Chapter Text
“I know you’re up to no good...again.”
“And what would make you say that, Senpai?” Noi asks innocently, brushing dust from the world’s oldest necronomicon and dropping it into a haggard-looking box labelled E.S.F.L.C (or, En’s Stupid Fucking Lexicon Collection).
“You didn’t answer my texts.”
The Archives are humming with energy: a byproduct of magic being methodically cast and refined, smoke secreted from pores like sweat and left to transfix and transform whatever it falls upon at will. Shin leans against the worn shelves of the case behind Noi’s workstation and feels the threat of splinters under his shoulder blade. The table she likes to use sits in the laser-focused beam of midday sun that pours in from the skylight. He consciously stands in the shadow around it to avoid sweating to death.
Noi continues to bask, a certainty he can always rely on: she’s a fucking weirdo who likes the heat. “I was digging up some information on undoing decay,” she tells him. And, “You’re so clingy, Senpai. I don’t have to answer you all the time.”
“Guess I’m going to lunch by myself, then.”
“W-Wait a sec—Senpai—!”
Thirty minutes later they end up in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in town between a magics shop and a theatre they’ve been to only once before. True to form, or by extension of a refined habit they’d fallen into back when she was still encased like a bullet, they sit by the window and plow through a three-course meal.
“What’s with the sudden interest in necromancy?” he asks after, while she’s busy working at her slice of Black Forest cake. “Isn’t that a kind of magic only life-givers can use?”
“Well—yes, mostly.” She lifts her eyes to meet his. “Is there someone you would bring back, if you could?”
“Hypothetically?”
“Potentially.”
He thinks her question sounds loaded but picks it open anyways, like an itchy scab half-grown over a wound. “No, not really. Violating the laws of death isn't exactly out of the ordinary here, either, but you’re talking about something worse, aren’t you?”
“N-No! Nothing like that!”
He says, “Don’t lie to your Senpai.”
Noi sets her fork on the plate and he attempts to decipher the unusually placid expression on her face. En must have said something, Shin thinks, unconsciously tensing. She’s off an octave and that only comes from concern for self-preservation—something which Shin wouldn’t recognize in himself because he’d always executed his decisions in the service of someone else’s.
To confirm his suspicions: “En thinks I have an untapped potential with my magic. I'm trying to heal Ebisu, and I might be able to undo her zombification if her flesh isn’t too far gone. Normally, there must be some living tissue for me to work with, but if I manage to do it without any living tissue, perhaps I could..."
Shin had learned in his first month after eradicating the association that the Sorcerer’s World exists in moral opposition to Hole: the violation of death isn’t about the humanity in any of them.
“You’re thinking you could practice to be someone similar to a life-giver?” he asks.
“I don't know.”
He wants to prod but knows it isn’t funny, so he takes his fork and steals a bite of her cake.
“Hey!”
“You weren’t eating it,” he says, and is relieved to find her gaze has softened away from the crimson glow of anticipation, reflecting the string of thoughts in her mind. He scoops another piece from her plate. “You gonna tell me what kind of life-magic you were hoping to find in a necronomicon?”
“That,” she says, “was out of my own curiosity.”
They pay for their food and don’t speak again until they return to the Archives. Shin finds that the shadow has extended over the desk now as the sun begins to descend from the sky. He curiously reaches into E.S.F.L.C. and pulls out the leather-bound tome to find that its cover is stitched from dried sorcerers' flesh.
There’s a lot he can decide to do in this situation: logically he should slice the book into slivers, but part of him is fighting the urge to walk away and through the doors and across town to the restaurant that makes delicious cheese-filled croissants to await the inevitable combustion of En's estate through Noi’s botched esoteric rituals, and he could always, he doesn’t know—put her on the table and fuck her with his tongue until she taps out, or something. Anything to distract her from whatever no-good scheme she’s formulated today.
Instead, he sets it in her open palms when she makes the gesture.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he says, waving her off with a flick of his wrist. “Don’t do anything dangerous without me, all right?”
“Of course not, Senpai!”
Surprising to exactly no one, Shin isn't reassured. He can’t articulate why; he just really, really doesn’t like the look of that book in her hands.