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rallamajoopThat post-apocalyptic AU I was writing is turning into a novel. Between everything I’ve got typed up so far, assorted notes and a number of untranscribed pages, I’m pretty sure it must have already broken ten thousand words, and I’m not even through Watanuki’s first week at Doumeki’s camp yet. I’m not even up to the first supply mission they go on yet either. Assuming this story keeps up at all, it’s going to be huge. o_o
I’ve still got a ton of stuff to figure out about what I’m doing with it. And I’m still expecting to need some help (for those of you who didn’t get around to saying much about the notes back on the last post, y’know, it’s still totally okay if you do). Good progress is being made, however. So, a couple of updates:
I’ve never tried tackling a project this way before, but I feel I’m going to have a better chance of keeping up momentum if I keep posting bits as I go (and since I seem to have a bit of a readership coming to this journal now, hopefully I can produce something to keep them entertained in the process ^_^). It’s likely to stay as unbeated early draft-type stuff though, since I don’t think I’m even going to know what needs revising until I have a better idea where I’m going later on. Once I’ve got some more done and cleaned up a bit better, I’ll start producing revised versions that’ll be worth sharing at the comms and such. (Well, that’s the plan at this stage anyway – we’ll see where it goes. ^^;)
The first part here picks up directly after the first original snippet – which I’m going to have to go back and revise at some stage anyhow since Watanuki did not really seem quite beaten up enough, and had one too many functional eyes. Concrit is generally welcome, but since there’s also an outside chance a lot of this will be scraped and completely rewritten before I’ll declare it officially ready for betaing, so it may not be worth it so much just yet.
So, without further ado, here’s part one.
(In case people want them, the original snippets went up here, and my first post on plot stuff for this universe is here.)
The stories said the April Fool was a boy born with one blue eye and one an empty white. They said that with his left eye he saw the land of the living, and with his right he saw the land of the dead.
“I see everything with the left one,” said the boy, who’d admitted to the name ‘Watanuki Kimihiro’ with minimal prompting, on the long journey back to camp. “I’m blind on the other side. I wasn’t born that way either.”
“Why the title?” Doumeki wondered.
“I was born on the first of April,” said Watanuki, sounding sullen. At Doumeki’s confused look, he added, “They used to call it ‘April Fool’s day’. It was supposed to be some kind of joke.”
A bad one, Doumeki thought. Surely no-one had associated the first of April with anything light-hearted in his lifetime.
“Appropriate,” he ventured.
Watanuki gave a faint snort of a laugh that was almost a sob.
***
Kurogane was neither greatly impressed nor greatly bothered by Watanuki, when they finally arrived back at camp. He hadn’t kept their camp alive this long by taking just anyone in, but he hadn’t done it by wasting even unlikely opportunities either. What he was clear about was that their newest member was going to be Doumeki’s responsibility, and he got that across without uttering more than half a dozen words on the subject. He had more immediate concerns. “Anything left back there we can salvage?”
That was the kind of world this was – a camp full of bodies was a camp with no guards and little chance any other scavengers had been there yet. If Doumeki hadn’t taken their lightest weight vehicle to save valuable fuel, he’d have needed a far better excuse than one crazy psychic boy for not grabbing every useful looking item he could carry. “Didn’t stay to check, but whatever happened finished fast.”
Behind them, Watanuki and Syaoran studied each other with unapologetic suspicion.
“Give me the map,” said Kurogane. “I’ll take the kid, expect us back by midday. Show your new friend around.” He didn’t add ‘but keep him away from Chi until we know more about him’, because Doumeki wasn’t stupid.
While they headed towards the lab, Watanuki looked around the camp with an expression of surprise just breaking through that baseline suspicion he seemed to direct at everything that moved and quite a few things that didn’t. April Fool, thought Doumeki – always waiting to see what trick the universe was going to play on him next.
Fye wasn’t immediately visible behind the shapes of the nearest solar panels, but Doumeki could hear the sound of tools clanking against tools somewhere, and as the crunching of their footsteps came closer, a fluffy white-haired head wearing a pair of elaborate goggles stuck up from behind the nearest panel.
“Back already, Shizuka?” said Fye, pushing the goggles up on to his forehead. Kurogane had always maintained they looked ridiculous on him. Doumeki had never had much of an opinion either way. “Oh, we have a guest?”
At the word ‘guest’, a second head stuck out from the behind the panel, around the side this time as its owner was a little short to see over the top. The combined puppet-show effect was almost comical. Sakura peered curiously at Watanuki, then glanced at Fye, who was remembering his own brand of manners by this point and herding them both around so they could meet their guest without a giant solar panel in the way.
“Well!” said Fye, taking a good look at Watanuki. “Could this really be…?”
“The April Fool?” said Doumeki. “So he tells me.”
“Well well well,” said Fye. “How extraordinary! I’m Fye D. Flowright, an honour to meet you. My charming companion here goes by Sakura.” Last names nowadays were generally understood to be a privilege and not a right. Sakura bowed slightly in greeting.
“W…Watanuki Kimihiro,” said Watanuki awkwardly. Doumeki guessed he wasn’t expected to introduce himself very often.
“Is he staying?” asked Sakura.
“Could be,” said Doumeki. Watanuki shot him a look.
“Don’t let our other boys scare you too much, Kimihiro-kun,” said Fye lightly, waving a hand. “We’re all really quite civilised around here.”
“Ah,” said Watanuki uncertainly. He still wasn’t relaxed by any stretch of the imagination, but under the combined assault of Fye and Sakura he was thawing a little. They tended to have that effect on people.
“Well, if you’re showing him around, we won’t keep you,” said Fye, before the silence could get uncomfortable. “We’ve still got a chance to get today’s problem unit working again before sunset if we don’t waste time. The others have gone out?”
“He came with a dead camp,” said Doumeki, indicating Watanuki with a shrug. “The others are there for salvage. May be back needing refuelling later if it goes well.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Fye. “Now, back to work for us.” He and Sakura disappeared back behind the panel once more.
There wasn’t much else to show, by the time Doumeki had pointed out Fye’s lab (off limits) and a couple of other buildings they used for storage and to sleep in he was more or less done. He’d have to drag out another mattress later, but there wasn’t any great rush. It had been a while since Doumeki had had to share his sleeping space with anyone, but keeping an eye on Watanuki took priority over privacy.
The boy himself was still looking around the camp as though he expected something was going to leap out and bite him any second. Doumeki supposed he should probably have told Watanuki no-one here would hit him for making mistakes, but he wasn’t feeling that charitable.
“This is really everyone?” said Watanuki, when they were done. Doumeki couldn’t blame him – five people to any camp which survived half as long as theirs had was exceptional. Even if that hadn’t always been the case.
“Want me to introduce you to the grave stones around the other side?” Doumeki suggested, assuming the hint would get through.
Watanuki gave a hollow but genuine laugh. “No thank you, I’m sure if any of them want to talk to me, they’ll find me on their own,” and Doumeki paused a moment at the discovery of a joke he hadn’t noticed he was making.
***
It took Syaoran and Kurogane two trips to bring back everything that was salvageable from the dead camp, counting usable vehicles, weapons and equipment. There was no need for a third. The gang had been on the move long enough that they’d lost anything they couldn’t carry with them long ago – the buildings where Doumeki had found Watanuki had been no more than a temporary campsite. There wasn’t so much as a scrap of anything edible, and hadn’t been for at least a few days, going by the enthusiasm with which Watanuki tucked into the slightly rancid food which was all they had at their own camp at the time. No wonder they’d been desperate enough to blame their seer for not delivering them a miracle.
“Did you look at any of the bodies?” Syaoran asked Doumeki when they got back. “The only ones with bullet wounds were the ones who’d been shot by one of their friends in the confusion. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Doumeki wasn’t going to ask how Syaoran told things like that from a room full of dead people. Concepts like squeamishness were lost on Syaoran where Sakura wasn’t involved; a room full of dead people held no fears for him. “Didn’t stick around long. It sounded bad from outside, but it was over before I got close.”
“The new guy – Kimihiro – he was there for it, right?” said Syaoran. “What did he say happened?”
“He said ghosts killed them,” Doumeki relayed.
Syaoran looked sceptical, but it was mixed with just enough doubt that the circumstances really had been mysterious enough that he couldn’t entirely rule out Watanuki’s claim either.
The bodies of the dead men they’d left where they lay. Burial or cremation was a luxury for people the finder knew and cared about, and food at Kurogane’s camp was not yet scarce enough that the human remains would need to be put to any other purpose. Before the day was out, scavengers of the inhuman variety could be counted on to arrive to clean up what was left at the camp site for themselves.
The so called ‘dead lands’ had never been all dead. As early as the first year After, the grass began taking root wherever it could get a hold. It was thick, wiry, Spinifex-like stuff, not remotely pleasant to walk through if you didn’t have thick boots on. It was also far too poisonous to eat no matter what you did with it. This didn’t seem to bother any of the small species of sharp-toothed, rat-like mammals that grazed on it, but as long as they were well fed they were poisonous too. You had to get a fair way up the food chain before you reached anything edible, and even then, if whatever you brought down had had a recent meal of it’s own, it could still be poisonous enough that trying to digest it became a wasted effort. The one small mercy was that the poison broke down quickly once anything that could stomach it had stopped ingesting more of it, but waiting for that to happen could mean guarding a carcass for hours or days on end. If you waited too long, the meat went bad or attracted worse predators; if you waited less, there was the danger there’d still be so much poison that you’d wind up very ill – or worse. When human flesh started to look appetising by comparison, it wasn’t for the wrong reasons.
***
Dragging the mattress out of storage and into his room was a task that Doumeki undertook single-handedly, but also under Watanuki’s awkward scrutiny. The April Fool obviously wasn’t built for heavy lifting, but he just as obviously wouldn’t need to be given his job description.
After he’d dropped the mattress into it’s new place (stirring up a largish cloud of dust), it occurred to Doumeki to ask, “What else do you do?”
“What else?” Watanuki echoed.
“Skills, I mean,” Doumeki clarified. “Anything else we can use.”
“Oh,” said Watanuki. It didn’t seem like this was a question he had to answer very often. “I can clean a gun or bandage up an arm – the usual stuff, I guess. I’m usually pretty good at figuring out how the tech stuff I find works.”
“We’ve got Fye for that,” said Doumeki.
“Oh,” said Watanuki again, sounding strangely disappointed. “That’s about it then. Mostly people just stick me in a corner and act like I’m cursed and it could be contagious. I’ve never learnt much else.” He looked at the mattress gingerly, like someone deciding whether sitting down was worth the effort.
“How bad is it?” asked Doumeki.
Watanuki shot him a scathing look that suggested he wasn’t admitting awareness of this conversation until Doumeki started making sense.
“Injuries,” Doumeki clarified.
“Can’t you see?” said Watanuki testily, indicating the bruise on his cheek. It was dark and swollen, and Doumeki wondered briefly how different Watanuki would look once it had faded.
“You’re telling me that’s it.”
“It’s nothing serious.”
“You’ve been walking strangely since we met,” said Doumeki impatiently. “Watching how you sit too.”
“It’s not serious!” Watanuki repeated.
“So whatever happened to you that made your ghosts angry enough to do all that…” Doumeki prompted.
Watanuki gave in. Under his shirt there were two more bruises spreading darkly over his skin. Watanuki admitted to a third on his thigh which he claimed was no worse than the others, and Doumeki took his word for it. They had to be more painful than Watanuki would admit, but there was nothing that shouldn’t heal naturally within a few weeks at most.
He raised an eyebrow. “This was all it took?”
“I told you it was nothing,” Watanuki complained, self-conscious without the protection of his shirt. “This is normal! It didn’t get bad in there until they brought the knife out.” The last part came out rather quieter than the rest.
Watanuki himself was conspicuously free of knife marks. “It got bad fast after that?” Doumeki asked, unsure why he was prying so far into event he hadn’t yet decided whether to believe in, other than to see how far the story held up. Watanuki looked down and away, but there was confirmation of a kind in his face.
Doumeki finished examining the bruises and stood up. He nodded towards the mattress. “Lie down, see if you can find a position you can hold comfortably. I’ll check with Sakura whether we still have anything we can use as a cold compress.”
He was already making his way out as he said it, so he never saw Watanuki’s look of surprise.
***
People around here went to bed early and got up at dawn. There was nothing worth staying up for, and no way of making light that didn’t drain some important resource or other. Sometime after midnight though, Watanuki got out of bed and went outside. Doumeki watched him through one cracked eyelid, then followed as quietly as he could move.
Outside, only a dozen or so paces from the doorway, Watanuki stopped and stood, staring out into the deadlands past the security fence, rubbing his upper arms with his hands to keep warm. After a minute he’d still shown no signs of moving any further, so Doumeki accepted that he wasn’t watching an attempt at anything subversive and said, “Oi,” loudly enough to be heard.
Watanuki whipped around sharply, but relaxed a bit when he saw it was only Doumeki. “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“I’m a light sleeper,” said Doumeki.
Watanuki glanced away, unsurprised. “Look, I’m not running away or anything. Where would I have to run to? I get traded back and forth between gangs often enough without encouraging it. But I have this thing where I just don’t sleep all that well after I’ve been at the scene of a massacre. I came out to get some air.”
In the context, Doumeki had no reason to question that.
Watanuki sighed. “I’ll be out a while longer, I’ll come back in on my own when I feel like I can sleep again. You don’t have to…”
“I’m staying out here as long as you do,” said Doumeki.
Watanuki gave in. “Whatever you prefer. Don’t expect me to apologise for keeping you up. Even if I should probably be grateful I’m not being ordered back inside,” he added, in a lower voice.
Doumeki sat down on the stump of an old wall to wait while Watanuki turned back around to stare out into whatever part of the deadlands might have held fascination for a boy who spoke to the dead. In the moonlight, the slim shape of his body and the torn edges of his clothes took on an ethereal quality, almost like Doumeki may have been looking at a ghost himself.
It never occurred to Dounmeki to wonder whether the presence of someone like himself might have been more patronising or comforting that night, but after an hour, Watanuki made good on his claim and came back inside with barely a word.
Feedback makes me write faster~!
I’ve still got a ton of stuff to figure out about what I’m doing with it. And I’m still expecting to need some help (for those of you who didn’t get around to saying much about the notes back on the last post, y’know, it’s still totally okay if you do). Good progress is being made, however. So, a couple of updates:
- Numbers at the camp don’t look like they’ll be increasing any. I’ve also got three named ghosts (excluding Haruka) and a few others from the X groups expecting a decent look in on things, so while there may be other cameos, I’m probably at the point where I should avoid adding any more significant characters to the cast.
- Kurogane now has all kinds of backstory. (Thank yooooou
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jaseroque!) I’m starting to get a grasp on how he and Fye probably met too – which is something was giving me trouble originally. - Without going into any details just yet, let us say a few certain very interesting facts about the history and management of the Complexes are coming into focus. (Did I mention jaseroque is a force of pure evil? Well she is. ^_^)
- Assorted other plot points are also sorting themselves into order. Like, I know where Doumeki was when he was away before the second snippet I posted, I know the circumstances under which Watanuki’s going to learn about Chi, and when I next sit down with the notebook again I know roughly where they’re going next.
- I still don’t know for certain what I’m doing about names, particularly the first-or-last name problem. More importantly, I have no idea at all what Fye calls Kurogane in this universe.
- I also need a title. Though I’m toying with the possibility of something along the lines of ‘juuoku monogatari kaidankai’ – or, for those who can’t be bothered running that through the WWWJDIC, that would mean ‘The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories’. Not certain, but it kinda fits.
I’ve never tried tackling a project this way before, but I feel I’m going to have a better chance of keeping up momentum if I keep posting bits as I go (and since I seem to have a bit of a readership coming to this journal now, hopefully I can produce something to keep them entertained in the process ^_^). It’s likely to stay as unbeated early draft-type stuff though, since I don’t think I’m even going to know what needs revising until I have a better idea where I’m going later on. Once I’ve got some more done and cleaned up a bit better, I’ll start producing revised versions that’ll be worth sharing at the comms and such. (Well, that’s the plan at this stage anyway – we’ll see where it goes. ^^;)
The first part here picks up directly after the first original snippet – which I’m going to have to go back and revise at some stage anyhow since Watanuki did not really seem quite beaten up enough, and had one too many functional eyes. Concrit is generally welcome, but since there’s also an outside chance a lot of this will be scraped and completely rewritten before I’ll declare it officially ready for betaing, so it may not be worth it so much just yet.
So, without further ado, here’s part one.
(In case people want them, the original snippets went up here, and my first post on plot stuff for this universe is here.)
The stories said the April Fool was a boy born with one blue eye and one an empty white. They said that with his left eye he saw the land of the living, and with his right he saw the land of the dead.
“I see everything with the left one,” said the boy, who’d admitted to the name ‘Watanuki Kimihiro’ with minimal prompting, on the long journey back to camp. “I’m blind on the other side. I wasn’t born that way either.”
“Why the title?” Doumeki wondered.
“I was born on the first of April,” said Watanuki, sounding sullen. At Doumeki’s confused look, he added, “They used to call it ‘April Fool’s day’. It was supposed to be some kind of joke.”
A bad one, Doumeki thought. Surely no-one had associated the first of April with anything light-hearted in his lifetime.
“Appropriate,” he ventured.
Watanuki gave a faint snort of a laugh that was almost a sob.
***
Kurogane was neither greatly impressed nor greatly bothered by Watanuki, when they finally arrived back at camp. He hadn’t kept their camp alive this long by taking just anyone in, but he hadn’t done it by wasting even unlikely opportunities either. What he was clear about was that their newest member was going to be Doumeki’s responsibility, and he got that across without uttering more than half a dozen words on the subject. He had more immediate concerns. “Anything left back there we can salvage?”
That was the kind of world this was – a camp full of bodies was a camp with no guards and little chance any other scavengers had been there yet. If Doumeki hadn’t taken their lightest weight vehicle to save valuable fuel, he’d have needed a far better excuse than one crazy psychic boy for not grabbing every useful looking item he could carry. “Didn’t stay to check, but whatever happened finished fast.”
Behind them, Watanuki and Syaoran studied each other with unapologetic suspicion.
“Give me the map,” said Kurogane. “I’ll take the kid, expect us back by midday. Show your new friend around.” He didn’t add ‘but keep him away from Chi until we know more about him’, because Doumeki wasn’t stupid.
While they headed towards the lab, Watanuki looked around the camp with an expression of surprise just breaking through that baseline suspicion he seemed to direct at everything that moved and quite a few things that didn’t. April Fool, thought Doumeki – always waiting to see what trick the universe was going to play on him next.
Fye wasn’t immediately visible behind the shapes of the nearest solar panels, but Doumeki could hear the sound of tools clanking against tools somewhere, and as the crunching of their footsteps came closer, a fluffy white-haired head wearing a pair of elaborate goggles stuck up from behind the nearest panel.
“Back already, Shizuka?” said Fye, pushing the goggles up on to his forehead. Kurogane had always maintained they looked ridiculous on him. Doumeki had never had much of an opinion either way. “Oh, we have a guest?”
At the word ‘guest’, a second head stuck out from the behind the panel, around the side this time as its owner was a little short to see over the top. The combined puppet-show effect was almost comical. Sakura peered curiously at Watanuki, then glanced at Fye, who was remembering his own brand of manners by this point and herding them both around so they could meet their guest without a giant solar panel in the way.
“Well!” said Fye, taking a good look at Watanuki. “Could this really be…?”
“The April Fool?” said Doumeki. “So he tells me.”
“Well well well,” said Fye. “How extraordinary! I’m Fye D. Flowright, an honour to meet you. My charming companion here goes by Sakura.” Last names nowadays were generally understood to be a privilege and not a right. Sakura bowed slightly in greeting.
“W…Watanuki Kimihiro,” said Watanuki awkwardly. Doumeki guessed he wasn’t expected to introduce himself very often.
“Is he staying?” asked Sakura.
“Could be,” said Doumeki. Watanuki shot him a look.
“Don’t let our other boys scare you too much, Kimihiro-kun,” said Fye lightly, waving a hand. “We’re all really quite civilised around here.”
“Ah,” said Watanuki uncertainly. He still wasn’t relaxed by any stretch of the imagination, but under the combined assault of Fye and Sakura he was thawing a little. They tended to have that effect on people.
“Well, if you’re showing him around, we won’t keep you,” said Fye, before the silence could get uncomfortable. “We’ve still got a chance to get today’s problem unit working again before sunset if we don’t waste time. The others have gone out?”
“He came with a dead camp,” said Doumeki, indicating Watanuki with a shrug. “The others are there for salvage. May be back needing refuelling later if it goes well.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Fye. “Now, back to work for us.” He and Sakura disappeared back behind the panel once more.
There wasn’t much else to show, by the time Doumeki had pointed out Fye’s lab (off limits) and a couple of other buildings they used for storage and to sleep in he was more or less done. He’d have to drag out another mattress later, but there wasn’t any great rush. It had been a while since Doumeki had had to share his sleeping space with anyone, but keeping an eye on Watanuki took priority over privacy.
The boy himself was still looking around the camp as though he expected something was going to leap out and bite him any second. Doumeki supposed he should probably have told Watanuki no-one here would hit him for making mistakes, but he wasn’t feeling that charitable.
“This is really everyone?” said Watanuki, when they were done. Doumeki couldn’t blame him – five people to any camp which survived half as long as theirs had was exceptional. Even if that hadn’t always been the case.
“Want me to introduce you to the grave stones around the other side?” Doumeki suggested, assuming the hint would get through.
Watanuki gave a hollow but genuine laugh. “No thank you, I’m sure if any of them want to talk to me, they’ll find me on their own,” and Doumeki paused a moment at the discovery of a joke he hadn’t noticed he was making.
***
It took Syaoran and Kurogane two trips to bring back everything that was salvageable from the dead camp, counting usable vehicles, weapons and equipment. There was no need for a third. The gang had been on the move long enough that they’d lost anything they couldn’t carry with them long ago – the buildings where Doumeki had found Watanuki had been no more than a temporary campsite. There wasn’t so much as a scrap of anything edible, and hadn’t been for at least a few days, going by the enthusiasm with which Watanuki tucked into the slightly rancid food which was all they had at their own camp at the time. No wonder they’d been desperate enough to blame their seer for not delivering them a miracle.
“Did you look at any of the bodies?” Syaoran asked Doumeki when they got back. “The only ones with bullet wounds were the ones who’d been shot by one of their friends in the confusion. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Doumeki wasn’t going to ask how Syaoran told things like that from a room full of dead people. Concepts like squeamishness were lost on Syaoran where Sakura wasn’t involved; a room full of dead people held no fears for him. “Didn’t stick around long. It sounded bad from outside, but it was over before I got close.”
“The new guy – Kimihiro – he was there for it, right?” said Syaoran. “What did he say happened?”
“He said ghosts killed them,” Doumeki relayed.
Syaoran looked sceptical, but it was mixed with just enough doubt that the circumstances really had been mysterious enough that he couldn’t entirely rule out Watanuki’s claim either.
The bodies of the dead men they’d left where they lay. Burial or cremation was a luxury for people the finder knew and cared about, and food at Kurogane’s camp was not yet scarce enough that the human remains would need to be put to any other purpose. Before the day was out, scavengers of the inhuman variety could be counted on to arrive to clean up what was left at the camp site for themselves.
The so called ‘dead lands’ had never been all dead. As early as the first year After, the grass began taking root wherever it could get a hold. It was thick, wiry, Spinifex-like stuff, not remotely pleasant to walk through if you didn’t have thick boots on. It was also far too poisonous to eat no matter what you did with it. This didn’t seem to bother any of the small species of sharp-toothed, rat-like mammals that grazed on it, but as long as they were well fed they were poisonous too. You had to get a fair way up the food chain before you reached anything edible, and even then, if whatever you brought down had had a recent meal of it’s own, it could still be poisonous enough that trying to digest it became a wasted effort. The one small mercy was that the poison broke down quickly once anything that could stomach it had stopped ingesting more of it, but waiting for that to happen could mean guarding a carcass for hours or days on end. If you waited too long, the meat went bad or attracted worse predators; if you waited less, there was the danger there’d still be so much poison that you’d wind up very ill – or worse. When human flesh started to look appetising by comparison, it wasn’t for the wrong reasons.
***
Dragging the mattress out of storage and into his room was a task that Doumeki undertook single-handedly, but also under Watanuki’s awkward scrutiny. The April Fool obviously wasn’t built for heavy lifting, but he just as obviously wouldn’t need to be given his job description.
After he’d dropped the mattress into it’s new place (stirring up a largish cloud of dust), it occurred to Doumeki to ask, “What else do you do?”
“What else?” Watanuki echoed.
“Skills, I mean,” Doumeki clarified. “Anything else we can use.”
“Oh,” said Watanuki. It didn’t seem like this was a question he had to answer very often. “I can clean a gun or bandage up an arm – the usual stuff, I guess. I’m usually pretty good at figuring out how the tech stuff I find works.”
“We’ve got Fye for that,” said Doumeki.
“Oh,” said Watanuki again, sounding strangely disappointed. “That’s about it then. Mostly people just stick me in a corner and act like I’m cursed and it could be contagious. I’ve never learnt much else.” He looked at the mattress gingerly, like someone deciding whether sitting down was worth the effort.
“How bad is it?” asked Doumeki.
Watanuki shot him a scathing look that suggested he wasn’t admitting awareness of this conversation until Doumeki started making sense.
“Injuries,” Doumeki clarified.
“Can’t you see?” said Watanuki testily, indicating the bruise on his cheek. It was dark and swollen, and Doumeki wondered briefly how different Watanuki would look once it had faded.
“You’re telling me that’s it.”
“It’s nothing serious.”
“You’ve been walking strangely since we met,” said Doumeki impatiently. “Watching how you sit too.”
“It’s not serious!” Watanuki repeated.
“So whatever happened to you that made your ghosts angry enough to do all that…” Doumeki prompted.
Watanuki gave in. Under his shirt there were two more bruises spreading darkly over his skin. Watanuki admitted to a third on his thigh which he claimed was no worse than the others, and Doumeki took his word for it. They had to be more painful than Watanuki would admit, but there was nothing that shouldn’t heal naturally within a few weeks at most.
He raised an eyebrow. “This was all it took?”
“I told you it was nothing,” Watanuki complained, self-conscious without the protection of his shirt. “This is normal! It didn’t get bad in there until they brought the knife out.” The last part came out rather quieter than the rest.
Watanuki himself was conspicuously free of knife marks. “It got bad fast after that?” Doumeki asked, unsure why he was prying so far into event he hadn’t yet decided whether to believe in, other than to see how far the story held up. Watanuki looked down and away, but there was confirmation of a kind in his face.
Doumeki finished examining the bruises and stood up. He nodded towards the mattress. “Lie down, see if you can find a position you can hold comfortably. I’ll check with Sakura whether we still have anything we can use as a cold compress.”
He was already making his way out as he said it, so he never saw Watanuki’s look of surprise.
***
People around here went to bed early and got up at dawn. There was nothing worth staying up for, and no way of making light that didn’t drain some important resource or other. Sometime after midnight though, Watanuki got out of bed and went outside. Doumeki watched him through one cracked eyelid, then followed as quietly as he could move.
Outside, only a dozen or so paces from the doorway, Watanuki stopped and stood, staring out into the deadlands past the security fence, rubbing his upper arms with his hands to keep warm. After a minute he’d still shown no signs of moving any further, so Doumeki accepted that he wasn’t watching an attempt at anything subversive and said, “Oi,” loudly enough to be heard.
Watanuki whipped around sharply, but relaxed a bit when he saw it was only Doumeki. “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“I’m a light sleeper,” said Doumeki.
Watanuki glanced away, unsurprised. “Look, I’m not running away or anything. Where would I have to run to? I get traded back and forth between gangs often enough without encouraging it. But I have this thing where I just don’t sleep all that well after I’ve been at the scene of a massacre. I came out to get some air.”
In the context, Doumeki had no reason to question that.
Watanuki sighed. “I’ll be out a while longer, I’ll come back in on my own when I feel like I can sleep again. You don’t have to…”
“I’m staying out here as long as you do,” said Doumeki.
Watanuki gave in. “Whatever you prefer. Don’t expect me to apologise for keeping you up. Even if I should probably be grateful I’m not being ordered back inside,” he added, in a lower voice.
Doumeki sat down on the stump of an old wall to wait while Watanuki turned back around to stare out into whatever part of the deadlands might have held fascination for a boy who spoke to the dead. In the moonlight, the slim shape of his body and the torn edges of his clothes took on an ethereal quality, almost like Doumeki may have been looking at a ghost himself.
It never occurred to Dounmeki to wonder whether the presence of someone like himself might have been more patronising or comforting that night, but after an hour, Watanuki made good on his claim and came back inside with barely a word.