The edges of the dream were showing again.

Kaoru observed the fact in silence, sitting on his desk chair and watching his brother maniacally pour over site after site of Black Magic.

He hadn't taken Haruhi's news well.

Kaoru felt as though he should be the more upset of the two of them, that he should be a wreck and his brother should be trying to comfort him, but that was not the case. Kaoru accepted the news with shock and horror, yes, but he accepted the news. It really did explain a lot, after all.

Hikaru, though…..Hikaru had not accepted the news by any means. He was indeed shocked and horrified and dismayed, but he was denying it too. Or, rather, denying that it wasn't something he could fix.

The first stop had been Nekozawa and his Black Magic Club. When it was revealed to the upperclassman that Hikaru actually wasn't crazy and had been seeing his brother's ghost all along, the older boy had been ecstatic at the idea of something so occult happening within the school. After he'd gotten over that, he and his club had consulted among themselves and eventually come to the conclusion that there was only one real way to bring a dead person back to life.

But Hikaru wasn't ready to go there yet if there was another way. So he was on the internet, begging and bargaining with people on forums who seemed to know what they were talking about, who would email him links to old websites that looked as though they'd been made at the start of the internet or to scans of books whose pages looked like they were older than time itself.

But all of them seemed to say more or less the same thing.

Bringing someone back to life was a big commitment, the spell, if it worked, would require proof of just how far the person in question was willing to go.

But Hikaru would go to any length for his brother, if that was what must be done. There was nothing he wouldn't do. Nothing.

Kaoru knew Hikaru was trying to hide the darkness of his thoughts from him, but Kaoru knew him too well for that.

"Hikaru." He said after a long moment, wondering if, since he was dead, his voice actually made any sound at all. Maybe the people that heard him were actually receiving his voice telepathically?

"What?" Hikaru said, turning and edging slightly in front of the screen, as if Kaoru hadn't been able to see over his shoulder just a moment ago.

"This isn't a good idea." Kaoru said.

"Don't worry, Kaoru, I'm going to fix all of this." Hikaru promised.

"Don't, Hikaru. It's fine. I haven't gone anywhere all these years; I've even grown alongside you. We can stay like we are. I don't need anyone else to see me, it's fine. Just leave it be." Kaoru pleaded.

"It's not fine!" Hikaru shouted, standing up and knocking the chair over as he did. Something black grew behind his eyes. "You're dead, Kaoru! That's not fine! You're dead! You're dead." Hikaru sucked in a deep breath before righting his chair and going back to the internet. "But you won't be for long. Don't worry about anything; I'm going to fix this, Kaoru."

Kaoru sat in silence, watching as the edges of the dream closed in on them.

The blackness was a bit daunting at first. It lay beyond the edges of the world they lived in now, the one where Hikaru did his damn best to forget his brother was dead while also trying to fix the predicament. It was a soulless blackness and Kaoru didn't want anything to do with it. He wondered if he was supposed to go into that darkness, if that's where his soul should go now that he realized he was a soul and might need to go off to some sort of afterlife.

But he rejected any afterlife, no matter if it held good things or bad things. He needed to stay with his brother and that was that. If he went anywhere, it would be with Hikaru right next to him, fingers clutching his, footsteps synchronized so that wherever they went, it would be at the same time.

At first, he'd wondered if Hikaru could see that blackness too.

Slowly, though, he'd come to the realization that, yes, his brother could see it. And that it also wasn't there for Kaoru.

That's not saying the blackness didn't want Kaoru, it most surely did, it was just that Hikaru had called this forth with the darkness of his own thoughts and now it wanted to suck him down into it, engulf him in a pit of dark, dense, blackness that he would never escape from.

Kaoru doubled his attempts to convince Hikaru that he was fine with being a ghost. He'd point to the edges, the abyss that waited for his brother, shouting and shaking the living twin, crying and pleading for him to stop. But Hikaru stared in the abyss and it stared back at him.

"Don't worry, Kaoru." Hikaru said, his voice strangely blank as he returned to his computer screen. "I'm going to fix everything."

Suddenly, one day, Kaoru noticed his brother had stopped looking through websites. He asked him about it, but Hikaru's smile was wrongwrongwrong.

"Did you find anything, Hikaru?" Kaoru asked at length, not wanting to sound hopeful, because really, he was fine as a ghost, he had his brother and that was enough.

Hikaru paused for several long seconds, his expression wavering through a great many things. "Yes." He answered and his voice was blank as his face suddenly was. "I found something."

Kaoru wanted to press for details, but Hikaru was walking quickly to his next class and Kaoru has to run to keep up.

The next day, Haruhi is absent from class.

The day after that is Tamaki.

After Tamaki is Kyoya.

The day after that, Mori is gone and Honey looks nervous and small in the halls by himself.

And the Honey is missing too.

Kaoru knows Hikaru is responsible, he knows it like a fact, demands to know where his friends have gone, because they were his friends. Through Hikaru, he'd come to love them. But Hikaru claimed innocence as the edges closed in on him, the blackness clawing at him from the outside and from within his own dead eyes.

On the seventh day since Haruhi had first gone missing, Hikaru wept bitterly into his brother's lap, wailing that it hadn't worked, it hadn't worked, it hadn't worked.

Red-and-red-and the smell of pennies in the air what-have-you-done? It's-gone-gone-gone-now red-blue-red-blue lights flas

Hands clasped and they ran and ran up and up they ran and ran and the blackness crawled behind them and they laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed AND LAUGHED.

At the end of a road, in what was once a wealthy neighborhood, sits a mansion. It is abandoned and decrepit, but one can easily see how grand it'd once been. It's said that long ago, a young man lived here with his family who wasn't quite right. He talked to himself all of the time and claimed he had an invisible twin brother.

Then, one day, the boy snapped and murdered all of his closest friends, painting the walls of the basement with their blood. The police found out two days later when the boy commited suicide and they discovered the horrific scene underneath the house.

The family, aghast, has long since moved away, as have all of the other families, trying to get away from the nightmare that occurred so near to them.

It's said that if you go into the mansion at any time of day, you can hear the laughter of a child, strangely echoed, as if there were two of them, chasing each other about the old mansion. If you stay longer than that, which few people ever do, the legend goes that you will feel a chill up your spine and hear a voice right in your ear.

"Let's play the—"

"—Which-one-is-Hikaru Game!"

The best bet is to run in this situation. The kind of people who don't back down from challenges have yet to be seen or heard from again.

This can be entirely blamed on 1zippy, who has been trying to persuade me to follow this up for about a week now. I hope you enjoyed it!