Asch the Bloody (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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starwardbestrewn2020-09-17 12:16 pm
bloodyashes) wrote in starwardbestrewn2020-09-17 12:16 pm
Entry tags:
Neku: What's up with those guys?
Two weeks after the Game, you decided to stop in at WildKat, for... answers, maybe, or just to check in. You found the cafe closed, and it never did reopen. There's an actual cat cafe there now, instead, with absolutely nothing remarkable about it as far as you know. Not even a Reaper's wall decal declaring it within bounds for Players.
Which is too bad, really, you really could have used twenty minutes of cat therapy... Damn near any time during those weeks, honestly.
So WildKat goes, and CAT disappears along with it, fading into obscurity almost supernaturally quickly even for Tokyo's trends. The last thing to remain is the mural, and even that gets painted over, people's tags on the lower part starting some two months in and the whole thing getting a paintover for a completely new mural eight months after the Game. It's a nice mural, but it's just as clearly not CAT, too many sharp geometrics and more cityscape than pop art.
Not sure what else to do, you leave a cheap bundle of flowers at the based of it, the ribbon held in place by one of your extra CAT pins.
And that, as far as you can tell, is the end of it.
----
It's been three years since the Game. You're eighteen, in that weird limbo between school age and adulthood, living wedged into an art school dorm with what feels like half a million other boys your age. Doing music, as much and as furiously as you can to build a portfolio, helping Shiki and Eri with their clothes and Beat with his music - he fell in with a band and drums, now - and Rhyme with whatever dream she's dreaming this week, still unable to settle but she has a year or two, still, before she has to make any hard decisions.
It's been three years, and you haven't seen a trace of Mr. H or Joshua or even most of the Reapers you remember. You swear you heard a familiar screech in a department store, once, but when you sprinted around the corner, nearly knocking into a display, there was no sign of Pinky or anyone except a confused part-timer asking what your hurry was.
It's been three years, and all you can do is keep an eye on the trends, watching for anything out of the ordinary. Not ever really sure what you're looking for, but you sure thought the Phantom Thieves were it, six months ago, before the whole thing blew over almost as quietly as CAT. You'd think more people would have remembered, what with national politics involved, but nope. It sails right over Shibuya like a heat wave, inescapable while it's there but disappearing into fog once it's gone. Even that celebrity teen detective, Akechi, faded into obscurity.
Which is why you're beyond surprised to see him hanging out with what seems to be a gaggle of other teenagers in the underpass, only a few steps from the Shibuya River, looking about as suspicious as it's possible to look. Most of them are wearing the uniform of Shujin, the school that featured so highly in the first Phantom Thieves incident, and there's also Yusuke Kitagawa, your school's own local Phantom-Thieves-related celebrity, and...
Yeah, you're not stupid.
You do have to wonder why they're following a cat around, though. The fact that the cat in question looks like an actual, real life Mr. Mew just adds enough icing to the surrealism cake that you can't stop yourself from following after them as they disappear completely beneath the street.
"I'm serious!" Voices echo in the underpass, especially when they seem to be arguing. "There's something here, I just can't figure out what..." The voice sounds too young to belong to a high schooler.
"Futaba, you getting anything?" That's one of the Shujin kids, the blond boy. None of them seem to have noticed you yet.
"Nuh-uh," replies one of the girls - the absolutely tiny redhead, the only one not in a school uniform. She plunks away at her phone without looking up. "Meta-Nav's not getting anything, either."
"That's so weird..." The blond kid says. He turns back towards the cat, and asks, "Are you sure it's the Metaverse?"
"Or something a lot like it," the first voice replies, and the cat sits almost daintily on its haunches and oh, oh god, the cat is talking. Alright. Now is the point when any reasonable person turns and walks the other way.
Unfortunately, Neku Sakuraba did not come back to life a reasonable person. No matter how much you sometimes wish he had, Joshua apparently didn't consider that part important.
So you step out from behind a trashcan, into a group of known maybe-criminals definitely-vigilantes, and say, "It's called the Shibuya River. Some asshole shinigami used to live there."
Maybe he still does. But if that's the case, he's sure not returning your calls.
Which is too bad, really, you really could have used twenty minutes of cat therapy... Damn near any time during those weeks, honestly.
So WildKat goes, and CAT disappears along with it, fading into obscurity almost supernaturally quickly even for Tokyo's trends. The last thing to remain is the mural, and even that gets painted over, people's tags on the lower part starting some two months in and the whole thing getting a paintover for a completely new mural eight months after the Game. It's a nice mural, but it's just as clearly not CAT, too many sharp geometrics and more cityscape than pop art.
Not sure what else to do, you leave a cheap bundle of flowers at the based of it, the ribbon held in place by one of your extra CAT pins.
And that, as far as you can tell, is the end of it.
----
It's been three years since the Game. You're eighteen, in that weird limbo between school age and adulthood, living wedged into an art school dorm with what feels like half a million other boys your age. Doing music, as much and as furiously as you can to build a portfolio, helping Shiki and Eri with their clothes and Beat with his music - he fell in with a band and drums, now - and Rhyme with whatever dream she's dreaming this week, still unable to settle but she has a year or two, still, before she has to make any hard decisions.
It's been three years, and you haven't seen a trace of Mr. H or Joshua or even most of the Reapers you remember. You swear you heard a familiar screech in a department store, once, but when you sprinted around the corner, nearly knocking into a display, there was no sign of Pinky or anyone except a confused part-timer asking what your hurry was.
It's been three years, and all you can do is keep an eye on the trends, watching for anything out of the ordinary. Not ever really sure what you're looking for, but you sure thought the Phantom Thieves were it, six months ago, before the whole thing blew over almost as quietly as CAT. You'd think more people would have remembered, what with national politics involved, but nope. It sails right over Shibuya like a heat wave, inescapable while it's there but disappearing into fog once it's gone. Even that celebrity teen detective, Akechi, faded into obscurity.
Which is why you're beyond surprised to see him hanging out with what seems to be a gaggle of other teenagers in the underpass, only a few steps from the Shibuya River, looking about as suspicious as it's possible to look. Most of them are wearing the uniform of Shujin, the school that featured so highly in the first Phantom Thieves incident, and there's also Yusuke Kitagawa, your school's own local Phantom-Thieves-related celebrity, and...
Yeah, you're not stupid.
You do have to wonder why they're following a cat around, though. The fact that the cat in question looks like an actual, real life Mr. Mew just adds enough icing to the surrealism cake that you can't stop yourself from following after them as they disappear completely beneath the street.
"I'm serious!" Voices echo in the underpass, especially when they seem to be arguing. "There's something here, I just can't figure out what..." The voice sounds too young to belong to a high schooler.
"Futaba, you getting anything?" That's one of the Shujin kids, the blond boy. None of them seem to have noticed you yet.
"Nuh-uh," replies one of the girls - the absolutely tiny redhead, the only one not in a school uniform. She plunks away at her phone without looking up. "Meta-Nav's not getting anything, either."
"That's so weird..." The blond kid says. He turns back towards the cat, and asks, "Are you sure it's the Metaverse?"
"Or something a lot like it," the first voice replies, and the cat sits almost daintily on its haunches and oh, oh god, the cat is talking. Alright. Now is the point when any reasonable person turns and walks the other way.
Unfortunately, Neku Sakuraba did not come back to life a reasonable person. No matter how much you sometimes wish he had, Joshua apparently didn't consider that part important.
So you step out from behind a trashcan, into a group of known maybe-criminals definitely-vigilantes, and say, "It's called the Shibuya River. Some asshole shinigami used to live there."
Maybe he still does. But if that's the case, he's sure not returning your calls.
no subject
In the middle of all the startled shouting of "Who are you" and "where the hell did he come from" and stuff like that, Kitagawa keeps his aloofishly cool head and just raises a hand in bland greeting. "Hello, Sakuraba-san."
"Hey, Kitagawa-san," you reply just as evenly, though you put a little more enthusiasm into your expression. "You can just call me Neku, we're not in school."
"Then I must insist that you call me Yusuke," he replies.
"Sure thing," you say, and that seems to have given everyone else either opportunity or incentive to chill. "Gonna introduce me to your friends?"
"Ah, of course. Everyone, this is Neku Sakuraba, a third year at my school, in the music program."
"Yeah, that's great and all, but not the point," Blond Guy says. You hold up a hand in surrender.
(The other, buried in your pocket, is fingering the old pins you have stabbed through the inner lining of your uniform pants, but they don't need to know that.)
"I'm not going to turn you guys in or anything," you say quickly. "If you ask me, the Phantom Thieves did a lot of things... maybe not great, but at least they tried. That's more than a lot of people."
There's some relaxing of shoulders, one of the blond girls in the Shujin uniform sighing loudly. Even the blond guy doesn't try to deny it, just looking at the floor and kicking his feet defeatedly.
"Then why follow us at all?" says one of the other girls, the dark-haired one. "If you're not interested in the Phantom Thieves..."
"It's not that I'm not interested," you say. "Even if I wasn't before, it's hard to ignore a talking cat."
"He can hear me?!" you hear the cat say. It walks up to the front of the group, tail lashing, fur poofed up. "Just who are you?"
"Neku Sakuraba," you say, "former dead kid and all-around weirdness magnet." The pronouncement is met with silence, though several people glance at Akechi, for some reason, as he lifts a hand to his chin.
"It's true, then?" says one of the blond girls, the one with long blond pigtails. "A real shinigami lives here?1" She casts a paranoid glance at the wall, as though expecting Joshua to jump out any minute.
"Yeah," you say, and you know it's wistful, and sad, and damn if it doesn't still hurt. If you aren't still waiting, on some level, for Joshua to return your call. "He... We used to be friends."