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In KK’s defense, he doubted there was a single person on the planet who’d react rationally to coming face to face with their own dead body, occupied by some no-name spirit implanted by the guy who’d killed them in the first place as a final, unbearably smug fuck you.
That didn’t mean that trying to take it back hadn’t been dumb as hell.
He had plenty of time to kick himself over it—as much as he could, reduced again to shapeless spirit inside the dark of the containment cube. The other spirits he and the kid had freed earlier in the night seemed to have had limited awareness of their circumstances, cycling through a few confused phrases from the instants just before they’d been decoupled from their bodies. KK wasn’t so lucky. He was fully aware inside the cube, and all the more agitated for it. In one moment he was seethingly angry; in another, so bored he could die a second time and feel nothing but relief.
Last and most obnoxious was the realization that unless the kid came to bust him out, this would be his new residence until such time as a Visitor came to: A, drag him to the underworld; B, devour him; or C, carry out some heretofore unimagined but likely horrifying alternative.
He’d wonder how the last seventy-two hours had gotten so fucked up, but the months that preceded them had hardly been a picnic either.
What felt like an hour passed, then two, and soon he was stuck on the anger setting, that familiar frustration to be stuck relying on people who didn’t get the gravity of what he did, the danger of what was out there. He couldn’t depend on other people and yet he had to, because no matter what he’d already given up to clear the way—no matter how many fetters to his old life he’d broken, link by painful link—there were only so many hours in a day and he couldn’t do every fucking thing on his own, couldn’t manage the tech and do the research and comb the streets himself without giving his targets enough time to slip through the cracks and drag some innocent lives through the mud on their way.
Erika, at least, had understood his urgency. She’d known better than the rest of them how deep her father’s madness ran, what lines he would cross to get what he wanted. But she was a teenager, someone KK couldn’t and wouldn’t place any further burden on, even if he didn’t quite agree with Rinko trying to keep her quietly hidden out of harm’s way forever either. Rinko herself had gone cold and distant as their target’s actions escalated and their situation worsened. Said KK’s pace was unsustainable, his mood increasingly terrible. Even Ed at one point had left him a message saying that while Ed was trying his best to prepare for the looming disaster they could all feel coming, it was hard to factor KK into his plans when he was carrying a chip the size of Tokyo Tower on his shoulder. Followed by a brief digression into the exact dimensions and material composition of Tokyo Tower.
By the time their target had kicked his plan off with a bang—and a hole through KK’s chest—KK was functionally friendless. And now he was stuck, disembodied and helpless, in a floating cube who knew where, waiting for some civilian nobody probably not even out of university yet to somehow find and bust him out when even the top-of-their-field professionals KK had worked with for years had failed, had lost, had looked at the furious mess of temper and snapping teeth KK had become and said, no thanks.
No, no. Going through it all again was almost calming, his anger going cold and inert. It was brutally simple in its finality. He’d just have to figure out a way out, the way he did everything else: by himself. He could still feel his powers, after all. Maybe if he could just focus them in the right way—
But before he could finish the half-baked thought, the walls of the cube opened out and away to reveal Akito standing there before him, staring KK down with calm certainty.
“You stop for drinks?” KK said, even as he thought, how about that.
The question percolated in the back of his head in the days that followed: how had Akito even found him? He’d been cut off from KK’s powers, and the shrine KK discovered when he emerged from the cube was more than a good trek away from the underground cavern where he’d been trapped in the first place.
But the question was a very low entry on a very long list of more urgent matters, and he wasn’t all that keen on reminding Akito of the situation. Part of him was admittedly somewhat abashed at the memory, ashamed at the impulsive behavior that had landed him in the mess with the cube and the rush of bitter thoughts it’d brought up. He was supposed to have a better handle on that shit by now. He wasn’t some hotshot in his twenties anymore.
So he resolved not to bring it up again, and held to that—until one night when Akito, his hair still wet from the shower, poured out a horror story from his childhood all in one go, handed KK the vulnerability like a knife, and something twitchy and vigilant unwound in KK, said: this kid is too sincere. Too open. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Not even you.
It was another day or two—or three, who was really counting anymore—before KK bit the bullet and asked. They were high up on the roof of the tallest building they'd been able to find in a ten block radius, trying to scout out the best path to a corrupted shrine, and KK stalled one final moment to feel grateful that neither of them were afraid of heights. Grappling up had been easy enough, but getting back down would take a little more forethought. The building wasn’t as tall as Kagerie, but it was still farther from the ground than could be sustained on a single span of gliding. They’d have to make a series of staggered jumps down onto the rooftops of nearby shorter buildings before it would be safe enough to make the final drop to the ground.
He waited until Akito had stooped down to look into the tourist binoculars mounted on the railing to ask.
“When that—thing occupying my body got me with the cube. How did you find me?”
Akito hummed a little at the question, tilting the binoculars this way and that. KK took in the view absentmindedly, formulating a route without much effort. “Rinko was the one that pointed it out,” Akito said. “You and I were…still connected, even cut apart like that. There was a trail, like black smoke. Led me right to the shrine where you were being held.”
Well. Imagine that—barely one night together at that point and KK had already left a mark on him. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that, or about the fact that the tie connecting them sounded so reminiscent of the shadowy smoke seeping out from the skin around Akito’s eye, visible in the reflection of every shop window and uncomfortably similar to the wispy tendrils of the tree-shaped masses of corruption that had begun to spring up around Shibuya.
“How’d you get past all the Visitors without my power? The streets were crawling with them.”
Akito sighed and stepped back from the binoculars, concentration broken. He looked up into the blood moon as he thought back. “Sneaking, when I could. Arrows and sutras when I couldn’t. Grappling and spectral vision were off the table too, which made everything way harder than it needed to be. Lots of running. Kind of sucked, to be honest, I’d really appreciate it if you could, you know, not get kidnapped again.”
He smothered the part of him that bristled at the implication that he’d been some damsel in distress for Akito to rescue. “Wasn’t planning on it, kid. Gotten pretty comfortable in here.”
And then immediately had to smother the thought about how true that was, too.
Akito’s tone was dry. “Ten out of ten? Would recommend?”
“Maybe an eight. Room for improvement but…pretty solid nonetheless.”
“Yeah, well, it’s my first time getting possessed.”
“I wouldn’t go making a habit of it.”
“Shouldn’t be an issue as long as we’re cohabitating, right? Unless…” The dawning horror of someone who’s had recent, prolonged cause to assume things can and will get worse. “Please don’t tell me another wraith could still—”
“No,” KK said quickly. “No. You don’t have to worry about that.”
He could almost feel it then—the pseudo-sensation of a heartbeat suddenly picking up in a chest he didn’t have. It wasn’t the first time it’d happened. Maybe it was Akito’s anxiety he was feeling, the intensity of heightened emotions pulling KK closer to the surface, the same way wiring in fused them together synapse to sinew and tethered KK back to the tactile world. Or maybe the uptick in the imagined pulse was his own, an automatic aversion to the honest distress in Akito’s voice.
Damn, but this kid was earnest. He didn’t know when that had become something to protect instead of pity.
Rinko would be laughing her ass off if she knew.
“Oh thank god,” Akito said all in one breath. The feel of the heartbeat slowly faded out. “So, what, there’s a two soul limit? That seems kind of arbitrary.”
“Pretty sure there’s a one soul limit. The only reason your body didn’t reject me straight away was because you were already halfway out the door, so to speak.” Bleeding out on the Scramble Crossing. “The next time we merged, and you were fully there and conscious for it? Didn’t sound like a pleasant experience for you. It’s standing room only in here. And you’re bearing the brunt of it. ”
Akito went quiet. Reliving, maybe, the pain that had made him scream himself hoarse—the first time seizing on his back among the spider lilies, the second collapsing to his knees on the wood floor of a shrine. “I fractured a couple ribs once in high school,” he said eventually. “Just some dumb sports injury, but it took forever to heal. It hurt more than I expected. A lot more. You don’t realize how fragile your ribs are until somebody puts their foot through them.” Another pause. “That first time we fused again, I just thought—I’d rather break the other twenty-two.”
“That bad, huh.”
“Yeah.”
Another flicker of sensation—this time, a sick swirling. Unfair that the low nausea of guilt could still reach him here in this quasi-form. KK had never worn the emotion well, had usually funneled it into anger instead. Even when he didn’t have a target for it and so by default turned it on everyone, deserving or otherwise.
If old dogs couldn’t learn new tricks, what hope was there for a dead one?
Still, something in him said, you’ve thrown this kid into the line of fire. Dragged him into a world he’s been trying to forget since he was seven years old. Carved out space in him and made yourself at home.
Worse than that, really. Akito hadn’t been touched by KK’s death so much as filled with it. In his time, KK had purged corruption, removed afflictions, freed trapped spirits—but the kind of kegare he’d inflicted on Akito…he could only hope there was a purification ritual strong enough for a stain that black.
He’d never worn guilt well. He owed it to Akito to try.
“For what it’s worth,” KK said at last, “I’m…sorry. For the pain.”
For everything, but what a useless word that was. All encompassing, but vague to the point of meaninglessness. Pain was immediate, specific. And he got the sense—though he couldn’t have said exactly why, beyond the detective instincts he’d learned to trust—that Akito had dealt with more than his fair share of it. Even before KK had seen the battered body in the road and said, You. You’re coming with me.
“Oh,” Akito said again, startled, “I—” He cut off with a cough. “It’s…okay? I mean, we’ve gotten separated a couple times in fights since, and the merging then was hardly painful at all. I must be getting used to it. Or we’re getting used to each other, I don’t know.”
That was true, KK realized. Kuchisake shears, it turned out, worked on more than just flesh: they could—and had—cut straight through to the soul, rending the two of them apart. He had a dizzy memory of a great wrenching sensation, and then seeing Akito suddenly standing opposite him, the way he had when he’d freed KK from the cube. Only this time his eyes had been wide and shocked in his face, hand reaching instinctively out to pull KK back to him. Fusing back together had been almost instantaneous, and Akito hadn’t screamed or fallen to his knees or dug bloody nail prints into his palms, just resumed the fight without a second’s pause.
Was that a good thing, or just a sign that Akito’s system had gotten so accustomed to KK’s presence that in his absence it didn’t even try to take back the space he’d commandeered? Like a wound that wouldn’t heal, forever anticipating the blade’s return. Maybe that’d spare him some pain in the short term, but it was a good way to bleed out in the long run.
What kind of life could Akito have once this was all over?
Warily, Akito said, “Was there more, or can I go back to figuring out how to get us to that shrine?”
“No need,” KK said absently, stuck in the grimness of that thought. “I got a good enough look. Get back to ground level and I’ll direct us from there.”
Another sigh, more annoyed than the last. “You could have said that earlier, you know,” Akito complained. He peered out over the edge of the building, lined up the drop to a nearby rooftop, and vaulted the railing. He landed neatly enough—his gliding really had improved. “We could have talked on the way and been halfway there by now.”
“Just focus on getting us down without breaking the rest of your ribs, kid.”
“Whatever you say.” Akito lined up another shot, then made the jump, touching down briefly onto one knee. He crossed to the railing and leaned out over it, squinting. “Looks green down there. Some kind of courtyard, I think. What are we at now? Five stories? Six?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re not even listening.”
He wasn’t. He was still caught on the question, couldn’t stop picking at it like a hangnail that wouldn’t come loose. What kind of life could Akito have once this was all over? What did it mean that the fusion process no longer caused him pain? What in him was changing, attuning to KK? A trail like black smoke, Akito had said. The connection between them, less a connecting thread than a coil of rope around Akito’s wrists. How deep had the stain of KK’s death seeped into him?
If he hadn’t been lost in thought, spiraling over questions he couldn’t answer, he might have realized it sooner. Maybe been able to shout a warning. As it was, he noticed the heavy presence behind them the same moment Akito did, spinning to put the railing behind him. He lifted his hands, but what happened next was too fast for him to weave.
KK saw it in fragments: the relentless walker, tall, broad, and lurching. The umbrella it had tossed aside to free its hands for a better grip on the hammer.
The hammer, drawing back—
It hit Akito in the chest with inhuman force. For KK there was no pain, no sensation at all, but he heard the breath leave Akito all at once, saw the black sky cut suddenly into view as his neck snapped backward.
His back hit the railing hard. With a groan, the metal gave way. And then they were falling through an inverted Shibuya, a blur of neon lights and rain and the ground rapidly approaching.
“Glide,” KK had enough time to yell over the screaming wind tearing around them, “Akito, glide!” and he thought Akito tried,
but they’d already run out of sky.
By the time awareness returned, Akito was on his side, one hand pinned under the side of his face, the other wrapped around the back of his head. He flexed his trembling fingers and then, for one long, terrible moment, went entirely still.
KK couldn’t tell if he was breathing. He hadn’t felt the blow or the landing—he had no way to gauge how bad it was, if there were injuries he’d only make worse if he took control to move them somewhere safer if that walker came looking to make sure it’d finished the job. “Akito,” he said, useless past the point of bearing, “Akito!”
He only stopped when Akito groaned. He was breathing enough for that. “Stop yelling,” Akito mumbled into the ground. It was grass below them, at least—a gardened courtyard, as Akito had surmised. “Give me a minute. God.”
“Did you hit your head?”
“Don’t think so. No.”
“Pain along your spine?”
“Trying to remember where that is.”
“That’s not helpful,” KK snapped.
“I said to give me a minute! I can’t even tell which direction is up yet and you’re asking for a full body inventory!”
He probably hadn’t rebroken his ribs if he had the lung capacity to yell back at KK like that. Small mercies. With great effort, KK bit down his next question, trying to let Akito get his bearings—and then very nearly lost his shit all over again when Akito abruptly sat up and tilted his chin toward his chest.
“Are you some kind of idiot? You could have a spinal injury!”
“I don’t think I do,” Akito said, slowly. He lifted a hand and rested it over his sternum, perplexed.
“That’s the adrenaline talking.” The statistics were burned into his brain from his years on the force. Even a four story fall had a fifty percent mortality rate, and the other fifty percent often didn't make out much better.
“No, I’m serious.” Akito pulled the hem of his shirt up toward his neck. The skin underneath was smooth and unbroken, no visible swelling—only the faintest flush along his side and where the hammer had landed, like he’d simply walked into the edge of a table by accident and not been bludgeoned straight off the side of a six story building.
If KK’d had teeth of his own in that moment, he would have ground them into dust. Don’t yell at the blunt force trauma victim. It’s not his fault he’s an idiot. One of them had worked the scene of dozens of traffic accidents and construction site falls and therefore knew better, and it wasn’t Akito.
“That doesn’t mean shit, kid. Not all injuries are obvious on the surface. Deceleration trauma is a bitch and you have no idea what kind of damage you could have going on underneath. Stop. Moving.”
“Yeah, okay,” Akito said mildly. “You want to call the ambulance, or shall I?”
There was a silence.
“Assuming the CT machines in the hospital still work, maybe we could pay a nekomata to hit the button for us,” Akito continued, just as mildly.
Never in his life—afterlife, whatever—had KK wanted so badly to go get blind drunk. “When did this all turn into such a damn clown show?”
Akito let out a breath and laid back down in the grass, head tilting up toward the sky. He didn’t move like someone who was injured, but KK knew firsthand how convincing adrenaline could be. What could they do even if Akito really were bleeding out somewhere under his skin? The two of them were, for all intents and purposes, the only free human souls with any real agency in all of Shibuya—excepting their target, who would have been all too glad to put another fist through Akito’s chest, and Rinko, whose first aid knowledge was as rudimentary as KK's. “I’ve lost track of how many days it’s been,” Akito said after a beat. “Are we at a week yet?”
“Beats me.”
They stared up at the night sky together.
“In spite of how we started, I’m glad you’re here,” Akito admitted. He'd brought his hand back up to his sternum, resting it where the hammer had hit. If it were causing him any pain, he didn't show it. “Shibuya isn’t meant to be this quiet. I think I would have lost it by now without someone to talk to.”
A faint feeling emerged, another pang in the chest he didn’t have. KK thought again of wounds that wouldn’t heal, forever waiting for the blade to come back. The black trail of smoke that connected them. “You shouldn’t be. Glad, I mean.”
“Why not? Even if I’d made it on my own until now, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have survived that fall unscathed without you.”
“You don’t know that you are unscathed.”
“I guess not. But you said yourself that you being in here with me made me tougher.”
“Against the fog.”
“And traffic accidents and freaks in Hannya masks trying to rip out my heart.”
“Those were different. You were in a liminal state, one foot in the underworld. My powers just helped tether you back to this one.”
“And replaced all the blood I lost? Sewed me up without leaving a mark? Don’t pretend like you know how any of this works, we’re both fumbling around in the dark here. If you taking up space in my head was enough to regrow the literal hole that got punched out of my chest, then I don’t see why walking off a six story fall is so unbelievable.” He was talking faster now, like he thought KK might try to stop him. “So you being here saved my life—again—by making me superhumanly durable, which means I might actually survive this horror show long enough to save my sister and apologize to her for being a shit brother, which I didn’t expect to ever get to do even before that maniac put his stupid masked face on every screen in Shibuya.” He finally paused to breathe. “So, thank you. Whatever. That’s all.”
“That was the most confrontational thank you I’ve ever received,” KK said, when he could think to say anything at all.
And he'd earned quite a few. No matter how Rinko might have scoffed, he was damn good at his job.
“Yeah, well. You started it.”
“Started what?”
“I don’t know, you were just in a funk. I thought detectives were supposed to brood, not mope.”
He bit out a humorless laugh. “I’m not good at this whole guilt thing.”
“What do you have to be guilty about?” Akito seemed to genuinely consider it. “Beyond stealing from shrines. And being rude to Rinko all the time, she’s just trying to help.”
Another laugh. He was surprised to find some actual amusement in it this time. “I've already told you, all property is theft. And Rinko can hold her own. She doesn’t need you to fight her battles.”
“So, what then?”
How to even explain? Silently he turned the words over in his mind. Akito let him do it. “I’m glad my powers could keep you alive,” he managed. Returning Akito's I'm glad you're here in kind as best he could. “I just don’t know if you’ll think the tradeoff was worth it.”
Akito wrinkled his nose; KK could see it in the peripherals of Akito's vision. “What tradeoff?”
“I don’t know yet. But everything has a cost. If I’ve kept you alive, I’ve done it by surrounding you with death. Some stains don’t come out, Akito.”
Akito huffed, like KK was being difficult on purpose. “You said yourself I had one foot in the underworld when you found me there in the Scramble. I was dying because some asshole ran a red light, not because you’d done anything wrong. Unless you’re trying to say that you were behind the wheel of that truck, in which case I’m honestly more pissed off about my bike. You didn’t infect me with your death, KK. You just saved me from mine.”
What could he even say to that? For all that he didn’t wear guilt well, he was finding absolution to be an even more discomfiting fit.
Akito turned his head to the side when KK didn’t say anything, like he might see KK lying there next to him in the grass.“Honestly, KK,” he said, voice impossibly kind, “all this moping is really going to tank your rating.”
“My what?”
"I was going to give you a nine out of ten for the cool powers alone. Gotta make some deductions for the angst, though. And for getting terrible songs stuck in my head all the time.”
The fondness hit him so abruptly he was nearly dizzy with it. It'd been a long time since he'd felt anything like it. “Not my fault you have no taste. What’s that leave me at, score-wise?”
“Seven out of ten. Pretty mediocre, I’m afraid. ”
“But would you recommend?”
Akito was smiling. KK couldn’t see it, but he could feel it.
“I’ll think about it.”