A huge thank you to my reviewers! You guys are a great motivation to stay on top of things, haha.
"Confidence."
Eika shifts uncomfortably, uncrossing and crossing her legs. It's far too hot for a long-sleeved blazer today, but she refuses to take it off. "Self-pity," she says.
"Unconditional love." He's getting better at this; after several weeks of this game, he's started to get the hang of how she thinks.
It's not so different from Yozo, the protagonist of her favorite book.
"Disdain." Eika picks at her hands now, tearing the skin around her nails off in peels and leaving angry-looking red and pink spots, either comfortable enough in his presence or confident that he won't stop her.
"Admiration?" He isn't so sure of that one.
"Maybe," Eika says, and he knows he's wrong.
"How about something else? What's the antonym of grief?"
She tilts her head, thoughtful. "Ecstasy." She doesn't even drink the coffee anymore, but he keeps bringing it anyway, letting it grow cold on the table between them, staining a ring in the bottom of the cup.
"And the antonym of ecstasy is suffering."
"Then the antonym of suffering," Eika says without a moment of hesitation, "is death."
Ken suddenly regrets asking.
"We're stuck now. The antonym of death is suffering, and the antonym of suffering is death."
"Do you really feel that way?" Ken asks.
Eika pauses. "Yes," she says, but she sounds unsure.
"I would disagree," he tells her, frustrated when she doesn't meet his eyes, "I would say that the antonym of suffering is numbness, not necessarily death."
"Death is numb," Eika argues.
"No." Ken shakes his head. "Death isn't numb. Death is nothing." She looks uncomfortable suddenly. Ken tries to smile at her, but it's painfully forced. "I guess we're playing a synonym game now." She doesn't answer. He figures now is as good a time as any. "You left your wallet here yesterday."
"Ah." She looks past him at the wall. She has to have known; surely she looked for it earlier before she came to Anteiku, wondered how she would pay for her coffee, and scrounged something up and put it into her pocket.
"I dropped it by your school. I figured you might get in trouble without your ID." He pauses. "They told me you haven't been there for two weeks."
She tears too deep and a droplet of blood rises to the surface of the wound beside the nail on her index finger. Ken doesn't see it because of the way she hurriedly hides it under the table, but he smells it, and he starts to salivate.
"So," Ken forges on, "You should go and pick it up sometime."
"Thank you, I will," she says, still looking away. He has a feeling that she won't. "Could we play the game some more?"
Ken closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. "Where were we?" he asks hollowly, resigning at last to the fact that Eika simply will not let him in. He's tried to meet her more than halfway, indulge her ramblings and coax the truth out of her, but she refuses, and he's tired. Honestly, he barely knows her. He doesn't know why he tried as hard as he did.
"Suffering," Eika says, apparently conceding his earlier point, "The antonym of which is…luxury, I suppose."
"Ah. Right."
Eika is picking at her hands under the table—the scent is sweet, strong, teasing him—but he'd never tell by looking at her face. She looks so relaxed now, so happy that he's going along with it, not quite smiling but not frowning either.
Eika is damaged somehow, afraid of things that Ken doesn't know about and can't protect her from, and she tears the skin from her fingers and averts her gaze when she feels uncomfortable. She turns inwards, bottles up everything she feels and lets it simmer inside of her, perhaps more content to be hurt than to hurt others.
She's human, Ken thinks, watching her come alive ever so briefly as they play their word game, she's so very, painfully human with her innocence and ignorance and gentle ways, and that, he realizes, is the reason he tried so hard.
On a lonely stretch of highway just outside of the city, it isn't all that unusual to find bodies lying in the gorge beneath, limbs sticking out of bushes, stiff with rigor mortis, as though beckoning some wary traveler to come find them. Sometimes they are young and wild, all dressed up with nowhere to go, couples who jumped together. Sometimes they are old and gray, unemployed and hopeless, carrying a bottle of pills and a length of rope as if they just couldn't decide. At first, it made Ken uncomfortable, because people are not meant to be so still, but it got easier as time went on. He rationalized it because he had to if he was ever going to stop his hands from shaking, told himself that he wasn't hurting them, that they didn't feel anything, that they didn't really need their muscles and tendons and marrow anymore. They weren't human anymore. It was like walking through the cold storage of a slaughterhouse with raw carcasses swinging on display.
He'd gotten better, he really had.
And then Eika Ishihara walked into Anteiku carrying a book by Osamu Dazai, and it was difficult all over again.
Ken is hesitant now, a slight tremor in his fingers as he reaches for a woman who threw herself from the winding interstate overpass, her car's emergency lights still blinking above them like ghost lights on the side of a mountain. She's alone, and she isn't all that old, and even though it isn't likely, even though her hair is wrong and she's just a little too tall, he still turns her over just to be sure, gently rolling her onto her back and holds his breath as he looks at her face.
It's isn't Eika. It never is. But he always looks now, just to be sure.
Later at night, long after that evening's harvest has been carefully packed away, Renji suddenly asks, "What is it?"
Ken tries to keep his voice even. "Nothing."
He receives a look of disbelief. Renji is quiet, not one to speak unless he believes it is absolutely necessary. He's observant, too; surely he's noticed the way Ken has begun checking the faces of the corpses, the apprehension in the gaze that falls upon the young women they find, handling them delicately as though afraid to hurt them.
Ken never answers; apparently, he doesn't have to.
"In my experience," Renji says quietly, "Sometimes, people simply don't want to be helped."
Ken has heard just enough gossip from Kaya and Enji to know that he's talking about himself. According to the hearsay, there was a time when Renji was possessed by his rage, and it drove him to destroy everything he came across on the path to vengeance. They say he changed when he met Yoshimura, but Ken wonders if something happened before that. If he was just tired of being that way.
"In that kind of situation, it's really out of your hands," he goes on, "You have to let them decide for themselves what to do."
Whether or not to live.
Ken must look as crestfallen as he feels, because Renji's hand comes to rest on his shoulder, gentle and comforting. "And sometimes," he adds, "It all works out."
Ken feels Eika's eyes lingering on him as she hesitates in the doorway, slowly making her way across the café. Her usual spot is taken today by a couple of giggling girls from another school, so she chooses the table closest to it. Ken slips the receipt from the store between the pages he's on and sets the book beneath the counter before he goes to make her a cup of coffee.
"You're reading No Longer Human?" she asks curiously.
"It's been a while. I thought I'd give it another read," he says, "Honestly, it's a struggle. I didn't care for it much the first time I read it, and I can't seem to muster the appreciation now."
Yozo, who struggles so much to understand and align himself with the humans around him, eventually reduces them to animals, strange and foreign creatures that love and mourn and fornicate, and he can't understand any of it. In the end, he acknowledges that he is not like them, not in any way, completely disqualified from being human.
It takes no imagination to draw parallels.
"Why are you reading it if you hate it?"
"I never said I hated it. I just don't care for it." He shakes his head. "It…hits too close to home sometimes."
Eika smiles in a way she hasn't in weeks. "I think we all feel a little like Yozo sometimes," she says softly, "Like nobody understands, and like we can't understand anybody."
"In the end, though, I think it usually turns out that we were mistaken." Ken meets her eyes. "Actually, someone did understand. We just didn't notice."
It's one final, desperate attempt, and Ken says the words almost carelessly, not really expecting any good to come of it.
When tears form in the corners of Eika's eyes, he's frozen in shock. She tries to wipe them away on her sleeve and pretend to cough, but he's already seen it. "Yeah," she murmurs, smiling through her tears, "I guess you're right."
Ken goes to get her tissues, but otherwise politely pretends he doesn't notice. "You know," he says, "Yozo and Horiki didn't just think of antonyms. They thought about synonyms, too."
"Synonyms are too easy, though," Eika tells him, "It's easy to group things together that are similar. Coming up with things that are very different is more difficult."
"I suppose." Ken smiles. "What's the antonym of 'farewell?'"
Eika smiles back with all of her heart. "Probably 'welcome home.'"
Ken thinks that, just maybe, things will work out.