@daymiire said: " i tried fixing this. i knelt down and put it all back together, but... it's never going to be like it was before. is it? " / from Basil!

there is only one realm in which the past lingers, and that realm is the mind. sunny’s best friend, basil, among those memories; a permanent picture of joyous innocence that was scribbled away so quickly. and whose fault was that? ( y o u r s. )

no matter how hard either of them make an attempt, things will never be restored to what they were in days past. not when the sight of basil makes sunny’s chest tighten, not when his voice makes sunny’s skin crawl, not when he can’t meet basil’s eyes for fear of seeing what was there—his own eye occupied with the other’s hands instead. ( what, don’t trust him to let your other eye stay? )

not to mention, something terrible and angry stirs in the pit of his stomach—what did basil ever fix, exactly?—but it is ignored as his heart swells with the familiar yet devastating feeling of guilt, all whilst the red rope hangs in a noose above them both. and if that’s sunny’s response, sunny doesn’t want to try to begin imagining how basil feels about him. ( stranger was an example that you imagined it in the past. )

sunny’s jaw is squared and tense in accordance with the mental blockade that refused to let his vocal chords yield any sound. he does force himself to slowly make eye contact—sunny finds he can’t read basil’s gaze well. then again, it’s not like either of them are going to be easy to read. or maybe sunny is idiotically dense.

it’s a long minute before sunny can answer. when he does, it isn’t a default string of words that easily slips out around his friends; no, it’s his slow, one-by-one word stutter that he uses around people he doesn’t know. sunny now finds little familiarity in basil. there’s some, but nowhere near enough. sunny’s stare conveys a silent apology in and of itself.

“ never. ” it never will be the same—he knows, he’s tried to fabricate it. after all, there’s only five now, and each to their own lives. sunny shakes his head, in part to accompany his word and in part to attempt to shake off the chill crawling along his spine. there’s no way he’s sorting out all his feelings today, but… he can at least try to show he cares.

She'd promised herself not to let any of these new moments with Mari go to waste, whatever she could believe about this whole revival situation recently she wanted to believe it was real and take none of it for granted. And the elder girl certainly wasn't making that difficult by any means.

It was still difficult to look at her, with both whatever happened to cause this revival recently and what Sunny had told them all. She just couldn't imagine this perfect, nurturing older sister figure snapping over anything the way she was told (regardless of how much Sunny downplayed her reaction, to cause what he did..) and even missing her so sorely and dearly this whole time just clashed. Unlike the way she held other's gazes, she kept her eyes on the ground.

This was some sick joke. Whoever was walking down the street was some sick creep. That wasn't Mari.

Aubrey backs up back to her house, opening the door behind her and ready to slam it after. But with her own sick curiosity, or desire perhaps, she pauses before taking a step forward to look closer at the incoming figure. It's not real. Just some weirdo from school either doing that as the world's worst joke or just passing by.

@daymiire said: ‘it’s okay, i’m here, we’re okay.’ | from Mari to Sunny, revival au!

this is not right. every fiber of sunny’s being screams it. that’s why he backpedaled from the door so quickly, that’s why he’s shaking, eye darting around the area to try and focus on anything else—every outward sense of his is on maximum, straining to try and tell whether this is a waking nightmare, a daydream, something else. in fact, his first reaction was to flee from her. he had turned tail and scampered to the next room, posture slouched and body rigid as he grasped the sides of the counter to try and support himself. the hairs on his neck raised when he heard gentle footsteps in the entryway of the kitchen. he hadn’t turned around, he had only used the counter to guide him as he tried again to hobble away and out of the room.

when she still softly followed him to the hallway, something in him snapped. his knees have out and he crumpled to the ground, wrapping his arms around himself as his chest heaved with effort upon effort to breathe properly. he heard the sound of mari kneeling beside him. her warmth, the feeling of her breath on his shoulder, her scent—it was an attack on his senses. paracusias, tactile hallucinations, phantosmia, visual hallucinations… hypnopompic hallucinations, the doctor had mentioned. sunny only vaguely knew what two of them meant, but the negative connotations did not escape him. nevertheless, this barren attack on all levels of feeling wasn’t fair. he whimpers, attempting to tightly curl up like a turtle retracting into its shell.

a scared sound escapes his throat when he feels mari physically pull him into a hug. he hears her whispering to him softly, like one would soothe a puppy; some internal instinct of his would have him melt into the embrace, would have him start crying as he hugged back and nestled against her, begging for every drop of comfort she could give him; yet it’s not like he could give into that desire. no, he knew better, and so he shivers and trembles and his eye is wide with a primal fear as he poorly attempts to process everything assaulting his very perception of reality.

the poor boy is afraid to move, but when he speaks, it’s the most frightened he’s ever sounded in his life. perhaps the second-most. nevertheless, he feels like he’s twelve again and utterly helpless.

@daymiire // asks

Basil’s eyes very quickly shift from looking at Sunny’s face to looking at his freshly bandaged broken arm, and a look of shock colors his face.

“What hap… happened?” He asks, darting over to the other, “Are you okay?”

There was a long silence (awkward? comfortable? mostly confused?) at the door as she stared at the boy. This was very... Unusual, sort of. Or maybe it was just felt unusual, it had been some time since they had actually been alone together or done anything for the other.

Wiping her wrist across her eyes, causing tears to stream down her arm and fingers and onto Mari's shirt... It wasn't fair that she be here, dealing with this too, but Aubrey was grateful for the older friend's presence and care.