As though in a dream, Monika stood there, completely unmoving. She blinked once or twice, barely reacting to the chirping of the birds - or Sayori's wide-eyed expression. She couldn't remember how she'd gotten here. Apparently, she'd crossed the floor of her hallway and opened her front door.

And then she understood that she hadn't opened her front door. Not really.

"Monika?" Sayori asked quietly.

Monika stared back. "Hey."

Sayori gulped. "What's going…I mean, are you okay?"

Monika's eyes swam, but they didn't waver from Sayori's.

"M'fine," she replied automatically.

Sayori's expression hardened a little bit, but her trembling lip betrayed her concern. "Monika."

For several seconds, neither girl spoke. Monika was starting to have trouble standing, and the world tilted around her. She felt her strength, her walls, crumbling away under Sayori's gaze, but just as she was about to fall over, she managed to tense her muscles and catch herself. She hoped that Sayori hadn't noticed her near slip up.

But she had, of course. She reached out, but Monika took a step back, and the hurt that was reflected in Sayori's face pierced Monika's heart deeper than any grisly truth about the world ever could.

Monika slowly, unconsciously began to shake her head. "I can't."

"What?" Sayori asked, her voice wavering. "What is it? What can't you do?"

"You need to go away, Sayori," Monika said, her voice low and gravelly. "Please."

"Monika," Sayori pleaded, taking a step forward. "Just tell me what's wrong. I want to help you."

"No," Monika said, whining a little bit. "Not you, too."

Sayori didn't move for a moment. Then, she took a bold step into Monika's house, her footstep firm, her expression determined.

Something inside Monika snapped. Her left hand, which had been resting against the inside of the door, pushed hard and slammed it into Sayori's foot, causing her to stumble back over the doorframe. However, before Monika could close the door entirely, she felt Sayori slam against it, preventing her from doing so.

"Monika!" Sayori cried. "Stop it! Please!"

"I can't," Monika wheezed, her eyes glazing over. "I can't. I can't. I can't."

Monika transitioned into using both hands, and each time she attempted to surge forward, Sayori met her, push for push. Monika's pleas grew quieter and quieter, and as they did, Sayori's grew louder. The two stood there, locked in an unshakable embrace of screams and sweat – and, as they began to streak down Monika's cheeks yet again, tears.

"Not her. Please," Monika moaned to herself, slamming her shoulder into her front door with a loud thud, her toes scraping against the hardwood floor as she tried everything that she could think of to get more traction. "Just me. Just me."

But her feet were slipping, and her resolve to continue fighting was already lost to her. She gave one, final, desperate push before Sayori blasted into the house, shouting at the top of her lungs.

Monika fell back onto the floor, the salt of her sweat mixing with that of her tears and creating a vile, pain-filled concoction which flowed freely down her cheeks and pooled on the floor beneath her. Above her stood Sayori, the golden light from the world beyond shining from behind her. Monika cowered in her shadow, sobbing.

She was going to discover everything. Either he would tell her, or Monika would tell her, or she'd somehow find out for herself. For the umpteenth time, Monika was going to drag Sayori down to her level. Monika covered up her eyes with one hand. She couldn't bear to look at her friend. She didn't deserve the sight, let alone presence, of such a person.

Sayori inhaled raggedly, her chest heaving loudly with the effort. "Let. Me. Help you."

"It's pOiNTless…" Monika managed in between sobs. "None of it matters, you don't understand – "

"Of course I understand!" Sayori screamed. "Feeling useless, and like nothing matters in the world! I can read you like a book, Monika!" She paused for just a second to catch her breath before continuing. "That's something I've lived with for my whole life! And it's awful! It's awful and it's not fair and I HATE IT!"

Sayori's body shook with the effort of yelling. She knelt down beside her friend, who kept her eyes covered, but made no effort to get away. Without hesitation, Sayori reached out to rest her shaking hand on Monika's shoulder, and a single, silent teardrop fell between them.

"Do you want to know how I beat it?" she asked.

Monika's only response was to sob a little quieter.

Sayori smiled mournfully. "You have to look at me before I tell you, Monika."

Monika sniffled a little bit and stopped sobbing, but did not remove her hand from her face. Sayori wrapped her free hand around Monika's and gently lifted it up. Monika's hand twitched, but she let it get carried away. Her eyes remained closed for but a few seconds longer before they opened hesitantly and met Sayori's.

Sayori looked down at her and took a shaky breath. "About a year ago, I was trying to get out of bed for school. It was on a Tuesday morning in the middle of Winter. The weather was terrible, and my body ached everywhere because I'd slept wrong. And I felt like a…a waste of space."

Monika shook her head weakly. "You're not…"

"Let me finish," Sayori said, her voice breaking a bit. She took a deep breath. "I felt awful. About both the world and myself. So I lay there in bed and I kept checking my phone and saying things like 'I should be eating breakfast now,' or 'I should be in first period now,' or 'it's already lunchtime.' And I stayed in bed and I just kept feeling worse for not doing what I felt like I had to do.

"Well, I'd been thinking for a while about how getting out of bed wouldn't make me happy…but then I thought about something that had made me happy. It was a poem I'd read earlier in the week. I wasn't into writing very much back then, but you and I had been talking a lot, and I'd been reading a bunch of your stuff. It was really good.

"So I reached over, grabbed my phone, and typed something out. I thought it was alright to start, but it definitely needed some work, so I spent the next hour or so making it longer and editing it and all that. And I kept working on it until I got it to a point where I thought it was finished."

Sayori wiped the tears away from her eyes and crossed her legs on the floor. "And then…I realized that I felt happy about what I'd done. Proud. And I figured that, if that one thing made me happy, then that meant that the rest of the day was worth it, no matter how awful it turned out to be." She smiled nostalgically. "So I got up, got dressed, ate lunch, and went to school for the last two periods. Then, later that year, we met Yuri and Natsuki, and the four of us founded the Literature Club. That made me really happy. I loved sharing my poems with other people, and I loved reading their poems, too. It's been so much fun…Believe me, I live for it."

With a sigh, Sayori rubbed Monika's shoulder tenderly. "I don't know if you feel the same way about the Literature Club that I do, but…well, in a nutshell, I saved myself by figuring out what made me happy and then doing that, with no regrets."

Monika, who'd been giving Sayori her undivided attention for the duration of the speech, spoke up in a voice that sounded just the slightest bit hopeful. "Something that made you happy?"

Sayori smiled warmly, wiping away the last of her tears.

"That's right. Find out what makes you happy and never let it go."

Monika could only stare up at her friend, awestruck. The light from the open door shone brightly on Sayori's face, but Monika didn't need to shield herself from it any longer. And for all of reality that lay just outside her front door, she found that it mattered very little while she lay there in her vice-president's company. She sat up and thought again about what Sayori had said to her.

She thought about something

Someone

that made her happy.

"Monika?" Sayori said curiously. "What are you – "

Monika pulled back, her heart fluttering anxiously. Her eyes took a moment to reopen, and when they did, a mass of peach-colored hair filled her vision. Sayori's face was pointed downwards.

"S-Sorry…" Monika said dumbly. "I-I, uh…"

She trailed off as Sayori's head started to turn upwards. Eyes focused on the floor between them, she gripped Monika's arms tightly.

"C-Could you…" she said quietly, hesitantly. "…do that again?"