[TWEWY Fic] The Opposite of Death (Part 2)
Title: The Opposite of Death (and the Recognised Stages of Coming To Terms with your Gain)
Part: 2. Yearning and Searching
Summary: Neku can't imagine why Eri ever wanted to talk to him to begin with.
Characters/Pairing: Neku, implied Shiki/Eri
Rating: G
Word Count: 3260
Warnings: Post game, spoilers for everything.
Previous: Part 1
As of 1PM on the third Saturday since he woke up back in the real world, Neku has known Eri for slightly over an hour, and so far his defining impression of her is that she makes him uncomfortable. It probably wouldn’t be hitting him so hard if he wasn’t, for the moment and extending until the others get back with lunch, stuck on a bench with her by Hachiko with no-one else but a few complete strangers and a pigeon for company, but it’s only making it worse that he knows his initial assessment of her hasn’t been fair. She’s a nice sort, even at her most self-conscious (see: today), and she’s one of Shiki’s closest friends, and Shiki is his friend, so that's a lot of incentive for the two of them to be doing the mutual-friend-thing and trying their best to get on. So he assumes, at least. Neku’s still so new to the idea of having friends of any kind that he’s still making up a lot of the rules as he goes along. During the one week he spent in the UG with Shiki she’d gone through a lot of angst over a small misunderstanding with Eri, so he supposes he’s also got the option of doing the friend-who’s-overprotective-and-indignant-on-your-behalf thing instead, but it would take a much bigger arse than him to seriously try to turn all that into Eri’s fault. None of that’s any more than a side-note to the real problem.
The real problem is that about 67% of his brain still thinks her face is Shiki’s, but Eri has her own voice and a subtle set of her own mannerisms, and every now and then she does some small thing that’s so distinctly not Shiki that it throws him in a way that’s going to take a lot more than one hour of acquaintance to get used to. The problem is that even if he wants to respect whatever made her ask to have a word with him privately, meeting her under the circumstances was weird enough even when Shiki was still around as a buffer zone, and he’d be blind not to see that she’s feeling that too. The problem is that ‘so I’m this guy who made friends with your best friend while she was dead for three weeks that got almost-completely wiped from your memory’ doesn’t carry a conversation very far. On which subject, Shiki might have said she told Eri ‘everything’ about the experience, but Neku is willing to bet that excluded a lot of details that are too personal to share with anyone - or worse, things Shiki’s going to want to come clean about eventually, but which Eri is going to take hearing a whole lot better from Shiki herself than to having blurted out to her by a near-stranger without enough tact for his own good. Shiki has failed to supply him with any kind of list of exactly which details fall into which category, and that leaves Neku tiptoeing through the eggshells of safe conversational subjects. The time he tried to strangle Shiki, for example, is hopefully in the first category for good. What Shiki spent the Game looking like could be either of the two.
He’s already started to wish Shiki had lied from the outset and told Eri he was just some old friend who’d moved back to the area, or some guy she met on holiday somewhere, and saved them all this messy stuff dancing around the truth. He can’t imagine why Eri ever wanted to talk to him to begin with.
“…and even if we wanted to tell anyone else it’s not like we have a shred of proof,” he’s saying, largely to have anything to say. “But it's not like any of us would want to make a big deal out of it. Getting back and finding out none of our families had noticed we were gone, that was as weird as anything the Game threw at us - and trust me when I tell you it threw some unbelievably weird shit around. But now it’s over, I’m glad we can just put it behind us. The last thing we would have wanted was to get back to life and have to go around explaining the Reapers’ Game to everyone. It’s the kind of thing most people would be happier not having to hear about.” He makes it all the way to the end of that sentence before he realises that ‘people’ arguably counts Eri and he’s basically just told her she shouldn’t want to know all this stuff she’s come here to find out and oh great, like this hadn’t been awkward enough already. There just isn’t any way to back-pedal through all that again without sounding too lame for words.
“You’re not wrong,” says Eri, apparently missing his last faux pas. She has her hands clasped in her lap, and since telling him she wanted to talk she’s made eye contact mostly in small, furtive glances. “Shiki talked about it for hours that night and I still don’t think I’ve got my head around half of it. It would be easier if I thought she was crazy, but - she’s Shiki, you know?” She hesitates, and when she starts again it comes out in a rush, with the sound of something that’s been mentally rehearsed too many times. “She tried to play the danger down, but I’m lucky any of you made it back, aren't I? And to talk to her I’ve got you to thank that she made it through at all.”
Shiki would make it sound like that. “She probably didn’t tell you how I wouldn’t have made it through the first day without her. I was halfway through that week before I had any clue what I was doing. It took someone beating me over the head pretty hard with everything I was doing wrong to get me that far.” She’d obviously left out the bit where it was all Neku’s fault she hadn’t made it home by the first weekend too, but that was first-category stuff if anything was and his own private guilt trip.
The admission gets him a small smile. “She did say something about you being a bit of a jerk to her for the first couple of days.”
There’s no point even pretending to take offence at that one. “She wasn’t exaggerating that part.” It would have been nice to blame it on the amnesia, except that suggesting he’d have been any better company otherwise was basically one big fat lie.
“So...” There's not even a sideways glance this time, she's just not looking at him at all. “What changed?”
Neku tries very hard not to read too much into body language that hasn’t even been in the language he’s been expecting from Eri’s body from the moment they met.
“Well, that’s pretty much what the whole Game’s about.” Other than royally screwing everyone over, that is. “If you can’t learn to trust your partner, you might as well give up on the first day.”
There’s an awkward silence; quite an achievement in the middle of such an awkward conversation.
“Look,” says Eri at last, “I know I’ll probably never be able to begin to understand what you guys went through that week, but I want you to know - if there’s anything between you and Shiki…”
Out of all the awkward questions that might have turned up in this train-wreck of a conversation, this is one Neku has been at least halfway expecting, but it’s still well up there with the ones he’s been least looking forward to answering. Incredibly, this ripper of an experience still only ranks as the third most awkward thing he’s had to deal with since making it back to the land of the living. The trophy for second place goes to the conversation he had with his Mum the night he got back, but first place is reserved for a conversation he had with Shiki a little after they’d started getting over the overwhelming euphoria of just knowing they’d both made it back for real. That had been when Shiki, with a lot of ‘um’s and ‘ah’s and constant verbal backtracking, came out and told him she had to get it out in the open - that she knew what it meant that she’d been the price for his second week (and she didn’t hold it against him at all!) and she liked him a lot and she was really quite flattered, but, well, she’d only known him for a few weeks and only a few days of that actually counted (and quite frankly he’d changed so much in that time that she could hardly believe he was the same person), and she just wasn’t sure how she felt about him just yet, or how much she felt about him, or, um, whatever. You know?
That had left Neku with no option but to explain in similar mode that the thing about the price he’d paid for his second week was… well, he’d spent his first week with his memory in so many pieces he was lucky he’d remembered his own name. He hadn’t even known what he had apart from his self-identity that he cared about enough to be his price - whereas she’d been right there. Put up with enough bitching from him to qualify for sainthood and generally been the whole reason he’d had any chance of making it back to normal human behaviour, let alone back to life - not to mention being basically the first real friend he’d ever had. So the fact she’d become what he valued most by the end of that week had been a foregone conclusion, and not something to read anything more into. It was such an obvious relief to Shiki that they hadn’t morphed into more-than-friends in the two weeks she’d been out of action that he couldn’t regret the conversation too much, though the reality was that he wasn’t sure even now how much he’d meant it - didn't know whether if they'd both gotten to go home at the end of the first week the way they’d expected they wouldn't eventually have had a conversation that started like this but reached a very different conclusion about where they stood with each other. Now that the issue had been forced though, it feels pretty final, and for all he knows, it’s for the best. He doesn’t need his first real friendship getting any more complicated.
“There’s nothing really,” he tells Eri, who doesn’t immediately seem to believe him, and he can't really blame her either. “Stuff got pretty intense, I'm not going to sugar-coat any of that, and I owe Shiki a lot, but with her and me… it’s not like that, you know?”
“And if I asked Shiki would she tell me the same thing?”
If there’s one upside to having talked it all out with Shiki, it’s being able to answer that one without exaggerating anything. “I partnered Beat in my third week, and just about everything I just told you about Shiki goes for that week too. No offence to him, but he’s not really my type either.”
It gets him the smile he’d been going for.
“I’m sorry, really, I’m being such a busybody today. I didn’t mean to imply… I know it’s none of my business...”
“It’s cool,” says Neku, and surprisingly, it is. For all of the fifteen seconds before Eri’s smile fades back into her face.
“Look,” she says, “I… I’m just going to have to ask you to listen while I babble here for a bit, okay, because I need to get the rest of this out in one go. When I met Shiki… well, you have to understand, I’ve wanted to be a fashion designer for as long as I can remember - designing clothes is my dream, but hand me a needle and it’s like I’ve got two left thumbs. Then I meet her - this amazing girl who can take one look at my silly little scribbles, vanish into her sewing room for a day and she’s turned out this incredible outfit that looks so much better than I ever imagined my scrappy little designs could. It was like we were born to work together.
“But all along… I knew she was jealous of me, for being the trendy, popular one. The first day we spoke it was like she couldn’t believe someone like me wanted to talk to her at all. She’s my best friend in the whole world and she knows me better than anyone, but she’s never had many other people she was close to. She’s got… got this image of herself as someone who’s shy and bookish and not pretty enough to be popular and if I was the friend I should really be I’m sure I should have done more to help her get past that, but… but the truth is there’s this horrible part of me that liked it. I didn’t want to have to share her. She has so much talent and there was this stupid fear in my head that if she ever made other friends, she’d be the one realising I wasn’t anything special and I’d lose her and…” Eri takes a desperate gulp for air and charges on, even faster, if that was possible. “Well, it came to the point where this one day she was feeling down about how she couldn’t come up with her own designs and I think I kind of freaked. We work so well together, but if she could do designs herself, what would she need me for? That was when I blurted out that stupid, stupid thing about how she just wasn’t cut out to be a designer, and it came out so wrong that I didn’t even realise until it was too late that she’d taken it in a way I never meant and I’d really hurt her.
“Then the very next day I’m waking up from this horrible nightmare that what I said broke her heart and she ran off and got herself killed - and it all turned out to be true! - and suddenly I’m hearing she’s been through this incredible, world-changing, life-or-death experience with these people who she never knew existed a month ago, and especially this one guy who she says she’d never have made it back without - and then I talk to him and he’s saying all the exact same things about her! - and it’s like, how can I ever compare to all that? It’s only by some weird fluke that I ever knew about any of this - I’m not even supposed to remember! She went through this incredible experience that I can’t begin to get my head around, and I wasn’t there for her, didn’t even get to see her off or pray for her or any of the things you're supposed to do because I didn’t have the faintest idea it was happening until too late. And now there’s this part of me - oh god, I can’t believe I’m saying this - that’s so incredibly jealous of you all. You and she and the others could have died, and there’s part of me that’s feeling mad and left out because I didn’t get to go too.” She stops, just long enough to hiccough in a really pained sounding way - but she’s not in tears or even really close to it, and somehow that just makes it scarier. “And you think your story’s crazy.”
Neku is left trying very hard not to gape. He’d thought he understood that Shiki and Eri’s relationship was a whole lot more complicated than Shiki had admitted when she’d first mentioned Eri’s name. Apparently, the truth is he’d had no fucking idea. And it’s only then he notices just how much she’s cringing away from him - even now she’s done with all that - because, oh hell, she really thinks she deserves contempt for all this? But there’s also a big feeling is relief, because at least now he knows what all that tension through the rest of this was coming from.
Well, so much for most of his resolve about the ‘safe’ areas for this conversation.
He takes a deep breath, sure he’s going to need it. “This may sound pretty lame,” he admits, flying on instinct because even he’s not sure he knows where he’s going with this yet - but the instinct is that this is all fixable, he just needs the words to make Eri see that. “But… you were there for her. Way more than you think.”
“…Neku?”
“Hear me out here, okay? Shiki had this photo of you on her phone. I spent the first three days wondering why she kept looking at it so much until she explained about it and who you were.”
Eri is giving him a guarded look, very deliberately withholding judgement until she knows where he’s going with this.
“That thing from the day when we saw you talking to, whatshername, Mina - Shiki told you about this already, right? - that was the moment she decided she had to make it back no matter what. You need something like that to keep you focused long enough to make it through. I don’t mean it like it was a good thing you guys had that argument just so she could get that boost when she needed it, but, well, fact is - if you hadn’t meant something to her, it never could have hurt her so much.”
From the way Eri’s eyes are widening, Shiki did tell her, it just took Neku spelling it out for her to make that last connection. Now he’s just casting around for some way to wrap all this up, and what he lands on is, “Just… trust her a bit more in future, alright? She adores you. She’s not out to replace you, she doesn’t have that in her.”
“You really mean all that, don’t you?” says Eri, looking just a little awed.
Neku shrugs. “Sure. The Game really forces you to think about what really matters to you. But with Shiki, I think she pretty much knew from the beginning.”
“If I hug you,” says Eri nervously, “you won’t take it the wrong way, right?”
Wonderful way to end an already sky-high awkward conversation, but, “Nah, you’re safe.”
Eri’s hug is short, to the point, and practically resonating with all the fear and gratitude she has no better way to express.
“Thank you, so much, for making sure she got back to me,” she chokes out. “I… think I can deal with her having a friend or two like you.”
“Any time.”
Just to prove that there’s someone up there with a half-arsed sense of timing, it’s right about then that Shiki, Rhyme and Beat show up again, loaded down with burgers and salads.
If Eri has any doubts left, the way Shiki relaxes the moment she realises he and Eri are getting on just fine should be telling her everything she needs to know.
Part 3
Part: 2. Yearning and Searching
Summary: Neku can't imagine why Eri ever wanted to talk to him to begin with.
Characters/Pairing: Neku, implied Shiki/Eri
Rating: G
Word Count: 3260
Warnings: Post game, spoilers for everything.
Previous: Part 1
As of 1PM on the third Saturday since he woke up back in the real world, Neku has known Eri for slightly over an hour, and so far his defining impression of her is that she makes him uncomfortable. It probably wouldn’t be hitting him so hard if he wasn’t, for the moment and extending until the others get back with lunch, stuck on a bench with her by Hachiko with no-one else but a few complete strangers and a pigeon for company, but it’s only making it worse that he knows his initial assessment of her hasn’t been fair. She’s a nice sort, even at her most self-conscious (see: today), and she’s one of Shiki’s closest friends, and Shiki is his friend, so that's a lot of incentive for the two of them to be doing the mutual-friend-thing and trying their best to get on. So he assumes, at least. Neku’s still so new to the idea of having friends of any kind that he’s still making up a lot of the rules as he goes along. During the one week he spent in the UG with Shiki she’d gone through a lot of angst over a small misunderstanding with Eri, so he supposes he’s also got the option of doing the friend-who’s-overprotective-and-indignant-on-your-behalf thing instead, but it would take a much bigger arse than him to seriously try to turn all that into Eri’s fault. None of that’s any more than a side-note to the real problem.
The real problem is that about 67% of his brain still thinks her face is Shiki’s, but Eri has her own voice and a subtle set of her own mannerisms, and every now and then she does some small thing that’s so distinctly not Shiki that it throws him in a way that’s going to take a lot more than one hour of acquaintance to get used to. The problem is that even if he wants to respect whatever made her ask to have a word with him privately, meeting her under the circumstances was weird enough even when Shiki was still around as a buffer zone, and he’d be blind not to see that she’s feeling that too. The problem is that ‘so I’m this guy who made friends with your best friend while she was dead for three weeks that got almost-completely wiped from your memory’ doesn’t carry a conversation very far. On which subject, Shiki might have said she told Eri ‘everything’ about the experience, but Neku is willing to bet that excluded a lot of details that are too personal to share with anyone - or worse, things Shiki’s going to want to come clean about eventually, but which Eri is going to take hearing a whole lot better from Shiki herself than to having blurted out to her by a near-stranger without enough tact for his own good. Shiki has failed to supply him with any kind of list of exactly which details fall into which category, and that leaves Neku tiptoeing through the eggshells of safe conversational subjects. The time he tried to strangle Shiki, for example, is hopefully in the first category for good. What Shiki spent the Game looking like could be either of the two.
He’s already started to wish Shiki had lied from the outset and told Eri he was just some old friend who’d moved back to the area, or some guy she met on holiday somewhere, and saved them all this messy stuff dancing around the truth. He can’t imagine why Eri ever wanted to talk to him to begin with.
“…and even if we wanted to tell anyone else it’s not like we have a shred of proof,” he’s saying, largely to have anything to say. “But it's not like any of us would want to make a big deal out of it. Getting back and finding out none of our families had noticed we were gone, that was as weird as anything the Game threw at us - and trust me when I tell you it threw some unbelievably weird shit around. But now it’s over, I’m glad we can just put it behind us. The last thing we would have wanted was to get back to life and have to go around explaining the Reapers’ Game to everyone. It’s the kind of thing most people would be happier not having to hear about.” He makes it all the way to the end of that sentence before he realises that ‘people’ arguably counts Eri and he’s basically just told her she shouldn’t want to know all this stuff she’s come here to find out and oh great, like this hadn’t been awkward enough already. There just isn’t any way to back-pedal through all that again without sounding too lame for words.
“You’re not wrong,” says Eri, apparently missing his last faux pas. She has her hands clasped in her lap, and since telling him she wanted to talk she’s made eye contact mostly in small, furtive glances. “Shiki talked about it for hours that night and I still don’t think I’ve got my head around half of it. It would be easier if I thought she was crazy, but - she’s Shiki, you know?” She hesitates, and when she starts again it comes out in a rush, with the sound of something that’s been mentally rehearsed too many times. “She tried to play the danger down, but I’m lucky any of you made it back, aren't I? And to talk to her I’ve got you to thank that she made it through at all.”
Shiki would make it sound like that. “She probably didn’t tell you how I wouldn’t have made it through the first day without her. I was halfway through that week before I had any clue what I was doing. It took someone beating me over the head pretty hard with everything I was doing wrong to get me that far.” She’d obviously left out the bit where it was all Neku’s fault she hadn’t made it home by the first weekend too, but that was first-category stuff if anything was and his own private guilt trip.
The admission gets him a small smile. “She did say something about you being a bit of a jerk to her for the first couple of days.”
There’s no point even pretending to take offence at that one. “She wasn’t exaggerating that part.” It would have been nice to blame it on the amnesia, except that suggesting he’d have been any better company otherwise was basically one big fat lie.
“So...” There's not even a sideways glance this time, she's just not looking at him at all. “What changed?”
Neku tries very hard not to read too much into body language that hasn’t even been in the language he’s been expecting from Eri’s body from the moment they met.
“Well, that’s pretty much what the whole Game’s about.” Other than royally screwing everyone over, that is. “If you can’t learn to trust your partner, you might as well give up on the first day.”
There’s an awkward silence; quite an achievement in the middle of such an awkward conversation.
“Look,” says Eri at last, “I know I’ll probably never be able to begin to understand what you guys went through that week, but I want you to know - if there’s anything between you and Shiki…”
Out of all the awkward questions that might have turned up in this train-wreck of a conversation, this is one Neku has been at least halfway expecting, but it’s still well up there with the ones he’s been least looking forward to answering. Incredibly, this ripper of an experience still only ranks as the third most awkward thing he’s had to deal with since making it back to the land of the living. The trophy for second place goes to the conversation he had with his Mum the night he got back, but first place is reserved for a conversation he had with Shiki a little after they’d started getting over the overwhelming euphoria of just knowing they’d both made it back for real. That had been when Shiki, with a lot of ‘um’s and ‘ah’s and constant verbal backtracking, came out and told him she had to get it out in the open - that she knew what it meant that she’d been the price for his second week (and she didn’t hold it against him at all!) and she liked him a lot and she was really quite flattered, but, well, she’d only known him for a few weeks and only a few days of that actually counted (and quite frankly he’d changed so much in that time that she could hardly believe he was the same person), and she just wasn’t sure how she felt about him just yet, or how much she felt about him, or, um, whatever. You know?
That had left Neku with no option but to explain in similar mode that the thing about the price he’d paid for his second week was… well, he’d spent his first week with his memory in so many pieces he was lucky he’d remembered his own name. He hadn’t even known what he had apart from his self-identity that he cared about enough to be his price - whereas she’d been right there. Put up with enough bitching from him to qualify for sainthood and generally been the whole reason he’d had any chance of making it back to normal human behaviour, let alone back to life - not to mention being basically the first real friend he’d ever had. So the fact she’d become what he valued most by the end of that week had been a foregone conclusion, and not something to read anything more into. It was such an obvious relief to Shiki that they hadn’t morphed into more-than-friends in the two weeks she’d been out of action that he couldn’t regret the conversation too much, though the reality was that he wasn’t sure even now how much he’d meant it - didn't know whether if they'd both gotten to go home at the end of the first week the way they’d expected they wouldn't eventually have had a conversation that started like this but reached a very different conclusion about where they stood with each other. Now that the issue had been forced though, it feels pretty final, and for all he knows, it’s for the best. He doesn’t need his first real friendship getting any more complicated.
“There’s nothing really,” he tells Eri, who doesn’t immediately seem to believe him, and he can't really blame her either. “Stuff got pretty intense, I'm not going to sugar-coat any of that, and I owe Shiki a lot, but with her and me… it’s not like that, you know?”
“And if I asked Shiki would she tell me the same thing?”
If there’s one upside to having talked it all out with Shiki, it’s being able to answer that one without exaggerating anything. “I partnered Beat in my third week, and just about everything I just told you about Shiki goes for that week too. No offence to him, but he’s not really my type either.”
It gets him the smile he’d been going for.
“I’m sorry, really, I’m being such a busybody today. I didn’t mean to imply… I know it’s none of my business...”
“It’s cool,” says Neku, and surprisingly, it is. For all of the fifteen seconds before Eri’s smile fades back into her face.
“Look,” she says, “I… I’m just going to have to ask you to listen while I babble here for a bit, okay, because I need to get the rest of this out in one go. When I met Shiki… well, you have to understand, I’ve wanted to be a fashion designer for as long as I can remember - designing clothes is my dream, but hand me a needle and it’s like I’ve got two left thumbs. Then I meet her - this amazing girl who can take one look at my silly little scribbles, vanish into her sewing room for a day and she’s turned out this incredible outfit that looks so much better than I ever imagined my scrappy little designs could. It was like we were born to work together.
“But all along… I knew she was jealous of me, for being the trendy, popular one. The first day we spoke it was like she couldn’t believe someone like me wanted to talk to her at all. She’s my best friend in the whole world and she knows me better than anyone, but she’s never had many other people she was close to. She’s got… got this image of herself as someone who’s shy and bookish and not pretty enough to be popular and if I was the friend I should really be I’m sure I should have done more to help her get past that, but… but the truth is there’s this horrible part of me that liked it. I didn’t want to have to share her. She has so much talent and there was this stupid fear in my head that if she ever made other friends, she’d be the one realising I wasn’t anything special and I’d lose her and…” Eri takes a desperate gulp for air and charges on, even faster, if that was possible. “Well, it came to the point where this one day she was feeling down about how she couldn’t come up with her own designs and I think I kind of freaked. We work so well together, but if she could do designs herself, what would she need me for? That was when I blurted out that stupid, stupid thing about how she just wasn’t cut out to be a designer, and it came out so wrong that I didn’t even realise until it was too late that she’d taken it in a way I never meant and I’d really hurt her.
“Then the very next day I’m waking up from this horrible nightmare that what I said broke her heart and she ran off and got herself killed - and it all turned out to be true! - and suddenly I’m hearing she’s been through this incredible, world-changing, life-or-death experience with these people who she never knew existed a month ago, and especially this one guy who she says she’d never have made it back without - and then I talk to him and he’s saying all the exact same things about her! - and it’s like, how can I ever compare to all that? It’s only by some weird fluke that I ever knew about any of this - I’m not even supposed to remember! She went through this incredible experience that I can’t begin to get my head around, and I wasn’t there for her, didn’t even get to see her off or pray for her or any of the things you're supposed to do because I didn’t have the faintest idea it was happening until too late. And now there’s this part of me - oh god, I can’t believe I’m saying this - that’s so incredibly jealous of you all. You and she and the others could have died, and there’s part of me that’s feeling mad and left out because I didn’t get to go too.” She stops, just long enough to hiccough in a really pained sounding way - but she’s not in tears or even really close to it, and somehow that just makes it scarier. “And you think your story’s crazy.”
Neku is left trying very hard not to gape. He’d thought he understood that Shiki and Eri’s relationship was a whole lot more complicated than Shiki had admitted when she’d first mentioned Eri’s name. Apparently, the truth is he’d had no fucking idea. And it’s only then he notices just how much she’s cringing away from him - even now she’s done with all that - because, oh hell, she really thinks she deserves contempt for all this? But there’s also a big feeling is relief, because at least now he knows what all that tension through the rest of this was coming from.
Well, so much for most of his resolve about the ‘safe’ areas for this conversation.
He takes a deep breath, sure he’s going to need it. “This may sound pretty lame,” he admits, flying on instinct because even he’s not sure he knows where he’s going with this yet - but the instinct is that this is all fixable, he just needs the words to make Eri see that. “But… you were there for her. Way more than you think.”
“…Neku?”
“Hear me out here, okay? Shiki had this photo of you on her phone. I spent the first three days wondering why she kept looking at it so much until she explained about it and who you were.”
Eri is giving him a guarded look, very deliberately withholding judgement until she knows where he’s going with this.
“That thing from the day when we saw you talking to, whatshername, Mina - Shiki told you about this already, right? - that was the moment she decided she had to make it back no matter what. You need something like that to keep you focused long enough to make it through. I don’t mean it like it was a good thing you guys had that argument just so she could get that boost when she needed it, but, well, fact is - if you hadn’t meant something to her, it never could have hurt her so much.”
From the way Eri’s eyes are widening, Shiki did tell her, it just took Neku spelling it out for her to make that last connection. Now he’s just casting around for some way to wrap all this up, and what he lands on is, “Just… trust her a bit more in future, alright? She adores you. She’s not out to replace you, she doesn’t have that in her.”
“You really mean all that, don’t you?” says Eri, looking just a little awed.
Neku shrugs. “Sure. The Game really forces you to think about what really matters to you. But with Shiki, I think she pretty much knew from the beginning.”
“If I hug you,” says Eri nervously, “you won’t take it the wrong way, right?”
Wonderful way to end an already sky-high awkward conversation, but, “Nah, you’re safe.”
Eri’s hug is short, to the point, and practically resonating with all the fear and gratitude she has no better way to express.
“Thank you, so much, for making sure she got back to me,” she chokes out. “I… think I can deal with her having a friend or two like you.”
“Any time.”
Just to prove that there’s someone up there with a half-arsed sense of timing, it’s right about then that Shiki, Rhyme and Beat show up again, loaded down with burgers and salads.
If Eri has any doubts left, the way Shiki relaxes the moment she realises he and Eri are getting on just fine should be telling her everything she needs to know.
Part 3