Chapter Text
Four years after the fall of No. 6, Shion finds he cannot ignore an empty, intermittent sort of thrumming at the base of his neck. One night as he is looking over a fresh stack of construction proposals, he absentmindedly picks at the rough scar and thinks of deft hands that had skillfully cut there before. He thinks detachedly about the severing of nerves, of a shiny paring knife lying in his kitchen drawer, and startles when he leaves red smudges on a page.
The feeling, as though sensing his desire to be rid of it, only persists.
Once after a quiet dinner, Karan startles him as he’s washing the dishes by gently taking his hand into hers.
“I know,” Karan says, then stops herself, considerate.
“I know you miss him, and that’s normal.”
Shion stares, and for a long moment doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Hardly anyone ever brings up Nezumi to him—as months turned into years (Shion stopped his hopeful countdown long ago) he seems to have become a taboo subject for everyone. He smiles warmly.
He can’t really remember his face anymore.
“Mom,” he clasps his mother’s hand back.
“I’m fine.”
That night, his heart thuds in his chest painfully when he recalls hands gripping his arm roughly, pulling him forward as he breaks clumsily into a run. He takes three more sleeping pills than usual.
Shion attends meetings in a new City Hall building, a crumbling old home without any of the sleek modern touches that tend to make most people sick with remembrance. He argues with bureaucrats, although he supposes he is one now, too, and reads between the lines of paperwork carefully.
He becomes very good at his job—so young, and so devoted to this new city, people say. There are no official titles in the new leadership, a sort of hushed anxiety still surrounding the concept of a government. It is still budding, unstable and volatile, and Shion does his best to keep it from falling apart.
He lets his hair grow out, mainly to cover the mess he makes of his scar almost daily. Cleaning and redressing the spot at the back of his neck becomes a soothing ritual. At meetings, he puts his hair up and thinks nothing of it—the only people who would take note of the eternally present bandage are not there.
Shion hardly looks at himself in the mirror, and chooses not to dwell on the way people look at him sometimes at mandatory dinners and bar mingling, opting to observe and avoid eye contact. Any ability he may have possessed to read a person’s intentions is lost to him now.
While flipping through botany books, he dozes off thinking of worn sheets and a solid body pressed to his, of sharp gray eyes and sharper words, of cool metal in his hands. His mind conjures images of Safu’s drained, still body that she had not permitted him to look at, had begged him not to, and he wakes up gasping, throat on fire.
When he is allowed to be alone with his thoughts, he feels a mounting panic overtake his limbs as he realizes he can’t remember what he was before, who he is supposed to be now. Once, a boy he had killed for had begged him never to change.
The stinging openness on the back of his neck is the only thing that grounds him in these moments.
Inukashi visits him occasionally, and always with little Shionn in tow, whose laughter fills Shion’s blank, palatial apartment. They soon took root in Karan’s home after Shion moved out, their beloved dogs seemingly never further than an arm’s reach.
Inukashi is no longer a wiry, angry child. They are only a few inches shorter than Shion now, frame no longer malnourished and tiny. Parenthood softens them, and he can’t help but smile when they attempt to scold Shionn as he tries to tug on their long, dark hair at the dinner table.
Shion’s changed too; taller, shoulders broader and face thinner, red scar as raw as the morning he woke with it. He doesn’t dare touch it anymore, save for clawing at it when the throbbing from within his neck seems extraordinarily relentless. He still thinks himself strange-looking, a serpent— a repurposed comparison that refuses to fade from his mind.
He has to swallow his surprise when Inukashi kisses him one day.
They visit him alone with a tin of his mother’s cherry cake one evening after work, customarily grumbling about the emptiness of the apartment as they step inside. They insist on staying to make sure Shion actually eats said cake, because, as they said, he was really starting to look like a bag of bones these days.
They both sit together on his hard leather sofa, little white plates and forks in hand, speaking in soft voices about Shionn, Karan, and the dogs. They speak of Inukashi’s growing skill as a baker under Karan’s tutelage, and even of Rikiga, who has properly married a displaced aristocrat and supposedly given up on the drink.
“But we all know he still has the hots for your mom,” Inukashi says with a characteristic smirk, and bursts into a fit of familiarly mean-spirited laughter.
Shion can feel his mouth effortlessly stretch into a smile more than a few times, a rare feeling. He looks forward to their talks, of being present, close with someone even as he feels he is on autopilot most moments.
At some point, they both settle into a comfortable silence. Inukashi, their head resting on his shoulder (a habit adopted so long ago, in such a different context), turns to face him. Their dark eyes are fixed on him, mouth parting, and then they lean in. Shion feels warm pressure on his lips. He is motionless at first, not quite understanding, and then he reciprocates.
They stay together like that for a while, entangled on his uncomfortable furniture.
“I,” Shion says breathlessly, and Inukashi looks heavily self-conscious.
Shion does not try to peel back layers of meaning. He knows he has always loved Inukashi, in some way, and he likes the weight of their warmth with him. Inukashi still prods him, lightly teases him for his air headed tendencies. They fall into an easy companionship which no one dares question or pry into, least of all Karan.
Shion finds that these touches and feelings are both achingly familiar and new.
One evening, as they laze on Shion’s obscenely sized (Inukashi insists) bed, they gather Sion’s hair in their hands and their fingers lightly brush over the bandage.
“This?” They ask, eyebrows raised.
“It,” Shion smiles weakly, “bothers me sometimes.”
When he comes, it is early Sunday morning, warm and bright, and Shion wipes his bleary eyes as he half-stumbles to the front door expecting anything but.
He is taller, and his hair is short, and it takes a long moment for Shion to recognize him.
“Shion,” He says, and looks at him steadily with a sort of open, hopeful look on his face that Shion thinks he recognizes. But never on him.
He panics and slams the door in his face, stares at the door like it will cave in.