1
"Can I ask how you died?" Neku does not look at her, eyes trailing up and down the queue at the ramen shop. He misses the flinch. She pulls Mr. Mew closer and stares at him to make sure he's not going to start looking at her.
"It was an accident." It is an unnatural voice, lacking the expected confidence and energy, one she had often used in those days before the Game, when she was just Shiki. It is a voice that apologizes for existing. "It was an accident."
He nods very slightly. She knows he saw the nervous hand waving, heard the hurried insistence in her voice. He must have.
People notice the little things, right? She bites her lip as she pulls at a thread poking out of Mr. Mew's tail. It's going to unravel and the seam will pop and she'll have to fix it. She stops biting her lip because it's so not cute, but she keeps pulling, twisting the thread around her fingers. She likes the purple patches that bloom on her fingertips.
She's not sure if she feels different from the way she was when she was alive.
People talk about the little things, right?
2
She's standing on the edge of the rooftop. She strategically placed herself on the side opposite her mom's apartment. She doesn't want her to see if she does anything. But she's not going to do anything, because she can't even poke herself with a needle on purpose.
She does what she used to do when she felt overwhelmed. She calls Eri. She feels younger doing this. Why does she always have to bother Eri?
"Eri here, well actually, Eri's not here which is how this whole answering machine thing works. There's gonna be a beep, then you talk. Got it?"
"Uh, hey... I guess you're not there... Well, goodbye..."
She calls a few more times, walking on edge. Listening to Eri's message and letting the silence stretch on. The sound of her breathing into the phone is mixed with the whipping of the wind. Eri hasn't been answering the phone much recently. She says she likes texting better.
The phone is ringing in her hand. She steps forward to steady herself, click the green TALK button, and maybe fix her life. She slips.
"Shiki? Shiki?! Where are you? SHIKI!"
Screaming and falling and Eri's voice on the other side.
There is a sound like panicked sobbing followed by a crash. The phone's twin, somewhere far off, has fallen to the ground. A blip and the foreign sounds and foreign voices are gone.
3
Shiki wakes up, somehow. There is no soft bed to mollify her fears. There is only hard sidewalk, Mr. Mew, and the sounds of people who don't care stomping and shouting all around.
She pulls herself off of the ground, her eyes catching her reflection in a shop window beside her. Eri stares back at her, red-eyed and clutching that awful ugly stuffed animal to her chest. She should have consulted Eri before she put him together. Maybe he'd be cuter, then. Eri tugs at her hair and slaps her arm. Eri reaches for glasses that aren't there and gasps, shocked that she can see without them.
Hell is weird, Shiki thinks, sucking in her stomach and admiring the actual curves- waist, hips, behind- she tried never to stare at for too long. If she was going to be attached to this, she was going to finally get a good look. There is something distinctly ugly (no, Shiki) in the way Eri's face moved. That could be fixed with time, she thought, trying out a wide smile. She giggled a bit, strangely giddy.
It's almost as if Shiki isn't here any more. Something in her crushes at this thought. There is a glistening in her eyes, she blinks away tears. She looks down at the pack strapped around her tiny waist and remembers the stash of makeup Eri always kept in it. She walks into the nearest restaurant, not stopping until she makes it to the bathroom. She stands in front of the mirror, artificial light glowing in her eyes, and she begins to kill Shiki a second time. Only this time, it could not be mistaken for an accident.
4
"I'm Shiki. Misaki Shiki," she says without thinking. There is the distant sound of her universe rebuilt crashing down. Shiki again. She smiles brilliantly at the boy and he scowls. She wants to be angry like him, but it's too hard. "Come on, what's your name?"
"Neku."
"That's pretty cute."
"Shut up."
Shiki grins and pulls him away.
5
"I'm sorry," he whispers and it's the first apology she's heard in years. Since that group of boys decided to cut off bits of her hair during arts and crafts. She's kept her hair short since then. Eri's hair brushes her shoulders and she doesn't like it. It's great hair, soft and sweet smelling, strawberry cream on top a death and sweat sundae. It's weird.
Shiki wants her hair back.
"It's okay," she replies, "Well, it's not okay. Don't do that again. We're partners, right? I want us to live- to win."
"Let's win," he echoes, almost making eye contact, "Anyone who tries to stop us- we'll give 'em hell, alright?"
"Absolutely. Though it doesn't seem all that nice..."
6
"Eri never… meant it like that," Shiki is shaking and sobbing. Neku's hand is draped uselessly over her shoulder- but he's trying. "I almost- I wanted to- I- I'm so sorry."
"Shiki, it's- it's okay," Neku is looking at her. Looking at Eri.
She gives him a Shiki half-smile, dabbing her eyes with the handkerchief he produced out of nowhere. Well, boys' pockets are always so deep.
"You ever feel like really small things are wrong and you're… supposed to do something about them… like if you fix those little things… everything will look better?" Shiki rambled, wringing her hands in tight circles. She sighs. "Sorry, that's stupid."
"It makes sense, I think. But small stuff is tough to see and tougher to fix." There was a pause, but no silence as they sat in the doorway of a shop that blasted cheery J-pop into the world at large. "Worry a little, but… don't try to fix everything. Some loose buttons are just fine, okay?"
Know who you are… Know what you want… Know what you got…
7
She's in comfortable old clothes and Mr. Mew is resting snug in her purse. For a first try, he is pretty cute. She would make other stuffed cats, improve the pattern she started with him, but she knew he was the one she'd keep.
"We're meeting friends today," she pressed a finger at his nose. She re-positioned her bag strap on her shoulder and kept going.
She can hear them before they're in sight. Beat is always so loud. Neku and Rhyme are laughing. She moves strategically, so she ends up behind Neku. She hopes he likes her face. She stared at it in her hand mirror for awhile this morning and snapped a couple pictures with her cell phone camera. She likes her face. Most of the time.
She taps on his shoulder and he turns around, smiling. She has Mr. Mew in her arms and she waves one of his paws at the boy. He laughs.
"You look great," he scratches at his face nervously and offers her a hand.
"I know, right?" Shiki takes his hand and shakes it. She believes him and she believes herself too.
"Where we gon' eat? Better be cheap, because 'Phones here says I gotta buy," Beat groused. Rhyme fake elbows him in the stomach and he pretends to double over in agony. He's laughing in between fake screams, but there is something a little too real in his writhing. No one knows it, but they've seen some real shit. Logically, Shiki knows that no one ever really knows anything about the people they pass every day, but it still feels weird.
They've been ripped apart and put back together in so many little ways. A week ago she woke up in her bed instead of a street corner and no one at home knew for sure that anything was different.
Her mom told her she seemed happier this morning. She told her she finally fixed up a pesky hole on Mr. Mew's left leg and she hugged her.
"It's a small thing to get yourself so jazzed up about, but I'm glad to see you looking a little better. Tell me when you're feeling down, alright?"
"Sure, mom. And, I'm glad too."
Writer's woes: This is a semi-personal cathartic piece, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not sure if I touched properly on this subject, sometimes I feel like my writing doesn't work for really serious stuff. I wanted this to be a nice subtle thing, and I hope it worked. Writing the happy ending/improvement bits were a lot harder than I thought they'd be, but also really comforting. I wrote the first couple of parts when I was in a super dark place this summer and I found them when I was going through my google doc of twewy fics. I felt like I had to do something with it. so yeah
Stay Strange,
Hillary