Six months since the thing wearing Hikaru's face came back. I know it isn't him, not really. My best friend died on that mountain. He died alone in the dark, and the cold, and the rain. Six months since I died with him, inside, where I kept him close.

I should have said....so many things. The regret is a burning pain in my chest. It's not a heat, but a deep, pervasive emptiness. It's a sick weight that seems to drown out all else.

Six months since Hikaru died.

How can I feel grief for the things that never were? Is there a word for that?

Six months ago the thing from the mountain came down wearing Hikaru's skin. It makes me sick inside. He has his memories, our memories. Like pictures on a screen, he knows them but doesn't feel them.

I guess I envy that.

I find myself watching him, that's how it's always been, hasn't it? I watch him from the corner of my eye, it's both familiar and foreign at the same time and the dichotomy sends me reeling.

In the end, I would rather an imitation than to lose him. I'm not ready to say goodbye.

'

Sometimes, it's like the real Hikaru bleeds through. Kurebayashi-san says that we are mixing, every time he lets his real face show, every time he crawls inside of my skin, he takes a little more of me with him. I want to fight it, this pull, the way he drags me under and covers me in his cold darkness but a part of me, deep down, wants to surrender (I would give him anything). Consume me until we cant be distinguished from one another.

I think it goes both ways. Hikaru is becoming just as mixed up as I am, Hikaru's memories, and the pieces of me that he swallows. It seems to be getting harder for him to remember what he really is. And if he forgets what he was up on that mountain, will it be enough? Will I be able to pretend it's really Hikaru?

I should have told him....I should have said. I regret more than anything. Even now, it's always on the tip of my tongue. One day it will slip, the words like daggers from my mouth. How will the Hikaru thing respond? Like the real Hikaru? Would I even really know?

Tanaka-san calls them impurities, creatures born from something other. I don't really understand if they're ghosts or something else altogether. Some impurities seem to be driven by human emotion. Even Hikaru himself says that they get lonely, (were you lonely, Hikaru?) and they get twisted. They latch on. Sometimes, they get mistaken for deities and so that's what they imitate. Nonuki, alone on that mountain became what the villagers wanted it to be, granting wishes, even if they came out all wrong. (What did you wish for, Hikaru?) The Hikaru thing tells me that as my friend lay dying, his last thought was that he didn't want me to be alone. I guess I am like those impurities, too. Latching on because we know no better. In the end, is it my fault that Hikaru came back down that mountain?

If I pray, can you grant my wishes too, Nonuki-sama?

Can you take it back? Give me the chance to make it right? I don't want to regret the things that I couldn't say.

So many burdens for you, caused by you, by us. By the world and the choices of men long dead. I hate them all. The thought sits like venom in my heart.

The cave, to be brave, to sew the hole in the world shut. You aren't human, you can't die there in that void between worlds, can you? I should be ok with that, you don't really belong here, to me, do you?

The thoughts hang like spun glass.

You go through the gate, through the tangle of legs spread wide. There is something viscerally unsettling, a pantomine of something intimate. My heart is a drumbeat, loud in my veins.

You don't belong here.

Hikaru.....please don't leave me alone again (Not again).

The thought spirals around and around in my mind, a tilt-a-whirl on a track of lights. Hikaru please.

The gate fights because it wants to be real, it want to exist here. It doesn't want to go back to nothingness. In my chest I know you're closing it, the gate, because of course you'd use something nonsensical to close it, because the real Hikaru would. I can feel you, I know you, I don't even think before I'm pushing against the thrashing legs.

They can't have you.

I struggle though them, fighting because I'd rather die with you than lose you again. Hikaru's talisman is hot in my pocket. When my hands find you, pull you though, I feel such triumph. You collapse into my arms as the gate begins to close, a rebirth. I hold you to me, as if in this small act I could stop it all from happening. If I could have changed it.

I can feel it when I hold you. Hikaru's body. Whatever animated him, (Nonuki-sama grant my wish), was no longer there. The hole spat out Hikaru's corpse and pulled the parasite from the host.

I'm shaking.....I can't....not again....please. The panic flares bright hot, burning, the piece of Nonuki-sama's power is still with me. The marks on my soul call to him. I can feel him, the pull from behind the closing portal. It's like a light in the dark and the amorphous shape that is Nonuki drags itself from the closing portal, looming massive and liquid. It pulses a black so dark it looks like nothingness, a black that also seems to hold a kaleidoscope of color. Hikaru is slumped in my lap and I hold my arms out for it, Nonuki....Hikaru, it doesn't matter that you aren't him. Here in the dark, I need you (I'll always need you). I'm afraid but my heart sings as tears well up, spilling hot tracks down my cheeks. I think I might be smiling.

Come....come....

"Hikaru..."

My voice is silenced when he pours over me, tendrils searching. He is everywhere, making me gasp at the feeling of him inside, my eyes roll back, I let him in.

He is my home.