"Boss," You walk into his office and pretend not to see the mini clothes strewn all over the place, with the man sitting by his desk surrounded by Western aesthetics of trinkets and shelves filled with European and Japanese war strategies. Books that he would reference them to you, yet you would simply have to nod in agreement because while you didn't understand where it came from, it seemed to be true because your Boss believed it.
That was the life you lived all your life: Confused, dazed, following the man of the house.
It was just that this time, it was a better man leading your life.
"Congratulations," He says, though his words end in a sigh of disappointment. "I've kept up my end of the deal, and so have you."
He presses a red stamp against your request to be formalised: You are going to Switzerland. The operation was simple: Structuring. It was when you would be splitting large amounts of money into smaller chunks to avoid transactions from seeming suspicious. And with the Swiss banks, this would be an easy task. You let a small smile cross your face; a victorious smile, your eyes filled with darkness of a fallen night.
"I know someone won't be pleased with my decision," He continued to say, the rich scratching of his fountain pen against the coarse paper filling in the brief silences between each word, as though he was seductively drawling them out. "I wonder if you know who that would be."
Your brows furrow. You have an inkling as to who it might be. "Who?"
"You can't guess?" He looks up after he dots his signature on the paper.
"I have a guess. But I'm not sure."
"I have a hunch that you already know."
"Is it Chuuya Nakahara?" You say, your voice full of doubt. Boss hums, before breaking out into a slow applaud.
"Correct," He says. "You know, he came to me when he was eighteen, four years ago, for intel about you. You must have given off a strong first impression, because he was insistent on knowing you."
"I was in Iran after that interaction."
"Yes you were, for four years. Has Iran made any strong impressions on you?"
"The Hasanlu Lovers," You say, remembering the picture that were being sold as souvenirs in the vendors of Iran: a black and white picture of a skeleton, the bodies around 20 to 30 years old, found locked in a forever kiss buried underneath the anonymous soil in Solduz Valley. Boss makes a noise with his throat; a humoured noise.
"Has the great (First name) succumbed to the highs and lows of love? To be swayed by an image of two lovers?"
"It has made an impression on me, yes," You admit. "But a curious one."
"Oh?"
"It is curious to me that some people would die for love," You say, your hands locked behind your back. "To die for something as trivial as that."
"Well, to some, it's not trivial at all," Boss says. He collects the papers and your fake passport before handing them to you. "But you have your ideals. Goodbye, (First name)."
"Goodbye, Boss," You dip your head in farewell before leaving the room. The door swings shut behind you, and you let a sigh escape your lips. You walk down the hallway and squeeze your eyes shut when remnants of the hymn play in your ears, softly and swaying, like a blade of grass weighed down by a dewdrop being moved by the violinesque singing of a gentle breeze. Your footsteps become more or less silent and the beating of your heart overtakes the noise.
Jesus keep me near the cross—
You find the dial to the radio and turn it off. You hadn't turned it off during the massacre; it had been kept on, concealed by the screaming and the bullets and the metallic crush of bones; yet it continued to sing on.
You look at the space before you and find yourself walking towards the bathroom, reliving the route that your younger self had done all those years back. You unlock the door to the bathroom by unholstering your gun on your thigh and mechanically shooting the knob, so that the door lock itself was busted open. You kick the door in with steel clad eyes.
Your mother is on the floor, bleeding her life out with her hands on her neck, desperately trying to stop the bleeding. When she lays eyes on you, her hands clasp into a prayer and she starts to apologise.
"I'm so sorry, dear," She had said. "I'm so sorry. Forgive me."
Even in death had she been so placid. Like water. You had put a foot on her back to force her closer onto the floor, before jerking the axe out in a way that spilled more blood onto the floor. Your hair went over your eyes and you had taken a second to wipe them off away from your face, the blood acting like gel in keeping them away. You remembered taking a quick breath, before ending her life there and then by severing her head clean off. She had made awful choking noises while doing this, because this wasn't a one-chop action; it had taken several attempts at severing the head by raising the axe over your head and dropping it over and over before the neck detached itself from the head, like a barbie doll's head being popped off.
Then you remembered, no, you dragged her headless corpse out to the living room and dumped her body over Father's corpse, who was still holding the phone, the telephone cord coiled tightly like a spring. The emergency dispatcher was panicked on the other end, asking and repeating her questions as you hung up the phone with bloodied fingers.
It's only when you bump into a wall that you re-open your eyes.
"What?" Chuuya's amused voice hits your ears and snaps you out of your own dimension. "Did you just—?"
"Ignore that." You rub your nose that was stinging from the impact, finding that your papers and passport were dropped from the collision. The vermillion-haired male gestures to the fallen heap.
"You need help?"
"If you don't mind."
He crouches over and helps you gather the papers in his hand, straightening them before coming to a complete halt when his brilliant eyes scour over the content of the papers. "Approved? To Switzerland?!"
"Yes," You say, with a hint of pride in your voice. "I got appr—"
"I told you I won't let this happen," He says, his voice on the verge of a snarl. He stands up with the papers in his hands, passport too, and rips them all in half with his bare hands. A cold shock of fury razes down your spine.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" You snatch them back into your hands, and drop them onto the ground when they would be provided useless to your endeavours. A growing hatred in your stomach that begins to conflagrate your innards, burning your heart alive as you clenched your fists by your sides. "What the hell?!"
"You think I'll just let you disappear like that?" He slams his hand onto your shoulder and into the wall, the dull thud of pain ignored by the outrage in your head. His eyes are flaring up as though ignited by a fire behind the thin veneer of the corneas, widening with visible, white-hot ferocity. "You think I would just let you go?"
"I don't belong to you," You wrench his hand off of you and clench the wrist so hard in your hand that had it been a civilian, the bone would have snapped clean in half. "I don't care what you thi—"
"I can't let you go," He cuts you off, seemingly in his own maddening world. You stare as he yanks his wrist out of your hand, adjusting his gloves as though preparing for battle. "I can't. Ever since you left me when we were eighteen, you've been haunting me. I've been seeing you in afterimages where you're not there."
You blink in shock at his confession: It sounded like a confession of love. But you regain your composure just as fast.
"That sounds like a 'you' problem," You snap. "Don't project your problems onto me. I'm leaving."
"No you're not," He sneers. "You're staying right here, with me."
You're stunned again at the sheer determination in his words. His stickiness brings you back into your past, a place where the sun doesn't shine, a place that lacked fecundity for anything to grow and develop—a place that you dreaded. Only death was in your past, both before and after the massacre. The very core of your massacre was that it was to gain freedom, and it is very frightening that this man, who claims he is intrigued by you, cages you in his hands like a sparrow caught in the starved man's net. Then you suck the inside of your cheek in contemplation, a notion that doesn't go unnoticed by Chuuya.
"Having second thoughts on leaving, princess?" He asks, his voice now gentle as rain. Maybe this man truly did care about you. Maybe that was why he was insistent on trapping you: So that you could get over the obstacle of your past, instead of side-stepping it constantly.
What a horrible thing to make someone do, against their will.
"Come with me," You say, walking away from him.
"Where are we going?" He says.
"We're going to my old hut, in Suribachi city."