Archive of Our Own

“You’ve got to have heard of it!”

“No? Reki, you know I don’t keep up with cinema.” It’s far too late; the summer air rolls in from the sea and through Langa’s window as they sit, cross-legged on the bed, hunched over a laptop.

“Okay.” Reki splays his fingers out, demonstrative. “So you’ve not even heard of Conclave? Dude, it’s so good! Like, ugh, the design is so artsy and niche and like…” he tapers off. Langa stares at him, expectant.

 “Mhm?”

“I know what you’re gonna say! I promise it isn’t boring; like, you don’t even have to care about old men, but—ugh, Langa, it’s so good!” He leans in closer, eyes beseeching. “And you did say I could pick the film…” That is true. Reki had beaten him here, taking shortcuts that Langa had until now been unaware of (how did Reki know the area around Langa’s house better than him?), to the point where Langa had to get off his skateboard and run, panting in the July humidity, to unlock the door.

“Ugh, fine… I’ll let you spend the whole night crushing on old guys.” Reki’s face turns so red that it’s almost purple.

“Langa! What the hell? It’s not—I don’t—” Langa laughs, curling further into himself, and Reki falls silent. He’s still not used to seeing him so lighthearted, so relaxed, after—well, after everything that could be collated under the name Adam. It’s nice. Simple.

“I know! I was joking!”

Langa shakes his head, and leans over to press the play button on the laptop. As he does so, his shoulder brushes lightly against Reki’s knee, and something about the action feels so strangely right that Reki leans ever so slightly against Langa, instinctively. They both smell faintly of pizza grease and cardboard (they’d skated down to Sia la Luce as soon as the final day of school had ended for the summer, begging Joe for leftovers), and as the opening cello chords of the soundtrack begin, Reki sighs.

The film really is as good as he’d been hyping it up to be. Reki finds himself observing Langa more than the screen– he’s seen it enough times to know the plot beat for beat, but Langa’s reactions are entirely novel to him. His eyes shine, bluer and more vibrant than they seemingly should be in the dark room, lit only by the reds and whites softly glowing from the laptop screen. Eventually, he notices his staring.

“Everything alright?” He’s suddenly glad for the darkness, and hopes that Langa isn’t close enough to feel how warm his face is (or wishes that he were close enough to want it to be).

“Um—I just wanted to make sure you weren’t bored! Y'know, because you told me how much you’d totally hate the movie.”

“No.” Langa turns to face Reki directly. “It’s good.”

For a brief second, Langa’s face wavers, and Reki thinks (absurdly, he now realises) that he’s about to kiss him.

And then he doesn’t, and he turns back to the screen. And the movie plays out until the smoke blooms from the Sistine Chapel, and Reki manages to tear his gaze away from those burning eyes.

As soon as Reki and Langa tumble out of Sia la Luce for the night, mentioning something about churches and possibly the Vatican City, Kojiro pulls out a bottle of wine and pours Kaoru a glass before sliding it over. Kaoru picks it up with a sigh.

“You are aware that you never charge those two for their meals, right? Or Miya. Or Shadow, for that matter.”

“I also don’t charge you, princess.”

“Sure. That too.”

“And? What about it?”

“Surely you’re losing profit because of it?”

Kojiro shrugs. “Not enough for it to really matter.”

Kaoru frowns. “Still. You shouldn’t be so generous.”

“If I stop being generous, you’d all stop visiting, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know about the others, but I certainly would,” Kaoru sniffs, swirling his wine glass and keeping his gaze away from Kojiro, as if that would make his words any easier to believe. Kaoru knew, as well as Kojiro probably did, that price was not something that was going to keep Kaoru away from these late nights at Sia la Luce. He isn’t supposed to say that out loud, though, so he keeps his silly sentiment to himself.

There’s a pause before Kojiro responds.

“Yeah,” he says. “I probably should start charging you so I don’t have to deal with you loitering in my restaurant all day.”

Kaoru’s eyes pull up at that. Kojiro’s turned away, wiping down a plate that had previously been used to serve leftovers to the rowdy teenagers that had piled into the restaurant just a few moments later. There’s something strange about his tone that makes Kaoru’s skin itch.

“Then why don’t you?”

Kaoru doesn’t know why he asked that. When he sees the way Kojiro’s shoulders rise, he thinks he doesn’t want to hear the answer to it, either.

“You know why.”

That’s not what Kaoru expected. He doesn’t know what that means, either.

He taps a finger against his wine glass. He should ask. He should ask what Kojiro means, why Kojiro is still turned away, wiping that same spot on that same plate, why Kojiro’s voice sounds like that—

A familiar jingle from Sia la Luce’s door stops Kaoru’s words halfway up his throat. Kojiro turns at the same time as Kaoru does to face the person at the door.

“Ah, good evening, gentlemen—my, I am interrupting something here, aren’t I?”

Kaoru goes red. “N-no, nothing like that—!”

Kojiro stands up quickly, chair scraping against the floor. “Fuck off, Adam, we’re closed.”

Adam sighs dramatically against the wall. “Is that any way to treat an old friend? Oh, you wound me—”

Kojiro crosses his arms. “Friends? That’s rich. You ignore—”

“—and physically assault!—” Kaoru pipes up.

“—us for how many years? But you get beaten once and come crawling back? What reason could you possibly have for that?”

Adam shifts, self-consciously. He’s wet, Kaoru notices (not in a weird way, for once) from the rain cascading down outside. Now, under normal conditions, Kaoru knows Adam likes to take a taxi (preferably limousine-shaped) everywhere, so he can contribute to global carbon emissions as much as humanly possible—which is the reason he doesn’t carry an umbrella. There are, however, no cars outside at all. Not only that, but Adam’s suit is, at a closer look, torn and dirty. Kaoru remembers the news had mentioned something about closing the government corruption scandal, though he’d been too busy thinking about Kojiro studying the sword making breakfast to pay it much mind. Perhaps…

“Adam,” he grins, “Are you broke right now?”

“Oh, Cherry!” Adam suspires sadly. “Perceptive, as always… As the Earth turns and the seasons wane, even I, too, must overcome a period of paucity, the pecuniary kind—I appreciate your concern, but it’s nothing I can’t recover from… Only, at the moment, the police aren’t letting me into my house.”

Kojiro sits down, confused. “And this is our problem why, exactly?”

Adam clears his throat. “I keep my money in lots of places, of course—establishéd institutions, banks, hedge funds, actual hedges, cartels, yachts—e’en in the aether on high, I’m told! But all my passwords and codes and important numbers I keep in a little box under my bed, which I unlock with this little key—” Adam leans forward conspiratorially and dangles a child’s pink key from his finger, engraved with the letters ‘BFF’ and complete with a pompom keyring. “Since I’ve learned about the power of friendship, I decided not to let my beloved secretary take the fall for the allegations against me, and sent him to Majorca, where I hoped to join him for a quaint holiday.”

“But alas!” A tear sparkles from Adam’s eye. “I cannot access my funds! Thus I have wandered, day and night, until my footsteps brought me to your merry establishment! Would you be so kind as to offer a poor, lost soul some solace in warm food and other worldly comforts?”

Kojiro and Kaoru glance at each other.

“Give us a minute,” Kaoru tells Adam. “Outside. Shoo. We’ll let you in when we’ve decided.”

“My life is in your hands~!” Adam gushes, bowing and backing out the door.

In the quiet thrumming of the restaurant, Kojiro puts his head in his hands. “Can we just lock him out there and leave him to die?”

Kaoru frowned. “That’s too quick a punishment. Also he’ll absolutely try to smash your nice glass door.”

“Shit, you’re right. Glass is expensive.”

“What if—and hear me out here—we help him?”

“Are you insane?”

“If we help him break into his house, he can get his stupid bank details and leave us alone.”

“Kaoru, please, see reason! He’s a schemer! Who knows what he’ll do next?”

“True, but who knows what he’ll do now?”

They both turn to the door, where Adam is comically pressed against the glass, squashing his nose in what is either a poor attempt at eavesdropping or a somewhat effective intimidation tactic. He slides his cheek up and down, smudging the polished surface.

Kojiro has a full-body shudder. “No, maybe you’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

“No you’re not!”

“Name one time I wasn’t right.” Kojiro opens his mouth, and Kaoru clamps his hand to shut it. “That’s what I thought.”

They stay in close proximity for long enough for Kaoru’s brain to start short-circuiting, until Kojiro licks his hand. “Oh my god, you’re a child—!”

After a brief tussle, they come to an agreement. “Okay,” says Kaoru. “We recruit the kids. We help Adam sneak past the police guarding his house. He finds his precious money box. We take some of the money because we deserve it. He goes on holiday. We all live happily ever after. Easy.”

Kojiro goes to open the restaurant door.

“Just don’t give him the carbonara,” Kaoru huffs.

It’s earlier than either of them would have preferred when the buzzing of Reki’s phone begins to hum insistently through the morning. It’s an unmarked number, naturally; it’s an unspoken rule to keep S-related contact minimal on traceable networks. Paranoid, maybe, and he knows for a fact that Cherry and Joe have been flouting the rule for as long as S has existed. Or at the very least, he and Langa are. Three successive buzzes shake the phone from its spot on his desk, thudding it to the ground.

In the end, it’s not the waking up that’s the problem, but the circumstances in which he wakes up. It could be said that the time of day is among those circumstances—seven in the morning? On the first day of the summer vacation?—but it’s more the fact that Langa is lying on the unmade bed next to him, one leg halfway across his own, his breathing calm, measured. The laptop is open, dead, at the foot of the bed. He has no idea when they fell asleep—he remembers putting on another film after the end of Conclave, but can’t remember how it ended or what it was. It all feels so normal, to such a degree that Reki feels half-inclined to write off the instinctual mournful twang in his chest completely. It is normal; after Langa’s tournament victory, they’d transitioned into some sort of unspoken closeness, some line which they carefully tread day after day. So waking up next to Langa is normal, mundane even. Reiki just wishes it wasn’t.

But that’s a problem for later. For staring out of his window at the sea, and wanting to run straight back to Langa’s house. Right now, he has to deal with Joe.

“What’s your freakin’ problem, man?” he mutters, louder than intended. Besides him, Langa shifts, then props himself up with his arms. His hair falls, messy, down the side of his face.

“What’s wrong?”

 “Oh, hey. Morning,” Reki says. “Um, Joe's texting.”

 “Oh.”

He stretches as he clambers off the bed, yawning, before opening the curtains and wandering down the corridor. Sunlight streams through the window onto the bed, and Reki narrows his eyes at the sudden brightness. He fishes around the floor, finally grasping his phone to read the messages. We need you guys’ help. He tilts his head, running through the possibilities. I can’t believe I’m saying this again, but it’s Adam. Reki’s eyes widen, blood instinctually running cold. Come to Sia la Luce. We’ll feed you. Bring Miya.

He wants to stick his head under the sand and pretend Adam doesn’t exist, to text Joe back with get screwed, old man, to just go to the beach like he and Langa had planned. But the idea of Joe’s cornetto al cioccolato with coffee is far too tempting to resist. He climbs reluctantly out of the bed (it’s still so warm from where Langa had been lying) and yawns, shoulders cracking, before calling down the corridor.

 “Hey, Langa—you hungry?”

“Alright,” Kojiro says with a grin, waving his phone in the air. “The kids agreed.”

“I can’t believe you roped them into this,” Kaoru mutters.

“Come on, come on,” Kojiro says with a wave of his hand. “Think of it as a family bonding experience.”

Kaoru raises an eyebrow. “Family, huh?”

Kojiro’s gaze flickers away. “Well, you know what I mean.”

Kaoru brings his wine glass to his mouth to hide his smile. He’d always figured Kojiro thought of the boys as his own, in a way, but it was still sweet to hear it said explicitly. Hell, there was a time or two that Kaoru had thought the same—then, what would that make Kaoru in their odd, makeshift little family?

Mama, Miya’s voice immediately begins echoing in Kaoru’s head. Kaoru shakes his head to dispel the thought. He had no intention to mother this group, although he supposed the argument could be made that he already did sometimes, so maybe he could be cool, aloof uncle.

Uncle. Yeah, that sounded alright. Kaoru thinks it ages him a little, but he supposes he’s spent long enough ignoring the somewhat grim reality of his actual age.

He tries to imagine, for a moment, being just that—an uncle to Kojiro’s children. His actual children, that is—Kojiro didn’t have any at the moment, but surely it was simply a matter of time. Kaoru is sometimes surprised that Kojiro has kept his gigolo act up for this long, but he also knows that Kojiro’s been going on fewer dates these last few years. So, yes, Kojiro would be settling down soon enough, and when he did, he would almost undoubtedly have children. Kaoru knows Kojiro, and Kaoru knows Kojiro adores kids. He thinks Kojiro would be a wonderful father, and Kaoru…

Kaoru would be a fun uncle. Wouldn’t he?

He might be a little uptight, but then again, he knows how much Kojiro would pamper his child. And if Kaoru wasn’t there to balance that with some pragmatism, well, Kojiro’s child would grow to be the most spoiled creature on the planet—

Although, now that Kaoru thinks about it, surely the child would have a mother to discipline them. Why would Kaoru need to balance Kojiro’s parenting style when Kojiro would, in fact, have a wife to do just that?

Then, where does that leave Kaoru?

The wine turns bitter on his tongue. He sets his glass down. Stupid, stupid, stupid, this is utterly stupid of him—he’d managed to avoid discussion of one dangerous topic just to get caught up in another. At the very least, he hadn’t put any of his thoughts aloud, which Kaoru guesses is a small victory. He doesn’t understand why his thoughts are so rampant tonight—maybe he’s had too much wine for a day.

He nudges the glass a bit further away with a finger before clearing his throat. Back to the plan.

“Right,” Kaoru says. “Then, we’ll head over to Adam’s house now. You said the boys would meet us there, right?” Kojiro nods. Kaoru sighs. “Have I mentioned this is a bad idea?”

“Multiple times.”

“...right.” Kaoru shakes his head. “Anyway, you’re driving.”

It is dark when Kaoru and Kojiro arrive at the far gate of that which no normal person would ever describe as a ‘house.’ Through the bars, what looks like a small country of manicured fields and hedges stretches off into the dreary distance. It is drizzling gently, sparkling on the windows. As their car skids to a stop, a bush in front of them lets out a yelp, and Reki tumbles out.

“Oh sweet lord,” Reki pants, trying to push himself up from the mud. “I thought we were going to get run over, oh, I could see the light—”

Langa steps out from behind the bush and gives them a small wave. He turns to Reki with a calculating look.

“Hey!” Reki yells, “Are you going to give me a hand or not?”

“No. You’re muddy.” Langa turns to Kojiro. “When’s Adam getting here?”

Kojiro shuffles, sheepish. “We’re not completely sure. Something about the angle of the moon above the house making a perfect Dorito shape.”

They look at the moon, or where it should be. The sky is rippling with clouds. The house isn’t visible, either.

Miya appears from a shadow and deigns to glance up from his phone, and mumbling, “Why do we even bother? How do we know this isn’t a trap?”

Kaoru winces. “Trust us, the alternative was worse.”

Reki looks like he wants to argue with that, but Kojiro interrupts him. “Where’s Shadow? Isn’t he usually your babysitter when you go places? How did you kids even get here?”

“He’s got a date,” Langa pipes up, followed by a long ooooooh! from Reki.

“So that girl finally gave up on rejecting him?” chuckles Kojiro. “Lucky guy. We’re still a good hour’s drive from Naha, though, so how did you guys get here—”

They hear a protracted squeaking noise coming from behind the gates. The arm of a bright yellow crane comes into view. Everyone taps their skateboards flat against the floor, ready to dash if necessary, and then they stand there, ready, for a minute as the crane inches higher. Suddenly, a bright floodlight flicks on.

Everyone covers their eyes, their ouch, why?s almost drowning out the disembodied Spanish dance music that fills the air. Kojiro is the first to interpret the omen.

“Dramatic motherfucke—”

“Behold! At the time foretold, I! Am! Here!” Adam (of course) belts, swooping down from the sky on his skateboard, and then doing a little twirl.

“Yes, we see that,” says Kaoru. “Do you have a plan?”

“Well,” Adam draws out the word. “The house itself is a bit of a way away, so I got some entertainment ready for the way! Can’t have you getting bored!” He gestures towards the gate, which opens with a creak, revealing a skate track, teethed with obstacles. Kojiro gulps. “If you wonderful people distract the police with your amazing tricks, I can try to sneak inside in the meantime! Doesn’t that sound fun?”

“Wait a minute!” yell Reki and Kaoru in unison.

“Oh, sorry, you go first,” Kaoru says, awkwardly.

Reki looks embarrassed. “No, no, you go.”

Kaoru stands up straight. “We’re coming with you!” he said, loudly. “To get the box! We request some recompensation for our time! In the form of money!”

Adam glances at him. “Whatever, sure. But what did you have to say?” He leans in toward Reki, smiling.

Reki stands his ground. “You’re not going anywhere near Langa, you hear me? He wants nothing to do with you!”

Adam uncoils. “Is this true?”

Langa nods shyly.

“...Ah, if I must. As I said, the power of friendship does wonderful things to a person. And what you two have is quite an interesting specimen—”

Kojiro points at the police motorbikes speeding towards them from within the estate, attracted, like moths, to the bright light illuminating them. “Are we going to head off or just get caught here?”

Adam laughs. “You make a good point, my friend! Allonz-y!”

And they all speed off down the skate track, filled with the adrenaline of the race.

The sound of the explosion shudders through the air, the dust particles from the fallen wing of the estate flitting wildly from the reverberation, and Reki’s head shoots up, his eyes wide.

“Oh, shit! We need to get out of here. Seriously.” He looks down, jaw gaping, at the hunk of marble lying despondently on the ground where Reki had managed to pull it off Langa’s foot. His fingertips are still raw and dusty from its rough surface. “Oh god, Langa, can you move?”

“Let me try.” He pulls himself shakily to his feet, leaning on Reki’s shoulder as he does so, and grimaces, hissing in undeniable pain as his weight leans towards the injured foot.

“Nope, you can’t. Oh shit, Langa, we’re screwed! This is bad!” The sirens are growing closer by the second, and Reki tears at his hair, foot tapping against the ground.

“Do you think I could skate out of here with you on my back?” Langa narrows his eyes.

“Are you trying to kill yourself? Even if I wasn’t too heavy for you to skate with, we’d be way too slow.” Langa crumples back onto the ground, leaning against the crumbled pillar as if it were a fallen log in the forest (wouldn’t it have been lovely if it hadn’t made a sound?). Reki huffs, throwing his hands up in frustration.

“I’m gonna kill Joe when we get out of here. We’re eating free for life or he’s a dead man. No way am I getting a criminal record the summer before I leave for university! I’m gonna be so screwed!”

Langa falls silent. He toys with a piece of rubble, absentmindedly.

“Reki?”

“What?”

“So I may have a way I could get us out of here,” he says, sheepish, drawn-out. Reki’s eyes light up.

“Seriously? And you didn’t mention it before now?”

“But you have to promise you won’t be mad at me. Like, ‘I’ve been lying to you for a long time’ kinda mad. It’s nothing crazy, but, like…”

“Now you’re making it sound like you’ve killed someone! Or you’re a mafia boss or something! Jeez, just spit it out.”

Langa sighs, resigned. The marble debris and dust continues to float through the air, but there’s a different quality to it now, a sort of artificial shimmering concentrated around Langa. His eyes are scrunched shut in an expression of resignation and muted pain, but even through the gaps around his lashes Reki can see a blue light far more intense than any eyes he’s seen in a human.

Then the shimmering stops, and a dragon, eggshell blue and the size of a small car, is lying against the marble pillar.

 “Langa, what the fuck?”

“You said you wouldn’t get mad!” the dragon (Langa?) says. The voice is undeniably his, but resonant, echoing as if they were trapped within a cathedral.

“I’m not mad! You just never told me you got dragons in Canada!”

“Uh, yeah! You’ve seen pictures of me as a baby! Why did you think I had blue hair when you’ve seen my parents?”

“I thought your mum cheated on your dad or something! Or he cheated on her! Not that you’re a dragon!”

“How would my dad cheating even work for that?”

“Did he get cheated on with a dragon then?”

“What? No!” He unfurls his wings, translucent membranes stretching out after months of disuse, and Reki has to turn his gaze away to comprehend what he’s seeing. “Get on.”

“You’re gonna fly away?”

“Did you think I was just going to walk up to the police like this and explain this all politely? Obviously not.”

Reki hadn’t expected to be leaving the wreckage of Adam’s mansion by air by mid-afternoon when he woke up this morning. But he obliges, clinging on as hard as he can, all the while mentally banking that he’s going to have to ask Langa so many questions tonight.

“Say, Kaoru.”

“Hm.”

“Did you think your evening was going to end up like this?”

Kaoru’s gaze slides over to him. “In a police station?” He lets out a huff before his gaze slides away again. “Can’t say I did.”

Kojiro leans back in his tiny plastic chair with a sigh. “It’s not ideal,” he murmurs. “But probably better us than Reki, Langa, and Miya, right?”

“Those kids couldn’t lie to save their lives,” Kaoru admits. “At least the police seem to believe our story.”

It’s not much of a story at all, and Kaoru can hardly believe the police have believed it at all. Kojiro and Kaoru aren’t exactly great liars, either, although neither of them would admit it—and Kaoru was sure that arguing over every detail of their impromptu, falsified story would ring alarm bells in the officers they were talking to, but they seemed relatively unbothered by the haphazard account. In fact, they seemed relatively unbothered about the whole mansion-blowing-up business at all—it makes Kaoru a bit concerned about the state of their law enforcement, but he wasn’t going to question their luck.

After Reki, Langa, Adam, and presumably Miya had left the scene, Kaoru and Kojiro had been quite tempted to flee similarly, but they’d realized fairly quickly that leaving such a place of destruction without an explanation would lead to more problems for everyone—and anyway, there was no way Adam’s mansions didn’t have cameras, at least prior to the damage. If the police recovered the video material, it would firmly place everyone at the scene of the crime. Kaoru and Kojiro had argued their way over to the police station with the intention of having Adam be the only person held responsible for the scene, but the police didn’t seem to want to find anyone responsible for it. If anything, they seemed more willing to brush it off than Kaoru and Kojiro.

Now, they were just waiting for some paperwork or the other to be filled—allegedly. Kaoru is pretty sure the officer taking their statements just went to the back to get a cup of coffee.

“What would we have done tonight if…” Kojiro waves a hand in the air. “All of this didn’t happen?”

Kaoru squints at him for the strange question. “What we always do,” he says after a pause. “Argue with each other at Sia la Luce.”

“Is that all?”

Kaoru turns to fully stare at him. “What?”

“I mean, is that all we would have done today?”

Kaoru’s eyes narrow. “What are you getting at?”

“I didn’t forget our earlier conversation, Kaoru,” Kojiro says, and Kaoru looks away.

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“I do.”

Kaoru does not want to have this conversation ever, but especially not in a police station, after maybe blowing Adam’s house up. God, why couldn’t Kojiro just drop it?

“You’re being weird.”

Kojiro just gives him a helpless shrug. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Kaoru’s shoulders rise. “What does that mean?”

“You know what it means.”

“Oh my god,” Kaoru snaps. “Stop being so damn cryptic, you gorilla, just fucking say what you mean, I can’t read your mind, asshole—”

“I’m in love with you,” Kojiro blurts out.

Kaoru’s mouth drops open. He stares at Kojiro.

The officer that took their statements pokes his head into the hallway, a steaming cup of coffee in his hands. “Kaoru Sakurayashiki and Kojiro Nanjo? You both are free to go.”

Miya crouches behind one of Adam’s many hedges, shivering.

What have I even been doing all this time? He thinks, sadly, to himself. What have the others been doing? Have they somehow forgotten me? Or did they mean to leave me out of the story all along?

He checks if his phone has signal, for the fifth time this minute. Still nothing. He peeks out from the hedge warily, then grabs his skateboard and quietly scooches over to the next one.

Miya got split up from the rest of the group at some point during their fun race to the house - not because he was slower than those talentless slimes, of course, but he skidded badly on a rock and by the time he had looked up they were gone. He kept following the route, but must have taken the wrong path because he ended up going in circles, almost getting caught by the police twice, which was scary.

Did the others leave him behind as bait for the police? Because he was too young to get put in prison? That’s properly—properly a dick move. They’d have to have a word about this.

And not to mention—they left a lot of rubble behind, too, strewn all over the paths of the estate. It was making skateboarding really hard, even for an incredible, natural talent like him. He kept having to walk round bits of furniture or plasterboard. He did find some cool stuff, though—some cutlery he swore was solid gold, some jewels he pocketed, and a lot of broken television screens still displaying pictures of Langa. And amidst it all—was that a dragon scale? 

A few hedges later, Miya finally found some atoms in Adam’s godforsaken estate which were in range of a mobile network tower, and he let out a happy yell. Immediately, he checked his messages. Nothing from any of the others. Maybe the police caught them, and they can’t use their phones. Serves them right, he thought. Just in case, he types a quick message on the chat asking how it went.

As he does so, he almost trips over the ugliest bright pink box he’s ever seen. They came here for a box, Miya remembers, and though he wouldn’t put Adam down as having… this taste in box, he decides to give it the benefit of the doubt. If the others failed in their mission, but he brings this home, he’ll be a hero! Nobody will ever forget him again!

It has a little keyhole, but Miya is a practical man, and grabs a nearby rock. When he starts to bash it, he hears the strangest quiet yelping sound, and stops, puzzled.

The sound stops.

When he hits it again, the sound starts again.

He shakes the box. It’s light, and sounds empty. No baby animals he might accidentally be hitting. Well, that’s fine then. He continues beating it to within an inch of its life, until the plastic finally snaps, revealing… bits of paper with short phrases on them.

What?

Is this the right box? Miya doesn’t know all the details of their little trip, since he always gets treated like a little kid—though he’ll prove his use to them, this time!—but could they really have been after some bits of paper this whole time? Who the hell needs this?

He looks closer at the strips.

el_M4TAD0R

WHERE15MYLOVE

hErE**D0GGy

langA!I!P1NE!!!

mY-He4rT-BURn5

“What the fuck,” Miya whispers, disturbed. The box is full of them, all in a similar vein—after he sees ch0KEME,,b4by,, he shuts his eyes in revulsion. He feels torn between shoving them in his pocket as proof, and not wanting to have touched this in the first place.

“Man up, man,” he tells himself. “They won’t believe you, otherwise. I’ll… grab a few of the less distressing ones, and the rain can get rid of the rest. Ugh…”

He shoves some of the paper in his pockets, then turns the box upside-down, so all the bits of paper fall into the grass. At this, he hears an ear-wrenching scream of agony.

He spins around, letting go of the box, and sees a figure half-buried under most of a heart-shaped red sofa. It looks like something out of a horror movie, so covered in brick dust and mud that it barely looks human, but Miya would recognise that man anywhere. It’s Adam.

“You useless child!” He screams, raw and desperate. “Pick those up now! That’s my money—my holiday… No! NO!” With a superhuman effort, he starts to rise, lifting the sofa off himself like a monster rising out of the sea.

Miya turns to run. He goes onto the emergency quick dial on his phone, titled ‘SHADOW - LOSER’, and presses the call button.

“MUM COME PICK ME UP I’M SCARED—”