The sunlight streamed in through the window and on to my face like a balm. The disgust I felt over the events of the past six days seemed to be drawn out of me by the sun's rays and for just a moment I was almost content. I was running away, and maybe that was best.

Ichiro was out getting supplies for the week ahead. If I was going to be staying with him for a while we would need food, and I would eventually need to go home and collect some clothes. But for now, my jeans and Ichiro's shirts would suffice. Home was not where I wanted to be right now. Home reminded me of Taichi, and thoughts of Taichi lead into darkness, despair and disgust. It was not just that he had so completely betrayed my trust; it was the fact that I was now second guessing the whole of our childhood together. When had he realised he was like that? Was it something to do with the whole Sorato situation, or were his involvements with his closest friends over the years just lies to cover up a deviant secret?

I was not coming to terms with any of this, the lies, the murder, or even the deaths.

Daisuke and Koushiro were no more, they had ceased to be and despite all the stupid mixed up emotions that still crashed around in my head about the both of them, I could not help but feel slightly responsible. Many scenarios were thrown around against the walls in my head for exactly why Daisuke had decided to try to 'go back' as it were, but the only ones that seemed to make any sense involved some sort of redemption for leaving everyone behind three years ago, or a play for my affections – which, to my mind at the moment, either meant that this was all either because I had inadvertently forced him to leave town, or because I had lead him on for so long whilst Takeru and I were still not admitting our feelings for each other.

Takeru.

Just because I had realised that my hatred for him was an irrational way to stop me from hating myself, did not mean I could let it go that easily. Urgh, the nerve of the bastard – just because I had apologised he suddenly thought it was a good idea to come over and discuss exactly what my apology meant. I had told him that I finally understood the end of his story, and he had acted all weird, said that the ending was just wish fulfilment but that he would love to hear my interpretation as well when he came over. It had taken every ounce of courage I possessed not to tell him he was being a presumptuous ass, and to instead set a time.

I looked at the clock on Ichiro's laptop, which I had just booted up out of boredom, and realised that Takeru was, unusually, late. It figured, now that I was starting to tolerate him again, that he would start to take that good will for granted.

I checked my emails and social media, but it was just more of the same inane things that I had skipped over just a few days ago. Looking at all the vaguely familiar faces and all the vaguely familiar topics of apparent interest to me, I felt my melancholy swell. If you wanted proof that life and death were meaningless, all you had to do was log on to the internet after a trauma and see that everyone else was still living their life exactly the same as before. To the populous, the subtraction of one life was nothing. The human race endured, and quite frankly, it did not care.

Thankfully, my train of thought was interrupted by the familiar chime of a Skype call coming through, and I had clicked on the icon at the bottom of the screen before I realised that, since it was Ichiro's laptop, it was his Skype that I was now technically snooping on.

My fingers danced inexpertly on the track pad, searching for the cross in the upper right of the screen, when suddenly a voice emanated from the speakers, but it only completed half of the traditional greeting before cutting out. I had not managed to close the window myself, but in my haste I must have answered the call by accident. The girl, for it was definitely a female voice I had heard, must have seen me through the built in webcam, realised I was not Ichiro and disconnected.

I heard a knock at the door, but I ignored it in favour of snooping on the display picture for the mystery caller. The door could only be Takeru, anyway.

Sadly though, it was only a white background with simple black Roman characters that possibly read something like ARI:KE, but then that was based on my very limited ability at reading English, and that was assuming the text was not one of those other European languages that used the same character set. Regardless, even if I had translated it right, I wouldn't have known what it meant. It could be a meaningful phrase, a name, or even an unimaginative logo for some brand.

The knocking continued and I figured I had left Takeru out there long enough. A twinge of paranoid superstition came upon me as I approached the door, and hesitating because of it, I checked through the peephole for a shock of blond.

I got what I was looking for, fixed my face into an expression of disdain and annoyance and opened up, only to find an interestingly dressed young woman with tarty blonde pigtails and an identical expression on her own, suspiciously attractive, features.

I had a burning desire to ask her as venomously as possible the most painfully obvious question: 'Who the shit are you?' but before I could do so, she pitched forward and face-planted firmly on the entrance room floor. She was unconscious before she hit the ground.

As she lay there, motionless, all I could think about was that if this was one of Ichiro's friends there must be a pretty important reason for him to keep her secret from me. I was not a jealous person, at least I didn't think I was, but I could not help but wonder if that reason was because he thought I would be jealous of her looks, or worse, that I had every reason to be.

I did go to the kitchen and grab some aspirin, a glass of water and some ice for the inevitable headache and bruising from her fall, so I felt a little better about myself for a moment. But then I felt terrible about feeling good about thinking of myself and assuming the worst of my boyfriend before thinking of the unconscious girl on the floor, and settled back into my newfound comfortable state of self-loathing.

I had returned to the entrance with my gifts, but the girl was not there. She was on the futon with Ichiro's laptop. Her face, I noted with a hint of disappointment, looked perfectly fine.

"What are you doing?" I asked, too torn between being angry, curious or scared to put any inflection on the question.

"Figuring out who is piggybacking my code,"

"So you're a–" I was so relieved I made air commas with the icepack and glass of water, " 'programmer' too then?"

"No more than a writer of autobiographies," she didn't look up at my confused face, but instead asked, "Can you help me?"

"I've got ice and aspirin if you're still feeling the effects of –"

"No, I mean with this, I am accessing the piggybacker's webcam and microphone and I would like a basic opinion on this person's intentions, so I can better determine whether I should help them or not, because from the sloppy way they are trying to access it, they need it bad." She got up and connected the laptop to the television, effortlessly locating the correct cable and the port on both Ichiro's television and his laptop, not even glancing to check their location or orientation and just shoving them in.

I tried to act naturally, though at this point I was not even sure what that was.

"So how well do you know my boyfriend?" I asked as she expertly navigated the menu on the television.

"Oh, I helped him on a thing once; made sure his logic was 100% and fixed his proxy to run with real input and output as opposed to the complex, imaginary-numbered system he was working with…" she had lost me at 'proxy' but even then what she was saying did not sound like the usual hacker mumbo-jumbo I heard from Ichiro, "got it," she said suddenly. She looked from me to the computer a couple of times before asking, "Do you know this mop of hair? You have similar bone structure, though he lacks the lightning storm that seems to be hanging around your shoulders."

The words were Japanese, but they were such an unusual assortment that before my intuition could kick in and tell me that I did not want to look at the screen, I looked towards the screen that she had turned towards me.

It was a picture of my brother with Sora, and only once the shock of seeing his face and all the horrid thoughts and memories that I now attached to it wore off, did I begin to wonder how the girl had managed to find a picture of them as if taken from the viewpoint of the computer that Taichi seemed to be working on. Clearly, it was taken some months ago, considering Taichi had stopped hanging around with Sora and Yamato before they went off to America, but there was something off-putting about the whole scene. It was something to do with how she sat on the edge of her bed, not at all at ease in her own room.

There was something else too, but before I could define it, the girl had turned the screen back and started typing feverishly.

"Hey, I was looking at–" I started, before a familiar, sisterly voice put a freeze on my mind.

"And you're saying she was the one off her face, not you?"

It suddenly struck me that Taichi was wearing the same shirt depicting the logo of Yamato's band that he had been wearing two nights ago. A strange coincidence.

I gasped as I heard his voice. He sounded tired.

"Well, considering what she'd found out…"

And Sora's attire in the picture was uncharacteristically Western, almost like she was preparing for her big trip.

"And what she'd seen! If Daisuke wasn't enough of a shock, to then find Koushiro too, I can't imagine what she's going through,"

I felt the colour drain from my face as I realised that what had unnerved me about the photo was that the curtains were moving. That and the fact that Taichi had not bought the shirt until after the band had left for North America because he did not want Yamato to know about it.

The reality set in.

"He's… out?"