There is little Asuka has to hate about her appearance. Her skin is flawless, her eyes sparkle even under dim light, and her smile is something delicate, carefully cultivated, almost as unreal-looking as Asuka herself. It's the same smile she's worn for a little over five years now, positioned the same way on the same face. She hasn't aged a day since what she assumes was a vampire got her some time between finals week and one too many parties.
Asuka isn't really sure what she is, exactly. She feels no compulsion to avoid sunlight like a cat avoids water; aside from tasting bad (as always), the garlic in the cafeteria food doesn't do anything; she's tried sprinkling holy water on herself, just to see what it would do, and felt nothing but unsanitary.
The only real problem she has, the reason for her doll-like smile, is that mirrors no longer work for her. In the beginning Asuka hadn't been able to ignore the flashes of movement she thought she saw out of the corner of her eye. She walks by mirrors now without stopping, abandoning a refection that's left her and seems never to be coming back.
That would explain, Asuka muses, why she hasn't noticed anything strange until now. When you've suddenly become a vampire overnight, or at least been cursed to disappear from mirrors, misplaced pens and overturned water bottles become just more annoying everyday occurrences.
But Asuka's stopped in front of the bathroom mirror today, and there's someone looking back at her. Her reflection is pale, like Asuka's looking at it through murky water, but she can make out blue hair and red eyes, and a wistfulness in them that Asuka imagines she might also have when she's sitting alone trying to remember what she look like.
"Hey," Asuka says to the reflection. Maybe this is the blur she's been spotting this whole time, or maybe she's dreaming. Or- here's a silly thought- what if it's the vampire that got her?
The reflection lifts a hand, spreads its fingers. Asuka does the same, copying what might be an attempt at a wave. The reflection smiles, a timid thing that shoots sparks up Asuka's spine. She tries to mimic that, too, the smile. It feels unnatural, but maybe that's because it isn't- it's the most genuine thing Asuka's offered anyone in a long while.
"Are you... can you talk?" The reflection shakes her head. Asuka feels a pang in her stomach- she's just lost the ability to see herself in mirrors; if she lost the ability to talk, she thinks she would've been driven mad. "You're a ghost, aren't you?" A nod. "Am I the first one to see you?" A nod, again.
"Huh..." Asuka sighs. At last she's found someone like her, someone different, and they can't even talk to each other. That, and whoever she's found is- "Hey, wait. You're dead, aren't you? Am I the only one who can see you, or does no one pay attention?" The question earns Asuka a shrug. "Am I supposed to help you- move on?"
The reflection laughs, but the giggle Asuka expects never comes. "I'm guessing that's a no?" she says to fill the silence. "Well, then what do you want? Someone to talk to?" The reflection nods a third time, then points at herself. Her hands form the shape of three letters in rapid succession, then tap at her chest.
"Your name?" asks Asuka. "Rei?" She's answered with an enthusiastic smile and a clapping motion. "Nice to meet you, I guess. Can you show up in any mirror, or just this one?"
Rei walks out of the mirror frame, then reappears a moment later. "That's a yes," Asuka says. "Do you know where my room is?" Rei nods. "Have you been following me this entire time?"
Rei's eyes dip toward the ground, and if she'd been able to speak Asuka imagines she would be saying something like 'yes, ever since I noticed you didn't show up in mirrors'. Asuka reaches for the space in front of the sink, where she thinks Rei might've been standing, or floating. "Well, I'll keep that in mind." She gives Rei what she hopes is another real smile and heads toward her dorm room.
Two days later, there's a mirror mounted on the wall beside her bed where the old one used to be, before Asuka threw it in the dumpster.
When Rei and Asuka communicate, Asuka talks enough for the both of them. Rei doesn't do much other than nod or shrug or shake her head, though Asuka's certain that she's twitched a few times, on the verge of trying to speak. At other times they just sit on Asuka's bed, watching shows off her laptop, Asuka scrolling through Netflix until she finds one Rei likes.
She hasn't asked how old Rei was when she died or when she was born, though from the style of her clothes, Asuka guesses it was recently. She hasn't thought of it much more than that. There's the implication that Rei might've died in the dorm building, maybe even in Asuka's room, and that's something Asuka doesn't need to consider.
Rei, for her part, is unobtrusive. She seems to know even before Asuka when her presence is wanted or not. Asuka guesses it's got to do something with her body language, or maybe Rei sticks her ghostly head through Asuka's backpack to see how much homework she's been assigned that day. Again, it's one of those things Asuka's never really set her mind to.
They're marathoning Disney movies late one night when Asuka realizes what she's found, aside from a strange girl who only appears in mirrors: a friend. Her eyes leave the screen and check the mirror beside her, where Rei is always sure to position herself so Asuka can see her reactions. She doesn't quite know where Rei's hand is- the mirror doesn't extend that far- but when Asuka places her hand on the bedspread, she thinks she's gotten it right.
The thing about being a ghost, Rei's found, is that you only really exist when someone's paying attention to you. No one's ever seen her besides Asuka, but even Asuka can't keep watching a mirror all day, and Rei's never been able to muster up that same energy required to move objects ever since Asuka's started speaking to her.
In hindsight it makes sense: how people find things that they've written off as lost, or maybe things that aren't even theirs, lying out in the open. Maybe it was a ghost who started carrying something and lost their concentration, or just a stroke of good luck. Rei wonders if this might be how ghosts die forever- try carrying something a distance way out of their league, and dissipate. She doesn't think it'll happen to her, but she's always kept that thought in the back of her mind, a warning, that if in her quest to bring Asuka something she ends up erasing herself, she'll be as horrible of a person as the driver who struck her as she crossed the street. She would be taking herself from Asuka, and that would be worse than if she'd never got Asuka's attention at all.
Rei has yet to leave the dorm and revisit the place where she died. She assumes it's a fear of wanting to move on that keeps her from going back, or something like that. Now it's compounded by a fear of leaving Asuka behind, one that outweighs any ideas she may have had of trying to go back.
She stays confined to the halls of the dormitory, too much of a coward to venture out and try and follow Asuka to a class, too weak to do much other than rattle doorknobs with the effort she exerts in trying to pick up those lost pieces of jewelry she's located behind dressers and under beds.
Someday she'll be strong enough to pull it off. Someday, she'll get Asuka a reminder. Someday, she'll find it in herself to carry something to where Asuka can see it, so that when she inevitably leaves the dorms, at least she'll be able to take the memory of Rei with her.
Rei hasn't been around much, but then again, Asuka hasn't been in her dorm for a long period of time lately, either. Asuka's hung around enough cute guys in college to know that when there's a chance, she should take it. If said chances involve staying out late and cramming in homework until the early hours, it'll just be something Asuka will have to deal with on her own.
She doesn't look into the mirror as often now. When she does, half the time Rei isn't there, and the other half her eyes are closed or she's doing something with her hands that Asuka can't pick up.
When two weeks have passed without them sitting down to talk or watching a movie, Rei seems to vanish. Asuka doesn't see her in the mirrors anymore, not even when she calls for Rei to try and say hello. She wonders if Rei's moved on, or maybe found someone else to be around, a possibility that shouldn't hurt Asuka like it does.
This continues for another week, this endless cycle of gazing at empty mirrors and calling for a missing ghost. During that week, Asuka comes back one night to find an unfamiliar ring lying just beside her door, as if it had been shoved under the gap between it and the carpet.
Asuka's attempt at a relationship, like all her previous ones, falls flat on its face. In spite of her looks and her fake smile, she yearns for something more than superficiality, and never finds it. Instead she's found a yearning for the quieter days of one-sided discussion and movies at unhealthy hours of the morning. But even when she's returned to lurking in her room, Rei doesn't show up again, despite Asuka carrying a hand mirror with her everywhere and even moving the one in her room off its mount, hauling it all around her dorm room just to make sure Rei wasn't hiding in one of the corners.
Her absence is one that's sorely felt: in the silence, in the times when Asuka wakes up and her first instinct is to check the mirror to see if Rei's standing over her, watching her rest. This time when Asuka gazes upon her seemingly abandoned room, it stings in her stomach worse than the time she first woke up and discovered she could no longer see herself in the mirror.
As the days pass, she stops checking the mirror and starts checking her laptop more often, looking for any evidence that Rei had existed before as a person, and that Asuka hadn't just imagined up her own imaginary friend. It takes her a few tries, but she gets it on the fourth day: a last name and a news report three paragraphs long that barely stretches the length of the screen.
At the bottom of the article is written an intersection, hidden so innocuously in a sentence that Asuka doesn't catch it on her first pass and nearly misses it on her second. A moment later, she's pulling on her jacket and looking up the directions to the nearest flower shop, spinning in a circle as she tries to find her wallet and keys without Rei to helpfully point out where she's laid them.
Asuka's halfway there, some six blocks down the road, when she realizes she never bothered asking what Rei's favorite color was. All they've ever really discussed was whatever Asuka wanted to talk about, and Asuka finds she's skipped the usual question- when Rei's birthday was, her favorite animal, where she'd want to go if she could pick any place in the world. And a searing realization with this: maybe Rei doesn't have favorites anymore. Maybe ghosts see the world only in grey, maybe that thin line that separates the dead from the living is more like a wall after all, and there's nothing to be found on the other side.
She thinks so hard that she doesn't realize she's overshot the flower shop until she's half a block past it. Asuka doubles back, eyeing the selection in the windows. She doesn't know what kind of flowers one buys for a memorial, and looking up flower language while standing outside the shop just seems tacky. Her gaze rakes across the display, settles on a small vase tucked somewhere in the back, a little cluster of white petals shot through with red. It might be the wrong message to send, or maybe she's not sending one at all, but Asuka decides she has to have that one and enters the shop.
Asuka leaves a few minutes later, a fist clenched around the plastic that the florists wrapped around the stems to keep them together. She wonders how strange this might look to the passersby- a girl who carries a bouquet like how one might carry a bludgeon. The mental image she conjures up is so ridiculous that Asuka can't bring herself to focus on it for long: it's one of those things that gets pushed out of conscious thought one way or another, the silly things that make vampires and ghosts seem plausible.
She makes it to the intersection stated in the article and stops a few feet away from the crosswalk, looking around like she expects something to be there. Maybe Rei's name scraped in the base of the stoplight post, maybe one of those monuments Asuka sees on the side of the road sometimes, made of barbed wire and wood and heartfelt messages. Instead she stares down four identical light posts, half-obscured by the trickle of people coming and going across the street.
Already Asuka feels as though she's been here for too long. There's a restlessness growing inside her, one that makes her want to turn and go and forget she'd even had a plan for those flowers anyway. But she's made it this far, and at the very least it'll make Asuka feel like she's paying Rei back for all those nights she's spent listening to Asuka rant on and on about things only the living would bother worrying about.
She lays her flowers down on a sidewalk that's probably been bare for as many years as Rei's been dead. She stands there for a while, listening to the cars whipping by and the murmuring of the people moving around her. They are, in that moment, two invisible girls, one still living and standing above a memorial for the other that, until this moment, hadn't existed.
She thinks, in retrospect, that maybe those flowers would have been better served sitting in a vase on her desk rather than lying at the base of a metal pole. It's not like Asuka to rethink her actions, but she's been thinking of one in particular since she left those flowers behind. Rei still hasn't come back from wherever she's gone, and Asuka doesn't think she's going to. It was silly of her to hope that Rei would just show up after Asuka dropped a few flowers by the side of the road, and yet it'd be equally foolish for Asuka to admit she didn't miss Rei.
Asuka sighs and folds her arms atop her desk, rests her head on them. "It's boring now that you're gone," she mutters to the empty room. Rei's never responded to her aloud, but even so Asuka can't help the disappointment that seeps from her to fill the silence. Her pen slides off the edge of her desk, clatters on the floor. "Where'd you go?"
Again, nothing. Another stupid idea: maybe it's too warm for Rei to appear, maybe ghosts only like the cold. Though that would mean that Rei should've disappeared later, when the temperatures turned hotter and there wasn't still snow on the ground. No, there's only one answer that really makes sense, and it's that Rei left because Asuka stopped talking to her.
Asuka groans and shoves her face into the crook of her arm. "Stupid," she says, chastising herself. "The one friend you get, and you go and lose her. Great job, Asuka. First you lose your reflection, and now this- huh?" The pen she'd dropped has rolled back, tapping against her sock. As she watches, it rolls back and forth, persistently nudging her smallest toe. "What's with you- hey!"
Asuka jumps up and runs to the mirror, staring at it eagerly. It's empty, but only for a moment: Rei drifts into view from the direction of Asuka's desk, waving at Asuka. "You!" Asuka exclaims, extending a hand to grab at the space the mirror says Rei is occupying. "Where were you?"
Rei shrugs, then gestures toward the door. "Out?" asks Asuka. "You went out?" A nod. "Where?" Rei makes another motion with her hand, drawing a circle in the air. "Around? Couldn't you have told me before-" Asuka cuts herself off, biting her lip. "No, you know what? It's my fault you ended up leaving in the first place. I shouldn't- I'm sorry."
Rei shrugs, then makes a patting motion somewhere by Asuka's shoulder. Asuka looks down, half expecting to see something there besides her own shirt, but Rei is still invisible to her. "So what were you up to?" Asuka wonders. "Do ghosts have stuff to do in their free time?"
Rei's brows furrow, and a cute frown works its way across her face. For once Asuka's glad Rei is behind her; it means she won't notice the warmth rising to Asuka's cheeks. Rei points to herself, then to the pen on the floor and the ring lying on Asuka's desk. "You were moving things?" A shrug. "You were... trying to find something you lost?" This time, Rei shakes her head. "Look, you can move stuff, right? Why not just write what you wanna say?"
Rei gives Asuka a woeful smile and gestures at the pen. It remains still on the floor. "You can't do that much?" Asuka says, and receives a relieved smile from Rei. "Then just tell me with your hands if it's so important."
Rei rolls her eyes, but she holds up a finger, telling Asuka to wait. A moment later she begins forming letters with her hands, spelling out words for Asuka. "You went for a walk? Really?" Asuka says. "That's a long walk." Rei motions again. "Did your testing give you anything?" Rei nods and points again to the pen and the ring. "You couldn't move stuff before?"
Rei hesitates, seemingly frustrated, then spells three words with her hands: I saw you. "Saw me?" Asuka blusters, already knowing what Rei must be referring to. "Where? Not the shower, right?" Rei laughs for a bit, then leans forward, and from the way her eyes reflect off the mirror, Asuka knows what Rei is telling her. "Okay, yeah, I went to where you died. It, I dunno, it felt right."
'I went back for the first time', Rei spells out.
"Why?" Rei smiles, and that's enough to tell Asuka that's one question she won't be getting answered today. "Okay, fine. Why'd you come back?"
Rei points a finger at the mirror, at Asuka. "Me," Asuka says dryly. "You came back for me after I ditched you?" Rei makes a motion like placing something down with both hands, and Asuka gets it immediately. That bunch of flowers has said more than Asuka has ever told Rei amongst all their talks combined. "Alright," Asuka says. "Yeah, I was stupid, and I missed you. You want me to apologize and make it up to you, since we can't exactly hug it out?"
Rei laughs and shakes her head, moving her hands again. "You'll haunt me? What kind of bullshit is this? Wait..." Asuka's eyes narrow. "Does that mean you'll follow me even after I get out of here?" Rei nods, a cheerful bobbing of her head. Asuka sighs, feigning exasperation. "Come to college for a degree, leave with a ghost. Not what I planned." Rei merely shakes her head again, leaning forward and wrapping her arms around where Asuka's shoulders should be. "So we'll be together for the rest of time?" Asuka whispers. Rei smiles and Asuka lifts a hand, leaving it in midair by where she imagines Rei's hands are. "Then that's perfect."
I've been lazy posting my shorts here so I'll be playing catch-up this week but here's my Valentine's Day contribution. I've also got a hell-ton of drabbles but really who came here for that.