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Joshua’s intention is to show up fashionably late – to continue the delicate work of pushing Neku away, little by little, seeing whether or not he’ll keep pulling himself forward. He wants this all to be difficult for Neku, for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. He wants it to hurt.
Right now Neku is sitting alone at a two-seater table at Spicy Curry Don, drumming his fingers inelegantly against the Formica tabletop. He’s staring out the window. Joshua would bet on ten minutes, maybe. Neku would wait ten minutes. Then he would realize that Joshua isn’t coming – that Joshua let him down, again – and he would get sourer and sourer, smaller and smaller. He would have to confront the fact that it’s stupid to have Joshua in his life, and dangerous, and probably not worth it. It would only take ten minutes to push him that little bit farther away.
Unfortunately, Joshua can’t wait out the full ten minutes. He’s selfish. The moment Neku’s knee begins to bounce under the table, Joshua yanks himself into the RG and slides into empty chair. He eats up Neku’s startle – the shock of surprise, the irrepressible delight. The way his face melts into a smile so easily. He smiles so easily, now.
“Hey,” Neku says. “You actually showed up.”
“Only for you, partner.”
“I figured you were here for the curry.”
“The curry is an unfortunate consequence.” Joshua picks up the menu, takes in the meager offerings. “Hm. How strong of an Imprint would it take to get Ken Doi to go back to ramen? Only temporarily, of course.”
“It’s good curry, Josh.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. It just seems like a waste of his talents.”
“He’s happy,” Neku says. “He’s doing what he loves. Isn’t that…you know. Isn’t that good for you?”
“Theoretically,” Joshua says. “What’s good for Shibuya is good for its Composer, et cetera. Practically? I want shio.”
“Next time, you pick the restaurant.” Neku says this to the menu, even though he obviously already knows what he wants to order. He can’t make eye contact after saying it: next time, a pawn hurled unsubtly across the chessboard. It’s adorable. Neku talks the way that he fights, in that he just sort of flails around and somehow manages to strike true every time.
“Next time,” Joshua says obligingly, “I’ll be Imprinting.”
“No you won’t.”
“Oh, Neku. Watch me.”
“That’s always what you want, isn’t it?”
“What makes you think that’s everything I want?” Joshua folds his hands in front of him, rests his chin on them. Neku’s eyes flick up from the menu and then back down again. Push, pull.
“I mean,” Neku says. “You also want ramen, right?”
“Too true.”
“I think that’s the whole list,” Neku says. He lets the menu fall back on the table. “Ramen. Me watching you be a dick. Maybe taking over the world, unless that’s too much work. I want curry, so pick something off the menu.”
“Surprise me,” Joshua says.
He has to look away from Neku, before Neku realizes what that means: Surprise me. Neku always does. And it’s marvelous, and it’s terrible.
Neku was right: the switch to curry is good for Joshua, professionally speaking. The pulse of the city wraps this restaurant up, holds it, fuels it; people leave Spicy Curry Don daydreaming about new pin designs and maybe taking up the violin again, maybe texting that long-neglected friend, maybe putting up new graffiti in Udagawa. (Joshua redirects the last one, nudges the impulse three streets south. Neku put something up in Udagawa, and – sentimentally – Joshua wants it up for a few more days.) The Soul of the city is just a bit brighter because Ken Doi is putting love into his food and giving the food to the people of the city. It’s all very wonderful.
“Wow,” Neku says. “You look like you’re planning a drone strike.”
Joshua blinks back into focus. “I’m hangry,” he says on autopilot.
“Well, I ordered. Food’s coming.” Neku’s eyes narrow a bit as he studies Joshua – it’s a strange feeling, being watched by Neku. Not horrible. Just strange. “How…are you, Josh?”
Strange.
“Not in the mood to destroy Shibuya, if that’s what you’re asking. Is that what this is about? Are you babysitting me, Neku?”
“No,” Neku says quietly. “I just…you’re important to me, and I haven’t seen you in a while, and I want to know how you’re doing. If you’re okay. If there’s, I don’t know, Reaper workplace drama.”
“I try not to pay attention to any of that.”
“Yeah, I gathered.”
“How am I…If I say ‘tired’, will you finally take that as an excuse to impeach me?”
“I’ve said no literally every time you’ve brought that up. It’s gone past weird at this point.”
“Heehee. Worth a shot.”
“Is it?” Neku says, and the food arrives: two plates of curry, immaculately presented and smelling of rich spices. It looks like Neku ordered chicken for Joshua, for whatever deep significance that’s worth. Neku’s plate has three kinds of curry on it, and cheese, and pork, and an egg – which he immediately starts devouring, like it’s about to teleport off of his plate.
“Oh, poor Neku. Were you starving to death?”
Neku makes a vague grunt and continues shoveling food into his mouth – eating with the approximate grace and poise of a wolf Noise. He’s done that for as long as Joshua has known him, which is to say the length of three Games and some change. Joshua still isn’t certain if that’s a Neku trait – if this is just how teenage boys are, when they’re alive – or if it’s the Game, the urgent need to fill yourself up with something before you fight for your existence. How much of Neku is shaped by his time in Joshua’s Game? How many fingerprints has Joshua left over the angles of his Soul?
Joshua mulls over this while taking a bite of curry; the chicken is well cooked, with faint notes of coriander and—
Fuck.
Neku startles when Joshua starts coughing his lungs out; he chews and frantically swallows his mouthful of rice. “Did you…burn your tongue? Somehow? Is that even possible?”
“Yes,” Joshua lies. His voice is hoarse. He drains a third of a cup of water in one go.
“Holy shit,” Neku says.
“Neku.”
“Holy shit,” Neku says.
“You don’t have to—”
“You can’t handle spice?!”
“I forgot,” Joshua says weakly, and rests his head in his hands as Neku starts to laugh. He really had forgotten – he had remembered to make himself taller, to pull the puppy fat out of the edges of his face, but he hadn’t remembered that Yoshiya Kiryu couldn’t handle spice when he was alive. The position of Composer means that he could have theoretically smoothed out that wrinkle. He could have cut all the messy parts out of Yoshiya Kiryu until he wasn’t a person at all, just a paper mache mask to wear for an afternoon. He’d just – it’s just – it had been nice, slipping back into the skin of a dead boy. It made him feel like all of this was true, somehow, and the consequence of this lapse in judgment is that Neku is laughing at him. Full hiccupping laughter.
“It’s too spicy?” Neku wheezes.
“Go on, laugh it up,” Joshua says. He leans back in his chair and watches Neku’s gulping hysterics – the sight of Neku curled in on himself, cackling, the laughter trailing into chuckles and then burbling back up again. Neku’s nose is scrunched up slightly; there are faint freckles on the bridge of his nose, on the apples of his cheeks. Sincere delight radiates from him in stupidly infectious waves.
One of the problems of Neku is that he makes everything easy. He makes it easy to pretend to be alive – like a real, normal person, who could get curry with another real person and eat it and digest it and shit it out later. It would be easy for Joshua to flip this body’s taste buds over, to affect nonchalance, to eat the entire plate of curry without flinching. It’s even easier to sit here and memorize the way Neku looks when he laughs.
I hate you, thinks his cold dead heart, and the heart of the alive boy says I like you, I like you, I like you.
“Wow,” Neku gasps, winding down at last. “Wow. Is that why nobody served spicy food during the Game?”
“The chili dogs—”
“Fuck the chili dogs. Those weren’t spicy.” Neku brusquely wipes tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I’m good. Here.”
He stands up and swaps his plate with Joshua’s – easily, like it isn’t anything. Joshua gets the decimated remains of Neku’s feast. There’s about a third of a plate left, most of it red. Joshua neatly and pettily builds a little wall of rice around the remains of Neku’s chicken.
“The fish curry isn’t as spicy,” Neku says, pointing to the red section of the curry puddle before he begins tucking into the hellfire that was previously Joshua’s chicken curry.
Unfortunately, the fish curry is good: tart, sweet, aromatic. There is a heaping pile of pickles, an abundance of pickles. He imagines people trip over themselves to give Neku extras of anything anywhere he goes: Shibuya tumbling over its feet to give itself to him, handing him the pieces of its red raw heart.
Neku really doesn’t look like much of anything. A boy. He has a smear of curry at the corner of his mouth, and it tucks into itself whenever he smiles – he keeps smiling, he keeps looking up at Joshua and smiling before looking back down again.
“Yes, yes, you’ve found my weakness,” Joshua says. “I’m sure it’s very funny.”
“It’s just weird,” Neku says. “Because it’s normal. I thought you wouldn’t have anything that wasn’t…” He gestures vaguely at Joshua’s entire person. “I mean, your shoes are white. They never get dirty. You know?”
“I know,” Joshua says quietly.
“Sorry I ordered you napalm. If I say it was an attempt to kill you and take your place as Composer, would that make you feel better?”
Joshua laughs, despite himself.
“Thought so.” Neku is smiling.
“Next time,” Joshua says, “it’s nothing but herbal remedies and supplements. I hope you’re ready for Viper Drink, Neku.”
Neku makes a face of deep horror and disgust; Joshua takes advantage of the opportunity to steal Neku’s (untouched) glass of water. He tries not to look at the way Neku’s face relaxes, opens up into something vulnerable. He shouldn’t be vulnerable. Neku shouldn’t be vulnerable, neither of them should be vulnerable. But doesn’t it feel good to imagine? To perch in the mind of someone walking by Spicy Curry Don, seeing two teenage boys at a table – bickering over curry, asking each other things like how are you. Two boys with no bullets between them at all.
“You’re staring again,” Neku says.
“You have curry at the corner of your mouth, dear.” Joshua taps the corner of his own mouth. He watches Neku wipe the stain away, leaving his mouth free to smile again.