a/n: (I'm supposed to be busy so WHY AM I WRITING?!)

in case you didn't catch it in the summary, based strongly off the song "Swaying" by Nanou, featuring Soraru, with a beautiful PV by CHRIS (the girl in the PV is so cute, it really sucks to see her sad). The song's title in Japanese is "Yurayura" which can also be translated as "wavering". I wanted to write about it because really resonated with me. Looking at both this song and Hello/how are you, I feel like Nanou understands a lot of things.

in the far future, I do want to make a full-length story with these characters. it'll be a completely different fic though, so this here is a oneshot, and it is complete.

cover image: rella, pixiv id 163536

In advance, thank you for reading. :)

"Hey."

A clear, smooth voice broke Rin out of the maze of her thoughts, the sudden music in a quiet room—or in this case, train. There was a boy bent in front of her. He picked up something from the ground and held it out to her. Her phone. "You dropped this," he chuckled, holding it out for her to take.

She'd realized she'd dropped it. She just couldn't be bothered to reach down and pick it up.

She took it from him, and their hands brushed for an instant, and Rin thought in passing that his smile looked a bit different from the rest. His small act of kindness was completely casual for him, yet for her, it was a moment: the moment that she noticed him, began to watch him, and that he became a large part of her small, short, insignificant life.

wa ver ing

ゆらゆら

Dear Len,

Please read this all the way to the end. I just want you to understand why I did what I did. And I want you to understand the role you played in it all.

And perhaps it's presumptuous of me to think you might be affected by what I write, but please don't cry.

They took the same train, the same car, every day to and from school. His usual seat was directly across from her own—it wasn't as if they knew each other, but they'd settled on the arrangement for simple coincidence and maybe fate. In the mornings, she boarded a few stops before him, and in the evenings, she disembarked a few stops after he'd already left.

It was always lonely after he got off. The warm sunset would snap to grey and sudden destitution slapped the car into galloping much faster than before—as if his presence had slowed the world, if only by a bit. She'd stare into her knees for the rest of the trip, wondering how it was possible that after so many years, her heart somehow still beat on, in spite of all the nothing it had been given to feed on.

At this point, it was probably just eating at itself.

The world isn't a kind place. It really isn't. There's a reason why babies cry when they leave the womb, you know. It's like they know what they've gotten into—what they've been dragged into. And then, as they grow up, as they become adults, the crying never stops. Life is tiny slits of happiness in a spectrum of suffering. Life is wars and hunger and hearts made of pebbles. That's all it is.

And I know you're shaking your head at the paper right now. You don't agree at all. You believe life is beautiful, right? You're one of those people. You believe in family dinners, tears of joy, sunrises and a baby's laugh. You believe in the tiny slits. That's how you are.

I'm not accusing you at all. In fact, that's the part of you I admire. It may be hypocritical of me, since I basically just said that I don't believe in happiness, but… People like you, happy people, are the reason why the world hasn't collapsed on itself yet.

Moving on. Remember Gumi?

Gumi was a girl one year older than them, from their school. She was a bit quiet; inconsequential. Neither Rin nor Len knew much about her until the day their morning train was delayed.

"What's going on?!" a red-faced salaryman demanded of a station guard. "I'm going to be late for work!"

"I'm very sorry, sir," the guard said, professionalism shading his eyes. "Someone jumped. A schoolgirl. We're in the process of clearing the body from the tracks."

"Again?!" the salaryman fumed. "It's been happening so often lately, I've had enough—"

Rin turned away and fumbled dazedly into the crowd, swimming through the ocean of people until the salaryman was safely on the other side.

It was true that people died every day. Millions of people—faceless people, empty names and numbers. Logically speaking, it was impossible to be saddened about every loss. Death was a truth of life that everyone had to learn to numb, tune out, in order to move forward. In fact, Rin herself didn't feel a knot in her stomach when she heard that today again, someone jumped onto the tracks—it had been happening often lately. And the salaryman, well, he wasn't wrong. Whoever had jumped had, in their death, inconvenienced many by choosing this particular method of suicide.

But still Rin felt the wind chill her skin as she tumbled onto a plastic station chair. Thoughts spun and dizzied her mind. It was a combination of things, really, but mostly it was cruel. That another person couldn't be saved, that they thought nothingness was the only option, and that nobody cared.

The world was cruel, and Rin, too, was cruel.

The trains resumed ten minutes later. The guards smiled and apologized for the inconvenience. Rin boarded and sat in her regular seat, adhering to her routine, returning to her everyday life. Because that's what you had to do to live—you had to snap back, spring back up, every time. It was exhausting, really.

Len came a bit later with his hands in his pockets, frowned at how his usual seat was occupied—the train was fuller today, due to the delays. So he instead held onto the strap above Rin's seat, and she slowly looked up to see him there, suddenly much closer than he'd ever been before.

"Hey," he said. "D'you know what was up with the trains?"

For the first time, Rin stared directly into his eyes. Globes of sea-blue with specks of green, grandiose and mystical. Like the Earth, like the world. "Someone jumped on the tracks."

His brows furrowed as if she just told him that tomorrow would be cloudy. "Oh, gosh. That's horrible."

He was talking to her. The boy she'd been watching for a while was talking to her, and her heart was beating harder for it. On a morning like this, the world still allowed her to have these trivial, worthless feelings, and she hated it. She hated it so much she wanted to cry. Her voice wavered as she spoke hardly over a whisper. "It's so cruel."

Len bent closer, a force that she couldn't push away; a wind that made her feel cold. "Are you… crying?"

They were slow tears—she wasn't hiccupping and her throat was clear and she wasn't sniffling. It was a clear, pure cry—the beautiful kind, the kind models flaunt in Hollywood movies—how cruel. She wanted to cry harder, uglier. That person who'd jumped, that person who'd died, deserved tears that matched their misery, the same amount of tears they'd shed themselves. Rin wanted to cry to make up for all the people that wouldn't. But Len really was good-looking, and she'd been told that she tended to look pretty when she cried, and her stupid heart was beating way too fast for her to keep up, and it was all so stifling and painful, eating her concentration like the headache that accompanied a fever.

Len bit his lip. He seemed concerned, but unsure how to comfort her. In the end he reached out and patted her hair. "It's okay. Don't cry."

She didn't want him to touch her. His hand burned her, seriously burned her. There was euphoria floating up inside her and she wanted to push it down, stomp it until it was so beaten it could never rise again. She wanted to seize the butterflies in her stomach and rip their pretty wings off and watch them flutter their last as she tossed them to the ground. Why did he try to comfort her? She didn't need comfort, she didn't deserve it—the girl who jumped, she was the one who needed his hand on her head. She was the one who needed to be told that it was okay, that she needn't cry. 'What about her?', Rin wanted to scream. 'Why are you more concerned for me, who's crying for the stupidest reasons, than for the girl who actually died?'

Perhaps her tears intensified, because Len smiled down at her, and through her bleary vision she saw the cruelty of the world inside him.

"Come on, don't cry," he said. "People die every day. You didn't even know the person who jumped, did you?"

And she crumbled.

Outwardly, she nodded and maybe she even smiled and thanked him for trying to help her—she couldn't even tell anymore. He seemed to think that she was okay now and turned his attention to the ads above their heads.

When they got to school, they learned from an obnoxious announcement on the PA that the girl who died was named Gumi Megpoid. They had a minute of silence for her—how many people spent that minute mulling over their weekend plans?

Gumi didn't leave a note. The police investigated her death over the next while, conducting interviews with her friends and family. Her parents, through beautiful, proper tears, howled with scratchy voices, like broken records, that they hadn't noticed anything wrong, that they were so sorry they didn't notice anything, and please, please, they screamed, clutching at the interviewer's clothes, please just bring her back.

It takes a strong, cruel person to handle a job with the police force.

She got good grades. She hadn't been bullied, at least to the extent of anyone's knowledge. She'd been a bit of a lonely girl, though, keeping to herself and spending breaks inside books. But even though she wasn't quite social, several of the boys who'd been interviewed admitted to having mild crushes on her at some point or another. She'd led a normal, perhaps even good life, at least on the surface. The police eventually filed the case away.

It was Gumi's creative writing teacher, Luka Megurine, that understood. Or at least, she had a feeling she understood. She had some 'evidence.' The 'evidence' was too abstract to present to the police—she doubted they would care very much, anyway. So she kept it to herself, another small piece of knowledge to store up on a high shelf, the kind of thing you only come back to on a quiet, pensive day.

It was an essay. Marking essays always gave Luka small, incidental peeks into her students' lives, their mindsets—some students were particularly emotional, for example. Some had a good grasp on how the world worked. Others were starkly logical and impartial. It was all very interesting, and she felt like she came to know several of her students very well, like old friends. But ultimately, she was just their teacher. They'd say their goodbyes after a year, and then she'd get a new crop of kids, and she'd forget about the old ones like she forgot what she wore yesterday. And then it went on and repeated in a slightly sad cycle.

Every year, perhaps one or two students revealed very personal matters in their essays—as if honesty equated marks. Luka did find it difficult to mark such papers fairly. It felt wrong to assign a number to something so heartfelt and real. Now, Gumi's paper had not seemed personal at first. There was a feeling of assured logic about it, and Luka read it as if it wasn't Gumi's opinion, but simply glib, a plea for a good grade. But after hearing of Gumi's death, Luka remembered the paper, went back to read it, and felt her heart waver for the girl.

The topic of the essay was kindness, and the thesis was that there was no such thing. There were assurances of the world's selfishness and tragedies—love, she said, was a thing that existed, but only when it was directed at the self. And then there was the concluding paragraph:

Personal bias permeates this paper. All I have to work off of is my own experience, after all. I can't speak for anyone else—maybe it's just that the world is kind to everyone but me.

At first, it appalled me how quickly you got over Gumi's death. She was someone you knew, if only from a distance. But that afternoon, you spent the train ride texting and listening to music, and I couldn't fathom how you could just stop thinking about her as quickly as she'd left this life. I really thought it was cruel of you. I myself couldn't concentrate on anything else—I didn't bother writing the biology test we had that day. My teacher let me off when I told her why. I suppose she assumed I was Gumi's friend.

The next day when you boarded the train, you said hi to me. And then you asked me if I was feeling better. I lied when I said yes.

You get along with a lot of people, and you have more friends than you can keep up with. I wonder how many of them you truly care about. I mean really care. I dare you to ask yourself that. How many of them would you give your life for? How many of them mean more to you than a few texts, a few Saturdays at karaoke? Don't you feel like you hate them, wish you could cut off ties when they come to you complaining about their stupid lives? When they try to connect with you on a personal level?

The truth is, people like you are superficial. You live too spontaneously, like you're skating over the surface of everything. If only you had the strength—the intelligence—to break the ice, you'd see everything underneath. Everything is so ugly.

You say you're saddened by your schoolmate's suicide, the shooting in America, the famine in Africa, but you do nothing about it other than tweet a hashtag over the span of two seconds. You sleep perfectly fine at night. You don't think about anything. Maybe if you did, maybe if you tried to, you'd realize what a piece of garbage the world is—what a piece of garbage you are. The world is like a landfill. Overflowing with trash like you, but there's nowhere else for it to go so they just keep on stacking it and stacking it and everything looks fine like it's not about to fall over but it really isn't fine. It really isn't. And yet the world moves on, because of people like you, because of people who don't care. People who don't know any better.

I'm sorry. I just insulted you a whole lot. I made it seem like I really hated you, huh? But, Len, it's the opposite. Would I really be writing this letter if I hated you? I really liked you. I liked you a lot.

Of course, you already knew that.

She hated him.

She would watch him across her on the train, every day, twice a day, as he did whatever he did on his phone. Phones were another trashy characteristic of modern life. He was so focused on whoever was on the other end of the line, of course he couldn't see what was right smack in front of him.

He smiled at the screen. He had a pretty smile, he really did—it was like a little ball of light, something as far-removed from the cruel world as the Sun.

She thought she was better than this. She didn't think people like him were her type—didn't she prefer guys who were more intellectually stimulating? Guys who were actually aware of the world around them? Guys who were as miserable as she was?

But there was just something about him. His smile was never far away. He was consistently laughing. His social media posts were ridden with exclamation points. And maybe there was something comforting about his constant, stable presence, there in front of her on the train, every day without fail. She couldn't pinpoint exactly what made her fall for him, but that day when he'd patted her head after Gumi was the final push over the cliff.

One day, they were practically alone on the train car. It was strange and she didn't know where everyone had gone, but maybe it was a sign. So halfway along the ride, she got up from her seat and grabbed the strap above him, and he looked up at her like she'd once looked up at him.

"Hi," he said. "Rin, right?"

She nodded. After she didn't say anything for a while, Len tilted his head.

"What's up?"

He was so beautiful. There was no other word for it. Beautiful, inside and out. The perfect combination of the right genes and a flawless upbringing. He did well in classes and he had so many friends and he was always smiling, yes, even now he was smiling up at her, and it made her feel blessed, like the world wasn't so bad—but then again she was so jealous, so extremely jealous of all that he had, all that he didn't have.

She murmured it, at first, so softly he couldn't hear, even in the empty train.

"Say that again?"

"I like you."

And his smile disappeared, and Rin remembered that the world was cruel, and he was cruel.

"Oh?"

And she stood there as the train hustled on, her heart thumping against her will again, and he looked at her uncertainly, and Rin wanted to look away and say listlessly, 'You're uncertain about this? You're uncertain about a girl liking you, but aren't there so many more things for you to be uncertain about? Like the existence of love, the meaning of your life?'

"Um, I'm sorry," Len said. "But, well, I don't really know you, so…"

There wasn't anything else she could say. Nothing else she could expect of him. "I know. Sorry."

She couldn't sleep that night. She'd cried too much. But of course he had no way of knowing that. And even if she did tell him, for whatever reason, he'd give her that uncertain look again, and he surely wouldn't care at all.

Then, the next morning, he wasn't there. The train passed his stop, and he didn't board, and the world kept spinning.

She saw him at school, on her way to the bathroom during lunch. He was walking with another girl with long, bright pigtails, talking and laughing. Maybe Rin felt a longing to be in that girl's place, but then she realized that that would be impossible. She could never settle in beside him, talk with him about trivial things and laugh in harmony with him. Even if they were to become acquainted, she would be like a shadow to him, a burden, unwanted. It was a simple issue of incompatibility.

That afternoon he was back on the train, but he'd brought the girl with him, as if to tell Rin, 'I'm taken, see, now stop staring at me, it's awkward.' He showed the girl something on his phone, and they both laughed.

He was smiling again. It was really beautiful. That he was able to smile, even when he'd made her cry, was beautiful. He was so unkind. He really didn't care about her. She'd probably disturbed him with her sudden confession, and now he was pushing her away, like she was something disgusting. And it hurt, maybe, maybe that empty feeling inside her was hurt, but it's not like it mattered. Wasn't she always hurt? And if her hurt was what allowed him to smile, then wasn't it all right?

The world was cruel. Whenever someone smiled, someone across the world or across the city or across the street was crying. And nobody cared. That was normal. Humanity was incapable of kindness. People blithely smiled through suffering, grinned through pain, laughed through death. Rin, too, smiled across the aisle at Len as the bright-haired girl cuddled his arm.

In other words, she didn't care anymore.

When I told you I liked you, it meant a lot more than you think. It's not just that I liked you as a guy. I liked you as—not a person, but an ideal. In the end, you represented one thing for me: strength. To be happy, you have to be ignorant, but you also have to be strong. Perhaps I envied you: it wasn't like I enjoyed being like that, being under an eternal raincloud, hating everything and wanting to disappear. I wanted to be happy, of course I did, but it was impossible for someone like me. My personality was like a brick wall in front of me; the way I was born and my circumstances of life just weren't the right fit. So the closest I could ever get to smiling was watching you smile.

I can't love myself. I've long forgotten how to love myself. But I can still love you.

You hate me, don't you? To you, I'm just the girl who's invaded your perfect life. I'm ruining your peace. You don't want anything to do with me. But I don't care about what you want. I hate you enough to not respect your desire for me to get the hell out of your life, but I also love you enough to want to make my mark in your heart, and that's why I'll never let you forget. You'll never forget me. I'll never forget you, of course.

You—at least, the idea of you—were the light of my life. At least towards the end of it. Honestly, you were. You're the only one I'm writing a letter to. I didn't even write one to my parents. I hope that speaks for how much you meant to me. Whether you want to share this with them is up to you—do what you think is right. I don't want them to be sad, but I'm not sure if they'd be happier knowing or not knowing.

I really hated the world, and I'd been wishing I could just disappear for the longest time. But the thought of dying had me wavering. I'd never found it in me to take action until you did something: you smiled after you made me cry. That one action was just shining with strength—with ignorance and cruelty, yes, but most overwhelmingly, strength. And your strength in that moment was what gave me the strength to jump.

Don't feel guilty. It wasn't your fault. It's just that the world is cruel, and kindness doesn't exist. And this is how my life was destined to end.

Don't cry. Don't you dare cry. You don't have the right to cry. And don't let yourself be overcome by your anger at me. If you do, you'd have made all this meaningless. Your smile is what gave my short life meaning. Your smile is what saved me, and continues to save me, even now. So smile. Keep smiling for the rest of your life. Don't become like me. You're fine the way you are.

It's better this way, you know. In the limits of my body, I'd only be able to see you until we graduated. But now, the way I am now, I'll be able to watch you smile forevermore.

So tonight, before you go to bed, Len, go outside and smile at the stars. I'll be there, smiling back.

Thank you. And goodbye, I guess.

Rin

Dirtying the paper like bloodstains were splotches of tears—both hers and his. Hers were the dried ones. His were the fresh ones.

The train rattled on.