#starryfic

You know how in anime they confess under a cherry tree? Or other stuff? Yeah throw that out of the window because this is ace we're talking about 💀.. you were the one who confessed first because this boy is stubborn.

Dating Ace would be chaos but you know he has his soft moments!

He'd share his things with you, even his food and his hoodie which would probably smell like cherries somehow

You bought ace a cherry plushie for your guys 1 month anniversary and now everytime you go into his shared room (with deuce i think i forgot i think it was a 4 person bedroom(s) but don't come at me 😭 i have shitty memory) you would see the plush you bought for him

You guys probably made a spotify playlist for each other and both of you also probably have a shared netflix channel

Speaking of netflix.. you guys have movie nights at either his or your dorm and you guys cuddle (grim is also there but you guys ignore him </3)

I think he would probably be an A-Ok cook? The only time(s) he has cooked for you is probably when you're sick, probably whined on how troublesome it is but also gave him an excuse to skip class and he still took care of you <33

He loves to hold your hand! Also swings it like you guys are going on an adventure (adventure to detention /j)

Likes to be the big spoon but also is sometimes the little spoon (≧▽≦)

Not really into big pda but he probably would display pda is someone is flirting with you and won't take a 'no'

If his s/o got into a dangerous situation or accidentally hurt theirself he would scold them and then go soft, "just be careful next time"

Dating ace is still the same as being before being in a relationship with him, just you guys are alot more closer and probably even see some new sides to him! (☆▽☆)

From his seat beside Misaki’s office desk, Hei could see her hand resting on the window, steam etching her print onto the glass. Outside was a flurry of frigid white, beating madly against the walls; inside, Misaki’s fingers were still tensed against the pane.

“The worst snowstorm we’ve had in ten years,” Misaki said, her pause punctuated by a shiver. “None of us are getting home in this.”

Hei stood, grabbing his trench coat from where it hung useless on Misaki’s coat rack. They had done nothing but paperwork today; all of his gear sat inert in a duffel bag. “I guess not,” he said, draping the black material over Misaki’s shoulders. She started, eyes widening in the reflection of the window as her fingers roved the fabric, plucking idly at the buckle of the belt encircling the collar. But she didn’t reject it, as Hei half expected; instead, she tightened the jacket closer around her.

 “Thanks,” she said, clutching the coat in place with one hand rather than shifting her arms into the sleeves. Hei was glad it looked so misplaced on her- but it warmed her, somehow, and that was enough.

“It’s no problem.”

For a while they stood in fractalled silence, watching the snow howl through the streets like the tails of alpine wolves. A fine mist inscribed the beats of their breaths on the window; Hei could almost see the Russia of his post-war days lingering in their cold silhouettes.

“It doesn’t seem to be getting any better,” Misaki finally said. Her fingers brushed against his arm only a second longer than was necessary as she gave him back his jacket. “We should check on the others.”

“Look, if we’re stuck here, we’re eating you first,” was the first thing Hei heard Kouno say upon entering the main room of the office.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” Saitou said. “If anything, Hei should be the one to go. He’s the new guy.”

“If you have a death wish, maybe,” Matsumoto shrugged blithely. “Looks like you got the short end of the stick, Saitou. Process of elimination.”

Away from the cluster of desks on the opposite end of the room, the best and brightest of Section 4 had pushed their chairs into a makeshift triangle, nearly obstructing passage to the far side of the office. 

“Oh, hey, Chief,” Kouno said, raising his head to look at his superior, who stood in front of him with arms folded. Hei waited expressionlessly behind her. “You can be the deciding vote- if we had to eat either Hei or me for survival, which would you choose?”

“Don’t I get a say in this?” Hei said without inflection, heading noiselessly towards the break room without waiting for the answer. Knowing Kouno, it would be something smartass. He began digging through the cupboards for the coffee grounds.

Mentally, Hei reviewed his team’s usual coffee orders- black for him, a single sugar cube for Misaki, milk for Kouno, cream for Saitou, and all three for Matsumoto. Becoming Section 4’s coffee-boy had begun as an accident, in Hei’s desperation to be useful around the office between field missions. At first, Kouno and Saitou refused to drink anything Hei made; their distrust only abated when Kouno realized that asking Hei for coffee at all hours of the day proved an amusing inconvenience. Hei, for reasons unknown to himself, filled the orders anyway.

Through the open doorway, he could hear Misaki sigh between the burbles of the coffee-maker. “This is ludicrous.”

“We’re snowed in, Chief,” Kouno’s voice replied. “All our paperwork’s done, contractors just aren’t up for killing each other in this weather, and we’re off duty. There’s nothing much else to do while we’re stuck here.”

“But that would be dealing with personal information, Kouno.”

“Not all of us are mysterious sticks in the mud like some people who shall not be named,” Kouno said. “Makes it more fun. Hey, let’s up the stakes. You don’t have to confess which it was if we get it wrong. So the goal of the game becomes obvious. Call it a training exercise.”

“But there’s more than three of us playing,” Misaki went on. “Statistically, you could buck the system just by having each person choose a different truth-”

“It’ll be all right, Chief,” Saitou interjected, and Misaki sighed. “We’re all just having a little fun.”

The coffee machine groaned for the final time. Gripping five mugs between his hands in a practiced motion –he had masqueraded as too many waiters for comfort-, Hei returned back to the main room. Kouno smiled smugly as Hei doled out the drinks, fingers shifting expertly from ceramic to ceramic.

“Thanks, Hei-kun,” Matsumoto said warmly as he took a tall mug from Hei’s grasp. Even after months of the nickname, Hei found himself unable to respond beyond a soft grunt.

He handed Misaki the last one, watching her glasses fog from the steam, before turning back to the main group.

Kouno raised an eyebrow, steepling his fingers between his knees. “So, is everyone ready to play?”

“Play what?” Hei asked, taking a sip of coffee. The rationed days of South America had turned his taste mercilessly black.

“Two truths and a lie,” Misaki answered, collecting two chairs and placing them in her subordinates’ circle. There was something slightly predatory about the arch of her shoulders as she placed their seats, but Hei couldn’t peg why. At Hei’s blank look, she furrowed her eyebrows. “You’ve never heard of it?”

“Not really,” Hei said, taking the empty seat beside Matsumoto. He settled his coffee mug at his feet, looking at Misaki in an attempt to ignore everyone else. Discussing his life in a context where he wasn’t, in Kouno’s words, ‘Brooding in a dark cave waiting to intimidate people’ was not something Section 4 –or he- had quite gotten used to. “They might have done it in school, but I wasn’t paying much attention.”

Settling in the seat next to his, Misaki folded her arms. “It’s exactly as it sounds. Each person takes turns giving two facts and one lie about themselves, and the rest of us guess. At the end of the round, you’re supposed to confess which was which, but seeing as that’s unrealistic in a real-life scenario” –Hei restrained himself from rolling his eyes- “In this game, you only have to confess if you’re caught.”

“All right.”

The game progressed easily enough, beginning with Kouno (“I cried at the end of My Neighbor Totoro”, “I have an aunt named Shirley”, “I think Hei’s a jackass for not putting enough milk in my coffee”), then Saitou (“I’m trained in Judo” –stern look at Hei-, “I think Persian rap is actually kind of cool”, “I want a cat, but my landlady won’t let me”), and Matsumoto (“My wife and I have lived in the same house since we got married”, “My doctor said I’m not allowed to have caramels”, “My son’s studying to be a doctor in Korea”).

After learning that Kouno’s aunt was in fact named Emily, that Saitou was actually a dog person, and that Matsumoto’s caramel stash under his desk had instead grown to disturbing proportions, it was Misaki’s turn.

“Looks like you’re up, Chief,” Saitou said, and Hei turned to face Misaki, unable to keep the intrigue entirely off his face. 

“Now this, I have to see,” Kouno drawled. “The Chief and the Reaper, one-on-one. Like the old times. Except, without the fear of imminent death part.”

Both of them ignored the jab, but to Hei’s surprise, Misaki agreed to Kouno’s terms almost immediately. “Okay.” She raised an eyebrow at Hei.

“Fine,” Hei said, ignoring the way his pulse seemed to twinge, and set his analytical gaze on her. It was odd, visualizing her as he would any other target- testing for a baseline, looking for tells- but he had done it before, months and a lifetime ago on the rooftop garden of a nightmare hotel. He couldn’t forget that night if he wanted to.

“I’ve never been to the ocean,” Misaki said suddenly, all emotion wiped from her expression. She was looking at Hei dead-on, the glare from her glasses partially shading her eyes, voice as steady as though commanding him under arrest. “My mother’s family is from Hokkaido,” she went on. “And my mother herself was a math professor.”

Hei narrowed his eyes. He had established Misaki’s baseline long ago, when fishing her at Alice Wang’s hotel, and that baseline was Misaki’s entire being. She lied so rarely that he had only managed to find a counterpoint months later, when she had begun to in order to protect his identity. The only distinguishing features were the way she narrowed her eyes as she fibbed, the slightly harsher cant to her voice as her bluffs came out too loudly or too rehearsed.

But just now, her voice had been level, posture straight; she wasn’t tapping her left foot slightly as she often did when waiting for Hei to find her out after making a teasing remark, or even looking at Hei as though she was particularly nervous about him seeing through her.

And she had never before mentioned the ocean, or her mother, except in spurts of memories like snowflakes clinging to candlelit glass.

“Your mother’s family is from Hokkaido,” Hei finally chose as the lie, if only because he could not imagine Misaki stemming from anywhere but Tokyo. Not when her pulse rang with the Yamanote line, beat the cadence of every innocent’s footstep.

Misaki merely looked at him, face betraying nothing. “Your turn.”

That had been true? Or was Misaki just baiting him for later? He had never pegged her as much for mind games –except, he thought with a slightly heated face, when it came to attempting to trap the Black Reaper- but she had a competitive streak that put most people to shame.

He decided to ignore it for now. Two truths and a lie…

What was there to say? Beyond his life as an assassin, there was nothing terribly fascinating about him. The fact that he led an entirely unremarkable existence was what had kept his alias watertight in Tokyo. His interests were niche but normal, his childhood banal. It took a billowing coat and a ceramic white mask to transform him into any point of interest — and then, the only person with which he ever shared details of his past professional life was Misaki. He wasn’t about to give the sordid particulars to the rest of his coworkers. There was nothing to say about it- nothing he wanted to say.

“All right,” he said. Schooling his face into careful blankness, Hei looked at Misaki with practiced, deadened eyes. He could hear her breathing hitch in response, lips pursing into a determined line. “The scar on my chin is actually from when my cousin and I fell down a well when I was ten,” Hei began. Misaki had asked about it several times, but he had never told her how he got it. Maybe it had to do with how she always ran the knuckle of her thumb against the ghostly white line when she asked.

“Is that really what happened?” Misaki blurted, before biting her lip at the interruption.

Hei raised his eyebrow. “You tell me.”

“Yeah, Chief,” Kouno said, downing his coffee with a final swig. “Expecting BK-201 to confess during an interrogation?”

Misaki caught Kouno in a frosty glare, but didn’t comment. Instead, she inclined her head at Hei. “Continue.”

Hei cleared his throat. “I’ve never been to Africa, though my sister always wanted to when we were kids.” On his left, he thought he could see Matsumoto smile sadly. He was the only one whose sympathetic nods didn’t sting, as a father of two himself- someone who didn’t pity Hei, but rather felt the phantom pains as any parent for their child. “And once I was nearly kicked out of a museum for trying to play with the Qing dynasty swords.”

Misaki stared at him, tapping her finger rhythmically against her wrist for want of a pencil. She seemed to be taking him in in his entirety, cataloguing every instance of his deceptions, playing them against his current face which brooked no betrayal.

“Going to Africa,” Misaki said. “That was the lie. You shifted your weight to the left as you said it.”

How he wished she had never found that tell. He had never noticed it himself until Misaki pointed it out; a giveaway he certainly didn’t have when lying as an operative. But personal memories made him heavy, gave him substance, were the grains of dust blown in the face of the invisible, if only to give it shape and meaning for an unfair second. Only after Misaki noted his habit did he see in himself how he shifted on his heels when talking of Xing, or the stars that pluralized her.

“How do you know that move wasn’t deliberate?” he said instead.

“Now you’re just hedging. Africa. Final answer.”

Hei looked over at Kouno, who was staring at the two of them with rapt attention. “She has to get everything right for her to win, correct?” Hei said.

“Well, yeah,” Kouno said. “But if she called you out on your lie, then the other two have to be truths…”

“They weren’t,” Hei said simply. 

Misaki narrowed her eyes. “Then all three of them were lies?”

In front of him, Kouno snorted; behind his coffee, Matsumoto was hiding a grin. Saitou seemed torn between admiration and castigation, mouth hanging slightly agape.

Hei shrugged. “You said you wanted it to mimic reality. In real life, I would have had no incentive to play by the rules.” It’s only rational, he nearly said, before nipping back the thought.

“Oh, hey,” Kouno said before Misaki had a chance to respond, inclining his head towards the window. “Looks like the snow’s letting up.”

“So you said all three of your statements were lies,” Misaki said as they swept into her apartment, flurried wisps of ice biting at the doorway. Misaki closed the door with a muted whuff.

“I did,” Hei said as he stripped off his scarf and gloves, hanging them and his jacket above the door. Misaki followed suit, turning to flick on the heating before heading into the kitchen, hands hovering over the cabinets in contemplation.

“Please don’t use instant hot cocoa,” Hei said, stealing into the kitchen behind her. He tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, resting his chin on her shoulder. “I’ll make some.”

Swivelling to face him, Misaki put both hands on his shoulders, canting an eyebrow in his direction. “Only if you tell me what the true versions of those statements were.”

He kissed the furrow on her forehead. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re a cheat.”

Breaking apart, Hei began rifling through the refrigerator for the required ingredients. “What makes you think that there are true versions to what I said?” Hei asked as he began grating the chocolate, a rich, dark cacao. It was easier, still, to ask these questions when his back was facing her. “I could have made anything up.”

“But you didn’t,” Misaki said behind him. “You’re good at lying, Hei, that’s true. It’s maybe one of the only true things I first assumed about you.” Hei frowned, watching the thin peels of chocolate cascade from the grater, enveloping him in bittersweet. She was beside him now at the counter, grabbing mugs from the sink, looking at him with the frank expression he both loathed and loved to see from her. “But I’ve also noticed that you don’t often lie completely. You hide bits of truth in between, whether you meant to or not.”

Hei didn’t answer, or maybe he couldn’t, losing his hands in the motion of destruction. The chocolate bar had been decimated to dust.

“I really did get that scar from falling into a well,” Hei finally said. In his peripheral vision, Misaki looked up sharply. “And it was with my cousin. It was also his fault,” he said as an aside, nearly unable to stop himself.

Misaki bit her lip. “Of course it was.”

“But I told you that I was ten at the time. That was a lie. I was eleven.” He moved to put the milk to boil, pouring it from the carton with a flourish. “And Xing really did want to go to Africa when we were kids, to see the animals. She saved her own money for years to go; I think at the end of it she had a couple thousand yuan…” He cleared his throat. The steam from the boiling milk was stifling. “But I have been to Africa- to Egypt, after the War.”

Against his back, he could feel Misaki’s delicate tapping like a maddening spring thaw, tracing the vertebrae of his spine through his shirt. “Then you really did almost get kicked out of a museum?”

“I did get kicked out,” he said, stirring the pot. “I want to say that I was instigated by my cousin again, but I really wasn’t. I just wanted to see the swords for myself.”

“You didn’t try any moves with them, did you?”

“…I might have gone through a kata before the guard came.”

Misaki snorted.

 “What about yours?” Hei said, changing tack. He strode across the kitchen to the mound of chocolate shavings prepared beforehand, tipping them into the milk with a soft shick. “You never told me which one was a lie.”

“You’re not the only one who can play by different rules,” Misaki said, taking the ladle from him and setting it in the sink. One day, he would get her to wash the utensils as they were used, and not just leave them for later.

Pouring the cocoa into mugs, Hei handed one to Misaki, who moved into the living room. They sat together on the end piece, enveloped by Misaki’s menagerie of blankets, as Misaki nursed her cocoa between warming hands.

From his position, it was all too easy to rest his chin on her shoulder and whisper directly into her ear. “Are you saying that you lied, Chief Kirihara?” It was perhaps too guilty a pleasure to watch her subtle jump at the sound of his voice. Maybe the real pleasure was that, after hearing it, she never ran.

“The game was ‘two truths and a lie’,” Misaki said. She angled her face to look at him. “I just told three truths instead.”

Of course she had. There was nothing else to be expected of her.

A Guide to Knowing When You Love Her 

i.

She looks at you like lightning: the kind that fractures blooming orange trees to pieces, in the midst of the field and the storm. There is charred incense with your touch, and it’s the kind of killing that your nature cannot help, but your semantics are not heard over the tapping of the rain.

And she looks at you like lightning: the kind that illuminates the dark when she’s trapped on a country road, where the daffodils are no help and the empty sky is no council. A bolt of blistering direction, comfort on high and high above her expectations. Since childhood she has studied the heavens, and she speaks the weather vane; but it was the lightning like a benevolent kiss which lit her pathway home.

“Thunderbolts,” she says, and in her clothes you smell the burn; in her hair you sense her rural maps, written in the ozone. Born and bred a planner, she. You wonder if your meeting then might constitute an act of God. “Both good and bad, but how they shine.”

 ii.

You propose to her in winter, when the air is the biting frankness of the scent of a silver coin. Others would criticize it, if they had the nerve to speak to you. But Misaki does, and Misaki will; you are her legal tender, for her to lose beneath couches and pockets as she pleases. You’re beginning to think that your purpose is to be lost by her. She spends you in kisses on Saturday mornings, when your coworkers cannot watch your happiness and wonder on your blackened soul. And yet she manages to save you every day.

You’ve always liked the winter. You used to believe that you had no right to think that; to have preferences for grey snows and brown eyes. But January nights in the park are clarity. She is clarity. She is the warmth that melts your clouded breath and takes your breath away.

A couple passes by you in the park from where you sit on a blanket on a hillock, watching the barren trees and winding paths twine below you like a parable. Their smiles are summer watermelons to spite the season; dripping with July whispers and the promise of an ocean wide. Your fingers brush what is in your pocket, kept warm by your body despite the lucid cold. It still surprises you that you are capable of conducting heat.

“Have you ever considered…that?” You say, in a voice so hesitant she must think you’ve backslid, deep in another alias again. There are so many people who have never lived, kept within you. You think sometimes that it makes you half-dead.

“I didn’t used to,” Misaki says, turning to face you from where she sits, curled in your harsh corners. She has never needed you to keep her warm- yet for reasons you cannot fathom, she chooses to.

“And why is that?” Even now, you wonder why you feel justified in trading the loops of handcuffs for a wedding band.

“Because,” she says, looking at you in a way that makes you want to run. There is trust there that you have no right to see, affection, in the way your knuckles brush. You crave what isn’t yours like the degenerate you are. “I always assumed I’d end up married to my work.”

Her hip presses into you as punctuation; she grins knowingly as you blush, pink herself. Your hand is sliding through your pocket now, pulling the ring out, palming it in a thief’s slight of hand.

“Would you…would you consider it, for us?”

And suddenly she is standing, forcing you up by the armpits, lips shooting stars on the crease of your eyelids, your nose, your mouth.

Her hands push you down until you stumble onto one knee. “Propose properly this time,” she says, bright eyes betraying her sternness. The Black Reaper never stumbles. But oh, have you.

 iii.

She finds you with cold tea in your hands, a whispering mist of jasmine steam flirting with the stillness of the room. Perhaps it was not in your original nature to be a pane of glass, only seen upon the smudges of the world. Indistinguishable from the rest of a room, and yet at base so transparent.

To blend in with Misaki’s apartment (our apartment, she says, but that is not your kind of mimicry), you would have to resemble the tender practicality of her bookshelves full of case files; the warmth of her sheets pulled up on the couch, kept there for late nights pondering case after case. You would have to believe in the ultimate good of people, just as you believed in the necessity of traffic light violations and the turning of dusk to dawn.

You would have to believe that this applies to yourself.

“Hei?” Misaki says, settling beside you on the couch. That you had once calmly considered slitting her throat sickens you; you have felt everything for this woman, and it leaves you irreversibly open before her.

Despite your silence, she comes to you, twining her arms around your back and pulling you down until you’re cheek to cheek. That she is slightly shorter than you means nothing to the gesture, although now your bent position gives the slight air of supplication. This is not wholly inappropriate.

You see her crumpled body in your mind’s eye under your merciless hand, and want to make her understand. She says your name as though it belongs to you and not your hardened mercenary’s heart; black for the hair she loves to tousle and not the darkness of your mind. She feels the warmth of your hands and imagines that the heat doesn’t come from the fog of a South American graveyard.

You’re going to let her down. You’re going to mess it up. One day she’s going to regret peeling back your porcelain mask and finding something she thought was human. Something she made you think was human.

You don’t deserve to marry her.

But reading criminals is her job, and you’re her special study. She can decipher you in the span of your own denial. Her hands tighten around you until you’re caged in her embrace, listening to the tattoo of her breaths.

You shouldn’t have asked her to marry you. She is the space between Tokyo skyscrapers, immune even to the stars and their vagaries. Counting breaths. But you want to. God, do you want to.

 iv.

Your engagement party is in the private room of an old Shibuya shop, known for its cheap food and banter. Though your life as a god of death has made you wealthy in blood and bitcoin, your newfound allegiance to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police has made it hard for you to use it.

Instead, your coworkers have paid for your dinner completely, and you now sit, watching Saitou and Kouno grow increasingly drunk, as you and your fiancée slurp soba in what is certainly not a competition.  

“I’m telling you guys,” Kanami says over a martini, though her shining eyes speak of stronger stuff. “Separate. Beds. I want to sleep without getting a million alerts.”

“Nah. BK-201’s off the wanted list, isn’t he?” Kouno interrupts, his usual monotone swirling with drink. He jabs a finger at you. “Your lucky ass isn’t priority anymore.”

You glance at Misaki, who glares at her subordinate before being nudged in the shoulder by a falsely ignorant Kanami.

“No cursing in front of Hei!” Saitou hisses, and you fight the urge to recount every colorful swear every fellow operative and victim has used over the past ten years of your life. Maybe one day you’ll remember when the habit of setting a good example for your little sister became such a hilarious character flaw for the Division of Foreign Affairs.

“You know,” Kouno drawls at you, hunching his shoulders farther upon the table. “With your aversion to drugs, alcohol, and cursing, you’re actually kind of straight edge.”

“Meaning?”

A mischievous grin you ache to smack aligns on your co-worker’s face. “Ah, don’t worry about it,” he says. “But I assure you that straight edge is very punk.”

You feign annoyance despite your gratitude. It wouldn’t do to lose the game, and admit that you appreciate Kouno’s off-color jokes and Saitou’s bumbling good will, or Kanami’s sporting obsession with reminding you of the myriad times you kept her awake, giving star reports to the police in the depths of the night. Somehow that justifies buying her alcohol tonight on your dime.

It wouldn’t do to admit that some family ties could quickly grow beyond blood.

 v.

You look at her like thunder: the kind that rolls over your sidewalk cracks and proclaims that you are guilty, guilty, guilty of everything you knew you were.

And you look at her like thunder: the kind so loud that it cleanses the mind, so steadfast that it leaves the gaps between your uncertainties raw. You feel her skybound peals tapping in your bones, the secret codas of your redemption. You look at her steadily thumping rumble and live in wonder at how her heart can beat so hard as a shield and as a solace, heard by the farmers as the assurance of rain.

You live in a world of those you would die for.

Your almost-wife would die for the world.

This is what you will soon ask her to always be: the lionheart to your cowardice, and the conviction to your chameleon heart.

You try to tell her that, at the altar, as she says that she will always watch for your star. She may not have one like you for you to watch in turn, but she is still Polaris, unwavering despite the turn of its neighbors, a point of unflinching constancy.

“Promise me you’ll catch me when I fall,” you say to complete the vow. You have no doubt in her ability. She is much, much stronger than you.

“I promise,” she responds, before demanding kiss after kiss, and you beg her now to bring her downpour.