VIVAMUS MORIENDUM EST

At his questioning, she nods. Because what else is she to say to convince a man already convinced? The more she listens and feels, the call of opening herself up beats at her mind. She hasn't in quite some time - but he's right: she should not be afraid of herself, or what she can learn.

It takes more time to unfurl the power than she realizes, her eyes glazing over as he praises her. Beyond the vision, she feels voices of his memories creep into her, of things he'd experienced.

He flinches in pain as a wound makes itself known, he cleans his hand, and something here feels more familiar than it should. She's been here before. She's seen it. Nadia had bitten into the fruit, had been overcome. Only now does she remember being in the shoes of the killer. She'd come to warn him, and in doing so, fulfilled the prophecy.

The fruit had put her in her own shoes, looking at a hand reaching out towards her master. She had felt the intent behind the person - to end it, to pull his life force for their own - but..

That wasn't quite true, was it?

She does not feel malice towards him, only pity. The knowledge floods her, rocks her to her core, and she takes it all in with deep breaths and fighting the pain forming right behind the eyes. One of her eyelids begins to droop with the force of multiple lifetimes of knowledge bombarding into her mind. The first time was an accident. Maybe he would be angry that it's intentional this time, but it won't matter for very much longer.

Nadia's fingers reach towards him and graze his forehead, but her fingers lock into place once they touch. "I see now." He would have destroyed everything for just a moment longer, and it's his hesitation allows her to step into the moment foreseen.

The glaze over her eyes has filmed her vision, blurry shapes all that she can see of the man who helped her embrace this part of her. All the knowing in the world will not prepare her for the grief she is about to face -- another fact she realizes. "I will continue to be a good student." Behind the drooping eyelids, brown eyes have turned cloudy white, "And I will carry your lessons with me until the day I leave this mortal plane."

It doesn't sound like her own voice - doubling and tripling in tones - as she reaches for the fruit and the tree of her homeland. "Just breathe, Master. Your pain will not last long." Another witch might have said the touch, perhaps, would not have been necessary - but Nadia wants to feel the pain he feels - physical, mental, emotional - and wants him to experience the relief of release.

For seconds, they are one entity, bound mind to mind, skin to skin. Though her magic deals with thoughts, experiences, emotions, memories - it is still energy, and it is through his teaching that she's able to harness that energy into something functional.

In this moment, she knows him and every experience he's ever had. All he's loved. All he's lost. All he's killed. And he knows the brief life she's had: the hatred of her family, the memories of her father harming her, the love she never had of her mother, the intense care and grief of losing her aunt. It does not compare to his vastness.

She pushes the energy created away from her own mind, down into her arm - nothing visible save for the twitch in her muscles and fingertips. The heat brands her prints into his forehead as she forces it into his mind, his synapses. Nadia focuses on breaking apart each connection of nerve and muscle in the mind - until there's nothing left except a fading heartbeat.

In his condition, he is not quick enough to warn her of how terrible a mistake it is to provoke forces she is not ready for. "Nadia." A foot slides across the tatami, as his head snaps sideways, eyes closed as pieces of history flash, and burn. Hurricanes, and typhoons; those skyscrapers she holds so high, clawing for the sky falling as easily as jenga blocks. She's found her way in, like a serpent slips through the cracks.

Nadia has seen his thoughts; the ones where he would have done the same to her city, if she did not distract him from the fall.

She is traversing the marbling of his mind, and no power he has can tear her out of it. He could suffocate her body, and deprive her of every element she needs. In doing so, he would prove her to be right; that the slippery thread she's opened between them is not needless. It is necessary. He is a thing that must be ceased; the hand in her vision is salvation. And whilst she's inside, opening up wounds, and stripping him bare of his existence; reliving days of hunger and ambition. He reaches for her, with power that protests the body it is trapped within. Students who came before her, long dead, buried. Some, on a path he cannot stop them from taking.

In the flickering from past, to present. In the glimpses she shares with him, of what she's seen — of what is to come. Miyazaki is granted the knowledge of powerlessness. The true kind, where the machinations are not his to control. She presents a grand illusion of a future without him, but one where she embraces this part of who she can be. Has she chosen him, her sensei, because he would understand the magnitude of what she's to do? Has she acted on emotion, or with conviction?

He knows which, too. Because they are tethered; a youth, and an elder. Bound in a violent rush of air, and flame. Tangled in minds that are locked in reflection. She's always been the hand, just as she is the mind, and the end of all that he is.

He is proud she has found a way to break shackles of her own.

She sees exactly what he is, beneath the robes and the mask. Past loves, and past monstrosities. She sees the same way he does, that he is the first and the last who should live as long as he, siphoning off the power of cities torn asunder. She's found her way inside the palace walls; a shiro she has gained access to, and known its walls, and its tapestries. She has stitched herself on the final panel; the hand striking the end of a legend lost.

Her words are hollow, and wistful. Blinding in their calm. Miyazaki's knee crumbles under the gale that sweeps through his own. Dusty, and ashen; a body unable to withstand the hands of the clock any longer. Powder never stains tatami, it disappears in the air, mid thought. The clock has been brought forward some ticks by Nadia — his own student. Is this a lesson he taught her?

"Make it a long time." he says, whether aloud, or along the trembling thread that undoes all his stolen immortality. Make your reign, long. Make it longer than most, he wants to add. But what does he need to say? They are the same, here. Be the Emperor, Nadia. He's out of time; a century she's never walked in. But she understands everything; time; history; the world of beasts, just as he does.

When the silvery threads of the elements turn to shards of glass, crushed and pummelled into what battered version of his soul remains, he knows that she would be right; it will not be long. It would end, and it would be soon.

She had been so worried about memory, and remembering. Yet, as close as they are, flesh against that of which is collapsing, and concaving and vanishing between them to the void. Magic does not take form; it clings and it bends, sometimes it breaks but it does not tear easy. As flecks of glass, peppering Nadia's body, old magic returns to somewhere where the axis of its existence is not in reverse. It burrows, and Tetsuya knows her hatred, and her despair. He is not an empath, but locked in Nadia's embrace, he is both himself and her. She is yet to know a love, or a cause — an ambition so violent, that the world would be forfeit.

One day, maybe she would. Maybe the parts that have bled into her, stay to remind her.

Then, in the growing relief of the end. His mind begins to fade into darkness. A smile, and a spark of knowing in a gaze that never falters. The vision of a boy yet to know power vanishes from the forefront, replaced with the light of Nadia's eyes, dimming from colour, to grey shades to —

Does Port Leiry mean anything to her? Of course it does. It's home. It's the place where she found herself, where she could be open, the first taste of freedom. Going back to Tennessee for the past few months had reminded her of what she'd gained by fleeing so many years ago. There are days and nights where she misses the quiet sanctuary of being nestled between blunted mountains, watching the fog roll into the valley. There are times where she misses the taste of her mother's biscuits, the smell of collard greens stewing in a pot all day, and the sound of chickadees and warblers in the quiet.

But it's not home. The times where she misses those days, those sensations - the memories of what made it awful are not far off. The smell of food cooking always gave way to the memory of smelling hard corn liquor on her father's breath. The taste of the food came with copper right at the back after a backhand. The sounds of birds, the sights of fog, and the mountains in the distance --

The sermons were loud, and the anger was louder.

Port Leiry was reprieve from that. She grew to learn to love the smell of the sea not far off near the docks, the taste of local coffee, and the sounds of a bustling city. It was sanctuary to her. The question is loaded, because does Tetsuya need to know exactly how deep her love for the pacific northwest runs now?

"Of course it does." She finally mutters, and sets the tea cup down on a counter space. What goes through his mind - why is he asking about the city after knowing that she'd seen his death? She studies him, and hates that the surge of deja vu is so strong here and now that it almost takes her breath.

"Master." She starts, stepping towards him - "Port Leiry is home. No.." She shakes her head, "It's.. protection. It's safety. The city itself and the people within it go through so much all the time, but for me, this place is the first home I've ever had - even when I was living under a bridge and off of scraps. This city has woven its roots within me. It means much more to me than just home." Her accent grows thicker the more she talks, worry and emotion threading into every word she speaks.

It just isn't his way. He does not bow his head, not even to time. It's no longer pride or tender sentiment. Tetsuya stands there and wonders if he still could. If there's enough power left in him, that hasn't bled out through the holes in his flesh and returned it to the earth. It'd drain the poison he turned power into, and cleanse it to be something anew. It would reduce centuries of bending the laws of nature, into nothing.

Not natural, she says. Miyazaki isn't that, either. Not for a long time.

His head tips back an inch. He doesn't think he expected to hear that she found the city to be her home. She discovered part of herself, elsewhere, so it seemed. And the parts she found in the dojo, are lessons he brought with him. From a time, and a place that wasn't this city, either. Tetsuya supposes, if he played that game of origin, nothing is where it once was.

She would miss it, if he used the overwhelming snowstorm to his advantage; if he weaponised it to buy himself time on a clock set to stop, eventually. If he turned metaphor into magic. Endless frost into freezing the hands of the clock.

But he listens, without judgement. No pity. Just observation. Acknowledgement to her confessions, bleeding out of her the same as his insides were. He feels the strain on his body with every moment he stays standing.

She feels safe, and she came back, just to warn him of a death he expected to come. It's more than a home for her. And Miyazaki wonders, for the first time in a long, long time, what that feeling is like. He has a homeland, but home? It's easily forgotten when on the path of pursuing power; limits were constricting. It's what stops every good student from ever reaching greatness. Does Nadia know the difference? Is it because she does not see herself beyond one lifetime — Miyazaki has broken sacred laws of nature, and forsaken old codes to drag himself through the ages. It had been his downfall, but perhaps the idolisation of one city is something to consider powerful in itself.

"I suppose you would miss it then." If he made it into an anchor for power. Her voice changes, and her expression turns back into worry. He does not know if she had used her power to decipher his thoughts, or whatever memories he might have let fleet through his mind. Maybe she knew he'd consider trading a city, for another slither of life. Perhaps she's yet to know the power that could come, when the well of it is torn open.

But afraid? Darkness is just another step.

Miyazaki did not expect she would mourn him in the way she describes. His mouth lifts in the corner, curious, as much as he is bemused. A fondness he hadn't foreseen; he wondered if her magic allowed her to see that as well. "And what would fear serve me as?" Not survival. More often a weakness, than it was a strength. "You saw my end, Nadia." He felt the surge of magic under his flesh, at just the prospect.

And he felt the trickle down his forearm, and wrist at flesh breaking beneath the weight of it. A hand slowly feels a blood soaked palm, with mild indifference. He tries not to allow it to drip onto the tatami. "I think you give too much credit to skyscrapers and their permanence." How could she not? She's young. What is a blip in his timeline, might be the entirety of hers. If they moved the city, or its people, is it still the same city, or does it become something anew, once ripped away from its roots. Miyazaki does not have the time to debate the philosophy of origin with her. "But your power," he shifts his shoulder, where a rotted wound has opened, and stained his skin as red as it is black. "That is undeniable. I saw that, before you left this place." She'd pulled things out of him, that people had died for. She'd done it without realising, but she'd still done it as easy as breathing. More severe in his tone, despite the whispering smile, "You should not fear it." Not what she is, or could be. He's perhaps come to realise, "That was all I needed to teach you."

The rest she would develop and mould on her own. If he did not pull the city from its foundations, then he would not see much more of what is to come.

He supposes, with the blood dripping down his hand, it does very little to her perception to let her watch him reach for a dark cloth in his pocket. He slowly wipes his palm, and the crevasses of his fingers. Not often does he digress into compliments, but Nadia has come to him, knowing how it ends. More than that. She's trying to save him, in some way. His eyes move from his hand, to her again. "You were a good student." Good enough to keep Tetsuya from the thoughts of totalling a city, on the backend of a redemptive path. "Even in loss, there is memory. You remember names you never met, do you not?" Miyazaki would not concede a fight, but he didn't expect there would be one. The one he has with himself, there is no victor. "And I expect you will remember whether we cut the hand that kills." He might face death, but that is not entirely the end.

With an unpleasant jab in his ribs, Miyazaki's face breaks its stoicism. The mask slips, as he reaches over his robe to press at the roiling anger of his magic against a body too mortal. The air trembles around him, careful as it coasts between them; threatening to slice. He considers how much he could endure before he either caved to depravity of old violence, or if he would be standing at the end, when Nadia's premonition finishes him.

He pocketed the cloth quickly, and thought about how Emperors, and Queens. Activists, and those on digital screens, still lived in the minds of thousands. Ancient things written in books, and rolling around in the minds of the many who had the pleasure, or displeasure to cross their paths. Miyazaki's stories were not ones he liked to repeat.

She had seen the way he leaves the world, and she had already started to mourn him. How much of him did she know and how much was she going to be able to learn? She'd hoped - before leaving the city the first time - that she would have grown to be able to talk to him without pretense of master and student. But she'd been shy, and he'd been standoffish. She knows that even if she is not successful in stopping this or if he isn't, that all she knows about him is flashes of information that she'd once been subjected to.

She would have to study him afterwards, like a scholar. That makes her hands shake more. Her parents were buried, and she had held no grief for them upon her return. How strange is it that she holds it for a man still standing in front of her?

Eventually, he allows himself a small smile - she'd not seen that on him. It stuns her. His voice had never been warm, but something when he speaks now sends a chill down her spine. Was it fear, worry, or care for him as a teacher? He'd helped her try and expand from the shell of a person she'd been, with discipline and patience. It was a mixture of all three.

Was. She says. Perhaps then, she is no more fearful. Maybe that is her relief.

He had thought Nadia Holme a explosive barrel of potential, the first time she stepped foot into his dojo. Brimming with power yet to be tamed. She'd dipped her fingers inside him, and learned more than most students ever do. She's returned with a grasp on it that will only grow into power. He wondered what she saw in his gaze. A watered down, staling old rage and ambition? Tiredness, to time's many hands? Determination, refusing to lay down and die?

Peace, to think she could already be a Yōkai, and he was standing on the edges of a spirited veil with her as his guide.  

Miyazaki does not believe he would be so fortunate to know this tranquillity. Not with the agonies carving pieces of his flesh so deftly underneath the cotton of his clothes. There is warmth, bleeding through an unseen bandage, where rotted skin can no longer shield the elements from him. But he does not let his sight dip from Nadia's own.

"You saw someone else's hand." Metaphorical? The hands of time. Physical. A battle yet to come; one he doesn't win. Holme has become a riddle, holding onto tea, and watching him as if he might fall in the next moment. She says it drove her to be where she was most needed. Tetsuya does not dismiss the ideals of her rediscovered coven's rituals. He has to bench arrogance, and consider that his strength is centuries of devolution. Even denial is a weakness he;ll have to admit to.

In the snow and mirror-like shadows, the same ones he held back in using an an anchor, she came for him; a warning. Miyazaki does not divine. He manipulates and bends nature to his whim. He does not listen to its protests, or complaints. His patience a testy thing, nowadays.

Her gaze flicks down to the peek of red bandages, and Nadia finds herself sucking in a sharp intake of breath, averting her gaze instead to the florals that decorate the dojo. "Master Miyazaki." She mutters her own greeting, dipping her head in a respectful bow to meet him.

Her visions before make more and more sense as she's confronted with the state of him, and she follows but keeps her distance as he moves to make her tea. Though stronger in magic and mind now, speaking up still makes her quite nervous - but she pushes through for the importance of the moment.

When he returns with her tea, she takes it, grateful for the warmth on her hands. "I trained while I was away." Nadia starts, trying to keep the shake from her voice. "With a coven who I was meant to belong to." Unsaid is that she knows she doesn't any longer - Port Leiry is her home.

"Before returning, we.. had a ritual in which the elder became a tree to produce fruit for us to consume and divine where we would be most needed. It gave me visions of.. here, of snow, of mirror-like shadows. But I saw your face, vividly. You were aging, dying, by someone else's hand." She doesn't know why that makes her fingers shake and her chest feel hollow and numb. She ignores it, pushes on, and swallows the intense deja vu that consumes her.

He acknowledges her confession with a nod, as the previous warmth of the cup fades; he moves them to rest his hands behind his back again. He senses that her power is stronger, less frayed at the edges and softened out into strong strands that match the channels that course through her. It's unlike his own, even before they began to crumble away to time. Yet her voice betrays her new stance. If she were fearing an opinion of her choices, Miyazaki had none on this. It's needless. Holme will forge her own path, with her own power.

But he allows pride to slip between the cracks of his indifference. She's impressive, for someone so young. But her vision is not within his scope; it is not something he can teach, and he is not someone to study the leaves like he would runes, within cups. She speaks of an elder; a tree producing fruit to consume. Divination is not a magic Tetsuya knows like his elements; his knowledge is all that it is; scripture read in ancient books, long destroyed in the pursuit of power that flees him with every breath he takes.

She saw his end.

And he smiles — soft and solemn.

It is not distrust he feels, because he believes Nadia has seen this path. She stands before him, tea unsteadied between clasped hands. An unease that's marrow deep. It tells him she believes what she has divined. Miyazaki has challenged every magic beyond his own across every continent, under every flag, it could be written on stone, and buried under mortared skeletons with no names. Time has been a companion, as much as it had become an enemy pursuing him. It was determined to right the wrong of magic bent out of shape. A timeline that has diverged too far beyond the natural path; Nadia has glimpsed the one where he does not survive the hands of the mortal clock.

To warn him, implies she thinks she can stop it.

As much as he fights the agony that his body wishes he would cave to, he stands tall, even if robes do not hide the failure of mortality beneath. Maybe, he can offer her a metaphor — a reading of his own, about her divination: "The hands of time, Nadia." Does she admire him so, that she expects him to break the world apart to beat it?

Miyazaki's arrogance says he would still best even his greatest foe if they came through the storm to be his final reckoning. There is still an opportunity to stop time from running its course, for catching up to him after centuries of evading it. There's enough ice outside to freeze the city, if enough power went behind it. Enough to unsteady the balance of nature, too, in the wrong hands.

Miyazaki had fought to be someone other than that; it had been why he had nestled himself in the city, away from history's version of him.

Then, he acknowledges her own feats; she came here, knowing that if he could, he would stop the hands of death from claiming him — he'd rip the air from the lungs of any who tried. Is that approval? She didn't want him to fall. Yet, did she know he'd considered tearing the natural order apart, element by element, with the snowfall as his conduit just to last another day?

This is the one of the visits she's dreading. The fruit she'd tasted of back home had plagued her with visions of her old master's face shriveling and drying into a skull. It was enough to warn her that something or someone was coming for him. That, along with the visions of an endless winter, of shades in the night - Nadia needed to make haste.

When she enters the dojo, she carefully removes her shoes and coat, doing her best to remove the snowflakes and ice crystals from her hair and face.

Stepping further in, she wonders if he's even here or if she's too late. "Hello?" The uninhibited claircognizance that had plagued her before is well under control now, and she only needs to channel herself if she wants to use the magic that her coven - her blood - has afforded her. After Tetsuya, she needs to make a visit to the crystal of her old leader. But he's a priority, and she doesn't know why.

Tetsuya, cloaked beneath a long robe has withered. Wraps soaked red around a torso and a stomach are the last defence to keep a legend of the elemental art, upright. He refuses to bow to the inevitable, even now. In his ever-working mind, he still plans to find a way to beat the waning of his existence.

Bare-footed, he traverses the garden without missing a step, tending to plants that will endure for longer than he might. He smiles, ghost-like, at the concept of that., because he does not allow pain, or the crack of power in his channels block for longer than a moment.

That is not who he is. Magic will cease, only when he does. If anything, he uses it more, in the steps he takes, and the doors he opens, closes. Needless, but a reminder that he is still there, and he would not fall so easily.

The storm has Li stranded in her home. Classes are suspended, where white frames the door stiffly. Easily removed, had he thought it necessary.

Miyazaki's head inches to the side; the air; his ally in the long years, still belongs to him. Just as the movements of it disturbed allow him to know of a visitor. One he has not seen for some time. She's braved the storm; a warrior in her own right to not turn to frost and mirrors; a glacier to be admired and serve as a warning; it would tell of danger when walking into the elements unprepared. He wonders how her power has manifested in the absence of their sessions.

"Nadia." An acknowledgement as he lowers his hands from watering the roots of azaleas. They needed consistent nurturing, and it filled his time; kept him grounded. He hasn't left the dojo, or the upstairs apartment in quite some time.

Tetsuya moves beyond her to make tea, as he always has. There is an oddity in her power, that tells him it's needed. It is a tell even more potent than the snow and the frost sprinkled across her jacket.

When: The Night of October 27th

It had been a manilla file just like all the others yet the one was heavier than the others.

She doubted this file had found its way to her desk by accident. Kali wasn’t careless enough to make that kind if mistake, nor was Kali carless enough to be using this target as a test. While Ha-Jeong knew her time spent with Miyazaki was not documented anywhere, the Reardon chair was clever enough to have intuited the assassin’s movements that this was not a hit Ha-Jeong would ever make. That is if Kali even knew…

What was probably more likely was some underhenchman had been tasked with this hit, and in their cowardice had slipped it onto her desk. Either way, as Ha-Jeong looked down at the file that claimed an anonymous ally to Reardon would like to see the witch Tetsuya Miyazaki taken care of, Ha-Jeong felt an instinct that had become only too familiar in the recent decades. The instinct to go against her pledged loyalties.

As she swept the file off the desk, she suspected nothing tied her to the hit really, if this was Kali’s doing and not some anonymous other hitman, the woman had gone through too much to save Ha-Jeong from her past Reardon betrayal to set her up for a new one. Ha-Jeong took off into the night intent on finding the file’s target, and warning him.

She already knew where her past paramour resided, it was her job to know things, and since encountering him in the woods all those months ago, Ha-Jeong had built her own file on his movements.

As she rounded the onto the street that led to the Dojo master’s home, Ha-Jeong assured herself that the smell of rot that seemed to grow with every passing step was nothing but in her own imagination. He had not had the stench on him when she had encountered him at gala, and while she trusted her senses implicitly, even someone like her was given to a little imagination. But the smell did not stop and as she climbed the steps to his home and rasped twice on the door, this was a social call at the end of the day even if she was coming to warn him a Reardon hit had been placed on his head.

It was strange, that he was not at the door before her knuckle had the chance to collide with the wood a secound time. In the past, it was like he could sense she approached just by the way the air moved around her, and she hadn’t been trying to hide her signature this time.

But as she went to knock the third time the door swung open and the stench increased, an almost instinctual hand going for a blade on her side without her knowing, “  私の風”it’s a whisper through her lips, so tender and soft only the wind would be able to hear it.

His memory and his knowledge would be the last thing that rogue magic would steal from him. If his life is forfeit to time and abuse of the elements not meant to be reworked, then he would redirect every fight to shielding a skull from the blackening magic and turning his flesh into creeping death. Veins like roots that snake beneath the skin, and curl around the back of his hands like oil. The same kind threatens to choke the pathways of his throat. He is the warm soil of a poisonous, parasitical flower that has chosen to grow within him.

It cannot be cut out or trimmed any further. A disease that is borne of his power; it will take it back, the same way he had claimed every right to it centuries before.

He does not have airy hands in every crevasse anymore. No passive energy spare. Just the reliance on a sense as he hears the rap of knuckles on his door. A head that turns to know the noise. Miyazaki reaches for a dark robe to wrap over a bare torso and ties it across his waist above cotton pants.

He finally understands who it is when tendrils of stuttering power sink through the door, and he's opening it.

Tetsuya reins in his abilities as eyes dip to her movements; intrigue about how she must have known the man behind the door, and yet her hands reach for something other. Did she expect to be met with air that has made a home in her, a hundred times over? He would deny relief in her company. But it is a weakness he accepts when resilience serves no purpose to him here.

His silence is greeting, and the door is opened wide, inviting her inside; a childish magic that has kyūketsuki trapped at the threshold. "登場、ハジョン."

Enter, Ha-Jeong.

They watched closely as Tetsuya moved through his apartment, tending to his plant in the silence that often fell between them. He wasn’t much slower, tense in a way that suggested he was putting in a lot more effort to do what he used to do casually, to try to avoid appearing as if there had been any change.

“You never took up my invitation to come see the station.” Arc stated, eyes still following him as he crossed the room, looking for any detail that might reveal what was going on. There was no real offense in their voice as they carried on, “Have you become so misanthropic you can’t bring yourself to visit an old friend?” 

They do not know that the nights of cities on fire, and magic bleeding in excess, forcing itself to become something anew, are long past.

The world is quieter in Miyazaki's unwanted step back from it.

Misanthropy is a deep-seated bloom in his core. Yet, he offers them a reason, dropped at their feet: "Time has not been a companion." Not recently. Not for a while. Fingers that know the power of the elements drawn forth, but waver in their control. The greenery in his home bends towards his touch, but they are yet to know that the final time will soon come. Tetsuya has found no way to stop the hands of tomorrow, even with power as great as his.

Miyazaki straightens and leaves the roots, whilst rot crawls into his marrow and sends agony rippling along every part of him. Pain is a thing of the mind's creation; Tetsuya still has his intact, unblemished thoughts free of decay. He nods at them and his neglect to visit, moving beyond his lack of warmth, "You are here now."

There were two sorts of attitudes people had about life, when they got as old as Arc was. They either focused on the ends instead of means, cutting out pointless flair and anything deemed purposeless, or they reveled in the drama, the little bits of joy to be had between goals met and major events. 

Arc was, admittedly, more the former instead of the latter, but they had their moments of flair. Leaning on Tetsuya’s kitchen counter in the dark, waiting for the man to get home and turn on the lights, that was more for the drama of it all than anything practical. 

They were old, they could find what little fun they could where it was available, and besides, their old friend had neglected to visit the radio station as promised. They could forgo the courtesy of knocking.

Arc heard him before they saw him. As quietly as Tetsuya moved, there was no hiding that familiar static of his magic still holding a strange frequency of something else. It was enough of a warning to prepare for his potential immediate reaction to be more inclined towards intruders than old friends before the light flicked on and they were face-to-face.

“Are you hiding all of your food, Tetsuya? Your fridge is a wasteland.” No greeting, no prelude. Those would have happened if he had taken the invitation to come see Arc at their place of work, instead of making them track him down.

Pain has no place, here. Even if he feels every aching vein cut away with the potency of a body decaying. Beneath black robes, is a map of everywhere dark roots have taken hold; impossible to slice away, when it has wrapped knots around his bones, and burrowed into the marrow. He does not yield to agony. But he is familiar with it, in a way he has never known before.

A light comes on beside a computer set-up, and there they are — comfortably lounging in a chair on the other side of the room. Miyazaki doesn’t spare much thought to his fridge; necessary stock, not wastage.

“Arc.” An acknowledgement — a calm, calculated utter. He imagines they have their own manner of tracing him. It’s their power that kept Miyazaki’s own dampened all these years. Kept it at bay enough to not beacon his movements to every Voiceless in the region. Finding him has never been impossible for them.

He doesn’t ask what they’re doing here. Because he expects they’ll make it known.

He first tends to plant at the window beside Aracely with hands that bleed water and warmth. A slow trickle of power that he refuses to be stunted.

Miyazaki then takes himself to the kitchen with intentional precision, where he makes the decision for water over sake. But it’s a close call for a man who rarely drinks. Even rarer — is for a crumbling man to make a quip, “I hope not to find bones in my walls.”

As time passed his eyes came to narrow back on her, the plethora of ideas now focused on her. The hand on her chin is removed, the contact broken. She stays on her knees a moment as he backs away. Her eyes follow him, eye contact lingers. A few moments pass before she rises.

She had not expected to run into here…or anywhere really. A century had passed and she had never quite acknowledged that she never thought she would see this particular face again.

She approaches him now. Her steps are sure but as she comes before him, her hand rises with the gentleness one might use when petting a tiger. The pads of her fingers brush across his scruff. Still gentle, she explores for a moment of her own before speaking. “Of all the faces I’d rather not see, it is nice to see yours. Sentimental as I am accused of being.” A small curve marks her lips.

Tetsuya has sometimes admitted his blindness and reflected on history where he has misunderstood the matters of the heart, or more intricate pieces of the soul. His capability has always laid a path for betterment, and to be distracted by such needless wants had been something he sacrificed time and time again.

Time is his nemesis now.

Miyazaki does not desire to make another of Ha-Jeong if he can avoid it. A reckoning that may see him bled at her hands with the kind of poetry he might believe she'd like. But he is not finished yet. There is no relief in sharing his ailment with her, or knowing she is a creature that still resembles the one he had known. Just a quiet understanding in their silences.

He will feel that pain in his side, long after she disappears back into the night. He will remember the touch of her fingers on his face in the same way he knows her nails in the dying pieces of his flesh. He does not know if this will be the beginning of the end for them — because he does not have another century left in his decaying body, even if his mind would go for millennia.

Tonight, gaze lasted longer than it ever had before. Maybe the thought of being hunted by her in a pure form, without her normal hesitations, and being able to bring a monster to her knees, would bring him comfort in some way. But the part of her brain that knew that not everything was rational knew it was probably something deeply irrational. And, as rational as Ha-Jeong prided herself in being, she could also acknowledge that her own irrationality was deeply interested in how a hunt with Miyazaki on the other end of it could unfold….

She met his eyes which had fallen out of their glazed state, they were on the same plane again, two creatures in a sea of people. A small smile touched her lips, yes, there were more ways than people thought of convincing the master of air next to her, though, “Enticements aside, you would not be here if you truly did not want to be.”

He supposes, in his humility, that this would be considered a weakness.

There is a smile forming on his mouth. It is the beginning of the sensei's version of a joke: "No. I had considered disrupting the civility, but there is no challenge in it." If he were to pull apart every political player in the room until there was nothing but experimentations of carbon, the purest of all, he would draw attention that he'd rather delay. And Ha-Jeong now knows what lies underneath his robes, and what battle he is losing. Dark eyes linger on hers, waiting for something other than a whisper of a memory he can no longer clutch: "And what is your reason?"

Irene didn’t flinch when he called it finished.

Didn’t move, either — not right away. She watched him, back straight, chin lifted just slightly, like she was taking inventory of the moment. The bruise blooming at her ribs, the sting along her palm where skin had split against the floor, the faint, searing tug of the rune still humming like a wire beneath her skin. Her body had already started recording it all. So had her mind.

He was turning. She let him.

But her voice followed him, low and dry and a touch sharper now — not angry, not raised. Just clean. Precise. “You know,” she said, “I’d heard great things about you.”

A pause. Just long enough to let it sink in. To let the echo find his spine.

“I came here thinking you’d be... I don’t know. Maybe not fair — not a lot of us get that luxury — but honorable. A teacher. Someone who pushes boundaries without tossing people off the edge.”

Her head tilted, the movement subtle, deliberate. “Guess that was my real mistake.”

There was a thread of something in her voice now — not quite bitterness, not quite amusement. Something halfway in between, twisted like ribbon around the edge of something sharper. “I didn’t cheat to land that hit, Miyazaki.” Her tone shifted, softer now, almost companionable in its honesty. “I earned it. Same way I earned that tattoo. You just assumed I didn’t. Which says more about you than me.”

She took a step back then. Not retreating — resetting. Composing. If he turned around now, he’d see a girl who looked less like the one who had cracked under pressure, and more like the one who’d simply decided to stop giving him the satisfaction.

He said he had no interest in her secrets — but she didn’t believe him. Not really.

And that scared her.

Because if he did say something, if he talked, whispered it to the wrong person, even in passing? She was finished. A hunter with magic wasn’t just an anomaly — she was a threat. One no one would hesitate to put down.

But he hadn’t said it.

Not yet.

So, she offered him that last, careful glance over her shoulder — steady, unreadable. “Maybe you’ll keep your mouth shut. Maybe you won’t. That’s something I’ll probably find out the hard way.” The corner of her mouth tugged up — a flash of something that could have been a smirk if it weren’t so tired. “Seems to be a theme tonight.”

She recognises one of her many mistakes. His head turns halfway back towards her, and he catches the power in the hunter in his periphery. Nothing is stopping her from enacting her illusion of grandeur once more, but she must now understand that Miyazaki will not allow her the element of surprise a second time; his elements are far more final in their severity. And he is far less forgiving.

Is this her at the edge? Or has she finally picked up the sword she has been so afraid to wield this entire time?

Fire finds a place in his sternum.

You did not earn that mark. Witches birthed that rune, and hunterkind made it a sigil of their death. Miyazaki is more disciplined than to allow anger to plant a seed and grow, but it threatens to germinate for just a second under the weight of her utterly misplaced belief. She has been given the option to leave with her life, and yet she chooses to spar with the sensei. This is not bravery, this is foolishness.

Her back straightens, and she makes herself become something else in less than a breath, slotting that mask into position once more. She speaks of honour, and then continues to hide behind stolen magic, and secrets. She paints him a cruel instead of just when he has never claimed to be anything else. He is a teacher — a sensei. But she is not ready for the lessons he has to teach.

How does she know her limits if she is not willing to get close to the boundary line?

How does she become better if she is stuck in the cycle of the same?

She claims to be willing but Miyazaki does not have the time, nor does he care to extend the patience to a woman who would rather hide and cower than face what she is and what she could be.

Even in his last string of life, he has not hidden what he is. Sheathed his ailment beneath black robes and a disciplined composure. But he has never hidden — not when hunters come to his door and demand his life. Or the ones like her, who desire to know a challenge; to teeter on the edge of potential. When they speak of his villainy across centuries, he does not deny those acts or the death he reaped. He does not deny that his leased life is the one opponent he could never truly best.

He pivots and offers half his body towards her. A hand on his wrist behind his back.

"I said you hide. Not that you cheat. I care very little about how you fight, hunter." He is formal in his style, but he is more favourable of the intent behind her warfare than he is of the manner in which she throws a fist. But, if she would like to hear him assess that, then she may have this. If she is so desperate to learn, first she has to accept that she is not worthy of schooling because she does not even know herself: "You speak of honour, but have carved dishonour into your skin. You speak of the greats, but I expect you know very little of what it takes to become that." Tetsuya does not move, merely continues to list off every fault he believes he has seen, every unteachable quality that he does not have the time to mould: "You cower behind a facade for those who would see you buried, than seen."

It's laughable, even spoken aloud. "Do not speak to me of honour. You do not know the meaning of the term." Miyazaki is cold, but he is tired. She becomes more of a child in his gaze, with every new line spoken: "You are afraid, hunter. Fear is no good to you if you are not willing to cut out the root of why you feel it. You have a weapon that you would choose to never draw, and that will get you killed." She's terrified he cares for her secret; to see what is beneath the mask. Miyazaki is only disappointed that she bleeds potential and would squander it in favour of hunterhood. "You came here to hit something, did you not?" And she has. His jaw reaps the result of that.

"There is no honour in cowardice." She could have endured, she could have pursued to see how far she might go the distance. Miyazaki could have torn her body to pieces, until they met their one thousand promised versions of death. Instead, she wants to speak poetry and weave lies for herself. Why would he stand and teach half of someone, when they hide away the rest? What good is that?

Miyazaki turns back to the garden on the other side of the threshold and steps down into it. Leaves her to show herself out. No bow. No respect. She'll earn that when she rips it out of him. When she might show him that she is something other than a ball of anger and suppressed hatred. That she is ready to be more than some illusory throwaway posing as a hunter. When she's willing to go off the edge, to know what she might stand to truly lose. He might give her the time.

“On the road.” A guarded way of admitting to having the recent need to do so much more work to their network than ever expected. Usually, they were able to stop in one place for a few years, put down roots, keep some semblance of stability with only a few shorter trips a year to fix up broken nodes, but now? 

Three nodes half-destroyed, at least five altered or shifted around by local development, one pulled completely off of the network when the bones within were mistakenly taken as historical artifacts and shipped off to the British Museum of all the ignoble places it could have been, and, most recently, the incredibly irritating experience of having to tear up a Walmart parking lot to find where their knucklebone had been paved over. 

They were exhausted, in need of a break, and even as they held their shoulders back and head high at this event, there was a weariness they knew they’d be unable to shield from their friend.

They've been busy; it echoes much of what he's said.

Ibarra's kept their cards close to their chest, and Miyazaki does not believe it's because they are noble in their privacy. They are not in closed walls or a dark room. There is not some unceremonious manner of blood and bone to contend with in which Tetsuya understands is the crux of Arc's power. They are crafting a picture carefully, much like he is. With their words as letters drafted in battle, they do not intend to hurt.

Disciplined minds can read the message hidden in the same code.

"I will find time." A thin promise, glued together by the undercurrent of how Tetsuya may consider waging a war against the very thing set out to destroy him. Ibarra would sooner pick the last tendrils of his mind, the moment he may enter her realm than let the silence of what he doesn't say linger. Tetsuya imagines the flattening of his tone is easy to discern: "You can tell me all about your latest work." Not for disinterest, but for knowing Arc withdraws their truths in the same calculated manner as he does.

Signals of distress, undetectable in this room. Because here, they desire to blend into their surrounding and not be a beacon. Tetsuya bows his head at Arc, respectfully. Formality that is marrow-deep: I shall not keep you, Ibarra. I am certain you have many faces to greet."

Irene didn’t answer at first.

She was still catching her breath — not from exhaustion, not truly, but from the weight of what had just happened. The spell had landed. Her fist had too. And for one fleeting, glorious second, she thought maybe she had the upper hand. But now, looking at him as he stood — straightening his robe, blood darkening beneath the surface of his jaw like ink sinking into water — she felt it like a stone in her stomach.

Disappointment. Not in him. In herself. She’d revealed too much.

She’d let him see her, truly see her — not just the bruises or the bite of her punch, but the truth stitched beneath her skin. The magic she wasn’t supposed to have. The mask she’d worn too well for too long. And worse? She hadn’t even meant to. Not like that. Not yet.

You hide, he’d said. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? She wasn’t hiding anymore.

Her eyes narrowed — not from anger, but calculation, coiling like wire behind her gaze.

Irene didn’t step back. Didn’t cower. But she also didn’t move forward again. Not when the stakes had shifted. Not when he’d seen what no one else had. And not when she could still taste blood on the inside of her cheek from that first slam to the floor.

So she gave him the only thing she had left — a small, crooked smile. Less warmth this time. More bite.

“Well, sensei,” she said, brushing a speck of dust from her shoulder, “you’re not exactly the type who gives out gold stars for honesty.”

Her voice stayed light, but her stance had changed — less of the poised, coiled aggression from earlier, more guarded now. Braced. If she was going to lose this round, she’d lose it with her back straight.

“Wasn’t trying to ambush you,” she added after a beat. “That wasn’t strategy. That was a bad choice. One I won’t make again. You don't fight fair either.”

She should have saved the spell. Should have waited for something worse. Someone worse. But she’d been angry — bone-deep, shaking, furious — and it had made her reckless. That was on her.

And now he knew.

He offered another match. Not a command. A challenge. She could taste the dare in his voice. The twist of something sharp and clever in his tone when he called her tired — like a knife pressed against the idea of weakness, not deep enough to cut, but enough to make you bleed if you leaned into it.

She didn’t lean.

Instead, she tilted her head. Studied him like he was another puzzle, one she hadn’t decided whether to solve or walk away from.

Then her voice lowered — softer now, edged in something that sounded almost like curiosity. Or maybe caution. “Can you keep it secret?”

Miyazaki doesn't falter. Even as his jaw blooms with colour, he has not forgotten that he bleeds like any creature might. In this final lifetime, he must pay the deadliest cost of magic long abused. But he stands stagnant, watching her justifications tumble from her mouth.

Regret is an ugly trait.

"It was your only winning move." A cost weighed. Tetsuya hadn't needed to use power; the hunter hadn't needed to use strength. If they had wanted to dance, they could have. But she had not come here for that. And amongst her well-hidden lies, truths slipped out of the cracks. "Your mistake was relinquishing control of it."

An opponent that can be pushed to draw forth power they did not intend for their enemies to know about — that is truly careless for a hunter claiming her expertise.

Somehow, the titling, the confession. There's respect rooted deep within her, despite knowing what she faces. It earns a sliver of his.

Miyazaki breathes a laugh. It's the first break in the stoicism.

Can I, or will I? It makes no difference to him. The politics of witches amongst hunters has never been anything surprising. A former student founded an entire order of the very same to snuff him from existence. Tetsuya determines that she is not some lackey infiltrating the dojo; Akemi would like to draw the final blow, he's sure. Not a woman asking for discretion. Nor one that's hiding behind a tattoo she did not earn.

"I have no interest in your secrets, hunter."

Truths hang like sharp hooks in the space between them now. One could cut themselves on the edge if they get too close. She will not last until one thousand; it took only seven until she broke her own version of intent. Crossing a line that she had been so afraid to. Imagine what she might do at seventeen, seventy, seven-hundred. What would she do if she stopped hiding like a coward amongst thieves?

That's all hunters are. Stolen magic and stealing lives. Miyazaki has more respect for mortals and their science; their technology, than he does for those out to thieve what is not meant for them. Miyazaki could burn that tattoo from her flesh with just one look. What would she determine is fair then?

There is no fair. Only discipline in how one views and is seen. An act of intent.

He begins to turn, "If you have nothing else. This is finished."

She hadn’t really expected him to take it, wasn’t disappointed that he hadn’t. It was more…curious. Curiosity mixing with the need for the gesture to have been made.

Her head slowly raises as he talks. Ascertaining that another blow is not coming forthwith. But this sent forth a different sentiment as he paced forward, closing the distance.

She stayed half kneeled. Curiouser and curiouser. There weren’t many illnesses that couldn’t be healed that way, but she would admit, she didn’t know enough about decay and how it could attach itself to long lived mortals.

The wound on her hand was already closed as her blood dripped from Miyazaki’s fingers. An offer but also a gesture. Ha-Jeong was known for her shot and intentionality when it came to drawing blood. She hadn’t meant to draw his in that way.

When he took her jaw in his hand, she made full eye contact again. “You have hardly been my only teacher,” her voice calm and even, “I mastered sentimentality long before you met me.” Some would see it as a weakness, like some of her fellow members of Reardon. But Ha-Jeong knew her commitment to sentimentality, to feeling, while it needed mastering, was a strength. A softness touched her expression, because it had been something she had always liked about herself.

A silent eyebrow lift, daring him to chastise her about it because she knew just as well as he, that once over a lifetime ago, he had liked it about her too.

Ha-Jeong knelt here, has the power to draw other, more indulgent memories to surface. When time had no meaning. Miyazaki's thumb continues to trace her jaw, still as fascinated as the first day they shared. It dips into the gap of her lips, in a similar motion to which she had spread her blood along his. A power returned.

Tetsuya mouth forms a smile. "I should expect not." For one teacher is to master one power; a dozen would see a well-rounded prodigy. Miyazaki believes he is worth all the elements, but he is not arrogant enough to expect he would be able to teach aspects of magic he cannot touch. Guide, maybe. But not in the way he and Ha-Jeong have ever been. Sentiment isn't something the sensei lingers too much on, and maybe that's denial at play. Because he had seen things in her eyes, and in her movements that spoke a different language to the hundreds he had known.

Something more poetic than Miyazaki had ever been. It's why just as he leans in to taste what sentiment is, he pulls himself away, like revelation has struck him hard; there is blood still between their mouths.

He lets go of her jaw, returns his hand to nestle behind his back as though it had never been anywhere else. He holds her gaze, and words form on his tongue that he kills forthwith. Is that why you wouldn't let me go easy? Why she stained his mouth with her blood in a sacred act of hoping he might live a little longer?