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“Tell me, what do I have left to offer?”
At the windowsill, a turtledove drinks from dew gathering on spiderwebs in crystal constellations. At the sound of an empty voice, it turns its head and blinks its jade eyes. Of course, it cannot see as much as a human’s vision, but it understands enough to coo at the young man sitting solemnly next to it with folded arms. The man’s cheeks are hollowed out by the absence of sound, his skin turned sunkissed to pale from the sun’s negligence. What a sorrowful sight, the turtledove thinks to itself. The sadness of humans is certainly profound.
“I have no purpose,” the human speaks once more, and the musicality his voice held months prior to the turtledove’s last visit has diminished to a low hum until it’s hushed by a tree’s rustling leaves. “I can’t contribute to my family or to others. What am I existing for?”
There is a long silence, perhaps to mourn the loss of this man’s talents or skills, or to hold vigil to a disappearing identity. The turtledove ruffles its wings seemingly in disappointment.
“But I still have to.” The beginning of this sentence hangs in the air, unanswered. Ah, there it is. The turtledove parts its beak to let out a silent chirp. The brilliance of this soul, its valor gleaming backlit gold in front of the dark, fogged window—this, this is what the turtledove yearns to see every day. This hope residing within. Dormant, but possessing the ability to quell tempests. What a spectacular force, albeit being just an abstract concept! What a grand sight it has lived long enough to see! The turtledove’s granular heart swells with such infatuation that even the incoming winter cold refuses to conquer it. “I will show them that I can achieve the extraordinary. This flesh, this body of mine, I’ll sacrifice it if I have to. I will become something that elicits awe.”
The man stands up abruptly and shoves back his chair with a terrifying scream of faith. His hands dance along the papers on his desk, shuffling mundane things out of the way to reveal redwood beneath his fingertips. Finally, after all the despondency that the turtledove has seen, this newfound goal is birthed.
“I need paint.” The man paces around the room, throwing aside curtains and tossing half of them into the trembling fire. “Red paint. But all the camellias and spider lilies have gone.”
He fusses over this for the rest of the day and agonizes himself in the corner of the room formulating new ideas, more papers, drafts, charcoal smudges smeared on his face in colorless rainbows. The pinch of his brows, his chipped fingernails, his easel standing untouched.
Now, the turtledove has seen the color red when it had once been wounded. A rosy color, dyed with the setting sun’s rays in a shining crimson that comes from rubies on the town statues’ eyes. It is a wonderful display of life through one hue. At this thought, the turtledove flutters its wings gleefully.
To nurture this hope, it will give its entirety to this man. To understand him more, it will succumb to death. To see him prevail once more, this turtledove will offer itself as a gift. What has been decided cannot be changed, for after the man has gone to sleep, it finds itself on the sharp end of a nail jutting from the window.
That night, under the moon’s white bath, the turtledove impales itself on the nail, and bleeds red from a pulsating heart.
Hajime finds a shrine outside his new home in a rural area.
At first glance, it’s a pile of rubbish. Some charred hunk of wood that’s lost its structure to the passage of time. There is still beauty to its form, though. Flowers have grown alongside its columns, and vines crawl up its sides to breathe life into its corpse. The shrine sits silently, as if waiting for something or someone to appear. How many years it has resided here in peace for, Hajime doesn’t know. What he does know, though, is that something as aged as this should still be restored.
“I’m not sure what it is,” he tells Kazuichi while making a mess out of their shared garage to find the necessary tools. “You could help me fix it.”
“Nah, man.” Kazuichi takes several steps back and shakes his head so hard it nearly unscrews itself from his neck. “Are you kiddin’ me? That thing? What if it’s cursed, dude? What if you come back with a curse and infect me with it? Have you ever thought about that? If I find another haunted doll or spirit in my house again—”
“Calm down.” Hajime rolls his eyes. Kazuichi’s always had a knack for overreacting ever since they were in high school. Maybe that’s how Hajime also got as jittery as him whenever something came up. “You don’t need to get so edged up about it.”
Kazuichi groans and wrinkles his nose. “Ugh. I’m just saying. I better not wake up to a headless floating corpse at my bedside. If I shit myself to death, you’re paying for my medical bills and my expenses.”
Hajime can’t help the amused smile that slips across his face in betrayal. As much as he would like to see Kazuichi shit his pants in bed, maybe a heart attack wouldn’t be the best way to go out. “Alright, alright. I promise you no ghosts. Or demons. Or possessed dolls.”
So Hajime goes out with a hammer and toolkits and works his novice magic on the mangled shrine. It takes him hours. The sun beats on his back through the gap in the clearing, burning into his skin as if to sear a branding between his shoulder blades. Yet Hajime works through all this with dirt-stained hands while he uproots the surrounding plants to replant them in a circle around the shrine. He works and works for days and days, until his hands are raw pink and he sweats down his torso, until he exhausts all his energy and deprives himself of a forgotten lunch. How he possesses this much dedication to this tiny thing, Hajime doesn’t understand. Maybe it is because of its hidden potential to be magnificent again, or maybe it is because he feels an unidentified duty toward renovating the shrine. Whatever it is, Hajime harnesses it and uses it as his resolve to finally erect the shrine’s last column.
“You—” Hajime tries to say, but his body gives up on him and he collapses in a heap of limbs on the earth. “You… You’re finally done. Agh.”
He throws an arm over his eyes to shield them from the sunset’s soft rays that gild his cheekbones. What a vivid shade of golden orange, he thinks dully to himself. Too bad it’s too bright for him. With a groan, Hajime closes his eyes, and he dreams
(of another boy, the pale sun, and white feathers. A glittering lake spans across Hajime’s view in an impossible blue, and he’s somehow sitting against a tree trunk with his legs sprawled out in front of him.
“So,” he says despite himself, somehow aware of everything going on. The turn of the earth, the changing of autumn to winter, and the boy sitting next to him with a book in his lap. The season’s slow shuffle knocks its knees into the waves’ steady rhythm along the shore. “Your last day.”
“Not my last,” the boy next to him chirps. “I won’t be gone for long, Hinata-kun. Unless, of course, that’s what you want, then I’ll gladly—”
“Komaeda.” A solid word out of Hajime’s mouth like an abrupt period in the middle of a eulogy. This Hajime says the name with a tinge of sorrow, as if it carries with it a thousand lifetimes within those two characters. “We talked about this.”
“So we did,” this Komaeda muses. His voice tunes low and soft in the way the forest would hush at nightfall. “I thought you might have reconsidered, Hinata-kun.” Then, he laughs with a dry throat that Hajime parallels, throwing his arms into the air in a mock stretch. “Especially for someone like me, I wouldn’t blame you at all if you wanted me gone.”
Despite himself, Hajime can’t bring himself to tilt his head to Komaeda’s direction. Perhaps it’s because it’s the slow-rising guilt tearing at the interior of his organs or how he doesn’t think he can give Komaeda away if he takes another look at him. Such is the desperation that comes with attachment. So, Hajime holds his head still with eyes toward the silent, empty lake where all the fish have died. “I don’t want you gone.”
Komaeda falls silent. Above them somewhere, a turtledove calls for an early migration, followed by the beating of wings in a deafening sound of change. Of loss. The birds are leaving, Hajime thinks sullenly to himself. Soon enough, Komaeda will leave too, and then it’ll just be Hajime again in the confines of the scholarly archives peeking through gaps in the shelves only to see solitude. Someday, he will leave like Komaeda will, except with loneliness at his heels in a devoted shadow.
“It’s for you,” Komaeda finally says. The trees behind them have gone to sleep, and the winter sun lounging on white wisps begins to leave. “For the most honorable cleric in this kingdom. This is what the gods want, and if it’s me that they need for you to receive their blessings, then I don’t mind. Hinata-kun.”
“I don’t care about the gods,” Hajime erupts with a force unreckoned in his chest, and he finally shifts his leaden body to face Komaeda, and that is when he sees him. This boy, the same age as him, dressed glamorously in gold leaves wreathed under his snowy hair and lining his silk outfit sculpting him in marble. And, oh, those jade eyes, deeper than the lake’s depths to drown Hajime in. “The gods don’t need you, Komaeda. I need you.”
Komaeda parts his lips, but Hajime grips him by the shoulders, trying to root him at his side, unrelenting.
“Being a cleric, holiness, blessings—whatever. They can’t give me what you have. They can never give me what you have. So, don’t leave. Please.” Hajime’s fingers print muted purples onto Komaeda’s skin, his palms trembling so much that it gives the illusion that Komaeda is shaking as well.
“Ah,” Komaeda laughs breathlessly, and his mouth is screwed into some fake happiness derived from forced belief. “I’m honored that you think of me that way, Hinata-kun. Maybe in another life, we could have been happier.”
“Komaeda—” Hajime reaches for him, but Komaeda twists his body from Hajime’s hands like how the sinful writhe in the presence of the divine. In the sunset’s quick death, Hajime loses Komaeda all at once to the grand chariot awaiting his departure. This is how the last of autumn dies under winter’s stampeding hooves, echoing past the same tree)
Hajime awakens to. Twilight has superseded the sun’s brief survival. The shrine sits next to him, illuminated by fireflies which Hajime accidentally scares off by sitting upright. “Komaeda,” he says instinctively with no knowledge of how that word embedded itself onto his tongue. A spinal reflex is what it is, because Hajime doesn’t bite his tongue until he realizes that there is no lake, no pale sun, no boy with jade eyes donning golden leaves of autumn. Hajime’s alone. And in his isolation, he’s left with question upon question, all answered with the hush of the forest during nightfall.
“Hey, Kazuichi,” Hajime acknowledges at dinner. “Do you think ghosts exist?”
“What—” Kazuichi sputters and nearly chokes on his food— “what the fuck. Don’t tell me you actually unleashed something in our backyard. Oh, god. That’s it. I’m moving out. But I just finished setting things up in my room. Hajime—”
“I’m just asking.”
But that’s exactly what a ghost is: a question. A husk of the past, some posthumous walking amnesia to feed questions into. “Who are you?” becomes Hajime’s name for this strange boy, and this “Who are you?” only answers with soft smiles and a once lingering presence now emptied into radio silence. There’s no way to answer a question with another question like this. Hajime knows this, so he seals his mouth with websites, dark letters on the screen, spines of books from the nearby library, the north breeze that sweeps past his ankles when he visits the shrine. Yet, he finds nothing. No records, no filled databases, no ancient material. It’s as if the person’s remnants are dead themselves—but then how does their ghost visit Hajime in his dreams?
Kazuichi knows nothing either, because he found this house on Zillow from a seller whose face he’s never seen, and he’s still scared shitless from that one time in his childhood when he allegedly saw the girl from The Ring in his bathroom mirror. (“I’m telling you, man,” Kazuichi persisted with fear scrawled in chicken scratch across his face, “I saw that shit.” And Hajime had only replied with an, “Okay, and?” which knocked the cap off Kazuichi’s swear jar that day.) He doesn’t answer Hajime’s questions either, leaving for town most of the weekdays to tend to his manager’s mechanics store.
Hajime doesn’t mind. Actually, he would have minded less if Kazuichi offered to lend an ear to Hajime’s stories about his dreams. Even taking Benadryl isn’t enough to send him into a dreamless slumber, though most of his dreams could be classified more along the lines of a forgotten memory. A vivid, lucid dream where another version of Hajime talks through his mouth and uses his hands to touch this boy’s solid form.
The more he sleeps, the more he sees Komaeda. Nagito Komaeda, is what the boy with jade irises introduced himself as at one point. Hajime woke up with a start that time and frantically Google’d the name, only to come up with nothing. Komaeda’s more of Hajime’s delusion at this point with the lack of information to his name. Hajime’s near to giving up, but he still has to sleep when he gives up, so it goes:
Sometimes, he’s with Nagito in a restaurant at the edge of somewhere somewhen peaceful. They make small talk, and Hajime wonders about Nagito’s ponytail only to flush red when he’s caught looking. Sometimes, he’s with Komaeda in a speakeasy several years down the timeline while war rages on the overworld, and he hears Komaeda sing with a glass of whiskey in hand. He wakes up that time with the song lingering at the back of his mind like another ghost. Sometimes, Hajime has his hands on Nagito’s waist behind a building stained with artificial lights, neon reflecting off Nagito’s metal arm. He remembers motorcycles and cars going above a hundred miles per hour and enough gasoline to make hands bleed oily black, remembers through one of his broken red eye implants of the sly expression Nagito wears when teasing him. And other times, most of the time, Hajime’s with Nagito on a white-sanded beach with seafoam between their toes. He tastes the salt on his tongue despite being in a dream and the content lying dormant at the base of his throat when he reaches for Nagito’s hand.
They’re peaceful, most of the time, but each time he feels the hollowing feeling of loss when he awakens. In every one of his dreams that he’s observed so far, Hajime Hinata loses Nagito Komaeda. It’s a repeating pattern as easy as the rewinding of a clock. Brief bliss, and then the terrible, guttural sensation of bereavement. The aftershock tastes of lament sour on the roof of Hajime’s mouth when he rouses. It is not enough to make him heave his guts out of his stomach, but it is not until the fourth month when Hajime first found the shrine that his throat strips itself raw with grief. This time, there is still the distress and torment that comes with devotion, except it comes in
(his hands stained with blood. It’s a poor mimicry of the livid red scratched across the skies in lines akin to blood veins, is what it is. Hajime clenches his fists once to wring out the life from his palms, and liquid ruby trickles down his knuckles in a manifestation of guilt. He doesn’t exactly know what he’s doing here amidst dying souls, so maybe it’s the sight of it that elicits a sickening twisting in his chest, but that can’t be right. Hajime has learned to understand himself through these gruesome battles, and what he feels is not caused by the stench of iron.
He is in mourning before death occurs. Hajime tastes his heart’s beating in his throat once he recognizes the desperation that comes with the acid in his legs and wounds along his chest, screaming: What’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong?!
“Nagito.” The name rushes out of Hajime’s mouth as he throws open the curtains to the medical tent. On a make-shift bed lies a pale body, drained of the red in Hajime’s hands. No, to describe the image as such would be wrong. Nagito is not on a bed, but an altar in a sacrifice as a willing victim who dares smile with the remaining audacity he has. “Nagito, I’m here.”
“Ah,” Nagito wheezes out. His breaths lie shallow in the air. “Hajime, you’re safe.”
Hajime doesn’t know who this man is, but the other’s faint words are a gaping sword wound to his heart. There it is again: the invisible blade notched between ribs, the heartburn, the sense of anguish, of losing someone before you ever knew them. For an unknown reason, it warps into something more like anger. The bitterness of rage birthed from excessive distress, as if the body is trying to cope with this inevitable loss. How the mind knows it will lose something it holds dear before it has even been lost is something so human that Hajime wishes he was never born one.
“You,” Hajime yells despite himself, because that is no way to treat a dying patient, “you shouldn’t have—you shouldn’t have thrown yourself in front of me like that! Why did you—”
Nagito lets out a trembling sigh caught by the winds prevailing through parted curtains. Hajime stops all at once, not having finished his argument yet, but he doesn’t need to, for it dies like the bodies outside.
“I’m just glad… you’re safe. Hajime,” Nagito whispers. His eyes are fluttering closed, but his hand holds a vitality possessed by those at the end of their time. It reaches out to clasp Hajime’s wrist before slotting between his fingers and holding it, deathly pale, deathly cold. Ah, he thinks with a start. So winter has come to claim its victims early. “If you died…” his chest heaves with every word, “if you died… I don’t think… I don’t think I could have lived with myself.”
“Nagito,” Hajime says now in a plea. He clings onto Nagito’s hand for any remnants of life. “Stop. Don’t—Don’t say anything else.”
At this, Nagito lets out a short laugh. “I’m so lucky to have met you in this life, Hajime. ‘M sure that once I’ve gone… You’ll be able to ascend new heights.” He squeezes Hajime’ hand once in feeble reassurance. “I’ve truly… been blessed.”
“Nagito? Nagito, Nagito!” Hajime tugs on Nagito’s hand as if he can pull him back from Death’s clutches, but everything is lost, and the world)
rests on its spinning axis that flings Hajime off his bed scrambling for the wastebasket at the corner of his room. Acidic bile burns a blemish into his esophagus.
It’s five a.m., shattered light through his curtains, darkness’s tinnitus like cicadas trapped in summer’s heat in his ears, and a quiet uneasiness residing in his shuddering heart. Hajime grips the edge of the wastebasket with such strength that his knuckles bleach white to match his pale face. There is no blood on his hands, not on his clothes, not in his veins. He forgets to breathe, because he gasps all of a sudden to a car’s passing headlights piercing through the windows like two phantom eyes.
It’s then that he forgets how to be human. How to process all this indirect grief detaches him from reality, and he continues to mourn listlessly when morning reaches its zenith. What is he? Who is he? Hajime doesn’t feel like Hajime. Being thrown through all these timelines, suffering with hands useless in his dreams, reliving the chaos of loss day by day—why does he always have to lose Nagito in the most inaudible, violent ways? Is it to taunt him?
It must be to taunt his inability to act, for Hajime doesn’t see Nagito that night or the night after. In fact, Hajime’s mind tries to force the concept of Nagito Komaeda entirely out of commission. And it’s crazy how he desperately longs for a body that doesn’t exist anymore. An unrequited wistfulness caused by death’s barrier, is what Hajime would call it. This deprivation is here to end him. He becomes blank the next few days, head mulling and mulling over Nagito’s death, and he can’t help but think that at least Nagito had passed away peacefully instead of savagely on the battlefield. And yet maybe his death wasn’t so peaceful after all with how he’s appeared countless times in Hajime’s dreams, always losing himself at the end of the timeline. Would it be right to say that Nagito always left without guilt?
Perhaps he did, Hajime wants to think. But the soft, light-hearted smiles he never ceased to give Hajime, that sheepish confidence he held under the gaps of his pliant rib cage that he let Hajime reach into, those cold hands warm enough to make Hajime blush, the migrating birds that came with his presence, the green eyes and golden leaves he became a metaphor for—all these failed to convince that Nagito did not care for Hajime. In every dream, life, timeline, whatever, if there was something Hajime fully understood, fully grasped the nature of, it was that Nagito was extremely transparent with his emotions when he let his heart become an opened door. In his most vulnerable moments, Nagito allowed Hajime to see through him like the surface of crystal water. Transparent. Trusting.
It is an extremely hard door to open, though, Hajime thinks now. He lies awake each night wishing for another dream, but he’s met with nothing but darkness. Even the moon refused to bleed past his curtains. Only the ghosts of his dreams came in fragments as abrupt memories during the day. It seems like Nagito has closed the door to his heart from how dreamless and sleepless Hajime is, but this is a thought that stops Hajime in his tracks. It’s a bold assumption for Hajime to think that Nagito is the driving force behind all these relived memories. He has no evidence that Nagito is the one showing these to him. Yes, he’s in every one of Hajime’s dreams, but what of it? It could be something else, some higher divinity playing with Hajime’s mind. Then again, he hasn’t had a dream ever since the last Nagito died in war.
Hajime hurls a string of curses into the evening of the fourteenth day, frustration becoming a second layer of skin. He can’t sleep in his room anymore. It’s not working. The dreams aren’t returning and he’s found a new definition for insomnia at this point. The internet is a fraud and Kazuichi is concerned for his health. The sun sets and Hajime pulls on a jacket so hard he nearly rips the sleeve off.
Fuck it. He’ll go sleep in the goddamn backyard near the shrine. He’ll go back to square one, and if that doesn’t help his condition, well, he’ll be fucking damned. Nagito, that bastard. Leaving all these footprints for Hajime to step into and then acting as the wave to wash them all away. Hajime stumbles wearily into the garden and collapses in front of the shrine.
“Please,” he implores the wooden structure with forlorn grief tinging his words. His voice breaks in the middle of his sentence, but he doesn’t even come to realize it until he’s finished talking. “Please, Nagito. Tell me where you are.”
He lies down to face the cloudy skies and can’t help but think about how crazy he is for sleeping outside on the dirt on a winter night with only a jacket on. So let it be known: Hajime Hinata has gone crazy for a man he’s never met while awake. Let it be known: there’s a man searching for a ghost who’s died upon death, and maybe he’s stupid and maybe he’s hallucinating and maybe he’s dumb, but he’ll find the spirit. At this thought, Hajime’s lips twist into a delirious smile as his mind wanders from the darkness of the small forest and into
(a burst of sparkles where he holds a lovely young woman in his arms, his legs moving swiftly on marble flooring to an orchestra situated on the outskirts of a spacious ballroom. The woman’s heels click in tandem to the music, and her dress floats around her and against Hajime’s ankles like seafoam. Her eyes, striking, denote dignity and poise, all fit for a noblewoman of one of the highest houses. Hajime knows he must be wedded to her. Hajime also knows that this is not how the story should go.
This time, he is in an unfamiliar setting but aware. He hears the symphony, each stroke of the violinists’ bows bringing him closer and closer to clarity. To the golden lit chandeliers hanging above in false stars his mind fixates itself upon. The steps to a waltz his legs seemingly remember in muscle memory. The woman’s fingers in his palm. Hajime does not understand how he has knowledge of all of these, but he knows that his mind is not from this era. The music ends, and so does their dance.
Hajime does not talk to the woman; this is a dream, after all. It has already happened, just not in the way Hajime wanted it to back then. He turns abruptly, tailcoat following after him hurriedly.
“You.” Hajime somehow pushes himself past the crowd mingling at the edges of the ballroom to the very corner at the back, near the windows where he has a reflection, but sees none in the man in front of him. “Nagito Komaeda.”
“Huh?” Komaeda turns around from the wall and blinks at Hajime. “Your Grace, are you alright? Has your dance with your fianceé ended early?”
Hajime intakes a sharp breath through his nose. He moves his hands the way he wishes to in all of these other dreams, and grips Nagito by the wrist. “First,” he says with a mouth that is finally his, with limbs that belong to him, with a mind that is free to wander along with his will, “don’t call me that. I don’t like when you call me that. Call me by my name. Second, you are to dance with me.”
Nagito blinks wildly, concern etched across his pinched brows, and for a split second, Hajime feels a flare of fear at the possibility that, in this timeline, Nagito has forgotten everything. But that can’t be possible. Nagito bears no reflection. He’s never bore a reflection. “Pardon? Someone as lowly as this servant can’t possibly—”
Without further explanation, Hajime whisks Nagito past the shadowy crowd and under those fake stars. The orchestra has started playing once more in a dance fit for two. Nagito’s fingers are perfect on Hajime’s shoulder, clipped crescents on the young night lounging on Hajime’s shoulders from where it leaks through the massive ballroom windows. The moon illuminates whatever is remaining of the ballroom and its soft edges clip over Nagito’s silver hair in a stark blessing. Unlike the moon’s unabashed attitude, Nagito is timid, blushing at something that isn’t supposed to be happening. Fate would not lay hands on them this time, Hajime muses.
“Nagito, look at me. How am I supposed to talk to you if you’re going to be looking downward for the rest of the dance?”
“It’s not sightly for a commoner like me to look at Your Grace’s face,” Nagito says, all disciplined and proper and Hajime hates it. Gone is their easy, languid way of talking, replaced with whatever their dynamic is at the moment.
“Okay, fine,” Hajime starts informally, because he’s never been to this era and never taught how to speak formally in this godforsaken language his tongue somehow knows. “As your superior, I’m telling you to look at me.”
And, oh, when Nagito’s eyes drift up to Hajime’s, it’s all over. The intimately familiar green of those eyes glue Hajime to the floor, and all at once, everything stops. The nobles halt, the music fades away, and Time’s hand rests stagnant on the roof of this building.)
“This isn’t supposed to happen, is it?” Hajime mutters, quite pleased with himself that he’s able to stop the flow of this dream.
“No, this isn’t.” Nagito stops to a halt with an amused smile. As if he wills it, the ballroom fades away to background noise, a brown muddled view around them. The people have disappeared and the lights dim. The world itself stops rotating, because Hajime has never felt more grounded than alone with Nagito. “You’ve figured it out.”
“I’ve had it figured out for a long time.” Hajime squeezes Nagito’s hand lightly, feeling the fullness of the other’s bones. How he’s wished to touch Nagito with his own, present hands.
“As expected of Hinata-kun!” Nagito removes his gloved hands from Hajime and claps gleefully. “Even after all these years, the hope within you has never once dissipated.”
“So,” Hajime says, cutting through Nagito’s beating around the bush, “what are you? What am I?”
“A ghost. Both of us. More so I am, at least. You lost your memories after your last death.” At this, Hajime hears a tinge of sadness that pangs his own heart as if the two were connected.
As Nagito walks past the ballroom floor and to the door at the other side of the room, Hajime follows.
“How come I’m living and you’re not, then?”
Nagito makes a shushing noise with his finger, and suddenly, they’re back in Hajime’s backyard next to the shrine. The air sends chills up Hajime’s spine and he blinks rapidly, wondering if he’s woken up. But his legs are heavy despite the air on his skin, and his surroundings blur around him when he turns.
“You know, you made that shrine for me. When I died the first time as an offering to the gods. There was one time when you died. Several hundred years ago. I built the other shrine for you.” He gives a sudden laugh, bitter in its existence. “But because of my horrendous luck, it got destroyed one day. What a pitiful soul I am, don’t you think? I couldn’t even keep your memory alive in the time it took for you to come back. That was all I had of you. And it was just… gone. The gods never did forgive me for coveting your heart that one time, I suppose.”
Nagito rocks on his heels. Hajime waits patiently, listening to the silence of the rustling trees. “So,” Nagito continues, “you died. At one point. But unlike me, you didn’t reincarnate for hundreds of years. Maybe there was a set condition for you to come back. Maybe it was a punishment for someone as vile as I. Maybe it’s a sign that I shouldn’t have tried to break the rules to get you back. But I never gave up. To see that hope within you shine… I had to bring you back. And,” he pauses, turning to look Hajime straight in the eyes. Hajime, unbeknownst to himself, flinches at the sudden eye contact. Nagito lets out a light laugh. “You were reborn one day.”
“As a ghost,” Hajime supplies, acutely aware of how heavy his limbs are. He may be living, but he’s still lost his history of a thousand lifetimes before this one.
“As expected of Hinata-kun—”
“Didn’t I tell you to call me by my real name?” Hajime frowns, but Nagito continues nevertheless, as if having never heard the other.
“—yes, I suppose you could put it like that. A reborn soul with amnesia that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was definitely a punishment. I knew that. Although perhaps… It was for the best. I should never have contacted you, Hinata-kun. Yes… I should have never. What was I thinking? Showing you all those memories, hoping that I’d get to be with you again. Certainly, this has to be my punishment. I was never supposed to be born again here to lure you back. Something as lowly as me attempting to covet your heart once more, to make you remember me, isn’t that the sin of greed? Aren’t I greedy?”
“No, Nagito—”
Nagito turns away, almost leaving. No, not again, Hajime thinks. Not again, not again, not in this lifetime, not in the next, it can’t end like this again—“You’ve always said no. ‘No, Nagito. You’re not greedy. You’re not worthless. You’re not talentless.’ That’s what you’ve said at some point every dream right? So, what if I told you that I fabricated those dreams. That they never happened. What if I told you that I lied to you? Every dream, every nightmare, of me leaving, dying, being lost—it was just to make you emotionally vulnerable? What would you do to me then, Hinata-kun?”
“Nagito—” Hajime can’t even get a word through. A high-pitched, wheezing ragged laugh echoes through the forest, and the shrine before him shakes under an intangible earthquake. The birds fly. The night descends into the abyss. Hajime shudders in a shrill chill that wrecks his bones.
“You were never supposed to remember me. You weren’t even born with those memories. Why was I so bold as to think I could bring the past you back? You aren’t even the Hinata-kun I lived lifetimes with. You’re… You’re…” Nagito stumbles backward, gripping his head and tugging at his hair in rage that Hajime can taste on the roof of his mouth. “You’re a fake. You’re just a ghost. An empty husk of a former self. You’re nothing. You—You—”
Nagito reels with his head in his hands, and, goddamnit, Hajime needs his body to move. Fighting against his own body is a competition between desperation and fate. But Hajime is stronger; he’s come back through reincarnation after hundreds of years, after all. He pushes through his mortal boundaries and lunges at Nagito, wrapping his arms around the man’s deteriorating frame and holding him tight as if he could put himself between those ribs.
“Nagito,” he starts through Nagito’s wheezing. “I may not be the same Hajime from before but—but I’ve felt all those timelines. I’ve felt my own pain and yours. I’ve lived through fragments of them. And you, in each one, suffered so much even when I lost you. I knew you were suffering. You’re suffering now. I don’t want this to be a cycle again, please. Please, Nagito, don’t leave me again. I want to be with you, whether you think I’m fake or not.”
Nagito lets out a choked laugh, fingernails digging into Hajime’s back like he wants to shred him apart and find those missing memories. At some point, he begins to cry, rough hiccups leaving his mouth next to Hajime’s ear.
“I know you’re lying,” Hajime continues, sinking down to his knees so Nagito can cry against his shoulder. “I’m here now, Nagito. You don’t have to lie to yourself to protect yourself. I want to spend the rest of my time with you. We can be whatever you want us to be, Nagito. We can be a tragedy, like you want. We can be a victory, won by transience. We can be something more. What do you want us to be? I’ll be anything for you.”
Muffled by his sobs, Nagito’s words barely register in Hajime’s ears. “I want us to be here. For us to stay. For you to stay.”
Hajime closes his eyes and runs soothing strokes down Nagito’s back, easing all those centuries’ worth of pain away. “Okay. Okay, I’ll stay. We’ll stay. We won’t lose each other again.”