~*~Chapter I~*~
High above the city of Tokyo, in a polished office room on the twenty-third floor of an enormous glass sky scraper, a young man lay beside a scribbling elderly lady. The nib of the pen scritching upon notepad paper, coupled with the young man's hesitant voice, were the only sounds that slid throughout the silent room. Floods of sunlight filtered in past the heavy drapery and picked out the red from the young man's fine brown hair. Every wrinkle and faded spot upon the woman's face was laid bare in the warm sunshine. Her incisive eyes were filled with patronizing sympathy as she watched her patient.
"What else do you see?"
"Scarlet." A carefully blank face stared up at the coffered ceiling tiles. "A world gone entirely scarlet."
"What do you think that means?"
"It doesn't mean anything. It just is. I don't question it. I accept it because it's a part of this world."
"It's a part of your world?"
"Not my world," the brown-haired teenager corrected. "Our world. This is reality. This is now. I see now. I'm not crazy."
"No one is calling you crazy Ken," the lady soothed automatically. "Tell me about this now that you see."
Hidaka Ken fisted his hands. He knew what she thought. She thought he was living in his head. She didn't believe him. He didn't want to speak to her anymore but he made himself do it. He had promised. "The scarlet is blood. It's thick and makes puddles on the floor. It drips down the walls and I know it's fresh. Sometimes I see bits of hair or pieces of skin in it. I see broken bodies. Sometimes their eyes are open and they're like cloudy marbles. Sometimes they're covered in their own blood. Their clothes are stained. I can feel their pain, the pain they would have felt before they died. It still lingers in the rooms. It slides into my skin and fills my head. I scream and I wake up screaming."
She wrote quickly. "What exactly happened to these people?"
"They committed suicide."
"All of them?"
He nodded. "And then I see them on TV or read about them in the newspapers. Their names stand out and I know."
"I see."
"You don't believe me."
She chose not to answer that. "Do you see only bodies or do you also see how they did it?"
"At first I saw only corpses but last night that changed. I saw two different men. One was pale with hair the colour of blood. The other was a tall policeman."
"What did they do?
Brown eyes clenched shut. "The red-haired man took a knife from his kitchen drawer and slit his wrists. His blood was dark against his white skin. He was tired and in so much pain. I could feel it. It radiated from him, like heat from a fire. I only felt a fraction of what he felt and it was so intense. I couldn't bear it and I woke up. I was shaking and my own wrists were hurting. I didn't want to go back to sleep but somehow I did. Then I saw the tall policeman and he shot himself. He got dressed in his police uniform and then drank almost a whole bottle of whisky. His hands were shaking as he took out his gun. Tears came out of his eyes and he pulled the trigger. His skull splattered all over the back wall. Skin and blood smeared on the floor tiles. No one would ever see his tears. His dog came in and licked his dead hand and started barking. The dog was hungry and the policeman was gone."
The woman glanced at him, her face impassive. "And you read about these two men in the newspaper today?"
"Not the first one. I couldn't find him. Just the policeman. His name was Hibachi Shiro."
The woman inhaled abruptly and her mottled fingers began to quiver.
~*~*~*~*~
Less than two blocks away, inside a meticulous office full of neatly stacked files and gleaming black technology, a scarlet-haired man sat before the half-white Tokyo Chief of Homicide Investigation, Bradley Crawford. Light fractured upon the steely glasses of the older man as he clinically analysed the pale figure before him. Glimpses of gauze peered out from beneath black sleeves. The flesh below was raw, scarred.
"I don't want this anymore." Fujimiya Ran's voice was nearly inaudible. Icy fingers tugged down black sleeves.
"It doesn't work that way." Crawford's voice, in sharp contrast, was edged with severity. "What you want is of no consequence. You don't stop seeing things just because it's too much for your mind. This is something of a gift or a curse. Call it what you like but it won't change the facts. Every minute you're alone and every night you sleep, you'll see and you'll dream and it will be real. There is no escape."
"But I..." Ran trailed off, ashamed. He was weak before this strong, strict man.
"You what?"
"I..." His wrists ached. "I just want peace."
To find peace from death...in death.
Crawford narrowed his eyes. "Where were you two weeks ago?"
Ran flinched. "You know where."
"I want to hear you say it." Crawford's face was hard, cold.
Plum-colored eyes shut. "In an asylum."
"An insane asylum," Crawford heartlessly clarified. "Admitted by your own parents."
We can't keep watching you hurt yourself...
"Yes."
"They couldn't take care of you. They were scared of you. They hated you for what you tried to do, again and again."
"Yes."
"And if I hadn't taken you from that asylum, hadn't risked my own career to illegally release you then you would still be there, sitting alone with your dreams and rotting."
A room like a soft cage, alone and silent and cold. Always cold...where I watch myself die...
"Yes."
"I don't give a fuck what you feel or what you want," Crawford bit out, allowing fury to mar his vision for the first time. "Because you are mine. I own you and you work for me. I only need you as far as my job is concerned but you Ran, you need me for your life. You would do well to remember that." He gestured in the direction of bound wrists. "If there are anymore of these incidents then I will send you back . Of that you can be certain."
Ran raised his head and met the older man's dark gaze. In this sorrow I remain ."I understand," he whispered. Waves of humiliation swept over him. His failures was so glaring. "I apologize."
"Good." Crawford yanked out a small, silver tape recorder and turned it on. "Tell me what you dreamed this morning."
"I saw..."
...a world gone entirely scarlet .
Ran blinked. Those words were new words and he didn't know where they could have come from. They felt external, spilling into his mind with an airy whisper. He thought about those words that felt odd as he began to speak. He spoke woodenly as he kept his mind occupied. "I saw the small man again. I saw his face and I saw his house. He had a new little girl with him. He liked her fear. He liked her skin. I saw him torture her for a long time and he called her bad names. Then he strangled her with her own skipping rope. He raped her corpse. He cut her braids off and kept them in his basement. He likes hair. He has hair from all the little girls. I saw his bed. There was a uniform on it. A grey cleaning uniform. I saw his pay check sticking out of the uniform's front pocket. He's a janitor at the school where the little girl used to go. I know his face."
Ran would have kept talking but Crawford snapping the recorder off made him blink. Slides of strident memories tried to get into his mind, tried to get back into the front but he pushed them from him as hard as he was able. His head split into a pain that was encompassing. His vision wavered and he saw how his skin had ruptured last night, splashing scarlet all over the place.
Bleed these sins away.
Crawford opened his desk drawer and removed an envelope stuffed with money. "Your work is done for today."
Ran took the envelope . His wrists throbbed, itching in madness. He wanted to see them again. He wanted to touch the skinned scars. He wanted to discard all the memories of aggressors and screaming victims. The people were different with different names and faces but the eyes were always the same. The scenarios were always the same.
As I am always the same. Alive. In discord. Alone with scarred wrists.
He stuffed the money into his coat pocket. "I need to be home."
"You remember my words." Crawford's mouth thinned. "I will be watching you."
Ran nodded and left the office, his eyes dying piece by piece.
Crawford still for a few moments , his mind working methodically before he opened the line to his secretary. "Eriko? Get me Kudou on the line."
~*~*~*~*~
"Well?" Kudou Yohji looked up from his laptop where he'd been organizing notes on his latest investigation. "How'd it go?"
"Stupid," Ken muttered, hanging up his coat. "I can't go back there."
"Why not?" Yohji demanded. "You need someone to talk to. This shit's getting out of hand."
"The policeman I saw in my dream last night was the shrink's nephew." Ken struggled against hyperventilation. "She pretty much flipped the lid when she realized what I was saying. It was horrible. She told me she never wanted to see me again. She was crying."
"Shits." Yohji lit a smoke, shaking his head. "Well whatever, we can't do anything about that. I'll find you someone new as soon-"
"I'm not going to anyone new," Ken snapped, his breathing laboured. He gulped in air. Shivers racing up the length of his spine. "I'm can't do this! I can't talk about everything I see and feel to someone who thinks I'm crazy. It's bad enough coming to you every night. It hurts too much."
"So you'd rather do this alone?"
"I'd rather not do this at all!" Ken dropped down into the nearest armchair and pressed clammy fingers to his temples. His head was suddenly throbbing. "I hate these dreams. Why do I keep having them? They don't serve any purpose!"
"I don't know why you're the one who has to witness all this stuff ," Yohji answered. "But I believe that everything happens for a reason."
"Oh well as long as it's happening for a reason," Ken mocked bitterly. The pain in his mind intensified. "Then all these years of seeing the same shit every night will be worth it."
"Ken it's not-"
"Don't," he snarled, his eyes blazing. "Don't patronize me. You don't see what I see and you don't feel what I feel and you'll ever understand what I go through!"
Yohji exhaled a mouthful of smoke. "I understand that I want to help you."
"Well you can't! As long as I sleep, I dream and as long as I dream, I see suicidal deaths and whether it's fate or not I'll never be able to help any of those people!"
"You want a chance to use what you see to help someone." Yohji leaned back against the couch and studied him.
Hundreds of corpses, bent and bloody, imploded behind his eyes. Waves of pains, churning and cloying. He loathed those bodies for making him witness it. He loathed himself for not being able to do anything.
To find peace from death...in death.
Words filtered through the agony inside his head. They were unknown words, as though he had not thought them. He rubbed damp fingers against his khakis. "Yes."
"I got a phone call from the Chief of Homicide," Yohji told him, inhaling a deep choke of tobacco. "He's got an informant who's something of a ward to him. The informant is depressed, suicidal and crazy. He needs to be protected from himself."
Ken shook his head slightly. His thoughts were wavering. "You want me to be a babysitter?"
"He dreams, just like you do."
Without warning, Ken's head erupted in a shower of anguish. He bit his lip hard, his sight blurring. He heard himself speak as though from far away. "What?"
"He dreams of killers, night after night," Yohji said softly. "That's why he's considered such a valuable source . He catches murderers because he sees things that no one else can."
He swallowed and it hurt. "Y-you're serious?"
"Do you I look like I'm lying?"
Ken blinked hard and his mind clenched at the tiny action. That he could meet someone who knew, who understood... "When? Where?"
"Now if you want. You have to go down to the station and meet with the Homicide Investigator first."
"I just..." The brunette was tongue-tied, his brain in a fog. He couldn't distinguish between pain and astonishment. "I just want to see him."
Yohji smiled and ground out his cigarette. "Come on, I'll give you a lift."
The ride to the police station was silent. Ken's mind twisted and gnawed like a living organism. Words that weren't his own raced past broken images. He Alone with scarred wrists was nothing more than an extension of the grief that bled within. He didn't know where he began and where his waning sanity ended. There was no purpose in what he saw. He was a spectator, unseen and empty, witness to pain most horrid.
"Here."
Ken could hear Yohji's voice and knew that the blond man was sitting beside him but he couldn't see him at all. There was a girl in Yohji's place, sleeping serenely with pills pushing through her slowing veins. A bloated man with purple skin and empty eye sockets lay tangled in a fishing net, water and a grey fish seeping from past fat, bruised lips. Cadavers as far as he could see. Flesh-caked ropes and gore-licked bullets. Faces and bone shattered, drooling upon floors and walls and beds and kitchens and bathrooms. Throats slit, wrists slit, hearts gauged, brains sprayed. So many limbs dripping, so many grotesque faces. Flesh to fluid, blood to chunks of gore. Dreams shattered. Endless anguish. Even still there were imprints of fear upon rotting appendages.
"The guy's name is Bradley Crawford, Chief of Homicide Investigation," came Yohji's voice, slicing through the smear of stacked suicides. "You'll find him on the fourth floor."
Ken felt himself nod. His hand reached out, past slimy, dangling legs and opened the car door. There was wind on his face, rustling through his hair and wrenching at a flowered skirt, a stained sleeve, matted curls. He stepped forward, his feet rippling through puddles of thick scarlet. Something pink and fleshy squished beneath him, warm juice Bleed these sins away squirting onto his pants. The overwhelming stench of rancid flesh clung to his skin, to his very aura.
It was hard to walk. He moved upon membrane and liquid and before him came the view of a bustling police station. His surroundings split as though in two. There was talking and ringing phones and swearing offenders. He saw many policemen milling about and still another world wavered against his skull; a world of heaped carcasses and searing sorrow. Dizziness swept over him, mingling with the gnashing ache in his mind. His head pulsated, like a heart nestled inside his cranium.
Where I watch myself die...
The forth floor was a maze of long corridors and closed, half-glass doors. Grappling at the painted walls to keep from falling, Ken struggled against raging blackness. These sorts of spells were frequent but it wouldn't do to have one in the middle of the police station. Not when he was to find one fucked in the head like himself. If there was someone he could help, someone who could make it all worthwhile than he needed to see him. Nothing else made any difference.
Clenching his teeth, he continued down the hallway. Bradley Crawford's office was at the very end. The words written upon the glass read 'Chief of Homicide Investigation'. He could read them, despite being weak. He was weak, always weak. What he saw in the depths of his sleep made him so.
You see what you want to see.
But that wasn't true. No one would want to be witness to continued self-inflicted deaths. It was horrifying. It was his curse.
A few meters away, Crawford's office door opened. Sunlight splashed out, causing him to cringe. Ken wiped at stinging eyes and felt himself leave behind his tainted world. A figure was illuminated in the doorway for an instant before the door slid shut.
A pale man trudged forward, his gaze trained to the floor. His hair was the colour of dark blood.
Ken's heart smashed into his throat. He froze in his tracks, right in the center of the corridor.
The pale man would have eyes the colour of violets. Ken knew without seeing them. He also knew that beneath those sleeves there were dead damaged wrists. He knew because he had watched the man slice both his wrists with a knife from his kitchen drawer. And now he wasn't-
"Dead...?"
The man looked up and their eyes locked.
To find peace...Blood crashed into his head, purging away every memory and every emotion. His ears rang with flooding torrents. He could hear nothing, not even his own thoughts. There were just those dying eyes and vibrant hair.
"A world gone entirely scarlet," the man whispered. He pressed one ashen finger to the arch of his eyebrow. Confusion spilled onto that empty face and then he was hurrying, his face carefully blank. Past him, beyond him and gone.
Ken stood there, his heart gushing. One of his dreams had appeared before him. A dream that hadn't died.