Sometimes I wish it were otherwise, but I know I can't enjoy a post bad end(I don't care what it's officially called, it's a bad end in my book) story.
It is officially called "Lilly's Bad End". Has been since the beta.
I have no idea why some people call it "neutral" just because they weren't at each other's throats at the end. ^^°
That counts as neutral in my book. I'm not saying I want some School Days ending, but I definitely want some drama and the feeling of "I so fucked up", not some oatmeal-boring ending like the Lilly Neutral Ending.
Hey guys, we arent dead! After over a year heres chapter 3! This chapters written by me, with edits from brythain
Chapter 3: Stuck in a Rut
It’s been a few weeks since she left and I’ve gotten myself stuck in a rut. I rarely see Hanako anymore let alone anyone outside of the student council. I talk to the council members everyday yet the conversations feel empty and I don’t really feel close to any of them. They always ask me to come do this and that with them but I always make up an excuse.
“Hey, Hisao!” Rika and Saki come up to me after I finish my work.
“Hi!”
“So we’re heading out for some dinner, want to come with us?” Saki says, being the mouthpiece of the pair.
“Sorry, can’t today.” I’m too tired to make up a better excuse
“You always have some kind of excuse, do you not like us or something?”
“No it’s nothing like that.. It’s jus-”
“Just what, Hisao? We, no, all of us at the council try to get you to do stuff with us and you always just blow us off with this excuse and that excuse. I’m starting to think our work doesn't cut it with you. Come out with us tonight, or we are done trying!”
I don’t feel like going but I don’t want them to think I hate them. “All right. Fine. I’ll come with you this time.”
Even to me, it sounds ungracious. Saki makes a slightly disappointed face, and Rika's eyes burn with suppressed anger. I could just be reading them wrong, of course.
“Great! Let's get going!” Saki says, still trying to be positive.
*****
As we walk down the hill I try to start up some small talk.
“So, where are we going?”
“This little tea shop. It’s really lovely. It’s called the Shanghai; haven't you been there before?” Saki rattles on breathlessly.
I cringe at the rush of memories of the place. The wound is still fresh, some time may have passed, but not nearly enough. I look at them and notice Rika giving me a strange look. Her hand reaches subconsciously up to her long silver braid. She must have seen me cringe.
“Yeah... I’ve heard of it.”
“From the look on your face, Nakai, it seems you’ve more than heard of it?” Rika chimes in, to my surprise. I've been thinking of her as the strong silent one of the duo.
“Well, I went there a few times with someone I used to know.”
Saki scrunches up her face with concern. “If you like we can go somewhere else.”
“No no, I’m fine. Don’t let me change your plans because of a few bad memories.”
*****
The rest of the walk is in relative silence. As we walk in I notice it’s a waitress other than Yuuko working today. It’d be silly to think she’s the only waitress here but I’ve only seen her on duty at this time of day before. As we sit down and the unknown waitress finishes taking our orders, Saki tries to get our conversation going again.
“So, Hisao, how have you been doing?”
“Fine.”
Rika looks at me oddly, but remains silent. Saki looks at her, then back at me.
“Now Hisao, we aren’t blind. I see the way you act during student council meetings, and frankly you seem depressed. I know we aren’t that close, but I'm a surprisingly good listener, so if you ever want to talk…”
“I appreciate that. I just don’t feel like talking about it.” I give her a stern look to try to get her to drop it. Thankfully the waitress brings us out our order and we eat in silence for what seems like at least one long, dreary hour.
“Well, thank you for coming, Hisao, but I think it’s time for us to leave.” Saki says, breaking into my self-absorbed mood. I feel guilty as she collects her things and gets up. Oddly, Rika stays seated.
“Go on ahead. Meet up with you later. I need to talk to Nakai.” Rika turns to me, as Saki sighs, waves her hand, and goes off to settle payment at the counter.
I’m a little scared of what the tall, quiet silver-haired girl has to say. In an effort to lighten the mood, I say, "You can call me Hisao, you know."
She nods seriously and begins to speak. “Listen, Hisao, if my... condition has taught me anything it’s that life is too short to dance around things. I’m going to be blunt with you. I know what happened with Lilly. You need to get a grip on things. Nothing but work and sleep? Not good. Hell, Saki had to practically bribe you just to get you to come here—”
“And she didn’t have to—” I try to butt in, but Rika shuts me off cleanly and effectively.
“Nakai, I’m not done. Doing nothing but work will only harm you. Have you kept in touch with your other friends here? Are you taking care of yourself? When I found out about my condition I was like you are now. It hurt me till I learned to live with it. I’m not telling you to forget Lilly and be happy; I’m telling you to learn to live your own life again. I know we aren’t close, Hisao, but I don’t want to see you wasting whatever time you have left, not like I did. Okay?"
I’m left speechless. She waits for an answer, but I have none. I just stare at her for a while. Before I can respond, she gives a wry, thin smile. Then she nods, gets up and turns towards the door.
I think she might be right. I’ve barely talked to Hanako, I haven’t talked to Shizune or Misha unless it was required for council work and I’ve gone out of my way to not see Kenji. Words slowly begin to boil out of me.
“You’re… you’re right. But it’s not something I can just casually talk about. Every time something started to get even a little better in my life, things crashed down to worse than they were before. I don't want that to happen again, so I'm not trying to make things better.”
“But you can't do that to yourself! If you keep that—” Rika stops, embarrassed that her voice has become so loud.
Too late. After holding it all in for so long, my brain finally snaps and all the pain explodes. I don't think about what I'm saying, and I don't care whom I'm saying it to, and I cut loose.
“You don’t know me! You don’t know what I’ve been through. I get confessed to, wow! Then I have a heart attack! I spend months in the hospital, the girl stops talking to me, I finally get out only to find out that I have to move to some school miles away that's pretty much another hospital!"
“Hisao, calm d—”
“It’s my turn, I’m not done, shut up! After finally I thought I'd finally adjusted to my new life, I've met new friends, I think I've fallen in love, and then I get abandoned! So if I’m just going to keep falling down, what's the point of climbing back up?!"
“The point is to live," Rika says softly. "Learn from your condition. Every second of your life is precious."
I've stopped talking, breathless and angry. She continues. "It doesn’t matter if you’ve fallen down a hundred times as long as you keep climbing back up. You owe it to the people who can’t but wish they could.”
At this point, the few remaining people in the cafe are all pretending to ignore us, but they're watching. We've been rude, speaking so loudly and offensively to each other. I start to quiet down. I've got no more words, anyway, or maybe just a few.
“You’re right... but I don’t have the strength to keep climbing back up anymore… I need to go.”
I can’t break down in front of someone again. I run out the door. The streets have become pretty busy while we were in there so I have to fight against the crowd if I want to move quickly. Almost at once, someone bumps into my chest. I turn around and try to go the other way, but someone grabs my arm and pulls me to a bench.
“Hisao…”
A white face, an unearthly beauty. Silver hair and reddish eyes, like warmth in winter. I start to break down.
“Why, Rika? Why are you still following me?”
“Hisao. You say that I don’t know what's happened to you. Strictly, that's true. What's also true is that you don’t know much about me either. I’ve been in and out of hospitals since I was young. I never had a real childhood, never had anyone confess to me, never had much of a life till I found this school. And even when I did I acted destructively trying to fit as much fun into my life to make up for all the lows I’ve had...”
Rika's voice starts to fade. She's murmuring like the sea. What's wrong? My chest, it's tight. Pounding. My vision… blackness. The last thing I remember is Rika calling for help.
"I don’t want to be here anymore, I know there’s nothing left worth staying for.
Your paradise is something I’ve endured
See I don’t think I can fight this anymore, I’m listening with one foot out the door
And something has to die to be reborn-I don’t want to be here anymore"
Theres more coming. My and brythain are back and planning on finishing this I had a lot of issues that pretty much prevented me from writing for a long time. Between having a rough patch in life and having no computer I didn't have much of a way to read or write, but now I have a shiny new pc and motivation to finish all my fics
This is an interesting take on things. I actually expected Hanako to blow up before Hisao did. She seems like she's holding back so much and trying so hard that it's only a matter of time. I really didn't think Hisao had it in him. He just felt more like he was slowling breaking dwon rather than about to exploded.
I don’t really have any friends. That’s the idea that squats at the back of my head, like a big black toad, eating flies and croaking. But I do, I do, I keep telling myself. And then, I don’t. I keep dreaming of the plane as it takes off from Sendai Airport. “Goodbye, Lilly!” we should be saying.
In my dreams, all I see is a big black car, a big black horse, a big black aircraft, and Lilly in a big black box. I know I’m repeating myself a lot, and that’s bad style, but my dreams are big and black, and when I wake up, I’m always so cold.
I don’t want to dream of heat either. When I do, my dreams are all about fire and smoke, everything happening behind my back while I can’t see what’s happening. I never have a night in which I don’t dream, never a peaceful night.
It’s as if I’m writing all these words down in my computer. I feel my fingers flying easily over the keyboard, a demon journalist whose every thought is becoming perfectly typeset material. And then I wake up, and I snatch at all the words as they escape my sleepy head, and this is all I’ve caught.
Hisao sometimes has black moods and doesn’t keep in touch. I think about him, and I wonder if he thinks about me. I haven’t heard from him since yesterday. Sighing softly to myself, I rub ointment into the thickened skin on my right side, the daily ritual that literally stops me from cracking up. I don’t look at myself more than I have to. I just do it, then put my clothes on for a new day of people-avoidance.
I think of my day as a white piece of paper. It blackens slowly as people and things and places and events mess it up. But by night, everything is dark anyway, so you can start with a clean sheet in the morning. Hisao, on the other hand, it’s as if he wants both black and white, so that he can decide if he will do black one day and white another.
There’s a knock on the door. I can’t help but look around. But there’s nobody in here but me, in my Spartan little room. “C-coming!” I announce, my throat as dry as ever. I hate that stutter, but it takes time for the air to come cleanly out of my lungs.
I open the door.
My friends! I’m not sure exactly how I feel, but seeing Naomi and Natsume and Misaki seems good, as if some peculiar warmth is nuzzling me under my ribs.
Then I notice the expressions on their faces. They’re all staring at me! Why? Instinctively, my hand reaches up to my face. “W-what’s the matter?”
“Hanako!” they all say at the same time.
“Yes?”
Natsume, ever the bossy one, waves a hand in the air. It’s such a strange thing to do, but I’ve seen her do it before. For some reason, everyone keeps quiet when her hand does that. She’s glaring at me. No, not glaring, staring. Frightened?
“Hanako, Nakai’s in hospital!”
The shock hits me like a punch in the guts. My mouth opens, but I can’t get any air out. “H… h…” — nothing, I can’t say anything!
Natsume doesn’t wait. She continues, while I gasp. “Naomi went to look for him, to check the interview transcript. But he wasn’t around. Saki told her he’d been taken ill while having tea at the Shanghai.”
Tea? At the Shanghai? I feel shame, because my first thought isn’t about whether he’s all right, but about whom he was having tea with.
“The Shanghai?” is all that comes out of my treacherous lips.
Naomi opens her mouth, but Misaki steps on her foot and Naomi shuts up. I notice all of that. People are so obvious sometimes. I glare at Naomi, who looks very uncomfortable.
“Somebody… who was there…” she begins.
Natsume interrupts her. “Maeda saw Saki and one of our juniors having tea with Nakai. Saki got up to settle the bill, and while she was away, the other girl was having a very intense conversation. Then suddenly Nakai got up from his seat, walked towards the door, stumbled, and fell.”
“W-who was this other girl?”
“Katayama. Rika, the albino with the very long hair.”
I’ve seen her before. Pretty. Like my day before people step all over it. I wish I could be as white as that. So, Hisao, you’ve been having tea with elegant Enomoto and graceful Katayama, have you? You must have recovered a lot faster than I thought you would have.
I find myself biting my lip hard enough to taste blood.
“Does anyone know how he is?” I ask. It’s the right thing to say. It comes out smoothly, like milk pouring from a carton. White words. Words with no meaning.
“We were thinking of visiting him after school,” Misaki says. “But we thought we’d ask your permission first, in case you knew something about his case.”
That makes no sense at all. Maybe I’m dreaming, having one of those surrealist nightmares that come with low-budget reading like Martel and Murakami.
“You don’t need my permission,” I hear myself saying. “He’s got some medical condition that means he can’t take too much stress, I think. But lying down in a hospital bed, he’s not likely to die.”
The words are so smooth, so white, like the sterilized surfaces of a hospital room. I’m not even stuttering. It’s like white chocolate. It tastes terrible, but you eat it because sometimes it’s better than nothing.
White chocolate and blood in my mouth. Almost like Rika Katayama. With sudden realization, I think I know something new about Hisao. He’s been looking for anybody who is the opposite of me—he’s been looking for a long-haired girl with pale hair and eyes that aren’t the colour of mud. And probably, someone with a smooth, flawless complexion.
That’s okay. I’ve always known I’m not the most beautiful girl in the room. I might be prettier than only Misha and Shizune, at least half the time, but I’m quite comfortable with being me. I don’t think Hisao would sleep with either of them, so there’s that.
I can’t even recognize my own thoughts. They’re like lightning in my head. They’re not me!
“Would you like to come with us? After school we’ll check in with Nurse and see if he has anything else to say about Nakai.”
“If nobody’s doing Newspaper Club, then I might as well come along, Misaki.”
I sound stiff, like a schoolteacher.
Natsume looks at the others, then looks at me. “Okay. Let’s get to class though, we can’t be excused for being late merely because we were gossiping about Nakai!”
In our school, people are always ending up in the infirmary. Sometimes, the worse cases end up in the hospital a few kilometres down the road. The worst ones end up in the morgue, I suppose, which is what a newspaper archive is also called. Such morbid thoughts.
I grab my books and shut the door behind me. Taller than all my friends now that Lilly isn’t around anymore, I feel like a reluctant flagship leading a squadron on the way to the open sea.
*****
The schoolday is a blur. I sit at the back of the class, but because my brain isn’t thinking very well, I don’t feel the usual urge to run away to a quiet spot in the library. I just stare at my desk and do any work that comes to me.
My friends stop trying to talk to me after a while. They start again at lunchtime, when we each grab a bento box in the cafeteria and head towards the Newspaper Club table. I answer with polite little phrases, clean and white. By the time we get back to class, they’ve stopped again.
I think I understand something now, though. I’m angry. I also know what I’m angry about, and whom I’m angry with.
I’m not angry with Lilly. She has a family, and if I had one, I’d do anything for them. I’m not angry with Akira, because she’s the big sister in that family, and she doesn’t get to have a choice. I’m just sad for both of them.
I’m not angry with Saki Enomoto, who is a bit like Naomi. They both need to play games with people. It makes them feel better. But if you don’t play, they can’t do anything about it.
I’m not angry with Rika Katayama, who can’t help being fragile and beautiful and unhappy and glamorous. Deformed daughter of a mob boss, or whatever she is, she’s like me—we can’t help looking the way we do, and people tend to run away or try to protect us.
I’m not angry with the boy. He’s just a boy. He fell in love with Lilly and had sex with her in the room next to mine. Boys do that, if they’re not doing something else. And now he has tea with Rika and she does something to his heart. So what?
I’m angry with me. I’m so aimless, so pointless. I’m everybody’s shadow, stuck halfway between black and white most of the time. I don’t have ambitions, I only have occasional dreams of things I might want to be. I haven’t been working towards those dreams. I always think: it might happen, it might not, whatever.
I need to take control of something. Maybe I should wake Hisao up from his short, sad dream of being normal. Maybe, I should do a Shizune on him.
It’s suddenly the end of the day. My friends are packing up. In a short while, they’ll be dragging me along to the hospital. What have I been thinking? I can’t be like Shizune. It’s just not me.
But… what is?
Post-Yamaku, what happens? After The Dream is a mosaic that follows everyone to the (sometimes) bitter end. Main Index (Complete)—Shizune/Lilly/Emi/Hanako/Rin/Misha + Miki + Natsume
Secondary Arcs: Rika/Mutou/Akira • Hideaki | Others (WIP): Straw—A Dream of Suzu • Sakura—The Kenji Saga. "Much has been lost, and there is much left to lose." — Tim Powers, The Drawing of the Dark (1979)
You can do it, Hanako! Steal the boy's heart, as broken and on the floor as it may be!
"I don’t want to be here anymore, I know there’s nothing left worth staying for.
Your paradise is something I’ve endured
See I don’t think I can fight this anymore, I’m listening with one foot out the door
And something has to die to be reborn-I don’t want to be here anymore"
Mirage_GSM wrote:Well... Does she? It's hard to tell confused as she is.
Frankly, the "not making sense" aspect of Hanako's thoughts is very well captured
I once knew a young lady exactly like this.
Post-Yamaku, what happens? After The Dream is a mosaic that follows everyone to the (sometimes) bitter end. Main Index (Complete)—Shizune/Lilly/Emi/Hanako/Rin/Misha + Miki + Natsume
Secondary Arcs: Rika/Mutou/Akira • Hideaki | Others (WIP): Straw—A Dream of Suzu • Sakura—The Kenji Saga. "Much has been lost, and there is much left to lose." — Tim Powers, The Drawing of the Dark (1979)
I had a lot of issues that pretty much prevented me from writing for a long time. Between having a rough patch in life and having no computer I didn't have much of a way to read or write, but now I have a shiny new pc and motivation to finish all my fics 
