𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄'𝐒 𝐌𝐘 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄? (𝗵. 𝗮𝗸𝗶) ✓

PROLOGUE

Hanasaki didn't go to funerals.

The last time she went to a funeral was for one of her buddies. Her name was Yukari. She had been her first buddy, and Hanasaki did not expect herself to be the one attending the funeral.

Yukari had been sixteen, which made her the elder by two years. She reminded Hanasaki of some older sister she might've had in another universe. Her own parents had been killed by the Gun Devil. Her little sister had survived, only to die a few hours later in hospital, she told Hanasaki. That was probably why she treated Hanasaki like her. She didn't tell Hanasaki that, but it was one of those things that didn't need mentioning.

Before joining Public Safety, Yukari had dyed her shiny curtain of black hair a russet-red. She explained that it had been her sister's favourite colour.

Hanasaki had struggled to make those words out, as Yukari had been bawling her eyes out into the sink. She had held a hank of that scarlet mane back as she threw up into the metal basin, her other hand resting gingerly on her shoulder. She knew then that she did not have a single maternal bone in her body. She didn't even know if she was sick, or whether she had simply cried too hard.

It disturbed Hanasaki, this violent grief. It had never possessed her, but she worried that one day, many more years after her parents' death, it would take her by the shoulders and shake her apart. But so far, the anger locked up inside of her had kept silent, albeit restless with the terrible need to break something.

The morning after Hanasaki had led Yukari, who was too bleary from emptying the contents of her stomach to notice much of anything, to her bed, she arrived at work to see that her buddy was already there. She fixed Hanasaki with a beaming smile and told her she'd decided to start getting up earlier. Hanasaki wondered if she'd forgotten the events of the previous night, but then recognised the steely glint in her eye that told her she shouldn't bring it up.

She was killed later that day. Hanasaki had been held back at headquarters because of a meeting with a superior. She had been told that she'd at least died quickly.

It hadn't seemed real then, that the death of her buddy was something she wasn't even there for. But she was well enough acquainted with loss to know that Yukari wouldn't pop out from round the corner one day with a burst of confetti, yelling, "Surprise!"

Hanasaki attended the funeral so that she could see her body as it was, stiff and lifeless. She wore her Public Safety uniform, as it was the closest to mourning wear she had in her closet. In an ironic way, it matched the occasion. She had felt out of place during the entire ceremony, mostly because she could count the number of people there on one hand. A middle-aged couple, who she assumed to be Yukari's aunt and uncle. Huddled by them was an elderly woman whose fingers curled around the edge of her coat the same way Yukari had held her jacket whenever she felt apprehensive. Every now and then, those three shot Hanasaki a baleful glance, which was often followed by a whispered exchange, and it was then that she realised she should never have come.

It was an open-casket funeral.

She made herself look at her face for as long as she could. Hanasaki had never seen a dead body like that before. Any dreadful image of a grey, rotting corpse her mind had conjured beforehand was dispelled, but she couldn't tell which was worse.

Yukari's skin was white and smooth, like marble. She seemed thinner somehow. Her face had always been sharp, but her cheeks appeared sunken, her jaw dangerously bright against the sloped shadow of her neck. The hair had been brushed from her closed eyes, strands of crimson grazing the tops of her ears.

It was then that Hanasaki realised she hadn't even been in Public Safety for long enough for her roots to have grown out. She looked inhuman, this wingless harpy with unnaturally red hair and no evidence that it was ever any other colour. She looked just like a fairy, or an angel. Some beautiful nymph her little sister could've easily been reading a storybook about before her house was razed to the ground by an avalanche of bullets.

She couldn't look anymore. She let the lid be placed back onto Yukari's coffin, but could not bear to watch her be lowered into her grave. Instead of convincing her of her mortality, all it did was make Yukari seem more alive.

For a few months of the funeral, she found her old buddy haunting her. Not as a literal ghost per se, but she'd find her in Tokyo's crowds, the halls of Public Safety, a head of ruby lingering at the clouded window of her front door. At first, she'd chase after her. She'd push through throngs of tourists, squeeze between a huddle of her coworkers who would eye her derisively when she passed. The ghost would flash her a smile, then disappear behind a wall in a flash of red hair. She speculated whether Yukari's sister had haunted her the same way, the last thing she saw being a childish form playing hide and seek behind the leg of a Devil just before her brain went to sleep forever.

After a while, she stopped falling for it. She let the girl with the red hair hover in front of her, just out of reach, and saw that she vanished as soon as she glanced away. The ghost appeared less and less, now materialising in only her dreams like a final attempt at getting her to follow her to wherever she ran. But she sat still in those dreams, and woke up with the skin on her arms rutted with gooseflesh, cold and dry.

A year from her funeral, and the ghost did not come at all. She had forgotten her face, she was sorry to say. She could no longer remember the angle of her eyes, the curve of her cupid's bow, the exact shade of the red dye she had worked through the roots of her silken black hair.

In another year, the name would be an echo of what it used to mean, as if Yukari had been someone else's buddy and she had been left with their memories. They didn't quite fit her right, like clothes in the wrong size. Perhaps this was how she was meant to feel, seeing as if she had been there the day she was killed, Hanasaki wouldn't have had to look her relatives in the eye, knowing they saw her as the reason their niece or granddaughter had died.

Hanasaki didn't attend any of the eight funerals that were held after Yukari's. After that, she wasn't assigned a buddy, and hadn't had one for four years afterwards.

She did not have a buddy when she stood triumphant over the body of the Devil she had set out to defeat at fourteen, and then rather wished she did, as she found she no longer knew what else to do with herself.