The English Pilot

Diary

The English Pilot had flown halfway across the world on some half remembered mission, the details of which had long since evaporated into sake fumes and floor-price anxiety, and somehow ended up at the Darkness Festival heckling Itsuki like a proper lad on tour. He was mid quip, something about Itsuki's stance looking like a man trying to open a jar with his feet, when three shadowed hands relieved him of his coin purse in the dark with the efficiency of a rug pull he never saw charted. There he stood, discipline of a former samurai buried somewhere beneath the accent and the audacity, blinking at his own empty palms while the crowd roared at the wrong joke. He tells himself daily that he is recovering, that he'll tighten up, meditate, count his coins twice, yet every dawn finds him aped into another dare, another round, another festival he shouldn't be at. Still charming, still broke, still utterly game, he grins through the loss like a man who came for glory and stayed for the beautifully chaotic ruin of it all.