It was raining heavily. Although he still had his eyes closed, Katsumi could tell by the noise. It wasn't very loud, but in the stillness of the room anything would have sounded loud. He liked the sound of rain. It was relaxing and normally when he sat and watched the rain falling he would end up in a mild daze. It was not an unpleasant feeling, and not unlike the way he was feeling now. Tired and confused and not really minding all that much. Shifting position slightly, he winced. It hurt to move. Had he slept in some weird position or something? And why the hell were his joints so stiff?
He opened his eyes a fraction (he didn't like lying with his eyes closed when he wasn't trying to sleep, and despite his own weariness he didn't want to fall asleep again - he wasn't quite sure why), only to close them again almost immediately. The lights in the room, though they were not bright, hurt his eyes. He wasn't sure he wanted to open then again for fear of what, or rather who, could be there. With the light came memories.
Koji. Worse, that other man - what was his name again? Had he ever been told? Did that matter when all he wanted to do was make sure he never met him again? Just remembering what he looked like would be enough. Katsumi remembered the man's brown hair and his dark, irrationally angry eyes. He remembered them both, remembered what they had done, and was suddenly terrified. He had no idea where he was, he was aware of nothing around him but the sound of the rain and the pain in his head and chest. He was utterly helpless. If Koji was anywhere around, he would kill him. Katsumi knew that for a fact.
Broken glass.
But he was alone. It was late at night - he had no idea what the time was: it was about half past eleven - and there was nobody else around. Not Koji or the other one, not anybody. He was alone and that was alright. That was better than alright - it was positively good. If he was alone, he was at least safe. He didn't want to kill himself.
He'd known from the first that he wasn't at home (the room had white walls - he'd painted the walls of his own room bright purple when he was about fourteen), but the smell was enough to tell him he wasn't at Koji's either, unless Koji had started ferociously disinfecting his flat. A hospital smell. Well, he thought vaguely, shouldn't be too hard to work out where I am from that, even for me.
It was at least half an hour before anyone even realised he'd come round. Once his head had cleared a bit that gave Katsumi ample time to think. There was, after all, nothing wrong with his head. Life wasn't like the movies. In films people always wake up in hospital on bright sunny days and they're never alone. For Katsumi, whose last conscious memories had been like something out of a late-night slasher movie, it was strangely reassuring to wake up alone and find out that his life hadn't somehow been reduced to TV size. Junk TV was all right to watch but to actually live it was something else. Right now he wanted to be left alone and thanks to the hour he had been.
God, he'd been such an idiot. A total idiot. Agreeing to go home with a man he realised he'd barely known, he'd known so little about him he hadn't even realised that he already had a lover. Hadn't realised he was so dangerously unhinged. Katsumi realised that every time he had spoken to Koji of his own life, his family and his friends, Koji had let him do most of the talking. Koji himself had given very little away whilst Katsumi had been prepared to talk for hours about everything that he had ever found important.
Katsumi was left alone with his thoughts and the noise of the rain on the windowpanes.
***
"Well?" Izumi asked.
Still unconscious over three weeks later. Three weeks. To Koji it sounded bad. He had no idea if Katsumi would ever manage to recover. He'd probably never be the same again. Koji had even been to see him once or twice (there was no way he'd be able to do it if the boy was ever to regain consciousness. Izumi, Koji suspected, was hoping he'd never recover. Dead men tell no tales). I did that, he'd thought, and had felt the same guilty pleasure he had the night he'd done it, but this time it was tempered with a sense of grief. Koji may not have actually killed the boy, but he'd as good as done so… and for a few seconds at the very least, the intention had been there. The only reason he hadn't managed to do so was because he'd failed to reach any major arteries.
"'Well', are we going out tonight? We've barely done anything for weeks."
Lying low for a while had seemed like the safest bet, but as far as Izumi was concerned this lying low had gone on to long. Koji had been quiet, too quiet, strangely content to stay in. It wasn't like him and Izumi suspected him of moping over that Shibuya kid (Izumi was already having difficulty remembering Katsumi's first name).
"Oh. Yeah, okay." Koji sounded unenthusiastic and Izumi felt angry.
Reluctantly, Koji walked into the bathroom to prepare for the evening. He didn't know if he wanted to go out, but maybe Izumi was right. Maybe he needed to take his mind off things for a bit and going out seemed like one way to forget.
"Izumi?" A sudden memory nagged at him and something in him wouldn't let it lie.
Izumi appeared in the bathroom door, leaning on the frame, and Koji frankly stared. He was beautiful, his straight brown hair neatly brushed, his eyes bright but somehow cold. Koji was not the only one who'd struggled with his conscience in the aftermath of that night three weeks ago. Izumi had found it exciting too, and over the last few days, when he had gotten over his feeling of mild consternation that he'd really tried to kill someone who hadn't in truth done anything much to him, he had found himself trying to think of ways that he could recapture the exhilaration he had felt, his feeling of total power. There was only one way he could think of.
"Exactly that. I want to do it again." Izumi replied.
***
"You know that blonde kid who used to come in here?"
Koji had not been in the bar fifteen minutes when, whilst standing by the bar next to an unusually contemplative Izumi, he overheard two people who were clearly trying the Visual Kei look and failing practically every step of the way discussing Katsumi - not that they knew that was his name. Koji had listened to it in mild amazement. It didn't sound like any event from his life they were discussing. Had Katsumi heard it, he'd have found it hard to recognise what had happened to him in that discussion. The Proto-Goths made it appear that the incident had been more like a violent erotic fantasy than an attempted murder.
The whole thing sounded like an urban myth rather than anything real, the kind of story that so many people told where chilling things happened to individuals whose names had long since been considered a mere technicality, who had in fact lost their individuality long ago. Do you know that boy in our year who… did I tell you what happened to Mr X's last assistant… One of my father's friends once knew this woman… a couple of years ago these two girls went walking along this path like we are now, and they… you know that blonde kid who used to come in here?
Izumi looked up at the two proto-Goths curiously. "Who's that you're talking about?"
Funny, Koji thought, how they make it sound like it was Katsumi's fault for going home with me - for trusting me - rather than mine.
Izumi sighed. "I wish I could say I was surprised, but it's so dangerous these days. What happened?" he asked. You would never have guessed from his tone that he already knew the story inside and out, that he had a starring role in it.
Izumi would have made a fantastic actor had he ever chosen to make a career of it.
***
Later on, Katsumi couldn't even remember what it was he'd been dreaming about. He never remembered his dreams for very long, which was why he wrote down the weird ones he could remember in his notebooks. He couldn't remember this one at all. Yet, at the time, it had terrified him. He hadn't even seemed aware that it had been a dream.
He couldn't even remember it and when he'd been told about it later on he'd been incredulous. Me? Haven't you got the wrong person? Why would I do something like that? Do I look the hysterical type? To him it seemed a little implausible, more than a little, to be honest. He didn't dream very often and the last time he'd had a really bad dream he'd been eight years old and feverish. Maybe a little younger than that, even.
But the first time Takasaka had noticed him he'd been hysterical.
He'd screamed, which was why they'd ultimately had to sedate him. Takasaka hadn't been there from the very beginning, but he'd heard him scream. By the time he arrived, out of curiosity rather than obligation as someone was already there and one more person - in the shape of a harassed junior doctor - wasn't going to help at all, one of the duty nurses was already talking quietly to the boy in an attempt to get him to calm down a bit. Kneeling on the bed, Katsumi was gasping for air, clearly petrified, staring straight ahead at something none of the other people in the room could see, eyes wide. Takasaka knew what it was like to have nightmares but he'd never had anything this intense. He couldn't remember witnessing anything this intense though he'd seen a good few patients in the middle of night terrors before. It came with the territory when you worked in psychiatrics.
"It's okay. You're safe. Breathe deep." The voice of the duty nurse remained calm despite the nervousness visible in her face. She never liked it when patients had panic attacks. For Takasaka it was an uncomfortable reminder that whilst the doctors had found it fairly straightforward to fix Katsumi's body, fixing the mind was more complex. Mental trauma had always, for some reason, reminded him of broken plates. Even if you manage to fix the plate, put everything back where it was, look closely and you can still see the cracks. The scars left from injuries like Katsumi's were not just physical, cliché though it was to say such a thing. Clichés had to come from somewhere.
He knew Katsumi through his injuries. Considering how he'd got them, was it any wonder he had nightmares? The boy had refused to even contemplate counselling, though if the dreams were anything to go by he badly needed it.
"It's okay."
It wasn't. Far from it. Standing by the door, uncomfortably aware that he shouldn't have been anywhere near this room, Takasaka watched as another doctor, an older one, gave the boy a sedative. He didn't know how he felt about that. Logic said it was sensible - it was the middle of the night, after all, and right now getting some sleep would probably help Katsumi far more than anything else would - but Takasaka couldn't help but wonder. It didn't seem right. It wasn't as if the problem would go away with drugs. It would be suppressed, that was all.
Long after the room had emptied itself of doctors and nurses, Takasaka found himself walking back to the doorway and standing hesitantly on the threshold as he had done a few hours ago, feeling self-conscious, as if it was somehow a transgression just to be there and in some respects it was. He had no right to be there, none at all. He wasn't Katsumi's doctor. He shouldn't even have been in the hospital. He wasn't on night shifts, but it wasn't like he had anything to go home to.
A few feet away, Katsumi slept the deep, dreamless sleep of the heavily sedated.
***
"I hate this place. Hospitals give me the creeps."
It was late August and Katsumi was missing it, but it wasn't like there was really anything that he could do about it. He'd missed most of the real heat, which was something of a relief, and the temperature this afternoon was almost bearable outside, agreeably warm inside.
He wasn't even that bored at the moment. He lay on one side on top of the bedsheets, his chin resting on one hand, half-wishing he was wearing something slightly more than his pyjamas, and glared in mock-anger at Takafumi, who pushed his glasses back up his nose with one finger before glaring back at Katsumi, who laughed.
"Don't tell me you're embarrassed. Katsumi Shibuya embarrassed?"
Takafumi and Keisuke, his earnest, cripplingly shy boyfriend, sometimes gave the impression of being joined at the hip. Katsumi barely ever saw Takafumi unless Keisuke was there as well. Keisuke didn't appear to go out at all unless he was with Takafumi and seemed to prefer to address the world through him. The pair represented coupledom at it's most scary, we-are-each-other extreme, though they were pretty cute with it. They didn't flaunt their relationship, but had long since stopped bothering denying it (and most people had stopped bothering commenting), and they certainly weren't overly demonstrative. Nonetheless, they were a couple; they came together. Takafumi and Keisuke. Like Sonny and Cher, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde. Saying the names together seemed natural, and to Katsumi it was hard to imagine either with another person or to conceive of a time when they had not been together. They'd been together for longer than he'd known them.
"He is not blushing."
Why Katsumi was friends with them was a bit harder to work out. They had met totally by chance: Katsumi was at least three years younger than they were and they didn't have all that much in common, despite the character traits he shared with Takafumi. Right now they were probably the closest friends he had. And right now, Katsumi needed friends. He needed people to be uncritical, to do nothing more than understand. He couldn't rely on his family for that. His father hadn't so much as said that he'd brought his situation on himself, but the implication had been there, and it certainly had not been welcome. It hadn't helped at all.
Then again, in these sorts of situations, family were sometimes the worst people to turn to.
"Katsumi, why would he be blushing anyway?"
And privately, Katsumi was jealous of them both.
***
Koji spotted him instantly. The same type of person as Katsumi was: quite plainly not Katsumi, but equally anxious, equally out of place. Though this boy was perhaps a little taller than Katsumi had been he was obviously a few years younger: he shouldn't have been there at all, he should have been at home with his parents arguing over midterms. The kind of person, Koji thought, who probably looks better in school uniform than out of it.
He was standing by the door, looking anxious. Not at all expectant, just unsure if he was happy there, looking round the room more in curiosity than anything else. He'd probably heard the same stories Katsumi had. He'd probably heard about what had happened to Katsumi - the latest cautionary tale, Koji supposed. He could hardly fail to have done if he came to this bar often.
Glancing questioningly toward Izumi, Koji saw his lover nod once, an almost imperceptible motion you would not have seen if you weren't looking out for it. Yes, he'll do. Not exactly a looker unless you were seriously into high-school boys, but what the hell, does it matter?
Late August, almost September - a hint of autumn in the suddenly much cooler air. Despite their stated intentions, Koji hadn't actually seriously set out looking for anyone to - well, for someone to kill - until a few days ago, waiting for the rumours circulating about what had happened to Katsumi to run their course and die down of their own accord. It had worked, the stories had been forgotten and people started to get less cautious. The feeling in the bar seemed to be that some transient weirdo had been the one who'd committed the crime, and that he had to be long gone by now. Besides, a few weeks ago Koji had found out that Katsumi was now well out of danger, was alive and most likely to be staying that way, as had most of the other people in the bar. Callous though it sounded, there would have been far more mileage in the story had he died, as it was it had run out of steam. You couldn't get much of a conversation out of it, that was for sure. Now he could safely make a move.
"Can I buy you a drink?" Koji asked.
Part 5