Once More, With Feeling

“Because I love you, Kira Ishikawa. In every dream I see your face, and my very actions are puppeted by a glimpse of our future, your hand in mine, like the call of the ocean to an earth-locked soul. Be mine, Kira, and I shall use my blood to nourish the soil so flowers may grow when no water remains, even for tears.”

Caught by surprise, Kira wasn’t certain how to respond. The winter’s breeze offered a reply in her stead, whistling through the onyx waterfall flowing down to her shoulders.

The boy – the man, technically, not that this fact took away the gravity of those words spilling out his mouth like warm milk, nor improved them – waited for a response, the moments he counted on a tapping finger ticking away in uncomfortable silence. As much silence as one could hope for in downtown Shinjuku, where winter had dropped like an insect net over the ward.

The words were the bars on the jail windows. The steel trap snapped shut, teeth biting down on soft flesh. Hunger unsatiated, despite shoving food down the gullet from dusk until dawn, heaving the work of two hundred pairs of callused hands back up onto the opalescent steaming plate.

They were the beginning to make a child’s paper boat for sending across a blue, nostalgic lake, the recipient on the other end – boat in hand – ready for shoving off when yours arrives wet and sopping and moments from crumbling under its own weight; a process to be repeated day after day, week after week, month after month, one year to the next: a loop predisposed behaviorally towards the unbreaking.

The wind whistles, discordant as a breath sucked back into the mouth. One would be forgiven for believing the leaves falling upward into the trees, but only for a moment. The sky shifts from grey to blue, to gold before sinking to red, bruising to purple, taking on the green of stars and far off lights to mix into the black veil, before repeating the process a thousand times in the drawn-out space.

With these words, a story written before begins again.

And so, Kira laughed. She laughed loudly, haughtily, full of vigor and indignation. Enough to stave off the night’s cold air, until the lamppost she’d been leaning on had its bulb explode in a shower of sparks and inconsequential motes of fine glass, spooking passersby.

Arata smiled in the face of the scene, his tied back hair catching the sudden wind and flowing like a dream caught in river’s flow, taking in the sight of Kira while the sparks fell about her – an image of angel’s wings unfurled from her back imagined in the lights.

“Making sparks fly without even kissing.” He pumped his arm in a courageous gesture. “In your face, Dad. But don’t be laughing too loudly now. We’re supposed to be all stealthy-like out here.”

One of Kira’s hands met the tears starting to form at the corners of her eye, brushing them away before the chill of winter froze them to her lashes, adding to the layer of snow at her feet. “Where did you even learn that? ‘Oh, shit, there’s no water. Here, Nosferatu, drink my blood instead.’”

“It’s red and full of life. Romantic junk. I got it from a film.”

“A film? Oh, we’re cultured now. Where’d you manage to see a film? Did this film have a title?”

“Not sure.” Arata shrugged. “The teens outside my door were only screaming about the scene. This seemed like the same sort of moment. One that required dramatic words in case everything goes south, and we lose any opportunity to get those unspoken words off our chests.”

“And you chose to confess?”

“Depends – what’s your answer?”

“No.”

“It was the best way to lighten the mood, before you went and blew it out.” He returned his gaze to the hustle and bustle beneath the overpass, to the candor of Shinjuku’s arteries thrumming with activity. Kira beheld his self-satisfied smile in the lights of a thousand blinking advertisements. If she’d been less distracted, she might have caught the flash of disappointment.

Where pine trees once stood decorated with tinsel and strings of lights amongst oversized, colorful Christmas iconography – the presents, sleighs, and a jiggling, jolly, white-bearded man from across the sea – people now milled on the streets, tourist and citizen, child to elder, enjoying the freedom from responsibility gifted liberally at night, and especially now with the end of the school term. Cars and taxis travelled one way or the other while those same people waited to cross. On the horizon rose the new year.

It was the 29th of December. A time of change. A moment to choose, to give affection – if one thought worthy – and perhaps, also, to receive it.

Kira’s hand slipped up to her throat, pushing low her sweater’s black collar on its way, reminding herself of the necklace wrapped there. The gold was cold against her fingertips, spaced out by engraved script in the metal.

She understood the ritual by now, that courting dance passed on from man to man through blood. Taking enough nervous yet calculated steps around an intimate question until it needed no asking, only a response from the one who sat watching themselves become encircled in that trapped, treaded path, waiting – as was christened with a term conceived by her former classmates – demurely.

Kira had decided long ago that tradition did not suit her. She envied Arata the bold maneuverings he’d been born to.

“Bad timing on your part,” she whispered. A crack of sharp wind sent her naked hand and its twin speeding back to her armpits. “I’d have preferred the surprise gift of a warmer sweater. I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

“Would you like a hug?”

“Would you like to die strangling yourself?”

“My heart is so wounded that I may just. Imagine the headline. ‘Boy, 21, Found Dead, His Last Lights Spent Toilet-Bound.’ More cost efficient than tissues, thank you –”

“…must be nice,” Kira groaned.

“– but later: I have a spotless record to maintain. The Don of Dragons does not take well to failure.”

Arata gave a curt cough, followed by not-inconspicuous clearing of the throat. Then a second. Then a third sounding not unlike him hawking a thick globule of saliva and mucus. Kira shot a withering stare on the fourth.

“Coming down with something?”

Arata coughed again. “Your mask.”

He pointed to the base of his throat, unaware that an entire white horn of his own had exposed itself from his collar, and whose tapered point was curved one hair’s breadth from his Adam’s apple. Kira watched it bob up and down until her disdain was clear to him in its source, readjusting her own so the visage of an Oni remained hidden. Arata shoved his own back down as if trying to drown it.

“Almost like you’re trying to endanger my reputation,” he said.

“There are at least twenty other wielders here better equipped for that than me,” Kira shot back.

“But none with so clear a signature. Don knows I make the master keys and boomsticks. Might as well carve my name in the thief stone I’ll send flying to kick this heist off, or sign my own death order if you jam my flow.”

“Can you say that again but louder? I didn’t quite hear you the first time.”

In Arata’s defense, no one else appeared to have either. Passersby took more notice in the girl’s head whipping back in forth, if anything.

But when an enemy could fry you with a lightning bolt, butter your behind in magmatic flame, then follow up with two earthen biscuits to crush you between, paranoia paid dividends.

Arata, comparably, was cooler than bad news. “Relax, girl. Any sneaky Falcon gang bitches have got greater issues to worry over than friends shooting the breeze over a, uh…” He snapped his fingers. “A video game.”

“You couldn’t even – with a gun to your head – name one that plays similarly to our assignment.”

“Correct, and neither can they – or any wielder, for that matter. Can’t poke holes in our story without a needle. Ergo, the perfect excuse to discuss this sort of stuff in public.”

Kira tore her eyes from the smug grin that had overtaken his face, onyx hair cutting lines in the air. “Just keep your eyes on the road. Van might be here any hour now.”

“Better get the goodies ready, then.” Arata reached down for the backpack at his feet and plopped it on the railing between them. Odor most awful plopped itself beneath Kira’s nostrils as he did. She jumped away so quickly the movement could have been accused as teleporting.

Coal and coke and white-hot phosphorus, he’d described the individual components as. Unmitigated lust between the blacksmith and his forge. It smelled like piss which was not at all the kind of lust she’d ever had one one-thousandth of a passing interest in.

“If I have to endure that stench during my interview tomorrow…” she grumbled, hand shielding her nose.

“You’ll be out of our lives and stateside soon enough without my help. Although if you’re having second thoughts, maybe I could leave you a surprise smoke bomb accidentally, eh?”

Her glare could have shriveled the paint from his house. Arata’s smile survived only the time it took to blink, replaced by an eyesore of melancholy the twitches at his lip told he was trying to keep down. Turning away proved kinder.

“Just getting in my barbs while I still can,” he said.

“It’s not like I’ll be gone forever.”

“Don’t hit me with that cliché movie trailer bullshit, please.”

“There are holidays. Breaks in which I can come back and say hi, hang out for a while –”

“And remind me of the old times before you go off again. Kick me in the balls, too, why don’t you? Arata pinched the bridge of his nose, ragged nails digging into the skin until it looked as if he intended to crush the cartilage, or – depending on one’s point of view – right out the damage that’d been there long as the decade she’d known him.

“As I was saying,” Arata continued, “I’ve got smoke bombs, shattering wand, blasting wand, a couple of thief stones – only had enough ceramic for two – and my trusty master key.” He withdrew from the bag a sheath of grey metal that looked oddly like a hardware store boxcutter, save for the strings of archaic script engraved in its handle. He waggled it before her eyes. “Should get us through the night. And I’ll return your backpack smelling like a daisy when this ends.”

“It’s just a van, not a bank. We have a stray thought around a car and the door pops off.” Kira cast her gaze up the road. The traffic had begun to subside, each vehicle separated now by widths measuring greater than the recently departed Christmastime deity’s famous waistline.

At the road’s blurry end, a faded grey box on wheels was taking advantage of the fact at every opportunity. Kira leaned over the railing, Arata’s lively chatter slipping into the background. Her eyes narrowed.

It was the right make, the right model, passing through the right part of Shinjuku at approximately the right time, desperate turn signal allowing other drivers a quarter second of warning. Fitting, as only the truly cracked would use a van brimming with modern comforts to transport what they were after. Arcane powers were predisposed to pulling apart gifts of the modern age with presence alone: wielders, wands, thief stones, the artifact so desired by the Don of Dragons and his Pride.

Nervous warmth bloomed in her belly. Dropping her gaze to the license plate as the van pulled around a delivery truck, one hand flew to her forehead in mock salute.

In the crowds, weapons of innocuous design were clenched in preparation. Arata slung the backpack and tightened its straps.

“N-O-N-D triple zero?” he asked. Kira nodded, and a wide grin broke across his face, negativity over her leaving seemingly repressed. “Then let’s get this party started.” He held a thief’s stone between two fingers, thin wire binding it down ready to pull. The ceramic reflected the artificial colors of civilized night.

When the dust settled, it reflected only the true, wild dark.

First came the bang, like the ringing of a great brass bell by a giant’s hammer run through a rock band’s overturned amplifiers. The resulting shockwave buffeted the streets in storm winds, sending snow on trees and rooftops tumbling down onto disoriented crowds struggling for cover. Windows shattered in their frames. Screens plastered onto buildings flashed garbled renderings of scheduled advertisements moments before blacking out. Streetlights exceeded their safety parameters before dying.

The two thieves pressed hands to their ears against the roaring until it passed, pulling them away in time to hear the squeal of tires and a cascade of metal boxes crunching one into another.

Kira stared out into the night, the true night lit only by the heavens above, memory leading her to the approximate location of the van they’d come for. It lay smashed and smoking, and dead as stone. Every car was.

“I… I don’t think that was ours.” Arata whispered.

Kira swallowed down the fear nagging at her spine, greater a chill now than the cold. She thought of her family sound asleep at home, under the pretense she, too, was ticking away hours in dreams, and remembered a number with more digits than a license plate – with far more zeroes. “Let’s not pass up the opportunity given us.”

She took off for the overpass stairs, Arata at her heels.