icarus also

The thought that he will never see Roxas again is an incisive pain, cutting through the layers of flesh and bone to reach him where he is soft and vulnerable. He can't bring Roxas back, not from this. Somehow he knows that Roxas would not want him to, but failure still rings true.

"Sure, why wouldn't I be?" Lea lies.

He changes the subject, seeking distraction, "Castle Oblivion is a ridiculous name."

"Is it?"

"It is."

Castle Oblivion, Lea thinks determinedly, is a name that sounds like something he and Isa would have come up with when they were children playing with toy knights and dragons. It sounds like evil trying too hard to be cool, which makes it less ominous as a whole. Lea would have chosen something more subtle, something that implies that the evil knows it needs no introduction because it was-- well, evil enough.

"I think it's alright," says Sora. "What else would you call it?"

"I don't know," Lea admits.

"How about the Mystery Castle?" Sora suggests.

"Jeez, that's worse."

Sora shrugs, unoffended. When Lea was Axel, the other Organization members didn't seem to care either, except for Saix, who was more annoyed at Lea's irreverence than at the name. Said they weren’t children playing anymore. So Lea drops the subject. He doesn’t know what else to talk to Sora about, so he stays quiet, listens to Sora’s tuneless humming, to their footsteps disrupting the vengeful peace of this place.

He had come because Sora had asked, because Sora had turned Roxas’s eyes on him and Lea could never say no. And why not, he had thought. He could play tour guide for a day. And you should never take the voices in your head lightly, especially if you were a Keyblade bearer.

Now it’s been hours, nonstop because Sora is tireless and endlessly optimistic. Each room is a new wave of memories, and nausea. They've reached the very bottom of the Castle, and Lea is having trouble finding his footing. He tries to brush away that sunset on the Destiny Islands, the hard edge of distrust in Kairi's gaze, the crunch of a seashell beneath his boot-- was that the first time he had ever seen the ocean?--the things he did for Roxas, for Xion. He says, louder than he intends to, "Getting any more of those weird signs?"

Sora frowns. "No, nothing. How about you? Don't you know this Castle like the back of your hand?"

Lea-- or Axel, more accurately-- does. He has every alcove and hidden passageway mapped, but he has never come across this Chamber of Waking that Xemnas, and now Sora, was so determined to find. He doesn't know what he would have found inside either. Xemnas had never deemed him worthy of the knowledge.

"I don't know how many times I've searched," he says. "I never found it."

"Hmm.” Sora turns to consider their current dead end, shifting his weight from foot to foot. "I'm sure she said it would be here."

"Well, does your mysterious disembodied voice lady have any more clues? Like what we’d find inside?"

"That's rude," says Sora. "She has a name. It's Aqua."

"Aqua," Lea echoes.

The flotsam are less now that they’ve stopped, only the odd piece here and there, of white walls and his first moments as a Nobody, the sterility of basement labs and the pull of his heart going out of orbit. That's the last of it, Lea thinks, feeling chill. And indeed there is calm, the waves gentle, moonlight rippling on black water. Lea imagines he can see a shoreline, and strange, towering structures, like the skeleton of an ancient beast half sunk under its own weight. Beneath a dark arch, there is a figure.

Lea blinks and there is Sora again, rapping his knuckles on the wall, and it seems the sound has to travel a great, misty distance before it reaches Lea in the middle of his dark sea.

"Sora," Lea calls.

"Yeah?" Sora says, turning around. "Do you feel something?"

"Your Keyblade," says Lea. He sounds faraway even to himself, and there is dread filling his chest like water.

Sora does not hesitate. The moment Sora draws, his Keyblade resonates with something deep and hidden within the Castle. The walls around them glow white-hot. Lea looks down at his hand, where he had summoned his own Keyblade without thinking.

Roxas? Lea wants to call out. But he knows already that that’s wrong. Roxas is gone, and so is Xion and Namine and Isa, gone, gone, gone. There is another name Lea should know, but his heart, still clumsy and slow, can’t recall it no matter how it strains.

He watches Sora reach a hand out, and Lea feels his heart reaching too, yearning. The wall before them dissolving in a shower of light before Sora touches it, the walls all around them shimmering and crumbling, a cascade of stars. A line of light sweeps beneath their feet.

The room they are left in is bright, open and empty but for the throne at the far end. The symbol of the Keyblade Master adorn the new walls, and in the back of Lea’s mind, the figure under the arch on that dark shore flickers. Lea’s Keyblade drops from his hand.

"Look,” Sora whispers.

Lea is looking. It’s impossible, he is thinking.

"Roxas?" says Lea. "Rox--" His voice cracks.

Sora walks past him, and Lea thanks the world for the good that is resilient, unshakable Sora, for Lea’s own feet are leaden and he cannot move. The part of him that's still Axel begins to tremble as Sora crosses the Chamber to the throne. The throne's high back and the high ceilings of the room make the body in the seat seem small and insignificant. How long has he rested here, alone, abandoned, under the weight of silence and an entire world. Lea's knees feel weak thinking about it, from fear or pity, Lea doesn't know. When Sora reaches out to touch, Lea's heart stutters.

A light surrounds them both, Sora and-- Roxas? could it be-- so bright that it hurts and Lea has to close his eyes. When he opens them again, the part of him that is Axel goes static.

The boy stands. "Sora," the boy says.

Axel knows that is not Roxas's smile, that it is not Roxas that fills the Chamber with a sudden thrumming power. But Lea is remembering too. The boy's voice turns warped and thin in Lea's mind. Lea knows they are still speaking, Sora and the boy, because he sees their mouths moving, sees Sora wiping at his eyes and the boy laughing, and something tears inside Lea, though Lea can't hear anything above the rushing in his ears. Lea takes a step forward, and another, until somehow he's on his knees before the throne and Sora's hand is on one shoulder, the boy's hand on the other.

Lea tries, "You're--" but he can't finish. There's something fundamental missing, something that is not Axel and not Lea as he is now-- something that belongs to a before that's been buried for years.

There's are lights now in that dark sea, glowing pieces of his past resurfacing from the depths. Gardens in full bloom, Dilan and Aeleus in their guard uniforms, the square of warm light that is Isa's window across the street. He remembers the curve of his frisbees against his palms, the bruises on his arms from tumbling down the stone steps of Radiant Garden Castle. He remembers a wooden key, a clear sky, defeat and laughter. He remembers.

"You're--"

The boy looks at him, his mouth a gentle curve. "Lea, right?"

After all, we're friends now. A declaration.

Stray puppies, Isa had chastised. Isa, whom Lea misses, whom Lea has betrayed. Isa, who always knew best.

But here, now--

"You remember," says Lea.

"I got it memorized," says the boy, the stray puppy, whose name Lea had not heard again since that first and only day, whose name was lost to Lea along with his heart. But now it's returned to him, along with memories of home, of long summer days and the scratched desks in his classrooms and the old parchment smell of the castle library. Days when his biggest worry was copying Isa's math homework while avoiding Squall's disapproving glare and getting home before curfew. Days that were reassuring in their predictability, until this boy appeared in Garden with his key and his hesitant smile, who had believed Lea when he said they’d see each other again.

Lea doesn't know where he finds the strength, but he nods.

"Ventus," Lea says.

The sounds are coming from Ansem's computer room, where Ienzo had camped earlier today salvaging whatever data he could. It was a daunting task and no one else had the technical expertise to help him-- Aeleus looking like he'd sooner put a fist through the monitor and Lea waving him off with talk of Keyblade training. There was that other man, now called Leon, whom Ienzo remembers from his childhood, but he was off roofing houses in the newly rebuilt residential district. There are moments when Ienzo is still grasping for clarity, so soon after having been recompleted, and so his progress with the computer had been modest at best, and he had to stop in the late afternoon to stave off a growing headache.

What carries Ienzo's feet now is the fear of irreparable corruption of the records he had not yet managed to extract from beneath the countless password-protected layers of the castle's security system. Ansem had always been a paranoid man, Ienzo remembers--and Ienzo has to stop his mind from wandering because there is grief and remorse further down that road and Ienzo is already defenseless without being incapacitated by old memories as well. Later he will retrace every one of his steps and his actions, and he will observe how he rushed in without a weapon to defend himself against whatever unholy beast is making that racket, and he will chastise himself accordingly. But for now, his only thought is the years of research--forbidden or otherwise--they will lose if he isn't fast enough.

Reaching Ansem's study, he sees an artificial red light spilling from the computer room into the hall. It's a steady pulse along with the blare of the alarms and Ienzo, ignoring the burn in his lungs, throws himself into the room. There are warnings flashing on every screen, streams of pop-ups alerting him to security breaches and critical errors. Before he can do anything, the screeching comes again, snapping Ienzo's focus away from the computer console. It comes louder this time, and then louder still, until it's loud enough to make Ienzo flinch. He is able to pinpoint its source now. It's coming from the Heartless Manufactory below.

Xigbar's voice resurfaces in Ienzo’s mind again, unbidden. It goads him, spinning suspicion about the Keyblade Wars and that hidden room, deep in the belly of the castle, where Xemnas would hold conversations with a friend, a ghost, another. It had been Xemnas's secret to keep and he had always kept it close to his empty chest.

But now that friend, that ghost, that other, is clawing its way up and out of that secret room. Ienzo is unshakable in his knowledge of this.

There is a long, fraught moment with only Tron's voice listing off error codes and the flashing red light throwing Ienzo's shadow rhythmically against the walls. And then comes the unmistakable, plangent impact of metal hitting metal, with enough force for Ienzo to feel the reverberations even where he stands.

Ienzo doesn't hesitate. There is simply no time. Rushing across the room to the walkway overlooking the Heartless Manufactory, Ienzo sees it: the thick metal floor crumpling upward with each resounding impact. Like a battering ram, his mind supplies. A relentless force. Ienzo watches, cataloging everything even as his blood roars.

The pounding stops. Silence falls and his breath holds itself in his throat.

There is an opening in the floor, now, just wide enough-- for gloved fingers to reach through-- the screeching again, metal grinding, that awful sound-- Ienzo’s eyes strain, his hands gripping the railing-- slowly, incrementally-- the entire floor opening up before Ienzo's eyes.

And from the darkness underneath, she rises.

She sleeps through the next day, which gives them a chance to survey the damage. Leon and Aeleus had gone down into the unexplored depths of the castle, and found the shattered throne and broken chains in Xemnas's Chamber of Repose. The door to it had been forced open from the inside, with indents in the shape of her fingers.

Her helmet is the only piece of armor they removed. It's proper, Ienzo thinks, though Ienzo's experience with ladies is admittedly lacking.

They all take turns watching her throughout the day. Aerith brings flowers to brighten the room and Yuffie even refrains from pawing at her armor. Ienzo does not remember either of them at all from his life before Zexion, but he had rarely ventured out from the castle anyway when he was young. He only remembers Leon because he'd always see him on the castle grounds training with the guards and there was Cid, who frequently did work on the lift system.

It's Ienzo's shift when she wakes the next night, breathless and pale, her hands twisted in the sheets.

"Are you alright?" Ienzo asks, sitting forward. He puts aside the book he had been reading, left behind by Even when Ienzo relieved him.

Her eyes are wide and liquid in the candlelight. "I was trying to--" Her voice breaks. "I need to--"

"You should rest," says Ienzo. "Surely whatever it is can wait until morning? You just tore your way out of what's essentially the castle dungeons." He hopes he doesn't sound condescending; he often has that problem.

"No," she says. "Ventus. Terra."

The names are not familiar to Ienzo.

"What's your name?" Ienzo tries. He's been told it's rude to think of people as specimens for study so he’s trained himself to ask for names first. To humanize them, so he would remember it was a someone and not a something to be pinned to a mounting board and labelled. Ansem had not been fully satisfied with that compromise, and truthfully it had not made a difference in the end. Ienzo had never been able to help his curiosity and he doesn't even try to now. She had just unearthed herself from the dark depths of the castle. Xemnas's friend, ghost, another. How long had she been kept there? For what purpose? Why rise now?

"Ventus," she says again, her voice rising. "Terra. Please."

"You should lie back down," he says, because she has swung her legs over the side of the bed and is making to stand. Ienzo feels the stirrings of dread inside him. She mustn't go. There are too many questions still unanswered. "You could be injured. Bruises, sprains, broken bones, internal bleeding. Someone should examine you-- not me, because I'm not a medical professional-- but someone. Shall I--"

"Where am I?" she asks instead, so softly Ienzo almost misses it.

"Radiant Garden. Formerly Hollow Bastion. The castle, to be specific. Second floor, east wing, to be even more specific. You are safe, I promise."

She does not respond, her eyes focused on her hands in her lap, and Ienzo is left with a rather awkward silence. His conversations are always prone to those, as he has a predilection for overloading his conversational partner with unasked-for information. But Ienzo suspects that in this case, she is simply too distraught to uphold her end. Ienzo will not blame her, having just run the emotional gauntlet of recompletion himself not too long ago.

"What's your name?" he asks again, in a tone that he hopes is gentle rather than overeager.

Another long pause before she answers, "Aqua." She frowns, and brings a hand to her head. "I'm sorry. I don't know how long it's been."

"Aqua," says Ienzo. His newly returned heart does something strange when he sees her fingers run through her hair. He bookmarks the feeling for later examination. "I must insist you rest."

Her armored shoulders visibly drop, her exhaustion seeming to resettle among the dust of her distress. "In the morning," she says, more to herself than to anyone else. Then she lifts her head and looks at Ienzo with eyes like glass. "I'm sorry. I didn't ask your name."

"Ienzo." Then, because for once he can think of nothing else to say, he stands from his chair by the bed and says, "In the morning, then."

"Please, leave the candle.”

He sets the candle down, the light of it banishing the shadows behind her back against the wall. There was something in the way she asked that was like a hook in his heart, and he contemplates it all the way back to his quarters, his hand to the wall to find his way in the dark.

In the morning, he finds her in the library with Aeleus, who is predictably silent. She does not seem to mind, captivated as she is by the sunlight falling in through the stained glass windows, the dust motes caught in the rays.

"Ienzo," she greets when she sees him. Her armor is gone, save for segments on her arms and her boots. She looks lighter without it, Ienzo thinks, though somehow no less like a warrior. The monumental fact that she had ripped her way out of the Chamber of Repose with her bare hands augments that perception.

"Good morning," he says, suddenly conscious of his sleep-mussed hair and rumpled lab coat with the ink stains on the sleeves. His discomfort must show because he catches the slight quirk of Aeleus's mouth.

"I want to thank you," she tells him. "And to apologize again for all the trouble."

"It was no trouble," he says. And truly it wasn't. Even having to reboot the entire security system felt like an infinitesimal price to pay for her arrival. He’s struck with a sudden, dreadful thought. "Do you already have plans to go off-world?"

Her expression morphs into what Ienzo has learned to recognize as disappointment. In his later days, Ansem's face had shown little else. Other than that, Ienzo is not particularly well-versed in reading emotions, having only had trivial experiences with them himself, even before he was Zexion. He has often wondered if that is why Ansem took such an interest in him. The seemingly Heartless boy with a heart.

"I can summon my Keyblade, but I haven't regained the ability to glide yet," she says.

Of all the days for him to oversleep.

"You have a Keyblade?" he asks, taking two steps forward before he catches himself. "Can I see it?"

She looks taken aback by his request, and Ienzo is afraid he's been rude again. Is it against decorum to ask to see a bearer's Keyblade? He doesn't know. He looks to Aeleus but he had slipped away at some point, eerily silent despite his bulk.

"Sure, I suppose," she says at last, to Ienzo's relief. She summons it in a burst of soft light, accompanied by a gentle wind carrying a scent reminiscent of the Gardens after a rain. "This is Stormfall."

It's fascinating, Ienzo thinks, and it's only the remnant of discomfort left over from his time as Zexion that prevents him from reaching out to touch it.

"I've been so long without it, it doesn't come easy anymore," she confesses. "It almost feels like I've forgotten how to walk, or something silly like that." She laughs, and even Ienzo can tell it's not sincere.

"I know what you mean," he says. "You miss a part of yourself for so long that you finally stop missing it, and when you get it back, it feels too heavy and too strange for you to carry it like you once did."

"Yes," she says. She holds Stormfall close. "But it is not so precious that I would not give it up again if I had to."

Her face in the sunlight is suddenly terrible with unmistakable grief. And Ienzo's heart is too heavy and too strange. He does not know how to carry it like he once did.

"Sora will be back soon," Leon says. "Until then, you're welcome to stay."

"I can show you around town," offers Yuffie. "I won't let Scrooge con you out of a sea-salt ice cream."

"Thank you," says Aqua. "But I think I'd rather stay in the castle. If that's all right."

Days later, Ienzo finds her in the Chamber of Repose with one hand on the back of the shattered throne. The Nobody sigils on the walls have gone dark and dull, the lines of chains severed, the ground uneven.

Without turning around, she asks, "Did he come down here often?"

It would be insulting to both her and himself to pretend he doesn't know what she means. Xemnas was Xehanort before the excision of his heart, and though Ienzo had been very young, he remembers the day Xehanort was found in Radiant Garden. Looking back on his memories now, he recognizes Aqua too, in that hollow, lifeless armor they brought in with him. The revelation makes his chest feel uncomfortably tight.

"Very often," he answers honestly. "For hours at a time."

Her hand falls from the throne to her side. "Terra," she says, her voice small, even smaller for the tall ceilings of the room shrouded in shadow.

Xemnas, Xehanort, Terra. Ienzo has more questions. He always does. As a child he had never stopped asking why, and how, and what if. The desire to know and understand was ever-present, eventually eclipsing even the quiet joy of sharing a sea-salt ice cream with Ansem. As Zexion he still sought answers, but without his relentless questions, wary of showing ignorance and weakness. And now he keeps his questions silent too, keeping to the door, afraid to disrupt this fragile peace lest the Chamber, so connected to Aqua for so long, collapses upon them.

"Sometimes I thought I could hear him in the Realm of Darkness. He called me 'friend.' I wasn't just imagining it? It was real?"

"You weren't," Ienzo says. "It was."

When she smiles at him, her eyes are wet, and bright too, even so deep in the chill darkness of the castle underbelly. She takes a seat on the ruined throne, and Ienzo can't help but memorize her profile, her head bowed with an emotion Ienzo now has the heart to understand.

Despite the events leading up to his exile and downfall, Ansem the Wise had earned his title many times over as the king of Radiant Garden. Ansem believed, before he was overtaken by obsession, that understanding the heart was more than just a study of light and dark. People were capable of wondrous, monstrous things, of creation and destruction and everything in between, and everything they did gave insight into the innermost mysteries of the heart. As a result, Ansem kept an extensive library, housing vast tapestries of history woven by the noble and the common and the divine, records of glory and blood, letters of good will and goodbye, the spectrum of human emotion in verse. He encouraged Ienzo to peruse it whenever he pleased, believing also in an interdisciplinary curriculum for young minds. And Ienzo did, whenever he wasn't in the labs or shadowing Ansem himself.

His time as Zexion is a long, deep divide between his childhood and his present, but his memories, though distant, are intact. He remembers clearly the gold filigree bordering the cover of that slim book, the yellowed page, the faded ink of the line:

for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,

He remembers the warm, orange light of the sunset, the silence so absolute and brazen it rang itself in his ears. And Ienzo remembers his young heart beating itself numb, the stillness that held his limbs hostage until Even had found him, scolding him for hiding away when there was work to be done.

The same stillness steals over him now, as he catches sight of her in the moonlit gardens. Her back is to him, but Ienzo can easily recall her eyes like glass in the candlelight, her face terrible with grief, the craters in the floor in the shape her fist.

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

There was a man in the Realm of Darkness, she had said to him in the Chamber of Repose. Whose memories were fading, though he held fast to his heart that was once given over to vengeance. He told me Sora would be the one to save us all, to give us new beginnings, and he was right.

I'm going to find Terra and Ven, she had said. And when I do, I'll never leave them again.

What about you, Ienzo? What will you do with your new beginning?

Ienzo was uncertain of his answer. All his life had been about study and research, stepping over the boundaries of human knowledge, and surely there was more of it to be done. There were wrongs to right, reparations to make. And he had friends too-- a loose application of the term was appropriate here-- who had yet to be found.

You'll find them, Ienzo, she had said.

There was something else he wanted to say, but the weight of it was as heavy as his unfamiliar heart and he did not know how to wield it. Forgiving his lack of response, the smile she gave him was sincere, Ienzo could tell, even from the doorway from where he was still too afraid to move. Her smile was perfect in ways that Ienzo could not scientifically qualify, and Ienzo had found a new reason to be afraid.

every angel is terrifying.

Ienzo watches her now, Stormfall in her hand, her face turned up to the sky. Looking for Sora on the horizon. Strength and courage and resolve in her posture, her open arms.

Griever settled when Squall was fourteen and Cloud eleven. She was molten-eyed with paws the size of Squall's head, raw power and primal grace. Cloud could not say he was surprised. Griever had been favoring the lioness form for weeks. Lion and lioness daemons were rare, Cloud knew. Merlin had said so and Cloud himself had never met another. It took a rare kind of person, they said. Fenrir had never been something so big, so regal.

Regal as she was, Griever still consented to stretching her jaw wide to indulge Cloud's curiosity about her teeth. Cloud thought back to the circus Cid had taken them to when they were younger, and that man who had put his head in the lion's mouth. But Cloud decided against it; he didn't think Squall would find it funny. So Cloud sat back, and Griever laid herself down at Squall's feet and allowed Fenrir to peck at her tufted tail.

"What do you think Fen's going to be?" Cloud couldn't help but ask.

Fenrir warked softly, hopping back over to Cloud. She bumped her head against his hand until he uncurled his fingers to run them through her feathers. His hands were still sticky from the seasalt ice cream Squall had bought for them earlier.

"Wouldn't you be happy with whatever form I take, Cloud?" she said.

Cloud frowned. "But what if you're a rat or something like that?"

"Then it would be your fault for being a ratty person!"

Cloud looked to Squall, concerned. "What do you think?"

"I don't think she'll be a rat," Squall said.

"I hope you're something cool like Griever," Cloud said to Fenrir, who puffed up her yellow feathers indignantly before shivering into the form of a fox. She bit at Cloud's fingers and dove under one of Griever's massive paws before Cloud could swipe at her. She made a contented sound as Griever curled the paw around her.

Watching them, Squall said, "You shouldn't upset her like that."

"I don't care," said Cloud, but he let the subject drop. There was a math problem he wanted Squall's help with but he had forgotten the page number. Flipping through his book, he was distracted again by the sun on Griever's coat, the tip of one of Fenrir's ears flicking against Griever's nose.

It seemed then to Cloud that there were more important questions than the ones in his math book. He wanted to ask Squall how he felt. Was it any different, did it hurt for Griever's bones to hold the same shape all the time, did Squall ever miss being able to cradle her in his arms? As much of a pain as Fenrir was sometimes, she was still a comfort on stormy nights, curled up under his chin as a kitten, or as a bear cub with her paws in his hands.

But then Cloud thought, Squall was not afraid of anything. That was why Griever was what she was. Because Squall was that rare kind of person and Cloud was not.

"Sorry," said Cloud. He let the book fall shut on his lap. "You don't have to."

Squall rolled his eyes and held out his hand. "Factorials, right? That's chapter four. Let me see."

But there was such a distance, suddenly, and Squall didn't seem able to reach him like he always did. Cloud tried to listen but it was difficult, and when the time came to go home for dinner, Cloud had still not gotten one practice problem without Squall’s help. He watched the steady roll of Griever’s shoulders as she and Squall walked away, until they turned into the alley shortcut to Squall’s home. Fenrir would not speak to him for the rest of the day and slept under his bed that night, no matter how much he cried for her to come up.

“I’m sorry,” he had whispered into the dark, which seemed so vast. “Please, I’m sorry.”

He couldn’t understand it, this feeling of dangling over a bottomless darkness. He was alone and it was so quiet. He felt his heart beating wild and frantic in his chest, but the beat he heard in his ears was too slow, off-tempo. Fenrir’s eyes watched him, cold as silver, unblinking. He was too terrified to beg anymore.

Olympus is another one of those worlds where the people keep their souls inside themselves like a guarded secret. These past nine years Leon has traveled to all manners of worlds, alive and dead and dying, but he will never be used to seeing a human unaccompanied, can't help that instinctual jolt of revulsion, when his mind throws up words like intercision and guillotine.

There's none of that when he sees Cloud in the lobby of the Coliseum. Leon feels only that cold wordless rush, amplified when Fenrir refuses to close the distance to stand besides Cloud like she should. But even without Fenrir by his side, it is impossible to mistake him. Cloud doesn’t look at him but Leon can’t look away. Leon is still taller. It is a thought that strikes him suddenly. Leon will always be taller and for some reason the thought comes with a guilt that threatens to cut his knees.

What could he say? What words were allowed to Squall but not to Leon? What is the point if he is already nine years too late?

"I hate him," Fenrir snarls from the doorway.

"What?" Leon says, startled. He must have heard wrong.

"Useless," says Fenrir. "Pathetic. Weak. I hate him."

"You can't," he says. "What are you saying?"

Fenrir bares her teeth. "I wish I were anyone's but his."

Griever moves before Leon can open his mouth again. Fissures spider across the ceiling at the impact of Fenrir's body hitting the wall, the torches flickering as dust and plaster fall into the flames. The room is too small for two great beasts and their claws and their teeth, and Leon soon finds himself backed against a wall. The ground shakes as Griever roars.

“That’s enough!” Leon says, his ears ringing, worried that they’ll injure themselves, that they’ll bury them all in rubble, and afraid, irrationally, that Cloud will disappear again. That he will have to go to Aerith and Yuffie and Cid and say that he lost him a second time. That he will have to go to sleep that night with regret and shame cloaking him like Dust, until his mind could think nothing else.

Before Leon can step in, Fenrir is hauled back by the hand on the scruff of her neck. She goes still, her fangs bared, refusing to turn around.

“I hate you,” she growls, low and guttural.

Cloud does not flinch. “Then leave,” he says. His gauntleted hand drops to his side and Leon does not have time to be surprised by his voice, because Fenrir is leaving like it is the easiest thing in the world, like it does not tear her apart to do so. He watches her go, shouldering past Griever with one last snap of her jaws, her paws leaving prints in the dust. He watches Cloud’s face for signs of pain, distress, anything, but it is blank. The air settles and Fenrir is gone from sight. Cloud turns to him, his eyes fixed somewhere in the vicinity of Leon’s collarbones, and Leon doesn’t know where to start.

The last time they spoke, Leon was sixteen and Cloud wanted to hear all about his first day training with Captain Aeleus. Fenrir, a wolf cub, had ran endless circles around them until Griever pinned her under a paw. It was already the early dark of winter and Leon was bruised and exhausted, but Cloud had waited for him and Leon couldn’t find it in himself to brush him off. Let’s get something to eat first, he had said, and they got roasted chestnuts in the marketplace because it was too cold for ice cream. Their fingertips were hot from peeling the shells, their breaths curling with the smoke in the cold. 

It had been so simple then, but now Leon doesn’t know where to start, can’t decide if it is horror or pity behind his hesitation. But hearing Cloud’s voice and seeing the flicker of Cloud’s eyes, Leon realizes it is neither. It’s only that he is not used to being so reckless. That’s what this is. He had not felt stupid hope like this since Sora showed up with his Keyblade that could lock the windows between worlds.

There are questions that Leon needs to ask. He wants to ask Cloud how he can stand to be torn from Fenrir. And how did it happen, who did this to you, how does it feel, isn’t it excruciating, what are you doing here, where have you been, can you forgive us?

But all that will come later.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

Cloud raises his eyes. Their blue is glacial. “I’m not a child anymore,” Cloud says, but the way he scowls is exactly the way Leon remembers, and suddenly it's like nine years haven't slipped between them. Like Leon could believe it's just Fenrir being her usual teasing self, or that Tifa had beaten them at arm wrestling again, and all Leon had to do was buy Cloud seasalt ice cream instead of having to contend with the emptiness at Cloud’s side like a gaping wound, and the unspoken, twisting guilt growing inside himself.

Griever circles Cloud slowly, not brushing, but close enough for warmth in Fenrir’s place, and that Cloud could reach out if he wanted to, and--

“Come on,” says Leon.

Cloud’s hands relax at his sides. “They don’t have seasalt ice cream here,” he says dryly.

“Who’s not a child?” says Leon.

"I'm fine, Aerith," says Cloud. He sits back in the chair and pinches the bridge of his nose. "So, there's sludge?"

"Yes," she says. "In the east wing. Yuffie can only switch the buckets out so fast."

"The ground floor?" Cloud clarifies.

She nods. She looks at Leon again, who is still frowning at the wall. "What do you think it is, Leon?"

"There's construction going on on the next floor," Cloud answers instead. "We-- you're renovating some of the living quarters. Right, Leon?"

There's a hint of a threat in Cloud's voice that Aerith does not miss.

"Right," Leon mumbles at the wall. "I. Forgot."

"Forgot?" says Aerith, concerned. But before she can move to check Leon's temperature, Cloud stands and walks between them, making for the door.

"A pipe must have burst or something. And the water mixing with all the dust and drywall. I'll go take a--"

Cloud stares down at the door knob that had come off in his hand, and with it, a good chunk of the door too.

"Cloud!" says Aerith, reaching for him instead. "What are you doing?"

"I--" Cloud seems to glare harder at his hand. "Forgot."

"Forgot?" says Aerith, feeling distinctly like that parrot Magda who belonged to the elderly lady living next door to them back in Traverse Town. "Your own strength?"

Cloud hesitates, then concedes, "Yes."

"Fix it later," says Leon, shouldering the door the rest of the way open and shoving Cloud out of the room. "Just go."

Aerith steps into the hallway after them. She is so used to watching their backs that she can tell they are both unsteady on their feet. Cloud snags Leon's elbow when Leon misses the turn for the corridor leading to the east wing. They're too far away for Aerith to hear what Cloud is saying in his low, soft voice, but not so far that she can't see how Leon's stubbornly trained his eyes on the floor. It is all so strange. Cloud's direct, unwavering gaze when he looked at her before, Leon's sudden preoccupation with his shoes.

She should go synthesize a couple of Remedies, just in case.

"Squally!" Yuffie has never been so glad to see someone in her entire life. Her arms ache, her hair feels like plaster, her clothes like papier-mache, and she's pretty sure she swallowed some of the sludge when switching out the sixth bucket.

"Don't," Cloud starts, but runs a hand down his face instead. "Never mind."

"Don't what, Cloudo?" She grimaces, trying to wipe the sludge from her legs before it cakes on her skin. Gross. She gives up. "You gonna help too? Did Leon finally bully you into doing some work around here?"

"I work," says Leon.

"I was talking to Cloud," says Yuffie. She stops combing her fingers through her hair to watch Leon's mouth open, then close.

Leon looks away. "I know," he says.

"I'm here voluntarily," says Cloud. "Can we get to work now?"

"Squally's really rubbing off on you, eh."

"No," Leon and Cloud say at the same time. They glare at each other, until Cloud puts a hand over his eyes in exasperation and Leon re-directs his scowl to the far wall. Yuffie looks between them. The scene is familiar but not in the way she expects. Like puzzle pieces in the wrong places. Something feels off-kilter. She wonders if there was something mind-altering in that sludge she ingested.

"All right," says Yuffie slowly. "Well, the leak seems to have slowed for now. Why don't you guys take a look upstairs? That's where all this is coming from. Probably from the construction?"

"Look who didn't forget," she hears Cloud mutter as he brushes past.

"Should I get the door for you," Leon retorts.

Yuffie shakes her head. Did those two get hit with a Confuse on the way to the castle this morning? Maybe she should see Aerith about synthesizing some Remedies. But first and more importantly: a shower.

"Cid's calling for you."

"I know," says Leon in Cloud's voice. "I heard him two minutes ago. Do you hear like this all the time?"

"No, sometimes I like to turn it off for some peace and quiet." Cloud rolls his eyes. "What do you think?"

"Whatever. And he's not calling for me, he's calling for Spiky."

"You're Spiky."

"I'm not answering to that."

"But you'll answer to Squally?"

Leon shoots him a glare. Cloud tries not to notice how nonthreatening his face actually looks. Leon just doesn't know how to use it properly, that's all.

"It's this pipe here," Leon is saying. "Must have cracked it drilling the other day. Good thing we shut the water off on our way here."

If Cloud doesn't say it now, he'll never say it. He waits for Leon to wander off a bit, checking for other weak spots. Then, "Sorry," Cloud says. Coughs. "For forgetting."

There is a painfully awkward silence. Just as Cloud starts wishing for Masamune to skewer him again, Leon says, "It's not important."

"Ok," says Cloud, not knowing what else to say. He's about to brush his hair away from his eyes but the sight of Leon's hand coming towards him startles him before he remembers it's his hand now. Now and for the foreseeable future, until Merlin figures out how what exactly was that weird purple orb Leon had picked up near the Rising Falls. Really, Cloud thinks, Leon and his penchant for pocketing strange baubles are entirely to blame here.

Cloud immediately feels guilty for thinking it. He looks around at all of Leon’s work in the weeks Cloud’s been gone. Cloud looks down at his borrowed hand, bare without Leon's usual gloves. They're bigger than Cloud's own, but with callouses in the same places. The index finger on the right hand is a bit crooked, from when Leon had broken it last year. Leon's fist is a heavy solid weight. There's a burn scar on the back of the hand. Cloud doesn't know how Leon got burned; he wasn't there for it.

"It's important," Cloud tries again.

Leon looks at him from across the room with Cloud's eyes, and it's strange. Everything about this is strange, was strange even before the switch.

"Ok," says Leon.

"I'll try not to forget things anymore."

"Ok."

They leave it at that.

A teacup whizzes by Leon’s ear at an alarming speed, but he ignores it, unfazed.

"The mages of old used to exchange their life force for mana,” says Merlin, sending the sugar bowl on the same trajectory. “Very risky business. But this little orb here would help that exchange along, so that the mages could call upon their most devastating spells as soon as the need arose in battle. It must have been warped after so many millennia, not to mention a Heartless invasion. It was born from the world after all. It must have felt the changes. Where did you say you found it?"

Merlin had directed the question to Cloud in Leon's body, but Leon answered for him. "On a ledge near the Rising Falls." He allowed Merlin a few seconds more of turning the orb around in the candlelight before clearing his throat. "So how do we switch back?"

"All magic is about the mind, boys," says Merlin, his spectacles slipping down his nose and somehow pushing themselves back up. "I imagine you must have done this last night when it happened. Just hold it and think of--"

"Right, ok," Leon says loudly.

He feels his face grow hot. Judging from the uncomfortable silence behind him, he can't look at Cloud because then he'd see his own face blushing and Leon would not be able to resist the urge to punch it to make it stop.

"Got it," he says, with forced calm. "Thank you."

Outside Merlin's house, they stand very carefully looking at the sunset and not each other. A claymore glides by and disappears around the corner. Then Cloud reaches out and takes the orb from him.

"Cloud," Leon warns, holding out his hand.

"I got it," says Cloud.

"It's not a toy. We have to switch back."

"I know."

"Then give it to me."

"I got it," says Cloud again in Leon's voice. "Trust me."

Leon drops his hand. Cloud's hand, with the scar on the palm the straight width of a blade that Leon had never been brave enough to ask about. With the bitten-down nails, cool fingertips, uneasy strength. That sought his last night, if only briefly, right before sleep.

Leon holds on. For a long while there is just the relentless, abrasive scratching of fabric against the mouthpiece of the phone. He’s probably being jostled around in Cloud’s pocket as Cloud himself is running from the giant plume of smoke Leon can see outside his window, even miles away. The television shows him a fleet of fire trucks and police cruisers, bathed orange in the firelight, their flashing sirens splashing red and blue onto his walls. The rapidly scrolling marquee across the screen pronounces, POLICE SUSPECT UNDERGROUND ECO-TERRORISTS. POWER OUTAGES ACROSS MIDGAR BOROUGH. NO COMMENT FROM SHINRA ELECTRIC COMPANY.

Leon is now nauseatingly aware of every single heartbeat, the vulnerable pulse in his neck and in his wrists. The news anchor, back-lit by the fire, keeps losing his words to the drone of helicopters and the wind whipping the flames still higher. Towering behind him is the burning black carcass of Reactor 1. But as Leon sinks onto his ratty couch, he can only think of Cloud’s hands, tucked into the sleeves of Leon’s leather jacket, of Cloud’s smile, that small, soft thing, of that flower on the window sill in Leon’s bedroom, living in a sawn-off beer can, turning towards the sun.

Cloud, Leon thinks.

The scratching from the phone stops abruptly and Leon turns his back to the television, says, “Cloud?”

“Leon.” Cloud sounds out of breath. There are people yelling, urgent and angry. “Sorry. This must be a lot to take in. I wanted to call– well, just in case.”

“You need to explain everything right now,” Leon demands, because he doesn’t know what else to say and he wants the people to stop yelling at Cloud and he wants Cloud to keep talking until Leon gets to him, until Leon understands everything, until Leon knows Cloud is not going to get himself blown up while Leon is sleeping in bed.

The yelling does stop. Call ended blinks at him from the phone screen. Leon needs to find his keys.

–

There are few things Leon hates more than riding his bike in the rain. It’s wet and cold, everything article of clothing plasters itself to his skin, the inside of his helmet always gets too damp, and people seem to think their spindly umbrellas will shield them from a head-on collision with a speeding hunk of metal.

There are almost equally few things that Leon hates more than riding the train, because Radiant Garden’s public transit system is as old as the crumbling castle on its outskirts, and is more stop than go no matter the weather. But at least there are no oblivious pedestrians for Leon to accidentally maim.

Pretending there is no one else in the car with him is a cardinal rule, but there is a small pile of dirt between the feet of the guy sitting across from him that Leon can’t ignore. As Leon watches, the pile grows just that much bigger as another shower of dirt comes down. Leon lifts his gaze to see that cradled in the guy’s bare hands is, indeed, a bundle of dirt and rising from that bundle, a single white flower. Leon can’t say he knows anything about flowers despite his hometown, but he recognizes it’s different from the ones in the Gardens because he does not recognize it at all. Maybe the guy doesn’t either because he’s frowning down at it like he’s baffled by its presence.

The train is mostly empty now, nearing the end of the line. Leon’s stop is next. The guy hasn’t moved. The rain outside has calmed to a fine mist which Leon knows will be just as annoying to deal with, for the way it will cling to his skin. Leon shifts.

“You’re getting dirt everywhere.”

The stranger doesn’t look up right away. When he does, it’s slow and searching, like he’s already forgotten the source of Leon’s voice. When he does find Leon, he doesn’t look away.

“Sorry,” the stranger says at last. “A friend made me take this.”

Leon has to swallow a few times before he can speak. “Without a pot?”

“She was repotting and was short one. She told me to find a new home for it. Seemed to think it was funny.”

Leon wishes this stranger would look away, wishes he would look anywhere but at Leon. The thudding in Leon’s chest is ridiculous and uncomfortable, and– somehow, now, the train has passed Leon’s stop with Leon still on it.

“Do you want it?”

“What?” Leon clears his throat. “What? No.” He stands, gripping the overhead bar. “No,” he says again, concentrating hard on reading the billboards outside as they flit by.

The train is slowing again for the next stop, jostling its passengers as it changes gears clumsily. Leon tries not to look down again, into the stranger’s eyes, but he can’t help it.

“I’m afraid it’ll die,” the stranger says, his hands a cradle, his eyes wide and blue. “I just don’t want it to die.”

Leon does not have an answer for why he walks home that evening with a pocket full of dirt, a single flower tucked carefully against his side, white against the soft black of his jacket, the mist trailing behind him like a sigh.

–

The officer– small, blonde, popping gum– is not at all intimidated by the leather or the long scar between Leon’s eyes or Leon’s glare. Leon tries cracking his knuckles, feeling unpleasantly like Seifer as he does so, but is only rewarded with another rustle of paper.

“Look,” says Leon. “I just want five minutes.”

The officer points to the hard plastic chairs in the corner of the room next to the fake plant without looking up from her paperwork. “Sit, or get out,” she says.

“I’ve been sitting for three hours. It’s four in the morning.”

“Then get out,” is the answer Leon gets.

It’s two hours of bleak daylight and restless pacing before Cloud finally appears, escorted by an officer with an eye-patch. The blonde officer gives a lazy salute and unwraps her sixteenth piece of gum since Leon had stormed into the precinct however many hours ago.

There are dark circles under Cloud’s eyes, both his wrists a painful red. Leon feels a rage scorching its way up his throat.

Eye-patch looks Leon up and down, his lopsided grin begging for Leon’s fist.

“This one yours, scarface?”

Leon takes Cloud by the elbow and his helmet from the chair, hears Eye-patch yelling after Cloud not to go where they can’t find him as Leon maneuvers them both out of the building. Outside, Leon jams the helmet onto Cloud’s head. It’s always easier, when Leon can’t see Cloud looking at him.

“What is wrong with you,” he says, taking Cloud by the shoulders. “I don’t even know what to say to you. What the hell is going on? What have you done?” He gestures sharply to the ruins of Reactor 1, colossal even from a distance.

“They’re not going to find any evidence,” comes the muffled reply. “All they can prove is that I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“That makes it better?” Leon shakes him. “Cloud, what are you doing?”

“Leon, I’m tired.”

Leon stares at his own haggard reflection in the helmet’s tinted face shield, catches the flutter of movement beneath it, of Cloud blinking, and suddenly Leon is back on that train, reaching for Cloud, for warm soil and green life, and Cloud’s hands streaked with dirt, how they parted and lifted so carefully away from Leon’s that Leon almost could not destroy the temptation to catch them and hold them fast. Leon searches desperately for something in him other than numbing relief and bone-deep exhaustion, anything to draw from, to give him energy to find and fix whatever it is Cloud has gotten himself into, but Leon finds nothing. He just wants Cloud home.

“All right,” he relents. “But later–”

“Later,” Cloud confirms.

He gives Cloud his jacket, so he won’t have to see his wrists.

–

“Excuse me.” He nods at the cart of yellow and white flowers. Gainsborough is painted on the side in looping cursive. “Are these yours?”

“Yes,” the woman says, smiling. “Would you like one? They’re only one munny. You look like you could do with some color other than black in your life.”

“No.” He frowns, unsure if he should be offended. He’s suddenly self-conscious about his all-black ensemble, his ripped jeans, heavy boots. “I already– some guy gave one to me. On the train? About a week ago?”

He doesn’t know why his voice keeps going up at the end like that. He wants to kick himself. The woman regards him for a long moment before smiling again, but this time in a way that makes him distinctly nervous. “I see. You must be looking for Cloud. He helps me sometimes with my garden.”

“No. I’m not. I– he was worried about it dying, so just let him know it’s not dead. That’s all.”

“You planted it somewhere?”

“Well. It’s just in my apartment.”

“You kept it, that’s wonderful. You can tell him yourself. He’ll be back soon with lunch.”

“No,” he says, hating how weak he sounds. “That’s not necessary.”

“I’m Aerith, by the way. And there he is– Cloud! I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

Panic and dread clutch at him, but the Aerith’s smile fixes him in place, daring him to take a step. Knowing defeat when he sees it, he sighs. “Leon.”

–

“I can’t believe you still have that flower.”

“I was cleaning dirt out of my pockets for days,” Leon mumbles, annoyed that Cloud is pulling him out of the comfortable lull of slumber.

“I can’t believe you put it in a beer can. I can’t believe it’s still alive.”

“I can’t believe you’re still talking.”

Cloud takes the hint. In the silence that follows, Leon can imagine he hears Cloud’s heartbeat beneath his palm and the layers of too-big t-shirt and muscle and bone. Cloud’s hair still smells like smoke and something that reminds Leon of the one time they had sparklers to play with at the orphanage. A gap in the gauzy curtains throws a thin stripe of sunlight on the bed, slicing across their calves.

“I’m sorry,” says Cloud. “For not telling you.”

Cloud’s prone to the kind of guilt that builds up walls and Leon doesn’t want to waste time knocking them down, so he allows the apology to settle over them and the threadbare sheets and the faded comforter.

"Get some sleep,” he says. “But tomorrow you take me to meet this Avalanche.”

He watches Cloud’s eyes finally close and he sees Cloud’s smile, that small, soft thing– he imagines it illuminated by firelight, the blue of Cloud’s eyes gone liquid, his skin heated.

He pulls Cloud closer still, lets his wild pulse drum against Cloud’s body.

Leon’s favorite part of Cloud, and Cloud’s favorite part of Leon. [x]

The moments when Leon allows himself to be still are rare. The people returning need roofs over their heads, and running water, and electricity, and something else besides to make it all feel like home again, to make staying worth it. The Heartless are an infestation and the world will not rebuild itself. Leon has had nine years to be helpless and powerless, and that was enough. Another nine years cutting himself up to give to this town will not make up for his failures, but Leon doesn’t know what else to do but try.

But the moments when Leon is allowed to stop– to teeter on that precipice overlooking forgiveness far, far below– is when Cloud is home. When Cloud says, I’m here. When Cloud pries the gunblade or sledgehammer or pen from Leon’s trembling hand with an ease that makes Leon shiver. When Cloud stands before him, smelling like ozone and the dust of other worlds, and Leon can’t look away and Leon’s world realigns with Cloud at its center and Cloud’s shadow stretches longer than those nine years behind them, and Cloud’s eyes are the color Leon remembers the morning sky being before Radiant Garden became hollow, and Cloud’s hands are on Leon’s shoulders and Leon feels like he is allowed to stop– fall– rest.

Because, “You don’t resent me,” he whispers, heart and hope stuck in his throat, thinking of the boy Cloud once was, and that other boy called Squall, the two of them throwing coins into the sun-shimmering waters of the fountain and wishing for an extra week of summer.

Cloud rolls his eyes and Leon should be offended but he is only thankful. Cloud, nine years among the dead and still human enough to be kind, and gentle. Leon knows he doesn’t deserve it, but Cloud gives it to him anyway. Absolution at Cloud’s hands, the way they move from Leon’s shoulders to either side of Leon’s neck, his palms cool against Leon’s skin, and Leon tips forward.

–

“Don’t look at me,” he says. It falls short of a command, because he knows Leon hears the please he can’t say out loud.

For a long, tense moment, he thinks Leon won’t listen to him, will fight him on this, will insist, as Leon often does. He still hasn’t learned it’s useless, that Cloud’s shame is weaponized, and so Cloud will always win. But then Leon does turn away, no argument, and a hurt that Cloud was not prepared for knifes viciously through him. He grits his teeth. He braces for the eddying darkness that will fill the space where Leon had been, the susurrus of dark things, glints of silver between it all– a sickness inside him and he’s sure the world can see it too, swirling and coiling beneath his skin. Worms, or snakes. Purples and blues and blacks. A voice in his head telling him to come and kneel.

He waits, but there’s none of that. Leon’s warmth is still with him and Cloud finds himself leaning against Leon’s broad back without knowing how he got there.

“You’re always like this,” Leon grumbles. “Too damn proud for your own good.”

Cloud can’t argue because Cloud can’t remember what he used to be like. Whether he’s changed or always has been too damn proud. Can’t understand why everyone’s mouths and eyes go soft instead of hard with fear when they see him, his wing, the calamity at his heels. He remembers the people, or snapshots of them, and jumbles of words returned to him on a passing wind, but doesn’t remember Radiant Garden, or a home.

He’s jostled back into the present, hears Leon saying, “Don’t fall asleep on me.”

Those words have a younger echo, something trying to reach him through the years and fugue. Cloud tries to remember, but it’s difficult, like cutting through a thicket with a dull knife and no fire to see by, cutting your own hands as much as anything. But there are glimpses– refracted light and blue stone, a trail of pink sky above. Everything looked bigger then. His head was hurting from trying not to cry. There was a rumble against his cheek, as a voice spoke.

“You sat here with me once,” he says lowly, once that echo has faded. “Like this.”

Leon’s answer is slow in coming, and soft, like he is very far away. “Yes,” Leon says. “A very long time ago.”

Leon does not think he has enough self-restraint left to not punch Almasy in the teeth after today's string of faculty meetings. The department chair had volunteered them all for the holiday party committee, claiming they were the best qualified, he was very proud of them, expecting great things. Leon wanted to demand what part of a theoretical physics doctorate means he knows the difference between holly and mistletoe but Quistis had kicked him under the table and Leon somehow stopped himself from putting his head through the walls.

“Professor." Because Almasy does not do anything as innocuous as greeting, the title comes out mocking, condescending.

Never had Leon encountered a student that inspired in him such an urge for physical violence. They must have been mortal enemies in a past life, or bitter rivals, or disenchanted not-friends on opposite sides of a war. Doesn’t help that Almasy is a shameless bastard in this life too.

Whatever might have been, in the here and now Leon considers lying about not having office hours. He decides reluctantly that it wouldn’t fly. Thursdays, 4:00 to 6:00pm. It’s right there on the top of his syllabus and Almasy isn’t an idiot, even if he does his best to act like one. He is among Leon's best students, loathe though Leon is to admit it. And definitely the last person Leon needs to see during office hours.

“What do you want,” Leon says, unlocking the door. He briefly entertains slamming it on Almasy’s foot but doesn’t want to risk his tenure track by assaulting a student. He lets Almasy in, watching in distaste as he immediately throws himself into the worn-down armchair in front of Leon’s desk.

Leon sighs. “Comfortable?”

Almasy grunts, and wriggles deeper into the cushions. “I’m all right.”

“What do you want,” Leon says again. “Office hours are for students who actually need help.”

Almasy rolls his eyes. “No one ever comes to these things. I thought I’d keep you company until quitting time, out of the goodness of my heart.”

Leon does not bother to call bullshit, as Almasy would just own it and compound it. He has too much work to do and he aims to do as much of it as he can before Almasy becomes unbearable. Ordering twenty pizzas for the holiday party is likely not among the great things that Cid Kramer is expecting. On Leon's desk are growing mountains of menus he's been collecting from catering companies the last couple of days while Cloud was away. Finding a decent one with the budget they have left after philosophy department insisted on the life-sized gingerbread house is looking near impossible.

Almasy’s voice interrupts his thoughts of skipping town, tenure be damned. Cloud had said Twilight Town was a nice place. Quiet. Quaint. Or the Destiny Islands, a hemisphere away. They could both use some sun, to escape the long, grey winters of Radiant Garden.

“What,” says Leon.

“I said, how’s blondie doing?”

Leon narrows his eyes. He makes two observations. One, that Almasy too is blond and would he appreciate being called blondie. Two, that Almasy's eyes are averted, like he's shy. Seifer Almasy, who propositioned Quistis the first day of orientation. Shy. The urge to punch him in the teeth surfaces again.

"Stop glaring at me, god." Almasy itches his nose. "It was just a question. Polite conversation."

"Don't," says Leon. He's about to tell him to leave again when he hears footsteps coming down the hall.

Almasy hears it too, going by the way his spine snaps straight. The office is small enough for Almasy to lean his long body over the tattered arm of the armchair to stick his head out.

"Well, damn," he says after a moment, sounding awed.

Cloud appears in the doorway wearing his leather riding jacket, the one with the quilted shoulders, and Leon puts his head in his hands.

"Am I interrupting?" Cloud asks. "I didn't think anyone actually went to office hours."

"See," says Almasy, smug. "I was just keeping the good professor company. That was nice of me, wasn't it, Cloud?"

"I guess?" Cloud says at the same time Leon grumbles, "Get out."

But Almasy is already emboldened, all trace of shyness obliterated. "He doesn't seem to want the company though. We shouldn't distract him from all the important work he has to do. You're too busy for us, right, Prof?"

"Oh," says Cloud, taking in the stacks of menus on Leon's desk.

Before Leon can say he has time for one of them and it's not Almasy, Almasy stands and says, "Let's make ourselves scarce. Show me your bike again, Cloud?"

Cloud's eyes lift from the menus to Leon's exasperated face before turning to Almasy, who easily towers over him. "I don't know," he says slowly, though Leon can tell he's pleased despite the carefully neutral expression.

"Just go," Leon sighs. The day has been ridiculous anyway and he is unwilling to begrudge Cloud the chance to show Fenrir off to someone who's as big a gearhead as he is, no matter his personal misgivings about Almasy. "I'll see you at home."

"Where'd you park," Almasy says, already out the door and impatiently pulling on his long, white coat.

"He's not your student so you can punch him whenever you want," Leon reminds Cloud, who gives him a small smile.

"Professor," Almasy gasps, bringing a hand to his heart.

"This way," says Cloud, walking past him, and Almasy is gone in flash of white without another word to Leon.

Leon listens to their voices until they've faded completely. The silence starts to ring after a while. He shakes his head and picks up another menu.

--

"He didn't try anything, did he," Leon can't help but ask when he gets back to their apartment after his evening class. He toes off his boots, his laptop clamped under his arm. "Cloud?"

"I'm in the kitchen, and I'm not going to answer that question."

"Is that a yes?"

"Is this an interrogation?"

"That's a yes." Leon frowns at the growing puddle of melted snow under his boots, nudging them until they're against the wall. He'll deal with it later. "Did you punch him?"

He enters the kitchen in time to hear Cloud sigh.

"You're embarrassed," Leon observes.

"I'm not."

"All right," says Leon, suddenly fond, which makes him magnanimous. "You're not."

Cloud shoots him a glare but lets it go. "Pizza," he says, gesturing to the oven. "I kept it warm.

The mention of pizza reminds Leon of his as yet unresolved quandary and his mood plummets again. It must show on his face because Cloud offers, "I can run out to get something else?"

"No." Leon slumps into a chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. "That's not it. Just-- this stupid holiday party. It's in two weeks and they haven't found a caterer, so now I'm supposed to. You don't happen to know anyone, do you. Mind you, they'll have to do it practically for free."

He grits his teeth before he can start ranting about gingerbread houses and mood lighting and 1000-thread count table runners and other such frivolities that have eaten up what was once a reasonable budget. He's not expecting a real answer, but Cloud looks thoughtful as he joins him at the table. "Is that all?" Cloud says. "I know someone. I'm sure you can work something out with her."

Leon's hand drops. He stares at Cloud, who catches his disbelief and makes a small sound of amusement.

"Tifa's really great," Cloud says. "I think you'll really like her."

Never as much as I like you, Leon thinks. He realizes he said it out loud when Cloud rolls his eyes and says, "Well, good. Now I won't feel uneasy giving you her number."

"Whatever," says Leon, trying to fight the blush and failing.

“To thank me for saving your ass, you can let me get out of having to go to the party.”

“No. You suffer with me.”

--

Later, he really does want an answer.

"But how did it go with Almasy today?"

"He said he's going to drop his physics major."

"What? Why?"

"I don't know." A pause. "Will you talk to him about it?"

"Cloud-- he's not you."

"Because he's actually passing his classes?"

"You know that's not what I mean. I just mean-- he seems fine."

Cloud doesn't answer for a long time. Leon's about to turn on the light so he can see Cloud's face, but Cloud’s hand finds his wrist in the dark, and Cloud says, “Fine covers a lot of ground.”

Leon settles back against the pillows. "All right," he agrees.

--

Almasy saves him the trouble of calling him over by approaching Leon after class. The book he's holding is white, leather-bound with ornate trim. Definitely not their physics textbook. To Leon's surprise, Almasy hands it to him.

LOVELESS, Leon reads from the cover.

"Why," Leon says simply.

"It's not for you, it's for Cloud."

"Why," Leon repeats.

There's that look on Almasy's face again. Shy. Young.

When it's obvious he's not going to get an answer, Leon continues, "Does this have anything to do with why you're dropping physics?"

Almasy's expression morphs from shocked to irritated to pleased, whiplash-fast. "You guys talk about me? What else did Cloud say?"

"Answer the question, Almasy."

Back to irritated. "What do you want me to say? What if I’m just bored with physics."

"You're good at it."

"Doesn't mean I like it. I just-- want to do something else."

"This?" Leon holds up LOVELESS.

Almasy’s face goes blank. Cloud-blank, Leon realizes. He might have to rescind his words from last night.

"Maybe,” Almasy says, his voice smooth and flat. “So what if it is? Poetry. Literature, the epics, all that stuff. Not as boring as physics. And LOVELESS is a classic, all right."

Escaped aggression curls Almasy’s last words into a low snarl. Leon almost doesn't manage to reign in the disbelief before it shows on his face. He wouldn’t have expected this of Almasy. He thinks no one else ever did either, judging by the way Almasy’s defenses shot up. Almasy who is loud and brash and—earnest. Almasy who is more like Cloud than Leon ever saw.

The longer Leon’s silence drags on, the more volatile Almasy seems to become.

"Well," Leon tries. He casts about for something else. "As long as it's what you want. Doesn’t matter what I think."

Almasy’s shoulders lower at that, so it seems to have been the right thing to say. Of course it is, Leon understands; it’s what Leon would have said to Cloud.

"You gonna miss me in your classes, Prof? You should invite me over sometimes, so Cloud doesn't worry about me so much."

"He doesn’t," Leon lies. “Don’t get any ideas.”

They leave the building together, parting ways at the crosswalk only because Leon threatened bodily harm if Almasy dared follow him home.

Almasy laughs, but turns to go the direction of student housing. “Give that to him, all right?” He gestures to LOVELESS. “I’ll know if you don’t. I have his number. I want to know what he thinks.”

--

“I want you to know it was a highly uncomfortable conversation,” Leon says.

Cloud nods absently, turning the next page, brows drawn close in concentration.

“Good book?” Leon prompts.

Cloud frowns, but it’s not his unhappy one. “I—I think I’m getting it.”

Leon smiles to himself. He falls asleep with the glow of the bedside lamp against his eyelids, the warmth of Cloud’s hip against the back of his hand.

--

“I hate this,” says Cloud.

“You’d be less irritable if you didn’t stay up all night reading.”

LOVELESS was last week, and when Cloud said he found it a bit heavy-handed, Almasy came back with I Want to Be Your Canary. Leon read it too and said Almasy could do with more subtlety. Cloud said Leon was disgruntled because Almasy had obviously meant for Leon to be King Leo.

“Whatever,” Leon countered. “But I draw the line when he starts writing you love poetry.”

The look of mortification on Cloud’s face had brought Leon great satisfaction.

Now, the heat of Cloud’s glare is rather cooled by the flipped collar on his button-up. It’s actually Leon’s, but Cloud had spilled tea over his only one earlier today, in what Leon suspects was a desperate act of sabotage. Now he’s stuck wearing a shirt that needs to be safety-pinned in the back, and Leon’s still trying very hard not to look smug.

Leon smooths the collar back down for him. “Tifa’s going to be there. It won’t be as bad as you’re making it out to be.”

“Seifer said he was going to pose as a server and crash the party.”

“He’d fail,” Leon says mildly. “He’s too tall and I think half the literature department has already developed a sixth sense for him out of survival instinct.”

Cloud looks torn between pride that Almasy has been terrorizing the professors in their ivory tower and disappointment that no one will be saving him from tonight.

“I’ll be there,” Leon adds.

“You’re the one making me go in the first place,” Cloud says, but he lets Leon pull his hands away from where they had been attacking his cuffs. “What if someone asks me my opinion on the Kingdom Hearts debate?”

“It’s light, I think,” says Leon. “And it’s all right to say you don’t know. You don’t have to prove anything.”

Cloud sighs heavily. “Get drunk fast again so I can use the excuse of needing to keep you from demonstrating time compression with the cheese spread.”

“No, I’m not taking anything Aerith gives me this time.”

Leon wakes up to an email from Quistis and immediately he wants to go back to sleep. He is lucky to have her help, but he’d rather she weren’t quite so thorough, or brutal. His fault; he was distracted last night and the notes he sent were juvenile and haphazard and he should have known Quistis would have none of it. He knows if he can pass muster with her then the rest of the committee will be no issue, but the revisions seem endless and there are only two days left.

I expect better of you, Squall, especially this late in the game.

Everyone always expects better. They’re all somehow convinced that he can be better even when Leon himself isn’t sure he can. He doesn’t know what he’s done to give the people in his life the notion that he is infallible. Their belief in him seems unfounded, irresponsible. He feels trammeled and adrift at the same time. He feels tired. The stress keeps him up at night. What would Quistis say if he wrote back saying he can’t do it anymore, that it’s too much and he wants to quit, that everyone was wrong about him? Would they leave him alone? Would they find someone else to build up?

He frowns at the thought. Outside a dog barks and the afternoon sun is already a deep orange. His radiator hisses at him and he sighs. He always feel this way, this time of day.

Sorry, he types back.

In the kitchen are the empty containers that held his dinner. Upon seeing them, his brain stumbles groggily into the question he abandoned last night, still unanswered. Leon rubs at his eyes. Not now, he tells himself.

But even before his coffee finishes brewing he knows it is a lost cause.

--

Leon has to admit he’s been waiting for this all day. His traitorous brain had not stopped demanding but where but where but where and it has made work impossible. It’s probably because the guy is something tangible, something in the context of here and now. Something that doesn’t have to do with cosmic strings and wormholes and the nauseous merge of space and time. Leon is quite frankly sick of all that.

Standing again in the foyer pinned under that blue gaze, Leon gives in. He’ll get an answer and then carry on with his life. “Where do I know you from?”

The guy looks taken aback by the question. “You mean, from before?”

Leon fights the urge to roll his eyes. He isn’t so far gone that he can’t remember who’s been delivering his late night dinners for the past week, so yes, of course he means from before. He nods curtly.

“You were the TA for one of my classes at the university.”

Leon pauses. Then, “Kramer’s class?”

A nod.

Strange. That was only last year. Leon still knows most of the students from that class by face and name when he sees them around on campus. He should not be having so much difficulty placing this one. Not with hair and eyes like that.

“I was only in it for about three weeks,” the guy offers quietly, like he’s sensed Leon’s confusion. “Before I—“ He cuts himself off with a one-shouldered shrug and drops his gaze.

“What?”

The guy studies his scuffed boots for a long moment. He shrugs again, eyes flicking up. “Dropped out.”

Leon is not expecting the sudden vicious hook in his heart, the heaviness in his gut the exact weight of guilt. There is shame, dense and dark, peering out at Leon from behind a sheen of blue. Leon opens his mouth to say he doesn’t care, that it’s not Leon’s place to judge. Wants to say academia is a soul-crushing place to be, as Leon himself is finding out, full of self-important, self-serving old men and terrors like Quistis whom you can never measure up to, and that the guy is better off elsewhere. That Leon doesn’t think any less of him, that none of that is important. Things that Leon wants desperately to tell himself too.

But Leon knows he does not have enough tact for all that to come across as anything but patronizing. And besides, what right does Leon have?

“I see,” is all he says. It’s inadequate but it’s the best he can do. He hands over the twenty wordlessly. The guy mumbles a thank you. Leon keeps the light on for him and watches him leave.

Back in his apartment, he pretends to work for another hour before giving up all pretense of productivity. An unease is growing, unfettered, fed by something that has nothing to do with his looming defense. He finds himself combing through his old emails for the roster for Professor Kramer’s intro physics class, dated a week before the semester started. He knows the name as soon as he sees it, nearly at the end of the list. He can’t believe he forgot. It’s as bad as his own.

The name unearths some other small fragments, modest blooms of color and hazy seconds of motion. A lecture hall, but one of the smaller ones with the asparagus green floors. Back row, towards the exit. Slumped shoulders and a down-turned face. Aggressive bed head. Hands folded on top of a conspicuously empty desk. But no matter how hard Leon focuses, that’s all there is. Leon does not remember how his eyes looked, what might have been peering out from behind them. He is consigned to the margins of Leon’s memory. If Leon could turn just a bit, raise his eyes that last fraction of an inch, then Leon would have him centered, focused, could catch his attention—but it is a year too late for that and time compression is still more theory than practice.

It is difficult to uncurl his fingers from the shape of a fist. His focus is spent for the night.

--

He is waylaid by Yuffie calling to reprimand him for being an unforgivable human being and for missing YuRiPa’s first live gig tonight. He tells her that tomorrow is the culmination of five years of over-caffeinated nights and library haunting and despaired staring contests with the void, and he’s convinced that the committee is out for blood, and Quistis is still not satisfied with his final defense.

She is not moved.

“Excuses,” she huffs. “Fine, but you’re celebrating with us this weekend. I’ll come drag the both of you out if I have to.”

“Both?”

Yuffie’s answer is the line going dead. Leon sighs. Preventative measures don’t work against Yuffie. He’ll have to deal with it when she comes banging on his door Saturday, but at least by then his defense will be over. He finally finds his wallet half-buried in the cushions of the couch and hurries out the door. It’s been several long minutes since the bell rang.

Cloud Strife, Leon reminds himself. A bad weather name like Leon’s own.

Cloud is waiting for Leon in the foyer, at the bottom of the stairs. Leon’s steps slow.

“Did someone let you in?”

“What?” Cloud looks genuinely confused when Leon reaches the last step. After an expectant silence, Cloud says, “It was just cold waiting outside.”

When Leon still says nothing, Cloud holds up the paper bag. The name of the restaurant is printed across it, Shinobi, in a bamboo-like font that Yuffie has told him is offensive and ignorant not to mention a travesty of design. Leon’s not looking at the font. Under the light of the foyer, the angles of Cloud’s face are sharper without the night dark to soften them, his shadow sitting at attention at his heels rather than languishing behind him, eyes a pale, glacier blue.

Cloud lowers the bag to stare at Leon over it and Leon scowls at himself. The stress is addling his brain.

“Whatever,” Leon says, taking the bag. It’s a bad start. He amends, “What do I owe you?”

Cloud fixes him with a blank look. Leon scowls again. Stupid. He thrusts the twenty towards Cloud, the only bill he had brought down with him anyway. Cloud takes it hesitantly.

“Change?” Cloud asks, hand still raised with the bill between his thumb and index finger.

“Keep it,” Leon manages without raising his voice. Rinoa always told him he did that when he got self-conscious. He is not self-conscious.

“The restaurant’s not that far away,” Cloud says. “It’s a lot of change. You don’t have to—“

Leon pushes Cloud’s hand away firmly, until it comes to rest against Cloud’s chest. Cloud stares at him harder for it and Leon regrets it immediately. He doesn’t know why he did that. He snatches his hand back and runs it through his hair instead.

“It’s late,” he says stiffly. “It’s fine. Just keep it.”

Self-preservation instinct and years of ingrained anti-social behavior tell him to extricate himself from the situation, to run fast, run now, but Cloud looks like he’s about to say something and Leon can’t bring himself to leave. The unease is growing bigger the longer he looks at Cloud, at the dark circles under Cloud’s eyes. Urgency underlines the question that hasn’t quite left Leon since that third night when he recognized him under the light: how did I forget you?

Leon shouldn’t have and it unnerves him that he did. And what does he do now that Cloud’s face is turned up to him and not down to an empty desk in the back of a lecture hall? Now that Cloud is centered, focused?

“Are you all right?” asks Cloud.

“Fine,” says Leon. “I’m busy.”

“Sorry, I’ll—“

“No.” Leon’s hand had rose without him thinking and Leon forces it to run through his hair again instead of reaching out to Cloud. “Don’t. It’s fine.”

“I don’t want to keep you,” Cloud insists.

Leon tries to quell the frustration and fails. Fine. What else could he say? He doesn’t even know why it matters. Cloud is silent as Leon unsticks his feet from the floor and picks his way back up to his apartment. He drops the bag on the kitchen table, glares at the piles of paper next to it. The entirety of the universe is scribbled across them, spelled out in proofs and strings of numbers and symbols of Leon’s own invention. What difference does it make what he does now or ever when he knows all of time can be narrowed down to a single instance and wiped clean?

He puts his cold mug of coffee in the sink and goes to bed. There isn’t anything else to be done, not with this wash of defeat over him.

--

It’s 6:45AM and the sun hasn’t risen fully yet. The streets are dead and a thin layer of snow had fallen during the night. The sky is a gradient of cool blues. Cloud Strife is standing on his doorstep. It’s hard to believe this is happening.

“What are you doing.” Leon is aware he sounds harsher than he means to be, but he’s not used to being up this early and he is a mere hour and fifteen minutes away from bombing his defense and negating five years of work. And Cloud, for whatever inexplicable reason, is here when he shouldn’t be.

Cloud blinks at him. “What?”

Leon looks at his watch. “It’s 6:47,” he says unnecessarily.

Cloud nods. “You’re never up this early.”

“I’m defending my dissertation today,” Leon answers without thinking. His eyes narrow as he processes the implications of Cloud’s statement. “How do you know that?”

“I didn’t,” Cloud says slowly. “You just told me.”

“No, that I’m never up this early.”

“I always come home from work around this time and I’ve never seen you.”

“Home?” Leon echoes. He is ill-equipped for this. He might as well just go back to bed.

Cloud looks like he’s waiting for something. Probably for Leon to stop being an idiot. “I live here,” he offers eventually.

Leon turns around to examine his front door, to make sure his apartment hadn’t morphed into another building.

“Here,” Leon says dully. “Since when?”

“August.” Cloud seems to take pity on Leon, because he adds, “We keep different hours. And you’ve been busy.”

How Cloud looks in the pre-sunrise winter gloom conjures up a number of adjectives that Leon refuses to entertain. Still, he’s distracted and Cloud has already maneuvered around him and unlocked the door before Leon can work through the fresh bewilderment and returning unease. Leon needs to secure something before he goes off to his doom—but he can’t articulate what it is.

“Good luck.” Cloud says it like goodbye, and Leon, in his haste to say something, anything, comes out with, “I’ll tell you about it after.”

Cloud gives him another look, this one unreadable. Leon tamps down on the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. But it’s not an unpleasant look, Leon rationalizes. It’s not condemning. Still a chance for damage control.

“It’d probably bore you,” he backtracks.

“It’d go over my head,” Cloud corrects. “You have better things to do with your time.”

Cloud says it like it’s a matter of fact, with no invitation for Leon to refute it. The frustration is back, but it swells into anger rather than defeat. Leon is the only one to decide how he spends his own time. Leon knows that a fraction of a second can be stretched to fill the expanse of an ocean. He can prove it. He knows a lifetime can be condensed down to a tiny, cramped apartment foyer. He can prove that too. And if Leon has to walk across an ocean, he could think of worse company than Cloud. If Leon’s time ends outside the circle of light of the foyer, he can at least count the green flecks in Cloud’s eyes before it’s over. What’s more, Leon cannot remember the last time he’s felt this all right with anything.

This has got nothing to do with his dissertation or other people’s expectations of him or the improbable workings of the universe. It’s about what he wants, independent of all that. It’s about what Cloud wants too.

“We’ll see,” he says, keeping his tone level. “Later. If you want. Or not, whatever. It’s about space—stuff. And time travel.”

God. He’s still terrible at this.

Leon doesn’t wait around to hear if Cloud says yes or no or whatever. Later, though. He means that.

--

On his way home, he stops by Shinobi. He makes a mental note to get rid of the evidence from the week before Yuffie comes over tomorrow to make good on her promise of extracting him from his apartment. After a moment’s consideration, he doubles the order and adds an extra roll. Cloud looks like he could eat more.

Leon’s defense had gone well. Exceptionally so. Granted, it had taken an outstandingly moronic question from one of the committee members to get him on track, but Leon had always worked best when taking people to task. Quistis had pulled him aside after it was over to give him a long hug. He had been in too much of a daze to resist.

As expected, she said.

If she had said that to him last night he would have told her that his dreams for the past half-decade have been about nothing but time compression and singularity and all of existence binding tighter and tighter around him until he was ground down to dust and then even less than that. Was that as expected? That he would be given over to his work so completely that he feels crushed by it before he even wakes in the morning?

But he did not feel bitter. After all, if anyone could understand the gauntlet of academia it was Quistis and she shouldn’t be blamed for his own personal shortcomings. And so Leon only felt validated—wrung out, but accomplished. Proud that he hadn’t proven Quistis’s belief in him wrong. Grateful that Quistis never once let him down.

Thank you, he said.

There was another revelation there, and Leon tucked it away carefully.

His building comes into sight and suddenly the bag seems too heavy. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe success is making him overly bold and reckless. But he thinks back to this morning, to that unease he now has an explanation for, and finds himself propelled up that extra flight of stairs past his own floor.

Cloud answers the door in the same jeans and hoodie Leon saw him in this morning, when the sun had yet to rise. Now the sun streams in through Cloud’s curtain-less windows, throwing his shadow across Leon’s. He opens the door wider to let Leon in.

“Space stuff and time travel, huh?” Cloud says without preamble. “You don’t look the type.”

Leon’s heartbeat feels too slow, then too fast. “Lunch first,” he says.

--

“Squall! You had better be dressed and ready to go or I’ll break down this door and—oh. Good! I’ll go get Cloud. You two know each other, right?”

“I’ll get him. You make too much noise.”

Yuffie follows him up the stairs anyway, then pushes past him to race ahead in her excitement. It doesn’t even surprise Leon that they share the same friends. Another sign of what he’s missed. He doesn’t want to risk spending his time wrong anymore, and not just because of the possibility of time compression ever-present in the back of his mind.

Cloud opens the door before Yuffie can bang her first on it.

“Hi,” says Cloud. “Cid’s going to yell again if you make too much noise.”

“That old man loves me, it’s ok. You ready to go, Cloudo?”

Yuffie hooks one elbow with Cloud’s and another with Leon’s. Cloud struggles to lock his door before she pulls him away. Leon has to grab Yuffie by the scruff of her neck to keep her from tumbling down the stairs and taking the both of them with her, and Cloud catches the heavy front door with his foot before it can slam on her nose. Yuffie takes it all in stride.

“Since you both missed the show, Yuna says you gotta make it up to them by going the first round of karaoke.”

“No,” Leon says.

“I was working,” Cloud protests.

“Hey, I don’t make the rules.” She manages to sound solemn and regretful. “But cover my bar tab for the night and I’ll see if I can pull some strings, get you two out of it.” She nudges them both in the sides, none too gently.

Leon hears Cloud laugh, a soft, barely-there sound.

iv.

Sometime between inking recipes for invisibility onto his palm and trying to breathe life into the sea beasts painted just off the shore above the compass rose, he read about you, and about the innumerable universes living in the spaces just beyond the warmth of your breath, that dreaming alongside you is another you, and another, all the yous that will ever exist existing right now where your existence bends away.

You, he read.

There on his knees between the stacks and with smudges of dark dust on the pads of his fingers that printed his own crest on everything he touched, he decided there could never exist a him who does not dream of a home he can sink into until his bones forget their own weight, nor a him who does not wonder at the lives he would never touch sharing this same air and sky. That in every iteration of his existence, there must be a moment--a book falling open, a conversation drifting through the wall, the sun catching on something broken and spectacular-- when he will come to understand possibilities innumerable as universes. In that moment too, All Blue would unfurl itself again, the world would grow until it can hold this new him who believes in anything and for whom anything can exist. In every iteration of his story, he knows there is an All Blue waiting, infinite and patient.

Years later, he has grown tall and lean and dreams of invisibility have been shelved for grander things and the sea beasts just off the shore have risen and fallen at his feet and the world has opened itself up to offer its possibilities without end. Here and now, bounded by blue above and blue below, he decides something else.

You, he read. There is something about him that is infinite, Sanji knows, infinite and on repeat. There is a him in every universe and in each of them there is an All Blue humming, and it may not be an ocean this time, maybe it's a hidden city, or a single, lung-blackening word, but in every universe he will find it, but only in this universe is he so lucky to have found something greater.

Only in this iteration is there a crown so sunbeaten and worn and loved, a white as sacred as the white of Wadou’s hilt, a map so intricately beautiful it names even the small rivers whose villages have gone. And where else could you find a bravery so honest every lie finds itself spinning into truth, or an elixir brewed so sincere it buries even your cruelest nightmares under cherry blossoms and snow and when you unearth them again in the morning you will find only peace where their bones should be. There is no language like the one chiseled into towering stone found in the cloud-heights and ocean-depths and furthest desert-reaches of this world, and in no other existence is there a ship home to two laughing spirits, their joy entwined the fiercest protection love can offer. And the song that plays for them on dark, sated nights, springing from wood and string, heady and triumphant, finds its inspiration under their stars, in the spaces between their hearts, pulling its notes from the ether of this life and the one just beyond.

He knows all this, without wavering, believes as he does in All Blue, in all things. He tells Zeff but Zeff doesn’t look up from the menu for tomorrow's dinner service.

“Shitty brat,” Zeff grunts. “This again?”

“What do you mean,” Sanji says. “What do you mean ‘this again’?”

Zeff wets the tip of his pen with his tongue, gives Sanji a look that makes Sanji want to put his cigarette out on the menu, so that Zeff will kick him through a table instead. Sanji stops himself. Carne comes in through the front door with an armload of sun-bleached whites and Gin materializes from the shadowed corner of the dining room to take the laundry basket from him. Sanji can't see the look Gin gives Carne, but they both move onto the kitchen without another word.

“Stop hovering,” Zeff says, after the kitchen doors have stopped swinging, the rhythmic thudding of knives against wood stuttering into a palpably anxious silence. “No one’s making you stay.”

“I know,” says Sanji. "But don't you want to at least try?"

vi.

“Do you think he’ll be thinking of me when he kicks it.”

He flicks the lighter open, flicks it shut and pockets it again without lighting up. For the first time since he can remember, he doesn't want a smoke. He wants room in his lungs to carry as much of these last moments with him as he can. The mild dawn air charged with early light, the wafting smell of fresh bread, his recipe, with fish bones dried and ground down fine, heartiest bread you'll find in any of the Blues.

"Probably will. Stupid old man."

An elephant tuna swims by right beneath their feet, followed closely by a school of sparrow fish in reds and yellows and greens. Sanji looks back up the long stretch of pier they had come down, at their little restaurant with the red brick chimney and big windows that Franky had built, a door studded with seashells. Storybook. Turning back to the water, he sees a ship cresting the horizon with the sun. Their first customers of the day.

Sanji shoves his hands into his pockets. “His last words will probably be, ‘tell that shitty eggplant his soup still sucks.’ God.”

Gin slings the last rucksack onto the ship, where it slides across the deck to join the rest of their heaped provisions. Gin shrugs and gives Sanji a look that says if Sanji’s going to cry again, could he please do it where Gin can’t hear him.

“Asshole,” Sanji sighs. “What do you know anyway. My soup’s fantastic.”

“We should go,” Gin says. “While the wind’s good.”

Sanji thinks about Usopp. Thinks about the first step Usopp had to take after Merry bid them farewell. Thinks about that stretching, churning abyss of guilt and loss, and what could possibly get him across safe.

“Shit,” he says. “Yeah, all right.”

"You can write. And he'll probably live forever," Gin offers as a condolence, along with his hand, to help Sanji onto the ship. "He just seems the type."

Unlike you, Sanji thinks, but that goes unsaid.

v.

At the door of the restaurant, Zeff had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, yanked him close. Kissed his forehead, bristly and rough. Said, "Don't think so fucking much." Looked at Sanji like Sanji was something unbelievable.

Before that, at the threshold of Sanji's room, Zeff had filled up the doorway, immovable, as Sanji coated everything he owned with nicotine and hunted for lost socks. There was a frantic shushing from the hallway and Sanji knew Patty and the others were huddled just out of sight, listening. They all have a stock in him, knew him even before his fingers could properly wrap around a knife, when he still thought the cover of smoke could make his shoulders seem broader.

At the threshold of Sanji's room, Zeff had said, "Tell me, what kind of fully grown man can't keep track of his own socks."

Sanji had nothing to throw back, or nothing that he'd really mean. Standing before Zeff, he didn't know if there would ever come a time when he'd feel less like a child. Gave the socks up for a lost cause and sat down on the floor to fold his winter clothes first.

Because before this, at the helm of a battered dream--theirs, Zeff's and Sanji's, for all Sanji dreamt of leaving--Sanji's used-to-be home, the everything Sanji had lived to give, with the blood still fresh on the deck and the remains of an armada knocking against their hull, Zeff had looked down at him and Zeff had said, "Dress warm."

On the eve of that first departure, Sanji had demanded of himself, how could you be so ungrateful. He has given you a bed to sleep in, a home to call your own, food on your plate, the ocean beneath your feet, a life. He has given up everything, and you cannot find it in yourself to stay, to be happy where you are.

Then and now, Sanji had wanted to say, I would live the rest of my life for you. I would count out all my days like coins to place in your palm and still it would not be enough for what I've taken from you, for all the possibilities like universes without end that even together amount to less than your singular sacrifice. But if you ask, I would stay, I would stay, I would learn to want to stay.

Zeff wouldn't ask. Still looks at Sanji now like he is something unbelievable. Like Sanji is something good.

Both times, Sanji had said, with sincerity enough to blister, but still only, "Thank you," what else did he have to give, for every day since that first day, for letting me grow, for letting me go, for seeing the good in me worth every life-drop of All Blue.

And at the door, with All Blue rising to their feet, Zeff had said, "I know you never asked to be saved." Had said, "I did not mean to be your burden all these years."

And he could not look Sanji in the eye and Sanji had nothing else left in him but cries of no, no, you were never, please. But they sunk deep into his chest before he could speak them. His useless tongue, trembling arms, clumsy heart, selfish selfish selfish.

"No," he tried, had to try, but Zeff grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, yanked him close, kissed his forehead, bristly and rough, and Sanji felt crushed anew beneath his own gratitude, his own love, the disbelief that he could have this much good, the weight of it so immense surely his knees would give out.

Zeff said, "Don't think so fucking much. All right?"

Meant, you are a dream greater than All Blue, what could I do but follow you?

Sanji on his knees, the back of Zeff's hand to his lips. Sobbing, how, how, how can I go, and Zeff pulling him up, Zeff putting him in Gin's waiting hands, Zeff shutting the door softly.

vii.

“In a perfect world,” says Gin, “you would complain a lot less.”

“In a perfect world,” says Sanji, “I'd be sailing with a beautiful lady and not you.”

Gin doesn't argue. He places the last dish on the drying rack and, after a moment’s hesitation, wipes his hands on a hand towel instead of on his jeans. Satisfied, Sanji puts his head down on the table and closes his eyes.

When he wakes, it's to Gin shaking his shoulder gently. The first thing Sanji registers is the smell of burning. The second is the sun young in the sky. Both snap his spine straight.

“Did you try to make toast again."

“Yeah.” Gin sits across from him. The circles under his eyes are somehow even darker, and something in Sanji twists. “You weren’t awake yet,” Gin says. “But now I’m really hungry.”

“Even Luffy could make fucking toast,” Sanji mutters, getting up.

"I'm not Luffy," says Gin, and rustles open the paper he brought in with him.

Sanji's long since learned it's no fun arguing with Gin, because Gin doesn't seem to have an anger setting when it comes to Sanji, and anyway, if Sanji's honest, he knows his own anger is misplaced. If he's honest, he knows that in this instance, his anger is one seeded by fear. That he no longer rises before the sun, that he had slept through the sound of the kitchen door unlatching and even the smell of burning. If this were the Baratie, Zeff would have made him walk the plank for incompetence. If this were the Sunny, Sanji would have walked himself.

“You should have just woken me up,” he says, swirling oil in the pan for omelets. “For watch too.”

"No green peppers. Please.”

“You’ll eat what I give you and you’ll be grateful,” Sanji snaps. But he puts the pepper back.

With the stove fired up, muscle memory takes over. He could still do breakfast in his sleep, at least. He crisps up the bacon in another pan while the omelets are cooking through, juices some oranges and grapefruit, cuts up strawberries and apples for a salad. Makes toast and doesn't burn it, whips up fresh butter. After breakfast is plated, he will get started on other preparations, he's thinking hand-pulled noodles in fish broth for lunch, with a side of simmered tofu, and a seaking paella for dinner, dotted liberally with the fresh green peas they bought on the last island. Triple-check that list of perishables they'll have to use within the week, have Gin help him take inventory before landfall so that Gin can practice his letters too.

In the middle of flipping a pancake, he hears Gin calling him.

"What," he says.

"I said, you don't have to make so much."

Sanji looks at the spread on the table, counts the dishes, shakes his head because there won't be enough if Luffy wants fourths, and he always does, not to mention snacks between meals, and if Zoro takes a nap afterwards, he'll wake up hungry again, and he hasn't even accounted yet for the servings Usopp and Chopper will steal to feed the fish in their aquarium.

He catches himself.

He turns off the burner and says, embarrassed, "There are still cinnamon buns in the oven."

"For later," says Gin, even though Sanji knows for a fact Gin can't eat cinnamon without pulling a face. Sanji had been thinking of Chopper instead.

Sanji stores the rest of the pancake batter in the fridge and takes his seat. "Old habits, I guess," he says.

"You're grinning." Gin hands him the crossword puzzle from the paper. Sanji moves the pitcher of orange juice and smooths the page out on the table.

"Just eat your breakfast, asshole."

Sanji absently spears an apple slice with his fork and surveys the landscape of plates near overflowing. He'll save the noodles for lunch another day, since they'll have enough leftovers; they are only two and not a crew of nine. It seems he is still accustomed to unreasonable, impossible things, like cooking for a bottomless void of a captain. The smell of cinnamon and butter wraps around them.

Gin's right: he's grinning.

"What's this word," Gin asks around a mouthful of toast.

Sanji glances up from the hint for 2-across (eleven letters, starts with M, "until recently, Mariejois's M.O.").

"Interrogation," he reads from the headline under Gin's finger.

"Like when you break people's kneecaps," Gin ventures, "so they'll talk."

"Yeah. Exactly."

Gin nods, spells the word out to himself under his breath. Sanji goes back to the crossword and skips over 2-across for 15-down, eight letters, "neighbor to Water 7, known for its tree-lined promenades": St. Poplar.

iii.

Gin had shown up at All Blue not long after Nami's maps went into circulation. It was much the same as the first time, Gin looking like even hell didn't want him, running on empty, except there was no armada on this heels this time and he knew to ask for Sanji by name. Sanji is a little taller than him now, though not by much, and only if he doesn't slouch. Sitting down, there is no difference.

"Where's Krieg?"

"Last I heard, he was trying to break into the arms trade in the Montrose Archipelago back in East Blue. But that was years ago."

"You didn't stay with him?"

"I left as soon as I didn't owe him anything anymore. It never was that much, once you got down to counting. I owe you more."

"You don't," Sanji had said, because these days Gin's cough was a wet rattling deep in his chest and sometimes there was blood between his teeth. Sanji remembered the taste of antidote on the back of his tongue, like iodine, and the rubber groove of the gas mask bruising his cheekbones, Gin's wrist enclosed in his fist, thin and hot.

"You're not going to start again, are you," Gin said, leaning his tonfa against the table. He took a seat at the edge of the booth, elbows on his knees, turned towards the square of orange sky out the window, instead of to Sanji across the table. "With the guilt. I don't have any use for that, and neither do you."

"Right. You're going to tell me it was your choice. You're going to tell me it was the right choice and I should stop agonizing over it so much. Except I always come out of it whole, and it's everyone else who's missing a piece of themselves. Then you say it's nothing and I'm supposed to live with it."

Gin turned to look at him. "You're not talking about me."

"I am," Sanji spat. "Both of you were the same. I'm not telling you to take it back. I'm telling you to just let me-- no, forget it."

There was a new, retrospective fear growing in Sanji now. There's only one of you, Sanji wanted to shout, but everywhere else there is a me. What if you were lost? I would not find a you anywhere else.

Sanji's foot had been tapping out a frustrated rhythm under the table, the cigarette between his fingers quivering above the ashtray. It had been eight months now since Zeff had shown up with the crew of the Baratie, following the map Nami had delivered by carrier gull, to find an empty, gleaming-new restaurant and Sanji waiting on the pier with his feet in the water. Six months since the Sunny had set sail again and a piece of Sanji's heart had swam out to sea after it.

The only light left on in the dining hall was the one above the next booth, where Zeff usually sat to do the bookkeeping. In the half dark, Gin rubbed at his eyes and sighed. Sanji braced himself for an argument, but Gin only swiveled around to rest his feet under the table next to Sanji's.

"Everything I eat tastes like copper these days," Gin said, folding his hands together. His fingers were crooked, broken and healed all haphazard over the years. "Can you make me something that doesn't?"

"You'll have to work off your meal this time," Sanji said, after a pause. "So stay a while."

ix.

If Zoro is surprised to run into Sanji again in a little town in North Blue nestled at the foot of a dormant volcano, he doesn't show it. Greets, "You got any cash on you?"

"I don't make it a habit to encourage people's drinking problems," Sanji replies. He shifts the bag of groceries to his other arm. His scarf is damp from his breath.

"It's not a problem," says Zoro, "if I can still punch you out afterwards."

"No. Come have dinner. Knowing you, you've been living off roadkill."

"What're you making?"

"That goat stew we had last time we were here. Remember? That old lady made it for us, the one who thought Chopper was a goblin. She got up before dawn with her basket so she could have first pick at the market. Did you know, she passed away last year. I just came from visiting her daughter and she told me. She still wears the earrings Robin-chan gave her, said she wanted something to remind her of us. She said her son didn't make it back for the funeral. He was working a job two islands over to help make ends meet, and there was a storm. I'm going to go visit the grave later."

"I'll help you with that," Zoro says, holding out his hand. "Since you're feeding me and all."

Sanji knows that Zoro, with his broad shoulders and reticent tongue, means more than the bag of groceries, which weighs almost nothing at all. Knows that Zoro is thinking ahead to the weight of snow on a headstone, the weight of earth on a body, of the early nights of the far north, and of Sanji never knowing a home and customs so landed, so rooted.

Sanji hands the bag over anyway, because it's not often Zoro decides not to be useless. He digs in his pockets for the shopping list, though he knows he has everything. "That's the last of it. Gin should have picked up the rest."

"Who?"

"Follow closely and don't wander."

They arrive back at the ship the same time Gin does, a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. Gin nods to Zoro, who nods back. They follow Sanji up the gangplank.

Sanji settles single-mindedly into dinner prep while Zoro takes a nap by the galley door. Out of the corner of his eye, Sanji sees Gin thumbing through yesterday's Grand Line Times. After a while, he seems to give up on words like legitimacy and tribunal and practices instead with Sanji's shopping lists. The sun's just touched the peak of the volcano on its downward arc when Sanji finishes setting the table and kicks the chair out from under a lightly-snoring Zoro. Gin doesn't wait for their scuffle to end before serving himself.

"I got in touch with Nami-san through the den den mushi," Sanji says, once seated. He gingerly tongues at his split lip as he ladles stew into a bowl and slides it across the table to Zoro. "By then you had already been separated from her and Luffy. How the hell did that happen?"

"They got lost," says Zoro. His cheek is already mottling, the burst capillaries underneath angry and spidering, courtesy of Sanji's knee. "And I got tired of waiting around for them."

"You're still as delusional as you are green."

"When're you going to do something about that stupid dartboard on your face."

"If you two flip the table over," Gin warns, pulling his bowl closer.

A truce is reached, unspoken and easy as it always has been. The way Zoro eats has not changed either, his movements focused and economical, not bothering to wait between mouthfuls to reach for the rum. It's a terrifying sign of fondness when that flash of annoyance Sanji feels is overcome almost immediately by a flash of relief. It's been close to a year and Sanji worries sometimes. His crewmates, each with their own trajectories that Sanji can only wonder at, that easily may not cross Sanji's again.

"Bring some of this with us later," Zoro is saying.

Sanji nods.

It takes no time at all for the sun to disappear to the other side of the world and for the constellations to flicker on. With the dishes drying on the rack, Sanji ties a cloth around the small clay pot and shrugs on his coat. Zoro's waiting for him on shore with the lantern and Gin's already slipped off into town.

"How was it," Sanji asks. "Being the original three again."

Zoro falls into step next to him. "Quiet," he says.

Sanji lets it be. The lantern in Zoro's hand casts a impenetrable circle around them, beyond it a formless, moonless blue-black, and Sanji almost feels they are moving on a different plane. The walk is uphill but it's not a long one, the town still visible as a soft glow on the horizon, but entering the cemetery gates is like stepping over a demarcation line. The air turns oppressive, the cold suddenly blunt and pressing instead of needle sharp. Their circle of light wavers as Zoro switches hands, and Sanji almost kicks him for the scare.

"You still have that thing about cemeteries?"

Sanji rises to it. "Why bury the dead when you can set them free at sea?"

In way of answer, Zoro says, "Let's find her."

They follow the narrow path, squinting at the numbers carved into the ground until they come across the right lot, near a cluster of birch trees, their white trunks evocative of bone, bleached and bare. When he can, Sanji reads the names on the stones, the years belonging to the beloveds and the cherisheds, in our hearts, and with us always, and peace.

When they find her headstone, Sanji's chest fills at the sight of flowers, a day old at most, and of her name swept clean of snow. Death is so small, he thinks, is nothing before the enormity of your memory, the longing.

Under Zoro's instructions, Sanji unwraps the clay pot and sets it down as an offering. The stew is still hot enough for steam to rise in the night cold. The sight is a comfort for Sanji, whose earliest memory of the proof of his existence is the curling white heat of his own breath against the Northern air, a sign of a fire within that refuses to go out. He remembers that this cold, this relentless dark, at least, are familiar to him in some primordial sense, despite the bone-trees that tower and the stones in the ground he cannot bear to touch. He finds the air easier to swallow.

"Um," he stalls, shoving his hands into his pockets. "I'm sorry we didn't come back to see you sooner. I think about this stew you made us whenever it gets cold like this. Our captain demolished half the town square by accident when we were here, so that didn't leave too good an impression on you, I bet. But you fed us at your table anyway, and we were grateful. Still grateful. Shit, I don't know, am I doing this right?"

"Yeah," says Zoro. "Don't swear."

"Sorry."

"Tell her about Robin."

Sanji hesitates, is awkward. Tries, "That's right. Robin-chan was your favorite, wasn't she? She's fluent now in Old North. Did you know there's a whole island of speakers hidden away in the Grand Line? Robin-chan learned a lot from them. She got so excited about the grammar. That's just like Robin-chan, huh? She would have wanted to speak it with you again. She would have wanted you to know you weren't the last one. She'll be sad to hear you've passed."

Zoro nods when Sanji looks to him again. Zoro sets the lantern down between them and the encroaching dark shrinks his stature, so that it's easy for Sanji to imagine Zoro as he might have been before he met Luffy and before the ocean pulled him in. In East Blue, where there is a girl's name engraved in Eastern characters instead of the letters of the common tongue, and Zoro as still as her stone, his head bowed. Sanji looks up, the sky a thick sheet of stars, refusing to blink until his eyes start to water and he has drop his gaze, his throat tight.

He understands the want for fixity, so that love always knows where to go. He understands the fear of goodbye, the eternity of it like the vastness of the ocean that can turn cruel as dry, barren land. Above all else, he understands the need to be found. Here, she will always be found.

Zoro covers the pot and wraps it back up. Sanji picks up the lantern and they make their way back in silence.

On the ship, Zoro rustles in the drawer for two spoons. They sit across from each other in silence and share the stew, cold now and congealed. Sanji feels it fill his belly, heavy and dense, like dirt, but this is hallowed, is reverential. Nothing like those child-sized fistfuls of desperation, of empty.

viii.

The den den mushi emits a crackling noise in Nami's octave, its round eyes blinking rapidfire as it tries to stabilize the connection. Sanji waits, holding the mouthpiece against his lips, feeling his heartbeat knock.

"H--

"Sanji-kun, hello? Can you hear me?"

"Nami-swan!" he cries, his chest seizing. "It's been so long! Are those idiots taking care of you? Are you eating well?"

"They are." She laughs and Sanji feels like spinning. "And I am. Don't worry so much, Sanji-kun. How are you?"

"Better than I've been in days, now that I have your voice in my ears," he says, honest.

"That's nice, San--"

Their connection wavers, fizzles. When the den den mushi's eyes focus again, its irises are smaller.

"Sanji!" says Luffy's voice. "We lost Zoro on the last island! Can you find him for us?"

"What the hell, asshole, keep track of your own swordsman! I don't even know where you guys are."

After a brief commotion and a distant whine all warped and thinned out, Nami's voice returns with a crackle. "Sorry, Sanji-kun. You know how Zoro is, he--

"Under freezing waterfalls or something. Anyway, we were in North Blue, on the map it's the--

"But past the island where Franky lost his nose, remember, and--

"But don't worry, they say it's been dormant for a while. Did you get all that?"

Sanji, who had curled closer to the den den mushi in an attempt to salvage Nami's words from the static and hiss of a bad connection, straightens his spine. "Don't worry, Nami-swan! I'll figure it out!"

"I knew I could count on you, Sanji-kun! Call us again when you're closer. We miss you and we--"

The den den mushi sputters, then closes its eyes.

Sanji holds his breath, but there is nothing else.

Not for the first time, he wonders if their words still tremble somewhere in the telepathic web of the den den mushis, if all their little hellos and how are yous remain suspended above their heads in the atmosphere. If they sometimes get caught in the current of those invisible waves and are channeled again into another place, another time, a stray have you eaten, an untethered stay inside, it's going to storm soon. If maybe somewhere on a remote island in South Blue, or along the smooth ribbon of the Calm Belt, someone will turn on their den den mushi years later to hear Sanji's voice saying, hey old man, I've found it at last. If all of Sanji's professions of love still exist somehow in some form unseen, and will continue to exist, humming and warm, until the last of the den den mushis goes offline and the web unravels and all those words, all those I love yous after an eternity of being true, will drop like rain into the ocean, something apocalyptic.

Sanji wonders at Nami's last words, we miss you and we-- dropped into the distance yawning between them, those words rising and floating for now in some liminal space, alongside a ten-year-old we saw the sun today and a don't forget to work hard from last week, in the murmuring company of goodbyes and good news and come home soons. Not gone yet, only waiting, for another wave, another time, another place.

And Sanji finds it easier to press down on that feeling of wild loss. He lets the breath go.

"Hey," Gin calls down from the crow's nest. "I see land ahead."

"Change of plans," says Sanji, cradling the sleeping den den mushi in his palms. "We're going north."

x.

After the third time Sanji kicks Zoro in the shins for not pulling his weight around the ship, Zoro finally stomps over to the sink and rolls up his sleeves. Sanji snaps at Gin to sit down and drink his tea and eat a fucking cookie. Zoro complains that isn't fair and Sanji says he'd upend the teapot over Zoro's head if it weren't such a waste of good leaves. Gin takes a mild sip under Sanji's burning glare.

The truth is Sanji and Zoro have never learned how to get along. The other truth is Sanji is grateful to have another body on board so that he doesn't have to pace the short, narrow length of the deck alone while Gin is sleeping off the night watches. The still other truth, and the most reluctant one, is Sanji is grateful that body is Zoro.

"I'm going to try my hand at fishing," Gin says, placing his empty mug by Zoro's elbow. His voice is less raspy now than it had been this morning. "Thanks," he says on his way out.

The door shuts on Gin's back and Sanji turns to face Zoro's.

"Do you remember," says Sanji, and it seems that's how all his sentences start these days, "that island where it was night all the time, and instead of electricity or hydropower they had those water lamps with the little things inside them, what are they called--"

"Phytoplankton," Zoro supplies without having to pause.

"Right," says Sanji. "Your photosynthesizing brethren."

"I know where you sleep."

"Do you remember," Sanji continues, "the mayor told us, their city kept growing and they had to go further and further out to collect more phytoplankton and release the ones that had gone dark to recharge. And because of demand they had to do this at all times of the day, even when the sun was out in the rest of the world. And how they were reluctant to because they were afraid? Because the sun beyond their shores was strange to them, and they didn't know how to contend with it?"

"I remember," says Zoro. He grabs Gin's mug and starts to scrub.

"But can you imagine? Being afraid of sunlight, when the rest of world lives on it."

Sanji expects Zoro to say he isn't afraid of anything, so no. Sanji also expects Zoro to tell Sanji to get to the point already, or does he really have to subject Zoro to this blathering on top of menial labor.

Zoro shrugs. "The world's a big place."

Which means, what I can personally know and imagine is not the limit of possibility. Which means, there are millions I will never meet sharing this same air and sky, and the thought of all that existence is more striking than the fear of sunlight. Which means, it's all right if sometimes you still cannot bring yourself to sleep on land.

Sanji had expected that too. Just like he's come to expect Zoro to remember the multi-syllabic names of microscopic sea creatures and to know which sponge is for the dishware and which is for the pots and pans, Sanji can trust Zoro to hear the questions they are not brave enough to ask and to answer in a way that accommodates both their cowardice, lock it in the space between them so that the rest of the world may not know.

"It is," Sanji agrees. "But I've been thinking of going back to visit. I want to see how they're doing."

"I have nowhere else to be," says Zoro.

ii.

It was not rare for Robin to rise the same time Sanji did, before the sun, in the hours of still lightening dark. Sometimes she read at the table and other times she joined him in Sunny's kitchen, a hip against the countertop, a pair of hands warming around her coffee cup, another pair whisking eggs despite Sanji's goopy, heart-studded protests that a lady should not exert herself so early in the day.

During these times, because she was a woman of the world whom Sanji could only marvel at, Robin would talk about any number of things. Was Sanji aware of that university in North Blue whose folkloric studies department had deconstructed the tale of Norland the Liar in concert with news of the Strawhats' visit to Upper Yard to lambaste in no uncertain terms the foundation upon which nearly all of modern Northern society rests, that is, the outdated, ineffectual puppet monarchy with its strings pulled taut by the Gorosei?

Had Sanji read that article in the Grand Line Times about the resurgence of man-of-war colonies in the waters all along the Red Line and did he ever think nature would be one so heavy-handed with the symbolism?

Did Sanji know, on that island they last visited, the native inhabitants had become a minority in their own home, outnumbered by the people coming to see their city of eternal dark and by foreign workers hired to harvest light from the ocean, who did not fear the sun, and so to whom did the city really belong now?

What was Sanji's opinion on the proliferation of trafficking rings since the launch of the Great Age of Pirates, which broke open the sea for dreamers and adventure seekers, yes, but also for those desperate and trammeled on their home islands, and for those looking to exploit that desperation of others, and how do you reconcile the freedom of one with the enslavement of the other?

Sanji did not think she was looking for any form of meaningful insight from him. Surely whatever intelligent thoughts he had on these matters were already circumscribed by her own, which were continually evolving to encompass all that was knowable, deciphered from the Poneglyphs, wrenched from the jaws of the World Government, gleaned from what passed before her innumerable eyes.

Sanji, she said once, will they say it was enough, years from now, what Luffy did, what we did?

I don't know, he had answered. What does Robin-chan think?

He could already hear the rumbling from the men's quarters. Dawn had passed so quickly. One of Robin's hands placed the last butter knife in its place on the dining table, and she gave Sanji a smile, confessed she was still more attuned to dead voices and silent stone than to the stories of the living, still unfolding, their ends uncertain.

i.

Back at the beginning, when they were still five and Merry, a girl with a woolen cap and embroidered coat and burnished beads around her wrists had stood herself before them and said, "You're not welcome here."

She looked young and terrified. Her cheeks were red and wind-burnt and she had a rock in her fist. The sleeves of her coat were frayed and too short. By her patched elbow was a dark-eyed boy with a falcon perched on his shoulder.

"We're not here to cause trouble. We just came through Reverse Mountain and want a place to rest," Nami had said, sweet and soft. Not two minutes ago she was threatening to keelhaul Zoro for dropping the anchor into a coral reef. Nami possessed the sort of multifacetedness and quick-turn tenacity that Sanji adored.

Nami's hair, Sanji remembers, was still short then, the cut of it straight and severe. But she had been smiling and when Nami smiled, you couldn't say no.

"No," said the girl, impervious. "No pirates."

Luffy took a step forward, interest already diverted, and the rock flew from the girl's fist to hit Luffy between the eyes. Luffy stopped and turned to her and the girl looked like her knees would give out.

Sanji knew Luffy was not above hitting children. He understood Luffy did not have a sense of right or wrong, only us or them, and this girl with her single rock and wet eyes was irrefutably them. Sanji did not trust Zoro to stop Luffy. Sanji knew that Usopp would not be able to.

Nami got to Luffy before Sanji could. Multifacted, tenacious, perfect Nami. She pulled Luffy back behind her, her voice calm over the screech of his protests, "We're sorry. We'll leave now."

Luffy had been herded back onto the ship. Before Sanji turned to follow, he saw the boy's falcon take flight.

Usopp had wondered aloud, "Marine-sympathizers, maybe?"

Sanji shook his head. "No Marine flag."

The boy's falcon had followed them as they rounded the island and hovered until they turned back out to sea.

Sanji does not think Luffy is above hitting children, even now. But Luffy had never truly understood. Luffy had never looked back once. And now that he’s crowned, Luffy is even harder to say no to.

xi.

Usopp's letter says, I wrote to the restaurant but Zeff wrote back to say you had left so I found a den den mushi to call Nami and she said you were on your way to pick up Zoro in North Blue where they had lost him, so after you do that, can you come get Chopper and me, because we've been stuck here for weeks and Nami says we're too out of the way, and we're so bored, please Sanji-kun, you're our only hope.

The return address isn't familiar on paper, but Sanji finds the name of the island on Nami's map and when they arrive a week later, Sanji recognizes its shores immediately: the towering, yellowed skeleton of an ancient leviathan rising from the black sand beach, stark, dwarfing even the mountains further inland, into which stone cities are carved.

They find Usopp and Chopper languishing in an outdoor cafe across from a stall selling animal teeth strung into amulets and charms. There is a pile of crumpled napkins next to Usopp's glass. One of them opens up just enough for Sanji to catch a glimpse of an ear, thoughtfully sketched, as if from memory.

Chopper looks up first. He jumps onto the table and knocks over his glass, thankfully empty.

"You came!" he cries.

Usopp's pen slips, leaving a gaping tear across the hull of the ship he's drawing. Sanji has only a second to mourn her seaworthiness before Usopp has his arms wrapped around Sanji and Zoro both. Sanji gets a mouthful of hair and next to him, Zoro, his arms pinned, is trying to shake Chopper off his face.

"Sanji-kun," Usopp wails. "Zoro-chan."

It's Zoro's muffled how dare you that finally dislodges something that's been stuck in Sanji's throat since they've docked, a clustered, thrumming feeling crowding his chest that's only grown since spotting Chopper's antlered head and the black cloud of Usopp's hair. The laughter that comes startles even Sanji himself, weakens his knees, shakes him, and it's embarrassing, how Usopp goes from leaning on him to holding him up, how Zoro alone is keeping them all from toppling into the street even as he tries to pry Chopper off. But Sanji cannot stop.

A vulnerable sort of fondness overtakes him when, later, he is counting the crescent moons Usopp's fingers buried along his wrist, the hoofed-shaped imprints on his pant leg that will need to be ironed out; a cut-open sort of fondness, that need to give and give and give until he gives out.

xii.

"It's getting crowded on the ship anyway," says Gin.

Sanji stops to grab a shop flyer from the young boy handing them out in front of the antiques store. Swipes the ballpoint pen Usopp had devised for him and Nami from his breast pocket, and shoves both towards Gin, who has to put down the giant wok Sanji had just haggled from the woman at the market, right in the middle of the street.

"Write my name," Sanji demands.

Gin looks at him like he's snapped but Sanji motions him to get on with it. Gin sighs and grudgingly puts pen to paper, angling it so that Sanji can’t see. The self-consciousness is palpable as the afternoon crowd parts around them, and Sanji glares at anyone who stares too long. The parcel of fresh cut meat he's carrying will keep for a while longer, wrapped in dried kelp.

"Here," says Gin, a bit aggressively. He flips the flyer around so that Sanji can read his own name in Gin's elementary script, the S with a tail that's just a bit too long, like Gin hesitated about whether it was facing the right way, the J that's really just an impatient hook.

Sanji nods. "You don't have an excuse now."

Gin rubs at the back of his neck. He's embarrassed, Sanji can tell and Sanji is struck by an overwhelming affection.

"No promises," Gin warns. "That kind of stuff, I'm no good at it."

Sanji takes up the wok and throws it over his shoulder so he's armored like a tortoise. They resume the descent from the mountain city down to the shore. The skeleton of the leviathan looks no smaller from this height; they are just level with the crown of the skull. If he squints, he can make out Usopp and Chopper's silhouettes darting between the ribs. He hears Gin fold up the flyer and follow.

"Make the effort," says Sanji. "I want to hear from you."

"Ok," says Gin. "Thanks, Sanji."

"What, not gonna call me 'Sanji-san' anymore?" he needles.

"I had to reevaluate after I discovered you owned a pink panda apron."

If Sanji were a person of weaker conviction, he'd have swung the wok right into Gin's face. As he is an upstanding gentleman, he settles for kicking Gin down the next flight of stone steps, past a man hocking magic carpets and a child drawing fish on the walls in bright red chalk.

"What do you know, asshole," he hollers after Gin's flailing form. "Doskoi Panda is brand name!"

xiii.

Usopp will say Sanji is cornering him but really Sanji just wants to have a chat. Sanji doesn't think his resting face is cause for alarm like Zoro's is, and he is offended that Usopp seems to think so. Sanji thinks he has a good face. A little narrow, but that's easy enough to overlook when he smiles, and he likes that his smile is so wide. He likes that his eyes are heavy-lidded, like he's half-dreaming always. He likes how well glasses sit on the bridge of his nose. He likes the line of his jaw beneath his beard. He likes that his eyebrows tend to draw up instead of down, curiosity before suspicion.

Sanji's spent a lot of time looking at his face in the mirror, mapping out his features, how they contribute to his projection of self, and he thinks he is allowed that, to make up for ages ten through twelve when he had been too afraid to, in case his reflection showed his cheeks haven't filled out as much as he thought they must have. Thinks he's earned the right to be a little vain after years trying to reconcile bird bones with the weight of all he wanted to carry. Thinks he worked hard to finally accept this body he calls his own, the only one he has, and to think it worthy.

He demands, "Why do you always look so terrified to see me, like I want your bones for soup."

"Well," says Usopp. "Guilty conscience, probably?"

Sanji bites back a sigh. He must be losing his edge, or maybe Usopp is getting better at sneaking around. "What'd you take?"

"A bag of flour," Usopp confesses. "I hid it with my bug collection because I knew you wouldn't look there."

Sanji's eye starts to twitch. "I don't want to know what you needed it for. Next time, you can just ask me."

"Flour bombs," Usopp supplies anyway. "And really? You'd let me have it if I ask?"

"No," says Sanji. "And you should know why by now."

Usopp's mouth opens, closes. He looks down.  "Yeah, I guess," he says.

Guilt is not Sanji’s intention, not when they’ve only just been reunited. He doesn’t want to always play the bad marine. "I don't do this to be mean, you know,” he says, feeling suddenly weary.

"Oh, I--" Usopp puts his hands up. "I know, Sanji. I didn't think you were."

Smoke rises steadily from the cigarette between his fingers, white ivy winding around an invisible column. Zoro's been asleep in the crow's nest for the better part of the morning, and Sanji let Chopper have the galley to sort through his herbs. Gin was so quiet when he was with them that it took Sanji brewing one cup of tea too many just an hour ago to remember he wasn't there anymore.

Sanji takes a seat on the deck across from Usopp's haphazard pile of pipes, loose gears, sheets of corrugated steel that look like they were stripped from someone's roof, and safety pins. He knows Usopp sees it differently, but as far as Sanji can tell, it's all junk. He can't even begin to imagine where Usopp had salvaged half of it, if explosions were involved, or why it's worth carting around from island to island.

"I'm making a prototype for the retractable shield I want to attach to Kabuto," Usopp explains without prompting. "Doesn't make sense to run for cover in the middle of battle all the time, right?"

"It's a good idea," Sanji agrees. "Though I don't know how you make any sense of all this."

"You think I understand how you come up with any of the meals you cook for us? Let's call it even."

Sanji blows contemplative smoke rings above their heads. They're harder to see against the still bright sky, but Usopp's eyes track them all the same. After the last one stretches itself into nothingness, Usopp looks to Sanji again and grins.

"I'll buy my own flour next time, so it won't mess up your inventory," Usopp says, pulling free the largest piece of steel and setting it aside. Sanji’s afraid Usopp will cut his palms open if he’s not careful. "It's really good to have you around again, Sanji."

Sanji grunts, almost bites through the filter.

They say you shouldn’t let your own self-worth be so tied up in another person’s appreciation of you. That people can outgrow people and to be careful where you plant your roots. Make sure you can survive distance and silence, long nights and severance. There will be moments when you are necessarily lonely, as you regrow those parts of yourself you had excised to give away and then lost.

You, he had read once, long ago, when he was still young. But for now, they say practice frugality; the you that you are now is still finite. Remember not to give away too much: the red mass of your heart, a hole blown through your palm, your shoulder where a hand had rested, your wide eyes.

It’s likely sound advice, but Sanji has never known how to be sparing with himself. It's a lesson Zeff never learned and did not know how to teach, and that makes Sanji's heart hurt. But Sanji finds that, ever since Luffy crashed through their roof and smashed their ship to plywood, there is no need for such caution. They have been so patient with his clumsiness, the girls with his fawning and the boys with his scowling; they continue to harbor all the pieces of him he had carved out to give. They've kept him for their own. He has not grown back. He is riddled with triumphant hollows. Look. How else do you count love?

Good to see you haven't grown fat and slow, Zoro had said. I haven't been able to give you a check-up for a while, Chopper had noted when he left the galley. And Usopp--

"What are you making us for lunch?"

He cooked and seasoned the rice early this morning and left it out to cool, has slabs of sashimi grade elephant tuna and lion salmon resting in the fridge, the horseradish already grated, the ginger already pickled.

It’s been a long time since Teikou. In a few months, Touou and Kaijou will be behind them too. In a few months, they will be all their own for the first time in all the time they’ve known each other, no numbers emblazoned on their backs, their chests bare of kanji. Daiki had lost track of the years, between tournaments and weekend pick-up games and this something with Kise that has been growing steadily underfoot despite distance like salted earth, this something that does not come as a revelation.

But now, in anticipation of spring, he finds there is still so much he didn't think he didn't know. Small revelations crouched behind questions like what they will be come March, when it no longer matters that they were Touou’s ace, Kaijou’s Kise, Teikou’s miracles. What shape they take off the court. If Kise will still follow. What Daiki has to do so Kise will.

That moment of suspension, of air hang before free fall, that follows questions like, "Where are you going?"

He bounces the basketball against the pavement, to ground himself. Kise doesn't look up from his phone.

"Didn't I tell Aominecchi," Kise says. His hoodie is only half zipped up, the trenches above his collarbones deep and dark.

"I never asked," Daiki says. Shouldn't have to, is what he means.

"Sorry," says Kise. "I must have forgotten."

The ball doesn't quite reach Daiki's hand on the next bounce, and he has to bend to scoop it back up. The thing is, anyone could tell you, Kise doesn't forget. Kise never forgoes an opportunity for attention if he can help it and even then, only after he's exhausted every avenue of communication. This seems the kind of thing Kise'd set into everyone's phone calendars, to remind them how desirable, bankable, untouchable he is and don't you wish you'd been nicer to him. But Daiki is only hearing about it now and Kise is not meeting his eyes. The light of Kise's phone screen illuminates the lines of his palm, and Daiki is trying to remember the last thing Kise mailed him, what it was about, did it hint to the oceans Daiki might now have to cross if he wants Kise to look at him again.

Daiki starts to dribble the ball again in earnest because otherwise he might throw it at Kise’s head. Satsuki is always telling him to learn how to use his words, but his hands are fluent where his tongue still isn’t. Kise slides his gaze to him, finally.

Kise can read him because Kise's taken the time to learn how. Kise can translate. After a moment, cold and long, Kise takes a breath.

Daiki cuts him off. "You can do whatever you want."

"I know that," says Kise, measured and slow, dismantling Daiki as if he has every right to what's inside.

Kise takes the last few steps to Daiki, who has stopped to wait under a street lamp, and doesn't say anything else. Instead, his thumbs resume their tracks over his phone. Daiki glances between the string of sparkling emoji on the screen and Kise’s expression, smoothed over now, and distant. Daiki tucks the basketball under his arm. They move from under the light.

“Aominecchi is going to be fine,” Kise says at last. He matches his steps effortlessly to Daiki's. A car drives by, headlights glaring, and their shadows blacken then fade.

Daiki's knuckles ache, a phantom bruise.

"Whatever," Daiki says, just to say something. He grabs Kise’s elbow, steers him around a square of wet cement. “Watch where you’re going, will you. Who’re you sending mail to that can’t wait until after we’ve got food?”

It smells like snow soon and neither of them are dressed warm enough. The sweat from their earlier game seems to have frozen on Daiki’s skin, like if he flexed his shoulders the sheet of ice would crack all down his spine.

Kise puts his phone away and shoves his hands deep into his pockets. Daiki’s knuckles are going red from cold around Kise’s elbow. He doesn't let go and Kise doesn't answer the question.

--

The next morning, he wakes up just as the seventeenth message from Kise in under an hour pings into his inbox, about feeling miserable and hideous and missing an interview today and how could Aominecchi let this happen. It looks to Daiki like the crying emojis will flood his phone and then his room, his life. But Daiki wonders what Kise's expression is now, behind his phone on the other end, if it would be smoothed over and distant, like it had been under the street lamp.

Even if so, there must be dark circles under his eyes as deep as Daiki’s. The slant of his mouth still devastating. It's reassuring to think this.

Satsuki flips his blinds open and the sun stripes across Daiki's bed.

"Is that Ki-chan," she says. "What does he want so early in the day?"

His phone goes off again, as if on cue. Daiki scowls and shoves it under his pillow.

“You’re going to summon him,” he says, closing his eyes against the great injustices of life. “And he doesn't like you calling him that.”

He hears her huff. He cracks an eye open to see her with her hands on her hips, trying not to laugh.

“We’re manly men," he explains. "So stop with the -chan."

She does laugh then, unapologetically. He wishes Tetsu would emerge from the shadows right now, somehow, so she would show some shame.

“Go away,” he grumbles, "if you're just going to be annoying."

She takes up her backpack, promises to come by again later after cram school and dinner with a friend whose name is unfamiliar to Daiki. She tells him not to mope, try to do something productive, you'll be an adult soon.

Soon but not for a few months yet. She's been ready all her life, he knows. By necessity more than anything else, having to look after him, wiping away his snot when they were younger, chasing him down from school rooftops, making sure he at least makes a perfunctory effort with his homework. She didn't argue when he told her he wasn't taking any entrance exams and had turned down every recruiter that showed up at Touou and hung up on those who somehow found his number. She understood that he had come full circle, back to where he has always been happiest, asphalt courts and chain-link fences and hoops missing their nets, none of that slick and shine. Daiki takes this as a sign that he is making the right choice. She would take it a personal affront to her honor if he were to sabotage himself now, after all her hard work.

But last week he had asked her, "What do I do now?" and she had said, "You'll always have me. But other than stopping you from inadvertently killing yourself, I'm not going to tell you what to do anymore."

He takes that to heart. He has been unfair to her for far too long, still goes to her empty-handed and expects her to prop him back up. Now, more than anyone else, she makes him want to be good, if only so she could stop having to split her energies between him and the universes of possibilities that have been waiting patiently for years at her heel.

Still, it's been difficult. These days, he's rediscovering how susceptible he is to loneliness. He hears the key turning in the lock downstairs and then it’s quiet except the distant humming of the fridge that needs replacing. He holds out for another seven minutes before sending the mail.

--

“Aominecchi is horrible."

“Stop whining. You don’t even look that bad." He pulls Kise in, and Kise comes with the cold wrapped around him like an aura, so that the hairs on Daiki's arm rise.

In response, Kise coughs long and wracking into his scarf and something strange like guilt spiders into Daiki's chest.

“Well you don’t look it,” Daiki says defensively. He releases Kise's elbow and holds out his hand.

Kise gives him the bag of Maji burgers, like he’s paying a toll. The look he gives Daiki would be withering if his eyes weren't watering so much. He shuffles past Daiki into the living room to topple over onto the couch, his booted feet sticking out over the armrest, his face squishing against the cover of a Mai-chan mag on one of the cushions. His gym bag drops to the floor with a defeated thump.

Something in Daiki recoils. “What makes you think we're playing basketball today,” he says. It comes out sounding accusatory, though he knows it's an unfair question.

Kise knows it too. Kise rolls over to look at him. “Because." He stops.

“We don't always just play basketball. We do other things too. And you're sick, idiot."

Kise watches him, but Daiki keeps his hands still. After a moment, Kise shrugs and the Mai-chan mag crumples under his shoulder.

“We do,” says Kise, "always play basketball."

“We don't."

“I like playing basketball,” Kise insists, and Daiki catches the exasperation sharpening his voice. “Why is Aominecchi suddenly getting so worried? I never said basketball wasn't enough. It is.”

“I'm not worried," Daiki lies, because he's pretty sure Kise is lying too.

“Ok, Aominecchi."

Kise's nose is red and his lips are cracked, but when he blinks up at Daiki, it's calculating in that way Daiki has come to recognize, like Kise is deciding if he's worth the effort after all, just short of a condemnation. Off the court, it seems more and more like the only way Kise ever looks at him. It's not unwarranted; Daiki can't think what else he has to offer either that isn't a good game.

But that doesn't mean he isn't pissed off at Kise for concluding the same. Again there is that old ache in his knuckles. Daiki remembers the bruise from Haizaki’s jaw and how Kise had looked at Haizaki exactly like this too before he let Haizaki walk, before Daiki had to take Haizaki down so he'd stop coming back, thinking he could still be worth Kise's time.

Last night with their shadows puddled at their feet, Daiki doesn't know what Kise found when he dismantled him, measured and slow, but he had let Daiki take his elbow, had paid for their meal, begged to play again soon, wouldn't stop waving until Daiki’s train pulled out of the station. But after all these years, Daiki's learned to read Kise too. Knows Kise has looked at him and thought about putting him to rest. Knows Kise continues to let him walk instead, expecting him to come back with something more to offer.

"You look so stupid," Daiki fires. The guilt in his chest goes out. "All those layers. You look fat."

“Aominecchi is mean," Kise sighs, sounding weary, which Daiki doesn't know how to respond to. "I'm cold. Treat your guests better."

The anger staggers and Daiki tosses the burgers onto the coffee table. When he stomps back in with a blanket, Kise has the mags stacked by the foot of the couch and his boots lined neatly in the hall next to his gym bag. Kise doesn't seem too concerned to have Daiki towering over him again.

Daiki snaps the blanket so that it billows out full and flat, and lets it settle over Kise's head. Kise pulls at it and reemerges with his hair alive with static.

The couch is barely big enough for the both of them once they stretch out and get comfortable, and Tokyo's winter still clings to the fibers of Kise's coat. But then Kise shucks his layers onto the floor and wraps the blanket around his shoulders and there is extra warmth from their limbs overlapping. Daiki shoves a burger into Kise’s hands, already cooling.

“But these are for Aominecchi.“

“Eat what you what,” Daiki snaps, but the anger doesn't quite crest the way he wants it to and he feels clumsy instead. He wrung from himself all these things he wanted to say, to prove, but didn't know how, and now they lay mangled everywhere for him to stumble over.

"You're not fat," he tries.

Kise rolls his eyes, which makes Daiki feel a little better, but Kise puts the burger down anyway and reaches for the remote.

Next to him, Kise flips silently through the channels and Daiki thinks of Kise standing before the counter at Maji with his oversized scarf and woolen mittens, of Kise remembering, ah, Aominecchi hates pickles in his burgers, of Kise thinking of him and how he will probably want to play basketball and it was good that Kise had brought his change of clothes and his own shampoo because the kind Aominecchi uses is too chemical, and of Kise wondering if maybe today he will win, if maybe today he will be good enough, and of Kise shouldering his bag and walking the long, dark distance to Daiki's house with this grease-soaked bag of burgers and fries he's not allowed to have but brought anyway because Daiki wanted him to, came through winter's early dark because Daiki wanted him to, will do everything Daiki wants, it seems, except stay.

"You didn't have to come just because I said," Daiki says over the crinkling of his wrapper, laying down an awkward truce. "You always do."

"Not because I'm nice or anything." Kise shrugs. "I just want to make sure Aominecchi will miss me."

"You really going to leave?"

Kise stops on a commercial for a new BB cream. The girl on the TV is framed by flowers, pink and white, and she's smiling soft, her hands a V cradling her face.

“She was part of my agency," Kise says. He puts the remote down. “That's a big brand. She’s doing really well, huh?”

“You want to be in commercials?”

“I don’t know." Then, as an afterthought, “Sorry, Aominecchi."

“You’re not sorry,” says Daiki. He thinks about it. “But you shouldn't be sorry, anyway.”

“No, I shouldn't,” Kise agrees. His shoulder is bony against Daiki’s. “But I'm sick and I don’t want to talk about it now.”

--

They wake up to the smell of something burning. There’s a crick in Daiki’s neck and his leg is pin-prickly from Kise’s knee pressing into a nerve. He limps into the kitchen to find Satsuki reheating soup. Kise knocks into him from behind.

Even as she’s scolding them for being stupid and irresponsible, she sounds fond instead of angry. Kise looking miserable has that effect on people, Daiki learns. She’s going to let them off easy.

"I can't believe you were going to play basketball," she says. "In this weather. When Ki-chan is sick.”

"We weren't," Daiki says.

"I saw Ki-chan's gym bag in the hall."

“That’s his overnight stuff. He’s staying over.”

Satsuki stares at him, her you offend me if you think I’m going to buy that face. Kise discreetly empties his bowl of soup into the sink. He does not deign to do the same for Daiki’s.

“My parents are away,” Daiki reminds her. “So it’s fine. And your parents are fine with it too, right?”

Kise tucks his hair behind his ears. “They don’t say no to me,” he offers.

“There,” Daiki decides.

Satsuki covers her eyes with a hand and sighs. She doesn't try to dissuade them, which at the least means she doesn't expect Daiki and Kise to kill each other, and that's good enough for Daiki.

--

Satsuki might be wrong for once in her life, because the next morning Daiki comes out of the bathroom shivering and murderous after Kise used up all the hot water for his shower. Daiki goes to strangle him only to find him at the kitchen table smearing something on his face using his phone camera as a mirror.

“Do you mind,” he grouses. “I eat there.”

“Aominecchi could use some of this too,” Kise says evenly, blending out whatever paste is under his eyes. “Though Momoicchi doesn’t have anything in here for your skin tone.”

“Where is she? I don’t smell any burning.”

“She dropped this off for me and went to cram school. She left some more homemade soup, but I poured it out.”

“She still has way too much time on her hands,” Daiki mutters.

“I guess because she doesn’t have to drag you to practice anymore,” says Kise, zipping up Satsuki’s pink cosmetics bag.

The bags under his eyes and the splotchy red of his cheeks are miraculously gone. Daiki still probably looks like shit. Kise smiles at him anyway. “Has Aominecchi been lonely without Momoicchi around?”

Daiki scoffs.

“Let's go eat something,” Kise says. “I’m starving.”

"Ok," says Daiki. “Leave your bag here.”

"I'm coming back?"

"Where else do you have to be?"

--

It's past a reasonable hour for breakfast, so Kise shells out for shabu shabu and they kick at each other's feet under the table as they order enough food for a party of five. Halfway through the meal, Kise gives up battling Daiki for the meat, after his chopsticks fall into the boiling broth for the third time, and settles for just enoki with his rice, until Daiki gives in to the internal nagging that's borrowed Satsuki's voice and spends the rest of the time fishing out slices of beef to place in Kise's bowl. Through the steam rising from the pot, Kise gives him an unreadable look that Daiki chooses to ignore.

They're waiting for the bill and Kise's tapping away on his phone again when Daiki remembers all the questions he has left to ask. Sated and warm, Daiki finds the room to be reckless.

"Why do you hang around so much if you don't even like me?"

"What do you mean." Kise looks up, surprised. "I like Aominecchi. Why do you think I don't? I'm here, aren't I?"

"Because I made you." Or worse, "Or because you feel sorry for me."

"I wouldn't waste my time like that," Kise counters smoothly, direct. His mouth curves easily. “I like you. The thing I like most about you is that you like me."

“Do you even hear yourself,” Daiki says. "And what about my basketball?"

“I guess that’s second.”

"How do you get away with being such a self-centered brat?"

"Because Aominecchi doesn't mind."

"How long will you be away?"

"So many questions," Kise says. He takes the bill when it comes. The owner is relieved to see them go.

Outside, Kise turns to him expectantly, as if to ask, what now?

Daiki doesn’t know, only that there are these questions that Kise won't answer and the clock is running down fast. Touou never did get to play Kaijou again in the tournaments after their first year, and Daiki wonders if that has something to do with this reluctant standstill, because Daiki never got the chance to explain things to Kise in the only context that seemed suitable, never got another chance to offer his hand, could only bluster and throw basketballs at Kise's head and demand Kise buy him food and take Kise home on the weekends.

"What do you want to do," he offers instead.

“We do always just play basketball,” Kise says after a while staring silent at the slow-scrolling wisps of grey cloud. His breath goes up in smoke. Then he seems to take pity on Daiki and amends, “Like I said, that’s enough, Aominecchi.”

“It’s not,” says Daiki, understanding now that it never would have been enough, despite Kise letting him believe for so long that it was.

--

So Daiki pays for their movie tickets and thinks he’s being very gallant. He even lets Kise pick the movie. He ignores the smile Kise gives him, because it’s more bemused than Daiki would have liked.

“Thank you,” Kise says, in English. He’s been practicing his th sound; it's no longer so sibilant. Maybe he’s been taking lessons from Kagami.

America, then, Daiki thinks, or Europe somewhere. An ocean or a continent away.

Daiki grunts. “You’re paying for your own snacks.”

“Stingy,” Kise whines, but it's token.

Kise gets the extra-large tub of popcorn, and only takes a handful before handing it off to Daiki as they sit down.

“If not commercials, maybe you want to be in movies,” Daiki thinks out loud, as the lights dim and the previews come on. The theater is empty except for them and two guys with mohawks three rows in front.

“I would look good up there, wouldn't I,” says Kise, musing. He pulls his scarf loose, now that he doesn't have to hide his face. "Admit it.”

“There’s nothing to admit,” Daiki says. “Didn't I just suggest it?”

“Well, if Aominecchi thinks so, I’ll have to consider it," Kise says, his voice lilting, more sly than genuinely pleased.

"Your English is still atrocious though, so you better stick to Japanese movies."

Lime-Mohawk yells at them to shut the fuck up.

“Aominecchi,” Kise whispers, sinking lower into his seat. “Don’t.”

The popcorn is already sailing its perfect trajectory before Daiki registers it left his hand. It lands on the guy's mohawk, where it stays perched like a crunchy, well-trained pet. The guy doesn't notice.

“Wait, wait,” says Kise, reaching for the tub in Daiki's lap. “I want to try.”

Between the two of them, there’s a total of six pieces of popcorn perched regally atop Lime-Mohawk's 'do before he realizes, and only because Kise overshot and the last piece tumbled into his lap.

Daiki shoves a handful of popcorn into his mouth as he watches Magenta try to keep Lime from vaulting over three rows of seats in a single leap that would put Kagami to shame. The movie screen back-lights the two so that they are nothing more than flailing silhouettes, a double-headed eldritch horror that would probably net a sweet amount of EXP if this were a boss fight. Kise covers his face with his scarf.

"Let's go," Kise hisses. Daiki can barely hear him over the movie's opening score, which seems to be one continuous crescendo, and Lime hollering abuse at them.

"What, you don't think we can take him?"

"I don't want to take him."

"But I want to watch the movie," Daiki says, but Kise jabs him viciously in the side before standing and jostling Daiki out of his seat.

Daiki doesn't get to hear what Lime has planned after the curb-stomping because an onscreen explosion obliterates the rest of his sworn vendetta and then the door swings shut behind them, the silence dropping like a wall. Daiki takes Kise's wrist and hustles them down the hall and around the corner.

“There was still one clinging to his hair,” Kise says when they've made it to the relative safety of the lobby with its many eyewitnesses. He's obviously fighting to keep the corners of his mouth from turning up. He coughs instead.

"You need to work on your aim," Daiki says, distracted.

The column in front of the concession stand is plated with mirrors. This is what they look like off the court. Come March, without their uniforms, they will be just this. Too tall for civilian life, like they've overgrown. Crumpled jeans on Daiki and the tail of Kise's belt peeking out from under his hoodie. Even just standing, they are unable to keep still, Kise swinging his arm absently, with Daiki's fingers still around his wrist, and Daiki's arm swings too. Kise's lips look rough, starting to get chapped again, and Daiki has absurd hat hair that's only made worse when he runs his other hand through it. They don't look like they could fit together. They don't look like they know any better.

"Throwing popcorn at punks doesn't count as basketball, right," says Daiki.

Kise beams at Daiki's reflection. “Aominecchi tried. Let's go back now.”

--

Daiki's grandma once told him about the specter of rain haunting her bones, making them ache, how she could look up at a beautiful, blue sky and know not to trust it. Kise is like that, is his own storm. Kise stretches, languorous, and Daiki's knuckles start to throb again; he's learned to read it like a premonition.

Kise ruins everything. It's just what he does. He's as good at it as he is at everything else.

"You don't need to go to university to become a police officer," Kise says. He's lying on his front, phone retrieved, taking up most of the bed and scrolling through the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department website. "They have an exam for high school graduates. You'll just have to go through extra training."

Daiki covers his face with the pillow. "Do we have to talk about this now," he groans.

"Aominecchi should think about it. I'll come see you in your police box all the time."

"Liar," says Daiki, muffled. "You won't be here."

"I'll visit."

"Don't treat me like a child."

"Maybe if Aominecchi stops acting like one. I said I'll visit, so I will." Measured and slow, but electric now too.

They fight like this all the time, explosive in a way that's contained, so that it reverberates inside them for days. Too large not to get in each other's way and too stubborn and selfish to cede ground.

Kise should have said no to him and stayed home yesterday. Daiki shouldn't have been so stupid. It's been a long time since Teikou but what's he meant to do with all those years if Kise's just going to leave and not tell Daiki where he's going, trying to go where he can't be found.

"You know what, why don't you just punch me in the face already so I know to stop trying." Something to tell him to give up instead of letting Kise have first shower, filling Kise's bowl at lunch, paying for a movie they didn't even get to watch, not playing basketball all day.

"Aominecchi is not listening."

"Forget it." Daiki throws the pillow at the light switch. "Sleep."

Daiki refuses to open his eyes to see the expression on Kise's face. Kise doesn't move for a long while, but when he finally does, the relief blooms quick and expansive through Daiki's throat.

The basketball court has long been too small to hold them both, but Daiki’s bed has always been just big enough, even if he’s shoved against the wall and Kise’s at risk of tumbling right off. But in the past year they've done this enough to know how to fit their still stretching limbs together without knocking out any teeth or boxing any ears or kneeing each other in the groin.

“You’re definitely going to snore and keep me up all night,” Kise whispers, after they've successfully negotiated space.

It's a new moon tonight and there are never stars this close to the city. Through the blinds, the light from the street lamp outside Daiki's window flickers every few minutes. Kise smells like toothpaste and nothing else.

“You snore too," he says, so that Kise will look at him.

“I do not!” Kise squawks. He coughs and it shakes the whole bed.

“Uh huh,” says Daiki before the silence resettles.

"Aominecchi's too warm, it's so uncomfortable. Go sleep on the couch."

"Go to hell, Kise."

"Mean."

Fingers curl around the hem of Daiki's shirt and Daiki falls asleep listening to the creak of Kise's eyelids as Kise blinks up at the ceiling. In the morning, Kise has a shoot. He will be gone before Daiki wakes.

--

Spring comes anyway.

It's chillier than the last; Daiki remembers because this time last year, Kaijou had won their first Winter Cup against Shuutoku with Kise benched in the fourth quarter, his leg finally giving out after Rakuzan had run him into the ground the day before, and for months after, because it was already warm enough, Kise would take his free weekends at Daiki's street court in Daiki's t-shirts and do nothing but watch Daiki shoot hoops. Daiki had thought Kise was going to cry for not making the winning basket or something, but at 00:00, Kise had never looked so content in his life.

Satsuki's still wearing her cardigan under her blazer at their graduation ceremony and has to keep holding her skirt down to keep it from flying up every time a remnant of winter wind snakes through Touou's courtyard. Ryou's just finished prostrating himself for burdening Daiki with a farewell/congratulatory/apology bento the size of Daiki's head when Satsuki nudges him and tells him his phone is buzzing in his bag.

"Oh, Aominecchi. I'm surprised. You never pick up."

Daiki shrugs and trusts Kise to hear the gesture somehow.

"Congratulations," Kise prompts dutifully.

"Yeah, congratulations," Daiki parrots. "Have all your buttons been torn off by girls yet?"

"Aominecchi thinks highly of me."

“Yeah, well." He clears his throat. "Forget them and go out with me."

“No." Kise laughs right into Daiki's ear. "If I had a girlfriend like you, I'd go broke just trying to keep you from going hungry!"

It's been months since he's seen Kise. Daiki grins despite himself.

"I'm going to have a going away party," Kise says, smiling volumes. "Well, a get-together. Sometime next month. I'll mail you the details. I haven't told everyone yet, that I'm leaving. Do you think they'll be angry? Well, I'm sure Akashicchi already knows, and he's the scariest, so it'll probably be ok. If you're listening right now, I'm sorry, Akashicchi." There is a pause in which Daiki can only assume Kise is bowing to Akashi's omnipresence. "Anyway, you should come tell me how much you'll miss me. And you should buy me something nice."

"You never told me where you're going."

"That's because I want you to keep looking for me, obviously."

Obviously. Daiki feels the shift, their standstill crumbling to an end, all in the way Kise says "you," how Kise sounds closer than he had in months, reaching across salted earth to offer a hand.

"If the get-together's not the day before my police exam, I'll come."

"Oh," says Kise.

"What?"

"No. Nothing. That's good that you're taking it. Really."

Kise pauses, holds his breath. Daiki waits for the exhale. It comes in a rush.

"You know, Aominecchi, I was really conflicted! I thought about staying. I thought maybe I wanted to stay. Those last two days I spent with you I was looking for a reason and when you didn't have one to give me, I was so angry. That was unfair, and I'm sorry. But even today, I still can't think of a single reason why I should stay. Not for Kurokocchi or my Kaijou juniors, not even to see you become a police officer. Are you mad?"

"No," and it's the truth. In the months living with Kise's absence and grappling with his own pride that kept him from reaching out, Daiki had taken the fact that Kise was no longer going to follow, and sanded it down until it was dull and bruising instead of cutting sharp, until it was small enough to contend with and live with and finally make routine as his own name.

Behind him, Satsuki is trying unsuccessfully to get the underclassmen on the team to stop weeping. Promises them Daiki will be back to yell at them all the time, and she will too, if she can find time between classes at Todai and smashing glass ceilings. "Don't leave us," they wail anyway.

"I was a little bit ashamed," Kise admits softly, and Daiki has to cover his other ear to hear him properly. "Because everyone knows I don't care too much about modelling. Except Midorimacchi, who thinks I really get off on seeing my face in magazine spreads or something--"

"Don't you?"

"All right, a little," Kise concedes. "But going abroad for something I don't really care about, that makes me seem aimless-- or like not a serious person. Right? That's not good. I don't know. I don't know why I won't just stay."

"Go," Daiki tells him. "When you get bored of modelling, go find something else you've never done that you also happen to be infuriatingly good at and do that for a while. You can do whatever you want, asshole. It's going to be fine. What else do you want me to say?"

"Are you really ok with not going pro?"

"I'll play whenever I want. Don't worry, I'm still going to beat you every time."

Kise goes quiet, and Daiki can hear the echo of distant conversation on Kise's end. He imagines Kise slumped over a desk in an empty classroom, his phone pressed hot to his ear, his too long legs stretched out, feet hooked on the legs of the chair in front of him. He'll be wearing his outdoor shoes because he has a face that'll let him get away with anything and no overbearing senpai around to scold him anymore.

"Midorimacchi," Kise whines.

"I'll be confiscating the alcohol too. That's contraband. Bad enough Aomine kept you out after curfew without proper clearance. Where is he, anyway? He has to sign you back in."

"Reporting to Akashicchi in the conference room," Kise answers absently. He's giving Atsushi a look like he's sizing him up. Which is stupid. Atsushi is way bigger, clearly. But he lets Kise carefully edge around him and towards the door.

There are only so many places Kise can run when confined to the CID. He'll tire himself out eventually, and Atsushi will be there, the moment Kise falls asleep. No struggle.

"I'll do it then," says Midorima's disembodied voice. "Come here."

Kise makes no move towards Midorima and his eyes don't leave Atsushi. Midorima registers the uncharacteristic silence too late. He stands from his chair just as Kise turns on his heel to bolt.

"Kise!"

"I'm sorry! Aominecchi will kill me if I let you have it!"

Midorima scrambles through the maze of desks and barrels into the hallway. His head whips between Kise's diminishing back and Atsushi standing just inside the door. Midorima points at him, looking like he wants to say something, but his jaw is clamped too tight. Oh, Atsushi recognizes that emotion too. The color rising to Midorima's face, the eye twitch, the shaking. Fury.

Midorima lets out a high, strangled noise and pulls at his hair. Definitely fury. Two for two, Atsushi scores himself. Akashi will be proud.

"He's getting away, Midochin."

"Shut up!" Midorima screeches. He whips around and finally takes off after Kise, his tie flopping like a tongue over his shoulder, his footsteps sending reverberations under Atsushi's feet.

"Kise, so help me god, I will have you decommissioned and hauled back to rehab by the ear!"

The office is empty. Atsushi goes to Kise's desk, uncaps the bottle of mineral water and upends it into Kise's drawer.

--

"Mukkun," Momoi greets him cheerfully.

Kise chokes. Atsushi ignores him for now.

"Sachin, you are harboring a fugitive."

"Aw, don't hurt Ki-chan." Her cheeks are pink. Atsushi smells the malt in the air. Looks like Midorima never did catch up to Kise and not even Midorima would barge into Momoi's quarters uninvited. She's an Enforcer but she's also a lady. For some reason beyond Atsushi's understanding, that matters.

"Don't hurt me," Kise echoes. "I'm sorry. Listen, I can make it up to you!"

"Listening," Atsushi says. "But be quick. I'm sleepy."

"OK—I have all these gifts from fans of my CommuField, the usual virtual junk everyone sends, but also vouchers that you can redeem for things offline, like snacks! They locked my CommuField after the arrest, but my account is still there. Momoicchi can hack into it—" Momoi salutes neatly. "—and transfer the vouchers to you, and you can get all the maiubo you want! You can have them sent to the Bureau under Aominecchi's name. He never reads anything, he'll just sign for them."

"Sad, but true," Momoi agrees solemnly.

Kise beams expectantly at him.

Atsushi blinks. "What's a CommuField."

Their expressions go blank for a moment before morphing into something else. Atsushi tries to place it. It's not exasperation. Something less angry than that, or not angry at all. It reminds him of the look the nice nurse used to give him, before he grew tall enough and big enough to scare even the older children at the facility. A soft look, where the eyebrows draw up in the middle instead of down. Lingering instead of flashing sharp.

It's no good. He doesn't know. It'll be a question for Akashi later.

"Mukkun," Momoi says. She puts a hand on his arm, gentle. This is an unfamiliar gesture too.

"What," he says, annoyed. Annoyance is good and safe. He holds onto it.

"Ah, never mind." Kise smiles but Atsushi can tell uncertainty when he sees it. It's the same as weakness. They won't meet Atsushi's eyes. "The important thing is that I'll get you your snacks. Sorry again, Murasakibaracchi."

Kise's never called him that before. Atsushi's not sure he likes this new development. No, he's absolutely feeling queasy now.

"Why would anyone ever give you gifts," he asks suspiciously. "Kisechin is gross."

"Huh?!"

He leaves Momoi to tend to a fallen Kise. It's almost three in the morning. Atsushi is too tired to think about this new feeling, like a light flickering inside him, on and then off and then on and then dark.

--

He wakes up to his phone buzzing under his pillow. The lights in his room are on, which means it's already past seven AM. His phone blinks Akashi's name at him.

"Akachin," he yawns.

"You wanted to speak with me, Atsushi?"

He doesn't exactly know how Akashi always knows. He suspects it has to do with all the voices talking in Akashi's head, whispering things, demanding things, arguing. He wonders how Akashi ever sleeps with all those people screaming all the time, wonders how Akashi keeps it secret when Atsushi would be threatening everyone to make it stop or else.

"Mn," he says. "Will you be coming into the office today?"

"Unfortunately not."

No explanation is forthcoming, but Atsushi isn't expecting one. Still, he pauses.

Then, "Kisechin called me Murasakibaracchi."

"Is that so," says Akashi.

"After I said I didn't know what a CommuField was. He and Sachin got a weird look on their faces. What's the big deal, anyway? We didn't have things like that in the facility. I'm not stupid. Kisechin is stupid."

"They don't think you're stupid." It's so quiet on Akashi's end. Atsushi can hear Akashi's breathing, but he might be imagining it. "It just makes them uncomfortable that you don't know. Do you know why that is, Atsushi?"

"Because everyone should know?"

"Yes."

"Because if I didn't grow up in the facility, I would know too?"

"Yes."

Atsushi considers this, but it's slow going with sleep still pulling him down. He gets it, eventually. "And now that they're the same as me, they think the isolation facilities are bad. We might be bad but what they do—what Akachin does—to people like us is worse. It makes them feel better to believe that."

"Very good," says Akashi. "You don't like Ryouta's name for you."

"No, I hate it. Why do I hate it?"

"You think he gave it to you out of pity."

"Pity," he repeats. That's a new one he has to remember. The thought of it brings back that flickering feeling from last night. "Yes, that's what I thought. It makes me feel sick. But that's wrong, isn't it? He doesn't feel pity for you or Midochin or Minechin. So that means he respects me now too, or something. Because now he's the same as me."

"Yes."

Atsushi frowns. The flickering stops, wiped away by the familiar surge of annoyance. It's comforting, almost.

"I don't care," he says. "I still hate it, because it's Kisechin. Make him stop."

"It's a good thing. You're becoming a team."

"I'm going to kill him if Akachin doesn't make him stop." Atsushi scowls. He knows Akashi will see it somehow, so he puts real effort into it.

"Go have breakfast, Atsushi."

--

Despite Akashi ordering him out of bed, he's the last to lumber into the office. He almost walks out again upon being blinded by the full blazing force of Kise-in-the-morning-with-a-mission, when Kise wears that expression that he thinks makes him look endearing and irresistible but really it reminds Atsushi of a puppy and Atsushi can't think of what to do with puppies other than to kick them.

But then he sees the white box on his desk, tied with white and green striped twine. It's about as big as his hand. There's an embossed logo on the lid, a quatrefoil around the words Pasticceria Rocco in curling Latin letters.

"I don't know anything about Italian shit," he hears Aomine whisper loudly. "If it's the wrong one, don't blame me."

"How, when I sent you pictures!" Kise whispers back, equally unsubtle. "Anyway, shut up now, Aominecchi."

Atsushi pulls the twine loose and flips the lid open.

"Surprise!" Kise crows. 

Atsushi recognizes it from the maiubo advertisements, though it looks impossibly more decadent in person. Resting on a circle of reflective gold foil, yellow cake under white cream under smooth, swirling chestnut puree, soft and light and dusted with sugar like snow, like a mountain top, he understands now the name, and it smells like everything he's since forgotten, like his memories of before the facility, before all he knew became synthetic and chalky and bland, this smells like what real must smell like, like what used to be when he was still small and warm and secure, before he wouldn't stop growing, before he went hungry and tired and so angry, smells like whatever was wrapped in the cloth his mother put into his hands before they took him away, that something he never got to eat because he had dropped it when they jostled him onto the truck and then it was just blood in his mouth instead. It smells like everything he knew before that moment of blood, before all those hands pounding on the outside of the truck as it drove away, begging for him.

He blinks.

"One of these every day, and Kisechin can live," he says.

"Haha, that's funny, Murasakibaracchi," Kise says with a dismissive flip of his hand, going to his station.

Takao taps his card against the pay pad and presses the button for shiruko with a knuckle. Shintarou has a moment of weakness, flashing back to the first time he met Aomine, who had been sleeping and drooling on Shintarou's favorite weight bench at the gym near the university. Aomine has never even thanked Takao for stopping Shintarou from dropping a 20kg iron plate on his stomach that day, and all the days since. Shintarou continues to get his psycho-pass reexamined after each encounter with Aomine and his insistence on being the most infuriating person this side of the Hue gradient.

Still, he manages to quash all thoughts of rebellion in the time it takes the shiruko can to thump itself into the port.

"Doesn't matter. Sibyl has decided."

"You don't even like guns," Takao sighs. But he tosses Shintarou the can, and starts his way down to the rumbling underground. "At least promise me we'll still get Korean on the weekends, Inspector."

--

His sister says, "Nii-chan knows best."

Shintarou watches her face on the screen, the way her eyes search his; reads the undercurrent of doubt in the waveforms of her voice, the long stretches of flatline unfurling.

"But are you sure—" she starts at the same moment his pride allows him the room to ask, "Do you think—"

They both stop. He turns away from the video feed to check the timer on the cooker. Two minutes left.

She defers to him. "Do I think what, nii-chan?" she asks.

"I've made up my mind, you know." He ought to remind her, to save her from taking on the same burden Takao had, of putting his world back on its axis for him. "Sibyl is irreproachable."

"Yes," she says.

He takes a glass down from the cupboard and fills it at the water dispenser. Puts it down on the counter. Thinks again and moves it to the table. Takes the pair of chopsticks from the dishwasher and places them next to his glass. Straightens them. His sister is patient.

"But do you think," he says, pauses.

The cooker beeps three times, then goes on standby.

He says, "Do you think they—mother and father—they wouldn't be disappointed."

"Never," she says. "No matter what you choose, they will be proud of you."

His sister is magnanimous. Always has been. Wherever his parents went wrong in raising him, they figured out when it came to her, and for that he is grateful. She is a much better person than he is, to know when to lie, or try, even now, when behind her in the hallway hangs a framed picture of Shintarou, five, in his mother's lab coat, immaculate. Playing savior. The stethoscope dragging by his feet.

"Worried, maybe," she concedes. He catches her frown at the peripheral of his vision. "We want you to be happy."

"It's the best course of action," he dodges. "I scored highest for the Public Safety Bureau."

"That's within the Ministry of Welfare, right?" She hesitates. "So is the Bureau for Medicine."

"That was my second highest," he says. "Not first. Therefore not best."

The cooker beeps again and Shintarou imagines it sounds more insistent. He goes to remove his dinner of white rice—a rare indulgence, real rice, not the bland, mealy strain derived from hyper-oats—and grilled saba. A bowl of shiruko for dessert. The steam fogs his glasses as he takes his seat. The holo-screen swivels around the kitchen to hover across the table from him. His sister watches him break up the rice with his chopsticks.

"Nii-chan knows best," she says again.

"Let me check over your math homework. You shouldn't slack just because I'm not at home anymore."

--

It's an Enforcer who greets him at the training facility on the first day. Shintarou recognizes him from the email briefs sent last week. He's more monstrous in person, not least because Shintarou has not had to look up to meet anyone's eye since high school.

"You're very punctual," says Murasakibara. "Akachin will like that."

"Who," says Shintarou.

"Wow. Maybe you're not as smart as Akachin says."

"You mean Akashi." Shintarou is grasping. Nothing about the Akashi Seijuurou he knows calls for the diminutive. Factors like height are negligible when you skyrocket straight to Chief of the PSB.

"S'what I said."

Shintarou decides it not in his best interest to argue such trivialities. He follows after Murasakibara, who could easily leave him behind if his gait were less shuffle and more stride. As it is, Murasakibara is in no hurry and the gleaming hallway seems endless. Shintarou fixes his tie, glances at his watch, stifles a sigh.

"You don't look very excited to be here," Murasakibara breaks the lull, ambling past the sixth identical door on their left.

"Look who's talking. And I'll do my job well, if that's what you're insinuating. Don't forget you'll be answering to me."

Murasakibara hums. "Got it, Midochin."

"Don't call me that. We're not friends. I have no wish to fraternize with the likes of you."

"What's that supposed to mean, 'the likes of you,'" demands a voice that scrapes the inside of Shintarou's skull.

The room they've entered is long with high ceilings, no windows, only blank monitors adorning the walls. A conference table stretches the length of it, the seats empty except for one.

"Aomine," Shintarou says. "Where's your keeper?"

Aomine shoots to his feet and looks like he's about to launch himself across the table at him. Murasakibara does not seem inclined to intervene, except to say, offhandedly, "Akachin doesn't like fighting."

"Akashi can go—" Aomine catches himself. Reevaluates. After a beat, he sits down again and kicks his feet up onto the table. Basketball shoes. Unbelievable. "Whatever. I'm not going to get kicked out just because you're an asshole."

"Why do you care what I say about latent criminals like Murasakibara. Sibyl's already deemed them unfit for society."

"Midochin is annoying," Murasakibara offers mildly.

"Well, I do care!" Aomine snarls. "So shut your mouth! You and your stupid Sibyl don't know shit."

"Ah," Murasakibara says before Shintarou can retaliate. "Akachin."

It's ridiculous for the room to feel suddenly colder, and smaller, but it does.

"Hello." Akashi Seijuurou smiles at them from the door. "Daiki. Shintarou. I don't believe I've seen either of you since graduation."

If Aomine is as offended as Shintarou is at Akashi's uninvited use of their given names, he only shows it with an eye roll and an ironic, "Morning, Chief," and a terse, "We gonna get started?"

Akashi looks at Aomine. Aomine grudgingly slides his feet to the floor. They sit. Akashi turns his eyes on him.

"I must confess my surprise, Shintarou. I thought you wanted to pursue medicine."

Surprise is the last thing Shintarou reads in Akashi's expression. Words like "think" and "believe" have no place in Akashi's vocabulary, adopted only out of amusement. Akashi knows. Everyone knows Akashi knows. Shintarou finds this affectation newly infuriating, uncomfortable.

"Yes, well." Shintarou straightens his spine. "Sibyl said otherwise."

The feeling that Akashi knows more than you is one everyone is familiar with, but Shintarou can't shake the unease that's started to circle him, pressing closer. He can't help but wonder now, about Akashi's appointment to chief before any of them had taken Sibyl's judgment, Akashi's departure from school before their last semester, Akashi showing up at graduation only to put in an appearance as the keynote speaker and to receive his diploma, as a formality. Shintarou's shogi evenings with him had tapered off months before then, and he hadn't thought twice about their paths crossing again except in those especially bitter moments regretting not having the chance to finally win a game.

But now here they are.

By Sibyl's decree, Shintarou reminds himself. Akashi would not be here otherwise; not even Akashi can manipulate the system, absolute though he believes himself to be. And Shintarou is here because Sibyl is all he knows to be right and good and Sibyl had said he will be an Inspector before anything else and Shintarou will not stray. His parents will understand. He is no longer five and naive.

"You will realize your fullest potential here, with me," Akashi decides, and it sounds to Shintarou as if Akashi is speaking with all the authority of Sibyl like a mantle on his shoulders, all of Sibyl's foresight behind his eyes, yellow and red, unfamiliar.

Presumptuous, Shintarou thinks.

But for the most part, romping through Midway Forest and the Gray Terminal, he had only himself to worry about and he was a little thing too, smaller than everyone else, younger and easier to lose. When Ace and Sabo laughed without him, he felt smaller still. He didn't think they did it to be mean; he thought maybe sometimes they just forgot to notice him. He made sure to be extra loud, all the time, so they wouldn't forget. He was afraid of being left behind while his brothers were running ahead.

And Sabo did run ahead, all by himself. He left Luffy and Ace behind to wipe grief from their eyes. It wasn't fair.

Now Luffy could taste nothing but dirt and fear as he lay facedown and alone on the cliff overlooking the sea, where the three of them had sloshed their drinks in the way that boys did, and sworn brotherhood in the way that men did. That seemed ages ago, but the memory was still bright and vivid in the back of his mind, brilliant greens and blues, the clink of their cups like Makino’s seashell wind chimes, their voices loud and without echo under the wide, open sky.

But Sabo was gone, and the brightness and vividness of that memory cast Sabo’s absence as a long, bleak shadow that followed Luffy wherever he went and Luffy could not avoid treading on it, on Sabo’s memory, though it hurt his heart to do so.

All this time Luffy was worrying about little things like himself when he should have been paying attention to other things—his brothers, their promises, the soft noises of their breathing in the dark—should have kept them close like Shanks’ straw hat. He did not know what to do with the goodbye coiled heavy on his tongue, fearful that if he swallowed it, it would grow into a snake in his belly, and he could not spit it out because Sabo was not there to hear it and Luffy could not bear the thought of it sinking down to the ocean floor like Sabo's ship. Like Sabo.

A heavy weight landed on his shoulders, pressing him into the ground. He shuddered and the world shuddered with him, everything going fuzzy around the edges with hurt and longing. In the end Luffy wasn't able to keep up, he was too small, and Ace, even Ace was small now that Luffy knew a sadness as big as Mount Colubo.

And in this fuzziness, in this crush and wild panic and radiating grief, a familiar voice sounded suddenly, deep like those hidden caves that swallowed up their torchlight, and it seemed to come from within and around and below. It asked him, Will you grow?

It was the same voice he heard back when Ace and Sabo had stood before him with uncertainty in their eyes and knives in their hands, when Porchemy and his gang had strung him up, and whenever he was lost and alone in the Forest late at night—a voice that would tell him, You will not give in.

Now it asked him, Will you grow strong enough to move mountains?

How could Luffy answer, when all he had in his mouth was Sabo's name and a goodbye he could not make sense of, how it could exist with no purpose, why Sabo had left without it. But Luffy also knew—he wanted Sabo back, he wanted Ace safe, he wanted to beat his fists into whomever would dare keep them from the blue, sunlit freedom of the ocean. He wanted to be strong enough to move mountains and bare the line of the horizon for anyone who would claim it for the taking.

So Luffy sobbed, I want, so earnest it scraped his throat raw. I want, I want, I want!

How strong?

The strongest!

The weight on his shoulders pushed down harder, like hands, massive and unyielding. It hurt. It hurt, but he thought of Sabo and he thought of sinking and he thought of how they had sat on this cliff and dreamed and something bloomed fast and livid inside him.

Tell me why, the voice demanded.

Because, Luffy gasped. Because there are people I love and I can't lose them too! Ace and Makino and even Dadan! Even Gramps! I love them. I love them.

Little one—the voice rolled through him in dips and rises, reverberated in the back of his throat—do you believe you can?

Luffy's bones felt hot, like they had been scorched by the sun. The weight disappeared and the sudden absence of it made his shoulder blades feel sharp. He stayed facedown, trembling, feeling like he could dissipate into nothing if not for that dark, greedy, livid something to anchor him.

Will you help me, he whispered into the wild, green grass, the smell of earth filling his head. Will you help me get stronger so that I won’t lose Ace too?

From the ground, from the nearby mountains that once housed volcanoes, there came a long, slow rumble that Luffy could feel in his teeth.

You’re strong, Luffy said. I know it, I feel it. I can become strong like you. You’ll help me. Right?

The earth quaked; the ocean churned and pressed closer.

You will not balk at anything, the voice commanded, thunderous, and Luffy could feel that fierce heat suffusing his bones again and pooling between his shoulder blades, between the knuckles of his hands, all through his limbs.

I won’t, he promised. I won’t.

I grant you strength here, the voice said and the pressure like hands on his shoulders returned, firm but no longer crushing. With it, will you carry the burden of others?

I will, he growled, his blood coursing fast, fast, fast, his skin glowing and burning to the touch. I will!

Will you bring the world to its knees? WIll you diminish your own life for the strength to protect?

I will. I will. I will!

Little one, the voice called, low and old and rumbling, the promise of newness and greatness towering, terrifying, inescapable. Will you grow?

And Luffy wept, the grief flowing dense and heavy and extraordinary from his chest, taste of dirt and life in his mouth. He pressed his forehead into the grass, balled his hands into fists, promised himself, I will grow, I will grow, I will grow. I will protect everyone.

He felt the tremors again, like mountains moving, the world shifting to bear his new weight. The birds and beasts and buzzing insects of the forest were all hushed and still. In their silence he could hear the roaring and singing of his blood, the hiss of steam, the frenzied pounding of his heart desperate to keep up, to give until it gives out. He could bring down empires like this, with his own small hands, he could bring the earth's core to the surface and create a new sun, he would, stretch as far as the Grandline goes, and then farther, until he found that faraway place where Sabo had to be waiting for his goodbye.

He lay there on the cliff, sobbing, listening to the far-off waves. They will bear him away some day. Slowly, the heat in him subsided, leaving him drained and boneless and panting until Ace came and found him.

Ace punched him in the head, demanded, “How long are you going to carry on like that, you crybaby?" 

“Ace.” Luffy could not help shaking still, but he swallowed, pulling his straw hat low over his eyes. “I will get stronger!”

The brush of fingertips across his shoulders, and a molten warmth that pulsed beneath his skin like new magma, and a voice that said, Yes.

The day he passes the aptitude test for Inspector, he meets her behind the test center and they take the same circuitous route home. He remembered to heat up the milk in the break room before leaving, even though she didn't email him a reminder. He hands her the bottle from the deep pocket of his coat and she settles for warm glass instead of the warmth of his hand.

"Congratulations," she says. "I knew you could do it." He grunts, but she can tell he's pleased. Her world is ending, very quickly. She reminds herself not to be selfish, not when he's already taking the next corner without her nudging him, and cutting diagonally across the street to the alley between the Mongolian barbeque place and the new Vienna-style cafe. They've been doing this for weeks, ever since she hacked into the system-- fell into it innocently enough after too much digging, she never could help herself, she always had to know-- and felt her stress levels spike, kicked up in the wake of her heart racing horror. They've been doing this long enough for even someone like Dai-chan, who thinks of nothing but eating and playing basketball in his free time, to memorize these precise, weaving steps. There are blind spots all over Tokyo and it's a simple matter to map them all. "Look," he says. "Stupid thing is already waiting for us." The windows of the office building are mostly dark, but some still stand out in the night as sharp, bright squares. The cat is sitting under a broken street lamp, swishing her tail. She pours the milk out into the plastic bowl she brought with her. Dai-chan says, "You know you're not supposed to give cats milk." "It's ok," she says. "She seems fine, doesn't she?" He shrugs and stands by, pretending to be bored. "Let's take the train home," she tells him, after the cat has licked the bowl clean. She pours the rest of the milk before twisting the cap back on and slipping the bottle into his pocket. "I'm tired today and I don't feel like walking," she says. "Won't that be the wrong number of left turns.” He raises an eyebrow at her. "You'll offend Midorima." She reads the surprise in his voice, though he tries to hide it. She laughs. "I'll wear my lucky jade bracelet tomorrow.”

"Maybe we should go shopping," he hedges awkwardly. "Hasn't it been a while since you dragged me to buy new shoes or whatever?"

"That would be nice," she says. Tomorrow, very early in the morning, they come to take her away. They knock softly on her door, but when she opens it she sees they have their Dominators out and ready. The sight of them at the door makes her mother weep, still in her pajamas and missing her slippers. Satsuki has nothing in the way of comfort, only guilt, dark and blooming. She feels the heat of Dai-chan's stare smolder between her shoulder blades when they walk her out of their apartment complex in handcuffs. For the first few days, she has no visitors. Then her father shows up, sliding into the seat on the other side of the glass, looking pressed and sad. He doesn't mention her mother, doesn't say much of anything at all, except get better soon, Satsuki, as if they quarantine people here for simple colds. She doesn't know if Dai-chan has come to see her, but they wouldn't let him anyway, since he isn't blood.

She is expecting him, though. In the meantime, she plans.

Someone her age is put in the cell across from hers. She recognizes him from the billboards, even without the make-up and the airbrushing. They smile at each other in the mornings. He looks bored most of the time. She lets him borrow her basketball magazines, shuttled between their cells by the nurses he’s managed to charm.

She leaves him a note nestled in the pages of the latest Monthly Basket: when I get out of here, I’ll definitely take Ki-chan with me. She has an eye for potential. He will be useful.