Miataru Masa

This story will most likely contain yaoi at some point. If you're not okay with this, I suggest you don't read it.

"Miataru Masa" loosely translated means "to find Masa". This story is alternately known as "Caramel"

Thanks for reading :3

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Miataru Masa

AKA “Caramel”

This was not normal. These things were just not supposed to happen. A perfectly sane 20-year-old man was not supposed to have the random whim to get up in the middle of the night, walk outside, and lie in the snow until he froze solid, which is how we found him the next morning.

For as long as we had known him, we had all assumed Yoshifumi Masa was completely sane. He was a studious, upright man with shoulder-length black hair and ideal posture. He worked as a teller at the bank near our circle of neighboring houses, something that far over-shined our achievements (as I, for example, worked in an adult bookstore), as well as attended the local college. And then there was also the defining fact that he was our friend. A friend, in our book, was someone who was sacred, capable of no wrong. And all of us who lived on that Cul de sac , having bought the houses just so we could live close to each other, were the closest circle of friends I could imagine. And so it came as quite a surprise when Masa did something so completely explainable.

It was Lolli who found him. He woke, as always, bright and early. On this particular day, Lolli planned to head over to the nearby grocery to pick up some eggs, planning to make an omelet for our communal breakfast. It was a custom when we all spent the night in the same house, for one of us to make a group breakfast, and naturally it was usually Lolli who was usually charged with the task simply because the rest of us were incapable of waking early. The previous night we had spent at Mera’s house. We’d gotten considerably drunk and lay scattered under blankets in various areas across the living room floor. Lolli had simple stepped around our lethargic bodies, grabbed his coat, and headed out the door. And then he came across Masa lying in the snow. But he knew immediately that something wasn’t quite right. He knew that Masa was irrefutably dead. As so, he did was Lolli normally did in such a situation. He screamed.

I have to admit it took us much longer than it should have to stir when he gave that characteristic blood-curdling scream. It was the scream he used when he burned something on the stove for dinner, when he dropped something on his toe, or when he just couldn’t figure out what to say and became stressed, shrieking in a girlish way like a cornered animal. We were all used to the scream by now, and it carried far less urgency than it would have a decade earlier before we knew him very well. At age 19, his scream was far less horrifying than the scream of 9-year-old Lolli, who we didn’t know how to deal with when we screamed. Lolli was an adult now, who worked alongside me at the adult bookstore, who folded his own laundry. And that morning at the sight of his friend lying gray with cold in the snow, he screamed like a child.

“What could he be going on about now?” Mera muttered groggily, his eyes barely opening as he peered out from under his blankets. A shock of dark magenta hair could be seen peeking out from under the blankets, and between that and his eyes, that was all that was visible. “Sorano, you should go check on him.”

Sorano was no more awake than he was. His hair, long and pale baby-blue, was spread out around his head like a silken ocean, and he eyes stayed firmly closed as he mumbled. “No. It way too cold out there. Karu, you go and check it out,” his words were so groggy that I barely understood them, but I got the basic point, and pulled the blanket farther over my head.

“Oh no you don’t. I always ended up doing things like this. There’s absolutely no way I’m going out there. If I have to go, all of you are coming with me!” slowly, trying to shake off the headache and the exhausted daze, I crawled out of the cocoon I had made for myself out of blankets and stood shakily before the other two. Almost certain that Masa would back me on this, I turned to inquire with my eyes, but his nest of blankets was empty; a coral-colored ocean of fabric without him in it. “Hey… where’s Masa?” I asked in alarm.

“Maybe he got up already,” Mera suggested, slowly pulling himself into a sitting position. “He was the only one of us who didn’t have anything to drink last night… maybe he’s starting breakfast while Lolli’s at the store, eh?”

“But Lolli isn’t at the store,” Sorano pointed out. “He’s outside screaming, and for all we know it could be about something serious this time.” he was standing now, and moved toward me, his fuchsia eyes blinking furiously to battle against his weariness. “I agree with Karu… we need to go and check on him.”

“He probably just got snow in his shoe or something,” Mera objected, but he was already moving, brushing his shortish magenta hair out of his eyes and crawling slowly outward from his shelter of blankets. He knew not to argue with Sorano when possible, especially not this early in the morning. “But alright, if you guys really think it’s necessary to drag ourselves out into the snow at ten in the morning to find that a tree branch dropped snow on his arm, I guess we’ll do it.”

It took us far longer to get out the door than was necessary that morning. We griped about everything as we pulled on our coats, tripping over each other in our drowsiness. I don’t think there was a single one of us that wasn’t completely disgusted at the idea of walking out into that snow, and as a result our boots slid onto our feet slowly, our coats refused to button, and by the time we were all ready I’m sure Sorano wanted to kill us both, though he was being just as lethargic as we were. Out the door we went in a tired, unenthusiastic huddle as I yelled over my shoulder to Masa (who I presumed was in the kitchen) that we would be back in a moment, out into that snow which blinded us as rays of sunlight slanted across its pristine white surface. Over to Lolli who stood petrified in the snow, trembling inside his pink suede coat. And there he was.

Masa lay perfectly still on his back, his hands folded casually, comfortably across his chest in the same manner he folded them when he got comfortable on the living room floor to watch a movie. His eyes were open, their pale blue depths staring peacefully up into the sky. There was nothing eerie or grisly about this position. The only terror came from the bluish gray tint in his lips, the unblinking stare of his eyes. I bent down before him (the others seemed afraid to touch him), and placed a hand on his cheek. He was frozen completely solid. The skin didn’t budge when I pressed on it. He was cold. He was cold and he was frozen and he was dead.

As I stood, there were really no words I could think of to sum up the full gravity of the situation, but to tell the truth it was really pretty obvious. Masa was dead, frozen solid, and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anyone in the group who didn’t grasp it at that moment. That moment was a lot of things; the moment everything changed for us, the moment that we realized that life can be that way, and the moment when something passed behind Mera’s eyes that I had never seen before.

“This was no accident,” he announced later, when we were all gathered around Lolli’s kitchen table drinking hot tea. Everyone was silent and very shaken-up, and nothing had been said before this statement. At the sudden sound, Lolli screamed and dropped the plate of cookies he’d been carrying to the table.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Sorano said over the rim of his mug. His expression was grim and matched all of those around the smooth round table. Outside, the sound of muffled voices from the police investigation was just barely audible. “What are you talking about?”

Mera was standing now, pacing back and forth in the small space between the refrigerator and the table. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he looked slightly crazy, which scared me a little and produced a squeak from Lolli. “I’m talking about murder, Sorano.”

“There’s no way it could be murder,” Sorano protested. “The only set of footprints in the yard besides ours were Masa’s, and they led directly to where he was lying. In order for someone to have killed him, they would have had to do it and leave. And there were no other footprints. That means that if Masa was murdered, the murderer would have had to been able to fly, and that seems highly unlikely to me.”

“There have to be other explanations,” Mera argued. He was leaning against the refrigerator with a hand stroking his chin. His eyes, which were a brilliant shade of green, stared off into space with enough intensity to melt the snow outside, internally searching, eternally searching. “There has to be something…”

“Why can’t it just have been an accident?” Lolli asked softly, sliding slowly into a chair beside me. He wasn’t crying, which surprised me. Then again, I supposed the shock was so great that the crying wouldn’t come for any of until later. It was something I was definitely not looking forward to; the bitter tears, sobs wracking my body, breath short as I struggled to quell my outburst of emotion. But for the moment, we were all safe, trapped with a bubble of numbness at the sudden disbelief of it all.

“Because Masa wouldn’t just do something like that…” Mera told him plainly, placing his palms on the table to stare around at all of us. “Masa wasn’t crazy, he wasn’t suicidal, and I believe I knew him better than any of you. Not to figure out the truth would be a complete insult to his memory. The police told me earlier that they don’t suspect foul play; they’re ruling it as accidental death even before they do an autopsy. They’re not going to do anything about it. And that’s why I’ve decided to take the investigation on myself.”

I can’t say any of us were really all that surprised by this declaration. That’s just the way Mera was; when he wasn’t satisfied with the results of something, he did something to generate new ones. It kept him busy, and no matter how unhealthy it was, and we never did anything to stop him. I suppose we all agreed to go along with it this time because I think every one of us needed something to take our minds off of Masa’s death. And that was the day that we ceased to be ourselves and became part of the investigation that Mera code named “Caramel”.

In the beginning, there was Masa the serious one, Mera the brilliant one, Lolli the sweet one, Sorano the logical one, and me, Karu, the normal one. But after Masa’s death, we were like four lost children, groping blindly through the darkness, searching for the light. In that darkness that became our uncertainty, we were searching desperately for some answer, something that felt real, something that would give us hope. We were the ones searching…

I never expected it would find us.