This is my first Rimahiko fan fic in a while, so I would appreciate some feedback on how you think I did portraying them (Even though it's AU, I feel like I didn't do the characters' personalities justice. I would love for some commentary on how exactly to portray Rima and Nagi in a more authentic way). Anything constructive (as far as criticism goes) or positive is fine with me with my writing. I really would like to grow as a writer. It means a lot to me, and I truly do appreciate the time you viewers spend reading my work. Enjoy~

Moving On.

'There are so many things that I want to tell you so badly, but I just can't.'

It was funny how long I stared into his eyes so desperately trying to form the right words to say. It was also funny how such a wonderful boy like Nagihiko would even tolerate dealing with such of a dysfunctional someone. I couldn't verbalize how much he meant to me. I couldn't even tell him what had happened to me.

Our relationship was on a standby – basically Nothing town at this point – because there was a disconnect between my tongue and my thoughts; all I could say was that there was nothing to say – no way to say it all properly. It was strained tight, frayed at the edges, all because of me. I can't seem to escape the fact that all this is my fault.

"What the hell, Rima," Nagi snapped.

His eyes were the most intoxicating thing about his appearance. Most people showed their emotion through their body language or the words they said. Nagihiko Fujisaki chose to hide his behind eyes. For him, eyes these days were like emotive murky waters in his irises for the world to see. They reflected anger back at me, a painful sight, but one that I was intrinsically drawn to.

I longed to look away, but own eyes couldn't, keeping them locked with his. I longed to run, but my feet were cemented to the ground.

"Why didn't you tell me what was wrong? How—why did you do this to yourself?"

'I want to tell you about everything, but I can't. I can't with that look you have on your face all of the time now. I just need you to look me in the eyes and think that I'm okay, that I'm Rima, and that somehow I'm normal. I just really need that from you.'

"You said you'd never leave me. You said you were going to be the one person in my life who was different. Why did you lie, Rima-chan?"

Again, there was nothing. There were clear thoughts in my mind. There was something in my soul that compelled me to find him, that made this confrontation possible. Even so, I was rendered useless in front of Nagi, a friend so dear to me, a friend who needed another to wipe the tears cascading down his cheeks or the warmth of a hug.

All I had was words unsaid. My words could not comfort him. They couldn't even touch him. And even if they could, they were not what he wanted to hear. They never would be.

He wanted something that he could see; he wanted closure, for something or someone to just explain to her how something like this could happen to a girl like me. Why someone like me would do something like this. To him, it didn't quite add up. It didn't make sense to me either. All of my thoughts lead me to a singular conclusion that the answer that this hysterical Nagi wanted was the one that she simply could not hear.

'You might still be looking for reasons. But there were no reasons. It was never meant to add up. Nagihiko, it just happened.'

It was interesting to see something so concerned about me, to see someone so compassionate and so sympathetic and so generally selfless that he could cry on my behalf. He could cry for all the things that had happened to me. He could cry when my eyes were incapable of producing such things.

Nagihiko was truly a kind-hearted soul, even when I screwed him over. He stayed with me even when he thought –when he knew- I was not around. I would never understand it, why a boy who felt emotions so intensely would be willing to endure the worst type of sadness for me. I would never understand a boy like him.

It was interesting how he found all of the things I intended on hiding. He pried and prodded and sneaked her way into finding out the things that he shouldn't have. It was hard to be mad at Nagi for finding and reading the diary under my bed or for cracking my blog password in his spare time. He was like a baby who cried too loudly during a plane ride—he did not know what he was doing, despite the fact it severely irritated everyone, included myself, around him—only that it was natural to do such things. He simply didn't acknowledge that he was crossing a very real, yet very figurative line—that he was going too far. He was simply too obsessed with understanding, and that would lead him nowhere. He didn't get it. He never would. Nagihiko was one the most oblivious boys I have ever met.

Or he was, at least.

'Let's forget about each other. Ignore what we feel. No one really needs to get hurt, or at least more hurt than we already are.'

Nagihiko stopped the one sided conversations. He accepted that I would never respond. I didn't blame him, really.

I proceeded about my own classes, I took to my studies, learning everything I could about this place, and I searched for something –someone – to keep me company. To get me away from here, where he was always so close.

Most people cared enough to see my corpse in the casket. Nagi never truly let go like all of the others did. What happened to me was a tragedy – something my mother made sure would not happen again and something my father yelled at me for, I mean, for what I did, it was warranted – but it was forgotten. I was nothing but a whisper among the hallways. I have a face to be seen occasionally, but nowhere as relevant as I used to be.

He, however, stayed silent, but thinking- constantly thinking of the why, how, when I could have done it.

Eventually the deep-seated anger and the systematic sadness in his heart had turned into a void in his chest.

Numbness was a misplaced emotion in Nagi. It didn't fit the way that he used to walk or talk or think. It didn't fit the way he used to feel. He became insensitive –rough around the edges - and spiteful.

It was interesting how I essentially ruined him. How I showed him how feeling nothing at all was somehow more beautiful and efficient than how he was before. How his eyes and his words became careful of what they say, of how he was eternally careful with who he let in. How Imogen Heap and Placebo blasted through headphones became gospel. How spite grew a branch of bitter sarcasm I had never seen from him before, sometimes sassy, something joking, but mostly gravely serious.

I wasn't feeling much at this point.

Emotion used to be fire, a burn that wouldn't stop searing against my chest. Emotions were recycled now. I ate all of my emotions up like leftovers, and there was nothing left.

There was no reason I was still here, really. I was detached, removed from everything. I became an animated corpse, a stoic consciousness tied to a body. I just wanted to leave. But he wouldn't let me.

"I want you to know that what happened to me wasn't something you could have stopped. I know that there are things that I haven't said, but you must understand that I simply cannot say them ever. I know you. You're the most empathetic person I knew, so you have to understand this. Please leave me be. Move on. You're complicating this for the both of us."

The day Nagihiko Fujisaki found happiness in the form of another, it was snowing. Then again, it was winter in Northern Japan. A better question would've been when it wasn't snowing.

Nagihiko offered up his jacket to a girl with bright pink hair in his homeroom class. Despite her incessant shivers, her morning smile was the warmest thing I had seen in this place all morning.

We learned her name was Amu Hinamori, the new girl who had only been in Seiyo for a week.

The two walked together and then chatted about Pre-Calculus and Nikidou's quirkiness—a type of crazy that both Nagi and I silently agreed mirrored her own in some ways—on the way and chose to sit next to each other throughout the class.

One thing led to another, and sitting next to each other in class led to Nagihiko tutoring the hopeless pinkette in Physics.

"No, Amu. You can't find velocity with just the formula for kinetic energy. They only gave you height and mass!"

"But I thought m was meters."

"Well yes, but… in this case, it represents mass. H is meters."

"What? Oh oh oh. I get it. So what's the mgh stuff?"

"That's potential energy. The thing that's equal to kinetic energy. Don't you remember Newton's t—"

"Yeah, yeah… Okay, thanks Nagi."

Nagihiko couldn't help but feel it. A pang of happiness that tugged on his heart strings. He missed the feeling of helping others with stuff like this, of helping those like me pass Trig last year. He saw Amu in the same way, a bit comical and hopeless in Physics.

He and Hinamori eventually ended up spending more time with each other. Besides their study sessions, the two partook to parfaits and movie nights on weekends, meetings that turned more romantic than platonic with time.

It was odd watching two individuals talk constantly, but with words that didn't necessarily matter to either of them. I was learning that Nagihiko was looking for different things in Amu's words than he did with mine.

With me, he wanted something substantial. With her, he wanted chatter, something that could make him laugh his life away. He wanted a sizeable distraction from the damage I made.

He always got what he wanted with her.

Through Hinamori, he was forgetting me, and I couldn't help but feel glee, glee that I could finally leave my prison cemented by his side, forced into soundless coercion with his unadulterated suffering.

However, the slightest part of me couldn't help but be just the slightest bit jealous.

"Don't come crying back to me when you've told the world that you've moved on. You made your choice, and that's great, but please let me make mine too."

"Rima. Rima. Rima!" he screams, falling out of bed. Nagihiko gasped for air like it was a trend about to go out of style. His shrieks were laced with heartbreak and desperation, long hair pooling with salty sweet. I could have seen veins popping out of his neck if I had tried harder. I almost reached out to pull those purple locks like I always had when we were younger, but I didn't. There was an Amu to do that for him.

"Nagi. She's gone, okay. She's dead. She's in a better place now, and she wouldn't want you to be this sad. Talk to someone. Please get some help. You need to move on." She says, hiding irritation behind crossed arms and rolled eyes. It was the fifth night in succession that his husband cried out for a woman that wasn't her. What a great honeymoon this was turning out to be, "please Nagi, move on. For me. Imagine if I was like this with Ikuto."

"But Ri-rima. Sh-she's," he was writhing on the floor, his lungs burning, begging for oxygen even though he was panting as fast as his lungs would allow him too. His skin his pale, his face is contorted, and his eyes are closed, as if he is remembering something excruciatingly painful.

Nagi opens his eyes in an instant, as if he were possessed or he's reached some kind of life-changing epiphany. I swear those golden brown eyes stare into mine in a pause too long to be unintentional, and he whispers to me, "she's never left."

I back away from the disoriented husband and confused wife, and I finally do what I've wanted to do since the end of then.

I leave.

"You forgot about me first. You were the one that chose to move on, so it's only fair that I do the same too."

It had been years, and I've spent the majority of my life in the now.

The details of then were fuzzy in my mind.

I wasn't sure how I ended up here or why exactly I was here. I couldn't remember most things from then. All I know is now.

"What do you remember, Rima?" Ikuto asks with a quiet urgency. He and I can talk to one another in a way that he cannot talk to the one he wants to see.

"A boy," I reply.

I can remember a flash of purple so dark that it almost seemed black in low lighting. Purple and gold that burned through my eyes. Beautiful pain. There was something unadulterated about good then, but that good dimmed in the now.

He was irrelevant now.

"Don't you want to see him then? Touch him? Go down to all of them and show them that you're still out there? Give them something, anything, Rima?"

I had known Ikuto practically since the first time I moved to the now, and he had been obsessed with this idea of fulfillment through a girl with unnaturally pink hair.

Ikuto was an apathetic type with most things in this life then, so he decided to make up for it in the now. He's been transformed from a cynic to a hopeless idealist, constantly gnawing at the mundane world in an effort to talk with his lost love, to explain what he couldn't say then but seems necessary for her to know now.

He flaunted his newfound passion for everything mortal through what I can only describe as ballads and tears. He was what mundanes referred to as ghosts. I was more convinced that in actuality he was once a Gothic poet. More than that even, I was annoyed.

"What was his name, Rima?"

"Excuse me?"

"What was his name? Hers is Amu. Yours is Rima. What was his?"

"Amu."

"No, his."

"He was—he was no one, Ikuto."

"His name was no one. I find that highly unli—"

"I said he was no one to me. Now man up, and move on already!"

Those words tasted like soap on my tongue. They were the words he needed to here in the tone needed to get this mantra through his thick skull, but they were so… hopeless.

My words were a certain type of lifeless that even I couldn't grow to understand. No one in the now really understood their condition. Some were like Ikuto, gripping onto their mortality and all the things they had lost. Others were like me. They moved on.

I'm not quite sure what moving on is. I just grew used to the now, quirks and all. I grew used to the screams and the cries and the blank stares of this place and how no one really did anything about it. I was used to the feeling nothing at all.

In the now, I found that it was harder to hold on than it was to just let go. It was harder to grapple with the then than to live in the now.

There was a purple stab wound in the center of my heart. It bled golden ichor and screamed my name. I used to scream back, but I couldn't even produce an echo. There was nothing left.

In the now, it is not about happiness. It is about not being subjugated to the pain. In a way, that is what morality is too: the pursuit of not feeling pain.

I'm not sure if I like the now. All I know is that it is better to accept it.

After all, I'm the one who chose it.

wow. this was wow. Sadder than I intended, anyways.

Well anyways, please, please review. I'm begging you. I can't emphasize enough how much feedback means to me, so if you have the time, please comment on what you liked or what you didn't.