Track for this chapter:
Falling, by Yiruma, from the album From the Yellow Room
One morning all had seemed well with the world; the sky was a clear greyish-blue, promising rain, but not in a threatening way. Maybe it would even snow.
The prospect of the bonfires awaited him and Hikaru that night, as it had every night for a week, and it had not been too busy. Ryo was present and, more surprisingly, actually awake, and nobody was messing up the scenery.
But as a mountain is quiet right before it erupts, so was today.
All of a sudden a mass of bodies blew into the lobby, a tangle of arms and legs headed towards them, as Ryo rushed out of the elevator on the other side.
One mass shoved something at him - the mass that was Masamune, Gingka, Yuu, and the unwilling Madoka - while the projectile from the elevator shoved something else at him.
"Here, will you babysit my ferret?"..."I need you to file these papers."
"THANKS, BYE!"
And then the tangle of four people and the blur that was Ryo tried to turn around at the same moment and collided into each other and the water fountain, spilling liquid across the tile, sending screaming bodies hurtling and slipping across it, and wetting the trousers and skirts of all occupants of the lobby up to the knees.
And as the island's always still after an eruption, ashes coming down and getting up the noses of the survivors, sixty-two people stood frozen and wet in the lobby while at least 20 of those sixty were on the floor in the giant puddle still spilling out from the busted pipe; and at the same time, ironically, it started to snow.
The ten people who were agents muttered excuses and filed out of the room.
The thirty-five people who were customers left in a huff.
And then the twenty on the floor got up and left.
This left Ryo, Gingka, Masamune, Madoka, and Yuu in a moaning, sodden heap on the floor, and Tsubasa and Hikaru standing at the lobby desk, Hikaru on a chair so her clothes would not get wet, and Tsubasa with an angry ferret and a heap of mushy paper.
For a moment all was still and silent, save for the rage building up inside him and the trickle of the busted pipe; the ferret angrily squealed at him and tried to claw its way up his hair.
And then the tension and stress bottled up since last summer came pouring out.
He stomped over to the pile of people on the floor.
"I'm not your ferret-sitter", he said to Gingka, dropping the angry animal on top of him.
"And I'm not your secretary", he said to Ryo, dropping the paper on top of him.
"I quit."
And then he left.
When he hit the sidewalk, he hit it running.
Dumpsters and alleyways flashed past him, blurred by the frustrated tears streaming from his face. His hair clip fell into the gutter with an audible THUNK; he left it. He realised he'd forgotten his backpack and jacket at the WBBA; but he didn't care, nor did he feel the bite of the cold on his bare arms.
At last he couldn't run anymore, and found himself in an unfamiliar part of the city, lost, wet, and lonesome; he also found that he couldn't care less.
He fell against the wall in the side of an alley, watching the snow swirl and muddy in the gutter on the sidewalk, and shut his eyes.
Tsubasa vaguely remembered opening his eyes at some point, just long enough to glimpse a tall figure standing in the alley, wearing a long white jacket with blue stripes down the sleeves; the figure dropped several large brown bags on the alley floor and raced through the snow towards him before the world went dark again, and he succumbed with no protest.
When he awoke again, his eyes felt puffy and swollen; he could hear the anxious ring of voices nearby, hauntingly familiar, but he couldn't quite place them. Before his slitted eyes he could see and feel the heat of a blazing fire, the weight of a blanket over him.
He didn't know how many times he drifted in and out of consciousness, only that he was somewhere he'd never seen before. In the hours of darkness surrounding him, he felt like he was falling downwards in an endless spiral, drifting aimlessly, not knowing when or where he might land...
...oddly at peace.