#yyh crappy indulgent si

[tackyink]

Fifth part, and longest one yet. Some of it was written with the first batch, some today. Includes a personal bit at the start.

As always, badly edited, blah blah blah, I’m going to crawl into bed right now. Hope you enjoy it.

I used to be the tight one The perfect fit Funny how those compliments can Make you feel so full of it

I had seen the box a few times and asked about it.

It was a late winter evening of 1992 and my father had arrived home from work. He went to the small room where he stored his tools and radio materials, took out the blue cardboard box with a checkered pattern, and placed it on the living room’s table, right by the curtained windows.

“Do you want me to teach you?” He asked.

I wanted to learn everything at that age, so I ran up to the table and took a chair in front of him as he took out from the box a thick, sturdy board that folded in the middle. He opened it with a click, revealing two sets of wood chess pieces encased between foam. He took them out one by one, and I watched with fascination as he put them on the open board, listened intently while he told me their names and what they did.

They had magnets on the base, and they stuck to the squares with a satisfactory ‘clack.’

When the preliminary explanations were done, he put the white pieces in front of me and said, “You begin.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because white always goes first.”

“But why?”

“It’s how it is.”

I didn’t think it was fair, because back then I still thought in terms of fair and unfair.

“Black can never go first?”

“No, it’s always white.”

I thought in less impolite words that that was bollocks, but kept it to myself. The white pieces looked like white chocolate, but the dark ones were much prettier. It just wasn’t fair.

But getting hung up on that wasn’t going to help me change the rules of the world or the game, so I moved a pawn with resignation.

We played a few matches in the next hours. I lost a lot, and eventually forced a draw. My mother looked every now and then from her reading spot on the armchair, leaving us to our own.

I remember being completely absorbed in my own thoughts, off in my little world, where only a chessboard existed, and unaware of the time as only kids can be. I remember moving one last piece thinking that surely he’d find a way to escape from it, because he always did. But after my move, he stayed quiet for a few seconds looking at the board, then looked at me and said, “You have to say ‘checkmate.’”

I didn’t realize what he meant, even though I had heard it a few times the previous hours. “Why?”

“I can’t move my king anywhere.” He signaled over the board all the paths available, and how I could take his piece no matter what he did. “You win.”

I thought that that wasn’t fair either, because maybe I wouldn’t have seen the opportunity to take his king. Maybe when my turn came I would have been distracted and done something silly and let the king escape.

A wave of disappointment washed over me, too, when I realized that if I had won, it hadn’t been playing seriously.

But I didn’t say any of that. I repeated, “Checkmate,” feeling down and absolutely convinced that he had let me win.

My mother looked up from her magazine and at my father, and the two shared a long look in silence. I was dejected and didn’t pay them any mind. I just had wanted to win fair and square, and if it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be.

Twenty years later, I found out through my mother that my father had, in fact, not gone easy on me.

This, along with my absolute ineptitude to make friends my age, was one of the catalysts that made the director of my preschool suggest my parents that they transferred me to a place more suited for me. They refused. But in turn, that director made sure that two years later I got admitted to the best school in the vicinity.

I wondered for many years what might have happened if they had transferred me, even held some resentment towards them that I was stuck in a place where I did not belong for so many years.

But when I found a place to belong, only curiosity remained.

Japan did not have schools for gifted children. In fact, the teachers tried very hard not to single out students in order to instill a sense of community. The group was prioritized above individual needs, and while that worked for many, it did not for Yu.

This translated to a very bored kid during class, and a very busy one in the afternoons, when he took private lessons that did grab his interest. Yu had very little free time, and that only added to his sense of superiority regarding his classmates, because he had more ~important~ things to do than hanging out after school or playing video games.

But he was still a kid, and he was personable with the people he trusted. He could have had friends if he hadn’t been a smug little shit that looked down on everybody he didn’t respect.

Sometime during my first year of school in this world, prompted by one of his extracurricular teachers, Yu had penned an essay on the influence of Chinese poetry in Japanese literature and submitted it to a contest. It won. And when word came out that it was the work of an eleven year old kid, everybody doubted him. There was much questioning and prodding, because that had to be the doing of an adult, surely his parents or a teacher had helped him, surely he had copied it from some publication.

Yu coped with these accusations as any kid would: badly and with a wounded pride.

He was sitting at the desk in his room, alone, when I happened to pass by, and in a fit of rage he tore off a bunch of papers from his notebook, crumpled them, and violently threw both pages and notebook into a trashcan with a frustrated groan.

“Yu?” I asked quietly.

He turned around slowly and beet red at being caught acting like that.

“W-what?”

“Are you—” No, I wasn’t going to ask a stupid question that was sure to tick him off. “You are not okay,” I said.

The fact that he didn’t praise my observational skills to get under my skin was as telling as a verbal reply.

I crossed my arms and leaned my shoulder against the doorframe, waiting for him to say something else.

The embarrassment diminished just enough to reply, “Is there even a point to this?”

“A point to what?”

“A point to—” He gestured towards the desk, the trashcan. “Why do my best when nobody will believe it’s my work?!”

I had never heard him raise his voice in the time I’d known him. I didn’t think anybody at home had.

But the rumor mill had been at work for a few weeks already. It wasn’t like him to react that way and so late. There had to be something else. “Did something happen?”

“Mother said a variety show was interested in interviewing me.” He huffed and pushed up his glasses as he started to pace around, a way of burning energy that threatened to come out of his mouth instead. “A variety show,” he repeated with disgust. “They are not interested in my work at all. They just want to show the child prodigy, cast more doubt on me in front of a camera, then cast me aside in favor of the next shiny thing.”

“Well, yeah,” I replied. “But is that so bad for you?”

Yu stopped moving and looked at me like I had grown a second head. “Do you want me to get embarrassed on national TV?”

“But you don’t know if that will happen.”

He contemplated what I said for a few seconds.

“I can’t know that it won’t, either.”

“You could take it as a chance to make yourself known. Talk to them like you talk to father when you discuss philosophy. It’s not the general public you need to charm, it’s the scholars.” I shrugged. “Know your target audience.”

He stared hard at me, but he didn’t seem completely unreceptive to the idea. “When did you become a marketing expert, sister?”

Little did he know that I had spent four years working at a marketing company.

“It’s just an idea,” I said. “Anyway, can’t you say you don’t want to go?”

“Mother already accepted.” He shook his head. “But it is like you said. I should be looking at this from another angle.” A pause. “Do you honestly think I’ll do well?”

“I do,” I answered sincerely. “And I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.”

“I know. That’s why I’m asking you, not mother.”

I smiled a little at that. “That’s me. Always pointing out uncomfortable truths when no one else would.”

It seems that this had also been a trait of Satori’s, so I was safe from suspicion on that account.

“I appreciate your support,” he said, looking calmer and walking to the trashcan to fish out the notebook. The crumpled papers remained there, though. “Yes, I think I will be able to do this.” He said more for his benefit than mine. “Thank you, Satori.”

My smile faltered a little upon hearing the name.

“Anytime, baby bro.”

He returned the pet name with a glare. “Hush. Close the door on your way out. I don’t want any interruptions.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, slipping out and almost closing the door before he stopped me.

“Satori.” He did not lift his eyes from his writing, and he spoke in a monotone, as if wanting to detach himself from what he was saying. “Do you ever feel like everybody takes your accomplishments for granted? That you don’t have any margin for error?”

He was detaching himself from the questions because Yu was a rational person, and as such, feelings ought not to be paid any attention. They were irrelevant, and yet they were eating at him.

Something sank in the pit of my stomach as I processed what he had said; a very familiar fear that had accompanied me for many years and I’d never been able to shake off.

It’s not fair, I found myself thinking again, that a kid had to endure this kind of pressure.

And any words of consolation would be cheap, and Yu was far too smart not to see through a weak attempt at comfort.

“All too often,” I said, and then I remembered a conversation shared a year ago. “But what matters is that you are satisfied with what you do. If others think less of you because of it it’s their problem, not yours. Easier said than done, I know.”

It didn’t feel like a conversation I should have been having with a middle school kid, but then again, few with him did.

He looked up for a moment, and, apparently satisfied, nodded and went back to work.

I understood then that Satori hadn’t been the only lonely kid in the family.

A month later, when I looked at the new school uniform lying on my bed, I still had trouble believing what was happening.

I also had trouble believing that somebody had thought it was a good idea to dress students in clothes these eye-searing, but I took consolation in knowing that it was better than the boy’s uniform. One thing was for sure: Meiou had to be a damn good school, because nobody was choosing it for the uniforms.

The next day, when I first went to school, I felt like a cosplayer dressed in a mix of crimson-rose red with yellow accents and black knee-high socks. I hated those socks. They kept slipping down, and I’ve never been a fan of showing my knees.

My parents hurried me into getting ready, and we took the train to the neighboring city while my little brother made a smartass comment about being abandoned in favor of the older child. I was the mature one, so I stuck my tongue out at him when no one else was looking.

The commute from home to Meiou took an hour. I saw some other students in the car with their parents, but they kept to themselves, and I spent that time dealing with my mother’s attempts to tame my hair, and trying not to think too much of what waited for me at school. As Hagiri had so eloquently put during our first meeting, during middle school I was the girl who lost her memory. Here, my reputation didn’t precede me, although, to be fair, I was the odd kid that was starting high school at fifteen instead of fourteen.

I remembered my high school years. The last two were much better than the previous years, but that was because I transferred. Some say those are the best years of one’s life. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back.

I was not a teenager anymore, though, so my outlook was not quite as dramatic as it had been back then, and I took my situation with a mix of resignation and curiosity at what I’d face.

The nagging thoughts that I had spent nearly two years in this world and made no progress regarding my situation chose that moment to resurface, and I stomped on them as hard as I could because this was decidedly not the time to sulk. There was plenty when I was by my lonesome.

The school grounds of Meiou were something from another world for me, an uncultured swine who in my previous life had only gone to schools in the bad parts of town. Even as a semi-private school kid, the facilities I’d seen had never even come close to these. I parted ways with my parents at the entrance, where they were led to the school gym, while older students showed us newbies the way to our classrooms.

In our homeroom, we were seated in alphabetical order. It landed me on the second row, not before my name got called wrong and I was confused for a boy. The teacher made an annotation on his list and proceeded to mangle the names of several more students with imaginative parents.

After that, the rest of the day was spent in a school-wide assembly where we went back to our parents and the director made some generic speech about the value of hard work and group unity, and honestly, I stopped paying attention halfway and entertained myself watching the other families. Judging by other students’ faces, I was not alone in my boredom, but the parents seemed to be unanimously ecstatic. There were a lot of pictures, a lot of speeches, and I think I saw a few parents cry, to the dismay of their children. I don’t think I fully realized until that day how important it was to get into a good high school.

Then the day was over, and we went back home. While my mother went with Yu to ask him how his day had been, my father called me aside.

“Satori, can you come here a moment?”

“Yes?”

I wasn’t sure what to make of his request.

In the time we had been living together, I had learned that he wasn’t a very open person, and the longer I’d heard him talk was when he was taking job calls or when discussing with Yu a topic of interest. He was a knowledgeable, stoic man, and though he wasn’t the most affectionate parent, he gave off a vibe of silent protector of the family. That was why his words surprised me so much, and why to this day I can’t forget how much they got to me.

“I know these years have been very hard on you, but I want you to know that your mother and I are very proud of what you’ve accomplished today. I must confess that we were worried about your attitude, but the way you’ve worked these past two years… your studies, your behavior at home…” He made a pause, looking worried, trying to find the proper words. “I’m sorry that we were so hard on you. When you were in that accident, your mother and I nearly lost our world.”

I swallowed a knot in my throat. “You’d still have Yu.”

“Both of you are our world. It can’t be as long as one of you isn’t in it.”

I knew these words weren’t for me. And maybe because of it, or despite it, my eyes began to water.

“I always knew you had this fight in you. No parent could ask for a better daughter.”

And with a light pat and a squeeze of my upper arm, he gave me a reassuring smile and left the room.

Left me thinking that, even if he had told me something that I’d needed to hear all my life, the one who needed to hear those words the most wasn’t here, and nobody but me knew.

I took out the chessboard Yu and I used sometimes and set to arrange the pieces in their squares, something mechanical to keep my mind from drifting to places where I did not want it to be, and a habit from my childhood that I had nearly forgotten.

The board wasn’t magnetized, so the satisfying ‘clack’ sound that meant everything was locked in its rightful place was missing.

The next day, class began for real, and to be honest, the routine was pretty much the same as in middle school. The biggest differences for me were the length of the commute and that I didn’t know anybody, but neither bothered me. I actually enjoyed having some time to myself every morning to think and read. As for the second part, well, I wasn’t a very social person. Acquaintances would come in time, perhaps.

And one of the first steps towards that was joining a club. It wasn’t mandatory, but not participating in any extracurricular activities was frowned upon, and this time I did want to start on a good note with the faculty.

If my old middle school had only had a handful clubs, Meiou was the exact opposite. When the bell rang and I headed outside, the clubs had set up tables near the entrance and its members were recruiting in full force, jumping every freshman they spotted.

It was easy to pick us out. We all had the same lost faces and did the same double take when we saw the amount of clubs to choose from. I counted at least seven sport clubs (soccer, baseball, track, basketball, swimming, judo, kendo and freaking archery, and even I felt tempted to join one of the last three because they looked so cool and girls we allowed to be something else than managers), brass band, shogi, chemistry, calligraphy, biology, hanafuda, art… I had no clue how they maintained a decent membership to stay open, but then it clicked that this was probably why the recruiters were so aggressive.

And I, like a dumbass, got caught in the crossfire.

A very spirited student stepped in front of me as I approached the table of the gardening club, because I had figured that I should stick to what I began two years ago. She wore her hair in two long pigtails and had a blindingly white smile that could put a car seller to shame.

“You look like a girl who can sew!” She said.

“Ah, yes, but I was going to—”

“Here, why don’t you take a look at this?” She shoved a pink and blue pamphlet on my nose. A teddy bear in a filly dress smiled at me. “We’re the handicrafts club! Here we meet to sew cute things and clothes! Have you ever sewed you own clothes? It’s—”

“Emi, stop intercepting every girl you see, she was coming to us!”

One of the guys from the gardening club had stood up, seething, and slammed his hands on the table.

“Aw, do you seriously want such a cute girl to be lifting dung bags every day after school?”

“It’s fertilizer.”

While the flattery was appreciated, that was exactly what I had planned to do. “I was in the gardening club in middle school, too.”

“See? She’s ours!”

“Shut up, Yasu!” Emi spat at him, and the turned to me with a complete shift in demeanor. “All the more reason to try something different! Widen your array of skills! You already know how to water a plant, so why not learn how to sew plushies? Knit a fluffy scarf?”

She made a great case. I liked sewing, and a decade of making my own cosplays had helped me learn, not that I was going to say that to her. My cosplaying hobby was to stay firmly locked up in my past, where no one could ask which characters I had cosplayed. Awkward.

But gardening. My cacti. My thorny bushes. My newfound skill of not murdering unsuspecting greenery. What was I going to do without them?

“Hey, do you like anime?” Another student shouted at me from a different table. “Come watch and discuss with us!”

The girl’s tone shifted again. “Go away, this is between Yasu and I!”

“Yeah, find someone else to convert to your cult!” Yasu looked at me in the eye. I looked away because I found it very uncomfortable. He didn’t reek of charisma like his competitor did, but he sounded passionate, if slightly constipated when he spoke. “Come to us! We’ve got a greenhouse and we’ve been promised a corner of the school grounds—”

“The greenhouse is shared with biology and botany and home economics, and you aren’t going to get any—”

“Well you don’t have a club room either, you share with hana—”

“Don’t tell her, you twit!”

I watched the exchange in silence, with the pamphlet of the smiley bear in my right hand, wondering if it was too late to turn around and learn about flower arrangements instead. My blank face must have been indicative of my thoughts, because they hurried to reassure me to stay, and suddenly neither of them looked so confident. I noticed that there were another boy and girl, respectively, sitting behind their club tables with second-hand embarrassment.

“Please!” Emi suddenly, begged, bowing and putting her hands together in a praying gesture. “There are only two of us! The guys from the hanafuda club will kick us out of the room if we don’t get more members!”

“Don’t try to guilt-trip her! We’re only three and you don’t see us doing the same!”

Ouch.

“Look! We only meet on Mondays and Fridays! The gardening guys can have you the rest of the time! It’s okay if you skip meetings too! I’m begging you!”

Yasu was taken aback by her outburst. “E-Emi—”

Mirroring Yasu’s earlier actions, she slammed a hand on her own table, making the other girl jump. “Don’t you want to keep your club alive by any means? Then this is how you fight for it!”

He seemed to have a revelation in that instant.

All this intensity made me think I had stepped into a shonen manga.

…Wait.

“You’re… You’re right.” He said quietly. “There’s nothing more important than the club. Hanging onto my foolish pride won’t get me anywhere!”

“President…” Said the boy beside him in awe.

This was not happening.

“I’m begging you too!” Yasu told me. “We meet on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, but there’s usually someone around every day anyway. Feel free to come anytime you please!”

He held out an inscription sheet at me. Emi followed his example and did the same.

“We’ll be in your debt forever!” Emi insisted.

I was weak, and it’s really difficult to say no to a begging kid, let alone two who had teamed up.

In a rare outburst, my father laughed when I told him what had happened, but Yu and my mother didn’t take it so well. Being in more than one club wasn’t encouraged usually – commitment to one is what looked best on college applications. I didn’t want to think about college yet, though. One step at a time. Just knowing I’d have to go through high school and entrance exams again, and that I’d signed away my life for three years with these many commitments was overwhelming enough.

Besides, there was always the possibility that I’d go back to my old life as spontaneously as I’d come into this one, but I didn’t count on it, and I certainly didn’t want to replicate the circumstances to try. My best bet to get info at the moment was killing myself to be picked up and shipped to the Spirit World, and for obvious reasons, I discarded it.

It would be a long time before I had a chance to come in contact with people who could help, so for the time being, I needed to be patient and try not to mess up any more lives. I was confident that my appearance in this world was so marginal to the main plot that it wouldn’t have much relevance when all was said and done.

I was also aware that my confidence was didn’t have a very solid foundation, but I didn’t want to stress test it yet, in case it crumbled. I had other things to look forward to, in the meantime.

[tackyink]

I shouldn’t be writing. I have a pair of pants to sew and a hat to accessorize, but these fricking cosplays haven’t let me write for weeks, and I needed to. I’ve gone from the aftermath of the terror attack, to protests on the streets, to the uncertainty of this political unstability, and right when I was settling down the only convention I go to every year is coming up. I just want to write in peace!

This was written a few months ago, but I’ve added things, changed a few others and edited a bit, badly, because my eyes hurt and I’m medicated and falling asleep.

Fourth installment of the terrible YYH self-insert.

There I go again Pretending to be you Make-believing That I have a soul beneath the surface

When my father asked what I wanted for Christmas, I knew right away what to reply. It might sound weird putting it like this, but if it was 1984, there was something I was in time to do for the first and last time.

I had known from the moment I saw it announced in a music magazine, just a week ago. The Yu Yu Hakusho world may have differed from my own, but some things remained the same, and one of them was the existence of my favorite band.

Queen was going to play its last concerts in Japan in 1985, and I had to go see them. I could not miss my last opportunity to see Freddie Mercury and John Deacon live, no matter how out of character it may have been for Satori.

But the request didn’t surprise my father. In fact, he said he had thought I’d ask for something like that.

That day I learned that the vinyl records and the CDs next to the music player in the living room were Satori’s, not her parents’. I had found out the one thing she and I seemed to have in common: a love of classic rock.

If you had asked me at that moment in time if travelling through dimensions thirty-three years in time and getting stuck in the body of a teenager in order to see Queen in their prime had been worth it, I would have said yes, logic be damned.

But before that could happen, a lot more had to be done.

For months, I had been stuck studying at home with tutors helping in my recovery, so for all effects and purposes, my job from September to April was to cram in my brain all the knowledge I had supposedly lost, and while subjects like math and science only warranted a quick refresher (and it was a good thing that Satori wasn’t in high school yet, because I hadn’t done any real math in close to twelve years), Japanese and history were another matter altogether. Luckily for me, I suppose, both were things I’d been interested in in my previous life and I couldn’t have found a more immersive way to learn the language if I tried, so catching up didn’t feel as frustrating as it would have otherwise, and I had always been good at studying.

The biggest hurdle came from elsewhere.

While I had determined that I wouldn’t go back to the tennis club once I returned to school, nothing could save me from the small piano at home.

Don’t get me wrong. At first, I thought it was amazing to have one. Learning how to play one had been a lifelong wish back when I wasn’t Satori. Then I had been asked if I remembered how to play it, and my deer in the headlights face had said it all.

About two months after the accident, my piano teacher came home, and though the news that I’d forgotten everything had been broken to her, I don’t think anybody realized the extent of the drama until I said I couldn’t read a score. If I had wished a thousand times in my previous life that my parents had signed me up for music lessons as a kid, I wished it even harder now. The extent of my musical ability was singing decently and having learned to play Greensleeves by ear on a toy keyboard. That was it. I had to start from scratch at thirteen-slash-twenty-eight years old.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t as disastrous as I had expected. As if Satori’s own body had grown frustrated with my uselessness, the hands seemed to move over the keys more easily than they should have. I realized it was muscle memory, moving my fingers to the keys without knowing what they were and pushing the pedals at the appropriate time.

But it sounded horrible, anyway. Muscle memory could only take me so far, and it didn’t matter much when it came to learning more pieces, but it was a small consolation that my new body was cooperating. My lack of coordination in my past life had been nothing short of sad, and this was a welcome change.

It wasn’t the first time I had thought so. Satori’s body was, nearsightedness notwithstanding, an upgrade from mine. She was more agile and in better shape than my paper-pusher butt used to be, but the most remarkable change was her brain. I don’t know what the physiological differences between hers and mine were, because I still felt very much like myself, but thinking with her brain was like coming into a sunlit clearing after wading through fog for years. Her attention span, her quick thinking, the way she absorbed information like a sponge was something I hadn’t felt for well over ten years. I didn’t get startled as easily, I wasn’t in an alert state 24/7, I didn’t feel anxiety creeping up on me at every little setback. My new brain was working with me instead of being bent on self-sabotage.

Thanks to that, I was able to make good progress with my studies before I went reenrolled at school. I still sucked at piano, but time and practice would take care of that, I hoped.

I remember the day at the end of February, nearly half a year after my accident, that my parents sat me down and told me with as much tact as they could that the school had decided to hold me back a year. This was a rare occurrence in Japan, from what I’d gathered, usually reserved for students who had missed too many school days.

My parents thought that Satori would think this was the end of the world. Fortunately, I wasn’t her, and since I didn’t know anybody at school save for one girl that had come visit me once while I was home, I didn’t care in which class I was put. If anything, I was worried about going back to school, in general.

All in all, I thought my parents took the grade repetition harder than me. There was probably some social stigma I wasn’t aware of associated to it.

I asked Yu about it when they weren’t around, but he shrugged off my concerns, instead asking me, “Do you mind being held back a year?”

“No.”

“Then however they think it reflects on you is their problem, not yours.”

This kid had just turned eleven and already had more aplomb than most adults I knew.

This kid also would, in five years’ time, if my assumptions were correct, have the guts to purposefully piss off Kurama in a room full of plants. I tried not to think about that.

“So you don’t care, either? Won’t the other kids laugh at you because your sister is dumb?” I joked, though in truth I was a little worried about it.

He looked at me like I had just demonstrated how dumb I really was. Kid could stare down a giant if he wanted. “I don’t care about their opinion. But I do care that you’re repeating a year.”

“Oh?”

“Next year we’ll go to school together.”

He was on his last year of elementary school. Normally, the gap of three years between us would have meant we’d always go to separate schools, but now we would be in the same place in middle and high school while I was a third-year and he a freshman. I would have an ally at school, however briefly! But then, the implications of that dawned on me right away.

If I was going to be at the same school as Yu, it meant that I was going to share a school with Kurama, as well.

I tried to smile sincerely at Yu’s comment, because it had been cute as heck, but the sudden realization had killed my enthusiasm swiftly.

“Yeah,” I said, hoping that he didn’t notice my mood change. “That will be cool.”

For five months, I’d managed to keep myself from thinking about it. For five blissful months of denial, I had concentrated on family life, on studies, and thought as little as I could about what the future held.

Because I had a good inkling of what my brother would get involved in in a few years, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to stay out of it myself. I didn’t think I wanted to, even, but then again, it’s easy to be brave when you’re looking at problems from a distance. I couldn’t tell how I’d react when the time came.

I had gone through many possibilities in the time I’d spent at home since I realized in which reality I was, but one that hadn’t crossed my mind until Yu pointed it out was that we were going to share a school, and that, in time, that would probably translate into going to Meiou with him. The perspective made me both excited and nervous.

Saying that Kurama was my favorite Yu Yu Hakusho character would have been the understatement of the two centuries I’d lived in. Saying that I’d been crushing on him since I was a teen would have only taken second place to the former assertion.

And I still hadn’t come to terms with him being a real person that I had a more than fair chance of meeting him in this reality.

And, because I had to be a worrywart, instead of being happy about it, I grew increasingly anxious about it as time passed. I didn’t want to be within ten miles of the guy lest I risk blubbering something silly and giving myself away.

But that would happen in time, I thought.

Maybe inspired by this turn of events, and since I’ve always had a bit of a masochistic streak, along with a liking of cacti and all manner of spiky flora, and four prickly children of my own at the time of my accident, when the school year started, I dropped tennis to go for gardening.

This caused some confusion among the staff and Satori’s teammates. Apparently nobody switched clubs once enrolled in one, but people were willing to overlook it because of my rather odd circumstances. There were still a lot of whispers behind my back – way to start off at school on the right foot.

Yu thought it was funny and more constructive that I had chosen to spend the next two years learning how not to kill a potted plant than hitting a ball, because it turns out that Satori had a notoriously black thumb.

I did, too. I once managed to kill a succulent in one month. And I’d felt horribly guilty even as I repeated to myself that it had been ill by the time I’d received it.

…Anyway.

I joined the gardening club because my other options were a sports team, which would mean I’d have no excuse to not go back to tennis, brass band, with was a definite no because I had enough embarrassing myself home with a piano in private, and calligraphy, which looked really cool but, call me weird if you may, I thought that before trying to draw kanji skillfully I should learn to read them.

So gardening it was. And being a non-sports, non-musical club, it only met three days a week, so it left me plenty of time to study.

Because that’s how I spent my first two years in the Yu Yu Hakusho world: learning nonstop all the things I should already know, and learning what I should have been learning at the time so I could enroll to a good high school.

Something I noticed as the months went by is that my parents seemed to be fascinated by the change in disposition in her daughter. I never got the impression from them or Satori’s own diaries that she had been a bad student, but I suppose she hadn’t shown so much drive to absorb knowledge as I did. Though, of course, I was doing it out of necessity, not just for the sake of knowing.

They were proud. And the prouder they were of their daughter, the guiltier I felt for not being her.

Yu didn’t have many friends at school.

I’d had the impression that smart kids were treated better here than they were back in my country, and that was true, with conditions: Yu was admired for his brains, but was worse, much worse with social niceties than I’d been at my prime.

For the record, I had been an absolute and complete disaster at getting along with most kids in my class, and that was taking into account that I saw them every school day for ten whooping years.

On the other hand, Satori’s classmates had moved onto high school, and the only friendships I retained were those of the people in the tennis club, who I didn’t know, and, frankly, did not care to. I more than doubled their age, and it was evident that they felt awkward talking to someone who didn’t remember who they were.

That gave me the perfect excuse to spend most of my free time with Yu, who made everything better with that thinly-veiled disdain for humanity of his and made him look like a pompous prick in the eyes of his peers. I, in turn, found it incredibly funny coming from someone his age.

Despite that, I told him to cut the back on the attitude because I was supposed to give him good advice, but he wouldn’t budge. He was at a difficult age, in an isolating position, and he had time to change.

I would lie if I said I didn’t worry about what he would do when I graduated, but while it lasted, we took comfort in each other’s company, a much needed familiarity for two introverts who’d been dropped in a foreign place.

During my first semester at school, I went with my father to see Queen at Yoyogi National Stadium.

I cried like the little girl I was supposed to be, and the next day I had no voice from singing along at the top of my lungs. I also had a lot of tears to spare when thinking about the band’s future, and it was hard to keep them at bay while I wasn’t alone.

On the way out, we bought tour shirts and a badge with the group’s logo that I proudly hung from my schoolbag.

Nobody took more than passing notice of it in class, except for a boy in my grade that I found staring really hard at the badge one afternoon, while I spoke to a club companion. He seemed to freeze for a second when he noticed that I’d caught him staring, but then he came closer. My clubmate observed the exchange quietly.

“Do you like Queen?” He asked.

He was a bit shorter than me, with stark black hair and piercing violet eyes, and he had spoken so seriously that I wondered if he would try to maim me if the answer wasn’t satisfactory.

“Of course I do,” I replied. “I wouldn’t carry this otherwise.”

His stony expression didn’t change, but his eyes sparkled. “I like them too. Who’s your favorite?”

“Um, I like them all, but Brian and Freddie—”

His expression lit up, but even then he didn’t smile. He sounded excited when he spoke next. “Did you know Brian May made his guitar himself?”

A smile escaped me before I could notice it. “Yeah! With an old fireplace and mother-of-pearl buttons—”

“I heard he spent years on it!”

“Can you imagine building your own guitar so young and so well that you can go pro with it?”

“He’s a genius.”

“Dang right he—”

Someone cleared their throat behind me. “Um, Kaito…”

My clubmate looked very much out of place when I looked at her.

“O-oh,” I said embarrassedly. “Yes, we should get going.” I turned to the boy. “Sorry, I should go. I didn’t catch your name…?”

“Kaname Hagiri.”

This world was rife with school kids trying to surprise kill me, I swear. I stared owlishly at him for a second before I remembered my manners. “Nice to meet you. I’m—”

“Everybody at school knows who you are. You’re the girl who lost her memory.”

I didn’t like the tone he used. “I have a name.”

I was surprised at how much it bothered me. Reducing Satori’s existence to her accident felt… wrong. And in turn I felt like a hypocrite, because what was Satori to me but another body? Yu’s sister? The girl who played tennis and piano and that had had a lot of friends that I’d managed to alienate in just a few weeks of school?

Satori’s existence, even to me, wasn’t an entity in itself. I always thought about her in relation to something, someone else. It wasn’t fair.

Hagiri was taken aback by my brusque reply, but he turned around and left anyway without saying anything else.

I thought that had been the end of it, and I was wrong.

He caught me by surprise one day after lunch, just as I’d left Yu to go back to class.

“Kaito,” he called solemnly, and his face wore the same immutable and slightly threatening expression from last time. His words didn’t match. “Do you listen to Deep Purple?”

As a matter of fact, I did.

I wondered if that was his way of apologizing for his rudeness, though I had been rude right back, so he had no reason to do it.

But what mattered was that, from then on, we stopped to talk to each other on the corridor, and that occasionally I’d have company when I wanted to pick up something from the music store.

This only lasted until the end of the school year, when we went on our separate ways to different schools. I wondered if I’d meet him again. I wondered if it would happen during the Sensui saga, and I wondered if I should, could have done something to prevent him from getting recruited. That nagging feeling wouldn’t leave me for months after I graduated, but only time would tell.

It was precisely during this year that the training wheels came off. The high school access exams were closing in, and my parents, who years ago had hoped to send Satori to one where she could focus better on developing her tennis skills, had to let go of the idea and find another place for me. I needed to compensate my lack of physical skills with raw brainpower, and given how tough school in this country was, I wasn’t sure I’d be up to par.

That insecurity kept on building up as the months passed, and by the time March was approaching I was a bundle of nerves. I took the Step Eiken, the exams to get an English certification, and took tests for public and private schools. My parents weren’t sure I’d be able to get into Meiou, since that school could afford to be picky with its students and my middle school hadn’t given me a recommendation thanks to me spending the last year and a half just trying to catch up. But if there’s something that drives me to do things is people telling me I can’t pull them off, so I studied like I’d never studied in my life. Harder than when I first woke up and had to learn all the grammar and vocabulary I didn’t know just to communicate with my family.

Having an obsessive personality has its perks, every now and then.

Yu supported me in this endeavor, even if he didn’t outright say it. On occasion, he made flashcards and diagrams with the excuse that they were meant for him, but I could use them too if I wanted. I knew him enough by then to realize that he knew the material better than the teachers. I think he was actually proud that his sister had turned bookish, that we had something else to bond over, and wanted to help.

In two months’ time, the exam results came, and with them the resolution of this weird phase of my life. First arrived the letters for public high schools, then for private ones.

I opened that last one with my parents breathing down my neck.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to read its contents.

But now, clear as day, I was able to see that I’d made it into Meiou.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding it as my mother announced that we were going out for sushi that night, and my father clapped me on the shoulder with a satisfied smile and told me to think if I wanted anything as a present.

I considered the admission a present in and of itself, but that didn’t stop me from asking if I could have a Discman.

[tackyink]

This one is sad, but I think things will look up from the next part onwards. Lots of setup until now.

Nothing is crueler than children who come from good homes

Another thing I learned, sometime before my encounter with the hospital ghost, was that Satori and Yu weren’t on the best of terms.

I’d said before that Yu had only been at the hospital when I woke up, and he didn’t show up any other day. I chalked it up to him having school, and if I had been in our parents’ shoes, I wouldn’t have wanted him around anyway. A hospital was no place for a kid.

I should have guessed by my mother’s reticence to speak when I asked about him that something was off, and little by little it became clear why.

My parents didn’t waste any time in finding me someone to help me study while I was out of school. I had class with two different tutors, morning and afternoon, from Monday to Friday, and though I was supposed to be taking piano lessons twice a week, my parents decided to set those aside until I was able to regain more urgent abilities. My routine, then, became a study marathon during the weekdays, only interrupted to go to doctor check-ups, while my father was at work, my brother at school, and my mother did household chores that never seemed to end.

My parents were kind, serious people. My mother had that stubborn determination of people who set a goal for themselves and never let go, and my recovery was her new goal. When I was not busy studying, she took me out to show me the streets near our home, my school, the train station, the shops. She helped me make flashcards for all the kanji I needed to memorize. She was there to ingrain in me manners that I had never been taught and rescue me when a well-meaning neighbor stopped us on the street to ask me how I was doing and I inevitable stumbled over my words. And she did everything with an unbreakably polite smile and a firm resolve.

As for my dad, I only saw him in the evenings. He didn’t give an approachable vibe. He wasn’t talkative, had a severe expression, and mostly spoke to us only to ask how our day had gone and give advice. The longest I saw him talk was one day at dinner, when he got into a philosophical discussion with Yu I couldn’t follow due to my limited vocabulary – and had I had it, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to, anyway. As time went by, I got the impression that he cared deeply for his family, but he didn’t know how to express it very well, as it was the case for many men of older generations. His way of showing affection was showing interest in what we did every day, even when the most consequential thing I had done was walking alone to the convenience store, he listened like I was telling him the most interesting story in the world.

He was strict and I never saw him crack a joke, but he treated us with the utmost respect. He was the textbook prototype of a family head, and he took on the role as if it was second nature to him, though when I think about it, I suppose it must have been taxing to be so restrained all the time.

And then there was Yu.

I thought he wasn’t talkative either, at first.

I was wrong. He just didn’t talk to me.

This went on for weeks, and while it was bearable when the whole family was together, it was extremely uncomfortable when Yu and I had to be in a room alone. He had perfected the art of ignoring me at all times, and only broke his silence when I addressed him directly.

I had to stop that situation, if only because it was fueling my anxious tendencies. For weeks, I didn’t know how to approach the issue. My opportunity came one Sunday afternoon, when I found him playing chess by his lonesome in the living room. He had a book on his lap, and checked it frequently in between moves.

I remembered doing something similar as a child, but I never put much effort in it. Playing alone bored me to death, and I didn’t have anyone to play with at home. My parents had been too busy with work, and my grandmother didn’t know how to play. I learned soon that all my attempts to rope somebody into playing would be useless, so I stopped trying.

Yu was a completely different kind of beast. When something grabbed his interest, he didn’t let it rest until he knew all its ins and outs, and chess was no exception.

He didn’t lift his eyes from the board, but he was aware that I was looking at him, and he asked in English, out of habit, “May I help you?”

I got startled. “Not really,” I said awkwardly, but I thought this was a good chance to try to speak to him. I didn’t lose anything by trying, except a few years of life. Boy, was I nervous about talking to a ten year old kid. “Isn’t it better to play against somebody?”

“Evidently,” he said with distaste, still looking at the pieces. “But I don’t see anybody available here. Do you?”

A ten year old kid that could be somewhat intimidating, in a pedantic kind of way.

“I could if you wanted,” I said hesitantly. “I’m not good at it, but it would be better than knowing your own moves ahead of time, right?”

The look he gave me was identical to that of the eleven year old I had once tutored when I told him that pink had been a manly color in the days of yore. “You?”

I was taken aback by the edge in his voice. “Yes?”

“You don’t know how to play.”

There was venom dripping from his voice. I didn’t know what Satori had done for him to be so resentful, but it had to be bad. Kids don’t hold grudges for weeks unless they’ve been seriously aggravated.

“I wouldn’t be offering if I didn’t know,” I shot back. I was not going to be intimidated by a runt.

His eyes were fixed on me, judgmental, and those few seconds felt like an eternity. Then he lowered his gaze back to the board and said, “Feel free to join.”

It was evident that I wasn’t wanted, but turning down his offer at this point would have been far ruder than sitting uncomfortably for a match.

“Do you mind being black?” He asked, looking at the pieces he was setting on the board instead of me.

“Not at all.”

The match that lasted all of five minutes before my king was cornered. He stopped several times to check his book, too. In another situation I would have been jealous of his brains, but I found too dang funny that someone almost a third of my age was destroying me at chess.

Even though I had never learned to play as I wanted, it was really fun to try to figure out what his strategy was, catch how a set of moves worked so I didn’t fall into the trap again. And I did fall, but I didn’t care. We played match after match, and save a few notable exceptions, I started to stretch their length gradually.

I sucked really bad, but that didn’t stop me from having the most fun I’d had since I had landed in this world.

By the time we were interrupted, it was getting dark and our mother was watching us from behind the doorway in astonishment. I was sitting with my back to it, so I didn’t notice until Yu looked up at her.

“Is something the matter?”

“Oh, no! You two keep playing. Dinner will be ready soon.”

There I went, feeling awkward again. Like I had crossed a line I didn’t know existed. And when I turned around, Yu was watching me again with that same judging stare, but I didn’t feel any hostility coming from him this time.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Why are you doing this?”

I didn’t know what he meant. “Playing with you?”

“Being nice to me. Is this some sort of scheme?”

Holy shit. What was the relationship between these two? How strained it had to be for Yu, no matter how smart he was, to be asking that?

I had to say something, but there was no adequate response to such a question.

“Why would I do that?” I asked, avoiding his eyes.

I had been an only child. I didn’t know how siblings were supposed to act, but I had assumed these two had gotten along more or less like my friends’ brothers and sisters did. It was now clear that I had been wrong.

“You always make fun of me. You never care about anything I do.”

The words hurt like a stab, even knowing they weren’t meant for me, not really. But if I had to live with this family, if I had to have a brother while I found out what had happened to me, we both deserved better than this unending tension.

I thought, in a way, that since I had robbed him of his real sister, it was my duty to be a decent one for him. And if that entailed making up for whatever had happened between Yu and Satori, so be it.

“I don’t remember,” I said earnestly, eyes downcast. “But that’s no excuse. I’m sorry.”

Yu’s defensive stance dropped, likely because he had been expecting me to attack him, not apologize. “You are sorry?”

I looked straight at him. “I am.”

He was at a loss for a few seconds, but he hadn’t been swayed when he spoke. “Empty words. You are saying you don’t remember.”

“No matter how I acted, it was bad enough to make you hate me,” I replied. “So I am sorry. I’m not asking you to forgive me, but you don’t need to avoid me. I’m not going to make fun of you again.”

Call it an excuse to feel a little bit better about myself, if you want, but letting him be at ease at home was the least I could do for him.

He readjusted his glasses in a nervous gesture that concealed most of his face, and this time he sounded shy when he spoke. “I don’t hate you. You’re my sister.”

And then, it was I who didn’t know what to reply. It was very much like me to let a kid leave me fumbling for words.

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. What I wanted to say was that I was not her sister, but I had to try for both of our sakes.

Something changed that evening. Yu was less standoffish from then on, asking me to play with him, helping me willingly when I got stuck with my homework. In turn, I asked him about what he studied, and found out that he had a liking for linguistics and philosophy even then. We started to go book hunting together, he for specialized manuals, I for everything that I needed to get up to date with what I was supposed to already know.

One time, as we made our way back with bags full of books, he remarked offhandedly that it was like I was a different person.

And once again, I didn’t know what to reply.

Satori kept a diary. Part of my self-imposed homework, for which I felt like a disgusting person, was going through it to learn about her. 

At first I wasn’t able to read a thing. As I got used to her handwriting and my vocabulary expanded, I was able to find out many things, one of which was made obvious constantly.

Satori was deathly jealous of Yu, and felt her parents were ignoring her in favor of him, so she was taking out her frustration on him. And from what I could understand, she felt guilty about lashing out at him, but she didn’t seem to know how to manage the situation, and neither did her parents. Satori needed attention, and her parents weren’t the warmest.

She did well at school, at the club, in her afterschool lessons. To her, they were favoring him just because he did better. But she couldn’t catch up to him. Satori was bright, but she was no prodigy child, and at some point she gave up trying, and her grades started to slip.

I didn’t get all this information from the diary, per se, but I was able to piece the picture together from years of conversations at home.

On one of the last used pages, she had written that maybe it would’ve been better if she hadn’t been born.

I closed that diary and decide that I wouldn’t read anymore. I hid it at the back of a desk drawer, under a box, and tried to forget about it.

Satori had never seen the faces of her parents when she was at the hospital. She had lost her life thinking she wasn’t wanted, and I could only hope that there was a way to let her get it back.

And if that happened… What would that mean for me? Would I just die if she reclaimed her body? Fizzle out of existence, since I didn’t belong in this world to begin with? If everything could be reverted to how it was before the accident, would I go to my old life without looking back?

The question had been in the back of my mind since I had learned I was living in Mushiyori and who my brother was. Of course I wanted my family and friends back, but did I want my life as well?

Again, I pushed that question aside, perhaps because I feared what the answer would be. And, in any case, there was no use in overthinking something that might not happen.

[tackyink]

A continuation of yesterday’s story… Which I should probably have waited to edit on a PC instead of a phone and avoid inevitable silly mistakes, but oh well.

Forces go to work while we are sleeping If I could attack with a more sensible approach Obviously thats what I’d be doing

Dissociative fugue.

That was the verdict of the doctors after days of extensive testing. Physically speaking, I had a concussion, a first degree sprain in my right wrist, and a few bruises. And somehow, I’d been clinically dead for a minute, but I had come back from the other side when nobody expected me to pull through without any signs of brain or cardiopulmonary damage.

Except, of course, my memory. And that could loosely be attributed to the concussion or the shock of a near-death experience, so the doctors observed me with a lot of curiosity, but not much worry.

They reassured these people – my parents, I still couldn’t wrap my mind around that – that fugue states were transitory, and that it was a matter of time that I’d recover my memories.

I couldn’t do anything but sit there and listen to their theories. Even if I tried to explain what had happened, nobody would believe it. I could hardly believe it myself. And I could not explain myself, because I didn’t have the vocabulary to do so, and with my brother absent I had nobody to translate.

His name was Yu, and after I woke up I didn’t see him again at the hospital, so I communicated with the personnel with a mix of my own mangled Japanese and their sloppy English.

I couldn’t do much those first few days. My dominant hand was immobilized with a plaster splint as soon as I complained that it hurt, and there was always someone in my room keeping an eye on me. My mother, despite how hard she had taken it when I woke up (and really, how else could a mother take her daughter forgetting about her?), had decided that she was going to remind me of everything I had forgotten, even if that meant recounting to me Satori’s life from the moment she was born.

Her determination was contagious.

Once it was evident that normal communication was impossible, she left the room to make a call, came back, and when my father came hours later to the hospital, he was carrying a Japanese-English dictionary that was heavy as a brick. I had to place it on the bed to use it, because I couldn’t hold it in my hands. But once we had that my mom pushed ahead with her plan, and every time I had trouble understanding something she said, or I needed a word I did not know, we had the dictionary to help.

To this moment I don’t know how we didn’t wear out the spine, because we used it constantly.

Those days had two effects on me, though neither were the one my mother had intended.

One, I got the harshest crash course in Japanese ever, and my vocabulary expanded considerably. I still spoke worse than a preschooler, but I knew more difficult words than one. Go ahead and explain to a four year old what a dissociative amnesia is, I dare you.

Two, I learned a lot about Satori and her family life. None of the things my mother told me could jog memories I did not have to start with, but I filed away as much information as my concussed brain allowed me.

Satori was thirteen, in her second year of middle school, and played tennis in a club. Her grades were okay, though they had been better years ago, and she took piano and English lessons after school. My mother was very surprised at how well I managed myself in English, because Satori’s English grades during the last year had been atrocious.

I laughed it off and said that that was odd.

There was more. My mother had been a secretary before becoming a stay at home mom, and my dad was a prosecutor. Her name was Yuko, his was Akio, and judging by the kanji of our names, our whole family was one big wordplay. My mother shared the first character of her name with my brother Yu, as I did with my father.

I stared at the kanji she wrote on a piece of paper. Yu’s name sounded masculine by itself, but used its meaning was ‘kindness’. He had a girl’s name.

I had no clue what Satori’s meant at first glance, but I’d soon learn that it had an obnoxious amount of pronunciations, and most of them were male names.

Some parents just have to make it difficult for their kids.

Our surname was Kaito, written with the characters of ‘sea’ and ‘wisteria’. It made me happy that I was able to read them without help.

Back to my new family, my mother told me that Yu was a very smart kid, which was a delicate way of saying that I had a genius brother, and that he was only ten but could speak English fluently, as well as read Chinese and classical Japanese. He spent a lot of time reading and writing, and didn’t have many friends, which was also another way of saying that he didn’t have any.

I noticed how she skirted around the subject when I asked how we got along.

I thought it was a funny coincidence that his name was Yu Kaito. A coincidence that started to make me uncomfortable as the days passed and I had time to sweat the small details. There was a CRT TV in my room. Nobody used mobile phones. There was a cassette player at the nurse station, and their phone was boxy and looked downright ancient. I had used one of those as a toy when I was little.

On the third day, I asked my mother for a calendar, and she gave me the calendar card with the image of two kittens she was carrying inside her purse.

1984. It was 1984.

I asked my mother – I was little by little getting used to think about her on those terms, if only to avoid any suspicious goof-ups on my part – if the calendar was right. She looked at me a little concerned, said it was, and asked me if I knew which year it was. I told her I did, I just but I had forgotten the date. She pointed to the 21st of September and suggested that I crossed a day off the calendar every day until I got readjusted.

It was one of those times that I didn’t know how I managed to keep my composure. It tried to smile at her, though I’m sure it came out more like a grimace, and she hugged me in a way that reminded me of my own mother. Before I realized, I was sobbing on her shoulder, and she was trying to console me with words I didn’t quite understand. She held me until I stopped crying, and she left me alone for a while with the calendar and my thoughts.

1984.

It was so Orwellian that I would have laughed if not for what it meant.

I was born in 1989. There was no body for me to return to. Wherever I had been transported to, I did not exist in this reality.

Did this mean that, when my time to be born came, another one would take my place? That I wasn’t supposed to be born in this timeline? Maybe the original Satori would switch places with me? But who was to say that my parents existed in this world at all?

I spent the afternoon thinking about possibilities, of people I missed, of getting used to a new family and country and culture all of a sudden, all while slowly crossing out numbers on the calendar. I saw my parents’ birthdays, my friends’, mine. I circled them to not forget, because even if my idea was to find a way back, I couldn’t bring myself to be optimistic about my chances. I didn’t know where to begin.

I’d been called a pessimist for many long years, especially when I was a child and unbridled optimism was what had been expected of me. But I had never been able to let go of my worries like that. Always overthinking, always theorizing what could go wrong and how to fix it before it happened. And it worked in my favor, most of the time. Even when fixing it wasn’t in my hands, I could take consolation in knowing how things worked, that if circumstances were a little different there would be a way, that if I pushed onwards, a possibility could eventually arise.

This time, though, I was utterly lost. Not enough information, no containment plans, no foundation upon which to build any.

The only thing to do was wait. I had to observe, learn, live. An opportunity to understand would surely come up, and when it did, I would be able to build upon that.

And so I crossed day after day with black ink, until I reached September 16th. The day of my accident.

I circled it in red, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to forget.

When I was released that weekend, my routine didn’t change much at first. I couldn’t be sent to school because I was still in recovery, supposedly, so for the first few days I stayed home alone with my mother while my parents scrambled to find a tutor who could come home and help me.

The Kaito family lived in a mansion, that is, something akin to a luxury apartment. It’s bigger, with more solid construction than a regular one; city housing meant for upper-middle class families. I spent the first few days with my mother, though as I got settled in, I decided that if I was stuck in this situation, I was going to adapt to it as fast as possible. I began reading everything that fell into my hands, and that was how I stumbled into the final clue that I needed to realize what was going on.

One afternoon, I was attempting to read one of my hospital forms with the help of a kanji dictionary, and the help of a regular dictionary to understand what the kanji said. Yu’s knack for all things wordy meant that we were excellently stocked on reference books, and I was going to take advantage of them to the fullest of my ability.

I spent a while deciphering the description of my condition, and when I got tired of figuring out technical terms I moved onto the basic part of the form: name, social security name, city of residence…

And that was where I came to a halt. I was able to read the first half of the name of the city.

My hands stilled over the pages of the dictionary.

1984.

Yu Kaito.

And a city whose name began by ‘mushi.’

Hesitantly, I began to pass the pages in search of the second character, giving the form nervous glances, not sure if fearing that I was right about my suspicion or worried that I had read it wrong and I was losing that one hint.

And right I was, I realized, when the dictionary gave the reading of the second character as ‘yori.’

If this was a coincidence, it wasn’t funny.

It wasn’t funny because it gave me context, a way to find people who could help me explain what had happened, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it for years. I could only hold on to hope until then, and if my supposition ended up being a mistake… could I take that?

It had to be a coincidence. Yu Yu Hakusho was not real. Real people didn’t get transported into their favorite anime series like a bad fic trope.

So, until I had hard evidence that my theory was right, I refused to entertain it. I convinced myself that I was looking for whatever trace of familiarity I could hold onto, and I needed to keep paying attention and gather clues that didn’t point to complete baloney.

But while the doubt stayed with me for some days, evidence piled up so high that I was forced to admit my situation was exactly what it looked like.

It became undeniable during one of my many follow-up visits at the hospital.

Doctor Kobayashi, the same that had been in my room when I first woke up, was telling my mother that my motor skills were fine, my brain activity was normal and that the fact that I was steadily regaining my linguistic ability was proof that my recovery was going well. That they would keep an eye on me for some time, but she didn’t need to worry. I was fine, save for the fugue state that didn’t seem to go away, but since I was behaving, they were positive that I’d regain my memory after the shock wore off. A resident sat next to the doctor, listening attentively to the conversation.

While they talked and I tried to figure what was going on, I saw a woman enter the doctor’s office. All would have been well if she hadn’t gone through a closed door. She seemed distraught, wandering without an objective, until she noticed that she was being stared at.

I was frozen on my chair, staring at her, wondering if this was it and I’d gone crazy at last. She seemed to be in her thirties, clad in a formal navy blue dress and a black jacket. Her eyes were sunken, and when they met my own, I felt a shiver go down my spine. It wasn’t because of her face alone. She radiated a chilling cold that seemed to skip clothes, skin and muscle to go straight to the marrow of my bones.

The doctor’s voice brought me back to earth, but I had caught the woman’s attention by then, and something told me that that wasn’t good.

“Satori, are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to look scared. “Sorry.”

The doctor smiled kindly. “If you feel anything odd you should tell your parents, all right?”

“Yes,” I repeated, nodding emphatically, and I tried to ignore the ice cold feeling that ran over me when a translucent hand attempted to touch my shoulder and instead sank in it.

“Where’s my body?” Said a voice in my head only I could only hear. “Why does no one else see me?”

The ghostly hand was protruding from the middle of my torso, and I hoped that the others weren’t paying attention to me, because I felt the blood drain from my face as I stared at it. But my lack of reaction made the spirit nervous, and she started to shriek as she tried to touch me to no avail, hands going through my physical body, each touch feeling like ice cubes were being shoved into my organs.

“Where’s my body? Where?! Tell me! I know you can see me, TELL ME!!”

When I thought I wouldn’t be able to bear it anymore, my mother thanked doctors Kobayashi and Kamiya and took my hand.

I looked at the resident as soon as I heard the name. Young, in his early to mid-twenties, with brown hair and glasses and a sharp stare.

He smiled at me. I squeezed my mom’s hand. The ghost shrieking behind me, the potential serial killer sitting there and the inability to do anything about either of them, another confirmation that I had ended up in a fictional world, everything felt too much to bear.

“Let’s go home,” said my mother.

I jumped from my chair quickly and followed along, forcing myself to keep my eyes down until we left the building. Don’t look at the dead, don’t look at the living, just focus on getting out until you are out and safe.

The hallways of the hospital felt eerie and ominous now that I knew what would happen there in a few years. How many of the people I was crossing paths with would die at the hands of the Doctor?

I kept running into Minoru Kamiya almost every time I visited my doctor. He was always there, with a pleasant smile that I was never able to return. Taking notes diligently, sometimes asking questions. His behavior was nothing but professional, and it was perhaps this facade of normalcy what made him scarier. After a few months, doctor Kobayashi asked my parents for permission to write a paper on my case. I was afraid that my secret would be found out upon closer inspection, but it was a baseless fear. Nobody in their right mind could guess that I was occupying a body that wasn’t mine.

The one I didn’t see again, thankfully, was the ghost of the lady, but on subsequent visits, I noticed more odd people near the ER and in the hallways. I made a point not to look at them directly, but they were there, always one or another, easily distinguishable from the living because the light seemed to go through them and cast a slight sheen over them. Some looked brighter. Some looked like shadows, the human behind the darkness barely distinguishable.

I never saw them twice. I supposed they had passed on in between my visits to wherever they had to go.

But once I noticed that one, they became a constant in my life. At parks. In back alleys. At the corner shop. Once, even, sitting on an oar with a woman in a kimono, riding it towards the clouds.

I was incredulous, but not stupid. The time for denial was over. And, conveniently, I seemed to have awakened my spirit awareness. Did that mean I had died in the accident? As I recalled, that was how Yusuke’s power had done the same. Then again, Satori may have been able to do this before I took over her body. I had no way to know.

But now that I knew where I was, hard to believe as it was, I had gained a perspective that let me be more at ease with my situation. At that time, I decided that I’d wait patiently until my brother crossed paths with Yusuke and the others, and I’d tell someone from the Spirit World about my problem. With luck, they’d have a way for me to go back. And in the worst case… well, I supposed that I was already dead. After all, I had no body of my own to go back to.

[tackyink]

Okay. OKAY.

...

*deep breath*

SO. This is rather short and probably won’t make much sense on its own, but that’s why I’m posting it here. Other reasons are that it’s rather personal, that it isn’t going to be regularly updated and that apparently somebody came up with a similar idea and posted it just this week. What were the chances? Anyway. There’s more poorly written stuff that I need to redo before sharing. This is @luckystarchild‘s fault, by the way. Go read her fanfiction if you haven’t yet.

If this were the last day of your life, my friend Tell me, what do you think you would do then?

I’d always liked September.

I’ve always associated it with new beginnings. The start of the school year and the hope that it would be better than the last. New books and pencils. It was the month when the unbearable summer heat died out, when I met two of my best friends, when I changed schools after ten years in the same place, when I cut my hair short willingly for the first time, when I got my first real job after a drought of two years right after college.

Septembers gave me hope for change, and I’d learned long ago that I didn’t know how to live without it.

I was twenty-eight and hoping for another change. Anything would have been welcome at that point – getting fired, switching jobs, moving to another country – as long as it got me out of the hole. But of all the things I wished would happen, death wasn’t even at the bottom of the list.

I rather liked being alive. That was why I didn’t take to kindly to dying.

Or, more precisely, to my body dying.

I had joked a million times with my friends about going to the Spirit World when I eventually kicked the bucket. It didn’t happen, of course, because the Spirit World isn’t a thing in our world, but things didn’t go according to plan, exactly.

I wouldn’t know the mechanism of what had happened until years down the line, but I should start this story from the beginning. The moment where the wheel of fate got jammed and began revolving backwards for me, so to speak.

It was early morning, and I was heading to my work at a small marketing company located at the posh part of the city.

The rain was coming down hard that day, but I didn’t mind. It made the trek up from the subway station more pleasant.

My workplace was on a crossing of a long street with lots of transit during the day. Pedestrians and drivers alike, most hailing from that same district and on their way work, lived by the motto, ‘Screw traffic signs, I have money.’

Just on that street, I had witnessed two accidents during the last year and heard about another one. One I saw from the balcony of my office, where a biker got stuck under a truck. My coworkers and I never found out if he survived, because the paramedics rushed to the scene and blocked it from view with tarp screens. Just a few months prior, a pedestrian had been hit by a car and died at the opposite end of the street. And another time, as I made my way to the office, I saw a car turn from the wrong lane and hit a biker that flew, along with his vehicle, just a meter from me. Had it happened five seconds later, I would have been caught up in it as well. The biker wasn’t gravely injured, but he told me as we waited for the ambulance that it wasn’t the first time the same exact thing happened to him on that street.

It checked out. I’d nearly been run over three times, on a crosswalk just a bit further down, by bikers that took a turn in the wrong direction to park. Nobody seemed to think that traffic rules applied to them.

So I was always extra careful when walking up that street, never standing too close to the edge of the sidewalk, remembering daily how close I had been to getting a motorbike to the face.

It happened on that same crossing, precautions and all.

I was waiting for the light to turn green as cars drove by, looking at my now wet sandals and legs, and I didn’t have time to register what happened next before it was too late. A car turned from the wrong lane, again, and in order to avoid a crash, it swerved to the right at the last second.

The road was slippery from the rain and the oil. I saw the car skidding towards me in slow motion, blinding lights, heard the sound of brakes and screams and smelled the burnt rubber and the dirty water as I fell. I cried in pain and hit the pavement, acutely aware of the yelling of the witnesses and the blood seeping through my skirt. My head ached like it never had, and I remember thinking that at long last something had managed to crack it. I tried to move and failed.

I heard people talking to me, blurs in motion before my unfocused eyes, but I was quickly losing consciousness, and this time it didn’t feel like the other times I had passed out. But as always, no matter how much I tried to fight it, my body was firm in its decision to shut out, and I was helpless as I felt my eyes close and the world go black.

There was no light, no movie reel of my life, no gates to Heaven or Hell or anybody to pick me up, only the sensation of being pulled out, forcibly removed.

And then, I woke up.

At first, I thought it had all been a dream.

Then I felt a dull pain on the back of my head, and I winced at the ceiling lights when I tried to open my eyes. I heard sounds of people moving and people talking around me, but I was in a haze until I was able to focus my eyes.

I was in a hospital room, which meant I hadn’t died. There was an IV attached to my hand that I tried not to look at because it made me queasy, but that, along the headache and a slight pain on my hip, were the only signs that I had been in an accident. It hadn’t been as bad as I thought. Death cheated once again, I could add that one to my Tumblr list.

I looked at the people in the room. An Asian family that I assumed was visiting another patient, and a nurse and a doctor, Asian as well.

I wondered where my parents were, but maybe they had gone outside or they hadn’t had time to come yet. I didn’t think much about it until the doctor began talking to me in Japanese. I caught something about waking up, but my Japanese wasn’t exactly great and I was too groggy to decipher what was being said to me.

“I don’t understand,” I replied in Japanese, a thankfully ingrained response after years of lessons.

The doctor seemed confused. He said something else.

“I don’t understand what you are saying,” I repeated.

He frowned at my reply while the man and woman behind him stared at me with concern. There was also a little kid sitting in a corner of the room. He had stark black curly hair, a face peppered with freckles, and beady black eyes framed by thick glasses. Clutching a book he had been reading, he watched me with obvious interest.

The doctor took out a small lantern from his pocket and checked my pupils. He barked something at a nurse and the woman left the room in a hurry, then returned his attention to me. He checked my neck and my head, asked if they hurt. I said I had a headache. I felt proud of remembering the specific word for headache, too.

“Do you only speak Japanese?” I asked him as he ran his tests. “English? Spanish?”

The adults in the room shared alarmed looks. The doctor asked the man and woman something, and they denied it and launched into an unsure explanation. I didn’t get what was so strange about what I had said. As far as I was concerned, the weird thing was being spoken to in Japanese as if I had to know it. It was pure luck that I’d been studying the language for most of my twenties.

I let out a tired sigh, already knowing the answer to my question, and resigned myself to waiting until somebody saw fit to call someone I could communicate with.

A high-pitched, self-assured voice spoke up in English. “I do.”

My eyes flicked to the kid. I had never felt so much gratitude towards one in my entire life, of that I was sure.

“Thank God! What’s going on? Where am I?”

He blinked, looking thoughtful, and for a moment I feared he hadn’t actually understood, but my worries were unfounded. “You were involved in a traffic accident yesterday,” he said. “The paramedics tended to your wounds at the scene and brought you to the hospital, but you went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance and have been comatose until now.”

I noticed the kid avoided looking at me when he spoke, and that he was using some big words for someone his age. I had been that kind of kid, too, but from an adult perspective I understood how out of place it sounded. His English was also better than mine, which could have been mildly ego-puncturing in a different situation, but I was too busy feeling relief to think about that.

He said I’d been in an accident and fallen unconscious. That matched what I remembered. What I still didn’t understand was who were these people and why were they here, getting all wound up over me instead of my family. I had to ask.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but who are you?”

The kid, who until then had regarded me like I was a rat lab in the middle of an experiment, faltered. The man and woman stared at me with alarm.

The doctor said, slowly, maybe hoping that I wouldn’t have so much trouble understanding, “You don’t know them?”

The way he asked, expressionless, coupled with the shock of the other people in the room, made me finally realize that something was very wrong and I hadn’t grasped what it was. “No.”

The woman covered her mouth with a hand to hide a gasp, and the man beside her didn’t know whether to look at me or at the doctor.

The doctor asked something that I only vaguely understood as relating to me. When I didn’t reply, the woman approached my bed and asked me, teary-eyed. “Do you remember us, Satori?”

The words took a few seconds to sink in. I turned them around and around, trying to find an alternate meaning that I wasn’t catching. I didn’t. Who was Satori? They had confused me with someone else, though how they had managed it boggled the mind. I’d had my ID on me when I got hit by the car, and I was whiter than mayo on wonder bread.

I felt incredibly awkward when I spoke. “I am not Satori.”

Her face changed as if I slapped her. She broke into sobs, and the man that accompanied her put an arm around her shoulders and tried to comfort her. I felt awful. Meanwhile, the doctor, who appeared to be quite composed, told me, “Your name is Satori. These are your parents, and this is your brother Yu.”

They were all looking at me, waiting for my reaction.

“You’re wrong,” I tried scrambled to say my mangled Japanese. “I don’t know them. I am not Satori.”

The doctor listened, but there was no reaction on his part, too lost in his own thoughts to reply. I was sure that if I paid enough attention, I’d hear the wheels in his mind turning.

The nurse came back with another one, the doctor said something to them, and then he said to me something, that, again, I didn’t understand. The nurses got to work and drove my bed out of the room while the doctor stayed behind to talk to the family.

My family, I’d soon learn.

This was a mistake so gross that it was difficult to believe. How on earth had been those people able to confuse me with their daughter?

Every person I came across in the hospital was Japanese as well. The only explanation I could find, however feeble it was, was that I was in a private hospital that catered to Japanese expats. It didn’t make any sense, but neither did the whole situation.

I went through a scanner, several physical examinations and a blood extraction during which I managed not to pass out with great difficulty. I let myself get carted around, since nobody was listening to me and nothing that was being done to me seemed dangerous, but I was at a complete loss for what was happening until I asked a nurse to go to the bathroom, and she brought me to one in a wheelchair.

I noticed something off as soon as I got up from the chair and started walking, but I attributed it to the after effects of the accident, the painkillers and the overall weirdness of the day.

I caught sight of a reflection out of the corner of my eye.

I hadn’t even meant to use the mirror, but when it happened, I had to turn and stare, because for a second I thought I’d imagined what I saw in it.

The person staring back at me was a young girl with wavy black hair past her shoulders, parted by a white bandage stained in brown-red, dark brown eyes, and a face full of dark freckles.

I moved, and she did as well.

I felt my chest constrict, my breath shorten, and my heart accelerate as an all familiar pain burst inside of it. I saw the girl go deathly white in the reflection as a cold sweat covered my body – her body – from head to toe. I’d never suffered a full blown panic attack until that day, but there was a first time for everything, it seemed.

Even swapping bodies with a teenage girl.