drama, trauma, and the joy of writing

Her hair isn't too dissimilar from his own, both in color and texture. It's more silver than his own ashen brown but it has the same weight and falls relatively straight, which is a relief. Her skin is an unhealthy pale—likely a side-effect of whatever caused her to have less hemoanima than the rest of the humans at either academy—and she's both unhealthily thin and has a fair bit of muscle on her. It's the lack of fat, the hard muscle replacing what should be healthy weight on her bones, and he frowns at how he can feel her lungs hitch and her heart pick up the moment he does any form of strenuous exercise. Even running up two flights of stairs to escape Takumi had winded her, the fluttering feeling finally leaving after several minutes of idle examination and resting.

It's almost paradoxical how she manages to be frail and sturdy in equal measures, her body determined to eat itself alive even as she works double-time to prevent such a fate. What remains is something akin to a statue, a defined being of ephemeral beauty, a bit like a dandelion seconds away from being blown apart in the wind.

When Eito was younger, he found solace and beauty looking at photographs of landscapes ruined by humanity's greed and ignorance. Vistas long lost to global warming and then what he later learned was World Death, preserved in film and print, his only escape from the constant onslaught of monsters on all sides.

Nozomi reminds him of one he saw of an ice-covered mountain peak, backlit by a sunset—or perhaps a sunrise, he can hardly remember after so many years—in cool colors as the sky behind it bled pink to a rich, velvety blue. The grey rock of the mountain looked almost purple in contrast, the snow scattering the sun's beams in bright bursts of blue and pink, soft clouds streaking white and orange across the front. She has the color pallet for sure; all cool tones with hardly an ounce of flush to her ensemble. She even has the stark cheekbones and jawline that makes him think of cliffsides.

She has a mole under her eye.

That final detail pushes him away from the mirror and away to fixing his appearance. While the morning announcements have barely finished playing, he can't chance being marked as 'suspicious' simply because he's incapable of at least looking the part. If he's to play at being Nozomi, he best dress like her.

Thankfully, she seems content with only one outfit in total: some kind of variation on a school uniform. Unthankfully, he's realized that she wears her hair in a braid and he is not exactly practiced in the art.

No better time than the present to learn, even if the thought alone makes his skin crawl.

Peeling Nozomi's sleep clothes off—grateful he remembered to lock her door as a sudden, horrible fear of one of the others walking in on him without warning gripped at his weak heart with vicious claws—he pauses. Not because he is in a female body in the nude—he has no interest in anything a human has going on, let alone a body he is inhabiting—but because something Nozomi said earlier makes a much larger degree of sense than before.

When he had asked her what her body looked like, expecting her to describe some kind of fetal monstrosity with bulging doe-eyes and thin hair, she had instead described some kind of macabre slug of a car wreck victim. And, namely, she had gestured across her chest as she discussed how his organs were spilling out of his open body.

A large scar runs across Nozomi's torso, along the line she had drawn as she described what she had been seeing.

A car wreck, hm? His fingers probe the long-healed wound. A smile plays across his face as he connects dots she likely hadn't intended to reveal. Perhaps that has to do with why her hemoanima is so weak. At least he can assume that her perception of everyone else through his eyes will be as colored by her own memories as his were untainted.

Without a second thought, he pulls on a bra and clean underwear and finishes dressing himself, placing her sleep clothes on her bed for later. Now for his hair.

His own hair has only ever been long enough to braid when he was in the hospital. His mother had liked his hair and, when under the care of the so-called nurses and doctors that had decided his eyes were a 'problem' that needed to be 'fixed', he hadn't been allowed control over anything, let alone his own appearance. The nurses had put their filthy, twisted fingers in his hair and had left their horrid residue behind when they'd finished winding his hair into a sturdy plait so it wouldn't get in the way of his 'activities'. So, while he has some experience with having his hair braided, he doesn't necessarily have experience with braiding hair.

Thankfully, Nozomi's braid usually falls over her shoulder so it doesn't have to really be even. He can work with that, so long as he can stomach looking in a mirror for however long it takes to finish the act.

Combing her hair and putting on her headband gives him some degree of understanding as to how much he actually has to work with. It's less than he thought but more than he's comfortable with but discomfort is nothing new.

He divides the majority of the remainder into three even chunks and begins to twine them together. Over, under, over, under. His fingers work with almost mindless dexterity as he mentally clocks out to avoid thinking about the situation.

Over, under, over, under.

Did Nozomi finally cave and put his glasses on? She had to, considering how poorly she took to her friends' appearances.

Over, under, over, under.

They never managed to discuss how to work each other's weapons before being interrupted. Knowing how dramatic irony works and how often the Invaders like to attack, they may not have enough time to figure out the differences between them before the next defensive battle. In fact, Eito would wager that it's incredibly likely that they may have to deal with a scouting party of some sort within the next few days.

Over, under, over, under.

Watching Nozomi shakily press the point of his Infuser against her chest, eyes wide and panicked, had been a novel experience. Thankfully, she was intelligent enough to grasp what he was saying as he talked her through how it felt to detransform, but it had been a sight to behold to watch her shake like a panicked animal as she froze in the face of death. Her bite had been surprising as well. He didn't expect her to be so...testy. She's always come off as a pushover and yet—

Over, under, over, under.

A knock at the door. Eito's fingers slip and his clumsy, uneven braid begins to unravel. With an irritated sigh, Eito uses a hairband to tie it off and moves to respond to whoever has decided that they want to bother 'Nozomi' so early in the morning. Surely it couldn't be Takumi again?! Not after the way Eito had...left him. He has to have more tact than that.

"One moment!" As before, Eito flattens out his irritation and lets Nozomi's weak voice do most of the work for him. The knocking stops and the silence that ensues makes him suddenly feel oddly unsafe. Or, no, not unsafe so much as exposed. Trapped.

After all: Nozomi's hemoanima is not his own and she does not have Special Fortunetelling. Luck is now a crapshoot and he can't just assume that things will work out because he is beloved by fate. Anything can happen.

(Not that it will. The Special Defense Unit is full of bleeding hearts and people who care for Nozomi. If anyone dared lay a single finger on any of their precious comrades or friends they would pay dearly, even if it was one of their own. How...trite.)

On the other side of the door is Nozomi again. This time she at least managed to dress his body up in his usual outfit. Gloves, jacket, and glasses. It seems as though she, too, has come to dislike even the thought of accidentally coming into contact with the faintest hint of humanity's filth.

"Come on in, Aotsuki." If Eito sounds terse, he doesn't care. While they can't openly call each other by their names, saying his own surname with a voice that is not his own makes him bristle with barely-contained disgust. She steps inside and he closes and locks the door behind her. Then he turns on his heel and looks up at her, barely managing to fake a smile as she stands awkwardly by her desk. "I see you decided to get dressed."

A bright flush burns across his - her face, her eyes widening behind his glasses. She still is avoiding looking at him, but she's at least not flinching when he talks. "You, uh, your glasses are really strong."

"They do their job."

This manages to get her to look at him—almost disapprovingly, at that. "You might want to be careful with that."

"I know well enough that I could ruin my eyesight." And isn't that the point? To destroy his eyesight to obfuscate the way humanity truly looks? At least then he won't have to look at them any more. "But that isn't why you came by, is it?"

She hums. It's an answer and not an answer at the same time; perfectly passive, like Nozomi often is. When she speaks again, she sounds somehow more and less sure of herself all at once. "I figured we should discuss things some more."

"We should," he agrees without any inflection.

"And you look like you need help with your - my hair." He looks down to see that the poorly-done braid he had hastily wrapped off had come undone and the overall look wound up being less 'exhausted mistake' and more 'half-assed rush job', which is a blow to his already brittle pride.

"Can you stomach it?" He couldn't, were he in her place, but she isn't seeing what he saw so perhaps her version of the monster that is Nozomi Kirifuji is more palatable.

Though, judging by the way her lips and brow twisted into a knot about her nose, probably not. "I'll manage."

"Don't throw up down my back. I don't want to have to get dressed again." He sits down on the couch and watches as she circles him like he's some kind of dangerous animal. When she finally steels her nerves, she still timidly uses her gloved hands to undo his hard work and begins to section off his hair again.

"Sorry about that."

"About what?" He hates empty apologies almost as he hates humans. Vapid words that mean nothing, deflections to push blame about. If she's going to apologize, she had better mean it.

Behind him, Eito can feel her hands tense slightly. He has to fight the instinctual urge to rip away from her grasp and go for her throat. When she does speak, it's oddly measured and stilted, as though she doesn't understand how to explain herself but she also is holding back. "Losing my composure in the Gym when my - when Kurara, Kyoshika, and Omokage arrived for our morning routine. I shouldn't have left you alone to deal with them. They can be...a lot."

That was an understatement. "I managed well enough."

"I heard you left soon after I did." She fumbles a bit longer with braiding, obviously wanting to take off her gloves but also not wanting to.

"I had places to be, things to do." His deflection is sharper than it might need to be, but he isn't going to let Nozomi lecture him on cowardice. "Like getting dressed and understanding how your weapon works."

"Right." At least she has the sense to sound embarrassed about it. There's a moment of silence, punctuated with a sort of toothy grunting noise, and then she continues to braid in earnest. Judging by the speed and sudden increase in finesse, she must have removed at least one of her gloves with her teeth. "I can explain that now, if you want."

He hums, careful to not move his head. He doesn't want her touching him any longer than he has to and undoing all of her hard work would be counterproductive.

"It's a lever-action shotgun that can hold about five shots with one primed at a time. If you need some direction on how to feed and prime it I can draw you a diagram once your hair is done." He doesn't deign to answer her, too focused on the gentle way her hands avoid touching his bare skin, knuckles skimming past the shell of his ear by centimeters but never once making contact, the tension causing the hair on the back of his neck to stand on end. "I have an ammo pouch where I keep my extra ammunition that's stored with the activator for my armor and weapon in the War Room. It should have more than enough for a full battle without needing any kind of restock."

"What kind of ammunition?" He knows what she can offer in battle, he's been on the same front as her a couple times before, but the more detail he has the better. "I know you have the healing one—"

"There's two types of slugs: ampoule and dust." The ease at which she throws around terms makes him almost interested in her. If she knows her gun this well, what kind of life had she lived before she was conscripted into this war? Is she anything like Kurara, whose family is a major arms dealer, or Yugamu, whose family are all assassins? "The ampoule slugs are just what they sound like: they're a glass ampoule filled with a liquid that shatters on impact. The splash zone is pretty large, assuming the actual slug doesn't impact someone."

Having been on the receiving end of a healing ampoule more than once, Eito knows the feeling of a glass slug filled with liquid impacting his chest. Were it not for his hemoanima bolstering his recovery and the potion doing its work, he would have likely fractured something from the blunt force alone. He must make some kind of face because Nozomi lets out a sad little laugh.

"Lucky for you, the only other ampoule slug is the paralytic. Less spread if you hit someone with it, and the agent can work its way into the open wound caused by glass shards." Over, under, over, under. "The dust slug is exclusively the bolstering agent. It's a weaker form of the drug that Omokage made for us to drink but it has a pretty good spread. The fact that it can be inhaled is good too."

"And that...cloud thing?" He won't call it 'an ultimate' like Darumi and Gaku keep insisting, finding the term gauche at best and infantile at worst. "What of that?"

"It charges automatically." Her frankness is refreshing, in an odd way. "After the mechanism has finished distilling the healing liquid and filling a shell, you load it in, fire it into the air, and it aerosolizes the panacea in a large area of effect. Less useful than chugging it yourself but more useful than the ampoule slug."

"How long does it take before it's ready?"

"Anywhere from sixty to ninety seconds?" A long time in a fight. "But it runs independent of your actions. It's constantly refilling so you don't have to manually prepare it, just load it in and fire up."

"Hmm..."

Over, under, over, under.

He wants her hands off of him.

He grins and bears it like he always does.

"There is," he broaches the topic with a falsified hesitancy, "a way to do a ranged attack with my scythe."

"Is there?" He feels her hands tense in his hair, twist and pull slightly too hard. She fumbles, picks up where she left off and resumes her monotonous pattern. "How? I just assumed that your weapon was a solely close-ranged one. Melee, I mean."

"If you focus your hemoanima—the rush of combat surging through you—into the base of the scythe, you can inject your blood into the ground and manifest it outside of your body in jagged, muddy spires." Like fingers, like fangs, grabbing and biting at the enemy. A way to kill without closing distance. "It has a maximum range but overall is useful for when you're poorly positioned and feeling fatigued."

Eito feels Nozomi tie off the braid; senses the weight of the corded hair against his shoulder; hears her slip her gloves back on with a terse little sound of disgust—almost inaudible but for how close she is to him, likely not meant for anyone but herself. He tilts his chin down and looks at the finished braid, then turns to look at her.

"Thank you." It's like pulling teeth.

A naive, hopeful smile spreads across his - her face, something foreign and sincere. How cute; it thinks it's worth loving. How nauseating. "You're welcome." Beneath that effluent burst of gratitude, a thin slime of disgust lurks. He can hear it.

He's heard it in his own voice for weeks now.

Before either of them can speak further, the alarm sounds, proving Eito to be correct when he had assumed today wouldn't be without its incidents.

Eito can't breathe. Every muscle in his body locks in place, hands shaking with tremors he hates. He hates this, hates how everything narrows in on the sounds of the sirens—not the announcement itself, but the sirens—the world muffling around the edges until it's a tinny mess. His weak blood rushes in his ears, flees from his fingers and toes and other extremities, breathing choked and uneven. He can feel his weak heart hammer sledge against his ribs, his pulse a war drum his body demands he march in time to.

They're just sirens. He's heard them dozens of times before. Why is it now that he—?!

Thinking is a struggle amidst the haze of warning lights and klaxons, panic—and it is panic, isn't it? This is a panic attack that he is experiencing, a panic attack that he is fighting control of himself for—stealing his senses and buffeting him like he's a ship in a raging storm. He bites his lip, digs his nails into his arms and palms to try and give himself an anchor.

Focus. Focus. Focus! Stop panicking and just—!

In the hazy corner of his vision he watches as Nozomi staggers a bit and turns to see him in this weakened state.

Don't look at me. Don't look at me with those eyes, that piteous expression, you filthy beast. Turn away, stop looking at me!

Nozomi's body's panic refuses to let him go. He rages against the tide of her body's pathetic pulse, animalistic fury tearing through him, rage at his own impotence and at whatever had decided to shove him into this broken human shell in the first place. It's futile.

As the sound of the sirens fades—the lights flashing still, a reminder and call for anyone who had yet to notice the alert—Eito's hearing slowly comes back. In the tinny distance he can hear Nozomi speak using his voice, saying words of encouragement with sincerity he could never imitate.

"Deep breaths, even breaths. Match what I'm doing. In—" Oh. She's trying to coach him through the panic. "Out." She's making direct eye-contact with him over the rim of his glasses. She is looking at him and not pulling away because her desire to be helpful outweighs any of the disgust his cognitive disorder might induce in her.

"I'm fine." He pulls away from her, brushes his bangs to the side, and smooths his clothes down. "I'm—"

"Aotsuki, I—"

"I am fine." He snaps. She pulls away, looking hurt. "I just...let's go to the War Room before anyone gets any ideas."

For a moment it looks like she's going to talk about it, lips pursing, brows furrowing. Then she does the wise thing and lets go. "Okay."

The walk to the War Room is done in complete silence. Neither of them say a word. Eito buzzes with tension and an energy he wants to let out through violence. Thankfully, at least Nozomi's weapon is capable of doing that—even if the girl usually delegates herself to a supporting role as healer. Him choosing to be more aggressive than she usually is won't raise too many flags.

And, in another stroke of perfectly ordinary luck, Takumi is as late as always to the War Room so Eito can take a moment to familiarize himself with how everyone looks through Nozomi's twisted human vision.

After all: it wouldn't do if he froze up every time he needed to be near someone, especially during combat—or something akin to it.

The gathered members of the Special Defense Unit all look up at Nozomi and Eito as they enter the War Room, attention drawn by the sound of the door opening. Even so, their gazes leave fresh claw marks down his skin and he fights back a shiver of disgust. Then, as quickly as they looked up, their eyes wander again and they all go back to their inane pre-combat rituals and conversations or whatever else they're wasting their time on. Eito takes this moment to try and familiarize himself with the main campus members' appearances while everyone waits on Takumi to arrive.

Humanity, he's realizing, is quite beautiful if you've never seen them as they see themselves. It's likely a mating instinct, to find members of one's own species attractive, but his labeling them beautiful has little to do with romantic or sensual appeal and more to do with a literal qualifier. In the same way that an animal or a landscape or art can be beautiful, humans are beautiful because Eito has never been able to see anything other than their true monstrous nature.

To call them 'beautiful' isn't ignoring their horror, it's a fact; one that he can truly say he keeps separate from his own knowledge of their actual forms. The packaging might have changed, but they are still humans.

They still make him sick, only in a different way.

Like Kyoshika, Tsubasa is broad-shouldered and sturdy. Her hands and arms are covered in fine scars—both cuts and burns—that have long healed but remain behind as a reminder of her love of machines and the dangers therein. Her light hair contrasts with her darker skin, gold on brass, and when she smiles, her eyes crinkle delightedly. She's wearing some kind of small bag on her hip, playing with the strap nervously as she talks with Takemaru. Even so, she seems at ease, surrounded by her companions.

Takemaru is statuesque—something Eito could have assumed based on how often everyone mentioned how big and scary he is—and riddled with ancient looking wounds. Everything about him reminds Eito of pictures of sperm whales who had survived hundreds of attempts on their lives, hides tattered but continuing on. Even as he leaned casually against a wall and gestured with one hand, the other picking at something in his teeth, there wasn't anything outwardly threatening about him. He's majestic in the same way a lion is majestic, a proud boss yawning to show off his giant fangs.

Gaku is gnawing at his nails, long lashes framing his large eyes as he scans the room nervously. Despite—or in spite of—his attitude and general demeanor, he has the same kind of delicate, frail prettiness as Kurara does. Although, unlike Kurara's obviously toned arms, he looks like he shouldn't be capable of holding his heavy Class Weapon. Yet, when he petulant flips off Takemaru when he says something he disagrees with, Eito can spot calluses on his hands that indicate that he is a laborer, despite his refusal to do anything for free. A contradictory mess of untouched and broken that form a complete picture of his lifestyle written in the grooves between his ribs—visible when his shirt rides up as he languidly stretches.

Darumi's hair is as bright as Yugamu's—though less sky blue and more an oceanic cerulean that darkens at the roots—and forms ribbons and trails as she darts around the War Room. Her painted face is startling—she is one of the few who wears such heavy makeup—but there's a strange comfort to the skeletal teeth she painstakingly pencils at the corner of her mouth. Something familiar in a sea of new sensations. The metal in her face and ears glint as she dances about, eyes glimmering with catlike mischief, cackling laugh matching her appearance. Even so, Eito can't help but recognize a liar when he sees one; even stripped of his righteous eyes as he is, Darumi's laughter is as real as Nozomi's thin smile or his own gentle demeanor.

Shouma brings to mind an extinct breed of dog that used to exist hundreds of years ago. A bug-eyed, snub-nosed, brachyphilic mess of an animal whose health issues made them difficult to care for and whose extreme gene selection was walked back to something healthier before eventually owning a dog was so prohibitively expensive and regulated that niche breeds fell out of practice for sturdier and healthier animals. Something about his flat nose and large, unblinking, wet eyes combined with his short stature and standing off in a corner by himself reminds Eito of a photo of that dog breed, the wall-eyed thing ugly and adorable in a way that made him angry that humanity had caused such issues for something for no reasons aside from aesthetic preference and showmanship. Maybe the dog comparison is bolstered by his Class Weapon's shape, but it hardly matters in this moment.

After acquainting himself with the new faces, he turns to see what everyone else is doing while they all wait for Takumi, trying to quiet the fluttering remains of his borrowed body's traitorous panic.

Kyoshika and Kurara are off to the side having an animated discussion about something inane. Yugamu is lounging languidly across a chair as he watches the advancing troops on one of the monitors. Nozomi has stepped far away from anyone else, eyes flickering across the room as she, too, catalogs everyone's appearances so she isn't stymied by being surrounded by monsters.

If there's any consolation with regards to having to fight as Nozomi instead of himself, it's that Takumi likes to keep Nozomi close to himself—Eito too, oddly enough, though sometimes he's put on one of the other fronts—on the primary defensive line so he won't have to worry too much about being startled by more than one new face.

It's a pittance but—

Takumi thunders in, sweating slightly, and ducks his head in apology. "Got held up."

"Shall we?" Eito finds himself asking, forgetting for a brief moment that he is not himself.

No one comments on what must be a slightly out of character action on 'Nozomi's' behalf and instead just grabs their Infusers and quickly transforms. Eito, too, activates Nozomi's Artificial Class Armor and puts on the ammo pouch, pulling one red and five yellow slugs to load into her weapon. The bolstering dust slug is primed into the slide and the remaining paralytic ampoules are loaded for additional shots.

Eito is ready to splatter Invader guts and brains all over the quad, if only to purge the tension that crawls along his nervous system. He wants to feel in control. He wants to know if killing an enemy feels the same at range with a gun as it does in close quarters with his scythe.

They deploy and Eito quickly surveys the battlefield before determining that this is, at best, a scouting party for a later Commander attack. The Lesser Invaders outnumber the Greater Invaders of all types five-to-one, which means that this isn't a serious attack force.

He clicks his tongue in disappointment. Takumi looks at him strangely. "You okay?"

"Hm?" Oh. He must be wearing a sour expression. "Yes, I'm alright. Thanks for asking."

When he smiles, it's nearly blinding. Eito can almost see a halo behind his head, glinting against the headpiece of his Class Armor. Eito smiles back. "That's good. You looked...really bad earlier."

"I'm fine now." The less he talks to Takumi, the better.

On the other side of him, Eito watches as Nozomi lands, followed by Gaku. She flinches and puts some distance between them, fingers clenching and unclenching around her scythe with nervous tension.

He doesn't wait for the signal, body a coiled spring. Adrenaline surges and, when the first Invader crosses the line designating the Last Defense Academy's defensive zone, he launches himself forward into the cloud of bolstering agent he had shot at the ground in his path.

Nozomi's body might not have stamina, but it does have power and control. She's built a bit like a sprinting predator, which means she's actually fairly good at running in sharp bursts. With the bolstering agent in his weak, borrowed lungs, he closes distance with the advancing line and begins to empty his gun into the enemy.

First shot. The kick is deceptively strong but the power the weapon holds is well worth it. He's going to have to learn how to handle the striking against his shoulder. Firing it one-handed like he had with the bolstering agent won't be feasible in the long run if he wants to be accurate and also not sprain or break his wrist.

Second shot. The sturdy ampoule impacting a Lesser Invader's skull—caving it in and shattering into an explosion of glass, gore, blood, and paralytic—is just like fireworks. Glittering shards, brilliant crimson, black globs, and grey-pink chunks that are coated in fluids of various other colors that mark the Invaders as alien spray starburst on the battlefield. It's not quite the same as cutting them in half with the blade of his scythe but it isn't dissatisfactory. In fact, it's like a macabre painting, the distance enjoyable in it's own right.

Third shot. Someone—likely Takumi—is standing at his side, cutting away at the army surrounding them. That means that Nozomi and Gaku are hanging back, Gaku out of cowardice and strategy while Nozomi's reticence is likely borne from her new combative role and unfamiliarity with his weapon. Whatever, that doesn't matter to Eito in the moment. What matters is the adrenaline and relieving all his pent-up aggression without raising any flags.

Fourth shot. He dodges one of the giant Greater Invader's large fists and watches as the paralytic does its work. The beast halts, gaping wounds vomiting blood down the front of its chest and out of its neck. Before Eito can fire on it a second time—or strike it with the butt of his weapon—Takumi lunges forward and skewers the thing through the eye-socket, his burning-bright blade disappearing up to the guard in the thing's skull before withdrawing with a wet sucking noise. The beast drops to the ground and a myriad of Lesser Invaders swarm over it like ravenous ants only to be cut down by Takumi's wide swings.

(It would be so easy to 'accidentally' hit Takumi and let him die.)

(It wouldn't be worth it. It wouldn't have any staying power. He'd just be scooped up, put together, and deployed again without any consequences.)

(It would only draw attention to himself.)

Fifth shot. The flying Greater Invader drops to the ground as its senses leave it and this time Eito manages to be the one to finish it off. The sensation of its strange, soft skull caving under the wide butt of his weapon is different than using his scythe, but certainly pleasant. He just could do without needing to wipe off the remains before he shoulders the gun again. Getting any liquids on his clothes is awful and irritating and he would rather die than touch anything that came from these things.

He racks the weapon to clear the slide and quickly backpedals to reload; five more paralytic ampoules with one bolstering slug primed. Lesser Invaders claw at his retreating form but he kicks to the side and fires off his second slug of the bolstering agent, taking a deep breath before jumping into the fray again.

A beep at his waist tells him that the aerosolized panacea is ready. He ignores it to fire at the enemy some more.

He can hear, through the haze of combat sounds and his own pulse, the calls of the rest of the Special Defense Unit barking across the open comms unit. Idle chitchat and back and forth that barely registers in his awareness past a mild annoyance.

"Aotsuki, behind with gun!" Followed by the sound of Maruko's weapon unloading a pint of his blood into a clump of Invaders.

"On your left you pea-brained moron!" Kurara, seconds before Kyoshika makes a pained noise. "What the fuck did I say?!"

"Let's fuckin' go!" The screaming sound of Takemaru's bike and his booming laughter.

"Defenses breached, Kurara! Goin' to halt the progression." Yugamu's calm voice didn't betray how hectic their front truly must be.

"Park your fat ass in front of my goddamn walls and do something useful you waste of fucking space!" Kurara again, likely to Shouma.

"O-on it!" And his predictable reply.

"Tsubasa-dono! A pick-me-up?" Kyoshika plaintively begs.

"Got you covered!" Despite it all, Tsubasa sounds composed.

Eito, meanwhile, is happily blowing the brains out of every Invader in his path. Holes in their heads, in their abdomens, in every available part of them. Eyeballs knocked from sockets, shards of glass gouging out and spilling organs across the ground, even limbs flopping around like severed octopus tentacles. It's cathartic. He needs this.

He needs to feel in control.

"Kirifuji! We need aid over here!" Behind him—not even across the comms but physically behind him—Takumi shouts for his attention. Gaku moans around what sounds like a mouthful of blood and he can hear Nozomi choking and coughing.

Eito turns to look at the call for aid, unsure how to proceed or if he even wants to help them.

Gaku and Nozomi have been hit hard by one of the Greater Invaders—one of the large shield breaker ones—and it looks like Nozomi might have some broken ribs by the way she's doubled over on herself as she staggers to her feet. Gaku, on the other hand, is very visibly dealing with a smashed-in face, a few loose teeth spilling from his bloodied mouth as he sobs. Nozomi props herself up on her scythe and Gaku is trying to push himself upright while Takumi fends off the hordes alone to protect his fallen comrades.

In front of Eito, the final wave advances on their front. Behind him, two of his unit are badly injured and the third is rapidly losing ground.

He could help them. That's what Nozomi's job is on the battlefield: she's the medic. And he is, for all intents and purposes, Nozomi. He is the Special Defense Unit's medic. He should help them.

He doesn't want to.

(He doesn't have a choice.)

Removing the filled shell from the device on his waist—and noting the way a second automatically feeds into the mechanism at the base from a gravity-fed rail system towards the top—he racks his gun again and feeds the panacea into the slide. Then he angles his shot and fires.

The shell flies in a wide arc. It bursts after a brief moment and a large cloud of greenish dust rains down over the area that Nozomi, Gaku, and Takumi are in. As that happens, with a mild noise of irritation, he cocks his weapon and leaps into the fray, paralyzing the closest Greater Invaders with zero wasted movement. His very presence seems to bolster the healing ability of the panacea he had just covered them in, Takumi's fatigue leaving him in time for him to quickly decapitate the Invaders Eito had incapacitated. Nozomi's breathing evens out and Gaku scrubs at his nose with the back of his hand, blood painting his gloves with snotty maroon streaks as he hoists his gun up again.

"Th-thanks, Kirifuji." Gaku doesn't even make a pass at him as he fires a direct line into some nearby Invaders, the hemoanima returning to his body with interest. "That fucking sucked!"

"Sorry it took me so long, Maruko." He isn't. He would have let them die if it hadn't been an un-Nozomi thing to do. "I'm not used to being a frontline fighter but I wanted to try and—"

"Stop kowtowing to the fucking pleb and just kill the damn Invaders! I want to actually have a moment to breathe!"

"Shut the hell up, Oosuzuki!" Gaku snaps at her over the comms. "I just got my teeth punched out of my goddamn face. Let me bitch a little!"

"I can remove the rest of them if you like," Yugamu offers. Judging by Gaku's shudder, the idea makes him nauseous and more than a little upset. "Or I can just kill you and let the Revive-o-Matic put you together with all thirty-two of them intact."

"Guys!" Takumi interrupts. "Focus up!"

"Yeah," Tsubasa adds, "our side is almost clear so if anyone needs some help, I'm running aid."

"Tsubasa Crazy Taxi Service, featuring the Hit and Run style gameplay you all know and love!" Darumi's loud excitement is so sharp that everyone flinches. "Mulch them, gib them, grind them into your undercarriage and against your bumper and grill! Extra points if the pedestrian is a child!"

Tsubasa stifles a heave, the comms cutting off as she manually mutes herself. Eito's attention quickly snaps back to combat as he blows the top off a flying Greater Invader, the disk lower half skidding across the dirt and leaving a wet smear as it goes. Disgusting.

Takumi cleaves a cluster of Lesser Invaders in twain and calls out, "Headcount?"

"We have seven on our end, mostly smaller Greater!" Kurara barks, having assigned herself the lead on their front.

"Two clumps of Darumarr and dropping!" Darumi chirps from her end, using her and Gaku's names for the footsoldiers.

"Down to a handful, mix of Greater and Lesser!" Takumi impales one of the ranged Greater Invaders through the chest. "Let's finish this!" With a cry, he strikes at the remaining Invaders in his reach, pulping them like meat in a blender.

To his side, Gaku braces himself and aims upwards. "Awright! Let's fucking go! Eat shit and die!" A rain of his hemoanima, sharpened into lethal spires, impales what few Invaders Takumi's attack didn't destroy, as he laughs hysterically with blood loss and his usual feverish battle-high.

In the distance, echoing across the open comms, Eito can hear Shouma yelling as a crimson laser of pure hemoanima obliterating the remaining troops on his front. And, on the third front, Darumi's mic picks up the sound of Takemaru's engine revving and Tsubasa's missiles detonating, misting the remains.

Silence follows. Eito's weak pulse stills. His breathing slows. Combat is over.

"Gen check?" Takumi asks.

"Seventy-six and solid," Kurara replies without a second's delay. "Hour's charge at worst."

"Any manual repairs needed?"

"None that I can tell!" Tsubasa finally joins back in on the conversation, voice raw from likely vomiting from stress. "Though the quad is pretty messy."

"Let the fucking drones clean up," Kurara sniffs. "I'm going to take a fucking bath. If any of you perverts try anything I'll castrate you with a fucking plastic spoon."

"Man," Gaku whines, whistling around his missing teeth, "I'm starving again but my jaw..."

"Just die!" Darumi offers, with no tact and too much delight. "That'll fix it!"

"Fuck no!" The coward predictably shoots back. "I like not being dead, thank you!"

"Your teeth won't just grow back," Yugamu points out, "and I can make it so painless you'll barely even realize you're gone."

"I said no! Christssake...fucking freak."

As everyone else breaks down into chatter and cross-talk, Eito just looks out at the mass of corpses on the battlefield and breathes. In—mouth watering with the precursor to bile and the taste of blood—and out—lungs weak and barely able to alleviate the choking hunger for more oxygen. In—red puddles beneath comic book splatterpunk corpses, viscera dark and horrible in contrast, wartime pop art made manifest—and out—in his mind's eye he tries to remember what the Special Defense Unit looked like before he lost his ability to see the truth, the ghost of their monstrous forms overwritten by the way they look to everyone else. In—he hates this—and out—he feels better though.

"Nozomi?" His own soft voice hoarsely grabs his attention; he flinches against his will. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine, Aotsuki. Thanks for asking but there's no need to worry." Is he still on open mic? Is she on open mic? He refuses to look at her in this moment, too focused on the carnage they wreaked on the invading forces and the drones grabbing corpses to drop them into the Wall of Fire, incinerating them. If he looks at her, if he makes eye-contact, then the fact of the matter will settle further and further into his borrowed bones. He needs to not think about it.

This isn't healthy but neither is her body.

How many days will he have to exist as 'Nozomi'?

(He wants to blow Nozomi's brains out, just to see what his own corpse looks like. Curiosity, surely, and maybe also rage.)

"You were certainly...aggressive..." The judgement in her voice is pointed, thorns against his skin. Irritating.

"I don't like sirens," his answer is coded and layered, "so I wanted to blow off some steam."

"You—"

"Is there a point to this, Aotsuki?" Do you have anything to say that can't be said in private? Is this the fucking time for it? "I'm a little tired."

Irritation is chased by resignation, exhaustion holding up the rear. She is so expressive with his face and he hates it. All those years learning how to school his expressions and she's failing to put any effort into it, failing at playing at being him. "What time would be good for you?"

He smiles at her with her teeth but not her eyes. "Try tomorrow. Lunchtime?" He has to train with Nozomi's friends in the morning. Breakfast will replenish his energy. He needs to make more shells for her weapon. His itinerary is packed. "We can chat while we eat." And nobody will be suspicious about the two of them spending so much time together. Nobody will look twice at them choosing to hang out in the Cafeteria.

"Of course. I look forward to it." The way the words squeeze out of her mouth makes it very clear that she would rather get their discussion over with now. Tough.

"It's a date!" The word burns coming out. He hates that this is something she would say, chipper coat of fake cheer toxic on his tongue. "Goodnight, Aotsuki."

"Sleep well, Nozomi."

His dinner tastes like ash and not even a boiling hot shower can make him feel clean. Misery wraps fingers around his throat and chokes any comfort from his body.

He is, after all, wearing an ill-fitted suit. One he can't strip out of, one sewed against his soul. It itches, burns, and he wishes he had his scythe so he could carve it away from his senses and find some modicum of relief.

Nozomi's pathetic hemoanima steals heat from her weak body as he lays in bed and begs fate that his dreams will be nothing.

—

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.