Koi No Yokan (gojo x oc)

25. The End of the Beginning

August 2007
12 hours later.

"It was supposed to be an easy mission to exterminate a second-grade cursed spirit."

I can't bring myself to do much other than stare, neck craned down at his gray, scarred skin. He doesn't even look like himself. More than half of his body isn't even here. "Get up," I say in my mind, "I know you. You'll open those massive eyes of yours and say you're okay. You'll laugh it off the way you always do." I see Riko and Momoko wrapped up in a sheet like this, limp, lifeless. Why doesn't he look like himself? "Haibara. Please. Get up."

"Damn it!" One of the stools whip past me, crashing into the wall. "Their faith in Ubusunagami," Nanami's breath is shaky, "That was a local deity. That was a first-grade case!" Suguru had given him a towel to tend to the wound wrapped around his hand, but he leans his head back, letting it shield his eyes. He can't watch the way we do.

"You need to rest for now, Nanami. Satoru has taken up your mission." Suguru pulls the sheet up to Haibara's shoulders. The middle of it is still soaking up whatever blood is leaving his body.

"Can't we just leave everything up to him alone at this point?"

"He's human too," I find myself saying, even though I know what Nanami meant. There's a layer of invincibility Satoru holds over the rest of us. Still, I know he must grieve the same way we do. His strength doesn't change him from feeling it all the same. "Never mind."

When I look across the bench, Suguru is staring down at the palm of his own hand. "Suguru, what is it?"

As if broken from a spell, his gaze snaps up to meet mine. "Nothing. I'm going to get some air."

The silence is louder once Suguru leaves. The heavy metal panels of the wall seem colder, more jarring than before. Nanami is still there, towel covering his face, left in helpless agony. I step over to his side, slowly, quietly.

"I'm sorry." My hand finds his rigid shoulder. "The first time experiencing this kind of thing is always hard." It's a sentiment I still don't fully understand. Death isn't what it used to be to me anymore. At first it felt like a fierce fire, one that burned in the pit of my stomach, blinding me to the rest of the world. Now, as the cycles continue on and on, I find it's a subdued sensation. What used to be robust and blinding, is now simply dull and prolonged. It sickened me, how I've evolved under its mercy, how I can't even feel the full weight of my friend, dead, a foot away from where I stand because it's a normality now.

The shoulder beneath my grasp suddenly begins to shake. Up and down it heaves, the slightest of sputters sounding from beneath the towel.

"Do you want me to leave?" I ask.

"No," he says. "Stay."

So I do. An hour, maybe two, of wavering silence comes and goes, then Nanami tells me he needs to go to his room. Shoko finds me with the body not even fifteen minutes later. She's already dressed in her coat and gloves, a surgical mask waiting at her chin. "You don't have to do this so soon," I tell her.

"It's better for my research if the body is fresh." Her tone hardens. "I'm okay, Kaede-chan. Really." She studies my face. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." I don't know if Shoko believes me. I don't know if I believe myself either. "Do you know where Suguru went?"

"He asked me for a cigarette," she says. "I doubt he'd wait long to use it."

The sun is already setting when I find him at the dormitory roof, sitting on the ledge, half a smoldering cigarette between his fingers. "Want some?" he offers.