2025-08-13: Ten Days
- Cutscene: Ten Days
- Cast: Fuuka Yamagishi
- Where: Tatsumi Port Island
- OOC Date: 2025-08-13
- IC Date: 2012-07-25
- Summary: Fuuka Yamagishi returns to school following her long absence, pondering the weight of ten missing days, and finds herself accidentally walking a familiar road as she slips back into her old routine.
A little over two weeks, accounting for the time Fuuka Yamagishi spent recovering in addition to her time in Tartarus, is a long time for a student to be gone from school. Not just from all the lessons she'd missed - the student body is a living organism, constantly growing and changing and evolving even when its members don't really notice. And so, Fuuka's return to school finds her, in teenager years, approximately one hundred years out of date. For someone who already has trouble keeping up with the latest trends, she feels completely lost. Gossip and other important topics of conversation have risen and died during the time she was gone - what still feels fresh for her is old news now, and there are things she doesn't remember that feels like they should be second nature to know for any Gekkoukan student.
It makes it worse that it still doesn't feel like it's been that long. She knows, academically, that it was. Feeling it, believing it, is another matter. What was ten days for everyone else was only ten hours for her(or thereabouts - keeping time got awfully difficult, after a while) - and now it makes her feel eternally ten days out of step with the rest of the world. While she was gone, it moved on without her. She may be out of Tartarus now, but there's no getting back the days it stole from her. It's a difficult thing to bring up or even describe to anyone else. Where would she even start? Could anyone even understand what it feels like?
Of course, there are some things her fellow students are perfectly happy to bring back into recency for the sake of allowing her to experience them... namely, a certain ghost story. It didn't take long for her to recognise herself in the story, and even if she hadn't, they were quick to point it out to her face. The 'ghost girl's return to school was a big deal, after all - many of them said as much to her face.
Despite this, the atmosphere does feel a little brighter now. She has friends. She knows more people in 2-E, now, and the jeers there were largely shut down when Natsuki approached her to talk, with no one wanting to get on her bad side. It was a little awkward, but it was... nice, actually. It felt like her usual experience has been turned on its head, and ultimately, the school day ends with her feeling tentatively positive about coming back. Her classes passed in relative peace - even if they were a reminder of how many lessons she had missed, requiring help to get through the material. Even the monorail ride home feels more enjoyable than before... though a part of that may be simply due to the feeling of things finally starting to settle back into familiarity - returning to the normalcy that had been shaken up for so long. She didn't realise how much she missed it.
And the walk back is -
Oh.
Fuuka takes notice of where she is. This neighborhood... She was so distracted by her thoughts, her steps automatically began to take her back to her house, rather than the dorm - muscle memory retracing her usual route. A slow frown crosses her face, and she comes to a stop.
Her house... Going back to her house would mean facing her parents in person. It's probably something she should do. ...But it's something she's tried to avoid. They've shared basic pleasantries, she let them know she was alright now, at least, but... She doesn't know what to think or how to feel. When she had finally gotten her phone back after her rescue, she had apologized for lying to them and told them she was sorry for worrying them.
Their response was, essentially, 'that's fine, don't do it again'.
...At the time she didn't think much of it. That's about what she expected from her parents. It seemed like a reasonable response for staying out ten hours later than she should have, by choice or not. But the more she thinks about it, the more she stews in it. Because she wasn't gone for ten hours. She was gone for ten days.
...Ten days, and that's all she gets.
Is it unreasonable of her to expect... more? If they argued with her and scolded her, at least she'd know where she stood. That reaction, though, basically a non-reaction - what is that? What does that mean? Where do they stand? She knows they're always busy - is it childish of her to expect her to be occupying their thoughts more than that while she was gone? Had they just been taking it easy on her, because she was supposed to be sick? Were they just hiding how they really felt, so as not to worry her? Or... is that the limit of how they feel about it?
...Did they ever try to track down a hospital room that didn't exist, to visit a girl that, for ten days, didn't either? When they failed to find it, did they go looking for her?
She doesn't know. Maybe they searched and searched until they couldn't anymore. Maybe they barely noticed she was gone. She hasn't asked, because she's afraid to know the answer. If she follows the train of thought further, she could find herself spiraling deeper and deeper into it. But if she does that, she isn't sure she'll be able to bring herself out of it. She tries to coax herself out of it, turning her attention anywhere else. She looks at the houses around her. Seeing the familiar - and the unfamiliar. Someone moved out while she was gone - she can see the sign in the yard. Someone repainted their walls, which had been peeling the last time she saw them. And - oh!
There's a cat! Perched on those walls, basking near the remains of a recently stolen fish. Fuuka, naturally, gravitates toward him to get a closer look. A small, ratty grey thing... Fuuka stares - and something clicks in her head.
"Oh... You're the one from before, aren't you? You were there too..." She starts, approaching carefully. "Thank you for your help before. I don't know if I would have had the strength to make it without those shards..."
Fuuka approaches the cat slowly, gingerly, inching her hand toward him in hopes that she doesn't startle him this time, and -
chomp!
Fuuka draws her hand back quickly with a wince, gently clutching her cat-bitten fingers. The grey cat takes up the fish bones in his mouth and scampers out, before she has the audacity to pet him again. She watches him go, and...
...She's at least relieved to know he escaped the tower alright. Just like her, he got out and seems to be living just fine. Maybe that's the best thing she can strive for, right now. ...And maybe next time she sees him he'll let her pet him. At least he's given her something else to focus on rather than her own thoughts which, right now, is a big enough gift. She can appreciate that much. She just wishes it didn't have to hurt, though. Ow...