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Haru’s apartment is the first thing that has felt like hers. It’s very silly to live here, objectively, but she can’t stop herself. She owns the building, now, and the apartment that she has could be much nicer, and yet.
And yet.
“It’s pitiful that you bought this,” Akechi says. His eyes are hollow and his mouth is full of blood. Sometimes she imagines him dead, a bullet wound in his head and brain matter splattered over the beige walls. She never saw him kill himself, but he told her about it afterwards.
Haru ignores him and finishes wiping down the counter. Sometimes when she looks out into the tiny living room she sees a copy of a copy of a copy of a thousand days that she never really lived. There’s Ann, sitting in the corner painting her nails. There’s Futaba, watching bad movies with Makoto and saying all the lines in tandem with the actors.
There’s Yusuke, sketching and letting Ryuji color until it’s unclear if what they’ve made is art or just a toddler’s mistake. There’s Sumire, watching them all with a quiet smile on her face.
And there’s Akechi, dead and alive and dead all over again, bleeding on the couch or laughing at a joke or smoking a cigarette.
She misses him so bad it feels like a physical ache. She would cut it out of her if she could.
Even if she could, she doubts she would feel it anymore. Pain feels like a distant thing, like something that happens to another girl. She’s died too many times for it to mean anything anymore.
She looks past the spectre of Akechi standing in the center of the room. He’s not bleeding anymore, but that’s almost worse. Now, she can see his dead eyes and empty expression, the way he watches her motionless, like a taxidermy creature. Reality feels fuzzy around her, as it so often does in this apartment. She can see every long afternoon ever spent here, knows every quirk of these 700 square feet better than she knows any other place in the world.
She sometimes worries that she’s not the same person, that she’s just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a cognition of a girl that died a long time ago.
Would that girl have forgiven Ren by now? Would that girl have been kinder and less angry?
Despite her best intentions, Haru doesn’t want to be that girl. Akechi wouldn’t either. If all of them were false copies, at least they were false together.
“You act like it’s your fault,” Akechi sneers, his lip curling.
It’s not; she knows that. It would be easier if it was, but Akechi wanted to die on his own terms. Even if she’d held a gun to his head, she only would have pulled the trigger if he’d asked.
“I don’t,” she says primly, foolishly. Speaking with her delusions only ever encourages them, and yet she keeps falling for it.
“Are you that obsessed with me?” Akechi asks. His voice doesn’t sound quite right. He was never kind to her, not exactly, but he rarely sounded like this. She can’t quite put her finger on it. She’s used to Akechi’s cruelty, his dissatisfaction. Even his disappointment had become familiar eventually, as had his grudging acceptance.
No, this is something different. Disinterest, she decides at last. Akechi has felt many ways about her, but she doesn’t think she’s ever bored him.
Her kitchen is spotless. Haru wishes she had more to clean. It takes her minds off things. She meant to go to school today, but she forgot. Ann and Makoto both texted her and she told them she was sick, although she doubts either of them believed her.
“No one else cares that I died,” Akechi tells her.
She frowns. “I’m certain that’s not true.”
Akechi tilts his head to the side. There are no whites in his eyes, just darkness. She can see every death she watched him die reflected in his eyes, can see gunshots and Maruki and destruction.
She thinks she misses it. She shouldn’t miss it.
“They don’t grieve me,” Akechi replies. “They’re sorry I’m dead. They don’t miss me.”
Haru doesn’t know what to say. They do, she’s sure of it, but the only person who misses Akechi the way she does is Ren, and she hasn’t talked to him in two weeks.
It’s been 19 days since the timeloop ended. It still doesn’t feel real. Haru doesn’t dream anymore, but there are days where it feels as though she’s asleep, as if everything that’s happened since Akechi disappeared is just a dream that Maruki is feeding her.
On February 4th, Ann skinned her knee so badly that her tights clotted thick with blood. The gravel was embedded deep into the skin, so ingrained into her flesh that Takemi had to use tweezers to get all of it out.
Ann had stayed silent through the whole thing, reacting with little more than a shrug when it happened. After Takemi was finished, she’d prodded it with her fingers curiously, as if surprised to find that the wound was still there. It wasn’t until days later, when it still hadn’t healed, that she thought to complain about it. Even then, her annoyance wasn’t about the pain, only the inconvenience.
On February 5th, Ren told them he wanted to have a funeral. On February 6th, Haru bought Akechi’s apartment building for far more money than it was worth.
On February 7th they had the funeral.
There was no body, but Haru still cried until she couldn’t breathe and then kept crying, until she sent even Ann away and it was just her and Ren standing over Akechi’s tombstone. She thinks they were both waiting to be the last ones left, and yet neither of them ever moved.
Makoto came and got them both, eventually. Took their hands in hers without a word and led them away, back to Leblanc and the waiting comfort of their friends.
By February 8th her and Ren were no longer on speaking terms.
“Then come back,” she says softly. “You can’t be dead.”
Akechi smiles. His mouth is too wide. There’s blood soaking through his shirt. “And you can’t be crazy. Yet look at where we ended up.”
Haru turns and gets a glass from her cupboard. Her hands are shaking. She fills it and drinks; her mouth tastes like blood.
The nightmare should have ended, and yet she’s still here.
“I miss you,” she says. “Come back.”
Akechi laughs. When she turns to look at him again, his throat is slit, blood spilling down his neck, his shirt, coating him in it until it’s all she can see.
He’s gone soon enough, and she hates that she misses even the apparition of him.