Archive of Our Own ^beta

“What do you feel knowing that we are dying? I want to run outside & ask everyone what their plan is for the end of the world but instead I am writing you this letter.”

Alok, story of contradiction

Beautiful glass doors beckon Issei into the dilapidated building. The nursing home is nearly identical to the others he’s been in. There is a muted floral carpet that looks straight out of the early 1900s. Gilded chairs cluster in the waiting area, creak under stale air. An atrocious lamp decorates the reception desk. 

Issei shuffles past the typing receptionist and eyesore of a light source. She clicks her sticky keys and leans further back into her chair; she pays him no mind. The residents whom Issei encroaches upon jam their steel walkers together. The traipsing med aids spontaneously huddle to exchange chart notes. 

If someone were to ask these people why they shrank into themselves, they wouldn’t have an answer. There was just something in the water, yes, a feeling that caused them to squish shoulder to shoulder or handlebar to handlebar toward one side of an empty hall. And that’s all there is to it. People avoid Issei because something deep inside of them—something primal and timorous—tells them to. 

Room 124. Home to Kobayashi Daisuke. It rests at the end of the hall, tucked in a cameo corner. A piece of printer paper is taped to the door: “Oxygen In Use.” 

The lock shows no resistance when Issei twists the doorknob. It never does. He heads toward the bedroom, noting that 1. the living room is messy, 2. all of the lights are off, and 3. a lone pair of slippers weep by the front door.

Living room wreckage funnels into bedroom ruin, and suddenly, there is a draft in the apartment. Predictable. The ghost of winter combs through Issei’s stiff curls and urges him closer to the bed. An emaciated figure shudders under a paper-thin sheet. Kobayashi Daisuke.

Issei checks for the signs of imminent Death. Kobayashi-san’s fingertips are bluing. Shallow breaths just barely escape his mouth. His pulse is rapid and weak, jumping like a fire trying to kindle without oxygen. 

All of the signs are present. Issei removes his fingers from the old man’s frail wrist. Kobayashi’s got another minute left, two minutes if God’s feeling cruel. Now, all Issei can do is wait.

The waiting is always the worst part.

He picks at the seams of his leather gloves. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to watching people die. 

A minute or an hour later, the frigidity of the room billows. A great maw gapes open, and then, just like that, Kobayashi Daisuke dies. The universe does not give Issei time to pay respects for a man he did not know. It grows relentlessly, leaving him with a corpse on his hands and a self-inflicted gash across his stomach.

Kobayashi-san’s soul begins to materialize beside Issei. Born first is a pinprick of light that expands in ways no formulas can define. Bones begin to calcify, string themselves together with sinew. Then, the muscles—red and raw and everything in between. There’s only small details left, now. Skin blanching. Hair blossoming. Teeth shining. This providential process is complete in twenty seconds. 

Most often when untethered souls actualize and see Issei standing beside them, they’ll ask if he’s God. Issei will smile and shake his head. “No, I’m not God.” 

(God only designates jobs; they do not sink so low as to complete them. Bastard.)

Kobayashi Daisuke does not ask Issei if he is God, but he does ask the second most common question: “Am I dead?”

“Yes,” Issei reveals. He’s never been great at this part.

“Oh.” Kobayashi-san scratches the back of his head, and by the way his lips twitch, he’s marveling at the hair growing there. “Do you know how I died?”

“Pneumonia,” Issei recites, because they’re supposed to stick to textbook answers. “But old age in the long run,” he adds, because he can’t bear leaving curious souls in the dark. “Physical decline had been coming in for years; sensory and cognitive getting worse, too.”

“Thanks. And do you know who I am?”

Souls can struggle to reorient themselves after Death. That’s what Issei’s for. 

“Your name is Kobayashi Daisuke. You were born October tenth, 1929, in Kurume, Fukuoka, Japan. You are the husband of the late Kobayashi Haruno, father of one Kobayashi Keiji. Grandfather of one Saito Hana. Great-grandfather of two, Saito Yuri and Saito Misaki.” 

“That’s right, isn’t it?” Kobayashi-san’s wandering eyes latch onto a picture propped on his bedside table. Two young girls dance inside the frame. “Who are these girls?”

Issei straightens his spine. “I would assume they’re your aforementioned great-granddaughters, but I have no way of confirming this.”

Kobayashi-san exhales, still adjusting to breathing without machinery. “That sounds correct.” He slips his hands into the pockets of his white bath robe (an odd outfit to wear for an eternity in Issei’s opinion, but to each their own), frowning. “All right, one last question, sir: what are you?”

“So you’re a Grim Reaper.”

“An Escort,” Issei corrects, “and still in training. Will be until I’m twenty.”

Hanamaki rolls onto his side to scrutinize him. “Right, Escort. But only once you’re legal.” 

Issei nods. 

“And you don’t…?” Hanamaki trails off.

It takes a second for the half-formed question to click. “I’m not a murderer, Hanamaki!” Issei scoffs, and if the assertion is too close to pleading, that’s not his fault.

“Hey, I wouldn’t have judged if it was your God-given duty to murder people!” 

Issei examines Hanamaki’s hands, which have been raised in a gesture that reads, “Hold your damn horses.” His palms are adorned with furious calluses. They have been this way since the start of high school volleyball, and are a mirror image to Issei’s own. 

“Well, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but Escorts only collect the souls of the deceased.” 

Hanamaki blows a weak raspberry into the air. “All right.” 

For one insane moment, Issei thinks the topic has been dropped.

“So who’s in charge of it, then?”

The molars digging into his cheek draw blood. “Who’s in charge of what?”

“Who’s in charge of the actual, you know, killing?”

Killing. 

The word is a persistent hangnail, a bruise that doesn’t heal. It sleeps with Issei and eats with Issei and weighs down on his shoulder every time he blocks a ball or takes a piss. 

“There is no singular cause for any given Death.” This is the first line written in the Escort System Handbook. Issei could babble about four years-worth of Escort Saturday schooling that supports this. He could elaborate that countless stars have to align for a Death to occur, and that God must give their stamp of approval at the end of it all. 

But instead, he decides to spare his best friend a migraine or mid-afternoon nap. He tells Hanamaki, “No one does the killing. Some things just happen.”

Matsukawa Issei and Hanamaki Takahiro are fifteen years young. They are splayed on Hanamaki’s bedroom floor because it is hot enough outside to make them liquify, and Issei has always known this conversation would have to happen. As first years in high school, they will soon be signing up for college preparatory courses. It is inevitable that Hanamaki returns Issei’s question of “What do you want to study in university?” since he’s not a jerk. And Issei isn’t a liar, so he replies, “Mortuary science, probably.” 

Hanamaki asks why on earth would he want to look at corpses all day. Issei contests that there’s more to it than that. Hanamaki prods, the same way he always does, and the rest is history. 

It’s not actually history because it happened less than twenty minutes ago, but time is funny when it comes to talking about things like Death and the Escort System. Issei feels as if he’s been interrogated for the past twelve hours. 

The cross-examination begins posthaste. 

“So how do you know who to kill?” Hanamaki’s nose scrunches. “Sorry, collect.”

“We get Escort Cards,” Issei explains. “They materialize in our pants pockets,” he continues, upon realizing his first words probably weren’t much of an explanation at all. 

In the blink of an eye, something in the air changes form. It colors itself. Lethargy all but evaporated, Hanamaki scooches across the floor to lean into Issei’s personal space. 

“Well,” he exclaims, “what about the girls then?” 

Hanamaki is far too close for comfort. Sweat matts rosewood hair to his forehead. 

“What girls?” Issei all but croaks. 

“You know,” Hanamaki continues, tugging on the sleeve of Issei’s shirt, “girl Escorts who wear girl pants! The letters can’t show up in their pockets cause girl pants always have fake pockets!” He shakes Issei by the shoulders now. “Where do their letters appear?”

Hanamaki Takahiro is going to give him a heart attack. 

“I… don’t know?” Issei hesitates, trying to mask how much he’s reeling from the pragmatic question. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

“Can’t you ask Yuka or something?” Hanamaki demands, frenetic.

Ishibashi Yuka is Issei’s cousin. She lives two houses down the street, meaning that Issei often comes home to find her sprawled on the living room couch, and she has met Hanamaki enough times to have inside jokes with him. She is elegant, responsible, and a terrible romantic—and also the closest thing to an older sibling that Issei will ever get. 

“Uhm, maybe?” Issei manages. (He cannot fathom asking Yuka, a very talented and therefore intimidating Escort in training, about her Escorting attire, but he keeps this to himself.)

The violent rays of summer eventually dissolve their stupor. Hanamaki jolts away from him. Issei rolls onto his back, and his heart slides out from under his tongue and back into his chest. 

Once the two boys are a solid meter apart, they burst out cackling. It’s truly too hot out for this type of exhausting joy, and yet. 

Hanamaki’s voice cracks like smoked wood. “Okay, well, make sure you ask Yuka the next time she’s over,” he wheezes, clutching his heaving chest. “I really wanna hear her perspective on the fake pocket dilemma.”

Issei smiles softly. “I’ll try.”

What a relief that his best friend can still laugh aloud, even with the knowledge that Issei is an Escort. What a relief that nothing between them has changed. 

The two boys go back to lying on the floor. They trade jokes about their troublesome teammates and they giggle like they’re fading. The drowsiness of the afternoon returns.

Against all odds, the next Escorting question doesn’t surface until they’re second years in high school. 

Seven PM, one hour after practice has ended. The tatami room of the Matsukawa household. January’s bitter bite has Issei and Hanamaki scrunched under the smoldering kotatsu. They are pretending to study, Calculus I textbooks open and everything. Rice paper doors are the only thing separating them from Issei’s shouting younger siblings, Taichi and Mirai. 

Hanamaki is working on a related rates problem, which means he is drawing the same right triangle diagram over and over again, making the ladder that is three meters long and two meters away from the wall a bit more detailed each time. He is not good at math. 

His Escorting question is as follows: “Are you immortal?” 

Issei pokes the eraser of his pencil into his cheek. “No, but some of us are. To be an immortal Escort, you aren’t allowed to have any romantic relationships. There’s a pledge for it and everything.”

“What are you guys, Jedis?”

“Something like that.” 

Hanamaki crosshatches his ladder diagram. “Well, that’s kinda ironic, don’t you think?” He erases a mark. “To take life and then still have your own be taken in the end, too.” 

Jagged hip bones knock against each other under the kotatsu. 

Hanamaki Takahiro is seventeen now—has been for about two weeks. (They celebrated by watching a dubbed version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 in theaters, then gorging on Korean barbecue.) Issei’s not envious of his friend’s age, but something or another’s been gutting him for the last half month. There’s this unshakable feeling that Hanamaki is grown now, which is ridiculous because he still scrapes the pickles off of his burgers and thinks dick jokes are funny. 

“I’m not sure you know what irony is, Hanamaki,” Issei says, rather than, “Did you do all of your growing without me?”

His best friend shrugs, erasing the bottom rung of his graphite ladder. “Probably not. You know lit isn’t my strong suit.”

Issei gives his divided attention back to his math homework. Related rates and optimization problems span the page—a guy's best friend. He manages to complete two entire problems before distraction strikes. 

It starts innocently enough. Hanamaki, bored, taps his chewed eraser against the pristine head of Issei’s mechanical pencil. Issei taps back. Eyebrow raises are exchanged, and twenty seconds of tapping later, they’re engaged in the most pathetic sword fight of all time. And because fortune flows in their veins, Hanamaki’s mechanical pencil flies out of his hand halfway across the room. And the Heavens are really beaming down on them today because the lead of the pencil strikes the tokonoma on the wall at just the right, rakish angle to leave a nasty gray streak on it. 

Shit.

The two boys stare at the desecrated scroll. A silver gash wounds the cloudless sky of the piece. 

Hanamaki crosses his arms. “Well, I’m not erasing that.” 

Oh, like hell he isn’t. Wrestling is the natural progression of this situation, so Issei huffs and curls his hands into fists. He launches toward his best friend, fangs bared, going for the kill. Surprise wracks his body when Hanamaki pulls away at his touch. 

That’s new. Quite curious. 

Hanamaki recrosses his arms slowly. Defensively. Shivers wrack his body, and his cracked lips dry blue. It could be passed off as a response to Issei’s obscenely cold hands, but more than anything else, Hanamaki Takahiro looks as though he’s seen a ghost. 

This, here in all of its glory, is what Issei has always been afraid of. This is the boy who fills Issei’s dreams, donning an expression that Issei nightmares about. 

It serves as a reminder of the nature of Escorts. They are beings that survive by swallowing shadows whole. They exist only in the dreams of occult fans and the nightmares of small children. They do not indulge in pubescent persiflage. 

Matsukawa Issei is an Escort before he is a seventeen-year-old boy, or a seventeen-year-old, or a boy. It would do him well to remember this. 

Two bony fingers tap his thudding heart. 

“I’ll erase the mark,” Hanamaki says. He traces a triangle over Issei’s left peck with his fingers. “It was my pencil anyway.” 

“Okay. You gonna do that before or after you do trig on my chest?”

Issei earns himself a swat. 

Hanamaki stands up with buckling knees. He gives the hanging tokonami a once-over before starting to knead his chewed eraser into the paper-thin skin of it. As he works to disappear the offending gray streak, Issei watches. Then, when he turns around to return to the kotatsu, Issei looks away.

(Issei is good at watching. He’s better at not getting caught.)

Hanamaki plops down right beside Issei. Then, after a fifteen-second commercial break, he professes, “I’m not going to stop asking about it.” He doesn’t elaborate on what he’s referring to; he doesn’t need to. 

“That’s fine,” Issei says, even though he’s not sure how fine it is at all. “I’m used to your obnoxious prodding.”

His best friend puckers chapped lips and pauses just a breath away from pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Oh, you adore me,” Hanamaki croons, hands clasping together. 

Issei, for his part, scrunches his nose in faux disgust. Perhaps his cheeks rush ruddy. “That’s unlikely.”

A laugh. “You know, you’re kind of an asshole sometimes, Matsukawa Issei.” Hanamaki is now propping his chin in the cup of his battered hand, leaning an elbow against the kotatsu. He cocks a thin, petal-pink eyebrow and angles the corners of lips turn upward ever so slightly. Hanamaki looks stupid and suave and sexy.

“Likewise, Hanamaki Takahiro.” 

Issei turns seventeen on March first, trailing just behind his best friend. Birthdays hold both less and more significance among Escorts. Life is but an evolution toward an inescapable Death, so it would be easy for them to dismiss birthdays as meaningless commemorations. But what good would that do? What difference would it make?

In the Matsukawa family, birthdays are a celebration of the impermanence that is life. They are a mantra whispered against soft pregnant bellies and shelled babies’ heads: everything is transitory, everything goes. 

“What do you want for your birthday, Matsukawa?”

Hanamaki’s question is pointless because Issei’s birthday will be over in sixteen minutes, and Oikawa has asked the same thing everyday for the past month. Still, though, he pauses to consider. To wonder. Maybe he searches for a genuine answer because it’s impossible for anything to be delivered in this last quarter of an hour. Maybe he searches because it quells the permeating sense of longing in his chest. 

“I don’t know,” Issei sighs at last. He is sitting on the ground with his legs balled up to his chest. 

When Issei was born, he was small. Not quite tiny enough to be put in neonatal care or anything concerning, but significantly lighter than both of his parents had been, and rather fragile, too. His late mother once said that six months after his birth, she sang to him—as a reference to his persisting, small stature—“Maybe you’ll stay my little boy forever.” 

The day after that, she swears Issei started growing. He’s never really stopped since. 

As Issei sits with his long limbs folded into themselves now, his back pinches. 

“Are you sure you don’t know what you want?” Hanamaki calls from atop Issei’s bed. (He claims this spot every time he comes over.) “You have zero clue what would make your heart happy on your special day?”

Issei thinks, and thinks, and thinks. He thinks himself into happiness and out of it while turning over Hanamaki’s question in his mind. Finally, he settles on something: “Permanence.”

“What’d you say?” Hanamaki asks, scratching faintly behind his ear. “Couldn’t quite hear you.”

Issei clears his throat. He wavers. “Purpose.”

“Oh, yeah. I feel that with college and all.” Hanamaki stifles a yawn. “I should get home before my mom beats my ass for staying out too late again. Can I keep the sweatshirt?”

The hoodie Hanamaki wears is one Yuka gifted to Issei for his fifteenth birthday. It is black and plain and similar from a distance of five meters to about 94% of the other clothing Issei owns. He’d graciously lent it after Hanamaki spilled lemonade all over his shirt and half of Iwaizumi’s. 

“Yeah, it’s yours for the night.”

“My man!” Hanamaki tugs at the strings of his borrowed hoodie and clambers off the bed. In the doorway of Issei’s bedroom, he pauses. “Happy birthday, Matsukawa.” 

Stay, Issei thinks, trying to memorize Hanamaki’s sloppy smile. “Get out of here already,” he says, waving his hand.

His best friend exits without fanfare, and Issei is left engaged in a staring contest with the door. He wants to open it. He should open it. He doesn’t. He should have. 

Footsteps soon echo down the hall. 

The first time Issei sees someone die, he is nine years old. Taichi is five and Mirai is four, and their only cousin Yuka has just turned twelve. 

Twelve bears weight in the eyes of the Escort System. At twelve, an individual begins Escort Training. They balance Saturday school and shadowing professionals for eight years, and then they are thrust into the Escorting world as fledglings. By God’s wishes, Yuka is assigned to shadow Issei’s father—Matsukawa Shigeyuki—for the start of her training. Shigeyuki asks Issei to join them for the soul collection. He doesn’t offer room for disagreement.  

Only the finest black garments are permitted for Escorting. Yuka dons a noir babydoll dress and matching kitten heels. Issei’s outfit consists of a crisp suit, trenchcoat, and dress shoes—all of which are two sizes too big. His father dresses identically, save for his signature bowler hat. He straightens each child’s clothes and combs through their coarse bangs, and then they are ready to leave.

The trip to the soul is, for lack of a better word, long. It’s not particularly dangerous or exhausting, but it swallows several hours whole. Yuka and her uncle are hushed while Escorting; Issei paws at the lush silence. They finally detach from the entanglement of rail lines at a small, ugly station, and the journey continues on foot. 

Issei is the caboose of their trio, but he doesn’t mind. The position allows him to indulge in the wintry landscape they wade through. There’s a distinct feeling of dejavú that he cannot shake, but that can’t be bothered once the Heavens start to flurry. He’s preoccupied with the first snowfall of this December. 

A disembodied voice speaks. “We’re here.”

Issei glances down from the flooding sky, and the snow seems to suspend. It’s impossible. He is nine years old and he is facing the impossible. 

This is the home of Issei’s grandmother, Matsukawa Mariko, who uses old Japanese and peels the pith off her oranges and always tries to collect ino-shika-cho in Hanafuda. She is a kind woman. She is probably too young to die. They enter the home anyway, because defying fate only brings greater grief. 

It is brighter than expected inside. Issei can make out the rusty kettle used to boil water to defrost pipes in January, the jar of blonde wafers his grandmother worships religiously. And in the middle of it all, his grandmother’s sleeping form. The moon illuminates the crystallizing sweat of her twisted forehead. 

“An aneurysm,” Issei’s father whispers. “In about forty-five seconds.” He flashes a small piece of paper, then, and dubs it an “Escort card” before explaining its function. 

Issei is slapped, then, with the harsh reality that he is merely shadowing a soul collection. It doesn’t matter if it’s for the woman who held him in her arms after his mother died, or the person who single handedly raised his father and aunt. This is just Escort Training. It’s just an Escort. 

Yuka squeezes the hem of her dress. Issei thinks to himself, vaguely, that the littering snow looks like sugar. He doesn’t know what his father does. 

Research indicates that the worst memories are often best retained, but Issei doesn’t remember much of what happens after this. He gets lost inside of himself, you see; the film tarnishes, the audio falls out of synchronization. But he’s present enough to pick up crucial fragments, like the pit in his stomach as he waited for Death and his grandmother’s soul materializing, angelic. His addled brain reboots during the solemn trip back to Miyagi.

The following day, Issei goes to school. A well-meaning peer asks if he’s feeling under the weather and needs to see the nurse. Issei replies that he’s fine; he had a rough weekend, but he’s no longer sad. 

(There is a funeral on Wednesday. Yuka is going because she’s the oldest grandchild. Issei is going because he’s the oldest grandson. They will take the same, wending trains down to Nagano and arrive at the same, ugly station. Alongside his father and his cousin, Issei will mourn Matsukawa Mariko with bone-white lilies and quiet contrition. They will probably be wearing the same clothes they wore to Escort her.)

His classmate flashes an approving smile. Issei mirrors his classmate’s visage, stretching his lips out into a wry grin—the first of many. 

He’s no longer. 

Death does not stop, so it’s only fair that life continues on, too. This is a relationship older than time. This is the only way of the universe. 

Issei gets older, taller. Battles the Osgood-Schlatter in his knees and cries at the end of more movies. Stops grabbing Hanamaki’s wrist when he wants to show him something, or make him hurry up to practice. Lets their hugs last longer. 

The third years graduate. Squished among the other upperclassmen, Issei’s arms are crushed in a final team hug. He promises his former captain that he’ll shoulder more leadership responsibility. Iwaizumi promises to become a stronger ace. Oikawa promises to become the best captain that the Aoba Johsai Men’s Volleyball program has ever seen. 

They’re all thinking it, but Hanamaki is the one who says it aloud. “We’re taking Interhigh this year, guys. I can feel it!”

Issei smiles, sad. He pumps a fist in the air as Iwaizumi and Oikawa chest bump to a chorus of cheers. 

On the walk home, Issei happens to catch sight of his best friend’s side profile. The sun dapples Hanamaki’s tear-stained cheeks in hues of red, orange, gold. His hair is the color of cherry blossoms. He is a summer dream. 

Issei tilts his chin up to color-blocked clouds that have been blended with too much white, and he laughs, real. 

A month later, he enters his third year. 

“You know, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Hanamaki alludes, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Can we sit?”

They’re walking home from a three-hour practice, crusted with dried sweat and—in Issei’s case—blood. (Iwaizumi had been excessively brutal with his spikes today, and he’d apologized by offering to wrap Issei’s mangled fingers. Hanamaki waved him off with a cryptic, “Issei’s used to dried blood” and Cheshire Cat grin.) The nearest seating area happens to be in front of the 7-Eleven. It’s a comically oversized convenience store that was built on top of Issei’s childhood park about five years ago, quite literally shoehorned into place. Little evidence is left to indicate what the lot used to be, other than the two wooden benches that have stood there since before Issei’s mom died. It is totally the kind of place you’d use as a hideout during a zombie apocalypse. 

Hanamaki takes a seat on one of the benches. He waits for Issei to follow. 

“If this is a follow-up question about why my school uniform ‘doesn’t suit me’ or whatever,” Issei sighs, sliding his thigh next to Hanamaki’s, “I still don’t have an answer for you.”

A nervous laugh, undulating like ocean tides. “It’s not.”

“All right, then go for it.”

Hanamaki’s hands wriggle below the fabric of his pockets. “How many of you Escorts are there?”

“I’m not really sure,” Issei admits. “The textbooks all say different things. A lot, though.”

This limited omniscience doesn’t satisfy his best friend.

“But there’s no way there’s enough of you guys to Escort everyone who dies. I mean, if you think about a tragedy that kills a ton of people in even just one city, it’d be impossible.” Hanamaki nods to himself twice, three times. “How would they even get all of those little white cards out to you? It doesn’t make sense.”

With only three years until he begins Escorting independently, Issei knows the System’s technicalities and history like the back of his hand. But Hanamaki Takahiro will never be an Escort. He will never operate from the same place of vulnerability as Issei and he will never wrestle with guilt like him. Issei wants to tell him more about the System but not everything. He doesn’t need to know everything. 

So Issei shrugs. “Who knows?” He listens to crickets coo into the night air, and then after ten chirps, speaks: “I’m feeling kind of hungry.”

He and Hanamaki shuffle inside the 7-Eleven and buy corn dogs from a cashier who is half asleep. They walk home in a silence that feels like it’s eating itself alive. They wave goodbye without meeting eyes. 

August 6th, 1945. 08:16:17 AM. Hiroshima, Japan. 

Thirteen square kilometers melted like wax candles, charred to nothingness. 80,000 souls out like a light. 80,000 Escort Cards—80,000 wondrous white doves—pouring from the reddening sky. 

“Microbiology, Anatomy, Embalming, the Psychology of Death and Dying, and Restorative Arts.” Issei leans back against the post of his bottom bunk and crosses his arms. This is a silent challenge. Go ahead.

Lying half off of his top bunk across the room, Hanamaki only smirks. Try me. He clears his throat dramatically and then says, with all the grace of a forest fire, “Public speaking, Communication for Business, Marketing, Mass Communication in Media, and Interpersonal Communication.”

Issei tilts his head back and forth to consider this. “Okay, not bad, not bad.”

His best friend hiccups an exasperated laugh. “Once again, I think it’s a tie.”

This comment is a crucial step in their routine before the start of every new term, which almost always looks like this:

1. Complaining to each other about their academic advisors. 
2. Setting two alarms on each of their phones to remind them of their registration times.
3. Missing all four alarms because they’re talking too loudly, or watching a Naruto rerun, or trying to invent a new two-person card game. 
4. Panicking about being wait-listed and then having to rearrange everything. 
5. Reading aloud their god-awful schedules to each other.

And, last but certainly not least, 

1. Deciding whose schedule sounds more snooze-worthy.

It is almost always a tie. 

Clumsy knuckles rap against their thin door. Issei twists his face into a grimace, and Hanamaki shoves a pillow over top of his head. This has also become a part of their routine, regrettably.

“What’s up, fuckers? Guess who’s back!” 

Their third roommate enters with a case of beer in his right hand and a pack of instant miso soup in his left. He is wearing a pair of plaid pajama pants, a single sock shoved into one of the pockets. Between his armpit, a bottle of glue is wedged precariously.

Fujita Ichiro probably belongs on the list of the worst people Issei has ever met. Every morning, Fujita obnoxiously blends a protein shake containing two raw eggs, and then leaves the egg shells beside the hand soap at their sink. He has a terrible habit of drowning himself in cologne. “Headphones” don’t exist in his dictionary and his desk has never once been clear. 

Issei and Hanamaki requested a triple because a senpai back in high school rumored this university never filled their dorms to capacity. So, within the first week of moving into college, they learned their senpai was a liar.

Fujita starts to shove the beer cans into their room’s shoddy mini fridge. The poor appliance has never once been empty for more than one minute, and its door creaks by the second. It is used by one person and one person alone. 

“Guess where I just got back from,” Fujita bellows, rhetorical as ever. “The gym!”

Questions collect and collect in Issei’s mind. Who wears pajama pants to the gym? Where did Fujita buy the miso soup? Why is there a sock in his pocket? 

“Okay, but what’s up with the glue?” This question is from Hanamaki, who is curious enough to peel the pillow off of his face. 

Fujita tosses the instant miso soup package onto his desk and collapses into his spinny chair. He spins gleefully. 

“Oh, do you mean this?” He holds up the clear bottle of glue in his hand—the only bottle of glue in their dorm. “It’s to fix the handle of your mug, Hanamaki! I broke it while drinking coffee the other day!” 

The now-fractured mug is an ugly thing, really. A poor second attempt at throwing on the wheel, Hanamaki was given the crooked cup by his oldest sister half a decade ago. Issei can’t explain why it was kept in the first place, let alone brought to college, but then again, he can’t explain a lot of things about his best friend. 

Hanamaki flares his nostrils at Fujita and pretends he is not a heartbeat away from committing arson or homicide or both. Hanamaki Takahiro is not good at pretending.

As his best friend very discreetly pantomimes choking Fujita, Issei turns to his phone. His family group chat provides an update about a second cousin’s birthday and a baby shower, both of which were on the same day. The weather app informs him that the rain is here to stay. The 1500 yen remaining in Issei’s dining account announces that he will be skipping meals for the time being. 

A minute into clearing his notifications, Hanamaki sends a text. 

From: hanamaki takahiro

To: matsukawa issei

[14:35 PM]

if this mf don’t learn to chew with his mouth closed i’m going to break something

Issei squirms as the volume of Fujita’s chewing increases tenfold to him, from forgettable ambience to a decent-sized orchestra. His roommate is eating some variety of chocolate bar. His face is covered in chocolate as if he is two years old.

From: matsukawa issei

To: hanamaki takahiro

[14:35 PM]

Better hope it’s not your mug this time :(

Issei starts Escorting independently the day after his twentieth birthday. Gone are the shifts shadowing his father, and later, a businessman named Satou-san, and even later, his cousin Yuka. Escorting alone is no facile task. Issei is familiar with the motions—he could do them with his eyes closed—but there is an emotional toll that comes with working independently. There is no shoulder to cry on during shifts, and more importantly, there is no one to remind you that tears are useless. 

At 12 o’clock on the dot, Issei’s shift draws to a conclusion. He’s sapped as he trudges back to his dorm. He trips over something invisible and menacing after opening the door, and Hanamaki just barely manages to catch him.

“You good, man?” his angel of a best friend asks as he slings Issei’s limp arm around his shoulders. 

They walk toward the bunk beds in a three-legged race. 

“‘M really fucking tired.”

Hanamaki’s tinted cheeks puff, and then he barks out a laugh. “Are you close to Death?” Comedic genius, truly.

Issei smiles in spite of himself. “Yeah, feels like it.” He collapses onto his bunk as soon as Hanamaki releases him. He looks at his beautiful best friend. “But at least I didn’t have to start Escorting on my birthday. I got one day.”

He got his twentieth birthday off, and that mattered to him. 

Going to college three hours away from the town you grew up in means a few things:

1. A better understanding of how streets and expressways dovetail together. 
2. Inevitably seeing some of your peers from high school in the dining hall. 
3. A somber understanding that you will always be close enough to your home to miss it, but always too far away to visit.

These are things that cannot be changed, things that Issei knows well. The third is what he struggles most with. Winter break is long enough to warrant a trip to his hometown, but for the last few years, he and Hanamaki have just spent the holidays cooped up together in their dorm room. So Issei doesn’t visit home. And that’s okay, really, because being away from home has done wonders for his social skills and independence, probably. But things can be okay and still hurt. 

Three years into his college education, Issei is assigned his first soul collection in his hometown. He is actually assigned ninety-two collections clustered around Shiogama—a brazen sign from the Heavens that he’ll be taking more than just a day trip. There is no point in pondering why God has fated him to miss his classes, so Issei books a train ticket. He is gone by the following dawn. 

During the train ride, Issei receives a text message from his father. He glances at the preview of it.

From: matsukawa shigeyuki

To: matsukawa issei

[9:22 AM]

currently in ibaraki prefecture for a week. sorry we won’t get to see each other.

Issei is disappointed, but not surprised. He and his father have never had the best relationship, and the static between them has only grown louder since he left for college. Of course, his father is gone during the one week he’s visiting home.

It is only as Issei unlocks his phone that he realizes the peculiarity of the situation. The lack of continuity. A minute later, his father sends another text cautioning him not to converse with Mirai because she’s in the thick of her Escort Training. Issei replies that he’ll keep his distance from his youngest sister, and once he clicks send, he notices that’s bizarre, too. Why shouldn’t he talk to his sister outside of her designated Training time? How does his father know he’s coming home?

It takes an embarrassing amount of time for Issei to piece the puzzle together. The answer, of course, is the very thing that underscores his family’s existence: the Escort System. So much of his life is constructed on its delicate lattice work, and so much is left unexplained because of this. And that’s odd. That’s not… normal. 

So Issei turns his attention to the train window and watches the ends of a thousand worlds blur by. And for the rest of the ride, he wonders why he’s never bothered to question the Escort System before.

For good or for ill, Shiogama-shi is the same as he’d left it. Aoba Johsai High still stands proud. The benches out front of the 7-Eleven are still smoke-stained and sagging. The sky is still bluer than blue, and the grass still grows up to his knees in the fields, and there are still far too many old people who leave their doors unlocked. (He doesn’t confirm that last part.) Issei’s childhood home follows suit. The spare key remains surreptitiously hidden below the largest plant, and the door yelps as it opens the same way it did five years ago. 

Two days and thirty-six Escorts into his stay, Issei decides that what he’s missed most about his childhood home is the bathroom. Wrapped in white and with a full-sized bathtub, it is a dream come true after a long day of Escorting. And a long day it has been. 

He strips from his freezing Escorting attire. He cranks the shower handle to the highest temperature. He musses his hair for good measure, and then he steps under the spray.  

Simmering. Issei only registers the heat once the water is gliding down his skin, as if the pain is an afterthought. His back is painted in an angry fresco. His chest is stippled all over. This is the pure release of energy that he has longed for. It is in this moment—as he is being burned to life—that Issei feels most at peace. He shampoos his hair first, then washes his face while the conditioner settles into his thick hair. When he scrubs the day off of his body at last, there is no blood caked below his nails. Issei takes comfort in that. 

Following the shower cleansing is the soaking. In typical bathing practice, the bathtub would already be filled to the brim with steaming water. But Issei had been restless, and consequently thoughtless, when he stepped into the bathroom, so he sits drenched on the edge of the bathtub as it slowly fills. Liquid drowns the depressed bottom. He shuts off the faucet when the water skims his ankles.

Issei reclines in the smooth, smooth tub for a timeless minute. Soaking provides a unique type of solace, and it’s nonexistent in university because of the shared bathroom. Eventually, he shimmies down until his back is flat against the marble floor of the tub. He’s thin enough right now that the water puddles in his stomach when he inhales; he hasn’t been eating well at college. Issei’s family runs lean in general, too—almost ghostly at the right angle. His father insists it’s a good physique for their job.

Water laps at Issei’s eyelashes. He stares down at his sunken stomach and resents. 

When he surfaces, the skin around his nose feels like it’s been broiled clean off. Heat clings to his cheeks like high school embarrassment, and his lips feel swollen red. All of this is temporary. In a few minutes, Issei’s temperature will drop as his body recalibrates. He will towel off, slip on his black bathrobe, and head to bed. Things will be as they’re meant to be.

But for now, the water and the air around him are warm, and that is enough. 

It’s not like they don’t fool around in college. Issei wines and dines a few thin-lipped girls from the psych department and Hanamaki has flings with people of all genders. These failed relationships aren’t a waste, even if they do eat up days or weeks or months, because they’re learning experiences. Hanamaki learns that he’s not interested in women. Issei learns that no one quite laughs like his best friend. The two stockpile the discovered information about themselves and their ideal relationships, and they continue trying to get things right. But mostly, they get things wrong. 

And then, during a fall week that feels like a dream within a dream, Hanamaki meets a guy. 

The guy has a name, but Issei doesn’t catch it the first time, and from then on, he makes it a point to plug his ears whenever it’s uttered. A surname isn’t what’s important, anyway. It’s personality. It’s connection. He’s never been alarmed by his best friend fooling around with other people because that’s all it was: fooling around. But Issei takes one look at the iridescence of Hanamaki’s eyes while he’s talking about the guy, and the bells in his head start chiming. Those eyes are real. 

After a month or so, things change again. He and Hanamaki are seated across from each other at an oblong table in the common area of their floor. They are pretending to study, laptops open and all, because some habits die hard. The four other tables webbing out from theirs are vacant. 

“He asked me.”

Issei emerges from his shell-shaped mind, fine-tunes his gaze onto the bangs falling in front of Hanamaki’s eyes. His hair is the longest it’s ever been. “Who asked you what?”

Hanamaki’s ears are a feverish pink. “I got asked out on a date. You know, by”—and here, Issei’s hearing eddies into obsolescence for a brief moment. He can read lips well enough, though. 

Oh.  

Matsukawa Issei is twenty-one and viciously in love with Hanamaki Takahiro, and he has always known this conversation would have to happen. 

“Nice,” he wheezes. An unrighteous pain wells in his chest.

“Should I go?”

The pain in Issei’s chest coils around itself, starts to devour itself. “What?”

Hanamaki Takahiro is pinning Issei down with his gaze alone. Hanamaki Takahiro’s hand is inching toward Issei, slowly enough that it could be dismissed as shifting with the breeze from the open window. “I’m asking if you think I should go on the date with him,” he repeats. 

Issei looks down at his best friend’s serene hand. How many times has he held that hand in his own? How many times has he taped those knobby fingers, disinfected the sticky red blood from their nail beds mid-practice match? How many times have those fingers appeared in Issei’s deepest dreams, and how many more times right within arm’s reach?  

“Why would you ask me that?” he wonders aloud, because he doesn’t know what else to say. 

Hanamaki snakes his knee between Issei’s legs, presses out against the inside of his thigh. He says nothing, which means he says something. 

Issei cannot imagine a life without Hanamaki. Together, they have been through thick and thin and every viscosity between. They have grown roots together, blossomed together, and wilted together. He thinks the enormity of his desire might be called love. Yes, Issei thinks it might be. But his has always been an abstract love, so he takes the encroaching hand and squeezes it. And he crinkles his eyes into that dry grin he perfected at age nine, and he exhales. 

“Of course you should go.”

Something like relief flashes in Hanamaki’s eyes. He smiles, neck taut. “Okay.”

So, this will be their new normal. So, this pain in Issei’s chest is a permanent resident. 

“What are you guys going to do?” he asks.

Hanamaki sighs—all dreamy and rose-colored—then nestles his chin in the curve of his palms. “We’re ice skating.”

Issei snorts. “But you hate ice skating. You’re terrible at it.”

“Yeah, but it’s such a romantic date idea!”

“Oh, yes. There’s a real seduction to falling flat on your ass.” Issei has been observing his best friend closely during their exchange, scrutinizing Hanamaki’s careful head tilts and excessive eyebrow raises. This gentle voyeurism has become a habit of his over the years. 

Hanamaki has never minded the watching, but today is different. Today he stares right through the bright bones of Issei’s face and says, “Well, maybe you’re just jealous.”

Issei’s cheeks burn cold. In a heartbeat, the act of watching has become dangerous. 

He peels his cracked gaze away from the devastating man in front of him and glues it to the floor. He should reply. He should offer some kind of response like “That’s highly unlikely,” or “Why the fuck would you insinuate that, Hanamaki?” or “Do you want me to be jealous?” 

But he doesn’t. So he and his best friend sit and sit as time collects. They do not study anymore. Daylight corrodes into darkness and the two eventually retire to their room, where they lie in their twin-sized beds and turn toward their respective walls. 

As Issei starts to feel sleep rubbing his shoulders, he thinks about Hanamaki. The way his hand moved towards him. The reprieve in his eyes. 

After far too much whistling to white noise, he lets something greater than sleep overtake him. What kind of dreams are you seeing?

Matsukawa Issei’s Current Concern: There is a date at 6 PM, which is in twenty-four minutes. The most plausible love of his life is going on this date. Issei happens to be in the middle of an Escorting shift. The life of his love is going on a date in twenty-four minutes with a guy Issei can’t even bother to name, and he’s stuck working. 

This is one of those shifts that involves too much waiting. Issei leans against the glass window of a bus stop, leather gloves tight on his hands. The soul he waits for is a woman. Thirty-two years young, she must be killed in a traffic collision on her way home from the grocery store. It will be a quick, agonizing Death. Splintered ribs will pierce flooded lungs like throwing darts, and then nothing but white. The woman’s two snoozing children in the backseat will remain unharmed. There won’t even be a tear in her thin, reusable grocery bags. The police will call this a miracle.

Cars collide, and the Escort Card in Issei’s hand becomes a carcass. He goes through the motions with practiced perfection as the woman’s soul materializes beside him. She weeps the way most mothers do, but she tidies her emotions quickly. And then, she does something entirely novel: she asks Issei how he’s doing. 

The soul stares up at all 190 centimeters of Issei and trench coat and bowler hat, takes one of his gloved hands in her own, and asks, “How are you feeling this evening?”

Issei knows that in this world, all must operate with what they are given. He is merely completing the job prescribed to him by forces too great to finesse. This is a story that has been rewritten time and time again, exactly the same way. 

“I’ve had better days,” he admits. He feels like crying. 

The soul smiles, sad.“I bet you have.” Her lips twitch in a way that reminds Issei, marginally, of his mother. “I hope it gets better.”

This is the last thing the soul says before her Escort is complete. It catalyzes something in him, causes an alchemical transfiguration. He thinks about everything there is to think about, and then his agenda shifts.

Matsukawa Issei’s Current Concern: How long does it take to get to Hanamaki Takahiro’s approximate location?

Issei doesn’t go with a plan of how to stop the impending date. He doesn’t even bother to change out of his Escorting attire, which includes ridiculously posh and uncomfortable dress shoes. Matsukawa Issei goes because it is all he knows how to do. He goes because life goes and goes, and Death goes and goes, and he is trying so hard to straddle the two of them right now. He goes because he is terrified to still in his tracks and never start moving again. 

6:54 PM in Miyagi smells like coffee brewed a half hour ago. It sounds like dishwater talking and tastes like a thousand missed chances. 

A low and pretty voice calls out to him. “Matsukawa?”

Issei spies his best friend sitting on the rock ledge outside of the ice arena. “Hanamaki,” he whispers to himself as he approaches. 

Hanamaki Takahiro is dressed in a pink jacket that he insists is really salmon, black skinny jeans, and some model of Nike shoes that Issei can’t name off the top of his head. He is warming his hands with a properly overpriced cappuccino, frowning slightly. Something is up.

“Dude, are you working right now?”

Issei pats his empty jacket pockets. “I called Yuka on the way here. She’s covering me.”

“I won’t ask why you came,” Hanamaki says, skeptical, “But it is fortunate. I got cancelled on like, thirty seconds ago.”

Issei tries not to sound lugubrious. “Yikes.” Something uglier than butterflies hammer against his stomach lining—moths, maybe. He is a cruel, cruel person. “Did he call for a raincheck?”

The question is answered with silence.

“Oh, shit, man.” He sits down stiffly. 

Together, they wait.

Issei thinks of everything that has ever happened between Hanamaki and him. The street swells and then unspools over and over again. It’s bewitching, in a way.

The spell breaks when Issei says, “Let’s go on our own date.” He immediately wants to take a swan dive backward into the thorny brambles. “Not like a romantic one, you know, but just the two of us.” Very smooth, Issei.

Hanamaki looks bound in space. He peers down at his slowly draining cappuccino. “Why?”

“I’m”—and here, Issei has to really think—“I’m trying to make my day better.”

The steam comes off of Hanamaki’s cappuccino in thick white curls, and Issei imagines he could grab one and knead it in his hands like mochi. 

“Okay.” Hanamaki nods. “Okay, I’ll guess I’ll buy your shit explanation.” And then he’s grinning that stupid, stupid grin, and everything is beautiful. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“You sure you don’t want to ice skate?” Issei asks, wiggling his eyebrows. 

“I fucking hate ice skating.”

And then they run off into the crowd of people who are holding hands and debating whether it will rain tomorrow and living while dying. And they indulge in new, absurdly priced cappuccinos because they’re on a “date,” and they have a sizable photo shoot with their drinks. And Issei goes and goes and Hanamaki goes with him. 

In the fall after they graduate, Hanamaki moves for some kind of marketing job in Tokyo. Issei stays in Miyagi to Escort, working at the Ishibashi funeral parlor—the one run by Yuka’s aunt. He doesn’t just collect souls, though; he does the regular duties of a funeral service worker. He comforts those who are grieving. He prepares bodies for burial. He learns about life and Death and life after Death through a completely different lens.

Years without his mom accumulate like autumn leaves. Birthdays without Hanamaki leave with the cherry blossoms. Being in the business of humans teaches Issei that there are no beginnings or ends—just branches of time.

Issei and Hanamaki meet up for the first time in three months at a shy Tokyo izakaya. Tiered red lanterns hang from the ceiling like falling stars. 

“And that’s why I don’t want to go to Kuroo’s fucking bachelor party! Or the damn baby shower.” Hanamaki rests his chin on the edge of the counter, stares through the sfumato surface of his beer bottle. 

“Yeah, I got a 30th birthday party to attend in a few days for a secretary I barely know.” Issei takes a swig from his bottle of peach soju. “My god, listen to us! We’re old now, Hanamaki.”

His best friend looks like he’s trying not to guffaw. “Yeah.” He cracks. “We’re practically at Death’s door.”

Issei gives him a jaded, fond look. “Are you ever gonna drop the Death jokes?”

“When I kick the bucket, sure,” Hanamaki responds, reaching for his bottle so he can tap blunt nails across the side of it. Issei watches those nimble hands. 

Things have become different as they’ve grown older. Loving Hanamaki Takahiro as a twenty-four-year-old isn’t worse than loving him as a hormone-crazed teenager, but it’s inexplicably different. They have jobs that are frosting over into careers, friends from their graduating class eloping or having kids. There are bills to pay and taxes to get confused about and so, so many trips to the grocery store. Things are just—different, now.  

The decrescendo of Hanamaki’s tapping is subtle against the respectable rainstorm outside. Gas pedal easing, sun setting, scalpel slicing. Subtle. 

Issei looks up to study his friend’s face. 

Hanamaki’s brow is pinched, his ears flushed with alcohol. He’s thumbing the white label on his warm bottle like it contains the secrets of the universe. He’s too funereal for Issei’s liking—window closed, door locked. 

“Issei?” Hanamaki whispers like a prayer. 

“Takahiro,” Issei acknowledges very carefully. Even after ten years, they haven’t used first names.

“Sometimes I can’t stand that time doesn’t stop.” 

There are breaks between Takahiro’s words, as if his voice is slipping through cracks. It takes a second for Issei to realize that the bottle in his friend’s hand is shaking. Or, more accurately, the hand wrapped around the bottle is shaking. 

“I know,” Issei says, after a long moment. 

He doesn’t ask about the reason behind Takahiro’s tremors. He can’t.

When Issei was young, his mother told him that if there were two things present in the same space, there was automatically a relationship between them. She said this chiefly about art, but always clarified that people weren’t exceptions.

In August of 2021, Matsukawa Issei and Hanamaki Takahiro watch their high school captain play in the Summer Olympic Games for a team that isn’t Japan. This is not a future either of them could have predicted, and it is certainly not what Oikawa Tooru had manifested on his vision board since the fifth grade. But it happens nonetheless. Their former vice captain is also featured in the Games, but as Nippon’s athletic trainer—an unforeseeable miracle. A durable promise. 

“I can’t believe we played beside Oikawa and Iwaizumi in high school,” Takahiro mutters, blinking silent tears into his cheap, fruity drink. 

“I can’t believe I had both of them throw up on me in high school,” Issei grouses, clinking the ice cubes against the side of his tall glass. “And on the same day, at that.”

Takahiro gives him a sympathetic pat on the arm. “You were kinda asking for that one, bud. Everyone knew they were wasted.” 

“Doesn’t mean I still can’t feel violated by it.” His cheeks are sore from smiling so wide. 

At some point during the third set, Hanamaki takes his eyes off the screen, takes Issei’s hand in his, and says to him, “Do you remember how we used to give our lives to volleyball?

 “I remember,” Issei replies, even though he knows the Escort System has shaped his experience.

“No focus on our grades, or at least not enough, and no friends outside of the team. And it felt like a pain in the ass most of the time because of the long practices and ice baths and Oikawa’s whining.” Takahiro’s fingers tighten their hold. “But when we won, it was incredible. That was our world. Do you remember?”

Do you remember?

Inhale, exhale. Count to ten. Issei sifts through his warping memory to unwrap countless fragments. He remembers standing beside his favorite person on earth the afternoon they received their jerseys. He remembers learning from Iwaizumi how to best tape his fingers. He remembers Oikawa nagging him to just try a jump serve at least once, come on, Mattsun, please! And Issei decides that he will always remember how it feels to sprout wings and jump for the Heavens in a block. And he decides that he will always remember feeling seventeen. 

But seventeen ends. He knows that now. 

“I remember,” Issei assures, thumbing Takahiro’s cracked knuckles. “I wouldn’t be able to forget it. Any of it.”

Takahiro looks at Issei. Even as the match peaks and Oikawa scores, he looks. And then, without opening his mouth, he speaks: “I’m glad I played volleyball.”

The smile lines bracketing Issei’s eyes reply: “Me too."

The first time Issei trains an Escort-to-be, he is twenty-six years young. His trainee is sixteen and some change, and she has no desire to be an Escort. 

“I don’t want to do this,” Fuminaga Emi states during their initial handshake. She has intentionally chosen not to wear proper Escort attire, instead patterned in a black Nike sweatshirt and flared jeans. 

“I can tell,” Issei answers, sliding his hand across the rim of his bowler hat. “Denim doesn’t really scream ‘Escort.’”

Emi’s lips purse like she wants to laugh. She hides her small face from Issei with the hood of her sweatshirt. “Every Escort I’ve shadowed has had me transferred to some other sucker. My last one was a real bitch.”

“Your last one was my cousin Yuka.” 

Emi pulls down her hood. “Well, your cousin’s kind of a bitch.”

Issei smiles. “She can be.” 

The two are seated in one of the consultation rooms of the Ishibashi Family Funeral Parlor. Emi was bewildered when Issei wrote to her that their first training session would begin with a conversation rather than an Escort, and she'd left him with forty-eight hours of radio silence and no confirmation. But she arrived at the parlor’s entrance on time today. That had to count for something. 

Emi reiterates her case, but her voice is higher and thinner this time. Younger, maybe. “I really don’t want to be an Escort,” she pleads as plum-colored eye bags pull tears from her waterline.

Issei’s heart is twice as heavy. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t want to be one either.”

Time loses its gravitational pull. A boreal chill encircles the room as Emi looks at her wrists, Issei at her. 

“You know, you’re the first Escort who’s said that to me before.”

“Admitted.” Issei adjusts the lapels of his jacket. “I’m the first Escort who’s admitted that to you before.”

From: hanamaki takahiro

To: matsukawa issei

[18:48 PM]

hey, are you busy tonight?

From: matsukawa issei 

To: hanamaki takahiro

[19:50 PM]

I worked this the morning so I’m off

[19:51 PM]

trying very hard to cook napolitan rn

A knock on Issei’s door causes his chopsticks to jump ship from his careful hands. He steps away from the warm stove to pad toward the front door. 

It’s late for a package to arrive, but Issei has learned that anything is possible when it comes to postage. (During his last meeting with the seventy-year-old mailman, his sweats were so low-slung on his hips that they’d almost fallen off when he’d reached to sign. He shudders at the memory.) But there is no untimely parcel, or delivery person to flash on the other side of the door. There is only a man with a head of dried roses and a perfectly crooked smile. 

“I love napolitan,” Hanamaki Takahiro announces before stepping into Issei’s apartment. 

Issei thinks to himself: I love you. And: I love you, and I can’t tell you, but I would like to. I would like to tell you. He tells Takahiro, “Well, welcome in, I guess.”

Issei’s apartment is nothing to call home about. It feels much like the footprint of a building, as if the designers had greater plans for it and then remembered it could only be a single apartment. It has an extra bedroom though, and it’s significantly bigger than the glorified closet Takahiro has resided in for the past four years. 

As his best friend marches through the apartment like he owns the place, Issei feels like he’s seeing his home for the first time. The refrigerator that’s broken at least three months out of the year. The coat rack bearing three jackets, none of which are for Escorting. The eggshell-white walls. The bed by the window. 

“Dude, what’s up with the sofa in your kitchen?” 

And the kitchen couch. 

The arrangement was supposed to be a temporary one. Lots of things were out of place when Issei first moved his old junk into his new apartment: a desk chair in the living room, a coffee table at the foot of his bed, seven cardboard boxes in his bathroom. But even as the other furniture were all heaved to their conventional rooms, the small, maroon couch remained in the kitchen, wedged between the wooden counter and wall. 

Issei shrugs. “I put it there when I first moved in.”

Takahiro nods as if this makes perfect sense, which it does not. Then he stretches his arms above his head—showcasing just a sliver of pale stomach—and collapses onto that uncomfortable couch. “Well, don’t mind me. Go finish making your pasta.”

And Issei has never been talented at turning down Takahiro, so he does. He tosses the boiled spaghetti and the cooked bacon into the ketchup sauce. With a fresh pair of chopsticks, he twirls the concoction together. He tries not to think of the man on the couch behind him.

A few minutes later, they sit beside each other at the counter and stare down at a single plate of napolitan. 

“I don’t need to eat,” Takahiro says, after a long pause. 

“I don’t mind sharing,” Issei assures him, after an even longer one. 

And Takahiro has never been talented at turning down Issei, so they do. They don’t eat their pasta in silence, because that’s not the kind of love they share. They make small talk that spirals into Big Talk, and by the time Issei is stabbing at the last piece of bacon on the plate, he’s confessing that napolitan reminds him of his late mother. 

“She used to cook it all the time.” He crooks his voice so it vaguely resembles his mother’s—raspy and rich. “‘Simple is best.’”

Takahiro laughs, almost like he wants to cry. “Ah, man. The world is so fucked.”

Maybe Issei’s Escorting shifts have been a few hours too long lately. Or perhaps training Emi has made him—dare he say—wiser than he was ten years ago. But regardless of the reason, Issei can’t stop himself from objecting. 

“But, it isn’t, Takahiro. The world isn’t… fucked. Not really, anyway.” He tries to reign back the Escort in him, but it bares its fangs. He sets his fork down to gesticulate. “Ask yourself: who is harmed during the cycles of Death and change?”

“Well, your mom,” Takahiro supplies tenderly. 

“Her,” Issei agrees, “but also everything else.”

“I don’t follow?”

“Humans like to believe that their pain is unique, but it really isn’t. No one gets an exemption.” He inhales. “There are few things more fair than Death.”

Takahiro nods before sliding off his barstool and right into the corner of the kitchen couch. “You went into Escort lecture mode there for a minute, buddy.”

“I know. Sorry,” Issei grumbles, joining his friend.

“Nah, it’s okay. But I still think the world is fucked.”

And this is when Issei decides he must address the elephant in the room. It’s been standing there long enough, posed among his varying ceramic sculptures. 

“Takahiro, what’re you doing here?”

“I told you. I’m staying with my parents in Miyagi for a bit.” 

So Issei takes a deep breath. Counts to ten. Wills his body temperature to raise a few degrees as he touches his friend’s strong shoulder. “Hiro, why’re you really here?”

The nickname slips out against his will, but it does the trick. 

Takahiro cries like he wants to laugh. “God, nothing gets by you, huh?” He wipes a stray tear, folds his hands in his lap. “I’m out of a job.”

Fucking hell. 

“Chairman died so they’re downsizing and shit. New direction for the company, with less need for twenty-somethings like me.” Takahiro tugs at his tawny hair. “God, I don’t know! I didn’t read the email all the way through,” he fumes, which means he read that email no less than seven times. 

Issei’s hand is still on Takahiro’s shaking shoulder. “So what happens now?”

“We get unemployment for a while, but my life is uprooted. No job, barely enough money to pay my rent in a couple of months, no nothing.”

“That’s supremely shitty, man.” 

“Isn’t it?” Takahiro scoffs, and here, he leans into Issei’s hesitant touch. “I rent my stupid studio apartment in Tokyo that’s the size of two parking spaces, and I eat instant curry packets with microwaveable rice for every other meal, and I leave behind Miyagi—and then I lose my job.” By now, Takahiro’s cheek bone is hooked on Issei’s shoulder. He’s close enough for Issei to press a kiss to his temple, and he’s heartsick. 

Beyond the closed windows of the apartment, trimmed grass swing dances with the sharpening night air.

Issei thinks about how there’s space in his toothbrush cup for another brush. About how he always seems to have enough eggs to make vanilla cream puffs from scratch. About how he’s been in love with his best friend since middle school, when Takahiro’s face was dotted with acne and dry with eczema, when he was still acclimating to his lanky limbs. 

And Issei thinks and thinks about all of these things, and it’s so painfully clear what needs to happen. So he says, “Move in with me.” 

Takahiro flicks his gaze up to Issei. “Say that again?”

“Move in with me,” Issei repeats, more courage barred behind his words. “You know I have an extra room, and it’s not exactly like there’s a job tying you down to Tokyo.” 

A hum against his arm. “Go on.”

“My rent’s pricey. It’d be nice to have someone else pitch in.”

Takahiro looks less like he’s got a mouthful of gravel to spit out now. More like he’s smiling. “So it’s not because you want my company, but because Escorting souls doesn’t pay the bills too well?”

“Oh, you’re always a joy,” Issei clarifies, and he means it, “Miyagi apartment prices are just offensively high.” White lies don’t hurt anyone. 

“Fair point, fair point. Give me some time to think it over.” Takahiro shifts so that his head is in Issei’s lap.  “Okay, I thought it over. Sounds good to me!”

Issei grins ear to ear. “Hiro, my man.” (And, oh, there’s the nickname again.) “Takahiro. Sorry.”

A cheek is pressed against his inner thigh. “You can call me Hiro, you know.”

“I—” Issei tries to think of an excuse as to why he shouldn’t. There isn’t one, other than, “That’s way too fucking intimate for me when I’ve been in love with you since I knew what love was. ”

So he says, “Sure thing, Hiro.” It’s got a pretty ring to it, really. Hiro.

Coexisting with Takahiro is as easy as breathing. Issei supposes they’ve been doing it for years; the only change is that they’re sharing space now, too. Takahiro takes the spare bedroom that was used for storage, slots his pink toothbrush next to Issei’s in the toothbrush cup, and they’re good as gold. 

Issei is forced to clear out all of his Escorting things from what is now Takahiro’s room—his murky wardrobe, the textbooks older than he is, all of his accolades. It’s strange to have his Escorting memorabilia in the same room he sleeps in. He is forced, suddenly, to acknowledge that he’s purposely separated his home life from his Escorting career. 

“Sorry about”—Issei gestures to the overflowing bins of Escort materials leaking out into the hallway—“all of this.” He’s been trying to finish the moving process for a week now. 

Takahiro shrugs. “Why apologize? They’re just a part of you.” He blows a kiss. “And I adore all of you, Issei.”

Issei pretends to swat the kiss away, but the smile on his face betrays his disdainful facade. Cohabitation is comfortable. It’s comforting. 

1. 7:20 PM on Friday, February 18th.

“When I die, will you be the one to Escort me?”

The question isn’t queer. If Issei had more friends who knew he was an Escort, he’d probably hear it often. The human experience is plagued with obsessions about why we’re here, where we’re supposed to go, what we’re supposed to do. This need for purpose isn’t easily smothered.

“I don’t know,” Issei admits. He stands at the kitchen counter, cracking eggs to scramble for soboro don. Takahiro is seated beside him. “It’s all in the hands of the higher ups. And your question also assumes I don’t pass before you.” 

“Oh, right.”

As if sensing that Issei wants to look at him, Takahiro leans over into his personal space—a designated area that has decreased significantly over the past two months. “It’d be nice if you were the one to do it, though. To Escort me, I mean.” He swings his long legs back and forth, almost kicking a hole in the cabinets every time his heels collide with the wood. 

“Well, most people would appreciate a familiar face in their final, first moments.” Issei cracks the second egg. A single sliver of shell falls into the bubbling yellow cup of liquid. “And will you please get your ass off of the counter? I thought we made a no-sitting-on-cooking-surfaces rule.”

The egg shell is particularly slippery. It shimmies its way out of Issei’s chopsticks twice, then practically springs out of his grasp during his third try at fishing it out. By his fourth attempt of extraction, he gives up. 

“I think I would appreciate it if you were the one to Escort me.” Takahiro’s words have a deliberate drag to them. “I think I would appreciate seeing you one last time. Just you.”

Ah. 

Issei cracks another egg; he pays no mind to what else cracks in the moment. 

(His left pinky knuckle. The eerie domesticity they’ve fallen into, in spite of his macabre career. Takahiro’s deep, deep voice.)

His friend pays mind, though. He’s well-versed in all of Issei’s visages. He can dissect if a sigh is one of pleasure or pain, determine when Issei is obscuring the truth just by his eyebrow alone. It is a given that he would pick up on Issei’s furtive shift in expression. It is horribly fitting that he would put two and two together.

“Oh my god. You like me too much to even think about Escorting me!” Takahiro beams insanely, and the pressure of the room doubles. “This is rich.”

And it is rich. Because that’s right, isn’t it? Takahiro is just one more soul in the eyes of the ever-expanding universe. He is an unexceptional human being. He is merely a person—a person whom Issei loves enough to sacrifice a lifetime of immortality. 

“I wouldn’t want to Escort you,” is what Issei finally settles on. He stirs white sugar into the liquid egg, whisks out any lumps with his long chopsticks. “It would be painful.”

 Smile drooping at the corners, Takahiro says, “I thought it always was.” 

It has started to rain outside. The window in the kitchen is open, but Issei knows that neither he or Takahiro will break their eye contact to close it. Some things are more important than rotting wood.

“If I were to Escort you, we wouldn’t be a special case. Everyone has to Escort people they love.” Issei sets down his egg-coated chopsticks, then hoists himself up onto the counter alongside his best friend. Rules be damned. “I mean, he’ll never tell me, but I think my dad was the one who Escorted my mom all those years ago.” 

It’s the first time Issei has uttered this inkling aloud. Inconceivably, the sky does not split open and thunder jagged stars. The ground does not swallow him whole. 

“You know, she wasn’t an Escort herself or anything; she only married into the family.” He steadies his breath. “But I think she always suspected that there was more to my dad than what he let on. More to his sister and the funeral home, too. Because she was smart, and she cared so much. And there have been so many nights where I just stayed up wondering if, when she died, she felt…” 

Betrayed. Hostile. Liberated. 

“Scared.” Issei’s voice is small now. “I wonder if she was scared by what the people she loved were capable of.”

This thought has resided like a tumor in Issei’s gut since he started Escort Training. It is the cause of his wounds beneath wounds. He has wanted to confess it for years, but the cost has always felt too great. This is a story about the mind and what it does when it hurts. This is a story about the bruises on Issei’s heart and the barrens behind his smile.

Takahiro doesn’t laugh off Issei’s anxiety. He doesn’t interrupt with his own pains; and he doesn’t say that Issei is a good person, in spite of his dubious career. He only presses his chin against Issei’s shoulder for one beat, two. 

“I’ll finish cooking,” comes the whisper. As if Takahiro knows how to operate anything in the kitchen without causing a small fire. Even quieter: “Thank you for talking to me, Issei.”

2. 7:20 AM on Saturday, February 19th. 

The room is wrapped in a blue light so soft it’s striking, which is to say that the world is wrapped in blue light. Because right now, this is Issei’s world: his matchbox of a living room with air conditioning that takes ten minutes to kick in, the gentle weight of Takahiro’s temple pressed to the bulk of his shoulder. He’s wearing one of Issei’s shirts, although they’ve been sharing clothes since high school, so it’s hard to draw the line between whose clothing is whose. 

(After an evening of grief and charred soboro don, the two had settled into the living room couch for a film. They’d gotten up once to change into pajamas, and then never again.)

Issei shifts against the sofa so that he can rest his chin on top of Takahiro’s hair. And as he wraps his arms around his love’s wiry frame, he thinks to himself: I wish there were no Escort system. I wish I could stay with my best friend for eternity and cradle him against my heart like this. I wish I could tell him that he is safe, I wish that we could be safe, I wish we were safe. 

Yuka was the one who suggested that Issei work at the Ishibashi Family Funeral Parlor. It was years ago, back when he was in middle school and she was in high school—starting to think about college and majors and leaving things behind. 

When asked what her future would hold, she’d answered, “Working at the family parlor, of course.” A pause. “You could work there, too, Ii-chan.” 

Issei had never considered this. Yuka’s family parlor was owned by her father—a man who was an expert Escort, but not a Matsukawa. Ishibashi Kouta had married Matsukawa Sakura, Issei’s aunt. 

“Maybe I will end up there,” Issei had replied. “Then we’d see each other every day.”

As it turns out, they do not see each other every day. They occasionally walk in the same direction in the parlor, or hand off paperwork to each other perhaps, but they don’t see each other. So when Yuka asks him to coffee in spring, Issei accepts without a second thought. 

His cousin sits at a round table toward the back. Her long legs are crossed over each other and sticking out one side of her chair, a laminated menu pinched between her fingers. She isn’t wearing all black. 

Issei offers a wave as he sits down. The two of them sit in a strange, floaty silence until the waitress arrives. 

Yuka selects a creamy mocha and the pastry of the day. Issei asks for black coffee and nothing else. 

“When did you drop gum syrup and cream?” his cousin asks, sometime later into their stay. “You loved sweets growing up.”

“I can’t remember,” Issei confesses. Their drinks are brought out, and they clink them together before sipping gingerly. “But with my lame drink order, we may as well have just met at my apartment.”

Yuka giggles, red lips parting. “Oh no, I didn’t want to intrude on you and Hanamaki.” Her pastry arrives when the sound finishes leaving her mouth. It’s a coffee cake of some sort, topped with powdered sugar and sitting on a bed of lace. 

“I would have kicked him out if it made you more comfortable.”

His cousin drags a knuckle up to the bottom of her chin, preparing to pop. “I don’t think that would have been your first choice. You like living with him, after all, don’t you?

By some random act of kindness from God, Issei fends off his encroaching blush. He’s never explicitly talked to Yuka about his feelings toward Takahiro, but her analytical abilities are damn near clairvoyant, and Issei is far from subtle with his love.  

“Yeah,” he chokes out, “it’s nice. We’re best friends.”

“Have you told him how you feel yet?” 

The inquiry is not unkind, for he knows it comes from a place of love. The answer shines in his eyes. 

“Oh, Issei. You should tell him.” Yuka whispers something to herself before taking her first bite of cake, a fragile corner piece that flops when it touches her fork. As she slides the metal out from between her dazzling teeth, she finishes, “Life is too short not to hold people close.”

The sound of fork against bone is jarring. 

It makes Issei want to crawl out of his skin. “I don’t want to lose what we have right now. What we have right now is—it’s good.”

Yuka laughs, uncrossing her legs for the first time in a half hour. “What’s the worst that could happen if you tell him? Relationships are simple: you either break up or die.”

“Thanks,” Issei mutters, frowning. “Very comforting.”

His cousin carves out a piece of cake again. “If you don’t tell him, you’ll regret it.” A delicate swallow. “It’s only the rest of your life.” 

Ishibashi Yuka is the type of woman who collects pieces of the men she loved before. She is not inordinately beautiful, but there is a certain magnetism to the spacing of her facial features, the ruby-red lipstick she swipes across her mouth. As a child, she was regarded as mature. She is lonely most of the time. 

A chuckle or a gasp or something in between hammers against Issei’s windpipe. “We’re Escorts, Yuka. We have Death to worry about, not life.”

“But that’s where you’re wrong, Ii-chan,” Yuka objects. “People think that Death is this exotic, scary thing, but it’s not. You know, and I know, that it’s really not. We were both there when our grandmother died, after all.”

The cafe is getting busier now. As more customers flood in, panic surges in Issei’s body. His mug of coffee has emptied itself. 

“Death is a mundane phenomenon,” his cousin continues. “Life is what’s extraordinary. And you don’t know how long yours is so you should just tell Hanamaki how you feel. Before things stop being extraordinary.”

Issei is actively dying, but he’s living as well. It would do him well to remember this. But his brain is one more eavesdropped cappuccino order away from exploding, and it’s getting too cold, so he clutches the handle of his mug tighter. “That doesn’t make sense,” he contests quietly. 

“If everything made sense, Ii-chan, nothing would be beautiful.” His cousin straightens the collar of her blouse, a new resilience smoking in her pupils. “If you’re never going to do something about your love, then you might as well submit your petition for immortality to the heads of the System. Go on, do it right now.”

Issei’s hands do not stray from his cup. 

“That’s what I thought.” Yuka softens like an unrolled futon, pats Issei on the shoulder. “Now go get ‘em, lover boy.”

During the walk home, he considers his cousin’s urgency. Issei knows that, logically, it would be easy to tell Takahiro how he feels. That, logically, if the feelings weren’t mutual, Takahiro wouldn’t be cruel about it. But there’s something inside of Issei—a little pinprick of light, a soul, if you will—that holds him back. Something inside of him is scared of taking that final plunge. 

A text tone rattles his phone.

From: hanamaki takahiro

To: matsukawa issei

[12:24 PM]

can you pick up cream puffs from that bakery with the teddy bears in the windows

i’ll pay you back for them

[12:25 PM]

actually i probably won’t but you should still buy them

Issei’s long legs find him standing outside the front window display of Hanamaki’s favorite Miyagi bakery. Two stuffed bears stare into Issei’s soul with beady glass eyes. He enters the shop, buys two large profiteroles, and starts at a brisk pace home so that the pastry won’t be soggy for Hanamaki.

About a block from the apartment building, Issei stops walking. The streets, unbothered, continue to hustle and bustle around him. They fight against the entropy of his fractured existence; they win. Issei looks down at the cream puffs he bought for his roommate of four months, his best friend, and the love of his life: Hanamaki Takahiro. 

He’s crushing the corner of the pastry box. He is scared of seeing something else die. 

The thing about living with Takahiro is that he’s always there. It’s not the same as when they shared a college dorm; there is no third roommate getting in between them, and their schedules are no longer fundamentally different two days out of the week. As twenty-seven-year-olds with stable jobs, Issei and Takahiro coexist in the same sphere of life. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking thing. Takahiro is there when Issei is at his best—charming and clean-shaven, curls framing his forehead—and he is also there when Issei is at his worst (this needs no explanation). 

Tonight falls into the category of the latter. Issei’s been working extra hours over the past two weeks, the Escort System’s version of a mandate. His lower back is killing him because of it. But what else is he supposed to do when the rice paper cards keep materializing in his left pocket? Who can he complain to? Not his friends or coworkers, and certainly not to God themself. 

Off-key humming welcomes him home. Issei slips off his dress shoes and slinks through the living room, conforming with the shadows cast against the ground. In the kitchen, Takahiro is boiling a pot of water for pasta. (He has been able to work himself up to this perilous task after months of impatient cooking lessons with Issei.) 

The tiny apartment bathroom is Issei’s refuge. It will never be as sacred as the one in his childhood home, but it possesses some quality of benevolence regardless. Issei begins to undress. The bowler hat and leather gloves first, followed by the trench coat and belt. Then the turtleneck damp with things he will not name, the freshly wrinkled slacks and his underwear. Lastly, the silver cuff links Takahiro gave him for his last birthday. They don’t deserve to rust. 

His clothing took the brunt of the Escorting mess today, so the shower water does not run fuchsia after it rushes down his body. But the memory of the gore remains. In the canals of his ears and the small bones of his feet and the hollowing space in his mouth. Issei scrubs and scrubs until he no longer feels the desperation of the seven-year-old boy he Escorted, until he no longer feels anything at all. Then he yanks the shower handle to the coldest setting and embraces the role God intended for him. 

He exits the bathroom in black silk pajamas that gape around the neckline, desiccated. Takahiro stands at the sink straining pasta through the colander. He looks at home in his loose sweater and green pajama pants. 

“You were quiet when you came in.”

Issei grunts in affirmation before taking a seat on the kitchen couch. “Wasn’t in a talking mood. Thanks for cooking.”

They eat at the counter in awkward silence. Takahiro looks like he wants to prod but is trying very, very hard not to. He hasn’t been with Issei on his bad days before, and he doesn’t want to set off a sharp-toothed thing. 

So to assert his humanity, Issei finally speaks. “Should we watch a movie tonight?”

Takahiro speaks around a mouthful of farfalle. “Sure. Can we do the horror movie that just came out about the girl in the church?”

Noir films don’t typically irk Issei, what with his career and all, but tonight feels different. Tonight is icky. He never fails to feel sick the evening after Escorting children. 

“I’m not really in the mood,” he tells Takahiro, picking up his bowl to shove noodles into his mouth. “Too creepy.”

Roars of laughter erupt from Takahiro. He wiggles his thin eyebrows like waves. “Oh, great Matsukawa Issei, harbinger of Death, pawn of God, are you scared?” 

And if the question were occurring during any other conversation, Issei would snicker along with him. But it’s not, so he doesn’t. 

“I’m terrified.” 

The ceramic bowl in Issei’s hands bounces off the kitchen couch as it falls, then shatters into three, clean pieces. Dazed, he reaches to collect the shards. His fingers don’t bleed when they curl around the biggest piece. 

A slap to the wrist knocks the glass out of Issei’s hands, and a bright spot of pain blooms below his skin. 

“No, no, Issei, honey, you can’t pick that up with your bare hands,” Takahiro whispers, leaning over to touch Issei again—gentle this time. “You’re not yourself right now. You’ve gotta breathe.”

Issei tries. He tries for Takahiro, and because he’s horrified about experiencing more purpling fingertips or blood pressures below 100/60 tonight. His focus on breath requires far too much attention and patience, but it keeps him alive. Issei is alive. 

Takahiro pats his arm. “Issei,” he starts, and he sounds so, so full of love, “what’s going on?”

He should answer Takahiro. He really should. But his slack jaw refuses to bite up on any words.

“What’s on your mind right now?” Takahiro tries again, leaning further into Issei, so that his cheek is almost against Issei’s shoulder blade. “Hey, I need you to let me in.” 

There’s a plea in Takahiro’s voice that catches Issei off guard. 

“Sorry, I’m not too good at letting people in.”

“I know,” Takahiro says, hushed just below a laugh. “Trust me, I know that better than anyone else. But I appreciate you trying.” He leans in a centimeter further, and now they’re skin to skin. “So what are you thinking about that? I haven’t seen you cry since we lost our ticket to nationals back in high school.”

Issei blinks, and a single star trickles down his cheek. He hadn’t noticed he’d teared up.

Matsukawa Issei does not cry. Matsukawa Issei is good at burying the human emotions that make his line of work dizzying.

“Am I a bad person?” he asks.

“You’re not a bad person.” Takahiro’s insistence grates against Issei’s ears. “I swear to the God who you don’t even like that you’re not a bad person. You’re one of the best people I know, Issei. You are.”

“If I were Escorting, you wouldn’t be able to see me. Even if I walked right past you.” Issei blinks out a pair of tears. “That’s what it does to you.”

Takahiro presses their foreheads together. “I would see you,” he assures.

“That’s not how things work.” 

“I would see you,” his best friend repeats. “Because I know you, and I know you on purpose.”

In the middle of Issei’s cave of bones is a man who knows him on purpose. A man who puts two pea-sized dollops of toothpaste on his toothbrush even though dentists only call for one, and who goes queasy at the sight of mushrooms, and who always keeps a penny in his breast pocket for good luck. I love you, Issei thinks. I love you, pounds against the back of his teeth. 

“Honest?” he asks, shy.

“Honest,” Takahiro confirms. 

And all at once, things change. For the better, this time. Issei’s panic and paranoia are sluiced. His tears begin to dry. His senses are sharper than ever before, so much that he can make out the hotel lotion on Takahiro’s hands that smells of plantain chips. 

“I’m grateful that I met you, Hiro,” he says, and that’s as good of a confession as any. “I’m grateful for everything.”

“Even my jokes?” his best friend asks, smirking.

“Even the incredibly overplayed, painfully awful jokes,” Issei whispers into the space between them, which, wow —now that the blood’s rushed back to his brain—is really not a lot of space. 

Takahiro beams. His teeth look blue in the moonlight. “Good. Got scared half to Death there for a second.”

“Fuck you,” Issei mutters fondly, cupping Takahiro’s cheeks. “You really know how to ruin a moment, huh?”

“Yeah, I do,” the life of his love replies, then leans in for a kiss.

For Issei, the most difficult part of being an Escort is not soul collections. It’s not the absence of normalcy, or the blood-soaked gloves, or the countless people who vanish right in front of him. It’s having to remember that he, himself, is alive. Even while surrounded by Death, he is alive. 

There are no fireworks or volcanic eruptions in Issei’s chest when their lips meet, and the world doesn’t stop spinning. But his heart beats loud in his ears. 

Issei kisses Takahiro back. He feels alive. 

There’s a paradox, you see, that keeps Issei up late at night—long after reality has become plastic and the last wandering souls have walked into white light. 

The paradox is this: souls are universally valued across cultures, but a person only exists outside of themself. In many parts of the world, when a person dies, their tombstone is inscribed with their relations to other people: mother, daughter, mentor, friend. These tombstones emphasize the truth that a people only exist as a sponge for connection. A person only exists outside of themself. This is a truth often overlooked in a human society that lacks a sensitivity to change.

With this in mind, the body should be praised more than the soul. It is the body that houses the pain receptors. It is the body that tells a person, “Yes, I am here” because to feel pain is to assert that you are alive. And even so, bodies rots. Wrinkles form and synapses spiral, and through it all, the soul stays bare as a baby—fresh like an open wound. Why is that?

Why?

Issei does not have an answer. Neither does his cousin with her bleeding lips, or his father with his pitch bowler hat, or anyone else in the Escort System. No one knows why the soul exists. No one knows what drove God mad enough to create such a horrid, lonely miracle. 

Heaven’s ceiling is gray against the technicolor city. It’s September, which means that tsuyu should be long gone by now, but clunky clouds have been emerging in the sky for the past two weeks. The unexpected showers drown crops, create pockets of joy for children with squeaky rain boots, and wet the pant cuffs of businessmen stuck in the early 2000s. For Issei and his boyfriend, they bring a string of at-home dates. 

Their dates have gotten more and more simplistic with each interminable day of downpour, culminating into today’s stellar activity: watching the rain. Takahiro and Issei are lying in bed, half on top of each other and half-clothed. The rain hitting the window panes sounds like freckled conversation. 

“I’ve been thinking, lately, about what souls might look like.”

Since luck is afoot, Issei is able to make out Takahiro’s words, even as they’re spoken into the divot of his pecks. “That so?” he prompts, raising a hand to scratch milky shoulder blades. 

Breath singes his chest. “Yup. And I’ve decided that everyone’s soul is different, and that you’re not allowed to confirm if I’m correct.”

“All right, go on,” Issei says, because he’s the best boyfriend ever. 

“I feel like souls each have unique shapes, you know?” Takahiro marvels, shifting so that he rests on his elbows beside Issei. “Like Oikawa, for example.”

“What’s his shape?”

“Square,” Takahiro declares without hesitance. “He’s loud and turbulent, but stupidly practical. And his soul is definitely mint green.”

Even after all this time, Issei feels butterflies in his stomach—great monarchs diving from trees, blinding and breakable. Their wings knife through the brittle air. Their initial falling has become rising. 

“So every soul’s got a color then, huh?” 

Takahiro scoffs. “Obviously.”

“What about my soul then?” Issei asks, propping himself up to mirror his boyfriend. 

“Something soft and absorbent.” Takahiro narrows his eyes. “A light gray, maybe, with baby blue accents.” 

Issei imagines the color brewing in the rainstorm outside. “I don’t know if soft and absorbent makes much sense, Hiro,” he deadpans. “I’m an Escort.”

“And a first-class asshole, but what difference does your profession make?” Takahiro pecks him on the nose. “If it offers you some weird psychological comfort, though, I think your soul probably looks hard, but is actually soft to the touch.”

This he can get behind. “Hard like marble or hard like a sea urchin?”

“Marble for sure.” Takahiro face scrunches together, fond. “Iwaizumi’s is more like the sea urchin though.”

They laugh so hard that the bed shakes. And then they keep chortling at every mundanity they discuss, like their broken refrigerator and the rain in September and the damn kitchen couch. And with every pump of his lungs, Issei steps deeper and deeper into an ever warm hot spring. He is impossibly, impossibly hot. 

“You know I love you, right?” he finds himself questioning, many hours after their titillation has subsided. He and Takahiro are lying on their respective sides of the bed now. They face each other like they’re facing the world, because right now, this is their world. 

“Mhmm,” his boyfriend mumbles very intelligently. He takes Issei’s nearest hand and navigates it to the broad of his thigh. In a declaration of something more immense than love, Takahiro whispers, “You make me feel safe.” 

It takes Issei twenty-seven years to learn that souls are present everywhere. They are in the changing seasons, the color green. Folded into his mother’s favorite dish and the two, old benches in front of the 7-Eleven. Woven into the hundreds of futons hung out to dry by the people of his hometown, all at one PM, so that if someone were to look from a birds’ eye view, they’d see an ocean of white stars. 

It takes Issei twenty-seven years to acknowledge that the Escort System is as intrinsically tied to Life-with-a-Capital-L as it is to Death. He must keep living, even while surrounded by loss, because it is the only way of asking for forgiveness from the universe. His life is too great of a gift to abandon. It is an unpayable debt.

Issei doesn’t suddenly relish being an Escort, but he begins to understand why some people—like his father—do. 

So maybe he will be the one to Escort Takahiro one day. And maybe that day will be tomorrow, or next month, or sixty-four years from now. But does that really change much? For now, he and Takahiro are alive, and what a mortifyingly mortal miracle that is. 

Matsukawa Issei is twenty-seven and alive, all flesh and blood and punched-out love. He is twenty-seven years young and life is beautiful. 

“A thing that’s 500 years old is 500 years old. Things happen to objects, surface accrues. When you take off that accrued surface, it’s never the same. All works of art have the inalienable right to live an honorable life and, when necessary, die a dignified Death.”

James Beck, Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business, and the Scandal