Daily Reminder (Pyrite)
| Daily Reminder (Pyrite) | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 30 October 2023 |
| Location: | Dorms |
| Synopsis: | Hm. Is this not interesting? |
| Cast of Characters: | Pyrite |
Himeko was busy getting ready for her birthday party. It was the next day, and they would be visiting Nephrite's house, and he was holding a party for her! And also for Halloween, but she was sure it was mostly for her! It was likely to be quite exciting and entertaining. She couldn't remember ever experiencing a birthday celebration, so this might be her first. It was definitely the first she has had as a ghost. So odd how clear her mind was presently compared to just a few months ago.
Her consciousness was so twisted and splintered that she hadn't been able to even acknowledge that she was a ghost. Sometimes she did not even realize that she was dead. Now, though, even if she knew the wheels of death would inexorably roll back all of her progress if she didn't keep being reminded, she had forward momentum. She was advancing to somewhere or moving into becoming something. She knew who she was (mostly anyway).
Pyrite was on her side of the dorm room, playing with the bakeneko while periodically sobbing. She was... Not okay. But no ghost really is. Not okay, that is. It wasn't that Himeko didn't feel the same pain, she was just... In the bizarre position of having to be her own big sister. So her younger self, even if they both had the same mental maturity now, the full intelligence and grasp of their situation that was developed over the course of these months, was shouldering pain for both of them.
In return, Himeko's job was to provide enough comfort and love to diminish that pain.
But... They were both still hurting regardless. It was just consolidated.
"Do you still need a new Halloween costume for trick-or-treating tomorrow?" Himeko asked of herself.
Pyrite looked up, dark smears down her face like ashen water in place of tears that continued to spill out of her bright red eyes. She allowed the bakeneko to continue biting her hand. It was fine. She wasn't going to be injured by it, and if she was, it wouldn't hurt. Not like the hurt on the inside. Drawing in a shuddering breath, Pyrite replied to herself, "I can make one."
Himeko nodded in acknowledgement and turned back to the mirror, where Pyrite was modelling the costume she planned for tomorrow in the reflection. Himeko nodded again, in approval. Then she turned back to the bakeneko who was biting her hand, as she called out to the Pyrite in the mirror. "Did you get our phone back from Mamoru?"
Pyrite stopped posing in her vampiric outfit with bat wings on her back, and a sparkling white dress with many frills. Staring at Himeko in her reflection, she said, "I don't remember." She twirled in a circle, her black military uniform as an apprentice Shitennou swirling almost as satisfyingly as the dress in the mirror. Though, at least Pyrite had a cape in this form. "We should find out."
Himeko nodded as she finally extracted her hand from the play bites and careful claw-holding, and stood up. Stepping out of the mirror, she turned back into her younger self. Pyrite slipped through the shadows to be under the table when her phone was pulled out by Mamoru and put on the table. She reached up a hand, aware that Naru and Kyouka probably couldn't see her, and slid the phone off the table without revealing anything but her hand to the teenage boy who had adopted her.
As Pyrite looked at the phone in her hand, it buzzed and lit up. Tilting her head, she looked at the message on the screen. I am investigating.
The black-haired, red-eyed little girl turned to face herself and held up the phone to show what was on it.
Himeko leaned forwards to look at the screen more closely. "Oh. This was from then. Okay. But that was a message sent to Mamoru not t--" Then she looked at what was below that text message. The Clock App was open underneath the texting window. She reached out to poke it, and watched the video she helped make (there was a lot of editing required and many more than one 'take', but it was still a pretty nice production in her opinion). "Hohhhh? So this got posted finally did it?"
Pyrite nodded to herself as she turned the phone back around. "I guess I must have returned his phone at some point."
Then she lurched over in pain, bending double, and found herself back at her Shrine. For a moment, she worried that thing she has always feared was happening. That she would just be back at her Shrine one day, realize none of the events of leaving it had ever happened, and it had all been nothing more than her madness trying to construct an escape from the prison of her own death.
But the bakeneko was there, and she was Himeko, not Pyrite, and the youkai were set to start marching through the streets. Not of 'normal' Tokyo, but of its spiritual mirror. Even so... There was the chance they might gain physicality if the right conditions were met. She smiled a little bit as she felt the tug of Hematite teleporting. "Do your best." she whispered.
Then she was looking down at the Clock App on her phone, leaving that thread to continue as it must. She was Pyrite again. Himeko was back at the Shrine. The young Pyrite could still tell something was wrong, that she wasn't as whole as she should be even split across two quarter-souls, since the other two quarters were still in the Soryuu Shrine. What was she missing?
She was distracted by the buzz and light-up alert of something being posted on the Clock App. Oh, it was that video she and Hematite had made!
"I wonder if he has seen it yet." she mused to herself. To make sure he did, she took the link and texted it to him, with the caption, 'I found this Clock App video that looks just like the one we made. Is it not interesting?'
Then she put away her phone inside of her cape, and looked up.
"U-SA-GI TSU-KI-NO!" a cat yelled. Oh, no. She was in the wrong apartment. She really hoped the cat couldn't see ghosts. Why was she here anyway? She hadn't meant to and... In fact... She shouldn't be here. This was nowhere in her shattered existence. Sure, she couldn't know everything, or acknowledge everything that she knew until it happened, but this was... Right? It wasn't...
It wasn't Usagi and Naru's dorm anymore. She was kneeling beside a duck pond, in the bright sunlight, watching the ducks swim up as she tossed out bread crumbs for them. A great big smile was on her face, so wide that it hurt, and she could feel that pain, and she was breathing in the fresh air, and she was alive and she reached out to grab Usagi's sleeve to tug on it, to tell her how grateful she was that they finally did this and why was she holding onto Hematite's sleeve? It was a dark, murky corridor in Obsidian Tower, and Jadeite and Nephrite and Zoisite were all here, and people were angry, and tense, and she was just looking up at her senpai and thinking rapid thoughts about why he didn't look at her the way she wanted him to, and why he wouldn't give her a command, and on and on and on.
She forgot, amidst all of that, the distinct impression she had that someone connected to her soul was trying to distract her.
Exactly as planned.
At least Hematite got his daily reminder that sometimes the dead can change.
