Please C&C to Gerald Tarrant at lordofmerentha@yahoo.com

Long Ride Home

It started to rain as I stepped out of the narrow exit of the bar, and I hadn't brought an umbrella. The weather forecast for today had been sunny, with slight cloud cover. I should have known not to trust the weatherman. Damn Tokyo weather.

The sun had set and the neon signs were flashing up and down the street, people swirling in a mass of black hair and neat, efficient suits and ties and glasses, hands grasping briefcases securely, and I felt out of place in my jeans and loose black t-shirt and floppy hat. I looked both ways before crossing the street, jamming my hands into my pockets, fishing for my box of cigarettes and realizing that I’d forgotten that too. The "Don't Walk" sign flashed on as I was halfway across, but there were no cars coming anyway.

I'd just reached the other side of the street when the slight sprinkle turned into a downpour. There was a collective groan from the pedestrians around me and a splashing and shrieking as people crowded into the nearest shops to keep dry until the rain let up. I contemplated just walking the rest of the way to the train station, then decided it wouldn't be worth the effort. I didn't feel like getting drenched before stepping onto the train, and it was a long ride home.

The rain was coming down so heavily that I couldn't even see my own two feet on the soaking pavement, so I made a blind run for the shop door on my right, groping for the handle and letting myself into the store in a cloud of water. It was only after I had finished shaking myself like a wet dog and stepped out of the small ocean that had formed around my general vicinity that I realized it was a music shop. Not just any music shop either – a nice one. Soothing strains of jazz drifted out of the speakers somewhere above my head, the floor was carpeted, and the air smelled of crisp plastic wrappings and cardboard and air fresheners and coffee. Lots of coffee.

I shook my head and blinked. Small drops of water dripped onto my nose from strands of wet hair. I felt a slight headache forming around my eyes, which was odd, because I hadn't been drinking that much. There wasn't even that slight, uncomfortable buzz that signaled the beginning of being drunk. I'd only had two beers…it was too early in the day to be getting drunk, anyway.

Though that hadn't stopped me before. It was the weather, maybe. I hated getting wet. I hated the water, in general. I hated water almost as much as I hated long train rides, both of which I had stepped into this shop to avoid.

Sighing, I stuck my hands in the pockets of my wet jeans again and meandered towards the nearest aisle, casting a glance at the window. Rain was still coming down in sheets and I could just make out the glare of headlights outside as cars slowed and stopped, unable to drive through the limited visibility.

"Irrasshaimase!"

I jumped before I realized it was just the girl behind the counter, cheerfully bowing to me as I passed her. I twisted my lips in what I hope was an acceptable smile, turning my face away before she could recognize me, though I didn’t know how many people still recognized me these days. Still, it didn’t hurt to be cautious.

Maybe it was arrogant of me, but I needed to feel like I still mattered.

The soothing jazz music was starting to grate on my nerves, but the rain showed no signs of letting up. Sighing, I glanced around the shop once and started up the narrow staircase to the second floor, where a sign hanging from the ceiling read "Rock/Pop." I might as well.

I started at the end of the alphabet, browsing. I didn’t know what for. I hardly listened to popular music nowadays…most of it struck me as overdone and unexciting, and I’d had enough of recording anyway. The CD in my stereo was forever stuck on Mozart. A soothing, neutral choice, something classy and that, if I believed the reports, helped my brain grow more brain cells. I’d been killing too many lately with my sleepless nights and my drinking.

I never used to drink this much.

I’d just about passed through the end of the alphabet, fingers moving onto “Y” when something made me pause. There it was. It was stuck between a Zone CD and something by a group I had never heard of before, looking somehow out of place in its brilliant red wrappings. I didn’t know why I pulled it out, running my hands along the crisp plastic outer wrapping, touching the flimsy material. It was cold. Cold and wet, from my hands in the rain. The lettering was large and white, naked-looking.

ZIGZO. ADD9 SUICIDE.

I stared at the box for a moment more, then slowly, reluctantly, pushed it back into the rack. I wondered if anyone would buy it. It looked lonely.

There really wasn't any way around Zigzo breaking up, not when all four of us had formed the band in the first place with the intention of breaking up. Well, maybe that wasn't true, but none of us had ever had the intention of continuing on and making it big, like so many other bands did. We'd all been there, done that. It was a hobby band, something to do in our free time, something to take our minds off of…things. It wasn't hard to realize that Den and Ryo had their own secrets hanging over them – Den had brought it up briefly with me once, something about "things left undone when he died." As far as they were concerned, there was only one he, and that was hide of X Japan. I didn't know how good of friends they had been, but that was something neither of them ever talked about, and I never asked.

Tetsu…not my Tetsu, but he was the only Tetsu in my life now…was probably the most normal out of the three of us. He had secrets and scars, but he never made too big a deal out of the secrets, and his scars were the healed kind, where the scab had already peeled off leaving fresh, pink skin behind, where the mark would remain but the pain it had caused would only be a memory to fade year after year until time had eroded it away. I liked hanging around Tetsu. He had an outlook on life that made even someone like me blink twice sometimes, but he was so open and honest and ready to take on the world that, even on the worst days, he could make everything seem all right again.

Of course, that meant that he was the one to call for the breakup.

I had been expecting it, but still it was somewhat of a shock. That last meeting in the local smoky livehouse that we'd haunt every day after practice, over our usual glass of beer and music in the background, he'd told us that it was time to end. Time to move on. Time to face the future, with a significant look in my direction that I'd pretended to ignore. I was good at that. Tetsu and I both had strong personalities, but where his strength lay in boundless energy that seemed to flow through every part of him, mine was my concentration and resolve. Ignoring Tetsu took a lot of work, and I was one of the only people I knew who could do it and do it well.

He'd cornered me afterwards, after Den and Ryo had left, subdued and for once, not drunk. "Yatchan," he'd said, and I'd turned my head to the side, slid out from the wall where he was trying to pin me.

"I don’t want to talk about it," I'd said, and walked away.

And here I was now, two weeks after the last live, existing on cigarettes and alcohol, wandering through the streets of Tokyo aimlessly from bar to bar, trying not to think of what I knew I had to do, because I didn't want to do it. I had left that part of my life behind five years ago, and I didn't want to go back. I didn't need to go back, because no matter what Tetsu said, it was over.

Tetsu…both of them.

The girl from the front desk had somehow wandered over my direction, wearing a quizzical expression. I pretended not to see her, and she hung around the edge of my peripheral vision for a moment before sidling up to me. For a split second, I contemplated walking away, but before my brain could set my feet in motion, she’d appeared next to me, like a spirit out of the air. I flinched.

“Ano…”

Before she could even get the sentence out of her mouth in her breathless voice, before she could even bring up her hand to offer me the pen and paper she was holding, before I could capitulate to the pleading look in her child’s eyes, I turned away.

“No,” I said harshly. “I’m not.”

I felt her bristling hurt and embarrassment, but I couldn’t afford to care. Almost blindly, I groped my way down the CD aisle, not turning to see if the girl was still following me, just feeling that I just had to keep moving, had to keep going because if I stopped, I would cease to exist. Dimly, I noticed it was still raining outside. The throbbing of my head seemed like it was about to hammer it open and my vision swam in front of my eyes. So against my better judgment, I stopped walking, leaning against the rack to my left, closing my eyes and willing the dizziness to pass.

The steady drumming of the rain on the roof, on the windows, above the jazz music, slowly crept into my consciousness. I hadn't disappeared after all…my body was still there, leaning against the CD rack. The little girl from the front desk was no longer there behind me. I wondered if she ever had been, or if that was just a hallucination too, brought on by long nights and long days and too little sleep.

I pushed myself away from the rack, making sure I could stand before turning to let go of the wooden shelf.

The little plastic divider by my hand read "L'Arc~en~Ciel."

Almost against my will, I reached down, picking up the CD stacked at the very front, my fingers trembling as if one careless movement would break the disc into pieces. The face of the woman on the front stared at me, accusingly, as if even she knew what I had done and was mocking me for it.

Heavenly.

I dropped the thing like it was too burning hot for me to hold and fled the store, not caring that it was still pouring outside, not caring that I hated train rides. I had to get home. I had to get away from the memories that still haunted me every step I took in this accursed city. Reaching the train station miraculously in one piece, I barely remembered buying the ticket and stepping aboard the train. I still saw the woman on the album cover, her eyes burning into mine, her pouting lips curled in a sinister smirk. Or maybe it was someone else's eyes and someone else's lips.

Soaked and shivering in the air conditioning, for once missing the heat of crowded bodies crushed tightly together during rush hour, I scrunched down in my seat and stared out the window as the train pulled out of the station. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but it was getting there. The rain had finally stopped, leaving pale traces and not-quite-smudges of wet prints on the window glass. My stop was the second-to-last, and I sat with half-closed eyes, watching the salarymen get off, bustling and busy in their sharp business suits and leather briefcases and silk neckties. I could have been like that, if I chose. Gone to university. Gotten a nice job in Tokyo with nice perks. Risen through the ranks. Been respected and powerful.

I imagined that it was me in that sharp suit and silk tie, carrying my own expensive leather briefcase, smiling as the secretary offered me tea and lower employees passed by me murmuring Good morning, shachou, in respectful tones.

No, that wasn’t me.

I remembered that Ken had been in school when they’d dragged him from his studies to play guitar for them. Or, more precisely…Tetsu had dragged him. Tetsu had a knack of doing things like that.

I wished I hadn’t been so rude to that girl in the music store. She was only trying to get a simple autograph…she had meant no harm. She probably would label me a jerk too now, just as all the news crews had labeled me five years ago, the jerk who betrayed his friends and his band and decided to throw away his career for a few moments of pleasure.

It hadn’t been like that. But I was too tired to argue with people who would not listen.

Tetsu had tried, but he couldn’t balance everything at once. Not even him. I saw the scales tipping before he even realized their slow slide, saw them falling away, saw everything tumbling down around him as he desperately tried to save what he could. Because he was the leader, and he had to.

I had betrayed him, in the end. Tetsu…Ken…Hyde…

I remembered that last day, the turning point for all of us. They’d convened at my place because the studio had banned me from its premises, and I had refused to see any of them. They’d entered one by one, sitting down in grim silence. Hyde had been distraught, small face pointed and pale, jaw clenched in fierce despair. Ken was stony faced, expression closed. Tetsu looked tired.

Sakura, he’d said.

And I had risen to my feet, looking down at all of them, thinking about how much I loved them and how much I loved the band and how I loved them all too much to ever let them go, because letting them go would mean that I would never again feel alive.

It’s all right, I said. I quit.

Tetsu I had hurt. I had hurt him and he had hurt me, in both our quests for dreams that we might never reach, and we'd only ended up destroying each other. I had agonized over it once, replaying scenarios over and over in my head, and finally only come to the conclusion that what was done was done and could never be repaired.

Ken I had hurt also. He showed it less than Hyde did, but Ken was a boy in the true sense of the word, looking ahead, questing for the future, hiding his wounds deep inside and making sure they were buried so deep that he could never have the urge to unearth them again. The boy inside of him didn’t understand. I saw him on television two years afterwards, and I didn’t recognize him. Ken was the boy who had lost a father.

And Hyde.

With a start, I realized that my stop was coming up. The train slowed, came to a stop. The station outside was dark, with a few people loitering outside as the doors opened. The old lady two seats over got up and creaked over to the exit. I got up also.

And found that I couldn’t step off the train.

I stood there for a few moments, with my hands on the wall, staring blindly at the doors and the station outside, but my feet wouldn’t move and I stayed planted to the floor. There was something…I knew I couldn’t get off here. The doors closed. The train started moving and I was jolted back into my seat. I watched in dazed confusion as the lights of my stop slid by and faded into oblivion.

No matter. I could ride the train around again. The rhythm of the wheels on the tracks hummed into my bones and I leaned my head against the window, slipping into a half-doze. It had started to rain again. The raindrops glimmered in the moonlight and I drew smoky shapes out of the air in front of my eyes, half-formed ghosts of nothing that smiled at me and faded away before I could put names to them.

The train slowed.

I jolted fully awake, peering outside the window. It was fully dark now and I had no idea where I was, but I stood up anyway, as if in a dream. There were only a few people left on the train now, mostly asleep. None of them looked up as I shuffled towards the exit and stepped onto the platform outside. I felt euphoric, like I had taken a hit of the drug again, but this euphoria was cleaner, brighter, more pure than the drugs had ever made me feel.

Sticking my hands in my pockets, I wandered slowly through the rain. The drops clung to my face and my neck and the thin material of my shirt and I closed my eyes, relishing the feel of fresh rainwater. The train had been cold, and the cool night air felt like pure pleasure to my goose-bump skin. Usually at a time like this I would have wanted to stick a cigarette in my mouth, to chew on it if not to light it. Ken had adopted that as his trademark, I noticed. Always with that cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

Thinking about him hurt.

I wandered down the sidewalk, not really caring where I was going, my thoughts on the rain and the memories of friends that hung in there like spirits. The buildings along the road didn't seem abandoned, but they were all dark, and there were no cars, no people, nothing. This wasn't any part of Tokyo I knew, and I briefly thought about stopping, turning around, and getting back on the train. I needed sleep.

The blinking sign on my left caught my attention, a bar sign flickering on and off on the otherwise deserted street. I felt myself move forward, as if caught by some mysterious hand and pushed along the road, down the stairs and into the establishment.

I'd been expecting something seedy, but to my surprise, the interior looked like something out of a ritzy downtown Tokyo club, with chic, state of the art furnishings, expensive looking wood paneling, and overall a very art nouveau-ish look. The bar was all chrome and wood, halogen lighting sparkling along its mirrored surface.

I emerged cautiously from the dark stairwell after a few glances around. The few patrons there were well-dressed, sipping from fluted glasses, and I began to wonder if I shouldn't just go back up the stairs, as I'd obviously stumbled into the wrong kind of bar. I needed somewhere cheap and dirty to drown my sorrow, not an upscale establishment where you'd take someone on a date. The smooth jazz from the speakers was beginning to make me sleepy, and the light murmur of conversation flowed around me like warm air, rising. I'd jolted temporarily out of the euphoric nothingness that had hit me after I got off the train, but all this was beginning to bring it back. My eyelids felt heavy.

"Yatchan?"

I blinked, and the mood vanished. I turned to see him coming towards me with a glass in his hand and a huge grin that lit up his eyes. He was dressed casually as always, in a dark t-shirt and ripped jeans and tennis shoes. Somehow, though, he didn't look out of place here. He should have, but he didn't.

"What the hell are you doing here, Tetsu?" I said.

The former Zigzo vocalist clapped me on the shoulder briefly, withdrawing his arm when I stepped away. "A better question is, what are you doing here?" I noticed that his glass was almost full, and he looked sober enough in the dim light. He didn't sound drunk, at any rate.

I shook my head. "If I knew, I'd tell you. Didn't feel like going home, I guess. Where is this place anyway?"

He gave me a weird smile and rubbed his head, the equivalent of someone running one hand through his hair, if he'd had enough hair on his head with that crew cut to run his hand through. "I'll let you figure it out for yourself. It's not your kind of place. Was wondering why you would find your way down here."

"It doesn't seem much like your kind of place either. No loud rock bands. No hard liquor."

"We all need a change of pace some time," he said, still grinning but with that weird smile that set my teeth on edge. "Come on, I'll get you a scotch or something."

"I don't want anything, thanks," I said. "I have to go."

He caught my arm. "Oh come on, Yatchan, you just told me you didn't want to go home."

"Oh yeah well I changed my mind."

Tetsu groaned, and I saw him set his glass on the corner of a table. The pressure on my arm didn't lessen. "We need a good talk, you and I. We haven't had one in a while."

"No we don't."

"Sure we do." I heard the clink of some change and the slithering sound of bills hitting the wooden table, and then he was pulling me towards the stairs. "Let's get out of here."

"It's raining," I said weakly, not in a mood to let Tetsu boss me around, but as usual, he wasn't listening. I realized he was quite willing to drag me up the stairs after him if I refused, and that sounded just a little bit painful. "Ow, let go of my arm. Shit, I get the point. Let go of me and I'll follow you."

He shot me a look that said "you better mean it or I'll kill you," and took the stairs two at a time. I followed, wondering where he got the energy. Even at the end of band practices, when the rest of us were tired out, he would still be jumping around, throwing imaginary punches and kicking the microphone stand. Den and Ryo would look at each other and grin, and I would look at him and imagine someone else behind the microphone, imagine someone else's hands on the guitar and bass, hear myself playing someone else's song.

That was all it had ever been. At least, I wanted to believe that. Someone else's song.

He was waiting impatiently for me when I finally emerged into the rain for the third time today, though it had lessened considerably. It was now no more than the slightest of drizzles, and I could almost see the moon from behind a thin cloud. The streetlamps lit the swimming sidewalk with a ghostly pale light, and Tetsu's white skin glowed in the dark.

"So," he said. "Want a light?"

I considered, then shook my head. "What did you want to talk about?"

He finished lighting a cigarette, sticking the box and the lighter back into one pocket, then smiled, taking a long drag and blowing the smoke out into the rain. "Nothing much. The usual. Haven't seen you in a while. Keeping busy?"

"You know what I've been doing," I shot back. "Absolutely fucking nothing. How about you?"

"Funny," he said. "Me too." I waited till he'd stopped laughing, then gave him a faint smile.

"I guess it is funny. If you look at it from a certain angle."

He gave me another strange look, and then before I could say anything else, was off and bounding through the rain, splashing in the puddles and making whooping noises. I was glad no one was out here who could see him. It was true he reminded me a little of myself at a younger age, or maybe even Ken, who I could still imagine doing something like this even though he'd tried to change himself over completely. Maybe if I could get back to him, we could go running through the rain and slipping through the puddles and making complete fools out of ourselves like we used to, and we wouldn't care.

I could only wish. That part of my life, I reminded myself firmly, was over.

"Dude, Yatchan, what is wrong with you?"

"Too much," I replied wearily, catching up to him at the end of the street, where he was looking both ways to make sure there were no cars. There were none. The place was deserted. "I wish I knew."

He straightened and turned to face me, and for the first time I noticed how large and dark his eyes were. How sad. I met his gaze square-on, though something in it made me cringe inside, made my heart freeze up into a tiny little ball, made me all of a sudden want to cry.

I hadn't cried in five years.

"Follow me," he said quietly, and started away from me down the street. I didn't argue. I started after him.

We walked through the rain, through the deserted streets, past the buildings which even though they didn't look abandoned, spoke with a silence that told us that there was no longer anyone here. Past the blinking stoplight that was stuck forever on the yellow light, casting its golden glare on the black asphalt of the slick, water-drowned road.

All of a sudden, as we turned a corner, the rain stopped. So did Tetsu, and I stopped too, watching him.

"Do you hear that?" he said.

I listened hard, trying to catch a new sound, and after a moment, I realized that there was the sound of water, but not of the rain. "Sounds like the ocean," I said.

He turned to look at me again, a long, discerning look that I could never have imagined could come from those eyes, usually so playful and happy. But then again, I'd never really noticed those eyes either, till now. I felt myself drawn, fixing upon them, their black depths, glittering strangely in the light of the distant streetlamps, like the moon on the caps of black waves.

"You haven't been to the ocean in a long time, have you?"

I forced myself away from those eyes, back up to the road, and found that the asphalt ended in a bumpy outcropping of jagged rock edges which sloped away, downwards, towards what could only be a beach, and then even farther off, the black ocean. A mirror of Tetsu's eyes.

"No," I said, and it came out in a whisper. "No…I haven't been to the ocean…in a long time. Not since…"

He didn't say anything else, simply nodded his head to me and began walking once more. I watched him go, my feet for some reason feeling rooted to the pavement, watched him as his moonlit form grew smaller, watched him bend and clamber down the rocky outcropping, watched his head disappear. The night was black around me and I felt my world closing in, shrinking like plastic vacuum packaging, crinkling cellophane tightening around me, squeezing.

The moon wavered, floating, before the trailing tendrils of a cloud brushed it, enveloped it, and it disappeared.

I heard a roaring in my ears.

A sharp sound broke the spell, the sound of a shower of small rocks tumbling down a hill, and I realized Tetsu was still making his way down. I stumbled forward, nearly plunging down the sheer rock face before I caught myself. Lowering myself to the edge, I grasped the rocky side and began my slow descent. It was steeper than I thought, and before I reached bottom, my hands were raw and a bit numb. I hadn't counted rock climbing into the bargain.

I looked around for Tetsu but he had disappeared somewhere in the distance. I could hear the waves louder in my ears now, pounding surf against the shore, breaking upon the rocks. I had forgotten how calm the ocean could be at night – I'd never really had time to go to the ocean these past few years, or go much of anywhere, even….except out drinking.

The thought brought a wave of shame rushing over me, which I pushed back with cold necessity. I had avoided the ocean because Hyde had loved the ocean, its eerie peacefulness and raw power, the secrets which it held beneath the waves. Fascinated with the prospect of the fisherman's boat – one lone craft against the current, man versus the wrath of nature, tossed upon the waves with hope of land. I had never claimed to understand it, but the very memory of it was painful: the memory of the water and the sky and him.

A wave brushed at my foot, and with a lurch of my stomach I realized I was standing at the edge of the water, as if somehow I had been pulled, unwilling, down the sand and towards the shore. At once sickened and horrified, as if the water was poison that, if it touched my skin, would commence melting it away until nothing of myself was left, I backed away, arms outstretched.

"Don't be afraid of the water," said a soft voice very close to my ear and I jumped. I hadn't seen Tetsu come up to me from wherever he had disappeared to, but he was there now. I couldn't quite see him in the moonless dark, but I could see his silhouette outlined against the outcropping, and I realized I was breathing hard.

"Why did you bring me here?" I whispered.

There was a long silence in which the breakers crashed against the rocks and echoed in my ears, a hollow howling of the wind even though it was just a breeze, ruffling my hair and his.

"Don't be afraid of the water…Sakura."

Tetsu of Zigzo never called me Sakura.

The clouds pulled away from the moon then, and as the moonlight exploded in a violent burst of glittering light on the sand, on the water, rising back towards the sky, I saw him standing there on the beach just like I'd left him those five years ago, gazing up at me with supplication, one hand held out slightly, trembling.

"Hyde?"

I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but stare helplessly. I wanted to fall to my knees, to curl up in the sand, but my limbs and joints were frozen. I saw hope in Hyde's face, desperation, longing and sadness as his eyes shifted from my face to the waves beyond, and I knew what he was hoping to see: a boat on the waves, his boat, still there, endlessly rocking, rocking, waiting…

"There's no boat, Hyde," I rasped out. My throat felt like it was on fire.

To my surprise, he nodded. "I know," he replied. "The boat will never come. But…that doesn't mean we have to stop looking. As long as there's hope…"

I barely noticed the tears pouring from my eyes, ticking down onto the sand like the second hand of a clock. Tick tick tick tick. The breaking waves behind me were like a weird echo of Hyde's voice, singing some unintelligible melody that only he and they understood.

"Come with me," he said. The sound of his voice was almost unbearable.

"This is your world, Hyde. Not mine."

He shook his head, reaching out his hand. I remembered he had such small hands, and so fragile. "It was your world once. It can be again. We can be birds…you and I…Sakura, let's fly away from this place."

"There is no boat," I whispered harshly. "There is no bird…there is no rainbow."

His face crumpled and the tiny hand curled into a fist. I squeezed my eyes shut. I was hurting him, just like I'd hurt him back then, but there was nothing else I could do. He didn't belong here with me…not with me. No matter how much he wanted.

There were some things that, once taken away, could never be gotten back.

"Why are you so afraid of the ocean, Sakura?"

"I'm not afraid of the ocean," I said. "I'm…"

A soft touch brushed my chin and I recoiled, standing, stumbling back. The waves curled around my ankles and I saw Hyde blinking back the tears he would never admit to shedding.

"Sakura?"

I took another few steps back. I saw him start towards me, and I put up a hand. The water didn't feel so cold now. "I'm afraid…that one day, the boat will come. The boat you've been waiting for. To take you away from here…"

He was still advancing, and I found that I couldn't move anymore, watched him come closer until he was standing in front of me, the ocean swirling around his legs and mine, felt his hair brush the bottom of my chin, and then he tilted his head up so he could look at me and I felt his breath on my lips, like a soft wind.

"I thought that was what we wanted," he breathed.

"Not that," I said with an effort, closing my eyes against the moon, against the water and him. "I…I wanted to be that boat, Hyde…I wanted to be your boat…"

I felt him smile, though I could not see him. "You can still be. It's not too late. It's a long ride home…but we can make it, you and I. If we do it together."

"No. We can't. It's over, Hyde. Over. Don't you understand that? I'm not your boat…I'm not your wings…I can't go with you. That's not my story. It's yours, but no longer mine!"

I felt him shaking his head, felt his hair tickle the bottom of my neck, wet with sea spray. "I don't believe that."

"Let me go, Hyde."

"Sakura…don't leave-"

I felt his arms snake around my neck and I gasped, a great sucking gasp of air, and a wave came around my feet and I fell, feeling him fall with me, tumbling towards the water.

"Hyde!" I shouted desperately, and everything swirled in front of my eyes and I felt a jolting sensation, felt my eyelids flutter open, felt my head knock painfully against the hard window glass of the train car and a wave of pain sear through my skull, and I sat up, trembling, panting.

There was no ocean. No moon, no waves, no rocks, no boat. There was only the familiar train seat, the scenery blurring past outside the window, the fading light and a hint of cigarette smoke. My head hurt.

I collapsed against the seat with a sigh, staring blankly up at the ceiling, feeling my wet clothes sticking to my skin, cold and clammy. Across the aisle from me, a lone salaryman shifted in his sleep, perhaps in the middle of a dream.

That was all it had been, after all. Then, now…past, present, or future, what did it matter? Maybe that was all it ever had been.

As long as I believed that, I would be all right.

As long as I believed that, I could let myself go.

My stop was coming up and I turned to look out the window again before the train pulled into the station. Against the darkening twilight, a lone bird fluttered past the buildings, over the tops of the trees, into the shadows of the gathering dusk, seeking shelter for the night because it, too, had had a long ride home.

19 April 2003
for Ri-chan