- Epilogue -


Ikkaku blinked, staggering, feeling like he'd just been sucked through a wormhole. Where had he been a moment ago? In his bed? No… Sleeping? No, he hadn't been sleeping, had he?

The air was crackling in his ears as his equilibrium was up-ended over and over. He shook his head and pinched his arm hard, looking around. What had happened?

He looked around in confusion, seeing that he was in front of the cemetery on a moderately-cloudy day. There were the familiar crows on the fencepost, and as he looked down he saw that he was wearing his work gloves.

Looking up, completely disorientated, he frowned when he saw a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and several bushes with bags around the roots. A few seemed to have been planted along the front gate.

Oh. He'd been working. He must've nodded off for a minute there. Already that little snip in reality was fading from his mind, so fast that he couldn't hold onto it at all. Still, he felt oddly exposed, as if something that was supposed to be floating behind him was suddenly gone.

After planting a few bushes, he started getting some serious deja vu. Hadn't he done this already? He felt like he'd done this job already. How long had he been out here for?

Reflexively, he looked down at his digital watch. It was two thirty on the dot. Maybe he'd lain on it wrong while he was sleeping and had accidentally turned the dial, because that definitely wasn't the right time. At least it didn't seem like it to him, but as he looked up at the sky, he surmised that it probably was the early afternoon, just like his watch suggested. That was so weird... He could've sworn he'd just eaten dinner a little while ago and taken a walk in the woods with-

He looked up. His brain had just done this weird flip-flop, as if it was a computer that had malfunctioned or tried to find a file that no longer existed. Looking back to his watch, Ikkaku again read that it was two thirty, but again, he thought that it was probably off or something. His watch had been acting weird ever since Yumichika-

"What the fuck," he said aloud. He hadn't seen Ayasegawa Yumichika in years. What the hell was wrong with his brain? It was almost like he'd had some sort of slip of the tongue, but in his thoughts and not his speech.

Maybe he'd been in the sun too long or something, which didn't really make sense either, because the sun wasn't breaking through the clouds at all. He just grunted and got the last few bushes into the holes he'd dug, patting the dirt down around the bases. Standing back up, he looked through the gates of the cemetery, off into the distance where he could see his full-length shovel sticking out of the ground. Oh right, he'd been digging up saplings that had seemed to appear overnight. There was so much rain that everything grew 'like weeds'.

He should probably go fill in those holes, or he might trip on them later. Knowing his luck, he would, especially with how much he'd been tramping around in the graveyard in the dark, hanging around Yumichika's grave.

Ikkaku hit himself in the side of the head. No, seriously, what the fuck was happening? It was like he was caught in some weird loop. Yumichika was not dead. He wasn't even in the same country as him right now. They hadn't met in years and hadn't spoken in even longer. They'd never even really been friends, to his own disappointment. Maybe he needed to get some rest.

"Nah, Yumichika'll probably just steal my pillow again and put it on the fire escape. For a ghost, he sure is-" Ikkaku stopped, and screamed a little to himself. "Gah! What the fuck?!"

Almost as quickly, he clapped a dirty gloved-hand over his mouth, looking around. He had forgotten… this place was wholesome. He couldn't swear or raise his voice because their might be kids or elderly people with faint hearts within earshot. Besides that, he literally might get arrested.

He let out a slow breath, trying to silence his mind for a few moments so he could try to figure out what the fuck was going on. What had he said? Yumichika? A ghost?

"I'm dead, Ikkaku," he repeated slowly, hearing the memory from somewhere within the back of his mind. It kept echoing and it hurt for some reason, as if he'd been staring at an old picture of a loved one.

All of a sudden, it started to come back: the visions, Yumichika leading him through the Multiverse, getting lost or something because of his young soul, the wish, the timeline shattering.

It was all coming back, but what he didn't get was why Yumichika wasn't here... Through all of that craziness in the moments after shutting his eyes, he'd never let go of Yumichika's hand... so where was he? Why was he alone?

"Where the fuck am I? What day is it?" he said out loud, looking around. As far as he could tell, he was doing his normal thing, living his normal life, like the normal guy he was getting used to being. Those bushes looked great. He was doing a good job. Maybe he should just calm down, enjoy being back here, and look at the clues rationally.

Ikkaku hummed. Now that he thought about it, there was dirt all over the ground, like he'd planted those things recently. When had he done that?

"What ugly bushes," came a snarky little comment that immediately set off some alarm in the back of his head. He was sure that no one had been around a second ago.

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What day is it?" Ikkaku asked menacingly, bearing down on a confused Yumichika who was immediately on the defense. There he was, the little shit! Why couldn't he just explain shit before doing it instead of asking permission like a normal person?!

"Um, I think it's a Tuesday?" Yumichika said cautiously, lowering his hands when Ikkaku no longer appeared to be ready to kill him with a shovel. "What's got you in such a temper?"

"Why don't you tell me what the fuck you did?" Ikkaku asked, pointing at him, looking for any kind of guilty reaction that could tell him what was happening. Yumichika had done something. It appeared to be the day that Yumichika had died again, but how was that possible? Had he really been sent back in time? Was this some fucked-up version or heaven or was he just losing it?

Yumichika's words came through to him about his soul echoing his past, and Ikkaku understood suddenly that Yumichika had let him go... Yumichika hadn't come with him. He was all alone.

So this Yumichika probably thought he was a completely lunatic, now.

Ikkaku lowered his hands, calming down a little bit. "Uh… Sorry, I… Uh, just… Sorry, I thought you were someone else," he repeated awkwardly. This Yumichika wasn't that Yumichika then. He had to start over. Fuck. No, really... fuck.

"I suppose it's alright, Mr…"

"It's Ikkaku," he said tiredly, feeling pretty down all of a sudden. He probably was going to get a chance to redo everything, but if he did, then Yumichika wouldn't fall in love with him again. This sucked. "What, you don't recognize me?"

"Of course I do, your name just slipped my mind for a moment," Yumichika said with a smile. Fuck. He was still so pretty. Ikkaku grimaced. Sparkly bastard.

"Scary looking thi-" Yumichika started trying to repeat what Ikkaku already knew he was going to say, so Ikkaku just cut to the chase.

"You're as pretty as ever. How's your career treatin' ya'?" Yumichika looked surprised, and then looked down with a smile that was almost shy, which seriously never happened. Ikkaku grinned a little.

'Smooth move.'

Their conversation flowed the same as before, so similar that it creeped Ikkaku out. Deja vu and other repeats of past events had always disturbed him, but he supposed that it wasn't really the past, because according to Yumichika's ghost, he'd wound up in some other reality, which was technically happening at the same time. His body hadn't really traveled in time. His mind had just traveled a distance.

Ikkaku spoke almost reflexively, allowing Yumichika's flirting and little jokes like before, and for a moment he forgot that there were pressing matters at hand. He didn't fully realize that he could change events here, because repeating everything that had already happened was so natural that it was hard to break out of it. He didn't even have to consciously try to remember what he'd said before, because it just came out. He was supposed to change something, right? An event? Well not the events, per se. It was as Yumichika's ghost had told him: he couldn't change what happened, but he could change his own choices and actions.

"Anyways, I was going to ask you, do you know the way to the post office? I have a letter to mail to my fiance's parents."

'Shit.' Ikkaku had forgotten that this meant that Yumichika was still engaged. He didn't have a chance with him anymore, even if Yumichika definitely was flirting with him.

So he'd had some sort of time lapse and had been sent to another dimension to rewind certain life choices. That meant that Kaa was still alive, Yumichika hadn't been hit by a car, and he wasn't even aware that Ikkaku should feel relieved to see him again. Yumichika hadn't fallen in love with him, he'd never gone through the trauma of having died and lost all his earthly possessions and his lover, and he'd never haunted Ikkaku or spent time with him. Well, he had, but the Yumichika here didn't know that because his soul's collective consciousness was somewhere else, waiting in the afterlife. Ikkaku was all alone in this knowledge.

"Uh, yeah, it's th-" Ikkaku pointed, pausing for a minute. "You know what? I'll show you where it is. Let's go."

"Oh?" Yumichika said in confusion. "That's very nice, but are you sure it's okay to just abandon your work like this?"

"Eh, it's like you said. No hurry," Ikkaku jeered, jamming his thumb in the direction of the graves, those of which no longer held Yumichika's earthly body. He was alive - out of reach, sure, but alive. He was living, and that was enough to send relieved tingles through him at the speed of light.

When Yumichika laughed, Ikkaku felt like his heart was starting to heal.


~Fin~


Closing Notes - Thank you to everyone who followed/reviewed/favorited!

I got this whole story idea from a song by Florence and the Machine - called, surprise surprise, 'Blinding'. There's one line that really spoke to me. Technically the line is, 'No more dreaming like a girl, so in love with the wrong world,' but I didn't know that at the time. I always heard it as 'No more dreaming like a ghost, so in love with the wrong world', and I don't know about you, but wowwww. That's such an awesome idea - Ghosts are here because they'd fallen in love with the earth and don't want to leave, so basically my idea stemmed from there.

I got a lot of inspiration from classic gothic literature, like Frankenstein, etc. I tried to create that suspenseful heavy mood without too many obvious thunderstorms. I think it only rained like once in this story, but some reviewers still noted that the mood was very tense, which was what I was going for. I love getting compliments like that about my storytelling taking you to new places~

Sequels/alternate endings/spin-offs are coming soon. There's going to be quite a few, so just to let you know, the next one you should read after this is 'Prism.'


Song lyrics Credit:

Chapter 1
Blinding - Florence & The Machine
Dead! - My Chemical Romance

Chapter 2
Blinding - Florence & The Machine

Chapter 3
I'm not calling you a liar - Florence & The Machine
Blinding - Florence & The Machine

Chapter 4
Blinding - Florence & The Machine
Dead! - My Chemical Romance

Chapter 5
Ghosts - Mayday Parade
Ghosts - The Head and the Heart

Chapter 6
Ghosts - Ladytron
Young and Beautiful - Lana Del Rey

Chapter 7
Hell is Empty - Emilie Autumn
The Ghost of You - My Chemical Romance

Chapter 8 -
I'm not Calling you a liar - Florence & The Machine
Blinding - Florence & The Machine

Notice a theme with the songs? And again, all the poems in the middles of the chapters are mine.