On the breakwater in the summer dark, a man and a girl are sitting,
She across his knee and they are looking face into face
Talking to each other without words, singing rythms in silence to each other.

A funnel of white ranges the blue dusk from an outgoing boat,
Playing its searchlight, puzzled, abrupt, over a streak of green,
And two on the breakwater keep their silence, she on his knee.

The faucet is dripping in the bathroom. It has been the whole night. Kyoya haven't gone in yet. Yet.

He moved here two months ago. It's his first apartment and he had no idea what he was getting into. He have been tearing down wallpaper, ripping up carpets, painting everything. And now he's here, in his bedroom with half his stuff still in boxes, listening to the faucet drip. Listening to water fill a bathtub.

By the second weekend Kyoya was here he already needed to a drink. When he sat down on the couch, Nile came into the apartment to the left.

Sweat ran down his forehead as he smiled at me in the already humid, wet evening rain. They made small talk for a few minutes and then, as Nile got ready to take his leave of the conversation and start to cook some dinner, Demure sat down on the couch and leaned in to Kyoya and lowered his voice.

"So, umm, how do you feel about... rotten flower?"

"About who? Madoka?" Kyoya asked. He took a sip a can of soda. "She's all the same... like this... Why?"

"Oh, I thought," Demure said, his voice supportive and eagerly. "I guess I thought she'd be a little more, umm, you know…"

"No, I don't. A little more what?" Kyoya asked.

"Well, you know. With what happened. To Madoka…"

"What do you mean, "what happened?" Did Ryuga suffocated her in the shed?"

Benkei looked at him. "Oh my god. Ryuga suffocated Madoka in the shed in the forest?"

"Did I told you?" Kyoya winced. "It's nothing."

"What happened?"

"Ryuga found Madoka a week ago, she, umm, she almost died. It was, umm…"

He said "umm" the way people say "om" in mediation: repetitively and with great belief that something will happen if he continues to repeat it.

"It was pretty weird, umm. That's what I heard. At least. I didn't see. I'm glad I didn't. She was a nice girl."

Demure looked at him and smiled. He wanted to be supportive to their leader of Team Wild Fang.

"She was a good mechanic."

Later that night, as Kyoya was trying to get to sleep, he heard the water drip for the first time. A plumber, he thought, Nile will have to call a plumber tomorrow. Before Kyoya fell asleep, he thought he could hear a song from a far away place. A sound that almost sounded like...

"Madoka?"

The doorbell rang the next day. It was Gingka, slightly damp from the light rain that had been falling.

He sat down in the kitchen and took a mug of coffee Kyoya offered him.

"I'm sorry to just barge in on you," Gingka said, blowing on the steam. The black surface of the drink rippled.

"It's ok. I'm not too busy today."

"I wanted to stop by and apologize for yesterday. I didn't tell you everything."

"Really?" Kyoya said, sitting down across from him.

"Really. You see, the guy who lives next door, he, umm, he used to talk to me sometimes. About stuff he used to hear in here. He thought he was going crazy."

"Really?" Kyoya asked, "what did he think was going on?"

"He thought there was something living in his pipes."

"What?"

"That's what I, umm, I said," Gingka looked at him. His golden eyes had little splashes of color in the sclera. Little brown discolorations. "I said, you're crazy. Ha ha ha!"

After he left, Kyoya realized it must have been raining harder than he had thought out there. His seat was all damp. Everything felt damp.

The plumber came the next day. Nile couldn't get the dripping to stop. He explained he needed a part, and he could be back the next day. Maybe the day after that.

That night, Kyoya listened to the dripping. He had gotten used to the rhythm. He kind of liked it, almost. The way it sounded like a song he almost remembered….

Right as he was about to fall asleep, he heard a weird noise, a sloshing sound sound. It sounded almost like stepping. Kyoya looked from his bed, without sitting up, and peered out into the hallway. He saw a dark figure moving, slowly, very slowly, to the bathroom. There was the wet noise of wet footsteps. The shadow moved into the bathroom. The water drops got louder. He could swear he recognized a song.

Kyoya woke up the next morning. He didn't know he had fallen asleep. The bed had wet spots on it, like something had been dripping on it.

He rushed into the hallway outside his bedroom. The ground… There were wet footprints leading into the bathroom. The footprints had too many toes.

Nile called the plumber. The part was still on order. Maybe he'd have it tomorrow. He knew he needed to get out of the house. Kyoya emailed WBBA agent, Tsubasa. He demand he tell him everything he knew. Tsubasa got back in touch in a few moments. He didn't know much.

The guy who lived there before Nile and Demure had died. The house was willed to his sister. She was the one who sold it. The realtor sent Ryo the email address she had for the dead man's sister.

Kyoya emailed Tsubasa immediately, begging him to tell him more. As he lay down on the bed, he stared out his window at Nile's house. In the cool weather, it shimmered, like it was underwater.

Tsubasa emailed him back in a little over an hour. He thanked him for his condolences and said all he knew about Madoka is, she got very sick living with Ryuga. He said Kyoya seemed paranoid, worrying about her, telling him about things that lived in the sewers under the house. Things that had moved there from the ocean. She sang songs, he claimed.

Tsubasa said he had seen the drain was knotted with hair one day, and he tried to clean it out. He said he pulled on the long, black hairs and then they were pulling him into the drain. Ryuga wrapped around his wrists, in between his fingers, dark and slippery, like ropes in fetid water. He let go, he told him, and he wrapped around his wrists and tried to suck him under, to pull into the pipes, into Madoka's singing.

He wrote she was very sick. And he wished he could have helped him more.

Tsubasa wished Kyoya luck in his new apartment.

Kyoya should have left. You would have, as you read this, that's what you tell yourself, he know. That's what he would say too, if he read this. But he have heard Madoka's song, her incomparable drowned melody. She want him to go to her. She want him to live with her, in her strange beautiful world of underground rivers and pale bodies and light brown hair.

Madoka has been telling him all about it. She'll help him to go into a palace. She sent him up here to do that. To help people like him. She is in the bathroom now, filling the bathtub with water. Kyoya's waiting for her and himself to strip off each others clothes and submerge in the porcelain, to dive into brand new oceans, to grow a beautiful new body.

The moon in the sky is dry and beautiful and very far away. In the bathroom, the song are starting. He recognize every word.

Thank You For Reading.

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- Lily Eclipse