The computer program

7. Doorbell

"You're wasting your time. And mine." Hashirama sat at his desk. He didn't even look at me.

"What has happened?"

He finally looked at me then. His face displayed something I never expected to see; disgust. I suddenly felt terribly, terribly dirty. A sense of panic snarled itself around my throat, and I wanted to run home and have a shower.

Hashirama, however, was a display of calm hostility itself. He braided his fingers in front of him on his desk, sighed and looked at me as if talking to a stupid child.

Maybe, that's what I am, I thought. A stupid child. A stupid child with a student-professor dream.

"You bore me", he said suddenly, and my heart froze to ice.

"What?" I whispered, tears in my voice.

"You. Bore. Me. Your work with me is done. Fuck off."

My lower lip started trembling pathetically. My vision blurred as if sensing I couldn't deal with the world as it was right now, and so wanted to protect me from seeing it.

I turned and I left Hashirama Senju's office.

I didn't go home to shower.

Instead, my feet took me to my brother's flower shop.

The doorbell pinged, that familiar and comforting sound, and then I stood there, in his doorway, and I could finally burst into tears.

Madara looked up.

"Oh, God! Gorgeous!" He dropped everything he had at hand and ran to me, put his arms around me. "I'll kill him! I'll fucking kill him!!"

"How do you-" I snivelled. "How do you know what happened?"

"It must be him. I just know it. That motherfucking and fatherfucking bastard. What did he do to you?!" He suddenly looked terrified. "Did he force himself on you?!"

"No!" I said and shook my head. 

He took me to the back room where he sat me down and gave me a mug of tea. I explained the situation. Madara started pacing back and forth.

"Oh God. I knew it... I knew it!!"

I looked up at him.

"Knew what?" My voice was muffled from all the crying. How had I let myself fall so deeply into the hellhole that was fucking your university professor?

"The age gap itself was a huge red flag", Madara begun.

"But age is-"

"Just a number?" Madara finished for me. "Fuck that. Izuna, it would be one thing if you were thirty and he was forty. Or even if you were twenty-seven or twenty-eight. But your twenty-three. You're in the midst of exploring yourself! Of finding out who you are and who you want to be. He's already been through all that! And being with someone in such a fundamentally different place in life will destroy you! And that's even without taking the power position he has over you into account."

I snivelled. I hadn't really considered that.

Madara sighed.

"I know what happened", he said.

"You do?" I asked.

"Izuna, he..." He looked away. "I suspected it from the beginning, but this proves it." Madara looked back at me. "I suspected he was only using you to get help with what he wanted. And now he got that..." Madara hid his face in his hands, turned round; he couldn't finish his sentence.

I looked down, mortified.

"I gave him what he wanted, so now he'll dispose of me."

"Exactly", Madara said, still turned away from me.

"But why didn't he wait until it was all done? How can he be sure what I told him works?"

Madara looked at me again.

"I thought he'd told you that at least. He told me he'd told you."

I felt an icy hand grab my heart.

"Told me what?"

Even if I knew the answer, Madara saying it turned my world upside down.

"I performed the surgery. I implanted the chip. It worked." The ground disappeared from beneath my feet. "The computer program is alive."

Our university was placed on the top of a hill.

On a certain spot you had a splendid view of the city, and that was where I went to lick my wounds.

I sat down, let the orange sunset sky consume me as it was slowly closed up into night sky, as if it was putting on a dark marine velvet jacket and slowly pulling the zipper up.

I sighed, hugged my legs, tried to comfort myself, to mend my broken heart like those Japanese pieces of art consisting of broken vases put together with molten gold.

Problem was, I had no gold within me to melt. I had poured it all on Hashirama.

I was just about to start crying again, when...

"Hello."

A voice.

A deep, ragged voice.

I turned round, my heart going from zero to one hundred in an instant.

I gaped.

Because there, behind me on top of the hill he stood, tall, broad, with his white, ragged hair sprawling all over his head, clad in a grey sweater and simple, blue jeans, he stood.

"... Izuna." He smiled a little crooked smile. The smile was oddly non-human. "I think we're on first-name basis now."