Periwinkle - Life in shades of blue (part 1)

Aftermath

Try to colour inside their lines
Try to live a life by design
I just wanna be myself,
I can't be someone else

Stand out fit in by One ok rock

I have been on countless missions since I first started high school, but let me tell you, nothing compares to this last one.

I was sent with Suguru, of course, cause we are the strongest after all. Who else could they send? The only other special grade is a weirdo researcher, she's probably on the other side of the world right now. I don't think anyone could have done any better than we did, if I'm being honest.

It didn't sound too exciting at first, when Yaga told us we had to basically babysit a middle schooler, but in the end it was so worth it. We even had a second date at the aquarium. It was fun to take our minds off for a while, and I had never been to the beach before so I took the chance to enjoy our trip to Okinawa. Using six eyes for forty-eight hours straight had proved exhausting but I don't regret it, it's not the first time I'm pushing my limits and it's always a thing I love to do, I'm still trying to understand where they stop.

After this, I'm almost convinced that they don't. Limitless. Huh, must be because of that.

I can't stop grinning after everything that's happened. After fighting with Toji, I felt as if I was living in someone else's body, or as if I was in no body at all, to be more accurate. At some point, I could see myself from outside and the world looked slow and quiet, like I was the fish in the aquarium tank and the world was just out of reach yet so close at the same time. I felt nothing. I was nothing.

Dying really stirred up something in me, and not in a self-awareness or spiritual way, I mean I'm mechanically and physically empowered. I can feel, I can see my own cursed energy flowing in a different fashion, it's easy to understand every fluctuating possibility, so much that anything seems possible. I can sense time and space and gravity and even probability itself, all of it in slow motion as if everything is happening all at once but all is yet to become at the same time.

It feels like my brain is expanding into space.

That's the only way I can describe how it was to use both reverse cursed technique and red for the first time. To transcend the concept of limit. To become limitless, infinite. Space itself.

Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps, but I feel my own body completely calm and still on the seat of the tram as I'm staring at my own reflection. I'm grinning so much that it would hurt if I actually felt anything right now. Even after the adrenaline wore down and having sat through half an hour of Yaga blabbering about consequences – ah yes, we actually failed a mission for the first time ever, but honestly whatever – even after that, if I look down at my bloody hands I can see the whole universe printed on my fingerprints.

I want to scream and jump and take Suguru by the hands to dance with him right here in the middle of the train, but when I look at my side he has his head hanging low on his chest. He looks like an empty potato sack while we get off at the stop near his house.

He's been acting strange since we came back, I bet he's thinking too much about what-ifs and getting stuck in his head about how unperfect his technique is. Maybe even feeling like he should have done better. Honestly, I think he did his best and that was more than enough to keep Toji busy while I was trying to heal myself. I want to tell him we did a great work, that the mission would have failed with or without us anyways, it was bound to end up like this. I know it.

When we walk up to his front door and I open my mouth to say it, he's already glaring at me and my grin freezes on my face. His narrowed eyes are glinting with unspoken words and hidden resentment when they burn through my sunglasses and pierce my own. He doesn't say anything, though, and just scoffs before fiddling with the key, his hands shaking too much to let him find the lock on the front door. I step closer to ask him to let me do it in his place, but when I'm almost touching him he snaps and throws the set of keys on the concrete.