Gravedigger
Made on: 28 Sep 2023
Word Count: 724 words
Characters of Focus: Shino Kominami, Akane Kasai
Setting: Pre-Canon (mostly)
Prompt: Ancient History
Warnings: Spoilers for the final chapter, Light body horror, Past major character death.
Beginning Authors Note: Written for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tinyfandomflash over on Dreamwidth!
ALSO! This work includes MAJOR spoilers for chapter 7!
Peaking over Shino's shoulder to look at the computer, Akane points – arms looping awkwardly around the other girl’s shoulders – to a counter declaring the amount of posts on the forum.
“Wo-ow!” she stretches out, “I didn’t think there were that many things posted here!”
“Well, it’s not like this is the first year the newspaper club existed.” Shino says, “It probably just doesn’t seem like the number matches since the posts that aren’t from this year are hidden. We wouldn’t want to activate old rumors, after all.”
Shino was nothing and then, quite suddenly, something once more.
She writhes, limbs unable to remember what it’s like to be – what it’s like to fit within her own self. Bones somehow not aligning with how it should be, her muscles following suit. She struggles, clawing her way back up to consciousness, to be real once more.
Her back hits something, a jolt that sends her quiet and still. The ceiling above her is familiar. Dark. It must be night.
Twisting over a bit, her eye’s land on the bottom steps. She knows these steps somewhere deep in her, in her non-existent bone marrow. She knows these steps.
Her arm trembles beneath her weight as she hoists herself up. Something thick and fluid dribbles down her chin and onto her shirt. Deep red. She can feel the warmth and tackiness of it in the places it meets her skin. The stairway goes up, almost impossibly so from this low angle, and she scrambles back. Away. A confusing and jumbled series of movements stringing along to remove the stairs from her view.
Her limbs, still unable to support herself fully, scrabble along the wooden floor. Her head bowed low, hair dragging and catching against the ground. Mouth open, panting, leaking, red spills from her freely.
She ends up huddled in some tucked away corner. Slumped over herself until she fades back into nothingness. A shadow of her lingers, still.
An indeterminate amount of time passes between these bouts of night time consciousness. Some she spends in the same corner she dragged herself to, refamiliarizing herself with how her limbs are supposed to work. Mostly she spends them thinking. Thinking of why, why, why it is that she's back.
Eventually, once she's able to stand without her legs crumbling beneath her own weight, she takes to walking the halls.
The school is more or less the same from how she remembers it. How it was when she was alive and breathing in its halls. If not for the seasons changing outside the windows and the chairs moving around between nights she could very well believe that this was the same exact school from that day. A purgatory of her own making. But it's not, evidently, so she continues to amuse herself by poking around.
On one particular night, for no particular reason, she enters the girl's bathroom and is immediately spooked by seeing somthing else move out of the corner of her eye. Shino jumps a bit, whatever facsimile of a heart that she now has stuttering, before realizing that it was just herself in the mirror.
It's the first time she ever got a good look at what she now appears like. It's nothing like how she remembers.
Her pale skin now gray, eyes missing and the skin around it hollow and drooping. Her hair is matted, a tangled mess all the way down to its ragged tips. Her school uniform is in good condition, at least, if one were to ignore the blood stains.
How horrid. She grips the edge of the sink, leaning closer, closer, as if looking close enough would change what she looks like. Change what she now is.
In a blink, between glares, that's exactly what happens. Her mirror self now exactly how she remembers, glasses and all.
Looking down reveals the same has happened to her actual self, too. Blood stains gone from her uniform. Her skin, a more healthy color. Another mystery added onto her current condition.
It took Shino a long time to check the forums, an aversion lingering from her time alive. Longer still to connect the post to her revival.
“That's smart.” Akane says, “You really think of everything, Shino!”
“You give me too much credit.” Shino flushes and pretends that it's because of the praise.
Ending Authors Note: This is a bit of an early halloween treat, I suppose!