a/n . first story in a while. Based off the Vocaloid song 'People Are Dying Somewhere', mostly the unfinished PV. It's a rather short story, but I hope someone enjoys it nonetheless c:
song sm9375472, pv sm9400510
the girl isn't anyone in particular, but she can be Miku.
They fascinated her, the reports flickering across the TV.
They repulsed her, too. They were so disgusting. And yet . . .
Whenever she turned it on, there they would be, the horrible deaths – haunting her, following her. The deaths that reminded her that she didn't deserve to live. The deaths that reminded her of her own debt.
She didn't really care about any of the deaths except her own, when she really thought about it.
It had been a cool spring day, the sort of day on which one expects nothing to happen except good things. She had been cruising along the highway at almost 120 kilometres an hour; there had been absolutely no one around.
Except for the truck that appeared out of nowhere, crawling slowly the wrong way.
Even if you're up against something moving slow, at 120 kilometres an hour nothing stands a chance. She smashed straight into the truck, of course. Her car was destroyed.
But she stood outside of it, outside of herself. She was an onlooker, on the side of the road, very confused but completely unharmed in the horrific accident. She pulled out her cell phone and called the fire department, told them there'd been a horrific crash on a deserted stretch of freeway.
She left before they ever got there and walked for several hours before calling a friend to drive her home.
When she turned on the TV that night, hoping that it had all been a horrible dream, it showed the wreck and said that the car had been so mangled in the crash they couldn't identify the bits of body they found. The truck driver had been asleep, tired from a long night; he had burned to death in the fire caused by the crash.
Silently she apologized to God for ever being born.
She tried to continue on with her life after the incident. Kept going to school. Kept getting good grades, and making friends with the right crowds. When people asked about her car, she told them she'd had to sell it in order to pay rent.
That was believable enough. She'd always been poor, after all. A few of them pitched in a few hundred yen every once in a while to help her.
But the deaths haunted her. Every evening she would turn on the news and they would be there. It became ritual, and while at first she was horrified at each and every death (to the point of becoming physically ill upon seeing a pair of particularly horrible corpses, mangled and torn up), by this point she was desensitized.
One day a friend was absent during class. She thought nothing of it, assuming they'd taken ill. But when she turned on the news report it showed their body. Or at least what was left of it.
Burned to death, murmured the TV reporters, background noise to the maelstrom of thoughts screaming through her head. Horrible car accident. Head-on collision.
Exactly the way she'd been meant to die.
She screamed and picked up the TV and almost threw it across the room, but after what felt like a lifetime she put it back down and retired, shaking, to the corner. She sobbed for a while.
In two days she managed to stop crying.
After a week she didn't care at all.
A half a year later the same thing happened. A friend didn't show up to class, and this time she was prepared for it; she claimed to be feeling ill (not far from the truth) and headed for the nurses' office.
She went straight past it, of course, and walked for half an hour to get to where she somehow knew the accident would happen.
She sat there and watched until it did; a head-on collision at 100 kilometres an hour for both cars. Neither driver survived. She called the paramedics and went back to school without anyone knowing anything more.
The report came on the TV as usual. None of the cameras that monitored the highway so much as considered the idea that she existed; no one would ever know she had been there, watching, with life and death in her hands.
This time she didn't cry at all.
By the third time it happened she was ready to give up. If this – whatever it was that was haunting her – wanted to pick off all her friends, then it was going to have a lot of people to kill.
She didn't bother, this time, with going to watch. She just called the paramedics and told them where to go when she knew it had happened.
She watched the report blankly. They had stopped hurting her at all. What good was this vengeful spirit doing, desensitizing her?
Maybe it just wanted to make her not care that she would die.
Well, it worked.
Finally the day came. The blessed, dreaded day.
She had gotten a car, for the first time in years.
It was a cool spring day, the sort of day on which one expects nothing to happen except good things. She was cruising along the highway at almost 120 kilometres an hour; there was absolutely no one around.
Except for the truck that appeared out of nowhere, still crawling slowly the wrong way.
This time she wasn't watching it from outside, she was in her car, hurtling towards the truck where she knew the driver was sleeping, and she wanted desperately to at least warn him. She looked around frantically, and out her window she saw –
Herself. Standing there, outside, watching quietly, confused.
Then everything was gone.