drama, trauma, and the joy of writing

—

The first thing Eito notices when he wakes up is how strange his breathing sounds. It's almost raspy, weak and thin as he inhales and shuddering as he exhales. He sucks in air, holds it until his vision swims with colors and shapes, then expels the air in a sharp burst.

His lungs scream at him, chest heaving shaking stuttering with a weak rabbit heartbeat and nausea clenching at his ribs.

The second thing Eito notices is the smell, namely: that there is one at all. It's soft and sweet, vanilla and gardenia. Cloying, even faint as it might be. It tickles the back of his throat, agonizes his oddly weak lungs with a half-assed coughing fit. Doubled over, fist jammed against his teeth, he blinks tears from his eyes.

Pauses.

Comprehends.

Compartmentalizes.

Lays in bed a few moments more.

The third thing Eito notices is—

Banging on his door. A rapid panic, bang bang bang bang, amen break misplaced. Or, he muses gently as he doesn't bother getting up just yet, maybe more apt than I'd like.

(Bang bang bang bang!)

Weak lungs pull air in. A weak heart pumps anxiety through shaking limbs. Reprehensible body shaking as he tries to steel himself to exit bed at long, long last.

(Bang bang bang bang bang!)

Whoever is on the other side of the door better hope that Takumi is elsewhere. Wouldn't want our leader to lose his head so early in the game.

(Bang! Bang! Bang!)

"I'll be right there!" He makes sure to shout extra-loud so as to be heard.

The banging stops. Good.

As the door swings open slowly and ominously—reminding Eito of a castle gate, maintenance fallen by the wayside, hinges screaming slow, low wails of warning—a thought occurs to him:

Maybe he should have changed into something instead of opening the door as-is.

Ah well...too late to worry now.

He tilts his head up and offers the person on the other side of the door his signature masked smile. "Yes?"

Looking down at him, squinting blearily, Eito's own face scrunches up in horror. "Please let me in, N-Nozomi."

"Of course. Come on in, Aotsuki." He steps aside and Eito's body enters. The door is closed behind him.

A beat. Eito's smile tightens, thins, and flattens. "So..." Eito listens to his own voice trail off timidly, unsure of what should be said.

Standing at the desk, Eito watches himself lean a—nearly-bare, only protected from the outside by his pajama pants—hip against the furniture and fall into a heavy silence. A moment passes. Another. A third.

Eito is very patient.

Eventually, Eito's body speaks up. "Aotsuki?" That confirms it.

Eito smiles with Nozomi's mouth, her pert lips gentle where his are sharp, and offers himself a slight bow. "Yeah. Honestly, I'm glad there's not more people involved."

Nozomi winces and turns her face away from him as she replies with an almost confused, "Huh?"

"If there had been more people swapping bodies than just us, well it would have been chaos, wouldn't it?" It's far easier to sell his gentle shtick using Nozomi's thin, breathy voice. She sounds pitiful, even without his own mask plastered over the base. "If it's just the two of us, then it's self-contained."

"...True." Nozomi takes a while to respond. A thought occurs to Eito and he chances a guess.

"Are you alright?" There. Nozomi flinches when he speaks, clutching her ungloved hands against her chest in her fear. When not grabbing for her heart, they cover her mouth and nose in a way that makes Eito think about bending over a toilet to empty his stomach.

And she won't look at him. She won't use his eyes to look at her own face.

"What do you mean?" Her own forced cheer sounds plastic spilling from his mouth in his voice. Eito smothers the part of him that feels mocked. She is ignorant, not aggressive. He can hate her for what she's doing, not what he thinks she might do.

He is better than them, after all. They're aimless monsters and he has a just cause.

"You keep startling whenever I speak up. You are constantly covering my - your nose and mouth when you're not talking." Each fact laid down, a two-by-four bridging a small pit, and he crosses precariously. The line between his truth and the lie he's selling the Special Defense Unit can be thin and he's wobbling on the best of days. "You won't look at me."

Guilty—like he knew she would be—Nozomi makes shaky eye-contact with him. Without his glasses distorting the view, his blue eyes are wide and his pupils are blown with fear. A thin crust mars the corner of his mouth.

Wait.

She isn't wearing his glasses.

No wonder she won't look at him.

"I..." She begins to say, then trails off.

—

Nozomi jolts awake from a dream she can barely remember, heart hammering horror against her ribs. She takes in one shaky breath after another and keeps her eyes closed to help soothe her frayed nerves.

Her lungs fill and fill and fill in a way that they haven't since she first agreed to help her mother. Her chest is suddenly missing the heavy stone that is her cryptoglobin transfusion crushing her ribs and lungs and heart into flat things that struggle to operate on the best of days. Her body feels flush and warm—not feverish but certainly more alive than her own cooler pallor—and there's an almost comforting heat to her pulse. It distracts herself from the way she woke up.

Then she opens her eyes.

White, sterile, and empty. It isn't her room. It can't be her room because where are her things? The smell of sanitizer, of germ-free cleanliness and impersonal emptiness fills her nose and her burning strong heart picks back up, a centipede of ice gripping her spine even as her ears rush with gouts of fear like fire. Phantom sirens scream as she tries to remember where—

It's not her room because the stuffed animals that Moko had made her as gifts weren't by her side. It's not the hospital because there's no IV in her arm, no tubes in her nose, no clamp on her finger to measure her rampaging pulse.

But it smells—

It looks like—

Nozomi bolts from the bed and empties her stomach in the toilet, mouth watering in the aftershocks while she coughs pathetic strands of vomit-flecked spittle against a bleach-scented bowl. Sweat mats her bangs against her forehead. She coughs again and again and again, stomach clenching around emptiness as her panic ebbs and flows like the ocean tide. Is she still dreaming? Had the dream been prophetic? Or something else?

(Fire and heat. Dying and begging for comfort. Someone gently brushing sweat-slicked bangs away from a feverish forehead. Whispering gentle kindness, love and affection. A hand in hers, even as the world ended. Heat and light, like an atom bomb tinged with regret and an apology.)

When the nausea subsides, snot dripping down her nose, she staggers to the sink and starts to rinse her mouth out and scrub at her skin. She feels vile and shaky, like a newborn deer, hands trembling even as she scoops water out of the flowing tap to rinse the taste of anxiety and stomach acid away. Idly, she peels her bangs away from her forehead, finally looking up at the bathroom mirror to see if she needs a shower before she leaves to train with her friends.

In the mirror she sees Aotsuki, pale and sweaty, spit and vomit crusted at the corner of his mouth, gently trying to peel his bangs away from his forehead. His eyes move with her vision, flickering in confusion. As she expresses the disorientation she's feeling on her face, the reflection of Aotsuki also frowns, brows furrowing and pinching as his lips twists into an ugly knot.

She tears out of Aotsuki's room moments after, chased by questions she doesn't have the answer to.

Free from the sterility of Aotsuki's room, the Last Defense Academy feels wonderful in the cool morning air. Nobody is awake just yet—Nozomi is an early riser on the best of days and she had just suffered a pretty awful nightmare—so it's her, the breaking dawn, any life within the Wall of Fire, and her thoughts. Lingering on the gentle breeze is a pervasive scent of rot and filth. Garbage, motor oil, fecal matter, burning hair, roadkill, vinegar, all faint wafts that makes her almost want to stop and figure out what she's smelling even as she power-walks her way back to her own room.

She doesn't have time to chase specters. She's not even in her own body.

She has to make sure that this isn't some kind of Invader plot.

Hammering on her own door feels novel. She knows she doesn't lock her door—a holdover from when she was at Second to Last Defense Academy, where the five of them trusted each other implicitly—but it feels...rude to just barge in on someone. Especially considering if someone was watching, they'd see Aotsuki forcing his way into Nozomi's room, and that's a bad look.

Nobody answers. She knocks harder.

"I'll be right there!" Her own voice, unbothered and clear, answers her panic. The shock is enough to halt her frenzy, another thought blossoming to life and spreading climbing vines across every corner of her mind, stealing nutrients away to draw attention to itself.

Kyoshika had once told her about a manga she had read that had helped her understand some of the nuanced aspects of her own gender. It was about a man who was enamored with a girl who came to the convenience store he worked at with regularity and how, one day, he woke up in her body and didn't know how to cope. Being a girl was horrifying and new and the societal pressures and social demands of being perceived female wrung him out. He wanted to know if she was okay, if everything was fine, so eventually he tracked down his body at the convenience store he worked at and realized something horrible.

He wasn't who he thought he was. He was, in fact, a fragment of the girl made to shelter her from the crushing demands of being a girl. He had never swapped bodies, he just was taking charge of their body while she recovered from the depression that was threatening her life.

Was she Nozomi or was she an aspect of Nozomi that Aotsuki had made in a moment of weakness to shelter himself from something she was unaware of? Is she who she thinks she is or is she a fictional being, a mask being worn by someone else?

The door opens and all of those thoughts leave her once more, fleeing in the face of herself.

Through the door, her own voice had sounded papery and wheezing, bubbly, as though she had lungfuls of fluid choking the words before they left her mouth. They'd been intelligible but muffled and Nozomi had assumed it had been the door itself that was the problem.

It isn't the door.

Describing what she's seeing is like trying to explain what her mother's research did on a technical level without being able to use technical words. It looks like a person should. It has a head covered in Nozomi's own purple-silver hair. Nozomi's lilac eyes stare up at her, emphasizing the height difference between her and Aotsuki. It has arms and legs—or she can assume it has legs, as they're indistinguishable from the mass of meat and flesh and metal that it drags beneath it like a macabre slug. Its lungs and intestines hang outside its stomach, torn along the wound she got all those years ago. Blood cascades down its mouth as it smiles a very Nozomi smile. Even that is an incomplete explanation of its mirage-like warbling form, impossible and incomprehensible in a way she struggles to even articulate to herself.

It smells like gasoline and medical-grade antiseptic and metal and fire and blood. She has to fight another wave of bile as it knocks against the back of her throat.

Its head tilts. From its bleeding mouth, a question bubbles forth, "Yes?" That's her voice, distorted with liquid and death and the sounds of metal on metal and screaming.

Nozomi flinches and prays whoever is in her body doesn't notice. Now isn't the time to falter. "Please let me in, N-Nozomi." Her voice catches on her own name, doing her best to not let her confusion or fear catch and pull the statement into a question.

The thing in her room nods, splattering the ground in fluids too foul to name. Nozomi covers her mouth and nose, praying she won't break in front of whoever this is. "Of course. Come on in, Aotsuki." It steps further in, leaving the door wide open. The doorknob is coated in slime and blood, the stench of the thing lingering even as it rapidly dries, making Nozomi's stomach roil and turn.

Once inside, she doesn't know how to proceed. It is her room. She can see her stuffed animals, her desk, her things. All of her possessions covered in the same viscous, noxious fluid that the thing secretes. The air is choked in its smell and it makes her lightheaded trying to breathe through her mouth so she doesn't hold her breath to escape the rancid miasma. "So..." How does she even ask? How do you ask 'Are you Aotsuki? Did we swap bodies?' It's like a cosmic joke.

It's almost cosmic horror.

She leans against her desk and looks at anything that isn't whatever the thing that is supposedly her. It doesn't help. Silence joins the slime coating her room and Nozomi breathes slowly to try and lower her heartbeat.

Eventually she just goes for it. "Aotsuki?"

The thing that might be her smiles with a mouth like hers and grins a mouthful of shattered, bloody glass. "Yeah. Honestly, I'm glad there's not more people involved."

What? "Huh?"

"If there had been more people swapping bodies than just us, well it would have been chaos, wouldn't it?" The idea that it was more than just herself and Aotsuki hadn't occurred to her in her panic but, as Aotsuki lays it out as if it has been a real possibility, the thought alone causes ice to creep up her spine. Thinking about it now, if everyone had swapped around, it would be almost impossible to coordinate and fight defensive battles. "If it's just the two of us, then it's self-contained." Again, a calm and objective truth.

What's wrong with her? Why is she so incapable of getting herself together? Why does her body look like a horrible monster, a reminder of the day she lost so much of herself? Aotsuki is put-together, already figuring out their situation. Why can't she do the same?

Wait. Aotsuki had said something and she's been quiet the whole time. She forces Aotsuki's mouth around words and begs that she doesn't heave again. "...True."

Aotsuki tilts the thing's head, mouth pulling into an exaggerated frown. Blood-crusted lashes narrow as he bubbles out a question. "Are you alright?"

Shit. He must have noticed the way she's been acting, flinching away every time he talks. She needs to recover and save face. "What do you mean?" Maybe he will—

"You keep startling whenever I speak up. You are constantly covering my - your nose and mouth when you're not talking. You won't look at me." The way he cuts through to the meat of her makes her clench Aotsuki's teeth so hard she's worried they might crack. A tension headache plays at the back of her skull. To be so obviously seen is...

She tries to make eye-contact with what must be herself. It's hard. It's agonizing, like pulling teeth. Like pulling fingernails. Every part of this thing she's seeing is almost tailor-made to upset her, a moment from her past that haunts her on the best of days made manifest as a shambling corpse. "I..."

"Why aren't you wearing my glasses?" He cuts her off before she can even try and formulate an excuse.

It's a good thing too. The confusion Nozomi is feeling stops her from spiraling into a self loathing nosedive. "You - glasses? Your vision is fine."

The smile that Aotsuki puts on her face is unkind. Even with all of the monstrosity of whatever is going on, somehow there is enough of Nozomi in the thing for her to feel disconcerted seeing an expression that vicious on it. "It is," he concedes, "but that's not the point of my glasses."

Wearing glasses you don't need makes it harder to see.

Harder to see...

"Oh!" Wait. "Oh?"

"What does this body look like to you, Nozomi?" Something in Aotsuki's tone changes. It becomes brittle and almost pointed, a scalpel cutting to the meat of the problem. If she pressed, would it snap? Would the shrapnel injure them both?

"It—" If what he's asking is any indication, then maybe... "A bit like the victim of a car accident. Torn like this," Nozomi gestures down the gash where her scar should be on her body, "organs falling out. Lower half is a mess, slimy and..." Aotsuki's smile tightens. "Blood everywhere. Everywhere." She emphasizes.

"I assume the smell and sound is also awful?" She blinks in surprise, too confused to be afraid of or nauseated by him in this moment. "I thought so."

"What do you mean?" She closes the distance between them, grabs at him with her bare hands then recoils as the sensation and overwhelming smell makes her immediately regret it.

"Well, I assumed since we had switched bodies that perhaps it would have followed my brain, but it seems as though this is less logical than I would have first thought." He hums, unbothered by her reaction to touching him. "I believe you know that I was hospitalized for a lot of my childhood?"

She didn't. Her group barely got along with the rest of the Special Defense Unit, even after the whole mess with Kurara and Ginzaki and the curry. She hasn't had a chance to learn anything about them past how they fight. There hasn't been a need yet.

He takes her silence for a negative. "I suffer from a...particular cognitive disorder. It's a type of agnosia that makes humans appear like revolting monsters, their scent and sound alone enough to put me off eating, let alone spending extended periods of time around them. I am the only person I have ever been able to properly perceive as normal. And now you are suffering from that very same disorder because you are inhabiting my brain."

"A-agnosia?" Agnosia is an inability to distinguish things through one's senses. That his senses are so specifically distorted that it's only humans that trigger this specific revulsion is strange but— "We've always looked like this to you?"

He doesn't answer. He just smiles, silent and pleasant.

The emotion that presses against her chest in that moment isn't pity. It isn't even in the neighborhood. Instead she feels anger, frustration. Did he not trust the Special Defense Unit enough to ask for accommodations, like they seem to have given to Tsubasa for her nausea? He's been here for a month now. Had it never once occurred to him that his unit would work with him to make his time at Last Defense Academy easier? Is he so stubborn that he would—

Aotsuki sighs. It's like a bubbling pot of stew, thick and wet. "Don't make that face." What face is she making? Normally she has such fine control over her expressions and still right now she... "I chose not to tell everyone. How would I explain all of that without having to describe how revolting and abhorrent it is to be in a room full of them? I mean," he waves a hand about, shattered wrist hanging limply and flopping with the movement, "I had years to get used to tolerating it. You are only dealing with 'me' and look how fast you've fallen apart."

His cutting words smart. She fights her first urge to fight back, choosing instead to be kind, nice, understanding. "I see." The smile he gives her somehow lets her know exactly what he thinks of that blasé dismissal.

"But that does beg the question of how this happened in the first place. And why us?" He gently curls his dripping fingers beneath his blood-soaked chin, humming gently in thought. "If it was everyone, I could definitively say it was some sort of hemoanima-related mess, but two of us?"

"It wouldn't be hemoanima anyway." Nozomi is surprised when she interjects. She didn't think before she spoke, the words slipping out almost involuntarily. Maybe it's her nerves, maybe it's the tension of the whole situation, and maybe it's that she's looking at her stuffed animals and frustrated that the coat of agnosia-induced slime and ooze makes holding them for comfort nigh impossible. Regardless, her mouth moves before her mind can comb through her words, make them more palatable, not interrupt Aotsuki when he's speaking.

He seems to not mind, instead just raising an eyebrow and making a gross, phlegmy rattling noise that must be a hum of interest. "Oh?"

"My hemoanima isn't—" now that she's actively speaking, now that her head is in the game, she stops herself from tipping her hand too far, "—it's weaker than everyone else's. It's why I have the Artificial Class Armor and weapon that Nigou made. If it was something related to hemoanima, it wouldn't have included me." Just because Aotsuki had shared something personal—revealed his condition to her out of some measure of necessity—didn't mean he was privy to her life's story.

Her mother's experiments with cryptoglobin and its immediate differences marking her as Other from the rest of the Special Defense Unit were hers and hers alone. Although...she might need to inform him about rejection symptoms if he starts to look too wan.

Not that she's really capable of gauging that at this time.

Aotsuki clutches at his heart, mottled and bruising fist disappearing into a softened, rotting patê of muscle and fat as he processes what she's just said. "I had wondered what was off when I woke up. The difference is oddly noticeable." She stares at a point above his head, the focus point allowing her to feign as though she's looking at him without actually taking in too much of the monster in front of her. "It's all in the heart, really. And the lungs."

That would track. "Yeah..."

The fire in her veins, the way her heart hammers a drumbeat tempo against her ribs; it's hemoanima. Tears well in her eyes and she pushes them down with even breaths.

The room hums with ambience and the awful sound of Nozomi's body's crushed and bubbly breathing. Her nose is flooded with the scent of metal and meat and fire and sepsis and bleach. She does her best to try and steel herself.

If Nozomi's own body looks, sounds, and smells like this, the rest must be as horrific, and she's going to have to deal with it.

"What do we tell Sumino?" They can't just stand here forever, idly trying to figure out what the problem is with just the two of them. Many hands make light work and two minds are better than one. Bringing everyone into the fold—especially their de facto leader—would surely reduce the load.

"Nothing." The way the word leaves his mouth paralyzes her like a single shot from her gun. She actually snaps her eyes back onto his messy, agonized face to try and figure out why. "There is no reason to involve Takumi or the others. I highly doubt they could help us, all things considered."

"What does that mean?" She feels thin and brittle, worn out and stretched over Aotsuki's larger frame, her emotions torn to the breaking point. Maybe that's why she's just incapable of being nice.

Aotsuki seems to be unbothered by her rudeness at least. He smiles at her, broken glass spilling blood and chunks of gum and tongue all down his chin, and cordially answers her as if she hadn't just been unbearably sharp and aggressive. "If we tell everyone that the two of us have swapped bodies, what do you think would happen?"

"They would help us find a solution, surely?"

The way his eyes become crescents, thin and sharp daggers of lilac and silver, gives her pause. "Which would take away from our daily efforts to defend the Academy. That, in turn, could lead to further conflict within our ranks, further collapse of the already tenuous structure we have established, and then the Invaders would wipe us all out and kill all of humanity." There's something strange there, in the hissing-screaming-bubbling of Aotsuki's borrowed voice, that almost sounds hungry. Like he had said something he had strong opinions about but she just is incapable of properly parsing through the visceral overstimulation.

"What if they found a solution?" She counters. "Omokage is well-versed in the medical field and, while I am part of the problem, I have no qualms about both aiding in research or experimentation and in volunteering myself as a test subject."

"First off," Aotsuki counters, jaw clenched tight enough to spill a waterfall of blood down his neck, "that is my body you would be volunteering to be subject to Yugamu's tendencies." She wants to interrupt, bristling at his callous dismissal of her friend's talents by way of his proclivities, but he barely gives her a crack to worm her way into the discussion as he barrels onward. "Second, even if it wound up only being Yugamu and yourself distracted by the whole...situation we have going on, he is one of the best people we have at crowd control and you, while in my body, are almost necessary to help in thinning the numbers of whatever front you are on. Both of you wearing yourselves out trying to solve a problem that may resolve itself on its own is foolish."

"And third?" She can't argue his desire to not have her volunteer his body for medical testing. That's fair enough. But to dismiss the idea of asking for help on the basis of 'it would draw attention away from focusing on our survival' is—

"What makes you think I have a third point?"

"Because you—!" Nozomi almost can't see for the way that anger digs its ugly claws into her ribs and wrenches. Carefully, slowly, she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. In. Out. When she opens her eyes again, she's greeted by the same horrors as before, only the horrors seem to be watching her with a measure of bemused confusion on his borrowed face. "Never mind. What do you suggest we do then, since talking to the others is out of the question?"

"Wait it out."

What is she supposed to say to that? "Sit back and do nothing?"

"Oh, you misunderstand," Aotsuki corrects her, distorted voice gentle as though she's a child, over-enunciating for the sake of clarity, "we will be doing something, we just also will be waiting out whatever caused this. It happened so suddenly, so surely it will be fixed as abruptly, right?"

"That's an assumption though."

"Assumptions are all we have right now. The best we can do is go on with our new normal and hope that, before day one hundred rolls around, we will be put back in our own bodies."

As much as she wants to argue—the uglier parts of her rearing their heads, clawing at their cage and screaming of unfairness and irritation—she can't find fault in his logic. If asking for aid is inviting distraction then letting things run their course is their best option. "And we, what, pretend to be each other in the meantime?"

He nods, vertebrae breaking with the movement. "We have to prevent the others from becoming aware that anything is wrong. Masquerading around as each other is going to be necessary."

Again, silence coats her room with the same slimy, bloody mucus that oozes from Nozomi's distorted body like a slug trail. She isn't sure how to even have this conversation with Aotsuki, unsure how to bridge the vast gap between them with anything other than force and frustration. Surely he doesn't have that good of an impression of her anyway, considering the trouble her group had caused when they first joined. She shouldn't make it worse.

When Aotsuki speaks again, it's so sudden and matter-of-fact that Nozomi can barely stifle the noise of surprise that squeaks out of her. "Have you ever killed yourself?"

"What?!" She can't even be bothered to hide her genuine emotions.

Aotsuki repeats himself, placing a hand over his exposed, pulsating heart. "Have you ever killed yourself? Your Artificial Class Armor functions differently from our Infusers so I assume you haven't ever tried to use a proper Infuser, but I need to gauge how difficult it will be to break past your self-preservation instincts just to fight."

Oh. He meant using an Infuser. "No, Nigou wouldn't let me try when I mentioned my hemoanima was too weak. Especially after he realized I couldn't be registered in the Revive-o-Matic. Hence the Artificial Class Armor."

"Then we should practice." The ease at which he suggests that is—

"How?" She gestures between the two of them. "Kyoshika, Kurara, and Omokage are going to want to use the Gym as soon as they wake up. It's our...morning routine." Suddenly the realization that Aotsuki will be in her body for that time period, that she will miss out on time with her friends drops the bottom out of her stomach. "If we're in the Gym when they arrive then I'm fairly certain that Kurara will have something...unkind to say to you - to me - to this body about being alone with 'Nozomi'."

The idea seems to upset Aotsuki as much as it upsets her. Maybe even more. His face twists into a bitter sneer. She's never seen herself make such an expression, nor has she seen Aotsuki look like that. It's a foreign and violent thing. "Then we had better hurry, so they don't catch us. We can hammer out the other's mannerisms on the way there."

She wants to protest. She wants to call out to him, grab at his twisted limbs and demand they stay out of the public light but something else occurs to her. "...Sumino..."

"What about Takumi?" Eito glances at her, eyebrows in his fringe.

"He has this...thing about me." It's the kindest way to speak about whatever strange problem Sumino has regarding her. He is...obsessed, in a way, but likely not with her. With whoever she reminds him of. It makes her uncomfortable and, for what it's worth, he has been keeping his distance since she expressed discomfort with his familiarity. Still— "Will you be alright if he decides to, um, try and get close?"

Again, Aotsuki smiles in a way that looks horribly foreign on Nozomi's face. Again, it makes her feel...uncomfortable. "Don't worry too much about Takumi. I can handle him." She nods. "Now let's go."

The two of them slink out of Nozomi's bedroom as quietly as they can, their footfalls—or, in Aotsuki's case, the awful slithering scraping sucking sound of him dragging himself along the rooftop—echoing loudly in the early morning air. Aotsuki leads the charge as if he isn't even aware of the trail of gore and ooze he's leaving in his wake or the blood and chunks of burnt flesh that remain on any surface he touches, too accustomed to taking the lead to accommodate for his condition to change now.

Nozomi, too used to keeping her head down and her mouth shut for the betterment of the team, says nothing of how badly it makes her want to scrub the upper layer of her skin off. After all: they have to play at being each other, don't they? It wouldn't do if she threw a childish tantrum over something as small as some discomfort.

If Aotsuki could live like this for seventeen years, she can live like this for a few measly days without complaint.

(It's nauseating and awful, the way her body sounds like someone dragging themselves by their arms, metal and bone and blood and organs trailing behind like a tail. The pulpy remains left behind are chunky reminders of pain, the smoky gasoline tinge agonizingly acrid. Nozomi fights to keep her hands away from her nose, struggles to keep her eyes somewhere near Aotsuki's borrowed head, strains to hear the words behind the bubbling choking sounds that drown out what was her voice come out of lips that look like her father's had. She swallows bile and breathes—in, out—trying to keep her composure.)

(She won't fail. She can't fail. She can't. She can't!)

(Aotsuki is depending on her.)

Aotsuki presses an Infuser in her hands. She blinks down at the clear window in the scabbard that shows off his name inscribed beneath the number four on his blade, turning it back and forth in her dazed grip. The way that the clinical choice of numbering their weapons contrasts with how pretty Aotsuki Eito looks written on the blood-red blade holds her attention as she wonders what number they would have given her, had she not been a failure. Likely the same as was stamped on her Artificial Class Armor but to see it carved into such a delicate thing as an Infuser is different, isn't it?

"Keep going." His command draws her attention and she looks at him without remembering what's going on. The expression that greets her—her own ruined face contorted like it always is in her own worst nightmares—is cold and distant. Porcelain. Fake.

Does she look like that to everyone? Cold and aloof, not the way that Kurara is but in a worse way, not dissimilar to the bullies in her school were? Fake and two-faced? Has she always smiled like her happiness was a lie balancing on razor wire?

"O-okay." She mutters, unsure if Aotsuki can hear her—or even cares—the nausea pushing against her throat less about the horror of her form now and more something like understanding. Clarity.

Outside looking in, has she ever been anything other than a pretty porcelain doll? Or has she—

The Gym is wide and dark, blissfully empty. Aotsuki turns around and looks dryly at the activator for her Artificial Class Armor in his hand, turning a cold eye to Nozomi and the Infuser gripped in her fist. "Would you like to start?"

His Infuser feels like ice in her hands now, the metal burning her borrowed too-hot skin. "With k—" the word catches, chokes her. He just smiles, patient.

It still feels fake somehow, like there's a veneer that holds the smile plastered on her face in place, plasticine and high-gloss paint bright and shiny to distract from— "I could learn how to use your Artificial Class Armor first so that I can heal you if you mess up but...if you have my body and my hemoanima, it likely won't be an issue."

"Howso?"

He sighs, phlegm and blood and chunks of some unidentifiable gore falling impotently from his lips and splattering against the Gym's wooden flooring, disappointment barely concealed. "My Specialist Skill."

What was his Specialist Skill again? Special...something to do with fortune?

"Special Fortunetelling, while it gives me an edge in combat, has a wider application in everyday life. Namely: I am extremely lucky." The patient way he spells it out for her, the words bludgeoning her thoughts back into her head, makes her hackles rise. She feels patronized to, and yet it's necessary because she can't seem to pull herself together long enough to think critically for even a second. "You are, while inhabiting my body, far more likely to achieve your goals if they rely on some modicum of chance." Like stabbing a blade into your heart and not dying of hemorrhagic shock, he doesn't say, but she can read between the lines. She's not stupid. "I can't fault you for wanting some kind of assurance you won't bleed out, however, even if you would be put back together by the Revive-o-Matic without much fuss."

Right...because Aotsuki's body has enough hemoanima to use the Revive-o-Matic. She isn't as mortal as she was before.

The fear of death stills her hand regardless. Her eyes stay fixed on the horrid, gaping wound in his torso, the way his intestines spill out and all over the floor, puddles of incardanine fluid sending spidery tendrils out to grasp at her feet with lonely hands intent on pullling her deep into the grave to join her parents. She's supposed to shove a blade into her heart? She's supposed to touch the very thing keeping her alive with the point of a weapon and that will allow her to fight?

Her breathing must have picked up in an audible way because Aotsuki turns over her activator in his malformed hands and scrutinizes it in detail, looking for how to operate it. When he speaks, his choked voice is pleasant but distant, cold and clinical—the way his room had been. "You're allowed to be afraid," he says, though it almost sounds like he's dismissing her instead of comforting her, "but after all the fights you've been in—without the access to the Revive-o-Matic at that—you're balking now?" Coward.

"I—"

"The human brain does have a powerful survival instinct," he notes. He affixes the activator to his chest and gently presses the center button, the Artificial Class Armor manifesting as it always did for her. Through her borrowed eyes, it almost appears as though the mass of his body is wrapped in a shell like a rigid body bag, the armor acting to hold in some of the spilling mess and pushing other things out of alignment. An explosion of blood and fat and intestinal fluids coats the Gym floor and Nozomi loses the fight against her nausea, doubling over with the overwhelming scent and sight of her body being compressed like a malformed sausage. Unbothered—or perhaps unwilling to let the conversation drift from his original point—Aotsuki continues on unperturbed. "But it isn't as hard as you think it is. You just find the gap between the ribs, a little left of your sternum." He presses a hand against the hard plating holding his body together, many-jointed fingers splaying like crushed insects. "Right. About. Here."

She knows where the heart is. She can feel it beating, screaming, pulsing as it pushes cryptoglobin rich blood through her borrowed body, screaming through her ears and causing her extremities to tingle. Still...her hand doesn't move. Still...she can't—

The noise Aotsuki lets out is a bit like unsealing a container of yogurt, sticky and chunky but wet. Disapproving. He closes the distance between them and wraps a slimy hand around hers. She tries to jerk away but his grip is stronger than she expected and she can't escape. "It only hurts for a moment. And it's only really scary the first time." His words are meant to be soothing but—

(The shadow of her mother in their apartment. Her legs not touching the floor. The sight of an asphyxiated corpse nothing compared to the horrid stench of a body relaxing every sphincter at once and painting what was a happy home in every fluid contained within the now empty shell.)

(Folded over her, metal shoved into his heart, her father looks at her with sightless eyes and smiles. His last thought, his last wish had been to save her. A blade of rubble impaling him, carving a gash up her stomach. Through his heart. His heart. His heart.)

It feels like a shot. Then it feels like a flood. She's bleeding—she knows she's bleeding, that's what happens when you puncture the heart—but it doesn't feel like it should. It feels like a relief, like her body is letting off pressure, and the blood doesn't pool so much as it curls around her in a protective embrace. Like a hug, warm and comforting. Within the cocoon, it paints her skin with hardened cryptoglobin, the black and white of the standard Class Armor curling over her body in place of the thin nightclothes she had been wearing before, the Infuser blade itself sinking into her heart and bursting into bright white fire that scorches the pectoral muscles to carbonized spires that form part of the unified look of the Special Defense Unit. Then, as it unfurls and gently sets her down on the Gym floor again, the remainder of the blood solidifies into Aotsuki's horse-headed scythe, the spines hungrily nipping at her gloved hands. The grey inactive blade curves wickedly, the crimson eyes of the skull that the blade protrudes from glinting as it watches the two of them stand in the aftermath.

Aotsuki blithely smiles at Nozomi, whose panic meets the shore of adrenaline, crashing and cutting her senses to dull sand and messy nonsense.

Now that it's over and done with, blood no longer spewing from her punctured heart, the tide recedes somewhat and she can breathe. In. Out.

It hadn't been so bad.

In. Out.

Like Aotsuki had said: it only hurt for a moment.

In. Out.

She can do this.

"There." She leans on Aotsuki's scythe as he nods his head in appreciation. "Now dispel it and do it again. On your own."

She frowns at him. "Dispel it?"

Aotsuki reaches up and taps the centerpiece of Nozomi's Artificial Class Armor, disabling it. His mass spills out, slopping across the floor like an upended food tray. Nozomi's nose wrinkles at the smell, she flinches at the sound, but she holds her ground. "Undo the transformation." Then he reactivates the Artificial Class Armor, squeezing the majority of his car wreck corpse of a body back into the metal and cloth shape of a person, oozing violently out the bottom like a burst burrito. "And redo it."

"How?" Maybe she shouldn't be so sharp about this but he is being very obtuse and she is not happy about how vague he's being. "How do I—?"

"Like killing yourself in reverse." The way he smiles—all teeth and no eyes—makes her shiver slightly. Still, his tone is pleasant, even if what he's saying is incredibly pointed. "Let go of your death."

"Mindfulness?" He laughs, a horrid snorting choking coughing sound, glass and chunks of lung and blood splattering past cracked lips. "How?!"

"How did it feel to die? To activate your - my hemoanima?" Deactivate. Reactivate. He almost fiddles with the mechanism of Nozomi's Artificial Class Armor, squelching horribly as he talks. "Think about that."

Helpful.

But...

A blade. A point. Heat. A rush.

All of that in reverse.

Think about her death, only backwards.

When she opens her eyes she feels winded. Drained. Aotsuki is watching her with eyes that feel sharper than they should, an uncomfortably dull razor across her skin, pulling hair out more than cutting it close. His smile is painted on, his head tilted in perfect imitation of her own neutral stance but it feels...off. Wrong. Maybe it's something about seeing someone else using her face, her voice, her body in this way, but she just wants to—

His scythe is in her hand before she realizes it, blade drinking in weeping blood as she points his - her weapon at her - at him. She trembles with an emotion she can't seem to understand as her instincts scream that whatever is in her body is wrong.

Unperturbed, his eyes watch her; trace the blade to the grinning skull, the hilt to her shaking hands, her arms to her panicked face. What expression is she making? Why is he smiling wider?

"There." He presses a finger to the activator and disables her Artificial Class Armor. "You did it all by yourself. Hardly painful, was it? You barely even noticed it had happened."

That was true. She hadn't even realized she'd transformed until she had leveled his scythe at him, the hooked blade wrapping around the back of her neck like the arm of an old friend. Like a promise.

"I-I'm so sorry!" In her panic, she drops the weapon and transformation both. Blood drips from her pierced palms as she steps away from Aotsuki, unsure of how to fix this or make it better. "I just—"

"Did what was asked of you," he finishes for her. He almost seems amused that she's so bothered. Does he not understand—?

"But—"

"Nozomi," cold ice cuts through the watery wheezing of his borrowed voice, the sudden feeling of a scythe pressed into the curve of her neck. She stops speaking, a strange fear gripping at her too-loud heart, crushing her too-fast pulse into a whine that screams in her ears. "It's okay."

She doesn't respond. She can't respond. Is it kindness that sees him deferring her concerns? Or something else entirely?

Behind them, the Gym door opens. Unthinking, Nozomi turns to see who it could be at this hour.

She had forgotten.

—

Eito watches as Nozomi turns tail and flees with his body, curled in on herself like a terrified child, barely holding it together. How pathetic she must look to the others, ashen, sweat-soaked, and slobbering from the aftereffects of emptying her stomach all over the pristine Gym floor. He suppresses a sneer, keeps his mouth pulled in a picture perfect imitation of concern and worry, eyes lingering carefully on the puddle of vomit on the ground.

He can't look up at the three people sharing his space. He isn't sure he can handle that in his current condition.

Watching Nozomi struggle with something as simple as using an Infuser had been an interesting diversion to distract him from the skin crawling horror of inhabiting her body. The mere thought of his mind and soul being packed into a vile human's shell against his will, his righteous eyes stolen from him and given to the wretch wearing his body like an ill-fitting suit, makes him almost blind with fury. And so, while they did need to become accustomed to how the other's body prepares for combat, perhaps he had less...polite intentions behind how forcefully he demanded she force the transformation.

(The speed at which she became accustomed to the act surprised him—despite only activating her Class Armor on her own once—though he had been amused when she pressed his own weapon against his borrowed throat, eyes wide in instinctual horror. Had she seen something in his face that terrified her, that told her he was a threat that needed to die? It was...gratifying in a way, to know that someone else in his position would fight against his natural urges just as much as he did.)

And so, in his attempt to perhaps draw blood in his education of how to use an Infuser, he forgot that the two of them were disheveled and in a public place. Hence the situation he's dealing with now.

What did Nozomi's friends look like to her? Filtered through his righteous eyes and her own perception of who they are, what new fresh hell was she subjected to before she fled? After all, she already confirmed that her perception of the body he's in is vastly different from his own had been.

Perhaps it's because she knows her own face—knows what she looks like without the lies of humanity stripped away—that she sees herself relatively undistorted. And, in that same vein, perhaps she sees her friends more human than he ever did. Either way, their very presence tipped her over the edge and she fled.

Coward.

"What the hell were you two doing?" Kurara's shrill voice pierces through the slowly growing headache Eito is fighting off, a lance of noise and irritation. "That whitewashed pervert took off like we caught him with his dick in his hands." Classy.

"If we had caught him with his...dick in his hands," Kyoshika chokes on the word, "surely Nozomi-dono would have blown it off with her Class Weapon. They are practicing here, or were before we arrived, and she looks far more composed than Eito-dono did, therein nothing untoward must have occurred!"

"Stuff your sword in it," Kurara snaps. "He's in his nightclothes, she's in her nightclothes, they both look like they've been rolling around on the floor. Class Armor or not, she's missing her weapon. What else could have happened?"

Perhaps Eito should step in and correct her vulgar misunderstanding but he doesn't trust himself to properly play his part without practice—and certainly not around the three people who know her better than anyone else at this academy.

"Judging by how hard he threw up, it must have been a killer time." Yugamu's amusement is what pushes him over the edge, the lascivious way he implies some foul deed coated in paraphilia and fetish makes his borrowed skin crawl and the hair on the back of his borrowed neck stand on end. Rising nausea threatens his - her dinner joining Eito's watery bile on the Gym floor.

"It wasn't like that!" Nozomi doesn't speak sharply, she's kind and soft and a pushover. That doesn't mean she doesn't have an edge—speaking with her the way he has, Eito is certain she's as fake as he is in places—but in situations like this, she would be more placating and mildly distressed than genuinely furious. "Aotsuki and I were practicing drills!"

Kurara snorts derisively. "Yeah, I'll bet." And then, as a vicious aside. "I'm going to shoot his dick clean off."

"Now, now, let's not be so hasty." Eito wouldn't have pegged Yugamu for the peacekeeper but he quickly reigns in Kurara before she can get too wound up. "If Nozomi says that they were running drills, we can trust her, can't we?"

Even though he's not looking at them, he can feel his gaze burn holes in his skin. It feels awful and vile, like being touched by a hot poker. He wants to go back to Nozomi's room and shower until his skin is raw and clean, boiled and disinfected.

Kyoshika makes some strange noise of agreement, a soft harrumph, but Kurara remains obstinately silent. When she speaks again, her voice strikes a vulnerable bit of Eito's brain that lances pain up his spine. "If he really didn't do anything, why won't you look at us?"

"Perhaps Nozomi-dono is still dizzy from running drills with Eito-dono!"

"I wasn't asking you!" Eito can feel her turn her attention back to him, can imagine her rotted head dripping with a scowl, flies buzzing around it in droves. Maggots must spill from the decaying mass of fruit that makes up her so-called head, hollow sockets squinted in irritation. "If it was really nothing, if you don't want me to go track down Aotsuki and punch him right to the end of this fucking war, then look me in the eyes and tell me it was just a drill."

How cute. She cares enough about 'Nozomi' to threaten 'Eito' with bodily harm.

He swallows heavily and looks up, puts on a smile he hopes is convincing enough. "It really is fine," he lies, "we were only running practice drills to increase our response time."

He stops and stares. Tries not to throw up. Almost fails.

Human memory is a fickle thing. It will sometimes hold on to images for long after they've ever been a presence in your life. And, in the same vein, it will sometimes quickly purge the original sight of something and replace it with its current appearance. As Eito looks out at the reserve squad, he finds it difficult to remember how he had perceived them the day before through his righteous eyes, their current appearances burning into his short and long term memory like a flash bulb snapped against his retinas.

Kurara, front and center in his vision, is strangely plain looking. Tomato mask aside—and maybe that helps make her more palatable to behold than if she hadn't been wearing something that covered her entire face—she's a slight, well-toned girl in an all-black uniform and platform boots. The expression on her tomato mask—likely the basis for his own initial understanding of her, a decaying mess of mold and slop that must have been drawn from the association borne between her mask and her personality and existence as a human being—shifting in strangely minute ways that shouldn't be possible and yet...

Beside her, looming like some kind of perverse prey animal, Yugamu smiles with his mouth, his one visible eye cutting to the meat of Eito in a way that makes him feel small and vulnerable. He's pretty in an androgynous way, lithe and delicate in ways Eito isn't, but there's something about his posture and the way he holds himself that brings to mind images of predatory insects or venomous serpents, offsetting the sudden recognition of the self that Eito is hit with.

It's Kyoshika that is the hardest to look at, not because she is objectionable or ugly—more ugly than humans usually look, filthy, vile beings that they are—but because she just...is. A muscular young woman with strong features and guileless grey eyes that watch him without malice or suspicion. Her smile curls the edges of her mouth, her gloved hands tucked against her sides, arms folded in a display of patience. Her long hair frames her face, lashes curving gently in a way that makes her seem almost angelic.

Eito has to swallow a hysterical, gasping laugh.

For most of his life, his is the only face he's ever seen. As such, he has grown accustomed to reading the facial expressions of beasts and monsters, parsing context through body language and muffled and garbled tone of voice. He practiced expressions in the mirror, taught himself to pretend, and held conversations with himself in the bathroom so that he could convincingly play the part.

Seeing a smile on a real human face that wasn't his own is—

Kurara's expression twists, pinches, and she sighs. "Fine." Behind her, Kyoshika lights up and her guileless smile widens in delight. "I won't punch his lights out. You're welcome..."

Eito wants to say thank you, to acknowledge what has been said and move the conversation to something else but his words stick in his throat. He worries—no, not worries, is certain—that if he opens his mouth, he'll vomit as well. It wouldn't be a good look and that's why he remains silent.

Nothing else.

"You sure made a mess of the place though." Yugamu notes, craning his neck at an inhuman angle to peer at the blood and bile on the floor. "Are you sure it wasn't something more fun than drills? This looks like far too much fluid for just a few uses of an Infuser." The way his mouth curls, the implication singing in his voice, is infuriating. It's nauseating.

I'm certain, he wants to reply. He doesn't trust himself to speak without his voice cracking and breaking. He holds still like a statue, silent as a grave, praying they'll assume he isn't feeling well. Hoping they'll draw their own incorrect conclusions.

"Should we perhaps postpone our run until after the Gym has been disinfected?" Kyoshika asks the others. Stripped of any affect his disorder applies to it, her voice is strong and clear like the shounen manga heroes she so clearly admires. And, in the same vein, her question is without malice, a sincerity there that is inhuman.

Eito can feel the smile he's wearing thin and fray.

"Do you want to get on your knees and scrub Aotsuki's pervert puke out of the cracks in the floor?" Kurara scoffs. "That's poor people work. I wouldn't be caught dead doing it."

"That can be arranged," Yugamu purrs. Kurara hisses and punches him in the shoulder. It dislocates with a sickening popping noise but Yugamu quickly sets it without so much as flinching. "It was only a suggestion."

"I would rather pay Maruko to lick it up than spend another second smelling whatever it is Aotsuki had for dinner."

"Actually, it's mostly stomach acid at this point. He must have already thrown up once before."

"Poor Eito-dono..."

"I'm sorry—" The words spew out unbidden, the panic painting them more real than he'd like to admit. "I - I'm not feeling well. I know we were going to—"

"Don't feed me those excuses," Kurara sniffs, waving a hand at Eito. "Go lay down and rest before you get me sick too. I don't want to catch your plebian cold or step in your puke or whatever."

Kyoshika's eyes practically sparkle as she looks at Kurara. "As Kurara-dono said: rest up! And, should you still be feeling unwell come lunch, I'll bring you a simple meal and feed you so that you can recover your strength." Red coats her cheeks as she mutters the last bit, twiddling her fingers in a way Eito can only assume is shyly. It's hard to tell through the tinny noise in his ears and the way his vision is wobbling.

Yugamu, on the other hand, never once turns his gaze away from Eito, silently smiling pleasantly at him. "Sleep well, Nozomi."

"Thanks...and sorry."

"Don't apologize," Yugamu's grin widens. "Just feel better."

He flees the Gym in much the same manner as Nozomi had. Perhaps with a bit more grace and dignity, not outright running away with tears in his eyes and a hand covering his nose and mouth, but certainly no less shamefully.

He just...couldn't be in a room with them for a moment longer. It was unbearable.

As he climbs the stairs back to the roof, Eito tries to remember what they really look like, stripped of their false likeness by his righteous eyes. He tries to cut away at the facade of unnatural beauty that Nozomi's perception of the others has shown him to reveal the ugliness lying within. He tries all this in vain.

All he can see when he thinks about Yugamu is the way that his delicate lips had curled into a smile that Eito can only call caring. All he can remember when he tries to recall Kurara is the worry her mask projected as she tried her best to pretend like she wasn't asking after his health. All he can think of when he imagines Kyoshika is the earnest way she closed the distance between them, eyes wide with concern.

They're monsters. Humans. They shouldn't look like he does. They shouldn't look like how everyone else sees them. He was the one person who could truly see everyone for what they really are and now—

The way Nozomi had paled—the color leaving her borrowed face moments before the contents left her stomach for what had to be the second, if not third or fourth time—upon seeing her friends. The way she refused to look up from the floor as she fled, white-knuckling her Infuser. The way everyone had stared after her, confusion palpable, then turned their myriad gazes back onto Eito.

She could see the truth and it disgusted her. He could only see the lie and it disgusted him.

Waiting out whatever it is that has happened to them is slowly becoming something of a horror show. An ordeal he is unsure he can actually tolerate to its conclusion if everyone in the Special Defense Unit looks the same as those three did.

After all: he hasn't even looked in the mirror.

Maybe it's hypocritical of him but no one can blame him for wanting to delay any kind of revelation regarding what kind of horrid human guise he's wearing. If he sees what Nozomi looks like to herself and to every other wretched human in the world, then he has to contend with his own understanding of the body he's found himself in—weak hemoanima aside.

It's not as though being trapped in a human body is going to deter his plans. Granted, it means that disposing of the others becomes more...difficult, as Nozomi can't actually process hemoanima the same as everyone else, and ingesting another human's hemoanima might send her into some kind of hemoanima-based arrest or perhaps it would even burn her alive from the inside out—her mention of how warm Eito's body felt compared to her own and the way he's constantly startled by how passively warm things are in comparison to Nozomi's body's temperature a clue that hemoanima did actually impact internal temperature. Still, he has other avenues of disposal and disappearance. The Wall of Fire, for instance. And Nozomi has access to the reserve corps in a way that Eito didn't.

Additionally, Nozomi is passive enough and people-pleasing enough to weasel her way into all the various floating social cliques that have formed in the Last Defense Academy. This affords him some new measures of freedom that being himself didn't.

A fair trade for a lack of power and the conditional immortality that the Revive-o-Matic affords those with sufficient hemoanima.

He can work with this. He doesn't have to let it push back his plans. He just has to adjust his strategy on the fly. He—

"Kirifuji?"

Eito stops dead in his tracks, dread sinking a stone in his gut. While unfamiliar in some ways, he's fairly sure he knows who's talking to him. The one person they had both tried their hardest to avoid.

What a karmic joke.

"Yes, Sumino?" He doesn't turn to look. He can't look. It's almost like a horror movie, like the type of thing where acknowledging the existence of something makes it real. If he sees Takumi then—

"Is everything okay?" He sounds concerned. Without the filter of his own cognition, Takumi's voice is oddly normal. It's almost familiar, enough like his own that a sudden flush of terror rips through him. "I saw Aotsuki running back to the roof looking like he was sick or something and you — I know you have your thing with your group and all but you also look bad? I just want to make sure neither of you are sick." He laughs, this awkward thing that makes Eito's heart race. "We can't afford to lose both of you, just in case there's a defensive battle or whatever, but also...you're—" Don't say it.

"Aotsuki and I were practicing transforming for defensive battles and just overdid it a little." The lie comes easily. A good lie has the basis of truth in it as a foundation and, like a good foundation, it runs deep. If his lie isn't consistent across the board, someone will get suspicious. "Thank you for worrying, though. I'm just going back to my room to rest after I take a quick shower."

"O-oh..." He can imagine, revulsion crawling insectile over his skin, the way Takumi is blushing as he unconsciously imagines Nozomi in the shower. Disgusting. "But—"

"Really," he can't afford to tarry. He needs to get back to his - Nozomi's room so he can collect himself and ready himself for the fight to come. "Thank you for your concern but I should—"

Takumi grabs him by the wrist to prevent him from leaving. Without thinking, Eito turns to look at him, eyes wide in panic. He sees Takumi for the first time without the protection of his eyes.

He's blinding.

By all accounts, Takumi is a normal young man. There's nothing special about him. He's as plain as Kyoshika is. But there is an intensity to his stare that gives him some otherworldly presence. His red hair frames his face in a halo of fire, blue eyes bright and without suspicion, crimson lashes making the overall effect akin to the way illuminated manuscripts painted angels. Gone is the burnt, twiggy, shambling corpse that Eito knew him to be. In its place is a funhouse mirror reflection of Eito himself; a boy who is by all accounts completely unremarkable but in that everyman way and, as such, becomes something ethereally beautiful in return.

Eito wrenches his arm free of Takumi's clutch, unsure of the expression he's making. Surely it's one of panic and horror. Judging by how horrified Takumi looks in return, it must be something to behold because he looks like Eito slapped him. Good.

Without another word, he runs the remaining distance between where he was and Nozomi's room, locking the door behind him. He breathes (in, out) and tries to collect himself.