All a Dream

Rating: K+.
Warnings: Spoilers for Week 1, slight spoilers for week 2 and very very vague stuff for week 3, Eri/Shiki, Shiki/Eri, too much description of what characters are wearing, certain implications about Shiki's death, enough fluff to make my beta's head explode.
Disclaimer: I don't own The World Ends With You, the characters and settings therein, and blah, blah, blah.
A/N: Sorry this chapter took so long to get written and stuff- I really don't have an excuse. I think it turned out okay, better than the first one, at least (although whether that's actually okay? Hopefully!) Thanks for the favs, reviews, etc. on the first chapter. Feedback on this one would be lovely as well.

104 is warm inside, and dry, too. Shiki huddles close to Eri as she puts the umbrella away. The stores are full of people, some who look like they're there to shop and some who probably just wanted to get out of the rain. Their wet shoes squeak, and the upbeat, poppy music almost covers up the sound-- but not quite. It's crowded, but hey, it's been worse. They've braved blowout sales and brand debuts, when it seemed like everyone in Shibuya was trying their best to pack themselves into one very fashionable building. To Shiki and Eri, shopping experts, a little rainy day was nothing.

The lights are as bright as always, and the store smells like new clothes and teen perfume just like every other time they've been here, but it's still a cold, wet day, terrible for going anywhere. A day where it makes sense to go inside a store if you're already there, yeah, maybe to buy something if you've got the money and you see something you like, but it doesn't make sense to go all the way downtown if you could just wait until tomorrow to put the trip off, especially not if you have to walk to the subway in the rain and walk to wherever you're going in the rain, and then back to the subway and back home to wherever you came from once you're finished. It's not like all the new clothes are going to be bought up before tomorrow, or a timer on their hands was counting off the seconds they had to get to the store before something horrible happened...

"Good to see you two again," says the clerk, giving a little wave, and Shiki reminds herself that "you two" is back to meaning her and Eri. "Let's take your bags?" she asks, almost apologetically, but the girls have been there enough so that they're one step ahead of her, already handing her their bags over the counter.

They're trying to get back some semblance of normalcy, and Shiki knows it. Eri's actually having to try to be Eri (Shiki could say that she knows what that's like). The spontaneity isn't coming naturally, and Shiki suspects that Eri wouldn't be acting so happy if she wasn't making herself get over this whole "death" thing by sheer force of will. It's not like they're shopping because they feel like it and they can, they're shopping because that's what they usually do, and maybe if they do things like usual, it won't matter so much that their lives had gone so horribly off-course. It's weird how intentional today has to be, Shiki trying so hard to be stronger, Eri trying to forget about the things that, technically, never happened now.

Shiki doesn't mind having to try. They're a team again, and that's what counts. She finds herself walking in step with the synthesized beat.

"Ooh, look at that one!" Eri calls out, motioning towards a bright yellow top. She's off to collect it, grabbing up a pair of pinstriped pants along the way. Shiki's over at another rack, picking up a pale green halter dress. She's seen it there before, thought it was pretty, just the sort of thing she would want to wear if she was pretty. If she could pull it off. She can't remember what it felt like to be so scared of an outfit. She can't remember why, and realizes that she has very little sympathy for the old Shiki. It's just a dress. If she doesn't look good in it, she can hang it up again and go back for something else.

Still, she feels the familiar tension in her chest, making her wonder whether it's really worth it to try.

For a moment, Eri's smile seems forced, like she's trying to hold on to normal, and Shiki wants to fix it, wants to make Eri smile for real... but normal is what Shiki's fought her way back for, what pushed her to keep going as things got progressively stranger, as they started making less and less sense. She doesn't want to think about what could have happened to herself, to everyone, or what exactly was going on that entire time, or what have you. Not now. She's glad to have met him, no, them, partly because it's helped her see what she's had all along and partly because she just likes them, but she's glad they agreed to give it all a week to take. She definitely doesn't want to think about whether "They made you my entry fee" means "I love you."

(Coming from a normal person, it probably would, she's decided, but this is Neku, and she has no idea what he'd mean. It's not really "I love you"-- that much is obvious-- as much as "I'm in love with you" that she's worried about, but people tended to say one to mean the other, and she's not sure he'll be able to know the difference right away.)

Shiki flips through the row of dresses until she finds one in a size small, and (still more cautiously than she'd like to) takes it off the rack. Eri's whirling across the store, picking up shirts and skirts and everything she can see, almost dancing to the music. It was a different song, now, but still the kind of song that made you feel happy and energized. 104 fare didn't have that much variety. They'd played the song before, almost three weeks ago that wasn't really almost three weeks ago, but a today that didn't happen. She doesn't want to think about it, but she was leaning against the mirror in the dressing room (careful not to look), looking at her phone, when the song came on, and before she knew it her eyes had felt hot and wet, and then there she was, crying like a little girl in her tank top and miniskirt (clothes Eri, not Shiki, would have picked.) Eri had used that song for her ringtone back when it had just come out.

Eri changes directions as she goes to look for accessories, her reddish hair spinning around her shoulders underneath the hat, catching the lights in the store in just the right way. Eri seems to have a talent for that, too, and Shiki sees that her friend has already drawn in several stares. For a moment, she's struck with the urge to go dance with Eri in the aisles, to move with the song and twirl around like pinwheels through the store, but she stops herself. She's not graceful like Eri-- but it's okay, she reminds herself, catching the doubt in time. Eri's like Eri, and looking at the way she flutters around when she's happy like that (even if it's intentional happiness, even if she's just doing it on purpose so she doesn't think about how bad it almost got) gives Shiki the same shortness of breath as when she'd seen Eri earlier that day, for the first time since she'd... died, that was the best way to put it, forget about the details, before she'd seen the shadows under Eri's eyes or the way Eri seemed to miss her just as much. She shouldn't know about it! but somehow she does, even if she doesn't remember it enough to know it was true. Eri... I'm so sorry...

"Shiki!" Eri calls out, stopping in her tracks. Shiki knows that look in her eyes-- last time Eri got that way, Shiki had ended up in an impossibly frilly pink Lapin Angelique number (Eri had tried on the matching white one. It's a popular style, Eri said, and they needed to know how to fit it into their designs, if they wanted to appeal to more people. Shiki was more preoccupied with learning how to balance herself underneath all of the bows and ruffles and layers of skirt.) "That dress! You have to try it on, Shiki, you have to!"

"Do you think it'll look good?" Shiki asked.

"Of course, Shiki, just try it on!"

It was her idea first. But that didn't matter anymore, Shiki told herself, and surprisingly, it didn't. She wasn't about to tell herself it was over. No, she knew herself too well for that. But for this time, it didn't matter whose idea was whose, or if Shiki was the one to get the credit, or who'd be noticed. She was shopping with Eri, and Eri thought the dress she picked was pretty, and a song had just come on the store's radio that was one of her personal favorites. A little slower, a little quieter than some of the songs here, but that didn't mean it was any worse than the quicker, perkier ones.

Eri counts out loud the number of things in the pile of clothes she's holding, then gets a tag for seven items for herself, and a tag for one item for Shiki before she grabs onto the sleeve of Shiki's cardigan and pulls her in the direction of the dressing rooms.

"You have to show me when it's done, okay?" Eri practically squeals.

"You too!" says Shiki, partially because it's still a little strange for her to talk about herself, but also because Eri's clothes really are cute. It's the kind of thing she used to see in flashes, in between the moments of Eri's prettier than me, or Eri dresses better than me, or Why does everyone like Eri better? She's seeing Eri as she really is, the sweet, kind, enthusiastic, slightly ditzy Eri that must have been there all along, as if the way she'd thought of Eri reflected the real girl through some sort of funhouse mirror, or blurred her, as if Shiki had her glasses off. Shiki could see it now. It was like he had said: she was lucky. She was so incredibly lucky.

"Fine, but you have to! You really have to!" she says, and then she picks a dressing room, props her pile of clothes up on the wall with her hip while she opens up the door, then scoops them all back up and goes inside. She leaves the door open for a second, a look on her face like she's trying to figure something out, and Shiki's breath catches-- was Eri asking her to share? They always used to try on clothes in the same dressing room when they were younger, an unspoken agreement between the two that Eri wouldn't say anything about how skinny Shiki was as long as Shiki didn't mention that Eri was the first in their year to fill out her bra.

It's different now, though, and Shiki looks away and heads into the dressing room across the hall. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Eri shrug, and the she hears the door close and the latch click and Eri start unzipping something.

Really, Shiki had wanted to share, and that's why she's over here, with the mirror and clothing hooks and the little bench all to herself, because she knows what that means, and it's unmistakable, really, now that she can see Eri for who she really is, but it's probably not obvious to Eri-- even though something's different, that's for sure. And if it was obvious to Eri, too... well, today, they were shopping. Today it was good enough to buy clothes, and ride the bus, and listen to the splashing noises their shoes made in the rain, and to share an umbrella... She's blushing, a little, but she remembers the dress, and that she's here to try on clothes, not to think that sort of thing... Eri's here, now. Neither of them are going anywhere.

Cardigan unbuttoned, shirt up, skirt down, and Shiki tries not to look in the mirror at the way her hipbones stick out and her ribs show and she doesn't have much of a chest, but she sees her reflection anyway, and it's mostly not as bad as she remembers it. At least the reflection is her own. There's nothing so bad about herself that she had to go and... do what she did. (She can't remember what she thought Eri would feel. She doesn't want to, because part of her worries she thought Eri would deserve it, or everyone would be sorry they let Eri overshadow her and it didn't matter what Eri thought, it was her fault anyway... or maybe it just hurt too much, maybe she hadn't been thinking about what Eri felt at all.) But she's not here to think about that sort of thing, either, and she slips the dress on over her shoulders, and ties the ribbons around her neck and waist, and unscrunches her eyes before she looks in the mirror.

She's pretty. The dress softens her up a little, leaves curves where Shiki couldn't see any before. It would probably look better on Eri... but Shiki reminds herself that it looks good on her as it is. She twirls around experimentally, watches the skirt spin. It's exactly what she was looking for.

"You done already?" Eri asks when Shiki opens up the changing room door (she must have heard the click, Shiki supposes).

"Yeah, do you wanna see?" Shiki says, gathering up as much confidence as she can. It's a pretty dress, and she knows it, but still, she's nervous, somehow. For the life of her, she can't figure out why, and then Eri's door clicks, too, and Eri comes out in the pinstriped pants and a white lacy top that Shiki hadn't seen before.

"Wow, that's..." Eri pauses, and for a second Shiki's afraid that it's a bad pause, but something tells her it isn't. "That's amazing! I mean, I never would have even noticed something like that, but on you, it's so..." Eri trails off again, and Shiki knows she's probably imagining it, but... "Shoes!" she cuts in, breaking the silence. "We need to find you some shoes to go with that! You can't wear a dress like that with those sneakers, Shiki!" Shiki knows she's got a cute pair of strappy sandals back at home that would match it perfectly, but she forgets about her sandals, forgets about why Eri's changing the subject, because she's over at the shoe rack with Eri, going through the boots and Mary-Janes, and talking and laughing and just being a team again.

In the end, Shiki doesn't buy any shoes, just the dress, and Eri makes several purchases, although not everything that she eventually went back and tried on. They get their bags back from the clerk, who tells them to have a great day, but they're ahead of her again with this request, too. The rain hasn't stopped, but it's gotten lighter, and they barely need an umbrella on the way back to the subway, but they take one out (Eri's pink one this time) anyway. They pass Hachiko, and Shiki smiles at seeing him-- he always did make her happy, waiting there. Then they get on the subway, and get off the subway a few stops later, and walk a couple blocks to the place where Eri turns left to walk to her house and Shiki turns right to take the bus to her apartment.

"I had a great time with you today!" says Eri.

"Me too," Shiki replies. She doesn't want the day to be over, wants to stay with Eri, but hey, with the way Eri makes her feel, it's best to learn to take what she can get. "I can't believe I found that dress!"

"We still need to come back and find you some shoes, you know," and then Eri's voice is more serious, less lighthearted. "I'm... I'm really glad you're okay."

"Don't worry about me, okay?" Shiki says, but Eri is Eri, of course she's going to worry, and it wasn't fair what she did. She thought it would be over, she thought Eri wouldn't have to be sad once she came back, wouldn't have to have been sad, but it's not completely gone. She couldn't take it away, and it isn't fair. She's sorry, but sorry only goes so far when you're pretending it never happened.

"See you later, Shiki," Eri says, smiling, and then gives Shiki a quick one-armed hug, which she's used to when they're carrying shopping bags, and turns to go home, but Eri's still hurt and it's not fair.

"Bye, Eri," Shiki mumbles.

It's not fair at all. She can't leave it like this.

"Wait!" she calls out, reaching out for Eri's wrist, and she misses, but Eri turns around and comes back to her, and then she can't really tell how it happens, but she's in Eri's arms, and Eri's in hers, too, and then it's unmistakable, really. It's obvious to Shiki, and it's obvious that it's obvious to Eri, and the way Eri always used to hold her hand and hug her and play with her hair and draw out clothes for her to wear... it makes sense, now, and the way that Shiki stuck around to sew Eri's designs all that time... she doesn't know it, but that makes sense, now, too, and Shiki's holding Eri to her tightly, and it's different now, closer now, but they're a team again, and Shiki finally understands what that's always meant.

She's heard people talk about dying of happiness, and the expression floats through her mind, the part of her mind that tells her she's not good enough, reminds her of what she did, and she answers it, perfectly rationally, that no, she can't die again, because she knows what her entry fee would be this time.

"Eri," she says, almost at a whisper, now, but this is what she has to do, if she really means it, if they're really a team, "I had a dream I died, too."