Work Text:
Reimu lifted her head at the quiet creak of the low iron gate leading to the graveyard. She floated above her gravestone, tattered sleeves swaying in an otherworldly wind. "You're a strange one, aren't you? Normal people wouldn’t continue to seek out a ghost for company."
The young man walking towards her smiled wryly. “Well, I can’t deny that,” he said, soft lilting voice tinged with self-deprecation and a loneliness that Reimu understood. Odd as this visitor was, it had been a very long time since anyone had talked to her.
The silver-haired man sat down by her gravestone, smiling up at her with an expression that had no business being so charming. With a little huff, she floated down to sit next to him, curling up with her legs drawn up to her torso. As a gentle breeze rippled softly through half-bloomed forget-me-nots, Reimu whispered a wistful request.
“Tell me about them again? Those friends we have in the future.”
When Ike woke up in that familiar-unfamiliar cluttered room with its years and years of old manuscripts piled high, his first thought was that he was dreaming of the past. That was something that had happened often in the first year after he had been tossed into the future. Those dreams had come less and less as he grew comfortable with his new life, until he couldn't remember the last time he had dreamt of these long-gone days anymore. Leaning his head back onto his folded arms on the table, he breathed in the nostalgic scent of old paper and ink, and dozed back off.
But when he woke again, he was still in that too-quiet, too-dark room (no thrum of a computer from the desk, no street lights slanting past drawn curtains). A sense of unease sank in then. It was in the pitch dark of a new moon night that he fumbled through the room, knocking over stacks of papers as he bumped into furniture placements that had long since become unfamiliar. He somehow managed to light an oil lamp with shaking hands, and looked around him with bleak eyes. The messy room looked foreign and forbidding in the dull flickering flame. A layer of dust had settled over everything in that small apartment, over empty chairs and his paper-laden desk. What had once been hoped for was now a nightmare - now that home was no longer this place but instead a warm future with friends and found family. But he had been thrown back here, with as little autonomy and explanation as the first time. And just like last time, he could think of no way back.
In the days that followed, Ike poured words onto pages, desperate not to let the memories fade (each moment wishing to wake up from this cruel dream). He wrote deep into the night with the company of oil lamps instead of electric lights, in the quiet darkness where no cars revved their engines and few people ventured out on the unlit streets. Yet as he wrote, his mind also played tricks on him. Could it all have been a dream, fueled by sleepless nights and a novelist’s imagination? But Ike didn’t think he could make up all of that. Time travel to the future, with its bustling cities and bright lights, with its lightning fast information and stunning heights of technology. And the people, so vivid and real in his mind’s eye - a demon with a warm heart, a sorcerer with cheerful jokes, a detective with witty humor; and a kind man with a sunshine smile, his name spoken with bright love.
In a single moment, the quiet of the room suddenly became too difficult to bear. Feeling as if his manuscripts, normally so dear, were instead closing in on him and threatening to suffocate him, Ike almost sprinted out the door. He had no destination, knowing only that he needed to get out. He walked blindly, only coming back to himself when a crow nearby startled him with a loud caw. Looking around, he found that the sun had shifted to a low angle in the sky and he had no idea where he was. A graveyard sat to his left, the bright blue carpet of forget-me-nots that spread out from one of the graves drawing his attention. How beautiful, he thought, in the moment before he noticed the ghost sitting atop the headstone.
The long-missed sight of a familiar face spurred him to approach her long before logic kicked in again to slow his footsteps. This was not the Reimu he knew, but instead the Reimu of this time. Could he withstand the torture of seeing no recognition in familiar eyes? For a long moment, he thought about leaving before she could notice him. But as he silently watched the ghostly girl sitting among forget-me-nots, he was struck by the thought that she looked so sad.
"Hello, Reimu-senpai," he called out.
One lonely soul to another.
"Tell me again about the friends we make in the future?" Especially those three girls who Reimu had dreamt about once upon a time, whose faces were eternally covered by a dark unforgiving haze that couldn't be pierced.
Again and again, enough that they both were able to believe it was true, Ike told her about a far-off time where both of them were happy.
(art by me, still learning!)