Chapter Text
The silence of the Empty SEKAI pressed in like fog, heavy and unyielding. Mizuki drifted through it, her footsteps leaving no mark on the groundless floor. The world around her was shapeless, built of shadows and pale light that refused to settle into form, as though even this place hesitated to embrace her.
Her chest ached. The words she had wanted to speak—her words, her truth—still clung to her throat like glass shards. She had rehearsed them, polished them, imagined Ena’s face softening in understanding. Instead, laughter had shattered the moment. Cruel voices, thoughtless and sharp, had stolen everything she had been brave enough to hold.
Now, here, there was no laughter. Only quiet. Quiet, and the unrelenting echo of her own doubts.
Was she foolish to believe Ena would have understood? Foolish to believe she could step forward, even once, without the world pulling her back into thorns?
Mizuki wrapped her arms around herself, nails biting into her sleeves as if to anchor her to something tangible. Once, that soft fabric had been a shield—something she chose, something that reminded her she could make herself beautiful in her own way.
But right now it felt like a costume that no longer belonged to her, a brightness stolen and mocked by voices she had never wanted to hear again.
The memory came unbidden, sharp and merciless.
She had stood on the edge of courage, words trembling in her chest like butterflies desperate to take flight. I’ll tell Ena. I’ll finally tell her. She deserves to hear it from me…
And then—laughter. The cruel, cutting kind. Her secret, tossed like scraps before someone she trusted more than anyone else. She hadn’t even seen Ena’s full expression, only a flicker of widened eyes before her feet carried her away. The Empty SEKAI did not answer. It only swallowed her questions, and for the first time in a long time, Mizuki wondered if even this place could keep her safe.
Now here she was.
Mizuki pressed her nails into her sleeves until the skin beneath stung. The ache in her chest swelled until it threatened to spill over, but there were no tears. She was too tired for tears. Instead, she stood in the vast emptiness, her breath fogging and fading in the still air, waiting for something—anything—to happen.
But the Empty SEKAI was quiet.
No Kanade’s gentle voice, trying to soothe.
No Mafuyu’s hollow calm, warning her not to expect too much.
No Ena’s sharp words that always hid her kindness.
Just silence.
Mizuki sank to the floor—if it could be called a floor—and pulled her knees to her chest. “It’s not fair,” she whispered, voice trembling but thin, as though the SEKAI itself would shatter if she raised it too high.
“I wanted it to be me. I wanted… I wanted to say it in my own way. To see her face, just once, when she really understood.”
Her throat burned. The words she had never been able to say now weighed like stones inside her, dragging her down. She was terrified of Ena’s answer, terrified of rejection—but more than anything, she had wanted the choice to be hers.
A shuddering breath escaped her. She hated how small her voice sounded when she whispered into the void:
“...Ena.”
The name dissipated before it could echo. No answer.
The world around her twitched in response to her thoughts — shadows pooling and stretching until they looked almost like canvases propped against an invisible wall. She blinked, and for an instant, Ena’s drawings stared back at her: sweeping strokes of color, harsh lines of frustration carved across the paper.
She could almost smell the faint tang of paint, almost hear Ena’s annoyed sighs when something didn’t come out the way she wanted.
But the vision collapsed as quickly as it came, melting back into formless gray. Mizuki reached out anyway, her fingers closing around nothing.
"Figures,” she muttered, trying to laugh, but her voice cracked halfway.
She wanted to blame someone. The bullies, for opening their mouths. Herself, for hesitating. The world, for being so cruel to girls like her. But blame didn’t matter now. Nothing she thought could undo what Ena had seen — the rawest part of her, exposed under the ugliest light.
Her chest tightened again. She could picture Ena’s eyes, wide with shock. Mizuki hadn’t stayed long enough to know what came after — surprise, disgust, maybe pity. She had run before she could find out, because knowing might have destroyed her entirely.
Still… her imagination wouldn’t leave her alone.
In her mind, Ena’s eyes softened. She put down her sketchbook, tilted her head, and said something like,
“You should’ve told me earlier, idiot.”
There would’ve been a sigh, maybe even a smile.
Mizuki’s heart twisted at the phantom comfort of it. She wanted it so badly that for a heartbeat, she almost believed it had been real.
But the memory of laughter — shrill, merciless, echoing down the hall — cut the illusion to ribbons.
The Empty SEKAI shifted again. The ground beneath her blurred into ripples, and when she lifted her head, she wasn’t in formless space anymore.
She stood at the rooftop of their school — or rather, a fragmented imitation of it. The railings bled into nothingness, the sky was a flat sheet of color, and the wind carried no sound. But it was familiar enough to sting.
This was where she had thought she’d tell Ena.
Her throat ached as she stood and staggered to the railing.
She rested her hands against the cold metal, leaning forward as if the view below would distract her. But there was no city, no streets, no world — just a yawning blankness stretching forever.
“Ena…” she whispered again.
The rooftop dissolved, unable to hold itself together. She fell back into the gray void, her stomach lurching as if she’d plummeted down a flight of stairs. When her feet touched the ground again, she could hardly breathe.
Why couldn’t she stay away from Ena, even here?
Why did every corner of this place insist on dragging her back to her?
Mizuki rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm. It didn’t matter how far she ran, did it? Ena had always been stitched into her heart like thread she couldn’t cut out, no matter how frayed it became.
For a while, she just stood there. Breathing. Trying to make sense of the ache gnawing at her ribs.
And then, as if in mockery, the Empty SEKAI formed another image.
This time, it was her own bedroom — every detail painstakingly recreated. The shelves cluttered with ribbons and fabric, the soft glow of her vanity mirror, the scattered trinkets she had collected because they made her smile.
It felt wrong to see it here. Too intimate, too fragile, like someone had reached into her chest and laid her bare.
Still, her body moved before her thoughts caught up.
She stepped forward and sank into the chair at the vanity. Her reflection stared back at her — but it wasn’t complete.
The mirror flickered, her image glitching in and out.
Sometimes it was her, smiling with lip gloss perfectly in place.
Sometimes it was a stranger, blurred at the edges, faceless and empty.
Mizuki gripped the edge of the vanity until her knuckles blanched. She wanted to smash the glass, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away.
“Who… am I even looking at?” she whispered.
The reflection didn’t answer.
The silence stretched, broken only by the ragged sound of her breathing.
And somewhere in the distance — so faint she thought she might be imagining it — came a voice.
A voice that sounded like Ena’s.
She knew it wasn't real all too well.
The Empty SEKAI was cruel.
Mizuki knew it, felt it in the way the world seemed to breathe with her pain. Every corner of it reflected what she wanted least to see, as if the space itself was intent on stripping her down to the bone.
Her bedroom shifted again, flickering like a glitching screen. The vanity, the trinkets, the colors she had gathered for herself — all of it dissolved. In their place came bare walls, stripped clean of personality. The bed was neatly made with plain sheets. The shelves were empty. The uniform draped across the chair was pressed, rigid, suffocating.
Her chest seized.
She knew this room. She remembered it too well — middle school, before she had begun clawing out fragments of her real self, before she had words for what she felt. Before she had the courage to take even the smallest steps toward becoming Mizuki.
And the mirror. The mirror was the worst.
It glimmered faintly in the dim light, taller than she remembered, the surface smooth and unbroken. She told herself not to look. She begged herself not to look. But the Empty SEKAI had its hooks in her, and her eyes lifted before she could stop them.
Her reflection stared back.
Not Mizuki. Not the person she had worked so hard to become.
Short hair cropped close, a jawline she hated, a boy’s uniform hanging awkwardly on thin shoulders. That thing in the mirror looked at her with empty eyes.
Her breath stuttered.
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head.
“No, no, no…”
Her nails dug into her sleeves. She wanted to claw her skin off, to rip away the image staring back at her. Every second her eyes remained on it was another knife to her chest.
“That’s not me.” Her voice trembled.
“That’s not me! It never was!”
But the reflection didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just stood there, silent and damning, like a ghost of everything she had tried to bury.
She remembered the laughter of her classmates, the way they had mocked her. She remembered how they had ripped her secret out into the open, how Ena’s eyes had widened, how everything had crumbled in an instant. And now the Empty SEKAI twisted the knife by showing her this — this false, awful shell.
Something inside her snapped.
Her body moved before her mind caught up. She lurched forward, her fist tightening until her knuckles ached.
“STOP LOOKING AT ME!”
she screamed, and drove her hand into the mirror.
The glass exploded beneath the force of her punch. The sound cracked through the Empty SEKAI like a gunshot, shards splintering outward in a storm of glittering knives. For a split second, she saw herself reflected a dozen times — fragments of a face she despised, eyes wide with fury and terror.
And then the pain hit.
White-hot, slicing through her hand as jagged edges tore skin open. Blood rushed out in an instant, dark red against the pale light of the room. It spilled down her wrist, ran over her palm, dripped onto the floor in heavy drops.
Mizuki staggered back, clutching her fist to her chest, but she didn’t care about the sting. She wanted the pain. She welcomed it. At least this pain was hers — real, tangible, something she could name.
Tears blurred her vision. She sank to her knees, glass crunching beneath her. The shards reflected her in broken pieces, each fragment catching a different angle of her face. She looked monstrous, fractured, unrecognizable.
Her sobs ripped out of her, ragged and raw. They scraped her throat until it burned, but she couldn’t stop.
She rocked forward, clutching her bloody hand tighter. Red smeared across her clothes, staining the fabric. The heat of it throbbed with every heartbeat, sharp and insistent, but still she pressed down harder, as if punishing herself for even seeing that reflection.
“I hate it,” she sobbed. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!”
The Empty SEKAI shifted again, its silence ringing louder than any noise. The broken glass at her knees began to flicker, glowing faintly as though absorbing her grief. The shards lifted from the ground, suspended in the air around her, reflecting hundreds of distorted images of her face.
She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head.
“Don’t— don’t show me—”
But the reflections warped into middle school again.
Her scream tore through the void.
The shards fell, scattering like rain around her, some slicing shallow lines across her skin. More blood joined the first, trailing down her arms, seeping into the fabric of her clothes.
Her breath hitched as she collapsed forward, pressing her forehead to the cold floor. Tears spilled freely now, unstoppable. They mixed with the crimson on her hand, streaking the pale surface beneath her.
“Please… I don’t want to be that person again."
The Empty SEKAI didn’t answer. Her sobs filled the silence, echoing back at her until she almost believed someone else was crying with her. Her shoulders shook with every gasp, her body curling in tighter, smaller, as though she could fold herself out of existence.
Blood kept dripping. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound was steady, almost like a clock, marking the minutes she had been unraveling.
She pressed her wounded hand against her chest, desperate to anchor herself in the pain. Her tears blurred everything into colorless streaks. She couldn’t see the shards anymore, couldn’t see the broken mirror. She only saw memories — flashes of herself in that uniform, walking halls where laughter followed her like knives.
And then, Mizuki’s mind betrayed her further: Ena’s face, startled, uncertain, watching her run.
“Ena…” The name tore out of her, hoarse and weak.
“I wanted it to be me… I wanted you to hear it from me…”
Until the words slurred into incomprehensible sobs, and Mizuki collapsed completely, curled up in the shattered remnants of her past.
The room around her blurred into a haze of tears and pain. She barely noticed the mirror anymore, now just shattered pieces scattered around her. But every glimmering shard felt like an accusation, reflecting a hundred wrong versions of her, broken but still taunting.
Her breathing turned ragged. She pressed her palm harder against her chest, the blood soaking through. The warmth of it spread, sticky and heavy, but she held on like it might keep her from unraveling completely.
Ugly, broken sobs that shook her small frame, each one wrung from her chest like the last drops of water from a stone. She cried until her nose ran, until her head pounded, until her entire body was curled into a trembling ball on the floor.
The blood spread in a dark halo beneath her. The tears fell faster, thinner, dripping into the red and vanishing there.
The pencil trembled in Ena’s hand.
She pressed it harder against the sketchbook, dragging another line across the page. Too harsh. Too heavy. It cut through the paper like anger instead of expression. With a hiss of breath, she tore the sheet out, crumpled it into her fist, and tossed it onto the growing pile of discarded drawings littering her floor.
Her room was suffocating.
Pages everywhere — half-finished sketches, ruined attempts, furious scribbles. The mess pressed in on her like a wall of failure. She sat in the center of it, knees drawn up, her sketchbook balanced against them. The theme mocked her from the corner of the page where she had written it earlier, neatly, as if that would help:
Peace Of Mind
Her stomach twisted.
What did that even mean? How was she supposed to draw something she had never felt?
The pencil hovered above the blank page again. She tried to think of something calm, something steady. Maybe the sea, gentle waves lapping at the shore. Maybe a clear sky, unbroken, unchanging. Maybe…
But her hand refused to move. The stillness felt foreign. Her mind refused to settle on anything soft. Everything inside her was jagged edges, raw nerves, like Mizuki’s laughter — that sharp, bright laughter that always covered something heavier — echoing in her head.
Her grip on the pencil tightened until her knuckles turned white.
No matter how hard she tried to push it down, Mizuki’s face came back to her. That look in her eyes when she ran away. The things people had said. The things Ena herself hadn’t said.
Her chest squeezed.
“I can’t—”
The words slipped out before she could stop them, thin and bitter.
She wanted to slam the sketchbook shut. She wanted to throw it against the wall, tear every page to pieces, and scream until her throat gave out. But she didn’t move. She sat frozen, pencil still poised over the paper, trembling like it could feel the storm in her chest.
Peace of Mind.
The words mocked her again.
She let the pencil drop. It clattered against the floor, rolling until it disappeared under a crumpled sheet. Ena pressed her palms over her face, breathing hard. Her skin was damp, her eyes stung, but she refused to let the tears fall. Not yet.
“Why…” she muttered, voice muffled behind her hands.
“Why can’t I just draw it? Why can’t I just… be enough?”
The silence of her room offered no answer. Only the crumpled paper around her, each one a reminder of every failure she couldn’t escape.
The pencil had fallen silent.
Ena didn’t move to pick it up again. She sat there in the middle of her room, knees drawn close, surrounded by failures. Paper crumpled into jagged little mountains. Lines that had gone nowhere, sketches aborted halfway through, smears of graphite across her palms.
The silence pressed in. Not a comforting silence. Not the kind that carried peace. It was the silence of a dam about to burst, the weight of all the things she hadn’t said, hadn’t drawn, hadn’t figured out.
Peace Of Mind.
The words sat in her notebook like a curse.
She let out a laugh — sharp, humorless, cracked.
“Peace of mind. What a joke.”
Her voice sounded too loud, too raw against the quiet. She dropped her head into her hands, rubbing her face until her skin burned, until she thought she could scrub out the bitterness that clung to her chest.
When she opened her eyes again, the room looked the same: messy, suffocating, small. She hated it. She hated herself more for never being able to make it enough.
Her gaze flicked toward the notebook again, the neat words on the corner of the page. She clenched her jaw.
“What do they want from me?”she muttered.
“What am I supposed to draw? Some pretty scenery? A sleeping cat? A smile?”
Her voice cracked on the last word.
She slammed the notebook shut.
It should have felt good — an act of defiance, a small victory. But it didn’t. The sound echoed in the room and left her emptier than before. She dug her nails into her palms, willing herself not to think further. Not to think about the eyes that always seemed to follow her.
Not to think about Mizuki.
But she couldn’t stop.
She saw Mizuki’s face in flashes: that crooked grin, the eyes that always seemed to hold something darker underneath. Mizuki, flippant and dramatic, hiding a weight Ena had only ever caught glimpses of. Mizuki, who had laughed off every cruel word thrown her way but whose hands trembled when she thought no one was watching.
Her stomach twisted.
She hated how much space Mizuki took up in her mind. Hated how just the thought of her made it impossible to focus, impossible to breathe without guilt clawing at her throat.
Because Ena knew — she knew — she hadn’t done enough. She hadn’t said the right things. She hadn’t been there when Mizuki needed her most.
And now… now there was only silence between them.
Ena dragged her hands down her face again, fingers digging into her cheeks.
“I’m such an idiot,” she whispered. “Why couldn’t I just—”
She cut herself off. The words caught like thorns in her throat.
If she admitted it — if she admitted how badly she wanted to reach Mizuki, how badly she hated herself for failing her — then it would become too real. Too raw. And she couldn’t afford that. Not when she couldn’t even fill a blank page.
Her eyes burned.
She pressed the heels of her hands against them, hard, forcing the tears back where they belonged. She wouldn’t cry. Not over this. Not when Mizuki would probably just laugh at her for being so dramatic.
Except… she wouldn’t. Not really.
Ena exhaled shakily. The silence pressed heavier, the mess of papers around her like an accusation. She reached for the pencil again, her hand trembling.
Ena exhaled shakily. The silence pressed heavier, the mess of papers around her like an accusation. She reached for the pencil again, her hand trembling.
The blank page stared back at her, merciless.
She wanted to draw Mizuki’s smile. She wanted to capture it — the real one, the rare one, the one that slipped through when Mizuki forgot to hide. But her hand froze. The pencil tip hovered uselessly above the paper.
Because she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t capture it. She wasn’t good enough.
With a choked sound, she dropped the pencil again. It clattered against the floor, rolling away into the chaos of discarded sketches.
Ena pressed her forehead to her knees, arms curling tight around herself.
"I can’t,” she whispered. “I can't do this.”
The silence swallowed her words whole.
And still, somewhere deep inside, Mizuki’s laughter echoed, bright and brittle, like glass about to break.
Her mind pulled her back — not to school, but to the Empty SEKAI. The place that had brought them together. That pale, dreamlike world where shadows stretched too far and voices carried strangely. She could still see Mizuki there, perched on some floating platform, legs dangling carelessly, tossing out comments that made Kanade sigh and Mafuyu roll her eyes.
Ena had tried to ignore her, at first. Mizuki was loud, flamboyant, impossible to tune out — everything Ena told herself she didn’t have the patience for. But somewhere between the teasing nicknames and the way Mizuki always found something to laugh about, Ena had stopped pretending not to listen.
She remembered one meeting especially. They’d all been exhausted, weighed down by their own storms. The atmosphere had felt like wet paper, ready to tear. And Mizuki, out of nowhere, had started singing under her breath — badly, off-key, ridiculous. Ena had snapped at her, furious that she wasn’t taking things seriously. But Mizuki had only laughed, eyes bright in that eerie SEKAI light, and said,
“Hey, if I don’t mess around, we’ll all drown in the silence, right?”
It had irritated Ena at the time. But later, lying awake, she’d thought about it again. About how, somehow, Mizuki had been right.
Her hands curled tighter in her lap.
Another memory came unbidden — the summer festival. They’d gone together, the whole group. Ena had brought her sketchbook, thinking she might capture the lanterns or the fireworks. But her pencil had frozen when Mizuki had bounded up beside her, face lit with neon, grinning like she belonged in the middle of the crowd and not apart from it.
"Draw me like this, Ena!" Mizuki had demanded, spinning dramatically, sleeves flying, hair catching the light.
Ena had told her to shut up, cheeks burning, but her hand had itched to do exactly that.
She never had. And she regretted it now more than she could say.
Her throat tightened.
She thought of Mizuki’s laughter again, bright and brittle, like glass about to crack. She thought of Mizuki’s back as she walked away from the SEKAI one night, shoulders trembling even as she called over her shoulder,
"Don't miss me too much, okay?"
Ena had scoffed then, pretended it didn’t matter. But she’d felt it. She’d felt the tremor Mizuki was hiding.
She had always felt it. And she had always stayed silent.
Her pencil lay abandoned on the floor. She reached for it again, fingers shaking. This time, she tried to draw Mizuki’s smile. Not the mask — not the dazzling, over-the-top one. The real one. The small one she’d glimpsed only once, when Mizuki had caught her sketching quietly in the corner of SEKAI and had said, soft and almost shy,
"You're incredible, Ena. I mean it."
The smile that came with those words had been fleeting, fragile, achingly genuine.
Ena pressed down, trying to capture it. But the lines came out wrong. Too harsh. Too exaggerated. The page filled with a stranger’s grin, something theatrical and false. Not Mizuki.
With a frustrated cry, Ena shoved the notebook away. It skidded across the floor, smacking against the pile of crumpled sketches.
Her chest hurt. Her vision blurred.
She hated herself. For being weak. For being silent. For not knowing how to reach Mizuki when it mattered.
She buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking, the word peace pounding in her head until it became unbearable. Peace of mind. She didn’t even know what it looked like. She only knew what the opposite felt like — this restless, guilty storm inside her.
And Mizuki was at the center of it. Always Mizuki.
Ena bit her lip hard enough to taste blood, forcing the tears to stay back. But they came anyway, slipping hot down her cheeks, soaking into her palms.
“…Mizuki,” she whispered, the name breaking in her throat.
For once, the silence in her room felt like an answer.
But it wasn’t the one she wanted.
She remembered the look in Mizuki’s eyes. Not angry. Not really. Something worse. Something desperate. Like she wanted to scream that she didn’t belong, that she was a mistake sitting among them, and the only way to prove it was to tear herself away before anyone else did.
Ena’s chest ached at the thought. She had been too shocked then to say what she really wanted. To reach out. To tell Mizuki she was wrong. That she did belong, no matter how much of a pain she could be, no matter how exhausting, no matter how confusing.
Instead, Ena had thrown her own words like daggers. Words she couldn’t take back.
Her hands shook.
Even now, she could hear Mizuki’s footsteps as she turned and left the rooftop, their echoes fading into the night. Ena wanted to tell her she didn’t mean it. That she wasn't leaving.
But she hadn’t.
And the silence that followed had been unbearable.
Ugly sobs escaped Mizuki as she spilled her heart out. Said sorry. It was excruciating for Ena to just watch, to try and say something but...
Her breath came faster now, uneven, ragged. The memory left her gut twisting, her skin crawling with shame.
If I'd just said something... If I'd just —
The thought cut off as she dragged her nails against her palms, hard enough to sting.
She bent forward, pressing her forehead to her knees, her shoulders shaking with the weight of it all.
“…Mizuki,” she whispered, the name trembling out of her like a confession.
Her tears slipped free at last, hot trails down her cheeks. She clutched at her legs, holding herself together because no one else could.
The rooftop. The festival. The SEKAI. The laughter, the masks, the fleeting glimpses of the truth Mizuki never wanted anyone to see. They all tangled together until Ena couldn’t tell where one memory ended and another began. Until Mizuki’s face was the only thing she could see in the storm of her thoughts.
Peace of mind? How could she draw that, when all she knew was this unrest?
The rooftop. The festival. The SEKAI.
They all tangled together, but one memory always pushed itself forward, sharper than the rest. Mizuki’s voice — not the playful lilt, not the exaggerated dramatics, but the real one. The trembling one.
“I hate it,” Mizuki had spat, her mask slipping so far it nearly shattered.
“I hate the kindness you give me. Even if everyone's kind to me, I'll still get hurt.”
At the time, Ena had stared at her, stunned. She didn’t know what to say. Nobody did. And Mizuki hadn’t waited for an answer — she’d turned away, shoulders stiff.
But those words had dug into Ena like claws.
Even now, they echoed in her skull.
I hate it. I hate your kindness.
Her throat closed up. Her hands gripped tighter around her knees, nails biting crescents into her skin.
Was it true? Had every time she’d tried to reach out — every awkward attempt at comfort, every begrudging word of reassurance — only made Mizuki’s pain worse? Was she really that selfish, thinking her clumsy offerings could help, when they had only hurt?
Her mind filled with fragments of that breakdown — Mizuki’s trembling voice insisting she didn’t deserve them, that she was fine being alone, that their kindness was just a spotlight on everything she hated about herself.
Each phrase cut into Ena, sharper than the last.
Because what had Ena done? Nothing. She had stood there, angry and defensive, biting her tongue until it bled. She had let Mizuki’s words wash over her and had answered with silence.
And maybe Mizuki was right.
Maybe Ena’s kindness had been fake, shallow, nothing more than a halfhearted attempt to make herself feel better.
Maybe Mizuki had seen through it all along.
The thought made her stomach twist.
“Damn it…”
Ena’s voice cracked as she pressed her fists against her eyes, hot tears spilling anyway.
“Why… why do you always— why do you say things like that and then…”
Her words dissolved into a sob.
The image of Mizuki’s smile — the real one, small and fleeting — flashed through her mind again, cruel in its contrast. How could the same person who had smiled at her like that turn around and insist she didn’t deserve kindness?
Ena didn’t understand. She hated not understanding. She hated that she hadn’t tried harder to understand when Mizuki was still right there, when she still could.
Now, all she had were these memories, these fragments of words replaying in her mind like a curse.
I hate it. I hate the kindness you give me.
Her chest ached so badly it felt like she couldn’t breathe. She folded in on herself, wishing she could disappear into the dark of her room, into the silence, into anything that wasn’t this relentless storm.
Mizuki sat with her hand cradled in her lap, breath shuddering, eyes fixed on the angry red cuts that marred her skin. The blood had slowed to sluggish beads, drying into dark crust along the lines of her palm. She traced them with her gaze, unable to look away, as if staring long enough would turn them into something else — something less real.
Her stomach twisted. Every mark was proof of what she had done, what she had been driven to.
Yet as the pain dulled to a throb, her mind drifted — not to the mirror, not to the shame, but somewhere else entirely.
She thought of Rui. His voice, animated and strange, always reaching toward some impossible dream. She remembered the way he had dragged her along into projects no one else dared touch. The spark in his eyes when something worked, even if it was weird, even if everyone laughed. Rui never seemed to mind being different. He had never called her weird as an insult. To him, Mizuki had been… fascinating. Needed.
She thought of Ena, too. The rooftop that night, when Mizuki’s voice had cracked with everything she’d kept locked inside, and Ena had just stood there — flustered, awkward, but listening. Mizuki had screamed that she hated their kindness, hated being seen as fragile. But still, Ena hadn’t turned away.
And Kanade, hunched over her laptop, eyes shadowed but voice soft.
Mafuyu’s cool distance, harsh but steady, a presence Mizuki could lean against even when it hurt.
NIIGO had been a mess of broken pieces, but they had fit together somehow.
Warmth ghosted through her chest at the memories.
Festivals with Rui. Laughter with Ena. The quiet, strange comfort of empty SEKAI with Kanade and Mafuyu. Even if she had denied it, even if she had screamed against it, those moments had been real. And for a second — just a second — she let herself feel them.
Her lips trembled into something like a smile, fleeting and fragile.
But then she looked down again.
At her hand. At the jagged lines carved into her skin. At the dried, ugly stain of blood across her wrist.
The warmth collapsed.
The memories felt cruel now, crueler than the mirror itself. Because they had been light, brief and bright — and now she was sitting here in the dark, her chest hollow, her body trembling around wounds she had given herself.
The laughter was gone. The kindness was gone. All that remained was this ache in her hand and the silence pressing in on all sides.
The numbness crept in slowly, starting in her fingers, then spreading through her arms, her chest, her head. She blinked, and the room seemed to blur, colors flattening to dull greys. Even her tears dried against her skin, leaving only tightness around her eyes.
She felt… nothing.
Not the guilt, not the shame, not the warmth of her memories. The cuts throbbed, but even that seemed distant, like it belonged to someone else.
She stared at her hand one more time, at the proof of her collapse, and the emptiness swallowed her whole.
Her thoughts shifted again, grasping for something less jagged.
Kanade.
She pictured her hunched at her desk, typing endlessly, her voice soft but steady when she spoke. There had been a night in Empty SEKAI when Kanade had looked up from her screen, shadows under her eyes, and simply said,
“I’m glad you’re here, Mizuki.”
No fanfare. No hesitation. Just quiet certainty.
Mizuki had frozen, stunned, and for hours after the words had replayed in her head like a song. Even now, the echo of them made her heart ache.
She let out a shaky laugh — if it could be called that. More air than sound, fragile and broken.
Mafuyu’s face came next, pale and unreadable. Mizuki remembered how sharp her words could cut, but also how grounding they had been. Mafuyu had never treated her like glass. Sometimes it hurt, but sometimes… it felt like relief.
These memories swirled together, fragments of warmth stitching briefly against the cold. For a moment she almost felt whole. Almost.
Her gaze dropped to her hand again.
The illusion shattered.
The cuts were still there. The blood was still drying. The pain still pulsed, relentless and undeniable.
And all the warmth of those memories seemed to mock her now, cruel reminders of what she had lost, what she couldn’t hold onto. Rui’s laughter, Ena’s stubborn presence, Kanade’s quiet words — they all felt impossibly far away.
Yet, the memory who might've sparked some warmth inside her turned dead cold.
And for the first time, she wished she could cry again, just to prove she was still alive.
Mizuki didn’t know how long she sat there, staring at her hand until the dried blood turned tacky and flaked against her skin. Time had slipped out of her grasp completely. The room felt weightless, suspended, as though she had been dropped into a world where clocks no longer ticked and nothing could touch her.
Her back ached from curling forward for so long. Her knees had gone numb. She shifted, sluggish and slow, pulling her legs beneath her as if she were moving underwater.
The floor creaked faintly when she pushed herself up, but the sound barely reached her.
Her bed waited only a step away. She lowered herself onto it like someone sinking into unfamiliar territory, her blanket rumpled and uneven, smelling faintly of detergent and the faint sweetness of fabric softener.
She pulled it over herself anyway, cocooning her body until only her face remained exposed to the chill of the air. Her injured hand she tucked carefully against her chest, the fabric brushing against the wound, stinging faintly — but even that felt distant.
She stared at the ceiling.
The shadows there wavered, shifting as the moonlight outside angled through the blinds. She tracked them with glassy eyes, watching them bend into shapes that meant nothing. Shapes that vanished when she blinked.
Her thoughts skittered across Rui’s grin, Ena’s defiance, Kanade’s voice, Mafuyu’s steadiness, but the images were faint now, like memories viewed through frosted glass. She reached for them, but they slipped away.
The blanket pressed close around her. The silence stretched.
Her eyelids sank shut, not from peace, not from comfort, but from exhaustion that reached into her bones.
And in the quiet of her room, with her wounded hand against her chest and her thoughts scattered like broken glass across the floor, Mizuki let herself drift into a restless, dreamless sleep.
The pencil wobbled on its edge before slipping off the desk and clattering onto the floor. Ena didn’t bother to pick it up. Her hand was cramped from clutching it so tightly, but the page in front of her remained a half-finished disaster: a handful of crooked lines, shading that went nowhere, shapes that didn’t mean what she wanted them to.
She leaned back in her chair and exhaled sharply through her nose.
“Peace of mind,”
she repeated bitterly. The theme taunted her, echoing in her skull like a cruel joke. Peace of mind? As if she had any idea what that felt like.
Her room was quiet, suffocatingly so. In the absence of her pencil’s scratch or her father’s footsteps outside, silence pressed against her ears until it rang.
And inevitably, into that silence slipped a face.
Pink hair, uneven bangs, eyes that carried both fire and fragility.
Mizuki.
Ena’s chest tightened. She tried to shove the image away, but it clung stubbornly. It always did.
She thought of Mizuki’s laugh, bright and ridiculous, always a little too loud during their calls. She thought of the teasing — insufferable, constant, the way Mizuki had a gift for finding the exact words that would make Ena snap.
But she thought, too, of the quiet way Mizuki sometimes listened, her gaze steady, as if she were truly seeing Ena in a way few others did.
Ena pressed her lips together until they hurt.
The rooftop returned to her mind uninvited. Mizuki’s voice, raw and cracking, throwing words like daggers:
I hate it. I hate your kindness. It's not good to be together.
Ena had clenched her fists so hard her nails left marks in her palms. She had wanted to shout back, to tell Mizuki not to be so ungrateful, to stop lashing out at people who were only trying to help. To maybe...even tell her that she would never leave. Would never change so drastically.
But she hadn’t. She couldn’t.
Because behind the venom in Mizuki’s words had been something fragile, something terrified. Ena had seen it. And instead of storming off like she had half a mind to, she had stayed.
Now, remembering, Ena rubbed her arms as though she could warm herself against the chill that memory left behind.
Why was it always Mizuki? Why did every thought, every attempt at peace, circle back to her, like the pull of some inevitable orbit?
She dropped her forehead onto her desk with a soft thud. The wood was cool against her skin, grounding, though not enough to quiet the storm in her chest.
"I love you." she admitted quietly.
Her stomach lurched violently, like she’d stepped too close to the edge of a cliff and the ground had tilted beneath her feet. She lifted her head too quickly, heart hammering, as if Mizuki herself might have overheard. But her room remained stubbornly empty.
The confession echoed anyway, refusing to be unsaid.
Ena groaned and covered her face with her hands. But the thought of Mizuki, of her presence, of the warmth that bloomed in Ena’s chest whenever their eyes met — it wasn’t going anywhere.
And worse, she found herself imagining.
What if Mizuki knew?
The vision unfurled against her will: the two of them on that rooftop again, but softer this time. Mizuki leaning against the railing, hair catching the wind.
Ena’s palms slick with sweat, her throat dry. She’d stumble over her words, trip and falter, probably say it too bluntly and too harshly.
I like you...okay? I...like you, more than a friend. So don't laugh.
Mizuki would laugh, of course. That bright, maddening laugh that made Ena want to throw her sketchbook at her head. But then—maybe, just maybe—her laughter would fade into a smile. A real smile. The kind Ena had only glimpsed in fleeting moments, unguarded and luminous.
I like you too, Ena.
The fantasy pierced her like a blade and a balm at once. She pressed her hands harder against her face.
Her stomach twisted with fear. The reality was less forgiving than her imagined scene. Mizuki could reject her. She could mock her, shut her out, remind her of how much she despised pity and affection. Ena could ruin everything with one reckless confession.
And yet, the thought of never telling her—of burying this secret forever—felt worse.
Maybe this is what Mizuki felt with her own secret all along.
Maybe Ena could understand more now.
Someday, Ena thought. Not now, not soon, but someday, she might tell her. When Mizuki wasn’t teetering on the edge of breaking. When Ena herself had the courage to peel the words out of her chest.
Until then, she would hide it.
Her gaze shifted toward her sketchbook again. The closed pages beckoned, the ghost of the sketch she had slammed shut still haunting her. Slowly, almost against her own will, she opened it.
Mizuki’s outline stared back at her: the arc of her hair, the curve of her smile, the spark in her eyes that Ena had captured in graphite without even realizing.
Her throat tightened. She flipped to a blank page instead, pencil hovering above it.
This time, she didn’t resist. She let the lines fall as they wanted: hair cascading, eyes alight, lips curved into a grin that made Ena’s heart ache. The strokes came smoother now, her hand guided not by thought but by memory, by feeling.
When she pulled back at last, Mizuki’s likeness gazed up at her from the page — vibrant even in shades of grey.
Ena’s lips quirked into something small, something fragile, something she would never admit aloud.
“Peace of mind, huh?” she murmured, tracing the edge of the drawing with her fingertip.
Maybe it wasn’t peace, not really. Mizuki was anything but calm, anything but easy. But maybe peace of mind wasn’t about silence or serenity. Maybe it was about this — holding on to someone who made her heart stutter, who set her world ablaze in color even when it hurt.
Someday, she thought again, closing the sketchbook gently.
Until then, she would keep Mizuki safe here, hidden in the lines of her art, a secret she could carry alone.