She Sees Him Like a Ghost
By: Aviantei
[Twelve Shots of Summer: Gotta Write 'Em All! 2-12 A]
[Kagerou Day 2018]
A Kagerou Project One Shot
When she opens the door, she can't take her eyes of the scene. She knows she shouldn't be staring, but there's no helping it. Her eyes are glued to her brother's corpse, to the bloodstain on his chest, to the scissors sticking out, all of it illuminated in the light from his screensaver, and she knows, she knows he's dead and all it means, that she'll never bicker with him again, that she'll never get to burst into his room and tell him to turn the computer off, tell him to go outside, but she just can't stop staring.
This must be what people feel like when they look at her, and Kisaragi Momo finally understands what they must go through.
Now she understands the need to not look away.
She screams at some point, not taking any note of how long it's been since even opened the door in the first place, and her mother comes running, and then she screams, too. It's several minutes before anyone calls an ambulance. Even when the medics rush into the room, Momo stands stock still the whole time, only moving when the police officer coaxes her to make a statement in the living room. It's only then that she shuts her eyes, because the bright light is too intrusive, too bright in comparison to her brother's dark room.
In some practical corner of her mind, Momo knows why they're asking her questions, but another part of her can't see the point. Even as her mother sobs about the why, it makes perfect sense to Momo. She's no stranger to suicide, even if the last time it happened it was somewhat distant, but still close enough to feel.
The name Tateyama Ayano never really left this house anyway. It's only fitting that Shintaro went to join her.
It's almost a relief to have someone staring at her again, instead of being the one doing the staring. Meeting the police officer's gaze with a confidence Momo's never felt on stage is somewhat comforting. She answers all the questions. She holds onto her mother as Shintaro leaves the house in a body bag. They both shed tears, though her mother's wails convey far more grief than Momo's quiet hiccups.
Momo realizes that she feels calm, that nobody was watching her because of her eyes. When she seeks her reflection in the living room mirror, it's the whites that are red, not the irises.
She thinks she sees a figure move in the reflection, but no one's there when she turns around, just the couch and the remnants of the tea her mother made for the police. Momo's eyes must be playing tricks on her; she's just lost her brother, after all. There's no need to imagine that his ghost is haunting them already.
After the police leave, her mother doesn't have the strength to do anything but go to bed, and Momo sits in her own room in silence. Eventually, she can't take it anymore and heads to his bedroom door. The police shut it out of kindness, and it's the silence that prevents her from slamming it open again. Instead, she eases it open, not even letting the hinges creak like they usually do, a technique perfected from sneaking up on Shintaro in the middle of the night as revenge for keeping her up with the sounds from his computer.
Momo stands in his doorway—and it's still his doorway, even if he's not here—looking over the room. Their mother couldn't bring herself to clean it up. Finally, she steps in. It seems the same, aside from the blood and lack of her brother. Even looking at his bed in the dark, Momo can still see his body there, eyes shut, the blood and the scissors.
For some reason, it's peaceful.
She walks back to her own room as fast as she can without running, without waking up her mother. She doesn't want to leave for long, so she gathers up her blankets. Her mother would probably panic if she slept in his bed with the blood, but Momo still wants to be there, as if sleeping in his room will make her closer to Shintaro.
There's a little bit of dried blood in the carpet, and Momo sets up her blankets as close to his bed as she can without touching it. Her mother doesn't need anything else to wash up. She starts to second guess her decision as she lies down, but starts to doze off soon enough, just like she did in elementary school, before their dad died, before Shintaro started shutting himself away. It's the only way she can close her eyes.
Before she falls asleep, Momo imagines her brother's hand patting her hair.
The funeral is a rather small affair. Momo and her mother are the only family aside from some astray cousins that can't even go. A few of their mother's friends come to show their sympathy. Shintaro hasn't gone to school for years, so none of his classmates come. Even if he had, he still didn't make many friends, so the crowd would have been just as small regardless.
No friends except for her.
Momo can't help but feel a bit angry at Ayano. She knows it's misplaced—Ayano was always so sweet and caring that she never would have meant to hurt Shintaro. But her suicide did, and that was what was responsible for Shintaro's depression, what caused him to shut himself away. If he hadn't run from everyone after that, then maybe—
Three kids show up to pay their respects. They're too young to have been in Shintaro's grade, and Momo wants to ask them what they're even doing here. It feels like an intrusion until she recognizes them—no names, but vague impressions of their faces. They're the kids that were adopted by Ayano's family, and Momo's surprised that they even remembered who Shintaro is.
The girl with her green hair leads the small group to the altar, and pays her respects perfectly. Momo watches in fascination, and for a second, their eyes meet. The girl has a knowing gaze, but it's not enough to cover her compassion at the loss.
The first of the two boys is already crying, despite how tall he is. He tries his best to cover the sound, but ends up sniffling a bit as he claps his hands together and bows, eyes closed. Glancing behind him, he steps aside, a look of apologetic and sadness on his face.
The second boy is the last to step up, and there's something about the way he walks that just seems off. Momo ends up staring at him, as if it'll tell her something. Moving almost mechanically, the boy pays his respects, then walks away with his siblings, a content look on his face.
Except for the moment Momo manages to lock her gaze with his, and it's different from his sister's. The boy seems to acknowledge Momo in a way void of any pity whatsoever, and for a moment he smirks.
The moment after that Momo swears that she sees Shintaro, and her entire body feels cold before she blinks, and the boy isn't even registering her anymore, just strolling out the door.
It doesn't take long for Momo's mother to realize she's been sleeping in Shintaro's room, and they have a shouting match early one Sunday morning. The stains in the carpet and blankets are gone, and it only takes a set of sheets to cover up the ones on the mattress, the ones that are almost shaped like the outline of Shintaro's body.
"You're the one that cleaned it up!" Momo says, gesturing to the rest of the room. It looks the same as it always used to, except for Shintaro. Regardless, if Momo didn't know better, she'd just say her brother went out for the day and their mother took the opportunity to tidy up a bit. "What do you expect us to do, just have an empty room sitting around that no one uses? 'Cause that's not gonna bring him back, Mom!"
Momo's mother frowns at the words, though her expression is anything but yielding. "That's not the point. I just haven't decided what to do with the room, yet," she says, her voice somehow calm yet strained at the same time.
"That's what you said about Dad." The words are out before Momo can even regret them. In that moment, though, she realizes that there's been a part of her this whole time that resents her mother for not letting go of her father, for pretending like nothing changed when he died after the first few weeks. If Momo would go to her mother's room, she knows she would find her dad's clothes buried in at least one of the drawers.
This time, her mother's eyes actually do widen. "That's not—" she says before letting out a cough. It's only a matter of seconds before the woman's gripping onto the doorframe, sinking closer to the floor.
"Mom!" Momo has a few moments of panic before she remembers her cellphone in her pocket, then digs it out to call 119 with shaking fingers.
In the doorway, she catches a glimpse of her brother, his lips parted as if he's watching something curious enough to be interested in, but not quite enough to be called fascinating.
Momo spends her time sitting in the hospital hallway feeling guilty. She should know better than to bring up her father's death, especially at a time like this. Her mother must have been unstable enough about Shintaro dying, and what Momo said was unfair. And, more than anything, her mom had just gotten out of the hospital, and now Momo's the cause for her going back in.
Momo clenches her hand on the otherwise empty bench. Before, she and Shintaro used to sit and wait for their mother together, even after they started to grow distant from each other. Whether it was Ayano's death or Momo's idol work or some stupid argument that caused the rift at any particular moment, it didn't matter, because they were still brother and sister, and siblings look out for each other.
Now, Momo realizes she's so close to being alone.
She wants to cry but she can't. She's done enough crying lately, and doing it now won't help. What if her mom wakes up and hears her? Momo can't do that to her, especially if it runs the chance of making her condition even worse.
I gotta get it together. For Mom, and for me.
It's a lot easier than it sounds. Before, Momo was able to do something by agreeing to become an idol to bring extra money into the house. That had been easy, though, since that option had been there for years before she finally had the courage to agree to it. Now, there isn't anybody else giving her an option, a way out. Now, there's only herself that Momo has to provide an answer, except that the problem at the moment is that she just doesn't know.
There are footsteps in the hallway, and Momo jumps to attention at the sound.
"Onii-chan!"
Except, as Momo finds when she actually bothers to look, it's not Shintaro that's walking down the hall like she thought. It is, however, a face she recognizes, smiling like it's nothing and blonde hair framing his face in uneven wisps.
"You're that… One of Ayano's siblings…" she says, her voice shaking.
At her words, the boy's smile brightens a bit more, until it seems like he's glowing, even amongst—or possibly because—the blazing white and florescence of the walls, floor, and ceiling. "Oh, so you did recognize us!" the boy says, that easy smile on his face. "Kisaragi Momo-chan, right?"
The sudden use of her name only makes Momo start again, and she decides that she's being way too jumpy lately. Far too late, she nods. "That's right. Sorry, though, I don't remember your name…"
"Don't worry about it." The boy waves his hand in a dismissive gesture, and he stops right in front of Momo. He's not tall, but Momo feels intimidated nonetheless. That lazy smile is just unnerving. "Hey, do you miss your brother?"
Momo's mouth goes dry, but she manages to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth. "O-of course I do." Shintaro may have been a pain, but he was still her brother. The boy's stupid smile gets to her, and Momo stands up, her hands balled into tight fists. "What's your deal anyway? You were all weird at the funeral, too. If you're just here to upset me—"
The boy tosses his hands up in surrender. "Easy, easy." Momo doesn't stop glaring, and the boy's eyes lock onto on hers. "If you don't calm down, you're going to end up drawing all sorts of attention. I don't think that's what you want, is it?"
Momo clenches her teeth together, recognizing far too late that she let herself go out of control. It's always been whenever she gets stressed that her eyes activate, that everyone is stuck staring. There doesn't seem to be anyone else in the hallway for the moment, but that's a small relief. She tries to shut her eyes, tries to flick the switch off, but she's never been good at controlling her power anyways. "Sorry, I—"
But when she opens her eyes, it's not the boy that's there. It's Shintaro.
Fear is the only thing that stops the scream from spilling out of her throat. Momo recoils, her legs collapsing under her. She falls back onto the bench and tries to push herself as far away as she can manage. She tries to tell herself she must be dreaming, that she fell asleep while waiting on her mom, because Shintaro's dead, it doesn't matter how much it looks like him, Shintaro's gone—
A hand pats her hair in slow, patient strokes. Momo sucks in a sharp breath, and then she's crying, tears spilling down her cheeks. She tries to wipe them away, tries to stop herself, but it's like every little feeling that's been inside her since she opened that door and found Shintaro's corpse has burst at once. She ends up crying more than she did on the day it happened.
"Are you alright?"
The voice isn't hers or her brother's. It's not even the boy's. When Momo opens her eyes, vision blurry from the tears, all she sees is one of the nurses who's taking care of her mother walking towards her. Momo whips her head around, but no one else is there.
Both Shintaro and the blonde boy disappeared like ghosts.
The nurse leans over Momo, shadows forming in the folds of his scrubs. "You're Momo-chan, Kisaragi-san's daughter, right?" he asks. A wayward sob still clogging her throat, Momo nods. "I was just coming to tell you that your mother's awake. She wants to see you."
Momo sucks in a gasp and starts to wipe her eyes. It won't do any good to show up at her mom's bedside looking like a complete wreck. "Thanks," she manages to say without sounding miserable. The nurse puts on a reassuring smile and helps Momo up from the bench and starts to lead the way to her mother's room.
She glances over her shoulder, almost expecting to see one of them—the shadow of her brother or the cat's smile of the boy—but there's nothing save for the empty hallway with its lines of doors and clean while tiles, stretching on for almost an eternity.
And then Momo hears her mom call her name, and she decides to stop looking back.
[Author's Notes]
Happy Kagerou Day, folks! It's been a while since I wrote a Shuuya one shot, but I couldn't resist the urge to slip in another one for this year. This one shot goes ahead and fulfills the old [Twelve Shots of Summer: Second Raid] prompt, "Alone on the Brink," which seemed like the perfect opportunity to go digging up this old unfinished idea from my folders.
I think I originally intended this one shot to be much darker. However, I didn't really have a plan for how it would end when I started writing it (shortly after "The Traces of Her Laughter Haunted Both of Us," I believe), so I didn't have to follow that idea when I finished it. Instead I went for a super ambiguous ending. What did Shuuya want, impersonating Shintaro? An excellent question. I'll leave it up for interpretation.
The [Twelve Shots of Summer] challenge is wrapping up this weekend, so I'll point you in that direction for some other one shots (including my Twelve Shots of Shuuya collection from a few years ago). Everyone there is hella talented. Do check them out.
Stay safe this Kagerou Day, everyone. Thanks for reading!
-Aviantei
[08.13.2018]