Dreams of Tanabata

Okay, so maybe Touma's fresh start could have gone better, but he doesn't think it went that badly either. As far as his social standing is concerned this is, at worst, a lateral move and he thinks that he managed to present himself accurately as well. That's better than if he had made them all think that he was something he was not and had to commit to keeping up that facade.

Touma's never seen the point of contorting himself into a shape capable of winning the approval of people who'd hate the real him. He'd never had to pretend to be someone he wasn't for Kusuo, who could see everything he was no matter what he did and had decided to befriend him anyway.

Still, it does sting a bit that he did not manage to leave a good enough first impression to have anyone to eat lunch with. It would have been nice if he really could make new friends like dream-Kusuo had said he would.

This thought has hardly passed through his mind when a scrawny teen with a shock of pale blue hair approaches him.

"Greetings, I am the Jet Black Wings, though in this life and body I am known by the name of Kaidou Shun." the boy says striking a strange pose, "last night I had a vision revealing how our fates are destined to intertwine."

"A vision? That is quite unusual. Would you care to elaborate on that statement?" Touma asks, not because he finds this claim believable in the slightest, everything about the boy in front of him screams liar, but he's curious to see where the boy's going with this.

"I saw you in my dream last night." He says, his cool facade splintering to reveal a glimpse of the excitement underneath, "A split-tailed cat with a wounded foot took me to see you and told me that we should be friends."

"Oh my, that certainly sounds interesting!" Touma says clapping his hands together in excitement, "Do you often have visions of that type?"

Even if Kaidou is lying it should be fun to see how he answers that question.

"Yeah," he says his voice squeaking a bit before he gets it back under his control, "All the time."

"I wouldn't suppose that you could by any chance provide some illustrative examples of such visions you've had in past?"

"Of course I can." the boy squawks.

Touma stares at him for a moment in silence. "Will you be providing these illustrative examples you mentioned?"

"There's just so many that it's hard to pick." Kaidou mumbles.

Touma giggles. It's fun to see what kind of excuses Kaidou comes up with.

"Don't laugh," Kaidou says, "You really were in my dream last night."

"Are you certain that it was me?" Touma asks, "Memories of dreams can be quite unreliable as they are exceptionally vulnerable to alteration after waking."

"Well, given how this conversation is going maybe it wasn't you I saw. The guy in my dream was called Asumi, anyway."

Touma leans towards Kaidou with interest, "That was my father's family name, which is something that I don't believe I had the opportunity to mention during my introduction. The fact that you know that does seem to suggest that your dream was in fact supernatural in some manner. Of course it is still possible that you obtained this information beforehand and are currently performing a 'hot reading' of some sort, but our brief acquaintanceship does not paint you as the type of person who would think to utilize such tactics and I have enough experience with supernatural phenomena that I do not doubt that such things as visions can occur."

"Wait, you have experience with the supernatural?" Kaidou asks, this information recapturing his attention that had been beginning to drift.

"That's correct. I'm afraid that the specifics of the matter are a secret that I've promised to keep but I've seen enough to say that things exist in this world that our current understanding of science is insufficient to explain."

"Yeah I totally agree." Kaidou says nodding to himself, "I electrocuted a snake with my mind one time. It was crazy."

"Intriguing." Touma says, tilting his head to one side thoughtfully, "I would be interested in seeing a demonstration of this skill if you care to give it."

"I'm still trying to figure out how to do it on command," Kaidou says, adding hastily "I did do it, though. It was in front of all my classmates and everything. You can ask them if you don't believe me."

"I admit that I am inclined to remain skeptical in the absence of corroborating evidence, but I think that your classmates' accounts will serve that purpose quite nicely."

"Well, if you expect me to believe you without any details or any evidence." Kaidou huffs, "That's hardly fair."

"I don't really care about whether or not you believe me. While I would certainly prefer you to consider me an honest person, my own confidence in the verity of my experience is sufficient for me."

"Huh, anyone ever tell you that you're a strange person."

"Yes, quite frequently. In fact, I believe that that, along with my unfortunately poor bladder control, contributed to making me the target of bullying in elementary school."

"Gosh, um, sorry to hear that." Kaidou says, clearly feeling awkward about having stumbled carelessly into the perceived sore spot.

"It's fine." Touma reassures, "When I was in second grade the three kids most involved in the bullying all simultaneously lost their minds and had to be taken out of school. Everyone left me alone after that."

"Well, it's been nice talking to you but I need to start getting ready for my next class now."

"Are you certain? You haven't finished your lunch yet." Touma asks because he knows from experience that people don't like for you to point out when they are lying.

"It's fine. I'll finish it later" Kaidou says, wrapping up his half-eaten bento with great haste.

Touma finishes his lunch alone. Oh dear, he seems to have scared Kaidou off. Perhaps he should keep the unfortunate fate of his bullies to himself if he wants his social life to be different here.

*

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 other 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 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.