Frailer than most deep dreams
Takes place quite some time after the game, so spoilers do apply. Done for the prompt "beauty in a breakdown", with a title taken from the 31 Days prompt for March 21, 2006.
"Ah! Miss… Takeba, right?"
"Mm, that's right."
"Hold on, let me get your usual."
"Thanks."
The pharmacist behind the counter beamed, and then turned and jogged off, entering the maze of aisles full of medicine behind him. Yukari Takeba rifled through her bag, stopped, fidgeted, pushed her hair behind her ears, looked around. It was a Monday, Day-Who-Knows-What, Month-Kami-sama-Only-Knows, Year Twenty-Five since she had started breathing.
"Here we are! We'll be putting it on your tab, as always."
"Okay."
"Just sign right here…. there you go. Have a nice day!"
Yukari Takeba smiled, waved but didn't answer. She dashed out of the pharmacy and headed straight for the train station; she was running late for work, so there wouldn't be time for a cigarette. Besides, she was supposed to have quit months ago. Habits, though, were hard to kick for someone like her. She had once figured that if she constantly reminded herself that it was also her mother's habit it would be easier for her to let go, but had soon realized that the only thing it did for her was make her feel worse about needing it.
Office ate away her entire morning and her entire afternoon, excluding that one not-too-glorious over that was torture under the euphemism of 'lunch break'. Evening found Yukari Takeba sitting on the lid of her toilet bowl, sometimes smoking, mostly staring at her latest bottle of pills. It took her approximately three hours to realize that Fuck It, She Needed to Sleep and Popping was the Only Way How. She could feel bad some other time. Feeling bad was for weak people, and she knew she wasn't weak; she couldn't have been. She had saved the fucking world once.
Yukari Takeba counted three (just the right amount to allow her to sleep like the dead, pun intended), took them with a glass of sugar water to make it all go down easier, flipped on a pair of earphones remarkably like the pair that had belonged to a boy she had known, curled up with a pillow and shut her eyes. This was how she made sure she did not think of him all the time.