Total Player Kill
Sara can’t sleep alone anymore.
Nao doesn’t mind. Every night she holds Sara close, absorbs the shudders that wrack her too-thin frame. (Nao can’t stand to cook anymore, but Sara eats so little that she hardly seems to notice Nao’s aversion to the kitchen implements, to the stove.) She kisses the dark rings beneath each violet eye, covers one ear and pulls the other to lie against her chest, to listen to her heartbeat.
Sara is the only reason Nao still has one, after all.
Sara doesn’t scream, anymore. She just stares at people who aren’t there. Sometimes she talks to them, although her voice is so hoarse she might as well stay silent.
The worst days are when she apologizes. Nao always wraps her in her arms and reassures her, over and over again, that she did nothing wrong. Nao is alive because of her; Sara is a hero.
(And if she isn’t… if she was wrong to do what Nao asked of her, in that last game… then what does that make—)
They were evil, the people who aren’t there. They all wanted Nao to die. Even Kanna. Even… even Reko.
Sara did nothing wrong. Sara (Nao) did nothing wrong.
When she isn’t at school or with Sara, Nao paints portrait after portrait of Professor Mishima. She knows now that his AI was just a facsimile, an imperfect caricature; her beloved teacher was a good judge of character, and would never have told her to trust people who wanted to harm her. When he had been alive, he had liked Sara; he had once told her that all of her friends were good because Nao was good. That meant that she and Sara were both good people. Neither of them were to blame.
She doesn’t paint anyone else, not even Joe. Sara, in one of her more lucid moments, had asked her not to. It was the first and only thing she had ever asked of Nao, and Nao would do anything for Sara.
“Joe, Joe, please forgive me,” Sara begs. The room is dark and empty, but her eyes track something pacing around the bed, back and forth, back and forth.
Nao holds her tighter, strokes her unwashed hair and her gaunt cheeks, coos “Sara did nothing wrong” like a lullaby, like a benediction.
“Please,” Sara says, voice as thin and weak as a cut thread, like it’s coming from an open neck—
…Nao’s one regret is that she hadn’t stayed long enough to find out who had stolen her professor from her, though it brought her comfort to know that the culprit was months dead, by now.
“Please, just please don’t hurt Nao. I can’t lose anyone else.”
“Oh, Sara,” Nao whispers, her cracked heart brimming with love and gratitude for this empty shell of the girl she had once so admired.
Even if Nao had broken her beyond repair with one simple request, even if everyone else she had once protected was gone, Sara would always, always be her hero.