“So you’re just giving up? Is that it?”

Two teens, standing on a sidewalk outside a basketball court as the sun sets. One faced away, another with his head bowed, clenching his fists.

“I thought…I really thought this team was everything to you!”

“I can’t.” The other tightens his grip on the strap of his bag. “I’m sorry.”

“Keita…you…you…!”

The distant teen — Keita — walks away, leaving his friend alone with his fists still clenched. The streetlights flicker on in the gloom, illuminating the tears tracing down his face. He’s been abandoned. His team has been abandoned. His passion is overwhelmed with the pain of failure. What is he supposed to do now?

Just across the street, an unassuming background character to this little event stops in front of a bookstore. It’s already closed, but there’s several paperbacks on display. He stares at one books.

“…That one’s come out, huh…”

He clicks his tongue, resolves to come back and get it tomorrow, and turns to look across the road at the teenager still crying with frustration. He tilts his glasses up, and his eyes flick to just above the teen’s head, where a braid of vivid maple-red ripples above him. A viscous sludge of something not quite there is clinging to it, occasionally dripping onto its host. It’s rather disgusting to look at, for something that doesn’t technically exist.

He drops the frames back onto his nose, and the red braid vanishes behind the glass.

Red. Passion.

“Damn! They found us!”

A scraggly man dashes out of his apartment. He quickly calculates what path to take. If those guys are out in front, then they’d come in from the left, but there’s no way they wouldn’t circle to the back to catch them there. There’d probably be a slight delay, though, if only he could…

The woman behind him touches his back hesitantly. “What do we do?”

He laughs. “We go through.”

He takes the woman’s hand and sends a flying kick into the door right across the hall. He hears his neighbour shriek, but he’s too focused on sprinting to the window. His companion looks wildly around her and flinches at the sight of the poor woman in her sitting room, shrinking back from what must look like home invaders. They don’t stop, though, just barrel right on through to the bedroom window. The man yanks it open, and leaps out feet-first. His toes settle on the edges of the building just outside, and he slides over so the woman can do the same.

They look around wildly, and the wind whips at their clothes. The man pulls a grappling hook and spins it in the air, barely holding on now.

“Do you carry that around with you everywhere?” The woman asks dryly.

“Only when I’m getting shot at,” he quips, throwing it behind him. The hook clatters against the window of the building opposite, just next to the basketball court. “Hold on tight!”

With one mighty leap, they’re sent flying off the building, just in time to hear the alarmed shouting of their pursuers. The wind whips through their clothes and hair, wild and free, and an excited whoop is ripped from the man’s lungs. In that moment, there’s no bullets or chase scenes, only the sensation of true escape. The exhilaration fills him, and he practically leaps off the wall when they finally meet it.

Just across the street, an unassuming background character dressed in a gakuran comes out of the bookstore, clutching a small plastic bag.

“They ran out of stock quickly…it’s good I got it right after school,” he muses, patting his prize.

Just then, two gunshots ring out across the street, and the boy in the background startles and looks up so quickly that his eyes move beyond the frames, catching the ocean of green that takes up the entire sky. He worries at his snaggletooth with his tongue, and pulls the glasses up all the way. There’s a man with a purple braid waving languidly in the apartment window, aiming a gun down at the street.

He turns to see the targets. A dark-haired woman in leather and a dirty, muscular man in a white T-shirt with artfully tousled hair. He glances up at their threads. Well, braids, everyone seems to have a braid in this situation.

Must be a big storyline.

A golden braid is held taut over the man’s form. The woman has a similarly tense line, but in dark blue. The man with the golden braid grins roguishly, and the background character notes with mild interest that the braid of the one shooting at them has been switched out for black.

He tucks the book back into his jacket and ignores the scene as the man with the golden braid fires, and his target tumbles to his death.

Gold. Adventure.

Dark blue. Drama.

The train station is quiet, at this time of night. Seems to fit the mood, with the body laying there.

“What do you think?” The detective asks, taking a drag of his cigarette.

“Going to have to ask forensics, but I’d say blunt force trauma to the back of the head and…” His partner uses gloved hands to slightly turn the head, revealing the rope burns on the neck. She drops it so it falls back into its original position and glances up at him.

“…Asphyxiation?”

The detective grits his teeth. Third one this week. He’s going to catch the bastard if it’s the last thing he does. He blows out a billowing cloud of grey smoke, mixing in with the white of his breath against the chilly air. He’s tired, lately.

“When they getting here?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“About enough time for a coffee.”

He nods to a vending machine, sitting under a bar of florescent lights that are buzzing a note of anxiety and unreality in the otherwise darkened area. A background character is sitting right next to it on the bench, flipping idly through a book while sipping a can of melon soda.

He watches as the two detectives pass him by, ignoring his presence entirely. He had come in on a train after the murder, thankfully. Being interrogated seems like it’d be a pain in the ass. Missing his usual train home was bad enough already. He casually returns to his book, cataloguing potential storylines as he goes. He’s getting better at spotting patterns, lately.

“It’s going to end here,” the detective says under his breath.

The background character lifts his glasses and peers above the man’s head. A single, thin thread of orange is winding up from his head.

His partner’s thread is black.

The background character hums. It’s probably just beginning.

Orange. Mystery.

Having a weird hair colour used to mean you were destined to be interesting. Then people realized that was superstitious and ridiculous, and within the span of fifteen years, having blue hair just stopped mattering. It’s just gene mutations, or whatever. They proved it with science. Something about the algae in Japan, or something.

One boy with blue hair runs his hands through it, looking out the window idly. Usually he doesn’t have the opportunity, being in the front row, but the teacher isn’t in right now. He’s not sure why. He hasn’t paid attention to class since first year, and now it’s already the last year of middle school…

He had just casually gone through life until now. How many classmates does he even know by name? He’s had someone next to him the whole semester, and he barely knows who the guy is. When the blue-haired boy thinks about it, he just knows him from the glasses and the way that some of his hair sticks up weird against his hair whorl.

His neighbour gives him a dispassionate look. The boy with the blue hair abruptly looks away.

“What high school are you going to?” A pink-haired girl behind him asks, her every syllable dragging in a way that gets on his nerves. He focuses harder on the window.

“I dunno…wherever you go! We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Of course! Then, I was thinking about…”

He tunes it out.

It’s been three years of middle school, and he hasn’t made one friend. He hasn’t joined one club. He hasn’t done anything.

Sighing, he slips out of his seat, and wanders out of the class. No one stops him. They’re busy chatting about the festival, their futures, their idealistic view on what life is going to be like from now on…it pisses him off.

His neighbour remains, chin perched on one hand, looking bored. This simple boy in the background didn’t make one friend during middle school either, though that was actually very intentional. He’s not the kind of person who likes being seen, after all. It’s only natural.

He lifts his glasses, and sneaks a look at the thin yellow-green thread vanishing past the door.

“Well, at least things are going to go well for you,” he mumbles.

Yellow-green. Coming-of-age and character study.

In a certain middle school, a girl graduating from her final year approaches her crush of the past three years. Cherry blossoms are floating dramatically on the wind, and the breeze rustles their clothes. Strands of hair miraculously avoid flying into the girl’s face, instead staying in perfectly manageable chunks she can pull behind her ear. The weather is gently overcast, making the sky a pure expanse of brilliant white. Neither of them are very cold, despite the wind and lack of sun.

There is a thread above the girl’s head. It’s pink, and held taught, like something is yanking on it. It extends into some unseen point in the sky.

The boy also has a pink line. It also extends into the sky. It is also held taught.

Neither of them can see these strings. In the background, another graduating middle school student is idly reading the final pages of his book. His eyes slide to the scene, and when he lifts his glasses, he studies the pink lines more than the people themselves. The firm draw of the threads allows a thick, viscous sludge of something not quite there to ooze down the pink lines, made up of little more than the concept of words and the suggestion of actions, whispering stories as it descends.

He turns a page in his book as the sludge settles heavy on the girl’s shoulders, crawls into her very being, and comes out thin and whispy like smoke around her ankles as it delivers the Narrative and completes its purpose. Her posture becomes softer as the stories are flushed through her, and her eyes become wetter.

“Yuuichi, I…” She simpers. “It’s about you, you see…I actually…”

Flip.

“I like you!”

The background character drops his glasses and closes his book with a little snap.

The book wasn’t very good, but it was useful.

The other two don’t notice him, and he doesn’t expect them to. He doesn’t expect them to do much of anything except act out their little scene, and understanding this just makes him that much more eager to get away. He’s conscious enough of the weather to shiver and hold his arms, lamenting the fact he hadn’t brought a sweater for the wind chill, and his nose wrinkles as hair tickles his eyes. He runs a hand through it, pushing it back and away from his face. He wonders if the reason bits of his hair always bend wrong around the top is because he never cares for it. He keeps forgetting where he puts his hairbrush.

“Sorry…I can’t return your feelings.”

A wave of rosy pink-coloured plot spills out of the two of them and explodes outward, slamming into the background character, and he swears his gakuran rustles from the pressure of it. He turns around just in time to see the string rising from the girl’s head writhe like a tortured snake, twisting left and right, independent from the wind or the trembling of her body. The explosion of plot is coming from her, which means…

The pink string convulses, and duplicates. Another string emerges, and then another, and suddenly there is a great, drifting cloud of them. He takes his book and holds it in front of his head like it can somehow protect him from the inevitable. Another pink-coloured surge rushes out from her strings, and he flinches when it soaks him through and his face heats up and he can feel his heartbeat stutter and his breath hitch at—

The background character gags, and peaks behind his book to squint hatefully at his classmate of the past three years. Waving in the air above her head is a thick pink braid, moving almost cheerfully in comparison to her delicate crying and painful smile. It dominates her tiny little unassuming green thread entirely, and will probably continue to do so until she stops glorifying romance so much.

He drops the book from his face and sighs, sparing a pitying glance at the boy she was confessing to, who looks awkward and uncertain. His pink string has lost interest in the affair, back to being overtaken by his much-larger green thread.

The boy in the background pushes his glasses up, and through the plain glass lenses, all the threads disappear. All he can see now is a blank white sky, and blank spaces above the heads of two classmates he hopes he will never have to see again.

Reikawa Yuuya turns on his heel and marches out to meet a new day, and a new level of education.

Pink. Love.