hope died, but it did (not) in me

kanna wonders why it is her, at the start of it all, and not anyone else.

sometimes, if she closes her eyes and shuts every screen off but one, she remembers her: her sister, paying yen for ice cream, two scoops on one cone and three on another, a smattering of laughter spread back and forth that glows with the sun.

sunset falls; and she opens her eyes again, because there is nowhere to go, not back nor forward, without seeing the dark.

her sister she misses dearly: she tells it to the girl recorded near and far and to pink curls who barely know her but comfort her, for they say they could never know that loss, so permanent and plunging deep, but they do not want her to remember it alone.

she wishes she could forget it. now, when she closes her eyes, she thinks of green stained red, of a scream that was never there but now is. she tries to forget what she hasn’t, a blur of tears and crying and words said back and forth that make sense but eventually don’t; she remembers her sister, so much calmer and drier than her, telling her something even while strapped down to a bed breaking bonds and bravery—

and she remembers the frantic typing, one number after the other until it reaches four and the door clicks, and the last teardrops left in the room before her sister died.

the last glint she saw in kugie’s eyes shone green in the red key.

the red key isn’t with her, no, and they explain why. kanna finds it pushed to the side where a box must have once been, though it isn’t really red as it is a bright lime green, watermelon fruit pushed to the head of the metal. out of some odd instinct she picks up the key, tossing it in her hands and turning it—and when she feels the rough in between where the colors change, her hands freeze, breath as ice cold as the material.

she remembers the shine of her older sister, a bright, lime green: as small as a dot on a key.

before long, she’s running, and reko is running, too, and so is nao, and she hears the trampling footsteps loud behind her until she turns enough corners for them to disappear. when they’ve faded away, she crumples, hands wrapped around her head and hair in a panic that won’t go away.

why is she looking? where is she looking? why did she run away? every flip of the key, somehow still clenched in her palms, adds another question to her thoughts, piling to form a problem she’s not sure why she even started. it’s because of her sister, maybe—because of her, and her sister, but what, what is it—

she flips over the key one more time and stares hard into the gradate of red and green again, until finally, she realizes.

sara.

she has to find her.

the brief memory of comfort and consoling words fills her head and stands her up straight, sets her off walking adrift through the rooms until she can find her. her hands trace over the bricked-up walls, eyes wretchedly searching around, until finally she spots light brown and blue and purple and clings desperately to it for an answer.

could she have saved her? could kanna have saved her sister? she clenches her hands round the key and fidgets with her fabric for an answer, hoping she can glean some answer—something, anything that will finally settle the truth in her head.

she knows it already. of course she does. she could have saved her older sister, just like joe and nao must have to their respective partners, just with this key, and whatever hazy object kugie had pointed out to her; yet, even as she repeats it through her head, as she had talking to reko and as she does now, it just won’t sit with her, and it won’t choke her or yell at her or grin wide enough at her to make her know it was right and was her own fault.

the girl in front of her swallows her breath and opens her mouth. and then, she hears the man with white hair, the man who was saved, who apparently saved himself and nao, instead, and her brain pleads. it cries that something’s wrong about it, that it had to have been wrong and it had to be her fault and not anyone else’s—

but sara chidouin, the girl in front of her, bearing light brown and blue and purple all over, finally opens her mouth to speak, promising her that he’s right, that none of it was her fault at all.

she keeps going. she tells her to keep going, tells her something just like kugie when she was just as kind and encouraging, and tells her to have hope.

for a moment, her hair looks darker, eyes even warmer than they are now, and kanna feels hers sparkle catching their light.

and somehow, instead of guilt, instead of inconsolable grief, the most overwhelming emotion ensnaring her is truly hope.

kanna tells herself she’s not to blame for this.

nope. no, erase that. go back. she tells herself that she is.

it’s not hard to accept, not when she can hear it pounding in her blood and her head. now she looks up at the room stretching around her, and instead of nothing she sees her, with eyes dead and bloodshot and hair matted and packed into crimps that shouldn’t exist, telling her that she is a revolting and ungrateful little sister. she feels a hand on her shoulder as she passes the vending machine and almost cries when she turns, seeing white hair turn to ash and glasses reflect the rays of a burning sun, hearing a voice all too calm tell her she was lied to and betrayed just as she did to kugie kizuchi and just as she will do to everyone else.

but here she is, being asked if she’s okay and hoping she’s okay, as if she hasn’t been fed too long a fib and won’t deceive them one by one. she tries hard not to cry into reko’s hands like she’s cried into kugie’s or her own, and she tries harder so when she spots hair tied up over blue and purple enter just behind the songstress.

for a moment, sara’s hair looks darker than it is, eyes colder than they looked just before, and she feels her eyes water over.

reko’s voice thuds faintly towards the other; as she walks away, her tears seem to recede.

oh, god, oh god, god, why have they retreated only then, she can’t put that on sara, she can’t, she can’t—

“Hey. Kanna.” reko crouches down, bends her legs low enough to meet kanna at almost eye level, and places her hands in hers, and won’t stop looking at her until her vision is only reko and not a wraith or otherwise.

“You know, what Miley said—about being a—god, a sister-killer—”

she can’t understand. she can’t. she didn’t have that challenge. joe did, and sara did, and mishima, and nao, and nearly all of them - nearly all of them --

“I don’t know just what happened in there, with you or your sister, or anyone who had to deal with it—but you can’t take everything she says to heart, you hear me?”

her heart can’t help but hurt at the thought.

“Miley, she’s twisting our words and actions, and you—you, of all people don’t deserve that, damn it—so if she ever talks to you like that again, and none of us are there to tell her off for it, then you have to remember it—that she’s just saying crap to make you feel even worse. You got it? ”

she doesn’t deserve this. she doesn’t deserve it, being told something so nice, hearing something that’s supposed to comfort her, something so rough in delivery but so smooth in meaning; in the end, she can’t even tell if it’s worth the effort, not when her heart hurts and bleeds and sinks as she continues.

she doesn’t deserve this hope when she can’t even feel it: not when reko says it, not when sara tries to give them or when her hand outstretched takes away any hope she has.

not when she’s a heartless sister-killer who betrayed her closest family member first, and not when she betrayed two more after by the sheer act of running away.

kanna wonders why she’s here.

it’s different than why it’s her still alive, because there’s no reason to her being here, twiddling her fingers and shifting her clothes at a bar she shouldn’t be old enough to sit at. and, truthfully, she can’t find an answer to it.

“maybe she wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t left everyone in the dust.” that’s the first thing the corpse crushed up behind her whispers.

something nags at her to stop listening, to stop hearing out what the ghost in her head wants. but she doesn’t. there’s no reason not to, not when she doesn’t have the strength to keep on, or when she might be a ghost soon herself.

the ghost knows this. she probably does. after all, why else would she tell her to look down into the cabinet below?

she slides from the seat, peeks her head in and picks up something fluorescent in the dark, and turns over the thin chip, to find—

“You ought to toss that.”

in one swift, stricken motion, she turns, and finds sou hiyori just a few feet away.

“Th—this isn’t—the, um—” shoot, shoot, shoot—

“If someone finds out you have the card, you die,” he shrugs - and the surprise turns to dread to, somehow, horror on her face. “Did it say something like that?”

after a moment, he sighs, “…Relax,” and even though she does not relax, he adds, “That’s a dummy rule.” a card flashes in his hands. “The kidnappers seem to want to distribute these cards to everyone. That one’s a dangerous card, though.”

dangerous. she flips the card around and around again, looking from the face to the back, from death to the skull printed flat on the card, and it finally rings true in her head.

“Trust me and hand it over, okay?”

somehow, even with the persistent chip on her shoulder, with the premonition that she’ll die even with it in mind, she finds herself passing it to him, and receiving a much, much different one in turn.

…a commoner card.

she finds herself croaking out a weak “…Thank you,” in response.

“… Of course.”

“Ah—” and, as she moves from the floor back to her seat, he freezes them up again—“and on that matter… I managed to get some other information on the Main Game. Considering the danger in those cards… what do you say to sharing it? We could both benefit from knowing it.”

her voice clams up in her throat, as if the decision is uneasy, uncertain. it’s dangerous, it’s too willing, and too immediate. even then—

even then, as if it isn’t, a single sentence slips out soon after.

“I want to know everything.”

“haven’t you had enough?” the ghost with yellow clips pangs at her.

has she? she has, hasn’t she? kanna’s heart still beats too fast, even when her blood runs too cold recalling all that transpired.

“Hey. Kanna. Look.”

“you killed your sister, then risked yourself, then killed three people you barely even knew. don’t you feel guilty?”

she had to. none of them would have lived either way.

“…Huh?”

“god, don’t you see what you’re saying, kanna? you could have always taken the sacrifice card for yourself.”

but then, she would—

“…I don’t get it.”

“you’ve just caused more and more deaths, you know. and two of them hurt someone else. you know who, don’t you?”

she knows. she knows. it’s why everything hurts, as if she had bled out herself once before being patched up.

“Get… what?”

“ugh. you’re just a middle schooler. how can you be so vile?”

she never meant for that. she—

“Didn’t you say it? ‘I want to know everything?’”

“however you’re trying to apologize, i won’t accept it. i bet it’s only superficial, anyways.”

no. she means it. she really, truly wants to say sorry, she does——

“I… did. But I… I don’t like this.”

“as if. you’re lying. you have someone better to talk to, anyways, don’t you?”

silence.

“Don’t—Please don’t make Sara sad.”

“see? what did i say?”

silence.

“Didn’t you feel anything after what Joe said?”

silence.

“… I…”

in this silence, there is noise. it’s a weak, low mix of buzzes and hisses, drowned under the fog in the room. but even as one noise among the crowd is the rebuke of a wraith, acetous and scornful, the other one loudest in the room is his, betraying the face of indifference so well-thrown towards her.

because even if everyone else wonders why him or why, why he was allowed to live, and even why he acts as such, she knows the answer, knows one thing out of everything so clear-cut in her head—even if it won’t slip out in the silence.