Well, here we are at the second part of this story. I think I should mention that this isn't meant to be a comprehensive AU Blues biography, just a peek at his first few years of life. And I feel it's fair to warn you that I'm going to follow many of the major canon plot points (at least, as well as I can piece them together), and that means the end of Part 2 is going to suck for Blues and you won't like it. But that's just how it is. Trust me...
Finally, a big THANK YOU to everyone who has left feedback!
The cicadas came first. Their song started as a solitary, droning buzz—a precocious early riser—which was joined by a second, then a third, and at last so many that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other. Next was a warbler's whistle, bright and clear, and the low cooing of doves. Then crows began to caw, sparrows chattered, and a hawk screeched twice from somewhere high above.
From behind closed eyelids, Blues could already detect the pale grey light of early morning. He reached up and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Even before dawn it was already hot, and the air was heavy and thick.
Suddenly the window began to rattle, and the whole house shuddered and creaked around him. He jerked his eyes open, flipped over onto his stomach and buried his head beneath the pillow. With his free hand he grasped the mattress and held on as his body rocked back and forth. His thoughts turned to the leaky roof above. If only it would hold... He let out a muffled gasp, though he knew there was no one around to hear.
It was over in a matter of seconds. Crows squawked excitedly in the trees outside. For a few minutes after the shaking subsided he remained frozen where he was, clutching the pillow to his head and muttering words of comfort to himself. At last he dared to relax his fingers, ducked out from beneath the pillow, sat up on the mattress and opened his eyes.
The only difference he could discern about the room was a sprinkling of fine dust floating down from above. He squinted. The walls were just barely visible in the pre-dawn glow; above his head were the dark, twisted outlines of the calystegia which in the spring had pushed its way in through the permanently stuck-open window and now blanketed half the ceiling. A few purplish buds pursed toward the light, just beginning to open. It somehow consoled him to remember that plants couldn't feel fear, and he reached out and stroked the leaves of a wayward hanging vine.
He waited. The house shuddered a second time, more gently than before. A single crow cawed once in protest. Blues didn't bother to take cover, but with his left hand he pulled his generator up onto the mattress and against his chest while still clutching the calystegia with his right. The flowers swang back and forth from the ceiling.
He stared with stifled longing at the open door. The hallway appeared as a uniform black rectangle, empty and silent. It had been three years—perhaps, even to the day—since he'd last experienced an earthquake. On that morning, which now seemed like a lifetime ago, Dr. Light had charged through the door and flung himself over him, shushing his cries until the two of them, silent, had lain listening to the distant sound of one glass after another shattering onto the kitchen floor.
"Blues, it's over," he'd said after the shaking had stopped. Then, with a chuckle, added: "you can let go of me now."
It had taken the greater part of ten minutes for Dr. Light to pry Blues's hands away.
Those days are long gone, stupid, thought the Blues of 2064 to himself as he loosed his grip from the calystegia. It's just a little tremor, anyway. Nothing to be afraid of.
Nevertheless he was compelled, as he often was when he felt anxious, to count his collection of energy cells. He kept them in a brittle cardboard shoebox next to his mattress so that, if he happened to wake up frightened during the night, he could reach out, take one in his hand, and be assured by its gentle silvery glow. He picked up the box and cradled it between his legs. One, two, three... He turned each of the smooth, spherical orbs over in his fingers as he counted. This was ridiculous... Of course they were all there...
Nine. He needed four cells to fully charge his generator, with which he could then charge himself every two days for about a month—although within the past two years, he had to admit, that had decreased to more like three and a half weeks. Nine was a good number. It meant an entire month ahead without worry, and another month after that to figure out how to replenish his supply.
Luckily for him, the cells charged motorbikes, garden tractors, and jet skis too—and the people of the small communities of rural Shizuoka rarely locked their garages and toolsheds. Stealing them was the easy part; the hard part was making the night-long voyage down from the mountain in perfect darkness and, once in town, ducking into the shadows to avoid being seen by the occasional homebound drunk. Dogs were a constant hazard too, as were the late-night patrolling policemen who, on one terrifying occasion, had chased after him demanding to know where his parents were.
Then there were the security cameras that blinked down from the lampposts at intersections and outside of banks. To protect himself, he wore a surgical mask and a pair of scratched and slightly bent sunglasses he'd salvaged from a public waste bin—and still, the thought of going anywhere near humans, even in the dead of night, even if he couldn't be recognized, filled him with dread.
Blues put the cells back into the box. Emboldened by the waxing light of the approaching dawn, he stood and dragged himself into the hallway. The floorboards creaked under his feet as he walked. He paused in front of his mirror, which had slid onto its side during the earthquake and was now lying face up on the floor. It was clouded with age and marred by a jagged crack in the middle, but it was the only mirror he had. He propped it back up against the wall, crouched on the floor and, squinting at his dim reflection, shook the dust from his hair.
Two bright brown eyes squinted back at him. It was a relief to see them: sometimes he was surprised to remember that he had a face at all. And just recently for reasons he couldn't understand, he'd sat on his knees gazing at it from different angles for hours at a time, searching for any feature that looked less than human.
Perhaps it was too perfect: flawlessly symmetrical, untouched by acne or the little scars and bumps that humans, even young ones, accrue just from being in the world long enough. Or maybe there was something about the smoothness with which he turned his head, or moved his lips when he spoke—or was it only his imagination?-that betrayed a lack of the flitting spontaneity of the organic.
A flare of pain in his midsection interrupted his thoughts. He groaned. Not this again—his core flaw didn't have the decency to leave him alone even on mornings like this. He leaned back against the wall adjacent to the mirror and watched his own wincing face as he clutched at his stomach.
A five. He didn't know why he still bothered to rate them, but he'd kept up with the habit.
At last it was over. As he pushed himself to his feet his elbow brushed against the bathroom door, which creaked open halfway. Before pulling it shut again he caught a glimpse of the small mountain of broken, rotted, and unusable things he'd gathered there when he'd first discovered the house: gutted electronics, brown, curled magazines, prescription medications, moth-eaten women's clothing, rusted aluminum cans whose contents had expired in 2053. Flakes of plaster, shaken minutes ago from the sagging ceiling, had settled over everything like dirty snow.
His first few days on his own had been a panic-stricken blur. He didn't know which was worse: the biting cold from which he couldn't escape, the pitch-black of the forest at night, or his incessant compulsion to look over his shoulder. With the code gone, returning home meant death—and he was so miserable that he almost persuaded himself to turn back and submit to the fate Nurtech had in store for him.
Then he found an abandoned shrine, netted with the brown skeletons of dead vines and flanked by three rotted and leaning torii. It was a tiny structure, barely large enough for him to stretch out his legs, and it offered no protection from the cold—but at least it was dry, and it shielded him on three sides from the wind. He regained a little courage, slept fitfully, and decided he'd return there the following night, but the next morning he found the house.
It loomed behind the trees like a lion in wait. Blues's first impulse upon seeing it was to crouch behind a snow-filled bush for cover, but he soon realized with certainty that he was alone and reemerged. As he drew nearer, he noticed a clearing three meters wide that looped down the hill behind him, a cracked and potholed concrete river glazed over with ice: the ruins of an ancient road. A burst of freezing wind set Judith's scarf flying in front of him, and he let out a gasp. Desperate to get out of the cold, he made a break for the structure. It was solid beige, with a grey tiled roof, trimmed around the windows and doorframes with rotted wood. He pressed his face up against one of the windows, but could see nothing through the darkness. He investigated a large sliding glass door off to one side, but a pair of floor-length lace curtains, yellowed with age, concealed the interior. The front door, of course, was locked.
Then he spied the open window on the second story, and below it a rusty ladder half-buried in snow. He dug the ladder out, propped it against the wall, and in a kind of reverse-escape ambled up and spilled into the room on the other side.
It was mostly empty, except for a mildewed mattress on the floor and some faded textiles piled pell-mell in the open closet. A few large, clearly defined light spots stood out on the walls like inside-out shadows: the ghosts of furniture and picture frames long since removed.
In the remainder of the house he'd found a few things worth keeping: a rusty utility knife from the kitchen cabinet, a few unopened boxes of pencils, a pair of house slippers, a portable lantern which he couldn't yet charge, and small pieces of furniture that were filthy but otherwise usable. He quarantined the rest in the upstairs bathroom—he had no reason to go in there, anyway—and, in an attempt to make the place more bearable, swept the dust, dead cockroaches, and flakes of plaster out the front door.
At the time, he didn't know how long the house had been vacant. Only later in his life, when he'd applied to his memories of it his knowledge of the rate at which wallpaper fades and peels, the age of a roof before it begins to sag, and how long it takes exposed wood to dry and turn grey, would he feel confident enough to hazard a guess of twenty years, at least.
He spent his first few nights in the house sitting bolt upright on the mattress in pitch black, shivering inside a moldy blanket and jumping at the sound of the wind whistling through the trees. During the day he didn't know what to do with himself, and he paced back and forth with feverish impatience, watching the timbre of the light shift as afternoon faded into another evening. Fresh snow collected in the corners of the windows, ghostly against the deepening dark.
Oppressed by the decay around him, he nearly gave in to his despair—but he remembered what Dr. Light had said about his human need to attach meaning to experience, and he took his utility knife in hand and whittled one of his pencils until it was sharp. He spent the rest of the day sketching a life-sized camellia—much like the one he'd burned during his escape from the lab—on one of the papered walls. When he'd finished, he drew the maple, and after that the pines. They stretched from floor to ceiling, and he sculpted each individual leaf and needle with a devotion that was like love. The days melted into each other. His work overflowed into the hallway, the stairwell, the downstairs living room, and the kitchen. Sometimes he paused to sit on the floor and gaze up at his work, wiping his eyes. By the time every possible space was filled, the warblers were whistling and it was spring.
He settled into a routine that kept him alive and sane. He stole or salvaged the things he needed from town—and although it was dangerous work, he still had to find ways to entertain himself once it was over. During the day he explored the mountain and the areas that lay just beyond, and little by little pieced together a mental map dotted with useful landmarks.
He was careful to avoid the hiking trails that wended around the mountain. He was grateful for the bells some of the hikers wore on their packs to alert bears to their presence—they alerted him, too. Afraid though he was, sometimes, driven by a force he couldn't understand, he followed behind at a distance hoping to catch a glimpse of them. There was something about the timbre of their voices, even when they were too far away for him to comprehend, that filled him with yearning. He liked the good natured cackles of the middle aged women, and the silly old men when they burst amorously into song.
At night he lay on his back and, as moths fluttered in the moonlight coming in through the window, in his mind's eye his flipped through the hundreds of pages of sheet music he'd seen in his first year of life. Anything he'd ever set his eyes on was his forever—and once he'd found something he wanted, it was only a matter of visualizing the keyboard, all eighty-eight keys perfectly sized and proportioned, and placing his hands over the image. Without ever touching a real piano, he expanded his repertoire by hundreds of pieces.
In the winter he moved the mattress to the adjacent room with windows that could be shut, and to keep out draughts constructed a kind of makeshift tent around it from wooden chairs and moth-eaten rugs. Each night he crawled inside and huddled under a mountain of blankets until the urge to sleep released him from his misery. On especially cold nights, or whenever his loneliness brought him to tears, he heard her voice.
"Well, what did I say?"
"What I needed to hear."
"Oh, Blues."
Although he didn't realize it at the time, he was lucky not to be an organic being. He didn't require a constant supply of clean water and couldn't fall ill. No matter how much the cold tormented him in the winter, it couldn't kill him. In the summer, the mosquitos left him alone. If stung by hornets or centipedes, or bitten by snakes—the latter of which happened once when he lost his footing along the grassy slope of a ravine, and slid down feet-first onto a sunbathing mamushi—the pain was short lived, and their venom had no power to injure him. Having a perfect memory meant he could never get lost.
There were many little things he had the luxury of not worrying about—and a couple of big things he would have given anything to forget.
He took the canvas backpack from its place in the living room closet, climbed back up the stairs, and carefully slipped his generator and five of the nine energy cells inside. Then he slung the backpack over his shoulders and prepared to head out into the morning.
As usual, he had to brace his shoulder against the front door and give it a hard shove, but at last with a woody squeak it popped out of its frame. He was just about to take a step outside when he noticed a cicada flailing on its back on the ground below. On bent knee, he turned the creature right side up, grasped it by the wings—it squealed and flailed its legs—and set it down a meter's distance from the garden path. It took a few languid steps forward and came to a stop. Though he knew better, Blues liked to imagine its big black eyes were regarding him with a look of gratitude.
He felt sorry for the ones that were too feeble to fly any longer, and sorry too for the multitude of others only weeks or days away from the same fate. After long years of infancy underground, they emerged into the sun only at the twilight of their lives. He hated treading on one by accident: the screech of protest it let out just a fraction of a second too late, followed by the terrible crunch of its fragile exoskeleton collapsing under his foot—but more than that, he felt it was only right to let them live out the short remainder of their lives in peace. They reminded him a little of... well, of himself.
Few hikers came to the mountain in the heat of summer, but one could never be too careful. Holding on to the branches of trees for support, he lowered himself in a zigzag path down the steep side of the hill. Just to hear the sound of his own voice, he recited the names of the trees he passed. Chamaecyparis obtusa, acer palmatum, lagerstroemia fauriei, rhododendron indicum, cryptomeria japonica. He recognized them all like fond friends.
After an hour of walking he heard the roar of the water. He froze and cocked his ear toward the sound. The waterfall itself was nothing novel—he'd heard it dozens of times before. What he was listening for—what he hoped not to hear today—was the sound of human voices.
Almost certain he was alone, he crept along the ridge overlooking the falls. Below it was the rush of the river pouring over the cliff, and below that a dark blue pool flanked by sunbaked boulders. No one was there.
Finally allowing his excitement to take him over, he slid down the ridge on his back end, and climbed steadily down the rock face to the pool. He pulled off his shirt and stepped out of his drawstring shorts: precious things recovered from the riverbed a day's walking distance downstream. He hung them from a nearby low-hanging branch.
On bare feet, he walked crabwise along the cliff face toward the falls through a spray of cool mist. Just before he reached the water he hesitated.
Go on, you idiot. Do it!
He leapt forward into the stream and braced himself, gasping, against the force of the water. For half a minute the shock of cold was torture; then it gave way, as he'd known it would, to euphoria.
He laughed. Small acts of daring like this, the things which at first had seemed so difficult and uncomfortable, were exactly what made him feel the most alive.
He'd come here with serious intent: to revel in the final days of the dying summer. Winter was coming. One day, soon, his store of energy cells would be depleted. Tomorrow, anything could happen. Tomorrow his ailing core might give out, or another earthquake—a catastrophic tremor like the one that struck Shizuoka in 2033—could cause the roof to collapse and crush him while he slept.
The trees groaned and creaked, and the boulder beneath him shifted back and forth, but this time it was a welcome feeling: like being rocked comfortably by a giant hand. Willing himself not to be frightened, he leapt from the cliff feet first and into the pool below. With a big gulp of air filling his "lungs," he floated on the surface with his arms spread out beside him and gazed up at the cloudless sky through a gap in the canopy.
The fractured outline of the sun shape-shifted, partitioned by swaying branches. Pain gnawed at his stomach, but just for now he didn't mind.
The present was all he had. Might as well try and enjoy it.
When he returned home late in the afternoon, he found the cicada exactly where he'd left it—its little body flattened inside the ridged outline of an unfamiliar bootprint.
