“—If you don’t want your pain taken from you, then come.”

  Pachin.

  At the instant the clasp snapped, the brick-colored Gamaguchi — an empty soul-vessel, a gate — cracked the dark open. The voice reached Yurie in that same sliver of time, right beside her ear, like the wind’s after-echo braided into words.

  Seven days had passed since color flaked off the world and everything stopped—since her life turned into a motionless blank. Outside her window, the traffic lights never changed. The winter sky stayed the same dull gray, as if someone had drained the pigment and forgotten to pour it back in.

  Inside, the room was simply the aftermath.

  A stack of condolence envelopes leaned on the table. Paperwork sat half-sorted in clear folders. A black dress—still carrying a trace of someone else’s perfume—hung over the back of a chair. Even the kettle on the counter looked abandoned, its waterline ringed with scale. The funeral clamor had packed up and left. What remained was a silence with weight to it, thick enough to press down on her shoulders.

  Winter light slanted in through the glass. In Yurie’s eyes it looked like frozen aspirin shards—pale, brittle, sharp. The light had lost its warmth. It didn’t comfort; it stabbed her eyes with something cold and inorganic.

  What clung to the back of her nose wasn’t the sweet scent of lilies offered in tribute. It was the cutting stink of alcohol swabs—the smell that had turned her fingertips white and raw through two months of watching over the end. Every time she breathed in, her mind supplied a sound: *scrrk* like a scalpel scraping thin plastic, shaving her self-awareness down, millimeter by millimeter.

  “…I did everything,” she said, the words slipping out like she was reciting a report. “The bedside care. The paperwork. The funeral. Everything I could.”

  Her voice hit the bare wall and collapsed like dry sand, dissolving into the dust gathered along the floor. No echo. Not even pity.

  The pet stroller was still there at the edge of her vision, mud crusted thick around the wheels. She could still see where she’d tried to wipe it off—brown smears dragged into pale fabric. That mud held the last *time* her dog had been alive, heavy and black, refusing to sink into the past.

  Dirt was supposed to come off.

  The fact that it wouldn’t made the room’s neatness feel like a joke.

  “There can’t be regret,” she told herself—too sharply, like she was correcting a child. “I stayed with her until the end.”

  A perfectly correct, perfectly cold argument. Tears shattered it anyway, hot and stupid and immediate. Memories weren’t salvation. They were a blade that kept condemning her—again and again—for the helplessness that hadn’t saved anything.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  (…So I decided to take it all apart.)

  Her fingers found the strap on her shoulder and tightened around her brick-colored Gamaguchi. The leather was cool against her skin. The metal clasp sat heavy and certain beneath her thumb, like a latch on a door she wasn’t supposed to open.

  Empty hands. Empty room. A heart that wouldn’t stop working even when she wanted it to.

  Pachin.

  The hard, mechanical snap pried open the sealed stillness. The Gamaguchi’s mouth gaped—dark, deeper than it should have been—and Yurie leaned in to look.

  That was when the voice slid into place again.

  “—If you don’t want your pain taken from you, then come.”

  It wasn’t a warning. It was an invitation that refused the easy kind of healing: forgetting.

  “…What?”

  No time to turn. No room to doubt the speaker. Before she could even name the choice, her weight tipped; the darkness under the Gamaguchi answered first, taking her awareness—and her gravity—with it.

  Her stomach floated. Her hair lifted, as if the world had suddenly forgotten which way down was.

  Her vision drowned in a color that wasn’t a color: the nothingness of worn suede. Up and down inverted. Her body pitched into a bottomless drop. Smell, temperature, the outline of reality—everything peeled away as the dark accelerated, stripping her in layers.

  Events lost their edges. Reasons slipped out first. Certainties that should have mattered crumbled before they became words. A name that should have been anchored to a face slid sideways in her mind, leaving only a raw impression, like a torn label.

  (…Ah. I’m falling—into the closed circuit that is *me*.)

  Then her right hand registered a solid, wrong kind of weight.

  When she looked, the brick-colored Gamaguchi was there—clenched tight in her fist. Her knuckles were white. She could feel the ridges of the clasp biting into her palm.

  She was holding it, and yet she was still falling inside it.

  Logic couldn’t keep up anymore. This was all she had.

  A violent, horizontal spark speared the thought—light that didn’t come from above or below, but from the side, as if someone had struck a match across the world.

  Something cream-colored burst in at her shoulder.

  Short legs kicked at the void as if it had ground. Wrinkled muzzle. Dark, round eyes. Batlike ears pinned forward with purpose. It cut across her path and then matched her fall, not tumbling, not flailing—moving like it owned the air.

  Hot breath snapped near her nose.

  “Fugah!”

  The sound punched straight through her chest. Her body answered before her mind did, and a name slipped out on its own—half a plea, half a question.

  “…Mer…mi…?”

  Only the name remained. She didn’t know why she knew it. The reason wouldn’t come back.

  Gravity toyed with Yurie, flipping her, tugging at her limbs. But the shadow beside her moved as if it commanded its own. It crossed the emptiness half a step ahead—steady, unapologetic—glancing back once, like an instruction: *Keep up.*

  Not chasing her—leading her.

  The fear of falling repainted itself without a sound.

  Still clutching the Gamaguchi, the plunge twisted into a sprint—an all-out rush to steal color back. Wind—or something that felt like wind—raked past her cheeks. The monochrome mist thinned.

  Ahead, the world sharpened into teeth.

  A gray cliff rose out of the fog, its surface stripped of color in broad, flaking patches, like paint scraped from old stone. Cracks ran through it like veins. The drop below it was not a place her eyes wanted to measure.

  …Go.

  To the cliff. To take back her own filthy kind of beautiful—whatever she’d left smeared there.

  A dive.

  And whatever waited beyond that cliff… it would demand a toll: memories.