alright. i asked for permission and you gave it. let's crank it up to 100 joshneku and 8/9 (either or). destroy my fucking ass
things you said when I was crying/things you said when you were crying
They didn’t give you a manual when you got into the Game. Or Neku didn’t get one anyway. (But then he had the impression his circumstances were… unusual.) And you didn’t get one for how to handle things after you won, either.
Like, for awhile, all of them -Neku, Shiki, and Beat- still… saw things, once they came back. Faint visions of spiny wings rising from the shoulder blades of random passers-by, or the shape of animals too strange and wild to be real, flitting through the crowds. Sometimes they’d hear sounds like a Noise calling -animal growls fractured and distorted, the cracks filled with static.
This faded, after a few weeks… for Beat and Shiki.
It lingered for Neku.
He wasn’t sure why. A side effect of whatever had happened to him during the Game, as far as he could tell.
Not like there was anyone he could ask about it.
Which isn’t to say he hadn’t tried to find someone -Udagawa had been empty the times he’d gone there, and his attempts to go to WildKat had ended curiously, with him somehow getting turned around and lost for an hour or more in what was essentially a straight thoroughfare. Sure, there was the river, but something in Neku told him that way was closed for him, now.
So, instead, he talked.
To what would’ve looked like empty air, if anyone was looking (which they usually weren’t: Neku spoke quietly, when no one living was around to hear.) He talked about school, about his parents, his friends, whatever song currently had his attention. He talked about the Game, what he had done, what he’d seen and was still seeing.
Which is what he was doing now: talking, softy, to the still late afternoon air, as he sat with his back against one of the newer CAT murals at Udagawa. (CAT still made art, but it happened less frequently, and it seemed less bold and sure, somehow). It was getting late, Neku knew, but he didn’t want to go back home just yet.
“-and I dunno how to talk about it with them?” Neku said. He gestured as he spoke, as if there were an invisible listener with him. “I think Shiki and Beat just wanna move on, and I don’t blame them, but. I don’t know anyone else who’s… who’s been where I was. And it sucks.”
A pause. “Also I can’t find my headphones? The ones I had back in the Game, I mean. I think I lost them back at Hachiko, but, y’know, good fuckin’ luck finding ‘em, they’re probably all trampled and shit.” Neku laughed, ruefully, and ran his fingers through his hair, leaning back against the wall.
For a moment he said nothing, taking in muted sounds of the city. Things were always oddly quiet in Udagawa.
“…I wish you were here,” Neku said. His throat suddenly felt tight, and something stung at the corners of his eyes. “I’m not. As mad, anymore? Like I’m still mad, dude, don’t get me wrong-” here he sniffled, rubbed at his eyes as that stinging beaded and began to trickle down his cheeks, “-but I still wanna be friends with you. Even after… after everything.”
Neku peered up and around at the empty alleyway, half hoping he’d see a familiar face rounding the corner, or settling down beside him. Someone he hadn’t seen since that strange throne room, deep underneath Shibuya.
There was no one.
Neku sighed, pushed himself up from the concrete, and brushed himself off. He cleared his throat, sniffed again.
“I’ll, ah,” Neku said, “talk to you later, I guess.” He hesitated. “That invitation to meet up at Hachiko is still standing, y’know. If… if you want it.”
Neku waited for a response, as he always did. There was none.
So he began the long walk down the steps of Udagawa, towards home. Neku reflexively reached to slip on his long-gone headphones before remembering, and sighed, grumbling under his breath about needing to get a new pair-
-when a strange crackling noise tore through the air, the sound of it somehow electric and liquid all at once.
Neku spun in place, heart thudding in his chest at the familiarity of the sound -not like a Noise, but close, static in the spaces of it, with a low barely-there thrumming underneath that made his stomach churn. It filled the narrow alleyway, echoing until it was almost a solid blanket of sound-
-and with a crack ended as abruptly as it had begun, the silence that followed deafening.
And, standing in the middle of that silent alleyway, Joshua.
Neku blinked at him, staring. Because he was hallucinating, surely, he’d finally gone off the deep end and this was all a dream or a brain-tumor induced vision or something, because Joshua looked just like he had the last time Neku had seen him, but somehow smaller and more real.
“You dropped them,” Joshua said.
“What,” Neku said.
“Your headphones,” Joshua said. He reached towards his own neck, and Neku belatedly realized that Joshua was wearing the set of headphones he’d lost. “You dropped them, back at Hachiko.”
“I-you’re-”
“I, um, held onto them,” Joshua said as he slowly took off the headphones. “For safekeeping. Until I could see you again.”
“Y-you’re…” Neku took a step towards him, then another. “You’re real?”
Joshua nodded, minutely. “As real as you are.” He smiled a small, apologetic smile, and Neku realized, with a jolt, that he was crying. “Sorry it took me so long.”
And then all of a sudden Neku had somehow closed the distance between them and he was holding onto Joshua and hugging him for dear life, not caring about the plastic of the headphones digging into his chest, or his own tears. All he cared about was Joshua leaning into him, how he felt solid and warm and too-thin under his hands, and how he was here, with him, finally.
Eventually they pulled away from each other. Neither of them spoke at first; Joshua put Neku’s headphones around Neku’s neck, the gesture so careful that it made Neku’s heart clench.
“Now,” Joshua said, slowly, “I didn’t hear everything you’ve been telling me, so. Mind getting me up to speed?”
Neku laughed, wiping at the tear stains on his cheeks, and nodded.
“Sure, Josh. Sure.”
