If and when I ever finish the Higurashi (original run) fandub that I've been working on for literal years, let it be known that one of my proudest tricks of scriptwriting was managing to wrangle an "only wish" quote into the final episode of every arc of the anime, except for Massacre, where it changes to "final wish" and is not repeated in Festival Music. 'Cause, you know, in Massacre it's LITERALLY the final wish in both senses (Keiichi says it before he dies and it's the last time the line is used in the series), and then in Festival Music, of course, everyone's wishes are granted.

It's a thematic chain, okay?! I'm proud of that! (Even if it wasn't originally my idea, of course. In fact, several arcs already had an all-natural "only wish" line in the anime, and almost every arc except Curse Killing and Atonement had one in the manga. My only problem for those cases was matching it to lip-flap.)

June 24th, 2022

Keiichi's thin mechanical pencil scratched feverishly over the ruled notebook paper. His knees ached from where they were bent up underneath his table, but he wouldn't stop. No, he couldn't stop. He couldn't afford to. At any moment Rena might come back, might find some kind of excuse to sneak past his parents and creep up the stairs and stand behind the thin paper of his door and-

And watch him, with those damning, slitted eyes.

That was the most terrifying part, to be honest. Keiichi could understand Rena coming up the stairs when dad had sent her up, that was perfectly natural. And Rena was polite; if she heard him talking on the phone, she wouldn't burst in on him, she'd wait patiently until he was done, or softly scratch at his door to let him know she was there.

But Rena hadn't done any of that.

She'd stood, carefully and quietly, behind the thin wall of his door, and listened without making a sound. Listened the whole time. And when Keiichi was done, she had turned around and left, just as silently.

What kind of normal person would do that?! Rena should have come in to yell at him, or fled in hurt tears at hearing Keiichi discussing things she and the others hadn't wanted him to know.

That wasn't Rena. That wasn't Rena. Something else mysterious was going on here, and Keiichi needed to get to the bottom of it. But danger was already coiling around him like a snake, so he needed to leave evidence. Keiichi had grown up reading mystery novels with his mom: he knew how important even the smallest of clues could be. So leaving a clear, concise note was even more important, right?

I, Keiichi Maebara, am in mortal danger. I don't know who is trying to kill me or why. The one thing I know is that it has something to do with Oyashiro-sama's curse.

Now he would add more facts to this note wherever he found them, so that even if he disappeared, Oishi-san and the rest of the police would have a way to avenge him. Keiichi wouldn't leave behind a tangled, impenetrable mystery for them to solve.

He scratched idly at the side of his neck. Jeez, summer was hot out here in the boonies: Keiichi's skin felt vaguely irritated all the time, now, damp with sweat and flushed with heat. If he wasn't careful, he'd get a rash.

Though he had a lot bigger things to worry about than a rash, Keiichi knew. Rena silently watching and leaving was weird, but what pushed it from weird to murderous was the needles hidden inside the ohagi she and Mion had left. Some aura of danger was swirling thickly around this seemingly peaceful village, and Keiichi was right in the middle of it. He needed to be careful. He need to be wary.

Just how careful wasn't immediately clear to him until the next day, when a van swerved and almost hit him. Keiichi had to dive into one of the roadside ditches to avoid it, and he had watched the white vehicle pause, as though realizing how he had dodged, before suddenly screeching away. His heart pounding as he stared after it, covered in mud and tepid water, Keiichi realized that that was no accident. Why would it be? Hinamizawa was remote enough that there practically were no cars here, that it was safe enough to bike in the streets. What kind of improbable coincidence would it be for a van like that to see him, swerve towards him, and then pause like that? Wouldn't anyone normal get out to check if they had clipped him and sent him flying instead of Keiichi launching himself to safety?

That was deliberate. That was deliberate. Someone had tried to kill him in a bogus hit-and-run incident. They'd failed, but that only meant that they'd start using more surefire methods, right?

Like hell Keiichi would let them!

He grabbed a bat to defend himself. He was almost unwary enough to let Rena in when she came by with food, but crushed that impulse –alongside, inadvertently, her fingers. Keiichi didn't care. There was no way that a human would know just exactly what he was eating, right down to the flavor and brand. It wasn't like Rena lived in his house. She couldn't know that. No human could know that. He called Oishi to help dispel his fears, but the old man only ended up feeding his doubts –admitting, for a moment, that even he was sometimes uncertain of just how human the agency behind the curse was.

Keiichi felt like a fish in a net, struggling frantically over something invisible and all-enveloping that clasped around him and drew him up, helpless, to certain doom. He thrashed, terrified, but the net only drew tighter around him as everyone and everything in Hinamizawa slowly began to warp around him.

The next time he wrote in his B5 notebook, it was when his skin was slick with blood and his whole body was juddering with fear and horror. The words were sloppy, rushed, but Keiichi needed to get them down before the adults he saw outside got into the house. He knew the white van that they were using. He couldn't afford to let them take him. He had killed Rena and Mion to get this far –he couldn't afford to die now.

Rena and Mion are part of the conspiracy. Keiichi wrote, frantic now rather than feverish, tears choking his eyes. There are also at least four or five adults. They own a white station wagon. Please investigate the victim of the dismemberment case again. He is still alive. Tomitake-san's death was caused by an unknown drug. This syringe is evidence.

I don't know how things turned out this way. If you're reading this, I am probably already dead.

…there might be a difference as to whether or not there's a body.

But to you who read this, please expose the truth. That is my only wish.

"Um, Oishi-san…" Keiichi asked, shivering inside his thin hospital gown. "What's happening…to Mion right now?"

The detective was silent for a moment, facing the window with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Before I tell you…there's one thing I want you to answer me honestly, Maebara-san." he said slowly.

"What is it?"

Oishi turned away slightly from the half-curtained window as the sun fell across his face.

"I want a serious, honest answer." he said grimly. "Because if you don't give me a straight answer, it could be seen as interfering with our investigation."

Keiichi's brow furrowed, and his hands clenched a little on the bedsheets. Mion was his best friend in the whole world…but she had also driven a knife deep into his gut and thrown Shion off her apartment building.

"Maebara-san." Oishi rumbled ponderously, turning back to the window. "Who do you think pushed Shion-san off the balcony?"

"I can't think of anyone but Mion." Keiichi replied, slightly puzzled.

"Then who was it that stabbed you?" Oishi asked, and Keiichi felt a flare of anger. What kind of circular talk was this? Was Oishi trying to drive home some point, make Keiichi feel stupid for trusting his friend?

"Don't make me keep repeating it!" he snapped. "It was Mion! Mion Sonozaki! She pushed Shion and stabbed me…you just said yourself that Mion did it, Oishi-san!"

"Ha-ha-ha…actually…" Oishi admitted, scratching his cheek without turning away from the window. "My basis for saying that Mion killed Shion is a testimony from her neighbor. This neighbor of hers is a member of their gang. In other words, he was Shion's bodyguard. This man testified…that the noise he heard in the next room was just like the sisters' quarrels he had heard in the past. At first, he thought it was a hallucination brought on by her derangement and left her alone, because there had been similar disturbances every night at the time. But this one was unusually long, so he went to her room to give her a tranquilizer. The disturbance had quieted by the time the manager got there with the key, but he thought he'd at least check on her and opened the door. When he did, the room was a mess, and Shion's body was under the balcony. And he said it must have been Mion's doing…"

Oishi fully turned away from the window at long last.

"In other words, he only heard it through the wall. Not one person witnessed Mion Sonozaki."

"You don't have to see it to know it was Mion, do you?!" Keiichi yelled, becoming increasingly annoyed at this roundabout questioning. His stab wound hurt, and Oishi seemed to be poking fun at some very obvious facts.

"Now, now." Oishi said as he stepped closer to loom over Keiichi's bed. "What I'm saying is…you are the one and only person who witnessed Mion Sonozaki that night. Because the other witness, Shion-san, is no longer alive."

Keiichi narrowed his eyes a little.

"I don't understand what you're trying to say, Oishi-san." he said irritably.

The old detective sighed, straightening up again as he turned away from the bed.

"Were you really stabbed by Mion Sonozaki?" he asked, sounding almost weary.

"Yes!"

"Actually…" Oishi said. "We found Mion Sonozaki at the bottom of the well."

Keiichi froze.

The world seemed to freeze.

"Eh…?"

"She had fallen to her death. After she knocked you out, she tried to escape through the hidden tunnel in the well. And while she was climbing down the ladder, she missed a step and fell to the bottom…we gather she broke her neck and died."

"Th-that…" Keiichi managed to force out through his dry throat. "That's crazy…"

"The autopsy confirmed it. there's no doubt she died on that day." Oishi replied with unshakeable conviction. "It wasn't that she went back there after attacking you and Shion-san. By then, she was already dead!"

Keiichi shook.

No…I'm sure…that the Mion who stabbed me…

It wasn't possible. Shion had been killed around the same time he had, and besides, she was the victim in all this! It couldn't have been her! But if it couldn't have been her…and it couldn't have been Mion…

"Th-then!" Keiichi shouted. "Who attacked me and Shion?! Who!?"

Oishi turned towards him with a bitter smirk.

"Someone who is Mion Sonozaki…but is not Mion Sonozaki." he answered simply.

Keiichi covered his pale, sweaty face with one shaking hand.

Who is Mion Sonozaki…but isn't Mion Sonozaki…

The leering face of an oni mask flashed before his mind's eye, and Keiichi flinched. No, that was impossible. Surely that was impossible. He was a rational person. Demons didn't exist.

"Do you remember how Miyo Takano-san died?" Oishi asked after an abrupt moment. Keiichi lowered his hand in surprise.

"Eh…Takano-san?" he asked. "Wasn't she burned to death deep in the mountains…?"

"We've learned that she was burned after being hanged." Oishi answered. "But this is where it gets a little strange. Her first autopsy reported that 24 hours had elapsed since her time of death. That didn't match up, so apparently they panicked and falsified the report to say that she had died that day. I know you've been asked this several times, but did you see Miyo Takano-san on the night of the Cotton Drifting?"

"…yes." Keiichi answered warily after a moment. Oishi turned towards him slightly.

"And you saw her the day before that, when you were getting ready for the festival, right?"

"Yes…" Keiichi said slowly. "I saw her."

"If she had been dead 24 hours, that means she was already dead the evening before the festival." Oishi said. "She was alive when you were getting ready for the festival. But by the time you snuck into the Saiguden, she was dead."

Keiichi blanched.

The beginning of everything. What started it all. Invading the Saiguden. The one who instigated it…Takano-san…when she asked us to go into the Saiguden…

"There are too many dead people walking around in this case." Oishi said, giving a hearty, almost performative laugh. "Nu-fu-fu!"

…she was no longer…a member of this world…

"If you ever want to talk in the future," the detective finished, tossing his coat over his shoulder. "You can call me at any time."

His footsteps clacked away, out the door, but Keiichi was left in frozen shock, staring sightlessly into nothing. He was still staring sightlessly, this time at the ceiling, when his heart failure was reported less than twelve hours later, and the last witness slipped away.

Nothing is over in this case.

It's still going on.

It's still got a long way to go.

Someone please put an end to this case. This cruel, miserable, sad case…please put an end to it.

That is my only wish.

The slip as his sweat-damp palm slid off the thick metal cables was heart-stopping, but not as heart-stopping as the rain of blows that had pummeled upon his heart and soul over the past few days.

When Keiichi had wanted Teppei Hojo to die, that had been a natural and in all-ways-justified desire. He had worked hard to kill the man, but that, perhaps, was the first strange crack in the world, the first oddity that had warped everything out of place. Even now, Keiichi wasn't sure if the bastard was dead. Hadn't he heard that line in one of his mother's mystery novels…?

Curse the beast, if he had as many lives as a cat he would owe them all to me!

Yes, that was the way in which Keiichi Maebara hated Teppei Hojo.

Takano-san, perhaps, was less justified. Keiichi's senses had twanged like a badly-tuned piano around her on that rainy night, his instincts telling him…telling him that she was not to be trusted. That beneath her neat, smooth lipstick and unruffled composure, lay a malice that matched his own, the same furious hatred and oozing sense of violence buried deep within his heart when he thought of Teppei Hojo. Badgers of the same set could identify each other by smell, and the rotting stench of a murderess floated around Takano-san like a cloud of perfume.

Keiichi could put together the clues. A bike that she said didn't belong to Tomitake-san, a hissed injunction that neither of them had seen each other on that night…he knew. He knew, and so he cursed her, cruel woman that she was, tempting Tomitake-san to his grave. He willed Takano-san to die with all the same furious energy that he had used to smash in Teppei Hojo's skull with a thin aluminum bat, just as brutal, just as fatal.

And Takano-san had died.

Once, Keiichi could put out of his mind entirely. He himself had killed Teppei Hojo with his own hands, and so the wound on his spirit was almost nothing. When Takano-san had died, he'd felt nothing but grim satisfaction. It served the woman right, to die a pitiful death alone in the mountains. The fact that she had been burned when Keiichi had wished for her to dance in flames…that was a bit spooky, but really, there weren't that many ways to obfuscate a corpse's identity. Burning or cutting off the head and hands were the most common, and everyone in the village knew Takano-san by sight. Burning was the most natural way to try and cover your tracks if you killed her. It was normal. It was natural.

But then…the world had started to go wrong. Someone who wasn't Keiichi Maebara had been seen at the festival, and Teppei Hojo remained stubbornly alive. When Keiichi had come to the Coach, he had expected help, and the man had given it. But then he'd taken it away, whispering to his assistants to drug Keiichi to knock him out so that they could treat him, and with all the broken-hearted fury of the betrayed, Keiichi had cursed him, too, as he shoved open the window to the clinic and ran for the forest to dig up the place where he believed Teppei Hojo's corpse to be. In his heart, he had cursed Doctor Irie to die with all the fervency and furor of a wronged child, expecting nothing more from it than a venting of his bitter feelings.

And then Oishi had come upon him as Keiichi was trying to dig up the body in the woods, and Keiichi had shaken mud from his bangs as he was kicked into the puddling ground and cursed the fat old detective too, murder in his eyes as well as his heart. He had cursed him with venom in his heart, thinking of how it had worked on Takano-san, but the utter shock of no body being where it should be had thrown Keiichi so entirely off his rhythm that he'd forgotten about his own malice for a while, intent on hunting down Satoko's damn uncle.

When he found her wilting from heatstroke in the bath, of course, all considerations had been erased in the need to take her to the clinic. And then, and there, Keiichi received the first crushing body-blow.

Coach was dead.

Coach was dead, and Keiichi had killed him with his wishes. It was a direct punch to the gut, a hair-raising chill down his spine as Keiichi realized that he had wished for Takano-san to die, and she had died. He had wished for Coach to die, and he had died. It was like he was wielding the power of a curse, a damn malformed monkey's paw that miraculously killed everyone except the one man Keiichi wanted dead above everyone else.

And then the second body-blow arrived mere moments after the first, driving Keiichi's spirit to its metaphorical knees.

Oishi-san had gone missing.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

Keiichi had cursed Takano-san to death. He had cursed Doctor Irie to death. And now, he had probably cursed Oishi-san to death too.

It was a barrage of hammering blows that no rationale could stand up under, and his mind beaten and bruised, awhirl with a thousand impossible thoughts, Keiichi had staggered after Satoko, heading back to the shrine where she and Rika lived. She could find some clothes there.

They had found Rika's body there, and the few threads of reason that had managed to cling onto Keiichi and Satoko both had snapped.

It wasn't possible. None of this was possible. As Satoko spit curses at him and shook him from the bridge, Keiichi couldn't even manage to offer more than a token resistance, his palms slipping on the hot, sun-warmed metal as the cicadas chirped and buzzed in a slow thunderous roar around them both. This should have been just another sticky summer day, and yet, everything had gone wrong. The whole world was warped.

Am I…the one that's gone crazy? Keiichi thought to himself as he plunged down out of the sky, drawn irresistibly towards the rocks and boulders of the ravine beneath the bridge. Or Hinamizawa…?

No…I…was never crazy. I had probably already disappeared. Yes. On the night of the Cotton Drifting. Now I say goodbye to this messed-up world…

In the end, I wish I could have…seen Satoko smile…one more time. If…I'm able…let me pray for one more thing.

My only wish…is for the death of this thing that we call the world of Hinamizawa.

So that no one else will wander into this messed-up world.

Two years after the Great Hinamizawa Disaster and the deaths of all 2,000 villagers, and seven years after they had first met, Akasaka Mamoru and Kuraudo Oishi met again. They relaxed in the hot spring, drank a beer, and ate as such men did.

But the topic of their conversation was grim, and blows were exchanged.

"O-Oishi-san!" Akasaka stammered, holding the side of his cheek as he sat upright from the floor.

"If you want to take the blame, I'll hit you as many times as it takes." Oishi told him with a scoff. "But there are other things you can do."

"Things…I can do?" Akasaka asked bitterly, his fingers digging into the matt. He hurled his words at Oishi, Akasaka's body lurching forward on the ground as tears started to pour from his eyes. "But…she's already dead! And so brutally…I couldn't save her…"

"That's right." Oishi agreed. "You couldn't save her because you were a greenhorn."

Akasaka choked, but then Oishi suddenly knelt, clasping his colleague by the shoulders.

"But now you're different!" he said eagerly. "Let's uncover the whole truth."

Akasaka's eyes widened, and he slowly looked up at Oishi.

"Uncover…?"

"If what you say is true, then all of the incidents were planned. And that changes everything about how we investigate them." Oishi continued. "I've been to the sites of every one of those bizarre deaths. And Rika Furude revealed the truth to you. Together…"

"Together…we can find out the whole truth…?" Akasaka gasped hopefully. He looked up as the door rattled and slid aside, seeing his daughter rubbing her eyes in the gap. "Miyuki?"

"Papa…are you crying?" she yawned, seeing the tears still gathered at the corner of his eyes.

"Oh, I'm just…" Akasaka hastily moved to wipe them away as his daughter plopped down in front of him, reaching out.

"Did you have another scary dream?" she asked, touching his cheek as Akasaka's arm dropped away, making him. "Are you okay?"

The little girl squeaked as her father suddenly enfolded her in a fierce embrace.

"Hey! Papa!"

"Akasaka-san…" Oishi sighed, heaving himself to his feet. "There's more to that series of mysterious deaths. On the night of the Cotton Drifting in 1983, a male photographer met with a suspicious death, and his girlfriend burned to death. The next day, the doctor killed himself. And…"

Oishi's fists clenched at his sides.

"One of my men…"

He pulled his head up.

"But everything is starting to get hazy in light of the great disaster."

"Even so," Akasaka said, squeezing his daughter tighter as the tears began to flow again. "The investigation isn't over…no! I won't let it be over! For that girl too…we'll keep the investigation going!"

"…Yes." Oishi smiled.

"Papa, who's that girl?" Miyuki asked, pushing out of her father's tight embrace with a grunt. Akasaka gave her a smile.

"Before you were born, Miyuki, I met a little girl who was like an angel."

"An angel?!" she gasped, perking up excitedly.

"She was cute and kind, but she was a very strong girl." Akasaka continued as Oishi sat back down, sticking a cigarette into his mouth.

"Woooow!" Miyuki gushed, eyes shining. "Papa! Then Miyuki wants to be that girl's friend!"

"…yeah." Akasaka choked after a second as the tears overflowed. He pulled his daughter to him in another, gentler hug. "Good idea…let's both go see her someday."

In the years that followed, a book was published about Hinamizawa village. The book contained all the information about the series of mysterious deaths, including those right before the disaster. This book was researched and written with the hope that the incidents wouldn't fade away. The afterword reads:

Alone, we cannot hope to uncover the truth about why these tragedies occurred.

We ask you who read this book to please find the truth.

That is our only wish.

Of all the things, all the monstrosities that she had done, it was the rip in her shirt that had shocked Shion out of her vengeance-fueled haze. It was just a little thing, in and of itself –a slight tug and then a burst of cooler air gaping through to touch the bare skin of her side as her shirt caught on a nail or a splinter, and then the world-jolting slip as the edge of her shoe slid just that little fraction off balance…

Shion slipped off the balcony. She fell, and clarity seemed to return.

Perhaps there was something to the saying that when people died, their life flashed before their eyes. Shion had always taken that literally, always thought that in that moment –whatever moment it was– the memories of all she had seen and done would shutter through her mind like a roll of film, that a brilliant flash of light would take her and within that bright whiteness would be all the colors of the life she had lived.

But really, it wasn't like that at all.

As she fell, long before she struck the lifeless concrete below, Shion remembered. Rather than a burst of final existence as her soul was rent from her body, the memory of her life flashed upon her suddenly, like a jolt of cold water thrown into her face. She couldn't help but remember. What was the phrase –resignation in the face of the inevitable, hindsight is twenty-twenty?

Those sayings melded together and sunk into her as Shion was torn out of the safe and comfortable path to her apartment, falling backwards into the cold night air. She looked back on her life, and what she saw was Satoshi-kun, always Satoshi-kun. Shion felt like he was still watching her, even now. What was it that first called him to mind? The gentle golden glow of the moon, peering down through the high-rise buildings as Shion plummeted downwards between them?

But thinking of that made her think of Satoko, and screaming and sobbing in the underground Saiguden –some of it hers, at the end. It made her think of the heart-wrenching feeling as all her purpose, all her soul, was torn out of her with the realization that she had failed Satoshi-kun, that she had cast aside the one and only one responsibility he had entrusted to her.

Satoshi-kun, I'm sorry I couldn't keep my promise.

He had put his sister into her hands, his precious little sister, the treasure for whom he had ground his life to dirt and submitted to the curse –and Shion had taken that wish, beautiful and delicate as an ethereal flower, and trampled it into blood-stained mud. Never once had she thought of her promise to him, never once had she even tried to think of Satoko, too wrapped up in her selfish grief.

Yes. Her grief was selfish.

Shion admitted that now, to herself, as she fell. She had only cared about revenge, only cared about hurting everyone else as she had been hurt. She'd used her grief and the loss of Satoshi-kun as a cloak, even to herself, hiding what she really wanted. She wanted to hurt, to torment everyone who had hurt her. The demon inside of Shion had wanted to crush her sister for stealing her future (the future where she could protect him), to murder Oni-Baba (whose sins could fill a book), to relentlessly attack Satoko as all the spite that had been saved up inside Shion's cracked heart had spilled forth with the cataclysmic force of a bursting dam. Kimiyoshi, who treated her coldly alongside everyone else once she donned the mask of Shion…Rika, who had none of the family problems that Shion did…Keiichi, who had the love Shion could never attain…

Selfish. Jealousy. Hate. Those were the real reasons that Shion had committed these atrocities, and nothing else.

I'm sorry, everyone.

She should have been stronger. Shion knew that now, as she hovered insensibly between the building-streaked sky and the ground far below, staring up at the moon as every second somehow took an eternity to pass, an eternity that left her body cradled by the cool air rushing past her. She should have fought down this demon inside her heart, but she hadn't, and now her weakness had killed everyone she cared about. Because Shion had not fought it, everyone was dead.

I'm sorry.

Shion blinked away tears as she stared up at the golden moon, seeing misty shapes form against it.

My only wish…

She reached up for Satoshi's face, smiling down at her with love and forgiveness as he was silhouetted against the moon.

Is that if I ever get another chance…I won't screw it up like this again.

As though the Fates had decided that Shion had been hanging in the air too long, the cord of that endless time she had been held in was finally snipped. Reality shuddered back to her as her life's flash came to an end, and Shion plunged suddenly out of the sky with a soft, startled gasp and a single reaching hand the only thing that trailed behind her.

Rena scratched at her throat. She'd never not been scratching at her throat, all night, whenever there was a pause, like her finger was a needle and her throat a magnet. Bandaids clung futilely to the column of her neck, layered over each other like ribs, but many were hanging loose, and the skin between them was scratched and irritated. Of course it was. You needed to dry the surface before you stuck a bandaid on, and Rena's skin was slick with blood and sweat. Mostly sweat, but as the sultry summer night wore on and she itched and itched and itched, blood joined it, seeping down hot and wet into the collar of her dress.

She was terrifying, silhouetted against the full moon with the scent of gasoline sharp and heavy in the air and her nata even sharper and heavier in her hand. The whole class had watched as she swung that weapon down on Mion's head, the whole class had watched as blood seeped down Mion's pale face –and that was when Rena had been using the blunt edge. What she would do to someone if she swung with the cleaver-like blade…

The metal of the roof was warm under her feet, warm from soaking in the bloody red light of the sinking sun all evening long, as Rena tried and tried and tried to make them understand. Gasoline stung her nose, making her want to sneeze, but she did not look away from Keiichi-kun. Rena was hurt, bitterly hurt. She had trusted him. Alone, out of everyone else, she had trusted him! Keiichi-kun had been the one person she didn't even entertain the thought of betraying her –and he had stabbed her in the back as hard and ruthlessly as Mi-chan.

Unforgivable.

Unforgivable.

Rena's hand squeezed tighter on the handle of her weapon. Didn't he understand, that it was better to burn themselves with a proper cremation than to have their bodies snatched and remade and erased by the aliens, to become the mere puppets of these parasites that were even now squirming through her brain? Rena was trying to help. She was just trying to help everyone. Why were they fighting her so hard? Why was everyone lying to her?

Someone was yelling at Keiichi from the yard. Probably Oishi. It sounded like Oishi. Rena had never liked Oishi, he was always prevaricating and trying to dodge her questions. Oishi had probably been working for the Sonozakis all along, laughing at her behind his hand. It was the perfect cover: if he pretended to have a feud with them, Rena would never suspect him of trying to sell her out. How diabolical. How cruel.

Her neck itched. Rena scratched at it, trying to squirm her fingers beneath the peeling layers of bandaids and scratch at that persistent itch that seemed to burrow all the way down into her nervous system. It didn't work. It never worked. She'd been poisoned, after all. You couldn't scratch poison out of you. That would be silly.

But she still felt so disgusting. She felt hot. There was sweat all over her. Her skin itched. There were bug bites on her skin beneath the dress, since she'd been camping outside these past few nights. Everything was uncomfortable.

"Now its all failed." Keiichi-kun said, turning back to her. "Everyone's out of the classroom. And you can't use the time-bomb anymore. Game set, Rena!"

How dare he stand there and grin at her in the way that he did. How dare Keiichi-kun stand there and act like nothing was wrong, when he might've just destroyed the world. How dare he. How dare he.

"I risked the last of my life to save mankind from the aliens…" Rena hissed, gritting her teeth. "But you ruined it all, Keiichi-kun."

She drew herself up and glared at him with every inch of righteous fury that was still left in her poisoned body.

"My only wish was to save everyone here." she spat, bringing up her nata. "If mankind is destroyed, it's your fault!"

A bullet to the chest hurt, unsurprisingly. It hurt like a punch, but as Keiichi buckled and fell backwards onto the soft, dew-damp grass, he was surprised to find out that after the searing pain of the worst suckerpunch he'd ever received, the stinging agony faded into an intense but not-entirely-agonizing ache.

That made sense, he guessed as his skull bounced off the ground and the forest canopy swam overhead, water involuntarily surging into his eyes. Having a lead slug tear through your nerves hurt, but once the bullet passed out of him, well, there weren't any nerves to be hurt anymore. They'd been shot straight out of his body, leaving a neat round hole behind.

"Kei-chan!" Mion gasped, everyone sinking to their knees beside him as Keiichi wheezed and struggled to merely breathe, an ominous liquid warmth spreading deep inside him. His hand was grabbed and squeezed by someone, but laid on his back like this, he couldn't see who. "Hang in there!"

Keiichi's gorge suddenly rose, copper burning across the back of his tongue, and he turned his face aside, coughing and spitting a gob of blood onto the ground. The warmth welling up in his chest hadn't lied: the bullet must have nicked a lung on its way through him.

"S-sorry…" he croaked weakly, looking back up at the others with a sheepish grin. "But…after all my tough talk…looks like I'm the first out."

"No…" Mion whispered, then shook her head wildly. Tears were brimming in her eyes as she looked back towards him. "No, this isn't happening, it can't be! Kei-chan, you can't die like this!"

He opened his mouth, trying to tell her to run, tell them all to run, the person who had fired the bullet was still out there, but blood was welling up continuously in the back of his throat, and he had to struggle to just swallow it down and breath at the same time. The words bubbled, helpless and inarticulate, through the blood, and Keiichi felt the chill of death creeping up on him.

"What?" Mion asked, leaning closer to him, turning her ear towards him. She knew he was trying to say something, even if she couldn't understand.

"Guys…" Rena gulped, and then her voice strengthened. "Let's go!"

Everyone sucked in a startled breath, eyes snapping towards her as Keiichi's gaze flicked between their pale faces.

"Just focus on surviving right now." Rena said desperately. "Keiichi-kun can't be wishing for us to stay here and be killed!"

His breath still wheezing raggedly in his throat, Keiichi managed to give Rena a slight grin and nod. Good old Rena. She always knew what was on his mind.

Rena stared at him, tears glimmering in her eyes, before she bit her lip and shouted.

"EVERYBODY RUN!"

Mion choked, Rena flinched, but the club launched themselves off, heels and sneakers digging into the earth around him and scattering Keiichi's arms with a few faint clods of dirt as they shoved away from his body, dashing away into the forest. No matter the blood slowly strangling the life out of him, Keiichi struggled to tilt his head back, watching them go from upside-down and through his bangs.

I want all of you…to survive. He thought simply, pushing his good thoughts out towards his friends, his arm trailing weakly after them. That's my final wish.

The light went out of his glimmering periwinkle eyes, and Keiichi's arm fell with terrible finality into the dirt.

7.39 AM, USA Central Time

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