10: The Love of October
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
—W. S. Merwin, The Love of October
October has been—will be—a good month. Beautiful even, one of the last best ones.
The first day is the last day for Saori, she who has either expertly played the entire school or has been victim to too stupid a mind. Each time, you decide on something different.
She gives you a recording of her speech, and when she does, she holds on to your hand for far too long. Maybe this is the reason why you never meet her as a boy, you think, because she's not interested then. Her hand is warm, and her nails scratch along your palm line as she smiles into your eyes.
"Do you remember your first love?" she asks, and tells you of her incestuous relationship with her uncle. He had been fervently in love with her, and she was too young to differentiate the need to be recognized and the acceptance of another's devotion. She has been, she says, playing that role ever since.
Huh, you suppose she just answered your question, even if in only this cycle.
"I had to move to this school to break away from him," she says, "even if I do miss the way he touches me sometimes." She pauses, then says, "He was forty when I was thirteen, and those extra years taught him—well," she licks her lips and look straight at you, "how to fingers and tongues work. The year I came here was the year that I outgrew being perfectly tucked on the backseat."
You steel yourself, but you can feel the goosebumps along your upper arms. You can't tell if it's because of disgust or arousal.
"In any case," she goes on, still lightly tracing your palm with her fingernails, "I suppose it's good that first loves never pan out."
Despite yourself, you think back. You haven't had your first love yet, not really—crushes and cute little middle school liaisons aren't really love. But if you are being honest with yourself, there was a little dark-haired boy in your elementary school, who was skinny in the way that young boys are, and smiled like you were the only little girl he ever saw. Once, his mom brings his dog to school, and you see him flash the same smile. Still, you would stand up and clap for him in class, you would try to pass the ball in gym even though you couldn't breathe, you would grade him paper and discreetly give him half of his points back (you were a teacher's pet, you admit it).
"I remember," you say to her, "but I was fat."
She lets you of your hand, "You aren't now."
You shrug, "Too late for him." You realize you can't remember his name.
She smiles, in that catty, pouty way that you see in magazines a lot, "His loss." She adds, after a moment, "And mine."
You quickly excuse yourself and head back to the dorm. You don't trust either her or you for a moment longer.
-.-.-
You find Shinjiro's pocket watch, and he gives you a strappy leather watch in return. It must have cost a pretty penny—you know that the rose-gold watch face costs more than Shinjiro has lying around.
It's stupid to pretend that you're not moved, but the closer you get with him, the harder he tries to pull back, and the more he fails, and the worse you feel, and the more he assures you that it's okay, and the more you remember how you were.
You had meant this persona you put on, once.
You wonder, once again, for the tenth time since the beginning of this month, why don't you love Shinjiro. (You never did like what you could get, you masochist, you.)
-.-.-
"Shinji," you ask in your best little-girl voice, "Have you ever thought of dying your hair white?"
"What?"
"I mean you already carry a huge sword. It kind of begets itself."
"No," he says gruffly, "You don't touch my hair."
"Please," you beg with quivering eyes.
"No," he maintains adamantly, "anything but my hair."
"Anything huh?" you ask, a hard glint to your smile.
"Uh oh."
"Anything, you said it!"
"Well," he scratches his beanie, "I meant 'anything' in a very strict fashion."
"Keep the next few days of your schedule free," you toss at him as you run upstairs to your laptop, "and don't expect to go to school."
You have done most of the things that you could think of, but you've never flown out to California for Comic-Con. So this time, you do, pulling Shinjiro along even though he protests the entire flight. What do you mean Squall fucking Leonhart, he had demanded sourly. But of course he is your hulking Squall—he fits the character perfectly, you think, with his barely veiled cynicism and Wagnerian brooding. You fit the bill less as the pure-hearted Rinoa, but you want to make Akihiko uncomfortable.
Last time, you had put on a wig and wanted to go as Chun-li, and had tried to get Akihiko to go as Fei Long in an attempt to introduce him to the fashion of being shirtless (the personality also matches up, but it was the costume that you really wanted to get through). Contrary to your wishes, however, Akihiko just got incredibly sulky when he found out that he couldn't do a proper Rekkaken (never mind that his persona element wasn't even fire to begin with).
The convention turns out to be less fun that you had imagined. Sure, there are some pretty outrageously meticulous costumes, including one person who rolls around in a giant pokéball, and there are a few Dantes already. Still, you protest, Shinjiro would have made a fucking killer Dante. There's a similar beauty to his withdrawnness, the same rough edge sort of beauty that all the other girls can see—you can see it too, dammit—but he doesn't, and that is really the only difference between them.
You wander around the stands, and listen to one FX show talk during midday, in which they talk about the future of some show you don't watch. None of the actors are cute, so you push off the thickened crowd, earning many curses and shoves in return. Shinjiro takes it upon himself to deflect as many of those shoves, and when he cannot, he jabs them right back.
You smirk and take his hand.
"You always act like you could be in love with me," Shinji says when you reach the skirt of the crowd, out of the blue, grumbling as if he is complaining about the weather.
You cock your head to one side and ask, half coquettishly and half curious, "And you mind?"
He shrugs, the fabric of his trench coat catching around his neck and then shifting down rigidly. "It makes me feel special. And not special enough." He continues as he shiftily looks away, I pretend you do though," he clears his throat, "when I'm in the shower."
You snicker. "Whatever gets you off. Besides, Rinoa is supposed to be in love with Squall."
"Don't give me that bullcrap," Shinjiro all but glares at you, "you know what I mean."
"You see right through me," you say resignedly.
"I don't get it," he mumbles, "Isn't that supposed to make you actually fall in love with me?"
"Why?"
"Because," he paused, "because I understand you."
"But do I want to be understood? Maybe I want somebody who can let me be who I want to be, not who I am," you say in a moment of uncharacteristic sincerity.
"So you want to play house," he says, a little harshly, but the bitterness stems from him, not toward you.
"If you want to call it that," you wave your hand in a blasé manner, reverting back to your usual stance.
"Because," he is relentless for once, "you know, that's why I want you to…" he falters before he can say the word, "because you see through me."
Shinjiro is so fragile and dependent. He loves you for what you are not. You keep him around like a goldfish, except he also cooks scrambled eggs in bacon grease and hand you aspirins for the hangovers. You bask in his undivided attention, but even that is not enough, it seems, because never once does he want to live for you. So you don't question why you want Akihiko, the one who always has another person behind his eyeballs: the heart wants what the heart wants, right? So Shinjiro can go martyr himself, and you'll kiss Akihiko until he stops thinking about Shinjiro and Miki.
"That's not it," you deny, "You want me because you think you see a kindred spirit, but also an innocence and brightness that you wish you had. You're the same thing," you sneer, "id-ideal, can't argue with Freud."
"I do understand you," he insists, "as much as you try to deny it."
"Do you?" you ask, bordering on anger now, "So why is it that you forget me?"
"Forget you?" he asks bemusedly, for once allowing his confusion to show on his mask of a face, "I would never forget you."
"But you do," you snap bitterly, "every, single, goddamn time."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," he shakes his head, "But I know that you know everybody too well, and feel like nobody knows you. You swing between antagonizing everybody and loving them with a superior, indulging feeling, almost motherly, and definitely patronizing. You're severely bored, maniac depressive, resigned to something, but I can't figure out what, because you have the entire world waiting for you."
"The entire world, huh?" you repeat. Waiting for you to sacrifice yourself.
"We've wronged you," he continues, "I don't know how, but we have, and I am sorry." He says that with so much heartfelt emotion that it dazzles you momentarily.
"Then," you begin, voice trembling like it hasn't in a while, "then why do you have to go and die?"
He falls silent.
Nothing's ever different, you think to yourself angrily, why do you ever even try.
"You have the whole world waiting for you," he says just when your eyes begin to sting and you want to run away. "And yet," he turns away from you, "I have the whole world to give back to the ones that I have wronged."
"If I," you say tentatively, "if I kill myself, do you think it'd be okay?"
He looks at you as if he has been expecting the question, you realize with a jolt. "I wouldn't stop you," he says tenderly, "although I hope you won't. The best sort of—you know…" he stammers with a deepening blush, "emotions and shit, is the kind that doesn't bind."
"Doesn't bind, of course you would say that."
"I—I have to, because there is nothing for me. It will be heartbreaking, but only metaphorically. You, though," he comes closer—almost too close for decency—and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, even though it is tucked neatly already, "you have so many people to love you."
"What does that matter to me," you grumble.
"It helps," he says, pulling you into his arms, softly picking at the nape of your hair at the back of your neck.
You do love Shinji, you can feel it, but it's less like a lover and more as—well, something other than a lover. Doesn't that just make it purer and truer though? "But I don't love," you confess. You get that feeling again, that there's something rotten and festering underneath your skin.
"Maybe this time, you will," he says it like a promise.
"Maybe this time I will again," you repeat, almost like a religious chant.
-.-.-
The dreaded day comes—well, another one of the dreaded days. Today is the one that Shinjiro…
Damn the selfish, miserable fucker, you think, but he's not getting off so easy this time.
You understand what you are trying to—going to—accomplish here; or at least, you understand it as much as you can. A live Shinjiro means a weaker Akihiko, because without the survivor's guilt, Akihiko will never rise above his rut. It's kitschy to say that the grief makes him a better man, but it does take change to make somebody change. You will never see Caesar.
Not only that, but Ken will never grow up. He will never have to bear the burden of another's life on his shoulders, and the unbearable weight of it will never toughen his hide and grow him a spine. It's never 'Shinjiro is dying', but always 'I will be left behind again' for him. He will grow from sour to bitter, sullen to an utter asshole, and it will all be your fault. You will never see Kala-Nemi.
You sink into your bed, defeated before a single Shadow could touch you.
You always talk yourself out of it. Because the part of you that believes that you know better than Shinjiro and should decide his life for him is also the part that believes two lives are greater than one. There is no quantifying a life, in the theoretical sense, but everything could be assigned a number, no? Your health, your courage, your relationships—they're all just numeric, so what is life but simple algebra?
This is not 1984: one plus one is still two and greater than one.
Before you step out of the dorm to go to class, you pull Shinjiro into your arms and doesn't let go for a very long time.
Maybe, you think, as Akihiko passes with a puzzled look, Ken rush off with a sour face, Yukari scuttle back and forth under the excuse of forgetting her pen and her notebook and finally the keys that she used to get in, Junpei with a lewd wink, Mitsuru with a wondering confusion—you think, after all of them had left, maybe the suspense of your potential love might give him the agency to not kill himself.
This time.
But he is like you, and he also never changes. So when night comes, and the rest of them gear up for the big game, you kill Strength and Fortune quicker than you had ever killed Shadows before, and yet you still find—
You don't want to talk about it.
-.-.-
Next time, you tell yourself, next time, you will save him. You promise him as you take his limp hand in yours. Next time, you will do what you've always promised him.
-.-.-
You sit on top of the monkey bars with Akihiko.
The both of you are silent, staring at nothing. It seems to require more energy than there exists in the world to talk right now. Your ass hurts from sitting on the metal bars for too long, but you also lack to energy to move.
You are supposed to talk about Miki with him—about how he can't let go of his dead little sister and how you are her and you also help her grow to be more dead.
Instead, there is silence and the prelude to healing.
-.-.-
Ken tags along when you walk Koromaru, late at night. He's the worst sort of company, not in the least because you hate his guts right now. His expression wavers between fearful and sullen, neither of them the right one.
You reach the park before the shrine, and sit on the seesaw as Koromaru runs around, occasionally peeing to reinforce his territorial marking. You forget that he is a dog sometimes, the way he fights.
Also, you glance at Ken, the way Koromaru is so much more human than some boys.
"I'm sorry," he says.
"Uh huh," you pick your nails. Like that's going to bring him back.
"I've found…" he sighs, "living is… painful," he whispers out, like it is a revelation.
"Guess what, dying is more so," you spit out.
He shrinks. "I guess I wouldn't know, not like my mom did and… he does."
Right, it's always about his mother. "What, you need some mommy milk to help you grow a pair?" you snarl at Ken, who balks at your words, incredulous, white as the homework paper in your notebooks. You hit home run, you know, but that is how you fight—some girls, like Yukari, throw out loud words out like cannons, hoping to land violently, but you strike like a sniper, precise and lethal. "Hey, don't be ashamed, it's better than paraphilic infantilism—but you also have that, don't you?"
Ken looks at you as if he can't believe that this is you saying these intentionally malevolent things.
"You know what," you can't stand his face anymore, "if you promise not to bloody murder Koromaru with nobody around," he ducks behind his hair, "then you take him back."
"Where are you going?" he asks futilely.
Tarturus—where else can you go?
You are angry, like, fuming angry in the head and not caring what happens anymore. It has been a while since anybody has really gotten a reaction from you, but this time you are really pushed over.
You go to the school during the Dark Hour and pull a solo run through, ending up with the white barracks holding you back from the next section, and you stab it again and again and again, until your rapier bruises your hand and you fall to the floor. You roll onto your back, staring at the false ceiling above you, panting, and stay there. You don't look up much inside Tartarus, but it almost looks like the sky up there, the way the darkness gives the illusion of depth.
After fifteen minutes, the air changes—it condenses around you, colder and heavier, almost like somebody pressed too much of it into the room. You know what that means—the Reaper is coming. And he does, wielding his long, glinting scythe, and before you climb to your feet with your Yoshisune blade, he tilts his head to the right just so, as if he can't decide if he has already killed you before.
You make short work of him.
You are a total badass and you know it. That, of all things, makes you feel better, although it shouldn't.
It really shouldn't, but you never end up being who you wish to be—what you tell yourself you will be, the next time. You are less kind, less patient, more bitter, more demanding, and you find yourself unfaithful to the ideals that you began with, or even who you were, at the beginning, the very beginning, when you were born a cheerful little girl with pins in her hair.
You never pause long enough to think this through.