[Daffodil Like Yourself] Chapter 2
Jul. 20th, 2019 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
morphogenesistw: drowning and description of dead bodies from it, violence
Chapter Two
At first Clover thought she felt queasy from the complimentary fries she scarfed on her break, or that the regular who always stared at her boobs came in tonight earlier than usual. She swallowed hiccups and bile all through the rest of her shift, and when she sat at the bar playing with her phone she noticed Light hadn't messaged to say he was on his way. He hadn't wanted her to take another cocktail waitress job, and he insisted on picking her up every day even though it took a train and a bus and a walk through a not-nice block to get here. But if he couldn't make it, he always let her know and asked her to please consider taking a ride home.
It clicked then: she felt this way in Rhizome-9, too, and even earlier in Building Q (both times). He didn't answer his phone and the restaurant said he'd walked out in the middle of his set and what did they do with this damn harp? Did she offer to pick it up? He was coming back and he needed—he was coming back, he was, he was.
She ducked out the back, not caring that she’d get written off the schedule if she skipped closing duties again. If she saw him he’d be okay, and thus they would be okay. She loitered under one of the streetlights, staring at her phone and shifting from foot-to-foot in her heels as she watched her ride creep slowly toward her on the screen. Around her, bars and clubs that filled the block reverberated with sounds Light would call “Bacchanalian” and she would call “work.” She liked her own little world, creeps and greasy food and all, where if she teased her hair and was quick-witted and quicker with drinks she’d stuff her pockets with tips at the end of the night and regulars would bring their friends just to introduce them to “Clover, like the four-leaf clover, yeah really!”
On the ride home, she watched the city cruise by, darker and quieter as they went uptown toward Station North, a district she and Light had picked off a tourism website because it was advertised as an officially-recognized “Arts and Entertainment district” and where they rented a studio in an 1890s building, a former factory converted into artists’ lofts where the charm and “quirky artistic lifestyle” authenticity ate up most of their combined monthly income. The person who lived in it before them was a sculptor and occasionally she still woke up with clay dust across her pillow, knocked from who knew where on the ceiling.
The same expensive, cold building where Light let her sit on his shoulders so she could hang more colorful prints when she ran out of room over her bed, where he let her sleep in his bed after the break-in because hers was too close to the windows. This place was going to be different.
‘Light is okay,’ she thought as she headed into her building. He got sick and came home and the restaurant owner missed the note he left explaining he’d come back for his harp later. Or she missed Light’s message that he was running late, and they’d just missed each other. He was at her work right now looking for her, wasn’t that funny—
Halfway up the second flight of stairs, she paused at a noise in the hallway above. Methodically, she removed her heels to muffle her footsteps. She sunk to her hands and knees and crawled upstairs like she did in training a lifetime ago. ‘It’s not dignified,’ Alice said then, pushing Clover’s shoulders down so she was pressed to the ground like a worm, ‘But it’s effective.’
Poking her head around the corner, she saw red light pouring into the hallway from their open door. Normally a comforting sight, their nightlight, but the noises within were neither the sounds of the folk metal band below them rehearsing or her brother cooking dinner or pushing things around searching for something of his she’d borrowed then set aside and forgotten. A large arm pulled the door shut and if Clover could’ve melted into the stairs and oozed down to the foundation to hide, she would’ve.
She started to creep backwards, not even looking behind her she was so braced to watch the danger before her, and someone snatched her ankle and yanked her down so fast she banged and scraped her chin against the stairs with such force she swore she’d been skinned. She turned her head and, thinking quickly, whipped her arm around and threw the only weapon she had—her heels—into the face of the man who’d grabbed her. When he yelled, she jumped up and shoved him backwards, hitting him low in his center of gravity (one of the advantages of being tiny). He nearly cartwheeled down the stairs, landing with a fleshy thump, and she jumped over him and made her escape, barefoot, outside and into the night.
Halfway down the block the building’s main door slammed open behind her; she didn’t turn her head at the pursuing footsteps. Feet burning, chin bleeding and tongue stinging, she darted across the street then picked up the pace with speed that would shame a cheetah as she ran towards North Avenue. When something hard struck her and she stumbled, she rolled her ankle, yelped, and pushed through the pain to run into the street, lone cars honking as she leapt through their headlights in a desperate escape bid. Honks and a sickening, solid crash announced her pursuer hadn’t been as lucky as she.
She finally slowed to a jog and then a pained limp, dragging herself along until she found a bus stop and curled up behind a trash can. The only sound was a few passing motorbikes, and still she wanted to throw up. New country, new language, new city, new bars, but one thing remained constant: there was nowhere people like her and her brother could hide.
It took her a few tries to swipe her phone’s lock pattern correctly, and then to pull up the contact she wanted. Now she knew why she hadn’t torn up the paper when she found it tucked into her purse after that cafe meetup. A little drawing of a four-leaf clover, with the carefully-written line: Faith, hope, and love, these three things will bring you good luck. Below that, a phone number. She pressed the call button for said number and counted the rings, hoping with each one that she still had a little luck left.
**
Junpei couldn't say he preferred any manner of death over another, but drowning while immobilized from the neck-down had to be one of the worst, speaking from personal experience and the knowledge that the absolute worst was exploding with one’s remains resembling children's finger paint and clay. Worst smelling too, in his opinion.
Hideaki Nomoto may have jumped overboard the starboard side of The Defiant of his own volition—he didn't have the cuts on his hands and knees his younger brother Itsuki did from likely fighting being thrown or pushed overboard. But the fall had broken Hideaki’s neck and for a time left him alive. At least Itsuki didn't have a massive amount of water in his lungs like his older brother; he had perhaps reflexively sucked in some water indicating the fall may have killed him. The Nomoto brothers were recently found floating in the Patapsco River, washed of most physical evidence and startling early morning rowers.
In the photos they were facedown in tarps, bloating, and the faceups even less appealing. Junpei compared the photos before him with the ones he had of the men before their disappearance and made notes: the underside of Hideaki's hair was shaved despite reports he worked a conservative job and Itsuki had lost enough weight to make his cheeks hollow. Frustrating little evidence, as the girls had been retrieved, identified, labeled suicides, and their bodies in transit to Japan before Crash Keys could intercept them. Seven called a forensic pathologist he had drinks with during his time as a cop to examine them again should Crash Keys grab them in transit between Tokyo and their rural family home in Hokkaido. A great undertaking, but anything for this case when the First Nonary Game children were involved. He'd rearranged his team last-minute just to race out here, leaving Akane to run Crash Keys at HQ.
Junpei sat heavily at the hotel desk. They were in a corner suite in a tourist trap which would’ve been nice if he wasn’t sharing it with Seven and a new guest. At least the sunrise looked nice, orange and purple finally appearing over dark water around 6:30am.
He hadn't slept since a quick afternoon nap yesterday, passing out while Seven considered several takeout menus. After picking up Clover close to midnight last night, hiding barefoot, bleeding, and cold, Junpei had carried her to the car and up the hotel fire stairs and picked glass from the soles of her feet. He promised her that he'd already sent someone to look for Light and let her yell at him.
"Did I let you down during the AB Game?" he said quietly, kneeling before her as she sat on the bed. The same thing he'd said to her outside the cafe, and she'd appreciated enough to kick him in the balls then. This time she'd just shook her head and held the note up.
"Had faith in you," she said, before yawning. "Wake me up when you find him." He swore it, and let her sleep it off in the king-size bed. She was still unconscious now.
The couch groaned as Seven stirred on it (further proof Aoi should've sprung for two rooms). He’d returned earlier from Mount Washington with a broken cell phone (looking stomped on by a certain delicate agent with all of his implied finesse) and a near-empty pack of cigarettes. The most concerning item was a red and blue kumihimo bracelet with a broken clasp; Akane brought it back for Aoi on her last trip home. Junpei’s was green because she said it looked nice on him. Neither had taken theirs off since she gave it to them.
"You ever sleep?" Seven asked. It was the same thing he asked the first time he saw Junpei after the Second Nonary Game, during that dark year in the shower. Junpei lied then and he lied now and Seven simply handed him an oversteeped, bitter green tea from the complimentary machine in the kitchenette.
"Look at that—on their necks. You see scars?"
Seven bent over the photos and squinted, then nodded at the seam where no hair grew at the base of their skulls. "Heads are shaved there like they do for surgeries." At Free the Soul's headquarters, their human experimentation focused on cloning, but he and Seven recovered some files pertaining to other experiments he'd left in Seven's hands because at the time Junpei hurtled toward another goal: Akane. (Seven took the files to Lotus under the guise of not knowing how to decipher them and the rest, as he said when he reappeared with a picture of them as his cellphone background, is history.) They had neither ruled out nor name Free the Soul as a co-conspirator. "What do you think that means?"
"I can’t say it was experimentation...but it was experimentation. We should get their medical records."
"Done and done," Seven said, holding up a phone. "They'll be here tonight." He nodded to the bedroom door. "So where do we take her?"
Junpei couldn't answer as Clover shuffled from the room slowly, feeling her injured feet, and sat on the couch. "Did you find my brother?"
"...Not yet." Not for lack of trying; Aoi hadn't touched his phone since texting Junpei he was on his way to Mount Washington last night. Junpei and Seven had been on their way to the meeting place when Clover called.
He felt dread when he wondered where Aoi was. Next week he had a business negotiation that he wouldn't miss if someone put a gun to his head, to intercept a deal between a subsidiary representing Hongou's interests in a plot of land and the company that sold it. An equally fake Crash Keys' subsidiary had put in a competing bid. As Aoi said while cracking his knuckles, better send the very best to negotiate.
"What have you been doing then!?" She jumped to her feet, hissed, and Seven kept her from falling into the glass coffee table. She shoved herself away from him, grimacing as she marched through the pain, and grabbed a photo off the table before Junpei could stop her. Her face fell when she looked at it: "...Itsuki?"
"You knew him."
"He was in Building Q and SOIS with me,” she murmured and studied the photo. Whatever she wanted to say was for the person in the photo.
"Clover," Seven said behind her as she stared at the photo like a priceless gem. He pulled up a chair and pushed her onto it gently. "There isn't an easy way to say this, but you're not stupid..." He told her about the disappearances and how, yes, she and her brother were likely on the abductors’ radar. That Light might be with them. "These two are the only ones who're dead."
"Right now! So what are you gonna do about it?" She looked between them. "SOIS would do something. They know all about these people and Alice would help me." She looked around. "Give me my phone."
Before they could get into that argument (Junpei positive he wouldn't be able to curb his smugness about beating SOIS to the punch), someone knocked outside. Seven beckoned them to get down on the floor, but Junpei unholstered the gun at his hip and flattened himself against the wall by the door while Seven looked through the peephole. "Uh..." He looked at Junpei and gestured aimlessly.
'What?' Junpei mouthed, but the next second answered his question.
"Room service! Let me in or I'll eat all these doughnuts by myself," came a syrupy voice. Junpei, defeated, holstered his gun and pushed Seven aside. He opened the door to Akane, indeed bearing a box big enough for two dozen pastries and looking at him with the cheery expression he feared like only a man who knew her well would. A man with sense. A man who knew her unexpected arrival heralded no good news.
"How was your flight?" he said weakly, feigning normalcy, and she shoved the doughnuts into his arms and sidled past him.
"Clover?"
"Her?"
Turning around, Junpei watched Clover stand slowly and approach Akane, and he was reminded of two female hyenas squabbling for power.
Clover lashed out and slapped Akane across the face so hard it cracked.
When he dropped the box of doughnuts, it bounced. Junpei got between Clover and Akane, holding Akane and turning his back to Clover while he tucked Akane's head to his chest. Behind him Clover protested and swore at Seven. "I'm fine," Akane said calmly, trying to get out of his grip, but Junpei squeezed her and ground his teeth. Twelve or twenty-four, his protective instincts for Akane couldn't be defied. "Junpei," she warned, and behind him Clover kicked the back of his knee while Seven dragged her away. "Let Clover and I handle this."
'I am in the hotel room God abandoned,' Junpei thought just as Seven grunted and Clover yanked the back of Junpei's hair.
Chapter Two
At first Clover thought she felt queasy from the complimentary fries she scarfed on her break, or that the regular who always stared at her boobs came in tonight earlier than usual. She swallowed hiccups and bile all through the rest of her shift, and when she sat at the bar playing with her phone she noticed Light hadn't messaged to say he was on his way. He hadn't wanted her to take another cocktail waitress job, and he insisted on picking her up every day even though it took a train and a bus and a walk through a not-nice block to get here. But if he couldn't make it, he always let her know and asked her to please consider taking a ride home.
It clicked then: she felt this way in Rhizome-9, too, and even earlier in Building Q (both times). He didn't answer his phone and the restaurant said he'd walked out in the middle of his set and what did they do with this damn harp? Did she offer to pick it up? He was coming back and he needed—he was coming back, he was, he was.
She ducked out the back, not caring that she’d get written off the schedule if she skipped closing duties again. If she saw him he’d be okay, and thus they would be okay. She loitered under one of the streetlights, staring at her phone and shifting from foot-to-foot in her heels as she watched her ride creep slowly toward her on the screen. Around her, bars and clubs that filled the block reverberated with sounds Light would call “Bacchanalian” and she would call “work.” She liked her own little world, creeps and greasy food and all, where if she teased her hair and was quick-witted and quicker with drinks she’d stuff her pockets with tips at the end of the night and regulars would bring their friends just to introduce them to “Clover, like the four-leaf clover, yeah really!”
On the ride home, she watched the city cruise by, darker and quieter as they went uptown toward Station North, a district she and Light had picked off a tourism website because it was advertised as an officially-recognized “Arts and Entertainment district” and where they rented a studio in an 1890s building, a former factory converted into artists’ lofts where the charm and “quirky artistic lifestyle” authenticity ate up most of their combined monthly income. The person who lived in it before them was a sculptor and occasionally she still woke up with clay dust across her pillow, knocked from who knew where on the ceiling.
The same expensive, cold building where Light let her sit on his shoulders so she could hang more colorful prints when she ran out of room over her bed, where he let her sleep in his bed after the break-in because hers was too close to the windows. This place was going to be different.
‘Light is okay,’ she thought as she headed into her building. He got sick and came home and the restaurant owner missed the note he left explaining he’d come back for his harp later. Or she missed Light’s message that he was running late, and they’d just missed each other. He was at her work right now looking for her, wasn’t that funny—
Halfway up the second flight of stairs, she paused at a noise in the hallway above. Methodically, she removed her heels to muffle her footsteps. She sunk to her hands and knees and crawled upstairs like she did in training a lifetime ago. ‘It’s not dignified,’ Alice said then, pushing Clover’s shoulders down so she was pressed to the ground like a worm, ‘But it’s effective.’
Poking her head around the corner, she saw red light pouring into the hallway from their open door. Normally a comforting sight, their nightlight, but the noises within were neither the sounds of the folk metal band below them rehearsing or her brother cooking dinner or pushing things around searching for something of his she’d borrowed then set aside and forgotten. A large arm pulled the door shut and if Clover could’ve melted into the stairs and oozed down to the foundation to hide, she would’ve.
She started to creep backwards, not even looking behind her she was so braced to watch the danger before her, and someone snatched her ankle and yanked her down so fast she banged and scraped her chin against the stairs with such force she swore she’d been skinned. She turned her head and, thinking quickly, whipped her arm around and threw the only weapon she had—her heels—into the face of the man who’d grabbed her. When he yelled, she jumped up and shoved him backwards, hitting him low in his center of gravity (one of the advantages of being tiny). He nearly cartwheeled down the stairs, landing with a fleshy thump, and she jumped over him and made her escape, barefoot, outside and into the night.
Halfway down the block the building’s main door slammed open behind her; she didn’t turn her head at the pursuing footsteps. Feet burning, chin bleeding and tongue stinging, she darted across the street then picked up the pace with speed that would shame a cheetah as she ran towards North Avenue. When something hard struck her and she stumbled, she rolled her ankle, yelped, and pushed through the pain to run into the street, lone cars honking as she leapt through their headlights in a desperate escape bid. Honks and a sickening, solid crash announced her pursuer hadn’t been as lucky as she.
She finally slowed to a jog and then a pained limp, dragging herself along until she found a bus stop and curled up behind a trash can. The only sound was a few passing motorbikes, and still she wanted to throw up. New country, new language, new city, new bars, but one thing remained constant: there was nowhere people like her and her brother could hide.
It took her a few tries to swipe her phone’s lock pattern correctly, and then to pull up the contact she wanted. Now she knew why she hadn’t torn up the paper when she found it tucked into her purse after that cafe meetup. A little drawing of a four-leaf clover, with the carefully-written line: Faith, hope, and love, these three things will bring you good luck. Below that, a phone number. She pressed the call button for said number and counted the rings, hoping with each one that she still had a little luck left.
**
Junpei couldn't say he preferred any manner of death over another, but drowning while immobilized from the neck-down had to be one of the worst, speaking from personal experience and the knowledge that the absolute worst was exploding with one’s remains resembling children's finger paint and clay. Worst smelling too, in his opinion.
Hideaki Nomoto may have jumped overboard the starboard side of The Defiant of his own volition—he didn't have the cuts on his hands and knees his younger brother Itsuki did from likely fighting being thrown or pushed overboard. But the fall had broken Hideaki’s neck and for a time left him alive. At least Itsuki didn't have a massive amount of water in his lungs like his older brother; he had perhaps reflexively sucked in some water indicating the fall may have killed him. The Nomoto brothers were recently found floating in the Patapsco River, washed of most physical evidence and startling early morning rowers.
In the photos they were facedown in tarps, bloating, and the faceups even less appealing. Junpei compared the photos before him with the ones he had of the men before their disappearance and made notes: the underside of Hideaki's hair was shaved despite reports he worked a conservative job and Itsuki had lost enough weight to make his cheeks hollow. Frustrating little evidence, as the girls had been retrieved, identified, labeled suicides, and their bodies in transit to Japan before Crash Keys could intercept them. Seven called a forensic pathologist he had drinks with during his time as a cop to examine them again should Crash Keys grab them in transit between Tokyo and their rural family home in Hokkaido. A great undertaking, but anything for this case when the First Nonary Game children were involved. He'd rearranged his team last-minute just to race out here, leaving Akane to run Crash Keys at HQ.
Junpei sat heavily at the hotel desk. They were in a corner suite in a tourist trap which would’ve been nice if he wasn’t sharing it with Seven and a new guest. At least the sunrise looked nice, orange and purple finally appearing over dark water around 6:30am.
He hadn't slept since a quick afternoon nap yesterday, passing out while Seven considered several takeout menus. After picking up Clover close to midnight last night, hiding barefoot, bleeding, and cold, Junpei had carried her to the car and up the hotel fire stairs and picked glass from the soles of her feet. He promised her that he'd already sent someone to look for Light and let her yell at him.
"Did I let you down during the AB Game?" he said quietly, kneeling before her as she sat on the bed. The same thing he'd said to her outside the cafe, and she'd appreciated enough to kick him in the balls then. This time she'd just shook her head and held the note up.
"Had faith in you," she said, before yawning. "Wake me up when you find him." He swore it, and let her sleep it off in the king-size bed. She was still unconscious now.
The couch groaned as Seven stirred on it (further proof Aoi should've sprung for two rooms). He’d returned earlier from Mount Washington with a broken cell phone (looking stomped on by a certain delicate agent with all of his implied finesse) and a near-empty pack of cigarettes. The most concerning item was a red and blue kumihimo bracelet with a broken clasp; Akane brought it back for Aoi on her last trip home. Junpei’s was green because she said it looked nice on him. Neither had taken theirs off since she gave it to them.
"You ever sleep?" Seven asked. It was the same thing he asked the first time he saw Junpei after the Second Nonary Game, during that dark year in the shower. Junpei lied then and he lied now and Seven simply handed him an oversteeped, bitter green tea from the complimentary machine in the kitchenette.
"Look at that—on their necks. You see scars?"
Seven bent over the photos and squinted, then nodded at the seam where no hair grew at the base of their skulls. "Heads are shaved there like they do for surgeries." At Free the Soul's headquarters, their human experimentation focused on cloning, but he and Seven recovered some files pertaining to other experiments he'd left in Seven's hands because at the time Junpei hurtled toward another goal: Akane. (Seven took the files to Lotus under the guise of not knowing how to decipher them and the rest, as he said when he reappeared with a picture of them as his cellphone background, is history.) They had neither ruled out nor name Free the Soul as a co-conspirator. "What do you think that means?"
"I can’t say it was experimentation...but it was experimentation. We should get their medical records."
"Done and done," Seven said, holding up a phone. "They'll be here tonight." He nodded to the bedroom door. "So where do we take her?"
Junpei couldn't answer as Clover shuffled from the room slowly, feeling her injured feet, and sat on the couch. "Did you find my brother?"
"...Not yet." Not for lack of trying; Aoi hadn't touched his phone since texting Junpei he was on his way to Mount Washington last night. Junpei and Seven had been on their way to the meeting place when Clover called.
He felt dread when he wondered where Aoi was. Next week he had a business negotiation that he wouldn't miss if someone put a gun to his head, to intercept a deal between a subsidiary representing Hongou's interests in a plot of land and the company that sold it. An equally fake Crash Keys' subsidiary had put in a competing bid. As Aoi said while cracking his knuckles, better send the very best to negotiate.
"What have you been doing then!?" She jumped to her feet, hissed, and Seven kept her from falling into the glass coffee table. She shoved herself away from him, grimacing as she marched through the pain, and grabbed a photo off the table before Junpei could stop her. Her face fell when she looked at it: "...Itsuki?"
"You knew him."
"He was in Building Q and SOIS with me,” she murmured and studied the photo. Whatever she wanted to say was for the person in the photo.
"Clover," Seven said behind her as she stared at the photo like a priceless gem. He pulled up a chair and pushed her onto it gently. "There isn't an easy way to say this, but you're not stupid..." He told her about the disappearances and how, yes, she and her brother were likely on the abductors’ radar. That Light might be with them. "These two are the only ones who're dead."
"Right now! So what are you gonna do about it?" She looked between them. "SOIS would do something. They know all about these people and Alice would help me." She looked around. "Give me my phone."
Before they could get into that argument (Junpei positive he wouldn't be able to curb his smugness about beating SOIS to the punch), someone knocked outside. Seven beckoned them to get down on the floor, but Junpei unholstered the gun at his hip and flattened himself against the wall by the door while Seven looked through the peephole. "Uh..." He looked at Junpei and gestured aimlessly.
'What?' Junpei mouthed, but the next second answered his question.
"Room service! Let me in or I'll eat all these doughnuts by myself," came a syrupy voice. Junpei, defeated, holstered his gun and pushed Seven aside. He opened the door to Akane, indeed bearing a box big enough for two dozen pastries and looking at him with the cheery expression he feared like only a man who knew her well would. A man with sense. A man who knew her unexpected arrival heralded no good news.
"How was your flight?" he said weakly, feigning normalcy, and she shoved the doughnuts into his arms and sidled past him.
"Clover?"
"Her?"
Turning around, Junpei watched Clover stand slowly and approach Akane, and he was reminded of two female hyenas squabbling for power.
Clover lashed out and slapped Akane across the face so hard it cracked.
When he dropped the box of doughnuts, it bounced. Junpei got between Clover and Akane, holding Akane and turning his back to Clover while he tucked Akane's head to his chest. Behind him Clover protested and swore at Seven. "I'm fine," Akane said calmly, trying to get out of his grip, but Junpei squeezed her and ground his teeth. Twelve or twenty-four, his protective instincts for Akane couldn't be defied. "Junpei," she warned, and behind him Clover kicked the back of his knee while Seven dragged her away. "Let Clover and I handle this."
'I am in the hotel room God abandoned,' Junpei thought just as Seven grunted and Clover yanked the back of Junpei's hair.
