Curses and Will Chapter 3: Chapter 3 - The Soul That Should Have Died

Read chapter 3 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I ignored her. Kept the wall up, the one I told myself I was building for her sake, not mine. I walked past her, head low, eyes fixed on the dirt where her shadow ended and mine began. Her hand caught my wrist before I'd taken three more steps. Soft. Firm enough that I felt it in the bone. "Dying is not a solution." There was a weight in her voice that pressed somewhere behind my sternum, somewhere I didn't have a name for, asking me to open up and spill everything I'd spent years sealing shut. I kept walking anyway. Shook her hand off. She said it again, louder this time, deeper. "DYING ISN'T THE SOLUTION." Something in me gave way. "SO WHAT'S THE GODDAMN SOLUTION THEN?" My voice tore out of me, ugly and raw, loud enough that it should have woken half the street. "What other solution is there? What does a cursed thing like me deserve more than this? Who cares if I'm here or not? They already think I'm dead. They decided that years ago!" My breath caught and broke apart in my chest. "I can't. I can't take any more of this." My voice cracked clean in half. "What do you even know about me? Why do you care this much about someone you met yesterday?" My head came up, level with her shoulders for the first time since she'd found me. Tears fell before I understood they were falling. Rain I'd been holding back for years, finally given somewhere to go. I couldn't stop it once it started. Then warmth wrapped around me, all at once, and the rain turned into something closer to a storm. She'd pulled me in. Both arms around me, holding on like she had every right to. For a while there was nothing but the sound of my own crying, ugly and unguarded, the only thing left in the world. Then her voice came, soft now, carrying something heavier than comfort. "You're not alone." A pause, like she needed it to land before she kept going. "Mrs. Kouya and I are here. We care. Live for us. Dying isn't a solution, not for you." Another pause. "I need you here. I want to know you. All of it." My breathing went heavy. My heart felt lighter than it had in years, and somehow each tear still weighed more than the last. She'd reached someone who was supposed to already be gone. She'd given rain to a flower that had no business surviving where it had been planted. I told her everything that night. The fire. The yokai. The years of silence after, the way the whole town had learned to look through me instead of at me. I told her about the bread two days expired, the mold scraped off with a thumbnail, the corner where the red-eyed thing waited every single morning of my life. We sat by the river while I talked, the same water that had nearly taken me hours earlier, now just water again, dark and slow and indifferent. When I finished, her face had gone soft in a way that scared me a little. Something behind her eyes had gone numb, sorrow and recognition both surfacing at once. "You're just like my brother," she said. "Kako no Yoake." Her eyes filled before she could stop them. "When we still lived in Tokyo," she started, "at our grandmother's funeral, he told everyone she was still with us. Still in the room. We thought he just couldn't accept it, that he was saying things to cope." She wrapped her arms around her knees. "Then it got worse. He started screaming at night. Running off from school without telling anyone where he'd gone." She breathed in slow, like she was steadying herself for the rest of it. "He said he could see things. Things that weren't supposed to exist in this world. We thought it was trauma. Or something wrong with his mind. He was the one closest to her, out of all of us." Her voice thinned. "We took him to doctors. None of it helped." A long silence. The river kept moving like it hadn't heard any of it. "Then one night," she said, "he jumped from the tenth floor of our building." She said it plainly, the way you say something you've had to say enough times that the words have worn smooth. "He survived two days in the hospital. Then he did