[HOUSE – STRUGGLE]

A few seconds of this engulfing silence passes them by, and then the first of the voices can be heard from behind the door.

“…I didn’t like how you handled that,” the mother says.

Masaru’s eye flinches as noises, movement: natural-sounding, human movement, can be heard from behind the door.

“Oh, right away, then?” comes a sharp tone from her father.

“Yeah, right away. Do you think you’re setting a good example, grabbing a beer-”

The father scoffs as Masaru steps up next to Yuna to look at the door. “Ah, the beer again! A man drinks beer after a hard day of work-”

“You don’t see me doing that-”

“Well what do you want me to say? That you don’t work hard?”

The mother scoffs with insult as Masaru reaches down to rub Yuna’s shoulder.

“---…” he stops himself, remembering again that there’s no sound in their area of the house now. It’s almost as if they’re in a movie set and their “scene” is over.

The parents bicker on about each other, about troubles at their company, their problems, and the kind of things that children are not apt to understand. In fact, not even Masaru understands much of it.

“You’re always like this. Ever since we got married you just ******** ******** ************ ************ ***********.”

“Oh? Well ever since we got married you got ********* ******** ******* **** **** ******* ******.”

What the hell are they even talking about by this point? Masaru wonders when he starts to feel a tightness in his chest.

He reaches up to his throat with a confused look, and his eyes jolt wide when he realizes that the tightness isn’t going away.

In fact… it feels quite a lot like drowning.

Masaru breaks into a cold sweat when he looks over to Valerie and Sato behind him.

Valerie’s clenching her chest, her teeth gritted as she leans against the wall.

Sato, bless his heart, has already collapsed and is convulsing for breath.

Masaru looks over to Yuna, who, despite the paleness in her face, is still screaming uselessly for them.

He shakes her, and he points for the door.

She shakes her head with a frantic expression, her parent’s voices lifting up to indignant shouting.

The hell is that supposed to mean, kid?! he snips in his mind.

He reaches for the door, but feels the sharp tug from someone at his waist.

Looking back, he sees Yuna, doing all she can with her weak but lively body to pull him back.

He shrugs at her, which causes her to flick her wrists about, walk in a circle, and push her hands up to her forehead.

But even then, he can’t move any more even if he wanted to. It’s like there’s something sticking him in place. He moves his legs, only to realize his body has been floating upwards. Looking up, he sees a vast expanse of outer space: but like a child might imagine it. Effortlessly beautiful, pastel, and dotted with planets, flying saucers, and silly aliens.

Masaru raises a brow as he reaches again for the doorknob, and Yuna, noticing his continued confusion, pulls out her notebook and begins writing.

Her tense expression begins to calm a little as she writes, in fact, a small smirk forms for only a second as if she’s found something out.

“CANNOT OPEN DOOR,” the message reads, but right away she turns it around to keep writing.

Masaru knows what she’s about to say, because he saw her move a little closer back down to the ground when she wrote it. He reaches for his briefcase, but realizes he doesn’t have it.

Looking to Valerie, he gestures for his briefcase, floating up along with them, but over by the couch.

She nods and, while suppressing her heaving spasms for breath, extends her rifle outwards to try and hook the bag.

Masaru glances over to Yuna, who is now showing the message. “I WENT DOWN!!”

He smirks crassly.

Yeah, no shit, kiddo, Masaru thinks as points for her notebook.

Yuna just blinks at him for a moment, and Masaru shakes his head. He turns back to Valerie.

The markswoman snaps up the bag at the rim of the briefcase’s handle and, after a moment of aim, spins it his way.

Floating up past the ceiling into the breathlessness of space, Masaru barely catches the bag, and slips out the piece of Yuna’s memento to write with his ever-trusty shirt pen. With every stroke of the pen, he can feel his air returning to him, and his body lowering back towards the hardwood floor of the house.

“WRITING GROUNDS YOU” Masaru writes before restuffing the contents, along with the pen, back into the bag before tossing it all to Valerie up above.

He watches her as she checks the contents, reads the note, and using the briefcase as a backing for the paper, writes something quickly.

At the bottom, she signals up to Sato, who flinches.

To Masaru’s woe she tosses up the weightless briefcase up to Sato, who flinches again… because he’s unconscious.

Valerie slaps herself in the face before rushing up to the other two.

Yuna, by this point understands how it works, and has torn out two nice pieces of paper for Masaru and Valerie to use. They begin passing around her pen to speak.

“WRITING IS THE KEY!!” Masaru writes.

Valerie reaches for the pen. “Okay, but how does it work?”

Yuna makes a grabby hand, and Valerie hands it over. “THIS IS AMAZING!”

The two look at her with smiles, and then Masaru reclaims the pen.

“So we can’t open the door?” Masaru writes, naturally passing it off to Yuna.

It takes her a moment, and the other two get a little light for breath, but as the voices of her parents continue to bicker, she pens out a rather helpful explanation:

“THE DOOR NEVER OPENS. THEY NEVER LISTEN. I THINK THEY HATE EACH OTHER AND I WANT THEM TO STOP FIGHTING, BUT THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO. I ALWAYS FLOAT UP AND RUN OUT OF AIR,” she writes, showing off the message with gentle, hurt frown.

Thought burns like a comet through Masaru’s gaze as Valerie shakes her head and reaches for the pen.

“You can’t stop that. I’m sorry. People can’t change that way.”

Masaru stares at the message like some kind challenge. He looks back to the house. He thinks back to how her parents were talking earlier.

He reaches for the pen and paper.

Valerie needs to hop a little to get to him, but he gets his hands on the pen and notebook.

“MAYBE IT’S SIMPLER THAN THAT. MAYBE SHE NEEDS TO REACH OUT TO THEM,” he writes, his shoes tapping back down to the floor.

Valerie almost snatches the pen out of Masaru’s hand. “No. Parents do not need to pull their kids into their sh- crap,” she writes, scratching out a word abruptly before writing another and showing it to the two.

Masaru blinks in thought as Yuna reaches for the notebook and pen.

She writes something, and then Valerie writes something back.

He begins floating up a little more with each passing second as he tries to remember something.

I could see through the ceiling when I was that high up, right? He recalls.

Only a few more seconds of not writing, and he gets his answer. Like an overlay of the whole house, Masaru can see down into every room. His gaze focuses in on the parent’s bedroom, lit warmly with two statues surrounding a bed.

He reaches down for the pen and paper, and this time… he slips.

The pen slides through his hands, and he moves it in a way that flicks the pen back down at them. Valerie arcs to toss it back up, but Masaru shakes his head.

Too risky…

He motions with his hands the act of “going over and down,” while he mouths the silent words to them.

The lady and girl watch his interpretive explanation for a moment, and while Valerie keeps shrugging, it’s Yuna whose face lights up as she grasps Valerie.

The air-starved Masaru watches them both float up before Yuna taps her foot on the wall opposite the bedroom door, sending her and Valerie gliding gently over the threshold. He grins as he watches her start writing, just as Valerie’s eyes widen in realization.

There’s a bliss, a hope on Yuna’s face emerging as she writes quickly and passionately. As her writing pulls them both down, she shows her note to Valerie who, after a moment of consideration, nods in approval.

Masaru watches as the drowning overtakes him. He watches Yuna approach her parents, now both turned towards her as she comes forward with the note.

He can barely breathe now, it’s torture, and yet it’s not quite so bad up in the silence, looking down and watching the look on that little girl’s tear-marked face flourish into a smile. She leaps up to the statues and gives them both a big, warm hug as the gravity in the house seems to stabilize. He thinks he can hear her speak now, albeit so far away.

Graying out, Masaru sees the smiling girl look up to him like a star in the night sky.

“Thank you!” she calls up, her eyes filled with something he cannot quite see in his fading vision.

Masaru smiles too, and attempts to give her a “thumbs up.”

Valerie smiles awkwardly at his display, but Yuna jumps for joy as she gives a “thumbs up” back.

…and that’s all he can remember.