"Ashita no Rondeau"
(Rondeau for Tomorrow)
.
1. Kienai Yume (Indelible Dream)
He had not slept well since he was twelve.
The filthy ways of humanity pervaded his dreams like the lives of noisy neighbours on the other side of a cheap apartment wall, writhing and squealing like the blind, worthless, worms that they are.
Oh they could do so much better, if only they would open their eyes and try!
That life was behind him now.
He went to sleep —true sleep— in the heart of Ukiya's Vacuum Gate with a smile for the irony. No-one could have imagined the future he saw in those last moments in the AEGIS Captain's eyes, how humanity found redemption in a minus Gate, and how he, in the end, was nothing more than a plot device, a pawn, for bringing about that greater destiny.
He thought he should be disappointed, angry, even, but all he did feel was a sense of relief. Peace.
Here, in the heart of a minus Gate, was nothing. No futures, no whispers, no visions, no predictions, no premonitions. Only him, drifting away forever into the dark, and he slept.
.
"… wake…"
… "… wake up…"
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No story ever ends at the ending any more than it began at the beginning. Just because the eye of the narrator has moved on doesn't mean that the story is over.
Of course, just because a story isn't over doesn't mean that the rest is worth telling. Who really cares how the heroes explain themselves to their parents at night or how the losers picked themselves off the battlefield afterwards? Who really wants to know what each and every archetype and plot device does with the rest of their lives or how they make it through from one narrative episode to the next?
Nobody, Megumi would imagine. There was nothing really interesting to tell about her, for example. She picked herself up in front of the National Diet Building and went home in time to make dinner deliveries for her parents. It was a great night for business, what with everyone too glued to their neighbourhood television sets to cook.
Even with all the media coverage, no-one seemed to recognise her at all. One baleful bespectacled high-schoolgirl is very much the same as another.
And after all the bowls were collected, she took over the dishwashing and sent her mother to bed. It was well past midnight by the time she was done, and her father had been standing in the doorway for over an hour, watching her with a helpless, distant, expression.
"I'm sorry we can't do better by you, Megumi," he finally said as she walked past him. "…We are very proud of you."
To which she looked up for the first time since coming home and managed a faint, heart-felt, smile. "I'm okay, dad… you should go to bed."
.
She never did go back to school.
Her parents did not force the issue. The Kuroganes realised a long time ago that their daughter was different and spent much of her life clinging to standard parental operating procedures in an attempt to keep up.
"It's alright," her father said, breaking the long silence that followed her announcement. This was the first time Megumi had properly expressed her thoughts to either parent. Mother wept distraughtly, but Kurogane Yuuzei was a man from a tougher age.
"It's alright," he said, tasting the coppery tears of pride in the back of his throat, "we trust you. If you think studying at home on your own is better, then your mother and I will support your decision."
She couldn't bring herself to tell them that the real reason she did not want to go back to school was because she did not know how to face her classmates. Her Minus Gate was teaching her to read people, and she, in turn, was becoming a better liar.
The small muttering voice in her head that slips out every now and then noted repeatedly that she was better off dead after such a humiliating defeat, except she was too weak-willed to go through with that either.
AEGIS arranged a mass brainwash through Asagiri Reiko to wipe the memory of Kageyama's three-day reign from the mind of the general public.
Sometimes Megumi would catch her father watching her with a soft, helpless look that made her wonder if he was somehow unaffected and if he somehow recognised her as the girl who stood on the side of the giant black robot.
It would have been a simple matter of using her Gate to find out, but she didn't dare to face what she might find.
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This is a different era from when you are used to.
The date is garbled. Not even those who live here are quite sure what day of what year it is now.
The time is "near dawn". Her watch hasn't worked in years, but she glanced at it anyway, an old habit. The symbol above the lifeless clock face belonged to Nike, Goddess of Victory. It calms her.
"Ready?" She turned to the frail figure behind her.
"In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo," the figure mewed, trembling under a dirty hooded evening cloak.
The young woman with the watch snuffed out her cigarette and carefully tucked the remains under the watchstrap. "You remember what to do?"
A small hand slipped itself into hers.
"Look with your eyes, not with your hands… when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you."
She took a deep breath and squeezed back. "Here we go… … opening gate…"
Back up around the corner to a safe distance.
A pressure builds in the still air, stirring up the dust of this ghost city, making it dance around our two strange characters and sucking it into… a hole in space, surrounded by one, two, three, four, five black rings, cycling ominously in mid-air.
"One, two, tick-tock…"
In the faint, cold, morning light, her companion's eyes glowed with rings of orange that were bright as the sun as her black Gate was dark.
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An unfamiliar voice called to him from the other side of time…
"…wake up!"
Why should he? It's warm here, and quiet.
"The clock stuck noon, she's there too soon,"
"We're out of options," the first voice gritted its teeth. He felt it… she— that became instantly known to him the moment she drew near. Ogawa Minoru, called Lich, nineteen… no, thir…?— The woman's hand sank through his defences, towards him, a motion that took no more than a heartbeat but felt like forever… "So WAKE UP!"
He felt her fingers dig into his flesh before the real shock from their contact hit, and The Boy Who Dreams of the Future screamed.
.
He had not slept well since he was twelve.
It would be irresponsible to say that his dreams were always the same. They were not.
But they told the same story, over and over: ruined cities landscaped with twisted bones, scavenging animals with madness in their eyes, curious black structures pinning down a miasmal sky, all across the world, stained rust-red in smog and old blood.
—Death.
—Decay.
—Despair.
He did not cry out from the horror of what he glimpsed in the woman's mind. That sort of scene no longer frightened him. Like any youth of today bombarded with images of violence and pandemonium, he was long since dead to it, even bored of it.
He cried now, because he saw that it was the world in which she lives.
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Next Time: 2. Shikkoku to Hayate