A/N: I haven't written anything for a while, so this is just kind of a spur of the moment type drabble. This is also my very first Nightmare Inspector fanfiction! I might make more chapters (and make this into a collection of drabbles) but I'm not quite sure yet.
Warnings: minor spoilers for those not all the way through the manga series.
Mizuki never had a significant sense of humor. She did love to laugh, but she was never good at telling jokes or noticing humor in situations. Mizuki had slowly realized the light-hearted, sweet girl she used to be was diminishing as more days passed in her dark, gothic teahouse. How anyone found comfort among its dusty, old tables and worn out floorboards, Mizuki could not give a suitable explanation.
She'd become slightly more cautious, more reasonable, and her heart had gradually grown apathetic. She related more to the silent, grey teahouse as she blew farther from the answer she'd been waiting for the past two years. Ever since that one day.
One old saying went 'home is where the heart is'. Mizuki knew the connection was not there between her and the teahouse. How she so desperately wanted that connection. This teahouse, her lost brother, her old memories, they fought and conflicted with little bits of remembrance of what her old house looked like. Flashes in her mind reappeared in her sleep, little by little, time after time. And no matter how much she thought about it, she began to hate herself more and more. Tears formed on her face whenever she couldn't remember a small detail in her old bedroom, what color walls she had, whether her bed faced the window or the door, or whether she even had windows in the first place.
She yearned for her brother's presence, and although Hiruko was the closest she'd probably get, it still was not him. It wasn't Azusa. At first, having Hiruko in her teahouse caused disruption in her mind, and despair in her spirit. She wanted him to go away, but for some reason she couldn't let him go. It frightened her at times just how similar he was to Azusa. She would become confused, often. Yes, she yearned for her brother's presence, but at the same time, a similar presence was always somewhere in the house, and it constantly surrounded Hiruko. It confused and calmed her, and she hated it for that.
Her confusion and surprised started when Hiruko first came to the teahouse. Upon receiving his first customer, Hiruko was of course, hesitant and very unsympathetic to the tortured dreamer. But nevertheless, he helped them anyway.
'Sleep now, leave this world behind.' The words blurred together in Mizuki's ears when she watched in awe the work of a baku. And just like that, he was gone, the customer left dozing with their head on the tabletop. Instant fear coursed through the pit of her stomach when she realized that...she could not feel that distance presence any longer. It had disappeared completely. She felt her head spin, it was so unfamiliar. The teahouse became foreign and threatening, and it was not her teahouse any longer. Not until he came back with a success or failure of the exorcized nightmare, not until the customer left happy or not, not until he would munch pleasantly on the small black orb, and not until she dared to speak and ask for the details of the dream.
It wasn't until recently, two years later, that she began to understand a little bit more. Her brother's presence had been masked completely, replaced with another one, constantly fighting for control over the other. She realized that without Hiruko in her teahouse, without his presence, the place would never be a place of comfort, or hope. It would just be a place of a weeping girl without hope, yearning for comfort that never came.
And yet she could not cry any longer, because she now felt the comfort of that new presence, replaced by the old one that never truly existed in the first place. The teahouse was Hiruko, and the teahouse was Mizuki also. For right now, that would have to be enough.
A/N: Damn, talk about ANGST! Here it is two thirty in the afternoon on the day of my last Prom and I'm sitting here writing sad fanfiction. What the hell? Well anyway, I would very much like some feedback on this little drabble…thing. Thanks for reading!