Chapter Text
At fifteen minutes to ten on a Sunday night in September, Mitsuba Sousuke is hit by a speeding car.
He’s on his way back from a late night photography session in the park when it happens, camera in one hand, coat in the other- because although it’s autumn in theory, the weather still stubbornly clings to the idea of summer. Warm nights, long days, cicada song in the bushes. Mitsuba wears his sweater tied about his shoulders like a cape, always prepared for the wrong sort of weather.
He’s in high spirits, he spins on his heel to take a photo of the way the street-lamp beams cut slices into the night, and a car swerves around the corner before Mitsuba can even think to breathe.
Brakes, metal, shattered brickwork and someone screaming. A horror movie in the back of Mitsuba’s head.
Then he wakes up, sprawled over backwards onto the tarmac. Right as rain.
Mitsuba gives himself a once-over- then a twice-over, just to be safe. Running a hand over each arm and each leg, pressing a fist against his ribs to make sure none of his precious bones are broken. It wouldn’t do at all if his cute image were to be ruined by some unsightly cast stuck over his arm or ankle. Although, he thinks, the fuss wouldn’t go unappreciated. (He checks his limbs again, just to be sure.)
Then, he notices that there’s a boy sitting on the pavement next to him.
Mitsuba stares at him, because he’s got a shock of blonde hair that looks like it’s never seen a comb in its life, one tooth at the front with a chip punched out of it, and he’s wearing the most ridiculous earring Mitsuba has ever seen in his life. Bright red, the kanji for traffic scrawled across the front, less of an accessory than a gaudy impression of a Christmas decoration, hanging off the side of the boy’s head. Mitsuba takes personal offence.
He considers his options.
There’s the polite way of doing things, which would involve asking (nicely) why the boy is sitting on the pavement next to him, and why he’s smiling in such a quiet, sad way. As if he holds the secrets to the universe in the palm of his hands, and they’re all becoming a little too heavy to bear. And then there’s the Mitsuba way of doing things, reserved for home and his mom’s business meetings, because he’s never really liked her co-workers.
“The hell are you looking at, lame-earring boy?” Resolutely, he chooses the Mitsuba way.
Said lame earring boy has the nerve to look surprised, pointing squarely at his chest as if there’s anyone else in the area with a terrible taste in accessories to match. He looks like he wants to say something, but Mitsuba beats him to it, riled up in a way he hasn’t felt in a long while.
“Who else would I be talking to?” He pushes, voice raised because the streets sit a little too quietly for his liking. “ Traffic safety? Is this some kind of joke? I bet this is a regular thing for you- I bet!”
“I-” Lame earring boy looks close to bewildered, whatever he was attempting to say dying on its way up his throat.
“I bet you were trying to do weird things to me while I was unconscious, weren’t you? You’re just a pervert with an ugly earring and a weird fetish and-” The boy lunges forwards. He moves faster than Mitsuba expects him to- faster than anyone would expect him to- and pinches Mitsuba’s face with one hand, effectively silencing him. Were he not suddenly stilled into a state of shock, Mitsuba thinks he might have just bitten him.
“I’m here to collect your soul.” He says, eyes sharp and serious and not entirely natural. Like he’s made out of the same material as glow-in-the-dark stars, or the cats-eye markers on the road beyond Mitsuba’s feet. Catching the moonlight from where it nestles behind the clouds. He’s close and bright and Mitsuba doesn’t know where to put any of his limbs.
So this time, he does bite him.
He sinks his teeth in, and the boy yelps in surprise as if he’s a wounded puppy rather than a person with hands and hair and the stupidest earring Mitsuba has ever seen. Mitsuba takes the opportunity to scramble further away- his mom will start to fuss if he doesn’t make it back home by ten.
“ I’m here to collect your soul, ” He echoes, as the boy nurses his hand. “Is that some weird euphemism you came up with?”
“No, I’m-” The boy looks at a loss for words, and Mitsuba clocks it as a personal victory. (He can’t remember the last time he managed to make a strong impact on someone- negative or otherwise. It feels good.) “You’re dead.” The boy resolves.
Mitsuba almost chokes on his tongue. “You’d really threaten a cute, defenceless boy like me?”
“No, I mean, you died, seriously- I’m supposed to collect your soul now.” The boy pushes, adamant. Mitsuba almost admires his perseverance, even through the frustration that builds about the cats-eye glare to the edges of his figure. (He’s odd to look at in more ways than one.)
Mitsuba thinks he might just be the weirdest person he’s ever met.
He tells him as such.
“Can’t you find some other car crash victim to be a creep to? I need to find my camera and get back home,” The wreckage of the car is still a little way down the road, surrounded by shards of brickwork and the distinct smell of burning rubber, and Mitsuba pities the flowerbeds of whoever’s garden it is that’s been torn up under its wheels. He thinks he should perhaps be concerned by the fact that the driver has yet to resurface, or that nobody has left their houses to help, but the absence of his camera feels like a more pressing issue.
Garden walls and flower beds are replaceable. Years upon years of memories and the camera that has become as much a part of him as his own fingertips- they are not.
“Please don’t go over there,” The boy is persistent in a way that’s almost disconcerting. “I don’t care if you don’t listen to another word I say, just believe me when I say you don’t want to look.”
He grabs Mitsuba’s wrist, fingers cold as ice, and a violent shudder passes through Mitsuba’s entire body. Involuntary, nauseating. He tears his hand away, because at first the boy with his strange earring and his weird euphemisms had been funny. Now, all cats-eye stares and ice-like touches, his presence is just as unsettling as the heavy, clammy silence which rests over the street.
(Why has nobody come out to help yet?)
“I’m just going to look for my camera. I’m not going to start prodding around or anything.” There’s something about the way the boy is staring at him- sad and desperate and electric blue- that makes Mitsuba want to run. So he does, turns on his heel and sprints towards the wreckage before the boy can even think to stop him. Before he can see that Mitsuba is close to tears, for some inexplicable reason.
It feels cold for September, the cicada song no longer echoes from the bushes, and Mitsuba thinks he’s going to be sick. Because there, crushed between the wall and the front wheel of the car, is a mirror image of himself.
“I tried to warn you,” Is all the boy says when Mitsuba falls back down on the pavement, feeling distinctly like his own body has turned itself inside out. “Don’t put in a complaint about me.”
“You think that’s funny, lame earring boy?” Mitsuba manages to reply, before he bursts into tears.
“It’s Kou,” The boy says, and though it’s just a name, his voice sounds like it’s laden with enough sadness to last a lifetime. “I’m here to collect your soul.”
He places a hand on Mitsuba’s shoulder, hesitant and numbingly cold, but Mitsuba leans into it anyway- forgoing all of his previous complaints. After all, it’s not as if there’s anyone else around.
The truth of the matter is- Mitsuba Sousuke has not lived much of a life.
His circle of friends extends no further than his acquaintances in the photography club and his own mother. He’s never been abroad (too scared of planes to ever set foot on one), he’s never been on a date (too cute to possibly tie himself down), he’s never made an impact beyond some bad first impressions back in elementary school. A background character in his own story, going about the motions the script tells him to. As cute as they come, but equally as uninteresting.
He wonders if anyone will even remember him.
The thought just makes him cry even harder, curling into himself on the pavement as Kou pats his shoulder like he doesn’t know what else to do with his hands.
“You’re not very good at this.” Mitsuba sniffs through his tears, while Kou puppeteers a clumsy attempt at comfort- with his stupid earring and his ice-cold palms and his glow-in-the-dark eyes.
“I’m trying my best!” Kou responds, indignant. “I’m new to all of this.”
“Try harder then.” Mitsuba wipes futilely at his eyes, and tries to force some sort of humour into his voice to drown out the grief that sits stone-like in the pit of his stomach.
“It’s different in practice than it is in training, okay,” Kou justifies, still patting at Mitsuba’s shoulder as if it’ll do anything to make things better. Around them, the night doesn’t breathe. Cold, suffocating, nothing like September should be. “This is only my third assignment.”
At that, Mitsuba laughs, a bitter, choking sound that doesn’t really feel like a laugh at all. It catches in his throat in all the wrong places, and the tears start up all over again. “So, are you an angel then? Or a grim reaper? Is bad fashion sense part of the job description?” He asks, and hates how the words waver.
“I think grim reaper explains it best.” Kou answers, purposefully avoiding the comment on his earring. He tugs on it as he speaks; habitual, absentminded. Similar to the way Mitsuba often pulls at the ends of his sleeves or the camera strap around his neck. For one short, breathless moment, Kou looks startlingly human. Like someone Mitsuba would pass in the corridors at school, or argue with over the last melon pan in the convenience store.
“Where’s the black cloak then- or the scythe?” He replies instead, because he misses melon pan already.
“I’m not actually a grim reaper, that’s just the easiest way to explain my job,” A tug of his earring, a frown on his face. Scarily human, scarily real. “But I do have a weapon, a staff-” He pauses. “Amane confiscated it, though.”
At that, Mitsuba really does laugh.
Kou’s expression melts into a smile that speaks volumes of sadness. He stands and extends a hand like a promise, reaching across the street to where Mitsuba still sits. “Do you think you’re ready to go?” He asks.
All of a sudden, Mitsuba wants to run.
He’s not ready for this- he told his mom he’d be back by ten, he’s got a camera full of photos to develop, and he’s still got to start his summer homework. He’s got more loose ends than he can think to count, and he doesn’t want to leave them so tangled. He can’t leave a world where, within a few years, nobody will remember the name Mitsuba Sousuke.
The tears come again, this time a knife-blade twist in his gut, sharp and angry and not like this. He thinks, if his voice wasn’t stuck in the back of his throat heavily enough for him to choke on it, he would have screamed. Mitsuba has never known grief like this- he was too young to remember when his father walked out, his grandparents died before he was born, he’s never been close enough to anyone to suffer a painful fallout or breakup. It’s new, raw and terrible, and Mitsuba Sousuke is not ready to die.
(Is anyone?)
Kou looks lost, three assignments into his role as a not-quite-grim-reaper and standing before a crying boy who doesn’t want to die, curled upon the pavement in the breathless night air.
“I’m not really supposed to without permission,” Kou starts. There , Mitsuba feels something like hope. “But I could make a deal with you. I don’t think Amane will yell at me too much.”
“Way to sound suspicious.” Mitsuba chokes out, but the hope is enough to pull him to his feet regardless.
“I can give you one more year. One year to live your life as best as you can,” Kou explains, and Mitsuba feels the night heave in a breath of air. “On the condition that you let me stick around with you.”
He looks guilty almost, tugging at that earring once again. Mitsuba frowns through the tear-trails on his face. “What, do you just want me around so you can do perverted things, or-”
“I don’t remember much about being alive,” Kou interjects, something about his expression so open and earnest that it stops Mitsuba in his tracks. “I figured that, if I tried to live as a normal human for a while, then I’d maybe recall some things that I’d lost.”
Kou extends a hand for an entirely different reason. A boy with electric shock hair and terrible taste in accessories and eyes that glow like cold embers in the dark- reaching out into the night. Mitsuba doesn’t want to spend a year stuck in the company of a not-grim-reaper who wears traffic safety charms as earrings, and potentially has a fetish for car crash victims. Mitsuba also doesn’t want to die. He wipes his tears away with the back of his arm, because one year is better than no time at all.
When he shakes it, he finds that Kou’s hand isn’t quite so cold after all.
“I’m sorry,” Kou says, as the world holds its breath. “I can’t do anything more than this. The rest is up to you.”
Then, before Mitsuba can say another word, it’s warm for September all over again.
The pain in his hand knocks him out cold before he can even scream.
-
Mitsuba doesn’t like hospitals.
He’s only been in one a handful of times- once for a broken toe, once for a bad case of food poisoning that he and his mom caught simultaneously, once to visit a distant relative who just slept the whole time. They’re always busy and clinical and he hates the smell of hand sanitiser, so he’s less than impressed when he opens his eyes to a row of fluorescent lights on the ceiling and the sound of someone coughing something fierce down the corridor.
Aside from feeling stiff from his head to his toes, he feels surprisingly alright.
(There’s a distinct absence of his classmates crying by his bedside, waiting to see if he’s okay because they’ve finally realised how delightful he is- but a boy can dream.)
His mom is sitting there however. Thankfully not crying, because Mitsuba thinks that might have just tipped him over into tearful sobs too. Instead, she smiles down at him, a little watery, a little worried, and asks him how he’s feeling.
“I feel fine,” He admits. A bit sore and a whole lot less cute than the norm, but fine. “I had the weirdest dream though.”
Boys with glow-in-the-dark stars for eyes, cold September nights and ridiculous earrings. A deal, a handshake, one final year in the making. Mitsuba scoffs to himself, because he’s clearly been watching too many bad movies from his mom’s collection.
She laughs. “That’s probably because you’re hopped up on more painkillers than I can remember the names of,” Mitsuba Yukie kicks ass at memory games, so that’s saying something. “Which would explain the dream and the fact that you don’t feel like hell right now.”
“I’m tired.” Is all Mitsuba can respond, because the steady to-and-fro of nurses and family members has begun to feel like a lullabye. Back and forth and back again, until he has to fight to keep his eyes open.
“Go to sleep, then.” His mom jokes, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
He does.
-
He spends the next few days in a state of half-wakefulness, prodded into awareness every few hours by nurses who check his vitals, his memory, the state of his hand.
His hand is something that Mitsuba doesn’t want to dwell on. An elephant in the room, wrapped up in plaster beside him as he sleeps his days away. It took the worst of the damage, from what he’s heard. Crushed between the wheel of the car and a garden wall, then patched back together by surgeons and an artillery of metal plating. In the best case scenario, he’ll be left with an ugly scar for the rest of his life. In the worst case, he’ll never use his hand again.
He’s been told, more than once, that it’s a miracle he didn’t need it amputated.
(It feels like some foolish attempt to cheer him up- a misplaced look on the bright side - so he pretends to be asleep every time they tell him.)
Mitsuba isn’t happy. But, he’s alive. And that’s something.
The dream from the night of the accident still sits heavy and foreboding at the back of his mind. Lying in wait, as if set to pounce. Mitsuba buries it by asking his mom to bring his laptop to the hospital so he can smother his thoughts under episodes of mindless TV dramas. The cast on his hand is unsightly, and it makes operating the keyboard more difficult than it ever should be- but it stops him from thinking about the kanji for traffic and electric blue eyes.
It also stops him from thinking about the summer homework he has yet to start.
It’s over a week before he gets any visitors that aren’t his mom. Unfortunately, said visitor is Yugi Tsukasa, who scrambles in through the doorway, makes a beeline for Mitsuba’s hand, and only narrowly misses when Sakura jerks him backwards by his collar.
There are some things which Mitsuba likes about Nanamine Sakura. They’re a few years older, have a flair for the dramatic, and sometimes offer to do Mitsuba’s eyeliner for him while the broadcasting club is setting up and the photography club is packing away. There are also some things that Mitsuba doesn’t like about Sakura. mainly the fact that, where Sakura is found, Tsukasa won’t be far behind.
Natsuhiko enters the doorway last, and puts a struggling Tsukasa in a headlock like it’s a habit of sorts. Tsukasa struggles for two seconds then goes limp as a doll, with a grin that would almost be endearing if it was on anyone else’s face. Mitsuba shudders.
“Why weren’t you all crying by my bedside?” He huffs, because the fact that it took them a whole week to show concern about his well-being is, quite honestly, unacceptable. Mitsuba wouldn’t say he’s friends with the sole three members of the local broadcasting club- Tsukasa is terrifying to say the least, and Sakura and Natsuhiko both graduated school, so he doesn’t see them in the corridors like he used to. But the photography club, held in a small media room by the park, always packs up as the broadcasting club arrives. And hence, here they are- stuck in some no-man’s land between acquaintances and friends.
Still, Mitsuba thinks, some concern would have been nice.
“I was going to come earlier,” Tsukasa pipes up, giving up the doll act to squirm out of Natsuhiko’s grip. “I wanted to see the X-rays from where your hand got all smashed up.”
Mitsuba grimaces. Tsukasa makes grabby-hands towards the cast on his arm. It’s Sakura that comes to the rescue this time, securing a firm grip on Tsukasa’s wrist with hands that Mitsuba knows from experience are stronger than they look.
“How are you doing?” They ask, in their soft voice. A shred of concern that Mitsuba can tell is genuine.
“Terrible,” He groans in response, and flops back onto the pillows to prove a point. “I can’t take a shower so I have to use dry shampoo on my hair, and this cast is totally not cute- plus the nurses keep prodding me and interrupting my beauty sleep.”
Mitsuba turns on the dramatics. He knows it’s easier than to admit the truth- that he’s scared he’ll never be able to use his hand again, that he can’t shake his dreams of deals and handshakes and electric eyes, that he’s being weaned off the painkillers so he feels distinctly like he’s been hit by a truck. ( A convertible, actually- his mom had joked the first time he told her as such. Making light of the situation in a way that only she could have managed.)
On top of his worries- Mitsuba has been told too many times that he could have died that night. How it’s a miracle that he’s still here, still breathing. It’s a giant, terrible concept, which perches upon the fluorescent lights in the hospital corridor and leers over him. Every second of every day he’s sat here, it sits and it waits.
You could have died, it says. (It sounds like twisting metal and a boy with the coldest hands Mitsuba has ever known.)
“Do you want anything to drink?” Sakura asks, like they understand everything without Mitsuba having to say a word. “There’s a cafe downstairs that we passed on the way up.”
“I’d fight another convertible for some lemonade right now.” Mitsuba affirms. Making light of the situation in a way that only his mom could have managed.
Sakura smiles- quiet and knowing and far beyond their years. “Natsuhiko, Tsukasa, let's go and get lemonade.”
Tsukasa trails behind as they leave, and Mitsuba bunches his sheets up to his chin to hide his cast from view. But instead of taking a lunge for it, sharp canines bared, Tsukasa just turns over his shoulder and grins as if he knows a huge, brilliant secret.
“One year isn’t that long, you know.” He says.
Mitsuba swears the temperature in the room drops by ten degrees.
-
There’s no such thing as angels or grim reapers or boys with electric-charged eyes. Near-death experiences are just something for the movie screen.
It keeps him up at night, regardless.
-
The all-clear comes after two weeks of shuffling around the corridors of the hospital, watching his way through five seasons of a drama he can’t even remember the title of, and dousing his hair in more dry shampoo than he cares to take note of. His mom drives him back home. He sits in the front seat of the car, head leaned out of the side window because it’s still warm for September, and he hasn’t tasted fresh air in days.
The first thing he does is take a shower- his hair feels disgusting and he needs to get it back to smelling like strawberries for the sake of his own pride. Getting washed with a plastic bag stuck over one hand to protect his cast is no easy feat, but it’s something he knows he’s going to have to get used to. Especially if his hand will be immobile forever. A new norm which he’s going to have to adjust to.
His mom does his hair for him, he squirms in protest because she always ties his ponytail a little too tightly, and then he pulls on a cardigan to cover up the fact that both his arms are still bruised like ripe fruit in the aftermath of being thrown into a garden wall. The weather clings stubbornly to summer, and Mitsuba wishes autumn would hurry up and sweep onwards.
He goes for a walk next. Being stuck indoors for close to two weeks has done him few favours aside from keeping him safe from insect bites, and he thinks he might just wither up on the spot if he doesn’t get some fresh air and a change of scenery. His mom goes out to pick up something for lunch, reminds him that there’s strawberries in the fridge, and tells him to take care with an expression on her face that’s a far sight more concerned than usual.
Yet another new norm to get used to, Mitsuba supposes, stepping out into the fake-summer streets.
The park and the road which runs alongside it is a place he steers well clear of, not willing to face the demolished garden wall and torn up plants quite yet. Instead he makes a beeline for the highstreet- it’s a weekday and school is back in session, so he should be able to make it through the crowds without running into any classmates. He’s not quite ready for people to see him just yet, with his haphazardly tied hair, the graze on his cheekbone and the unwieldy cast over his arm and hand.
The air smells like summer, and for once, Mitsuba is glad that nobody recognises him.
“There you are!” Footsteps sprinting down the street, a cold hand on Mitsuba’s shoulder, and the kanji for traffic catching the mid-morning sunlight. Sixteen strokes which make Mitsuba’s blood run cold.
Mitsuba has been told more than once that he’s prone to dramatics. And so he screams, wrenches his arm free, and sprints off down the street without a second thought.
Grief twists in the pit of his stomach again like a wound with the stitches ripped clean out. It was meant to be a dream- some nightmare brought on by a cocktail of painkillers and a traumatic experience. Kou, firework eyes and earring and all, is not meant to be here. He’s not meant to exist. Mitsuba thinks he’s going to be sick.
His breath sears his lungs as he runs, out of practice and unused to being outside- never mind undergoing strenuous exercise- and every single part of him hurts. But nothing as much as the realisation that this is it. That there is a countdown over his head that has already begun ticking down. That he’s been wasting his days away in the belief that forever was something he owned.
The thought turns sharp and bitter in his gut, and the time in which he falters is all Kou needs to catch up with him, still breathing easy.
“Hey,” He starts, securing a hand around Mitsuba’s elbow like he expects him to sprint away again. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. You’re kinda bad at running.”
In the light of day, Kou looks almost normal. If he had never encountered him before, Mitsuba could easily mistake him for another student from the highschool down the road, skipping classes for the day. He glances from Kou’s chipped front tooth, to the hand gripping his elbow, and hits him solidly in the stomach with the back of his cast.
“Get your creepy hands off me, lame earring boy!” He struggles into the mouth of the nearest sidestreet, smacking at Kou’s hands as he goes, because really, does he not know how to talk to a boy without manhandling him first? Despite looking a bit winded, Kou’s face splits open into a bright grin that’s so earnest it makes Mitsuba’s teeth hurt just looking at it. Nothing like those slow, sad smiles from under the streetlamps.
“Oh good, you do remember me!” Kou sounds delighted, and Mitsuba wants to hit him again. “You really didn’t make it easy for me to find you, y’know.”
“So you’re a stalker as well as a creep, weird earring boy?” Mitsuba starts, but feels his energy slowly running out. He sighs- heavy, tired. “I thought I’d made you up while under the influence of like, seven different painkillers,” He admits. There’s only so long his theatrics can hold out, under the crushing realisation that Tsukasa was right somehow. One year is not a long time at all. Kou seems to recognise the tone of his voice, and his grin cracks and fades, just a little.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t do anything about your hand.” Kou then replies. There’s a bitter note underlying his words, as though he’s angry towards himself for not being able to help. It’s an odd sound, and Mitsuba feels himself wither underneath it. Here he is, a boy that Kou has known for less than an hour. Here he is, a boy that Kou was willing to change fate for.
He doesn’t address it. (He doesn’t know how to.)
“So,” Mitsuba says instead, through the knife-twist of grief buried to the hilt in his stomach. “Is this really it then? One more year?”
Silence, curled heavy and dissatisfied at the end of the sidestreet. Then-
“One year is better than nothing, right?” Kou responds. Looking on the bright side in a way that Mitsuba thought only his mom was capable of. He’s learning things about Kou by the second- his bright smile, chipped tooth, terrible taste in earrings. He’s someone Mitsuba is just going to have to learn to live with.
“Yeah,” Mitsuba replies, curling a fist around the hilt of the knife-blade, and ripping it free. The longer he can ignore it, the better. “You’re right, I guess.”
“Hey, don’t sound so unsure of my judgement!” Kou wrinkles up his nose and shoves Mitsuba in the arm that isn’t trapped in a cast. Slowly, he then adds; “You might want to walk home a different way- screaming at thin air then bolting off in the other direction isn’t a good look.”
What. Mitsuba thinks.
“What.” Mitsuba says out loud, and feels dread rise up in the pit of his stomach for an entirely different reason.
“Nobody but you can see me- I thought you knew that?” Mitsuba did not, in fact, know that.
Somewhere down the road, there is an entire street-full of people who just saw Mitsuba scream and tear off down the street- hair tied lopsided and his cardigan sleeve bunched up to accommodate for his cast. When he spoke about making an impression, this was not what he had in mind. Kou peers at him like he can’t quite hide his own grin. “I could make myself visible to people, if you’d prefer.” He offers.
Mitsuba groans, and punches Kou solidly in the stomach. Cute image be damned.
“You’re just here to humiliate me! I bet you’re getting some gross kick out of seeing me embarrassed.” He whines. Kou raises his hands to defend himself when Mitsuba tries to hit him a second time.
“I should have taken your soul while I had the chance.” Kou responds, but he’s grinning as if he’s not even bothered by Mitsuba’s attitude at all. (He denies firmly to himself that it’s a nice change of pace.)
Kou assures that he’s entirely visible before they wind back to Mitsuba’s apartment through the side streets. He even stops to pet a cat he finds lounging on top of a gate to prove it, smiling back at Mitsuba as he does so. An unspoken I told you so which is so bright and self-assured it’s almost laughable.
“It’s creepy how you’re so desperate to spend time with me,” Mitsuba calls, when Kou asks him how long it’s going to take them to get home. Home, like Mitsuba’s apartment is a place he belongs in too. “Is it your car crash fetish? Do you think this is hot?” He holds his cast into the air.
“I do not have a car crash fetish!” Kou protests. “You’re the weird one for constantly bringing it up.”
Mitsuba shoves him, Kou shoves back, and for a moment, it feels like they’re friends. Mid-morning, strolling down the streets after skipping school, heading back to Mitsuba’s house to play video games while his mom is out. Mitsuba hasn’t had friends over to his house in a long while. He’s not disliked at school, he’s just not particularly liked either. People talk to him in class and group up with him for team sports, but nothing further than that. There’s no sitting outside the convenience store together or staying for dinner at people’s houses.
Kou isn’t human. He’s got eyes that shine like fireworks in the dark and he can turn himself invisible to everyone but Mitsuba. He’s also the closest thing Mitsuba has to a friend right now. He scoffs to himself, because it doesn’t get any sadder than that. One year left to live, and he’s going to spend it with a dead boy hanging out in the corner of his bedroom.
“So,” Mitsuba starts, to prevent his thoughts from becoming any louder. “Do you remember anything about when you were alive?”
Kou hums, thoughtful. “My name is Kou, and I’d just turned sixteen. I was from around here, but I can’t remember where my house was. That’s all.”
“Birthday?” Mitsuba pushes. Kou shakes his head. “School name?” Another shake. “ Family name?” A third negative. “Wow, you’re hopeless .”
“I can’t help it!” As he speaks, there’s something about Kou’s expression that seems almost guilty. Mitsuba doesn’t know how to deal with just how open he is, heart worn on his sleeve in full view- a clear display of exactly what he feels towards the world around him. (Mitsuba kind of wants to know what he thinks about himself too.)
Mitsuba fumbles with his keys, finding that unlocking the door with one hand is more difficult than he anticipated. Without another word, Kou takes them from his hands and does it for him. All the while, he wears that same earnest smile on his face. They step inside, Mitsuba doesn’t thank him, and Kou doesn’t ask him to.
There’s someone sitting on top of the kitchen table, and he’s eating Mitsuba’s strawberries right out of the carton.
Mitsuba shouts Hey! At the same time as Kou shouts Amane!
Mitsuba begins to feel left out of the loop, as Amane puts down the carton of strawberries, hops off the tabletop, and grabs Kou by the collar of his jacket.
The first thing Mitsuba notices is that Amane looks like a mirror image of Tsukasa, to the point that it’s genuinely upsetting. The second thing he notices is that Amane’s hat is almost as ridiculous as Kou’s earring. The third thing he notices is that Amane is furious .
“Boy-” He shouts, and Kou sets his face into something defiant. Teeth gritted, staring across at where Amane has him caught by the lapels of his jacket. “What are you doing? ”
Kou glances across the kitchen to where Mitsuba stands, significantly out of his depth. “It’s just one year, Amane. I couldn’t take his soul like that.”
“Boy, if we went around making deals with every dead person we felt sorry for, then the city would be full to the brim with wandering souls that none of us have the time to collect,” Amane stares, and Mitsuba shrinks backwards. The one saving grace when it comes to Tsukasa is that he never looks angry. Now, Mitsuba knows exactly what outrage would look like on him. It’s not a comfortable sight. “You can’t be so compassionate.”
“So dead people don’t deserve empathy just ‘cause they’re dead?” Kou challenges. Mitsuba wonders if he can creep past them and escape into his bedroom. “We’re dead too, Amane- do we not deserve a chance either?”
“We didn’t get a chance,” Amane’s voice is ice cold- bitter and sad and Mitsuba flinches away because it feels like he’s overhearing something he wasn’t supposed to witness. “That’s why we’re-”
“You gave Yashiro-senpai an extra year.” Kou says.
The pressure in the room drops, a vacuum opening up in the centre of the kitchen, right between the fridge and the table where Kou and Amane stand in a stalemate. Mitsuba, waiting by the front door, an unwilling observer. (He hopes desperately that he doesn’t become part of the collateral damage too.)
“That’s not-” Amane moves, and Mitsuba takes the opportunity to skirt past him, collect the remaining strawberries from the kitchen table, and sit himself down on the sofa. If he turns the volume up on the TV, he can just about drown out the shouting from behind him. He tosses the stalks from the last few strawberries back into the carton, and tries to pretend that nothing is unusual. Tricking himself that he’s living in an idealised world, where one year is just another measurement of time, and there aren’t two undead boys having a screaming match in his kitchen.
“Oh.” Mitsuba’s mom steps in through the front door with a takeout box in one hand and her car keys in the other. Kou is standing on the kitchen table, Amane is floating about the light fitting, and Mitsuba doesn’t know how he’s going to explain any of this to his mom, open-minded as she is.
“Sousuke, could you tell your friend to get down from the table,” She says, like Amane isn’t there at all. “I should have enough lunch for the three of us.”
In a startling change of demeanor, Amane cackles like a banshee and vanishes into thin air. Kou at least has the decency to look mortified when he scrambles back down from the furniture.
“Actually,” Mitsuba starts, because his mom looks confused out of her mind and Kou is floundering in the corner of the kitchen for any semblance of an explanation. “We already ate. Come on.”
He secures a hand around Kou’s elbow, forces down a shudder over just how cold he is, and hauls him down the corridor towards his room. Apparently, Mitsuba Sousuke must do everything around here. Apparently, he must also invite creepy visitors with car crash fetishes into his bedroom.
Gross.
“You can’t skip out on lunch, it’s not healthy.” Is what Kou decides to address once Mitsuba slams the door shut behind them. Not their deal, not the argument, not how Amane somehow broke into his kitchen and started eating his strawberries out of the fridge. He decides to talk about lunch . Kou looks like he means business too- arms folded, frowning deep and worried. He’s ruining the atmosphere of Mitsuba’s room just by standing there.
“I’ll get some leftovers later.” Mitsuba promises, just to placate him. (He doesn’t exactly feel like eating, not now that talk of souls and death and one year remaining has accommodated his gut- an unwelcome guest.)
Kou’s frown relaxes. “Good, skipping meals isn’t-”
“Are you my parent, Kou-kun?” Mitsuba interjects. “Is this another thing that you’re into?”
Kou picks up a sweater left lying on the bedroom floor and hurls it at Mitsuba’s face. (He thinks he might have deserved that one, just a bit.)
“No touching my stuff!” As much as he may have deserved it, Mitsuba still turns to glare at Kou, tangled up in the arms of the sweater. This is his home, his space- he seldom lets his mom in his room, never mind a strange boy with strange eyes and a smile that errs on the wrong side of too bright. And here is Kou, throwing items of clothing around as though he owns the place. “That’s rule number one, because apparently you don’t know how to act when a cute boy lets you into his room.”
“Ah.” Kou says, and returns a photo frame to its spot on Mitsuba’s bookshelf.
“No touching my stuff, don’t go in my drawers or cupboards, don’t even think about coming in here when I’m sleeping, don’t sit anywhere other than the floor or the beanbag over there.” Mitsuba counts the items on his fingers as he speaks, and Kou nods obediently. If he keeps talking, he can almost fool himself into thinking that Kou is just a friend staying over- maybe he had an argument with his parents, maybe he ran away from home. He’ll be gone by the end of the week, Mitsuba will go back to school, and he will live out his life until he’s old and wrinkly and gross.
The knowledge that he can’t avoid it forever curls up behind his ribs, settling stone-heavy in his chest. But he’s never been good at facing his problems head-on. It’s part of the Mitsuba way of doing things- taking the easy way out.
If Kou has any problems with that, then he doesn’t voice them. Maybe he likes to take the easy way out too. (There’s something about his enthusiasm and stubbornness which tells Mitsuba that’s far from the truth.)
“This beanbag?” Kou asks instead, and flops backwards into it before Mitsuba can give an answer. “Your room is nice.”
“It is.” That’s one thing Mitsuba can agree with.
He likes his room a lot- it’s a place where he can be himself. There’s nobody here to tell him he can’t paint his walls pale pink, or keep a box-full of flavoured lip-glosses next to his desk, or collect enough plushies that it makes getting into bed difficult each night. There’s nobody to make fun of him for hanging up his favourite photos in elaborate frames, or for hoarding scented candles on his windowsill. Elementary school was rough, middle school was rough for entirely different reasons, and this year, he thinks, might just be the worst of them all. But there’s always been a place he could come home to. Kou melts into the beanbag in the corner of the room, and grins up at the ceiling as if he’s found his new favourite place.
“Stop smiling like that, you’re so creepy,” Mitsuba says, and does little to pretend that he’s not glad to see the lack of judgement on Kou’s face. “Anyway, are you going to explain what was going on out there? Why was there a scary kid eating my strawberries.”
“Ah,” Kou repeats, again. “That was Amane- he’s my supervisor. He’s not that much older than me, but he’s been dead for a really long time, so he’s got way more experience. He doesn’t act like it though- he’s a creep and he’s rude to girls and he took my staff off me because he thinks I can’t use it.”
Mitsuba remembers Kou mentioning his name, the night of the crash. Amane, who has been dead for years, yet shares a face with Yugi Tsukasa from the broadcasting club.
“So much for your idea that he wouldn’t yell at you,” Mitsuba comments, settling down on the edge of his bed. His painkillers are sitting next to it along with a glass of water, so he takes one, suddenly all too aware of the ache in his hand. “That sounded a lot like yelling to me.”
“Oh, that was nothing!” Kou has the nerve to grin. “He didn’t even pull out his knife.”
Mitsuba chokes on a mouthful of water. “You let a guy with a knife into my house? What if he attacked me? How could you expect cute, defenceless me to-”
“I wouldn’t have let him come near you!” Kou interrupts him with a grin that sits dazzling upon his face. Sharp canines, chipped front tooth, enthusiastic in a way that makes him look more alive than dead. Mitsuba thinks he might just have to look away. “You’re under my protection now, just leave it all to me!”
Mitsuba has never seen anyone look quite so radiant. It feels as though, suddenly, he doesn’t know what to do with his hands or his feet, or any other part of himself. A stranger in his own bedroom, all because a boy with a stupid earring and electric-shock hair has invited himself in. He decides firmly that he hates every bit of hopeful energy that Kou has.
“That’s so cheesy,” He scoffs. “Way to sound like a bad movie hero.”
“I mean it, though,” Kou tells him, earnest as ever. “This year is meant to be the best you’ll ever have- Amane watching over your shoulder the whole time would just ruin it.”
How can it be the best year ever when I know it’ll be my last, Mitsuba wants to say. How can you, who knows what it’s like to die, look me in the eye and tell me it’ll be okay.
“ You watching over my shoulder is gonna ruin it.” He replies, instead. Fooling himself, taking the easy way out. The truth hangs around his furniture- ominous and heavy and a disaster waiting to happen- and Mitsuba ignores it. The easy way out.
Kou doesn’t mention any one-year-left’s . Mitsuba doesn’t tell him about Tsukasa, because there’s no easy way to inform a person that their boss shares the face of a boy who once told Mitsuba he had a secret, then pulled a long-dead mouse out of his pocket.
“So, are you going to get lunch yet?” Kou asks, still stuck in the beanbag. “Because skipping meals is really-”
“There’s no way you weren’t an older sibling back when you were alive.” Mitsuba comments, and, if he looks hard enough, he thinks he can see a spark of recognition in Kou’s glow-in-the-dark eyes. Before he can say another word, he goes to get leftovers from the kitchen.
“So, who's your friend?” His mom sounds delighted as he re-enters the kitchen, and Mitsuba can hear her knowing smile even behind the screen of her laptop.
“He’s not my friend.” Mitsuba tells her, as he puts two plates into the microwave. One after the other, because operating with one hand is something he’s yet to grow accustomed to.
“ Sure.” She grins, in that I know everything way of hers.
“Sure.” Mitsuba affirms- and when he doubles back to collect the second plate, she’s still smiling.
Back in Mitsuba’s room, Kou has detached himself from the beanbag and stands over the desk in a hunched over pose that can’t possibly be comfortable. He looks solemn, like all the air has been pulled out of the room by the nearest window. Next to him, his food grows cold.
“You’ll put your back out if you stand like that for much longer.” Mitsuba sing-songs, wobbling over to put his plate down on the floor before he drops it. It’s barely past lunch-time, and he’s already tired. His legs hurt, and when he tells Kou as such, he doesn’t even blink. Moving closer, he finally sees what it is that Kou is fixated on.
It’s his camera.
The broken, shattered-to-pieces remains of his camera. Sitting on top of the desk like an apology. The serrated blade of grief, which Mitsuba had tried his best to rip free, comes back and twists itself deep between his ribs. It wouldn’t be short of an exaggeration if Mitsuba said that his camera was everything to him- an extension of himself, allowing him to capture the world in the way he sees it. Photography club was a place where he could belong, editing photos into the night was what kept him busy, taking pictures of the sky, birds, weather was what he wanted to do with his future.
(A future he no longer has, reminds some bitter thought, wrapped underneath his tongue.)
The no-longer-a-camera sits broken upon the desk, and if Mitsuba wasn’t a crybaby at heart, he thinks he could have almost laughed at it. How fitting.
He’s crying before he can even think to stop himself, sinking back into the bed and pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes hard enough that he sees stars. Then, he hears footsteps falling gently across the carpet. Then, the bed dips at his left side. Then, a cold, quiet hand presses against his shoulder. Light, unsure, one of the worst attempts at gentle comfort that Mitsuba has ever had the misfortune of witnessing.
But he doesn’t protest, this time. There’s an insult which sits and dies in the back of his throat, soothed out by Kou sitting steadily beside him. He’s quiet when he needs to be, Mitsuba finds- smiling in a muted, sad way that says he doesn’t understand, but also that he wants to.
Later, Mitsuba will get mad at Kou for putting his clumsy hands all over him, for breaking the rules and sitting somewhere other than the beanbag, for snooping around his bedroom the moment his back was turned.
For now, he just leans closer.
“Can you buy a new one?” Kou aks, eventually. And that’s all it takes to release the bitter, painful laugh from the back of Mitsuba’s throat. He doesn’t know if dead boys still have hearts, but if Kou has one, then Mitsuba is now certain he’d be wearing it right on his sleeve.
“Don’t be stupid,” Mitsuba scoffs, watery and more miserable than he’s ever sounded in his all-too-short life. “Of course I can. It’s just- the principle of it.”
Kou’s expression shifts into something that would be more suited to a confused puppy than a human with two hands to rest on Mituba’s shoulders. “The principle?” He echoes, and Mitsuba decides he doesn’t like dogs any more.
“That camera was meant to take me to photography school. It was supposed to be my future. And now-” A broken lens, and one year left. Mitsuba can’t make his voice curl around the words, because if he speaks them soft into the fake summer air, then they’ll become real. They’ll follow him and he’ll collapse under the weight, and not even Kou’s hands, cold for September, will be able to hold him up.
“One year is a lot longer than you’d think.” Kou says, and for a second or two, Mitsuba remembers how to breathe.
-
“Your friend seemed very lively,” His mom jokes, once Kou has pretended to leave and now sits unseen, swallowed up by the beanbag in the corner of the bedroom. “You seemed to get along well enough though- you even let him into your room!”
There’s a question underlying her words- a hundred questions, even- where did you meet him, why didn’t you mention him before now, what’s with the earring? She doesn’t ask any of them, because if she really wanted to know the answer, she’d probably have coaxed it out of him already.
His mom just knows how to handle him like that. ( You’ll never be as bad as any of my co-workers , she told him once, whispering conspiratory over a plate of tonkatsu. Deal with them, and you can deal with anything .)
“I had to put him in there so he didn’t try to climb on the table again.” Mitsuba responds, a half-truth that has Kou glaring from where he’s making his best attempt to melt into the beanbag.
“Invite him over again, I want to meet him properly.” Yukie says, and Kou grins like he’s got a kilowatt bulb stuck behind his teeth.
Mitsuba groans.
-
He spends the next few days lounging around his room, watching TV shows, eating fruit his mom left in the fridge, and ignoring the heavy, terrible thing which sits above the broken camera on his desk. Denial is the first stage of grief, and Mitsuba doesn’t have any intention of experiencing the other four.
He doesn’t start his summer homework (summer is long-gone, no matter what the weather might think) and Kou sends him small, sad smiles from the corner of the room.
Kou also sends Mitsuba bright, larger-than-life smiles from over his shoulder, trailing around the kitchen after him. The sort of expression that makes him look alive and wild and brilliant, and kind of makes Mitsuba want to lock him in the bedroom so he doesn’t have to look at him. He smiles like he means trouble, but not too much trouble- a kid with a baseball bat who would shatter every window in Mitsuba’s bedroom, then apologise for the mess.
(He’d be a good subject for a photo if he could sit still for longer than two seconds at a push. Or, if Mitsuba’s own ego would allow it.)
“Lame-ass earring pervert.” Mitsuba calls him, when Kou offers to help him pack his school bag for the next day- after watching him struggle with the zipper for five minutes. Kou smacks him in the side for the insult, snatches the bag off him, and closes it with ease.
-
It takes the teacher walking into the room and acknowledging Mitsuba with a curt greeting for his class to notice that he’s back. For some foolish reason, Mitsuba had expected a change- that people would finally realise what they were missing in his absence, and he’d step into the room to find people lining up around the classroom to say good morning. He knows it’s wishful thinking- Mitsuba has never done a single thing to stand out since middle school, and it’d take more than a few weeks of absence to change that.
Nonetheless, it hurts to realise just how irrelevant he’s become.
It’s not that he hasn’t tried- he’s spoken up in class and kicked up a fuss during group projects and tried to do things the Mitsuba way all over again. He sees now that it hasn't made a difference at all. He pulls his laptop out of his bag, and the class turns to face him in some giant, unspoken ‘ oh, he hasn’t been here?’
He types up his work because writing with his left hand is no easy feat, and wonders, low and heavy, if it would make any difference if he had died that night. It’s a small, venomous thought that sits upon his shoulders through the duration of maths class, and makes concentrating on work he’s already behind in all the more difficult.
Would they finally feel his absence? Would they stand up at his funeral and lie that they were friends, that Mitsuba Sousuke was a good person who was gone too soon? (Would they even remember him?)
Satou from the front row answers an equation on the blackboard, and Mitsuba cuts that thought off before it can begin, or he might just cry to the scrawl of chalk against board. He focuses on the numbers instead, staring until Satou’s neat writing turns incomprehensible. Maths is hard, but there’s worse things to think about.
-
Thankfully, accompanying Mitsuba to school isn’t a part of Kou’s attempts to remember what life as a human is like. He does, however, meet him just beyond the gates afterwards, standing against the fence like a delinquent or a jilted lover, waiting for his true love to return. Mitsuba assumes that must make him the cruel sweetheart who left him behind.
“I’d never date you, even if you paid me.” Mitsuba tells him preemptively- he’s too cute to be tied down, after all. He’d just embarrass anyone who tried.
Kou grins. “You’ve got a terrible personality, so I wouldn’t date you either!”
The thing between them is some bizarre middle ground between friends and associates in a grand terrible deal which took place one cold September night. It’s a strange game of push and pull, where Mitsuba insults Kou (rightfully so), Kou hits back (also, rightfully so), and then Kou smiles with all his teeth on display, as if he’s discovered a part of himself that he had forgotten existed. Rinse and repeat. They walk along the road, and the thing tips more towards friends. Kou talks animatedly about streets he might just remember, and Mitsuba keeps his voice low in case he’s not quite visible.
There’s a cafe that they walk past, one which Kou claims he remembers just a little. He wraps a hand around Mitsuba’s wrist and pulls him through the door before he can protest that he has lessons to catch up on, barely any savings left, and that he still hasn’t started on his summer homework.
“Summer is long gone!” Kou tells him, and Mitsuba thinks that he’s at risk of withering under the force of his enthusiasm.
He orders for one, because he’s learned the hard way that Kou doesn’t actually need to eat, but the milkshake that’s placed on the table in front of him has two straws stuck into it and a heart-shaped biscuit embedded in a mountain of whipped cream. A subtle ‘ have fun on your date’ that makes Mitsuba squirm in his seat.
He shoves both straws into his mouth before Kou can get any ideas.
“This jog any memories?” Mitsuba asks around the straws. (He’s not about to take any chances.) Kou glances around, from the lights to the cakes in the display case and the odd trinkets lined up along the window. He hums, curious.
“How mad would you be if I said none at all?” He then asks. Mitsuba kicks him under the table, and hopes that’s enough of an answer.
In the daylight, Kou just looks like any normal boy- rowdy, enthusiastic, terribly dressed. In the daylight, Mitsuba can play into an imaginary world where they’re school friends, where he doesn’t have to check if Kou is visible before talking out loud, and that he doesn’t sometimes disappear at night, only to come back looking as if there’s a lifetime of sadness living in the back of his eyes.
He told Mitsuba one evening that he doesn’t need to worry about any of it, and Mitsuba never brought it up again. He hopes he never has to.
“So you admit that you just brought me here because you wanted to go to a cafe with a cute boy?” He pushes, because that’s what he’d say if they were friends. “I bet you’ve been fantasising about this all day.”
“Speak any louder, why don’t you.” Kou hisses, and- Mitsuba thinks- that sounds like fighting talk.
So he raises his hands to his mouth in a makeshift megaphone, takes a deep breath, and-
“This ugly-earring perv has been fantasising about-”
Kou clamps a hand over his mouth, not even trying to be gentle. Mitsuba struggles and positively shrieks into his palm, and he wonders if this is what having a proper friend is like.
“You’re terrible,” Kou berates, releasing Mitsuba on account of the cafe patrons shooting them strange looks across the tables. “Awful. The worst-”
“But you’re still hanging out with me.” Mitsuba says. But you’re still trying to be my friend.
“But I’m still hanging out with you.” Kou replies, smiling again.
Later, he’ll realise that a dead-boy trying to make friends with a dying-boy sounds like the setup for a bad movie script. For now, though, Mitsuba will just offer Kou a sip of his milkshake, because just maybe, he’s not all that bad. Not if he can take the Mitsuba way of doing things by the horns, and still say I’m hanging out with you with the certainty of someone who will still be hanging out with him for the foreseeable future.
“You know I shouldn’t try to eat or drink stuff.” Kou stares down at the milkshake through sad eyes.
“Come on,” Mitsuba insists, and the irony is almost enough to make him laugh. “Live a little.”
Kou snorts, one part disbelieving and one part amused, then picks up the glass.
-
The beanbag in the corner of Mitsuba’s bedroom has gone from simply being the beanbag, to being Kou’s beanbag. The thought makes it permanent, that he’s here to stay.
-
Tsukasa is waiting to ambush Mitsuba by the door of his classroom. For someone who once crept up on and caught a bird in the school yard with his bare hands, Tsukasa still doesn’t seem to have got the stealth thing down quite right. He keeps leaning around the doorway impatiently, and even when he’s hiding behind the frame, Mitsuba can still see the toes of his shoes peeking out.
He slides his laptop into his bag, excruciatingly slow. Dealing with Tsukasa is an ordeal that’s as terrifying as it is disturbing, and Mitsuba doesn’t want to face it while Sakura isn’t around to play damage control. Tsukasa lurks. Mitsuba pretends that he didn’t actually want to get his lunch out of his locker, anyway.
It takes Tsukasa exactly a minute and a half to get bored of waiting. He sidesteps in through the doorway, marches over to Mitsuba’s desk, and slams the palms of his hands down on the surface with a resounding smack. Mitsuba cringes as almost every head in the classroom turns to stare at them.
Then they see Tsukasa, and look away as fast as possible- par for the course.
“Who were you hanging out with by the gates yesterday?” Tsukasa asks, hands still bracketed on either side of Mitsuba’s desk. “With the funny earring.”
He looks curious, ready to sink his teeth into something. Mitsuba just hopes that something isn’t his arm, or maybe his laptop. If Tsukasa wants to sink his teeth into Kou, then Mitsuba supposes that’s just his problem to deal with.
“Just a friend from another school.” Mitsuba lies. He likes to think it sounds convincing- he and Kou have practiced this, after all. Spinning a tale about how they met, a false backstory that should just about be believable, so long as nobody probes too deeply.
Tsukasa grins in a way that says I know something you don’t. Another huge, dreadful secret. The unsettling kind, said before leaving a hospital room to get lemonade- not the weird kind where he pulls a mouse out of his pocket right after. Mitsuba suppresses a shudder.
But two can play a game of secrets, so Mitsuba doesn’t tell Tsukasa that he knows a grim reaper boy named Amane who shares his face.
“Are you just gonna stare at me all creepy, or do you actually want something?” Mitsuba shrinks back in his chair. Tsukasa has been staring at him a bit too long, with eyes that look almost like they’re made out of the same stuff as glow-in-the-dark stars.
“Maybe,” He says, straightening up again. “Maybe not!”
He goes to sidestep around the desk, and instead walks face first into Yokoo from the front row. Yokoo almost drops his lunch on the floor. Tsukasa blinks like a cat, then skips out of the classroom without a second thought. Mitsuba wants to sleep for a week.
“I don’t get why you hang out with him, Mitsuba-kun,” Yokoo says, after ensuring that his food is in no further danger. His lunchbox has a boat printed on the front of it, as does his bag and his gym shirt. “He’s so weird.”
Mitsuba tries really hard to put his words in the right order. “I don’t hang out with him- I’m an unwilling participant.”
At that, Yokoo laughs. He’s got a loud laugh, one that Mitsuba would normally call obnoxious- but Yokoo has kind eyes and fluffy hair and he kind of looks like a golden retriever puppy which hasn’t yet realised it’s too big to sit in people’s laps any more. Mitsuba has always wanted a puppy, because dogs are one of his favourite animals. Mitsuba thinks he might, just maybe, like Yokoo.
Satou from the front row then approaches, asking if Yokoo wants to eat the tomatoes out of his lunch because he doesn’t like them. Yokoo leaves with a friendly see you later, Mitsuba-kun.
Realistically, that’s how all of their conversations go. A few polite sentences, Mitsuba forcing down the urge to check if Yokoo’s hair is as soft as it looks, then a see you later which never actually happens. He decides that he’s too cute to be dealing with any of this, and heads to his locker to retrieve his lunch.
Tsukasa is still standing, right at the end of the corridor. Mitsuba doesn’t even know which class he’s in, nevermind if he has any friends of his own. He avoids eye contact, and Tsukasa doesn’t move an inch.
-
Denial is the first stage of grief. Mitsuba thinks he’s getting pretty comfortable with it.
-
Mitsuba makes it to mid-October, before an offhand comment from his homeroom teacher brings every bit of his comfortable avoidance crashing to the ground.
It’s raining outside- the weather has finally given up on summer and unleashed an October storm which has persisted for three days straight, and Mitsuba’s shoelaces are wet from where they came untied on his walk to school, and he didn’t have anyone to do them back up for him. Though, in a few days, he switches out his cast for a somewhat more portable hand brace- a small mercy which will make life a little easier.
He considers investing in some velcro shoes, if this is what the future looks like.
His homeroom teacher walks into the room, and drops a stack of pamphlets about the pros and cons of university onto the front desk.
“I know it’s only second year,” He says, to the echo of groans throughout the room. “But this stuff creeps up on you and hits you like a sack of bricks. It’s best to start thinking about it early.”
And it’s that which knocks the floor to ruins under Mitsuba’s feet.
Mitsuba wanted to study photography. He’d go to university, meet new people, make a name for himself, and come out of the other end with an esteemed job on the right side of a camera. That’s not going to happen any more. There’s a countdown over his head that ticks forwards to next September, and then nothing more. He can hear chatter from the desks around him, discussions of a future that his classmates will receive, and he will not.
It’s a heavy, terrible weight to bear.
“Mitsuba-kun, what do you think you’re gonna do after school?” Yokoo from the front row pipes up, with his soft-looking hair and his golden retriever eyes. He leans over the back of his chair, and Mitsuba thinks he might cry.
There is no ‘after school’ here. He thinks.
“Sorry, I think I’m gonna throw up.” He says out loud, and bolts out of the classroom door before anyone can see the tears in his eyes.
He locks himself in a cubicle in the third floor girl’s bathroom, because it’s been out of order for the past two years and everyone knows that it’s one of the only places in the school to get any privacy. It’s also said to be haunted, but ghosts are the least of Mitsuba’s worries.
It feels like someone has kicked him in the chest, and broken every one of his ribs clean in two. The feeling of grief is back, except this time, instead of a knife, it’s a thirty-five inch longsword that skewers him through the chest. Puncturing a lung on the way, and maybe his heart too. He sits on the closed lid of the toilet, sobs into the sleeves of his cardigan, and thinks that maybe dying that night would have been less painful. A kinder, quicker fate.
The bathroom is quiet aside from a steady drip from one of the taps and Mitsuba hopes nobody comes looking for him- he doesn’t know how he could explain any of this to a person who isn’t Kou. Every time he tries to stop crying, to catch his breath and dislodge the sword that sits painful and unwieldy through his chest, it just makes it worse. Loud, angry sobs that stick in his throat and aren’t cute at all. Not in the slightest.
He can’t even say that he has one year left any more- September is long gone, and October is well on its way too.
“I don’t think people ever realise just how tough it is, to know that you’re going to die.” A voice comes from the next stall along, and for a brief moment, Mitsuba wonders if the bathroom actually is haunted. Then he realises that the voice sounds like Tsukasa, but at the same time not like Tsukasa at all. So it must be Amane, sitting in the third stall along, for some reason.
“What are you doing here?” Mitsuba manages to ask, watery and punctuated by a heavy sniff.
“I’m here to tell you that the boy made a mistake- but I’m guessing you’ve figured that out for yourself by now.” Amane says, his voice muffled slightly by the cubicle wall between them. The boy being Kou. The mistake being Mitsuba sitting here, still alive.
“Are you gonna take my soul now, then?” Mitsuba asks. It sounds nothing like the defiant statement it should be. “Because I really don’t want to die in a school bathroom.”
Amane lets out a laugh that doesn’t sound much like a laugh at all. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to- you’re Kou’s responsibility now. I can’t lay a finger on you,” He pauses, and the barometric pressure between the stalls seems to rise till it’s nearly suffocating. “I can give you advice though- you have a chance here that not many of us got. I sure didn’t, and the boy didn’t either. Don’t waste it.”
He sounds bitter and exactly as young as he looks- just another kid who got robbed of his future. Just like Kou. Just like Mitsuba.
“What would you do? If you got the same chance?” Mitsuba leans his head against the cubicle wall. The running and the crying and the surprise of Amane showing up in the third floor girls bathroom has taken all the energy out of him.
Amane hums. “I guess, I’d do all the really dirty-”
Mitsuba yells and cuts him off before he can say anything more. He’s starting to have doubts about the credibility of Amane’s advice.
“Take this seriously!” He sobs, and tries to stop himself from crying all over again.
“Just do all the things you want to do,” Amane says through the wall, once he’s finished cackling. “Make new friends, enter a competition, go swimming in a lake or something. You get one final year- better make it count.”
‘The rest of us weren’t so lucky’ says the cold, terrible thing sitting above the stalls. And then, Amane is gone.
Mitsuba emerges from the cubicle, peers into the mirror, and tries to make himself look presentable. Combing through his hair with one hand, wiping away tears with the sleeve of his cardigan, plastering on a smile which will hopefully distract from the way his eyes look exactly like he’s been crying in the girl’s bathroom for the past half an hour. He steps into the classroom in the middle of English class, ducks his head in an apology, and slides back into his seat.
“You okay?” Yokoo leans over the back of the seat again. He looks worried, and Mitsuba kind of likes the attention. It distracts from the thirty-five inch sword made of grief that punctures clean through one of his lungs. (He knows now that it must have missed his heart, because it’s still beating- fast.)
“Yeah,” He whispers back. “I think my mom tried to poison me over breakfast.”
Yokoo laughs, and the teacher tells them to be quiet, which only makes him laugh harder. Outside, three days into a mid-October storm, it stops raining.
-
On the way home, Mitsuba buys a notebook.
It’s small and unassuming, a plain front cover and neat lines inside, and he knows it’ll tuck nicely out of view into the drawers beside his desk. His shoelaces fall untied into the puddles when he steps out of the shop, and he wonders when Kou will show up, because he could use the help with tying them again.
Back in his room, he pulls the notebook out of his bag, slaps a bunny sticker on the front for good measure, and starts to write a list.
One final year- better make it count. He scrawls Amane’s words onto the top of a page in the middle of the notebook, handwriting sloping messily with the pen gripped in his left hand. He knows for a fact that typing would be easier, but this- the bad handwriting and the empty notebook- just feels correct.
Win a photography competition - the first item reads. He’ll need to get a new camera for that, but he knows that, if he can’t go to study photography, then he’ll just have to make an impact with his work in another way. He’s been told he’s good enough to win more than once- that he has an eye for the unusual that gives his photos an extra something . He hopes that something will be enough to leave an impression.
Make new friends - says the second. He wants to get to know someone who isn’t Tsukasa, and who will spare him more than a few polite words and a See you later, Mitsuba-kun that will never actually happen. Preferably someone who isn’t already dead.
Then Kou is back in his beanbag, out of breath and frowning to himself. Mitsuba doesn’t know how he got into the room, or how long he’s been sitting there watching him with eyes that have lost some of their electricity.
“Don’t worry about it!” Kou tells him, in a way that lets Mitsuba know he should probably be worrying about it. He doesn’t suppose it’s easy, telling people that they’ve died, that their time is up. He wonders, distantly, just how many awful things Kou has seen under that bright smile of his.
“What’re you doing?” Kou asks, peering up from his beanbag.
“I’m making a list,” Mitsuba hesitates, then counts from one to three and back down again. “One of all the things I want to do before I die.” And there it is. He said it- out loud.
Aside from Kou blinking twice in surprise, nothing changes. It hurts just as much as it always did, and the ceiling does not come shattering down to crush him. Mitsuba has said a lot of words in his life- before I die is just another three.
“That’s a good idea.” Kou smiles, and he doesn’t look quite so sad any more.
Mitsuba wracks his brain for all the things he’s ever wanted to do before, then cuts out all of the unrealistic ones- he doesn’t think he has the time to become a superstar, or to graduate university, or to go to space and take photos of the asteroid belt. Kou makes suggestions too, detaching himself from the beanbag to crouch by the side of the desk, but Mitsuba tells him firmly that all his ideas are dumb.
It’s a painful thing to write- a checklist counting down the days of his final year- but it’s also the most cathartic thing he’s done in a long while. He eases that longsword from his chest, and though the wound bleeds and aches and may never heal properly, he thinks he can learn to live with it.
The final list covers three pages, on account of Mitsuba’s wobbly, sloped handwriting. From sleeping under the stars, to planting flowers in the park, to learning how to drive a motorcycle, it makes things feel final, but complete. Kou looks over the list once, then once again, and tells Mitsuba firmly that he’s going to make sure that it’ll be the best year he’s ever known.
With the amount of determination Kou puts into it, Mitsuba can’t help but believe him.
“Why’d you cross that one out?” Kou then asks, pointing at the last line on the list. Get a boyfriend, with one big, wobbly line struck through it.
“‘Cause I’m never gonna be able to find someone as cute as me in the space of a year.” Mitsuba tells him, resolutely.
Kou stares like he wishes he could die for a second time. Mitsuba laughs loud, open and genuine for what feels like the first time since he woke up on the pavement with Kou sitting next to him.
-
Mitsuba’s cast is removed at the hospital days later, and he gets shipped through more tests and X-rays than he can count before his hand is wrapped back up and packaged into a tight-fitting brace. It’s just as hard to move in, but it’s sleeker than the cast and his cardigan sleeves can fit right over the top of it. He can hide the bulk of the brace from view, and there’s something about that which gives him an unexpected hit of confidence.
The next day at lunch, Mitsuba gets out of his own chair, and sits himself down next to Yokoo and Satou from the front row.
“Can I sit here?” He asks, after he’s already got half of his lunch unpackaged onto the table. Satou nods in a way that looks more bemused than angry. Yokoo grins at him, wide and bright, like Kou’s smile but without the sharp teeth in the way. Yokoo slides his natto across the desk and into Satou’s lunchbox while he’s distracted.
Mitsuba knows from experience that the polite way of doing things won’t get him anywhere. If Kou can tolerate the Mitsuba way with barely any complaint, then, just maybe, everyone else can learn to as well.
(If he’s only got one year left, then he wants to spend it as himself. )
So he reaches out, and helps himself to a mouthful of fried potatoes from Yokoo’s lunch. He turns to him, cheeks stuffed with food, and tells him; “I’m cute so it’s allowed.” It’s what he’d say to his mom, to Kou, to the friends he kind of wants Yokoo and Satou to become.
Yokoo stares at Mitsuba like he’s grown an extra head. Satou looks from Yokoo, to Mitsuba, to the potatoes that are now missing a bite, and then almost topples out of his chair from laughing. Yokoo yells that it’s not funny stop laughing, but he’s on the verge of collapsing into giggles too. Mitsuba tells him the potatoes tasted good, and Yokoo does laugh so hard he topples out of his chair.
Satou mentions something about homework, and he and Mitsuba have to talk Yokoo through a sheet of chemical equations due next period. Mitsuba gets another mouthful of potatoes as payment. Satou finds the natto in his lunchbox and swears he doesn’t remember putting it there- something which Mitsuba manages to stay quiet about for a total of ten seconds before selling Yokoo out.
It takes him way longer to eat his lunch than usual, but when the teacher for chemistry class walks into the room, he doesn’t want the break to be over, for once.
This time, there’s no See you later, Mitsuba-kun. This time, Yokoo swears he’ll get him back for the natto when he least expects it, and Satou declares Mitsuba a partner in crime against Yokoo’s picky eating.
As he walks back to his desk, Mitsuba feels satisfied.