happy kagameme birthday! this was actually something i wrote for the re:echoes zine and features some incredible writing and artwork from some very talented kagameme fans! go check it out! i chose to write about the soundless voice/proof of life/endless wedge batch of songs so this one's going to be a punch in the gut

i know i have another kagameme birthday fic that i Really need to update but shhhhh irl is kicking my ass

I dreamed of you again.

It was just like your last day. Just the two of us on that snow covered field as though we were teenagers without a care in the world. One final slice of nostalgia coated memories from another lifetime.

You had suddenly stilled in the middle of the field and I knew—I knew—

I ran over and took your hand to ask what was wrong and then you called out to me—

I can't remember what you said. The memory slips through my fingers with the snow from that dream. But I woke up with tears in my eyes and your name on my lips.

I still can't believe you're really gone.

-x-

I keep bringing food to your room.

It's stupid, really. I saw the paramedics bring your body to the ambulance. I held your lifeless hand all the way to the hospital. I'd dealt with all of the documents, all of those forms and practicalities that we'd talked about all on my own. I've had more than enough time trudging through the snow on the trek home for the reality of the situation to set in.

I know you're dead.

What I don't know is what's wrong with me. I can't stop finding myself walking to your room with a tray of food any more than I can stop the tears from falling.

-x-

The house is emptier without you.

There's no cheerful music playing from the speakers, no scent of chamomile or vanilla from those scented candles you used to light on the living room table, no sign of your sweet voice filling up all the pockets of silence as we would go about our daily lives.

I don't recognize this place without you. It's lifeless. Dead.

Most of the heaters are turned off. It's not like I've been going anywhere besides the kitchen on the best of days. I just spend most of my time in your room huddled in your bed wrapped. I don't know what to do with myself half the time. I stare up at the ceiling waiting for the sand in the hourglass to run its course for a chance to glimpse your figure.

It's not home anymore. Home is anywhere I was with you. Now, it's just a place where I exist and you don't.

-x-

I got your ashes back from the hospital. They're in an urn just above your dresser.

You made arrangements for this months ago. Just one of those things people do when they get a terminal illness. I guess taking care of your mum desensitized you to that sort of thing. You always were the more practical one of us.

The urn came with a handwritten note. You probably wrote it a few months ago when your hands weren't so shaky.

Scatter them when you can let me go.

—Rin.

I actually laughed when I read it. That's exactly like you. Even when you weren't here beside me you could always find some way to lift my spirits. Those small encouragements of yours that you'd tape on my lunch box when we moved in together for college still make me smile whenever I think about them. I framed some of the best ones and put them on my desk as a joke and you would always get too embarrassed to look at yourself being so sappy.

I don't know if I can scatter your ashes. It feels too much like letting your memory fade away with the snow. Too much like letting your smile flicker and break before the fact that you're gone. Such a tiny word like regret feels inadequate to describe the wedge lodged in my chest.

I could imagine myself clutching your remains for the rest of my lonely life. I'd just be another lonely man bemoaning his love taken from him too soon. But you wouldn't want that. I know what you'd say. I can almost hear your voice chiding me for even thinking about it.

And I know you'll forgive me if I spend tonight sobbing into your urn.

-x-

The snow has melted away with the sun. It still feels cold without you. The world feels a bit harsher now that you're gone.

I'm doing better, I think. I've been spending less time rotting on your bed. I've even remembered that I should probably start eating healthy meals again.

That means having to start cooking on my own. I've never been very good at it. The rich boy who'd usually had servants waiting on him never learned how to cook, what did you expect?

You were always so good at it though. I remember when we first moved in together you would handle all the cooking for the two of us. You'd always greet me from your spot in the kitchen with a happy smile whenever I'd come down from my bedroom.

I don't think I'll ever forget that. The way you smiled at me every time I'd come down for a meal even though it was such a mundane pleasure—such a little thing in the grand scheme of things.

It hurts. Your smile is wedged in my heart so deeply that it still hurts a little to remember. I don't think I'd mind having a piece of you lodged in my chest for as long as I draw breath.

-x-

I dreamed of you again last night.

It's the two of us again, sitting in one of the compartments of that ferris wheel at the amusement park that we went to during the last summer of college. The moment brushes up against my memory perfectly. You had the Polaroid out and were leaning against the door of the compartment to get a picture of the sunset while I was asking you to sit back down.

I was worried that the door would suddenly break apart and you'd be sent crashing down onto the ground. You assured me that it was fine and I should stop being a worrywort and let you get a good angle of the sunset. It all seemed so stupid at the time.

I protested again before you grinned and finally took a photo. You held it out to me with a smile and then I knew—

—that this was a dream.

My face fell with the realization. You looked at me strangely and touched my arm in concern. This wasn't how the memory went. Instead of grabbing the photo I had grabbed you and wrapped my arms around you while you sat on my lap with a grin.

As soon as I realized that—

—I opened my eyes to an empty house. You were still gone.

It took longer than I expected for the tears to stop falling. Longer still for the void in my core to temporarily overtake my sadness as I hobbled over to the kitchen to fill it.

The dream was so clear in my memory that I could touch it. One of my happiest memories with you twisted into another reminder that you're gone.

I don't want the moments I had with you to be stained with sadness. So I'll hold every memory of you close to my heart. And maybe there'll come a day when you smile at me in my dreams—

—and I'll be able to smile back.

-x-

There's a festival a few blocks away from our house.

It was a good break in routine. I got a chance to eat something that wasn't just a glob of canned goods lazily plopped onto a pot for a meal or another batch of takeout. I can't say that some of the stuff they were selling was any better, though.

The festival was one of the better ones I've seen, I'll give it that. There were stalls and decorations scattered all around the streets alongside people that were smiling and laughing all around me as they went on with their lives. I was about to turn to my right and ask you were we should go first but I realized—

I bit the inside of my mouth hard enough that it bled. I didn't look back. It didn't take long for the unease to flip over into nausea and I'd vomited up everything I'd eaten into the nearest bush.

How can the world pretend like you never mattered? How can the world just move on as though nothing happened? How can the world look so beautiful now that you're gone?

I hate it.

-x-

I was going through our photo albums today. Working up the nerve to go through your things without curling up in a ball and sobbing was harder than I thought. Took me a couple of days to completely get through them, but I managed.

There were more albums than I expected. You spent a good stint in college with that Polaroid around your neck when you really got into photography and it showed. I didn't even know you'd snapped some of these photos. You'd always find some cut of the scenery that was interesting enough to be immortalized in a photo. You had an eye for it.

Most of the time though you took pictures of me. There's a picture of me sitting at my desk from the side with my notes haphazardly scattered around me. Another at breakfast while I was nursing a cup of coffee with a half-finished meal. There's even one that you took when we graduated with me raising my diploma at you and grinning.

You said to me once that a photo was worth a million words. You had that half-smile stretched across your face and were leaning in my direction as though you were waiting for me to give in. I couldn't help it. I put a hand on your cheek and countered by saying that there were only three of them worth saying to you. That melted your argument flat because you shoved me away with a flush on your face to get to your next class.

-x-

It's summer now.

I've been visiting the places that we spent together. Our old high school. That one cafe where we had our first date. That tree where we carved our initials during that hellish summer where there was no electricity for weeks. The lake where I was clutching a velvet box and stuttered over my words before I gave it to you.

I'm grasping onto that nostalgia before it fades away with the dreams. My dream journal's been helping with that. It's nothing too fancy. Just a notebook on my nightstand that I reach for every time I can grasp onto those fleeting moments that my mind has conjured up when I lay my head down.

Every time I close my eyes I still hold out hope that I'll catch a glimpse of you. I do, on occasion, but it's nothing substantial. Nothing coherent. Just flashes—images of you—interlaid with large gaps of nonsensical feelings from the days when my mind doesn't deign to dream. The wedge in my chest still aches every time I open my eyes to see your figure missing from my side.

I've stopped crying whenever I think too hard about you. I don't know if that means I've started grieving better or not.

-x-

We never really tried for children, didn't we?

It was just never the right time. You were too busy with your new degree and I was already starting to get too many job offers for someone who was already drowning in money. Our house wasn't big enough for children and it was too far from the closest school to be comfortable. Neither of us wanted to be tied down to parenthood after we'd spent years gasping for freedom.

There were so many reasons why we couldn't. We'd talked about it enough times for us to be sure that we couldn't commit to a child.

That didn't stop you from wanting one. You'd always look longingly at the children in baby strollers whenever we'd go out for our walks or at the children's clothes section where you sometimes shopped.

You'd always said you'd wanted one, maybe two children if the first wasn't that much of a hassle. I can imagine a future like the one you'd dreamed of. A little blonde haired child running down the hallways before getting scooped up by his mother. I would kiss the child on the forehead before placing a kiss on your cheek and then you would look at me with those eyes that shone with happiness and smile at me like you usually did.

I wish I could've given that future to you.

-x-

The leaves are starting to fall.

I've been playing the piano a lot recently. I didn't realize how rusty I was until I put my fingers to the keys. Every time I put my fingers to the keys I can't help but play a sad tune. You wouldn't have liked it.

You used to love listening to me play. Those days in the music room where I played a melody for you after classes and you would lean on my shoulder as we did nothing but breathe in each other's company were some of the happiest days of high school.

It felt like it was just the two of us in the entire universe. A place that we'd carved out ourselves where no one could reach us. It was just us—we weren't the sad rich boy killing time or the poor girl with a sick mother—we were just two kids drawn together by circumstance and fell together faster than time could pull us apart.

-x-

I didn't notice it until after I looked back at your photo albums.

There were so few pictures of you in the frame. I never noticed that until I was looking back at all these albums. It made sense—someone had to take the picture in the first place and most of the time they wouldn't be seen in the picture itself—but with you gone it seemed a small tragedy that you weren't in more of them.

-x-

It was that dream of you again. Just you and me in that snow covered field.

I stood facing you, dumbly, drinking in your figure as you brought your hand out to reach for mine. I remember this moment. It lingers against my skull every time I think of you. You had a smile on your face. You smiled, even though you knew you were going to die.

There was so much I'd wanted to say to you. I'd fantasized about what I would change out of those last five minutes over and over again and now that I'm here I can't bear to change a thing. All the things I'd wanted to say to you—all the words I'd kept buried in my heart died in my throat in the heat of the moment.

I took your hand and squeezed it as tight as I could. It's what I did last time. I couldn't bring myself to deviate from what actually happened.

You collapsed in my arms as your legs finally gave out amongst the snow. I rushed to catch your fall as gravity ran its course and your frame lay on my lap. You looked so beautiful. Even then, on the verge of breaking entirely, you looked just as beautiful as you'd ever been.

Your voice reached my ears, clear as day. Your last words to the me that was left behind. Thank you.

And then I woke up. The memory of you dissipated in my hands yet again as I was thrust back into consciousness. I opened my eyes to see the sun knocking on my window along with the first snowfall of winter and you, still gone.

I did cry. There were tears streaming across my cheeks like so many times before. But these tears were different. I could feel the wedge in my chest settle with the weight of your passing. Holding you in my arms like that again—being next to you again—was more than I could ever deserve. I think something finally clicked inside me after that.

I knew what I had to do, then. It didn't take long for me to dress appropriately for the occasion and bring the car out of the yard for a short drive, your urn secured in the adjacent seat as I drove to our destination.

The tree was still there, of course, alongside the initials we had carved on it almost a decade ago. I opened your urn to see your ashes sitting inside before I took one last whiff of you. I don't know why I did that. It just felt right, in the moment. But I scattered your ashes around the tree, just like we agreed.

I watched the breeze blow some of your ashes away as I just stared at the tree. I stood there for a very long time before I sank to my knees and bawled my eyes out.

It hurt. It hurt more than I can ever describe. And despite all the tears falling I found a smile on my face even as the sobs kept coming unbidden. It was okay. I was going to be okay.

I realized it then: I wouldn't be able to forget you any more than I'd be able to pull that wedge out of my heart. I wouldn't have wanted it anyway. But your passing isn't a scar. It's a reminder of all my precious memories of you.