A/N: Written for the Snakes and Ladders Challenge at the AMF. The square I landed on was "monologue". This is a first person fic, but (you might need to squint) it can also be considered a narrative monologue. Not as glamorous as Shakespeare's, but it'll do. :D
New Regrets that Replace the Faces of the Old
Most people come to this world because they die regretting something. Maybe, if I'd died straight away instead of struggling those last seven days of my life, I would have died regretting something too. Then I would have been just like everyone else: Yuri and Hinata, Yui and Iwasawa and the rest of the Girls Dead Monster, the rest of the Shinda Sekai Sensen, Naoi, Kanade…
Maybe, even if I hadn't died regretting something, or losing my memories of those last moments where I'd been at peace, I'd still have come to the afterlife, because Kanade wouldn't be able to leave without me. Or maybe I would have been reborn, again and again, until the time came where I would die with regrets, and come upon the afterlife, and Kanade…
Maybe I did live a life after that one, after I died seven days after the accident, signing the donor card so someone could take what working organs of mine survived and lived on. Because that was Kanade: Kanade who carried my heart inside her body, and lived on. The timing doesn't make much sense, for her to have been in the afterlife for so much longer than me, and yet I don't remember any lifetimes between that fateful one and this afterlife…
But maybe I should just do what Yuri used to say, and just take things as they are. Don't overthink – because, if you think about it, overthinking is what causes most of the problems in this world. What created the Shinda Sekai Sensen in the first place, because Yuri saw a world struggling to stay in conformity and rebelled against it, rebelled against what she believed to be the will of God. What made Kanade become the Angel in fighting back, because what she wanted was for everyone to follow the rules and live a happy student life and then move on…
When I found out about that, I couldn't believe how the two sides had managed to so severely misunderstand.
It made sense, after a little more thought. Kanade was a rather awkward person. Her way to helping people pass on was something that people who'd cursed the unfairness of life in their dying breaths would never be able to accept. People like Yuri, who would rise up to defend the ideals of freedom in a world that demanded conformity, who would struggle to continue living in the afterlife instead of being reborn only to repeat their regrets again…
When I first came to the Afterlife, I thought "I wouldn't mind being reborn". Because I didn't remember anything about my life, I didn't remember any regrets. I didn't think I could have had that bad a life.
I didn't, really. I just wasted a lot of opportunities. Opportunities to spend more time with Hatsune, to make the short life she'd lived a more meaningful one. Opportunities to have studied properly from an earlier time and work harder – instead of wasting all that time I did in junior high. But…I don't think those things were regrets I died with. I had all those regrets when Hatsune died. I used those regrets as fuel when I saw that little girl who looked just like a healthy Hatsune, outside the hospital thanking a nurse for her new life.
I decided that day that I would live on to hear those kinds of thanks. And I dedicated my life to that. Studying hard and improving my marks so that I could get into a top high school, and then finally into medicine. Unfortunately, the day I was to take the exam for entrance into the medical course, the train I was on was in an accident and that was the end of becoming a doctor.
That's how much I remembered first, what I carried around with me for months. That regret of finding something I'd lived for, only to die before fulfilling it. And those tears were heavy ones: one of the few times I ever remembered crying so fiercely. My sister had always been sick, so it was only when she died I cried that hard.
There was only one other time. When my parents had died, soon after giving birth to Hatsune. I was just old enough to remember them. Nowhere near old enough to look after my little sister on my own. But the orphanage wasn't bad. The people there were nice. It became a place I could call home, even though the time I spent there was minimal.
After all, most orphans had no family to look back to. I had Hatsune, sleeping day after day in the hospital. Hatsune who was barely at the hospital, who eventually was staying permanently at the hospital, who barely even got to see the outside world. And I'd taken that for granted. I'd taken Hatsune for granted too, how she'd smile and say thank you to a measly manga volume I'd bring her, whether it was one I'd brought for her before or a totally new story that didn't say a thing about the last. Who knew. I might have even give her stuff not appropriate for girls her age – but whatever it was, she'd smile and say thank you and start reading.
It wasn't until after she died did I realise I'd been living since our parents died just to hear the words "thank you" from her mouth.
I'd tried to overcome that regret, by finding a new dream: of becoming someone who would save people, like I couldn't do anything for Hatsune. Someone like that nurse whose face would light up when a girl she helped cure of her illness would wave goodbye and head for a new life with the words "thank you" on her lips. I'd thought I'd died before achieving that dream.
When I regained those memories, I thought: "I couldn't have died like that. What a horrible way to die." Even if my life wasn't that horrible. Even if it was nothing like Yuri's, who'd watched her three younger siblings slaughtered in a space of thirty minutes because she couldn't find anything valuable for them. Not like Ayato, who'd had to live like someone he wasn't, try to accomplish tasks that were impossible for him, just because he was the one of the two twins who had survived. Not like Iwasawa, who'd had to suffer so long before her death, both with physical inability and the knowledge that that powerlessness came from the parents she'd tried to escape from – and my parents had been great people. I remembered them. They were just like Hatsune. I'd loved them all from the bottom of my heart.
Hehe. Look, I'm crying now. All alone on the rooftop of the school, where no-one can see me. But there isn't really anyone here. No bodies with souls anyway. None that I know. They're all NPCs…what Hinata called NPCs. Non-playable characters. Shadows meant to fill up the school, create this normal environment so that, when people who did have souls full of regret wandered in, they could live a normal life amongst them, let go of those regrets, and then vanish.
That's the purpose of this world after all. The purpose I took a long time to understand, to learn. The purpose that I will continue perpetuating, waiting as new lost and regretting souls come in and out of this world.
And I'll continue staying here and waiting until this new regret I've made can pass on from my heart.
It's a little ironic, actually. This new regret, I mean. Coming here, I was sad at all the unhappy memories my new friends carried around with them. I was sad they had to live with that, continuing to resist, continuing to defy a God they weren't even sure existed. That was a new regret, one that stayed with me even when I'd remembered the entirety of my life: those last moments I remembered only when I heard the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears. Those last seven days, at the end of which I, feeling my life letting go, signed myself as a donor so this body of mine could help someone else and give them the time they need to go on and make their dreams come true. I died believing that my body would help at least one person – and, if I had done that, I'd lived a fulfilling life.
Kanade told me, when I woke on her chest and told her that, that the person who received an organ of mine would be thanking me for the rest of their lives. And she was right, because she had my heart in her chest and that was her regret: that she couldn't thank me for the life I had given her.
I wonder…I never asked her if she'd known, in life, whose body that heart had come from. Of if it had been just a faceless, nameless life before her she couldn't touch, or find. She'd been her a long time. Far longer than me. Long enough to become the Student Council President. Long enough for Yuri, who'd been here for a long time as well, to begin the Shinda Sekai Sensen, whatever name it had had back then, and rebel against her position. Rebel against the angel who upheld the word of God, so she thought.
In fact, Kanade was like I am now: the president who enforces the school laws so this school can be a normal place, where the unhappy youths can come and study and play like they couldn't in real life and eventually depart without regrets. But that's not for everyone. Not for people like Yuri, whose regrets had nothing to do with a youth lost. Not for people like Kanade who were waiting for people to come to them, people who might never come, if they didn't have some regret in them after death.
And once I learnt that, I devoted myself to that as well. I hadn't moved on, despite learning I'd died without regrets. That meant I'd made a new regret for myself, somewhere. Maybe it was all my friends. Maybe it was fighting Kanade all this time, when I could have been helping all the souls here move on. That was what I thought. Either way, I could help them move on from that point. So I did. First Yui. Then some others: the rest of the SSS…then Yuri, Hinata and Naoi…and, finally, Kanade.
But the truth was, I didn't want Kanade to move on. It occurred to me that I should stay here. That maybe that was why I'd been brought here in the first place. To stay here, to guide all those regretting souls that would come and be unable to find peace. People like Yuri who can't just conform to the rules and relax and vanish back into the cycle of rebirth. I didn't mind not being reborn again…so long as I had Kanade by my side.
But Kanade's regret was that she'd never had the chance to thank me, and she did that and vanished, that one regret she'd born for so long gone. And I was still there, alone and in tears. I'm still here, even now. Watching new souls come and go, guiding the ones that need guidance and acting as the student council president in between.
But this president doesn't follow the rules. I don't go to classes. I'd graduated before beginning here after all. I might have still been seventeen, but that was only because the university exams were before the beginning of the new school year. I would have been eighteen by the time I started university, wherever I would up, whatever I would up doing. If it wasn't medicine, I think I would have found another way to get to medicine afterwards. I would have done something, somehow.
And now that regret, the regret of watching my friends fight something that doesn't need to be fought, is gone, but a new one has taken its place. Because I didn't get to spend that much time with Kanade, before she was gone. Just enough time to fall in love with her. So now I'm waiting for her. Just like she was waiting for me. And in the meantime I'm doing what I'd decided to do back then. I'm guiding all these souls. I'm just a little lonely, sometimes. Times like this where there don't seem to be any souls; only NPCs.
But I'm always a little lonely, because I'm waiting for Kanade. Even though the unselfish part of me hopes she won't die with regrets this time, to come back here.