Not A Dream | An Omori Fanfiction

16- Who Took This Photo?

- Part Two -

Kel's P.O.V

It had been two days since me and Aubrey's talk. It was also the day Sunny and Basil were going to be discharged from the hospital.

I was the only one who'd bothered to visit them. Hero was still trying to think everything over and believe it all, and Aubrey was as conflicted as ever.

If I wasn't at the hospital, I was hanging out with Aubrey. I'd offered Hero to join us, but he always refused. He'd been immersing himself in random projects to distract himself. That had been something he'd done for years. After that year he spent unable to drag himself from bed, he distracted himself in every way possible, to keep himself from reverting to that state.

So I just spent my time with Aubrey. Our time was mostly spent trying not to think too much about our situation, but that changed last night.

We'd been sitting in her room, laughing at absolutely nothing, like we used to when we were kids. It was nice.

I'd never been to Aubrey's house when we were younger, and I understood why now, but she'd offered it up and I agreed.

We laughed for a solid two minutes before she abruptly stopped. Her expression dropped and she glanced somewhere behind her.

I stopped laughing too and gave her a confused look, "You ok?"

"Uh... yeah, I think. Thought I heard something..." She muttered, "But that reminds me..."

She stood up, walked over to her dressing table and pulled one of the drawers out. She grabbed something from inside of it and tossed it at me.

The thing, turned out to be multiple photos, which I recognized from the night of Sunny and Basil's fight. Those photos with the shadowy figure drawn on them, only now there were more.

"More...?" I asked, half to myself. "Yeah." Aubrey said, walking over and sitting back down, "I asked Polly if I could look through the photo album again. I showed her these too..."

All of them were almost the same, except the last one, which disturbed me most because it didn't look like Basil had taken the photo.

It looked like someone else - or something else - had.

All the other photos were ones that Basil himself had clearly taken and then drawn the figure onto. The last one however...

It was dark and the photo was blurry but I could make out Basil's small form and widened, fearful teal eyes staring at the camera.

"He didn't take that..." I concluded, plopping that photo down between the two of us. Aubrey nodded, "Yeah... there wasn't any writing beside this one and it was on a different day than the others..."

"Wait, were the others all on the same day?" I asked. "Yeah, why?" Aubrey asked. "Just curious..." I muttered.

Something was off...

Logically Basil's hallucination wasn't real. No way in hell that thing was real. But that being the case... who took that photo, and what was Basil so afraid of?

"Maybe... maybe we should ask Basil today when he gets home..." Aubrey mumbled. She didn't exactly sound excited by the idea, but not repulsed either.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" I asked, "Maybe we shouldn't bombard him with questions about his past on the first day of him being home from the hospital..."

"Kel, I want answers. This isn't right... and as long as he and Sunny are over here..." She sighed, "Maybe I'll let them explain the day Mari died..."

As much as I didn't like the idea of forcing these memories back into Basil, I wanted everyone to try getting along again.