Chapter Text
Dying was a terrifying concept. Not just for you. Many people fear it, even young children. That’s why when a car managed to run you over when the pedestrian light was on, you were surprised at the feeling of tranquility settling in. Blinding lights and scattered shouts were heard all around you, enveloping your last moments alive. You should have felt panic, fear, or even a rush to stay alive, but you didn’t. Instead, you focused on the lights above you, three bright lights that changed colors depending on the next person who tried to move your body around to get a reaction out of you.
They danced around in your vision, moving along to the melody of the song playing in your earbuds. You were on your way to college that morning - chemistry class. The night prior was full of last-minute studying for today’s test, the most difficult one of the semester as described by the professor. Maybe it was for the better that you got run over. Even if you managed to survive then you could at least look forward to a hefty check in the mail, but it wasn't possible. Your mother always complained about how you would get nowhere in life without her. Preaching up and down to any friend that gave her the chance that without her, she wouldn't be able to function. Sometimes she would sit at the edge of your bed and let her imagination run wild as the rest of your siblings slept away their worries.
“The day that I die is the day that you will be forced to grow up. At your age, I already left my family, moved out of the country, and made something out of myself. I’m proud that you are studying, proud that you are my daughter. But I am so tired of having to see you every single day rotting away in this house doing the same boring routine.”
You were only eighteen, in your first year of college. Maybe it was good for you to die, let go of every trouble and piece of suffering that you’d held onto for years throughout childhood and now into your small chapter of adulthood. The only thing you could regret at this moment was not being able to live life to the fullest for the few years you were granted. Mostly all of those years were spent studying and going home to help your mother. You had never gone to one party, never been on a date, never tried to get a significant other, never lived. The lights stopped dancing. The people stopped trying to move you. You are officially dead.
In that world at least.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
You would have imagined death to be much more dark. Well… not dark as in the morbidity of the concept itself but instead the sense of being. You were dead, but it didn’t feel like you were. There was no logical explanation for how you would be able to survive the crash at the severity your injuries were and yet when you opened your mouth once again oxygen flooded into your lungs. The first thing that you noticed once you managed to pry your eyes open was the fact that you were laying on a bed rather than the cold pavement of where your body landed. The bed was comfortable, far too comfortable. It was to the point where it truly made you feel like this was a dream.
Was this the place that people called heaven? To you, it looked far too similar to a teenage girl’s bedroom. Books laid perfectly on a bookshelf in the far right corner. Far where you laid, picture frames were visible but their pictures were blurred out. The comforter you laid on was a light shade of purple with tiny embroidered daisies decorating its surface. The desk that was positioned to the left of the bed held a backpack along with a thin piece of paper next to it.
Managing to push yourself up in your confused state, you picked up the paper to be able to see what it read. Perhaps it could provide you the smallest amount of reassurance in making sure you were safe or that maybe this was a dream after all. That hope of reality shattered the moment the words processed in your mind: Congratulations on graduating! To the student Suzuki (y/n). Seeing your actual first name should have been comforting but the name that laid before it threw you for a loop. It got even more concerning once you realized that the entire paper was written in Japanese (you knew the basics of hiragana but kanji was unknown territory for you before) and yet you had understood everything.
You doubt getting hit by a car will make you magically fluent in a foreign language so this being a dream wasn’t out of the question. Running a hand through your hair, it was abruptly stopped by a hair tie being in the way. Looking into the mirror resting on the bench you made out your familiar appearance with a few drastic changes; first was the fact that you looked to be a different ethnicity from before (Japanese you could guess), second was the fact that you were wearing the stereotypical school girl outfit.
Slipping out of the room, you surveyed the rest of the house that you had woken up in. There didn’t seem to be anybody else present from the lack of noise but there were signs of life in every room you had explored. There were two other rooms separate from the one you were in; one that was a bedroom with a king-sized bed and the other one that was more of a study rather than a room. Two bathrooms were present, one connecting to the other bedroom and the other in the hall. If you had to guess, the master bedroom had to be the room of the parents - or well your parents for now - but there was no other blatant presence other than their belongings. Nothing gave you a clue as to what their names were or what kinds of people they were but knowing that you weren’t entirely alone here made you the tiniest bit calmer.
A small yellow post-it note caught your attention from around the entrance of the house. It was a typical small one that your previous self used many times to write notes in the textbooks when studying. This one had tiny hearts decorating the corners, all hand drawn, and the tiniest scribble of your first name along with the words: Sorry we won’t make it to your graduation but your dad and I will make it up to you somehow! Love, mom. So far they weren’t having the best first impression but if these are the parents that your delusional self dreamt up, it was all you could settle with.
After hours of rummaging through the various rooms without making a huge mess all you were able to turn up with was a phone and notebooks full of notes from school. The time on the phone still read to be around midday on a Sunday so there was no school to worry about missing. Other than that, there were no notifications, no people other than your parents in the contacts or signs of your dream life on the phone. Sadly, that was pretty much reflective of your true life so perhaps there was only so much your dying consciousness could make up.
Weighing the options you had, you finalized your thinking by settling into exploring the new dream world you had made for yourself. The first thing that welcomed you on the other side was the bright sun nearly blinding your naive face. You stumbled a bit at the steps that followed, pulling at your skirt as a form of comfort as you passed the gate separating the yard and the street. The front nameplate read the same last name the graduation paper had written, so it was the seal to your new name. For some reason this place was far too similar to that of the actual Japan.
You were interested in manga and anime as much as a normal fan would be, indulging in the exploration of the culture of the country they originated from but never to the point where you would dream of an entire new life set there. Walking the road straight, mostly following the other people that would pass by in a rush you eventually landed in a heavy shopping district. All the alarms in your mind rang into your conclusion of this city being a representation of Shibuya due to the famous crossroad laying out in front of you. But why were you even dreaming of such a place?
People pushed past you, at some point dragging you into the groups they had formed in order to pass the crossing when the opportunity showed itself. Some women openly glared at you and your stumbling while some men got far too close for your own comfort making you push away from the group. You wandered for what seemed an hour before you finally grew tired and sat at a table in an arcade. The worker, which you understood with no problem, tried to get you to buy tokens a couple of times but eventually gave up once he realized you were here to just sit down.
Eventually that also proved to be boring, and instead you walked through the various lanes of the arcade as the lights flashed around you. You didn’t bring any money with you so playing any of the games was out of the question so watching others play turned into your new form of entertainment. First you observed a group of girls who acted drunk off their asses, stumbling and holding onto the various pieces of furniture as they playfully argued over the game they were playing. They eventually left once another much sober friend came over and dragged the poor girls away and into a car. It was getting closer to six at night when you wanted to return home but a group of boys around your age soon caught your attention instead.
They were shouting at each other the entire way up to the games near where you stood, playfully pushing the shortest of the three in the midst of their argument. Their actions weren’t what caught your attention but rather the strange sense of familiarity they brought to you once you saw them. The middle one was by farthest the most familiar. His shaggy hair covered most of his face but for some reason your mind was screaming at you for not recognizing him straight off the bat, so he had to be important.
Your staring grew stronger and more apparent after a few minutes of it continuing making the tallest of the three notice you first. In your mind, you were only staring at them (mostly at the middle one) but in the eyes of the tallest your stare looked like more of a glare. Usually only thugs would dare look at him and his friends in such a way due to his history with them so once he fully analyzed who it was glaring at them, he grew confused. It wasn’t every day some high school girl would even look their way so for one of them to openly glare at them, it meant that Chota had done some creepy shit and got caught.
Karube pushed the shoulders of his neighboring friends to catch their attention and transfer it over to where you stood. Chota was the first to turn around and see you, Arisu was still too focused on his game to bother. Chota quickly recognized you as a former classmate from another class but in the same year to have graduated that morning with him and Arisu. You were known for being quiet, often donning the nickname of shadow due to how much you blended into the background. While you weren’t bullied, he never saw you sitting with anybody during lunch or leaving school with friends either. Suzuki (y/n): the shadow recluse.
“Why the fuck is that girl glaring at us? What did you do?” Karube whispered into Chota’s ear.
“Why would I know? I never spoke to her despite going to school with her for like forever. Ask Arisu man,” Chota whispered back secretly running through all of his memories of the past few months to relocate anything that could clue him into his anger.
Karube pushed against Arisu’s shoulder again, effectively making him loose at his game, but finally gaining his full attention. He turned around to face his friend in anger only for it to quickly dissipate into concern once he saw their expressions. In the time that they had all managed to look in your direction rather than only Karube noticing you, your glare had turned into a crying mess of evading eyes.
You were so utterly fucked. If this was a dream to settle your mind, there was no way in hell you were happy. If anything this was turning into a nightmare in the span of a few minutes. That was Arisu and his friends standing in front of you. Characters that existed in your world but through the drawings of a manga and the live action reenactment that had the second season just aired two weeks before. You would prefer your painful and pitiful car accident death rather than being stranded in this story.
Arisu quickly recognized you as well but his confusion was set aside by concern over your crying form. Similar to Chota, he had never spoken to you either but a crying girl was enough to make him take action.
“Suzuki? Are you okay?” he questioned as he slowly walked up to you. His shaggy hair was pushed back by his hands letting his face be fully visible to your blurry vision. The manga had depicted Arisu as a young recent graduate while the show made him out to be an adult. With his current appearance it was clear that so far the manga would be the most accurate to base his age at, leading it to rest around yours as well. He repeated your last name again in concern when you provided no response.
“Arisu right?” you asked, a hiccup following soon after as you tried to gain control over your emotions.
A small blush decorated Arisu’s cheeks as you spoke his first name in such familiarity. It was almost as if you knew him… like knew him. Chota and Karube picked up on it as well, both shoving each other’s shoulders as if questioning what the other knew about the relationship you both held. Arisu provided you with a small nod when we got over his initial surprise and went back to focusing on your state of being.
Realizing your mistake at the sight of their reactions, you raised your school shirt to wipe off the tears and clear up your face. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to cross your boundary. Would you… would you mind telling me where we are? I hit my head really hard, and it's hard to remember.”
“No, no. You’re fine, it just surprised me. We are in Tokyo, near the Shibuya station. We graduated this morning. Remember?” Arisu informed and questioned at the same time. “Should we take you to the hospital Suzuki?”
“No. I’ll just go home, I don’t live far. My mom will be worried if I don’t get there soon,” you partially lied. While your crying had stopped the feeling of misery had only started to fester deeper into your soul, slowly inching to rip you from the inside out. You moved to push past them, parting them through the middle as they backed away. You had almost made it fully past the entrance of the arcade, where the worker was tiredly staring at your group but otherwise ignoring the situation before Karube roughly grabbed onto your arm.
“We’ll walk you home,” he stated while pulling on your arm so that you stood in between him and the rushing Arisu. You were quick to reject his actions, but he shushed you with one strong side glare. “While I don’t know you, I am not that much of an asshole to let a girl walk home alone at this time. Especially if she said that she hit her head hard. Let us make sure you get home safely.”
Karube started walking while still holding onto your arm to make sure that you wouldn’t separate from their sides if you had the chance. Chota was following closely from behind, still trying to make sense of the situation but otherwise happy that he was in the presence of a girl. Perhaps this was good luck finally visiting him in congratulations on his graduation.
The walk home was far more embarrassing than what you would have imagined it to be. Karube was determined to stand as a bodyguard for you at the moment while Arisu kept on huffing and holding back his words. It was apparent he wanted to say something but held himself back from talking for some reason. Fear was a large factor in many social situations, so it was probably the thing that was holding him back, similar to you.
Once you reach the familiar gate and nameplate that signifies the presence of your house, you let yourself fully relax while still in Karube’s tight hold. When he finally noticed that you stopped, he peered around his surroundings and noticed that they had made it to the desired destination. He let go of your arm and carelessly patted your back before shoving Arisu forward.
Arisu stumbled to catch himself at the loss of his previous balance but finally got a hold of his body weight and was left staring at you like an idiot. He started doing the familiar gesture that he repeated throughout the walk there, slowly opening and then quickly shutting his mouth and passing his phone from one hand to the other. Finally, he decided that words were not his strong suit in this situation and instead held out his phone to you. Gently taking it into your hands you stared at the screen before realizing that it was open to make a new contact.
Shifting the phone in one hand, you used the other to take out your own and started searching for your number. Pushing in the numbers one by one as your gaze peered between both of the phones to secret start memorizing your new number. You finally finished setting up the new contact as Karube had started growing restless and the sound of an opening door interrupted the silent tension.
A woman, who you assumed to be your mother, stood at the opening of the door with her mouth open as if to call out to you before realizing that there were others with you. Shoving the phone back into Arisu’s hand, you gave them a full bow and ushered out a thanks for their help before shuffling back to run up the steps to your house. Reaching the side of your mother, you turned back to face them and bow once more before going inside and slamming the door shut behind you.
Your mother wiggled her eyebrows at your sweating form before letting out a laugh and calling out to another person in your house. She disappeared around the corner to the hallway, blabbing about what she had just witnessed to perhaps your father and left you alone at the doorway. Taking off your shoes and pushing them to sit with the others at the entrance, you sat on the small bench near the coat rack and sunk into yourself.
Reality had finally let itself sink into your body. This was not a dream. You were somehow in the same world that Alice in Borderland had taken place in, and you were so fucked if it was happening anytime soon. Sure, you managed to binge-watch the entire new season the night it aired, but you had never once touched the manga despite knowing there were drastic changes made throughout not only the characters but the plot lines. Maybe you could evade the entire situation but seeing as you had met the main cast in just the first day, the universe was going to push you into the event despite your best wishes.
Oh, how you wished to just be dead right now.