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Rena was in a cell at the Okinomiya police station after her attempted bombing and her life was over. Already, reason was reclaiming her mind, dousing it in cold water. Already, she could hardly remember why she’d ever wanted to do it. It was all she’d thought about for the last twenty-four hours. She was awaiting trial, and yet she felt calmer than she had in so many years. After catastrophe came quiet, then relief. It was the kind that only arrived in the moments where you have reached rock bottom and somehow survived, where everything can surely only get better moving forwards.
It was as she was considering this that she realised the station had fallen eerily silent. The detectives had been missing for a little too long. In time, she heard a door swing open, a cacophony flowing in from the other side. She could, at least, pinpoint that as the moment everything changed.
In the middle of the night, between June 25th and June 26th, a large-scale disaster broke out in Hinamizawa Village, Shishibone. The details have not yet been investigated, but there was an eruption of volcanic gas... ....All the households in the Hinamizawa Village region were wiped out. There were over one thousand victims. The SDF is still confirming the situation on the ground, but their results are predicted to only increase that number...
One evening she was watching the blurred, tear-stained moon over Keiichi’s shoulder as he held her, larger than life, impossibly white, too beautiful and too real. She had become so acutely aware in that single moment of every sensation. Less than two days later she was struggling to speak, struggling to think, struggling to support her own body weight with her two feet. She deteriorated quickly, and woke up in a hospital bed.
At first, it made everything easier. All she had to think about was the white wall facing her. They fed a tube down her throat to keep her nourished and stuck little pads all over her body to monitor her vitals.
Stark yet gentle in its embrace, the shock was overwhelmed with the quietest dread. An indeterminate amount of time passed, and she realised she could make out the dimples on the wall. She began to wake up when the nurses came to inject her. She came to understand the murmur around her, the steady beep of the monitor next to her bed. Day by day, she became reacquainted with her altered reality—a world that didn’t make sense, one she didn’t know and didn’t want to. She began to realise that this was no lucid dream, and it left her with a sensation that felt something like free-falling with no knowledge of when the ground would come.
One evening two weeks in, the sunset comes glaring through the window, the glass muddying the din of the evening cicadas’ song. It casts glowing orange shapes across the wall—shapes that she figures into memories. The memories are of a classroom where they’re seated around a table, playing a game, laughing.
She doesn’t know what’s more unpleasant: throwing up with a feeding tube down her throat, the nurse who cleans her without so much as speaking a word, or the one who rushes in upon hearing the news as though it’s some kind of an event. The end of purgatory. Steadily, everything begins to merge. Orange and white. Chatter and beep beep beep. She’s shivering, and she smells of vomit, and there’s pins and needles in her legs because she hasn’t walked in sixteen days. The nurse is saying something to her, and she can’t even cover her ears, can’t even tell her to go away because she’s transfixed as she comes back to life.
Ryuugu Rena remembers everything all at once, and she’s seized with a panic that says that this is real, and she can feel herself begin to tremble again under the stiff, unfamiliar bedsheets of her not-home. She shivers the same way she had with the shock blanket around her shoulders, in the cold and unfamiliar police station where she’d found herself alone yet calm, warmed from the inside by an unshakeable belief that finally everything really was going to be okay.
In a few hours, her life had been turned inside out in the most wonderful way. She wants to believe that that person is still somewhere, in that Hinamizawa where classrooms burned amber and the warmth of his hand on her wrist meant she was allowed to start again. She’s shaking so much now somebody is calling for a sedative.
This isn’t that somewhere—this clinical room where she sits still covered in small scars and remembrances that she is alive, and they are not, and that somewhere, something had gone unspeakably, horrendously wrong.
It’s a blistering summer’s day when the nurse appears to let her know she has a guest. Even as he’s let in, she only stares at the view beyond her window: a patch of clear sky. She doesn’t seem to process the news; who could there be left to visit her now?
“It’s good to see you up and alert, Ryuugu-san. How are you feeling?”
The voice makes her stir, as if awakening something in her half-buried. Her mouth moves before she wills it to.
“Ooishi-san…”
He smiles a smile that's neither unkind nor warm. The smile of someone who understands, if just. It’s a strange solace, here and now. The fact that it’s the first she’s felt in the intermittent weeks only makes her sadder.
“I take it you don’t recall my past few visits?” She shakes her head slowly. “Then hopefully that’ll make this less tedious for you. I came when you were first admitted, but given there was no response, the nurses decided I was just hindering your recovery.” He laughs bitterly as he takes a seat by the side of the bed and loosens his tie. His next words are quieter—the quietest she’s ever heard him, in fact. “Please allow me to offer my condolences.”
Part of her wants to ask what for, exactly. Her father? Her friends? Her life, or herself? To have someone who’d known her then see her now felt disturbingly akin to hammering the last nail into the coffin. It was as if being observed in this state meant that this became the truth, and that the person she’d been a mere few weeks ago wasn’t coming back. More than once since then she’d considered the footsteps she’d once known so well, the being who’d acted as her shadow, and had wondered if she hadn’t become it—someone other than herself. How nice that would’ve been.
“...Ryuugu-san?”
“Sorry, yes?” Her voice doesn’t sound like her own.
“I’m investigating the incident in Hinamizawa. Multiple, actually.”
“Incidents...?”
“The disaster, for one. The murders, for another. And the links that might exist between them.”
Her thoughts are moving as though underwater, as her mind wakes up again. “The murders...?” She furrows her brow. “Tomitake-san’s...?”
At this, something flickers across the detective’s face, gone too quickly for her to catch. And then, as if to himself, he mutters, “That’s right… I suppose you wouldn’t know.”
There’s a pause, and a sunbeam travels across her blanket. Her hands are sitting one atop the other on her lap. They’re bony, pale, and twitching a little—she notices—in anticipation of something she hasn’t consciously acknowledged. A gut feeling that something is very wrong fills her again, as it had on that night. And she remembers what they had called this man—Oyashiro-sama’s messenger. She presses her eyes shut. He begins to talk before she can tell him to stop, but this world will continue to turn whether she wants it to or not.
“Furude-san, too.”
No.
“I’m sorry. She was your friend, wasn’t she? She died the night prior to the gas disaster... The same night you were apprehended.”
No.
“What happened…?” The words slip out, barely more than a whisper. Ooishi lowers his gaze.
“She was found in front of the shrine.”
She knows she doesn’t want to hear the rest, but needs to. As if to confirm some suspicion, some false memory like the kinds that have come to her in dreams, because she’s remembering now, this thing she should never have had to know.
“Please tell me…”
“...She’d been disemboweled. Whilst still alive.”
Her body slumps forward like a puppet with cut strings. She waits for tears that won’t come. She only feels cavernously empty—so much so, it’s suddenly an effort to breathe.
“I’m sorry, Ryuugu-san. I don’t know what to say.”
“And you don’t know who did it?” The words carry an accusatory edge.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Not just about Furude-san’s death, but all of your friends’.”
Ooishi goes on for some time, brazenly and with passion, imploring her to support him in his quest for the truth. At one point, a smile tugs at the corner of her lips. It all sounds so far away, so strange. He’s convinced the disaster that had occurred in Hinamizawa wasn't environmental in nature after all. It’s interesting, and it all makes some kind of vague sense, and it sounds like the kind of thing she should be interested in.
Eventually his radio goes off, and after a quick conversation with a colleague he rises to leave, promising he’ll be back, and will she answer some questions then? She supposes she nods, because he leaves looking something akin to heartened—there’s almost a spring in his step.
The door swings shut and the room falls silent once again. She can just hear the distant noises of the wards separated off from her private room. Day is fading into dusk beyond the window. Japan is welcoming a vivid summer.
As she watches the shadows of her room deepen, she wonders what about the visit had left her feeling so desolate, even as Ooishi had sat by her side and shown her something resembling genuine kindness. It comes to her only as she’s drifting off to sleep that night that the aura he’d possessed had been one of somebody who still had something left to achieve—indeed, something worth living for.
Soon, she’s recovered enough to be moved to the regular ward. She’s been in bed for three weeks at this point, and one of the nurses pushes her there in a wheelchair. It’s a strange feeling, like taking her first step back into the world—a world that has somehow moved on. Stories of the limited relief efforts in Hinamizawa had already left the daily news cycle.
The nurse wheels her through the door. She faces her new bed, curtained off from those next to it. She starts ever so slightly at the girl she just catches in the one next to hers. But it can’t be. You’re seeing things, Rena. She smiles wryly, dips her head.
The nurse makes sure she's comfortable before leaving. It’s already late into the afternoon, and a weekday. There are few visitors. She sits and watches the light fade. She strains her ears for noise from the bed next to her, the one she’d seen coming in, and hears nothing. Maybe there’s nobody there at all.
She’s just dozing off when the nurses come making the dinner rounds. For some, it’s food; for others, some intravenous alternative. She’s moved to the former now, and is thankful she no longer has tubes in every place she’d never wanted them, at the least. She’s getting better, day by day, somehow. It makes her wonder for the first time what will happen when she’s discharged—and where she’ll go. She shakes the thoughts from her mind.
There's a nurse at the bed next to hers now. A less fortunate patient, from the sounds of it.
“Do you think you can manage it? Even a little?”
“So long as none of it came out of a can.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” The lightest of laughs. Rena furrows her brow. Something in her mind is stirring. It's a sensation akin to grasping at a dream as it slips through your fingers and fades into wakefulness, something that wouldn’t dare to be hope.
“Well, here you are. Give it your best attempt, you need to regain your strength. Just use the call button if you need anything, Sonozaki-san.”
She starts at the sound that comes from her lips—a dry, broken laugh. Ha ha. A funny coincidence. But it’s not—not when she’s pressing her eyes shut, now, bidding away all the things she’s forced herself not to remember for all this time. Just one more cruel joke, when she’d been only a heartbeat away from wondering if there had really been some wonderful mistake.
The swish of metal and cloth slices through her introspection, and the nurse addresses her.
“Now, why don’t you two get talking? You’re a similar age. I’m sure you can find something in common.” A bright, impersonal smile, and she dashes off to her next job. Rena turns to her new neighbour.
She’s equally startled by the admission, poised almost comically, chopsticks halfway to a mouth already stuffed with food. The girl is wearing the standard issue hospital clothes, the same as her own, but one leg and arm are each encased in a plaster cast. Messy hair spills over her back and shoulders. She looks tired—exhausted, in fact. Still, Rena sees hints of so many things in her eyes: playfulness, curiosity and suspicion, all decidedly dampened by whatever had happened to lead her here. Probably no different from herself.
Rena turns away, and she thinks. Heaven was not supposed to be an sunset-dyed hospital room in Okinomiya. But then, she’d never believed in heaven in the first place, and thinking about religion made her head hurt. Was she having a particularly vivid dream?
They were her norm now, night after night. The two of them would be playing around with the club, or walking home from school, or sitting side by side at the junkyard, or in her room, and at some point during it all, she’d start sobbing.
“R-Rena? What’s wrong?!” That same voice, always so animated, so inquisitive, so alive.
“S-Sorry, I’m just so happy…” She laughs through the tears. “And so sad…”
“I don’t really understand, but…” She comes over and puts her arms around her, everything words never were. Everything. “It’s okay.” Quieter now as she pulls her into her chest, strokes her hair as though she’s a child, the way she could never remember her mother doing. “It’s okay.”
“But it’s not.” And just as she grasps at the material of her clothes, as if on cue, she opens her eyes, and they're sticky with tears, and her arms are empty.
So she blinks, and she blinks again, but she doesn’t wake up, and the girl is still there, a paradox. She has a word, just one, but cannot for the life of her remember how to speak.
“Uhhh…” The girl swallows and points her chopsticks. “I know you.” Silence. One person trying to put a name to a face, another trying to prise one away. Because it can’t be, and it isn’t. “Are you, like… okay?” She’s starting to look both uncomfortable and annoyed.
Rena feels like she’s going to be sick. She forces it out like that, like a foreign object. “Mii-chan?”
Everything in not-Mion’s face tenses for one clean moment, then relaxes. A mechanical laugh. “Nope. We get mistaken a lot.”
She tastes the tense like it shouldn’t be in her mouth, parts her lips to correct herself, then thinks better of it, and looks away. When she turns back, she’s prepared. Even as she introduces herself, Rena gets the sense that in that moment, she’s already closed a door. Her smile is bright and empty.
“I’m Shion. Sonozaki Shion. Mion was my sister. Twin sister. Older twin sister.” She distances herself from the was quickly. “You knew her.” It’s a question that figures itself into a statement. Obviously, she seems to want to say. You’re looking at me like I’m a ghost.
“S-Sorry.” Rena squeaks. “I just… I was shocked.” Clumsy. “I, um, forgot—that Mii-chan had a twin. I completely forgot.”
The fixed smile settles on Shion’s face. She realises she should’ve kept her mouth shut.
“Yeah? That happens a lot, actually.”
“I mean, I— She spoke about you, just... With everything that’s happened… And we’ve never met…”
“I get it, Rena-san.”
“You know my name?”
Not-Mion, Shion, laughs. The sound makes her feel as though she’s being plugged back into reality.
“Of course. Stupid it took me so long to remember. Mion never shut up about you.”
Dusk arrives, feeding the shadows in the corners of the room, and Shion makes her way through her food, slow and methodical. When she’s ready to sleep, she only sits back and closes her eyes.
Rena wonders why she’s there, and every so often she’ll steal a glance at the girl, like an afterimage of the life she’s left behind. Some things are different—for one, her hair is down.
Just like it was when she let me brush it out. She loved doing that.
She grasps at the material of her duvet, balling her fists, and she’s sure she sees Shion open an eye to just peer over, all questions she can’t work out whether she should ask. That night the room seems choked with Pandora’s boxes and disorienting dreams.
Shion is woken by the nurse refilling her drip. She closes her eyes and imagines it slipping into her veins, forcing the waves of pain to recede. Like that, she manages to breathe—in, and out. In, and out. She hadn’t known, after all, that pain in itself could be traumatic.
Behind her eyelids, a film plays, flickering on and off the screen, as though somebody’s scratched the disk. That was how her life had felt the past few weeks. Only now was everything regaining terrible clarity.
Mion’s death had sent her family into chaos. There was no time for mourning; the power vacuum was a gaping wound, and any number of her parents' closest confidants were all but ready to shed their sheep’s clothing. Even her safety was called into question as a possible 'replacement'. It was all the excuse she needed to allow herself to be forgotten.
There had been the room she’d shut herself in in Okinomiya, the curtains always drawn, as though the mere fact that night and day continued to cycle in and out had been too much to confront. She remembered throwing up until her stomach was one pulsing ache at the centre of her being. She remembered tearing the mirror down from the wall and stamping on it until her bare feet were bloodied. The room had one ghost too many, even without the reflection.
Simple grief turned to night terrors turned to voices and sights and not-memories and if this was the days and the weeks, what would become of her in the months and years? The version of herself that haunted her didn’t deserve those, anyway.
She remembered climbing with shaky legs onto the balcony ledge, cold and promising. In that moment she felt the freedom just beyond her fingertips, the chance to take something of her life and self back. Ironic, really. The regret burst within her like a firework a half-breath after the fall, because as much as she felt her purpose was no longer anything but to become the shattered corpse she saw in her dreams, it wasn’t what she would have wanted.
Do you know what people sound like speaking from a windpipe that’s been torn in two? She’d made that voice like that somewhere, somehow. The bodies filled her mind like an Eldritch gallery: the body claimed by the explosion that never happened, that of the gas disaster, and the worst one of all, the one she can’t work out if she’s scrapbooked from the most terrible of the nightmares, the one lying, rotting itself to bone, alone at the bottom of that cold, dark well, in some life running parallel to this. The one that whispers in her ear saying, It was meant to be you.
So why now, free-falling through the night, is it the first time she dares to remember her sister’s face? Not broken and bloodied, but crying in her arms, looking up at her like she had the answers to everything that had ever hurt them, like she was so much more than she’d ever been, the way she had in the same room she’s only now left forever, one year and a lifetime ago.
Six bleeding nail beds becomes two bodies.
Hey, Mion? They’ll be able to tell us apart now.
The impact comes headfirst, a dazzling power cut, just a second after she feels herself become a million pieces.
***
The first thing she checks is her hand, as if to orient herself in time. Three nails that have grown back decently enough to deter questions. A midsummer night’s sky, a beautiful moon.
A million pieces. Her other hand flies to her head—that’s what her brain says, but the impulse is undercut by the blossoming pain, more than her nerve cells can yet comprehend.
Okay, Shion. One hand, two perfect nails, three decent ones; all good.
The second—somewhere at my side. Definitely broken.
This is a problem, because the pain is starting to be a lot more than she’s ever understood that word to mean and she wants to check her head is in one piece. It occurs to her that if a considerable amount of the bones on the right side of her body have come to resemble china someone’s dropped on the kitchen floor, then that may well be true for the rest of them. Next, she begins to wonder if that side of her body even works anymore. Through it all, something blares steadily louder through her mind like an alarm beckoning her from sleep, a reminder that no body gets to be in this kind of shape without you feeling it.
The urge to scream comes at the same time as the impact reaches her brain. It washes her breath and consciousness away all together in one sharp, saltwater wave.
***
The next thing she knows is white wall. The second is like a dialogue option in a video game:
- I’m alive?
- So this is the afterlife?
She closes her eyes, tries again.
Open.
White wall.
“How are you feeling, Shion-san?” Kasai, at her bedside, miraculously unflappable. For the first time in a month, she laughs at the impossibility of it all in a voice that sounds like it didn’t expect to be used again, scratchy and thin.
“You managed to scrape me off the floor, then?”
“It was a roof jutting out quite a few floors down.”
Wow. You sure fucked that one up, Shion.
“Damn. I’m guessing you already covered the paint job?”
He just looks at her, sort of helpless, and she could be a child playing pranks again.
“Can I get you anything?”
“You know me, I can take care of myself.”
A pointed stare. She looks down at herself. “Oh, right.” The entire right side of her body is encased in plaster.
“It’s a miracle you weren’t paralysed.” It’s something too tired to be an admonishment and the back of her throat burns with, Don’t talk to me about miracles.
She considers cracking a joke about saving them the expense of another funeral, at least, but thinks better of it. Hers wouldn't have been nearly as extravagant as her sister's anyway.
She passes her time by imagining all the little pieces that now make up her limbs, and wonders what kind of surgery they performed to try and make her whole again. She marvels at the thought of her body repairing itself, regardless of permission. Her improvement is speedy and the hospital staff are delighted, presenting her with her vitals like exam results. She smiles and nods and after a week they move her to the main ward. Her family had paid for a plush, private room. She’d been moaning to Kasai about cabin fever.
A nurse does her evening rounds. The patients tend to blur into one, but she always notices the animated conversation coming from two beds in particular, though it only ever seems to be one girl talking. A curtain separates them from the thoroughfare, so she can't be sure. Still, it’s nice when people make friends on the ward; it’s good for their morale and improves the atmosphere, she thinks. A colleague had been sure there hadn’t been anybody in the second of the beds earlier in the day—but maybe somebody new had come in. There had been a surge in inpatients, what with what had happened in Hinamizawa. Not so much patients with physical ailments—in fact, they hadn’t found a single survivor. No, local family members who were suffering from the shock and grief. Not all the illnesses they treated showed on the body. The nurse shakes her head as she walks away, downcast.
The next day, she’s sure she hears the girl behind the curtain crying. She notices because she’s so used to her upbeat voice, dominating the conversation, recounting her day. She hovers, unsure whether to intervene. The girl only says one more thing, however, before she seems to quieten down.
“I’ll be there soon, Mion. Just wait a bit longer.”
In, out… “Well done, Sonozaki-san. All finished. I’ll go get you your breakfast now.” By the time she’s opened her eyes, the nurse is gone. Good. She didn’t like to be reminded—of the initial realisation as she lay on the cold roof that night, and the onset of the pain. It still winded her. She turns, and then remembers. Ah, right.
There’s someone in the bed next to her, now. Rena-san, the girl they’d wheeled in yesterday, against all odds. She stares for a little too long, and her gaze is met with an inquisitive one.
Rena's eyes are like saucers, and were probably, at a time, much brighter. She feels naked under that gaze, one that’s so surely searching for signs that she’s somebody other than herself, as if trying to exorcise her from her own body.
Believe me, I’ve already tried.
She makes a point of turning away as the nurse brings her breakfast.
She makes even more of a point of not making eye contact when she leans over thirty minutes later to throw it back up into the bucket between their beds. And yet within seconds Rena’s there, holding her hair out of her face. No comforting words, no hand at her back. When she’s done, Rena brings her tissues, finds a nurse who can fetch a glass of water, and at the end of it all she simply climbs back into her bed and resumes her staring at the wall, without a single word being exchanged.
It’s all so simple—almost robotic—and yet somehow Shion gets the sense that in those few seconds she had deftly calculated exactly how kind to be without any overfamiliarity, and that sympathy would’ve been unwelcome. It’s a small thing, and yet it’s the first time she’s felt even a little understood in recent memory, and that just won't do. The girl is more, now, than vacant eyes and a pathway to things that should be left undisturbed.
All at once, Shion realises there’s more to this world than what remains of her life. The past weeks have given her enough questions to chase her off the edge of a building, but now there’s an answer she can almost touch, if she just reaches out.
Dreams are like oil on water, Rena finds. Endless reiterations of the supposedly single life she’s lived, enough to leave her feeling a million miles from the self she wakes up to—enough to leave her struggling to remember what’s real, and what’s fantasy. It's like being trapped in a room of trick mirrors.
The dreams are of the first time she felt safe, while in her arms. And the dreams are of the colour of her blood, the feeling of striking bone, and a broken voice collapsing in on itself, hollow and desperate and every terrible thing and all her fault. And the dreams are of Don’t shoot her and She isn’t herself and her embrace, back where her world began, the only place everything made sense. The dreams are of a warm afternoon a million miles from all of this, and they’re of the smiles she gave her when they were alone, the ones that made everything in her wake up from the winter.
Rena comes to to a splitting headache. She can hear something, the cause of her awakening. She focuses on the sound; a low groan, like one you might hear coming from a wounded animal. That’s what she tells herself as she stares into the dark. It’s a terrible sound, the one she’d made until her throat was raw in the police station, stifled, and it’s coming from the bed next to her. She wonders when nights became so cruelly long.
For the second time that day, Rena appraises the situation, and decides to stay right where she is.
“Why did you do it?”
Japan is deep into July, and the vent on the wall systematically chugs out clean, dry air. Rena wonders how many germs float around in here, and she feels itchy and strange and decides to focus on something else.
There’s a dragonfly on the windowsill, a distant remnant of nature. Outdoors is bright and warm, the kind of Saturday where families take picnics to the park and kids are out kicking a ball around until late in the evening and don’t go in for dinner until the third call. Those are the things she imagines people doing out there, in the world beyond this room.
She turns at last. Shion is patient, her hands folded across her lap as always, unreadable. Rena parts her lips without knowing what might come out. A conversation was hardly something to be afraid of anymore.
“I’m being punished.”
If it had been down to her, there would’ve only been eighteen bodies.
“We all are.”
There’s no anger in the voice. Shion holds her gaze, and it doesn’t make her as uncomfortable as it once might’ve. She doesn’t have the right not to be seen—not now.
She gets out of her bed, sliding one foot into the hospital slippers, then another. Her legs still aren’t quite used to being used. When she’s confident she can do it, she takes the few steps that separate their beds. She stands and waits. After a few moments, Shion just tilts her head, an unvoiced question.
“You didn’t slap me when you met me. I’m giving you the chance now.”
A bemused look twists into something else, and for a moment Rena is uncertain what will follow. She flinches preemptively. Shion begins laughing that awful, hollow laugh, and Rena wonders if she really thinks nobody can tell.
“You’re weird.”
“I nearly killed your sister.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t.”
“Maybe if things had gone differently…”
“If you want to take responsibility for Mion’s death, don’t worry about it.” She sort of shifts her body, barely perceptible, as if to say, Get in line.
Rena had noticed, when she’d pulled her hair back the day before, a scar running all along her scalp. Skin recently split open. Somehow, she’d known. What else could it have been? Shion continues, words clipped, as though she’s somehow annoyed.
“Who needs gods? We punish ourselves either way.”
Rena considers this.
“Why did you do it?”
A storm of emotion passes over Shion’s expression, and she almost looks as though she wants to answer, if it were possible. She settles on a sardonic smile. There’s a sort of glint in her eye, Rena notices, like a predator outsmarted by its prey, both amused and intrigued, and so she tries something else. “Were you two close?”
Shion exhales, and tips her head back so that it’s resting against the wall. Rena wonders what she’d looked like when they’d found her. Half the blood in her would be somebody else’s by now. Dying was strangely impersonal when it didn’t work.
“I used to have an answer to that question.”
Rena waits for more, but it never comes. There’s something sad in it, but at least she understands now why Shion hadn’t taken the opportunity she’d presented. All she is to the girl in the bed is another something at the end of a degree of separation. And somehow, that makes it easier to breathe. The past is entombed in her memory, sentenced to secrecy, now.
That night, when Rena’s already laid down to sleep, a nurse comes in and helps Shion wash and change into different clothes. Even as she’s aware she shouldn’t watch, she can’t tear her eyes away from the gap in the curtains; not until she makes sure of one thing.
Shion’s back is bare, all clean skin.
Grief washes through her, unrelenting. It seemed within herself she’d still harboured some small hope the girl might jump up, throw off the casts, yell a, Got you! How was my acting? even as that possibility drew further and further away with every one of those laughs that made Rena’s stomach curl in on itself.
Yes, Rena knew of Shion, and she knew of the one way to distinguish between the twins, the one spoken of only in rumours, the stuff of Takano-san’s scrapbooks, the dark magic that had led her so far from the light of reason.
Before any of that, she had known from the time the rainy season had come upon Hinamizawa, in the days of skies swept with deep, rich blues, where the air smelt fresh and they’d walk to school in soft and heavy silence; the days where the clouds would collapse in on themselves minutes from home and they’d run the rest of the way, laughing and clinging to each other. Sodden clothes were left in a pile on the floor, and they’d wash one another’s hair as they waited for the bath to run.
It was on the first of these occasions that Mion had stopped just before slipping her shirt off, face clouded with worry. Rena had blushed and stuttered and offered to leave, but something about this had seemingly given her the courage to complete the gesture and turn.
Her body was art. She’d said it then, and since, and as much as the mark meant more than she dared pry into, something in Mion's expression would soften at the words, and Rena had liked to think it made her think of herself in new ways.
In time, she would trace the bold strokes all the way down from the tip of her spine until she felt every muscle relax under her touch. The more she came to know the girl, the better she understood how deeply she needed to be cared for before she was convinced of its authenticity. And so she would forget time, forget herself, and dedicate all that she was to loving her in a way that would sink beneath her skin. Night after night, like that, they’d come to know themselves.
Perhaps it’s why it shocks her so deeply now, because everything else is the same, but the absence feels to be a betrayal, as though Sonozaki Shion is some kind of an imposter, an apparition of mismatched parts. They’re terrible things to think, and she feels the sharp prod of guilt, still not enough to override the despair and desperation building in the pit of her stomach.
Rena is a strong-willed person, and she wonders at how this girl makes her crumble without even trying. She thinks of scar tissue, and of shampoo, and of the acrid contents of a stomach turned inside out. She thinks of the non-existent gods who are testing her now and the humans who punish themselves. That night she gives herself completely to every feeling flooding her chest, and the dreams are of her, and they’re vivid and intoxicating and drug-like. The dreams are of pathways through the rain and wet hair and the way her lungs forgot themselves every time she unbuttoned her shirt and the first time she was teased about it, voice soft and singsong and just for her.
In the dreams, her hair is down, and she asks about it, and Shion laughs and calls her weird. In the dreams, when they wash, her scalp is scarred, and when she slips the material off the other girl's shoulders, her skin is pale, and she doesn’t know where to put her hands, and she sees the veins that carry others’ blood.
In the morning she wakes up and decides it’s still better than the dreams where she realises she’s in bed with a body that isn’t breathing, where she pulls her hands away and finds them covered in blood, thick and red and permanent as painted skin, cremated skin.
By the end of the first week, she feels positively voyeuristic. Though, for what it’s worth, Shion isn’t exactly discrete. That’s what Rena tells herself when she wakes up at three in the morning as if on cue to lie in her own sweat, shake off the dreams and listen to the noises of grief; they're deeper and emptier than sobs. And that’s what she tells herself as she watches the morning sun chase the shadows back to their resting place up the orange hospital wall, and she listens to the conversation.
“I thought I was a whole person. I don’t know how to explain this feeling. And she understood it even less than I did, but she understood it. Who’s left to understand it now?”
She can almost sense Shion listening to the silence, as if trying to divine answers from thin air. Conversations with ghosts were not unlike a pantomime. Who was to say they weren’t responding, from beyond the veil that separates actor and audience? Perhaps speaking to ghosts wasn’t so strange, when you lived as close to death as they did.
Rena wonders when she became so pessimistic. The ghost is called Satoshi-kun.
Patients arrive, then get discharged, and it begins to feel more and more like life has left her behind. The colours of the sunset don’t bring memories that make her eyes prick. All thanks to Sonozaki Shion, she’s found something to anchor her in this purgatory, a blessed release from thoughts of the past and future alike. Most of them, at least.
Ooishi comes to interview them both from their hospital beds. With only a brusque warning, he jumps in, questions like forceps, merciless and demanding, asking for accounts of the weeks leading up to the disaster. He leaves an hour later, empty-handed and unappeased. He becomes more subdued about halfway through the visit when Shion challenges him to tell them just where his investigation has gotten him so far. Before he goes, he promises to return, but his spirit is noticeably dampened. For all his intriguing ideas, the weeks are stretching on, and with nothing to show for his efforts, Rena feels her interest begin to fade. Like that, Ooishi goes back out into the real world, leaving them behind.
Even less eventful are Shion’s routine visits from the man in the suit. Rena still doesn’t know if she’s asking for him in lieu of her family or if they just aren’t bothering to come. This in itself is depressing to observe, and one day Shion tells him with a little more force to come to her if he has something she actually wants to hear or else to wait until she asks for him. This seems to work, and also seems to make her more noticeably upset than anything that’s happened so far. Rena wonders why the bodyguard-slash-butler can’t tell Shion is the kind of person who says many things she doesn’t really mean. In that way, she’s the same as her sister.
In one of the empty afternoons devoid of police questionings and well-meaning visits and whatever other remnants they possess of their shattered lives, where the cicadas' cries spill into the room along with a warm breeze, Shion turns to her.
“You and Mion were close, right?”
And she smiles. “Yeah. She was my best friend.”
“Tell me. About how you met, and everything.”
And she does. She tells Shion about her first day attending the Hinamizawa Branch School, standing in front of a class of kids smaller than her and still too scared to speak. She tells her about the one girl her age at the back of the room smiling as though to encourage her, and she doesn’t tell her how it had made her heart skip a beat.
She tells her about how Mion had showed her around the school, and explained how everything worked, and about how she had paid rapt attention as Rena had recounted her childhood in the town with eyes that were wide and fascinated and made her feel as though she was being properly listened to for the first time in months. She tells her about the prank Satoko had played on her as they went back to the classroom at the end of lunch, and about the raucous laughter that had rung out behind her and at first made her jump, then join in.
She tells her about how Mion had walked her all the way home that day, and invited her out that weekend, and how she had looked out of her window that evening as the sun had set between the mountain peaks and had thought that the village looked somehow different.
She hesitates, and then she tells Shion that it was the first time she felt something other than fear at the thought of the future.
She tells her about the million small instances like that, the days and the weeks that had woven together to create the life she’s just left behind, a life that was happy. And it’s now that she realises she’s crying, as tear after tear rolls down her cheeks and she understands it, at last and all too late. She was happy.
Shion waits for her to calm down, but she doesn’t carry on her story, because she’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to recount such punctured memories, omitting the feeling that flooded her senses every time Mion took her fingers in her own, or the times they lay by the river together under the sun and tentative touches became kisses.
There are memories of when tragedy strikes, memories of the ghosts that haunt their ward, memories of the boys that transfer into Hinamizawa and the boys that transfer out and the rhythm that held it all together like a heartbeat, the days she spent with her, enough to fill an eternity. There are memories that exist and memories that don’t, memories that confuse her and always end with her voice and her laugh and her promise of Everything will be okay, more to her than air, and a lie. She thinks of all of this, and she says nothing, and somehow she knows that Shion understands, and she’s deeply grateful.
A nurse brings dinner, they eat in silence, and Rena wonders if she said too much, until Shion sets down her chopsticks.
“My story starts a bit earlier. I hope you’ll be patient.”
And it does. And she is.
The story is of two girls born to a family that staunchly and resolutely wanted one, and how mistakes can be left unforgiven for a lifetime, even when you’ve apologised a thousand times and it’s not your fault. And the story goes on until the street lights have come on far below, and she can tell there are just as many omissions and cut corners as her own, and she sees the moments where something flutters across Shion's expression and she draws a sharp intake of breath, fingers brushing over an old wound, and she waits, just as Shion had for her. And there’s something in it, this deep acknowledgement of their collective selves, all they are and aren’t ready to share.
By the end of the story, it’s memories of the everyday, silly stories, ones that make them laugh together until their faces hurt, because Mion had that effect on people. And if there’s anything to the audience of ghosts Shion has conjured, it’s what she would’ve wanted, and it feels right.
When the stories and laughter end, there is only summer night silence, all that’s left of the burning embers of day. And when they’ve run out of words, Rena looks at Shion, and Shion looks right back at her.
She understands, now, that the girl is not the one she had so hoped for when she'd arrived on the ward weeks earlier. Why, then, had the déjà vu remained, too strong to overpower, too deeply rooted in some part of her that made her feel strange things, like she was living some twisted disfiguration of her first spring back in Hinamizawa all over again?
And what excuse, if this was hers, did Shion have to hold her gaze for just as long—long beyond the realm of reasonable explanations and evasions, and well into a place that neither of them could walk back from?
That night, Rena dreams of the ghosts that flood the room, a collective embodiment of claustrophobia that presses down on her chest as though willing her body into a state of submission, the barely-breathing thing she was just after the disaster, before walking contradictions had wandered into her life and called her back from the dead. It’s a dream that makes her feel like she holds no secrets, one that plants guilt in preparation for the coming seasons, ready to flower year on year and remind her that humans will always punish themselves for their own mistakes, and that no apology is enough, most of all when you’ve done nothing but try to live and it’s somehow still wrong, wrong, wrong.
August. The hospital rooms suffocate under the sky-heat, embedded as they are in the towering building. When the staff on the ward open the windows in the space between afternoon and evening, little makes its way in but the remnants of humid day and the cries of the evening cicadas, pulling in dusk. They’re far too far from the streets below for voices to reach.
Much of her day is spent watching Shion, as if to make sure she won’t simply disappear. Often, she’ll look back. They’re strange, these shared gazes completely devoid of performance. Rarely will they so much as smile. These are the things that draw Rena to Shion. There’s no need to pretend for her, and it makes her so acutely aware of the act so much of her life had been. Moreover, there’s an intimacy in it—the way they refuse to be one another’s saviours.
Shion’s words flow and recede like waves. Some days they spill over her lips, a lifetime unable to be contained. Sometimes she’s silent, held hostage by the ghosts. They’ve had many conversations since that day, without really saying anything at all. Rena wonders more and more what constitutes falsehood and what constitutes truth.
The nurses begin to give her looks, now—if you’re okay, why not leave? Because, yes, she is learning how to live again. It was the thing that had terrified her all along: she knew she could survive this.
Anxiety begins to slides its cold fingers around her internal organs. Hers and Shion’s journeys were not one and the same; this place was only a meeting point. As time continued its incessant march onwards, the life drained from Shion as it did from the world around them, soon to submit itself to autumn—the season of death.
Nobody had the heart to discharge a girl with nowhere to go. Still, she knows she can’t stay here forever, and so she hopes. She hopes the world stays colourful, and that the sweltering heat continues to build, so that when she closes her eyes, everything she wants and will never have again remains just beyond her fingertips, no closer, but at least no further away.
When they wash, they do it together. Partially because Shion still needed help, what with her casts. Partially because it was an excuse for human touch, something they appeared to crave equally, as desperately as if they were children.
The first time Shion undresses in front of her and knows she’s watching, her heart beats into her throat, hot and nauseating. All of that falls away when she sees her body.
Shion is impossibly small, under her clothes. Horribly so. She stares—at the awkwardly bulging bones, the pallid skin pulled taut over all-too-evident skeleton. The places where she’s bruised, cut, the remnants of the fall. The places where she bleeds still under broken skin; the scars that will remain. Shion laughs, voice slicing the air.
“You have absolutely no manners to speak of sometimes, Rena-san. I like that about you.”
She says nothing, and sheds her own impersonal hospital gown like it's an old skin. Shion’s gaze brushes remnants of scars littering the places clothes hide, passing over them quickly. It’s not a favour; she simply isn’t surprised, isn’t fazed.
It had been different, with Mion. She wasn’t sure what she had expected. There was the look—first, almost imperceptible shock; then, something quieter, sadder.
She was never sure what to expect with Mion, at first. In those moments, she juggled the possibilities. Concerned questions, or else some romantic gesture—placing her lips to every part of her she’d once hurt. What she hadn’t anticipated: the simple embrace, devoid of ceremony. They had spent some time that way, a mess of limbs and hair, skin against unbroken skin, bare-boned intimacy. She couldn’t remember which one of them had started crying first.
Shion’s gaze is cold, and empty, and cutting; a release from expectation. It makes her feel like she’s nothing, and that itself is relief.
They take turns with the clinical-smelling hospital soap and sponges, scrubbing indiscreetly. She jumps sometimes, when Shion touches her somewhere she doesn’t expect. Still, there’s something comforting in the way Shion treats her body almost as though it’s her own.
She responds in kind, but quietly enjoys allowing her hands to wander the other girl’s skin, imperfect as her own. She takes her time running the conditioner through Shion’s long, tangled hair. As she does, she thinks. Yes, Mion had been rough around the edges, but she was brilliant, in the truest sense of the word. She had a laugh that filled rooms, an infectious smile, an ability to make anybody feel at ease. So often, Rena would look at her: the way her eyes shone with the promise of adventure, the way her emotions played out across her face in the most endearing way. She was a uniquely genuine person, and the kind who truly didn’t know how wonderful they were, nor how adored. She was everything Rena had to act her heart out to even begin to match.
When they were alone, Rena would look at her and wonder if she was good enough for Mion. It was something between envy and self-doubt; something not so easy to diagnose. It was a shadow that passed over her thoughts rarely, but one she remembered, now.
Shion, in comparison, was a shell. All the trappings were there, but once you got under the fake smile and the clothes? They were the same. And she knows it’s the worst possible dishonour she can do Mion’s memory to remember the impossibly rare times in which she’d made her feel not enough, insecurities she'd never even disclosed—but there’s something so satisfying in looking at Shion, and knowing. You’re no better than me.
They dress in silence, then eat dinner. Rena ignores her thoughts for the remainder of the day, unsettled.
She doesn’t recall drifting off to sleep, yet she awakes to Shion’s shadow that night, sitting upright and rigid in her bed.
Shion had said that there were times where it felt as though Mion was there with her. She had been deadly serious. Well, Rena had known what she was talking about, and had only smiled with thin lips, unwilling to shatter the illusion. If that’s who it is to her, that’s okay. She wished her apparitions took such friendly forms. And then, Shion had said something else.
Sometimes it’s a comfort to have my sister with me, more than I can describe. But I can’t communicate with her. I can try, but she never says anything back. She’s just there, and she knows everything, and I can’t hide.
“Let’s go on an adventure.”
Initially, Rena had been a distraction. Shion’s interest had been a little macabre in nature, admittedly. She wished she could say it was something as romantic as wanting to keep the memory of her sister alive—more than that, Rena was an unwilling partner in grief, an exercise in probing wounds. She couldn’t muster an ounce of resentment for the way the girl’s eyes combed over her, analytical and focused. She couldn’t curse the way they took her apart, piece by piece, day by day. For her part, she’s patient. She allows herself to be an instrument for wish fulfilment; whatever purpose she can serve.
Still, Rena must know by now. No, she isn’t her sister—isn’t even close. And yet she doesn’t lose interest.
It isn’t charity. She can tell by now—Rena is terrible at acting. And yet her voice betrays no disappointment when they speak. She listens. She cares. And Shion doesn’t understand—how her existence can be any more than the harsh reminder of regret. But she’ll take what she can get.
Rena looks down at her from her bedside, expectant. She puts down her book, and thinks for a second.
“Okay.”
The “adventure” is confined to the hospital walls, but those alone afford something, at least. For one, there’s the wards, full of life. People chat away to their guests, complain about the food selection in the bento brought from home, or otherwise graciously accept gifts, all well-wishes, hopes of the patient getting better soon, moving on from here, the thing everyone wants.
Husbands arrange flowers in vases at bedsides; expectant wives nurse bumps. Sobs are heard from behind drawn curtains and rooms with closed doors. Nurses complain about their shifts, their date last weekend, the doctors. The doctors survey clipboards, unreadable. Noises of indeterminate nature float through the corridors, perhaps unsettling, if they were to be found anywhere else. But hospitals are a home to everything, a microcosm of life itself. Nobody pays any mind to the teenage girls in their spectral gowns, winding their way around the floors, taking it all in.
On the ground floor near the entrance is a shop. They scan the items with disinterest; neither of them have any money. Plush toys hold hearts bearing 'Get well soon's and confectionary comes in twee packaging, wrapped with a bow.
“It’s tacky, don’t you think?” She dangles a white bear from its ear in front of her face. “Like, what about the kids with cancer who’ve just been told they have three months to live? The person who comes out of a car crash in a wheelchair? There’s nothing here for them.” She spits it out, and sees an assistant cast a harsh look over her shoulder, but doesn’t care. Instead, she watches to see Rena’s reaction. Rena, to her surprise, nods almost imperceptibly. Their gazes lock. She doesn’t need to say it. What about us?
They choose meals from the array on offer at the cafeteria next door—free to them, as patients, the same foods the nurses would bring up to their room anyway—and sit down to eat at a small table that looks out onto a grassy expanse at the back of the building. It’s mid-afternoon, and the light is tinged gold. The days are getting shorter. She picks at her food and watches Rena. Rena watches the light filter through the trees and onto the grass, utterly transfixed.
“What were you planning to do when you were done with school?”
“Who knows? I didn’t think that far ahead.” Rena replies distractedly.
Shion cocks her head slightly, surprised at this. Rena seemed to keep everything just-so. She remembered what Mion had told her once—that she was surprisingly unshakeable and unshockable. Always somehow more prepared than the next person, no matter the situation. She can imagine them, now; her sister’s overflowing empathy, Rena’s cool logic.
“What, do I give a different impression?” Rena’s lips curl into a slight smile. “I didn’t want to waste my time thinking about the future—my hands were full being happy in the present. But now that present’s gone, I don’t know where to go. I was never brave enough to plan for that. I thought I was clever, focusing on the now. Really, I was just afraid of hope, and of believing in things that weren’t promised to me.” Rena’s eyes, until now gazing languidly beyond Shion’s shoulder and into the distance, suddenly meet her own, startlingly blue. “What about you, Shii-chan? What did you want?” Her smirk is almost cruel.
“I was the opposite. I dreamed of the future and nothing but. I didn’t want to waste appreciation on a life that was less than what I thought I deserved.” She's never been this honest. She was fully aware of her tendency to come across as precocious, spoilt, whatever quality looked most unpleasant on a young woman that particular week. But to openly admit to her dissatisfaction felt equal to admitting failure. Never once had she come close to crafting the life she had wanted to live.
She stares at the linoleum just peeling off the edge of the metal table they’re seated at, focusing on every little detail, drawing her attention away from the nausea building in her stomach.
“I was thinking about becoming a librarian.” Her voice is small. “I thought it would be nice to work in a place surrounded by people who knew they had more to learn. I thought it would be quiet and peaceful. It wasn’t a huge ambition. But those were always for my sister, anyway.”
Yes, she had thought many a time how much better she would be at the role Mion had been given—but never out of envy. She felt sorry for her sister, having to perform duties she knew would remain as scars and make her question her own goodwill, her values, her sense of self. Her sister had been the kind of person never to forgive herself for hurting another. Her sister had, in many ways, been so utterly different to herself. At the worst of times, she would look into the mirror and detest herself for stealing the visage of someone who regarded the world kindly, and who received that kindness back. Someone decidedly more good than herself. In the way her hair framed her face, the curve of her eyelid, the set of her jaw—she had felt like a fraud.
“I wanted more, but I never knew what that meant. I was never satisfied.”
She speaks in past tense not only because she speaks of a life left suspended, but because she now regards the her of a mere few months prior as a fool. What was ever going to be enough, and how would she get there now?
She looks up, and Rena is regarding her with pity. It’s a terrible, penetrating gaze that says There is nothing I can do and I wish there was. It’s the look she detests the most, worthless, empty sympathy. You can’t do this alone, but you have to.
She looks around them at the people living their own lives and shouldering their own pain whether they deserve it or not and becomes more acutely aware than she ever recalls being prior that point there is nobody and nothing watching over them, connecting them, or keeping them apart. The loneliness is oil, thick and black and coating her organs from the inside out, polluting her with a fear that chills her to bones. Even the shade of the setting sun fills her with dread.
She stands abruptly and grasps Rena’s hand, not caring if she hurts her as she drags her out of her seat. Rena stumbles and falls into a trot behind her without question as she's pulled out of the cafeteria and into the hallway, then the elevator, then back up to their ward. The whole time Shion focuses on the sensation of skin against skin, the only thing she can trust: that Rena's veins are pumping red, red blood, gallons of the stuff, tethering her to this hell just the same, keeping her terrifyingly alive, in spite of it all.
She doesn’t know whether to regard their making it to now as a failure or a success, only an impasse. They are coming from nothing and going nowhere and she knows now more than ever that Rena is the only thing keeping her sane and married to this reality, for better or for worse.
“Do you ever dream about things that never happened?” Shion asks. They’re lying on her bed, whispering by lamplight.
“Like winning the lottery?”
Shion turns to look at her, their noses inches apart. Her eyes plead.
“Okay, yeah. I do.”
The other girl smiles then, as if to say, You can’t talk about them either?
“I dream that it’s the last time I’m seeing Mii-chan, and she’s covered in blood, and it’s my fault.” Her voice cracks and she takes a long, shuddering breath. “Your dreams can’t be worse than that, because it really happened.” She pauses. “You should hate me, you know.”
“I never do what I’m supposed to, Rena-san.”
Night confessionals become routine. Finally, she can relate a little to the teen movies she’d watched once upon a time—only, in those, sleepovers were usually reserved for talking about love, sex, drugs.
“I don’t think I’m a good person, Rena-san. Still, this is unfair, right?”
Rena is quiet for so long, she wonders if she’s fallen asleep. Her head is resting on her chest. She strokes her hair absent-mindedly as she stares at a moth flying dangerously close to the light. Then, she hears the subtlest of sniffs.
“I feel so guilty for missing her.”
“She liked you more than she liked me, you know.” She replies. Rena sits up and faces her, looks scandalised. “Hey, I didn’t say loved, I said liked. We were siblings.” She closes her eyes. Her chest is tight—painfully so—but she presses on. “Mion was Mion. Anyone would miss her.”
“I didn’t deserve her.”
“Then we’re even.”
Rena turns off the light and lies down beside her, and she holds her breath until the other girl’s slows, and only then allows the sorrow to overwhelm her.
The sobs are building, choking her, never letting themselves escape when Rena speaks again, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“I’m so scared.”
Her heart is pumping so quickly, her throat too dry and aching for words, so she swallows and hopes Rena feels her head shift as she nods, a promise that in that moment they aren’t alone, gods be damned. She balls her fists in Rena’s shirt and knows it will never be her sister, feels hot tears drip onto Rena’s skin, Rena’s throat, Rena’s shoulder.
She holds her without understanding anything, with the desperation reserved for sinking boats, and those who know exactly where this all ends, and only fear facing it alone.
It had been the last night of summer. The next morning, a cool wind had blown, the beginning of a dance that would come to tease life from the trees. In the following days, grief would threaten to overwhelm her as she watched the season depart.
Sleeping side by side becomes commonplace, as though if they held one another tightly enough, they’d be able to keep the nightmares out. On an evening where the sunlight is turning golden and they're washing together, Rena asks her. “Why do we still do this?”
Shion cocks her head in acknowledgement of the question, facing forwards as Rena washes her back.
“You mean you don’t enjoy our quality time together, Rena-san? You break my heart.”
Shion's voice is playful, holding her at a distance, despite her words. She’s been like this more and more these days, Rena has noticed.
“I do enjoy them.” She massages soap into her skin, feeling it under her fingertips. Beneath her touch, blood rushes, almost taunting her. Shion is so warm. Later, they take their time dressing one another, touches lingering.
This is also how it’s become: intimacy undefined. Under the blankets at night, sometimes Shion’s fingertips would find the nape of her neck, or the curve of her waist. She'd think of the times when her sister had done the same, before anything had found its way to words, and bite down the familiar craving, hold Shion tighter. Not that. Not now.
In the present, Shion is tying the back of her gown. “Hey, Rena-san?”
She murmurs to tell the other girl she’s listening.
“Have you ever kissed anyone?”
She turns to face Shion and is surprised to see how vulnerable she looks. For a few drawn out, painful moments, neither of them say anything. She watches Shion make to laugh it off—and when her lips part, she closes the distance.
She finds the other girl’s face with her hands and pushes her still-damp hair behind her ear. For one brilliant moment, she’s lost in it; they kiss one another desperately, as though hungry, and she doesn’t care about anything else. Her fingers follow the neckline of the gown Shion has only just put back on and Shion responds by putting her hands on her waist, placing just enough distance between them to force her to look. Her eyes say, Calm down.
Rena nods, and the next time they kiss it’s chaste, lips just meeting for the briefest of touches. Shion giggles nervously and the sound is beautiful, musical and unbroken and from somewhere deep within her, like for just a moment she’s set herself free. They laugh into the kisses until they can’t kiss anymore, and then Rena looks into her eyes and understands finally how nothing in this world is as simple as right and wrong. The guilt never comes.
That night, they sleep in one cramped bed where she cannot tell dream from reality, and is no longer sure of the difference.
She dreams of the same bed with Mion instead of her sister, where she pulls the other girl’s arms around her and wakes up to Shion asking her what she’s doing, unsure if she’s awake or asleep. She tries to blink away the face in her dreams but it’s there, two inches away, lips downturned into a gentle frown, and her insides are seized with an ache that makes her retch.
She stumbles to the bathroom and collapses on the cold tile where everything is dark, and footsteps follow, and she wants to tell them to go, but all that comes out of her mouth is a groan. She holds herself as she shakes, and Shion sits with her, strokes her hair and waits every time she begins to sob again. She stays until the morning light is staining the walls an icy blue and she can see her now, everything she is and isn’t, and she cries until her eyes are swollen and she is too tired, and Shion wraps her in a blanket and carries her back to bed. The sleep is black.
“I’m sorry about last night.”
Shion just looks at her, and already nothing of yesterday remains.
“You don’t need to say that.”
“Why don’t you cry more?” She blurts out. “I feel like an idiot.”
Shion languidly lifts the hem of her hospital gown to expose her inner thighs. They're lined with angry red cuts sitting on raised skin, edged with sharp white. There are dozens of them, small and uniform.
“I’m sorry…” She manages to stutter.
She'd seen Shion's cuts before, of course, but had simply assumed they were old, like hers. She realises now that the whims behind the days where she had decided to shower alone were not that. Shion shrugs.
“You have them too. It’s not a big deal.”
And she wants to say it is, but she doesn’t have the words, only thinks of the night prior where she had cried on the bathroom floor for hours as Shion had sat with her, then imagines Shion sitting on the same floor in the evenings methodically slicing open skin, alone.
Time moves by them and few words are shared. Each time she catches Shion’s gaze, she looks a little more tired. Autumn is in the air, and the days take on an air of melancholy reserved for Sunday afternoons and the end of summer vacation. There’s never another moment like the one in the bathroom, and she begins to wonder if it had simply been another of her dreams.
At night, she’s kept up by anxiety’s embrace of her lungs. Its fingers pry into her brain every time sleep threatens, massaging fresh horrors to the surface of her mind. Shion feels further away all the time, and she wonders if she’s about to lose everything all over again.
For this reason, when Shion asks her on a date the next afternoon with a self-deprecating smile, she surrenders herself without question. Shion pulls a suitcase out from under the bed—it had appeared during one of the man in the suit’s visits—and reveals two dresses: chiffon and lace. She asks her to pick one and tells her she can keep it.
By the time they’ve both gotten ready, visiting hours are over and the sun is low in the sky. Shion takes her hand, nails freshly painted, and leads her out into the evening.
The grounds are modest and all too familiar, dipped in shadow and moonlight. They evoked hazy memories of walks taken outside the institution she had spent some time at as an inpatient back in Ibaraki. She appeared to be developing a habit of making a home of hospitals.
The grass is soft under her shoes, the changing trees red and golden. They're too far from both the hospital and the sidewalk, and it’s the time of day where everyone has already gone home to their families, and so there’s not a sound but for the evening breeze dancing in the branches above them and their muffled footsteps.
They take their time walking, mostly apart until one calls out to the other about some discovery: a strange bug; a bird’s nest; a dropped bus ticket. Their wonderment at these reminders of life unites them.
When Shion finally settles on the grass, Rena goes to sit beside her. She looks up, and the sky is full of stars.
“They’re not as bright as in Hinamizawa.” Shion muses.
“They’re beautiful.” She states, and she means it; they’re as magnificent as she’s ever seen them.
She lies back to take it all in, and for the first time she realises that the sky truly has no boundaries. It brings her a sense of calm, the way it stretches on above them in every direction, further than the eye can see, a great big blanket over the earth. In that moment, the world doesn’t feel so vast, nor the future so incomprehensible.
She turns to Shion, but her face remains unreadable. She takes her fingers and squeezes. Shion squeezes back, a little weaker than her.
She has no idea what time it is when they stand and go back inside. She changes back into her hospital gown and climbs into Shion’s bed.
Shion brushes aside her bangs to kiss her on the forehead before they sleep, impossibly gentle, barely there. By contrast, her embrace is warm and certain, setting any lingering tension in her body free, convincing her that if everything can feel okay for even one night, it’s enough.
She awakens the next morning to find Shion sitting on the side of the bed looking purposeful. She feels a pang of guilt for having let her wake up alone. For a long time, Shion stays quiet, and she's not sure if she’s realised she’s awake. She doesn’t want to break the spell. Suddenly, she speaks.
“I don’t know if I’m trying to find something of my sister in you.” Shion pauses. When she speaks again, her voice is quiet. “That’s probably weird to say at this point.” A smile that would’ve once been self-mocking is now only sad.
“I understand.”
“Were you in love with her?”
None of the emotions she expects to come. All of her secrets have escaped, despite her best efforts. Perhaps that was what it meant to truly love someone—there was so much Mion had never known about her.
As she’s considering this, before she has time to reply, Shion speaks again. “I see. Obviously.”
Shion meets her gaze, and she wonders how long this girl has seen right through her, and what could’ve been if only she’d been a better liar.
“She loved you too.”
Still, Shion’s smile that day isn’t false. She carries herself with the poise of somebody who has accepted the truth. Perhaps that was what had lulled Rena into a false sense of security. Or perhaps she had only been in denial; the final equilibrium between pain and peace evident in her demeanour announced her decision clear as day. Still, if this day was all she wanted, it was the least she could do for her.
It was nothing like a home, but they had been there long enough for the hospital to feel familiar. They chatted about this and that as they ate breakfast in bed: staff they had come to know, the new food on the cafeteria menu, the idea of sneaking out to go shopping for nicer toiletries and clothes. Illusions of a future, she had thought, and yet she hadn’t minded. After all, what was left for them beyond these walls? Here, with Shion, things were somehow okay.
Equally, they spoke of the past. Memories of the club playing together. Shion spoke about Satoshi, then times spent with her sister in childhood. They listened to one another and laughed. It didn't hurt, she realised, like a ray of light through slowly moving clouds, momentary, but miraculous all the same. It was the first time they'd acknowledged their lives before this and their lives going forwards as co-existing. It felt like healing, and for the first time, that hadn’t frightened her.
Shion spends the better part of the morning writing something, and when she’s done, they go to fetch lunch, a wordless agreement. She suggests they eat outside. They sit under a tree that casts dancing sunlight over the ground. At one point, Shion asks her, Do you think days like this are the remnants of summer, or are we already deep into autumn? Is the warmth a sign that the world is fighting back against the progressing seasons, or a swan song in the face of the oncoming winter?
At the end of it all, she won’t remember her answer to Shion’s question; all that had been on her mind was the thought of climbing under the covers that night and feeling her embrace. When the moment comes, she holds Shion tightly, surely uncomfortably so, so she’s certain—that she’s here, that they’re together, whatever this is. She clings to consciousness until the last possible moment, as though afraid of what lies on the other side of the night.
There’s no warning, no ceremony. She’s dreaming, and then panicked nurses on the morning round are rushing her out of the room as she rubs at her sleepy eyes. The light is a steely gray and rain pounds the windows—she wonders how she’d slept. And then she realises, as she’s brought into the hallway—Shion isn’t with her. Other patients huddle in confused circles, still waking up. They found someone in the bathroom. One of those young girls. She used the bedsheets. How terrible.
She knows by now, how these things end. She still can’t stand the sound of thunderstorms, rain on her roof at night, as though everything of her life will be swept up and sent out to sea. In those moments she becomes afraid she is somehow alone again, surely the last person left on this earth, cursed to weather the waves even as they take everything else under.
On their bedside table, her hair tie, and a note.
My sister used this sometimes. If there’s a time and a place where we remember none of this and are strangers, I think it’s a world where more went right. I hope you understand my wishes when I say this is goodbye.
She comes to dream of repentance, of holding the girl in her arms a little more tightly, or being there when she wakes up. She dreams of a world where one person is ever enough to fix everything. She dreams of worlds where someone new transfers into their school and Mion introduces her as her sister. She dreams of knowing the answer—whether the light arrives the moment you choose to fight or surrender. She bides time, no way to live, all she has left. Year on year, she dreams of one burning summer, two girls and a sky that folds into rain as though the world is at its end. She counts small miracles—the flower she finds one day, the one that means ‘I won’t forget you’. With each year, their faces fade further from memory, and she know it’s closer to the time when everything will start again. As Shion had said, a world where more went right was waiting. Most of all, she dreams of telling her: You gave me this because it belonged to your sister, but I keep it in memory of you both.
On another day, in another life, Rena watches Mion do her sister’s hair against the gentle symphony of festival music. Before them, sins drift away downstream under a sky of endless stars. She ponders over Shion’s name—the characters for poem and sound. She’d only met her that night, but somehow, she thinks it suits her perfectly.