Dreaming...
'Tokyo rain has no smell.'
That was the first thought I had as we walked under the faint autumn sun, Lucy's hand warm and tight in mine.
Back in my city, rain smelled of wet asphalt and rust. Here, it was just water. Clean. Anonymous.
"Kaito, look!" Lucy's voice was a bell. She tugged me toward a kitsch shop window, pointing at a giant teddy bear with a heart stitched on its chest. "Isn't it adorable?"
"It's a bear. Stuffed. Costs as much as my electricity bill for three months," my reply was automatic. Practical. But there was a smile, a rare one, betraying me. I knew because I felt it stretch the skin of my face, unused to the motion.
She nudged my arm. "You're so boring! It's the thought that matters."
"The thought of going into debt for a lump of synthetic stuffing?" I replied, in an ironic but serious tone.
She laughed. A clear sound that cut through the Shibuya crowd murmur. It was for that sound I was there. For that light in her eyes that, by some inexplicable miracle, turned on when she looked at me. Kaito Yamada, the electrician. The guy who could fix a circuit but not a conversation.
Yet with her, it wasn't needed.
She was the only one who understood me and my 'particular' soul.
We walked , and through laughs and talks, we ended up eating takoyaki from a stall where she burned her tongue. I handed her my water bottle, and our fingers brushed.
Even the smallest physical contact was enough to make my heart flutter, I must admit.
It was all so… normal. So human. There was no system assigning affection points. No quests. There was just the warmth of street food, the steam rising into the pearl-gray sky, and the strange, fragile feeling of being happy.
Lucy always used to talk talk about her dreams. She wanted to open a little shop. Maybe a café. "Where people come to feel good, not just for coffee and wifi."
Her eyes shone with a fervor I'd never possessed.
I nodded and told her I could handle the electrical work. That I could install the right lights. It was the only way I knew how to contribute to a dream: by making it safe, efficient, up to code.
"You're always so practical," she said, but it wasn't a complaint. It was a tender observation, as if my practicality was a precious quirk. She squeezed my hand tighter. "That's why I like you. You'll keep me grounded."
In that moment, I believed it was the truth. I believed my boredom, my cynicism, my obsession with things that worked, were the perfect counterweight to her flight of fancy. I believed this fragile, mundane balance could last.
We sat on a bench, watching the flow of people. She rested her head on my shoulder. The scent of her hair was sweet, artificial. I liked it anyway. The world narrowed to this point: her weight against me, the rhythm of her breathing, the silent promise of a predictable, monotonous, and perhaps, because of that, perfect future.
That was when the Voice came.
It didn't come from outside. It wasn't a sound. It was an implosion in my memory. An echo that had never been a noise, but had existed forever, buried in the very foundations of my consciousness.
It had no words. It had intent. Images forced into my mind with the violence of a jackhammer.
I saw a fortress of bone and shadow, not of terror, but of a geometric, frightening order.
I saw a man – no, the shadow of a man – sitting on a throne of contracts sealed in ancient blood, watching a world on fire with the eyes not of a tyrant, but of a desperate accountant. I saw heroes, beautiful, glittering, smiling, advancing not for justice, but because an invisible script commanded them to. I saw that shadow-man raise a weary hand, and the fabric of reality obeyed, not by magic, but because he knew its most intimate clauses.
And over it all, like a sentence, the feeling of the Voice. Not rage. Not madness. A weariness so deep, so ancient it had consumed even the right to despair. And beneath that weariness, an ember. A hatred not for people, but for the system. For the script.
Then, words formed. I didn't hear them. I remembered them, as if I'd always known.
«Remember.»
The sun over Shibuya faded. Lucy's scent became chemical, false. Her warmth against me felt like a constraint.
«Remember this moment. This warmth. This peace.»
Her hand in mine suddenly felt like a manacle. Happiness, a well-designed trap.
«Remember every detail. The texture of the takoyaki cardboard. The sound of her laugh. The futility of the promise you are making to yourself right now.»
My heart seized in my chest. It wasn't fear. It was the recognition of a truth I hadn't wanted to see. Happiness was an unstable line of code. Love was a subroutine that consumed too many resources and crashed at the first bug.
«Use it. Use this image. Trap it in the ice of your memory. Because it is the fuel.»
The Voice didn't rise. It deepened. It became the vibration of the universe itself collapsing.
«The hatred simmering beneath your civil servant's calm… don't smother it. It's not for her. It's not for the blond man who will be fucking her in your boss' office in two weeks. It's for the machine that made all of this inevitable. The machine that says the hero must win. That the common man must lose. That love is a prize, not a right. That your logic, your order, your obsession with fixing broken things… are flaws to be corrected.»
Lucy stirred, lifted her head. "Kaito? You made a really weird face. Are you okay?"
I couldn't answer her. The Voice wasn't finished.
«Love is a luxury. The most expensive one. It was my luxury. I loved this world enough to want to make it perfect, logical, just. And for that, they made me the monster. They used my love for the world to make the world hate me.»
In my mind, I saw the shadow-man—Aldmax—watching his logical creation being dismantled by a screaming horde of 'good', and in his gaze there was no anger. There was the infinite disappointment of a teacher whose best student had cheated on the test.
«Now it's your turn. My brave, colorless, wonderful successor. You are not a hero. You are a revision. You are the quality control returning to the factory after the production line has gone mad.»
The Voice became a final whisper, with the weight of a black hole.
«Remember this happy moment. Then bury it. Use its memory not to weep, but to calibrate your contempt. Because when you shatter the barriers of fate, when you break the script and free everyone from this bloody farce… you will do so knowing exactly what they are defending. And how little, in the end, it is truly worth.»
The Voice receded.
I was back on that bench. The noise of Shibuya deafened me. Lucy was shaking my arm, worried.
"Kaito! Did you faint? Let's talk about going home, you look awful."
I looked at her. I still saw the woman I loved. But now, superimposed on her image, I saw the ghostly trace of source code. I saw the hidden tags:
I smiled at her. It was the hardest smile of my life. A civil servant's smile upon receiving notice his office was being shut down.
"I'm fine," I said. My voice was flat, perfect. "Just a little dizzy. Let's go home."
We walked towards our home we had built together and told her I loved her. They were all lines I now felt were dialogue from a script I'd already read, and whose tragic ending I knew.
That night, I didn't cry. I didn't get angry. I opened a spreadsheet. I started cataloging.
The memory of her smile: 15 megabytes of compressed pain.
The sound of her laugh: a .wav file to be used as motivation.
The feeling of her hand: a sensory datum to be archived under/memories/fuel.
I wasn't going mad. I was optimizing.
The Voice had been right. Love was a luxury. And I, Kaito, had always been a practical man. When you couldn't afford a luxury, you replaced it with something more efficient. More durable.
Like hatred.
Like a project.
I lay down, staring at the dark ceiling, with Lucy's head on my chest. The system of my new life hadn't activated yet. I knew nothing of necromancy or fantasy worlds.
I only knew one thing: someone, somewhere, had written a script where I lost. Where Lucy betrayed me. Where my normalcy was my condemnation.
And for the first time in my life, the idea of following the rules, of accepting the role assigned to me, filled me with more disgust than death.
I closed my eyes. I slept.
The next time I opened them, I was Mordecai. And I had work to do.