The Show Must Go On {Sanscest}

The Ghost Watches

"Why are you still awake?" Cross heard his Chara ask. He turned his attention from the tent wall to the ghost floating slightly above him. The wind and rain outside became a background noise.

"Isn't it obvious?" he asked, rolling onto his back before quickly glancing towards the human performer on the opposite bed to make sure they were asleep.

"Not really, dipshit," the ghost scoffed, raising an eyebrow.

"Someone's having quite a rough night.." Cross mumbled, shifting his gaze towards the wall again. "And I mean emotionally, you dirty bastard." He narrowed his eyes, glancing back at Chara.

"Should've listened to your husband when he told you not to say anything filthy around me," they reminded him, narrowing their eyes back at him.

"You're like a parasite on my SOUL, I can't watch my language around you if I don't know when you're here and when you're not. I watch you leave and throw in the dirtiest joke I have, only to turn around and see that you're already back. Which, by the way, is the complete opposite of what you did when you were alive. I looked away from you for five seconds and when I turned back you were out of my sight. And two minutes after that you were getting carried back to the medical tent for getting caught in the crossfire of a grenade." Cross stared at them unimpressed while their eyes shifted further and further away from direct eye contact.

"Anyways," they started, trying to shift the attention away from the previous topic into a new one, "Any next plans?"

"Not yet.." Cross murmured, again – paranoid – glancing towards the sleeping human to make sure they were still asleep.

"Why not? We came here for a reason, didn't we?" Chara sounded annoyed, but Cross didn't really pay attention to their tone.

"You do realise that we're trapped here?" – he raised a browbone at them – "And the only way out might as well be death. Our first plan failed. I don't want to rush into a new one without thinking enough first," he reminded them.

"You've escaped from a 'rest of your life' -situation before, twice. Why would you stay here?" they pointed out, circling around him like the ghost they were cursed to be.

"Tell me: what do we have left?"

Chara stopped. A second passed, another, soon third.

"Exactly," Cross huffed. The silence had answered better than a thousand words could. "We don't have anything left. Even if we get him back. We don't have a home, our children are all dead, and I'm pretty sure that he isn't exactly alive either."

Chara opened their mouth, but Cross continued before they could get a word out, "I won't give up hope. I'll continue looking for him until I can confirm that he's actually dead. I'm just pointing out that if he's gone, there's nothing, and I say nothing, left for me outside these walls."

His gaze burned through Chara, making them shift uncomfortably. They should have dropped a comment. Something to criticise Cross with. Anything. But they couldn't. They didn't know what to say.

"We've spent our entire life running. Aren't you getting tired of it? And you aren't even alive anymore."

Chara Peñaloza was a victim of the war. A young child soldier who had died one cold winter morning to an airstrike when bombs started raining from the sky. Most of their body was buried in the forest near the remains of an old medical tent with no landmark to be found by. The dismembered part of their body that had been found from the scene of the attack along with their fallen comrades were buried on the graveyard of an unidentified church, along with their name on the memorial gravestone before the group grave.