Chapter Text
With bloodshot eyes and dry, chapped lips twisted into a bitter frown, he lifted a hand. Dropped it. Clenched his fist. Released it. Nothing.
Shintaro lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Empty. There was absolutely no purpose. His limbs felt like lead, and he could scarcely squint his face was so numb. In the shadows of his fluttering lashes, he didn't dare start to dream. It was all so foreign. So empty.
Usually his thoughts were whirring - a complex machine that never stopped working - a complexity beyond the average human mind that was never to be the same again. Now it was still. Empty, it was all empty.
His computer let out an odd wheeze. He ignored it.
It had only been a day since he found out. A day since that confrontation. A day before he realised that the pretty summer smile he was graced with had hidden the deepest secrets, and her kind heart had embraced so much pain that wasn't hers to hold.
A day when he finally understood that the one who wants to disappear more than anyone else was her.
A day when he realised those gentle eyes had shimmered with tears, but that lonely mouth didn't dare betray her thoughts to anyone.
A day could be so long, yet another day could be so short. Another person could mean so little, yet so much. Distortion. Stop it. Something within him told him to stop.
Stop tainting an imperfect girl with such frivolous beliefs.
Stop tainting an imperfect girl with perfection.
"Ayano," he mouthed breathlessly, the first word to escape his lips for hours.
It did nothing to quell the pain. Or lack thereof, because there was no pain. Only emptiness. Only the feeling of the dull, boring lifestyle she had lit up with her own light returning to him - the life he regretted becoming reality once more.
"Ayano, Ayano, Ayano."
It had only been a day.
Yet he was already starting to forget.
Her smile, her voice, her laugh. It was all fading into this arrangement of sounds and images but none of them seemed complete. None of them worked.
She was leaving him behind.
Ayano... did he ever really know who Ayano was?
A girl with a smile that reminded him of happy, summer days?
That was disgusting.
But even so...
More than anything, he wanted to go back in time; to before the day she was taken away.
Even just one more time.