A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, L1 – write a multichip with chapters under 2000 words.

This is a rewrite, so some things have been changed and other gaps have been quite liberally filled. Lots of jam for these biscuits, which means its slow going too and rather abstract at times – but the idea works better as a slow paced and short-chaptered work so that's how it'll be trotting along.

Enjoy!

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Existence
Chapter 1

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It was a dark world: the word where the curtains were drawn on a sky that no longer showed its bright stars, drawing a path to oblivion.

But that was when there were stars, and oblivion was a cliff built with grass that still clung to that morning's dew and stones that still held a little bit of the sun and the unforgiving ocean below –

But that was a lie too, wasn't it, because there were saviours who saved those who didn't want to be saved even in the ocean that was said to be the giver and the receiver of all life. People who didn't want to be caught up in the romantic impossibility it so tantalizingly offered, only to be crushed when that thin strand of hope was trampled into dust.

He'd watched her struggle with that thread of hope broken into fragments no more dense than sand. His mother. That woman who'd found the dark world unbearable and had tried to drown it – and herself. But she had failed. The ocean had spat her out, again, and she had cursed it bitterly with her broken body and broken mind.

He remembered those curses well.

The ocean that they would reach if they walked straight… The ocean that called, with its arms wide – transparent arms, that broke with a touch, and transparent chest that became a hard, slippery thing that threw them back…

He shut his curtains to that world. It was too quick to change. Untrustworthy.

Inside his room, inside his mind, was a world with a blanket of darkness that the light of lies could not rip.

He would call it his eternal world.

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Eternity did not last. The lights in his room would come on and the spell would break. Yukiko's voice would cut through an inexact haze and he would lose the final threads of his waking dream and surrender to reality again.

It was easy to surrender to reality when there was someone there: speaking, touching…even simply breathing…

Smiling. Even though it seemed like a rare thing sometimes, to see that smile.

But it wasn't Yukiko's fault she was rarely home.

And she was home now.

'Come,' she said, offering a hand. 'Dinner's ready.'

She had been home for a while.

'And what were you doing in the dark anyway?' She frowns as she looks around. Reprimanding.

The dark was always there when she was home.

It wasn't through any supernatural hand. She worked all day, leaving before dawn and arriving home after dark. There was no other way to work, no other way to have enough, not only for herself but for all the scraps of family held together by frayed threads. There was him and her, in the house. His mother in one hospital. His sister in another. His sister who never saw the dark, never saw the sky. The ocean couldn't even try and swallow her, nor could the night. She was in an eternal waking, the antithesis of their mother, in her eternal sleep.

Eternity was a strange concept for all of them. Eternity was that thing that would eventually come to a conclusion. Rest would give way to healing or death. Sleep would give way to death or the waking world. And the night gave way to the day, and the day to the night. Loneliness opened the door to a companion and then they would pass through it again, taking that brief meeting back with them and leaving only an echo behind.

'I was waiting, Auntie,' he replied, truthfully, as he always did.

Their entire conversation was a dance they committed to, time and time again.

'Come down then,' she said, withdrawing. 'Dinner's ready.'

She'd said that already, but that was the nature of their lines. Words melting together. Sentences melting together. Time dragging on. They needed to be caught, chained, confined – otherwise they became insignificant and forgotten.

Time did that. Humans had long ago slapped on labels: seconds, minutes, hours, years…

'I'll cook tomorrow,' he offered – or acknowledged. Because tomorrow was one of those things that was both twenty-four hours later, and never.

His aunt nodded and vanished down the stairs. He gave his sanctuary a last, fleeting look, and then followed her.

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Dinner was a necessity in many ways. It gave them food. It gave them companionship. In a way it also gave him an anchor – because dinner was the only meal they had together, even if most nights they'd eat past nine in the night. His aunt was lonely too: her husband had abandoned her a long time ago and she came away wounded and bitter for it. But perhaps she was the lucky one. She had a wall to help keep the sorrow at bay. His mother had nothing like that. Just the teasing ocean. Just her own eternal world, just out of reach no matter how she reached for it.

His sanctuary was easier to touch and he was grateful. The ocean was cruel, pretending to climb, pretending to offer a hand – and even to the parched throats wondering closed, pretending its water was blue and pure when it was laden with salt that burned instead of soothed.

Downstairs, with the windows parted, he could just make out the road leading to the cliff, and the ocean beyond it. The lighthouse too was a small speck that appeared and disappeared in the distance, like a candle flame. They sit where they could both see the scene, though his aunt never went closer. She despised the place. She feared it. He always found himself drifting too close.

Downstairs, eating together at the table, they were at an equilibrium. They exchanged quiet, meaningless conversation – how their day had passed, what their plans were for the coming days. Things that slipped into place on the calendars that were their lives. Things that could fit on a single wall, leaving the other three for exposition.

It was the perfect image, the perfect stage – but that was all it was. It had ceased to be special for the both of them, a routine to which they danced. They kept it now only to keep that semblance of stability in their lives – because both of them had places they could vanish into and never return, if the rest of their life allowed.

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The food in his stomach and the wetness still on his laps always made it a little harder to slip into his sanctuary. He accounted for that with another bit of routine.

He'd turn the lamp on as soon as he came in and the place would be transformed. The glare begged for action, much like the darkness begged for inaction. And he acted. He moved. He prepared for bed and then emptied his bag and spread out his work in priority order and did however much he could before midnight. He wasn't a perfect student by any means nor did he allow for it. Instead, he did as much as necessary and a little more: enough to be acknowledged, but not called upon. The highest seats, and the lowest – he didn't care for either of them. Perhaps if it weren't a part of his routine he would forego it. Maybe if he hadn't already been in school and in its ways, it wouldn't have become a part of his routine.

There was a lot of uncertainty in the world. But routine gave an illusion of certainty and those two or three hours before midnight each day, with the glaring lamp, was that time for him.

And then the work would be done and he'd flick his light off and the room would sit in its afterglow before settling into true darkness again. And he'd lie on his bed and stare at the blank ceiling or equally blank curtains and drift in a cauldron of unorganised thoughts.

When he didn't need to arrive at a conclusion, the drifting was somehow lulling, like a boat out to sea. And after all was said and done, there was nowhere he really needed to be.

And soon after his light went off, another light blinked out as well, and the Kousaka household becomes completely drenched in the night's darkness, as well as the two souls within it, until the sun came up and the cycle, the dance, began again.