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The glass fills up to the brim, the cold pungent alcohol nearly spilling over and reflecting in the dim overhead light of her observation table.
Shoko looks at the empty bottle of Absolut Vodka in her hand and tries desperately to focus her eyes. The world is a mess of colors, the boundaries of dreams and memories and imagination blurring more and more every day.
She holds the bottle in her hand and shakes it slightly, watching as the few drops at the bottom trail in circles along the edge. The blue text printed on the label is mocking her, screaming at her in memory of one of her best friend’s eyes.
Her eyes blur, the bottle under her fingers shaking with her hands. She never told them, but she always thought of Suguru and Satoru as her brothers. She grew up with them. She spent her adolescence, the only years of her life she truly lived, with them by her side.
They’re her family. She saw them every day. They lived together. They lived together and ate together and breathed together and fought together and she always hoped they would die together.
A morbid part of her mind tells her to drink another bottle, to join her brothers, to finally see their smiling faces again.
But Shoko can’t do that. She’s one of the only sorcerers who’s able to use reverse cursed technique and if she died then all of the newer generations would surely follow her. If she died, Iori would most definitely be right behind her.
Shoko keeps one hand around the nose of the empty bottle and reaches for her glass with the other one, downing several large mouthfuls of vodka in one go. She cringes at the familiar scent, far too reminded of the disinfectants she’s surrounded with constantly.
She’s cold. Her body already feels as lifeless as the ones of the people she held dear. Her shoulders shake with the chill and the absence of human touch. She’s more familiar with the touch of a corpse than one of love these days.
She misses Iori. She hasn’t seen her in so, so long and there’s not a waking moment she doesn’t worry about her.
Satoru and Suguru always had each other. They were a unit, something beyond the bounds of what could be considered romantic or platonic. They were one. They were who they were because they had each other and the second they broke apart neither of them was the same. They lived and breathed each other. It wasn't a teenage friendship, it was a way of life.
Her brothers had each other, and she had them. But she was always an add-on, someone extra, someone removable, whether they knew it or not. She made peace with that long ago. And besides, she wasn’t alone. She had Iroi.
Iroi was the one person she spent her youth with that she didn’t consider to be a sibling. Iroi was so much more. She was what Shoko woke up thinking about and who she went to sleep dreaming of. She was her best friend, an angel, someone she would die for, someone she would kill for; a teenage girl.
Shoko chuckles to herself, the hazy memories of days spent bathing in the saccharine strawberry lipgloss of girlhood. Smiling at the reminiscent feeling of hushed, happy orgasms given and returned in the warm blur of summer nights. They were just girls.
They were girls together.
She rummages through her pockets for a cigarette and a lighter, her lungs screaming for the sedation of nicotine, a seductress she’ll never escape. Smoke fills her lungs the way it used to. The way it did when she was young. When she had a family.
Blue assaults her eyes, shoving its way into her vision when her head starts to droop down with long-ignored exhaustion. She’s still holding onto the empty bottle, the empty bottle of Absolut Vodka with its bright blue fucking label. The same blue she remembers so fondly, shining in her brother’s eyes. Blue eyes she'll never see again, at least with life in them anyway.
There’s a body lying on her observation table two feet away from her. She doesn’t know who it belonged to or why they’re in her office, but she can’t bring herself to care anymore. She gently shoves her rolling chair over to it and pours the last few drops from the bottle into the dead thing’s open mouth with a laugh.
Her body is cold and warm at the same time, the arms of intoxication cradling her in its comforting lull of sedation. She is polluted, rot seeping through her bloodstream. The body below her is pale and lifeless. She laughs again and pokes the thing in the cheek, finger-touching a cold wound where an eye should be.
Suddenly recognition dawns over her, the hazel eye of the body clouded over and dead, staring at her in offence. The dead girl’s short brown hair is splayed around her meticulously cared-for face in a halo. The lips that probably had hours spent on them, drawing on pretty colors and smiling at the Zen’in girl were cold and chapped and hanging slightly open, one drop of vodka on them. She looks far too similar to how Shoko did when she was her age.
Shoko stands, the bottle in her hand dropping to the floor and shattering into a million screaming angry shards that dig through her thin shoes and slice the soles of her feet. Blood seeps through, painting the cold cement under her in a mixture of blood and alcohol.
The girl’s cold eye seems to follow her, weeping tears of envy for a youth she never had; one Shoko got to live.
Bile rises in her throat, burning its way up and out of her stomach and onto the glass-covered cold floor she’s spent too many hours standing on. Her stomach purges itself, turning inside out on the floor below her and destroying her throat. What hits the ground and splashes on her bloody shoes is a clear, acidic liquid. A toxic mix of stomach bile and vodka. She really has been drinking too much.
Shoko blinks in rapid succession, her eyes dry and stinging. The cigarette in her mouth went out a long time ago and she’s left collapsed in her office chair, chewing on the cigarette butt and holding a glass of vodka.
Would that girl be her niece? If they were a normal family, would she go over to Satoru’s house on Christmas and see that girl’s smiling face sitting next to her classmates? Her brothers?
Would she walk into the warm living room and see Suguru with his girls? Would he be brushing their hair or baking cookies with them? Would she see Satoru and Suguru embrace each other the way she always knew they longed to?
Would she see Satoru’s students as her nieces and nephews? Children to spoil and teach all of the irresponsible things an aunt should teach? Shoko laughs to herself as she lifts her glass to meet her chapped lips, a greeting of an old friend, and allows herself to indulge in her fantasy.
She would open the door of Satoru’s home with Iori in her arms, coming into a warm welcoming house out of the snow and being greeted by all of her family.
She’d take off her winter boots and hug her brothers, saying hello and apologizing for not seeing them enough. She would go into the kitchen, the smell of hot chocolate and a homemade meal filling the air, and say hello to all of her nieces and nephews.
She’d give them all gifts that she’d hand-chosen for them and watch as they opened them with joy. The pink-haired boy wouldn’t have scars under his eyes, and he’d laugh without any reserve. Fushiguro would smile.
Mei Mei would show up fashionably late, her hair in an extravagant braid and her body accessorized in expensive clothing. Maybe Iori would bring her kids and in that world, they'd be her kids too. Maybe the Zen'in girls would make peace and love each other the way sisters should.
She would hold Iori in her arms and kiss her underneath the mistletoe, laughing into her perfumed neck. She would teach the Kugisaki and Zen’in girl all of the things she wished she knew growing up loving another girl.
Maybe Nanami would be there too, sitting with Haibara in the study, reading classic novels and snacking on sweet treats. The snow would fall outside of the window and that would be okay, because she'd be inside and she'd be warm.
Somewhere in another universe, she’d playfully gag as Satoru and Suguru exchanged kisses by the fireplace. She’d braid the twin girl’s hair and tell them stories of her high school days. She’d hold Iori against her heart and bask in the warmth of the people around her, all happy and smiling and alive .
She finishes her drink, unfocused eyes looking up through the bottom of it at her glowing observation light and seeing a small bug illuminated in a halo of light, stuck and crushed under the bottom of her glass.
Somewhere, they’d be a family.