the art of losing isn't hard to master

Rating: Mature Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Fandom: ヒプノシスマイク | Hypnosis Mic (Albums) Relationship: Amemura Ramuda/Aohitsugi Samatoki Characters: Amemura RamudaAohitsugi Samatoki Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Smoking, Alcohol, Consensual Violence, Blood and Injury, POV Second Person, Ambiguous Relationships, 5+1 Things Word Count: 3835 Summary:

Tonight you’ve decided you want to play at testing limits, to see what he does and doesn’t care about, what you can try to take that he’ll let you have. The bottle in your hand, already drunk down to the dregs, is the first thing. The easy thing. The second thing is the cigarette you snatch from between his lips without asking, and the third is the long drag you take from it without lowering your eyes.

Five things you take from him, and one you give.

1.

The story you tell Samatoki when you see him, and will tell anyone who asks hereafter, is this: you were in the neighborhood. You just wanted a drink.

You still know the bar. He took you there once, with the others, on a night you made him play host for the weekly crew meeting because you wanted a change of scene. You filed the address away in your memory in case you ever needed it again, as was your way and still is; you have a long memory for seemingly useless things, things you’re not sure you’ll want again, because you never know, and it’s better safe than sorry.

You don’t make plans to meet him there, and neither of you are such creatures of habit that you can just expect to find each other. But any way you slice it he is there, smoking alone at a corner booth like a stray that came in from the cold, and you can’t say if this is lucky or unlucky but it’s easy as anything to slide in beside him and order a drink of your own. You haven’t seen each other since you disbanded, but neither of you will mention it. It’s possible neither of you care.

The funny thing is this is old hat for the two of you, these long nights with no other company on account of deadweight teammates who went home too early, Ichiro too young, Jakurai too—whatever. Too old, too tired. No fun, you’d both said then, in jest, laughing and shouting from deep in your cups, no fun.

Those two, no fun. You imagine that now it’d be less than a joke. But you continue to drink together because you can’t do this with anyone else—and maybe this means drink but maybe in some capacity it also means be yourselves—and now the two of you are closing the bar, and everything else is the same as ever.

You like that he’s the same as ever. Samatoki won’t play any of your usual games, doesn’t bat an eye when you tell him you’ve missed him. You don’t even care if he doesn’t say it back; you’ve always had a good imagination, and coming up with new games is nothing to you.

Rating: General Audiences Fandom: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones Relationship: Cugar | Cormag/Turner | Tana Characters: Cugar | Cormag, Turner | Tana Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Flashbacks, Travel, Rain Word Count: 3763 Summary: 

Outside the rain is quieting, and she knows the stars will come out whether or not she can see them, and that will have to be enough.

In which Tana searches, and finds, and learns to make do in the time and the places between.

I’m at your back door with the earth  of a hundred nations in my skin.

- Vienna Teng, “Enough to Go By”

When she’s lucky, she makes it under some kind of roof before the rain hits.

Before Tana left home, Syrene made her a map—sure, generous strokes looping across a fresh sheet of parchment, spelling out the names of towns and inns and villages with all the certitude of someone who had traveled the world’s skies. It was, Tana had thought then as she opened her hands to receive it, just the sort of gift someone like Syrene might give, knowing full well that she could no more tell Tana where to find what she was looking for than she could accompany her on the journey. At the very least, Syrene could show her places where she might find rest as she searched, and that was no small thing.

Tana knows that is no small thing, now, having been away a full moon. Syrene may not be with her, but her hand has shown Tana the way ahead, and her name has helped secure a room for Tana for the next sennight at least. Now she writes with a borrowed quill to say as much, her own hand less certain of its path across the page—a little spidering, a little crooked as it’s been since she was a girl—but no less eager, no less determined for all that.

You’ll be happy to know I made it to the inn you recommended. The innkeep sends you her affection and is glad to know you are in good health since the end of the war. The spring storms have begun to blow in off the Western sea and Achaeus is unhappy about all the wet, as well as about having to be put up in a stall for the meantime, but we are safe.

Outside the rain has started up in earnest, but for now there is enough between her and it that she can appreciate the soft drumming it makes on the eaves overhead. In counterpoint she can hear voices just outside the door, footsteps coming and going, a harper tuning in the dining hall downstairs. It’s an organic sort of music, wonderful for its ordinariness, and Tana loves it instantly.

I don’t know much yet about where I should be heading—I’ve found no one who’s met him so far as I’ve gone, just a whisper here and there, people who remember his name—but I mean to keep asking and I trust I’ll find something soon.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Fandom: ヒプノシスマイク | Hypnosis Mic (Albums) Relationship: Aohitsugi Samatoki/Jinguji Jakurai Characters: Aohitsugi Samatoki, Jinguji Jakurai, Iruma Jyuto, and a small surprise Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Ambiguous Relationships, POV Second Person, 5+1 Things Word Count: 3450 Summary: 

You can make a crime scene of your body, a crash site, a killing floor, and he will say nothing as he puts you back together again.

1.

It feels a bit like the end of the world, the night you light up on the steps of Jakurai’s fire escape.

He won’t say anything about it, but you know the cigarette’s an imposition—and that only one of the many you’ve burdened him with since you woke up at midnight and found your skin hot and red-streaked and stinging from an infected tattoo. The long and short of it is that he was the first person you thought to call, and now he’s sitting two steps above you on the stairwell, leaning his back against the steel grilles as peaceful as you please, letting you smoke.

You breathe in, roll your shoulder experimentally to test how much it still hurts, then exhale. The image is of a black snake, beginning at your left shoulderblade and winding up and over until the head rests just beneath your collarbone. It’s the newest sign of what you’re becoming, a warning for poison you won’t let anyone else see; you’ve been buttoning up your shirt extra high to hide your healing flesh from Ramuda, from Ichiro, pulling your jacket shut to keep the questions out.

You’ve always thought this is a part of your life you’re not keen to share with them, but when you came to his door Jakurai had gestured for you to unbutton your shirt and inspected your skin and said nothing about what any of it meant. Jakurai has always made the work of healing look simple—a tube of antibiotic ointment from his own medicine cabinet, a note for these or those pills. A directive to go the extra mile to keep your hands clean, at least for the next two weeks.

Inhale, hold, exhale. You’re not sure you can—remember it all, keep your hands clean—but for him you’ll at least try. Sometimes Jakurai has a way about him that makes you want to bow your head. There’s no telling how far that desire will take you, if you choose to follow it.

“Sorry to trouble you, sensei.”

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Fandom: ヒプノシスマイク | Hypnosis Mic (Albums) Relationships: Aohitsugi Samatoki/Yamada Ichiro, Yamada Ichiro & Yamada Jiro & Yamada Saburo Characters: Yamada Ichiro, Yamada Jiro, Yamada Saburo Additional Tags: Aftermath, Dreams and Nightmares, Character Study, POV Second Person, Time Shenanigans, Inspired by Poetry Series: Part 2 of the wishbone series Word Count: 2517 Summary: 

You’ll do what you have to do with a smile. You smile at everything because that too is one of your duties. You’ve been cleaning up messes all your life and this is no different; if you had to, you’d do it again.

On cleaning up after yourself, and all the things that fall through the cracks.

This is the last of what you do on the night of the accident, when you finally make it home: you pull into the garage, fall asleep in the front seat, and promptly have a nightmare.

But maybe that’s telling things too fast. Maybe your thoughts are going a mile a minute and you need to slow down. Take it step by step, like this: the night of the accident, when you finally make it home, you pull into the garage and shut off the engine. Instead of getting out you lean your head against the window, close your eyes. The clock on your dashboard reads 3:33 AM, and it’s entirely possible that this night has run you so ragged your body just surrenders, and then you hear the gun go off again.

You don’t hear it for what it is, not at first. For all you know it could be a firecracker, or an engine backfiring around the corner. You’re used to being out in the city at all hours and to keeping your ears open; loud noises don’t scare you anymore.

Fuck off.

It’s what comes after the noise. Hands dragging at you until you stumble. The salt, the hot metal. First you smell it, breathe it in until you can taste it in your mouth.

Fuck off. Fuck off, Ichiro.

By itself your body jerks, and you hit your head on the window, and when you wake splintered from your sleep it’s still the night of the accident.

Maybe you only call it an accident because there’s nothing else you can call it, even if you know that’s not what it was. You have no idea what it was, but that black spot in your thoughts looks like something dangerous, so you look away from it, tell yourself you have no business messing around with something you can’t fix.

Rating: Teen and Up Audiences Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Fandom: ヒプノシスマイク | Hypnosis Mic (Albums) Relationship: Aohitsugi Samatoki/Yamada Ichiro Characters: Aohitsugi Samatoki, Yamada Ichiro, Jinguji Jakurai Additional Tags: Gun Violence, Gunshot Wounds, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Everything Basically, POV Second Person, Time Shenanigans, Inspired by Poetry Series: Part 1 of the wishbone series Word Count: 2445 Summary: 

“I didn’t do it for you, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He doesn’t need to know that you don’t know why you did it, except that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, except that you saw him and then you saw the one AM lamplight on the barrel of the gun, and then your body moved faster.

“I don’t care why you did it.”

On trial and error, and what happens when you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Thank you so much! That’s very kind of you to say <3

25) Have you ever cried whilst writing a story?

Never, but that’s mostly because I’m just not much of a crier by nature. :’) It’s often that writing a story gives me a very choked-up heartclenchy feeling, though, so there’s that!

26) Which part of “when the streets were left unlit” was the hardest to write?

Hmm, maybe the first scene? Beginnings are usually difficult for me, and in this fic the first scene had to be an interesting way to establish the world and the atmosphere. But on the whole I’m happy to say this fic wasn’t terribly difficult to write; I knew what I wanted out of it when I started it and what details needed to be there and it was really fun for me the whole way through.

27) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?

I outline very meticulously, haha. I tend to spend a lot of time in the planning stages when I’ve decided to write a fic, but operating that way has always helped me finish the things I start.

Of course! Thank you, dear Carole <3

8) Where do you take your inspiration from?

Other things I read/consume, mostly! Music, poetry, a sentence in something where I zero in on it and think hey that’s a good line I’d like to place that line in something... Also images. It’s usually something that gives me a particular feeling I want to capture, or a particular thought I want to explore, because I have a strange writing brain that begins with a thought or a theme or a feeling and very rarely with an actual plot (e.g. sometimes if I’m lucky the inspiration will hit in the form of something a bit more fleshed out like a situation).

12) Who is your favourite character to write for? Why?

I’m a huge fandom nomad, so I’ll keep it at fandoms we share. I got an ask not too long ago about my favorite HQ characters to write and I chose Suga, Iwaizumi, Kuroo, and Kenma, and there’s a ramble here about why, because I enjoy them all in different ways and for different things. 

For Shokugeki it’s Nene, unquestionably, which is why I default to her POV in most of my Nesshiki fics. I just love her very measured, slightly sharp way of looking at the world and her constant state of “why are you like this” about Isshiki, but one kind of off-the-beaten-path thing I always love exploring about her is her love of her family and everything they stand for, which is why she takes so much pride in the tradition and wants so much to live by it. A lot of the time in stories duty and dutifulness are things that need to be shucked off in the course of learning to think for yourself, but I do love to imagine that over time Nene comes to be very deliberate about doing her duty because she wants to, and because it means something to her, and because it’s where she feels she belongs. (As a side note, I haven’t written her as a focus character yet and she’s just made little appearances in things so far, but Rindou-senpai is a delightful kind of chaotic chaotic to write and I really really want to put her in more things.)

44) What is the last line you wrote?

“The boy said nothing, only looked at the coin in Dice’s hand as he tossed it into the air, as it spun for what felt like eons and landed, but all Dice did was press it into the boy’s palm and curl his fingers around it without looking at it.”

This is from the last Hypmic fic I wrote, and it’s more people not saying things, which is absolutely on brand for me, haha. (This isn’t the last line in this fic, but it’s near the end of the last scene I wrote for it.)

Rating: General Audiences Fandom: ヒプノシスマイク | Hypnosis Mic (Albums) Relationship: Arisugawa Dice/Yumeno Gentaro Characters: Arisugawa Dice, Yumeno Gentaro Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Storytelling, Rakugo, Dreamscapes Word Count: 10181 Summary:

If I win, you’ll tell me our story.

That gave the boy pause, midway through cutting the cards, though maybe he should have known that Dice would ask for the last thing anyone might have expected.

Ours?

Yeah, silly! Like, one with the two of us in it.

In which two boys walk in dreams, and come to life.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

— Joan Didion

The bolts of cloth in the tailor’s shop come in more colors than Shibuya-ku at night. For all he’s been visiting this shop since he was a boy, Gentaro’s not above still finding some wonder in it all, admiring the twist and loop of gold and silver embroidery through midnight-blue brocade, the drape of red silk crepe around a dressform.

Today the tailor himself is out on another appointment, so it’s his son who’s brought Gentaro’s new clothes from the backroom, and stands now examining the new hakama, the crested haori, hands measuring out the width of Gentaro’s shoulders to ascertain that everything fits as it should. He hums as he works, but his eyes are sharp enough to thread a needle unaided, so of course he sees when Gentaro’s gaze wanders.

“That dark green there with the gold leaves. That would look so pretty on you, bring out your eyes and all.” His sigh is so exaggerated Gentaro has no trouble at all imagining him on a stage. “It’s a shame you never want anything but black.”

“You save even my poor taste all the time, Ramuda.”

The truth is Gentaro likes black. He likes the elegant understatement, but moreover he likes the way his body disappears into it—what is a storyteller, after all, if not an expert in the art of vanishing? But the secrets of Gentaro’s trade aren’t Ramuda’s concern; he hums, probably half in concession and half in derision, and folds himself down onto the floor to sit at Gentaro’s feet. The little plastic case he produces from his back pocket is full of sewing pins, their heads bright pink and yellow and aquamarine.

“That I definitely do. You could make it up to me with a story, Yumeno-sensei.”

The sound of the name raises a chill along his spine and makes all the hairs on the back of his neck stand, but Gentaro is nothing if not a consummate performer. “Yumeno-sensei is my master.”

Ramuda beams up at him, as if to say, Ah, but for how much longer? “They say you’ve been writing your own stories. That you’ll debut one next week when you inherit the name.” His fingers twist and fold the hakama at the hem, and he slides one of his pins into place where the last few inches need to be taken in. “But nobody knows what it’s about, because you’ve been keeping it a secret even from your closest friends.”

“That’s certainly news to me. I wasn’t aware I had friends.”

“That’s cold.” Ramuda laughs, secures another pin. “Aren’t we friends?”

It’s a joke they’ve shared since the days of their apprenticeship, to call themselves two birds of the same twisted feather. Ramuda loves to tease and mock, to say what he means aslant until the very act of conversing with him feels like work—and Gentaro, when he isn’t being put through this work himself, thinks he can appreciate that. It’s almost a shame, really, that he wasn’t born to the theater. But perhaps, seen from a different angle, perhaps it’s also a relief.

“One little story, Yumeno-sensei. Even if it’s not the one you’re keeping closest to your heart, that’s fine with me.”

Watching his own face in the mirror, just as he’s practiced, Gentaro smiles back.

“I never could refuse you anything.”

Rating: General Audiences Fandom: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia Relationships:  Anthiese | Celica/Mae Characters: Anthiese | Celica, Mae (Fire Emblem) Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergenc, Love Confessions, of a sort Word Count: 1733 Summary: Celica starts making ready to say goodbye to Mae on the first clear day after a week of rain.

Celica starts making ready to say goodbye to Mae on the first clear day after a week of rain.

It’s noon, and they’re down on the pier, picking their slow way across hardwood planks still damp and water-stained. Celica had heard her advisers saying that the people were saying so much rain was a blessing so soon after the coronation, doubly so to come on the heels of such a long drought. It’s only today that she’s had the chance to come out of the castle and hear—and see—all of it for herself, ignoring those same advisers when they protested that surveying the last of the trading ships were things queens had other people do.

She is, perhaps, being willful, but Celica thinks that this is at most only a small rebellion. Meager payment for all the goodness she knows she’ll spend her life upholding now. And a queen needs to know her people; in the end, no one can argue with that.

At the moment Celica’s chatting with one of the captains, inquiring after his cargo and his ship, quietly negotiating passage to Novis for her friends. A little ahead of her she hears Mae discussing spells with the mages that will work the wind and the waves to ensure a safe journey. Celica can hear her laughing, making a joke as she’s always been wont to do, but when she glances over Mae’s eyes are fever-bright, her face flushed like it always is just before she cries—not from anything like grief, more from frustration or annoyance or some combination of the two. And Celica, her heart tying itself in a tight knot in her chest, can’t bring herself to smile the same patient smile she’s always kept in reserve for times she needs to face the possibility of Mae’s tears.

When everything is settled the captain takes his leave of her, and Mae draws back up by her side. She stops a few steps from Celica, just far enough that Celica would have to reach one arm out all the way to grasp her shoulder if she wanted. It’s a strange, timid space; Celica feels, or possibly imagines, the wood under her feet rock in the hold of an uncertain tide.

Rating: General Audiences Fandom: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia Relationships: Anthiese | Celica & Conrad, Anthiese | Celica/Mae Characters: Conrad (Fire Emblem), Mae (Fire Emblem) Additional Tags: Missing Scene, the people who love celica are worried about her, that's it that's the fic Word Count: 1611 Summary: 

A look. Truth be told, Mae knows she should have been watching the trees for unwanted presences, signs of danger. But she had seen the light in Celica’s tent and had just—lost the ability to look at anything else. Some guard she’d be, in the event of an ambush. A look, huh.

“It’s all right,” Conrad tells her, like he can hear her thoughts. After a pause he adds, a little wistfully, “She’s always been easy to love. Though you’d probably know that better than I would, now.”

“You’re in love with her.”

The voice in the dark under the trees is gentle and almost certainly nonthreatening, but the words jolt Mae, make her twist her body around like she’s just taken an arrow between the ribs. She only just manages to bite down on her tongue to keep from crying out, and even then the night is so still the scuffing of her boots across the grass already sounds like a screech—enough of a racket to carry all the way across the campsite to Celica’s tent, where a lamp still burns behind the canvas flap.

it does exactly nothing for her panic to see it’s only Conrad—Celica’s brother, which she’s only just learned is who the Masked Knight is without the mask on—regarding her with wide eyes and palms conciliatorily raised. The apology is already spilling out of his mouth, as if all this while he had been meaning to say that instead of, well, the other thing.

“Forgive me. Forgive me. I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”

Mae thinks about all the things she might say to that, Yeah, sure and Already done and Who said anything? Did you hear anyone say anything? Not me. She cycles back and forth through them in her mind, but all that she can manage around the lump in her throat in the end is a half-hearted “Gah.”

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Fandom: ヒプノシスマイク | Hypnosis Mic (Albums) Relationship: Arisugawa Dice/Yumeno Gentaro Characters: Arisugawa Dice, Yumeno Gentaro Additional Tags: 5+1 Things, Falling In Love, the T-rating is for some minor injury and a handful of suggestive themes, and also dice's potty mouth i guess, Snapshots, Inspired by Poetry Word Count: 3876 Summary:

Tonight, as every night, Dice grins when Gentaro opens the door.

Five times he passes through, and one time he stays.

In the room we will find nothing In the room we will find each other

- Margaret Atwood, “Hesitations Outside the Door”

1.

Tonight, as every night, Dice grins when Gentaro opens the door. He leans in over the threshold, peering around like he’s seeing everything for the first time even if it’s actually the fourth, the fifth. The truth is Gentaro forgets when he began imposing himself—sometimes with Ramuda, more often alone, good-naturedly steamrollering over any and all resistances.

The truth is Gentaro might be starting to forget to put up resistances, token or otherwise. But it won’t do, of course, to let Dice know—especially not when he’s leaning bright-eyed and breathless into Gentaro’s space, whispering, “Whoa, you live in a house.”

“So it would seem,” Gentaro says. “I can’t imagine why you think that would have changed much since you were last here.”

“I just never get over it.” The grin widens—then he reaches up to touch the back of his neck like he’s remembered his shame, and then only halfheartedly, and then only too late. “Sorry, man. It’s just I was in the neighborhood and…” He gestures to the sky behind him, the grey storm-clouds, even if Gentaro can see them well enough. There’s even rain dripping from the ends of his hair, from the hem of his coat. “Crazy weather, you know? Mind if I chill here until it lets up?”

For all Gentaro knows, Dice really is sorry. Or maybe it’s that he knows he should be, so he’s trying his best to be, even if he can’t muster up the spit to fake something he doesn’t really feel. And, to his credit, they’re drawing up on that part of the summer, that long electric stretch of weeks where the days scorch the skin off your back but the nights are all thunderstorm.

It’s also not as if Gentaro has anything better to do, but he knows better than to let Dice know that right off, too.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Fandom: Free! Relationship: Kirishima Natsuya/Serizawa Nao Character: Kirishima Natsuya Additional Tags: POV Second Person, Alcohol, Minor Injuries, Bad Decisions, disaster natsuya Word Count: 800 Summary: Soon the sight of still water makes you restless; soon you can’t even gaze into the surface of an empty pool without wanting to dip your hand in it and disturb everything. To throw yourself into it and disturb everything.

You still dream, sometimes, of the sea by your hometown. In those dreams you’re walking in the water, wading waist-deep against the gentle push of the tide. He is walking the shoreline behind you with your shirt hanging off one shoulder, and there are shards of sea glass in his hands and in his pockets, frosted lumps of amber brown and cloudy white and green, all the edges taken off. Nothing that can hurt him to touch anymore. When you wake up your skin is still warm as it only ever is when you’re home.

The truth is it’s years since you’ve been home. Since then, there have been other oceans, some you tell him about, and some you don’t. You’ve never told him about the cliff just outside of the town you moved to, how night after night in the summer you and your friends would bike up there to drink and shout and kiss each other until the sun came up. You’ve never told him you leapt that cliff once, the day you turned eighteen—because one of the girls dared you to, because you liked the way she smiled when she said it, because that smile reminded you of something far away. You still remember how the stone cut into the soles of your feet as you ran, and how quick it all was before there was nothing at all overhead and underfoot and all around you, nothing but the sun in your eyes and the sea foaming below, and a horizon line so distorted you couldn’t tell where the sky began. You still remember how every bone in your body thrummed when you hit the water. You came back up with a mouth full of salt to the sound of a dozen voices shouting your name, and for days after that you could feel the ground rocking under your feet like a moored boat.

You’ve never told him, I might have died that day. You’ve never told him, I never stopped thinking of you.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Fandom: Free! Relationship: Kirishima Natsuya/Serizawa Nao Characters: Kirishima Natsuya, Serizawa Nao Additional Tags: Snapshots, Long-Distance Relationship, references to s3, POV Second Person Word Count: 812 words Summary:

The trouble with him is that he wants everything. The trouble with you is that you always decide what you want is too much.

In which Nao studies the names of bones.

1.

The doctor tells you it will be a few days before you can see again. You don’t imagine you’re being brave when you smile and tell her that will be fine; you don’t think it’s brave, really, to take things as they are. As ever, you’re content with what you can be certain of. For now, that is the nurse opening the window by your bed in the morning, so you can feel the wind blowing in from the ocean. That is Natsuya banging down the hallway in the afternoon, throwing your door aside,  ignoring all the signs that warn him to observe silence.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationship: Kirishima Natsuya/Serizawa Nao Characters: Kirishima Natsuya, Serizawa Nao Additional Tags: Snapshots, Long-Distance Relationship, sort of, whatever it actually is is much messier, references to s3, POV Second Person, Alcohol Words: 792 Summary: 

When he laughs—all air, that beautiful sound, all the air you breathe—and says, “You never could sit still, Natsuya,” you know he’s telling you something else.

On leaving, and returning, and leaving again.

1.

There’s a bandage over his eyes, but he still smiles when you open the door. You don’t need to say a word for him to know who you are, only scrape back the chair by his bed, only move into the space beside him so he can reach out and ascertain the shape of your face. He says “Natsuya,” and as you lean into him you hear the sea out the window—and you know he’ll still be smiling later, when you sit up straight again and he pulls back his hands, unsurprised that his palms are wet.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Fandom: 食戟のソーマ | Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma Relationship: Isshiki Satoshi/Kinokuni Nene Characters: Isshiki Satoshi, Kinokuni Nene, Nakiri Azami | Nakamura Azami, Tsukasa Eishi, Kobayashi Rindou Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Mob, Assassins & Hitmen, Murder, POV Second Person Word Count: 3333 Summary:

“Come over here, Nene?”

It’s not really a question, even if it sounds like one. He is now your only partner and has been for almost a year—you’re not sure when Azami decided this or why, and it’s not your place to ask—and he’s made a ritual of showing you where all his weapons are. You don’t know if he does this for you or for himself, just as you have yet to figure out whom the shadows would obey if he ever touched you before you could kill him.