rex_sun | [fanfic] Necropolis [Hikaru no Go]

Title: Necropolis
Rating: PG, I suppose...?
Fandom: Hikaru no Go
Characters: Fujisaki Akari, Shindo Hikaru
Summary: When saddled with Hikaru's more disturbing moments, Akari repeats for herself the classically insufficient line: Hikaru is just different.

Notes: Guys. I don't even know. Don't read this. I debated whether or not to post this. I think the concept has potential so I don't want it to just be lost to the fires of deletion or the dusty shelf of the 'unfinished' folder on my jump drive... BUT THIS DAMN BLOCK. It's still here! I thought taking a break and watching a shitton of anime would, I don't know, make me relax and then it woud go away. But I'm still struggling with my writing. In the end I'm posting it now so that I maybe can come back to it later, because I am FED UP with working on it right now.

SIGH. So er, this was SUPPOSED to be a Halloween fic, and it was SUPPOSED to actually GO SOMEWHERE and be something more than pointless, disconnected drivel. Unfortunately, this is all I could manage-- and it's late, at that. So ffffffff. Okay, okay, read it if you dare and let me know what I'm missing. (Protip: the answer is "sense".)

[/headesk eternal]

Can y'all tell how frustrated I am?
----

Hikaru is quiet in his hospital bed. It’s unnatural—he doesn’t even seem like Hikaru. She feels as if there’s someone else in his stead. Someone else listening to their hushed conversations, someone else in Hikaru’s body.

He lays there for hours before Hikaru’s mom, shivering and wild, turns to Akari and says quietly, “Maybe you should leave, Akari-chan.” But it’s as she is turning that Hikaru’s eyes open. Just simply open, neither flutter nor fly, but slide, as if he were not asleep but merely closing his eyes and tricking them this whole time. The possibility occurs to Akari because this is, after all, Shindo Hikaru… right?

And just as smoothly he rises and removes his oxygen mask as if it’s nothing but a nuisance and not the device that was saving his life moments earlier. He even reaches for those little tubes that stick in his arm as if he wants to rip them out, but his family all gasp and rush forward and bat his hands away.

His mom shakes him and cries. His grandpa asks what in the world happened. His grandma asks him what he got into up there. His dad asks him how he feels. But Hikaru looks at them all in turn distractedly, with the face he wears when he’s not actually paying attention to the teacher’s lesson. He shakes his head harshly when his mom tries to put the oxygen mask back on and even when the doctors come back in, he stares unblinkingly past them all.

The adults all discuss what should be done since the doctors haven’t figured out what’s wrong. Someone asks Hikaru how he feels again, but Hikaru is looking at the corner of the room.

“Go away…” Hikaru whispers.

“Excuse me, young man?”

“Hikaru! What’s gotten into you?”

Hikaru shakes his head vaguely. “Just leave! Don’t bother me anymore!”

Akari rubs her arms, feeling disturbed and cold. Am I standing under an air vent? she thinks vaguely, but mostly she gapes in confusion at Hikaru while the feeling of unease and nervousness and—and something else, something she felt back up in Hikaru’s grandpa’s attic—that same feeling wells inside her again.

“What do you want?” Hikaru shouts, voice colored like Akari has never heard it before. She thinks several things: that the adults are stupid, can’t they see Hikaru isn’t talking to them; that Hikaru has gone just a bit too far with this prank; and—

And she suddenly knows also that she does not, on her life, want to turn around and see what Hikaru is addressing.

It’s about at the time that Hikaru throws up on a nurse that grandma-Shindo steers Akari from the room and Hikaru’s grandparents drive her home.

It’s a persistent, unsettling memory to her, but nothing more. She eventually accepts, as the Shindo family accepts, thinking Hikaru is different. Hikaru is a little strange, and Hikaru is a little odd, and Hikaru is a little weird—and every other adjective that will be vague enough yet still serve as the explanation they don’t really have—but it’s nothing they can’t properly ignore. Nothing that will keep Hikaru from doing normal things as well as his not-normal things.

Because, well, the only other option is taking Hikaru to the doctor. The other doctor.

So Hikaru is just ‘different’, and after that once, he never faints on them again. He does have a problem with nausea, but it’s probably only the horrible junk food he sneaks under his mother’s nose. It only lasts a short while in any case. (Though Akari does remember him pleading, stomach caving, in out in out—Hikaru pleading between gags and coughs and hurls—“Okay… okay, okay…”)

But sometimes even today, Akari will follow Hikaru, hear his voice, and turn around the corner of the school to find him utterly alone. He whips around, disturbing the dead leaves at his feet, grinding them into dust.

“Who were you talking to just now, Hikaru?” Akari braves sometimes. Hikaru grins crookedly at these times, and he responds,

“No one.”

And they leave it only like that.

“What is this?” Kumiko asks once, flipping through the package of photos Akari just had developed.

Akari looks over, confused. Did something go wrong with the development? Akari gasps angrily at the white blotch smack dab on the middle of the photo. “What did they do! Really?” she snaps, thinking of the lackadaisical young man behind the photo counter. A perfectly good, super-rare photo of Hikaru—ruined!

Kumiko is quiet for a moment, thumbing gently through the stack and pulling out all the ruined photos. Then she whispers in a strange voice, “It’s only photos of Shindo-kun that are like this.”

It’s true—but there is no explanation. The only consistency is that the white blotch only appears on photos of Hikaru, and only right by Hikaru’s side.

“…Hikaru is odd,” Akari says. The classically insufficient line.

When Hikaru comes down with his depression, his parents grow nervous and edgy once more. And Hikaru had been doing so well, they whisper. Akari, though, sees it as an improvement. At least he doesn’t talk to the voices in his head anymore.

And when he recovers, he’s the best of all. Not sad or strange, just secretive, and Akari will take that any day to his weird mood swings, to his plaguing nausea, to his quiet muttering or loud outbursts, and she’ll take it any day of the week to the way he used to, sometimes, turn his head quite suddenly and stare off at the empty air and nod.

The only remnant of his strange time:

There is one day where, after watching a certain program on the television, Mitani gets the brilliant idea to go ghost hunting, of all things, and somehow it turns into a mini-reunion with all of the old Haze hands. Mitani even grudgingly tolerates Hikaru’s presence.

The prison is perfectly old and empty and damp and dark on the new moon night. This sort of commercial attraction is the best they all can do, but the owners did offer a group discount. They delight in being locked in at sundown and the owners wish them luck in lasting the night.

Akari looks back as the others move on. Hikaru stands by the entrance, looking with a very serious face up at the second floor. As she watches him in worry, he hikes up his backpack and turns on the spot. He’s surveying the empty balcony, and at length he smiles his old crooked grin again.

“I never really realized how many dead people there are in the world.”

----
...yeah. All I got. It totally just ends like that. I'm so sorry.
Happy Halloween in any case.