Perhaps it was because he knew, on some deep, subconscious level, that Saori was guarding by his side—a silent, unwavering sentinel—that Shiratori Seiya slept more soundly than he had in months.
The exhaustion of the past thirty-six hours, the emotional whiplash of the concert and the hospital and the desperate, tearful confessions, all of it melted away beneath the gentle weight of her presence.
But perhaps it was also because he had just witnessed that harrowing, hysterical scene of Shione on stage—her voice shattering, her body collapsing, her tear-filled eyes scanning the crowd for him and him alone—that his sleep, though deep, was not peaceful.
Shiratori Seiya had a very long dream.
In the dream, he was young again. Middle school. The first time he had ever laid eyes on Hasegawa Saori, a girl with long, dark hair and eyes so clear they seemed to contain the entire sky. He fell for her almost instantly—the kind of instantaneous, gravitational pull that bypassed logic entirely and went straight to the heart.
She was, as it turned out, a bit of a ditz.
Earnest and sincere to a fault, but easily confused, easily flustered, easily targeted by those who mistook gentleness for weakness. So he helped her. He drove away the jerks who tried to bully her, standing between her and their cruelty with the fierce, unthinking protectiveness of a young boy who had discovered something precious.
She liked kendo. She had talent in it—raw, natural, extraordinary talent. So he followed suit. He learned kendo too, throwing himself into the discipline with the obsessive focus he brought to everything he cared about. He did his best to take care of her. He made it easy for her to fall in love with him—and she did.
Completely. Absolutely. Irrevocably.
He was the type of person who planned things out meticulously, thinking three steps ahead for every single step he took. A strategist by nature. So after they started dating, he had already mapped out their entire shared future. University. Careers. A modest wedding. A small, warm home. Children, perhaps. A life built together, brick by careful brick.
But then—shortly after entering high school—everything crumbled. Her family suddenly owed a massive, suffocating sum of money. Her mother fell gravely ill, the medical bills piling up like an unclimbable mountain. And her family, her parents and relatives, did not like Shiratori Seiya at all.
They looked at him and saw only what he lacked: no money, no status, no proven ability. They felt he could never give Saori a secure, definite future. They couldn't entrust her to him with any peace of mind. He was a gamble they weren't willing to take.
Just when the darkness in his heart had grown so thick he thought he might drown in it, Hojo Shione suddenly materialized. In the dream, she was like a mature, impossibly alluring older sister—the kind of woman who exuded a dangerous, almost intoxicating aura without even trying. She wrapped her slender arms around his neck, her red lips brushing against his ear, her voice a devil's silken murmur:
"I'll give you money. I'll help you earn more money than you've ever dreamed of. In exchange... how about you date me instead?"
"You need money, don't you? With money, you can solve anything, right? Your precious Saori's family debts. Her mother's hospital bills. Your future together. Money is the key to all of it."
"As long as you date me... as long as you're mine... you can have all the money you need. I'll make sure of it."
"Give your body to me. Your time. Your devotion. The more of yourself you give, the more money you'll earn. It's a simple transaction."
In the dream, he inexplicably agreed.
The moment the word left his lips, he felt as if his heart had been physically gouged out of his chest by Hojo Shione's perfectly manicured fingers. She held it up, still beating, dark blood dripping between her knuckles. But strangely—impossibly—he felt no pain at all. Just a vast, hollow emptiness where something vital used to be.
Immediately after, bundles of money—yen notes stained crimson with his own blood—began to rain down from the sky. They slammed into him, piled up around his ankles, filled his arms until he could barely stand. He wanted to look down. To gather them. To count them.
But as he bent to pick up the blood-soaked bills, Takahashi Mio suddenly materialized beside him. Her eyes were sharp, her movements quick and greedy as a magpie. In the span of a heartbeat, she had snatched every last bundle from his grasp, clutching them to her chest with a terrible, knowing smile.
"These are all things you promised to give me. You owe them to me. Every single yen. I won't give you a single cent back—not now, not ever."
Her smile stretched wider. Too wide. Unnaturally wide. And suddenly Shiratori Seiya felt as though he had been plunged into an ice-cold cellar, the chill seeping into his bones, his lungs, his blood. He tried to shout—to call out, to protest, to demand—but his throat produced no sound. Not even a whisper. He was mute. Powerless. Drowning in silence.
Then, without warning, the triumphant expression on Takahashi Mio's face froze. Shattered. From behind her, a figure emerged from the shadows. Hojo Suzune. Small. Pale. Covered in blood that was not her own. In her trembling hand, she clutched a dagger, its blade slick and crimson. Tears sparkled like broken glass in the corners of her eyes, and her lips curved into a smile that trembled on the edge of collapse.
"Seiya... I... I helped you take everything back. All of it. Look." She gestured at the scattered, blood-soaked money. "Only I truly love you. Only me. Not them. Never them. Me. Just me."
Before she could finish, before the desperate, pleading words could fully leave her lips, Saori appeared. She moved with the silent, lethal grace of a ghost, her long sword gleaming like a shard of frozen moonlight.
In one fluid, merciless motion, she drove the blade forward—piercing through both Suzune and Shione in a single devastating strike. Their bodies crumpled. The blood pooled. And Saori stepped over them as if they were nothing, her face calm, her eyes fixed only on him.
She wrapped her arms around him. Tightly. Possessively. Her voice, when she spoke, was a gentle, tender lullaby in his ear.
"Seiya belongs only to Saori. Only Saori. And Saori will always, always be by Seiya's side. No one else. No one will ever take Seiya away again."
'Buzz!'
A bolt of pure, primal terror shot down Shiratori Seiya's spine like lightning. His eyes flew open.
Darkness.
Complete, absolute darkness filled his field of vision, so thick and total that for a disorienting moment he couldn't tell whether he was still trapped in the nightmare or had woken into some new, unfamiliar hell.
He blinked. Hard. Once. Twice.
The shadows slowly resolved into shapes—the faint outline of the ceiling, the pale glow of moonlight filtering through the curtains, and above him, hovering like a guardian angel, a blurry face.
The figure shifted. Seemed to notice his sudden awareness. And then, soft as a prayer:
"Seiya... are you awake?"
Saori.
The voice was Saori's. Unmistakably. Irrefutably.
But even as his conscious mind recognized her, the grotesque images from the dream still flickered behind his eyelids like the afterimages of a flashbang—Saori's sword, Shione's blood, Suzune's tears, Mio's terrible smile—and his heart clenched painfully in his chest. His fists curled involuntarily, fingers digging into his palms.
But then, in the very next heartbeat, he felt it. The soft, warm pressure beneath his head. The gentle curve of her thighs. The memory of before he fell asleep came flooding back in a warm, grounding wave: Saori guiding him down. Saori covering his eyes. "Seiya can rest now. Saori will keep watch."
He was still using her lap as a pillow. She hadn't moved. She hadn't moved for—
Shiratori Seiya swallowed, his throat parched and scratchy. Carefully, hoarsely, he called out to her.
"Saori...?"
His voice was a ragged croak, barely recognizable. A dry, persistent itch scratched at the back of his throat, and he couldn't suppress the cough that followed.
"Saori is here."
Her voice was pure. Steady. Utterly, completely present.
The moment the words reached his ears, Shiratori Seiya felt the iron bands of fear around his chest loosen. He exhaled a long, shuddering breath. And then, without fully knowing what impulse drove him, he turned onto his side—toward her—and wrapped his arms around her slender waist, pressing his face against the soft, warm plane of her stomach.
Saori's breathing immediately quickened. He could feel the muscles of her abdomen tighten beneath his cheek, the involuntary tension of surprise and something else—something more tender, more vulnerable—rippling through her.
He didn't pull away. Didn't explain himself. He simply lay there, his face buried against her, separated from her skin by only the thin fabric of her tracksuit, the warm, steady rhythm of his breath penetrating the cloth and ghosting against her belly.
'Mmm...'
A soft, almost involuntary moan escaped her lips. It was a fragile, breathless sound—the kind of sound a person makes when they've been submerged in something warm and overwhelming and slightly intoxicating. Her body, which had been so tense, so rigid with the effort of stillness, seemed to melt.
She straightened her spine, leaning forward just slightly, and her long, pale fingers rose to card gently through his tangled hair. The touch was reverent. Adoring. As if she wished she could knead him entirely into the substance of her own body, absorbing him into her flesh and bone where he would never be apart from her again.
A long, quiet moment passed. Then another.
Gradually, Hasegawa Saori's body relaxed fully. The tension bled out of her muscles. Her breathing steadied. She extended her fingers—cool and soothing—and began to gently massage his temples, her touch light but deliberate. With the pad of her thumb, she wiped away the thin sheen of cold sweat that had gathered on his forehead.
"Did Seiya have a nightmare?" she whispered into the darkness.
"It's alright... cough cough..." Shiratori Seiya's voice was still dry, still rough. He pushed himself upright, reluctantly lifting his head from the warm sanctuary of her lap, and swung his legs off the sofa. "What time is it?"
He knew, instinctively, that Saori had refrained from turning on the lights in order to preserve his sleep. The apartment was still shrouded in near-total darkness, the only illumination the faint silver glow of the moon seeping through the living room curtains.
But that pitch-black atmosphere—so similar to the void of his nightmare—made his skin prickle with the lingering sense that he was still trapped in the dream. Still drowning. Still mute.
He rose and fumbled his way toward the wall switch, his fingers trailing along the familiar contours of the room.
'Click.'
The incandescent ceiling light blazed to life. Shiratori Seiya squinted against the sudden brightness, his eyes stinging and watering. After a long moment of pained adjustment, he blinked the room into focus. His phone lay on the coffee table where he'd left it. He picked it up, pressed the side button—
Nothing. The screen remained stubbornly black. Dead.
He frowned, long-pressed the power button, and waited as the device shuddered through its reboot sequence. The moment it connected to the network, a cascade of notifications flooded the screen. Dozens of missed calls. A string of unread messages. He scrolled through them with growing unease.
Apart from two unknown numbers, the overwhelming majority of the missed calls were from a single contact: his aunt, Ando Norika.
No need to guess why she's calling.
The news of Hojo Shione's catastrophic concert collapse had clearly reached Kyoto. His aunt, who had always maintained a complex, ambivalent relationship with his romantic entanglements, had somehow gotten wind of the situation and was now trying to reach him.
He didn't know precisely what she wanted to say—scold him? Interrogate him? Offer unsolicited advice?—but it was past midnight, and he was in no condition to have that conversation right now.
He tossed the phone back onto the coffee table with a weary sigh and turned to look at Saori.
She was still sitting on the sofa, exactly where he'd left her. But now, her hands were kneading her own thighs—slow, methodical, almost mechanical motions. Pushing. Pressing. Working out knots that had clearly formed from hours of immobility.
The realization hit him like a physical blow. His pupils constricted.
"Saori." His voice came out sharper than he intended, edged with a dismay he couldn't hide. "You haven't... you didn't just sit here the entire time, did you? Without moving? Without getting up once?"
Hearing the tension in his voice, Hasegawa Saori lifted her face. She blinked once—a slow, owlish blink—and then nodded. As if it were the most obvious, natural thing in the world.
"Yes. Saori stayed right here. The whole time."
"..."
Shiratori Seiya's throat tightened. A powerful surge of emotion—too complex to name, too overwhelming to contain—rose from his chest and washed away the lingering terror of the nightmare. The image of that fearsome, sword-wielding Saori from his dream, the one who had stabbed through flesh and bone without hesitation, dissolved.
This was the real Saori. The one who sat motionless for twelve hours rather than disturb his sleep. The one who massaged his temples and kissed away his tears and whispered that she would do anything—anything—to make him happy.
"Dummy."
The word came out rough. Choked.
He swallowed against the dryness in his throat and crossed to her in two quick strides, dropping to his knees before the sofa. His palms found her thighs—the muscles beneath the fabric were tight, knotted, trembling faintly from the prolonged strain—and he began to massage them with firm, practiced motions.
He had done this countless times before, back when they were younger. After her kendo training sessions. After competitions. He would sit with her just like this, working the tension from her overexerted legs while she smiled down at him with that blissful, foolish, utterly content expression. The technique was a little rusty—it had been years, after all—but his hands remembered the basics. The muscle memory was still there.
Being scolded in that familiar, exasperated tone, Hasegawa Saori showed not the slightest trace of hurt or indignation. Quite the opposite. A sweet, honey-warm smile curved at the corners of her lips, spreading upward until even her clear eyes crinkled with joy. She looked, in that moment, utterly, incandescently happy.
"Didn't you know to get up and move around? Even just a little? Wouldn't it have been fine to just slide a pillow under my head instead of—of letting me use you as a human cushion for half a day?"
"Is Saori's lap... not comfortable enough to use as a pillow?"
"..."
Her question caught him off guard. Involuntarily, his mind drifted back. Saori's legs were long and pale and, when she sat like this, the flesh of her thighs spread just slightly beneath her weight—forming a cushion that was, objectively speaking, far more comfortable than any pillow he'd ever owned. The warmth. The gentle give. The way she'd stroked his hair while he slept.
But he refused to give her the satisfaction of admitting it. He kept his expression stern and shot her a pointed glare.
"In the end, you're the one who suffers. You're the one whose legs go numb and ache for hours. So what's the point?"
"It's worth it. Letting Seiya use Saori as a pillow is always worth it."
A pause. Her smile turned just slightly sheepish. "And besides... Seiya always gives Saori a massage afterward..."
Hearing this, Shiratori Seiya's hands stilled. His brow furrowed. He looked up at her with naked suspicion.
You didn't... you didn't deliberately let your legs go numb just so I'd have to massage you, did you?
The question formed on his tongue, sharp and incredulous. But before it could escape, he swallowed it back. The thought felt ungrateful. Unworthy. And besides—he knew Saori. Her mind didn't work in such convoluted, scheming ways. She was simple. Earnest. Incapable of that kind of calculated manipulation.
"Mmm... it hurts right here..."
Meeting his suspicious stare, Saori's slender brows knitted together. Her rosy lips pushed out into an unconscious pout—the expression of a child who had scraped her knee and was trying very, very hard not to cry. She poked her index finger against a spot on her thigh, her clear eyes glistening with wordless grievance.
"If you know it's going to hurt, then don't do something so foolish next time. I won't be moved by this kind of thing. I'll only be angry."
Despite his stern words, Shiratori Seiya lowered his head and resumed massaging, focusing his attention on the precise spot she'd indicated.
"Okay."
Saori's response was soft and obedient. She gazed down at the young man as he worked, his dark hair falling forward, his hands gentle but firm against her aching muscles. A sly, almost imperceptible glimmer flickered through her pure eyes. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper.
"Seiya... is Seiya feeling sorry for Saori right now?"
"I don't feel sorry for you at all."
He shot her a flat glare. "If you pull something like this again next time, don't expect me to care about you anymore."
The words hung in the air, and suddenly his thoughts drifted. Unbidden. Inescapable. To Hojo Shione. To the hospital bed. To the prescription bottles and the doctor's careful explanations and the revelation that she had been swallowing antidepressants for months while smiling at him as if nothing was wrong.
A sharp, familiar pain lanced through his chest.
His hands slowed. Stopped.
When he looked up at Saori again, his dark eyes were clouded with something complicated—grief and guilt and a fierce, desperate protectiveness all tangled together.
"Saori. Will you promise me one thing?"
"Okay."
The answer came instantly. No hesitation. No questions asked. She nodded, her expression utterly trusting.
Seeing her unquestioning acceptance, Shiratori Seiya shook his head slowly. "Listen to what I'm actually asking first. Before you agree."
He took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice was low and serious—a voice that brooked no argument.
"Promise me that no matter what happens—no matter when, no matter what circumstances—you will never, ever do anything foolish that harms yourself. Nothing like what Shione did. Nothing that sacrifices your wellbeing for my sake. Promise me."
"..."
This time, to Shiratori Seiya's genuine surprise, Saori didn't answer immediately. Her lips pursed. Her clear, luminous eyes fixed on him with an expression that was almost... wounded. When she finally spoke, her voice was small and trembling.
"Is Seiya... going to leave Saori behind?"
"I—"
"Because if Seiya dies..." Her voice dropped to a whisper, so soft he had to lean closer to hear. "...Saori won't keep living either. There would be no point."
"What kind of ridiculous talk is that?!"
Shiratori Seiya's chest tightened with something that was half fury and half heartbreak. He shifted forward, still on his knees before her, and gripped her hand with both of his own—squeezing hard, as if he could physically press his words into her skin.
"How could I possibly just die? That's not—I'm not going anywhere. It's you I'm worried about. You and the kinds of thoughts that might take root in that stubborn head of yours."
"Then... will Seiya always like Saori? Forever?"
As she spoke, her eyes shimmered with a fragile, desperate hope. She looked, in that moment, exactly like a small, soaked puppy on a rainy roadside, gazing up at a passerby with a trembling, unspoken plea—as if a single word of rejection would be enough to send her leaping from the nearest rooftop, a martyr to unrequited love.
Shiratori Seiya drew a long, steadying breath. "I will."
A pause. Then, deliberately, with the weight of absolute truth:
"I've liked you from the very beginning. Since before I even knew what the word meant."
"Earlier than Takahashi Mio?"
"Much earlier."
"Earlier than... Hojo Shione?"
"Even earlier than that."
Hearing this, Hasegawa Saori moved. She surged upward, her arms reaching out to throw around him in a fierce, desperate embrace. But her legs—numb and tingling from over twelve hours of motionless duty—betrayed her completely. Instead of standing, she crumpled forward, her weight knocking into him and sending them both tumbling to the floor in a tangle of limbs.
She didn't seem to mind. Her chin found its place on his shoulder, her breath warm against his neck. The corners of her lips curled upward into a smile of pure, radiant, uncomplicated bliss—the satisfied expression of a cat who had found the perfect sunbeam and intended to stay there forever.
"Saori will listen to Seiya. Saori will always, always stay by Seiya's side. And Saori will make absolutely sure that Seiya keeps liking Saori... for a whole lifetime."
"..."
Listening to her quiet, fervent vow, Shiratori Seiya felt the tension drain from his shoulders. The love radiating from the girl in his arms was so intense, so all-consuming, that it almost frightened him. Almost. He exhaled slowly and tightened his arms around her, pulling her just a little closer.
Half a minute passed. Then a full minute. She showed no sign of letting go. Just as he was about to gently suggest they get up off the cold floor, a sound emerged into the quiet air between them.
Grumble~~~
Shiratori Seiya froze. In his arms, Saori's entire body went rigid.
Grumble~~~
The second rumble was even louder. More insistent. The unmistakable, plaintive cry of a stomach that had been neglected for far too long.
Saori finally, reluctantly, released her grip. She knelt up, still straddling the floor, and pressed both hands to her midsection. When she looked at him, her cheeks were flushed pink, her expression the very picture of pitiful grievance.
"Saori... Saori is hungry..."