Hello, Angel Beats! Fandom! I'm really happy to introduce to you my latest one-shot, and first in this fandom, Strings. I hope you enjoy it like I did the anime!
"Kanade…"
Yuzuru had been left crying at her feet for who knew how long. Hours, days, he didn't really care. The only thing that had changed was the amount of light on the spot he had collapsed on.
He finally stood up, but promptly was taken back to his knees by how sore they were from kneeling there too long. He didn't notice the pain; he hardly noticed anything now. All that was running through his mind was Kanade, standing, sobbing tears of gratitude and unwanted departure. Had he really sent her away to a new life? A new life that he didn't know what she would be?
In fact, hadn't he done that for everyone?
His baggy eyes shot open, as he just realized this once again. He had just sent every lingering soul to a new life. Yuri, Hinata, TK, even Christ (Otonashi granted the poor kid the request he always wanted now that he was gone). All had been obliterated, destined to be who knows what, and who knows where. All thanks to him.
The boy finally got himself to stand up, cursing himself for not getting obliterated, too. Maybe then he couldn't remember anything, but he would not have to linger behind stuck with the memories of his afterlife shared with them. Shinda, Yui, Noda, Kanade… not one. There was very little known of the life after the afterlife, but the only thing they were sure of was that their previous memories would be erased.
Otonashi slowly walked back to the hospital bed and decided to sleep there, reminding himself of his first time in this world. The time when he got stabbed and woke up in a hospital bed, alive. Or, not as alive as he thought, as he was to find out.
He managed a chuckle about the Noda incident as he finally felt the tendrils of sleep wrap around him for the first time since he was left alone in this world.
His dreams were also bittersweet, reveling in the previous memories of the SSS. His first mission and having to face the seemingly demonic Angel. Noda trying any way possible to have a good reason to kick Otonashi's ass. Yui and her "love to hate" aura that surrounded her. Otonashi missed the band of idiots, as Yuri called them.
Then one by one, the people disappeared. Hinata patting him on the back suddenly became having him blown away. Shina evaporating before finishing her catchphrase, "This is so stu…"
And all that was left was Yuri, in a room full of computers, talking to an NPC. He had seen this before; this had been what she was doing in the fight against the shadows. This would be when she destroyed the computers.
Staying true to the true experience, Yuri went ballistic with her guns, spraying bullets over every monitor and hard drive in the room, defeating the programming once and for all.
But once again the scene shifted, to a secret room. No one was in it, nothing was in it. In fact, it wasn't really much of a room at all. It was just a screen on a wall, hidden from the view of the world. On it was Iwasawa. He didn't know how he knew it was Iwasawa, she sure didn't look like the Girls Dead Monster star she was at the Battlefront. In fact, pretty much the only two things she retained from the afterlife was her gender and her personality.
But it was Iwasawa, and instantly, Otonashi knew that this was her life after the afterlife.
In this life, she wasn't in Japan, like all of them originally were, but instead in the USA. She was born from immigrant parents, her new name now Katherine Iwasawa, as her parents had named her to fit in more with the other names in her area.
She was only two years old from what he could tell, which shocked him. Had he really been in the afterlife for 2 years since she had sung that song? Maybe time just moved faster in this world, or maybe time wasn't relevant to Otonashi after everyone left, he didn't know or really care, as the fact that this little Iwasawa was on the screen.
Even at the tender age of two, Iwasawa was found messing around on a toy piano, on her way to being an amazing artist. While her playing was exactly good yet, it was amibitious, free, and somehow even fun to listen to. Coming from a two year old, Otonashi could easily imagine her becoming a superstar, now that she wasn't destined to die young.
Otonashi finally jolted awake from the strange dream, feeling rather confused. He hadn't understood why he had the dream, considering he hadn't had any dreams since he was here; Christ had once explained that now that he was only a soul, he didn't have real eyes to produce the REM or something like that. Otonashi honestly never understood what he was talking about and honestly never cared until now.
But if not a dream, then a revelation? Otonashi asked himself. He had to investigate this, if only to put rest to the thoughts.
Going back to the secret lab, proved arduous enough, with the teen struggling physically, and seeing flashbacks of friends where walls now stood weighing him down emotionally. Entering the lab was even worse, as the NPCs weren't programmed to clean up the mess that was the final battle, so every broken computer and monitor remained in their shattered pieces they always had been, as they always would. Forever reminding him of his friends.
But Otonashi left little time for reflection. He came here for a reason. So he shuffled through the broken glass and hardware and searched the walls for something, anything; a hidden passageway, a false wallpaper, a wall-colored door. If it would prove his vision it would work.
Hours on end were spent in the room searching, in which he got many a cut and many hopes trampled. It seemed that he had searched every square centimeter of the room, without any results. Maybe Christ was wrong; maybe there was actual dreams in this world, but only if you stayed long enough. Or maybe Otonashi had gone mad from loneliness.
He began to shed tears and hit the wall beside him, experiencing yet another breakdown in this world. The unbearable circumstances were becoming too much for him. He couldn't go to school again with the NPCs, it would just remind him of Kanade actually doing work, or Noia being thought of as an NPC until he turned mega-bad. He couldn't stay in the hospital, if not for all the incidents that were there. And yet there was no way out of this world. No highway to heaven or hell or reincarnation. No sky to fly to outer space through, no death to have him leave the world for good. All there was was obliteration, which hadn't worked for him no matter how many times he tried. He felt his hand bruise and bleed against the wall, but he didn't care anymore.
Until he heard the wall crumble.
He looked up with his teary eyes and saw a hole in the wall he was punching, which was no more than just a cover for a hallway behind. How had he missed this? It didn't matter. He began to beat down on the hole, expand it, eventually making it possible to go through. He squeezed in and plopped out on the other side, a dark and narrow tunnel leading into black.
He walked. Walked down the hallway, taking turns and bumping into walls once the light from the computer room no longer reached. He walked for minutes, trying not to get lost and still wondering about what would be on the screen now, if it existed. But surely it had to by now, his dream could not have been fantasy.
He finally saw some cracks of light coming around a corner. Without hesitation the teen ran around the corner, eager to find the room that he was longing to see; the room that could tell where his friends were now.
And lo and behold, the screen was there. Powered off, but it was there. His tears flooded his eyes again, this time in joy. He ran into the room to turn on the screen.
It was then he noticed the strings.
Strings, everywhere throughout the room. Each one thin as a hair. But each had a small flag on them. And each flag had a name. He looked down the strings and saw and they went into the floor.
The floor began to rise, revealing a globe. Only one string was actually connected to the globe, though. It was Iwasawa's, connecting to
He went to touch the string of the musician, and instantly the screen jumped into life, showing events that were happening in her life at the present time. The toddler was seen playing a toy guitar, her favorite toy as heard from the cooing of her parents. They had never expected their daughter to so quickly grow fond of a plaything. Perhaps it was a sign that her mashing on the piano, the ambitious and free sounds of a toddler's imagination, would grow into a superstar. Otonashi already knew she would, if this life was any hint, but it was never certain.
He released his finger from the string, and the screen faded to black once again. Otonashi was now very curious, thinking, Maybe…
He found the string labeled "Yui" and picked it up. But when he looked towards the screen, there was no life, no color, no sound. This disappointed Otonashi as he just dropped the string, which no longer had meaning.
He dropped it onto the globe though. Onto Japan. And instantly he could hear the sound of a baby's wail.
He looked up, his hand in contact with Yui's string, and saw the birth of a new girl, a rather light one according to the doctors. Yet it was still wailing louder than any baby they had heard before, prompting one of them to even ask a nurse for earplugs as they cleaned off the baby and wrapped it in cloth.
And instantly he knew what was happening.
The globe was real life. The strings were his friends.
This was the reincarnation they had all been so longing for.
He heard a soft chuckle in the background, and an old man walk into the foreground. "So you've finally figured it out, eh?"
Otonashi spun around in surprise and saw a grandfatherly figure in the room, complete with a cane and soft eyes, staring at him. "W-who are you?" He managed to stutter out.
"Well, I guess you could say that I'm the one who coded this world. I made sure that you guys got here safely, made sure you didn't stay, and, when you were obliterated, sent you back down."
"S-so you're God?"
Another laugh was heard from the old fellow. "Hardly! I'm only in charge of one minute part of the afterlife. But none of that is important right now. What is important is that you've found this place."
Otonashi asked, "What's so special about this place, anyways? The globe and the strings."
"Well, you've already figured half of it out. A string represents a soul in this universe. When you touch it, you see the memories it is having at that certain time. Of course, it can only have memories while living, so if it's not alive, you get nothing. But when you touch it to the Earth, the soul is born into a child. You give life. That's the basics of this thing, all that you've figured out.
"But the fun part is what else can be done with the strings."
Otonashi instantly became interested. "What do you mean by that?"
"Every soul is itself, no matter where you put it. They will always be them; no changing that. What can be changed is the people they meet. Take this "Iwasawa" character for instance. Right now she's just a toddler sharing her primitive genius with her parents. But what if we placed this "Hisako" string down next to her."
He did just so, and once again the birth was heard in the room. But he didn't stop there. He twisted the strings of the two girls together.
Otonashi was confused. "Why'd you do that?"
"Why? Because this ensures that they will meet sometime in their life. At one point they will meet each other and leave a lasting impression. Odds are that they'll stick together like peanut butter and jelly."
"So you're saying that the strings control their fates?"
"Not entirely," The man corrected, waving his stick slightly to emphasize. "Like I said, they have their own personalities, and there's nothing we can do about that. How they handle meeting each other is entirely up to them. They might end up unwinding the string I just twisted for them. They might have twisted the string without our help. All I'm doing is giving helpful hints to their kismet; a slight nudge in what I believe is the right direction.
"Now," the man became more strict-like, his tone dropping slightly. "You're not supposed to know of this place. That dream you had, which I may or may not have sent you, was not supposed to be for your information. Likewise, all of this technology is not available for you to use; you will never be able to do anything with it and are better off forgetting about the whole incident."
Otonashi's mouth was agape, as he blurted, "Then why did you tell me all that stuff?"
A smirk formed on the old man's lips. "Because your friends are still undecided on where they will end up going, and I'm just too darn lazy to place them. In fact, I'm so tired that I'm going to leave this room for an hour to take a nap, leaving you here all alone with your friends' fates in your hands to choose how they'll finally end up. I won't be able to catch you, but it's against the rules, so you shouldn't do that, understand."
Again, the teen was shocked, but gave a smile, "Okay, sir. I swear I won't touch anything. Have a good nap."
The old man left, saying, "Good afterlife," a warm feeling flowing through his spiritual veins as he went to bed.
And so Otonashi was left to help his friends meet each other, so that maybe they could once again be a happy lot with each other. After all, even if he couldn't see them anymore, it didn't mean he couldn't pull a couple strings.
And that's it! How'd you like it? Was it good, bad? Was the pacing off? Tell me how you felt about it in a review!
I have to be completely honest, this story pretty much had two phases. The first was from start to the dream, and the second was the rest. In the second I took a completely opposite turn of where I was planning on taking it, but I actually liked my second route better. Gave more depth or something intellectual like that.
Either way, I hope you enjoyed this one-shot and have a great day!