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Sakura thought something was suspicious when the rent was so low.
When he tours the apartment, though, nothing seems amiss. The agent talks up the built-in tatami flooring, the abundance of natural light in the bedroom, the balcony right outside the window, and despite the clear attempt to embellish the shitty place, it still doesn’t seem quite run-down enough for the rent to be dirt cheap. Not that Sakura plans on looking a gift horse in the mouth.
“So,” the agent clasps their hands together, with a wide, fake smile, “What do you think, Sakura-san?”
Their fingers tremble slightly in their grip. Sakura’s long used to people being scared of him from his clear status as a delinquent, but it’s strange for them to be terrified for the whole thirty-minute tour. Maybe they’re just really cowardly? It’s a bit much, regardless.
Sakura shrugs, looking around. He doesn’t really care how crap the place is, as long as he can stay somewhere in Makochi where he can afford the rent. As he glances about, a flash of movement catches his eye.
The switch of the bedroom light, hanging in the middle of the room, swings gently from the ceiling. As Sakura watches, it flicks from side-to-side before it slows to a stop.
Strange. There’s no wind in here, and the window is closed. Neither of them touched the light switch, apart from the agent turning it on as a quick demonstration more than five minutes ago. Unmoving, Sakura stares at the switch until he’s sure it has halted completely. The agent shivers, nudging closer to Sakura.
“I’ll take it,” Sakura says. The agent sighs with clear relief.
In the kitchen, a droplet of water splashes against the inside of the sink. The sound is amplified tenfold in the frozen air of the apartment, which is stale as a days-old corpse. The agent jumps with a squeak.
The faucet must be leaky. Sakura ignores it.
When Sakura moves in, it takes a total of fifteen minutes to unpack everything he has. He places down his futon, throws the blanket over it, then puts his one towel away into the storage space that opens up into the bedroom. His Furin uniform goes onto the hanger by the balcony, the water that he just bought at the convenience store into the kitchen cupboard, his phone charger into the outlet, and all that’s left is the few sets of clothes he has.
As Sakura’s folding them up neatly to keep with his towel, a quiet squeak catches his attention. He looks up, instantly worried that he has rats that the agent didn’t warn him about.
In the short corridor between his bedroom and kitchen, the other storage room’s door swings lightly on its hinges. On every turn, a soft creak sounds from where it hangs from the wall. Sakura stares at it unblinkingly for a few seconds.
When Sakura stands to close it, running his fingers over the sides, there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Must be loose from how old it is.
As Sakura grabs the door, something bright captures his attention. He pulls open the door fully to peek inside. A cloud of dust greets him, tickling his nose enough for him to sneeze. He waves it away with a sniff and squints at the darkness inside until his eyes adjust.
There’s a rumpled pile of fabric shoved into the corner. It’s stacked rather high, like it consists of a large volume of cloth. Even in the shadows of the small storage room, its yellow colour seems to glow. Sakura reaches in and grabs a fistful of whatever it is.
With some effort, he drags it out onto the wooden floor and into his bedroom, dislodging more dust as he goes. He sneezes a few more times before he drops the object onto the tatami flooring.
Under the setting sun, the faded pattern becomes clear. There’s stars scattered all over the yellow, their various colours turned faint with time. They’re of varying sizes, giving the material a childish feel. It looks like something a kid would have in their room.
When Sakura lays out the fabric fully, the plastic hooks at the top reveal what it’s supposed to be. It’s a set of curtains, probably abandoned by whoever lived here last. Sakura takes it out on the balcony to drape over the railings and beat the dust out of for a couple minutes.
Once he’s no longer sneezing repeatedly, he hangs them up over the window. Waste not, want not, right?
Sakura takes a step back after putting up the curtains. He likes them, he thinks. They add a bit of life to his room. Staring at them, he feels strangely proud of himself.
Even when Sakura leaves the light off after sunset, the curtains almost seem to glimmer with some otherworldly illumination. It’s as if they’re imbued with light that shines from inside its material. Since the night is exceptionally stifling, Sakura leaves the balcony windows open a crack. With what little wind blows through the gap, the fabric rustles and wavers against the glass. Its hues appear to shift with the passive movement.
When the moonlight hits it, the curtains shimmer especially bright. The stars are nearly indistinguishable from their counterparts in the sky, glowing against the backdrop of the outside surroundings. In the presence of the curtains, the room is practically luminous, so much so that Sakura can move around his room without waiting for his eyes to adjust.
Huh. Freaky magic curtains. Sakura guesses there’s worse things to receive as a housewarming gift.
After that, it’s smaller things. The light turning on after sunset on particularly dark evenings. Sakura’s phone getting unplugged after reaching 100% when he charges it overnight. The water already being hot when he grabs his towel for a bath. Old houses are weird, Sakura supposes, but it’s the first time the weirdness has worked so much in his favour.
Whatever. As long as his electricity bill isn’t affected.
Sakura starts suspecting something the day he returns home from the fight on the main street. The wound is shallow but bleeds like hell, the red visible even through his bandages when he finally reaches his apartment.
The moment Sakura unwraps the bandages in his bedroom, the entire place shudders.
It’s like wind passes through his very walls. The light switch swings furiously beneath the light that flickers on and off. The air conditioning shakes on the wall to a cacophony of rattling. The cupboard doors open and slam shut with ricocheting bangs. Distantly, in the corridor, Sakura hears the thumps of several of his water bottles falling from the shelf.
“What the fuck?” Sakura looks up, genuinely concerned that he’s hallucinating from blood loss despite the small volume he’s lost. In an instant, everything stops. The immediate halt of all movement is eerie, as if everything around him has dropped dead. In the sudden lack of sound, the silence seems even louder than the previous noise.
A quiet creak draws Sakura’s attention. The door to the storage space where he keeps his futon opens slowly. The first aid kit he haphazardly threw together tips over the edge of the shelf before he can react and catch it, making him hiss in irritation. He scowls when everything scatters across the floor, already wincing at the thought of collecting it all on his injured ankle.
Slowly, a set of fresh bandages in the middle of the supplies begins to shake. As Sakura watches warily, it rolls over once, twice, making its way over to him. When it knocks gently against his ankle and comes to a stop, the movement is almost sheepish. It’s as if the apartment itself is apologising to him.
Sakura stares at the bandages long enough for a bottle of disinfectant to topple over too, startling him into jumping. Grumbling about stupid cheap rent and probably haunted houses, he picks up the disinfectant and pours it over his cut before grabbing the new bandages.
“Everything better be in its original place when I get out,” Sakura warns half-seriously when he brings his towel and the bandages into the bathroom, more out of annoyed anger than anything else. He shuts the door, expecting to have to pick everything up after he scrubs himself clean.
When Sakura emerges, his apartment is completely normal. The water bottles that laid by his feet as he entered the bathroom are stacked neatly in the cupboards when he opens them to check, much neater than he knows he would have kept them. Even the medical supplies strewn over the floor have been packed tidily back into the box and kept neatly into the corner of the shelf. The whole apartment seems cleaner than before, like someone carefully brushed dust out of every corner.
Sakura blinks, goes back into the bathroom to rewrap his ankle, then decides to disregard everything that happened as a waking dream.
The notebooks fall on Sakura’s head when he bangs his shin as he’s keeping his futon one morning.
Sakura muffles a curse as he clutches his foot with a wince. Beside the futon laying forgotten on the floor, he hops on one foot and resists the instinctive cries of pain. When something smacks the top of his head, he has to bite back a scream.
It’s a notebook. A few more flop onto Sakura’s head, setting off another string of cussing. There’s maybe five of them in total, scattered about his feet as he rubs the back of his head. Thankfully, the soft covers mean that the dull ache, more from surprise than anything else, fades quickly.
Sakura settles himself onto the floor. As he crosses his legs neatly under him, he picks up one of the notebooks. It’s yellowed from age with pages that curl slightly at the edges, as if someone spent years flipping through them.
Unbidden, Sakura considers the notion that whatever ransacked his apartment last time made these notebooks fall onto him. The circumstances were too out of the blue, though. It really does seem like this is a random occurrence he managed to stumble upon.
Sakura skims through the notebooks. There’s pictures carefully drawn in pencil, meticulous writing surrounding them. The graphite is slightly smudged like someone ran their fingers over it one too many times. Slips of paper, held in place by fraying tape, cling weakly to the pages with vague notes or doodles scribbled onto them. They’re mostly records of people, some wearing the same Furin jacket that hangs by Sakura’s balcony.
When Sakura reads through them more thoroughly, he doesn’t quite know what to do. There is endless information in these, diligently collected over what must have been years. The books include blood types, favourite foods, worst subjects, every little note penned down with thoughtful care. Whoever made them must have chased down each recorded detail with infinite dedication.
Sakura brushes his fingers over the messy handwriting. Beneath his touch, the page crinkles softly. With something that was so clearly loved in his hands, he doesn’t know how to handle it with anything less than reverence.
It’s strange. It’s not as if Sakura can learn about a person purely through their notebooks, but their enthusiasm leaks through every page. He can nearly picture the flying of their hands across the page, fingers excitedly crumpling the paper where creases now lie, adorning an eager smile and an even more eager tone as they spew questions. A mild sort of bitterness coils at the base of his tongue.
“Are these yours?” Sakura asks aloud.
The room is frozen around Sakura. Beside the balcony window, the curtains waver a little, but don’t move. The faucet in the kitchen, which leaks half the time, is wholly silent. The light remains staunchly off, the light switch immobile below it. The atmosphere is stiller than a graveyard.
When Sakura swallows, the noise is loud in the quiet. In the complete absence of sound, he listens to the whistle of his own breath and waits for any sort of disturbance.
A light rattle sounds from behind Sakura. When he turns, a wooden pencil that he left thoughtlessly in the corner of his bedroom now sits conspicuously in the center of the tatami flooring.
As Sakura watches, the pencil trembles with a shiver then begins to rise. When it ascends to a certain height, it tilts at a particular angle. It’s as if someone has picked it up and is now holding it in their hand. Sakura feels his pulse race underneath his skin as the graphite tip catches the light.
From the pile of notebooks on the floor, Sakura retrieves the least worn of them. Carefully, he flips to the end and spreads the blank page over the floor. The white, in contrast to the older notebooks’ yellow, is glaringly stark against the light brown of his tatami flooring.
There’s a pause. Then, the tip of the pencil lowers to the page and starts to write.
Nice to meet you, Sakura-san
Sakura inhales until he thinks his lungs might explode. He stares daggers into the pencil, which is unmistakably moving without any visible guidance.
“Are you,” Sakura pauses, trying to figure out how to avoid offending a supernatural being, “Um…?”
The pencil tips slightly, like whatever’s holding it takes pity on Sakura. Below the last line of writing, it adds more strokes.
Yes. I’m dead. I’ve been dead for a while now
Sakura leans forward, gazing at the way the graphite bites into the page. The pencil stutters slightly, akin to the flinch of a hand. It goes unnoticed, though, as Sakura runs his fingers over the page and traces the fibres beneath his touch.
“How are you doing that?” Sakura asks curiously.
I can move smaller objects like this pencil. It’s easier to interact with things that belonged to me, though
Here, the pencil pauses. Sakura waits patiently, and it continues after a beat.
I’m sorry if my writing is unclear. It’s been a long time since I wrote in these notebooks
“So,” Sakura says, “These really are yours? All these books, and the notes in them?”
They are. I collected information on people I thought were cool when I was alive
With each new word, it looks like the writer’s handwriting is improving bit by bit. The shaky lines start to resemble something more confident, similar to the written text in the notebooks. Sakura tracks the progress absently, catches himself, and wonders why he cares.
“It was you, right?” Sakura asks. “The strange things that happen around the apartment sometimes? The air-conditioning, the light, the faucet?”
I can’t do much, but I was excited to see someone new after so long. I’m sorry if I scared you
The apology is wobbly, as if written with a shaking hand. Sakura feels the same bitter taste surge up to coat the back of his teeth, the same way nausea does right before he throws up. Though he can’t see the person he’s communicating with, he can imagine the guilty look to the side, the fearful shrink back, the innate anxiety that they’ve overstepped. If they were visible, Sakura thinks they would probably be fidgeting nervously with their fingers.
“Thank you,” Sakura blurts. The words sit in the air, their loudness bringing a boisterous kind of boldness to the tense stillness.
The pencil freezes mid-air.
“For the curtains,” Sakura hears himself say, the words spilling out of him as if summoned. “For turning on the lights for me, and unplugging my phone when it’s done charging, and switching on the hot water before I take a bath.”
It was nice. It felt like living with someone, properly, not being shoved into a room with other children who hated him from the moment they saw him and sidelined by foster parents who made it clear they didn’t want him. It felt like having someone to pick up after him, to worry about him, to want to cheer him up. Sakura is so sure that living with someone who cares for him would be just like this.
“What’s your name?” Sakura asks.
The pencil wavers in the air hesitantly, then returns to the notebook.
Nirei Akihiko
“Thank you,” Sakura tells him, “Nirei.”
The sensation of the unfamiliar words on Sakura’s tongue is strange. Still, within this room that feels like a world with only the two of them, he finds that they’re easier to say than usual. Maybe it’s the lack of a solid person before him. Maybe it’s the unreal tinge to the whole situation. Maybe it’s the absence of the judgmental gaze he’s already used to. Regardless, Sakura thinks it’s been a long time since he called someone’s name out loud.
The pencil trembles before him.
But I scared you, that time
“That time?” Sakura frowns and wracks his mind for what they could be referring to. “Oh, when I got hurt?”
The pencil jerks a little, before it scrawls angry strokes into the paper.
I didn’t mean to I’m sorry I saw you put on your school uniform for the first time I saw you leave the apartment in the morning I saw you come back with your injury and I thought
The scribbled lines stop instantly. The pencil falls to the page with a tap. Sakura doesn’t reach out to grab it, and it rolls lazily to the side.
“What?” Sakura probes cautiously. “What did you think?”
There’s no response. Sakura waits, and waits, and waits, until morning turns to noon. The notebooks and the pencil don’t move, left idle in their locations. The air-conditioning rumbles along quietly, with no peculiar noises. The light switch hangs without movement. The faucet doesn’t leak a single drop of water. When Sakura finally stands up, gathering the notebooks and placing them beside the curtains, it’s with the same gentleness as someone would handle an urn of ashes.
It’s the longest Sakura’s apartment has ever been this silent.
The notebooks and pencil are left dormant at the side of Sakura’s room for a whole day on end. He doesn’t close the pages of the one he opened, instead leaving it splayed out on his floor. The next morning, as soon as he wakes, the first thing he does is glance over at the notebook. When he gets home that night from Cafe Pothos, after their “strategy meeting” for the upcoming fight at Shishitoren, he heads straight for the notebook.
Nothing changes, no matter how many times Sakura checks. The words they exchanged yesterday sit on the page gathering dust. The pencil remains untouched where it sits in the groove between two pages, in the exact same position Sakura left it in.
Even the things that used to happen before stop occurring. Despite Sakura waiting past sunset, watching the last rays of sunshine disappear and darkness descend upon his shadowed room, the light doesn’t switch on like it used to. He charges his phone for far longer than necessary, leaving it plugged in after it reaches 100%, until the device nearly malfunctions from overheating. The plug doesn’t detach like it typically does.
Eventually, Sakura rises to his feet to retrieve his futon. Although he’s more than willing to stay up the whole night, he has a fight tomorrow. With his mind so filled with the ghost boy in his apartment, he hasn’t spared the battle tomorrow a single thought. Now, though, he pauses in the middle of putting down his futon.
Sitting back on his folded legs, Sakura tilts his head back.
To the ceiling, he says, “I’m fighting this other team’s vice-captain tomorrow. Wish me luck.”
There’s no response. Sakura stays like that for a few seconds to be sure, listening attentively to his surroundings. Nothing happens, so he sighs and slips into his futon. Exhaling softly through his nose, he turns to the side and pillows his head on his arm.
Right before Sakura falls fully asleep, teetering between the edge of unconsciousness and wakefulness, he feels a cold touch brush through the strands of his hair.
After they return victorious from Shishitoren’s turf and wrap up at Cafe Pothos, Sakura heads straight home. Now that the adrenaline of the fight has worn off, his muscles have begun to ache from exertion. Beneath the bandages, his wounds pulse dully in pain. He’s looking forward to taking a shower and going straight to sleep.
The moment Sakura opens the door, a clatter sounds from his bedroom. Heart in his throat, he shucks off his shoes and steps further inside.
The notebook has been laid in the middle of the room, a clear distance away from its original position. The pencil rolls away from it like someone dropped it in their haste. It taps against Sakura’s foot then comes to a stop. Slowly, as if approaching an injured animal, he lowers one knee and crouches to grasp the pencil with his fingers.
When Sakura drops the pencil onto the notebook, it remains unmoving for a few beats before it rises. The graphite tip gradually moves nearer to the page, shaking as it does. It’s like whoever holding it is trembling furiously.
You’re all beat up, the words read. Does it hurt?
Sakura huffs. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”
Despite his brave front, something tight in his chest unravels. The entire day of silence really did scare him after getting used to his apartment being in constant motion or noise. As he watches the pencil scribble shakily across the paper, the relief that unspools in his chest is a million stronger than after their victory against Shishitoren.
Your eye is swollen too, Nirei continues. It looks like it’s gone down quite a bit, but you should still ice it just to be safe.
“I’ll go to the convenience store after I shower,” Sakura hums. “You know a lot about treating injuries, huh?”
The pencil stills. Words stop appearing in the notebook. Sakura’s heart freezes in his chest, expecting another sudden disappearance like last time. Without a thought, his hand shoots out and grabs the pencil.
Instead of wood, though, his fingers close around a strange substance that’s almost indescribable.
The sensation of it is something like forest spring water, cool to the touch and somehow refreshing. Its surface has an imperceptible give, preventing Sakura from fully securing his grip on it. The touch sends a full-body shiver through Sakura’s body from his fingertips as if he was electrocuted.
The pencil clatters to the floor, forgotten.
“Don’t leave,” Sakura says quietly. “I won’t pry.”
Everyone has something they would rather hide. Sakura gets it. He has no right to push, not when it’s something that so clearly terrifies Nirei, and not when he has things he hides himself. Sakura is content with whatever Nirei is willing to give.
The not-quite hand under Sakura’s quivers like the disturbed surface of a windy lake. Sakura squeezes it instinctively and his fingers sink slightly into half-solid skin. Similar to the breeze on a winter morning, the contact siphons heat rapidly from his fingertips. The feeling is disconcerting, yet Sakura doesn’t pull away. When the fingers shift underneath his, Sakura expects to be shaken off and left alone once again without explanation.
Instead, Nirei slips his fingers between Sakura’s, and stays.
Everything was bound to catch up to Sakura eventually, he supposes. The afternoons he spent trying to memorise his classmates’ names by himself after becoming grade captain, the nights he stayed up to talk to Nirei through the notebook until the sun rose over the town, the recent KEEL fight and the resulting realisation that he cares for his classmates, all took a toll on him at once.
When Sakura wakes up with a pounding head and a stabbing pain in his throat, he groans and immediately rolls over to go back to sleep.
The curtains pull open the whole way, letting in sunlight that worsens Sakura’s headache. The light above him turns on with a tug of the switch, blasting more light that pierces through Sakura’s shut eyes. After he grumbles and mutters some indistinct threat, the sudden sound of the faucet gushing full-blast from the kitchen makes him jerk awake.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sakura grouses. “I get it, now stop that.”
As Sakura stumbles groggily to his feet, the curtains draw shut again quickly and the light clicks off. The air-conditioning rattles on and begins blowing comfortably cold air like a wordless apology. Sakura rubs at his eyes and clumsily makes his way to the kitchen, where the cupboard door swings open at his arrival. Before he can reach out and grab one of the bottles of water up there, one conveniently tips over the edge and drops into his open hand.
“Thanks,” Sakura mumbles. He unscrews the cap to take a huge swig, before retreating back under the warm covers of his futon.
After what feels like five short seconds of feverish sleep, Sakura’s phone rings. His voice scrapes painfully when he groans and slaps unseeingly at the floor around him to search for his phone. When his fingers meet something familiarly cold, he jolts back into awareness. Nirei’s touch quickly retreats from his, leaving behind Sakura’s ringing phone.
“Hello, Sakura-kun!” Suo’s cheerful voice comes through the speaker once Sakura’s picked up.
“Whaddafuck do ya’ want,” Sakura delivers flatly into his phone.
“Oh my,” Suo continues tinnily through the device, “You sound awful, Sakura-kun—”
Sakura hangs up on him.
With a sigh, he faceplants back into his futon. If he’s lucky, he can pass out until tomorrow morning. In the haze of his fever, he barely senses the cold fingers that press against his burning forehead in an attempt to bring down his temperature.
Sakura is woken up by Suo calling his name and following it up with a “Sorry for the intrusion”. He buries his face into the base of his futon and frowns up at his bedroom door when Suo slides it open silently. Seriously, who even breaks into the house of a sick person?
Peculiarly, once Suo glances into Sakura’s bedroom, he freezes. A foreign expression coasts over his face, something unreadable that Sakura has never seen before.
Before Sakura can ask, Suo tilts his head with a smile and lifts the two plastic bags in his hands. “This is from everyone in class. You made them really worried, you know?”
It’s a short visit, at least. Suo rises to leave after a swift exchange, only pausing at the doorway leading to the rest of the apartment.
“Sakura-kun,” Suo says, voice sounding uncharacteristically serious. Sakura, who was drifting off into sleep, replies with a non-committal hum.
“You know he can’t stay here, right?”
Sakura makes an inquisitive sort of noise and turns over to ask what the hell Suo’s pulling now. He’s mustering up what little energy he has in preparation for a complaint about pranking sick people, when the solemn expression on Suo’s face causes him to hesitate.
More importantly, though, the way Suo’s gaze shifts from Sakura to the notebook in the corner makes Sakura freeze. He left the book open from the conversation with Nirei last night, with Nirei’s unfamiliar handwriting clearly on display.
“He’s not meant to be here,” Suo tells Sakura, with a sad crook to his lips. His eye crinkles, though even that looks mournful.
Sakura opens his mouth, to ask what do you mean, or how do you know, or why can’t he stay, but his throat chooses that precise moment to give out. The question comes out as a warbling croak, akin to the sound a cat makes when it’s backed into a corner.
Suo smiles again and shuts the bedroom door quietly. “Take care, Sakura-kun.”
Sakura is left with a creeping chill that manages to counter the sweltering heat of his fever.
“Oh my god,” Kotoha greets him with. “Your place is hella haunted.”
Sakura hikes himself up onto his elbows. He squints at Kotoha, head spinning. For a second, he wonders whether he’s hallucinating a second person breaking into his apartment. Somewhere behind her, a cupboard door slams shut and makes them both jump.
“Kotoha’s someone I know,” Sakura mutters softly. Although it’s barely loud enough for Sakura himself to hear, he knows that the person he’s talking to will be able to pick it up anyway.
“Sorry, what did you say?” Kotoha blinks at him, setting down the huge bag she’s holding.
“I said,” Sakura says louder, “Why the hell are you here?”
Kotoha scowls at him as she drops a pot in his lap. Sakura lets out an oof but regards it with much interest once he catches the smell of food. When the lid is lifted to reveal the steaming egg congee, Sakura finds that his complaints about people breaking into his house without invitation have miraculously disappeared.
“Suo said your door wasn’t locked, but it wouldn’t open when I tried it at first,” Kotoha says offhandedly as she picks up a box of fever patches. “Did you lock it afterwards or something?”
“No,” Sakura says in between bites of egg congee, “It’s ’cuz you don’t have a Furin jacket.”
Kotoha squints at him. “You’ve got some sort of advanced technology on your door that only lets Furin students in?”
Sakura thinks about cold fingers and scribbled handwriting. “Something like that.”
Kotoha slaps a fever patch onto him in response. He yelps then glowers at her, pressing his fingers uncertainly against the swiftly cooling surface.
“Your fever’s making you hallucinate,” Kotoha sighs, directing a pitying look at him. “It’s really high, by the way. Have you been trying to cool it down at all?”
In the corner of Sakura’s room, the air-conditioning beeps as its temperature is cranked a few degrees lower. Kotoha startles and fixes her gaze on the machine suspiciously. With a shiver, she turns back to Sakura.
“I know they’re only rumours, but this place still creeps me out.”
“Rumours?” Sakura asks, hissing when he burns himself on the congee. “What rumours?”
“You don’t know?” Kotoha frowns. “Nobody’s rented an apartment in this building since that suicide case a year ago.”
In an instant, Sakura’s whole body turns cold. The feeling is different from the one he gets whenever he touches Nirei, instead sinking so deep it pierces even his bones and aches from the inside out.
“Suicide?” he repeats. The singular word drifts out of him as if he’s untethered to his own body, its sound wavering fragilely in the air.
“There was a Furin boy who used to live here,” Kotoha says. “Apparently, in middle school—”
“Stop,” Sakura says at the same time as the air-conditioning releasing a groan loud enough to nearly drown out what he said. Kotoha flinches.
“Just…” Sakura glances to the side, where the notebook is still open. “Not now. I don’t want to hear about it now.”
“Fair enough,” Kotoha shrugs, after shooting one last furtive glance at the air-conditioning. “You should focus on recovering anyway. Why’d you go all out in that fight yesterday? That’s why you fell so sick, you know.”
Sakura frowns. “It wasn’t ’cuz of the fight.”
“Oh yeah,” Kotoha says conversationally. “It was because you liked your friends so much you froze up, right?”
Sakura chokes on his egg congee.
When Kotoha leaves, Sakura scrapes up the last of the egg congee in silence. The scratches of the spoon against the base of the pot is deafening as he lifts the spoon to his lips. Although the apartment is quiet like last time, it seems more anticipatory than empty in comparison.
“You don’t have to explain,” Sakura ventures. He shovels the last spoonful of congee into his mouth as a buffer. Focused on chewing and swallowing as fast as he can manage, he keeps his head angled downwards.
There’s a pair of feet in front of him.
Sakura goes completely rigid. Vaguely, he registers himself slowly setting both the pot and spoon down beside him. He cranes his head back and—
It’s Nirei. It has to be, with the nervously darting eyes and the twisting fingers and the way he carries himself, like he’s trying to curl up so small that he blinks straight out of existence. The most damning characteristic, regardless, is the translucent quality to Nirei’s body. Sakura can see straight through him to the wall behind him. Addled from the fever, his brain struggles to process it.
Despite the steady flow of wind from the air-conditioning, the ends of his blonde hair don’t shift at all. As he fidgets on his feet, Sakura catches sight of the few freckles above the bridge of his nose.
“You…” Sakura doesn’t know what to say. “You’re Nirei, right?”
Nirei nods furiously. “Mhm! I’m sorry that I couldn’t show up in front of you before. It took a while to save up enough energy to do something like this.”
There’s a crackle to his voice, like it’s coming through a centuries-old radio. Beneath it, though, Sakura can kind of gather what his actual voice must have sounded like. It’s pitched slightly high, expressive in a way his written words could never replicate. He speaks as if each word carries the full force of his emotions.
“Ahem,” Nirei clears his throat. “I thought that, if I did this, I should do it properly.”
As Nirei straightens to his full height, a Furin jacket flickers into view on his shoulders. He tugs at it with a wobbly smile. In a gust of wind that Sakura doesn’t feel, the back of the jacket wavers in the wind like a hero’s cape.
“I’m Nirei Akihiko, from Furin high school!”
“It’s nice to meet you, Sakura-san,” Nirei echoes the words he wrote during their first exchange.
Sakura watches, mute. As he curls his fingers into the woven tatami flooring, his heart thuds strangely in his chest.
“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” Sakura repeats. “Not if you don’t want to.”
Nirei fiddles with the edge of his jacket. Now that he’s somewhat visible, his anxious jitters are clear to see. Sakura feels mildly vindicated at being proven correct in his prediction, from the very first time he talked to Nirei.
“I want to,” Nirei responds with certainty. “I owe you an explanation for…”
He trails off, though the words he leaves unsaid are easy to guess. For panicking when Sakura came back injured, for vanishing on Sakura that first time, for mistrusting anyone without a Furin jacket.
“I was bullied throughout middle school,” Nirei admits, fading a little at the edges. “I was saved by someone from Furin. I thought they were so cool, so I was determined to go to Furin when I graduated.”
A plop startles Sakura. When he looks up at Nirei, he realises that the other boy is crying. Big, fat teardrops well up at the corners of his eyes and coalesce into rivulets that stream down his face. In the background, Sakura registers the sound of the kitchen faucet dripping to a rhythm matching Nirei’s tears.
“But it’s not like I could magically become stronger once I entered Furin,” Nirei’s voice cracks. “The people who bullied me in middle school…they found out I got into Furin eventually.”
Behind Sakura, the curtains begin to flutter furiously. Although the balcony stays firmly shut beyond them, the movement is akin to being battered by strong winds from all sides. Against the cloth, the patterned stars start to faintly glow.
“They must have tracked down my patrol schedule, and figured out where I usually separate from my classmates,” Nirei says. “They waited until I was alone, and…”
Nirei flickers like an old television. The cupboard doors creak open and slam themselves closed, over and over again, each bang making Sakura’s nails dig even deeper into his palm. Amidst the noise, he hears the clatter of multiple objects toppling over with the disturbance.
When Sakura refocuses on Nirei, he has to swallow a noise of terror. Nirei is covered in scratches that are an angry red and bruises that bloom a melancholic purple and wounds that bleed sluggishly, cradling one arm like it’s fractured and favouring one leg over the other. The Furin jacket is ripped and slipping off his shoulders, like someone hacked at it with something sharp and tore chunks of it off.
“They said they’d find me every day for the rest of my life,” Nirei quivers, pupils blown wide. “They said they wouldn’t stop until either I quit Furin or I died.”
The whole apartment is shaking around them now, harder than it did on the day Sakura came back with a slashed ankle. The air-conditioning vibrates so forcefully on the wall that Sakura fears it may fall right off. The light flashes intermittently as its switch oscillates back and forth. The sound of metal rattling from the kitchen betrays the shaking of the faucet where it’s attached to the sink. In the midst of it all, Nirei stands like a broken kaleidoscope of blood and bruises. Sakura fixates his gaze on him, and doesn’t look away.
“So I did it first,” Nirei raises his trembling voice. “I climbed up to the roof of the tallest building I could find and—”
The place falls back into an abrupt lull. Objects settle back into place, appliances quieting down as if they were the attendants of a funeral. The background noises subside, enough for Sakura to hear what Nirei whispers next.
“It’s pathetic, isn’t it?”
Nirei’s shoulders are hunched, lifted until they’re by his ears. Although the faucet has fallen silent, his tears drip steadily from the tip of his nose as he stares at the ground. His hands are clenched into fists in his tattered Furin jacket. Where his fingers curl into the fabric, half the skin on his knuckles are scraped off like he tried to throw punches but didn’t know how to.
“No,” Sakura says. “It’s not pathetic at all.”
Sakura reaches out and hooks his fingers around Nirei’s own trembling ones. He expects the frigid contact by now, tolerating it without complaint. Nirei jolts at his touch but gives in easily, interlinking their fingers together by instinct. He grips as tightly as he can without his hand phasing through Sakura’s.
“If anything,” Sakura tells him, “You’re strong for dealing with all of that.”
Nirei clutches Sakura’s hand and cries.
The end, like the beginning, starts small at first.
After the night Nirei showed himself to Sakura for the first time, he disappears for a long time. However, unlike last time, he gives Sakura an explanation first. Apparently, revealing himself like this takes a toll on him and he’ll have to rest for a while. They take this chance to talk for as long as they can, staying up past dawn.
Sakura talks about freezing up during the KEEL fight because he saw his classmates get hurt, about being given the role of grade captain and not living up to their expectations, about not knowing how to rely on others. Nirei talks about how helpless he felt in middle school and the awe of seeing a Furin student, about the frustration of not being as strong as the classmates who were around him, about how someone who can reassure him with “it’s not pathetic at all” is the best example of a grade captain he can think of.
When Nirei finally can’t maintain his form anymore, he vanishes from view with eyes rimmed red but smile wide. Sakura holds his hand until his fingers close around empty air.
In the morning, he goes to school and apologises to his classmates.
Days pass by stagnantly in Sakura’s apartment. He turns on the air-conditioning himself and waits until the water heats to take a bath and lets his phone charge overnight without unplugging it at 100%. Only when the notebook’s pages flutter in the presence of no wind does Sakura release a breath he swears he’s been holding for days.
Things go back to normal, mostly. They talk through the notebook and Nirei manipulates the apartment the same way he used to. Still, it’s not fully the same.
Sakura starts waking up to his phone plugged in at 100%, or stepping into the shower to freezing, unheated water. Some nights, when he calls Nirei’s name with the notebook before him, there’s no response.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sakura asks, the next time they talk.
I don’t know, Nirei writes, then disappears for the rest of the night.
It’s terrifying. Sakura is out of his depth here, with ghosts and the supernatural. He doesn’t know how to help when he can’t rely on his own strength.
He knows who can help, though. He just doesn’t want to admit it. However, when Nirei doesn’t show up for three days on end, he abandons every shred of his pride.
Sakura corners Suo after school.
“You know about him, right?” Sakura bites out, already steeling himself against Suo’s teasing. “The ghost in my apartment.”
Contrary to Sakura’s expectations, Suo doesn’t tease him. Instead, he straightens and his entire face smooths out, flattening the usual curve of his mouth. He looks unnaturally serious, so much so that Sakura’s heart pounds in his chest.
“Is there something happening?” Suo asks.
“He’s…” Sakura pauses. How does he even begin to describe the helplessness of it all? The intermittent periods of sudden absence, the inexplicable loss of activity in his apartment, the way Nirei’s writing sometimes trails off and the pencil falls to the surface untouched.
“He’s disappearing,” Sakura says. “I don’t know how to help.”
Although he’s unused to admitting weakness like this, it doesn’t matter much when Nirei is involved.
Suo hums lightly as he thinks. “Did you do something for him? Say, for example, something related to his past, or means a lot to him?”
Sakura opens his mouth, poised to say no, but then he remembers the words he told Nirei that night and the tears that they brought forth.
It’s not pathetic at all.
“…what does it mean if I did?” Sakura asks instead. “Is it my—did I cause this?”
“Ghosts are created for a reason,” Suo replies. “Usually, it’s because their lives were unfulfilled. If they have a strong urge to achieve something, it can tether them to the living world. They can be attached to objects that meant a lot to them, or things that they poured a lot of effort into.”
The notebooks. The pages of notes, accumulated over what must have been years.
“So what happens when,” Sakura halts. “When that urge is fulfilled?”
“The connection is severed,” Suo says. “Nothing will be keeping them here, anymore. They move on.”
Sakura, abruptly, feels sick.
Nirei musters up enough energy for a conversation that night, as if sensing something wrong from Sakura’s expression when he gets back. Sakura showers and buys his dinner in a daze, nearly bumping into a pole on his way back from the convenience store. He only refocuses on the real world when he sits down in front of the notebook.
“Nirei,” Sakura says. “Could you appear again?”
There’s a pause. Then, the pencil lifts and writes, I don’t have enough energy to stay for long.
“That’s fine,” Sakura swallows. “I just need to—see you.”
When Nirei flickers into view, Sakura holds back a cry. He’s barely visible, most of him fully transparent like empty air. What remains of him keeps wavering in and out of sight, with flashing wounds that are there in one moment and gone in the next.
“I’ve been like this since that night,” Nirei says, and Sakura can hardly make out his words through the static. “I don’t know what’s happening—I don’t know what to do. What do I do, Sakura-san? I don’t want to—”
Nirei presses his lips together. He’s trembling.
How much time does it…how much time do we have? Sakura asked Suo.
A week, maybe less, Suo responded.
It’s been a week since Sakura fell sick.
“What was it that made you stay?” Sakura asks. “What kept you from moving on?”
“I…” Nirei blinks out of existence for the shortest of moments.
“I wanted a friend,” Nirei says, and the first tears fall from his eyes. They vanish mid-air before they can reach the ground, like mist dissipating on the wind.
“I wanted someone to believe in me, for once. I wanted someone to tell me I’m strong.”
Sakura grabs Nirei’s hand, like the countless times he did before. It phases out of existence every other second, leaving his hand momentarily grasping at space, but he doesn’t let go.
“Stay here,” Sakura says. With me, he doesn’t add. “I can—introduce you to more people, I can bring my classmates by, you can make more friends, friends who believe in you, who can tell you you’re the strongest and most amazing person they’ve met—”
Sakura’s crying too, now, broken sobs that he chokes out through blurry tears. Nirei’s hand is shivering in his, cold skin vibrating when it manifests into existence. Sakura hunches over, weeping, as he presses Nirei’s fading hand to his forehead.
Ghosts aren’t meant to exist, Suo told him. If they stay in our world for too long, they disappear anyway.
You can’t make him stay, Sakura-kun. It’ll destroy him.
Damned if Nirei stays, damned if he leaves. The first friend Sakura ever made, and he can’t even keep him. Why did fate have to teach him the value of companionship, and then wrench it away from him? How cruel. He hates this world that does nothing but take from him.
“Thank you for being my first friend,” Nirei says. “Thank you for staying up late to talk to me, and listening to my story, and keeping me company. Thank you for giving me so much, Sakura-san.”
More of Nirei is disappearing now, turning into nothing but blank space. Still, Sakura can feel Nirei’s hand shaking violently and he clutches on as tightly as he can.
“Don’t go,” Sakura begs. “Don’t leave me alone again.”
He can’t imagine living here without Nirei. Without the air-conditioning that’s always turned to the perfect settings, without the shower that already has hot water when he uses it, without the light that turns on at the exact time the sun sets fully. The few times Nirei’s presence wasn’t there, Sakura felt like he was suffocating in this apartment.
“You’re not alone at all,” Nirei argues. “The classmates who went out to buy gifts for you, Suo-san who carried the gifts to your apartment, Kotoha-san who cooked congee for you…you have all of them. The whole town is by your side.”
He wants to stay here, Sakura decided that day. This is a place where he belongs. Still…
“You’re part of it too,” Sakura insists. “I don’t want it if you’re not here.”
“Don’t say that,” Nirei frowns tearily, fingers tightening around Sakura’s. “I’ll still be here as long as you remember me.”
How can Sakura remember Nirei in his entirety, when he’s fading before his eyes? He wants to memorise every detail he’s learned, to commit it to a record that he can keep for the rest of his life. Something like…like Nirei’s notebooks.
Sakura scrambles to grab Nirei’s notebook. The pencil is sandwiched between the pages, and he flips past line after line of late-night conversations about everything and nothing until he reaches the very last blank page.
“When’s your birthday?!”
“I—what? My birthday?” Nirei looks helplessly lost. “September twenty-first.”
Sakura sketches out a box, following the format he’s read a million times on the other pages. Hurriedly, he jots down, Birthday: September 21st.
“What’s your height? Weight? Blood type? Hobbies? Skills?”
As Nirei answers his questions obediently, Sakura starts to sketch out a head of messy curls. He’s never been an artist, and his hand is trembling so furiously that he can hardly hold the pencil steady, but he’s careful with each stroke. As quickly as he can, he draws a pair of wide, glimmering eyes, then adds a few dots beneath them for freckles, and starts on a button-up shirt underneath a Furin jacket.
“Type you’re into?” Sakura asks, when he’s filled in most of the page. He ignores the blush that paints itself onto his cheeks, focused on writing down as much as he can.
“Sakura-san,” Nirei blurts, voice filled with static, though the name comes through clearly regardless.
Sakura promptly drops the pencil. When he looks up, Nirei is shuffling on his feet. Although his face has turned fuzzy and indistinct, the pink tint to his freckles stands out anyway.
“You…” Sakura stares. “You like me?”
Nirei nods, eyes screwed shut.
Sakura thinks of the time he spent picturing what Nirei would look like, the hours he would map out Nirei’s hand by touch alone, and the nights he couldn’t sleep after they met face-to-face because his head was filled with thoughts of sunshine-yellow hair and freckles.
Oh.
“I like you too,” Sakura says. Too little, too late.
Nirei drops to a crouch and places his freezing hands over Sakura’s. His wide eyes dart across Sakura’s face, as if searching for falsity.
“Can I—” Nirei flickers. “Can I kiss you, Sakura-san?”
Sakura nods, unable to speak with the rock in his throat. Nirei sets his hands on either side of Sakura’s face, the touch barely there, and stares into Sakura’s eyes for a moment that stretches into eternity. When he leans in, Sakura curls his hands into fists and shuts his eyes.
The kiss is lighter than a butterfly.
“I’m sorry,” Nirei tells him. “Thank you for everything. Make lots of friends for me, okay?”
“I will,” Sakura promises. “I’ll tell you all about it the next time we meet.”
The apartment falls silent. The air-conditioning rumbles along, a little colder than Sakura would have liked. The light remains on although the sun hasn’t completely set yet. In the kitchen, the faucet doesn’t leak a single drop. Sakura sits in the middle of the room for a moment, alone, before he stands up to put away the notebook. As he skims over it, the part where he wrote Type he’s into: makes him halt.
In Nirei’s handwriting, Sakura-san rests neatly beside it.