Dreams of Tanabata

Touma finds Cream in the first box he opens the next day.

It is quite a surprise, though not at all an unpleasant one to find her there, wedged among his mother's sudoku books.

"Huh, how'd it end up in there? I could have sworn I threw it away," his mom says. "Well, I guess this is a stroke of luck for you, Touma."

Touma is also curious about this (which is to say that he regards Cream's reappearance with even more than the unusually high baseline level of curiosity with which he approaches the world at large) but this isn't a gift horse that he's about to look in the mouth of.

He sets her beside his folded up futon and gives her bell a little flick for good luck before heading off to school. The tongue of the bell had fallen out long ago so it just makes a dull clank where his fingernail hits it, but he's happy that it's there for him to ring at all.

*

After everything that happened yesterday evening it feels strange for Kokomi to come to school and go about her day like nothing is wrong. She does it anyway though because the perfect pretty girl would not deny the world the light of her beauty.

It isn't as easy to give as it usually is.

As she walks to class her mind keeps drifting away to other things like how she's going to have to break the news of her brother's disappearance (death) to her parents. They'll probably want to come home and stay with her for a while to assuage their fears that Kokomi might be stolen from them as well.

"Are you alright miss Teruhashi?" Rifuta asks her, pulling her from her thoughts.

Kokomi isn't sure if the two of them could be considered friends per say but Rifuta has been hanging around Kokomi since Kokomi had taken the first-year under her wing to show her around her new school and establish the futility of trying to upstage her.

Maybe she should just tell her that her brother has gone missing. He's rather famous so his disappearance is sure to become public knowledge soon enough.

No, that's too risky. She really shouldn't do anything to invite closer attention than the usual distant adoration.

How many people even know that the two of them are related, anyway? In the eyes of the public, it will be Mugami Toru that has gone missing, not Teruhashi Makoto. "Don't worry, I'm fine," she reassures, propping up her trademark pleasant smile that had been beginning to slip.

Rifuta still looks at her with concern. Dang it, is it that obvious something's wrong?

"I just stayed up too late studying. That's all." she adds, with a small lady-like yawn that she shields from the world with the palm of her hand. This is an acceptable enough excuse. The perfect pretty girl should get good grades, but it's okay if she has to work hard to get them from time to time. Anyway it's half-true. She'd slept rather poorly the previous night though it had been her guilty conscience keeping her up rather than her studies. "Wow, you second-years really have it rough," Rifuta says, with a slight purse to her lips.

"Don't worry, the workload isn't too bad but sometimes you just need to put in a little extra time and effort to stay on top of things," Kokomi says, placing a reassuring hand on Rifuta's shoulder.

Rifuta nods, a faint blush coloring her cheeks.

With her kouhai's concern successfully warded off Kokomi heads to class.

It turns out a new student is transferring in today. It's a boy like the one who had transferred in last year had been but aside from that he's quite different. He's considerably shorter which in combination with his rounded, amateurish haircut make him look more like a middle-schooler than a high-schooler and he comports himself with none of the previous transfer's over-cautious stiffness, but rather the relaxed confidence of someone fully comfortable in his own skin.

When asked to introduce himself he rambles giving entirely too much information but none that actually answers the question until the professor tells him to just get to the point already, which leads him to tell them that his name is Akechi Touma and launch into a lecture on the kanji meaning and backstory of his name (and his parents' recent divorce) which the teacher also has to dissuade him from.

They can never get normal transfer students can they?

The whole affair is so awkward that Kokomi is beset by an almost painful level of embarrassment just from watching it unfold but it's still a welcome distraction from her current concerns.

*

The dark, monotonous isolation that has become Makoto's life is broken only by the man in the kitsune mask coming in to feed him more of that disgusting stew or subject him to humiliating ordeal of helping Makoto use the toilet with his arms and legs bound. These brief meetings offer little relief aside from making is lying alone in the dark seem less unpleasant in comparison afterwards.

He comforts himself by imagining how he'll recount his tale of woe to Kokomi when this is all over. How her angelic fingers will brush his overgrown bangs from his eyes when they finally find him and bring him home and her angelic eyes will meet his with a look of gentle, loving pity, nothing like the angry betrayed look he'd seen corrupt them in the moment before he fell.

The Kokomi he knows and loves would never push him down those stairs. If she had despite this fact, then can he say that the girl who he'd loved all these years even exists? If she doesn't, then where does that leave him?

Eventually after what feels like an eternity but logically could only have been a few days, a week tops, the man in the kitsune mask comes in and says, "I need more of your blood, and it's occurred to me that you'll probably be more cooperative if I show you what I'm using it for."

He unties Makoto's legs and helps him to his feet at which point Makoto gives him a kick in the nuts for his trouble and dashes for the open door.

Makoto doesn't get far before a sudden tightness around his throat brings him to a halt.

The man in the kitsune mask has thrown a lasso around his neck.

"There's something that you would do well to get through that thick skull of yours," the man in the kitsune mask says as he hooks his finger between the loop of rope and Makoto's neck, loosening it until he can breathe again, "And that's that no matter how famous and popular you were out there, to me you're just a living blood machine and the moment you become more troublesome to keep than you'd be to replace I won't hesitate to kill you."

With this terrifying proclamation out of the way, the man in the kitsune mask leads Makoto into the basement's main room where the smell of blood and cheap scented candles launch a two-pronged assault on his nostrils. It doesn't take long to see why.

Blood fills four concentric circles of interlocking symbols carved into the unfinished concrete floor and candles sit at evenly spaced points along the largest circle's outer edge. In the center of these circles lies a child.

He's an unassuming little thing, probably no more than ten years old, with tousled, pink hair and short, thick metal spikes wrapped in long, thin strips of paper pierced through his hands, feet and neck.

Makoto's blood runs cold. He'd never gotten along well with children even when he was one (except of course for his sister), but it takes a special sort of sick fucker to kill one of those snot-nosed-buggers and keep its body on display like this. True, it's not particularly surprising to learn that the man in the kitsune mask is that sort of sick fucker but it's quite another thing to see evidence of his sick fuckery like this.

"What did you do to that kid?" Makoto asks, "Like I knew you were a sick freak, but I thought you were like a vampire fetishist or something, not the kind of sick freak who sacrifices innocent children to appease your evil gods."

The man in kitsune mask laughs uproariously at this, bent double, like Makoto has just told a particularly funny joke.

Eventually he straightens up and says," I'm sorry. It's just that that 'innocent child' actually is the 'evil god.' Though calling him a god is a bit misleading, and while it's true that without my interference he'd probably end the world within our lifetimes, he isn't really evil either. It's not like he'd do it out of any malice towards us and he'd feel really bad about it afterwards. Which brings me nicely to why I need your blood actually. The seals I use to forestall this outcome require a steady supply from human virgins to maintain."

"He doesn't look very dangerous. How's he supposed to end the world?" Makoto asks. The man in the kitsune mask is obviously nothing but a dangerous mad man, but the better he understands how his captor thinks the better his chance of making it out of here alive.

"I thought a beautiful man with an ugly heart such as yourself would be well aware of how deceiving appearances can be."

"Where the fuck does a sicko like you get off calling my heart ugly?!"

"At least I'm self-aware about my heart's ugliness. You're so lacking in that department that it's almost cute in an infuriating way." the man in the kitsune mask says, smiling audibly as he forces Makoto to meet his eyes by pushing up his chin with one finger.

"You still haven't explained how that dead kid is supposed to end the world." Makoto says, pulling away as much as the rope around his neck allows.

"What you see here is merely the conduit it uses to interact with the physical world. The seal mostly serves to keep the conduit from functioning properly."

He turns to face Makoto, "You don't believe me, do you?"

"I do, I swear!" Makoto lies desperately, not wanting the rope to tighten around his neck again.

"Aww, you're already scared of me?" the man in the kitsune mask says, "but really, it's fine that you don't believe me. I'm the one making extraordinary claims so, naturally, the burden of proof falls to me as well."

He pauses for a moment, before continuing, "For the last seven years, you've dreamed of the same festival every night you slept in this town."

"I don't see what that has to do with anything." Makoto says. True, it's freaky that the man in the kitsune mask knows this but this is probably just some sort of con artist trick though he comes up blank when he tries to think of any that would let him peep on Makoto's dreams.

"You're wondering how I know that. It's because everyone in this town dreams the same dream. Well, everyone except me, but that's only because I've taken precautions against the influence of that thing you call a child." the man in the kitsune mask says, toying with the amulet around his neck.

Makoto still doesn't understand. Even if this shared dream thing is real, what does that have to do with the end of the world?

"You clearly still don't believe me. That's fine. I need your blood, not your faith." The man in the kitsune mask says as he takes a syringe from his pocket and fills it with the viscous black fluid that pools around the dead child's wounds.

Makoto watches with morbid fascination, only realizing too late what the man in the kitsune mask intends to use it for when he plunges the needle into Makoto's arm.

"Ew, ew, ew, ew! Why are you injecting me with corpse-juice? I thought you wanted me alive for my blood."

"I do. Don't worry. Any micro-organisms in that liquid could hardly be considered alive anymore."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That you don't need to worry about infection." the man in the kitsune mask says unhelpfully, in a voice that seems even more grating than usual.

The rope around Makoto's neck begins to burn against his skin like an iron shackle as he becomes unbearably aware of first his clothes on his body and then every molecule of air against his skin. He can feel the way both his and his captor's breaths move it, make it swirl in strange patterns.

His heartbeat pounds in his ears, in his hands in his chest. He barely notices as he starts to slump to the floor so distracted is he by the way his captor's coat swishes, the way his feet pound against the floor as he rushes towards him and the way his captor's body feels burning hot against his own as he catches Makoto.

The world starts to waver out of focus as if torn apart by its own intensity.

He's dying, he realizes. The corpse juice is poisoning him and he's dying.

He's never going to see Kokomi again, all because that madman injected him with corpse juice for some inscrutable madman reason.

Everything goes dark.

And suddenly-

-he is not himself but rather some other thing all limbs and mouths and fins and he is swimming through a dark place following a trail of tiny bright pearls of warmth the sink blissfully into his body as he brushes against them. He follows them to the crevice they pour forth from in an endless torrent of pleasure and reaches for it growing toward it like a plant grows toward the sun or a root grows towards fertile soil. No sooner do the tendrils of himself enter the crevice, then it snaps shut around them and the rest of him begins to be dragged in after it.

He twists away and snaps off the arm that he can already feel dissolving, can still feel dissolving even separated from him as it is, trying to cut his losses and get away.

There is a shifting of something so large as to paradoxically render it invisible. Its coils trap him, smother him, absorb him, dissolve him and each and every particle of him remains aware all the while.

Each and every particle remains aware even as he melts away forever and ever and ever without death and without end, even as his remains are mingled with the remains of so many countless others that share his fate, even as the slurry of countless eternal creatures are packed away into blissful pearl-like eggs and scattered into the void.

Makoto wakes up back in his tiny bathroom prison, the taste of vomit in his mouth. Much to his confusion he finds himself, dripping wet and dressed in a worn pair of cat-patterned pajama pants and an oversized T-shirt advertising some astronomy-themed event at Tokyo University that he definitely hadn't wearing before whatever the fresh hell that was. He stiffens at the realization that his captor must have stripped, bathed, and redressed him.

The man in the kitsune mask stands in front of him, preparing a toothbrush at the bathroom's sink.

"Welcome back. Did you have a nice trip?" he asks, grinning audibly.

"Did you drug me?" Makoto asks, "Is your child carcass full of drugs?"

"In a sense, I suppose. My intent was to heighten your senses to such an extent that you'd be too overwhelmed to try anything while I took your blood, but I must have given you too high a dose," the man in the Kitsune mask says. "I failed to consider that you'd be lacking any of the tolerance I've built up to the stuff over the years. Quite the embarrassing mistake on my part."

He lifts his hands to his temples in an exaggerated "oopsie" gesture.

Makoto had never before imagined he could hate someone so much as he hates the man in front of him right now.