NO MORE SHAME / NO MORE FEAR / NO MORE DREAD

but then there’s the knife's edge, and with the knife’s edge comes the fear: has he gone too far? and if he has, what comes next?

STELLA HADN’T MEANT TO HURT HIM, BUT HE HAD HURT STELLA—which is of course what he’d wanted to do. only that now that he's done it, he regrets it. and not only that: he promptly convinces himself that he hadn't meant to do it at all, that it isn’t like him—he wouldn’t do that!—and all of this is a horrible misunderstanding.

the strangeness of his expression turns to dismay. he has the decency to look horrified, if not about his own actions then about stella’s, and the way that her stammering makes him feel. shh, he wants to say. it’s okay. i’m not mad. trust me, i’m not mad. i’m not mad and so you can trust me. it’s okay! it’s—

the cotton candy bobs between them. to reward stella her penance, he tears off a piece with one hand, holds the cone steady with the other. now they're both holding it, which is strange and unbecoming. and also her hand feels very warm. or maybe that’s his.

' i apologize. i was rude. we will have dinner together, all together, and i will pay, and you can eat veal. ' he still hasn’t let go of her; he still doesn’t eat the tuft of cotton candy. his eyes have turned to rabbit’s eyes, dark and imploring, darting across her face in search of anything that he might interpret as forgiveness. but forgiveness for what, exactly? he can’t place it now. and shouldn’t he be the one doing the forgiving?

two flightless birds sit on a wire. they seek absolution from each other rather than from the sky.

' i don't ... i don't know what that ' veal ' is. will you explain it to me, please? ' something in the way he says this, so lame and wanting, makes him sound his age.

' and will you have some of this too, please? ' he offers her the piece of cotton candy.

"You weren't rude!" The cycle threatens to solidify itself. Stella, by some grace of her God or something even more compelling, manages to overcome it by smiling—genuinely.

Now they're both holding the cotton candy. The tube supporting the cotton candy is made of paper—paper only slightly more durable than what you or I might put into a printer. It does not crumple beneath the pressure of Stella's frantic hold because she does not do things, ever, in a manner that would cause such injury or threaten the integrity of anything, anyone.

Stella's hand is very warm. Or maybe that's his. What's most likely is that it is both of their hands—sweaty, too feverish to be truly clammy.

"You don't have to pay," she says, and when she says it, she's giggling girlishly; she's briefly, loftily amused by Ranta's complete and utter lack of awareness of how things go.

Stella is under the impression that neither she nor Ranta truly know what his family at large and her father currently discuss in the privacy of Daniel's office, but in this moment, Ranta seems even more delusional and optimistic than she is. Among other blind spots he possesses, he must not know he won't be able to pay for anything; Daniel has already taken care of it. He will provide what must be provided for anyone who needs it.

Ranta looks like he is on stimulants. Stella looks so kind that it tires her.

To accept the cotton candy offering, she decides to let go of the tube, since Ranta's still holding it above her lap. She takes the piece from his hands and eats it from her own fingers. The sugar melts against her tongue quickly. She smiles, close-mouthed. Finally:

"Veal is, um," This isn't the sort of thing you discuss so frankly—not in public, not with people you barely know. This is because most things, when you think about them, are better off unsaid. "It's like beef. Like steak?" She doesn't know how to make that more relatable or applicable to his experiences. What she does know is that her explaining that veal can only ever be a cow killed when it was still a calf, when it was still young, won't happen willingly. "You can eat veal piccata?" It comes out like a question. She already knows what she said doesn't make sense.

"Try it!"

She nudges his knee with her knee, then regrets it. Her palm is still warm from her own nervous blood flow, and his palm is still wrapped around the cotton candy tube. She can't move away. It's not his fault she can't—all the same, she's stuck.

ranta says nothing for some time—not to restrain himself but rather to demonstrate what restraint looks like to someone who seems to lack it.

around them, hawkers hawk; music drifts through rippling tent flaps; circus-goers amble through the dust in their unreasonable shoes.

' and what do people eat, miss romano? ' when he finally speaks, he keeps his voice kindly but remote: a cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and benevolent patriarch. that should be the tone for conversations like this, where he doesn't want to directly acknowledge his disappointment with her. only imply it. which he does by keeping his eyes lowered, his expression pensive.

' you're family, right? you must know. ' having shed the cardigan, he has no sleeves to pick at and settles, instead, on clasping his hands together. ' you spend dinner with them, yes? because you're family? '

it's important to him that she knows that this—this ragtag abomination of the weak and the exploited, who must surely be victims of exploitation because they are weak, and not due to some delusion of love and loyalty that keeps them together, keeps them happy, keeps them placid—isn't family. and that if it is, she isn't part of it. she can't be. because this isn't family. this is not a family. this is not what it means to be a family.

which is also to say: because the hei share their meals, and the kukuru can name his favourite meat, and the zen'ins allow him to sit at their table, he knows that they—unlike stella and her circus—are.

but she sounded so familiar just now, didn't she? he's heard it said. he's said it himself. he's thinking it now, as he does any time he thinks of home: of course i like it here. i love it here. it's nice. this is a great place, and we are family.

' so ... ' ranta turns to look at her, ' what do they eat? ' he is speaking so, so gently now, and his eyes are very, very wide.

' what do you eat? ' and why isn't it the same thing?

—none of that was to inflict pain.

So, politely: What the fuck is Ranta Zen'in's fucking issue right now?

"Yes, I—"

Ranta's disposition and posture are briefly so reminiscent of Daniel's (at times when he has endeavored to show her right from wrong because she was too confused and naive to figure it out herself) that Stella can't finish her sentence. She's better suited to cutting herself off.

"I'm just—maybe—"

Maybe what? Stella blanches as it occurs to her what must have happened here: it was rude of her to speak so severely when Ranta merely wanted to know more about how the performers at Blackwell's live, how Stella lives, because he lives across the ocean and eats different types of food and does not relate to his family as wholly, as intuitively, as Stella relates to hers.

"This," The cotton candy once more must be jostled, "Is something you eat when you go to—I don't know. When you come here, or a carnival, or a festival, or something like that? It's sweet. Did you try it? It's really sweet, and—"

Surely he knows you can't eat dessert whenever you want. He's an adult. He must know that.

"—you should try it. It's good." An offering.

"And maybe later, after the show, my dad will cook something for you guys. Something we like to eat." We as in herself, Spirit, and occasionally Vincent. She does not know what Rhett and his friends and coworkers eat when they're exhausted to the bone and haven't been able to make it to the grocery store. That version of reality does not occur to her. Her stomach does sink, however, as Ranta's interrogation has an effect that surely was unintentional: Stella must accept that the performers at Blackwell's are not her family. Her family is the three people who sit in stilted silence while their forks clatter against expensive bowls and everything around them grows colder, colder, colder.

When Daniel cooks for the performers, which he has done, in his life, Stella can't figure out how to make that sort of communal meal align with the dinners she's eaten since she has memories of them.

#dealing with family be like

choso does. dante appreciates it, though he keeps that truth very close to his chest. he doesn't understand everything that is going on with choso; the magic that surrounds him, the darkness that simmers. he could ask. perhaps he would be given an answer.

but choso hasn't asked too much of him. so maybe he can do the same thing, and keep his curiosity to himself. there are things to learn, anyway, if you're smart enough to glean the pieces of information: the way he speaks of the world, the way he stands. like right now, arms around himself, protective over his own body like he expects someone to throw a punch. dante finds it so very ironic that a decade ago, more or less, he would have been the kind to take advantage of such knowledge.

"nothing really makes sense these days," he admits, the flat line of his mouth giving up nothing more than the words spoken.

So he does not know everything he could about Dante's father, his family. He does not know whether Dante was passively complicit or eagerly, enthusiastically helpful to his father's strategy. What Choso has decided, however, is that Dante loved his family, and this was the right thing to do even if it did not go the right way.

Choso does not have a father he would do anything for. Whatever distorted, blurry memories he's retained of Noritoshi Kamo aren't about Noritoshi Kamo at all. They are about something far, far worse than whatever man he would have turned out to be had he been allowed to live the rest of his life without Kenjaku's interference.

"Mm." Choso gets confused, too. There is a lot to see and feel and accept about the world in a way that he did not have to bother with for the first one hundred and fifty years of his existence.

"Even if what happened," what you and your family did, "Was unforgivable—yes—because it was—unforgivable, you should not resent the people who are left. They can teach you how to be better. They can show you who you need to be."

He shrugs. His arms slacken slightly, but not to reach out for Dante in any meaningful way. The balcony is cramped enough as is; they are as close as they need to be. (Choso lives simply, almost monastically, and he prefers small spaces. Even being outside, exposed to the sky, can occasionally leave him twitchy.)

when the tiniest sliver of an opportunity to deflect presents itself, she fits herself inside of it.

“i don’t even smoke anymore.”

and by anymore, she means for the last month. ish. translated: tucker’s trying to be a clean girl. he’d like that, wouldn’t he? she’s made multiple tiktoks about this mystery man of hers and all of her commenters agree. except the ones who don’t— who think she should dump him because he's just using her for ...

she deletes those.

“look, forget it.”

which means the exact opposite.

“i have to go.”

"You have to go?"

He doesn't rise to stop her. He doesn't rise to do anything. However, he's watching her with an acute sharpness that had been lacking before now.

"Where are you going?"

And how is she going to get there? Look, she's not trapped here, and he doesn't mean to imply that she is, not even in the privacy of his own confused thoughts, but—this isn't how the night was supposed to go. They'd made arrangements.

she also stutters a lot, or else interjects her own thoughts with other, less relevant thoughts, like she can't decide between which one is important enough to say—if any of them even are. which ranta is starting to doubt. sometimes, as now, he has to frown at her to try and parse her meaning.

sit down? dirty ... footwear?

he sticks out his leg and considers his shoe. then he looks at stella and considers her shoes, too: sensible but not dirty. just like his!

' sure. ' he doesn't say if you want, because then it'll sound like he's doing this for her. due to how red her face is, he decides that this isn't something she can handle right now.

the circus isn't wanting for seats, but of course most of them are arranged around the ring. instead of entering this seventh layer of hell earlier than strictly necessary, he settles on a pair of hay bales that someone had dragged in front of a gold- and mahogany-striped tent. he shirks off his cardigan and lays it on one; waits patiently for stella to take her place; and then sits down on the other.

' —do you think they like it here? ' such an irrelevant question, and one he regrets immediately after asking. ranta makes a point of not philosophizing about anyone he considers less fortunate than him. his sisters, mostly. and sitting ducks. hypotheticals were easier to stomach. sure, they could be dangerous (the inflammatory what-ifs of a better life). but they were more-or-less safe when applied to strangers, whose lives simply did not apply to him at all.

like stella's, for example.

a stalk of straw digs uncomfortably into his thigh. he shifts to avoid it and, when that doesn't work, resigns himself to endurance.

' sorry, i mean—do you think you would like it here? ah, working. and eating this every day. ' does he really think they eat cotton candy every day? ' would you do it? ' if everything were different and nothing were as it is? he stares at his open palms.

As it did not occur to Stella earlier that Ranta's unprompted, gratuitous compliment could have been directed towards anyone but her, she now assumes, and therefore knows confidently, that Ranta agrees to sit for her benefit more than his own. He didn't need to say if you want for her to draw this conclusion.

"Thank you," she says, too-quick and too-gracious since she didn't thank him quickly enough for his compliment. His chivalry, now, must be acknowledged appropriately.

Stella sits. As soon as she does, she regrets ever having suggested this—even though it prevents her from conjuring up facts about Blackwell's half-rooted in reality or compelling Ranta to see this place as more glamorous than it truly is.

He couldn't possibly hate it here, but he certainly doesn't look impressed. She's glad he asks a question because she'll have less to come up with on her own. She's not glad for what the question is, so she doesn't answer for awhile—long enough for Ranta to finish asking if Stella would want this life.

"Of course they like it here. They love it here. It's—it's really nice, it's a great place, and they're—we're like a family."

(I like this cage, and I like my spot here in it. Even sitting on your cardigan waiting to watch my father's employees dazzle audiences with their powers so they can pay their bills, I am so extremely grateful.)

"Eating—this every day?" She shakes the cotton candy. It shifts, dandelion-like, though slightly more stubbornly enduring.

"I guess so. I like the noise. There's always something to—" distract you from the horrors "—do. Everybody has ADD now, you know? I think that includes me."

She gets to work. You always start with the roots.

“it’s somethin i heard once like out of a fortune cookie or somethin. or maybe someplace else, like, what have you done today to earn lookin at all that’s good lookin in the world around you. it’s a thinker.”

giddy’s head hurts. he straps the dirty pink headpiece with the bunny ears attached under his chin. the fabric muffles the ringing in his ears. he sighs, and itches his arms, and seems to remember that choso is there in full corporeality.

But Giddy doesn't say this outright, or even say much that would allow Choso to infer it. It's an accusation Choso's already decided to hear. It's grown legs.

He's still fretting over Giddy's undeniable resentment towards him when he realizes Giddy has the look of someone who's been subjected to Satoru Gojo's infinite void, or maybe the look of someone who was hit by a brick very severely not so long ago.

Now Choso's got even more to worry about.

"—yes."

He did say something. Are you mad at me are you mad at me are you mad at me?

Choso wrings his hands until they settle on his arms. He feels better when he's wrapped around himself. He understands Giddy's accessorizing, the utility and the purpose of it, more than he could articulate in any language. There's too much real feeling to it for words.

"How are youuu—euh. Sleeping?"

what he needs is a three-ply tissue.

she presses one into his palm. despite the tremors she can see and feel passing through him, he remains cool to the touch. she suspects that this is because choso’s blood flows to his heart and pools in his chest. hemorrhages, sometimes, in the form of tears and sobs. and so there’s none left over for his pale skin or often-rigid limbs.

' mm. ' fondness melts into something soft down her throat. she smiles a smile of her own, slight and rounded, because smiles are contagious—and when choso talks about yuji, he does it in a way that fills the room. there’s no choice but to enter the memory with him, experience that single joy firsthand.

It doesn't taint his adoration of her that there is, presently, nowhere else for her to go but by his side. Even if they walked in opposite directions until their legs gave out, they would return to one another as if they'd never tried to leave. They haven't tried that; they do not want to. Tengen's bland, uninspiring habitat does not allow any necessities to be desired, once you know how to communicate with the space. And even if they could leave or separate, two more things prevent it: their duty to this mission and their increasing fascination with one another.

Yuki's hand is warm. He wants to hold it. Instead, he knows he needs to pull himself more together.

Not only for Yuki, or himself, but for—

<<Yuji wouldn't want to see me like this. He shouldn't see me like this. If he were here, he would want to race from one end of Tengen's sanctuary to the other, like a game we could have played when we were growing up together. Even though he's young, he has the right perspective. He's very optimistic. Like you are, too.>>

He turns his head towards her, which has the effect of leaning his cheek against her palm. Still warm.