Marionette

Cosmos, Chapter Sixty Four - Kowareta Chinmoku [ 壊れた沈黙 ]

'You're not coming to class anymore, are you?' Maehara had asked her before he left to return home that night.

It had been dark outside when he had eventually left, once Amaya had regained her composure and it had grown late enough for his mother to email him and request he return home right away.

The question had come out of nowhere, spoken with a brief pause of hesitation that didn't escape her notice.

Her answer was given with no thought, no true pause beyond the small breath that had escaped her.

'No.' She told him. 'I'm done with that place.'

He seemed accepting of that answer. In fact, he didn't seem all that surprised by her response at all.

'Are they... going to come erase your memories?' He then asked her.

It was a question that hadn't graced her thoughts in quite some time, prominent in some sense. But honestly?

'Probably not...' Amaya answered him before long. 'They didn't erase Takebayashi-kun's memories, after all.'

Toji was connected to Shiro, or whatever his name really was, and therefore, was connected to the classroom. Too many lines between her own nightmare of existence and that classroom was blurred.

She honestly doubted they could properly erase any memories she had without leaving gaping dead ends they couldn't fix. Hell, the threat of memory erasure may very well have been an empty threat, because how would kids know what secret technology was possible to call that bluff.

But if they actually could...?

It might be in her best interests if they did erase memories.

Maehara's departure was silent after that, pensive, apprehensive in spite of how he tried to keep his expression moderately blank. This whole situation was a disaster, a nightmare of hurt and betrayal, and there was nothing either of them could really do.

There was nothing she could do but try and stand her ground. And with every passing moment, every minute she tried, she hoped at the very least she could keep herself from drowning.

Her siblings didn't ask where Karma was when she walked back inside, or why all of his things were absent from the house.

They didn't ask why Amaya had new house keys for them, either.

Any any time Reiko had obviously slipped up and been about to mention his name, Yuta was swift and vicious in cutting her off before the words had fully escaped her.

It was clear that Yuta had either heard Maehara and Isogai talking about what had happened, or he figured out the basic gist of it all on his own. The older twin had clearly worked out a way they were going to manage this situation, and she wasn't inclined to interfere with whatever it was he had planned. Amaya wasn't about to ask, either.

But she appreciated it, none the less.

The rest of the night was cold and miserable, a perfect reflection of the discord inside the bounds of Amaya's sense of self. The hours trickled by sleeplessly, stretching onwards at a snails crawl until she eventually nodded off somewhere in the early hours of the morning.

Come morning, she was greeted with the cold, empty silence of apathy.

Through this curtain of apathy that numbed her emotions and stifled her wayward thoughts, Amaya's motions became calculated, her whereabouts routine.

She tended to her siblings needs and escorted them to school in person. She only left once she saw the three children walk through the main entrance of the very building itself, departing to spend part of the school hours locked away in the Tiger Fang Gym, where the presence of her classmates had already been banned. And when her exhaustion grew too much for Amaya for the day, she had relocated to a cafe nearby her siblings school and curled up in a booth in the back corner to wait for the hours to tick by.