April 15th

[terminalshow]

April 2nd, 2012, early morning

It would be sunny today. She could tell. Despite a fine fog clouding the streets of Okachi so early in the morning, it would definitely be sunny later in the day. Why was she going to school so early in the morning, anyway...? Hikari Endo of class 2-F had been in a fog for days now. She hadn't been getting much sleep or much of anything done. But today was the first day of school, so of course she had to go. It was like her mind was stuck in a daze – she often found herself standing aimlessly in front of her bathroom mirror and completely unsure of how she'd gotten there.

So far she was the only one on the path to school. Her footfalls were heavy against the cement and seemed to echo unnaturally. One of her hands rose to rub at the side of her head as she heaved a sigh. “What in the hell is wrong with me...?”

April 2nd, 2012, morning

Eh? What? The girl blinked, fluttering her long lashes. She was staring at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. Crisp morning sunlight filtered through one of the windows, casting her shadow out against the bathroom tile in an almost ominous fashion. Come to me...

Her eyes went half lidded. Had she heard that correctly? She raised a hand to lightly brush her finger tips against the smooth surface of the mirror. It rippled like a pond that had been disturbed, and her reflection smiled. Hikari didn't seem to notice. Everything was fuzzy... She wanted to sleep forever. Come. The reflection in the mirror beckoned her forward, and she obediently climbed on top of the sink counter.

With her forehead leaned against the cool glass she exhaled... And fell through.

April 9th, 2012, early morning

How long had Hikari been waiting here, on top of the elementary building roof? She was drenched from the mist of rain that had been falling for the last several hours. Strands of her long black hair clung to her face as she stared dully out at nothing. The bags under her eyes were huge, and her shoulders were trembling ever so slightly. She'd asked Kiyomi Katsuragi, a fifth grade teacher, to meet her here this morning. The teacher came reluctantly, holding an umbrella.

“Endo-san, you promised you wouldn't call me like this anymore... What's the matter with you? You don't look well.”

“Call me Hikari. You always used to call me Hikari,” Her voice was hollow.

“Well I can't anymore! We agreed to this! You understood!” Kiyomi backed up as the slender framed Hikari advanced. She was slouched oddly, but her eyes were intent upon the teacher's face.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall...”

A scream tore through the morning quiet and then cut short.

April 15th, 2012, afternoon

Strangled sobs were vaguely audible from the girl's bathroom on the second floor of Eizou Academy. Class was in session at the moment, however, so no one had come. She was lucky that way. The state of the bathroom was quite a sight to behold. The mirror that spanned the entire left wall was shattered in spots. Splatters of blood marked the glass and dripped to the counter. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” Mumbled words from the hysteric girl sitting on the tiled floor. There was a lot of blood, and it was easy to guess that it was all hers.

Sunshine brightly illuminated the blood on the stalls and the floor, and glinted off of the shard of mirror firmly in Hikari's hand. Her body was in a bad state and her skin had gone a sickly pale. The shard of mirror was lifted and plunged into the torn up flesh of her thigh over and over while she sobbed out the words 'I'm sorry'. Eventually she slumped against the tile, whispering the word 'Kiyomi' before her eyes shut for good.

She'd written messages into the tile and onto the stalls, all in blood.

mirror, mirror, on the Wall,
push them down
and wAtch them fall

i'm sorry Kiyomi

rEflections

yoUr shadow

Please don't go

Comments

[americandiplomacy]

Greg wasn't paying much attention to where he was going while he navigated the school's halls. Today had been boring, they were learning math that he'd already studied ahead and figured out himself, so he'd done his usual thing: Asked to go to the bathroom. Now he planned to stay there for as long as was reasonably possible and play games on his dumb phone. The boy had a lot on his mind, though, mostly events from the past few days... It was that which caused him to push the door to the girls' bathroom open rather than the one he'd intended, and there was an oddly wet and squishy noise when he stepped in... A pool of red?

With his attention suddenly torn back to the real world and out of his thoughts, he glanced up with a whole lot to suddenly take in. Greg's eyes darted around the gory bathroom, it was like something out of a horror movie, and then they focused on one of the nearby mirrors. It was the only one not halfway concealed by blood, and curiously enough there was no reflection of... Anything in it. Not him, not the bathroom, just a plain sheet of shiny glass. His eyebrows furrowed, that was very interesting for whatever reason, and Gregory somehow ignored the rest of the scene to take a few cautious steps closer to that. "Uh..." It seemed a little silly, even to him, to try and talk to a mirror of all things. "H.. Hello..?"

Behind that sheet of reflective glass, not that Gregory could see it, was what looked like... Well, him! A few key differences, notably the luminescent yellow eyes and the wide grin on his face, made it pretty obvious that this was someone else. It responded, too, which came out of the blue! Unfortunately, it also knew exactly what he wanted to hear as well as his first language. "[You want one, right? What Seiya's got]?"

He was in a bit of a daze, and the sudden voice despite no one else in the bathroom wasn't terribly alarming. "[Uh...]" To make things even more odd, Greg felt like he had no problem being honest. "[... Yeah. What's it called?]" Greg was at the sink in front of the mirror, now, leaning on it and staring blankly into the thing.

"[Who cares? I can give you one. Climb in; you have to be on the other side to get it.]"

The boy's eyebrows furrowed. Something about this didn't make sense, but he had one knee up on the sink already regardless. "[I gotta, uhh... Get back to class, so... Only for a second, okay?]" Both knees, then, and he had one palm pressed to the bloody wall to steady himself. The other hand was reaching toward the glass, slowly but surely, and its surface rippled while another similar hand reached right out!

"[A liiiittle closer..!]" The grin on his reflected self's face was growing wider, and its hand was so close--

RIIIIIIIIING!

Gregory shifted, the bell signifying lunch startling him out of whatever daze he'd been in, and lost balance at the same time. "Ah, what the f--!" He fell off of the sink and flat onto his back, grunting heavily with the force. The back of the poor boy's head smacked against the tile, too, so everything was blurry for a moment... He turned his head to the side while his vision re-focused, and when it did there was-- A fucking dead body! Facing him and covered in blood! "[OH, CHRIST!]" The whole bathroom was bloody! How was he only just noticing this?!

After hopping up, he glanced at the mirror from before to find that it was behaving normally. There he was along with the bathroom behind him, and... Writing? It was backwards in the mirror, so he turned around to get a better look. There were several messages, actually, all over the bathroom. It occurred to Gregory that he was shaking, then, and a trembling hand got to fiddling with his phone. "[Police, poliiice...]" What was the number for that over here?! Oh, right, it was just backwards.

The boy hastily dialed 1-1-9, lifting the phone to his ear and then gnawing at his lip while reading the decidedly 'colorful' messages the student had left behind. "Come onnn, pick uuup..."