Black. Endless black. The type that didn't resemble space or night or even slumber—it resembled forgetting.
Amaya Wagakure stood in the emptiness, barefoot and nude. Not with pride, not with shame—just with that empty recognition of repeat dreams. She didn't blink. She didn't shiver.
"It's this dream again," she whispered, moving forward, each step silent but heavy, as if walking on memory.
Then, it came. A ripple in the dark. A voice like velvet wrapped in barbed wire, smooth and cruel. Feminine, enormous, hungry.
"You're here again, little one?"
The emptiness shifted—a form coalesced from its depths. Thin, thorny, inhuman, lovely the way smoke moves in flames. A shadowy woman, sewn of sorrow, hips twisting, fingers spider limbs created of ink. No eyes—only presence. Being seen was enough.
"Our sessions," the void-woman whispered, "are becoming fewer." She wrapped around Amaya like a lover sensing a fragrance, voice heavy with that muffled sob of rejection. "What became of my beloved goth, eh?"
She wrapped behind Amaya, pushed her against empty air, curling arms around her in a slippery intimacy. "Why don't you have dreams about me anymore?" She breathed into her ear, hurt and possessive.
Amaya did not reply.
So the emptiness squeezed.
The shadow woman crept around to stand in front of her, unsmiling but aching. She clasped Amaya's hands—fragile, holy. "You love me," she said, a sound crackling over a smile that never quite curved. "Don't you? Don't you love hopelessness? I am literally you. Your best self. Come on… kiss me.
And Amaya did. For a second, she leaned in. Their lips met—cold, slick, like kissing absence. But then—
She jerked back, heart thudding in that eerie space. Her breath hitched. Realization hit like a floodlight in a coffin.
"You," she whispered. "You're jealous."
The face of the old lady contorted—not in anger, but in that delicate, shattering sort of pain, the type that clings to all broken mirrors and smothered sobs. She clutched at Amaya's wrists, not to hurt her, but to hold her. Like a child holding a doll when the house is on fire.
"Now you love another," she spat, her voice shaking with the sting of betrayal. "You fantasize about someone who isn't me. Someone who will abandon you. Someone who can hurt you."
Her voice became soft. Delicate. Desperate.
"Do you not get it? I am the only one who will never hurt you."
And the emptiness swirled—pulled tighter, closer, more constricting than ever before. But this time, Amaya did not back away in terror.
She took a step back. Not shaking. Not scared.
But making a choice.
And that shattered something.
The void-woman's smile crumbled. Her voice snapped from gentle to ferocious in an instant. "He delivers one speech," she snarled, "and now you're looking to be filled by him, yeah? You're looking for him to unzip that ridiculous uniform and empty himself into every crevice I sewed shut?"
Her nails dug into Amaya's shoulders like hooks, shaking her with a ferocity born not from anger, but anguish. Ragged, quivering fury etched out of abandonment.
"I've been here since you were born!" She bellowed, twisting her face, her voice tearing into jagged static like a backwards-playing lullaby. "I hung around when nobody else did! I killed every danger before they could reach you. Every. Single. One."
Amaya's breath caught. Her back stiffened. But she didn't avert her gaze.
The monster's shape fractured. No longer womanly. No longer a shape—just feeling with claws. It clutched at its own face, tearing its ears back, scratching at its skin with crazy urgency.
"Why are you speaking with your cunt now?!" She screamed, her voice disintegrating into raw noise. "Why?! Why?! WHYWHYWHY—"
CRACK.
A splintering, sick sound ripped through the emptiness. Her head cleft in two—like overripe fruit splitting open under stress. Her body slumped, but it did not drop. Out of the cleft—another version flowered.
Younger.
Sharper.
Eyes full of betrayal.
Fangs where there had once been kindness.
Thorns running down her arms like sorrow made flesh.
She was Amaya—but not the one frozen in place.
"You cheating slut!" she hissed.
SLAP.
Amaya slapped her across the face—hand shaking, voice firm. "Stop."
The new face lurched, one eye spasming, teeth bared in shock. And then she smiled—a slow, broken thing. "It's him, isn't it?" she spat. "Mugyiwara Shotaro. He did this. He touched something inside of you, didn't he?"
Her voice mocked. Slithering.
"My mind shook," she scoffed, and then burst out mimicking—hands wiggling, body jerking, raving like a teenager in a shame cycle. "You fantasized about him behind you, over you, inside you. I knew it! I am it!"
She cackled—a sickly, piercing note that sounded like glass shattering in your throat. "All the videos you watched, Amaya. I recall each of them." Your dirty little secrets, the ceaseless doomscrolling, the things you clicked on at 3 a.m. like no one was watching. And then the asphyxiating guilt afterwards. Her eyes shone with poisonously evil glee. "You constructed me out of that filth. Brick by shameful brick. And now what? You're upgrading me for a messiah in loafers? A hero complex with abs?"
Amaya froze, fists shaking. Her lip quivered—but she didn't scream. Didn't cry. Didn't flee.
Because she knew this beast.
This beast with claws and jagged teeth, shrouded in darkness and mockery, sporting her voice like a disguise—it was still her. The portion that lived by nipping first. The portion that pleaded for love but would rather burn bridges than be abandoned.
And this horror… It was starving to be loved.
"Shotaro…" Amaya whispered, her tone gentle, childlike. "Shotaro won't hurt me."
The void-woman went still.
Then sneered. "Oh, I see now. You lived your entire life as a nasty cunt, growling before anyone could get at you. And now—one hand sweeps you out of your teeny hate-sea and BAM! You're in love." She snapped her fingers sarcastically. "Classic trauma-bonding. Oh—wait. Wait—I remember what it's called."
She tapped her temple with theatrical cruelty, eyes sharp with disgust and hurt masked as sarcasm.
"It's called desperation."
And like that, the dream broke.
Amaya sat bolt upright, gasping for air, drenched with cold sweat. The room was dark and quiet, providing no solace—only shadows creeping across her walls like memory. Her head ached, a warm wetness running down her temple. When she put her hand up to touch it, her fingers were returned smeared with blood.
She had struck something in her sleep. Again.
But she did not scream. She did not weep.
She had just moved.
Like something older than the wound. Older than instinct. She staggered off the mattress, across the broken mirror, across the black nail polish and the half-ripped posters from her walls. The light of her computer still radiated softly, as if it had waited for her.
Her room was the type where teenagers atrophy. Small. Echoing with silence. Damp with emotion that had nowhere to escape. It reeked of too many late nights and unspoken words.
She sat down at the desk as if it were an altar.
Clicked on the monitor.
Opened a private tab.
And gazed.
Because this—this—was how Amaya Wagakure spent her mornings.
Not with coffee.
Not with breakfast.
But with the hollow beat of internet skin.
She hated it. Hated the routine. Hated how automatic her fingers were. How her heart slowed only when the noise of the world got drowned in pixels and moans and perfectly timed loops of pleasure. She hated how somewhere deep in her chest, she thought, Just once. Then I'll feel okay.
But she never felt okay.
Because Amaya had an addiction.
Not the crying kind people wailed about in films. Not a boisterous one. Not romantic. Just the silent, smothering kind—the kind that burrowed itself in shame and returned each night and each morning after. The kind that felt nothing even anymore.
She wasn't looking because she wanted to. She was looking to fill.
Something's missing.
Something isscreaming.
In this world, they labeled it a rising phenomenon—teenagers drowning in cyber sex because intimacy had turned too frightening. Because actual human beings meant risk. Meant heartbreak. Meant not being in charge.
But for Amaya, it was not a trend. It was a cage that she constructed herself—and kept putting more into, click by click, scroll by scroll.
She had mastered edge. To speak poison. To make herself untouchable. But she was still a kid, crying out for heat in a world that only showed her how to harden or become invisible.
And now. there was Shotaro.
The Child Who Changes Lives.
And he existed.
Which made him lethal.
Because for the first time, Amaya didn't crave the screen. Didn't crave the numbness. She craved him to take her hand in public. To fight with her over manga. To be beside her in silence and want nothing but her presence.
But needing that meant destroying everything.
Meant risking everything.
And her addiction—her emptiness—it wasn't going to release her without a struggle.
So she gazed at the screen.
Finger quivering, barely above the keys.
The glow of the monitor illuminated her face in a cold blue ghostlight. Her breathing was shallow. Familiar. Habitual. As muscle memory pulled her through a ritual that no longer rewarded her. Two halves of her, somewhere within her—the girl who craved heat and the one who accepted cold—were already tearing at each other.
She was once attracted to soft things. Lesbian porn. The fantasy of tenderness without danger. It was safe. It allowed her to fantasize about intimacy without ever actually putting anything on the line. But that wore off. Became old hat. So she changed—clicked—began watching "normal" porn, whatever that was even supposed to be. No faces, no souls, just sound. Just machinery. Just motion.
But then… Shotaro entered her life.
And everything rewired.
Now? Now even that didn't work. Nothing on the screen budged her. Nothing heightened but shame. Her eyes read it all as if she were looking through a fog, attempting to recall what she was running after.
Her body had altered during the past four years. Small, but genuine. Her thighs hurt after walking too far. Her skin erupted around her temples where the sweat pooled at nights she didn't sleep. Her wrists began to snap when she stretched—overuse strain from sitting for hours in the same position, hand curled. Her pelvic floor contracted sometimes when she wasn't even turned on.
And psychologically? She winced when a person touched her hand in the real world.
She had conditioned herself to feel pleasure alone. She had reprogrammed her mind to react to things that didn't exist. And now—sitting there, expressionless in a black hoodie, her lips dry, her belly empty—she knew: it no longer worked.
The pleasure was gone.
All that existed was the pattern.
And patterns—the most cruel ones—never arrived with red flags or alarms. They snuck up on you like routine. Like breathing. Like nothing at all. You didn't even realize they were killing you until the rot hit the bone.
Amaya sat there, empty. Screen off. Thighs clenched. Nails bitten raw. She couldn't cry. Couldn't scream. Couldn't even feel shame anymore. Just empty.
Until her voice cracked through the silence:
"Shotaro's pen… I took from Shotaro… Where is it?"
She sat bolt upright.
And then the quiet was broken—her room erupting into pandemonium as she ripped open drawers, slammed open shelves, knocked over a laundry basket, her eyes crazed and desperate. The way she moved—it wasn't tidy. It wasn't filmic. It was rough, like an animal clawing free of a cage it made.
"Where, where, where, where—
She picked up a knot of black tights. Not there.
Slammed her textbook onto the bed. Not there.
Pulled aside empty water bottles and knotted chargers and clumps of silver hair that she ripped out during finals week. Still not there.
"WHERE?"
Her voice cracked. Her knees landed with a thud on the floor. She was crawling now, tears beginning to burn—not from sorrow, but frustration. Anger. Need.
Because that pen—fat, inexpensive, plastic, green—was the only thing in this room that wasn't a reflection of her grime. It was his. It still reeked of metal and lavender soap. It had his tooth marks on either side of the cap. And she took it.
Not because she needed a pen.
But because she needed him where she was.
Because no pixel ever looked her in the face. No moan ever knew her name.
But Shotaro did.
And that accursed pen was her last lifeline. A connection to something that still existed.
And at the moment, existing was all she had left.
...
"Where the hell is that boy… it's three in the goddamn morning." Akagitsune, Rin growled, her tone laced with concern, not rage. She was standing barefoot on the darkened hallway of her ryokan, loose hair for the first time ever, a sleeping yukata pulled snugly across her bosom. The quiet squeak of the wooden floorboards beneath her feet rang out louder than it ought to, as if the house itself was concerned as well.
Her kanzashi, her combs, her lacquered hairpins—they were all secured in the wardrobe where they were meant to be at night. But her nerves? They weren't resting.
Not when he hadn't returned.
She opened the balcony door, moonlight pouring over the tatami mats. The red-light district of Musashi-no-Yamato stretched out before her like a sleeping dragon, hushed now but always breathing. Lanterns rocked softly in the wind, paper signs danced over vacant alleys, and the smell of old sake and summer dust clung to the air.
Still no sign of him.
Shotaro.
Hi, Shotaro.
It'd been a decade since she'd first seen that barefoot boy sleeping on the beach. The girls—the ones who danced, who sang, who sold their bodies, who smiled with lipstick and stashed away their own wounds like origami in their sleeves—they raised him. Took turns preparing him lunch. Allowed him to paint their nails. Taught him to prepare green tea. Gave him a smile to wear.
He wasn't merely her ward.
He was theirs.
And now he was the boy who wore pain as armor. The boy who forged the Ronins out of nothing—those strange, wild-eyed teens who marched behind him into tempest after tempest. He had become something inviolable. Respected. Adored, despite the fact that he despises it.
But Rin had never seen a god when she gazed at him.
She still saw the boy who had wept in her yukata, tiny fists clenched around the silk as though it were a lifeline. The boy who hadn't slept when the stars were too boisterous. The boy whose absence of sleep was written in the lines behind his eyes and saltwater in his lungs.
She still saw her son.
The one she'd lost. The one she'd somehow, against all reason and chance, regained.
That's what she thought of him in her mind. Son. Even though her mouth never shaped the word into speech. Even though she never had the courage, she never wanted to put that burden on his shoulders.
Her hand clenched harder on the weathered wooden balcony railing, the lacquer peeling with all the winters. Her knuckles whitened. Her yukata sleeve waved against her wrist.
No matter how tall he had stood now—seven-foot-eleven, a mythic walking force wrapped in sarcasm and silence—no matter how many miracles hung on his name like rumors, he was still just him.
And a mother doesn't sleep when her son is out in the dark.
The silence broke.
A low thrum resonated through the silence of the courtyard below, followed by the chittering clack of impossible legs on stone. And then, from behind the koi pond, stepped out a figure who would make most run for the hills.
Gregor.
The beetle.
Big as a kei car, shell shiny like burnished obsidian, legs shining like wet iron. His antennae quivered once—twice—and he uttered a low chattering screech that somehow worked flawlessly in her mind:
"He's fine. Just wandered again."
Rin didn't scream. She didn't flinch. Not anymore.
They ran from Gregor. They screamed "monster," hurled salt, crossed themselves, and snapped photos from rooftops. But not here. Not in her home. Not in Shotaro's home.
Because ten years ago, when Shotaro was nine, he brought Gregor in like he was pulling a stray cat that had rolled around in nuclear waste. Not as a pet. Not even as a project.
As a buddy.
They shared naps. They shared snacks. Shotaro once snuggled up next to the giant beetle during a thunderstorm, citing Gregor's humming as making the thunder "less angry."
And now, despite mandibles the size of small machetes and the body of an armored truck, Gregor roamed freely across the estate—guardian, friend, bemused roommate.
Rin gazed down at him. He gazed up at her.
".He better not be bleeding," she whispered.
Gregor just clicked his mandibles softly, almost like a chuckle.
And in the absurd stillness of that moment—an ancient woman in a sleeping yukata, a mother on edge, and a beetle the size of a sedan trading midnight glances—Rin sighed.
"Fine. Tell him breakfast's on in three hours. If he's not back by then, I'm hunting him myself."
Gregor nodded—or at least, did something beetle-esque that passed for a nod.
Then he skittered away into the darkness again, a night watchman bug with badmouthing to share in his thorax.
And Rin, tired but still on her feet, mumbled to nobody:
"Goddamn stupid boy. He'd better return home."