#sigil.

You exhale through your nose and dig the heel of your palm into your eye, hoping to jostle the hangover out with it, before you shift onto your side and reach toward the glow of your screen.

Nanami, the caller ID reads. A second later, an arm slides across your waist and hooks over your stomach.

You freeze.

It’s a nice enough arm. Thick, corded with slumber-soft muscle, fuzzy with hair, and you think it had a tattoo on the shoulder; you’d asked him about it but you don’t remember the question or the answer he gave. It was a nice enough arm to draw you out of the bar door and into its home, at least.

“...Go back to sleep,” he murmurs, lips brushing soft against your bare shoulder.

You grimace, and your hand closes around your phone, the screen lights your face ghost-blue. Clingy, you inwardly scoff. Maybe if he weren’t so clingy you’d stay, at least for one more round — he was good enough. And maybe if your phone wasn’t still buzzing in your hand and jeopardizing your quiet exit plan.

You ease his arm off of you, slow and careful, like slipping out of a wire snare. You’ve done this enough to know to slip a pillow beneath his elbow in your absence, and you quickly and silently pad out of the room.

In the hallway you answer. “Yeah?” It’s more of a croak, your throat is dry and crackly, you quietly clear it.

Nanami’s voice feels too loud, so you shuffle further down the hall to keep him quiet. “You’re still near Shinjuku?”

You nearly trip on the carpet, and you stoop to pick up your jeans laying inside out along the wood wall trim.

“Roughly,” you rasp. “...ish.”

Nanami sighs, “It’s Tuesday and you sound hungover.”

You shove your legs into your pants, shuffling and hopping awkwardly to pull them up one-handed — you grunt into the receiver. 

“There’s been an incident. It’s… unusual. I’d like your perspective.”

After a beat, Nanami says: “Now, if you can manage it.”

You rub a thumb under your eye. Your dark circle debt was only getting steeper. “Unusual how?”

“Enough to warrant this phone call.”

You press your knuckles into your brow. Coffee or curses — your mornings usually come with one or the other. You prefer coffee. But that’s a luxury, and today clearly isn’t.

The mattress creaks behind you. Springs complain.

You shove your foot into a shoe, fast.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be there in—”

“Hey.” 

You freeze. Again. Definitely the clingy type. 

You don’t even have to look. But you do, because you have manners. He’s standing up now, leaning against the doorframe and looking more rumpled than you remember. He mumbles, “Why’re you up so early?”

You smile. Or try to. It’s the apologetic kind you hope reads as: sorry, emergency and not thank god I’m leaving. You wave your phone with its lit mid-call screen like a white flag. “I have to take this.”

“Oh…”

He drags a hand through his sandy blonde hair. It only makes the bed-head mess worse. You look at him, thinking to yourself that he’s actually pretty cute, if you were into surfer-dudes with few prospects and fewer insightful things to say. Not the worst mistake you’ve ever made. 

The brief flicker of guilt you feel sputters out when he asks: “You don’t have to rush out, do you? Let me get you breakfast… coffee at least…?”

Ah. There it is. 

He’s already on his feet, barefoot and hopeful, walking toward where you assume the kitchen ought to be.

“D’ya like eggs?” he calls back. “I’m not a chef, but I can totally scramble the hell out of an egg.”

Nanami says nothing, but the interrupted pause on his end is a heavy thing. You wonder if he heard. You assume he did and now he’s politely waiting for you to wrap up.

You sling your bag over your shoulder. “Actually… there’s a work thing. Emergency.” You inch toward the door, hand fumbling behind you for the knob. He’s holding the carton now like he means it and it’s meant to impress you. 

“And I’m allergic to eggs,” you lie.

The guy with the arms deflates. Shoulders drop, hand lowers. The eggs hit the counter with a soft, tragic thump.

“Oh,” he says. His brow furrows, looking perplexed. “No eggs. Got it. I’ll remember that for next time…?”

And there it is again.

You know that line. You’ve had it delivered about a dozen different ways, but the pitch is always the same.

“Yeah,” you lie again. “I’ll text you.”

And then you’re gone. No time for another pitch, and no time for the awkward shuffle of shoes at the door or whatever sentimental detours might’ve followed. You take the stairs two at a time. 

Work — for all the things you hate about it — has never looked more appealing than it does now. Anything is better than that god awful pointless lingering.

You don’t remember your phone’s still clutched in your hand until you’re outside. The air smells like ozone, thick with almost-rain. It’s already misting, needling into your hairline.

You bring the phone back to your ear.

“Nanami?”

Silence, long enough for you to wonder if he hung up.

Then, finally: his exhale crackles through the speaker. “...Yes. I’m still here.”

You close your eyes and tilt your head back and let the tepid drizzle hit your face. It’s surprisingly nice.

“Send me the address,” you say.

“I’m on my way.”

It’s the middle of July on a Tuesday, and Shinjuku Station is completely empty.

Not empty like off-peak which was never really empty, and not empty like Sunday night when sensible folks were home finding reasons to wake up the next day. It was empty like an abandoned exhibit… or a mouth pried open and scooped of its teeth.

The officers don’t ask who you are. One look — then none. Like they think acknowledging you too long might make something happen to them too. As if you are the nuclear power plant that produces curses and not them. This isn’t their jurisdiction anymore. They’re already pretending they were never here, curling away from you like a leper.

“Your people are down the track,” one of them says, already halfway through sealing the door behind you.

You don’t get a word in. Just an affronted wrinkle of your nose and the sound of the lock sliding home.

You notice the silence before you notice the body.

Because when has Shinjuku Station ever been quiet? 

Not since it was born. Not for a moment. Not even during blackouts or bomb threats. There’s always something. Coins dropped in a hurry, rubber soles squeaking on tile, mothers shouting after children or tourists mumbling wrong directions. Now there’s not even those shrill announcements that always play on repeat until they fade into the ambient white noise of bustling platforms.

Now it’s just the garish fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like black hornets drunk on halogen.

It’s all been hollowed out like a carcass. Ribs and bones and nothing in the middle — a morgue robbed of its ghosts.

You take the stairs slower than usual. 

You’ve done this walk a hundred times, probably more. Late and frantic, hair stuck to your lips, your bag catching on strangers’ knees. Drunk with Shoko, your laughter loud enough in tiled tunnels to make up for her silences, Utahime crabbing sideways with a traffic cone pilfered under one arm. You’ve thrown up in this station before — many times. Slept here once. Sat crying before, too, though you don’t remember all the reasons why.

And you never noticed how ugly the tile was. Pale beige, a terrible choice for public flooring, cracking along the seams and smudged with shoe rubber and rust-brown age in the grout. 

You can even read the signs today. That’s new. The bilingual wayfinding placards, the safety warnings, the “Welcome to Tokyo!” poster with cartoon mascots with wide smiles and flashy colors. 

It feels a little morbidly ironic now; you wonder if the victim — you assume there must be at least one — saw it too.

Didn’t make it very far, if so.

Normally there’d be a thousand people between you and those signs. 

Today it’s just you.

You — and the body.

Or—

You, the body, and the girl puking over the railing.

That’s your second clue that this is going to be bad. The first was Shinjuku Station being empty — a feat achievable by no manner of man and only by some divine act of God — and now someone’s losing their breakfast.

She’s folded over the chrome rail guard like a paper crane crushed under a boot. Skinny elbows jammed into black sleeves too long for her, the Jujutsu High uniform half-swallowing her frame. Her hair is stuck to her temple in damp, dark strings, and her face is pale, clammy, the color of wax paper.

Her shoulders hunch and she throws up again, this time it looks mostly like bile. You wince in sympathy. A first year, probably. You should know her name but you don’t yet — too many hours spent in the field and not on campus grounds. New faces come, and then they go faster than you can keep up. You hate it, that you know the contents of the girl's stomach before you even know her name.

You crouch beside her, your knees cracking and popping. You dig through your bag, rummaging through receipts, a book, your book, important papers, breath mints, until your fingers curl around the lukewarm crinkly plastic of an unopened water bottle. 

You place it near her foot.

“Water when you’re done,” you murmur. You’re no stranger to throwing up in unfortunate places.

She grimaces greenly at you, her eyes sunken and dark, her face sallow and soaked with sweat, and her lips tremble like blossom jelly on porcelain. “Thank y— huurrrrrk!” 

She spins away just in time to avoid puking on your shoes. You exhale through your nose. “You’ll feel better when it’s out,” you say. You rub a steady circle between her quivering shoulder blades with your knuckles. She nods like a puppet, jerky and ashamed.

You leave her there with the water, thinking that you all had to start somewhere. You pissed yourself on your first mission, so you think she’s doing significantly better than most. 

Experience is the only thing that keeps you from gagging when you hit the wall of it. The smell.

You recoil and cover your nose with your sleeve. Can’t help it.

Thick and hot on the back of your tongue the same way pennies taste when you suck on them, or that slime you swallow by accident when your nose bleeds and you tilt your head too far back. But it’s a little sweet too, like bruised cherries that pop when you pinch them too hard.

You try to breathe through your mouth which definitely doesn’t help with the smell, much less the taste. It actually makes it worse, your mouth starts to water and you hate that it does.

You’re thinking there must be something wrong with you, but you already know there’s something wrong with you. You also wonder if you should’ve said yes to the eggs just to have something in your stomach before all this… meat.

You spot the smear before the body. Just a dot of blood caught in the grout, dried at the edges, dark and sticky at the middle. Puckered like jam crusted around a jar lid. You want to touch it with the tip of your finger, just to make sure it is what you already know it is, because compulsions usually don’t make sense. You don’t, though.

Impulse control: not completely shot.

The body lies lengthwise down the center of the platform between two tile pillars. It looks like it's been placed — not dropped, not abandoned by happenstance, because of the way the arms are placed neatly by the sides, chest unzipped straight down the middle. 

It’s under one of those ceiling lights too. Bright as a stage, no shadow.

It’s a man, maybe. Once. Human-shaped in the vaguest sense. He could’ve been a butterfly, with how his ribs are broken outward and snapped at the curve, unfurled open like wings pressed under museum specimen glass. His wings are held open with wire; you think it’s the same kind they use to secure rebar, a little rusted at the twist, and you reckon if you checked the tracks you’d find where it was ripped from. 

But he’s not a butterfly, because you’d squished one of those by accident once on the sidewalk and it was just gooey — not full of ropey pink loops and soft grey tissue, and you were able to keep walking after a sorry frown and a mumbled apology.

The skin is gone in some places. Peeled like fruit and pulled back and tucked under like shirt cuffs — the thinner spots curl like onion paper. His stomach is… hollow. Not empty, not a hungry belly, but hollow. Excavated. Totally vacant. You can see the difference in his spine at the back, ridged and blush-pink like coral.

Each tile you step closes the gap. Two tiles away, your throat locks up. You stay there. That’s close enough. 

His intestines are all piled up like a garden rope, loops stacked deliberately at his hip like their extractor intended to return them when it was done with… whatever it was doing.

It’s all too neat. That’s what gets you.

Curses reduce people to smears on pavement, or eviscerated cubes of meat, or makes them disappear. They don’t display things.

For a second you wonder if it even was a curse and not some demented human killer. Maybe the higher-ups got it wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve fucked something up.

But the residuals don’t lie.

Inky black smears like oil on hot tar, streaks and spots of cursed energy residue are splattered around the platform messier than the body itself. It was definitely a curse, just an unusual one.

Nanami’s already there, standing near a concrete divider talking to some bald man. His blue sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and his beige jacket is unbuttoned, but his shoes are still polished. There’s something reassuring about that, that his shoes are clean. Like the world hasn’t gone entirely to shit yet. One of those when hell freezes over things, but things would only really be dire if he has dirty shoes.

You decide to wait for him to notice you. 

It doesn’t take him long to feel the daggers poking the back of his neck. He looks up at you, and as you quickly look away he says something to the man beside him — old, sweating through his collar, doesn’t want to meet Nanami’s eyes — and strides over to you.

You recognize the other guy’s head. Superintendent General. He always forgets who you are, no matter how many times you relieve him of these curse incidents. You’ve stopped correcting him. Waste of breath, and you don’t feel like introducing yourself for the sixth time today.

Nanami stops at your shoulder, and you look back down at the body. He doesn’t speak and he doesn’t rush you.

You take a half-step closer, careful to avoid stepping on the twizzled spiral of veins extracted on the floor.

“You could’ve warned me,” you mutter, pressing your fingers to your mouth. They’re numb, you barely feel it, so you pick at the dry skin on your lips and rip a piece off as a distraction.

“I said it was unusual,” Nanami says. 

You glare at him, and he registers the look you give him — half annoyance, half what the fuck. He shifts and rephrases. 

“I wasn’t sure how to describe it accurately.”

You nod. Yeah. Fair.

Honestly, you’ve seen worse. Seeing what was once a person turn into nothing but a fine red mist and chips of jaw bone makes it hard for anything else to rattle you or make you squirm. But it’s not the gore or the carnage that makes you queasy, it’s the spectacle of it. It’s artistic and precise, the cuts — not precise enough for a surgeon but too precise for a curse — are too deliberate. It never bodes well when curses have agency. 

“So what the hell is this?” you ask, pointing with the toe of your boot to a fleshy mass bulging out of the man's mouth. 

Nanami’s cheeks sink with a frown and he shakes his head. “Shoko thinks it’s a spleen.”

You hesitate… then nod like you knew it all along.

You don’t know what a spleen’s supposed to look like up close. You were never very good in anatomy — you copied off of Shoko who copied off of her phone.

You lean in, hardly letting a single breath past your fingers. It’s just a yawning cavity, slicked in brown-black, steaming in the AC chill of the platform. This isn’t old. You wonder if it made noise when it did it. If there were wet sounds. If the victim was alive for it and watched his own unmaking, or if the shock took him first, or whether it was the removal of his heart nestled like an egg in the pink nest of his entrails that killed him.

“This is recent,” you note pointlessly.

“Correct,” Nanami confirms.

“Did anyone see it… like… happen?”

“Not a soul.”

You keep picking at your lip, your nails tapping against your teeth. “Yeah, no. Hate it.”

You shift your weight, careful not to crunch a tendon under your heel when something shiny catches your eye on the left wrist. A watch. 

The silver-link band is clean, not a drop on it. The face is still ticking, and you can even hear it when you lean close enough. Click. Click. Click, time crawling forward with unbothered little licks like its wearer isn’t dead as a doornail. 

You squint at the watch face. “Looks expensive,” you whisper, more to yourself than to Nanami.

Nanami hesitates before speaking: “Grand Seiko.”

You whistle. “Expensive,” you say again more confidently.

By the time you look back over your shoulder, Nanami’s changed positions. He’s holding his left wrist in his right palm and turned his shoulder to the side, facing away from you.

“Why’re you being modest?” you roll your eyes. “I know you have one.”

“It feels inappropriate.”

“Hm.”

You sigh, stand, and take a much needed step back.

“I’ve been meaning to get a watch,” you mumble. It’s easier to look at silver than sinew.

Nanami gives you a flat look. “You are not taking a dead man's watch.”

You scoff-snort through your nose. 

“Relax, I wasn’t gonna,” you scrape your nail along your lip again to where the skin is cracked, split just enough to catch. “It just reminded me.”

“... I really do need to get a watch.”

“Maybe if you had one, you’d stop being late.” Nanami agrees, letting you back a few steps away before turning to follow you.

He almost walks straight into you when you abruptly turn, and stalk the other way. One, two. One again. You twist back the other way. Nanami stands stiff as a statue and watches as you pace in front of him.

You press your tongue to the roof of your mouth, and it tastes sour and metallic and a little like rubber bands. Your fingers squish against your lower lip, pushing it between your teeth to nibble on what’s left of the skin.

Each step sets the impact of your heel knocking up through your joints. You try to think.

The cursed energy is overwhelming, spread like an oil spill, splattered around more than the blood… of which there’s surprisingly little for a death this theatric. Not in a way that feels terribly strong, but like that of an infant that hasn’t learned restraint or finesse. It’s immature.

Low-grade then, probably. It’s all too clean for something hulking, this wasn’t a tantrum. You’ve seen second-grade curses peel people open like oranges — sloppy, and stringy, and joyous in the ruin of it all as it sheared sinew like white pith. This isn’t that.

You release your lip and replace it with your finger. You scrape at a hangnail. Not the edge this time but underneath, where the skin’s gone glassy and pink. It comes up easy and your teeth click around it.

Nanami sighs your name on your next lap past him, but you keep going.

Technique, maybe. Some kind of cursed technique that allows for precision. A scalpel-type ability? You’ve seen Nanami do it, sort of — divide the world into neat and orderly ratios and choose which part to ruin. But this doesn’t feel like him, either. There’s still a brutish-ness to Nanami’s blows… his enemies break.

The nail on your middle finger is split down past the quick, and there’s a slick patch of skin beneath that looks as soft as sashimi. You thoughtfully suck the ache between your teeth, and it throbs against your tongue.

Nanami suddenly steps into your path before you can blink the glaze from your eyes, his hand closes around your wrist. His grip is firm but not painful when he gently pries your fingers from your face; he avoids touching where you’ve gone all soft and sore.

He reaches into his jacket pocket and there’s the familiar rustle of foil. You sit up a little straighter like Pavlov's puppy.

Nanami presses a small, round candy into your palm. Red foil. Strawberry this time. Your favorite flavor from the value bag he buys and you scavenge from the drawer in his desk.

He raises his thin eyebrows, looking at you over the metal rim of his glasses. “No biting,” he says. “Or else you’ll have no fingers left to put on your watch.”

You blink, somewhat stupidly. Then look away from his eyes down to the hard candy in your palm. 

You thought it made him a bit like an old man when he started carrying around hard candies in his pockets, but you decided back then not to tease him about it because he always shared them with you.

That, and Gojo beat you to it the first time he saw Nanami give you one, and you told him (nicely) to shut the fuck up, and said that he was just jealous (he was).

Your bitten fingers sting a little as you struggle with the wrapper. Your brow furrows, but eases out when you finally get it unwrapped and in your mouth. “I don’t even have a watch.”

But Nanami just squeezes your hand around the wrapper and probably gets your spit on his palm.

“I’ll get you one.”

The waitress was a nice lady, she greets you both with a welcome back that makes you suddenly aware that you both come here more often than you realized.

The cafe is mostly quiet, since most normal people with normal jobs are probably at those normal jobs or sitting behind a desk somewhere. You figure the dead guy in the station had a normal job too, and now there’s an empty desk inside one of those office buildings that’s being packed up in cardboard boxes.

But probably not. He was probably C-Suite and had his own office given his expensive watch.

You order water. Your stomach’s empty and more than likely eating holes in itself but you don’t have much of an appetite, and you don’t really feel like sitting across from Nanami and pretending like you aren’t unsettled.

Nanami orders a coffee, and you barely catch sight of the surprised glance underneath his glasses when you don’t follow up with any food.

So he orders his regular casse-croute, and takes another few seconds to scan the menu. He orders a pancake too, strawberries on top, no whipped-cream because it always melts before it reaches the table.

When it arrives he slides the plate to your side of the booth, but you’re still stuck in the subway staring at the emptied out husk of what was once a living breathing man who might’ve also eaten pancakes sometimes, and listening to a girl — no older than you when you first started — throwing up down the tracks.

Nanami says your name.

That same girl was out there now tracking the thing while you sat and poked your pancake with a fork. 

She’d volunteered. She looked like she was feeling better when she sidled up to you and Nanami. She seemed a little shy, no doubt mortified, but earnest when she said she could do it. That was when you dropped Nanami’s hand and shoved yours in your pocket to fiddle with the candy wrapper. 

Neither of you liked the idea, but it wasn’t either of your calls to make. Nanami got in a heated argument with the higher ups on the phone a few paces away until they came to a compromise — the girl would locate it, and then call someone else to exorcise it. That was more merciful than you expected of the old bastards. 

You prod at a strawberry on top of your pancake, sliding it around the surface and painting it watery pink. 

Nanami says your name again, and you blink.

“Huh? Sorry.” You don’t know why you’re apologizing, but it was a knee-jerk reaction. 

He frowns at your plate, all the fork-holes riddled into your food and red goo, “Stop picking at it,” he says, wiping up a bit of strawberry from the table with a napkin.

“Oh… sorry.” This time you’re apologizing for wasting his time and money, but you don’t move to take a bite, either. 

“You smell like shitty liquor,” he admonishes. “The least you can do is repay your body with something to soak it up.”

You grimace ruefully. 

“Drank too much,” you admit to your fork. “Kind of nauseous, too. Could be the blood, could be the tequila. Probably both though.”

Nanami nods, stirring his coffee clockwise. The spoon knocks the porcelain cup once, twice, then he sets it aside and folds his hands.

“You were already awake.”

You roll your eyes. “Sure was. By your call.”

Nanami nods to your plate. “You’re still not eating.”

You stab a piece of pancake and raise it halfway, then let it fall again. “I was going to.”

But he just raises a brow and keeps his fingers laced, watching you until you begrudgingly bring that same piece to your mouth and chew. 

“Happy?” You mumble before you swallow, chasing the bite down with a long sip of water. Your stomach immediately growls and you feel about a thousand times hungrier than you did before. 

“Yes,” he says and he smiles so you know he means it.

The table goes quiet, but you don’t mind too much. Nanami’s a nice person to be quiet with — the first thing you learned about him was that he doesn’t like smalltalk. You don’t feel the need to fill the space with mindless chatter, and you’re pretty sure he wouldn't like you as much if you were the type of person that did.

Sometimes Nanami breaks the silence first though. He’s halfway through his coffee when he says: “You weren’t alone.”

“Mm,” you shrug.

“Just some guy. Nothing exciting.”

“You left quickly.”

You shrug again. “Always do. I am nothing if not efficient.” 

Nanami says nothing. He adds another sugar to his coffee — one packet, and the spoon clinks against the porcelain a little louder than the first time when he stirs it in.

You twirl your fork in the syrup, watching it pool. Nanami places his spoon down and grips his mug, but he doesn’t lift it.

“Anyway,” you say, brushing hair out of your face, “he offered me eggs. That’s why I had to run.”

He glances back up at you. Just a flick of the eyes, like he’s checking for sarcasm.

“Eggs?”

You nod, solemn. “I panicked. Told him I was allergic.”

He considers that quietly, then knuckles his glasses higher up his nose. “I see.”

“It felt more merciful,” you continue. “Than saying I didn’t want eggs. Or him.”

Nanami finally takes a sip of his coffee, and when he sets it back down on its saucer he chuckles. 

“You’re a menace.”

You smile. “You’re just now figuring that out?”

He takes his glasses off and folds them slowly. His smile softens a fraction without the lenses in the way.

“No,” he says. “I’ve always known.”

You set your fork down. The strawberries are bleeding into the syrup — little red halo soaking into the sponge of the pancake.

“And you still like me,” you say, definitely not asking. “Still buy me lunch.”

Nanami leans back and crosses his arms over his chest. 

“I’ve made worse investments.”

He says it like it’s just numbers to him. An asset he’s long since accepted the returns on even if they’re minimal, and he’s fine with that.

You nod at his wrist. “Is the watch going to be an investment, too?” He glances down at it and rolls it once on his wrist with a loose thumb like he forgot it was there. “Of course.”

You acknowledge him with a thoughtful hm. Truthfully, the watch doesn’t really matter to you, and you don’t need one that bad. You always made fun of Nanami for wearing one all the time when he has a smart phone in his pocket. 

I’m old-fashioned, he would say, but you’ve seen him organize Excel sheets and crunch budgets for the school like he could do it in his sleep, so you know he’s not tech-averse. Old-fashioned was just a code word for it looks nice.

“You still think about quitting?” 

It’s sudden, the way you ask. And you don’t know why you do, only that you’re completely unsurprised by his answer which he doesn’t hesitate to give.

“Every day.”

You nod.

Nanami left once when you were both younger and still idealistic. You’d watched him go with your chin jutted forward and your arms crossed, like you had any real authority over anything at sixteen, but you didn’t try to stop him. You thought you were so mature for that. Graceful, even. But you weren’t — you just didn’t know what would’ve made him stay… deep down you knew nothing would.

Just like nothing could’ve made you leave.

He didn’t say goodbye properly — not to you and not to anyone. You thought that was cowardly — you wouldn’t have done that. 

Deep down you didn’t actually think he was wrong though. Everyone understood why he left, even if you hissed that Nanami Kento was a traitor and a coward to anyone who asked how you were holding up. 

But he wasn’t like the rest of you. You always thought if anyone could leave and build a real life after, it was probably him. You remember thinking how lucky that made him. How unfair that made it too.

“You ever think about what you’d do if you did?”

“Mhm.” He leans back in his chair. “I’d find a beach somewhere far away — cheap. Sit in the shade. Read something pretentious and long. Be a drain on the system and enjoy every second of it.”

He says it like it’s a joke, but he means it. You can picture it too — Nanami in white linen, a paperback in his hand, the sun drawing gold lines through palm leaves across his forearms, much tanner than they are now. No cursed energy, the only blue is the sky and sea, and he deserves it.

But you already knew that would be the answer. It always was anytime you asked, and you always sort of hoped he’d fudge the math a little and give you something different. Maybe one of these times he’d just say that he’d like to travel but he’d always come home, or he’d like to go to school — a real, not fucked up, not producing child soldiers school — and get a degree in something he didn’t hate. The idea of Nanami leaving for good some day made you antsy. He’d always been here, at least in Japan, and you weren’t sure what you’d do if he was just gone.

Your mouth pulls sideways. “You’d get bored.” 

You say it too quickly, like it's a rebuttal. Like if you can prove him wrong, he won’t go.

“That’s too peaceful. You’d miss me.”

“I would,” he says easily. 

He doesn’t look away when he says it, so matter-of-fact that it sounds insincere. So you decide he couldn’t possibly mean it, and glare at him for lying to you.

“What will you do?” he asks. “When you quit?”

“I’m probably not going to.”

“Never?” says Nanami.

You shrug. “I mean, I don’t really know how to do anything else. And if I left now, what would’ve been the point of everything?” 

You’re comfortable here doing what you do. You know it’ll kill you someday, but you’re doing at least a little good before you get there… and there’s a little comfort to be found in knowing exactly what’s going to kill you. 

“So no plans,” Nanami summarizes. 

You shake your head, and Nanami finishes his coffee.

“Then it sounds like you’re free to come with me,” he says like he’s just stating another fact again. “So I won’t get bored.”

You look at him skeptically. Even if he tolerates you, there’s no way he actually wants to be stuck in an island paradise with you where he can’t get away — but he’s already reaching into his jacket again. You half expect another candy — you really are trained — but it’s just his phone. He checks it, locks it again, and places it screen-down.

You watch his hand settle back down on the table. Long fingers, the same one that held your jaw steady while Shoko stitched your eyebrow and you wouldn’t stop squirming, and handed you peeled and quartered oranges when you were too sick to eat anything else, and also punched curses through concrete walls.

You press your lips together. The quiet’s nice; you don’t want to ruin it.

But you ask anyway. “You think the girl’s okay?”

“She’ll report in.”

You nod, pretending like that made you feel better. But you weren’t really asking for facts, just reassurance. Nanami knows that, but he doesn’t like lying to you.

You slice through your pancake again, even though you haven’t taken a bite in six minutes. The syrup’s starting to thicken, the cake is melting, and the strawberries are basically just seedy jelly.

“She looked scared.”

“She was scared.”

You look out the window, and the city is still moving out there. It decided not to rain after all, but the sky’s still overcast. People walk on the sidewalks, and they probably don’t know that there was a man disemboweled in the subway that morning.

“I don’t think I had it in me, at her age.”

“I remember you did.”

You disagree. You were terrified back then.

You thought everyone saw them, those black things with bloated joints and blinking eyes, crouched on benches or clinging to stair railings, sometimes half-submerged in the floor like mold that learned how to breathe. You thought they were just part of the world. Ugly, definitely, but ordinary. 

Until one dragged its wormy tongue across the back of a classmate’s neck and you were the only one that screamed.

They buzzed around you for years and used to make you cry. By the time you were thirteen you learned not to flinch, because that made them swarm and swarms drew the big ones. 

You stopped telling people too, because the last time you tried, your mother didn’t even look up from chopping radishes. Just reached across the table and pressed two wet fingers to your forehead to check for a fever. 

“Stop being dramatic,” she said. “Set the table for dinner and get your father.”

You were crying, you don’t think she noticed, and behind her the spindly beetle-man with the too-big smile grinned at you and wrapped itself around her shoulders.

Yaga came the day after your birthday where all you asked for was omamori paper and ink. He knocked on your door like he’d gotten lost on the way to somewhere more important, which made sense at the time, because you didn’t remember anyone ever coming to Shirakawa on purpose.

You sat in front of him on the tatami mat and refused to look him in the eye. You didn’t know how to talk to strangers, much less entertain them while mom steeped tea and dug for an old dog-eared map. But he told you he saw your paper charms on the door, and along your fence, and said that they were clever.

You told him you made them to keep the monsters away. Slipped them inside kitchen drawers, under your bed, between the sheets in the linen closet. Any place you didn’t want to be afraid. 

He called you a genius, and when he left you sent him off with a paper slip in his pocket. The next day when he came back he called it a scouting visit, and mom was ecstatic. You didn’t know what that meant, you just knew he didn’t talk down to you.

Your parents told the neighbors it was a scholarship to a school in the States. They took a photo with you at the station, then smiled and waved at you through your foggy glass window. Your mother even put it in a letter that year — right next to a photo of the dog they got to replace you.

That was the last thing they sent.

You didn’t expect them to call, and it wasn’t like you would’ve picked up.

Looking back down at the red and congealed mass on your plate, you prod it with your fork and think about the first year, and the body on the platform, and it makes you wonder if that’s what you would look like on the inside too someday.

“Hey, Nanami?”

“Hm?”

“You ever play that game Operation?”

Nanami doesn’t think that’s funny.

You don’t either, really.

By the time you’ve finished pretending to eat — exactly two bites of pancake, two sips of water, and fifteen solid minutes more of pushing syrup around like you’re Jackson Pollock — the cafe’s started filling up with suits and lanyards.

Nanami stands and starts walking like he knows exactly where he’s going. You follow because you don’t. Falling into step behind him is easier because the other option is just going home to face your laundry and the horrifying mess of parchment paper you left unrolled across the floor like some kind of cryptic labyrinthian path. You’re not ready to roll it all back up.

So: you follow.

At the corner, he turns left. You do too.

He leads you into a bookstore. Not a big one. One of those tucked-between-building types with uneven floors and moody lighting that you could walk past your whole life and never know it’s there.

Without a word, he veers off toward autobiographies (lame) and leaves you to fend for yourself.

You linger in travel and flip through a glossy spread of Malaysian beaches. Turquoise water, hammock, those little huts that sit directly on top of the ocean. Everything is sunlit and obnoxiously perfect. You picture Nanami there in one of those huts, with a book and some pretty drink in his hand and it’s a little too easy… so you picture it raining instead, hut stilts swallowed by choppy grey seawater and a leaky roof.

You trail up through fiction. Then down through romance. You skim the back of a book with a man on the cover who looks like he could bench-press a combine harvester and croon poetry at you while doing it. You think about bringing it to Nanami and saying: ‘Oh, this would look great on your shelf between Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen!’ but you just put it back in its spot with a little amused snort.

Eventually, you catch sight of Nanami again — over in cookbooks holding a big hardcover. You smile and wave at him from the adjacent aisle through a gap in the books.

He looks at you, smiles, then gently slots the book back and blocks your view with the spine of “The Joy of Japanese Pickling” (rude).

It’s peaceful, though. Quiet. There’s something about being surrounded by shelves taller than you are, like standing in a very polite forest. The shop owner doesn’t mind your aimless wandering either — you’re probably the most activity he’s seen in three days.

He even follows you for a few aisles, offering you cold barley tea from an old chipped mug and starts showing you photos on his phone — a cat on the sidewalk (she keeps the mice away, they like to eat old paper apparently), a stack of rare paperbacks (not for sale, unless he likes you, would you like to see them?) a blurry concert poster from 1998, and pictures of his grandchildren and great grandchildren. 

Smiling and laughing along when it's expected is easy with someone so earnest, especially when you’re just trying to kill time.

You intentionally lose track of Nanami after that, letting him browse for whatever brought him here. You drift through poetry. Essays. Graphic novels. You touch the edge of a notebook with a hand-sewn binding and think about nothing for a few long minutes.

By the time you circle back to science and psychology — now holding a book about the cultural history of color theory that you definitely won’t be buying — it’s been at least thirty minutes, maybe more, and your feet are starting to feel it. You’re thinking about sitting down in the aisle and just waiting for Nanami to come collect you when—

A hand lands on your shoulder.

Jumping like you’ve just been caught shoplifting, you slam the book back in its spot.

Nanami’s standing behind you. You look down expecting to find a book bag but he’s empty-handed and frowning, as if he’s just remembered bookstores are supposed to serve a purpose beyond loitering.

“Find anything?” he asks.

Your heart is still thumping like it thinks this is a fight-or-flight situation. You don’t want him to feel bad for accidentally holding you hostage here so long, so your eyes dart to the first thing they land on.

There’s a pack of citrus-scented sticky notes shaped like yuzu slices.

You hold them up like a trophy. “Been needing these.”

You add a smile, wide and beaming. Hope it says aren’t I efficient and definitely not wasting your time.

Nanami nods, looking relieved. He plucks them from your hand and walks them to the register.

When he returns, he presses them back into your palm without fanfare.

He glances at his watch, then back at the street.

“I have one more stop.”

Just like that he’s walking again, the jingling bells outside the door rattling once, and then twice as you scurry after him, fiddling with your new sticky notes in your pocket.

Somehow, after the bookstore, you end up helping him pick out a new phone case.

He doesn’t ask. He just walks into the store, and you trail after him like a duckling with no real opinions except “that one’s ugly” and “that one’s uglier” until he ends up choosing a plain black leather one.

Then it’s a hardware store. Then a quiet stop at a stationary shop, where you spend an unholy amount of time smelling the scented gel pens like a freak. Somewhere in the middle of it all, you think you passed a park, and at one point Nanami almost bought a desk lamp but ended up talking himself out of it like it was a mortgage.

By late afternoon your legs hurt, your stomach’s extra empty, and you’re starting to question if Nanami actually somehow enjoys interacting with capitalism in fifteen different districts.

That’s when you end up here.

A little pocket park tucked behind some office buildings, more sidewalk than grass, with a crooked bench and a single patch of green trying its best to be a lawn. There’s a vending machine next to it — one of the old, pale blue and sun-faded ones, with a peeling Boss Coffee sticker that looks like it’s been there since the Shōwa era, and another with food of dubious origin.

The world's loudest cicadas chirp into the dusk from the one tree permitted to grow in the corner.

You sprawl onto the grass without ceremony. With limbs out you take up almost the entire real estate, and you feel a little like roadkill.

“Okay,” you say, “I get it.”

“Get what?”

The sky’s turning black at the edges now, and your stomach lets out an absolutely inhuman noise.

When you crack open one eye, you spot him an arms-length away, sitting properly on the bench like a normal person, one leg crossed over the other, jacket folded neatly beside him.

“You’re not subtle.”

He doesn’t answer, which is suspicious.

You wince. “Fine. I surrender. Feed me.”

Nanami adjusts his glasses up his nose, but you’re sure it’s just to cover the magnanimous and smug smile on his face. “What do you want?”

“I want something disgusting,” you declare. “Like, this’ll take months off my life terrible. Literally anything at this point.”

Nanami hums low in his throat, then stands, brushes nonexistent dust off his pants, and walks the three steps to the vending machine. You hear the coins jingle, the whir of a motor, and the mechanical clunk of something dropping into the retrieval tray.

He returns and offers it wordlessly: a boxed sandwich. Egg salad on white bread cut into perfectly symmetrical rectangles.

You hold it up and squint for a label — there isn’t one. “You’re a monster.”

“You said disgusting.”

You peel back the weirdly damp plastic that smells like sulphur and mildew. “This is barely food, Nanami—look at it.”

He shrugs, clearly unbothered, and sips from the canned coffee he got for himself. “You could’ve eaten earlier.”

Sitting up and leaning back on your elbows you take a grudging bite of the sandwich. It's cold, oddly sweet, and sticks to the roof of your mouth like paper mache. You chew it slowly and glare at him like it’s his fault.

He looks at you over the edge of his can. “How is it?”

“Want a bite?”

Wood creaks as he shifts forward on the bench.

When you blink up at him again, he’s leaning toward you, forearms braced on his knees, coffee loose in one hand and sleeves rolled. His head’s tilted and angled down toward you, enough for you to smell the coffee on his breath and catch the subtle dark patch of sweat on his starched collar.

He watches you take another bite of the sandwich, seeming fascinated that you’re actually stubborn enough to go through with it.

He smiles contentedly. “Absolutely not.”

“I hate you,” you grumble.

“What a shame,” he sighs.

“You hate me,” you insist, well and truly hangry.

“Not even remotely,” he chuckles and then, without a word, makes his untouched casse-croute from lunch appear from one of the bags he’s been carrying.

The puppy-dog eyes you flash him are pointless. He’s already handing you half, no doubt soaking in that he gets to be your hero. 

“I don’t actually hate you, you know.”

Nanami leans back on the bench, shoulders to wood, and exhales like your grumpy little declaration actually held some unknowable weight. 

“Good,” he says, and takes a bite of his sandwich. He rolls his head to the side to regard you still stretched in the grass. “I’d be bored if you did.”

You wrinkle your nose. “You’d probably be more relaxed, honestly.” 

“Mm.” He looks unconvinced.

You nudge your sad egg salad further away in the grass with your toe and peel open the wax paper of your new superior sandwich. “You put up with my shit for free.”

That earns a snort, a real, proper one.

“Like it’s hard.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I like you,” he says simply.

You purse your lips and side-eye him skeptically. But he looks so serene, that it must be sincere.

You don’t have a smart response lined up, so you take a bite of your sandwich instead. It’s better than the last one, which isn’t saying much, but you chew it anyway like it’s the best thing you’ve ever had and decide to believe him. If only because he’s sharing.

Across from you, Nanami adjusts his posture — one shoe scrapes softly against gravel as he shifts his weight — and just as your shoulders start to settle back on the ground, his phone buzzes in its new case.

You glance at it expectantly. Then at him.

But Nanami doesn’t pick up right away, just watches the screen flash like he’s waiting for it to stop… which it doesn’t.

He sighs — one of those low, full-body exhales that deflate his shoulders — and finally presses the phone to his ear.

His voice is clipped again, a little more weary than it was before.

“Shoko.” he greets.

You perk up, pulling out your own phone expecting to see her name pop up on your own screen next, but it doesn’t happen.

You frown a little bit. It’s not like you’re mad or anything, but you and Shoko are friends. You share funny cat pictures. You’ve eaten takoyaki together at 2AM and thrown up in each other's bathrooms and you once gave her bangs with kitchen scissors because she asked you to.

So yeah — you’d think she’d call you first.

Whatever. It’s fine.

Nanami listens silently to whatever Shoko’s saying on the other end of the line.

There’s no nodding and no grimacing, but there’s a minute change in his posture. Something recalibrates in his shoulders and he shifts his stance, just barely, enough that you catch the angle of his body turning slightly away from you to absorb whatever’s flickering through his eyes now before it hits you.

You can’t hear what she’s saying, but you know. The sandwich in your lap suddenly feels stupid, and the sky is less indigo, more gray.

Then: “Understood.”

One word, then the call ends.

His thumb hovers over the screen like his phone might ring again. Then he tucks it back into his pocket, but he doesn’t look at you.

You look away from him too. He’s waiting for you to ask, but you don’t want to — what’s the point? You already know what these calls sound like. 

Your sandwich is wrapped back in wax, and you just listen to the cicadas scream a little longer and appreciate the feel of the city air on your skin while you can. Finally, you roll onto your side to face Nanami, frowning with your hair sprawled all over the grass.

He hesitates to meet your gaze, but when you don’t look away, he finally does. 

“There’s another one.”

Yeah. You figured.