Chapter Text
Shibuya was shaking.
Sanae Hanekoma didn’t even bother running to the Room of Reckoning, opting instead to take a shortcut through the Higher Plane. An abuse of his powers? Probably. But it was an emergency.
The Composer was dead.
As he warped in, Hanekoma scannned the room, eyes momentarily pausing on the lifeless form of the previous Composer before finding what he’s looking for. Over against the wall, curled up into a ball and clutching his head, was Joshua.
“Josh?” Sanae ran to his side and knelt down next to him.
“...Kill me.” He opened his eyes, and Hanekoma’s heart skipped a beat. Joshua’s face was stained with tears, and upon seeing the barista he seemed to break even further, burying his face into the older man’s chest.
“No can do, boss.” He gently picked the boy up, ready to back off at a moment’s resistance, but found none. “Come on, J. Let’s get you home.”
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Joshua was Shibuya, and Shibuya was Joshua. Everything hurt. Everything simply was, all at once. He had been a fool to think he could handle this.
He couldn’t figure out how return to his physical body. Did he even have one?
Wait, what was his name, again?
He began to explore himself, looking into the lives of the people who lived in him. But something was wrong. Everyone in the city, no matter what they were doing, seemed confused and upset. Was that because of him?
After what the calendars around him said was three days, he noticed a tiny hole in the fabric of the city—a missing link, a person he couldn’t account for. There was someone missing in Shibuya, and it was like an itch he needed to scratch.
He probed the city around where the fabric had ripped, from minds to objects to the very streets themselves. Finally, his search turned up a name: Joshua.
Wait.
He was Joshua.
His consciousness was violently ripped from the city streets and shoved back into a human body, searing pain in his muscles and a pounding in his head as the whole of Shibuya tried to cramp itself into one small child.
His name was Joshua Kiryu. He was eleven-and-a-half years old. And as of right now, he was the entire city of Shibuya, too.