Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Yashiro Nene starts each morning the same way.

A hearty yawn, a kiss blown to her K-pop boy shrine, and two servings of omurice; one for herself, and one for the spirit living inside the walls.

It’s been this way for as long as she can remember. Voices at night, strangers wandering into her dreamscape, lingering presences felt in the insistent chill of her room. Nene is all too familiar with the involuntary prickle of fear that comes with living alongside a ghost. If she were truly afraid, she would have sought professional care years ago.

Instead, she sets out two breakfast plates on the otherwise unoccupied kotatsu.

“Enjoy the meal!” She chirps, before digging in.

The plate across from her own, of course, sits undisturbed.

They’ve come to an unspoken agreement, her and the spirit. As long as it leaves her alone, she treats it well. Homemade breakfasts, casual (albeit one-sided) conversation, and even the occasional movie night were all essential parts of any proper roommateship -- why should she skimp out just because said roommate happens to be invisible? That just isn’t right. The guilt would consume her.

Or maybe all of this is a sick, twisted fantasy her hopeless heart has conjured up to cope with her increasingly concerning loneliness. 

Ah, well. Only time can tell.

And this is the part where the blinds begin to rattle, gently at first and then with more force behind their trembling, beating its plastic bones together as though in a wordless, thrumming hymn of reassurance: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. 

Nene smiles contritely into her ketchup-filled bite. 

She isn’t the only one who’s well-acquainted with loneliness.

“Nene-chan! Oh, you’re just in time, the katsudon is almost done! Hey, Akane, go help Lemon with the meat, please! Nene-chan, come in, come in!”

Nene’s wrist is snatched and rather forcefully tugged as she stumbles through the entryway of Aoi’s apartment, nearly dropping the container of stir-fried vegetables she’d brought along.

She barely has a moment to toe off her sneakers before she’s being dragged by the arm once more, this time into the abysmally homey abode of her childhood friend, Aoi Aoi. There isn’t a chair left unhugged by a fleece throw; not an inch of floor uncovered by plush, malleable carpet. Nene feels like she’s going to overheat and suffocate to death wrapped in the midst of such a warm-hued, close-clinging cyclone of comfort.

“When’d you visit last? It’s been so long -- too long!” Aoi fusses as she leads them over to the couch, only a few paces away from the bustling kitchen.

“A-Aoi… it was last Wednesday,” Nene stutters, awkwardly fidgeting with the vegetables in her lap. “Um… I grew extra in the garden, so I brought…”

“Ooh, summer veggies? Yum! Akane, come and take these off Nene-chan’s hands, will you?” 

“Ah, that’s -- that’s really alright, I can just--”

But it’s a fruitless effort; what Aoi wants, Aoi gets. The privilege of beauty, Nene thinks bitterly, before reminding herself that Aoi is her friend and Nene is absolutely over the whole obsessive jealousy phase. So middle school.

It’s not long before Akane pops into the room and greets her with a cheery “hey, Nene!” before depositing a wine glass in Aoi’s hand, then scooping up Nene’s side dish and whisking it away back to the kitchen, presumably to continue assisting Lemon.

Nene used to think it was weird, their throuple. Aoi lives with her husband, Aoi Akane, who also invited his boyfriend, Yamabuki Lemon, to lodge with them as well. Nene learned long ago not to ask questions. She shows up once a week, maybe twice, for free dinner, and makes polite conversation with her three closest (only) friends, who all managed to find love before she did, and now live happily in their perfect bubble of perfect marital bliss with their perfectly furnished home. It’s fine! She’s fine! Akane makes some kick-ass katsudon!

“So, tell me,” Aoi chirps, sipping on her drink, “what’s Nene-chan up to these days?”

Oh, you know. Wasting my youth in singledom, and working a pathetic dead-end job. Gaining weight too, probably. It’s all gonna go to my legs. Crap, why didn’t I sign up for that cardio class at the gym last week? It was half off membership fees, too… Wahh, what if the instructor was hot? 

“-ene? Nene? Nene!”

“Eek!”

Nene jerks in her seat, sufficiently startled out of her fantasy. Aoi looks back at her with the same mixture of fond and condescending concern that Nene’s always associated with their friendship. It makes her shift, slightly uncomfortable, and she begins to fidget with the ruffled hem of her black skirt. “What?”

“Are you alright?” Aoi asks, licking a stray droplet of wine from her lips. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost!”

And, inexplicably, Nene’s thoughts drift up, up, up to the floor above the apartment she’s currently sat in -- her consciousness escapes to the fourth floor, slips inside room #404, and suddenly, violently, remembers rattling blinds, whispering walls, and two plates of omurice.

She wets her tongue when she remembers she has one. “Well. I-I guess you could, um. Say. That.”

This grabs Aoi’s attention. For all of her lighthearted teasing, her pointed jokes, her poking and prodding of Nene’s fragile sense of self, she would never go so far as to disturb the shell Nene has carefully knit to protect herself in their shared years of budding adulthood. Quite the opposite; Aoi was there when nobody else was, from bumbling, underwhelming adolescence, to the turbulence of Nene’s first foray into solitary living, all the way to here and now: setting her glass down to lean forward and purposefully catch Nene’s skittering glance, refusing to let her edge away.

“Nene-chan,” Aoi says, carefully, voice like the gentle click of a door shut quietly closed, “have you seen a ghost?”

Of course she’d be worried, even after all these months. Even after Nene had long since moved out of her first apartment complex; the one with residents that kept her up at all hours of the night; the one that clung to her clothes with the scent of rot and decay; the one that nearly kept her as a permanent tennant.

“Haven’t ‘seen’ him,” Nene defends weakly.

Not yet, anyways.

“‘Him’?” Aoi parrots, eyebrows raising alongside her pitch, and oh, how Nene desperately does not want this to become a Thing. Just when she thought she’d overcome her slated, near-inescapable role as The Weird One, The Girl Who Sees Ghosts, The Chubby Friend Who Talks To Herself And Has Daikons For Legs, Look, It’s Daikon-Senpai!

(Alright, that last one might be a little too specific, but can she be blamed? Middle school was a tough time.)

Nene starts to sputter a weak line of protests, the usual no big deal, doesn’t mean anything, nothing serious, but she finds herself stuttering into silence when Aoi stops her with one soft, immaculately manicured hand resting upon her own shaking ones.

“Nene-chan. Just let me say this.”

Nene lets her.

“I remember what it was like for you before. No sleeping, no eating, no time even to hang out -- you were so dedicated to helping the poor things pass on. That’s always been Nene-chan -- she always helps people! But who helped Nene-chan? Hm?” Aoi squeezes where their hands are linked, and Nene wants to die, just a little bit. “Who helped Nene-chan?”

Who helped Nene-chan?

Burnt out, drained, nearly debilitated by the sheer force of her altruism, Nene was almost lost to the very spirits she’d sworn to heal. She lost her job. She lost most of her friends, save for Aoi, who was long used to Nene’s penchant for the esoteric. She was on the brink of losing her life.

“Aoi,” Nene whispers. “Aoi helped me.”

“That’s right,” Aoi praises. “And I’ll always be here. And so will Akane, and Lemon. Because?”

“You love me.”

“And?”

“I love you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re real.”

Aoi pets the back of her hand, the ghost of a caress. “So is Nene-chan. Don’t forget you’re here with us, too. We want you to stay. Okay?”

“Okay.”

It is at that exact moment Akane and Yamabuki decide to bustle into the room, arms heaped with plates and pots, utensils tucked wherever they can fit, as the two of them make entirely too much noise than is strictly necessary to announce that the food is ready. Nene allows Aoi to untangle the two of them, and then Aoi is laughing uproariously at the boys’ antics, as though nothing was amiss. They too laugh along, as though they didn’t know what they’d barged in on. 

As she spoons a generous serving of steaming white rice onto her plate, Nene can’t help but let out an awkward, stilted giggle of her own. 

She doesn’t think they’re laughing at the same joke.

By the time Nene manages to extricate herself from the happy throuple’s near-smothering, reluctant farewell of kisses, cooing, and an armful of tupperware stacked up to the underside of her chin, the sun has long since sunk beneath the horizon. 

If this were the other complex -- the old one, the one she’d had to be rescued from -- Nene would have abandoned reason and taken the stairs all the way up to her apartment. The spirits that lingered there were always lonely, especially at nightfall. Nobody wanted to dwell in the darkest corners of a creaky old building, where the only light that shone was confined to the very limits of one’s periphery, shifting and bursting and shifting again in incomprehensible, manic glee. 

They were so happy to have company. Especially the little ones...

But, that was then, and this is now. Nene has promised too many people that she’d moved on from that world, with its lifeless inhabitants and its all-too-enticing unreality. She cannot afford to get stuck there again.

She’s not sure she would make it out alive this time.

So she takes the elevator.

For all of this building’s technological feats, residence accommodations, and location perks, its fatal flaw is the elevator system. Old, dingy, rickety, and oftentimes blatantly inoperable, the elevator shafts took forever to arrive at one’s call and even longer to deposit one at one’s destination. For a building of just seven floors, it proved a daunting endeavor to journey throughout them all. 

A dull ding! announces the long anticipated arrival. Nene steps inside, casting back one last forlorn glance at the cement door frame enshrining the staircase, before she sighs and stares down the faded button for the fourth floor. 

Not your problem. Not your world. Not anymore.

Just as the sluggish door is almost complete in its closing, a foot slams inside and nearly rocks the elevator car by the force of its interruption.

...A long, leatherbound, pointy shoe…

...Attached to a slim, sickly pale ankle…

...That disappears up into worn, impossibly inky black trousers…

Crap, Nene swears internally.

It’s the landlord!!

Tsuchigomori enters the car and the elevator almost seems to flinch back. Six-odd feet of lean, slouched muscle skulks forward with a gait so lackadaisical it’s almost zombie-like. The skeletal man is comically dwarfed by his oversized turtleneck and lab coat, neither of which he has ever been seen without (Yashiro would know, she gossips). His color palette is depressing at best, awash with pallid greys and bottomless blacks, fabric frayed and haphazardly stained as though he’d just dug himself out of an early grave; and from the brutal-looking bruises smattered along the undersides of his eyes -- the only pop of color to be found on his general person -- it isn’t such a farfetched assumption. 

“Thanks for holding the door,” says Tsuchigomori, mildly, metal door weeping shut behind him.

“Ah! Tsuchigomori-san! I-I’m so sorry, i-it gets quite, um, quite dark here at nights -- I apologize! I didn’t see you coming! I didn’t mean to be rude!”

“No one ever does.”

Nene feels her heart stutter. “...I’m sorry?”

“Rude. No one ever ‘means to be rude.’” The other man casually leans his waist against the support bar at the opposite end of the car, rooting around in the breast pocket of his overcoat before producing...of all things, a lollipop. “What did you think I meant?”

His eyes are so strange. Despite the rest of his muted palette, his gaze is so bright that it almost glows in the dismal lighting of the elevator car. 

“...Nothing. I-it was such a long night, I’m so--”

“If you apologize one more time, I’ll be forced to evict you, Yashiro-san.”

He has to crack a grin around the candy in his mouth before Nene realizes that he’s joking.

“Aha..ha..ha…!” Those teeth. Are they cosmetically sharpened? Is Tsuchigomori really the type to get plastic surgery? Not to mention his tongue...is there a procedure even available to lengthen a muscle like that? The way it wraps around and around the lollipop…

She startles when he moves a lanky limb towards her, but relaxes when he reaches for the array of buttons. “Fourth floor, right?”

“Um, yes! Thank-- you…”

He’s...didn’t she say yes? Why is he pressing 1? 2? And 3...then 4...5...6...7…

With each button pressed, their individual electronic glow grows brighter and brighter until Nene is forced to avert her gaze from the control panel. She digs her chin into the tower of tupperware she’s still holding, for some reason, and focuses on the grounding exercises Aoi always hounds her to do.

Deep breaths. Something physical I can feel, touch.

The plastic is warm where she clutches at it, desperately.

“Maintenance trick,” Tsuchigomori quips. “A super-secret combo just for landlords.”

“Ha,” Nene exhales.

“Hm. You’re unit 404. Have you met Hanako-san, yet?”

Something I can see. Something I know is there, something I can watch happen.

She scuffs her Mary Janes against the cold linoleum as the elevator drones to a halt, and bares its insides to the second floor. When she peers curiously out, the only thing that greets her is a daunting darkness; the kind of black that envelopes everything around it, until its surroundings are powerless to do anything but be absorbed in the overbearing oppression. No hallway, no doors, no tenants in sight.

“This, um. No. No, I haven’t. Does this...Hanako-san live nearby?”

Tsuchigomori’s scoff echoes loudly in the deep quiet. The doors shut, the elevator lurches to life once more. “You could say that. You know, I think you two would get along.”

This catches Nene’s attention. Of course. Of course that’s all this is. She’s tired -- practically dead on her feet -- and she’s being silly, letting her paranoia get the best of the situation. Her landlord may be off-beat in every conceivable sense of the word, but perhaps his good intentions are left mercifully intact. 

He’s a nice man. In the several months Nene has lived in his building, there’s been no raisal of rent, no evictions. He must have noticed her shy, anxious nature. He must be trying to introduce tenants to each other, build a sense of community. Of course.

“Oh? What makes you say that, Tsuchigomori-san?”

“She’s a shy young woman like yourself.”

“Have I-- have I seen her before?”

“Maybe. School uniform, red skirt, walks around in pigtails. Probably still carrying around that butcher's knife of hers. Very cute. Ring any bells?”

The elevator jolts violently with the stop it comes to at the third floor. Nene would’ve lost her balance had she not been rooted to her spot in paralyzing, spine-tingling fear.

Something I can taste. Something that isn’t my own bile.

“None,” Nene says at length. “Would you introduce us, sometime?”

The third floor looks nothing like how she remembers it. A graveyard, maybe, is the only thing she can liken it to. What little she manages to catch out of the corner of her eye is misty and damp and grey and mind-numbing to try to comprehend. So she redirects her gaze up to the face of the man in front of her, and suppresses a shudder.

(Did he get...taller?)

Tsuchigomori has finished the candy at the end of the lollipop and now toys loosely with the poor paper stick, his tongue grasping the end of it as he maneuvers the muscle to pick his (worryingly sharp) teeth clean. 

“Like I said,” he continues on, as though nothing is happening, as though Nene isn’t a split second away from nervous collapse, “she’s shy. It’ll be better if you go yourself. Oh, don’t look at me like that. So pitiful. Here, I’ll give you a hint.”

The door slides closed once more. The tupperware in Nene’s death grip begins to tremble.

“Knock thrice on the bathroom door, she doesn’t like surprises.” Tsuchigomori almost seems to loom over her now, his already long legs now an endless (and...multitudinous?) expanse of black, and Nene is forced to crane her neck upwards to try and meet his luminescent violet eyes. 

“I don’t imagine she would,” Nene murmurs. “It’s unkind to interrupt a lady on the toilet.”

“Right?” This amuses Tsuchigomori, and he grins so wide it threatens to split his face.

(Where did the ceiling go? The floor? The dated wood panelling, the tupperware in her hands, the elevator doors? Why can she only see bright balls of light -- the buttons? -- swirling around the pair of them?)

“Now listen. This is the important part.”

Nene perches so far up on her tip-toes that she nearly falls forwards, into the rapidly decreasing negative space between herself and the creature in front of (above? Below? All around?) her.

One by one, a legion of limbs unfurl from Tsuchigomori’s back like tendrils of smoke from a burning flame. Nene can smell the sulfur, can taste the rot and decay and death on the back of her tongue -- nearly reminiscent of the saccharine remnants of a lollipop.

“Yes,” Nene breathes. She barely notices as her hair begins to float around her, a wreath of iridescent silver. “I’m listening.”

“Call her name.”

From behind his glasses, Tsuchigomori’s eyes shine so brightly that it hurts to look, but she maintains the contact, anyways. Even when her eyes fill and burst over with something a little too viscous to be called tears. 

This is what she’s been missing, Nene realizes rather abruptly. The loneliness, the bereavement, the living-dead-syndrome that’s plagued her soul with an inescapable funk these past few months -- it was all a product of denying herself a connection that needs her as much as she needs it. How was she meant to function, half-alive in the land of the living? 

It’s always been inside of her, and her in it.

“‘Hanako-san,”

The omurice, the blinds, the walls--

“‘Hanako-san,’”

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here --

“‘Are you there?’”

And as soon as it starts, it all comes crashing to a halt. At once, Nene is shoved back into her body as the elevator thunks to a heavy halt. A large, red 4 is emblazoned on the button by her elbow, and Nene becomes almost painfully aware of the now-lukewarm tupperware in her arms; the drab outdated wood paneling of the car; the familiar mildewy scent of age; the creak and moan of cables long overdue for repair; and, oddly enough, the lingering taste of sweetness at the back of her throat. 

“Just kidding.”

She blinks once, twice to clear the fog from her head, and there is her landlord slouched in front of her, gesturing bemusedly to the open doorway.

When she peers past, Nene isn’t sure if she’s relieved or horrified to discover that it’s her floor, with her front door just a few paces away from the elevator, as it always was. As it always is.

“Well?”

Jolting in place, Nene’s gaze startles back to the lanky man and his four, normally sized limbs.

(Where did those teeth go? That tongue?)

 “Ah. Um. Please excuse me.”

“Sure,” Tsuchigomori agrees. “But first, catch.” He reaches into the breast pocket of his overcoat once more to produce another lollipop, tossing it so that it lands perfectly on top of the heap of containers Nene is now struggling, honestly, to hold upright. “Be a shame if you lost track of your dinner, there.”

It’s time to go. She knows that, logically, this encounter -- however strange or distorted -- has come to a close. To linger any longer would be unwelcome, inappropriate. Off-beat.

She must force her feet forward, one methodical step in front of the other, until she’s made it just past the elevator door before Tsuchigomori calls out to her once more.

Nene spins around so fast it almost gives her whiplash.

“Good night, Yashiro-san.”

Now she knows it’s time to book it out of there, because the lights inside the unit flicker and for the barest hairsbreadth of a second, in that deep, bottomless, abysmal dark, Nene sees Tsuchigomori not as the lanky landlord she’s reluctantly accustomed to, but as the looming creature with teeth and tongue and eyes like weapons.

And then she blinks. The world rights itself once more. The man smirks at her from underneath his unkempt white fringe as though they’re sharing a private joke.

“Good night, Tsuchigomori-san. Be well.”

He nods once, the door hisses shut, and just like that -- all the tension drains from her body. Nene has to slump against the rough drywall of the hallway to recover as the air leaves her lungs in great heaping gusts. What the hell. What the hell. She can never tell Aoi about this. She doesn’t think she could stand her friend’s look of pitying disappointment. 

Who helped Nene-chan?

Who helped Nene-chan, indeed.

As soon as she’s able to breathe without hiccuping in between, Nene rightens her posture, pushes off the wall, and takes stock of herself: limbs, check. Phone in her pocket, check. Tupperware, che--

Huh.

Well.

She’s a container short. When she looks down, there are only three plastic boxes in lieu of the hefty stack of four Akane had practically threatened her to take back home. Atop the third rests a candy wrapper, innocently unfurled, and still shifting in place, as though recently disturbed.

“Don’t forget to knock.”

The voice wafts from the vents, encircling her until all of her senses are commanded by that familiar low, sleepy drawl, with an edge to it that lights a tremor along the length of her spine. She swallows, and makes her way to her front door. Only a few more paces. Nene makes sure to take her time. 

She knows all too well things that run are meant to be chased.

Shoes in the genkan.

Food in the fridge.

Wrapper in her pocket.

Bathroom door in front of her.

Nene breathes deeply in, deeply out, and wills a silent apology to Aoi, to Akane and Yamabuki and her parents and all the people she’d glibly gifted empty promises. They are nothing more than corpses, now, littering the basement of a house that’s long-since collapsed. She lays them to rest, says a prayer, and moves on.

Knocks thrice.

“H-Hana--”

Her voice falls apart. She stitches it together and tries again. 

“Hanako-san, Hanako-san. Are you there?”

…

…

…

Nothing.

Well, now she feels appropriately awful. Not even the walls nor the blinds have anything to offer her except an unfamiliar, deafening stillness. How desolate. How predictable. She owes Aoi a real apology after this. And Tsuchigomori, too, when she’s able to overcome the embarrassment that was her behavior in the elevator. 

The beer in her fridge will absolutely facilitate the apology process.

She should get right on that, and then she should go to bed and sleep for the next two days and convince herself that this night has just been one very long, very disturbing exhaustion-related hallucinatory episode. It wasn’t real. It can’t be.

Nene spins on the heel of her fuzzy socks, and turns to trudge into the kitchenette.

A hand on her wrist stops her.

Bones locked immediately into place, blood congealed and frozen solid, breath stuttered to a sudden, petrified halt, it’s all Nene can do to trail her gaze from the unearthly pale (and cold) bony hand clasped around her wrist -- along a svelte, lithe arm shrouded in black, across the bony span of one shoulder, creeping up an impossibly thin, translucent neck, to finally stop in between the doorjamb at the frailest, whitest, saddest face she’s ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on.

Bottomless pools of red stare right back.

“Boo,” says the boy, quietly.

“What the fuck!!” 

Nene leaps into action, wrenching her hand from the stranger’s grip as she falls on her ass in surprise, and scrambles backwards in fear. She only stops when her back meets the lower cabinets of the kitchenette.

She screams once more when the boy steps out of the bathroom to follow her.

“Stay--stay back! Stay back, or I’ll--” Quickly, Nene throws open the nearest cabinet and grabs the first thing her hands can latch onto before brandishing it in front of her. “--I’ll be forced to act in self-defense! Do you hear me! Stay back!”

The boy glides to a halt -- wait, glides? A furtive glance downwards confirms that, yep, he’s floating. That’s a thing that’s happening.

Absurdly, he pouts at Nene’s outburst. “Aw. No fun! And here I thought we were friends!”

“Friends,” she parrots dumbly. “Right. Okay. No.” She shakes the thing in her hand, which she belatedly realizes is a frying pan. “Stay right there. Don’t move! I’m not afraid to use--um, this!”

As Nene jumps to her feet, she sees the boy’s pout quickly widen into an eerily wide, playful smile. 

“Silly human. You’d have died a gruesome, violent death a thousand times over if I were an intruder. You need something more like, ah, this--” and then the strange boy pulls an entire butcher’s knife out of his sternum.

Alright, this situation has quickly capped out her limit of bravery for the day. Nene drops the pan and barely registers the loud bang! It makes as it hits the floor; she’s far too preoccupied with bursting into terrified tears as she pleads for her life.

“Please,” she sobs, “please don’t hurt me! I’m too young to die, don’t you think twenty-two is too young to die? I haven’t even had a boyfriend! Or a first kiss! How can you kill a girl who hasn’t kissed anybody yet?! Please, Mr. Spirit, don’t stab me with your big, scary...butcher’s...knife…”

School uniform, red skirt, walks around in pigtails. Probably still carrying around that butcher's knife of hers.

“...Hanako-san?”

The boy blinks once, and tilts his head to the side. Nene tries to ignore how puppylike the action is. “Yes?”

“Wha…?” She wipes confusedly at the tears marring her cheeks. Great, she’s probably all puffy now. In front of a boy, too! How embarrassing… “Buh--but where’s your red skirt? And pig-- hic --pigtails?”

His grin is back in full force, possibly even more sadistic this time. “Just a silly rumor. I see you’ve met Tsuchigomori-sensei. No matter. Please, I’d rather you called me ‘Hanako-kun.’”

“Huh? Why would Tsuchigomori say--”

“He thinks he’s funny,” Hanako cuts in, cold and blunt. He quickly thaws out, however, as he sizes up Nene. “You’re shaking.”

No shit, she wants to scream. You’re a weird apparition, who I was told to summon by my demonic landlord! Right after I promised my best friend in the whole wide world that I was done involving myself in all this bullshit so she wouldn’t have to help me move apartment complexes! For the second time!

Instead, she whimpers, pulls her arms tighter around her body. “Yeah.”

Hilariously, Hanako seems to be at a loss for what to do. 

Nene is sure this is his first time consoling a wayward, trembling spirit such as hers -- usually, the roles are reversed in this type of situation. Nene can’t even begin to count the number of souls she’s had to comfort as they (some, very literally) spilled their guts all over her living room floor and cried and blubbered and wept as she calmed them down long enough to send them on their way.

She’s never been on the receiving end of this kind of thing.

It’s not like she’s ever had very many friends. Not even with Aoi, who is lovely and sweet and really just a saint for putting up with Nene’s scatterbrained self, but does little more than remind her that she should only be focusing energy on what’s material. Nene loves her best friend, she does, she does, but sometimes Aoi can be frighteningly out of touch with Nene’s reality.

And so, Nene stands pitifully in her own kitchen, stocking-clad knees knocking together as she cradles her own torso and strokes her own back in an attempt to self-soothe from the wave of adrenaline, anxiety, and pure shock that now crashes heavily down upon her quivering shoulders.

Vision obscured by thick, hot tears, she can’t even see Hanako when he asks, infuriatingly, “Need a hug?”

Nene sniffles, and tries to remember to be embarrassed about the snot she’s dripping everywhere. “Uhuh. P-please, um. Drop the knife first, please.”

Seconds later, she’s enshrouded in what she can only describe as a bone-rattling cold. It seeps into her joints and freezes her solid from the inside out, a sensation so frigid it almost burns. Nene has never been touched this intimately. She can’t say she totally hates it.

Especially when the touch comes attached to a...pretty okay-looking guy. With high, sharp cheekbones, and silky soft hair, black like spilled ink, and a nose so round it’s just asking to be booped, and eyes...those eyes...eyes the color of rubies-- no, cherries-- no, something deeper, something thicker, something…

“You’re staring at me.”

Immediately, Nene jerks out of Hanako’s hold like she’s been slapped. “Y-you’re just full of observations tonight, aren’t you, Hanako-kun?” 

He’s watching her with a question in his eyes. Whatever he’s wondering, he must answer it for himself, because he’s back to that (adorably) maddening chipper smile in the same time it takes for Nene to will the heat out of her cheeks. 

“So what’s your wish?”

Now this grabs her attention.

“My what?”

“Your wish,” Hanako says breezily. “That’s the only reason people rent out this unit, anyway. Fourth floor, room #404, knock thrice on the bathroom door -- then boom! Hanako-san, here to grant any which one of your earthly desires. For the right price, of course.” He tacks on the ending quip with a sharkish grin, probably meant to make Nene squirm. All it really does is highlight the gaunt stretch of his cheeks, the sunken depression where his eyes sit like buried gemstones.

How old is he?

Very carefully, Nene considers her next few moves.

“Hm. I wish you’d let me go to bed, then.”

The boy in front of her gawks, and he looks kind of funny like that, with his face contorted in ghoulish shock -- white skin, red eyes, hair straight from the gullet of an abyss -- as he pouts in a worn black sweater and faded jeans. He’s got on, oddly enough, a pair of fuzzy yellow socks.

“What! Not a real wish. Doesn’t count.” He honks, in a comical impersonation of a buzzer. “Try again.”

Nene tiredly pads out of the kitchen, and pretends not to notice when Hanako floats after her. “Hm. I wish you would make me some breakfast in the morning?”

She can hear the frown in his voice. “Human. Do not take for granted the magnitude of power being offered to you. Something so grand and all-encompassing, your puny mind couldn’t ever hope to comprehend its scope. Plus, no way. Your omurice is the best.”

Her bed pulls out from the couch easier than it normally does. She usually has to fiddle with the springs and hinges before the mattress will extend properly, but tonight, she’s granted a reprieve. Good. She thinks she’s earned it.

“Okay, let me sleep on it.” Nene pulls out her horned hair clips as she drifts towards the bathroom, exhaustion plaguing her every footfall.

“Oi.”

Hanako appears suddenly in front of her, blocking her path to the bathroom door, and backs her all the way up until her head hits the opposite wall. The ghoulish boy looms so close she would be able to smell him, if she could.

(Despite this, if she concentrates, she can almost make out the distinctly sweet scent of… powdered sugar. And something richer, headier underneath that. Baked goods?)

With the way he’s boxing her in, there’s no choice but to gaze upwards into his face, mere centimeters away from her own. 

“Yashiro- chan,” he croons playfully, bringing a finger up to tilt her chin even further towards him, “don’t make me wait. I get restless, you know. Will you take responsibility?”

As much as she wants to fluster and stutter and explode because wow, hello, this is the closest she’s ever been in her pathetic twenty-two years of life to a male that wasn’t blood-related to her… 

Nene can’t bring herself to see anything other than a young boy in ill-fitting clothes, whose only company are those who are transient, those who want something from him.

That’s the only reason people rent out this unit, anyway. 

How many tenants has he granted wishes for, only for them to abandon him by sunrise?

How many souls has he helped pass on?

Probably just as many as Nene. If not more.

She should be scared -- terrified, even. Nothing good has ever come out of her dipping her toes into the spirit world; all too often, she’s dragged bodily in, until it threatens to drown her, and the lines between this world and the next are blurred by the blood, sweat, and tears she puts into those who’ve yet to move on. It’s more than a bad habit. It’s a curse. 

It’s a curse to have to bear Aoi’s pitying looks, in her perfect apartment, with her perfect partners, who grace Nene with stiflingly condescending worry of their own. It’s a curse to be estranged from her family, labeled as a bad omen from the first moment she realized there was more to life than what first met the eye. It’s a curse, still, to be wary of every home she’s ever set foot in, and every home she ever will. It’s a curse to be born into the wrong world, and it’s a curse Nene will carry with her until she transitions into the world she truly belongs.

And, funnily enough, it is -- at the same time -- a blessing.

It’s a blessing to grant a reprieve to the lost weary souls who so closely mirror her own earthly misery. It’s a blessing to send the elderly on their way to be young once more; a blessing to coddle children strayed lifetimes away from people who were once their parents; a blessing to shower the wayward in love, the damned in affection, the unfortunate in mercy. 

Before Nene is burdened, she is kind. This is a fact of life so deeply ingrained within her that she doesn’t think she could refuse those scarlet, saccharine eyes even if she wanted to.

“I wish you’d help me find love, Hanako-kun,” Nene breathes gently into the delicate space between their lips.

Certainly she’s not the first human to ask something so misguided of a powerful, wish-granting entity such as himself. But it must be the way she says it -- without the fervor of a touch-starved adolescent, but rather, with the melancholic, bereft whisper known only to those who have suffered true loss -- this is what knocks Hanako out of his playful kabedon. 

The boy rocks back on his socks, and stares impassively back at her. Nene resists the urge to shiver under the weight of his contemplative deadpan.

“You’re a strange one, aren’t you. No wonder you need help with love! Alright, leave it to the great Hanako. You’ll be swooning in no time, Yashiro Nene-san!

He proffers a pallid, diaphanous hand.

“For the right price, of course.”

She raises her own, just a breath shy of embracing his. “And what’s that?”

Hanako smiles, then, in a way that Nene will never forget for as long as she lives. It travels down the length of her, pooling in the pit of her gut like a python coiled for a nap: peacefully benign.

For now.

“Play to find out.”

They shake hands. The world doesn’t end. Nothing feels dramatically different, save only for the python wriggling a little bit as Hanako’s fingers ghost along her palm as he withdraws his hand (come back, her traitorous brain whispers).

As soon as they’re done, a wave of fatigue crashes over her, so solid and intense that the yawn it elicits is enough to make her knees buckle. “Ah… can you, um. I need to get to the shower.”

“Aw,” Hanako pouts, floating effortlessly out of her way. “Without me?”

She pretends like she isn’t flushing to the roots of her bangs. “Y-yes. No peeking!!”

He covers his face with both hands before splitting his fingers down the middle, enough for those glistening rubies to peer mirthfully back at her. “No promises.”

Nene scrambles into the bathroom and slams the door behind her, heart beating a mile a minute as she tries to tamp down the heat on her cheeks.

Breakfast is going to be so weird tomorrow.

Chapter Text

Surprisingly, breakfast is not that weird.

…

Well. 

There are some speed bumps.

Nene still starts her morning the same as she always has. Big yawn, a good, long stretch, and she gets about two-thirds of the way through lovingly stroking her K-pop slogans before she is rudely interrupted by a sudden chill at her side; the blinds are knocked back by the force of the sheer amount of condensed energy slotted next to her as she shivers in her seat on the fold-out mattress. The sunlight flickers and wanes, casting sick, distorted shapes throughout the apartment, and Nene gasps, heart falling through the floorboards as she turns her head to the left, in shock--

--before coming nose-to-cheek with a very pale, very familiar gaunt face.

“Wow, these guys are your type? What are they, humans? Or dolls? I don’t know if dolls like radishes, Yashiro Nene-san. At this point, it might be wise to give up hope. And stop skipping leg day!”

It takes one, two, three beats before Nene’s brain reboots and she’s able to comprehend three very important facts of life as she knows it in this current moment.

1.  Someone other than herself is touching her Idol Shrine.
2. That ‘Someone’ is a ghostly apparition. A fairly handsome, svelte, relatively-around-her-age-looking ghostly apparition with bitten, chapped lips mere centimeters from her own.
3. A ghostly apparition that just called out her daikon legs!!

“Ge- ge- get away from me!” Nene shrieks, dropping the poster in her hands (she sends a silent apology to her idols, promising never again to disrespect their handsome merchandise) as she violently lurches away from her previous perch on the mattress, scooting and shoving until her back rests against the couch cushions at the “head” of her “bed.” 

Belatedly, she realizes that her legs are quite generously exposed past the hem of her nightgown after all that movement, and buries herself underneath the comforter with a squeak. 

“B-begone!” Nene calls, quivering, voice muffled through the fabric. “I can’t see you!”

A second later and the edge of her security blanket is being lifted just high enough for a single red eye to poke through, somehow shining in the darkness of the covers. 

“Now you can. Boo!”

“Eek!!”

Fifteen minutes later, after quite possibly the most harrowing round of hide and go seek she has ever experienced in all her twenty-two years, Nene has just finished sliding the second rice-filled omelette onto a plate. It’s almost second nature to snag the ketchup bottle from its innocent perch right next to the stove and scribble cute smiley faces on each pouch of eggy goodness, along with an ☆itadakimasu!☆ On the edge of the place, in an adorably overly-rounded hiragana font that makes her grin as she draws. 

Once complete, she surveys her handiwork with pride.

Then, she remembers who the other plate is for. Very quickly, her grin contorts into something decidedly less excitable.

As she approaches the kotatsu, she gives herself a firm pep talk! Well...as firm as Nene can hope to be at eight in the morning.

Be resolute! Set boundaries! Give a spirit an inch, and they’ll take a mile. I know this. I shouldn’t let him fluster me. He can’t fluster me. I’ve done this before. I’ve got this!

Yes. All of those things are very pertinent to keep in mind, and good guidelines for how to navigate this budding, uniquely engaging relationship between herself and the foreign entity occupying her apartment...but it all seems to fall away, as she gazes properly at him for the first time that day.

Hanako looks up at her, and the world seems to slow down around the two of them.

Of course, he’s in the same clothes as he was last night -- dark pants, dark sweater, yellow fuzzy socks just barely visible from where he’s tucked his feet underneath his sparse thighs -- but in the pallid light of early morning, the boy is painted anew with colors and hues previously hidden by the night’s oppressive dark. 

Out here, underneath the planter-clad line of her windowsill, Hanako is like a placid cat as he blinks serenely into the warm embrace of the sun’s kiss. From this angle, in this lighting, Nene is able to notice the subtle beginnings of a flush in the crest of his cheekbones, at the southernmost point of his chin, dusted across the gentle ski slope of his nose, and teasingly speckled at the corners of those bright, chatoyant eyes. When he blinks, it’s slow, almost docile. His hands fidget in his lap, half obscured by the length of the black sleeves that confine them as he picks at his cuticles. Bangs like an oil spill leak into his eyelashes and he is so relaxed, so taken apart by the light streaming in from between the blinds that he doesn’t even think to blink. Nene has to wonder how long it’s been since he’s last seen the sun.

“Hana--” her throat closes before she can spit all the syllables out, but it’s enough to grab his attention. “Hanako-kun,” she tries again, and mentally repeats her mantra of resolve! fortitude! will! as Hanako turns that gentle, sleepy, effortlessly pretty gaze and directs it all at her. Oh. Oh, wow. Do all boys look like this early in the morning?

(Do all boys look like this? )

Focus! Strength! Determination! 

Nene brandishes his plate in warning. “Listen up! I’m only gonna give this to you if you behave, you hear me? No sneaking up on me anymore! No mean pranks! ...A-and no jokes about my legs! In fact, the word ‘leg’ is off-limits from now on, got that?” 

He bats his big, bottomless eyes at her. Red, red, so unfathomably red. God, it’s like staring straight into a massacre. 

“Hm…” he ponders, bringing up a white, slender finger to tap at his pursed lips. “Then... is ‘daikon’ okay? They’re practically synonyms, after all!”

That morning, Hanako doesn’t need to rattle the blinds or shake the walls. Nene’s indignant shrieking does the job well enough -- perhaps, even better.

;

As they’re just finishing up their meal, there’s a knock at the door. Nene looks over her shoulder, puzzled at who could possibly need something from her so early in the morning. 

Hm. It’s probably Aoi, bearing the well-intentioned (yet insufferably smothering) gifts of endless tupperware containers, or skincare gift-packs, or one of an impossibly many arranged assortments of snacks and candies. Nene appreciates her friend’s concern, she does. Really. But there are only so many ways to say ‘I don’t trust you to take care of yourself’ before it gets blatantly offensive.

And… there goes her good mood for the day.

 It was almost...dare she say fun, bickering with Hanako and throwing bits of egg and rice at him as he flailed to catch the on-coming delicious assault with his mouth. She laughed so hard that it was almost possible to ignore the way Hanako’s skin gleamed so pale it was bordering on translucent; or the way his neck curved in such a way it made Nene afraid to make any sudden unexpected movements, in fear of startling his head right off the thin structure of bone. So much of Hanako was just that -- a skeletal leftover from what was once pumping flesh, what Nene might have once reached out to touch and found a pulse, a heat, a fire. 

Now, the only heat in his his palette was in his eyes; those same eyes that pull Nene a little too close to something unnamed, something dangerous, some deep-dark pit of a fate so abysmal it runs a shudder through her just to think about what Hanako must have seen, to have eyes like chasms.

...Yep. Good mood definitely ruined. 

Petulantly, she finds that she’s disgruntled to be dragged away from the kotatsu, where the ghostly boy sits, fit to bursting with excitable energy.

“I’ll be right back!” Nene calls, not bothering to snag her robe on the way to the door. It’s nothing her best friend hasn’t seen before. “It’s Aoi.”

Upon opening the door, Nene very quickly realizes that the person who’d knocked is not, in fact, Aoi.

Nene must crane her neck a considerable amount upwards to be able to look her landlord in his very tired, very heavy, very vibrantly purple eyes. And he looks down at her, as she stands there, mortified, clad only in her…

In her nightgown. Her cutesy, children’s mascot-themed nightgown.

“A-ah, um. Good morning, Tsuchigomori-san.”

“Good morning, Yashiro,” is what he blandly responds with -- or, what he attempts to respond with, before their line of sight is rather abruptly interrupted by a large floating mass of black fabric, fair skin, and a grin just a touch more menacing than its usual sadistic slant.

Then, Nene is engulfed in an embrace that wracks her head to toe in chills from how frigid it is, how potent the cold in her bones becomes. Hanako has effectively wrapped himself around her body so as to block the exposure of even just a centimeter of bare skin. And, as if the koala antics weren’t enough, Hanako’s got his arms looped over the back of her neck to tilt her head this way and that, until the crown of his own can rest comfortably in the junction between her taught jaw and wildly spasming chest.

“Good morning, Tsuchigomori-sensei! What can we do for you today?”

Nene does not know how, exactly, to articulate it, but this is somehow even worse than having Tsuchigomori catch her in her sleepwear. At least then she had some semblance of decency, however flimsy or embarrassing. But with Hanako quite literally contorted around her with a vice-like grip, cold fingers pressing into the meat of her bare skin so tightly it threatens to brand her…

This is…

This is the farthest I’ve ever gone with a boy!

Immediately after thinking that particular thought, Nene feels her face begin to blossom in a brilliantly awful shade of red.

“Hanako-kun,” she whispers urgently, desperately, through the barren expanse of her dry mouth, “Hanako-kun, I think you can let go of me, now.”

He doesn’t miss a beat with his reply. There is no beat for him to miss -- the entirety of this interaction has now swayed itself to the rhythm of Hanako’s sheer force of will. “No, I don’t think I will.” 

He turns his head back to face Tsuchigomori, smile dipped in something two shades too sinister. “Sensei?”

Tsuchigomori, to his credit (that Nene is gratefully giving him, +1,000 points in her mental book of people she does not hate), is as unfazed as he is unimpressed. He ignores Hanako in lieu of addressing Nene directly. “You didn’t eat the candy.”

“...Eh?”

“The lollipop. From last night. Anyways, you lost this in the hallway. Try to be more cognizant, next time, Yashiro-san. Can’t have our cleaning staff pick up after every clumsy tennant, hm?”

It is only at that moment does Nene realize Tsuchigomori is holding, in his loose, lanky grip, the tupperware container that had disappeared from Nene’s grip last night.

“Oh!” She’s relieved he had found it -- how the hell would she have explained to Aoi just where it went? “Thank you, I appreciate it! I’ll just…”

Nene awkwardly brings her arms up and around Hanako, who is still clinging to her like a koala, or a possessive puppy, or an overgrown, insufferably needy infantile man-child. He refuses to budge, even when Nene’s arms fail to reach far enough to grab the container. Hanako, after a pregnant pause that nearly makes Nene pass out from all the heat rushing to her face, must reach out himself to pluck the plastic from Tsuchigomori’s offering hand. “Here you go, Yashiro,” he murmurs, patting her head, as though it’s just the two of them and another grown man -- who is Yashiro’s literal landlord that she has to see and greet every day -- isn’t standing less than three feet away, eyeing the whole spectacle with an unamused poker face. 

“Thank you,” Nene deadpans, taking the container. She then proceeds to bash Hanako over the head with it. 

Does she feel guilty at the pained yelp he lets out? 

Yes. 

But does it get him off of her? 

Also yes.

(Does she immediately miss the feel of his arms around her, even in spite of the deathly chill? Well...nobody needs to know the answer to that one.)

As the apparition sulks over to the corner to lick his wounds, Nene gives Tsuchigomori one last cheerful thanks before she sends him on his way. The taller man pauses in his retreat from her doorway, though, as if he’s just remembered something. 

“Yashiro.” His head is the only thing turned towards her -- at a one-eighty degree angle, no less. Nene forces herself to repress the instinctual flinch as she watches (and hears ) his flesh twist and stretch to accommodate the unnatural contortion. “I realized my behavior last night might have been frightening. I’d like to apologize. I was under the assumption that...well. Nobody ever rents out 404 unless they’ve got a specific goal in mind. Tennants know what they’re getting into. Beforehand.”

Fourth floor, room #404, knock thrice on the bathroom door -- then boom! Hanako-san, here to grant any which one of your earthly desires.

Rather abruptly, Nene is reminded of Hanako’s words the prior night, the way he’d had them memorized -- like he was reading out of a theatrical script. The way he’d been fully prepared to grant her a wish and send her on her way: deflective, businesslike, impersonal. 

A near complete contrast to how attached and informal he’s grown just in one night, and all because Nene had expressed an intention to not leave immediately. 

“Eh...No...” She shakes her head slightly, messy bangs bouncing up and down from where they’ve fallen forward. “I just like the unit.”

Tsuchigomori lets the two of them rest in a silence so still it feels forcibly constrained. And he just looks at her, with those violet eyes that seemed to follow her all the way from the elevator car, only letting her out of their sights when she disappeared behind her front door, scarlet 404 emblazoned on the front like a branding. Like a warning. 

“Very well,” he says eventually, his long (lizard-like?) tongue now escaped from his mouth as it fiddles with one of the sharpened prongs of his rows...and rows...of teeth. He’s still facing her with a broken neck. “Remember what you’ve said here, today, Yashiro Nene.”

Before she can ask whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, Tsuchigomori is already turning away from her. He gropes around in his breast pocket once more and throws something over his shoulder, which Nene catches with a familiar stuttering snag.

As he strides away, the vents in the hallway carry his voice to her.

“Strawberry,” echoes the empty corridor, which rapidly starts to fill back with the morning sunlight that had been drained by Tsuchigomori’s presence. “Maybe you’ll like it better, this time.”

She is so consumed in the strange parting words that she barely notices Hanako materialize in front of her. Remember what I said? Why would I forget?

The lollipop is plucked out of her lax, distracted grip.

“Tsk, tsk, Yashiro. Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to take candy from strange old men? Unless…” He looms close, close, closer, until their noses brush, until she can feel the tickle of his soft black hair which feels impossibly softer than it looks, and she finds herself threatening to drown in those captivating whirlpools of crimson. From this distance, breathing his air, Nene can smell that strange, contradictingly sweet scent on his collar...something soft, something fluffy to bite into... something like cupcakes? No, maybe a sweetbread-- 

“Yashiro’s type is older men?” He whispers conspiratorially. “How scandalous!!”

“Pervert!”

Hanako finds out for the second time that morning that Nene’s right arm is not to be trifled with.

“Scary woman! Quit hitting me! How am I supposed to grant your wish if you’re just gonna attack any guy who gets within five feet of you?”

My wish, Nene remembers belatedly. She pauses in her aggressive stance, fists falling lamely to her side as she recalls the surreality of last night; remembers that the boy playfully cowered behind her couch is only a boy in appearance; remembers the not-boy grabbing her by the wrist, his arm extending from the bathroom door cracked ominously ajar, face split in the frame, grinning like the monster under the bed; remembers the knife he pulled from his sternum. 

Remembers how she asked him to help her find love.

“...Yashiro?” Calls a curious voice, Hanako’s head popping up in concern.

Nene drifts over to sit heavily down on the mattress. “My wish,” she starts, hesitantly. “Can you really...can you really do something like that?”

He’s beside her in an instant, hovering just above her shoulder with his hands drawn up and limp like a cartoon ghost. The sight almost makes her want to laugh. “But of course! There’s not a want in the living world that the great Hanako-san cannot meet!”

She wonders how he can sound so jovial with that voice. It’s always husky -- like he’s just finished screaming himself hoarse. 

“Besides,” Hanako continues, tone plummeting through the floorboards and immediately plunging the apartment into a petrifying frigidity. If she couldn’t literally see otherwise, Nene would’ve thought her breath was beginning to fog, with the way gooseflesh begins to crop up on her arms and legs like a rash run rampant. She’s struck frozen by the drastic change in atmosphere, only able to watch helplessly as Hanako floats over her shoulder to address her face-to-face.

“Not even I am in control of fate. I just set things in motion, you see.”

A dark shadow casts over his face as he lifts his head, baring that piercing, gruesome red gaze. 

“Once I accept a wish, it will be fulfilled no matter what.”

Nene’s hand is encased in a lethal cold and she gapes, dumbly, as Hanako brings their linked hands to be level with his lips. 

“As such, I am also guaranteed a payment. Nothing without a price, preserving balance within the universe -- y’know. That kinda thing.”

“But I-- I haven’t given you anything yet? Hanako-kun…?”

“Silly human,” he gives a chuckle that would be jovial if his gaze wasn’t so heavy , boring holes into her with such an intensity that, despite the chill in the room, Nene can’t quell the heat that sparks and begins to smoulder low in the pit of her gut. 

“Ah, The concept of time is so unnecessarily orthodox in the Near Shore... Think of it like this, okay?” Hanako uses his free hand to grab Nene’s, and he holds both of her arms gingerly by the wrists. “You have two hands, right? Always have, most likely always will?”

“W-well duh--”

His grip constricts, suddenly, and he holds her with a purposeful embrace. “Exactly. Let’s say you lose one or both -- you’ll still have the memories. The sensations. They’ve always been, they’ll always be. They’re yours from the start and they’ll be yours when you die. They belong to you, physically, figuratively, or otherwise.” 

Nene, absurdly, feels her face grow hot when Hanako gently unfurls her left pinky from the loose fists she’d unconsciously clenched into. “Even the littlest parts of you, you’re entitled to from the moment you breathe into existence.”

It tickles when he brushes his own pinky along the length of hers, over and over, back and forth, until the teasing sensation of it threatens to explode Nene’s head, what with the amount of blood rushing up to it. “S-so wha-- ahem. What does that have to do with--”

“Yashiro,” says Hanako quietly. He links their fingers together and stares so deeply into her eyes that it almost feels like he’s looking through them. “From the moment you made your wish--” He lifts one of her hands in emphasis, “A price was manifested.” The other rises to match its twin, and now Hanako glides closer still, until the only thing separating his face from hers is the interlocked union of their hands. He peers over the rocky mountains of their knuckles, twin red suns like a bad omen on the horizon.

Despite his iron grip, Nene feels herself begin to tremble. 

“What is mine belongs to me already. It always has, and it always will.”

Everything around them dissipates into something less than nothing, something so nebulous and inconsequential that Nene cannot even comprehend the possibility of a world outside the one Hanako’s breath paints in front of her. 

In the tiny, miniscule compartment of her brain that isn’t trained solely on Hanako, Nene realizes that she’s stumbled into something forebodingly permanent.

This situation is nothing like her previous experiences with the spirit world, where the extent of her responsibilities was to coax, console, and comfort. Thus far, she’s only ever had to offer up her time and emotional availability to reach an understanding with an apparition -- and even then, those things were transient, and grew and shifted with the natural ebb and flow of time.

What Hanako is talking about…

A deal mandated by fate itself… 

She should be scared. She should run. She should run far away from room 404 and straight downstairs to Aoi’s safe haven on the first floor, and get her best friend to perform an emergency rescue once more. No, that would take too long; Nene should evacuate the building, the city, the prefecture as fast as humanly possible, and she should never -- not once -- look back. 

Things that run are meant to be chased, after all. And Nene’s not too sure she’d be able to resist being caught, if it was Hanako’s piercing gaze from which she had to escape.

The same gaze that shocks her now, in this moment, with the severity of its inscrutable fixation.

Nene opens her mouth to say something; whether it’s a plea (don’t hurt me), a demand (tell me what you’re really after), or even a question (what are you really after, here?), it bubbles up from the very base of her and threatens to suffocate her with the force of the urge to expel it. She parts her lips, and they are so close that Nene watches Hanako’s pupils dart to follow the movement, the shift of her tongue, the way her throat clicks as she swallows around nothing but dry air and her own heartbeat, the meat of her bottom lip as she sucks at it, anxiously. “H-Hanako-kun…”

Before she can choke out whatever it is she wants -- needs -- to tell him, she is rudely interrupted by the blaring sound of her ringtone.

Which, mortifyingly enough, happens to be the synchronized harmony of her favorite Korean boy band. 

Whatever atmosphere crafted from Hanako’s proximity and their linked hands has now been effectively shattered. Nene remembers where she is (in the middle of her cramped, rumpled studio apartment, sat on her pull-out couch mattress) and what she must look like (bed-head a mess, still clad in her children’s patterned nightgown) and it’s enough to shock her out of Hanako’s orbit as she falls flat on her back and covers her burning face.

Eeeeeeek!!

He was so close!

His lips! If our hands weren’t there, he could’ve…!

On my bed, too!

Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod--

“Hm? Yashiro? Aren’t you going to answer it?” 

Hanako’s voice sounds suspiciously close. When Nene tentatively removes her hands from her face, she’s greeted by the sight of the boy hovering above her, eyes wide and imploring, head tilted to the side in an endearingly puppy-like manner. 

He’s -- he’s over me!

On my bed!

“Yes! I’m getting it right now!” She all but shrieks, sitting up so fast that she forgets how physics work and she rams her forehead into Hanako’s on her ascent upwards. 

He’s spluttering indignantly, muttering something or another about scary woman and always hitting me, but Nene cannot physically bring herself to pay anything more than peripheral attention to him at this point in time, lest she spontaneously combust and die an early death.

She dives for the phone and swipes to accept the call, bringing it to her ear as she desperately pants, “Hello!!”

“...Nene-chan? Are you alright?”

“I am perfectly okay!” says Nene, hurriedly swiping her nose with the back of her wrist to collect the last few stray droplets of blood. “What’s up, Aoi!”

“...If you’re sure. Anyways,” Nene chirps, and there’s some shuffling on the other end of the line. “This might be random, but you remember Minamoto-kun, right?”

Nene must pause and breathe deeply through her mouth.

This is the most exciting morning she’s had in months.

“Are you joking? YES.” As if Nene could forget possibly the most enticing of all the objects of her hopeless romanticisms. Minamoto Teru -- known locally as the Prince of the Second Floor -- checked all of her boxes, and then some: tall, slender, with pretty, sparkling eyes and a voice that belonged in an otome game; one of the fantastical ones, where the main character is swept off her feet by a host of dashing boys in a reverse harem type of situation and wow, okay, Nene really needs focus. 

“S-sorry... Did you just say something?”

A muffled giggle comes through the line. “You mean, before or after you totally daydreamed about his ‘pretty, sparkling--’”

“Okay, I think I get it now, thank you! Please continue!”

“Well, get this. Guess who I just ran into at Daiso.”

“No…”

“Yes. Guess who’s the bestest friend in the whole wide world for chatting him up? And name-dropping a certain adorable, available, single friend of mine?”

“NO…”

“ Nene-chan, yes. Guess who’s number I got!”

It’s almost too good to be true. Nene practically feels herself vibrating in excitement. “Y-y-you got Minamoto-kun’s number?” She shrieks at top volume, falling back into her pillows as she resists the urge to roll around and kick her feet in excitement. She’s not a teenager anymore, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever grow out of this: the euphoric dizziness associated with a girlish crush.

“No.”

All at once, her train of thought lurches to a sudden, abrasive halt. Gears squealing, engine whining in protest, the track laid beneath dropping quickly and unceremoniously off the side of a cliff. 

Her mouth works silently open and closed for a few, empty seconds. “Huh?” 

“Did you know Minamoto-kun has a younger brother? They look super similar, Nene-chan, I swear! Same blonde hair and everything!”

“Ah… Aoi, I don’t know…” It feels too much like a consolation prize. After all, Nene’s never seen nor heard of this boy before. What if he’s weird? Ah, she’s never been good with first impressions…

“He’s a year younger than you,” Aoi deadpans. “A sweet boy...I bet he’d call you Senpai if you asked…”

The train suddenly and violently leaps back to life. Smoke pours out of her ears.

“Please send me his contact information.” Says Nene, shamelessly. 

“Aaaand that’s what I thought you’d say. I’ll send it on Line now! Let me know when you get it, okay?”

“Yes,” is all she can manage to spit out, her mind replaying the image of a pretty boy pouting around the stuttered S-Senpai… struggling to work its way past his pursed lips. Oh gosh. “Y- ahem. Yes, alright. I will. Thanks Aoi.”

“Of course, Nene-chan. You know I only want Nene-chan to be happy, right?”

“...Right.”

“Good,” the other woman sighs, sounding relieved. “And you’re doing well?”

Nene knows what she means by that, what she’s really asking. 

Nene-chan… have you seen a ghost?

She almost feels bad having to lie to Aoi like this. Her best friend, who has done quite literally everything in her power to keep Nene alive and sane these past couple of months, is owed, at the very least, honesty. And Nene can’t even give her that. 

Swallowing hard as she gazes up at her bland, off-white popcorn ceiling, Nene steels her resolve. It makes it easier, when she doesn’t have to do this to Aoi’s face. 

“I’m all good, Ao-chan,” Nene hums. “Promise.”

“Okay. Okay, good. You know it makes me smile to hear that… y’know, with this new guy -- the brother -- if you two hit it off, you can finally come on double dates with me and Akane! ...And...Lemon...wait. Would that be a triple date? Hm…”

And this is where she must make her exit from the conversation, unless she wants to choke to death with the envy that threatens to grip and kill her whenever Aoi mentions her perfect partners living the perfect life in their stupidly, infuriatingly perfect home.

“Yup. But you gotta send his stuff to me first, ‘kay?”

“‘Kay! Bye, Nene-chan!”

“Bye, Aoi… and thanks.”

“Of course! Anything for you.”

The line disconnects.

Nene lets her phone slip onto the mattress beside her, the movement fluid and unconcerned. The last hour has felt like a giddy haze of new heights and pitfalls that she didn’t even know her emotions could reach. It isn’t even noon yet, and she’s already got a cute guy’s number, had her demonic landlord formally apologize to her (along with gifting her another piece of suspicious candy from that seemingly bottomless coat pocket of his), and Hanako explained the -- er, mechanics of the wish-granting process… 

Wait. 

Hanako!

He’s been rather quiet this whole time. Nene’s known him for approximately twelve hours, but somehow, she feels it’s out of character for the boy to keep his mouth shut for more than a few breaths at a time.

After scanning the whole room (which isn’t hard, considering how cramped her studio is) without even a hint of that familiar mop of abysmally dark hair, Nene is convinced that he’s simply retreated to wherever he goes when she’s not home, she presumes. The bathroom, maybe? That is where he’s summoned from, after all.

It’s at that moment a cold, wet something jams itself inside of her ear canal.

Nene rockets herself half a foot off the mattress in pure shock, and then terror, before she whips around to find the boy in question; giggling, hand over his stomach, eyes clenched so tightly together that the beginnings of crow’s feet line the outer corners of his puffy, flushed eyes.

“Oh man,” Hanako wheezes, pointing and laughing at her. “I can’t believe you fell for that!”

“Ha ha. A wet willy, very mature,” she grumps. She makes the executive decision to ignore how brightly the boy’s eyes shimmer when he’s caught in the throes of glee. This excited, the color almost fully returns to his palette. Nene catches a glimpse of something more filled-out than the walking apparition she’s known thus far. 

He stares back at her, smile melting soft and gooey like hot butter, and Nene has to do something -- anything -- to reroute the direction this interaction is headed towards (spoiler: the destination is her, fawning over the vulnerable innocence on that malnourished, emaciated skull. If she didn’t already know it, this would solidify her status as a complete and utter freakshow. 

Who looks at a corpse and thinks first of how warm they must have been, once?)

“I-I have a date today!”

That wipes the smile right off his face. Good. Crisis averted.

“You do?” Hanako asks, expression gone vacant and politely curious in the blink of an eye.

Crap. I do now.

“I do.” The lie on her tongue tastes different from the one she’d had to bitterly choke out to Aoi. This one is sweet like candy, like strawberries and rot and all other things that sit at the back of the throat and decay into something death-adjacent. “Did you, um… was that you, Hanako-kun? Did you do that with your powers?”

He stares blankly back at her before slowly, almost mockingly, raising his hands above his head before spreading them down in the arc of a rainbow, fingers wiggling. “Manifestatioooooon…”

When her phone chimes with the telltale Line Chat notification, they both look towards it; Nene, with trepidation; and Hanako, interestingly enough, with a genre of sadistic glee she’s had yet to see from him. 

Right. 

Nene wonders if he can manifest her some social skills. She’s talked to more boys in the past twenty-four hours than she has in the past twenty-four months. For so long, it was just her and Aoi, and Aoi’s...accessories. Who, granted, were decidedly male, but posed no threat to Nene seeing as they’ve all known each other from childhood. Somewhere around the end of their second year of high school -- when Aoi finally agreed to bless Akane with her presence for one singular trial date -- was the first time Nene let herself relax around the two boys. 

It certainly didn’t help that she was convinced that the only reason they were kind to her was because she was Aoi’s best friend. Even now… although her self-esteem is leagues above where it was when Nene had been a chubby, hormonal, unstable adolescent, she still can’t shake off the vestiges of that insecurity; the deep-seated notion that there was something innate inside of her, its presence so foundational that it was intrinsic to her very core, that rendered her lame. Defective. Undesirable.

Unlovable.

Hanako isn’t the only one who knows how to shift the pressure in a room.

He senses the change in her demeanor nearly as soon as Nene’s mind hops from “I have a cute boy’s number for the first time!” to “Oh, no. I have a cute boy’s number for the first time.” Nene can tell -- she watches him flounder in the afterglow of his little joke, as he realizes she isn’t reacting as he’d intended.

“Yashiro…?”

To her horror and endless frustration, she feels tears tickle the edge of her lash-line. This is the second time Hanako has watched her reduce herself to tears for no apparent reason and they haven’t even known each other for a day. 

… If it’s possible to ‘know’ a suspicious apparition occupying her haunted unit. In her haunted apartment building. Owned by her demonic landlord.

Who has an obsession with showering her in candy.

“I’m gonna die alo-o-o-one!!”

Her hacking sobs prove to be the final push it takes to jolt Hanako into action. The boy zooms through the air to where Nene is now knelt by the foot of the mattress, hugging her knees in distress, face buried so as not to embarrass herself any further. 

Twin points of frigid, intense pressure pierce through her shoulder blades. “Hanako-o-o,” she whines pitifully as she leans into the touch, resisting the sharp urge to shiver, lest that draw his hands away. 

“There, there,” he hums. This close, that potent, sweet scent wraps around her in the fuzziest blanket of warm protection. It’s odd, Nene knows, that she’s comforted by the embrace of a spirit. She shouldn’t call out for a name that’s used only in summonings; she shouldn’t lean into a cold lethal enough it threatens to burn her alive.

And yet, here she is, burying her head between her knees as she allows herself to be pet by some mysterious, suspiciously morally questionable entity. 

“Jeez,” whispers Hanako in a tone Nene would describe as gentle had it come from anyone else. Even when he speaks lowly, there is still a sharpness to him, an edge that cannot be eroded no matter how fondly the mid-morning sun caresses his face. “Such a crybaby, huh?”

“Am not.” 

“Are to.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Yeah-huh.”

The childish exchange is enough to coax Nene’s head slightly out from where she’d hidden in shame. “Go away.”

“Hehe. No.” He meets her gaze head on. And even though he’s doing his best impression of a reassuring smile, Nene doesn’t think she’s ever going to get over the blunt force behind those eyes. “How else would I make sure you won’t die alone?”

Oh, no. Oh no, no, no, no.

Playful banter is one thing -- after all, she’d be concerned if she was roommates with someone with whom she struggled to maintain a fun, easy dynamic. (And truthfully, even before she’d summoned him, she always felt at home in her odd, cramped studio, with all its sharp corners and rattling blinds and walls that talked back.) 

But she draws the line at the mere suggestion of what her pounding heart is trying to tell her.

It’s true that Nene has let her hopeless romantic heart jump to the wildest of conclusions, entertain the most far fetched of fantasies, and create entire false narratives all in the name of a little self comfort in a world that refused to love her as much as she loved it. 

However, those bad habits were always in the context of school girl crushes on devastatingly handsome student council presidents, or main romantic leads in her high school’s theatre club, or pretty boys who stopped her by her mailbox slot just to ask how she was doing because he’s noticed she just moved into the building, you’re new, right, it’s nice to meet you, I’m Minamoto Teru!

And all of these love interests have always been, without a doubt, unreachable in a way that no amount of self confidence or pep-talks could ever hope to bridge. It’s safer this way, and it always has been. How can they break her heart if she never bares it to them in the first place?

This, though. This is different. This is unprecedented, unspeakable, whatever adjective first comes to mind in the context of not innocent school girl crushes, but the rhythmic thud thud thud of her heartbeat, slamming like a gunshot against her spasming rib cage as she gawks helplessly at Hanako’s deceptively serene face. No amount of gently curved smiles could ever dilute the rawness he carries about him, the more-than-something to be desired in the violent slant of his cheekbones, the smattering of bruises under and around his eyes -- those eyes, eyes that are always following her, eyes that have tracked her every movement from the moment she’d set her first footfall beyond the genkan of 404.

No. He wouldn’t break her heart.

He’d eat her alive.

The total tragedy of pining after the undead… As an adolescent, Nene might have done that to herself. She can see it clearly: fifteen-year-old her -- short and stout and round-cheeked in all her first-year naivete -- falling head over heels for the ghostly boy that spends all of his time with her and showers her in the staples of an easy, comfortable, authentic relationship that she's never known.

But Nene is no longer fifteen. Nene is an adult now, and what she does know is that it wouldn’t be the meet-cute, happy-go-lucky romantic comedy like Aoi and Akane and Yamabuki get to live out everyday.

It would be a horror story. Complete with all the tears and bloodshed and death inherent to the genre. 

So it is with a renewed resolve of steel that Nene stands, Hanako’s hands falling limply off of her as she scrubs once, twice, three times at her face to dislodge any remaining evidence of her momentary breakdown.

“You can start,” she says, “by letting me get dressed.”

Whatever emotion that enveloped the two of them as they sat kneeled on the ground -- Nene with her head buried in her knees as Hanako embraced and consoled her -- is dead. The apparition looks up at her with wide eyes, silent for a contemplative moment before the usual sharp grin splits his face.

“Oh, don’t mind me.”

“Hanako!”

As it turns out, Kou is indeed ready and willing to call her Senpai. Nene doesn’t even have to ask.

They meet around midday at a gesen in the central part of downtown, which surprised her as his first suggestion when they’d messaged on Line to hash out the details, but upon meeting, she can immediately put it together in her mind.

Kou is excitable. Kou is hyperactive. Kou is eager to please. Kou plays with such an intensity that he almost breaks the plastic on the Taiko Master drum and is asked very politely by an employee to remove himself from that particular gaming station. Kou sags his pants and wears layered shirts open and unbuttoned like a stereotypical shoujo anime delinquent, but his good intentions and naivete come across so clearly that it’s almost as though he’s a parody of himself. Kou has a traffic safety omamori pierced to the lobe of his right ear and carries around a big black umbrella on his back (something that Nene wants to ask about, later. If there is a ‘later’). Kou’s unkempt, boyish mop of blond hair is nothing like his brother’s.

Nene wants to like him so badly.  

He holds doors open! He’s polite! He blushed when she first arrived at the gesen and let her have all the first turns! He even paid for both of their lunches at the cafe just next door, despite his unfortunate financial status as a last-year university student. By all standards, Nene should be trembling at the knees from how likable he is.

But… 

He’s just not my type!

This is dismaying. This is depressing. This is fucking irritating, is what it is, and Nene refuses to give up the fight so easily. Maybe her judgement is being clouded by the incredibly long and emotionally draining morning she suffered through. Maybe she’s not giving him a fair chance. Maybe she needs to give him an opportunity to redeem himself.

So she does.

It would be sweet that he walked her home if they didn’t live in the same building. He does ride the elevator up with her two floors past his own, however, which awards him a hefty +50 points in Nene’s internal book of people she does not hate. He isn’t even douchey about it, either, and shuffles it under the guise of i-it’s only polite to walk a lady to her front door! -- admittedly, a little cheesy, but she’s kind of… endeared by his seemingly effortless boyish charm.

As they approach her front door, she doesn’t think she’s imagining the way he begins to sweat and fidget nervously with the strap of his umbrella.

“Th-this is you, huh, Senpai?” He stutters clumsily, scratching the back of his head. “Uh-- 404?”

“Yep,” Nene chirps, sidling her back against the front door so they’re face-to-face with just enough room for her to feel the heat on his cheeks. Now more than ever, she’s thankful for her condensed height, even if it did result in the unsightly augmentation of two limbs she really doesn’t like to spend her time thinking about.

“... O-okay, well, I, uh. I hope ya had fun today. I-I really did.”

Is this all it takes to get a guy flustered and mumbling? Pulling at the open flaps of their jackets, tilting her head to expose the swan’s dive curve of her neck, batting her eyelashes a little bit? 

Too easy.

Kou’s big, boxy hands begin to fidget with the umbrella strap in earnest. It’s strewn across his chest, and when Nene brings a few digits of her own to tug on it and bring him down to her level, he stiffens.

“Um, Senpai, wh--”

He’s got big doe eyes. A pale azure, color of the sky. There’s weightlessness to him. He’s just so sweet, so safe.

“Come inside?” She whispers.

Nene watches as those baby blues trail up from her face and stare fixedly at the red 404 emblazoned above her head. She feels it when his grip on the umbrella strap tightens just a touch, just enough to startle the hair on the nape of her neck.

“Yeah,” breathes Kou, eyes back on her, clearly done with whatever internal debate he’d been fighting. “Yeah, okay.”

“Okay?” Nene simpers, blindly fishing in her purse for her key fob and nearly crying from relief when she closes in on the familiar piece of metal. The adrenaline rush she’s experiencing now is nothing like any of her other previous, fleeting encounters with males her age -- God, what is she doing? Inviting a boy inside after the first date? Is he as nervous as she is? Can he hear her heart pounding?

The door swings open after a considerable struggle and then the both of them are falling inside, a whirlwind of tangled limbs and haphazardly kicked-off shoes and horribly clashing fabrics; Kou with his crisp, sun-faded pastels and worker’s patterns, and Nene in her black lace and frills. It’s a miracle nobody trips as she leads him by the strap over his chest, guiding him coquettishly further and further into the apartment. The evening sun provides light, but it’s minimal, and Nene can just barely make out the tremor in his lips, the wild look in his eyes as he scans his dim surroundings.

(It certainly doesn’t help that the apartment darkens considerably upon his arrival.)

“Nice, uh,” he gulps, sharp canines fiddling with his bottom lip. “Nice place ya got here.”

“Thanks,” says Nene, breathless and distracted as she propels them both on the couch with an oomph from the impact. 

Once the momentum is gone, urgency sapped straight from their veins like blood escaping an artery, leaking out into a messy puddle, pooling around their feet. Neither wants to step in it. Kou looks like he’s about two seconds away from slipping and drowning in the mess.

Nene decides to clean it up.

“Um,” she stutters, the ridiculousness of her behavior thus far slapping her in the face so hard that it leaves her bright red and misty-eyed. “Th-this was real fast… Sorry for, like, shoving you in here--”

“No, Senpai, ‘s okay--”

“--didn’t mean to force you--”

“--I wanted to--”

“H-huh?”

Kou blinks at her flustered squeak and, suddenly, they both realize that they’re bumping noses. He doesn’t pull back. “I wanted to -- fuck, I wanna be here. Only if--if that’s what you want, too, Senpai!”

What does she want?

For the first time in twenty-two years, Nene has a cute boy practically in her lap, panting, nose-to-nose with her as he shivers…

Shivers?

“Are you cold?” Nene asks abruptly, absurdly.

“Y-yeah, ‘lil bit,” he chuckles, lips pale and chapped as they curve around a lopsided grin. “You tryna save on heat, or what?”

“Mm-mm,” she shakes her head. Looks up through her lashes. Bites her lip. God, she hopes this works. “But I could--I could h-help you warm up?”

Kou lets out a noise that sounds like he’s been socked in the gut, and it almost makes her burst into a nervous fit of giggles, but she perseveres. Those blue eyes are now almost totally eclipsed by the sudden swell of his pupils, the heavy sink of his lids, the way his (really very long, very pretty) lashes tickle her own as he tilts his head closer. 

“I’d like that, Senpai.”

And then he leans in.

Nene ducks immediately out of the way.

“Sorry!!” She whisper-shouts, cursing herself a thousand times over. Stupid stupid stupid stupid! “You, ah! You caught me off guard…”

“Oh, my bad! I’ll. Uhm. I’ll go slowly this time.”

“Okay… sorry…”

“No, don’t apologize, Senpai! Really, it was my fault!”

“Kou-kun…”

“Right. ‘Kay. Take two.”

…

“Owie!”

“Ouch, fuck.”

“Kou-kun, are you okay?!”

“Y-yeah, no worries, Senpai, just a split lip. ‘S practically nothing!”

 “You’re bleeding, though...”

“K-kiss it better?”

Nene admires the sheer force of this boy’s determination as he absolutely, wholeheartedly, valiantly refuses to let the mood die -- resucitating it even as he bleeds from their clumsy collision of teeth and ill-placed lips. At this point, she’s almost ready to call it quits. This isn’t working. How does a kiss manage to be ruined twice? How can this be so awkward? 

He looks up at her through his lashes, then. Although he’s handsome, he still has yet to shake off the last of his baby fat; she tracks the way it clings to his cheeks like dough on a dumpling. If she chose to, Nene could reach out and grab a handful of that plush, well-fed face, or those shapely arms, or even his head full of sandy, tousled locks. Kou is everything she should be attracted to -- everything she should have no issues with mauling like an animal on her couch.

And yet…

And yet, Nene can’t help but look at his complexion that’s just a little too sunkissed, muscles just a little too defined, clothes just a little too bright, eyes just a little too blue. 

He’s not… 

Shaking her head, Nene refuses to allow herself to waste any more time. She can do this. She can. 

She leans in, softly slotting his lips to his and tries to envision fireworks as he presses back, shy at first before a foreign eagerness overtakes him and he surges forward.

He’s not…

Her hands begin to roam over rough denim and worn corduroy, until she finds the satiny fabric of the umbrella strap and tugs at it to get it off.

Kou immediately stiffens, breaking their lips to pull back. When had he grown so pale? Is he really that cold?

“N-n-” He has to stop and clear his throat. “No, Senpai. I… can’t take that off.”

The world comes to a screeching, deafening halt.

What.

“You. Can’t take off your umbrella.”

Kou nods.

“Even if we…”

Slowly, and with a flush growing impossibly brighter, Kou nods again.

“Okay.” Fine. Whatever. At this point, the interaction literally could not get any worse. Nene is so looking forward to sending him home and cackling with Aoi the next morning about how much of a trainwreck she is that she can’t even seduce a boy well enough to take his clothes off.

“I-i-i-it’s not you, S-Senpai,” says the boy, teeth chattering. “H-hah, th-this place is r-really--”

Even caught in possibly the most uncomfortable situation in existence, he’s still trying to reassure her. He’s kind. He’s considerate. He’s respectful. Nene should be head over heels.

He’s not…

“H-hey, uh, S-sen--”

Caught in the web of her internal monologue, Nene is blissfully unaware of the plunging temperature in the apartment, nor the rapid dwindling of all light sources, until it is a deep and near-tangible black that blankets them. Not even the sudden onslaught of chills is enough to shake her; it’s only when Kou’s ice cold hand jostles her upper thigh that Nene jolts back into the present.

The very dark, very frigid, very hair-raising, bone-chilling, heart-stopping, stomach-clenching, bottomless-pit-of-stone-cold-fear present.

She realizes what’s about to happen a handful of seconds before it actually plays out. Nene watches as, almost in slow motion, Kou’s hand tightens on her thigh and his thumb unconsciously begins to circle in slow, maddeningly gentle movements. “O-or I c-c-could w-warm you up--”

The presence is something she senses rather than feels. One moment, it’s a terrifying pit of inky nightmare swirling around the pair of them in a mindless kind of terror-inducing anxiety; and the next, there’s a voice that cuts through it all, so hot, so close, so personal that the blade of it cuts right down to her core.

“Room for one more?”

Hanako.

The ghostly boy has wedged himself between Nene and Kou, knobby knees drawn up to his chest, sweater-pawed hands splayed on each of their shoulders to make room for him as he crouches like a roadblock in the midst of their ongoing trainwreck of a hook-up. His face is even paler than usual in the all-encompassing dark as he glows diaphanous and ethereal; Nene would almost call it angelic if he didn’t wear that infernal grin, and those eyes.

Bloody, gory, pools-of-impending-massacre eyes that were trained on Kou with a brand of glee so manic, so sadistic, that it sent a thrill of something absolutely inappropriate for the situation down the ramrod cord of her spine.

In this moment, Nene realizes three dismaying truths in very quick succession:

1. She is not going to be having sex, or anything adjacent, tonight (this one is the least upsetting -- she already kind of knew it at the start of the evening).
2. Kou can see Hanako (???????).
3. There is about to be an Altercation.

Reality shifts and reconstructs itself around her as Nene watches, incredulously, almost catatonically, as Kou leaps up from the couch and onto the surface of her kotatsu. He’s unclipping the strap across his chest and moving with a swiftness Nene’s eyes struggle to follow -- the actions of someone who’s trained for quick-paced, dangerous combat.

Kou whips out the umbrella from behind his back which, evidently, is not an umbrella.

The golden staff glows and thrums with a power that Nene feels up to the rattling roots of her teeth.

“Evil presence, I’ve come on behalf of the sacred Minamoto clan to honor my grandmother’s work and exorcise you once and for all! In the name of peace and justice, balance will be restored to this dwelling, so help me heavens!”

To her abject horror, Hanako rises slowly from his perch beside her on the couch. And then pulls out the butcher’s knife that apparently lives in his rib cage. It gleams underneath the raw power undulating from Kou’s own weapon of choice.

Hanako brandishes it. Licks his lips. Lowers his eyes. Giggles.

“You’re far from heaven in here, boy.”

Outside, lightning cracks (when did it start storming?) and for the briefest of seconds, the room is thrown into a sudden and terrifying wash of bleached out, dynamic color. Kou is whey-faced and trembling, gripping his golden staff like it’s his life line -- and in what is about to be, undoubtedly, a shitshow of a duel, it probably is.

On the other side of the room, however, Hanako is… well.

If he’d been oddly charged that morning, snaking his way around Nene’s body to shield her from the nonexistent ill intentions of Tsuchigomori…

The boy looks downright murderous right now.

“Don’t--” Nene begins, before she’s immediately cut off.

“No worries, Senpai! You probably didn’t know such a scary guy was living here with you, huh? But don’t be afraid -- Minamoto Kou is here and ready to fight! For Senpai’s honor!!”

Before she can tell him no, actually, she did know Hanako was here and hellno she doesn’t want him to leave, the two boys are leaping at each other in a frenzy of clanking metal and matching twin grins of pure adrenaline.

Nene isn’t sure she totally comprehends what happens next -- they’re moving scarily fast, and her poor, overstimulated, frankly exhausted human brain can only catalogue so much information before it clocks out for the night. She’s barely able to track their bodies as they fly through the air of her cramped, cluttered apartment, knocking down books and shelves and plants as they battle it out.

“Stop!” She yells, but the protest falls upon deaf ears.

Glass shattering. Thuds. Moans. Grunts. The sound of metal grating against itself in a terrible, woeful yowl. 

She tries again, and again, and again, but the two boys either refuse to acknowledge her, or are so entranced in their battle that they aren’t going to stop until someone is dead. 

Oh, God. 

They aren’t going to stop.

“Hey! Hanako-kun! Kou-kun! Enough!!”

Nene is desperately trying to grab their attention, now, as they knock into walls and bounce off of the ceiling and floor like some kind of grisly, hellish cyclone. Fire and sparks follow in their wake, the product of whatever preternatural warfare they’re inflicting upon each other, and it absolutely destroys everything it touches: the drywall; the kitchen countertop; the fluffy welcome mat she’d been gifted by Aoi when she first moved in; the miniature planter on her bedside windowsill; and, most horrifyingly, her K-pop shrine.

“Please…!”

She’d wanted it to come out reflecting all the anger and outrage she feels having her space, her life, and her boundaries disrespected.

Instead, the sob she lets out is choked. Pitiful. Small. Weak.

“Please…”

Instantly, the commotion comes to a halt. 

When the boys stop moving, it’s in a pose so overtly violent that it would be comical in literally any other situation. Hanako has Kou in a headlock, knife pressed to the underside of his jaw and the human boy’s golden staff held securely in Hanako’s free hand as he holds it just out of reach. Kou has two big, boxy hands on the solid line of Hanako’s forearm, and tugs desperately at it, but to no avail. The pair of them look straight out of a cartoonish freeze frame.

When did my life stop being real?

When did I start living in fantasy?

“Stop beating up my roommate, please, Kou-kun,” Nene mutters tiredly. “It’s really rude of you, y’know.”

“You should listen to her, boy.” Hanako’s grin turns utterly insufferable. 

“...I’m sorry, your fuckin’ what.”

“My, uh, temporary roommate! He’s just moved in for, ah, reasons! Reasons best kept private! Thank you! I invited him here, so stop fighting, please!”

“Yashiro summoned me to help her find a boyfriend. Isn’t that so romantic?”

“Nevermind,” says Nene. “Please, continue, Kou-kun.”

The human boy stares between the two of them like he’s tracking an incredibly engaging badminton match. 

“... Er,” he begins, eyes wide. “‘M not exactly winnin’ here, Senpai. Speakin’ a which -- oi,  shorty. Can you let go now?”

“Certainly,” chirps Hanako, who then promptly releases Kou to drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

A litany of curses explode from his mouth as Kou picks himself up, haggard and irritable, before shooting a flustered glance up at Nene and ducking his head in a quick bow. “S-sorry, I don’t mean to swear in front of a girl!”

“... Eh? Ah, it’s okay… I--”

“And gimme that!” Kou’s hand shoots out so quickly that Hanako barely has time to react before the human boy has secured his weird, golden, magically glowing staff. “Don’t gimme that look -- I ain’t gonna use it. Not if… not if you don’t need me to, Senpai.”

“I really don’t--”

“Anyways! I don’t like you, shorty,” he proclaims, despite their current height difference exacerbated by Hanako’s floating. “Not one bit.”

“Very interesting! Might I introduce you to this riveting possibility: nobody asked.”

“Senpai,” Kou calls to her, in lieu of even briefly acknowledging Hanako’s response. He crosses the room and is knelt in front of her by the couch in an instant. “You really trust this guy to -- help you find a boyfriend, or whatever? 

“Um,” she says, because it’s all she can muster up. How is she supposed to respond to that?

Behind Kou’s back, Hanako pouts at her.

“Well, if that’s what ya summoned him here for, then he can’t leave ‘til he does what you asked, huh?”

“...Yes?” Nene ventures.

“I guess I got no choice.” He nods solemnly to himself before raising his head in an earnest fervor. So driven and passionate in the apparent climax of his monologue, Nene is taken aback when he grabs both of her hands in his and squeezes, desperately, stars twinkling in the endless sky of his eyes. “I’m gonna help Senpai find her one true love! Even if I gotta work alongside the spirit of 404… I’ll do it! If it means protecting your honor! On behalf of the sacred Minamoto clan, so help me heavens!”

“Is that… something you should be using your family name for, Kou-kun?” Nene questions, dazed and confused.

“‘Course! We’re a long line of exorcists, after all. ‘Nd this is -- at its core -- a mission to get rid of him,” Kou whispers conspiratorially, as though Hanako isn’t listening to everything, amusedly, picking his teeth with the knife.

“Right.”

“I swear, Senpai. You’ll be safe with me!”

“Okay.”

He squeezes her hands one more time before rising slowly. Turning, he jabs his staff threateningly in Hanako’s general direction. The ghostly boy feigns a mocking-high pitched scream, before sticking his tongue out. Kou gives him a very rude hand gesture.

On his way out, he calls one last farewell to Nene, shouting out a boyishly charmingly “g’night Senpai! Call if ya need anything!” before the front door shuts conclusively behind him.

As soon as he’s gone, Nene’s bones sag into each other as she falls back onto the couch, fatigue swarming her from the inside out until she’s convinced she’s less of a human and more of a dried corpse left to shrivel and rot in the sun.

Across the room, Hanako takes one look at her -- and smiles that maddeningly cryptic smile of his. It’s starting to become a pet peeve of hers.

“Let’s go for a walk, Yashiro.”

There’s a little courtyard in their complex. It’s small, nothing special, but it’s encased in the ivy-clad walls of the apartment building and strewn with a litter of wooden benches and beautiful bouts of shrubbery. At the center of the green oasis is a meagre two-tiered fountain, surrounded by an array of blossoming flowers. Nene is a new resident, so there’s no way she would’ve found this gem of a hideout by herself.

What does it mean, then, that Hanako thought to immediately bring her here in a time where she very obviously needed comfort?

All the plantlife does her good to calm down from the shitshow that was her life twenty minutes ago. God, she can’t even dwell on it, unless she wants to start hyperventilating again.

For a very long while, the only sound that permeates the space between them is the rhythmic lull of rushing water. They sit hip-to-hip on the stone edge, pinkies brushing, gazes steadfastly parallel. 

And then Hanako begins to speak.

“I can go anywhere in this building, but I’m tethered to 404 so that’s where I’m strongest.”

The moonlight casts everything in such a dreamy glow; from the creamy yellow of Hanako’s fuzzy socks to the wistful blue of the hyacinths that bloom all around them, Nene is entranced in the otherworldly beauty of this pocket dimension Hanako has seemingly ripped open and pulled her into. If only for tonight, there is a distinct lack of the constant horror and dread that seems to cling to the boy like a second skin. 

Outside of the apartment, swinging his feet off the ledge and humming a tune Nene can’t for the life of her recognize, she could almost delude herself into believing -- for the barest, most fleeting of seconds -- that she was an ordinary girl, and they really were ordinary roommates, and Hanako brought her down here not to calm her from a panic attack, but to… to…

“Does it ever get lonely?”

He doesn’t even pretend to ask what she means. “Not really. It isn’t a totally terrible gig. Once a human gets their wish and I get my payment, I can go back.”

“... Go back…?”

“Wherever a soul goes,” Hanako breathes wistfully at her side, “when it lays to rest.”

When it lays to rest?

“You’ve--you’ve moved on before?” 

She’s startled enough by his candid answer to turn and face him. Which is a mistake, obviously, because Nene is trying to deny the budding attraction she feels for the boy, not exacerbate it.

He is just so damnably pretty. Underneath the moonlight like this, his skin is a blemishless expanse of alabaster, milky and smooth and a beacon of light in the dead quiet dark of nightfall. His eyes glisten as they look not towards her, but up, up, up at the stars, like he’s greeting an old friend. 

“Yes. But I always come back.”

“Why,” she presses. Why in the world would you do something like that?

Can you even do something like that?

“Because I’m Hanako-san of the Toilet,” Hanako says simply. “And I exist to grant wishes to the living.” And then he curves that impossibly thin, ropy chord of a neck to meet Nene’s glistening eyes with his own. They shine bright with something more potent than tears, something that transcends any kind of human emotion altogether. “For the right price, of course.”

She feels it like a gunshot when his pinky twitches.

“That’s. Hanako-kun,” Nene gasps, “Hanako-kun, that’s so sad.”

“It’s not. It’s penance,” he remarks rather matter-of-factly, before bringing a hand up to her cheek, wiping away a stray tear Nene hadn’t even noticed she let escape. “Besides,” he continues, tone so soft it throbs like a festering wound, “you don’t have to worry about that happening anytime soon, huh? It’ll be a miracle to find a guy who’s got a fetish for radish legs!”

The slight against her calves barely even registers, Nene is so overcome with sympathy. How could this boy just -- accept such a cruel fate? Damned to die and re-awake, over and over and over again? To know the overwhelming peace of having his soul laid to rest, only to be ripped from that cocoon of safety and yanked back to the world of the living, and all to grant some selfish human’s wish?

She’s done crying tonight. She doesn’t even know if she has any more tears left to shed. Instead, she lets Hanako cradle her cheek and murmur similarly sadistic teasing remarks with that deceptively sweet face of his. That sweet, macabre, gaunt face of his.

Nene vows never to mar it with another speck of anguish. Not if she can help it.

Renting out 404 is starting to seem less and less like a happy accident. After all, there are no such things as coincidence in the eyes of the vast, expansive universe. 

He’s smiling at her, after all that. How much has Hanako had to give and give and give, and still be asked for more? At what point does penance turn into the brutal torture of a soul who’s already died once, goddammit! Nene refuses to become a part of that hellish cycle -- no, she needs to do more than refuse.

She needs to break it.

As much as the worlds, both earthly and spirit, have broken him… it’s time for something to change.

Underneath that full moon, on the lip of the fountain, in the literal palm of Hanako’s spindly, pellucid hand, Nene makes a promise: she will never, ever, ever find love. If that’s the wish she made that brought Hanako back, then it will remain unfulfilled for as long as she can hang on to defend it. She refuses to have him disappear into the ether, only to be pulled back by a cruel desire. 

Hanako-kun… Hanako-kun…

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

The stars are so bright tonight.

She can’t help but think that they came out to say hello.

Chapter Text

The ensuing two weeks are nothing short of pure, unadulterated chaos.

Nene feels like a protagonist in a poorly paced reverse-harem drama. It’s tragic that this is the only thing she can think to liken her experience to. 

She is asked out on a date every. Single. Day. When Hanako said his powers ‘set things in motion,’ Nene assumed this meant a gentle push at her back in the right direction, or correcting her clumsy fawn’s gait to help her slide gracefully into love; subtle, calculated shifts within the universe that aligned her one step closer to the fulfillment of her original wish. 

Instead, she finds her life upended drastically and suddenly with all the inconspicuity of a four-ton sledgehammer. 

A month ago, Nene would have reveled in the onslaught of attention from those around her, be it fellow tenants of the building, her usually standoffish co-workers, strangers on the subway -- hell, she’d even been propositioned by a cashier at the supermarket! Granted, he was admittedly very much her type (tall, pretty, and polite) and One-Month-Ago Nene would have fallen all over herself to stutter out her number for him. 

Present Nene flat out refuses to entertain any of it.

Admitting her love for any of these potential suitors means admitting defeat -- and, consequently, losing Hanako to the merciless void that jerks him around at its beck and call. She can’t do that to the ghostly boy, despite their brief time together. It may have been not even a handful of weeks that they’ve shared, but they have, admittedly, been the best days she can ever recall living through.

To lose this newfound almost-something-adjacent-to-happiness… 

To lose Hanako…

It would kill her.

Moreover, it certainly doesn’t help that she isn’t… actually… attracted to anybody that fate, or ‘manifestation’, or whomever’s pulling the strings has thrown her way. All of the boys have eyes too light for her tastes, voices too sweet, smiles too safe. Wading through her same-aged dating pool is like navigating the baby-proofed, corner-covered, edge-eroded world of a young toddler. What could she possibly have in common with these strangers who would leave her at the drop of a dime the moment they found out that Nene was… well, herself?

That being said, she can’t deny that some of the dates she’s been rather unceremoniously shoved into have been entertaining. When Kou promised to help her in her journey to “find a decent lookin’ guy, or whatever” as he’d so eloquently put it, he really meant it. As the younger brother of one of the most sought-after tenants in their building, the younger Minamoto had a wide array of contacts spanning all seven floors of the complex. In combination with Hanako’s supernatural influence, Nene is very quickly introduced to the rather colorful cast of characters that inhabit her immediate surroundings.

There was Natsuhiko, who was devastatingly attractive up until he opened his mouth. God, he was pretty… but there had been an odious feeling around him the entire time they’d been out. Nene couldn’t shake the suspicion that his lovable-airhead routine was a mere smokescreen for something a little more nefarious. His eyes trailed her every moment, tracked every mention of her life since she moved into 404, catalogued every time she caught herself about to mention a roommate that didn’t really exist, not to anyone but her and… well. Nene was starting to realize that, within the underbelly of their building’s seemingly mundane facade, many tenants were aware of the existence of her invisible roommate. 

They were the tenants with gazes like weapons, auras like spatial sinkholes, laughs just two beats too late, threats wrapped and bowed under the guise of harmless jokes, smiles that never reached their intense, esoteric eyes.

(When she returns home from their date, she blocks Natsuhiko’s number.)

Kou tries to set her up with his good friends from middle school -- first Satou, and then Yokoo, both of them from the third floor -- but neither one sparks anything other than guilt for wasting their time. They are just so ordinary.

And besides, Nene is resolute in her commitment to perpetual solitude, if it means protecting Hanako-kun. Nothing and nobody can sway her in her promise! She is Yashiro Nene; summoner of spirits, befriender of exorcists, and a very capable young woman, thank you very much.

“Hey, Senapi,” Kou muses one day, flopped leisurely over the back of her couch. “Kind of a longshot, but my big bro’s been single since, like, forever. Dunno if you’d be up for it, but--”

“I would be indebted to you for the rest of my days,” says Nene, dropping into a stiff, formal bow.

Hanako, conspicuously, chooses this exact moment to insert himself back into the conversation. “Hm, no,” he hums, floating over to ruffle Kou’s mop of unkempt blond. “I don’t think that will be necessary, boy. What Yashiro needs is a change of pace!”

“Ah, Hanako-kun, I r-really think Kou-kun has the right idea here--”

Kou irritably bats the spirit’s hands away from his head. “Oi, quit it! And yeah! You heard the lady! Kou-kun has the right idea!”

“Yes, yes, ideas are fun to play around with. But who holds the power, troublesome children?”

The apartment grows eerily dark as the apparition speaks, tone sickly-sweet as he holds each of their gazes with a spectral, glowing scarlet. Thunder cracks outside, which is honestly just overkill at this point. What a show-off.

“You do, O Great Hanako-san,” Nene and Kou groan in tandem.

So, Nene ends up going out with Nanamine Sakura. 

Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have any qualms with the romantic pursuit of another woman; Nene considers herself fairly open minded, and although her attraction to men is a preference, sure, it isn’t a clear-and-cut hard boundary line. 

(After all, she’s under no delusions about her relationship with Aoi, and just why she’d clung so close to her purple-haired goddess of a human being for the better part of both their childhoods).

But Nanamine… doesn’t make it easy.

They meet at a traditional tea house on the outskirts of the city. Yashiro can barely scrounge up the appropriate attire for such an outing (read: clothes that aren’t either all-black, frilled, lacy, or a combination of all three) and once she does arrive, she feels intimately and jarringly out of place -- a sense of disbelonging embedded so deeply within her bones it could’ve crawled underneath her skin and died there.

The “date” -- if she could even call it that -- lasted barely an hour. The entire time, Nene felt less like a girl being wooed and more like a guilty woman standing on trial for a crime she not only had no memory of, but in fact was a deed used to frame her. Every question, every comment, every careful word was delivered like a delicate package of political warfare. If Natsuhiko was unnerving, Nanamine was downright frightening.

“When did you move in?”

“Is the complex to your liking?”

“Are you experiencing sleep loss? Chills?”

“Have you met some of our more interesting tennants, yet?”

“What are your intentions going forward, Yashiro-san?”

By the time they decided to part ways and definitely not journey back home together (Nene made sure of this with an absolute catastrophe of a bullshit lie about errands to be ran), the sun was just beginning its descent beneath the horizon. The way Nanamine turned back towards her at the end of the street, green hair glinting something sinister in the waning twilight, face devoid of any traceable emotion, hands clasped in front of her, ominously hidden by the long sleeves of her yukata… it’s a sight Nene would be hard pressed to forget any time soon. 

“I live on the fifth floor,” Sakura had stated, voice tranquil much in the same way the ocean is flat and tepid on the surface, whilst simultaneously bearing  monstrosities so foreign, so unfathomably nightmarish, they are confined to the most tenebrous pits of their host. “We’ll meet again. When you’re ready.”

“W-was this even a date?”

She’d smiled for the first time that evening. “I think you know the answer to that, Yashiro Nene.”

And then she was gone. Nene didn’t sleep well that night.

In between all of these surreal outings, however, remained one constant in the rapid upheaval of Nene’s personal life:

Hanako.

They hang out together; they watch movies together (she tries to wheedle out of him some of his own favorites so they can be added to the queue, but the ghostly boy is shockingly secretive -- even about a matter as trivial as cinematic taste); they gossip together; he tells her spooky stories that probably aren’t even reputable in any way, just to watch her shriek and squirm. It’s good fun that they have, together -- the most fun Nene can recall experiencing with someone that isn’t Aoi. 

There is a thought that haunts her, clings to all her clothes like a malignant curse and refuses to be scrubbed out in the shower. It clogs all her drains, writes itself in blood on all her mirrors, and invites itself to sit on the couch next to her, yammering about this and that, distracting her from her work, incessantly interacting with her like it’ll shrivel up and die if she doesn’t feed it attention. The thought is this:

Hanako would be a good boyfriend.

If-- if he was her type!

And, of course, if he were alive.

No matter how easily they converse, how hard he makes her laugh, how fast he flutters her heart, she would have to be more of a misguided fool than she already is not to notice the marked removal from general humanity that Hanako is plagued with. Perhaps it’s an affliction of his status as an apparition. Or, perhaps, it is a trait intrinsic to the boy behind the hellish eyes -- the boy who, once upon a time, had cheeks fat enough to be pinched, and whose embrace inspired warmth, not frigidity. 

(Nene doesn’t know how she feels about this second possibility. Not for the first time, she wonders just who Hanako-kun was before he became Hanako-san of the Toilet).

He… likes to tease her, in a way that is absolutely foreign to Nene. She can’t really reconcile their friendship with any of her other past truths, because there is only Aoi, and Aoi is no comparison. There is nobody like Aoi in Nene’s life. It’s a fact so fundamental that to even consider drawing someone else up against her purple-haired companion is like oil and water.

Who helped Nene-chan?

As much as Nene likes to moan and groan about it, it really is Aoi who’s there for her: from start to finish.

That being said, Hanako carries his own equally significant weight in Nene’s life. He’s a boy, but not really (being dead for an indiscriminate amount of time, oddly enough, lessens the intimidation factor for Nene); he’s mean, but not really (he never lets a joke get so far as to genuinely unsettle Nene -- which is more than she can say for literally any of the other boys her age she’s had to interact with over the years); he’s strange, but not really (there is a delectably easy sort of comfort associated with not being the weirdest person in the room, for once); he’s… he’s her roommate. He’s her friend. She intends to keep it that way for as long as she’s able.

Even if he does make it a daunting challenge. God, would it kill him to lay off the flirty quips? And learn a little personal space? Not to mention that morbidly intense gaze he’s always fixing her with… those eyes, red like a warning… red like danger… red like spicy cinnamon candies, the kind you pop into your mouth and suck and tongue and bite even when it hurts so bad all you want to do is curl up and weep…

…

Eek!!

Way, way off task, there. Nene has absolutely no idea how that particular thought slipped past her defenses.

She bites her lip, flushes hot and hard from her browline to her chin as she stares absently at her phone screen. What had she even been doing before her train of thought ran completely off track?

“Well someone’s got their mind in the gutter.”

The wry chuckle comes from way too close to her ear. Nene should be used to the invasion of privacy by now; but still, even after two weeks and change of rooming with him, the apparition’s barbed slights and sadistic teasing manage to strike a new match underneath her bottom every time. And every time, she leaps like she’s been burned. She supposes it’s what she gets, for drawing near to the flame in the first place.

She can’t do more than splutter indignantly, clutching her phone to her chest. She scoots all the way to the opposite arm of the couch for good measure. “Wh--you-- bad Hanako-kun! Inappropriate! Pervert!”

Hanako, much to her chagrin, follows her. He doesn’t even float to do it, either, which adds insult to the injury. “And so are you,” he muses quietly, leaning all up in her space with the incongruous facial expression like that of a curious puppy. “Who are you messaging, huh, Yashiro? Is it that clownish exorcist boy?”

“Um… I am texting Kou-kun, actually.”

“Oh. You are.”

“... Yes? We were planning to hang out later today…”

“Oh? You are?”

If Nene wanted to be very unkind to herself, she’d almost peg Hanako’s face as something adjacent to crestfallen. But she remembers that this is a mysterious spirit summoned from the gullet of her toilet -- a spirit who pulls knives out of his body and smiles like he’s just finished severely maiming a basketful of small animals -- and she figures he’s probably irritated because Kou had quite literally tried to kill him upon their first meeting.

“Ah, don’t worry, Hanako-kun. Kou-kun is over all that ‘so-help-me-heavens’ stuff, you know that! I mean, look at how often he stops by to hang out in here! With you!” 

If at all possible, Hanako’s features sour even further. “Yes, I’m well aware. Even if I wish I weren’t.” 

“Hey,” Nene frowns. “That’s not nice. He’s our friend. He’s helping us.”

The ghostly boy shifts his gaze to the side, muttering something suspiciously along the lines of “he’s helping you, sure” and that’s about all Nene can take.

She stands abruptly from the couch, knocking Hanako back on his ass. His surprised expression brings the petty, vindictive side of her a spark of satisfaction. 

Nene can stomach the incessant teasing, the constant whining for her attention, reminiscent of  a little boy in the way that Hanako will tug on her metaphorical pigtails in an attempt to get her to look his way, if only for a heartbeat; if she couldn’t literally see otherwise, Nene would’ve guessed he’d died and stayed thirteen forever. But he is, unfortunately, as much of an adult as Nene herself is (give or take a year or two, maybe) and yet he is still stuck with the appendages of all the most awful things about a schoolyard crush.

It isn’t codependency, necessarily… not obsession, either, because Nene is confident she would spot that and strike it dead the moment she sniffed it out.

But…

Hanako is decidedly invested in the granting of her wish. In a way and for reasons that has always made her too sad to entirely dissuade.

Until right now, apparently.

“What is your problem,” she snaps, and again, feels that same rush of gratification as she watches Hanako flinch bodily back at the sound of her tone -- serrated at the edges, not safe to approach. “Kou-kun and I aren’t even like that. And--and even if we were, isn’t it, like, your job to make sure I fall in love?”

His face glosses over, in that funny way the ghostly boy’s reserved for conversation that wanders into the territory of his cosmic duty. Especially as it relates to Nene. She refers to it in her head as the shift from Hanako-kun to Hanako-san; from a well-meaning, soft-socked wearing boyish spirit to a timeless entity damned to a cruel and lonely fate, with no one to thank for it but the human he impassively stares down before him.

She knows it was rude of her to say. But Nene is suddenly so stiflingly, suffocatingly angry. The quick onset of rage grips her from her very core and rattles outwards, until even the tips of her painstakingly manicured black fingernails tremble with barely-suppressed fury.

“Why are you always so opposed to it?” She continues, disregarding his uncharacteristic silence as she stomps her way over to the closet to rip open the sliding door and swipe a jacket. She doesn’t see which one. She doesn’t care.

“Setting me up with guys who I’d never like, sending me out with that creepy Nanamine-san, chasing away the few I do manage to bring home…” 

The thud of her feet against the hardwood echo like gunshots in the otherwise silent apartment. Nene doesn’t even bother to look up, too caught up in the broiling stew of her own repressed frustration to think of anything other than how -- how unfair the situation is.

Regardless of her promise to never find love in order to spare Hanako’s (after)life -- it was the principal of the matter. He didn’t know she was committed to defeating all of his efforts. He should have been trying with all his might to pair Nene up with her veritable soulmate, so he could get to rest in peace again, even if it was only a temporary pleasure.

Instead, Hanako has routinely sabotaged nearly every single one of Nene’s prospective romantic opportunities. If it wasn’t lack of effort, it was an overt denial of someone who might work, someone Nene would pick out herself; and if it wasn’t that, then it was Hanako shooing the poor soul out of the apartment in truly terrifying display of horror-movie gore and effects.

It was almost like he wanted Nene to fail at getting a boyfriend.

It was almost like…

Almost like…

“It’s almost like you don’t believe it’s possible,” says Nene, so quietly that her teeth rattle in her skull from the effort it takes not to throw up from the sheer emotion that rolls through her. “For me to deserve love.”

Finally, Hanako decides to speak up. “Yashiro--”

Nene jams her feet into her black trainers, uncaring of what excuse is about to be slung haphazardly her way. “And if you think it’s so unrealistic to find someone who loves me, w-well--” no no no no don’t fall apart you’re almost there you can do it “--well, maybe you should just give up!”

Immediately, a dreadful hush descends upon the room in a grip Nene feels around her neck in a double overhand noose. She… she hadn’t exactly meant for it to come out like this. Like that.

She makes the mistake of looking up.

Hanako sits very, very still on her couch. It’s easy to forget how thin he is, how small his frame stands, how little it would take for him to rip and collapse in on himself, a jumble of skin and eyes and teeth once loosely connected and now strewn along her couch, her kotatsu, her carpet, tender meat sliding right from the bone like it was meant to fall apart all along.

His eyes spell out, for the first time, something worse than any kind of red sun, or murder scene, or hellfire. 

When Nene drinks in the sight of him -- a shock of white swaddled in black, ink spilled too soon on a fresh, clean page -- sitting cross legged on her couch, it is not the vaguely esoteric aura that freezes her innards, nor is it his ghoulish face smoothed out into a gut wrenching sort of blankness.

No, what terrifies Nene is unnatural sheen sparkling in his eyes, that enrich the carmine color impossibly redder.

She gasps when it pools, spills over, and a single reddish-brown rivulet streaks down the length of Hanako’s face. Hanako’s flat, emotionless face.

“It seems you’ve done that for the both of us, Yashiro.”

His voice is nothing Nene can recognize or decipher. The walls begin to heave. The blinds rattle. Her planter falls from its innocent perch on the windowsill. Nene needs to leave now.

And she does just that, pivoting swiftly on her heel as she flies through the front door, slamming it shut behind her. As soon as she’s out of the apartment, she breaks into a dead sprint for the elevators.

Even when she’s in the lobby, even when she’s two, three, five blocks away from the building and loitering in the restaurant she and Kou had planned to meet up at, even when the aforementioned boy arrives two hours early at Nene’s harried request, even when he shows up with raiteijou strapped to his back and a slew of exorcism materials no-doubt crammed into his backpack, and even when he embraces her, soothingly stroking her trembling frame as she weeps it all out into his shoulder, it still isn’t enough.

Nene can still feel those gruesome eyes watching her.

Nene can still see that single, bloody tear.

Nene can still smell the stench of tender meat fallen from its bone, littered across her floor in a heap of rotting mess.

Kou, to his credit, does his best to remedy the mood. Even if it’s socially reprehensible how disengaged Nene is from properly enjoying their outing.

The two of them had plans to rendezvous for a late lunch at one of the best hole-in-the wall ramen shops Tokyo-to had to offer. These original plans were shot and flayed wide open by Nene’s desperate, pitiful Line message to please, please, please can we meet two hours early, Kou-kun, please, I could really use the distraction right now. 

The excitable boy had, obviously, come running at her call like a well-trained puppy. He was so purely good that sometimes it hurt Nene’s heart to think about. Didn’t ask a single question, didn’t pry her for any kind of information outside of the when and where.

And here they sit now, across from each other in a secluded corner booth as Kou once again demonstrates his incredible determination to salvage any mood, no matter how malnourished it is. He slurps loudly and unabashedly at his noodles as he prattles on about some guy named Mitsuba with a ‘really seriously cute smile, Senpai!’ he’d met recently while on his quest of floor hunting for her potential suitors. 

Nene tries to be supportive. She does, she swears. But it seems as though she is overwhelmingly surrounded by people who have managed to achieve feats she has never been able to in all her life, who have managed to turn out considerably happier than her, have managed to maintain a semblance of normalcy better than her -- even Kou, who was born into a literal generational line of exorcists managed to scrounge out a sweet romance for himself.

Why is it so hard for Nene?

Why must she source outside help for a task so seemingly easy for everyone else?

What does it say about her, when even that outside help abandons her as a lost cause?

The two of them part ways after finishing up at the noodle house (Kou, of course, tries to pay). A surprisingly lengthy amount of time had slipped by whilst Kou had been preoccupied with rambling excitedly about his new crush, and Nene had been… spiralling, honestly. By the time they’re outside, take-out containers carried in their respective smiley-faced plastic bags, the sky is dyed an evocative burnt orange. Nearly sundown.

“Ah, I should be heading home…”

“Huh? Y’sure, Senpai?” Kou peers suspiciously down at her. “Look… I dunno what happened to ya today that made ya wanna meet so fast, but if it’s got anything -- and I mean anythin’ -- to do with Shorty…”

Nene wants with every fiber in her being to assuage Kou’s worries, to brush them aside with a flippant what? Hanako-kun? Of course not! What would he have to do with it?

But she can’t say that. Not when the heart of the issues lies (and has always lain) in the spirit of 404.

So, instead, she yawns exaggeratedly and wipes at the tears collecting at the corner of her eyes. “‘M tired, Kou-kun… can we talk about it tomorrow?”

He may have his eyes on someone new right now, but Nene is still quick to harp on how fast his cheeks color at her display of sleepy-cuteness, how quickly he drops the subject, how selflessly he offers to walk her home, even though she knows for a fact he’s still got business to attend to in the city. 

Even if their first venture together crashed and burned, Kou will always be someone special to her, and her to Kou. They are bound, now, by their joint experience with Hanako.

God, Hanako, she groans internally, just as they trek through the front doors of the complex. She’s absolutely dreading seeing Hanako after their rather explosive morning -- all those nasty things she said, the way she let her tone cut into him and keep carving like it was sport… the bizarre surge of anger that had rocketed through her… threatened to choke her, actually, with the intensity of its unexpected and powerful control over her… 

“Hey, I think I’m gonna take the stairs up tonight. G’night Kou-kun. I’ll see you around, ‘kay?”

Kou, predictably, furrows his brow. “Senpai--”

But Nene is already drifting away from him and through the lobby, past the half-assed desk-and-flower-vase set up at the front desk, floating by the mailroom, and finally arriving at the dark corridor she’s been aching to traverse from the moment she’d moved in.

The doorway is made of a different kind of wood panelling than the rest of the floor. It stands like a beacon of death, a harbinger of misfortune in a suspiciously secreted alcove of the lobby, almost daring a tenant to pass through the lazily flickering exit sign hung crookedly above the frame. By all means, Kou had every right to be concerned when Nene announced she would be entering the dismal passageway. 

Strangely enough, she’s more afraid of the elevator tonight. She doesn't want to be brought back to the fourth floor so quickly. She doesn’t want to have to face the inevitable confrontation that awaits her. In this moment, what Nene wants most is a reprieve from the relentless presence of 404 and all its accessories.

(It was this feeling -- this bone-deep exhaustion at the mere thought of interacting with another spirit -- that was effectively the beginning of the end, in her old complex. The complex she’d nearly killed herself trying to heal singlehandedly.

The complex Aoi had to save her from.)

The first flight is uneventful, but helpful. The tranquil quietude allows Nene the reprieve she’s been searching for all day. All week, really. It’s been an endlessly draining ordeal, engaging with and appeasing and entertaining more people in the past fourteen days than she has in the past fourteen months. Nene is introverted by nature, and she’s more squeamish interacting with her fellow flesh-and-blood species than she is floating along in the world of spirits. And even then, their antics have been getting wearisome.

It’s depressing, to think that the place she really belongs is neither alive, nor dead, but alone. 

The second flight of stairs is harder to get through. Her feet drag in their buckled platforms, and a wave of lethargy overtakes her, almost as though the shadows of the stairwell are licking along her wrists and ankles and tugging, in an attempt to strap her down and prevent her from ascending. The only thing keeping her awake and alert enough to push past her fatigue is the sharp coldness living in the unheated concrete flooring and walls all around her. If she didn’t know any better, she’d almost start looking to see if her breath began to fog up.

The third flight threatens to put a cap on her stamina.

Nene is unreasonably winded from her very brief journey, and it takes a combination of pitiful limping and hugging the metal railings to make it to the squared concrete slab of platform cut between her previous escapades and her next adventure. The wall is downright freezing when she collapses against it for a quick respite. 

Just… Just a little more…

Panting. She’s panting. When did she grow short of breath?

With fluttering eyes, spasming lungs, and hands beginning to purple at the fingertips, she (pathetically) crawls up the next flight of stairs. When she comes to her next rest, it’s on her hands and knees, crouched on the landing between floors three and four.

Was it something bad she ate whilst out with Kou? But she’s been to that restaurant before… 

Stress? Ah, maybe, but a visceral reaction like this… especially without any panic symptoms…

An outside force, then. Something beyond her control.

Something like…

Nene can feel the presence before she sees it. A deep, chasmic void of energy pulling at the very fibers of her being, beckoning the entirety of her existence itself to submit and surrender to whatever it is at the helm of such a domineering aura. The cold doubles down, and shivers rack her frame.

Suddenly, and without even a single forewarning flicker, the industrial lighting of the stairwell shuts off with a soft little click.

Before she can even begin to freak out, there is light.

Desperately, her eyes scramble to follow the fuzzy glimmer of salvation, focusing and refocusing until she’s able to gather a clear enough picture to realize that, oh. That isn’t a flashlight, or a lamp, or a candle, or even a single source of light, at all.

Those are twin orbs of light.

And they burn a familiar, fiery red.

Hanako?

The red light expands inhumanly, until the glow they radiate is enough to cast the staircase in an ambient, alarming hue. It reminds Nene of the wail of an ambulance’s siren, emergency rooms, danger in all its most subliminal and overt forms: Get out. Get out. Get out.

But, try as she might, her body does not obey the rapidfire flight flight flight signals her brain sends out like this is a real emergency, like she might actually--

“Yashiro… ?”

Dread pools thick and viscous in the pit of her gut. The voice is so familiar, so achingly, hauntingly familiar, and yet, filled with a tenderness to foreign to anything Hanako’s ever directed towards her. It makes her want to cry. It makes her want to collapse inside herself like a burning house, his gaze the fire, her body somewhere far, far away as she gives everything she has to this one moment, where he’s looking at her like he cares.

“Hanako-kun,” she whines, breathy, lungs still struggling hopelessly for air, hand clutched against her throbbing temple. “Hurts, Hanako-kun.”

The boy lingers at the top of the next flight of stairs. The dark of his trousers and sweater almost gobble him up, even as he illuminates their surroundings.

(Or maybe, that’s wrong. Maybe he is not swallowed by the dark. Maybe that inescapably, perilously grim expanse of black is not the predator, but the prey. Maybe he bares his teeth, and the dark flinches back.)

With more urgency than Nene has ever seen him move, Hanako practically zooms down the stairs, by her side in an instant, taking her elbow to help her stand on her own two, wobbly feet.

“Silly human,” he coos. He doesn’t let go of her arm even when she is finally upright and stable. Instead, he brings his free hand up so he can clutch at her wrists, turning them over to thumb at the thin skin just below her palm. “Always so fragile, always getting into trouble. What am I gonna do with you, huh?”

His head is ducked, entranced as he presses against the stark blue of her veins. “Hanako…”

“What am I gonna do,” he repeats, before abruptly snapping his face up to gaze into Nene’s. “With my silly little human?”

She should ask what he’s doing here. She should ask how he knew she was in the stairwell. She should ask why he’s touching her. She should address what happened this morning. She should apologize.

Unfortunately, Nene has never been good with resisting temptation; not when she’d convinced herself that a couple more souls helped was no harm to anybody; not when she’d knocked on the bathroom door of 404 despite being well aware the consequences of inviting a spirit into her home; and certainly not now, as said spirit holds her like she’s fine china, like if he handles her even just a touch too roguishly, she will fall apart in his arms.

Which, at this rate, she might.

“Um…” she tries valiantly to push through the haze of heat and heat and heat and want that pulses through her at Hanako’s proximity. “What… what are you…”

The way he looks at her is dangerous, pupils a mere pinprick of black drowning in a bloody sea. They track her every move, every breath, every rivulet of perspiration that tracks its way from the edge of her trembling jaw all the way down to the curved slope of her pale, damp neck. 

“You are mine, aren’t you?”

He draws closer, until Nene would be able to feel the puff of his breath, if he was breathing. His fingers slip from their embrace to brush against her hips in a maddening tease, thumbs sketching teasing little circles over the jut of her hip bones over, and over, and over again. Even through the layers of her dress, Nene feels like she’s been stabbed.

How sick is she that she wants to say yes?

How cruel is her mind that, after a handful of seconds spent wallowing in his caresses, Nene is willing to spend the rest of her earthly life there, too?

Hanako slides one hand from her waist up to her neck, his slender pianist’s fingers tickling the hair at the nape of her neck.

“Hey, Yashiro-chan,” he whispers, eyes red red red red red red red, so hypnotically, entrancingly red. She’s never seen anything like it. She never will. Not even blood looks that savage, that gory. “Wanna know a secret?”

He’s leaning in. He’s leaning in. 

Oh, God. This close, their noses bump. He’s soft. Nene has always wondered.

She goes up on her tiptoes, fingers clutching at that (also soft) black sweater, digging in so hard she’d be afraid of hurting him if she knew he couldn’t hurt anymore. “Hm?” She hums, eyes folding gracefully shut, lips blossoming open. 

Hanako tightens his grip imperceptibly, just enough for Nene to feel held. It’s perfect, it’s everything she’s never allowed herself to even consider. Pressed flush together, skin-to-skin, heart-to-heart, mouths trading air, Nene understands that she is about to receive her first kiss in the emergency-lit concrete corridor of her apartment building’s stairwell. Somewhere, in the back of her Hanako-addled brain, she accepts this as appropriate. Fitting, even.

He groans, she groans, their legs tangle, and right before he slots their lips together, right before she falls irretrievably, wretchedly into his flushed, panting mouth, he tells her the secret:

“Amane will never love you.”

The hand on her throat constricts. Not imperceptibly, this time, but rapidly, and with a grip of steel. Her waist is encased in a similar trap, and very quickly, Nene is immobile, tangled in the web of…

… Whatever creature that’s caught her.

As he draws back, Nene knows this is not Hanako.

It’s something similar, sure -- same choppy, black bangs; same rumpled sweater; same trousers; same yellow socks. But it’s all two beats off, a note gone sour, the whole song unnerving in a way that makes Nene acutely aware of how every bone and muscle in her body shift against each other in primordial fear.

His pupils are so small that for a moment, Nene thinks his eyes are just red. And when he opens his mouth to speak next, she catches the momentary flash of canines so large and sharp there’s no doubt that they weren’t meant to tear through anything other than fresh meat.

“You think he would say all that stuff to you?” The creature continues, pitch distorting into something higher, something rougher than Hanako’s familiar raspy drawl. “You think he would be kind? To a human?” 

In his blind rage, he laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs and shakes her so hard her head strikes against the concrete wall and lolls to the side from the impact. Fast like lightning, the hand on her waist shoots up to grab her by the hair on the crown of her head, snatching and pulling until Nene is kept upright by a chokehold on her neck and a mind-numbingly painful stretch on her scalp.

The terror is so immediate that it paralyzes her in its swift, debilitating onset. She cannot move. She cannot speak.

“Listen to me,” says not just the creature nose-to-nose with her, but the stairwell, the building, the particles and molecules and itty-bitty powerless atoms all shitting themselves in abject horror as they realize that they’ve got no choice but to submit and relinquish control to the cold, unadulterated nightmarishness that permeates through everything even remotely fathomable.

“Amane likes me best. Amane likes me so much he made sure we could play together forever. Isn’t that fun?”

Underneath the crimson lighting, the creature smiles so wide his jaw unhinges. He looks bathed in blood. Nene is hit with the truth of the matter: if she does not escape this stairwell, she will die. 

And soon.

But she is locked in his unforgiving embrace -- his cruelly constricting embrace, reminiscent of a disturbed python no longer benign. 

“Pl-please,” she wheezes, hands scrabbling uselessly at the twin points of his iron grip. “C-can’t brea--”

“You know what game we’re playing right now, Yashiro-chan?”

Nene gurgles uselessly, vision fizzling out at the edges.

He squeezes in a pulse of unforgiving strength just to watch her body go slack. The sight amuses him, apparently, and his discordant giggle echoes all around her in a cacophony of morbid glee.

“Hide and go seek!”

Just as she’s about to give up and surrender to the impending inky black that beckons her away from the terrifying monster centimeters away from her face, fangs dripping with the intent to eat, eyes gleaming with the sadism to savor every last bite, Nene smells, oddly enough, sugar. 

No, something more integrated. A baked good. She wracks her brain. Not too moist… not a cake.. sweetbread, maybe? Ah, but it’s too subtle for that… 

As she literally chokes to death with barely enough awareness to send off mental apologies to her friends and even her family, the most absurd thought barges its way to the forefront of her mind:

Donuts!

“Found you.”

All at once, the creature’s hands leave her body and Nene takes in a gulp of air so fast she starts coughing in her eagerness. Her head is spinning and her vision is still recovering, but she makes a floundering attempt to scramble as far away as possible from the platform. Crawling on her hands and knees, Nene staggers towards the next flight of stairs, only to be unceremoniously swooped up into a solid pair of arms.

The only thing that keeps her from screaming is that unbearably sweet scent, and how much more potent it grows when she buries her face into her captor’s chest.

Hanako.

She’s groggy and still recovering from almost being fucking murdered, but she’s coherent enough to know that the embrace she’s surrounded in is the right one, this time. 

Donuts. Donuts… ?

 Deliriously, she wonders what his favorite flavor is.

“Amane!”

At even just the mere sound of the creature’s deranged voice, Nene jolts violently in place. Hanako tightens his grip underneath her knees and around her shoulders, gathering her to him until her line of sight is shielded from the monstrosity not ten paces away.

“I found you,” Hanako repeats, tone even and cool in a way Nene has never heard it before. “You lost. Don’t touch her again.”

“But Ama-ne! No fair! Amane never shares his toys!”

The sound of… is that a foot stomping on the ground? Arms flapping in the air?

Is the strange boy… throwing a tantrum?

It’s such a sharp contrast from the beast that almost killed her that Nene nearly passes out from trying to stretch her human mind around the conversation being held (literally) above her head.

“Yashiro is a friend, not a toy, and you will not touch her again.”

A scoff. “What’s with all these dumb rules? We never played with rules before, Amane. Is Amane getting bored with me?”

“Tsukasa--”

The other boy -- Tsukasa , Hanako had called him? -- cuts him off with a quiet, incredulous tone. “Bored enough to play with a human? Even after you promised we could play together forever?”

“Tsukasa,”

“Even after you made super-duper sure we could, even after you pinky-promised,”

“Tsukasa.”

“Even after you ki--”

“That is enough.”

Woodenly, Nene dares to unearth herself from the safehouse of Hanako’s chest. She stares up at him, wide-eyed, mouth slack, arms frozen around his neck and body anaesthetized by the absolute authority in his voice, the unfamiliar hard set of his shoulders, the way he stares ahead with his usually-carefree face contorted into an unfamiliar expression; an expression it takes Nene a moment to parse, it is that much of an antithesis to the roommate she knows, the roommate that takes care of her, the roommate that always rubs her back and wipes her tears and catches her when she’s falling and makes everything okay again.

Fear. 

That is fear striking an ugly downward slant to Hanako’s mouth. That is fear in his glimmering ruby eyes. That is fear in the way his nostrils flare, just lightly, in muted panic. That is fear in the way he swallows so hard around a heart that beats no longer. 

That is fear in the way he clutches Nene to his body, anxiously, worriedly, as though he is the only thing standing between her and certain death.

He’s right, chimes the faint, miniscule part of her brain that’s functioning and lucid enough to think critically about the situation she’s entangled in. He’s right to be afraid.

“Yashiro and I are going to leave now,” says Hanako. The tremor of his voice would’ve been noticeable if Nene couldn’t feel it vibrating against her cheek. “You lost, Tsukasa. The game is over. We’ll play again tomorrow, okay? I--I promise.”

This, strangely, is what finally appeases Tsukasa. The other boy hums, somewhat displeased, but altogether removed from his violent tantrum. “Hmph. Pinky promise.”

“...Tsu--”

“Pinky promise, Amane.” His words lift in the thinly veiled threat of an endless abundance of rage, simmering quietly under the deceptive surface of that pretty, porcelain, doll-like face. 

Hanako, Nene knows, has no choice but to do as the other boy says. She’s quickly readjusted to fit vertically in his one remaining arm, as his free limb extends to cross the no-man’s-land of stagnant air between himself and Tsukasa. Nene watches, transfixed by the otherworldly potency of energy, as the two interlock identical pinky fingers, releasing a heatwave that radiates from their union. It flashes through the corridor, blowing back Nene’s hair and clothes, running through her like a subdued bolt of lightning.

When they part, the lights miraculously flicker back on. The building lurches back to life. The python has been sated. All is well. 

For now.

“Alrighty then,” Tsukasa chirps, “Bye-bye! Play tomorrow, Amane! Oh, and Yashiro-chan--” The direct addressal makes all of Nene’s internal organs turn to liquid in a knee jerk reaction of pure terror. 

I will never heal from this night, she thinks. 

Nene goes to speak, nearly vomits on the floor. She clears her throat and tries again. “Y-yes?”

“Dinner was delicious, two weeks ago. Make me more some time, ‘kay? Have a nice night!”

Two weeks ago? What happened two weeks ago, what ‘dinner’ is he talking abou--

She’s a container short. When she looks down, there are only three plastic boxes in lieu of the hefty stack of four Akane had practically threatened her to take back home. Atop the third rests a candy wrapper, innocently unfurled, and still shifting in place, as though recently disturbed.

Aoi’s missing container. The missing container that Tsuchigomori returned to her the next morning, empty, scrubbed squeaky clean.

Hanako must feel the way her bones begin to rattle in place -- how could he not hear her heartbeat begin to pound, how could he not see the perspiration streaking bullets down her neck and back, when she is so thoroughly cocooned in his arms she might as well be apart of the boy. Their physical proximity is the only thing grounding Nene to this moment, the only thing she can rely on to tether her to earth and keep her from melting right through Hanako’s spindly fingers and sinking past the concrete floor, past the foundations of their building, the very essence of her consciousness seeping so deep down inside the earth Nene’s not sure she would ever be able to claw her way back up. Not after tonight.

Fortunately, she doesn’t get the chance to disassociate to that degree. Hanako is whirling around in midair and zooming up the remaining flight of stairs before Nene can even choke out a garbled response to Tsukasa’s obvious taunt. 

As they rapidly retreat from the stairwell, the strange boy calls out a final farewell,

“Night-night! Good game!”

Nene clenches her fingers so tightly into Hanako’s back she’s sure he would bruise if he could.

Getting back to the apartment is a blur. One moment, Nene is airborne and held securely within a misleadingly strong cage of wiry arms -- and the next, her bed has been pulled out from its hiding place underneath her couch cushions, and Nene is swaddled in her favorite blanket -- a fluffy, worn pink monstrosity of a comforter that is one of the few memories of her childhood she allows herself to carry -- and Hanako sits on the armrest just a couple paces away. Eyeing her. Biting his lip. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The air in 404 is very still for a handful of seconds. Stiller than it’s ever been, even before Nene had knocked on that damned bathroom door. They consider each other in silence. He fidgets with his socked feet, swinging them back and forth and back again, like a child caught misbehaving and sheepishly anticipating his punishment.

“What,” says Nene mutedly, “the hell was that.”

“...Yashiro. You were never meant to, ah. Meet. Him. I apologize for that, I really do. But that -- he -- is really none of your concern--”

“My concern?” Nene asks incredulously. Is she still shaking? Or is it just the walls? The floor beneath her? The building? Is everything as charged, as teeming with barely contained chaos as she is? “Don’t tell me about what is and isn’t my concern. Spirits have always been my concern. Spirits always will be my concern. Spirits are extra my concern now, especially because one just tried to KILL me!”

Hanako flinches back, hands fisted, eyes screwed shut. Distantly, Nene registers this harrowing, outlandish night as the first time she’s ever seen him express anything other than manic glee. She knows there’s something wrong with that. She knows -- knew, always knew -- that Hanako held her at arm’s length, that Hanako had a mask so securely fixed in place if only to keep himself from getting attached to a world he will never again inhabit permanently.

The mask is splintering, though. The act is growing tired. Nene wishes she could predict what this means for her.

“That will never happen again, Yashiro, this I swear to you. But,” and now his eyes flash open again, this time with a captivating intensity. She hates when he does this. When he grabs her chin and straightens her spine and shifts her center of balance towards him all without laying a single finger on her. 

How pitiful is she, that the axis of her world so easily rests in the center of that gaze? 

“You can’t ask me about him. You just can’t.”

“Bull- shit!” Yashiro shoots up from where she’d been curled on the fold-out, throwing her safety blanket to the side as all the repressed despair from the day bubble up and spew forth from her mouth in a scathing slew of rage. “You don’t get to tell me that! Not when, whatever that thing was almost choked me out in a -- in the f-f-fucking, in an empty stairwell -- he ate my food, he touched me--”

“‘Me, me me.’ Humans are all the same.”

Something about Hanako’s tone -- the emptiness of it -- dampens the flames of Nene’s anger, until all she can do is splutter weakly into silence. “What?” She tries to demand, but, to her surprise, barely manages to whisper loud enough to fill the suddenly chasmic void of space between her and the boy curled up at the end of her couch, knees tucked to his chest, chin drawn down, only two suspiciously shiny, carmine eyes peeking out from the tiny, cramped ball of dark.

“Even if I wanted to tell you,” Hanako mumbles, voice muffled by the barrier of his knees, “it’ll only put you in more unnecessary danger. You’re here for one thing and one thing only, just like everybody else who rents me out. After you get it you’ll be on your way and I’ll be on mine, so let’s just keep it like that.”

Nene feels the moment her heart stops beating.

“H--”

What?

What?

When had she screwed up so badly? 

When had she forgotten her promise -- to spare Hanako the pain of his curse, no matter the cost?

He looks so, so, so small when he curls up like that. A stray kitten huddled for warmth in a dark and stormy night. Lost and confused. 

Hissing and lashing out when even a helping hand draws too near for his liking.

“Hanako-ku-u-u-un!!”

She’s running over and squeezing him in her arms before he has the chance to say another word in that hurtfully cool, detached tone of his. Nene won’t allow anymore of it -- not after he’d just saved her from a no-doubt gruesome death, and not after she’d almost lost sight of the real objective in front of her.

“‘M sorry,” Nene snuffles into his chest, where she once again finds herself tucked against, “Sorry, sorry, sorry Hanako-kun. I was so mean today. Even after you saved me. I think I…”

I think I was lonely.

I think I was scared.

I think I… 

“I think I missed you,” says Nene, quietly. “E-even though you were there with me the whole time… I’m sorry, I know it doesn’t make sense, but--”

“No,” Hanako interjects, suddenly hugging Nene with a speed and intensity that leaves her breathless -- for multiple reasons. “I’m sorry. I’ve been unfair to you. Yashiro, you…”

A hand gently guides her by the side of her face to look up.

Hanako peers down with his second unfamiliar expression of the night.

With his meagre cheeks scrunched in a teasing crescent of a smile, brows drawn together, and eyes simmered in a homey, temperate hearth of red flames, Hanako is…

He’s soft. He looks soft. Like if Nene leaned up the extra five inches it would take to bite him, her teeth would sink right in. Like eating a pastry. Like eating a donut.

“You are the kindest any person has ever been to me, in life or in death,” Hanako says, hand never leaving her cheek. “Why? What did I do to deserve that?”

The answer comes as easy as breathing.

“You answered when I knocked.”

He lets out a great gush of air like she’s just punched him. Nene’s surprised yelp melts into a pleased little noise as he gathers her against his chest once more, leaving no room for even the suggestion of a separation any time soon.

“You shouldn’t say things like that to something like me, Yashiro. I wasn’t meant to do anything other than fulfill your wish.”

Fuck the wish, she almost screams, but she’s cut off before she can.

“If you aren’t careful… I might just keep you all to myself.”

The words are so soft Nene’s almost positive they weren’t meant for her, even if Hanako says them into the crown of her head. 

This is the closest they have ever been. Even in the stairwell, Hanako had only picked her up for her own safety, and it was over before it could really begin. But this: his body wrapped so securely around her own, it’s like she’s encased in her pink blanket, but larger, more capable, sweeter-smelling and with soft black hair that tickles her temples, fingers that draw intimate circles along the curve of her spine, lips that send unfamiliarly intense pings of pleasure down the length of her body, leaving her trembling at every point of contact…

It’s good. It’s too good. Nene almost doesn’t even recognize her plunging body temperature, the way her fingers begin to blue at the tips, the numbness running up one leg.

“I might just eat you alive.”

Now, Nene has always known there are several things wrong with her. But she doesn’t know how to categorize the sudden pulse of wantwantwantwant that grips her by the core and squeezes at the quiet intensity of Hanako’s -- threat? Promise?

Confession?

She tries and fails to stifle a whimper at just the briefest consideration of such an idea. A confession. From him. To her.

But before she can get too wrapped up in the fantasy, Nene brings herself back down to the present moment, the reality of the situation. The pledge she made. The subsequent sacrifice that occurred. Love is not something she can obtain or admit to experiencing. 

Not if she means to keep him by her side. 

“H-hey,” she coughs, finding her voice. “Ah, don’t say th-things like that, Hanako-kun. You almost sound like a b-b-boyfriend, or… something… haha…”

“That’s what you think boyfriends say to their girlfriends?”

“Well! I’ve got a very limited pool of knowledge, here!”

“I hope you aren’t talking to strange men who make concerning threats on your wellbeing,” he quips, drawing back just far enough for Nene to latch onto his mirthful face, eyes sparkling in an unspoken taunt. “That would be worrying, Yashiro.”

She bites her lip. “Maybe I like it when you worry about me.”

Hanako’s eyes flash so dark Nene thinks she must be imagining the way his pupils blow and threaten to eclipse the entirety of his irises, until a flimsy band of red is left as more of an allusion to his natural eye color rather than the usual, undeniable statement of it.

His smile tightens along with the fingers now splayed across her waist. “Do you, now.”

And she’s about to push her luck, push against that carefully measured warning on Hanako’s pale, gaunt face, equivalent to a collection of flashing road signs all advertising the same message: Do not cross any further. It’s disturbing how easy it is to fall into their dynamic, to dig the familiar rut even deeper, to make him look at her just a little longer every time, to get him to say just a little bit more every time, to stoke the flames that crackle deep within his guarded heart just a little bit higher, a little bit hotter, a little bit brighter every time.

Nene releases the death grip she’d had on her bottom lip and opens her mouth, fully intending to say something wildly inappropriate and ultimately unconducive to her goal of not falling in love with the ghostly boy currently holding her like he’ll die a second death if he doesn’t--

Instead, she yawns. Long and loud and with such a force behind it that she squeaks -- squeaks! -- at the tail end, bringing a loose fist to rub at her teary eyes once she’s done.

All of the tension they’d cultivated evaporates instantaneously. Hanako’s eyes rekindle to their usual simmering temperature, and his hands loosen enough for Nene to not feel like she’s got freezer burn racing along the entirety of her torso.

They catch each other’s gaze and smile, sheepishly.

Hanako is the first to break their embarrassed silence. When he does, it’s with a steady tone, the distant cousin of the voice he’d used just a few minutes prior in their ugly argument. It’s got less ice this time around, though. She wiggles contentedly between his palms.

“Yashiro,” he begins, face focused and determined. “I regret what happened today.”

Her stomach falls through the floor, and her immediate panic must register on her face because Hanako is quick to revise his original statement. “Not-- I didn’t-- the stairwell! I meant that…” He sighs, hanging his head. “Allow me a moment to collect myself.”

“Hanako-kun is sleepy too?”

“Hanako-kun is sleepy too,” he confirms. “After such a scary day, who wouldn’t be? ...I shouldn’t even be telling you this, but I will. For your own safety. A human involved in spirits’ affairs is no longer a human in full. Do you understand?”

Dubiously, Nene nods.

“The apparition on the stairs today. That was -- is -- my brother.”

With a gasp, Nene recalls the muted recognition in Hanako’s fearful eyes as he’d held her close, the knowing way in which he’d bargained for their escape from what could easily have been a murder scene.

“Now that he knows you and I are -- erm, familiar, he’s not… he’s not going to leave you alone. Not anymore.”

“Didn’t he… say something about a ‘game’? What did he mean, Hanako-kun?”

She watches as his eyes go dark again. This time, it isn’t under the influence of an all-encompassing heat of passion.

This is cold, quiet distress. Nene knows it well.

“That is nobody’s business but his and my own. Unfortunately, he’s decided to drag surrounding innocents into it, and because of that… I have to protect you, Yashiro.”

Nene is almost about to swoon over the sentiment, but quickly reverses tracks when Hanako lifts a hand to pull his butcher’s knife from out of the side of his rib cage.

“Um-!!”

“A blood ritual,” he chirps, like those words are something that is going to assuage Nene’s alarm, “it’s the only way.”

“I-I’m sure there are a bunch of other ways you could protect me! Probably all involving absolutely zero amounts of blood!!”

“The only reliable way, then,” Hanako amends. It’s disconcerting how easily he spins and circles the knife in one hand, blade and handle tumbling and weaving through his spider-like fingers with a kind of grace that only comes from copious amounts of practice. 

The thought is like a bucket of water tipped and poured to crash over her head. There is so much she doesn’t know about the boy in front of her -- it was only today that she learned he had a twin brother, and that was only because said twin brother attempted to take her life! For reasons Nene still does not understand, and for reasons Hanako refuses to disclose, apparently.

“How can you be so nonchalant!” Nene squeals, drawing her knees up to divide them but staying otherwise unmoved from their close proximity. 

“How couldn’t I be?” He shoots back, using his free hand to snag her chin between his thumb and forefinger, forcing her to look him in those troublingly red eyes. “If this is all it takes, just a nick of blood for us both…”

Hanako smiles, wryly. “How else would I make sure you won’t die alone?”

His quip takes her back to a different day, a different time. The moment she’d realized that the ghost occupying her apartment might have monopolized more in her life than just her living quarters. That first morning they’d shared together, so fluffy and light in hue, everything still fresh in its novelty, Nene’s first foray into the seemingly shallow pool of her building’s spirit world, every move, every word, every thought marked by a stunning lack of naivete. 

Quietly, she mourns the peace that has been shattered between then and now. Only two weeks have passed and, yet, it feels as though Nene has entered a different dimension entirely -- one in which the smiles offered to her are anything but genuine, the people surrounding her anything but mere humans, and the only source of reliability, the single constant, the saving grace she relies entirely too much upon, even to save her life…

...Is sat inches across from her on her shitty pull-out couch, cupping her face with one hand as he twirls a butcher’s knife in the other.

“The only reliable way?” She parrots softly.

“It’ll hurt just a tiny bit,” Hanako says, bringing the blade to thump briefly against the left side of his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to… Well. You know the rest.”

Nene must still wear evidence of her uncertainty on her face, because Hanako rushes once more to reassure her, in that backwards, blase fashion he is so accustomed to. “Silly human. I have to do it, too! Look, I’ll even go first. Watch me, okay?”

Hanako draws the blade down into the shallow space between them and, before Nene can properly start, he makes a shallow cut on his right pinky finger, even going so far as to lift his hand up for her to cautiously inspect, brows raised in a wordless see? I told you so.

She doesn’t know why she’s so surprised to see him bleed. But bleed he does, in a thin stream down the crooked, knobby knuckle of his littlest finger.

If she looks very, very closely, she can track how it trembles and quakes in the low lighting of the room.

“My turn,” Nene says, her own shaking hands reaching out to take the knife. Despite Hanako’s general frigid affliction, the handle is...surprisingly warm. As though it had just been used. Warm to the point that it threatens to scald Nene as she clumsily maneuvers it to slice a jagged, ugly line down the side of her finger. She hisses sharply at the first impact but, true to Hanako’s word, the pain recedes almost immediately as it had stabbed her.

“Um… what now?”

“Give me your arm.”

She does as requested.

Hanako intertwines their arms together, until they are faced with each other’s wet, pulsating fingers. She can smell it again, from this close -- the cloying scent of freshly baked donuts. How jarring. How inappropriate. Sweetness has no place here, in her haunted apartment, in the blood dripping onto her couch, in the butcher’s knife stabbing Hanako’s rib cage as he shoves it back home.

And yet, the only thing Nene can bring herself to think as the ghostly boy tells her to drink up is how badly she’s wanted to taste the sugar that’s been teasing her since the first time she encountered it.

When she closes her lips around Hanako’s finger, he does the same to hers simultaneously. For a moment, nothing happens. She distantly wonders if the ritual has failed, if something has gone awry.

Then Hanako sucks.

Her world is immediately blown completely off its axis, spinning and tumbling and hurtling through the vast expanse of space, flying so completely out of reach that even if Nene wanted to live anywhere other than inside Hanako’s mouth, she wouldn’t be able to. She wouldn’t even try. She couldn’t. Not when everything she’d already come to passively observe about him is suddenly magnified in the greatest, most infinite of scales.

Nene can count each individual strand of hair on his head, can feel the way the ghost of his pulse threatens to leap out of his throat, can taste the lurid, saccharine palate of what she now, somehow, knows to be his favorite food -- plain donuts, homemade. 

The experience is transcendental in a way that none of her previous spirit world dealings have ever been ( or ever will be, a small voice chimes in the back of her head). So overwhelming and visceral in its passion that Nene almost misses the way the entire apartment is glowing from it, a white-hot beam of energy surrounding their tangled pretzel of limbs on the couch.

When she’s able to comprehend and process more than just how much she is currently feeling, she notices that Hanako is faring much the same: pupils blown impossibly wide in the same way they had been when he’d pinned her between his hands and told her he’d eat her alive.

It’s all too much; the light, the sensations, the way Nene can feel Hanako like he’s living inside her body, an extra soul crammed in right next to her own, the fit so tight that she’s about to burst at the seams. 

Her skin crawls with the pressure that grows and builds and mounts into a wave of all-consuming, pure, unadulterated awareness that lights up each and every single nerve ending she possesses. She’s hit with it like a sock to the gut, like a kick to the face, like a hand on her throat and a hand on her hips and a hand tangled in her hair and a hand on her thigh -- hands everywhere, touching, cataloguing, memorizing the exact rhythm of her heartbeat, the gap between her two bottom teeth, the smattering of freckles at the small of her back, the crooked ankle she still carries from an elementary school scuffle; all of her body’s intimacies are combed through and embraced so wholly and completely it leaves her shuddering, teary, and panting into Hanako’s hand.

Swallow, she hears a voice that is not her own command.

Powerlessly, Nene closes her throat around the blood in her mouth.

And all at once, the unbearable wave of sensitivity fizzles out against the jagged rocks of whatever newfound mental fortitude she’s gained just from following that one order. Nene can breathe again, can see past the unshed tears blurring her vision, can watch as Hanako removes his hand from her mouth, and her hand from his. He extricates their limbs until they are -- Nene wants to say until they’re two separate beings again, but she can’t say that, not really.

Not with the way everything inside of her throbs hard in protest at being separated so quickly.

Her breath is still coming in sharp, wanton pants. “Wh-- wh, Hana--”

“There. You’re safe. Now, I’ll always be with you. I can always protect you.” Hanako says, voice infuriatingly stable. “Wow, somebody got a little too excited, huh?”

“Sh-shut up,” she groans, sliding down onto the mattress in utter humiliation. “Go aw-way. Hate you.”

The boy has the gall to giggle at her, after all that. Nene wants to hit him.

This is usually the part where Hanako drifts into the bathroom and does… whatever it is that he does when Nene goes to sleep, but the moment he floats off even vaguely in that direction, Nene is overcome with -- not pain, not necessarily, ( not yet )... 

Nails on a chalkboard. Cutlery scraping against plates. Glass shattering. Involuntarily, her neck contorts into an uncomfortable cringe.

“W-wait!” She shouts, before she can stop herself.

Hanako rotates around in midair, face expectant.

Nene covers her mouth in mortification.

“Good… good night, Hanako-kun.”

He smiles, somewhat indulgently, a ghost of the way he’d asked her what he’d done to deserve her. “Good night, Yashiro.”

Then he is gone.

Except not really.

Because that night, Hanako’s presence is so thick that the walls of her apartment threaten to cave in. 

Nene falls asleep to images of a guard dog standing watch just outside of her front door. Small and dark, eyes something from the pits of hell, monstrously sharp canines bared in an absurd grin as it lies in wait underneath the blood-red branding of 404.  

Chapter Text

There is something to be said about young love. 

There is an even greater something to be said about the pretty boy who very decidedly occupies the apple of Kou’s eccentric brand of misguided, foolhardy, headstrong young love.

Well -- he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to call it love, yet! They haven’t really had that discussion… or any discussion… about what it is they are. Or what they’re doing. 

Can he call it dating, if the only time they ever see each other is stolen rendezvouses in the secreted garden of their shared building? Does it count as romance if he leaves raiteijou at home, content to bask in their limited moonlit hours without any distractions or reminders of the outside world?

Is it love, if he can’t even say it outloud?

(If a young boy dies and nobody is around to save him, will he be missed?)

Mitsuba Sousuke is someone who is cocky, looks like a girl, sarcastic, selfish, has an annoying voice, obsessed with his camera, goes emo sometimes, and is only fake nice. For all of these reasons and countless others, Kou has found himself woefully enraptured by the starving photographer from the third floor.

Every night, the younger Minamoto slips stealthily from underneath his older brother’s watchful gaze and makes his way down to the courtyard. It’s not that Kou doesn’t want to tell Teru about his newfound sentimentality, the newfound spring in his step, the newfound phantom-body he curls himself around in order to sleep peacefully at night; being the eldest Minamoto, however, is not only a title, but a responsibility. 

A burden. 

As grateful as Kou is to be born into a bloodline as righteous and revered as theirs, it has never escaped him -- not in childhood, and certainly not now as he grows older and ever-wiser to each shore and the cruelties present in both -- that their clan has remained as pure and untainted as it has for one reason only.

“Mitsuba! You’re early!

“Maybe you’re just late. That lame-ass traffic-safety-earring is so heavy it’s slowing you down now, huh?”

The moon is almost full tonight, casting everything in the overgrown garden an iridescent, almost unreal shade of pale ethereality. It’s Kou’s first time seeing Mitsuba awash in such a bright, vivid hue.

He prays, silently, for many, many more moons spent with the boy standing across from him.

Mitsuba’s hair is as adorable as it usually is: in a sleek, neat little ponytail held up by a crisscrossing of colored bobby pins Kou recognizes from the konbini down the street. He’s trembling, dwarfed by his signature Canon camera slung around his neck, and that raggedy pink cardigan he insists on wrapping himself up in no matter the weather. Kou has only once jokingly asked if the other boy ever washed the thing. Because he values his life and the status of his gut as not-punched by a surprisingly strong fist of steel, Kou has dared not to ask again. (It’s alright. He knows the answer, anyways).

Nature and all her assets are friends and family Kou has been conditioned to revere for as long as he’s known that they exist; they see him, and he is to respect them. Each blade of grass is a gentle caress on his foot bottom, propelling him forward towards his next journey; each tree branch a symbol of the myriad of directions into which his path could possibly splinter off, each leaf on their shuddering limbs acting as the friendly waving fingertips of ancestors long gone, greeting him once more in ways that surround him every day. One of the first and most foundational lessons he’d ever been taught as an exorcist was to remember that everything -- everything was alive in some way, no matter how miniscule. 

Perhaps it is this manifesto that’s led him straight into the heart of his current predicament. 

“Why’d you keep me waiting, dummy?”

Mitsuba is so unfairly pretty shrouded in starlight. The sight of him -- glowing and flushed bright pink from the overgrown roots of his cherry blossom dyed hair down to the soles of his ratty converse -- renders Kou absolutely powerless to the sudden urge to reach out and touch. 

He doesn’t think he’s seen anybody or anything as soft-looking, as supple as the way Mitsuba’s cheek curves like the round moon above. Pale and smooth and the stuff of childhood fantasies, the fabric with which only the sweetest tapestries of fairy tales are woven.

Kou brushes his thumb across the other boy’s cheekbone, and watches --- absolutely stupefied -- as red begins to bloom behind the trail of his finger. “So you were waitin’ for me.”

“No,” says Mitsuba, long lashes fluttering shut as he leans into Kou’s touch. “Why would such a cute guy like me wait on a lame-ass like you? I’m way out of your league.”

“You sure are.”

This makes Mitsuba cock open an eye. “Hey. It’s weird when you agree with me when I’m bullying you. Don’t do that. 

“Hah? ‘S only funny when you do it?” Kou isn’t used to shaving down the rough, serrated edges of his delinquent’s drawl. Even the drag of his calloused worker’s hand is gentle in a way that is undeniably calculated and purposeful, so as not to mar the otherworldly beauty that rests itself in his grasp. 

Like holding stardust. Like cupping a cloud. Like all other things so unimaginably euphoric it boggles the mind to even attempt to comprehend the scope of its beauty.

“Yeah,” pouts Mitsuba as he tugs on Kou’s free hand to pull the taller boy down so the two of them sit across from each other on the iron bench. All kinds of flowers bloom underneath their feet, some of which Kou surprisingly doesn’t recognize, even after all his worldly exorcist-in-nature training. 

Everything is so new, with Mitsuba.

“Didn’t mean to keep y’ waitin’ for long. Were ya?”

A rare glimmer of sincerity pokes through. “No. I wasn’t. But don’t make a habit of being late, dumbass Traffic Safety Earring.”

“‘Course not,” says Kou seriously, hand over his heart as the other stubbornly refuses to release Mitsuba’s coyly smiling face. “Wouldn’t dare dream of it.”

The other boy nuzzles his lips into the palm of Kou’s hand. It is totally an okay thing for him to do. This is cool. This is fine. Kou is not going to pass out in this mysterious garden in the middle of the night. He is willing and able to survive a half-kiss from quite possibly the prettiest person he’s ever met. 

“Good.” Mitsuba whispers it into his skin. He feels the vibrations all the way down in the soles of his feet.

There’s nothing overtly significant that they discuss during their nights spent together. Although it’s only been two weeks and maybe a handful of change, much of the appeal (and driving force) behind their instant connection was the lack of acknowledgement of their respective real-world stressors. 

In the meagre square footage of the courtyard, Kou was not an exorcist, and Mitsuba did not starve for his art. Sat thigh-to-trembling-thigh on the wrought iron bench, Kou was not the youngest brother living in an ever-expanding shadow, and Mitsuba still had a family to speak of, a home to go back to during the summer holidays. 

Held in each other’s hands, Kou is a twenty-one-year-old who’s just found his first love. Mitsuba, to his endless chagrin (and secret delight, Kou is certain) is much the same.

Tonight is no different from all others before it. Idle chit chat ensues after Mitsuba’s had his fill of being belligerent and contrarian. There are two close calls of near death experience -- one in which Mitsuba leans forward to hear Kou’s voice over the rustling leaves and they almost ( almost! ) bump lips; the second encounter is too shameful to recount, involving a wayward hand, a scandalized backside, and an earful of indignant-sassy-boy-pitched screeching -- but it is overall an enjoyable time spent with his… more-than-friend-maybe? That. Happens to be a. Boy. His boy… friend.

(If  he can call him that! Kou should really bring it up, one of these nights.)

They part the same way every time: Kou exiting first to trek back up to the second floor, at Mitsuba’s stubborn insistence that he leave while he can still scrounge up a couple hours of sleep. It is, undeniably, more than a little haunting to turn his back on the other boy as he skulks out of a garden so beautiful, so depressingly small and confined and coveted that it could believably be the product of a legend, or myth.

His one gracious bit of comfort is that Mitsuba always looks crestfallen to watch him leave. Mitsuba is clingy, this Kou knows intimately well, and to have to stand there and watch him leave night after night is a special kind of torture Kou wishes Mitsuba wouldn’t inflict on himself.

After all, he’s already died once. There’s no point in rubbing salt in the wound.

Kou may be overeager; he may be gullible; he may even be the well-meaning puppy-type (as Yashiro-senpai has so lovingly entitled him); but he is no fool, and especially not to abnormal activities in the Near Shore. He would’ve had to be either blind or a pisspoor excuse of an exorcist to not realize that this beautiful boy, this enrapturing soul, the love of his vibrant, youthful, short twenty-one-year-old life -- is dead. 

Mitsuba is dead.

If it wasn’t the wraithlike diaphanous skin, then it was the aching hollowness of those pink eyes; and if it wasn’t that, then maybe it was the all-consuming desolateness that plagued his spirit, had him drifting along the ivy-strewn walls of the courtyard for hours at a time, unaware of Kou’s watchful eyes gazing at him from two stories up. Always feigning surprise and fake-outrage at Kou’s “late” arrivals. As if Mitsuba hadn’t always been there. As if Mitsuba will never always be there, condemned to roam the tragically enchanted garden of his own personal purgatory.

Searching for any kind of news article was hard. No hits, no pings, zero correlation between any of the other Mitsuba Sousukes in the whole of Japan and the one that clung to Kou in body, mind, and heart. 

Kou was eventually forced to break and ask the creepy fucking landlord -- seriously, there’s something wrong with him beyond his unfortunate likeness to that of an unholy spider-demon -- if there were any tenants of that name who’d recently (or not-so-recently) inhabited the building.

Spiderface must have seen the look in his eyes. The set of his jaw. The tremor in his hands as he handed him the dated autopsy report of Mitsuba Sousuke, M, Age 21, COD: Blunt force trauma. 

The fall was an instantaneous, painless death from his third story window, and his body was recovered in the overgrown brush of the courtyard. He’d still been wearing his camera -- strap tangled and twisted like a noose around his broken neck, lens shattered to all hell, both of his mangled hands clutched severely around the body of the damned thing, rigor mortis binding his cold, still flesh and the splintered metal into one entity.

Victim reportedly attempted to take a picture with [PERSONAL EFFECT #3]. Victim took picture by leaning out of bedroom window. Victim quickly lost balance and--

(That was enough of the cold, hard facts for Kou. He couldn’t bring himself to read beyond the third line).

And that was that. The space between not knowing anything about Mitsuba and knowing (and seeing ) the dismayingly gory details of his death was not actually that large of a bridge to cross. 

Because Mitsuba is more than crime scene tape, or a hushed-up pseudo-suicide. Mitsuba is more than a starving photographer. Mitsuba is more than the distasteful look that soured Spiderface’s already drawn features as he’d gently pried the autopsy report back from Kou’s frozen hands. Mitsuba is more, more, more, so much more than a corpse barely breaching one year in his grave.

Mitsuba is someone who is cocky, looks like a girl, sarcastic, selfish, has an annoying voice, obsessed with his camera, goes emo sometimes, and is only fake nice.

Mitsuba is also someone for whom Kou would walk through a thousand fires, if it meant gleaning even just the echo of that wretchedly sweet, tender grin.

Neither of these descriptors are mutually exclusive. Kou doesn’t think they could be even if they tried.

As he steps into the elevator, he can’t help but to reflect fondly on their humorous first encounter; Mitsuba’s shock that Kou could see him, the poor boy floundering his way through a pitiful excuse of having just moved in, I-I’m new here, that’s why you’ve never, um, seen me. Before. Hey, don’t be so nosy!! 

Every time that uncomfortable blade of doubt stabs through their easy, familiar atmosphere, it’s all Kou can do to stop himself from grabbing the boy’s hands and telling him that it’s okay, now. He knows. And he loves him anyway.

What other choice does he have?

Maybe it’s a little too much to feel -- to know -- about an acquaintance he’s had for barely over a fortnight. But if there’s one thing Minamoto Kou is known for, it’s wholehearted action. Once he commits to something, or some body, he does so with the entirety of his being -- each strand of hair on his hard head, each skin cell thrumming with life inside of him, each whipped cord of toned muscle all coming together in a unified, determined force of unconditional love and adoration. 

For people like Yashiro-senpai, like Mitsuba… it’s just what feels right. It’s just what they deserve.

Sneaking out of the apartment is one thing. Sneaking back into it is an entirely separate matter, complete with a unique set of obstacles and hazards Kou had thought he’d gotten a decent handle over throughout his many years of experience living with his no-nonsense older brother. 

Apparently, he’s nowhere near as good as he thought he was.

“Why don’t you take a seat, Kou?” Says Minamoto Teru, eldest son of the current Minamoto clan bloodline, head of house, slayer of spirits, regionally renowned exorcist at the ripe young age of just twenty-three. He’s currently enshrouded in a fluffy pink robe and matching slippers, legs folded primly underneath him he waits, impatient, for his younger brother to sit down across from him in their overly formal living room.

Kou skulks forward after kicking off his shoes, head hung, avoiding the eyes of all the portraits of their ancestors as they look on in ill-conceived contempt from their perch on the walls, above the doorways, atop dressers and bookshelves and countertops and anywhere else Teru has placed them to be a “comforting, watchful presence.” Kou thinks they serve an opposing purpose. He gets itchy whenever he has to walk through his own home.

The tatami bites into him like a sharp reprimand as Kou collapses onto his haunches at the other side of the chabudai. Head still hung, he wrings his clasped in his lap, waiting silently for the storm he knows is closing in.

And quickly.

“It’s three in the morning,” Teru muses, voice gently menacing like the warning rustling of leaves, the scampering of small animals, the whine of a cat or a dog as they hide underneath beds, ears tucked shut and eyes hidden by their quivering, terrified paws.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have classes tomorrow?”

“I do,” says Kou neutrally, knowing better than to lie to Teru, who asks for a printed hard-copy of his schedule at the start of every semester. 

The worst part of being in trouble with his brother, he thinks, is the deafening silence. As strong of an aura Teru commands in his day-to-day life, he is just as capable of leaving a room devoid of any palpable emotion, any ledge of comfort, any helping hand out of the simmering anxiety that threatens all of its victims in an invisibly sinister chokehold.

“Oh,” hums Teru, conversationally. The wind picks up. Clouds begin to congregate in the air above. Breathing becomes a touch more difficult to do, in the thickening air between them. “I wouldn’t be able to tell. I didn’t know university students -- seniors, at that -- thought it was appropriate to stay out past witching hour.”

“It’s not.”

A sudden crack of lightning. “Not what?” 

“Appropriate. ‘S inappropriate.”

“This kind of behavior, not just once, but repeatedly, over the course of -- what, nearly three weeks has it been?” Thunder rumbles and Kou’s heart leaps into the back of his throat like it wants him to suffocate and die from his own pulse, slamming wildly out of control. 

“You know, Kou. I can’t help but to wonder what’s got my youngest brother so preoccupied that he--”

“I was wrong!”

He can’t stand it anymore. He has to nip this in the bud, before the guilt threatens to consume him whole. “I was wrong! I’m sorry, Teru-nii!”

“... Kou? Wh--”

“I tried… not to,” Kou sniffles to his tightly-clenched hands, nails digging so deeply into the worn denim of his trousers that he feels the stab of it all the way down to the marrow in his bones.

He thinks of Mitsuba’s rare, bright smile. He thinks of being shooed out of the courtyard every night, thinks of how every day he tries to promise himself never to return, thinks of how he’s drawn, almost against his will, back and back and back again into the arms of a boy he will never be able to bring up to the second floor, will never be able to invite into his home, a boy who will never be able to shake his brother’s hand, will never be able to meet his parents or the rest of his familial clan of literal exorcists.

Not unless he wants to die a second time.

Not unless he wants to be killed, this time around, at the hands of someone who’d sworn to protect him. To cherish him.

To love him.

“I really tried,” says Kou, quietly. “B-but I… I jus’can’t. I can’t stop feelin’ what I feel, even if it’s -- wrong. So I’m sorry, Teru-nii, but I love h--”

“Kou, please calm down. I already know you have a girlfriend.”

…

…

…

“What.”

Teru, for his part, looks almost as confused as Kou feels in this moment. “Seriously? You didn’t think it would’ve slipped past me, did you? The late nights, the sneaking out, all this time suddenly spent away from home. You must be dating someone, right?”

For some inane, inexplicable reason, Kou latches not onto the fact that Teru has sussed out his romantic entanglements of late, but the fact that the romantic entanglement in question is presumed to be a girlfriend.

As if! Kou might be bi, but he’s notoriously nervous around girls of any and all kinds. In fact, the only female acquaintance he can call his own would be…

That would be…

“Yes,” Kou nods very seriously before bowing his head in humility. “I have a girlfriend. I was wrong to keep secrets from you, Teru-nii.”

A hand comes down heavily on his head to ruffle the blond locks tangled there. Teru’s familiar grip is the only solid footing Kou can use to anchor himself in the midst of his own churning guts. 

“That’s okay, Kou. You know you could’ve just told me the truth to begin with, right?”

No. No, I really can’t.

“Yeah…”

“Well, anyways,” the elder Minamoto sighs, hand retreating from its affectionate nuzzle to drum idly on the low table separating the two. “You know the drill. Let’s schedule dinner for sometime this week, yes? Since she’s seemingly available every single night, surely she can spare one to spend with your big bro?”

You know the drill.

Indeed, Kou knows the drill far too well.

The drill wherein duties are fulfilled, order is kept, and the Minamoto bloodline runs as pure as water from a temple; the drill that means any and every potential romantic partner Kou covets must first meet Teru, who confirms -- by virtue of whatever advanced eldest-son exorcist powers he lords over the whole of the situation -- the status of the lover in question as 100%, undeniably, without even a sliver of a doubt, human. No bad blood. No exceptions.

The truth, Teru had mused, so condescendingly that it made Kou want to slam his own face into the chabudai hard enough to splinter that wood, to crack his own skull open along with it, to bleed and bleed and bleed until he is drained of everything that makes him so damnably ‘human.’ 

“Uh-huh,”

The truth has never been easy in the Minamoto household.

“‘M sure she’d love to meet ya.”

And it has just been made exponentially more difficult.

Ah, well. Yashiro can’t say Kou’s never done anything for her.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God? Oh my GOD.

...Is what plays on repeat inside Nene’s head the minute she watches the Line notification that drop from the top of her phone screen like a gift from heaven itself, unexpected and dazzlingly bright and perfect.

Kou-kun - 13:57
senpai
dinner tonite w me nd teru-nii?
the kbbq place u liek
*like
the korean one

Me - 13:57
YOU BEAUTIFUL SWEET SUMMER CHILD
WHEN
LIKE WHAT TIME
WHAT SHOULD I WEAR
OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD? OMGOMGOGM
AAAAAAAAAAAAA

Kou-kun - 14:05
haha uh
7 work fr u
?

Me - 14:05
I NEED TO CALL AOI
FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Kou-kun - 14:29
that a yes

Me - 14:29
I COULD KISS YOU!!!!!!

Kou-kun - 14:30
??/3??&@

Kou-kun - 18:22
oh yea aha
one condition tho

Me - 18:23
Hm?
What do you mean?

So… Nene gets to go out to dinner with her long-time crush by pretending to be the girlfriend of his younger brother. 

Because said younger brother has a boytoy. Or whatever. Kou wasn’t super specific, and Nene gets the strange feeling that it’s more complicated than he’s letting on.

This is not the idealized version of their first social encounter -- it certainly did not adhere to any of the scenarios she’d plotted in pages thirty through fifty-seven of her Super Secret Diary, the one she hides underneath the kitchen sink (behind her Super Secret Stash of Puchao) so Hanako can’t get to it -- however, Nene is also painfully aware of the fact that she has no room to be picky. Beggars can’t be choosers, and right now, she’s on her knees, practically salivating at the thought of sitting across a grill in a humid, sweaty, cramped booth, dim lighting and bottles of soju littered all around, gaze locking with…

“Minamoto-kun,” she sighs, dreamily, clutching at the ruffles of her dress as she twirls around the living room, “I’m gonna go on a date with Minamoto-kun~!”

Twirling, dancing, skipping, Nene feels like she’s walking on air. She’s on cloud nine. She’s up in the stars. She’s playing hopscotch on Saturn’s rings. She’s light as a feather, she’s bouncing into her kitten heels, she’s spinning on the balls of her feet, she’s posing like a princess, she’s…

She’s tripping and falling into a familiarly solid chest.

She must be getting used to the cold, Nene thinks, because Hanako’s embrace no longer turns her lips blue. Instead, she feels less like a corpse being thrust into a freezer and more like she’s just stepped out of a bad blizzard and into the warmth of her dingy apartment. Still chilly, but with a heightened sensitivity that makes her aware of every follicle of hair on her arms and legs, and with the hint of future heat on the horizon.

“You’re going where?”

That’s another thing she’s been getting used to -- the spiritual boom of Hanako’s voice. It used to reverberate in her skull. Now, she feels it in the pulse of her heartbeat, in the point of pressure that makes itself (unbearably, unfortunately) known in the pit of her belly.

“A date,” huffs Nene primly, pulling herself away from Hanako’s chest so she can pivot to face him. “With Minamoto-kun.”

His leering smile tightens around the corners. “That guy? You’re still stuck on him?”

“Stuck on him?” Nene stops her foot, heels clacking loudly in her disbelief. “Are you joking? He’s so hot! And totally my type! Tall, princely, with sparkly eyes, and such a dreamy voice… ahhh…”

She snaps out of her fantasy-induced daze when Hanako slings one of the kitchen towels at her and it lands on her head, the red cloth flopping down to obscure the entirety of her face like a fiery brand of shame.

“For the drool,” he quips, greeting her with a serene smile when she yanks the offending article off. “As well as any additional inconvenient leakages.”

“Pervert!!”

Infuriatingly, even as she towel-whips him with all the fury of the thousands of suns of heat contained in her brilliantly crimson cheeks, Hanako refuses to be shooed away. Another interesting development as of late; if Nene thought the boy had been clingy before, well. She’d been woefully ignorant.

Not a moment goes by that Hanako isn’t attached to her hip, hovering over her shoulder, playing with her free hand as she absentmindedly scrolls on her phone -- even going so far as to forget to be intimidated when she’s irritated with him! Once upon a time, there was a point in their relationship where she would bonk him on the head and he would shy away, appropriately scolded for his unabashed flirtation.

Now, however, he seems drawn towards her like a moth to flame. Even as she lashes out in attack, Hanako draws ever near, as though the thought of being apart for even a moment is something not just unappealing, but a function his body is literally incapable of fulfilling.

Nene… doesn’t want to think too hard about the cause for this recent development. At a logical level, she’s sure it has something to do with the strange blood ritual Hanako had been uncharacteristically serious about completing. After that night, they’ve brushed flesh more times in the past two days than they have in the past two weeks. 

There’s something he’s not telling her. She knows that this fact should bother her. She should be feeling violated, uncomfortable, perhaps even in fear of her life that rests so intimately in the hands of a spirit from the Far Shore.

But it is so much easier to sink into this new, unexplored territory that night has seemingly unearthed the treasure map for. Every minute that passes is a minute grown closer to Hanako; every hour that passes is an hour spent familiarizing herself with the scalpel’s jut of his jaw, the lethal edge of his cheekbones, the way he bats his eyelashes when he wants something, the subtle jerk of his left knee when he tells a fib -- all of his intricacies, the things that make him tick, are coming together and splaying themselves wide open on Nene’s newfound examination table. 

There is a sadistic sort of glee inherent in picking through the softer parts of Hanako, who is normally sealed disappointingly shut. To be able to slice him right open and look inside him so easily, to practically watch his still heart beat alive once more, to poke and prod and touch things that make him squirm in such humanlike authenticity… 

If she’s not careful, Nene could find herself quickly becoming addicted to the cloying scent of formaldehyde.

“I’m leaving now.” She steps away from the genkan and resists the sudden, uninvited urge to kick her shoes back off, close the door, and stay inside 404. “To go on my date. With Minamoto-kun. Don’t wait up!”

From the other side of the threshold, Hanako looms over her. He grabs the top of the door frame with both hands to lean so far into Nene’s personal space that she would be affronted, if she were anybody else. 

“Yashiro,” he purrs, glittering rubies going half-lidded in a teasing simper. “Leaving me all by my lonesome? How cruel.”

And it does feel cruel. The moment Nene stepped out of the apartment, her gut swam with an anxiety that could almost rival the rivulets of perspiration that run in bullets down her back, the tremor running along her right leg, the way her heart sputters pathetically as she tries to reason with her panicking body that she is not in danger. She’s not. She’s safe.

Isn’t she?

“Y-you’ll get over it,” says Nene, swallowing around her thick, dry tongue.

To any stray passersby happening to stroll the fourth floor hallway, she must look crazy. Talking to her empty doorway. Clutching tightly at her black purse, perched on her tiptoes as if anticipating -- well.

Hanako locks eyes with her and the rest of the world falls away as easily as tender meat sliding off of the bone. 

What concern does she have with the rest of the world? What concern has she ever had with the rest of the world?

What concern could be greater than the one that occupies her doorway, her apartment, her life? 

Blood pounds in her ears as they silently regard each other for a moment. Nene realizes that the panic she feels is not because she wants to leave.

No.

Nene wants to stay.

The revelation knocks her off balance, and she wobbles on her heels before falling into Hanako’s chest for the second time that evening. He catches her (like always) and his arms tremble with what she thinks is laughter. His chest is rumbling, anyways. He smells so good. So sweet. And the cold is wearing off bit by bitter bit, the gently diminishing slope of it cresting right along the shell of her ear, coaxing her to stay stay stay it’ll get warmer soon it’s almost warm just wait just stay just stay you have to stay--

“You’re going to be late, Yashiro.”

Donuts. She’ll never tire of that scent. It makes the back of her throat open almost on instinct, her body salivating for something she can only catch a feeble, lingering hint of.

“Yashiro.”

“Hm?”

“Your date.”

“My…”

She looks up, then. Hanako looks down. 

(Were his eyes always that red? His gaze always that dark?)

“My date.” The words are meaningless to her, a mere semblance of syllables tumbling out of her mouth hung agape.

“Go,” says Hanako, “While you can.”

There is a very vital, very crucial part of this conversation that refuses to reveal itself to Nene. She grasps for it blindly, floundering to catch a ledge of support through the thick hazy fog that clings to every corner of her mind, shrouding her awareness in a stubborn obscurity. 

“Go?” Nene parrots dumbly. Despite her best efforts, she can’t begin to fathom why Hanako is telling her to go. Can’t even consider a situation wherein she would go.“Why?”

She’s still encased in his arms, her own latched onto his chest, fingers kneading and curling the malleable cotton of his black sweater like a cat content to purr and play the day away. The hallway is suddenly a breath of frosty, arctic breath, and Nene nestles herself even further into Hanako’s lukewarm embrace.

“Your date.” Hanako is so calm, so patient with her. Even as he continues on and his voice wanes underneath a clear, visible discomfiture, he never jostles her, never tightens his grip. Not even an inch. “With Minamoto-kun.”

“Oh, right! Ah, I’m going to be late! Hanako-kun, why didn’t you tell me? Eek, look at the time! I’ve gotta run if I wanna make it!”

“Sorry. Must have slipped my mind.”

“Dummy! Next time don’t keep me for so long! Now I have to rush, gosh…”

“You’d best be off, then.”

“Yeah, no kidding!”

A hand at her elbow just as she’s finally turned to head towards the elevators. “Yashiro…”

Nene looks back, questioningly. She really doesn’t have the time to loiter around! 

There is a flicker of something that casts a shadow over Hanako’s normally bright features -- something that makes her pause in her hasty exit. She’s almost tempted to liken it to what she saw the night of the stairwell encounter, but Hanako isn’t scared, per se. Not like he had been then. No, this is a few notes too sour to be fear. 

“Hanako-kun?”

And as quickly as he’d grabbed her with the strangest pleading look in his eyes, he drops her arm twice as fast, as though the limb physically pained him to touch. Why, then, does he smile at her? “Be safe. Don’t bring any weirdos home.”

“Oh, please. I already told you -- it’s Minamoto-kun!”

“I know,” he says simply. “Bye now! Upon your return I expect a generous portion of whatever you humans are planning to gorge yourselves on.”

The door shuts in her face before she has time to close and lock it herself. 

Nene blinks once, twice. Straightens her magatama. Fluffs her skirt. Walks to the elevator, feebly presses the down arrow, and tries to ignore the impending dread that fills her stomach like black tar with each step taken away from 404.

This is… It’s…

This is so not a date!!

If she and Kou were an actual couple, she thinks this outing would have solidified the end of their relationship -- and that’s disregarding the fact that his insanely hot older brother is present.

The eldest Minamoto’s presence certainly is a formidable obstacle standing squarely between their shared evening and enjoyability. In more ways than one.

Firstly, Nene wasn’t afforded the luxury of being briefed on this strange covert operation until a literal half an hour before she was due to show up! She’s never been a fake girlfriend before! Heck, she’s never even been a real girlfriend before, either! How is she supposed to know what to do, how to act? Does she ruffle Kou’s hair like she usually does? Or is that too friendly, too benign? Do they… do they… k-k-ki--

A- hem. That thought almost lodges a piece of bulgogi permanently in her airway.

Irregardless of her failures in all things remotely romantic, there remains an underlying tension blanketing their table from the moment she sits down. It feels less like an outing with friends (or a theoretical boyfriend) and more as though she’s being tested. The experience is uncomfortably reminiscent of her tea house venture with Nanamine-san. Unconsciously, she finds herself scooting closer and closer throughout the evening in a mindless need for protection -- from what, she cannot say.

The clinginess works well in their favor for a number of reasons. Probably the most pertinent being Kou’s shockingly violent system of non-verbally clueing her into which questions from Minamoto-kun she must tread around like a minefield, which answers to obscure from those ever-piercing cerulean eyes, which thinly-veiled accusations she must laugh at as though the seemingly-playful mention of spirits and ghosts in everyday conversation didn’t send a cold shudder down the length of her ramrod back.

“So, Yashiro-san,” Minamoto-kun hums casually, wiping his mouth of any stray water left clinging to those meticulously crafted lips. Like the graceful unfurling petals of a lotus; creamy and captivating and enticingly pink and--

“I can’t say I’ve seen you around the building very often. If you don’t mind my asking, when did you move in?”

Crap. Had she been caught staring? “A-ah, um, not too long ago, haha! Actually, I live on the f-- ff--”

Kou pinches her thigh hard underneath the table. Although the touch is dulled by her skirt’s layers of lace and ruffles, it’s still enough to alert her to the nervous stretch of his puppy-like smile, the pointed set to his jaw. 

No.

“--fffabulous, most fabulous little self-sustained garden. It’s. A, uhm. A planter. On my windowsill.”

Minamoto-kun raises his brows. “Oh?”

“Yes. I grow summer vegetables,” says Nene, who watches her life flash before her eyes with each and every word that comes foolishly tumbling forth. 

She wants the flames of the grill to leap up and burn her alive. She wants to scorch to death, right smack-dab in the middle of this (otherwise very pleasant) Korean barbeque establishment -- ugly screams and flailing limbs and the whole nine yards associated with dying via blazing hellfire.

Anything would be better than this. Anything.

“You don’t say! Hey, that reminds me, remember that basket of cucumbers outside our door the other day, Ko--”

“N-no.” Kou, unfortunately, is not wearing a skirt, and thus has no middleman between himself and Nene’s nails of righteous fury. “Ain’t got a clue what you’re talkin’ about, Teru-nii.”

“...Wow. You guys sure do hold hands super tight.”

“We are… very… committed.” 

I’m gonna kill him as soon as this is over.

Nothing improves after that point in the evening. In fact, if Nene allowed herself to dip her toes into the pools of pessimism she routinely shoves into the back corners of her consciousness, she would say that the outing only gets worse. The handsome, charming prince of the second floor is considerably less dashing when he’s looking at you through smoke and fire like he wants to gobble you up -- and totally not in a sexy way. In a scary, mean, gigantic human-eating dragon way.

(If there… if there even is a way such as that. Oh well. Nene sees the image in her mind very clearly.)

The blow to her confidence is pretty fatal. She’s no stranger to rejection, but Minamoto-kun’s frigid, calculating stare feels a little too personal to be yet another failed attempt at wooing on her part. Where was the nice guy from the mailroom when she’d first moved in? The one that handed her her envelopes, a lighthearted laugh tinkling lilke windchimes as he’d introduced himself? Shook her hand? Offered her his assistance should she run into any trouble?

Where had that Minamoto-kun gone?

What changed?

“Excuse me,” Nene mutters quietly, slipping out of the shared booth seat to rush as quickly as she can to the nearest restroom. 

In her haste she ends up scurrying awkwardly past Minamoto-kun’s seat at the table, and watches in absolute mortification as he sniffs the air she leaves behind her and grimaces.

No, she’s never suffered a defeat as humiliating as this one. Not even in any of her wildest, most sadistically self-flagellant fantasies.

Once inside the single-stall bathroom, Nene whips out her phone to send a distress text to the only person she can think to call on right now.

Me - 19:37
SOS
SOSOSOSOSOSOS

Ao-chan - 19:37
Nene?
Are you okay?
Where are you? What’s wrong?
Do I need to come over?

Me - 19:37
Bad date!!!!!!!!!!!
So bad… aoi i wanna die

Ao-chan - 19:37
Oh.

Me - 19:38
Yeah T____T

Ao-chan - 19:38
I can’t say I’m surprised, Nene.

Nene jerks back from her phone like she’s been slapped. The abrasively fluorescent lighting of the bathroom must be distorting her vision, her phone screen. That must be it.

Me - 19:39
Huh? What do you mean???

Ao-chan - 19:39
All these dates…
With all these random people…
Nene-chan is so busy lately.
It’s not like you.
Are you happy?

Me - 19:39
Am i happy???
Uh well
I dont know exactly

Before she can begin to ponder the strange query any further, there’s a series of rapid knocking at the door. She’d been leaning on the hard wooden slab, and the force of whoever’s will to piss is strong enough that it jolts her into action, and reminds her that she has people waiting for her outside -- she can’t be stuck wallowing inside this decrepit bathroom forever.

Me - 19:40
Anyways aoi i gtg im still here with them
**him

Ao-chan - 19:40
That’s fine.
You do whatever makes you happy, Nene-chan.
And when you come home tonight we’ll eat ice-cream on
the couch & you can cry it out & tell me all about it. Okay?

Me - 19:41
okay
Thank you
You always help so much...

Ao-chan - 19:41
Because?

Me - 19:41
You love me

Ao-chan - 19:41
And?

Me - 19:41
I love you

Ao-chan - 19:41
Why?

Me - 19:42
Because you’re real.

It’s this final exchange that fills Nene with the courage to open the door and walk out of the bathroom. 

Dinner doesn’t last very long once she returns to the table. She can’t find it in herself to be particularly disappointed, though. Not only had the encounter been unpleasant to the point of upset, but there was also the disturbing development of her physical wellbeing. It hasn’t even been an hour since she’d sat down with the two brothers -- and yet, she’s exhausted, as though it were an eternity that she’s been away from home instead of one measly evening.

Overhead, the once-dim lighting is now unbearably bright. The excitable chatter from the other patrons claws its way inside of her ears and takes root right at the base of her skull, shooting outward in tendrils of acute, sharp pain. Her vision swims dangerously, despite her being seated and gripping Kou’s forearm like he’s the only thing keeping her from deflating and floating away on a stray breeze.

For all she knows, she just might.

Minamoto-kun is kind enough to pay the check (and leave a healthy tip, too. This is the kind of chivalrous action that Nene would have swooned at if she wasn’t 1) convinced of the eldest brother’s discontent with her and 2) trying not to pass out).

The walk home is short enough not to be excruciating, but is made exponentially longer by Nene’s poor condition and need for frequent rest stops. By the time the trio approaches the front doors of their shared complex, it’s all she can do to release Kou’s arm and prop herself up against the cool concrete exterior. 

Man, that feels nice. She presses her overheated body even further into the building and bites back a groan of instant relief.

“Yashiro-san,” calls Minamoto-kun not unkindly, and she flutters her eyes open to pay attention. He sounds like he’s gearing up for something -- in fact, everything about his body language sends a signal of panic pinging white-hot through her veins. 

Tall, handsome, dreamy Minamoto-kun who looks down the length of his gently sloping nose at her; whose plush lips twist into an ill-conceived scowl at the sight of her obvious plight; who grabs Kou by the scruff of the younger boy’s collar and pulls him closer to his side, as though she were a rabid animal to which Kou had strayed too close for safety.

“I appreciate your interest in my brother. I’m sure he does, too. Regretfully, I don’t think this is going to end well -- for either of you.”

What.

“What,” Nene breathes. “What are you--what do you me--”

Minamoto-kun’s eyes narrow into dangerous bullets of concentrated azure. “Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.” He leans forward to lower his voice. In the eerie spotlight of the street lamp, Nene catches herself thinking that he’s never looked more princely than right now, in this moment: regal, severe, one heartbeat away from unsheathing a hidden sword and stabbing her through the womb.

“In the restaurant,” he whispers, “I could smell him on you. In you.”

The realization hits her so immediately that she almost laughs. 

 In her haste she ends up scurrying awkwardly past Minamoto-kun’s seat at the table, and watches in absolute mortification as he sniffs the air she leaves behind her and grimaces.

This “date” -- if Nene is still deluded enough to call it that -- now makes a lot more sense. Minamoto-kun’s contempt, Kou’s anxious insistence that she avoid disclosing why she moved in, what floor she moved onto, what room she moved into--

Minamoto-kun was never interested in meeting her. He must be an exorcist like Kou.

And Nene remembers all too well just what Kou’s real intentions were when she’d asked him to enter room 404.

To his credit, the elder blond looks at least some level of conflicted about what he’s saying; however, it is not a high enough level to spur him into any other action beyond drawing back from her, and pulling Kou away, as well.

“I don’t know what, exactly, your end goal is here, Yashiro. But it will have nothing to do with my brother and I. Please do not contact us again. We’ll be leaving first. Come on, Kou.”

Before she can formulate any kind of coherent response, the two Minamoto brothers are bustling past the front door and through the lobby area; Minamoto-kun with a purposeful, hurried stride and Kou in indignant compliance. From behind the murky glass panelling of the front door, he shoots her one last apologetic glance: a look that screams we’ll talk later.

Nene’s not too sure, what with how his brother had essentially excommunicated her. 

The dream-like daze she walks through now stands in stark contrast to the bubbly anticipation she’d had merely two hours prior. What she looked forward to as a golden opportunity to meet the long-time object of her (perhaps fantastical) affections has now eroded into something ugly, something decayed, something better left buried in the mass grave she holds deep inside of herself for all the other dreams shot dead right before her eyes.

Like a lamb to its slaughter, Nene is vaguely aware of her body trudging inside the building. She knows that, logically, she must have dragged her thick ankles across the linoleum of the lobby in a zombie’s pitiful gait. There was a middle section missing between point A-- her soul-crushed paralysis outside -- and point B -- in the elevator, somehow. Always in the elevator, somehow. Always traveling up and down and all around this strange building. 

Always pressing those buttons that glow like bright little eyes, that twist and turn in their sockets to stare up at her as she caresses and coaxes one into please taking her to the first floor, it’s been a long night. The door weeps gently shut. The car lurches not to life, but a hazy, transient existence adjacent to it.

At least whatever was ailing her earlier has since eased up. She’s able to stand on her own two feet without the help of the support bar. (Still, she finds herself clinging to it, in need of something to hold. To touch. To feel. Something she can point to as tangible and real).

Aoi, Nene thinks, her voice distant and tinny inside of her own head, I should go see Aoi.

And yet, as the car benevolently opens its mouth to grace her with the chance to escape its gullet, she’s met not with the drab sight of the first floor, but instead, the lone silhouette of a tall, gaunt man amidst a sea of impenetrable dark.

“Evening,” says Tsuchigomori, clambering inside the car. 

“Um. I’m? Supposed to get off here?”

His second set of arms reach out to press the buttons for the fourth and fifth floors. “Are you quite sure about that?”

“No,” Nene says, honestly.

“Alright then… Oh my.” One of Tsuchigomori’s elven ears flicks back and forth, disturbed. “Now what do we have here?”

This time, there is no mountain of lukewarm tupperware containers for Nene to clutch desperately in fear. There is no longer a semblance of normalcy, no false pretenses being made for her sake; the creature that lingers before her does so without the slightest regard for her fragile human mind, its capabilities, or its limits. As he shuffles closer to her on those four grotesquely long, unthinkably dark four legs of his, Nene thinks she should be more perturbed than she actually is.

(Which is to say: not at all.)

“Um…” she hums, unsure. “Just my purse. It’s super cheap though! I didn’t think things like this would be your type, Tsuchigomori-san, but if you’re interested, I can--”

“Foolish girl. Not the damned handbag. Your scent.”

Now -- this. This is something that makes her flinch back, makes the blood pulsing through her veins spasm and stutter to a sudden stop, full brakes. All the air leaks out of the car as the door slinks closed, encasing the two of them in a preternatural silence. It is not merely quiet -- there is an absence of sound, bar the shamanic drumming of her own heartbeat, but Nene thinks she’s the only one who can hear that.

She hopes.

“My…”

Tsuchigomori leers at her, rows and rows of shark’s teeth winking at her from the hidden depths of his abysmal grin. 

“Well, well, well. Looks like the brat got impatient.”

Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

Nene cannot move, she is so captivated by the glint of sadistic humor in her landlord’s expression. It’s a slant to his mouth she’s never seen before -- one that leaves her in immobilized suspense, scared to hear the punchline.

“E-excuse me, Tsuchigomori-san? I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, didn’t think you would,” he mues, drawing back far away enough to comfortably dig around in his breast pocket. What he produces is, shockingly, not another piece of hard candy like Nene had been expecting. Instead, he pulls out an old-fashioned smoking pipe, plated with the same glimmering gold of his chained eyeglasses. “A human would have to be crazy to consent to something like that, if they knew beforehand what it would do.”

What the hell is he saying?

“Can you -- Would you please explain?”

The spider-like creature in front of her chuckles darkly, smoke black as tar spilling out the sides of his mouth. “Sorry, no-can-do, Yashiro. That’d be out of bounds.”

“Bounds? What bounds?”

“The bounds,” says Tsuchigomori, “that are currently keeping you alive.”

Ding!

The car parts for her impending exit, a bloody red number four emblazoned and glowing on the control panel at her elbow.

Nene is rooted to the floor. Although the scuffed tile is seemingly solid underfoot, she can’t shake the irrational image that bodily shoves its way to the forefront of her mind: she takes two dainty, ladylike steps in her kitten heels and falls through the bottom of the elevator as though it were her fate all along to be consumed whole by the carnivorous appetite of her surroundings. Very suddenly, very dismayingly, Nene becomes acutely aware of every physical sensation in the cramped car.

He must notice the way her knees begin to tremble and knock together in ill-conceived fright. And yet, all Tsuchigomori does is gesture to the grey hallway that lies on the outside of their little rendezvous point. “I do believe we’ve arrived at your final destination, Yashiro.”

(It’s the way he says final.  )

“Tsuchigomori-san,” Nene begins, voice wavering under the weight of her anxiety, “am I in danger?”

Juxtaposed with her first supernatural encounter with Tsuchigomori, it would be easy to label this one as comparatively less frightening. There are no strange worlds on display beyond the sliding metal doors; no creepy stories; no disassociation to a foreign dimension in which only she and her demonic landlord and a sea of bright, bobbing lights exist in desolate isolation.

But Nene has come to realize an important truth over the past couple of weeks:

Sometimes, the scariest things aren’t grotesque denizens straight out of a nightmare, or cursed surroundings bewitched by malevolent entities.

Sometimes -- quite often, in fact -- the most dangerous games are played right in the comfort of one’s own home.

“Don’t ask me,” muses Tsuchigomori, one of his four hands still fondling the curved edge of his smoking pipe. “I’m just the landlord. I try not to make it a habit of meddling in the affairs of tenants. Very unprofessional, you see.”

No, I don’t see. I really, really don’t.

“Anyways,” he continues, “you should be on your way. Have a nice evening, Yashiro. Say ‘hi’ to the brat for me.”

And then Nene is being pushed out of the elevator, which is actually kind of fair considering she doesn’t think she possessed the presence of mind to move on her own. Before she can turn back around and demand a proper answer -- any kind of answer, at this point -- the elevator cinches shut, and grows still, cold, and dark. It gives off the impression of being inoperable. Nene feels like if she were to try and coax it into waking up and servicing her around the building once more, it might grow teeth and bite her head off.

Shuddering, she pulls her purse tighter to her person. Those once humorously-outlandish visions of the great atrocities living alongside her in the building are no longer as funny as she once thought them to be.

The hallway seems bleaker than usual, tonight.

Finding it proves to be an arduous task given the unkempt state of most of her personal belongings littering the bottom of her bag, but she eventually unearths what she’s looking for. If she were to be asked what prompted her to finally unwrap the strawberry lollipop and shove the damn thing in her mouth, Nene would probably say it had been a spontaneous decision borne from the strange encounter from which she’d just escaped.

(But this is not the truth. Nene sucks on the hard candy with her head down, eyes shut, fists clenched, and tries desperately not to think of beady red eyes and a hand secured unforgivingly around her throat.

A most dangerous game, indeed.)

Kou has raised his voice against his older brother twice in the whole entirety of both of their lives.

The first time was the result of a nasty scuffle as children, wherein Teru had refused to let Kou play with his limited edition Yu-Gi-Oh! cards on account of Kou’s bad case of sticky fingers.

The second time is now.

“Teru-nii,” he shouts in indignant outrage the moment they’ve both made it back to the apartment. “Are ya crazy? The hell was that?”

He’ll shoulder whatever severe reprimand that follows after this confrontation, he doesn’t care. If there’s one thing Kou will not tolerate, it’s the mistreatment of his friends.

Especially a lady! You have to be nice to ladies!

Ladies that Kou knew for a fact were reputable humans! 

“Kou.”

Teru isn’t explosive when he calls his name. The older man isn’t usually one for senseless, unrestrained anger, so this is nothing of particular note; what does give Kou pause, however, is the hollowness with which Teru speaks. If Kou didn’t know any better, he’d almost call his brother’s tone contrite.

“What,” he says, still incensed but now wary of the way Teru hangs his head, slumps his shoulders, frame pathetically slumped in an exhaustion older than his bones.

“I could smell him,” Teru repeats in a shell shocked imitation of his former severity earlier that evening. “I could smell the ghost of 404 inside of her. He must have-- shit. Shit.”

“Shit what?”

Teru lifts his head, then, and the expression on his face is downright morose. Kou has never seen anything like this from his brother. He doesn’t know if he ever will again. He sure hopes not.

“They’ve bonded. A blood bond.”

“Horrible,” groans Nene, flopping down onto the couch as she answers Hanako’s query. Her voice is ragged, she knows, but she can’t summon the emotional wherewithal required to mask the toll her long evening has taken on her. “It was awful. I didn’t think guys as handsome as Minamoto-kun could be so mean.” 

Her eyes may be shut, but she doesn’t have to be able to see to know that Hanako is being creepy -- the sudden plummeting of the room temperature tells her all she needs to know.

“Mean, you say?”

“Stop that, Hanako-kun, don’t feel well. And, um, n-not… maybe not mean -mean, but he said some pretty weird stuff…” Nene frowns suddenly, rightening herself in newfound focus. How could she have forgotten to ask? “Hanako…”

“Ye-e-es?”

The pale boy hovers by her shoulder for a few seconds before settling down beside her on the couch -- entirely too close for comfort, no less, but Nene has come to accept his lack of comprehension regarding personal space. 

It’s not as if she’s complaining, either. Having those glittering red rubies bore into her from mere inches away… the sharp press of his hip bones where they meet her own softness… those rough, bitten, chapped lips so temptingly, alluringly near…

No. Focus.

“H-he said… Minamoto-kun said he could smell you. Um. On… on me.”

She can barely get through the full sentence before her face bursts into an entire flower shop’s worth of rose. Surely, in the moment, when a very beautiful, very terrifying man was treating her like she’d had rabies, his accusation was less embarrassing than it was hurtful in some deep, profound way Nene felt like a spear through her heart.

But now… sidled up on the couch next to Hanako, trapped between his eager body encroaching on her rapidly dwindling personal space, and the unforgiving barrier of the armrest behind her… as she tells him about how another man smelled him on her… inside of her…

If Hanako is disturbed by what she’s just said, he doesn’t show it; in fact, her admission only prompts him to scoot impossibly closer, until he’s practically in her lap.

This is probably not good for my health and well-being, thinks Nene, as she tries not to choke on the rapidfire pounding of her heartbeat.

“Yashiro,” he hums, grin lopsided and wolfish in a way that makes her avert her eyes. “I told you I’d protect you, right?”

“R-right.”

“I surely hope you don’t think I’d lie about something like that.”

Nene is quick to jump into action and assure him that no, of course she doesn’t think he would lie to her! Of course she knows he would protect her -- has already done most everything in his power to protect her!

There is a thought, however, that continues to niggle at the back of her head. Even as she playfully squawks at his sudden embrace, even as she allows him to bury himself into her side, and even as she reciprocates all of the unabashed affection, Nene can’t help but wonder…

There’s something he isn’t telling me.

“... O-okay? Is that bad, or somethin’?” Asks Kou, properly calm now as he sits atop the zabuton adjacent to Teru’s usual spot. “Certainly don’t sound too pleasant.”

“And you’d be right. Hands and feet out.”

Kou obediently extends his limbs far enough to be submerged in the two white bowls of salt water that Teru laid out for him. Purification is not an uncommon occurrence in their household, but the occasion must require either 1) a serious threat being made to the sanctity of the dwelling or 2) Teru’s control-freakishness skyrocketing beyond reasonable doubt.

At this point, Kou doesn’t know which prerequisite has been fulfilled. He’s a little too spooked to ask, thanks.

After the elder situates his own limbs into matching bowls, he grabs a glass vial out of pockets of his pants and wordlessly passes it to Kou.

Normally, Kou loathes doing salt water rinses. It tastes like ass, and he’d rather bathe butt-naked underneath a waterfall in the middle of december than have to tease his tonsils with the bitter mixture. He’d complain about it vocally, too (as he’s prone to do) if Teru didn’t look so painfully serious.

“What’s wrong, Teru-nii? Ya look like someone’s just died.”

That was the fuckin’ wrong thing to say, Kou notes, as Teru doesn’t even flinch in the wake of his younger brother’s vulgar tone. This is some Real Shit, then, if he isn’t even bothering to invoke his pompous role as Righteous Older Brother.

Teru speaks once he’s spat out his own dose of salt water. “Someone very well may.”

“The hell do ya mea--”

“A blood bond,” interrupts Teru, “permanently binds the fates of two souls. Where one spirit goes, the other is destined to follow. And whenever their physical bodies are separated for an extended period of time, it hurts.” 

Kou stills, the after taste of sodium in his mouth eroding into something like ash.

“But did you miss me~?”

He is trying way too hard to be cute. It shouldn’t be endearing. It’s not. It’s not endearing. Not in the slightest.

This is the delusion Nene will keep repeating to herself, over and over in a mindless mantra, until she believes it to be true.

“No way!” She huffs, and it is absolutely not because she just wants to see him pout. 

“Wow. You totally did.”

“I did not,” says Nene, who totally did.

Hanako, determined for whatever reason to extract some sort of rise out of her, makes it his mission to get as close as humanly -- spiritually? -- possible. “Not even a little bit?” He simpers, legs thrown over the expanse of her trembling lap as he snakes his sweater-clad arms to wrap around her shoulders. “Yashiro didn’t even think of me once? How cruel.”

Not good. Not good. Code red.

“I-I-I-I-I was o-on a date, dummy,” she sputters, scrambling to save what little is left of her composure. The last time Hanako was entangled with her like this, it was to protect her decency, and she’d been wearing significantly less clothing than she was right now, and wow, okay, that is a train of thought that needs to be derailed immediately. “Why would I think of you on date, anyways?”

Those red eyes stare up at her with a disconcerting amount of intelligence shining behind them.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Averting her gaze, Nene sighs. “...M- maybe I wanted to come home early, okay? But it wasn’t like that! I felt yucky.”

“Yucky?”

“Uh-huh, like kinda sick?”

At this, a shadow passes over Hanako’s cheery expression -- so quickly that had Nene not already been drinking in every single detail on his face, she would’ve missed it completely. One moment, his brows are furrowing in muted surprise, lips twisting into an ugly little slash marring the otherwise unblemished expanse of cold, dead white; and the next, he’s back to smirking up at her like the cat who’s just got the cream.

“Hm? Should I take care of Yashiro-chan, then?”

“I told you to stop doing that baby-talk voice! It’s weird! I don’t like it!” Nene lies, like a liar.

Toes damp and clenched tightly where they’re tucked underneath his haunches, it’s all Kou can do to press Teru for more information.

“Haah? That ain’t -- it can’t be right. Sounds like a textbook spiritual ritual, 'nd those're only supposed to be--”

“--performed between spirits, yes,” Teru interrupts once more, and Kou barely restrains himself from snapping at him to cut it out. “The connection isn’t built for beings from the Near Shore.”

Frustratedly, he fiddles with his lighter, trying to force out a flame that just barely ignites -- and licks his thumb when it does. Damn. He’ll have to pick up a new one on the way back from class tomorrow. “You’re not makin’ any sense. If the ritual ain’t built for humans, then how the hell did it work?”

Teru passes him stick after cone after coil, brooding in consternation all the while. 

“I’m not sure. There must be another variable we’re missing. Irregardless, the consequences that are in store for Yashiro… well. I can’t even imagine. I’m not sure I want to.”

The mattress has been pulled out.

Her fluffy blanket is swaddled around her in an impenetrable cocoon.

It would be easy for her to be surprised at how well Hanako knows all of her go-to comfort objects; it would be easy to forget that beyond the two and a half weeks she’s been in direct contact with Hanako, he has known and observed her for far, far longer. 

Nene doesn’t like to dwell on it -- the mere concept plaguing her with a guilt so concentrated it nearly kills her with the unforgiving chokehold of its noose -- but she’s fully aware of the fact that Hanako had been her friend long, long before she had been his.

Every action he takes to comfort her in this moment is a direct, bittersweet reflection of that damnable truth. Even if there is still the persistent undercurrent of sadism in his teasing remarks and pointed personal jabs, Nene still falls ready and willing into the arms that comfort her in their aftermath. He wouldn’t be Hanako-kun without all of his sharp edges, after all.

(He even conjures up some tea for her -- and her favorite blend, too!)

She knows… she knows she cannot let herself fall into this illusion of domestic bliss. She knows that if she hadn’t been sidetracked by Tsuchigomori, she would be with Aoi right now, probably sandwiched between her and her two husbands, watching ridiculous game shows and shoveling down copious amounts of instant noodles. She knows that this is what she’s been doing for months -- years, even, if she were to include the decade of just her and Aoi’s friendship -- and she knows that it’s the right thing to be doing.

It is right to spend time with her best friend. Her normal, real, human best friend. The same best friend who’s tirelessly pulled her away from death’s door more times than either of them can count. 

The same best friend that would weep in despair if she knew who Nene had abandoned their plans for this evening.

Nene tries to justify it. Aoi isn’t from her world, so she can’t possibly fathom the intensity of the connection Nene shares with it. 

As Hanako floats towards her from the kitchen, electric kettle in one hand and a tin of tea leaves in the other, sweet smile shining bright against the eternal dark of their shared apartment, Nene thinks: No, Aoi would never understand this.

“ ‘Consequences,’ ” Parrots Kou, hands frozen where they hover uselessly above the last incense holder. “What d’ya mean, ‘consequences’ ?”

Teru’s eyes go flat and cold.

He’s spoon-feeding her the tea which, granted, is a bit much -- and she was already absolved of her strange momentary illness as soon as she’d stepped through the front door -- but like hell she’s going to turn this down.

Because… it’s perfect. Nene can no longer deny the bubbling sensation that threatens to burst into full bloom, encompassing the entirety of her palpitating chest in a swarm of gooey, sticky, messy, tooth-rotting, toe-curling, lash-fluttering, stomach-rolling affection.

Is it too miserable to call this everything that she has ever wanted? Would it be piteous of her, if she leaned further back into the hand cradling the nape of her neck? Is she a bad person to gratefully, greedily drink from the hands of a boy who has eyes the color of gore, skin the color of a body drained dry, hair the color of the deepest depths of an abyss? 

Is it so wrong to want young love?

Is she wrong for having never found it before?

(Is she wrong, to only have found it in a place where things go to die?)

Nene feels it as her eyes grow misty. Hanako teases her for being a baby over a simple stomach ache, and adjusts his hold on her head so she isn’t as strained when she leans up to accept the warm liquid from his spoon. 

“Silly human,” he coos, voice gentle in a way Nene is afraid to touch, lest it unravel at her feet. “What would you do without me, huh?”

I don’t ever want to find out.

“They are one in the same, now. Fated in the eyes of the Far Shore. There’s no parting, not even in death; for when that girl’s body dies, her spirit will go right back to him.”

The lighter falls from Kou’s slackened grip in a course so smooth, so fast, it is almost as though it had always been destined for a downward trajectory.

At some point, Nene begins to nod off. She knows this only because Hanako removes his hands from where they had gently combed through her silken hair, and his potent presence retreats from Nene’s field of awareness. She assumes he’s making to take respite in the bathroom, which is where he usually goes at nights, and has gone every night prior to this one.

Something is different, tonight.

Something compels Nene to shoot out an arm and grip onto the threadbare sleeve of Hanako’s sweater like it is the last thing she will ever do. The thought of being without him -- even for a single night, for a mere collection of hours, of minutes, of even the most fleeting of seconds -- is a torture she cannot endure. 

“Hanako-kun,” she breathes into the empty quiet of room 404. “Don’t leave me.”

Under the influence of the dark and her own sleepy half-awake state, she can only really make out his eyes. Two twin points of virulent red. Staring at her. Assessing her. She stares back, undaunted.

“Please, Hanako-kun. Promise me you won’t go.”

The sound of socked feet hitting the floor is like a gunshot in the otherwise still air.

Another thud sounds not too far after it. And then, another. And another. Slowly, Hanako walks across the wooden floor until Nene no longer has to stretch her body unnaturally to accommodate their physical connection. The boy looms over her bedside, expression an impassive blank slate.

“Promise you?” He whispers.

“Promise me,” confirms Nene, releasing his sleeve to offer up her pinky.

Hanako remains unmoving for so long that Nene thinks she’s said something wrong. Just as she opens her mouth to apologize, she startles her by intertwining their little fingers with such sudden voracity, he almost tears the appendage out of its socket.

“I promise, Yashiro,” Hanako says lowly, sinking down to one knee and bowing his head, “that I will never leave you.”

A muted wave of energy emanates from their joined hands; it emanates outward in slow, heated pulses -- enough of a force to blow back the sweeping tendrils of Nene’s hair.

When Hanako finally lifts his head, he wears a bright grin that has no place on his pallid, emaciated face. 

Nene is struck with the impression that this smile belongs not to Hanako, but to the boy who had to die for Hanako to be here with her, right now, pinky locked in hers as he swears to always be by her side.

Nene wants to say hello to that boy. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not for many nights.

But she will make sure to -- or she will die trying.

Hanako clambers up onto the bed at her petulant insistence, and she even allows him to snuggle up to her side so long as he remains above the covers. They share a pillow. If she were even an ounce more awake than her current status as on-the-brink-of-unconsciousness, this would probably be cause for full-blown panic.

Ah, well. She’ll remember to be in denial about it in the morning.

For now, Nene allows herself to melt into the warm points of contact she maintains with the cuddly boy on her bed. His hands are like mini-furnaces where they reach around to hold her close, and she can’t help but to let out a contented little sigh at how purely pleasurable it feels to be this close to Hanako, how good it is to revel in the warmth of his embrace, how right it is that she can feel his fingers drawing meaningless characters up and down the length of her waist.

Perhaps her viscerally satisfied reaction is due to the fact that nobody has ever touched her like this before. Is she supposed to feel like she’s going to cry? Is that a normal reaction to being held?

Drifting off into what she’s sure to be is a full and complete slumber, Nene swears that she can feel a soft pressure at the peak of her forehead. Something pliable, something wet, and something that leaves the scent trail of plain donuts as it hesitantly retreats from where it had touched her.

“Sweet dreams,” Hanako kisses into the crown of her head.

It is with the last of her lingering awakeness that Nene reaches for him one last time, and hooks her tingling pinky finger into the collar of his nightmarishly dark sweater.

I’ll see you there.

Chapter Text

“Oh! Aoi!”

Before she can get another word in edgewise, two enviably pale, slender arms are wrapping themselves around her neck, a head of perfectly silky smooth amethyst hair nuzzles into her cheek, and Nene finds herself caught quite securely in the air-tight embrace of her best friend.

“Thank goodness,” sighs Aoi, lips tickling the junction where Nene’s neck slopes down into the soft valley of her clavicle. It’s sensitive there -- so much so that she trembles, just slightly, when the other girl speaks into it, her the brush of her lips akin to teasing kisses. “I was so worried. So, so, so worried…”

Dazed and confused, it’s all Nene can do to awkwardly pat Aoi’s back. She is normally unused to so much touch -- and all at once, at that. But this early in the morning? As the birds still trill from the telephone poles just outside her window? As the clean, fresh scent of dawn lingers in the bags beneath her eyes, the stiffness between her joints?

It’s all she can do to lean into it. After all, Nene doesn’t think she has much of a choice here. Aoi has always been good at disarming her when she’s least prepared. “H-huh? What do you mean?”

“Nene-chan never came by last night!”

“Last night?”

Aoi’s head retreats for a second, and Nene is blessedly granted back her gift of sight. If the early morning sun hadn’t done enough to blind her, then Aoi’s river of free-flowing locks was a more than effective blindfold. Nene has to blink several times for her field of vision to refocus.

She’s greeted with the sight of Aoi’s adorable pouting-face that only kind of makes her feel guilty for something she has yet to remember (not) doing.

“You promised,” Aoi simpers, hands still clasped around the very sensitive nape of Nene’s neck, body line still pressed along the length of Nene’s own, toes kissing, knees knocking, chests rising and falling in near identical simultaneity. “Nene-chan promised she was gonna eat ice cream with me last night. After your totally awful, terrible, horrible, unsalvageable date. Remember?”

Oh crap!!

“Ah…!! I-- forgot?”

It’s a weak excuse, but considering the fact she’s just been abruptly woken up out of one of the deepest slumbers she can remember slipping into, Nene thinks it’s enough to appease the other girl. After all, Aoi has always been willing to look past Nene’s shortcomings, if it means that Nene is as quick to apologize for them as she is to make it up to her best friend.

It hits her, rather belatedly, that the pair of them are still lingering in the doorway. “Um, we’re kinda -- here, Aoi, why don’t you come inside--”

“That won’t be necessary,” says a familiar voice, as smooth and chilly as the surface of a lake frozen down to its core.

Nene can feel the chill of it strike her like a palm to the back of her head. The sensation is disorienting, because this genre of cold is one which only overtakes her when in the presence of supernatural entities. But that voice…

It doesn’t make sense. It can’t make sense.

She watches, rendered still and stupefied, as Akane steps into her frame of view. Nene had been so preoccupied with consoling the apparently hysterical Aoi, that she forgot to center her gaze elsewhere. Her doorway is only so big. She must crane her neck to see over Aoi’s shoulder, to get a good and proper look as the red-head steps into view.

“We just came to check and make sure you’d gotten home safe. Isn’t that right, babe?”

If she could speak in retrospect, she’d describe what happens next as playing out in slow motion.

Quickly, before Nene can categorize the feeling in the pit of her stomach as dread, before she can slow her steadily accelerating heartbeat, before she can do anything but stand there and stare, Aoi breaks away from her tight hold on Nene’s body. She takes one, two steps back and stands between her husband and a rapidly-awakening Nene.

“Hm, that’s right. We were just--” And that’s as far as Aoi gets before she freezes in place.

Well. That’s not quite right.

It isn’t only Aoi who pauses in motion.

In front of her, the very fabric of time itself seems to grind to a sudden, screeching halt. There is no gradual pulsing wave of energy expanding outwards from the apex of its influence, akin to how she’d seen Hanako perform preternatural acts of power; no, this is an immediate oppression of everything in the vicinity. No warning. No consent. There is only the complete and utter commandeering of every single surrounding particle, atom, cell, and all other building blocks that synthesize their living world.

This, of course, excludes herself and Akane, as the latter stands very casually with a pocket watch in his hand, the other at rest behind his back. 

(And strangely enough… The apartment behind her is also unaffected. The longer she lingers, the more she wonders if she’d been spared on purpose, or simply because she’s still stuck in the doorway.)

The drywall is warm where she grips it to combat the nerve-numbing coldness emanating from the hallway.

The man who stands before her is Akane -- but he’s not; he’s got the same riotous upstart of ginger hair, but it’s been pulled back into a swooping ponytail that crests and curls just past the jut of his collarbones; he’s got the same kind, plain face, but it’s been chiseled by the omission of his ever-present red wire rimmed frames; he’s still Aoi’s husband and childhood best friend, but that is not every identity he assumes, apparently.

“What the hell,” says Nene, neutrally, “is going on.”

It is unnerving like nothing else, to be maybe a handful of centimeters away from Aoi’s still body. Nene has always thought her friend possessed doll-like beauty -- but she’d never meant, or wanted to see that come to fruition in a literal sense. She gets the unwarranted intrusive thought that if she reached out to touch Aoi her trembling fingers would be met with cold, pliant flesh, like that of a corpse. Her body is still smiling, faintly.

“Please move out of the way for me, if you could, Yashiro!” Akane pockets the watch and gives a haggard grin. “Haven’t got much time to explain. But don’t worry! I’m sorry it’s taken this long, really, but this will be a quick and painless process -- for you, at least. Now, if you’ll allow me to just...”

When he takes a step forward, Nene acts on a primal urge beyond mere human instinct -- it is as though something older than the bones she currently occupies is forcing her body to splay wide, arms out, feet spread, the entirety of herself stretching thin to guard the door of 404.

Perhaps she should first be asking why? Maybe a curt what are your intentions? Even a firm I’m not afraid to call the landlord! Should things take a turn for the worst. 

On top of that, Nene is well aware she’s less than the perfect picture of intimidation, dressed in the battle armor of her fluffiest pair of matching pajamas and the Rilakkuma slippers she’d spent half of her paycheck on just last week, hair barely contained by the frizzy braid she’d slept in, face puffy and flushed from a night of deeply satisfying rest.

And yet.

She clings onto the metal door frame with all four points of contact, holding tight and fast to the familiar driftwood in the sea of Akane’s foreign influence, like she’ll drown to death if she doesn’t.

“N-No.”

Her voice is quiet and unsure, at first, and it goes unheard by Akane who keeps steadily advancing -- so she clears her throat and reiterates her point with a ferocity she’s never known herself to harbor.

Until now.

Culminating in the heated churning of her gut, it bubbles and pops like magma left to stew for thousands of malignant millenia, rising to the surface in a spray of lava so hot, so aggressively angry , that the shriek she lets out threatens to scorch the back of her throat as she expels it in single-minded fury.

“ No! ”

Her thoughts are not with the tenants on her floor who are most definitely asleep at this early hour. She isn’t thinking of them, or herself, or any other human body in the vicinity -- not even the one belonging to her best friend, the one that stands propped up and defenseless, close enough for her to caress, to reach out and pull to safety, if she wanted to.

No, all Nene’s mind can focus on is the memory of a warm body next to hers; dark hair, terrifying eyes, hip bones like a drawer full of kitchen knives, all of these characteristics synthesizing within her panicked mind as an entity she has sworn, multiple times over, in no uncertain terms, to protect. 

She doesn’t know what Akane’s come here to do, but the way he’d said it before -- a quick and painless process, for you, at least -- lit a fire at the base of her spine, the flame of it extending outwards until not a single fiber of her being is left untouched by the strange heat that threatens to engulf her.

Her scream of anguish is less enunciated by her mouth than it is felt in the air all around them. The foundation of the building quakes, wooden beams and support structures whining in protest as they’re pushed to their very limits by the vibrations racing through them. For such a potent display of power, one would expect the epicenter to take root in a traditional energy pool, such as the stomach, or the heart, or even the mouth, from which the otherworldly yell had originated.

Nene has never been one for tradition or conformity, however. 

She feels the height of the tension at the base of both pinky fingers.

There is no time to think rationally about what’s happening, no time to spare on freaking out over what the hell she’s doing, what the hell just happened, what the hell has been happening, what the hell it all means--

The blast of her exclamation blows Aoi’s body back so abruptly, so harshly, it’s as though she really is a doll, a mere puppet to be positioned and repositioned at will. Her porcelain limbs flail like the limbs of aplaydoll as she sails through the air and hits the door opposite from Nene’s own with a sickening crunch! 

Time is still frozen. As the body slides down into a limp heap, Aoi’s vacant smile still remains. Nene stares into those dead eyes, and tries to ignore the spark of consciousness that struggles to break free. A thin trickle of blood leaks out of one nostril, and Nene must forcibly tear her gaze away from the lifeless body of her best friend, must pin her concern onto the most direct form of danger present in the freezing, damned hallway.

In front of her, Akane has been knocked back a few feet. Where his posture had first been congenial (albeit insistent), he is now appraising her with something calculating, wary, and…

(Is that fear, Nene smells?)

“Yashiro,” he says lowly, hands held high and visible, as though consoling a wild animal. “I mean no harm to you.”

To you, he foolishly tries to reassure her, like that’s even remotely near the heart of the issue, the heart of her hearth, the heart that she can feel herself turning feral in efforts to protect. 

The raising of her metaphorical hackles must be all-too visible, because Akane sighs impatiently and fidgets in place. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? Yashiro, you are in danger!”

Danger?

Danger?

Nene wants to laugh. In fact, she does laugh, her body still splayed wide, hunched over in a deeply defensive stance, contorted unnaturally as she is consumed with the ancient urge to guard protect defend save mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine minemineminemine--

She has a vague idea of what she must look like: hot all over, hair in a deplorable state of disarray, probably, pajamas blown askew, pupils expanded so wide with adrenaline that they eclipse nearly the entirety of her irises, mouth stretched into a hysterical grin as she laughs. And laughs. 

And laughs. 

In danger? Her? In her own home, with the familiarly comforting presence of consolidated dread pushing at her back? Roiling in her veins? Awakening each and every nerve ending lying dormant in her body -- until Nene has no choice but to be aware of the weight of power she now suddenly finds herself wielding?

(Ah. So this is what Hanako meant when he said he’d protect her.)

There is no doubt in her mind, now, that she is not the one in danger here.

As she continues on giggling, hands and feet still glued to each post of the door frame, Akane’s face morphs from ragged determination to something she’s definitely seen before. Something slightly blonder, something a little more handsome, something that had stared at her with cold contempt as it told her never again to linger near it, lest she be smote down.

“Gods above,” Akane whispers, shellshocked. “He’s already got you.”

Perhaps she should be terrified: overwhelmed by the sudden influx of magical (?) prowess that’s worked its way into her body, flowing freely through her with a sensation akin to the scorching path of molten lava; confronting her best friend’s husband, who assumes control of similar supernatural abilities; and all of this occurring within the impossibly short span of four minutes.

Sensory overload is what would be appropriate for her to be experiencing. To cower in fear, to plead for mercy as Akane carries out whatever plan he’d intended to execute this morning -- these are all viable options for her, and most definitely are options that she has chosen to select in times of extreme duress whilst living in this strange, strange building. 

Sometimes, the strings attached to being a tenant wrapped around her neck like an unforgiving noose. Sometimes, it is all she can do to stretch and bare her neck like nothing but a mere whimpering animal of prey to accommodate for the chafe. Sometimes, it is easier to make room for the uncomfortable intrusions in her life -- even if this passivity is short-sighted. Even if it only allows for the eventual tightening of the noose, and her subsequent game of catch-up, as she contorts herself wildly into different positions to appease the cruel vice, to live just one more day, to be allowed to breathe just one more shuddering, labored, strangled breath of air.

Nene is done with being a bystander in her own life, however.

If ‘safety’ means allowing strangers to barge into her home, look at her like she’s got shit for blood, and declare her a lost cause -- if ‘safety’ means failed dinner dates, ex-communication from a best friend she barely got to have -- if ‘safety’ means being handled with oven mitts, invited over for meals out of pity and obligation more than love -- if ‘safety’ means being shunned, repeatedly, over and over, by the very people that claim to want to save her…

Those are not proclamations of safety. Those are the hands pulling frantically at the noose around her neck -- not to unravel, but to tighten.

“Leave. Now.”

Akane furrows his brows, face gone pale and clammy. “Yashiro, please listen to reason. I’m running out of time, won’t be able to talk for much longer -- but that…  that guy in there with you is not who he says he is. You need to leave while you can!”

He extends a hand to her, sweaty and flushed where it shakes before her, inches away from her sternum. “Come with me,” says Akane. Without his trademark red frames, he has unnervingly piercing brown eyes. They shine with an intelligence older than time itself. “Our home is a sacred space. You will be safe there, with us. Something can be done for what’s happened to you, I’m sure, and then we’ll go from there. Please. You don’t have to do this alone.”

His fingers are so thin, so pale. Nene remembers watching them chop up thin rounds of green onion. Nene remembers watching them card lovingly through Aoi’s hair -- the same Aoi who now sits crumpled like a broken doll not even three meters away, blood trickling neatly down her face as though cosmetically applied. The fact that Akane isn’t beside himself with worry and outrage is a testament to the severity of the situation.

You don’t have to do this alone.

“Please,” he repeats, thrusting his hand out further towards her. “Ao-chan would be so sad.”

Aoi…

Faintly, Nene feels her grip on the door frame twitch and slide, pinky finger lifting from the metallic surface in dazed reluctance. 

And then -- like most things associated with Hanako, she can sense what’s coming seconds before it actually happens. 

There is a voice distinctly separate from her own internal monologue that tells her to duck! And so she does, with a swiftness nearly too fast for her human body to accommodate for. One moment her gaze is zeroed in on Akane’s open palm, and the next, she’s dropping low and fast to the ground, craning her neck upwards to catch the tail end of Akane being pinned to the opposite wall, shirt tacked to the surface of the building structure by the blade of a butcher’s knife.

As the blade soared through the air, it seemed to have sluiced through whatever time-stopping effect Akane cast on the world outside of 404. Very abruptly, life returns to the corridor like a scratched CD hit one too many times, now forced to produce all of the sound it had been previously withholding. The hustle and bustle of the apartment complex is a cacophonous wave of sound, and it threatens to drown Nene in the midst of its swirling whirlpool. 

She is saved, of course, by the grounding touch at her quaking shoulder blade. 

Hanako’s hand is warm where it closes around the bone and squeezes. She feels the heat of it all the way down to the soles of her feet.

“Found you, clock-keeper.”

Akane struggles uselessly against the knife holding him against the wall, shooting anxious glances down at the still-unconscious Aoi. He doesn’t even bother to acknowledge Hanako. His efforts are still directed entirely towards Nene, who crouches on the ground in part due to the shock of what’s just happened, but mostly to stave off the sudden onslaught of nausea that’s overcome her.

“Do not listen to a word he says,” Akane pants, one hand clutched around the knife handle as the other points directly above her. “That man is a murderer, Yashiro.”

The grip on her shoulder tightens.

Hanako is… 

“Hanako-kun?”

Nene starts to turn around, but Hanako’s firm hold on her keeps her in place: on her knees, back to him, facing blindly ahead.

His voice comes out as playfully jovial as usual, if a little quiet. “I said I’d protect you,” he murmurs, “but it looks like you can handle yourself pretty well, huh?”

The knife comes hurdling back through the air, presumably to be caught by Hanako’s capable grasp and slipped back into the mysterious depths of his rib cage. Nene, although forced into limited vision, can see it in her mind’s eye all too well; the deft handling of that terrifying weapon, the lack of any hint of discomfort as Hanako shoves it into his body, as though he’s done it thousands of times. Nene knows he has. Did he lose all tactile feeling, when he died?

Or has he just gotten used to the pain?

As soon as he’s released, Akane falls to the ground and scoops up Aoi’s limp body. Her arms dangle loosely where they spill over the sides of Akane’s princess cary. She really could be a princess, Nene thinks, one caught in the middle of a war that has nothing to do with her; a casualty of convenience. 

The red haired man stares hard at her once he has Aoi in his grip. “You aren’t in your right mind. But it’s alright, Yashiro. It isn’t too late. Ao-chan would want me to save you, so I will. And soon. Just -- hang on a little bit longer. For her.”

And with one last scathing look thrown above her head, Akane stalks away in the direction of the elevator. It is only when he’s well past the metal doors and plunged into the unfathomable depths of the building that Nene begins to feel the adrenaline coursing through her abruptly drop off into nonexistence. Like a marionette with its strings suddenly severed, she collapses into a heap on the threshold of 404.

Tired. She is so tired it is a chore even to feel her chest rise and fall with the immense effort it takes to keep breathing.

That man is a murderer.

That man is a murderer.

That man is a murderer.

Warm hands swoop seemingly out of nowhere to lift her up from her crumpled heap on the ground. The last image Nene registers in her exhausted, strung out mind is the rapidly decreasing sight of the hallway. Once illuminated by the pale, pure wash of early morning light, the corridor is stolen away from her by the front door swinging heavily shut. 

The hands holding her loosen only once, and it is to lock the deadbolt in place.

Teru’s words from the night before are still rattling torturously around in his brain. Even whilst Kou should be present elsewhere -- at school in casual conversation with Satou and Yokoo, or completing a task as mundane as declining a point card at the konbini -- there is an ever-present undercurrent of anxiety that plagues him. It takes the form of his elder brother’s voice: that cool, collected tenor, whispering into the softest, most vulnerable parts of Kou, relaying to him the devastating message that his best friend (and beloved senpai) is doomed. Physically. Mentally. Spiritually.

Yashiro is doomed.

The fact of the matter haunts him throughout the day and into the evening, worming its way into the soles of his worn off-brand Converse and following him as he makes his nightly trek out of the apartment and towards the complex courtyard. A cartoonishly vivid rain cloud is what it  most closely resembles, really; a force so depressing, so all-encompassing in the disconcertia it rains down upon him, that Kou barely pays any heed to Teru’s indignant warnings about visiting anyone this late at night, let alone That Girl.

Yeah, well. His brother’s ire is the last thing on his mind right now. He’ll shoulder the brunt of it later -- when he fixes things.

Mitsuba doesn’t have the time to open his mouth for another playful reprimanding as Kou bursts through the wrought iron fence enclosing the perimeter of the dark little garden. He’d been walking on his way here, at one point; but the need for -- something, anything more than the grief and guilt he’d been shouldering all day had overpowered him. One moment, he’d been dragging his feet in solemn, reflective silence, and the next, he was racing through the empty halls of their eerily quiet building, hopping hallways and skidding past corners, leaping over caution signs and tumbling through the kudzu-entwined entryway he’s come to know so well, these past two weeks.

The momentum that carried him doesn’t abate once Mitsuba turns to greet him, although he is much more considerably out of breath at the sight of the other boy (which… is saying something, considering he’s just sprinted a good kilometer or two. But everything pales in comparison to Mitsuba, anyways).

“Dumb-ass Traffic Safety-Earring,” those perfectly heart-shaped lips sneer, albeit teasingly. “Just couldn’t wait to see me, huh--”

“Blood bonds. Whaddaya know about ‘em?”

He cuts straight to the chase, panting and bright eyed as he plows through Mitsuba’s (normally welcome) haughty, playful greeting. Kou can see the cogs turning in that pretty little head of his, working out just how to save the face of a lie that’s never existed between the two of them -- not to Kou, at least.

Mitsuba tugs at the strap of his camera, looped around his neck like an accessory. “Hah,” he laughs, fidgeting with the hem of his sleeve. “Y-you must’ve really lost it this time… bluh-- uh. Blood? Bonds?” He staggers backwards in what births as shell shocked surprise, but quickly morphs into abject horror. “You feeling alright? Or did you use all your brain power… trying to… get… here… um.”

In three very quick, very purposeful strides, Kou brings them nose-to-nose in an act of courtesy he should have extended a long time ago. From the very start. Before any of what’s transpiring between them now had had chance to take root and blossom into the current state of affairs, which is this: a boy, another boy, and the garden in which both had fallen prey to a temptation of tragedy.

Cautiously, as though afraid of spooking a wild animal, Kou raises his hands to cup at the sunken hollows of Mitsuba’s pale, pale cheeks.

“Mitsuba.”

But had he come clean the day they’d met -- had Mitsuba not been startled into keeping his supernatural status a secret -- had they both been aware, from the beginning, of what vines and vices they were entangling themselves in, as human and spirit involved in a dangerous game of chicken -- 

“I know.”

Would their limited time together have ended differently?

“ Don’t. ”

Would things have been easier?

“I do. Knew the whole time.”

Would Kou still be feeling as helpless as he does right now, as desperate to please ( to save, an ugly little voice hisses from the depths of his most repressed thoughts) as he is in this moment, flesh to undead, painfully frigid flesh with a boy who will never feel the warmth of his doorway? 

A body lain dormant? A soul shackled to the scene of his own murder, a forbidden garden with fruit so low-hanging that the supple skin of it rots and molds from the outside in?

“Why did you stay?” 

Kou doesn’t know what he expected, going into this. He certainly did not anticipate getting this far. An easy prediction could have been anger, maybe. Betrayal? Some form of lashing out, for sure. A few choice words he’s heard Mitsuba sling at him before, in light of far more trivial matters.

So he is appropriately blindsided when the shorter boy leans into Kou’s big, boxy, trembling hands, and stares up at him with the most pitiful set of watering eyes that Kou has ever had the misfortune of gazing back into. They shine like the stars above, and he’s barely capable of maintaining what flimsy composure he’s been clinging to throughout the entirety of this rapidly spiralling, botched confrontation.

“Why did you stay,” repeats Mitsuba, wretchedly quiet. “If you knew I was --”

“You stayed with me first. Y’make some damn fine company, y’know.”

The tears spill over, cardigan-clothed arms wrap around his midsection with near-suffocating strength, and suddenly, Kou finds himself closer to the object of his wildly boyish affections than he’s ever been before.

Breathe. Fuck. Breathe. He smells so good, shit -- no, don’t focus on that! Breathe!

Mitsuba mumbles something into his chest which sounds suspiciously like stupid boy, but Kou could care less what callous monikers are hurled his way, as long as they’re accompanied by a pretty pink-haired boy stood on his tiptoes to embrace Kou with all the strength his meagre, stringy arms can muster up.

There is a distinctly heavy quality to tonight which separates it from all the other nights spent with his (almost?) friend-who-happens-to-be-a-boy. The darkness surrounding them is just a couple inches deeper; the air hangs thick and full, nearly palpable with unspoken tensions, and… 

 Kou knows -- instinctively, gut-wrenchingly, maddeningly -- that this will be the last time for a long time. 

As an exorcist, developing a sixth sense is crucial to one’s survival in the realm of the paranormal. But sometimes his is just too acute.

 Sometimes the knowledge is too heavy a burden. Sometimes Kou wants to ignore it -- all of it, everything he’s ever been taught and everything he ever will teach to the subsequent lineage of the Minamoto clan -- and burrow himself completely within this hidden, sacred garden. He wants to flower here, undisturbed, roots planted firmly beneath the ground as he’s tended to by the sunlight of Mitsuba’s smile, the sustenance of Mitsuba’s attention, the love inherent and wordless in every action traded between the two of them; in their own language, crafted specially by and for themselves and only themselves. 

In another life, he swears his heart to this place, to this boy. In another life, he sacrifices himself to satisfy the deep, carnal urge burning volatile deep within that screams at him to keep this boy with him and him with that boy. Forever.

But this is not that life. 

He is not -- cannot allow himself to fall into the all-too-enticing wiles of codependency. As much as Mitsuba presents a safe haven, an escape from the daily stressors of life, and a love written about only in the fluffiest, most far-fetched of fairy tales… 

At the end of the day, Kou has a duty to perform. He has a family to show up for, he has friends that rely on him out of good faith, and to abandon the loved ones in his life in an infatuation-addled sense of escapism is an unthinkable act. He would have to be in an impossibly desolate place to even consider it. 

After minutes, hours, days, centuries of holding each other in solemn silence, the boy in his arms retracts just slightly to meet his gaze. It seems Mitsuba has calmed himself enough to speak. Kou can’t stop staring at the beauty mark underneath his left eye. 

“I dunno a lot about spirit business ‘cuz I haven’t been -- y’know -- for a super long time. But I do know that blood stuff is the most powerful kind of magic in either shore… ‘nd once it’s done, it’s done. Are you -- you didn’t do anything stupid , did you?”

And the intensity of the concern of Mitsuba’s face would have been sweet -- elating, even, had it not been misplaced. “Not me,” mutters Kou, regretfully, “but a friend a’ mine is in some pretty freakin’ serious danger. Looks like there ain’t too much we can do about it, either.”

A very conflicted look passes over Mitsuba’s face, the sudden onset of overcast on an otherwise sunny, undisturbed beach. The brewings of a dark storm linger behind those candied pink eyes, even when the rest of his impossibly perfect features smooth out. 

“... I think I know someone who can help…”

“Really? You serious?”

“Y- yes, ow, let go of me you overgrown pomeranian, I can’t breathe!!”

“Heh. My bad. Got a little excited, there.”

“I could tell,” pouts Mitsuba, rubbing at his protruding ribs, visible through even two layers of thin fabric. “B-but anyways. If you’re looking for help, seek out the green haired witch on the fifth floor. She’ll know what to do.”

“Fifth floor?” Confirms Kou, already drawing away with a newfound burst of adrenaline, eyes bright and muscles coiling in preparation to sprint his way back up the building.

But before he can break completely away from Mitsuba’s sphere of influence, the other boy pins him to his spot with just one soft, forlorn look. It is as though the roots and stems of all the otherworldly plantlife in the garden slither up to grab at his ankles and hold him prisoner, thorns biting into the scarred, calloused flesh of his athlete’s ankles. 

“...Be careful.” It’s not what Mitsuba wanted to say. Kou can tell, because every time Mitsuba second-guesses himself, he always bites down at the exact same spot on his lower lip. There’s a permanent dent there, one that Kou wants desperately, shamefully, to remedy with his own mouth. “There’s eyes everywhere in this place. Don’t be dumb, dumbass.”

Kou smirks. “Don’t worry ‘bout me, sweetheart. ‘M a professional.”

This, apparently, is enough to break through whatever dark cloud that had momentarily hung over Mitsuba’s demeanor. The shorter boy rolls his eyes, huffs, and the overcast breaks through to reveal the beautiful landscape of light and warmth Kou is much more accustomed to basking in.

“W-whatever. Get lost.”

“I’ll be back!” Kou promises, already spun around on his heel as he jogs out of the garden and back into the belly of the beast.

He is gone so fast, so enthusiastically, that he fails to hear Mitsuba’s final, trailing lament.

“I’m so sorry,” whispers the ghost, sinking to his knees as he buries his face in his pale, trembling hands -- hands with the pallor of the waxing moon -- hands once creamy with a rich, alabaster hue, now soon to be stained red by the blood of the one he loves -- loved, loved the most. 

The ensuing thunderstorm is torrential and terrifying. Some might say that the night sky itself mourns the loss of one of its own stars.

Mailroom duties are one of the more unfavorably bland tasks of landlordship. Tscuhigomori would know.

Bills, bills, questionable magazine subscriptions, more bills. Perhaps it’s uncouth to sift through the personal packages of tenants. He would stop -- really, he would -- but life as an immortal denizen gets boring after the first handful of centuries. Especially when he can see what’s coming as easily as flipping through a particularly engaging hardback.

But sixth-floor Takeuchi-san’s monthly installment of Maids Gone Wild ? Priceless. She’s got oddly specific tastes, but hey. He’s not complaining. 

He thinks about complaining, however, when the already-dim lights flicker out into complete darkness. The thick, sludge-like black that fills the mailroom is opaque, suffocating, and -- most irritatingly -- keeps him from perusing the contents of his daily entertainment.

“Hi, Sensei.”

Tsuchigomori exhales sharply out of his nose. Fuck. He knew he’d forgotten something on his grocery run yesterday. His bottomless breast-pocket is empty of the one talisman he is in need of the most, right now.

“Not your Sensei anymore.”

The creature’s eyes crinkle in morbid amusement. The rich, red pigment of them is so strong that the color threatens to leak and spill out of the sides, like a berry crushed, a heart wrenched out of a fresh corpse, still beating as it struggles against the hand that wrings the muscle out of its last few pathetic spurts of gore.

“That’s funny, Sensei.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“How are you today, Sensei?”

“Tired.”

“Why, Sensei?”

“ Because, Ts-- Brat.”

His mistake was brief, but there all the same.

“What business do you have here,” Tsuchigomori tries again. 

“Play to find out.”

Find out, the thing across from him trills in a cruel, bastardized version of the childish glee Tsuchigomori had once known. Had once held close to his heart -- as close as any supernatural entity can hold a human life, that is.

“I need ‘find’ nothing ‘out.’ Reveal your intentions or begone from this place.”

To even suggest that something lies hidden from the overarching scope of Tsuchigomori’s command of future knowledge…

Were it any other being of life or death, he would have written it off as a harmless bluff. But there have always been exceptions to the books of fate. 

A notable narrative, discontinued right at the apex of its plot trajectory, resides just four floors above.

In lieu of a proper answer, the creature across from him stretches its mouth wide in what is probably supposed to be a smile.  

There are worse things than death -- and doubly so for those who try to evade her.

Tsuchigomori wishes he’d had the foresight to relay this truth to the kids before it had gone to shit, all those years ago.

“Hurry, Senpai, c’mon! Faster!”

Running, running, running. Heaving pants, using her clammy fingertips to guide her way by the contours of the walls encasing them, thick ankles tripping clumsily over each other, acting on their own accord, as though the sentient consciousness they have so suddenly acquired commands them to keep her from advancing any further: all of these sensations swirl and combine with one another to paint the terrifying tapestry in which Yashiro Nene now finds herself the star protagonist.

Today was not a bad day, but it hadn’t been great, either. The upheaval of Akane’s visit was already enough to set her considerably on edge -- and that’s saying something! Nene’s elastic patience had swollen over the last three weeks to accommodate increasingly grander and larger feats of unreality. Even her best friend’s husband of several years revealing himself as a supernatural being wouldn’t have taken such a toll on her, if only he had stolen the limelight from all other external forces in Nene’s life and made himself the sole surprise for the day.

Instead, their strange duel did not just open the already-splayed floodgates. The gates have now been wrenched off of their proverbial hinges, and here she is, in the midst of the broiling tsunami.

Hanako dodged questions about anything concerning Akane or the outlandish accusations he’d made, as well as Nene’s own line of questioning as to -- pardon her French -- how the everloving fuck she was able to fend off an entity of that caliber. In addition, he’d proclaimed it unsafe for Nene to traverse the halls today, and implored her to stay home. If only for her personal security. If only for her sake. If only, if only, if only.

And it… was startlingly easy to fall into Hanako’s demands. 

Even broaching the doorway had rendered her momentarily weak. To leave 404 was now a daunting feat, one that she was perhaps even less eager than the ghost himself to see herself accomplish. 

Of course, that was until she’d been quite literally snatched out of her own household.

Thunderous knocking, a raspy, boyish yell she’d never thought she would get the chance to hear again, and as soon as she’d cracked open the door (to Hanako’s disgruntled displeasure) there was an iron grip on her wrist and she was being swept into the hall before she even had time to claw at the doorway. When Hanako tried to follow, Kou brandished that strange, golden, glowing weapon he’d dragged along with him on their first evening together -- the evening that roguish, handsome, lovable, sweet Kou had tried to kill Hanako.

In that harrowing, split-second moment in which Hanako had reached out to pull her back into the apartment, to wrench her out of Kou’s girm, protective grip, Nene was swiftly reminded of that old intention: the ice-cold steel in his eyes, the lightning dancing manically across his body as he surged forward in an act of righteous violence. An act he hasn’t repeated since, in the near-month’s time of their three-way friendship. An action he hasn’t felt the need to repeat.

Until now, apparently.

The realization slid down her spine in a revoltingly invasive, slimy crawl.

Something has gone very, very wrong.

And here she finds herself presently: half-carried by the blond exorcist as he shuttles the both of them off to some urgent destination. For all the tricks that the building is fond of pulling, the pathway there is blessedly brief and straightforward. There is some elevator hopping, sure, as well as a great deal of legwork, but it isn’t nearly as circuitous as Nene had been anticipating.

In fact, the hallways themselves almost seem to bend to their will, leading them along a journey nearly pre-ordained in how quickly they arrive. Nene is out of her mind for a good portion of it -- blinking in and out of lucidity, frantically willing herself not to panic at the sudden onslaughts of nausea, fatigue, and muscle weakness that plagued her from the moment she’d been ripped from Hanako’s arms. By the time she regains some of the dregs of her awareness, she is able to faintly register that she’s been propped up against Kou’s side, as they stand before a door that she has never seen before.

“Apartment… 555,” Nene pants as she reads the emerald placard uncomprehendingly. “That can’t… be right. The floors, they, they only… go up to… the forties?”

Before either of them can knock, the door swings slowly open, as though carried by an unforeseen cool breeze. 

Nene feels it when her heart stutters -- genuinely terrified for the first time all day-- over a skipped beat. “Y-You’re…!”

“Yes,” says Nanamine Sakura, as cool and fresh as a spot of afternoon tea. “And you’re late.”

 
Once ushered inside and lead to sit at a round, low tea table that gives Nene some rather unfortunate flashbacks, Sakura (as she had reintroduced herself as in no uncertain terms, scoffing at Nene’s overly-polite floundering) starts to finally, blessedly, explain.

“I am a witch. Hyuuga Natsuhiko is my apprentice--” her subtle grimace is punctuated by a loud cacophony of thuds and crashes from the kitchen, “--and we made the decision to take root in this building in order to save the earthly lives of all of its human tennants.”

It is at this moment that Natsuhiko bursts forth from behind the partition screen that divides the kitchen from the rest of the living space, bearing the tray of a traditional tea set. He’s just as handsome as he had been on their date -- an event that feels as though it had taken place many lifetimes away from the one that Nene currently occupies. He sets down in front of her a porcelain cup filled to the brim with a cloudy liquid, and the vapor emanating from it alone is enough to bring Nene back from the pain-addled stupor in which she’s been lingering from the moment she had left her home.

“Oh, wow thank you,” she moans in gratitude after nearly draining all that’s been served to her. Wow. She can practically feel her body begin to knit itself back together. “This is, like, healing me. What is it? Can you make more? There’s -- there is more, right… ?”

In lieu of a response, her enthusiastic query is met with nothing but empty silence. 

“Right?”

But repetition doesn’t seem to be the answer. The longer the silence stretches, the more uncomfortable Nene grows -- the longer the shadows loom, the darker the corners appear, the brighter Sakura’s lime green eyes glow like those of a particularly cold, assessing housecat. 

The woman across from her watches her steadily for one, two more beats of quietude in which time itself seems suspended, before responding. “A cleansing rinse,” she says, evenly, “brewed in preparation for exorcisms.”

“It’s literally just salt and a bunch of nasty herbs in boiling water.” Natsuhiko chimes in, helpfully. “Most people hate it, actually! Can’t even make it through a cup! I know I couldn’t, my first time, haha.”

When Nene turns to face Kou where he sits beside her, seeking out any kind of authenticity to pin to what’s just been said, she finds not the reassuring pillar of bonafide confidence which usually settles on him with comfortable ease; rather, Nene gets halfway through her pivot before she is shackled to the spot by the look her best friend gives her.

Never has she seen him quiver. Let alone at her. 

Kou is wide-eyed, slack jawed, flinching back when she reaches out to press a comforting hand at his knee, almost spilling his full cup in the process. 

“Kou-kun?”

“S-sorry,” he mumbles, jamming a shaky fist into his pocket. “”S just… well… “

“Just what?”

She can feel that familiar irritation lingering on the horizon, threatening to slither up along the softest, most intimate parts of her and sink their fangs in, taking root, filling her with a contempt so foreign in its intensity that she has trouble recognizing where it is, or what it spurns from.

But before she can lose control, Sakura’s clear timbre neatly slices through the tension. “The rinse is designed to rid the body of any lingering malignant energies. Ill omens. Curses. Possession.” And here she pauses, leaning imperceptibly forward, unblinking as she holds Nene’s wide gaze. “Of course, the effects are not permanent. The afflicted oftentimes describe a sensation akin to immediate momentary relief.”

“Like popping an Advil!” Chimes Natsuhiko.

“And if the host remains pure of soul,”

Sakura motions to the brunette beside her, who seemed to have already anticipated her doing so. The rounded porcelain cup is already halfway to his lips before Nene hears Kou’s sharp intake of breath, feels the hairs raise on the nape of her neck. Natsuhiko slurps what cannot be more than a teaspoon of the strange, milky liquid, before gagging instantaneously. He spews what little he took in back out into the cup, coughing harshly as though he’s ingested some strange ailment instead of an unassuming little sip from the same drink that Nene guzzled down in an impassioned, needy fervor just minutes prior.

He is still snorting and rearing -- albeit overdramatically -- when Sakura deigns to speak again.

“ That happens.”

Her statement hangs heavily in the air for one, two, three heartbeats. And that’s all Nene can stand, her kettle boiling too close to full to be able to contain herself for much longer. Be it frustration at the lack of clear explanation, anxiety at whatever the implications are of what Sakura has just implied, or plain faced anger at being dragged out of the warm safety of her apartment in the middle of the night, still in her pajamas, mind you!, Nene finds herself enveloped in the vortex of a steadily rising heatwave, the apex of which burns whitehot at the base of both of her little fingers.

“So- so- so what does that even mean? Am I… what you said? Cursed? Did someone-- hex me, or something? Am I nothing but a ‘bad omen?’” She sights hotly, fingernails digging so hard into the cup in her grasp that, were she of sounder mind and less concerned with being livid, she’d be afraid the pale, fragile thing would shatter under the pressure. 

“You know, it’s really funny. Everyone loves telling me there’s something wrong with me. It’s not a new thing, so don’t feel bad. But nobody -- not my best friend, not either of her husbands, not my creepy fucking landlord, not the one boy I thought I could finally t-trust,” she must ignore Kou’s sharp intake of breath, must barrel straight past the hurt she knows is dripping like a bloody handprint of her own size right smack across the apple of his rosy, youthful cheek, “nobody, and I mean nobody, ever tells me what exactly went wrong. Nobody wants that on their conscience. Nobody wants anything to do with me once they get close enough. It’s always ‘Yashiro, you’re a danger’ or ‘Yashiro, you can never talk to me or my brother again.’”

“Yikes,” whispers Natsuhiko, wincing.

She can’t -- she can’t handle this. What is she even doing here, with these strangers -- both of whom she’s known before in the most intimately humiliating context of failed dates. And their purpose in her life is now… what? To embarrass her over some sick joke, a cruel prank with tea almost as unappetizing as she so decidedly is?

The force of her own palm slamming into her forehead hurts in a way that calms her, almost, from how satisfyingly right it feels to reach out and make something break. 

“‘Yashiro no,’ ‘Yashiro stop,’ ‘Yashiro don’t,’” Nene parrots, voice slipping high and cracking on the jagged edges of her own tears. “You all -- think you kn-know -- what’s best for me ,” Dimly, she’s aware of hands trying to close around her arms in an attempt to stop her self-inflicted pummeling, but this only sends her even further away from herself. She screams, rejecting the touch, and flings the offending appendages back in the face of their owner. “But you don’t know ANYTHING! Nuh-nuh-nuh- nobody knows anything about me, no one but--”

“Amane?”

In an instant, she is frozen. Fists pause midway in their ascent back to her pounding head. Manic shrieking dies in the dried depths of her spasming throat. Mouth hanging ajar, eyes throbbing with pressure as she stares down the green-haired witch sitting primly not even a foot across the table. 

“How do you know that name,” says Nene, lowly.

She is still in a half-guarded stance, with her arms held defensively (if feebly) in front of her ducked head, as though anticipating a series of devastating blows. It takes everything within her not to flinch back in shock when Sakura slowly brings her hands up -- palms out -- and wraps them gently around the battered, bruised skin of Nene’s knuckles; so gently, in fact, that Nene is breathless enough from the tenderness of the touch to allow herself to be unfurled. 

Shaking. She’s shaking. Or is that the building itself? Laughing at her, at her short-lived, pathetic meltdown?

This time, when arms encase her, she allows herself to be held. She knows it’s Kou because she can smell the faintly sweet scent of those potato jellies he always carries around in his pockets. She wonders if he would slip her one right now, if she asked.

Probably not.

Sakura begins to speak as the darkness of the apartment swells in size, drowns everything within its overarching reach save for those luminous eyes, bobbing and swaying like a lone, forgotten paper lantern in the desolate expanse of a village left to starve and perish. 

“Fifteen years ago, this apartment complex was once home to the Yugi twins: Yugi Amane and his younger twin brother. As children, they were close and spent not one day apart. Their family was poor and came from little more than the skin on their backs. The children struggled through school -- and even moreso as the younger of the two fell terminally ill. With absent, working parents, and no means to shoulder the cost of an actual hospital visit, it then fell upon Amane to become the primary caretaker for his brother.”

Gasping quietly, Nene clutches a hand to her wildly beating heart.

Hanako?

Hanako?

“Resentment bubbled quietly in him. Amane was always a star student, and often came first in exam rankings across all subjects. But -- forced to drop everything and nurse his brother back to health -- Amane began to slip. His marks fell. His attendance dropped. All but one of his teachers lost their faith entirely, and abandoned the star student in his greatest hour of need. With no parents, no mentors, not even a friend, Amane had only his brother, whose condition continued to plummet further and further with each passing day.”

Although it is a cruel request and borne from a split-second of selfishness, Nene almost tells her enough. Stop. I can’t hear this. I can’t take it.

Sweet Hanako… who laughs and kids as though he hasn’t a care in the world? Who sings along with her when she blasts her boy idol bands at full volume? Who has seen all her favorite movies and can recite them line for line -- and does, on occasion, whenever she’s particularly mopey? Who has rescued her time and time again from danger, who made it his mission to protect her even when he can’t be around?

That Hanako? That is the Hanako who -- who once wasn’t Hanako? 

She’s never had a chance to fully grasp the concept that there was a boy, before there was the Hanako that she has come to know. Hanako has never let her meet him, preferring to squirrel him away underneath the bath mat, behind the shower curtain, down the sink drain, and anywhere else that is both infuriatingly close and frustratingly inaccessible. 

Sakura doesn’t allow him to remain hidden, however. 

With every word she is uprooting everything Nene has been able to piece together in an attempt to build a cohesive image of her roommate. That fallacy shatters, now, like the shards of a broken bathroom mirror, scattered at her feet in the wake of whatever violent act would warrant a bathroom left in such gruesome disarray.

“Out of luck, out of patience, and out of time, Yugi Amane did what any human does when confronted by the terrifying ordeal of their own mortality: he prayed.”

No…

“And wished,”

No…

“--For anyone who might be listening to come and stop his brother’s suffering.”

Nene is so lost in the tale -- that isn’t an urban legend of some far-off, fantastical variety and instead the life of the boy she holds dearest -- that she can almost see it playing out right before her eyes: Hanako, starved and straggly as he is, run ragged by life’s cruel twists and turns, desperate for any kind of answer. Anything to help. Anything to ease the burden, ail the pain. Back then, was he still all sunken eyes and chapped lips? Was his head still a grisly oil spill of a mop? Did he chew his nails the same way he does now, when he’s deliberating on something? Did he laugh the same way, tinkling and eerie? 

Did he laugh?

It’s almost too much to conjure up the vision of Hanako as a scared little boy. But there is a persistent, nagging urge that grows louder and more obnoxious, blooming from the base of her skull and all across the expanse of her aching head, blinding her from all other thoughts except the one screaming at her to watch watch watch watch watch.

The ease with which she’s able to sink into the vision is something that, dimly, distantly, she recognizes as alien. This is not her memory that she’s accessing, not her story; so why, then, does she see everything play out in perfect color? Why do her eyes slip closed and reveal to her not the opaque blackness that should have been there, but instead, the view of an apartment she simultaneously knows and does not know? Why is there dirt and grime caked along her cream walls? Why is the television set nearly two decades out of date? Why does the air smell not of the fragrant earthy tinge of her window sill planter, but something… sour? Metallic? Spoiled?

“Unfortunately for him, his wish had been heard loud and clear. Down came a god known only to those dolorous enough to solicit him.”

Nene does not even have the presence of mind to remind herself that she is physically far as can be from the events unfolding both in her ears and in front of her eyes. From the moment she’d met him, Nene was never much good at maintaining an appropriate amount of degrees of separation between herself and her roommate. 

And now, she supposes, these are the consequences of what had always been a downward trajectory. There was never a moment to correct her course of descent, never a chance to not careen straight into the open arms that were always -- always -- waiting for her to crash into. Waiting to keep her there, fully submerged in the soft, worn fabric of frayed wool and the cloying, nostalgic smell of freshly baked goods. Donuts. Unglazed. Homemade.

“A god of calamity was what Yugi Amane invited into his home. And once that god agreed to the fulfillment of Amane's wish in exchange for a price, there was no return from the horrific fate that would soon ensue.”

Nene’s body breaks into a cold sweat. Chills wrack her form and render her wobbly on the thin legs that carry her through what once had been her home, and is now, instead, a maze rendered barely navigable by the utter lack of control she has over her own limbs. The dissonance between body and mind is disturbing enough that it threatens to drive her out of her own mind with the nightmarishness of it all.

“Amane was swiftly possessed by the entity, who used his supernatural influence to stoke the flames of resentment burning low and dormant inside of him.”

She feels her arms begin to jerk erratically. Is -- was that Hanako, in this vision? Or are those her arms, flailing and contorting at inhuman angles, bending and snapping and bruising black and blue from the strain?

And then the heat.

God, the heat. Nene thought she knew what it was like to harbor anger. But this is something else entirely. This isn’t mere upset. This isn’t frustration, nor is it fear, or contempt, or any other pitifully mortal emotion that she’s experienced thus far.

This is Hell. This is the place where things go to burn and suffer in the flames of their own sin. This is what it feels like to bathe in misery. This is what it feels like to grip the handle of a butcher’s knife -- the black handle of it clumsily large in her small, pale hands; this is what it feels like to have every murder fantasy realized, every sick daydream, every shameful desire now brought to life in vivid, terrifying clarity.

(Somewhere very far away from here, a young woman is howling in anguish. Her legs writhe like a bed of serpents, and still she is held down, forced to shoulder the weight of a story she should have never heard, starring a boy she should have never met.)

“Amane, now blinded with rage, grabbed a knife and walked to the bathroom--”

Heavy footsteps thud thud thudding like the beat of her heart like pounding of her pulse--

“--where his younger brother was soaking in a medicinal bath--”

--wide amber eyes she’s seen those before but not like this not so kind never this kind--

“--and then, incensed by the god residing within him, rage exploited by preternatural means--”

--her hand is lifting the knife is raising why is it doing that stop stop stop nononononononono--

“---Amane stabbed his sickly younger brother to death.”

And now -- now begins the similarity. Now Nene can finally recognize something, in the haze of unbearable agony stretching her body to its very limits.

The red that coats her hands, the water, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the face that those wide, trusting eyes belong to, still as open and loving and vulnerable as they had been mere seconds ago… she’s seen this hue before. She knows the way it refracts the early morning sunlight. She’s seen it sparkle with humor and dull with boredom. She’s watched it watch her, trace her every movements and cling lose, so close, like meat to the bone.

Knife clattering to the tile, bathwater overflowing in a rich carmine waterfall, she turns around to face the mirror.

Hanako stares back at her.

Bloodied and wan and dark in the cheekbones, in the eyes, in the space where his thighs don’t touch and all other places he is absent where he should be full, Hanako stares at her. 

(His eyes are so black. She almost doesn’t recognize him.)

He maintains eye contact even as the insufferable heat leaves their body, even as he is drained of everything but his churning innards and the heavy sledgehammer’s slug of his heartbeat. Even as he crouches to retrieve the knife. Even as he turns it inwards. Through it all, Hanako holds her gaze steadily through the mirror, as though he’s comforting her through what is about to be the conclusion to a horrendous, absolutely wicked little tale.

No! She wants to scream, wait, please, wait! Wait!

(For who?)

The last image she glimpses of Hanako is a wry smile, winking as he presses one finger to the dry twist of his lips, blood and gore dusting across the apples of his cheeks in what could have been sun-kissed freckles. 

(If only. If only, if only, if only.)

Nene’s eyes fly open and she surges against whatever is pinning her down. It takes a moment to remember that Kou -- her friend, she knows him, she does, she does -- is holding her to prevent her from bruising herself on the low tea table. It takes an even longer moment to quell the nausea swirling in her gut as soon as she remembers where she is. Who she’s with. Who she isn’t.

“Wish technically fulfilled,” continues Sakura, and Nene almost snaps her own neck with how fast she refocuses her attention on the green haired witch, “the god intended to receive Amane’s body to inhabit permanently as his price. Instead, Amane exacted revenge on the scheming god by taking his own life and thus withholding payment.”

She’s still panting. Her ribs ache.

“Enraged, the god used its power to reanimate the body of Amane’s younger brother to inhabit as payment. As punishment for his insolence, Amane was cursed into supernatural-dom and damned to haunt his childhood home and final resting place, granting human wishes as foolish and misguided as his own, for the rest of eternity.

The god now roams these halls wearing the skin of the younger Yugi twin, looking to play with Amane as they once did, as children. Should you run into him, he will spare your life if you give him a lollipop -- the younger Yugi’s favorite snack. Otherwise, he will steal your soul, and keep you as a tenant forever.

This is the legend of the Disastrous Haunting of Room 404.”

Nobody speaks for a very long moment. 

And then, weakly, Nene struggles to sit upright, extricating herself from Kou’s (now slackened) grip. “But you -- Sakura-san, you said that you moved in here to save everyone? Right?”

“ ‘Did.’ Past tense.”

“ Hah? Why? The hell did that scumbag do to ya’?!”

Sakura locks eyes with Nene, even though it wasn’t her who had spoken. Nene feels her breath stutter and die in her throat.

“You will come to learn that there is little a human can do, when bound to the supernatural.”

Dread, cold and tingling, creeps up along the curve of her spine and expands outwards, metastasizing so quickly that Nene is rendered frozen dumb before she can fully understand the implications of Sakura’s words -- all she can comprehend, in these last few terse, unnerving moments is that she and Kou are not safe. They never were. 

Stalling for time, for any semblance of escape -- that’s what she should be doing, right? If she could move, she’d pinch Kou’s thigh in warning; sound an alarm; scream; anything to get them out of the spider’s web in which they had been so cleverly entrapped.

“What can you do?”

“Only what He wants. And what He wants, Yashiro Nene, is you. Out of his way.”

After that, the dim lighting of the apartment morphs into a tangible black. She can barely think to yell out before Sakura’s blandly melancholy face and Natsuhiko’s complicit, sympathetic grin are swallowed from view, and Nene is drowning in the sheer nothingness that gobbles her up whole. 

With the last of her remaining consciousness, Nene’s final thoughts are spent not on where Kou has gone, or where either of them will end up; they don’t even concern Aoi, and how the last time she saw her best friend it had been after she’d been bleeding and smiling blankly back up at her, in the wake of a terrifying encounter.

No, the only person occupying Nene’s mind in her ending credits are, as always, the real star of the show. The main character to her supporting role. The one with whom all of this has spawned, and with whom it will be buried when it dies.

Hanako, she thinks, wretchedly. I am so, so sorry.

And then she is gone, lost to unknown depths.

Chapter Text

Time is not on my side.

This is what replays on a near-endless loop inside the mind of Aoi Akane as he scrambles frantically to save the life of his wife’s childhood best friend. 

There was a certain point in his life -- not nearly long ago enough for his liking -- where he would have reveled in the uninterrupted flow of time and his powerlessness to stop it. But now, when he is arguably in the most need of the strange abilities he’s been forced to inherit, his efforts were insufficient. He was too late. He’s failed.

He’s failed Aoi, whom he knows will be distraught and beside herself with grief when she learns of Yashiro’s inevitable passing. He’s failed himself and his own personal promise to defend his fellow human residents, lest they be entrapped by supernatural forces such as he was. 

Perhaps most importantly, he’s failed Yashiro herself. 

An innocent she was, albeit a high-risk one. When Aoi first suggested inviting her troubled, silver-haired friend into their apartment complex as an escape from her own, Akane very strongly considered refuting the idea -- for reasons, of course, that would have sounded contrived and perplexing in even the best of circumstances.

Poor Nene. Akane can hear Aoi’s lamenting tone as clear as day, all these months later, as though it was just yesterday. Her symptoms have been flaring up again.

Curse his throbbing heart, that bled for anything Aoi’s did. Symptoms?

You know! I’ve told you a million times before! That’s minus two points, mister. Mild schizophrenia. She was diagnosed as a child, right around when we first met. Anyways, she’s just had a bad episode. I don’t want her living on her own, so far away… and with her family being how they are, and everything…

A ‘bad episode?’

The way Aoi’s lips had tightened at the corners… her darkening eyes… it’s not something Akane thinks he will ever be able to completely expunge from his memory. The sight is dyed with guilt, glistening and carmine. 

She thinks she can talk to spirits.

And that was really the point where Akane should have shut the conversation down. Maybe direct Aoi towards the idea of transferring Yashiro into an assisted living home, or even an institutionalized setting. Either of those options would have been exponentially more influential in the betterment of Yashiro’s mental health. Any other option would have been miles, leagues, lightyears ahead of what Aoi was so innocently -- yet so insidiously -- suggesting.

However, as he’d looked around the cozy life he’d built for himself and his partners: an impossibly perfectly furnished living room and kitchen; married and settled at just twenty-four to the loves of his life; a stable job at one of Japan’s biggest banking franchises; and without any material stressors in sight…

Akane realized that he would never be happy.

Not as someone who’d had to bargain with the very essence of his humanity in order to acquire all of these things. Not as someone who’d been caught unawares, lacking in judgement, in strength, in fortitude, and was able to do only what any human does when confronted with the terrifying ordeal of their own mortality:

He’d prayed.

And he’d wished.

And he’d gotten to live the life of his wildest dreams.

For a price.

Now, he lives with his wife and boyfriend who love him not because he’d put in the work of courting them, or because he possesses any particular outstanding, attractive traits. No. Akane is able to wake up every day and smell a freshly prepared breakfast -- roll over to kiss his high-school crush with all the impassioned fervor of years of backlogged yearning, and clock into his well-paying shift as an esteemed accountant -- by virtue of a deal he’d struck.

Depressed, financially struggling, living alone, wallowing in self-pity, and at the end of his proverbial rope, Akane had sent  up one last prayer to be heard -- for someone to please save me from my suffering.

Imagine his surprise as a lifelong skeptic when there had been an answer. Granted, it arrived to him in the form of a young, strange looking young man wrapped up in an ominously dark Shosei uniform. 

But who was Akane to know that this bargain would have caused such a calamitous outcome?

Who was Akane to know that this boy was not a boy, and instead was a god wielding power and severity the likes of which Akane’s woeful, inferior human mind could never even hope to comprehend? Who was Akane to know that he should have been carrying a lollipop as he’d trudged up his building’s decrepit back stairwell, all those months ago? Who was Akane to know that he’d be saved from his own personal hell -- at the expense of being delivered directly into an even more furiously raging inferno?

He hadn’t known. Nobody had bothered to tell him that there was a price still to pay, after hanging from the end of his ‘proverbial’ rope until his body went stiff and his eyes fizzed out and all was quiet and dark. To be dragged cruelly back from his momentary bliss of abysmal peace and forced to fulfill his end of a prayer he’d made as a split-second, last ditch effort… it was a cruelty known only by a few others in this tortured, unbearably mortal plane.

The entity called Tsukasa answered his plea, that fateful night. Waited until after Akane had given up on divine intervention and went ahead and said goodbye to his pitiful existence -- just to encase his newly freed spirit in a set of iron bars, built of torment and enforced by the very fabric of the Far Shore itself.

So, yes. Akane got the girl -- and the guy. He got the job. He gets all the promotions, all the bonuses, all the security he could ever need or ask for. His mother finally said she was proud of him. 

But each detail of this new life -- down to the way Aoi’s plum locks blossomed across his chest at night in all the ways he’d ever fantasized about -- had been fabricated out of thin air, borne of a wish that rewrote the laws of reality itself. As beautiful as she is (and always was), Akane can’t deny the empty, vacant look in her eyes. He can’t ignore the way Lemon putters around the kitchen constantly, waiting on him practically hand and foot, nearly buffering as he flounders for a response when Akane tells him that no, he’s not hungry, no, he doesn’t need the bathrooms cleaned, no, he doesn’t want a foot massage, no, no, no, no.

The illusion of perfection always comes at a cost. And what it cost not only Akane, but Aoi and Lemon as well, was their autonomy.

(Some days, he doesn’t recognize to whom he comes home. The way Aoi’s eyes glow in the total darkness of their shared bedroom… it reminds him too much of the thing that had damned him here in the first place).

And, of course, Akane was bound in eternal servitude to the entity called Tsukasa as payment for his wish being granted. In exchange for living out his lifelong fantasy of domesticity, Akane must bear the burden of the building Clock Keeper: regulating the normally-undeterred current of time, speeding along untimely deaths, and all other fate-altering acts of service are what he is condemned to -- had condemned himself to the moment that he’d sunk low enough to drag other people into his own sick, perverted escapist daydreams. 

Akane is able to recognize it, now. He’d been in denial for so long a time it was as though nothing passed at all; he’d spent days (weeks? months?) stuck in the picture perfect reality the entity called Tsukasa had created for him, drinking up the attention, lavishing in his newfound romances.

And then Aoi -- in a rare, unexplained moment of lucidity -- had brought up Yashiro Nene, of all people. Her childhood best friend that nobody had neither heard from nor seen in months. 

She thinks she can talk to spirits, she’d sighed tiredly, her amethyst eyes as clear and unclouded as the day they’d met.

Aoi Aoi didn’t get tired. Not in Akane’s suffocatingly saccharine dream-world. 

It was enough to have him leaning out of his chair, blinking to make sure he wasn’t imagining the resurface of a woman he thought he’d lost to the ether long ago. Aoi had been awoken from her preternatural tranquilization by just the mere mention of Yashiro. If this was what a simple thought could do… if there was still hope, maybe, for Aoi to shed her doll-like demeanor… for Lemon to break free from the binds of his confinement… for Akane to rectify his sins, and to free the innocents he had so selfishly entrapped in his weakest, most destitute moments…

There was no hesitation. We should help her move in.

And then, four months later, it all went sideways. So much for meddling in the affairs of the spirit realm. Akane should have known better. He should have. He should have. 

Instead, he so foolishly tempted fate once more, and now he is racing against time to undo the severity of his transgressions.

The second floor is almost painful to enter, but he dutifully trudges through the difficulty, even as his lungs begin to spasm, even as his brow erupts in a downpour of perspiration, even as his physical body begins to degrade the nearer he draws to one of the literal banes of his existence.

To approach the dwelling of an exorcist is more than a death wish, as he is in his current state. After all, he’s been fortunate enough to have his life spared thus far by the infamous Prince of the Second Floor -- perhaps seeking him out is too great a show of arrogance. Or, it would be, if a young woman’s life weren’t currently in jeopardy.

Akane drags himself the last few steps it takes to cross the hall from the elevator and posits his quavering, clammy body beside the door of apartment #200. It’s all he can do to brace one hand on the door frame as the other lands in three heavy, solid, thudding clunks just below the peep hole. He knows he’s made himself a visible target, which in and of itself is an admission of the neutrality he hopes to maintain throughout this meeting (keyword: hopes. The Prince is not known for his benevolence, after all).

Silence. Nothing fills the air save for the sound of Akane’s labored breathing. 

He’s about to give up and zombie-walk his sorry ass back up to the fourth floor to try one last time, when the door swings violently open.

“Kou, you nearly scared me half to death running out of here like that, and at this hour, what on this holy earth were you thi--”

The exact moment Minamoto Teru realizes it is not his brother to whom he’s speaking, but one of the ghosts of the complex, is marked by the sudden and swift drop in both his speech and his tone. The two men stand there for a heavy moment, stewing in mutual incredulity at the situation at hand.

Akane clears his throat, wincing at how his palm burns as it presses flat and hard against the apartment wall. 

“I--”

“Absolutely not.”

And then the door slams in his face.

“ Teru--”

“This is your last chance to leave,” Teru growls through the white slab of cheap metal that separates them. Even with the distance, Akane still flinches bodily back, can still feel the ill intent radiating in his face like he’s drawn too close to a burning candle, his curiosity only fanning the flames that now lick at his face in strained consternation. “Before I eradicate you as per the natural laws of this land.”

“Really? You want to do this now , you pompous ass?”

At least the door is open now.

“Yes, I would very much like to do this now,” spits Teru, huffing in satisfaction as Akane is forced to flinch back at his sudden (and painful) proximity. “Seeing as a supernatural presence has made itself known immediately after my kid brother goes spontaneously missing.”

Akane sighs, impatiently. “He’s probably with that girl, you know. Yashiro.”

“I am well aware. The same girl that now concerns herself in the affairs of your kind. She practically is supernatural, at this point. I -- and my brother -- want no part in whatever discord is brewing amongst the lot of you. Now begone.”

“S-so that’s -- that’s it? You don’t even care?”

“What is there to care about?” They are nose to nose, now, and Akane must grit his teeth against the wave of indescribable agony that wracks through his body just by virtue of standing this close to one of the most powerful holy men in Tokyo. 

“Her life, what the hell?”

“She signed the rights to that away the moment she--”

“Have you ever once considered ,” Akane says, low and deep from the depths of his very being, “that she didn’t have a choice in the matter?”

“How does one not have a choice, when they so willingly move into that accursed place?”

“Who was she to know?”

His voice breaks something ugly and raw as the last syllable leaves his lips, trailing down and out like the last dribbles of words left long unsaid. “Who was she to know,” Akane repeats, softer this time as he steps completely into Teru’s space, toes brushing toes, chests heaving against one another, eyes locked in an explosively intense stand-off, “when nobody bothered telling her? The only answers she’s gotten have been from that cretin, and that’s probably how she was sucked into this mess in the first place.”

The first sign of victory is the way Teru’s eyes flutter briefly shut as he steps back, hand to his forehead as he sighs heavily through his nose. “And you’re proposing what, exactly?”

“We go and take him out. Two against one. He can’t handle us both.”

The blond cracks open one piercing, icy arctic eye. “And should we fail?”

“We won’t.” We can’t is what’s left unspoken, but the both of them exchange that added sentiment silently between themselves. I can’t is what Akane thinks privately, determinedly, as he buries his terror and self-pity for once, in lieu of contributing to something bigger than himself.

“... For Kou,” exhales Teru, finally, after he’s done pinching the bridge of his nose in what Akane thinks is a ridiculous theatrical display, honestly. “When that dwelling is properly cleansed and this building knows peace once more, never again will I make the mistake of letting him run on so loose of a leash.”

“Sure,” Akane readily agrees, “So… you’re in?”

Teru nods grimly. “I am.”

We’re coming, Yashiro. Hang in there just a little bit longer.

From what had been such a simple plan, there birthed a wealth of complications.

One particularly obstinate hardship was the fact that they’d decided to challenge the Ghost of 404 in his home territory. Perhaps not their smartest move. But Teru had insisted he’d be able to get the job done with Akane’s assistance -- which the latter proffered eagerly and profusely, in whatever ways his overgrown string bean of a human vessel could help. Clearly, they fell a little short.

This, of course, didn’t even take into account their… less than stellar internal teamwork. Or their botched communication, wrought with innuendo and passive aggression. Or their opposing ideals on why the fight was being fought in the first place.

All this is to say that they get their asses handed to them, thoroughly and completely.

However, the confrontation does not begin with this inevitability; oh no, quite the contrary. When Teru unsheathes his righteous, noble blade and stabs it through the door of apartment 404 and then wrenches the damned thing off of its hinges, the duo are the perfect picture of confidence: the blond exorcist and his decades of dedicated training, skill-refining, and lethal technique, and Akane’s burning passion for repentance combine to make a formidable force of consolidated energy. 

“Evil presence, I have come on behalf of the sacred Minamoto clan to protect the innocents under your sphere of nefarious influence and exorcise you once and for all! In the name of peace and justice, balance will be restored to this dwelling, so help me heavens!”

“Oh, how long it’s been since I’ve had someone to play with.”

Things went very swiftly downhill from that point.

Akane doesn’t like dwelling on his failures -- he’s always been the kind of person to bounce back and try twice as hard. So tries his best not to linger in the hot-faced shame and humiliation that was the embarrassingly short length of time that their proposed ‘battle’ actually took. One moment, he and Teru had been charging into the apartment with battle cries and weapons brandished, and the next…

Well. He’d rather not go into the details.

The facts of the matter are these:

They’re cornered, caught in what is rapidly approaching a check mate. The ghostly boy (the pale, malnourished, sickly sight of him would make Akane’s gut twist in sympathy, were they under literally any other circumstances) has Akane in a very firm chokehold and pinned against the living room wall. Teru, who lost his weapon an admirable three minutes into the skirmish, now lays pinned underneath the ghost’s socked foot, held in place by supernatural powers unseen to either of them, but felt in the invisible binds that render both boys immobile and at total mercy of the spirit they’ve just challenged.

And lost to.

And, subsequently, enraged.

Akane doesn’t even know if it’s possible for him to die a second time, or what that would mean for his contract with the entity called Tsukasa. The only thing he can register is pure, total, unadulterated terror at the manic rage dancing alight in this creature’s inhumanly red eyes; the way his smirk widens the harder Akane struggles against the grip crushing his windpipe; the bony jut of his heel atop Teru’s chest; Teru’s frantic gesturing…

Wait a minute…!

Teru blinks wildly at Akane from where he’s been tacked to the floor by the esoteric butcher’s knife pinning him down at the collar of his shirt; the spirit stands atop him, one foot planted firmly (and what looks to be painfully) on the center of his shallowly rising rib cage, the other coming down to crush his right wrist--

--which Teru directs his eyes towards, before bringing them back to focus on Akane in an alarmingly intense, pleading gesture.

Oh.

The spirit beads. Teru always wears them in a subtle band around his wrist. It had definitely been a shock, the first time the exorcist had whipped them off and they’d expanded into a full fledged weapon of restraint. That was an encounter Akane isn’t keen to repeat any time in the near future; the beads themselves are anointed with some kind of cleansing agent, or spell, or incantation, or whatever it is that makes them burn like brands when they touch the skin of spirit. He’d ached for weeks thereafter, and not just physically.

Very carefully, Akane inches his foot outwards.

“While it was thoughtful of you both to come and pay me a visit,” the ghost mulls, that unsettling grin on his face like a beacon of danger, “I do believe our time is up today, gentlemen. I’ve got rather important matters to attend to, you see! Wouldn’t do well for me to be late. You understand, right?”

When the patent leather tip of his loafer connects with the bracelet, Akane can feel it. Mostly because even that miniscule amount of contact scorches him from the outside in. 

“Y--You won’t--get aw-away with--this--”

“Oh, won’t I?” He simpers, softly, as he tightens his grip on Akane’s neck to the point where the redhead can no longer form audible sound. 

That’s fine. It’s fine. His vision begins to waver at the very periphery of his line of sight, but if he can just wedge his toes underneath the beaded band… if he can just nudge it far up enough to dislodge into Teru’s palm… if he can just deal with the pain… if he can just… if he… 

With the last dregs left of his awareness, Akane watches as the ghost watches his foot finally slips the spirit beads all the way into Teru’s eagerly awaiting grasp.

Several things happen at once.

Before either of them can react, Teru has already flung the beads into the air with an impressive flick of his wrist. The previously thin circle of jewelry now transforms mid-air into what Akane can only describe as ropes and ropes of torture. Lines of beads hone in on their target and surge towards the malevolent spirit, startling him badly enough into releasing his grip on Akane’s neck. 

Akane drops to the ground low and fast, poised on the balls of his feet as he readily lunges out and away from the creature. He barely manages to clear the room before the beads encircle the spirit in countless coils, revolving swiftly in the air around him before rattling with a conviction that shakes the very foundation of the building. The window panes quake rapidly for their life, the drywall shrieks in protest, the floorboards wail in unabashed anguish; and all the while, the Ghost of 404 is finally, blessedly, completely and wholly -- captured.

His body falls to the ground in a firm hog tie. Akane doesn’t know why he flinches when he hears the surprisingly solid thunk! Of his thin, skeletal frame against the hardwood. 

Teru does not wait until the spirit has time to process what has just happened. The exorcist leaps into action, jumping up and snagging his long blade from where it had been cruelly discarded just out of his prior reach. As soon as it’s back in his hands, Teru is whirling on the ghost with an expression almost as lethal as the weapon he brandishes.

“Enough of this. It’s the end of the line, 404.”

If it’s even possible -- which Akane did not believe it was -- the boy grows even paler in clear distress. 

There was never an opportunity to catch a glimpse of him, let alone whilst his ever-present mask of smug condescension was shattered and now littering the floor in pathetic, jagged shards of ruin. Akane… refuses to acknowledge the twist of his gut, the cramp in his heart, the way he must avert his eyes as the ghost begins to plead.

“You idiots,” he hisses, a snake cornered and gone mad with blind terror, spitting venom and wide-eyed in a last-ditch attempt at an offensive strategy. “You absolute fools. Have you no idea of the fate you are condemning her to? Have you no shame? No conscience? Not an ounce of that empathy you so love to lord around?”

Akane has to swallow his breakfast back down. 

A solid, sadistic roundhouse kick connects with the boy’s flank and he spasms wildly on the floor, a fish on a hook, a lamb on the chopping block -- fresh meat, is what he is, fully aware of his impending morbid fate as he struggles against his bonds. 

It is needlessly cruel to kick him while he’s down. Teru either doesn’t know this (which wouldn’t be a shock) or doesn’t care. In each reality, however, the strikingly handsome exorcist sneers down his nose at his prey, face flat and detached as he drives the just of his boot into the younger, frailer boy, over and over and over, again and again until the boy turns his head to the side and attempts to heave out blood that no longer runs through his veins. 

How vivid must the pain be, wonders Akane, that it makes a ghost remember his humanity. 

“Shut up.”

Another kick. This time to the face.

Do bones normally crunch that loudly? That sickeningly? Or is everything amplified in this echo chamber of grief and despair? 

“Aah!”

Another kick. This time to the ribs.

“And stay like that,” breathes Teru, calmly, once the pale boy’s body has ceased its pathetic wriggling and now lies still and cold on the hardwood floor. “Make this easier for yourself.” He raises his sword in his right hand and murmurs something too low for Akane to parse out, but potent enough for it to manifest a ball of black lightning that begins to swell at the tip of the blade.

For Yashiro.

This is for Yashiro.

With seemingly the last bit of his strength, the ghost lets his head fall to the side and face Akane -- who huddles against the opposite wall, knees drawn up in a makeshift barrier between himself and the visceral scene unfolding in front of him. 

Those red eyes bore into him with such a ferocity that it chills him down to the very root of his corrupted soul. The boy’s face is wan, stretched thin and tight across his skull as though whomever sewed him together had missed a couple of stitches, had given up halfway through and left the rejected project to sit and stew in back corner of some empty, abandoned closet. Akane can see it with nearly startling clarity: this creature -- neglected, inanimate, vacant, dead in all senses of the word -- now made to dance in what Akane is rapidly understanding to be one big, elaborate puppet show.

As Teru hurtles down his sword of fire and brimstone, Akane watches his eyes swell and burst in the form of one single tear, rusted and gory as it slides down the rigid, sunken planes of his white cheek. 

She doesn’t know, mouths the boy, pleadingly.

“S-stop!”

Akane’s voice explodes forth from his body in a desperate bellow, surprising both himself as well as the other occupants of the room. His cry is so sudden, so jarring, that it startles Minamoto Teru into a split-second of hesitance.

Which is all Akane needs, really.

His hand clamps around the pocket watch at his hip in an adrenaline-induced mania. He’s just barely able to push the crown down in time for Teru to stumble and freeze in place, statuesque in his violent lurch overtop the small, dark, pale boy, who lays still as cornered prey, eyes still wide and locked onto Akane.

“Five minutes,” pants Akane, out of breath for some strange, inane reason. His arm falls limp at his side, fingers trembling around the golden orb so cold in his right palm that it almost burns. “You have five minutes to explain.”

A jerky, stilted nod.

And then the Spirit of 404 begins to explain himself. 

If it were possible, Akane would’ve keeled right over in those five minutes. A second death is decidedly less painful than the story Hanako relays, and the story he maps out in alarmingly frantic plot points, looping explanations, and the hitched half-sob of the conclusion to this tragedy. 

In hindsight, Akane realizes he should never have come here. Not to 404. Not to Teru’s apartment. Not to the stairwell. Not to the hardware store he’d sought out for that damned coil of hemp rope. Not to this building. Never to this building, where the longer he lingers, the more twisted and entangled his fate -- and the fates of countless others -- becomes. 

But who was he to know?

(How were any of them supposed to have known?)

The first thing she registers is a sea of black.

Even after Nene can feel her lashes flutter open and her eyes blink back to reluctant awareness, she is still unable to see. Her immediate thought is that she’s gone blind but -- no, that’s not quite right. 

Because she is aware that there’s a space she’s been entrapped in, and the features of this landscape make themselves maddeningly hidden to her scope of view. Even if she knows something is there. The sensation is frustrating in the way that a word evades the tip of the tongue, the way a ball shies just short of its goal. It’s almost like her brain can’t even comprehend what she’s seeing, and has decided to shut out all visual processing.

This, (un)fortunately, leaves her other four senses perhaps nearly too intact. 

Everything is heightened to a painful degree: the silence of this black expanse of mind-numbing emptiness is so loud that her ears blare in siren-like ringing; an acrid stench commandeers her nose, slithering up inside of her until the base of her skull and every nook, every cranny, every hollow part of her skull, every soft spot of her body, is tainted by sulfur and rot; bile rests comfortably at the back of her throat, cloying and saccharine in a cruel imitation of the niggling remnants of a lollipop long-since broken down and digested, now returning from the dead; and she feels…

Moisture.

Nene is crouched on her hands and knees, in the midst of an impenetrable dark, surrounded by a body of shallow liquid. It’s cold and thin enough that she feels optimistic enough to call it water. She hopes it’s water. She would pray that it be water, if she weren’t so afraid of who might answer that call. 

“...Hello?”

Nothing. 

And then, softly:

“S-Senpai?”

The hesitant utterance comes an indeterminate length of measurement away from her own vague existence. Gathering the presence of mind to respond is difficult, but Nene perseveres. She knows that if she allows herself to be lost to this endless darkness, this tangible doom and dread, she will never return from its tantalizing, terrifying depths. “Kou-kun! I’m here! I’m over here!”

“Over where?”

“Here, dummy!”

“But where?”

“Right here!”

She allows their bastardized match of Marco-Polo continue on until once-distant splashing transforms into ripples of water coasting across her thick ankles. She cannot focus on how ridiculously scary it is not to know where she is -- to not even be able to see, despite knowing her eyes are wide open in ice-cold horror. To process that fact is to accept that her reality as she’s currently living it has now progressed past the scope of her human understanding. 

(And this is a fear she’s held from the moment she’d made her first contact with the Far Shore, a fear that has propelled her to do the hard work that she does, to heal the spirits that she can, to love what has been broken and left to stew in neglect.

 Because Nene has always known her life would reach an unsalvageable point. She’d just hoped that she would have been more useful before she fell so low.)

When Kou finally draws near enough for Nene to smell his boyish cologne, she reaches blindly outwards and almost sobs in relief when she makes contact with a familiar pair of boxy hands.

“Kou,” she breathes, winded by everything and nothing, “Kou, Kou, it’s me, it’s…”

“You’re okay? You ain’t hurt? Senpai, you--”

“--Fine, I’m fine, are you--”

“--’M good, just glad you’re--”

Nene squeezes his fingers so tightly that she can feel them grow cold. “I’m sorry,” she chokes out into the opaque darkness in front of her. “This is all my -- I’m so sorry, God, I’m so, so sorry.”

“The hell? Senpai, wh-wha--”

“You should be.”

And then there is light.

Not all at once, and certainly not enough for Nene to paint a clear picture of her immediate surroundings. But gradually, progressively, swelling and compounding in on itself in crescendoing completion, there is light. Bolstered by abstract hues that flit around her obstructed vision, there synthesizes a portrait half-finished, a photograph half-developed, colors marrying together in a grotesque muddling of what Nene can somehow tell were once bright, lively pastels. Her chest constricts, sympathetically, at the ugly display of colored lights that struggle to piece themselves together into one cohesive being -- almost as though the image it tries to display doesn’t even want to be seen.

The only warning she gets before the picture fully manifests is a sharp, aborted intake of breath from Kou, something suspiciously adjacent to the word No.

A svelte young man stands before them, emanating an ethereal glow that illuminates the bare-bones minimum of Nene’s periphery. She’s able to glimpse her own feet (trembling and submerged in what she now knows conclusively to be startlingly clear water), where her hands are conjoined to a pair of larger, rougher ones, and the body that other set belongs to -- the way it locks into place, how every follicle of hair on either arm, on the nape of his neck, at the base of his sideburns all stand at petrified, shell-shocked attention.

Kou doesn’t even spare her a glance. He instead looks directly forward, to the boy lingering in the shallows with them.

“Mitsuba,” says Kou, in the skeleton of a whisper.

The boy -- Mitsuba, apparently -- flinches bodily back at Kou’s voice. Nene gets the feeling that she’s missing something here. But, wait, hold on… 

There had been a day far, far away from here, from whatever abnormal existence she currently occupies. Back when she still left her home with Kou, back when she still left her home at all, but even those memories are difficult to conjure to the forefront of her clouded mind. It was warm, it had been so warm… a restaurant, maybe? Kou’s unruly mass of electric blond, the fuzzy edges of his memory-addled self shifting and rising and falling in an excitement that precedes even the struggling figments of Nene’s compromised recall… 

He slurps loudly and unabashedly at his noodles as he prattles on about some guy named Mitsuba with a ‘really seriously cute smile, Senpai!’

Oh no.

Please, no.

“This isn’t…” Nene whispers, eyes never leaving the ominously loitering wraith. “Kou, you never told me--”

“You should be sorry,” repeats Mitsuba, scathingly, with such an unexpected vitriol that it startles Nene into stunned silence. “Stupid, stupid, stupid human. You don’t belong here. You never did. Now look what you’ve done.”

“H-Hey now, Mitsuba, just wait a sec--!”

“And you.”

Nene feels swiftly grateful that all she’d received from the boy was a curt, sharp reprimand.

Two words. How much emotion can be contained in two strained, strangled words?

All of the light surrounding his general unearthly being consolidates in the dead center of his eyes, which glow pink and bright and hot with a tangle of sentiments Nene can’t even begin to decipher. The only thing she can liken it to is the stark image she still holds in her heart, of a gaunt, white face; a blood red tear; rattling walls and shuddering blinds and a house so broken with grief that it has no other option but to cave in underneath the overwhelming pressure.

“Why’d you get involved with any of this? Huh? HUH?” 

Mitsuba doesn’t cry blood, Nene notes, which is yet another question she’d rather not know the answer to. In lieu of liquid, what falls from the trembling boy’s shining, pearlescent eyes are the singular petals of a cherry blossom tree. Their descent out of his skull is not something her human consciousness was designed to process, and so she doesn’t try to. Nene’s only option is to watch, in mounting dismay, as the ghost in front of her bleeds the remnants of an aborted spring. 

It would be a beautiful sight, she thinks, if it didn’t tell such a haunting story.

“Not your world,” Mitsuba continues, the arm covered completely by the sleeve of his pink cardigan raising to scratch at his bruised neck, “N-not your business, none of your business, y-you were crazy to think I -- it, this w-world was any of your dumb b-business even for a second!” He rubs, frenetic and rough, until the worn fabric from his sweater rips a lesion into the side of his neck. What should be gore and blood that breaks the surface is instead more of the same cherry blossom petals that fall from his eyes, raining down in an endless spray.

Next to her, Kou is frozen. If she couldn’t hear his ragged panting, Nene would have thought he’d stopped breathing altogether.

“It was never your world! I was never -- you never -- you never-- stay back!” Cries Mitsuba when Kou makes the mistake of hesitantly reaching out. Kou’s hand falls lamely to his side. 

The discarded petals begin to swirl around the three of them in a rapid, swarming spring storm. They lift Nene’s hair and they rustle her clothes, reaching a speed that matches the pace of Mitsuba’s agitated clawing of his own throat. The once milky, silkily smooth expanse of skin now peels back like the crude surface of a lottery card -- cheap, fake, created just to be peeled back and eventually disposed of -- and exposes the inner workings of the vessel his soul has been entrapped in.

Branches, thick and dark, begin to poke out from where he mutilates himself. 

“The same class,” he shrieks, voice distorted and layered in on itself, a looping track of wind crashing and breaking against worn bark, “We w-were in the same graduating class, I, our, our school, we w-went to the same school,”

“Oh--oh, hell. Oh, Mitsuba,”

The petals multiply by what seems like the hundreds. Full tree’s arms break forth from his, impaling his body in a spear straight through his most vulnerable part. “I was never your world,” he, his otherworldly voice carried by the blanket of darkness all around, reverberating so deeply, so profoundly in every fathomable way that Nene has trouble maintaining awareness of anything that isn’t the anguished wailing of the spirit that now directs his ire -- not at her, but at…

Kou. Who stands still. Who stands still as a dead body, gone frozen and stiff. Eyes still open. Lips still parted, stuck in eternal surprise at the knife suddenly wrenched through his gut.

“So why did you -- why did you have to start caring now? Y-you got all mixed up in this stuff, you and your dumbass traffic safety earring and your stupid golden staff of bullshit and your, your f-fucking smile, and your--” 

The ghost cuts himself off, gagging on the branches that force their way up and out of his mouth. No longer able to speak, his final sentiment is not audibly heard, but felt in the air, in the way Nene’s skeleton rattles inside of her skin without her consent, in the way that her innards scramble together, in the way that she herself feels choked by the pure unadulterated misery that undulates with the blossoms, with the spring breeze turned violent, with the corpse of a boy who hangs mangled and twisted-armed and broken-necked from the scene of what can only be the cruel image of his final resting place:

I wish I’d never met you!

The petals fall. The wind abades. And with everything that falls, so does Mitsuba’s body. He is limp where he’s held up by the branch spearing through his neck. His eyes flutter once, twice, shaking loose a handful more of limp, wilting blossoms, and then the light leaves his being in a gush of hot, pulsating air. It blasts through the space and ripples the water at their feet, rushing away from the boy as though the life has been forcibly banished from him.

It’s blinding, the extinguishment of Mitsuba’s soul, and Nene has to shield her eyes from the sudden onslaught of a light so bright it threatens to split her head open. She feels Kou instinctively bring his arms up to do the same, and they both quake in the wake of a supernatural occurrence the likes of which neither of them have ever dared to experience.

When Nene cautions a tentative peek through her fingers, she doesn’t know what she expects to find. 

But it certainly isn’t the massive, twisting trunk of a cherry blossom tree.

The piece of nature is as hulking as it is beautiful, boasting a full canopy of vivid, bright pink that weeps gently down into the water in which it is rooted. Dangling by its strap from a particularly long branch that juts forward is a… camera?

It’s professional-grade, that much is evident by the size of its lens. The camera sways with the breeze, content and calm to drift suspended in mid-air.

There’s something bigger than one of the thousands of petals that float down -- it’s square-ish and heavier in mass, struggling to make its way in descent. Nene is just able to jump up and snag the object before it flies clear over her head. She grips it, hard, and turns it over in her hands to reveal that it is-- a photograph.

Of Kou.

Smiling brightly. Head upturned away from the camera, unaware of his voyeur. His signature undershirt and layered short-sleeved overshirt combination fluttering in the wind, forever suspended in frozen time.

Cherry blossom petals swirling all around him.

“This,” croaks Kou, woodenly, “was the end of first year.”

“First year? Of university?”

“Yeah.”

“Kou-kun…”

“Didn’t even know he existed. Not ‘til he died.”

Nene feels lightheaded. Two years. 

She wants to say something, anything, that could offer her friend some solace in what is an unthinkably grim set of circumstances. The words are on the tip of her tongue, ready to spill forth in an outpouring of empathy and compassion only too eager to soothe Kou’s raw, open wound of a heart; Nene is there, gripping his hands tight in her own as she passes over the photograph, mouth parting to console him--

And then she convulses.

“Senpai?!” Exclaims Kou, roused from his dazed stupor by the alarming way Nene’s body folds easy and fast.

Nene attempts to speak, and gets about halfway through an aborted moan before she feels her stomach lurch, and clamps a hand over her mouth, shaking her head rapidly to signal to Kou to keep his distance.

This is an involuntary reaction -- trauma response, whispers the small part of herself that is still tapped into her human existence. Chills erupt along the length of her in less of a bodily function and more of a sensation that is demanded of her. Erratically, Nene begins to jerk and heave and jerk again, limbs flailing as she struggles to contain the sheer panic that courses through her veins.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck . Not good. Senpai? Yashiro Nene-senpai, can ya hear me?”

Closer. It’s getting closer.

Nene’s back bows inhumanly before bending to arch just as extremely, at the whiplash of it throws her even further out of equilibrium. The already maddening dark now becomes an even greater source of instability, and Nene is incapable of curbing the monstrous roar that clambers out of her throat.

Danger danger danger danger danger danger danger danger danger--

“Senpai! Holy shit, what the hell’s yer fuckin’ problem?”

She retches violently into the water below.

Strong hands grip her wildly flapping arms in an attempt to contain her. “Senpai? Senpai! Yashiro!”

Frozen. She’s frozen, body immobile save for the tremors that rattle every particle of her being -- both physical and spiritual -- until not an inch of her existence is left untouched by the primordial fear.

Kou is inches away from her face, breathing just as hard as she is. His electric blue eyes are alight with shock, and scan over her, uselessly.

Nene can’t articulate to him that it’s a lost cause.

Nene can’t wrangle her traitorous tongue into telling him to leave, now, before it’s too late.

All Nene can do is choke and splutter, raggedly, hoarsely:

“He’s here.”

A hazy red light fills the space in between and all around them, thick and viscous and lethal in origin. The cherry blossoms shrivel up and die where they come into contact with the warm hued tint. Corpses litter the shallow water. The darkness itself shrinks back in fear, parting to reveal a form that has Nene whimpering and cowering, scrambling to hide behind Kou and make herself as small and unnoticeable as possible.

She can’t look. She can’t. She can’t. She can’t. She’ll lose her mind completely if she has to face that thing that is now descending upon them from the uninterpretable depths of the blackness above. 

Tsukasa.

“Fun performance, Mitsuba! It’s real sad you had to go so soon. Oh, well. Good game!”

It’s absolutely fucking horrible, the way she can physically feel his gaze slide over to where she is cowered behind Kou. Even with her eyes shut, her hands clamped firmly over her ears, her body balled up so tightly she doesn’t occupy a centimeter more than she has to -- Nene is still damnably visible to the malevolent entity.

“Hiya, Yashiro-chan! Long time no see!”

Nene lets out a muted squeak of terror, burying her face further into Kou’s back. The blond immediately jolts into action and spreads his arms far and wide to shield her more completely from view, growling as he does so. “I dunno who the fuck y’think you are, but if Senpai don’t like you then I don’t like you. And what… what the hell did ya do to Mitsuba?” The latter half of his statement is broken, haunting and serrated as Kou strains his voice loud enough to echo in what is rapidly revealing itself to be their cavernous surroundings.

“Nothing~,” sings the creature, high and raspy. “He made his wish ‘nd played the game. I won, though! But that doesn’t matter anymore… ‘cause some new players are here! So fun!”

New players…?

It’s almost too much to process. Nene is on the brink of mental collapse. To think that all of this insanity -- from Akane’s grand reveal, to the disturbing visit at Sakura’s apartment, to Mitsuba’s (second?) death, and now Tsukasa of all things showing up -- has happened in just one day…

She is so tired.

Abruptly, overwhelmingly, distressingly, Nene’s eyes begin to grow damp. Not in abject terror, this time, but in yearning. In longing.

None of this would have happened if I never left home.

None of this would have happened if I’d just stayed inside, like Hanako said.

None of this would have happened if…

“Hanako-kun,” she whimpers, sniffling pathetically into the back of Kou’s taught shoulders. “Hanako-kun, help me…”

The water begins to ripple underfoot.

“Hanako-kun, save me…”

The cavernous walls rumble like the belly of a beast.

“Hanako-kun, please…”

The tips of her pinky fingers burn white-hot as Nene screams:

“Hanako-kun, I need you!”

Her eyes snap open just in time to glimpse an eruption from the water maybe a few paces away -- not enough for her to see what’s happened, exactly, but that’s okay. Nene doesn’t need to see it to believe it. She can feel the universe right itself again, in what amounts to be only a handful of seconds. One moment she’s hanging onto Kou for dear life as she anticipates her inevitable death at the hands of the same calamitous god that’s been wreaking havoc on everyone she’s come into contact with -- and the next?

A wave of relief washes over her, pleasant and cool. Her spine straightens. The knots in her stomach untangle. Nene opens her eyes for the first time since she’d begun to hide, and is greeted with the sight (over Kou’s shoulder) of Akane, Minamoto-kun, and…

“Hanako!”

The ghostly boy snaps his head towards her and she’s never been happier to have those sparkling rubies pinned onto her like a target.

Nene leaps from where she’d been cowering and makes a beeline for Hanako, who’s still soaking wet from head-to-toe. She couldn’t care less. She throws herself into his slack arms, winding her own around the base of his neck as she shoves her head as far as it can go into his chest and breathes.

How sweet he smells. How good. How homely. How right.

“You came. You really came for me.”

“Y-Yashiro…” 

Why are his hands hovering so awkwardly above her? This is a reunion hug, dammit! Stubbornly, she nuzzles further against him until he takes the hint and -- albeit reluctantly -- embraces her in kind. 

“You’re the one who summoned me,” he murmurs into the crown of her head. The ghost of his breath tickles her, and she sighs, shuddering and heavy, at the sensation. 

“Answered when I called,” is all she can find it in herself to reply with.

“How touching.”

Tsukasa’s voice is still gut-wrenching and awful to experience, but the effect is significantly dulled once she’s nestled securely within Hanako’s grasp. Even as they break away from the hug, he still keeps her under his arm, at least one hand touching her at all times. 

(He is so warm.)

“But it’s game over,” Tsukasa continues, his tone eerily childish as he floats closer to where she, Hanako, Akane, Minamoto-kun, and Kou now cluster together in a loose defensive circle. “for Yashiro-chan.”

“M-me?”

She shouldn’t have spoken. His eyes slide over to her and she is grateful for how strongly Hanako grips her, as his arms are the only thing suspending her upright. “Yes, you,” the creature hisses, inhumanly, before blinking once and regaining his disconcerting immature composure. “You’re trying to steal Amane all for yourself! Amane can’t play with me if he’s busy with you! I had him first, no fair! Finders keepers!” 

“We can share, Tsu,” tries Hanako.

Nene wants to ask why the hell he’s trying to reason with this monster -- why the hell he reasoned with him on the staircase, as he’d made a tactical retreat with Nene in tow -- why the hell Hanako has ever tried to reason with him…

But she can see the glistening red sheen to his eyes. Can feel the way his fingers anxiously clench and unclench, kneading the soft skin of her upper arms as he stares down the nightmare in front of them; the nightmare who wears the skin of Hanako’s baby brother. The nightmare who is not a nightmare, not to Hanako.

This is a new kind of evil, Nene realizes. One with which she has had no previous encounters. How insidious. How disturbingly insidious.

Her gut rolls with unease. “Hanako-kun--”

“A-ma-ne,” implores the creature, drawing ever nearer, his tone disarmingly light, palms up and out as he bats his eyelashes up at Hanako. “Amane doesn’t wanna play like how we used to? Amane is going to leave me again? Amane hates me?”

Around her, Hanako’s body begins to shake.

Nene can smell the creature from this close up. She hadn’t been able to, the first time they’d met, as he’d been purposefully disguising himself in the cloak of Hanako’s identity. But now that he’s manifested in his true form, Nene picks up on the discrepancy as soon as he’s within range:

The stench of rotting flesh.

Very, very quietly, Nene mutters, “He’s not real.”

Tsukasa’s eyes flicker briefly towards her before returning back to Hanako, even more intense in their quest to sway him over. “Amane?”

“He’s not real,” says Nene, louder this time, tugging at the end of Hanako’s worn sleeve. “He’s not real, Hanako-kun. That’s not Tsukasa.”

“What the fuck is going on,” whispers someone behind them, but Nene ignores this in lieu of strengthening her resolve. Hanako has been brave for her all this time -- he’s been protecting her, even when she didn’t understand how, or why, or from what; the least she can do is save him, just this once.

“Mean! She’s mean, Amane! I think I’m gonna cry!”

“Smell him,” Nene instructs, urgently, “What did Tsukasa always smell like?”

Hanako’s answer comes in a numb, vacant shell of an utterance. “Lollipops.”

“And what does this smell like?”

He doesn’t have to respond. Nene relives it with him: a bathroom painted bloody, water dyed red, the broken shards of a bathroom mirror left to witness the horrors of an innocent prayer gone horribly, terribly wrong. 

The creature reaches out towards Hanako -- to caress his face, to grab at his sweater the same way Nene clutches on tightly and holds for dear life, she cannot say for sure -- with a look of such crestfallen hurt worn on that pudgy, youthful baby face that it almost fools her for a second.

But before it can make contact, Hanako slaps the hand away. 

“Who are you,” Hanako says slowly, “and what have you done with my brother.”

The hand falls lamely to the creature’s side. Tsukasa’s skin ripples. Glitches. His expression remains blank even as Nene watches his eyeballs roll in their sockets, his teeth rise and sink in his gums as the body realigns itself. The shift is quick -- instantaneous, really -- but there all the same. And if Nene’s painfully human brain is able to catch and catalogue the abnormality…

Hanako plunges his hand into his rib cage. 

“Get back, Yashiro.”

“Don’t tell me yer gonna fight this -- thing.”

Kou, who has been unnervingly silent this whole time, bursts to life once more with his familiar fiery timbre. “Shorty, ya gotta be crazy.”

“Let them destroy each other,” Minamoto-kun pipes in. “It makes less work for us.”

“You sick fucking bastard. Is it so hard to look outside yourself for one measly second? If they’re both gone, who’s gonna get us out of this place? I mean -- where are we, anyways?”

“Somewhere even your nightmares do not dare venture.”

The squabbling is sliced through by the thing that wears Tsukasa’s skin. Its voice does not come out of the body, as it had done previously in order to maintain at least a flimsy semblance of authentic humanity. It seems as though the entity has given up entirely on saving face; when it speaks, Nene hears it vibrate deafeningly inside of her own skull. 

And then, before anyone can do much more than gasp in horror, the darkness vanishes.

In its place is the horrendous landscape in which they’ve been entrapped.

Nene almost wishes it had remained hidden from view. 

The shallow water flowing around their feet is some unnatural portal, marked by the hands that periodically crop up and out of its unknown depths, attempting to claw out of the stream before falling short and sinking back down into oblivion. The sky above is a murky, burnt-orange apocalyptic stretch of foreboding, clouded by a thick, rolling mist that leaves only a large, red sun visible on the horizon. Just when Nene thinks it can’t get any worse, the thing snaps its fingers, and the strange dimension erupts into a horrible scene of upheaval.

As soon as the ground begins to quake, Hanako leaps into action, scooping Nene up into his arms in a nostalgic bridal carry as he shouts frantically for everyone to follow him. He races fast and far away from the creature, whose maniacal laughter is booming and echoing as it stretches far and wide across the landscape.

“We’re in the basement,” Hanako explains, his hold on her tightening by the millisecond, “which is both the spawn and expiration point for all supernaturals in this building. It’s the boundary closest to the Far Shore, and if we aren’t careful, this could go very poorly--”

A particularly incensed bellow is the only warning they get before the sky itself shakes apart, a seam ripping open between the thick, oppressive clouds to rain down a shower of terror: unspeakably disgusting things begin to literally fall from above. Nene doesn’t allow herself to process that. She can’t. She can’t. Not if she wants to survive this with her sanity still somewhat intact.

“Screw bein’ careful,” pants Kou, sprinting alongside Hanako, “we gotta fuckin’ leave, dude!”

“Language,” Minamoto-kun admonishes from just slightly behind, “but, yes, I agree. And the only way to get through that darksided entity is--”

“An exorcism,” The Minamoto brothers say in tandem.

“It’s too powerful to be contained by a mere seal.”

Hanako flinches, chuckling nervously. “I understand how badly you’re itching to get rid of me, really, but it’s a no-can-do. Tsu--That thing and I are… bonded. By virtue of us sharing the same bloodline. Where one goes, the other follows. And by extension, anything that is me is also him, and because Yashiro here is, ah, bound to me as well… if either of us were to be, ah… ”

Dodging something large, squishy, and flesh-toned that Nene refuses to acknowledge, Akane finishes Hanako’s rambling thought. “...My god. Yashiro would be obliterated.”

“B-but, wait,” she speaks up. “I’m… I’m still human, right? There’s gotta be a limit to what this bond can control, i-if I still belong in the mortal world?”

He shoots her a sidelong glance, equal parts calculating and wary. “The only way we can be separated is if I granted a wish and returned to limbo. Humans can’t venture there, not physically. But Yashiro, your wish… it hasn’t…”

“Put me down.”

“...Pardon? What do you m--”

“Hanako. I said put me down.”

She knows the request is odd -- the tone of her voice odder still -- and yet, it does the trick all the same. Hanako has no choice but to bend to her will, and the other boys follow suit, slowing pace until the five of them are circled in a protective huddle, heads ducked and shoulders hunched against the offensive onslaught of terror that only increases with each moment spent under its downpour.

“Y’okay, Senpai?” Kou worriedly asks, fretting over her nervously. Akane steps forward to do the same and, hell, even Minamoto-kun looks disconcerted. They all crowd around her, itching to see what’s wrong, itching to put their hands on her and fix her and Nene is done allowing it. That’s what got them into this mess in the first place, it’s what always, always, always leads her down a rabbit hole of trouble, and she’s sick and tired of having other people think that they can save her. That she even needs saving in the first place.

No, the only one who’d needed saving all along had been…

“Hanak-kun,” Nene breathes out, shaky and uneven. She pointedly ignores everything and everybody else save for the gaunt, gangly boy stood hunched in front of her, eyes like a furnace, skin like that of a body drained dry, hair and clothes and shadows so dark it threatens to swallow her whole. 

I couldn’t even do one thing right. 

I couldn’t even protect you.

Not even from myself.

Her body thrums with a tension coiled so tight, so potent, that it makes her shake and shiver uncontrollably, muscles contracting as though in preparation for impact. Nene feels herself seize up in anticipation, for what she knows is about to devastate them both.

“Yashiro,” Hanako mimics, questioningly, uneasily.

All sorts of visions flash before her eyes: scenes of domestic bliss; karaoke nights; daily omurice; movie binges; fashion hauls; every bit of their life together stitches itself into one big quilt of damning evidence -- one that Nene spreads out in front of her, bare and naked with nothing but the truth. The truth she’s buried deep inside of herself from day one.

The truth that now comes to rear its ugly head, in the worst of times, in the worst of ways.

Before she says it, she can already watch Hanako’s thin face morph into the beginnings of mortification and… God. This shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. This shouldn’t be this hard, but, fuck! 

Fuck if Nene had hoped, for once, that something would work out right in her life!

Fuck if Nene had clung to the idea that maybe one day she’d find love, even if she had to cast a supernatural wish for it!

Fuck if Nene--

“Fuck if I don’t love you,” Nene sighs, the words spilling uncontrollably out of her chattering lips. “Fuck if I haven’t loved you from the moment I met you -- no, not then, not when you came out of the bathroom, but when I first moved in. You know, I was afraid of being lonely? New building, small apartment, lots of empty hours to kill by myself. But I -- you never let me feel alone. Even before I knew you were there. I think I started loving you then. I think I’ve always loved you. I think I thought I was protecting you, by never telling you, which is what my master plan was all along. Sounds kinda stupid, now, isn’t it? But it made me so sad, Hanako-kun, so sad to hear you talk about your fate -- curse, your curse. And it was like… I can suffer quietly, like this. I can suffer quietly for the rest of my life if it means you get to be here and I get to be here with you and we get to be here, together, with each other.”

She is vaguely aware of the world around them beginning to peel apart at the seams, crumbling and dissipating at the very edges. The others are shouting, but it is a muffled, distant annoyance. How could she possibly focus on anything other than Hanako, the way he stares at her in dawning comprehension, the way his eyes -- those eyes, those murder scene eyes -- widen and fill and shimmer with all the rich carmine intensity of a bathtub full of blood?

It’s always been Hanako. It will always be Hanako. It was never a matter of choice, of dates, of ‘finding’ the ‘right one’; not when Nene has belonged to him from the start. Not when she was already his from the moment she’d set foot into this strange, wonderful, awful building.

“B-but I ca-an’t--” and this is where she begins to break down, finally, her voice going thin and watery as she sways to the rhythm of the earthquakes that are rolling through the boundary like the reckoning-- “I can’t even do that right. I can’t even protect you. The only thing I can do -- the only thing I’ve ever been able to do, honestly! -- is love you. Hanako-kun, Hanako, I love you. I always have. I always will. And I’m so, so sorry.”

Nene furiously blinks away her tears. She refuses to have her last moments spent with Hanako in anything other than crystal clarity. Even if the sight of him evaporating into thin air is something so distressing it makes her knees go weak. 

He’s leaving.

He’s leaving me.

“W- wait!” She cries out desperately, flinging herself forwards and noting in muted shock that there are arms holding her back, “What about your price! What about the payment!!”

She’s seen this expression. She’s seen those teary eyes. She knows that face, taught with emotions long-since locked away for safekeeping. But just this once -- in this blessed, cursed instance -- Hanako is startled into uncensored vulnerability.

The look on his face is suddenly, harrowingly sad. Sad in a way that is deeper than despair. Sad in a way that cannot be described in any of the flowering, far-fetched metaphors that Nene’s romantic brain conjures up to cope with the reality of the situation. There is nothing poetic about the way Hanako’s face contorts into an ugly, pinched grimace. There is nothing beautiful about how he curls in on himself, clawing desperately at the air in a futile attempt to escape his fate. The same fate Nene had tried and failed at saving him from. The same fate Nene is responsible for returning him to, even if there hadn’t been a choice.

Hanako is just sad. 

“Oh, Yashiro,” he groans, his arms reaching out to caress the barest hint of her cheek, one last time. “It would be selfish to ask you for anything more.”

And the world around them heaves and hos, and the water begins to rise, and the sky begins to eat itself, and the very fabric of reality tears itself to shreds, and the booming voice of that damned creature crows out a sinister THANKS FOR PLAYING! SEE YOU NEXT TIME! And Nene can barely focus on any of it, too wrapped up in reliving the lingering touch at her face. Even as the world goes dark, even as the screaming of all the men around her starts and does not stop, she pays it no mind. 

As they sink into chaos, Nene knows that she will never be whole again. Dead or alive, safe or in danger, young or old, Yashiro Nene will never know anything else but the feeling of a lover ripped away from her at the apex of her trembling, gasping confession. For the rest of her life, Yashiro Nene will live in the palm of that pallid, translucent hand, and the bereavement it left in its wake. 

Yashiro Nene will live the rest of her days the same way:

In half-completion.

Thank you, Hanako-kun, she closes her eyes and thinks, prays, wishes, hopes, clinging to the many arms that now encase her in protection as the world caves in, for granting my wish. 

There is no answer.

Not even when she knocks.

Chapter Text

It’s been a month.

From what Nene understands, Hanako and the thing that called itself Tsukasa are so powerful and intimately bound that it is impossible for one to exist without the other. This means that Nene cannot summon Hanako without also simultaneously summoning Tsukasa. It is this fact and this fact alone that has kept her (just barely) from knocking on her bathroom door and calling out for the boy she once knew.

She still has trouble sleeping at night, once it’s all said and done. Some of the things that the creature had said… well. Nene hopes they weren’t somehow physically stuck together, wherever they were. 

In the end, Hanako got his payment, and Nene got her wish. She did indeed find love. But in exchange, Hanako was owed that love -- as well as her heart, soul, body, and spirit. 

Nene experiences chronic pain from being permanently separated from her blood bound partner. When Hanako explained that humans cannot physically enter into limbo, he’d neglected to specify the implications of what was left unsaid. The distance drains her body, takes a toll on her mental state. Sometimes, she feels as though her soul is leaking out of its empty, hollow vessel. Sometimes, all Nene feels like is an empty, hollow vessel. Sometimes, all Nene can bear to be is an empty, hollow vessel.

Perhaps a silver lining in all of this is that she has access to the Ghost of 404’s supernatural powers, however diluted they are by his absence. Nene is fully in-tuned to the spirit community inside of the building, and had been once she’d awoken miraculously safe in the sanctuary of her apartment, after the clusterfuck that was that day of reckoning.

Nene doesn’t have it in her to blame Sakura or Natsuhiko. She understands, now, that they didn’t have a choice in the matter. Now that both of their respective keepers are gone, they sometimes rendezvous for tea -- all three of them. Nene always imagined that they might be good friends outside of the given circumstances, and it’s a small favor to be proved correct in this once-far fetched hope for normalcy.

Mitsuba… is gone. Kou refuses to speak to anyone about what happened between them. He’d turned in his Raiteijou and moved out into a small studio unit on the first floor. During the first week of April, he’d loitered in the courtyard garden nearly all day, every day. Eventually, he began to sleep out there. Nobody had the heart to tell him ‘no.’ To this day, Kou spends the majority of his time doing schoolwork underneath the canopy of the brand new, fully grown cherry blossom tree that scales the length of the building. He and Teru are not on speaking terms, and haven’t been since they’d returned.

Tsuchigomori is still vaguely unsettling, even with everything that’s happened. Nene never learned what, exactly, his role was in all of this, beyond that of an ambivalent and neutral-party keeper of the future timeline. Recently, he’s decided to shack up with a Kitsune from the second floor, which is hilarious to absolutely everybody. 

And even with all of these loose ends tied up neatly, mercifully, Nene still feels bereft. Half-complete. She is already struggling to cope, struggling to resist the slippery slope of a rapid downhill spiral, and it’s only been a month. She will die at this rate -- but if I die, I’ll get to go back to him -- but she has to stay alive for Aoi, for her friends -- all of my friends are either dead or can see the dead, it won’t matter much -- and she has to persevere...and...survive, for a reason that grows ever elusive day by torturously desolate day. 

She sees him, sometimes. Out of the corner of her vision. Late at night. Early in the morning. After she’s just finished sobbing so hard she retches into the kitchen sink. He’s never there for long, and she can’t talk to him, but he is there all the same, and it’s enough for her. Mostly.

When she tells her friends, they look so sad for her. They tell her it’s time to move on. They say she must heal. So she stops allowing her friends to visit. The only people allowed inside 404 are Kou -- because he knows -- and, of course, Aoi. Not Akane. She’s still pissed at him for keeping the truth from her for so long; even still, he evades her demands for clarification. Not Lemon, either, because those two are a package deal. Just Aoi. Always, just Aoi.

Aoi, who was the first to show up at her apartment door with flowers and ice cream, after Akane had told her that Nene was involved in a nasty ‘accident.’ Aoi, who stayed by her side for the ensuing month of Nene’s rapidly deteriorating physical health. Aoi, who sits by her bedside every night, with an impossibly serene face, and steady hands, as she spoon feeds Nene her dinner of mushy vegetables or soup broth or whatever she’s able to keep down for more than a couple hours at a time.

How long will I spend being indebted to her?

So this is Nene’s current reality: bedridden, sickly, unable to even hoist herself up to use the bathroom (which, she does not use The Bathroom for, and instead bathes in her kitchen sink; the same kitchen sink she brushes her teeth in, which is the same kitchen sink she gets sick in, which is the same kitchen sink she cries into after she gets sick after she brushes her teeth. It’s a daily routine). 

When the hallucinations get more frequent -- that’s when the blackouts start. Sometimes she loses whole entire days, succumbing to nothing but the piercing black darkness of her own mind. It’s nice there. Quiet. She doesn’t have to answer her phone, or the door, and the hundreds of Line messages that stack up in a notification bar she can barely look at, nowadays, asking Yashiro, are you okay? Yashiro, how have you been? Yashiro, you need to eat. Yashiro, Yashiro, Yashiro.

He lingers for longer, now. It used to be only a handful of seconds Nene would catch a glimpse of him, and now the longest he’s stayed is almost a full minute. Nene would know, she’d counted every beat of it. One time she even held his gaze before he’d fizzled out into non existence. 

Aoi doesn’t like that she still sees him. He doesn’t like that Aoi is there so often. Nene can tell. He also doesn’t like it when Nene eats, or when she drinks too much water, because it’s harder for her to focus on him when she puts those things in her body, so she stops doing that altogether.

He’s visiting her in her dreams now. He’s the man behind the counter serving her a cup of coffee. He’s the dashing movie star. He’s the firefighter rescuing her from a burning house. And just when Nene opens her mouth to speak -- you! you’re! -- he gives her that same slow, sly wink, index finger pressed against his lips, and vanishes into thin air. And then she wakes up. Her ribs ache. She can’t remember why. She doesn’t know why she’s crying.

Nene does not leave her bed. Nene finds a yellow fuzzy sock underneath her pillow and never lets go of it. Nene sleeps with it tucked to her chest. Nene thinks it belonged to a little boy. Nene wants to meet him one day. Hadn’t she had a roommate, once? Aoi says no. Nene doesn’t believe her.

Aoi comes over to visit a lot, nowadays. Aoi comes over today. Aoi says nobody else wants to come and visit because Nene is making them sad. Why am I making them sad, Ao-chan? Aoi doesn’t answer. Aoi spoon feeds her rice porridge. Nene can’t chew by herself anymore so Aoi moves her jaw for her. Aoi’s hands are so soft. Aoi smells good. Aoi smells like lollipops.

Aoi says Nene should go to sleep now. Nene thinks that’s a good idea because Nene is very tired. Hopefully Nene will see the handsome boy in her dreams again. Maybe Nene will talk to him this time. Aoi says that it’s okay to go to sleep because Aoi will be there when Nene wakes up. Nene likes that. Nene likes Aoi. Nene says good night to Aoi and then Aoi puts Nene to sleep.

When Nene emerges from the murky depths of slumber, it’s dark in the apartment, save for a light emanating in a thin, shimmering golden strip from underneath the bathroom door. The bathroom door that’s been left slightly ajar.

A familiar face pops out -- jaded, gaunt, twin red sunken depressions -- and there’s mirth in his grin as he brings up one fist to knock playfully at the door, three times.

“Nene-chan, Nene-chan… are you there?”

She smiles.

And then, in a practiced, fluid motion, Nene gets out of bed and walks over to the bathroom door. 

It clicks neatly shut behind her.

END