Content Warning: This chapter is especially dark, even by the standards of this fic. Warnings for abuse/bullying, implied rape, and suicide. Also manga spoilers.

Her life outside of meeting Yukari Nejima.

It was quite something.

"You have an adorable smile," the middle school teacher chirped as he leaned over her, fingers tapping against the blackboard. She had just finished off the integral of the hyperbolic tangent with a cursive flourish in her loopy girl's handwriting, beaming with accomplishment and dry chalk dust getting inside her nails. She had even remembered to tag the "+ C" constant at the end.

"You're really going to become something some day," her smiling mother declared, kneeling next to the crib of Takasaki's baby step-brother and stroking his hair. He fidgeted in a blue onesie, clutching a stuffed elephant almost as big as him. Her mother trained her focus entirely on him in faux ignorance, but Takasaki knew she could see her leaning against the doorframe, within earshot, wearing a polite smile.

That one time she scored the highest in the class on a test back in middle school, even somehow besting her genius friend Shuu, and she had a dumb grin for the rest of the day. Then none of her so-called girl friends would talk to her. Not even Shuu.

"Nerd," one of them had called her as she passed by in the hallway.

And she vowed never to do it again.

"You should smile more often," the stranger on the subway had advised her, leering at her and "accidentally" bumping into her voluminous chest amidst the unbreathable crowd.

She smiled back, naked, from pictures of her face edited onto grotesque stills from the most violent online pornography, stitched together with the computational power of an open-source generative adversarial neural network. A gaggle of the boys whose confessions or letters she had rejected - yes, that many - had teamed up to post these memes on their own dedicated website until her friend Shuu used her computer skills to hack it and take it down. She had urged her to take the list of IPs to the police. More innocent and bemused by the sheer lengths they had gone just to spite her than offended, however, Takasaki had nodded along back then. Knowing the history of Facemash and Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, she figured one of the pranksters might become a billionaire some day.

One particular day, walking home from school and humming Saint-Saëns' Rondo Capriccioso to herself, she felt someone grab the crook of her arm and swing her to the ground. She missed her 50/50 chance and fell on the wrong side, feeling the abrasive concrete against her ribs on one side and the textbooks in her shoulder bag slamming into her other. Looking up, she saw one of the jilted guys, grinding his teeth and clenching his fists. He kicked her in the gut, saying her face was "too pretty to mess up", and she tasted something sour in the back of her throat as she nearly coughed out the contents of her lunch. She bolted her aching arms down to smooth down her short skirt, then clutched herself and shivered in pain on the sidewalk as the boy groused that he "would have raped her right then and there if her father weren't a politician," before stalking away. And all she could think was: "good riddance I had said 'no' to him," and whether he really would have had the guts to follow through on the threat.

When she came home she said she fell on the way. It was technically true and less of a hassle over what she considered a schoolyard tussle.

"You have your mother's smile," her weeping father told her during one of her final visitations to him. His thousand-dollar haircut and boyish charm had somehow survived impeccable, marred only by a five o'clock shadow, but his sinking, hungry eyes had aged a decade. He pinned her into the bed with his knee, all lights off and curtains drawn, his crooked golden Versace necktie dangling over her. He stroked her hair, and all she could wonder was how a man with such bad, whiskey-stained breath ever became a member of Japan's National Diet.

Misaki Takasaki had run out of illusions by then. She cried for weeks afterward, refused to go to school. When she finally returned, head against the desk and the former eager hand-raiser reduced to silence the entire day, a teacher pulled her aside and asked what was wrong.

She sighed and thought squeezing her eyes might suck the tears back in, but that only further reddened and irritated them. She could never forgive her father. And yet…her father had worked his whole lifetime to build attain the heights he did in his political career. Did she really have to tear it all down for an hour of indiscretion?

"A murder can be a single minute of indiscretion. Any crime can be, really. That's the whole point!" the better part of her mind chastised herself.

She hated her father. She would never forgive him. But to see him live in jail for the rest of his life? And she could do without the inevitable Twitter death threats, the political howling and accusations of familial betrayal and doubts in every newspaper column, just the withering spotlight itself. Almost as if she were the one to commit a crime. She hated herself, how she had let society condition and disincentivize her so much that even her own mental jury chose to exonerate him. If she couldn't take her own side, then who would? But in the end, that's what she chose.

"When you're a politician, if you're having a bad day, that means you have to smile even more!" her father had once advised her in his warm normal voice, deeper than his years. He rested his hand around her small shoulder as they stood on the thick carpet in his cluttered office. Before the divorce, back when he was normal and wore his ties straight and shaved and the ordinary kind of family love existed between them.

Takasaki exhaled.

She wore the prettiest, most reassuring smile she could muster. It shined so bright it almost erased the sight of her puffy eyes and the trails on her cheeks. She shook her head, the teacher nodded, and she never stopped smiling since.

Some things couldn't be communicated in words.

It wasn't a single secret.

It was a thousand shards of experience pricking at her skin, summing up to an entire mental landscape of feelings and beliefs. It wasn't what she would first think of for the word "secret", but nonetheless an incommunicable kaleidoscope qualified in some sense, didn't it?

That time about a year ago when her friends blathered about first crushes and first kisses and Takasaki nodded along. She lied with her words, her benign smile, the very fact she conversed with them even as her heart looked back at her ruined past and ruined future and broke apart within her.

"Oh I'm not surprised you don't have one yet, you're so beautiful you can afford to be patient. I'm jealous!" one of them had rationalized.

That night Takasaki grabbed one of her mother's magnetic sushi knives from the kitchen with a zing as she peeled it off the rack, went up to her room, and locked the door. She laid her head against the desk, studying her reflection in the blade's polished surface. The face on whose beauty hundreds must have commented over the years. The face of a future beauty pageant winner, the face of a future music idol, the face of a future politician. The face she herself always saw in tears, in frustration, in anxiety when the world only saw her beautiful, beautiful smiles. The face she saw in the bathroom mirror every morning, the most ordinary thing in the world.

She plunged the knife down into her left wrist.

It didn't really feel like her own arm at all, as she see-sawed the instrument until it wiggled against rigid bone. It still hurt, in a distant, vague sort of way that she couldn't really bring herself to concern herself about. The pressure, the spikes in her chest every day in, day out, had already acclimated her anyway. Bright red globs gushed out and stained the porcelain-colored skin of her arm. They dripped down like a hundred red strings and soaked into the penciled equations beneath. She regarded the entire sight with her spent eyes and bored frown and thought about falling asleep. She had always imagined death would entail weeping and brokenhearted anguish, but in the end she had exhausted all capacity to care. She was nothing now, too little of a person left to grieve or cry over herself. She was just throwing out a defective product, nothing more.

The edges of her mind grew fuzzy and drifted back towards Nejima, like it always did. She glanced back at the steel and saw his tearful face pleading with her instead of her own reflection. His distant smile, his nestlike brown hair, the hunch of his neck. His childish eyes, broadcasting every thought and feeling on his mind. His bashfulness when he handed that eraser to her all those years ago. Seeing him grow up along with her from afar, seeing his adorable, endearing dorkiness expressed in a novel way every year.

"I'm sorry," she mouthed to herself, "that you couldn't even tell Neji-kun how you feel."

She loved him, more sure of that than anything else in her life. But how could she approach him and offer to him in good faith her defective life, her defiled body, her mangled soul? She only knew how to appear cheery and positive because she once had been. She had kept the obsolete shell, now rupturing from the toxic waste that had built up inside over the years. She knew would only make Nejima's life worse. She had lost all ability to inspire the best in other people, after she had lost track of her own definition of goodness. Her despair would only infect and taint Nejima. She had nothing he could want, if only he knew the truth. And that's what love was, wasn't it. Truth. What sort of mutated facsimile of love would spring forth from a foundation of lies?

But she wanted him anyway. Her heart burned for him, burned so much she thought it would burst and hurt more than the knife stuck in her arm right now. Even though he could never be her first in her black permanent ink-stained life, she wanted him more than anything else in the world right now. Even if it hurt her, even if it hurt him, even if it ruined everything, even if it was a lie. That was just the sort of person she was.

That wasn't love.

Why not just confess to him, then? Even amidst the abyss of her self-esteem, even she acknowledged her incontrovertible title as most beautiful girl in the school. By any objective standard not in her league, he had nonetheless won her over and the scenario gave her immense perverse pleasure.

She could win over anyone. But she didn't want anyone. She wanted Yukari Nejima.

"What if he likes someone else already?" her brain pondered. She also knew the Yukari system would never match someone like her with someone like him, in the end.

Takasaki sighed. It didn't matter anyway. Nejima didn't even know her, so he wouldn't even feel sad about this. But there was a reason hope was the last, cruelest item at the bottom of Pandora's box as she imagined his smiling and holding her hand. Even the unlikeliest future was distinct from impossible.

She dropped the knife, clattering on her desk in a sticky bloody puddle, and wrapped her arm in math homework. Her mother made no comment, they drove to the hospital, and her mother explained for her that she had cut herself in a cooking accident. Sometimes, when she wore a watch or a bracelet, she couldn't even see the scar.

Paralyzed between the tantalizing vision of Nejima falling into her embrace and the rest of her broken life, Takasaki waited for him to show up out of the blue and confess his feelings to her.

Which he did, a couple magical months ago.

And now on their first date, in the midst of kissing the one man she loved in the whole world, Misaki Takasaki still couldn't believe it. She pressed her chest against his, her heart hammering so fast within her she was sure he could feel it too. The muscle almost exhausted itself and she worried maybe it seized through a missing beat here or there and the possibility of falling into a cardiac arrest in the middle of her happiest moment. She didn't know there existed so much euphoria in the world, let alone that she could enjoy it. She had pretty much forgotten the definition of happiness before Nejima had confessed to her, and now she had several gallons of it in liquid concentrate poured into her brain all at once and she didn't know what to do with it or how to handle it.

Her whole body shook as Nejima's tongue brushed past hers with a deliberate wet lollipop lick and probed deeper into her mouth. The idea of a part of Nejima inside her excited her to no end and she wanted to get closer, to intersect in space further, only regretting that they were two separate people in two separate bodies. It wasn't enough to be with Nejima, to cling to his arms and press her face and lips against his, she wanted to be Nejima: Misaki Nejima. To adorn her very identity with his name and leave behind the diseased part of her self with his better half.

Between her wild trembling and their passionate movements, a bit of their intermingled saliva sloshed out onto her lips. Her meticulous, ironed blazer wrinkled in his firm grip as he held her and she trusted him to lean on his arms like in a movie, forming a nice arc from her head to her billowing school uniform miniskirt fluttering in the park breeze. Individual strands dared to separate and poked out as her hair ruffled and glistened with sweat in the heat, summer and otherwise. The normal primness of Takasaki fell to the side as she consented to letting him see her like this. She didn't care how she looked, she just wanted more Nejima.

He rested a hand on her cheek, and she half-opened her dreamy eyes. She had always thought Nejima cute, maybe a degree of handsome in his own way, even as she sang her main praises for his good and honest heart. But now, as he held her, as he kissed her with passion Takasaki never imagined possible and as they swapped parts of themselves and fluids, it struck her in this moment just how sexy he looked in a way he never had before.

Her insides roiled and thoughts about Nejima not suited for polite contemplation entered her head. Takasaki shoved him away to catch a breath, although still close enough for a stringy bridge of saliva to connect their mouths. It took her a few seconds of panting to recover as Nejima shot her a quizzical, perhaps concerned, look.

"So…rry….any more…and, I… kind of, feel, like I'd lose it," she explained, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. "You're really, um, way too good at kissing, you know?".

As they sat back down, Takasaki pondered on how there existed no inherent logical reason that mashing two lips together should feel this fun. If anything, it should seem a little unsanitary and repulsive. But the way Nejima did it to her, the way doing it with him alone made her feel…

"Oh, um, thanks," Nejima acknowledged with a nervous laugh. "I'm just happy if you're happy about it."

"You shouldn't really take my word that much…I've never done it with anyone else, after all," she disclaimed. "I'm just guessing. Every time we kiss, my head just gets full of thoughts about you…it's embarrassing. I wonder if everyone else does that when they kiss their crush."

Nejima grabbed her hand and turned to look her straight in the eye, with that timorous determination she always found so endearing.

"You are my crush, but now you're my girlfriend!" he claimed her.

"Girlfriend…" Takasaki repeated, rolling the word over in her mouth. It tasted sweeter than anything coming from Nejima's lips, and yet. He had affixed a red string from her ecstatic present to the unceasing ticker tape of a stormy, impossible future. No longer a series of rhapsodic Dirac delta spikes, but a permanent Heaviside step function up - not that Takasaki would ever dare repeat such nerdy nonsense out loud, especially in front of Nejima.

"What?! Did I say something wrong, Takasaki-san?" Nejima asked in a panic.

"Oh, what, no? No, just a bit sudden, is all," Takasaki strung together incoherent particles into a semi-coherent expression of thought. "Girlfriend…girlfriend," she muttered, as she keeps trying to identify the source of the faint bitterness tinging the word, lost in thought all alone.

"Exactly!" Nejima exclaimed. "I know act a bit weird, and I have a stutter and a hunched neck and I wouldn't be a very reliable man, but I hope…I know, I'll try my best for you…Misaki!".

"Huh?". Her eyes widened and her concentration broke, as her first name caught her off-guard more than a kiss.

"Heh…I really just went all out, didn't I?" Nejima said, closing his eyes and rubbing his neck.

Takasaki thought back to earlier in their date, when they visited Nejima's favorite kofun museum. How he blathered on about the early pre-history of Japan in front of all those glass-encased artifacts, and the blank wonders of a civilization that left no recorded writing system, and even though she didn't really follow the individual words of his impromptu lectures, the passion etched onto his face remained indelible in her memory. She almost envied it, or coveted it for herself.

How Nejima worked himself up so much over some stamps and she found it adorable.

How Nejima thought her order of cream soda a bit childishly cute.

How she froze in fear when she saw Anekawa, the government section chief, at the museum for some reason and they had to hide in a photo booth and Nejima had to console her.

Wait, she wasn't supposed to remember that part. But she supposed the government might take a special interest in the Yukari arrangement of the daughter of a Japanese lawmaker. Potential opposition research. An aspiring politician herself.

"Your honesty, and that rare way you don't try to hide your failures, it's all part of what makes me love you," Takasaki considered. "You don't have to work to change a thing, Nejima-kun."

She looked up towards the sky. Almost scared to admit it, but she thought he deserved this much.

"A long time ago, I went through some pretty rough times. I didn't really want to go to school, or go back home. I'd just ask myself, 'why am I here?', and stuff."

Nejima grew a look of concern. "Nothing serious! Nothing like bullying or suicide or anything," she lied to assuage him.

"I thought I'd run away somewhere, didn't really know where, when I saw you, smiling like always. And I had these ethereal thoughts of 'oh, I really do love you.' And then they evaporated and I came back to reality and realized I had to do class rep duties again, like any other day."

She tittered. "Dumb, right? Just how much you like this guy? I usually think too much or think too deep and it's going to get me in trouble some day, I never thought I could think such a dumb, pure thing. But it's just you, Nejima-kun. You don't need to 'fix' yourself, because there's nothing to fix. I love you the way you are right now."

"Haha, thanks, I'm not really sure what else to say that," Nejima replied.

"Yeah, I was really happy to learn a lot of new things I love about you today."

A beat.

Takasaki got off the bench and stood in front of Nejima.

"I love you, Nejima-kun, more than anything, more than you could know," she declared, and she could see Nejima almost tearing up in joy. "And it's with that in mind that I want you to listen very carefully to me."

Her heart screamed at her not to do this. It banged at the door to her brain, screeching that this is the single worst idea it had ever conceived. Her selfishness could extract moments of happiness from Nejima, but she couldn't allow herself to commit to poisoning him with her true self. He would find out eventually. He didn't deserve this. To be honest, even Reader didn't deserve this.

Takasaki prepared herself to cut off her one and only reason for living, her fingers shaking over the metaphorical scissors. But on some level, she cared less than she felt she should, because she never wanted to live in the first place.

"I'm going to lie now, but this is a lie I have to make a reality." And she could see Nejima's expression melting into confusion. To be honest, she was confused too, but she pressed on. "I'm going to accept my government notice."

…

"WHAT?".

Her brain surveyed the state space of possible explanations with which to respond. The punishments for breaking the Yukari Law. Their affected futures. The growing chemistry between him and his assigned partner Ririna that everyone involved denied to themselves…

She could never allow Nejima to abandon her, even if the only way to accomplish that…

In the end, for all her so-called charisma she couldn't even convince herself.

"Look, even before the Yukari system, it was pretty unusual for high school sweethearts to get married, right?" she rationalized away. "It was thinking, we could keep doing this until graduation. You know, going out, spending time together, kissing…"

She didn't make any sense right now. She wasn't even being consistent. So much for implementation skills.

"Why?" Nejima whispered, a tear rolling down his cheek despite his best effort.

"You don't have to answer right now," she said. "You should talk to Ririna about it…in fact, you should focus on your relationship with her. A real relationship. I wouldn't mind…actually I would be happy. You need the normal sort of love, that the Yukari notices provide."

"Even you of all people are going to tell me that?" he muttered, shaking his head.

"I was really happy she was ok with all this…I was really happy to know how you feel and share these moments with you," Takasaki explained. "I'm just…I'm sorry I can't give anything back."

She spun and ran out of the park, weeping and screaming as the pieces of her heart, strung together by Nejima's red string, finally decoalesced again.

"Wait!" a breathless Nejima called out from behind her.

Panting. "I love you!" he declared. "You told me you loved me in that park all those months ago when I confessed to you! Was that all a lie too?".

Takasaki swivelsed almost offended. "Of course it wasn't a lie! I accepted, even though I knew I couldn't, because I was so excited and carried away in the moment. That's just the sort of no-good person I am. I'm just a stupid girl who knows what the right thing is and can't do it. I love you, Nejima-kun, I think I might even love you more than you love me, if you can even imagine it, even if I can't explain it in words very well."

"Then why?".

"Because my feelings, your feelings, both of our feelings, none of it is reason enough for us to be together."

Through her wet-blurry sight, she could see Nejima on the verge of tears again, in a way she had seen on a guy only once before. It saddened her how much hurt she had caused her beloved in this moment, and the moments to come, but she knew it was for the best for him.

"That doesn't make any sense! Why can't you tell me? You can trust me - " he hesitated for a moment, "…Takasaki-san, of all people! I'm the one you love! Who else could you tell? I don't want to see you sad like this! I just want nothing more than to spend time with you, hold your hand, make you happy!".

Takasaki cast her eyes down. "It's because you're the one I love, I can't tell you. I'd love nothing more than to do the same…but if you knew the truth, I doubt you'd ever want to hold my hand again."

"No matter what it is, I don't care!" he shouted.

Nejima fell into her arms, pressed his lips firmly on hers and his arm around her body and a hand around hers.

For a crystalline moment every reason to live, every good thing in the world permeated within her once again, until her accursed brain tamped it down and blocked off her overflowing heart and convinced her of what must be done. She pulled away, sultry eyes on her beloved, and shook her head. The curtains of her hair swished with it.

"I'm sorry, Nejima-kun," she intoned. "This is goodbye."

She turned and walked away and never looked back. It sounded like Nejima refused to budge for a while, and as she got further away she thought she heard Ririna's voice coming out and comforting him.

A fork in the road. On the right, her current house with her mother and step-family. She went left.

Nejima, in his typical historian's excitement, had discussed at the museum how the ancient kofun cultures didn't have a writing system to leave behind, and how all they left behind were artifacts that implied their ideas without words.

Words had too low of a bandwidth. Feelings had too high of a Kolmogorov complexity. And all the words in the Japanese language couldn't even constitute a complete linear spanning basis to represent the space of feelings she had wanted to express.

Some things couldn't be expressed in words.

Takasaki hopped on the next train to Tokyo, punched in her father's old address on Google Maps, and before she knew it she stood before the once familiar light grey apartment door. She knocked. No response, of course, even on a weekend.

She reached into her schoolbag for her wallet, extracting the almost-rusted key she hadn't used in years. She still wondered sometimes why she had kept it, maybe for this very moment.

It still worked, and she stumbled into the empty unit. She dashed for the closet and rummaged through its top shelf until her hand hit cool metal. With some difficulty she dragged out the heavy briefcase, protected by a numerical code. After punching in her birthday, it clicked open and she snorted in disbelief that he had never changed it.

One wasn't supposed to have guns in Japan, but people in high places played by different rules…

She knelt on the tatami mat in the hallway. No more knives or bleach or Tylenol. The 9mm handgun stared back at her, alongside half a dozen pointy, shiny pieces of brass. She fumbled a bit with the contraption, but she fashioned herself at least smart enough to figure this out. She pressed the side, slid out the magazine, and slotted in her first round with a click.

Her phone rang.

She sighed. Nejima or her mother?

Firstname Reader, the screen reported, displaying my cheery school photo.

With some reluctance, she tapped it and set it aside on speaker phone. "Hello?".

"Takasaki-san!" I greeted with more loudness than I intended. "Nejima and your mother have been wondering where you are and they're worried sick! They even asked me, and I had no clue. You weren't picking up their calls so I thought I'd try! What's going on!?" I said all at once.

Takasaki gave a weak smile, although she knew I couldn't see it. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience. I did kind of want Neji-kun to be the last person I talked to…"

She slotted another round in. Click.

Click.

"Wait, last…" I wondered aloud.

Click.

"Takasaki-san," my voice shook in trepidation and unwanted suspicion, "what are you doing?".

Click.

"It's okay," she dismissed, "nothing important."

"It's not okay," I pushed back.

Click.

"Are you trying to kill yourself?" I chased direct to the blunt point.

"Uh." The query caught her off guard. "Why do you ask?". Such a dumb question, and she knew it, but her addled mind couldn't come up with anything better.

"Why else would you do something so self-destructive as break up with Nejima like that?" I answered with my own question.

Her voice settled into that flatness she only used to recite a math theorem. "I explained it last time I talked with you. It's just not realistic. We both have futures that aren't possible if we - "

"You don't if you do this!" I accused, and she fell silent. "Don't play games with me, Takasaki-san! I've been there before, and I should have seen it in you long before!".

Takasaki gulped. She slammed the magazine into the pistol, and then slid off the safety.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she claimed.

"That time we first talked five years ago," I reminded her, "I was ready to jump off that ledge because of my family problems, until you convinced me otherwise, whether you meant to or not. Until you showed me an alternative, that there are things in life which make it worthwhile. And look at everything I've accomplished since. I'm telling you Takasaki, you're unique, you're brilliant even if you try your best not to show it to fit in. I know you can do a hundred times as much as me, things I can't even imagine! If I really love you, the least I could do is repay the favor."

"Then I'm sorry. I prefer incompleteness to perpetuating this inconsistency between you and Neji-kun" she added.

She pointed the gun at her heart, before deciding her stupid, overthinking brain held more responsibility. That useless organ which kept calculating, computing, balancing costs and feasibility and reasons not to. If only she were stupid enough to love Nejima without regard for the consequences, or smart enough not to fall in love with him at all.

She rested the cool, metal barrel against the temple of her head.

"What about everyone else!" I protested. "What about your family?".

"They don't care," she answered.

"What about your friends?".

"They'll only pretend to care."

"Nejima?".

Takasaki took a moment to compose her answer. "It'll hurt for a while, but I think it'll be better for him in the long run if he moves on and finds happiness with Ririna."

"…what about me?" I "I love you Takasaki-san. There's nothing in it for the long run for me, there's nothing I wouldn't give up to at least see you smile just one more time, even if it isn't at me. I know you don't love me back, and I'm not asking you to, but isn't knowing how I feel in my heart enough for you to at least not murder the woman I love? I promise I'll do my best to show you that life is worth living!".

She exhaled and lowered her gun.

"Reader-kun," she began.

She had come too far. Her brain pressed her to finish the inexorable task she had already embarked, the moment she opened her mouth and lied to Nejima.

"…Goodbye."

She lifted the gun once more and pressed it firmly against the side of her head, so she would have no chance of missing. At least she wouldn't ruin her pretty face, for anyone who would still care afterwards.

"TAKASAKI!" I screamed.

She squeezed the trigger.

Click.

She shook it, examined it. Jammed.

Tossing it aside as it bounced against the ground, she curled up against the wall and tears rolled down her already inflamed face.

"Takasaki-san," my somber voice leaked out of the phone, "you don't need a boyfriend. You need professional help."

"Please don't report me, or I'll find some other way right now," she pleaded. "I don't want people to think…"

"I can make the appointments under my name and we can go together. I'll just say you're going to support me, and nobody has to know. Promise me?".

"I don't know…"

"Promise me."

Takasaki sighed. She sat alone on this floor with nothing but a broken firearm and the disembodied voice of Reader and a relationship she broke with Nejima. For the first time, thanks to all the final cleaning she had performed before her planned end, her mind had all the throbbing clarity of someone with nothing left to do in the world. "I don't want this anymore."

She made a wide gesture to no one in particular. "I don't want to be trapped in this defective life anymore," she pleaded.

"There's a way to escape that doesn't involve escaping the 'life' part," I offered.

"I can't see how."

"Process of elimination - get out of the 'defective' part."

"That's not possible."

"I'll show you how it's possible."

Silence.

"How?".

"Promise me," I asked once again.

"…ok then. I'll try my best"

Takasaki stood up.

Author's Note: Some manga context for this chapter: in the manga, Takasaki has some terrible major secret she won't tell Nejima that she feels prevents a full relationship. It's still not revealed in canon, so I just used my imagination. The Nejima parts of this chapter draw from two existing scenes in the manga (first date and Christmas party arcs).

This fic is a work of fiction: if you feel like you're in Takasaki's situation, please get help.

See disclaimer in chapter 1.