The blades spun in lazy circles, warped slightly, probably from when she'd thrown a shoe at it last week.
[I can't seem to remember much from last week]
"The invasion," she whispered. "Dominic. Seraphina. I can't believe they're dead."
The words came out flat.
"And I still feel like this."
Her hands were shaking. She'd tried holding them still, pressing them against her thighs, sitting on them, wrapping them in her blanket. Nothing worked. "Whatever I've done, I deserve this. I deserve this."
"I should get up. I should go brush my teeth. I should eat something. I should shower. I should-"
Her body didn't move. It just lay there, heavy and foreign.
The door was locked. She'd checked it four times. The windows were locked too. She'd checked those five times. The bathroom door was open, the light off, the shower dry. She hadn't used it in days. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt clean.
"Hoshimi came by yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before. He knocked. He left food outside the door. I didn't eat it."
"I'm so useless. I'm always useless. I was useless at the aquarium. I was useless during the invasion. I was useless in the chamber. All I did was breathe, sucking up the oxygen like a useless pile of flesh."
Her chest tightened. Her throat closed. The tears came without warning, hot and sudden, streaming down her cheeks and into her ears. She didn't wipe them away. Didn't move.
"I want to die. But it's so scary. I wish I wasn't born at all."
The thought wasn't new. But it was louder now. More insistent.
"What's the point? What's the point of any of this? I'm just supposed to be a weapon. I kill everyone around me just by existing. I killed my father. I killed so many people. I almost killed Hoshimi in the chamber."
"The world would be better off without me. Everyone would be better off. He wouldn't have to leave food outside my door or check on me or pretend he cares. He could focus on important things. On finding Sarah. On getting Sophia back."
"I should just do it. I should just end it. There's a knife in the kitchen. It would be quick."
[I'm scared]
Her eyes closed.
The darkness behind her lids was warm. Comforting. She let herself sink into it, let it swallow her whole, let it carry her down into the quiet place where thoughts couldn't follow.
Black.
The darkness shifted.
Black Scene.
Kira opened her eyes.
She wasn't in her room.
The void stretched infinitely in all directions. Not black, not exactly. More like the color of old paper, yellowed and fragile, like the pages of a book that had been left in the sun too long. The ground beneath her feet was flat and featureless, neither warm nor cold, neither hard nor soft. It simply was.
In the center of the void sat a wooden table, and on it was a single book with an opened bottle of alcohol standing by its side like an old friend.
The book was old. Ancient, maybe. The leather binding was cracked and worn, the pages yellowed and fragile. She couldn't read the title, it seemed to almost blur. The letters shifted when she tried to focus on them, rearranging themselves into patterns that almost made sense before dissolving again.
Beside it. Sake. She recognized the shape, the label, the way the light caught the glass. It was half-empty. A small ceramic cup sat next to it, also empty, waiting.
And behind the bottle, cross-legged on the void-floor, sat a man.
He was young. Maybe thirty, his skin was pale, eerily so. His hair was dark and messy, falling across his forehead in unkempt strands. His eyes were half-closed, dark circles under his eyes, lazy. He wore a simple kimono, dark blue, rumpled, and his feet were bare.
He was looking at her.
He seemed to be barely alive, standing on the edge between life and death, he blinked slowly.
"Yo."
His voice was flat. Monotone. The kind of voice that had given up on inflection years ago and never bothered to find it again.
Kira stared at him.
"Ummm…"
"You're finally here," he said. "Took you long enough. I was getting bored. Well, more bored. Well it's not like I've been waiting very long anyways, I don't really know how long I've been here. I guess my sense of time is skewed."
"Who are you?"
He tilted his head. "Who do you think I am?"
"I don't know. A hallucination? A dream? Am I finally dead?"
"All of the above, probably." He picked up the sake bottle, poured some into the cup, and drank it in one smooth motion. "I'm a writer, at least that's what I like to call myself. But usually the others would call me a clown." He poured another cup. "Nice to meet you, my name is Shuji. Though 'nice' is a strong word. Let's say 'adequate.' Adequate to meet you."
He didn't reach his hand out for a handshake.
Kira's hands were shaking again. She looked down at them. In the void, they were unmarked. No scars. No tremors. Just pale skin and thin fingers and nails bitten down to the quick.
"Why are you here?"
"Why are any of us here?" He waved a hand vaguely. "Magic really is a fascinating thing, it can be used to kill us and keep us alive."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I've got." He drank again. "You're the one who came to me, remember? I was just sitting here, minding my own business, being dead, and then suddenly. You're in my void, not that I can see what you are, I can barely discern one human from another. Very rude, by the way. I was having a nice nap."
"I didn't come here on purpose."
"I know that." He set down the cup. "But here you are anyway. So. What do you want? Someone to tell you that everything's going to be okay?" His lips curved. Not quite a smile. "I mean, if you keep trying, something good is eventually going to happen to you, not that it happened to me while I was alive."
Kira stared at him.
"You're an author?" she asked slowly. "I've never heard of you."
"Authors usually have pen names." He said it casually. "From what I can hear of your distorted voice, you must be a foreigner."
"I'm Japanese."
"I'm rather surprised that I'm wrong, then you should definitely know of the book that I wrote 'Human Disqualification' or somewhere along those lines, I wouldn't know how the west translated it."
"Maybe it's on the tip of my tongue, maybe I've read your book somewhere before."
The silence stretched between them. The void hummed with a frequency that was almost, but not quite, sound. The book sat between them, its pages rustling though there was no wind.
"You want to die," he said.
It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"Me too." He poured another cup of sake, drank it. "Well, wanted. Past tense. As you can see, it didn't work out for me, my soul is simply sharing a body with you now, not that I have much power over the decision making."
"How do you deal with it?"
"I simply do not." He set down the cup. "Dealing with it would imply that there's something to deal with. There isn't. There's just... this." He gestured at the void. "The emptiness. The pointlessness."
"That's not helpful."
"I'm not here to be helpful." He picked up the book, flipped through it idly. "I'm here because you dragged me here. Because you're in pain and your brain reached out for something, anything, to make sense of it. And it found me. Lucky you."
"Why you?"
"Because I'm your reincarnation." He closed the book. "You remind me of a part of myself, a part of myself that I write about. You don't see any meaning in the world do you? Everything is just a string of accidents and coincidences that accidentally pulled us together."
"That's not-"
"Isn't it?" He leaned forward. His eyes, dark and tired, fixed on hers. "Tell me. What do you believe in? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What makes you want to keep breathing when everything inside you is screaming to stop?"
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I don't know."
He leaned back. "Neither do I. Neither did I. I spent my whole life searching for something to believe in. Love. Art. Revolution."
"And what's the truth?"
He smiled. It was a terrible smile, empty and knowing. "We're all just stumbling around in the dark, pretending we know where we're going. But I found that the true meaning of life is to suffer, living is the true meaning of sin. The weak fear happiness, our lives are like a leaf slowly withering away. The only certainty in life is death."
Kira's hands had stopped shaking. She didn't know when that had happened.
"So what's the point?" she asked. "If there's no meaning, no purpose, no reason to keep going... what's the point?"
"There is no meaning to anything."