The thing about Riku is that he’s scared and alone and tired and 15 and scared
dude i’m so. he was like i’m dead right. this is death, yeah? this is the afterworld. it’s over for me. i just want to see my friends again. it’s cold and dark and scary in here i have lost myself i have lost my body it’s been overtaken by worse than a demon- by a man with brilliant wit and evil intent. i am fifteen. he used me. i am fifteen years old and my flesh was ripped away from me for trying to do the right thing and now he’s threatening to destroy the world and kill my friends and i’m in the dark somewhere as a spirit. is this really all there is to the afterlife. can someone at least send me some sort of happy mirage of them so i can live in the illusion of happiness one more time instead of being alone with the crushing guilt that i have betrayed my oldest friend for nothing and damned the person i damned myself in order to save. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
You’re so right please do that chart for Joshua I need to know his Minecraft stats
ehehe!
he built a 1:1 recreation of shibuya in minecraft. sometimes he'll unleash various disasters on it, or fill it with elaborate redstone traps to troll neku. he refuses to go into any other servers because he sucks ass at survival.
hi. this one came out longer than i expected. i might be incapable of writing something less that 500 words
ask game (i decided to do it with writing). Song: About Damn Time by Lizzo
After it was all over, just after Shoka was found and everyone had settled into something almost normal, Beat started to feel restless.
They all settled into this routine. Rindo, Fret, and Nagi all went back to their schooling. Shiki always had her job, but she made time. He and Neku hung out often. Shoka had a place to stay and hung out with Rindo and Fret. Rhyme liked to swing by his apartment randomly. They all kept up with each other through their group chat. Everyone was doing their best to make everything feel normal.
So why the hell couldn’t he?
Beat couldn’t fully relax, no matter how hard he tried. Not like it showed, he liked the hangouts and the chance to talk to his friends when they weren’t under the threat of the Reaper’s Game. Nagi and Fret kept trying to talk to him about that confusing game, Rindo showed a surprising interest in learning how to skateboard, it was all good.
So why was it that sometimes it didn’t feel good? He was still tense when he should’ve been going back to normal—whatever that was.
Beat hadn’t really had a normal in three years. Spending every waking hour chasing after a ghost wasn’t really the most average thing for someone to do. Even now, when he got on his board, he’d find himself scanning and searching for someone he knew was in his reach.
He talked with Neku about it, though it was a struggle to even begin putting the feeling into words. Neku wasn’t the most talkative about his own feelings, but he was a great listener.
“It’s not that everyone’s trying to get back to normal,” Neku had told him after Beat had asked what he thought. “We’re just… Doing stuff that helps us feel alright. Sometimes that’s doing stuff that’s familiar. Sometimes that’s me talking to you, or you talking to me. You get it?”
He got it. Neku always could explain shit like that so easily, it was just one of the things he was good at. Still, that didn’t really give Beat the reason he felt so tense.
The person who really got it was, surprisingly enough, Rindo.
Rindo actually talked to him about it. It was when Beat met up with him like they always did when Rindo wanted to learn how to skateboard.
“Do you ever feel like the rug’s about to be pulled out from under you?” Rindo had asked, sitting at the edge of the skate pool.
“Like a board?” Beat hadn’t understood at first. “Everybody falls off the board, don’t worry ‘bout it. Y’just gotta get your balance down first, so even if you totally wipe out, you can land okay.”
Rindo sighed. “Not what I’m talking about.” He sat there for another moment. “But… thanks, actually.”
Beat realized what he meant long after that particular conversation had moved on. Duh, it felt obvious after the fact. Rindo was feeling that tension, like he had to keep a close eye on stuff or it’d be snatched up.
But Rindo wasn’t alone in that feeling, the others probably felt it too, now that he thought about it. That’s why everyone was doing so much to make things feel alright, wasn’t it? Maybe they should do that too.
“Yo, there was this one time,” Beat started, watching Rindo slowly ride on the flat concrete and try to turn around. “I fell off my board in the middle of Center Street. Just ate shit so hard on the ground.”
“Must’ve sucked,” Rindo commented.
“Yeah, got a huge scrape on my leg. I couldn’t ride for a bit and it hurt like hell, man.” He scratched his head.
Rindo slowed to a hesitant stop on the board, turning to look at Beat quietly.
“So it got me super down. But I still had to go home and clean up and all that, y’know? To let it heal. Rhyme wouldn’t let me go out on my board ‘till it was better…” Beat wasn’t sure how to make his point, and honestly it was getting a little confusing at that point. “Anyway, the point of the matador or whatever is, right now you’re still grounded by Rhyme ‘till you feel good enough to ride again. Worry about falling off the board when you get back on it, not now. Okay man?”
Rindo looked at him, then nodded, taking the words to heart. “Alright. Thanks, Beat.”
Beat knew he should take his own advice, there was no reason not to. That tension in his chest that he was feeling? It was definitely less than what he’d started with just after the Game. It was slowly unraveling, but it wasn’t like he’d ever claimed to be patient.
Still after that talk with Rindo, things felt like they were looking up. He could enjoy not understanding a single word from Nagi, or sending Shoka stupid memes a lot more than he could before.
Everyone was still getting better after that fall. Beat was too, he had been since Neku was killed again. Still, it was about damn time he aimed to get back on the board.
