Chapter Text
CHAPTER 1
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-POV: Aoi-
Tokyo, September 2010
The air has teeth today, and not metaphorical ones.
It slips under fabric, stings the skin, like it always does in the first chill of autumn. Aoi notices it only because her hands are stiff around the canvas, too tight, as if loosening her grip would mean losing her balance and her nerves.
Autumn is usually kind to her; the way the city softens when the leaves turn gold and orange, the constant hum of Tokyo breathing more slowly than shouting out loud. She should be paying attention to that; she should be cataloguing the color of ginkgo leaves, the way the streets smell different when summer finally gives up. Today it’s all background noise, decorative in a way an artist like her should take time to appreciate; instead, her attention keeps folding back onto the weight in her arms.
The last painting.
One year, ten canvases, ten different emotions, ten attempts at saying something real and meaningful without opening her mouth. Her professors had called the series bold; her classmates, impressive; but no one had called it what it was: invasive, exhausting, soul-draining, and personal in a way that made her sleep optional and her sanity negotiable.
Nine of them are gone already, sold, hung in places she’ll never see in her life. This one still stayed.
Hate.
Really, the word feels heavier than the canvas itself. It hadn’t wanted to exist, not cleanly like the others. No gentleness, no patience was used in its creation; it had come out raw, feverish, all wrong angles and bad intent, and when she’d finally stepped back from it, she’d felt hollowed out and craped clean. Now it presses against her ribs as she moves through the crowd, wrapped in white cloth, pretending to be harmless; it is harmless, in fact, right? It is just a painting.
Aoi blends easily; she always has. Slight frame, faded green jacket freckled with old paint stains she refuses to wash out; light brown hair framing her hazel eyes and hacked into a bob and tied badly at the nape of her neck. Practical and forgettable, the kind of person you bump into and immediately forget, apology included.
Rain starts without asking; autumn likes to be predictable that way.
Strands of hair cling to her cheeks, and the tattoo under her collarbone itches when the first drops hit; it was just a small paintbrush symbolizing her passion, a passion that lately felt like something she no longer understands. Her eyes burn from the sleepless night to finish her project, but she keeps walking.
She also keeps pretending not to feel the stare.
Not the real ones of the real people around her, those are easy; strangers pass, umbrellas tilt, shoes splash water on her calves. But the other eyes, oh, those have been with her longer than she could remember, always watching and waiting.
She learned early not to talk about them; as a child, she’d pointed into corners, into shadows that didn’t behave properly, where ominous shapes leaned where they shouldn’t, where there were faces where there were supposed to be nothing at all. Hollow-eyed things that breathed without lungs.
Her parents had listened at first, then they’d smiled like they were indulging a child because they were. Then doctors followed; an obscene amount of them, with their soft voices and clean rooms, and explanations that felt like dismissal.
There’s nothing there. You’re just very imaginative. You’ll grow out of it.
Aoi hadn’t grown out of it at all.
She had instead stopped speaking of those figures, learned silence the way other kids learned multiplication, learned that truth, when repeated often enough, turns into a liability.
And just like that, ignoring them became muscle memory, a survival trick. If she didn’t look directly at them, they stayed peripheral and manageable, mostly.
Art helped because color drowned out noise, and canvas, usually, didn’t argue. That became the rule. Even now, as she runs through Ueno, things move where they shouldn’t, something coils in the dark alleys between buildings, something crouches in a corner, and something perches too neatly on a lamppost.
Aoi does not look. If I ignore them, they can’t hurt me.
Her destination is close anyway: her university's Art department tucked just behind Ueno Park and its Ueno Tōshō-gū Shrine, in honor of Tokugawa Ieyasu. She just has to drop off the last painting, then collapse into sleep, maybe snacks so unhealthy her grandma would probably have a stroke about, then maybe brainrotting herself in front of some taiga drama while sketching for the pleasure of sketching and not for the sake of a deadline.
She hurries, tugging her jacket tighter. “Rain. Of course it's raining,” she mutters, because the universe enjoys being acknowledged when offending her efforts.
The street ahead is quieter, narrower. She turns the corner still half inside her own head—
—impact. Like running face-first into the concept of no.
She hits something solid, well, someone. The crash steals her breath, and gravity wins; she stumbles backward, the world tilting too fast to correct in time, and the canvas slips from her damp hands.
“No—”
She goes down with it, her palms scraping concrete and burning her skin; the cloth-wrapped canvas, her damn precious painting of Hate, skids toward the wet road.
Aoi lunges as pain registers later than instinct; the only thing that exists is the painting. Her fingers close around it just in time, dragging it back against her chest as a rescued vital organ, and everything else fades. The rain, the cold, even the shadows can wait; everything can wait.
She checks the canvas frantically with shaky hands; if it’s ruined, if all of it, all those nights, all that bleeding effort—
The cloth is damp at the edges, but nothing more; relief hits her so hard it makes her dizzy. Or maybe she was just hungry, and angry, and tired of existing in the same space as people who don’t watch where they’re going.
…She knew she was the one not looking, but that was not a justification for the stranger for trying to ruin her painting.
“What the hell—”
She looks up, furious at the stranger in front of her. He’s tall, and not just tall; he obnoxiously takes up space with the kind of presence that makes the space around him feel incorrectly proportioned, like the street should apologize for being under his feet. His white hair sticks out in every direction, utterly unbothered by the concept of rain ruining your hair. Black jacket, relaxed posture, and sunglasses.
Sunglasses in the rain, in a narrow, gray street that barely qualifies as daylight: psychotic behavior.
He looks at her the way people look at gum stuck to their shoe, with mild irritation and nothing personal. He doesn’t apologize, doesn’t speak, doesn't ask “are you okay,” doesn’t… anything. Just one slow, disapproving eyebrow lifting, as if she had inconvenienced him by existing in his trajectory. No recognition that she’s bleeding a little and shaking a lot, just… ugh, this exists.
Something in Aoi snaps. “What's your problem? Are you blind?” She scrambles to her feet, hugging the canvas to her chest even as her voice shakes. “You almost ruined my painting.”
Almost, her brain supplies viciously; almost still counts.
He tilts his head, as if that’s an interesting question, really considering her for the first time, really looking. A corner of his mouth curves. “Did I?” His voice is smooth and lazy. “Kinda looked like you ran into me.”
Oh. Oh, she hates him already.
Her grip tightens. “Maybe if you weren’t standing in the middle of the sidewalk like a damn statue—”
“—or maybe,” he cuts in, talking over her, smirk widening, “you should watch where you’re going. Hard to miss a whole person standing still, art girl.”
Art girl.
“Huh. Art students are feisty.”
She bristles, her fingers dig into the canvas. “Don’t call me—”
She stops because the shadows moved.
Not toward him, away from him. The things that usually linger, that hover too close to her peripheral vision, pull back, curl inward, press themselves flat against walls and corners like animals that suddenly remembered fear in the presence of a major predator. They don’t want to be near him.
Aoi's stomach drops, and she looks away immediately, forcing herself not to look directly. Don’t acknowledge them. Don’t look. She’d survived years on this rule.
“What’s that face?” he asks, tilting his head again with mock-concern behind the sunglasses. He glances lazily around them as if trying to catch what she's looking at. “You see something interesting? A ghost?”
“No,” she lies too fast. “Nothing.”
He just chuckles, soft and completely unconvinced; then his attention shifts not to her face but to her canvas. She feels it before she understands it, his focus narrowing, as if peeling through cloth and paint and straight into the thing she bled onto that canvas.
His head tilts just a fraction, and Aoi takes an unconscious step back, arms tensing instinctively around the canvas, drawing it closer. “What? What are you staring at?” Her voice cracks, uncertain now. "Are you looking for a fight? I practiced Judo for two years, just so you know."
He hums, thoughtful, ignoring her for the third time in just as many minutes. “…Huh.” It’s quiet, almost to himself, and definitely not to Aoi.
Whatever he sees in her canvas, he doesn’t react the way she expects. He mutters something under his breath, too soft for her to catch. Then, just like that, it’s gone, the focus, the tension, whatever he was doing, looking at her wrapped canvas like a maniac, replaced by that same infuriating grin, casual indifference snapping back into place.
“Wow. That’s a nasty piece you've got there,” he says, dismissively. “Kinda ugly, too.”
Aoi blinks, her mind grinding to a halt. "Excuse me?" Disbelief blooms in her chest. "You haven’t even seen it! Who do you think you are? Are you out of your mind?"
He doesn't answer right away, just keeps looking at her, no, through her. Finally, he straightens and shrugs, actually shrugs, like she isn't worth his time. “Not to mention…” He pauses, then adds, almost lazily, “Yeah, it’s definitely cursed.”
The world stutters. “…What?” Aoi just stares at him, dumbfounded. The words don’t make sense; he had to be insane. Who's this guy, spouting nonsense about her art? About her? She stares at him, searching for the punchline, but apparently, there isn’t one. “Wow,” she says flatly. “Okay. You’re insane.”
“Probably,” he agrees cheerfully. “Still right, though.” He grins, tapping the side of his head as if he had some kind of sixth sense. “Trust me, I’ve got good eyes for these things. That painting? Total disaster waiting to happen. But don’t let that stop you, carry on with your day, art girl. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Being called art girl once again, her temper flares. “The only cursed thing here is your attitude and those stupid sunglasses! Maybe if you take them off, you’ll see where you’re going next time!”
He steps back, already disengaging, already don and waving a hand in goodbye. “Oh, I see just fine. Anyway,” he says over his shoulder, starting to walk away, “good luck with that disaster! Hope it doesn’t eat you alive.”
And then he’s gone; just like that. Long strides, no hesitation, and no second glance. As if she were never there at all. Aoi stands frozen in the rain, heart hammering, insults stacked behind her teeth, with nowhere to go; every instinct screams after him—punch him, insult his bloodline, don’t let this slide—
Don’t.
By the time she looks again, he's gone.
Aoi swallows, jaw tight, and forces herself to turn away as the rain soaks through her jacket; she barely notices. She clutches the canvas closer. “What an idiot,” she mutters. “Ignore him.”
But the feeling sticks: something about today is wrong.
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Aoi finally reaches the art department.
When she stops in front of the main hall, her jacket is soaked through and clinging where it shouldn’t, her hair is plastered to her face, and cold is under her skin. She stands there for half a second longer than necessary, because she's still remembering how to breath after running across the whole Ueno park under the rain, waiting for her pulse to stop trying to kill her.
It doesn’t.
The way the things in the shadows had flinched from the white-haired guys before keeps intruding on her mind.
It doesn’t matter.
Aoi shoves the thought aside; she has trained herself over the years to compartmentalize, minimize, and move on.
What matters is the last canvas in her hands.
Her fingers tighten around the wrapped painting, knuckles aching as she pushes the glass doors open.
Warm air rushes at her, carrying the smell of paint, uselessly kind against the cold in her bones; her shoes squeak against the lobby floor in small and wet, embarrassing sounds.
Familiar place, usually grounding, but today it feels like being swallowed.
The lights hum overhead, with too-loud clicks, a signal she recognizes too well, and her eyes slide automatically toward the corners of the space.
They’re there; of course they are, the deformed shadows. Never too close, hovering where vision blurred, with their shapes that refuse definition and their limbs that don’t commit to real anatomy. Always watching her as if they’re somehow entitled to her peripheral vision.
They’re not real. Or they are, but not her problem.
Aoi keeps walking, with a forward gaze and a steady pace. The commission office is down the hall, second door on the right, right beside the vending machine with the broken second row of snacks, the one that ate her money for over a year without giving back anything, like most things in her life.
She imagines the moment after giving away the Hate painting: empty hands, empty arms, empty mind. The thought almost works, but halfway down the corridor… ugh. There are more of them than usual; the air around her feels crowded with shadows today. Unusual even for her standards, but once again, she tightens her grip on the canvas and keeps moving.
The office door opens with a click, and the man inside smiles at her with kind eyes and white hair curling at the edges. Safe, ordinary human details; nothing like the shadows.
“Ah. Ms. Fujikawa.”
Aoi nods, wipes her hands on her jacket without thinking, in a nervous tell. “Sensei. The final piece.”
She sets the canvas down carefully, reverently, and her fingers hesitate before pulling away a moment too long. Letting go feels… final and wrong at the same time, like leaving a window open and trusting that whatever monster was waiting outside won't enter your home.
Which was crazy; there were no monsters outside. Aoi recited her mantra once again, as if convincing herself to believe it with every neuron; today was really putting her nerves on edge.
The professor hums, pleased. “Remarkable work, Fujikawa-san. Truly. This series has made an impression on the commission. This one,” he continues, lifting the cloth just enough to acknowledge the canvas wrapped inside, “is the Hate painting, yes?”
“Yes.” Aoi smiles because she knows how, but it doesn’t reach very far. Dense, uncooperative, Hate painting.
“We’ll take excellent care of it.”
Aoi bows, automatic and polite; finished. Finally. When she steps back into the hallway with only a single glance back at the painting in what she hopes is a final goodbye, she expects relief to crash into her in some clean, cinematic release.
Instead, the corridor looks… stretched. Shadows too long and corners deeper than they were five minutes ago.
She starts toward the stairs with a very important mission on her mind: down, out, home.
Halfway there, she realizes something else is wrong. The shapes are gone. Gone. The space they occupied feels abruptly vacant, like a room after furniture has been dragged out in a hurry.
Aoi slows. Huh? She glances around with a small frown creasing her face, dazzled. Where are all those shadows? Her pulse stutters because that doesn’t happen usually; they never just leave.
At the second-floor landing, she finally sees it: one of them, one of the shadows, standing still in the middle of the hall, too tall and thin, with limbs stretched past human shape and eyes black and empty and very, very focused. It looks scared, which is also unusual, but the fact that it's here sends a spark of relief through Aoi's nerves: just another normal day in her unnormal life.
She adjusts her path smoothly, as if this were always the plan, and turns down another corridor without breaking stride.
Ignore it.
Ignore it.
Thanks, kami. One of them is here; nothing wrong today.
No, not that, ignore it.
But the silence is still wrong and pressured, and the building feels like it’s holding its breath.
When she reaches the first floor, nothing. No shadows, no movement, not even that scared-looking shadow that was following her mere moments ago from a corner. Her stomach drops: they fled. The realization hits her all at once. From what?
She takes the stairs to the ground floor so fast her feet barely touch the step. Her heart's slamming as she notices something else wrong, as if the day's having fun piling up mistake after mistake.
Outside the windows, the sky is black and heavy, like someone pulled a curtain too early.
It’s not that late; she knows it’s not that late. The clock on the wall confirms it with indifferent honesty: just mid-afternoon. And yet the campus looks like night swallowed it whole.
Her instincts, which were never wrong and usually very loud, start screaming: leave, now.
On the ground floor, the lobby is empty. No students, no voices, no life. Just the echo of her footsteps and the hum of failing lights, while the whole campus was still suffocated in that black curtain. Her hand closes around the door handle fast and trembling with contained panic; in retrospect, maybe the panic's not that contained.
The handle's too cold, and just as the lights flicker, the air presses.
Aoi freezes; every nerve in her body locks down at once, in a primal and unarguable survival instinct. The certainty slaps her mind: if you move, you die.
Her fingers go numb around the handle because it’s the only solid thing left in the room, and her chest tightens until breathing feels optional.
Don’t turn around. Don’t breathe. Don’t exist too loudly.
She doesn’t know how she knows, but she's pretty sure something's behind her.
Never before in her life has she been absolutely, devastatingly sure this has nothing to do with her imagination.
The air behind her bends and presses around her throat like a gripping hand, and soon enough, cold seeps through the entire lobby until even her breath fogs in front of her mouth.
Aoi doesn’t turn because turning feels like permission. This isn’t one of the usual shadows. But her body refuses, locked in place.
Then a voice cuts through the silence. “Why… you… hate me?” Clear and broken, and aimed directly at her spine.
Her heart skips, then slams back into motion. No.No, no, no. This isn’t a mindless shadow. They never spoke before.
The voice asks again, closer. “Why… you… hate…”
She swallows.
Don’t move.
Don’t breathe.
Don’t look.
Don’t—
Her traitor's neck betrays her; slowly, like she’s moving through water, she turns. The thing stands a few feet away, almost human in a way that irked her. Skin stretched thin to the point of breaking, and gray over angles that shouldn’t exist; arms too long, with fingers ending in claws that kiss the tile, producing a sound that makes her teeth clatter; its face looks unfinished, melted, hollow-eyed, with lips pulled back into something that might once have been a mouth if someone dared to imagine past the horror.
And in its eyes—
Hate. Focused and personal.
“Don’t… hate me.”
The whisper that was no longer a whisper coils through the lobby, almost pleading in its wrongness, and Aoi’s legs shake.
This one wants an answer. You can’t ignore this one.
The claws scrape forward, and that’s when her body finally listens to itself. Aoi rips herself away from the door and bolts sideways just as the glass explodes behind her; the sound that follows her is deafening. Shards rain down over her, glittering, and she throws her arms up, hits the floor hard, skin screaming as glass bites into her.
No time to mourn her scraped knees. She’s up again, feet slipping as she hits the ground and runs.
Behind her, slow footsteps, never rushing.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Each step cracks the tile and makes the building tremble, or maybe Aoi was just that scared that everything in her vision was blurring and making less and less sense as the horror proceeded.
Far behind her but somehow still close enough for her to hear, he thing breathes patiently, like it knows Aoi has really nowhere to run.
“…hate… don’t… hate…”
Why me? What did I do? She doesn’t slow because she knows these halls by heart, every turn, every blind corner, but it doesn’t matter. No matter how fast she moves, that thing follows at the same steady pace in an almost insulting cadence.
It will catch her. She's sure of this.
Aoi skids around a corner—
—and slams straight into something solid for the second time that day.
What she grabs, unlike the handle and the lobby and apparently the whole campus, is warm and human. She gasps, stumbles back, hands clutching black fabric on instinct, and when she looks up, her brain does something unhelpful and petty.
Of course it’s him.
Those white hair, that jacket, that face, that attitude. Those sunglasses—no, he's not wearing sunglasses now, which is reassuring because it was still raining and they were inside; Aoi would have had to say something about it if he showed up still wearing sunglasses inside on a rainy day. Somehow, she still wishes he had worn sunglasses, because those eyes—
Ridiculously blue. Calm and bored. Overall, pretty eyes. On her mental scale of pretty eyes, they scale a solid nine. Her mind short-circuits, annoyed. Because why wouldn’t the universe stack the deck like this, giving the same guy she had called a dumb idiot those pretty eyes?
Focus, Aoi. There is still a monster trying to kill you. Maybe revise your priority.
She shoves herself back, panic reaching back to the surface of her face. “You—get out of here!”
He barely reacts. “Told you,” he says lightly, like they’re discussing cryptocurrency, “that ugly painting of yours was a disaster waiting to happen.”
Deciding that, despite the pretty eyes, her first impression of him was, in fact, correct, she doesn’t wait for more. Aoi runs past him, heart in her throat, and then she glances back just for a second.
He isn’t running; he’s, god help her, walking. Hands in his pockets, shoulders loose, strolling straight toward the hallway she just escaped from, toward the corner that monster was about to turn.
Aoi watches him with a kind of stunned disbelief that feels embarrassingly familiar, like when a stranger cuts in line, and you’re too shocked to be rude fast enough.
No. No, no, no, what is he doing? Then, she remembers, oh no. He can’t see it. He doesn’t understand—she tells herself, because that’s the only explanation that doesn’t involve her having the worst luck in Tokyo.
How does she explain it to a stranger? Hi, sorry, there’s a nightmare behind you, could you maybe not stroll into it like you’re sightseeing? She’s spent her whole life pretending these things aren’t there, but pretending is easy when you’re the only one paying the price; now someone else is about to pay it.
“Wait!” Her voice comes out wrecked. Unflattering. She turns back despite every instinct screaming at her not to. “You can’t—there’s something—”
He stops, turns his head just enough to look back like she’s interrupted him mid-thought, with an expression that says, Kami, you’re persistent. Not Kami, are you okay? Definitely not Kami, there’s a monster, and we're doomed.
“Seriously?” he says, irritation creeping in. “Just disappear already, art girl.”
Aoi stares: What the hell is wrong with him? The list must be very long.
“I’m serious,” she snaps, and it comes out too desperate; she hates that. “You need to run. There’s a monster right there!”
She points, wild and frantic, toward the end of the corridor, where the air distorts behind him, and the monster's jagged shadows bleed into the dying light, claws dragging and carving their way into the world.
He lifts an eyebrow, then exhales, slow, long, and theatrical. “A monster,” he repeats flatly. “Booo. Scary.”
He turns back toward it, hands still in his pockets.
Aoi’s anger boils so fast: Is he— is he stupid? No, that’s too generous; stupid implies efforts, at least.
For one breathtaking second, she considers letting him go. She can blame natural selection, darwinism and the universe’s trash taking itself out. But the monster shifts closer, and she sees the way its attention hooks onto him for a split second before sliding right back to her like she’s the main course.
No. She can’t let the stupid white-haired guy die on her watch.
Aoi curses his bloodline under her breath, ugly but heartfelt, and her eyes snag on red: a fire extinguisher mounted to the wall.
Perfect. Why not?
She lunges for it, yanks it free, and the cold metal bites her palms, but the weight grounds her. She doesn’t think because thinking is for people not currently being hunted, and she doesn't have the luxury right now.
She just sprints after him and throws. “Watch out!”
The extinguisher slams into the monster’s torso with a satisfying thud; it staggers, barely, as if she’s thrown a pillow at a truck, but at least it’s something. A heartbeat of interruption in the monster's charge.
Aoi whirls back to him, panting. “Listen—I know this sounds insane, but there's a big scary monster right in front of us! That thing is real, and if you don’t want to die, you need to run.”
He squints down at her like she is the inconvenience, like she is the hazard, not the monster. Then his mouth curls, smugly.
“A monster,” he says again, tapping his chin, faux-thoughtful. “And your big plan is… a fire extinguisher.”
Aoi’s jaw drops for good this time. “What are you— are you stupid? I’m trying to save your life, you ungrateful knucklehead—”
She doesn’t finish, because the monster lunges, moving too fast for her brain to keep up, a blur of grey limbs and worse intentions. Air screams around its movement, and a cruel voice slams into her brain:
This is it. I'm done.
Her arms lift, useless, flimsy, bracing for impact, as her mind flashes through a dozen endings, none of them good, all of them loud—
The impact never comes.
In its place, only silence. Aoi’s eyes snap open to the sight of the monster's claws frozen inches from them, stopped mid-swipe, hoovering against something invisible. The tips scrape in sparks of pressure and friction, but they can't move forward.
Standing in front of her, like he’s waiting for a bus, is him, somehow, somehow, hands in his pockets.
Aoi stares at the monster, then at him, then back again at the monster, because her brain is trying to do the math of a reality that includes this.
He looks her up and down, unhurried, the way someone might appraise a messy canvas. “So,” he says, head tilting, “you were just pretending you couldn’t see the curses, before.”
Curses?
The word lands in her head, refusing to leave, no matter how much Aoi wants it to. She should say something intelligent. She should scream, kick him where it hurts, and leave the whole mess behind.
Instead, her brain locks on a single messy truth that makes her whole blood boil in frustration.
Her mouth opens, and her voice comes out cracked. “You— you can see it?” Her fists clench. “You can see it, no screw that, you can stop it, and you didn’t do anything?!”
He shrugs; actually shrugs. “Didn’t feel like it.”
As if that’s normal. For the record, Aoi thinks it's not normal at all. She is going to kill him; not today, because she’s busy not dying, but eventually, someday.
His gaze flicks over his shoulder at the trapped monster, no, curse as he calls it; then back to her. “So?” he asks, like they’re continuing the conversation from earlier without interruption. “Where’s the ugly painting?”
Aoi just… stares. What is even my life. There is a curse trying to carve her into concept art; the hallway looks like the inside of someone’s nightmare, hers probably; her hands are bleeding, and her entire nervous system is on fire. And this man is worried… about her painting. Worse. He's calling it ugly.
“Hello?” he adds, voice light, conversational; he waves a hand casually in front of her face, as if looking at a rare case of dissociation and finding it funny. “Earth to art girl? Where’s that ugly, cursed painting of yours? The one you threw a tantrum before—”
Her brain stutters. “Are you… insulting my art?” a part of her observes, dimly, and that part that loves her art very much is petty enough to stay conscious through the trauma. “What are you even talking about?” she snaps, jabbing a finger to his chest and not reaching, the same way the curse couldn't reach. “There’s a monster here trying to kill us, and you—”
“Kill you,” he corrects lazily, not even looking at her. “I’m actually fine.” He nods toward the curse with a lazy thumb throw behind his back. “That thing’s here because of the ugly painting. So. Where is it?”
Aoi wants to bite him, then to shake him until something humane falls out. “I—” She swallows. “I gave it to the commission office earlier.”
He sighs like she’s just confessed to pouring bleach into an aquarium full of rare fish at risk of extinction. “Great.” A beat. “So you handed a cursed painting to a bunch of non-sorcerers. You just keep making it worse.”
“I—” Aoi starts, because excuse me? She doesn’t even know what half of those words mean, and he’s saying them like she should have taken an elective in Supernatural Disaster Management.
Before she can find a good insult to convey her frustration, the curse’s voice leaks through the air again, strained and wet and furious, still pushing against the invisible wall.
“Why… do you hate me?”
Aoi’s head turns automatically as her frustration detonates. “Would you both just shut up?” she snaps, voice cracking again. “My painting’s not ugly, and I don’t even know why you—”
The curse growls, louder in its insistence and demand. “Why do you hate me?”
Suddenly, the hallway feels too small, and the air tastes like metal. Her breath comes too fast as the absurdity piles up; him, casual as a bored god; the curse, somehow emotionally needy; her, bleeding and furious and trapped in the middle. Something inside her breaks.
“Fine!” she blurts, too loud. “Because when I was in fifth grade, the boy I liked thought I was weird for seeing things like you!”
Silence drops. The horrible, awkward kind.
Aoi stares at the curse like she can’t believe she just said that out loud, here, now, in front of this stranger with stupid hair and stupid eyes and a stupid attitude.
But the curse…recoils. Without much drama, it twitches as if the confession has snagged at its core by accident.
Of course the one time she weaponizes her humiliation, it works.
Her mind, cruel and unhelpful, supplies the memory anyway:
Fifth grade. Kenta. The stupid thrill of liking someone and the catastrophic confidence of telling him. His laugh and the way his face had shifted in disgust and ugly amusement. Weirdo, he had called her, and the whole class was echoing it by the end of the day.
She never mentioned it again.
While Aoi’s breathing is ragged, her hands sting, and her brain supplies the memories, the white-haired man? He lets out a long, dramatic sigh, rubbing the back of his neck like she’s exhausted him personally. “Wow,” he mutters. “Fifth-grade trauma.” His gaze slides toward the curse, then back to her. “Well, I’m glad it's all cleared up, now.”
Aoi’s brain is already in pieces when he turns away.
No, wait, he doesn’t simply turn away, he does that thing where he starts walking like the hallway is a moving sidewalk and everyone else is just… baggage.
He’s actually leaving.
Of course, the only person who looks remotely qualified not die today is also the kind of person who would abandon her without a blink.
“No— wait—!” She stumbles after him. “You can’t just— you can’t leave me here!”
He doesn’t slow, doesn’t look back; he lifts a hand in a lazy wave over his shoulder like that’s a substitute for proper responsibility.
Aoi lurches after him anyway, half-running, slipping on tile that’s still gritty with glass. “Hey!” she calls, and it’s not even anger anymore. “You can’t be serious. You can’t just—just leave me here.”
Behind her, the curse stirs again; claws scrape and breath wheezes. “Don’t… hate… me…”
Aoi tries to keep up, legs shaking and brain screaming.“Stop!” Her voice breaks again. “Save me!”
The words hit the air, and something snaps. It's not even a sound, more a sensation, like a rubber band stretched too far, finally giving up. The pressure changes, and the hallway tilts a fraction.
He freezes mid-step. Just… stops, completely still, like someone pressed pause on him and he doesn't know how to restart himself. He doesn’t turn immediately, doesn’t even breathe for a beat. But his shoulders go rigid.
“…What?” His voice cuts through the silence, threaded with something she did not expect to hear from him: unease, maybe confusion, and a flicker of alarm, quickly masked with irritation because that’s clearly his comfort zone with her. “What did you do? What was that?”
Aoi blinks, throat tight. “I— I don’t know. I just—”
“You just what?” He turns his head slightly, impatient as if she's being dense on purpose.
Her mind tries to assemble a coherent sentence and keeps dropping pieces on the floor. What has she done? She hasn’t done anything—had she? All she has done is beg him to save her, like any sane person would do, because that's what you do when a monster is about to rip you apart. “I… begged you to save me?” she says, pathetic and small like she’s twelve again, asking an adult to believe her about the monsters in the corners.
Why is he suddenly acting like this? He was going to leave her here to fend for herself just moments before, and yet, here he is, frozen in place as if her words had triggered… something. The whole situation feels like a nightmare she can't wake up from; she's trapped between a curse that wants to kill her and a strange guy who seems mentally unstable.
Aoi presses herself lower to the ground, giving up on everything; her hands, still stinging from the cuts, throb as they press against the hard surface. Blood smears on the tiles beneath her, and she winces, biting her lip to keep from crying out.
That's when she notices the man's expression shift in a way that makes her stomach sink further; his eyes widen for a fraction, then he frowns, as if something finally clicked in his head, and he doesn’t like what it means.
He looks down at his hands, raises them slowly, cautiously, like he expects to see something there. Then he starts brushing at his arms, his chest, his jacket, quick, jerky movements, swatting at nothing, as if he’s trying to wipe off a stain only he can feel.
“What the hell…?” he mutters, half to himself, and his eyes dart to her, then to the air around him, then back to her. “Oh. Oh no. No, you didn’t. You didn’t.”
Aoi stares, wide-eyed. Great. So the strongest person in the building is having a… what, a crisis? A breakdown? An allergic reaction?
“You’ve gone mad,” she says under her breath, and it comes out with a nervous little laugh because her brain is too far gone. “You’ve actually—wow—you’ve completely lost it now, of all the times.”
He doesn’t even hear her; he keeps brushing at himself, muttering faster now. “No way. This isn’t happening.” He grimaces like he’s tasted something bitter, forming a small pout with his lips. “You must’ve done it when you grabbed my jacket—ugh. Great. You really did it.”
His glare snaps to her like a whip, like she woke up this morning and chose inconvenience the tall man.
Aoi blinks, mind blank. “What… what did I do?”
Before he answers, the curse growls again, dragging the sound across the floor. “Why… you… hate me…”
The words suffocate her mind and her body. Right. The curse is still there. It’s patient, it has time, apparently.
Aoi sinks lower without meaning to while everything feels too loud and too distant at the same time, like her brain is trying to float away from her body out of sheer self-preservation.
This is how I die. Chased by a monster. Abandoned by a lunatic. Killed in an art building. An obituary nobody reads. Local girl dies holding her feelings.
Just as she's writing her mental obituary, he stills, and his hands finally halt their compulsive brushing. His posture changes, subtle and terrifyingly quick. His shoulders square, his face empties out of frantic irritation and settles into clear focus as his eyes lock on the curse.
“Ah. Damn,” he mutters, like he’s annoyed he has to do his job.
He moves; one second, he’s several steps away, mid-argument with the universe and scrubbing at his jacket, the next, he’s in front of her, between her and the curse like a living, annoyed wall.
Aoi’s breath catches. “What—?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he raises one hand, extends a single finger, casual as pointing out a typo.
And the air blooms.
A Red light flares, searing and violent, from his fingertip. Heat lashes across Aoi’s face, stinging her eyes just as she throws up an arm, flinching hard. The blast punches through the hallway. Tiles buckle; the floor groans; cracks spiderweb outward, and debris skitters across the ground. The fluorescent suspended lights scream once before dying out; one fixture snaps loose and dangles, sparking.
The curse doesn’t even get a dramatic death. One blink and it’s gone.
No scream or last word. No more why do you hate me, thank fuck, because Aoi was about five seconds away from answering with her entire autobiography.
Now, the hallway is wrecked, and he stands there like he just swatted a fly because, apparently, in his opinion, he had.
He exhales, now bored again, instantly, then glances down at her, eyebrow lifting in that infuriating look that says well? You done being a problem?
Aoi stares up, mouth opening and closing once like a very dumb and proud fish. “What… are you?” comes out, tiny and disbelieving.
He rubs at his temples, irritated. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Then, sharper, because apparently her existence is a personal inconvenience—“Do you know what you’ve done?”
She blinks; dust snaps from her lashes. “I—I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Figures.” He flexes his fingers, staring at them and testing something, maybe checking whether the universe still behaves. “Of course you don’t. This is why I hate dealing with amateurs.” He looks toward the empty space where the curse used to be, mildly disappointed. “Whatever. I’ll figure this mess out later.”
Mess? Her whole world just detonated, and he calls it a mess? She almost laughs again, but it would come out as a sob that she refuses to give him.
He sighs again, dramatically, as his gaze snaps back to her, blue eyes bright with that lazy, arrogant amusement. “Now,” he says, “we’re going to get your ugly painting.”
Aoi’s brain lags; is he really still thinking about the painting?
“My—”
“Show me the way,” he adds with a mock-innocent smirk, like they’re heading to a café. “Art girl.”
Aoi just stares, struggling to keep up with his logic; because yes, she’s terrified, and furious, and bleeding, but underneath all of it, the one thought that refuses to shut up is—
Why the hell didn’t you blow up that monster from the very start?