Chapter Text
Koyomi opened her eyes to darkness and rain.
Cold water pooled beneath her palms, soaking through her sleeves and numbing her fingers. Her knees stung sharply, her elbows too — scraped raw like she’d fallen hard. The pavement beneath her was slick. Asphalt. Not tatami. Not wood.
A car honked in the distance.
She blinked up at the sky — no fallen castle walls, no golden ginkgo leaves, no blood, no mist.
Just streetlights. Wet and humming.
Her breath hitched.
She looked down at her wrist.
The watch — the same one she’d been wearing that faithful night — flickered weakly, rainwater dripping off the cracked face.
10:48 p.m.
Her heart stumbled.
That was… just a minute after the accident. A single minute after she was supposed to die — after metal and headlights swallowed her whole.
One minute here…
Six months there.
Her stomach dropped.
Time hadn’t just passed differently in that world — it had stretched, pulled thin, unraveled and rewoven itself around her like a second spine. Six months of fear and fighting, of blood, of laughter, of names written in her notebook…
…and here, only sixty seconds had dared to move.
Her breath trembled out of her, white in the cold air.
Six months of living — crammed into one minute the universe had spared her.
She lifted a trembling hand to her cheek. Warm. Real. Alive.
A sob tore out of her — raw, splintering, half-alive. Relief tangled with grief tangled with the shattering ache of disbelief as the last ghostly traces of wisteria smoke and demon blood dissolved into the cold night rain around her.
“Mui…” she breathed.
The name broke her open.
It lodged under her ribs like a thousand glass shards.
Muichiro Tokito.
The boy who found her with a sword at her neck.
The boy who remembered her stories when he couldn’t remember anything else.
She had left him behind.
No — she had walked away from him, traded her entire existence for a future he deserved.
Rain gathered in her lashes, but it wasn’t the rain that made her vision blur.
“Did you… did you live it?” she whispered to herself, for the ghost of him, voice breaking. “The life I wanted for you… the life I gave up everything for?”
Her hands curled into the gravel beneath her. She wished the earth could answer.
Had he grown older?
Had he laughed louder?
Had he stood under the wisteria tree and lived long enough to see it bloom for another season?
The rain fell harder, and Koyomi pressed a trembling hand over her heart as if she could hold the pieces still.
“I hope you lived,” she choked out. “I hope you lived a long, beautiful life… even if I never got to see it.”
“I did.”
The voice cut cleanly through the rain — quiet, steady, unmistakably real.
Koyomi’s head snapped up.
A figure knelt at the edge of the station lights, rain pouring over his hunched shoulders, droplets catching and darkening the soft fabric of the hoodie she recognized instantly.
Her breath stopped.
That hoodie — the one worn by the stranger she’d bumped into while racing for her train, the one belonging to the person who had shoved her out of the car’s path, the one she remembered clutching as she hit the asphalt.
The umbrella he’d been holding lay forgotten on the ground, half-crushed by the rain. His hood slipped back under the weight of the storm —
—and revealed a pair of gentle turquoise eyes. They looked at her as if they had been waiting a lifetime for this second.
Her world collapsed into that single color.
Not memory.
Not illusion.
Not a dying dream.
He exhaled — a thin, trembling breath that shuddered all the way through him. Rain plastered his hair to his forehead, dark strands dripping over the familiar cyan-tipped ends that clung to his cheeks. Those soft sea-glass eyes — eyes she had memorized, eyes she thought she would never see again — never once left hers.
“I lived,” he repeated, the words breaking around the edges like something long-held finally spilling free. “We all lived. All the way to the end.”
Her pulse roared in her ears, drowning out the rain, the station noise, everything but the kneeling figure in front of her.
“...Mui?” she whispered.
It felt dangerous to say it — like speaking his name out loud might shatter the illusion if this was only a cruel hallucination. Her voice trembled, barely more than breath. “Are you… really…?”
His eyes softened, the way they always did only for her — a quiet recognition, a familiarity so achingly gentle it hurt.
He lifted one hand, hesitating for a moment as if afraid she might vanish if he touched her. Then, with a trembling exhale, he brushed his fingertips against her cheek.
Warm. Real.
“Koyomi,” he breathed, voice cracking on her name. “It’s me. It’s really me.”
She choked, tears burning down her face before she even realized she was crying. She grabbed his wrist — desperate, shaking — terrified he would dissolve into mist if she let go.
“But… how?” she gasped. “You—your world—everything—”
He lifted his head then, rainwater sliding down his jaw like falling glass, eyes meeting hers under the flickering station lights. Sea-glass eyes. Soft. Gentle. Familiar. And filled to the brim with emotion that didn’t belong to any boy she’d ever met in Tokyo.
“I didn’t remember anything before,” he said, voice tight. “Not in any of the lives I lived after I died. I kept feeling like I was… missing something. Missing someone. But I didn’t know who.”
He swallowed hard, hands fully cupping her face now. His thumb brushed along her cheekbone, sweeping away the rain… or maybe her tears. It was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
“But then tonight — when I grabbed you, when I pushed you out of the way of that car — something snapped back into place.” His voice wavered, raw. “Like the moment you returned to this world… you pulled me back with you.”
Koyomi’s vision blurred instantly. She didn’t know if it was the rain or the swell of emotion rising in her throat.
“Mui…” she breathed, trembling.
“I remembered everything.”
The words broke out of him in a shudder. “The forest where we first met. You almost dying in my arms in the village. Our home. The way you called me ‘Mui’.” A choked laugh escaped him, aching and fragile. “The final battle. The way you just disappeared, and I didn’t even know. The six years when I couldn’t remember why my chest hurt every time the wind chime rang. And then… finding your things under the wisteria tree.”
He leaned forward until his forehead touched hers, their breaths mixing in the cold, wet air.
“I didn’t even get to mourn you,” he whispered. “Not until the very end. And the thought that I could have lived — and died — without remembering you after everything you sacrificed…” His voice cracked. “I would never forgive myself for that. I’m just glad it wasn’t too late.”
Koyomi’s chest constricted painfully. “Mui… it would’ve hurt so much less,” she whispered, “if you could just forget me forever.”
He let out a shuddering breath and nodded against her. “I know. It would’ve been easier.” His hands tightened on her cheeks, gentle but desperate. “But you remembered.”
He lifted his head, eyes shining with a fierce, unwavering devotion that felt older than the world around them.
“How could I forget… when you remembered me?”
Her pulse stuttered. A sob tore out of her.
“But it doesn’t matter now,” he murmured, voice thick as he framed her face with trembling hands again. “Because I found you.”
“Thank you…” Her voice broke as she leaned into him, tears mixing with the rain. “Thank you for finding me.”
His thumb brushed her cheek—once, twice—slow, reverent.
Then he lowered his face, lips brushing hers with a tenderness so overwhelming it unraveled her completely.
And unlike their first kiss — that desperate, trembling moment when she’d been the one to lean in, her body half-transparent and fading, neither of them able to truly feel the other — this one was real.
Warm. Solid. Undeniably alive.
Muichiro’s lips moved against hers with a soft, aching certainty, like he was memorizing the shape of her in this world, and the world before that, anchoring her to him all over again. No flicker, no fading, no slipping through fingers like mist.
Just him.
Just her.
Just the rain-soaked pavement beneath them and the thundering of two hearts that had once belonged to another lifetime.
His hand slid to the back of her head, fingers threading gently into her damp hair, pulling her closer with a quiet desperation — determined to never let her go. His arm wrapped around her waist, holding her steady through the storm.
This kiss wasn’t goodbye.
It wasn’t a consolation made at the edge of death.
It wasn’t the fragile, dissolving contact of a soul that had been fading away.
It was a beginning.
He breathed her name into her lips between kisses — soft, reverent, almost worshipful, as if he’d carried the syllables across a century just to give them back to her now.
“Koyomi Ubuyashiki…” A shiver ran through her at the way he said it, like it was something precious. “I love you.”
And she whispered his right back, broken and full of relief. “Muichiro Tokito…” Her voice cracked on the last syllable, a laugh-sob twining together. “I love you, too.”
And those were the words — the simple, human, impossible words — they never got to say in that world of blades and demons, where time ran out too quickly and fate was far too cruel.
But here…
In this life…
They said them out loud.
They heard them.
They felt it.
And instead of being last words swallowed by tragedy, they became the first of many — a beginning spoken in love, in relief, in the quiet certainty that this time, neither of them would have to walk alone.
— The end —