Rumination

—

You find it while he's still in the kitchen.

You aren't looking for anything. You are just — looking. The way you look at things in spaces that belong to other people, cataloguing without meaning to, your eyes moving across his shelves with the idle curiosity of someone who reads spines the way other people read faces.

And then you stop.

It's on the third shelf. Tucked between two larger volumes like it belongs there, like it has always been there, like there is nothing remarkable about it at all.

The cosmology essays.

Same edition as yours. Same slim spine, same slightly faded title. But where yours is clean — you've had it for months and treated it carefully, the way you treat things that matter — this one is worn. The spine creased from being held open too many times. The cover soft at the corners in the way of something that has been carried and consulted and loved in the particular rough way of something you keep coming back to.

You look at it for a long moment.

You look at the copy in your bag.

The third chapter is wrong, he said, the day he gave it to you. Setting it on the counter. Stepping back. Someone recommended this to me once. I thought of you when I found it.

You thought of you when I found it.

You reach out and pull his copy from the shelf.

You open it.

The third chapter is annotated.

Not heavily — just a few marks, a line here, a question in the margin there, the notations of someone who read it carefully and knew exactly where it went wrong before they finished the page. The handwriting is precise. Deliberate. Familiar in the way his handwriting has become familiar over the past weeks — controlled, economical, the hand of someone who is always very careful about how they present themselves on the page.

He read this before he gave it to you.

He already knew the third chapter was wrong.

You stand there with both copies in your hands — his worn one and your clean one — and feel something shift in your chest. Not dramatically. Not the sharp wrongness of something breaking. More like the slow wrongness of something that has been slightly off the whole time finally rotating into the light where you can see it properly.

I thought of you when I found it.

He didn't find it.

He already had it.

—

You put the copy back exactly where it was.

You go back to the couch.

You open the notebook.

Not to the stellar formation page — not yet. Just to something in the middle, something neutral, something that doesn't ask anything of you. You are very careful about your face when he comes back in with the tea, setting it in front of you with the quiet efficiency of someone who has done this many times, and you smile and say thank you and wrap both hands around the mug.

You wait until he's settled beside you.

Until the apartment is quiet and warm and everything looks exactly the way it always looks.

Then you turn to the back of the notebook. Casually. The way you turn pages when you're just browsing. Your eyes moving over the physics, over the proofs, over the two sets of your own handwriting that you have stopped being able to explain and started simply accepting.

You find Mahito's annotation.

notable consistency across iterations.

You have read this line before. Many times. You have always filed it away under: physics terminology. A note about variables. Something technical that you didn't fully understand but assumed made sense in context.

You look at it now and it doesn't feel like physics.

"This line," you say. Lightly. Conversationally. You turn the notebook toward him slightly. Not accusatory — just curious, just the way you'd ask about any annotation in any book. "I've always meant to ask. What does iterations mean here? In context."

He looks at it.

That's what you notice first — not his answer, but the quality of the pause before it. A fraction of a second. Barely anything. The kind of pause that could mean he's simply thinking, the normal beat of someone pulling up a piece of information.

Except you have asked him spontaneous questions before. You have caught him mid-thought and redirected him and asked him things he couldn't have anticipated and watched his brain retrieve the answer in real time, the slight unfocus of genuine searching.

This isn't that.

This is the pause of someone selecting.

"It's a physics term," he says. "Referring to repeated cycles of a calculation. The consistency of a result across multiple runs." He looks up from the notebook. His expression is exactly right — mild, informative, the face of someone answering a simple question. "Whoever wrote it was probably noting the stability of a variable. That it held across different iterations of the same equation."

You look at him.

You smile.

"Right," you say. "That makes sense."

And it does make sense.

That's the thing. The answer is perfectly reasonable. Technically accurate. Exactly what a physics annotation would mean.

And yet.

The way it arrived. Too smooth. Too complete. The answer of someone who has thought about this question before — who has prepared for this question before — who knew, somewhere in the architecture of this conversation, that it might come.

You look back at the notebook.

Notable consistency across iterations.

You turn the page.

—

You don't say anything else about it.

You talk about other things — a book you've been reading, something that happened at the shop, the lecture series he mentioned wanting to take you to next month. He is warm. Attentive. His whole attention on you in that way he has, that quality of focus that has always made you feel like the most interesting thing in the room.

You have loved that about him.

You are sitting with it differently tonight.

You think about the cosmology book on his shelf. About the wear on the spine. About I thought of you when I found it and what it means now that you know he already had it. You think about the coffee he brought you black with no sugar before you'd told him that's how you take it. You think about the glasses, slightly tilted, and your hand moving toward them before you decided to move it.

You think about how much he seems to already know.

You are not ready to follow that thought to its conclusion.

You are getting there.

—

At some point the conversation winds down into the particular quiet of an evening that doesn't want to end yet. You are sitting sideways on the couch, legs tucked under you, close enough that the space between you has stopped being space. The notebook is on the cushion beside you. The tea is long gone cold.

You look at him.

At the stitching.

You have looked at it before — noticed it that first Tuesday, filed it away, stopped registering it the way you stop registering anything that becomes familiar. But tonight something makes you look properly. The deliberate lines of it. The way it traces his face like someone sat down and decided exactly where it should go.

"Does it hurt?" you ask. "The stitching."

He looks at you. Something in his expression recalibrates — the slight adjustment of someone who was expecting a different question. "No," he says.

"Did it ever?"

"I don't remember."

You reach up slowly — giving him time to stop you, the way you always give people time to stop you before you touch something that might not be yours to touch — and your fingers find the edge of one line. Just tracing. Just following where it goes.

He goes very still.

Not the controlled stillness you have come to associate with him — the deliberate quality of someone managing their reactions. Something different. Something that happens before management. Before calculation.

Just — still.

You don't notice the difference. You have no baseline for his unguarded face. To you it just looks like a quiet moment. Intimate. His eyes on yours.

"I like them," you say simply. "They look like something that was decided."

He doesn't say anything.

You lean in slowly and press your lips to one of the lines. Light. Gentle. The way you do things that feel right before you've decided they're right.

He doesn't move.

You pull back and look at him and there is something in his expression you have never seen before — not the warmth he gives you, not the precise attention, not any of the things you have come to know as his. Something underneath all of that. Something that has no performance in it.

You shift in his lap slightly and look at him properly.

"Hey," you say.

"Hey," he says. Quieter than usual.

And something about the quiet of it — the specific unguarded quality of it, the way it arrived without being calibrated — makes you say the thing you didn't know you were going to say.

"Too many people think I'm a concept," you say.

You don't look at him when you say it. You look at the stitching under your fingers instead — following one line, then another. Like the words are easier if you're looking somewhere else.

He doesn't say anything.

He doesn't move.

"Like I complete them," you continue, quieter. "Or I'm going to make them feel alive somehow." You stop. The words sit there for a moment, slightly unfinished, and you almost leave them that way.

His hand shifts — just slightly, just enough — settling warmer against your back.

You look up.

"I'm just a person looking for my own peace of mind," you say. "I don't want anyone assigning me theirs."

Silence.

He is looking at you with an expression you have never seen on his face before and cannot name. Not the clinical interest. Not the studied warmth. Not any version of Mahito you have met in any of the Tuesdays and lectures and closing times since he first walked through your door.

Just — a face. Just a person. Looking at you like you have said something that landed somewhere he didn't expect to have a somewhere.

His hand comes up.

Not the precise gesture. Not the chin tip or the calculated tenderness. Just his hand, slightly uncertain, finding your face the way hands find things in the dark — without a plan, just reaching.

He kisses you.

And it is different.

Not better or worse. Just — different. No architecture to it. No studied sequence. Just him, slightly unmoored, kissing you like he forgot for a moment to be careful about it.

You kiss him back.

And when you pull back to look at him his expression is still that unnameable thing and he looks at you for a long moment and then says, very quietly:

"...You're weird."

You laugh.

It surprises you — the realness of it, the way it comes out before you decide — and he looks almost startled by the sound of it and then something in his face does something that is not quite a smile and is the closest thing to one you have ever seen from him that wasn't deployed.

"I know," you say.

—

He is unhurried in a way that undoes something in you.

His hands find your waist first. Then the curve of your back. Unhurried, the way he does everything — moving like he has already decided there is nowhere else to be. His mouth finds the curve of your shoulder, the inside of your wrist, the place beneath your jaw that makes your breath catch before you decide to let it.

Being watched by him is something you have to breathe through.

He is thorough.

This is a thing he is — thorough, unhurried, present in the specific way of someone who pays attention because the data is interesting. He catalogues the pressure-mapping of your responses. The sounds you make versus the ones you swallow. The way your hands move when you stop deciding where to put them.

He becomes interested in something else.

You make a sound you didn't mean to make.

Your hand comes up automatically — the instinct to manage, to contain — and he moves it away. Gently. Without discussion. Just — no. His eyes find yours after and there is nothing performative in the way he looks at you and you feel the last of the careful distance go.

She is trying not to perform. She keeps trying and keeps failing and each time she fails she looks at him like she doesn't know whether to be embarrassed or relieved.

He finds the project of —

He doesn't finish that thought.

He says your name.

Not to direct you. Not calibrated. Just your name, low, like it was there and he wanted to say it and decided to. You feel the difference between being called and being named and something opens in your chest before you can close it.

He keeps moving before either of you can sit with that.

—

This is where it shifts.

His hands move and your hips follow without permission and the sound you make this time you don't try to swallow — and he makes a low sound in response that tells you he noticed. That he has been waiting for you to stop managing yourself. The unhurried quality is still there but underneath it something has caught, something has tipped from deliberate into necessary, and you feel it in the shift of his weight, in the way his hands find your hips like he has stopped thinking about finding you and is simply there.

Something shifts.

He is aware of it before he can name it — the quality of the attention changing, the data collection falling away, and underneath it something that has no clinical framework. You stop managing and he stops noting and you are simply here and he finds that he—

He doesn't finish that thought either.

He says your name again. Not the first time — not that careful deliberate choice. This time it arrives without permission. Just your name, in the particular register of something true.

He does not file it.

—

At some point he stills.

His hands find your face — both of them, just holding, the way you hold something you are being careful with — and he looks at you. Not assessing. Not cataloguing. Just looking, with the specific quality of someone who has decided to be present for something rather than observe it from a distance.

Okay? he says. Again. The same word as the beginning of the night but different now — quieter, lower, the question underneath the question.

You look at him.

There is something in your chest that has been closed for a long time. Not grief exactly. Not longing exactly. Just — the specific fear of being somewhere completely and having it matter and losing it anyway. The fear that lives underneath wanting things.

He sees it.

You don't know how. You don't know when he learned to read you well enough to see the things you don't say. But he sees it and he doesn't name it and he doesn't move away from it — he just holds your face and waits, the particular patience of someone who has decided you are worth waiting for, and slowly, slowly, he eases you down onto him.

And the fear goes.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just — with each slow careful inch of him, the thing that was tight in your chest loosens, and you breathe out, and he watches your face the whole time, and somewhere in the watching he stops being the man who walked into your bookstore on a Tuesday with a prepared answer for every question.

He is just here.

So are you.

He watches your face.

This is the thing he cannot file — not the sounds, not the data, not the pressure-mapping of your responses. Your face. The way the fear moves through it and then goes. The specific moment when you exhale and something in you arrives somewhere and your hands find his arms and hold on.

He stays still until you do.

He has not prepared for wanting you to be okay.

He does not examine this.

You are still somewhere slightly outside yourself when your hands move.

Not deciding to — just moving, the way your hands always move toward things worth knowing. Your fingers find the stitching at his shoulder and follow it without thinking, tracing the line of it, and then your hand moves further and you realize —

It doesn't stop.

The stitching continues. Across his collarbone. Down. Deliberate lines mapped across his body the same way they trace his face — like someone sat down and decided exactly where each one should go. All of it intentional. All of it chosen.

Your hand stills.

You look up at him.

He is watching you with that expression — the one that has no performance in it — and something in the looking-at-each-other goes very quiet and very present.

His hips move.

—

Your legs are shaking at some point and you laugh — breathless, uncontained — and he goes still for just a second.

Then he laughs too.

Quietly. Once. His forehead dropping to your shoulder. Like it surprised him.

He laughs. He doesn't try to file it.

You look at each other after. Neither of you mentions it.

You cry later — not from sadness, just the specific overwhelm of being somewhere completely. It arrives before you can catch it. He catches it. His mouth pressed to your hair, his arms pulling you in, and you turn your face toward him without deciding to — the involuntary lean of something that doesn't know it's doing it.

He says it low, into the space just beside your ear, in the particular quiet after —

"I won't assign you as mine anymore."

You go still.

The words land somewhere deep, somewhere that doesn't have an immediate response. You feel yourself beginning to turn toward them — to pull the thread, to ask what it means and where it came from and why it sounds like something that cost him something —

His hips move and your mind goes somewhere else entirely and the question dissolves before it arrives and you are here, just here, and later never comes.

You laugh one more time before you go under.

Call him weird again.

He lets you.

—

Later, he lies awake.

The lamp is still on — you always fall asleep before you mean to and he stopped reaching for the switch at some point without noting when. His arm is under you. The pillow beneath his head is yours, brought over three weeks ago because his were too flat, you said. The comforter is also yours. He allowed both. For logical reasons.

That is what he told himself.

He looks at the ceiling.

He thinks about the stitching. Your fingers following the lines like his face was worth knowing. Your hand going still when you realized it didn't stop there. The way you looked up at him after — not with alarm, not with hesitation. Just — oh. there is more of this than I thought.

On his third shelf there is a cosmology book with a worn spine. On his couch there is a notebook that has passed through more hands than either of you know. On his kitchen counter there is a brand of tea he started buying because you mentioned once, in passing, that you liked it.

He did not note that down.

He has not noted down a number of things lately. The list is getting longer.

He looks at you.

Satoru Gojo, he thinks, very quietly, in the particular dark of a night with no one to observe him —

had a good choice.

He does not write it down.

He does not turn off the lamp.

· · ·

← viii. perturbation  ·  ↳ masterlist  ·  next →

a/n: hi hello 🤍 i'm not good at writing smut so i did not. but i hope this chapter still delivered — lmk what you think!! also thank you guys so much for the support on my one-shots, i've been cheesing all week despite my exams absolutely kicking me 😭 dead reckoning is so close to its next arc and i cannot wait for you guys to see what's coming. stay tuned 🪐

The math is simple. The math is the worst thing.

Your class level is Bronze. This is something you discover on day two, when the cafeteria on deck seven dispenses your breakfast — a protein bowl that tastes like nothing, grainy and grey and nutritionally sufficient in the way that a thing can be sufficient without being anything else — and the system cheerfully informs you that your daily allotment has been logged.

Daily allotment.

You look at the protein bowl. You eat it. You eat it the next day. And the day after that. You learn the four options available to Bronze class passengers: the protein bowl, the grain porridge, the nutrition bar, and the coffee. The coffee is acceptable. You drink a great deal of it. You eat the protein bowl every morning and you think about your classroom — the way it smelled, chalk and something sweet from the bakery two doors down, the noise of twenty-six eight-year-olds all existing at once — and you think about the colony planet and the schools that will need teachers and the children who will be born into a new gravity and need someone to show them what learning feels like —

You think: I have to survive this.

The bots are not company. You know this the way you know the difference between a photograph of a person and a person — technically similar, fundamentally not. But the silence is very large.

"Good morning," you say, to the service bot on deck seven.

"Good morning," it says. "The usual?"

"Yes," you say.

You talk to the bots. Not because it helps, exactly. But because the sound of your own voice, even unanswered, is better than the hum of the ship filling every silence. You tell the bot on deck seven about your classroom. You tell the navigation bot about the lesson plans you've started writing in the ship's open documents — all of them, every grade, every subject, adaptations for colony conditions you've been researching because you need something to do with your hands, with your mind, with the eighty-nine years —

The bots listen. They do not respond. You keep talking anyway.

By month three you have mapped every corridor your Bronze access permits. By month five you have read every accessible book in the ship's library and started on the technical manuals. By month eight you have learned more about the Aether's propulsion system than you ever wanted to know, and that beyond the Bronze decks there are Gold decks and Platinum decks and something called Founder Class that isn't listed in the public manifest at all — just a blank space where information should be.

By the end of the first year, the silence has a weight and a texture and a specific quality that you know the way you know your own heartbeat.

You are so tired.

Tired in the way that has no practical solution. That lives underneath everything. That accumulates like the distance between here and there.

You are tired of being the only heartbeat awake in a vessel of five thousand sleeping people.

You find him at the end of the first year.

You are not looking for him. You are doing what you do most afternoons — walking the operational levels, the parts of the ship that run the running, because your Bronze access technically doesn't cover these corridors but the maintenance panels respond to a sequence you found in a technical manual and you stopped feeling guilty about that around month four —

The hibernation deck is long and very quiet.

Five thousand pods. Five thousand people sleeping through the distance, through the dark — and you walk among them sometimes because the sound of the environmental systems keeping them alive is the closest thing to the sound of breathing you have found on this ship —

You find him in row forty-seven. You stop walking.

He is — you stop.

He is very beautiful.

This is an objective observation. You are a person who has not seen another face in a year and you are capable of objective observation and the face in pod 4716 is, objectively, the most beautiful thing you have seen on this ship including the stars. Sharp jaw. White hair, strange and striking even in sleep. The specific quality of someone whose face in stillness still suggests movement, intelligence, a mind that doesn't stop even here —

The pod's classification panel reads differently from every other pod you've passed. No class designation. No passenger number. Just:

Gojo Satoru. Aether Founder. Systems Architect.

Priority: ORIGIN.

You don't know what Origin means. You've never seen that designation.

You stand there for a long time. You tell yourself you are just looking.

You come back the next day. And the day after that.

You tell yourself there is no decision being made here, slowly, day by day, in the specific loneliness of someone who has been talking to bots for a year —

On the three-hundred-and-seventy-eighth day, you open his pod.

✦   ii. perihelion   ✦

He doesn't wake up gracefully.

You had prepared for this — for the disorientation, the physical difficulty of coming back from that kind of cold. You had not prepared for the sound. The gasping, terrible sound of a person being pulled from very deep water, and then he is upright and coughing and you are there with a glass of water and your heart is doing something very loud in your chest —

"What," he says.

"Oh—" Your voice comes out with exactly the right amount of surprise you had been practicing with. "Oh, thank god — I heard something from this corridor, I thought it was a system malfunction—" You gesture at the pod, at him, at the vague idea of a person who has just unexpectedly woken up. "Are you okay? Do you know where you are?"

He stares at you. His eyes are not quite focusing. He takes the water. He drinks it. He looks around the hibernation bay with the specific expression of someone running a great many calculations at once.

"I'm on the Aether," he says.

"Yes," you say.

"I'm awake." "Yes." "I shouldn't be awake." Not to you — just the fact, stated. The way you'd state a mathematical impossibility. "My pod is the most secure unit on this ship. I designed the failsafe systems for this entire deck. There is no scenario in which—" He stops. Looks at his hands. Looks at you. "Who are you?"

You tell him your name. "What class?" "Bronze," you say.

Something moves across his face. "How long have you been awake?"

You pause for just the right amount of time. "A year," you say. "My pod malfunctioned about a year ago."

The expression that crosses his face is not pity. Something more complicated — faster, more internal, the expression of someone absorbing information and immediately beginning to do something about it.

"A year," he says. "Alone." "Yes." "What have you been eating."

You blink. Of all the questions — "The Bronze cafeteria. Deck seven. Protein bowls, mostly."

His expression does something that you will later recognize as the specific face he makes when someone has told him about a system that is deeply, personally offensive to him.

"Protein bowls," he says flatly. "And coffee," you say. "The coffee is—" "Come with me," he says.

His name is Gojo Satoru and he overrides your class restriction in approximately three seconds.

Not the upper dining hall's door panel — your entire Bronze designation, lifted, replaced with something that doesn't have a name in the public system. He does it from the ship's main console on the operational level, his hands moving across the panels with the ease of someone who doesn't navigate systems so much as speak to them, and when he's done he turns to you and says: "You can go anywhere on the ship now."

You stare at him.

"The class system," he says, and his voice does something — flat, controlled, the control of someone pressing down on something that wants very much to surface — "was not my design. It was my business partner's. Suguru thought a tiered revenue structure would make the mission financially viable. I thought it was obscene. I needed his funding." He looks at the panel. "You've been on this ship for a year eating protein bowls because of a decision I made in a negotiation I've regretted since the day I signed it."

"That's not—" you start. "It's not your fault," he says. "It's not particularly your problem either. But I can fix it so I'm fixing it." He looks at you with those eyes, which are, now that they're focused, an extremely unsettling shade of pale. "Are you hungry?"

You laugh. It comes out slightly broken — the first real laugh in a year, and it sounds like it — and he watches you with an expression you can't read yet and won't be able to read for months.

"Yes," you say. "I'm very hungry." "Good," he says. "I know where the real food is."

He is scared.

You see it underneath the competence, underneath the easy authority of someone who knows every system on this ship — the specific fear of a man who has understood something he cannot fix. His pod should not have malfunctioned. He says this in pieces, over the following days, while he runs diagnostics and checks failsafes and sits in the navigation deck talking to the ship's consciousness with the quiet focused voice he uses when he's thinking hardest —

"Someone tampered with it," he says one morning, over breakfast. Real breakfast, upper level, eggs and coffee that he makes wrong and doesn't know he makes wrong yet.

"Who would—" "Suguru wouldn't." Immediately. Certain. Then, less certain: "Suguru wouldn't." He looks at his coffee. "There are people who didn't want me on this colony. People who thought my research was dangerous. Who thought a neurologist with my access to the colonist population was—" He stops. "It doesn't matter now."

You look at him across the table. The stars move past the window.

"What were you going to do there?" you ask. "On the colony."

He looks up. Something in his face does the thing you will come to know very well — a brightness, brief and real, the light switched on behind the pale eyes — and he tells you.

He tells you about the blank page. About what it means to study a human brain adapting to a new gravitational constant, a new atmospheric composition, the first generation of children born into a different sky. He tells you about the research he's been building toward for twenty years, the thing that required a new planet because Earth had given him everything it had and he needed more variables, more unknowns —

"You needed a place where everything was a question," you say. He looks at you. "Yes," he says. "Exactly that."

"I understand that," you say. "That's why I wanted to teach there. The first children. The ones who won't know any other sky — I wanted to be there when they start asking questions about it."

He is quiet for a moment. "What grade?" he asks. "Eight-year-olds," you say. "Roughly. Whatever that maps to on a new planet."

"Eight-year-olds," he says, in the tone of someone who finds this both baffling and somehow correct. "They're the best age," you say. "Old enough to have real questions. Young enough to still think the answers are magic."

He looks at you for a long moment. "Tell me about your lesson plans," he says.

✦   iii. accretion   ✦

He shows you the ship.

This is how it happens — gradually, the way all the most important things happen, in increments so small each one is dismissible. He takes you through the atmospheric processors first, because you ask about the hum — it changes pitch sometimes, you tell him, around what I think is 3am, it drops slightly and then comes back — and his eyes do the thing and he takes you to deck twelve and shows you the seasonal variation cycle, the way the ship mimics Earth's atmospheric rhythms to keep five thousand sleeping bodies calibrated.

"The human body needs rhythm," he explains, his hands moving over the panel. "Even unconscious. Even in hibernation. It needs to know that time is passing in a way it recognizes. Without the cycle the immune response degrades, the circadian architecture collapses—" He glances at you. "Sorry. Too technical?" "No," you say. "Keep going."

He keeps going.

He shows you the navigation deck and the star maps and traces the route with one long finger — the arc between here and there, the specific trajectory that adds two years to the journey — "a radiation belt," he says, "most people didn't notice the adjustment, they were already asleep, but I spent six months calculating the safest path and Suguru tried to override it because the shorter route was cheaper to fuel—" "What did you do?" "I told him I would dismantle the navigation consciousness I'd built if he changed the route." "Would you have?" He looks at you. "No," he says. "But he didn't know that."

You laugh. He watches you laugh the way he's been watching you — the specific quality of his attention when you do something he finds not surprising, exactly. Something more like confirming.

He shows you the observation deck last. You've found it on your own — of course you have, you've mapped every corridor — but you've never been here with someone else, and being here with someone else makes it different. The glass in every direction. The stars at every angle, their positions wrong, shifted by velocity and distance into configurations that have no names yet —

"That one," you say, pointing. "Cygnus," he says. He leans slightly — closer than necessary — following your finger. "Though from this angle it looks more like a question mark."

You look at him instead of the stars. He looks back. Neither of you says anything.

The ship hums around you. Two people awake in a glass room full of unnamed stars —

You look away first.

He gives you access to the medical level on day forty of his waking.

"For safety," he says. "You've been alone on this ship for over a year. You should be able to access the full medical suite." "Satoru," you say, "I'm not—" "It's practical," he says. Not looking at you. "The full access lets you into the emergency systems. Survival equipment. The cryogenic medical preservation units on sub-level four — those are last-resort systems, built for catastrophic injury, they freeze cellular activity to prevent death until proper treatment is available." He pulls up the clearance on the panel. "You should know they're there." "Okay," you say. "Okay," he says.

He doesn't look at you. You don't think about sub-level four again for a long time.

✦   iv. binary   ✦

It takes eight months after he wakes up.

You mark it not by a specific moment but by the morning you wake up and realize the guilt has gone quiet. It was there underneath everything for so long — the specific weight of what you did, the five thousand sleeping people and the eighty-nine years and the word selfish applied to yourself every night — and then one morning you reach for it and find only the hum of the ship and the light coming through the porthole and the thought:

He makes coffee wrong. I should tell him.

You tell him. He argues with the specific energy of someone who has never been wrong about anything and finds the possibility philosophically interesting rather than threatening. You argue back. He makes it correctly under protest and takes one sip and says nothing for a moment and then says: "It's marginally better." "It's significantly better," you say. "Marginally," he says.

You feel something so ordinary it almost hurts.

Two years together looks like this:

It looks like breakfast every morning in the upper dining hall, the real food, the coffee argument that never resolves. It looks like him appearing in the observation deck when you're already there and sitting beside you without asking, close enough that your shoulders almost touch, both of you looking at the wrong-angled stars.

It looks like him pulling up star charts and pointing out things that have no names — "this cluster," he says, "doesn't exist in any catalog because no one has seen it from this angle before" — and you say "then we should name it" and he says "that's not how astronomy works" and you say "we're the only people awake in a billion miles, I think we make the rules" and he is quiet for a moment and then he says, "alright. what would you call it?"

You name seventeen stars over two years. He pretends to find this scientifically embarrassing and writes all seventeen names in his notebook.

It looks like him getting sick — a minor thing, a ship-borne virus from the recycled air — and you bringing him tea and sitting in the chair by his bed while he sleeps because you know what it feels like to be alone on this ship with nothing wrong and you won't let him be alone with something wrong. When he wakes up and finds you there he looks at you for a long moment and says nothing, just: "the tea is cold." "I'll make more," you say. "You make it wrong," he says. "I make it correctly," you say. "You have a fever and compromised judgment." He almost smiles.

It looks like learning each other in the specific way you learn things in a small space with nowhere else to go. The way he goes quiet when he's working on something that matters. The way he talks to the ship's consciousness like it's a colleague. The way he looks at the planet on the navigation charts — Kepler-452b, the destination, the blank page — with something that is not quite grief and not quite longing and takes up a shape in his face that you have never asked about because you know what it is.

It looks like him saying your name in the observation deck one evening — just your name, nothing attached to it — and you turning and finding him looking at you with the expression he's been building toward for eight months, the one with nothing performed in it, just him, and him saying:

"I need you to know that whatever happens. Whatever this is. I'm — glad you're here."

The ship hums around you. "Satoru," you say. "You don't have to say anything back," he says quickly. "I just — I needed you to know."

You look at him. At the pale eyes and the white hair and the face that has been the only face on this ship for two years, the face you woke up to find, the face you found in row forty-seven and told yourself you were only looking —

"I'm glad too," you say.

He exhales. The stars move past the window. Not moving. You are moving.

✦   v. redshift   ✦

He finds it on a Thursday.

You are in the observation deck when it happens. You feel it — the specific change in the quality of the ship's atmosphere that you've learned to read after two years of being one of two people awake in it — and you sit very still and you wait.

He comes to find you. His face is doing something you've never seen it do — very still, very controlled, the control of someone holding something enormous and not sure they can hold it —

"The bots keep recordings," he says. "Standard liability protocol. I was running a diagnostic and I found — there are recordings of you. From before I woke up." He looks at you. "From when you were deciding."

The observation deck is very quiet.

"You found me on day forty-three of your first year," he says. His voice is very even. Extremely even. "You came back every day for three hundred and thirty-five days. You talked to the bots about it. About finding me. About—" His jaw works. "You planned it."

"Satoru—" "You knew." Still even. "You knew what my classification meant — Origin class, it's in the public addendum if you know where to look — you knew what my work was and what this mission—" "I didn't know what Origin meant," you say. "I found out after. I didn't know who you were when I—" "When you decided." His voice finally does something. Just at the edge. "Does it matter whether you knew my name? You knew I was a person. You knew what you were taking from me."

The stars are in every window. "Yes," you say. "I knew."

The silence after is total.

"I was alone for a year," you say. Quietly. "I'm not telling you that so you'll forgive me. I'm telling you because it's the truth and I owe you the truth." You look at your hands. "I was so alone. And I told myself for three hundred and thirty-five days that I wasn't going to do it. And then I did it. And I'm sorry. I know what it cost you. I know what the colony was supposed to be. I know what your research—"

"Do you." His voice is very quiet now. The quiet is worse than the volume. "I read everything you published," you say. "After I woke you up. Every paper. Every proposal. I know what you were going to do there and I know what I took and I have been sorry every day and it has never been enough and I know that."

Something moves across his face. "You doomed it," he says. "The research. The colony neurological program. The first generation data that would have taken human medicine forward by fifty years. There were people — there are people who don't exist yet — who needed that work." His voice cracks, just slightly, just once. "What were you thinking."

You don't answer.

Because the answer is: I was thinking I couldn't survive one more day.

"I'm sorry," you say. He leaves.

The silence that follows is a different kind. Before, the silence was the ship's — vast and impersonal. Now it has a shape. It occupies the observation deck without him. The breakfast table with one setting. The navigation deck where he works late and you no longer bring coffee.

You give him the space. You do not follow.

You sit in the observation deck and you name the remaining stars alone and you think about sub-level four. About the cryogenic medical preservation units. About what he told you when he gave you the access:

Last-resort systems. They freeze cellular activity to prevent death until proper treatment is available.

You think about it for a long time. You think: he won't miss me. After what I did. He shouldn't. You think: this is going out on my own terms. You think: at least it will be quiet.

✦   vi. event horizon   ✦

You leave a message on the ship's system on a Sunday.

Meet me in the upper bar tonight. I know you don't want to. One drink. One conversation. After that I'll leave you alone.

He comes.

He sits across from you with the stars behind him and you pour him a drink — the good whiskey, the real kind — and you pour one for yourself and you look at him.

"I'm not going to ask you to forgive me," you say. "I know you can't. I just wanted to sit with you one more time."

He looks at you for a long moment. "Okay," he says.

You talk. Not about the big things. Just — talk. The way you used to. He tells you about a recalibration he's been running on the navigation system, a minor inefficiency he found that he is fixing because he cannot leave a fixable thing unfixed, and this is so specifically him that something in your chest does something you don't let show. You tell him about the lesson plans — the complete archive, every grade, every subject — and that you've filed them in the ship's system under a public folder.

"All of them?" he says. "All of them," you say. "Someone should use them."

He looks at you. "You would have been extraordinary at it," he says. Quietly. "The teaching."

You look at your glass. "Another?" "Yes," he says.

You pour. His has something extra in it.

You watch his eyes change.

Not immediately — gradually, the way the ship's lights change at the cycle's edge, so slow you could almost miss it. He's mid-sentence about something in the navigation deck when the words start coming slowly. His hand on the glass goes still.

"What—" he says. "I'm sorry," you say. "I know you wouldn't have agreed any other way."

He looks at you. The pale eyes finding you through the fog, through whatever the sedative is doing, and the expression on his face is not angry. Not anymore. Something past anger. Something that has come all the way around to the other side of it —

"You can't," he says. Slow. Careful with the words. "You'll be okay," you say. "The pod is ready. I've been checking the systems for weeks." "You'll be—" He stops. Tries again. "You'll be alone." "I know," you say. "I don't—" His eyes are losing the focus. "I don't want you to be alone." Your throat does something. "Sleep," you say. "It's okay."

His head tips forward. You are already there — your hands on his arms, careful, guiding — and he looks up at you from that low angle with the losing-focus eyes and his mouth tries to form something that might have been your name —

You put your hand on his face. His cheek against your palm. You look at him the way you have been looking at him since day three-hundred-and-seventy-eight, pod 4716 — the specific look of someone who has made a decision so large it has become a kind of peace.

I love you, you think. I'm sorry I woke you up. I'm sorry I couldn't be sorry enough to not do it.

He goes under.

You put him back in his pod yourself. You know every panel — you've been learning them, quietly, for weeks. You run the sequence. You watch the panel cycle through.

Hibernation stable. Estimated wake: arrival at Kepler-452b.

You put your hand on the glass. You take it away.

You write the lesson plans. All of them. Every grade, every subject, every adaptation for colony conditions, margin notes in your handwriting — for the first teachers, for the children who won't know any other sky — and you file them in the ship's system under a public folder where anyone can find them.

You watch every film in the ship's library. You read every book. You learn the names of the seventeen stars you named together, so you won't forget them even though there is no one left to tell.

You write him a letter.

To Satoru.

I'm sorry I woke you up. I know you're probably still angry at me, and I don't mind that. You had every right to be.

I know you're upset about our last drink. I knew you wouldn't agree to go back any other way. I looked for another option for a long time. There wasn't one that I could live with.

Satoru. I really loved you. I know that doesn't fix anything. I know it doesn't give you back the years or the research or the colony the way it was supposed to be. But I loved you and I wanted you to know, because I don't think I ever said it properly and this is the last chance I have to say anything.

After I put you back I did some research. I didn't know, when I found you, that you were THE Satoru Gojo. Founder of the Aether. Architect of everything. The person this mission was built around. If I had known —

I think I still would have woken you up. I'm sorry. I think I still would have. You were so beautiful and I was so tired and I —

Anyway.

I hope you live out your life on the colony planet the way you wanted to. I hope the blank page is everything you needed it to be. I hope you learn everything again.

I know nobody on this ship will remember me. You don't have to either.

I found the preservation units on sub-level four. The ones you told me about when you gave me the access. I understand what they're for now. I'm going to use one. I know it's meant for injury, not for this, but I've been reading the technical specifications for weeks and I think it will work the way I need it to.

I'm not afraid. I've had the stars and I've had you and that's more than I expected when I woke up on that Tuesday.

I named the rest of the stars. All seventeen. They're in the ship's log now. I thought you should know.

Have a nice life, Satoru.

✦   vii. remnant   ✦

The planet comes into view on a Wednesday.

Good morning, the ship says. Arrival at Kepler-452b in seventy-two hours.

He lies in the wake-up bay with the fluorescent lights and the specific fog of coming back from that kind of deep and the knowledge already there waiting for him before he is fully conscious —

You're gone.

Around him the bay fills with the noise of five thousand people waking all at once — coughing, confusion, the slow reorientation of bodies returning to themselves — and he lies in the middle of all of it and thinks about a woman who found him in row forty-seven and performed shock very convincingly and brought him coffee made correctly for two years.

He gets up. He finds his quarters. The box is on the desk.

Small. Plain. His name in her handwriting — four months of her handwriting on coffee arguments and navigation notes and the margins of borrowed books, he would know it anywhere —

To Satoru.

He sits down. He reads it. He reads it again.

I think I still would have woken you up. You were so beautiful and I was so tired and I —

He puts the letter down.

He sits while the planet fills the observation windows — blue-green and new and waiting — and outside his door the Aether comes fully alive for the first time in eighty-nine years, five thousand people moving through corridors that were empty for most of his memory of them.

I know nobody on this ship will remember me.

He stands up.

He finds her on sub-level four.

He knew he would. He has known since the letter — the line about the preservation units, the cellular freeze, and the specific tone of someone who has thought very carefully about a thing and made a decision — and he follows the access log to a maintenance corridor he showed her himself, the clearance he gave her himself, and the door he opens himself —

The medical preservation unit is humming. Has been humming, the log tells him, for eighty-seven years and four months.

He opens the display panel. He reads the cellular status. He goes very still.

The unit was not designed for this. She did not know what she was doing — or she knew exactly what she was doing and not what it would mean, which is different — and the cellular preservation is not perfect, it is not what the hibernation pods achieve, but it is —

It is something.

It is the specific something that a man who has spent his life studying what the human body can survive looks at and does not look away from. It is the specific something that a man who has never left a fixable thing unfixed recognizes immediately and with the full force of everything he is —

He looks at her face through the glass. He has looked at this face across breakfast tables and in observation decks and in the last moments before a sedative took him under. He has looked at this face for two years and then lost it and then carried the loss across eighty-nine years of cold dark sleep —

You are so still. The specific stillness of something that is waiting without knowing it is waiting.

He opens the unit. He carries you to the hibernation deck. He finds an Origin class pod — his own specifications, the ones he wrote knowing exactly what they would do — and places her inside with the care of someone who has been thinking about what the body can survive for his entire career and has never wanted the answer more than he does right now.

He programs it himself. He seals it. He puts his hand on the glass.

He straightens. He looks at the planet in the window at the end of the corridor. Blue-green. New. Full of blank pages.

He takes out his notebook. At the top of a fresh page, in the handwriting she knew, he writes:

maybe the next technology I invent brings back —

He doesn't finish the sentence. He closes the notebook. He goes to the colony. He goes to work.

✦   viii. synthesis   ✦

you did not mean to give him anything.

you thought you were only leaving.

you named seventeen stars.

they are in the ship's log.

he knows all their names.

have a nice life, satoru.

he intends to.

author's note: hi hello🤍 so I couldn't go to sleep without writing out this fic, its late and probably not proofread but I had to get it out there lol. dead reckoning chapter should be out by the end of this weekend, thank you all so much for your support I truly appreciate it! I'm always open to requests or just random asks!

He is reading a section of his own draft — chapter two, the part about the initial collapse, the moment when a molecular cloud stops being inert and starts being something — and his vision blurs and he realizes with the detached clarity of someone observing a result they didn't predict that he is crying.

Not dramatically. Not the kind of crying that announces itself. Just tears, arriving without permission, tracking down his face while he sits at his desk with his pen in his hand and his glasses slightly pushed up and his thesis open in front of him.

He takes his glasses off.

He puts them on the desk.

He sits there for a moment with his face in his hands.

Why are you crying, he asks himself, with the methodical tone of someone running a diagnostic.

He doesn't have an answer.

He tries to find one anyway. He runs through the obvious candidates — stress, sleep deprivation, the particular emotional vulnerability of 3 a.m. when the brain's defenses are lowest. He has been working long hours. He has not been sleeping well. These are facts. These are sufficient explanations.

They don't feel sufficient.

The chapter is about collapse. About the moment before ignition. About the cloud of gas and dust that has been floating in the dark for longer than most things have existed, cold and apparently inert, and then — something. A perturbation. A shock wave from a nearby star. Some external force that tips the balance and begins the collapse that ends in burning.

He wrote this chapter.

He knows what it says.

He doesn't know why it's making him cry.

He puts his glasses back on.

He reads the paragraph again.

The collapse, once initiated, cannot be reversed. The cloud does not return to what it was. The process of becoming something that burns is also the process of losing the thing it was before.

He stops.

He reads it again.

He doesn't know why that particular sentence is doing what it's doing to him. It is a factual statement about stellar physics. He wrote it himself. He has read it a dozen times in revision and it has never once felt personal.

It feels personal now.

And then — because that's how it works, because his brain which is always running parallel tracks never stops even when he wants it to — the thought arrives before he can intercept it:

I have lost something.

He doesn't know what. He can't locate it. He searches the way he searches for anything — methodically, from the outside in — and comes up empty. His work is intact. His research is intact. His friendships are limited but present. His apartment is exactly as it should be.

Nothing is missing.

Except that sentence keeps sitting in him like something true.

He pushes his glasses up. Looks at the desk. At the three empty mugs. At the chair.

At the gap on the bookshelf.

He bought the books on that shelf over the span of three years. He knows exactly which ones he has and where they live. He keeps a gap between two volumes — has kept it for months — and he cannot explain why. Every time he thinks about closing it something in him resists. Every time it stays open it bothers him in the specific way an unfinished equation bothers him.

It is negative space.

It is the shape of something that should be there and isn't.

You are crying, he tells himself, because it is 3 a.m. and you are sleep-deprived and you have been working too hard and this is a known physiological response to accumulated stress.

His face is still wet.

He knows he's right.

He also knows, with the part of him that has always been better at feeling than he gives it credit for, that he is not right.

That the crying is not about the thesis.

That it was never about the thesis.

That somewhere below the academic language and the logical framework and the controlled precision he has always used to organize his world, something has been trying to be heard for a long time — and at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday with his defenses down and his thesis open to a chapter about irreversible collapse, it finally got through.

He doesn't know what it's saying.

He just knows it's saying something.

He sits with that for a long time.

His pen moves before he decides to move it.

He finds, in the margin of page seven, something in his own handwriting that he doesn't remember writing.

He always writes in the margins. It's a habit, a reflex — the thinking happens in the margins, the real thinking, the stuff that doesn't make it into the formal prose. But this is different from his usual notes. This isn't a correction or a question or a reference to follow up.

It is one line.

she said: look up and you might find it again.

He stares at it.

His handwriting. Unmistakably his — the precision, the slight economy of the letters, the way he writes when he's not performing legibility but just thinking. He wrote this. He wrote it here, in the margin of chapter two of his doctoral thesis on stellar formation, at some point he cannot account for.

He doesn't know who she is.

He doesn't know what she said it about.

He doesn't know why he wrote it down like it was something he needed to keep.

He reads it again.

she said: look up and you might find it again.

He looks up.

His apartment ceiling looks back at him, unremarkable, the faint crack near the light fixture that he has never fixed.

And something about that crack — something completely specific and sourceless and impossible to explain — makes the crying worse.

He doesn't know why.

He sits there at his desk and lets it happen because fighting it is taking more energy than he has and his brain, which is very good at solving problems, has run out of solutions for this particular one. He is crying about a thesis chapter. He is crying about a sentence he wrote. He is crying about a crack in his ceiling and a margin note in his own handwriting belonging to a woman he cannot name and a gap on his bookshelf that he keeps because closing it feels like losing something he was never supposed to have.

He is crying about the shape of an absence he cannot identify.

He is crying about not knowing why he is crying.

At 3:47 a.m. it stops.

Not because anything has resolved. Just because it runs out, the way these things do, leaving him wrung out and clear-eyed and slightly embarrassed in the specific way of someone who has just cried alone in the dark over something they cannot explain.

He wipes his face.

He looks at the margin note.

He puts his glasses back on.

He closes the thesis.

He doesn't sleep.

When he does, he dreams of a bookstore.

He is mid-sentence.

He doesn't know what he was saying.

He knows he was saying it to someone.

He knows it was important.

He wakes up reaching.

—

The date is on a Saturday.

Her name is Yui and she is studying environmental law and she is funny and direct and has the specific quality of self-possession that he usually finds genuinely appealing. She chose the restaurant — a small place, good lighting, not trying too hard. She arrived before him, which he respects. She stands when she sees him coming and smiles without making it a performance.

He decides, walking toward her, to be fully present.

He means it. That's the thing about Satoru Gojo — when he decides something he commits to it completely. He has decided to be here, actually here, and so he is. He asks her about her thesis over drinks and actually listens, following the argument she's building with the specific attention he gives to things he finds genuinely interesting. He finds it genuinely interesting. She is building a case about environmental liability in international waters and there are three points where he asks follow-up questions that make her pause and reassess and she looks at him differently after the third one.

"You actually know this area," she says.

"Adjacent," he says. "I study astrophysics. The legal frameworks for resource extraction in international territories have interesting parallels with emerging debates about—" He stops. "Sorry. That's a tangent."

"No," she says, leaning forward slightly. "Finish it."

He finishes it.

She argues back.

He argues back at her argument.

She laughs — the real kind, the kind that happens before you decide to laugh — and says: "Okay you're actually kind of annoying."

"I've been told," he says.

It is a good date. By any objective measure it is a good date — interesting conversation, genuine engagement, two people who are not performing at each other. He orders something he actually wants. He makes her laugh twice more. When the food comes he eats it instead of forgetting about it, which is not always guaranteed.

He is completely, genuinely, present.

And underneath it all, quiet and persistent as white noise, something is reaching.

Not loudly. Not in a way that interrupts. Just — there. The parallel track his brain keeps running even when the surface is occupied. Reaching for something that isn't at this table. Measuring the distance between where he is and where that track keeps trying to take him.

He becomes aware of it properly when she's describing a difficult case — something about a corporate entity and the burden of proof — and he finds himself, for a fraction of a second, turning to say something to someone who isn't there.

Not a physical turn. Just the internal equivalent. The beginning of a gesture toward someone he wanted to share the thought with.

Someone who isn't Yui.

Someone who isn't anyone he can name.

He files it away.

He keeps listening.

He looks at the way she holds her chopsticks.

He thinks about how someone else holds chopsticks. He doesn't know who. He doesn't have an image. Just a quality — a particular carelessness about it, the chopstick grip of someone who picks up whatever object is nearest without adjusting their approach, who moves through the world with that specific free-spirited ease of a person who has never needed to optimize their chopstick grip because they have always been too interested in the next thing to—

He stops.

He has just spent thirty seconds thinking about an imaginary person's chopstick grip.

"Sorry," he says. "You were saying about the burden of proof."

She gives him a look that is perceptive without being unkind. "You're not really here, are you."

It isn't a question.

"I'm here," he says, which is technically true.

"Physically," she says. "But your head is—" She gestures vaguely. "Somewhere else."

He opens his mouth to deny it.

He thinks about the thesis chapter. The margin note. The unfinished sentence at 2:17 a.m. The reaching when he wakes up. The crying that ran out but didn't resolve. The gap on the shelf he keeps because closing it makes the apartment feel worse.

He closes his mouth.

"I'm sorry," he says instead. "I've been — there's something I can't locate. It keeps pulling my attention and I don't know what it is." He says it because she deserves honesty more than she deserves a performance. "It's not you. You're — this has been genuinely good. I just can't seem to be fully here and that's not fair to you."

She is quiet for a moment. She is, he thinks, genuinely impressive — the way she receives honesty without making it about herself. She sets her chopsticks down. Looks at him evenly.

"Is there someone else?" she asks, without accusation.

The question lands strangely.

"No," he says.

Which is true.

Which is the precise problem.

There is no one. There is only the reaching. The parallel track running underneath everything that won't stop and won't arrive and won't tell him what it's looking for. There is only the crying at 3 a.m. and the unfinished sentence and the handwriting in the margin and the dream of the bookstore and the mid-sentence he can't finish because he doesn't know who it was for.

There is no one.

There is only the space where someone should be.

Yui looks at him for a moment with the expression of someone doing arithmetic.

"There's no one now," she says. "But there was."

He doesn't answer.

She picks up her chopsticks.

"It's okay," she says, not unkindly. "Some people leave gaps."

He looks at her.

Gaps.

He thinks about the bookshelf.

The gap he keeps.

The gap he cannot close.

The gap he restored when closing it made the apartment feel worse.

"Yes," he says, very quietly. "I think they do."

They finish dinner. He pays. She lets him. At the door she pauses and looks at him one more time with that arithmetic expression.

"I hope you find it," she says. "Whatever you're looking for."

He nods.

He watches her go.

He stands on the pavement for a moment in the particular cold of a late evening and doesn't know what to do with his hands.

—

He texts her once on Sunday. A brief and genuine message — dinner was good, thank you for the conversation — that is not an invitation to continue and she is perceptive enough to read it as such.

She texts back: good luck finding whoever left the gap.

He stares at that for a long time.

He puts his phone down.

He goes back to his thesis.

Page seven. Chapter two. The margin note in his own handwriting.

she said: look up and you might find it again.

He picks up his pen.

In the margin below it, in the same handwriting, he writes:

I am looking.

I don't know where.

I don't know for what.

But I am looking.

He puts his pen down.

He pushes his glasses up.

He stares at the ceiling.

The faint crack near the light fixture.

He has never fixed it.

He thinks, suddenly and completely without context, that someone once said something to him about that crack. He doesn't know what. He doesn't know who.

He just knows that the crack used to mean something.

He looks at it for a long time.

Then he opens his laptop.

Then he starts to write.

—

That night he dreams of the bookstore again.

Sunlight through tall windows.

Dust in the air like suspended glitter.

He is mid-sentence.

"You said you hated—"

He doesn't know what you hated.

He doesn't know your face.

But he knows the light.

He knows the dust.

He knows the feeling of standing across from someone and understanding, without deciding to, that everything is about to change.

He wakes up at 4:37 a.m. with his hand outstretched.

Reaching.

Always reaching.

He writes it down.

One line, in the margin of a notebook he has started keeping beside his bed:

"bookstore. light. dust. mid-sentence. don't know what I was saying."

"don't know who I was saying it to."

"but I think I was saying it to you."

He doesn't know who he is writing to.

He writes it anyway.

Just in case.

· · ·

He doesn't have a reason to be on this part of campus.

His department is on the east side. This part is older, quieter, the kind of architecture that was built when universities still believed beauty was worth spending money on. He walks here sometimes without deciding to, stuck on the date, his feet finding the path before his brain registers the route.

He tells himself it's the long way home.

He has been telling himself that for three weeks.

He sees her before he understands why he's looking.

Just someone laughing on a path ahead of him — head tilting back, something unguarded in it, the kind of laugh that happens before you decide to laugh. He doesn't know her. He has no reason to be looking.

He keeps looking.

There's a man beside her.

Satoru's eyes pass over him the way they pass over anything incidental — registering, filing, moving on. He isn't looking at the man. He's looking at — he doesn't know what he's looking at. Just the laugh. The way she's walking. Something about the quality of her presence that his brain is trying to process and cannot quite categorize.

And then the man says something.

Satoru catches only the tail end of it, four words carried back on the afternoon air, and something shifts.

Not recognition. Not memory. Just — a shift. The way a room shifts when a door opens somewhere you can't see. He doesn't grab onto it. Doesn't examine it. His brain notes the feeling the way it notes things it doesn't have a category for yet and keeps moving.

She almost turns.

Her shoulder shifts fractionally — just slightly, just the beginning of a movement that doesn't complete itself — and something in his chest does something he has no name for. He stops walking. Three steps forward without deciding and then stopped on the fourth.

She doesn't turn.

She keeps walking. Her arm through his. Their voices low and warm and completely illegible from where Satoru is standing.

And then the man looks up.

Not at her. Not at the path.

At Satoru.

It is a very brief look. A second, maybe less. And then it's gone — the man's attention returning to her, to the path, to whatever they were saying before. Perfectly ordinary. Perfectly unremarkable.

Except.

Satoru has been looked at in a lot of ways. He knows what it feels like to be assessed. He knows the difference between someone who looks at him and someone who looks at him like they already know what they're going to find.

That last look was the third kind.

Precise. Unhurried. The look of someone who glanced at a variable they'd already accounted for and found it exactly where they expected.

The smile that accompanied it was small.

Controlled.

Gone before she could have seen it.

Satoru stands on the path and watches them turn the corner and disappear and does not move for a moment longer than he should.

Who is that man.

He counts twelve steps to the café without meaning to. Orders tea at the counter — the words out of his mouth before he's decided what he wants. Sits at the corner table. Looks at the door. Looks at the tea going cold.

He doesn't drink it.

He picks up his phone.

He opens the contacts.

He searches for the name.

It isn't there.

He deleted it eight months ago — not dramatically, not in anger, just the quiet administrative act of someone closing a door they weren't sure they'd open again. He had stood in his apartment and scrolled to the name and pressed delete and told himself it was practical. That keeping it would mean something he wasn't ready for it to mean.

He stares at the empty search results.

He puts the name away.

He opens a new dial pad instead.

And then — before he decides to, before his brain catches up with what his hands are doing — his fingers move.

Not searching. Not thinking. Just — moving. The way hands move when they know something the mind has filed away. The sequence arriving from somewhere below memory, below decision, below the eight months of silence and the deleted contact and all the careful architecture of a falling out.

He knows the number.

He has always known the number.

He presses call.

It rings twice.

On the other end, a phone lights up with an unknown number.

He almost doesn't pick up. He has learned, over the years, to be careful with unknown numbers — the specific caution of someone who has had difficult conversations arrive without warning and has built a small quiet system for protecting himself from them.

But something about the sequence of digits is familiar.

Not labeled. Not saved. He deleted it too, eventually, for the same quiet practical reasons. But the shape of it — the specific pattern of the numbers, the way they sit next to each other — lands in him like something recognized before it's identified.

He picks up.

He doesn't say hello.

He says: "Satoru."

· · ·

"Did I seem different," Satoru says. No preamble. No apology for the eight months. "About a year ago. Did something change."

A silence.

Not a confused silence. Not the silence of someone reaching back through their memory. The silence of someone who already knows exactly what period is being referenced and is deciding how much to say.

"I'll be at yours," Geto says finally.

Satoru understands what that means. Geto knows he doesn't do well with crowds when something is wrong. Always has known. Eight months of not speaking and he still knows.

"Okay," Satoru says.

The line goes quiet.

He sits there for another moment. Looks at the door. Looks at the tea.

Leaves without touching it.

—

Geto is already at the apartment when he arrives.

Not inside — standing in the hallway, back against the wall, arms crossed, like he walked over and got there first and has been deciding whether to knock ever since. He looks exactly the same. That's the first thing Satoru notices, stupidly. Eight months and he looks exactly the same.

Everything happened.

"You didn't have to wait in the hall," Satoru says.

"I wasn't sure you'd actually show up," Geto says.

Satoru looks at him for a moment. Then he unlocks the door.

They don't hug. They don't shake hands. Geto walks in the way he has always walked into this apartment — like he has partial ownership of the space, like some corner of it still belongs to him — and Satoru closes the door and they stand in the living room with eight months between them and neither of them knows how to put it down.

Geto looks around. His eyes move to the bookshelf. To the gap.

Something in his expression does something Satoru can't read.

"Sit down," Satoru says.

Geto sits. Satoru doesn't. He stands by the window with his arms crossed, glasses slightly pushed up, looking at his oldest friend like he is a problem he needs to solve before he can breathe properly again.

"You knew," Satoru says. Not an accusation. Just the place they have to start.

Geto is quiet for a moment.

"I was told not to say anything," he says carefully. "I received a note. After. Asking me not to discuss it with you."

"A note."

"Yes."

"From who."

Geto's jaw tightens. "I don't know exactly. It arrived with enough information that I understood what it meant. What had happened." He pauses. "I assumed it was what you wanted. You seemed fine. You seemed like yourself. I didn't want to—"

"I wasn't fine," Satoru says.

The words come out quieter than he intends.

Geto looks at him properly for the first time since he walked in. Really looks at him — with the specific attention of someone who has known another person long enough to see past the surface of them.

"No," he says quietly. "I know."

The silence that follows has texture. The texture of two people who have hurt each other and are both sitting in it without knowing how to begin.

Geto exhales slowly.

Then, without saying anything, he reaches into his pocket and takes out his phone. He holds it for a moment — just holds it, the way you hold something you've been carrying for a long time and aren't sure you're ready to put down. Then he turns the screen around.

Satoru goes still.

It's a photo. The three of them — Suguru on one side, Satoru in the middle, slightly flustered in the specific way he gets when he's been caught off guard, ears almost pink, glasses slightly askew. And her. Pressing a kiss to his cheek like it's the most natural thing in the world, eyes closed, one hand warm on his arm.

He looks happy.

He doesn't remember being happy like that.

He stares at it for a long time.

"Who is she," he says finally. His voice is very even. Too even.

"Satoru—"

"Who is she."

Geto pulls the phone back slowly. Sets it face down on his knee. "There are things the note asked me not to—"

"I don't care about the note."

"I know you don't." Geto meets his eyes. "I do."

Satoru looks at the photo. At himself in it. At the pink ears and the slightly askew glasses and the expression on his own face that he doesn't recognize because he has not looked like that in a long time and didn't know until this moment that he'd stopped.

"I saw her today," he says.

Geto goes very still.

"I didn't know her," Satoru continues. His voice is steady. He is holding it steady with both hands. "She was with a man. They were walking together on the south path. He had—" He pauses. "Stitching on his face. Deliberate looking. And he said something and she laughed and then he looked back at me." He stops. "He smiled at me like he knew exactly who I was."

The silence from Geto is a different shape now.

Not the careful silence of someone navigating a note. Something tighter. Something that looks almost like alarm.

"Suguru," Satoru says. "Tell me her name."

"It's not my place—"

"You just showed me a photo of a woman kissing my face." Something is cracking open in his chest, slow and irreversible. "It is absolutely your place."

Geto stands.

"I can't," he says. Firm now. Final. The voice of someone who has made a decision and is going to hold it. "I've already — showing you the photo was already more than—" He looks at the screen. Something moves across his face. "I'm sorry. I should have said something sooner. I thought I was protecting you."

"You were protecting a note."

"Yes." He holds Satoru's gaze. "I was."

He moves toward the door.

Satoru's hand finds his arm before his brain approves the motion — fingers closing around his sleeve, the grip of someone who has run out of patience and words simultaneously.

"Don't," he says. One word. Low.

Geto stops.

Turns.

Looks down at the hand on his arm.

"Let go," he says quietly.

"Tell me her name."

"Satoru. Let go."

"You've been carrying this for eight months—"

"I said let go—"

"And you said nothing, you just watched me be—"

"BECAUSE YOU ASKED ME NOT TO—"

The words crack the room open.

They stand there in the wreckage of it — both breathing hard, eight months of silence broken the wrong way, nothing resolved and everything raw. Satoru releases his arm. Steps back. His glasses have gone crooked.

"I didn't ask you anything," he says quietly. "I didn't know there was anything to ask."

The anger drains out of Geto's face. Leaving something worse underneath. Something that looks almost like grief.

"I know," he says. "I know you didn't."

And then Satoru shoves him.

It isn't calculated. It's the physical expression of something that has nowhere else to go — all of it, the wrongness and the reaching and the dreams and the tea and the gap and the smile on that man's face and the photo of himself looking happy in a way he can no longer access — it comes out through his hands and Geto stumbles back into the bookshelf and a book falls and they look at each other and—

Geto hits him back.

Not hard. Not to hurt. Just — there. The specific language of two people who have always communicated physically when words stop working. Who have been in each other's orbits long enough that even their violence is familiar.

Satoru takes it. Doesn't move.

The book on the floor between them.

And then something happens.

The specific pressure of it — Geto's hand connecting with his jaw, the exact weight and angle of it, the way it felt to be hit by someone who loves him and is furious at him simultaneously — cracks something open that the dreams couldn't. That the margin notes couldn't. That the tea and the gap and the unfinished sentences at 2 a.m. couldn't reach.

Not a memory.

Just a feeling.

The ghost of different hands. Smaller. Not violent — something lighter, something that was never meant to hurt, a push maybe, the specific physical reality of being in close quarters with someone whose energy is completely different from Geto's. Someone quick and warm and—

Gone.

Before he can hold it. Before he can turn toward it. Just the outline of it, dissolving at the edges, leaving him standing in his own living room with his jaw aching and his glasses crooked and something behind his sternum that has no name yet.

He blinks.

Geto is watching him.

"What just happened," Geto says quietly.

"I don't know," Satoru says.

His voice sounds strange to his own ears.

He looks at his hands.

Geto sits back down. Slowly. Like his legs have decided for him. He puts his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands for a moment and breathes. When he looks up his expression is different — not the careful navigation of the note, not the anger, just Suguru. Just his oldest friend sitting in his living room looking tired in the specific way of someone who has been tired for a long time.

"I can't tell you her name," he says. "I meant that. But—" He stops. Looks at the gap on the shelf. "I can tell you that you didn't seem like yourself after. I can tell you I noticed. I can tell you I should have done something sooner and I didn't and I've thought about that every day."

Satoru looks at him.

"The man," he says. "With the stitching. Do you know him."

Something flickers across Geto's face. Very briefly. Just enough.

"No," he says.

Which is not quite the same as I've never heard of him.

Satoru files that away.

He sits down finally. Across from Geto. In his own apartment with the book in the wrong place and the gap on the shelf and the ghost of smaller hands already fading.

They sit in silence for a long moment.

It isn't comfortable.

But it isn't the eight months either.

"Satoru," Geto says.

"What."

Geto glances at him. Then away. His jaw works slightly, the way it does when he's deciding whether to say something. "...I'm sorry. For that time."

Satoru is quiet.

Outside a car passes. Someone's music, briefly, then gone.

"...Okay," he says finally. "I'm sorry for pulling you just now, I guess."

It is possibly the least graceful apology in the history of apologies. Geto's mouth does something that is almost a smile and is also not a smile at all.

They sit with it.

"Also," Satoru says. He is looking at the wall. His voice is carefully flat. "Happy late birthday."

A pause.

"...Asshole," Suguru says.

But he doesn't leave.

—

After Geto goes, Satoru sits at his desk for a long time without opening his thesis.

He thinks about the photo. About his own face in it — the pink ears, the slightly lost expression of someone who has been caught completely off guard by something and doesn't know what to do with it yet. He thinks about the laugh on the campus path. The shoulder that almost turned.

He thinks about the man with the stitching.

The smile that said: I knew you'd be there.

He opens his laptop.

He doesn't know what he's looking for yet.

He starts looking anyway.

He has always been better at finding things than knowing he was searching for them.

· · ·

← vii. the right words  ·  ↳ masterlist  ·  next →

a/n: hii hello 🤍 a bit late BUT i hope yall enjoy this, yall will DEF enjoy the next few chapters hehe. I might start slowing down on my updating time since exams are back to back but trust I'll try to get at least two more chapters out. Thank you guys so much for your support! It really motivates me to continue! I know I've only written for Gojo so far but would you guys be interested if I started writing for other characters? If so totally lmk or send requests!

—

You don't mean to bring it up.

Or you do — you have been carrying it for weeks, the dream of going back, the specific shape of the wanting that has been getting louder since you found the notebook, since you started understanding equations you shouldn't understand, since astrophysics started feeling less like a foreign language and more like one you once spoke fluently and have been slowly remembering.

You have been carrying it the way you carry things you don't know how to put down.

You are closing the register and he is reading something at the corner table and the bookstore is quiet and warm and it feels, for a moment, like the right kind of place to say something true.

"I've been thinking about going back to school," you say.

Not looking at him. Still facing the register. Giving yourself the option of taking it back if the silence that follows is the wrong kind.

The silence that follows is not the wrong kind.

"Tell me," he says.

Two words. Quiet. The specific quality of attention you have come to recognize as his — complete, unhurried, the kind that makes you feel like whatever you say next will be received carefully.

You turn around.

He has set down whatever he was reading. His glasses are slightly tilted — they always are, you have noticed, and you have noticed that you notice — and he is looking at you with that precise quality of attention that you have learned to read as interest and have not yet learned to read as data collection.

"Astrophysics," you say. "I want to study it properly. I left university before — a long time ago, different reasons — and I've been thinking about going back. Switching." You stop.

And then, without meaning to, you keep going.

"I know the foundational coursework I'd need to cover. I've looked at the entry requirements. I know I'd be behind most of the other students and I know it's not the path of least resistance and I know there's a gap between loving something and being able to build a career in it—"

You stop.

You become aware, mid-sentence, of what you are doing.

You are explaining yourself. Preemptively. Building a defense against objections that haven't been made yet, laying out your reasoning like evidence before a verdict, bracing for the moment when someone tells you, kindly and accurately, all the reasons this is harder for you than it would be for someone else.

You don't know why you feel the need to explain this to him.

He hasn't asked you to justify anything.

He hasn't said a word.

You look at him.

He is sitting exactly as he was — still, attentive, his hands loose on the table — and he is simply waiting. Not with impatience. Not with the quality of someone who has already formed an opinion and is waiting for you to finish so he can deliver it. Just — waiting. The way you wait for something you genuinely want to hear.

"Sorry," you say. "I don't know why I — " You shake your head slightly. "You didn't ask for all of that."

"Do you want me to tell you it's practical?" he asks. His voice is even. Not unkind. Just — precise.

You stop.

"Because it isn't," he continues, in the same even tone. "You're right that you'd be behind. You're right that the coursework is significant. You're right that it's not the path of least resistance." A pause. "None of that is what you're asking me."

You look at him.

"What am I asking you?" you say, quietly.

He is quiet for a moment. Long enough that you think he might not answer. Long enough that the bookstore settles around you both, the low light and the old paper smell and the particular held-breath of a space waiting to hear something important.

"You're asking me if I think you can do it," he says. "Not the logistics. Not the coursework. You. Whether I think you're someone who gets to want this."

The accuracy of it lands in your chest like something being placed back where it belongs.

Like a word in a language you thought you'd forgotten.

Like a door opening in a wall you thought was solid.

Your throat does something.

"And?" you say. The word comes out smaller than you intended. Your hands have gone very still on the register.

He looks at you for a long moment.

"I think you should," he says.

Four words.

Simple. Direct. No qualifications. No explanations of why it would be harder for you than for others. No logistics. No careful accounting of the obstacles. Just — I think you should. The specific weight of someone who has considered the question and arrived at an answer and is giving it to you without conditions.

You don't know why your eyes fill.

You don't know why four words from a person you have known for a matter of weeks is doing this to you — opening something that has been closed for longer than you can account for, reaching something that has been waiting to be reached in a way that makes you understand, dimly, that it has been waiting for a very long time.

You blink.

It doesn't help.

"Sorry," you say. You laugh a little, which doesn't help either. You press the back of your hand to your eye briefly, a gesture so automatic it bypasses dignity entirely. "I don't — I don't know why—"

"You don't have to explain it," he says.

He stands up from the corner table.

He crosses the bookstore floor — unhurried, certain, the specific quality of movement that has always belonged to him — and when he reaches you he does not ask. He lifts his hand and brushes the tear from your cheek with his thumb in a gesture so practiced it should feel natural.

It doesn't feel natural.

It feels accurate.

There is a difference.

You don't know the difference yet.

He tips your chin up slightly — just slightly, the minimum adjustment required — and kisses you.

And your body — your traitorous, muscle-memoried body, the one that makes two cups of tea and looks at the door and fixed a stranger's glasses without asking — leans in.

Not consciously. Not as a decision. Just the automatic response of someone who has been held before and whose body remembers what that felt like and reaches for it before the mind can catch up.

For one second you are fully present in it.

And then something catches.

Something beneath the level of thought, beneath language, beneath anything you could point to and name — something goes wait. A frequency that doesn't quite match. A warmth that is the right temperature but not the right source. The uncanny valley of being held correctly by the wrong person.

You pull back.

Just slightly. Just a fraction.

He follows.

Smoothly, without hesitation, without giving you the space you almost created — he closes the distance again, his hand still at your chin, and you let him because you don't know why you pulled back in the first place and the reason is already dissolving like a dream you can't hold onto.

You accept the kiss.

Your body started it.

Your instincts interrupted it.

He finished it.

It is a technically good kiss — gentle, unhurried, the precise amount of tenderness for the emotional temperature of the moment. Everything calibrated. Everything correct.

You pull back again, further this time, and he lets you go.

You become aware of the bookstore around you again — the low light, the old paper smell, the particular quiet of a space that has been holding its breath.

"I — I'm sorry, I don't—" you start. Your hand moves vaguely, a gesture that means nothing and everything. "I don't know why I—"

"Did it feel right?" he asks.

The question lands cleanly. No warmth in it, no leading, just the question itself sitting in the space between you waiting for an answer.

You think about the frequency that didn't quite match. You think about the something that went wait beneath the level of thought. You think about leaning in before you decided to.

"...I think so," you say.

"Good," he says.

And he kisses you again.

This one is different from the first. The first arrived like a question. This one arrives like a period — quieter, more certain, the kiss of someone who has received the answer they needed and is now simply confirming it. His hand comes up to your jaw, unhurried, and you accept it the way you accepted the first one.

Your body doesn't lean in this time.

It doesn't pull back either.

It just — waits.

Still waiting.

You step back eventually, and this time he lets the distance stay.

"I should lock up," you say.

He nods and gathers his things from the corner table with the easy unhurried certainty of someone who has gotten what they came for.

You lock the door behind him.

You stand in your bookstore alone.

The low light. The old paper smell. The particular silence of a space that has held something and is now holding the absence of it.

You put your hand flat on the counter.

You look at the corner table.

Empty now.

You don't know why it looked wrong with someone in it.

You don't know why it looks wrong empty.

You look at the door.

You don't know what you're looking for.

And then — before you decide to, before you think it through, before the reasonable part of you catches up with the part that is already moving — you unlock the door.

You go after him.

He hasn't gone far. Half a block, maybe. He is walking at his usual pace — unhurried, certain — and he turns when he hears your footsteps the way he turns when he hears everything, completely and without surprise.

He looks at you.

You are standing on the pavement outside your bookstore in your apron with your keys still in your hand and you don't know exactly what you came out here to say.

"Do you really believe in me?" you ask.

The words come out quieter than you intend. Not small — just unguarded. The question underneath all the other questions. The one you couldn't dress up in logistics or practicality, the one that doesn't have a reasonable version, just this: do you believe in me.

He is quiet for a moment.

He looks at you the way he always looks at you — with that complete, measuring attention — and then something in his expression settles into something that looks, from where you're standing, exactly like certainty.

"Yes," he says.

One word.

He doesn't elaborate. He doesn't qualify. He just says it and lets it stand and the simplicity of it is so specifically what you needed to hear that you feel it land somewhere deep and tired and waiting.

"Okay," you say.

It comes out barely above a whisper.

He nods once. Turns. Continues walking.

You stand on the pavement and watch him go until he turns the corner and disappears.

You go back inside.

You lock the door.

You stand in the silence of your bookstore and you don't know why the yes that should have felt like enough feels like a room with all the right furniture and no one living in it.

You don't examine it.

You turn off the lights.

You go home.

—

What you don't know:

He walked two blocks before he took out his phone.

He stood under a streetlight and typed with the particular efficiency of someone recording results before they degrade.

Subject brought up the dream without prompting. Unprompted disclosure suggests elevated trust. Emotional response to corrective stimulus stronger than projected — tears, visible distress, significant duration.

Kiss accepted. Reciprocation present on first attempt — motor memory activated before conscious override. Second kiss accepted without reciprocation.

Motor stillness during second kiss consistent with previous observations. The body maintains the space. The wound is specific. The fracture is responding.

Subject returned after departure. Requested verbal confirmation of belief.

Provided.

Accepted.

Note: subject's eyes moved to the door after I left the first time.

She was not looking at me.

She came after me the second time.

She was not looking for me either.

Next variable: proximity. Increase frequency of campus presence. The fracture needs a source to run toward.

It will find one.

It always does.

Notable consistency across iterations.

· · ·

← vi. subject  ·  ↳ masterlist  ·  viii. perturbation →

a/n: hi guys🤍, im trying to get as many chapters out as I can b4 uni locks me in for finals week. I want you guys to know I'm up to chapter 11, i'm proofreading ALL of them so please bear with my uploads and shtuff lolol. anyways what do you guys think of mahito? maybe another chapter out tmr we'll see :p

—

You don't get the notebook.

You don't know why. You stand in the back room for a moment with your hand on your bag where the notebook has been living since you brought it home and then brought it back and then kept it behind the counter and then put it in your bag again — and you make a decision you cannot fully articulate the reasoning for. Just that the notebook is yours in some way you can't justify. Just that giving it to a stranger feels like losing something you haven't finished finding yet.

You go back out.

"I'm sorry," you tell him. "I don't think we have it."

He looks at you.

You look back.

The silence lasts two seconds longer than it should.

"That's alright," he says finally. And then, instead of leaving, he tilts his head slightly and says: "You're interested in astrophysics?"

You blink. "Sorry?"

He nods toward the section behind you — the science shelves, where you were reorganizing when he came in. "You were reading the spines in the physics section. Not reorganizing. Reading."

You were. You don't know when you started doing that — pausing at the physics shelves specifically, running your eyes over titles that shouldn't mean anything to you. You have noticed it before and filed it away under: inexplicable.

"I find it interesting," you say. Which is true and also somehow insufficient.

He smiles. It is a small smile, controlled, the smile of someone who is receiving information they expected.

"There's a lecture series at the university," he says. "Public access. Stellar formation, mostly." A pause. "You might find it interesting."

Stellar formation.

The words land in your chest the way they always do — with that specific warm weight, that sense of beginning rather than ending that you have never been able to trace to a source. You don't know why those words feel like coming home. You have never studied stellar formation. You have no reason to feel anything when you hear them.

And yet.

"How do you know I'd find it interesting?" you ask.

He tilts his head slightly. "I don't," he says pleasantly. "But you're still here talking to me instead of going back to work, which suggests you might."

You look at him for a moment. At the stitching. At the glasses. At the specific quality of his attention that you cannot quite categorize.

"Better yet," you say, "why should I trust you?"

Something in his expression shifts — not surprise, not discomfort. Something closer to appreciation. The look of someone who has just received an answer they find more interesting than the ones they usually get.

"You shouldn't," he says simply. "Not yet." He sets the card on the counter — plain, white, just a name and a number — and takes a small step back. "But the lecture is public access. Thirty people in a room at a university. You don't have to trust me to find it useful."

He leaves without waiting for your answer.

You look at the card for longer than you should.

—

You go to the lecture.

Of course you go. You tell yourself it's curiosity — general, academic, the kind of intellectual restlessness that has always been part of how you move through the world. You tell yourself it has nothing to do with him specifically. You tell yourself a lot of things on the train ride over.

The lecture hall is smaller than you expect. Maybe thirty people. You take a seat near the back and spend the first ten minutes feeling slightly foolish for coming, for dressing deliberately casually, for bringing a pen when you don't know what you would even write.

He finds you at the end.

Of course he does.

"You came," he says, sliding into the empty seat beside you with the ease of someone who does this regularly, who takes up space without asking permission. Not aggressive. Just — certain.

You shift slightly in your seat to face him. "You said it would be interesting," you say.

"Was it?"

You consider lying. You don't. "Some of it," you say.

He nods, unsurprised. His hands are folded loosely in his lap, completely still in the way of someone who has learned to take up no more space than necessary when they want someone to keep talking.

"You have good instincts," he says. "For the material."

The phrase lands strangely. You file it away under the growing category of things about this interaction that feel slightly off-axis without being wrong enough to name.

"What do you do?" you ask. "Besides track down lost notebooks."

"Research," he says. He turns slightly toward you as he says it, the movement deliberate, giving you his full attention in a way that is — not uncomfortable. Just very thorough. "Memory, mostly. The way the brain stores and loses information." He says it the way people say things that are true but incomplete. "It's fascinating work. The human mind is remarkable in its inconsistencies."

"Inconsistencies," you repeat.

"The things it holds onto," he says. "The things it lets go of. The things it reaches for without knowing why." His eyes are on you with that specific quality of attention — measuring, interested, not unkind but not warm either. The attention of someone who finds you genuinely interesting in the way a researcher finds a result genuinely interesting. "Don't you find that fascinating?"

You do.

That's what unsettles you. You do find it fascinating. You find yourself nodding before you mean to, leaning slightly forward, engaging with this stranger about memory and loss and the things the brain reaches for without knowing why — and somewhere in the middle of it you lose track of the fact that you don't know him, that he came into your bookstore looking for a notebook you lied about having, that something about him makes the back of your neck prickle in a way you keep dismissing.

He is interesting.

He is interested in you.

These things feel important in a way you can't quite locate.

—

He comes back to the bookstore the following Tuesday.

And the one after.

It becomes a thing without either of you deciding it is a thing — through repetition, through the quiet accumulation of shared time, through the particular alchemy of two people who find each other interesting and keep showing up to prove it. He asks questions. Good ones. The kind that suggest he has been thinking about your previous conversation, that he is paying attention in the specific way that makes you feel like you exist more clearly when he is in the room.

You like this about him.

You don't examine why it also makes you feel slightly watched.

He brings you things.

This is the detail you will think about later, when you have more information, when you understand what he was doing. At the time it feels like thoughtfulness. At the time it feels like the particular attentiveness of someone who listens carefully and acts on what they hear.

The first thing is a research paper on stellar formation — the kind that shouldn't be accessible outside an academic institution. He sets it on the counter without ceremony, sliding it across with two fingers. "Thought you might find this useful," he says. His voice drops slightly on the last word. Just slightly. Just enough.

You look down at the paper, then back up at him. Something in you responds to the softness of it before you decide to.

You read the paper that night. You understand most of it. More than you should.

The second thing is a coffee. He sets it on the counter on a Wednesday morning before you've opened, knocking quietly on the glass until you unlock the door. Black. No sugar. He doesn't come in — just hands it through the doorway, his expression perfectly neutral, like this is a completely ordinary thing to do.

You don't remember telling him that's how you take it.

"Thank you," you say, because what else is there to say.

"Of course," he says, and leaves.

You drink it anyway. You tell yourself you must have mentioned it at some point.

The third thing is a book. Small, slim, slightly battered at the corners in the way of something that has been carried and consulted and loved. He sets it on the counter on a Thursday and steps back, giving you space to look at it without hovering. "Someone recommended this to me once. I thought of you when I found it."

You pick it up. Turn it over. Read the back.

Something moves through you — not recognition exactly, more like the shadow of recognition, the shape of a feeling without its content. Like walking into a room and knowing you've been there before without being able to say when.

"Have you read it?" you ask, still looking at the cover.

"Parts," he says. "The third chapter is wrong."

You look up from the book.

He is watching you with that precise quality of attention and something in his expression is not quite readable — not warm, not cold, something calibrated to appear like warmth without fully committing to it. Like a very good approximation of a person being fond.

The phrase the third chapter is wrong sits in your chest.

Heavy. Warm. Sourceless.

Like something you have heard before.

"How do you know I'd like it?" you ask.

He tilts his head slightly. "I don't," he says. "But you're still holding it."

You are.

You look down at your hands. At the book you have been gripping with both hands without meaning to, the way you hold things you already know matter.

You buy it.

—

The fourth thing is a packet of tea.

He leaves it on the counter on a Friday with no explanation, no ceremony — just sets it down beside the register while you're helping another customer and steps back to browse the shelves. You finish with the customer and look at it.

Loose leaf. A specific blend. The kind you don't remember ever mentioning because you're not sure you ever have.

You look at him across the store.

He is reading a spine in the physics section, his back to you, apparently absorbed.

You make a cup that afternoon in the break room.

It tastes right in a way you cannot explain. Like something your hands knew how to make before you decided to make it. You stand at the break room sink holding the mug with both hands and feel, for a moment, the specific weight of something familiar that has no name.

You drink it.

You don't mention it to him.

He doesn't ask.

—

The fifth thing is harder to categorize.

He comes in on a Tuesday — the usual Tuesday, the quiet one — and finds you reorganizing the window display, the one that has been bothering you for weeks. He doesn't offer to help. He just leans against the nearest shelf and watches you work with that particular quality of attention, and occasionally says things.

Not suggestions. Not opinions. Just — observations. That one catches the light better on the left. The negative space is doing more work than the books. Things that are useful without being instructive, the difference between someone who is watching because they find you interesting and someone who is watching because they want to fix you.

You have spent a long time around the second kind.

The first kind is — new.

Or it feels new.

You finish the display.

He looks at it for a moment.

"Better," he says simply.

You smile without meaning to.

He sees it.

He doesn't comment on it.

But something in the quality of his attention shifts — very slightly, very briefly, the way a calculation shifts when a new variable is introduced — and then settles back into its usual precision.

You don't notice.

—

It happens on a Thursday evening when the store has emptied out and the light has gone gold through the front windows and you are standing at the counter going through the end of day count and he is at the corner table reading something and the bookstore is so quiet you can hear the page turn.

You say something — a stray observation about a book you've been meaning to read, something light, something ordinary — and he responds, and you respond to that, and without quite deciding to you are in the middle of a conversation that has the specific quality of conversations that don't want to end.

At some point you move from behind the counter.

At some point you are sitting on the edge of the table nearest his, close enough that the conversation doesn't have to work so hard.

At some point you realize you have been talking for an hour and a half and the light through the windows has gone from gold to amber to the particular blue of early evening.

"I should close up," you say.

"You should," he agrees. He doesn't move.

You don't move either.

You look at him. At the stitching. At the glasses slightly tilted the way they always are, the way you have started noticing without meaning to, the way something in you keeps snagging on without knowing why.

And then — before you understand what is happening, before your brain has caught up with the motion — your hand moves toward his glasses.

You stop yourself.

Half an inch from the frame.

Your hand hovering.

You look at it like it belongs to someone else.

"Sorry," you say. You pull your hand back. "I don't — I keep doing that."

He looks at you.

Something in his expression is very still.

"It's alright," he says.

His voice is soft. That specific softness — the register that lands in you like something familiar — and you feel the warmth of it and the warmth is almost right and you are so tired and the evening is so quiet and he is right there.

You don't lean toward him.

But you don't move away either.

He does it very quietly.

His lips at your temple.

One second.

Gone.

You go very still.

He doesn't move back. Doesn't acknowledge it. Doesn't deny it or explain it or make it a moment. He just — continues. Picks up the thread of the conversation from somewhere before the silence, says something about the book he was reading, his voice perfectly even.

Like it was nothing.

Like it was the most ordinary thing.

Your heart is doing something loud and inconvenient.

You don't know why.

You pick up the thread of the conversation.

You close the store twenty minutes later.

He leaves without ceremony.

You stand in the empty bookstore alone and touch your own temple, very briefly, with two fingers.

You don't know why you did that either.

—

You tell your coworker Mei about him on a Friday, which is how you know it has crossed some internal threshold you weren't consciously tracking.

"He sounds interesting," Mei says, with the specific neutrality of someone withholding an opinion. She doesn't look up from the inventory sheet she's working through.

"He is," you say. You are leaning against the break room counter, mug in both hands, looking at nothing in particular. And then, because something in you needs to say it out loud to see how it sounds: "He feels familiar. Like — I don't know. Like I've known him longer than I have."

Mei looks up from the sheet.

"Is that a good feeling or a weird feeling?" she asks.

You think about it honestly. About the glasses. About the coffee he knew how to order. About the third chapter is wrong sitting in your chest like something returned to its rightful place.

"Both," you say. "It's both."

Mei holds your gaze for a moment longer than necessary.

Then she looks back at the inventory sheet.

She doesn't say anything else.

Neither do you.

—

What you don't know:

He catalogued the response.

Two point three seconds of stillness. Elevated pulse, visible at the throat. No withdrawal. No acknowledgment.

He had found it in a recording — a morning, a walk, a gesture so habitual the subject didn't notice he was doing it. A kiss placed without decision, denied immediately, the ears pink for three blocks afterward.

Mahito did not flush.

He did not deny it.

He simply noted the result and continued.

Motor memory of recipient: confirmed responsive.

Attachment point: located.

Next phase: proximity.

· · ·

← visitor  ·  ↳ masterlist  ·  vii. the right words →

a/n: hi guys!! it's out 🤍 lmk if you like it!! thank you so much for all the recent support — the likes, the reblogs, the comments, i'm genuinely so happy and so grateful for every single one of you.

also!! part 2 of play it right for once is coming — would you prefer a fluff ending or keep it angst?? let me know!! 🪐

✦   i. the technique   ✦

Your curse technique has a clean name in the mission reports.

Redaction. The ability to remove yourself from a target's memory — not violently, not traumatically, just cleanly, like lifting a word from a page. You were there and then you were not. The target continues. The target never wonders about the gap because the gap doesn't feel like a gap. It feels like nothing, which is its own kind of perfect.

Jujutsu High found you when you were fifteen and they told you what you were worth. Not in those words. In assignments. In the specific category of missions that require someone who can be invisible not just in body but in memory. Someone the enemy will never report. Someone who leaves no trace.

You were seventeen when you learned the cost.

The technique doesn't just redact you from targets. It redacts you from everyone — bleeding at the edges, slow and cumulative, the way ink spreads in water. Every use takes something. Not much at first. Just enough that over time, in the people closest to you, memories begin to thin. An inside joke fades. A shared moment loses its texture. You become, gradually, a figure in the background of someone else's story rather than anything central.

You told Yaga when you were seventeen. Yaga told the higher-ups. The higher-ups filed a report and kept sending you on missions.

You were nineteen when you met Gojo Satoru. You were twenty when you understood what the way he looked at you meant. You were twenty-two when you understood he knew what it meant too and had decided, for reasons you could map but never fully understand, to keep the distance anyway.

You were twenty-four when you stopped counting the missions. It was easier that way.

✦   ii. what she notices first   ✦

The joke goes first. Not his memory of it — yours.

He makes the reference in a briefing, turns to you automatically, expecting your response, and you open your mouth and find — nothing. The shape of something. The feeling that there is supposed to be a word here, a specific word that belongs to the two of you, that you've exchanged a hundred times — and it isn't there. You smile anyway. You deflect. He doesn't notice, or if he does he files it as tiredness, as distraction, as one of those days.

You go home and write it down.

The Osaka joke. Gone. Write it here before the rest follows: it was about the vending machine and the curse and the way he—

You stop. You can't remember the rest. You write: there was a joke. it was ours. it mattered. You close the notebook.

✦   iii. the notebook   ✦

You started keeping it when you were nineteen and first understood the cost. Back then it was clinical — dates, mission counts, a record for Yaga, documentation of the bleed. Evidence, in case anyone ever needed it.

Now it is something else. Now it is the only reliable version of yourself you have.

You write everything down. Not just the losses — everything, while you still can. The way you take your coffee. The name of your first handler. The mission in Osaka where you broke three fingers and didn't tell anyone until after the debrief. The look in the hallway three years ago — him, you, the thing that wasn't said — which you wrote down the same night it happened, some instinct even then telling you to preserve it, to press it between pages before it could fade.

You read the notebook every morning. Some mornings it reads like your own life. Some mornings it reads like a stranger's. The strangers' mornings are getting more frequent.

✦   iv. what he notices   ✦

He notices she's off before he has words for it.

It's small things first — she reaches for a reference and misses it by a half-second, laughs at something a beat too late, looks at him sometimes with an expression he can't read, like she's searching for something just behind his face. He files it as tiredness. As stress. As the accumulated weight of this work pressing down in the particular way it does on people who've been doing it too long.

He doesn't ask.

He keeps the distance, the way he always has, the careful geometry of almost. He tells himself there's time. He tells himself she'd say something if it were serious.

He tells himself a lot of things.

What he doesn't do is look closely enough. He has six eyes and he doesn't look. He notices the surface wrongness and he doesn't push past it and later — much later — this will be the thing he cannot forgive himself for. Not the distance. Not the five years. Just the specific moment, repeated across weeks and months, of noticing something wrong and deciding it was someone else's to carry.

He was very good at that. He has always been very good at that.

✦   v. the unraveling   ✦

It starts small, the way all catastrophic things start small.

A target in Sapporo who should not remember you does. He files a report — vague, confused, but specific enough. A description. A technique. Jujutsu High flags it. You file a counter-report. It's contained.

Then a target in Fukuoka. Then two in Nagoya.

The memories you removed are coming back — not all of them, not completely, but enough. Enough to leave traces. Enough to make you findable, trackable, visible in all the ways you were never supposed to be. Your entire value to this institution was the clean erasure and it is unraveling in both directions now, outward into the world and inward into yourself.

Because that's the other thing. You're forgetting too.

Not just the missions — everything. Names dissolve before you can write them down. You reach for memories and find the shape of them without the content, the way you can feel the outline of a word you've lost. You forget what you ordered at breakfast. You stand in a hallway for four full minutes once, completely certain you were supposed to be somewhere, unable to remember where.

The technique has been eating outward for years. Now it's eating inward too.

Shoko runs tests and doesn't tell you the results in words, just in the specific quality of her silence after, the way she sets down her pen and looks at you with the expression of someone doing the math and not liking the answer.

"How long," you ask. She's quiet for a moment. "Shoko." "I don't know," she says. "It's not linear. It depends on whether you use it again." You nod. You already knew that.

✦   vi. the penthouse   ✦

You don't know how he finds out.

You suspect Shoko. You suspect she watched you forget which corridor led back to your room for the fourth time and made a decision, and you can't be angry at her for it even though some shrinking part of you wants to be.

He shows up at your door on a Tuesday with that expression — not the performing one, not the loud one, the one underneath — and says: pack a bag. you're staying with me until this is handled.

You want to tell him it can't be handled. You pack a bag.

His penthouse is too big and too white and too full of him — his particular disorder, his specific gravity, the way he takes up space without trying. You sleep in the guest room. He brings you coffee in the morning, correct, without being asked, and you wrap your hands around it and think: the notebook says he used to do this. the notebook says this meant something.

You believe the notebook. You're working on feeling it.

He becomes, without announcing it, your caretaker.

Not in a way that makes you feel small — he's too careful for that, the specific attentiveness of someone who has decided to do something and is doing it completely. He learns the shape of your bad mornings and on those mornings he sits across from you and talks, not about anything important, just talking, giving you the texture of the day, anchoring you in the present while you find your footing.

He corrects you gently when the words come out wrong.

This happens more than you'd like. A simple word will come out scrambled, the syllables in the wrong order, and you'll feel the wrongness of it without being able to fix it, and he'll say it back to you quietly, correctly, no drama, just the word returned to its right shape. You repeat it. He nods. You move on.

You don't say thank you anymore. He asked you not to. It's not something you thank someone for, he said. It's just talking. You wrote that down in the notebook that night.

The higher-ups call on a Thursday. You hear his side of it from the kitchen.

She's a liability. She's no longer—

I know what she is, he says.

Then you understand why we're asking—

I'm not letting her go.

That's not a discussion. You want to talk about liability? Let's talk about seventeen years of missions you sent her on knowing what it cost. Let's talk about the report Yaga filed when she was seventeen that you buried. Let's have that conversation and then you can tell me what she owes you.

Silence.

She stays, he says. Find another way.

He hangs up. He comes into the kitchen and looks at you and you look at him and neither of you mentions it. He takes the kettle from you because you've been holding it without pouring for several minutes, and he makes the tea, and he sets it in front of you, and he sits across from you like nothing happened. "Okay?" he asks. "Yes," you say. He nods.

He says I love you for the first time on a Sunday morning, quietly, without preamble, the way you'd state a fact you've known for a long time and are tired of not saying. You're reading the notebook. He's across the table with his coffee. It's raining.

You look up at him. You think: I know this. The notebook says this. He kept the distance and you loved him anyway and you would still, somewhere underneath all the missing pieces there is something that orients toward him the way it always did—

"I know," you say. Softly. "I know you do."

It's not I love you back. You both know it's not. But it's not nothing either — it's you telling him you believe him, that the notebook and the tea and the words corrected gently and the phone call you weren't supposed to hear have all landed, that you are receiving it even if you can't return it at full weight.

His jaw works slightly. He nods. He looks back at his coffee. "Okay," he says. Like that's enough. Like he's decided it's enough.

You watch him decide that and you think: where was this. five years ago. any version of then when I was still all here to feel it properly—

You look back at the notebook. You write: he said it today. sunday. raining. he means it. remember this. Below that, smaller: I think I love him too. I think I have for a long time. the notebook says so and I believe the notebook. Below that, smaller still: I wish I could feel it the way I used to.

✦   vii. the night he snaps   ✦

It has been building for weeks.

It happens on a Thursday night, after a phone call that lasts forty minutes and ends in a silence with a specific weight to it. He comes out and you are at the kitchen table with the notebook.

"The higher-ups want to move you," he says. "A facility. They're calling it care." The word comes out flat. "I told them no." "Okay," you say. "It's not okay. None of this is okay. You're sitting there reading your own diary because you can't remember your own—" His voice does something it isn't supposed to. "I'm trying everything and it's not—" "I know," you say.

"You don't know. Every morning I don't know how much you're going to remember. Every morning I read your face to see where we are and sometimes you look at me like I'm—" He cuts himself off. "I told Yaga. I've been to everyone who might know something and there's nothing. There's just nothing."

"I am fighting it," you say, and your voice comes out with an edge you didn't intend. "I fight it every day. You don't see it because you're not inside it. You don't see what it costs to sit here and read that notebook and know that the things in it are mine and feel nothing—" "Then tell me—" "I am telling you—" "You never tell me anything, you never have, that's the whole—"

He moves his hand.

It's a gesture — frustration, dismissal, the kind of motion you make when words aren't enough and your body picks up the slack. His hand sweeping out, waving off the conversation, the distance between you just slightly miscalculated.

His hand catches your face. Not hard. Barely. The edge of his palm against your cheek, more contact than impact. The silence afterward is total. He looks at his own hand like it belongs to someone else.

And then — because you can feel the sting of it but you can't find the argument, you've already lost the thread of it, all you have is the present moment which is: he is standing in front of you looking horrified and you must have done something—

Your eyes fill. "I'm sorry," you say. His face does something you have no word for.

"Don't—" His voice comes out wrecked. "Don't apologize. Please. I'm the one who—" "I don't remember what we were arguing about," you say. Simply. Just the fact of it. He stares at you.

"I know something is wrong," you say. "I can feel that. But I can't find it." You reach up and touch your cheek. "I'm sorry. I know that's hard to hear. I'm sorry." "Stop apologizing." Barely above a whisper. "I don't know what else to do."

He crosses the room and stops right in front of you, his hands at his sides, very still, like he doesn't trust them right now.

"It was my fault," he says. "The argument. Whatever you can't remember — it was my fault. Not yours. It was never yours."

You believe him. You don't know why, can't find the history to confirm it, but something in the way he says it lands as true. "Okay," you say. He exhales.

He sits down on the floor next to your chair. Not across from you. Next to you, close enough that you could touch him if you reached. You don't reach. But you don't move away either.

You pick up the notebook. You go back to reading. He stays on the floor.

Outside the higher-ups are building their case. The notebook is almost full. He stays on the floor until you go to bed. He is still there when you come out in the morning.

✦   viii. the mission   ✦

He shouldn't have gone.

He knew it the way he knew most things he chose to ignore — completely, clearly, with the specific certainty of someone who has made a decision and is pretending he hasn't. The mission was necessary. It required him specifically. Three days, he said. He arranged everything: Shoko checking in morning and evening, Ijichi with a key, the notebook open to the page that seemed to anchor her best.

He left on a Tuesday. She nodded with the polite attention she gave to most things now. He stood in the doorway for a moment longer than he needed to. He left.

Shoko calls him Wednesday night. He knows from the first syllable. "She's gone," Shoko says. "Someone came in while I was — there was a distraction, staged, and when I got back—" He is already moving. "Suguru," he says. Not a question. "Yes," Shoko says.

✦   ix. the room   ✦

He finds her in eight hours.

He reaches out before he even opens the door — a reflex, the thing he does now without thinking, the way you check a pulse on someone you're worried about. He has been tracking her cursed energy for months, learning its diminished signature, the specific frequency of a technique bleeding inward. He knows exactly what she feels like.

He reaches out. There is nothing.

Not diminished. Not quieter. Nothing. The specific nothing of a space that has never held cursed energy, that has no memory of it.

He opens the door anyway.

The room is ordinary. She is sitting in a chair in the middle of it, very still, with the expression of someone waiting without knowing what they're waiting for. She looks at him when he comes in. She looks at him the way you look at a door opening. Mild attention. Nothing underneath.

"Hello," she says.

Suguru is somewhere to the left, watching Gojo's face with the focused attention of someone who has been waiting specifically for this moment — for the exact second the realization lands, for the expression that crosses the face of the strongest person alive when he understands what's been done.

Gojo doesn't give him the expression. He is very practiced at not giving people what they're waiting for.

"What did you do," he says. Very evenly.

"What needed doing," Suguru says. Pleasantly. "She was already disappearing. We simply finished it. The technique is gone, Satoru. All of it. Nothing left to bleed, nothing left to track, nothing left for Jujutsu High to weaponize." A pause. "You should be thanking me."

"You took everything from her."

"Jujutsu High took everything from her. Seventeen years ago. I just—" Suguru tilts his head slightly. "I ended the part that hurt."

"She was suffering," Suguru says. Still pleasant. Still precise. The voice of someone who has thought about this for a long time and arrived at a conclusion he believes in completely. "Every day she woke up and read her own life like a stranger's. Every day she reached for herself and found less. You watched it happen. You were there for it." A pause. "Tell me I'm wrong."

Gojo says nothing.

"She would have kept disappearing," Suguru continues. "Piece by piece. The technique would have taken everything eventually. You know this. Shoko told you. The math was never going to change." He looks at her — at the woman sitting in the chair, watching them both with the mild attention of someone observing something she doesn't have context for. "Now she doesn't remember the suffering. She doesn't remember the missions or the cost or what Jujutsu High made her into. She's just—" He pauses. "She's just a person. She gets to be just a person."

"She doesn't know who she is," Gojo says. His voice is very even. Very quiet.

"She's not in pain, Satoru. For the first time in years she is not in pain."

The room is very still.

Gojo looks at her hands. Folded in her lap. Ordinary hands. The left one slightly uncertain, reaching for something to hold and finding nothing.

He thinks about the notebook. I wish I could feel it the way I used to. Written small, at the bottom of a page, like she was trying to take up as little space as possible even in her own record of herself.

He thinks about the floor. The cabinet. The night she apologized for an argument she couldn't remember having, tears in her eyes, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know what we were fighting about—

"She used it on me first," Suguru says.

His voice has changed. Something in it has come undone — not much, just enough, the specific quality of a man who has recently received information that rearranged everything and is still in the process of rearranging.

"When I killed our parents," Suguru says. He says it the way he says everything — plainly, without flinching, the voice of a man who has made peace with what he is even when peace looks like this. But something underneath it is not plain at all. "She was there. She saw what I did, and then she used her technique and I forgot her completely." A pause. "Not to protect herself. She did it so I would hate myself less. So there would be one less face in it. One less person I had taken." Something moves across his face that has no name. "I forgot I had a sister. For years. I thought the feeling of something missing was grief for them. I thought I was mourning my parents." His voice stays even. Just barely. "It was her. It was always her. She made herself disappear so my guilt would be smaller and then Jujutsu High found a girl with no one looking for her and a technique they could use and they—"

He stops.

He looks at her — at the woman sitting in the chair who does not know she is his sister, who does not know any of this, who is watching them both with the patient attention of someone waiting to understand something that keeps not arriving.

"She's been carrying all of it," he says quietly. "The parents. Me. Every mission they sent her on. I remember everything she repressed. Everything she took from herself to give to everyone around her. How could I have forgotten I had a sister."

It is not a question.

"She's not in pain anymore," Suguru says. He looks back at Gojo. Something in his expression is not asking for forgiveness. Something older and more tired than that. "She was one of us once. Before Jujutsu High made her into something else. Before she had to make herself disappear to survive." A pause. "Now she gets to just be. No technique. No missions. No cost."

Gojo says nothing.

Suguru watches him not say it and something in his expression shifts — not triumph, not satisfaction, something quieter and older and more tired than either of those things.

"Take care of my sister, Satoru."

The words land in the room.

She looks up at the word — sister — with the focused attention she gives to things that seem like they should mean something, turning it over slowly, trying to find where it belongs. She looks at Suguru. Something in his face makes her look longer than she looks at most things. She doesn't find what she's looking for. She looks back at her hands.

Gojo looks at Suguru for a long moment. There are things he could say. Arguments he could make. The difference between mercy and theft, between ending suffering and ending personhood, between what she would have wanted and what was done to her without asking. He has all of it. And now this — a sister who erased herself at the very beginning. A brother who carried the shape of her absence for years without knowing what it was. Two people who loved her and couldn't hold her and lost her in different directions.

He looks at Suguru. He says nothing. He turns to her instead. He crouches down.

"We're leaving," he says.

She looks at him. She does not stand up. She looks at him the way you look at anyone you don't know who has just said something that concerns you — with caution, with the mild wariness of a person who is in an unfamiliar place and has just been addressed by a stranger. "I don't—" she starts. Then stops. Looks around the room. "Where are we?"

He crouches down further, bringing himself to her eye level, making himself smaller, which is not something Gojo Satoru does. "It's okay," he says. His voice does something careful. Something that has nothing performed in it. "You're safe. I'm going to take you somewhere safe."

She looks at him. "I don't know you," she says. Simply. Just the fact of it.

Something moves across his face. Quick. Contained. "I know," he says. "I know you don't."

She looks at him for a long moment — with that focused attention, the instinct to read a thing carefully before deciding what it is. He lets her look. He stays still. He doesn't perform anything. He just — is there, with his hands open and his face doing nothing it isn't supposed to.

She looks at his hands. She looks at his face. "Okay," she says finally. The way you agree to something you're not sure about but have decided to risk.

She stands. He stays close as they cross the room — not touching, not crowding, just present, a body she can orient by if the room tilts. She stays near him the way you stay near the one solid thing in an uncertain place, not because she knows him but because he is the only thing in this room that has looked at her like she matters.

He doesn't look at Suguru on the way out.

Outside, in the corridor, she stops. "What's my name?" she asks.

He tells her. She repeats it quietly, testing the shape of it in her mouth, the way you repeat a word you're trying to learn. "Does it feel right?" he asks. She considers this seriously. "I don't know," she says. "I don't know what right feels like."

He looks at her for a moment. "That's okay," he says. "We're working on it." She nods. She follows him out into the night.

✦   x. principle   ✦

"She's no longer a concern," the voice says. Carefully. "Her technique is gone, her cursed energy is undetectable. She poses no risk. She's not our responsibility anymore."

Gojo is standing at the kitchen window. She is at the table behind him, reading the notebook again — slowly, the way she reads it every morning now, like studying for an exam she's not sure she'll pass.

"No," he says.

"She was your responsibility for seventeen years," he says. His voice is very even. Very quiet. "You filed a report when she was seventeen and you buried it. You sent her on missions knowing what it cost. You built a weapon out of a person and ran her until she broke and then you tried to put her in a facility and call it care." He lets a moment pass. "So no. You don't get to decide she's not your responsibility now that there's nothing left to take."

"What exactly are you asking for?" "I'm not asking for anything. I'm telling you. You will formally acknowledge what was done to her. Every mission, every report, every decision made by every person in that chain going back seventeen years." A pause. "And then you will leave her alone."

"Gojo-san, she doesn't even remember—"

"I know she doesn't remember," he says. His voice, for just a moment, does something it isn't supposed to do. "I remember," he says. "That's enough."

He hangs up. Behind him, she turns a page. He goes to make the coffee.

✦   xi. something without a name   ✦

Weeks pass.

She learns the penthouse the way you learn any new place — gradually, through repetition, the layout becoming familiar even if the reason for being in it never does. She knows which cabinet has the bowls. She knows the window sticks in the morning. She knows he takes his coffee a specific way that she cannot remember learning but knows nonetheless, the way you know things that live in the hands rather than the mind.

She doesn't know his name always. Sometimes she does. Sometimes she has to check the notebook. He never makes her feel like she should be embarrassed about this.

She has noted that about him — in the new notebook, the one he bought, the one he started and then quietly handed to her without explanation, as if continuing was something she could just pick up. She has filled twelve pages. Small observations, careful ones. The way he laughs at things she doesn't intend to be funny. The way he checks on her without hovering, appearing in doorways and then finding reasons to stay. The way the coffee is always correct, which she knows because it says so in the old notebook and because something in her body confirms it every morning before her mind can.

He is patient, she has written. I don't know why. The old notebook says something about five years. I think it cost him.

The moment happens on a Thursday evening, ordinary, unremarkable in every external way.

She is sitting at the window watching the city go dark and he is nearby — close, the way he is always close now — and she is not thinking about anything in particular, which is its own kind of new, the ability to simply exist in a moment without the notebook, without the inventory, without the effort of trying to locate herself.

She looks at him.

He is reading something, not paying attention to her, and the lamplight is doing something to the white of his hair, and she looks at him with the same focused attention she gives to everything, and something moves.

Not a memory.

She knows what memories feel like now — the way they almost arrive and then don't, the specific frustration of reaching for something that isn't there. This is not that. This has no shape she can chase, no content she can try to recover. It is just — a feeling. Residing briefly in her chest like something that belongs there, like something that has always been there and she simply hasn't noticed until now.

Warmth, maybe. Or the shadow of warmth. Or the specific ache of something that used to be enormous living now at the very edge of what she can feel.

She doesn't know what it is. She looks at him for a long time. He looks up.

He catches her looking and something moves across his face — quickly, contained, the expression of a man who has learned to be careful with his own hope. "What?" he says.

She considers telling him. Considers the words — I felt something just now and I don't know what it was — the plain clinical accounting she's learned to use for everything she can't explain.

Instead she says: "Nothing." She looks back at the window. The city is very bright. Behind her she hears him go back to his reading.

She sits with the feeling for as long as it stays — which is not long, which is never long, which is the nature of something that has no anchor, no history to hold it in place.

It goes. She stays at the window.

She doesn't write it in the notebook. Some things, she is learning, are not for keeping. Some things you just — have. briefly. and then you let them go. In the lamplight behind her he turns a page. The coffee will be correct in the morning. It is always correct in the morning. She doesn't know why. She thinks, sometimes, that she doesn't need to.

author's note: hi hello!! okay so I wrote this after finishing the most recent chapter for dead reckoning, thank you so much for the support! I've been giggling and kicking the air seeing all the notes.

—

You don't plan the timing.

You have been thinking about it for weeks — longer, maybe, if you count the walk where you tried and didn't get there, the evenings where you almost said it and found a reason not to. You have been carrying the words around like something fragile, waiting for the right moment, the right light, the right version of yourself that felt brave enough.

Tonight doesn't feel particularly brave.

But you are tired of waiting for brave.

"I've been thinking about going back," you say.

You are looking at his notes when you say it. Not at him. Giving yourself the option of taking it back if the silence that follows is the wrong kind.

The scratch of his pen doesn't stop.

"Mm," he says. The sound of someone who has heard but not yet processed.

"To university," you say. "Properly. Switching to astrophysics."

The pen keeps moving.

You look up.

He is still writing. His glasses are slightly pushed up — they always slide — and his head is tilted at the angle it gets when he is thinking about something that isn't you.

"Satoru."

"Yeah, I heard you." He finishes the sentence he's writing. Sets the pen down but keeps his eyes on the page, reviewing what he just wrote. "Astrophysics."

"Yes."

He looks up then. Properly. The full quality of his attention landing on you the way it does when he decides something is worth engaging with — which should feel good, which usually does feel good, except that something about being evaluated is already making your chest tight.

"You'd need to cover a lot of foundational work first," he says. Not unkindly. Just accurately. He has turned in his chair slightly — enough to look at you properly, not enough to fully commit to the conversation. "Depending on what transferred from your previous enrollment — calculus, differential equations, classical mechanics. That's before you even touch the actual program content."

"I know," you say. "I've been researching it."

"The program is competitive." He leans back slightly in his chair, the posture of someone settling into a problem. "The entry requirements alone—"

"I know the entry requirements," you say. "I looked them up."

He looks at you for a moment. Something in his expression recalibrates — he has registered that you are more prepared than he assumed, and is adjusting accordingly.

"Okay," he says. "Then you know what you're looking at."

"I do," you say. "I'm not asking you to tell me about the requirements. I'm telling you I want to do it."

Something in his expression shifts — not quite understanding what you're asking, not quite ready to ask what you mean. He picks up his pen again. Not writing, just holding it. His eyes move back to his page briefly before returning to you.

"It's a significant undertaking," he says. "Especially starting from where you are. The gap between a general interest and the academic foundation you'd need—"

"I'm not starting from zero," you say.

"I know you're not." He says it quickly, dismissively, the tone of someone correcting a misunderstanding rather than considering a point. "But interest isn't the same as aptitude. And aptitude isn't the same as the specific kind of—" He pauses, choosing words, tapping the pen once against the desk. "It's a different thing, to love something and to build a career in it. The rigor is—"

"I know what the rigor is," you say. "I've been sitting with your notes for six months."

"Which is different from doing the actual coursework."

"I know that."

"And the people you'd be studying alongside—"

"Satoru."

He stops.

You look at him.

He looks back.

"I'm not asking you to map out the obstacles," you say, and your voice is steady but only just. "I'm telling you something I've been thinking about for a long time and I'm asking—" You stop. Start again. "I just wanted to tell you."

He is quiet for a moment.

His pen taps once against the desk. Twice.

"I'm not trying to discourage you," he says. "I'm trying to be realistic. When I switched from pre-med—"

And there it is.

The first wrong thing.

Not cruel. Not intentional. Just — when I switched. The specific weight of that comparison. Him explaining his own transition as a reference point for yours, laying the two of them side by side with the calm certainty of someone who has run the numbers and found the difference significant.

When I switched, he says. As if his switch is the standard. As if his starting point, his aptitude, his particular quality of mind is the baseline against which your dream should be measured.

"—it made sense because of the background I already had," he continues. "The pre-med track gave me the scientific foundation, the analytical training. The switch was difficult but it was — it was a natural extension of what I was already doing." He looks at you. "Your situation is different."

"How," you say quietly.

You have set his notes down without realizing it. Your hands are in your lap now, very still.

He blinks. "What?"

"How is my situation different."

Something moves across his face — not discomfort exactly, more the expression of someone who thought the answer was self-evident and is now being asked to say it out loud. He shifts slightly in his chair. His eyes drop to his desk for a moment before coming back to you.

"You don't have the same foundation," he says.

"I've been learning," you say. "I've been—"

"From my notes," he says. "Which is different from—"

"I know it's different." Your voice is sharper now and you watch him register it — a slight stillness, a recalibration. "I know I'm not you. I know I didn't do pre-med, I know I don't have your specific background. That's not what I'm saying."

"Then what are you saying?"

"I'm saying I want to try." The words come out smaller than you intend. You look down at your hands for a moment — at the pen you've been holding, his pen, the one you picked up from his desk weeks ago and never put back. "I'm saying that being here, learning this, has made me feel like—" You stop. Look at his notes spread across the coffee table. His handwriting everywhere. His mind on every page. "It has made me feel like I could. Like I might actually be capable of—"

"Being capable of understanding my notes," he says, not unkindly, "is different from being capable of the program."

Second wrong thing.

Your hands go very still in your lap.

My notes. Not astrophysics. Not the material. My notes. As if what you have been learning isn't the subject itself but a simplified version of it, a translated version, a version made accessible for someone who couldn't handle the original.

As if what you fell in love with was never really the thing itself.

Just his version of it.

Just him.

"That's not—" you start.

"I'm not saying you're not intelligent," he says. He has picked up the pen again. He is turning it in his fingers the way he does when he's working through a problem. "I'm saying the program selects for a very specific kind of aptitude. The people who thrive in it—" He pauses. "It's not just intelligence. It's a particular way of thinking. Of processing. The way I approached pre-med, the way I approached the switch — that came from something innate. Something I've always had."

You look at him.

He is looking at his desk.

He is still turning the pen.

"Something you've always had," you repeat.

"Yes." He glances up. "That's not a criticism of you. It's just — honest."

The third wrong thing.

Not the words exactly. Not even the meaning exactly.

The pen.

He says the most devastating thing he will ever say to you and his hand is still moving, the pen turning and turning in his fingers, his eyes already drifting back to the page he was working on before you said anything, and you understand with a clarity that has no warmth in it at all that he does not know what he has just done.

He genuinely does not know.

He thinks he has been helpful.

He thinks he has been honest, which to him is the same thing as kind.

He thinks this conversation is essentially over and you will process what he's said and come to understand that he's right and the evening will continue the way evenings here continue — you on the couch, him at his desk, the apartment quiet and full.

He thinks you are still here.

You are still here.

But something has left the room.

—

You don't say anything for a long time.

Long enough that he notices eventually — looks up from the page, finds you looking at nothing, and misreads the quality of your silence the way he has always misread the quality of your silences.

"I'm not trying to be discouraging," he says again.

Something inside you goes very tight.

Discouraging.

He used that word like it's abstract. Like it's a concept he's being careful to avoid rather than a thing that is happening, right now, in real time, in the specific way it has happened before — in a classroom three years ago when a professor handed back a paper with a note that said consider whether this field is the right fit for you, in the study group that stopped inviting you after the second week, in the slow accumulation of moments that taught you, quietly and thoroughly, that some worlds have doors that don't open from your side.

You left university the first time because of this feeling.

Not because of circumstance. Not because of timing. Because of this — the specific cold weight of someone whose opinion matters telling you, kindly, reasonably, without malice, that you are not quite the thing this requires.

You thought Satoru was different.

You thought he saw something.

You thought the notes, the evenings, the margins full of your handwriting meant that he had looked at you and found someone who belonged here.

You were wrong.

Or he was.

You can't tell which is worse.

"I know," you say.

Your voice is very even. You have made it very even on purpose, with the specific effort of someone holding something fragile and keeping their hands completely still.

He looks at you for a moment with the expression of someone who has noticed something is slightly off but cannot locate the source.

"You're upset," he says.

Don't. "I'm fine."

"You don't—"

"I said I'm fine, Satoru." The words come out with more edge than you intend and you watch him blink — watch his pen go still — and you hate that he can see it, hate that the edge gave something away, hate that you are sitting in his apartment in his hoodie with your hands pressed flat against your thighs fighting back the particular burning pressure behind your eyes that means you are about to do the thing you absolutely refuse to do in front of him.

You press your palms harder against your thighs.

Not here.

Not in front of him.

Not again.

You have cried in front of people who made you feel small before. You remember what it looked like. You remember how it felt — the humiliation of it, the confirmation it gave them that they were right to doubt you, that you were too emotional for this, too sensitive, not built for the rigor.

You will not give him that.

You will not give him the satisfaction of watching you fall apart over words he doesn't even know were weapons.

He is quiet.

The pen stops turning.

For a moment — just a moment — something in his expression shifts toward the thing it would have needed to be from the beginning. Something that looks like it might be about to ask the right question, say the right thing, notice what it should have noticed.

The moment passes.

"Okay," he says.

He looks back at his work.

The pen starts moving again.

You watch it move.

You think: he doesn't know.

You think: he genuinely doesn't know.

You think: that is the worst part and the best part and you don't know what to do with either.

You look at his notes spread across the coffee table. Six months of evenings. Six months of his handwriting becoming familiar, of equations starting to make sense, of sitting in this apartment feeling — for the first time in years — like someone whose mind was worth something.

You thought he gave you that.

Maybe he did.

Maybe that's the cruelest part — that he gave it to you and then, without knowing, took it back.

"You taught me to love this," you say.

Your voice comes out quieter than you intend. Not small — steady, the way things are steady when they have been held very carefully for a very long time. "You handed me your notes and talked about astrophysics for hours and made me feel like the way I think about things actually means something." You pause. "Did you think that came with an expiration date?"

He looks up from the page.

For the first time since this started, he puts the pen down completely.

"That's not—"

"Because it feels like it did," you say. "It feels like you gave me something and now you're telling me I'm not the right kind of person to keep it."

"I never said that."

"You said it's a particular way of thinking. Something innate." You look at him steadily. "Something you've always had. Which means something I don't."

"I was talking about the program's demands—"

"You were talking about me," you say. "You just didn't use my name."

The silence that follows is the particular silence of something true landing in a room that wasn't ready for it.

He opens his mouth.

Closes it.

His jaw is tight in the way it gets when he is working through something he can't immediately resolve — when the answer isn't coming as quickly as it should, when the certainty he lives in has developed a crack he can't locate the source of.

Good, something in you thinks.

And then the other thing comes out.

You don't plan it.

You never plan the things that do the most damage.

It arrives from somewhere below thought — from the place where you have been carefully keeping the things he trusted you with, the things he told you in the particular late-night honesty of someone who has lowered their guard all the way. He told you about Geto months ago. About the falling out. About the way his certainty had cost him the person who knew him longest. He told you with the specific vulnerability of someone who doesn't usually tell anyone anything and you held it carefully because that's what you do with things that matter.

"You told me about Geto," you say quietly.

He goes very still.

His pen — which had started moving again, slowly, the smallest possible return to the familiar — stops completely.

"You told me why it fell apart." You are not looking at him now. You are looking at the coffee table, at his notes, at six months of evenings that felt like home. Your hands are folded in your lap. You are being very careful with your voice. "How he stopped being able to reach you. How you kept being right about everything and he kept feeling like he was disappearing next to you." You pause. "I didn't understand it then."

The silence stretches.

You look up.

"I see why," you say.

Two words.

The room doesn't move.

His face is — not angry. Not defensive. Something worse than both. Something that looks like recognition without acceptance, like a person being shown a mirror they didn't ask to look into and finding something they can't immediately argue with.

The pen is on the desk.

His hands are very still.

You watch him not say anything and something in your chest collapses quietly — not because you were wrong, but because you weren't, and being right in that specific way is its own kind of wound. You used the thing he trusted you with. You took the careful thing he gave you and you put it down like a stone.

You didn't mean to.

Or you did.

You can't tell anymore.

"That wasn't—" you start.

"No," he says.

His voice is very quiet. He is looking at the desk. His hands are flat on either side of the page he was working on — not writing, not holding the pen, just — there. Grounded. Like he needs something solid.

"You're right," he says. "Say it."

"Satoru—"

"If you're going to say it, say it properly." He still hasn't looked at you. His jaw is tight. "Don't stop halfway."

The silence between you has a texture now. Something jagged. Something that wasn't there an hour ago when you were on his couch in his hoodie and everything felt like home.

"I'm sorry," you say.

"Don't apologize for being honest," he says. Still not looking at you. "You said I value honesty. You were right about that too."

You don't know what to say.

He doesn't seem to expect you to say anything.

Slowly, he picks up the pen.

He doesn't write.

He just holds it.

And you sit there together in the wreckage of an evening that started warm and ended here — both of you wounded, both of you wrong in different ways, the apartment around you exactly the same as it was an hour ago and completely unrecognizable.

You think about Geto.

You think about what Satoru told you — how it ended not with a fight but with a slow withdrawal, a silence that grew until it was permanent, a friendship that collapsed under the weight of everything that wasn't said.

You think: I don't want that.

You think: I don't want to be another thing he loses without knowing why.

But you also think: he didn't say I think you should.

And that thought sits in you like something that has already decided.

—

They meet again four days later.

Neither of them suggests it formally — it happens the way things between them always happen, through the quiet accumulation of habit, through the fact that Thursday exists and Thursday has always meant the library and neither of them has said it won't anymore.

He is already at the table when you arrive.

The corner table. His stack of papers on one side, his coffee on the other. He looks up when you sit down and something moves across his face — relief, maybe, or the version of relief that belongs to someone who doesn't fully acknowledge they were worried.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey," you say.

That's all.

You don't talk about the other night. You don't talk about the argument or the pen or the I see why or the hoodie you washed and folded and put in your bag to return. You sit across from each other in the corner of the library and work in the particular silence that has always felt full and now feels like it is carefully avoiding something.

He works on his thesis.

You work on nothing. You have a book open in front of you that you haven't read a single word of.

An hour passes.

He doesn't hand you his notes.

You notice immediately. You have always noticed — the moment when he finishes something and slides it across the table without looking up, the casual offering of it, the thing that was never casual at all. It is one of the small rituals of being here, of being with him, of being the person he trusts with the inside of his thinking.

He finishes a page.

He sets it face down on his stack.

He picks up his pen.

He doesn't slide it across.

You look at the stack.

You look at your book.

You think: was he dumbing it down.

The thought arrives fully formed, unwanted, with the specific quality of something that has been waiting to be thought for four days and has finally found its way through.

Was it ever actually your mind he saw, or was it just — proximity? Just being near him long enough? Just him explaining things in a way that made them accessible and you mistaking accessibility for understanding?

You look at the equations visible on the top page of his stack. The ones facing up, the ones he hasn't turned over yet.

You understand them.

You are almost certain you understand them.

But now the certainty has a question mark behind it that wasn't there before and you don't know how to make it go away because he put it there and he doesn't know he put it there and you can't ask him to take it back without telling him it exists and you are so tired of being the one who has to explain what he did wrong.

You close your book.

"I'm going to get some water," you say.

"Mm," he says. Not looking up.

You stand at the water fountain for longer than necessary.

You come back.

You sit down.

The notes are still face down.

—

It happens on the walk home.

You have been walking in a silence that is almost like the old silence — almost, but not quite, the way a copy is almost like the original until you look closely enough to see where it diverges — when you pass someone handing out flyers for an open day at the university's science faculty.

The person offering the flyer looks at you both.

Satoru takes one automatically, the way he takes anything academic-adjacent, and glances at it as you walk.

"Astrophysics open day," he says, with the tone of someone reading something mildly interesting. "They do these every year. Try to get people excited about the program." A pause. "Most of the people who come to these things end up not applying. The dream of it is more appealing than the reality."

You keep walking.

"It's a nice idea," he continues, still looking at the flyer. "Wanting to study something because you love it. But the people who actually make it through — it's not really about love, is it. It's about whether you're built for the specific kind of thinking it demands." He glances at you briefly, conversationally, the way he glances at you when he's sharing a thought rather than directing one. "Most people figure that out eventually. Better to figure it out early."

He drops the flyer in a bin as you pass it.

He keeps walking.

He does not look at you.

He does not connect what he just said to anything.

But you slow down.

Just slightly. Just half a step behind him, enough that he doesn't notice.

Because behind the astrophysics flyer, still in the hand of the person distributing them, is another one.

Different design. Darker. Minimal.

You don't take it.

But you read it.

One line. A slogan. The kind of thing designed to lodge in the brain and stay there, to arrive at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way —

"This makes it all feel like a dream. A dream you didn't know you dreamed."

You walk on.

Satoru is a few steps ahead now, already looking at his phone.

He didn't see it.

He never looked back.

You catch up to him.

You don't say anything.

But the words are already inside you, sitting in the specific place where things go when they arrive at exactly the right moment — not forgotten, not acted on yet, just held. Waiting. The way a door holds itself open before you decide to walk through it.

You walk two more blocks.

You say goodnight at the corner where you always say goodnight.

He squeezes your hand briefly — the old warmth of it, the familiar pressure, the language of a person who loves you in the ways he knows how and cannot see the ways he doesn't.

"See you Thursday," he says.

You look at him.

He is already looking at his phone.

"Yeah," you say.

You walk home.

You sit on your bed.

You open your laptop.

You don't search for long.

You already know the words. They have been sitting in you since the street corner, since the half-step you took behind him, since you read a line on a flyer he never looked at while he was already looking at his phone.

You type them into the search bar.

"This makes it all feel like a dream. A dream you didn't know you dreamed."

The website comes up immediately.

You stare at it.

You think about the notes he didn't hand you.

You think about most people figure that out eventually.

You think about the four words he never said.

You close the laptop.

You sit in the dark for a long time.

You think about his hand at the corner. The warmth of it. The familiar pressure. The language of someone who loves you in the ways they know how.

You think: it isn't enough.

You open the laptop.

You make the appointment.

And then, quietly, in the dark, you cry.

· · ·

Matcha, he thinks.

He doesn't know why he thought that.

He is sitting at his desk at — he checks his phone — 11:47pm, which is not late by his standards, which means he has been sitting here for approximately two hours since she left doing approximately nothing, which is not like him. He is always doing something. His brain does not idle. It runs on parallel tracks, always, the surface occupied and the underneath processing, the thinking never fully stopping even when he sleeps.

Right now it has produced: matcha.

The overpriced kind. The one from the café two streets over that she complains about every time and orders anyway, with the specific stubbornness of someone who has decided something is worthwhile and intends to commit to it regardless of evidence to the contrary.

He doesn't know why his brain went there.

He picks up his pen.

He puts it back down.

Matcha, his brain says again, with the quiet insistence of something that knows it has found the right answer even if the question isn't clear yet.

He doesn't sleep well that night.

—

The notes sit on his desk for four days.

He finishes them the morning after — a section on protostellar collapse, the part he was working on when she came in, the part his pen was still moving through when everything went wrong. He finishes it and prints it and holds it for a moment and then puts it on the stack.

He doesn't know why he doesn't set it aside for her.

He always sets things aside for her. It is a habit so ingrained he doesn't think about it anymore — finish a section, slide it across, watch her read it with that particular quality of attention that makes him feel like what he wrote is worth something. He didn't know he needed that until she started doing it.

He puts the section on the stack.

He tells himself he'll give it to her at the library.

Thursday comes.

She sits across from him.

She has a book open that she isn't reading.

He knows she isn't reading it — he can tell from the quality of her stillness, the way her eyes aren't moving. He knows her tells. He has catalogued them over months of Thursdays without meaning to, the way you catalogue things that matter without deciding they matter.

He finishes a page.

He looks at the stack.

He looks at her.

He puts the page face down.

He picks up his pen.

He doesn't slide it across.

He doesn't know why he did that.

He knows why he did that.

The gap between them has a shape now. He can feel it — not the comfortable silence of two people who don't need to fill every moment, but the loaded silence of two people carefully not touching something. He doesn't know how to reach across it. He doesn't know the right thing to say. He has never been good at the right thing to say and he has always found ways to compensate for that — the notes, the coffee, the walking her home even when it was out of his way — but none of those things are working right now and he doesn't know what else he has.

He watches her not-read her book.

He says nothing.

The notes stay on the stack.

—

He buys the matcha on Friday.

He stands in the café queue for eight minutes thinking about it — she drinks matcha the way she does most things, with the particular stubbornness of someone who has decided something is worthwhile and is going to commit to it regardless of evidence to the contrary. She has complained about this specific café's matcha four times in his presence. She keeps buying it.

He buys two.

He stands on the pavement outside with one in each hand and looks at his phone.

I got your overpriced matcha, he types.

He stares at it.

He deletes it.

He types: are you at the bookstore today?

He stares at that too.

He deletes it.

He stands on the pavement until one of the matchas goes cold and then he drinks them both, standing up, one after the other, which is not something he does and tastes terrible and somehow still feels like the right decision.

He puts his phone in his pocket.

He goes home.

He sits at his desk.

He looks at the notes.

He picks up his pen.

He puts it back down.

Does she want the notes, he thinks. Why isn't she reaching for them. Is it because of what I said. Was what I said—

He stops that thought.

He said true things.

He starts it again.

Was what I said the right thing to say.

He sits with that for a long time.

He does not arrive at an answer.

—

His glasses have been slightly tilted for four days.

He notices this on Saturday morning in the bathroom mirror — the left side fractionally lower than the right, the specific off-kilter angle that has always bothered him in a mild unfocused way and has always been corrected before he gets around to minding it.

He reaches up to fix them.

He stops.

His hand is at his face and he stops.

Because it has never been his hand.

He doesn't know when that happened — when he stopped adjusting them himself because there was always a hand that got there first, a reflex that wasn't his, fingers finding the frame with the specific ease of someone who has done it so many times it has become a language. He doesn't know when he started waiting for it instead of doing it himself.

He fixes his glasses.

They feel wrong fixed by his own hand.

He stands in the bathroom for a moment with that information.

He goes back to his desk.

He stares at the notes.

Why isn't she fixing my glasses, he thinks, which is an absurd thing to think and he knows it's absurd and he thinks it anyway. Why isn't she taking the notes. Why is she holding her book wrong. What did I do. What can I do. What is the thing I am supposed to do here that I am not doing.

He does not know.

This is an unfamiliar sensation.

He does not enjoy it.

—

The walk is his idea.

Sunday. He texts her — not the matcha message, not the bookstore message, just: walk? — and she says yes after a pause that is slightly longer than her usual pauses and he takes it as a good sign because it is the only sign available.

She meets him at the corner.

She is wearing her own jacket.

He notices.

They walk.

The silence between them is almost like the old silence. Almost. He is talking more than usual — filling the gaps, reaching for topics, doing the thing he does when he is uncertain which is to use words as a bridge and hope the other person meets him halfway. He talks about his thesis. He talks about a paper he read. He talks about the way the university's science building has changed since the renovation.

She is beside him.

She is not quite here.

He is trying to find the right thing to say.

He is saying all the wrong things.

He knows this somewhere below the talking. He can feel it — the way she is listening but not arriving, the way her responses are present but not warm, the specific texture of someone who is waiting for something he doesn't know how to give.

Someone is handing out flyers ahead.

He takes one automatically.

Astrophysics open day.

He reads it as they walk, says something about it — something about the program, something about the people who come to these things, something that feels like solid ground because they always talk about astrophysics, astrophysics has always been safe between them —

He drops the flyer in the bin.

He keeps walking.

He doesn't look at her.

He is already looking at his phone.

He doesn't see her slow down.

He doesn't see her read something.

He doesn't see the way she catches up to him with the specific stillness of someone who has just made a decision they haven't told anyone yet.

He just walks.

Talking about nothing.

Filling the silence.

Missing everything.

—

He walks her to the corner.

The usual corner. The one where they always say goodnight, the one that has become its own small landmark of this thing between them — the handoff point, the place where the evening ends and whatever comes next begins.

He squeezes her hand.

The warmth of her. The familiar weight of her fingers.

"See you Thursday," he says.

She looks at him.

He is already looking at his phone.

"Yeah," she says.

She walks away.

He watches her go — two seconds, maybe three, the usual glance before he turns back to whatever is on his screen. He doesn't know it's the last time she'll walk away from that corner as someone who remembers him. He doesn't know that in the time it takes him to read one email she will have crossed a threshold he can't see from here.

He looks at his phone.

He looks up.

She is already gone.

He turns toward home.

He passes the spot where the person was handing out flyers.

Empty now.

Just a pavement. Just a street. Just the ordinary unremarkable geography of a city that doesn't know something just happened here.

He walks past it without stopping.

He goes home.

He sits at his desk.

He picks up the notes from the stack — the section on protostellar collapse, the one he finished the morning after the argument, the one he has been meaning to give her for four days.

He sets it aside.

For her.

The way he always does.

He picks up his pen.

He starts to write.

He doesn't know she is already on her laptop.

He doesn't know she already has the words memorized.

He doesn't know that the door he didn't see is already swinging open.

He just writes.

—

He gives her the notes on Thursday.

She doesn't come on Thursday.

He sits at the corner table and waits.

He waits for a long time.

He goes home.

He puts the notes back on the stack.

He stares at his thesis.

He thinks about stellar formation — the moment a cloud of gas and dust stops being inert and starts collapsing toward something.

He thinks: some things only start becoming what they are when they begin to fall apart.

He doesn't know why he thought that.

He writes it in the margin anyway.

Just in case.

· · ·

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But something stays with you after she leaves — the specific quality of noticing that you have been changed by someone without deciding to be changed. Not dramatically. Not in a way that anyone else would see. Just — your eyes going somewhere different now. Your brain reaching for different things. The world slightly reorganized around a new center of gravity.

You think about this for the rest of your shift.

You think: is this mine now, or is it just his?

You don't have an answer.

You make a note in the margin of your break room copy of his notes — not an answer, just the question, in your own handwriting next to one of his equations:

whose is this.

You don't know why you wrote it.

You go back to the floor.

· · ·

him —

She carries the notebook everywhere now.

He notices this the way he notices most things about her — sideways, without meaning to, cataloguing details his brain files away before he's consciously decided to pay attention. In her bag on Wednesdays. On the break room table at the bookstore, open to whatever page she's on, a different pen each time. On her nightstand when he stays late enough that the conversation outlasts the reasonable hour to leave and neither of them mentions it.

He gave it to her thinking she'd read it once and find it useful.

He did not anticipate that she would inhabit it.

He did not anticipate a lot of things about her, if he's being precise.

He watches her across the library table now — chin in her hand, reading something that isn't his notes for once, highlighter moving in long unhurried strokes — and thinks, not for the first time, that she is the most interesting problem he has ever encountered.

Not because she's complicated.

Because she makes sense in a way he wasn't expecting.

He looks back at his own work.

He has read the same paragraph four times.

· · ·

you —

The evening is his apartment.

This is where you end up most Thursdays now — the library closing, the walk becoming habit, the apartment door opening the way it does when a place has decided it knows you. You on the couch. Him at his desk. The particular warmth of a space that holds two people comfortably without requiring them to perform for each other.

You have his hoodie on.

You stopped asking if that was okay weeks ago.

He has music playing — something instrumental, something without words, the kind of thing he plays when he's thinking hard and doesn't want language getting in the way. You have learned to read his music the way you've learned to read his handwriting. This one means he's close to something. Working toward an edge.

You read his notes.

Not the new ones — he hasn't given you those yet, they're still face down on his desk, still being thought through. The older ones. The ones you have practically memorized by now, the ones you keep coming back to because there is always something new in them, some connection you didn't make the last time, some thread that wasn't visible until you'd read enough of the surrounding material to understand what it was reaching for.

You find yourself underlining something.

You stop.

You look at the underlining.

His notes. Your pen. Your instinct responding to his thinking before you decided to respond.

Whose is this, you think again.

And then — softer, underneath it, the thing you haven't let yourself think directly yet:

Does it matter?

You look at him across the room. The back of his head. The slight tilt of his glasses. The way his shoulders look when he's writing something he believes in.

You think: I came to this through him. So what. People come to things through people. That doesn't make it less real.

You think: I am different than I was six months ago and the difference feels like mine.

You look back at the notes.

You keep reading.

· · ·

him —

He becomes aware, somewhere around ten o'clock, that he has been writing for three hours and she has been there for all of them and the apartment feels different with her in it than it does when she's not.

Not louder. She's not loud. Just — fuller. Like a room that has remembered what it's for.

He turns around.

She's asleep on the couch.

His notes across her lap. Her pen still loosely in her hand. Her head tilted at the specific angle of someone who didn't mean to fall asleep and went under anyway, quickly and completely, the way people do when they are finally somewhere safe enough to stop holding themselves up.

He looks at her for a long time.

He is a person who has always known things. It is the fact of him, the organizing principle — the certainty, the aptitude, the particular way his mind moves through problems and finds the answer before other people have finished reading the question. He has never questioned this about himself. Has never needed to.

He looks at her sleeping in his hoodie with his notes on her lap and thinks, quietly and without quite meaning to:

I did not anticipate her.

Not her specifically — not the bookstore, not the way she argues in margins, not the way she holds things she cares about with both hands. Not the specific frequency of her mind, the constellation-thinking, the way she moves from meaning to meaning and arrives somewhere he wouldn't have gone alone.

He didn't anticipate any of it.

He thought he had already encountered the interesting things.

He was wrong about that.

He gets up quietly. Finds the blanket from the end of the couch and drapes it over her without waking her, which requires a specific kind of careful he is not usually called to exercise. She doesn't stir. Her pen drops slightly in her loosening hand and he takes it before it falls and sets it on the coffee table next to his notes.

He stands there for a moment.

He looks at her.

He does something he will not acknowledge doing.

He goes back to his desk.

He picks up his pen.

He looks at the page he was working on.

He writes, in the margin, without quite deciding to:

she asked if I ever worry I'm wrong about something fundamental.

I said no.

I think that was the wrong answer.

He stares at it.

He doesn't cross it out.

He goes back to the thesis.

· · ·

both —

He walks you home in the morning.

You wake to the smell of coffee and the specific quality of early light through his windows — the kind that comes before the city is fully awake, pale and unhurried — and find him at his desk already, working, as if he never stopped. Maybe he didn't.

"You didn't wake me," you say.

"You needed to sleep," he says, not looking up.

You sit up. Find the blanket. Look at it for a moment.

"You covered me," you say.

"It gets cold," he says.

You look at him. At the back of his head. At his glasses slightly tilted the way they always are.

"Did you—" you start.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says. Still not looking up. Still writing.

You look at him for a long moment.

You smile.

You don't push it.

You reach for the coffee he left on the table for you — exactly how you take it, without being asked — and wrap both hands around the mug and let him have the denial.

You know.

You let him keep not knowing that you know.

It is one of the small private languages of this thing between you.

—

He walks you home after coffee, through streets that are just beginning to fill, the city finding its rhythm for the day. You walk the way you always walk — side by side, his hands in his pockets, yours occasionally gesturing when you're making a point, the particular ease of two people who have learned each other's pace.

He tells you about a paper he's been thinking about.

You listen.

You ask a question that makes him stop walking.

"How do you do that," he says.

"Do what."

"Find the thing I haven't said yet."

You look at him.

"I just listen," you say.

He starts walking again.

"Most people don't," he says. And then, because he is who he is, because the certainty is always there underneath everything: "Not the way you do. You have a particular way of — processing. It's unusual."

You hear: you're unusual in a good way.

You will remember, later, that what he actually said was: you're unusual.

Not: you could do this.

Not: you belong here.

Just: unusual.

You are about to file it away — the way you file small wrongnesses on warm mornings, carefully, without examining them — when he does it.

Mid-step. Mid-sentence. Just — briefly, quietly, the way he does things he won't acknowledge doing. His lips at your temple. One second. Gone before you can decide how to receive it.

You go very still.

He keeps walking.

He doesn't mention it.

You don't ask.

You let exactly two seconds pass.

Then you turn, go up on your toes, and press a quick kiss to his cheek.

And run.

Not far — just ahead, three or four steps, enough to put distance between you before he can compose himself. You're already laughing by the time you turn back to look at him.

He has stopped walking.

He is standing on the pavement.

His mouth is slightly open.

You have never seen Satoru Gojo at a loss before. Not genuinely. Not in the specific way of someone whose brain, which processes everything at an unreasonable speed, has encountered something it cannot immediately categorize and has simply — stalled.

You laugh harder.

"You—" he starts.

"Come on," you say, still laughing, already walking again. "You'll be late."

He catches up.

It takes him a moment longer than it should.

When he falls back into step beside you his ears are pink and his composure is approximately eighty percent of what it usually is and he is very pointedly not looking at you, which means he is thinking about it, which means you win.

"That was—" he tries again.

"Mmm?" you say pleasantly.

He closes his mouth.

You smile at the pavement.

He walks slightly closer to you than he was before.

Neither of you mentions that either.

· · ·

The notebook stays on your nightstand.

His pen is on your coffee table.

In the margin of page forty-seven of his thesis, in handwriting slightly less controlled than usual:

she asked if I ever worry I'm wrong about something fundamental.

I said no.

I think that was the wrong answer.

He doesn't show you that page.

You don't ask.

Not yet.

Not yet.

· · ·

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—

The tea is the only other part that ever feels slightly off.

Not bad off. Just... you always reach for two mugs before catching yourself. Every single morning, without fail, your hand finds the second hook on the mug rack before your brain catches up and redirects.

One, you remind yourself.

Just one.

You've lived alone for as long as you can remember. There is no reason for two mugs. There is no one else in this apartment, no one who takes their tea a specific way, no one whose mug you would know by instinct. Just you. Just one.

You know this.

Your hand reaches for the second one anyway.

You put it back.

You drink your tea standing at the kitchen window watching the street below come slowly to life; a dog, a cyclist, the elderly man from the third floor who walks at exactly the same pace regardless of weather, as if he made a private agreement with time and intends to honor it. You watch him until he disappears around the corner.

You finish your tea.

You rinse the mug.

You leave.

One minute behind schedule.

You don't know why that bothers you more than it should.

—

The bookstore smells right.

It always does — something about old paper and held air and the particular quiet of a space that has decided what it is and committed to it fully. You've worked here long enough that the smell no longer registers consciously. It just means: you're here. this is yours. everything is fine.

Everything is fine.

You hang up your jacket, tie on your apron, and check the schedule pinned to the corkboard. Deliveries at ten. Inventory in the afternoon. Your coworker Mei is on the register until two, at which point you'll swap and she'll disappear into the back to nurse one of her mysterious headaches.

You make a cup of tea in the break room.

Then you make another one.

You stand there looking at two steaming mugs on the counter and cannot explain why your hands did that. Muscle memory, maybe. Except you have never worked with someone who drinks tea. Except you have never had a reason to make two cups here.

You pour one down the sink.

You carry the other one out to the floor and tell yourself it doesn't mean anything.

It doesn't mean anything.

—

The deliveries arrive at ten on the dot and you spend the better part of an hour sorting through them in the back — new releases stacked in careful piles, orders cross-referenced against the spreadsheet Mei keeps with the particular obsessiveness of someone who does not trust the universe to organize itself. You find a satisfaction in this part of the job that you've never been able to fully articulate. The sorting. The placing. The act of deciding where things belong.

By eleven the floor is quiet enough that you have time to rearrange the window display, which has been bothering you for two weeks. The current arrangement puts all the new releases front and center in a way that feels aggressive — like the books are demanding to be noticed rather than inviting you in. You prefer the latter. You have always believed that the best kind of discovery feels accidental.

You spend twenty minutes rebuilding the display from scratch, standing back to assess it with your arms crossed and your head tilted slightly to one side.

Better.

A woman comes in around half eleven and asks for a gift recommendation for her daughter who has just started university. You ask three questions — what does she study, what did she read last, does she prefer to be challenged or comforted — and then lead her to a slim novel with a blue spine that you press into her hands with the quiet confidence of someone who has done this a thousand times and means it every time.

"She'll love this," you tell her, and you mean it completely.

The woman thanks you warmly, and you watch her leave with the book tucked under her arm, and for a moment you feel entirely yourself. Good at this. Content in this. A person in the right place.

Then the bell above the door rings and you look up before you decide to.

Just a man in a coat browsing the fiction table.

Just a reflex.

Just nothing.

You go back to the counter.

—

The bell above the door rings forty-seven times before noon.

You aren't counting on purpose. You just notice — every single time it rings, your eyes move to the door. Every time, without deciding to, without consciously choosing to look. It happens before thought, before intention, somewhere in the body below the brain.

Most of the time it's regulars. The woman with the canvas tote who always buys poetry collections and never looks like she needs them. The university students who come in looking harassed and leave looking marginally less so. The man who asks for recommendations and never buys anything but comes back every week, and you have quietly decided that the coming back is the point — that what he is really looking for isn't in any of the books.

You look up every single time.

You tell yourself you don't know what you're looking for.

You're not looking for anything, you correct. You just look. Reflex. Customer service instinct. The entirely normal habit of a person who works in a shop with a bell above the door.

Entirely normal.

You go back to the display you're arranging and try to remember what you were thinking about before the bell rang.

You can't.

The bell rings again.

You look up.

A woman with a pram. Two teenage boys. An elderly couple who immediately separate to opposite ends of the store with the practiced ease of people who have spent decades agreeing on the important things and diverging comfortably on the rest.

You watch the couple. There's something about the way they split apart without discussion — without even a glance — that makes you feel something unnamed and passing, like a shadow crossing your peripheral vision that disappears when you turn to look at it directly.

You don't examine it.

You go back to work.

—

The afternoon gets busy the way bookstore afternoons do — gradually and then all at once, a slow accumulation of people and soft questions and the particular chaos of browsers who pull books halfway off shelves and then don't commit, leaving them jutting out at odd angles like they couldn't decide whether to stay or go.

You are in the middle of redirecting a man who has been standing in the wrong aisle for ten minutes — he wants literary fiction, not general fiction, a distinction he feels very strongly about and has explained to you twice — when a woman approaches with the look of someone who has a very specific need and limited patience for obstacles between her and it.

"Excuse me — science fiction?"

Your brain says: second aisle, right side, past the—

And then something misfires.

Half a second. Barely even that. A blip, a stutter, the cognitive equivalent of a skipped heartbeat where your brain goes somewhere else entirely without asking permission. Not science fiction. Just science. And specifically, for reasons you cannot begin to account for, astrophysics — the weight of that specific word in your mouth like vocabulary from a language you once studied and have since let go untended. Like something that used to live close and has moved to a distance you can't measure.

You don't know why you almost said that.

You don't know why astrophysics specifically. You don't study it. You never have, as far as you can remember. There is no logical pathway from science fiction to that particular word except through some part of your brain that apparently didn't get the memo about what you do and don't know.

The whole misfire lasts less than a second.

"Second aisle," you say, your voice perfectly smooth, already pointing. "Right side, organised by author. Le Guin is at the far end if that's what you're after."

The woman thanks you and moves past.

You stand there for a moment after she's gone, in the particular stillness of someone trying to locate the source of a sound that has already stopped.

Second aisle. Right side.

You know where everything in this bookstore is. You can navigate it in the dark, in theory, which is not something you have tested but feel confident about. There is no reason for your brain to have stuttered on a simple directional question.

You shake it off.

You go back to the display.

The bell rings and you look up.

Nobody you recognize.

Nobody you were waiting for.

You weren't waiting for anyone, you tell yourself again, more firmly this time, as if the repetition might make it feel more true.

It does not feel more true.

—

The notebook turns up at half two, in a box of donations someone left by the back door sometime between the morning delivery and now.

You go through donation boxes the same way every time — quickly, practically, sorted into keep, price, recycle. Most of it is readable. Some of it isn't worth the shelf space. Occasionally something genuinely interesting surfaces and you set it aside for yourself, which is one of the small private perks of the job that you have never once felt guilty about.

The notebook is near the bottom of the box.

Spiral bound. Battered at the corners in the way of something that has been carried everywhere and consulted often, loved in the particular rough way that you love things you can't put down — the metal spiral slightly bent from being shoved into bags, the cover creased along the spine from being opened and held flat too many times to count. No title. Just a name written on the front in handwriting that is precise and slightly too small, the kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who always has more to say than space allows and has learned to be economical without ever quite managing to be brief.

The name means nothing to you.

You open it anyway.

The pages are full.

Not printed — handwritten, dense, marginalia crowding every available edge. Physics. Astrophysics specifically, which sends a small strange ripple through you that you file away without examining. Equations and proofs and long looping arguments that circle back on themselves and then spiral outward, wider each time, until the original question is barely visible in the rearview. You follow the structure of it with your eyes and notice the way this mind moves — it never comes back to exactly the same place. It loops outward. Always outward. Like it is afraid of arriving somewhere it has already been.

You don't fully understand the math.

But you follow it.

That's the strange part — you follow the thinking even where the equations lose you, the way you can follow a piece of music without knowing how to play the instrument, tracking the feeling of it rather than the mechanics. There's something in the way this person's mind moves that feels almost like—

You turn the page.

And stop.

Because the handwriting changes.

Not dramatically — it's still small, still dense, still crowding the margins. But it's different. Rounder. Less economical. The kind of handwriting that takes up space without apologizing for it. The kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who has always had something to say and has never particularly learned to be quiet about it.

Your handwriting.

You stare at it.

Your handwriting, in a stranger's notebook, responding to a stranger's notes. Your annotations tangled up with his across the margins of the page — arguing, questioning, occasionally writing wrong but interesting next to a theorem in penmanship that is unmistakably, impossibly yours.

You flip back. Forward. Back again.

There you are on every other page. Blue pen, then pencil, then — and this is the detail that catches in your throat for a reason you cannot name — once in what looks like eyeliner. The rushed looping hand of someone who had a thought too urgent to wait for a proper writing instrument, who would rather annotate in eyeliner than let the thought get away. Asking questions. Pushing back. Having a long complicated conversation with someone whose name you don't recognize about ideas you apparently understood well enough to argue with.

You don't remember this.

You don't remember any of this.

You flip to the middle of the notebook, looking for some context. A date, maybe. A location. Something that would explain how your handwriting ended up in a stranger's physics notes. Your eyes scan the pages quickly, passing over equations and proofs and margin arguments, until they snag on something near the bottom of a page —

this is the part where you're wrong and you know it — in your handwriting, in blue pen, with a small arrow pointing to one of his equations.

You stare at it.

You can feel the echo of whoever wrote that. The confidence of it. The familiarity it implies — you don't write you're wrong and you know it to someone you don't know well, someone you don't feel comfortable enough to tease. You write that to someone you have argued with before, someone whose reactions you can predict, someone whose face you can picture when you say it.

You cannot picture his face.

But you can feel the ghost of the dynamic.

You turn another page.

I think you're overcomplicating this — what if it's simpler? — in your handwriting again, in pencil this time.

And then his response, in that precise too-small hand: it's not simpler. you just want it to be.

And then yours again, smaller, at the very bottom of the margin: maybe. but sometimes wanting something to be simple is how you find out that it is.

You read the exchange three times.

You don't know when you wrote that. You don't know where you were. You don't know who he is or how you met or why you apparently spent enough time with him to fill the margins of his notebook with arguments and questions and eyeliner annotations.

But then —

Near the back of the notebook, in the older pages, the ones whose edges have gone soft and slightly translucent with years of handling —

A third handwriting.

Still yours. Unmistakably yours — the same shapes, the same particular way you close your letters, the same instinct to underline when something feels important. But different. Younger, maybe. Rounder, less certain, the handwriting of a version of you that hadn't fully decided what it wanted to be yet. Different pen. Different pressure. The questions written here are more tentative — less you're wrong and more is this right? Less argument, more wonder.

And some of them are the same questions.

Not exactly the same. But close enough. Close enough that you can see the shape of it — the same curiosity, the same instinct to push back, the same mind approaching the same material from two different points in time without knowing the other was ever there.

Three sets of annotations.

His, running through everything like a spine.

Yours — recent, confident, arguing back.

And then this other one. This earlier one. This version of you that was apparently here before, asking the same questions in a softer hand, the handwriting of someone who was only just learning that she was allowed to ask.

There is one more annotation that catches you before you reach the back — tucked between two of the younger handwriting's questions, in ink that is neither his nor yours. Different pen entirely. Darker. More deliberate. The handwriting of someone who is very careful about how they present themselves on the page.

It is four words and a period.

notable consistency across iterations.

You read it three times.

You assume it's a physics term. A note about the equations surrounding it — something about the consistency of a variable across multiple iterations of a calculation. That's what it must mean. That's the obvious interpretation.

You move on.

You don't think about it again.

Or you tell yourself you don't.

—

You are standing in the back room of your bookstore with a donation box half-sorted at your feet and this stranger's notebook open in your hands — a notebook that somehow contains you, not just once but twice, in two different versions of your own handwriting — when you do something you should have done immediately.

You check the donation slip.

Every donation box gets logged — that's just procedure, has been since the incident three years ago when someone donated what turned out to be a first edition and the owner nearly had a heart attack. Whoever processes the box writes a slip. Date, brief description, initials.

You find the slip tucked inside the front cover where it was placed and missed.

Two words. A date from last week. And initials that are not yours.

Mei's handwriting.

You stare at it.

Mei processed this. Mei touched this notebook, logged it, shelved it, went home and thought nothing more of it because why would she — it's just a physics notebook, just two words on a slip, just another donation in a week full of donations.

You find her in the back room before she leaves for the day, jacket half on, bag over her shoulder, in the middle of a thought about dinner.

"The physics notebook in the donation box," you say. "Do you remember who dropped it off?"

Mei finishes putting her jacket on. Thinks about it with the specific face of someone genuinely trying. "Donation box by the back door?"

"Yes."

"Last week sometime." She zips her bag. "I didn't see who left it. It was just there when I came in on Thursday. Why?"

"Did you look inside it?"

"It's a physics notebook," she says, with the gentle tone of someone pointing out that she has better things to do than read physics notebooks. "I wrote the slip and put it on the shelf." She looks at you properly now, the particular look of a coworker who knows you well enough to notice. "Why are you so worked up about it?"

You open your mouth.

You close it.

You are, you realize, completely without an answer. Not because you don't have thoughts — your head is full of thoughts, crowded with them, the three sets of handwriting and the eyeliner and the notable consistency and the word iterations and the younger version of yourself asking questions you apparently asked again later without knowing — but because none of those thoughts can be arranged into a sentence that sounds like something a normal person would say to their coworker at the end of a Thursday shift.

Because my handwriting is in it twice and I don't remember writing it sounds unhinged.

Because something about it feels like mine sounds worse.

Because I think I have been here before in a way I can't account for sounds like something you'd say right before someone called a professional.

You have always had words for things. It is one of the things you know about yourself with certainty — you are the person who names the stray cats, who has an opinion ready, who fills silences naturally and without effort. You have never stood in front of someone with your mouth open and nothing coming out.

The notebook has taken your words.

"I don't know," you say finally, which is the most honest thing you can offer.

Mei looks at you for a moment with the expression of someone who knows you well enough to know when something is off and respects you enough not to push.

"Okay," she says simply. "Lock up properly."

She leaves.

You stand in the back room holding the slip in Mei's handwriting.

Physics notes.

Two words.

Whoever left the notebook knew exactly where to leave it. Knew about the donation box by the back door, knew it was checked and processed and shelved without question. Knew you would find it eventually.

You don't know why that thought makes the back of your neck prickle.

You go back to the register.

You take the notebook out again.

—

At closing time, when Mei has gone home and the last customer has been gently redirected toward the exit and the door has been locked and the sign has been flipped and the particular end-of-day quiet has settled over everything like dust —

You sit behind the register and take the notebook out again.

You don't read it the way you read books, front to back, with the intention of finishing. You move through it slowly, the way you move through something you're trying to understand by feel rather than logic. Stopping on pages that snag at you. Reading exchanges that you apparently had and cannot remember having.

And now that you have the time and the quiet and no customers to redirect, you let yourself actually sit with the question that has been hovering at the edge of your awareness since the back room.

Why is your handwriting in here.

You try the obvious explanation first. You donated this notebook, maybe. You owned it once and gave it away and forgot — except you have never studied astrophysics, have never filled pages with equations and proofs, have no memory of ever caring enough about orbital mechanics to argue about it in the margins. So that doesn't work.

You try the next one. Similar handwriting. Someone else who closes their letters the same way, who underlines with the same pressure, who — but no. The eyeliner. No one else would annotate in eyeliner. That is specifically, embarrassingly, entirely you.

You try the one after that. A dream, maybe, some strange confabulation — but the pages are real. The ink is real. The paper has been handled and creased and loved. Whatever this is, it happened.

So the question isn't whether it was you.

The question is when. And how. And who he is, the person whose name is on the cover, whose too-small handwriting runs through everything like a spine, who apparently knew you well enough that you were arguing with him in the margins of his physics notes in eyeliner at some point in your life that you cannot account for.

You turn back to the exchange near the middle that you found earlier and read it again.

His handwriting: the problem with looking for meaning in systems that aren't designed to produce it is that you find it anyway. the human brain is too good at pattern recognition. it will build a constellation out of any three points of light.

Yours, in the margin: maybe that's not a problem. maybe that's the whole point.

His, smaller, at the very bottom: maybe.

You read it twice. Three times. The maybe at the end is doing something to you — it's the maybe of someone who has just had their certainty slightly dented, someone who argued back and then, very quietly, considered that they might be wrong. You can feel the pause in it. The quality of attention it took to write it.

You don't know what you were talking about. But you know what it sounds like. It sounds like two people who are very carefully talking about something else entirely.

You turn more pages.

Near the back, in the younger handwriting — the softer, earlier version of yourself — there is a page where his notes occupy maybe a third of it and the rest is yours, crowding every available margin, looping around equations and underneath proofs and into every white space available, as if you ran out of room and kept going anyway.

At the very bottom, in handwriting so small you have to bring the page close to your face:

I think I understand this better than I understand most things. I think you're why.

You sit with that for a long time.

Then you keep going.

Near the very back of the notebook — past the physics, past the proofs, past the arguments and the eyeliner and the younger version of yourself — there are a few pages that look different from the rest. Less structured. More personal. His handwriting, but looser, like he was writing quickly or writing late, writing the way people write when they think no one will read it.

You slow down here. Careful, like you're moving through someone's private room.

Most of it is illegible from the looseness of the hand. But on one page, near the bottom, something catches your eye — a line that has been underlined twice, the kind of underlining that happens when you write something and then go back and underline it because you want to make sure you remember it:

stellar formation — she said it's about the beginning, not the ending. keep this.

You stop breathing for a second.

She.

He wrote about someone. He wrote about something she said, something about stellar formation, about beginnings rather than endings, and he underlined it twice because he wanted to keep it.

You don't know who she is.

But the word beginning is sitting in your chest in a way you can't explain, heavy and warm and slightly too large for the space it's been given.

And just below that line, in handwriting that has been squeezed into the very last remaining margin at the bottom of the page, so small it's almost invisible:

she said: look up and you might find it again.

I think she was talking about the stars.

I think she was talking about something else.

You read it until the words blur.

You don't know who she is.

You don't know why you can feel her.

You don't know why look up and you might find it again is landing in you like something you have heard before, in a voice you cannot place, in a room you cannot picture, from a version of your life that doesn't have a location in your memory but apparently left a mark in the margins of a stranger's notebook.

Your eyes are heavy.

The store is very quiet.

You mean to keep reading.

You don't.

—

You fall asleep at the register with the notebook open in your lap.

The last page you read still visible.

Stellar formation. She said it's about the beginning, not the ending.

In your dream you are standing somewhere bright.

You are mid-sentence.

You don't know what you were saying.

But you know you were saying it to someone.

And they were listening.

And it felt like the first time anyone had ever listened like that.

You wake up to the sound of rain finally arriving.

The notebook is still open.

You close it carefully, like something that deserves to be handled gently.

You put it in your bag.

You lock the door.

You walk home in the rain and you look up anyway.

No stars.

But you look.

You always look.

You don't know why.

But somewhere, on a page near the back of a battered spiral notebook now sitting in your bag, two underlines hold a sentence that has been waiting, across more time than either of you know, to be found again.

She said: look up and you might find it again.

You did.

You just don't know it yet.

· · ·

← the notes  ·  ↳ masterlist  ·  not really →

a/n: hi hello 🤍 chapter three is here and it's quieter than the last two. Also thank you so much for your latest support, including the reblogs, I probably failed my exams but I felt so much joy in seeing you guys enjoy my latest posts! Let me know if you guys liked the forum from play it right for once.

i. three years ago — the quad, september

Satoru Gojo is never late.

This is not a personality trait he has cultivated so much as a natural consequence of being the kind of person who calculates everything — the walk from his dorm to the physics building takes seven minutes at a moderate pace, his lecture begins at ten, he leaves at nine fifty-two. This has been true every day since the semester started. It will continue to be true.

Until today.

He hears it before he sees it.

The Paganini Caprice No. 24 — he knows it immediately and completely, the opening theme one of the most recognizable in the violin repertoire, technically ferocious, a piece designed to demonstrate mastery, correctness, the absolute upper limit of what the instrument can do in the right hands.

Except.

It is wrong.

Not wrong the way a student is wrong — not missed notes or the particular wincing wrongness of something attempted beyond its means. Wrong in a different direction entirely. The tempo where it should be strict is breathing, loosening and tightening like something alive. The variations, which are supposed to be a catalogue of technical achievement, are being treated as a conversation — a question in the fourth, an answer in the seventh that Paganini did not write and that is somehow more correct than what he wrote.

He stops walking.

He does not decide to stop. His feet simply stop.

You are on the grass.

Barefoot — your shoes sitting neatly at the edge of the path as if you set them down and forgot them — cross-legged in the September quad with your eyes mostly closed and your face doing something he takes a moment to categorize. He has seen musicians perform. He has seen the performance of feeling, the cultivated expression of someone delivering an emotion to an audience.

This is not that.

You are not performing anything. You are simply inside it — completely, the way he gets inside a problem that has finally opened, when the variables fall into their right relationships and the shape of the solution is so elegant it is almost unbearable.

You open your eyes.

You find him immediately — he is standing in the middle of the path like an idiot — and look directly at him with an expression that is not embarrassed and is not performing. Just: oh. hello. yes, I see you.

You smile.

Small. Private. The smile of someone caught doing something they were going to do anyway.

You keep playing.

He stands on the path and the Paganini Caprice No. 24 rearranges itself around him, wrong-right and right-wrong, and he is late to his lecture for the first time since he arrived at this university and he does not move until the last note resolves.

You do not look at him again. You don't need to.

That evening, Satoru Gojo downloads TikTok.

Then Instagram. Then YikYak. He tells himself this is empirical — he heard something anomalous and he is locating its source, the way you locate the origin of an interference pattern. Data collection. Science.

He finds you in eleven minutes.

The account is not large — not yet, not in September of your first year — but there are videos. A Bach partita in what appears to be a laundromat. A Brahms sonata on the library steps at two in the morning. The Paganini from today, filmed by someone three benches back, the angle catching your shoes sitting empty at the path's edge.

He watches the Paganini video four times.

Then he converts it to an mp4 and puts it in a folder on his desktop labeled data — the least convincing folder name he has ever created — and sets it to loop while he works through his problem set.

The Paganini plays. He works.

He does not examine why the problem set goes faster this way. He notes it, the way he notes all useful data, and does not ask what it means.

He is very good at not asking what things mean.

📱 [r/campuswatch — september, week three → view thread]

ii. two and a half years ago — the physics building, february

The music room and the physics lecture are not in the same building.

They are not on the same side of campus. There is no architectural or logistical reason that the sound of a violin should reach the second floor of the physics building on a Tuesday afternoon in February.

And yet.

He is forty minutes into a lecture on wave mechanics when it arrives — not intruding, the way sound intrudes when it is unwanted, but waltzing. Drifting through the February air and through whatever gap exists between the music building's practice rooms and the physics building's ventilation and arriving in the lecture hall like something that has decided to be there.

He knows whose it is immediately.

He does not stop the lecture. He is the kind of TA — the youngest the department has had in a decade, a fact he does not mention because it is simply true and true things do not require announcement — who does not lose the thread for anything.

But his eyes go to the window.

One student notices. Front row, third seat. A girl he doesn't know the name of yet, watching him look at the window with the expression of someone filing something away.

He does not notice her noticing.

The music resolves and disappears and the lecture continues and afterward he is erasing the last equation when he becomes aware that the student from the front row is still there, notebook open, a question on her face about the third derivation that he answers in four sentences and she receives with the specific attention of someone who was actually asking.

He learns your name that afternoon.

He does not yet know it is the same person.

📱 [r/campuswatch — october through november, year one → view threads]

iii. september — year three

By the time you are officially, quietly, without announcement, together — a word neither of you has used, a category neither of you has named — the campus has been writing your story for two years.

There are compilation videos. There are threads with hundreds of replies. Someone has made a tier list of your most notable sightings. The coffee line incident has become legend.

You find out about the folder on a Sunday in September.

You are at his desk — he is in the bathroom, you are waiting, you have been waiting by looking at his whiteboard which is covered in equations you find genuinely interesting and you have leaned over to get a better look at the third line and accidentally moved his mouse and his desktop has appeared and there, between a folder labeled coursework and a folder labeled research, is a folder labeled data.

You should not open it.

You open it.

Forty-seven files. Mp4s, all of them, labeled by date going back three years. You click the oldest one.

The Paganini Caprice No. 24. Filmed from three benches back. Your shoes sitting empty at the edge of the path.

September. Year one.

You are sitting in his desk chair looking at the oldest file in a folder labeled data when he comes back from the bathroom and stops in the doorway and looks at his laptop and looks at you and says nothing.

You look at the date on the file.

"This is from the first week of school," you say.

"Yes."

"We hadn't spoken yet."

"No."

You look at him. He is leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets and the expression he gets when he has been found out and has decided that being found out is simply a new piece of information to work with, to be received without flinching.

"You left the coffee line," you say.

Something moves across his face. "You knew about that."

"Suguru showed me the thread." You look back at the laptop. Forty-seven files. Three years. Data. "How many times have you watched these."

A pause. "I don't have an exact number."

"Estimate."

He looks at the ceiling briefly. "I stopped counting around the first year."

You are quiet for a moment.

"Satoru," you say.

"Mm."

"You named the folder data."

"It seemed accurate."

"It's not accurate."

He looks at you. You look back. The September light is coming through his window the same way it came through the music building window three years ago, and you are sitting in his desk chair with forty-seven files open on his laptop and the whole quiet history of him watching you from a distance arranged in chronological order.

"No," he says finally. "It's not accurate."

You close the laptop gently.

You reach for his hand.

He lets you take it, the way he always lets you take it — without fuss, without performance, like it is simply the next logical thing.

"Forty-seven," you say.

"And counting," he says.

📱 [r/campuswatch — march through october, years two and three → view threads]

iv. his dorm — tuesday

The piece you are playing is Ravel.

The Tzigane — long and strange and technically ferocious, three weeks of you making it yours, finding the places where the notation leaves room, where the composer's intention and your own run parallel close enough to touch.

You are on the floor of his dorm room with your back against his bed, bow moving, eyes closed. This is what you do here. What you have always done here — since the first time you stayed late and reached for your violin unconsciously, the way you reach for it when you need to think, and he looked up from his textbook and did not tell you to stop.

He never tells you to stop.

You had loved that about him first.

The Tzigane opens quietly. Then stops being quiet. You let it become what it needs to become — the tempo loosening in the third phrase, the dynamic swell arriving half a beat early because that is where it lives in your body, the bow pressure building and releasing in a pattern that belongs to you and Ravel both and neither of you exclusively.

You are so far inside it you almost miss the sound of his pen hitting the desk.

Almost.

"Can you just—" His voice comes out wrong. Too sharp. The frustration in it unfamiliar, unpolished, the voice of someone who does not have practice at losing his patience and is discovering in real time that he has lost it. "Can you play it right? Like, actually right. The way it's written."

You open your eyes.

He is not looking at you. His hand is pressed flat against the problem set like he is trying to hold it down.

You lower your bow slowly. "What?"

"The notes." He gestures vaguely, still not looking. "It has notes. Written down. By someone who knew what they were doing. You just — you change everything, you slow down where it shouldn't slow down, you swell where it's marked piano, it's like you're playing a completely different—"

"I know what the notes say."

"Then play them." He finally looks up. His eyes are tired in a way you have not seen before, something behind them that is not quite him, a version of him that has been awake too long and is not managing it well. "Just — for once. Just play it the way it's supposed to be played."

The room is quiet for a moment.

"For once," you repeat.

Something in his expression shifts — the first flicker of awareness that he has said something with edges — but he is tired and he is frustrated and he does not stop.

"It's just — it's noise, when you do it like that. It's beautiful noise, fine, but it's—" He pushes back from the desk. "There's a reason the notation exists. There's a reason Ravel wrote it the way he wrote it. You don't just get to decide that your feelings about it supersede two hundred years of—"

"Don't." Your voice is very quiet. Not angry. Something worse than angry.

"—musical theory and tradition and—"

"Satoru."

"—I'm just saying, objectively, there is a correct way—"

"You're just saying." You set the bow across your knee. Your hands are very still. "You're just saying that what I do isn't music. That it's noise. That I'm wrong."

"That's not—"

"You're just saying that three years of people stopping on the path and sitting down on the grass and filming it and sending it to their friends is all just — what. A collective failure to recognize incorrectness."

He opens his mouth.

"You're just saying that the piece I've been playing for you every Tuesday for eight months, that you listened to — all those times — you were just tolerating noise."

"I didn't say that—"

"Then what did you say?" Still quiet. Still terrifyingly still.

He is standing now, the problem set behind him, and he is frustrated and tired and the thing he said has gotten away from him and he does not know how to retrieve it so instead — instead he does the thing that intelligent people do when they are losing an argument they should concede: he keeps going.

"I said I can't concentrate. I have a problem set due tomorrow that I cannot figure out, which has never happened to me, and I have been sitting here for three hours and I just — I need quiet. I need actual quiet, not—"

"Not me."

"Not the violin, I didn't say—"

"You said distraction." Your eyes find his. Level. Clear. "Last week. You said it. You're a distraction. Not the violin. You."

The silence that follows is a different kind of silence.

He knows he said it. He opens his mouth to walk it back and what comes out instead — because he is tired, because the problem set is unsolved, because the unfamiliar feeling of not knowing the answer has been sitting in his chest for three hours like a splinter — is:

"Maybe that's true sometimes."

You look at him.

"Maybe that's true sometimes." He turns back to the desk. "And I just — I need to be able to think, and you're here every Tuesday and half of Thursday and you just play whatever you feel like and it's—"

"Satoru—"

"—and frankly," he says, and this is where he should stop, this is the moment, the edge of it, and he does not stop, "you're not going to have much control left anyway. So why don't you just — play it right. For once. While you still can."

The room stops.

You look at him.

He looks at the problem set.

Three seconds. Four. He can feel them passing the way you feel time passing when you are waiting for something to detonate — the specific suspended quality of an aftermath that hasn't arrived yet, the knowledge that what you just said cannot be unsaid, cannot be retrieved, is already living in the air between you and will live there forever.

He looks up.

Your face is completely still.

Not the managed stillness you wear in public. This is something underneath that. Something prior to management, prior to composure, prior to all the practiced fine you have been building since the appointment card. This is the stillness of someone who has been hit in the exact place they most feared being hit, by the exact person they most trusted not to hit them there.

He watches you go cold.

Not all at once. Quiet and gradual and the most frightening thing he has seen in three years of knowing you: the temperature dropping out of your face, the expression you wear in the world when you do not want to be legible returning to a place it has never been before — here, in his room, in the space that was supposed to be safe.

You have never worn that expression in his dorm room.

"I told you," you say. Very quietly. Like you are reading from somewhere far away. "Before anyone else. I sat right here and I told you and you held my hand and you said—"

"I know what I said." His voice is smaller than it was.

"You said I wasn't alone in it."

He doesn't say anything.

You stand.

You put your violin in its case. The sounds of it are very loud in the room. Clip. Clip. Latch. You do not look at him. You pick up the case and you do not look at him and he does not say your name because what sentence exists that follows your name and accounts for while you still can, what possible arrangement of words—

You open the door.

"Please—" The word leaves him before he decides to say it. Stripped of everything, just: please. "I didn't — I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I—"

You stop in the doorway.

You do not turn around.

"Yes you do," you say.

The door closes.

Not a slam — or it is a slam, technically, the sound of it traveling the entire length of the corridor, but it doesn't feel like a slam. It feels like a period at the end of a sentence. The quiet finality of something that has been said completely and does not require anything more.

There are people in the corridor.

You walk.

You hear his door open again behind you almost immediately. His footsteps. His voice saying your name once, twice, the third time quieter, and you do not turn around. You walk with your violin case and your chin at the angle it goes when you are carrying something enormous and intend to carry it alone, and you push through the building's main door and the cold air arrives and you breathe it and you are fine.

You are always fine.

You have been practicing fine for longer than you have been practicing the Tzigane, and you are better at it, and you will not think about while you still can and you will not think about the appointment card and you will not think about the fact that you told him first because he was the person you trusted most in the world with the worst thing you had ever been given.

You told him first.

He forgot.

Playing for him was the one place the illness didn't follow you in.

Was.

The past tense arrives quietly and you let it arrive and you walk and the evening is cold and ordinary around you and somewhere behind you he is standing in a corridor saying your name and you are already gone.

📱 [r/campuswatch — tuesday, 9:47pm → view thread]

v. the auditorium — friday

The auditorium is the largest performance space on campus.

You stand in the wings and breathe.

The reintroduction — the moment before the moment, when you remind yourself and the instrument of each other. Hello. It's me. We've done this before. You have been doing this since your first recital at eight years old, shaking in a church hall in a dress your mother ironed twice. You do it now in the wings of the university auditorium, the spring concert, closing act, the most important performance of your university life.

Your right hand.

You look at it. Then you stop looking at it.

You lift your bow. You walk out.

The notes are correct.

Every one of them — every dynamic marking observed, every tempo indication followed, the double stops clean, the long opening line arriving on time and not breathing, not opening, not becoming anything other than exactly what is written.

You play the Tzigane like it belongs to Ravel.

Because it does now. Because you gave it back. Because on Tuesday evening something in you made a decision you hadn't consciously reached — that if correctness was what was wanted, correctness was what you would give. Every mark on the page followed to the letter. Whatever was yours in the music would stay yours. Private. Somewhere he couldn't reach it.

You're a distraction.

You play.

The audience is quiet in the way of people who are waiting for something that isn't coming. You can feel it — the held bewilderment of people who have seen you play before, who came tonight because of the TikToks and the YikYak threads, who are waiting for the moment you stop delivering the piece and start inhabiting it.

They keep waiting.

You give them Ravel.

The third movement. The place where the Tzigane stops being a showpiece and becomes something else — where the technical difficulty falls away and what remains is just the presence of someone willing to be fully in it.

You play it as written.

The last note resolves. The bow lifts.

The silence is too short. Polite. The sound of an audience that witnessed something correct and is not sure what else to call it.

You bow.

You walk toward the wing.

The stairs.

You don't register them until your foot finds the first step wrong — the edge of it, not the center, your weight going sideways in the dark where the stage lights don't reach and the transition from bright stage to dark backstage has taken your vision for a half second too long and your legs, which have been doing the thing, the thing you have been managing and compensating for and not showing anyone, make the decision for you.

You turn.

Instinct. Always the instinct — your arm swings out, the violin case lifted and held clear, your body rotating to take the fall on your shoulder, your back, anywhere that is not the instrument, and you hit the stairs and the stairs are not kind and the violin is fine and you are not fine and you are not fine and the last thing you are aware of is the sound of the concert continuing on the other side of the curtain, the next performer already on stage, the evening moving forward without you, correctly, on time, every note in its right place, and you are on the stairs in the dark and the music is right and you are the wrong and the world keeps going.

The world keeps going.

vi. him — the same night

He is late.

Forty minutes standing outside his own door trying to find words adequate to Tuesday. He couldn't. He gave up on words and started walking.

He enters through the side door during the last movement.

The next performer is already on stage — a pianist, the program continuing with the ordinary momentum of events that do not stop for anyone. He scans the program in someone's hand. Closing act: your name. Already finished.

You have already played.

He moves toward the wing entrance without deciding to.

He smells it before he sees it — the particular quality of a crowd gathered around something that has gone wrong, the murmuring, the specific hush of people who are trying to be quiet and useful and are not sure how. He pushes through the door and there are too many people and between their shoulders he can see the stairs and at the bottom of the stairs—

He stops.

He pushes through.

There are people in the corridor and he moves through them the way he moves through everything — without asking, without announcing — and then he sees the blood and he stops.

Not a little blood. The rag that Professor Yano is pressing to your temple is already losing — the white of it gone dark and wet — and there is a thin line that has made it past the cloth and tracked down the side of your face and Yano is pressing harder, both hands now, his weight behind it, and the blood has run down his forearm, your blood, soaking into the cuff of his sleeve, dripping from his elbow onto the floor beside you, and he has not looked at it once.

He is not going to look at it.

He is looking at you.

Yano's hands — which Satoru has watched conduct lectures and correct bow holds and once, famously, hurl a bow across a practice room in a fit of principle — are shaking. Not much. Just enough to see. The fine tremor of someone who has been holding something together by will alone and is not stopping, will not stop, the shaking irrelevant, the hands staying where they are.

Satoru thinks, with the useless clarity of a mind that has come unmounted from its foundations, about a YikYak post from last October.

A student had shown it to him, crying-laughing. Do you know who this is. And it was a photo — slightly blurry, taken from three benches back — of Professor Yano in full pursuit across the quad, a bow raised in one hand and a fistful of sheet music in the other, pages escaping into the October air around him like something theatrical. And ahead of him: you, running, laughing, your own sheet music flying, violin somehow still in hand.

who's professor is this bru im crine why he chasing her aka quad girl with a bow.

He had shown it to you that evening and you had laughed — the real laugh, the one that took your whole face — and said he has a point, I did cut four bars of rest and he had said you're lucky he didn't throw it at you and you had said he almost did and you had laughed until it stopped being funny and became something warm and ordinary, just the two of you on an October evening.

He looks at Yano's hands. Your blood running down his arm. The sleeve soaked through, ignored, because you are more important than the sleeve, more important than his own arm, more important than anything in this corridor right now.

He knew, Satoru thinks. During the performance. Yano always sits front row — a fact that has been documented on every student forum on campus, the uptight professor who fought you for two years and then one afternoon stopped fighting and started showing up — and the moment the Tzigane started, correctly, the moment the first phrase arrived on time and unbreathing, Yano would have known. Immediately. The way you know when something you accepted after years of resistance is suddenly gone.

He accepted you.

That is what the quad was. What the sheet music flying through October air was. What two years of wrong, wrong, you're doing it wrong was — the language of someone who knew exactly what you were doing and could not yet admit that it was right. And then one day he listened. And he admitted it. And he has been in the front row ever since.

He accepted you.

And Satoru — Satoru who has forty-seven files, Satoru who was late to a lecture in September because he could not make his feet move, Satoru who held your hand in his dorm room and said you're not alone in this —

Satoru told you to play it right.

The medical team arrives.

They move efficiently and someone says sir, please to Yano and Yano speaks to them in a low urgent voice — your name, the fall, the stairs, the head wound, your medical history — and Satoru realizes with a lurch that Yano knows your medical history. That you told him. That at some point you sat in that man's office and told him, and Yano has been in the front row ever since knowing what he knows.

Yano's hands release the rag to theirs. He stands.

He is still shaking slightly. Your blood is on his arm, on his sleeve, drying at the elbow, and he looks down at it for the first time as though he has only just remembered he has an arm, as though the arm was simply not relevant until now.

He looks up.

He finds Satoru across the corridor.

The look that passes between them has no language. Just: two people who both know what you are. Who have behaved differently with the knowledge. Yano's expression does something complicated and then closes, and he looks away first — back toward the medical team, back toward you, where his attention has always returned.

You are already being moved.

Satoru takes one step forward. A hand on his arm — sir, are you family, only family— and the word lands like something dropped from a great height.

Family.

He has no answer for it. He has never said the word for what you are. He has kept it in a folder labeled data and called it science and looked away every time naming it became necessary and now you are at the end of the corridor and the medical team is speaking in shorthand and the concert is continuing on the other side of the curtain, correct, on schedule, every note in its right place —

You are already at the end of the corridor.

He has not reached you.

He thinks about the folder. Forty-seven files. Three years of showing up quietly, table five, the coffee line, the umbrella in the rain, the dorm room on Tuesday evenings with the Tzigane playing and the problem set open and everything exactly as it should be —

He thinks about while you still can.

He thinks about the thread. The one he has been reading since year one, since the Paganini incident. He followed the account in October of your first year and has never unfollowed it and has read every entry and said nothing, the way he says nothing about most things that matter, the way he keeps things in folders and calls them science and does not ask what they mean.

He should have talked to you.

He should have told you about the folder. About September. About being late to his own lecture because his feet stopped working on a path outside. He should have given you the information instead of keeping it, should have named the thing instead of filing it, should have said the word instead of standing in corridors saying your name while you walked away—

You are already at the end of the corridor.

He is standing exactly where he always stands.

Late.

The music is right.

You are the wrong.

You gave them correctness.

It cost you everything.

📱 [r/campuswatch — friday, spring concert → view final thread]

pt. 2?

He walks in like he has already decided the store contains exactly what he needs, and all that remains is locating it. Tall and white hair. The natural kind, or maybe not, you're not close enough to tell. Glasses that should look too academic and somehow don't. He moves through the aisles with the specific confidence of someone who has never once had to ask for directions and has never once considered that this might be a personality flaw.

You watch him over the top of your clipboard.

He stops at the science section.

Picks up a book. Reads the back. Makes a small sound of displeasure that you can hear from the register. Puts it back. Picks up another. Makes a slightly different sound — less displeasure, more disappointment in the author personally.

You should go help him.

You finish writing the inventory note you were on first.

Then you go help him, already working up your customer service tone.

"Can I—"

"Do you carry Penrose?" he asks, without looking up. "The Road to Reality specifically. The unabridged edition, not the—"

"Popular science version," you finish. "We don't. We can order it."

He looks up then.

You file away several observations in quick succession: the glasses are slightly smudged on the left lens. He has the kind of face that seems aware of itself without being vain about it. His eyes are the particular blue of something that goes very, very deep.

He does the same to you — a quick, unconscious scan — and something in his expression shifts. Not quite surprise. More like: recalibration.

"You know it?" he says, straightening up slightly.

"I know of it," you say, which is honest. "Eight hundred pages of mathematical physics. Not exactly a beach read."

"It's not supposed to be a beach read."

"Most things worth reading aren't," you say, and turn back toward the register.

You hear him follow.

—

He comes back on Friday.

You don't mention that you noticed. You're wearing something with color today — a jacket the shade of something between rust and ember, the ends of your hair catching the afternoon light as you reach for a high shelf, and you notice him notice, the way people notice things they don't mean to.

He asks about Feynman. You have the Feynman Lectures, volume one, and he spends twenty minutes telling you everything wrong with the indexing while you lean against the shelf and eat an orange segment and decide that he is, unfortunately, interesting.

"You work here a lot?" he asks, eventually.

"Every Wednesday and Friday," you say. "And the occasional Saturday when my coworker decides she has a headache."

"Does she have a lot of headaches?"

"Mysteriously, yes."

He almost smiles.

He buys the Feynman and leaves.

—

He comes back the next Wednesday.

And the Friday after.

And then it stops being something you track, because he is simply there, a fixture, the way the smell of old paper is a fixture. He talks too much. He has opinions about everything and presents them not as opinions but as conclusions, which should be insufferable and is instead, bafflingly, charming. He recommends books to you with the gravity of someone issuing important documents. He has never once asked if you like to read — he simply assumed, correctly, that you do.

You find this irritating and then, slowly, not.

"You'd like this one," he says one afternoon, holding up a collection of essays on cosmology. "The third chapter is wrong but the rest is worth it."

"How generous," you mused.

"I'm serious. The author misunderstands the implications of—"

"I'll read it," you say. "If you stop explaining the ways he's wrong before I've had a chance to find out myself."

He pauses.

Considers this with more seriousness than it warrants.

"Fine."

You take the book. Your fingers overlap briefly on the spine. Neither of you mentions it. You walk back to the register and do not look back and are unreasonably aware of the fact that he is watching you go.

—

You read it in two days.

You read it with a pen in hand, making notes in the margins the way he does — which is not something you do, have never done, but something about his annotations in his own copy (which he left on the corner table, which you absolutely did not read, mostly) made it seem like the right way to approach a book that wanted to be argued with.

You finish it and sit with it for a while before you understand what's actually happening.

The third chapter is wrong. You can see exactly where and why.

You find this unreasonably exciting.

You sit with that feeling too.

—

"You were right about the third chapter," you tell him on Wednesday.

He looks up from whatever he's annotating at the corner table you've started leaving for him, because he always takes it and you've stopped pretending that's accidental.

"I know," he says.

"The author assumes a static reference frame when the whole—"

"Point of the argument requires a dynamic one," he finishes, and then stops. Looks at you differently. "You caught that."

"Was I not supposed to?"

He doesn't answer right away. He looks at you the way he looks at problems he finds genuinely interesting — like he's revising something he thought he already understood.

"Most people don't," he mutters.

You sit down across from him. You haven't decided to — you're still technically on shift. But the store is empty and your feet hurt and he is looking at you like you are a problem he wants to spend a long time solving, and you have never been particularly good at walking away from things that look at you like that.

"I like the stars," you tell him. "I always have. I used to do birth charts for people in secondary school. Charged five quid a reading."

"Astrology," he says, with the tone of a man setting something carefully to one side.

"Don't," you say.

"I didn't say anything."

"You said astrology like it personally wronged you."

"It's not falsifiable," he says. "It doesn't—"

"I know it's not falsifiable," you say. "I'm not an idiot. I just think there's something in the wanting. In looking up and deciding the universe is paying attention to you." You pick up his pen from the table without asking and turn it in your hands — a habit, touching things that interest you, that you've never quite managed to curb. "Isn't that what you do? Look up and try to figure out if it means something?"

He is quiet for a moment.

A long moment.

"That's not the same thing," he defends himself.

But he says it slower than he means to.

And he doesn't take the pen back.

—

A week later he brings you a notebook.

Spiral bound. Slightly battered at the corners in the way of something that has been carried everywhere and consulted often. Your name on the front in handwriting that is precise and slightly too small — the handwriting of someone who has learned to be economical because they always have more to say than space allows.

"What is this," you say. Not a question.

"Notes," he says. "On astrophysics. The actual foundations — not the popular science version. I wrote them for myself when I switched from pre-med, to make sure I understood the fundamentals before I started the program."

You look at it.

Then at him.

"You're giving me your notes."

"You have good instincts," he says, and the tips of his ears go the faintest pink, which you will think about later, in private, for longer than is strictly necessary. "The way you think about things — the framework is there. You just need the vocabulary."

He says it like it's practical. Like it's obvious. Like he didn't just hand you something that has his whole mind in it — his real mind, not the polished version he presents to lecture halls and seminar rooms. The version that asks itself questions in the margins and argues with its own conclusions and occasionally writes wrong, but interestingly wrong next to someone else's theorem.

You take the notebook.

You hold it with both hands without meaning to, the way you hold things you already know matter.

"Thank you," you say, quietly.

He nods once, looks back at his work, and pretends the moment isn't happening.

You let him.

—

You read the notes the way you read the cosmology book — all at once, with a pen, in the margins. But this time the margins are already full. His handwriting crowds the edges of every page: little arguments with himself, corrections, questions he wrote down and then answered three pages later.

He thinks in spirals, you realize.

Not circles — he never comes back to exactly the same place. But he loops outward, wider each time, until the original question is so far behind him he's almost forgotten he started there.

You think in constellations.

Point to point. Meaning to meaning. The shape mattering more than the distance between stars.

You wonder, falling asleep with the notebook open on your chest, your pen still loosely in your hand, if that's why the universe put you in the same bookstore.

Probably not, you decide.

But maybe.

—

After that:

Thursdays at the library, his stack of papers on one side, your highlighted notes on the other, your jacket thrown over the back of your chair because you run warm and he keeps forgetting to account for that when he picks the table by the window.

Him explaining redshift with his hands, getting too animated, knocking over your tea.

You started learning to bring two cups just in case.

Long walks where he talks and you listen and occasionally say something that makes him stop walking entirely — just stops, mid-pavement, to look at you like you've said something that requires recalibration.

Him on your couch at midnight, glasses pushed up, reading aloud from something he's excited about, not checking whether you're still awake.

You are always still awake. You like the sound of his voice when he forgets to perform certainty.

The first time he calls — not texts, calls — and talks for forty minutes about a paper he's reading and then says goodnight like that's a completely normal thing that just happened between two people.

The first time the silence between you stops needing to be filled.

The first time you look at him across a library table, your chin in your hand, the afternoon light catching the color in your hair, and understand quietly and without drama that you are in serious trouble.

You don't say anything.

Neither does he.

But he starts leaving a space on the shelf for your bag.

And you start bringing two cups of tea.

And that is how it begins.

Not with a confession.

Just with cups of tea, and a space on the shelf, and two people deciding. Without saying so, without making it a thing. That the other one is worth making room for.

—

The notebook lives on your nightstand.

You never give it back.

He never asks for it.

Later, when you are trying to explain to yourself why you did what you did — why you walked into that clinic, why you signed your name on that line — you will think about the notebook.

About how it felt to hold something that was entirely him.

About how it felt when he made you feel like you were not.

· · ·

← half an inch to the left  ·  ↳ masterlist  ·  iii. donated →

The words don't register immediately. He thinks you're joking. Like how you used to prank him with the "I saw your best friend Suguru Geto on Tinder!" pranks.

He almost smiles.

Almost.

Yet this time there's no teasing curve to your mouth. No warmth, no shared understanding beneath the surface.

You look at him the way you look at strangers who accidentally stand too close in public spaces. The ones who take up the whole sidewalk.

He feels something inside his chest misfire.

"I—" he starts, then stops.

You shift your weight slightly, apologetic but firm.

"I think you have me confused with someone else." Your eyes are distant. They don't hold the warmth they once showered him in.

He studies your face carefully.

He knows your tells: the way your brows crease when you're lying. The way your lips twitch when you're trying not to laugh. The way your nose scrunches when you're holding back words.

None of them are there.

You mean it.

"You're not joking," he says quietly.

You shake your head, offer a quiet apology, and leave the aisle.

There's no cruelty in it.

That's what makes it worse.

—

He walks home slower than usual. Not because he's upset — he could never be upset with you.

But because he's trying to think.

Memory doesn't just disappear. That isn't how cognition works — he would know, with all those pre-med all-nighters still calcified somewhere in the back of his mind.

There are clinical explanations. Stress-induced dissociation. Selective recall gaps. He runs through them the way he runs through problem sets: methodically, without sentiment.

None of them fit.

He thinks, instead, about starlight.

How the light reaching Earth from a distant star is not the star as it is — but the star as it was. Thousands of years ago. Dead, maybe. Collapsed into itself. And yet the light keeps arriving, keeps being received, keeps being mistaken for something present.

He wonders if that's what this is.

Not you forgetting him.

Just — the light running out.

He unlocks his apartment and steps inside, closing the door behind him with soft precision. The familiar quiet greets him: bookshelves, desk lamp. The faint scent of old paper and clean laundry.

Everything is exactly where it should be.

So why does it feel slightly off-balance?

He pulls out his phone, skips past a few apps, and opens his contact list.

Your name is still there, emojis included. Even your profile picture — the one you made him promise he'd delete, that he never did.

Your message thread still exists.

He scrolls up.

Photos. Random stray animals you loved to snap and send him. Those .5 photos you took of him during his all-nighters, catching him mid-focus when he'd finally switched to astrophysics. Voice notes. Sometimes ten minutes long, just you talking about your day, something you saw, an inside joke that makes no sense without context.

There is one he keeps hovering his finger over.

"I love you." Your voice, soft. Three seconds.

"I love you." Replay. "I love you." Replay.

It is proof.

You existed with him, right beside him. You loved him — that three second voice note said so, in your voice.

He sighs, sets his phone down, then immediately picks it back up. His thumb hovers over the call button.

He presses it.

You answer on the fourth ring.

"Hello?" Your voice is the same. Soft — but the kind of soft you give to strangers who hold the door open for you. Who ring up your orders at the supermarket.

He swallows.

"Hey." A beat. His heart is running at a frequency he can't calibrate, can't name, can't slow down.

"Yes?"

He closes his eyes briefly.

"It's Satoru."

A pause long enough to fracture bone.

"I'm sorry," you say again. "I don't think I have this number saved."

Something inside him goes very, very quiet.

The line ends. This time without a goodbye, love you.

—

He doesn't cry.

He doesn't throw anything.

He sits at his desk and stares at the wall until the sun sets. You used to do that with him. You'd spend the time just talking about each other's days, about nothing, about everything.

The world hasn't ended. Worse.

It just shifted half an inch to the left.

Enough to make everything feel wrong for him, while it kept spinning for everyone else.

He replays one of your old voice notes.

Static crackles softly before your laughter fills the room.

"Stop overthinking it, Satoru."

The sound is so vivid it almost convinces him the afternoon didn't happen.

He listens to it three times.

Then five.

Then twelve.

By midnight, he knows this isn't stress.

This isn't temporary.

You don't remember him.

And you aren't trying to.

—

He searches for answers the way he does everything: quietly, thoroughly.

Medical journals. Case studies. Dissociative episodes. Neurological trauma.

Nothing matches. Nothing explains this.

Selective memory erasure of one specific individual with no other cognitive impairment is statistically improbable.

Nearly impossible.

He doesn't sleep. When he does, he dreams of standing in a room where every photograph has been cut down the middle.

He wakes with his heart pounding and no clear image of what he lost.

—

Three days later, he sees you again.

By accident, of course. Not because your social media went from private to public.

You're leaving a café, holding a paper cup with both hands the way you always do when it's too hot.

You hold the door open for him.

You smile.

It's the same smile.

It just isn't for him.

He nods in thanks.

"Have a good day," you say.

You walk away and he watches you go. He doesn't call your name. Doesn't tell you that you know each other.

Because you wouldn't turn around.

—

That night, he finds the clinic recommendation someone sent him months ago that he ignored.

"This makes it all feel like a dream. A dream you didn't know you dreamed."

Experimental memory editing. Attachment recalibration.

Director: Mahito.

He stares at the website for a long time, reading through every page. The About Us. The Meet the Team. He doesn't believe in drastic solutions — physics has one clear answer, and the real world should too.

But he doesn't believe in this emptiness either. Doesn't want to anymore.

The ache is constant now. Not sharp. Not dramatic.

Just persistent. Like white noise he can't turn off.

So if you don't remember him —

Then maybe he shouldn't remember you either.

He books the consultation.

—

The clinic is quieter than he expects. There's no sterile hospital brightness, no antiseptic sting in the air. Instead, the waiting room is dimly lit, modern, curated. Books line one wall in careful symmetry. A water feature hums softly in the corner — engineered calm.

It feels less like a medical facility and more like a place designed for surrender.

Satoru signs in without hesitation. The intake form is standard to a regular check in — name, age, emergency contact he leaves blank. Near the bottom a small checkbox: "returning client?" He marks no without reading it properly and hands the clipboard back.

When he's called back, Mahito does not stand.

He simply looks up from his tablet, and the quality of his attention shifts — the way a room shifts when something in it starts paying very close attention to you.

He is younger than Satoru expected. That's the first thing. The second is the stitching — tracing his face in careful, deliberate lines, precise enough to suggest intention rather than accident. Satoru finds himself thinking, against his will, that they suit him. That he cannot picture the face without them.

He files that thought away under: irrelevant.

"You're here for attachment extraction," Mahito says. Not a question. Questions give people room to reconsider.

He gestures to the chair.

"Sit."

Satoru sits.

"Has the other party already forgotten you?"

The question lands cleanly.

"Yes."

No tremor. No dramatics. Just fact.

Mahito hums softly, tapping something into his tablet.

"That simplifies things."

Simplifies.

Satoru doesn't react.

"What does the procedure involve?" he asks instead.

Mahito leans back slightly.

"We isolate neural clusters associated with a specific individual. Emotional anchors, episodic memories, associative triggers. They are removed."

"Removed how?"

"Permanently."

The word sits between them. No embellishment. No comfort.

"You will retain all other cognitive function," Mahito continues. "Language. Education. Motor skills. Personality traits. Only the targeted attachment will be erased."

Satoru considers this carefully.

"And there is no chance of spontaneous recall?"

Mahito doesn't hesitate.

"None."

That's the lie.

Not entirely false. But incomplete.

Selective retention is possible — there is so much the human mind can do that humans haven't begun to comprehend. Hairline fractures can be left in the neural map. Mahito has done it before.

But he does not offer that information. He wasn't asked. If they want answers, they have to ask. It's all in the fine print.

Satoru nods once.

"How long does it take?"

"Several hours. You will be unconscious. Comfortable."

"And afterward?"

"You will feel relief," Mahito says. His voice is gentle in a way that doesn't quite reach his eyes. "A noticeable absence of distress."

Relief.

Satoru imagines waking up without the constant white noise. Without wondering whether you're somewhere in the city breathing the same air and not knowing he exists.

"When can we schedule it?"

Mahito smiles faintly, already turning the tablet to face him.

"Tomorrow evening."

—

He doesn't tell anyone.

There is no one to tell.

That's the part that surprises him. When did his life narrow this quietly?

The apartment feels different that night.

He moves through it the way you move through a space when you already know something is wrong but haven't named it yet. Slowly. Touching things.

The back of the chair. The kitchen counter edge. The place on the bookshelf where a gap used to live between two volumes — because you borrowed one, and he never asked for it back, and he liked the gap being there.

The book is on the lower shelf now.

You must have returned it weeks ago. He doesn't remember when. He doesn't remember the day, or whether you stayed, or whether you said anything when you left it.

That gap in the shelf used to mean something.

Now it's just negative space.

He sits on the couch and holds the book and thinks about black holes — which is what he does when he doesn't know how to think about something else. How a black hole isn't an absence. It's a presence so dense it bends everything around it. Light doesn't escape. Time doesn't escape. You just orbit and orbit until the orbit becomes the only thing you know how to do.

He has been orbiting for three weeks.

He is so tired of orbiting.

This is what he is removing, he tells himself.

Not just you.

The version of himself that stood at the event horizon and called it love.

He wonders, briefly, if that version deserved to stay.

The thought is answered by the white noise.

He picks up his phone and confirms the appointment.

—

The next evening, the equipment arrives in discreet cases.

Mahito comes with two technicians. They move efficiently, transforming the living room into something colder without rearranging much at all.

Electrodes. Monitors. A low mechanical hum as systems power on.

Satoru removes his glasses and sets them neatly on the coffee table.

He lies back against the couch cushions.

He does not ask for reassurance.

Mahito steps closer, adjusting the final lead at his temple.

"Once we begin, you will fall asleep naturally," he says. "There will be no pain."

Satoru nods. He stares at the ceiling. There is a faint crack in the paint near the light fixture that he has never noticed before.

"Is it immediate?" he asks quietly. "The absence?"

Mahito's gaze lingers on him.

"Yes."

Another omission.

The absence will come. But something else will remain.

The machine activates. A low pulse hums through the room.

Satoru exhales slowly.

His thoughts begin to dull at the edges.

The last thing he feels before sleep takes him is not grief.

Not love.

Just exhaustion.

—

Inside his mind, the unraveling begins.

The first memory. That bookstore aisle. The way you looked at him the first time recognition sparked. The way you smiled before either of you knew what it would become — like you both found home at the same time.

The memory trembles.

Mahito watches the monitor carefully. Neural pathways light up in branching constellations.

"Extraction initiated," a technician murmurs.

The bookstore flickers. Books blur at the edges. Your voice distorts slightly —

"Do you always stare at—"

Satoru, even unconscious, reaches for something —

And the shelves split down the middle.

White seeps through the cracks.

—

Mahito adjusts a dial almost imperceptibly.

He isolates one thin thread in the network.

Not the core. Not the anchor.

Just a peripheral strand connected to sensory response.

Enough to leave behind gravity.

Not recognition. Not memory.

Just pull.

He watches it carefully.

Curious.

Very curious.

—

The memories collapse in reverse order.

Rain on pavement. Coffee gone cold between your hands. The argument. The almost-kiss. The quiet, sleepy murmur:

"I'm not going anywhere."

That one resists.

The monitors spike sharply. A technician moves to intervene — Mahito raises one hand without looking up.

Even unconscious, Satoru's pulse quickens.

Mahito tilts his head.

Interesting.

He does not intervene. He lets the machine press harder.

The ceiling fractures. Your voice distorts. The words stretch thin —

And snap.

White.

—

By 2:37 a.m., it is done.

The technicians disconnect the leads, pack the equipment into cases with quiet efficiency.

Mahito remains standing over Satoru for a moment longer.

He studies his face.

Peaceful. Blank.

He removes a small data drive from the console and slips it into his pocket. The artifact box — carefully collected earlier that evening — rests near the door. Mahito picks it up himself.

No evidence. No triggers. No accidental recovery.

When they leave, the apartment looks untouched.

As if nothing happened.

—

Morning feels clean.

Too clean.

Satoru wakes with a faint ache behind his eyes and no explanation for why he slept on the couch. The apartment is in order. His phone is unremarkable. His messages are ordinary.

There is no missing space.

There is no white noise. Why did he think about white noise?

Just quiet.

He tells himself this is how it has always been.

—

That afternoon, he leaves to clear his head. He walks without thinking. Stops at a café he doesn't consciously choose — but his feet felt it was right to walk here.

The bell above the door rings softly.

You turn at the sound.

He doesn't know why his breathing shifts.

He doesn't know why the room feels subtly misaligned — like a frequency slightly off from the one his body expects.

He looks away first.

You look back twice.

When he orders, his voice is steady. His smile comes easy — it always does. But you watch him the way you watch something you can't quite place, the feeling of a word sitting at the very edge of your tongue.

When you leave, your shoulder almost brushes his.

It doesn't.

But something lingers.

He stands there a moment longer than he should.

His coffee is getting cold. He doesn't notice.

The door has already swung shut behind you. The bell above it has already gone quiet. There is no logical reason for him to still be looking at the door.

He looks at the door.

Somewhere beneath the clean surgical silence — beneath the absence that feels, incorrectly, like peace — the hairline fracture Mahito left hums at a frequency he has no name for.

Not memory.

Not yet.

Just the specific weight of a door that has already closed,

and the inexplicable feeling

that he should have held it open.

· · ·

↳ dead reckoning — masterlist

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