Golden Hour
summary: this is the left hand path, this is the less traveled road, this is walking into the 黄色, kiiro, yellow, of fall
pairing: Getou Suguru x Reader
warnings: spoilers, making choices and not being sure of consequences
(also un-beta'd, i'm sure i'll find a dozen typos in the next week)
It's rush hour. Compared to the sleepy little city you'd grown up in, it seemed to always be rush hour in the city, but right now the sun's setting. People plod slowly from their trains, trek with dragging steps.
It makes it all feel syrup-slow. Like watching a bug get trapped in tree sap, only you're the bug, and this last lonely day is the silent weeping blood of something alive, something reaching to the sun.
Suguru. You're running, and everyone else is moving so steady and slow. You heart is skipping, tripping, and the hands on the cheep watch at your wrist are keeping the same time.
Shinjuku. It's not like the twisting, open alleys of Harajuku where you and Suguru would slip off, laughing, spend easy hours, buy nothing. The tall buildings leave long stretches of shadow, dank mold-strewn paths make a labyrinth between buildings. If only you knew how to navigate them, you would find him, but you don't know how to find him, don't know where he is. Shoko had sent you the picture, framed awkwardly, his hair spilling down his back, and one word.
It meant it was a fool's right to try. And you are a fool.
Sound cracks apart like stale bread in your throat, chokes you of air for a moment as yet another empty alley goes by on your left, and another on your right. Small stalls are closing, the little shops only open in the morning and afternoon pulling in their cutely decorated chalkboard signs. A cute looking girl in the cap and apron of a specialty bakery wipes the date from the board and it feels like feedback cuts through your brain, cracks the evening open.
Wh- where are you, why. And all the answers to your second question pour through your head with the blood in your veins.
One street, and his sallow cheek, now filled out with sleep and his own brand of reckless stubbornness could be around the corner.
One more right turn, one more black and white striped crossing and his long dark hair, once dulled with ruined arrogance and self reproach, could flick long and unbound over his shoulder.
Anything you think, because three years and three friends you never knew you needed, wanted, had made you reckless too. Promise the heavens anything, and the heavens will take it, will take every ounce of good fate, every kind thread, and make it a rope.
You dash the first tears you've cried since you were twelve years old from your eyes and taste iron on your tongue and run, your footsteps fleet with late summer light, your limbs cold and your flesh numb with need.
Suguru.
How long have you been running? Long enough to start feeling the first violet touch to evening clouds, the cradling, creeping touch of dark.
And you stop, all at once, movement arrested, ribs throbbing, lungs dry-aching, heart pounding in your head.
Look left.
He's there, framed in shadow, turning slowly from a cursed spirit surely meant to take him away from here. Toji cut down his dragon. Suguru held little to no fondness for the curses he choked into his own body, but Ko Ryu had been a beautiful, death-white thing, bright like clouds.
The short alley bottlenecks and then opens up again, like the kind of pathways that lead to the shrines hidden all over Tokyo's streets. He stands where it opens up with the manta ray spirit bobbing in the air.
He sees you, you know he does. His body is too still for anything else. All of your own movement is frozen like static around your body while your chest heaves. It feels like everyone has suddenly disappeared, and now time moves so much faster than the two of you. One autumn passes to another, and another, five summers gone, ten summers, in the time it takes for him to mostly face you, shoulders back, chin just slightly tilted. It's foreboding, daring, it is what will you do.
You do not step into the dark of the alley. It drapes over him like a cloak. Evening pours of you like inverted sugar. The last thing you'd ever shared with him was a plate of dango, on a day much like today, but with summer's heat just rising from the storm-wet earth, cicadas croaking in your ears.
It's dead silent now, never mind the passing of cars, the slow plodding steps of people, the ratcheting sound of a metal gate rolling closed somewhere nearby.
You see the way Suguru starts summoning up a smile, and then decides not to. His eyes are soft, and all you can think of is how you can score sandstone with your nails but it will scrape you right back.
"W-were you going to leave without saying goodbye?" to you. You have no doubt Satoru's seen him sometime in the last week, probably in the last few hours. Shoko had sent you that picture.
"No," he says, like a liar. And what he really means is that he doesn't want you to see him like this, purified by blood.
You could choke on your words, on the lack of moisture in your throat, stolen by the gasping breathes pulled through you mouth while running for what feels like hours.
"You should go back," he says quietly, the tilt of his body leaning towards the cursed spirit. The flow of Suguru's movements has always been so smooth it feels like he's meant to be where he already is. You can seldom read more than one or two steps ahead.
"Wait."
He does, pauses, turns back to you and looks at you out of the corner of his eyes before he does it head-on again. He watches you as you step across that straight line of shadow and into the narrow part of the alley. It disrupts the line so the dark wobbles across your features.
He stares, waiting. Part of you wonder if he'll kill you if you try to leave. He'd killed his blood family, yet they say blood is thicker than water. You step closer. Suguru's body telegraphs a warning.
That hurts.
"Are you alone?" you ask.
A tiny smile flickers across his expression. "No," he answers, like it's an almost pleasant surprise.
And that smile breaks your fear. He's close enough to touch when you stand beside him. The cursed spirit makes a whispering noise, almost like recognition.
He has nothing on him but the clothes on his back and the curse set into his body. He looks well, or better, healthier at least, but the shadows seem to cling to him more easily. There's something almost like a thin shell between him and the world. He's never let you hold the swirling sphere of a captured curse. You wonder if it feels like this.
"Let me come with you."
He's surprised.
You have your bank card in your wallet, your umbrella slung cross-ways over your shoulders, the wakizashi at the small of your back, your school uniform, jacket half unbuttoned. If you go, you will have nothing but this to take with you.
"You'll regret it," Suguru says.
And maybe he knows you too well, because you feel your eyes go flinty, you hand twitch closer to a fist. Something crystalizes in your chest, or maybe it's just the endless shift and pull of your own curse, its changeability until the moment you let it all go.
The entire world is only systems of chaos.
"Let me worry about that," you say. You're already there. In your heart, you're already gone. None of what once belonged to you is yours any longer, only what you carry.
Suguru doesn't do you the discourtesy of asking if you're sure, if you understand what this means, of reminding you of all the people you're leaving behind. (He's selfish too, willful, more obdurate. This you will know better than anyone else before ten years' time.)
"You'll become a criminal, an outlaw," he says, cool, teasing, his hand held out in front of you to lift you onto the manta ray's back.
You sniff haughtily. "Not if I commit no crimes."
There is that tension in the air again but Suguru settles at your back. The spirit lifts slowly above the ground, winds its ways through these alleys like Suguru has a map to them in his head. The two of you muffle and smother your residuals.
"You know better than that," is all Suguru murmurs in response to your line drawn in the sand.
You glance to the side. You've known all along that you aren't the one to get saved. Sorcerer's leave the force all the time, willing and not. If someone wants to curse you for it, you can't stop them.
"No provable crimes," you say, although both of you know it's not a concession but flat sarcasm.
At least Suguru laughs, even if it's cold like autumn leaves whipped across the ground.
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