Post by Downfall on Dec 24, 2022 21:01:54 GMT -5
The Bridge
Sleet'd been falling, turning the Oak-Bay Bridge into a slushy, dangerous mess for traversal; Even as he had walked the cycling path, now and then, a car's tires had turned up a fan of wet, soaking his cuffs to the bone. But he'd walked slowly, heedless and impervious to the outside elements, gazing out over the water and turning Keiko Hasegawa's grief-stricken rant over and over in his mind.
Almost aimlessly he'd thumbed over the talisman in his duster pocket, his rough print sanding over the inset stone and worrying it.
What was churning and fermenting in his psyche wasn't the refusal of the ring, per se, or the pained rebuke of a refugee who'd lost her child... those were just two more drops in the bucket of a hell of a year...
It was just his wont to question, as he wandered the bridge in the waning hours of the holiday eve, the costs; Didn't that old saw begin "so this is Christmas, and what have you done?"
He grimaced as he extracted the ring from his pocket.
Holding it out palm flat, so that it glinted faintly under the halogen orange, he stared at it, turned it this way and that, and thought about it once being a symbol of love, a piece of his heart that he'd purchased, and then that he had divested himself of when he had first come to the conclusion, long ago, that he couldn't be who he was if he had his heart, too.
It was Michelle's ring.
He held it up to the light, remembering...
And as he stood there on the cycle path, overlooking the choppy, frigid, inky-black Bay, a sedan sped through a puddle, showering his legs, and he tensed.
He exhaled a little, and looked back up into the sky, sleet pelting his upturned face. Fuck, he hated Christmas...
It'd started earlier that night, as;
The Ring
It seemed to soothe her anxious mind to be working with her hands, so Michelle was at work in the little, undersized kitchen pressing cookies into shape.
She did so with the careful consideration of someone experiencing it for the first time, yet she began rapidly gaining in confidence.
Mat and Keiko were gentle with her, and Keiko, still brittle and pale from the last two weeks, gave a matronly remand in her tongue when Michelle licked the batter off the spatula. Michelle giggled, girlishly.
Daniel had watched all of this from down the hallway, his arms crossed over his chest. Rumiko, who had come with large tote bags full of groceries and supplies for the "roommates", glanced in on them, then observed to Daniel, gently, "Michelle seems warm to Keiko, at least, and it's good for both of them to lean on each other. The Hasegawas are grieving, and Michelle is..." still unsteady in her own mind, still a blank slate, void of memory or form, thrown in an unfamiliar situation with people she doesn't recognize who frighten her... all of the above.
Daniel's grimace moved slightly. He knows all of this, but his impatience and frustration with the situation is growing... it's completely out of his control.
"I know what she needs to remember," he says, his mind made up.
Ru looks from the tableau in the kitchen to Daniel, starting to move from the wall. In the kitchen, Michelle is diligently applying the frosting to the cookies, and they don't look up until the ominous presence of the frightening man in black is at the door.
As Michelle notices him, she draws back. His face is cold, and he starts with a brusque, "Knock knock...." which doesn't give the reaction he wanted.
"Michelle..." he says, then softens his voice ever so imperceptibly, "Hi, I... I wanted to give you something..." What would a normal person say? He's asking himself. "For Christmas. It's Christmas."
Keiko Hasegawa's eyes are flinty chips, and her dislike is plain on her face as he crosses the room to her. Keiko steps towards him, to block him, but he pays her no mind, and sweeps in to stand over Michelle. From here, the dynamic looks uncomfortable, as Michelle noticeably shrinks from his touch as he reaches out to her face.
Daniel's hand hangs there, open, reaching and splayed out in midair, before his fingers curl slowly, bitter and defeated, into a fist and he takes his hand away.
He lets that bother him for just a minute, before he gets to his objective for this, reaching into his inside pocket, "Here kid, I... I got you something. Something we've... passed between us this last year..."
He takes out a simple, gold band, with a little purple amethyst inset, inscribed on the inside with "to my heart". It came from a little shop out in the countryside in Japan, twenty years ago, and for the longest time, it stayed, cached in a hidey-hole, until Danny had retrieved it.
In 2021, he'd made an effort to be a better man. In 2021, he'd tried his hardest to win her back, and he'd gone to his little stash of sentimental (human) items he had long-since cast away and brought out the ring, in an effort to win her back.
Touched, Michelle had said for him to keep it.
That seemed... so long ago, and to a different man altogether.
But he held it out in his hand, to her, and, to all and the world watching, it would seem like the act of someone trying to clutch on to what was left of what made him human, once upon a time.
Uncomprehending, Michelle's huge blue eyes fixed on the hole in the ring, before turning up to his face, childish and bewildered.
"Come on... take it..." his voice was angrily commanding, but there was a drowning man's flail hidden just under the surface, "Just take it, Michelle..."
"Daniel, that's enough," Ru said, beginning to get concerned, as Michelle was starting to get agitated noticeably, and Keiko was beginning to look downright hostile.
"Take the god damn ring, slip it on your lil' fingies there, and remember! Remember when I gave this to you! Come on, kid, I know you remember!"
"Daniel, stop!" Ru began, stepping forward, but -
Keiko Hasegawa, her already sturdy face lined more with age in the last two weeks than in forty years, stepped forward, lip peeled back with rage, and slapped him full across the face.
Daniel huffed, his head tilted to the side, and he wiped the side of his lip before, moving with the ratchet-slowness of a machine, his blazing, dragon-like eyes turned back to bore into Keiko's. Keiko met his gaze, fiercely.
"You hurt enough people," Keiko said, in accented English, "All you do is hurt people,"
"That's my job," he said, with no inconsiderable stubbornness, but Keiko would have none of it. "You just the same as the Death Riders, you corrupt our street and you make us all unsafe! It's because of you that all our sons turn to crime out in the street, and it's because of you MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD!!"
He bristled, stiffly looking down at her, but not saying anything. Keiko continued, aggressively putting a finger right in his face.
"You curse everything you touch with your... your black hand and heart! You want curse this woman! She's INNOCENT! Like Tomie was INNOCENT! I will not let you hurt this woman the way you got my daughter - My- My daughter k -"
Keiko's eyes brim with a sudden burst of anguished tears, and Rumiko comes into the room, taking Keiko in her arms in support. Michelle, suddenly very sad, comes to both of them, fidgeting nervously.
Daniel stands apart, aloofly, staring at the whole scene, before;
Keiko looks up from Ru's shoulder, eyes burning through the tears, and she snaps at him, "Why don't you kill yourself??"
Shocked, he blinks at that, "Wh-what?"
"WHY- HAVEN'T - YOU - KILLED YOURSELF YET??"
Keiko degenerates, wracked into painful, mournful sobs, and Mat Hasegawa comes in the room, ushering Daniel out, and shutting the door. Over his shoulder, Daniel can see Michelle and Rumiko, patting her shoulders and letting her vent her wellspring of grieving.
He stood outside the door. Emotions that wanted to come to the surface but werent able to, layered under the anger and frustration that any chance he had to reach Michelle was lost to him now, didn't occur to him, but Keiko Hasegawa's words haunted him.
Throwing his long coat over his shoulders, he had ventured out into the falling sleet, and, over time, his feet had taken him all the way down Pine Street until he got to the bridge.
The Bridge Is Always There
Face still upturned against the sleet pelting him, and looking up into the street lamp, his mouth firms. He starts to rear back with his arm, preparing to pitch the damned ring into the Bay. But something, just something, stops him... something he can't put a name to.
Stopping his hand from completing that doomed arc, he exhales a cloud of breath in the chill air, and he looks closer at the ring.
First of all, you ask yourself, what are you keeping this ring for? If the answer is, to win Michelle back, congratulations, you aren't gonna. If the answer is, to remind her of what you and she had, that ship has sailed.
Then what are you doing this for?
What are you doing any of this for?, he asks, and his mind touched on the ten pounds of gold he still had stashed back in his duffel bag at home... the blood-drenched belt he had committed was worth dying for, worth killing for, worth going to hell for, amen.
Maybe he was thinking of what Keiko had yelled in his face, after all.
He was there, constantly being pelted by the icy precipitation and the occasional wave of slush splashed on him by a passing car as he stood there, overlooking the bay, weighing the ring in his hand as if it was his heart set on a scale against a feather.
Either way he turned, he felt damned, he felt lost...
His eyebrows raised in surprise, lost in thought broken as he heard a scraping off to his left, and someone grunting with effort. The ring, and his quandary forgotten, he turned, to see an obese man of about thirty-six, who had been leaning on the rail and had slipped over. He clung to the rail, trying as best he could to stay on the narrow overhang. "Shitshittt", he said, starting to lose his grip due to a lack of strength...
Danny's hand shot out, and gripped his lapel, pulling him close against the rail.
"Water's too icy to go diving tonight, friend," he said, and the overweight man's cheeks reddened, and he yelped "Nooooo! Lemme go!"
"Not doing that. Come on." And he held on to him over the rail, with all of his strength. The fat man's body trembled like jelly against him, heaving.
Bit by bit, and with the fat man helping along as he got over the rail, he pulled the bigger man back over the rail and the short metal plate overhang, back onto the cycle path on the side of the bridge.
The man's face was a wave of emotions, changing like the sea, now relief, now embarassment, and he began to weep, "I can't believe I almost did that, I... I wasn't going to let go, I promise, I..."
He looked up at Danny, kneeling next to him, and when he saw the scowling figure clad in soaking black leather next to him, he drew back in fright.
Daniel sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "It's been a night for that, thanks..."
"I -.... I guess... I sh-should say... th-thank you..." the fat man said, fixing his glasses on the bridge of his nose...
"Tell me... did you or didn't you mean to go off the bridge tonight - What's your name?"
"...Bradley... Bradley Jutensai..." Water droplets collected on his glasses along with condensation, his coarse hair matted down, but up close he was just an average, slovenly fat man, Danny judged quickly and, perhaps, harshly.
Bradley looked off into the water for a moment, in answer to his question. There was a sense that he wasn't even sure, he had said he wasn't going over, but he'd wanted badly in the moment to be let go.
"Know what I think?"
"I think that you acted on an impulse here, and you started to go over, but you stopped yourself..."
Embarrassed, Bradley said "I started to climb over the rail, but my foot slipped, y'know, on the ice, and I lost my balance, and I was hanging there, but I wasn't strong enough to - "
Dismissing that as if it didn't matter, Danny waved it off, "- But you didn't follow through with it, and you stopped yourself. That says that you don't want to die."
Bradley exhaled, wiping his forehead, "I guess so..."
Bradley accepts his hand up with a grunt, lifting his big ass up out of the slush.
"Sometimes it just gets to be too much, y'know? Like... there's nothing in my life that gets better, nothing in life that's in my ability to control... I... Sorry, that sounds stupid."
"Nah, I get that," Daniel admits, fingers rubbing over the ring in his pocket.
"But you're looking at it wrong. The bridge is just an excuse... you haven't really given up on living because you still cling to the bridge the instant your foot slips on a wet spot. The truth is, though... it's the bridge that's the real constant, and is the only control in the situation. The bridge is always going to be here... and every day of your life, you're going to drive over this bridge, or maybe take this little bike path, and you're going to look down at that water and think "what if?" Because you're still searching for a constant. Still looking for control."
"But it only exists, with the bridge. The only constant is that every time you drive on this street, the bridge will always be up ahead, and it'll be your choice then to go over the rail this time or not. Regardless, the bridge will continue on, after you're gone."
Stunned in the face of such a blunt, nihilistic and frankly fucked up response, Bradley eyeballs him, horrified, "Jesus, man, that- that's dark... come on..."
Daniel shrugs, "You're the one that tried to jump..."
"Yeah? You said you can relate... so if there's something in your life you're trying to control, what happens if you decide to let go and jump one day?"
Daniel starts to scoff, then, actually gives a pause, as that's a damned tricky question.
He turns away from Bradley, to the rail, and rests his arms on it. "You know... at my job, there's this guy I fucked over."
"He and I...... really, don't see eye to eye on our methods of doing business, and it's escalated to some frankly brutal declarations of - " He senses that going too far into the minutiae of his war against Corey Black for the Hardcore title will traumatize this poor, flabby feeb, and so he shakes his head a little out of it, and continues, "-Anyway."
"He talked his way into going for the same achievement, the same... award as I wanted. And I'd wanted it for so long, because to me, it symbolized, even more than winning "The Big One" at my new job... that I had rehabilitated my career. That I had done... better this time around."
"So he won this... award. And it enraged me, because it felt like he didn't fucking deserve it. At all. He hadn't been the whole year, he hadn't done the things I'd done, he - "
In the weeds. Right. Bradley blinked at him, moon-eyed, confused. "That... enraged me. So much so that I began to not just take it out on him, but to go on a tear of vengeance, right. I started daring everyone. And I stole this guy's award and carried it around with me, because god dammit, it WAS mine, or should have been."
He shrugs a little. "I'm not saying I was wrong to do that... but I am saying, there's a throughline there with your situation. Maybe I was outraged and upset for the wrong reason, because there were a lot of factors that I wanted so badly to control that weren't within my scope to control."
Bradley joins him, placing his forearms on the rail as well, looking out over the water.
"Maybe... your constant is that no matter what, the award will always be there... and you can't control everything by forcing it?"
Annoyed by this little pissant trying to parrot his words back at him, Danny squints at him, fuming. "Don't try to turn this into a fucking lesson, this isn't 'It's A Wonderful Life.'"
A grin cracks Bradley's face as he looks over. Then, he looks up, "It's beginning to snow..."
It was, he noticed, so he looked over at Bradley, "Look... I don't want you gushing over this because I saved you, but maybe... do something different with your life in this year. You can't control your whole life and make it better in one go, but if you change your situation bit by bit, you'll start moving where you want to go. That's all I got. I'm not a fucking life coach."
Bradley exhaled, his mood still a bit somber, but he looks over to Danny, thanking him with his eyes and then, finally, bringing him in for a big hug. Daniel snarls, pushing at him, "God, get the hell off..." but when Bradley breaks the hug, he grins.
"You ain't such a bad guy, Downfall!!" Bradley says, as he walks off, pointing at him like he's the man.
"Oooh, awesome, he recognizes who I am, like he's been on a message board since 2005, get the fuck out of my face," Daniel snarls, weary and tired of this interaction, and he turns his shoulder away from the man in true tsundere fashion.
Just the same, he gives a glance over his shoulder, to make sure Bradley walks away from the bridge unscathed.
And then, he out over the water, as the snowflakes drift down around him.
He pulls the ring out of his pocket... looking at it again.
He knows he isn't fully going to give up the methods he's been employing in his life... but maybe tonight has shown him that he can't hold on too tightly to things in an effort to control them.
You'll just end up slipping, every time...
With a sigh, and, convincing himself this is for the more correct reason, he whispers a goodbye to her as he lets the ring fall through his fingers, and fall, spiralling down into the dark Bay, already lost.
That's the first thing, that isn't his any longer, to let go of.
If it's meant to come to him, it'll come back on it's own time, he counsels himself, walking back up the bridge towards Pine, as the sleet-turned-snow drifts around him.
The Gift
When he stepped through the shuttered gate, and walked into the stairwell, he touched the new drywall, inspecting it, even though he could still smell the smoke in the insulation from where the gym had previously burned. He walked up the steps, leading to the offices, wistfully staring around at this space he'd created, and everything that had gone into it. Anger, spite, and violence permeated it's foundation. Pettiness. Ego.
And yet, the kernel of the dream that had been in him when it had started... to do something with his life that gave back.
And wasn't he giving back?
All of these are questions he asks of himself as he removes his sodden coat, sighing. No easy answers to them found.
"A hell of a year," he concludes to himself.
And when he enters the office, he finds Michelle, and Rumiko, both standing there.
"Danny, Michelle has something she wants to give you," Ru prompts, like a teacher prodding a shy student... and Michelle, both hands clutched in front of her, prim and proper and anxious, looks at the man in a former life she called lover, and though their former life together wasn't there in her eyes, and she was still hesitant, she stepped forward.
With a gasp, he looked at the talisman she held in her hands, offering up to him like a precious gift.
It was the snowglobe from her purse.
"I thought you'd like to have this," she lisped, her voice solemn... "Thank you for letting me stay here..."
He took it gingerly from her hands, wondering at the gift she'd given him, of the little, inexpensive token that served, to her, as a memento of their time together and their tempestuous relationship. He was speechless.
"I... Chelle..."
She looked up at him, her eyes wide.
"Thanks." He made a show of shaking the snowglobe, and then put it down on the desk, watching the little plastic flakes fling around inside, showing her encouragingly. "I love it."
She grinned. "Good."
Rumiko, satisfied, looked over at Danny. "So, the thing is... I found the Hasegawas a new apartment, so this old dump will be less two tenants... good news for everyone..."
"I'm gonna go back downstairs and see if Keiko wants a cookie," said Michelle, filled with sweet innocence.
"And while she does that," Rumiko says, smugly, as she extrudes a brown paper bag by it's neck that can only be one thing, "If you'd care to join me out on the fire escape, sir, we can celebrate too..."
As the two of them exit out the window onto the fire escape, Rumiko's eyebrows raise, "Hey... Danny, earlier, that ring you gave Michelle, was it..."
His mood darkens a little as he thinks of the incident earlier, but he shuts it off, suddenly brusque. "It doesn't matter, don't bring it up again."
"It's just.... I get why you did it, why you want so bad to hold on to what you and she had... what she was to you was special, once..."
"Yeah. It was..." He sighs, leaning against the brick siding of the building, and lighting a cigarette. But he doesn't give it another thought... the ring's floating at the bottom of the river now.
They didn't speak of it any more, just passed the paper bag containing the finest bottom-shelf bourbon back and forth between them as the snow started to blanket Pine Street.
"Merry Christmas, Danny..."
".....Merry Christmas, Rumiko."