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Classroom on the dying edge of golden hour, again: warm light deepening into red. The school emptying of life and sound. Mikiya sits on his desk, waiting to see which Shiki wants to speak to him.
Shiki approaches with a smile, knife-bright. The expression is confirmation enough, even before he speaks: “I think I’ve figured out what the problem is.”
“You mean with how you’ve been... falling out of sync?”
“Yeah.” Shiki stretches, the gesture generous and lazy and entirely his; leans against the edge of the nearest desk, staring out of the classroom window. If the other Shiki is a rabbit, Mikiya thinks, this one might be a cat. “As always – it’s about what she doesn’t want. The problem, this time, is the overlap.”
Mikiya waits, patient. This Shiki doesn’t need prompting.
“What she wants, and what she doesn’t want. It used to be easy, you know? A clean divide. The dojo. Sharp edges, violence. She could hand all that to me. But you, Kokutou – you’ve messed things up for us.”
“Sorry,” Mikiya says. He genuinely is.
Shiki turns towards him, grinning. “I like that about you too, you know.”
He looks almost as if he wants to pat Mikiya on the head. The expression is foreign on that face, but not unpleasant. It lingers, a few heartbeats longer, and then Shiki goes on: “I thought she didn’t. But that’s not it. She didn’t want to like that. The same way she feels about all of this.” He pauses, corrects himself: “All of you.”
Despite himself, Mikiya feels a small shy warmth blossoming inside him. “I–”
“I know,” Shiki interrupts, impatient. “She does, too. She wants you, and she doesn’t want to want you, and she pushes that feeling to me. And that’s why it’s different, this time. Because the origin is the wanting.”
Mikiya swallows. Whatever he feels for Shiki is a warm and steady thing. He isn’t even sure if it counts as desire. Not in the same way.
Shiki watches him. His gaze is clear and bright and hungry; so different from hers, even though their eyes are the same.
“And she’s scared of that,” he adds. “Not just of how I might kill you. I mean – that too, of course. But that’s an excuse, in the first instance. She forces her fear into a suit of logic and pretends that that makes it presentable. She believes that she’s empty, but not in a way that needs to be filled. Do you get what I mean?”
Somehow, impossibly, Mikiya thinks he does.
The first time he saw her, it was in a different sort of emptiness: darkness, falling snow, the world muffled even to itself. But there had still been passing cars, the city’s lights below, the night sky stretching overhead. An open sort of vastness; the emptiness of infinity, impossible to contain.
It wasn’t the emptiness of a classroom after school, abandoned daily to be filled up the next. This is an emptiness defined by the walls that encircle it, by what it lacks. A space that echoes with absence.
Shiki is still watching him. Still waiting.
Mikiya asks: “And you?”
Shiki sends him to do what she doesn’t want to do; to say what she can’t bring herself to say. That’s the only reason for his existence. It always has been.
And yet Kokutou looks at him now – even though everything that he has said was about her, was said for her, on her behalf – and asks that.
And you?
It isn’t simple curiosity that Shiki sees in Kokutou’s gaze. Not exactly. He licks his lips, replies: “What do you mean?”
“What do you want?” Kokutou asks. As if it’s a simple question.
Shiki flashes a jagged smile. “I want to kill you, of course.”
It’s all that he has ever known. The exhilaration of destruction, raw and irreversible. The satisfaction of bringing something to an end. The intimacy of a blade slipping under skin, deeper and deeper. The warm generosity of blood: suffusing the air, clinging to skin. Fingers closing and closing, tighter. Again, again, again.
Kokutou nods, solemn. Behind that untroubled gaze, something like a conclusion seems to be forming. “How much do you know? Of the times when I’m with her, I mean.”
Shiki considers the question. They take turns, yes, but they know what the other feels. So he knows all of it, even if only secondhand. The school roof in the sun. A hummed song in the shadow of the school porch; a grey and dreary rain that seemed as if it would never end.
But it did end. The song, yes, but also the rain.
Shiki shrugs, loose and careless. “Enough.”
Kokutou nods again, considering. “So she knows this too?”
Shiki realises what he means. How considerate.
“Whatever I do,” he says, replying to the unasked question, “is what she allows me to do. I do what she doesn’t want to do herself.”
Kokutou relaxes. “Doesn’t that mean that you won’t kill me? If she doesn’t want that.”
Shiki feels his grin curl into something more scornful. So it comes back to this, in the end. Kokutou wants something from them after all: a safe interpretation. Kokutou wants to see an emotion small and weak and human enough to be understood. Something other than the urge that crawls always under Shiki’s skin, that sends his fingers twitching around the hilt of his dagger. The wish to crush something beautiful. To sink a blade into something soft and warm, unfurling it open to the world.
“I told you,” Shiki says, tone hard. “Humans can only express the emotions they have. All I’ve experienced is murder.”
Kokutou looks at him, warm and steady. Says: “Then you just have to experience something else.”
For perhaps the first time in his existence, Shiki finds it hard to speak. He can feel his smile fraying, his heartbeat turning erratic. This body is both of theirs.
“I don’t want to die,” Kokutou says. “But I want to give you what you want.”
Kokutou stands up. Steps closer. The sudden shift in height is disorienting – Shiki looks up, fingers curling around the edge of the desk. Imagines curling them around Kokutou’s throat instead. How that soft flesh would yield under his touch.
“I want to kill you,” Shiki repeats.
Kokutou reaches out cautiously, as one might approach a wounded animal, and places a hand on his shoulder. Steps closer still – slow, careful – until Shiki can sense the rhythm of his breathing, deliberately controlled. Kokutou isn’t as calm as he seems. That’s somehow reassuring.
Carefully, Kokutou rests a hand on the back of Shiki’s head; encourages him to lean forward, against his shoulder. All this is light, tentative, barely an embrace, but Shiki can still feel it: the simple warmth of a body close to his. He wants to press closer. He wants to sink his blade into Kokutou’s unresisting form, twist it, tear him open.
“Here,” Kokutou says, his words a warm hum through the fabric of his uniform. “Like this. Isn’t this – different?”
Shiki laughs. It’s a brief, dry sound; withered leaves in a bamboo grove. “Not enough.”
He pulls away, glances up at Kokutou – just long enough to catch a flash of dismay – and then grabs his collar, pulling him down.
A memory surfaces, abrupt and absurd: the too-sweet fizz of orange soda. Kokutou tastes nothing like that, of course. He tastes clean and simple and boringly, ordinarily human. Shiki imagines filling the kiss with blood. Imagines a blade’s path up through the chest, coming to rest at the curve of the sternum.
When he pulls back, Kokutou’s breathing is heavy, laboured, like a prey animal at the end of the chase. Shiki presses a second kiss to his throat, teeth grazing skin. Imagines biting down, down, tearing into the warmth of blood and yielding flesh. His fingers curl tighter around Kokutou’s collar.
“I want to kill you,” he whispers, lips pressed against Kokutou’s throat. “I still want to kill you.”
It’s okay, he thinks. He’ll disappear soon. The fortune-teller said so. He’ll disappear and take this with him, this twisted and wretched longing, and leave her with Kokutou.
“I know,” Kokutou breathes. “I just wanted to give you something else, too.”
For some reason, Shiki thinks of the Ryougi mansion: its echoing corridors and too-large rooms, the bamboo grove leading up to it, rattling and hollow. A grey and endless rain.
Yet Kokutou holds him, warm and steady and still-alive, as the last sliver of sun disappears beneath the horizon.