Originally posted under the full title of "The Opposite of Death (and the Recognised Stages of Coming To Terms with your Gain)"

1. Shock and Numbness

It's been said, under the astute wisdom of certain circles of pop-psychology, that wanting something is better than having it, and Neku has to admit there might even be some truth to that considering that it took a week of being dead to teach him to appreciate a whole lot of what was out there to make being alive so thoroughly worthwhile. On the other hand, he spent three weeks wanting little more than to make it out of the Game in one piece, and now he's done it he's pretty confident that nothing – not all the emo-urges that school, family and the modern rat-race in all its horror combined could ever hope to inspire – are ever going to make him regret pulling it off.

That said, being alive again might have been taking a little more adjusting than he'd prepared for.

The embarrassing part is that there's nothing in it he shouldn't have expected from the start. If he'd spared even a moment to think about it he would have seen something like this coming: he'd have remembered that in all the years of his life he's never once seen anyone make the international news after coming back from the dead, and there are only so many ways to reconcile that with the nature of the Reaper's Game that wouldn't have made him give up on the spot. If anyone had actually come out and asked Neku how he thought it all worked, he'd have had to admit he'd pretty much been taking it for granted that what happened in the UG stayed in the UG and it'd all take care of itself. At the least that was still a much more comforting explanation than what was frankly the more plausible possibility - that the promise of being returned to life had never been any more than a carrot on a string the Reapers were dangling in front of his eyes to keep him dancing to their tune. But un-life in the UG had had a way of keeping them too busy to worry about the big picture, and no matter what the objective was, the reality was that on a shear moment-to-moment basis they'd never been playing to win nearly so much as they'd been playing not to lose. The risk of being erased was not only a constant and incredibly motivational threat, it was a fate so horrible it was didn't bear thinking about – and if they weren't going to waste time thinking about that then they certainly weren't going to have the time to waste worrying about anything less immediate.

The long and short is that even if the question had occurred to him, the healthiest thing he could have done would have been to push it to the back of his mind and forget about it, because sometimes denial is the only thing that keeps you going. So when it finally became an issue he had no defenses, and the Reapers' parting shot against his sanity got him with both barrels.

"…then outta nowhere we get this lecture on road safety. But it was like our folks didn't know why they was giving it – like someone gave 'em a script an' they were just reading it all out at us."

Beat looks every bit as worked up as he sounds; like he wants to crawl into a little ball and flail off a thousand kilojoules of excess energy at the same time, and the combination is not doing good things for him. "You think being dead was freaky, it had nothin' on this."

"It was like our parents knew there was some reason they should be worried about us, but they couldn't remember what it was," Rhyme puts in. "They're never that happy to see us when we get home on a normal day. They wanted to be angry at Beat for being careless – at both of us – but they were too relieved to see us. It must've been horrible for them."

"Forget them – Dad looked like he was about to hug me! I woulda died again right there!" says Beat. "Whole time we was in the game the only thing in my head is gettin' through it. Then suddenly Rhyme and me are standing on our doorstep and it hits me that our folks are gonna think we've been dead for three weeks. What the hell are we gonna say? And then the door opens and everything's going nuts and Rhyme has to elbow me out of blurting out the whole story three times before I catch that as far as they know we ain't been gone for the weekend. Never felt so boneheaded my whole life."

Neku leans back against the bench as Shiki makes appropriately sympathetic noises. He heard most of this on the phone a week ago, not so coherent without Rhyme's inputs, but there's something weirdly comforting about having Beat – born one of those rare individuals with no brain/mouth filter – having the big, loud freak out that everyone else is feeling but doesn't want to have in public.

"It was the same with my parents," says Neku – and it was, except that his mother really had hugged him for what had to be the first time since he was old enough to be trusted on his own feet – so completely out of the blue he hadn't known what to do with it. It wasn't like he'd expected to do his usual thing of walking in at any hour without either of them so much as glancing up from their latest row, but he'd walked home in such a daze – not seriously believing he'd even get home without hitting a Reaper wall somewhere – that by the time he had shown up and been proven alive and well and visible even to parents who usually didn't notice him coming home unless he walked right under their noses, he hadn't yet given a moment's thought to what he was going to say. Beat and Rhyme had it dead right: you could feel they knew there was some reason they ought to be glad he was home; the poor suckers just didn't have the faintest idea what.

He was finally packed off to his room, headphones unneeded for the first time since he couldn't remember when, because downstairs was blessedly quiet but for the kind of sounds you expect as a reminder that any family lived here. Neku knew he'd heard somewhere that surviving trauma was supposed to bring people closer together, but did that even apply when they didn't have the first clue what kind of trauma it was supposed to have been?

When, around midnight, the phone rang and he answered it to hear Beat's voice bitching about how many Sakuraba's there were in the phonebook and just what the hell happened back there, man? It was the first thing that felt real all evening. By the time they hung up again it was so late it was early – so late that Neku's next impulse to see how 'Masaki' ranked against Shibuya's most common names had to be squashed down as a bad idea. He'd flopped down on his bed, not even out of the same clothes he'd been wearing since he couldn't remember when, convinced he wasn't going to sleep a wink, and that was the last thing he remembered before he was waking up to find the sunrise glaring through his window, having crashed so hard and fast it felt like nightfall back in the Reaper's Game all over again.

Neku cut school the next day in favour of camping out under Hachiko from practically the first light, jumping just about every time he saw anyone carrying anything black, whether it was plush toy-shaped or otherwise.

It was late by the time Shiki finally showed (whadya know, skipping school is a lot harder when there are people around who'll actually notice you're not there) but he didn't regret a minute of the wait. He'd never hugged someone for that long either. (Actually, that was probably almost as awkward for her as it'd been with his Mum, but at least he'd be able to explain himself at the end of it.)

Beat and Rhyme hadn't been able to come out and meet them properly until the end of the week because their parents had picked up this sudden unbelievable paranoia about letting them go out on their own, especially if there were any roads they might have to cross on the way, and it took them a few days to calm down.

Now, finally, here they all were, alive and well and apparently just expected to go on with their lives, everything resumed as normal, the management apologises for the delay.

And it certainly isn't news that the powers running the Game can rearrange a memory or two, Neku's got ample first hand experience of that one. Allegedly all of Shibuya is under their control, whatever that's actually supposed to mean. When all's said and done it's not hugely crazier than the idea of a bunch of invisible dead kids running around Shibuya and shopping for their lives, but the kind of power it must take to rewrite three whole weeks and wipe everything clean from so many memories is nothing that can be brushed off so easily – and it wasn't just memories, there must've been funerals, gravestones – the whole shebang. Just trying to get his head around it gives Neku a headache.

Every time he makes the mistake of thinking the Game had run out of surprises it proves him wrong.

"My parents too," Shiki puts in, bringing Neku back to the conversation. For someone who'd had to explain to two of the three persons present why she didn't look anything like how they remembered her from when they'd first met, she was holding together her composure as successfully as anyone could have expected from her. Rhyme and Beat took it pretty well – and considering that Rhyme had spent four days treating her brother like a stranger, the level of cruel and unusual punishment in Game entry fees was nothing new to them. Explaining that Shiki's UG appearance was based on a friend of hers who was a very real person they might run into on the street any time was less comfortable when there were still so many raw personal issues tangled up with it, but there at least Rhyme seemed to have picked up enough of a hint to be sympathetic without prying, whereas Beat passed the whole thing off with "Man, that Game – ain't one part of it that's ever gonna make sense to anyone who's not as crazy as those Reapers themselves."

"Although…" Shiki adds with more trepidation, "um, you remember Eri? That friend I told you about?"

"Oh yeah, you've…" 'made up' is the word Neku wants but really not the one he wants to use in company, "talked things out with her, right?" Shiki saw how devastated Eri had been by her death. Coming back to life only to see Eri forget everything might well have been weirder than what happened with her parents.

"Sort of, it's a bit…" Shiki's hands are gripping her skirt hard enough to leave extra creases. "Well, actually, she showed up at our doorstep at five AM the morning after I got back, completely freaking out. She said she'd had this horrible dream I'd died and it was so real she had to come right over to make sure it wasn't true and…" A shiver runs through Shiki, almost too fast to see. "She tried to play it down after she saw I was okay, but… you guys should've seen the look on her face when I answered the door."

The silence that follows that admission is simultaneously broken by Neku saying "Wow," just as Beat exclaims "Man!" shortly followed by Rhyme chiming in with the more important question, "Did she really dream everything that happened?"

"Right down to the details," Shiki breathes. "Everything that happened in the accident was there. You know how normally when people describe dreams they're full of, oh, dreamstuff? Things that don't make any sense? There was nothing like that in this one. More like someone had taken a whole memory away from her and made her think it was a dream."

"That makes sense," says Neku, a little bitter and really not in the mood to hide it, "being as how that was exactly what happened."

"Do you think maybe that's what happened to the rest of our families too? They were made to think they'd dreamt all those memories?" wonders Rhyme. "It would explain why they all acted that way when we got back."

"I for one am not gonna be asking," moans Beat.

"So what did you say to Eri?" Neku asks before they can get any more sidetracked.

"I sort of… told her everything," Shiki admits.

"Did she believe you?"

"I think so. She kept saying it was crazy, but when everything in the dream matched what I was telling her so well – and there were even a few things, like how the accident happened and the stuff she told Mina afterwards, that she hadn't even dared tell me about until I brought them up first. I mean, it felt so real to her she had to come over and make sure it wasn't true, so when she heard it was…" She looks up shyly, one of those expressions Neku remembers so well from her UG-self that he'd know her even without that plush-pig thing she's all but hugging to death. "Um, you guys don't mind, do you?"

Neku scratches his head. "I don't think so. You would've had to lie to your best friend's face about the biggest thing that ever happened to you… that's not something any of us would ask you to do."

"Like Phones said," says Beat.

"How much did you tell her?" asks Rhyme.

"Pretty much everything. All the parts I could explain. About the Reapers' Game and all of you. And we had a long talk about some stuff between us from before. We both cried a lot. She wants to meet all of you sometime, if that's okay. I think it'll make it easier for her to believe everything."

"Um, sure," says Neku. "I don't see why not." He's got no idea what he's actually supposed to say to Eri when he meets her for real, but it's pretty obvious how much it's going to mean to Shiki that he at least makes the effort.

"So, for everyone else – our families and our other friends – we're just going to keep it a secret?" asks Rhyme.

"I guess," says Neku.

"Who'd believe us?" says Beat. "They'd lock us up for being nuts."

Shiki does the nervous look again, at each of them in turn (Neku last and longest), and finally voices the question they've all been dancing around all day. "So... what do we do now?"

There isn't actually any good reason Neku should have to think about how to answer that one. But there is a bad reason, being that that even though at the time the Reaper's Game might have been all about winning, or not losing, or things similarly mercenary and simple, Neku came back to the real world changed – in more ways than he's probably even ready to admit to himself yet – and he's glad of it. But the thing he can't – probably ever – say to the others is, "I'm glad it happened. And I'm glad all of you were the ones to go through it with me", because that's too close to, "I'm glad you all died and got put through three weeks of hell to earn a second chance," and making it sound the way he really means it would require him to venture into territory more sappy and touchy-feely than even the new post-Game Neku is ever likely to be capable of without a personality transplant and maybe a sex change too.

So instead he shrugs like it's not that big a deal and says, "We've got a second chance. We make the most of it."

And that's really all that needs to be said.

The way he saw it, dying was just a career change. Been there, done that, worn the shroud… And then you got over it and got on with your life. Of course, he knew that many people didn't, for some reason, but he thought of them as not prepared to make the effort.

– Constable Reg Shoe on the subject of death, (Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)