Content prep: panic attack, vomiting

The end of the school week comes quietly and quickly, and Yuuya spends most of it napping his unrest away. Reliable Senpai doesn’t seem to remember he exists, and most of the Battle characters have been coagulating into a school gang. Nothing remarkable has happened. There’s no activity from the white thread at all. He hasn’t seen a single storyline worrisome enough to interrupt or flee screaming from.

As for things he has seen…

“Are you a stalker?”

Yamada-san has unexpectedly appeared. When Yuuya leaves school at the end of the day, there he is, hands in pockets, looking around at the students nervously. His hair is more naturally tousled, and while he still has those oval glasses, he’s wearing a subtly patterned white button-down with a dark jacket. He’s really refreshing to look at, and reminds Yuuya of his brother, if his brother had the harmlessness of a newborn puppy.

Yuuya isn’t sure whether to be shocked at Yamada-san’s appearance or not. While it’s true he introduced himself as a throwaway placeholder character that could be killed off without fanfare, being a quintessential placeholder character is in of itself a pretty striking quirk. With the way his thread is phasing in and out of Passion Red and Daily Green, he probably has some quirky episodic problem-of-the-week life now. Good for him.

That doesn’t explain why he’d seek out Yuuya, though.

Yamada-san scratches the back of his head sheepishly. “Ah…Sorry, I…wanted to confirm that you’re real?”

Yuuya gives him a dry look. The effect is likely dampened by the fact he’s trembling and pink-faced.

“I know, I know,” Yamada-san sighs. “Well, I said I would make it up to you somehow, but you left without any way to get in touch. I got the picture, yes, but it’s still been bothering me. I haven’t gotten new job yet, but…in the very least, here.”

Yamada-san hands Yuuya a simple card, featuring his name, mail address, and phone number.

“You were lurking outside th-the school for this?” Yuuya asks. He tries not to wince at how his words stumble.

“All you gave me was your first name and that you were going to start high school. What did you expect?”

“To be left alone.”

“Still quite the rebellious attitude, huh?” Yamada-san says with a teasing lilt. He seems almost fatherly, but seeing as Yamada-san looks like he’s only in his late twenties, Yuuya just feels patronized.

“…Of course I’m going to be…to be rebellious. I’m being ha- harassed by some weirdo.”

“Hmm. By the way.”

“What.”

“You really blush easily, don’t you.”

Yuuya flinches, and humiliation only makes the blushing worse. “Y-You see! All you’re doing is hara- is harassing me!”

“Sorry, sorry. You looked a little too strung-out, I couldn’t help it. It’s better if you express yourself, you know?”

Yuuya steps away with a scowl. “Th-Thanks for the card. Are you satisfied now?”

“More or less. I’d love to stretch this out, but I have a long stretch of job-hunting to do, so-”

“Private detective.”

“…Eh?”

Yuuya looks away, down the street full of departing students.

“Well, that or a ‘general helping service’. Those kinds of jobs, where you happily assi- assist people in the background, would suit you. That’s my final bi-b-bi…bit of advice.”

“Oh. Er. Thanks.”

“…Then.”

Yuuya turns to leave.

“…Goodbye! Yuuya-kun.”

Some of the unease that had seemed endlessly crushing only a few minutes ago releases itself, and yet, a part of him winds tight with tension.

“…Bye.”

“…What’s so special about anime, anyway?”

Yuuya stands outside the media store, staring imploringly up at the sky. The sun is setting already. Strange, since he just managed to wake up.

Yuuya at home has become a pattern opposite to Yuuya at school, in the worst ways. He’s focused sharp to a point, and he has trouble sleeping; even when he’s tired, giving himself a hearty dose of caffeine jolts him back into awareness.

It’s all in effort to watch anime, of course.

“When mom was in high school, it was all dramas, wasn’t it…?”

The city’s Narrative has been leaning towards anime stories a lot in the past ten years or so, and in order to keep up, he’s been forced to buy a lot of garbage anime BDs. Most of it is inexcusable tripe, with swords and harems and illogical action sequences and great carefully labelled voids where characters should be.

Luckily, he had picked up a common story pattern in the school; Sports and Battle. Nashi High is a very physical place, and the Passion Red subset is way higher here than it was in middle school, where kids would get passionate about an extra egg in their school lunches. He’s not overly concerned with sports, but that pattern is worrying.

In terms of the school’s ultimate fate, the principal’s overt Battle storyline is telling, but not any of Yuuya’s business. His priority is to live a reasonably safe, trouble-free life at his own pace. Even if the principal were a problem, his family would take care of it, because he is a grown-ass man who could and would kill him, Yuuya’s family members are all adults who know some form of combat, and Yuuya is an underweight 16-year-old with the battle instincts of a dodo.

That, again, leaves him with nothing to do but watch anime about all the ways he may possibly die.

Yuuya stares blankly at his bag. He should subscribe to a streaming service. This is starting to tax his wallet.

The streets around him are lit up with ads, selling a whole colourful rainbow of products all along his walk home. Most of them are for tech. Yuuya pauses at one he doesn’t recognize; a RomanSoft ad for the newest model of scrollphone.

The model is small, dangling from a woman’s neck, and shaped like a pill. Naturally, the name reflects that: RoSo PILL. The poster shows off an open PILL, lit up with a series of large icons. The screen quality looks a little better than what Yuuya is used to from scroll devices.

There’s a few girls standing between the ad and Yuuya, gossiping amongst each other.

“What is that, it’s so small!”

“so you can wear a phone as jewellery now? We’re living in the future, huuhh.”

“What’s with this boring setup. Invent holograms already!”

“I wouldn’t buy it. The screen is too small to run any apps.”

“It’d be cheaper, then. Like a little phone just for calling and notifications?”

“That’s like that watch thing, isn’t it?”

Yuuya opens his mouth, almost ready to comment, something simple and non-intrusive clearly formed in his head — would it be compatible with SHELLCHARAs — but the words stick in his throat. He doesn’t feel especially scared or anxious, but no matter how clear the phrase is built in his head, it won’t come out. It’s like hitting a brick wall.

He lets a slow breath.

Background character.

Why does he want to talk to them in the first place?

Background character.

His grip on his bag is trembling and weak, and he hates himself a little for his frailty.

Yuuya is a background character. He’s not meant to be paid attention to. Not meant to be interacted with. Not meant to be interesting.

He can tell himself that until it’s true, at least.

Yuuya never really considered himself a rebellious child, or a bad student, but he has to come to accept one fact; if he spends one more minute studying or researching, he’s going to throw his chair out the window.

He blames his stress levels. Even though absolutely nothing troublesome has happened, he’s practically crawling up the walls. The entire point of doing stuff like mapping the school and keeping tabs on other people’s threads was to avoid both annoyances and abominations, and yet, now that he’s getting exactly what he wanted, his stress couldn’t be higher.

He doesn’t want to start going around talking people off roofs, either. It’s only going to trade one type of stress for another.

So instead, Yuuya is going to the convenience store to blow off some steam.

There’s one just two blocks away from his house. It’s open at all hours, which is good, because so is Yuuya’s sleep schedule. Right now, it’s about nine in the evening, so the sky is dark and Yuuya’s willingness to consume enough caffeine to keep him up until nine in the morning is somewhere around ‘fuck it, let’s go’.

Yuuya twirls his non-knife in his fingers idly as he walks. The weather hasn’t quite warmed up all the way, and the air is refreshingly cool on his lungs. The sound of his footsteps echoing off an empty street is revitalizing. There’s nothing better than spending some alone time by yourself while outdoors.

The convenience store is a glowing white beacon at the end of the street. Yuuya doesn’t see anyone else around. He gets the place to himself again. A relief; when people are there, he can’t focus at all, and he always feels like he has to rush his purchase.

When he enters, he can hear pop music play from tinny, slightly-too-quiet speakers, and the various machines hum in harmony with the fluorescent lighting. He glances around. The cashier is playing on her phone. There’s a stand for fashion glasses next to the potato chips now, which is new. Yuuya stops next to it on the way to the beverages, and fixates on a pair of lime green glasses with stars on the corners.

Five minutes and twenty bottles of Lipovitan-D later, he walks up to the till wearing said glasses.

Yuuya places his basket full of drinks on the counter and stares at the cashier expectantly. Whatever he’s doing on his phone, it must be important, because she doesn’t even blink.

Yuuya grimaces, but allows that his presence is usually lower than that of any given phone app.

“E-Excuse me?” His voice doesn’t come out quite right; the pressure of speaking up makes his voice break.

No response.

Yuuya takes a deep breath and says in a louder, clearer voice, “Excuse me.”

No response.

Suddenly, all the tension Yuuya had released from taking a walk winds right back up again. He blinks rapidly, and tries to use rhythmic breathing to keep himself calm.

“Excuse me,” he grits, sharp and bitter. His hands have started shaking now.

The cashier flicks her finger across her screen.

Yuuya sees red.

“HEY.”

His palms SLAM against the counter, and the girl jumps a foot in the air and whirls to look at a seething Yuuya.

“S-Sorry, I was reading…” she mumbles.

Yuuya clenches his teeth and glares at the drinks. She scans them in.

He doesn’t pay for the glasses.

There’s a river that cuts through Nashioka and feeds into the local lake. Very little of it passes through the town itself, but there’s a bridge on it anyway. It’s wide, not very deep, never floods, and is pretty clean, so it’s a popular family-friendly spot to relax. It doesn’t look like much at the moment, though; it’s just mostly just long grass, mud, and a lot of weeds.

Yuuya doesn’t have a school club, and he feels more and more defeated the earlier he heads home. He’s far too emotionally exhausted to go for a walk every single day, though, so he just sits on the bridge of the river, far away from the bustle of the city, and stares off into space until he feels a little less terrible.

A few people are walking a little ways downriver, but not close enough to bother Yuuya. He closes his eyes, sucks in a breath through his nose, and exhales forcefully.

He’s irritated.

At what?

Himself?

He opens his eyes again. The landscape is starting to dim, and the river is covered in long shadows. The sun’s going to set soon. The white thread cuts across the landscape, out of place against the rest of the city.

Yuuya just wants to do something. He feels like he’s teetering on the precipice of some horrible turning point. Every time he sees that thread in the distance, every time he ends another boring school day, every time something goes even a little bit wrong, more stress piles up. It’s endless. He doesn’t have any hobbies, or anything that makes him happy, so he’s helpless to the overwhelming negativity clinging to him.

He just wants it to rot away.

“You’re in the way.”

Yuuya shrieks and nearly topples into the water.

Behind him is a young boy, around ten years old, with a head of spiky grey hair. His slanted, beady little black eyes are drilling into Yuuya’s very soul.

“…I’m sorry?”

“You’re in the way,” the boy repeats, and holds up a camera.

Yuuya looks to the camera, to the river, to the camera again.

“O-Oh. Of the view. Sorry.”

He hops the railing back onto the bridge and sidles out of the way, so the boy can set the camera up. He has a laser-like intensity to him. Not exactly a Protagonist, or even a main character; he’s too…simple, washed-out. Even though his skin isn’t all that light, it’s still pale, practically grey. Like he was born with darker skin, but hasn’t felt the kiss of the sun since birth.

“KAAAAAAIIIIII!”

Yuuya glances over his shoulder at the shrill voice. A fairly average-looking boy about the same age as the camera kid comes running up, waving his arms wildly. Unlike the bland washed-out nothingness of the boy next to him, the newcomer is vibrant, rosy-cheeked, and has a head full of untidy brown hair. Comic relief? Protagonist?

“…Kenta,” says the grey one.

“Kai! You got the spot!”

The boy — Kai — glances away. There’s no nervousness in his body language. Or any emotion, really. “…It’s not like it’s any trouble.”

“Eh? Really?”

“If someone intruded, I’d break their legs.”

Kai balls his hand into a fist and makes direct eye contact with Yuuya. Yuuya swallows.

“Ehhh, ya don’t need to, y’knooooww? It’s just pictures.”

“I would, though.”

“You’re gonna get in trouble, Kai.”

The brown one — Kenta? Kenta — wraps his arms around Kai’s shoulders and squeezes. Kai doesn’t react at all.

“…I don’t mind.”

“Okay, the pictures gotta be glorious! Do you know how to use these fancy cameras?” He climbs right over Kai to grab the camera from around his head. Kai, to his credit, doesn’t even wobble.

“More or less.”

“Make it really red! Like it’s on fire!”

“The sun hasn’t set yet.”

“Well when it sets, it’s gotta be on fire!”

Kenta teeters, and then falls back to the ground to re-establish his original position of wrapped around his friend.

Yuuya feels strangely agitated, seeing the easy contact, and he’s not sure if he wants to leave or not. It’s not like he has anything to contribute, but getting shooed away from his own relaxing spot is a little…

Kai glances his way. Yuuya flinches. Slowly, deliberately, Kai holds his hands up and clutches Kenta’s arms. Without breaking eye contact, he nuzzles into them.

“Eh? Are you cold? It was so warm today, though. You need to get your blood pressure checked, man.”

Yuuya chokes down a wave of totally irrational anger.

Is he getting antagonized by a ten-year-old?

He doesn’t know why, but the intent alone makes his face pinch. And then, to top it off, Kai smirks at him and turns to look back out at the river.

Annoying.

Not people.

Not people.

Yuuya spins on his heel and marches away to cool off somewhere downriver. Maybe he’ll wade in a little, let the cold water clear his head. He doesn’t have to deal with some brats. The fact it even bothered him at all is bad enough.

He stops at a hill overlooking the bank. There’s a couple talking in front of the glittering water below him. It looks intimate, important. He pushes his glasses up with the heel of his palm and feels a hard note of disgust when he sees the Love Pinks held taut and laden with stories sinking into the two like a disease.

Yuuya leans down, palms some mud into a ball, and chucks it as hard as he can physically manage at the two.

It nails the guy in the head.

It doesn’t make Yuuya feel better.

Yuuya gazes listlessly at the front of the classroom.

…He’s tired.

He doesn’t even have the energy to get through the second week of school. His studies are a blur of half-assed notes. He’s probably going to fail the next test. He’s only just started the school year, and he still feels emptied-out. Yuuya is seated the second row from the door, third seat down, an intentionally boring choice, but he finds himself lying with his head on his desk, staring out the window. A gnawing desperation is tearing him up inside, he knows, but it can’t tell where it’s coming from, or what it’s desperate for.

He’s just tired, and he wants to cry.

The classroom is noisy, but a surprising respite from the rest of the school’s potential issues. There’s only Daily Greens, subtle Love Pinks, and two Violence Purples in here. The only thing worth worrying about is the sheer girth of one of the Daily Greens, coming out of a huge, kinda buff guy in the back. He looks gently sensitive. Yuuya is entirely prepared to leap out the window if they ever converse.

He closes his eyes. Like that’d happen. He doesn’t even have to bother being openly hostile. No one seems to recognize him as a fellow classmate. He’s being thoroughly ignored. He’s gotten the peaceful easygoing life he wanted.

How nice.

Yuuya curls up a little. That middle school classmate that set next to him…he noticed Yuuya. He isn’t sure why; it was the first time they’d been in a class together, and Yuuya was at his peak level of boring and indistinct. Even so, Yuuya could feel his eyes on him sometimes, to the point he’d almost gotten used to it.

It’s not as if Yuuya is non-existent, or entirely invisible. That Reliable Senpai had sought him out. That harmless-looking Yamada-san had thought about him until he had to see him again. Even that brat on the bridge acknowledged him to the degree he thought it was necessary to make fun of him. There’s plenty of people who found their attention drawn to him in some way, even though he hated every second of it.

His classmates could show him some regard, every now and then.

A girl with dark purple-tinted hair bursts into the room, looking furious Yuuya pulls his head up to watch her.

She marches over to a nondescript male student and stands before him with her hands on her hips. Despite her furious determination, the only thread she’s sporting is Love Pink, but the thread is large, and coming out of more than just the base of her spine; smaller lines cling to her shoulders and lower back like cobwebs.

Yuuya feels sick.

“Akira-kun! Duel me!”

“E-Eh? Duel?”

“B-Because you saw me in that kind of position…No, because you’re daring to intrude into my precious territory! Prepare yourself!”

“The teacher assigned me, though…”

“No excuses!”

Yuuya bites down hard on his lip and jerkily rises to his feet. He feels more drained than ever, but if he has to listen to any more of this, he’s going to crack this girl’s head open on the desk of her precious love interest.

He passes by another girl still seated in her desk on his way to the door. She’s flushed and clutching her chest. Yuuya pulls his glasses all the way up and jerks back. Both the screaming girl and the girl sitting in front of him have taut pink threads.

And then he feels it, the horrible, slimy oblivion, so starkly he can almost physically see it. The stories, the whispering, oozing narrative blight, like the city’s collective bile. His stomach turns so sharply he feels it cramp.

The stories fall into the girls and flush out around their feet in the usual bloom of visible pink. He backs away from it, even though it can’t really affect him.

The girl is still clutching her chest with her eyes squeezed shut. She must be monologuing about her crush.

“Do you have heartburn or what?” Yuuya spits with an unintended degree of maliciousness.

At the sound of his voice, the girl looks up straight at him.

Yuuya jerks back and practically falls into the wall in an effort to get away. He isn’t watching where he’s going, though, and he falls right in the way of that loud cobwebbed girl, who was about to drag the nondescript boy out of the classroom.

Yuuya’s glasses are still up, so he gets a full view of how the stories have affected her.

The cobwebs have grown thicker, winding from her face, her arms, even one coming from her eye, all in a massive spiralling tangle. Her eyes, nostrils, mouth, her entire being is lit up with an unnatural pink glow, as if her thread is burning her up from the inside.

Not a person.

Not human.

Yuuya screams, sliding backwards along the wall, but the pink-coloured creature keeps advancing. It’s radiating such a terrible, empty light.

Adrenalin rushes through Yuuya, and his instincts jump straight to the offensive. His hand snaps out to grab a fistful of hair. The thread cluster flows out of the way like his very touch is deadly, but he shivers anyway, because the hairs are about the same width, and they’re snagging on his fingers.

And then Yuuya pulls back and slams the thing’s head into the wall as hard as he can.

The plaster cracks. There’s a few screams. The pink thing drops to the ground, and Yuuya backs up to the door.

“What the hell are you…”

The love interest looks horrified. Yuuya can feel his heart thundering in his ears. No cobwebs…He doesn’t have any cobwebs, but he has more than one pink thread, and the way they twist up is sickening to look at.

And he’s looking right at Yuuya.

Everyone is looking right at Yuuya.

He wheezes, chokes. Words won’t come out. He isn’t even sure what words he wants to use.

“No…” He whispers.

The boy takes a step towards him, and Yuuya bolts.

There’s too many people in his way, and barely any of them notice him before he shoves past them. Barely anyone notices him at all. The walls feel too small.

“No no no no no no…” Yuuya’s voice creaks. His vision is starting to tunnel. He’s hyperventilating. His glasses had fallen back onto his nose at some point, but the absence of the threads isn’t helping. He knows they’re there.

He climbs the stairs in a three-limbed scramble. Staircase after staircase, countless pairs of eyes staring staring staring staring staring staring staring staring

[You always wanted people to pay attention to you.]

Yuuya hits the top floor and bursts out onto the roof with his limbs flying. He inhales deeply, trying to himself to breath properly. He feels dizzy, and his teeth are buzzing. The fear is cold and clenching and turning his stomach until—

Yuuya turns around and vomits against the wall.

He coughs, spits, and grinds his forehead against the wall’s rough surface. It tastes awful and acidic, and he spits again and again to get rid of it.

Then he swallows, breathes in deeply through his dripping nose — he sniffles a few times — and exhales out through his mouth. It comes out shaky and on the lip of a sob. He tries again. Seven seconds in through the nose. Hold. Seven seconds out through the mouth.

It’s hard to tell if it’s working through the vertigo. It feels like he’s at it for hours. He hears his own breath settle, at some point, and maintains a steady pace after that. It grounds him until his lungs aren’t raw and his heart doesn’t ache with how fast it’s beating.

Yuuya swallows, exhales slower this time, and mops the tears from his eyes. He swallows the snot clogging up his nose and takes a long breath.

He opens his eyes to the sight of his own bile splattered just in front of his shoes.

His fingers scrape painfully against the wall as this processes, as he understands what just happened, and he—

not people

not human

only a background character

doesn’t exist to

doesn’t exist

they’re not people and he doesn’t

Yuuya’s teeth grind. His usual rationalizations skitter around uselessly across his mind, and he can’t grab hold of any of them. All he has are simple truths.

He’s all alone in this city.

He’s scared.

He can’t trust anyone in this city.

He doesn’t even want to bother.

Yuuya twists his fist into the wall. He can feel the heat of his blood trickling down his fingers. Anxiety falls away to rage.

He lets out a small keening noise, equal parts anger and despair. He punches the wall, once, twice, and drags his forehead down farther with each impact. The urge to vent is overwhelming. The stress is just going to keep climbing, even if he calms down now, and he doesn’t want to bother trying to stop it anymore.

He chokes on his tears and lets out a thin groan. The next punch is vicious. It jolts the bones in his hand, and throbs painfully all the way up his arm, and it’s still not enough.

“Ah…uh…uh…” Yuuya hiccups through the useless noises pouring from his throat, and the self-loathing it incites only makes his rage worse.

“Ugh…uuuuuUUUUAAAAAAAAAAA!”

Yuuya tosses his jabbing knife clean across the roof. It bounces off the chainlink fence and clatters on the cement.

It’s useless. He’s useless.

“AAAAAAAAAAA”

He can’t take it.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

Prepping doesn’t help. He can’t take the peace. He can’t take the danger.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

He can’t take being looked at. He can’t take being ignored.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!”

Yuuya’s legs collapse out from under him. He slumps against the wall and faces the sky.

It’s an endlessly stretching, deep, beautiful tragedy blue, and he hates it.

The fight seeps out of him. He squeezes his eyes shut. Hot tears roll down his cheeks, and the realization that he’s crying only makes it harder to hold back the sobs.

“Ah…hic…Aaahh…uu…uuaaaa…hic”

He‘s so tired.

He wants to go home.