This begins like a day before the Anime does. The character casting is a little strange. It's one of those stories where everything starts out disconnected and makes perfect sense by the end, which partially explains the title. The Akira characters are more around than in the fic. I'm not writing this from their POV (maybe a little later), but how other people react to it all.

Scism

by Zapenstap




Neo Tokyo blazed.

Glittering like a glass jewel, resplendent in the star light, though dead under a magnifying glass, the city hummed with its own peculiar energy. The flash of lights, the whir of motors, the chatter of voices, the whispers of intrigues saturated everything. Neo Tokyo heaved like a turbulent ocean, pounded like blood in the ears and bulged like an over-stuffed pillow, tearing at the seams.

It was a city about to explode.

In the airport, stranded by an overlaid flight, grad student, literary scholar and auditorium speaker Andrea Maverick stood alone and annoyed by the bus tunnels, trying without success to translate the kanji written on the walls into English. All, right. No problem. She would just have to be creative. She was shockingly independent, always had been, and she could speak Japanese a little, having a strange inborn affinity for learning languages, but she couldn't read or write a lick of it, and her speaking skills were too rusty for her to simply approach a stranger and fumble trying to ask for directions. The only person she knew in the entire city was an old family friend from oh...years ago. But she had no idea how to find him.

She'd been traveling home from Russia to America after her speech in the embassy there about the importance of family as a center and foundation in the turbulent times following the war, but her flight had been rerouted do to some mechanical interference and she was expected to wait two days before she could reschedule her flight. Two days!

"This world's gone straight to chaos," she muttered aloud to herself in English. An old Japanese woman frowned at her, but she ignored her. The bus came and she got on. "Where the hell does this go?" she muttered as she sat down. "Does anybody here speak English?" But of course, nobody did.

*****

"You're such a cynic," customer Ken Harold said good-naturedly to waitress Fuyumi Ishida. "Don't you believe in anything?"

"Do you harrass every waitress or just me?" Fuyumi returned as she refilled his water. "Why do you always come here and order the same thing and ask the same questions?"

"Because I enjoy it," Ken replied with a smile, noticing the way her brown eyes gleamed in the yellow lighting of the shabby restaurant where she worked fifty hours a week. "Why don't you go out with me some time?"

"I do not date customers," she said dryly. "Anything else?"

"No. I'm okay," he replied, and sighed as she nodded and made her way to the next table. Nice girl, Fuyumi. Well, maybe under all that hostility and negativity she was nice. A total cynic though. Skeptic too. But then, who wasn't these days? Especially in this city, the first to be hit by nuclear war thirty years ago.

Ken had been alive only eighteen years, the first fourteen spent in America with his Japanese mother and American father before they moved to Neo Tokyo after it was rebuilt. His parents had actually met in the original Tokyo and had planned to marry and live there, his father being a Japanese major and professional translator, but they took a trip, just a vaction, to America to meet his father's family... right before Tokyo was demolished and World War III. So they'd been forced to stay in the American midwest, and counted themselves lucky, but his father's passion for Japan eventually sent them back to Tokyo. It was strange for Ken, who had grown up American, though his homelife was extremely interlaced in Japanese, the Japanese language and culture and tastes. He felt like a foreigner in Japan, even still, but that didn't matter because he was moving back to America for college next fall anyway. It was nice being bilingual and multi-cultural, but it would be better in America were such things were common, and more useful. He didn't regret his highschool experience in Japan, not really, but he was looking forward to seeing the friends he had left behind in America, and felt a little uprooted in general.

He was going to miss eating lunch here, though, and the waitress who served it to him, even if she was a cynical little thing.

The door opened and he turned to see his highschool friend Akira Hisaishi saunter in with a disgruntled expression on his face. Ken gestured across the table from him and his friend sat down heavily. "What's up," he asked. "You look upset."

"It's all this craziness," Akira said, tossing something onto the floor with force. "The new tax law and all the rioting and the terrorism and everything. I can't tell the police from the army anymore. Everything's just crazy."

Ken didn't bother saying anything to that. There was no point. "Your brother still in that gang?" he asked instead.

Akira hung his head. "Yeah, the dumb punk. You know he's been weird since dad died, doing dope and skipping school and screwing whores. You know how it is."

"I know how it is," Ken agreed quietly, and paused. "You still see him, Taro I mean?"

"He comes home every once in awhile, to eat and borrow money when he needs it, or steal it usually, like I don't notice. It's just that... I don't know, I never thought he'd join a gang. I guess it makes sense in a way, when it's just him and me with mom all crazy in the hospital, and I work all the time. He's gotta be lonely, but shit, I hate thinking what he might be doing, especially at night. For all I know he's out killing people, molesting girls, shit like that that will land him in prison. He should know he doesn't need to do that kind of stuff, that I'll take care of him, just as soon as I can get us out of debt."

"You want a cigarette?" Ken asked.

Akira shook his head firmly, arms lying on the table in front of him. "Nah. It won't help and I promised myself I'd quit. I've been doing pretty good these last few weeks. Haven't been drunk since October either. I guess that's something to be happy about. I don't want to turn into my dad and I'm not going to."

"Yeah," Ken said, and was quite a moment. Alcoholism ran in Akira's family. It had made his dad a monster, led to domestic violence, wildness. His mom was officially pronounced crazy and locked up in a ward, mostly from all the drugs and shit she used to do, probably because of his dad, among other things. Now his little brother, just barely sixteen, was falling to the wayside, like everybody these days. Akira himself was a gem of a guy in truth, honest, hard-working, determined to get out of his situation and take his brother with him... somewhere. "You want to come to America with me, man? I mean, it's not much better than here in some places, I guess, but in the country..."

"I don't know, Ken. I've got to pay off my debts first. Besides, what the hell would I do in America?"

"What are you going to do here? You need to get far away, for Taro if anybody, and Japan's just too small. You know he'll just run away if you move to Kyoto or somewhere."

"I was thinking more like Kagoshima, but mabe you're right. Maybe I should just go to a different country. I'm just afraid if I suggest it Taro he'll take off and I'll never see him again. It's that damn gang loyalty."

"Even if you don't say anything, you might not see him again. He could get killed tonight, or tomorrow... you know how it is."

"I know how it is."

Seeing the sad, faraway look in Akira's eyes, Ken bought his friend a drink, non-alcoholic, and changed the subject.

*****

The rich man's wife was in a flurry of curiosity and bewilderment as she followed her husband through the halls of a trashed school. The place frightened her, even with her husband, and the idea that it frightened her annoyed her immensely.

"You can't be serious," she protested, tugging on the white leather gloves on her wrists. She tilted her head at him and blinked her eyes. "Giving so much money away! You'll put us in the poor house."

Her husband shook his head. "You don't understand, Minami," he said. "I have been sent by God to do this."

She snorted. "You are having a mid-life crisis," she chastised him. "You went to the doctor and still you went to that horrid little church and now you are throwing your fortune away. Why do you insist that you are dying? Your test results say that you are as healthy as a horse."

"Please," he said to her, stopping in the halls and grabbing her wrists. She stopped, startled at the intensity in his eyes. "Please try to understand. It was not what the doctors said. I know. I know I am going to die. I just know it."

Minami muttered under her breath and tried not to feel panicked. It was a mid-life crisis, that's what it was. He wasn't dying. She wouldn't let him. She patted her hair and walked along beside him.

A shout rang through the hall and a group of boys burst through the doors across the hall and away out into another hallway.

"Slow down, Kaneda!" one boy shouted.

"Keep up, Kai! Tetsuo, did you get that..." The doors closed behind them.

Minami stood with her husband some space away, watching them with a pensive frown. "Why are we here?" she demanded of her husband.

"You have always been sad that you can not have children," he said and she lowered her eyes, clinging to his arm. "I thought maybe there was a reason, you know? Like maybe there are too many children who don't get cared for. I thought..."

"Don't tell me you want to adopt a rogue!" she exclaimed. "I thought you said you were dying? Surely you would not adopt a rogue and then leave your poor wife alone to deal with it."

He patted her hand comfortingly. "No, no. That would be too much for you, but I thought a little donation of some kind to the school, or sponsorship or scholarship..."

She frowned up at her husband, alarmed by this sudden change, this benevolence, this urgency, just realizing how real it was. She had been surprised to fall in love with a man of her status in her youth, but she had enjoyed her comfortable life with him in happiness, the money that had protected them during the war, that had allowed them to travel away from it all, to close it all out. And now they were in the pit of hell, planning to just give it all away?

All because her husband thought he was dying and regretted his life. Or maybe it was that Theologian that was at fault! That foreign man in the church with that japanese woman who claimed to have visions and see the future. Her husband had visited that pair and came back all wild and full of energy. And then there were all those crazy occultists in the streets, proclaiming destruction and doom and death to all at the awakening of Akira. What nonsense! Her husband said the two groups were not related, that they were strongly opposed, but she did not see a difference. He was being riled up was what it was. Surely he would not die and leave her alone in this horrid little world.

"Oh, here," he said, and pushed open the door to the main office. "I called ahead, so they should be expecting us."

"I still think this is all so crazy and unnecessary," Minami muttered, but she followed him inside.

*****

Kana replaced her reading book on the table and rose quietly as the door to the house opened and closed. She could hear her mentor hanging his coat up on the rack.

"I had another dream," she said quietly.

The Theologian appeared in the archway and crossed the room to the chair she sat in. "I know," he said.

She smiled. "It's strange, you know," she said with a smile. "I went to see Miyako today, and was barred from entering the temple."

"You should have expected it."

"I did," she said. "But I wanted to see if our visions were the same."

"They're not," he said. "They dream of the stream. It's different."

"I still dream in it," she said.

"I know." He smiled at her, "but it's different, and you know why."

"But a disaster will still befall the city," she said with conviction.

He nodded. "Akira."

"Akira," she confirmed.


Yes, this a strange story to go with a strange anime. It'll be a mix of theology, comedy... I don't know what all, but keep reading because it should be good!