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In a flurry of noise and colour and motion, it hits him all at once:
Mikoto's back is against the asphalt and Munakata's knee pushes on his sternum, the weight of him real and true.
The tip of his blade sings at Mikoto’s throat, the metal cool, sharp, alive.
And even here, above all, it's the Blue King's gaze that pins him to his place.
The look asks: What's it going to take to get you back in your body?
Mikoto breathes in and in, past the smoke in the air and the coppery tang of blood and the way his insides seem to fray, and then, all at once, come to a standstill.
Sometimes, it can only ever be this.
*
Other times, it's fingernails digging into his shoulder, and the sting is sweet.
It’s always too close and never enough.
He doesn't think it will ever feel like enough.
Fundamentally, he's well aware that that's because there's something deeply wrong with him–a careless joke that Kusanagi used to throw around the bar when it was still his uncle’s. It’s a joke that’s come to haunt them all now for different reasons altogether.
Maybe, it could have been nice, a life without something so deeply wrong with him.
Nice, but boring, he thinks, as Munakata flips them over like he could be made of paper, bites his lip nearly hard enough to draw blood but not quite, like the fucking tease he half-pretends to be.
Maybe, and it’s a fractured semblance of a thought, he can just forget for a second about everything that comes along with having a body--
Munakata picks up the pace, hands tight on his wrists like shackles, and the thought goes to pieces.
--Everything but this.
*
And sometimes, it’s little else besides the nights in the bar that he sleeps above on the nights he sleeps, the alleyway lights, the unasked questions that hang in the air and the loaded looks that Kusanagi and Totsuka exchange that keep his body tethered to this world.
Sometimes, it's hard to remember home as anything other than the furrow at Kusanagi's brow, the easy music Totsuka's hands fill the air with, the knowing look that Anna gives him, reading him clean down to his bones except for when she senses he needs to salvage something for himself.
What is even the point of a body? A home for your soul?
But home’s never been easy, not the way people made it sound.
From the beginning, it was a construct, designed by others, and he'd come to terms with it and let it become his in his own fucked up gesture of love or something like it.
*
Kusanagi had asked him once if he’d wanted to die. He hadn't and he'd said as much, but he still thinks about it all the time.
“But do you even want to live?” Munakata asks.
And it feels like the wrong sort of question now and so he lights up a smoke and laughs.
He remembers the jagged coast formed by the Kagutsu crater and the water beneath his feet as a child.
Sometimes, his mind drifts towards the notion of the Suoh crater that may or may not come to be, the inherent poetry in it, and towards the thought of some other child a hundred years or so later swimming around blissfully amidst its ruins.
He understands the honesty and freedom that lies in destruction but had never been particularly fond of initiating needless casualty, had woken up in cold sweat many a night with the fear of it.
In his bones, he knows, if nothing else, Munakata would stand in the way of it: the containment system, the fallout shelter, the silent promise of a shield between him and everything else.
It’s the only thing that lets him sleep some nights.
*
(They cremate Totsuka's body but his soul breathes on in every brick and glass and filtered ray of sun that enters the bar, in the kids in the clan, in Anna, and Kusanagi and the shared air they breathe.)
*
"There's no convincing you," Munakata sighs. "Your power will steer you to your death."
(Your powers are meant to protect.)
"Nothing's changed," Mikoto says, easily. "It all just sped up."
"Acceleration towards the inevitable. I think I just wanted to forget," Munakata concedes. "Even managed to, sometimes."
Momentarily, he thinks he might have as well.
It's one more thing he's grateful for in all its complicated simplicity.
*
A sword nearly falls in a snowy field but never makes it to the ground.
Another, smaller one, clatters by Munakata Reisi's side, covered in blood.
A body is only a body after all.