[part 1 2]
There wasn’t a lot of time.
Hakuba stood shaking in front of the mirror, palm sliced open from between his index and middle finger down to his wrist. Blood slid over his hand and dripped into the sink in a steady stream, and though he had the bandages laid out, he couldn’t stop the grin that pulled at his lips. It was so difficult to care about it. It hurt, certainly, but he’d stopped hissing a few moments ago. Really, all he wanted to do was continue to flex his hand, back and forth, and watch the way the skin pulled away from itself over that gash of red.
It was fascinating, really. The threads of tissue and muscle. The hand was such an intricate piece of machinery…
The detective shook his head. No. He had work to do.
“Concentrate…"
He shuddered, blinking several times before he turned to the supplies next to him. Bandages. A syringe. Liquid already measured out. But what was…? Oh- oh, yes the solution. Chemical compounds he’d put together in the labs earlier, which would react to certain parts of the…
…the drug…
The detective pressed his palm against the mirror and pulled his hand down over the reflection of his face. It was all so familiar… a memory from before. Years ago? Not too long ago. Something like that. His pack of friends had done this before. That was in London. Where was he now?
Not that it mattered. God, red was such a beautiful color. He smeared his hand sideways in an arc and sighed. Just like Koizumi-san; the sunrise, the sunset, heaven and earth. What was blue, anyway? Unoxygenated? Non… oxygenated? Blood…
No, that wasn’t right. That was just a myth. Blood wasn’t blue unless you were speaking of royalty. Which he was not.
"Fuck my grandfather, really… who needs lineage? It’s all just a game… a bloody game of kiss and tell with papers like dogs and like horses. Horses…”
He touched his face and chuckled.
Where were they? His mates.
“Lend me a fiver. Lend you a fiver. An’ we’ll head down to the pub fer a drink! A drink and a fight and a bit of a fuck in the back alley by the brick wall and the underground parking lot…”
How long had it been since he’d called them? Months… years? No, it was years, he was fairly certain. He dug in his trouser pocket for the silver Master Watch and pulled it out, holding it close to inspect the time. His vision blurred, doubled, and he pulled it against the mirror. Yes, it’d been years since he’d seen his friends. He’d need to give them a call…
But where was his phone? Not in his pocket…
“Tricksy… string or nothing.."
Not that it mattered, either. He’d find it in a moment. There was always the house phone, too. Or, no, this wasn’t his house, was it? Not exactly. Things were too clean. Too sterile. But it wasn’t the labs.
Yet there was a syringe there… next to all that spilled white powder. What was it for?
He closed his eyes to think, running over memories of carnivals and street markets, tall grass and a bracelet of beads. She’d worn such a short skirt, that bird. The pack leader. Such a short skirt with nothing underneath. How’d she get away with that, anyway? How had she remembered him after the years of not talking?
The blood was dripping onto his trousers and he paused to wipe his hand and arm over his bare chest and stomach, manufactured frown on his face. Sticky, that. Red and sticky, with just a bit of grit. Impure blood. Like crime scenes.
The syringe was for…
Oh yes. For an experiment. He only needed to push it in. Needles weren’t scary. Not when you worked with them in a lab quite often. Nothing more than tugging on the skin here, a little pinprick there and – ah- push the stopper…
The needle fell into the bloodied sink when he dropped it, rolling around before coming to a stop. It was a feeling of triumph. He’d done the task he’d set out to do. He almost hadn’t been able to, but he managed, and already a bit of clarity was coming back to him. He blinked at the mirror, suddenly hesitating.
The sunset he’d painted was dripping. Boiling. It turned to fire. He shuddered, staring past it at his own face, chalk white. There was someone standing next to him. Black robes. Thin white collar. The cross.
He stepped back into the towel rack and froze. The cold metal touched those scars. Lifting a hand to comb through his hair, blood dripped to the crook of his elbow and onto his bare foot. Fire. There was fire there. Soot-stained stone. The dig of that metal. The smell of burning skin.
Hakuba choked on a gasp, staring into the eyes of that man. Two men in one. The turban threads swung loose in the breeze, but he wasn’t there. None of it was there. The locks were on the doors. Chair in the way. The sliding glass had furniture in front of it, too. He couldn’t move it. Bolted down? No. how could this be? Then the wire… the wire everywhere.
The web…
He was caught all over again; a scared little boy at only sixteen, face-to-face with that man who spoke of thieves as if they were only his lures. Men and women that he played with, propped on silver strings and made to dance for his supper.
Red everywhere. The sky, the grass, the flames.The faces of children burning, screaming silent screams, weeping muffled into pillows. Bloodied sheets. Hands and feet so cold they burned with blood on concrete pathways. He watched them all as they tumbled down the steps, one after another until the blood flowed like a river over stone, carrying them to the tide beyond.
It was hell. Everywhere around him was eternal purgatory, reaching toward outer darkness and a scream that he couldn’t manage from all that boiled in his gut. But there it was on the ceiling… those words he’d been searching for these years. The face of the man he was searching for. There, just barely out of reach… and if he could only just stretch a little further, deal with the pain a little longer, he could save them…
…
Whether it was the loss of blood from his untreated hand or the chemical cocktail that had him unconscious first was unclear, but he remained out cold until late the next morning. Even once awake, it felt like hours before he could drag himself from the floor to his knees. The bloody scene that greeted him left him ill, but he managed to make it to the bathroom before completely losing all composure. Yet, sick or not, and so much cleanup ahead of him, at least there was one small comfort:
The experiment had been a success.