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There were no mirrors in Shinjuku.
There had been, once. Before the city was sucked in on itself, the sky merging with the concrete to warp the buildings into a massive sinkhole that took the lives of everyone, UG and RG alike, with it. Back when Shinjuku was Shinjuku, and not a distorted void wiped not only from the map but also the memories of those still living, there were mirrors there.
But not anymore. There were no mirrors in Shinjuku anymore. There hadn’t been for three years.
His eyes closed and his grip on the sink in the Hachiko Café bathroom so tight his fingers ached, Neku took a deep breath. In through his nose, until his chest hurt with the strain of it—and then out through his mouth, until his shoulders sagged from the loss. Three years. He had been trapped for three years. He hadn’t seen himself in three years, because there were no mirrors in Shinjuku. But here in Shibuya—
Neku opened his eyes, and squeezed the porcelain as he fought the urge to close them again.
Someone—him, his reflection, somehow—stared back at him from the mirror above the sink. His hair was still orange, but it was longer, with tangles he wasn’t able to comb through no matter how hard he tried and frayed, dead ends from improper care. His eyes were still blue, but they were . . . different? They weren’t, they couldn’t have been, but they were. They were different in a way he couldn’t name. He narrowed them, glaring at the blue irises reflected back at him. Maybe it was the dark rings etched into them from three years of haunted sleep. Maybe it was the stress lines around the corners. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. All he knew was that those weren’t his eyes, though they were.
His cheekbones were sharper. Neku traced his fingers along his right cheek, up across the bone under his eye. No, that wasn’t it. Bones couldn’t change. It was that his face was thinner. Three years of growth had worn away the remnants of baby fat to make his facial features sharper, more defined. His jaw, too, was—
“Hey, Phones!” Beat’s voice was accompanied by two heavy thuds on the bathroom door, and Neku jumped so badly it felt like his feet left the floor for a second. “You aight in there?”
“Yeah,” Neku croaked, and he cleared his throat to make his voice stronger. “I’ll be out in a sec.”
“Cool, jus’ checkin’.”
Neku waited until Beat’s footsteps faded and his own heartrate slowed before he turned back to the mirror. It was him. He was staring back at himself. But it didn’t look like him, or at least . . . it did, but it didn’t. It was like he was staring in a funhouse mirror, or like someone had used PictoShop to try to make him look older than he was. But they hadn’t, and he wasn’t—this was how old he was. He was eighteen now. He might even be nineteen soon, depending on what month it was. He hadn’t looked at a calendar since he’d made it back to Shibuya, and his stomach bottomed out as he realized he didn’t want to look at the one on his phone.
Three years. Three years. He scrunched his eyes shut and put his head in his hands, his elbows braced on the sink. He knew it, had known it, but there was a difference between knowing something in his head and feeling it with his whole chest. The problem was that time didn’t pass in Shinjuku, or at least not in any way that mattered. Mentally, time had passed for him there; he was painfully aware of every second he was trapped in the void, unable to really sleep for the wails of the dead, unable to make any real sense of the chaos around him, unable to provide any answers for the questions Coco incessantly asked about what could have caused the Inversion in the first place. There had been no way for him to know exactly how much time was passing there, because there had been no sun or moon to keep track, but learning that it had been three years wasn’t surprising. If anything, it sounded about right.
But while time had passed for him mentally, it hadn’t physically—at least, not until he got back to Shibuya and time snapped its collar around his throat. The clothes he died in fit him the entire time he was trapped in the void, but the second his feet touched ground in front of Hachiko his shoes squeezed his feet so tightly he hit the concrete face first, and his shirt was so small he felt his ribs cracking. Three years of growth had decompressed in a nanosecond. In Shinjuku, he had been eighteen in a fifteen-year-old body. In Shibuya, his body matched his mind. And while that sounded good on paper, and was good in a way, he wasn’t—he wasn’t used to being this tall. He couldn’t reconcile who he knew himself to be with the version of himself he saw in the mirror. His teeth fit differently in his mouth now, and his hands were bigger, making him clumsier with his phone. Hunched over the sink like he was—and that was just it, he had to bend down so much farther just to—
Neku bolted upright as an impatient fist rapped against the bathroom door, his heart hammering along with the fast, unyielding knocks. He clenched his fist on the edge of the sink, every muscle in his body rigid, and before the person on the other side could say anything, he snapped, “I’ll be out in a minute!”
The knocking ceased, and the person on the other side of the door huffed. “Jeez, take it down a notch. And hurry it up, would you? We don’t exactly have all day out here.”
The tension drained from Neku’s body as quickly as it had flooded him as Shoka’s soft footsteps took her away from the door. That . . . wasn’t great. He shouldn’t have yelled. He should have at least given her the chance to say something before he snapped. Not that he’d meant to—it’s not like he wanted to be so jumpy—but that didn’t change anything. Yelling and hurt feelings didn’t exactly make for great teamwork. He’d have to apologize to Shoka next time he got a chance.
Neku sighed and turned back to the mirror, only for another shock to jolt through him at the sight of spider-cracked glass. It wasn’t shattered, not yet, but sharp cracks spiked haphazardly from top to bottom, a few touching the upper corners. Instinctively, Neku looked at his hands, but they were free from any cuts or bruises. There wasn’t a speck of blood on his skin, the sink, or the mirror. He hadn’t touched it—or at least . . . when the knock on the door had startled him, and he felt that rush of alarm and anger congealed into one . . .
Neku grimaced, and gingerly brushed a finger along one of the cracks he’d made with his mind. Well, that was new. And it was a whole new reason to try to keep his temper in check, too.
Try.
He took another deep breath—in through his nose until his chest hurt, out through his mouth until his shoulders sagged. He didn’t recognize his reflection anymore. That was okay. He’d get used to it over time. He didn’t have any clothes that fit him anymore aside from the ones on his back, which he’d dug out of a suspiciously convenient cardboard box tucked behind Hachiko. That was okay, too. He could buy new ones. Shibuya was set to invert and implode on itself and he had no idea why, or how to stop it, despite spending three years trapped in Shinjuku ostensibly to figure out why Inversions happened and how to stop them, and despite everyone calling him a “living legend” who was supposed to have all the expertise and power necessary to fix the problem. That was . . . not great, but he wasn’t alone. He had Beat, who was there with him at the end last time. And there were the new Players, too—Rindo, Nagi, Fret, and Shoka. Between the six of them, they could figure it out. They had to. They just had to take it one moment at a time.
Enjoy every moment with all ya got.
Neku smiled wryly as the quote jumped in his head, unbidden. “There’s not a whole lot to enjoy here, Mr H.”
No—no. That wasn’t true. He couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t keep going if he thought like that. He had Beat. After three years in isolation with no one but Coco, he had one of his best friends by his side, someone who always had his back and would never let him down.
(Someone who was looking to him to fix Shibuya, just like before.)
He was going to get to see Shiki again soon, and god, how he missed her. Three years had passed but he still remembered everything about her: the sound of her laugh, even as she tried to hide it with her hand; the way her brown eyes shined behind her glasses; the way she bit her lip when she smiled. He wanted to kick himself for not realizing that Gatto Nero was her brand sooner when Mr Mew was the brand’s mascot, but any irritation he felt toward himself was mitigated by how goddamn proud he was of her. She hadn’t given up, just like she’d promised. She hadn’t gone back to the old Shiki. She made her dreams come true and had everything she deserved, and soon he’d get to tell her just how proud he was of her in person.
(Of course, she’d probably moved on. He was gone for three years, and it wasn’t like they’d known each other for very long. It would be weirder if she’d waited.)
Neku had been stuck in the void for three years, but the rest of the world wasn’t. Three years in the void meant that there was new music for him to listen to—so much new music that he could probably spend days, if not weeks straight trying to catch up on all of it.
(Not that there was time to, with everything going on. And if he failed to fix it, there never would be.)
It wasn’t just music. There was new art, too. He didn’t recognize most of the street art around Shibuya now, and he hadn’t yet had a chance to appreciate it the way it deserved, but that just gave him—
(—a chance to see how CAT’s work had been wiped clear, how even his mural in Udagawa was partially covered with tags by other artists, proving that he really was gone—)
“Stop, shut up!”
Neku struck the wall with his fist as two more cracks splintered the mirror, a few shards finally breaking free to litter the sink by the tap. Neku stared at them, his breaths coming out uneven, ragged, his whole body shaking as he slowly lowered his arm to his side. This was pathetic. This was stupid. He was fighting his own brain, arguing with his own thoughts. And the worst part was that he couldn’t even keep it contained anymore, if the mirror was anything to go by. All that time fighting Noise in Shinjuku made his ESP so powerful he could now use it without thinking—without intending, pins or no pins. If he wasn’t careful, he could hurt someone—really hurt them, all in the space of a second, and it could be too late before he realized. He didn’t think he could live with himself if he did that, but he also didn’t know how he was supposed to keep his power in control when he wasn’t aware he was losing his grip until after the damage was done.
Enjoy every moment . . . Neku wanted to, he really did. But all things considered, he had to say it, if only here in this bathroom where no one could hear him:
“This fucking sucks.”
Not for the first time since returning to Shibuya and discovering he finally had service again, Neku palmed his phone and swiped through his short list of contacts, landing on the one he always called when he needed help the most.
“The number you are attempting to reach has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please hang up and—”
He didn’t need to be told a seventh time.
Mr Hanekoma was gone. Neku didn’t know to where, or why, but he was gone. He had a good reason, Neku was sure of that. Mr H wouldn’t abandon Shibuya without good reason. If he knew what was going on now, and he wasn’t there to help, then there was a reason for it, just like there was a reason why he didn’t contact Neku in Shinjuku for all those years. Neku didn’t know what those reasons were, but he knew they were good ones. They had to be. Mr H had never let him down before, and he wouldn’t now. Not without good reason.
Neku stared at Mr H’s contact entry in his phone, his thumb hovering over the number for a moment longer, before he locked it and shoved it in his pocket. He closed his eyes, and took another deep, steadying breath.
Mr H was gone. Shiki wasn’t in Shibuya. But Beat was here in the UG, and they had a small team to help them fix whatever was threatening to destroy Shibuya this time. And if Neku was lucky, he would get a chance to head down Shibuya River to find Joshua, and make him do his goddamn part to fix things instead of leaving it all on Neku’s shoulders, again. It wasn’t impossible. He could do this. He had to.
Neku cast one final look at his fractured reflection, and then stepped through the door to go rejoin the others.