Title: 'After the Game'
Description: The Game is finally over. Shibuya is still standing. The only thing that is different in the city of constant change is four teenagers, with eyes that have seen too much, and hearts that have yet to heal. This is their story. (A collection of one-shots taking place after the Reaper's game.)
Disclaimer: I do not own The World Ends With You
Chapter 1 – 'Accident'
"Mom! I'm home!"
Haruto Sakuraba looked up from the cutting board as her son's voice called out. Setting down the knife carefully and shaking a few flaky pieces of onion peel off of her apron, the fourty-three year-old woman rinsed off her hands before brushing back a few russet strands from her eyes. There had been a time that her hair had been a bright, violent orange, but now it was dulled and faded from age and the stresses of life, streaks of grey showing up here and there, more frequently with each passing year, it seemed. Making her way out of the kitchen, Haruto was–not for the first time in the past week–forced to quell the small gasp that threatened to escape at the sight of her boy.
Her little Neku, who once hid his scowl behind a high collar, shadowed his piercing, slate-blue orbs under low-hanging bangs, and drowning out the world with his treasured headphones. Her little Neku, standing there now with his schoolbag slung over one shoulder his face relaxed into a absent neutral expression, headphones pulled back around his neck, and chin tilted higher, as if to face the world head-on with steady eyes.
"Is dad coming back from work late again?" He asked with a hint of disappointment as his sweeping gaze landed on the dinner table, set for two with a vacant space where a third plate should have rested. Haruto stood there quietly, still watching the young man who used to be like a stranger living under the same roof, blending into the background and vanishing for hours on end to go to his murals in Udagawa and simply stand there, staring silently.
"One of your father's coworkers recently passed away, so he's having to deal with backlogged work since several others are taking time off to mourn." He nodded slowly, and–for the briefest of instants–Haruto saw her son's eyes flicker with a multitude of emotions, gone by so quickly she couldn't pick any of them out. He had not been the same when confronted with death, ever since...
"He's been out busy a lot since the accident."
The woman's heart twisted painfully with the memory. The accident. The day he had vanished after school–the way he always did–and did not come back home. The first place she had searched was Udagawa, by the mural. She remembered seeing a splatter of blood and seven bullets in the dying light, right beneath the painted cat.
'There,' it had seemed to say with that twisted expression that was neither laugh nor frown. 'Your child was there.'
Then came the news.
'Collapsed in the middle of the scramble,' was what she was told. 'Freak seizure, brought on by stress.' She didn't believe it for an instant. Haruto Sakuraba was not stupid. They said no one had seen him fall, but such an occurrence was impossible in the scramble crossing, right in the heart of Shibuya where thousands of people traveled every day. No, when she had visited him in the hospital, she was met with a lanky doctor with pale blond curls and a smile that never felt more than skin-deep. Kiryu, he said his name was. He had been so very kind in explaining that Neku had fallen into a coma, and that he was very close to death. Almost anything could finish him off. Patiently, he had answered her every question.
"Is there anything I can do for him?" She remembered asking. "I don't want him to have to fight this alone." At that, Dr. Kiryu had smiled, this time with genuine humor, and told her, very reassuringly,
"Oh, there's no need to worry, Ma'am. He won't be fighting alone." And Haruto had the strangest impression that he wasn't talking about either of them. She asked to hold Neku's hand, and he said he could allow that for a short time. After that, he asked her if she had any more questions. She had only one.
"Why are you lying to me?" She said, the cold sensation of her little boy's hand still lingering, the lack of any pulse shaking her down to the core.
Dr. Kiryu gave her a kind smile, and said that he had no idea what she meant.
"Don't screw with me, Kiryu," she bit back angrily, before storming from the room.
The next three weeks made it feel as if the world had lost it's colour. Always, she would make her way to Udagawa, right when Neku would have gone after school. She never saw either the blood or the bullets again, but the cat still seemed to point to where they had been, the expression seeming more like an ugly scream, as if it were sharing in her anguish. It was as if it knew what was happening to her son, but was unable to reach out and tell her, frozen in stone and garish paint as it was. A week passed, and it seemed that he might be recovering. He stirred with tiny movements, and, the one time she was admitted to visit him, she could have sworn he mouthed out a name–she thought it could have been a girl's–arm tensing as if to reach out, even from beyond whatever deathlike state he was trapped behind, but then it slackened again, and a single tear trickled down his cheek. The next day saw him falling further than ever before; so far that the doctors were unsure if he would ever recover. But he stabilized, and seemed to be recovering over the course of the second week, and, though the third week saw his vitals dip again, they only redoubled from there, growing stronger and stronger, until finally, on the twenty-second day, the news came.
They told her he'd woken in the night, slipped out of the hospital, and collapsed–yet again–in the scramble crossing. And Haruto Sakuraba believed them this time. Because the thing she wanted more than the truth was her son. She had wept with joy and relief, and yet not all was as it had been. The Neku that had woken from the hospital bed was not the one from before the accident.
"Mom...?" Haruto was brought back from her thoughts as she felt her son pull her into a tight embrace, clutching desperately at her with arms that were too thin and yet too muscled for a boy that had spent a month comatose;as if he was afraid a passing wind might whisk him away. She felt him tremble and realized he was crying, sobbing silently into her shoulder–something little Neku hadn't done since he was four, and, for a moment she felt apprehension and a crippling sense of unfamiliarity as the boy that she should know better than he did himself made an unspoken plea for acceptance. Then the moment was gone, and Haruto Sakuraba wrapped her arms around her son protectively, because she was his mother, dammit. And he was her son.