't remember being so afraid since childhood. He wanted to be in his bed, to pull the covers over his head, so that only his nose and mouth would be exposed to whatever danger lurked in the dark.
He didn't have covers, or bed. He sat on a roof of a locker room, tipsy but not drunk, and armed with nothing but a half-finished cigarette.
And after living most of his life afraid, he realized something.
He was done with it. Just fucking done.
Renji threw the cigarette on the ground and got down as fast as he could without breaking any bones. The distance between him and men's locker room wasn't much, and he ran as fast as he could.
He entered the building without letting himself to think. Above the open door was a pale green emergency exit light. It was dim, hardly bright enough to reveal wooden benches, the lockers, and the showers at the end of the room.
The light also revealed two persons: a tall, thin man in white, and a short but equally thin woman in black.
He could see a knife handle sticking from the man's chest. Blood flowed from that wound, and others. Renji had never seen so much blood in one place.
The woman pulled the knife out and turned around, as if she had sensed someone coming. Her face was familiar to Renji. It had lost its childlike innocence, but he had no doubt. The woman was Rukia.
She stared at Renji for a second, almost as if she knew him too. The distance between them was mere meters.
Without any warning, she raised the knife and ran towards Renji.
He realized he was practically blocking the only way out, but he couldn't move, couldn't speak. Couldn't think.
Her knife cut from up to down, and the sudden pain made him to take an instinctive step to the side.
She ran out and was gone in seconds.
Renji felt the need to run after her, but the man in white had slumped on the floor. Renji felt like someone else when he crouched next to the man to feel his pulse.
There was none. All the wounds had stopped bleeding.
All the blood that was supposed to be in had come out. The thought felt like it came from somewhere outside him. There was nothing to be done.
The man's body was still warm (of course it was warm) but he was dead. His clothes were wet with blood and his hair, also white, was spotted with it. His eyes were so pale he must have looked lifeless even when he was alive. The light was too poor to tell the exact color of his eyes.
No matter the eye color, the man no longer saw the changing room, or smelled its characteristic perfume of feet and old sports equipment. The man stared into the empty sockets of the Grim Reaper, or maybe he looked into the dark currents of the River Styx.
Renji stared him for a while, then pressed his hand on his own side and flinched with pain. His touch met warm wetness, but he didn't stop to think his own wound beyond the immediate pain. His whole attention was fixed on the dead man.
Even the man's skin was almost white with blood loss. The only color Renji could see, besides all the white and the dark red of blood, was the bright orange of the headphones the man wore around his neck.
Even they were splashed with blood
Someone was walking outside. Renji could hear the steps= and didn't have much time to act. On an impulse he pulled the cord of the earphones. It came out bloody, dragging an equally bloody connector but no player or phone with it.
Renji took the headphones. The steps were closer now, and if he ran, he'd undoubtedly be seen. Thus, he had only one choice.
Fitting himself in one of the lockers was not nearly as easy as it was painful. The pain made his head clearer. Thinking was getting easier.
The sound of the steps changed. The shoes must be meeting locker room floor instead of soft grass, he thought. It was a woman's walk, and he hoped Rukia had come back.
The echoing scream told Renji the woman was not Rukia.
More steps followed, then a brief silence and then more steps. The heels met the soft grass again.
Renji could only guess that whoever had interrupted them had checked the dead man's pulse, and was currently calling emergency services.
Which was exactly what he should be doing, instead of half-standing, half-sitting in someone's sports locker. The aforementioned someone's clearly non-washed sports pants dangled against his face, and he stood on candy wrappers and now-crushed cans and sports drink bottles.
He waited in the locker five minutes or so before peeking out. The dead man was still on the floor, in the same position Renji had left him. They were the only ones in the room.
Or, Renji though, maybe he was alone. It depended on how you liked to look at these things.
He walked out as fast and as quiet he could. He didn't see anyone, but had little doubt that the police were on their way.
When his apartment door closed, Renji closed his eyes in relief. His clothes were damp and sticky with blood. Had someone walked on him in the well-lit corridor, the red stain and cut shirt would have been next to impossible to miss.
He sat to next to the door, unlaced his shoes and dropped them on the floor. His hands were steady.
Maybe he hadn't yet comprehended what had happened. It all felt like a movie he had started to watch somewhere in the middle. The characters were half-brained strangers, the plot made no sense and the special effects were shitty. The blood looked like off-color ketchup.
Better to make good use of it as long as it lasted, Renji found himself thinking through the haze still fogging his head. He started by organizing all his footwear (sandals, combat boots and running shoes) in a neat row.
He stood up, opened the bathroom door and wiggled out from his t-shirt. Blood had already glued the cloth on his skin. All the moving made the wound bleed more.
Renji looked at his bare chest in the mirror. The wound was long, ten centimeters or so. It descended from right to left and ended just above his lowest ribs. A long gash, but not deep. The edges looked clean as far as Renji could tell. A couple of stitches would do good though.
He had made stitches before, but never onto himself. During their later years in the children's home, the boys had occasionally engaged in what Renji liked to call boyish pranks. Often it had been easier to stitch each other up, rather than to confess and face the consequences. The kit was still in his medicine cabinet, buried under copies of old prescriptions and leftover drugs.
Still holding the bloody shirt, he opened the bathroom door again. Opposite it was a cleaning cabinet, and it in a plastic bucket. He dumped the shirt in the bucket and took it back to the bathroom, this time locking the door behind him.
He took off all his clothes. Only his socks had been saved from bloodstains. All the clothes went into the bucket and he filled it with cold water. No point in boiling the blood on the clothes, no point at all.
He poured a liberal amount of washing soap in and placed the bucket under the sink, and re-focused on cleaning himself.
Water stung. That was nothing in comparison to the burn the disinfectant gave when Renji poured it directly onto the wound.
When the burning subsided, Renji realized he was squeezing the sink edge with both hands. He let go and breathed out, then in. He got his normal breath back slowly, and the tiny red, purple and strangely shimmering black dots receded from his vision.
The next step was making the actual stitches.
The needles were single-packaged. When he opened the package, he saw the familiar shape of the metal, like the very edge of a crescent moon. A thin plastic string was attached to it.
Renji used pliers to grab the needle and place it on his skin, but he didn't have the courage to pierce it.
Small tidy stitches, he repeated in his mind. Not too long, not too short. Place the point of the needle at a right angle to the skin. One movement with the wrist, not slow but not rushed either. The needle comes though first, then comes the string. Lift it with the pliers, make the knot. Make sure it isn't too tight. A few more knots so that the stitch won't get loose. Then cut the excess string. Repeat as many times as needed.
Doing stitches on an orange was much easier than doing them on a human being.
Doing stitches on someone else was much easier than doing them on himself.
Lack of local anesthesia didn't help at all.
Renji steeled himself for the first move, held his breath and twisted his wrist. The needle slid through the tissue, and he reminded himself to breath.
The smooth plastic string glided almost but not fully painlessly inside the skin. The knots finished the stitch.
The worst stitch wasn't the first one.
Before the first, one didn't know how much it hurt. Before the second, one knew, but didn't know if he had the courage to do it again.
Renji didn't have many viable options. He gritted his teeth and made the second stitch.
After the last one he sat on the bathroom floor and rested his back to the wall. He closed his eyes, and noticed he was starting to tremble. Maybe it was from relief, maybe from the shock of it all, maybe tiredness, maybe all three combined. He felt a sudden wave of nausea, but it passed before he had time to even properly notice it.
He forced himself to stand up. The wound needed dressing.
The sterile cloth was years past its date but Renji didn't have anything better and used it anyway. He taped the cloth at place with surgical tape and hoped for the best. Then he allowed himself to go to bed and cry himself to sleep, and soon found he was past caring about anything but rest.