₊⊹ kumo☁︎⋆˙‎‎

Circadian rhythm is a myth you stopped believing in three years ago. Sleep is a luxury people with nine-to-fives have, and daylight is a rumor the morning shift swears exists. Your schedule treats rest like a hobby you can’t commit to, always meaning to get back to it but never finding the time.

The dispatch center is a patchwork organism: worn consoles exhaling heat, swivel chairs that shriek protests with every movement, half-empty bottles of green tea sweating condensation onto particle-board desks. Energy drinks stand abandoned mid-sip, their carbonation long dead. Screens glow in muted blues and tired whites, maps peppered with blinking markers. Status columns refresh, again and again — a digital heartbeat reminding you that crisis, much like you, rarely sleeps.

You badge in and begin the ritual that transforms you from person to function.

Login. Password. CAD system. Phone system. Radio console.

Your employee ID appears so many times it sheds meaning, the numbers blur into abstraction and becomes an identifier of someone who exists only to be there for someone else's sake.

Then you put on your armor.

The headset settles over your ears with a practiced click, padding pressing lightly against your temples. The microphone arm curves towards your lips, waiting to catch your words and send them out to strangers in the dark.

The world narrows until all that exists is what you can hear — you’re in it now.

Early on, it’s a steady grind: ten, twelve calls an hour, and that’s only the emergency line. It doesn’t account for the administrative overflow bleeding through from other services, the while-I’ve-got-you calls from lonely people who just want to hear a kind voice, the follow-ups, the wrong numbers, the pranks from teenagers who think they’re funnier than they are.

It also doesn’t count the radio crackling to life beside you — that second channel demanding a different part of your consciousness, one that expects you to juggle units and GPS coordinates while keeping enough bandwidth free to be someone’s lifeline.

Most calls are textbook. 

Paint-by-number crisis. A petty neighbor dispute that’s been simmering for months, finally boiling over at midnight. Someone locked out, sitting on their doorstep in the cold. A man sleeping rough by the roadside — a concerned citizen uncertain if he’s passed out or passed away.

Then there are the calls that take longer. 

Domestic violence where every word carries the weight of a life balanced on a knife’s edge. House fires that refuse to die, that keep finding new fuel, new rooms to devour. You talk people through procedures you pray you’ll never need yourself: press here, keep low, count with me, stay with me. 

You are meticulous. Exact. Because the difference between XX-ban and XY-ban can be measured in minutes, and time is a currency you can’t afford to waste.

Thanks are rare in this job.

Endings are rarer still.

But you know—you know—that when you clock out at dawn, the city is still standing partly because of what you did while it slept.

Your fingerprints are on it, invisible but everywhere — in the spaces between sirens, in roads that stay open, in mornings people wake up to without ever knowing how close someone came to never waking at all.

That’s why you stay. Not for the easy calls, but for the moments when you can take the worst day of someone’s life and make it fractionally, infinitesimally less terrible.

The phone rings.

There’s no warning, no omen, no cinematic pause. You don’t feel a chill of intuition or anything prophetic stirring in your chest. 

For now, it’s just another line. 

Another voice waiting to be heard.

Another story you’ll only ever hear the middle of.

You answer.

You: 119. Fire or medical emergency?

Static washes through first, then breathing, then a man’s voice.

Caller: Emergency. I need an ambulance.

Your cursor blinks expectantly on the incident screen, a small pulse of light waiting to be given substance. You straighten, pen poised, the plastic warm where your thumb has worn the coating thin over countless nights just like this one.

You: What's your location? Caller: Shinjuku-ku, [—]-cho, [—]-ban, [—]-go. Near [—] Station. You: Shinjuku-ku, [—]-cho, [—]-ban, [—]-go. Near [—] Station. Is that correct? Caller: Yes. You: What’s the nature of the emergency?

A brief pause, filled with empty silence.

Caller: A building collapsed. There may be people trapped.

Your pen moves without conscious thought, collecting details and anchoring them to paper, building the skeleton out of coordinates, keywords — something the city will soon flesh out with sirens and rescue personnel.

You: Sir, are you injured? Caller: No. You: Can I have your contact details?

Another pause. This one shorter and more deliberate. You can almost hear him thinking, weighing his words on some internal scale you cannot see.

Caller: I’ll stay on the line. I can flag down the crews when they arrive.

The radio crackles as you dispatch units. Help begins to move through the city’s arteries.

You: Emergency services are being dispatched to your location. I’m going to keep you here to gather more information. Can you tell me how many people might be affected? Caller: Hard to say. But the east side took the worst of it. You: Can you describe what you’re seeing right now?

On his end, fabric rustles — a body trying to get comfortable in an uncomfortable situation. The sound is oddly intimate, transmitted through miles of copper and fibre optic, arriving in your ear as if he’s standing right beside you.

Caller: Debris field across the street. Concrete, rebar, dust everywhere. The building’s… folded in on itself. I think something crushed it from above.

You relay this, fingers flying over keys, passing intelligence to crews already converging on the scene.

You: Any immediate hazards? Fire, gas leak, downed power lines? Caller: No fire. Don’t smell gas either.

You nod, even though he can’t see it.

That’s the strange intimacy of this job. You sit in a climate-controlled room surrounded by screens and static, yet you’re also standing, in a way, beside a stranger in the dark. Close enough to hear how he breathes. Close enough to matter.

On your screen, the incident pulses with new life, its details now pinned in place, timestamp ticking forward.

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

Sometimes, they begin exactly like this.

But for now, it’s just another voice on the line.

Early Winter, Nine Years Ago

You almost don’t go.

You stand outside the building with your phone glowing in your palm, cold biting into your skin as messages from your friend stack one atop another. Each buzz is a small insistence, each line of text another hand at your back, pushing.

Free drinks, she’d promised, as if alcohol were sufficient compensation.

You need to meet people, she’d insisted, as if connection were a finite resource you were squandering.

Still, you go. Because that’s what twenty-year-olds do on Friday nights. Because it feels worse to be alone outside a party than lonely inside one.

Light spills from the building's windows in aggressive yellow squares, silhouettes moving behind them like figures trapped in a snow globe someone won’t stop shaking. Already you can hear the bass distorting into something less music and more assault on the senses.

The mixer is exactly what you feared it would be: loud without being lively, bright without being warm. 

Music hammers from speakers never meant shoulder this kind of ambition, turning everything muddy and indistinct. The room feels crowded in a way that has nothing to do with the number of bodies packed inside and everything to do with the suffocating weight of performance, of everyone trying so desperately to be seen.

Conversations overlap and cannibalize each other, turning words shapeless. Laughter rises and falls in waves, pitched too high, held too long. 

Everyone here is selling something — the most desirable version of themselves, marketed in carefully curated fragments.

You listen more than you speak; a trait born from habit and honed by your major. As a communications student, you can’t help noticing the constant misfires — people talking at each other rather than with, filling air as if silence would prove fatal.

You’re halfway through calculating the minimum polite duration you're required to stay when the music dies mid-beat.

An awful, metallic shriek tears through the speakers—feedback loop screaming its death rattle—and half the crowd flinches in unison, hands flying to ears. The DJ swears into the mic, something colorful about technical difficulties and shitty equipment. A collective groan ripples outward, followed by that awkward, suspended phase where no one knows what to do with their hands.

You step back instinctively, grateful for the reprieve, and collide with someone doing the exact same thing. 

Elbow-to-elbow, accidental and light, but enough to send your drink sloshing dangerously close to the rim. 

“Oh—sorry,” you say, turning.

“Sorry,” he says at the exact same moment.

You both laugh — reflexive and a little startled. His cup, you notice, is empty. Has been for awhile, judging by the faint ring dried at the bottom.

“Either you’re a raging alcoholic,” you say, eyeing the cup suspiciously, “or you’re exercising impressive restraint.”

He looks down at it as if just now remembering its existence, lifting it in examination. Blue eyes—startlingly bright even in dim lighting—flick back to yours with mischief dancing in their depths. 

“Oh, this? This is my escape hatch. Turns out telling people you’re getting a drink is a surprisingly effective way to flee boring conversations.”

The corner of your mouth twitches. “Well,” you say, lifting your own cup in a small salute, “actually drinking is also a surprisingly effective exit strategy.”

“Looks like we’re both veterans of social warfare.” His smile comes easy, reaching his eyes and crinkling the corners, making him look younger than he probably is. “I’m Satoru. Astrophysics.”

He says it casually, like he’s telling you his favorite color rather than announcing he studies the fundamental architecture of the universe.

You blink. “Wow.”

“Oh, don’t give me that face.”

“I’m allowed to make this face,” you argue. “It’s an objectively impressive sentence. Also, you absolutely look like someone who studies astrophysics.”

“Is that so?” He tilts his head, curious. “What, pray tell, does an average astrophysics student look like?”

“Like someone who owns at least three shirts with equations on them and gets way too excited when planets align.”

“I own two shirts with equations, thank you very much.” The mock offence in his voice is undermined by a spreading grin. “And nothing gets me going more than planetary motion. I am but a simple man with simple pleasures.”

You laugh — surprised by how easily it comes, by how genuine it is in the midst of all the exhaustive performances. You tell him your name, and in doing so, make a subconscious decision that you’ve just extended your stay beyond the minimum polite duration.

“Communications,” you offer when it’s your turn to reduce yourself to a major.

He hums thoughtfully. “Yet you don't enjoy social events? Seems a bit ironic, doesn’t it?”

“I specialize in listening,” you say with a shrug. “This place is way too loud for me to practice.”

“You’re not wrong.” He winces, reminded of the assault on his eardrums mere moments ago. “I was about five minutes away from pulling the fire alarm and staging a heroic escape.”

“That’s a crime, you know.”

“Only if I get caught.”

“So you’re a criminal astrophysicist. That’s a first.”

“I contain multitudes.”

And as if summoned by the joke—cosmic irony at its finest—the music crashes back to life, reclaiming a volume louder than before. The room surges again, bodies closing ranks, conversations restarting mid-sentence.

Satoru's expression turns painful. Then his face shifts, a thought clearly forming.

“Want to commit a misdemeanor with me?” he asks with a boyish smile. It makes it seem like he’s inviting you to skip class.

“What kind?”

“The fleeing kind.”

You pretend to consider it, even though you already know your answer. “I don’t know. I’ve only just met you. You could be dangerous.”

“I study stars for a living.” He spreads his hands in a gesture of innocence that’s entirely unconvincing. “What could I possibly do to hurt you?”

“That’s exactly what a dangerous person would say.”

“Fair point.” His grin widens, and his eyes light up, impossibly bright. “Then I guess you’ll have to take your chances.”

“Okay,” you say. “Let’s flee.”

Outside, the night opens up like a gift. 

The campus stretches out in long, quiet lines. Cold air kisses your cheeks, sharp and clean after the stale warmth inside. The party’s noise dulls behind you, replaced by the soft crunch of gravel underfoot.

You walk side by side with no destination in mind, no purpose beyond away, steering toward a pathway that cuts through dead grass and dormant trees.

“So,” you say after a comfortable silence. “Astrophysics. What about it called to you? Were you one of those kids who discovered comets through a backyard telescope?”

“Nothing that impressive.” He tucks his hands in his pockets. “I just… liked looking at the sky.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” A shrug, self-depreciating. “My parents wanted me to be a doctor. Good salary and better bragging rights. But I kept thinking about how small we are... how temporary.” He pauses, breath misting in the cold. “A human life is, what, eighty years if you’re lucky? But a star? A star burns for billions. We’re nothing but brief blips.”

You’re quiet for a moment, absorbing this — the casual way he discusses impermanence, the way some people discuss weather. “That’s kind of depressing.”

“Or liberating.” He slows, then stops altogether, looking up. “To quote Anatole, the wonder is not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.”

You follow his gaze upward, neck craning back.

“Perhaps the millions of visible stars,” he continues, “and the countless others we cannot see, might amount to nothing more than a single drop of blood of some tiny creature, living in a universe beyond our imagination. Yet even that universe could be just a speck of dust in something larger still.”

Above, the sky is washed thin by light pollution—Tokyo’s eternal glow stealing the stars—but a few push through anyway, stubborn pinpricks against the dark. He points one out, then another, talking about them like old friends. You listen, even when you don’t quite follow the science, because the way he speaks makes you feel like you don’t have to understand to appreciate the beauty of it.

“That one’s my favorite,” he says, like he’s admitting a childhood crush.

You squint up at the same patch of sky. “Which one? They’re all look like dots to me.”

He shifts a step closer and, without thinking, reaches for your hand. His fingers are warm despite the cold; they engulf yours completely as he guides your arm upward, tracing a small arc through the air with your joined hands.

“There,” he says, voice soft beside your ear. “See it? It’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. But once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.”

You follow the line he’s drawn, adjust your focus, recalibrate your vision, and then you see it — a point of light brighter than the others, a single star holding court in the winter sky.

“Oh. How did I miss it before?”

"It gets overshadowed." He smiles — you can hear it in his voice even though you’re not looking at his face. "The moon steals the show most nights. But the moon’s kind of a fraud. It only looks bright because it’s borrowing the Sun’s light. Just a big, dull rock pretending to shine.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Sirius,” he says. “The brightest star in the night sky. It only shows up during the winter months, then goes back into hiding when it gets too close to the Sun.”

He drops his hand then, releases yours and tucks his own in his pocket. A flicker of self-consciousness crosses his face, suddenly worried he’s said or done too much.

You stare at Sirius a moment longer, feeling a strange sorrow.

“That’s kind of tragic,” you say softy. “Sirius and the Sun — they exist at the same time, but they’re never allowed to be seen together.”

He goes still beside you, and for a second you think you might’ve said something wrong. But then he smiles, and it’s different from before.

“Don’t worry,” he reassures. “They’re still bound to each other, even if we can’t see it.”

Just then, a breeze cuts through the quad. You shiver, hands instinctively coming up to rub your arms. Before you can even process the movement, he’s shrugging out of his jacket and draping it around your shoulders.

“You don’t have to—”

“Don’t fight it,” he says, adjusting the collar so it sits properly. “It’s my good deed for the day. Gotta balance out the potential serial killer thing.”

The fabric still holds his warmth. You pull it closer, feeling the weight embrace you.

"Thanks," you mutter.

You walk for a long time after that, aimless and unhurried, conversation meandering the way good ones do. He tells you about late nights in the observatory, about simulations that crash spectacularly, and you talk about classes and about professors who mistake volume for authority.

You talk about nothing, about everything.

Near the edge of the campus, where the lights fade out and the stars reclaim their territory, you realize you’ve been smiling for no particular reason. That your face actually hurts a little from it.

“I almost didn’t come out tonight,” you admit.

He looks at you, and his smile is a little shy, a little hopeful. “I’m glad you did.”

You exchange numbers like it’s an afterthought, a casual thing, though you both know it isn’t. Another decision that doesn’t mean anything yet.

But later—much later—when this memory returns to you in fragments, you’ll think about this night. You’ll remember the weight of his jacket on your shoulders and the way he guided your hand through the dark. And you’ll come to understand just how cruel gentle beginnings can be.

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

They slip in under the cover of the night, wearing an ordinary face.

And by the time you recognize them for what they are, it’ll already be too late.

Late Winter, Nine Years Ago

Love doesn’t arrive all at once.

It comes the way spring does — incrementally, in ways you only notice in retrospect. One degree warmer, one minute of daylight longer.

It edges in through text messages that gradually become frequent enough that there’s no hour that feels unreasonable anymore. It comes in the lengthening of days and the way your lips curve involuntarily when his name lights up your phone — that Pavlovian response you can’t control and have stopped trying to.

You don’t call it anything yet. The absence of labels preserves the illusion of freedom, of not being in too deep.

You are, as always, very good at lying to yourself.

Your phone buzzes while you’re doing the dishes. You don’t even dry your hands before reading the message, just wipe the suds carelessly on your jeans, leaving damp patches on your thighs that will take twenty minutes to fade.

Satoru: Coffee tomorrow? No lectures about stellar evolution this time, I promise.

A smile appears before you can stop it. You actually turn your phone face-down for a moment, embarrassed, as if he might witness the way you’re grinning like an idiot at your kitchen sink.

You: I don’t know… still not convinced you’re not a serial killer. Can you guarantee you won’t try to kill me? Satoru: I can guarantee pastries. Is that good enough?

You can see it so clearly: the tilt of his head, that particular angle that makes his hair fall across his forehead. The way one corner of his mouth lifts higher than the other, asymmetrical and devastating.

You: Fine. But if you murder me, I’m so haunting you. Satoru: Deal. I could use the company.

The café he chooses is small and warm. The kind of place that smells like roasted beans and brown sugar. You choose a seat near the window, watching the steady stream of strangers pass, trying your best to distract yourself from your nervous state.

When Satoru walks in, it feels like the continuation of a thought you didn’t know you’d started. 

His coat hangs open, scarf loose around his neck. He’s wearing a soft blue sweater, clearly loved into comfort. The cuffs are slightly stretched, and his hair is doing that thing where it refuses all attempts at discipline. 

When he spots you, it’s as if a switch flipped inside him, illuminating what was once dormant.

“Hey,” he says, sliding into the seat across from you.

“Hey yourself.”

He flags down a server, orders something complicated with far too many modifiers—extra shot, oat milk, no whip, yes whip, maybe whip?—then turns his full attention back to you. And when Satoru gives you his attention, it’s full. Undivided. Like you’re the only person in the room, in the world, worth looking at.

You talk about everything that matters and everything that doesn’t. About classes and deadlines and group projects where you somehow end up doing all the work. He tells you about staying awake for thirty-six hours trying to fix a simulation and the vindictive satisfaction of finally making it work at four in the morning.

You notice things you shouldn’t, details far too small to matter and yet mattering anyway: the faint scar near his knuckle, the way he drums his fingers against his cup when he’s thinking, how his eyes track to the window when he’s searching for the right words.

You wonder, idly, what moments shaped those details; what histories live beneath his skin.

When the check comes, he grabs it before you can protest, snatching it out of reach.

“I can pay for myself,” you start.

“You can fight me for it next time.”

“Next time?”

Though the question is casual, the hope beneath it isn’t.

He looks up, suddenly uncertain — a crack in his usual confidence. “I mean… if you want a next time, that is. No pressure.”

A smile accompanies your response. “So, same time next week?”

The weeks blur together after that, each one folding into the next. Coffee becomes dinner, and dinner becomes long walks where you talk and talk until your voice goes hoarse. He texts you photos of the night sky from the observatory, tells you their stories. You send him pictures of interesting graffiti you pass on your way to class and snippets of overheard conversations that make you laugh.

It’s easy, effortless.

And then, on an unremarkable evening in late February, the remarkable happens.

The rain starts halfway through the walk back to his place — a light mist that freckles your hair and darkens the shoulder of his jacket. By the time you reach his building, it’s steady enough to justify lingering under the awning, both of you pretending you’re waiting for it to pass, both of you knowing you’re really just prolonging the night.

“You could come up,” he says, trying for casual but not quite managing it. “If you want.”

And you do.

His apartment is dim when you enter, lit only by a lamp in the corner that casts everything in honeyed shadows. You toe off your shoes by the door and he takes your coat, hangs it up without thought. The gesture is so natural it almost hurts — that casual domesticity an intimacy in itself, an implication of futures unwritten.

“Make yourself at home,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

You sink onto the edge of the couch, feeling the fabric grow familiar as you wait. From the kitchen you hear water running, the click of the kettle, the percussion of ceramic against counter. Then the smell of tea — something herbal and sweet.

When he returns, he sets the mug into your hands, fingers lingering long enough to transfer warmth.

“You didn’t have to,” you murmur, holding it between your palms.

“No, I didn’t,” Satoru says, small and sincere. “I just like doing things for you.”

You bring the mug to your lips, letting steam fog your lashes. The tea is perfect — not too hot, sweetened ever so slightly, exactly how you mentioned you liked it in an offhand comment made weeks ago.

“You remembered,” you say softly.

“Of course I did.”

You look down into the mug, watching the surface tremble with the quiver of your hands. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

He settles beside you on the couch, resting his elbow along the back of the couch. “Why not?”

“Because it makes it hard to pretend this is casual.”

You can’t see it, but there’s nothing casual about the way he’s looking at you right now.

“Well, I’ve never been good at pretending,” he confesses.

The words are simple yet enough to undo you completely.

He reaches out, covers your hand where it wraps around the mug. You feel your breath change before you realize you’ve taken it. And when you turn to meet his eyes, you find yourself drowning in blue.

You become painfully aware of how close his face is. How you can count his eyelashes if you wanted to. How his gaze drops to your mouth and traces the shape of your lips before returning to your eyes with a question written in their depths.

“Can I—?” he starts, then falters. The question dissolves as he swallows it back down, hesitant.

He tries to look away, but your hands—seemingly with a will of their own—reach up to cradle his face. Your palms cup his jaw, feeling the barely-there stubble rough against your skin, the warmth of him seeping into you.

“Yes,” you say, permission and plea all at once.

He kisses you like he’s been thinking about it for weeks. 

Probably has been. 

Soft at first, tentative and questioning, giving you every chance to pull away. When you don’t, when you lean in instead and thread your fingers into his hair, the kiss deepens.

His hand finds your waist, slides around to the small of your back, pulling you closer until there’s no space left between your bodies. His hands are everywhere now: your hips, your ribs, tangling in your hair with a desperation that mirrors your own.

The rain drums steadily against the windows, blurring the city beyond into impressionist streaks of light. Time becomes elastic, meaningless. There is only the sensation of his mouth on yours and his hands learning the geography of your body.

You melt into it, surrendering inch by inch. Your fingers curl into his sweater, sliding beneath it. His stomach contracts under your palms, muscles taut and trembling.

“Wait,” he gasps against your lips, though his hands continue their restless journey across your body. “We can slow down if you want.”

But your wanting has already passed the point of patience.

This need has been building for weeks, layer upon layer of almost-touches and loaded glances — a slow burn that grew into an inferno.

“I don’t want slow,” you say, “I want you.”

His eyes go dark, entirely focused on you.

“God,” he breathes, fingers digging into your hips through denim. “The things I’ve imagined doing to you.”

He stands, lifting you with an ease that steals the breath from your lungs, hands secure beneath your thighs as your legs wrap around his waist. He carries you down the short hallway to his bedroom, lips never leaving his, unwilling to break contact even for the seconds it takes to navigate the distance. 

The rain’s symphony follows you, each droplet a percussion against glass, a metronome marking the pace of your shared unraveling. 

He reaches for the buttons of your shirt, working them open, tugging off every remaining article of clothing you have on. Each inch of skin revealed feeds his hunger further. You arch into his touch, head falling back as sensation floods through you, breath coming in short gasps as his mouth follows the trail of his fingers.

You fumble with his belt, his button, his zipper, hands clumsy until he is finally, blessedly naked. He hovers above you, utterly bare, and you can barely breathe. All lean and smooth skin, broad shoulders tapering to narrow hips. Every line of him is defined by shadow and want. He’s gorgeous, and in this moment, he’s yours.

You push him onto his back and straddle his lap where he sits at the edge of the bed, your knees indenting the mattress on either side of his hips. His hands find your thighs, fingers splaying across skin as you rock against him, drawing a deep groan from his chest.

“Condom,” he grits out, forehead pressed to yours. “Nightstand—“

You’re already reaching for it, tearing the wrapper with shaking hands. He watches as you roll it down his length, hissing through clenched teeth.

“Now,” you say, desperate and beyond pretense.

He guides you down onto him, the feeling deep and drugging and absolutely devastating. Your nails dig deeper into his skin as he fills you inch by inch, stretching you until he’s fully seated.

You begin to set a rhythm — rolling slowly first, adjusting to the fullness of him, gradually increasing the pace until each thrust makes your toes curl and sparks scatter across your vision. His mouth finds your neck, your shoulder, anywhere he can reach, murmuring filthy praise between kisses that will no doubt leave marks you’ll only discover tomorrow.

Your nails score down his back, pleasure coiling tighter and tighter in the pit of your stomach as the intensity builds. You can feel him responding, growing harder and longer inside you.

“Satoru,” you gasp, leaning in to catch his earlobe between your teeth, tugging gently. “What else have you imagined?”

“How you’d take me from behind,” he admits, voice wrecked and raw. “Seeing you like that—it’s all I can think about.”

The image sends a fresh flood of wetness between your thighs. You roll off and position yourself on your knees, presenting yourself like an offering he can’t refuse.

He responds in kind, pulling you back against him, sliding between your folds before entering slowly. The new angle makes you feel impossibly full, long and deep strokes hitting places that make you cry out into the pillow. 

The obscene sound of skin meeting skin fills the room alongside your broken moans. His hand snakes between your legs, fingers finding your clit and circling it with movements that match his thrusts.

“S-satoru,” you gasp, gripping the sheets knuckle-white, face pressed into the pillow. “I’m close.”

Your admission sends him into a frenzy — driving deeper, moving faster, fingers working you with increased urgency. You shatter, body convulsing as pleasure crashes over you in waves that seem endless. You cry out his name as your walls clench around him, pulling him deeper, taking him over the edge with you.

You collapse onto the bed together, bodies slick with sweat. He wraps his arms around you, holding you close as he softens inside you, neither of you wanting to break the connection yet.

You lie tangled together in his sheets, your head on his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath your ear. The rain had slowed to a patter; a lullaby sung by the sky.

You’re already half-asleep, warm and sated and safer than you’ve felt in years.

He presses a kiss into your hair, and mumbles something you can’t make out. But it’s a confession he didn’t need to voice. You learn then, how much can be said without words at all.

Outside, the clouds have parted and yielded to the moon. Through the gap in the curtains, the stars appear one by one. You fall asleep with him under their watchful gaze, dreams intertwined, hearts beating as one. 

Love didn’t arrive all at once.

It slips in unnoticed, patient as melting ice, warming you by degrees so small you only recognize it once the cold completely thawed.

Suddenly, spring is everywhere.

The line stays open.

This isn’t unusual. Once the essential information has been gathered and response has been set in motion, some calls drift into a waiting state. Once the urgency loosens, the work becomes less about extraction and more about endurance, about simply being present.

You glance at the incident timer: seven minutes, forty-three seconds. Forty-four. Forty-five. The city is still rearranging itself around the information you fed it.

Protocol says you could clear the call. Free up the line. Move on to the next crisis in queue.

But something—instinct, maybe, or something less rational—roots you in place. An unreasonable certainty that if you let this call end, if you sever this connection, something crucial will be lost forever.

So you keep the line open.

You adjust the mic slightly, a reflexive gesture. The padding has gone warm against your skin, and you can hear him breathing — each exhale a quiet affirmation that he’s still there.

You: Help’s on the way. I’ll wait with you until they arrive. Caller: Thank you. For staying. You: It’s my job, sir.

You imagine him standing somewhere near the wreckage, phone pressed to his ear. You picture the set of his shoulders, the way he might be bracing against the cold or the dust still settling from the collapse.

You shouldn’t do this — shouldn’t populate the voice with a body, the body with a face, the face with a history. Faces aren’t part of the job. Faces make it personal, and personal makes it hurt.

And yet.

On the other end of the line, you hear movement. Fabric brushing against fabric. A faint scrape, like a shoe adjusting against pavement.

Caller: Do you like what you do?

The question ambushes you. Your gaze drifts across the room, taking in the familiar landscape of chairs inching closer to desks and a dispatcher down the row leaning forward, posture snapping from bored to alert in a heartbeat as their screen glows with endless updates.

You: I don’t know. Spend enough time in one place and it starts to feel like home, I guess. I’ve been doing this long enough that I can’t remember what a normal schedule looks like anymore. Caller: Are you taking care of yourself?

A laugh escapes you. It surprises you, honestly, how easily it comes. How strange it feels to hear concern directed at you.

For years you’ve existed as a role rather than a person. An invisible hand guiding people through their worst moments. Somewhere along the way, you began to believe that invisibility extended inward too — that you’d become as transparent to yourself as you are to the strangers on the other end of the line.

Caller: Sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep. You: No—no, it’s just that… I’m usually the one checking in on people. Caller: That’s not fair, is it? You: Sir— Caller: If you’re always saving others, who’s left to save you?

The vinyl chair creaks as you shift your weight, suddenly uncomfortable. You can see the waveform of his voice on the screen, small peaks and valleys marking his every word. Proof of life, translated into lines.

For reasons you can’t name—reasons that feel selfish and shameful—a part of you hopes the city takes its time getting to him. Just a few more minutes. Just long enough to keep this strange, unexpected connection alive.

You: Right now you should be more concerned about yourself. If the building collapses further, you might be in danger. Caller: Don’t worry about me. You: I have to worry about you. It’s literally my job. Caller: Are you always this stubborn? You: Are you always this evasive?

A soft sound comes through the line — not quite a laugh, but close. Warm and weary and impossibly real.

Caller: Fair point. You: Can you at least promise me you’re somewhere safe? Caller: It’s safe enough.

It’s not the answer you want, but it’s the one you get. You recognize the deflection for what it is.

You: Most people in your position would be more nervous. You don’t have to put on a brave face for me, you know. Caller: Well, I’ve never been good at pretending.

The words hit you; a physical blow.

They seep through the line and settle into a cavity left empty for so long. It sparks a memory you’ve kept locked away for years, buried so deep you thought it was gone.

A pause stretches between you. Long enough that you start to wonder if you imagined the words entirely, if you’ve finally cracked under the pressure of too many nights.

You: What did you just say? Caller: I said, I’ve never been good at pretending.

The phrase is specific, distinct.

Sound warps and stretches, becomes something underwater and far away. You feel it in the way your shoulders tense, in the sudden rabbit-kick of your pulse against your throat, in the way your fingers have gone numb around the pen you’re still clutching.

You: You… you remind me of someone. Caller: Do I?

Your lips remember before your brain does. The shape of a smile once learned by heart resurfaces, suppressed under years of careful forgetting. It settles on your mouth like muscle memory — a ghost that still haunts your heart.

You: Yeah. He used to say the same thing. Caller: Why do you talk about him like he’s gone?

You close your eyes. The smile fades, leaving its echo behind. A phantom sensation of happiness that no longer exists.

Your fingers still on the keyboard, hovering over keys you don’t press. You become acutely aware of your own body — at the uniform collar sitting against your throat, at the ache at the base of your neck. Your heart is beating too fast for someone sitting still.

You: Because he is. Or—he might as well be. It was a long time ago. Caller: Do you miss him?

You swallow against the tightness in your throat. Around you, the emergency center continues its mechanical symphony — keyboards clacking, radios crackling, phones ringing in endless rotation.

You: I— 

Just then, something slips through the line. A low, uneasy sound that doesn’t quite belong. Something scraping and straining, groaning under a weight it was never designed to bear. Metal complaining. Concrete settling into new, unstable configurations.

Your training kicks in before conscious thought does.

You: Sir, did you hear that? Caller: …No, I don’t think so. Probably just the wind.

Another phone rings just beyond your periphery, and a colleague answers with the same practiced cadence you used earlier:

“119, is it a fire or a medical emergency?”

The room erupts with renewed activity, radios coming alive one by one.

“Units staging on the west side.”

“East access blocked.”

“Be advised, instability increasing.”

The words layer and overlap, building a low, urgent rhythm.

You press the headset harder against your temples, as if physical pressure might keep him close to you. You don’t know why this voice feels different from the thousands you’ve heard before. You only know that the idea of the line going dead—of this connection severing cleanly and without ceremony—fills you with a dread so profound it feels like drowning.

You think about the thousands of voices you’ve heard over the years. How all of them, along with their stories, vanish the moment the line goes dead. They become nothing more than incident numbers in a database and timestamps in a log file.

But this one. This voice.

You’re terrified you might never get to hear it again.

So you stay.

Because for now, he’s still there.

And that has to be enough.

Winter, Eight Years Ago

“God,” Satoru murmurs against your neck. “You’re making it very hard to think.”

He’s propped up on one elbow beside you, bare-shouldered and beautifully disheveled, white hair mussed in ways that have nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with your fingers tangled in it moments ago.

Late afternoon light leaks through the gap in the curtains, cutting across the bed in golden bands. Dust motes hang suspended in the air, disturbed into visibility after the sheets move and settle with you.

His hand comes to a rest at your waist, thumb drawing small arcs into your skin. It’s an act so natural now it feels like he’s writing his name there. You lean up, and his lips part easily for you, familiar yet still capable of unmaking you entirely.

He rolls onto his back and brings you with him, arranging you so your head rests over his heart. The steady rhythm beneath your ear has become your favorite sound — proof of life, proof of reality.

“So,” he says, and you can hear him trying to sound casual about it. “I might be gone for a bit next month.”

“Gone where?”

“Conference in Kyoto. Then maybe another one right after in Osaka.“

“Oh.” The word feels inadequate, so you supplement it with forced brightness. “That’s exciting.”

“It is.” You can hear his smile. “It’s a big opportunity. Lots of important people are gonna be there. Dr. Yaga thinks it could really open doors for me down the line.”

You want to ask how long, and if he’ll miss you. You want to ask whether this is the beginning of a longer absence or just a temporary detour on a path that leads back to you.

Instead, you ask, “When do you leave?”

“Two weeks.”

Sooner than you’re ready for.

“That’s not much time.”

“I know.” He turns to you, face painted in golden light. His thumb brushes tenderly over your cheekbone. “But I’ll call. Every night. And I’ll text you so much you’ll get sick of me.”

You want to believe him. You do believe him. But there’s a small, cynical part of you that nudges doubt you’re not ready to acknowledge.

“Just…” You bite your lip. “Don’t forget about me while you’re gone, okay?”

He’s hurt that you’d even think it possible. “How could I?”

But the question hangs between you, unanswered and unanswerable, because neither of you knows what the future holds.

The night he packs, you sit cross-legged on his bed and watch him fold shirts. He’s explaining something about the conference schedule, about panels and presentations, but you’re only half-listening. You’re too focused on watching him tuck socks into shoes to save space, the way he frowns at a wrinkled collar before deciding it’s good enough.

You’re memorizing him, just in case.

“Do you really have to go?” you ask.

“It’s just for a few weeks,” he says, not looking at you. “Maybe a month at most.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be back before you know it.”

“I know.”

He stops packing. Crosses the room. Sits beside you on the bed and takes your hand in both of his. “Hey. Look at me.”

You do, reluctantly.

“I’ll call,” he says. “I promise.”

And you believe him.

For the first week, at least.

They come regularly at first, late at night when he’s back in his hotel room and the day’s obligations have finally released him. He tells you about the presentations — some fascinating, some mind-numbingly dull. About the keynote speaker who somehow made black holes sound boring, which should be impossible. About the food that’s good but not as good as the ramen place near campus that you both love.

“I miss you,” he says on day four.

“I miss you too.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Just got in bed.”

“I wish I was there.” A pause. “What are you wearing?”

“Satoru.”

“What? I’m just curious.” You can hear the grin in his voice.

“Your shirt. The gray one.”

Silence. Then, softer: “You’re killing me.”

You smile in the darkness of your room. “Good.”

By the second week, the calls become texts. Short updates between panels, photos of slides and conference halls and terrible coffee. Apologies for missed calls, promises to talk later that get pushed back again and again.

Satoru: Sorry, got pulled into drinks with some researchers. Call you tomorrow? You: No problem. Have fun. Satoru: I’d rather stay in my room and talk to you. You: You’re lying, aren’t you? Satoru: Okay, maybe a little. But I do miss you.

By the third week, the texts arrive at odd hours. They’re fragmented and hurried, dashed off between other, more important things.

Satoru: Might be here longer than planned. Opportunity came up. You: How much longer? Satoru: Not sure yet. Will keep you posted.

By the fourth week, you learn to fall asleep without the sound of his voice in your ear. You learn to stop checking your phone every hour and you learn that missing someone is less like a sharp pain and more like a dull ache.

You tell yourself it’s fine. He’s busy building his future, after all. He’s brilliant and driven and destined for important things, for a life bigger than what this small campus can offer.

You just didn’t realize his future might not have room for you in it.

The thought is a stone in your chest, growing heavier with each day of silence.

Summer, Seven Years Ago

The kitchen floor is cold in the way tiles always are at night, and the way truth usually is.

Its unforgiving ceramic leeches warmth from whatever’s left of your hope.

You sit with your knees drawn to your chest and your back pressed against the cabinet wood beneath the sink. Your bare feet are tucked under the hem of his old T-shirt — the one you’ve been sleeping in for months that it barely smells like him anymore. It hangs loose on you, fabric softened by too many washes, the screen-printed logo across the front cracked and fading.

There’s an open takeout container between you, cardboard flaps wilted. The noodles inside have gone glossy and congealed, steam long since abandoned. You ordered too much, as always. He used to tease you about it.

Satoru is stretched out on the floor opposite you, one arm tucked behind his head, sleepy and loose-limbed. He’s staring at the ceiling, looking at it the way he looks at the sky. As if it might open up and reveal something infinite. As if it owes him something vast.

And he’s talking. The way he always does when he’s excited, and when something has captured his attention completely.

“—and if the simulations behave,” he’s saying, voice bright with that lift that only ever surfaces when he talks about space, “there’s a real chance I can secure that internship.”

You hum in acknowledgement, the response automatic. It’s the sound you’ve perfected over the last few months. 

You trace a crack in the tile with your finger, following its jagged path until it disappears beneath the refrigerator. You wonder how many things vanish that way — hidden but spreading, non-apparent until it’s gone.

“Houston or Boston, most likely,” he continues, oblivious to your silence. “Maybe DC if I’m really lucky. Dr. Yaga seems to think I have a real shot, especially after how well the conference went. He said my work on stellar evolution was—”

“That’s incredible,” you cut in, because if you don’t speak now you never will.

He turns toward you, eyes bright with that boyish enthusiasm you fell in love with. It’s the same look that used to make your heart race but now only makes it ache. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” you say, and you mean it. You always do.

But meaning it doesn’t make it hurt less.

He sits up, smile faltering at the edges as his eyes search your face. He always notices when something wrong, just never what it actually is.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

You shrug. The motion is small, meant to deflect and pass unnoticed. “Nothing.”

“Not convincing. Try again.”

“It’s nothing, really.”

“We both know that's not true.” He reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear with such casual tenderness it makes you want to scream. “Talk to me.”

You huff a breath, resting your chin on your knees. 

“I don’t know,” you start, words coming slowly. “It’s just… everyone has this grand plan, you know? Look at you — you’ve got this big map laid out. Conferences, internships, research positions. You know exactly where you’re going and how to get there. And I’m just… here. I don’t even know what I want for lunch tomorrow, let alone five years from now.”

He smiles, because this feels solvable to him. “You don’t need a grand plan,” he says, too easily, too dismissively. “You’re good with people. You’ll figure it out.”

The words are meant to be comforting but they miss the landing completely.

“Figure it out when?” Your tone comes out harsher than you intended, sharp enough to make him blink. “You talk about your future like it’s already decided.”

He exhales through his nose, rubbing the back of his neck. You can see him trying to locate where he mistepped. “Well,” he says, hesitant now, “it kind of is. If everything goes right, that is.”

“And what happens then?”

“Then, I suppose, I’ll go.”

Though the words are soft, they still break you.

You nod, mechanically, feeling your heart crystallize in your chest.

You’ve known this was coming since the first time he mentioned the internship, said casually over dinner as a distant concept rather than an imminent reality. You’ve been pretending not to hear it ever since.

“You’ll go,” you repeat quietly, testing the words in your mouth.

“Yeah. To Boston, or Houston, or—if things really line up—Washington.” His mind is already there, already walking through buildings you’ve never seen, meeting people whose names you’ll never learn. “Wherever the research takes me.”

“And what about us?”

“What about us?”

He says it like the question itself is confusing. Like he doesn’t understand why those two things would be connected — his future and yours, as if they weren’t part of the same equation.

You laugh, because if you don’t, you might cry. “What about me?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

He frowns, the first real flash of frustration crossing his face. “What do you want me to say? That I’ll turn down the opportunity? That I’ll stay here and do what, exactly? Work at a planetarium? Teach high school physics? Waste everything I’ve worked for?”

“I’m not asking you to stay.”

“Then what are you asking?”

You press your lips together, feeling your eyes burn with tears you refuse to shed. You hate that you want to cry on a kitchen floor at three in the morning over a future that hasn’t even happened yet. Hate how small you feel for wanting something you don’t have the words to ask for.

“Are you planning on leaving me?” 

The word—leaving—makes him flinch like you’ve struck him.

“I’m not leaving you,” he says. “I’m just going.”

The distinction is everything.

And nothing.

It’s strange how a sentence can share the same words yet still mean vastly different things. Perspectives are funny like that.

You can see him thinking, doing the math in his head, the way he always does. Distances and probabilities and trajectories. He’s spent his whole life studying objects that move apart and come back together. Orbits. Ellipses. He’s always understood the universe in motion; always trusted that things return to where they belong.

Equilibrium, he’d call it. The natural order reasserting itself.

He doesn’t understand that people aren’t celestial bodies. That love doesn’t obey the laws of physics.

He scoots closer, uncrossing his legs so he can sit directly in front of you. He takes your hands in his, and they’re warm like they always are, like they always have been.

“Listen to me,” he says, squeezing your fingers. “This doesn’t change anything between us. I’ll visit. We’ll make it work.”

“For how long?”

“However long it takes.”

“And then what?” You can hear the hysteria creeping into your voice and you can’t stop it. “You finish the internship and take a position somewhere even farther away? I follow you around the world while you chase stars? When does it end, Satoru? When do I get to matter as much as your work?”

He pulls back. “So what are you saying?”

You don’t answer right away. You can’t. Because you don’t know what you’re saying. You only know that the future he’s envisioning—the one with long-distance calls and occasional visits and love stretched between time zones—feels like slow suffocation.

“I’m saying,” you start, choosing each word carefully, “that I don’t know if I can do this. The waiting. The wondering when I’ll see you next. The always, always coming second to your work.”

“You don’t come second.”

“Don’t I?”

The silence that follows is answer enough.

He stares down at your joined hands — except they’re not joined anymore, you realize. In the last few seconds, you’ve pulled away, created distance where there wasn’t any before.

“It doesn’t make sense to keep trying,” you say weakly.

“It may not make sense,” he says, “but there are forces infinitely more powerful than reason.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’ll always come back to you.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

You hold onto his words because they’re all you have.

Later, you will understand what they really meant. Because coming back isn’t the same thing as staying. His absence was already built into that promise.

For now you are young, and in love, and still believe that wanting someone badly enough can keep them from drifting too far. 

So you nod, and squeeze his hand back, and let the future remain abstract and far away.

But as Rousseau once said, there are two kinds of lies: one concerns an accomplished fact, the other concerns a future duty.

Right now, on this kitchen floor, you’re both lying about the second kind.

For now there is only summer, and midnight, and two people who love each other but have already started letting go.

Neither of you know it yet, but the ending has already begun.

Winter, Seven Years Ago

The cold is more insistent this year, biting at your cheeks with teeth sharper than previous winters, finding every gap and seam you didn’t know existed.

You’re still together.

Technically.

It means you haven’t had the conversation. You still text, still call, still say “I love you” at the end of phone conversations that grow shorter and more stilted with each passing week; it means you’re both pretending the end isn’t already here.

It’s been two months since you last saw him in person, two months of missed calls and empty apologies, of growing accustomed to an absence that’s supposed to be temporary but feels increasingly permanent. 

He’s back for winter break, though only for a handful of days before he leaves again.

Dinner that night feels like a performance. You laugh at the right moments and he asks you about your classes, but neither of you mentions the circles under your eyes or the new hollowness in his cheeks. Neither of you acknowledges the elephant in the room — that you’ve become strangers who happen to share a history.

When he walks you home afterward, his hand finds yours out of habit. The touch is familiar and foreign all at once. The same hand you’ve held a hundred times now belonged to a different person entirely.

At your door, he kisses your forehead instead of your lips.

That’s when you know.

There was never a single moment when you stopped loving each other. You simply stopped belonging to each other.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says, and the lie sits between you like a mistress.

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

But you don’t. 

You know he means it in this moment, knows he believes the promise even as he makes it. But you also know that tomorrow will bring new reasons why later becomes never.

You say the words so that he didn’t have to.

“We need to talk."

“About what?”

You take a breath. “I don’t think this is working anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

He tries to save it, to promise he’ll do better. But he’s leaving tomorrow, and you’ve heard it all before. You can’t bear to sentence yourself to more months of slow erosion, this death.

You don’t have it in you to hurt all over again.

“I’m trying,” he says, “you know I’m trying.”

“Trying isn’t the same as being here.”

“What would you have me do?” he snaps, frustration bleeding through. “Give up my career? My dreams? That’s—I can’t do that. You can’t ask me to do that.”

The words sting, even though you know they’re coming from a place of fear, even though you know he doesn’t mean them the way they sound.

“I’m not asking you to give up anything,” you say. “I would never ask that. But I can’t keep waiting for you to decide that I’m worth staying for.”

“You are worth it.”

“Then why does it feel like I’m not?”

You close your eyes, feeling tears slip free and trace hot paths down your cheeks.

“I love you,” you say, the words breaking apart as they leave your mouth. “I really, truly do. But I can’t keep loving you from a distance.”

“I never meant to make you feel that way.”

“I know.”

“I do love you.”

“I know that too.”

A final moment of silence, heavy with all the things you’re both thinking but won’t say — futures that won’t happen, promises that will remain unfulfilled.

“So this is it?” He sounds young, lost.

“I’m sorry,” you say. And you mean it more than you’ve meant anything.

He nods, once.

“Yeah,” he says finally, voice barely above a whisper. “Me too.”

You stand in the doorway long after it closes, listening to the sound of footsteps retreating, growing smaller and smaller until they disappear entirely.

This is how things end.

With two people who have come to realize that love alone isn’t always enough.

Eventually, Satoru becomes a name you don’t say out loud; a constellation you’ve stopped searching the sky for.

It feels like growth.

It feels like loss.

While time you had with him was brief, the forgetting takes years. The thought of being forgotten by someone you could never forget aches as bad as a bruise that won’t fade. But the world doesn’t stop for your grief. Life, indifferent and relentless, continues its forward march.

You graduate. You apply for jobs. You sit through interviews where they ask about your strengths and weaknesses, where you smile and lie through your teeth about being a team player.

You eventually take a job at the emergency call centre. The training is exhaustive — weeks of protocols and procedures, but you learn quickly, discover you have a knack for it. The work is hard, but it’s honest. And it keeps you busy enough that you don’t have time to think about blue eyes and winter stars. You calmly instruct others to compress their wounds even though yours is lodged at your heart, bleeding where no one can see.

In a world full of so much suffering, yours hid itself well.

Most days.

But some nights, when insomnia grips you at three in the morning and you step outside to clear your head, you still look up. And every winter, without fail, Sirius appears — bright and solitary and impossibly far away.

Once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.

You tell yourself you don’t feel anything anymore. That the ache in your chest is just from the cold or exhaustion catching up with you after another long shift.

You are, as always, very good at lying to yourself.

Time stretches differently when someone is waiting on the other end of a line.

Seconds expand and grow elastic until you can feel each one pass. The incident timer climbs past eight minutes now, each digit another small forever.

You swivel in your chair, angling your body toward the console while around you, more calls are coming in — secondary reports, bystanders, people who heard the collapse from blocks away, wanting to know if their loved ones are safe.

His breathing is still controlled, but there’s an irregularity to it that wasn’t there before. A rasp at the tail end of each inhale, air costing him more than it should.

You: Sir, are you feeling alright? Caller: I’m fine. Just a lot of dust. You: Hang on, help is almost there. Caller: I know. I can hear the sirens now.

Outside your peripheral vision, the emergency centre shifts into full crisis mode.

Another phone rings. Then another. The sound layers and overlaps, snapping dispatchers into motion. A supervisor steps into the aisle, eyes flicking to the incident board where Shinjuku blooms red with updates.

“Ambulances on scene.”

“Fire department establishing command.”

“Search teams prepping entry.”

The chorus grows.

You: That’s good. That’s really good. Can you see them?

A pause — longer than it should be.

You: Sir? Caller: Not yet.

There’s a tightness to his voice now, a barely perceptible strain that makes your stomach drop.

You: Where are you right now? Caller: I told you. Outside. You: Sir, I need you to be very specific with me. Are you on the sidewalk? On the street? Behind a barrier?

Another pause. He’s choosing his words carefully, weighing what he can tell you against what he wants to hide.

Caller: I’m where I need to be.

His answer drops through you; stone through water.

From his end, a sound comes through, low and uneasy. The groan of stressed metal bending under impossible weight. The shift of unstable concrete settling into new, dangerous configurations. Things that shouldn’t move, moving — all sounds that don’t belong outside.

Dread arrives then, cold as winter frost.

You: … you’re inside, aren’t you?

The silence that follows is answer enough.

You: Sir— Caller: It’s fine. I’m fine.

Horror floods in; ice in your veins, tremor in your hands, the whole world tilting sideways. Your breath comes out too fast, too shallow. Everything is simultaneously too bright and too dark.

Incoherent, incohesive thoughts rush through your mind like whitewater over jagged rocks, and you’re in the middle of it, careening and crashing into every one.

Your hand lifts from the desk—trembling, useless—falls back without accomplishing anything.

You: You lied to me.

The words escape raw and unfiltered before you can temper it, stripped of every professional protocol you’ve ever learned.

Caller: I know. You: Why? Why would you— Caller: I couldn’t hurt you twice. 

The phrase lodges in your chest; foreign and familiar, impossible and inevitable.

You: What do you mean, twice?

His laughter comes through, soft and worn after years of regret. And it’s the laugh that does it. The particular way it falls — something you used to know intimately. Memory is a stubborn thing that comes back when you least expect it.

Caller: Fate is funny, isn’t it? Out of all the dispatchers in Tokyo, all the voices you could have been… I’m glad it was you. You: How do you know— Caller: I’d know your voice anywhere.

The room contracts to a point. Everything else fades to static, to irrelevance, to nothing. There is only this voice, speaking words that can’t be real.

Love leaves a memory that can’t be stolen.

And you know. God help you, you know.

You: …Satoru?

The name comes out broken, barely a whisper. A prayer to a god you stopped believing in years ago when love proved insufficient.

Satoru: Hey.

And just like that, seven years of careful forgetting, of walls that you’ve built around parts the most vulnerable parts of yourself, collapse into nothing.

The threads stitched closed by time have come loose and the wound you thought had scarred over tears itself open once again, fresh and bleeding.

The shattering of a heart is the loudest quiet ever known.

You: No… no, no. It’s not—it can’t be you. Satoru: This isn’t the way I’d imagined we’d meet again. You: You’re not—you can’t—

Your voice doesn’t sound like yours anymore. It belongs to the girl who once stood under winter stars with his jacket slipping down her shoulders.

Memories rush in unbidden, of summer nights and bare feet on cool tile, his hand warm at your waist, and his laugh that filled rooms before distance taught it restraint.

Satoru: Been back for awhile now. I’ve been meaning to call… but I just couldn’t bear to see you and face what I’d lost. I’m sorry I took so long. You: It’s not the time for that right now! You need to get out of there!

Your voice cracks, too loud, and heads turn across the room. Your supervisor glances over, frowning, but you can’t bring yourself to care about protocol or professionalism now.

You: Are you hurt? Satoru: Define hurt. You: Satoru— Satoru: I can’t feel my legs. That’s probably not a good sign, right?

Your breath stops.

Everything stops.

The distance between you and Satoru has been measured in different units over the years — city blocks, then prefectures, then entire countries. Tonight it’s measured in floors of concrete, in the five miles between your dispatch center and the building that’s crushing him.

Your hands are shaking now, trembling so badly you have to clasp them together to make them stop. You press your headset closer, as if the pressure could somehow keep him tethered to you.

You: Help is coming. They’re there now, Satoru. You… you just have to hold on. Satoru: I know. You: The crews are setting up, search and rescue is preparing entry. They’re going to find you. Satoru: Okay. You: They’re going to get you out. Satoru: If you say so. You: You’re going to make it. You have to. Do you understand me? You have to make it.

From his end, you hear it again — that ominous groan of stressed materials failing, of concrete shifting and metal screaming in defeat.

Satoru: It’s no use.

You can hear the wet rattle in his breathing, the pauses growing longer between words, each clearly extracted at great cost. 

Your training tells you what this means, your experience confirms it; but your heart refuses to accept it.

You: D-don’t do that—don’t you dare give up on me!

His voice has gone soft now. It’s the voice he used to use late at night when the world narrowed to just the two of you.

In the background, you hear the sounds of imminent collapse, of time running out. Each beat bleeds loud in your ears, loud enough to mask the roaring of the call floor around you. 

Satoru: I’m sorry, I can’t keep my promise. I don’t think I can come back to you this time. You: You don’t get to decide that. You hear me? You don’t get to make that choice.

Your voice splinters, scrapes its way out of your throat like it has to claw past bone to be heard.

You: Listen to me. Rescue teams are inside the building now. They’re clearing the east wing as we speak. I need you to stay awake, okay? Just keep talking to me. Satoru: About what? You: Anything. Everything. Tell me what you’re thinking right this second.

He shifts, and a sharp inhale follows, cut short like it hurts too much to complete. Tears stream freely down your face now, hot and unchecked.

Satoru: I’m thinking about the night we first met. You remember? You: Of course I do.

How could you not?

Satoru: You were so beautiful. It hurt to even look at you. It was like I was staring directly at the sun. You: To think I almost didn’t go that night…

He hums faintly, a sound of agreement, of presence.

Satoru: I used to wonder about that sometimes. About all the tiny, insignificant decisions that led to it. If you’d stayed at home. If the music hadn’t cut out when it did. If we’d stepped in different directions instead of colliding. How many universes are there where we never met? Where I spent my whole life not knowing what I was missing? You: Satoru—

Your fingers curl into your sleeve, nails biting into fabric into skin.

Satoru: Seven years… is there a universe where I didn’t let it go to waste? We had time, and I spent it so carelessly. I walked away from the best thing that ever happened to me because I thought—God, I don’t even know what I thought. That I needed to prove something? You: Don’t. Don’t do this to yourself. Not now. Satoru: It’s true, though. I had everything I needed right in front of me, and I convinced myself I needed more. You: You don’t have to explain— Satoru: I do. I need you to understand. Need you to know that leaving you was the single biggest mistake of my life. That every day since has been colored by that regret, and I’d give anything—anything—to go back and choose you, over and over again.

His breathing is noticeably worse now. You can hear him fighting for each word, each syllable choked out of failing lungs.

You: Satoru, please, save your strength— Satoru: No. Need to… need to say this. If I don’t say it now—

He breaks off, coughing. The sound is horrible. Wrong in every way.

You’re screaming into your radio now, demanding updates, telling them to move faster—please move faster, please, please, please—but even as you do, you can hear Satoru fading on the other end. Each breath shallower than the last, each pause between them stretching longer and longer.

Satoru: If this is it… I’m glad I got to hear your voice one more time. You: Don’t talk like that. You’re doing it again—you’re talking about your future like it doesn’t include me, and I can’t—I won’t— Satoru: It’s getting harder to see. You: Stay with me—just a little longer, please. You don’t get to leave me again. Don’t you dare leave. Not again. Satoru: There’s a light. Above me… I can see it. You: Satoru, that might be the rescue team. Can you hear them? Can you hear anyone moving above you? Satoru: No. It’s quiet here. You: H-hey, just focus on me, okay? I know. I know it hurts. But just a little longer, okay? Just hold on a little longer and they’ll get you out and we can—we can have more time. We can have all the time we should have had before.

The light steadies, for just a moment.

He lets out a breath, a sound full of warmth and sorrow and acceptance.

Satoru: I can see you now. You’re here with me. Finally. You: What do you mean? You’re not making any sense. Satoru, please, just hold on— Satoru: Sirius… and the Sun. They’re bound to each other, by forces infinitely stronger than reason.

The call center fades, and you don’t hear the radios anymore, don’t see the screens. There is only this voice and the ache it carves into you.

Satoru: From the moment I met you, up until the very end… you’re all I can see. God, you’re even more beautiful than I remembered. You: No… no! Satoru, please, please stay with me—I’m begging you!

The light blurs completely now. 

He gasps, once, and smiles.

Satoru: I will always be with you.

Then—

Silence.

The waveform on your screen flattens into a single, unbroken line.

A hollow, awful nothing where his voice used to be.

Through your supervisor’s radio, words filter through the static:

“Victim located. Male, early thirties. Unresponsive." “Starting CPR.” “No pulse.” “Starting compressions.” “Get the AED ready.” “Clear!”

The mechanical thump of electricity trying to jumpstart a stopped heart.

“Nothing. Again.” “Clear!”

Another thump.

“Still no pulse.” “Keep going!”

Another failed resurrection.

“Time?” “2:47 AM—call it.”

The words don’t process. Can’t process. They exist in some other reality, another timeline where this isn’t happening — not to him.

The numbers imprint themselves into you, permanent and unforgiving.

Someone is making a terrible sound—a raw, animal keen of grief that doesn’t sound human, doesn’t sound like anything should sound. It takes you a moment to realize it’s coming from you.

Your supervisor gently pulls the headset from your hands, and the loss of that connection—that last tether—destroys whatever’s left holding you together. You collapse forward, forehead hitting the desk, and the sobs that tear out of you feel like they’re ripping you apart from the inside.

Arms wrap around you. Your supervisor, a colleague, you’re not sure. Someone holds you while you break, while you shatter into pieces small enough you’re certain you’ll never be whole again.

Your console stays dark.

You sit there, hollowed out and trembling, staring at the call log.

Duration: 23 minutes and 14 seconds.

That’s how long you had with him.

Twenty-three minutes to say everything you should have said seven years ago; twenty-three minutes that will have to last you for the rest of your life.

Three Months Later

The funeral was small. 

A scatter of colleagues from the research institute where he’d been working. Dr Yaga found you afterward, pressed something into your hand as he left. You waited until you were alone—truly, devastatingly alone—to open the small wooden box.

Inside it were printed messages, carefully preserved. Dozens of them from those early months: movie ticket stubs with dates and times faded but still legible, a pressed flower from some long-ago date you can barely remember, photos of the two of you—young and smiling and so heartbreakingly naive.

It was full of evidence of ordinary evenings that had felt extraordinary simply because you’d spent them together.

And at the bottom was a small notebook, leather-bound and worn.

His handwriting filled every page — journal entries spanning years. Scattered thoughts and observations, equations and diagrams, the detritus of a brilliant mind.

And littered throughout like stars in a dark sky: your name.

Over and over and over.

“Saw Sirius tonight. Wonder if she was looking too, wherever she is. After all this time, she’s still the only one I see.”

“Turned down Washington. Couldn’t explain why, just said it wasn’t the right fit. Dr. Yaga thinks I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have. But I couldn’t do it — couldn’t put an ocean between us, even though I have no right to be close to her anymore. Maybe it’s finally time to go home. Should I tell her? Would she even want to know?”

“I saw her today. Across the street from the station. I don’t think she noticed me. Seven years, and she still takes my breath away.”

You read through them all, one after another, tears falling freely onto pages that blur and swim before your eyes. Each entry was a small window into the years you weren’t there. 

You pressed the notebook to your chest and cried until you ran out of tears, until crying became dry heaving, until your body had nothing left to give to grief.

Now, three months later, you’re standing on your balcony at 2:47 AM.

The exact time they called it.

The night is brutally clear, and there, where it’s always been: Sirius — the brightest star in the sky. It burns alone against the darkness, solitary and brilliant and impossibly far away. Ninety-three trillion miles of emptiness, travelling across incomprehensible distances to reach your eyes.

“I see it,” you whisper to the empty air, to his ghost, to the universe that took him. “I see you.”

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

They don’t knock or clear their throats or arrive with the courtesy of a warning.

They slip in quietly, wearing ordinary faces; in the shape of a phone call at 1:17 AM, in the voice of a someone you used to love, and still do.

You learned early that endings don’t feel like endings when they begin.

The boy who studied the stars became one, invisible but still there, bound to you by forces stronger than distance, or time, or death.

Once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.

Even when it’s gone.

Especially when it’s gone.

“I’m looking, Gumi,” you murmur, resting your forehead against the boy’s. “Did you wanna tell me something?”

Megumi yawns and then pokes at the dark circles under your eyes with all the tenderness a toddler can muster, “Sleep.”

“Are you tired, honey? Mama's tired, too. We can take a nap,” you whisper, already lying down on your side. The recliner is huge–big enough to fit you, Toji, and Megumi in it for movie nights. Toji bought it when he found out you were pregnant. Something about the man of the house needing a throne—you tuned him out. Still, you're grateful for it because you’re able to curl up on your side while cocooning Megumi against your chest. His little head fits perfectly under your chin, and his fists grab onto the front of your sweatshirt. He can be so clingy when he wants to be.

Toji watches on from the sidelines, equal parts amused and enthralled. This whole mothering thing came surprisingly naturally to you. Of course, there were bumps in the beginning, but this? The sight of you curled around his son so protectively is enough to melt a heart he long thought frozen solid. 

Toji’s movements are always so silent that you’re surprised to feel the gentle press of his lips against your forehead. He can feel his heart stutter in his chest when both you and Megumi blink big, bleary eyes up at him.

“Go ahead and sleep, you two. I’ll take care of dinner,” he mumbles gruffly. A small nod and the shifting of your body around Megumi’s is all the confirmation he needs before he’s off to the kitchen. 

Lately, you’ve been working more while Toji takes care of things around the house. Toji doesn’t mind, really. He’s done less dignified things for a lot less reward. Lots of people, friends included, have made snide remarks about it all.

'He's a bum.'

'You deserve better.'

'Why does he make you go to work?'

'Didn't you say he used to be a gambler? How do you know what he does all day?'

Toji being a stay-at-home dad is one thing, but a lot of people are a bit more judgmental when you add in the fact that he’s also given up his family name. It gets under Toji’s skin sometimes, but he just takes another glance at you and Megumi laughing together. He’d do every single depraved and wretched thing he’s ever done all over again if it meant getting to end up with you two. You're the loves of his life, his reason for living, and all his passion wrapped up in one.

Because of that, though, you’ve been getting less sleep. You keep insisting on staying up with Megumi after you come home to give Toji some alone time, but he just wants you to rest tonight. Besides, he’s becoming quite the chef. He'd never thought about cooking before. Being a hitman doesn't really allow for that kind of luxury. The motivation to learn came easily during your pregnancy, and he's found that he enjoys cooking and being able to make yummy, nutritious meals for you and his son. There's nothing quite like the satisfied smile on your face after you've eaten one of his meals.

About thirty minutes later, you’re awoken by Megumi accidentally kicking you in the ribs. He had just been shifting around in his sleep, but the action woke both of you up. You trade accusatory looks with the toddler before his tongue sticks out in a show of defiance. 

Toji hears a loud squeal from the kitchen and decides to check on the two of you. You sometimes have a habit for smothering Megumi when you nap with him. The sight that greets him is enough to make his heart flutter in that broad chest of his. Megumi’s giggling and thrashing in your hold while you tickle his tummy and pretend to gnaw on his hand. 

"Nom nom…hey, you’re pretty tasty, Gumi. I should get daddy to put you into a soup!” you tease him. 

Megumi squeaks indignantly, and Toji clears his throat from the doorway.

“You two havin’ fun in here while I slave away in the kitchen?” he asks dryly, a hint of humor in his bored voice that only you could ever pick up on. The tender look on his face betrays his true feelings. There’s a twinkle in his eyes that makes your heart soft.

“Mm-hmm. You know it. We're just two bums. Grifters, even." You and Megumi give him twin smiles.

An almost imperceptible grin quirks the corners of Toji’s lips up. You’ve always loved the way his scar moves when he smiles. He’d never admit it, but it’s something that he gets a little insecure about. It’s hidden under layers of nonchalance, but that insecurity, the small voices in his head telling him that he’ll never be good enough for anything or anyone, is still in there deep down. 

Without another word, you’ve got Megumi in your arms again, and you head into the kitchen. Megumi is plopped down onto the kitchen island with a quiet whine and some grabby hands shot in your direction. You sidle right up next to Toji and duck your head under his arm to peek at what he’s making. 

“That looks good, honey,” you murmur. You sneak a kiss to his chest before retreating back to Megumi’s side. The boy has already found entertainment in playing with a few stray grains of rice on the counter. 

“Thanks, sugar. I have keep my lady and my boy well-fed, don’t I? You might get an upgrade otherwise.”

You laugh and help Megumi chuck a grain of rice at his back, “Upgrades aren’t covered on my data plan, I'll have you know. Not until I pay off the lease on my original model, anyway.”

Toji snorts, and the stray rice is swept away by one of his strong hands, “Noted.”

There’s a moment of warm silence that’s interrupted by the soft beeping of the rice cooker. Toji flicks it off and begins crumbling some nori into the fresh rice. You get an idea and reach out to poke Megumi’s chubby cheek.

“Hey, Gumi. You wanna help Daddy and stir the rice?” 

Megumi, who was previously invested in chewing on the strings of your sweatshirt, nods solemnly.

“Yeah! Help Daddy!” he exclaims, his little hands reaching out for the rice bowl. You shoot Toji a playful look. He hands you the bowl and a wooden spoon with his own look that says, ‘If he gets rice everywhere, you’re going to be the one cleaning it up.’ 

You pass the bowl off into Megumi’s eager hands, watching as he begins to clumsily stir the rice. A big clump of rice threatens to spill out of the bowl, but you manage to push it back down before it can hit the floor. You hear a sigh from your right, and you shoot Toji a sheepish look.

“Woah, Megs…let me help you, okay?” your gentle hand settles over Megumi’s, and you help guide him to stir the rice in a more controlled fashion. “There we go…now it’s all nice and mixed up.”

Megumi beams up at you and then, in true toddler form, he shoves his hand down into the bowl, scoops up a handful of rice, and begins eating it from his palm. Your expression drops into something between distress and incredulity. Toji just laughs.

“Yeah, that’s my boy, alright.”

Bolstered by his father’s words, Megumi begins eating a second handful of rice. He’s got grains stuck all on his cheeks and a few have managed to get onto his socked feet. An exasperated sigh leaves you, and you delicately snatch the bowl away from Megumi.

“No more before dinner time, okay? Don’t want you getting a tummy ache.”

Megumi, ever the resolute toddler, nods and goes back to chewing on his rice. The second you turn to put the rice bowl back onto the counter, though, Toji’s feeding the boy a piece of the chicken katsu he’d just finished cutting up. You shoot him an exasperated look and shake your head.

Dinner goes off without a hitch, and, soon enough, you’re tucking Megumi into bed for the night. You depart from his bedside with a kiss to his forehead while Toji flicks the lights off. The second Megumi’s bedroom door clicks shut, Toji’s crowding you from behind and groping your ass.

His head dips down, lips brushing the side of your neck, “Hey, sugar. Why don’t you come shower with me? Take a little break.

A shudder rips through you,goosebumps prickling your skin. You’ve always been sensitive to Toji, and his hard chest pressed right up against your back is no exception. His right hand travels up to rest just over your ribcage.

“I’ll behave,” he coos.

Yeah, this? This is not behaving. Toji’s left hand is wrapped around your throat, tilting your head back against his collarbone while his soapy right hand gropes your tit under the guise of “cleaning” you. 

“Pretty fuckin’ thing,” he mumbles into your shoulder. Damp, navy blue strands of hair stick to your jaw as he trails his lips over the surface of your shoulder. Toji lets the water rinse off the soap before he leans over and sucks your puffy nipple into his mouth. 

A quiet mewl squeezes its way out of you, and Toji flicks his tongue over the peaked flesh in response. Toji grunts as he manhandles your body back against his. It sends a shiver down your spine that the warm water flowing over the two of you holds no effect over. His left hand travels down from your throat, between the valley of your breasts, and comes to a stop at your side, just so his fingers can dig into the swell of your hip.

“C’mere, baby. Toji’s got ya. You’re not getting away from me,” he murmurs. Toji always acts greedy. He is greedy. He’s also half-convinced that you could walk away from him at any point, so every time he gets the chance to sink his fingers into the doughy flesh of your thighs is just another chance for him to exercise that greed.

His left hand reaches down between your thighs, and two of his thick fingers spread your sticky folds apart. His fingers slide all over cunt, rememorizing the shape of your folds and every contour that makes you unique. He's a little freak about it, but he's all yours. The tip of his finger rubs feather-light circles over your clit, too much and yet nowhere near enough. Toji knows it's not enough. He just lives to see you squirm.

He gets his wish when you start aimlessly grinding your soft ass back on him. His erection has been poking at your lower back since you bent over to get the water started. Even in the shower, Toji can feel your slick gathering on his shaft every time your ass circles back against him.

“Thaaat’s it, baby. Just like that…don't stop,” he chuckles. His right hand lifts up to tilt your head back in the same moment that one of his feet kicks yours farther apart. His shoulder hunch, bending over to get nose-to-nose with you. “There you are, pretty girl. Open for me.”

You do as he asks easily, you pretty lips parting just for him. They’re shiny and slick from the shower, only getting messier as Toji pulls you into a filthy kiss. Every time he kisses you, it feels like the world stops and holds it’s breath. He’s never shy when he slides his tongue into your mouth, always seeking and exploring like he's trying to make you his from the inside out. The taste of you grounds him. He’s got his left hand grabbing you just under your jaw to keep your head in place while he explores your mouth, applying just enough pressure to distract you from what his sneaky fingers are doing between your thighs. 

The hot, wet pressure of his tongue sliding against yours is already enough to make your head spin, but the feeling is compounded when he suddenly sinks two fingers deep inside you. Toji grins against your mouth at the squeal you let out. He parts from your face just enough to look into your lidded eyes. The hand not currently exploring your cunt from the inside out slides up to squish your cheeks.

“You like that, huh? Aren't you going to tell me how much?” A feral grin distorts the scar on the corner of his lips when you defiantly shake your head. “Eh, don’t worry, sugar. I’ll fuck some honesty into you.”

His fingers pick up their pace, scissoring and twisting inside you. His fingers are so thick that you can feel each individual knuckle, even more so when he decides to curl them up into your g-spot. A cry tears out of your throat, but the sound of it is swallowed up by the cascade of water coming out of the shower head. His hand is moving at near-superhuman speed, simply because Toji loves seeing your eyes roll back into your head. The pleasure is nearly blinding, building and swirling deep in your gut, tightening in your core, almost bursting–

And then nothing. Toji roughly pulls his fingers out of your core and pushes you forward with a strong hand on your upper back. Your hands slam onto the wall to keep yourself upright. Your thighs are already trembling, and you’re not certain if you’re more embarrassed that you’re this wrecked from Toji fingering you or by the fact that Toji’s fat tip is leaking precum onto the arch of your back. 

“Fuckin’ perfect,” Toji grunts. He ruts against your ass a few more times before angling his cock down against your pussy. The stimulation is enough to make you whine and try to squirm away from him. Toji tuts and snakes his arms around your waist like iron bands, “Nice try, sugar. I told you. You’re not getting away tonight.”

Toji grinds against you a few more times, slapping the heavy head of his cock against your clit twice for good measure. Once he’s fully coated in you, he starts pushing in. He loves watching the way your pussy eats his cock up like it’s a gourmet meal. It's something he'll never get tired of seeing.

He lets out a low groan as he bends down over you, shoving his tip right up against the gummy sweet spot near your cervix. His big hand brushes your wet hair onto one shoulder, and he presses feathery kisses to the nape of your neck. You never really understood the sentiment of “feeling like coming home when you’re with your partner” until you met Toji. Home is the way his hands settle on your waist after a long night. Home is the way he kisses you like you’re made of glass.

Home is the way his arms tighten and lift you up off the shower floor before he starts fucking you so deep you see stars. Your arms and legs dangle uselessly as he keeps you pinned against him. He’s got one arm right under your belly, and the other one keeps your chest propped up. It's an obscene show of his strength, but you've always known that your husband is abnormally strong. It still has your pussy fluttering around him, though.

His cock has the perfect angle to hit your sweet spot over and over again, gravity making slide right back down his cock every time he pulls out of you. 

“Fuck, fuck, Toji, oh my god–don’t stop,” you whine into the shower wall. You can feel your brain actively shutting down as it gets flooded with oxytocin. The pleasure is almost too much, setting your skin on fire until you can feel it all the way down to your toes.

“See, baby? Told you I’d–shit–fuck some honesty into ya. Hah…” Toji’s words are a low growl pressed right between your shoulder blades. He’s never been more thankful for having to install those grippy ducks on the bottom of the shower than he is right now. 

“Yeahhh, take it for me. So good for me. Love you so much. Shit, your pussy’s so perfect,” he groans. The way your bodies play into each other is almost maddening. Each squeeze of your gummy walls makes his cock throb, and every time he pulses inside you, you clench down on him involuntarily. “Mm-hmm…little more, baby. I can feel you getting tighter. You wanna cum for me?”

You let out a little wail and nod frantically. Toji’s still hitting your g-spot, and the way his balls slap against your clit rhythmically is good enough to make your toes curl. Toji can’t tell if the wetness on your face is from tears or the shower anymore.

“Yes! Yes, fuck, please make me cum, Ji–”

Toji cuts you off by squeezing your throat lightly, “Never gotta say please with me, princess. You know I’ll give it to you.”

That promise is enough to have you clamping down on his cock and gushing around him as your orgasm washes over you. Your legs thrash uselessly in the air, your eyes rolling back into your head as Toji keeps you speared on his cock. The aftershocks are stupidly intense as Toji keeps rutting into you. He’s groaning louder now, too, spurred on by the fact that you once told him he sounds pretty when he cums. If that wasn't enough, you can feel his cock starting to twitch inside you, too.

“Mm, want me to fill you up, baby?” he grunts against your back. “See if I can make you a mama again?”

You must’ve managed to nod in your delirious state because soon enough, Toji’s thrusts falter. He empties himself inside you, pelvis flush against the red skin of your ass. He stays there for a few moments before slowly pulling out and setting you back on your feet. Even the sensation of the rough adhesive ducks makes your overly sensitive nervous system twitch.

“You’re so tired, aren’t you?” Toji asks, his voice gentle despite being worn raw from moaning. He helps you stand back up and brushes wet strands of hair out of your face, strong arm supporting your weight. His free hand alternates between stroking your cheek and rubbing soothing circles into your lower back. “I’ll get you cleaned up. Don’t even worry about it.”

Thirty minutes later, you’re curled up in Toji’s lap on your big bed. He’s got you in one of his old, worn shirts, tucked up in his arms while he spoon feeds you ice cream. There’s some kind of trashy reality show playing on the TV, but the two of you are completely wrapped up in each other. 

Your hands are resting on the curve of Toji's spine. You snuck them up under the hem of his shirt the second he sat down behind you. A content hum slips out of your chest when Toji’s fingers, once used for unspeakable violence, settle into your hair for a scalp massage. He feeds you another spoonful of ice cream, and you plant another little kiss over his heart. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. 

Megumi’s still tucked away, cozy and snoring in his bed, and you’re right here, safe and sound in his arms. Toji doesn’t mind any snide comments he gets from strangers about your relationship dynamics. He doesn’t care if he still gets messages from past acquaintances claiming that he’s gone soft, telling him that they're still waiting when he's ready to get back in the game.

The truth is that he has gone soft. But if softness means he gets to keep the two most valuable people in his life safe, he’d gladly turn into a damn teddy bear. His eyes drift down to your now-sleeping form cradled against his chest. 

Huh.

Maybe he already is one. 

all written content belongs to @cherrys-wrld. i do not own the original characters or the official art used above. do not feed my work into ai, repost, translate, or copy it.

masterlist

toji/jjk taglist: @nyapinkypie @poepard @dawnsoblivion @satorusrealm @dollhousesinner @sugurusbadhabit @suguruss1ut @sgarcubes @imagineadream @getopied @killakuna @hotties4gojo (i'm in love with you btw aisha :3)

Circadian rhythm is a myth you stopped believing in three years ago. Sleep is a luxury people with nine-to-fives have, and daylight is a rumor the morning shift swears exists. Your schedule treats rest like a hobby you can’t commit to, always meaning to get back to it but never finding the time.

The dispatch center is a patchwork organism: worn consoles exhaling heat, swivel chairs that shriek protests with every movement, half-empty bottles of green tea sweating condensation onto particle-board desks. Energy drinks stand abandoned mid-sip, their carbonation long dead. Screens glow in muted blues and tired whites, maps peppered with blinking markers. Status columns refresh, again and again — a digital heartbeat reminding you that crisis, much like you, rarely sleeps.

You badge in and begin the ritual that transforms you from person to function.

Login. Password. CAD system. Phone system. Radio console.

Your employee ID appears so many times it sheds meaning, the numbers blur into abstraction and becomes an identifier of someone who exists only to be there for someone else's sake.

Then you put on your armor.

The headset settles over your ears with a practiced click, padding pressing lightly against your temples. The microphone arm curves towards your lips, waiting to catch your words and send them out to strangers in the dark.

The world narrows until all that exists is what you can hear — you’re in it now.

Early on, it’s a steady grind: ten, twelve calls an hour, and that’s only the emergency line. It doesn’t account for the administrative overflow bleeding through from other services, the while-I’ve-got-you calls from lonely people who just want to hear a kind voice, the follow-ups, the wrong numbers, the pranks from teenagers who think they’re funnier than they are.

It also doesn’t count the radio crackling to life beside you — that second channel demanding a different part of your consciousness, one that expects you to juggle units and GPS coordinates while keeping enough bandwidth free to be someone’s lifeline.

Most calls are textbook. 

Paint-by-number crisis. A petty neighbor dispute that’s been simmering for months, finally boiling over at midnight. Someone locked out, sitting on their doorstep in the cold. A man sleeping rough by the roadside — a concerned citizen uncertain if he’s passed out or passed away.

Then there are the calls that take longer. 

Domestic violence where every word carries the weight of a life balanced on a knife’s edge. House fires that refuse to die, that keep finding new fuel, new rooms to devour. You talk people through procedures you pray you’ll never need yourself: press here, keep low, count with me, stay with me. 

You are meticulous. Exact. Because the difference between XX-ban and XY-ban can be measured in minutes, and time is a currency you can’t afford to waste.

Thanks are rare in this job.

Endings are rarer still.

But you know—you know—that when you clock out at dawn, the city is still standing partly because of what you did while it slept.

Your fingerprints are on it, invisible but everywhere — in the spaces between sirens, in roads that stay open, in mornings people wake up to without ever knowing how close someone came to never waking at all.

That’s why you stay. Not for the easy calls, but for the moments when you can take the worst day of someone’s life and make it fractionally, infinitesimally less terrible.

The phone rings.

There’s no warning, no omen, no cinematic pause. You don’t feel a chill of intuition or anything prophetic stirring in your chest. 

For now, it’s just another line. 

Another voice waiting to be heard.

Another story you’ll only ever hear the middle of.

You answer.

You: 119. Fire or medical emergency?

Static washes through first, then breathing, then a man’s voice.

Caller: Emergency. I need an ambulance.

Your cursor blinks expectantly on the incident screen, a small pulse of light waiting to be given substance. You straighten, pen poised, the plastic warm where your thumb has worn the coating thin over countless nights just like this one.

You: What's your location? Caller: Shinjuku-ku, [—]-cho, [—]-ban, [—]-go. Near [—] Station. You: Shinjuku-ku, [—]-cho, [—]-ban, [—]-go. Near [—] Station. Is that correct? Caller: Yes. You: What’s the nature of the emergency?

A brief pause, filled with empty silence.

Caller: A building collapsed. There may be people trapped.

Your pen moves without conscious thought, collecting details and anchoring them to paper, building the skeleton out of coordinates, keywords — something the city will soon flesh out with sirens and rescue personnel.

You: Sir, are you injured? Caller: No. You: Can I have your contact details?

Another pause. This one shorter and more deliberate. You can almost hear him thinking, weighing his words on some internal scale you cannot see.

Caller: I’ll stay on the line. I can flag down the crews when they arrive.

The radio crackles as you dispatch units. Help begins to move through the city’s arteries.

You: Emergency services are being dispatched to your location. I’m going to keep you here to gather more information. Can you tell me how many people might be affected? Caller: Hard to say. But the east side took the worst of it. You: Can you describe what you’re seeing right now?

On his end, fabric rustles — a body trying to get comfortable in an uncomfortable situation. The sound is oddly intimate, transmitted through miles of copper and fibre optic, arriving in your ear as if he’s standing right beside you.

Caller: Debris field across the street. Concrete, rebar, dust everywhere. The building’s… folded in on itself. I think something crushed it from above.

You relay this, fingers flying over keys, passing intelligence to crews already converging on the scene.

You: Any immediate hazards? Fire, gas leak, downed power lines? Caller: No fire. Don’t smell gas either.

You nod, even though he can’t see it.

That’s the strange intimacy of this job. You sit in a climate-controlled room surrounded by screens and static, yet you’re also standing, in a way, beside a stranger in the dark. Close enough to hear how he breathes. Close enough to matter.

On your screen, the incident pulses with new life, its details now pinned in place, timestamp ticking forward.

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

Sometimes, they begin exactly like this.

But for now, it’s just another voice on the line.

Early Winter, Nine Years Ago

You almost don’t go.

You stand outside the building with your phone glowing in your palm, cold biting into your skin as messages from your friend stack one atop another. Each buzz is a small insistence, each line of text another hand at your back, pushing.

Free drinks, she’d promised, as if alcohol were sufficient compensation.

You need to meet people, she’d insisted, as if connection were a finite resource you were squandering.

Still, you go. Because that’s what twenty-year-olds do on Friday nights. Because it feels worse to be alone outside a party than lonely inside one.

Light spills from the building's windows in aggressive yellow squares, silhouettes moving behind them like figures trapped in a snow globe someone won’t stop shaking. Already you can hear the bass distorting into something less music and more assault on the senses.

The mixer is exactly what you feared it would be: loud without being lively, bright without being warm. 

Music hammers from speakers never meant shoulder this kind of ambition, turning everything muddy and indistinct. The room feels crowded in a way that has nothing to do with the number of bodies packed inside and everything to do with the suffocating weight of performance, of everyone trying so desperately to be seen.

Conversations overlap and cannibalize each other, turning words shapeless. Laughter rises and falls in waves, pitched too high, held too long. 

Everyone here is selling something — the most desirable version of themselves, marketed in carefully curated fragments.

You listen more than you speak; a trait born from habit and honed by your major. As a communications student, you can’t help noticing the constant misfires — people talking at each other rather than with, filling air as if silence would prove fatal.

You’re halfway through calculating the minimum polite duration you're required to stay when the music dies mid-beat.

An awful, metallic shriek tears through the speakers—feedback loop screaming its death rattle—and half the crowd flinches in unison, hands flying to ears. The DJ swears into the mic, something colorful about technical difficulties and shitty equipment. A collective groan ripples outward, followed by that awkward, suspended phase where no one knows what to do with their hands.

You step back instinctively, grateful for the reprieve, and collide with someone doing the exact same thing. 

Elbow-to-elbow, accidental and light, but enough to send your drink sloshing dangerously close to the rim. 

“Oh—sorry,” you say, turning.

“Sorry,” he says at the exact same moment.

You both laugh — reflexive and a little startled. His cup, you notice, is empty. Has been for awhile, judging by the faint ring dried at the bottom.

“Either you’re a raging alcoholic,” you say, eyeing the cup suspiciously, “or you’re exercising impressive restraint.”

He looks down at it as if just now remembering its existence, lifting it in examination. Blue eyes—startlingly bright even in dim lighting—flick back to yours with mischief dancing in their depths. 

“Oh, this? This is my escape hatch. Turns out telling people you’re getting a drink is a surprisingly effective way to flee boring conversations.”

The corner of your mouth twitches. “Well,” you say, lifting your own cup in a small salute, “actually drinking is also a surprisingly effective exit strategy.”

“Looks like we’re both veterans of social warfare.” His smile comes easy, reaching his eyes and crinkling the corners, making him look younger than he probably is. “I’m Satoru. Astrophysics.”

He says it casually, like he’s telling you his favorite color rather than announcing he studies the fundamental architecture of the universe.

You blink. “Wow.”

“Oh, don’t give me that face.”

“I’m allowed to make this face,” you argue. “It’s an objectively impressive sentence. Also, you absolutely look like someone who studies astrophysics.”

“Is that so?” He tilts his head, curious. “What, pray tell, does an average astrophysics student look like?”

“Like someone who owns at least three shirts with equations on them and gets way too excited when planets align.”

“I own two shirts with equations, thank you very much.” The mock offence in his voice is undermined by a spreading grin. “And nothing gets me going more than planetary motion. I am but a simple man with simple pleasures.”

You laugh — surprised by how easily it comes, by how genuine it is in the midst of all the exhaustive performances. You tell him your name, and in doing so, make a subconscious decision that you’ve just extended your stay beyond the minimum polite duration.

“Communications,” you offer when it’s your turn to reduce yourself to a major.

He hums thoughtfully. “Yet you don't enjoy social events? Seems a bit ironic, doesn’t it?”

“I specialize in listening,” you say with a shrug. “This place is way too loud for me to practice.”

“You’re not wrong.” He winces, reminded of the assault on his eardrums mere moments ago. “I was about five minutes away from pulling the fire alarm and staging a heroic escape.”

“That’s a crime, you know.”

“Only if I get caught.”

“So you’re a criminal astrophysicist. That’s a first.”

“I contain multitudes.”

And as if summoned by the joke—cosmic irony at its finest—the music crashes back to life, reclaiming a volume louder than before. The room surges again, bodies closing ranks, conversations restarting mid-sentence.

Satoru's expression turns painful. Then his face shifts, a thought clearly forming.

“Want to commit a misdemeanor with me?” he asks with a boyish smile. It makes it seem like he’s inviting you to skip class.

“What kind?”

“The fleeing kind.”

You pretend to consider it, even though you already know your answer. “I don’t know. I’ve only just met you. You could be dangerous.”

“I study stars for a living.” He spreads his hands in a gesture of innocence that’s entirely unconvincing. “What could I possibly do to hurt you?”

“That’s exactly what a dangerous person would say.”

“Fair point.” His grin widens, and his eyes light up, impossibly bright. “Then I guess you’ll have to take your chances.”

“Okay,” you say. “Let’s flee.”

Outside, the night opens up like a gift. 

The campus stretches out in long, quiet lines. Cold air kisses your cheeks, sharp and clean after the stale warmth inside. The party’s noise dulls behind you, replaced by the soft crunch of gravel underfoot.

You walk side by side with no destination in mind, no purpose beyond away, steering toward a pathway that cuts through dead grass and dormant trees.

“So,” you say after a comfortable silence. “Astrophysics. What about it called to you? Were you one of those kids who discovered comets through a backyard telescope?”

“Nothing that impressive.” He tucks his hands in his pockets. “I just… liked looking at the sky.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” A shrug, self-depreciating. “My parents wanted me to be a doctor. Good salary and better bragging rights. But I kept thinking about how small we are... how temporary.” He pauses, breath misting in the cold. “A human life is, what, eighty years if you’re lucky? But a star? A star burns for billions. We’re nothing but brief blips.”

You’re quiet for a moment, absorbing this — the casual way he discusses impermanence, the way some people discuss weather. “That’s kind of depressing.”

“Or liberating.” He slows, then stops altogether, looking up. “To quote Anatole, the wonder is not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.”

You follow his gaze upward, neck craning back.

“Perhaps the millions of visible stars,” he continues, “and the countless others we cannot see, might amount to nothing more than a single drop of blood of some tiny creature, living in a universe beyond our imagination. Yet even that universe could be just a speck of dust in something larger still.”

Above, the sky is washed thin by light pollution—Tokyo’s eternal glow stealing the stars—but a few push through anyway, stubborn pinpricks against the dark. He points one out, then another, talking about them like old friends. You listen, even when you don’t quite follow the science, because the way he speaks makes you feel like you don’t have to understand to appreciate the beauty of it.

“That one’s my favorite,” he says, like he’s admitting a childhood crush.

You squint up at the same patch of sky. “Which one? They’re all look like dots to me.”

He shifts a step closer and, without thinking, reaches for your hand. His fingers are warm despite the cold; they engulf yours completely as he guides your arm upward, tracing a small arc through the air with your joined hands.

“There,” he says, voice soft beside your ear. “See it? It’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. But once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.”

You follow the line he’s drawn, adjust your focus, recalibrate your vision, and then you see it — a point of light brighter than the others, a single star holding court in the winter sky.

“Oh. How did I miss it before?”

"It gets overshadowed." He smiles — you can hear it in his voice even though you’re not looking at his face. "The moon steals the show most nights. But the moon’s kind of a fraud. It only looks bright because it’s borrowing the Sun’s light. Just a big, dull rock pretending to shine.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Sirius,” he says. “The brightest star in the night sky. It only shows up during the winter months, then goes back into hiding when it gets too close to the Sun.”

He drops his hand then, releases yours and tucks his own in his pocket. A flicker of self-consciousness crosses his face, suddenly worried he’s said or done too much.

You stare at Sirius a moment longer, feeling a strange sorrow.

“That’s kind of tragic,” you say softy. “Sirius and the Sun — they exist at the same time, but they’re never allowed to be seen together.”

He goes still beside you, and for a second you think you might’ve said something wrong. But then he smiles, and it’s different from before.

“Don’t worry,” he reassures. “They’re still bound to each other, even if we can’t see it.”

Just then, a breeze cuts through the quad. You shiver, hands instinctively coming up to rub your arms. Before you can even process the movement, he’s shrugging out of his jacket and draping it around your shoulders.

“You don’t have to—”

“Don’t fight it,” he says, adjusting the collar so it sits properly. “It’s my good deed for the day. Gotta balance out the potential serial killer thing.”

The fabric still holds his warmth. You pull it closer, feeling the weight embrace you.

"Thanks," you mutter.

You walk for a long time after that, aimless and unhurried, conversation meandering the way good ones do. He tells you about late nights in the observatory, about simulations that crash spectacularly, and you talk about classes and about professors who mistake volume for authority.

You talk about nothing, about everything.

Near the edge of the campus, where the lights fade out and the stars reclaim their territory, you realize you’ve been smiling for no particular reason. That your face actually hurts a little from it.

“I almost didn’t come out tonight,” you admit.

He looks at you, and his smile is a little shy, a little hopeful. “I’m glad you did.”

You exchange numbers like it’s an afterthought, a casual thing, though you both know it isn’t. Another decision that doesn’t mean anything yet.

But later—much later—when this memory returns to you in fragments, you’ll think about this night. You’ll remember the weight of his jacket on your shoulders and the way he guided your hand through the dark. And you’ll come to understand just how cruel gentle beginnings can be.

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

They slip in under the cover of the night, wearing an ordinary face.

And by the time you recognize them for what they are, it’ll already be too late.

Late Winter, Nine Years Ago

Love doesn’t arrive all at once.

It comes the way spring does — incrementally, in ways you only notice in retrospect. One degree warmer, one minute of daylight longer.

It edges in through text messages that gradually become frequent enough that there’s no hour that feels unreasonable anymore. It comes in the lengthening of days and the way your lips curve involuntarily when his name lights up your phone — that Pavlovian response you can’t control and have stopped trying to.

You don’t call it anything yet. The absence of labels preserves the illusion of freedom, of not being in too deep.

You are, as always, very good at lying to yourself.

Your phone buzzes while you’re doing the dishes. You don’t even dry your hands before reading the message, just wipe the suds carelessly on your jeans, leaving damp patches on your thighs that will take twenty minutes to fade.

Satoru: Coffee tomorrow? No lectures about stellar evolution this time, I promise.

A smile appears before you can stop it. You actually turn your phone face-down for a moment, embarrassed, as if he might witness the way you’re grinning like an idiot at your kitchen sink.

You: I don’t know… still not convinced you’re not a serial killer. Can you guarantee you won’t try to kill me? Satoru: I can guarantee pastries. Is that good enough?

You can see it so clearly: the tilt of his head, that particular angle that makes his hair fall across his forehead. The way one corner of his mouth lifts higher than the other, asymmetrical and devastating.

You: Fine. But if you murder me, I’m so haunting you. Satoru: Deal. I could use the company.

The café he chooses is small and warm. The kind of place that smells like roasted beans and brown sugar. You choose a seat near the window, watching the steady stream of strangers pass, trying your best to distract yourself from your nervous state.

When Satoru walks in, it feels like the continuation of a thought you didn’t know you’d started. 

His coat hangs open, scarf loose around his neck. He’s wearing a soft blue sweater, clearly loved into comfort. The cuffs are slightly stretched, and his hair is doing that thing where it refuses all attempts at discipline. 

When he spots you, it’s as if a switch flipped inside him, illuminating what was once dormant.

“Hey,” he says, sliding into the seat across from you.

“Hey yourself.”

He flags down a server, orders something complicated with far too many modifiers—extra shot, oat milk, no whip, yes whip, maybe whip?—then turns his full attention back to you. And when Satoru gives you his attention, it’s full. Undivided. Like you’re the only person in the room, in the world, worth looking at.

You talk about everything that matters and everything that doesn’t. About classes and deadlines and group projects where you somehow end up doing all the work. He tells you about staying awake for thirty-six hours trying to fix a simulation and the vindictive satisfaction of finally making it work at four in the morning.

You notice things you shouldn’t, details far too small to matter and yet mattering anyway: the faint scar near his knuckle, the way he drums his fingers against his cup when he’s thinking, how his eyes track to the window when he’s searching for the right words.

You wonder, idly, what moments shaped those details; what histories live beneath his skin.

When the check comes, he grabs it before you can protest, snatching it out of reach.

“I can pay for myself,” you start.

“You can fight me for it next time.”

“Next time?”

Though the question is casual, the hope beneath it isn’t.

He looks up, suddenly uncertain — a crack in his usual confidence. “I mean… if you want a next time, that is. No pressure.”

A smile accompanies your response. “So, same time next week?”

The weeks blur together after that, each one folding into the next. Coffee becomes dinner, and dinner becomes long walks where you talk and talk until your voice goes hoarse. He texts you photos of the night sky from the observatory, tells you their stories. You send him pictures of interesting graffiti you pass on your way to class and snippets of overheard conversations that make you laugh.

It’s easy, effortless.

And then, on an unremarkable evening in late February, the remarkable happens.

The rain starts halfway through the walk back to his place — a light mist that freckles your hair and darkens the shoulder of his jacket. By the time you reach his building, it’s steady enough to justify lingering under the awning, both of you pretending you’re waiting for it to pass, both of you knowing you’re really just prolonging the night.

“You could come up,” he says, trying for casual but not quite managing it. “If you want.”

And you do.

His apartment is dim when you enter, lit only by a lamp in the corner that casts everything in honeyed shadows. You toe off your shoes by the door and he takes your coat, hangs it up without thought. The gesture is so natural it almost hurts — that casual domesticity an intimacy in itself, an implication of futures unwritten.

“Make yourself at home,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

You sink onto the edge of the couch, feeling the fabric grow familiar as you wait. From the kitchen you hear water running, the click of the kettle, the percussion of ceramic against counter. Then the smell of tea — something herbal and sweet.

When he returns, he sets the mug into your hands, fingers lingering long enough to transfer warmth.

“You didn’t have to,” you murmur, holding it between your palms.

“No, I didn’t,” Satoru says, small and sincere. “I just like doing things for you.”

You bring the mug to your lips, letting steam fog your lashes. The tea is perfect — not too hot, sweetened ever so slightly, exactly how you mentioned you liked it in an offhand comment made weeks ago.

“You remembered,” you say softly.

“Of course I did.”

You look down into the mug, watching the surface tremble with the quiver of your hands. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

He settles beside you on the couch, resting his elbow along the back of the couch. “Why not?”

“Because it makes it hard to pretend this is casual.”

You can’t see it, but there’s nothing casual about the way he’s looking at you right now.

“Well, I’ve never been good at pretending,” he confesses.

The words are simple yet enough to undo you completely.

He reaches out, covers your hand where it wraps around the mug. You feel your breath change before you realize you’ve taken it. And when you turn to meet his eyes, you find yourself drowning in blue.

You become painfully aware of how close his face is. How you can count his eyelashes if you wanted to. How his gaze drops to your mouth and traces the shape of your lips before returning to your eyes with a question written in their depths.

“Can I—?” he starts, then falters. The question dissolves as he swallows it back down, hesitant.

He tries to look away, but your hands—seemingly with a will of their own—reach up to cradle his face. Your palms cup his jaw, feeling the barely-there stubble rough against your skin, the warmth of him seeping into you.

“Yes,” you say, permission and plea all at once.

He kisses you like he’s been thinking about it for weeks. 

Probably has been. 

Soft at first, tentative and questioning, giving you every chance to pull away. When you don’t, when you lean in instead and thread your fingers into his hair, the kiss deepens.

His hand finds your waist, slides around to the small of your back, pulling you closer until there’s no space left between your bodies. His hands are everywhere now: your hips, your ribs, tangling in your hair with a desperation that mirrors your own.

The rain drums steadily against the windows, blurring the city beyond into impressionist streaks of light. Time becomes elastic, meaningless. There is only the sensation of his mouth on yours and his hands learning the geography of your body.

You melt into it, surrendering inch by inch. Your fingers curl into his sweater, sliding beneath it. His stomach contracts under your palms, muscles taut and trembling.

“Wait,” he gasps against your lips, though his hands continue their restless journey across your body. “We can slow down if you want.”

But your wanting has already passed the point of patience.

This need has been building for weeks, layer upon layer of almost-touches and loaded glances — a slow burn that grew into an inferno.

“I don’t want slow,” you say, “I want you.”

His eyes go dark, entirely focused on you.

“God,” he breathes, fingers digging into your hips through denim. “The things I’ve imagined doing to you.”

He stands, lifting you with an ease that steals the breath from your lungs, hands secure beneath your thighs as your legs wrap around his waist. He carries you down the short hallway to his bedroom, lips never leaving his, unwilling to break contact even for the seconds it takes to navigate the distance. 

The rain’s symphony follows you, each droplet a percussion against glass, a metronome marking the pace of your shared unraveling. 

He reaches for the buttons of your shirt, working them open, tugging off every remaining article of clothing you have on. Each inch of skin revealed feeds his hunger further. You arch into his touch, head falling back as sensation floods through you, breath coming in short gasps as his mouth follows the trail of his fingers.

You fumble with his belt, his button, his zipper, hands clumsy until he is finally, blessedly naked. He hovers above you, utterly bare, and you can barely breathe. All lean and smooth skin, broad shoulders tapering to narrow hips. Every line of him is defined by shadow and want. He’s gorgeous, and in this moment, he’s yours.

You push him onto his back and straddle his lap where he sits at the edge of the bed, your knees indenting the mattress on either side of his hips. His hands find your thighs, fingers splaying across skin as you rock against him, drawing a deep groan from his chest.

“Condom,” he grits out, forehead pressed to yours. “Nightstand—“

You’re already reaching for it, tearing the wrapper with shaking hands. He watches as you roll it down his length, hissing through clenched teeth.

“Now,” you say, desperate and beyond pretense.

He guides you down onto him, the feeling deep and drugging and absolutely devastating. Your nails dig deeper into his skin as he fills you inch by inch, stretching you until he’s fully seated.

You begin to set a rhythm — rolling slowly first, adjusting to the fullness of him, gradually increasing the pace until each thrust makes your toes curl and sparks scatter across your vision. His mouth finds your neck, your shoulder, anywhere he can reach, murmuring filthy praise between kisses that will no doubt leave marks you’ll only discover tomorrow.

Your nails score down his back, pleasure coiling tighter and tighter in the pit of your stomach as the intensity builds. You can feel him responding, growing harder and longer inside you.

“Satoru,” you gasp, leaning in to catch his earlobe between your teeth, tugging gently. “What else have you imagined?”

“How you’d take me from behind,” he admits, voice wrecked and raw. “Seeing you like that—it’s all I can think about.”

The image sends a fresh flood of wetness between your thighs. You roll off and position yourself on your knees, presenting yourself like an offering he can’t refuse.

He responds in kind, pulling you back against him, sliding between your folds before entering slowly. The new angle makes you feel impossibly full, long and deep strokes hitting places that make you cry out into the pillow. 

The obscene sound of skin meeting skin fills the room alongside your broken moans. His hand snakes between your legs, fingers finding your clit and circling it with movements that match his thrusts.

“S-satoru,” you gasp, gripping the sheets knuckle-white, face pressed into the pillow. “I’m close.”

Your admission sends him into a frenzy — driving deeper, moving faster, fingers working you with increased urgency. You shatter, body convulsing as pleasure crashes over you in waves that seem endless. You cry out his name as your walls clench around him, pulling him deeper, taking him over the edge with you.

You collapse onto the bed together, bodies slick with sweat. He wraps his arms around you, holding you close as he softens inside you, neither of you wanting to break the connection yet.

You lie tangled together in his sheets, your head on his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath your ear. The rain had slowed to a patter; a lullaby sung by the sky.

You’re already half-asleep, warm and sated and safer than you’ve felt in years.

He presses a kiss into your hair, and mumbles something you can’t make out. But it’s a confession he didn’t need to voice. You learn then, how much can be said without words at all.

Outside, the clouds have parted and yielded to the moon. Through the gap in the curtains, the stars appear one by one. You fall asleep with him under their watchful gaze, dreams intertwined, hearts beating as one. 

Love didn’t arrive all at once.

It slips in unnoticed, patient as melting ice, warming you by degrees so small you only recognize it once the cold completely thawed.

Suddenly, spring is everywhere.

The line stays open.

This isn’t unusual. Once the essential information has been gathered and response has been set in motion, some calls drift into a waiting state. Once the urgency loosens, the work becomes less about extraction and more about endurance, about simply being present.

You glance at the incident timer: seven minutes, forty-three seconds. Forty-four. Forty-five. The city is still rearranging itself around the information you fed it.

Protocol says you could clear the call. Free up the line. Move on to the next crisis in queue.

But something—instinct, maybe, or something less rational—roots you in place. An unreasonable certainty that if you let this call end, if you sever this connection, something crucial will be lost forever.

So you keep the line open.

You adjust the mic slightly, a reflexive gesture. The padding has gone warm against your skin, and you can hear him breathing — each exhale a quiet affirmation that he’s still there.

You: Help’s on the way. I’ll wait with you until they arrive. Caller: Thank you. For staying. You: It’s my job, sir.

You imagine him standing somewhere near the wreckage, phone pressed to his ear. You picture the set of his shoulders, the way he might be bracing against the cold or the dust still settling from the collapse.

You shouldn’t do this — shouldn’t populate the voice with a body, the body with a face, the face with a history. Faces aren’t part of the job. Faces make it personal, and personal makes it hurt.

And yet.

On the other end of the line, you hear movement. Fabric brushing against fabric. A faint scrape, like a shoe adjusting against pavement.

Caller: Do you like what you do?

The question ambushes you. Your gaze drifts across the room, taking in the familiar landscape of chairs inching closer to desks and a dispatcher down the row leaning forward, posture snapping from bored to alert in a heartbeat as their screen glows with endless updates.

You: I don’t know. Spend enough time in one place and it starts to feel like home, I guess. I’ve been doing this long enough that I can’t remember what a normal schedule looks like anymore. Caller: Are you taking care of yourself?

A laugh escapes you. It surprises you, honestly, how easily it comes. How strange it feels to hear concern directed at you.

For years you’ve existed as a role rather than a person. An invisible hand guiding people through their worst moments. Somewhere along the way, you began to believe that invisibility extended inward too — that you’d become as transparent to yourself as you are to the strangers on the other end of the line.

Caller: Sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep. You: No—no, it’s just that… I’m usually the one checking in on people. Caller: That’s not fair, is it? You: Sir— Caller: If you’re always saving others, who’s left to save you?

The vinyl chair creaks as you shift your weight, suddenly uncomfortable. You can see the waveform of his voice on the screen, small peaks and valleys marking his every word. Proof of life, translated into lines.

For reasons you can’t name—reasons that feel selfish and shameful—a part of you hopes the city takes its time getting to him. Just a few more minutes. Just long enough to keep this strange, unexpected connection alive.

You: Right now you should be more concerned about yourself. If the building collapses further, you might be in danger. Caller: Don’t worry about me. You: I have to worry about you. It’s literally my job. Caller: Are you always this stubborn? You: Are you always this evasive?

A soft sound comes through the line — not quite a laugh, but close. Warm and weary and impossibly real.

Caller: Fair point. You: Can you at least promise me you’re somewhere safe? Caller: It’s safe enough.

It’s not the answer you want, but it’s the one you get. You recognize the deflection for what it is.

You: Most people in your position would be more nervous. You don’t have to put on a brave face for me, you know. Caller: Well, I’ve never been good at pretending.

The words hit you; a physical blow.

They seep through the line and settle into a cavity left empty for so long. It sparks a memory you’ve kept locked away for years, buried so deep you thought it was gone.

A pause stretches between you. Long enough that you start to wonder if you imagined the words entirely, if you’ve finally cracked under the pressure of too many nights.

You: What did you just say? Caller: I said, I’ve never been good at pretending.

The phrase is specific, distinct.

Sound warps and stretches, becomes something underwater and far away. You feel it in the way your shoulders tense, in the sudden rabbit-kick of your pulse against your throat, in the way your fingers have gone numb around the pen you’re still clutching.

You: You… you remind me of someone. Caller: Do I?

Your lips remember before your brain does. The shape of a smile once learned by heart resurfaces, suppressed under years of careful forgetting. It settles on your mouth like muscle memory — a ghost that still haunts your heart.

You: Yeah. He used to say the same thing. Caller: Why do you talk about him like he’s gone?

You close your eyes. The smile fades, leaving its echo behind. A phantom sensation of happiness that no longer exists.

Your fingers still on the keyboard, hovering over keys you don’t press. You become acutely aware of your own body — at the uniform collar sitting against your throat, at the ache at the base of your neck. Your heart is beating too fast for someone sitting still.

You: Because he is. Or—he might as well be. It was a long time ago. Caller: Do you miss him?

You swallow against the tightness in your throat. Around you, the emergency center continues its mechanical symphony — keyboards clacking, radios crackling, phones ringing in endless rotation.

You: I— 

Just then, something slips through the line. A low, uneasy sound that doesn’t quite belong. Something scraping and straining, groaning under a weight it was never designed to bear. Metal complaining. Concrete settling into new, unstable configurations.

Your training kicks in before conscious thought does.

You: Sir, did you hear that? Caller: …No, I don’t think so. Probably just the wind.

Another phone rings just beyond your periphery, and a colleague answers with the same practiced cadence you used earlier:

“119, is it a fire or a medical emergency?”

The room erupts with renewed activity, radios coming alive one by one.

“Units staging on the west side.”

“East access blocked.”

“Be advised, instability increasing.”

The words layer and overlap, building a low, urgent rhythm.

You press the headset harder against your temples, as if physical pressure might keep him close to you. You don’t know why this voice feels different from the thousands you’ve heard before. You only know that the idea of the line going dead—of this connection severing cleanly and without ceremony—fills you with a dread so profound it feels like drowning.

You think about the thousands of voices you’ve heard over the years. How all of them, along with their stories, vanish the moment the line goes dead. They become nothing more than incident numbers in a database and timestamps in a log file.

But this one. This voice.

You’re terrified you might never get to hear it again.

So you stay.

Because for now, he’s still there.

And that has to be enough.

Winter, Eight Years Ago

“God,” Satoru murmurs against your neck. “You’re making it very hard to think.”

He’s propped up on one elbow beside you, bare-shouldered and beautifully disheveled, white hair mussed in ways that have nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with your fingers tangled in it moments ago.

Late afternoon light leaks through the gap in the curtains, cutting across the bed in golden bands. Dust motes hang suspended in the air, disturbed into visibility after the sheets move and settle with you.

His hand comes to a rest at your waist, thumb drawing small arcs into your skin. It’s an act so natural now it feels like he’s writing his name there. You lean up, and his lips part easily for you, familiar yet still capable of unmaking you entirely.

He rolls onto his back and brings you with him, arranging you so your head rests over his heart. The steady rhythm beneath your ear has become your favorite sound — proof of life, proof of reality.

“So,” he says, and you can hear him trying to sound casual about it. “I might be gone for a bit next month.”

“Gone where?”

“Conference in Kyoto. Then maybe another one right after in Osaka.“

“Oh.” The word feels inadequate, so you supplement it with forced brightness. “That’s exciting.”

“It is.” You can hear his smile. “It’s a big opportunity. Lots of important people are gonna be there. Dr. Yaga thinks it could really open doors for me down the line.”

You want to ask how long, and if he’ll miss you. You want to ask whether this is the beginning of a longer absence or just a temporary detour on a path that leads back to you.

Instead, you ask, “When do you leave?”

“Two weeks.”

Sooner than you’re ready for.

“That’s not much time.”

“I know.” He turns to you, face painted in golden light. His thumb brushes tenderly over your cheekbone. “But I’ll call. Every night. And I’ll text you so much you’ll get sick of me.”

You want to believe him. You do believe him. But there’s a small, cynical part of you that nudges doubt you’re not ready to acknowledge.

“Just…” You bite your lip. “Don’t forget about me while you’re gone, okay?”

He’s hurt that you’d even think it possible. “How could I?”

But the question hangs between you, unanswered and unanswerable, because neither of you knows what the future holds.

The night he packs, you sit cross-legged on his bed and watch him fold shirts. He’s explaining something about the conference schedule, about panels and presentations, but you’re only half-listening. You’re too focused on watching him tuck socks into shoes to save space, the way he frowns at a wrinkled collar before deciding it’s good enough.

You’re memorizing him, just in case.

“Do you really have to go?” you ask.

“It’s just for a few weeks,” he says, not looking at you. “Maybe a month at most.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be back before you know it.”

“I know.”

He stops packing. Crosses the room. Sits beside you on the bed and takes your hand in both of his. “Hey. Look at me.”

You do, reluctantly.

“I’ll call,” he says. “I promise.”

And you believe him.

For the first week, at least.

They come regularly at first, late at night when he’s back in his hotel room and the day’s obligations have finally released him. He tells you about the presentations — some fascinating, some mind-numbingly dull. About the keynote speaker who somehow made black holes sound boring, which should be impossible. About the food that’s good but not as good as the ramen place near campus that you both love.

“I miss you,” he says on day four.

“I miss you too.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Just got in bed.”

“I wish I was there.” A pause. “What are you wearing?”

“Satoru.”

“What? I’m just curious.” You can hear the grin in his voice.

“Your shirt. The gray one.”

Silence. Then, softer: “You’re killing me.”

You smile in the darkness of your room. “Good.”

By the second week, the calls become texts. Short updates between panels, photos of slides and conference halls and terrible coffee. Apologies for missed calls, promises to talk later that get pushed back again and again.

Satoru: Sorry, got pulled into drinks with some researchers. Call you tomorrow? You: No problem. Have fun. Satoru: I’d rather stay in my room and talk to you. You: You’re lying, aren’t you? Satoru: Okay, maybe a little. But I do miss you.

By the third week, the texts arrive at odd hours. They’re fragmented and hurried, dashed off between other, more important things.

Satoru: Might be here longer than planned. Opportunity came up. You: How much longer? Satoru: Not sure yet. Will keep you posted.

By the fourth week, you learn to fall asleep without the sound of his voice in your ear. You learn to stop checking your phone every hour and you learn that missing someone is less like a sharp pain and more like a dull ache.

You tell yourself it’s fine. He’s busy building his future, after all. He’s brilliant and driven and destined for important things, for a life bigger than what this small campus can offer.

You just didn’t realize his future might not have room for you in it.

The thought is a stone in your chest, growing heavier with each day of silence.

Summer, Seven Years Ago

The kitchen floor is cold in the way tiles always are at night, and the way truth usually is.

Its unforgiving ceramic leeches warmth from whatever’s left of your hope.

You sit with your knees drawn to your chest and your back pressed against the cabinet wood beneath the sink. Your bare feet are tucked under the hem of his old T-shirt — the one you’ve been sleeping in for months that it barely smells like him anymore. It hangs loose on you, fabric softened by too many washes, the screen-printed logo across the front cracked and fading.

There’s an open takeout container between you, cardboard flaps wilted. The noodles inside have gone glossy and congealed, steam long since abandoned. You ordered too much, as always. He used to tease you about it.

Satoru is stretched out on the floor opposite you, one arm tucked behind his head, sleepy and loose-limbed. He’s staring at the ceiling, looking at it the way he looks at the sky. As if it might open up and reveal something infinite. As if it owes him something vast.

And he’s talking. The way he always does when he’s excited, and when something has captured his attention completely.

“—and if the simulations behave,” he’s saying, voice bright with that lift that only ever surfaces when he talks about space, “there’s a real chance I can secure that internship.”

You hum in acknowledgement, the response automatic. It’s the sound you’ve perfected over the last few months. 

You trace a crack in the tile with your finger, following its jagged path until it disappears beneath the refrigerator. You wonder how many things vanish that way — hidden but spreading, non-apparent until it’s gone.

“Houston or Boston, most likely,” he continues, oblivious to your silence. “Maybe DC if I’m really lucky. Dr. Yaga seems to think I have a real shot, especially after how well the conference went. He said my work on stellar evolution was—”

“That’s incredible,” you cut in, because if you don’t speak now you never will.

He turns toward you, eyes bright with that boyish enthusiasm you fell in love with. It’s the same look that used to make your heart race but now only makes it ache. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” you say, and you mean it. You always do.

But meaning it doesn’t make it hurt less.

He sits up, smile faltering at the edges as his eyes search your face. He always notices when something wrong, just never what it actually is.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

You shrug. The motion is small, meant to deflect and pass unnoticed. “Nothing.”

“Not convincing. Try again.”

“It’s nothing, really.”

“We both know that's not true.” He reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear with such casual tenderness it makes you want to scream. “Talk to me.”

You huff a breath, resting your chin on your knees. 

“I don’t know,” you start, words coming slowly. “It’s just… everyone has this grand plan, you know? Look at you — you’ve got this big map laid out. Conferences, internships, research positions. You know exactly where you’re going and how to get there. And I’m just… here. I don’t even know what I want for lunch tomorrow, let alone five years from now.”

He smiles, because this feels solvable to him. “You don’t need a grand plan,” he says, too easily, too dismissively. “You’re good with people. You’ll figure it out.”

The words are meant to be comforting but they miss the landing completely.

“Figure it out when?” Your tone comes out harsher than you intended, sharp enough to make him blink. “You talk about your future like it’s already decided.”

He exhales through his nose, rubbing the back of his neck. You can see him trying to locate where he mistepped. “Well,” he says, hesitant now, “it kind of is. If everything goes right, that is.”

“And what happens then?”

“Then, I suppose, I’ll go.”

Though the words are soft, they still break you.

You nod, mechanically, feeling your heart crystallize in your chest.

You’ve known this was coming since the first time he mentioned the internship, said casually over dinner as a distant concept rather than an imminent reality. You’ve been pretending not to hear it ever since.

“You’ll go,” you repeat quietly, testing the words in your mouth.

“Yeah. To Boston, or Houston, or—if things really line up—Washington.” His mind is already there, already walking through buildings you’ve never seen, meeting people whose names you’ll never learn. “Wherever the research takes me.”

“And what about us?”

“What about us?”

He says it like the question itself is confusing. Like he doesn’t understand why those two things would be connected — his future and yours, as if they weren’t part of the same equation.

You laugh, because if you don’t, you might cry. “What about me?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

He frowns, the first real flash of frustration crossing his face. “What do you want me to say? That I’ll turn down the opportunity? That I’ll stay here and do what, exactly? Work at a planetarium? Teach high school physics? Waste everything I’ve worked for?”

“I’m not asking you to stay.”

“Then what are you asking?”

You press your lips together, feeling your eyes burn with tears you refuse to shed. You hate that you want to cry on a kitchen floor at three in the morning over a future that hasn’t even happened yet. Hate how small you feel for wanting something you don’t have the words to ask for.

“Are you planning on leaving me?” 

The word—leaving—makes him flinch like you’ve struck him.

“I’m not leaving you,” he says. “I’m just going.”

The distinction is everything.

And nothing.

It’s strange how a sentence can share the same words yet still mean vastly different things. Perspectives are funny like that.

You can see him thinking, doing the math in his head, the way he always does. Distances and probabilities and trajectories. He’s spent his whole life studying objects that move apart and come back together. Orbits. Ellipses. He’s always understood the universe in motion; always trusted that things return to where they belong.

Equilibrium, he’d call it. The natural order reasserting itself.

He doesn’t understand that people aren’t celestial bodies. That love doesn’t obey the laws of physics.

He scoots closer, uncrossing his legs so he can sit directly in front of you. He takes your hands in his, and they’re warm like they always are, like they always have been.

“Listen to me,” he says, squeezing your fingers. “This doesn’t change anything between us. I’ll visit. We’ll make it work.”

“For how long?”

“However long it takes.”

“And then what?” You can hear the hysteria creeping into your voice and you can’t stop it. “You finish the internship and take a position somewhere even farther away? I follow you around the world while you chase stars? When does it end, Satoru? When do I get to matter as much as your work?”

He pulls back. “So what are you saying?”

You don’t answer right away. You can’t. Because you don’t know what you’re saying. You only know that the future he’s envisioning—the one with long-distance calls and occasional visits and love stretched between time zones—feels like slow suffocation.

“I’m saying,” you start, choosing each word carefully, “that I don’t know if I can do this. The waiting. The wondering when I’ll see you next. The always, always coming second to your work.”

“You don’t come second.”

“Don’t I?”

The silence that follows is answer enough.

He stares down at your joined hands — except they’re not joined anymore, you realize. In the last few seconds, you’ve pulled away, created distance where there wasn’t any before.

“It doesn’t make sense to keep trying,” you say weakly.

“It may not make sense,” he says, “but there are forces infinitely more powerful than reason.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’ll always come back to you.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

You hold onto his words because they’re all you have.

Later, you will understand what they really meant. Because coming back isn’t the same thing as staying. His absence was already built into that promise.

For now you are young, and in love, and still believe that wanting someone badly enough can keep them from drifting too far. 

So you nod, and squeeze his hand back, and let the future remain abstract and far away.

But as Rousseau once said, there are two kinds of lies: one concerns an accomplished fact, the other concerns a future duty.

Right now, on this kitchen floor, you’re both lying about the second kind.

For now there is only summer, and midnight, and two people who love each other but have already started letting go.

Neither of you know it yet, but the ending has already begun.

Winter, Seven Years Ago

The cold is more insistent this year, biting at your cheeks with teeth sharper than previous winters, finding every gap and seam you didn’t know existed.

You’re still together.

Technically.

It means you haven’t had the conversation. You still text, still call, still say “I love you” at the end of phone conversations that grow shorter and more stilted with each passing week; it means you’re both pretending the end isn’t already here.

It’s been two months since you last saw him in person, two months of missed calls and empty apologies, of growing accustomed to an absence that’s supposed to be temporary but feels increasingly permanent. 

He’s back for winter break, though only for a handful of days before he leaves again.

Dinner that night feels like a performance. You laugh at the right moments and he asks you about your classes, but neither of you mentions the circles under your eyes or the new hollowness in his cheeks. Neither of you acknowledges the elephant in the room — that you’ve become strangers who happen to share a history.

When he walks you home afterward, his hand finds yours out of habit. The touch is familiar and foreign all at once. The same hand you’ve held a hundred times now belonged to a different person entirely.

At your door, he kisses your forehead instead of your lips.

That’s when you know.

There was never a single moment when you stopped loving each other. You simply stopped belonging to each other.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says, and the lie sits between you like a mistress.

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

But you don’t. 

You know he means it in this moment, knows he believes the promise even as he makes it. But you also know that tomorrow will bring new reasons why later becomes never.

You say the words so that he didn’t have to.

“We need to talk."

“About what?”

You take a breath. “I don’t think this is working anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

He tries to save it, to promise he’ll do better. But he’s leaving tomorrow, and you’ve heard it all before. You can’t bear to sentence yourself to more months of slow erosion, this death.

You don’t have it in you to hurt all over again.

“I’m trying,” he says, “you know I’m trying.”

“Trying isn’t the same as being here.”

“What would you have me do?” he snaps, frustration bleeding through. “Give up my career? My dreams? That’s—I can’t do that. You can’t ask me to do that.”

The words sting, even though you know they’re coming from a place of fear, even though you know he doesn’t mean them the way they sound.

“I’m not asking you to give up anything,” you say. “I would never ask that. But I can’t keep waiting for you to decide that I’m worth staying for.”

“You are worth it.”

“Then why does it feel like I’m not?”

You close your eyes, feeling tears slip free and trace hot paths down your cheeks.

“I love you,” you say, the words breaking apart as they leave your mouth. “I really, truly do. But I can’t keep loving you from a distance.”

“I never meant to make you feel that way.”

“I know.”

“I do love you.”

“I know that too.”

A final moment of silence, heavy with all the things you’re both thinking but won’t say — futures that won’t happen, promises that will remain unfulfilled.

“So this is it?” He sounds young, lost.

“I’m sorry,” you say. And you mean it more than you’ve meant anything.

He nods, once.

“Yeah,” he says finally, voice barely above a whisper. “Me too.”

You stand in the doorway long after it closes, listening to the sound of footsteps retreating, growing smaller and smaller until they disappear entirely.

This is how things end.

With two people who have come to realize that love alone isn’t always enough.

Eventually, Satoru becomes a name you don’t say out loud; a constellation you’ve stopped searching the sky for.

It feels like growth.

It feels like loss.

While time you had with him was brief, the forgetting takes years. The thought of being forgotten by someone you could never forget aches as bad as a bruise that won’t fade. But the world doesn’t stop for your grief. Life, indifferent and relentless, continues its forward march.

You graduate. You apply for jobs. You sit through interviews where they ask about your strengths and weaknesses, where you smile and lie through your teeth about being a team player.

You eventually take a job at the emergency call centre. The training is exhaustive — weeks of protocols and procedures, but you learn quickly, discover you have a knack for it. The work is hard, but it’s honest. And it keeps you busy enough that you don’t have time to think about blue eyes and winter stars. You calmly instruct others to compress their wounds even though yours is lodged at your heart, bleeding where no one can see.

In a world full of so much suffering, yours hid itself well.

Most days.

But some nights, when insomnia grips you at three in the morning and you step outside to clear your head, you still look up. And every winter, without fail, Sirius appears — bright and solitary and impossibly far away.

Once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.

You tell yourself you don’t feel anything anymore. That the ache in your chest is just from the cold or exhaustion catching up with you after another long shift.

You are, as always, very good at lying to yourself.

Time stretches differently when someone is waiting on the other end of a line.

Seconds expand and grow elastic until you can feel each one pass. The incident timer climbs past eight minutes now, each digit another small forever.

You swivel in your chair, angling your body toward the console while around you, more calls are coming in — secondary reports, bystanders, people who heard the collapse from blocks away, wanting to know if their loved ones are safe.

His breathing is still controlled, but there’s an irregularity to it that wasn’t there before. A rasp at the tail end of each inhale, air costing him more than it should.

You: Sir, are you feeling alright? Caller: I’m fine. Just a lot of dust. You: Hang on, help is almost there. Caller: I know. I can hear the sirens now.

Outside your peripheral vision, the emergency centre shifts into full crisis mode.

Another phone rings. Then another. The sound layers and overlaps, snapping dispatchers into motion. A supervisor steps into the aisle, eyes flicking to the incident board where Shinjuku blooms red with updates.

“Ambulances on scene.”

“Fire department establishing command.”

“Search teams prepping entry.”

The chorus grows.

You: That’s good. That’s really good. Can you see them?

A pause — longer than it should be.

You: Sir? Caller: Not yet.

There’s a tightness to his voice now, a barely perceptible strain that makes your stomach drop.

You: Where are you right now? Caller: I told you. Outside. You: Sir, I need you to be very specific with me. Are you on the sidewalk? On the street? Behind a barrier?

Another pause. He’s choosing his words carefully, weighing what he can tell you against what he wants to hide.

Caller: I’m where I need to be.

His answer drops through you; stone through water.

From his end, a sound comes through, low and uneasy. The groan of stressed metal bending under impossible weight. The shift of unstable concrete settling into new, dangerous configurations. Things that shouldn’t move, moving — all sounds that don’t belong outside.

Dread arrives then, cold as winter frost.

You: … you’re inside, aren’t you?

The silence that follows is answer enough.

You: Sir— Caller: It’s fine. I’m fine.

Horror floods in; ice in your veins, tremor in your hands, the whole world tilting sideways. Your breath comes out too fast, too shallow. Everything is simultaneously too bright and too dark.

Incoherent, incohesive thoughts rush through your mind like whitewater over jagged rocks, and you’re in the middle of it, careening and crashing into every one.

Your hand lifts from the desk—trembling, useless—falls back without accomplishing anything.

You: You lied to me.

The words escape raw and unfiltered before you can temper it, stripped of every professional protocol you’ve ever learned.

Caller: I know. You: Why? Why would you— Caller: I couldn’t hurt you twice. 

The phrase lodges in your chest; foreign and familiar, impossible and inevitable.

You: What do you mean, twice?

His laughter comes through, soft and worn after years of regret. And it’s the laugh that does it. The particular way it falls — something you used to know intimately. Memory is a stubborn thing that comes back when you least expect it.

Caller: Fate is funny, isn’t it? Out of all the dispatchers in Tokyo, all the voices you could have been… I’m glad it was you. You: How do you know— Caller: I’d know your voice anywhere.

The room contracts to a point. Everything else fades to static, to irrelevance, to nothing. There is only this voice, speaking words that can’t be real.

Love leaves a memory that can’t be stolen.

And you know. God help you, you know.

You: …Satoru?

The name comes out broken, barely a whisper. A prayer to a god you stopped believing in years ago when love proved insufficient.

Satoru: Hey.

And just like that, seven years of careful forgetting, of walls that you’ve built around parts the most vulnerable parts of yourself, collapse into nothing.

The threads stitched closed by time have come loose and the wound you thought had scarred over tears itself open once again, fresh and bleeding.

The shattering of a heart is the loudest quiet ever known.

You: No… no, no. It’s not—it can’t be you. Satoru: This isn’t the way I’d imagined we’d meet again. You: You’re not—you can’t—

Your voice doesn’t sound like yours anymore. It belongs to the girl who once stood under winter stars with his jacket slipping down her shoulders.

Memories rush in unbidden, of summer nights and bare feet on cool tile, his hand warm at your waist, and his laugh that filled rooms before distance taught it restraint.

Satoru: Been back for awhile now. I’ve been meaning to call… but I just couldn’t bear to see you and face what I’d lost. I’m sorry I took so long. You: It’s not the time for that right now! You need to get out of there!

Your voice cracks, too loud, and heads turn across the room. Your supervisor glances over, frowning, but you can’t bring yourself to care about protocol or professionalism now.

You: Are you hurt? Satoru: Define hurt. You: Satoru— Satoru: I can’t feel my legs. That’s probably not a good sign, right?

Your breath stops.

Everything stops.

The distance between you and Satoru has been measured in different units over the years — city blocks, then prefectures, then entire countries. Tonight it’s measured in floors of concrete, in the five miles between your dispatch center and the building that’s crushing him.

Your hands are shaking now, trembling so badly you have to clasp them together to make them stop. You press your headset closer, as if the pressure could somehow keep him tethered to you.

You: Help is coming. They’re there now, Satoru. You… you just have to hold on. Satoru: I know. You: The crews are setting up, search and rescue is preparing entry. They’re going to find you. Satoru: Okay. You: They’re going to get you out. Satoru: If you say so. You: You’re going to make it. You have to. Do you understand me? You have to make it.

From his end, you hear it again — that ominous groan of stressed materials failing, of concrete shifting and metal screaming in defeat.

Satoru: It’s no use.

You can hear the wet rattle in his breathing, the pauses growing longer between words, each clearly extracted at great cost. 

Your training tells you what this means, your experience confirms it; but your heart refuses to accept it.

You: D-don’t do that—don’t you dare give up on me!

His voice has gone soft now. It’s the voice he used to use late at night when the world narrowed to just the two of you.

In the background, you hear the sounds of imminent collapse, of time running out. Each beat bleeds loud in your ears, loud enough to mask the roaring of the call floor around you. 

Satoru: I’m sorry, I can’t keep my promise. I don’t think I can come back to you this time. You: You don’t get to decide that. You hear me? You don’t get to make that choice.

Your voice splinters, scrapes its way out of your throat like it has to claw past bone to be heard.

You: Listen to me. Rescue teams are inside the building now. They’re clearing the east wing as we speak. I need you to stay awake, okay? Just keep talking to me. Satoru: About what? You: Anything. Everything. Tell me what you’re thinking right this second.

He shifts, and a sharp inhale follows, cut short like it hurts too much to complete. Tears stream freely down your face now, hot and unchecked.

Satoru: I’m thinking about the night we first met. You remember? You: Of course I do.

How could you not?

Satoru: You were so beautiful. It hurt to even look at you. It was like I was staring directly at the sun. You: To think I almost didn’t go that night…

He hums faintly, a sound of agreement, of presence.

Satoru: I used to wonder about that sometimes. About all the tiny, insignificant decisions that led to it. If you’d stayed at home. If the music hadn’t cut out when it did. If we’d stepped in different directions instead of colliding. How many universes are there where we never met? Where I spent my whole life not knowing what I was missing? You: Satoru—

Your fingers curl into your sleeve, nails biting into fabric into skin.

Satoru: Seven years… is there a universe where I didn’t let it go to waste? We had time, and I spent it so carelessly. I walked away from the best thing that ever happened to me because I thought—God, I don’t even know what I thought. That I needed to prove something? You: Don’t. Don’t do this to yourself. Not now. Satoru: It’s true, though. I had everything I needed right in front of me, and I convinced myself I needed more. You: You don’t have to explain— Satoru: I do. I need you to understand. Need you to know that leaving you was the single biggest mistake of my life. That every day since has been colored by that regret, and I’d give anything—anything—to go back and choose you, over and over again.

His breathing is noticeably worse now. You can hear him fighting for each word, each syllable choked out of failing lungs.

You: Satoru, please, save your strength— Satoru: No. Need to… need to say this. If I don’t say it now—

He breaks off, coughing. The sound is horrible. Wrong in every way.

You’re screaming into your radio now, demanding updates, telling them to move faster—please move faster, please, please, please—but even as you do, you can hear Satoru fading on the other end. Each breath shallower than the last, each pause between them stretching longer and longer.

Satoru: If this is it… I’m glad I got to hear your voice one more time. You: Don’t talk like that. You’re doing it again—you’re talking about your future like it doesn’t include me, and I can’t—I won’t— Satoru: It’s getting harder to see. You: Stay with me—just a little longer, please. You don’t get to leave me again. Don’t you dare leave. Not again. Satoru: There’s a light. Above me… I can see it. You: Satoru, that might be the rescue team. Can you hear them? Can you hear anyone moving above you? Satoru: No. It’s quiet here. You: H-hey, just focus on me, okay? I know. I know it hurts. But just a little longer, okay? Just hold on a little longer and they’ll get you out and we can—we can have more time. We can have all the time we should have had before.

The light steadies, for just a moment.

He lets out a breath, a sound full of warmth and sorrow and acceptance.

Satoru: I can see you now. You’re here with me. Finally. You: What do you mean? You’re not making any sense. Satoru, please, just hold on— Satoru: Sirius… and the Sun. They’re bound to each other, by forces infinitely stronger than reason.

The call center fades, and you don’t hear the radios anymore, don’t see the screens. There is only this voice and the ache it carves into you.

Satoru: From the moment I met you, up until the very end… you’re all I can see. God, you’re even more beautiful than I remembered. You: No… no! Satoru, please, please stay with me—I’m begging you!

The light blurs completely now. 

He gasps, once, and smiles.

Satoru: I will always be with you.

Then—

Silence.

The waveform on your screen flattens into a single, unbroken line.

A hollow, awful nothing where his voice used to be.

Through your supervisor’s radio, words filter through the static:

“Victim located. Male, early thirties. Unresponsive." “Starting CPR.” “No pulse.” “Starting compressions.” “Get the AED ready.” “Clear!”

The mechanical thump of electricity trying to jumpstart a stopped heart.

“Nothing. Again.” “Clear!”

Another thump.

“Still no pulse.” “Keep going!”

Another failed resurrection.

“Time?” “2:47 AM—call it.”

The words don’t process. Can’t process. They exist in some other reality, another timeline where this isn’t happening — not to him.

The numbers imprint themselves into you, permanent and unforgiving.

Someone is making a terrible sound—a raw, animal keen of grief that doesn’t sound human, doesn’t sound like anything should sound. It takes you a moment to realize it’s coming from you.

Your supervisor gently pulls the headset from your hands, and the loss of that connection—that last tether—destroys whatever’s left holding you together. You collapse forward, forehead hitting the desk, and the sobs that tear out of you feel like they’re ripping you apart from the inside.

Arms wrap around you. Your supervisor, a colleague, you’re not sure. Someone holds you while you break, while you shatter into pieces small enough you’re certain you’ll never be whole again.

Your console stays dark.

You sit there, hollowed out and trembling, staring at the call log.

Duration: 23 minutes and 14 seconds.

That’s how long you had with him.

Twenty-three minutes to say everything you should have said seven years ago; twenty-three minutes that will have to last you for the rest of your life.

Three Months Later

The funeral was small. 

A scatter of colleagues from the research institute where he’d been working. Dr Yaga found you afterward, pressed something into your hand as he left. You waited until you were alone—truly, devastatingly alone—to open the small wooden box.

Inside it were printed messages, carefully preserved. Dozens of them from those early months: movie ticket stubs with dates and times faded but still legible, a pressed flower from some long-ago date you can barely remember, photos of the two of you—young and smiling and so heartbreakingly naive.

It was full of evidence of ordinary evenings that had felt extraordinary simply because you’d spent them together.

And at the bottom was a small notebook, leather-bound and worn.

His handwriting filled every page — journal entries spanning years. Scattered thoughts and observations, equations and diagrams, the detritus of a brilliant mind.

And littered throughout like stars in a dark sky: your name.

Over and over and over.

“Saw Sirius tonight. Wonder if she was looking too, wherever she is. After all this time, she’s still the only one I see.”

“Turned down Washington. Couldn’t explain why, just said it wasn’t the right fit. Dr. Yaga thinks I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have. But I couldn’t do it — couldn’t put an ocean between us, even though I have no right to be close to her anymore. Maybe it’s finally time to go home. Should I tell her? Would she even want to know?”

“I saw her today. Across the street from the station. I don’t think she noticed me. Seven years, and she still takes my breath away.”

You read through them all, one after another, tears falling freely onto pages that blur and swim before your eyes. Each entry was a small window into the years you weren’t there. 

You pressed the notebook to your chest and cried until you ran out of tears, until crying became dry heaving, until your body had nothing left to give to grief.

Now, three months later, you’re standing on your balcony at 2:47 AM.

The exact time they called it.

The night is brutally clear, and there, where it’s always been: Sirius — the brightest star in the sky. It burns alone against the darkness, solitary and brilliant and impossibly far away. Ninety-three trillion miles of emptiness, travelling across incomprehensible distances to reach your eyes.

“I see it,” you whisper to the empty air, to his ghost, to the universe that took him. “I see you.”

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

They don’t knock or clear their throats or arrive with the courtesy of a warning.

They slip in quietly, wearing ordinary faces; in the shape of a phone call at 1:17 AM, in the voice of a someone you used to love, and still do.

You learned early that endings don’t feel like endings when they begin.

The boy who studied the stars became one, invisible but still there, bound to you by forces stronger than distance, or time, or death.

Once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.

Even when it’s gone.

Especially when it’s gone.

You sipped at your orange juice all too smugly, and then your mother burst out.

“Nonsense. He’s a universal gentleman! His beauty is appreciated from here, all the way to France.” she proclaimed emphatically. “F’goodness sake, in an age of pruny old men, he’s the living Adonis!”

“I’ll admit he’s good-looking. But still, he’s rude; that cancels out all his other qualities.”

Mother waved a hand at you and rolled her eyes, “Handsome men are always rude because they know they can afford to be. I think you will be a bride by next spring. Oh, how happy I am! My littlest girl will be the best wed of all my children.”

You lowered your glass, prolonging your stare of disdain at your mother—who was glowing, ignorant to your expression.

“Have you ever considered for a moment your own daughter’s happiness?” grunted your father, appearing at the archway into the kitchen, waddling in.

“Not at all!” replied your mother sarcastically, spearing a small scone with a butter knife and ungraciously smearing butter into the slit. “I’ve only cared about her entire livelihood and future for my whole life!”

“My love, you’re being dramatic again.” he said, rudely.

Mother burst, “Dramatic! Maybe you should try give birth five times and see how you feel!”

“Eh, eh.” your father let out a gruff laugh. “Well, I never wanted five of them. One was more than enough.”

Lanky and yet slow as a clunky machine, your father made his way to the chair next to your mother and scooted it outwards to sit. Then, he grumbled as all old men do when they sit down, like the weight of being the favoured one in society is just so heavy a burden to bear. Must be hard, you thought, living in a world that licks between the cracks of your hairy ass.

“So then, do you think it will happen?” he directed at you.

“Absolutely. I’ll kill him by next spring.” you replied, stabbing into a scone, spreading strawberry jam into it, and jamming it into your mouth.

He let out a wheezing chuckle, “Ah, sounds good. Then we might be free from the Gojo reign at last.”

“I’ll ready the dagger.”

“—and ram it through his heart, make him yearn for a fine girl like you.” your mother smiled, and you momentarily closed your eyes in pain at her insufferableness.

“Now, now; don’t eat too much, you’ve got to stay in shape.” your mother stole your scone clean out your hand just as you prepared to take another bite, leaving you to linger after her with a truly miserable glare.

She binned the scone and then proceeded to get to her feet and tug out your chair from the table, shooshing you out like a rat out of the kitchen.

“Be early, not on-time; it will show your eagerness to be with him. Now, out with you. Out, out!”

She shooed you like this all the way to the front door of your manor, shoving at your back with a greater force than you would expect a small woman like her to have.

After tossing your coat over your shoulders, your mother proceeded to wring the heavy mahogany door open and practically kick your ass out the door into the much too cruel world of morning.

“Now remember; have manners, be graceful—” she began to list,

“—no yawning, no sighing.” you completed, misery lengthening your face. “Got it.”

“My girl, you won’t become a man’s obsession with a face like that. F’god’s sake, smile.”

So you tried to smile; one twitch at a time, twisting and contorting your muscles until what appeared on your lips could hardly be classified as a smile, rather, something like a dog baring its teeth.

You did not humor her. She slammed the door shut in your face.

When you turned your head to the right, you saw a slither of lacey white as your neighbour shut the blinds—privvy eyes acting as if they went unnoticed.

But you noticed.

You always noticed people’s eyes.

And they could never escape the vortex of yours.

ㅤ⚜

The carriage ride to the palace was long and bumpy.

Your breasts tremored, body swayed, but one thing about you remained fixed; your hands. You hardly moved them at all, never restlessly fiddled or wrung your hands like many people did.

No, you remained still; very still. Almost like a painting.

And that quality is the reason why you appear in so many paintings across the country; because you were the muse of many artists throughout your youth. With an arresting beauty, and natural stillness, many talented hands requested to paint you in various costumes and poses. Your mother always pushed you to be compliant in this flurry of requests, because they paid her handsomely to draw the portrait of her little girl.

But enough was enough at some point; by the middle of your adolescence, you threw a tantrum and, after breaking all tools of the young artist who proclaimed love for you and destroying his every painting of yourself, you then refused to be anybody’s muse ever again.

Now, emerging into your twenties with a bold and firm foot in the world, you hoped to re-establish yourself as a writer.

So that you did; but claiming fame brought with public scrutiny.

Because your father, and his forefathers, were already well-established writers. That is, you were not respected in the eyes of ‘real’ writers and ‘honest’ critics, for you were born into a privileged lineage that pushed you up into ranks which others earned through hard work.

Was that true?

Well... shut up. Just shut up, you.

Anyways, regardless of what the envious writers and snobbish critics said about your ‘dry’ prose, the prince reached out to you—like a tendril of opportunity.

At first, your eyes went starry. On your first carriage ride to the palace you were conjuring up wonderful dreams of your future. Beautifully rich, beautifully talented, and beautifully unstressed by men and their evil phalluses.

This was to be your highest paying job yet, but it was not the money that tickled you; having on your record that you were a notable scribe of the prince would surely shut up the loudmouths that scrutinized your work.

Now it was a month since then, many visits later revealed that the prince was a hopeless romantic idiot and you... well, you were unfortunately... his greatest desire.

He didn’t hide it very well. Maybe in the beginning he did, but by now he had grown a little more... crazed. You were just glad that he kept his hands to himself. At the very least, he denied himself to act upon such animalistic impulses. The most he did was ghost around where you sat and wrote, peering down at you with unashamed curiosity.

He stared. He always stared.

And much like the effect you had on others, you could never escape the vortex of his eyes.

Wheel hit stone. You swayed hard in the carriage.

Woodlands turned to flat plains turned to rows of cypress trees, and eventually you met the iron-wrought gates bearing the Gojo crest, inscribed in pure gold.

Your chest rose and fell as you heaved out a prepatory sigh, before being escorted into the castle.

ㅤ⚜

“I am here.” you announced after bobbing a brisk curtsy.

“So you are.” he turned, flashing you a smirk.

That smirk is the same one he’s been wearing since he met you, and now you’re convinced that he has no other expression to clothe his face with.

After having been escorted through the grandiose palace to the east wing, you met the prince in the study, in which all writing sessions happened.

You took your seat by the window and soon began, but of course not without answering his first set of unnecessary questions;

“Are you well?”

“Quite.” you replied curtly.

“I’m well myself.” he answered as if you had asked.

“Excellent.”

“And your family?”

“Very well, thank you.” you gritted.

“Good, good... I’m glad.”

He stiffened, nervously smoothed out his black waistcoat, inspired a deep breath into his broad chest, blinked at you a few times, then tucked his hands behind his back and began to stare.

You noticed. You pretended not to, but you always noticed.

Blue eyes followed your every move as prince Satoru curiously watched you prepare yourself; unsleeving your hand of its white gloves, setting them aside, heaving your typewriter from its baggage—with great difficulty, too, because it was as very heavy and your arms were far from well-toned.

Satoru saw you struggle.

“Allow me to help,” he began, swiftly maneuvering over to you.

“No!” you rejected, rather loudly, causing him to cease abruptly and look at you in surprise. You then nervously fixed your tone, “No, prince Satoru, do not worry yourself; I can lift it.”

What you really meant to say was; this is my typewriter and only my grubby fingers are allowed to touch it.

He could sense your possessiveness over the object and chuckled a little to himself as you finished heaving—with a small grunt he found oddly cute—the typewriter onto the table by the window.

He’d designated that spot for you to write after noticing, within the first week of your employment in his study, that you had a habit of taking breaks from typing to gaze out the window in thought.

He noticed. He always noticed.

You wiped your hands down the pleats of your skirt, rather anxiously so, and then you waited.

Suddenly, his brow perked up, and his lip curled. “What are you waiting for?”

“You order for me to be seated, sire.” you drawled.

His lip curled further, face assuming something rather snarky, “Only dogs wait to be told to sit. Are you a dog?” he challenged.

“No, sire.” you replied firmly, sick of him testing you before the session has even begun.

Satoru narrowed his crystal eyes at you, almost pitifully.

You knew that he derived pleasure from mocking other’s obedience to authority, because he was a damned rebel himself—always ignoring the elder’s orders and doing as he wanted, even if it caused a ruckus.

But you were annoyed by his failure to understand that you had been raised to fear disobeying the crown, even if it was in the quietest of gestures, like sitting before being told to.

There was a long silence, one he began, one he continued, and one he ended.

“Sit down.” he commanded exasperatedly.

What a jerk, you thought.

But your response to him was just a humiliated smile.

You seated yourself into the ornate desk chair without a sigh and interlaced your shaky fingers, resting them before the typewriter’s edge.

When you took your seat upon the pillowy chair, he began again, after a moment of hesitation.

“Alright then.” he nearly whispered, penetrating gaze unwavering on you, “Let’s continue from where we left of last time.” he instructed.

He seated himself as well, but unlike you, he could afford to be flamboyantly lazy and ungraceful; he plopped upon the parcel-gilt recamier with all the elegance of a toad.

“—oof!” he exclaimed.

And then, the toad began to speak;

“... now, dear reader, our beloved and slightly mad character A began to fret, for he knew not what to make of his feelings—was it love swelling in the pits of his bosom?—er, make that ribcage, not bosom—or was it a cruel ghost puppetteering his body? Surely, surely, he who had not loved any other but that girl in the painting, was not in love!” he rambled poetically, acting out and straining his voice at points for emphasis.

Your fingers had began moving swiftly across the keys, hammering down on them to create what the prince felt was music to his ears—tiktiktik, taktaktak.

Satoru draped himself over the pin-striped recamier like a lazy child, arms dangling off the back and eyes fixed on his favorite artwork in the room; you.

Clacking away at keys, hyperfocused, with eyes like heaven narrowed at the typewriter.

When you finished transcribing that bulk, he waited a moment. Actually, he waited such a long moment that you thought he had spontaneously died, so you finally glanced over at where he sat.

Lo, behold; the toad had not died, but instead was staring at you intensely.

A shiver went down your back. Your thighs tensed together.

What was he doing? It seemed like he was trying to figure something out, but you didn’t know what.

Only after he’d lengthened the silence into an acute awkwardness, did he then continue speaking.

“It couldn’t be. Ah, so our beloved and slightly love-sick character A fretted severely now, his life of delectable licentiousness soon to be upturned, re-realizing his old dreams and desires. His madness ensued; self-destruction became imminent. And that, all at the soft hands of a woman.”

—tiktiktik, taktaktak.

Satoru watched your hands and fingers move as you typed. He watched them move, ponderingly.

The air in the study came to a still again. No noise roused except sweet birdsong from the gardens, and the ocassional rustle of the prince repositioning himself on the recamier.

He fiddled with the golden tassle end of a pillow, seemingly lost in thought.

“Sire?”

“Do you like it?” he asked randomly, “My story, I mean. Is it interesting to you?”

You blubbered at first, not ready for his question. “I—well, my prince,”

His heart leaped at your use of a possessive pronoun. What could it mean? Were you trying to be endearing? Perhaps, perhaps...

“Go on,” he purred, “Be my most brutal critic, Miss Darling.”

Oh, and there he went, calling you by that name again like he did last time. The tease. Had he no shame? Calling you by cute names like that, like he was your husband, was so uncouth.

Satoru rested his cheek on his forearm; one hand delicately poised on the gilded edge of the recamier.

So beautiful, messy yet tidy in the way he dressed; he fussed a lot with his puffy sleeves, had a habit of nibbling at them or playing with them—yes, this man was of age and still he held onto these childhood habits. Long legs clad deliciously in just a pinch-tight black trousers—it’s those long legs that many women swooned about, that intimidated men of regular stature. You? Well, you suppose his long legs were quite attractive, yes. But he was too cocky about his height, especially showing off around you by straightening to his full length—just in case you cared.

He looked at you like you were the painter, and he was the muse falling madly in love—instead of how it really was, which was absolutely the other way around.

“I’m waiting.” he encouraged, growing a little more impatient with each passing moment of your silence.

You swallowed unsurely before answering, “I think it will be popular.”

Then the boy let out a noise, a funny noise of displeasure—like a goose honking—which almost made you laugh, but you held back.

“That’s not what I wanted to hear...” he muttered, “Answer me again, but differently this time.”

“Um, alright.” you complied, completely confused, “Women will love it,”

He curled his lips at you, seemingly still dissatisfied so you hastily added, “I think the protagonist is very endearing.”

“A-ha!” he caught.

You started in your seat, brows raising high up your forehead and smile ripping across your face without warning, because the prince had abruptly jumped up on his two feet and stood—yes, with his shoes—on the recamier.

He was like an actor trying to portray a pirate who had just found treasure through his spyglass.

The prince stood like this, and said:

“So you do like it!” he smirked triumphantly, dimples sweet on his cheeks.

“Sire, are you really twenty-seven? Because right now, with you acting like this, I can hardly believe it.” you teased.

His smirk only grew, like he was enthralled that you were infected by his playful spirit.

In that moment, god knows how or why, you felt like two childhood best friends playing around.

You had resolved to never forgive his arrogance or shameless licentiousness, to punish him for flirting with you and eyeing you out since day one of your employment as his scribe; but right then, you just couldn’t.

He was too cute.

Rudely so.

He leaped off the recamier and landed on his two feet with a clak. Then, he made his way over to you, all hyper as a puppy.

The chair in front of you was torn outwards, and then he plopped onto it.

Pale fingers interlocked each other under the flushed tip of the handsome prince’s nose.

“Now, tell me what else do you like about it? Tell me, tell me.” he begged.

“I—um, I don’t know.” you stuttered, watching his movements. “I suppose it’s, quite... quite... uh.”

Schlunk. Schlunk. Schlunk—that was the sound of the feet of the chair scraping across wooden floors as he scooted the chair around the circumference of the window table closer to you.

“Yes? Go on.”

Blue eyes sparkled at you. Satoru hounded you until you said something—anything—about his story.

“I—I really think we ought to get back to writing, or you will never finish this book at all.” you suggested.

He glowed at you, cheeks a subtle pink.

“Right, right... you mean to say, rather, that you want to see the ending so badly that you can’t hardly contain yourself?—well then! If that’s the case... I’ll continue. If only for you.”

You sighed, heart beating abnormally fast, as you reposed your wrists and hands, reading your fingers atop the keys of the typewriter.

ㅤ⚜

The library was teeming with books, stacks piling up and some spread across the desk or coffee table or floor, proving how much time the prince had spent cooped up reading. Reams of typewritten pages also decorated the study, some crumbled and laying rejected while the others made it to the revered holy stack.

You massaged your wrists, then raised your eyes to where the prince stood.

Tall, lean; Prince Satoru lazed against the edge of the window, casting a thoughtful look outwards to the gardens—they were in full bloom, pink and red roses whisper conspiratorily to one another about the prince and the poet, making up stories about the two of you.

“I have decided,” began Satoru, voice sounding a little more tired than earlier when he was bursting with energy, “I will not name the characters until the story is completed. Partially, because I just have no idea what names suit them.” he explained, fiddling his fingers.

He always clenched his hand like that; like he was trying to knead something within his fist.

You listened to him continue, “... and partially, because I feel it would take from me the lazy pleasure that I feel from leaving things unfinished.” he completed, smirking smugly to himself, then finally drawing his gaze away from the rosebushes and to you.

But he quickly looked away again, stealing his pretty attention away from you.

You wrinkled at him, “I always name my characters. It’s the first thing I do. Otherwise, they feel empty and soulless.” you said. “The least you could do for character A is name him—he’s suffering terribly.”

He looked at you again, eyes finding you with ease—like he’d been planning to recapture you in his pupils from the moment he’d torn his eyes away.

“And character B?” he lowered his voice. Your stomach tensed. He sounded sultry... oh god, enticingly so.

He dared closer to you as he continued, “what do you think of character B? Is she not suffering, too?”

“Not to the same degree he is.” you argued, “Your Highness is really putting him through it.”

Satoru’s heart panged. His eyes glittered at you.

And then, he drew yet nearer.

And nearer, and nearer, he came to you slowly, one step at a time, long legs striding with grace—a stark contrast to the lazy clutz act he usually puts on. For he was in fact, not clumsy, but exactly precise and calculated in his movements; he only ever pretended to be clumsy.

The prince’s hand brushed sensually over the top of your typewriter. Your hands were laid lightly on the keys.

“Do you feel pity him?” he asked in a quiet voice.

Your entire body tremored—prince Satoru noted how you squirmed, how your breath became more uneven.

When he leaned down, your heartbeat quickened. “Do you feel pity for the torment he’s going through?”

You blubbered.

Oh god, he was so close. You could smell his sweet breath, his soft cotton, his hair.

Those lips, they looked rosier than usual—and he nearly smiled when he caught you looking at them.

Those eyes, they were like glistening chandeliers. He fluttered his lashes at you, and then suddenly the study room felt much more like a bedroom.

Your head spun; this eye contact and proximity was dizzying. His lips looked so kissable. Satoru continued to pierce you with his gaze, not letting you escape the vortex.

Then, a noise resounded and completely distracted the prince.

A great noise, like a whale or something—ah.

It was your stomach gurgling.

He smiled. Your face burned.

“Ah. Never mind.” Satoru dismissed. “Let’s take a tea break.”

He eased off, slowly increasing the distance between you and him which only now did you realize had nearly closed completely—just how close was he to stealing a kiss? To grazing his fingertips over your hand?

For a moment there, it felt like he was going to do something, but then he didn’t.

ㅤ⚜

The gardens were quaint; soft, green, a heaven of roses. In the distance, there was a statue fountain of a nymph preening her hair. Moss creeped up her feet, as if in worship.

You could easily laze around all day and stare out at this scenic view of the palace’s most cherished gardens; it was so refreshing.

A cool breeze swept across the prince’s skin, as he sat slouched, legs widening. Condensation drops rolled down the pitcher of cool lemonade.

He’d watched you, with a pleased smirk, as you cleared the topmost tier of a dessert tray.

“Someone was hungry.” he teased.

“Very.” you replied.

The pleasant sweetness of a macaron clung to the tip of your tongue. A breezy silence came over the garden. Everything was still, only the birds flirted quietly in the distance.

The two of you continued to bask in the quietness for a long while, before Satoru punctured the silence.

“So then, Werther’s suicide—we did not finish our discussion last time you were here.”

“Right. Yes. That.”

He shifted himself in his chair, assuming a very unconventional sitting position.

“Do you need more time to gather your thoughts on it?”

“No,” you lied, “I form my opinions quickly.”

“How un-deep... er, what word am I looking for?”

“Shallow.”

“That’s it.”

You glowered at him, so he sipped awkwardly at his lemonade and darted his eyes away.

Knowing he must have said something mean, he quickly attempted to fix it.

“See? Now this is why I hired you; such a smart girl.” he complimented.

You winked your shoulders at him, “I prefer lethally intelligent woman, but thank you, I suppose.” you sassed.

He grinned.

Cool lemonade kissed his lips. A macaron found yours.

Then the two of you teased each other once again.

“I swear if wit could kill, I’d be dead by now.”

“Oh, if only it could!”

He giggled.

The prince giggled—like a boy.

You had to remindd yourself that he was still annoying.

But your heart swelled without permission.

ㅤ⚜

Old, old trees made kaleidoscope shadows upon the grass with their leaves.

The birds continued to flirt in the distance. Two pigeons fluttered upon the fountain’s edge to sit—not to pay respect to the stone nymph’s beauty, but to flap their wings at each other.

You and the prince watched them from this distance; the one chased, the other ran.

At last, they flew away together.

Satoru bit his lip, chewed on it for a while, and did that thing with his hand again—kneading, nervously.

You sat there like you were posing for a painting, oblivious for once to his staring because you were trying to script out the rest of your own little stories—you’d been stashing ideas away all day, just waiting to get home and write them, even though you knew you would probably just fall asleep instead, leaving your brilliant visions to decay yet again.

The prince cleared his throat, more to remind you of his presence than anything.

He cast a glance at your fingers, poised upon the table one layered over the other.

Then he noticed, like he has many times before, how naked your fingers were.

“You’re not married.” he noted.

“I am not.” you confirmed.

He blinked at you, and shifted around, “Has anyone made an offer to you?”

“Not yet.”

The prince smirked.

“Yet...” He repeated, teasingly.

Leaned forward in his seat, blue eyes glimmering like aquamarines at you, the prince’s face grew curious.

“What?” you questioned innocently.

“You said ‘not yet’—that means you intend to marry.” he deciphered.

You shrugged, “Maybe.” you tried to throw him off. “It depends.”

You deepened his interest with this. He leaned in even closer, now reaching halfway across the table—not one for being subtle, is he?

“On what does it depend?” he asked eagerly.

“Well, I would only marry if I were really in love.” you explained.

“Ah. Then, what kind of lover do you want?” he attempted to dig deeper.

“I don’t know.” you blocked him again.

A bout of silence passed, the lingering of conversation suspended in it.

The tiered silver platter sat short and sweet at the center of the white iron table, brimming with danishes, scones, macarons...

Satoru took one of them and began to nibble at it.

“A gentleman.” you finally answered.

He stopped nibbling at the edge of the macaron, “I see. And, ahem, how do you feel about poets?”

You pushed air through your nose, damned to smile.

“They’re the worst.”

His lips pulled into a smile, too, heart racing a little.

“And why’s that?” he explored, lowering the macaron.

Blue eyes marvelled at you, as he sat there awaiting your reply.

You’d begun fiddling with the pleats of your skirt. He seemed completely calm.

“Because all they do is dream.”

“What’s so wrong about that!”

“They spread a disease across the hearts of young women. You might know it; it’s called disillusionment.”

Satoru grumbled, falling back into his chair and falling apart, like your words had just completely dismantled him.

“I disagree. The best lovers are poets.” he argued.

“Ha-ha, no! When a man is a poet, he’s just a—” you bit your tongue.

The prince cocked his head, attention snapped by your near slip-up.

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. We’ve gone off-topic. About Werther...” you detracted.

“Werther can wait.” interrupted the prince. He abandoned the macaron he had nibbled at and began to rise from his seat. Your eyes followed him. “Let’s get back to writing. I have a new idea of how to further torment character A.”

“You’re cruel!” you scolded.

He smiled down at you, white hair caught perfectly in the light, rustled by the breeze.

“So are you.”

ㅤ⚜

Night-time neared. The breath of the golden hour had nearly vanished.

In the study, reams of paper had piled up even more as Satoru tormented character A for many pages more. And what else?—he laughed and smiled while he did so, as if deriving pleasure from being cruel to this poor, innocent fictional man.

But eventually, the prince became distracted, like he always did at the end of the day.

Because of you.

Because everything that had transpired throughout the day between you and him, was now whispering up his spine.

He sighed into the recamier, sinking so low into it that he disappeared from view of the window where you sat with your typewriter.

You yawned, you sighed, and you waited like a dog to go home, but alas; the prince kept you longer and longer, like a captive in his castle. Mind addled with his poetry and ever-changing prose, you just wanted your home and your bed.

You propped your face upon one palm and listened to prince Satoru ramble on about... well, anything and everything.

He sporadically shifted between topics, desperately trying to capture your interest and failing each time, because you were simply too tired to follow his train of thought anymore.

He swung his legs off the edge of the seat, kicking them back and forth.

“He said, ‘she has taken possession of my whole being’—isn’t that just so beautiful? I love how dearly he regards his Lotte. Never have I felt so akin to a fictional man...”

He nearly whispered the last part to himself.

You yawned bigger, you sighed louder, eyelids growing heavier. With the prince’s murmuring voice, and the serene stillness of the palace at golden hour, you nearly fell asleep.

“And the symbolism of the ribbon—”

“Fair prince,” you interrupted him mid-sentence.

“Yes?” he arrested immediately at your voice, legs stilling.

The prince bit his lip, waiting idly for you to speak. You couldn’t see him, he was concealed behind the recamier’s edge, nor could you see his honestly cute expression.

“If I don’t leave soon, I won’t make it home before dark.” you reasoned.

He wilted, “Oh...” he cast a sad look to one of the windows, noting the shifting sun, “it’s that time again already?” he mumbled glumly, propping himself on his elbows.

You saw a head of messy white hair and a pair of sleepy blue eyes pop up from behind the recamier. He rubbed at his eye, then sniffled. It seemed like something was on his mind.

“Right. I’ll have the carriage readied for you.”

ㅤ⚜

You walked in stride together out of the castle.

“You worked really hard today—sorry for wasting so much of your time with my ramblings... I, er, got carried away.”

“Not at all, prince Satoru, I like it when you ramble.” you huffed.

“You like it...?” he muttered inaudibly to himself with a smile.

Now you walked ahead of him, heels of your boot crunching gravel, leaving him to stare open-mouthed after you. He ruffled his hair, smiled a little to himself, then hurried after your shadow.

Oh, it was no use. He couldn’t hide that he yearned for closeness.

And he made it very obvious when he helped you into the carriage, leading you up the footstep by the hand.

He was gentle, sensitive; holding your hand lightly even though he wanted to squeeze it.

You could brush it off as polite chivalry, yes. Many men have kindly lead you by the hand into carriages. So you were prepared to think nothing of it... until...

“Thank you for—” you cut off at feeling a sudden softness at your hand.

Something warm and plush met your skin—the prince’s lips.

Blue eyes bore up at you. His back bent low. Breath on skin. He kissed your hand, slowly, while staring right up into your eyes.

“—see you tomorrow.” he whispered, lips grazing the back of your palm.

“Right.” you breathed, eyes blown open wide.

The sunlight was a brilliant gold, brightening his face and making him appear so especially handsome right then. His young face, rouge cheeks, heavenly eyes and snowy hair were like something of legend. To behold this kind of man was a rarity—a rarity that was all yours. And he let it be only yours in that moment.

His hand left yours too soon. Skin missing warmth, soul missing soul.

And then the prince stood there and watched as the carriage took you away, missing you immediately.

ㅤ⚜

You caressed your fingertips over the back of your palm as you contemplated for the entire carriage ride home.

Swaying softly with the carriage’s rickety movements, you felt utterly confused by your own emotions.

No, you could not make sense of what just happened, nor how it made you feel. You were trying to solve the entire day’s experiences like a riddle in your mind, piecing together his actions and linking them to presumed intentions.

Was he just a flirt? Was he just being playful? Surely, surely.

You felt the print of his lips on the back of your palm, fresh and alive, and smiled a little to yourself.

ㅤ⚜

“Mom! Dad!” you called from the entryway, stomping down your boots and unlacing them.

“Daughter!” your mother called in a cheery tone, “Come into the kitchen, I have news! I have news!”

Dinner was cooking, home smelled especially homely, for some reason. It was warm, soft, honeyish. The foyer chandelier sat crooked as it’s always been for nearly a decade, since you knocked it with a broomstick as a child in an attempt to shake a ragdoll out of it (you’d been playing Fairy Flight School a little too hardcore).

Upon the coat rack you hung your coat, then two white gloves found themselves forgotten elsewhere in the foyer.

You sighed tiredly but still felt invigorated. Was it the prince’s kiss making you feel this way?

Maybe you were wrong about him. Maybe he wasn’t all that bad—perhaps your pride and prejudice had gotten the better of you.

He made you laugh, after all. Insults aside, you suppose. That’s more than a great deal of men have been able to do for you.

Scurrying into the kitchen, you found your mother bustling about, fussing over pots and pans simmering with—mm, hearty stew.

She welcomed you home with all her heart, pulling you into an aggressively affectionate hug as she always did that ended with you having pinched-raw cheeks.

You seated yourself lazily at the table, hard dining chairs not nearly as comfortable as the pillowy one you had spent the day writing in for him.

“How was today?”

“It was... good.” you blushed.

“Daresay you almost miss him?—oh, I’m just teasing!” she laughed.

You groaned, “Mooom! Give me the news already.”

“Alright, I’ll begin with the bad news,” she sighed, bringing her hands to her plump hips where the apron sat upon, “Father is working late tonight, so he won’t be joining us for dinner.”

You frowned. “Well, that’s not news at all.”

“He’s a wanted man.” she sighed yet heavier.

“In more places than one...” you muttered, recalling unpleasant childhood memories. It was always like this. You were always left waiting for him to come home. And when he did, he’d walk past you. In time, you learned to forgive him on the idea that maybe he was just too tired to greet his little girl with enthusiasm. But it still nagged you.

“NOW FOR THE GOOD NEWS!” your mother barely contained herself, and you jumped in your seat at how her voice swelled to an operatic pitch now. “Your dear sister is coming to town—she’ll be staying for Christmas.”

“What!” you stood up again, face glowing with a bright smile. “Oh! When is she arriving!?”

“Tomorrow, two o’clock. I’ll be picking her up at the train station while you are at the palace.” she explained, beaming very smugly.

You expressed, exchanging happiness with your mother who seemed quite pleased.

Finally, you’d have someone to bitch about the prince to.

ㅤ⚜

The table was set. The blessing of a mother’s home-cooked meal made up for the plain cutlery and plates and the hard chairs.

You wondered briefly how the prince ate. His plates must have been lined with gold. The food must have been exotic. He was probably dining with a wealth of stimulating company, laughing and joking—a jester in his own court. Gleaming chandeliers and fairy princesses and noble women clinging at his side.

But the picture you had painted in your head was very, very different to his reality.

ㅤ⚜

Far away, in that palace you had left just a short two hours ago, sat the prince in his grand and lonely dining hall.

Gilded silverware and gloomy chandeliers, a picturesque view of the garden framed by the tall top-rounded windows.

He pecked sparcely at his food, like a bird.

Not a living sound met his ears. In fact, the silence was so strong, that he could only hear the gentle flickering of a candle flame.

And he sat alone, pale face illuminated by this warm light revealing a look of glumness.

Prince Satoru leaned his cheek on one palm, played with his food for a little while longer, before giving up entirely on the meal and deciding to instead roam the palace to try and find peace with his other hunger.

Blue eyes like brilliant saphires blinked about the halls. They were cold. White lashes shivered. The puff of his eyelids thickened with sleepiness.

Two feet dragged slowly down corridors, until he stopped at last.

And he stared.

There, hung on the wall in a golden gilded frame, was a portrait of a young girl.

He blinked slowly at the painting that he had seen many times throughout his childhood, when he would loudly bound down the empty halls.

Satoru continued blinking at the painting, an uncomfortable feeling swarming his chest. He felt frantic. Like he was about to go crazy. Because god, he kept remembering your laugh, your eyes, your smile—and he tried and tried to deny the evidence nagging in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t.

Now, dear reader, our beloved and slightly mad Prince Satoru began to fret, for he knew not what to make of his feelings—was it love swelling in the pits of his ribcage? Or was it a cruel ghost puppetteering his body? Surely, surely, he who had not loved any other but that girl in the painting, was not in love.

“Not like in the books, at least.” he muttered, quietly talking to himself. “Ohhh, how should I punish myself for feeling this way for you?” he sang low, heart throbbing full of visions of you.

You’re a mess Prince Satoru. You’re a royal mess.

ㅤauthor's note────Something about this story idea clicked so well with me that I kept writing it, despite having a lot of promised stories piling up. I wanted to start a fluffy mini-series prior to High Exposure, which is going to be very very angsty and sexually charged, so I wanted a bit of a break from that; a lighter story to work on on the side that requires much less intense planning. I wrote this overnight on a whim. Each scene is spur of the moment, which I haven’t done in a long time. This story is an exercise in writing for me, because I have developed a style for most of my fiction that is very cheeky and crude (which I love, and will continue writing other stories in this fashion of course). For the sake of keeping myself on my toes, I will push myself to write a little more elegantly for this story. I’ve been reading Russian classic literature again, as well as my favorite book which is The Sorrows of Young Werther, and I'm watch period piece films. So all of those are the driving inspiration behind this work in particular. I love having an excuse to talk about my favorite book so I'll extend their debate on that book, and I have debated it a lot in real life so the dialogue seems to be flowing very easily between the prince and the poet.

“Gojo likes to think that he runs this whole ‘show’,” he adds air quotes around the word show, an eye roll to accompany the slightly annoyed tone. “But, he doesn’t.” He looks down to check the time on his watch — reading 8:53 in the morning. “He is just the regional manager of this location,” he sighs, long and hard. His eyes wandering beyond the camera into the parking lot where cars are starting to drive into. “And if he is [BEEP] late today, I’m going to-“ he cuts himself off, staring into the camera. “We can’t curse, huh? Good [BEEP] luck with this team.”

He turns his back, walking to the big glass doors leading himself into Japan’s largest arms producing company. 

Hidden Inventory & Co. was founded in 2003 and quickly became the country’s shining star — leading supplier of tactical weaponry and defense gear. Or, how some workers like to describe it as “adult fun gear”, (surely not to be mistaken with sex toys), and “killing machines bought by men who peaked in high school.” 

The company operates six branches across the country, three more branches opening in the United States earlier this year. This specific one, the Shibuya office, has the highest turnover rate in the company’s history. Every year. For the four years running. 

The camera lingers on the company’s banner tacked onto the side of the building, sun bleached and crooked — what used to be sleek black, now looks grayish. The silver words littering the company’s logo: “Building peace, one weapon at a time,” looks like it’s been lazily erased with a very short eraser. 

Behind the camera crew the sound of car doors slamming, muffled good mornings and tired yawns rip into the chilled air. Swiveling around to get a glimpse of the standing employees of this branch, screens are greeted with a hearty team of people. 

A blonde is walking in, head down, lips tucked into a straight line. His patterned tie gives off a youthful glow, not matching the stress lines etched across his forehead. His steps are quick, as if rushing in would send him home any earlier. Without much of a look towards the cameras, he stomps into the office building.

A heavy slam of a car door, an iced coffee and cellphone balancing in one hand, an unlit cigarette in the other. A sly grin is dressed across her face, her hair flowing behind her as she slowly makes her way towards the doors. 

“This was Gojo’s idea, huh?” She juts her chin in the direction of our crew, her eyes taking over the equipment and the people herding it. “Yaga is going to have his [BEEP],” she chuckles, making her way into the building. 

Trailing pretty close behind is a couple, a lanky man with green rooted hair and sharp features, eyes half lidded and jaw tense. Next to him, a woman skipping to keep up with his hurried strides — smiling at everyone who catches her eye. Her blue pencil skirt clashing with the dull color of his khaki warehouse uniform — the name of the company plastered against the right breast of his shirt.

She looks over her shoulder at the green pickup truck that has been parked here since before Yaga jumped out of his own car. The quiet hum of the car's engine still cutting through the air as a pink haired man sits in the driver's seat. His eyes following the smiling woman's walk as she looks over her shoulder — looking for him it seems.

With an engagement ring shining in the early morning sunlight, she waves towards the car. The wave seems warm, as if it was made to be only his. A sweet smile accompanied the movement, a small giggle weaving through the small breeze and to his car. And the hardness that's been riddling his features since he's parked, softens. His hands still gripping tightly around the wheel as if he debating if he should drive away or sit and watch her.

“Can you come on?” The man she is supposed to be keeping up groans as he throws a quick look over his shoulder. The warmth that seems to radiate around her, dwindles a bit as she is presented with the coldness of the man by her side, or who should be by her side. He is currently at least six feet away from her, no signs of his steps stopping to wait for her.

She stumbles a bit as she tries to gather herself, the waving hand gripping the cardigan covering her shoulders. "Yeah,” she calls out, sending him a smile as well. As if this is her default face — a shining smile, no matter the words or tone being thrown at her. “I was just saying hi to Su-“

Looking forward again, his feet hurrying to wherever he has to be, he cuts her off. "I’m not having lunch with you today,” and then he's walking around the corner of the building to the loading dock. His back tense, almost angry.

She watches him, the first time you'll catch the tips of her lips dipping into something other than the gleaming smile. "I love you," she calls out, without any response coming from him. The same hand she used to wave at the man in the green pickup truck is waving towards this man's retreating back. Less warmth in the wave, it's almost hesitant, wary.

And then she's walking into the building as well, her shoulders to her ear as she breathes in deeply — the smile finding its way back on her face.

In the pickup truck, her friend watches with an unease that is felt throughout the whole parking lot. His lips snarled between his teeth and his eyes narrowed, not towards her though. Following the tense back of the man finding his way to the loading dock. His hands flexing around the steering wheel, with a zoom of the camera we can make out just how harshly he's gripping as his knuckles are white from how tight.

His crimson eyes flick to our direction, the warmth that was felt from her smile is replaced by something colder, less approachable.

Then, a car skirts into the parking lot. The tires loudly screeching, the pop song bumping out of the car is even louder. Wind swept frosty, white hair and ravened slicked black hair sweeping behind the occupants of the car.

The car doesn't pull into a parking spot, but directly in front of the crew. The lyrics of a Britney Spears song, at a decibel that's much too loud for it to be almost nine in the morning, smacks across the mics. The sound coming out screechy in the headphones of the mic handlers.

"Oh," the white haired passenger waves his hand out the window. "Is this how Snooki felt when she first entered the Jersey Shore house?"

The driver peeks over, his hair loosely falling around his shoulders. His eyes on his passagner, not the cameras situated to get every movement in his car. "Or more like Angelina when she came in with the garbage bags?"

A gasp squeaks out of the passangers lips, his unnaturally blue eyes widening as he spins his head to look over. "I'm not Angelina," he almost yells. The clock on the dashboard ticks as it becomes nine.

"Well," the driver shrugs, his eyes narrowing as he finally pays attention to how many people are gathered at his small car. "You're not Snooki either… She's short."

A beat of silence, a silent stare down between the two, as the passenger lets out a groan. His hand combing through his disheveled white locks. "Go around the block," he demands, his fingers impatiently pushing his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose. "We're doing this again."

And as they backup, you hear the retreating hums of their bickering and the blaring of a car horn.

"Don't speak unless I say so!"

The camera pans to the man in the green pickup truck, his forehead pressed against the steering wheel.

[The Office theme songs instrumental starts playing]

Camera cuts to the confessional room — an unutilized storage closet that the manager made his receptionist clear out before the camera crew arrived. A stock photo of a happy team is plastered on the wall behind him. Smiling faces, hands thrown in the air.

Sitting in a small chair, black sunglasses on the ridge of his nose and a very easy grin on his lips, is the boss of this place — Gojo Satoru.  

“I like to pretend that this little place is my real life sims simulator and I get to play around with my characters all day.”

He throws his hands up in excitement, dropping down a coffee can filled with pens. 

“We have my pride and joy, Geto Suguru.” 

A clip of Gojo delicately examining a dying plant and Geto scribbling down notes. Phones are going off behind them, a flustered voice woman — her eyes wide as she runs into the office they’re in. 

“I am Geto Suguru. Not the top salesman but best friends with the boss, so basically the same thing.” 

Suguru is lazily sitting in the chair in front of the camera. No tie, a few buttons open in his shirt. His cellphone pings on his lap and his lock screen pops up. It’s a picture of him and Gojo riding a bike. 

“We sell weapons. Or we’re supposed to be selling them.” 

He shrugs his shoulders. There is a knock on the door and Gojo’s booming voice calling for him. 

"Well, Sukuna sells. I think he's selling them to himself to create a militarized sanction of just him."

[Commerical Break]

Gojo stands in front of the room of his employees, a huge grin on his lips as he holds a microphone pack. Yaga standing next to him with a grimace as everyone stares back at the two.

The cigarette smoking brunette bunkers down in a corner, her head leaning on the pillar of the wall. Her purple button up slightly sliding off her shoulder. The glasses wearing blonde sits next to her, his hazel eyes hawking over the crew as he sits straight up.

"I am not sure how this got approved by the highe-" Yaga starts, a yawn spilling from Geto who just so happens to be sitting facing the rest of the employees. His shoulder pressed to the narrow hip of his superior (and best friend).

"I paid them," Gojo shrugs.

"For [BEEP] sake, Gojo," Yaga lets out an exasperated sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"I thought it'd be fun to show the audience our very hard jobs."

"We sell weapons," the stotic faced man in the back speaks out. His voice low, but hard. He rolls his eyes when Gojo looks his way, his arms crossing against his chest.

"And that's hard, Nanami," Geto practically whines.

With a finger point and the chuckle from this morning easing into her voice, the brunette picks her head up and looks at Geto. "For you, apparently."

"Anyways," Yaga booms, everyone straightening, watching as he paces across the front of room. A whiteboard is scribbled with numbers and different models of weapons and their destruction rate. "Sales is confidential, so can't talk that much about the actual gist of your damn jobs." He turns to stare at Gojo. "So what's the plan with that?"

"Going to talk about friendships."

A gruff voice breaks into the room, coming from the second row. In the new light, the camera can make out tattoos etched across his face — the owner of the green pickup truck from this morning. His stare is still uneasy, unapproachable. "I'd rather die," he shakes his head, his shoulders bumping into your shoulder as you start to snicker. "Why can't we talk about sales?"

"Are you asking because you're planning a revolution and want to delete all your proof to come off as normal?"

"Oh my God."

"GUYS," Gojo yells over his employees. His hands raised above his head, as if he's surrendering not only himself but his team to the idea of having a camera crew on them eight hours a day. "We're going to treat this like a regular thing," everyone, including Yaga stares at him.

"I don't regularly have cameras following me," crimson eyes roll as his lips stretch across his face in a straight line. His big hands on his thighs balling into fists.

"I mean, I doubt they allow cameras in jail unless you're like in beyond scared straight or something."

"What the [BEEP] are you talking about?"

"Sukuna isn't a felon," you softly call out, your voice getting mixed up with the gruffs and complaints from everyone around you. You look to your right, catching (who we now know is Sukuna) Sukuna's eye. He raises an eyebrow and you shoot him a smile.

"Of course you'd know that."

"What?" You swivel around in your chair, your knee bumping into Sukuna's thigh in the process. The fists balling on his lap relax, his palm settling flat on his black slacks.

Gojo claps his hands, the sound sharp and slightly piercing. Geto scooting away, his raven hair covering his hand that's checking if his eardrum is okay. "Anyways," he point towards the angry looking Yaga, who had now moved to a corner that is steps away from the door heading out of the room. He eyes stalking over every interaction that had flown between this group of people. "Any words Yaga?"

"This is going to be a disaster."

"That's not the spirit I was hoping to gather for my team." Gojo frantically, almost childlike, rolls his eyes. Sulking over to where a burly Yaga stands, and pushing him towards the conference room door. "Bye Yaga. Everyone ignore his emails, please."

"Can we get back to work?"

"Are you rushing to get back to LinkedIn, Nanami?"

"Yes."

"Okay, don't listen to him," the white hair manager looks directly at the camera. One hand on Yaga's shoulder, the other pointing towards Nanami in the back. "Mics stay on at all times."

"Even in the bathroom?" Sukuna jumps back into the roll of voices squirming about. His eyebrows raised, as you look down at the comically small mic pack in his big hands.

"Yeah," Geto stands , walking to where Gojo is. His palm wrapped around the knob of the door as Gojo finally manages to push Yaga out, Geto closing the door. "We can get audio of the one man, one cup video I'm planning on directing."

"I'm not even going to ask what that is."

"You haven't seen two girls, one cup?"

"I'm confused," Gojo wipes his hands together, dusting off imaginary dirt. He looks at Sukuna, pure confusion etched across his face and his cerulean eyes take him in. "Do you need to bring cups in the bathroom with you in jail?"

"[BEEP] you," Sukuna flips him off.

You speak up, confusion also etched across your features as you look over at Sukuna and then Geto standing in front of you. "Are they like sharing ice cream?"

"You're so cute," the only other woman in the room, the brunette calls from the back of the room. You turn back around again, your hair moving with the movement. Sukuna leans over a little, like he's trying to get closer to you. "No, they're eating shit."

You turn, looking at Geto who is doing everything in his power to keep a very serious face. Sukuna falling back to his original position, sliding over a bit so that you wouldn't turn over and smack against his shoulder. "Why are you making a video like that?"

"Money."

Director cuts in to explain how the mic packs work, where cameras will be situated, and how this should be natural. The crew only wanting raw footage of the day in, day out of an employee here. Gathering the group of people's attention for a solid five minutes, before Gojo decided he wanted to talk about himself in the confessional… again.

“[BEEP]!” 

“Do you need help with your mic?” Your soft voice is picked up between the shuffling of bodies and office chairs rolling to and from their respective desks. "Also," you turn to the cameras, looking over to the directors. "We can't curse?"

"Really?" Sukuna stares down at you — the unapproachableness isn't as heavy when he stands in front of you. A comfortable tension settling between you two, it feels.. known.

The cameras shakes, the simple answer of no.

"We have to work on that, Ryo," you tap his shoulder, signaling for him to turn around as he places his mic pack in your much smaller hands. "Sorry, I meant Sukuna." You shake your head, as if you're embarrassed that an obvious nickname slipped from your lips instead.

Your ample fingers work, attaching the pack to the back of his pants. Clipping it smoothly on his belt. "You know you can call me that," he says from over his shoulder. The conference room clearing out, leaving you two alone with a censored white board, flickering lights, and the sounds of Gojo laughing in the confessional room. "I [BEEP] hate it though."

You click your tongue, poking his hip. "You cursed."

"I know what the [BEEP] I said."

With mic now properly attached to him, you two start to walk out of the room. His steps aren't so long, as if he's waiting for you to step with him on every one. "Say fudge instead of [BEEP]," you point your finger up at him. "Oh [BEEP], I cursed," your hands hurriedly cover your mouth.

"Twice."

"Shut it."

With matching steps, you reach his own desk. A simple desk, a few protein bars and pens littered around. A picture of a pink haired little boy, that eerily looks exactly like him, and a trophy where the person on it is missing a head and that has the words "BEST SALESMAN". It's his, and that much is obvious.

"I'm not saying fudge," he stands at his desk, his hand planting against the hardness of it. Geto sits on the side of his, his heads popping up when you respond to Sukuna with a soft laugh.

"Moan instead."

Both you and Sukuna pause. "In what world is that a better alternative?" You ask Geto, your legs slowly shuffling to your own desk.

"The one where my one man, one cup video goes viral."

"I'm going to [BEEP] hurt you."

[Commerical Break]

A shot of group of desks, a head of pink and those narrowed red eyes follow the camera’s movements. The smiling woman with an armful of documents is shuffling to his desk. His eyes avert to her, gaze softening. 

“Sukuna.” 

Sitting in the too small closet is Ryomen Sukuna. Top salesman, crimson eyes always narrowed, and fingers tapping impatiently on his thick thighs. He lets out repeated huffs of breath, his arm tangling with the wires of his mic everytime he moves.

Tattoos adorn his face, a plain T-shirt tucked into slacks. Pink hair messily contrast the darkness of the supply closet, as well as his overall demeanor.

“I don’t make friends. Just do my work and get the [BEEP] out of here. So I don't know what you want me to talk about."

Sukuna is standing at the receptionist desk, the first thing you see when walking in. It's adorned with colorful little pieces of life — hand written cards, colorful flowers in a tin can, little figurines that bring as sense of personality in the otherwise pretty dull office. He is leaning on his forearms, a very soft grin on his face, and looking down at you. Gojo walks by glancing at the camera, holding a mug that says ‘Boss Babe’. 

Sukuna notices the camera and immediately narrows his eyes, a grumble leaving his lips but the microphone (that's supposed to be on him) doesn’t pick up on what he said. 

“Sukuna hates everyone.. I think?” 

Gojo is back in the confessional. His ‘Boss Babe’ mug held high. He lazily leans back, the door of the confessional room slightly cracked open. From his position, you can see Sukuna burrowed at his desk — fingers clicking away, eyes narrowed on the blinking screen, and his phone ringing in the otherwise quiet office.

“Well, not YN. I think she is the only person he likes… or at least tolerates.” 

Gojo shrugs and wiggles his eyebrows at the camera. 

Cut to: YN at her desk, smiling faintly as she types. Her ring glints under the fluorescent light. Sukuna’s eyes flicker to it. Then away. The mic finally picking up on the muffled sigh that seethes out his nose.

“Hi! I’m YN LN.” 

The camera shakes a little as you wave — it's small, but sweet. A smile to match as you're surrounded by the colors of your desk.

A small plaque reads "Receptionist/Office Coordinator/Gojo's Best Girl Friend" — the last title scribbled in sharpie, and also misspelled, as it really says "Gojo's Best Girl Frend".

"Sukuna has been slowly chipping the last line away whenever he comes up to check on me," you're in the confessional, the camera zooming on the light flickering above your head. "I like the title… I love being someone's best friend.." you pause, the laugh already squeezing out of you. "Or frend, I should say."

You're balancing a tray of coffees, walking through the row of desks with the ease that comes from having every movement memorized. The camera crew runs behind you as if they're filming a war at hand, their movements loud and slightly clumsy.

Your manicured hand places a cup of steaming black coffee — you explained everyone's coffee orders in great detail — on Nanami's desk. He doesn't look up, you didn't expect him to. Then you're floating towards Geto's desk, his cup of green tea is placed near his framed picture of the office building. He offers you a peace sign, his eyes more focused on a text messages he's sending. You roll around to Gojo's office, his 'Boss Babe' mug filled to the brim with fruit punch — his lips already red from the last cup he drank twenty minutes earlier.

"I try not to give Gojo any caffeine after," you pause, the last drink on the tray awaiting its placement on a desk. You look over your shoulder at the clock above your desk, the time reading noon. "Honestly, I try not to give him caffeine at all," you say, before walking your way to Sukuna's desk.

"Oat milk latte," you hum, setting the cup near his mouse. He doesn't look up, but instead grunts.

"Didn't ask for this."

"You always do this," you start to back away, smiling towards the man. "But you drink it anyways."

A tiny pause, his eyes flicking up towards the camera's crossing his desk at the moment. The hardness of the look causing a few members to stumble back. Then, his eyes flick towards your back as you turn and walk away. "Only because you buy it."

"You know it's on company's dime."

Sukuna is sitting in the confessional again, the light above flickering hard enough that his eyes narrows up towards it after every world that leaves his lips.

"She's too nice," he mutters, scratching his jaw. "She remembers birthdays, and coffee orders, and people's middles names." He pauses, staring at the light. "It's weird. And she's always smiling, no matter what," his face softens just a bit, the furrowing of his brow has calmed down and his scratching of his jaw slows. "Being happy just comes easy for her."

"It's my job to remember all of those things," you smile, your own oat milk latte is in your hand. "I handle everything small and big — it all goes through me!"

Director: "You seem to enjoy it!"

Your eyes flick down to your pencil skirt, your feet starting to tap along the crackled marble floor. A heavy exhale wheezes into the room.

"I guess I do," you shrug, eyes still focusing on the threading of your skirt. "It's not a little girl's dream to become a receptionist," you force out a laugh. "But, I'm here and I want to be great."

Cut back to the office — you're answering a phone call, pen in hand as you write something. You dramatically roll you eyes at Gojo trying to throw paper balls into your trashcan. Sukuna's desk is angled next to yours, his chair turned slightly to face you. He's typing, and everytime you let out a giggle his face flickers towards you.

"I'm engaged," you raise your hand for the camera to finally get an actual glimpse at the princess cut ring decorating your left hand.

You're smiling, but it doesn't reach your eyes — not in the way that every other smile reaches it. Your fingers toy with the button on your cardigan.

"He works in the warehouse," you wave your hand, signaling the warehouse that is directly below the office, "We were supposed to have our wedding last summer," the light above you flickers, a little too harshly. You wince from the cackle and pop. "Timing wasn't right."

Gojo: "And the year before that."

Sukuna: "I have a graveyard of save the dates from her."

"Wedding planning is tricky!" You fake a smile, your feet tapping along the crackled marble again. "I think I'd make a pretty great wife one day."

[Closing Theme Song]

director’s note (again): ugh this has been plaguing my mind since the beginning of the year. i was quite nervous to even try to tackle it, but i am happy i did. thank you to my sister, venus, pepper, and daya for reading this over and suffering whenever i brought this up 😭 i promise to shut up. and thank you daya for your idea about the beeping of the curses, i am going to hold your brain hostage. but thank you, thank you, thank you — i really hope you guys enjoy it as much i have enjoyed creating them! 

Circadian rhythm is a myth you stopped believing in three years ago. Sleep is a luxury people with nine-to-fives have, and daylight is a rumor the morning shift swears exists. Your schedule treats rest like a hobby you can’t commit to, always meaning to get back to it but never finding the time.

The dispatch center is a patchwork organism: worn consoles exhaling heat, swivel chairs that shriek protests with every movement, half-empty bottles of green tea sweating condensation onto particle-board desks. Energy drinks stand abandoned mid-sip, their carbonation long dead. Screens glow in muted blues and tired whites, maps peppered with blinking markers. Status columns refresh, again and again — a digital heartbeat reminding you that crisis, much like you, rarely sleeps.

You badge in and begin the ritual that transforms you from person to function.

Login. Password. CAD system. Phone system. Radio console.

Your employee ID appears so many times it sheds meaning, the numbers blur into abstraction and becomes an identifier of someone who exists only to be there for someone else's sake.

Then you put on your armor.

The headset settles over your ears with a practiced click, padding pressing lightly against your temples. The microphone arm curves towards your lips, waiting to catch your words and send them out to strangers in the dark.

The world narrows until all that exists is what you can hear — you’re in it now.

Early on, it’s a steady grind: ten, twelve calls an hour, and that’s only the emergency line. It doesn’t account for the administrative overflow bleeding through from other services, the while-I’ve-got-you calls from lonely people who just want to hear a kind voice, the follow-ups, the wrong numbers, the pranks from teenagers who think they’re funnier than they are.

It also doesn’t count the radio crackling to life beside you — that second channel demanding a different part of your consciousness, one that expects you to juggle units and GPS coordinates while keeping enough bandwidth free to be someone’s lifeline.

Most calls are textbook. 

Paint-by-number crisis. A petty neighbor dispute that’s been simmering for months, finally boiling over at midnight. Someone locked out, sitting on their doorstep in the cold. A man sleeping rough by the roadside — a concerned citizen uncertain if he’s passed out or passed away.

Then there are the calls that take longer. 

Domestic violence where every word carries the weight of a life balanced on a knife’s edge. House fires that refuse to die, that keep finding new fuel, new rooms to devour. You talk people through procedures you pray you’ll never need yourself: press here, keep low, count with me, stay with me. 

You are meticulous. Exact. Because the difference between XX-ban and XY-ban can be measured in minutes, and time is a currency you can’t afford to waste.

Thanks are rare in this job.

Endings are rarer still.

But you know—you know—that when you clock out at dawn, the city is still standing partly because of what you did while it slept.

Your fingerprints are on it, invisible but everywhere — in the spaces between sirens, in roads that stay open, in mornings people wake up to without ever knowing how close someone came to never waking at all.

That’s why you stay. Not for the easy calls, but for the moments when you can take the worst day of someone’s life and make it fractionally, infinitesimally less terrible.

The phone rings.

There’s no warning, no omen, no cinematic pause. You don’t feel a chill of intuition or anything prophetic stirring in your chest. 

For now, it’s just another line. 

Another voice waiting to be heard.

Another story you’ll only ever hear the middle of.

You answer.

You: 119. Fire or medical emergency?

Static washes through first, then breathing, then a man’s voice.

Caller: Emergency. I need an ambulance.

Your cursor blinks expectantly on the incident screen, a small pulse of light waiting to be given substance. You straighten, pen poised, the plastic warm where your thumb has worn the coating thin over countless nights just like this one.

You: What's your location? Caller: Shinjuku-ku, [—]-cho, [—]-ban, [—]-go. Near [—] Station. You: Shinjuku-ku, [—]-cho, [—]-ban, [—]-go. Near [—] Station. Is that correct? Caller: Yes. You: What’s the nature of the emergency?

A brief pause, filled with empty silence.

Caller: A building collapsed. There may be people trapped.

Your pen moves without conscious thought, collecting details and anchoring them to paper, building the skeleton out of coordinates, keywords — something the city will soon flesh out with sirens and rescue personnel.

You: Sir, are you injured? Caller: No. You: Can I have your contact details?

Another pause. This one shorter and more deliberate. You can almost hear him thinking, weighing his words on some internal scale you cannot see.

Caller: I’ll stay on the line. I can flag down the crews when they arrive.

The radio crackles as you dispatch units. Help begins to move through the city’s arteries.

You: Emergency services are being dispatched to your location. I’m going to keep you here to gather more information. Can you tell me how many people might be affected? Caller: Hard to say. But the east side took the worst of it. You: Can you describe what you’re seeing right now?

On his end, fabric rustles — a body trying to get comfortable in an uncomfortable situation. The sound is oddly intimate, transmitted through miles of copper and fibre optic, arriving in your ear as if he’s standing right beside you.

Caller: Debris field across the street. Concrete, rebar, dust everywhere. The building’s… folded in on itself. I think something crushed it from above.

You relay this, fingers flying over keys, passing intelligence to crews already converging on the scene.

You: Any immediate hazards? Fire, gas leak, downed power lines? Caller: No fire. Don’t smell gas either.

You nod, even though he can’t see it.

That’s the strange intimacy of this job. You sit in a climate-controlled room surrounded by screens and static, yet you’re also standing, in a way, beside a stranger in the dark. Close enough to hear how he breathes. Close enough to matter.

On your screen, the incident pulses with new life, its details now pinned in place, timestamp ticking forward.

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

Sometimes, they begin exactly like this.

But for now, it’s just another voice on the line.

Early Winter, Nine Years Ago

You almost don’t go.

You stand outside the building with your phone glowing in your palm, cold biting into your skin as messages from your friend stack one atop another. Each buzz is a small insistence, each line of text another hand at your back, pushing.

Free drinks, she’d promised, as if alcohol were sufficient compensation.

You need to meet people, she’d insisted, as if connection were a finite resource you were squandering.

Still, you go. Because that’s what twenty-year-olds do on Friday nights. Because it feels worse to be alone outside a party than lonely inside one.

Light spills from the building's windows in aggressive yellow squares, silhouettes moving behind them like figures trapped in a snow globe someone won’t stop shaking. Already you can hear the bass distorting into something less music and more assault on the senses.

The mixer is exactly what you feared it would be: loud without being lively, bright without being warm. 

Music hammers from speakers never meant shoulder this kind of ambition, turning everything muddy and indistinct. The room feels crowded in a way that has nothing to do with the number of bodies packed inside and everything to do with the suffocating weight of performance, of everyone trying so desperately to be seen.

Conversations overlap and cannibalize each other, turning words shapeless. Laughter rises and falls in waves, pitched too high, held too long. 

Everyone here is selling something — the most desirable version of themselves, marketed in carefully curated fragments.

You listen more than you speak; a trait born from habit and honed by your major. As a communications student, you can’t help noticing the constant misfires — people talking at each other rather than with, filling air as if silence would prove fatal.

You’re halfway through calculating the minimum polite duration you're required to stay when the music dies mid-beat.

An awful, metallic shriek tears through the speakers—feedback loop screaming its death rattle—and half the crowd flinches in unison, hands flying to ears. The DJ swears into the mic, something colorful about technical difficulties and shitty equipment. A collective groan ripples outward, followed by that awkward, suspended phase where no one knows what to do with their hands.

You step back instinctively, grateful for the reprieve, and collide with someone doing the exact same thing. 

Elbow-to-elbow, accidental and light, but enough to send your drink sloshing dangerously close to the rim. 

“Oh—sorry,” you say, turning.

“Sorry,” he says at the exact same moment.

You both laugh — reflexive and a little startled. His cup, you notice, is empty. Has been for awhile, judging by the faint ring dried at the bottom.

“Either you’re a raging alcoholic,” you say, eyeing the cup suspiciously, “or you’re exercising impressive restraint.”

He looks down at it as if just now remembering its existence, lifting it in examination. Blue eyes—startlingly bright even in dim lighting—flick back to yours with mischief dancing in their depths. 

“Oh, this? This is my escape hatch. Turns out telling people you’re getting a drink is a surprisingly effective way to flee boring conversations.”

The corner of your mouth twitches. “Well,” you say, lifting your own cup in a small salute, “actually drinking is also a surprisingly effective exit strategy.”

“Looks like we’re both veterans of social warfare.” His smile comes easy, reaching his eyes and crinkling the corners, making him look younger than he probably is. “I’m Satoru. Astrophysics.”

He says it casually, like he’s telling you his favorite color rather than announcing he studies the fundamental architecture of the universe.

You blink. “Wow.”

“Oh, don’t give me that face.”

“I’m allowed to make this face,” you argue. “It’s an objectively impressive sentence. Also, you absolutely look like someone who studies astrophysics.”

“Is that so?” He tilts his head, curious. “What, pray tell, does an average astrophysics student look like?”

“Like someone who owns at least three shirts with equations on them and gets way too excited when planets align.”

“I own two shirts with equations, thank you very much.” The mock offence in his voice is undermined by a spreading grin. “And nothing gets me going more than planetary motion. I am but a simple man with simple pleasures.”

You laugh — surprised by how easily it comes, by how genuine it is in the midst of all the exhaustive performances. You tell him your name, and in doing so, make a subconscious decision that you’ve just extended your stay beyond the minimum polite duration.

“Communications,” you offer when it’s your turn to reduce yourself to a major.

He hums thoughtfully. “Yet you don't enjoy social events? Seems a bit ironic, doesn’t it?”

“I specialize in listening,” you say with a shrug. “This place is way too loud for me to practice.”

“You’re not wrong.” He winces, reminded of the assault on his eardrums mere moments ago. “I was about five minutes away from pulling the fire alarm and staging a heroic escape.”

“That’s a crime, you know.”

“Only if I get caught.”

“So you’re a criminal astrophysicist. That’s a first.”

“I contain multitudes.”

And as if summoned by the joke—cosmic irony at its finest—the music crashes back to life, reclaiming a volume louder than before. The room surges again, bodies closing ranks, conversations restarting mid-sentence.

Satoru's expression turns painful. Then his face shifts, a thought clearly forming.

“Want to commit a misdemeanor with me?” he asks with a boyish smile. It makes it seem like he’s inviting you to skip class.

“What kind?”

“The fleeing kind.”

You pretend to consider it, even though you already know your answer. “I don’t know. I’ve only just met you. You could be dangerous.”

“I study stars for a living.” He spreads his hands in a gesture of innocence that’s entirely unconvincing. “What could I possibly do to hurt you?”

“That’s exactly what a dangerous person would say.”

“Fair point.” His grin widens, and his eyes light up, impossibly bright. “Then I guess you’ll have to take your chances.”

“Okay,” you say. “Let’s flee.”

Outside, the night opens up like a gift. 

The campus stretches out in long, quiet lines. Cold air kisses your cheeks, sharp and clean after the stale warmth inside. The party’s noise dulls behind you, replaced by the soft crunch of gravel underfoot.

You walk side by side with no destination in mind, no purpose beyond away, steering toward a pathway that cuts through dead grass and dormant trees.

“So,” you say after a comfortable silence. “Astrophysics. What about it called to you? Were you one of those kids who discovered comets through a backyard telescope?”

“Nothing that impressive.” He tucks his hands in his pockets. “I just… liked looking at the sky.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” A shrug, self-depreciating. “My parents wanted me to be a doctor. Good salary and better bragging rights. But I kept thinking about how small we are... how temporary.” He pauses, breath misting in the cold. “A human life is, what, eighty years if you’re lucky? But a star? A star burns for billions. We’re nothing but brief blips.”

You’re quiet for a moment, absorbing this — the casual way he discusses impermanence, the way some people discuss weather. “That’s kind of depressing.”

“Or liberating.” He slows, then stops altogether, looking up. “To quote Anatole, the wonder is not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.”

You follow his gaze upward, neck craning back.

“Perhaps the millions of visible stars,” he continues, “and the countless others we cannot see, might amount to nothing more than a single drop of blood of some tiny creature, living in a universe beyond our imagination. Yet even that universe could be just a speck of dust in something larger still.”

Above, the sky is washed thin by light pollution—Tokyo’s eternal glow stealing the stars—but a few push through anyway, stubborn pinpricks against the dark. He points one out, then another, talking about them like old friends. You listen, even when you don’t quite follow the science, because the way he speaks makes you feel like you don’t have to understand to appreciate the beauty of it.

“That one’s my favorite,” he says, like he’s admitting a childhood crush.

You squint up at the same patch of sky. “Which one? They’re all look like dots to me.”

He shifts a step closer and, without thinking, reaches for your hand. His fingers are warm despite the cold; they engulf yours completely as he guides your arm upward, tracing a small arc through the air with your joined hands.

“There,” he says, voice soft beside your ear. “See it? It’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. But once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.”

You follow the line he’s drawn, adjust your focus, recalibrate your vision, and then you see it — a point of light brighter than the others, a single star holding court in the winter sky.

“Oh. How did I miss it before?”

"It gets overshadowed." He smiles — you can hear it in his voice even though you’re not looking at his face. "The moon steals the show most nights. But the moon’s kind of a fraud. It only looks bright because it’s borrowing the Sun’s light. Just a big, dull rock pretending to shine.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Sirius,” he says. “The brightest star in the night sky. It only shows up during the winter months, then goes back into hiding when it gets too close to the Sun.”

He drops his hand then, releases yours and tucks his own in his pocket. A flicker of self-consciousness crosses his face, suddenly worried he’s said or done too much.

You stare at Sirius a moment longer, feeling a strange sorrow.

“That’s kind of tragic,” you say softy. “Sirius and the Sun — they exist at the same time, but they’re never allowed to be seen together.”

He goes still beside you, and for a second you think you might’ve said something wrong. But then he smiles, and it’s different from before.

“Don’t worry,” he reassures. “They’re still bound to each other, even if we can’t see it.”

Just then, a breeze cuts through the quad. You shiver, hands instinctively coming up to rub your arms. Before you can even process the movement, he’s shrugging out of his jacket and draping it around your shoulders.

“You don’t have to—”

“Don’t fight it,” he says, adjusting the collar so it sits properly. “It’s my good deed for the day. Gotta balance out the potential serial killer thing.”

The fabric still holds his warmth. You pull it closer, feeling the weight embrace you.

"Thanks," you mutter.

You walk for a long time after that, aimless and unhurried, conversation meandering the way good ones do. He tells you about late nights in the observatory, about simulations that crash spectacularly, and you talk about classes and about professors who mistake volume for authority.

You talk about nothing, about everything.

Near the edge of the campus, where the lights fade out and the stars reclaim their territory, you realize you’ve been smiling for no particular reason. That your face actually hurts a little from it.

“I almost didn’t come out tonight,” you admit.

He looks at you, and his smile is a little shy, a little hopeful. “I’m glad you did.”

You exchange numbers like it’s an afterthought, a casual thing, though you both know it isn’t. Another decision that doesn’t mean anything yet.

But later—much later—when this memory returns to you in fragments, you’ll think about this night. You’ll remember the weight of his jacket on your shoulders and the way he guided your hand through the dark. And you’ll come to understand just how cruel gentle beginnings can be.

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

They slip in under the cover of the night, wearing an ordinary face.

And by the time you recognize them for what they are, it’ll already be too late.

Late Winter, Nine Years Ago

Love doesn’t arrive all at once.

It comes the way spring does — incrementally, in ways you only notice in retrospect. One degree warmer, one minute of daylight longer.

It edges in through text messages that gradually become frequent enough that there’s no hour that feels unreasonable anymore. It comes in the lengthening of days and the way your lips curve involuntarily when his name lights up your phone — that Pavlovian response you can’t control and have stopped trying to.

You don’t call it anything yet. The absence of labels preserves the illusion of freedom, of not being in too deep.

You are, as always, very good at lying to yourself.

Your phone buzzes while you’re doing the dishes. You don’t even dry your hands before reading the message, just wipe the suds carelessly on your jeans, leaving damp patches on your thighs that will take twenty minutes to fade.

Satoru: Coffee tomorrow? No lectures about stellar evolution this time, I promise.

A smile appears before you can stop it. You actually turn your phone face-down for a moment, embarrassed, as if he might witness the way you’re grinning like an idiot at your kitchen sink.

You: I don’t know… still not convinced you’re not a serial killer. Can you guarantee you won’t try to kill me? Satoru: I can guarantee pastries. Is that good enough?

You can see it so clearly: the tilt of his head, that particular angle that makes his hair fall across his forehead. The way one corner of his mouth lifts higher than the other, asymmetrical and devastating.

You: Fine. But if you murder me, I’m so haunting you. Satoru: Deal. I could use the company.

The café he chooses is small and warm. The kind of place that smells like roasted beans and brown sugar. You choose a seat near the window, watching the steady stream of strangers pass, trying your best to distract yourself from your nervous state.

When Satoru walks in, it feels like the continuation of a thought you didn’t know you’d started. 

His coat hangs open, scarf loose around his neck. He’s wearing a soft blue sweater, clearly loved into comfort. The cuffs are slightly stretched, and his hair is doing that thing where it refuses all attempts at discipline. 

When he spots you, it’s as if a switch flipped inside him, illuminating what was once dormant.

“Hey,” he says, sliding into the seat across from you.

“Hey yourself.”

He flags down a server, orders something complicated with far too many modifiers—extra shot, oat milk, no whip, yes whip, maybe whip?—then turns his full attention back to you. And when Satoru gives you his attention, it’s full. Undivided. Like you’re the only person in the room, in the world, worth looking at.

You talk about everything that matters and everything that doesn’t. About classes and deadlines and group projects where you somehow end up doing all the work. He tells you about staying awake for thirty-six hours trying to fix a simulation and the vindictive satisfaction of finally making it work at four in the morning.

You notice things you shouldn’t, details far too small to matter and yet mattering anyway: the faint scar near his knuckle, the way he drums his fingers against his cup when he’s thinking, how his eyes track to the window when he’s searching for the right words.

You wonder, idly, what moments shaped those details; what histories live beneath his skin.

When the check comes, he grabs it before you can protest, snatching it out of reach.

“I can pay for myself,” you start.

“You can fight me for it next time.”

“Next time?”

Though the question is casual, the hope beneath it isn’t.

He looks up, suddenly uncertain — a crack in his usual confidence. “I mean… if you want a next time, that is. No pressure.”

A smile accompanies your response. “So, same time next week?”

The weeks blur together after that, each one folding into the next. Coffee becomes dinner, and dinner becomes long walks where you talk and talk until your voice goes hoarse. He texts you photos of the night sky from the observatory, tells you their stories. You send him pictures of interesting graffiti you pass on your way to class and snippets of overheard conversations that make you laugh.

It’s easy, effortless.

And then, on an unremarkable evening in late February, the remarkable happens.

The rain starts halfway through the walk back to his place — a light mist that freckles your hair and darkens the shoulder of his jacket. By the time you reach his building, it’s steady enough to justify lingering under the awning, both of you pretending you’re waiting for it to pass, both of you knowing you’re really just prolonging the night.

“You could come up,” he says, trying for casual but not quite managing it. “If you want.”

And you do.

His apartment is dim when you enter, lit only by a lamp in the corner that casts everything in honeyed shadows. You toe off your shoes by the door and he takes your coat, hangs it up without thought. The gesture is so natural it almost hurts — that casual domesticity an intimacy in itself, an implication of futures unwritten.

“Make yourself at home,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

You sink onto the edge of the couch, feeling the fabric grow familiar as you wait. From the kitchen you hear water running, the click of the kettle, the percussion of ceramic against counter. Then the smell of tea — something herbal and sweet.

When he returns, he sets the mug into your hands, fingers lingering long enough to transfer warmth.

“You didn’t have to,” you murmur, holding it between your palms.

“No, I didn’t,” Satoru says, small and sincere. “I just like doing things for you.”

You bring the mug to your lips, letting steam fog your lashes. The tea is perfect — not too hot, sweetened ever so slightly, exactly how you mentioned you liked it in an offhand comment made weeks ago.

“You remembered,” you say softly.

“Of course I did.”

You look down into the mug, watching the surface tremble with the quiver of your hands. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

He settles beside you on the couch, resting his elbow along the back of the couch. “Why not?”

“Because it makes it hard to pretend this is casual.”

You can’t see it, but there’s nothing casual about the way he’s looking at you right now.

“Well, I’ve never been good at pretending,” he confesses.

The words are simple yet enough to undo you completely.

He reaches out, covers your hand where it wraps around the mug. You feel your breath change before you realize you’ve taken it. And when you turn to meet his eyes, you find yourself drowning in blue.

You become painfully aware of how close his face is. How you can count his eyelashes if you wanted to. How his gaze drops to your mouth and traces the shape of your lips before returning to your eyes with a question written in their depths.

“Can I—?” he starts, then falters. The question dissolves as he swallows it back down, hesitant.

He tries to look away, but your hands—seemingly with a will of their own—reach up to cradle his face. Your palms cup his jaw, feeling the barely-there stubble rough against your skin, the warmth of him seeping into you.

“Yes,” you say, permission and plea all at once.

He kisses you like he’s been thinking about it for weeks. 

Probably has been. 

Soft at first, tentative and questioning, giving you every chance to pull away. When you don’t, when you lean in instead and thread your fingers into his hair, the kiss deepens.

His hand finds your waist, slides around to the small of your back, pulling you closer until there’s no space left between your bodies. His hands are everywhere now: your hips, your ribs, tangling in your hair with a desperation that mirrors your own.

The rain drums steadily against the windows, blurring the city beyond into impressionist streaks of light. Time becomes elastic, meaningless. There is only the sensation of his mouth on yours and his hands learning the geography of your body.

You melt into it, surrendering inch by inch. Your fingers curl into his sweater, sliding beneath it. His stomach contracts under your palms, muscles taut and trembling.

“Wait,” he gasps against your lips, though his hands continue their restless journey across your body. “We can slow down if you want.”

But your wanting has already passed the point of patience.

This need has been building for weeks, layer upon layer of almost-touches and loaded glances — a slow burn that grew into an inferno.

“I don’t want slow,” you say, “I want you.”

His eyes go dark, entirely focused on you.

“God,” he breathes, fingers digging into your hips through denim. “The things I’ve imagined doing to you.”

He stands, lifting you with an ease that steals the breath from your lungs, hands secure beneath your thighs as your legs wrap around his waist. He carries you down the short hallway to his bedroom, lips never leaving his, unwilling to break contact even for the seconds it takes to navigate the distance. 

The rain’s symphony follows you, each droplet a percussion against glass, a metronome marking the pace of your shared unraveling. 

He reaches for the buttons of your shirt, working them open, tugging off every remaining article of clothing you have on. Each inch of skin revealed feeds his hunger further. You arch into his touch, head falling back as sensation floods through you, breath coming in short gasps as his mouth follows the trail of his fingers.

You fumble with his belt, his button, his zipper, hands clumsy until he is finally, blessedly naked. He hovers above you, utterly bare, and you can barely breathe. All lean and smooth skin, broad shoulders tapering to narrow hips. Every line of him is defined by shadow and want. He’s gorgeous, and in this moment, he’s yours.

You push him onto his back and straddle his lap where he sits at the edge of the bed, your knees indenting the mattress on either side of his hips. His hands find your thighs, fingers splaying across skin as you rock against him, drawing a deep groan from his chest.

“Condom,” he grits out, forehead pressed to yours. “Nightstand—“

You’re already reaching for it, tearing the wrapper with shaking hands. He watches as you roll it down his length, hissing through clenched teeth.

“Now,” you say, desperate and beyond pretense.

He guides you down onto him, the feeling deep and drugging and absolutely devastating. Your nails dig deeper into his skin as he fills you inch by inch, stretching you until he’s fully seated.

You begin to set a rhythm — rolling slowly first, adjusting to the fullness of him, gradually increasing the pace until each thrust makes your toes curl and sparks scatter across your vision. His mouth finds your neck, your shoulder, anywhere he can reach, murmuring filthy praise between kisses that will no doubt leave marks you’ll only discover tomorrow.

Your nails score down his back, pleasure coiling tighter and tighter in the pit of your stomach as the intensity builds. You can feel him responding, growing harder and longer inside you.

“Satoru,” you gasp, leaning in to catch his earlobe between your teeth, tugging gently. “What else have you imagined?”

“How you’d take me from behind,” he admits, voice wrecked and raw. “Seeing you like that—it’s all I can think about.”

The image sends a fresh flood of wetness between your thighs. You roll off and position yourself on your knees, presenting yourself like an offering he can’t refuse.

He responds in kind, pulling you back against him, sliding between your folds before entering slowly. The new angle makes you feel impossibly full, long and deep strokes hitting places that make you cry out into the pillow. 

The obscene sound of skin meeting skin fills the room alongside your broken moans. His hand snakes between your legs, fingers finding your clit and circling it with movements that match his thrusts.

“S-satoru,” you gasp, gripping the sheets knuckle-white, face pressed into the pillow. “I’m close.”

Your admission sends him into a frenzy — driving deeper, moving faster, fingers working you with increased urgency. You shatter, body convulsing as pleasure crashes over you in waves that seem endless. You cry out his name as your walls clench around him, pulling him deeper, taking him over the edge with you.

You collapse onto the bed together, bodies slick with sweat. He wraps his arms around you, holding you close as he softens inside you, neither of you wanting to break the connection yet.

You lie tangled together in his sheets, your head on his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath your ear. The rain had slowed to a patter; a lullaby sung by the sky.

You’re already half-asleep, warm and sated and safer than you’ve felt in years.

He presses a kiss into your hair, and mumbles something you can’t make out. But it’s a confession he didn’t need to voice. You learn then, how much can be said without words at all.

Outside, the clouds have parted and yielded to the moon. Through the gap in the curtains, the stars appear one by one. You fall asleep with him under their watchful gaze, dreams intertwined, hearts beating as one. 

Love didn’t arrive all at once.

It slips in unnoticed, patient as melting ice, warming you by degrees so small you only recognize it once the cold completely thawed.

Suddenly, spring is everywhere.

The line stays open.

This isn’t unusual. Once the essential information has been gathered and response has been set in motion, some calls drift into a waiting state. Once the urgency loosens, the work becomes less about extraction and more about endurance, about simply being present.

You glance at the incident timer: seven minutes, forty-three seconds. Forty-four. Forty-five. The city is still rearranging itself around the information you fed it.

Protocol says you could clear the call. Free up the line. Move on to the next crisis in queue.

But something—instinct, maybe, or something less rational—roots you in place. An unreasonable certainty that if you let this call end, if you sever this connection, something crucial will be lost forever.

So you keep the line open.

You adjust the mic slightly, a reflexive gesture. The padding has gone warm against your skin, and you can hear him breathing — each exhale a quiet affirmation that he’s still there.

You: Help’s on the way. I’ll wait with you until they arrive. Caller: Thank you. For staying. You: It’s my job, sir.

You imagine him standing somewhere near the wreckage, phone pressed to his ear. You picture the set of his shoulders, the way he might be bracing against the cold or the dust still settling from the collapse.

You shouldn’t do this — shouldn’t populate the voice with a body, the body with a face, the face with a history. Faces aren’t part of the job. Faces make it personal, and personal makes it hurt.

And yet.

On the other end of the line, you hear movement. Fabric brushing against fabric. A faint scrape, like a shoe adjusting against pavement.

Caller: Do you like what you do?

The question ambushes you. Your gaze drifts across the room, taking in the familiar landscape of chairs inching closer to desks and a dispatcher down the row leaning forward, posture snapping from bored to alert in a heartbeat as their screen glows with endless updates.

You: I don’t know. Spend enough time in one place and it starts to feel like home, I guess. I’ve been doing this long enough that I can’t remember what a normal schedule looks like anymore. Caller: Are you taking care of yourself?

A laugh escapes you. It surprises you, honestly, how easily it comes. How strange it feels to hear concern directed at you.

For years you’ve existed as a role rather than a person. An invisible hand guiding people through their worst moments. Somewhere along the way, you began to believe that invisibility extended inward too — that you’d become as transparent to yourself as you are to the strangers on the other end of the line.

Caller: Sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep. You: No—no, it’s just that… I’m usually the one checking in on people. Caller: That’s not fair, is it? You: Sir— Caller: If you’re always saving others, who’s left to save you?

The vinyl chair creaks as you shift your weight, suddenly uncomfortable. You can see the waveform of his voice on the screen, small peaks and valleys marking his every word. Proof of life, translated into lines.

For reasons you can’t name—reasons that feel selfish and shameful—a part of you hopes the city takes its time getting to him. Just a few more minutes. Just long enough to keep this strange, unexpected connection alive.

You: Right now you should be more concerned about yourself. If the building collapses further, you might be in danger. Caller: Don’t worry about me. You: I have to worry about you. It’s literally my job. Caller: Are you always this stubborn? You: Are you always this evasive?

A soft sound comes through the line — not quite a laugh, but close. Warm and weary and impossibly real.

Caller: Fair point. You: Can you at least promise me you’re somewhere safe? Caller: It’s safe enough.

It’s not the answer you want, but it’s the one you get. You recognize the deflection for what it is.

You: Most people in your position would be more nervous. You don’t have to put on a brave face for me, you know. Caller: Well, I’ve never been good at pretending.

The words hit you; a physical blow.

They seep through the line and settle into a cavity left empty for so long. It sparks a memory you’ve kept locked away for years, buried so deep you thought it was gone.

A pause stretches between you. Long enough that you start to wonder if you imagined the words entirely, if you’ve finally cracked under the pressure of too many nights.

You: What did you just say? Caller: I said, I’ve never been good at pretending.

The phrase is specific, distinct.

Sound warps and stretches, becomes something underwater and far away. You feel it in the way your shoulders tense, in the sudden rabbit-kick of your pulse against your throat, in the way your fingers have gone numb around the pen you’re still clutching.

You: You… you remind me of someone. Caller: Do I?

Your lips remember before your brain does. The shape of a smile once learned by heart resurfaces, suppressed under years of careful forgetting. It settles on your mouth like muscle memory — a ghost that still haunts your heart.

You: Yeah. He used to say the same thing. Caller: Why do you talk about him like he’s gone?

You close your eyes. The smile fades, leaving its echo behind. A phantom sensation of happiness that no longer exists.

Your fingers still on the keyboard, hovering over keys you don’t press. You become acutely aware of your own body — at the uniform collar sitting against your throat, at the ache at the base of your neck. Your heart is beating too fast for someone sitting still.

You: Because he is. Or—he might as well be. It was a long time ago. Caller: Do you miss him?

You swallow against the tightness in your throat. Around you, the emergency center continues its mechanical symphony — keyboards clacking, radios crackling, phones ringing in endless rotation.

You: I— 

Just then, something slips through the line. A low, uneasy sound that doesn’t quite belong. Something scraping and straining, groaning under a weight it was never designed to bear. Metal complaining. Concrete settling into new, unstable configurations.

Your training kicks in before conscious thought does.

You: Sir, did you hear that? Caller: …No, I don’t think so. Probably just the wind.

Another phone rings just beyond your periphery, and a colleague answers with the same practiced cadence you used earlier:

“119, is it a fire or a medical emergency?”

The room erupts with renewed activity, radios coming alive one by one.

“Units staging on the west side.”

“East access blocked.”

“Be advised, instability increasing.”

The words layer and overlap, building a low, urgent rhythm.

You press the headset harder against your temples, as if physical pressure might keep him close to you. You don’t know why this voice feels different from the thousands you’ve heard before. You only know that the idea of the line going dead—of this connection severing cleanly and without ceremony—fills you with a dread so profound it feels like drowning.

You think about the thousands of voices you’ve heard over the years. How all of them, along with their stories, vanish the moment the line goes dead. They become nothing more than incident numbers in a database and timestamps in a log file.

But this one. This voice.

You’re terrified you might never get to hear it again.

So you stay.

Because for now, he’s still there.

And that has to be enough.

Winter, Eight Years Ago

“God,” Satoru murmurs against your neck. “You’re making it very hard to think.”

He’s propped up on one elbow beside you, bare-shouldered and beautifully disheveled, white hair mussed in ways that have nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with your fingers tangled in it moments ago.

Late afternoon light leaks through the gap in the curtains, cutting across the bed in golden bands. Dust motes hang suspended in the air, disturbed into visibility after the sheets move and settle with you.

His hand comes to a rest at your waist, thumb drawing small arcs into your skin. It’s an act so natural now it feels like he’s writing his name there. You lean up, and his lips part easily for you, familiar yet still capable of unmaking you entirely.

He rolls onto his back and brings you with him, arranging you so your head rests over his heart. The steady rhythm beneath your ear has become your favorite sound — proof of life, proof of reality.

“So,” he says, and you can hear him trying to sound casual about it. “I might be gone for a bit next month.”

“Gone where?”

“Conference in Kyoto. Then maybe another one right after in Osaka.“

“Oh.” The word feels inadequate, so you supplement it with forced brightness. “That’s exciting.”

“It is.” You can hear his smile. “It’s a big opportunity. Lots of important people are gonna be there. Dr. Yaga thinks it could really open doors for me down the line.”

You want to ask how long, and if he’ll miss you. You want to ask whether this is the beginning of a longer absence or just a temporary detour on a path that leads back to you.

Instead, you ask, “When do you leave?”

“Two weeks.”

Sooner than you’re ready for.

“That’s not much time.”

“I know.” He turns to you, face painted in golden light. His thumb brushes tenderly over your cheekbone. “But I’ll call. Every night. And I’ll text you so much you’ll get sick of me.”

You want to believe him. You do believe him. But there’s a small, cynical part of you that nudges doubt you’re not ready to acknowledge.

“Just…” You bite your lip. “Don’t forget about me while you’re gone, okay?”

He’s hurt that you’d even think it possible. “How could I?”

But the question hangs between you, unanswered and unanswerable, because neither of you knows what the future holds.

The night he packs, you sit cross-legged on his bed and watch him fold shirts. He’s explaining something about the conference schedule, about panels and presentations, but you’re only half-listening. You’re too focused on watching him tuck socks into shoes to save space, the way he frowns at a wrinkled collar before deciding it’s good enough.

You’re memorizing him, just in case.

“Do you really have to go?” you ask.

“It’s just for a few weeks,” he says, not looking at you. “Maybe a month at most.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be back before you know it.”

“I know.”

He stops packing. Crosses the room. Sits beside you on the bed and takes your hand in both of his. “Hey. Look at me.”

You do, reluctantly.

“I’ll call,” he says. “I promise.”

And you believe him.

For the first week, at least.

They come regularly at first, late at night when he’s back in his hotel room and the day’s obligations have finally released him. He tells you about the presentations — some fascinating, some mind-numbingly dull. About the keynote speaker who somehow made black holes sound boring, which should be impossible. About the food that’s good but not as good as the ramen place near campus that you both love.

“I miss you,” he says on day four.

“I miss you too.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Just got in bed.”

“I wish I was there.” A pause. “What are you wearing?”

“Satoru.”

“What? I’m just curious.” You can hear the grin in his voice.

“Your shirt. The gray one.”

Silence. Then, softer: “You’re killing me.”

You smile in the darkness of your room. “Good.”

By the second week, the calls become texts. Short updates between panels, photos of slides and conference halls and terrible coffee. Apologies for missed calls, promises to talk later that get pushed back again and again.

Satoru: Sorry, got pulled into drinks with some researchers. Call you tomorrow? You: No problem. Have fun. Satoru: I’d rather stay in my room and talk to you. You: You’re lying, aren’t you? Satoru: Okay, maybe a little. But I do miss you.

By the third week, the texts arrive at odd hours. They’re fragmented and hurried, dashed off between other, more important things.

Satoru: Might be here longer than planned. Opportunity came up. You: How much longer? Satoru: Not sure yet. Will keep you posted.

By the fourth week, you learn to fall asleep without the sound of his voice in your ear. You learn to stop checking your phone every hour and you learn that missing someone is less like a sharp pain and more like a dull ache.

You tell yourself it’s fine. He’s busy building his future, after all. He’s brilliant and driven and destined for important things, for a life bigger than what this small campus can offer.

You just didn’t realize his future might not have room for you in it.

The thought is a stone in your chest, growing heavier with each day of silence.

Summer, Seven Years Ago

The kitchen floor is cold in the way tiles always are at night, and the way truth usually is.

Its unforgiving ceramic leeches warmth from whatever’s left of your hope.

You sit with your knees drawn to your chest and your back pressed against the cabinet wood beneath the sink. Your bare feet are tucked under the hem of his old T-shirt — the one you’ve been sleeping in for months that it barely smells like him anymore. It hangs loose on you, fabric softened by too many washes, the screen-printed logo across the front cracked and fading.

There’s an open takeout container between you, cardboard flaps wilted. The noodles inside have gone glossy and congealed, steam long since abandoned. You ordered too much, as always. He used to tease you about it.

Satoru is stretched out on the floor opposite you, one arm tucked behind his head, sleepy and loose-limbed. He’s staring at the ceiling, looking at it the way he looks at the sky. As if it might open up and reveal something infinite. As if it owes him something vast.

And he’s talking. The way he always does when he’s excited, and when something has captured his attention completely.

“—and if the simulations behave,” he’s saying, voice bright with that lift that only ever surfaces when he talks about space, “there’s a real chance I can secure that internship.”

You hum in acknowledgement, the response automatic. It’s the sound you’ve perfected over the last few months. 

You trace a crack in the tile with your finger, following its jagged path until it disappears beneath the refrigerator. You wonder how many things vanish that way — hidden but spreading, non-apparent until it’s gone.

“Houston or Boston, most likely,” he continues, oblivious to your silence. “Maybe DC if I’m really lucky. Dr. Yaga seems to think I have a real shot, especially after how well the conference went. He said my work on stellar evolution was—”

“That’s incredible,” you cut in, because if you don’t speak now you never will.

He turns toward you, eyes bright with that boyish enthusiasm you fell in love with. It’s the same look that used to make your heart race but now only makes it ache. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” you say, and you mean it. You always do.

But meaning it doesn’t make it hurt less.

He sits up, smile faltering at the edges as his eyes search your face. He always notices when something wrong, just never what it actually is.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

You shrug. The motion is small, meant to deflect and pass unnoticed. “Nothing.”

“Not convincing. Try again.”

“It’s nothing, really.”

“We both know that's not true.” He reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear with such casual tenderness it makes you want to scream. “Talk to me.”

You huff a breath, resting your chin on your knees. 

“I don’t know,” you start, words coming slowly. “It’s just… everyone has this grand plan, you know? Look at you — you’ve got this big map laid out. Conferences, internships, research positions. You know exactly where you’re going and how to get there. And I’m just… here. I don’t even know what I want for lunch tomorrow, let alone five years from now.”

He smiles, because this feels solvable to him. “You don’t need a grand plan,” he says, too easily, too dismissively. “You’re good with people. You’ll figure it out.”

The words are meant to be comforting but they miss the landing completely.

“Figure it out when?” Your tone comes out harsher than you intended, sharp enough to make him blink. “You talk about your future like it’s already decided.”

He exhales through his nose, rubbing the back of his neck. You can see him trying to locate where he mistepped. “Well,” he says, hesitant now, “it kind of is. If everything goes right, that is.”

“And what happens then?”

“Then, I suppose, I’ll go.”

Though the words are soft, they still break you.

You nod, mechanically, feeling your heart crystallize in your chest.

You’ve known this was coming since the first time he mentioned the internship, said casually over dinner as a distant concept rather than an imminent reality. You’ve been pretending not to hear it ever since.

“You’ll go,” you repeat quietly, testing the words in your mouth.

“Yeah. To Boston, or Houston, or—if things really line up—Washington.” His mind is already there, already walking through buildings you’ve never seen, meeting people whose names you’ll never learn. “Wherever the research takes me.”

“And what about us?”

“What about us?”

He says it like the question itself is confusing. Like he doesn’t understand why those two things would be connected — his future and yours, as if they weren’t part of the same equation.

You laugh, because if you don’t, you might cry. “What about me?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

He frowns, the first real flash of frustration crossing his face. “What do you want me to say? That I’ll turn down the opportunity? That I’ll stay here and do what, exactly? Work at a planetarium? Teach high school physics? Waste everything I’ve worked for?”

“I’m not asking you to stay.”

“Then what are you asking?”

You press your lips together, feeling your eyes burn with tears you refuse to shed. You hate that you want to cry on a kitchen floor at three in the morning over a future that hasn’t even happened yet. Hate how small you feel for wanting something you don’t have the words to ask for.

“Are you planning on leaving me?” 

The word—leaving—makes him flinch like you’ve struck him.

“I’m not leaving you,” he says. “I’m just going.”

The distinction is everything.

And nothing.

It’s strange how a sentence can share the same words yet still mean vastly different things. Perspectives are funny like that.

You can see him thinking, doing the math in his head, the way he always does. Distances and probabilities and trajectories. He’s spent his whole life studying objects that move apart and come back together. Orbits. Ellipses. He’s always understood the universe in motion; always trusted that things return to where they belong.

Equilibrium, he’d call it. The natural order reasserting itself.

He doesn’t understand that people aren’t celestial bodies. That love doesn’t obey the laws of physics.

He scoots closer, uncrossing his legs so he can sit directly in front of you. He takes your hands in his, and they’re warm like they always are, like they always have been.

“Listen to me,” he says, squeezing your fingers. “This doesn’t change anything between us. I’ll visit. We’ll make it work.”

“For how long?”

“However long it takes.”

“And then what?” You can hear the hysteria creeping into your voice and you can’t stop it. “You finish the internship and take a position somewhere even farther away? I follow you around the world while you chase stars? When does it end, Satoru? When do I get to matter as much as your work?”

He pulls back. “So what are you saying?”

You don’t answer right away. You can’t. Because you don’t know what you’re saying. You only know that the future he’s envisioning—the one with long-distance calls and occasional visits and love stretched between time zones—feels like slow suffocation.

“I’m saying,” you start, choosing each word carefully, “that I don’t know if I can do this. The waiting. The wondering when I’ll see you next. The always, always coming second to your work.”

“You don’t come second.”

“Don’t I?”

The silence that follows is answer enough.

He stares down at your joined hands — except they’re not joined anymore, you realize. In the last few seconds, you’ve pulled away, created distance where there wasn’t any before.

“It doesn’t make sense to keep trying,” you say weakly.

“It may not make sense,” he says, “but there are forces infinitely more powerful than reason.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’ll always come back to you.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

You hold onto his words because they’re all you have.

Later, you will understand what they really meant. Because coming back isn’t the same thing as staying. His absence was already built into that promise.

For now you are young, and in love, and still believe that wanting someone badly enough can keep them from drifting too far. 

So you nod, and squeeze his hand back, and let the future remain abstract and far away.

But as Rousseau once said, there are two kinds of lies: one concerns an accomplished fact, the other concerns a future duty.

Right now, on this kitchen floor, you’re both lying about the second kind.

For now there is only summer, and midnight, and two people who love each other but have already started letting go.

Neither of you know it yet, but the ending has already begun.

Winter, Seven Years Ago

The cold is more insistent this year, biting at your cheeks with teeth sharper than previous winters, finding every gap and seam you didn’t know existed.

You’re still together.

Technically.

It means you haven’t had the conversation. You still text, still call, still say “I love you” at the end of phone conversations that grow shorter and more stilted with each passing week; it means you’re both pretending the end isn’t already here.

It’s been two months since you last saw him in person, two months of missed calls and empty apologies, of growing accustomed to an absence that’s supposed to be temporary but feels increasingly permanent. 

He’s back for winter break, though only for a handful of days before he leaves again.

Dinner that night feels like a performance. You laugh at the right moments and he asks you about your classes, but neither of you mentions the circles under your eyes or the new hollowness in his cheeks. Neither of you acknowledges the elephant in the room — that you’ve become strangers who happen to share a history.

When he walks you home afterward, his hand finds yours out of habit. The touch is familiar and foreign all at once. The same hand you’ve held a hundred times now belonged to a different person entirely.

At your door, he kisses your forehead instead of your lips.

That’s when you know.

There was never a single moment when you stopped loving each other. You simply stopped belonging to each other.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says, and the lie sits between you like a mistress.

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

But you don’t. 

You know he means it in this moment, knows he believes the promise even as he makes it. But you also know that tomorrow will bring new reasons why later becomes never.

You say the words so that he didn’t have to.

“We need to talk."

“About what?”

You take a breath. “I don’t think this is working anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

He tries to save it, to promise he’ll do better. But he’s leaving tomorrow, and you’ve heard it all before. You can’t bear to sentence yourself to more months of slow erosion, this death.

You don’t have it in you to hurt all over again.

“I’m trying,” he says, “you know I’m trying.”

“Trying isn’t the same as being here.”

“What would you have me do?” he snaps, frustration bleeding through. “Give up my career? My dreams? That’s—I can’t do that. You can’t ask me to do that.”

The words sting, even though you know they’re coming from a place of fear, even though you know he doesn’t mean them the way they sound.

“I’m not asking you to give up anything,” you say. “I would never ask that. But I can’t keep waiting for you to decide that I’m worth staying for.”

“You are worth it.”

“Then why does it feel like I’m not?”

You close your eyes, feeling tears slip free and trace hot paths down your cheeks.

“I love you,” you say, the words breaking apart as they leave your mouth. “I really, truly do. But I can’t keep loving you from a distance.”

“I never meant to make you feel that way.”

“I know.”

“I do love you.”

“I know that too.”

A final moment of silence, heavy with all the things you’re both thinking but won’t say — futures that won’t happen, promises that will remain unfulfilled.

“So this is it?” He sounds young, lost.

“I’m sorry,” you say. And you mean it more than you’ve meant anything.

He nods, once.

“Yeah,” he says finally, voice barely above a whisper. “Me too.”

You stand in the doorway long after it closes, listening to the sound of footsteps retreating, growing smaller and smaller until they disappear entirely.

This is how things end.

With two people who have come to realize that love alone isn’t always enough.

Eventually, Satoru becomes a name you don’t say out loud; a constellation you’ve stopped searching the sky for.

It feels like growth.

It feels like loss.

While time you had with him was brief, the forgetting takes years. The thought of being forgotten by someone you could never forget aches as bad as a bruise that won’t fade. But the world doesn’t stop for your grief. Life, indifferent and relentless, continues its forward march.

You graduate. You apply for jobs. You sit through interviews where they ask about your strengths and weaknesses, where you smile and lie through your teeth about being a team player.

You eventually take a job at the emergency call centre. The training is exhaustive — weeks of protocols and procedures, but you learn quickly, discover you have a knack for it. The work is hard, but it’s honest. And it keeps you busy enough that you don’t have time to think about blue eyes and winter stars. You calmly instruct others to compress their wounds even though yours is lodged at your heart, bleeding where no one can see.

In a world full of so much suffering, yours hid itself well.

Most days.

But some nights, when insomnia grips you at three in the morning and you step outside to clear your head, you still look up. And every winter, without fail, Sirius appears — bright and solitary and impossibly far away.

Once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.

You tell yourself you don’t feel anything anymore. That the ache in your chest is just from the cold or exhaustion catching up with you after another long shift.

You are, as always, very good at lying to yourself.

Time stretches differently when someone is waiting on the other end of a line.

Seconds expand and grow elastic until you can feel each one pass. The incident timer climbs past eight minutes now, each digit another small forever.

You swivel in your chair, angling your body toward the console while around you, more calls are coming in — secondary reports, bystanders, people who heard the collapse from blocks away, wanting to know if their loved ones are safe.

His breathing is still controlled, but there’s an irregularity to it that wasn’t there before. A rasp at the tail end of each inhale, air costing him more than it should.

You: Sir, are you feeling alright? Caller: I’m fine. Just a lot of dust. You: Hang on, help is almost there. Caller: I know. I can hear the sirens now.

Outside your peripheral vision, the emergency centre shifts into full crisis mode.

Another phone rings. Then another. The sound layers and overlaps, snapping dispatchers into motion. A supervisor steps into the aisle, eyes flicking to the incident board where Shinjuku blooms red with updates.

“Ambulances on scene.”

“Fire department establishing command.”

“Search teams prepping entry.”

The chorus grows.

You: That’s good. That’s really good. Can you see them?

A pause — longer than it should be.

You: Sir? Caller: Not yet.

There’s a tightness to his voice now, a barely perceptible strain that makes your stomach drop.

You: Where are you right now? Caller: I told you. Outside. You: Sir, I need you to be very specific with me. Are you on the sidewalk? On the street? Behind a barrier?

Another pause. He’s choosing his words carefully, weighing what he can tell you against what he wants to hide.

Caller: I’m where I need to be.

His answer drops through you; stone through water.

From his end, a sound comes through, low and uneasy. The groan of stressed metal bending under impossible weight. The shift of unstable concrete settling into new, dangerous configurations. Things that shouldn’t move, moving — all sounds that don’t belong outside.

Dread arrives then, cold as winter frost.

You: … you’re inside, aren’t you?

The silence that follows is answer enough.

You: Sir— Caller: It’s fine. I’m fine.

Horror floods in; ice in your veins, tremor in your hands, the whole world tilting sideways. Your breath comes out too fast, too shallow. Everything is simultaneously too bright and too dark.

Incoherent, incohesive thoughts rush through your mind like whitewater over jagged rocks, and you’re in the middle of it, careening and crashing into every one.

Your hand lifts from the desk—trembling, useless—falls back without accomplishing anything.

You: You lied to me.

The words escape raw and unfiltered before you can temper it, stripped of every professional protocol you’ve ever learned.

Caller: I know. You: Why? Why would you— Caller: I couldn’t hurt you twice. 

The phrase lodges in your chest; foreign and familiar, impossible and inevitable.

You: What do you mean, twice?

His laughter comes through, soft and worn after years of regret. And it’s the laugh that does it. The particular way it falls — something you used to know intimately. Memory is a stubborn thing that comes back when you least expect it.

Caller: Fate is funny, isn’t it? Out of all the dispatchers in Tokyo, all the voices you could have been… I’m glad it was you. You: How do you know— Caller: I’d know your voice anywhere.

The room contracts to a point. Everything else fades to static, to irrelevance, to nothing. There is only this voice, speaking words that can’t be real.

Love leaves a memory that can’t be stolen.

And you know. God help you, you know.

You: …Satoru?

The name comes out broken, barely a whisper. A prayer to a god you stopped believing in years ago when love proved insufficient.

Satoru: Hey.

And just like that, seven years of careful forgetting, of walls that you’ve built around parts the most vulnerable parts of yourself, collapse into nothing.

The threads stitched closed by time have come loose and the wound you thought had scarred over tears itself open once again, fresh and bleeding.

The shattering of a heart is the loudest quiet ever known.

You: No… no, no. It’s not—it can’t be you. Satoru: This isn’t the way I’d imagined we’d meet again. You: You’re not—you can’t—

Your voice doesn’t sound like yours anymore. It belongs to the girl who once stood under winter stars with his jacket slipping down her shoulders.

Memories rush in unbidden, of summer nights and bare feet on cool tile, his hand warm at your waist, and his laugh that filled rooms before distance taught it restraint.

Satoru: Been back for awhile now. I’ve been meaning to call… but I just couldn’t bear to see you and face what I’d lost. I’m sorry I took so long. You: It’s not the time for that right now! You need to get out of there!

Your voice cracks, too loud, and heads turn across the room. Your supervisor glances over, frowning, but you can’t bring yourself to care about protocol or professionalism now.

You: Are you hurt? Satoru: Define hurt. You: Satoru— Satoru: I can’t feel my legs. That’s probably not a good sign, right?

Your breath stops.

Everything stops.

The distance between you and Satoru has been measured in different units over the years — city blocks, then prefectures, then entire countries. Tonight it’s measured in floors of concrete, in the five miles between your dispatch center and the building that’s crushing him.

Your hands are shaking now, trembling so badly you have to clasp them together to make them stop. You press your headset closer, as if the pressure could somehow keep him tethered to you.

You: Help is coming. They’re there now, Satoru. You… you just have to hold on. Satoru: I know. You: The crews are setting up, search and rescue is preparing entry. They’re going to find you. Satoru: Okay. You: They’re going to get you out. Satoru: If you say so. You: You’re going to make it. You have to. Do you understand me? You have to make it.

From his end, you hear it again — that ominous groan of stressed materials failing, of concrete shifting and metal screaming in defeat.

Satoru: It’s no use.

You can hear the wet rattle in his breathing, the pauses growing longer between words, each clearly extracted at great cost. 

Your training tells you what this means, your experience confirms it; but your heart refuses to accept it.

You: D-don’t do that—don’t you dare give up on me!

His voice has gone soft now. It’s the voice he used to use late at night when the world narrowed to just the two of you.

In the background, you hear the sounds of imminent collapse, of time running out. Each beat bleeds loud in your ears, loud enough to mask the roaring of the call floor around you. 

Satoru: I’m sorry, I can’t keep my promise. I don’t think I can come back to you this time. You: You don’t get to decide that. You hear me? You don’t get to make that choice.

Your voice splinters, scrapes its way out of your throat like it has to claw past bone to be heard.

You: Listen to me. Rescue teams are inside the building now. They’re clearing the east wing as we speak. I need you to stay awake, okay? Just keep talking to me. Satoru: About what? You: Anything. Everything. Tell me what you’re thinking right this second.

He shifts, and a sharp inhale follows, cut short like it hurts too much to complete. Tears stream freely down your face now, hot and unchecked.

Satoru: I’m thinking about the night we first met. You remember? You: Of course I do.

How could you not?

Satoru: You were so beautiful. It hurt to even look at you. It was like I was staring directly at the sun. You: To think I almost didn’t go that night…

He hums faintly, a sound of agreement, of presence.

Satoru: I used to wonder about that sometimes. About all the tiny, insignificant decisions that led to it. If you’d stayed at home. If the music hadn’t cut out when it did. If we’d stepped in different directions instead of colliding. How many universes are there where we never met? Where I spent my whole life not knowing what I was missing? You: Satoru—

Your fingers curl into your sleeve, nails biting into fabric into skin.

Satoru: Seven years… is there a universe where I didn’t let it go to waste? We had time, and I spent it so carelessly. I walked away from the best thing that ever happened to me because I thought—God, I don’t even know what I thought. That I needed to prove something? You: Don’t. Don’t do this to yourself. Not now. Satoru: It’s true, though. I had everything I needed right in front of me, and I convinced myself I needed more. You: You don’t have to explain— Satoru: I do. I need you to understand. Need you to know that leaving you was the single biggest mistake of my life. That every day since has been colored by that regret, and I’d give anything—anything—to go back and choose you, over and over again.

His breathing is noticeably worse now. You can hear him fighting for each word, each syllable choked out of failing lungs.

You: Satoru, please, save your strength— Satoru: No. Need to… need to say this. If I don’t say it now—

He breaks off, coughing. The sound is horrible. Wrong in every way.

You’re screaming into your radio now, demanding updates, telling them to move faster—please move faster, please, please, please—but even as you do, you can hear Satoru fading on the other end. Each breath shallower than the last, each pause between them stretching longer and longer.

Satoru: If this is it… I’m glad I got to hear your voice one more time. You: Don’t talk like that. You’re doing it again—you’re talking about your future like it doesn’t include me, and I can’t—I won’t— Satoru: It’s getting harder to see. You: Stay with me—just a little longer, please. You don’t get to leave me again. Don’t you dare leave. Not again. Satoru: There’s a light. Above me… I can see it. You: Satoru, that might be the rescue team. Can you hear them? Can you hear anyone moving above you? Satoru: No. It’s quiet here. You: H-hey, just focus on me, okay? I know. I know it hurts. But just a little longer, okay? Just hold on a little longer and they’ll get you out and we can—we can have more time. We can have all the time we should have had before.

The light steadies, for just a moment.

He lets out a breath, a sound full of warmth and sorrow and acceptance.

Satoru: I can see you now. You’re here with me. Finally. You: What do you mean? You’re not making any sense. Satoru, please, just hold on— Satoru: Sirius… and the Sun. They’re bound to each other, by forces infinitely stronger than reason.

The call center fades, and you don’t hear the radios anymore, don’t see the screens. There is only this voice and the ache it carves into you.

Satoru: From the moment I met you, up until the very end… you’re all I can see. God, you’re even more beautiful than I remembered. You: No… no! Satoru, please, please stay with me—I’m begging you!

The light blurs completely now. 

He gasps, once, and smiles.

Satoru: I will always be with you.

Then—

Silence.

The waveform on your screen flattens into a single, unbroken line.

A hollow, awful nothing where his voice used to be.

Through your supervisor’s radio, words filter through the static:

“Victim located. Male, early thirties. Unresponsive." “Starting CPR.” “No pulse.” “Starting compressions.” “Get the AED ready.” “Clear!”

The mechanical thump of electricity trying to jumpstart a stopped heart.

“Nothing. Again.” “Clear!”

Another thump.

“Still no pulse.” “Keep going!”

Another failed resurrection.

“Time?” “2:47 AM—call it.”

The words don’t process. Can’t process. They exist in some other reality, another timeline where this isn’t happening — not to him.

The numbers imprint themselves into you, permanent and unforgiving.

Someone is making a terrible sound—a raw, animal keen of grief that doesn’t sound human, doesn’t sound like anything should sound. It takes you a moment to realize it’s coming from you.

Your supervisor gently pulls the headset from your hands, and the loss of that connection—that last tether—destroys whatever’s left holding you together. You collapse forward, forehead hitting the desk, and the sobs that tear out of you feel like they’re ripping you apart from the inside.

Arms wrap around you. Your supervisor, a colleague, you’re not sure. Someone holds you while you break, while you shatter into pieces small enough you’re certain you’ll never be whole again.

Your console stays dark.

You sit there, hollowed out and trembling, staring at the call log.

Duration: 23 minutes and 14 seconds.

That’s how long you had with him.

Twenty-three minutes to say everything you should have said seven years ago; twenty-three minutes that will have to last you for the rest of your life.

Three Months Later

The funeral was small. 

A scatter of colleagues from the research institute where he’d been working. Dr Yaga found you afterward, pressed something into your hand as he left. You waited until you were alone—truly, devastatingly alone—to open the small wooden box.

Inside it were printed messages, carefully preserved. Dozens of them from those early months: movie ticket stubs with dates and times faded but still legible, a pressed flower from some long-ago date you can barely remember, photos of the two of you—young and smiling and so heartbreakingly naive.

It was full of evidence of ordinary evenings that had felt extraordinary simply because you’d spent them together.

And at the bottom was a small notebook, leather-bound and worn.

His handwriting filled every page — journal entries spanning years. Scattered thoughts and observations, equations and diagrams, the detritus of a brilliant mind.

And littered throughout like stars in a dark sky: your name.

Over and over and over.

“Saw Sirius tonight. Wonder if she was looking too, wherever she is. After all this time, she’s still the only one I see.”

“Turned down Washington. Couldn’t explain why, just said it wasn’t the right fit. Dr. Yaga thinks I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have. But I couldn’t do it — couldn’t put an ocean between us, even though I have no right to be close to her anymore. Maybe it’s finally time to go home. Should I tell her? Would she even want to know?”

“I saw her today. Across the street from the station. I don’t think she noticed me. Seven years, and she still takes my breath away.”

You read through them all, one after another, tears falling freely onto pages that blur and swim before your eyes. Each entry was a small window into the years you weren’t there. 

You pressed the notebook to your chest and cried until you ran out of tears, until crying became dry heaving, until your body had nothing left to give to grief.

Now, three months later, you’re standing on your balcony at 2:47 AM.

The exact time they called it.

The night is brutally clear, and there, where it’s always been: Sirius — the brightest star in the sky. It burns alone against the darkness, solitary and brilliant and impossibly far away. Ninety-three trillion miles of emptiness, travelling across incomprehensible distances to reach your eyes.

“I see it,” you whisper to the empty air, to his ghost, to the universe that took him. “I see you.”

Most disasters don’t announce themselves.

They don’t knock or clear their throats or arrive with the courtesy of a warning.

They slip in quietly, wearing ordinary faces; in the shape of a phone call at 1:17 AM, in the voice of a someone you used to love, and still do.

You learned early that endings don’t feel like endings when they begin.

The boy who studied the stars became one, invisible but still there, bound to you by forces stronger than distance, or time, or death.

Once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it.

Even when it’s gone.

Especially when it’s gone.