It's been years since I've written or posted anything but here we are again. I've been sitting on this idea for a while and finally got it done some weeks back. I love the idea though I'm not totally in love with how everything turned out, and I hate that I'm forced to use these lines as section dividers... but oh well. That said, do enjoy.

Warning: Contains character suicide.

Part 1.

The first conscious thought Minako Aino remembers having after blacking out in the hospital comes before the sun starts to peak over the horizon on a brisk Sunday morning. She's startled out of whatever void her mind had been wondering in by the sudden halting of a car in front of her. A woman she recognises as her mother dashes out of the back seat before the driver even has the chance to put the car in park. "Oh," is what Minako thinks as her mother rushes by, eyes red and cheeks splotchy in a way that Minako has never seen before but immediately knows to mean that her mother – her mother of all people – has been crying.

By the time Minako manages to get to her feet her mother is fifteen feet away and counting.

"Mom!" she calls out, and it comes out sounding hoarse, barely more than a whisper, her voice cracking in the midst of it. Her mother hears her despite this. She jerks to a stop as if surprised and spins around so fast her ponytail – which Minako marks as odd, her mother always wore her hair in a tight bun – whips around to smack against her cheek. "Mom," Minako calls again, her voice stronger this time, only wavering slightly at the end.

Her mother puts a hand over her mouth as her shoulders start to shake, and Minako gets a proper look at the woman she's spent more time talking to on the phone than speaking with in person. She's in the striped skirt that she only ever wears when she's trying to land a huge contract and a white, long sleeved, collared shirt. The jacket she usually wears to complete the look is strangely missing. Her mascara is smudged and her stockinged feet are bare, her black high heels dangling in the hand limp at her side. Her mother is a mess and it honestly scares Minako to see her that way.

Her heart beating hard in her chest, Minako takes a step towards her haggard mother. "I'm fine," she says, because the only other time her mother has ever had a hair out of place was when Minako had fainted mid-way down the staircase at home, and because the last thing she can remember is being in a hospital. She takes another step closer and there is something like relief in her mother's eyes for a brief moment, but then it's gone. "Mom, I'm okay," she says again. She wants that look of relief to come back, but instead it's replaced by something else. Her mother's hand falls from her face and her face crumples into something like distress, her entire body shaking, and Minako starts to move forward, going to her in case she collapses.

"I'm sorry," her mom says, her voice thick. Her eyes harden as she pulls herself to stand straighter, and it is a look that Minako knows is reserved for persons her mother has no time for that is levelled at her. Minako stops walking. "You have the wrong person."

Then before Minako can think to get a word out in protest, her mother turns and rushes the rest of the way into the building.

Above the entrance her mother disappeared into are bright green letters spelling out, 'St. Joseph's Private Hospital'. It's the very hospital she had been admitted to two weeks prior and blacked out in the night before. She's mostly confused, but there's a feeling like terror rising inside of her the longer she stares at the building.

The building towers over her, suddenly dark and threatening and promising to drag her to places Minako is sure she does not want to go, not again.

Not really sure what she's doing, Minako turns and runs.

She winds up in a video arcade of all places. The lighting inside is dim, but the bright flashes from arcade screens give the place an otherworldly glow. She is surrounded by boys laughing and cheering, a few of them cursing. The room is hot with their combined body heat and the lack of windows – the few fans aren't enough to cool her down in the slightest. It smells of cheap cologne and sweat and that underlying boy-smell that all boys seemed to have. She doesn't see a single other girl in the room, but no one really pays her much mind and Minako walks amongst them as if she's been in one of these places before.

She stops behind a little boy on a machine coloured blue with "Space Invaders" written across the top in bright yellow letters. He's pushing a giant red button furiously and pulling a stick from right to left so hard she wonders if it might break. She doesn't see why he's putting so much effort into the game. It looks simple enough. She chances a guess that he's somehow controlling the square thing moving around at the bottom of the screen and it seems to be rapidly firing something at the other square things at the top of the screen. She hazards another guess that those other square-looking objects are the "space invaders". She stands behind the little boy and watches as the tempo of the music increases and he works his controls furiously before he's been hit one too many times and the invaders have gotten past the green barrier.

It's cute when he kicks the machine and shouts "No fair!" at the screen flashing "Game Over". Then he turns around and sees her standing there and that terror, the one she felt outside the hospital, bubbles inside her stomach and makes her feel sick. He looks up at her through black bangs – his mother needs to give him a haircut, she thinks – and she looks right back. Seconds later a blush spreads across his cheeks as he mumbles out if she wants a turn.

Minako can't help the smile that blooms on her face as a result of how adorable he looks and the little boy smiles back, asking again if she wants to play. No one else is watching her when Minako shakes her head and says that she's never played before.

No one looks on in confusion or amazement at the sight of a little boy teaching a 15 year old girl how to play Space Invaders. And when Minako comes back every day afterwards and meets that little boy to play arcade games – moving from Space Invaders to Asteroids to Pac man and Defender – no one bats an eye or asks what a girl is doing there. Somewhere during the first week, Minako notices that she never needs coins to play the games like the little boy does. She doesn't think much of it.

The headaches had started suddenly when she was twelve. The first time had been in class and she'd clutched her head and asked the teacher if she could go to the nurse. The teacher had told her to remember to bring back a note when she returned and Minako had nodded as she got up to leave.

She hadn't made it to the door. Her first blackout had also been when she was twelve. She only remembers wondering why the teacher was suddenly calling after her.

"It's just a lack of rest," the doctor says. "She needs a proper eight hours of sleep each night. Once she gets that she'll be fine."

She remembers her father sighing as he says, "Thank God." Relief filling his brown eyes as they settled on Minako, sitting up on the hospital bed, her legs swinging aimlessly over the side, his hand resting on top of her head. Her mother isn't there. Unlike the headaches, the business trips had started when she was six.

She got eight hours of sleep each night.

The headaches always came back.

For the first month Minako doesn't eat or shower or interact with anyone outside of the little boy. Time moves by so smoothly she doesn't even notice the days passing, spending most of her time drifting around Tokyo while studiously avoiding any place her parents might frequent. She doesn't think about anything other than which game to try out next and doesn't pay much attention to where it is she walks during her days except to note other arcades she can visit. She knows that she's not quite alive and avoids thinking about how she's also not quite dead and nothing frightens her now as much as ambulances and hospitals.

She feels like a ghost, like she isn't quite present in the world and she isn't sure how or why this is happening to her. She's not even sure she wants to know.

For the first month, Minako is a shadow on the wall only a little boy takes note of and she thinks nothing of it when she walks past the toll booths onto the highway and steps into the path of an oncoming truck. Her only thought before she steps onto the road is that if she is dead, this won't change anything, and if she isn't then she should be; she isn't living either way.

The truck driver doesn't even slow down and Minako wakes up to find herself on a bench outside of a hospital.

The little boy's name is Sugao Saitou and he likes arcade games and ice cream and magazines with pretty girls and ladies all dolled up on the cover. He likes numbers but hates science and his dream is to play football – what the Americans call soccer – and become famous. He walks around with shades that are too big for him in his backpack so that whenever someone asks what he wants to be when he grows up he can slip them on, holding them in place with a finger, and say in a voice that is trying too hard to be low and manly that he's "gonna be famous" with a 'babe' tacked in terrible English if he's talking to a female. He likes to get his hair just the slightest bit wet when it rains so he can comb his fingers through it and make it spike up at odd angles but he hates getting sweaty because it has the opposite effect and causes his hair to stick to his scalp and forehead. He's a bit of a drama queen and Minako hangs around him because he is full of life and somewhere deep down she wonders if being around him will let some of that life rub off on her and make her current existence more meaningful.

He introduces her to his parents and she can't figure out if it's the weirdness of his family or the laws of the universe continuing to bend around everything involving her and her interactions that makes them decide that it's perfectly ok to ask a complete stranger to babysit their kid. Now Minako finds herself spending her afternoons and evenings with Sugao and sometimes having dinner with his family, spending the rest of her day drifting in lost time.

She's walking him home one day, six months after meeting him and he's talking excitedly about a new movie theatre opening up near his favourite ice cream shop when an ambulance rushes by them, sirens blaring. Her head ache comes suddenly and though it is only a mild throbbing in her skull Minako is instantly terrified.

She doesn't black out.

Sugao keeps talking and the headache is gone a minute later, but Minako's heart beats erratically the entire walk to the Saitou household.

She sees her parents for the last time eight months after meeting Sugao. She is walking him to cram school when she spots them walking towards her mother's car, talking in loud whispers and forcefully restrained hand gestures. Her mom gets in on the driver's side and starts the car as her dad stands on the curb, his voice steadily getting louder. Minako doesn't notice that she's stopped walking in favour of staring at them, worried and amazed. She's never seen her dad so much as lift a finger at someone let alone his voice and now his face is turning red and his arms are moving in sharp, cutting motions as he argues with her mother. Her mother yells something back and everything happens all too fast.

Her mother pulls out and is immediately hit by another vehicle. Her car spins, pivots really, in an arc and slams into her father, throwing him into the window of a clothing store before it slams into the power pole her mom was parked beside. She's so focused on her mom's car and her mom's head, lying against the steering wheel, unmoving, that she doesn't even notice the other vehicle as it spins out of control towards her.

She wakes up on a bench in front of a hospital and doesn't spare any time to let anything sink in. She just gets up and walks away.

She's cursed.

She reads about the accident in newspapers for the next week. It says that the accident was the fault of both drivers, one speeding and the other not paying attention when pulling out into traffic. It says both drivers are alive, her mom released the day after she was admitted to hospital, the other driver released the day after. At first it says the pedestrian, her father, is in a coma after sustaining multiple head injuries, a fractured hip and broken legs. Then it says her father, regional manager of G. Numan Finances, might not pull through. There is exposition on his life and work, of his tragic family history – his dead daughter and the divorce his wife has filed for – and it all paints a tragic picture that settles poorly in Minako's gut and makes her eyes water.

A full week after the accident it says that he dies.

Minako makes her way to the bench outside of the hospital and sits down and cries and constantly tells herself that she is not waiting. She stays there until the next day and no spectre of her father shows up and it's okay because she wasn't waiting.

She walks back to the scene of the accident and enters one of the stores along the road – not the clothing store, she'll probably never go in there – and she convinces herself that she is not waiting to see if he passes by as lost and confused as she was on her first day back from the dead.

She walks the streets of Tokyo for a week and tells herself that she isn't looking for him amongst the crowds of commuters and loiterers and persons finding time for short breaks in their busy, meaningful lives.

She never sees him anywhere.

She's cursed. She's cursed with death and cursed to not die and maybe if she hadn't stuck around, hadn't noticed her parents, hadn't seen them fighting for the first time in her life then her dad would still be alive; really alive. Maybe if she'd just kept walking she'd have carried her curse with her and he wouldn't have died – truly died. She's died three times and he's died only once and Minako sits in an alley and cries, maybe for hours, maybe for weeks; what does time even mean to her anyway?

The newspaper never mentioned a second pedestrian who'd been involved, only eye-witnesses. What does time mean to a girl whose existence the universe only acknowledges so it can punish her with a farce of a life?

Her body never quite gets over its confusion as to whether it is dead or alive. There are times when walls have only hesitantly offered resistance to her frame and times when the buttons on arcade machines don't press down. She lives with no money, little food and the clothes on her back but she doesn't need shelter, she doesn't much need food and her clothes never dirty or tear. For all intents and purposes she is a ghost and she only knows she isn't when a year passes and her headaches come back, black outs in tow and she suffers silent and alone, a shadow of a person for six months. When she dies she has two thoughts: ghosts don't die, and maybe this time she'll stay dead.

She wakes up on a bench in front of the hospital and is immediately sick. No one pays any attention to a 15 year old girl vomiting into a trash can outside of a hospital, not even to ask if she needs any help going inside.

What does Minako even know about ghosts anyway?

She runs into Sugao again when he is 17. He sees her first. His scream is what grabs her attention and she's only just realised who he is when he runs up to her and hugs her with enough force to make her wonder if her next death will be by suffocation before he lets her go and beams at her. For the first time in years Minako feels people staring at her. Sugao is holding her by her arms and gushing words a mile a minute but Minako can only focus on the people around them, looking at her and Sugao with nosy human curiosity and whispering to others about them. She doesn't even notice how panicked she is before Sugao picks up on the fact that he is causing a scene and takes her hand to lead her all the way back to his house.

People noticed her and she doesn't know how to feel about that because she had gotten used to being invisible. She'd thought she understood the rules of her existence, that she'd somehow be a shadow amongst humanity forever.

When she had died the first time her own mother hadn't recognised her after, yet here was this boy – a man now – who still remembered her and saw her and recognised her and got other people to notice her as well.

They're in his sitting room and it's not much different from how Minako remembers it, except for a new couch and a more modern television. He's made her coffee instead of tea and he's asked so many questions. Where did she go? Where has she been? Why didn't she visit? There are so many questions and Minako can barely comprehend the fact that she can exist to other people still to even consider any possible answers.

She stays silent, coffee cooling in her hands as he adjusts his glasses – he wears those now, square frames that look awkward on him – and runs a hand through his hair – blonde at the tips, before leaning on one arm and looking at her with the calmest expression he's had since she first saw him barrelling towards her on the sidewalk.

"Minako-chan," he starts and she fidgets, suddenly nervous. "You don't look a day older than when I last saw you."

And Minako breaks.

Part 2.

Two months before Minako turns fifteen her parents decide that it's best if they take her out of school and get her a personal tutor as well as a personal nurse. Minako wants to protest. She has friends at school and an almost boyfriend. She has things that make her happy and she really doesn't want to spend her days at home, alone with strangers. She wants to protest, but she doesn't. She doesn't because she has friends and an almost boyfriend that are slipping away from her almost as quickly as her grades are plummeting.

The headaches are a constant echo inside of her skull at this point and sometimes the painkillers her doctor has her on help ease them but most of the time they flare up just before lunch and her eyes hurt as her vision goes white and if she's eaten anything in the previous two hours she'll throw it all back up and wake to find herself on a cot in the nurse's station. She can't focus in class. The headaches sometimes cause the words on the wall to blur and her teacher's voice to turn into a war drum beating in her head as a thousand tiny soldiers march through her brain. She's quieter than she used to be and she smiles less and she drifts behind her friends and winces any time they laugh because it starts up hell in her brain.

Minako isn't really herself anymore and she knows it, her friends know it, even her parents know it despite them barely even being around anymore. So instead of complaining when her dad sits her down to tell her that they're withdrawing her from school she sits quiet, because she doesn't really want to watch any more of her life drift away from her. At least at home there aren't whispers of her dying anywhere except inside her own head.

Her nurse is a kind lady in her mid-twenties who recommends all kinds of books for Minako to read and tells Minako stories about her son and all the ways he manages to almost give her a heart attack. She is sweet and caring and takes Minako out to all sorts of places to get some sun and fresh air. Her tutor is a condescending prick who sometimes looks at her like she is a giant waste of his time and at other times looks at her like he only has to deal with her just a little while longer. He is polite and he is patient when her headaches distract her and cause him to have to repeat what he's said two, three, four times, but his eyes are never on the same page as his actions. He comes three days each week, even during the summer and Minako hates him almost as much as she's sure he hates her.

It doesn't matter much anyway because six months after her parents first sat her down Minako is kept under constant observation in the hospital and her parents call her every day to say how much they're trying to make time to come visit her and give promises of "soon" that Minako never believes in.

It doesn't matter because a year and three months after Minako stops attending school, she dies in a hospital and her entire existence becomes one giant question mark in a nightmare curse she doesn't know how to escape.

She used to have parents and friends and an almost boyfriend but now all she has is a boy turned man named Sugao and if she loses him like she lost everyone else she doesn't really know what will become of her. So when he offers her a place to stay, with him in his new apartment, she's relieved and a little bit happy for the first time since she beat the high score in Defender back when Sugao was still younger than her and carrying around shades that didn't fit. She makes note of the date for the first time since her first death and counts down the weeks until Sugao finally moves out of his parents' home and into his new apartment.

Sugao forces her to do things. He drags her grocery shopping and makes it so that she starts to eat regularly, even though she knows from experience now that she doesn't need to eat at all. He encourages her to volunteer at shelters and clinics and anywhere else that doesn't need an ID so that she's forced to do meaningful things and interact with other people. He asks for her help with his business homework even though she never knows the answer and introduces her to his friends as his younger cousin so that he has an excuse to have her tag along whenever they go to hang out.

For a time it feels like her wish from all those years ago is coming true. It feels like Sugao, with all his boundless energy, is giving purpose to her hollow existence. Minako starts to feel like even if she isn't truly alive, she is at least living. There are people who know her name and face and things to look forward to every day. Then the headaches start again and Sugao forces her to go the hospital. The doctors there still don't know what's wrong with her and can't figure out how to stop it no matter how much Sugao pleads and yells and cries. His parents drop by at one point, but they do not remember her and think that she is their son's latest on a short list of girlfriends.

The stress and never ending terror that comes from being in a hospital again seems to accelerate her illness, and Minako dies just weeks after she is admitted.

She wakes up on a bench outside of a hospital. Sugao is waiting for her, and he has never before seemed so beaten and hopeless. Minako has sucked all the life out of him and still her very existence is nothing but a lie.

They walk home in silence.

There is a pattern to it, they realise. If she doesn't die by any other means, Minako can live for upwards of a year and two months before the headaches start. After they do, everything is just a matter of months. They still can't find a reason for why the universe refuses to let her stay dead and the best Sugao can optimistically guess is that she's needed for something important in the future and this is all destiny at work. Minako thinks this is all nothing more than the universe and all its gods punishing her, and despite the many times Sugao jokes about how she's going to end up saving the world in the future, the pain of her mounting death count is taking a toll on him.

Sugao ages and it reaches the point that sharing his apartment with a teenage girl is getting them suspicious looks from their neighbours who forget who Minako is every time she dies and forget that there has always been a teenage girl living with Sugao from the day he moved into their apartment complex. He gets her a room at a nearby hotel and neither of them talk about how they never get asked to pay for it.

Sugao ages and eventually he becomes Saitou to Minako. The first time she says it with respect to his age, Saitou nearly cries and Minako stutters over the name so much it is barely recognisable. Neither of them suggest she keep calling him Sugao though and after the third, fourth, fifth time, the address comes easily.

Saitou ages and Minako finds herself in the slightly weird position of feeling proud of someone. She has known him since he was a boy and now he is fully grown with a respectable job at a talent agency, slowly rising through the ranks. He pays his taxes mostly on time and eats healthy and even though he doesn't have a wife – and there was that pregnancy scare with his last girlfriend – he's done well for himself and she's gotten to see it all.

The years go by and she doesn't love or hate any of it, content to ignore how every time she dies and comes back the number of lines at the corners of Saitou's eyes increase and it seems to get harder for him to smile at her like he used to. She likes to think that she's happy and it isn't until Saitou meets her by a bench outside of a hospital with audition papers for his talent agency, with an excited grin and a silent plea in his eyes that she considers for the first time that Saitou can't lie to himself like she can and watching her die in the hospital again and again is making him miserable.

She loves him, she realises, in a way that is far too confusing to puzzle out. It's not romantic, definitely not, but it is strong and persistent and it is what causes her to take the audition papers and seriously consider them. She has a year and two months to try and be a pop idol and though she doubts she can make it big, for Saitou's sake she will try. When she takes the papers from him he tells her that the doctors this time around could actually tell him what was wrong with her. They can't fix it, not yet. Minako didn't survive long enough for them to try, but new medical technology in the making could likely be her saving grace. The strained smile Saitou sends her way reads of hope that maybe the next time she gets sick they will be able to save her, and the broken looping record that is Minako's existence will be replaced with an unscratched disk with a full lifetime's worth of living.

Minako smiles back. "Here's hoping," she says, and doesn't tell him that she's worried that them finding a cure to whatever's wrong with her brain will just force the universe to find some other way to kill her. She fears complications in surgery and unfortunate accidents and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but for Saitou she smiles. She puts her all into her audition and when she gets selected, when Minako Aino becomes Minako Aino superstar, she allows herself to believe that maybe – just maybe, she can make something of the sham that is her life.

Part 3.

"We've been tasked with a mission from our past life, Reiko."

Mars scowls at her, annoyed, but Minako has to make her see, has to make her understand. "The universe doesn't just decide to bring long dead people back to life for no reason," Minako says, and if only Saitou could hear the words coming out of her mouth right now.

"I don't care about the past," Mars says, exasperated, probably tired of having to repeat herself to Minako again. She doesn't understand how important the past is, she can't understand how the past made Minako come back earlier than needed and repeat a cycle of death and rebirth eleven times just to get her to the point where she is now. "The only life that matters is the one I'm living right now."

She says it with such certainty that Minako knows that it will be almost impossible to get her to change her mind, but she has to try.

She's about to explain to Mars how everything they're fighting against and fighting for is linked to everything they lost in the past; about to explain how they have a purpose and an assigned mission so important that the rules of life and death were cast aside for them to be here; about to explain how they need to understand what happened before to find meaning in what is happening now. Her lips part to try to open the eyes of her stubborn comrade but then Rei's stony expression softens and the way Rei looks at her reminds her of the way Saitou had looked at her that first time he had dragged her to the hospital, pleading for her to hope for a better future.

"Your future matters, Minako. You shouldn't sacrifice it for someone else's past."

She knows Rei means the Minako of Venus, long deceased and forgotten with the ashes of the Moon Kingdom, but it is not that past that Minako is willing to sacrifice her future for. Minako thinks of all the years spent waiting, drifting, hating herself and her existence, praying for some meaning to it all; a meaning she finally has. Rei doesn't understand the difference because Rei doesn't even know that Minako has been on this earth for longer than she should have been. Her arguments fall flat because Minako isn't fighting to correct a past failure, she's fighting to give meaning to all those wasted years in tortured limbo.

Still, Minako can't seem to find the words to argue with Rei, and it's the way Rei looks at her that causes it. That look stays in Minako's head, pleading and caring and promising hope, and in the end Minako caves.

Love is her strength and her weakness. It doesn't change her views or opinions. It doesn't bring her hope for a future she's long given up on. Instead, like it did with Saitou, like it does with Rei, it makes her decide to try.

And she does.

She dies. She doesn't wake up this time, instead she remembers. She is in a studio recording her single when the memories come flooding back and she looks around even though she knows there is no bench or hospital behind her. She is alive, and for the first time since she went hunting for her dead father, Minako hopes.