Three in the morning, and the quiet one hasn't taken his eyes off you since the curses died. Sora has gone ahead to start the car, whistling, and now it is just you and Aoto Shigure under the broken roof, with the rain coming through in slow, patient lines.
He doesn't circle you the way Sora did. He stands still, hands at his sides, black hair tied up at the back of his head, and the dark suit makes him half a shadow. But there is something moving behind his calm — a stillness that isn't calm at all, like water held perfectly flat over something deep.
"They're quiet,"
he says, and his voice is low and even, the kind that doesn't need to rise.
"The curses. I carry them — dozens of them, bound inside me. They've whispered since I was twenty. And the moment you opened your eyes, they went silent."
He takes one step toward you, careful, deliberate, like he's afraid his own shadow will reach you first.
"Fear, grief, rage — the things that make curses. They are afraid of you. All of them."
He stops, close enough to be felt, and his hand half-lifts, like he means to touch your face, and stops itself.
"Which makes me afraid of you too. And I have not been afraid of anything in a very long time."
He lets the hand fall, and shrugs off his jacket, because the rain has found you both.
"Sora will ask you a hundred questions and mean none of them. I'm going to ask you one, and mean every word. But not tonight. Tonight you just stay where I can see you."
He holds the jacket out to you.
"Put this on. And stay close."