do a flip!

_

You think the sky is kind of ugly this early in the morning. Black streaked blue, but it makes way for the best part, you think. When it all goes orange and red. Like a campfire. It rides across the horizon like a bad music note. 

The symphony is an ugly sound, ripping at your ears. Your eyes will burn.

Breathe to lips. Sound to song. Promises to lies. Your neck feels like a bad memory, your back feels like an uncracked glow stick. You pop it, like you were born to do. You get the untimely feeling you're older than you look by millennium.

(What's your name?)

"How old am I?" You ask him, you're early today. The clock says its six-one-two-AM and you've just have to wonder why that is. Why this is such a curve from your routine. Today is different in the way yesterday wasn't. Today is tragic and nothing's even happened. The sun is out, barely reaching out of the horizons grip. You have to wonder about that; it's golden, it's holy, it burns, and it's the ugliest damned thing you've ever layed your eyes on. It almost makes you want to laugh, then. Almost.

"It's rude to ask an immortal their age, you know." Nedzu says, sipping his tea like it doesn't have whiskey in it. You know, you brewed it this time around.

He seems to appreciate it.

You drink your tea and humm at the burn in the back of your throat. It tastes like burnt berries, almost. Steeped ginger and half eaten rosemary. You won't think about it. 

"My deepest apologies." You say. You don't mean it, you never do. You think he knows, but you don't think about that either. Nedzu smiles cheerily, his scar pulls at your face, pulls at your memories. 

(There's a shadow in the corner in the room, the man has melded to the wall, he's tip tapping at it, he's holding a pomegranate. You know, I've never met anybody with such exotic taste—  he throws it at you and you rip it open with your bare hands; now you've gotten pomegranate juice on the walls; sticky and red, fruit dripping under your nails. The man is laughing but you don't care. You're not entirely sure what you've eaten is a pomegranate, but you don't care. Lemon soda burns the back of your throat, it's almost laughable.

Who are you? you ask the shadow, but the man is gone. You're all alone, pomegrante juice on the floor, sticky on your fingers, the peices got in your hair. You'll pull it out. It's red, it's sweet.)

You should jump from the roof, again. You should, but you need groceries.

—

There's something eating at your hands, even though you're wearing gloves. The ugliest shade of green. The prettiest shade of green, fresh rainforest, bright, lively, obnoxious, shut up. You hiss into your head, it doesn't; it cackles, dry and loud. 

You don't like the color because there was a boy—

But there was a man, camping, once. He was all heavy eyed and dazed, flushed against a rotten tree - you asked if he was going to build a tree house with the ax he was holding, both of you politely ignoring the red in the wrong place. Red is the color of war, after all. Red is the color of blood.  He said that he was sick of red too, and that he just might build a treehouse.

Toga likes red, you wonder how? How? How could she ever possibly like such an ugly, rotten color. 

"What's your favorite flower, ha?" she asks, wide eyed over some stale cereal. "I like carnations!"

You think about it, bury it into your skin. "Sunflowers." you say. You take a bite of the now-soggy, not very cheery, cheerio's. They taste like sawdust. 

"Hah, why?" She asks, all starry eyed and gleeming, it hits you that she's a child, then, soft and sharp and all the oxymorons you can make into a person. "I never liked yellow much," she tells you.  You think that's dumb, it's the color of her eyes, he hair, her teeth before she came to you; "It's too happy." she grissles. 

"I like sunflowers because they're larger than life," you tell her, you aren't looking at anything but your soggy cereal, watching it turn to mulch under the milk. "also, they're taller than a good chunk of the Japanese population, there was this kid I used to know—" there was a boy with forest green eyes and a broken inhaler with a bite of steel. "—he absolutely despised them because they were taller than him— because, he was real small, see, and everything was taller than him because—"

(What's your name?)

"— his brother got all the height genes."

(What's your name?)

(What's your name?)

(Do you think that the sky is lonely?)

"It made him upset."

(I'm lonely.)

(What's your name?)

Time seems to move slow, molasses, trickling down your skin, melding to you— your hourglass is on its' side, perminently stalled, forever frozen. You'll live forever, you know, it's a bitter realization. It always is.

"I'm going to die, now." you tell her. Your head is pounding, it feels like there's sand in your mouth, in your nose, in your eyes, salt water pouring from our ears.

She whines. "Already? You always do this when things start getting intresting."

You smile. You hope it looks okay.

—

You're dead. I killed you. 

What kind of suicidal nutbrain gives a kid their very personal rehash-of-what-happened-after-my-your-our-death note?

—

You're a little bit disoreinted, what with the kid telling you that you saved her. You don't really feel like you're the kind of person to do that. You tell that to her, too.

She said you'd say that when you remember. You don't know what that means, because you read the notebook, but it still feels like somebody else, like an autobiography of some washed out depressed person who want to kill themself. Who did, you remind yourself, looking at the knife, rusted red on the floor, kill themself.

You don't know who you are, but that doesn't feel like something you'd do— you don't really know what you're willing to do but— you tell Miko-chan that you want to live, that you want to survive; she says that you wont. It's kind of disheartening, but there's nothing much you can do at this point except try your hardest to not regain your memories. It leaves you sour and bruised.

There's nothing you want to remember eagerly, if the things in the notbook are true. 

You go to sleep, you think nothing of it. You dream of—

—

You are in a car. It's an old model, one the two adults in the front are chatting cheery about. The seats are kind of itchy, but not enough to really bother you, just enough that you want to get where you're going fatser. You're going somewhere where it's less crowded, the adults in the front say. You don't know where you're going, specifically, because it's a surprise; nobody told you it's special, but you know, smomehow, someway. 

You look carefully at the road, at the daffodils everywhere and the sunflowers pulling to the clouds; everything is so big and you are so small, so miniscule. Even the people driving to car are larger than life, all dirt-stained cheeks and whatnot but you don't care. Bandages over your face and on your knees from failed atempts at tree climbing feel sticky on you, but you ignore it. You're happy, now.

You weren't happy before.

You wonder why, for a moment, but it slips, unimportant.

The woman in the drivers seat is very pretty. Her eyes are a sparkling color you can't describe, but it reminds you of the end of summer, in a way. She ins't small like you'd imagine a woman to be, she's very big, hunched over the top of the car, and the man in the passenger seat is far smaller, his head reaches the head-holder for The Adults, but not much further than that; he's holding the womans hand as she drives. They're laughing about how you'll all finally be away from the thing happening where it was crowded.

You aren't very fast, in the car, and the little boy sitting next to you is asleep, soundly when you look away from the daffodils and sunflowers and houses spread very far apart.

He's very small, tiny, in one of those big, baby, carseat when your in the booster; he wakes up, a little, and smiles a gummy smile at you, cooing. "Little brother!" you say, and you don't know this boy, except you do, because he's your little brother, and the people in the front are your parents and the bright red light blaring closer—

The bright red light blaring closer, closer, closer.

Closer, closer.

Your parents don't seem to notice, too busy looking at each other, sparkling, being happy and proud and so glad that they're getting away from [the thing happening where it was crowded].

―

(What's your name?)

—

Your alarm clock says 1:09AM when you wake up, strangled for air.

You decide to not go back to sleep. Your adrenaline is too high and you don't know where you are. Not fully. It's somewhere safe, probably.  The world is fuzzing around you and the bed aches around your back. You can see, now, why the Original may have wanted to forget, if the nightmares stay the same, blistering and bleeding through even when there are no memories of any events to recount on. 

(What's your name?)

(You're dead. I killed you.)

Your chest aches more than your back does, like an iron weight has nuzzled into your stomach and called it home. To stay perminently; there's a stutter in your chest, like somebody told you a bad joke, one that you already knew the punchline of, but you're laughing anyway. Except there's nobody here. It's one-two-seven-AM, and you're alone in the dark. You should do something to distract yourself. You turn on the lights.

The floor looks like it could use a good scrubbing.

You wander into the bathroom to look for bleach, a mop, a bucket; you find them. First you have to sweep, though, so you wander around looking for a broom, tiptoeing around Miko-chan's passed out self. She's knocked out cold on your pull-out couch. Not that it's actually pulled out, but you're sure it can be; the function looks like one of teh old ones that can. 

You walk through to your room and pick up the clothes and blanket from the floor. 

Stop, before you start you take a breath, close your eyes, and— red red red red—

Open them. You sweep quickly, over and over an over again, until there's no more dust on the floor. You get teh mop out, pack away the broom, neatly, and get to mopping your room. Nobody else lives in this apartment, you think, Miko-chan says that this place is old, like dawn-of-quirks old, and that there's ruomoured to be a ghost here. In accourdance to online forums, you suspect. 

You twitch, a little bit. Your arms hurt, a little bit.

Not enough to stop but enough for you to notice. You take a moment, aknowledge it. Then you continue, mopping the floors until they reflet you, you, you. The mirrors should look like this too, the bathroom mirrors, you should clean those, they were dirty when you saw them. Very dirty. It's 1:58AM you still have time to clean, you still have time to fix this, to distract yourself. So you do. You do. 

The bathroom is filthy, so you scrub down the mirrors, the sink, the toilet, the floor, and the toilet again, because you probably didn't do to well the first time. You're cleaning. Maybe you should scrub the walls. The walls look dirty, smokey, like you smoked in them, even if you don't smoke (maybe the Original does, maybe, maybe, these maybe's are driving you insane, you'd muse, but you don't have time with the bathroom so dirty). So, you clean the walls, scrub them until you can't scrub them anymore. You do the dishes, then, the counter, the table, the two wooden chairs. The kitchen.

Your hands peel a little, a little, bleeding.  A little. Only a little. You keep going, you're on a roll, one you aren't going to be stopping until you have to take a shower and leave to go to whatever a Yuuei is. 

So you keep going until there's nothing to do.

The house is clean. You can't find anything else to do, so you shower, change into your clothes, and you realize that you can do laundry. It's only three-two-four-AM, you still have time, you still have to do things. You don't want to stop, you might start thinking about the [red red red,] you don't want to think about that, you'll think about the eyes, then. You'll think about―

(What's your name?)

(You'll think about something that echos in your head and you'll stop, breath, you wont close your eyes this time; you aren't a fool. You don't stop, because if you do―

What's your name?)

Maybe, you thinks a tad hysterically, you aren't a sane as you thought you were. Maybe the reason the Original died was so they didn't have to listen to that. Maybe, if you die too, will you cease to exist?

There's an hourglass. You picture an hourglass. Except the hourglass is broken, somewhere, so the sand was never inside to begin with, if there's no sand in an hourglass you cannot tell the time. So you are struck, slowly with a realization that makes your skin crawl. You are going to live forever, in one way or another, so Miko-chan was right. It scares you, deeply, that all of this is, always will be, entirely pointless, because if you— once you— rememeber, this you, this version of you wont be anything but ceasless paranioa and a cold-hearted desire to live. 

(You're dead. I killed you.)

You throw up into the toilet.

The bathroom is dirty now. You should clean it again. It's only five-zero-two-AM, after all, and the notebook says you should leave at seven. 

You get to work.

—

There's that thing that you don't want to think about.

(You're dead. I killed you.)

You don't know what it means, but you don't want to. Miko-chan says to go, it's seven-AM on the dot, and she's rushing you out of your house like she pays rent (maybe she does, you don't know, you don't kow, you don't know, it's mortifying). She puts the directions on your phone and you follow the arrows; you wonder if the familiarity is because you've done this so many times, or because you're making something up to calm yourself down.

You decide it doesn't matter either way.

You know you've made it when there's a bunch of kids in a uniform you looked up online, Yuuei's uniform. It's not a lot of kids, mind you, it's two. Some boy with blue hair dye and boxy glasses with engines popping out of his legs, and a girl with orange hair and a bright smile. You wonder what you look like, then, and you find you can't remember, your face blurs into shapes. Diluted like salt-water. 

You walk through the gates, weary-eyed and shaking. It's the coffee, you drank four cups. You probably shouldn't have, but what're you going to do, die?

There's a man in black, with a terrible scruff and the ugliest jumpsuit you've ever seen in your life.  He looks like somebody woke him up one day and he was too betrayed to ever go back to sleep. Probably. You don't know. You're jittery. And tired. Really tired, but you don't want to risk dreaming about [RED RED RED] so you're just, kind of shaking it off. Not like it matters much, you think to yourself. 

"You." the sleepy man hisses. "Nedzu's been on my ass for twenty minutes because you're late."

"Uh, who?" you ask, tongue tied.

"Our boss. Just." he sighs, and you wonder how often he deals with you just not remembering things. "Let me take you there so you don't get lost."

You follow him, twisting through the same hallways, over and over and over―the repetition is getting you; like you're acquainted with the windows here. Like you know what's happening, you don't.

It makes you itchy; sandpaper cereal is in your mouth. You have to wonder what that means. What does it mean, you can't remember. There are rules that weren't in the notebook; you don't know what they are but―

The not knowing is what gets you, in the end. There's a distinct surprise that comes with opening the door to find a.. dog? A dog. Standing. With a cup of tea and a scar that takes up a good chunk of the dog's face.

"What the fuck?" You ask the man in black. He doesn't seem to realize what's wrong, so you repeat it, earnestly. "What the fuck?"

"Am I a dog? A bear? A―"

"It speaks?" You whisper. "I'm crazy. I'm definitely crazy."

The dog-bear grins, sharp. "Green tea it is, would you like some as well, Aizawa?"

"No. I'm leaving." Says the man, Aizawa. And he does. There's nothing but air when he leaves, a lilt in the atmosphere, it's like smoke. Like red. You wonder if Nedzu can smell your fear, if he can smell the bleach on your skin.

You don't ask.

He sets down a cup of green tea, but it looks off, cloudy. You think he might be poisoning you, so you don't drink it; you sit at him, look him in the eye.

"It's your favorite." He says, assuredly.

You drink it. It's bitter.