Work Text:
i) f/2.8
You're teetering on the edge of the platform. Heels rocking back (1-2) and forth (3-4). It’s 10:20 — 22:20, if you’re fancy. And in a couple of minutes, maybe you’ll be able to take a breath without having to draw it in behind clenched teeth.
They might say that all you did was swap out one city for another in the pre-written script of your life. Kyo-to. To-kyo. A meaningless rearrangement of syllables on the page. And you’d say that it was still a choice. And that it matters just the same. Because Tokyo isn't here. It's 457 kilometers away from everything you've ever known. It's 457 kilometers away from that house. Those walls. The ghosts in the garden.
Not long to go now.
22:22 is the magic number. You always did think that good things came in pairs.
You've got a plastic bag hanging in the crook of your elbow. Snacks for the road. The rail. Whatever. One salty, one sweet, because. Well. You wanted them both, and there was no one around to rattle off a well-worn itemised list of reasons why you shouldn't. It's funny, how growing up wanting for nothing can make you fixate on the spaces between everything. Makes you want things closer. And maybe that's why you're standing here now. At the little liminal-point that joins two carriages of the train. Looking out the window, trying to let the outside world blur into something a little softer. Trying to commit that picture to memory.
ii) f/4
In a school as large as this, with as many rooms as it has, you're almost surprised that you'd be put into one right next to someone else's. In the family home you could go days without seeing the same person twice.
His name is Suguru Geto and you see him every morning.
He's charming, and he's funny, and he always knows the right thing to say. He has a lot of faces but you like to think he has a special one for you. The one where his smile reaches his eyes. The one that makes yours crinkle around the edges. And, sure, it's maybe not the best one. His cheekbones a little too high, his canines a little too sharp, his laugh like a bark that's been forced out of him. But you've never known someone who can take a hit like he can. The first time you threw a fist in his direction, he caught it in his palm. You didn't know it then, but you were doomed.
Some days, you're a trio.
Shoko Ieiri is the third student in your little cohort. She has a blunt bob with a glare that could cut to compensate. She isn't much of a talker. For the most part. But sometimes you swear you can see right through her. When she forgets to draw the curtains closed.
Most of the time she doesn't manage to get out of bed early enough to walk over to class with you both. But today, you're on her right and Suguru's on her left. She's lighting up a cigarette and you crinkle your nose at the smell of her first exhale. Every time. You have a long-practiced, fun and lighthearted, totally educational lecture on the dangers of smoking at the ready. But Suguru is directly transmitting a memory into your brain via pointed eye contact over Shoko's head — about certain people ending up on the pointy end of a scalpel, on a certain afternoon in April, after a tasteless joke about lung cancer — and you're suddenly very interested in the health of your nail beds.
Things aren't always this peaceful, though. Between you and Suguru in particular. Especially when Shoko isn't around to threaten to send you both to the morgue. You're teenage boys, with fuses so short you're perpetually one badly-timed breath from detonation.
God, you're such an asshole sometimes, he says. You reply that you've never cared about being a good person. You think there might be a "but" lost somewhere around the end of that statement, a "maybe" too, possibly two more after that. Two words that feel a little too big for the room you're in. They're stuck under your tongue, and you swallow them down. So you blurt out some shit you both know you don't mean, and you don't talk about it.
iii) f/5.6
You barely feel it when pierces through your chest. It all happens in a sickening pulse between an inhale and exhale. Like a hot knife through butter. It shouldn't have been so easy. Sure, your body is already stitching itself back together around the wound, but the pain is white-hot and blinding, streaming out between the seams.
Suguru wants to stay, but you tell him to go, and you watch him leave — because you owe this to Riko. She deserves a choice.
And suddenly, you're on the floor. Six eyes, but you might as well be blind. You've bled before, but never like this. It's in your mouth now, streaming over your eyes like a shroud. This will be the last time you ever let anyone get this close again.
***
You don't know what Suguru saw in that tomb. You don't know that Riko reached out her hand, trusting that he'd take it. You don't know that more than one thing shattered after she hit the ground, when Toji Zenin told him he'd left you in pieces upstairs. You don't know what it meant to see you whole, with Riko's body in your arms. You don't know, because Suguru won't tell you. Because you don't ask. He's haunted now, and you pretend you don't notice.
You can't let your guard down.
So you train. You try not to think about how sometimes you wake up with the phantom ache of a blade in your throat. You try not to think about how wearing infinity like a second skin feels like being buried alive. You try not to think about the tightness in Shoko's shoulders, and how Suguru definitely isn't eating enough. You try not to think about how you stop seeing him every morning.
iv) f/8
Sound travels five times faster in water than in air. Shoko told you that once. When you're under the waves, sounds go straight to your skull. Makes things sound muted, but heavier. Distant, but everywhere all at once.
"...He likely killed his parents too."
It's playing on a sick loop in your head, like an unrelenting tide crashing in and out along the shore. You barely even register Shoko's call. In the blink of an eye, you're standing in the middle of a crowded street in Shinjuku. He's right there, and you're drowning. You want to ask him to come home, but you let him go, and it isn't the first time.
Yaga-sensei will ask you later why you didn't follow him, and you dodge the question because you can't admit how badly you wanted to. He won't ask again. You've never felt so cold in your life.
v) f/11
Sorcerers never die without regrets.
That's what Yaga-sensei always used to say. And you wonder if that's supposed to make it easier. Believing that Suguru would've written this story differently, if he'd had the chance. You both always used to joke about going out in a blaze of glory. A barehanded battle to the death on a rooftop in the rain. It wasn't supposed to end like this, on Christmas Eve in 2017. It's been almost ten years since you've seen his face. You want to hate him for it. You know you should hate him for everything else.
But he's slumped against the wall, his hair longer than ever, and his laugh sounds exactly the same. He tells you it wasn't personal, but how could it not be? He's your best friend, and you can't —
So you —
Well, you know how this goes.
You're writing this part, though. The part where you fall to your knees, your lips brushing his, and you can't help but notice — he's still a little warm. It burns. It burns, and it tastes like a curse. Sharp and metallic. Shrapnel in an open wound. The taste no one else knows.
Exorcised.
Ingested.
vi) f/16
Of course, you could be standing outside Naha Airport before even the first passenger steps foot on the plane. According to the announcements, this flight is going to take 2 hours and 55 minutes. You've never been a patient person. But you want to feel the drag of every second. You take an aisle seat and you keep your eyes closed.
***
You asked Shoko to meet you here, by the seaside. She has the same look on her face as she did a year ago today. When you tracked blood on her floorboards, hanging by a thread at the axis of everything. Disapproving, but not unkind.
"You picked a shitty day to ruin each other," she says.
And you know. You know that she knows she doesn't need to tell you. He was the wrong boy, but you always did like to take the salty with the sweet. You move to stand on her left instead of her right, fitting yourself inside his shape. It isn't quite right. Unbalanced. So you try to bury your feet in the wet sand, but the ocean keeps washing it away. You don't deserve it but you hope it'll strip you clean.
Shoko takes a drag of her cigarette and stands firm; lets you lean against her shoulder. Lightly. Just for a little while.