Your Name

Untitled Part 1

Nene couldn't fall asleep that night.

It was so very pitiful, the way thoughts lulled ruthlessly in her head. How her body was still in mourning — how she still yearned for things she couldn't name.

Despite being back to the near shore, reuniting with Hanako and Aoi, her mind constantly buzzed. She said she was okay with her fate. It was okay. But nothing could excuse the buried fear that knotted into her stomach at the sound of fireworks, and how she has to in the Minamoto household in order to not spiral. How she constantly turns her head behind her. How she can't be left alone.

How she can't sleep, how she weeps silently.

She can't even decide how she feels. She is so happy that she is here — breathing, on the floor of Kou's bedroom, wandering in the world of the living with Aoi.

With Hanako.

Hanako.

Oh, oh did he know — the damage he did to her little heart when he told her that? When he said that her ideas were crushed, that really, living with him forever and ever is a whole other journey weaved by the worst mystery.

  She just wishes it could all be easier. If only the paranormal worked like that — if life worked like that. She wished Hanako would understand her, the way she lost the will to live in his eyes, how he made her realize that nothing would matter without him. Because even though Nene denies it, nightmares lurk of her graduating — than leaving, leaving him, and never seeing him again.

It makes her feel utterly homesick, a sharp pain that punches her in the gut.

So if she dies, who cares. She doesn't care, because at least in her life she met him. He made her feel perfect and whole, like nothing else in the bum of a world meant anything at all. He made her world burst into color, made her expect the best out of things. Made her excited to go to school, or even to wake up in the morning.

But she knows they won't give up, and that Hanako doesn't take no for an answer, and she knows how selfish she is.

Yet, the tears fall anyway. They fall quickly, and Nene feels herself becoming more undone as she sinks deeper and deeper into her thoughts. How pathetic it is that even in the Minamoto household, she still isn't satisfied.

But they keep coming. They gather pools on her cheeks, falling into her shirt, soaking onto Kou's blankets. She takes her sweater into her mouth to muffle her cries, suffocating more into miserableness — into an array of questions, defeat, the absence of her concinnus in her own head.

Her eyes grow heavy, but she can't close them without reacting to the smallest of sound. She sees things erupting from the ceiling — surrounding her, hallucinations of a different kind taunting her, praying for her demise. They are faces of the lost ones in the Far Shore, begging her to return. They tell her to ignore Hanako, and to get into a mesh of Yashiro Nene, to become an unrecognizable supernatural.

And they're so loud. They plead for her. They latch onto her, screaming into her, some even tear into her limbs.

"We'll do it for you!" They chant.

"Please—" she whispers, but before she can defend herself, they vanish.

With that, her mind races, sweat colliding with her skin. She jolts up, running to the bathroom.

In the mirror, she sees a girl she can't recognize.

Hair beyond the adjective messy, soaked with sweat.

Red, puffy eyes and swollen cheeks.

There's creases in her shirt where she has hugged herself, and scratches from her nails deep into her skin.