It had been six days since Neru's death.
Miku had taken to sitting alone in her room, staring at the ceiling tiles, counting the number of dead crickets caught in the overhead fluorescent light fixtures.
Four. Four dead crickets in light number one. Four, four, four.
Six. Six little dead ones in the light by the window. Six. Six days since Neru had joined those little crickets in death.
Miku ground her teeth together and squeezed her eyes shut. No more dead bugs, she thought decidedly as she flopped onto her stomach.
Even something as mundane as dead crickets in the room reminded Miku of her. Everything reminded her of Neru. Some things were easier to identify than others: the nasty breakfast quiche served on Tuesdays that Neru always hated, the small room with the bay window where Neru used to teach Miku how to draw. Since the shooting, Miku hadn't gone back there. There were too many ghosts.
And some things were harder to point out. The noticeable absence of Neru's honking laughter that used to bloom and brighten a room. How cold everything was now that Neru was cold and dead as well. Neru was truly like a star. Sure, she was a small and obnoxious burning gas cloud, but that burning of gas exuded warmth and light, two things Miku desperately needed.
They hadn't known each other long, but the two had become friends of necessity. They needed each other. For one to provide stability to the other. Miku brought Neru peace, but Neru brought something even more important. Hope.
Neru was now peaceful enough in death.
But Miku still needed hope from the one place she could never get it.
Miku wanted to die.
It had been six nights. Six long nights spent wandering around in the dark without light. Some people described nights as black, well, Dell described these nights as gray. Several impossible shades of gray, absent of that tiny light in the distance, the little spark of Pandora called 'hope'.
The hateful vodka became Dell's constant companion. He had chosen not to come into work and see Harris's smug horseass face. He chose to sit around and drink himself to a black hole, a region of spacetime where gravity and self-centeredness were so dense they forbade any light from passing through.
He chose to watch movies.
Old Pixar classics, the new releases on Netflix, anything. Something that could immerse him in other people's written and staged troubles instead of allowing his own troubles to haunt him.
So, drunk Dell sat for almost a week, calling in sick to work with love disease, though he refused to acknowledge who had passed this disease to him. The burning golden girl whose name hadn't passed his lips since the day her flame went out.
On one afternoon, as the unwelcome sunlight slashed his retinas, hungover Dell decided to run. Run away to another town, another place, another time, like an angry little brat who had gotten in a fight with his parents. But to do that, he needed to quit his job, pack up his few shitty belongings, and... Say goodbye to someone.
He needed to say goodbye to Hatsune, as much as he didn't want to. But he remembered how betrayed he had felt when the one he had loved left his life so suddenly, like a candle snuffed out. He couldn't live with himself if he just vanished on Hatsune and never came back. That would make three people in her life. That Kagamine asshole, and... Akita had already left, their brains blown out. Dell at least wanted to say goodbye.
He packed up the few pieces of furniture in his apartment into a couple of boxes in the course of three hours. The work helped to clear his head of the hangover.
In time, he was in his car, heading to his old workplace. Dell could have driven there with his eyes closed. He had half a mind to, anyway. Maybe he wouldn't see another car coming. Maybe his little Acura would get hit again. Maybe another eighteen-wheeler would smash into him and send him careening through the window and into the pavement. Maybe it would send him back to that night five years ago. Maybe it would send him to his love, to join her in still peace.
Dell wanted to die.
At dusk, Miku lay in bed, trying to convince sleep to take her away. Her eyes were weary and fatigued; the creak in her bones cried out for rest. But her mind was active as ever. She sat perfectly still while her mind wondered, rewinding over old thoughts.
Why? Why did that bastard shoot Neru? Why?
Miku didn't know. Patients had outbursts all the time, but none of them had ever been killed. At least, not that she knew of. Then again, no other patient had ever attacked Harris. Still, the pieces of the puzzle didn't add up.
It was almost like Harris had that man shoot Neru just to make Miku suffer.
Old tears pricked her eyes. She already lost one of the people who gave her balance. Len. She hadn't thought about him in a while. Truthfully, she hadn't thought about her family, either.
But besides Neru, there was one person she thought about quite a bit.
Her old therapist, Mr. Honne.
She knew he must have taken a few days off of work, to deal with grief. Miku knew that he had loved Neru, for whatever reason. She had seen it in his eyes, in the strange way he seemed to steer Neru, with a hand between her shoulder blades, as if she couldn't guide herself when Miku knew Neru was probably the steadiest of them all.
She was snapped back to reality when a harsh hand pounded the door in a crude knock.
Miku clambered to her feet. She really was not looking forward to an encounter with this person who, judging by their knocking method, was rather pissed off.
She opened the door to find none other than Mr. Honne.
It had been a long drive up here. Not necessarily in miles, but in memories. He drove by the gas station so old it still had outdoor bathrooms, by Carlos's Taco Emporium, by intersections and crooked sidewalks that were as familiar to him as his own name.
Every day for the past five years, he had driven by these makeshift landmarks. It was strange how after only six days, he felt like a stranger in his own territory.
When he pulled up to the hospital, he resisted the urge to light a cigarette. Dell needed a smoke to tranquilize him, to make him comfortably numb enough to walk through the lobby where the light of his life had been shot without falling to pieces.
But that wasn't an option. Smoking was strictly prohibited within 200 feet of the hospital.
So Dell steeled himself and walked in, his hands shaking like leaves. His fellow coworkers looked shocked at his arrival, a few offering a tentative 'welcome back'. He shrugged them off and stalked toward his office, planning just to grab his laptop and drop off his letter of resignation with Harris's secretary.
But something stopped him in his tracks.
He liked to think it was Neru, guiding him from the beyond, but that was stupid.
Something compelled him to take a one-eighty and walk to Hatsune's room, ward room 305.
Dell felt a flush creep up his neck. After a week, he would see Hatsune, see the wreck she must have become after the shooting. The thought cheered him somewhat. However bad Dell had been these past few days, no one could throw grieving temper tantrums like Hatsune.
He tried to knock on the door but ended up just slamming his palm on it. Damn coordination; she would get the message.
After a brief pause, the door swung open, and there she was. Hatsune's eyes were wide and awed. Had she really not been expecting him to come back?
The biggest face-splitting grin devoured her face, and in the next second, Dell had an armful of girl.
Dell let out a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding.
"You came back." Her statement was muffled as she pressed her face into his shoulder. She seemed oddly... Affectionate.
"And now I'm leaving again," Dell warned.
She looked up at him, dull cyan eyes narrowed.
"I'm leaving this place once and for all. I just wanted to say goodbye."
Dammit. He hadn't meant to be so harsh.
"I'm coming with you," she demanded, stamping her foot like a child.
One look at her set-in-stone expression, and Dell knew he was hopeless. He couldn't take the girl with him, but how could he leave her? Hatsune was his last, only link to -
"There are too many ghosts here. I'll die if I don't escape soon, and I can tell you will too."
Dell scoffed and informed her that she was not as dear to his heart as she seemed to think she was. Hatsune's face twisted into scorn. Any affection she had for Dell was long gone.
"Well fine, Mr. Self-Centered Jackass. If you won't do it for me, do it for yourself. You were intoxicated with her, and now that she's dead, you know as well as I do that you don't want to mourn alone. You want someone else to remember and suffer with you. Grief may be self-centered, but it loves company-"
"Miku."
That shuts her up. Dell has never referred to her by her first name, only Hatsune.
He takes a deep breath. There would be too many repercussions for kidnapping a patient, even if said patient was trying to run away. If Harris found out and informed her parents, the parents would sue, the police would come sniffing around...
Lightbulb.
The last thing Harris wanted was to attract attention, especially the law's attention, to the asylum. Hadn't he had Neru killed for that very purpose? The reason he drugged the docile patients... He was concerned with the ward's image. He didn't want to look bad, he wanted to look like his 'treatments' were working. And if the police came to investigate, they'd find the drugged patients, the abused ones, the low security. They might even find her body.
So, they might lose a patient, but one unaccounted-for Hatsune was worth maintaining the sanctity of the mental hospital.
"Grab your stuff, Hatsune. We're leaving."