Day 4: A-Side (Encore)
Part 22: All Great Silence, Part 2
"I know." Nagi responded, though still flushing slightly red.
"You… do?" Rindo asked, stupefied. "W-When he told me – don't tell him I ever told you this, by the way – when he told me, he was under the impression–"
"I have suspected for about a day now. My ability to read people is second to none, if I dare to say so myself. And his behaviour, no matter how much he tried to bury it, suggested just that. Glances that continued on for just a moment too long, his face flushing deeper than just embarrassment would permit, even how his tone wavered when addressing me… verily, it spoke of his affliction with that status ailment." Nagi told Rindo, her tone sharp.
"Wow. You did a reeealll good job of not letting on then. Had him convinced, at least." Rindo seemed slightly taken aback.
"Indeed. I am not flattered by the fact I am his bias, nor I am unflattered. 'Tis just how he seems to be." Nagi said, adjusting her glasses.
"How he… 'seems to be'?" Rindo pursed his lips in confusion.
"Fleeting, effervescent, yet powerful feelings of attraction sweep over him from time to time – he himself has admitted as much to me." Nagi explained.
"Explains quite a bit." Rindo nodded his head as if affirming something for himself.
"Indeed I…" Nagi trailed off, feeling a pang of guilt at what she was about to say, "I wonder if, permitted she were still with us, his feelings for Lady Kanon would have become less passionate as time marched on."
Rindo stared at Fret for a while, sizing him up, as if trying to fit this puzzle piece he'd just been given about his friend into the grand jigsaw of his life. Fret was still almost enigmatic to the people closest to him.
"Y'know, you almost make it sound like he isn't capable of a serious relationship." Rindo finally spoke up.
"No no, far from it. I just believe the way in which he loves is…" She searched her brain for the most delicate way of putting this, "…immature."
"Immature?" Rindo scoffed, disbelieving her.
"Allow me to explain. Take yourself and Lady Shoka, for example. As I doth see it, your love is based on an understanding of one another. A sort of… levelling out, mutual respect and equal in most parts. You love each other in equal measure, respect each other in equal measure and are guided in your relationship by one another. And that is what works best for you two. You are equals, seeking to be an equal to the other." Nagi thought of all the times they had been in public and Rindo had been apart from Shoka. It was hard to recall one – though it never felt overbearing and clingy, more like the natural magnetic force between two bodies. Like something that just fit. Though, she had still known relationships like that to fail. Perhaps there was fraying there she was not witnessing, but all she had to go on was experience and instinct, both of which she trusted.
"I mean… I guess. Sure doesn't feel like it sometimes." Rindo sighed.
"Lord Rindo, focus. Your love is stable, of that I can assure you, and so long as you continue to communicate it shall continue to be stable."
"R-Right. Thanks for the pick-me-up Nagi. But… what does this have to do with Fret?" Rindo said, closing his eyes in thought. Nagi tilted her head up to the ceiling, up to the overbearingly bright light and sorted her train of thought into a line of logic.
"Fret… loves in such a way wherein he can never be the equal, for those he loves he props up as unattainable figures far beyond himself. He is like a knight or a samurai, seeking a worthy superior for whom he can be a vassal for. Within those vassals, he finds fulfilment for the parts of himself he knows he lacks in." Nagi explained this as bluntly as possible, though she found herself uncomfortable with how distant and cold she was being to someone sleeping just a few feet away from her.
"Uh…" Rindo looked slightly shocked. "That's the vibe he gives off?"
"I can prove it. First, he looked to you to replace the friendship he had lost and found fulfilment through you, leading to a burst of passion that cooled as he kept his distance."
"Wait, Fret had a crush on me?" Rindo smiled in a way that suggested exasperation.
"Indeed, he did. I assumed you knew. He makes it obvious when he likes someone, after all."
"I mean… even if I wanted to know at the time, I was just kinda wandering through life on autopilot. I doubt I would've even seen the signs at the time." Rindo traced a line across his eyebrows, thinking for a moment. "Yeah, you were right. He definitely was crushing on me. Sorry I couldn't see it, man," he whispered to the sleeping figure on the bed, causing Nagi to crack a smile. It seemed, as she had predicted, this did not make Rindo uncomfortable.
"After you came Lady Kanon. He sought in her what 'realness' he himself lacked and wished to devote himself to her so he may regain that. Whether or not those feelings would have met their end eventually is… unknowable, alas." Nagi grimaced, thinking of Kanon's fate and how hard they had fought to avoid it. She knew she had helped give Fret closure, but the would was still there, and thinking of it made the dull ache just throb all over again.
"Okay, I think I'm following you." Rindo said. "So, third is you, right?" He asked.
"Ah, there was one other. Lord Neku." Rindo's mouth formed into a small 'o' and a lightbulb seemed to turn on in his head. "Indeed, it was Neku's unshakable faith in Fret and the reassurance he provided that Fret could not provide himself that led to an extremely brief period wherein he held a flame for Lord Neku. But that died out, held back by feelings of guilt and recognition this love was, to him, fake and harmful to him." Nagi remembered the guilt in his eyes as he explained just what his past crushes meant to him. Love, his way of loving, hurt Fret. And she, in return, did not wish to hurt him by even allowing him the chance to think of reciprocation.
"But… if he knows it's fake, why does he still have those feelings for you?" Rindo questioned.
"Because he cannot help it. Fret is guided by his heart, now more than ever. I… believe to him I may represent all of what his past flames offer and more." Nagi looked to Fret's scar once more.
"Okay, so say you shoot him down. What if someone comes along that kinda… likes being worshipped or whatever by him? I'm sure that doesn't sound so bad to someone."
"Verily. Whoever that is may be his perfect fit, so long as their intentions and heart are pure. But… that is not how I would choose to love." Nagi looked back to Rindo, who still seemed to have limitless questions on his mind.
"Then, what is your way of loving? Sure, you can sit there and psychoanalyse Fret but… and, uh, I'm not trying to sound cruel here buuuut… what about you?"
"Love, to me, is… beyond complicated," Nagi began, slumping her shoulders. "I still cannot grasp my own thoughts on it completely. But I do know some meagre amounts on how I choose to do it. I believe it exists to entwine two souls together and bind them to one another in equality. It need not be any more than fulfilment between two parties, but that fulfilment must be complete and whole and… human. I have witnessed love between two who view each other as resources before. I will not love like they did. I cannot be worshipped in love. I will not be subjugated in it either. It would break my heart." She straightened her back, removing the deflated feeling burrowing deep in her chest.
"I… think I get it? Your big fancy speeches always leave me a bit lost though." Rindo's lips curled upwards slightly, showing he meant no harm by his lack of understanding. Nagi, in spite of his confusion, was thankful. It felt like she had meaning to say that for quite some time now – though it made her uncomfortable, something she could not put her finger on lingering with the words she had spoken and pushing back against them.
"Nagi?" Rindo asked after a while of them staring at their phones. She had habitually checked the Twisters' group chat every few minutes for a while now, but there was no sign of any updates. There were so many questions she wished to ask, but was unsure if she'd even get an answer to. Letting out a louder exhale than she wished to, she addressed him.
"Yes, Lord Rindo? A-Ah, apologies, that discontent was not directed at you."
"I… I've decided that I need to tell you and Fret something. When he wakes up." Rindo said, a bead of sweat dripping down his forehead and past his restless eyes.
"Indeed?" She began to feel a tight feeling in her chest. Tension. At first, it was just due to the way Rindo was acting, but quickly it crescendoed into a buzzing in her ears and heat behind her eyes. Like the feeling of being observed and watched, of being choked by her surroundings.
"I-It's about…" Rindo took in air, clearly nervous. "These… these books I've been getting. And about someone you– someone your talk on love earlier reminded me of."
"Right. Very w-well, proceed," her words leaked out like drips of water; at random, staccato intervals and unable to contain the anxious energy she was feeling well up within her." Rindo gazed at her for a long while, completely having seized up, sometimes opening his mouth to start a sentence and always failing to.
"Lord… Rindo?" She seemed to drag him back kicking and screaming into reality because before she could even formulate another thought, he began speaking quickly."
"Look, Minamimoto and these… these reports, he– I–" The door behind them slammed open and Rindo yelled, stirring Fret from his slumber and causing Nagi to flinch. He breathed in for a while as the three of them looked at a man, dressed prim and proper, entered the room.
"Apologies for startling you, young man." He said, reaching into his blazer pocket and pulling out a leather-bound pouch with a Tokyo P.D. crest on the front, catching the light from above and reflecting Rindo's aghast look in gold. It tumbled open and the officer's stern and sullen face and dark, crew-cut hair now stared at them twice over from behind and beside plastic. He quickly pocketed the ID and introduced himself.
"Detective Shigeki Honda, Tokyo P.D. I assume you know why I'm here, and why I have to ask you to leave."
"R-Right," stammered Rindo, collecting himself, "yeah, r-right," with stiff but swift movements Rindo heaved himself from his chair and walked, shoulders up to his ears, to the doorway in a way too fast to be considered collected and natural.
"Uh, bye?" Fret blinked twice, adjusting himself to his waking state before limply waving Rindo off. Rindo just nodded back before leaving. Nagi, still on-edge from the noxious feeling lodged deep inside of her, got up to leave the room. She nodded Fret off, who smiled back at her and turned to the detective, who sat where she had been. She slid the door slowly into position to ensure it made no noise and surveyed the hallway for Rindo. She glanced forwards, then backwards to the other end of the corridor, both starkly empty and absent of any sign of Rindo. No footsteps echoing down the long rectangular halls, no voice calling for her, just an uncomfortable silence and the knowledge that Rindo did not trust her enough to reveal whatever secrets he was keeping hidden about Lord To– Sho Minamimoto and whatever else he had scurried away from divulging. She sent him a simple "Where are you?" over text, but after standing in the all-too-quiet hallway doing nothing but staring at her screen waiting for a response, rapping anxious knuckles against cold wall, she decided it would be best to simply return to Shibuya and see if Rindo would respond sooner rather than later.
Prying her eyes away from the screen, she stared up to see that the hallways had seemed to… shift? They seemed longer, somehow. And darker – or more like the spacing between the ever-humming fluorescents on the ceiling had gotten longer. She stared into the end of the corridor, her ears becoming more aware of the oppressive electrical buzz above her by the second and began to feel vertigo, as if she were looking down from the peak of Tokyo Tower and not a simple hallway. She slammed her eyes shut before the already nigh-unbearable nausea got worse and breathed in. When she opened her eyes the sensation had subsided but the bizarreness of the situation had not. She took a tentative step down the warped hallway and found it rang out, echoing all around for a second or so before subsiding. She continued down the corridor, the sound of boot on flooring continuing to ring out like church bells, making her nerves scramble themselves each time it did so. Eventually, she made her way out to the main lobby. There were signs of life here, people going about their everyday business, but she could not help but feel like they were all looking at her. When she took a step out onto the landing, she half expected everyone's gaze to immediately turn her way, to take a look at the girl who had just emerged from the impossibly long hallway, but they did not. Everything almost felt normal again – chatter between families seated and awaiting treatment or visiting privileges, people at the front desk rudely asking the receptionist if they could go and see whoever was in triage, the rolling of dollies and equipment across the floor but it was all so damn loud. Everything came at her at once, the rolling of conversation, the bile of angry shouting, choking sobs and laughter. She could hear it all and it weighed down on her, a cacophony of human emotion threatening to overpower her.
She stumbled her way to the exit, trying her best to look normal and to block out the world around her, until she made it onto the street where the audible mayhem screamed at her, a wall of sound hitting her at a million miles an hour. She began to feel short of breath, the nervous feeling that wrapped around her lungs like barbed wire tightening its chokehold. She hunched over and told herself, "Pull yourself together, Usui," perhaps a bit too loudly as some overdressed youths around her age passed her by and laughed at her, confusion and mockery painted on their faces. Her eyes stung with shame and fear as she staggered her way through the streets. She took in as deep a breath as her body would allow her and strained herself to look up, taking her surroundings. The lights of the city blurred and blared at her, blinding her with their ferocity and laughing as they did so. The hot air she had taken in began to burn her lungs and she exhaled, the noise of her breath getting lost in the storm clouds of conversation that the streets were awash with. Words rattled into her eardrums like machine-gun fire, causing the pavement around her to twist and warp. Every so often a particularly loud sound – a car horn, a wolf-whistle, a heated argument – brought clarity back to the world immediately in front of her, but it was short-lived. She imagined to the world around her she must've looked incredibly drunk – one heckler in particular clearly did, though she still had the will to shoot him a gaze filled with enough malice to get him to back off – but the only thing she felt was something indescribable, every horrid, malign emotion she had known compounding in on one another and causing her to feel lower than low.
"Whoof," a sarcastic voice rattled in her skull, causing an already developing headache to become splitting, "and I thought my uni days were rough."
"Wh-why have you returned?" She asked out loud, again a bit too loudly, again earning her some puzzled and mocking stares from people on Central Street.
"Seemed like as good a time as any," repressed laughter coated every word this voice said, rolling across each syllable.
"Well… Just, go away." She whispered the words this time, and reached for her phone.
"Ooh, checking if blonde-and-cowardly himself has responded, or just lookin' to get away from me?" It cackled. Nagi just furrowed her brow, hoping it got the message.
"Am I pissin' ya off, darlin'?" It sneered – though she could not ascribe a face to it, she knew if it had one, it would be sneering. "Nyeheh! Igorin' me ain't gonna do any good! I've told ya before, I'm in here with ya!" As if to prove its point, the voice began to emit raucous laughter that slammed into Nagi's skull, causing her vision to blur even further and the world around her to pulsate. She quickened her pace and staggered into the very back of an alley off Central Street, propping herself up against a vending machine. She felt her left hand's exposed fingertips against the cool, chilled glass of the machine whilst her right hand gripped the hot skin around her mouth holding back a wave of nausea that hit her body like a typhoon. As the laughter hit fever pitch, the wave peaked and flood of warm vomit came rushing out of her mouth and nose like a stream, lukewarm splashes of bile and food splashing against her face as it hit her palm before pooling in it, allowing hot, frothy yellow distributaries to slide through her fingers and hit the scorching ground beneath her with a wet splash. She sunk onto her knees as she coughed up more, arm sliding down the machine as an overpowering sour and bitter taste filled her mouth which still clung onto the putrid remnants of throw-up. Through specks of vomit on her glasses she stared at herself in the vending machine, tears of shame rolling down her eyes as bile-coloured saliva dripped from the centre of her bottom lip and joined the rest of the refuse on the ground below.
"See, this is how you should be spending your uni days," the voice told her, "nothing beats spilling your guts in some back-alley." She didn't want to respond to it. She just watched as her tears mingled with snot and spit and joined filthy company below her.
"Oh, don't feel too bad. I only really did this to prove a point, darlin'. Besides, I have told ya to look in the mirror before, but someone doesn't follow orders too well,"The voice almost sounded like it had left her head and was now speaking from beside her – but the reflection in the glass before her was only her own.
"Look at where you are," The voice said, a cold edge to its words.
"Wh-where I… am?" Nagi said reflexively, before chiding herself for answering it.
"On yer knees sweetheart," it sounded fed-up, the disembodied… thing speaking to her now hovering by her ear. "See, I heard that whole talk ya were givin' blondie back at the hospital and it just really rubbed me the wrong way." Talk? Which bit? She wished that this joker would be a bit less obtuse with how he went about insulting her.
"The bit about Mister Immaturity, or whatever you wanna called star-crossed lover-boy. Nyeheh! Ah, what a sad-sack," the voice mused on Fret in a hushed tone for a moment, seemingly revelling in mocking him, savouring the moment it could jab at him.
"Anyway! I think ya might just be a bit out of line tossing around your psycho-analysis or whatever about worship and the like."
"Y-You would insinuate my analysis is fallacious?" Nagi asked, beginning to collect herself.
"Pah-hah!" The voice spat out a deep chortle, "Are you kiddin' me?! Little Miss 'Off he flows, like a devilishly handsome gust of wind,', 'His Lordship in dreamy 3-D,' is gonna lecture someone else on worship?!" The voice's mimicry of Nagi was both deeply insulting and eerily accurate.
"The comments towards His Lordship you refer to… 'twas not real love, merely fandom," Nagi clenched her teeth and retorted.
"'Course not, 'course not, that's why you're still mendin' that weak little heart of yours from Mister Mathematics' lecture in abandonment, riiight ? Nyeheh!" She could hear the voice stand up and laugh into the dark night sky – manic, ravenous laughter, like a hyena laughing at wounded prey it intended to devour.
"Sh-shut up," Nagi was not normally one for such curt and crude insults but this headcase deserved one.
"I ain't shuttin' up about this. Ain't it about time you just admit you do half this shit like light and dark or whatever 'cause it's an easy way of keepin' distance? I mean, if ya did, it'd break ya – and from where I'm standin', that's a net positive."
"Go away," was all Nagi could tell it.
"Your wish is my command. Keep claimin' ya want that 'mature' stuff or whatever, ya goddamn hypocrite. All I see rootin' around in this head of yours is the same scared little girl who went and gave herself sunstroke because she thought no-one would accept her for who she is. And that's all you'll ever be." The voice moved away from her, as if it were retreating into the shadows of the alleyway. It did not speak again. Nagi knelt there, staring at her devastated visage in the glass of the machine, completely still. She hung her head low, as if in prayer, and felt herself shut down.