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Nobara’s leaving.
She’s leaving the village. She’s leaving behind her only friend, but she’s also leaving the crazy people, the only home she’s ever known. She’s leaving for bullet trains and night districts, for a city so thick with the constancy of overtime that she finds herself grinning at the thought of curses brewed strong enough to keep her hammer satiated.
She wants to be satisfied, if nothing else.
And so the motor goes rumbling. And so she doesn’t look back.
There’s a vase of roses on the table, and one person to admire them.
Nobara had cut them herself. Fingers more used to shooting nails than for slow, delicate work, the back of her forearms are now marred with angry red stripes. It’s embarrassing, given all the torture she’s endured. It’s painful as it is annoying to deal with the sporadic stinging, the nosy questions she’ll get from her classmates. But it’s ebbed with a sense of accomplishment, her own, burning admiration. She doesn’t need anyone else to sit down on her limited chairs and tell her what she already knows. She knows her roses are pretty. She knows that herself.
It’s why she sits, and doesn’t leave. Leans into the vase. Observes that, on some of the roses, the petals are dark, curled, and crisped from their days in the sun. Some petals are wilted, this close to tearing away and spotting her wooden table in blush. Nobara prods the blooms to see where it hurts.
A petal falls. Another, and another after that, until it’s clear to her that she doesn’t have a good eye for flower picking.
She’s smiling, nevertheless, when she puts her head down to sleep.
Yuuji doesn’t leave.
He dies, and he comes back, and he doesn’t leave again. Nobara’s expecting it most of the time. It’s why she keeps him between herself and Megumi so he can’t move another centimeter, but he swears that he doesn’t have a death wish. It sounds like the truth.
Nobara’s not sure what sounds like a lie anymore.
These days she’s running on fumes, so she can’t think too much about it. They’re not students sprinting from one class to another, but newbie sorcerers taking nearly an entire week to complete missions specially assigned for their grade. The reprieve is short, more often than not. She makes the most of it by joining the boys in her room to inhale snacks and souvenirs before they’re off jumping cliffs again. Nobara says that she wants them here because she needs to be a tourist without going to the places they’ve gone, and not because it could be the last time she sees them.
They look terrible, she thinks instead as three heads bob in tandem, silence descending once more. Yuuji’s chin rests on the back of her desk chair; he’s sporting a purple right eye and scuffed cheeks, a bright red nick on his left brow. Megumi, beside her on her bed, eating from the same bag of chips has a scab on his lip. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing the tense muscles underneath, the fresh bandages already seeping pink where they’re wrapped around his biceps.
They look crazy, she adds, and tries not to be aware of how knotty and greasy her hair feels, how pungent her uniform smells all of a sudden. She can still feel the blood hot on her face, but she hadn’t killed anyone this time. It’s only exorcism.
Her left wrist turns over instinctively. She feels for her pulse, the two bumps that remember the cold of iron through flesh and blood, and nods to herself.
Her friends believe her, and they aren’t leaving. It’s not a surprise.
What catches her off guard is that nothing seems to change in the days leading up to Shibuya. The hours become shorter, and Nobara finds herself forgetting the small things she swears to have noticed at the beginning: the fushiguros that bloom in line by the school gates; the fragrance of vanilla that drifts from the kitchen when Gojo saunters out; the slight curl to Maki’s bangs even when Maki herself claims not to see them; Yuuji’s flat smiles; the dimples on Megumi’s face when he does smile…
Nobara doesn’t make a habit of lying to herself. Life’s too short to run away, and with a sorcerer’s life expectancy, much of that time is spent running in the opposite direction. Nobara’s not saying she won’t lie about shivering when the lights flicker out, that her dreams sometimes shake with subways to dimmer cities. But she’s always wanted to live her life, right and proud, and this is the only way she can do it.
The only way you know how to, psycho.
She’s clutching the left side of her face. It ripples with something she wouldn’t associate with pain; more like roots digging through, thorns needling up. Something flashes behind her fingers, and she glimpses Yuuji on the other side. He’s staring at her, distraught. He’s saying her name in three, bleeding parts, but she can’t hear a single word that passes through his lips.
It doesn’t hit her that she's sixteen. It develops, rather, comes with the gore, the garbage disposals lain on the dumpster, flies buzzing about as the corpse turns rancid in the sun. It’s the campus setting at the edge of the city, made a home that’s not just a dorm, surrounded by people of her caliber and vision. It’s recorded in videos of her and Maki skittering back from the tide on that one beach trip together; Megumi’s faint voice scraping on seashells; Yuuji, staring weirdly at his phone before Nobara’s calling him over, telling him to join the rest of their wild crowd.
It strikes her that she’s got a full table, now. There are chairs where she doesn’t remember them, and people she’d never thought to speak to again a month after their first meeting. It’s scary how they work; they’re the same people she’s been trying to leave behind, and yet time slows—fast enough for her to register the petals flushing from her left eye—enough for her to see the village lamps a little more clearly, the title of her life.
Despite everything, Nobara snorts. Crazy people tend to be loud, so it seems as if they’re everywhere. They easily step on other people’s lives. As her time runs out, Nobara tries to imagine a life without those sorts of people. She doesn’t beat herself up when she can't, but sighs, and concludes, Or so I thought. Feels the corner of her mouth quirk up, her nails dragging down her cheek.
The table, all woodchips, and sawdust. Yuuji, a remnant of what had been another seat, once upon a time.
“Hey,” Nobara says, and grins up at her friend. “Tell everyone it wasn’t so bad!”
The petals fly: round, and whole. She leaves them all, anyway, and it’s nothing short of a success.