Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Hi."

Suguru flinches abruptly, instincts kicking in, willing his cursed technique to life. A special grade curse manifests before him, but he makes it stop, immediately.

Eyes widened, his breath hitching, Suguru feels the entire world collapses on him as familiar ocean-blue eyes stare back.

“…Riko-chan?”

A girl in a sailor school uniform is smiling reluctantly. She blinks. And then: “Ah! You can see me after all! Thank goodness!”

But in Suguru’s head, what’s happening is this: a thud of body falling, the gunshot, the relief and hope and gratitude all merged in a smile, the tragedy of a mission gone wrong happening in reverse.

“ Let’s go home .”

She had taken that hand. She had taken it.

“Suguru!” She reaches out to him, but her hand only passes through her chest. Disbelief and confusion swim in her eyes before she retracts it back, fingers trembling a little. “I cannot touch you.”

“Riko-chan,” he says again, and her eyes lock with his. Her eyes don’t have the kind of blue that Satoru has, those hues that are always brilliant and vividly powerful, but hers are more human. Alive like the ocean.  “Are you… a ghost?”

“A ghost?” She looks at her hand that has passed through him. “Yeah. I guess I am. This is so weird. Can you help me follow the light?”

“The light?”

“Yeah! Kuroi told me when people die, they follow the light and rest peacefully forever. Suguru, you’re the only one who can see me in this state. Can you help me?”

Suguru doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if he’s capable of helping anyone anymore. But he smiles because he’s a gentleman like that, because he can hate everyone in the world and bury all those feelings somewhere no one can reach, but at the end of the day, Riko is here right before him and he feels like the teenager he has been a month ago, without the stench of death and her lifeless eyes following him everywhere he goes.

“Yeah. I think I can.”

(

Sometimes, at night, Suguru would take slow, deep breaths, allowing the world to realign itself before him, dragging his head out of the waters, closing his eyes to try to remember Riko’s voice, her laugh, her cry, every sound that make up of her.

It’s because Suguru sucks at remembering faces. He doesn’t have a portrait of him with her, or any photo. Satoru had one with her, but he had lost his phone during his encounter with death.

I’m sorry , Satory had said, apologizing for not blocking her killer, for everything else. Suguru had heard him laugh while fighting the monkey that murdered her, a laugh so bright and deranged, blood spilling between his teeth where the wounds had long closed off. 

That night, Suguru learned that he was the only person alive who would ever mourn for her. Funny to say that, when he has never even once gone to her grave.

Graves, after all, are a bit overrated: they don’t hold as much as sentimental value people think they do, it’s all bones under and then regrets above. It's like knocking on the doors of death, saying hello, knowing full well nothing lies on the other side. 

)

She guides him to many places. The religious school, the hotel that had been blown up to bits, the beach, then the temple.

They stop before the entrance to the temple. His feet falling to steps next to her, and although she cannot touch him, she looks more solid tonight than she has been earlier this day. Her charming face carrying the youth everyone has stolen from her, eyes that have the innocent shine, and he thinks, this isn’t right. Right now, she should be alive, but she isn’t.

“Huh,” she says, both hands curling behind her as she leans forward. “I still don’t see the light.”

He points the flashlight of his phone at her. She doesn’t have a shadow. “How about now?”

“Stop messing around!”

He laughs. It messes with his throat for a bit. He hasn’t laughed that genuinely for a while. He thinks deeply. He supposes the answer has been laid bare in front of him the whole time, but he refuses to acknowledge it, refuses to end this dream-like charade already.

She’s thinking. He doesn’t like where this is going. “Riko-chan.”

“I think I’ve got it all wrong,” she says, her voice soft and light, drifting away. “What if it isn’t about the light?”

He swallows. In the back of his mind, a voice is screaming, stop, stop. His own cursed energy feels like birds rattling in a cage, uncontrollable, blood dripping out from each claw. “Let’s go, Riko-chan. Maybe we can find it in somewhere else-”

“Do you know, Suguru, the last thought I had before I died?”

“No.” I don’t wanna know. Keep it. Let’s look for another way. But Suguru’s throat is perched, and every coherent word is devoured by his guilt.

“I thought at that time: if I’m going to die right now, I’ll die happy. Then I did die. ” She laughs. Suguru doesn’t, staring at her intently, mouth closed to a thin line. “You’re the last person I saw, and I thought it’s such a shame I never got to confess to you.”

Somewhere, a bird cries. Or hums a tune. It’s all the same to him now, every opposite thing not making a difference, whether a person dies or a person is born, the world spins and no one apologizes for all the shitty thing it has done to him. 

The world spins. But here, right now, with Riko standing next to him, figure set aglow, eyes trapping the moonlight to dark blue, he thinks it has stopped long ago, preventing him from moving on.  

Time stills.

“Suguru.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not really one for romantic relationships.”

She laughs. “Yeah. Even if I lived , I doubt we’d be anything until I turn 30 or something.”

He tries to come up with a world where Riko lives, a world without the condescending applause and the sickening giggles, without her frozen smile and unshed tears. His world with hers, colliding, two souls in a single heartbeat, alive. Her in a jujutsu high uniform, sailor details in the blouse, and a skirt below her knees. Shoto will adore her, sharing dresses and humor in sync, all quiet grins and knowing looks. On weekend evenings, when there is no curse needed exorcising, Satoru will take them out to a nice restaurant, too extravagant there are no prices on the menus. He’ll hear her laughter in between the clinks of glasses and tinkles of forks. He’ll laugh along too, watching the start of fall with a girl he’s only beginning to love. 

It would have been a start to something, maybe not greater, but something good, something worth living in. He will never have to look down at his hands and see patches of innocent blood and taste misery between his teeth.

Suguru doesn’t say anything for a long, long while. “Then stay,” he says. “Stay and let’s figure everything out.”

Her lips turn up in amusement. “That’s so silly. You know I can’t.”

“Why?”

She gestures with her head, still smiling, and Suguru can feel a sting behind his eyes, his chest tight, like something permanent is being carved into it. “The light, Suguru. I can see it now.”

“There’s no light,” he says, pleadingly. He tries to catch her wrist, but only interacts with air. He chokes out of nothing. “There’s no light. Riko-chan, please .”

“Suguru.” She smiles, that smile, the familiar, beguiling smile haunting his dreams and keeping him awake and feeding to the shadows in his room devoid of light. “It’s really been fun! Please tell Satoru that as well.”

“Tell him yourself!” A small curse spirit forms to shape next to him, harmless yet strong, and he commands it toward her, as natural as breathing, hurling and trying to grab a part of her, but it bounces off her, by her own decision.

“I never blamed you,” she says, looking down at her hands that are starting to dissolve into particles of light. Suguru cries for her name, over and over, and she says nothing, fascinated in her own body. “Any of you. See you, Suguru. But not too soon, alright!”

“Riko-chan!”

He embraces nothing. The moon watches, says nothing, and he thinks if this night bleeds into red, no one will care.

Bleed everything into red, he does.