It was always far worse after dusk, once the pleasant layers of the city had peeled away and its rotten insides were laid bare; the bitterness and resentment would sink into Kirigiriâs heart like a set of teeth, ready to eat her alive. There was no longer anything to hide behind, no matter how much danger and destruction she threw herself into or how many hours she dedicated to her cases. The reality of it felt heavy and daunting as a rope around her neck.
She wanted to hate Naegi. Unreasonably, unjustifiably, Kirigiri wanted to detest him, blame him for infecting her with his rawness and humanity and then leaving her all alone. But she couldnât, not only because he had not willingly done so, but because Kirigiri herself was the one at fault â and living with that while not knowing if she could ever fix it was consuming her.
So, true to her nature as a detective, she found herself looking for salvation at the bottom of a glass.Â
Truthfully, she had spiraled into something she no longer cared to control. Usually, it was a matter of finding somewhere relatively safe to spend the night and drinking herself into a stupor until she passed out, but on this particular occasion, the first step had been skipped altogether. The alleyway sheâd ended up in was narrow and damp, smelling of piss and alcohol; Kirigiri was slumped against the cold flat of the wall, her head falling against her shoulder as she slept.
At the corner, where the street ran off and the streetlamps were surrounded by small halos of reflected light, a figure approached. The sound of footsteps stirred her awake, but in her barely-conscious, still slightly inebriated state, it was hard to make sense of her surroundings. She blinked slowly, brows contracting as she stared hazily at the stranger â no, not a stranger, a vision. A vision she was all too familiar with. This was a nightmare, Kirigiri concluded, and it would play out exactly the same way it always did.
âUgh...â  she croaked, her throat dry. âYui... not now.â
