Like a Hurricane

I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream......

Noriko looked up, startled.

Two days before she'd asked Shuya what he liked about her. Shuya had discovered that girls did this quite often, so he wasn't surprised by her question. He was a little taken aback by his answer though. You are like a hurricane, he replied, there's calm in your eye. (He almost added, and I'm getting blown away, but thought better of it.) It probably should have come across corny, but it was spontaneous and Noriko knew it and Noriko liked it.

Just for a second the calm was gone. As she looked up at him, Shuya saw turmoil, confusion, even fear. Her eyes were usually like the dark brown pebbles on the beach at Shodoshima, polished by the surf and sand, and Shuya could occasionally catch his own reflection in them. Now they'd seemingly become translucent, as if they were those lenses that changed from dark to light when you stepped out of the sun. Noriko had always been there to support and defend Shuya. Her vulnerability exposed, he realized, in that second, that the time would come he'd have to protect her.

Just for a second and then her composure returned. Shuya felt relief. Until he saw the knife in her hands, its blade smeared with blood, not yet quite dried and glinting in the glare of the hallway's fluorescent lights. Someone had stabbed Kitano earlier that morning. He was badly hurt but not critically. He'd be back to torture Shiroiwa Junior High with denominators and differentials soon enough. He knew instantly it wasn't Noriko who did it. 

- Well, don't just stand there, give me a hand to hide this, said Noriko, standing up and placing the knife between the pages of a copy of Blenda magazine.

- Okay, but who....

Noriko raised a finger to her lips. 

- Let's go, Shu. 

It was, of course, Yoshitoki who'd shanked Kitano. Even though it was so many years ago, a wave of sadness passed through Shuya as he remembered his old friend. The way he'd raise his eyebrows and grin like an idiot whenever Shuya fell for one of his practical jokes, the way he'd bubble with uninhibited enthusiasm whenever he talked to Ms Ryoko and the way his head disintegrated into thousands of bits of bone and brain when the bomb around his neck was detonated. If he was dying, Shuya was not being spared such memories. But he still didn't know where he was. He had no reference point, there were no shapes, nothing defined. Just light and colors. 

Photochromic. That was the name of those lenses.

If he was dying? Now, there's a thought, Shuya thought to himself.