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Chikage’s life is countless stories being told at once, pieced together by footnotes and lines, separated by scribbled borders. A roadmap of who he isn’t, leading to where he’s not. Every word written with the pen pushed down hard enough to imprint on the page that comes after.
On one of these pages is a portrait of a man. A simple, classic kind of handsome, and yet Chikage keeps redrawing it, pasting on pieces from magazines, stills from movies, painting over with corrective white, trying again, and still something is always off. It sits in a void of blank space, waiting for Chikage to find the right words to describe Tsumugi Tsukioka.
Whatever the answer, it’s something that has Chikage drive him to his family home, but that stops him from going inside. Something that gets him out of the car, but keeps him leaning against the fender.
He’s only waiting ten minutes when the front door swings open and Tsumugi reappears. Gardens on both sides guide him down the front path. Watching him, Chikage thinks, if he keeps making allowances and pushing these lines back, redrawing them over and over, eventually he’ll have nothing but a book of black pages.
He pushes away from the car.
Tsumugi’s holding that dog of his, that pathetic little runt with its sad, beady eyes. His face is pale, his steps halted. Eyes wide and jaw set in a way that Chikage knows too well. With Tsumugi’s hands covered in blood, staining the dog’s sandy fur, all those ink lines are starting to look more like watercolour.
Twenty minutes later, paramedics wheel her body through the flowers. One of them is so young. All while she’s talking to Tsumugi (her voice gentle as he nods and nods and shakes his head and nods) Chikage’s looking at her thinking she can’t be much older than Sakuya.
Stroke, she says, aneurysm, maybe. Common at her age. Must have hit her head on the way down, she says. There’s nothing anyone could have done, she says. She’s so sorry, she says.
No ink-drawn wards could keep death contained. It exists on every page, in every chapter.
The first time they deliver the news, half of Winter Troupe and a few others are there. Tasuku and Tsumugi disappear into their own little word and everyone else is left to fill the silence with smalltalk. They can’t believe it, they say, it doesn’t feel real. She was so kind. Poor Tsumugi. Chikage catches Hisoka staring at him, but looks away the moment they make eye contact.
When Tasuku comes back, he’s alone.
“I won’t be able to do the theme park job,” is the first thing he says, and there’s something funny about it. Less funny is the waver to Tasuku’s voice that says more than he ever will. “Someone else is going to have to—”
“I’ll do it.” Chikage gets to his feet, keeping his eyes on a text message he didn’t get. “Excuse me, I have to make a call.”
After a death, there are firsts for everything. Once the clock starts moving again, then you have to do something. You have to keep existing. There’s the first thing you say, the first thing you eat. Laying around being sad gets boring, so there’s the first time you waste time. Your first time playing video games, scrolling social media. Your first time laughing, taking a piss, sneezing, jacking off, showering.
And it feels stupid. Everything feels stupid and pointless. You put your own humanity under a microscope and find no answers.
The next day, Chikage goes to work. He goes out for lunch, he takes a photo of the meal, but doesn’t post it on his blog. He gets stuck in traffic on his drive home. He watches Itaru play video games. Neither of them say much. Chikage leaves in the middle of the night to meet with an associate, stops them before they’re about to leave, but then lets them go once he realizes there’s nothing they can do to fix this situation. He goes home. He sleeps, he wakes up. He picks up his suit from the dry cleaner. He drives his family to the wake.
This grief is secondhand. Chikage knows the woman only as the colours in Tsumugi’s portrait. He knows her legacy and her proof, and watching Tsumugi standing in place with his face buried in his hands, Chikage knows the weight crushing him to dust.
Tsumugi is supposed to be inside with family, but here he is, hiding in the garden behind the ceremony hall. The moment he lifts his head, he notices Chikage smoking on a bench and makes his slow way over.
“You’re still here,” he says, because he’s too kind to ask why. If he did, Chikage would tell him all about having his car stolen. But Tsumugi doesn’t ask, so Chikage doesn’t lie. “Pretty much everyone else is gone. My parents are dealing with some leftover family.” Tsumugi takes his place on the other side of the bench, unbuttoning his jacket and loosening his tie. “I did my part and sent the Winter Troupe home.”
“I can’t imagine they made that easy.”
“They don’t make anything easy.”
Black suit, black hair, sickly pale complexion. All of him, still and colourless surrounded by vibrant flowers, Tsumugi is a moment out of time.
“No, that’s not fair,” says his guilty conscience. “I know they care, it’s just…” He shakes his head. “I’m glad you’re still here, though. It’s stifling in there. All those people treating me like I’m made of glass.”
Chikage flicks the ash off his cigarette. “And you don’t think I will? Just how cruel do you think I am?”
Halfway to his lips, the cigarette is snatched away. Tsumugi places it between his own and the cherry flares angrily, its orange light contrasting with the dark of him.
“I don’t think you’re cruel,” he says. “I think you know how much kindness hurts.”
Tsumugi barely stifles a cough as he holds the cigarette out. When Chikage doesn’t take it back, he keeps the last drag for himself before snuffing it against the bench’s metal arm. Chikage’s hands stay in his lap, laced so tight his bones creak.
“Maybe you should let it,” he says.
Smoke trails from between Tsumugi’s lips in the shape of a trembling laugh.
“How? What do I do?”
Sunlight pours over them from the clear skies above, contrasted by the cool breeze that slides between them. Chikage shakes his head.
“I don’t know.”
Tsumugi is the hard bone beneath soft flesh.
Eyes too gentle, eyes too knowing. Preconceptions of innocence used to weasel his way to a win. He keeps stepping over those ink lines but then waits in limbo while Chikage redraws another. Never pushing too far ahead but getting closer all the time.
It’s a game. It was a game. They don’t seem to be playing it anymore.
Before this happened—before the funeral, the wake, before the ambulance’s flashing lights and stuttering siren, before Tsumugi looked at Chikage over breakfast and asked, “Do you mind if we stop somewhere on the way home?”
—before all that, the hotel room is paid for by someone that doesn’t exist.
“Old habit,” Chikage says, “an estranged family member that still supports me financially,” because he wants to believe it’s still a game at this point. The look on Tsumugi’s face says otherwise. In the confined space of an elevator, the weight of Tsumugi’s head resting on his shoulder, hand in hand, it’s enough to scare Chikage shitless.
The worst thing someone can do for a cry for help is take it seriously.
Above the hotel bed, Chikage doesn’t notice until he’s on his back, but the ceiling is mirrored. Of course it’s mirrored. When he points it out, Tsumugi follows his finger and they laugh, even if nothing is really that funny.
Even less hilarious is when Tsumugi climbs on top and Chikage has nowhere else to look. Surrounded by all these angles of the ways they’re about to hurt each other, Chikage looks over Tsumugi’s shoulder and watches his fingers trace his spine. With his hands as stained as they are, he could be painting pictures. He turns his head, closes his eyes. Opens them, looks again. Tsumugi’s mouth bruises his neck, breath tickles his ear, and instead of something real, Chikage keeps staring at the reflection of it.
“Hey.” Tsumugi sits up. The warmth of his bare chest against Chikage’s vanishes. “Are you okay? If you’re not sure—”
Chikage slides his hands up Tsumugi’s thighs, to his waist, and that’s real. The heavy breaths moving the ribs beneath Tsumugi’s skin, that’s real.
Always with his head lost in tragedies yet to come. Chikage keeps his eyes on Tsumugi and sits up. Lifting him as gently as he can, he rolls them over, until all he sees is the man beneath him. And whispering the most honest words he can, he makes sure Tsumugi can see only him.
No ink-drawn wards could keep death contained.
Reflected in the flower shop’s window, Chikage is painted in cold blues. A portrait of a man standing in shadow, framed in sunshine and potted plants.
Marigold and gladiolus, he’s thinking, valerian and zinnia, and it’s all so stupid. Feeble in the face of something monstrous and real. But there’s nothing else he can do. He buys a potted kalanchoe. He drives to a café and buys a tin of chamomile tea. Outside, there’s a street artist selling carved wooden trinkets, so he buys one of those. In the wake of death, everyone just does what they can.
Chikage waits until late to deliver the gifts. The excuse is leaving them as a surprise while the intention is something uglier, and in the end he gets what he deserves.
He’s still crouched, making sure the gifts are somewhere Tasuku won’t trample them when he leaves for his morning run, when room 204’s door swings open. Zabi barrels out and nearly knocks the glasses off his head. Chikage shoves him away. Gently.
Tsumugi kneels and takes the plant and tea. Smiling, but only with his mouth.
“This is beautiful,” he says, and he almost sounds like he means it. “Thank you.”
They get to their feet. With the stupid kalanchoe cradled in his arms, Tsumugi parts its stupid leaves and pokes the stupid wooden rabbit Chikage had nestled so whimsically among its stalks.
“You have good timing," Tsumugi says. "Zabi and I were just about to go for a walk.”
“At three in the morning?”
“That’s not so strange for you, is it? Would you like to come?”
“Is Tasuku—”
“—asleep, like any normal person would be, yes. I’m a grown man, Chikage. Are you coming?”
With the way he wiggles the rabbit side to side, it could be thumping its foot, warning of danger. Tsumugi is no predator, but the thing stalking him will devour Chikage too.
“Lead the way,” he says, and it bares its fangs.
Chikage told a lie at work once, to explain away a bad mood and get a coworker off his back. Some story about a falling out with a friend. Or maybe it was a doomed love. Whatever it was ended with this older woman patting his arm and saying that everything happens for a reason. Broken bones heal stronger than before.
Even at its earliest hours, Veludo Way’s lights are never extinguished. With no performers and no audience, it’s an elaborate stage on display for no one. Only Chikage and Tsumugi’s shoes scuff against the concrete, accompanied by the jingle of Zabi’s tags and the occasional passing taxi.
“You’re filling in for Tasuku, right? For the theme park job.”
“I am.”
“Thank you,” Tsumugi says again.
They pass by the mouth of an alley, opening to a thoat made darker by the lights of the main street. Angel that he is, Tsumugi picks up a discarded can and puts it in the next bin they come across. Whatever he is, Chikage keeps his eyes on the shadows.
“How is practice?”
“As noisy as ever.”
“But you’re working hard? Getting along with everyone?”
“You must see me as quite the instigator. I always do, don’t I?”
“Then it's only me you’re avoiding.”
If Chikage was a worse liar, this is where he would give himself away. Like Taichi or Muku might, he’d whip his head around but avert his eyes the moment they met Tsumugi’s. He’d stutter and insist no, no, he wouldn’t do something like that.
Maybe he even wants to. To be so honest that lying never works, it must be so freeing.
But Chikage is a natural. Or he’s been taught well, if the difference matters at this point. He lets the shock wash over him and dissipate, so that when he turns and meets Tsumugi’s gaze, there’s no trace left.
For him, honesty has to be a choice.
“Here I thought you like how mean I can be,” he says, because that's the game. Chikage is the damaged one, Tsumugi is the one trying to tear down his walls.
This time Tsumugi doesn’t bother to force a smile.
The thing about broken bones—immediately after the break, they are sturdier as a way of protecting the fracture. But once healed, they go back to being as flimsy as before. And Chikage, he’s still trying to figure out if his splintered edges will cut whoever gets too close, or if he’s just as fragile as everyone else.
“Sorry,” he sighs.
Tsumugi shakes his head, eyes turned down the street.
“Me too.”
Outside the only 24-hour café for blocks, Tsumugi and Zabi wait on the street while Chikage rushes in for two coffees and donuts. It’s not enough, but he helps pull back the tab when Tsumugi struggles to open it with his hands full. He wipes sugar glaze off his cheek. He remembers how it felt to wake up in this man’s arms. He stays with him. He does what he can.
Every step takes them further from Mankai, into the areas of the city where the buildings and webs of wires give way to the sky above. Wide open space that promises galaxies but delivers nothing. They’re still too far into the city for the sky to be anything other than a sickly orange.
Just outside an empty park, host to the skeletal remains of a jungle gym, Zabi’s pace starts to slow, his little legs exhausted after thousands of steps next to their hundreds.
“I think you know,” Tsumugi says, kneeling to scoop the dog into his arms, “about us taking Hisoka to the ocean?”
Shoulders up to his ears, neck bent to rest his cheek against Zabi’s head, Tsumugi keeps his eyes shut for too long after he blinks. But the road doesn’t bend, and he must trust Chikage not to let him walk into any poles.
“They keep saying I should do something too—when I’m ready—but…”
But it feels pointless. This is another one of those firsts. When actions are just actions and gifts are just things. Nothing will make you feel better. You don’t want it to feel better. You don’t want to feel anything. You don’t feel enough. You’re scared of feeling too much.
Tsumugi stops so abruptly that it’s a couple steps before Chikage does the same. In the space between streetlights, he’s carved of asphalt and shadows.
“I’m not running away,” he insists.
“I know,” Chikage tells him.
A man walking his dog passes the other way, the big beast pulling at its leash with its tail propellering like it’s about to launch into orbit, but Tsumugi doesn’t let Zabi down to socialize. He starts glaring at different parts of the road.
“I keep thinking—an old professor of mine always used to say that people are logically illogical. Reactions to trauma are as unique as the person experiencing them, but they generally follow basic patterns. From the outside looking in, it all makes sense.”
But suffering is incomprehensible.
“I know,” Chikage says. “Tsumugi.”
Tsumugi shakes his head.
“Hey.” Chikage moves closer. Tsumugi shakes his head faster. “Would you put the dog down, please?”
Tsumugi doesn’t move, Chikage doesn’t repeat himself, and eventually Tsumugi does what he’s told. Zabi’s tags jingle as he hops to the asphalt.
Two steps forward, Chikage turns to a clean page. He pulls Tsumugi close to his chest, rests his cheek against his soft hair. Closes his eyes. The curve of Tsumugi’s nape fits so perfect against his palm. Shaking breath tickles Chikage’s neck, and finally, Tsumugi moves too. He wraps his arms around Chikage’s waist and squeezes tight. And Chikage himself bends but does not break.
Only once the tremors wracking Tsumugi’s body still do they step apart. His cheeks glisten in the distant light until Chikage wipes them dry.
“Tsumugi,” he murmurs. “Let’s go home.”
Itaru complains when he comes to pick them up, but only a little. Judging by how fast he read the text, he was already awake, this is just that way of his—always putting up a front even when it makes him look worse.
At a red light, he catches Chikage glancing into the backseat under the guise of nosing through the console.
“Ran into him on my way out,” he explains.
Hisoka always sets a record for falling asleep, but curled up next to him, Tsumugi didn’t fall far behind. They’re using each other as pillows, arms linked, and Tsumugi is still pale but he’s looking more relaxed.
Chikage turns forward and rearranges Zabi on his lap. Scratches his ear, underneath his collar, his chin.
“I see,” he says.
“Scared the shit out of me, creeping around like he does.” Itaru taps his thumb against the steering wheel, too quick to be in time with any song. “Told him I was coming to pick you guys up and he decided he was coming before I could even ask. As if I would’ve said no.”
He keeps glancing sideways. Even with a practised deceiver like him, the tells are obvious. Nothing has ever been said, no one knows exactly what is (or isn’t) going on with Chikage and Tsumugi, but Itaru is too observant for his own good. All that curiosity must burn.
Sometimes silence is the closest thing to truth, and once they’re in the dorm’s parking lot with the engine cut and the lights off, things start feeling a little too honest. Each passing second rubs their skin raw.
“Thank you,” Chikage says. “For—” for coming, for not asking, for giving him time, now and then and always “—for everything.”
Itaru’s eyes go wide for a moment, then it’s back to a more familiar smug look.
“Don’t take so long next time.”
They get out and open the back doors. Chikage gets Tsumugi semi-conscious with a bit of prodding, then takes his hand and gently tugs him to his feet. Itaru doesn’t miss that, either.
“Well,” Chikage says, “have fun carrying the other one.”
“What? Wait—”
“I’m kidding. Here.” Chikage hands over Tsumugi and the dog’s leash, then hauls Hisoka’s body out of the backseat. With a bit of help, and while harbouring fantasies of just dragging him inside by the ankle, he manages to get Hisoka on his back.
Halfway to the front door, the weight shifts.
“Chikage,” says a voice in his ear, “you’re slow.”
“Says the man who keeps running ahead into walls.” Hisoka lets out a little breath that might be a laugh. Chikage bounces him to get a better grip. “Go back to sleep or get down and walk.”
Up ahead, Tsumugi holds the door open. Itaru’s already inside, keeping up some stream of updates from—what Chikage can gather—the current endgame content in the MMO he’s been playing. He knows Tsumugi doesn’t understand; it’s just for noise. For normalcy.
Haloed in light, drained but unwavering, Tsumugi keeps his gaze fixed on Chikage’s as he joins them in Mankai’s warmth.
“Sure hope I pulled this off better than you do.”
Flip to the back of the book and Appendix II catalogues an entire series of revenge. Tucked away for moments like this, with Itaru taking pictures while all Chikage can do is bow with a hand over his heart. Wearing a suit with epaulets like melting icing, he goes, “I would gladly spend the evening with you fine gentlemen—”
“Ew.” Another picture.
“—but there is much to be done in the Kingdom.”
“Wait, was Tasuku really gonna do this?”
With the back of his hand pressed to his lips, Tsumugi barely conceals a grin. Even after his hand falls, his voice wavers. “The… idea was to revisit his roots. Something about how to go forward, sometimes you have to go back. At least, that’s how Izumi roped him into it. For what it’s worth, Chikage, I think you look nice. And Itaru, I know you had fun when it was our turn.”
The only reason they have Chikage cornered like this is because most of the women and children who would be bothering him for pictures are on their way to the night parade. The handful remaining are barely out of earshot, talking amongst themselves and occasionally looking over.
Five minutes left in his shift and of course Itaru hunted him down to make each one miserable. Presumably Tsumugi is along for the ride because he has a badly suppressed sadistic streak honed by years of bullying Tasuku. Conjecture, of course.
“You really must excuse me,” Chikage says. “And please, be safe on your way home. Especially you, my friend,” he adds, smiling at Itaru. “It would be such a shame if you vanished and no one ever found your body.”
“Uh huh.” At the very least, Itaru puts away his phone. “Well, have fun, your majesty.”
He starts to leave but only gets a few steps before he realizes Tsumugi isn’t following. Standing straighter, hands clasped behind his back, it’s obvious what’s happening. Itaru notices too. He shakes his head and waves over his shoulder, disappearing down the cobblestone road.
“Prince Cinnamon,” says Prince Candy, “how kind you are to spend time amongst your subjects.”
Chikage bows again. “I have heard of the perils that befall the citizens of this land. Evil princes kidnapping princesses and such. I would live amongst the people and do my utmost to keep them safe.”
Tsumugi smiles and glances around. With closing time ever closer, the crowd is moving on and the moment is theirs. He reaches over and smooths nonexistent wrinkles out of Chikage’s jacket. The bright lights of the rides around them highlight every motion in blues and reds, and what’s left vanishes into black shadow.
“You really are handsome,” Tsumugi murmurs.
He keeps his eyes on his hands. Wets his lips. The whimsical lights become unsettling strobe, nauseating and disorienting with the cheerful music mocking their silence.
“Chikage—”
“I know.”
“I just need time. I’m not asking you to wait—”
“I will, though.” Chikage takes Tsumugi’s hand and pries it away from the sash he keeps trying to straighten. “I just can’t believe you’re doing this while I’m dressed like a cinnamon bun.”
Tsumugi covers his mouth too late to stop his laugh from bubbling out. But mirth doesn’t last long, not like this. “Sorry… I had this whole speech planned out, but…”
“It’s okay.”
This time Chikage is the one to look around for prying eyes. When he finds none, he lifts Tsumugi’s hand to his lips, pressing a kiss against each finger, his palm, the inside of his wrist for good measure.
And he knows, then, the words he’ll ink next to Tsumugi’s portrait. Knows the way they’ll one day spill off the pages, too big for any language. And he hopes, then, that with no more need for stories he’ll carry them etched in his bones.
One more kiss, then he finally lets go.
“Anything you need,” Chikage says, “I’m yours.”