i honestly can't believe that i've never written kagepro fanfiction before considering how much i love the series? so hey, have some angsty shintaro/ene friendship.
also, reviews are really nice and make me smile if you want to maybe leave one
update: i didn't even realize that this wasn't marked as completed! sorry if that was confusing to anyone, but yeah, this is a oneshot. thanks so much to konona for pointing that out!
It's been a month.
It's been a month and Ene still doesn't understand who this boy is; the boy in the red jacket with the messy hair and the circles under his eyes and the strained voice. The one who thickly swallows his sentences and leaves trash on the floor like he can't be bothered to simply pick it up.
The boy who she knew, a month before, as cold and soulless and who stared blankly through friendship and trained his thoughts only on himself. The one who she wasn't even sure was human because he ripped through her video game skills faster than she could imagine and didn't even blink when he cut her down.
It's been a month and Ene can't even recognize him for the boy he was because his hair is longer and splayed across his face like he hasn't ever heard of a brush. All he wears is that red jersey and some black shirts and his headphones are always on his ears as if he's trying to drown out the world.
After thinking about it, Ene realizes that he probably is.
Because she hears him every night, shuddering in his sleep. It rips at her heart and she wants to help him; because this Shintaro is not the Shintaro she knew, and this one feels pain and suffering and has dealt with more loss than she can even imagine. All three of his best friends, his only friends, died on the same day- and though she can't remember him ever caring about them it occurs to her that maybe he did because they certainly affect him now when he shifts in his sleep and yells himself hoarse.
So she tries to cheer him up.
Maybe Ene doesn't go about it the right way, but really, it's the thought that counts. She moves his files to distract him and plays with his songs to piss him off. She hopes he realizes that she really cares and she hopes he never realizes that Ene is actually Takane. She's been thinking (the old Shintaro would have muttered under his breath that 'wow, that's new' and she tries to put that thought away before it splinters into something worse) that if he knows it's her something really bad might happen, worse than even right now. The memories will flood back and the evidence will be right in his face all the time, never letting him forget.
And no matter what an asshole he was, she can't (won't) do that to him.
He tries his hardest to find out, though.
"Hey, Ene," he asks her once, when his voice isn't cracked and his eyes are not circled by tears. "Where are you from?"
"What d'you mean, Master?" Ene twirls around the screen and plasters a grin on her face, hiding any secrets behind her mischievous smile.
"I mean," his eyes narrow and Ene is forced to remember the boy with the sharp glare and impossibly high IQ, "you're a very advanced program." His fingers must be digging into that can enough to crush it by now, she thinks as she stares at the indentations he is subconsciously making. "Nobody would just randomly make a virus like you to send off into the internet and annoy people. You must have some purpose, and I'm inclined to think it's not to make my life a living hell."
She twirls again, partially to keep up the guise of happiness and a carefree personality, and partially to hide her face as it twists into a frown. He's bringing up things that she's carefully tried to avoid, always tiptoeing around the 'her' and focusing on the 'him'. But no matter how ripped apart he is or how long he's ignored his sister's knocks at his door (Momo knocked seveny-one times altogether to try to get him to leave his room before she gave up) Shintaro is still the genius boy with the impossible skills. And he can still see through a lie and tell when a story is taped together and cracked and only held up by one very forced smile.
But the truth will always be worse than his suspicions, so Ene puts up her walls and shoves on her smile and dances around the question, just like she always has.
It doesn't occur to her that maybe she doesn't do this only for him. She wants to forget too.
It's the desire to fix this boy, mend him at the seams and repair all his breaks, and then grab him by the hand into the hot sweltering sun as Ene and the not-asshole Shintaro, not Takane and her sort-of-friend. Some part of her, she knows, wants to forget about Haruka and the way her face flushed when she looked at him. Some part of her wants to ignore the heavy feeling in her chest when she could never voiced what she wanted to say, and the fluttering panic she felt at the hospital. There's some part of her that wants to forget the girl in the red scarf with the soft voice who was her best friend and his best friend too. It's the desire to ignore how his hard look melted a little when watching her smile, or how he would help her even though his comments of 'I don't care', rang through the night, lies to the end.
Maybe Ene thinks she can give that ignorance to Shintaro, but that dull feeling of pain hasn't even left her yet, but she can't let it show. She's been given this new body at least, a new body and a new chance and somewhere to call home. Shintaro's been left in the dust with only the regret of his mistakes and memories of people he can't forget.
She asked him about it once, pretended like she didn't know and acted like a curious little virus.
He glanced at her. "I...had a friend. Well, three. Sort of."
"Sort of?"
"Thinking back, I wasn't really the best to them. Any of them, actually. And they're... they're uh...dead." He finished, his face shockingly empty but his voice betraying his indifferent expression .
And that was the end of the story.
In the end, their chosen method of coping is ignorance. Their infrequent discussions of Ene's past or Shintaro's actions fade away and become nonexistent. Ene's smile becomes real in some moments, when she sees Shintaro splutter at her redesign of his computer folders or blaring alarms in his ears. There are some moments where she can forget that she is pretending and that he is broken and imagine that she is just Ene and he is just Shintaro, and yes, they're honestly friends now.
Of course, coping is never foolproof and there are still days when Shintaro won't get out of bed or days when Ene will mysteriously not show up on the desktop. But they've created their own form of happiness that lasts in the large bedroom, just the two of them and a computer and memories that they ignore.
It's been twenty-four months.
It's been twenty-four months and Ene has moved past trying to see this boy as the one she used to know. This boy in the red jacket and the messy hair and the indignant voice that stutters and complains- this Shintaro is honestly her friend. And she understands that things are different- and really, they always will be. They're both still a little broken, but time does heal, and Ene finds that Shintaro has been her medicine and she has been his, even if they both deny it completely.
It's been twenty-four months and both of them are ready to live when the computer breaks and the sweltering haze makes its way into their lives.