Chapter Text
The first thing he saw was blood. So much blood. Streaked down the driver-side window, splattered across the dashboard, and smeared on the steering wheel of the wreckage of the Daihatsu. He began going through the mental checklist he used every time he'd been shot or stabbed, cataloging the trauma to assess what he was working with. He could feel his arms and legs and move them. Ok, that was a good start. He checked his chest and abdomen next. No wounds there that would indicate a punctured lung or anything more serious. His head? Oh, that's where all the blood had come from. Head wounds did tend to bleed a lot. Alright, now time to try to assess how concussed he was and make sure his memory was still working since head trauma was in play.
My name's Kiryu Kazuma.
I'm 40 years old.
I was driving back to Kamurocho for Christmas with -
Oh god, no.
"Haruka???" His voice came out a strained croak. Oh god, she wasn't in the car. What if all this blood wasn't his? Images of her small, broken body ejected from the vehicle filled his head as he wrenched the passenger door open and hefted himself out, the muscles in his arms protesting angrily at the effort it took.
"Haruka?" His voice sounded steadier this time. He needed to be calm. Or at least appear calm. He didn't want Haruka to hear him sounding frightened. He wanted to give her the reassurance that he was in control of the situation and that they were both safe and everything would be fine.
Except she wasn't outside the car either. Panicked, he scrabbled his way back up the car's undercarriage to look in the passenger seat again. The car didn't have much of a backseat to speak of, but he checked it anyway. No sign of Haruka.
Where the fuck was he? They couldn't have been far outside of town. He'd just started seeing the familiar urban sprawl of the edges of Kamurocho when….what exactly had happened?
Kiryu looked around, trying to get his bearings. The shops on the side of the road were unfamiliar. He squinted at the names through the pervasive mist that was making it hard to see much of anything in front of him. No, he didn't recognize any of them but surely they'd be able to call the police and an ambulance. He walked to the door of one and tried it. Locked. So was the next one. And the one after that. Why was nothing open? The sun was up. What time was it anyway? He checked his watch, but the face was so badly shattered it made the time unreadable.
Suddenly, realization caught up with him with all the speed and impact of a freight train.
Where was the traffic?
No matter what time it was, there should be taxis. There should be pedestrians. There should be salarymen scurrying about. How had he not noticed? The bustle of Kamurocho was an inextricable part of the city. And now that he was aware of it, the utter silence unnerved him deeply. But it wasn't completely silent, was it? There was a…vibration? A hiss may have been a more accurate description. Whatever the sound was, it was low and pervasive and seemed to dampen all other sounds around him, replacing everything with itself, overwriting any other sounds of life that should have been there.
Maybe the noise wasn't really there. Perhaps it was ringing in his ears from his injury. He could worry about all of that later.
"Haruka!" His voice echoed down the empty street. None of this made any sense, and all he knew was that standing by the wreckage of the car and shouting wasn't going to accomplish anything.
His phone! Of course! Why the hell hadn't he looked for his phone sooner? Maybe he had a worse concussion than he realized.
He knew on a subconscious level that his phone wasn't in his pockets, but he still absently patted at them. It must still be in the car. He did his best to climb back into the ruined vehicle without cutting himself on the seemingly endless supply of broken glass and found his flip phone in the driver's side footwell. Easing himself back onto the sidewalk, he flipped the phone open to see two missed call notifications - one from Haruka and the other from Majima. Holding the button to dial into his voicemail, he tightly held the phone to his ear, gripping it as if it were a lifeline.
"You have two new messages. First message sent December 21st at 9 a.m.."
"Oji-san? Where are you? Oji-"
"Message deleted. Next message."
Message deleted? He hadn't deleted it! He frantically poked at the buttons on his phone, trying to remember which one replayed a message. But the phone uncooperatively had already segued into the next message, not giving the slightest interest in his distressed button mashing.
"Message sent December 21st at 9:15 a.m."
"....chan? Kiryu-chan? Pick up the fuckin' phone. Or…call me back. Something….. don't….no. No, stay…." The message cut in and out until it finally dissolved completely into loud, crackling static.
"Message deleted. You have no more new messages."
He hadn't deleted that one, either! What the hell was wrong with this damn phone? It must have been damaged in the crash. He took one last look at it and decided he could at least be grateful that the battery had retained its charge. A small miracle in a day of disasters.
The thought of miracles stirred an unpleasant idea to life, and Kiryu wondered then if he was dead. Perhaps this was what the afterlife was like. He had died in the accident and was now the only inhabitant of this cold, grey, mist-filled world.
No. That couldn't be right. Before his phone had destroyed them, he'd had messages from Haruka and Majima, so they must be here too. Kiryu wasn't a religious man, but he thought the idea of voicemails in the afterlife sounded too absurd to be worth entertaining. This was real alright. The pain was certainly real. He put a hand to his head and began wandering down the road, looking for a familiar landmark, a sign of Haruka, anything really.
The mist had settled in and thickened into what could only be described as a dense, suffocating fog that obscured everything more than a few meters away in its depths. He quietly cursed it and continued walking until a familiar sign caught his eye.
Le Marche? Now he was getting somewhere! Showa Street felt familiar and comforting - the first relief he'd felt since this hellish experience began. He didn't know why he bothered to try the door. It was locked. Of course, it was locked. The taxi stand was empty of cars and people clambering for a ride. He wondered if the trains were running, and that thought brought him to a discovery that made his blood run cold.
The subway entrances were blocked. No, they weren't just blocked; they were completely filled in with concrete. The only indication they'd ever been there was the canopy covering the entrance. But the entry itself was smooth sidewalk, littered with the same detritus that could usually be found on the rest of Showa street. Except for two bumps that stuck out of the concrete, which drew his attention for some reason. He bent below the station canopy to examine them and then recoiled with a cry of shock.
Fingers. They were human fingers embedded in the concrete, caked in the grey dust of it and stretching skyward.
No.
That wasn't possible.
This wasn't happening.
The subways hadn't been filled with concrete, and certainly not while there were still people inside. This must be some kind of….art installation? Kamurocho wasn't exactly a hive of creative minds, but that had to be the explanation.
It had to.
He leaned in momentarily, wanting to reach toward the fingers. To touch them. To see if they held any human-like warmth beneath the layer of concrete dust. His hand never made the connection, pausing when images sprang unbidden to his mind of terrified eyes looking up at the grey Kamurocho sky, panicked screams, and fingers reaching desperately for freedom only to be closed away in the darkness forever.
Kiryu hurriedly stood and backed away from the subway entrance, casting his eyes about for anything to focus on besides the fingers. And that was when, in the distance, he saw a figure dart across Nakamichi Street. Or he thought he did. He wasn't sure between the fog and his mind, which was clearly playing tricks on him.
But if he had seen something, it would be the first person he'd come across since he got here.
It could be Haruka.
The thought spurred him forward. "Haruka? Haruka, is that you?"
His voice echoed against the empty buildings before being engulfed in that strange perpetual background noise that seemed to be growing louder, preventing him from listening too closely to determine the path the figure had taken.
Kiryu half trotted, half limped down Nakamichi Street toward where he'd seen the person disappear. It had cut across Tenkaichi Alley, headed toward Tenkaichi, and he followed it doggedly.
Where had it gone, though?
"Haruka!" He somehow already knew it was useless to call out, but he did it instinctively. There was no response. He squinted into the fog, looking for any sign of where he should go next. If only he could see better, but between the fog and it getting dark.
Dark…?
Wait. It couldn't be dark already. If the voicemails from Haruka and Majima had happened just after the crash, then that put him sometime around noon at the worst, he assumed. Unless he'd been knocked out for longer than he realized. It was a possibility. But the meager light that had filtered through the fog had that blinding midday quality to it that gave credence to his theory. It should be somewhere around noon, so why was it getting dark?
He glanced at his watch before remembering it was broken and then pulled his phone out of his pocket again to check the time. 11:11 a.m. Even earlier than he'd thought. And definitely not the time of day for darkness to be setting in.
The thought was interrupted by the sharp sound of footsteps pattering down the alley near New Serena. They were quick and close together and had the heavy quality of the steps of a child who wasn't mindful of how loud they were being.
"HARUKA!" He took off toward the sound of the footsteps in a dead run, turning sharply right into the alley that led to New Serena's back entrance.
Then a left.
Then another right.
Then a left…wait…he slowed to a jog and stopped to look around. It looked like the alley leading to the back entrance, but there were far too many turns, and it seemed to be growing more and more narrow.
It was also almost entirely dark now, so he put his fingers out and felt his way along the lefthand wall of the alley. The wall that should have led him straight to the stairs. Except it didn't. It disappeared into another sharp left turn which he followed, feeling more confused and desperate by the minute.
"What the fuck is going on here?"
He asked the question of no one in particular and expected no answer, so he was surprised to hear a noise above him. It sounded like….something clicking along the wall above him, quickly fading away. It unnerved him because the sound had the cadence of a dog or a cat running, albeit far too quickly. It was more like… scurrying. The thought made him shudder.
Alright. I'm not sure where I am. I can't see where I'm going. I still don't know where Haruka is. And there's…something in this alleyway with me.
Kiryu had found his internal monologue grounding at many points in his life, but this was not one of them because it forced him to confront several uncomfortable truths. The first was that while he should be in a familiar alley, he felt hopelessly lost. The second was that there was undeniably something in that alleyway with him because he heard it race by again high up the wall. His unease was compounded by the fact that he couldn't see more than a few inches in front of him.
He flipped his phone open and grimaced at the inadequate illumination. Well, it was better than nothing. At least now he could see the wall he ran his fingers along, if nothing else. The wall which was beginning to look disturbingly….organic.
Kiryu held the phone closer and stared at the wall. Blood vessels were running along its surface, and if he watched closely, he could see them pulse and writhe with the pumping of whatever unseen heart supplied them.
"What the hell?"
A loud clatter behind him made him jump, and he dropped his phone, which threw its dim light onto a dark puddle of something in which it had landed.
Oil? What was oil doing here?
He bent to retrieve his phone and felt his throat constrict. It wasn't oil; it was blood. He was standing in a pool of blood that seemed to be seeping up from the concrete itself.
The scuttling noise passed overhead again, and he fought down a wave of terror threatening to consume him. And then something soft brushed his cheek. Almost ticklish. Playful. And with a familiar floral smell…like a woman's hair.
It was hair. And it was wrapping around his neck.
Kiryu tried to cry out but failed as his air supply was restricted, and he swung wildly, hoping he'd connect with whatever was holding him. He tried to look up but couldn't make out of much of anything through the combined darkness of the alley and his vision beginning to fade out. He thought that perhaps there was a face just above his. Many-eyed and unblinking, watching him twitch and flail.
"...-chan!"
His consciousness was rapidly fading. He couldn't hear properly. Everything sounded like it was filtering down through very deep water.
"Kiryu-chan!"
He tried to cry out, but the only sound that came from him was a rattling gasp as the hair released him. His knees buckled, and then there was nothing.
—-
“L - O - V - E Lovely Haruka!”
"Hehe. Oji-san, you're silly."
That laugh. It sounded like morning light and sunflowers and everything good in the world. Haruka had been trying to find Christmas music on the radio, but the only station she could find this far out was playing pop songs. So she'd been singing along to Get to the Top as they drove down the road, and Kiryu, who was in uncommonly high spirits, was doing his part by filling in with interjections.
"Oji-san, do you think we can do karaoke while we're visiting?"
"Probably."
"Do you think Majima-ojisan will want to come with us?"
"Why don't you ask him? I think he'd like that."
"Do you think he can sing?" Haruka wondered aloud with a mischievous smile.
"He can. Sometimes. When he's not being…." What was the word he wanted? When he's not being flamboyant? When he's not himself?
"Dramatic." He finally settled on dramatic because that probably would be the easiest for Haruka to understand without further explanation. She giggled again in response.
"It was nice of him to invite us to come stay with him, wasn't it, Oji-san?"
"Yeah."
The invitation had been less of an invitation and more of a very unusual phone conversation. Kiryu had protested, asking Majima who precisely he thought was going to run Morning Glory while he and Haruka went swanning off to Kamurocho. The children couldn't very well take care of themselves.
"That's ok; I tracked down Suenaga-san."
"Suenaga? From Sunflower? Where did you even…"
"Look, where doesn't matter, Kiryu-chan. Point is she's gonna be there in two days. She's on my payroll, so ya don't hafta worry about that, and she's so excited to meet the kids. You wouldn't wanna disappoint her, would ya?"
True to his word, Suenaga had appeared on the doorstep of the orphanage two days later, and the children took an immediate liking to her. With that assurance, he and Haruka each packed a bag and headed to the airport.
However, there had been a mixup with their tickets ('a busy time of year' the agent had explained by way of apology), and they only got as far as Osaka by plane. So they'd rented the cheapest car they could find and had headed off down the road to Kamurocho.
They'd stopped briefly to get snacks at a conbini, and then continued into the night and the wee hours of the morning. Kiryu found himself growing tired, hypnotized by the road, but Haruka's enthusiasm was infectious, so he kept driving.
"How much farther do you think it is, Oji-san?"
"Hmm. Probably another two hours?"
"Have you been to Majima-ojisan's house before?"
Kiryu frowned a bit. "I think he lives in an apartment. And only once. It's been a long time, though. I don't even remember if this is the same address."
Staying with Majima for a week. That was certainly going to be an experience. He had, in fact, been to Majima's apartment once before. The morning after he'd asked him to watch over Daigo. He'd turned to leave the roof that night when he felt a hand on his shoulder roughly spinning him around into a clumsy, uncoordinated, and entirely too tooth-filled kiss. They'd somehow tumbled into an elevator and then to a taxi stand, a chaotic whirlwind of half-removed clothing, love bites, and kisses that resembled a brawl more than foreplay. They garnered stares from everyone they passed along the way and the ire of their taxi driver, who Majima had tipped generously for having the balls to unabashedly berate the two half-naked yakuza groping each other in his cab.
He remembered very little of Majima's apartment. He dimly remembered the door, which he'd been pushed against the minute it closed, a lithe and wiry body grinding him into it. He vaguely remembered the couch he'd tripped over in a clumsy attempt to remove his pants while navigating to the bedroom. He mostly remembered the bed, though. A large western-style bed that he'd mercilessly fucked Majima into twice that night before slinking out of it shamefully in the morning, leaving the other man still sleeping. It had been a culmination of years of frustration and want escaping containment.
They'd spoken of the incident exactly once since then, over the phone with hundreds of kilometers separating them when Majima asked what it had meant to him. Kiryu had babbled something about how much he appreciated Majima, which was a piss-poor description of his feelings. But he wanted to keep those emotions safely at arm's length where neither he nor Majima could be hurt by them.. He'd then deflected the conversation into something else, and it hadn't been spoken of again. Kiryu took the silence to mean that Majima had accepted it as a one-time occurrence.
"Oji-san, it's raining."
"Yeah. Not much of a storm, though."
It wasn't really raining. It was more of a damp mist, filling the air and leaving speckles of precipitation across the car's window, making it difficult to see. He flicked on the wipers and cringed as they gave a miserable squeak at being dragged across the glass. A strip of rubber trailed behind one of them, and the window remained water-speckled.
"What's wrong with them?" Haruka asked, and he noticed a tinge of nervousness in her voice.
"They're just old. It's fine. I can still see."
He really couldn't, though. The car's fog lights weren't helping, and the mist seemed to be thickening. He squinted for brake lights in front of them but saw none. No headlights behind him either. Odd. This was a reasonably well-traveled road.
The radio abruptly cut out in the middle of the cheerful love song that was playing and Kiryu glanced down at it in a moment of distraction.
"OJI-SAN!" Haruka's scream of terror made him jerk his eyes back to the road immediately. He had just enough time to register that the car was dangerously drifting toward the edge of the road.
But he'd only glanced away for a second.
Hadn't he?
Kiryu hadn't meant to but, in his surprise, he overcorrected, yanking the wheel hard to the right, and then everything was a maelstrom of sound. The bang of the car's fender ricocheting off the guardrail melded with the explosive pop of the airbags deploying. A second bang as the car landed on the driver's side door, followed by the scream of metal sliding against asphalt, creating a shower of sparks and leaving behind a shaky streak of the car's silver paint against the black of the road. And another scream, this one human-like. He was sure it had come from Haruka, although it might have come from him. The last thing that registered with him was that the view from the car's front window was composed entirely of asphalt and mist, an expanse of grey soaking all the color out of the world.
—--
His head hurt as if it'd been split open. Maybe it had. He groaned and reached up to touch it, and his hand encountered an unfamiliar texture. Gauze? It seemed like gauze. Perhaps the whole experience had been a dream. He'd open his eyes and find himself in the hospital, Haruka at his bedside, ready to admonish him for falling asleep at the wheel.
It wasn't a hospital. He was sprawled on a booth in New Serena. He didn't have time to register more than that before his vision was obscured entirely by a reassuringly familiar face.
"Oh, thank fuck yer awake."
“Majima-no-niisan?”
"How many fingers am I holdin' up, Kazzy?"
Kiryu grunted and pushed his hand away in annoyance, awkwardly trying to sit up.
"Well, how's that for gratitude? No 'thank you, Majima for draggin' me back here and takin' care of me while I was unconscious.'"
"I didn't know you'd done that."
"Course ya didn't, 'cause ya were unconscious, ya jackass. Found ya all sprawled out in that alleyway floppin' around like a fish and holdin' your throat. Thought ya were dyin' on me."
"I was. Sort of. That thing was choking me."
Majima's expression shifted to one of confusion. "Thing? What thing?"
Kiryu bit the inside of his lip as he realized how positively unhinged it sounded to say, "That thing with all the eyes and hair that was scuttling along the wall like a spider."
"Nothing. Nevermind. Nii-san, have you seen Haruka?”
"Nope. Why, ya lose her?" His tone was half joking, which made anger bubble up from the pit of Kiryu's stomach.
"I didn't lose her! We were in an accident. When I came to, she was gone. I tried going for help, but all the stores were closed. I got that voicemail from her. And the one from you-"
"Kaz, ya aren't makin' sense. Slow down. What voicemail?"
"The one you left me. It's…gone now. But it was there. You sounded-"
"Hey." Majima raised his hand and touched the side of Kiryu's head with concern. It was almost gentle. "Kaz, I think ya hit your head harder than ya thought. I haven't called ya. Frankly, thought I was alone here. Hadn't seen a soul. Anyway…why dontcha rest here, and I'll go look for Haruka-chan?"
"No." He was already pulling himself up out of the booth with a grunt. "I need to find her. And I think it's dangerous out there. I should go."
"Well, if ya think it's so dangerous, let's go together then, yeah?"
Kiryu considered the proposal with a frown. Majima was a formidable foe and knew the nooks, crannies, and alleys of Kamurocho better than anyone.
"Alright. Let's go."
"Hold up a sec." Majima disappeared behind the bar and rummaged around behind the counter before producing a large yellow flashlight and a first aid kit.
"We shouldn't just take that," Kiryu muttered with a hint of reproach.
"Ya see anybody here to use these? Course ya don't 'cause there's nobody here. Far as I can tell, you and I are the only two people in the whole damn city."
Kiryu was forced to agree on that point.
"So ya said ya got in an accident? Ya think Haruka-chan’s hurt?”
"No idea. She was gone when I came to. Looked all around the car and didn't see her."
"Where'd ya say ya crashed?"
"The far end of East Showa Street."
"So let's start there. Maybe we'll find somethin' to give us a hint."
Kiryu wanted to protest that he'd already searched the area, but maybe he'd missed something. He'd been hallucinating long-haired monsters in alleyways, after all. Majima's logic seemed sound, so they gathered the flashlight and first aid kit and headed out into the unknown.