Archive of Our Own

Your name is Hakua. Someone doesn’t love you. Is this because:

1. you’re you

2. you’re not you

3. you used to be you

4. all of the above

-

You always liked light novels. You’d read them late on school nights. Back then, which was your favorite genre?

1. Horror

2. Comedy

3. Yuri

4. Tragedy

-

Who are you?

1. Akari’s best friend

2. The Lord

3. The Pure Concept of Ivory

4. The Ivory Hero

5. Hakua Shirakami (this world puts given names first)

6. Shirakami Hakua (Japan puts family names first)

-

You’re a normal high school student. You and your best friend have been described as ‘attached at the hip’ (by laughing and not unkind adults) and ‘codependent’ (by some joking classmates). It’s rare that one of you can be found without the other nearby. You don’t dislike this.

What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without speaking with one another?

1. A thousand years. —(INVALID ANSWER. That doesn’t count. There were extenuating circumstances. That doesn’t count. That doesn’t count.)

2. Counting the time in the time loops? A decade, give or take.

3. A few months, not counting the previous loops.

4. Hey, it shouldn’t count if she didn’t know you existed here.

5. One thousand and twelve years plus three months and three days.

6. The longest period of your life.

7. 33 hours and sixteen minutes, rounded to the nearest whole number. You counted it once.

-

Your best friend’s name is Akari. Akari has been giving up her memories, which is... OK. After all, you’ve been there to safely collect every single one of them. You look over the books of her memories daily, even though you don’t want to. Most of it is things you already know. Each one tastes sour as grape soda. You have to hold all of her memories, in order to give them back, even after you take the very last ones from her. So you read from the paper of her mind:

YOUR NAME IS AKARI. SOMEONE LOVES YOU.

Who loves her?

1. Well, certainly not anyone here.

2. You, obviously.

3. ‘Menou’ is basically just you. That doesn’t count.

-

‘Menou’ is a stupid, unfortunately useful… thing, created from the tiniest bit of your flesh and the tiniest bit of your soul. The sole and single thing that she can do and you cannot is is join souls with Akari, and that’s a purely physical issue. You don’t care about her, and if you do, you only care that she’s helping Akari be less lonely.

Akari’s memories are very… fond, of her. ‘Menou’ is young, tenderhearted, and cunning. She wants to help others and has a strong sense of responsibility, sometimes to the point of disproportionality. She’s very self-sacrificial, although you suspect that won’t be the case when it matters most.

Is ‘Menou’ you?

1. Well, she is made out of you.

2. No, of fucking course not.

3. Hey, isn’t this comparison kind of offensive?

4. Yes, she’s you when you were you.

5. Menou is the you that existed before you became the thing you are now.

6. Menou is the you that Akari knew.

7. She’s just a pale imitation.

8. This is an incomplete question. In order to know that, you have to know what you are.

-

Hey, real quick. What’s Menou’s gender again?

1. A girl, because you were a girl.

2. Butch, because her Master Flare that her blank existence copied is butch.

3. Not the same as yours, that’s for sure.

4. Not the same as yours.

5. Something Akari likes.

-

Are you even still a girl?

1. Ha-ha.

2. Clearly not.

3. You look like one. You’ll never give up looking like one. Do you even want to look like one?

4. LOL.

5. LMAO.

6. Since when is god something a person can so clearly label? Seriously, who do these people think they are?

7. If someone asked you that you’d erase them from existence, honestly.

8. It doesn’t really matter. Akari likes girls. Even if you aren’t one anymore, you’re going to go back to being one soon, so whatever.

-

Flare is leaning against the same bookshelf she always does. She’s balancing her scripture on her ring finger and staring into the long-starless pitch blacks of the astral archive. She’s been vaguely, inconsideratly informing you of her apprentice. The thing is maybe ‘ten’ now. Flare said the thing’s hair is getting longer, which she frankly didn’t need to tell you.

“Don’t say it reminds you of me,” you say heatlessly, although not without threat.

Flare knows you well enough to recognize the danger of your perpetually colorless tone. But she just snorts. “She’s more like me than she is like you.”

What do you respond?

1. …

2. Okay

3. Sure

4. That’s the thing Akari is supposed to join guiding forces with?

5. Whatever

-

Does Akari love you?

1. Yes.

2. She has to.

3. You’ll bring both of you back to the beginning. You’ll bleach out this entire useless, worthless world. You’ll blanch yourself until you’re clean and pure again; you’ll steal her heartbreak and her heart, wipe it clean of its grief, and gently place it right back in her chest, where it will love you. And when you look at her, and see how much she loves you, you won’t remember what you did, all you’ll know is that you love her.

4. Not really.

5. A version of you, sure.

-

What do you do when someone loves you?

1. Sacrifice a world for them.

2. Kill two friends, do something even worse to the rest of them.

3. Wait a thousand years.

4. Become unrecognizable.

5. Anything at all.

6. Anything.

-

When she wasn’t here in this world, you couldn’t resent her—you COULDN’T resent her. It wasn’t her choice. She wasn’t even in the same world as you. But now she is, and she’s not with you. You whited out this world and remade it exactly how you wanted. In—hah, ‘your image.’ She can’t recognize that? Some part of you thought that within days of her getting here she’d go, ‘oh!’ and just know it’s you and what you did and how to find you and how to even make you come out. You’d step out of the astral archive if she so much as talked to a scripture and said ‘Hakua, I know you’re listening. Stop avoiding me!’

There’s not a single person in this world that doesn’t know of—‘you.’ Your touch made everything Akari’s seen, and yet she still can’t recognize it’s you? Why can’t she see you?

1. She’s always been an oblivious person, a bit of an airhead.

2. You’re unrecognizable.

3. You haven’t shown yourself to her.

4. She already found the ‘you’ she wanted.

-

Is she mad at you. (Yes/No).

1. Yes

-

What’s the difference between not being wanted around and not being wanted?

1. She still loves you.

2. Virtually nonexistent.

3. What’s all this philosophizing.

4. This is unfair.

-

Akari wants to stay in this world. You don’t.

You look at her and you realize that. You read her memories in your hand and feel like you’re holding a falling star and it’s burning in your hand. You can feel it more scalding than the ivory sun. It’s enough to burn everything out of you, if you weren’t white ash already.

Why does she want to stay?

1. Because she was so heartbroken by your absence, she considered that entire world of Earth worthless.

2. Because going back would require a few hundred thousand human sacrifices, a nation’s worth of materials, some other stuff—literally who cares.

3. Because Akari doesn’t care about the ‘world’ or ‘responsibility’ or ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ You were always the more (hah) pure and just between the two of you. She doesn’t care. All she wants is a world where she gets to exist with the person she loves more than anything and everything.

4. But you can’t exist in this world. You’d rather (hah) die.

5. But the name in her head isn’t ‘Hakua’ is it?

6. Because a world without ‘Menou’ is worthless

-

Is it selfish that you still want to go home? Akari would be happier here, allegedly. And even if she wouldn’t, it’s what she wants.

1. Oh, fuck off.

2. No.

3. Selfish? YOU?

4. No!

-

She gave that up. She sacrificed her memories of you. She SACRIFICED HER MEMORIES OF YOU. She SACRIFICED HER MEMORIES OF YOU! She fucking got rid of them, of her own willing. She decided her memories of you were okay to lose, but not her memories of Menou. She gave up her memories of you to save Menou. You hate her, you hate her, you hate her, you love her more than anything. This feeling boiling in you, whiter and whiter and whiter, white-hot, omnipresent nothingness, more abrasive than bleach, more purifying than the sun, you feel it in your fingertips, head to toe. You feel nothing at all, until you feel this.

She only cares about ‘you’ but you care about more than ‘her.’ You want to go home.

You can’t take this world. You hate it. You hate it. You hate it. It’s this world’s fault. You’re level and texture-less as ivory, until you remember this world, and you can never forget it.

Why do you hate this world?

1. It’s unjust

2. It’s hopeless

3. It’s made in your image and you hate the reflection

4. This was never your reflection before

5. It made you into this

6. It made you kill your friends

7. It hurt you so much

8. It took Akari from you twice over

-

What do you need to sacrifice to go home?

1. Your heart.

2. Your soul.

3. Your body.

4. Your mind.

5. Only a few hundred thousand people, a small nation’s weight of materials, and a continent worth of energy.

6. Yourself.

-

You can go home without her. (True/False)

1. N/A

-

What was your favorite Japanese food?

1. Pocky, from the vending machine near school.

2. Onigiri, from Akari’s lunch box.

3. The one specific brand of curry, from the konbini near your apartment.

4. Miso soup, the way your Kaa-san cooked it.

-

Maya’s mother followed her here. It took her a thousand years, but she got here. She wasn’t even summoned; she followed the stars desperately, unendingly, beyond reality. And when she got here, she immediately knew that her innocent and energetic little girl was one in the same as Pandaemonium, even though Maya’s name was long-since lost to time. Not a single person in the world remembered it. They only knew the little girl which was the pure embodiment of evil. But Maya’s mother knew.

It’s not unfair to hold Akari to the same standard. (True/False)

1. don’t be unreasonable.

-

Does anybody love you?

1. The nuns and the priestesses pray to you daily.

2. They worship your word.

3. Commons have statues of you carved out of wood that they hang by the door to ward off evil.

4. Noblesse beg for your blessing.

5. You saved the guardians and they pledged the rest of their existences to you.

-

Are you loved? Provide evidence with your answer. Explaining your reasoning is required.

1. No.

-

What do you say?

1. Please and thank you.

2. Please.

3. Thank you!

4. You’re welcome!

5. It was no problem.

-

What should you say?

1. I was wrong. You are wrong.

2. I’m sorry. I didn’t do anything wrong.

3. People should control the government. I should control the entire world.

4. Thank you.

5. I’m not funny. I alone decide what is funny.

-

Do you regret staying for her?

1. Never.

2. You can’t regret that.

3. You’d do it again a thousand times over.

4. ...I want to go home.

-

As a hypothetical:

If you don’t get to go home with her, what will you do?

1. Kill everyone and then yourself.

2. Leave Akari and Menou alone. You just want Akari to be happy. If you’ll get in the way of that then—

3. Find a way to die. The only reason you haven’t already is because you wanted to go home, and the only reason you haven’t gone home is because you were waiting for her.

4. Go home alone—not happening.

-

You’re so jealous, it’s a chemical stain. You are the chemical stain. Your thoughts keep drawing back to it, the fact that Akari gave up her memories of you of her own willing. Somehow, a thousand years, and you had never considered that she’d do that. The one person in the world you never wanted to call you ‘Menou’ and she did anyway, because she’d given up her memory of your name. You don’t know what to do. The despair of it is a physical sensation, so thick in you you almost think you couldn’t burn it out. This isolation, this library you’ve rotted in for a thousand years already. Nobody loves you.

Akari loves you, Akari loves you, Akari loves you. You have her memories. There’s no way you couldn’t know that. You don’t blame her. Even if you want to. Even if you feel wronged, somehow. But she isn’t here.

How do you live if nobody loves you?

1. You’ve never been able to do that.

2. How would you know?

3. Hello? Rude.

4. Somebody has to love you.

-

But haven’t you always loved you? Provide evidence for your answer.

1. Yes, because you don’t fault yourself for any of it.

2. Yes, because you did so much of this because you know what was done to you was wrong, because if no one else in the world will care about you, you have to care about you. Because you live in you, no one else has spent this much time with you, you feel your own feelings, you know your whole life, you hold each one of your memories in painful, unclouded condition. Because you have to be on your own side.

3. Yes, because Akari taught you how to love yourself.

4. No. It’s obvious.

-

Flare touches your jaw. It’s an offense. She looks at you. It’s an offense. She smirks. And that’s an offense too. She tells you, “You really don’t like yourself, do you?”

So. Do you?

1. You should kill her for the audacity.

2. ‘Like’ is different from ‘love.’

3. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU LIKE YOURSELF?

-

Flare is a rude, abrasive, irreverent, dangerous person. She’s never had faith in anything, much less you. You can’t trust her. Although the number of people you allow access to the astral archive you can count on one hand, she’s one of them. Why do you tolerate her?

1. She’s never failed you.

2. She has no reason to go against you. Your goals align; she doesn’t want you around, and you don’t want you around either.

3. She looks at you without balking. Sometimes, she even touches you like you’re a thing that can be touched.

4. Because she’s betrayed everyone she’s ever known, and never plans to change that. Because she’s a truly wretched and despicable person, but you think you understand her. On your worse days, you even think to her and think ‘I should be worse’ because it almost feels like her existence is permission. Traitor, you think, and sometimes almost smile.

5. Because she’s… like… you?

-

How long can a human survive on just salt and water?

1. Around 2-3 months, biologically speaking.

2. A while, as long as they don’t try to drink seawater.

3. You hope Flare has killed herself already.

4. You’re not something that can call itself human anymore anyway.

-

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become _____?

1. god

2. a bedtime story

3. …

4. the villain

-

Do you deserve it?

1. No.

2. You were only sixteen.

3. Anyone would do what you did, and if they wouldn’t, they can go fuck themselves.

4. Please.

-

There’s a grief to realizing that your most wretched self is unpalatable, unwanted, intolerable, and not a single person in the world, not even yourself, wants it to exist. Somehow you thought that someone, somehow would still love you. Somehow, ‘you’ could exist in acceptance and want, if only for a moment. There’s not a single person that can tolerate you. There’s not a single person you couldn’t hurt without even trying, not a single person that would tolerate being hurt by you, either. You’re just too much.

Why did you think anyone would love you?

1. The guardians said they’d do anything for you. You saved their lives, saved their existences. After seeing the path ahead of you, all that time ago, you cried and you sobbed hysterically. You were hyperventilating so hard and fast and shallow, it was poisoning your blood with the incorrect exchange of gases; you could feel the tingling and the numbness, the twitching, even if it wouldn’t do anything to you. And the guardians saw you, and they cradled you. The Magician told you “It doesn’t matter what you become. I’ll be by your side. I will always love you. There’s nothing I can do to repay you. It doesn’t matter if it’s centuries or millennium.”—she can never even last sixty years.

2. Because you saved the world. Because history still calls you a ‘hero.’

3. Maya once called you her older sister she never had.

4. You’re just Hakua.

5. Akari. Akari expressed feelings so vivid and potent, nothing could dilute them. She cared about you more than anything, everything. You saw it in her every action. You still see it now. And yet.

-

Why are you grieving?

1. You died.

2. You thought you didn’t die and are only truly realizing the fact of it now.

3. You thought something and it wasn’t true.

4. You lost a lot. You lost what you had. You lost what you wanted. You’re not sure you’re allowed to want it anymore. You’re not sure you even do. And it’s all your fault.

5. Akari still loves you.

-

Here’s a better question: if you HAD to choose something you can be, who would you want to be?

1. I’m not answering that

2. Fuck off

3. There’s nothing else you can be

4. It’s not about ‘wanting’

-

NO. You HAVE to choose. The question is if you HAD to choose. You don’t have to want to choose and you don’t have to think you can. What would you want to be?

1. ‘Menou.’

2. Yourself, a thousand years ago.

3. Yourself, right now.

4. Just a person in the world. Hakua Shirakami.

-

The thing is that Akari does love you.

She’s never willingly left you alone, not really. When you disappeared from home, Akari decided the entire world was useless because it didn’t have you in it. And Akari alone didn’t give up on you. Akari loves you more than anything. When she came to this world, when she saw Menou, she said: “Hakua?” She only became so attached to Menou in the first place because Menou is a scrap of you. It’s not like you ever revealed yourself to her. She decided she’d die for even so much as a scrap of you. She didn’t want to go home because Menou wasn’t there, because you weren’t there. She rewound the world a dozen dozen times to save a scrap of you. She’d selfishly endanger an entire universe, for you. She’d give up herself, her identity, warping further and further, she’d give up you for you.

She loves you so much it’s unreal. She probably loves you more than you love her.

You know that, right?

1. Yeah.

2. You always did.

3. It’s not even fair to so much as think she doesn’t love you.

4. She’s told you as much.

-

It’s your fault. (True/False)

1. It always is.

-

Hypothetically:

If you had just come to her in that first loop, none of this really would have had to happen. You needed Menou and Akari’s guiding force connection, but that could have happened another, gentler way. In a gentler world. It’s true. You could solve every problem they faced without so much as lifting a finger. She would have accepted your plan, and Menou could have been convinced at that point, too, probably; you’ve always been self-sacrificial. World regressions are unneeded when you can blanch memories at will. Akari would never have needed to decide to die. Akari wouldn’t have ever had to decide between a version of you and the you in her memories.

If you had just stepped out of your library, if you had just let yourself into her sight—it would have made your skin crawl, but if you did it then, she wouldn’t have rejected you.

What would she have done?

1. Cried (crybaby).

2. Hugged you.

3. Kissed you.

4. Laughed with you.

-

At the end of everything, Akari is so conflicted you can read it on her soul. She’s grieving, too. Akari tells you: “I don’t want you to be alone again.”

It’s the worst thing she’s ever said to you.

What can you even say to that?

1. “You only don’t want to leave me because you don’t want me to be alone?”

2. “I don’t want to be alone either.”

3. “Please don’t go.”

4. Don’t say anything. Start tearing up, although you’d forgotten how to cry.

-

How do you say ‘I’m sorry’?

1. I didn’t do anything wrong.

2. Please forgive me.

3. I didn’t mean it.

4. I love you.