D O W N T I M E • C L O S E D
[♫] Miyashita Park was crowded per usual. Even if Neku was opposed to crowds and people as a whole, he couldn’t deny there was an appeal to people watching, and hell, what better did he have to do? He’d been burnt out on graffiti for a solid hour now, taking the bus from the West Exit to the nearest pit stop located adjacent to the park; the neighboring parts of Shibuya held no interest for him as far as shopping and site-seeing went. He’d seen it all a thousand times over, and today, he just wanted to kick back and observe.
As a sea of people scurried along, he noted discrete things about the strangers — their baggy clothes, their muted expressions, how annoying their voices sounded when they spoke. It only took a matter of minutes for Neku to remember why he hated masses and why he never left home without his personal mute button, in latent terms, his headphones. With haste, he stretched them up over his head, around the circumference, pressing them snug to his ears as he pulled his music player from his shorts. He flipped through his music selection with a particular song in mind, something that spoke to him when he needed soft undertones to his usual alternative/grunge playlist.
The bold, distinct sound of Gackt blared all around him.
❝Atemonaku hitori samayoi aruki tsuduketa
あてもなく一人 さまよい歩き続けた.❞
❝Kasukana toiki wo tada shiroku somete
かすかな吐息を ただ白く染めて.❞
❝Wake mo naku namida ga koboreta
理由もなく 涙がこぼれた.❞
Ima mo aishite iru. He wouldn’t dare sing it out loud, but repeating the line within the seclusion of his own thoughts was acceptable. A small smile flickered along the span of his lips. Shiki. I wonder how she’s doing. He hadn’t contacted her in two days, and Shiki being a girl and all, she made him promise that it was solely his responsibility to reach out to her. He wasn’t sure if it was her way of trying to get him to poke out of his shell, or if she was just insistent that he do the gentlemanly thing and initiate basically everything. Irritating, to say the least, but he obliged nevertheless. Between being caught up in improving his wild-style graffiti, creating stencils of his own, and having surprise run-ins with RG Reapers, contacting her had slipped through the cracks.
He buried his hand in his other pocket, retrieving his phone and scrolling to her name. There was a brief pause before his thumb pushed on the ‘send message’ widget, not missing a single beat as he transitioned into a short, but comical greeting. He hoped that she’d reply relatively soon, soon enough to join him within the hour.
From: Sakuraba Neku - Hey, Stalker. If you promise not to make a scene about my clothes, you can keep me company at Miyashita park. Are you in or are you out?