Chapter Five: Too Human Tonight
The snow started to fall, and he didn't go home.
The snow and the rush hour and stopped the traffic on the roads. It got dark, and the streets became streams of headlights and brake lights trickling through the city, bunching up at junctions like blood clots before the inevitable heart attack. Beneath his feet, subway cars would be wrappers of almost solid compressed flesh, smelling like locker rooms and hotter than ovens. Anyone with any sense was walking. It was a long walk, but he didn't care.
He came up into Bit Valley and was surrounded by salarymen. He might have been one of them. Get up in a tiny apartment alone or with a woman who'll kiss your cheek if you're lucky, drift to work, spend your day working in a box that's so small you have to be reminded it's not already your coffin, drift home, eat dinner that'll never quite taste as good as what your mother made you when you were young, go to bed and thank your lucky stars you can do it all again tomorrow. Maybe in between you'll play with your kids or help them with their homework. Maybe your eldest son will look up from Gran Turismo long enough to tell you he's doing well in school, and you'll be proud. And when the day is over maybe you'll even have sex with your wife, because it's too simple to be making love, and there's not enough passion left for fucking. But afterwards she'll say she loves you, and you'll say it back.
He kept walking. No point wishing for a life you can't have and don't even want. Just be part of a crowd. A drop of water in a stream. No, he was smaller than that. A molecule of water in the bay. Moving back and forth but never really going anywhere. Maybe he was part of a wave that pounded on shore, but the shore never changed either.
That wasn't true. Youji Kudou did change things. He changed things in a way that made sure no one could ever change things back again, no matter how hard they tried. There's no more permanent way to change a life than ending it.
Sometimes he asked himself if they did the right thing. He tried to stop himself, answering that it didn't matter whether it was or not, but he asked anyway. He knew it wasn't right, but he did it anyway. He knew Omi believed Weiss were right in what they did, but then the poor kid had a moral compass so screwed up it permanently pointed to the lodestone on Persia's desk that the shadow man probably used as a paperweight. He knew Ken didn't think they were right, but thought what they did had to be done: a necessary evil, he'd called it once. Aya did it for a girl, that was all Youji knew. Aya had never explained and Youji had never said anything, especially not that he doubted whichever Aya their newest teammate had taken his name from would appreciate what he was doing with it.
And Youji knew the answer to his own question. He didn't kill with Weiss because he thought it was right, or because it had to be done or even because of the memory of someone long gone. He did it because the targets Weiss hunted changed other people's lives for the worse, and though he could never save their victims, at least he could stop it from happening again. It wasn't noble or heroic, and there were so many other ways, but Youji had made his choice, and there was no one left to care.
He lit another cigarette and wondered if he could even use that excuse this time. The job this time was to clear up Kritiker's mess. The organisation had become too good at breeding secrecy and betrayal, and now one of their own had kept secrets. They themselves had been betrayed. Get close to a man who had upheld the law, whose only crime had been not being special enough until he had stolen another secret. Youji didn't know why he'd done it, he didn't even know what the secret had been that was worth killing for. He would at least find out who the buyer was, they would say a last hello very briefly, but he might never know the motive. Weiss never asked for reasons or excuses, they simply delivered judgement. But this time Youji had to get to know the target, become his friend, learn his secrets, push him and pull him in the right direction, walk him blind down a path towards a cliff and then give him a good shove. Et tu, Kudou?
The cigarette wasn't enough to keep him warm anymore, so he stopped for coffee in sight of the statue Hachiko. All he cared about the coffee was that it was hot, the rest was irrelevant. As he drank he watched the old dog statue, and desperately hoped someone would meet under it as he had done many times. He stared across the road, feeling cold even as the coffee burned his throat and stomach, and alone. Then he was rewarded. A high school boy wearing glasses to make him look smarter paced around the statue to keep warm. A girl with a deliberately short skirt and honest glasses walked up and waved. The boy was so busy beaming he forgot to breathe, then he took her hand for a moment, let it go, and they walked off into the snow together. Youji suddenly felt warm.
It would have been easy to get on a train at the station, but Youji kept walking. Even in the cold, a freezing winter night with the snow falling, Harajuku made him smile. He could feel the style in the air. Shops offered suits straight from the designers in Europe from windows blazing with light, as if style was a gift from a benevolent deity. Maybe it was. Youji stopped, examining a thick winter overcoat knit from the most aristocratic Italian sheep, and tugged thoughtfully at the lapel of the well-worn trench coat left over from his PI days that, despite everything, he couldn't bring himself to throw away.
Then there were the girls. It wasn't even Sunday, but they were still there. Youji had to admire their dedication: rush home from school, get out of the uniform, spend nearly an hour dressing and making themselves up just so they could walk the streets with their friends on a freezing evening in the snow. They glistened and glittered, walking fashion statements. Beautiful, in their own way, but ugly at the same time. He could have been in a manga. These weren't real girls anymore, they were stylised creations of their own imaginations. They might as well have been pictures on a page. There were days when Youji wondered about himself. He was half expecting to bump into Rick Deckard coming the other way.
He wondered where the cynicism had come from. He'd been Kawaii once. He'd danced with rockabillys, flirted with gothic-lolitas and once even helped a girl out of her sailor suit. The truth was he'd grown up. He was still a pretty boy, but he was a smart pretty boy. The girls he liked were grown up, they knew themselves and they knew what they wanted. They took him home because what they wanted was a pretty boy who'd show them a good time, take them for a ride and wouldn't make a fuss when they kissed goodbye. They'd all grown up enough to go into it with their eyes open.
He thought of the girls in the flower shop. There were days when you could practically taste the hormones in the air. They tasted like flat soda: strangely sweet, but something was missing. He felt sorry for Omi and Ken, they were the right age for the girls. The three years between him and the oldest of the girls was too much of a chasm to jump. You did your best bit of growing up in those three years. Before, you were a kid borrowing your name being bounced around the world by merciless chemicals inside your own mind. Afterwards, you got to be you for the first time in your life. To those girls, he was unattainable, just a fantasy figure who they got to giggle over every day. He may as well have been posing next to Teru in a Glay poster on their bedroom walls.
The weird thing was that he missed it. He realised he'd reached Shinjuku again when he saw the National Stadium through the snow, and felt a pang of regret. He had been away for a week, but it felt like forever. He felt like he'd left himself behind there. In Shinjuku he was a parody of Youji Kudou, spewing lines that Bogart would have made sound a hundred times better. Back in the shop he would be himself, and he would be home. The girls would buzz around like bees with a warped sense of priorities. Omi would carve through schoolwork with ease then come to a screeching halt when he hit the part of his life that his chessboard brain couldn't deal with. Ken would attack everything he did with savage perfectionism even if it was just making flowers into the shape of a cartoon cat. Aya would just stand there like he always did, the only man in history to win a staring contest with a sunflower. One day, Youji and Ken were going to bring in a cardboard cut-out on his day off and see if anyone noticed.
Thoughts of his team helped him focus. His hours of introspection were almost up. It was time to get back to work. He had decided a long time ago he would do his job, and do it to the end. He would never let down someone who depended on him again. Once in a lifetime was enough.
When he got back to the hotel, the phone was ringing.