ONE MORE JOB

SOMNIA IN MORTEM, VIVI ET CATALYSTS GRADIENDI LAPIDES /// CONCLUDE

I've got this vivid memory.

Me and my dad – we were sitting on a bench next to this lake.
At that time, it had already been a month since my aunt passed.

She was great. The closest thing I had to a sister, even though she was way older than me.

Beautiful, tall, and slender.
Always had a tender smile; everything I've always wanted to be.

In her last hit, she'd have been taken by surprise by her target.
She was clubbed to death, barely recognizable from the sweet woman we all knew.

Unfortunately, the handler that was assigned to her resigned shortly afterwards.
The only way we were able to retrieve her body was through insider sources.
They refused to give any details.

To this day, we never figured out who killed her.

I didn't take the news too well.
Though, no one in my family took it as anything at all.

My aunt wasn't an outcast.

She was well respected, as well respected as my father.
They've always worked together, yet only that one hit was through a different handler.
She knew the risks, I'm sure she did. She'd be stupid if she didn't, and I know she isn't.

No one in my family spoke about her afterwards. No one but my father.

I'd wake up every night from terrors, swearing vengeance against her killer.
I suppose it was hard to ignore considering that I've always had an irritating voice.

In the lake, he'd have convinced me that the dead dream.
All having one, interconnected dream of coming back again.
Not only was it a dream, it was a wish. A goal.

The dead are humans forced to devolve all their whims into one thing.
Saying goodbye.

After that day onwards, I was completely desensitized to the concept of loss.
Ten years passed, the Akira event transpired.

My father was the first to die, his phone being rigged to explode in the middle of a call.

My mother was found stabbed twenty five times on the stomach, her corpse found floating on the same lake I had my conversation with my dad.

And my father's best friend who had been living with us at the time, Iwao.

I had to take his life with my own hands.
But I felt no remorse, it's as though the ability to do so was forcefully stolen from me.

Instead I'm left here, confused.
What am I supposed to feel right now?

Everyone who's raised me into the person that I am right now; stepping stones and contributors to my success as a substitutor, are dead.

I'm left alone in a world that is alien to me. As I walk these streets, all eyes gaze upon a person whom they think are one of their own.

Am I?

I think of myself as such; that's more than enough.
I'm content with just that alone.
But I'm all alone now; something I cannot change.

I still remember the last words he said before we left.

"Mortuis tamen somnia."

"What does that mean, papa?"

"The dead still dream."

My father's point was to desensitize me of death, yet he still romanticized it.
I never understood him.
Really, I doubt anyone could begin to understand us, so it was par for the course.

My aunt, Chiyo-san, my father, my mother, Iwao-san, Hamada.
They were already dead long before they really were.

We put ourselves in this, some are born into it but are given a choice to leave.
None of us ever took the initiative to do so until we're put in a situation where we had to.