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Satoru still visits that beach sometimes, in some perverse attempt to smother the grief, or maybe to never let it die. He looks at the waves and at the sea-foam, how setting sun dances in the reflections of water-soaked sand, casting a golden sheen to it and remembers a different scene, from ages ago and not yet ten years.
He, untapped power still sleeping in the awkward teenage body, immortal and invulnerable, but not quite, not yet, playing like careless child in the water with Riko, a girl slated for slaughter. He remembers feeling a strange emotion in relation to her, not pity, but something much more poignant, something more hurtful.
He tried to explain to Suguru, once, how this feeling of convoluted kinship confused and unsettled him and Suguru, who always understood him without a word of explanation, except when it mattered most, looked just as lost.
Lost, a good description for both of them, after.
But after is not then, where Suguru is on the same beach, in colourful shirt, mirthful smirk on the edges his lips, warmth at the corners of his eyes. Next to him is Riko’s caretaker, a woman more forgotten than Riko herself. At least Riko’s death would get thrown at Satoru in a fit of accusations, the single failure of the infallible. Kuroi was barely a footnote, not even a statistic, just another corpse, not remembered enough to be mourned.
And so, on those rare visits to the beach, the picture lights up in his memory, clear and sharp with the perfect recall of Six Eyes and muted in colours by grief.
The sun, golden beach, sea-foam. Mortal, soon to be murdered, then reborn as something more, a dead unsacrificed girl and a corpse, that will die ten years before Satoru will kill him.
———-
There are no beaches in Prison Realm, only choking darkness. Nevertheless, Satoru dreams of one.