note: this fic contains spoilers for the entirety of the game, and is also angsty as hell. not recommended for:
1. people who haven't finished the game/anime, or 2. anybody, ever
a world where nothing happened
The first funeral is the worst.
Riki spends the entire time staring at his feet, nails digging into his hands and leaving tiny crescent indents as he struggles against the urge to vomit. It is a strange kind of nausea, one that seems to run through his entire body, crawling its way up his chest and pooling in his throat until he can barely breathe. He is vaguely aware of someone – some relative of Kurugaya's, someone who he never even met or heard about – speaking in the background, but he cannot make out their words over the sound of his heart thudding uncomfortably in his chest. His entire body feels wrong, as though someone had stitched him back together after he broke apart but had sewed all his limbs back in the wrong positions.
He is suddenly aware of a pressure on his chest, and turns his head to realize that Rin is sobbing openly into it, her hands trembling as she clings to his shirt as desperately as if it is the anchor that grounds her. A dull wetness seeps through his clothes as she cries. Riki tries to move his arm to – put it around her shoulders, stroke her head, do something, anything – but all the strength he can muster is not enough to get his body to work properly. All he can do is gently rest his head against the top of hers and hopes that the warmth will be enough to remind her she is not alone.
By the time Komari's funeral arrives, Rin sits in silence as the tears flood down her face, as though the weight of the sadness gripping her has crushed even her vocal cords into pieces, as if her heart was not enough for it to claim. The only movement she makes - save for the erratic rising and falling of her chest - is the occasional shifting of her hands as they make fists in the fabric of her dress, as if she cannot bring herself to believe that what she is feeling beneath her fingertips is really there.
By Kyousuke's, she sits as still as death, staring straight ahead with distant, bloodshot eyes, her face blank and empty, as if she has lost all ability to feel.
Riki wishes the same were true for him.
They transfer schools, because there is nothing else for them to do. They are sat down in rooms with décor so blindingly white that Riki feels as though he is drowning, and they meet lots of kind people who shake their hands and smile warmly, and they are told that it will be okay, and there will be people to help them through this, and Rin cries the entire time as her fingers shake in Riki's grip.
On what is meant to be their first day of their new school, Riki wakes up in a room with no bunk bed over his head, staring at a distant ceiling that is sickeningly foreign to him. The entire room feels unfamiliar to the point where it is physically unnerving; the sheets thrown over him are unnatural and invasive, as though they don't belong there, and even the morning light filtering through the blinds feels wrong, as though the entire world has been rebuilt upside-down. But he pushes off the weight pressing down on his chest and forces himself to stand up. If he closes his eyes he can imagine that this is nothing out of the ordinary, that he is back in his dorm with Masato snoring gently behind him – because he never got up on time, even when Riki put the alarm clock right next to his ear – but these thoughts are poisonous, and he grits his teeth as he throws on a shirt that itches uncomfortably against his skin.
It is only when he, finally ready to leave, knocks on Rin's door to only be met with a deafening silence, that he realizes something is wrong. As the seconds trickle by and no answer comes, he tentatively pushes open the door, his hand sweating slightly as he grips the handle. The light from the hallway falls into the room, disturbing the darkness – she hasn't even opened the curtains, Riki realizes – and instantly highlighting Rin's tiny, vulnerable frame.
She is lying with her face buried into her mattress, her arms collapsed haphazardly around her head as her body shudders. The only thing she has on save for her underwear is her shirt, as if she willed herself to get ready but fell apart halfway, and normally Riki would look away for the sake of her modesty but there is something terrifyingly innocent about her state of undress that he seems to be completely removed from such thoughts. As he stands in the doorway, hand frozen on the door handle, unable to move, she suddenly seems to become aware of his presence. She raises her head slightly to reveal a face stained with tears, and whispers "Riki" in the most heartwrenchingly feeble voice he has ever heard, and he stumbles down to her and pulls her to his chest as he realizes that this is going to take a very, very long time.
Riki is no stranger to grief.
The thing is, however, that grief takes many forms. When he was young it wrapped itself around him like a blanket, sheltering him from the world and all its coldness, and he would lose himself in sadness in a way that was somehow comforting. Now, however, grief chases him down into his bed at night, grips at his throat with claws that never quite sink deep enough to draw blood, but the pressure is always there, crushing his strength to breathe and he flails uselessly in its grasp, thinking no, no, I don't want to feel like this, please stop, please help me – but this time, nobody is coming to save him with an outstretched hand and a smile that brings back the sun again. And that is, ultimately, the hardest thing to face; that nobody can help him now, that they did all that they could, and that now he is on his own.
Except he is not on his own, and he is reminded of this every time Rin looks at him with a gaze so lost that it is as if she is seeing right through him and into the depths of something far beyond his reach. Every time he sees her he remembers that she has never known pain like this before, and day by day she looks more and more distant, more translucent, as if one day soon she is going to drift away completely, so he tethers her to the earth with the feeling of her fragile hand held in his gentle grip.
He has to become stronger.
Rin does not go to school. She barely leaves the house, instead spending her days lost inside her bedsheets, breathing into her quilt as if it were an ocean that would drown her. When she does step outside, it is as a result of days of Riki coaxing her gently, encouraging her with patience worn down thin, and it never lasts long. Rin was never sociable before, but now, in the after, she is a new kind of uncomfortable; she barely even talks to Riki these days, and when a stranger approaches her she stands in frozen silence until the tears threaten to overflow from her eyes.
It's bizarre how he thinks about it all. Before and after. Like two parts of a book. This doesn't feel like the second part of anything to Riki. It would be more accurate to say it feels like the epilogue, as though it's marking the end of something, like there's nothing after this, but even isn't right. It feels like something that was never meant to have been written.
He goes to school because he feels like he should, but it does not benefit him in the slightest. He sits in lessons and doesn't hear a word the teacher says because he is too distracted by phantom blurs out of the corner of his eye, images people that are no longer there. At breaks he talks to nobody, instead staring at the classroom window as if someone is going to climb through it at any second. He lags behind in every class but his teachers, uncomfortably aware of his 'circumstances', mention nothing. He grows more tired every day.
Rin has nightmares, terrible half-formed recollections of the worst of all her memories, mashed together with a cacophony of sounds and voices she can no longer hear. It gets to the point where she becomes too terrified to sleep and so constantly dozes in and out of a halfhearted unconscious state; she is always tired, dead on her feet from the tenth sleepless night in a row, but Riki thinks this is better than the sight of her waking up in the middle of the night with the tears already on her face before she even has time to scream.
Riki does not have nightmares in the truest sense of the word. Instead, he dreams what almost he considers to be worse. In his dreams everything is alright, as it was meant to be, as it was before the world turned on its head. Everyone is there and alive and living and healthy, and they laugh and they joke and do all the things they should still be doing now, and then Kyousuke says, "If only this could last forever," and the words that Riki needs to say die in his throat before he even knows what they are.
In one dream, he and Kyousuke sit side by side, watching the river as it is stirred along by the breeze of a late summer. They talk about nothing in particular, things so comfortably mundane he can't even remember them, and Riki suddenly finds within himself the strength to speak. So he says "we need more time," and he hopes Kyousuke knows what he means – please don't go, please wait a little longer, we can't do this on our own yet, please don't ever leave me. But Kyousuke just stares straight ahead and smiles as the wind whispers through his hair, as if he didn't hear a word that Riki said.
In another, Kyousuke just stands and looks at him, and he is smiling but there is something about the smile that seems wrong. Riki can't place what it is until he realizes that it is the same smile he has been wearing every single day since he woke up in the hospital bed. He says, "we weren't strong enough yet," and Kyousuke just keeps on looking at him, and that smile stays on his face the whole time, and Riki wakes up the second before it shatters.
Some days things are better. Some days he wakes up and the light is a little less blinding, the wind a little less cold. Some days Rin makes an expression reminiscent of something on the way to happiness. Some days he feels as though they are going to grow past this.
One such day comes in the early days of winter, when Rin tugs on his shirt and stares at her feet and mumbles, "Let's go somewhere." So they get the train to a village nearby, and the whole time Rin grips his arm so hard it is nearly painful, and when someone accidentally brushes against her she shudders and her breath comes out erratic and terrified, but when she turns to Riki she has a smile on her face, and it's small and subtle but still very much there. They visit a forest, and the auburn leaves crunch satisfyingly beneath their feet as they walk. The wind is cold and stings Riki's face with a bitter touch, but the warmth of Rin next to him is enough to counter it. The day passes in a blur, but above it all Riki is aware that it is the happiest he has been in a long time, and the smile on his face feels a little less artificial. At one point a spider crawls onto Rin's arm and she shrieks and nearly knocks Riki out in her desperate attempt to fling it off of her, and Riki laughs so hard at the look on her face that his stomach aches for about ten minutes afterwards. As the sun begins to set, casting an ethereal orange glow around them, they start the walk back to the train station, feeling content in a way they had both forgotten how to feel until now.
And then, Riki is suddenly hit with a terrible premonition which he instantly knows he is powerless to act against, as if he is staring an oncoming train in the face as it barrels towards him at full speed. Something in the air, something he cannot see nor feel, shifts imperceptibly, and the illusion shatters. Rin is crying before she even realizes it is happening, and as she presses her face against his chest and sobs, Riki's arms feel a million miles away from him as they wrap themselves around her tiny shoulders.
"When is this," he begins, but the words stutter on their way out, and before he can stop them, the tears spill from his eyes. He briefly wonders why he is even crying, but he knows the answer – he is crying for Rin, for himself, for the people who should be here but cannot.
Months pass before he feels ready to visit their graves. He stands before each of them and tells them, one by one, about things that have happened and how he feels. Many of the things he says are mundane, insignificant, but somehow comforting to say aloud; he tells Mio about how he read a book she once recommended to him, and how he's never had much taste for literature but he enjoyed it all the same; he tells Kud about his Russian lessons, and how maybe if she was around, she could be the one tutoring him this time. He tells Komari about how Rin misses her more every day, but also about the smile on her face when she talks about her. He tells Masato, teasingly, how much easier it is to sleep at night without his snoring blaring around the room. He talks to them all, tells them all the things he's been keeping inside for months, talks and talks until his voice feels ready to break, cries openly until he feels as though he's drained his body completely dry.
And then he turns to Kyousuke, and all the words escape him for a few moments. He rests back, relishing the feeling of the grass beneath his fingers, revelling in the crispness of the open air.
"I was angry at you," he admits finally, after the silence. "I was angry at you for leaving Rin alone, for leaving your family behind, but -" and at this point he realizes he's crying again, but he just lets the tears fall; there's no point in holding them back now - "I was angry at you for leaving me here alone." He laughs then, awkwardly, and wipes his eyes. "I know that's kind of, um, irrational, but. I didn't feel like I was ready for this, and I wanted you to, you know, say it was alright, and I didn't have to face the truth yet. For a long time. Maybe forever." He pauses. "But I realize that would go against everything you did for us. And I know I still have a long way to go, and so does Rin, but -"
At this point he gets to his feet, and smiles down at the grave, and the sun is fresh and new upon his face. "I'm going to make it through this."
The dreams have all but stopped now. Occasionally, he wakes up half-crying, chasing down the fleeting memory of something that slips out of his grasp as he reaches out for it, and there are nights when he awakes to the sound of Rin sobbing as she stumbles through the darkness towards his room, but for the most part their nights are peaceful, and the only nightmare they have to face is the one that they've been living with all these months. But it's a nightmare they're getting used to, and each day it feels a little less sharp around the edges, a little more easier to deal with.
Even so, despite the gradual shifting of the darkness, Riki finds himself lying in bed every night, whispering to himself, "This is enough, isn't it?"
As he drifts away, it becomes a mantra, repeated to infinity. He repeats it over and over again as he gradually slips into unconsciousness until, eventually, they stop being his words and turn into somebody else's.
It is too late for him to answer.