Chapter Text
Eventually, Saki's shift ends, though it takes about a thousand years in subjective time. Yosuke congratulates her for a job well done, then wink-smiles like he does, looking as if he expects her to ask him to take it back, and she (reluctantly, but still immediately) imitates the gesture: head-to-one-side, quick-not-quite-flirting-wink, resist the urge to make a finger gun which may tip the scale from homage to sarcasm.
“Happy to help, Hana-chan."
The worst part is how sincere his delight is. When she walks off, Hana-chan still looks like someone shoved a Christmas tree up his nose and lit his skull up with fairy lights inside.
The rain’s let up, so she takes a long, meandering walk home, saying hello to a few locals she vaguely recognizes - a kind of dopey-looking guy with a tie and some twins. She’s at the corner of the shopping district street when she hears a faint rattle-whir that gets suddenly louder, and dodges to one side as some guy on a rickety old bike shoots by. He shouts something as he passes, but she can’t quite make it out; it sounds either like a profanity or an apology.
(She wishes the kid hadn’t apologized (or, uh, cursed.) It’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to her all day.)
Brushing it off pretty quickly, she gets home. Naoki is out at club, or Health Association or whatever, so she’s got the run of the house; she chooses to take a sprawling seat on her bed, her hair fanning out on the pillow like a flare. Of course, she only remembers then that she doesn’t remember where the remote is for her TV, so she has to get up to turn on the local news on her dinky little old-timer set. Eye Television, Inaba Channel 5.
As usual, the news uses respectable language with very little substance to it. It's the thousandth rerun of Mayumi Yamano’s tawdry love affair with Taro Namatame, and Misuzu Hiiragi’s reaction, and the train thing again -- the update is that the injured (miraculously few!) are being moved to Inaba Municipal Hospital. What a way to start life in Inaba: trapped from the word go.
(Maybe it’s divine punishment?)
“Sis?” Saki jumps a little.
Naoki is back. “Health Association let out early?”
“I showed up a little late, and they told me they had everything in hand.” He shrugs. “It seemed sort of rude to me, but they insisted..."
“Well, if they were okay with it, there’s no problem, right?”
“I guess so.” Naoki sits. “Anything interesting on the news?"
“A minor train incident, apparently. And they’re rerunning the Namatame story again."
“Kind of depressing, isn’t it?” And just like that, Naoki produces the remote and changes channels.
“Geez, seriously?” She’s impressed, and a little irritated. “Did you seriously find my remote just so you could do that? That’s a pretty serious investment of time and effort just to screw with your sister.” Naoki doesn’t even have the decency to look contrite. (Or maybe he just found it on her dresser and she's terrible at searching; that’s a distinct possibility.)
At least the channel is inoffensive: the screen has a graphic of rain and an aimlessly pleasant voice narrating something about stratocumulus clouds and the probability of rain. It’s the weather channel, which by all accounts should be boring, but Saki has long recognized the pleasure of monotony and, besides, sometimes they pipe in rain BGM, which is exactly what she needs to calm down after a long day even if there is real rain. Something about real rain seems fake, sometimes.
“So how was my cream puff?"
“…c’mon, Naoki. You can be charitable about one little dessert, right? I’ve offered to pay you back, too."
“I don’t want to be paid, sis, I want to eat cream puffs. There’s a subtle distinction there, I know, but I really thought you’d pick up on it."
Sibling bickering, like rain on TV, is white noise for Saki. She talks about nothing with Naoki for a while, breaks off to do homework (Mrs. Kazawa assigns difficult work, for such an unassuming teacher), sends a few emails and surfs the internet for a while before dinner.
Dinner is a nice chicken dish, spiced by her brother. The Konishis eat as a family; that is the rule —
(— and if these words are exchanged:
“Thank you, Naoki; it’s nice to have someone around to help with these little things when I need it."
and the implication is:
“Not like your sister."
They are lost in the ceaseless thrumming of rain.)
— — — — —
As is usual, her first waking thought is to wring the sleep out of her hair with her hands. The strange thing is, that same hair feels slightly damp, in a way she’d call dewy if she were more poetic than confused. Vaguely aware of her arms, she reaches to her scalp and (perhaps misguidedly) tries to rub the wet away. It’s ten full seconds of pulling at her off-brown tresses (making no process in drying out) before she decides to open her eyes and face whatever’s soaked her this early in the morning on a school night.
She’s sprawled out on a surface that feels vaguely like tile, and it dawns in a few seconds that this cannot possibly be her floor, which is teak-hard wood, the signature of her old, old house, covered with the clothing she can’t be bothered to pick up. Her floor is not this cold, and her floor doesn’t pulse — this floor is thumping like a heart inside someone in deep trouble. It’s dark red, she sees, and smooth as glass.
Wherever-this-is proves, as she lifts her head from the tile (a weird perfectly-ordered design of cubes she sees as she lifts her face), to be shrouded in a thick, pale-blue fog. She takes a few tentative steps and almost falls — the platform she’s on terminates in a sheer drop to either side of her, but, once she walks a few more steps in another direction, prodding with a foot after every step, to extend much further towards some unknown terminus, (she presumes). More of a road than a platform, then.
She walks for a while, looking for familiar shapes in the fog the way she does back home, but it’s almost reflective — at the right angle, she might be able to see herself, and she can tell that this would be a true mirror, one that will reflect what is and not what other people see. She can almost make out a lock of her own hair, the color of weak coffee, wet with — dew? Only something in her expects it to be matted filthy and dark —
“Have you come for the truth?"
She turns forward, and there’s a door - or a gate, or a sculpture, but it's something made of concentric rings that cuts off the platform and rises infinitely upward.
“If that is truly your desire… then prove it to me."
There’s a weight in her hand, she realizes, with a smooth grip like a bike handle. She looks down at a tapering, curved object, with its weight in the end she isn’t holding. There's text on it, faded to illegibility. It makes her feel thirsty.
She touches the rings and they turn in a way that appalls her eye and sense of space. Beyond is a figure with no features besides fog, only a smooth unknowable profile. “If you wish to know me, then act,” it says, and its voice comes from everywhere.
Instinctively, she knows to strike, and it recoils back in a boneless way, moves without seeming to move.
“Your will is greater than you know… but you have no direction.” It moves in the hissing static fog, and suddenly everything thickens and congeals around her. She can smell alcohol and frying meat and ozone —
“Humans act only on those truths that please them, and forget the rest… can you prove otherwise?"
It engulfs her, and the weight in her hands is gone. The air begins to taste rancid. She feels drunk. She feels like Death is on her shoulders, perching and crowing. She feels like Saki Konishi is dead, everyone knows, it was on the evening news —
“In a different land… seek me out, if you care enough to try."
Something has her by the ankle. She looks down into a pit of black gas and red flecks of filth, and the thing whose face is coated with shadow growing out of the dead land, and it is familiar.
Saki wakes up from dying, and falls out of bed.