Tomura is a demon of the crossroads, bound to haunt it until the end of time - and to haunt it alone. The last thing he expects is for his crossroads to trap a human spirit with him.
This is a leftover from a Halloween prompt I eventually filled with something else. Fairly dark AU, gender neutral reader, warnings for existential horror and violence. Tomura and the reader get worse before they get better. 10.5k, complete. Dividers by @/ saradika-graphics
change over time
In Tomura’s opinion, you picked a really shitty place to die.
The road is dry. There’s nothing for the lights on the police cars to reflect off of but the puddles of gas and antifreeze and oil, oozing from your wrecked car onto the concrete. You were thrown clear in the wreck, and now you’re sprawled out, your limbs askew, your chest rising in short, shallow gasps as blood bubbles at the corners of your mouth. Your eyes are open, but the concrete around your head is stained red and grey. When they try to move your body, the back of your head is going to come off.
Tomura’s seen it all before. He’s seen every kind of car accident, every kind of injury, every kind of suicide that starts with a human body and ends with a bloody smear on the road. This is his crossroads. He’s haunted it forever. But in all of the forever leading up to right now, no one’s died dead center, in the middle of the vortex where the four roads meet. And if something doesn’t change in the next few seconds, you’ll be the first.
The human body is strange to Tomura. He’s never had one, and he’s oddly fascinated at just how hard it fights to live. Your heart is still beating, even though your brain’s splattered across the road. Your eyelids are still opening and closing weakly, even as your pupils cloud over, and your chest still rises and falls, even though your ribs have punctured through your lungs and your skin. Fighting the inevitable is a waste of time. It’s such a human thing to do. And yet, Tomura watches.
You die at the center of the crossroads, and no one comes to save you. When the paramedics load you into a body bag, your corpse slumps, spilling sideways and expelling blood and tissue and brain matter and bone. There’s so much of you left that a second team of people come back to clean up before they reopen the road. But no matter how much cleaning the humans do, there’s one piece of you left behind.
No matter where a human dies or how they die, the result is the same – a soul, sprawled out in the same position it was in when it took its last breath. You look like you must have before you were thrown through the windshield of your car, your body unbroken, your eyes closed. When Tomura reaches out to shake you awake, you don’t stir. That’s not new, either. If you do what other souls do, you’ll lie here for a year, unmoving, unknowing – and when you wake up, one year to the second since you died, you’ll get to your feet and walk away.
Tomura’s seen it before. Still, he makes sure he remembers your face, remembers where you lie amidst the other souls waiting to rise and leave. He’ll check back in a year.
Tomura doesn’t know how time passes for humans when they’re alive, but he knows how it passes for you because of how you wake up. Most of the souls at Tomura’s crossroads were dead before they knew what hit them, and they wake up slowly, peacefully. They seem to know they’re dead already. They get up fast and walk faster, dissolving into nothingness past the edge of the crossroads before they even realize that Tomura’s there. But you knew what hit you. You know something went wrong. Tomura knows, because when you wake up, you lurch upright, clawing at your chest and struggling to breathe.
You’re dead. You don’t need to breathe. You don’t need to shiver, either, but your spirit’s shaking all over as you press your hands against your chest, touch along your arms and legs, reach up to the back of your head and press down hard. Tomura remembers what your body looked like on the road, and you must remember, too, because with every injury you can’t find, your panic increases. Your hands keep returning to your chest, the back of your head, like you’re trying to hold your body together.
You don’t have a body anymore. There’s nothing there, and Tomura doesn’t like the way watching you makes him feel. “Hey,” he says, and you freeze in place. “Pull it together. You’re dead.”
“Dead?”
Tomura hates the way you say it – like you’re shocked, like you’re hurt, like you’re scared, when you’ve known the truth since you opened your eyes. “Dead,” he says, and you curl in on yourself, hiding your face. “Hey. Over here.”
You won’t look at first. Tomura’s not used to talking to dead people, and he’s not used to repeating himself, and although there’s a faint voice in the back of his mind telling him to be nicer, it’s easily drowned out. He keeps telling you to look, and finally, you do. Tomura gets his first look at you – not you, dying, but you how you must have looked before you went through the windshield, when you were really alive. You get a good look at him, too. You start screaming, and you don’t stop.
You spend the first year after you wake up trying to hide from Tomura, after you finally stop screaming and figure out that running away won’t work. Tomura was hoping that running away would work, too, but it hasn’t. The fact that you’ve stopped screaming is good, but the hiding isn’t, mostly because it’s useless. You’re at a crossroads. There’s nothing to hide behind. No matter where you go, Tomura can always see you.
You’re always hiding from him, but that’s not all you’re doing. Sometimes Tomura will pretend not to see you, just so he can watch what you do when you think you’re alone. You pace the edges of the crossroads, finding out where the borders lie, and your expression shifts with discomfort when you realize just how small it really is. You stay out of the road, like you’re still alive, like you could be hurt. You spend a lot of time staring at a new street sign, one with flowers growing at its base and a picture propped beneath it. There’s writing on the sign. Tomura can’t read it.
When it’s dark, you try to make yourself sleep, but it never works, and eventually you give up. Instead you start investigating the other souls. You don’t touch them, but you get up close and stare – only at night, only when the roads are nearly empty and a car coming from any direction would give plenty of warning. Tomura wonders what you’re looking for. Why you’re so confused by something that’s so easy to understand. They’re dead, and so are you. They’ve left, you haven’t. Easy enough.
It’s not until one wakes up that Tomura gets what you’re really doing. The soul sits up, stretches, and as soon as its eyes are open, you’re in front of it, trying to talk to it. It can hear you and see you, just like it could hear and see Tomura if he wandered over, but while you’re frantic, it’s calm. It gets to its feet, turns from you, and walks towards the edge of the crossroads. You grab hold of its hand and follow it along.
You’ve tried to escape before, but this time it might work. Tomura comes closer to watch. The soul you’re following steps out through the bounds of the crossroads, passing smoothly through the boundaries. Not as smoothly as usual, though. The hand you grabbed is still on the other side of the barrier, still in the crossroads with you.
The soul on the other side doesn’t look worried. Nothing worries them once they’ve risen. It just pulls gently, trying to free its hand from yours, and you hold on. Tomura turns his attention away from the soul – nothing special, he’s seen a million of them – and watches you, watches the desperation on your face turn into despair. Tomura watches, almost unsettled but not quite. He thought you were confused, but you aren’t. He thought you didn’t realize you were dead, but you do. All this time, you’ve been thinking about something else. About the fact that there’s somewhere humans go, and you can’t get there.
Tomura’s a demon of the crossroads for a reason. If he was in your place, locked out of whatever’s next with forever to burn, he might hang on for centuries, just to force someone else to suffer with him, just because he can. But there’s no such thing as suffering for a soul on its way out. They’re endlessly patient, infuriatingly calm, secure in their belief that they’ll get where they’re going sooner or later. It’s not possible to torture something that’s at peace.
You aren’t at peace, but you’re no demon like Tomura. You let the other soul go. Then you turn away, your eyes sliding past Tomura like he’s not there, and throw yourself into the road.
It catches Tomura by surprise, given how carefully you’ve avoided the road before. An eighteen-wheeler plows through your spirit with absolutely no effect, followed by a bus full of kids and a red car with no roof. You lay down in the road instead, letting them roll over you, hidden from view by a mountain of metal and rubber as car after car collides with you. If you were still alive, your body would be a bloody paste on the road.
And suddenly Tomura figures it out – why you’re doing this in the first place, why you won’t stop even though it’s not working. He crouches beside you on the road, his presence strong enough to divert the cars around him, and peers down at you. “You can’t die again. Get up.”
Your eyes are shut. You’re sprawled out in a rough approximation of the pose you were in when you died, and you’re in the right spot, too – dead center of the vortex. Tomura doesn’t like the way it looks. He repeats himself. “You can’t die twice. You can lay here getting hit by cars until the end of time and it won’t change anything.”
“Why not?”
Tomura wasn’t expecting you to talk. Or to open your eyes, and although you flinch when you see him, you don’t scream again. “Why not?” you ask him. “I’m dead just like the rest of them. Why do they get to leave?”
“Look at where you died,” Tomura says. You turn your head to the left, then to the right, and Tomura feels a surge of frustration. He seizes your spirit by the front of its shirt and hauls it up into midair, higher than he’s gone in millennia. “You know where you died. Look at it.”
You’re looking. “The middle.”
“The center. If you die in the center, you can’t leave,” Tomura says. He wasn’t sure before, but he’s sure now. “Wherever humans go, you’re not going there. This is where you’ll stay.”
You were never really struggling against Tomura’s hold, but now your spirit slumps. “Forever.”
“Forever.” Whatever that means to a dead human. It means next to nothing to Tomura. But while he’s got you here, not hiding and not screaming, he might as well make a few things clear. “This is my place. You can’t get out. No matter where you go, I can see you, so you can stop hiding. Do whatever you want, but none of it will make a difference. And don’t scream when you look at me. It’s annoying.”
You don’t answer. Tomura gives you a sharp shake to make you focus, but you’ve gone limp, and your spirit jerks, head thrown back in a way that would snap your neck if you still had a body to die in. Tomura recoils, revulsion swamping him, and he drops you straight back down into the center of the crossroads. You don’t get up. You let yourself get hit by car after car after car, day and night, sun or rain, wind or snow, until a year and another year and another have passed.
You’re following Tomura’s rules. No hiding, no screaming. Tomura should be pleased, but he isn’t. His crossroads sees the usual set of accidents and hit-and-runs and suicides, the usual number of souls lying down to sleep for the last time, and you stay sprawled among them, like them on the surface and nothing like them underneath. Time passes in a human blink for Tomura. The ten years between when you lay down in the road and when you speak again are the longest blink he’s ever felt.
Even amidst the chaos of the crossroads and the hum of so many sleeping souls, your voice is easy for Tomura to hear. “Is this Hell?”
Hell. Hell is something humans made up. When they wake up from their last sleep and walk out of the crossroads, they all dissolve the same way, no difference between the drunk drivers and the people they killed, no difference between the person who was run over and the person who fell asleep at the wheel. But things are different for you. Tomura shrugs. “Call it what you want.”
After that, it’s quiet between the two of you for a long, long time.
There have been dying people and sleeping souls at Tomura’s crossroads since before there were cars. He’s used to it, almost bored with it, but you aren’t. There was a while where you tried to warn the living when you sensed there was an accident coming, but it never worked, and you learned your lesson eventually. Now you sit and wait, watching the crossroads with an interest Tomura’s never felt. It’s been decades now since you died, and even though you’ve long since accepted your death, you still feel some kind of attachment to what you used to be.
You let the accidents happen, but once they’ve happened, you step into the road. Tomura can’t figure out what you’re trying to do as you brush past the already-dead and crouch down beside the injured. At first Tomura thinks you’re trying to save them. Then he thinks you’re trying to kill them faster. But there’s no pattern to who dies and who doesn’t. It doesn’t mean anything, whatever you’re trying to do. Nothing does.
One day, an accident leaves a human thrown through the windshield like you were, now crushed between their car and the wreck of another. There are other injured people, but you pass them by, going instead to the trapped human. Tomura can’t read the expression on your face. You’re speaking too quietly to hear. But he can see what you’re doing – crouched on the wreckage, one hand grasping the human’s, the other stroking the human’s hair.
It makes Tomura angry – furious – and he doesn’t know why. “You’re dead,” he snaps at you. “She can’t hear you.”
You don’t look up. “I know.”
“She can’t feel you touching her,” Tomura says. “It won’t change anything. She doesn’t even know you’re there.”
“I know,” you say. “I know. That’s what matters.”
No, it doesn’t. None of it matters. Tomura reaches for you, grasps your shoulder, tries to yank you away – but you yank back hard, so hard that Tomura loses his grip. You look up at last, and Tomura sees his own anger written across your face, harsh and almost terrifying. “It matters to me,” you say. “You don’t.”
Tomura doesn’t matter to you? You’re lying. He knows you are. You think this is Hell, and he’s a demon, so shouldn’t he matter to you? Shouldn’t he be the only important thing in your world – the one who frightens you, who tortures you, who haunts every second of your death? Fuck you. Tomura makes another grab for you, and you slap his hand aside, so hard that you knock him through an ambulance and halfway across the intersection. Then you turn back to the human. Talking again. Touching again, until the medics finally figure out how to pull the human free. Tomura’s expecting the human to die, but it doesn’t. It’s still alive when it’s loaded into the ambulance, and the sirens keep wailing all the way out of earshot.
Tomura didn’t try to touch you again while you were with the human, but now you’re moving the newly sleeping souls around, and that’s so stupid that Tomura can’t watch it for a second longer. He waits until you’ve set the soul down, finished arranging its arms in some stupid way that only makes sense to you, and straightened up. Then he grabs your arm and shoulder, shakes you to disorient you, and hurls you as hard as he can into the barrier between his crossroads and everything else.
You lie there for a moment, stunned, but it doesn’t last long. You’re up on your feet again long before Tomura expected you to be, and this time, you attack first. You seize him by his shoulders and throw him down against the ground, your hand smashing into his face before he catches your wrist and swings you down against the ground yourself. That gives him the upper hand, if only for a second or so. When he tries to wrap his hands around your throat, you duck your chin and sink your teeth into his fingers. Tomura recoils for a split second, and you’re on him again.
Why are you fighting him? Where did you get this kind of strength? Tomura knows exactly where you got the rage from, but the rest of it is a mystery. One miserable human soul shouldn’t hold a candle to him, and yet you’re holding your own, matching Tomura strike for strike. He feels the shock of each blow, the impact when one of you falls. He wonders if your head is ringing like his is. If the heart you used to have is racing, like Tomura’s would be, if he'd ever had one.
You can’t truly hurt him, just like he can’t actually injure you. All the two of you can do is fight – and you keep fighting, day and night, sun and rain, wind or snow, until the next accident sprays blood and bodies over the crossroads.
You unlock your teeth from around Tomura’s collarbone and kick out at him to keep him away as you scramble to the site of the accident. Like always, you leave the dead. Like always, you gravitate to the living, and the same anger Tomura’s spent months or years hammering into you wells up anew. Or maybe it’s not the same. There’s something awful about the way you handle the humans you speak to, the way you grasp their hands or stroke their hair or lie down beside them in the wreckage. Something that makes Tomura more than angry. Something that makes him sick, too.
This time, the human dies, and once the others take its body away, you focus your attention on its soul. You’re strong enough to fight Tomura without ceasing, but carrying another human soul is hard for you. You don’t move it far. Just a few more meters towards the edge of the crossroads, where two other souls are already asleep. The two souls are small. You set the third soul down with them, arranging it so it’s curled around them, and that sick feeling wells up in Tomura again, worse than before.
He throws the challenge across the intersection to you. “If you think that matters, you’re wrong.”
You turn back to face him, and like Tomura’s anger is spliced with sickness, yours is cut with misery. “It matters to me,” you say, and you lunge for Tomura with closed fists.
You’re fighting again – you’re always fighting – and the accident that interrupts you this time is big enough to rattle Tomura’s crossroads down to the bones. It does something to you, too. You had Tomura pinned, but now you topple sideways, your soul contorting, your features screwed up in agony. Tomura’s never seen you look like that before, at least not in death. This is how you looked the first time he saw you. The last time you were alive.
He reaches out to you, but you cringe from his hands. You’re crawling away, dragging yourself along the road, headed straight for center. You died there. Tomura watched it happen, remembers thinking it was a shitty place to die – and then he understands what you’re doing, enough to get there ahead of you. There’s someone else sprawled in the center of the crossroads, their broken body fitting perfectly into the vortex. A year from now, someone else might wake up in Tomura’s crossroads, never to leave.
Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing. Fighting you feels different than it used to, and Tomura could use something else to look at. You reach the center moments later, but unlike Tomura, you don’t sit back and watch. You grasp the body with your useless, insubstantial hands, trying to drag it away.
It’s the most pointless thing Tomura’s seen you do in a while. He watches, bemused, and you turn on him in fury. “Don’t just stand there. Help me!”’
“With what?” Tomura doesn’t like the way you’re looking at him, like he’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen. He’s not the one trying to rescue someone who can’t be saved. “That human’s alive. You can’t move it.”
“I have to. We have to.” You’re pulling with all your strength, and doing absolutely nothing. “This is a kid. Do you want a little kid to be trapped here forever?”
Tomura wonders how good a little kid would be at fighting. Probably not very good. He couldn’t fight with them like he fights with you. “You don’t want me here. You hate me,” you say to Tomura. What? “Why would you want someone else to hate?”
“I don’t hate you,” Tomura says. “You think I hate you?”
“Yes,” you say. On the ground in the center of the vortex, the human – the little kid – is taking strange, lopsided breaths. “If you don’t hate me, help me move him.”
Tomura’s used to you saying and doing weird things, but he’s not usually doing them with you. And if you’re doing this, you’re doing it wrong. “Don’t pull the whole thing. Use its hand,” Tomura says. “It’ll only get stuck if its whole body is inside when it dies.”
Your expression shifts, and you grab the human’s hand. Tomura grabs it too, thinking to himself that it won’t work, it’ll never work – only to feel heat against his hand, the frail beat of a pulse under his fingers, the texture of concrete and asphalt brushing his fingertips. It’s the worst thing Tomura’s felt in his existence. He thinks. Maybe.
You must feel it too, but you’re a human. You know what the living world is supposed to feel like. “Come on,” you plead with Tomura, desperate. “Do something. I don’t want anyone else to end up like me.”
Tomura thinks of how miserable you’ve been. How much time you spent screaming and hiding and lying in the street getting hit by cars. How much time you’ve spent fighting with Tomura, how many times he’s told you that what you’re doing doesn’t matter, and how many times you’ve clawed a hole in his face and told him that it mattering to you is enough. It isn’t enough, and Tomura knows it, and so do you. Of course you don’t want this for anyone else. Tomura doesn’t want it, either.
The thought rips a hole in Tomura as surely as your nails have done, and unlike those, it doesn’t heal. Tomura yanks on the kid’s hand with all his strength while you pull with all of yours, your fingers wrapped over his so you’re pulling him and the kid at once. The human’s pulse is faint, fading. Tomura can’t tell if its heart is still beating by the time the two of you move the tips of its fingers out of the center. “Did we get it?”
You look more miserable than Tomura’s ever seen you. “I don’t know.”
You sit down on the road, and Tomura sits down next to you, and you don’t fight. You don’t speak, either. You wait side by side for a year, frozen until the moment the child’s soul wakes up from its final sleep. It wakes slowly, unlike you. There’s no panic or fear in its face, and it doesn’t search itself for the wounds that killed it. It gets to its feet easily, walks past the barrier, and vanishes into the beyond.
Tomura feels an odd sense of relief. Beside him, you start to cry.
There’s only one soul from the accident this time, and the person it belonged to was planning to die. It doesn’t make a difference to you. Tomura watches you extract the soul from the wreckage of the car, so crumpled around a lightpost that it’ll take the firefighters hours to pull it apart, and carry it off to one side of the crossroads. You arrange the soul’s limbs like always, in a posture Tomura recognized as sleeping a long time ago, and then you settle down beside it. Other souls you leave alone, but the humans who took their own lives rate your company for the entire year they spend asleep.
It bothers Tomura that they get so much of your attention. You won’t fight him while you’re sitting vigil for one of them, and even though the two of you are more likely to talk than to fight these days, it’s worth a try. He skulks at the edges of the crossroads. “Are you done yet?”
“It won’t be long,” you say, like you always say, because there’s no amount of mortal time that counts as long to either of you. “You can sit with me if you want.”
You’ve never said that before. Tomura’s never wanted to, either. He settles down next to you, but can’t resist pointing out the obvious. “You know –”
“I know it doesn’t matter to them,” you recite, rolling your eyes. “Save it for someone who’s going to listen.”
There’s nobody to listen. There never has been, until you, and Tomura’s not done with you. “If you know it doesn’t matter, then why do you do it?”
You let out a startled laugh. “You know you’ve never asked me that before right now?”
“I have. Don’t make things up.”
“No, you haven’t. You tell me it doesn’t matter, and I say it matters to me, and then you say I’m stupid and I tell you to shut up and then we fight until somebody else dies in a car crash.” You glance up at Tomura. “You’ve never asked me that question. Don’t lie.”
“So what? I’m asking now,” Tomura says. You’re right, but he’s not going to admit it. You already spend too much time with the upper hand when you fight him. “If it doesn’t matter and you know it, why do you keep doing it?”
You’re quiet for a while, and Tomura’s crossroads is quiet with you. It seems like there are fewer cars these years. “Are you really asking? Do you really want to know?”
“I don’t ask questions if I don’t want to know the answer.”
“Okay.” You close your eyes for a moment, then open them again. “I know it was just chance. All of it. I was in a car accident. I landed in the center of the vortex when I went through the windshield, and because I died inside it, my soul was trapped here forever. It didn’t happen for a reason. There’s no purpose to how I died. It just – is. Or was.”
So you do get it. Tomura’s not sure why you thought about it any further than that. “And thinking about that,” you continue, then stop for a moment. “Thinking about that feels worse than dying did. It’ll feel worse than dying every day until forever, and I don’t want to feel that way. The only way not to feel that way is to find a way for it to mean something. To make it mean something, even if it’s only to me.”
Tomura doesn’t like thinking about that. Something about that hurts – not the distant echoes of pain he feels sometimes when you fight, but the way it hurts when he thinks about what it really means to be stuck here forever. “So what does it mean, then?”
“It means –” You trail off for a moment. “The people who die here die suddenly. They die hurting and scared, and they don’t have a chance to say goodbye. They don’t really have a chance to think, even. I didn’t.”
You never talk about how it felt to die. A shiver runs through you, and because Tomura’s sitting close, it passes to him, too. “And I thought that maybe if there was someone there. Someone to talk to them, even if they can’t hear it. Someone who’s with them, even if it doesn’t help. So they don’t have to do it alone.”
“Like the Grim Reaper?”
“The Grim Reaper takes the souls himself. Not quite.” The soul in front of you stirs in its sleep, and you go silent for a moment to watch. “I think the word is – psychopomp. Somebody who helps the dead get where they’re going. I could have used one.”
You had one, or could have. Tomura was right there, watching you die, and he did nothing. Like he always does nothing. Like he’d always done nothing, until the day he helped you save someone else from ending up like you. He’s so busy squirming away from that thought that he misses the question you asked, and you have to repeat it. “Still think it’s pointless? I won’t be mad if you say yes.”
“Why not?”
“Because you listened,” you say. You smile slightly, but it’s sad. All your smiles are sad. “That’s all I can ask for.”
It shouldn’t be. Tomura’s starting to think he owes you something. You go quiet after that, focusing back in on the sleeping soul. Tomura shakes your shoulder, not hard enough to start a fight but hard enough to catch your attention. “Hey. Aren’t you going to ask me?”
“Ask you what?” you say. “What it means to you?”
“I belong here,” Tomura says. “That’s what it means. Being here means I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.”
It sounds empty even to Tomura. It shouldn’t. He’s a demon. Demons haunt things, haunt people, take places that should be neutral and turn them bad. That should be enough. But he’s sitting next to you – you, with your made-up purpose and whatever comfort it brings you – and he feels the way you must have, every time he told you nothing mattered. Nothing matters, him included. Tomura knows that. It’s just never felt wrong before.
“It could mean something else,” you say to him. “If you wanted it to.”
He should tell you it’s stupid. Remind you that nothing matters – not the living, not the dead, not you, not him. Force it through your spirit that the world outside his crossroads is just as pointless and uncaring, that the only difference is that it’s bigger, until there’s nothing you can do but admit what Tomura’s known since forever.
But you did admit it. You admitted it, and you don’t care. Tomura thinks about how gentle you are with the injured, even though they can’t see or hear you. How careful you are with souls who will never even know you were there. Tomura doesn’t have that in him. The fact that you’re both trapped here is the only thing you’ll ever have in common.
“What is this thing?” Tomura asks, and you drop down from where you’re sitting atop a streetlight to come investigate. “Do you know?”
He thinks you must know, because of how much time you used to spend staring at it, but it’s been a long time since you came anywhere close. You study it for a little while. “It’s a memorial,” you say finally. “This whole sign is, technically – you can see the names of the people who’ve died here on it – but down here, this part, it’s just for one person.”
“For who?” Tomura asks, and then he looks closer. There’s a photograph in a frame set into the smaller stone, dusty and faded by the sun. The face inside it looks familiar, and it should. Tomura’s seen it every day for untold counts of time. “It’s yours.”
You nod. “Do I still look like that? What do you think?”
“You’re dead. What else are you going to look like?”
“I don’t know. You changed, so I thought I might, too,” you say. Huh? “And you didn’t answer. Is that still what I look like?”
“Of course it is. What do you mean, I changed what I looked like?”
You give Tomura a puzzled look, like you think he’s messing with you – but then your expression clears. “There’s not a mirror around,” you say. “And it wouldn’t matter even if there was, because you’re a ghost. I guess you wouldn’t know.”
“I’m a demon,” Tomura says. “What did I used to look like?”
You want to draw something to show him, but there’s nothing to draw with, and neither you nor Tomura is planning to exert the massive amount of force it takes to influence the living world just to draw a portrait in the sand. You describe Tomura instead, and the longer Tomura listens, the more convinced he is that you’re making fun of him. “I didn’t. Stop lying.”
“You did,” you say earnestly. “You had so many hands. All of you was hands. I couldn’t even see your face, because these two huge hands were wrapped around it. The only part of your face I could see was your eyes.”
“You’re making that up,” Tomura says. “Don’t you think I’d have noticed if my whole body was made of hands?”
“No, because it would just be your body. And there wasn’t anybody here to tell you,” you say. “The first time I saw you, you looked like a monster. I thought you were going to eat me.”
“You were already dead,” Tomura snaps. “What was I supposed to do, eat your soul?”
“Isn’t that what demons do?” you counter. “If you’d looked like this the first time, I wouldn’t have screamed that much.”
If you wouldn’t have screamed looking at him, Tomura must look a lot different now. “What do I look like? Tell me.”
“You still have some hands. But they aren’t your hands,” you say. Tomura gestures for you to keep talking, but instead you raise your hands, close them around your throat. “They’re here, and on your shoulders – and there’s one on your face, still. I don’t know how you can see around it.”
“I don’t have a hand on my face.” Tomura raises his hand up to his face to test, and his hand bumps against something. He runs his fingers over it, hoping you’re wrong, but instead he finds the outline of knuckles, five fingers, fingertips. An ugly, uncontrollable shiver runs through him and he makes eye contact with you. Eye contact through a set of fingers that aren’t his. “The other hands. You could take them off?”
You shake your head. “They never fell off, not even when we were fighting. One day they were just – gone.”
Tomura doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like the hands, doesn’t like that he didn’t know they were there, doesn’t like that there used to be more, doesn’t like that he doesn’t know where they came from or where they went. He doesn’t want to think about it any longer. “So I still looked like that when we started fighting,” he says, and you nod. “Attacking me when I looked like that – you must be crazy.”
“I was angry.”
“We don’t fight anymore,” Tomura says. It feels weird to point it out – almost the same as wanting it does. “Are you not angry anymore?”
Your mouth turns down slightly at the corners, and you look away from Tomura. “I’m still angry,” you say. “Not with you.”
Tomura doesn’t need to ask what you have to be angry about. He knows already that you don’t like to waste time being angry, even when you have endless time to waste. “Fight me anyway.”
You won’t, so he shoves you, sending you sprawling into the road – and right into the path of one of the few cars that still travels this way. You freeze in place, then go limp. Tomura hates seeing you like that, with your limbs splayed and your head falling to one side. It looks too much like you did when you died. He steps into the road after you, crouches down to shake your shoulder. “Hey –”
You come to life beneath his hand, and he realizes that you were faking to lure him in. It would piss him off if he didn’t know it meant you want to fight after all. Tomura lets you pull him down, roll over to pin him, and waits a few seconds to let you think you’ve got the upper hand before he throws you off. He hasn’t been counting the years since the last time the two of you fought, but it’s been too long. Fighting with you is the most fun he ever has. Or at least it used to be.
Tomura can’t figure out what’s wrong. Not in this fight, and not in any of the ones he picks with you over the months, years, decades that follow. All he knows is that it’s missing something, and even when Tomura makes you angry enough that you attack first, it doesn’t come back. Not when he grabs you so tightly that you’d break out in bruises if you still had a body. Not when you hit him hard enough to stun him for seconds, minutes. Not when he tears at your skin or when you sink your teeth into his neck, his shoulder, his jaw. He wants things to be the way they were before. And it’s not coming back.
Maybe that’s why you’re angry. Losing something, knowing he can’t have it back, wanting it anyway – it’s enough to drive even a demon like Tomura crazy.
“It’s quieter than it used to be,” Tomura says. “Isn’t it?”
You nod without looking his way. The two of you are watching as a solitary set of headlights approach from the north, and you’ve been watching since the lights appeared on the horizon. It used to be that Tomura couldn’t pick out a single set of headlights if his damnation depended on it; now, it’s rare to see more than a handful of cars. Sometimes you and Tomura pass the time by trying to guess how many cars will pass through the crossroads on a given day. It’s been a long time since there was a soul asleep in the road.
You don’t say anything, so Tomura prompts you. “Why?”
“They could have built a new road, or a train,” you say. “Or maybe they can teleport now. But if you ask me –”
You trail off. “I’m asking,” Tomura says, and you smile slightly. “Why?”
“I don’t think they’re here anymore,” you say. “I think they left.”
“What do you mean, left?”
“The planet,” you say. “Look up at the sky for a second. Does it look different to you?”
Tomura looks up. It’s dark, like it is about half the time, and the sky is filled with thousands of tiny points of light. Some of them are bigger than others, brighter than others, and there’s a faint ribbon of something that looks like cloud weaving between them. Tomura would say it looked pretty, if pretty meant anything when it comes to dots in the sky. There’s only one kind of pretty that matters.
“It’s clearer than it was when I was alive,” you say. “A lot clearer. There’s not as much pollution – from light, or anything else. And there aren’t as many cars, and it’s been so long – we didn’t go extinct, so we’ve probably got the technology. I think we left. I bet we left.”
You still know more about humans than Tomura does, even though it’s been thousands of years since you died. “And went where?”
“Up there. Out there.” You point up to the sky. “There are millions and millions of stars. With the right kind of technology we could travel between them. Some of them have planets around them, and some of those planets are enough like ours that we could live on them. I bet we left Earth and found somewhere new, all of us.”
Tomura can’t picture that. The sky, the stars, the space between them. “They’ll have crossroads out there,” he says. “They’ll have demons like me.”
“Maybe,” you say. You glance at him. “Or maybe every road out there takes you exactly where you need to go.”
Before Tomura can say anything, the car the two of you have been watching comes to a stop at the crossroads. Tomura thought the headlights were too high to be a car, and he’s right – it’s a bus, the kind of bus humans drove in the era you died in, even though that was eras ago. There’s writing on the side of it, but Tomura’s never been able to read. You read it aloud for him. “Old Earth Ultra Tours. Let’s go closer. I want to hear what they say.”
Tomura follows you closer. The two of you sprawl on top of the bus and watch as the humans pile out to explore. They’re dressed strangely, doing strange things, but they’re still more like the souls who used to sleep here than they are like Tomura, or like you. Most of them avoid the vortex like they know it’s there. Every so often, one will wander through, pause in the middle of it, and every time one does, a shiver travels through your spirit. Tomura hates watching it. After the first few dozen times, he reaches to touch your shoulder.
In all the thousands of years since the first time Tomura laid a hand on you, he’s never touched you when he’s not in the middle of a fight, or trying to start one. He’s thought about it. Sometimes there’s not much else to think about, with no cars to watch or souls to stand guard over and nothing to fill the silence with but the questions he wants to ask but doesn’t want answered – or maybe he does. He’s always thought you’d flinch, or hit back. Instead you let him, and the next time a human walks through the vortex, you stay still.
Eventually one human summons all the others to stand by the sign with your memorial stone at the base. “We’ve spent the last few days traveling by road, as our ancestors did in ancient times,” the human says. It’s wearing a button, one you tell Tomura says ‘tour guide’ on it. “This network of roads was in use long before our ancestors developed motor vehicles, but once they did, this particular intersection was known as the Devil’s Crossing, due to the high number of fatalities that occurred here.”
So they didn’t stop here for no reason. They’re here about Tomura’s crossroads. One of the humans raises its hand, then talks without waiting for the tour guide to call on it. “Aren’t there legends about crossroads?”
“Yes! Most ancient cultures had a network of superstitions surrounding crossroads. Some of them include –”
This human, whoever they are, thinks they know a lot about crossroads. They get the part about demons like Tomura right, at least, even if they’re wrong about summoning and making deals with them. Tomura can’t grant wishes or deal curses. He’s just here. The human’s right about crossroads lying between the living world and whatever happens to the dead. The only thing Tomura hears that’s completely wrong isn’t about demons or the dead at all.
“In the very ancient past, there was a tradition of conducting executions at crossroads, and burying the bodies where they fell,” the tour guide is saying. Something tangles in the depths of Tomura’s spirit, tangles and pulls uncomfortably tight. “Those who died by suicide were also buried at crossroads. It’s believed that this tradition came about as a result of –”
“He’s wrong,” Tomura says to you. You look up at him, puzzled. “They didn’t do that. I was here. He’s wrong.”
You don’t argue with him, which is a relief. You reach up and cover Tomura’s hand on your shoulder, still listening to the tour guide. “All of that being said,” the tour guide continues, “this particular crossroads comes with a different kind of legend. Many motor vehicle accidents and fatalities occurred here, but there were also survivors – and more than a few survivors reported an encounter with a much more benevolent spirit.”
Your grip on Tomura’s hand tightens. “This spirit appeared to them while they waited to be rescued, and spoke to them. Some said that the spirit reassured them that death was not to be feared, or that the spirit distracted them from their pain, or simply that the spirit kept them company. A very benevolent figure indeed!”
“People who are hurt and dying see things that aren’t there,” one of the humans on the tour says. Tomura would climb down from the top of the bus and walk through it if he wasn’t busy with you. “And our primitive ancestors believed all kinds of things. You sound like you believe it. Why?”
“It does strain the imagination,” the tour guide says. “Here’s the thing: All of the survivors who reported seeing the spirit described the spirit as looking the exact same way. In fact, they described them as looking like this.”
The guide beckons the humans forward, and they all crouch down to peer at your memorial stone, at the picture of you. The tour guide says a name that must be your name, from when you were alive, and next to Tomura your spirit contorts, frays at the edges. Tomura’s never seen that before. He seizes you, holds you close, as the guide continues to talk – not about the accidents or the deaths, but about you.
About who you were when you were alive, about everything that happened to lead you to Tomura’s crossroads. Tomura learns more about you than he’s learned in thousands of years in the span of a few sentences, and all the while, you shiver and crumble in his arms. “Whether it’s true or not, it’s a nice thought, isn’t it? For those who survived this place, there was someone who’d seen it before to help them through. And for those who died, there was someone to guide their way.”
It mattered. You were right and Tomura was wrong, and what you did here mattered – to the living as well as the dead, enough that you’re remembered, thousands of years after your death. Enough that people came back here from somewhere else, some other world, to see the place you haunt. Or haunted, because you’re fading out of Tomura’s grip, beginning to dissolve like every soul who’s ever passed through this place. It won’t last much longer. You’ll be gone. And Tomura will be alone again, trapped here again, until time itself comes to an end.
He can’t make you stay. He can’t stop you. All he can do is hang on, sick and angry and hopeless and scared, as your soul fades and solidifies, fades and solidifies, over and over until the humans are long gone and the two of you are sprawled out in the empty road. Your eyes are blank and empty, far from here, and even when Tomura says your name, your gaze doesn’t refocus. He says it again, and again. And then, in desperation: “Don’t leave. Don’t leave me here alone.”
You don’t respond, but the next time you fade, you don’t go quite as far. You come back a little stronger, and as the cycle repeats over and over, you settle back into the form Tomura’s familiar with. Until finally you’re lying still beneath Tomura, your eyes closed, the way you were for the year before you woke. Tomura’s seized suddenly with the urge to run.
But then you open your eyes, and it’s too late. “You stayed,” Tomura says, like an idiot.
“I couldn’t leave,” you say. You reach up to Tomura, wrap your arms around his neck, and pull him down to you.
The two of you have never been this close together, not even when you’ve fought hard enough to tear each other apart, and your spirits sink into each other, meld together, until Tomura can barely tell where he ends and you begin. Some instinct he can’t remember drives him to get even closer, but he can’t figure out what that would mean. Maybe you know, but you couldn’t answer even if Tomura asked – your mouth is buried in the side of his neck, just over his pulse if he had one. And for a single awestruck second that stretches into eternity, he does.
You untangle from each other sometimes, but never for long. Tomura spends eons locked into you and never misses the time. Sometimes you talk through it. Other times not, and Tomura’s alone with his thoughts as the world falls silent around him and your spirit molded to the shape of his becomes the only thing that’s real. If you ask him, he’ll tell you what he thinks about. You tell him, when he asks you.
“I’m thinking about where we go,” you say, once. “When this is over.”
“When it’s over?” Tomura repeats. “It doesn’t do that.”
“Everything does,” you say. Tomura’s head is on your chest, and your hands are in his hair. Tomura can remember when you used to yank his hair mid-fight, how he could feel the hopeless rage that drove you both in every part of your soul. Now your hands are gentle, and Tomura relaxes into your touch. “Something will happen. The crossroads will be destroyed or the planet will fall apart, and then there won’t be anything keeping us here.”
Tomura doesn’t like thinking about that. “Nothing keeping you. I’m a demon. I stay.”
“No,” you say after a moment, “I don’t think you are.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not,” you say. “You know the rift?”
There was an earthquake a while ago, strong enough to rupture the crossroads almost straight through. Even if cars came back, even if people came back, they couldn’t travel this way, and now there’s a crack in the center of it, deep and jagged. “What about it?”
“Have you ever gone into it?”
“No,” Tomura says. “Why? Have you?”
“You’d know,” you say dryly. “I think we should.”
Tomura recoils from the thought, so strongly that his spirit rattles. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” You try to sit up, and Tomura won’t let you – but you keep trying, and he gives in so you won’t let him go completely. “It’s just a feeling. And it’s somewhere new, Tomura. When was the last time either of us went somewhere new?”
Never. Tomura’s never gone anywhere. He’s always been here, and he always will be. But you won’t. The crossroads will be destroyed one day, and you’ll be gone. “Fine,” Tomura says. “Let’s go.”
You’re hand in hand as you descend into the rift, and Tomura keeps stopping along the way. He can’t say why he keeps stopping, why he keeps turning inwards towards you, but you never push him away. You always melt into him, holding him close for endless lengths of time, until he draws back, and the two of you can walk another few steps further.
“It feels old in here,” you say. “Older than us.”
“Older than you.” Tomura keeps expecting the rift to end, for them to reach the bottom of it, so they can climb back out into the world he’s familiar with. There’s things on the walls down here, writing he can’t read, drawings faded with time. “What is this stuff?”
“I don’t know,” you say. Your foot descends through something without disturbing it, but you still recoil. “Tomura –”
Tomura hasn’t seen you get scared yet. He pulls you back towards him and investigates. “Those are just bones,” he says. They’ve gone black and shiny with age, but there’s nothing else they could be. “It’s a hand.”
You don’t look any less disturbed. Tomura looks further down the path. “There’s another one,” he says. “Come on.”
Now you’re dragging your feet, but Tomura pulls you along, past hand after hand, and the bottom of the rift rushes up to meet you. It’s flat here, a plane of ancient stone, and there are more bones here, too. More hands, in a circle, around a hunched, withered form in the center. You’re pulling at Tomura’s hand now, trying to drag him back, but he can’t stop himself. He’s drawn forward, past the boundaries of the circle, until he’s staring down at the ancient thing in the middle.
It’s a body, or it was. A human body, curled up in death, and it’s old, but not old enough. Not old enough to have been here as long as Tomura should have been, as long as Tomura thought he was. He crouches down beside it, mimics its strange curled pose, and something rocks through him – heat, cold, anger, fear, in a mess that almost rips his spirit in two. He tries to scramble back, but he can’t move. The hands. There are so many hands, fingers pointed accusingly. Hands around the corpse’s arms, around its throat. And one skeletal hand secured down over Tomura’s face.
“No,” Tomura says, but his voice doesn’t sound like his any longer. “No, please –”
He said that before, too. The memories flood back through Tomura, piercing his eyes, burrowing into his ears, pouring into his mouth when he opens it to scream.
He’s not a demon. He was here, buried here – killed here. Left to die here, buried alive in a circle of hands, hands bound all over him, sacrificed or punished and left here, forgotten forever. His life comes back to him in shards, the same way you must remember yours, but his are tearing him apart. They’re awful. Nothing like the stories the humans told about your life before you came here. Tomura’s not a demon. He’s a person, and his body’s trapped at the center of the vortex, the same as yours was.
No, not the same. Tomura’s body made the vortex. You’ve been stuck here all this time because of him.
“Tomura.” You’re pulling him away, hanging onto him so tightly. “Tomura, it’s okay. Everything’s okay.”
Tomura can’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe before, either. His spirit heaves with the memory of dust filling his lungs, and he twists in your grip, clawing at you like when you used to fight. “Look at me,” you say. “Tomura, please look.”
He looks. You aren’t angry. Your eyes are soft. “I’m going to do something, and I want you to let me,” you say. Tomura nods, and you reach forward like you’re going to touch his face. But you don’t. You grab something and lift it painlessly away, Tomura barely registering its pressure until it’s gone. “Now look.”
Tomura looks down, and finally he sees what you must have been seeing all along. There’s a hand in yours. He’s had it on his face since before he died, and as he watches, it dissolves into nothingness from between your fingers. Your hands come up and catch the sides of Tomura’s face. “That’s the last one,” you say. “When I met you, you were covered in them. They’re all gone now.”
Is that supposed to mean something? Tomura shakes his head. “I’ll explain,” you say. “Let’s not do it here. Let’s go back.”
Tomura can agree to that. He nods, but when you help him up, something yanks his attention back. He glances back at the body. His body. “I have to,” he starts. “I don’t know how.”
You nod. “I’ll show you.”
Influencing the living world is hard, but it’s faster with two. You help Tomura unfold his body from its tortured pose, and pull the hands away from what’s left of it, arranging it into the same position Tomura’s watched you place so many thousands of souls. You’re gentle, and some part of Tomura feels it, the way all the others must have when you tended to them. Something about it makes him feel sick.
“What do you think?” you ask, once the two of you have laid what’s left of him to rest. “Is this right?”
Tomura nods. Influencing the living world is hard, and he’s tired, more tired than he’s ever felt in all the eons since his death. He sways on his feet, and you catch him – and then, like he did when he showed you the crossroads, you lift him into your arms and ascend. Tomura remembers dragging you, hauling you up and dropping you from a height. But you’re carrying him. Even once the two of you are clear of the rift, you don’t put him down.
Tomura wonders if you’ve realized it yet. He waits for you to say something, but you’re tangling yourself into him like always, and Tomura can’t let you. Not when you don’t know. “It’s my fault.”
“No.”
“I made the crossroads. I made the vortex. It’s my fault you’re stuck.”
“You didn’t make the crossroads or the vortex. The people who put you there did,” you say. “You didn’t make this place, and it’s not your fault I’m here. It just – is.”
“What I was when you got here –” Tomura chokes on the words. “I was a monster.”
“I don’t think so,” you say. Your mouth is against Tomura’s throat again, gentle this time, and Tomura knows what to call it now. He never felt one while he was alive, but he knows what a kiss is. “You were here alone for a long time. I think you just forgot who you are. If I was in your spot, I’d have forgotten, too.”
“You didn’t forget.”
You kiss his neck again. “I had you.”
It’s been so long. Decades where the two of you didn’t speak, centuries where you did nothing but fight, an intractable length of time where you’ve been one, but not whole. Tomura feels awful. He feels sick and hollowed out and guilty and scared. What he was before, he’s not any longer. He never was a demon of the crossroads, never a monster meant to torment you. He was always just Tomura. Just the person he’s been with you.
“You stayed for me,” he says, and you nod. “Why?”
“I love you,” you say. Your grip on Tomura tightens, your spirit blurring the edges of his. “You don’t have to say it back.”
“I wouldn’t,” Tomura says, “except I do.”
You look up at that, startled, and Tomura kisses you. In all the thousands of years he’s wanted this, he couldn’t have made it happen before today. The hand was always blocking him, the hand he didn’t notice until you pointed it out, the hand whose weight he didn’t understand until it was gone. Tomura’s not a demon. It was safer to be a demon. Easier to be a demon than to survive the way you did – knowing what happened to you, knowing what you lost, knowing there was no reason and finding a way to make it matter anyway. He doesn’t want to be a demon anymore.
Tomura’s lost time with you before. He could lose the rest of time with you, and it wouldn’t be enough.
Tomura knows it’s the last day when it comes, just like you do. You sit together at the edge of the crossroads as the planet begins to collapse inward, falling away beneath your feet. It’ll be over soon. The crossroads will be gone, and you and Tomura will be free to go. Wherever you’re going.
“I saw it, a little bit,” you say, when he asks you. “When I was fading. I saw enough to know I didn’t want to see the rest without you.”
“So it’s – good.”
You nod. You’re shimmering at the edges, and when Tomura lifts his free hand to look, he realizes that he is, too. That didn’t happen to the souls who used to get up and walk away from the crossroads. They always looked peaceful. Tomura doesn’t know if he can call the way he feels peaceful. It’s more like he’s ready. Whatever it is that’s next, he’s ready for it, and even if he wasn’t, it would be fine. He’s got you.
And there’s something he’s been thinking about, something he’s held onto for a while because he’s not sure how you’ll react. But the world’s ending. If he’s going to say it, he might as well. “Remember when we used to fight about the reason?”
You laugh faintly and lean in against him. Tomura wraps his arms around you. “I think it happened for a reason,” he says. “Maybe not you dying, but you dying in the place you did.”
“Yeah?” The world shakes, but you and Tomura are so insubstantial now that it doesn’t disrupt your spirits even slightly. “Tell me.”
This is the part Tomura feels stupid about. He says it anyway. “It’s me,” he says. “You died in the vortex so you could save me.”
It’s quiet for a second. The horizon Tomura’s stared at for millions of years is vanishing and moving closer in the same moment, coming on faster and faster with every moment that passes. A surge of nerves hits him. “I’d be mad, if I were you.”
“I’m not,” you say. “I read somewhere, forever ago – a person who saves one life saves the whole world. I bet it goes for souls, too. And –”
The horizon’s so close now. After so much time, you’ve got seconds left. “And I love you,” you say. You’re looking away from it, at Tomura, and Tomura holds your gaze. “You’re a good enough reason all on your own.”
“So are you,” Tomura says, and you smile – and the ground’s torn away beneath you both in a single sudden motion. Tomura’s heart lurches. “Don’t let go –”
“Never,” you say, and as whatever’s been waiting for you all this time catches you both and pulls you in, your eyes never leave Tomura’s face. Not until you’re there. Not until you both can see it. Not until you can take your first steps out of the crossroads together, hand in hand.
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