"There's not a lot left to do, huh?" Narancia commented, eyes shut as he enjoyed the spring breeze. With Passione regaining control and building their empire, there wasn't a lot of work left for the bodyguards. Mista shared his sentiments, but he didn't mind the lack of work. "God, I'm bored..."
"Mhmm. Hey, what's (Y/N) doing? She's been cooped up in her room all day." While his sentiments were one of worry, he was mostly curious of what she could be spending her time on. She hadn't come out since yesterday evening, and the only time anyone saw her is when Trish witnessed her barge out, steal some of Giorno's stationary, and then march back to her room, muttering about something she didn't really catch. "Should we check on her?"
"I don't know... One time I went into her room in the middle of the night because I kept hearing noises, right?" Narancia shivered as he recalled the memory. "I opened the door and it's just her rearranging her entire room, there's stuff everywhere and it looks like a tornado hit, and then she spots me and just screams and then I ran out and hid under my bed. It was terrifying."
"Uh... alright...?" He raised an eyebrow, unsure of how to respond to his horror story. "Well, I don't think you need pencils and pens to do any of that."
"Maybe she decided to draw on the walls or something?" Narancia sat up to move his face out of the sunlight. "I don't know... oh! Maybe she's practicing those pencil spinning thingies!"
"What?" Mista raised an eyebrow. "Don't know what you're talking about, but can't we just check on her? See what she's up to?"
"Yeaa... beats sitting here." They stood up, meandering their way towards her room, but there was actually a bit of a crowd in front of her open door. "Heyy, what's going on?"
"(Y/N)..." They didn't really know how to explain this. Sure, they were used to her eccentricity by now, but this was pushing it. All across the walls were sticky notes and string connecting them, quotes and dates scrawled on each of them so rushed it was almost illegible. (Y/N) sat in the center of the room, combing over a weathered book that seemed eerily familiar. Trish recognized it to be the book she brought back after the trip. "What's all this? What's with the sudden turn to conspiracy, huh?"
She didn't answer them, face twisted into one they've rarely seen from her. It wasn't like fear, this was something primal, something ingrained into her mind and spirit, a taint on her soul. Her leg bounced beside her with such vivacious movements it could shake the entire house, and Bruno peeked over to see what the hell it was that she looked through. It looked like a simple logbook, there were a few ledgers, notes and numbers written down neatly, but peering closer, he could see the body counts, each double digit listing some number of humans flowing in and out. This was the notebook that the boss of the Factory owned.
"Seriously, what are you doing?" Fugo muttered, following the trail of string down to the first note everything stemmed from. With the fading blue ink, she highlighted a few of the quotes and notes about some man twelve years ago. Along with a blur of garbled writings and ramblings, they continued to list on. Snippets here and there, additions to this crude timeline that slowly started to paint some abstract picture he couldn't understand. At the center of the room, (Y/N) gripped the page, scribbling down another note and pasting it onto the end of the string next to her.
"I can't make heads or tails of any of this." Giorno furrowed his eyebrows and bent down to shake her out of this delusioned state. She seemed not to care that they were in the room, or that they were seriously worried about her mental state at the moment. If there was any chance of her worry, she didn't show in the slightest, at least. "(Y/N), what is all of this about? What's going on?"
"He knows." her voice was soft, barely a whisper as if she tried to prevent herself from crying. "He knows I'm out there, I know he knows. I know it's the end."
"He? Who's 'he'?" Trish took a sticky note to look over, chills trailing up her spine at it all. There was something rather ominous about all this. But they didn't read the book. They didn't live through the pain of being forgotten. They didn't understand. Of course they couldn't. She never told them the full story. She never told them the reason her father found them on that day. She never told them how it felt to lose all sense of who you were, and she never told them the reason forwhy she was targeted two years ago. How could she say them now? How could she face the fear that strangled her to this day?
She didn't know his name. Not even the book said it, He was always referred to as the business partner, the supplier, the dealer, the nicknames changed annually, always on the first meeting after the anniversary of her mother's death, and the day that for ten years ever since she was six, her entire existence was erased from the memory of everyone. Perhaps their souls were like Diavolo and Trish's, they were almost parallel, just enough that he too was erased from the earth, even for just a single moment. But unlike her, people could remember him, if even after a little work. They would never remember her. That day two years ago, when she was supposed to die, he erased the last of her. She would have disappeared in a quiet death, not with a bang like the end of a dynamite's fuse, but with the silent fizz of a candle, with nothing left to prove her spark even existed. But then she killed the boss with a literal firework.
Then she unlocked a sight that she perhaps shouldn't have. Then she questioned things she shouldn't. Then she looked at herself, she looked at her own soul, and saw eyes that were not hers, eyes that didn't exist, simply black voids that she knew belonged to someone that wasn't her, and she knew that the owner of those visceral holes saw her too.
"My father. I think he knows I'm still alive now."