#kanade.

You can’t save anyone.

She can’t tell who’s voice it is anymore that rings in the back of her mind. Is it her dad’s? Is it her mom’s? Maybe it’s Mafuyu’s. It could be Mizuki, or Ena, but those two...well, they were still here to tell her otherwise. To give her empty encouragement where they hoped it mattered.

She can’t stand having to constantly look into their pitying eyes. Her front door has been locked for almost a week now. It was still maybe two more days until Mochizuki’s next visit to clean and cook.

Kanade hasn’t logged into Nightcord in several weeks, but in that same amount of time, Mizuki and Ena had been spotty as well. No one was comfortable. No one knew what to do. When Kanade looked at her computer, it felt like she was suffocating. Like someone stuck her head under the water and wouldn’t let her back up. When she looked at the synthesizers by the wall, it felt like her fingers were being bent backwards one by one. When she looked at the scattered papers on the floor, it felt like her pen had been jabbed into an eye socket.

She felt like putting herself through each and every one of those things.

That’s all that’s left for her to do, really. She’s done everything else she was allowed to try instead. She tried to be normal. Her mother died. She tried to help her dad. He collapsed and lost his memory. She tried to save a girl she cared about. That girl had been found dead in her bedroom just last month. Overdosed on medicine she had managed to find while her mother was out running errands and her father was at work, when she had excused herself from class, snuck away from the campus entirely, and gone back home. It had finally become too much. No one had gotten through to her enough in time. She was backed into a corner she felt convinced there was no getting out of aside from her original plan. Except, disappearing wasn’t so easy now that she had friends who so vigilantly watched over her. That wanted otherwise for her.

But...when someone was really, truly backed into a corner, maybe it really did feel like there was no other choice. No other way you were really going to find some kind of happiness.

Kanade didn’t particularly blame her. It wasn’t as if she’s never felt that way herself. Though whenever she’d considered the same end, she always considered it in ways that were slower and more painful. Like that was the only way she should leave this world. Suffering and alone, feeling every minute of misery and agony until her last breath. Sufficient punishment for the wrongs.

She at least hoped that Mafuyu’s weren’t that agonizing. She didn’t deserve to feel all of that. She didn’t deserve the corner she was stuck in, either.

When they had first heard, Ena and Mizuki cried. Of course they did. It hurt. It made Ena angry. It brought anguish and grief. A dear friend was gone—someone that they all tried to reach for and couldn’t.

Kanade hadn’t said anything. She didn’t cry, either. Something in her wanted to. Desperately, she wanted to. She remembered crying as a child when it had finally settled that her mother was gone forever. She had even cried a little when her dad was in the hospital, even if it was partly out of rage directed at herself. But what was left in that little machine heart running in her chest now? She felt…

Empty.

Maybe she saw it coming. Even if she promised to save Mafuyu, what could she really do? She couldn’t even help herself, so she wasn’t sure why she was so convinced that she could do anything for someone else. This so called atonement she tried to carry out for everything she had broken so far was never going to work. Everything she touched with so much as her presence ended up broken or gone, and that was never going to change.

Now, she can’t even try and save Mafuyu. That chance had come and gone. She was too slow. Too naive and stupid to do what she needed to do. She couldn’t give Mafuyu what she needed. She gave the girl empty promises, and then stood by until she died.

A month came and went. The computer was unplugged, and the phone battery had been dead for about a day now. The doors and windows were locked, curtains drawn until all sense of anyone being in this house were simply...gone. There were occasions when knocks on the door startled Kanade, but after neglecting to answer them in any way, eventually they would go away.

She’s certain that if she waited long enough though, someone would find their way in one way or another. There was still someone in the house, after all. Ena and Mizuki would grow more and more alarmed, maybe unable to wait around idly any longer once Miku admitted to them that she couldn’t seem to find her way to Kanade’s computer or her phone.

The sound of paper fills the bathroom, old music sheets and scrapped scores filling the bottom of the bathtub in front of Kanade as she had opened her arms, letting what all she gathered fall. It felt alien to her, to see the floor of the work room so clean of trash and paper. Most of her usual mess had been cleaned up and properly put away. The boxes of unopened noodles sat neatly on the table in the kitchen as well as the electric kettle and disposable packs of chopsticks. The bed was made. Her usual tools were cleaned up, picked up, and put back. Her jacket was neatly hung over the back of the office chair.

The messiest thing in this house was her.

It seems appropriate. She felt like a part of it that shouldn’t be here. Disconnected from its existence, like something that wanted to belong here, but ultimately didn’t. She climbed over the edge of the tub and sat inside of it, the papers underneath her moving and crumpling in response. Slowly, she laid down onto her side, eyes only seeing porcelain white and the messy, scribbled music notes of the numerous failures underneath her. It was like one, messy timeline of her decline. What were probably once pretty drawn notes on scraps of paper—ideas flowing from a young, carefree mind—devolved into hastily written letters and angry notes over scribbled out music bars and sections of paper with so many of them that they had almost turn under the force of the pencil.

And then...there’s her.

The culmination. The end result. The little monster, only capable of harm and quiet destruction. The one only ever allowed to watch while the things and the people she tries to touch dissolve at her fingertips. The wannabe savior tangled in red string. She used to think that maybe that string would lead her somewhere. Maybe it would show her a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe it would be another person. Someone likeminded that would understand her. That she could help and would somehow help her. Or maybe it would show her the reason why she was here in the first place.

Instead, it tangled around her fingers and limbs. It turned and it turned and it turned until became a mess that had no beginning and end. It spun itself around her neck, and it never snapped anywhere except at the ends that were once connected to other people. It disconnected from her mother, it snipped itself away from her dad, and her connection to Mafuyu had finally severed as well.

Surely, there were still threads that led to her other friends somewhere. Honami...Ena...Mizuki...Ichika...anyone.

Lazily reaching into her jacket’s pocket, her fingers grasp what’s within, pulling a box cutter into her line of sight.

Those threads don’t need to be there anymore. They didn’t need to be hurt by her too. It’s better like this—if she’s left alone. She studies her arm. The faint, healed lines that scatter over it taunt her endlessly. They’re reminders of what she put herself through when she was first alone in this house.

They really did look line lines of red string, from this angle. Maybe they really did lead to other rays of light.

Pushing the blade out slightly, she pressed it to the inner side of her forearm, just halfway up. She always thought...if she could just cut away this awful, tangled thread, it would be much easier. Not for herself. For everyone else. Maybe it would hurt at first, but...in the end, she wasn’t supposed to be here. She was never meant to be here. Not like this. Maybe that was why she continued to destroy everything around her.

It stings, when the blade cuts. She can see a line of blood slowly falling from where she left it embedded in her arm, hand still as she simply...stared. What kind of irrational feeling made her not want to continue? Was it some kind of useless fear? Was it a silly hope that maybe there was something she wasn’t seeing? Hasn’t she spent long enough trying to delude herself like that? Someone else was dead, now. Someone who could have done so much more, if only someone other than Kanade had found her.

Please. Just leave her be. Let her have this.

Her trembling hand tensed, trying to force itself to stop shaking so much. In one sudden, final chance, she pushed her hand down, forcing the blade to continue its path down her arm. The arc stops at her wrist, where the blade had finally slipped back out and the box cutter clattered against paper and porcelain, her hand open and free to start shaking again. Her entire body was trembling. She groaned, pain flaring all along her arm. She felt sick to her stomach, but there wasn’t anything in there to throw up. Just...the uncomfortable sensation of stomach acid.

Gasping, she opened her eyes and watched through a half-lidded gaze as blood freed itself past the long cut she’d forced herself to make across the healed scars from before. Just like that. She cut the tangled string like she was always supposed to.

Kanade Yoisaki no longer had to be a name anyone needed to think about or worry about. It didn’t need to have a spot in someone else’s life. She didn’t need to have some kind of purpose alongside such bright, promising people. Someday...someday they would pick themselves back up. They’d find their footing again and move forward, finding their own purposes and meanings and forging their own bonds. They would do things she could never, ever do.

Her arm felt cold. The papers underneath her felt warm and wet, stained a dark, violent kind of red. It really would have been a shame if she had done this anywhere else. Left some kind of inconvenient mess that other people would have to clean just to make this house look...normal, again.

It really was better without her in it. The world already looked so, so much better. Brighter. It felt so much less suffocating.

That’s right. So...in the end, the most selfish thing she could ever want, truly was the answer she should have sought in the first place. If only she had.