At first he hadn't known where he was.
Just deep, pervading darkness. A strange acknowledgement that the space he was in existed inside something rather than outside it – no walls exactly, no floor exactly, just the suggestion of dimension. Like being inside a held breath.
There was something there when he had first gathered his surroundings. A red, ornamental vase – floating in the middle of the darkness – water dripping off its lip.
And also, something else.
In the dark: iridescent, pearlescent eyes glimmering beyond the shadows.
He had been frightened, initially. That was honest.
He remembered the bar. A girl with cascading dark hair and red eyes he hadn't been able to stop thinking about across the room. And the direct way she had looked at him – not sizing him up or performing interest, just assessing. Quietly. The way someone looked at something they had already made a decision about.
He had thought that was flattering. He had thought she was cute. He had downed his drink in one gulp and made his way toward her.
He remembered going home, hand curled around hers. Talking and laughing, his body and mind loose from the alcohol. Then they had entered his apartment and he had pressed her against the wall. And then fragments that didn't fully assemble – suddenly, a feeling like being hollowed out from the center, the floor, hands, a chilly draft from an open window. Pain, fear, and confusion – something fundamental being removed without asking – a sensation that he was irrevocably harmed.
Then, something in his body clicked into place and he woke up in the dark – in this space.
He had spent the first stretch of time – days which turned into weeks – trying to understand where he was. Though time moved strangely here. His thoughts were thick like molasses. His identity frayed. What had happened. Whether he was dead. Where he was, exactly. Who he was even, sometimes.
He was not dead. The iridescent eyes sometimes watched him from its corner of the dark – without malice. Patient and indifferent – a thing that had existed long enough to stop experiencing urgency as a concept.
Eventually, he could feel his body distantly somewhere far – the weight of it, the quietude and injury of something that had stopped moving on its own. Machines somewhere. A room. Murmurs and voices, words he couldn't discern – out of reach, but consistently present. Sometimes he felt someone adjust the blanket. He could feel all of this the way you felt weather through a closed window. Present. Real. Just – behind glass.
He understood, gradually, that he could leave. That the way back to his body was present and available – a door that had never been locked. He had only to reach for it.
He hadn't reached for it.
Not immediately. Not yet.
Because first, he wanted to understand. He was a civilian – a graduate student. No special powers, no special body. His only job when the city alarms would echo ugly and blaring in robotic succession had always been to run and hide, and he had always done that efficiently and gone back to his life without examining the edges too closely. The esper world, monster gates, the Great Filter – those had been something Rena moved through that he only saw the outline of. But he was inside it now.
He could get information. He would go back with something useful.
Justice felt possible from here.
Whatever had hurt him, he was inside it, he knew it – felt it. If he could figure out its weaknesses and take it to Rena and her guild, then they could destroy it. Vanquish the evil – like espers did with everything beyond the gates. He had never paid close enough attention. But he could now. He sat in the dark with the iridescent eyes and tried to understand what had happened to him.
The weeks continued to pass, turning into months.
He began to understand that the space had texture. Not just the dark – there was a strange sensation, a weighted accumulation of something very old compressed into a small container. Like a room where someone had lived for years and left traces everywhere without meaning to. And beyond that, threaded through everything, her – the person who had nearly killed him.
He couldn't hear her; not her thoughts, not her memories, not what she was seeing, nothing that legible. Just the emotional texture of her days arriving to him like warmth through a wall. Moments when she felt content. Moments where she was frustrated. Moments when excitement would surge through her. Moments when she felt lonely. Moments where she felt small.
And the hunger. Managed with the particular exhaustion of long practice – not the desperate lurching hunger of someone newly deprived but the deep structural hunger of someone who had built an entire architecture around containing it.
She was performing – something she wasn't, presented consistently, maintained carefully.
And her solitude and resignation. Not dramatic. Not announced. Just – there, the way a low hum was present, something you stopped noticing consciously but that shaped everything around it.
He recognized it.
He knew what that aloneness felt like from the outside – had seen it in his younger sister. The aloof way Rena held herself slightly apart from everyone, the way she had learned to be contained because the world had not always been understanding what she showed it. The way she considered others – kept her own emotions smothered because she didn't know how to get them out in a way that others could hold.
This felt like that.
Not the same. Nothing like the same. But – adjacent. The same family of feeling.
Sera was not Rena.
But she was a way in. A way to see his sister more clearly. Once their parents had passed, he had taken care of Rena with love and obligation and cheerful big brother energy – but he had never understood her. Didn't understand her cold moodiness as a teenager, didn't understand her icy, detached manner as an adult.
The eyes in the dark watched him. Sometimes they closed entirely – whether the beast slept or simply rested or did something that had no human word for it, he couldn't say. It never spoke. He didn't speak either. There was nothing to say to a pair of eyes in the dark and he had the sense that speaking first would be wrong somehow – like interrupting something that shouldn't be interrupted.
He sat.
Months turned into a year. And then two.
He wasn't sure why he stayed. Kept staying. And then one day – or one night, the dark made it difficult to distinguish – something moved through the space. The beast had gone somewhere.
A distant satisfaction. Dense and warm and alive, something her core closed around and held. A hunger briefly, genuinely fed – not the thin trickle of the management he had been feeling for months but something substantial, something that reached back. The feeling radiated outward from wherever the center of this place was, filling the dark with the heady warmth of something that had finally, after a long deprivation, gotten what it needed.
He felt it and didn't understand it.
The thing returned - its iridescent eyes opened. Fully, for what felt like the first time and looked at him.
After a long while it spoke, a voice that didn't travel through his ears, but burned through his very being.
"Don't you think we could eat you?" it drawled, eyes glinting in the dark.
His body, or what he thought was his body in this space, went very still – suddenly aware that his next actions could lead to his extinction. He stayed silent.
A sound that wasn't quite a laugh – drier than that, more amused than warm. Something ancient, finding something genuinely funny. The iridescent eyes caught whatever light existed in the dark, glittering faintly.
"Naive prey."
He did not reach for the door.
Instead – he wasn't sure why – he sat down.
The eyes watched him. He watched them back. He took a gamble and spoke.
"Why didn't you finish the job the first time?"
The beast stayed silent, staring at him, before its eyes glanced toward a far distance. And he knew, then, it was because of her. Because she hadn't wanted to. He remembered, with sudden clarity, the edge of a memory he had almost forgotten. Desperate hands pressing his chest in urgency, trying to get his heart to start.
Something in him flickered then. He realized why he hadn't left. He didn't want the girl he had met for one night - dark hair, red eyes, a small cool hand wrapped in his – to be alone. He was intimately aware of the turbulent interior she kept locked stiffly inside her. No longer one night.
As he sat in the dark with the beast, watching the weather of the person they were both in, a strange acquaintanceship began to form in the coming days.
The beast spoke rarely and intermittently – not because it had nothing to say, he came to understand, but because it had a different relationship to time than he did. It didn't feel the need to fill silence. When it spoke it was because something had occurred to it that seemed worth saying, and not before.
"What's tea," it asked one day.
He blinked.
"It's a drink," he said. "Leaves steeped in hot water. People add milk sometimes, or sugar."
"She thinks about it often."
"It's a common drink."
The beast was quiet for a moment, processing.
"Strange," it said. "She wants it everyday. Misses a particular…honey."
"People have preferences," Jonathan had replied, confused at the mundanity of the topic. "Liking something."
The iridescent eyes blinked slowly. Didn't continue the conversation.
Another day, when the relationship between him and the beast felt safe in that particular moment, he initiated the conversation first.
"What is she exactly?" he asked, noting the feeling of her frustration echoing through the walls.
The iridescent eyes looked at him. A long moment.
"Me," the beast said.
He thought about that for a long time.
The beast waited. It was very good at waiting.
"Does she know I'm here?" he asked finally.
The eyes slid toward him. Something in the quality of the glitter changed – amusement, he thought. Or whatever passed for it.
"No," the beast said.
He turned his head in confusion.
The glimmering eyes curved in delight. "I'm hiding you."
He stared at it. "Why?"
"It's fun."
His conversations with the glimmering eyes were mostly like that. Short, brief, and not particularly revealing in the moment, leaving him to chew over the conversation alone in his thoughts.
Another time, the beast had spoken.
"Sera is tired" it had said, factually.
Jonathan sat with that.
"Are you tired?" he asked.
The beast seemed genuinely surprised by the question. The iridescent eyes blinked once.
"No," it said.
"What are you then?"
"Interested," the beast said, after a moment. "I have recently become very interested. In things."
He almost smiled.
There he was, sat in the dark, with the beast. Felt her world and kept not reaching for the door. The iridescent eyes watched him – different now, friendlier, if he could call any relationship with the terrifying thing something positive. It had the register of something that had learned language late and found it slightly inefficient but occasionally useful. Mostly they were simply there, existing alongside each other in the blackness of the void.
He had become, somewhere along the way, someone who wanted to root for her. Not because she deserved it – he didn't know enough about deserving to say. But because he had felt every frustration and every small loneliness and every moment of something that might have been warmth toward a thing, filed away immediately before it could settle. He had felt all of it and he had kept sitting with it and somewhere in that sitting his own need for justice had become something else entirely.
He wanted her to be okay.
His body was out there. His life was out there – his apartment, his job, his friends, the texture of his life was out there waiting. He wanted it back, desperately so, but if he left this space he would lose the connection entirely. She would be a stranger again. Someone who had nearly killed him. Someone who would face those consequences. He didn't want to shield her from that. He knew that, from her feelings, she wouldn't accept it either. But he didn't want to leave.
And then, one day, flowers appeared.
Lilies. Growing at the edges of the space without announcement – cold and luminous, their scent arriving before their shape, something that pressed gently against the dark without disturbing it.
The beast didn't move.
"Hello," said a voice of a thousand, rising from the field of lilies – gentle, lilting, arriving the way the lily scent had arrived, before the shape of it fully assembled.
Jonathan looked at the flowers. "Hello," he said back.
The presence behind them was distinct – different from the beast's compressed patience. Something warm in soul, but cool in function. Something that had chosen to be here the way he had chosen to be here, for reasons of its own.
The beast said nothing. The iridescent eyes caught the faint luminescence of the lilies.
And then there were three of them.
The space began to change. Not dramatically – but the way light changed when a door opened somewhere distant. Something in the texture of Sera's days began loosening fractionally. The beast left more often. The flowers grew. Her filing was still present, the management still running, but something underneath it shifting. A slow and steady dismantlement of the resignation that built her world.
He liked that she had moments where she felt free.
They sat together. The beast, the flowers, him – in the dark when the beast spoke once more.
"Why haven't you left," it said. Not quite a question. More of a demand.
Jonathan sat with that for a moment.
At first, it was information – so he could take revenge. Then understanding Rena, who was similar. Then, somewhere along the way it had become something simpler and harder to name – he had known this person from the inside of every emotion, every frustration, every bit of loneliness and yearning for the past two years.
But could he do anything from here?
He looked at the beast. He looked at the lilies.
He stood up. Walked toward the iridescent eyes in the dark and let his body that wasn't a body become enveloped in the shadows. Put his arms around the beast, closed his eyes, and hugged deeply.
The beast didn't lean in. But it didn't lean out either.
He let go. "I'll be back," he said, his brown eyes meeting iridescent ones.
He reached for the door, his form dissipating in the dark.
✦ ♡ ✦
The ceiling of Aldway Hospital's long-term residency wing was white and unremarkable and the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He lay there for a moment, breathing. Just breathing, slowly, weakly, carefully. The luxury of lungs that had started moving on their own.
He turned his head and coughed.
Dried sunflowers on the windowsill. Zinnias, their color faded but their shape intact. A coffee cup someone had left and forgotten. Accumulated tenderness – a room that had been visited regularly for a long time.
His eyes traveled to his hands.
He looked at them for a long moment.
Less of them than before. He had known that – had felt it dimly, from the dark – but knowing and seeing were different things.
He raised what remained. Flexed his fingers slowly. Weak. Stiff. Fragile.
Fine.
Slowly, excruciatingly, brought himself up just a little. Saw a yellow note left on his bedside table.
"Jon, if you wake up, I'm in a gate. I love you. See you soon. – Ren"
The machines beside him registered the change in his heartbeat. A monitor shifted. Somewhere down the hall, something beeped.
Outside, the city moved through its afternoon without knowing anything had changed.
Jonathan tenderly sat up a little further, adjusted the pillow behind him, and waited for someone to notice he was awake.