Chapter Text
The boy who isn't a boy is pretty sure he doesn’t have to sleep, but he likes to. Sleeping reminds him of something from—some time before. Possibly even before he looked like a boy at all. But what does that mean? How could he remember something from before there was a he to remember?
He doesn’t know. There’s a shadow in his mind, a hungry hole that grows and grows and no matter how many new memories he makes, they’re not enough to fill it. His past is full of holes, or maybe his past is a hole: more void than substance.
Every so often, something floats to the surface. A flash of familiarity, devoid of context. It happens when he wanders into an old record shop and his gaze snags on a pair of red headphones; when he orders a small fries at Wuck and receives a limp packet of wet potatoes and snickers and eats them all anyway. The feeling is sort of like recall, except that, if he tries to focus on it, he finds himself abruptly, intensely reluctant to look any closer. It's like treading water over open ocean and feeling something enormous brush the sole of your foot. Will you plunge your head under and squint against the salt? Or will you close your eyes and swim to shore? The boy who isn't a boy is curious, but not enough to die for it.
It’s like with Junpei. From the moment he lays eyes on him, the boy knows that he knows Junpei. He knows the fits of melancholy that seize him sometimes, when day yields to night. He knows when to redirect a bad mood with a joke and a nudge to the ribs, and when to confront it head-on. The boy knows how to quell the flashes of ego that sometimes flare hot without warning, and he knows exactly how long it will take Junpei to apologize for the things he said while the flame still burned. But why does the boy know Junpei? Junpei doesn’t know him.
“Where’d you say you were from again?” one of the girls asks on his first day of school, and the boy just—freezes. Did he say where he was from? If he did, can someone remind him? The girl is still watching, waiting.
“I’m from your dreams,” he says, batting his eyes. “I’m the prince you gave up on ever meeting. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Oh my god!” she squeals. “How can you that stuff with a straight face?”
How can he say that stuff with a straight face? He doesn’t know. Most of the guys get embarrassed when a girl even looks at them. But the boy feels at ease around girls, even more than he does around boys. There’s something comforting about the way they feel and look and smell. Was he a girl in a past life? He doesn’t remember.
It’s a little unnerving, but it doesn’t bother the boy, who is having the time of his life. High school is filled with wonders. A whole vendor just for different kinds of bread. Fields of beautiful people running and grunting and sweating. Girls who will pet him and dote on him for nothing more than a few passing compliments. The girls all seem to like compliments, so the boy loosens his tongue and lets admiring words pour forth. You’re lovelier than a shower of sakura petals. Your hands look cold, can I hold them for you? Did you fall from heaven? Cause they’d look better on my floor. Junpei rolls his eyes, but the boy isn’t doing any harm, and people like it. He likes making people happy.
###
“Why don’t we go to your place this time?” Junpei suggests, and the boy’s brain stutters.
“My… place?” he repeats. Does he have a place? He closes his eyes and racks his brain for something useful. Yes… he has a place, he thinks, or at least he did once. A little room with a pink checked blanket and a mirror that showed someone else's face.
“Uh. Yeah? You know, like… where you go after school?”
“After school we go to Wuck,” the boy says helpfully. “Or sometimes the arcade.”
“Riiiight. But, like. After that?”
Where does the boy go after that? He isn't sure. Sometimes it feels like he blinks into existence on the train every morning, bag in hand, scarf wrapped snugly round his neck. Where does he go when he’s not at school or the strip mall or the arcade? When no one’s looking at him, does he even exist?
Junpei is starting to look exasperated. "Uhh. Okay. Let's try, uh... Where your parents live?”
The boy’s face closes. Something rises from the murk: the leaden cold of grief. Whose grief is this?
“I,” he says. His voice cracks. He opens his mouth to try again, but Junpei moves faster.
“Hey, I’m sorry. That was, uh— Look, I of all people shouldn’t make assumptions. You don’t have to talk about it,” he adds, kindly. “Let’s just go to mine.”
###
By the start of his third day, the boy has begun to grow uneasy. He’d assumed that the dark place in his mind was a hole: empty space vacated by a past that he’d somehow forgot. But when he looks closer, he can make out lines in the darkness. The suggestion of texture, and of movement. It's as though the dark place were substance, not absence. But that would mean that the problem isn’t with his memory—it’s with him. It’s not that he can’t remember, but that he won’t.
If the dark spaces in his mind aren’t holes, why are they so dark? What is it that he won’t let himself remember? Something tells him that it may be important. And the longer he looks away, the larger it grows. It's beginning to hurt. He can manage it, for now. But for how much longer? How much longer until his whole mind is dark, and there's nowhere else to look?
“Ryoji!” a friendly voice calls, and the boy who isn't a boy—Ryoji is his name, he keeps forgetting—jolts back to the present. “You haven’t met Hamuko yet, right? She was out sick for a couple days.”
“Is she cute?” Ryoji asks hopefully.
Junpei claps him on the shoulder. “Like you wouldn’t believe. Sit tight, I’ll introduce you!”
Ryoji sits obediently as Junpei hollers across the room at a girl who wasn’t there yesterday, with frizzy brown hair so coppery-bright it’s almost orange.
“Hamuko! Say hey to the new new kid!”
“Hey, new new kid!” she calls back.
When she looks over, Ryoji can see that Hamuko’s hair is pinned in place with six hair clips, criss-crossed like the roman numeral for ten. His breath hitches. He can feel his heart hammering in his chest. XX, X marks the spot, like a sign from the gods saying look here, this is why you’re here; it’s her, you’re for her. He feels like he’s seen her in his dreams every night for the past sixteen years. He feels like he could guess her blood type on the first try. He’s pretty sure he knows what shampoo she uses.
“Has anyone introduced you yet?” Junpei asks as she saunters up. Then, not waiting for an answer: “Ryoji, this is Hamuko Arisato.”
“Hello,” he says, warm and soft, like he’s sharing a secret. She quirks an eyebrow, gives him an appraising but not unfriendly once-over.
"She transferred here earlier this year," Junpei adds helpfully.
"Oh," he says. “I see.”
So she’s like him — an outsider, or at least she was recently. Is that why he feels this sense of kinship? Hamuko Arisato… Strange. He feels like he’s seen that written down somewhere.
"I'm Ryoji Mochizuki," he adds, when he realizes that he knows her name, but hasn’t offered his own. "It's very nice to meet you."
She tilts her head to one side. For a dizzying moment, something like recognition flickers behind her eyes. Then it's gone, so quick that Ryoji isn't sure if it was ever there at all.
"So you're the new new kid," she greets him. "Here to steal my mantle, huh?"
“Aigis already stole your mantle!” Junpei reminds her. “Face it, Arisato, you’re last semester’s news. And be nice! You’re scaring Ryoji.”
“I’m always nice! Ryoji knows I’m just playing. Right, Ryoji?” She flashes a grin that makes his head spin. Her eyes are so warm a brown they’re nearly red. Where has has he seen them before?
An elbow to the ribs brings him back to the present. Junpei is watching him, inquisitive and a little unsure. “What’s up, buddy? You’re kinda quiet.”
“Huh?” Ryoji says muzzily. “Oh. Sorry, I just… Hamu-chan,” he says earnestly, and almost reaches for her hands before he remembers that he literally just met this girl.
Looking startled but not displeased by the familiarity of his address, Hamuko flashes another blinding grin.
“Ryo-chan,” she shoots back. Junpei rolls his eyes like he expected no less.
Ryoji doesn’t usually talk about the things he can’t remember. It’s much more fun to play in the present, where the sun is warm and the girls are pretty. But something about Hamuko makes him feel like she might understand.
“I just got the weirdest feeling, seeing you,” he confesses. “Like… nostalgia? Could we have met before, do you think?”
When Hamuko’s head tilts the other way, her smile goes a little cold. Her stare turns calculating, like she's doing equations in her head. But before she can answer, Junpei is shoving him on the shoulder.
“Dude,” he snickers, “I know you’re shameless, but that’s, like, the oldest line in the book!”
“That’s not what I meant,” Ryoji protests, momentarily distraught. Because it isn't. It’s not like he has any problem with flirting, in the abstract. It’s just that this feels—bigger than that. More important. But Junpei is laughing affectionately, and Hamuko is smiling at him, and Ryoji can’t stay upset for long.
“Ah, well,” he concedes, with an amiable shrug. “I hope we get along!”
###
They get along.
Being around Hamuko is easy. She’s alive in every moment, bright in every place that he’s dark. Electrifying charisma flows from her every gesture, every bloodthirsty grin and confident toss of her hair. She throws her head back when she laughs, her laugh two times too loud and trigger-quick; and for someone who seems to find everything funny, she still manages to look surprised and delighted every single time that laugh barrels out of her.
Ryoji loves people. He loves tracing the edges of their perspective and fitting it over his own. He loves to make them feel good, to flatter and to praise until they bloom before him. He likes to hear them talk about themselves.
He doesn’t like to talk about himself. What would he even talk about?
With Hamuko, Ryoji talks about himself. Like. A lot. But he also talks about the nature of love, and the way the light sparkles off the sea, and whether or not Hamuko could beat her housemate Akihiko in a fight (she swears on her life that she could). He tells her about the holes in his mind, and the terror that thrills through him every time he recognizes something that he shouldn’t. Hamuko listens and maybe even understands, and it all feels so right he can hardly bear it.
###
The only problem is Hamuko’s self-appointed guardian, who won’t stop telling him he’s dangerous.
"You are a threat," Aigis spat at him when she first stalked up, stiff-legged and bristling. He was startled by hatred in her voice, a fury that didn’t quite match the look of distant, sterile hostility on her oddly inexpressive face. “Please step away from Hamuko-san!”
Ryoji flirted reflexively, hoping to win her over with his good nature and obviously benign intent. It didn’t work. If anything, Ai-chan looked angrier than ever.
It upsets him a little, when he thinks about it. Ryoji might not be sure who he is, but he’s not dangerous. How could he be dangerous? He wouldn’t hurt a fly. If he saw a fly that someone else had hurt, he’d probably try to nurse it back to health, though first he’d have to figure out what flies ate: fruit, or maybe blood?
And dangerous to Hamu-chan in particular? Ridiculous. Just the thought of something happening to Hamuko makes his heart contract with dread. He’d die before he let anything hurt her.
###
When the class goes to Kyoto, Hamuko takes him to the river and buys him a green tea crepe to share. Two bites in, her nose is already green with powdered matcha. When Ryoji reaches out to brush it off, he has to resist the bizarre conviction that it's his own nose he's cleaning.
“Hey,” he says quickly, “here’s something I didn’t know: the light reflects off the river in a different way than it shines off of the ocean."
Hamuko’s eyes light up. “It’s 'cause of how it’s flowing! Water doesn’t actually have a color, you know. It’s like a mirror. When you look at it, you’re actually seeing whatever-it-is that it’s reflecting. The smoother the surface, the clearer the image.”
“How it’s flowing,” Ryoji repeats, turning the words over in his mouth. “So the water is on a journey, too. That must be fun.”
Hamuko grins and shuffles closer. “Here, lemme see if I can still do this.”
She grabs the paper that the crepe was wrapped in and presses it smooth. Then with a few deft movements, she folds it into a new shape: a little pyramid sitting in a pointed nest.
“You made something new!” Ryoji gasps. “What is it?”
“What do you think?”
“A hat?” he guesses hopefully, snatching it up and settling it on his head.
Hamuko snickers. “You got matcha in your hair,” reaching out to brush it away. She’s so close that he can see himself reflected in her eyes. If she were any other girl, he would ask if he could kiss her. “No, it’s not a hat. It’s a boat! That way we can send it on a journey, too.”
“But won’t it get wet?” Ryoji asks. There’s a strange sadness welling up inside him. “And sink?”
“Eventually, yeah,” she says dismissively, flapping a hand like she couldn’t care either way. She pushes herself to her feet and pulls him up after her, and the two of them skid down the slope of the riverbank — Hamuko light-stepping like a mountain goat, and Ryoji in a loosely controlled slide. “But everything ends someday,” she concludes, catching him by the waist before he goes tumbling into the drink. “And think of all the things it’ll get to see before it does!”
“I guess you’re right,” Ryoji laughs, crying a little. He’s never felt so much before. He’s — oh, fuck, he’s in love. Gods help him, he absolutely, irreversibly loves her. He met her this week, he can’t possibly love her. He can’t get her out of his head. He could never love anyone else.
###
The boy who isn't a boy hates to be alone. When there’s no one around, there’s nothing to distract him from the dread that subsumes him sometimes: the terrible, creeping assurance that all is not well, that it’s all for nothing, that he’s not really here at all. When Junpei is busy and Hamu-chan isn’t picking up, the boy goes to Paulonia Mall and charms strangers into buying him coffee.
On his way out of Chagall, he spies a familiar puff of russet hair.
“Oh, Hamuko!” Warmth wells up from his belly. Just seeing her makes him feel more real. She’s here with a man a few years older, with cream-colored hair and beautiful yellow eyes. “Is this another of your boyfriends? He has white hair, too. Is that your type, Hamu-chan?”
Hamuko gives him a sharp look, as though deciding whether she’s being insulted. When he only gazes earnestly back, she grins.
“I like 'em dark-haired, too," she says, and winks. "This is my friend Theo. Theo, this is Ryoji. Oh, huh... I think you guys would really get along, actually.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Theo!” Everything is nice when Hamuko’s around. “I love your blue coat, it’s beautiful. And it looks so soft! Can I try it on?”
“Ah—is that customary?” Theo asks hesitantly, shooting Hamuko an uncertain look. Ryoji would also like to know the answer, so he turns to listen too.
Faced with such an attentive audience, Hamuko snickers. “Yeah, sure. Totally customary. Here, let’s all trade clockwise. Dibs Ryoji’s scarf!”
He hands it over gladly as he slides his arms into Theo’s blue coat — which is just as soft as he hoped — and gives Theo, who’s squeezing into a too-tight cream sweater, an encouraging smile.
“Well, I think we look great,” Hamuko declares. “C’mon, Ryoji, I was about to introduce Theo to karaoke. You can keep us company.”
###
They’re spending more time together. They’ve taken to touching — not flirtatiously, necessarily, but affectionately, casually: her arm draped around his shoulders, finger tracing circles round his collarbone. Ryoji blooms under her touch. He rubs his face against her shoulder like a lovesick cat. When night falls, he walks her to her dorm.
“You can’t come in,” she sighs. “Aigis would lose her mind.”
“Then I don’t want you to go either,” he says selfishly. Hamuko gives him an exasperated look, but takes his hand anyway.
“Come on, then. Let’s go to the shrine.”
They climb to the top of the jungle gym and sit with their knees touching, feet dangling over open air. Hamuko breathes hot steam into the cold night air. It hangs between them for a moment, ghostly, before the wind whips it away. She looks cold. On instinct, Ryoji unwinds half of his scarf and wraps it around her neck, binding them together. She huffs a breath into the fabric.
“It’s still warm,” she confides, eyes sparkling. “Thanks.”
He’s sort of surprised to hear it. Hamuko is so hot with life that he thought he might feel cold by comparison.
“It’s because you’re here,” he decides, utterly serious. “You breathe warmth into me.”
That too-fast, too-loud laugh rattles out of her like gunfire, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
“You sure say some stuff,” she observes, stifling another giggle. The cold air pinks her cheeks, turns the tip of her nose rosy. Ryoji frowns and pulls his scarf up over it. Then, for good measure, he cups his hands and brings their faces close, trying to breathe warmth into her like she does for him.
“—h,” she breathes, barely a whisper. He looks up from her cold-numbed nose to find her right there, eyes like mulled wine, only inches from his own and warm with fondness. Need strikes with painful urgency.
“Please,” he says desperately, “I have to kiss you, please—”
“I can’t,” she starts to say, and Ryoji dies a little. “I mean, I can’t... be serious right now, about anything, I don’t think; it’s been kind of a—”
“Serious!” he laughs, drawing her up short. “God, I don’t need you to—even this, just this, it's already—it feels like coming home, you can’t even imagine. Anything you can spare, it’s already—”
Hamuko softens.
“You’re crazy,” she whispers, bringing her face close enough to bump his forehead with her own. Ryoji closes his eyes and then it’s her warm mouth on his, breathing fire into his belly and gilding his bones with molten gold. Ryoji sighs into her mouth and bursts into tears, and there is no room left inside him for fear.
###
The boy who isn't a boy has never been so happy, or so afraid. He’s drunk on devotion, high off her scent and her voice and the sound of her laugh. But even the blazing beacon of Hamuko’s affection isn’t enough to burn away the dark. He's afraid to be alone, panicked by the thought that tomorrow will come. He's terrified by the fact of his own fear.
“Hamu-chan,” he says desperately, so early in the day that the sun is still half-hidden behind the world. They’ve snuck onto the school roof, even though school is supposed to be closed on Sundays. The front door was locked, but Hamuko is very resourceful. “Hamu-chan, I’m… Am I really here?”
He feels like the words don't match up with his mouth. Like he’s a character in a bad dub from one of those shady websites where Hamuko downloads foreign cartoons. He feels like he's watching the scene play out from above, and if he dared to look up he would see himself, bodiless, suspended overhead like a vengeful ghost. He feels like he’s dying, or maybe he’s already dead.
Then he looks up and sees Hamuko looking straight at him, possessive and fierce with concern, and his fear dissipates like smoke.
“It’s nothing,” he says easily, because everything is easy with Hamuko. “Look at the water, it's like silver. It almost hurts."
“All the best things do,” she says, and laughs.
###
The dreams are getting worse. Ryoji can’t bear to sleep. He’s losing time, waking up in strange places. He can feel the darkness growing. When Hamuko sends him away at night he feels cold inside and hollow, like a paper boy. He thinks about the paper boat she made him by the river in Kyoto. He imagines it taking on water, the paper turning slushy and soft. Dissolving into the murk until there's nothing left of it at all, not even a matcha-colored stain. He thinks about all the things it's seen, and will never see again.
Ryoji closes his eyes in class and wakes up on a bridge. The moon is enormous, a colossal yellow eye. The clouds look like bread mold. Like the whole sky is rotting. Ryoji closes his eyes and wishes he was anywhere else. He wants to throw up. He both needs and desperately doesn’t want to know how he got here. He never wants to learn the truth. He wants to lie and lie and lie until he’s sick with it, until his skin splits and his pores drip silver. He wants to be Hamuko’s and nothing else until he dies. He wants to be selfish. He wants to be real.
If the boy really isn’t a boy, then what is he, exactly?
Footsteps close in. It’s Ai-chan, Hamuko’s protector. The one who calls him dangerous. What does she know that he doesn’t?
Aigis’ face is as smooth as ever, but he can still feel the hate in her. It's not hot like Hamuko’s, but glacial cold. Aigis looks at him with murder in her eyes and takes his world apart.
“You are not real,” she says coldly, and the light that Hamuko put in him goes out. “Your name is Death.”
Thanatos remembers.
Hamuko's living weapon cannot harm him, no matter how much he might wish that she could. Thanatos is whole now, and stronger than he was when last they met. To dispatch her is the simplest thing in the world.
He doesn't finish Aigis off, because it would hurt Hamuko, and he would rather die than hurt Hamuko. Instead he sits beside her and waits for his friends to arrive.
“My mother is coming,” he warns them miserably. He can’t look at Hamuko. He doesn't want to see the betrayal in her eyes. “Now that I’m whole, she’ll come for me, and that’s the end of everything.”
“So we’ll beat her,” Yukari says fiercely. “We’ve beat bigger.”
“You don’t understand. She’s not a monster to fight, she’s more like… sunset. She’s inevitable. Everything ends, and she’s what ends it.”
He tells them everything, about the day that Aigis failed to kill him and opted instead to seal him away inside a little girl who had just lost everything. No matter what he says, they don’t understand. He can still see the hope burning away in them, guttering but not yet ready to go out. He’s not explaining it right. He has to make them understand.
“There’s more I need to tell you,” he says weakly, and collapses. Everything ends.