#[ furuta doesn't remember citta as anything but vague memories or dreams ]

[animuras]

best wishes for the holidays [drabble] [start]

this ‘drabble’ got crazy out of hand and I’m not gonna finish it in time, so we’re breaking it into parts. i’ll get the first two out now, and then update as i finish.

          part i Souta doesn’t see the present for a while. Not for the usual reason, because he isn’t at his own place at all, but at Roma’s, sleeping in a nest of pillows and blankets and the scattered ashes of any dignity he might have ever had. No, he’s actually been in his own room more, trying to see if bashing his head into a different wall will make a difference.

December, December is always busy, only this year, there’s nothing to do. Nothing left to be busy but his own messed up fractured brain, and honestly, after months he’s getting tired of that. You’d think with 25 years of repressed trauma his mind could get more than a couple months of horrific waking nightmares before it started getting repetitive, but most of his life had been empty repetition, anyway. Repetition and habituation. There were only so many things left that could qualify as nightmares and Roma singing off key at 3am had most of them beat at this point.

Most of them, but not all. There’s more left, even now than he’d like. He tries to pretend, like he always has, that he’s fine. After all, there’s entire other universes of anime to watch, novels to read, video games to play. Brand new gacha games, even. It’s almost enough to smear globs of white-out over the days he can hardly remember, knocked off balance by the passing smell of some specific flowers, or the wrong shade of purple hair. There are days when his sides ache, when the scar on his chest feels like its bleeding, when the kakuhou under his skin feel like they’re tearing him apart from the inside and he just lies there hoping they really will, really eat him alive after all this time, just like he’d asked so many years ago.

It’d gotten better for a bit, certainly. Even with the odd Zombie Apocalypse. But, as if on some kind of alarm, as soon as the calendar had flipped over to December, that same month is baby of a boss had marked up on the wall, the gears he’d barely managed to get turning started to spin out again.

It’s almost been a year, give or take an entirely different universe’s counting of time. A year since he’d felt that old man’s blood splash up over his gloves, since he’d felt the give of his sinew and bone under katana’s forged to defend him. A year since he’d conducted that orchestra, hallways of his childhood painted red, redecorated with corpses.  All that waiting and a year ago it really, finally started, he’d dragged the boulder to the top of the hill at last. All that was left was a few quick months of it rolling down, down, down.

And it had, hadn’t it? It had even crushed him under its weight like he wanted, in the end. What more could he have wanted. Would it have made any difference at all if he’d been able to make it through the next few scenes? Would the world have cared? It wouldn’t have mattered, really. He’d have been dead either way.

Maybe he’d have been here, either way, too, spending December in a new universe, (some computer simulation, maybe, he doesn’t even know,) not able to tell the difference between dreams and waking and memories, and too tired to bother to push them away by the middle of the month.

He lays in his bed and watches them, sometimes, the memories and nightmares, the video reel of his life with all its scratches and tears from being played like this so many times on a faulty projector. They transition seemlessly between things that really happen and things that never did, between fact and fiction, recall, imagination, dream, nightmare. If the screaming is real, really coming from outside his door or window, he wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t care.

He watches Kijima tap dance across his floor, his head cut in half, spraying blood everywhere and thinks, with annoyance, how hard all that will be to clean, hopes his roommates, wherever they are, can’t hear the thudding of that peg leg, and its only when the patchwork man phases clear through the wall that he remembers there’s no noise, no blood, not really. The wall beyond him shifts and he’s at Itori’s bar, her usual choice of music playing in the background.

The last thing I need is to get drunk, he thinks, pushing the bottle away from him. How many days has it been since he’s slept?

“How do you know you aren’t sleeping right now?” Itori lilts at him

“I don’t,” he says. “I never do these days.”

“I have to say,” Uta says from beside him, “the scientists have amazing timing, don’t they?”

Souta turns, looks at him from across the cafe table, a cup of hot black coffee in one gloved hand.

“There I was, so excited to see what Tokyo had to offer, but life is never so kind as to give us what we want.”

That’s true, he thinks, as the scene continues to play.

“I can only guess how frustrating it is to have such closely calculated plans interrupted in this kind of way.”

That’s also true.

“Killing your dad so easily… your inspiration is truly priceless.”

“So,” his own voice says, though it takes him a second to place, “They’re all dead then?”

Huh? His head buzzes, and the cafe around him shifts and he was back in that office,  then nowhere at all, then lying in a bedroom, staring at a strangely familiar white ceiling. He sits up, and looks down to see a small silver star in his hand.

Holiday presents were just as bad as birthday presents. Usually food or something consumable or trash, right? And yet here he is.

A wish, huh?

Huh?

There’s no star here at all, no poster on the wall, in fact, this room looks nothing like that. Dreams again, strangely banal dreams.

Which is when he sees the present. It’s not a star, but then dreams like to make those subtle and stupid changes. This must be why he’d put that silly one together.

He knows right away this was another plot of this hell without even looking at the strange name on the tag. He should throw it out. What reason did he have to think this... present would be any more amenable than anything else about this city.

Deja Vu, probably from the dream, nags at the back of his skull. He should just leave it be—

[ part ii ]