Author's Notes: Yayyy headcanon dump! Also WHY IS FFNET SCREWING WITH MY FORMATTING SO MUCH Dx
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Neku doesn't understand why his mum even bothered keeping these old newspapers. Hell, he didn't even know she had been collecting them, year after year, all this time. All he knows is that his dad had finally convinced her to part with them, which meant he had to clean all this junk out.
Taking a quick break, he idly leafs through the papers in his latest pile for taking out. And pauses at a full colour page in the fouth paper from the top.
He tears out the page and folds it for keeping.
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"You know, you never told us how you died."
Joshua looks up from his coffee, heartbeat, and smiles. "What makes you think I died at all?"
But Neku has known Joshua long enough to expect that reply. Reaching into his pockets, he pulls out a coloured newspaper page, crumpled from weeks of carrying it in the hopes of catching Joshua without company. He can feel Joshua's neutral stare as he unfolds the page and lays it flat on the table, smoothing it out.
He points to a familiar grey-ish mop of hair. "This is you, isn't it?"
He watches Joshua's eyes scan the image, a wreckage of a train in the Underpass and a zoom in of one of the many bodies found. He watches Joshua lift his coffee cup and take a long sip, before setting it down again with a soft clunk. "And if it is?" he says, the corner of his mouth tugging into a smile. "What difference does it make?"
Neku lifts his hand, palm up as he says quietly, "All of us know how we died." He doesn't know how to explain how and why that connection had allowed them to be closer together, even though they never speak of it. But the fact they had all died had been something that seperated them from Joshua, along with the other walls the other boy makes.
The silence stretches as he watches Joshua finish his coffee. "I was returning to Shibuya," Joshua explains.