Chapter Text
When Akiyama Mizuki disappeared—Mizuki, not Mafuyu, though she had been feeling pressure from her mother at its worst lately—it was sudden and fussless and it happened without a sound.
Ena checked her phone for what must’ve been the two-dozenth time, her scowl slowly shifting to a frown. Mizuki was late. They were supposed to meet at the station and go to the mall—Mizuki had even told her to get up early, teasingly reminding her not to be tardy. But here she was, half an hour past their scheduled meeting time, and Mizuki was nowhere to be seen.
She shook her head and stowed her phone back in her bag, only to immediately pull it back out and open her Nightcord app. No new messages from Mizuki since last night. Not in their DMs, not in the server they shared with the other two members of their music group: Nightcord at 25:00. Her grumpy messages asking where they were had not been answered. The same was true for her texting app—she hadn’t even been left on read! Nothing since the “goodnight” sticker they had sent her the night before. That was it.
Ena, with a final sigh of resignation, tapped the call button, moving to a less crowded corner to hopefully be less of a disturbance. The call immediately failed, cut back to her contact page. Ena blinked and tried again, to the same result. Her mild frustration was quickly collapsing into worry. A hundred different horrible scenarios flashed through her head before landing on a memory only a few months old.
Mizuki had been acting strange for a while, frowning in the most horrible way when they thought no one else was looking. They had gotten better since Ena had promised to wait for them, but before that, they had been in a bad way: enough to actually run away from her with some half-assed excuse. What if something had caused them to relapse without her, or Kanade, or Mafuyu or anyone being there to pull them out of it?
She swiped back to Nightcord and tried calling them in their private DM. That, at least, rang several times, the annoying Nightcord jingle continuing for a minute or so before stopping, leaving her alone in the call. Ena sighed: a horrible, hollow sound. Even with fresh air in her lungs, she could not still her growing worry. A long hour spent waiting later, she boarded the first train back home.
Yuki: I will not be able to make it tonight. My mom wants me in bed early to take a practice test tomorrow.
K: Okay, rest well. I’ll post the final version of the song in our shared folder when I complete it.
Ena sat back in her chair with a groan, already waiting in the call, although 25:00 was not for some thirty minutes. A moment after sending her response, Kanade joined as well. “Hello Enanan.”
Straightening up a bit, Ena said, “Good evening, K. You’re here early tonight.”
“Yes, I wanted to work on the song to have it ready for Yuki. Are you working on your art?”
She glanced down at the tablet in her lap, her drawing program open with no progress made that day. “...Uh huh. I’m working on the rough draft based on what we discussed last night, but it would be nice to have Yuki’s lyrics since what I want to depict might change based on them.”
“Understood. I’ll be muting until 25:00.” Ena heard the ping of Kanade muting and did the same herself, then immediately glared down at her rough draft. She found her eyes being drawn to all the wrong places, lingering on too-crooked lines. It was only a draft—a rough sketch, but she could just not turn off her critical eye. What she had made just wasn’t good.
Ena opened a new layer and hid the old one. The inspiration wasn’t flowing, but she would have to power through that, restarting her rough draft and making sure it was up to her standards this time. Her pen hesitated and she glanced at the time on her computer: 00:47. Ena shook her head and returned to her work.
00:55. She had made only a few lazy lines, the start of a face. “No, this isn’t right…” she grumbled. Too anime. She cleared the layer and started again, her attention inevitably straying back to the time. 00:57. She made a line, then erased it just as quickly. 00:58. Maybe starting on the background would help—something different. 00:59. But no, that wasn’t working. She just couldn’t envision how exactly she wanted it to look.
1:00—25:00, that was, and still no Mizuki. Ena let out a sigh, her shoulders sinking down. Her head fell back and rested on the back of her chair, leaving her looking up at the ceiling, lit by the blue glow of her screens.
“Amia’s late; do you know if she’ll be joining us tonight?” Kanade’s voice spoke through her headphones like a phantom.
Ena jumped, barely holding back a shriek. She hadn’t heard Kanade unmute. Looking again at her clock, it was 25:11. She had spaced out for so long.
Sitting up, she scrambled to unmute. “I haven’t… heard anything,” Ena choked out, hoping Kanade wouldn’t notice.
“Hmm.” She could almost imagine the composer pursing her lips in familiar worry. “I’ll send them a message, but if they are asleep, they won’t respond…”
Kanade was silent for a moment, but Ena could hear her keyboard’s faint clacking through her microphone, followed shortly after by a soft sigh. “It looks like they are asleep, then. Is there anything you can work on now, Enanan?”
Ena shook her head, though Kanade had no way of knowing that. “I need to work on my rough draft, but I think I’ll leave the call to do that.”
“Okay, have a good night Enanan. Thank you for your work.” Kanade’s voice was so soft. However, its calming effect was not working on her. She sounded a bit worried, likely fretting over Mafuyu—her mother had been increasingly strict lately, leaving them all on-edge.
Ena glared down at her tablet: a glossy black screen hiding away her wonky lines. Frustration at her inability to make something good enough for her music group welled up within her, threatening to ignite like an oil fire.
“Good night, K,” she said quietly, clicking the button to end the call.
Shutting down her computer, Ena felt a shiver run through her that had nothing to do with being cold. She set her tablet down on her desk with a twinge of guilt, then threw herself onto her bed. She couldn’t bear to work on her rough draft any more that night. Instead, Ena hugged one of her plushies: a rotund penguin Akito’s teammate Toya had given her, tightly, her thoughts straying to Mizuki.
The last time they had talked had been the night before during the Nightcord meeting, and then afterwards, when Mizuki had called her to invite her to the mall. Ena remembered how they had been acting a bit strange; their joking around a shade off from normal. Her heart sinking, Ena recalled asking if anything was wrong, remembered the way they had danced around the question the way they usually did, and how she had been distracted as they pestered her to see her rough draft. It was so obvious in retrospect.
Ena pulled another plushie into her tight hug, this one a fat sea-foam green cat she had found one day while out with Mizuki. After a long while of stewing in her thoughts, she blindly reached out for her phone and sent them another message to add to all the unread ones she had already sent that day.
Enanan: Are you okay? I’m getting a little bit worried.
She fell asleep still waiting for a reply.
“Be honest, K, Enanan, Amia… You all want to disappear more than anyone.”
Ena remembered that day, when Mafuyu was at her worst, so dangerously close to giving into despair. It had been their first time in her Sekai, seeing those gloomy, liminal structures. It had been their first time talking to her without that honor-student front that never ceased to bother Ena.
Ena opened her eyes.
She was not surprised to find herself surrounded by metal pylons and strange pyrimidine protrusions, a faint, lingering mist wafting between them. What did surprise her, caused her heart to ache terribly, was seeing Mafuyu before her with that angry, miserable expression, glaring right at her. Seeing her back in that state put into perspective how far she had come in the many months since then. Beside Mafuyu, Miku regarded her with cautious eyes.
“Seriously, what’s gotten into you, Yuki? What do you mean I want to disappear? I love my life, so why would I think that?”
Ena started for a second time, a chill shooting up her back and spreading across her arms as gooseflesh. She spun around to face the direction the familiar voice had come from and found herself face-to-face with Mizuki. She caught a glimpse of herself and Kanade as well—and a part of her was very weirded-out from seeing herself like that—but something kept her eyes glued on Mizuki. They were dressed in one of their favorite outfits: a ruffled white shirt and a pale blue skirt held up with suspenders, topped off with a lacy black bow. It was all Mizuki-typical cuteness, from the way they did their makeup to how their hair was styled. Seeing that hurt for some strange reason, perhaps because of the time that had passed. Ena could not remember the last time she had seen them in that particular outfit.
Mafuyu, now behind her, had continued speaking. “You don’t have to do this anymore.” When that confrontation had happened in real life, Ena had been reeling, overcome with a myriad of powerful emotions from the revelation of Mafuyu as OWN, and from what she had said to her. She had not paid any attention whatsoever to how Kanade or Mizuki had reacted, or even fully heard what was said to them, but this time…
“Amia, you always act like you’re having fun, but deep down you know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
It was a cruel thing to say. Ena watched as Mizuki’s quizzical expression fell away and was replaced by something not quite blank; not quite hostile.
“...Oh, really?” Their voice had dropped, and Ena was reminded of a time Mizuki had sounded hauntingly similar.
Ena stood in the mall, feeling the tile floor beneath her loafers, hearing the overlapping sounds of other shoppers all around her. Her own words, just spoken, still rung in her ears like a choir of bells. “I may not always be able to help, but I can at least listen…!”
Mizuki stood before her, hands falling away from where they had been clenching their skirt, their frantic smile fading away into nothing. Some of the color faded out of their eyes. “No…
Nothing’s bothering me…
I have nothing to talk about…”
Ena felt her own face shape into a frown, her mouth forming words although no breath left her lungs to give them sound. “What do you mean…?”
Mizuki’s head suddenly snapped up. For a moment, their eyes met and Ena saw terror in the dusty pink of their irises. No amount of concealer or blush could hide the queasy green that tinged their skin. And the next minute, they were gone.
But Ena had promised to wait for her after that, and things had gotten better. Hadn’t they? The sunset had come off the sky a dying orange, but reflecting on the windows of the Shibuya highrises, the light was golden.
“I’m the worst when it comes to waiting, but I’ll make a special exception for you. So promise to tell me when you’re ready.” All the colors swirling around might make one think the world was aflame, the rooftop of Kamiyama High being the only exemption.
Mizuki's mouth split into a hesitant smile. “I will…”
Then, with the blare of a woeful trumpet, that smile was replaced by a most horrible expression: Mizuki staring into the aisle of a train, on their way back home from the mystery tour the four of them had gone on, when they’d believed no one was awake to look.
Then, at a diner sitting across from Kanade and Mafuyu, they had looked off towards the door just as Ena had returned from the bathroom and caught a glimpse before they could hide it with a smile.
Then, a dozen more such scenes, each interspersed with a flash of the Empty Sekai, almost too fast to see as anything but an afterimage, not even Miku in sight.
Ena heard a deep, rattling sigh, like a dying man’s last breath; something that should never have had to come out of Mizuki’s mouth.
The images flashed faster, like old film reels, growing transparent as she watched herself scamper off the roof, running late for her night classes, leaving Mizuki alone.
“I just lied to her…”
Mizuki seemed to be folding in on themself, the smile they had given Ena refusing to leave their face. It did not reach their eyes.
“The idea that she’d stay my friend forever if I never tell her actually crossed my mind…”
“Huh?” Ena stared blankly at Mizuki as their thoughts were dragged right out of their head, like a violation. As the sun set between the buildings of Shibuya. As the door to the roof began to swing shut with a hushed creak.
“I’m such an awful person… Haha, Ena’s going to be so mad when she realizes that…”
The door to the roof slammed shut with a tremendous clamor. It was strange. Ena had thought the door was metal, not made of wood.