The time has come to end this story.
Damn, late to the party.
Oh well...here we go.
OSSU!
Chapter 27I was back in the same dream I'd been in moments before. I was sitting on the floor watching the TV. On the screen was footage of war. Peruvian citizens being ambushed by Norwegian soldiers, then a quick cut to Egyptian air forces bombing Beijing.
"What's going on?" I demanded out loud.
...
"Miki?" a voice asked from behind me.
I turned around and saw Aya sitting on the couch.
...
"What's going on here?" she asked. "Why did all these world problems start?"
I stood up as well.
"You mean you don't know?"
"Huh? How would I know?" she asked with a frown. "You're the dream. You should know."
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh...waking dreams, and even more interesting, it looks like they're now sharing the same one!
Maybe now they can finally clear a few things up with each other. Stuff that they didn't have the courage to say to each other while they were awake, they might be able to say it now in this dream.
I reached a hand over and touched her arm. It felt very real. I pinched it a few times, making Aya brush my hand away with a frown.
Ummm...you're supposed to pinch YOURSELF to wake yourself up from a dream. I doubt that it also works by pinching someone else that's already IN your dream.
And then we saw it. One of Aya's hands tightened on mine and she brought her other hand up to turn my head in the direction in which she must have been looking. In what appeared to be "the distance" was a faint light. It was moving towards us.
The "light at the end of the tunnel"? But why here? Why now? Miki and Aya aren't going to die here, are they???
I noticed something after a few seconds. There was something in front of the light. A silhouette. It drew closer as though it were walking. Walking on air? I couldn't tell. It came closer and closer as it got brighter and brighter.
This person... This person will know what's going on. He has to. Maybe we'll even know him. Maybe he'll be... Tsuyoshi-kun. Now that would be funny!
Gotta admit, it WOULD be funny if it was Tsuyoshi.
In any case, hopefully whoever it is has some answers that can help.
The approaching person interrupted me. No, not the approaching person. He had finished approaching and now stood before us. No, not he. She.
"There has been a mistake," the woman said. "This was never supposed to happen."
Okay, what "This" is this woman referring to? It's probable that Miki and Aya weren't supposed to learn the details about their other selves. After all, knowing it all hasn't exactly enriched their lives. So then, what does this woman mean when she says "This was never supposed to happen"? Was Miki never supposed to disappear from Aya's world? Was Aya never supposed to find Miki back in Hokkaido? Was Miki not supposed to move to Tokyo?
She spoke in a soft voice, but one that commanded attention. Her face, like her voice, was lovely and gentle-looking, yet its perfectly symmetrical beauty couldn't call attention away from the incredible hardness in her eyes. They were eyes that belonged to one much older than the twenty-five years she looked.
She was tall, or at least she appeared to be. Maybe it was an illusion. It was hard to judge height when we all seemed to be floating in nothingness. She had dark black hair that fell as far as the middle of her back.
...
The only thing that was off about her professional attire was a set of four ear piercings, two in each earlobe. Nothing extreme.
As I read the description, for some reason I couldn't help but picture her as Kaori.
The earrings though, do seem to be a little out of place though.
The woman blinked once calmly.
"I'm here to explain. Things are not supposed to be like this. Time has gone wrong."
...
"Who are you? Father Time?" I asked sarcastically.
Yeah, we kinda figured that one out on our own. Questions that we need answered right now are...exactly HOW has it gone wrong and WHAT can/is going to be done to fix it?
"The fabric between the worlds has been chafed, worn down. Holes have appeared and caused incredible flow between all realities. One incident set it off."
Okay, the way that she describes the problem makes sense. The logical course of action would then seem to be to go and rectify that triggering incident (either by reversing/changing what happened, stopping it from happening altogether, or if something went wrong the first time, ensuring that it actually occurs as it was supposed to).
She didn't seem willing to share any more information with us. Any warmth that I had seen in her face before was gone. She was all business now.
Well, part of the problem right now is that Miki and Aya know too much, and it's confusing the hell out of them. To tell them even more now could just compound that problem even more.
"In your terms of measuring time, it would have been about four and a half months ago."
Four and a half months ago... Four and a half months ago... Four and a half months ago was...
"When we met?" I asked her and pointing between me and Aya.
Oh god no...
"All I can tell you is that something terrible and inexcusable happened in the main dimension four and a half months ago."
"The main dimension?" Aya asked.
The woman nodded and took a breath and pointed to Aya.
"You are from the main dimension."
That certainly didn't explain anything.
Actually, if we look at what happened, it just might. The woman says that Aya is from the main dimension, and that four and a half months ago something terrible happened. Well, if we're looking at who's involved, then the "something terrible" MUST be something big that happened in Aya's and/or Miki's life, and that something was probably NOT supposed to happen. Assuming that THAT is the case, and taking what this woman said earlier about what happened with the dimensional barriers, it was probably something that happened to Aya, since she was the one that was shifted into this Miki's dimension, where the latter never made her H!P audition.
That would mean that all this time Miki and Aya (and also Ochiai-san) have been in Miki's dimension when they weren't supposed to be. By coming into her dimension, they brought thier memories of the "other Mikis" from their world, which was why people here have been giving THIS Miki the strange/funny looks. That, subsequently mean that in THIS dimension, Miki's life is no longer proceeding as it normally would have had she never met Aya and Ochiai-san. For all we know, in this dimension Miki was meant to stay in Hokkaido, marry Hiroshi, have a few kids or what not.
All you need to know is that there is one dimension that is considered the most likely and ideal. It takes the most-likely-to-happen possibilities and moves forward in that way."
"Huh? Like a paradise?" I asked.
...
in greater terms, 'ideal' comes to mean something more inclusive of other feelings and outcomes. There may be death and misery, but it is ideal for the dimension to experience those things as opposed to some other courses of action that may lead to the destruction of that world. Do you follow me?"
"In Japanese, please," a nonplussed Aya said.
...
"She's saying that perfect doesn't necessarily equal happy," I summarised for her, and she nodded in understanding.
Another way (albeit a pretty morbid one) to put it would be that given the choice, the lesser evil is the one that's chosen. It's never about finding "the happy ending", rather it's about finding the ending that allows for the world to continue existing as smoothly as possible. However, there will still be other dimensions where "the other option" is the one chosen. Should I go left or right? Coffee or tea? Should I take a chance or not? Events can unfold drastically different depending on the choices that people make.
"If she's from the main dimension, what am I from?" I asked, feeling a little offended that my world wasn't considered one hundred percent "correct" by... whoever this cold lady with the ears was.
...
You are from one that runs fairly parallel to the main one."
That might explain why Aya slipped into her dimension (if that is indeed what happened). It does seem more likely that she would shift into a place that's fairly similar to her own.
So it all came down to this most important question: Why in the world would we have met? Because we weren't supposed to have met. So why did we?
I had secretly wanted to believe all of Aya's silly "it's destiny!" statements, but now I knew that I had been right in brushing them off. Unfortunately. Our meeting was not fated, but a big mistake.
A mistake.
So that meant that I'd never had a chance. Not since we met. All the decisions I had made from the moment I met Aya had all been based on a mistake. None of it was supposed to have happened. It was all a waste.
Miki can't say that for sure. Granted, it's pretty obvious now that THIS Miki and THIS Aya weren't supposed to have met, but what about the Aya that was originally from Miki's dimension? There's no way of knowing that the two of them wouldn't have ever met.
As for Miki thinking that all of her decisions have been mistakes, that's not necessarily true either. People are presented with different choices based on the actions they take. Depending on where you are (both literally and figuratively) in life, there will be different choices to make. Miki thinking that she might be able to make it in the entertainment industry isn't a mistake, it's the natural choice that would have been presented to her because she was now living in Tokyo. Given her potential and her surroundings, it's only natural that this opportunity present itself to her at this time. Had she stayed in Hokkaido, her decision wouldn't have been whether or not to try to make it in showbiz, but rather they would be ones more appropriate to the setting and to the people that surrounded her there, such as should she finish university, should she accept Hiroshi's proposal, and so forth.
"Something happened four and a half months ago in the main dimension because of the eroded walls. It caused you," the woman nodded at Aya, "to be thrown into the present Fujimoto's world just before the event occurred again for the first time - and don't bother trying to figure that sentence out.
Wait, when "Aya's Miki" had disappeared, that was NOT the event that triggered all this, but rather, it was the result of it? If that's the case, then we still don't know what this "terrible incident" was. Miki and Aya were merely sleeping, and when Aya woke up, from her perspective, Miki was gone. We now know though that this is only partially true. Miki hadn't disappeared from Aya's life. She shifted from her dimension into another one were Miki wasn't in her life to begin with. If we go back to the main dimension, then it's actually Aya that's disappeared from THAT Miki's life.
Oh, BTW, I TOTALLY called the fact that Aya was the one that shifted from one dimension to another. Damn my ass is good sometimes.
As for the people of your world, they were affected by the flow of ideas between worlds. It's not simply a physical problem. Ideas and beliefs have been circulating through realities by way of these holes. People have suddenly been coming to know things that they have not in fact learned.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSHIT my ass called this one too!
There was a large spill of knowledge, which, I have come understand, has caused you great distress, no?
Maybe just a tad.
"What was it that happened in my world?" Aya asked, probably hoping to stop a round of abuse from me to the self-proclaimed guardian of time.
The woman fixed Aya with a stoic look that scared me.
"You don't need to know that."
That doesn't sound good.
If she had said it to both of them, then we might be able to assume that she's just choosing to not tell them. The fact that she focused on Aya when she said it though...something big (likely bad) must be destined to happen to her.
What could have happened that would have gotten Aya thrown out as part of a natural defence mechanism? It must have been something terrible.
I suddenly had a bad feeling that I knew what it might be.
"She was going to die, wasn't she," I stated. "Aya-chan was going to die."
I was afraid it was something like this. The dimension must have been faced with the options of Aya living or dying, and for whatever reason, in the "grand scheme of things" it was, to use the woman's own words "more ideal" to have Aya die. In the main dimension, this was what was supposed to happen, but instead she was shifted into this Miki's dimension, thus preventing that from happening. The fact that Aya didn't die must have started to throw everything out of whack even more than how it already was.
"I'm in charge of fixing things. Restoring everything and everybody, repairing the holes, and making sure none of this ever happens again," she stated.
She must therefore have the ability to make changes in time and space. To "restore" everything, she'd have to put everyone back in to where their were in their native dimensions, and allow events to continue to unfold as they had originally done.
That means...Miki will have never met Aya, and Aya's going to die.
"You can't!" I yelled at the lady, who was tracing something I couldn't see in the air.
...
"She's taking you away," I said through grit teeth. "I'm not gonna meet you."
I dug my fingers into her flesh, holding on in fear that she'd suddenly disappear.
"But she has to restore everything back to normal," Aya said calmly.
...
"How can you stand there and say that?!" I screamed at her, shaking her.
...
Angry tears dripped down my cheeks one by one. Aya's face turned sympathetic.
But I didn't want her sympathy. I just wanted her to stay. Or say she would miss me. Or help me stop the nasty woman who was going to tear us apart.
"You won't remember me," she said confidentially.
Aya realizes that as much as she and Miki want to stay together, it's just not right. She's basically an intruder in this dimension, she was never meant to be here. Miki's life was moving along pretty smoothly until Aya came and turned it upside down. It's painful for both of them, but Aya's right, once things are "reset", neither of them will remember anything that happened in the past four and a half months since Aya was first shifted here. They will continue living out their lives the way that they were meant to.
Still sux though.
"I don't wanna leave you," I stammered. "I can't. I can't go back to living that way. Don't let her take you away."
I looked at the woman who was now writing furiously in the air, green characters appearing and disappearing and appearing again.
"Stop it! Stop what you're doing!" I screamed.
Miki's often said that Aya's the stronger one between the two of them, and that she herself is usually the more selfish one. Considering their personalities, Miki just wouldn't be herself if she weren't fighting to keep what she and Aya have now.
"I'm sorry, Miki. I really am."
I could barely hear her voice. It was so soft, so apologetic.
"You know that thing they say about it b-being better to have loved and lost than to-to never have loved at all?" I stammered, the noise from the wind almost swallowing my words.
There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that Miki's trying to tell Aya that she's helped make her a better person. Meeting Aya helped awaken parts of Miki's personality that she didn't realize she had been ignoring. She's opened her eyes in many different ways and in the long run, her life is better for having known her.
The other is that Miki thinks that the saying is a lie. To have loved and lost means that you not only remember the joy of that love, but that you also remember the pain of when it was lost. We know that Miki doesn't take loss (especially when Aya's involved) well. If Miki's thinking in THIS manner, then she's saying that forgetting Aya completely would be less painful than remembering what they had. If she doesn't remember Aya, then she never has to be reminded that she was once a big part of her heart, and that now she's gone.
I opened my mouth to tell her what I thought about that phrase when suddenly there was an impossibly bright flash of white light that made me close my eyes.
I lost consciousness.
And now we see just what the woman had planned to do.
Chapter 28My eyes crack open a fraction of a centimetre. I let out a cranky groan and open them all the way. I roll up to sit and stretch my arms above my head. My back cracks in a few places and makes me wince. I stand up and go to my window, pulling the curtain aside just a tad.
"First frost," I mumble sleepily but happily.
As is expected, Miki's back in Hokkaido. Question is, is she exactly the same as she was before this all happened, or might there still be a little bit of the influence that Aya had on her?
I feel rejuvenated. It must be the fresh air. I'm bored in this town, but I know that there's a lot more out there in the world. I'm filled with hope. Maybe I'll suggest to Hiroshi that we move in together in Sapporo when we finish school. There's more to do there in the big city. There are far more opportunities than in this crumbling town. I'll bring up the subject with him soon.
Reading this, I'd like to think that it's more likely that option 2 is true.
Miki had told Aya that she was scared of getting in a rut in Hokkaido, but she hadn't had the guts nor the initiative to even think about trying to leave it. It had always been her safety net. Looks like this Miki now has a little bit more ambition in her.
Chapter 29My eyes crack open a fraction of a centimetre. I let out a cranky groan and open them all the way. I roll up to sit and stretch my arms above my head. My back cracks in a few places and makes me wince. I touch my jaw. It hurts. What the...
Oh. Right. I look beside me. I'm alone.
What? Where's Miki?
I stand up and shuffle out of my bedroom. I look in the living room and the kitchen, but there's no sign of Miki. I frown. Where has she gone?
I hear running water, and I smile, walking over to the washroom. I poke my head in and see Miki washing her face.
And now Aya's back where she was supposed to have been all along.
"So," I say conversationally. "Today I leave."
Miki nods stoically.
"Will you miss me?"
She says nothing. She cups her hands under the water and suddenly splashes it in my face. I gasp in surprise.
"Yes," she says in a sweet and innocent voice. "You'd better bring me back some cool souvenir."
...
We say goodbye that evening. It's a tearless farewell like we earlier agreed to do. Three months isn't too long. At least Italy is still on the same planet as Japan.
Fuck, knowing what's supposed to happen makes this scene really hard to take.
As we're walking to the gate, a girl drops her passport holder and doesn't notice.
"Excuse me!" I call out, rushing forward to pick the valuable item up.
The girl doesn't notice my voice in the din of the busy airport. She keeps walking. I look at the holder and see her given name written on it.
"Naomi-san!" I call out.
She turns around, and I wave the passport at her. She smiles brilliantly and walks to me, taking her passport back.
"Thank you so much!" she says with a grateful bow and the smile.
"You're welcome," I say, returning the smile.
We part, but a few minutes later, I notice that she's also taking the same flight as me. We smile knowingly at each other when I walk by her sitting at our departure gate.
Oh crap, you just had to throw that in, didn't you?
Bad turbulence wakes me up. The seatbelt sign is turned on, and I double check to make sure that I'm wearing mine. I look out the window. It's cloudy and I can't see a thing. No, wait. I can. Poking out from the clouds below us, I see peaks. Mountain peaks. They are all capped with ice. It's a breathtakingly beautiful sight.
The plan gives a few terrifying jerks, and the co-pilot comes on the air with an announcement, reassuring us that we're going through a patch of stormy weather but that it will pass. The turbulence, however, gets worse, and my knuckles are now white from gripping my blanket in my hand. My manager looks rather pale-faced, too.
Oh god, you're not gonna make us live through this, are you???
Then as soon as it started, it's over. The rest of the flight is smooth. We land without incident. I step only Italian soil for the first time in my life.
I take a deep breath in. I'll be here for three months. I'd better get used to everything quickly.
Eh? The plane didn't go *boom*?
YATAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
A million things happen at the hotel, but it ends with me being escorted to my (very large!) room and shown how to place international calls.
...
Five rings later, a sleepy voice answers.
"...'lo?"
"Miki?" I ask.
"Hey!" she exclaims, perking up. "Took you long enough."
I laugh.
"Sorry for waking you up," I apologise.
She brushes it off quickly. For once, I'm deemed more important than her favourite pastime - sleeping.
AYA'S ALIVE!!! SHE'S ALIVE AND TALKING TO MIKI!!!
despite the distance, I've never felt so close to Miki. Maybe something has been awakened in me, but I feel like I have to treasure every second that I know her. I guess distance really does make you appreciate the things you have.
Having to go through a time when you think that you've lost something/someone important like that might have something to do with that too.
The End
This was one HELL of a climax that you had set up here. I've called your stories emotional rollercoasters before; dude this one had the biggest rise and the biggest drop yet. To say that this was tugging at the old heartstrings (especially when the dream woman started that ritual to set things back the way they were and Miki was pleading with her to stop it) is a GROSS UNDERSTATEMENT. In the end, it looks like both Aya and Miki got their "ideal" possibilities. Miki might have forgotten Aya, but she's by no means unhappy or worse off. As for Aya...well, she's got
her Miki back in her life, so to speak. Also...not dying in a plane crash is DEFINITELY a good thing.
Thank you for the happy ending (specifically, thank you for NOT killing either of them off this time). I seriously hope that you continue writing. It doesn't have to be really frequent nor does it have to be GAM-based. As long as it's something, it's more than likely going to be good. At the very least it'll be heartily welcomed by those of us that have gotten hooked on them anyway.
You're definitely a big part of the fanfic community here at JPH!P, and we hope that you stick around for a while.
Now wait for JFC, the honorary president of your non-existent (I presume) fan club, to do the honors. I bet it'll be sobfest. *pokes JFC's cheek* <--- I'm talking about the face, btw.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
correct me if I'm wrong but, after re-reading again the last three chapters I've reached a conclusion...
The big mistake four and a half months ago wasn't Aya meeting Hokkaido's Miki right? It was the plane accident. If Aya's dimension was the paradise-like, then she and her Miki should be together and happy forever and ever because that's why that's the main and perfect dimension. Then something happens, Aya dies and everything goes nuts XDDD
So, the only way to repair the damage was to go back and repair what went wrong.
I was actually thinking that myself, especially after reading the last parts of Chapter 29. At first I thought that Aya was supposed to die (which wouldn't have been surprising, considering how
OTN1 has written is previous works). It would appear though, that the ACTUAL ideal situation in that dimension was for Aya to have lived, and that her dying was the mistake. So to rectify the situation, the only way that "fate" could keep Aya from dying on that plane was to keep her from boarding it in the first place, and to so to do that, it shifted her into another dimension where she would be prevented from doing it (remember that losing Miki, and wanting to find her was enough for Aya to cancel the trip). To make such a drastic change must have meant that the situation was such that the action had to be taken quickly (perhaps it would be harder to save Aya from dying if they waited too long). But while the intentions were obviously good, the damage it caused between the dimensions sure gave a lot of people (like Miki) a hard time.
...But wasn't supposed to happen was Miki's death too!
Oh god, let's not try bringing THAT up again too. Having to deal with one death is hard enough.
Again, completely, utterly awesome ending
OTN1!