Chapter Text
Ganta was driving. Pumping beats through the stereo which was just 3D enough (depth-wise) to really get into. Every so often his heart would sync up to the beat realizing again fully that Shiro was next to him, grooving a little and nodding her head along, with the windows halfway down and her hair blowing across her face. And then he’d be back in the bass notes again.
Kinda cold fingers, since it was night and the air was colder out. But it was perfect: they were listening to new music, trying things out for fun and he thought about three of the songs so far had been good enough to add to his playlist. She was wearing a blue T-shirt though it was dark enough even under the streetlights that it only really passed by (Blue!) between shades of black. They were in their twenties now. Almost a decade after Deadman Wonderland, driving back from a mutual friend’s house but taking the long long way. And it was just such a clear moment (it often felt this way when they were driving aimlessly like this, together or alone, time to breathe). He had those a lot but each one was as imperative to be in as the last. That’s how you lived the years before they went by. He knew what Shiro meant now, about it–though he’d felt that way before too, of course it just took some time before he had realized the extent, by nature dissociation–that any time she could be there, “fully stuck to the ground,” as she put it, was a treasure. (Though he typically felt more casual about it than that, he was thinking.) (And she was more stuck to him than to the ground sometimes.)
Though it was his car and she wasn't supposed to drive at all since her eyes shook, Shiro had taken to it, beating him to the front door’s silver handle whenever she could. Yanked it realizing he hadn’t unlocked the car yet. Would try :| to go slow enough for him. She swore the long-gone ability of her Nameless Worm adaptation (sin: defying death) could stir in her reflexes and focus her eyesight like pain to a nerve. It did require that kind of focus to use in any meaningful capacity, Ganta contemplated, even though he was skeptical of her sight. But ultimately she was a good driver in the rural areas where they went to joyride, liking to go smooth with it–he had to admit it was impressively pleasant to ride with her. Even when she was speeding and more jerky, it fit her curt type of grace. Made sense that she had that kind of inherent spatial awareness, since she’d been fighting from childhood with her eyes completely covered by sheet metal.
But the driver’s seat was his tonight. Following the white and yellow lines like the music and hearing her pretty voice come clear through. His nice one too. Projection of the car, of their sound, of where they were super-positioned into the future where they could see and hear it. Yeah, things had been coming through clear lately, like the glint of a needle point.
Life was good. They had an apartment together. A cat. :) He was liked at his job and could get into the work most of the time. As far as Shiro told him, she was doing well at hers too–a small, corner convenience store that Ganta classified as open-air because they kept the doors open and the doors were one whole side of the shop. It wasn’t anything special but she liked it. She would eat animal crackers behind the counter and study and occasionally have a text convo with a friend and then act like she was caught doing something she wasn't supposed to on the clock when someone came in suddenly. She would end up doing something else eventually, after all! though she was happy to take her time. There was an older lady coworker she found nice and funny. And a couple of college students that frequented enough to get to know a tiny bit. The store roof had a bird nest right on top of the anti-bird spikes the owners had put up. “It’s a tall nest,” is how Shiro always said it and would imitate the message she thought it represented with a provoking middle finger and a *rock-out* tongue face for him. Tall nest in the shade of the ceiling beams. She often came home with pictures of the mated birds.
Ganta was working at a law firm, unsurprisingly. Justice and how easily it could be turned into its opposite had become something of a pressure valve in his system and a central driving force in what he wanted to do with his life, even if it felt kind of unfair—he’d never really been interested in law as a subject. He was more of a sports and video games person and in 7th grade before his life course had been set, he’d thought either of those would be fun as careers (in whatever job). By 2029, everything in the world was always getting scarier but at the same time it was never as scary as not knowing where he stood. This way, at least he would have done his best while providing a comfortable lifestyle for him and Shiro. Right now it wasn’t anything he couldn’t manage, though it was certainly a lot of sitting and reading and wearing a tie around his neck again every fucking day. While he went out, still, played basketball and stuff with his friends, went for hikes/runs, went clubbing occasionally, celebrated holidays, had sex, the spikes of chronic pain were the worst they’d been since the original wounds were inflicted, and he was tired a lot.
The dark trees were rushing by black on the sky. And as the song changed and the music slowed, Ganta started letting the road go unfocused on, just for a second, to look at the stars. He would always remember the first time he looked up and the stars were blurry-clear like that. It was a memory that he’d recovered after he’d found out Shiro was the Red Man. Then, he had been somewhere around seven or eight. An unbothered and pretty considerate kid. Content with his life, his friends, his activities. Just sitting on the curb waiting for his foster dad to finish talking to his teacher at parent-teacher conferences. Saw a smashed baby bird up the sidewalk and he got flashes of it. What he had seen—what she had done, that first time. Though he didn’t know what the images were from (nor that Shiro was just as much the baby bird trembling in its broken, rotted shell as she was the preyer. Back then, she was only killer of real sinners. He kind of willfully but not consciously forgot about that sidewalk curb flashback within a couple years because it scared him so bad to think of.
At the time he hadn't even really wondered how his mind could've conjured those images and why he was crying without realizing why. It seemed like such a strange question to ask. But he didn’t know anything. Nothing at all.
Now, in the car, with her….
Well, it was like when he was so accustomed to managing—having and then managing—the terror that he hardly recognized when he was struggling. If he started feeling the pain and fear in his heart too much, literally any time of the day or night. And even if he’d developed the skill of rendering something within himself unreachable/inaccessible, he was still living right under the drainage pipe of grief. Where his classmates and some of his dearest friends were. In the gutter because that’s the only place he could be, like a dead fall leaf caught in the drain, there to catch and thereby honor all the water he could in this world of poison. And he knew she observed this in him too. They were counterparts after all. He couldn’t really think of what that would be like for her, lol. Can you tell? The bleeding through but there is still—and has to be for the sake of tomorrow—the separation. She really scared him sometimes. Even if he wouldn’t allow himself to realize it. He could only be himself after all and it would be cruel to openly struggle with aspects of her self that had enacted nightmares unto his life, when she'd worked so hard to become herself and he had accepted her with all his heart, after all the time they'd spent together then and since. And besides, when he'd been… struck with the inflictor of her pain, it was the reckoning kind that you couldn’t ever return from. What Deadman Wonderland embodied and concentrated was everywhere in everything. Anyway he was so accustomed to it that he would just turn the lights off in the bathroom in the middle of the night even though he was exhausted because he couldn’t stop shaking, put in his earbuds and dance and chuckle breathlessly at himself and the fact that this was actual necessity to his survival. Good thing Shiro’s a hard sleeper.
She’s looking out the window and he takes particular notice of her snowy eyelashes. She’d started using a sparkly makeup to accentuate her eyes and he could tell she was feeling carelessly cool.
She had come to get where she could reach reality through visualizing. It was seeing herself for real when she looked at videos she and Ganta took together. That was really her in them, with him so close, closer than she could have ever dreamed he’d allow her to feel for him out loud much less feel them back for her! As usual, she knew, she remembered and did so consciously every time she would watch one, but it was so particular to imagine looking at that girl who was more than a ragged piece of gloom! in his world, now her world too, where things happened and she had friends and things to do within a community where at least like most people cared about each other on a base level and enjoyed life. So visceral to see herself out there in front of her like her video-game-like dreams in childhood. Same as the manifestation of her will in the controlled flinging of blood. That juxtaposed beside going to the nature center to read and hang out on her phone. Beside Ganta having to take their cat to the vet because she couldn't do it. It spun her whole sense of physical balance if she was leaning too much into those almost crystal-clear planes nowadays. Back then if she had faith that the air would catch her ghost, she could float and soar. Those realities would always haunt her and she’d inevitably get sucked into the whirlpool again. Every single time in some capacity. She’d fallen to grief enough to not survive it. The flight to Ganta was the manifestation of her last hope as Cinderella manifested her fairy godmother to grant her heart’s wish. (She realized that for the thousandth time full-blast again while she’d been doing math problems at work listening to the same three songs on repeat and found herself out somewhere in third person, out watching herself in this unbelievable happy life–where she had so much and was not alone–see, she wasn’t fully aware or concerned with where her conscious agency happened. (That was the becoming part, the ugly process of fully waking up in a suffering body that was hers in a world with billions of other suffering things in bodies, however tiny of a portion of the suffering of which had been hers: some she had inflicted on purpose, and a lesser proportion on people who hadn't deserved it.) It was way more than enough to get a happy ending.) In the sparkles of the magic wand, there were memories, she had a kind smile, a fun presence, even if you could tell just by looking at her that she was a shell-shocked violent animal. She didn’t even have anything to say these days, she was just moving through foliage and city streets and hallways at happy places. Focusing really hard on everything often forgetting not to focus on the focusing and just drifting off without realizing again. Highway hypnosis if you will.
She had memories of all of it but of course she would always kind of live in Deadman Wonderland. And so the thing she kept coming back to was watching herself floating above the whole day like a dioramic spread when they had told each other “I love you” for the first time and then later she was trying to kill him to get him to kill her or find some fucking resolution and then maybe the just thing happened: he saw that it was her. It was the moment between those moments, when she had emerged from the inside of the iron maiden with the determined invincibility of love but unable to repress her other need from him—her urgent secret wish—she had donned the blood-stained cloak and floated there waiting for him to show up, holding the worst thing she could be holding for him to see, even if this time she hadn't been the one to do it. It was that moment that she remembered most vividly even though she’d had her sight blocked by silver. She could feel everything past present future and she could smell Ganta on the breeze.
Shiro leans back in her seat and flops her head toward the center console. “Ready to go home?” she grins up at him.
It had to come out in front of her as a story—and one she could make peace with—or she couldn’t bear to tell it at all. Sometimes, very rarely and with a lot of shame, she did find it amusing that he was scared of her. Not of her, even, but of her capacity. She knew enough to recognize the dread of fear.
Still looking forward, he passes her a stick of gum with one hand as he unwraps another for himself teeth and fingers.