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The phone rang that morning. Caught Ai with an arm out his coat, and something in him made it so the inner sleeve had to sit perfectly flat against his arm before he dragged his feet to the landline.
No one spoke as he switched the receiver from hand to shoulder. No one ever calls this number when his grandpa is gone. Ai held it there, still, while he picked at his remaining rolled-up sleeve.
“Hey, son,” came through all strained and choppy. In return, Ai gave a faint acknowledgement. Unconcerned if it’d even reach him past the whirring. “Just checking in, it’s been a while.”
Through the static, dignifying his words enough to find out if he was trying to be cheerful wasn’t something Ai was about to do.
“I was ‘bout to go out,” he slurred instead, tracing back to the half empty can sitting on the entryway bench. It would topple over, any second now.
“Oh, with your friends? Right, right,” Ai wondered, briefly, if voicing it as a certainty made leaving him alone easier. If it was meant to be an encouragement. “Wouldn’t wanna keep ya.”
Twisting his neck away from the receiver, Ai sighed. “I’ll be here tonight, so…”
The silence on the other end went on for just a beat too long.
“Won’t tomorrow morning do? You’ll probably be asleep by the time I finish the rounds.”
A noncommittal hum, low and bitter, and the call ended.
The air outside was dry.
No one used to call when his grandpa was gone. Not even him. Ai would be lucky if he didn’t find him sitting with his back to the door at odd hours, every time the house keys vanished from his pocket.
Ai was left with a wooden box of money, a stacked cupboard of non perishables and a sparse list of emergency contacts stuck to the fridge before he was tall enough to reach the latch on the front door. His grandpa had missed the window for worry.
His energy drink had sat for too long and he couldn’t pretend that it had been a sudden change of heart. Old age and its eagerness for proximity.
After all, his grandpa always seemed much more relieved to see him when he stuck his head out from the couch to catch him taking off his shoes by the front door, than when he called his name before the door could close, because they were already there. Always made it a point to strike their piece of shit space heater until it squeezed out just enough steam, so he could tell Ai to stay off long sleeves while indoors even in the dead of winter. Kept their broken window so, for it to stay unopened.
Damn geezer couldn’t be more seethrough.
He didn’t get it. Few people did. The last thing Ai would be looking for was a way to die.
Maybe he thought Ai went off the deep end. It had been years since he understood to keep his dream to himself, after all; his grandpa probably thought he’d given up. And for most, the realization was only a bump in the road, but Ai wasn’t oblivious to the amount of graves filled with people who couldn’t take it.
Those people and him, though, they’re nowhere near the same.
They didn’t have Professor Kasukabe. They didn’t have his own drive , either. He had looked into it, mistakes being the best source of knowledge and all. If at least one of them had worked so tirelessly on a plausible way to turn their body into what it was always meant to be, if they checked and checked every part of their plan and spent countless nights crumpling pages in their fists, if they ever were as close as he was to a breakthrough — had the scientific ambition to recognize it, not as a word, but as electricity —, then they’d been a precedent instead of a casualty.
That’s exactly what Ai strived to become.
He was not so arrogant as to think he’d beat Kasukabe with a measly year and a half under his wing, but through his whole career, the man had looked at sorcerers with entirely different eyes; he had no interest in becoming one himself, even if Ai found a way how. With decades worth of research a short walk from his apartment away, the hard part had already been laid out for him in that book he kept, dogeared and construed, on his nightstand, before Ai had even learned to talk. All he had to do was shine a different light on it.
The way to go was still long, he was missing all the crucial parts and the entire thing had to be perfect because he only got one shot at it, but he took every step towards his goal with confidence.
His grandpa, or anyone else, for that matter, had nothing to worry about. It would be pointless for Ai to die as a human unless it was the price for rebirth as a sorcerer.
Four blocks away from Kasukabe’s clinic, Ai stopped at the faint green seeping from the broken traffic light and thought about stepping just over the edge.
Sticking ungloved hands out his pockets, he guessed he didn’t think he could die. That life of his, after all, was a chrysalis. A transient state where he was both nothing and everything, at once.
Ai Coleman was all imaginal cells, caterpillar sludge. Inside the cocoon, the larva may be dead, but the butterfly certainly isn’t. It hasn’t been born yet, and so it can’t die.
There were no plans for death in Ai’s books. Human death was not something he ever cared to speculate on.
Not before carving his way into Kasukabe’s pharmacy, at least. Hard to keep the scattered thoughts of where the poor magic victims he handed meds to ended up, when they eventually stopped showing. The lab was full of sorcerer bodies, as was a dedicated chunk of their morgue, but the rest still held human remains.
When he was in charge of pulling them out for the embalmer to take, Ai wondered where their end really laid.
Brief, detached, gone the second they disappeared out the front door; there all the same.
Every sorcerer, without fail, meets their demise in Hell. That’s their afterlife. Kasukabe says they all know it, that devils sometimes offer lectures to put people’s minds at ease over the process, as much as a devil can accomplish such a thing.
“… Hey, what do you think human afterlife is like?”
For all Ai knew his grandpa would’ve been worried sick over the question, Kasukabe simply smiled.
“Well,” pen and notepad long forgotten on the table, Kasukabe hummed in thought, for just a moment. “Magic residue has some side effects over human corpses. Living Dead Day zombies aren’t hard to catch, but I can only get so far with them in a single night. Wish we could keep them,” the last of his stray sentence sank into the end of the cigarette he placed between his lips. “But that hardly counts. Seem more like puppets to me than any lingering sliver of person.”
From a scientific standpoint , he said next, grin growing as big as the cloud of smoke, at least for humans, it wouldn’t make sense that we’d go anywhere.
“I mean, that’s the last frontier for the curious mind, isn’t it?” he laughed. “I’d much rather get to study Hell, though.”
Something about the simplicity of human death prickled at Ai’s backbone.
“So it’s all for nothing?” escaped between his teeth. Only because Kasukabe would know exactly how to take it, where anyone else would misunderstand.
Locking seasoned eyes with his, Kasukabe took another puff of his cigarette before turning on the coffee maker.
“Of course not,” then, came the visor of Ai’s cap sinking his eyeline with the weight of a rough hand. “Life’s too long to qualify as a transient state. If experiencing the things around us had no merit, what would be the point of trying to understand them? What would we need science for?” Ai found it better to let his eyes wander where they already were. “I’ve written lots of books on my research because I want it to remain after I’m gone, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as interested in them as you are. For a long time, I was just doing it for myself.”
Everything holds its own merit the way every person holds their own self. If a tree falls where no one can hear it, it doesn’t mean it didn’t make a noise.
It sounded too sugary sweet, every other time someone had suggested so. Kasukabe, though, knows better than to deliver false hope.
“Or,” he ventured, because he could see right through Ai by then; he knew he had him. “Why would you want to become a sorcerer, then? If that would mean, whatever you do, you’re bound to be at devils’ mercy for eternity when you’re done?” with a final gust of smoke, he sat back down. “It’s not the end you're looking for, is it?”
It wasn’t about the end, all this.
For a while- for a good , long while, life was great.
(What should’ve been a guarantee, with smoke flowing alongside blood, came only as creeping sparks from a faulty outlet- it means it’s working, still; it means it’s bound to blow.)
Despite it all but because of Risu.
The wonders of this world Aikawa used to think, deep down, he could only ever dream of, their novelty, it wore off quicker than he could’ve possibly anticipated, with no one to share them with.
(What was it all for, if instead of a stranger in his own skin, he got to be one out in the world. So much bigger, brighter, blinding? And the parts of him that finally grew to size did so with him as an afterthought?
Something got into that chrysalis. Something foreign, unknowable. In return, a part of him, of what he could’ve been, stayed behind. Maybe it thought he wouldn’t need it. Atrophied as it was.)
Letting people in would only mean trouble in the long run. Aikawa decided so the first time he woke up in an apartment that was surely his own, if the keys in his pocket were anything to go by, but he had no memory of buying. Questions of why and when and where , tearing down the foundations of the life it took him so long, cost so much, to reach.
Why would he put himself through that ?
He enlisted into a magic school, met a couple friendly faces he could leech the occasional lunch from, if he got between bullies and them a couple times. People liked him and they wouldn’t get to know him enough for it to go sour.
Not for him, not for them .
A working system. Oiled up once, self-sufficient. Hands off and it’ll work for decades (add a single screw into the mix and it’ll lodge itself somewhere it can’t be taken out. Not without disassembly).
A working system that left him… unsatisfied.
(What a selfish thing to feel. When he had so carefully placed himself in one of the few places where no one had to get hurt just for neglecting their back around him, no weapon of his own at the ready, but a switchblade he had no way of ever stopping.)
If you’re gonna cave , he told himself as he turned to face the wall by his bed, a week after meeting Risu, better make it a good one.
And, months, years of taking in all that Risu would gladly let him have, giving back whatever he was able to scrape of his own, he did. They did, together . It didn’t take long for Aikawa to see that the only person he’d find himself getting invested in cacti propagation for, was Risu. Nevermind helping out on crosseye missions, no matter how inconsequential, or how small and shallow his attempts at sabotage.
Risu was a crosseye, and though maybe it should’ve been, in the end it wasn’t important. The peace of mind it sometimes took away from Aikawa to know what went on with them, could be just as easily brought back just by being near Risu on a good day.
They had plenty of those. Aikawa wouldn’t be able to forget it if he tried.
Risu wasn’t his only friend- his best friend, his partner , because he happened to be first, nor because Aikawa decided to cling to him like he’d refused to do with anyone else. It was Risu — had to be Risu —, because he’s the only one who could ever get this far. Aikawa picked him in only the same extent that Risu did him. He made an exception to let him see all sides of him he could claim his own, like Risu did by letting gunpowder and fire fizzle away eventually once lit- when he wouldn’t for anyone else.
It wasn’t as if Aikawa hadn’t noticed on his own. Split knuckles and those deep lines carved into his brow. Risu still told him, more than once, but only ever when the outside was quiet and he could get away with avoiding his gaze, that people didn’t find it easy to stay around. That he often found it difficult to keep them, too.
Anger had never felt as white-hot, as all-consuming and irrational as Risu spoke of it, not for Aikawa. Yet he listened (listened without moving, lest the faulty springs inside the couch turned out to be too loud and made Risu swallow what was left of his words).
Of his own, Aikawa couldn’t offer much.
(Of what ate his insides, mind, body and soul . Of what he used to be and still haunts him because like this , he can’t ever escape it. Of what exactly he’s scared of, what pulsates like a warped tumor pushing brain onto skull.
Of how he feels the same way as Risu. Has got those same concerns that’ll pull them apart, with time, but while Risu calls them hard to spit out, if Aikawa did so much as try , they would rip him wide open, and the little that he is would melt away into dark mud, not without bloodshed.)
Of his own, Aikawa couldn’t offer none .
They laughed it off, when they were done. But Aikawa knew Risu had wanted him to be honest, too.
No matter how far, there’s always a limit. Guilt commanded his every action, word and thought until he stopped noticing it, but that was all Aikawa could do about it; it would never be enough.
(Risu- Risu was willing to let Aikawa’s letdowns and half truths slip where he’d seen him put stakes through other people for less. How could Aikawa keep himself from wishing he could be a better partner?
Even if wishing was all that he could do.)
It was, one way or another, always going to end.
Risu would get sick of him failing to keep more and more important promises, hiding one too many things where he made sure to hold himself open for him when it was the hardest. It was his right, and since it was all he could possibly do, Aikawa wouldn’t fight him on it. He had nothing with which to do so, either way.
The longer it went on, the more the memories would hurt. In the long way before they reached their point of no return, their heat death, though- there was just so much to live out.
So, now, is he satisfied?
The simple ghost of such a question shocks all nerve endings until he can no longer breathe.
(Why. Why does it matter how it ended if, all this time, he had just been waiting for it?)
The Earth goes around the sun, this world will never know rain, magic is just another chemical process- and Risu was always going to leave. Irreparably, irreplaceably so. Forever. By Aikawa’s hand- or the place it should have occupied.
Then, why would the how matter when the end result is still the same? When they had a good run. Better than Aikawa could ever anticipate- and it’s all gone now; he’s all by himself. It would always end like this.
Aikawa’s convinced himself of harder things.
(Organs that weigh nothing at all resting inside him anyway, fingertip smoke that means more than it would in anyone else’s hands, yet, by design, will never amount to anything — is it even real? Or is it just a ploy to keep him sure of something he can never know? —.
… The dislodged space inside his chest belonging to no one but him. His hands, eyes, mouth, time all being entirely his own, first and foremost. His body answering to him alone, without fail- never to turn against him at a bubbling command he can never hear but he can’t ever stop feeling . Wriggling inside his veins as if parasitic, holding everything that’s left of him as both mercy and ransom; its end of a promise and deadly noose around his neck. The ground under his feet, mud, regardless.)
There isn’t-
There’s no body to bury, mourn with lukewarm skin against stone (or- there won’t be. Not by the time the crosseyes- it is done with it).
Aikawa doesn’t ever have to go into the bathroom, doesn’t have to unroll that bloodstained carpet. For something as rare as curse magic, it wouldn’t ever entrust a soul to do the job- but, the cleanup? As long as Aikawa closes his eyes, when he’s back, it’ll be like nothing ever happened. He did it once already, when he knew, and he knew , but he walked away like he didn’t, when the slashing and gushing were just the same as they had been a million nightmares before but they sank his heart more than they made his stomach turn.
Like this, with faded green and cream, dripping, nauseating red , all that’s overtaking the apartment bathroom floor, who’s to say who the body belongs to?
Hands anything but his reach down to claw at the fabric. The illusion is not broken, because the sludge around him is dark enough to blind.
This coffin is a mere holding place. He’s not really here, he’s not really anywhere. When it commands bone and muscle from the inside out. When he holds perfectly still, the gunk flows in like sea water into shore, then becomes stagnant as a puddle, the occasional burbling never quiets down. Not quite murky water, not quite blood.
As long as it can fill his lungs everywhere oxygen should be, Aikawa is satisfied.
It can’t kill him, that thing wouldn’t allow for it. If it didn’t need him around, not a fragment of Aikawa would’ve made it out of the lake of refuse.
Every vein, pulsating lump of meat in this miserable place seems to call for blood, still.
When people drown it’s nothing close to peaceful.
They make it hard for themselves, they struggle. Aikawa has drowned before, in a way. If that person had been able to die, back then, he thinks he might not have minded it. After the thrashing, the sinking, the fight to pull out not just his weight but someone else’s, despite how desperately the tangibility of his dream propelled him- for just a moment, when his limbs gave out, it was like drifting off into sleep.
This peace; the numbness, he doesn’t deserve it. That person did, then, but he doesn’t anymore.
Aikawa stays underwater. This is as close as he can get to dying, currently. If he dares open his eyes- even if he doesn’t, the hunting knife rusted with Risu’s blood will be in his hands, and he won’t ever allow it to aim at anyone else’s throat.
Drowning is no way to die. Not for him.
Something grows beneath the bubbling. Jumbled, scattered, first. Homogeneous, a single sound, then, quicker than Aikawa can pull his head out of the mud. Encapsulating the bathroom, the whole building and himself with it, in a deafening symphony of disarray. It smells of death, that thing must notice it, too.
It jumps away before Aikawa can get a good look, but it’s enough to make the earth shake. Aikawa doesn’t care about the phone call it makes, too busy sinking into the buzzing of a million flies. They could consume a man, this way.
Whatever curse magic is, it’s relentless. There’s comfort in that. Aikawa can’t stick his feet to the ground; that won’t stop him from dreaming about maggots pouring out his eye sockets, eating holes through his heart and brain. That, too, is a familiar feeling.
That thing can fight all it wants. If there’s one thing about Risu that this curse preserves is how far he’d go for revenge. Aikawa rooted for him when it was about that asshole who followed him home on payday and broke down the door to his apartment trying to get in, how could he not be on his side now?
One way or another, Aikawa allowed that thing to kill Risu (if he hadn’t gotten close enough for Risu to trust him with his magic, if he had spent any time at all maybe- maybe looking for a way around this thing’s rule over him. If he had been brave enough to warn Risu- whatever it did to him for it be damned). He owes this much to his ghost.
Curse magic lives on for a single-minded purpose, it turns out. That thing will run out of energy with which to flee. A matter of time.
At the end of everything, Aikawa will open his eyes and let himself be torn apart. Wouldn’t dare to expect any less from Risu.
Risu. Risu alone should be the one to kill him. It , alongside him. A curse to break another curse.
A week in the making, it thinks its plan will work. Aikawa knows — hopes , really — better. Putting a whole world between them is its last resort, until the door fades away, Aikawa refuses to believe it can work.
Karma isn’t real, bad things never happen to bastards, the way all kind people end up as corpses. Yet- Risu’s curse, it was born out of the need for retribution, where will it go if it can’t achieve it?
Right on time, the buzzing flows back in, building slowly like it’s the first time again, growing deafening in a split second. The keyhole is big enough, Risu’s silhouette looks that thing in the eye.
(Somehow, to some extent, Aikawa hopes there’s just as little of Risu inside his curse as there is of him inside this thing’s body. That he knows, through feeling alone, he’s there also, looking right at him where it searches for a way out.
Not out of sentimentality, just to fuel him. Bring back all raised scars from Aikawa’s fuckups, make this all a death to him as much as a death to it .)
The silky smell of death is burned into his nostrils once more. That thing isn’t ready to give up yet. Good. Aikawa wishes, if nothing else — if nothing at all —, it can still feel distress . Visceral, like the pulsating flesh of a frog sliced in half. Not unlike it, it may be a simple trick its corpse is completely unaware of performing, completely unaware of what it comes off as for its spectators. Aikawa will gladly take it.
And, same as this post-mortem twitching, its escape is pointless; they’re both already dead.
Risu’s curse exists for the sake of killing it, killing him. His shadow casting over, sharp claws for knives, back-breaking speed, this is right.
Hands made for the sole purpose of splitting skin open take hold of the tips of its ears- Aikawa can almost feel it like they’re his own. With all he’s got, he channels those faint bruises until his teeth biting against the insides of his cheeks and tongue are washed off by something a million times more rabid.
Just right. All in time for claws to shred down to bone, dented, dull, blades of their own right. They tangle, sloppy, around meticulously grown foreign tissue, pulling string by string. Brute force alone, nothing left in their wake.
Their own small gaps bleed into one, not fit to let organs out without squeezing them wide open. Their leftover chunks plummeting back down inside, no use left except for rotting, eating into the remains of a body frankensteined together. There won’t be time for that.
No. Risu- his curse, beats them to it.
All contact is severed, yet Aikawa swears he can feel dull enamel tearing rubbery tissue. The tension, how it caves.
No more than taste the pressure carving eye sockets hollow, nor vertebrae dislodging, millimeter accurate to crack open on impact, to slice skin from the inside out as if it were old cloth. The very last of his pain receptors cling on by a thread, when his skull smashes to a pulp on the alley’s concrete ceiling.
A saving grace of all this , that they can survive, feel , without a head, just a bit longer.
Death- is not nearly as peaceful as he remembers it.
(But if he winds up in Hell… maybe Risu and him will be together.
… Aikawa hopes he’s still human in some regard.)
In the middle of a night that could be a million days or a breath away, all of them thawed into one another (as much as Aikawa fought to grasp every memory differently; make them last, their overwhelming- presentness lulled him like a river flowing into a waterfall that breaks into razor-sharp rock), Aikawa remembers the dark outline of Risu’s hand hanging over the side of the bed. Barely above his own on the air mattress.
After taking it in his own, there’s no telling how much time went on before Risu finally squeezed back.
“Ugh,” he sighed, his free hand dragging down his face. “Just get in here.”
(And the proximity comes back in waves. The barren earth each leaves behind a hole in which to bury a part of himself; futile safekeeping.
Getting to live that way forever was never up to him. Up to these hands Risu will never allow near him again as if they were ever worthy, once he’s burned through all his patience.
All his fault, his own making. All grasping at scorching metal. Aikawa isn’t worried about himself, but over the amount of jagged shards that’ll inevitably lodge within Risu.
This, all of it, comes back to him more vividly than any warmth could.)
Any second chance to lay past mistakes into the ground behind him are wasted on him, and so Aikawa would never take them as a sign.
When he wakes up again, grass bristles grounding him, he only lets himself get ragdolled into the life around him because he knows damn well he’s got no other choice.
How and when and why are nothing but pipe dreams. He was put here for a single, inescapable purpose. Like a machine — rusted, waterlogged —, he’ll serve it until he’s discarded. One way or another.
He stretches out and laughs in spite of the hollow in his chest, but even passing thoughts of normalcy won’t ever satisfy what the marrow in his bone misses.
Carrying on will get easier, if he stuffs the gap deep past the point of looking back. Throws shovel and key both away.
If there had been enough distance between himself and their final resting place, if he hadn’t been so selfish as to tie loose pieces of his old life together and stab himself into them- maybe he’d have had a shot.
How’s Risu these days? Takeo asks, offhandedly, and Aikawa manages to brush it off barely long enough to keep the contents of his stomach in.
As his feet find their way back to the Tachikawa apartment complex, Aikawa makes no excuses for it.
See, it’s empty, echoes through his head before he’s pushed the door open. It’s been empty for a long time.
(And- Risu will be another blank, nameless silhouette that sometimes reaches out to him in radio static, speaks as if underwater. Aikawa hears it clearly- he’s right there, waiting to drown.)
But it’s not.
Unable to stay away then, unable to do so now, Aikawa lets the lights flood in and doesn’t ask any questions except for the ones that matter. Are you okay? Do you remember me?
He should repay whatever kindness this is by putting as much world between Risu and him as possible. He should, but he doesn’t.
Sat at the edge of his bed until he’s feeling better, Aikawa shouldn’t , either- yet he allows himself to pretend that everything’s fine. That he can leave- that he will , if only he can get a little more of this for the road.
Quickly, though, it becomes apparent that the fact Risu missed him too doesn’t stand a chance against the fact that he knows . A skewed, alarming version of things that leaves Aikawa alone on the school’s rooftop, reaching out and wishing, if Risu’s gonna think he’d ever turn on him of his own accord, then he’d hold no doubt that Aikawa wouldn’t pass the knife on to anybody else.
Mouthing the words would surely kill him, but his silence would do the job. If Risu just remembered.
Risu still knows enough, if he’s heading for the crosseyes.
Aikawa doesn’t get there on time to apologize, but he manages, with sweaty, stinging hands, to slide in before the window to save him closes.
It’s the last time he’ll get to hold him in his arms. If he’s your partner, then you should come with us , Nikaido says, accepting Risu’s weight, anyway. ( Please, her eyes ask someone else entirely, please come with me.)
The veins behind his eyes will pop any second now. He wouldn’t go, even if he could. With all he’s got, he turns around and hopes never to see Risu — none of them — again.
Those hands are not his own, by then, but the terrible things they do next constrict dark liquid around his closed eyes. Flashes, all of them. Red and black and gunmetal grey, screams that die in his own chest as they break his ribs apart. Drowning didn’t used to be this hard.
Suddenly, with the mouthfeel of his own blood and dirt still caked between his teeth, there’s light.
No time to get blinded, with the chance of a lifetime — or several of them stringed together —, standing within reach. That thing would never allow for such a lame defeat, Aikawa wants to think, though it may not hold any pride at all, any cravings save for hunger . That way, the wider he holds his arms open, the closer he offer up his unprotected chest to be beaten to dough, the bigger the fuck you he’d die extending.
Above it all. He’d finally be able to… rest.
Of course, though. He should know- he should know this by now ; no matter how many times he bleeds, it won’t feel a damn thing. It’ll pull itself from the grave, Aikawa in tow, and he’s so damn tired.
He’d gotten it, dammit. They hadn’t died, either of them, but they were left in such a vessel that there was nothing they could do. They would rot, and then it’d be over.
The crosseye elites… despite fucking everything Aikawa had seen that thing put them through, they won’t grow a spine and leave it to die .
Long ago, there’d been a time he felt for them. They were just kids, after all, when they started trailing behind it, they knew nothing else. This time, the very first time he’s been face to face with them- he’d kill just to drive his head through a wall.
Not them. Never them.
His attempt at getting away while they scrambled to understand the unexplainable was sluggish. Dokuga was too preoccupied with seizing any chance of finding their boss, too efficient compartmentalizing to let questions get to him before he had no choice but to allow it, to let Aikawa loose.
Jerks overdid it with the chains, but perhaps like this- it’ll be delayed. Whatever it is it had set its mind to.
Kasukabe talked too much, said all the right things to the wrong creature. Aikawa wouldn’t have been able to help him. Ever.
Just like that, more blood on his hands. His own. Because he’d hack them off a million times before allowing them to harm those important to him, but it’s not up to him. And so this blood will lodge itself under his nails and tongue, inside his nostrils, behind his eyes. Unable to be washed off- himself incapable of doing so, if it wasn’t.
What’s the point of his existence? Why didn’t that thing carve his body hollow to wear? Why did it need him here, to claw helplessly at his arms and neck? It’s not blood, what sneaks past his cheekbones. Or- maybe it is, not his own but warm, boiling enough to pass for it.
The face of someone he never knew, not as himself, but who he remembers smiling, now frayed and unfairly lost (she was a crosseye, she did this to herself- telling himself that doesn’t work anymore. Not when he can hear her voice so clearly, when she deserved to grow up and all she got was the spit of a dream she didn’t know she was chasing. This world or the next, they’re unforgiving, that way). Burned into the back of his eyelids, just as painful.
I’m sorry , he mouths, draping the tattered fabric that used to restrain him over the glass that holds her head. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, either.
With it gone, he makes an oath. To go through life under its will, make this easier for himself, if there’s any part of that left.
He’s forgotten before, he can do it again. Survival depends on it. Not his own (he’s past caring about what happens to him, in this body that won’t fucking stay dead ), but the one of those around him. The ones that are still left. And Risu.
Something stops his numb tracks. The quiet sound of approaching footsteps, the glimpse of a blade.
Tetsujo’s voice calling Dokuga’s name is louder, then. Time bought with their pointless conversation that Aikawa should use to scurry away.
Faster than he can do so, Tetsujo tells Dokuga they’ve found the source of that magic explosion this thing craves. That the one who did it wasn’t there by themself. Kawajiri’s name and the offhand descriptions from neighbors quickly lead Aikawa to Nikaido, to Risu.
His blood runs cold and that thing heard them too. He’s running out of time. For a long time, he’s been running out of time.
Amidst the smell of decay, thanks to it, Aikawa finds a final will to resist .
The meaning of his existence, all this time, the reason he’s here at all. It was an oversight.
It means nothing at all but he won’t facilitate its goal one second longer.
He can almost feel the mirror bend under his fingertips, when he traces a thick, red line across the eyes in its reflection. Then comes the knife, held so tight his hands shake the way hesitation could never make them.
Skin parts not like paper, but like magnets. Splintering off raw. Blood flows out like he’s made of it, like he never quite drowned but his lungs are full of water. It serves no real purpose, but Aikawa, with the last of his strength, targets the pulse right in his chest. Feels it lash out like a wounded animal. Sprains turn to broken bones, to punctured organs, that way.
Somewhere far away, something rumbles.
Death isn’t dark, quiet. Death is- a catalyst.
… Coming back to, who knows how long after, mud and sludge mending parts of him over someone entirely new. Aikawa finds his way out of the walls, this time. This time , he’s got a fighting chance.
Perhaps as pointless as every other time, the sheer possibility of standing his ground against that thing is enough.
Never having looked it in the eyes before, never having felt its vacant, empty stare cut into his bones- past them. He’ll make it count.
“Once this is all over,” he tells Risu, pressing his index finger to his chest. “You’re free to kill me, if you wanna.”
With his eyes closed, he’d bet he looks nonchalant. It’s the only thing hiding how badly he wants it.
And- while they catch up to that thing, there’s plenty of other stuff he might never get another chance to say.
Truth is, Aikawa would’ve died, time and time again, if it meant being able to tell Risu a sliver of the truth. Who he never was. Why he was able to meet him in the first place and how sorry he was. About everything.
About everything he had no control over, most of all.
Wrapping his arms tight around Risu’s shoulders, burying his face there, because it might still be the last time, Aikawa is able to lay his heart bare at last.
For a long time, Risu’s arms hang tense at both his sides- yet the sharp maw of his mask fizzles out and suddenly there’s a bitter breath melting into Aikawa’s chest, followed by the desperate crash of his forehead against his shoulder.
Rigid, shaky arms arrive at the top of his back, eventually.
Something cold filters through the fabric of his shirt and he’d known it anywhere. When he opens his own eyes, it’s right there, too.
“You said I could kill you if I wanted, when this was over,” Risu mutters against him. Then, an unsteady whisper. “I don’t.”
Aikawa’s heart stops, picks up like a race against time, out of habit.
He pushes Risu away from their embrace then, hopes he still knows the cheeky grin he wears behind his mask by heart.
Briefly, it’s like they’ve been granted another chance. As if, for the first time, they’re allowed to do more than just enjoy the ride, like there’s a future waiting for them. Like they made it.
That thing no longer shares Aikawa’s body; he won’t have to die with it, when it’s defeated. Risu and him, and everyone else that matters will get out of here alive. They’ll go back to the magic world, live out the rest of their time in comfortable normalcy, find a way to make themselves useful, together.
Risu’s got no bullshit organization to serve under, Aikawa’s got nothing holding his secrets tight at the bottom of his windpipe, no hands clutching at his spine. This time, there’ll be no world-ending lies between them, no lies at all, and so Risu isn’t bound to end up spitting on his grave — metaphorical- or not —. They’re not headed for disaster.
Three years or so from now, they’ll exchange partner contracts and make out about it, as if they need an excuse for it, at this point.
He worked out a life of his own, despite that thing fucking it over bit by bit, whenever it stormed in. Risu is here, wants to be here, wants to stay , despite it taking him away once before. It’s time for him to live it.
Aikawa can be a sorcerer.
Its bloated head slides down with a wet thud. Aikawa didn’t have to be the one to kill it, but it feels good, it tastes like revenge, it-
… Just as every other time, the iron coating his tongue is short-lived.
He sighs in something close to defeat, closer to numb acceptance, and lets the heavy windflow of the room take him away.
He understood the truth the first time he sank inside it. The end never hurt, then, because he knew the only way to rid the world of it was going under alongside it. His hope was blinding, but he remembers now. There never was another way.
Risu reaches out for his ghost, this time (he wanted it, he would’ve stayed, he would’ve taken him back- it’s enough). As vestigial sewer water melts the skin of his face again, he calls Risu’s name and tells him he’ll die here, after all.
Locked in his wide eyes, Aikawa’s glad he didn’t get to voice any of his hopes- despite knowing Risu didn’t need to hear them from him.
That thing was a part of him for so long, took so much- replaced so much with pieces of itself. There never was a way to escape it.
“Risu,” he says. Risu holds his breath, he can tell. “I should be killed by you. I want to be killed by you.”
His eyes get even wider, twist at the corners and never once leave him- then he blinks, for what seems like the first time in forever, and he’s holding the knife.
No one else is here, when Risu makes it back to him.
This time, Aikawa kept the promise he made. To himself and to a sleeping Risu. This time, he’ll make it count. This time, Risu gets to be set free from his curse and live on without him, the solace in this fact will carry him, satisfied, into the nothingness.
Last time they were like this- Risu, or some part of him, waiting to slice him open; himself, with arms open, eyes closed, all Aikawa wished for was another day, an extra hour to hold Risu close. Those short days of bringing tea to his nightstand, pulling his covers up and waking up to him watching over him from the bed… it was more than he could’ve asked for. This chance to set things right, for it, alone, he would’ve done anything.
More than Aikawa deserved. He’s lucky Risu wanted this, too, and they’re both anything but, because they’ll never be able to reach it.
This end, though, he’d pick it any day.
“I’m sorry it was all pointless,” he breathes out. “Everything we did.”
Knife at the ready, Risu’s brow furrows. Aikawa swears he can see the thin line his lips have become past his mask. “It wasn’t .” Ah.
No, it wasn’t .
“Goodbye.”