A little theory I made after going insane about this silly franchise.

I do not own Corpse Party, or Team GrisGris... or any of that. I just own... well I guess I technically own nothing but the title Let us Go.

Nah, I don't know if I own that either. Uh... read on... -glances at little girl in red dress awkwardly-

Let us Go

The light of her candle lost its will to go on hours ago. She felt as if she'd died with the wax piece as the tear-like drops spilled from the top of the dwindling flame and stained the sides of the towering light. She wanted to die with the flickering glow, but her body continued to accept air, even after the fire died out. Her soul was broken; she was alone. The cold, creaking floorboards of Heavenly Host Elementary School only further allowed her to feel the utter loss she now suffered. She even knew how every last piece of her soul had crumpled. The other eight slips of paper were somewhere in the school still, sitting in the pockets of decaying corpses—possibly held together only by clamped, skeletal fingers of pure calcium. Bone. Or even lost to their deathly clutch. Either way... she wound up the last one.

In her mind's eye, the events circled, casually colliding as they ran. First it was the screeching of one dear friend as another swung on a noose, her body rocking slowly, the ropes creaking, like a clock that once breathed and moved. She somehow felt Seiko's presence as she crumpled into nothing. That stain on the floor once represented the short brunette with playful curls in her hair and a silly smile to fit even the occasion of falling into this death trap. But the smile was gone as her body tottered on that limp, creaky rope, the one thing holding her into the air.

Then she stood and watched as Mayu was thrown against a wall and her body broke; flesh that once held skeletal and internal organs alike melted against the wooden walls and floors and ripe blood exploded against the corridor. Not even the small, pink hairpiece that once secured a section of her soft, brown hair up remained. Nor those hopeful, green eyes that nearly fell apart on her last day of school—on her last day to live. Suzumoto was nothing—reduced to a jumble of organs and blood and meat that resembled a puzzle left unsolved. She was dead.

The girl with the candle's heart swooned, so lucky Kishi—Yoshiki, that Yoshiki always stayed with her, promising that they would live, that they would all escape, that the death could only be an illusion. When Mayu died and that ripe sledgehammer struck him from the gloomy corridors out of nowhere, he silently sank away from her as if to take away the pain, to hide any death, if there would be death, from her. When he found her again, she now noticed how much more secure she'd felt afterwords.

And then they learned who the killer's identity stained of, and... the blonde delinquent, her dear blonde delinquent didn't go back into Heavenly Host with her. Her heart seemed to rip apart when she left their safe school behind a second time and journeyed into the haunted spaces again. His jacket was still over her shoulders when she disappeared into the dark opening again—from when she fell into that pool of churning water. She didn't realize how devastated she felt, alone, until the dank rooms and spiderweb-crossed walls returned, as did the corpses. The skeletons. The numberless amass of dead bodies and the knowing that nobody else was with her. Not a soul permeated with her existence now that Yoshiki ditched.

Hearing Morishige's death cry upstairs brought a small sliver of hopefulness back to her. She found his twitching, black-worn body at the bottom of a drop from an open window. His scream was meant for her—Mayu, unknowing that the girl was dead. And he was dead, too. His pair of flashing glasses still filled his face. It was then that she knew leaving Yoshiki was bad. Very bad. And she was oh, so alone. Her heart was heavy and broken. Her mind was ill. Yoshiki of course had been right to stay behind. Everyone was destined to die for returning. Die.

She was only able to resume mere thinking when his tall, pale figure walked up those steps and eventually deliberated he'd made a terrible mistake. He needed them as well—Mayu, Satoshi... Yuka... all of them. Still, hope permeated. Just because Morishige had left their dimension of space didn't mean, couldn't mean, the others had ceased to go on as well.

She remembered a blur of a bloody, ripped body—the anatomical model—chasing after them at certain times, guarding papers from Naho's notebook—oh, Naho, her body filled with the anguish of losing her beloved teacher and sending an innumerable amount of teenagers and children to their deaths—and yelling in a garbled fury at the sight of the ghosts regaining body parts. They found his name tag, Kizami Yuuya, but never truly feared or hurt him until they saw the limp, middle-school-aged body wrapped over his shoulder that sat severely torn, near impossible to see through dried blood and crisscrossing shadows. But the blue dress could be distinguished beneath layers of torn skin and running blood.

Yuka was dead too.

They had met up with Yuka before, whom had told of a man she tried to befriend named Kizami Yuuya himself before escaping thanks to her faithful older brother, and seeing the body brought both of their small group to shudders.

Once their "way out," without appeasing the ghost children and just escaping like little wimps was determined to be useless and the pieces needed to free the dead spirit Sachiko were brought together in the hands of Naomi, Satoshi, Ayumi, and Yoshiki, they were to meet at the basement of the haunted elementary school. The two latter were able to arrive, but beforehand they had

found a crippled body of Naomi, short hair plastered against a bloody, tear-stained face, cradling the broken body of Seiko even in death. Something had gotten her. But they managed to arrive in the basement and meet up with Satoshi without other news to bear.

Until the trio found an odd, unnamed room with the lines of a bloodred pentagram hastily sketched over the ground and the bottom popped off. If it hadn't been for the arrival of Yui-sensei, she would have died. Saying that, the young teacher fell with a broken arm—she fell, and the crash of rubble landing on top of her pink sweater let Ayumi and Yoshiki and Satoshi know Yui-sensei couldn't return.

Eventually their white-clothed friend asked if the bluenette or blonde had seen his sister, returning with images of Yuka's body swinging along with the bloody beast she rode upon. But they had to tell the boy and he lost it.

Absolutely lost control.

Disappeared from sight.

Later on the two found Satoshi's trembling fingers holding onto a small, plush cat: the one that child girl had once owned. His chest was filled with tears and rips. His lifeless eyes may as well have been glass held in sockets. His tongue was missing. But it was not until the final room, a small chamber leading up into Sachiko's resting place, that they learned what killed him. A large, burly man with bleeding, ripping, red eyes held up a thick hammer that carried the stench of carrion and blood. With a moan, he lifted the sledgehammer and smashed it into the ground, ripping out floorboards but missing the blonde hair Yoshiki had on his head. She remembered him telling her that he took two hits from the hammer and that Yoshikazu's aim was clumsy and poor. He did not tell her that the bloody anatomical model stood behind him, or that both men held scissors. He did not know until such moment.

She was petrified at the thought of dying, at the remembrance of this school, at the knowing of how each and every one of the people she let use the Sachiko Ever-After charm died, with the exception of Yoshiki. She started to smile at the thought that he would at least live. But something shoved her away, screamed at her to live, told her he wanted to see her smile. To see her eyes light up. To see her happy.

Yoshiki tore open like a pinata. The two men mechanically lifted their arms, groaning and moaning ominously, and carried his corpse away. She just sat and stared. She fucking sat and stared. At nothing. Nothing but fucking cobwebs and fucking blood.

And eventually lifted brutally-shaking fingers to, after bundles of tries, light the candle. She couldn't even bring herself to cry. She didn't even feel- but the numb pang that everything was gone. Life had ended. Joy didn't exist. She was an empty, hollow shell. And Ayumi Shinozaki was alone.

There she sat around a dead flame and a tearful candle, her entity lifeless and broken. She took in gasping breath after gasping breath, oxygen that involuntarily relighted her candle's core, and worked up the courage to whisper:

"Kishinuma." But it didn't quite feel right to call him that anymore. Ayumi squeezed her eyes tightly shut and used a voice so gentle, so quiet, so helpless that another being couldn't hear it if they tried.

"Yo-Y-Yoshi..Yoshiki..."

She abruptly poured her face into her hands and cracked into thick, wet tears. She started to scream, not only his name but of seven others that were dead. She wanted to see them again- she needed to see them again. To recover her torn-into-eight heart, like that damned charm. She couldn't take back the nine times she pleaded for this ending to what felt like an eternity before. One that existed once—or never. She wanted to curl up and pretend none of this ever happened. That she wasn't possessed by a ghost. That she hadn't witnessed the murder of three girls. That the principal never strangled Sachiko to death or pushed her mother down a flight of stairs. That no one died. These people shared a strange connection to her—they all did. Each had a part of her heart taken. And now they were all as lifeless as she felt. Oddly... a dark fog in the back of her head suggested an otherworldly emotion. That this wasn't the first time she wished the exact same ideals and none of the above had actually granted themselves.

Ayumi squeezed those now-wet and -snotty fingers into little fists furled of determination—or what she hoped she had of it—and raised their sockets to her wavering, waxy, watery candle. Mindless boggles of shots dizzied her head along: skulls and legs and bones and entrails and guts and leaky pools of blood and dried pools of blood: Sachiko's little creations. If Takamine Yanagihori never... ever snuffed out that tiny, little flame... those creations couldn't have existed.

A sudden, fleeting moment left the bluenette reeling without air in sudden thought of herself strangled... or her school uniform doused in blood or her head snapped straight of and sent sailing like some sort of sick sport for that rancid little brat to catch and toss to one of her ghost buddies—but Ayumi caught herself when she remembered the tiny, cyan Yuki.

There was a good in Sachiko, and Ayumi had to waken it again to free herself in the very least.

Her heart caught: "M-myself..." She mumbled the word. "Myself." Again, like Kishinuma... the simple word didn't fit in her lips correctly. Eyes finally beginning to dry, she choked out a watery cough.

"Why does it feel like..." A hiccup bashed through her jaw. "Why..." Two; three. Another followed in pursuit. "Wh-why the hell does it feel like this all happened before?!" She didn't expect much other than the silence welcoming her and the candle as its slow descent of blinking out and dying once more encored. A sudden urge to ask her dear blonde friend how he felt about this seized her up—then Ayumi remembered again that Yoshiki died. Yoshiki died a little bit ago. He wasn't with her in this hole any longer.

Long shadows cast dangerously, almost as if threatening her, along the blackened and broken floorboards. Where the light didn't reach, the outskirts outlined themselves in a hefty black mark. The candle's time was about up. It sat listless in a white stump—all that remained of its sad rein despite the steadily growing pool of wax below. Ayumi wondered, listlessly as well, whether or not the little girl in the red dress kept the candle stumps stuck in the ground, or if the ones that never seemed to falter would stay as long as they could and never be touched by that wavering ghoul's filthy, childish fingers. She knew again she shouldn't pour such loathe into the little Sachiko, but... they were dead; reason emerged. Well, enough of a reason. Ayumi had decided already that losing the eight people she'd done that charm with and suffered through enough hand-in-hand—her friends, her friends—was enough to call that little girl whatever she felt like calling her.

Heart clutched alongside a certain paper scrap, a sigh fell out of Ayumi's lips. "I'm supposed to give her those items... and then I'm supposed to live." She didn't want to live but that undying bit of beating heart that apparently was too stupid to die like the rest of her heartbroken self told of righteousness and living and that's what Yoshiki wanted and Yui-sensei and Mayu and shit, shit juuuust like that. Either way, as long as the blood kept flowing, Ayumi Shinozaki had to keep going.

All she had left on her list was to live—once that list included saving her friends. Now she only had to escape and that empty check, open like a gaping hole, could be filled with some mark and she still felt so cold, so alone... so empty. Hollow, like a shell. Her stomach crawled with the anxiety of the thou-

"Stop it, Ayumi! STOP IT! You'll live..! You'll live! Now get this over with!"

As blood-soaked shoes clambered onto creaking floorboards, the girl felt, in that stupid part of her heart refusing to die, that something else had yet to happen, like there was more than the appeasement and the chanting and then Sachiko's repentance. Again, like she'd been here before and there was more. Panting like Yui-sensei's cat in the unwavering heat, Ayumi flooded herself past the old and dreary walls stuffed with mud and stone and hurtled hard over the short, stubby hallway that lead her into a cold chamber: clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, splat, splat, skffffffff... Ending her step, Ayumi only vaguely remembered the corpse of a certain giant in the room she'd already past and hadn't even looked at when the blood-splattered girl in scarlet landed in front of her.

In front of her own remains, her own skeletal entrails, as well.

FUMP.

"Don't look at them."

"I-"

"Don't look at them!"

Appearing child-like and modest, as if those scissors in her limpid fingers didn't exist, Sachiko raised her free hand and unraveled stone gray fingers to point one out at Ayumi and screech: "DON'T LOOK AT THEM!" Her entrails. Ayumi knew this—not from any sort of deja vu or of the sort.

An odd suspicion in her head fell through, inferring that Sachiko's dress wasn't always red. Like too many killings dyed it another color. Because she was tired and only wanted to get this load of shit over with, the bluenette bargained around the thought. She had absolutely no care for this stray thought but decided more precious energy would be wasted against the freaky sense of uncaring will that something would happen she knew couldn't possibly: one Sachiko was all. One little brat that sent her friends' innards out. One little brat that beat her so dear Yoshiki to bits. One fucking child was all it took to tip her life out of orbit and into the warped realm of Heavenly Host Elementary School.

Besides, if she'd gone to this place before, she would have remembered. Sachiko's little world of death wasn't an easy dimension—in all due respect—to forget. And how could Ayumi have come if it hadn't been for her eight beloved journeyers in tow that died in their desperate scrambles for life and... to see each other one last time if never again? Ayumi still felt as if she'd been here before, prior to her current stare at the girl in the red dress, but she also felt like there was another one... without the blood, which was crazy because Sachiko didn't wear else but adorning her red: therefore, there was one Sachiko.

Never been two. Always the single mass in all its love and glory—lack of it, thereof.

As if Sachiko has ripped out another bit of her heart, Ayumi whipped at her returned tears and snarled above her hollow loneliness. "This is yours! J-just take it already!" With a squrch, a reddened hemp bag rolled tastelessly for the ghost girl.

Her dead eyes rolled alongside the bag with a sniffle. Ayumi joined the little girl's symphony, her own rein of tears splattering again and erasing the blood already creased over her pale skin. Pale with health, unlike her friends. Unlike Seiko or Mayu; or Naomi. Unlike Yui-sensei, Morishige, or Satoshi, or little Yuka... or Y-Yoshiki, either. If their skin even held a square inch of color, such color stained their outward body pieces and skeletal bits as red: a deep, murky, desolate, empty red that Ayumi so wished to pour all over herself and join them. She just wanted to hear their voices, to see their smiling faces, to be happy already, to stop feeling dead and decaying and wrecked...

The thought gnawing on her brain festered at that point. Stop feeling wrecked, she had thought. As if they'd done this multiple times and felt dead prior. Like they were once alive... multiple times.

It's impossible, she scolded. Impossible. As if this proved her emotionless notion, her fingers flitted for the hard ball of fluff packed to her skirt's pocket and tugged out the alluring head of the black stuffed cat. Sachiko's dead eyes suddenly brightened with life and hard pain. "M-mommy..." she whispered to the kitten's own lifeless face.

Ayumi, gentler, flourished the rest of the cat's stuffed and loose body with a flick of her wrist and, kinder, smiled slightly as she handed the cat back to its due master. "Uu...wwww...wwaaa..." The call for the dam's break sounded as little Sachiko split into tears and Ayumi saw behind the girl in the red dress was a second little girl with long, raven-black hair that straightened and curled through the help of a mother's daily care, propped up in a soft, white, silky fabric that pooled to the ground: a girl in a white dress: Sachiko in a white dress. Her eyes flashed from red to white, red to white again, candy-cane stripes dancing along in her head at the sight. Impossible. Improbable.

The dark curtain in her head seemed to split. She definitely had been here before. The smile in her head didn't belong to a face she'd seen long before it burst into sinews and flesh. Mayu's smile—her beloved Mayu's beam fastened onto her face in tow as it always had before her dear, dear Mayu learned that she would move out of town and leave them... Smiling again, painted to the background of broken wood and creaking doors and the big man with the hammer, Yoshikazu, racing past them as Ayumi's mind reeled. But the entire sight, up to the stench of blood, was chock-full of memory. Her mind was playing tricks on her.

Ayumi stubbornly clawed past her tears. Mayu died, and she never had a chance to smile in that forsaken school, though the bluenette knew her dear Mayu would find a way to. She could bet each of her pigtails without worry of losing them that the sweet, short brunette, her dear Mayu, would find a reason to smile in the cold pit of Heavenly Host—she practically never stopped in the act.

Another foul thought provoked her as sights filled with a glasses-adorned bluenette running out toward petite Mayu, his attire dark as usual though somewhat reddened by the blood and other vital organs he must have been forced to walk through or by in order to see her again.

"Mayu! Mayu!" Morishige ran on, yelling his lungs out for the frozen girl in front of him. "Mayu, speak to me!" His eventual broach caused for him to search his best friend's eyes fearfully, light in touch and search in the anxious thought that she could be dead. "Mayu... are you... okay..?" Afraid to lose an answer. Afraid to lose her.

So deathly afraid.

Ayumi felt the shaking hidden beneath his clothes. Pent-up feelings in his heart that he tried to deny burst in him. "Mayu..."

Until bottle-green eyes widened and struck. "Shige-nii... it's... r-really..." A sob fell out of her mouth as she jumped at the boy. "I thought... I thought..."

"I'd never see you again..." He hid his surprise well, smoothing his hands around her yellow-clothed back and hugging the girl closely.

"Uu..."

With her orbs so full of emotion, Ayumi found herself doubting how the girl's next words managed to force their way out. "I... l-love you... Sh-shige-n-nn-nii..." Mayu plowed past another tear as she clung onto her best friend tightly. A sudden weight seemed to lift from her shoulders at her remark, as if the thought had forced her soul under for such a long time. Somewhere in Ayumi's heart, this bold pain clung tightly and plunked at her strings like an instrument, just searching for the right cord to take her heart wide open. As if the two usually never coincided...

If this Heavenly Host actually had been searched through by the bluenette and her dear companions. If the thought roiling in her skull actually permeated a sense of truth. That they'd all been here before—multiple times, even, possibly more than the once; and Ayumi wasn't experiencing some unlucky deja vu. She didn't know for sure, but the sight, even if a vague remembrance, of Mayu's little beam released even the smallest urge to search for another angle, a spiritual reaching that could shine a clutch of light on the situation. In a lair like Heavenly Host Elementary, Ayumi couldn't find enough of such hope. Practically none else than cobwebs and crusted scarlet stained the corridors.

Her thoughts whirled closer to the memory, almost seeming to fetch closer detail: the gentle press of a glinting substance on Morishige's glasses; faint, rosy blushes along his and Mayu's pale, living cheeks; incredulous wonder of it all, collecting in their averted gazes. "...M-mayu..." Ayumi herself, pressing the ever the closer with each collective breath, could tell that the denial upon denial, layered and caked and shoved so fearfully close, a force to hold away the impact of emotions, each unfaithful breath fell away at the petite girl's words. She again felt the strumming twinge against her chest that the two never saw each other if Heavenly Host were a dungeon, or an encroachment of sorts. Somehow the shaking girl snuffed out her own beating heart enough to feel—truly feel—this sudden heat to her face, the knocking in her chest like she's a door, opening out to the world, and her eyes moist and full, unable to conceive the words pulled into motion. Because...

"Mayu, I love you too, Mayu... I love you t-"

"WAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhh..." The two Sachiko children combined emitted a shriek unlike any other, shattering Ayumi's cocoon like a glass vase and tossing it aside so that the pain of the children—child, whichever they were—could be heard by the dizzied girl in the pigtails. Upon sight of their jaws thrown straight out, head continuing to reel, Ayumi abruptly fell to the ground. Evidently she recalled that last step of what she had to do in order to survive: that damned charm. With a snort and a snotty wipe of her wet fingertips, she recovered her so dear paper scrap that had shriveled into a small, wet ball of dull, white limpidness with small rips and dents betwixt as if to remind her of the eight friends this little guy connected her to. Always would.

Without another soul to accompany her, she deliberated for the path that sounded most reasonable to her not-so stupid piece of stubborn heart... the one that did remind her of two of her friends, she knew:

"Sachiko, we beg of you!" A risk especially since each of her friends no longer existed. But if that stupid heart of hers knew what it was doing that first strike it took... surely it could take her home: truly home. And... to her friends, perchance, if she knew what she was doing. Sadly, Ayumi really didn't know what she had in mind or if it worked, but stupid heart seemed to. She only knew to trust it by then.

"Sachiko... we beg oF YOU!" For a sound, fleeting moment, the pigtailed girl could have sworn she tasted the yell of others down her throat, other beings screaming with her own body and voice; she'd been possessed multiple times though and couldn't count on any sense of hope. Just... Ayumi crossed her fingers in a quick sense of denial, that they weren't gone and she wasn't crazy, and upturned her head toward the face of a single little girl, one collided between the two, with warmer eyes and a larger, brighter smile and a face that could have portrayed as happy, she thought, in another world. The girl in the white—no longer a need for the blood, at this time, though the stupid heart told her there would be another—began to dissolve into the air, beam slapped upon her cheeks and all. Ayumi couldn't smile back: all thoughts lied on the corpses she'd left behind to reach so far... so far after her damned charm.

Cyan whisked itself beside her but the blue-haired girl felt that pinch in her head again, the one that had told her not all that long ago something else was amok. Toes clenched, she knew the order to run before the child Yuki could plea for her. Ayumi's head snapped back and the uniformed girl set herself in the opposing direction, toward the yawning opening ahead of that dreary door to take her home. She didn't need to look back for the stupid heart to alert her that little Yuki's fabrics, so gently stained by the blood of her missing eye, had dyed themselves a sickening scarlet that she realized couldn't come out through any sort of rainwater that infinitely ran just outside the school.

"Ah... ah... ah... ah..."

She wheezed, ran, panted, wheezed.

Thump thump thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump-shkkkkk... Thump thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump...

Ayumi pelted on and on, sucking in breath as she willed as Yuki's words, the ones she hadn't heard this round, bounced along in her skull: the school day ends when the bell chimes seven. The bluenette grumbled to herself at this as her eyes blurred to tears and sights became brown and whatever she stepped on, she pleaded wasn't the forlorn and blackened body of Yoshiki Kishinuma. She didn't see the blonde, but she also didn't see the wall when it came out at her and bit. The unfortunate reckon was that one of her trips, or one of those moments she stepped and she squished, those were Yoshiki's farewell. Whatever liquid blurred her gaze now only burnt in succession.

"I'm"—solid gasp—"s-so"—another gasp—"s-ssorrrrry"—deep wheeze—"Yoshikiiiii!" Her cries hit her own chest like bullets; the thudding in her heart suggested she'd betrayed herself. And she felt like he had—never apologized to the boy, not a single time, even through his relentless assistance. Thick, soupy regret bubbled inside of her chest alongside her steady lack of oxygen. But all Ayumi could do was run on. If she stopped... no. She couldn't stop.

Another squelch, and the girl decided she must have stepped on Seiko as well. Losing breath and losing heart, Ayumi drily squeaked at the feeling. She couldn't even manage a hello to the dead passerby and began profusely apologizing in the safety of her head. She knew enough that the curl-styled girl and her uppity attitude had infiltrated her head once when she was possessed and... and she nearly harmed Yoshiki, had she not? A hug and she accused him of squeezing her life out. Ayumi added the blonde again to her list of apologies. Then, out of a weak sense of desperation, the pigtailed girl mentally yelled and begged for apologies to each of her friends for losing their lives and never seeing them again and being so selfish to live when they died and to want them back so much... Through a sniffle, Ayumi again thanked her stupid, stupid heart for living so well, even as she ran and it pumped and screamed through each bloodied floorboard.

Ayumi didn't even care about the skeletons or the stench any longer.

She was just tired—bone tired, dead tired, bloody, bloody tired. Her eyelids threaten to close over on her; her head spun weakly; her lungs begged to end this purgatory and supply them with true, refreshing breaths. But she couldn't yet. Not yet. The damned charm and the damned school demanded this final task.

Then her friends, she mumbled deep in her heart. They'll be there. They have to.

Not quite, her heart seemed to rumble deep inside of her. Not quite.

Again Ayumi cursed at her stupid bit of believing self and recalled her heart a stupid organ. She probably could live without it if she tried. The girl knew this fact could never be proven true but Sachiko was technically alive and so was Yoshikazu and the ghost children and Yoshie so she could assume all the hell she wanted to.

Thump thump thump thump

Plip plop plip plop plipplop

thump thump sksh sksh sksh sksh sksh

plipplopplipplopplipplopplipplopplipplopplipplopplipplopplipplop

Rain hurtled down and struck old wood like an old enemy, like it was screaming at the school to go to hell already. Ayumi reminisced from memories she couldn't tell were hers or not any longer that this place was hell. She saw enough blood to believe this wholeheartedly. And Naho. She could go to hell too—she killed Mayu in the first place. Ayumi firmly deliberated that Mayu could live somehow, but as long as her dear friend didn't show, she'd blame the entity of that hell.

She liked blaming the hell. It made her feel better.

Just a tiny crumb of it. Of better.

With a sweep, the rain flicked out of notion and Ayumi stopped moving. Her position, hurtled over the old, slick railing, vanished along with her memories and sense of life. Dizziness smashed her like a sledgehammer, a fairly large one wielded by a blood-eyed monster man, until visions of desks rattled across her—and that faded too. She just smacked an unholy smack against newly-shined floorboards and released a pent-up groan. Ayumi lived.

Shivering, flickering orbs clicked shut. She thought about how nice it would be to flick open those blue orbs again and see Mayu beaming down on her.

A silent blink.

No one.

Another blink.

Not a soul.

Another

none

another
another
another
another
another
another
another
another
another

"MAYU!" Suzumoto didn't feel right. "MAYU, COME BACK TO ME! MAAYUUUUUUUU!" Fierce tears scoured her brain. "SEIKOOO!" A sob. "SATOSHI!" Another sob, louder, broken, dead. "YUI-SENSEI...! YUKA! COME BACK..! COME BAAAAACCKK! M-MOri...shige... uuuuwwwwaaahhhhhhhhahh..." She burrowed into her own arms. Ayumi felt a cold, dark pit of loneliness bite into her and her wet, leaden forelimbs, but she didn't care. The stupid heart said they would be here. She wanted her friends. She wanted them all back. She was ready to believe those old memories were some of theirs and they were alive somewhere: she could take the fact that this had all happened before and before and before. Just give them back, she pleaded, give them back to me.

Days began to pelt by.

Ayumi remembered being found on the floor by some new teacher, one that everyone remembered so that not a soul had to recall Yui-sensei. Class 2-9 no longer existed as six of the children had never existed, so therefore an insufficient number supplied any sort of 2-9 that ever could have and will exist. She didn't hear much about the junior high, but she assumed well enough that a class now held one less child. Stiffening with a cry, Ayumi didn't look at any of the people who came and found her and asked her name as if she'd forgotten and why she was talking about people that didn't exist.

None of them exist, she deliberated. None of the people standing in front of her existed, because they thought Yoshiki Kishinuma didn't exist. There was always the possibility they hadn't heard of this Kishinuma, the dear blonde of hers being a delinquent with parents who disowned him, but stones in her heart rejected this.

None of them exist, because they don't think he exists.

That was all she knew.

Eventually, settled within the safety of a mattress and one too many puffy, white blankets, Ayumi kept to herself in her little cloud fortress. In the few moments she wasn't either heavily sedated or blocking out any and all life about her, she searched out and could detect the maternal and paternal voice of parents that didn't understand who Yui-sensei was. She mentally elected the dead teacher become her real parent or guardian. None detested. No parents of hers wouldn't believe her words about the teacher with the bright smile; the teacher that kept her students and loved them like a mother; the teacher that listened to her woes endlessly and chatted on... no parent could detest Yui Shishido.

She's real, Ayumi knew. She's real and everyone else is too. They're all fake. All these idiots are fake, fake, fakefakefake.

They couldn't possibly be actual people if they thought her friends didn't exist. She wasn't insane. She wasn't talking to damn ghosts—don't they dare detest her sister as well. Hinoe Shinozaki was right on the occult, Ayumi knew this as well. She never heard her sister's sweet, gentile tone, but she knew the brunette—she'd believe her sister. And Ayumi would believe her. Hinoe couldn't be fake. That, at least, she felt comfortable in labeling absolutely impossible.

Ayumi dreamed on in her tiny fortress, where her friends existed and only her sister could come in, and though she never smelt the certain incenses or heard the soft clack, clack of Hinoe, she knew that girl was on her side. She knew it. Not even her own heart was with her anymore, but Hinoe always always was. Always.

In a slow and methodical order, other reveries and memories uncoiled around Ayumi's head. She saw the perverted Seiko choking on her rope as a stricken Naomi, short hair sticking like a sort of hedgehog's, plowed at her best friend in repeated attempts to save her, dutifully noting that a small scatter of such events held Seiko's own neck snapping open and blood spraying the ceiling and dripping to a glooping sound toward the rinds in a slurred stumble. Multiple times, multiple times, her head seemed to bang in a sort of chant. Multiple times.

Little glimpses of a tiny girl, much smaller than even Mayu herself, in a bright red headband and blue smock as she stumbled about in the gloom revealed later on. Ayumi saw the tearful, wet-panted Yuka run amok in Heavenly Host, stepping in hot ooze or squealing as she ran from what could have been opponents. Once she tripped and her head sent itself flying off her head; once the tyke froze in place, locked over, as a thick, tan hand ripped over her smock and began a gloating glee; other times she disappeared into the darkness, never to be seen or heard again. Multiple deaths, multiple senses of what could have been life. She even began to sight a cyan-hued Yuka, as if the girl had materialized into a ghost... afterlife. Still, she cried for her big brother.

The girl, cocooned in her covers, felt more of others: she saw Mayu and her dear Morishige meet once more before the two never matched eyes again and became messy pulps by the end of their times; she saw a tall brunette in a strikingly white jacket running about, yelling, screeching for people, for friends, sometimes before a creature struck him over with a quick bludgeon; she saw Yui-sensei as well, her shoulder-length brown hair bobbling along with the panda necklace draped over her skin as she once clasped hands with what Ayumi eventually realized was herself, shaking and stricken and each living, very well breathing, on bloodied floorboards; and she saw Yoshiki... she saw the blonde watch over her and yell for her and stand there with her—and she saw him alone as well, or running alongside his best friend, yelling at and with Satoshi, the two freeing a limp Seiko as breath faithfully clings on, or reaching out and yelling, yelling with Morishige as well.

"The whole gang," she mumbled to herself, quiet again, for the dead, dead doctors to not hear. "The whole gang, right there..."

A slow fade took Ayumi out of her bed—it grew colder with each day as did her feeling, her sense of life, of love, of hope. But her heart beat warmly, content with the thought that she would find her friends again soon.

Again was the key word. Not for the first time would she be searching like this—again.

With this knowledge came realization, precise as it dawned on her and whacked her well in the head. This most indubitably could not have been her first escapade, or their first deaths. She also felt as if she'd left her body there once. She'd died in Heavenly Host. Lost her life in that ruin. Burning, bruising, ripping, rancid, cold, hard, shredding, grating, bonking, deadly monstrous evil dark pain seemed to always worm its way into her heart. If she still felt the bed she may have rested herself on, she would have felt the sheer cold blanketed about her. Frigid. But she wasn't... there... anymore. This Ayumi knew. This she knew well.

Thoughts pillowed amongst her. The more Ayumi lost sight of her life, the less of those memories seemed to uncover, like she was reaching the end of them. Pangs wrapped around her cords and pulled tightly, and she recalled her absolute need to find him, to find Yoshiki, but beside such tensions she didn't see much. Skeletons flashed and danced in her vision along with bright stamps of blood, as if sending her off for a ride.

Cold, creaky tension snapped beneath her. The softness of whatever bed left her. Ayumi was alone—no. No she wasn't alone. A rancid breath of blood caught her nostrils.

"Shinozak-!..ah, goddammit. Why won't that word... feel..." Narrowed eyes drilled into hers.

"Yoshi... Yo... shi..." Her mind had nullified itself, but she seemed to recall as well that she hadn't called the blonde Kishinuma for a time. Lying on dead wood nailed beneath her, Ayumi locked eyes and ripped the word out of her mouth: "Yoshiki!" A release of air filled her lungs. "Yoshiki. Yoshiki... Kishi... nu..." Ayumi began to recall what happened on her last visit to Heavenly Host... and when the blonde's body was burned apart. "...m...mmmmm...mmmMmmMMMm..."

She couldn't.

She just couldn't. "YOSHIKI!" She sprung from the bloodied floorboards and leaped at the delinquent.

"Shino-... A-Ayum-i!"

Another loop began.

Because she managed to live when all others crumbled apart, Shinozaki Ayumi held together the fragile loop that connected their nine people to Heavenly Host Elementary School, the loop that kept them from throwing themselves into the pits for waste.

So yeah... basically I've felt like this little pit here is like a loop... and when everyone dies, no oe makes it out, the loop is over. Everyone's cursed~
Now... everyone lives, we all escape, and—oh come on, I'm sure all of you know what an antonym is. :3

Of course there's a middle too. Where a couple guys live. Keep the loop going. No one technically "dies," but it's kind of close, you know. Hweh, just a little thought I composed after looking up and reading about and watching and playing waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much corpse party.