The cold night air grazes me with a crisp chill. Moist, soft breeze, the perfect weather for a jog around the corner, I guess. A breeze that would make you forget the collective bullshit piled up on your rapsheet. Who am I kidding. Not even a fucking hurricane would make this pit of shit I’m feeling in my stomach go away.
Across the highway guardrails, Adachi rested. Its’ denizens couped up in their own self-fullfilled damnation—tired after binging a 120 work-week. A mix of nullcasters and lowcasters—both working for a corp that sees one as a nut, and the other as the bolt.
Both crowds dropping their blinds, the slats letting through a soft shimmering blue pulse.
Those windows that had no blinds, had no life either. Like a dark gouge covered by plastic wrapping. You want to look inside to see how bad the wound is. But you’re afraid that something might peek back.
It was the exact same feeling I got from staring into Teach’s trunk.
A gaping monster, wanting to hold me in its gut, promising it’s drunk enough water to stave off the acid.
“It’s a bit cramped,” I hear him snore-drone. “But should fit if you curl up.”
“Yeah,” I say, voice barely above the hissing of a faraway tram. “Guess beggars can’t be choosers.”
He tries to help me in, but I shake a no. I settle, and lie down. He nods at me, before he pulls up an old burner phone.
“Just need to make a few phone-calls,” he says, the tone ringing, before his eyebrows perk when they answer. He walks away, their chatter fading with the distance.
Crepper leans against the rear light before giving me a half-profiled stare.
“Kumori,” he says, that voombox doing wonders for clarity. “Here’s a tip.”
He points at the food canister.
“You ever find yourself in trouble—you pop that thing open, and you use that shell. You hear me?”
I tilt my head, raising an eyebrow.
“Right—offering them an acute dinner, and hope they’ll dine with you—”
“I mean the battery slotted for the anti-kinetic tech, kid.”
He pushes himself off the light and grabs his snub-nosed sawed-off from his inner pocket. Breaking it open, the hinge clattering like an echoing ratchet wrench, he pulls out the remaining battery-shell.
“Look here.”
He puts the shell close to my face, prodding a tab on its rear.
“Your fingers will hurt—but one good press here—”
He pushes in, the tab separating from the shell barely, before he stops.
“Poof—twelve rounds in one go.”
“Damn, Crepper,” I say, shaking my head. “Almost like you’re expecting it to happen.”
“Judging by how things go for you kid—I’m most definitely betting on it.”
“Odds in your favor, huh? So that’s what the catch was all along.”
He snickers shaking his head.
“Still think I’ve got strings attached, huh, kid?”
“Like a fucking marionette wired to four crosses.”
He shakes his head, grin almost as bedazzling as the milky way belt above us. His eyes linger for a long while. Hell, they even started to glimmer, rivalling the stars.
“You’d think a place like Tokyo,” he starts, lower eyelids creeping up like a dam holding behind the waterworks. “Would devour the very notion of you getting a bit of stargazing.”
He exhaled a single muted chuckle, before he looks down at me.
“But—no,” his eyes were bloodshot. “Another courtesty from government investing.”
His smile brooked no mirth. He looks back up again.
“Sure is a sight though, isn’t it?”
I look up at the night sky.
“Yeah.”
I look up at the milky way belt—a closed eye wearing the most bedazzling obsidian eyeshadow spruced with glittering diamonds. Galaxies wept from the eye like a snowstorm of shimmering stars and solarsystems melting into liquid pearls.
“You know,” Crepper says, breaking the silence. “Used to do this a lot with my daughter.”
His scoff barely came through, before he looks down, and releases his breath into a shuddering, yet soft cascade.
Teach approached us, standing with his hands on his hips. Crepper glances at him. Teach nods in return.
Crepper looks to me.
“Break a leg out there, kid.”
The trunk closes with a clunk, the locking mechanism groaning as it tightens.
<hr>
The girl stood on a wooden stool before a mirror, wearing the Milky Way galaxy. Barely able to fill half its length, a fifth of the dress scraped the unclean floor with each spin, sullying it more and more—the girl’s bedazzled giggles filling the room from the visage she had turned into.
“It’s so cool,” she hisses with a honeyed squee in her tone.
Biting her lower lip, she leaned in—careful to balance one foot on the back of the wooden stool.
She surveyed the galaxy upon her—eyes landing on three glimmering dots.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Orions belt,” she says, reminiscing a documentary about constellations she saw the other day. It was the only channel that worked.
And it was free. She never knew why, nor did she bother to ask. She was just happy it worked as it kept the shadowy claws of the night at bay.
Her fingertips trailed along the slick, liquid-esque membrane. It felt like soft glass, and looked like staring straight out of a window in space.
When suddenly—the stool-leg screeches, and pops the girl down with a yelp.
The concrete floor of their apartment would definitely leave a bruise, the girls eyes teeming with tears.
Which subsided when looking upon the flowing fabric of the dress again.
A dark galactic pond, the stars shifting unevenly, as if they really were there at different distances. Her unevenly toothed grin could not stretch any further. Her breaths—deep and quick.
“This is so effing cool! How did they even..."
And then it appeared. Floating in the nothingness of darkness within the door of the apartment. A face that stretched into the likeness of a fox and a snake. It''s eyes—thin dark slits as the void surrounding it.
When suddenly, irises—fiery from the pupil, a dark blood-red on the edges—illuminated her scowl.
It did not waver the girls grin. No. Instead, the sight welled her with happiness.
“Look mama! I am the milky way! Just like—”
“What the fuck,”
This, however.
“Do you think,”
Did.
The lady closed the door behind herself.
“You are doing—”
The lady removed her stiletto heel.
“You little shit.”
“M-mama?”
The girl did not scream. She did not beg. She did not weep.
But the lady?
Oh she shrieked. Her voice, a cranial drill at max torque. A battlecry from a whore mother—who rushed in—to grab the girls arm.
So she could send her galvanized stiletto heel—
Right into the girls arm—
<hr>
—SLAM!
“Ghkk! Argh, fuck!”
Headbanged the damn trunk-door.
“You okay in there, kid?” he says, his voice muffled by the trunk.
With a clattering snap, the darkness splits like an eye, the trunk door opening to a blinding spotlight—shit, could barely waver my hands to cover my face.
“Here.”
Could barely register what the fuck he was ''here-ing'', let alone any basic shapes.
I slowly clamber out of the trunk—toe-catches the edge sends me stumbling out—reflexes grip the lower lip of the trunk, saving me from a face plant.
“Easy, kid,” Teach says, reaching in to help—which I elbow off.
I lean against the open trunk with pocketed hands. Damn. Teach really went straight to the front door, didn’t he?
The cylindrical apartment complex stands a few steps away from the sidewalk we were parked on.The wind drags a hoarse voice through the rectangle-punched breezeway corridor entrance, lit by aluminum fluorescent tubes that coat everything in blue and pus-green sheen.
“Don’t forget the food, Kumo-chan.”
Right. The canister.
“You want it or not?”
I take it and see the light is still a solid green. Crepper’s shell keeping it juiced up. Same shell he told me to use in case shit hits the fan. Good thing we drove past all those fans. If only I could remember how he opened it up.
I gaze at it, the green light developing itself into my sight as everything around it darkens. Then it starts to blink.
… He pressed this button here, gave the canister a slight twist, and presto. Steam hisses from the crevices as the canister opens in the center, and elongates to reveal two perfectly placed takeout boxes in their own neat little compartments. A small tilt of the canister, and they gyrate, remaining upstanding. A slight jerk—they rock in opposite force.
Shit. Ryo-Kata wasn’t kidding when he said it could handle earth-quakes.
The shotgun shell is embedded under the lower takeout box. I pull it out, and the whole cylinder goes dark. The gyroscopes stiffen. The boxes are no longer being kept warm.
I can hear the wind soughing through the corridor like a flutist on their death bed.
Teach is pacing behind me. Doesn’t want to rush me, I guess. So he does it behind my back, instead.
Would’ve been appreciated—if he didn’t intentionally scrape his soles to the sock. As if he wants credit for being respectful but also wants to emphasize his anxiety over the whole sitch.
Whatever.
Time to feed Kira.
<hr>
The door to the corridor hasn’t been fixed since we moved in here. The landlord had banked on the security within to be enough.
He didn’t bank on the corridor itself not being safe from the brining of the dockyards nearby. Meaning, when going inside… If only walls could bleed.
The rust leaking from metal wall panels smelled iron and chalk as I walk through the corridor. The same four origami’d sakura-blossom trees with white bark stand in the court yard, their body illuminating the first two floors, with the rest being covered by a clawing darkness borne from whatever blocked the skyhole above. At least the apartments hallway glass walls staved it off with a dim sheen.
“They’ve birched the bark, and ‘cherrypicked’ the leaves.”
The soy-dark membrane blocking the hallway to the first floor apartments remains closed when I approach it. It’s always slow when checking for your residency. Used to just be a basic metal gate—hell, the fucking entrance to the apartment complex used to have an industrial grade military door that center-closed. At least according to the neighbor. Could be full of shit. Hard to tell when that thing’s open like it’s got BED, while this membrane’s as closed as someone with GERD.
So sick and tired of this shit.
A gentle breeze hymns from the breezeway, which gently trickles the paper flowers off of the sakura tree.
“Please refr—you have been fin—please ref—a fee has been added to your—you have been—“
The government fining itself the moment they land on the ground.
Made me smile.
The soy-membrane door finally chimes, and the usual pair of white dots—which I believe are supposed to be eyes—pop up and stare. With black static, a white spazzing, and a glitching grunging, it squirts out a sliver of hieroglyphs which I think are meant to be ‘Hikari. K’.
Could be ‘go fuck yourself’ for all I know.
The membrane opens with a wet click—finally.
An arrow with the text ‘213’ fades in on the right-hand glass wall and points me to my apartment. Usually helps people who want to move in here think that they’re being looked after.
The dumb ones usually realize early and get out while there’s anything of them left to get out. The dumber ones never leave their apartments.
Instead, the smell of grease-caked rotten duck, buttered with soy sauce and burnt plastic, does.
After scaling the staircase to the second floor, I look to the court yard.
The sakura blossom fees are still turned to fines. No wind to flick them about. I’ve always wondered how the hell it regrows the paper leaves. Especially since the flower itself is barely bigger than a coin.
I take a deep breath, and turn to face the door to apartment 213. No point in wasting time. The black panel to the left of the slot-push handle shows two lines of text.
光吉良。
Hikari, Kira.
The sunlight that tried to abort her daughter.
光曇。
Hikari, Kumori.
The overcast that’s brought food.
Let’s brighten her day, I guess.