A/N: I know when I released the first chapter of No. 6 & 1/2, I said something cocky like "there should have been boning and making out!" As I write, I find Shion and Nezumi a little more resistant to the idea than I thought. As I was writing, I kept thinking, "they'll at least make out by the end of Act I." As I kept writing, they kept refusing to make out.
I'm sorry for the disappointment. I've written up to Act II, Scene II, and the boning doesn't actually come until that chapter - if you want to skip to the boning, that'd be the place to start. I'll have Act II, Scene I up shortly, and Act II, Scene II is almost finished, and should be ready in a day or two.
Thank-you for continuing to read, even if there isn't any naughty business happening (yet)! I'd love if you reviewed if you have time!
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green [...]
- Emily Dickinson, There Is Another Sky.
Shion is reading aloud to one of the mice when Nezumi returns from work. He looks worn and tired, but Shion still doesn't even know what the other does for a living.
Shion decides to try and find out again.
"Nezumi, you're back early."
"It was a short night," Nezumi replies simply, with no more explanation than that.
Shion tries digging a little harder.
"What kind of work do you do? You look exhausted when you come back."
Nezumi gazes evenly at Shion.
"Why do you need to know?"
"Isn't it normal to want to know what a friend is doing?"
"I'm letting you stay here because you saved my life, and you might be useful. That doesn't mean you need to know that much about me or what I do, nor does that even make us friends."
Nezumi lounges on the ragged sofa that has been Shion's bed the last few nights.
"Macbeth," Nezumi comments. "Didn't take you for the type that's into tragedies."
Once again Nezumi skillfully avoids telling Shion anything about himself.
"There's not much variety. You really like tragedies, don't you?"
"'Like them..?' Tragedies are honest. A brutal truth of the world."
Nezumi pulls apart a loaf of bread and hands one half to Shion.
"There are miracles in the world, too," Shion answers honestly.
Nezumi snorts. "Miracles? I can't say I've seen any of those. Plenty tragedies, though."
"Liar."
"What do you know?"
"It was a miracle that I escaped the Correctional Facility. I thought... it was over. I had a feeling a wasn't going to get to live to a ripe old age. I was ready to give up. You saved me."
Only a sheltered citizen like Shion can see something like this as a miracle. He still doesn't understand.
"When you really know what kind of life this will be, then tell me that again. You're so naive that it's making my head hurt. I'm going to bed. Feed the furnace before you fall asleep."
With that Nezumi stalks away into one of the tunnels to his room. Shion sighs, and returns to Macbeth.
It's still early in the day when Shion rises to the sound of a kettle boiling.
"I could have cut you open and been out of here with your purse before you woke up." Nezumi says.
"And a good morning to you, too."
"I'm sorry, did I disturb your slumber, my liege? His lordship will find the stale bread and tea I've prepared for breakfast acceptable, I hope."
Shion clears his plate. He can't remember ever finishing a meal without feeling full before. Now, the meagre meal seems to make him more hungry than it is filling.
"I'm going into the market to buy some food. Come with me, but stay close, and don't try sticking your nose into other people's problems like you're always doing."
Shion knows that West Block is a filthy and unsanitary place. He's been told that much about it. It isn't like he is unprepared for what he finds in West Block.
Filthy and unsanitary... those words alone aren't enough to describe what he sees. The market is along a pier by the ocean.
When he saw it from a distance, hope sparkled inside him. The green-blue light reflecting off the water was beautiful. Even in a place like the West Block there can be beautiful things.
Shion's hope shatters when he reaches the pier. Huge swathes of algae and kelp cover the surface nearly 50 meters out from the shore. The water he can see is filthy and filled with refuse.
Shion spies what he's almost certain is a human calf, separated from the hip and knee.
Chopped into little pieces.
"Is that-" Shion points, words failing.
"Stop pointing, you're drawing attention." Nezumi hissed. "A lot of bodies wash up on shore. The birds pick the meat clean."
Almost as an afterthought, Nezumi continues, "Those birds are mean though. They don't care if you're still moving or not."
Even the birds will rip you apart, he seems to be saying.
Shion struggles against the waves that are crashing against him.
I'm in over my head again. What am I doing?
"If you stand there looking all spaced out like that, someone will stick a knife in your back."
Nezumi pulls him into any alley and out of the main the throng of traffic.
"Things are gonna be tough if you panic every time you see a body floating in the bay." Nezumi's voice is calm and soft like that's just a simple fact.
Shion feels almost weightless. The waves would take even him away one day. Why fight for today so you can die tomorrow?
As simple and natural as the tide. You're born when the tide comes in, and you die when the tide goes out.
Why bother swimming against the current?
"O, that this too solid flesh would melt! Thaw! And resolve itself into a dew!"
Nezimi performs the lines perfectly. His face is a perfect picture of the despair Shion feels in his heart.
"Go ahead and melt into the ground, I'm not going to stop you. Just sit down there and die. But hurry up and decide - don't drag me along for the ride with you."
Shion finds himself gazing into Nezumi's colorless eyes again. When he first saw those eyes, he wondered what things they had seen.
This is part of what they've seen. Yes, but there is still more hiding there.
Shion decides he won't quit, even if the sea had deceived him from a far. Maybe there are still things worth seeing on this Earth.
"I'm not going to sit down and die. Not today."
Nezumi laughs. "'Not today', huh? Well that's okay. Let's get some food to eat just for today."
Shion takes Nezumi's outstretched hand and steadies his body's shaking.
They head back into the fray of bodies. The streets are packed tightly with shoppers and vendors hawking their wares.
"That was Hamlet, right?"
"What?"
"'That my too solid flesh might melt.' Isn't it Hamlet?"
"Oh, that. Yes, it was the prince of Denmark himself who said it."
"That was an amazing performance, Nezumi. 'If my too solid flesh would melt...'"
I think I understand how the prince must have felt facing down the deep, fathomless depths of his mind.
A number of shops seem to be grilling small birds, too large to be chicken. Shion pales.
Surely they don't eat the same birds that scavenge the beach...
"Nezumi, please tell me you don't buy any of that bird meat."
Shion can't stomach the idea of eating birds that have been fattened on the bodies of dead citizens of the West Block. What little breakfast he had threatens to leave him.
"A lot of people think you'll be cursed if you eat those birds. A lot of people are starving and thinking they got more pragmatic concerns to think about than curses, too."
Nezumi shrugs as if to say he couldn't care less either way. "No, I don't buy the bird meat."
He pulls Shion into a cramped shop selling vegetables. Most of them have rotted through in at least one spot.
Shion watches as Nezumi picks through a box of potatoes. He picks out four that seem to have less eyes than the others, are still mostly firm.
A squabble breaks out between two haggardly women over a tomato with mold spots dotting the top.
It's the last tomato the shopkeeper has.
Nezumi tsks and walks away to pay for their own pathetic potatoes.
The two women begin to shove each other. Through the fighting they somehow manage not to crush the overripe tomato.
The lady holding the tomato suddenly falls, a look of surprise blooming on her face. A twisted red grin runs across her dirty white apron.
She shrieks, her shrill voice crying in agony.
A stomach wound. It would be a slow and painful death.
Shion only notices he's moving when he's stopped by Nezumi's hand on his arm. Nezumi's fingers dig painfully into his flesh.
"I told you to keep your nose out of other people's business."
The other woman looks disgusted when she sees that the tomato has been crushed.
"You better not be thinking on going anywhere." The shopkeeper says slowly. "One of you is going to pay for that tomato."
The woman bends over and rustles through the bleeding girl's pockets. The woman on the ground struggles, but the other eventually finds what she was looking for.
Her coin purse.
Shion doesn't know how much more of the West Block he can handle. The despair rolls through his body again.
"And what am I supposed to do with her body?"
The woman dumps the entire coin purse into the shopkeep's hand.
Inside the bag, he finds one gold coin.
"That'll pay for a Disposer. Now get out of here and don't let me see you in here again."
The other woman is still groaning on the floor.
"Nezumi," Shion whispers.
"What?"
"I don't ha
ve the tools to help with a wound like that. She's going to bleed out slowly... I can't do anything... to help."
Nezumi releases his arm and Shion feels cold steel in his hand.
"If you really want to help, put her out of her misery."
What a twisted kind of help that would be.
Shion grips the handle tightly. His heart wavers and cries murder, murder!
Again, Shion is not aware of moving. The woman pleads. Kill me, please. Let it end. Let it end.
He imagines himself back in the clinic . He places the scalpel carefully along the carotid and presses a deep, red line down the length of her neck.
Nezumi whispers softly in Shion's ear, " To die...to sleep... To sleep, and perchance, to dream..."
Nezumi takes the knife from Shion's limp hand and wipes it carelessly on his pants and pops it back into its sheath.
"Hamlet again, if you were wondering. Though maybe Macbeth suits you better."
Shion doesn't understand how Nezumi finds the ability to laugh at him. Kneeling here, soaked through in another human being's blood.
Nezumi must see because he hauls him up by the arm.
"You told me today you were going to live."
Nezumi's eyes accused him of giving up.
"Not today," Shion repeats.
That's right. Another day, but not today. There are still too many experiences in Nezumi's eyes Shion can't understand.
So, not today. Once again Shion finds himself leaning on Nezumi.
"That's... probably enough for one day, huh? Let's go back for today. I'll get some beef on the way home from work."
Once again, Nezumi's eyes haunt him. What about Nezumi keeps Shion's feet planted firmly in this world when his will was drifting away?
If he keeps moping like this, I'll...
Nezumi can't finish the thought.
I'll what? If I keep threatening to kill Shion, he'll call my bluff eventually. Shion is acting unusually weird though.
Nezumi glances to the corner where Shion has hid himself in. Earlier, Nezumi thought he heard Shion crying, but when he checked on him, his face was a blank slate.
Shion hasn't spoken since the market.
Nezumi has no more words for Shion. There is no elegant Shakespearean verse that can explain the depths of despair one feels the first time they see a human life taken so callously.
Shion will come to terms, or he won't. Nezumi has done all he can.
"Make sure you feed the heater before you fall asleep. I'll be pissed if I wake up in the morning with frost on my blanket."
Shion doesn't answer.
Nezumi sighs, and heads towards him room down the back hall.
The attachment he feels towards the other is... unsettling to Nezumi. A rope that can too easily be twisted around his own neck.
"Nezumi."
He might have missed the word if he'd walked any further down the hall.
"Yes?"
"Don't leave yet. Read to me..."
"...Please-?"
Nezumi hesitates. Shion starts to believe the man had padded silently back to his room, when Nezumi's voice carries through the den-
"There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness here;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields
-Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green."
The darkness that threatens to overcome Shion flees at the sound of Nezumi's voice.
Shion lets himself be carried away by the deep passion of Nezumi's voice. He's carried to the small house in Lost Town he'd grown up in, and the little flower garden his mother fretted over every summer.
"Thank you, Nezumi." Shion can't think of anything more adequate to say.
"Will that be all, your highness?"
Shion has already slipped into a peaceful dream. Sitting among the sweet scents of the garden with his mother.
Nezumi takes the blanket from the sofa and winds his way through the corridors of books where he finds Shion.
His knees drawn up to his chin, he's fallen asleep with one of the mice nestled against his neck.
Nezumi drapes the blanket over Shion and whispers. "Good night, sweet prince."