Part 4
“So, are you ready to talk?”
“…”
Her house was the quintessential mess, making it easy to see that her lackluster, lazy attitude weren’t limited to her clothes outside school. There was just too much irony when compared to the rigid-borderline-OCD-level tidiness present in her work life.
I could only wonder if she brought Ayaka here.
After two days, my mind was already diverging from topic and calming down, in a sense. My body, on the other hand, still got fierce shivers and felt like it was all beyond my control. Quite an achievement from the previous state it was in, just after ‘that’ happened.
When I saw that corpse in front of me I crashed real hard, like an x86 trying to run a modern First Person Shooter.
Dead people don’t bother me; it’s passive and helpless. Nothing you can do about it, it already happened. However, people dying, especially if they are killed in front of me, is both active and disturbing. Ever since a certain point of my life I would rather not mention, if anyone dies in front of me I get catatonic.
It’s the kind of thing one cannot just ‘get over,’ a trauma that will probably haunt me for the whole duration of my life. I considered therapy but I’ve never been stable enough regarding location to take it seriously, therefore me staying seriously mentally unstable instead. Unless you call talking to Kouma ‘therapy,’ which I personally wouldn’t. Even if I did, I’d rather never bring the subject up, especially with someone as Freudian as her.
I don’t need any more mistaken judgments; this whole story started because of that.
“Koukishin-kun, you’re not mad at me, right?”
And there was another one.
Like me, Reikoku-sensei was quick to take things personal. Which was selfish and borderline silly because if I was mad and it was relevant compared to the fact I’ve been catatonic and speechless for two days and counting, I probably wouldn’t answer if I could, or rather would just walk away instead of being interrogated. Hell, angry or not, if I could I would have left when she gave me the sponge bath.
I swear that actually happened. I was catatonic, not delusional.
In the face of that accusation there was only one way to respond, given my state at the moment.
“…”
But getting used to not receiving the answer one wanted was part of the daily life of a public school teacher, so it was obvious that stubborn-by-nature adult would not give a traumatized me a rest until I actually spelled it out for her, which as a matter of fact I couldn’t do at the moment. Not talking for a couple days made me wonder if I still could, while she seemed to want to talk for the two of us.
“It wasn’t my fault and you weren’t supposed to see it anyway, so if there’s anyone to blame it was him for being a troublemaker and resisting and you for following me around.”
Denial and shifting the blame was useless when murder was involved, and this definitely was not about morals. Right or wrong, someone died as a consequence of fighting her and I have every right to be upset or even fear her, considering she brought and kept me, the only witness, here. The line between patient and captive was just too thin under those terms.
“I called the school and said I had a sick relative I needed to take care of, but I can’t keep using that excuse or the Council will not be pleased no matter how nice they are. Either way, to be able to work without being worried all the time I need to know you’re going to be okay on your own. I’ll stay with you for today, though. If you want me to.”
Had I the ability to speak properly I would tell her to go away, although that could be seen as a conceptual mistake, this being her house and if anyone had to leave it should be me. Getting up and walking out the door probably wouldn’t have the same psychological/dramatic effect, however.
“…”
“I know it’s hard to believe someone under these circumstances and you have probably been through a lot before to get a reaction that screams post-traumatic stress disorder like that, but you have to understand I did what I had to do.”
Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of how stalking people and beating them to death in mildly dark alleys was part of a Japanese teacher’s work.
“…”
“Thing is, there are many of those. People like Ayaka and that guy, I mean. I have been researching them for a while now. They all seem to share a similar mindset, in the sense that they always seem willing to fight or manage to get themselves in trouble because apparently getting powers doesn’t come to those with the common sense to keep it on the down low. Alternatively, if there are indeed people fitting that criteria they must be really, really good at it then.”
Maybe, just maybe, the fact those persons were all aggressive or hot-blooded had to do with the fact they were, I don’t know, possessed by supernatural beings.
“…”
“What I’m trying to do is bait them out: with tempers like those, how could they stand the fact there’s someone out there defeating each and every one of them? They’re bound to come after me, which is exactly what I want.”
Based on the premise ‘they’ work in groups. Judging by Ayaka’s and that guy’s case, I wouldn’t say so; they all seem autonomous. Of course, I could be wrong to assume such, as she has been doing this for a while now and probably has seen more than a couple situations. She did say Ayaka’s was an isolated incident, so there is a chance she didn’t misjudge and there is at least one faction of them.
“…”
“If they come out one by one, I fight them. When they realize they have to come all at once I will try and bring them to my special trap. I don’t feel like talking about it now because it would take too long, but the details are in the safe. The combination is seven-nine-five-three-one-three-three-eight. Repeating, seven-nine-five-three-one-three-three-eight. If anything ever goes wrong, the data you’ll need to blow this town up is there.”
I prayed it wasn’t literal but knowing my teacher it could as well be.
“…”
“They took… killed a student of mine.”
“…”
For all I knew about what happened to Ayaka, so did she.
“Long before Ayaka’s case, there was a girl named Minato Suzuki. She wasn’t particularly bright or pretty. She wasn’t funny or lonely, she didn’t have any special talent... she was as regular as it gets. Regular grades, regular speech, regular number of friends, regular everything. There was virtually no one who would look at her twice, except someone did.”
This is giving me the weirdest vibe because of one really unusual dream I had a long time ago, just before I got involved with the band.
“...”
“I got to the room in the second building where she was standing, apparently untouched. I felt like something wrong happened to her, so I touched her shoulder to comfort her. Then she fell apart. He had slashed her in small, perfect cubes of three centimeters each side. She just disassembled in front of me.”
She skipped a good part of the story but I could not say she didn’t have my full attention at least from that last line on.
“…”
“And you know what really bothered me? Keep in mind I’ve seen my fair share of bad things, but this ticked me off big time. That despite what he did to her, despite being beat up really bad because when I found the bastard ‘deathly furious’ was just a euphemism, he didn’t even seem to remember it. Like she was just one more, nothing special about her. Mediocrity followed her all the way to the grave.”
“…”
“I decided to meet her parents to know how I’d deliver the news, although my plan was to do it indirectly so suspicion wouldn’t fall upon me. Her parents assumed she ran away, and after seeing how her family life worked I wouldn’t have blamed her if she did. Alcoholic, gambling-addicted father along with deny-reality-and-everything-will-be-fine mother is a lot for a kid to deal with. One can guess acting like she was nothing special was her self-defense mechanism to
avoid having people interested enough to find out. Maybe not, this is just speculation after all.”
“…”
“I knew how to hide a body and considering the emotionless way the parents reacted to their daughter’s disappearance, it was probably for the best I did. No one at school seemed to care much after the first week either, so I let the rumor spread and added a few bits of my own to it. She deserved better than this, so I made her interesting. It was all I could do for her at that point.”
“…”
“So now if you ask anyone in this or the nearby towns about Minato Suzuki, they’ll tell you she was more than just another girl that vanished one day. They’ll talk for years about how she outsmarted a foreign con artist that passed by, how they fell in love and eloped. How she’s still out there, probably in Vienna or Berlin playing cards against the best of the best. Some might even say she came here to run away from her past, having been a genius all the time. Reports of events she was involved with have her part magnified and elevated her to a status that I don’t know she ever dreamed of, and all fame is good fame.”
“…”
“But I digress. You know how bad it gets when those jerks are around. Innocent people get involved, regardless of how important in society they are. People die for nothing, and I can’t have that.”
“…”
“According to my personal research, for now it seems like this particular region is the only one, say, ‘infected’. So I hunt them whenever I can and expect them to hunt me back, and I told you that because, though I fall, I expect you not to take my place, but finish it for me no matter how drastic this might be. Too much of a burden, I know. Still, you can’t deny this is bound to get in your way sooner or later if you plan to live around here and in the way of those you care for. It will be the worst case scenario if you do, but it still doesn’t mean we can’t win.”
“…”
“Whatever happens, this can’t spread all over the world. Even if it means staining our hands with blood.”
“…”
“You understand, right? Of all people, I thought you would.”
Because we’re the same? Don’t make me laugh. Everyone thinks that, and if anything that’s my one true power: charisma. The way it attracts a lot of monsters and deviant beings makes it my curse too.
“…teach me.”
“What?”
“Teach me.”
“To fight these monsters ruining society?”
“No.” Breath pause. Speaking was somewhat hard still and I wanted to get a few bigger sentences out next, so I took my time to regain the ability to talk. “Fine. I’ll put up with your Dark Knight-ish raising project. You’re making a huge mistake though, for I am absolutely and utterly worthless. If you don’t care about that possibility, use me. Whatever potential you saw in me, I will fake it until it becomes real. For a price.”
One eyebrow raised, her face was the same as usual and not the one of a murderer.
“And what would that be?
“Teach me how to kill without restraints.”
She seemed underwhelmed by that proposition.
“Oh, there’s no such thing. It sucks every time.”
…like, really?
“You don’t seem depressed or traumatized.”
But then apparently I struck a nerve by doing that.
“Oh no. You’re not going to give me that. Think about my speech just now. Hell, think about how I speak all the time. Think about how I act and how my students no longer look up to me but rather fear me because of the rumors that spread like fire. I’m putting the career and life I worked hard to get at risk despite having fought for it for years, coming from a similar scenario to yours and all. Everything could just be gone if I fail and there’s no clean winning no matter what I do, but I can only lose if I close my eyes to that. Do I look okay to you?”
I kind of deserved it.
“…”
“At the end, we’re all broken. Don’t bother denying it or overplaying it; both are futile ways to live because in that sense, everyone is the same. Embrace it and deal with it the best you can.” She then stared at me for entire five seconds. “Either way I’m here for you. So, are you ready to talk?”
“I just did, didn’t I?”
“No, I mean for real. There’s no way I can tell what your passive-aggressiveness is all about, but you need to get that off your chest, whatever it is.”
I wanted to say a witty retort.
“…yeah.”