The Unlucky Thirteenth (Akise Aru Fanfiction)

Fourteenth

I don't want to die, that's the simple truth. I'm scared. Everything I do that seems noble is just me being scared shitless and being all self-sacrificing and that worthless garbage. I don't want to go out here, not now.

I'm gonna go blow shit up. And I'm gonna fucking like it.

Amaya burst from the room, all signs of pain gone, and dashed after Minene. The girl who seconds earlier couldn't bend over to put on her shoes now ran hard, just because her life depended on it.

It didn't hurt, not now. She was going to fucking blow things up, and enjoy every shitty moment of it. Her veins sang with determination. Her heart beat to the pulse of the drum of rage.

Do you hear me, Akihiko? Here I come.

Her brother was nowhere near her, and she very well knew that. He had fled to wherever in the night, somewhere Amaya could not see him. Somewhere with the orange haired man who had killed her family and the young girl she had seen at the site with her hair a strange color, who was probably someone's daughter.

Yes, Amaya knew more than she let on about her family's killers. Knew their vague heights and hair colors, and two of their faces. Knew that her brother did not work alone.

That did not change the fact that she knew her brother had done most of the killing. The girl had merely sat and watched with a detached smile. The orange haired man had been wearing a white coat which wasn't spattered with blood stains.

The third man had waded through the carnage with his serrated, gleaming knife. His hand had come down again and again. Five different times he killed. Who was it? Who was there that night to take her brother's place? Who else had been there, to mark Misayori Amaya's place?

No one. The police had simply stopped searching. The people the government hired had stopped looking. The friends of her family had stopped looking. The detectives assigned to the case had stopped looking.

Everyone had simply stopped looking for her.

She stayed in plain sight. She walked among them and was not recognized. No one looked. No one cared about a little girl they didn't know.

She would have gone back, would have found her  way back to society, except they had stopped looking. If no one cared enough to look for her and presumed her dead, then dead she would be.

And then, of course, she met Minene. The air was cold and rainy and damp. They had tried to kill each other there in an alley, and Minene had fled. A week later, she came back with an offer, and the girl did not speak again for quite some time.

But Amaya remembered, and did not forget her family's killers. She did not forget the laughter when nothing was right in the world. She did not forget the fear that the murderers would come for her.

She did not forget the cops slacking off on their duty to find her, when she was watching them from across the street, debating whether to go and say, "I am Misayori Amaya, the girl you're looking for."

Amaya did not forget the despair that filled her when she realized she had lived without the people she loved dearly. She remembered the hatred that coursed through her veins when no one would take that leap for her and let her be found. She remembered wanting someone to say, "There she is! We found her!"

And she remembered deciding that then, and only then, she would go. Then, she would return to the land of the living and turn her back on the world of shadows. Amaya remembered wanting someone else to make her decision for her.

She remembered when everyone else stopped looking, while she longed to be found.

Most of all, Amaya did not forget the fear. The fear of being found, of a world without her family, the fear that whatever had gotten them would come for her in the night.