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The full moon stretched overhead, hastening away clouds and filling the sky with an eery silver glow. The forest was drowned in its cool light, casting dark shadows under the dappled leaves and painting the bark of the trees white.
But despite the light, the forest was silent.
Buffered somehow.
As though the light chased away the usual night sounds.
The usual scurrying of moles and mice, rabbits and hares, scuttering through the undergrowth in the night, avoiding predators, had disappeared. Instead, there was only the crunch of autumn leaves under Todoroki Natsuo’s boots and the whisper of the wind.
Witching hour, he supposed.
With a quiet sigh, Natsuo shifted his hold of the man thrown over his shoulder. He’d had to tie his wings down, clamped against his back, so they wouldn’t get in his face as he transported him, but otherwise the man was limp. Still unconscious from the sedative Natsuo had slipped into his tea.
He’d forgive him.
Or if he didn’t, then it would be okay.
This was the only way Natsuo was ever going to be able to forgive himself.
A howl of wind picked up the collar of Natsuo’s light jacket, tossing leaves into his hair and his hair into his face, but the wind wasn’t the only howl in the night. Natsuo shivered. The light from the moon never waned, even as he trod into the deepest parts of Aokigahara.
He had left the path almost half an hour ago, his car parked in the carpark on the edge of the forest, next to a sign asking visitors to think about the people who loved them. The trail under his feet was only marked by a GPS guide on his phone.
He picked a careful path around a thickly trunked tree, ducking under the worn, dirty red rope that still hung from a branch that would be too tall to reach now. Something cold brushed against his shoulder, but when Natsuo turned, there was nothing there.
The map on his phone indicated that he would arrive at his destination within twenty minutes, which would give him almost an hour before witching hour. It was enough time, or that was what Shigaraki had promised.
Six months ago, Natsuo had only dabbled in witchcraft. His own skills only really aligned with elemental magic, and they weren’t strong. His mother was a practiced hedge witch, though she excelled in elemental magic as well, and was skilled in the healing arts. His father was significantly more experienced with his elemental magic, he protected the borders of their country alongside other strong witches and warlocks, so spent significant periods of time away from home. Natsuo’s skills though were nothing to write home about, he could sometimes use his magic to heal basic burns but it was temperamental and he had long since given up on relying on it.
He hadn’t cared. His sister’s magic was virtually non-existent. In fact, when they had measured her magical affinity when she was a child, they had to test her three times before she even registered. She could use it to lull children to sleep when she read to them, which suited her just fine. She taught at a primary school in the prefecture over from their family home.
His youngest brother’s magic was perhaps the strongest. He had inherited their father’s offensive elemental magic and their mother’s affinity for potions and spells, but he was still learning. He was barely eighteen.
Touya.
Touya’s magic had been a force to behold. It was fierce, sometimes too wild, but to watch him wield it was to see the very nature of magic. Its anger, its beauty, its danger, and its strength.
And the fact that it was gone, that was Natsuo’s fault.
He could remember the day clearly. It was imprinted on the backs of his eyes every time he closed them. He didn’t even have the luxury of being able to say that it had been night time.
No.
He had killed his brother in broad daylight. The day perfect, cloudless and blue, hot enough that Touya had been complaining about the temperature and playing with the air conditioner in Natsuo’s four-year-old graduation present of a car.
The thing that people didn’t often understand about the Todorokis was that they were perfect. Had to be perfect. The perfect family unit. Strong magic ran through their bloodline like water down a river. Their father might have been away a lot but their mother loved them.
So, while Touya had his rebellions against their father, and Shouto barely respected the man, they were expected to. They were the bearers of the Todoroki magic. The strongest, in their own ways.
And somewhere in the middle, often forgotten and frequently informed about how lucky he was to have such wonderfully powerful siblings, was Natsuo.
But Natsuo didn’t care about that.
When he went out with the better half of his student dorm after exams finished and woke up in a park somewhere, half hidden in a slide, it was to be part of the student experience. Sure, his head didn’t thank him for it later, but he had good memories to make up for it. He had blacked out on more nights than he cared to count, but it made up for the endless all-night study sessions and days spent in front of his laptop memorising medical procedures and types of diseases.
It was part of the student experience.
So, when Touya had turned up at his dorm room in the middle of July, a day after his final exam for the year, Natsuo had just been suffering the side-effects of the student experience.
Touya could drive, but the car had been Natsuo’s present. His graduation gift for completing high school and being accepted into medical school. None of his other siblings had been gifted a car at the end of high school (even Shouto hadn’t been when he graduated two years later), so no one else was allowed to drive his car.
He shouldn’t have driven.
Touya had asked if he was okay.
He had only really stopped drinking a few hours earlier, but he had slept in between, so he had shrugged Touya off.
He shouldn’t have driven.
He didn’t remember the accident itself, but he could remember laughing with Touya about finally introducing his boyfriend of almost a year to the family, and he remembered with cold clarity waking up days later, his skin stitched together and sore.
And being told that Touya hadn’t made it.
Natsuo had taken a break from his studies, but moving home hadn’t helped. No one blamed him, when they really should have. It was an accident, they said. As though he hadn’t been miles above the acceptable blood-alcohol limit (Natsuo wasn’t even sure they tested – the doctors probably wanted to avoid additional stress on a family grieving the loss of one son and the potential death of another). As though he hadn’t been driving.
As though he hadn’t messed up his own kidneys so badly that the damage from the car crash hadn’t caused one to shut down entirely, while the other was injured in the accident so badly that it had to be replaced.
Keigo had even visited him a few times over the months afterwards, trying to find comfort in each other’s presence. Natsuo didn’t understand how he could stand him.
Touya’s death was his fault.
His hands were drenched in his blood.
And yet, no one blamed him.
And Natsuo had found that the hardest thing to stomach.
The dense trees stopped at the edge of a perfectly circular clearing and Natsuo paused. On the edge of the forest, even the wind died away, leaving nothing but the glow to the too large moon and the heavy, thick silence.
Natsuo might not have had very much magic but he could feel it in this place. It trailed cold fingertips down his spine, dragging icy dampness over his cheeks and his collarbone, leaving him shivering. It was not kind magic. It did not light warm hearths in his family home, miles and miles away from the forests at the base of Mount Fuji where he found himself. It did not promise to heal.
It promised to hurt.
As a child, he had grown up with stories about people who practiced black magic and what happened to them. Spells cast for selfish reasons, to hurt people, to manipulate people or fortunes. They carried horrible consequences. The tales told of deals made with demons under full moons, of practitioners who had lost their souls, their humanity, in the pursuit of power.
Of those who practiced the forbidden arts, necromancers - witches or warlocks who dabbled in death magic, were the worst.
The most evil.
To interfere with the natural process of life and death was the very darkest kind of magic. It was rarely practiced, and the stories of those who did were horrible, twisted into stories about ghouls that were reanimated and consumed the family members who had paid to bring them back, stealing their magic to take it back to their masters.
But when Natsuo had met Shigaraki Tomura, he wasn’t anything like he had imagined.
His silver-blue hair curled loosely at his shoulders, and it had been tied back in a low ponytail at the nape of his neck. His slate-grey eyes had danced in amusement when Natsuo had almost fallen flat on his face in the aisle of the prefecture library, having tripped over a pile of books that a librarian was probably organising to return to the shelf, and Natsuo’s heartrate had gone from “oh fuck, I’m going to brain myself” to “oh fuck, he’s pretty” in the space of two seconds. His laugh was chesty, sometimes a wheezed sound that it sounded like he was fighting to stop it, and he had dry lips, with an old scar that bisected them on the left side.
And Natsuo had been fascinated.
Except then Shigaraki had asked what he was doing in the section of the library dedicated to dark magic, and Natsuo had to try to find a believable lie when all he could focus on was the sharply defined rise of Shigaraki’s collarbone, just visible under the open collar of the grey shirt he had been wearing.
“Natsu’!”
Natsuo shook his head and continued into the clearing as the youngest witch in Shigaraki’s coven bounded over. She was maybe a year older than Shouto, but she dressed like a school-girl, with her hair twirled up in blonde buns in a pleated, tartan skirt. Her name was Toga Himiko, and Natsuo had made her acquaintance a few nights earlier when she had demonstrated her skill with a knife to reopen the scar over his hip that had only healed a month ago.
Apparently, her magic was more aligned with manipulation, which was why she had joined Shigaraki’s coven, but she had a particular interest in knives. She didn’t have any interest in studying medicine. It was a hobby.
Natsuo had to compliment her skill though. The wound ached, but the cut had been clean.
It spelled the end of Natsuo’s heavy drinking in university, it wasn’t really advised on one kidney, but if it worked…
If it worked, it would be worth it.
“We were worried that you would get lost,” Toga smiled widely, “Jin said that you would chicken out, but I said it was a bit late for that.”
She giggled and Natsuo gave her a side-eyed look as he tightened his hold on Takami’s waist. If he was going to change his mind, before he let her remove Touya’s kidney would have been preferable. In comparison, drugging and kidnapping someone seemed like a mild price to pay.
“Himiko,” Shigaraki called quietly, his tone even and never raised but powerful all the same, “keep preparing the altar.”
The knowledge that they didn’t have the time for idle chit-chat was implicit and weighed heavily on Natsuo. If they missed the correct time under the moon, then Shigaraki had said it would be seven years before they could attempt the same spell, and Natsuo wouldn’t be able to do it anyway.
“Shigaraki,” Natsuo greeted quietly, pausing a few strides away from the large stone platform that was in the very centre of the clearing.
Shigaraki was marking it with what appeared to be ash. The sharp symbols he was painting were unfamiliar to Natsuo, but he could feel the power in them. The ash was mixed with something wet and thick, but it was black on the pale stone.
Natsuo suspected it was blood, but he didn’t want to think about it too much.
“Getting cold feet?” Shigaraki asked with a teasing lilt, his eyes shimmering with amusement as he glanced up from under his messy fringe.
Natsuo was certainly reconsidering a number of his life choices, but he wouldn’t have said he was getting cold feet. He carefully lowered Takami to the ground, laying him on the soft grass near the altar.
Shigaraki’s instructions had been clear. Takami needed to be alive, the spell wouldn’t work unless all the components were alive, but to make the trip easier he would need to remain unconscious until right before the ritual. He didn’t stir as he was settled on the ground, and Natsuo checked his pulse again.
Steady. Strong.
“No,” Natsuo shook his head, standing confidently to tuck his hands into his jean pockets.
This was all he could do.
Whatever happened, he would have to deal with that on the other side, but he wasn’t going to back down. He owed Touya his life. Whatever that cost him. Whatever of his brother he could get back from beyond the veil, it would be worth it.
Even if the worst happened and he was only with Touya for a moment in passing, one life returning, one life passing, it would be worth it.
He owed Touya everything.
Touya had cooked for them for the three years while their mother was in hospital. Touya had protected them when their father flew into one of his hot-headed rages, or when they were almost caught sneaking into the house well past curfew.
Touya had taught Natsuo to drive, and had studied with him all the way through high school to make sure that he got the grades to go to medical school.
And at the end, Touya had saved Natsuo’s live.
It was what he would have wanted, his family had tried to reassure him. He was dead anyway, and Natsuo would have died without his kidney.
But, honestly, Natsuo felt better without it.
He didn’t want to carry his brother with him for the rest of his life. He wanted his brother with him for the rest of his life. Alive and well. Making bad puns and laughing at things he shouldn’t.
“You look uncertain,” Shigaraki observed, prowling closer with long confident strides.
He wasn’t wearing anything special. Black jeans and red sneakers, a dark hoodie over a T-shirt to counter the cold, the sleeves of which were pushed up to his elbows. He was wearing a pair of gloves that only covered his little and ring fingers, but of the fifteen times Natsuo had seen Shigaraki, he had never seen him without the gloves.
Shigaraki had been a little elusive about why he wore them when they first met, but he had said that it was related to his magic. His experience in death magic meant that he sometimes had a strange effect on living things if he touched them with all five fingers.
Strange in that they sometimes stopped being quite so alive.
Watching Shigaraki place all five fingertips on the limb of a potted fern and have it shrivel slowly, then turn to grey dust minutes later had been…an experience. Natsuo wished that it had been a terrifying experience. Instead, he had marvelled at the ruby-red colour that Shigaraki’s eyes had washed, and wondered how much darker the colour would turn when he performed the spell to bring his brother back from the dead.
Because Toga might have dabbled in some manipulation magic, as did Bubaigawara, and Iguchi specialised in spells that required sacrifice, but Shigaraki practiced the most dangerous of all witchcraft.
He was a necromancer.
“I’ve already had Toga slice an organ out of me, and I drugged one of the most powerful warlocks to ever be born in Kyushu to bring him here. Do I really seem uncertain?” Natsuo rolled his eyes, shrugging his backpack off.
Shigaraki took two steps closer to bring himself chest-to-chest with Natsuo, peering up at him with dark eyes.
“You seem a little nervous now,” Shigaraki smirked, his lip curling slightly over sharp canines.
Natsuo swallowed thickly.
“I’m fine,” he replied breathlessly, “blood of the father?”
He offered Shigaraki a bag of dark liquid.
The bag was cool from where it was been tucked between ice packs in his backpack, but it was undamaged.
“Did he suspect anything?” Shigaraki asked, taking the bag gently.
“No, he donates regularly and I offered to volunteer at the blood drive today for some practical hours. No one noticed that I never checked him in,” Natsuo shook his head.
His father’s was the hardest.
Shigaraki had been paranoid about Enji finding out about what they were doing, and the theft of blood was rarely for good magic. Someone with his power and connections finding Shigaraki and his coven would be disastrous, and not just because he would kill everyone, including Natsuo and Touya, if he found that they were connected to necromancy.
“The blood is less than twenty-four hours old?” Shigaraki confirmed, weighing the bag in his hands, “and more than two-hundred and fifty millilitres?”
“It’s four-hundred and ninety millilitres, and it was drawn at two pm,” Natsuo confirmed.
Shigaraki nodded, setting the blood carefully on the altar.
“Then I will explain this all one last time, and if you change your mind, Shuichi will escort you back through the forest,” Shigaraki looked up at him, his cool eyes firm.
Natsuo swallowed and then nodded to show that he was listening.
“There are several types of reanimation. Not all of them are very effective, some of them are very unpleasant, but all of them are complicated and consume a huge amount of magical energy. The spell we will attempt this evening is called The Exchange of Life. If you change your mind about performing the spell tonight, then we cannot perform the same spell until the moon position is exactly the same, which won’t occur for another seven years, and I would need another living part of your brother. Which, due to his cremation, isn’t possible,” Shigaraki paused.
Natsuo’s gaze slid to the altar, where Toga was carefully laying out Touya’s kidney, kept functioning in a complicated medical apparatus that had been shrunk so it could fit in a suitcase. That was the only living remnant of Touya, and it would only survive three days on the equipment before it started to deteriorate.
“In addition to a living part of the person to be brought back, I also require living elements of the father – one half of the biological imprint of the dead, the brother – the biological imprint that is closest to the dead, and the lover – the emotional bond that ties the dead to the world of the living, formed by choice, not by circumstance. You have chosen blood as the most easily accessible, living part of these people,” Shigaraki continued, “is that correct?”
“Yes,” Natsuo nodded.
“And you understand that when the spell is successful, your brother’s life will be bound to mine, and he will have to remain with me, in the safety of my coven, where my magic will support his?” Shigaraki looked up at Natsuo carefully, “he will have freedom over his actions, his words and his mind, but his physical body will be bound to mine for as long as I live, and when I die, he will die.”
Natsuo nodded again. They had discussed this, at length. It was the best reanimation spell that Shigaraki could offer, it gave the most freedom, but he would also channel so much of his magic into bringing Touya back that Touya would always be reliant on it. He could travel away from Shigaraki, overnight at most, but he would have to return or he would begin to fade again.
Natsuo just hoped that Touya understood, and wouldn’t behave like a rebellious teenager when someone said he had to stay somewhere. Natsuo was happy to visit him wherever he was, and he was willing to chain him in Shigaraki’s basement if it meant keeping him alive.
“Very well, we’ll start then. We only have twenty-three minutes until midnight,” Shigaraki offered him a wan smile as he stepped back up to the altar.
Natsuo stood a few paces back, next to Takami’s still unconscious body, and watched as Shigaraki carefully placed the machine containing Touya’s kidney at the centre of the altar and then cut the bag of Enji’s blood open. He painted it onto the altar by hand, with sweeping confident movements that Natsuo realised mimicked the main arteries of the body, with the kidney over the place where the heart would be.
Toga approached him as Shigaraki worked, a metal bowl in one hand and a sharp scalpel in the other.
“It’ll be easier if you sit down, you might feel a little lightheaded afterwards,” she giggled and Natsuo sighed, folding his legs to fall cross-legged to the ground.
The slice was simple, across his forearm, and he watched absently as his blood filled the bowl. It stung and he could hear his heart pounding in his ears, but it wasn’t unbearable. It didn’t even take that long before Toga pulled the bowl away and let him bandage his arm, closing the wound with a few butterfly stitches and covering it in gauze.
Shigaraki painted his blood, still warm, over his father’s, over the exact same lines, all the way out to the ashen symbols that circled the edge of the altar.
Takami stirred as Shigaraki was finishing painting the circle of blood around the medical equipment that housed the “heart” of the spell, his huge wings straining against the metal clamps Natsuo had used to tie them down. It might have been the slice to his arm that had woken him, he certainly screamed, but Natsuo couldn’t worry about his comfort.
Whether Takami forgave him or not was irrelevant.
When Touya came back, he would be there for Takami as well, and he was going to have to make peace with that.
His screeching wasn’t helping settle Natsuo’s nerves though, even if the cuffs around his wrists seemed to be stopping him from lashing out at Toga. She didn’t seem too bothered. She merely giggled when she had enough to fill another small bowl and trotted back to Shigaraki.
Iguchi was patrolling the edge of the clearing, marking the trees with the same symbol, slashed into their trunks again and again, against every tree that surrounded the clearing. Bubaigawara was holding a thick, leather-backed tome and flicking back and forth between two pages, muttering quietly to Shigaraki as he continued to mark the altar, laying Takami’s blood over the top of Natsuo’s.
“Why did it need to be here?” Natsuo asked Toga quietly when she skipped back over, washing her hands on a damp towel, having bandaged Takami’s arm despite his struggles.
“Death is strong magic. The places where people die leave scars, weakening the divide between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The places where many people have died are among the weakest. Hospitals, old-people’s homes, battlefields, castles. It consumes less magic to attempt reanimation in places where the divide is weaker, which is also why we perform the spell during witching hour, on a full moon, this close to All Hallows Eve,” Shigaraki replied softly.
“Natsu-o?” Takami asked blearily, shifting on his shoulders so he could look around at him, “wha’the f’ck?”
Natsuo glanced down at him and then looked back up at Shigaraki.
“You make it sound like it could fail, if you need this many supports for the spell,” he frowned, “you didn’t say this might not work.”
“All spells can fail if performed incorrectly, or by someone who doesn’t have the right kind of magic, or enough of it,” Shigaraki shrugged.
“Have you done this before?” Natsuo asked, an edge of worry in his tone.
“Done what before?” Takami snapped, his tone clearer as he shook away the remnants of the sedative.
Natsuo ignored him again, as did Shigaraki.
“No, but I also know it won’t fail,” Shigaraki replied flippantly, cleaning his hands on a towel after he finished the last of the lines.
“How do you know that?” Natsuo frowned.
He hadn’t gone through all of this for it to not work. He didn’t have another option. Touya didn’t have another option.
If this didn’t work, Natsuo would just have to accept that…he was dead.
And he didn’t know how to do that.
“I just do,” Shigaraki shrugged, “but if you’re worried, we can place a wager on it?”
“What kind of wager?” Natsuo asked slowly, after a pause.
“If I fail to bring your brother back to life, you owe me nothing,” Shigaraki offered with a shrug.
Natsuo narrowed his eyes at him. He had already cleared out his savings and a significant chunk of his trust fund to pay for the spell. He already thought he owed Shigaraki nothing.
Takami’s wings shifted against their restraints, but he had fallen silent, apparently having decided that he would learn more by observing than interjecting, even if his sharp, too intelligent eyes were tracking Shigaraki’s every move with predatory intensity.
“And if you bring him back?” Natsuo asked curiously.
Shigaraki swept elegantly around the altar, his thumbs hooked casually in the pockets of his jeans as he leant down over Natsuo, grey eyes ringed with red burning intensely.
“You owe me dinner,” Shigaraki replied with a smirk.
Natsuo raised an eyebrow. That was it? Dinner? It would almost be considered a privilege.
“Just dinner?” Natsuo asked curiously.
“I’ll see if you’re half as interesting over dinner as you seem now, and we’ll go from there,” Shigaraki smirked, straightening to return to the altar.
“Okay,” Natsuo replied, “bring Touya back, and I’ll take you to dinner.”
Shigaraki smirked over his shoulder, his face half-hidden for a moment by a cloud that drifted over the moon, his eyes gleaming through the darkness.
And then it began.
Natsuo wished he could bring himself to care more about the stories, of dark magic and deals with demons, but he didn’t.
Not when Shigaraki buried his hands in the blood that dripped from the altar and smeared it up his forearms.
Not when Toga, Iguchi and Bubaigawara circled the altar, and not when they started chanting.
Magic tore through the clearing.
Furious and powerful. Gnashing and clawing at the altar but somehow contained by the runes Shigaraki had painstakingly drawn. Natsuo could feel his magic recoiling in his veins, weak though it was, and Takami whimpered out loud, his wings straining so hard against the restraints that blood mixed with the red of his feathers, desperate to get away from the cloying, dark magic.
But then, visible between Bubaigawara and Toga’s shoulders, dust began to form on the altar. It was slow, but the form began to take. Loosely connected and then more solid. Then no longer grey, just dark, and then lighter and lighter.
Skin stretched and formed over long limbs, defined ridges of bones and lithe muscles. Ivory hair, short and then longer, and long fingers.
Takami gasped softly.
Natsuo knew those hands.
They had held his through skinned knees, and picked him up when he fell out of trees. Pushed him on the swings, and traced over lines of his essays when he was too tired to read them himself.
When Shigaraki stopped chanting and the magic died down, Touya was laying, naked, on the altar, covered in the dark lines of the blood that had been painted on the stone, with the medical equipment that had been keeping his kidney alive crushed uncomfortably under his left shoulder.
Takami was the first to move, because Natsuo was almost too shocked to do much more than stare.
He must have wriggled a feather loose from the restraints on his wings because Takami’s cuffs fell to the ground as he darted forwards and flattened himself against Touya’s chest. He might have been crying, but Natsuo couldn’t tell.
He could see Touya lift a hand carefully to the back of his head, gingerly and uncertainly.
He was probably disorientated.
There would be a lot to explain, but it could wait.
Natsuo wasn’t even really aware that he was crying until Shigaraki knelt in front of him, wiping his cheeks dry with a clean towel. His eyes were blood-red, almost entirely consumed by his pupils, with dark circles underneath. He was swaying on his feet as he squatted in front of Natsuo but he had a proud glimmer in his expression.
“You owe me dinner, Todoroki,” Shigaraki smirked and Natsuo laughed breathlessly.
Shigaraki’s lips were dry against Natsuo’s but his cheeks were warm. There was the familiar tremor of excitement, exacerbated by the tension of the evening, and Natsuo could hear nothing over the thump-thump-thump of his heartbeat.
It was simple.
Chaste.
A cumulation of the adrenaline of the evening but Shigaraki’s eyes were bright, and the smug expression had faded when Natsuo pulled away from the kiss.
“It’s a date.”