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Why fire?
People want him dead. This Niragi understands; this has always been true. He’s been kicked, beaten, knocked down, knocked out. He’s been bruised, and sliced up, and all that was before the Borderlands ever happened.
He’s never been burned before.
It’s a stupid fucking thought to have as he’s falling, as he’s crashing, as he’s drowning. It’s not what he should be wondering as his back hits the pool tiles; as the pain sinks out of his limbs, leaks into the water. Still it’s all he’s thinking.
Why fire? Why burn him?
When his lungs finally threaten to burst, he spurs his eyes wide open and sucks the chlorine in. The water tears into him like acid, and there’s no air left to choke on, and it’s not as quick as he’d like—but when’s Niragi ever gotten what he wanted?
Fire’s personal, Niragi’s brain struggles to realise as it runs out of oxygen. Fire means something.
It’s on the tip of his tongue, what that look in Chishiya’s eyes had meant as he pulled the trigger. That almost-crazed, black-eyes-all-pupils look, as though he barely believed it himself—
Niragi dies with his eyes wide open. All he sees as he fades is firelight kaleidoscoping on the surface of the pool, and in the centre, the cold black of a silhouette.
Chishiya doesn’t die.
Chishiya’s released from the hospital on a blazing July day. The sky’s pure blue and though his heart stopped, there’s barely a scratch on his skin, and every nurse and tech and doctor tells him he’s lucky. Lucky to be alive, lucky to have all his limbs attached, lucky to be absolutely, perfectly fine.
(His parents tell him he’s a drain on hospital resources. He should have gone home sooner. He should’ve had the dignity to sign himself out. They do not put this in writing, but he’s had plenty of experience reading the downward twitches of their mouths and narrow eyebrows.)
The sun blazes white-hot over Tokyo’s broken skyline, and Chishiya comes home to an apartment kept fastidiously clean by his nameless, faceless cleaning service. Even his stacks of journals and notebooks have been dusted. There’s not even a single mouldy vegetable in the fridge to prove he’s been gone. To prove he’s been dead.
He breathes in hard. At least his battered ribcage aches.
A month after the sky broke, there’s a memorial service held on the edge of the meteor crater. Chishiya only catches fragments of news anchors and sombre music on his patients’ televisions. His name isn’t on the slab of marble they erect next to the crater, after all. He’s alive, even if his skin feels like it’s somehow more whole than it’s supposed to be.
There are speeches and priests and prayers, and the news crews note the heavy scent of smoke still clinging to the air. Chishiya pauses, and looks up at the screen. A news anchor in a perfect black suit explains that the meteor had compromised gas mains. Somewhere, something had sparked. His voice implies nothing but professionalism.
Chishiya closes his eyes, and imagines the heat. The flames.
The firelight.
Weren’t you in Shibuya, doctor? the nurses say.
You’re lucky, sir, his patients say.
Gas mains, the television says. A number of victims remain unidentified.
Chishiya doesn’t work with burn victims. His patients are too small for their age, big-eyed and a little too serious sometimes. Half the time they understand faster than their parents do. Today they say they feel sorry for him. He tells them there’s nothing to be sorry about. Nothing really happened, after all.
His shift doesn’t end until the sun’s long gone. Outside, the night air is body-warm on his skin; he can’t say why he shivers all the same. All around him, crowds rush, heading home or heading out; high-rises tower, yellow light crashing out into the black. He pushes his hood up, and keeps his eyes trained on his sneakers.
The news crews aren’t there, anymore. All that’s left is a pile of flowers next to the shiny black monument, and the ghost of the summer day still clinging to the rubble of what used to be Shibuya. Between him and the broken shells of unrecognisable buildings, there’s only a thin metal fence. He doesn’t clutch at its bars, though his fingers itch. The shadows are long and hard and black, scorched into the concrete like soot. He breathes in hard. The air still tastes of immolation.
A number of victims remain unidentified.
Something sharp and caustic crystallises in Chishiya’s stomach.
It shouldn’t matter, the fact that he didn’t die.
It shouldn’t matter, that his bed’s big and cold and empty, because the only other kind he’s slept in was small and cold and empty. His crumpled bed sheets press marks into his skin as he wakes. He shakes his head—a rush of brilliant light and harsh laughter in his ears—and forces his eyes open. The AC’s working too hard in the corner, buzzing and buzzing and buzzing, like there’s a fly stuck in his skull. It’s three or four in the morning. He’s sweating. His heart’s hammering in his throat.
The scent of smoke is so, so thick in his nose.
His head swims as he forces his body to sit up. The room’s dark all around him; long dark shadows pour through his curtains. He plants his feet on the freezing linoleum. His ribs ache as his lungs heave, but there’s not enough oxygen in the air, and there’s smoke leaking into the room from beneath his door.
Why fire? the back of his brain whispers.
He staggers to his feet. The smoke’s thin and white and see-through, and carries the stench of burning flesh. The air’s icy on his flushed skin. He’s not supposed to open the door if his apartment’s on fire. It’ll erupt with the oxygen and swallow him whole and this time there will be a scratch on him.
Why fire?
Gas mains, he thinks back, and puts his hand on the handle.
Chishiya’s eyes spur wide. His retinas flash with red and orange and yellow as he yanks the door wide open, and the heat that hits him is no more than a phantom.
August crashes into typhoon season. Rain and storm winds batter at the windows of the hospital, following him everywhere he goes except into operating theatres. Here the sound of the world is replaced with mechanical beeps and dead-calm requests for scalpels and needles and forceps. Antiseptic burrows into his nostrils. He breathes it in deep. It’s good to smell something else.
The child on the table is young and thin and whole except for the gap in his chest. The blood spilling out of him is deep cherry-red, and it’s mopped up by expert gloved hands before it can ever hit the floor, and Chishiya doesn’t understand why he’s staring. It’s just blood. Just standard, basic, healthy human blood. The sort of thing it doesn’t make sense to be afraid of.
Not that he is afraid.
But he can’t categorise the twisting of his insides, the pins-and-needles in his fingers. It’s foreign. Unfamiliar. He’s not felt it before—well, not before the meteor. Not before that incident with his own heart.
His heart’s a little too heavy in his chest, these days.
When he walks home, he takes the long route, despite the growing torrent and the warnings. The city might flood. He might drown. He shouldn’t be out here. Storms are serious, but what’s a storm compared to a meteor?
The water beating at his back soaks through his clothes in minutes. He keeps his eyes trained on the wet fabric of his shoes, the puddles on the pavement. On the horizon, Shibuya pointedly isn’t there.
He shoves his hands in his pockets. The fabric’s rough with the water, and you can’t burn when you’re this soaked, but when he inhales he smells exhaust fumes and wet asphalt and fire.
(There’s a figure in the distance, sitting hunched over at the water’s edge. It cradles a long narrow shape across its lap; well-trained hands load and unload and load the rifle, though its fingers are black brittle coal and by now they should have snapped.)
Why fire? Chishiya’s brain thinks at him on the subway. Why fire?
Next to him, a pair of tourists chats in clipped, too-loud French. Three middle school kids fight over a single pair of earbuds, and a young woman sighs through lip-sticked lips and leans back against her seat. The train rocks from side to side, tunnelling into the dark, and he closes his eyes only for a moment.
When he opens them he’s staring at the demolition site that used to be Shibuya crossing. Most of the rubble is gone and only the wound remains; stinking city soil and exposed piping, remnants of cellars and mud. The shadows are soot-black stains; some of them twist and coil like they’re alive. Like they are, at the very least, aware.
Chishiya stares. Inhales the stagnant air, and wonders how long he’s been losing time, whether he’s just exhausted or whether he’s insane.
He reaches for the metal fencing between him and the pit; catches himself before he can touch the thin bars. He takes a breath. He’s better than this. So he died. So his heart stopped. Resuscitation is hardly a medical miracle. Not the sort of thing to lose your mind over. It happens the world over, every single day. On the grand scale of the universe, there’s probably a whole lot of meteors crashing into a whole lot of planets. None of it means anything. In the distance, shadows twitch.
A number of victims remain unidentified.
If they’d gotten to him just a little later, they’d have dragged his cooling, stiffening corpse out of that pit.
Chishiya pulls his hood up, and decides he doesn’t feel the shiver that racks through him.
At night smoke clouds into his bedroom. Whenever he wakes the room’s thick with it, heavy and foreign and nothing but a nightmare, Chishiya tells himself. Still its harsh black particles burrow into his lungs, into his blood, into the core of him; they scratch at his throat he breathes them in. His forehead’s wet with sweat. He forces his eyes closed. It’s not real. It’s not rational, the dip of the mattress next to him, the itch all the way down in his lungs, the faintest trace of fingers ghosting down his face.
Soon it’s November, and he spends it at the hospital. He takes shift after shift—napping in the break room counts as sleeping, he tells himself, even if the pain in his spine is quickly becoming permanent. It’s alright. His hands know what to do, and if he loses time it’s just due to the exhaustion, just because even dying children become repetitive.
He can’t tell his patients what day of the week it is; soon he grows bag-eyed and exhausted and dull, and his coworkers stop telling him he was lucky. It’s nice, to just be working. To just be Doctor, instead of Chishiya, instead of one of the survivors. It’s so much easier to play a role than to be a person. Chishiya’s fine.
All he did was die, after all. People do that all the time.
Sitting and eating means sitting and thinking, so his footsteps ring hollow as he takes a lunch break detour past the meteor ward. They’re still here, some of the people he came in with. The worst cases. The comas, and the brain injuries, and the life support. There’s someone he doesn’t know in his room, now. Of course there is. That shouldn’t surprise him.
Can I help you, doctor, the nurses say.
There wasn’t ever a burn ward here, they say, though he can’t recall asking the question.
Most of the burn victims didn’t make it, they say.
Some of the victims remain unidentified.
The smoke isn’t real, so the soot he coughs up into the staff bathroom sink isn’t real, either.
(He’s running through a maze he doesn’t recognise. He never runs—but now his heart jackhammers in his throat, and his sneakers echo between the tall brick walls, and in the distance someone screams.
He can’t recall the game rules. It doesn’t matter—at the core they’re all the same. Don’t die. Think, and don’t let your emotions kill you, but Chishiya doesn’t have those so either way he’ll win.)
His gloved hands are still tinged with blood when he opens his eyes in the morgue.
He’s alone. The clock on wall ticks past three AM, and his skin’s all goosebumps, and all he smells is smoke.
A wall of stainless steel doors stares back at him, flashing white in the artificial light. He clenches and unclenches his hands and a drop of blood splashes onto the too-white floor. Did he just come out of surgery? He shakes his head. His brain’s all fuzzy with static and he’s not supposed to know the morgue’s entrance code. Someone’s most likely spotted him on camera by now. He should leave. Get back to work. Forget—
Some of the victims remain unidentified.
The drop of blood stares up at him from the floor. Blood’s been doing that since the meteor, since he died, it’s been looking at him different. Like there’s something wrong. Like he did something wrong. Like something happened, when it can’t have, when nothing ever happens to him. There’s not a scratch on his skin. Chishiya’s fine. Chishiya is always fine.
Why fire?
The room crowds with harsh black shadows. There’s a ringing in his ears and his toes are tingling and his heart’s so, so heavy in his chest. It’s the third door on the lower row. He can’t know that, but he does. He closes his eyes. Yanks them open again. Impossibly, the shadows blink back. Another drop of blood slides off his gloves and somehow he can hear the impact.
Why burn me?
I don’t know, Chishiya lies.
A door slams in the distance. The echo twists down empty hallways and distorts into cackling.
They do spot him on CCTV.
Go home, they say. Get some sleep.
Clearly you went back to work too soon, they say. Cut your body some slack.
Your heart stopped, they say. That’s not nothing.
It is nothing, Chishiya tells himself. He lies flat on his back on his bed and stares at the ceiling. It’s winter; snow cakes at the windows. Soon it’ll be six months since it happened, and he needs to get himself together. He’s good at what he does. He can’t be stuck at home. He’s a doctor, or he’s nothing.
(His parents do not contact him. He does not expect them to, though he knows they’re well aware he’s been found lacking. This is fine. He’s accustomed to their silence. He doesn’t understand why he notes it all the same.)
His bed’s cold, and he doesn’t know what time of day it is. Once the window’s filled up with snow he can’t see the lack of Shibuya on the horizon anymore, and with his eyes forced closed he can’t see the smoke billow, either.
The fire rages and rages and rages, below him and above him and around him. His chest’s burning with something he can’t name—it’s hot and twisted and digging into his lungs—and something has gone wrong. Something he can’t take back.
He should crash to his knees. He should bite at the insides of his cheeks until his mouth fills up with blood. He should turn back time and fix this.
He walks up to the edge of the roof, and down below someone isn’t staring back.
The metal fencing is so cold under his fingers. Maybe his skin will freeze and get stuck to it, and it’ll tear away when he leaves, but that’s fine. His skin’s too whole as is. Snow blows across what used to be Shibuya crossing. It’s flattened now; soon they’ll start building again, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened. They’ll smooth out the scars and every victim who’s ever going to be missed has been missed by now.
In the distance, high-rises light up warm yellow in the black of the night. There’s people in there, normal people with goals and lives and people to miss them, and none of them would have mourned him if he hadn’t been dragged out of that pit.
He takes a deep breath. His ribs don’t even ache anymore; the clouds are bruised black overhead. He’s always wondered why his patients understand before their parents do. Why those parents keep clinging to the life they’ve mapped out ahead of them, even if it’s based on nothing but assumptions, even when they’re presented with so much evidence to the contrary. Why they won’t just face what’s right in front of them. They’d save so much time.
Well. It turns out it’s so, so easy to be blind.
Why fire?
He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he’s in the morgue.
None of it is real; neither the smoke nor the soot nor the figure, lingering in mirrors and twisting around corners. It’s not real, the thing standing in the middle of what used to be the crossroads, tossing the ghost of a gun across its shoulders and laughing. It’s not real, its soot-black fingers or its bone-white grin, it’s not real so Chishiya’s not seeing it, isn’t thinking about it, doesn’t feel it when its hands cradle his face, even when he’s wide awake, trying and failing to fall asleep in the break room.
Chishiya’s fingers sting. The morgue’s lit only by the dull, green EXIT sign, and the small metal door is already open. The stretcher’s already pulled out. The body bag’s still zipped shut. This time, the camera’s broken on the floor in the corner.
His joints ache when he finally moves. The tag on the door reads John Doe in quick, scratchy script. They’ll keep cleaning his apartment when he’s gone. Nothing will even go mouldy. How long until they’ll figure out what happened?
Some of the victims remain unidentified.
The plastic body bag crackles when Chishiya climbs onto the stretcher. He’s not sure if he’s moving his own body. He is sure he’s not afraid. His breath’s slow and even, though the shadows turn harsh and black and deep, and his tongue tastes of nothing but coal.
Why fire? the shadows say.
Chishiya lays down. The steel is cold and hard and his mind hasn’t been this clear in weeks.
Why fire? the smoke in the corner says.
Chishiya places his hands on the cold walls of the compartment, and pulls the stretcher back into the freezer.
Why burn me? the body bag crackles.
He’s sat on the rooftop, watching the party roar below. He doesn’t join. If he did, he’d have to face that he doesn’t know how, that there’s ways in which he’s lacking. Here he can sit and smirk and think stupid, idiots, the lot of them, they’re going to die and they care too much to do anything about it.
Niragi’s laughing by the poolside, a little louder than the others, gun a little bigger than other people’s guns. He’s won a game tonight and there’s no one at the Beach who doesn’t know, because Niragi’s been miming it out all night, the gunshots, the way his victims died, the impact and the shudder and the collapse.
Niragi glances up towards the roof.
Time hitches. Niragi’s eyes are black and sharp and empty, and contain none of the glee he’s been playing at, none of that confident violence. Chishiya’s breath freezes in his lungs. The deep, low beat of the music pummels into his chest.
Niragi’s eyes are just as empty as his.
He’s so, so warm. The world’s dark and small and there’s someone breathing next to him, and he doesn’t want to move. Fingers tangle in his hair. A heartbeat pounds steadily next to his ear. His hand curves around scars, and they’re rough and solid and alive. The breath on his skin forms one hushed word. Why?
Haven’t you ever wanted to punch out a mirror? Chishiya replies.
His eyes slip shut. His limbs are so, so heavy. The breath on his skin grows slower, and it’ll be good to sleep, to sleep properly. He’s been so tired for so long. An arm tightens around him. In his nostrils, there’s the faintest scent of smoke.
I saw too much of myself in you.