A/N: I love Lost in Harmony, but after I finished it I really wanted to explore what happened (particularly to Kaito) in the wake of Aya's death. There is just so much potential for him to mourn lol. I wrote this first draft awhile back but I've just gotten around to editing and posting.

DISCLAIMER: Lost in Harmony and all related content, characters, etc. belong to Digixart. I own nothing.

The Shadow of Stars



Prologue

The things she left behind were only important because I made them. The things that mattered smelled too much like her to evoke anything but rain-colored memories that tasted of salt.

Truthfully, I didn't need the Onkyo headphones that were still sitting on her dresser. They were broken and had been so for the past two years. She'd told me not to wear them and try to grind a rail for the first time but like an idiot I didn't listen. I hit the concrete stairs hard enough to crack the internal drivers and, for that matter, my face. At the time, it was pretty upsetting considering the headphones were a birthday gift from her.

Although when I stop to think about it, she didn't laugh when I fell or neg with her foresight. She was right beside me, pulling to me to my feet and wiping the blood off my lip with her pale wrist as she screamed my name. Kaito, Kaito, Kaito... Can you hear me...

I closed my eyes, letting that memory sit in my on my brain as I gouged my eyes with the heels of my hands. No one would ever say my name like she did.

I took the headphones and stuffed them into my backpack. Absently, I reached for the Totoro plush she had sitting on her dresser but my fingers felt stiff, caught by the invisible threads of memory that lead back to the anime marathons we had on long weekends. When she was too tired to keep her eyes open she would curl herself around a throw pillow and sleep. I would count her breaths as she slept, notice how many inches her small hands were from mine. As time passed her breathing became sharp and quick, like she was inhaling glass. I started choosing road movies that would make her laugh so she wouldn't fall asleep.

I took a deep breath, gathering the courage to turn around and face the entirety of her empty room. Sans Aya, it should have felt lonely and bitter. But it didn't. Aya had rudely left very real pieces of herself all over the room and it made my heart bleed something ugly.

Her favorite hoodie was empty, draped over her vanity chair as though she was coming back to hang it up. Scattered across her butterfly duvet was sketch paper, pencils, and eraser shavings. On her bedside table, half-full orange prescription bottles were clustered next to a glass of stale water and her reading glasses. I walked to the bed and sat at the head. The slight smell of jasmine lingered, making my skin prickle as sepia memories blossomed.

I reached out and picked up the nearest picture. It was a simple drawing of two hands holding a brilliant star. The detailing was incredibilly thorough, but even I could tell she hadn't finished it. The shading was incomplete, making some parts appear to pop out of the page while others were flat and one dimensional. Additionally, unlike many of the other pictures Aya had scattered across the bed, this one was bland and colorless.

Nonetheless, I lifted it to my nose and sniffed. Jasmine. It still smelled of jasmine.

"Kaito?"

I dropped the paper and jumped off the bed, hoping my hands didn't look as red as my cheeks.

"Y-Yeah?" I looked up to see Miyoko, Aya's mother, standing in the doorway. Her hair was the same passionate red her daughter's had been. Today, it looked unwashed and disheveled, half-heartedly swept up into a lopsided bun. Underneath her eyes she had dark half-moons but she still smiled at me. "How's it coming? Are you finding your things okay?"

I swallowed and it felt like glass. My eyes suddenly felt hot and wet. "Yeah," I said. "I don't have much. It's just weird, you know, seeing everything without her here."

Miyoko was silent for a moment, breathing in the silent atmosphere of Aya's room. "I know." She said finally. "It still feels like she's here, doesn't it?"

Her words were incredibly generic, but the depth of her tone made me realize that I wasn't the only one who walked through my day with Aya's absence burning a hole in my heart. I would mourn my inability to share a new ollie trick I learned at the skate park while Miyoko would pretend she still had to buy her daughter a birthday gift two months from now.

"Well," Miyoko broke the silence again. "I found this in Aya's things she had the hospital." She held out a small flash drive capped with the cute chibi head of a bear.

"Oh, that was Aya's." I said as casually as I could. She had used it many times during school projects.

"I know." Miyoko said. "But it has something on it and I can't get in. I know you two were close, so I thought that maybe whatever is on that flash drive might belong to you."

I took the drive from her, staring at the cold plastic face of the bear in my palm. "Thanks," I said, turning it over, not quite sure why I was accepting the bear.

Miyoko nodded. "Take your time." Then she was gone, leaving me alone with the the drive and Aya's mess of art work.

Her art. I had been looking at her art. I tucked the flash drive into my pocket and returned to the pictures. Just at a glance she had done quite a few. Most of them were filled in with watercolor but the one that captured my attention was a rather familiar portrait of the two of us.

I snatched the picture, immediately feeling my heart throb as I stared at her gorgeous depiction of us. I was riding my skateboard across a dirt road, her arms were wrapped around my neck and cheek was pressed into mine. My hands were wrapped around her legs to support her as I carried Aya on my back. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling like we had a secret.

I felt cold, realizing that maybe we did because this look an awful lot like the dreams I had during her slow decline into sickness; dreams I had only vaguely mentioned to Aya.

With shaking hands I dropped the picture, grabbing half a dozen more from the bed. The picture on the top of my pile. Aya and I were standing under a giant ceiba tree with what looked like a random arrangement of musicals scales carved into the trunk. Both of us had rainbow macaws perched on our shoulders, Aya was laughing as one nibbled a strand of her hair.

In the next picture, she was screaming as she gripped my clothes with all her strength as we skateboarded away from an explosion in the background. Our faces were smeared with dirt and ash, the buildings we passed bore red swastika or notes. Beneath that was a gigantic red-eyed bear, a terror that had often haunted my nightmares as a child. He had recently surfaced to try and gobbled Aya and I up in a dream, but I had only told her about the boars. This bear she had drawn was something she had pulled from within me. She had pulled everything from me.

My heart felt as though it was seizing. I rifled through the rest of the pictures, finding robot cops volcanoes, tidal waves, and everything else I had ever dreamed of saving her from. It was all here, the dreams I had hardly even whispered about inked into paper and the etched with notes and scales. It was as if she knew I would be standing here, looking through these pictures; as if they were all meant for me.

I touched the flash drive in my pocket, savoring the feeling of the single hot tear rolling down my cheek. It fell off my chin and hit the paper dangerously close to an A3 note hidden in the sea foam of a wave. For the first time since her funeral she was screaming my name, perhaps even louder than she ever had in real life and she just might be asking me to sing hers. The worst part of it was that I hated singing.

A/N: This was idea was sparked after reading Kaito's bio and I noticed he didn't like to sing. So I said hey,what if Aya pushed him out of his comfort zone after she died? Also, I applied a name to Aya's mother because I couldn't just use her, her, her. I would have lost my mind. I'm assuming she is Japanese. I do plan on continuing this one.