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Yashiro Nene didn’t think much about her life. She had more pressing matters in her mind, the idea of love and being carried off by a prince had always been something she cherished even as she grew up surrounded by those who would be much more than her, not that she knew it yet, not that she understood just how far her life was to go before she made a wish with a bathroom ghost and suddenly, things had become much too exciting not to think about. From living her middle and high school life dreaming after the same princely figures, Nene had a foolproof plan to make sure the rest of her dreams would come true. It had been so easy to summon the ghost residing in the old girls’ toilets, so simple that she hadn’t thought much of it—hadn’t understood the ramifications when she ate a mermaid scale and was suddenly whisked away just like in her wildest fantasies.
This, however, was not a tale of the princess and her prince. Rather, it was the story of a girl meddling with the flow of the netherworld, risking her all just to throw it all away before she could go through with it and that pesky ghost, with no real powers of his own, had struck such a deal with her, given her an ultimatum of her own desires, that it was desperately impossible to refuse and thus—she found herself not in the storybook land of a princess and her prince, living lavishly in a castle (or, in other words, traveling the halls of the school linked hand in hand) but rather, stuck with a mop and a bucket and the title of Daikon Cinderella over her head.
It hadn’t been pretty, as nothing ever really was, and it hadn’t been enjoyable (but who could say she didn’t find herself having fun?) but the tale of Hanako-san and his assistant was one of peculiar interest. A human girl wanting nothing but the best person to love her realizes her selfish deeds when it’s one hour too late, striking a deal with the leader of the school’s netherworld and suddenly mixing in the two shores more than they had been in years. If she had her future told out to her like that, Nene figured she would laugh and call it silly, that there was no way she would be mopping old bathroom floors and fighting for her life in the between of the living and the dead.
That was, of course, before Hanako-kun became part of her life.
Cleaning toilets had nothing to do with the real job he had offered her, a representative of the humans in her world, someone who could change the rumors whispered amongst the halls, the true reason she had been given that deal in the classroom days ago, her very own heroine storyline. Of course, when being the heroine of a story, there was no mistaking the trials and people she would meet. From a boy falling from the sky, proclaiming to exorcise Hanako in the name of justice, to the mysteries Hanako had said he was in charge of—1,2,3,4,5, and 6. They were, as said by Hanako, the governors of the netherworld within her quiet little school (which, in retrospect, wasn’t nearly as quiet as she had thought) and because of her wish, a selfish desire backed out of too late, she too was becoming enamored within the far shore, tied within their cut up threads because there was no more fate for people who were dead and for people like her—bonded to a supernatural for all the days to come—being the balance between the far and the near shore was nothing short of exhausting.
Destroying Yorishios because number 2 had gone berserk had to have been one of the most terrifying moments of her life. Completely out of the league of the faeries, The Misaki stairs was an entire nightmare fueled hazy dream that she could still remember, the way her friend had disappeared, the way no one seemed to remember her except for Nene herself, how Hanako-kun had said that he would help them get all the missing students back—finding Aoi’s broken head in a pile of water after going ages across a multitude of stairs. She still remembers the way Hanako-kun had smiled at her to keep on going, the way she had ripped off the black and white seal for the first time that would soon become second nature to her.
How for a single second, Hanako-kun had made her heart race faster than any prince ever would.
There were bumps along the way of her journey of course—such a thing she simply couldn’t deny—and sometimes, it had felt much easier to be a normal girl than a heroine ( The confession tree makes everyone fall in love, everyone except Hanako-kun and her) but there was something keeping her tethered to such a world, a force that she simply could not shrug away no matter what she tried. Who was Hanako-kun before his death? What did he mean by God had given him this role? What sins did he have to atone for? And…why was it that Nene wanted to know so much more than the ghost she had summoned on a baker’s whim?
He had looked like such a normal boy when he apologized to her, his hair a mess and his eyes downcast that Nene couldn’t help but wonder more—she wanted more and like the heroine she was, her curiosity led her right to her goal. Meeting the fifth mystery of the school was something Nene thought would be a more grand ordeal, she had figured—mostly, that there would be another rumor gone wild, another mess they had to fix, and like Yako, the fifth mystery would reveal themselves. She hadn’t, however, expected to be led into a library, to find books where everything and anything was recorded within the school walls (“ red is for the future, black is for the dead, white is for the living, which one have you read?”) and to realize that the so-called fifth mystery was no one else other than Minamoto Kou’s homeroom teacher.
Truthfully, Nene did enjoy it much more than she’d admit.
The shock, confusion, and excitement had all melded into one. Someone at her school, someone who worked with actual humans , was part of the far shore? Such a discovery meant so many things, had so many questions and yet, all Nene could do was follow the orders of Hanako-kun and destroy Number 5’s Yorishiro, listen to her Sensei call her something that would register within her mind weeks later, and find a part of Hanako-kun’s past as the once living Yugi Amane, a bruised and battered boy with a love for space, a dreamer who had stopped dreaming a little too late, and the human of a ghost who had his past tucked away and hidden for no one but himself to see.
That is, until someone took out the key. Yugi Tsukasa was not someone that Nene would like to cross. Violent and uncaring, she had seen enough of the boy on the rooftop that fateful afternoon and she had seen enough of him in the boundary before she was sent to Nowhere , landing smack dab in the center of Amane’s past yet again, this time—meddling with his wounds, grabbing the key he had dropped and never being able to return it. It had been so quick that day that seeing Hanako-kun’s smile was enough for her to vow his protection (but what could a human like her do against the laws of the supernatural?).
That vow had been the only time she ever promised herself something so serious, so life changing that at the time, Nene never realized just how big it was. Throughout her days spent with the perverted ghost, she found herself tossed left and right, meeting new mysteries and ripping off their Yorishiros, seeing their personal memories and recognizing that her feelings for Hanako-kun had grown deeper than any crush she had ever gotten on any boy in her school, that as they face another supernatural head on and he tells her that she can’t give up because humans like her, those with a determination far more than any supernatural could ever achieve, were the ones who always won in the end.
But did this count as winning?
Did seeing Hanako-kun slowly peel away his happiness in a facade of desperation even considered a victory? How was she supposed to feel at the Yorishiro crumpled between her fingers when she could still remember just how cold those metal bars felt on her palms? How could she push through with the odds when her life was nearing its end and the clock was ticking minute by minute, day by day, here she was huddled in her room under the covers, gasping for breath because she was going to die soon and you didn’t come back from the dead unless you had regrets and could she even, if just for a second, begin to prepare herself for the afterlife? For the slim chance that she would wake up as a ghost on the far shore with no one to see her? No one to hug her and say that everything was going to be alright, no warmth to be felt as she passed right through walls and watched everyone interact, walking past her with no recollection of the red eyed girl who had cleaned the abandoned bathrooms every day and night.
She could see it now, the rumors springing up about the girl who died from Kamome, the whispers amongst the halls as she was forced to stay in the near shore because her regrets were things that couldn’t be fulfilled, because her unfinished business laid in the hands of an already dead boy and an exorcist in training. The halls would be alight with mumbles about the ghost girl people swore to have seen around the abandoned girl’s bathroom, quietly crying as she curled up to the wall. Perhaps Tsukasa would approach her then, tell her all about how Amane missed her and how once you were dead there was no going back unless she was desperate enough to let him create her rumor, unless she was so alone that the only position would be to trust in the boy whose sole purpose was to twist the wishes of everyone trapped in his web and Yashiro thinks that she would have been desperate, that she would have taken his hand and let him craft her body as if she was made from nothing but clay.
Clay and the whispers of the school halls, clay and the intercom speaker cutting to static before replaying her wounded soul and then it would spread like an infection until word reached the mysteries and there would only be one thing left to do. She’d watch helplessly as she’s seen as nothing but a twisted fragment of what she had once been and the knife digging into her chest would be coated with no blood but the scales of a mermaid long gone. It would be then that she’d curse herself for ever trusting Yugi Tsukasa, for letting him into her deepest thoughts and desires and bringing them out into warped and twisted whispers amongst the students.
She’d wish she’d been exorcised more often than not and the thought of living such an afterlife, when she already had so much to do, so much to live for, so much to finish haunts her every waking moment as she curls up tighter underneath the blankets of her bed and begs for the voice laughing in her head to be quiet, begs for her mom to stop calling her as she tries to breathe through panicked sobs, begs to walk and to run and to live.
God doesn’t answer her prayers.
The days felt like they were getting shorter, the hours felt like they were turning into minutes. Making the most of her life had been something of a fantasy, a sort of dream she had when she was young and impressionable, but now it was reality and she wondered if she should prepare her bucket list in advance? If she should write down all the things she wants to do before she eventually crumbles away because the fake world had been nothing but a desperate trap of miscommunication and it had felt so cold to hear Hanako-kun say such words to her and her friends, that he would do anything to keep her alive—to save her with all his powers combined even if it made him the bad guy and it was so wrong, so, so wrong .
But she couldn’t waste away when he had already sacrificed so much.
His reputation, his standing, his goals had all but shifted into protecting a human girl he shouldn’t have had anything to do with and when she picks up a pen and buys a notebook from the corner store (bright pink with yellow dots, so stupid, so colorful) she sobs into it three minutes in because the paper is smudged with ink and there’s so much bullet points that it takes up four pages worth.
- Learn how to ride a bike
- Win a contest
- Plant new flowers in the practice garden
- Visit her grandmother in Korea
- Make new recipes with her mother
- Get married
- Live for ninety years—
There’s no telling when her life will suddenly cut itself short, when the days will dwindle and her breaths would become harder and harder to maintain without a machine helping her stay alive—a futile effort it would have been—and he had told her he would grant her wish, that he would let her grow old and get married, live a life with kids and grandchildren and her tears have stained the notebook blue, ink smudges barley allowing the words to be any recognizable and she thinks of how desperate Hanako-kun had been, how his whole reputation had been thrown into the dirt and buried six feet under with his corpse because she had been so stupid as to summon him, so foolish as to wish for ninety more years of life.
Thus, Yashiro Nene found herself at a shrine.
Prayer had never been something that Nene looked into, she had never been one for following a certain religion like the people before her and yet, fear wracked her bones and she prayed as hard as she could to survive whatever was coming towards her. Could she even begin to prepare for her untimely death? For the idea that one day, she would be nothing but bones buried in soil? It hurt to think about, it hurt to talk about it, it hurt to see her mother calling her for breakfast as she laid in the bathtub with clothes on and scales across her skin, as she stared up at the bathroom light and wished that life had given her a choice in the matter.
It didn’t, of course, and she travels through the days with nothing more than a smile and a shiver whenever she has to turn off her bedroom lights. Was this how Hanako-kun felt when he smiled through every horrible moment? Was this how Kou-kun felt as he told her he would find a way to save Mitsuba, as he told her he would find a way to save her ?
So much promises had been made because of her selfishness, so much declarations and determined faces that Nene didn’t know how to tell them that she was already losing hope, that she couldn’t sleep well because the thoughts of never waking up again filled her every night, that she was now more upset than she had ever been, checking behind the shower curtains, peering outside her bedroom window, checking her mother’s bedroom and rummaging through the drawers to see if she stashed a gun hidden under the clothes, walking into the kitchen and realizing that yes, her mother would notice the missing kitchen knife.
Sometimes she thought over how it would have been if she took herself out before whatever happened, happened. Sometimes she thought that maybe not going to school wouldn’t be too bad, that not leaving her room wouldn’t be too horrible, that perhaps—if she limited her interactions to her hamster and her bedroom, she could live for ninety years and more. Yet, Kou smiles at her when she walks with him to school, Kou picks her up from her house because Teru leaves early and having company is always nice, Hanako-kun tells her to clean the bathrooms and she gives the mokke candy every time they meet and Tsuchigomori-sensei tells her that it’s okay to be afraid, that it’s okay to cry and hate because she was going to die soon and no one knew how it felt to die early.
No one except Yugi Amane.
So, Nene figures she must put on a brave face, she figures she must hold back her demons and talk less about her death and more about the present. That there’s no chance that Hanako-kun and Kou would let anything happen to her and her present was more important than what her fate had decided for her. It had been easy to say that, it had been easy to practice it all the way through and yet—when it came to summer vacation and the quiet tune of a flute echoing through her ears, Nene realizes that no amount of meddling with fate can help her and that finding No.1 of the school mysteries would be the only situation to buy her a little more extra time, a little more extra days.
Yet, she should have known that messing with fate would have dire consequences.
There had always been a rule around meddling with the constructs of destiny. That trying to change or redesign your fate would lead to dire consequences being set forth. Tsuchigomori-sensei tells her that Amane’s consequence was becoming a ghost tethered to the near shore, that he would forever be haunted by his regrets until he could finish his atonement and that anything even remotely close to defying his orders would punish him with everlasting immortality in death—with no way of passing on, Amane would sit within his stall, he would govern the mysteries as Hanako-san, and he would watch as countless others fail to summon him only to be taunted with the excuse of a human asking for a wish—as if granting wishes would ever reprieve him of his duty of being the seventh mystery, for once and forever more. The thought had been jarring to process, that Hanako-kun had so much to live to, had some much to protect of himself that one foul move would bring it all crashing down and yet, and yet—
He turns the world upside down for her, he grabs the moon from the sky to make into a wedding ring, he lifts the oceans from the earth to give her something to drink, he defies the laws of the world he now resides in, pushes past the realization that he was now so desperate as to bring about the end of the world just to see her grow old and wrinkly and it gives Nene an entire new a sense of horror because oh is it wrong, oh is it so, so wrong to see him turning the wheels in his head, to see the world warped and twisted around her because he’s going to save her but not until he can keep her out of ruining his plans, not until he can ruin the world with everyone inside and it would be then—and perhaps only then—that he would allow her to live in a world where nothing is real and where fiction becomes the only reality she knows.
He is willing to defy destiny, to break her threads and wrap them around his neck until it chokes him into another afterlife and here she is, wasting the days away because she couldn’t finish a bucket list, because she didn’t think that Hanako-kun would have it in him to tell her that he is saving her while condemning her to a world of fakes and nothing more. Yet, he did have it in him, he did wish to keep her alive for so much longer, to keep her from collapsing at the same horrors he had faced—only 15, Nene wondered how she would fare as a ghost, how Hanako-kun would feel to see her transparent and floating through walls and people alike.
Yashiro Nene never thought he had it in him to do it again.
The fake world had been enough, her speech about living for more than ninety years had been a fluke of her fear of death, the desire to get married was something she had since childhood and yet she didn’t think he could do it again, she didn’t think he could take the world apart and ignore her pleas until it’s too late. She didn’t think that he would defy the very laws kept in place simply for her own selfish desires and she never had once thought that it would be so heartbreakingly awful to see him smile again as if he had finally done it at the cost of everyone and anyone to ever cross his way. Despair can make you do such irrational things, Supernaturals were so easily the type to give up and let whatever they were chasing run its course that in a world of the dead and the living, only balanced together by the boundaries in-between, Hanako-kun was an anomaly of a supernatural ghost—a paradox of sorts that did anything out of desperation, offering a humane situation of always finding a way, of never giving up even when the obstacles become ten times harder.
He would tear the world apart over and over if he had to, remake the moon and the stars and turn back time if he could. Anything for a human girl that had summoned him out of a selfish wish of desperation, anything for Yashiro Nene; his faithful Kannagi assistant. The undertone to such desperation could have been sweet had it not been for the world reminding them that actions always had consequences and Hanako-kun was chipping away at the seams, telling her that they would all disappear soon, that her wish had been granted because he had tried so hard, he had let No.6 govern the most horrific moment in supernatural history, he had let Aoi die in her stead just so she could live another day and the memory of cold steel bars and crumpling Yorishiro paper between her fingers burns at the forefront of her mind.
“Hanako-kun….” And his name wobbled and broke off when it came out of her mouth, just like he was as she gripped onto his old uniform shirt, as he told her that Aoi had sacrificed herself in your stead and her mind whirls with the way he smiles at her, so broken down with big empty eyes, cupping her face because he liked her more than Aoi, because he had meddled with fate far too much and now they were both paying the price. Crumpled up yorishiros and cold steel bars, the knowledge of death looming around the corner, nothing could have prepared her for the world to end right underneath her feet and shouldn’t she be thinking of the bucket list tucked away under her clothes? Of the bullet points she had listed out to do before her untimely death had caught up to her?
Shouldn’t she be relieved she wouldn’t have to hide a knife under her pillow? That she wouldn’t have to check to see if her mom had any ill intentions towards her? That she could walk to school and back without checking behind her every two seconds? Shouldn’t she be relieved that she wouldn’t have to be isolated within her home forevermore? But Aoi was gone, Aoi was dead, how could she feel such comfort, how could she let herself feel happiness when it had to be ripped away from someone else’s? When Hanako-kun was slowly disappearing before her very eyes and all she could do was muster up the courage to raise her hand and clutch at his gakuran with sobs wracking her small frame.
Small shards of glass flaked off into the air, gently falling as she hunched over. Aoi was never supposed to be involved, Aoi was never supposed to be involved and yet— “Don’t go,” her whisper sounds too broken to be anything more than sobs, “ please don’t go, Hanako-kun…!” And yet, he never listens to her, he never thinks of how she would feel. He does and he does and he does until he’s caught red handed and too late, only there to have her shout at him just how wrong, just how vile everything he had done to keep her safe truly was.
(She had fun with him once, cleaning the bathrooms as he played cards with the Mokke, and yet, she can’t remember a single time she’s ever smiled at him anymore)
Nothing Nene could do would ever change how fate had dealt her a new hand and all the cards had taken her down. Nothing could fix the way Hanako-kun’s arms wrapped around her still flaking off into the air, his hat slipping off his head to reveal a mess of brown underneath and Nene feels so cold when he brokenly whispers into her ear—like some sort of final goodbye.
“I…..wanted to try living with you too, Yashiro.”
It hurts to hear him speak, it hurts to feel the way he holds her tightly as if he knows this is the final day he’ll ever spend with her and Nene lets her head fall, wraps her arms just as tight around him as the moon shines from above and it all feels like some sort of fever dream she’s waiting to wake up from with Hanako-kun and Kou hovering over her asking if she’s alright, with Hanako-kun dumping water on her until scales grow on her arms and legs and face, scolding her for “sleeping on the job”. She waits and she waits and she waits but she never wakes up and instead, curls up on the floor with shards of glass at her feet, feeling as if her heart had been cleanly sliced in two.
“ Hanako-kun….”