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When Katsuya dies, he does so as an old man. It’s a simple death, a sudden death—maybe not the most pleasant, but what death can really be called pleasant in the end?
It happens on a Tuesday morning. A Tuesday morning just like many that came before it. Unsurprising, really. Serizawa Katsuya has had the same routine for years, ever since his official retirement. It goes a little something like this:
6:00am. He wakes early. He got into the habit of rising with the sun early in the days of Spirits and Such—mostly to get his homework done before he was dragged into whatever the shenanigans of the day were going to be.
6:15am. Makes himself a breakfast of rice and eggs, eats while reading the paper. Again, an old habit—always on the lookout for strange phenomena to report to the office, even though it’s been a decent while since he was a regular employee.
7:00am. Gets dressed in his slacks and sweater, and—
7:30am. Opens the book shop. So he’s retired—doesn’t mean he doesn’t need something to do. He’ll sit at the cash register and read, music playing in the background, until customers come, and then he’ll talk to them about whatever it is he’s reading. Sometimes he fields a call from the Agency, coaching them through with his elderly wisdom. Sometimes a simple call turns into an hour-long story, words filling the silence when the music does not.
11:30am. Breaks for lunch. The shop is still open, and he’s still reading, but now he’s doing it with a sandwich from the shop down the street in one hand. He continues to entertain any customers that come in.
6:00pm. Winding down now. He’s not so much a night person anymore—he used to take university classes in the evenings, all the way into his eighties, but he finds himself too tired for that now. He closes his book, turns off the lights, locks the doors.
6:45pm. Dinner. Sometimes he’ll sit with the younger lady in the house next to his small home, and her care-giver. She marvels at his independence. He tells her that he’s come a long way—that he thinks he’s finally grown all the way up. She laughs, and he smiles, and then he goes inside, alone, and sits in the rocking chair Shigeo-kun gifted him some time back.
8:00pm. The news comes on. He tries his best not to doze off as he watches, but he’s tired a lot these days.
9:00pm. Balances the books. Another of those long-cared-for habits. When he first started to run Spirits and Such alone, truly alone, he found that he dreaded returning to Arataka’s apartment without Arataka in it. He’d instead spend his evenings in the office, balancing the books just like Arataka taught him, letting the work soothe him late into the night.
10:00pm. He does not push on so late anymore. He’s old, achy—his joints start to silently weep when he’s been sitting at his desk for too long. He turns off the music player in the living room and turns on the one in the bedroom.
10:30pm. Slips under the covers. He does not use his powers much anymore, but he’ll use them to switch off the light switch on the other side of the room, and to set off the metronome that sits on his bedside table. He watches the metronome tick, back and forth and back and forth, until it lulls him to sleep. Easy peasy, a simple life.
He does this every day of the week except Sunday. Sunday is his personal day, always has been, even since before his retirement. Sometimes that means taking on a case to show the latest recruits at Spirits and Such how it goes, sometimes that means staying home and taking a much-needed relaxation day complete with bath time and incense, and sometimes that means taking the train from cemetery to cemetery to place flowers on the grave markers of the many, many people he’s outlived.
He always visits one specific marker last, on those days. He spends the most time there, after all—there are plenty of people who clean that particular grave, but they never seem to do it quite thoroughly enough. Katsuya is meticulous—the devil is in the details, after all, and he has a lot to say, talking as he works.
So there it is. His routine. Same as always, never changing. This particular Tuesday, however, he doesn’t get much farther than breakfast. He’s unbuttoning his flannel pajama top when he starts to feel it—a numbness on his right side, rapidly progressing from his fingertips to his elbow to his shoulder. He goes to speak out loud, a simple ‘what on earth’ that belies his confusion and concern, but the syllables are minced on his tongue and that’s… that’s it.
It’s over in a matter of ten minutes, more or less. The blood clot in his brain takes care of any chances of living past the morning, and he strokes out lying on his side on his bedroom rug. He is ninety-four years old. His obituary includes the words ‘loved by all who knew him.’
That isn’t the end. Well, it’s the end of his life, certainly, but it isn’t the end of him. He’s had the same routine every day except Sundays for the past two decades, and then one Tuesday he dies and when he opens his eyes he finds himself in a place that can’t exist. It’s impossible—physics don’t work like this. Feet don’t walk on thin air as if it’s solid, and wind doesn’t blow straight through you from one side to the other as if you’re not, and the world isn’t spread out below like the view from a plane, unreachable, untouchable, inviolate.
This… this is new.
A tentative step forward. Katsuya marvels. He’s dead—he’s quite sure of it. There is no other way to explain the way he can no longer feel his aura around him. It is, instead, confined to him… and he to it… as if he no longer has a physical body to displace the psychic power from its truest shape. This, he knows, in the ineffable way that one does, is the shape of his soul.
He revels in it, stretching his ghostly hands forward and then back. Their wrinkles seem to be receding—or, perhaps, settling into something more fitting. He doesn’t have to see his face to know that it is youthful again. Not young, per se, but youthful—the time he felt most comfortable in life. He has never felt more free, more himself, than he does in this strange yet beautiful place. He has never felt more… alone.
It’s something about the silence that does it. As if he’s not really hearing the world he’s floating in, the clouds and atmospheric motion just passing through him, never quite reaching his eardrums the way it once did. It aches in a familiar place in his chest. He’s spent a lifetime chasing sound to fill that void, and he thought he’d succeeded, but feeling it now… he knows it’s always been there, just under the surface.
He hugs himself, smiling a small smile. Familiarity… yeah. He’s spent a long time with the quiet. It’s almost as much a part of him as his curly hair or his thick fingers. If this is eternity, well… wouldn’t that be fitting?
“Katsuya?” says a tentative voice, as if on cue, breaking the bittersweet silence right in half.
Time, if it were flowing, would have stopped at the sound. Katsuya freezes where he stands. Katsuya… he knows that voice. Knows it intimately, has known it intimately even through the sixty-odd intervening years since he last heard it—every time he thought he’d started to forget it always came back to him, in a memory or a dream or even on a cassette tape in a recording device buried in a drawer in the office, as if it weren’t content to fade into nothingness. It doesn’t matter how quiet the owner of that voice was in those last few weeks, months, how quiet he left the world in his wake—Katsuya’s subconscious remembered the old times, the better times, and never let him forget, for good or bad.
“Katsuya,” the voice says again, tender and expectant, and Katsuya folds his face into hands that hold the memory of the wrinkles of old age. There is desire burning inside him, so bright so bright. He wants to turn—he wants to lay eyes on the man who calls him so softly, so dearly. But he… he can’t. He can’t. There is a part of him that is afraid, too afraid to spin on his heel, a part that remembers this man as he was the day he died, barely thirty and so, so sick. He was so young. So young… he’d barely gotten a real start on his life.
And Katsuya outlived him.
The pain blooms, as taut and aching as it always does, eclipsing the flare of desire. It should be simple—this is the afterlife, after all. It should be good, and sweet—it should be everything they’ve ever wanted, finally at the tips of their fingers, in their grasp. And yet Katsuya’s mind is awash with questions, too many to tame them all, starting with: does he hate Katsuya for living on as much as Katsuya himself does? Will he have the same frustration that has haunted Katsuya on and off since the day the man was diagnosed as terminal? Is Katsuya’s guilt enough of an apology for how long it took for him to arrive? Sixty years, he made him wait—sixty years while Katsuya got to do all the living that was denied to him, the man still waiting so patiently for Katsuya to get himself together and turn around. How can he ever be forgiven?
Katsuya knows the answer already. Arataka always was a good man—he could never blame someone for something that was in their very nature. He would never blame Katsuya for living on, and that hurts worst of all.
He would also never stand for self-pity and guilt, always a fan of moving forward despite everything, which is evident in the playful reproach in his voice as he says, “You never gave that ring to anybody. What’s the point of final wishes if no one is going to bother honoring them?”
Katsuya chokes out a laugh. “I didn’t think anyone would appreciate second-hand love,” he says in response to the slight jab, raising his face from his hands to stare out at the vastness of the heavens before him. The figure at his back does not move, does not push. He waits, patient, as if he knows. Knows that these words, the first words that Katsuya has spoken to him that haven’t been directed at a grave marker in sixty long years, are already more than Katsuya can handle. Knows that Katsuya has to let the truth of this settle in his unbeating heart. Knows that it seems like it should feel unreal, like it’s too good to be true, but that Katsuya is aware that this is the closest they have ever been.
Because it may be true that Arataka was cursed to wait, separated from all he loved by the gripping fingers of death, but it’s also true that Katsuya was cursed, too—fettered and bound to the ground below, unable to cross the boundary. But he finally has. He’s here—he’s here. And on some level, some base level, underneath the guilt and the fear and the desperate longing, he knows how stupid it is to worry about the time they’ve lost, especially when they are this close to being in each others’ arms once again.
They are together, finally, and he can’t stand the thought of another moment waiting.
It’s this that finally convinces Katsuya to turn, pivoting with a grace he rarely had on earth.
The sight would knock the breath from his lungs if he still had breath to spare. Arataka is young, and beyond that, he’s healthy—healthier than Katsuya ever remembers him being. He can’t be a day over twenty-five—younger than he was when Katsuya saved him for the first time at the top of a city tower. His hair is short, fluffy, blowing in an invisible breeze. His hands are in his pockets, his shoulders relaxed.
His smile… god, Katsuya has missed that smile.
In this place, this space beyond space, Katsuya doesn’t need to breathe. He doesn’t feel hunger, or the ache of his old joints, or the gentle tug of fatigue that has dogged him for a decade or more. As such, it’s a surprise to find that he can still cry, the tears overflowing and streaming down his cheeks. They float off the edge of his jaw, dissipating into the air, and he curls his fingers over his mouth to hold in sobs. He’s smiling, too, now—so wide he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s a mess, a wreck, and he just—he just—
“I’m glad you’ve come,” Arataka says, and Katsuya breaks.
It’s through sobs, with trembling hands, that Katsuya reaches forward. He doesn’t know what his probing hands will find—he half expects them to ghost straight through the figure in front of him, to find that eternity has cursed them to see, to hear, but to never again touch. To spend the rest of forever without the binds of a physical body and so to never again be sated, satisfied.
Instead, his shaking fingertips alight on a warm cheek.
“Oh,” he manages to gasp, the only sound his quivering vocal chords can manage just now, hands shaking harder. He presses closer, cupping Arataka’s jaw with one hand, then the other. His fingers graze fluttering locks of hair. He’s gentle, so gentle—he remembers the last time he held Arataka, the frail body growing cold in his arms, and he weeps. As if in defiance of that memory the cheek in his light grip tilts to the side, pressing closer, closer.
The warmth under his palm is bright, vibrant, relentless, a candle that will never again burn out.
The guilt must show in his eyes, because Arataka clears his throat.
“I… you know, I wondered,” Arataka says, his jaw moving in Katsuya’s grip. Katsuya nods, encouraging him, staring down and soaking up every detail—the freckles on the bridge of his nose, the palest hairs dusting his chin, the smile that still plays on his lips, smaller now, sadder. He, in turn, hasn’t stopped looking up at Katsuya this entire time. “I thought, for a little while, that we were soulmates—before I died, this was. Before I got… you know. I thought we were meant to spend the rest of our lives growing old together. But then I died, and I wondered if you would move on.”
He breathes out, and Katsuya strokes the soft skin of his cheek, the side of his nose, with one thumb. Giving him space, room, to continue as he lets the tears flow free.
Arataka does, the words coming faster and faster on his tongue, building up into that classic Reigen frenzy. “It frustrated me when you didn’t. I was… god, this is going to sound so bad, but I was angry at you? I just wanted you to live, you know? And it was like you wouldn’t, like you were stuck!”
One hand rises in Katsuya’s periphery, brandished to punctuate his point, but it’s secondary motion, reflexive movement. Arataka’s face doesn’t so much as twitch in Katsuya’s grip—in fact, it seems to nestle closer, Arataka pressing his cheek into Katsuya’s palm all the firmer.
“I saw you hurting and I thought, fuck, I’m the one whose dead! I’m the one who should get to scream and cry about how unfair it is! It’s me, me who has to be stuck in this state, unchanging and frozen in time!”
He laughs, a ghost of a breath drawing past Katsuya’s wrist. He looks so calm, so peaceful, like there’s no longer any bite behind the words. He’s obviously been holding them in for a long time—nearly as long as Katsuya has been holding onto his guilt, most likely. Sixty years… what does sixty years mean to a spirit, to a soul? Anything?
Arataka answers that question when he dips his head, pressing his lips to the lifeless pulse point in Katsuya’s wrist. “You and I… we are two very different people. I realized, after watching you for a long time, that you were living. You were living a slow, unhurried life. You were experiencing everything you needed to experience. The people in your life… they filled that void as much as you could let them. And I know you never quite let me go, but after a while I understood that you… you needed to hold on?”
Katsuya swallows as Arataka’s eyes search his own for a moment, dipping his head in a nod.
The smile on Arataka’s face widens, crinkling his eyes just slightly. “…I think, when I realized that, I fell in love with you again,” he breathes.
It’s so much. The proximity, the warmth, the words—they’re all so, so much, and Katsuya feels like his knees will give out. He’s had dreams like this—dreams where Arataka forgave him for living on beyond him, assuaged his guilt with a gentle hum from that silver tongue. But he always woke again—cold, and alone, and with the dead certainty that he’d never know what Arataka thought ever again. Arataka was gone. Arataka was dead.
“I’ve never loved someone the way I love you,” the words continue, as if to refute the idea that Arataka would ever, could ever, leave Katsuya for good. As if the six decades passed were nothing but a small nuisance for the both of them, a necessary but ultimately unimportant side trek, a blip on the radar. He’s almost playful as he speaks, as if he knows exactly what he’s doing to Katsuya’s heart, turning his head into Katsuya’s hand and pressing his lips there to speak into truth the most important words, once more, again.
“Serizawa Katsuya… you were the love of my life, my afterlife, and everything beyond. I am so, so glad you’re here.”
If there was any guilt left for Katsuya to feel, it is exorcised by the pure, burning joy that radiates from Arataka’s soul, soaring into a crescendo with those words. It permeates the empty space between them, crossing the boundary between their ethereal forms and striking down everything in its wake. Hesitation, frustration, guilt, grief, self-hatred, longing, fear, worry—all disintegrate into nothingness, pure and absolute. Katsuya is hollowed out and filled up all at once. With nothing left to hold him back, he folds Arataka into an embrace, holding the smaller man to his chest as wave after wave of joy reverberates through the core of his very being. Words are meaningless in comparison, but still he finds himself speaking, filling that silence yet again, every combination of the words ‘God, I missed you’ and ‘you are the light of my life’ and ‘I love you, too’ that he can form on his clumsy tongue. Arataka is laughing, hands clutching at Katsuya’s shoulders and hugging back just as tight, and Katsuya… he is right where he’s supposed to be.
The hug lasts forever, it feels like. Time is meaningless in this state—the embrace could last a second or a millennia and Katsuya wouldn’t know the difference. Eventually, however, Arataka takes the wheel again—leaning back, he presses a kiss to Katsuya’s lips and slips one hand into Katsuya’s, intertwining their fingers together. Then, together, they begin to walk, Arataka talking all the while, his other hand flitting through the air.
It goes on for another length of forever. He’s been watching all this time, he says—not on earth, but from the sky above, beyond, where their voices flowed as if in a current that he could dip his fingers into at his own whim. The voices that came through the clearest were the ones at his grave—and he has a response for every word Katsuya ever spoke to the cold stone of his grave marker. Every grave visit… every graveside rant… sixty years worth of Sundays… all coming to a head all at once. Arataka has years worth of words to fill the silence.
Katsuya is content to listen. No matter how long it takes. He knows, the same way he knows his own true form, that he will never tire of hearing the sound of that voice. Not now, not a century from now, not after the course of eternity… never. Reigen Arataka is his world, his universe, his everything, and they will never again have to walk on separate planes of existence. He will never again have to suffer the familiarity of that aching silence.
He is whole, and that’s all there is to it.