Work Text:
Somewhere beyond life and death—beyond dream and reality—Kotone meets a boy on a rooftop. The same rooftop she had fallen asleep that final time, Aigis’ metal fingers combing through her hair, the spring sunlight warm on her face. The Gekkoukan High roof was just good like that—a good place for meetings and partings, for reunions and fated encounters.
She can't help but feel that's what this is, that kind of intrinsic knowing that goes beyond anything she can explain in words but has learnt to put her faith in this past year. She sits up slowly, no longer in Aigis’ lap, and finds a boy sitting beside her on the bench, his eyes tracking her steadily. Blue hair, pretty face, headphones dangling around his neck. There's no music coming from it but she can almost hear the melody of what he might have been listening to inside her head. The lyrics spring to her lips, daring to just tumble out: You protected this empty, wavering world with your own hands.
His soul just resonates, different to the way Ryoji's had but strangely, achingly familiar all at the same time, and Kotone somehow knows him without ever really knowing him, this mysterious boy, and thinks again about reunions, about fated encounters, and cracks a smile that is a secret and a joke all rolled into one.
“I am thou,” Kotone says.
The boy just looks at her for a long impossible moment, something flickering behind his steady unwavering gaze, and then his mouth curves in a smile; just the barest upturn of the lips, really, but there's something almost more profound to it, she thinks. Like it's not something he does often but when he does he does it wholeheartedly and her throat aches at the thought, at this boy who is and is not her, with his soft mouth and softer eyes. “Thou art I."
His name is Yuki Makoto.
The differences between them seem stark and clear but the facts of their life lay out mostly the same. Wild card orphans with the personification of death sealed inside them, shuffled from relative to relative, school to school, never sticking around long enough to grow roots, to forge true connections, hiding in their own ways from the world because Kotone hid too but she did it behind a smile, having learned early on that if you smile big and bright enough the gleam of it will distract people from ever noticing the yawning void underneath.
“It was a crazy year, wasn't it?” Kotone says, sitting back on her hands, tilting her face up to the sun. Remembers signing a contract on a sickly green night, the terms laid clear: You will have one year. But she packed a lot of living into it, didn't she? Before she had been sleepwalking through life, going through the motions until she put that Evoker against her head for the first time, pulled the trigger, and came alive.
"That's one word for it," Makoto says, something wry in his voice and the tilt of his mouth that Kotone likes the look and the sound of and she tries to imagine a world where they could both exist at the same time. A soul halved, not shared. Would they be siblings there? Strangers? At any rate she wouldn't be Shiomi Kotone any more, at least not the version sitting here with him right now on the rooftop that they had both closed their eyes and never opened them again, and he wouldn't be Yuki Makoto. She's happy to know him now, to have met this boy with the same soul and the same fate. One year, she thinks again, and her eyes sting and her throat aches but she doesn't regret it, can't, even if a small secret part of her wishes, even if she aches and aches for everyone and everything she loved and left behind.
Except she didn't leave it all behind, not really, not when she carries all of it and all of them with her even now. Can just hear the gentle murmur of Theo's voice, saying that bonds as strong as hers are not so easily severed. She closes her eyes and feels Makoto shift closer, feels him press his shoulder against hers, a gentle pressure, easy, unassuming. He's not as outwardly expressive as she is but he's there, really truly there, and he's kind and it's a relief to not be alone after everything, to be able to create one new precious memory with one new precious person.
"You were happy, right?" Kotone asks, hating the vulnerability in her voice and swallowing around the tightness of her throat because even after everything a part of her instinctively shies away from letting her most delicate, vulnerable parts be seen, and Kotone already knows the answer but she needs to hear it: the words given voice, validation from someone who is and isn't herself.
You were happy, she thinks. I was happy. We were here and we were happy and we lived and we loved and we made ourselves and unmade ourselves and we gained and lost and lost and gained and learned what living really means, learned what it's like to love and trust and smile and really mean it and we lived and we died but most importantly we lived. We really, really lived.
A tear trickles out from behind a closed eyelid. Kotone laughs shakily and rubs it away with the back of a knuckle like a child might. But wasn't that all they were in the end? Two dead children, somewhere beyond space and time. Fate was funny. Fate was cruel. Fate took and took and took again.
A hand covers hers, the one still on the bench. Cold, calloused. Did he use a naginata too, she wonders, and there's so much she'll never get the chance to know, so much she will never get the chance to ask. Kotone swallows again and opens her eyes and looks and finds Makoto already looking back and the answer to the most important question is all right there, right in his eyes, and Kotone swallows around it, once, twice, her hand trembling under his.
"Yeah," says Makoto, gently, squeezing Kotone's hand. "I was happy. I've never been happier."
The wording is not lost on her: Have, not had.
Kotone's smile trembles but it's real and true and hers.
“Hey,” Kotone says. “Makoto.”
There's not much time left. Kotone can feel it slipping away like sand between her fingers but the coldness of eternity doesn't feel so dark and overwhelming, knowing that in another universe a boy is also standing against humanity's despair and longing for death.
“Kotone,” Makoto returns, blandly, but his eyes are bright and she knows it's teasing. She shoves at his shoulder and it reminds her of Junpei, of Yukari, all those well worn memories that Kotone will hold close to her heart, forever and ever. She'll hold Makoto close to her heart now too, along with Aigis and Ryoji and Mitsuru and all the rest.
And it's silly, really, the words trapped behind her teeth, but she wants to say it because who else could but her, alone with him at the end of all things?
“You worked hard,” says Kotone. “I'm proud of you.”
Makoto snorts and barely raises a hand in time to cover his mouth; she can just spy a smile peeking out between his fingers.
“Hey,” she says, more indignantly, but she's grinning now too. “Don't laugh! I'm being serious here. Sincere and serious; seriously sincere even. Treasure it while it lasts. It's a rare treat."
"I'm sure," Makoto says, dryly, and he's funny in a quiet, sardonic way that must have been an interesting energy contrast to his own Yukari and Junpei. She can just picture what it was like, him with his friends. She's glad he had them, the same way she's glad she had hers.
"See, I'd take it back,” says Kotone, “but I'm as benevolent as I am beautiful, unlike some cruel people who shall not be named.”
"You're ridiculous is what you are," Makoto says, shaking his head, and then hesitates for the barest of seconds before he says, "I'm proud of you too."
"You'd better be," Kotone says, smiling so hard her cheeks ache. "I am you, after all. And you're me."
She thinks about how Orpheus also heeded Makoto's call; Messiah too. She thinks about how Death made a home in the dark, empty spaces of their hearts. She thinks about the shadows that lifted with each beautiful fleeting moment spent with the people they loved and the people who loved them and the love and light and hope that trickled in to fill its place. She thinks about bonds and she thinks about seals and she thinks about eternity.
She thinks: I'm happy. Right here, right now.
She thinks: I'm grateful. I had one life and I made it mine. I had one year and I lived it to the fullest.
She thinks: I'd give it all up again and again.
"Me too," Makoto says, somehow echoing Kotone's thoughts, and she smiles and he smiles and it's enough. It's always been enough.