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The last candle staunchly refuses Akutagawa’s magic. “Come on,” he grits out, sending another spark towards it, but it remains unlit.
Across the room, Atsushi picks something up from one of the desks, looks at it, and sets it back down. Akutagawa would be more pissed off about him going through his and Gin’s personal items if he didn’t already have this spell to focus his attention on. “If your magic’s not working, you could just use a lighter or something,” he suggests—Atsushi, as he’s come to learn, is much less apologetically meek when he isn’t trying to suck up to someone in charge. At the very least, he’s typically a pain when he’s around Akutagawa.
“Or you could be patient and let me do my job,” he snaps. “The spell won’t work if I don’t light it with magic. What, do you want to do it?”
“Well, seeing as I’m not a witch,” Atsushi starts, and pauses. “Oh, that was your point, wasn’t it?”
“So unless you want to discover another secret ability of yours all of a sudden, shut up.” Akutagawa returns to the spellbook. One known complication with this spell is the last candle not catching on, a stipulation at the bottom of the page reads, commonly due to conflicts with the magic of witches who are hybrids. Good to know it isn’t his fault, then. If this problem persists, follow the extended spell instructions on page 38B. Oh. He flips to a page where all the instructions take up the same amount of space in a font that’s twice as small. Great. Burning a rare grimoire from Natsume Soseki’s personal collection in a fit of anger, he reminds himself, would be counterproductive and unhelpful.
Atsushi, impervious as always to the work that goes into being a witch, raises his hands in mock surrender. “Talk about being touchy,” he says. “I guess you’ve always been on edge about your powers, though.”
“Have we not been through enough at this point for you to be able to sit quietly while I work?” Akutagawa asks again. “You worry about—I don’t know, keeping your blood in your body so that we can complete the ritual. I hear you have a problem with that.”
Atsushi scoffs. “You cut off my leg,” he says.
“You killed me,” Akutagawa responds. “You’re lucky it didn’t take.”
Atsushi ignores him in favor of thumbing through some of the papers on Gin’s nightstand. “I don’t hate you as much as I used to,” he starts.
“Okay?”
“—but I still don’t understand why Dazai would make us do this spell together. Wouldn’t it be better to give it to a pair who are more—in tune with each other?”
“Did you listen to the briefing?” he asks. Amaranth powder should be mixed in with the blood used to create the ritual circle, the instructions read—he hadn’t been able to find any native plants nearby, but the storage room had yielded some flowers. Atsushi stares at him blankly as he pulls out a board to smash the petals on. Akutagawa pauses. “Do you all not receive mission briefings?”
“Usually Dazai just tells me to do things,” he says. “Kunikida does, too, and his instructions are more official, but he gets overridden a lot of the time.”
“And you just do them?”
“I’m not always happy about it, but yeah,” Atsushi says.
Akutagawa has never known witches to be so disorganized, but then again, the only coven he’d ever known was his family as a small child—a long time ago—and they’d been different from most witches regardless. The only real system he’s ever known is the Port Mafia’s, and he doesn’t think they’re the most typical vampires, either. The chain of command and his orders are always clear, though. “Well, you, of course, have to be involved in the ritual because you’re…” He gestures to all of Atsushi. “Whatever you are.”
“Unidentified magical species?” he asks.
“You’re clearly not a normal shifter,” Akutagawa says.
“…Thanks.”
“Wasn’t an insult, but you’re free to take it as one,” he says. “But the other reason is that the spell has to be done by a hybrid. It’s specified here. I’m the best one around.”
“Wouldn’t it work with me and Dazai, too, though?” Atsushi asks, frowning.
The answer to that one is easy, but it’s information he seems not to have yet, bringing Akutagawa a sort of satisfaction in momentarily having the upper hand. “You know Dazai can’t do magic on his own?” he says. “Would be difficult for him to do this with you, especially since your powers are so unpredictable.”
Atsushi looks confused. “But he does magic all the time,” he says. “I see him use it even for trivial things. Just this morning I saw him burn Kunikida’s toast when he turned his back to pick up a butter knife.”
Showing off—typical. “It’s not his power,” Akutagawa says. “He has to siphon it from other magical sources.”
“Oh,” Atsushi says.
“So, you know—” Akutagawa waves a hand—“hanging around a witch with the power to imbue ordinary objects with magic is a pretty good strategy.”
Atsushi frowns. “Maybe they’re just friends,” he says. “I don’t think it’s like how you think it is.”
“Right,” Akutagawa says. “I think you’re delusional if you can’t see that something Dazai spends all his time hiding from other people is more than just a minor quirk.” Just because they’re friends doesn’t mean he’s not using him, he doesn’t say. Dazai has never cared for useless people.
“Is he actually hiding it?” Atsushi asks. “Obviously Kunikida knows, if he needs him for his magic to work, and you do, too.”
“I only know because Dazai’s old partner relapsed into alcoholism and told whoever would listen, and I was the only one who happened to be around at the time,” Akutagawa says. It hadn’t been a matter of friendship or intimacy—as a matter of fact, Nakahara hasn’t spoken to him since—but there was something about the way he’d said if he goes down, I have to, too, that had unsettled Akutagawa deeply. The idea that you could be so tied to someone you hated to the point of inescapability, to the point where your fates would be inseparably intertwined, would be frightening to anyone, especially if it could happen to two of the world’s strongest hybrids.
But then again, Dazai likes to play-act at being a normal witch these days as though it makes him more approachable, like anyone has forgotten who he once was. Admittedly, for many of the witches and shifters he works with and mentors, it seems to work; either they ignore the rumors or brush them off as a life he’s simply gotten over. Vampires, though—vampires never forget.
Akutagawa shrugs. He finally crushes the petals and silently spells them into a finer powder—talking to Atsushi has really slowed him down. “He’s not a very good vampire, anyway,” he says. “At least, not anymore.”
“Was he?” Atsushi asks. “Before, I mean.”
Akutagawa glances up at him. “You ask a lot of questions.”
“Sorry,” he says, only sounding a little apologetic. “No one really tells me things around here. You’re the one person who actually talks back.”
“I don’t respond to you because I want to,” he says. He picks up the next item from the spell materials list—a vial of something Gin had snuck him from the witches’ downstairs storage—and twists its cap. “If it were up to me, I’d never have to see you on school grounds again. I only do it because Dazai told me I needed to.”
“Magically?” Atsushi questions, easily brushing off Akutagawa’s tone. “Or just because you want to?”
“Are you asking if he compelled me to do this spell with you?” Akutagawa asks. “Vampirism doesn’t exactly work like that. You should really pick up a book sometime.”
“I was just asking,” Atsushi says. “Kyouka was telling me that you’re…”
As if his day couldn’t get any worse. “Sired to him,” Akutagawa finishes for him. “Yes. She shouldn’t have told you that.”
“So what does that mean, exactly?” Atsushi asks. It’s difficult to tell if he’s this willfully uninformed all the time, and just refuses to look anything up in the extensive library downstairs, or if it’s something else where he doesn’t like to ask people questions unprompted. Akutagawa suspects it may be both. “Do you just, like, do whatever he says? It happens when you’re in love with the vampire who turned you, right?”
“That’s for humans,” Akutagawa says, sharp. The spiral diagrams in the grimoire twist into condescending smiles. He slams the heavy tome shut with a loud thud that makes Atsushi jump and his belt-tail stand straight up in surprise. “With us—with hybrids—it’s about gratitude, not love.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, holding up his hands. “Sorry to strike a nerve.”
“You didn’t strike a nerve.” Even looking down at the crimson symbol he’s drawn on the bedroom floor, he can feel Atsushi’s eyes on him. He keeps his expression purposefully blank. There’s no point in giving Dazai’s new pet more ammunition than he’s already managed to pick up.
“You don’t know, do you?” he asks, curious.
“Shut up,” Akutagawa says. He isn’t wrong—he doesn’t know whether he does what Dazai wants because he’d actively ordered him to do so, whether it’s a residual effect of being turned, or if it’s just plain old loyalty. It doesn’t matter which one it is, he thinks, because he’d do whatever he asked anyway. There’s no point in getting hung up on the logistics. Admitting that, though, admits a certain weakness, and worse, it opens him up to a kind of pity he never wants to feel from someone like Atsushi.
“Sure,” Atsushi says. He takes a seat on Gin’s bed—but he’s stopped moving, at the very least, so Akutagawa doesn’t bother to comment. The constant sound of footsteps pacing back and forth had been getting to him. “I mean, I know I don’t know as much about all this magical stuff as you probably do—you know,” he taps his head, “repeated memory-wipes will do that to you.”
Akutagawa hadn’t been given much information on Atsushi when he’d first arrived, but he’d heard all the rumors everyone else had—that he hadn’t even known he wasn’t human until he snapped one day, and, depending on who you heard it from, had either committed minor property damage or mass-murder. He’s no stranger to rough childhoods himself, but the degree to which Atsushi had been made and re-made is almost unimaginable. For someone who is clearly still so wrapped up in that trauma—enough that his powers regularly go haywire as a consequence of being reminded of such—he’s oddly casual about it sometimes, almost like he doesn’t know any better; like there are moments where he forgets what is normal and what isn’t. Akutagawa doesn’t want or need any pity from Atsushi, but a part of him feels obligated to give him something in return. “I don’t remember it either,” he says. “Turning.”
Something flashes across Atsushi’s face, as though he instinctively pities him and then represses it immediately. For all that he doesn’t understand about the magical world, he seems to understand people in a way no one Akutagawa grew up around ever did. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you? It’s not information I freely offer up.”
“Can I ask how you died?” Atsushi asks. “Um, I know you’re not supposed to ask vampires that, but…”
Akutagawa had always assumed that the reason Atsushi hadn’t asked was because he’d already heard all about it—maybe not from Dazai, but Kyouka, sure; in several months of being roommates, it seems like the kind of thing that would have come up naturally. The idea that he hadn’t sought any more information out is as infuriating as it is comforting. Not everyone has to know that story—but he’s stupid for not looking further into it. Akutagawa would never let himself go blind into a situation like that—especially not now. “Run-in with a hunter. It wasn’t supposed to be that dangerous of a mission,” he says. That part is true, but he doesn’t tell Atsushi that before he’d left, Dazai had set a hand on his shoulder and said you know what the risk is. He shrugs. “Just… went wrong, I guess.”
“A hunter,” Atsushi says, his voice heavy with sympathy. “That’s horrible.”
It was easy to condemn hunters, Akutagawa thought; they were faceless murderers whose whole purpose was to kill people like them. No one had much love for their kind. Vampires and covens, on the other hand, had always handled issues with their own internally. Raising concerns about another member of your coven or army wasn’t just questioning their behavior; it was putting yourself in front of your boss and asking them if you mattered more than the person who’d engaged in misconduct. Most of the time, the answer would be a resounding no. The so-called international councils meant to govern intergroup conflicts were a joke, too—they could barely be bothered to remember that other supernatural bloodlines and families outside of the ones in Europe and North America even existed. There had never been much accountability, and there probably never would be. The closest thing to it was getting taken out in an act of revenge. Not for the first time, Akutagawa thinks that everything would be a lot easier if everyone would just adopt the “fight to the death over it” approach that wolves and other shifters do.
“It’s fine,” he says, “I don’t remember much. I woke up back on school grounds and—it happened. My transition wasn’t eventful. They gave me blood from the bank and that was that.”
“You died,” Atsushi says, as though it’s a new revelation and not a fact that Akutagawa has been forced to confront every day of his life since. He sounds half-starstruck and half-horrified. “I mean, I’ve come close, but you actually died. And then you came back. Don’t you feel something about it?”
There were very few hybrids like Akutagawa—witches who retained their magic when they became vampires—and he’d never heard of any that came from the same background he did. Dazai couldn’t have known that he would manage to keep that part of himself when he made the decision to turn him: I took a chance, he’d told him once, after, and I was right. Do we have anything else to talk about? He hasn’t specified when or how his blood had entered his system, and Akutagawa had never asked him about it again. All this considered, he already knows this line of questioning won’t lead anywhere good or productive, and he’s already handed over enough personal information with nothing to show for it and no good reasoning behind it besides pity. “I would’ve been dead if he didn’t turn me,” he says finally. “I can’t say I love being a vampire, but it’s better than being dead, isn’t it?”
“Well, you’re still dead, in a way,” Atsushi says. Then, “sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “Just. At the end of the day, I guess you’re right. You could have done this with him instead.” Atsushi is silent for a second before he laughs. The sound echoes in the empty room, making Akutagawa stiffen. “What is your issue?”
“You just laid it all out for me and then took it back,” Atsushi says. “You literally told me exactly why it had to be you and then doubted it when you thought about Dazai for too long. You’re—he’s totally in your head.” Akutagawa does not answer—he doesn’t have a response that isn’t a partial admission of defeat, no matter which direction he goes in. “I know I asked first, logistically, but the joint council obviously chose you for this because you’re one of the most talented witches here,” Atsushi presses on. “They wouldn’t—Dazai wouldn’t choose you if he didn’t believe that. He’s a lot of things, but he’s not careless.”
Akutagawa knows this as well as anyone—there had never been a moment where he thought any of Dazai’s remarks towards him were thoughtless or only thrown in after the fact. But if every insult was purposeful, every put-down chosen with surgical precision, then it became hard to believe that Dazai had been completely honest the night before that mission: you know what the risk is, he’d said, but not that he’d been preparing Akutagawa for a different risk altogether. He wasn’t always happy as a vampire, but then again, he’d never gotten to know anything different; such is being stuck at nineteen for the rest of your life. Most days, the thought is as upsetting as it is comforting. He’d never grow past being the person he’d been when Dazai had made him who he was. “Last part of the ritual,” he says, standing up. “The part that involves your blood. Step into the circle.”
Atsushi does, though warily. After being prompted, he offers his arm forward, rolling up his sleeve past his elbow. Akutagawa only needs his hand, but it’s no issue. He carefully encircles Atsushi’s wrist with his fingers and presses down. His cold touch and the application of pressure against Atsushi’s radial pulse draw a breath out of him. Definitely alive—definitely so many of the things that he isn’t.
“I know he’s not careless,” Akutagawa tells him, quiet. “I know that. I know it has to be me. I told you as such. But I also know that part of the reason I was chosen is because I’m willing to die for Dazai. Are you?”
He looks skeptical. “I don’t know,” Atsushi says, “I’d personally prefer not to die, if that’s fine.”
“Wouldn’t think so, with the way you act,” Akutagawa says. He doesn’t intend to be nice, but there’s no real bite to it. Atsushi shakes his head.
“Look, I’m not a good person,” he says. “I have to save people so that I can be. That’s why I’m here.”
“Saving people to be worth something,” Akutagawa says. “Don’t you think that’s a little selfish?”
“I’m still saving people, aren’t I?” Atsushi asks. It’s true. Akutagawa knows what he was made for, what he has been raised to be, and just how good he is at it. Dazai had tried to make him something else for a time, and it had only made his edges sharper, his attacks twice as effective. Even then, he hadn’t been taught to save people. It wasn’t something people like him did. Gin was family, and she was different. But he wasn’t a savior, and he’d never claimed to be, either.
Becoming someone Dazai would be proud of was supposed to be moving forward. Sometimes, though, a quiet voice in the back of his mind asks if pretending that goal is a part of the future and not a relic of the past really counts as getting over anything at all. These days, that voice has come to sound a lot like Atsushi.
“I’m going to cut your hand now,” Akutagawa tells him diplomatically. Atsushi should be grateful that he feels like telling him first; any other day, he’d do it without asking.
Atsushi looks alarmed. “Like, with a knife?” he asks. “I thought you’d just bite my arm or something.”
He truly doesn’t know anything about vampires. It’s almost endearing that he’s not human, and yet somehow still naive to the point of being one unethical vampire away from getting murdered—and there are plenty of those hanging around campus. “I’m not doing that,” he says.
“Isn’t it supposed to be less painful?” Atsushi says. “Sorry. I just realized how stupid that sounds. Pretend I never said anything. I can handle it.” He offers his hand.
“It’s just… intimate,” Akutagawa explains, trying his best not to say it’s like sex, but it’s supposed to be better in some ways, and it’s really awful in other ways. Unfortunately, it does not seem like his point is getting across, because Atsushi simply squints at him. This one is a losing battle. He chooses not to elaborate further, drawing a long knife from his sleeve and angling it carefully alongside the line that the spellbook’s diagram had indicated.
“Have you ever thought about moving on?” Atsushi asks suddenly.
Akutagawa looks up at him, still gripping his wrist with one hand. “I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”
“I’m just saying,” Atsushi says. “Coming here, for me, was like—finding out there’s a whole world beyond what I thought there was. Like, there’s a whole world outside the orphanage I grew up in, and there’s even another world past that, the one where people like you live. There’s so much out there. You’re going to live forever. Why spend all that time hung up on the opinion of one man?”
Akutagawa pauses with the knife poised over the edge of Atsushi’s palm. “That’s easy for you to say,” he says finally, “because he already approves of you.”
“You’re different than the person I met when I first came here,” Atsushi says. “I think you know that, too.”
The last mission they’d taken together had involved a witch whose specialty was blood magic, one who’d been bought by hunters and had easily sold out his own people. The curses he’d strategically placed on leaders from each group had almost destroyed Natsume’s Tripartite framework entirely—his school was one of the only places in the world that vampires, witches, and shifters shared, and it’s really only thanks to Akutagawa and Atsushi that it’s still standing. He’d complained the whole time, but even then he’d known that Atsushi, as new to and unfamiliar with magic as he was, had a kind of strength that he was helpless but to admire. If he was a different person today than he was when he’d met Atsushi, it undoubtedly was in part because of his influence. But none of that information is useful in the current moment: “Maybe,” he says, soft, and cuts a straight line across Atsushi’s hand.
The blood that hits the floor in the center of the spell circle pops and sparks as it hits the wood. Atsushi exhales heavily, as though he’d been holding his breath for the past minute. It only takes around ten seconds for the flesh of Atsushi’s palm to begin knitting itself together again. It’s much faster than Akutagawa knows shifters typically heal, and the glowing light beneath his skin is unlike anything he’s seen in the past. His hand has almost completely fixed itself when the blood settles on the floor, and every candle in the room bursts out in the colors of the amaranth Akutagawa had carefully ground into dust.
“Wow,” Atsushi says. The pink-red flames flicker over his face. “You’re really good.”
In spite of himself, Akutagawa feels proud at the idea of being undeniably talented enough to force him to acknowledge it. “I know,” he says. He kneels, slicing a ribbon from his sleeve, and wraps one side around his right hand. After setting the knife on the ground, he stands. The other end of the fabric he holds out to Atsushi, who stares down at it in wonder, as if incapable of believing that he’d hand a binding tool over to him, just like that. “Ever tried to summon an immortal before?”
“Are you sure we can do this?” he asks, looking suddenly wary.
“It’s the only way to destroy the Five,” Akutagawa says. “What, you want a chaperone?”
“No,” Atsushi defends. The provocation motivates him into tying the bit of Akutagawa’s sleeve around his hand, though, and the last slick remnants of blood left on his skin crackle and simmer as they’re absorbed into the fabric. “I’m just—it’s a dangerous ritual. We’re summoning across dimensions. I might still be new to all this stuff in comparison to the rest of you, but even I can understand how difficult that is. And it’s just the two of us.”
“Do we need any more?” Akutagawa asks. Atsushi stares at him for a long moment, the candlelight painting the world around him shades of blood-red and bright magenta. He steps into his half of the ritual circle, the flames flaring up as he enters, and pulls.