2022-06-11: Fear
- Log: Fear
- Cast: Anti, Ranka Lee
- Where: Tsutsujidai
- Date: 2022-06-11
- Summary: Ranka gives Anti a gift. Anti struggles with his encroaching humanity.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
OST - White Noise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfPqeZjc2c
The cicadas cry. The noise warps over the heat of the concrete. A commercial flag barely lifts, more from warmth than breeze. Summer has just begun, but here in Tsutsujidai, it's as if it's been summer forever.
The people here are hollow, shallow, superficial. They pass by without looking, without seeing. You can touch them. You can make them disappear.
The storefronts sell real things. They're edible.
The world parts for you, here.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
Anti walks through the commercial district, and he is unaffected. He passes by the open air food court -- he keeps walking. His hands to his pockets, no one looks to him. He is a speck of navy blue, in an ocean of nothing.
He turns into an alleyway, and sits himself down on the lower steps of a fire escape, looking out into the street.
He isn't really looking.
<Pose Tracker> Ranka Lee has posed.
BGM Change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMe7Vu0X37g
Everything is emotionally hollow. Empty. Once in a while she'll feel the presence of someone who exists.
Once in a while.
Tsutsujidai is like going into a crowded city and understanding something is missing. You're still in a city, but it feels like a rural community for the lack of people. Great expanses and distances between each one.
What is this place?
Why is it like this?
whywhywhywhywhywhywhywhy
The mystery is more an idle thought, but one she does not pursue. She's scared. It scares her. She does not make waves. Someone says something she wonders whether it's directed at her. She greets them, and smiles with a smile that feels like she pasted it on.
They weren't. They weren't.
shefeelsnothing
In and out she goes, coming to visit Kaworu, a bright spot, a beacon... then she leaves. The commercial district is on the way to the train station. The seas of empty people flow around them, as her senses pick up...
someonethatexists
The search for their position is disorienting, her senses thrown for a loop. The people move like stop motion animation to her senses. One does not though... he walks into the alleyway.
Her red eyes turn, focusing on that speck of blue. That familiar speck of blue, with familiar emotions to her... she stops, frozen. She's scared. This place scares her. He almost killed her, know it or not...
... but...
Shouldering her bag, she turns down the alleyway... what Anti will see when she first enters into his vision is a girl in a cream yellow summer dress with a blue zig zag around the hem stepping into the alleyway, a featherlight scarf around her neck, brown floppy boots on her feet.
hereinthisplacewheretwoexist
"Hello." She tries her best to smile, "I haven't seen you since the concert. I..." Out of her pack, she takes out a small wrapper with a cat sitting against the earthlight of a dark moon upon a crescent field... "... here. I wrote this. It's a song."
She told Kaworu she wanted everyone to enjoy her music... and not just people...
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
A 'human heart'...
That's what Gridman -- Yuta -- said.
Anti scratches at the back of his hand. They're covered by pale gloves, after Kaworu's warning. There's the glimpse of something blackened, under there, before he pulls his sleeve back down.
What, is he stupid..? Anti's a kaiju. What he's supposed to do...
... what he's supposed to do...
Anti looks out over the street, but he isn't looking. His blood runs numb and cold in his veins. He wonders if it's red, the way Yuta's is, the way Liam's is.
Someone greets him.
His grim gaze focuses only then on the girl at the mouth of the alleyway. His eyes move. His head does not. He stares, for a long, long time.
"You're alive." He says, tone buried to gravel. If there's something of surprise to those gruff words, it's difficult to unearth. He is chthonic.
He does not move to take the wrapper.
<Pose Tracker> Ranka Lee has posed.
His stare is penetrating, it's enough to unnerve her slightly. Should she just run?
However he then comments that she's alive.
"Yeah. That was..." Ranka's voice hitches but then admits after a moment. "...really terrifying. But... I thought about it. How you felt. It was a concert. And you like music."
She lets herself take a breath, "So there was something you were trying to protect. And, you weren't trying to hurt me. You could have just let me fall, or swatted me off. Not put me on your shoulder."
Ranka bends down, and puts the wrapper on the ground, then takes a step back.
"Thank you for being there - supporting Sheryl, protecting something important to you - even if almost noone knows it. That's all I wanted to say."
She does not quite flee yet, she finishes saying what she wants to say. And if he tells her to go after... well she might just take him up on that.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
She should just run. Anyway.
Anti watches, with unwavering intensity, as Ranka talks about how he felt. How he felt. This, again -- how he feels, how things affect him, how --
His lips part.
Nothing comes out.
"..."
But if he had a human heart -- maybe it would sound more like pain. More like regret and desperation, pressure building and building to an overflow, caught between what he wants and what he has to be.
"I couldn't... protect her," Anti says, finally, finally, all at length, all lengthened, lash to the rack and pull.
"I can't... protect her," and there is no clue he is speaking about two different people, except for the shade of his heart between them.
Helplessly, he insists: "I'm a kaiju."
<Pose Tracker> Ranka Lee has posed.
Ranka looks skittish, like she might turn and bolt at any moment, part of her expecting at any second now that he might change - and that's it. She has well honed survival instincts. She has to. The Vajra have attacked near her again and again and again.
However she feels it... something. As he says he couldn't protect her. That he can't protect her. How taut he is.
Ranka's hands clasp together as he says he's a Kaiju. And her red eyes blink several times. "I know you are." She says, voice still a bit stretched, tense. "I don't like violence... but I recognize... that it's necessary to protect things. I just wish the people I care about weren't the ones who had to be involved."
After a moment, she looks back up at Anti... and...
"Maybe you couldn't. And maybe you can't." Ranka says, her voice soft not recognizing how he's talking about two separate people when he says 'her'...
..."But you still tried. And I think that says a lot about who you are, and how you feel."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Change? He can't.
There are rules for everything, and for everyone, rules.
Violence... is necessary to protect things, huh.
"Leave this place." He says, like a gavel.
"You don't have to be involved. None of you."
You don't have to be involved with me.
"Trying... is pointless. I don't drive. All I can do... is what I'm supposed to do."
Anti's gaze tracks lower, to the cat decoration she placed down.
"And I'm not supposed to help helpless little girls I find at concerts."
They're not his words; they hurt.
<Pose Tracker> Ranka Lee has posed.
Anti tells her to leave, and she almost bolts right there. It's obvious she's skittish. She doesn't want to be hurt. She doesn't want anyone else to be hurt. She doesn't want to hurt anyone.
Even in this city of non people where she can feel nothing... all it would take is Anti rising above all, and so many of them would no longer be present.
"Involved? I don't... I'm not trying to be..."
Ranka looks down and away at the alley ground at the cat wrapper, as she sucks up a breath as if like gathering her courage. Because she feels something...
"I don't know what you're supposed to be doing. I just know what you did."
Ranka finally looks back up at him, the look in her eyes still a bit fearful but more resolved. "I don't think trying is pointless. I've been trying really hard to become a singer. To change myself... to take the first step. Then every one after that. It's difficult, as I didn't think I could ever sing for anyone else... but... now I can."
Ranka takes one step backwards, then another. "You can only fail to change... if you tell yourself it's impossible. That's... that's something someone taught me."
She intends to just go perhaps. To leave... but he's hurting, obviously hurting...
... and someone once reached out to her when she was hurting and saying things like it's pointless, and it's impossible for her.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
It would be easy to yell at her. If he threw something, she would certainly leave. Anti knows this for certain, like the blood pulsing through his fingertips.
They seize together, in their loose position on his lap. They tighten. They tighten because they are in pain.
If, then; are you, then?
He covers one hand with the other, and holds them, tightly, as the question pierces and rages against his skin. Not so dark, not now.
"It's impossible... that's what they say." His voice doesn't shake much from it, that same burning-ember embankment he's always spoken.
"Kaiju don't need to care about people's feelings. They just act."
Even so, he hasn't moved.
"..."
Anti looks away. It's the magic trick, for letting someone leave. What is unobserved is unbound.
"I'm... satisfied you survived." He says it; he flinches, brow tightening over his sunset eyes, lips thinning to a pressed line.
<Pose Tracker> Ranka Lee has posed.
Ranka stops walking backwards as she sees him holding his hands so tightly. He's in pain, but she knows it's not just from his hands.
'It's impossible... that's what they say.'
She just listens. Letting him say what he wants to say, needs to say.
Then he ends it by saying he's satisfied she survived.
Ranka takes a breath. It's so hard in this city where everything feels absent. The one thing she feels is the feelings of a Kaiju that almost killed her. Yet he's in pain. He's in pain. It was so easy and hard in equal measure to ignore the pain of others for years.
... because she had the deep seated impression that she could only cause it...
"Maybe they don't... need to... but you do." She says, voice drenched in her own uncertainty.
"But... I think... right now... you're feeling bad. And because you do. It's not... them. They're not really the ones saying it's impossible - even if they are."
Ranka slowly drops her bag, then unzips it just a little, then with a ripping noise slowly takes out a sheet of paper, which she starts to fold, again and again, inexpertly, creasing the paper again and again. She hasn't folded these a thousand times.
It was never her dream to fly.
Someone's dream to fly only inspired her to begin taking the first step.
When she stands back up, she has her little paper airplane in her hands.
"You're the one saying it's impossible for you." With a little heft, the paper airplane flies. It's definitely not like Alto's throw, and it doesn't catch the air in such an inspirational way, but it does fly from one end of the alley, straight down the other. Try taking a piece of paper and throwing it that far. It won't be able to.
Change it a little though...
"And you're right, and you'll keep being right... so long as you're the one who keeps telling yourself that."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Anti's gaze catches the paper airplane, as it goes from one end of the alley to the other. He watches, as the nose hits the brick at the end of the alleyway, and doinks, gently, to the ground.
"..." Anti says, in elision.
"..."
His fingers tighten over his glove. It creases and tugs; what lies below is a grey lighter than black.
"..." Breath tumbling over his lips, and what silences him is not inscrutability or arrogance.
"I'm... feeling bad," he repeats, finally, slowly, trawled from the bottom of the ocean floor by a rising anchor.
He says it like it's news to him.
"I'm also saying..."
Those gruff words trail to nothing; deliberately, he releases his hands long enough to fix his clothing. He goes right back to holding his hands, when he's done.
The sad machinations which trap Akane in her labyrinth were always about Akane. Anti knew she was hurting; felt it with every explosion. He knew she was in trouble. He knew she needed help.
Even so... he was copying her so faithfully.
"I am afraid," Anti says.
"Just like her."
He says it, and at once he cries out, as his limbs pull in closer to himself. His shins bite into the stairs below his seat; his arms tug into his midsection. "Arrghh--!"
His face twists, as his teeth grit; his nostrils flare, lips lifting, chin ducking down. "I don't know -- what's --" Anti bites out, tightened like a wound-up spring. "Go!" He snaps, nerves exposed in the word. "Leave me!"
It hurts.
And he can't guarantee the safety of helpless little girls.
<Pose Tracker> Ranka Lee has posed.
Ranka watches him, as he watches her pathetic little show of the paper airplane, she's no Alto. She can't fold it well. However... he says... he's feeling bad... but that he's also saying, he's afraid. Ranka clutches her hands in front of her chest.
'Just like her.'
He says it - and he cries out, and Ranka lurches forward a half step, before backpeddling... 'I don't know -- what's --'
A half step forward...
'Go!' 'Leave me!'
And then suddenly backwards, clutching her bag with its precious cargo inside, as she backs up and further, and further.
"I'm sorry."
Then Ranka turns and bolts. Just BOLTS. If something's happening, she doesn't want to put him in that position, or anyone else in danger...
... but it doesn't make her feel less bad for leaving him, as she runs through the crowd of hollow people, breathless, all the way back to the train station as fast as her legs can carry her.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Anti's breath hitches, all curled up into himself.
What are you? What is this? Sympathy to humans... I'm a kaiju! Don't give me that shit! What are you? Did you grow here, with the earth and the trees? I'm a kaiju...
Slowly, his breath evens.
Slowly, he uncoils.
"I'm a kaiju," he repeats, out loud, to himself.
And he's running out of time.