Dipping my toe into some Keiichi/Rena stuff this time around. Let's see how that goes.

June 3rd, 2022

Keiichi Maebara rubbed his hands together, trying to stave off the chill of the cold autumn night. He always came back to the city at this time of year, even though Hinamizawa was his home –the only home he could really think to have, even though, academically, he knew that he had counted Tokyo as his home before.

It was odd, how words could change with your thoughts. Home had initially just meant –a house, a place where he lived, a room to store himself in, a spreading network of connections tied to school and shops and his house. It wasn't a cold, empty word, but it was certainly a meaningless one, a jumbled string of syllables. Home was just the place where he lived, a building he used to house himself.

When he'd come to Hinamizawa, home had started to mean something different. Home became something deeper, pulsing hot and slow in his veins like blood. Home meant something important, meant Hinamizawa and all its surroundings, meant the people there and the social ties that bound them. Home meant being a part of that community, meant that Keiichi, at root, belonged there, like a differently-colored strand of fate had been tied around his wrist and inevitably led him back to these mountains.

Keiichi had a red string tied around his pinky, too, and it led him back here every autumn, to cold stone tablets and icy air, to sticky-sweet flowers and nectar clinging to his benumbed hands and heartbreak tugging patiently at his heart.

"Yo, Rena."

The grave, the earth was silent. Of course it was. It had been silent every year that he had come, every year since that terrible day when the car swerved out in front of them and-

It wasn't fair.

Keiichi had said his piece on that –it wasn't fair, it should have been me, why did you push me out of the way, why couldn't it have been me instead, you deserved to live– and so he kept silent on it now, laying the flowers down and staring at the grave mournfully. Mion and the others left him to give his respects alone every year, before coming back the day after as a group. They knew how much Rena had meant to him, and they knew that this kind of grief should be a private thing.

He would lay his flowers down and speak, talking out all that had happened to him since the last autumn day that he'd come here.

Rena would have liked to hear about it, Keiichi thought. If she'd been alive, she would have swung her legs on a red-painted wooden park bench and chattered to him all about what she'd seen and done since they'd last met, and she would be just as eager to listen to Keiichi as the browning, rust-colored leaves of fall swirled down around them both. She would wrap his scarf tighter around his neck, telling him he looked cold, and then laugh when Keiichi argued that he wasn't some wussy city boy anymore.

She loved the scarf he had knit for her. It had been a clumsy and bedraggled thing, with thick ugly yarn and even thicker, uglier loops, but Rena had adored it as the chief of her treasures, because Keiichi had made it with all the shy blushing attention of love, and it had been his first gift to her.

She has been wearing it when she died. Keiichi used to love that ridiculously ugly shade of puce (the only yarn his mom had had in the house), but now he couldn't even look at things in that shade, because to look was to remember, and remembering the blotches of blood that spread over the joyful yarn turned his stomach.

I miss you, Rena.

The stone tablet marked with her name –her real name, the one she carried, not the one her mother had given her– was silent. It was always silent.

Grief bowed his head and made his steps slow and dragging when Keiichi finally turned away from the grave, shuffling his slow and mournful way to the cemetery gates. The icy wind swirled around him, tinting his cheeks a falsely bright pink, numbing his fingers, chilling his limbs until they ached as badly as his heart. Dry skeletons of leaves scuttled and danced over the pavement and gravel, an eerie, rustling counterpoint to his prosaic steps. He stopped at the gate to take a deep breath, and then he heard it.

Scuff.

Keiichi, Hinamizawa native as he was, instantly tensed at the familiar sound. It took him a few seconds, though, to work up the courage to glance behind himself. Nobody there, of course. He hadn't really expected there to be, the sound of a footstep or not.

One extra footstep.

Rena had talked about that, one of the signs of Oyashiro-sama's curse. At the time, he'd brushed it off, because really, how scary could one extra footstep be? Who even paid that much attention to their footsteps, anyway? And besides, even if it was as frightening as all that, Keiichi was a Hinamizawa native through and through. He followed the rules. He left no more, no less, and no farther than anyone else. His heart was here. Okinomiya was generally the farthest he went, and it was where Rena was buried.

But it wasn't just the extra footstep. It was the heavy, lingering, looming presence that that footstep announced, like a lead cloak draping itself over his shoulders, clasping around his throat, weighing over his back, and then refusing to let go. Every sense of sight, sound, touch, and smell told him that he was alone, that there was no one here, but something persistently was. There was a lack of presence behind his back that screamed its existence to the world so loudly that he could hear its footfalls walking behind him.

It wasn't Rena. Keiichi knew it couldn't be Rena, even as his heart clenched and hoped. Ghosts didn't walk, didn't even have feet. If it was Rena, there wouldn't be an extra footstep. There would just be her gentle presence beside him, fingertips touching his wrist, the warmth of her heart enfolding him. This wasn't Rena.

"Go away." Keiichi muttered, hunching his shoulders and turning back to the road. He tucked his chin into the worn, brown, coarseness of his old scarf, and set forth without a backwards glance.

He didn't listen to any extra steps that might have followed him.

Rivulets of water ran down the glass of his apartment windows, Keiichi staring listlessly into his steaming mug. He'd added a dash of alcohol to make the warming drink go down easier, loosen him up, and now he found his mind drifting aimlessly, like the tide. The rain had turned everything slick and shining, metallic and as cold and grey as his thoughts. Perhaps he had added too much alcohol: the room spun slowly around him, like a melancholy carousel, as his thoughts swirled round and round in gloomy drifts.

He wasn't chilled anymore, not really.

He missed her.

The alcohol-laced hot chocolate warmed his body, but he still felt cold inside.

Why was he alone?

Why did Rena have to die?

The world wasn't bright anymore, without her.

His universe was dead and cold and grey.

Keiichi was thirsty, but when he drank, it burned.

He was too tired to stay at the kitchen table but too heavy to move.

Keiichi lay collapsed across the table with his cheek on his outflung arm, staring and blinking slowly at nothing in particular. His mouth tasted like hot chocolate and whiskey. He was warm, but it was the faint, clinging warmth that would leave him as soon as he moved, the kind of heat that carried streamers of cold with it that would find him soon. His eyelids dragged downwards, drowsiness enfolding him, but he was too miserable to sleep, and besides, sleeping meant bed and bed meant movement and Keiichi was too drained and dispirited to consider any of that.

He blinked, a little fuzzily, at the wall. Strange, how that patch of moonlight looked so much like Rena's white dress. So bright, so pure, so strangely untouched by all the grubbing in the dirt she did, looking in the trash heap for treasures. That dress was a part of her, and a bittersweet, tear-choked smile slid onto Keiichi's face. Even though it hurt, all the good memories attached to that dress made him look, preventing Keiichi from turning his head. He just blinked at it, watching and thinking, remembering and wishing.

At length, the dress seemed closer, and Keiichi's eyelids fluttered shut in a long, slow blink. Odd, how the moon moved.

Even odder, now that he thought of it, that there was any moonlight at all. Shouldn't the storm clouds have blocked it out?

Ghostly fingers lilted through his hair.

"Oh, Keiichi-kun." he heard Rena sigh, and tears stung his closed eyes. He didn't want to open them. He didn't want to wake up from this dream, even if it hurt him down to his soul. "Look at you."

He couldn't look. He refused to.

"Come on, now. Come to bed."

Keiichi wasn't sure if he was being lifted or carried, if Rena pulled him out of his chair or he staggered there on his own. Perhaps he had done it before he fell his sleep, because the next thing he knew, he was curled on his futon, and Rena with him. She was cold, and wasn't there at all, really, but something about her misty nothingness was achingly familiar.

"You know, I pushed you out of the way because I wanted you to live." Rena said after a while. Keiichi didn't answer her. "Just goes to show, huh?"

Goes to show what? That they needed each other? That Keiichi could survive, but he could never really live without her, his other half?

His eyes fluttered open. Rena was lying beside him, her eyes fixed unblinkingly on his face. She was there, but she wasn't, and the alcohol mixing in his stomach didn't help.

"I miss you." he said, or tried to say. Talking was hard, and he wasn't sure if it was sleep, alcohol, or something else.

"I miss you too." Rena said, and a horrible echo of her old brightness came back to her, all the more horrible because she was so cold and still. "So, I had an idea."

Rena pushed him lightly, rolling Keiichi onto his back, as she hovered above him.

"It's actually not so bad, being dead." Rena told him. "But it is lonely. So I thought…well, Keiichi-kun, it might be nice to come back."

Her hands stroked down his face, and then moved lower, lower. Perhaps Keiichi could have fought her, as Rena's cold, dead fingers closed around his throat. He wasn't sure he wanted to. Was this a hallucination born of too much drinking? Rena was here with him, and that was too wonderful for words, but her eyes were deep and dark rather than the blue he remembered.

Too deep.

Too dark.

Those were eyes of the grave.

Well, she was dead, after all. Keiichi reached up a hand, but rather than trying to fight the hands locked on his neck, he found his fingers brushing through her corpse-dry hair. It felt like cobwebs, fine and thin and soft. He would've thought it had been more tangled, or even charred and burned. Cremation was the typical funerary method in Japan.

He coughed as Rena's grip began to tighten. It was starting to hurt, a little, as she squeezed his throat. Her cold, hard nails were digging into his skin.

"But you know what would be even nicer, Keiichi-kun?" Rena asked with a haunting echo of her usual brightness, an unhallowed gleam echoing in her dead, dull, expressionless eyes. A ghastly imitation of her old, cheerful smile spread across her face. "If you came with me."

Keiichi hadn't stopped her when Rena had fastened her hands around his throat. He hadn't stopped her when she began to strangle him. But now, as her grip grew tighter and tighter, he found his legs spasming without his will, kicking on the futon in weak, instinctive lunges. The grey world was creeping in at the edges. This hurt, now. Rena's love hurt.

But no matter how much it hurt, how much it killed him, Keiichi still wasn't quite sure he wanted to push her away.

This was Rena.

He loved her.

He didn't want her to be gone.

And now she was here with him, and did he want to stop that?

Keiichi didn't know. He couldn't think. His stomach was churning, acid clawing up the back of his throat, and suddenly he wanted to be sick –but he couldn't move. Rena was squeezing all the air out of him. His face was burning, but he couldn't tell if it was with heat or with cold. All he knew was that he didn't like it.

He wondered whether or not this was really a dream.

He didn't know if he wanted it to be or not.

9.53 PM, USA Central Time

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