Warnings: Brief descriptions of violence
Heavy references to chapter 80 of this fanfic lie ahead.
Lucky Child
Chapter 97:
"Clap if You Believe in Fairies"
I took a deep breath, and I turned around.
They stared at me with confusion in their eyes: Yusuke, Kuwabara, Botan, Shizuru, Atsuko, and even Yukina. Hiei, Kurama and Genkai were there, too, of course. The entire gang was there, although the latter three looked more suspicious than confused. But that was to be expected. They knew my secret already. They had to suspect that that was why I had called everyone together before standing at the front of the room, nervous, twisting my fingers like a length of gnarled rope. As dragonflies bit at the lining of my belly, I shifted from foot to foot and tried my hardest not to barf.
"So." I swallowed. "You must be wondering why I called you here today."
Yusuke slouched in his seat upon the couch. "Yeah, no foolin'."
"What gives, Keiko?" said Kuwabara, who sat beside him on the edge of his seat. Imploring eyes searched my face. "Are you OK?"
"Yes, I'm fine." A deep breath. A shaky smile. "I just have something I really need to tell all of you."
I told them the truth, then. The speaking of it wasn't difficult. I'd rehearsed every word ten thousand times. It was keeping my composure that was hard, that filled my veins with buzzing bees and thrumming heat. It was their eyes that put fire in my cheeks and a chill on my neck. It was their looks of dawning comprehension—she's serious!—that dropped my eyes to the floor in shame and made me fall quiet when I was done.
I waited in silence for them to react.
A beat passed.
Yusuke's voice cut the silence like a knife when he snarled: "Are you serious?"
And Botan bolted from her chair and said, "You can't really expect us to believe that you—"
Kuwabara was on his feet, too. "What the hell, Keiko?!" he said, hurt and fury waging war behind his eyes. "You kept that from us the whole time?"
"I knew you were strange, but this is just sad." Hiei, meanwhile, hardly moved a muscle, but the roll of his eyes cut worse than any blade. "You're delusional."
Kuwabara's hands came up, almost reaching for me. "How could you not tell me this before now, Keiko?" he said, looking every inch a kicked dog. "I told you about how I was psychic, but you couldn't tell me the truth about you? Are we not friends?"
Panic rose hot and heady in my chest. "No, I—"
"Oh, Keiko," Kurama said, soft and pitying. "You chose the worst time to do this."
"And your delivery left quite a bit to be desired," Genkai added in a rasping grumble.
Botan turned on her heel, blue hair flying. "I'm going to have to report this to Lord Koenma at once, of course," she said, heading for the door. "It's a shame, but…"
"This is what you were hiding for all those years?" Yusuke said. "That's crazy!"
"Keiko, how could you?!" Kuwabara warbled.
At the back of the room, Shizuru whirled, giving a short, harsh bark of anger as her fist punctured the wall with the sound of thunder—a sound that set a frown to the corners of my mouth and brought my finger up to point at her furious face.
"No—no," I said. "Shizuru would not punch a wall. That's completely OOC! She would say something quiet but devastating, and—" My hand came down like a guillotine. "Oh, fuck it."
The scene around me froze, but no one stood still. They literally froze like a video on pause, cosmic remote locking time in place around me. Kurama and his pitying eyes, Genkai and her scowl, Hiei's derision, Botan's sadness, Yukina's silent shock, Yusuke's anger, Kuwabara's hurt—their emotions continued to bore into me despite their frozen faces, and with a groan I sank into Kuwabara's empty seat beside Yusuke and put my head in my hands.
This exercise had not gone well. But then again, these lucid-dream simulations of mine never did. From the first time I had managed to conjure the likeness of a person, it had been exceedingly difficult to craft a likeness that could mimic the intended subject as well as resemble them physically. At first I had simply crafted a likeness of Tom that could sit at a computer in silence, clicking the mouse as video games played across the screen in the darkness of his office, while I sat on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and staring at the cowlick on the back of his head. Eventually I tried to get him to talk to me, but like so many things in my life, it hadn't ended well.
I'd tried to make speaking likenesses of other people after that. It had gone better with characters from Yu Yu Hakusho than it had people from my old life—probably because I'd spent a good chunk of my first life trying to mimic the personalities of the YYH crew through fanfic. It also helped that the YYH crew was literally all around me to use as a reference point, unlike Tom.
I hadn't actually heard Tom's voice in 15 years, after all. But I digress.
Trying to get a dream-person to accurately act like Tom just didn't work. He came out exaggerated. Overblown. OOC, to use a phrase from the world of fanfic. The YYH characters were much easier, and it didn't take long to create speaking simulacrum of the friends in my new life. For the most part, they acted just like their real-life counterparts, although sometimes they veered into OOC territory—mostly when I tried to create more than one of them at a time. It was easier when I interacted with them one-on-one. Like crafting a one-shot character study of a single character, as opposed to a big group scene where personalities got lost and diluted. Perhaps it was because I couldn't devote enough mental focus to a big group of characters at once, attention spread too thin? I wasn't sure. But the fact remained that I was just plain better at summoning one likeness at a time.
So to summon all the YYH characters at once? No wonder my dream-simulations about telling my friends my secret had never gone any better than poorly. This must've been my tenth attempt to dream-reveal my secret to them, and it had gone as not-well as all past attempts. I ran this scenario to prepare myself for their worst possible reactions, but when I couldn't even keep them in character, what was the goddamn point?
Frustrated, I waved a hand to banish the scene. The room vanished along with its occupants, leaving me sitting on the couch in the middle of… nothing. The vast black expanse of my mind's eye stretched long and dark around me, and with a shiver I waved again to fill the void. At once the room changed to a stark white office, a wingback sitting across from a large desk.
In the chair behind the desk sat the other person I'd learned to conjure over the past few months: a boy with pink hair and blue eyes, smiling from ear to ear with cryptic good cheer.
I stared at my simulacrum of Hiruko for a moment in silence. He stared back without speaking. I opened my mouth to talk, to tell him off and demand answers. Like all the times I'd practiced a predicted social interaction in the shower in my past life (staple tactic of anxiety-sufferers everywhere), I wanted to practice what I'd say to him here so I wouldn't freeze in the moment. To practice the verbal massacre I'd unleash upon him whenever I saw him next, which I'd deliver without a single stutter or misstep.
But as I looked into his smiling little face, nothing came out of my mouth but air.
I banished that simulation and let myself fall into deep, dreamless sleep before the production could even begin. I knew it wouldn't go well. I'd tried to practice telling Hiruko off before, after all—and Hiruko was a thousand times harder to mimic and predict than my friends and fellow characters could ever be.
For a long time, Hiruko and I just stood there.
I needed the moment to adjust, truth be told. Seeing him for longer than a glimpse was a lesson in becoming thunderstruck. I had only glimpsed his adult face once before, and to see it now… it felt unreal. He looked just like himself, but his face had lengthened, cheekbones high and lacking in their usual baby fat. His hair, too, had lengthened into a braid that hung over his shoulder and trailed along the front of his surprisingly broad chest. He wore a traditional red garment just as he had in his child form, hands tucked into the trailing sleeves of his crimson robe, standing in a pair of wooden sandals that creaked when his weight shifted. Sunlight filtered through the window at his back, turning his sakura-petal hair the color of dyed-bright bubblegum. Something told me he'd laugh at the comparison, even if I informed him that I hated the taste of gum, in general.
Rather than insult him, I just said his name. Once, low, dark and full of warning.
But he only smiled. "Not-Quite-Keiko." His eyes gleamed; his eyes that hadn't changed even a little bit. "It's good to see you."
I glowered. "The feeling is not mutual."
"Pity." His smile grew sad, but it didn't disappear. "And we could be such good friends."
"I highly doubt that."
"Another pity." He shook his head as if to clear cobwebs from his hair. "Well. You're here now, and that is all that matters." He gestured at the table beside him, up at the blossoming sunflowers suspended above his head. "Do you like the arrangement? I procured it for you, you know."
"… why?"
Hiruko tittered. "Because they're your favorite flowers, darling. Why else?"
"No, not the flowers." I stepped toward him, heels sinking into the plush carpet. "Why am I here? Why did you send those demons after me?"
"How do you know it was me who sent the demons after you?" he said, coyly.
"Oh, save it." My eyes rolled hard enough to give me a concussion. "You weren't exactly subtle."
"Oh?"
The way he tried to sound innocent had me gritting my teeth, spitting from between them, "Red thread. The demons collapsed into it." Instead of gritting my teeth, I bared them. "You love a motif, drama queen."
"I suppose I do love a dramatic calling card," he admitted. "But I'm surprised you could even see it." He wagged a finger as if to scold. "Those eyes of yours have grown quite sharp!"
"Save the compliments. They won't work."
"Spoilsport." He heaved a sigh. "Yes, I sent the demons after you. You caught me red handed, pun most definitely intended."
So that was one theory confirmed. He'd attacked Cleo with thread once, and the wall of red thread that had blocked memories of my death had been his unmistakable handiwork. Of course the thread-demons had been sent by him—but even though I'd solved the mystery of 'who,' that left 'why' maddeningly unresolved.
So I took another step in his direction and said, "But why? Why did you send them?"
He shrugged, fishhook in his ear catching the light like a gem. "Quite a number of reasons, I should think." Hiruko ticked off the reasons on long, pale fingers. "Delay you, upset your friends, cause a rift between you and your aforementioned companions… any number of outcomes would suit my purposes." His hands disappeared into his sleeves again, expression on his face pensive. "I didn't foresee this, however. You, coming to find me."
"So you're not omnipotent," I muttered.
"Why, Keiko. I've never made that claim." Hiruko laughed. "What an imagination you have!"
I bristled at his patronizing tone of voice, but when he took a sharp step forward, I shrank back against the lounge's tall wooden door. His eyes glittered—but he didn't come for me. Instead he walked with confident steps beneath the crystal chandelier toward the huge bar to my left, all mirrors and polished gold railings and black slate countertops… only he didn't 'walk' so much as he 'swanned,' dancer-graceful with swagger and panache. He paid me no attention as he started rummaging behind the bar, and in spite of how dangerous I knew this man (deity, creature) was, I found myself following him over. Gingerly I sat upon one of the barstools as he took a set of lowball glasses and placed them before me, lifting a metal scoop from beneath the counter to fill both glasses with crystalline ice cubes.
I scowled at him. "I don't have time for drinks."
He didn't look at me, rummaging beneath the bar again. "Of course you have time."
"No, I don't. I need—"
Blue eyes flickered. "The window, dear."
He didn't say anything more. He just kept searching. Suspicious he might be playing a joke, I looked over my shoulder out of the corner of my eye, but nothing seemed amiss near the floor-to-ceiling windows on the opposite side of the long room—but then I spotted the bird. I got to my feet in a flash, darting over to press my hands against thick window panes.
A bird hovered outside the window, wings motionless, suspended in midair—paused like a video game.
The forest below didn't sway in the wind. The clouds did not move, either. More birds taking flight from a trees many stories below us looked like pale dots against the greenery, unmoving and still. I stared with my jaw dropped for an untold length of time (untold because time, it seemed, had ceased to be) until Hiruko chuckled, tearing my attention from the frozen bird to his smiling face.
"I assure you," Hiruko said, "that we have all the time in the world."
"I—" I swallowed down the taste of impossibility. "How?"
He looked at me with pity again—an expression I was beginning to despise. "I'm the god of this adorable little world, child. I can do whatever I please."
I swallowed again. "Except I'm not sure that's true."
Hiruko leaned his elbow on the bar, pillowing chin on hand. "Oh?"
"You keep telling me to break the rules. If you could do whatever you pleased, you could make me. You wouldn't be asking nicely."
He leaned his other elbow on the bar, cupping his face. "Perhaps forcing you to do anything would be counterproductive," Hiruko hummed.
"Counterproductive to what?"
"To why I created this world, and to why I placed you in it."
"And why was that?"
Hiruko tutted. "Now, now, child. I can't go telling you all my secrets." Elbows slid off the bar with the whisper of silk on stone. "That, too, would be counterproductive."
From below the bar appeared a bottle with a label I didn't recognize, but the dark liquid Hiruko splashed into his glass was at least familiar. The scent of peat was a dead giveaway. I could smell it even before I returned to the bar and sat again, placing a hand over the remaining empty glass with a shake of my head. Cold air buffeted my palm, ice sending chilly vapors against my skin.
But Hiruko just laughed. "Only juice for you, dear." Another bottle appeared, this one with the picture of a cranberry on the side. "I'd offer you a proper drink, but I'm afraid you're a shade too young."
Another scowl as I moved my hand, allowing him to fill my glass. "So are you. I've seen your real face."
He didn't look up from my cup, concentrating on pouring deep red over clear ice. "Have you, now?"
"Yes." I leaned toward him. "Why do you look like this?"
"I took a leaf out of my dear nephew's book." He put the bottle away, lifted his glass, and toasted. "No one takes you seriously when you look like you're barely out of diapers, after all."
"Your nephew," I repeated—and then I leaned even closer, eyes wide. "Koenma?"
He took a sip of whiskey and grimaced. "Nephew might be too formal of a word for it, but… in a sense, yes."
"That's… oh." I settled back a bit, blinking at him. "Wow."
It made sense, after all. Hiruko, otherwise known as Ebisu, was a figure from Japanese mythology, firstborn son of Izanami and Izanagi, the god and goddess of creation. Koenma was the son of another figure from Japanese myth, which logically meant there had to be some connection between them. Their exact relationship depended on the parentage of King Enma, of course, but…
The ice in Hiruko's glass clinked when he lifted it to his lips. "You have questions, naturally," he said, smiling over the brim. "Feel free to voice them."
My hand tightened around my glass of juice. "And will you give me answers?"
"Perhaps." He took a sip, eyes glittering. "Perhaps not."
I opened my mouth to snap at him. Something biting, something clever.
Nothing came out but air.
Hiruko watched in silence as I tried to speak. Too bad for him, he had to watch for quite a while, because I had no clue what to say. Well. The opposite. I had plenty of clues regarding what to say. More accurately, I had too much to say, each of my myriad questions warring for attention inside my head like a thousand gusts of wind fighting for space in a too-small sky. The storm raged so loudly, I couldn't hear any individual breeze—so I said nothing, sipping my juice as I tried to pick a single line of inquiry out of the screaming crowd. The taste of berries filled my throat and palate with sourness, perfuming every shallow breath I took through my parted lips.
Eventually Hiruko lost patience, glass descending to the bar with a clatter. "Well, you're uncharacteristically quiet," he said. "You usually pepper me with a million and one questions in under five minutes, and now you're just sitting there like a particularly shy statue." His head cocked, fishhook earring nearly brushing his red-clad shoulder. "What gives, lucky child?"
It was my turn to shrug. "You've never given me a straight answer before. Wondering if asking questions is even worth my time."
"It never hurts to try," he said, bright as a sunny day.
I traced the lip of my glass with a fingertip. "I think I'd like to try something else, honestly."
"Oh?"
I nodded absently—but then I pinned him with my most withering glare. "You took me, Kagome, Minato, and placed us in this world, in the bodies of characters from various anime series," I said, hand tightening around my glass again. "As far as I can tell, you made this world, and you did it by stealing something from the Fates—something like the thread of fate, which seems likely given the red thread on those demons, the red thread blocking my memories, and the time you used threads to fight off Cleo."
Hiruko's smile faded, although it did not disappear. "Why are you telling me this?" he said, hiding his mouth with his cup of whiskey.
"Rubber duck theory."
Pink brows knit. "Rubber what?"
"Rubber duck theory. It's a coding trick. Look it up." Carefully, I set my drink aside. "Anyway. You've told me that you wanted a place to belong. I know that your parents threw you away as a baby." (Here he looked dangerously close to dropping his smile, face spasming like he'd bitten into a lemon.) "I know that you've never felt wanted, and making your own world has to be a result of that."
"And what is your point, pray tell?" he said, tone uncomfortably dry.
"I mean, it has to, right?" I said, ignoring the question. "But that can't be the whole story, because there's more to it. There has to be." I tapped my nail against the counter, sound tiny in the huge, still room. "I don't know why you want me to break the rules so badly. Why you wanted characters from shows to appear in this world. I don't know how the pieces of this puzzle combine to form a legible image."
He waved my concerns away. "I'm afraid that is simply the name of the game."
"How can you be so blasé about this?" I asked. "You, the person who should be able to empathize the most?"
One of his eyebrows shot up. "Excuse me?"
"I don't fit anywhere in this world." I couldn't keep the gravel from my voice, the throb of pain and regret and accusation from my face. "It isn't mine, and I took someone else's place inside it." I mopped a hand over my face, trying to keep calm. "I belong nowhere, just like you."
"What's your point?" Hiruko snapped.
"How could you?"
The words were a plea, a prayer, a call for mercy. Hiruko's head came up when I said them. He looked at me in bewilderment, staring with a mix of confusion and horror that almost (almost) wiped the smile from his mouth. I suppose I'd never really used that tone with him. I'd yelled at him, cajoled, appealed to his better character—but I'd never begged.
Time to try a new approach, much though it scalded my pride.
"How could you do this to me? To us?" I said, voice breaking when I thought of the others—the souls just as lost as mine whom I had learned to call my friends. "To me and Minato and Kagome alike? How could you put us somewhere foreign, unlike anything we've ever known, and leave us to flounder in the dark?"
"How could I?" Hiruko repeated, face the portrait of disbelief.
"Yes. How could you?" I said. "And that's why I deserve clarity, why I deserve answers." Palms flat on the bar, nearly rising from my seat to meet his gaze, I implored, "Don't you see that? You owe that to me after what you did!"
But Hiruko's eyes remained cool. "Do I?"
"Yes," I said, unmoved. "Yes, you do."
"Even when you're asking the wrong questions, lucky child?" said Hiruko.
I stared. "The wrong…?"
Hiruko moved. The space behind the bar must not have been carpeted, because his sandals clacked with every step he took. Slow pace by slow pace, he walked out from behind the bar and, without looking at me, approached the windows and their view of the frozen world beyond.
To that view he murmured, "I was alone for so long. So I do empathize, Not-Quite-Keiko." When I got up to follow him, dogging his steps, his eyes and bitter smile found my reflection in the glass. "I'm sure you've experienced much fear. Much uncertainty. It comes with the territory of forging one's own path." He looked away again, back toward the unmoving earth. "I know those feelings very well."
"So I was right," I said, coming to stand only a few steps away from his red-clad back.
Blue eyes—unyielding as diamond, as hot as flame—found mine again. "You're right about that," he said, "but to blame me for doing this to you, and to blame me alone?" A cruel laugh escaped his lips, ever-present smile as rough as sandpaper and scales. "I know you don't remember, but I thought you would at least have realized by now that I did not act alone."
A chill filled my mouth, descending into my stomach with a punch. "What?"
But Hiruko did not reply. At least, not right away. He stood regarding me with those flame-hot, diamond-hard eyes for the longest time—time immeasurable, because time continued to stand still. The chill in my stomach moved lower, filling my hips and legs until my knees threatened to turn to water underneath me. Somehow, against all odds, they held steady even as Hiruko's eyes fell shut. Soon he breathed a long, tired sigh into the room's oppressive silence.
"I don't what learning the truth would do to you," he whispered. "If it would hurt you or heal you. I'm not used to not knowing, nor am I accustomed to hesitating. But that look of panic in your eye…"
His eyes opened. The smile he wore held pity, and sadness—and an undeniable flicker of interest that turned the chill in my blood to solid ice.
"For all that I control here," Hiruko told me, "I do not know if the truth would send you spiraling or give you strength."
He let me process that, or perhaps he simply had no more to say. Either way, he stayed quiet as I backed up, only stopping when my calves nudged the edge of one of the many couches that filled the lounge's floor. I sat heavily, springs creaking under my weight, plush cushions so soft they hurt as they glided beneath the planes of my sweating palms.
"Tell me," I said.
Hiruko huffed, perhaps amused; it was hard to say. "I don't think that's wise."
"It's not for you to decide." Unexpected stone lay beneath that statement, and Hiruko looked up in surprise. My pulse beat an assault in my temples, punctuating every syllable I spoke with the sound of drums. "You can't make decisions for me. I'll decide if I should hear whatever truth you're hiding, and I will make the choice to—"
Hiruko laughed.
Hiruko laughed, and he didn't stop. The laugh started as a chuckle and grew into a loud guffaw, one hand covering half his face, the other braced on the window to keep his shaking frame upright. He chuckled, and he howled, and he laughed until his head bowed, pink braid writhing like a snake in the air. Every sound felt like acid in my ears, nails on my skin, forcing a flinch from me like an unexpected gunshot.
"What's so funny?" I demanded when I couldn't take it anymore. "What's so funny, Hiruko?"
He giggled, peering at me from between splayed fingers. His smile was a gaping wound, teeth peeking from it like the bones in a catastrophic break.
"You ask me for the truth," he said between giggles, "and somehow, you speak it in the same breath."
I stared at him, not comprehending. His words did not make any sense.
… until, suddenly, they did.
And the sense they made was so horrible—so unspeakable, so unexpected—I could not believe a word.
"No. No!" My feet wanted to move, to run, to take me away from this place, but when my legs moved of their own accord, they merely pushed me deeper into the couch. "I would never have—!"
"But you did," said Hiruko with unexpected gentleness.
"I don't believe you."
He wheeled in place and took a single, quick step in my direction. "But will you believe you?"
"What the hell do you—!?"
He held up his hands before I could get the words out. With their ascent came a flash of brilliant, blinding red light, reflecting off a thousand, a million, a billion strands of bright red thread that filled the room to bursting like the webs of some unknowably gigantic spider. They held me in place, lashed around my arms and legs and body, stretching off into infinity and out the window and through the walls as if those barriers mattered not a bit to the path they trekked. I couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't budge an inch—couldn't even scream when I saw the threads and the way they wrapped around Hiruko's fingers, controlled by him as certainly as he controlled the flow of time.
But when I saw the threads coming out of me, a scream found its way outside of my chest at last.
They sprung from my chest. From my heart, or where it lay beneath my ribs. The threads blossomed from my body, a scarlet flower with straight lines for petals, to trail away to parts unknown, pulled in taut strands of inscrutable geometry to… somewhere. Or someone.
One of the threads blooming from my heart ended in the same spot above Hiruko's. And more flowered from his heart, too, winding away into the infinite and out of sight.
"Don't be afraid, Keiko," Hiruko said, as though he could sense the throbbing of my heart and the horror in my head. His fingers twitched; he held them aloft, studying the cat's cradle of thread around his hand. "Now, let's see. I believe it's… ah, yes." He lifted his other hand. "This one."
He took one of the strings between his fingers.
"Your link to the past," he said—and he winked. "We're taking a little trip. Hold on tight."
He plucked the string, and the world went black. I turned to darkness, too. It felt like being made into water and sucked down a drain, my body losing its corporeal structure and turning to flowing ribbons of me. I think I tried to scream, but I couldn't—but just as soon as I thought I'd die, or come apart, or lose myself forever, the disparate parts of myself locked together once again. I found myself standing, hale and whole, upon white. Not a white floor or white snow, but pure, endless lack of color. Upon white, infinite and strange, but no stranger than the walls and ceiling rising high above. These were covered in rippling threads of brilliant scarlet, millions of them overlapping and undulating as they throbbed, swirled together in a tangle so thick they looked impenetrable—impenetrable, but familiar. Very familiar.
I knew where Hiruko had brought taken us long before that blowhard opened his mouth to mansplain the inside of my own head to me.
"You've been here before, of course." Arms outstretched, he spun in place, grinning at the red walls and the thread that made them. "That fire demon with the pesky eye showed you this place after it unexpectedly wormed past the barrier I'd installed in your mind. I didn't think anything from this world would be able to accomplish such a feat, but I know better now. They're stronger than I realized… no doubt thanks to your influence." He winked again, conspiratorial in a way I didn't understand. "I underestimated the impact you'd have on them."
I started to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but when I tried, I found I still couldn't move. The red threads that bound me in the physical world bound me in my internal landscape, too. It was all I could do to stand there in silent impotence, glaring at Hiruko as he looked with pride upon his handiwork—handiwork I now had confirmation was his, the red strings blocking my memory another of his creations.
Eventually he laughed and sighed, looking at me with fondness. "I suppose it doesn't really matter if it found the way into this place," he said. "I've made adjustments since then that it can't overcome." His smile dimmed a few watts; one hand came up, red threads around his fingers gleaming. "But then again, so has she."
Hiruko clenched his fists. The threads went taut, and the sound of creaking rope filled the air. The red-threaded walls buckled and rippled like a lake under a stone, and then there came a sound like glaciers cracking. The red thread fell in a heap, and when it hit the infinite white floor, it vanished like it had never existed in the first place.
In its place, a wall of pitch black stone remained. This, too, I recognized from my venture into my subconscious with Hiei—and my suspicions about this, also, Hiruko soon confirmed.
"She was clever; I'll give her that." He hummed in appreciation, placing his hand upon the wall of inky stone to pat it like a beloved pet. "I placed a barrier, but she placed one of her own just inside mine, just in case. If I took mine down, hers would remain. Insurance in case I decided to show you the whole truth and she deemed the action undesirable."
Somehow I managed to fight the binding threads enough to grind out, "Cleo?"
Hiruko rolled his eyes. "Who else?" He walked forward, fingers skimming the wall with every step. "What's that word from your world and time? She's 'salty' about what I took from her?" He stopped walking. Smiled a smile full of teeth. "But whether forged of salt or stone, every wall has its cracks."
I only realized I could finally move again when my knees gave out, pitching me to the featureless white floor. At once I bolted back upright, pride smarting as Hiruko chortled. He stifled the laugh quickly, jerking his head toward the wall, murmuring that I should come and see what he had found. For a minute I hesitated, but I'm ashamed to admit that curiosity got the better of me. Trying to give Hiruko a wide berth, I joined him beside the wall, squinting at its dark heft until I saw it.
A crack. A jagged, hairline crack no longer than my forearm, a silver wound amid dark stone.
"That demon with the eye," Hiruko said. "When it looked into your mind—"
"His name is Hiei."
Hiruko paused, looking at me in confusion—but the expression turned to humor soon enough. "Fine. Hiei, then," Hiruko said with a musical laugh. I got the sense he was somehow humoring me, though I didn't understand why. "When Hiei battered through my defenses, he must have chipped through Cleo's barrier as well. We each shored up our barriers like workers on a leaking levee, but the damage had already been done." He smirked. "And she never was one for detail… well, go on." He reached for me, but I danced backward and away. Hiruko scolded, "Oh, don't be like that. Just take a look."
"A look at what?"
"The crack, dear," he said with the most patronizing patience imaginable. "The truth is on the other side." But when I didn't move any closer, the patience turned to irritation. "What, are you scared?" Hiruko said like some mocking playground bully. "We've come all this way, and you're chickening out now?"
It was exceedingly obvious that he was baiting me into doing what he wanted—appealing to my pride to coax what he wanted out of me.
I'm ashamed to admit it worked—because I took a deep breath, and I pressed my face to the crack in the wine-dark stone.
For a moment, I saw nothing.
Then a light erupted from the crevice, and the past exploded to life around me.
Music.
Music blares from the speakers of my car, bright synthetic pop keeping me awake on the long drive home. I sing along and try not to glance at the bouquet of white flowers bound with blue ribbon sitting in the passenger seat.
I'd caught the bouquet at Denise's wedding.
Tom will laugh when I tell him, I think. Tom will laugh and kiss me and say well, of course you caught it. Because we just talked about the future last night, and marriage, and how neither of us wants kids, and how we're perfect together, and how the future looks so bright when viewed side by loving side. The bouquet is too perfect, too perfectly timed to be anything but a sign from fate.
A car with its brights on roars up the highway behind me. I adjust the rearview mirror. My face reflects back at me for just a moment. I see blue eyes, champagne-colored glasses, and loose brown curls falling against my red dress, cheeks flushed pink from a night of dancing. The moon reflects in the mirror, too, full to bursting next to my flushed face. Denise had gotten married on the night of the supermoon, and I'd caught the bouquet she'd thrown.
I thought of calling Tom, to tell him.
The impact came before I could pick up the phone.
My spine undulates; my head snaps atop my neck. Soprano screech of metal on metal drowns out even my blasting music. A quick flash of dashboard illumination, sparks on the pavement lighting up my hands, and the world turns over and over again. I catch the barest glimpse of my terrified face in the rearview mirror again, features pale and glowing like that bloated moon—
Next comes darkness.
Then a blinding light.
A velvet couch, black and plush, cushions my body like a cloud. Blinking in the light of the warm lamp on the table to my left, I stare straight ahead. The pale grey wall in front of me is bare, except for three words painted in cheerful yellow letters.
Everything is fine, they say.
"Ah. Good. You're here."
I look to my left. There is a door. It is open. Standing in it is a little boy. He wears a red kimono, and his hair is pink. Who would let a child dye their hair that color? Eyes the same color as the ribbon in Denise's bouquet twinkle like living oceans.
"Hello," says the little boy. "My name is Hiruko." He gestures behind him, through the door. "Everything is fine. Now won't you come with me?"
I look at him, wondering.
I get up, because everything is fine, and walk toward the boy named Hiruko.
And then I snapped back into myself, and I was no longer reliving those moments. Rather, I was watching them, which is a different experience entirely.
I recognized all of what I'd seen, of course. I'd lived it once, and I'd relived it many times the night Hiei helped me discover the red-threaded room that housed my missing memories. I recognized my past self with her grey eyes and the mole on her forehead, right arm misshapen and scarred, long brown hair and square jaw inherited from her father. I recognized the red dress, belted at the waist, and the black boots on her feet. It was the dress I'd worn to Denise's wedding.
She walked in those boots after Hiruko, through that door to the left—and with heart heavy, full of dread, I followed my old self through the path of our memory, through the door and into the room (into the memory) beyond.
I didn't relive the memory from the perspective I'd possessed when I first lived the events that formed the memory itself. I watched myself in third person, standing in a corner of a small, brightly lit room as my old self sat in a wingback chair the color of sawdust across from Hiruko, who had taken up residence behind a large wooden desk in a chair the color of dandelion down. She—the old me who looked almost like a strange after seeing Keiko's face in the mirror for so many years—fidgeted in her seat. She had no idea why she there, obviously. Her eyes cast about the room in broad sweeps, lingering in confused curiosity on the little, pink-haired boy across from her.
In our first meeting, Hiruko hadn't bothered to age himself up. To put me at ease? So I'd underestimate him? It was hard to say, but judging by the look on her (my) face, the old me had been fooled enough to not be scared.
I wasn't fooled.
But the old me didn't know the truth yet, and thus, she fell for it. It was with curiosity mild that she asked him, "Where am I?"
Hiruko smiled, chipper and adorable. "You're dead, sweetheart."
"I'm—what?"
"Dead. But you don't have to stay that way." He leaned forward, bracing both hands on the desk and rising to his feet, eagerness shining from every pore. "You see, I'm making—"
"Uh. Hold up." My old self shook her head a few times, mouth open, eyes incredulous. "I'm dead?"
"Very dead." Hiruko gave a solemn nod. "Doorknob dead, in fact."
She stared at him in silence—and I remembered that in that moment, I felt like I should have been having a panic attack. The lack of panic was disquieting, but nothing more. I remembered wondering if it was because, being dead, I no longer had a body and the associated capacity for physiological sensations. But there was probably no getting an answer, so I (she) just stared a Hiruko for a time, wondering. And Hiruko seemed hesitant to say anything and break that silence, for whatever reason.
I couldn't recall if I'd recognized it then, but now, watching the memory, I could see gears turning behind his bright blue eyes. What was he thinking? Planning? And was there any use in wondering?
The old me eventually decided enough was enough. "Who are you, if you don't mind my asking?" she said—politely. In the voice that had let her get special treatment on phone help lines when the internet was acting up. The 'customer service' voice. It had served her (me, us) well many times, and she put faith in it again that day.
Hiruko only smiled. "I'm a friend."
"You're not, like…" She waved vaguely at nothing and gave a nervous laugh, probably hoping that he'd laugh, too. Another tactic for getting what we wanted. "You're not the true form of death, or whatever?"
Hiruko giggled. "No. Not quite"
Something gelled behind her gaze. A certainty, like stone. She said, "This is a hallucination, isn't it." And it was not a question.
Hiruko gave her an answer anyway, head shaking. "No. Not a hallucination."
But she shrugged him off. "Nah. Gotta be." Leaning back in her chair, she crossed her legs at the thigh and nodded. The customer service voice vanished as she swirled her fingers around her temples, clenching and unclenching her fist like popping fireworks. "I'm in my death throes, synapses are firing, I'm oxygen deprived… that's what the light at the end of the tunnel is, you know. It's the brain hallucinating as it dies." Her eyes cast about in another curious sweep. "This is one weird hallucination, though."
Hiruko's smile had faded, if only slightly. "I am not a hallucination," he said, tone firm.
"Funny." My old self grinned. "That's exactly what a hallucination would say."
Hiruko looked at her in silence. Slowly he placed his elbows on the table, but only so he could cradle his head in his hands and mutter, "Why, oh why, did I choose an atheist…?"
She perked up. "Choose?"
"Yes. Choose." He looked more frustrated than anything, gesticulating with no apparent purpose, rattling off facts like rain on a tin roof. "I chose you. Brought you here instead of letting your slip away on the tide of the universe. Drew you from the ether to give you another shot." Hiruko huffed, slouching with a pout. "Fat load of good that did me, though."
Whether or not he'd meant to, her interest had been thoroughly piqued. "What are you talking about?" she asked, sitting up a little straighter.
"Oh, you want to listen to me now?" Hiruko looked at her askance, smug. "Even though I'm a hallucination?"
"Sure. Why not." Again she slouched into her seat, foot bobbing with impatience and the restless jitters that had so plagued my old self. "Better than just sitting here in silence and waiting for the end to come."
"I don't know if this flippancy is better or worse than the disbelief."
"I think you should prefer the flippancy, dude. Disbelief is how fairies die."
"I beg your pardon?" Hiruko said, bewildered.
She pasted on a happy face and started clapping in big, exaggerated swings of her hands. "Clap if you believe in fairies!" said my old self in a voice of obnoxious cheer. "I do believe in fairies! I do, I do!" But when Hiruko only continued to look mystified, she let her hands drop. "Peter Pan? Tinker Bell?"
"I don't know who that is." Hiruko gave a derisive sniff. "And that name is patently ridiculous."
"Good grief, you're a tough critic," she muttered before giving an irritated toss of her hair. "Just tell me what you meant by choosing me before I disappear or whatever."
Hiruko sat there quietly.
He opened his mouth and said, "I'm making a—"
It was like static, or a bad cable line, or a radio with imperfect signal. His voice distorted, the image of his face blurred and pixelated, colors dragging and mixing and cracking in a disorienting burst. The room disappeared under the chaos, bedlam spreading from Hiruko's form to cover my old self, the entire office, and my vision entirely. It was horrible to hear and see, a maelstrom of light and sound that immediately translated to pain—but some words drifted through the chaos, Hiruko's face swimming to clarity as he said, "Power."
And then, "Create."
"Fiction."
"Source."
"Reality."
"Canons."
"Stories."
"Prove."
A scream cutting through the din. I recognized it as my own.
"Fate," Hiruko continued.
"Yu Yu Hakusho."
"World."
"Real."
"Appeal."
"Makers."
"Worthy."
"Belong."
Another scream (my other's scream) cut the chaos. The adult Hiruko appeared beside me, colors distressingly solid and immutable, scowling—an expression more chilling than any of his incongruous smiles.
"Her doing, no doubt," he muttered; I suspected he meant Cleo. "She doesn't think you can handle the whole truth." His head inclined, smile emerging once again. "No matter. This isn't why we're here, anyway."
He waved. The overwhelming lights and sounds sped up like a tape under the thrall of the fast forward button, colors blending with nauseating speed, sound rising to a thunder that made my head feel like a grape under the heel of a giant. But soon the torment ended, colors snapping into place as the clamor quieted back into coherency.
Hiruko, I saw, still sat behind his desk.
My old self lay on the floor in a ball, arms around her knees, face an agonized mask of pain.
"Oh, dear." Hiruko twittered as tears poured down my old self's face, her (my, our) sobs the soft soundtrack to his monologue. "I knew it would difficult to hear, but… take your time and orient yourself." He reached for the box of tissues (had that been there before?) on the corner of the desk, plucking one so he could offer it to her. He said, voice soothing: "Everything is fine."
The me of the past uncurled as the tissue's shadow fell across her face. Her button nose was puffy, voice a rasping hornet's nest when she said, "I don't—I don't feel fine."
Hiruko shrugged. "You're mortal. Of course the great universal truth is hard to bear." He shook the tissue until I (she, we) took it from him with shaking fingers. As she sat up, Hiruko instructed, "Take it slowly. Let it adjust inside you and find its place. Relax."
"That sounds…" She grunted, levering herself back into her chair. "…pervy."
Hiruko threw back his head and laughed, delighted. "I see you haven't lost your sense of humor!"
"Yeah. Well." Her red-rimmed eyes were as swollen as her nose; she dabbed at them with the tissue, grimacing. "Humor is how I deal with trauma, I guess."
"Yes, I see that." Hiruko offered her another tissue, which she accepted (so she could loudly blow her nose, manners be damned). "How are you feeling?"
It took her a minute to answer. "Better. I think?" She swallowed, pulling at the neck of her dress. "Everything you said. It's…"
Hiruko broke into a broad grin. "Now do you believe I'm not a hallucination?"
"No." She grinned—and her grin widened when his dropped away completely. "Now I just think my body must be dying really painfully or something, to make me feel like that."
The thunder on his face belied Hiruko's apparent age. "Do you really mean that?" he said, voice somehow rumbling despite his size. "Do you really?"
She grinned some more, reveling in it. "I always mean what I say."
"I knew you were stubborn," he said through gritted teeth, "but this is beyond the pale."
"Hey, can you really blame me for not believing?" she said, joking (but not really joking at all). "None of that—none of what you said… it doesn't make sense." She shook her head. "It's just… how can any of that be true?"
Hiruko's chin rose, and despite his height, he managed to look down his nose at her. "Whether or not you believe in facts doesn't impact their validity. The good thing about facts is that they're true whether or not you believe in them."
She rolled her eyes. "Facts are not fairies. I got it. No need to misquote Neil deGrasse Tyson at me. But—" Her hands dropped like stones into her lap. "But Yu Yu Hakusho?"
"That's the part you want to discuss?" he said with undisguised disdain.
"It's the most bonkers part of the whole thing!" Her voice rose, high and reedy and impassioned. "You want me to take the place of a character in the canon of Yu Yu Hakusho? I mean, what the fuck, man? What the hell kind of afterlife is that, anyway?"
"It would not be the afterlife," Hiruko said, impatient. "I told you that."
"Oh, whatever," she said, spreading her soggy tissue across the dome of her knee. She picked at the edges, laughing to herself, lips curling more at one corner than the other. The smile I (she, we) had inherited from our father. "I just—all the rest of it makes sense and whatnot, but that… that's just insane." She looked at him with concern that might or might not have been genuine. "You understand it's insane, yeah? And don't give me that line about being a genius again; it's pretentious bullshit and you know it." Anger crossed her features, chin tucking until she had nearly six of them. "You're not a genius. You're a motherfucking Cartesian egocentrist on a goddamn power trip, and I'm—"
"Sticks and stones, dear," Hiruko said, not at all offended. "The only question I have for you now is if you'll do as I ask."
She didn't look at him, too busy smoothing the creases in her tissue. "Take a character's place in your sandbox?" she grunted.
"Yes."
"And be the—what was it you said?" Here she looked up, brow raised beneath the mole on her forehead and the curve of her uneven hairline. "The source?"
"Yes," said Hiruko.
She crumped the tissue in her fist. "God, this really is a case of 'clap if you believe in fairies,'" she growled. "And why the heck do you think I would agree to this?"
He wore the smile of Buddha when he said, "Because if you don't, you'll have to consider the alternative."
"Meaning, oh vague and mysterious one?"
"Well." He steepled his fingers, expression cherubic. "Clearly there's more waiting for humans after life than slipping quietly into oblivion. Which is what you've always considered death to be, atheist that you are." He sighed, obviously for dramatic effect given the way his eyes twinkled with overt mischief. "It begs the question of what else lies after death. If I were to let go of your soul, where would it go? You didn't believe in any of the deities you'd heard of where you're from. Who's to say you'd go somewhere…" A teeth-baring grin, menacing in its cheer. "…pleasant?"
But she was unimpressed. "Are you trying to scare me with hellfire and brimstone?" she said, words measured and slow.
"Is it working?" he asked through his tombstone grin.
"Not really, actually. Because I don't believe in any of that, you absolute goon." She rolled her eyes in disgust. "It's like threatening me with Santa's disapproval. I can't feel threatened by something I don't believe is real."
Hiruko's grin dissipated. "And this experience after death hasn't changed your mind at all?"
"Not remotely, no." Again she waved her hand, vaguely and at nothing at all. "Hallucinations and whatnot, remember?"
Anger had Hiruko baring his teeth. "You are the most stubborn, pigheaded, obstinate little—"
"Sticks and stones, dear," she sweetly quoted at him. Her syrupy act dropped like lead balloon when she snapped, "Like I haven't heard that line about hell before. If you know so much about me, shouldn't you know that I got threatened with hell, torture and damnation every day of my life until I was fifteen, and I still came out gay as hell and an atheist? I've barely known you for fifteen minutes, and you think you stand a chance of doing what those preachers never could in fifteen years?" She harrumphed, legs uncrossing and re-crossing with a smack of boot against floor. "Get real, Hiruko."
Something about her rant had soothed him, apparently, rather than rile him up (as I knew her intention had been; we were nothing if not a pair contrarians, my past self and I). Hiruko looked at her for a few moments in silence, small fingers drumming against the desk in a rhythmic series of taps.
"Seeing is believing for you, isn't it?" he murmured eventually.
"Yes." She looked proud of that. "Yes, it is."
"So you're not going to believe any of what I told you until you see it for yourself."
"Probably not."
"Fairies die in droves when you're around, I take it."
Here she looked even prouder. "Pretty much."
Hiruko spread his hands, helpless in defeat. "Then we're at an impasse."
"Seems that way," she said, grinning a hyena's grin. "We are indeed at an impasse, mister hallucination, sir."
I wanted to jump in and shake her. Tell her to stop being so flippant, to take this seriously—but I couldn't. I could only stand in the corner of the room and watch as my memory's version of the childlike Hiruko sized my past self up, looking her (me, us) over with quiet consideration that didn't rattle her in the least. Soon, Hiruko cocked his head, baby-pink hair shining under the overhead light.
"Would a second chance at life not be preferable to endless oblivion?" he said with curiosity that sounded genuine.
She shrugged. "Depends on the life."
"You know how many of their lives would go," Hiruko said. "You know the fates of the characters in Yu Yu Hakusho."
She thought about it for a minute before admitting, "True." A rueful laugh. "But that's only if my personality, hypothetically speaking, didn't fuck with things and mess stuff up for whoever's body you stick me in."
"Perhaps." He remained maddeningly demure about that possibility—maddening because that was the subject of so much angst in the future, and here he hinted at none of it. "Most of their lives are not bad ones."
My past self shrugged. "No. They aren't."
He nodded sagely. Suggested all too casually: "You could meet many characters you're fond of, if you were to accept my offer."
She frowned. "What's your point?"
"Well. If you think this is a hallucination, and that facts remain facts whether or not you believe in them…" He shrugged, smile coy and secretive. "What's the harm of agreeing to what I'm asking you to do?"
My past self opened her mouth to reply. Closed it again. Sat back in her seat with a frown.
"... huh," she said.
And Hiruko grinned anew. "I have a point, don't I?" he said, eagerness leaking into his cultivated detachment. "Agree to do what I've asked, and if it turns out I'm telling the truth, you'll live again. In a world you love. With characters you love. And if I'm not telling the truth, and you're right about the nature of death, you'll slip away into oblivion with no regrets." A peaceful smile, hands brushing the air as though to shoo a sheep through a flowering field. "Just peaceful darkness, forevermore."
Her teeth worried her lower lip; her nose wrinkled. She pulled her long hair over her left shoulder, twisting it around and around until it lay in a single, long ringlet over her breast. Fingers continued to comb through it, shaping and reshaping the ringlet again and again. An old nervous habit. One I had no need of in Keiko's life.
"So…" Her wrists curved, twisting and twisting. "I make this agreement with you, and it's basically no-harm, no-foul either way?"
He nodded vigorously. "It seems that way to me."
But she did not appear convinced. "That all seems to me like when people convert to a religion on their deathbed to cover their bases just in case they're going to hell," she said, staring at him. "Hardly feels sincere."
"Well, that's the beauty of it!" Hiruko said with a laugh. "You don't have to be sincere. You just have to say yes!"
But she didn't accept this easy answer, her track record as a skeptic holding strong. "So my options are oblivion, become a character in Yu Yu Hakusho so you can fulfill this weird plan of yours… or perhaps there's a third option." Her head rocked from side to side, considering. "Hell, maybe. Heaven, maybe. Maybe something unlike either." She curled in on herself, speaking to her lap. "I always did think that if there was a supreme being out there, humans wouldn't be able to understand it." Hands twisted her hair again. "Maybe…"
"Maybe…?" Hiruko ventured.
She brushed her hair back behind her shoulder. "To be honest, they all seem equally likely to me. And that means they're equally unlikely, too." A long, weary sigh, her face tinged with regret. "I feel for you, Hiruko. Truly, I have empathy for your situation. You don't deserve what happened to you, and I hope like hell you get what you want someday. I hope like hell this plan of your works as you intend it to." Her spine lengthened, another of her nervous, placating laughs slipping past her lips. "But I'm afraid I've always prided myself on being a foxhole atheist, Hiruko. No sense changing that now. And that means my answer is no."
He didn't get angry. He just deflated. "I see," he said, more to the table than to her.
She waited a beat before asking in a very small voice, "You're not going to browbeat me some more?"
"I know a lost cause when I see one," he said—and although his smile turned wry, it was tinged with the unexpected light of hope. "But don't feel sorry for me. You see, you aren't my only option."
For a second, she didn't react—but then the proverbial penny dropped. She did the smallest of double-takes, hands fisting atop her knees.
"… what?" she asked, confused.
"I'll find someone else to play your part." Hiruko sighed, but he continued to smile. "It's not like you're the only Yu Yu Hakusho fan who will die at a convenient time, after all."
"I…" she shifted in her chair, uncomfortable "…suppose not?"
He sighed again. "Pity, though. It's unlikely someone as knowledgeable and as fond of that world will die when I need them to—not in the way you did, I mean. Someone who knows the series, certainly, but loves it? Wants what's best for it? That will be a touch harder to find. You were an aberration, to be sure." He stood up, giving her a matter-of-fact nod and another of his cheerful grins. "No matter. I'll keep looking. Try, try again, as they say!"
She stood, too. "Wait, wait—what do you mean by 'wants what's best for it'?"
Hiruko blinked a few times, lashes fluttering against his cheek. "Why, I mean just what I said, of course," he said. "You would have been taking the place of a canon character. And like you said before, your personality could change things." Pink hair swayed when he shook his head, brushing against his rosy cheeks. "Imagine someone who doesn't love the story of Yu Yu Hakusho taking the place of main character. Can you comprehend the chaos? Perhaps Yusuke would never rise from his comatose state, for instance—oh, but that hardly matters. You've made up your mind." His loudest sigh of all followed, pink bangs moving across his forehead. "I had hoped someone who loved the characters would enter their world and advocate for their wellbeing and happiness, but…" Hopping off of his chair, he headed for the door, wooden shoes clacking against the tile. "I'll send you along your way now, since you aren't interested in filling the position. Follow me!"
But she didn't follow. She only reached for him and barked, "Wait!"
One blue eye turned over Hiruko's shoulder. Cool and assessing. Calm and unperturbed.
"Wait?" he asked with uncertainty that did not match his stare. "Whatever for?"
"Yeah, just…" Shifting from foot to foot, she muttered, "Wait. For like a minute, OK?"
I remembered what went through her (my, our) head, then. I remembered with stunning clarity the way I (she, we) had considered all of Hiruko's seemingly innocuous words. It was true; I loved Yu Yu Hakusho dearly. So what if this pink-haired boy with the bright blue eyes—the boy so pitiable, so lonely—was right? What if someone else, someone less in love with Yu Yu Hakusho, took the place of the chosen canon character? And what if, in their lack of love and understanding, they fucked it all up? In that moment, I remembered thinking that even if I was dead, I'd never be able to live with myself if I learned that my choice had caused that outcome. And in my ignorance, I had thought that that urge to protect Yu Yu Hakusho had been mine, and mine alone.
But the me of the future—the me of the now—knew that Hiruko must have wanted this reaction from me all along.
Which is why his cheek twitched, suppressing a satisfied smile the me of the past was helpless to detect, when my past self threw her hands up and declared, "Fuck it."
"Beg pardon?" said Hiruko.
"I said, fuck it," she said. When Hiruko didn't react, she added, "Like… just fuck it?" She laughed a bit and rolled her head atop her neck, looking at the ceiling. "Like, OK. OK, yeah. It's highly unlikely any of this is real, but just in case it is—OK." Her hands opened, arms extending, as if to embrace the world. "Why the hell not agree, on the off chance all of this is actually real? No sense letting some rando screw it up when I could do everything right, right?"
Hiruko made a show of widening his blue eyes. "So you're saying yes?"
"I'm saying 'fuck it,'" she said, laughing still, "which is basically the same thing."
But Hiruko tittered. "I need to hear you say it, I'm afraid."
"Uh… why?"
Sweetly, he asked, "Because you always mean what you say, don't you?"
Her (my, our) smile faded. "Yeah. I do," she said, and then she drew herself up with a perfunctory nod. "Fine, then. Yes. I will do as you ask. I'll become one of the characters." She shook her head a bit, face screwing up with humor. "Ethical questions about taking their place aside, this is an opportunity to live out every fangirl's dreams, and even death can't cure the absolute weeb-ish nature of my heart, so—"
But Hiruko was not listening to her (my, our) jokes. He had walked up to her with his hands outstretched, and already thin red thread had spiraled from his fingertips, snaking through the air in her direction. But her eyes were powerless to see it, even when it covered her face and hair and her brilliant red dress—the one she'd worn to Denise's wedding on the night she died—and bound her powerless where she stood. She tried to scream, thrashing under bonds she could neither see nor understand, but it was no use.
I remembered, then, the way Hiruko's eyes had looked. Boring into me, blue as the hottest fire, burning down to the heft of my soul in a way I was sure would leave a scar.
She (I, we) had been terrified.
Hiruko did not care.
"Thank you," he whispered to her (my, our) screaming form, "Thank you so much for being such a wonderful volunteer."
And then, in a flash, I remembered the way my memory of the EVERYTHING IS FINE mural in the previous room had disappeared. The memory of the office followed, as did the contents of my past self's conversation with Hiruko in that barren room. I remembered the way the gaps formed in my memory—gaps that were now filled again, since I had witnessed the memory from afar—but in that moment, they had gaped like the space where a tooth had once been housed.
It was agony.
Hiruko did not care about that, either. He kept on, scrubbing my brain until there was nothing left about him in it.
"Can't have you remembering me," he'd said. "Not yet, anyway."
"Hiruko, stop!" I (she, us) had tried to scream.
But then we forgot his name, and we forgot meeting him entirely.
Next, without warning, came endless black.
Then there was light.
I felt cold, and wet, and a hand slapped my back until I could finally find my voice to scream. I wailed, long and loud and in terror—and I couldn't seem to stop. And my eyes couldn't seem to focus. And I blinked, and I screamed, but I could see nothing but vague shapes and distant colors, the words of a foreign language swimming into my muffled ears.
But then someone wrapped me in a blanket, and I was placed in someone's warm and gentle arms. It was nice, and I finally felt safe, but I only cried harder at the sheer confusion of it as my mother—as Keiko's mother—said something soft and sweet against my scalp.
I had been born, I realized later.
I born into a life I had agreed, on no uncertain terms, to make into my own.
NOTES:
Missing chunk of memory aside, here are some details on how NQK ended up in this world. And surprise! She chose to be here! And approved of Hiruko's goal when she first heard it?! Yeesh. There's a lot of reading between the lines that can be done with this chapter, ESPECIALLY in regard to the babble of random words NQK managed to hear when the memory became distorted. Interested to see what people make of it. Apparently Cleo is trying to protect her from something in that memory, too…
Writing the last section was a fun experiment. Watching one of your own forgotten memories from the POV of an outsider, despite being the original memory's POV, then having your memories of that memory get REMOVED… while still remembering it, because you're watching it from outside the memory's original POV? Jesus. Why do I do this to myself?
Aaaaand maybe this is weird to say, but I feel like I need to apologize. I'm sorry if the previous chapter wasn't up to snuff. I doubted people would like the chapter before I posted it, and based on the response level, I think my doubts were correct. I promise to try to do better.
SO MANY THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO TUNED IN FOR CHAPTER 96! You honestly made my day. Coming back after hiatus remains the single most stressful thing I've done regarding this story, but your support kept me feeling optimistic when I was feeling bummed about chapter 96. Thank you so much to Lucinda17, A Wraith, RedPanda923, Sorlian, IronDBZ, Lady Milk Tea, Yakiitori, Meno Melissa, vodka-and-tea, ShadedEclipse, Biku-sensei-sez-meow, Kitty-ryn, tequilamockinbur, mothedman, Kaiya Azure, read a rainbow, NightlyKill, LadyEllesemere, xenocanaan, tammywammy9, buzzk97, SMAshelyRenee, Wandering Reader, Ghost King 666, OdinsReaper, Konohamaya Uzumaki, and cestlavie!
NEXT UPDATE: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2020
