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He’s singing along with the radio when he gets the news.
For days afterward, he’ll be hounded by the outlandish but unshakable idea that if he hadn’t answered the phone, they’d still be alive.
*
The funeral disgusts him with how beautiful it is.
Shouta wouldn’t have cared about any of the ornate floral arrangements or the gaudy displays of candles and incense. Oboro would have wanted it to be a celebration of their lives, not a room full of mourning.
Full of ostentatious displays of grief from people who didn’t truly know either of them.
Hizashi leaves when he hears someone say that at least they can still be together.
Lovers in death as in life.
He goes home and falls apart again.
Nemuri finds him later when he’d thought he was done crying, sitting on his kitchen floor still dressed for the service. Bits of opal and obsidian decorate the floor around him, pretty little shards of wasted potential, and his hand is bleeding freely where a jagged edge had sliced him when he shattered the protective charm he’d had above the door.
Useless.
Nemuri sits next to him and he holds his breath until he can’t anymore and a sob bursts from him, and she rocks him and strokes his hair until his tears dry up again.
She tells him she’ll finalize the cremation plans and he lies to her. He tells her no, Shouta wanted to be buried. He wanted to be returned to the earth, Oboro to the sky.
It makes sense – it sounds so much like them that she believes it, even though Hizashi’s certain they would have wanted their ashes scattered together.
Held together by Nemuri’s arms, eyes red and stinging, palm bloodied, soul scraped raw, Hizashi forms a plan.
Watching them cook together is the worst one.
Hizashi probably has a new worst every time the three of them are together, a new ‘I can’t take any more than this, I can’t keep smiling if they look any happier than they are right now,’ but this domesticity is like tiny razors of teeth gnawing into his heart, and he’s wondering how big the hole will have to get before the pain wins and he can’t fake happiness anymore.
Shouta’s happiness isn’t fake.
They’re arguing over a recipe, Shouta mocking Oboro’s loose interpretation of the directions, Oboro saying spices don’t need to be measured if you know what you like, Shouta suggesting that if it works like that then why don’t they just put all their favorite foods together in a stew, Oboro not ceding his point and agreeing that it would be delicious.
There’s a smile on Shouta’s face the whole time.
He looks at Oboro with such devotion his love may as well be carved on his bones. Like all the chips in their souls, their scars, the specific shapes of their personalities were fated to slot together perfectly. A key in a lock.
H izashi’s no more than a lockpick. A hollow version of that love, trying to force his way in one pin at a time. Making Shouta smile is something he’s learned how to do over years of practice and it will never be as easy for him as for Oboro, who summons Shouta’s happiness, those tender, adoring looks, only by existing.
“Hizashi, you’re on my side, right?” Oboro calls, turning with a grin – his own version of a fond smile.
He’s always been on Oboro’s side. They’re both in love with Shouta. But he’s never going to say that.
“Sure,” is what he says instead, “since I enchanted the cumin and cinnamon so you taste them when you touch the containers.”
Oboro’s jaw drops in dramatic indignance, and Shouta fails to stifle a laugh.
“One time,” Oboro mutters. “I mixed them up one time.”
There’s dirt under his nails, and somehow that’s distracting even when it’s not really there. He hadn’t touched anything, not directly; he’d been meticulous about not being found out as a graverobber.
He’d gone under cover of darkness and the dense fog he’d conjured to help obscure his crime. A spell he’d learned from Oboro.
Fitting, for this.
The fog, shifting so much earth, covering both his physical and magical footprints, getting the body back home – his reserves are halfway to depletion already, and if not for the extra magic he’d been tucking away in charms and sealing spells, he wouldn’t be able to do the deed tonight.
Reanimation costs a lot of magic.
Not that anyone’s ever written a manual on it.
But he knows it’s possible.
It wouldn’t be illegal if nobody had ever performed it.
His basement is warded; no trace of the darkness he’s performing will escape the room. He has no neighbors, not close enough to be alerted, but he won’t take any chances with this.
The body lies in the middle of the circle that had taken him hours to draw – so many intricate sigils. The candles he’s meticulously chosen for their colors and lengths wait off to one side until he finishes one final check – the bones and skin are fully intact, any wards placed to fend off spirits looking for an empty shell to inhabit have been cleansed – then line the perimeter of the circle.
Hizashi wastes magic lighting them, because his fingers are shaking too much to strike any matches.
He takes a breath and pulls in every bit of magic he has tucked away – sealed inside him and in every charm and talisman he could find in the house – then feels it drain rapidly, like a magnet ripping it straight from his skin as he says the words he prays will work.
The candles go out.
Hizashi whimpers a spell, calling on light, then lets it go out again.
Shouta’s eyes are open.
*
He spends two days too scared to sleep.
The door down to his basement becomes a thing out of his nightmares, a looming, gargantuan portal that seems far too flimsy a barricade for what lies behind it.
Sometimes he thinks he can smell it.
Decay, disease, decomposition, death.
Depravity.
Shouta blinks, which Hizashi hadn’t thought to find strange until it became unnerving – such a normal, human function performed by such a lifeless form.
He also breathes, which he shouldn’t need to do. Hizashi takes that to mean there is life in there. His brain must be functioning enough to be cognizant of the body it’s attached to.
He’d fled when Shouta had first woken up, too unnerved by the unnatural glide of his body as he sat up, head lolling into place until he stared straight ahead.
Hizashi sat and shook, mind blank, until hours later when he realized Nemuri was talking to him. He’d fumbled his way through a conversation about wanting to be alone and promised to answer her calls and texts. She’d hugged him, warm, long, solid, and left after bringing in the sympathy gifts that had been collecting outside his front door.
After sunrise, when Hizashi could pick himself up and open that door again, Shouta hadn’t moved. He still sat in the center of the circle, among the tipped candles. He didn’t react, at least not to sound or sight – Hizashi couldn’t make himself get close enough to touch him. He knelt in front of him, spoke his name, and couldn’t tell if his eyes were focused or not.
*
On the second day, his eyes move. They follow Hizashi as he sits down, they follow the finger Hizashi moves from side to side, but nothing else stirs. If Hizashi goes beyond his range of vision, his eyes snap back to the wall directly in front of him.
Unsettling.
It wasn’t fear that had kept him from sleeping, at least not fear of Shouta.
What kept him from shutting his eyes was the terrifying thought that it had gone wrong, that it wasn’t Shouta in there.
What if he’d brought back something else, invited an entity that wasn’t supposed to be here, something malevolent, and it now resided in Shouta’s body?
Or worse: What if it was Shouta, trapped inside, aware but unable to move, to speak, to convey his horror at what Hizashi had done? Or maybe his mind had been warped, twisted by the shock of his death and what came after and then being yanked back to life.
Maybe Shouta was the dark, unnatural thing.
Hizashi would lie in bed and stare at the doorway out into the hall. Every time he closed his eyes, he imagined a sound, or felt a presence staring at him, and his heart would pound faster, harder, painfully so, until he opened his eyes again and saw that there was no shadowy figure standing by his bed.
The second night, unable to stop replaying the way Shouta’s eyes had followed him while the rest remained a perfect statue, Hizashi falls asleep. So many hours awake, each of them spent under a haze of terror, and his mind finally gives in to his body’s pleas for rest.
He awakes with a start, leaping from bed the moment awareness reaches him. He needs to know; it’s light out, he’d been asleep long enough something could have happened. Shouta could have moved or something could have happened to his body, or the dark thing he was so afraid of could have escaped, or Nemuri could have come over and found his shameful secret.
He flings open the door to the basement, stumbling down the last few steps and barely catching himself, only to rear back and fall anyway, landing hard on the bottom stair when he sees – Shouta’s looking at him. His body hasn’t moved, but his head is turned.
It doesn’t look right.
His neck doesn’t appear to be turned any more than is humanly possible, but he still somehow looks bizarre. Perfectly expressionless face, still body, slow blinks as he stares directly at Hizashi – he’s never felt more scrutinized in his life than as he stands, hands trembling, and walks over in front of Shouta.
His eyes no longer seem to move, motionless as his head turns. Hizashi kneels and looks.
Stares.
Those are Shouta’s eyes. That’s Shouta’s face, Shouta’s body. The man he loves.
Hizashi swallows thickly, mouth dry. He tries to speak and only a squeak emerges. He clears his throat and tries again.
“Shouta?”
Those eyes stare back at him, and Hizashi doesn’t know why relief is mixed in with the sense of failure.
Maybe it’s too soon to expect anything. His research hadn’t give him any sort of timeline; maybe three days isn’t long enough, maybe the slow progression is normal.
Normal – as if people stoop to his level all the time.
He tries again.
“Can you understand me?”
Silence. Blinking. Breathing.
Then a single nod, a slow up and down, eyes never leaving his.
Hizashi runs again.
He slams the door shut and locks it twice: throwing the physical bolt into place and shakily muttering the words for the magical lock as he backs away.
He reaches a wall and slides down to the floor, clutching his head. He gags and retches, but nothing comes up – he can’t remember the last time he ate. Unexpected tears are in his eyes, warm as they spill down his cheeks.
What has he done?
Why couldn’t he have dealt with his grief like any sane person would have? Why did he have to do this, why was he so sickeningly attached to Shouta that he’d risk everything, risk being stripped of his magic entirely, ostracized, jailed for the rest of his life if he wasn’t lynched and publicly executed for being an abomination – just for the chance to be near him again?
He’d foolishly thought that anything would be better than nothing, so now he has this. A creature, a being that made crystals of ice spread through Hizashi’s veins simply by existing, a mockup he couldn’t stand to be around, an effigy of Shouta that held nothing of his warmth behind those dead eyes, only emptiness in a familiar shell.
He thinks about turning himself in. He thinks about calling Nemuri over, telling her to look in the basement, waiting while she absorbs the knowledge of what he’s done. She would stay calm; she’d come back up and sit with him and ask why and what he was thinking and she’d be gentle with him and stroke his hair while she explained what would happen, how she was going to call the police and she could put him to sleep for a while if he wanted. She’d say that it was good that he’d given himself up, and she’d try to make them both believe that whoever sentenced him would see that he was still deep in mourning and show leniency.
And the soul in the basement would be set free to go back to whatever realm it called home, and Shouta’s body would finally be cremated.
Hizashi doesn’t want that.
He’s scared, exhausted, horrified with himself. He has no plan for moving forward, no long-term precautions for making certain nobody would ever find out. He’s still caught in sorrow, because even if he’s achieved his goal, even if that’s Shouta sitting down there, it’s not the same as having him back.
But he doesn’t want to let go of him again. He can’t.
Shouta had been ripped away from him; how can he willingly give him up again?
Hizashi sniffs and wipes his eyes, and stands up, legs shaky but heart determined, as if with a few tears he’d been able to shed days of soul-deep doubt.
Has he done the right thing?
No; he’ll never be able to justify reanimation, even to himself. Every “But I…” he can imagine wouldn’t be enough to erase the sensation that he’d done something reprehensible, something morally outrageous.
But he’s done it.
He’s accomplished it, and Shouta’s becoming more alive every day.
He can’t stop now.
“Do you remember that witch we met last week?”
Hizashi waits, but Shouta’s still seemingly engrossed in whatever old tome he’s flipping through. “You’ll have to be a little more specific.”
“At the nursery. When you wanted another jasmine plant.”
“Oh, the guy working there? With the little rain clouds?”
Hizashi does remember him – bright-eyed and chipper, grin hardly ceasing during the minutes-long conversation they’d wound up in. Relatively new in town, loves his job, which he got by demonstrating one of the weather tricks that came so naturally to him (while they spoke, he’d had to shoo one of his more playful dark clouds back to work watering the plants). He’d been chatty. Friendly. Cute.
“Yeah. He was there again today.”
“Get roped into another chat?” Hizashi smiles down at Shouta’s familiar, purring in his lap, imagining they’re sharing amusement at the thought of Shouta being stuck alone with someone nearly as talkative as Hizashi.
“I think he asked me out.”
Hizashi’s fingers clutch at the cat’s fur and it tenses, on edge with the sudden change in emotion until Hizashi catches him self and scratches under its chin, hoping Shouta hadn’t sensed any of his familiar’s temporary turmoil through their bond.
“You think?” he asks, and whether it’s courtesy of the siren ancestry his mother swore they had or simply years of practicing nonchalance about Shouta’s love life, it comes out without a hint of what he’s truly feeling.
S houta hums, frown deepening as he continues turning pages. “He asked if the catnip I got was for my garden or my boyfriend’s. I told him you were just my friend and it was for my cat. Then we talked about familiars. Then he asked if I wanted to meet for coffee sometime, and I assume he meant as a date.”
Hizashi laughs, and some of it’s real. “Yes, Shouta, he definitely meant as a date.”
Shouta only hums again.
“What’d you say?”
“I said maybe.”
“Oof.” Hizashi’s chest releases. “Not interested, huh?”
“What?” Shouta finally looks up. “I said maybe.”
“Did you leave him any way to contact you?”
“No, he didn’t ask.”
“So you told him ‘maybe’ and then left.”
“Yes?”
Hizashi sighs with affection. “It’s not like you were buying cat food; people only buy new plants but so often. You didn’t say yes and then left him there not knowing when or if he’d see you again. He probably thought you were just too polite to say no.”
“Oh.” Shouta’s eyes drop. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“So…” Hizashi ventures. “You really did just mean ‘maybe?’”
“I wanted to think about it.” Shouta shrugs.
“So you’re considering it?”
The book snaps closed harder than he thinks was intended, but Shouta still taps a finger on the table before speaking again. “What do you think?”
“You’re asking me to choose your dates now?” The incredulity he doesn’t need to fake, but the smile is a strain. “I don’t know, what’d you sense from his aura?”
“That he’s exactly what he appears to be.”
An outgoing, motor-mouthed witch. Smiles a lot. Charming enough to keep total strangers invested in a conversation. Slightly taller than Shouta. Attention-grabbing hair. Wants to be with Shouta.
Hizashi can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt.
The only difference between them was in how much they had to lose if the answer was ‘no.’
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I trust your judgment more than mine when it comes to things like this.”
If Hizashi were a petty man, he’d abuse that trust. He’d tell Shouta to forget about it, that they weren’t at all suited for each other.
And maybe he is petty.
“I think you should go for it.”
But he loves Shouta too much to stand in the way of his happiness.
The first time he tries to get Shouta upstairs, he only makes it onto the first step before careening backward into Hizashi. His movements are still too mechanical, too stilted and stiff.
He can walk, arms limp at his sides, eyes either directly ahead or locked onto Hizashi, but he doesn’t seem to have a sense of his body. The first time he’d tried to stand up (only after Hizashi told him to), he’d overbalanced and tipped sideways, head bashing against the floor when he made no attempt to break his own fall, then had attempted it again and would have fallen again if he hadn’t been told to stop.
So Hizashi waits.
He moves a desk into the basement and thinks about trying to start working remotely – he’ll have to go back eventually; nobody would believe he was okay if he became a recluse (Nemuri especially would be visiting him daily). But he can’t keep his eyes off the room’s other occupant.
He watches Shouta’s movements become fluid. His steps turn more graceful, he looks around at the rest of the room, he sits and stands without help, he reaches out to touch the candles and crystals lining the shelves. The basement door opening seems to summon him, as he’ll appear at the bottom of the stairs whenever Hizashi descends them.
The dread that had made a home in his chest starts to relinquish its hold – warily, like Hizashi isn’t quite sure he should be allowed to feel anything close to okay yet.
One day Shouta stops in front of the steps, gazing up at the door above, frozen like the first time he’d opened his eyes, until Hizashi says “You can go up there, if you want.”
Shouta climbs the stairs easily this time.
He blinks rapidly when the door opens, which Hizashi takes as a positive sign – he can’t remember exactly what he read about the association between blinking and memories, but it looks more human than anything Shouta’s done so far.
His face is unmoving, neutral, as he pads around the house, but his eyes dart around relentlessly. He swerves to avoid the table without looking at it, takes a larger step to miss the creaky floorboard while he’s focused on Hizashi’s guitar across the room.
It’s better than Hizashi’s felt in days.
Shouta moves through the kitchen, eyeing the dried herbs hung in the window. Hizashi almost moves to stop him when he steps toward the door, but Shouta stops, gaze fixed upward, on the middle of the doorframe.
The charm that had hung there, the one Hizashi had broken after the funeral, was Shouta’s. A gift, because protection is stronger when given – an exchange of power, an acknowledgment of a bond. Shouta had given him obsidian, and Hizashi had given tiger’s eye in return. As far as he knew, it still hung over Shouta and Oboro’s door.
He still can’t imagine going over there, going through their belongings. He trusts Nemuri to pack away the important things, save them for when he thinks he can bear the memories.
Shouta hasn’t moved, only reacts when Hizashi says his name. He blinks, then turns and walks back out of the kitchen, back to the basement door, down the stairs. Hizashi follows, watching as he looks through the crystals he’s been perusing for days now. He stops and reaches out for one, and while his body is blocking most of Hizashi’s view, it’s obvious he’s clutching it close to his chest.
He turns and Hizashi sees he’s holding a thin chunk of peridot – healing, balancing the mind and body, releasing guilt and resentment. Protection.
Shouta takes his hand and presses the stone into his palm, pushing his fingers closed around it, and Hizashi starts to cry.
*
Shouta’s face becomes softer in the days that follow. His eyes aren’t so wide open anymore, and his jaw is no longer set as if he’s grinding his teeth.
His posture changes as well. He slouches, back hunched rather than upright at attention, arms braced on the table rather than resting rigidly in his lap. His gait, too, is different – there’s a glide in his movements that’s far removed from that first day, and the way he settles into a chair or lifts himself from the sofa is so very Shouta it sets off a sparkler in Hizashi’s ribcage every time he watches.
He doesn’t show much emotion. A slight furrowing of his brow at something he doesn’t recognize in Hizashi’s home, or when he doesn’t seem to understand something said to him. A vague gentleness around his mouth when Hizashi sings, even less of a smile then he used to give.
He doesn’t speak. Hasn’t even tried, as far as Hizashi’s aware, despite being able to comprehend what’s said to him. Any questions that can’t be answered with an affirmative or negative will get him a stare instead, not nearly as blank as those eerie eyes from day one but still empty enough to make him want to turn away.
Questions involving agency also go nowhere: offering ‘Do you want some?’ while making himself a meager dinner is not answerable, but ‘Are you hungry?’ has Shouta shaking his head without hesitation.
(He’s glad; he’d asked only because Shouta was watching his hands prepare the food with the same intensity he watched everything now, but he doesn’t know how much of Shouta’s body is working. If his brain had flipped a switch for his lungs but not his stomach, would anything he swallowed be redirected to his trachea? Would his brain register suffocation and attempt to tell him he was dying a second time? Better not to test it.)
He doesn’t seem to get bored. Whenever he’s not engaged in watching Hizashi, he’s watching the wall. Without stimulation, he reverts to his day one self – sitting, eyes straight ahead, a primed canvas. Hizashi gives him books (‘Do you remember you used to love this one?’) and he’ll curl into a ball and read until he’s finished it, flipping pages with rote rhythm, no reaction to the words he’s consuming, then set it aside and return to staring until Hizashi offers another (always ‘Do you remember this one?’ or ‘I think you’d like this;’ never ‘Do you want to read this?’).
Still, he grows more casual in his bearing day by day, and Hizashi grows used to having him there.
He grows complacent to the point he’s built enough of his life back for it to come plummeting down when Nemuri says she’s coming over.
He’d known, in that same part of his mind that holds his thoughts about how long he can keep this up, hiding Shouta away from the world, that he couldn’t avoid her forever. She texts him daily, and the shame of hiding what he’s done from her never lets him respond with more than a few perfunctory words.
She’s worried, and telling her he still wants to be alone isn’t going to make her stop worrying. When she invites herself over, Hizashi doesn’t fight her.
He flits around his home tucking sprigs of rosemary into corners, whispering words of protection and banishment. Nemuri would have noticed if there’d been any malignity hanging about the last time she’d visited, so fresh after his ritual, but by now Shouta’s scent will certainly have permeated the place, and her senses are too keen to assume she won’t smell him.
He’d just have to use the excuse that he’d been embarrassed by the state of his place and cleaned just before she came over. The excessive scent from the rose oil could be passed off as nothing more than having gone overboard in his fragile state; he didn’t have to tell her it was to confuse her sensitive nose.
He nearly urges Shouta back into the basement, but since the day they climbed the stairs, Hizashi’s only been down once, to retrieve his laptop. The remnants of the ritual are still there, and he can’t look at how far Shouta’s come and feel okay about locking him back down where he spent those hellish first few days.
Hizashi puts him in the bedroom instead. Sits him down and explains that Nemuri can’t know he’s there, and asks if he understands. Hizashi gets a nod in return, but closing the door behind him, shutting him in, feels like betrayal.
Was he planning to do this for the rest of his life?
He flinches when his front door opens, and not from sensing the wards going off.
When he greets Nemuri in the entryway, he’s not surprised to catch the once-over she gives him. She tries to hide her concern behind a smile and a hug, but he can only assume he looks as frayed as he feels. He hasn’t exactly been prioritizing taking care of himself.
“Do you want tea?” Hizashi offers, if only because he feels like he doesn’t know how to talk to her anymore.
"Let me make it," Nemuri says, and he's grateful; he doesn't want to leave her free to wander the house.
There’s nothing to make small talk about, so Hizashi returns to the living room. He realizes with a sucking jolt that he hadn’t bothered to move his desk back up from the basement, but collects his computer and notebook from the low table in front of his sofa and tries to look busy.
He’s done nothing but stare at the screen by the time Nemuri brings their tea.
“How are you doing?” she asks as she sits, and there’s too much weight behind it to qualify as a simple pleasantry.
Hizashi shrugs. He’d made sure to sit on the side closest to his bedroom, but he realizes now it situates Nemuri to have an open view of it should the door open. “I’m okay.”
It’s mostly a lie. She can likely tell he hasn’t showered in too long – his hair is probably disgusting – and while the house may smell astringently clean, he can’t remember how many times he’s changed clothes since she last saw him. Probably not enough.
“I’ve been trying to keep busy,” he adds.
Also mostly a lie.
“Yeah? Working from home?” Nemuri nods toward his laptop, closed again on the table.
He nods. “There’s this witch that’s trying to sue a restaurant for not allowing her familiar in.”
It’s actually nice to chatter about work. Not that he’s done much of it, but he supposes that’s why his boss assigned him such routine research – how many times has he had to prepare a similar case? He feels like he’s written half the precedents he finds.
It’s easy work that requires little focus, and he’s thankful for it.
He’s thankful for Nemuri, too. As much as he’d cringed at the thought of her in his house with Shouta right there, as much as he thinks he’s going to vomit after she leaves from the way guilt is boiling in his gut, she’s important to him.
She’s the only person who knows what Shouta meant to him.
She understands how much losing him hurt.
If not for what he’d done, she would be his most important person in the world.
So he talks about work and listens to her talk about hers, he’s able to find a real smile for the video she shows him, he’s able to keep the tears to a minimum and say “not yet” when she asks if he wants her to bring over any of Shouta’s things.
There’s a thud and the sound of glass breaking from his bedroom.
Hizashi goes stiff but drags himself back into composure. Nemuri is on her feet, her eyes narrowed into slits, fangs and claws already emerging.
“It’s fine,” Hizashi says with all the nonchalance he can muster. “I got a familiar.” It should feel strange, how easily the lie tumbles from his mouth.
“Oh?” Nemuri asks, her eyes on the bedroom door even as she sits back down, fingers combing over her hair much like a cat smoothing down its fur after a scare. “What about-”
“He left,” Hizashi interrupts. She means Shouta’s cat. “I haven’t seen him since…” He falters, the memory stinging. “I haven’t seen him in a while. And things around here have been…”
The truth? Things have been terrifying. Exhilarating. Nauseating and hopeful and exhausting.
“Quiet.”
It hurts.
“So I checked around and somebody mentioned one that was a little temperamental so I thought hey, I could use a project.”
More lies, so many untruths just building on each other, a fortress that will eventually topple. He has a project, yes, but what about when Nemuri demands to meet his familiar and he has nothing to show her?
The quiver in his smile is real, though.
“That’s good,” Nemuri says, and it’s too sweet. It’s painful. “That you have something to focus on.”
“Yeah, I should probably…” He gestures toward his bedroom.
“Right.”
She hugs him long and hard and gentle before she leaves, and he knows it’s pointless to try and hide that he almost starts crying again.
As soon as she’s outside, he rushes for the bedroom.
“Shouta?”
He opens the door and finds his suspicions confirmed: the smashed glass was from a picture frame, one Shouta had apparently broken on purpose to get at the photo itself – he was tracing over a face with one finger.
Hizashi had it framed on his dresser since of the men on either side of Shouta in the photo, he’s only holding Hizashi’s hand.
“Shouta,” he repeats, stepping closer.
“Oboro.”
His body goes numb.
The first word he’s spoken. The first sound he’s made.
As if getting to hear his voice again isn’t painful enough…
Hizashi swallows, forces limbs he can’t feel to move until he’s standing beside Shouta.
“Hey.”
Shouta turns his head slowly, eyes staying on the photo until it’s out of his sight, and he stares at Hizashi.
There’s something there, something brighter and deeper and sharper. Like before.
“Do you remember him?” Hizashi asks, wishing he didn’t know the answer.
Shouta continues to stare at him for long seconds, frozen but for the tremble in his hand – that’s new – shaking the picture, until he turns back to it, finger again rubbing over the familiar face.
“Oboro,” he repeats, whispered.
It hurts like the day Shouta said “He proposed.”
He wants to ask more, to push him, if only because he’s finally speaking. Does he remember Oboro, truly? Does he remember that picture being taken?
Does he know he shouldn’t be here? Does he remember what happened? Does he realize how lucky he is that his body was intact enough to still house his spirit, that all he’d gotten was a knock on the head in just the wrong spot while Oboro was nothing but blood and-
Blood.
There’s blood on the photo.
He hadn’t noticed at first, too stunned by Shouta speaking, and then he hadn’t registered the significance, but...Shouta’s finger is bleeding from the glass.
Not an oozing trickle of coagulated liquid...it’s thin, smearing translucently over Oboro’s face.
Impossible, because for a body to bleed like that it needs-
He should be ecstatic. It means his ritual is working as it should be, it means Shouta’s had two enormous leaps forward in the space of minutes, it means Hizashi’s getting what he wanted.
He’s not.
Because this feeling is the same one that’s always been there. He stands there willing to tear down the laws of the natural world for the one he loves, and Shouta only has eyes for someone else.
Hizashi’s given him life again, but he’s still not the one making Shouta’s heart beat.
“He proposed.”
Eyes wide, lips parted, body frozen – Hizashi’s lucky the first immediate brush of anguish looks the same as shock.
“He did?”
Shouta’s features look nothing but tentative as he judges the reaction. “You’re surprised.”
“What? No, I just...You don’t seem happy about it.”
A troubled look takes him over, and Hizashi begs his heart not to hope. Hope will kill him.
“I told him I wanted to think about it.”
It will kill him.
“Why?”
“...I don’t know.”
Hizashi waits.
“Did you ever imagine me getting married?”
Yes. Married, handfasted, soul-bonded; Hizashi’s imagined too many commitments to each other. His creativity is possessive, almost cruel in how often and how easily it conjures imaginings of them together – happy, devoted, adoring.
“Yeah.”
Shouta looks so innocent when he looks up, surprised. “Really?”
“Of course.” He shrugs, helpless. “You have a lot to give. I’ve always thought you’d find someone you wanted to spend your life with.”
“Aside from you,” Shouta adds, too quickly and too simply, too casually.
It will kill him.
“Aside from me,” Hizashi amends softly.
“You think I should say yes, then?”
He’ll grieve over this later. Cry until his face aches, drink and rage against Oboro, want to sleep and be dead to the world so he doesn’t have to keep hurting, not trust himself with even a sleeping spell and drink some more until he passes out. Craft a glamour in the morning to cover his shame so nobody has to know how lost he is.
“Is that what you want?”
Shouta looks almost shy, glancing away and smiling so softly, and it’s like Hizashi can feel each individual rusted nail being beaten into his heart.
“Yeah.”
“You’re home early.”
Shouta comes back fast.
Within days, he’s stringing together sentences, curling up on the sofa (the first time Hizashi caught him napping had panicked tears springing to his eyes even as he dashed over to Shouta, because he shouldn’t need to sleep), smiling, rolling his eyes, scoffing. He only slips into that blank stare when he’s not given something to do.
“Yeah, I finished up quicker than I thought I would.”
Hizashi’s gone back to work – half-days, courtesy of an understanding boss he never truly appreciated before – though he wonders if it’s truly necessary to keep up appearances. Yes, maybe it would be strange for him to quit and start preferring ‘his own’ company to anyone else’s, but however much his paranoid brain wants him to think otherwise, people would only blame grief. They would think the sudden loss changed him.
And maybe some would have some suspicions confirmed or put some pieces together, not of what he’d done but of how he’d felt. It’s more believable to think someone went off the rails with grief when they’ve lost someone they held closer to their heart than a friend.
And does it matter to him, anymore?
Ironically, it wouldn’t, if he hadn’t brought Shouta back.
“So you’ll be moving on to a new case, then?”
If Shouta were dead, Hizashi would have no reason to hide. He’d be free to tuck himself away, to become a mourning recluse. He could tell everyone to have pity for him because he’d been so in love with Shouta and had him ripped away so suddenly.
But he’s not sure if Shouta’s dead. And whether a beating heart and the capacity for language and emotion are the difference between life and death is beside the point – Shouta’s here.
He’s here and alive enough to Hizashi that he needs to play at having a normal response to loss.
He can’t have anyone getting suspicious, because he knows what will happen to him if his ritual is discovered, and he doesn’t know what will happen to Shouta if his feelings are discovered.
“Not right away. My boss said I could take a long weekend before we start something fresh.”
Shouta hasn’t talked about it.
Hizashi can’t bring himself to ask what he remembers. He’s definitely not going to ask if Shouta’s curious about why he’s back, or about where his partner is.
He can’t ruin the charade.
“Will you be working full days again?”
As things are now, he can almost pretend they’re together.
When Hizashi smiles at him and he returns it, it’s so close to the devastatingly fond way he used to look at Oboro. When Hizashi puts on a movie and sits next to him, Shouta puts an arm around him and lets him curl close. They spend many nights with their faces so close it’d be too easy to lean over and kiss him.
His love for Shouta had never been sexual, but his thoughts have strayed even there.
Because he’d slept with Shouta – not just Shouta, with both of them, because when the chance came around, he wasn’t going to turn away from it just because Oboro was there. If anything, the lack of anything approaching romantic in his feelings for Oboro (distant care, gratitude for taking care of Shouta; he’d never hated Oboro) had made that night more intense.
Sex magic is powerful, and Hizashi still has energy from that night tucked away in several talismans. It had only taken a little alcohol and Shouta letting slip that he’d never actually tried it before – intimacy with intent, more than sex, using your magic to light up your partner’s senses, carve their pleasure as they did the same to you, building off each other’s emotions until your bodies couldn’t hold any more, leaving you magically glutted but physically exhausted. Not a spell, not a ritual, just the power of magic touching magic in the most primal way.
“Not yet. I’ll still be around most of the day.”
But that’s not why he brought Shouta back.
He brought him back for the odd hitch in his breath that sometimes happens while he’s sleeping, the laxness of his features when he tends to Hizashi’s plants, the occasional hums when he’s focused on a book.
The little things Hizashi thought he’d never experience again.
It doesn’t matter that he can never tell anyone what he’s done, that he’s forced himself into a life of hiding. That Nemuri will almost certainly find out someday. That he’s afraid to bring up Oboro, that he’s going to continue hiding his love from Shouta even after having gone this far.
None of that’s important.
Shouta welcoming him home, Shouta helping him cook a dinner he won’t eat, Shouta sleeping next to him – that’s what’s important.
“Good. I’d miss you.”
Oboro’s moving in with Shouta.
They haven’t even been dating a year.
He hates that he can’t hate Oboro.
Because wouldn’t that make everything easier?
He’s jealous, certainly, definitely, but the ugliness that seeps into his blood when he thinks of them together doesn’t come from wishing awful things on Oboro. It blooms out of regret and disappointment, seeds of vitriol sowed by knowing he did this to himself, new growth sprouting every time he thinks of another similarity between himself and Shouta’s lover.
He hates himself for being so weak, so helplessly devoted that he can’t think the worst of Oboro, because Shouta wouldn’t like it. Shouta loves him, so Hizashi allowed himself to be dragged into friendship.
He never asked for the two of them to become the three of them.
The most he can do is wish Oboro weren’t so kind.
He’s so kind and patient and bright and warm. He’s so good to Shouta. He loves Shouta.
Hizashi’s thought about leaving.
He’s wanted to say goodbye so many times, just leave this hurt behind, but he can’t. He’s selfish.
He’s too selfish to give up Shouta entirely.
He gets two weeks of bliss.
For half a month, he’s happy.
*
Shouta complains of a headache one day and Hizashi doesn’t think anything of it.
Hizashi starts working longer hours, safe in knowing Shouta will be there to greet him with a smile when he gets home.
Shouta keeps getting headaches, bad ones, and Hizashi gets nervous.
Nemuri comes over again, and it’s a good night. She believes his story about his familiar being out wandering somewhere, and Shouta doesn’t ask why he has to hide in the bedroom.
Shouta collapses, curled up in pain, and Hizashi can’t pretend it’s okay.
He doesn’t know what’s going on. He can’t explain what’s happening. There is no research he can turn to in this. No precedents – at least none recorded. Nobody who’d ever performed resurrection had dared write down what they’d done. Hizashi had put together his ritual through theories and desperation, puzzle pieces of knowledge found scattered through the darkest books he owned.
He’d only known it would work because he had to believe it; to think otherwise hadn’t been an option.
He’s scared to try any purification spells at first, not knowing what rules apply – it’s Shouta’s soul in Shouta’s body, but magic doesn’t always work logically. What if anything intended to cleanse him regards his soul as an intruder, a spirit that should no longer be in this realm, and casts it away?
But Shouta gets worse; he hurts, he shakes, he spaces out so Hizashi has to call his name twice, then puts on a false smile as if Hizashi can’t tell the difference.
Hizashi tries everything he can think of. When one spell doesn’t work, he starts looking for another. Protection, healing, purification – he tries any combination of herbs, crystals, and rituals he thinks might make a difference, but the magic he’s loved, studied, played with, and relied on his entire life is failing him. Nothing helps.
This is worse when than when Shouta died.
Hizashi’s watching him die slowly.
Nemuri starts calling every day again. She’s gone back to treating him gently, avoiding Shouta’s name. He wishes he could tell her the truth.
Shouta starts going blank again, eyes focused on empty air. Magic starts behaving oddly around him, energy being pulled in or pushed away – his headache shatters a glass in Hizashi’s hand.
One night an episode takes him, worse than the others. He writhes on the floor, the house trembling, clutching his head, yelling “No” and “I won’t” until it passes. He doesn’t try to get up, just lets his body be cradled as he wipes away Hizashi’s tears and tells him to stop apologizing.
*
The house is shaking when Hizashi wakes up.
He’s already climbing out of bed when he sees Shouta isn’t next to him; the crash only makes him move faster.
Shouta’s standing in the living room. Hizashi can feel magic swirling in the room like a biting wind, a malevolence stirring within it that makes him hunch like the cold is real.
He hears whispering, sharp sibilants from nowhere. His notebooks slide off the table, smash into the wall.
Shouta turns toward him, and Hizashi knows what’s happening.
“I tried,” Shouta says, voice raised just a little over the swishing magic, the voices, the rattling windows. “I wanted you to be happy, but I don’t belong here.”
“No,” Hizashi whimpers, hearing only ‘I don’t belong with you.’ He steps forward, but Shouta steps back.
“Don’t. Please. Don’t.”
Books fly off the shelves, thudding against the wall, the sofa, the floor.
“I have to go.”
Hizashi shakes his head.
“You have to let me go.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know.” He looks pained. He looks like he’s crying. “I know you don’t. And I know you’re hurting, but I am, too.”
The bookshelf topples over.
Hizashi’s hands are clutched hard around his mouth, but his body heaves with the force of his silenced sobs.
“You didn’t have a chance to say goodbye last time. I understand.”
He shakes his head again, forcing burning eyes to keep watching Shouta.
“I wish I could have loved you. I’m sorry.”
The window shatters. Hizashi flinches. Shouta doesn’t.
He repeats: “You have to let me go.”
“Stop,” Hizashi pleads. He can’t do that. He needs to ask Shouta how long he’s known. Why he didn’t say anything. If he’d known all along, or if he didn’t realize until Hizashi brought him back. How he could let Hizashi go on pretending he hadn’t done anything wrong.
How he can stand there and ask Hizashi to end his life.
“Please.”
In the end it takes only a few words of reversal, the right magic focused with the right intent, and everything’s quiet.
“Shouta loves you, you know.”
“What?”
“I’m just saying, I can really see how much he cares about you. And you about him.”
“Um, you are still his boyfriend, right?”
“You know what I mean.”
“...Well, yeah, we’ve been friends for ages. I love him.”
“And I’m really glad he’s had you in his life, and I just hope he still has you.”
“Hm?”
“...I just don’t want anything to come between what you two have going on. Like if one of you had a boyfriend who was really in love with him.”
“Why would that...You...That’s not...Why would you...You’re not coming between anything, that…We’re friends, we don’t have anything-”
“It’s okay. I get it.”
“Get what?”
“Heh, you’re as bad as Shouta sometimes.”
“What?”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. We’re friends, right?”
“...Yes?”
“Good.”
Nemuri finds him the next day when he won’t answer his phone, still sitting on his back steps, hands blistered and dirty, shovel abandoned next to a mound of earth, as desolate as he’d been weeks, months earlier, on his kitchen floor.
“He’s gone,” Hizashi says, and whether it’s to tell her everything’s okay now, or to acknowledge to himself that he’ll never be okay again, he doesn’t know.