He might have been someone important, might have been loved by a mother, a father, embraced by family before he became the human body wrapped around the power of catastrophe and destruction. ____ didn’t feel anything about that, or about the seal between self and the world, or about the seal between that vessel and the world, where people moved in the distant light beyond this blue grey glass.
Cold winters, they said in the southern lands—before Heresh had ascended as Winter King. Now, it was cold winter. Everywhere.
He didn’t stay there. He tried to stop breathing out the cold long enough to feel for Arot’s pulse and heartbeat, reassuring under his too cold hands, then he took his friend back to the Summer Court and left him at the back kitchen door where he knew the servants would find him quickly.
He couldn’t stay.
Heresh was winter and wherever he walked, winter would be coldest. He couldn’t stay and let it break Arot’s inborn summer power.
So he wrenched his gaze from the dim but reassuring glow, like sunlight under Arot’s skin, and stared out at the snow falling on late summer woods, then began to walk.
North.
Mikoto stood in the doorway to the bar, and Kusanagi just looked at him for a long moment before Mikoto shrugged and dropped onto his usual seat at the front.
It wasn’t his way to apologize. Kusanagi had been the one to tell him that ages ago.
“You’ve had that in your system for years,” Kusanagi commented. His voice was just slightly sharper than usual, more disappointed.
Mikoto leaned his head back. Kusanagi was too close to this, too close to Mikoto’s inability to protect Totsuka, and he’d be the first hit when Mikoto left him holding all the pieces. There wouldn’t have been comfort in Kusanagi’s bed.
Munakata should know this was the only warning he was going to get.
“Did you find the gun?” Mikoto asked.
Kusanagi studied him for a long moment, seeming to pack up his pain, his disappointment, his face and tone smoothing out to something both casual and dangerous. “Yes.”
Skylight pulled the sleepshirt over her head and eyed her remaining clothes not in the laundry. With her habit of shoving in extra training sessions wherever they would fit, she had a bad tendency to sweat through shirts almost faster than she could wash them.
Math chuckled behind her, as if he could see the speculative look on her face (he could not). There must have been something about her stance that gave her away.
“Wash tomorrow,” she commented. Her spare supply was justified.
“Yes.” He got out of the bed behind her and fished down her second to last tank top. He paused, hand tracing over her back gently then over the line of her sports bra.
Skylight breathed evenly, slow and steady, but she felt warm all over.
He carefully lifted the shirt over her head and tugged it down over her shoulders, let her fit her own arms through the holes, but smoothed it carefully into place after.
She didn’t let him go for the overshirt before she dragged him close and kissed him good morning.
“Mori’s asked me to look after you.” The woman folded her hands into her sleeves as she looked Chuuya over, assessing. “I’m Ozaki Kouyou,” she introduced herself.
Chuuya remembered Mori’s comments that someone was responsible for teaching and caring for new Port Mafia recruits, and it was only a relief he clearly didn’t consider that devil Dazai his recruiter. He stood up a little straighter for Kouyou. “Thank you, Ane-san.”
She paused, a hint of surprise on her face, but waved it aside for the moment and handed him a small box. “For you.”
He opened it curiously, then slowly slipped off the band marking him a member of the Sheep. He reached up and fastened the choker around his neck.
Kouyou smiled. “It suits you.”
Typically, it was the boy walking the girl home from school, but Kukuri was the most familiar with Ashinaka and had once served as a guide to Kuroh. It was natural for her to keep walking him back to the dorm at times, especially on days when Shiro promised to keep Neko out, generally with a promise of “Shopping!” or “Food!” explained by Neko as she hung off him excitedly and he blushed a little and waved in his sheepish innocent manner.
He felt small and very alone in the quiet woods around him. He wasn’t very big yet anyway, newly born from his power only a few years before, and while he grew, it was at the rate of all the gods—whatever that power sustained.
So even when he’d been walking alongside his older sister, her mouth curling in a bright smile, warm fingers curled around his hand, he’d been a child at her waist and unnamed yet. But there it hadn’t mattered that he was small and she was not because he knew that she wouldn’t let anything happen to him.
The woods rustled gently, creaking branches, wind-blown leaves and underbrush. His sister was the god of finding. If he just waited, she would find him.
He crawled under the brush around one of the trees with low-hanging branches and let it cover him while he waited.
“Isn’t he a terrible patient?” the Blue with the red hair and bright smile asked with a quizzical head tilt.
Aura still sparked in Fushimi’s veins, but he could actually feel it fading, bleeding out slowly until one day, he knew, it would no longer answer his call. He wasn’t even sure he’d miss it.
There were moments when all anyone could think about was the blood on their hands, their fallen team members—something not quite family but beyond mere friends—and their own willingness to go bloody themselves again.
“And this is the hacker,” Kusanagi announced. “Now play nice, Fushimi,” he added to the hacker.
Lirian was queen of ice and snow, her lands robed in white mists and frost. Winter was cold in Lirian’s heart, fitting for her rank. She condemned who must be condemned to save who must be saved and never let it pain her. Such was the lot of she who would rule over the icy lands.
But as she swept in from another long day in councils, divying up what supplies there were, knowing she was deciding who would live and who would die, she let out a sigh as the heat of the roaring fireplace at the far end of the great hall began to thaw the chill off her skin and warm her furs to a tolerable temperature. There was a small child sitting near the fire, a fierce scowl on her dark face, black crow feathers growing from her black hair.
“Seiran,” said Lirian.
The child looked up, scowl vanishing into an expression more neutral than blank. The child stood and curtsied.
“Never mind that.” Lirian waved off the gesture and moved closer to the fire. Her gaze stayed on Seiran and something in her heart felt warm. “You had a pleasant day?”
Seiran shrugged indelicately. The child had only a feral grace, but she was beautiful to Lirian anyway. “You didn’t,” she said, more brazenly than anyone else might.
“I did not,” Lirian agreed. She reached out a hand to stroke her fingers through soft feathers and hair.
Seiran sighed quietly.
They stood in the silence together as their iciness thawed.
For nine years, she absolutely had been a grief-crazed AI, though she couldn’t fully discern whether she was grieving more for Lieutenant Awn or for herself as she used to be. But somewhere along the way, that had ceased to be true. She wore her grief like her phantom selves—not only her core but also all her segments, all at once—but it no longer drove her to the anguished state that anyone could call “crazed.”
That could be quantified. She could look at her data and say this is when that changed.
What she couldn’t quite define is when she ceased to be “it” and became a “person.” Even now, the words were fluid, not quite fitting whichever she chose, but for better or for worse, this too had changed.
“Are you sure about this?” Misaki sounded nervous, and his fingers fidgeted at Saruhiko’s hip.
The beanie had never been decorative. It kept people from bothering him, just as the loose sweatshirt served its own purposes to hide some of Yata’s less common features. He’d never liked leaving his tail out in public where anyone could grab it and pull and he’d only ever let one person give him scritches behind his ears, and that was a long time ago.
There’s an angry goose whose job it is to know these things. They say the reason so few people meet their soulmate is because the goose can only herd around one soul at a time in the direction of their mate and until the goslings grow up, the country just has too many people to get through before it’s your turn.
Every country has its own soul guide. Theirs is the angry goose. Yata always wondered but didn’t dare ask if someone else had the happy goose. Had he asked, his mother would have told him, they’re all angry, dear, they’re overworked.
He doesn’t really think anything of it when he’s skateboarding past a park and there are birds flying up startled from the ground, making small angry sounds at his disturbance. Not until a very loud angry honking doesn’t fly up. Instead it follows him, startling him back into careening right off the skateboard into the grass.
And there’s an angry goose in his face. It thrusts its beak at him as if it wants him to get moving.
Fushimi Saruhiko was prepared for many kinds of craziness to be a part of his workday, but the last thing he expected was a certain familiar redheaded skateboarder to come tearing through Scepter 4 chased by a honking, biting goose close on his heels. Misaki crashed into Saruhiko’s desk, and the goose stopped to glare at them both with one beady eye.
It gave one last smug honk and waddled away.
Live.
The refrain that binds them together, that tears them apart.
Live. You’re you.
People live to save themselves.
You started to want to live.
Born together in a day, in a single battle, reborn in another, in a single night.
Why couldn’t you live with me? Chuuya almost wonders. They’d been equals. They’d never made each other dependent. They’d never given the other unease and betrayal. Why, Dazai?
Not that he wanted him close, wanted him near, not that he wants him close now. But he looks in the eyes of his one-time partner grimly, the old words hanging, “We should just give up and die.” So cheerful, so fascinated still by the end of life. And yet, this closeness to death, wasn’t that Dazai’s way of living? Why would he go elsewhere to find it?
“Whenever you say something like that, like I really had a choice.”
You’re not going to die here.
Live!
Cor knew it wasn’t a lack of trust that made Rhezere shy away from displaying any kind of vulnerability with his own integrate. There were enough issues bubbling between their minds that the filter couldn’t hide for Cor to know it wasn’t even personal. But it grated.
“You okay?” No matter how neutral and offhand the delivery…
“Aww, Cor, you were worried about me!” Rhezere always managed to brush it off with brilliant smiles, a light tone, deliberately changing the subject to something annoying. Anything to avoid letting Cor acknowledge there was vulnerability.
Never talked about the scars they both knew weren’t from accidents. Never talked about the people Rhezere wouldn’t admit to caring about. Never talked about the fact that Cor preferring to sleep in Rhezere’s room wasn’t only because they were synced.
Cor sighed in disgust and let it go.