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CHAPTER 01: DAISY: I WAS REBORN: Part 01
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The daisy is the first flower a child ever learns to pick, because it grows where nothing was planted and asks nothing of the soil. In the old tongue the word meant beginning. In the older tongue it meant the eye of the day, the thing that opens when the light comes, whether it wants to or not.
The controller had a crack running down the left grip, and Natsuki Subaru had been pretending not to notice it for three weeks.
He noticed it now. The plastic bit into the heel of his palm every time his thumb worked the stick, a small persistent sting that could have been solved with a strip of tape and eleven seconds of effort, and he had not solved it, because solving it would have meant admitting that he had broken it, and admitting that he had broken it would have meant remembering the night he threw it at the wall. That had been in February. It was October now. The apartment had gotten smaller in the intervening months, the way rooms do when nobody opens the windows.
On the screen, the words GAME OVER sat in the middle of a field of dead pixels, patient as a landlord.
He let the controller drop into his lap and pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes until colours bloomed behind the lids. The room smelled of old rice and warm electronics and the particular staleness of clothes that have been worn, removed and worn again without ever having been washed. Somewhere below him a neighbour was running a machine on a spin cycle, and the whole building hummed with it, a low mechanical heartbeat that had become so familiar he only heard it when he was already listening for something else.
There was a stack of mail on the desk. He had stopped opening it in August, which was the same month he stopped going to the convenience store on the corner, because the woman who worked the night shift had started asking how he was doing, and she had been kind about it, which was worse.
There were four messages on his phone from a boy called Kenta, who had been his friend since primary school and whose last three attempts had gone unanswered. Subaru had drafted a reply to every one of them. He had never sent any, because each version came out either too light or too heavy, and he could not find a register that did not sound like a person auditioning for the part of himself.
And propped between the tower of unopened mail and a cup containing three dead pens, there was a photograph in a cheap frame.
Kenichi Natsuki was making a face in that photograph, the kind of face a man makes when he wants his son to laugh and does not care what the camera thinks about it. Naoko Natsuki had her hand halfway up to cover his mouth and was laughing too hard to finish the gesture. Between them a fourteen year old boy was rolling his eyes with the theatrical disgust that only a teenager can produce, and the boy in the photograph did not know that this was the last picture the three of them would ever take together, because the boy in the photograph was an idiot, and idiots never know anything until the knowing has gone useless.
Subaru looked at them for a while.
They had gone to Ohayo for work. That was the detail that got him on the bad nights, and by then they had all become bad nights. Not the noise. Not the heat. Not the specific way the air changed pressure and shoved him sideways into a vending machine hard enough to leave a bruise the shape of a coin slot across his shoulder blade for a month. It was the word work. They had died doing paperwork in a different prefecture. They had died because a stranger with a grievance had decided that a railway concourse was an argument, and they had happened to be standing in the middle of his sentence.
He had been there too. That was the other thing, and it was the thing underneath all the other things.
Not far away. Not at home. Not asleep in a bed in another city, being telephoned by a policeman in the small hours the way it happens in films. He had been standing eleven metres from his mother when the world changed temperature, and he had not moved. His legs had made a decision that his brain was never consulted about. He had stood in the smoke with his hands open at his sides and watched people run past him in both directions, some of them shouting, one of them carrying a child upside down under her arm, and he had made no sound and taken no step, and when a paramedic finally crouched in front of him and asked whether he was hurt, he had said no, and it had been true, and it had never once stopped being the worst true thing he had ever said in his life.
Useless.
That was the word his head had selected for him and kept sharpened on the strap. He had turned it over so many times that it had gone smooth, like a coin rubbed featureless in a pocket. It was not even painful most days. It was simply the correct description of a thing, the way a chair is a chair.
And the very worst of it, the part that made him grip the broken controller until the crack bit deeper into his palm, was that eighteen months on, his thoughts about his parents still curved back around to himself. His father had been a source of money. His mother had been a source of dinner, and clean shirts, and a voice through a door at seven in the morning. Without them there was no money and no dinner and nobody to shout at him, and so the shape of his grief kept turning out to be the shape of his own inconvenience. What kind of son was that. What kind of person. He had loved them. He was almost sure he had loved them. But every time he went looking for the love, what he found instead was a boy worrying about rent, and it had begun to seem entirely possible that there had never been anything else in there in the first place.
He picked up a different controller, started a different game, and watched a loading bar without seeing it.
The headache had been present all evening, in the way headaches are present all evening, sitting politely at the back of the skull with its coat still on. Now it stood up. It walked forward. It put both hands on the inside of his forehead and pushed.
Subaru made a small noise, more surprise than pain. The loading bar finished. His vision went briefly white at the edges and then came back wrong, the colours of the room sliding half a centimetre out of register with the objects they belonged to, so that the desk had a second desk faintly behind it and the photograph had a second photograph.
He thought, with the terrible administrative calm that sometimes arrives in place of panic, that this was probably not a normal headache.
He thought about his phone, which was on the floor by the bed, which was four steps away.
He got as far as leaning forward.
Something in the left side of his head gave way. There was no sound to it, which was strange, because it felt like the kind of thing that ought to have made a sound, a wet structural failure like a mooring rope parting under load. Heat went through him from the inside outward, filling his jaw and the sockets of his eyes. The controller left his hands. The floor arrived with no journey in between.
He lay on the mat with his cheek against the weave and looked at the leg of his desk, and further up at the bottom edge of a photograph whose faces he could no longer make out, and the last complete thought he managed to assemble was not a noble one. It was not a prayer, or an apology, or a message for whoever might find him.
It was: oh. So that is it, then.
And then he was gone, and downstairs the machine finished its cycle and beeped four times, and nobody in the building noticed anything unusual at all.
—=<>=—
The dark lasted either a moment or a hundred years. He had no instrument with which to measure it. There was no body to be bored inside of and no clock to be bored by, and whatever remained of him simply hung in it like a word waiting to be said.
Then there was pressure.
It began as a suggestion and became an argument and ended as a verdict. Something was compressing him with an entirely impersonal patience, the way a machine presses metal, and it did not care that he had no lungs to scream out of, because it had already reached its own conclusions about his lungs. His skull moved. He felt the plates of it shift in a manner that plates are not supposed to shift. His spine bent in a direction it had no business bending. Everything was hot and wet and red, and it was a red that was not seen so much as suffered, a red that pulsed in time with an enormous and unfamiliar heart.
He had been wrong, earlier, on the mat beside the desk. Death itself had been nothing at all. This was considerably worse than death. This was being unmade and remade at speed, in the dark, with no explanation offered and no consent requested.
Then voices came through the red, muffled, as though shouted across water.
"I can see the head. One more, my lady. One more and it is done."
Whatever had hold of him pushed again, harder, and the world narrowed to a tube of crushing heat, and then the heat ended and the cold began, and it was so cold, so sudden and so total, that his entire new and unwilling body convulsed against it.
Air went into him for the first time. It went in like a blade.
He tried to scream, and the scream came out, but it came out wrong. It came out high and thin and animal, a wail with no words in it and no mind behind it that anybody else in the room could possibly hear. He heard it from the outside as well as the inside and understood, with a rising horror that had nowhere at all to go, that this reedy little noise was now the entirety of his voice. That everything he had ever been had been compressed into that, and nobody was ever going to know.
Light. Far too much light, orange and shivering, resolving slowly into shapes. Faces above him, enormous and blurred, leaning in. Hands. An astonishing number of hands. A woman weeping somewhere close by with the particular exhausted joy of a person who has just survived something she was not certain she would survive.
"Lord Astrea," said a voice, thick with feeling. "It is a girl. A healthy girl, my lord."
Subaru's mind, which until that moment had been fully occupied with the question of whether it still existed, came to a complete halt.
Girl.
He had no capacity to sit up. He had no capacity to look down. He had no capacity to do anything whatsoever except lie in the crook of a stranger's elbow and be wrapped in cloth by people who were talking over the top of him, and yet somewhere in the wreckage there was a small clear voice saying, very distinctly, that this was not correct, that an error had been made at an administrative level, and that somebody needed to be informed immediately.
Nobody was going to be informed. That was becoming clear as well.
He was lifted. The room swung around him. He was carried a short distance, the world tilting past in soft smears of gold and shadow, and then set into a pair of arms so much larger and steadier than the first pair that they might have belonged to a building rather than a man.
He was raised up.
He could not focus properly. What he could see was a shape above him, broad at the shoulder, with a great deal of dark red hair and a face he would go on to remember for the entire length of his second life without ever quite being able to describe it to anybody.
"Beautiful," the man said.
The voice went through the infant's chest the way a struck bell goes through a room. It was warm and low and entirely certain of itself, and underneath the warmth there was something else, something that had nothing at all to do with love, something that sounded very much like arithmetic.
"There is a great deal in you," the man went on, more quietly, and it was not at all clear that he was speaking to anybody present. "I can see the potential in you. I can feel it from here."
The infant blinked very slowly. The man's eyes were blue, and even out of focus they were the kind of blue that a person notices and then goes on noticing.
"You shall be Theresia," he said, in the tone of a man announcing a decision to a council. "Theresia Astrea."
And whatever had survived of Natsuki Subaru, whatever had crawled through the dark and the pressure and come out the other side screaming in a language it did not have, finally broke.