The apartment felt too large after that, though nothing in it had changed size.
Momo sat at the desk for three days without leaving it for longer than the bathroom required. Null stayed close the entire time, pressed against her leg or curled in the empty space on the mattress where someone used to sleep, as if the cat, too, understood the shape of what was missing and had decided the safest thing to do was stay near the person who understood it best.
Momo didn't cry during those three days. She'd done all her crying already, on the street, in the hours immediately after, until there was nothing left in her that worked the way tears required. What remained was quieter than grief. Steadier. It felt, in a way she couldn't fully explain even to herself, like clarity.
She logged into the admin account on the fourth day.
The forum was still full of him. Threads celebrating the billion, threads dissecting the ending, threads asking, over and over, when Doctor Sterben would show up to answer questions the way indie developers sometimes did after a big launch. None of them knew yet. The news hadn't reached them. She was, as far as she could tell, one of only a handful of people outside the hospital and the police report who understood exactly what had happened on that crosswalk.
She opened a new post.
She didn't title it as an announcement. She titled it as what it was.
Who he actually was.
She wrote for hours. She told them about the notebook with three chapters and a mirror glued inside the cover. She told them about the belt, and the thirteenth place, and the two years he'd spent building a floating city out of code in a room he shared with a girl who loved him before he ever had room to love her back. She told them about Root128, about ksociety, about the boy who had built an entire second identity just to survive being erased by the first one. She told them about the strawberry pastry, still sitting somewhere in an evidence bag, untouched.
She did not glamorize any of it. She did not turn his pain into spectacle. She wrote it the way you write something you need someone else to understand correctly, because you won't be there to correct them if they get it wrong.
Near the end, the post changed. It stopped being about him.
She wrote about herself. About loving someone for over a year without asking anything back. About choosing, every single day, to be enough without being chosen. About how some kinds of grief don't have an exit built into them, and how she had thought, for a long time, that she was stronger than that particular kind.
She was wrong.
She posted it a little after midnight. She did not write a separate note. She had already written it, in full, for everyone.
What happened after, she did quietly, the way she'd done most things that mattered to her. Careful. Deliberate. Without asking anyone's permission. By the time the sun came up, she was gone.
The forum found the post within the hour. It spread faster than the game itself ever had.
Null found her first.
The cat had no way of understanding what stillness like that meant. She only knew the shape on the floor was Momo, and that Momo always came back after being still for a while, after sleep, after long hours at the desk, after everything. So she waited. She sat beside her the way she'd sat beside her a hundred nights before, patient in the particular way small animals are patient, certain that the person they love always returns eventually if you simply hold your place long enough.
No one came for a long time.
Null stayed anyway.
Three states away, in an apartment that still had his childhood height marked in pencil on a doorframe, Yami's parents were on the phone with a lawyer when the news reached them from two directions at once.
The first call was about the billion. A representative from the publishing platform, polite and businesslike, explaining next-of-kin procedures, asking whether they wished to be connected with an estate attorney regarding royalties.
His mother had already begun calculating percentages before the call ended.
The second thing arrived fifteen minutes later, through a news anchor's voice on the television his father had turned on out of habit, the segment leading with the headline before either of them fully understood what they were watching. The reporter read from the forum post. All of it. The belt. The thirteenth place. The specific silence that had preceded a specific kind of storm.
His mother's hand went still on the phone.
His father did not move at all.
Neither of them cried. What crossed his mother's face instead was something closer to fury, sharp and immediate, the particular rage of someone watching a door close on money they had already begun spending in their head. His father's expression didn't change so much as empty out entirely, the way a screen goes dark when the power is cut, no warning, no fade, simply absence where something had been.
They did not grieve a son that night.
They mourned, instead and only, the version of him that had still owed them something.
Someone came for her eventually. A neighbor, alerted by the smell, then people in uniforms who moved through the apartment with the practiced quiet of those who did this often, who spoke to each other in low voices and didn't look too long at the desk, or the string lights that had never been turned on, or the small gray cat that wouldn't stop circling their feet.
They took Momo away first.
They left Null behind.
No one came to collect her for the cat, not that day, not the next. The apartment sat sealed with a strip of tape across the door, and somewhere in the confusion of a landlord and a lease and a family that didn't answer calls, a small animal was simply forgotten, the way small things sometimes are when the people around them are drowning in something larger.
She survived on what was left in her bowl until it wasn't. Then she waited by the door instead, the way she'd waited on the mattress, the way she'd waited beside a body that never woke.
She was the only one left who had watched all of it happen. The fear. The building. The quiet, private months of two broken people choosing, over and over, to be gentle with each other in a world that had rarely returned the favor.
She had no way of knowing that no one was coming. She only knew how to wait, and so she did.
Outside the window, Tokyo carried on exactly as it always had.
Indifferent. Enormous. Entirely unaware that it had just lost something it would spend years pretending, in forum threads and gaming retrospectives and hushed convention hall conversations, to have understood all along.