RE: Pink Composition

Donned in jeans and a button down, the kid couldn’t exactly be described as disheveled, but it wasn’t likely that he was employed by this hotel either. Room service, my ass. Unfortunately, it was exactly the fact that he was, as noted, just a child, that made Dean falter. Besides not intending to shoot someone merely for busting into his room, he was a kid. And Dean Winchester didn’t shoot kids.

“Yeah, I got my license the same place you’ve got an employee ID.” Which was to say nowhere, considering it didn’t exist. The boy’s English was surprisingly good, his voice more high pitched yet just a little too calm, a little too smooth, for this to be a first-time offense. He would bet good money that the kid made a habit of sneaking around and breaking in when he saw fit. ( Okay, so Dean did the same thing, but it was part of his job! He protected people. Absolutely not the same thing. ) Besides, the gun pointed dead center between his brows had no effect on the stranger, which raised the hunter’s suspicions even more acutely.

“Gonna tell me what you’re really doing in here?” Though his voice had the same sharp edge, he lowered the gun toward the floor, setting his finger along the side of it instead of keeping it poised above the trigger. So far, this conversation did not require a weapons discharge. And he was hoping to keep it that way.

Dean had fallen asleep on his stomach, arms splayed out beside his head, face half-pressed into the soft pillow. He had hardly bothered to take his boots and jeans off before toppling head-first onto the mattress a few hours prior. The moment Dean hit the bed, he was done - after the long day he’d had, he had no chance in a fight against sleep. But, true to his nature, sleep was an elusive beast for the hunter, and it only remained with him for short spurts of time. Anyway, he only intended to sleep until sometime in the middle of the night, when he would have a better chance to investigate the crime scene.

So only a few hours after passing out, Dean’s eyes slid open slowly as he blinked away the grogginess that had already set in. And although he couldn’t hear a sound, something in his gut stirred, told him to be wary. With a single, fluid motion, he had pulled his pistol from beneath his pillow and gotten to his feet. It only took a couple steps to pad out to the living area of his room, and, just as his gut warned him, he found someone poking around there.

Dean trained the gun on the stranger and — well, there was just a sliver of something within him that said the young man looked familiar, but there was no time to ponder that feeling. Voice low but gruff, he growled, “You wanna explain what you’re doin’ in here?”

The local angel tensed briefly when he heard a voice. Well well, this was unexpected. He had thought for sure this foreigner would be down for another few hours considering he was probably American judging from his choice in language and his accent, which means serious jet lag. But instead of panicking, he merely adopted a smile that would mask any emotion and turned to face the man with a finger curling his hair.

The longer he stood amongst the crowds of people, the more warm bodies pressed against him from all sides. Dean couldn’t say he was claustrophobic, but the sheer number of people in the area made it nearly impossible to breathe, and certainly to do his job in the first place. He lithely maneuvered through the gathering crowd and made his own swift exit from the train station. With any luck, the station would be much quieter at some odd hour, which would make it much easier to work.

His eyes traversed every face he passed, mostly noting them as tourists or locals. There was a face he only caught a glimpse of, someone he could have sworn had looked at him (or, more accurately, through him), but the person disappeared so quickly he wasn’t sure if he had just imagined it.

With a little more navigating, Dean was able to find the hotel where he’d booked a room. It was a classier than the establishments he tended to frequent, but it was situated well in the area and it was a place for him to sleep, which he desperately needed. He hadn’t exactly caught much sleep since before his flight (there was no way in hell he was sleeping during his flight), and his muscles and mind were beginning to feel heavy, riddled with fatigue. A few hours was all he needed - as nightfall rolled around, he would be up again to do some poking around.

Time was a slow thing to Joshua as he watched the strangers mill about. Over the day, he had mentally marked multiple people to keep a watch on. The ones most notable were the ones that were new to Shibuya and went straight to the crime scenes. Why even bother unless they either knew something or had a sick fetish? Either way, they weren’t good to have in his city.

Ok, so the angel of death may have ended a life tonight, but it was for the sake of Shibuya. Too bad it wasn’t the culprit behind the severing of children.

Now he found himself on the rooftop of a hotel. Another soul he had been monitoring was within....and what an ideal time to snoop. He was foreign, he’d sleep like the dead to get over the jetlag, surely. So Joshua could look through his things and check his agenda. At least, that was the plan.

It had taken some navigating, and a few wrong turns, but Dean had found the train station the Teke Teke was supposedly haunting. As soon as he walked in, he could sense something unusual about the din of the crowd, a tension and unease settling in the air - something had obviously transpired - so the hunter weaved his way through the throngs of people to get a look. At their center was another body, pretty grisly even for Dean: a young boy, looked to be about in his teens, whose body was in two pieces. The dismemberment appeared surprisingly clean, cuts not jagged as they likely would have been if made by a human hand.

This was going to be a challenge for him, as he had no real access to the law enforcement here. Pretending to be FBI would get him nowhere, so it was going to require some subterfuge and sheer luck to get the kind of information he needed. Fortunately for him, some basic hacking skills had also made their way into his repertoire of tricks, so he was at least a step ahead there.

As he stood poised just at the edge of the crowd (close enough to really see but not so close as to draw unwanted attention), Dean committed as much of the scene as he was able to memory before he inconspicuously snapped a couple pictures with his phone. Brow furrowed and green eyes squinted beneath long lashes as he tried to notice anything out of the ordinary - his kind of out of the ordinary. Slowly, he felt a dull throb start in his temples, pushing its way through his skull. However, he merely chalked it up to the plane ride (which he was still attempting to block out of his memory) and jet lag, rubbing a tired hand across his brow.

Blending into the crowd was easy. Even if he wasn’t on a higher plane, nobody would have thought twice about the boy among the crowd of people. His bored expression as he stared at the corpse was the only thing off, but then, here in his plane nobody could see his imperfect disguise, so that was ok.

The click of a camera caught his ear. There was no sound that could hide from the master of Shibuya, and this one was no different. Joshua looked up, scanning the familiar faces - faces that frequented his Shibuya, and those that did not. Tourists and locals alike he had burned to memory, ingraining their sound into the song that drove Shibuya from the underground. It was the song of the soul that made him furrow his brow at someone in the crowd. He looked like any other tourist. Perhaps European, or more likely American judging by the rather rude practice of photographing a corpse.

Making his way easily through the crowd, Joshua tuned himself to the plane of the living, moving away from the gruesome scene with a mask of worry and horror at the sight his poor boyish heart just witnessed. He passed the American, glancing over his shoulder to commit the face and soul to memory. There was something....off about him.

The smallest coffins are the heaviest.

The plane ride over was a complete nightmare. Dean Winchester had flown only a few times (even if he had only flown once it would have been once too many) and here he was stumbling out of a 13 hour flight halfway across the friggin’ world. 

A few years back, Dean promised a favor to a hunter who’d saved his bacon on a hunt gone south. Well, that favor was called in, and no problems there. But that hunter? He’d up and moved. Not just halfway across the country but halfway across the world - to Japan. And Dean Winchester was nothing if not a man of his word, so he’d gotten on a plane and white-knuckled his way through a couple puke bags, maybe snuck in a shot of whiskey here and there, and made the trip over. 

Rumors had been going around though, about the string of murders going on, and the local grim reapers weren’t too happy about it. Mostly because it meant more work for them, and a hazard. It wasn’t there fault the girl had lost the game, but she apparently refused to take it lying down.

Joshua Kiryu stood over a victim near Shibuya Station. A large crowd surrounded the sliced corpse in a large circle. The victim, a young boy in a red hoodie, had once upon a time been a player in a game of life or death. He won his chance at life....but now someone else had stolen it away.

See what pops up first with these words:

"Yes yes. That best friend of yours was Axel, if you can recall. Red head. Likes to throw fire at people. But you know, Saix, there is no such thing as ‘normal’. It is a word defined by an individual and various upon person to person. What’s normal to one person is utterly strange to another, so I wouldn’t say you don’t have  a normal life. Just a life. One that’s worth living, and honestly, that’s the only important thing, isn’t it?"

"I…"  he swallowed back a lump in his throat.  "I’ve read about an Axel in my journals."  Was it the same one?  Even after months of reading he still felt like he was looking in on a stranger’s life.  "I believe I read something about a wolf.  I think it was lost in a fight with Ansem if I recall the words correctly."

The angel reached into his pocket and stepped closer to Saix as his own pokemon walked over to butt her head gently against Joshua's arm.

"As for that wolf in your journal, you may have lost him in a fight, but he was never really lost. The noise cannot be destroyed. They are just recycled back to me. So...if you wanted him back..." he held his hand out, and in his palm was a black pin with a white wolf drawn on it.

"Well to be fair, a lot of the soldiers in his army aren’t exactly the strongest. But then again neither are a lot of our armies. I guess in Angel Land it really ends up being more of a battle of the aces."

To think you could save everything was setting yourself up for disappointment. Life wasn't some comic book fantasy where everything worked out in the end. Death was inevitable.

"Heh heh well let me clarify, Pitty~ Hades wouldn't even send his aces to battle here. One underworld soldier from Shibuya would single handedly wipe out hundreds of Hades' soldiers. The aces wouldn't even bother coming out to play. Heh heh and that's probably because Shibuya recycles souls far more efficiently than your dear dear Hades. And they make stronger monsters here~"

Was Shibuya really that different than Hade's world with the whole taking souls and making monsters? Hard to say when Joshua was being so...Joshua.