Sitting on a bench in the local park, Monika had just finished doing something she figured she wouldn't have done.
"So, let me get this straight… Shujinkou saved you guys at the warehouse by going on a rampage?" Fuyu repeated.
Monika nodded her head.
"And at the hospital, after being mercilessly beaten by Akui, he suddenly turned it around and proceeded to effortlessly manhandle him and Akuma before suddenly passing out."
Monika nodded her head once again. She knows how crazy the story sounded and the borderline dumbfounded look on Fuyu's face was expected.
"Hard to believe right?"
Monika knew she didn't need to ask, but she had to say something to try and break Fuyu from her stunned silence.
"…I can see why Mali was so vague in her description of the events," Fuyu said. "It's one thing to say Shujinkou risked his life to save you guys, it's another to say Shujinkou led a successful one-man charge and played human paddleball with a gruff criminal."
"Only one of the reasons I never told anyone the specifics of what happened," Monika admitted. "Except for Claudette since she was there for the first part."
"And this was what Shujinkou being 'off' led too?"
"Mm-hmm."
"Wow… I already felt like I was harsh with him earlier…" Fuyu lamented. "This is kinda helping my case of how I would say the wrong thing due to ignorance."
"I'm sure you were just trying to do things the proper, right way. Shujinkou tried that too, but it didn't really work."
Monika closed her eyes, recalling all the strange things that happened during the incident. These almost supernatural moments occurring during a dark time made one hunch feel like a fact.
"It really feels like no matter what any of us could have done, there was nothing that could stop events from playing out like they did," Monika admitted. "And after…"
Monika couldn't find it in herself to finish her thought.
"And everyone else… Couldn't everyone be taking time to themselves?" Fuyu asked.
Monika solemnly shook her head. "No… Everyone explicitly made it clear that that wasn't the case… I tried to fill the missing void, tried to do something but… I should have known that I would be unable to do it."
"Why not?"
"Because..."
Monika bit her tongue.
"What does it matter? After all, what am I supposed to do when your friends are so serious about staying away that they'll look at you like you're a threat?"
"They… really looked at you like that?" Fuyu marveled.
"They looked at me like Shujinkou did at Akui and Akuma when he lost himself. It hurt of course, but now I realize that that's how much they want to move on," Monika let out a sad laugh. "And at this point, it feels like I'm the only one trying to hold onto something that's gone. I realized, but didn't want to admit it until now, that I have to move on too."
"Move on how?"
Monika dug into her bag and pulled out her letter.
"By giving you this; an official letter to disband the Literature Club."
"Snatch."
A hand reached forward and effortlessly took the letter away from Monika.
"Claudette!?"
Monika looked could only look up, stunned by the sudden appearance of her cousin. Claudette combed the contents of the letter, her eyes lighting up with clarity once she finished. After all this time, she found the answer she was looking for.
"So this what the whole day was about," Claudette mused.
Snapped out of her initial surprise, Monika finally came to realize something important about her cousin's sudden appearance.
"Claudette, what are you doing here and… why are you wearing my uniform again?"
"Because I needed it again to sneak into your school," she answered matter -of –factly.
Fuyu lowered her head in shame and sighed. "I did not hear that."
"But why?" Monika questioned Claudette.
"Because I needed to make sure I didn't make your mood worse after triggering you last night. The strange thing was, you've been hovering around Fuyu's office doors every break today, minus lunch."
Claudette looked down at the letter again and took a deep breath.
"I thought you were just struggling to open up to someone, not try to make a decision you'll obviously regret."
"This isn't about regret, Claudette; it's about accepting that I have to move on," Monika corrected. "And the only way to do that…"
"-Is to cut out the part that still holding you back from doing so, I know that's where you're going." But did you ever consider the fact that you were clinging to what was holding you back for a reason?"
Monika nodded her head in agreement. "You're right. I was clinging to it and I now know the reason: it's because I just have a hard time accepting the reality of everything."
"That's not what I was going for and you know that."
"I do, but… I also know that what you want me to do just isn't the real. You want me to think that if I keep clinging to the past then everything will magically get better."
"No, that's what you were hoping for," Claudette argued. "And I let you hope for it because it meant that part of you didn't want to give up. But this, this letter… If you actually go through with this, then you're effectively surrendering the one thing that allowed you to achieve what you actually wanted for so long."
Claudette paused for a moment and exchanged a brief, but enlightening glance with Fuyu.
"No… You'll be giving up what you achieved. Some of the precious friends you never stop talking about; that's what you'll lose giving up now."
Monika jumped up. Her expression was grim.
"What other choice do I have? I mean, if there's anything I've learned from all of this is that I'm just unable to do anything that's even a little useful for my friends. Even the little stuff I did was rendered immediately pointless. I can't even… I can't even keep a promise I made!
And now all I have left is just dreams and memories of how I failed everyone and all the happy memories are there just to remind me of how bad that could have been! The club is nothing but a reminder of what was lost and how it tears me up inside! And now I see… That's the reality I was avoiding and now I have to accept it. I have to move on like the others have."
Claudette shook her head quietly.
"…No, Monika. I know you. That's the defeatist in you talking. You always try to accept things like this even when it clearly hurts you. You're not letting anything go, you're just internalizing it like you the time you were used for a slumber party or when you unintentionally ticked off that entitled girl in your class and the list goes on.
You can't let yourself take the blame for something that was completely out of your control. Heck, if you want to blame someone that's not the people who are directly responsible for the whole Devil's Night thing, why don't you blame Shujinkou's dad since he was in a prime position to prevent any of this happening?"
"I shouldn't expect anything like that from Jomei; I realized that talking to him. And there's actually one thing he said that actually made sense in that-"
"Nope," Claudette sternly interrupted. "The opinion of a guy who effectively put his own son in danger is not valid. Try again."
"Claudette… I don't have a choice. This is the only thing I can do at this point," Monika stressed somberly.
That was a phrase Claudette had heard for almost her entire life, and like always there was only one thing she could say.
"…No. Actually there's something else you can do at this point."
She nonchalantly crumbled the letter into a ball and tossed it into the air. She opened her mouth only to be rendered silent from the sight of a human-sized shadow falling into the nearby bushes.
"Ow…"
What rose from the bushes was Kiyoko. She gingerly rubbed the back of her head with one hand as she held the crumbled letter in her other.
"Gotta admit, I always expected me getting a harsh wakeup call like that from a Frisbee, not a crumbled up piece of paper…" Kiyoko groggily admitted.
Everyone's showing up out of nowhere… Monika scratched her right cheek in disbelief over the third sudden appearance in the last 24 hours.
"Kiyoko, what were you doing up in that tree?" Fuyu asked.
"I was getting in some Zs before visiting Shujinkou, then I heard some voices being raised then I got hit in the face with paper…" Kiyoko recounted, casually tossing the tool that definitely woke her up in the air. "Is this the center of some argument or something?"
"Just that Monika's planning to move on from everything that's happened by disbanding the Literature Club and effectively saying goodbye to half her friends," Claudette succinctly explained.
Kiyoko caught the letter one final time and stared at it curiously. "Really? So this paper is a letter of disbandment?"
"Yes…" Monika sighed. "You're probably going to say that I'm needlessly abandoning everything too, right?"
Kiyoko looked up at Monika and shrugged. "That depends."
That was something Monika didn't expect to hear. Kiyoko's response was neither for one side or the other, but squarely down the middle. It was perhaps more shocking than if she flat out took her side.
"If you really feel like you this will help you move on then go for it, but only if you really feel like it should,"
"So, you think I'm jumping the gun?"
"Personally, I don't want to shove what I think in your face."
"But what do you think?"
"I think you're jumping the gun."
The bluntness of her confirmation was enough to elicit a small chuckle from Monika. "I knew it…"
"But I only think that because I think you think that you don't have any other choice. I'm an advocate for moving on, because sometimes in life, you have no choice but to do so. You can try and try to recapture a thing of the past, but it doesn't always work that way.
I don't think you disbanding the club in order to move on is inherently a bad idea, especially when it's the only thing you can do for you to feel better, but I don't think you're at the point yet."
"Kiyoko, I really am at that point."
"Are you sure?" Kiyoko quizzed. "Because you're kind of making a decision that effects the entire club without everyone's consent."
"It's clear that everyone isn't coming back."
"I'm not too sure about that. After all, Shujinkou isn't in any condition to say that anything along the lines of 'I'm done too'," Kiyoko pointed out.
"That's…"
Kiyoko's response was as calm and factual as usual. However, despite knowing this, Monika still felt as if she was just accused of something objectively terrible.
"I mean, he's…"
"You shouldn't try to find something that lends credence that he would be in the same camp," Kiyoko interrupted. "I'm fairly certain he wouldn't. It'd be kinda weird for the guy who stuck his neck out like he did to do that."
"Then what am I supposed to do?" Monika questioned. "You said that you're an advocate of me moving on and yet you're saying things to keep me from doing so."
"That's not what's I'm trying to do. The thing about moving on, Monika, is there are only two true versions of it. There's moving on because you found closure and moving on in spite of the fact that you can never get that closure.
Like I said, I'm not going to pretend that I know what's going on or what happened behind my back, so know that I'm only saying this based on what I'm seeing and remember to take it with a grain of salt but…
Monika, at this moment, you're going to have to figure out which one you're going to take or end up with and to know for certain what you're moving on from.
But to do that, you'd have to own up to the fact that you have something on your chest that you need to let out, if just for your own sake. You're talking about moving on because a part of you recognizes that very thing is keeping you trapped in a cycle of regret and self-loathing.
You may want this or that, but at the same time you feel like you can't have or don't deserve it or both. You believe your only choice is to move on and put everything behind you, but I don't think you can fully commit to it now otherwise you wouldn't be trying this hard to convince both you and us, you'd just accept it and move on."
It was scary how on point Kiyoko was. Monika wanted to say something but she couldn't when she was right and unbiased about everything.
"That would be moving on despite no closure, which is the option you're gunning for. At this point in time, there's no feasible way for you to get it," Kiyoko continued. "But… you know that's not true. Because no matter what you decide to do from now on, you know deep down that there is at least one sliver of a chance to get some kind of closure."
Monika knew what Kiyoko was referring to. But no matter how it was brought up, it didn't change one singular fact.
"I… I can't do that," Monika denied.
"I'm not telling you what you should do regarding your own club, heck, I'm the very last person that would have any right to say anything about your club, but I think you do need that closure. It's actually something you needed at least since the end summer, right?"
"What?"
"Remember that I can only assume, but isn't the way you're feeling now similar to how you felt at the convention we went to?" Kiyoko questioned. "You told me how you felt then and it really seems like part of how you feel now is connected to how you felt then.
And maybe the closure that you need is for someone to hear you out and that someone may need to be the person those feelings relate to."
Rendered speechless by Kiyoko's assessment, Monika could only meekly scratch her right cheek.
It seemed pointless to ask now, but still, "And doing that…?"
"May help free you to do whatever you really want to do from now on. But maybe I'm completely off base and everything I said was just plain wrong. If that's the case…"
Monika instinctively stuck her hand forward to catch her letter. It was surprising, to say the least, that it was returned to her at all. But it paled in comparison to what she said next.
"If you really think that's the solution, then you should do what you were going to do with that letter."
Monika gazed at the letter in hand. She was just given the vindication she was seeking and yet, like before, something was holding her back.
She looked up at Fuyu. "…Fuyu, what do you think?""
"I already told you I'm not going convince you to do one or the other, but I do agree with what Kiyoko's suggesting, if only for your own health."
Monika turned to her cousin. "Claudette?"
"You know my own feelings, but… I'll accept whatever you want to do as long as you do it with a clear head."
Monika scratched her right cheek and sighed.
"…Alright. I'll do it."