Shimazaki had never been that good at sensing spirits.

He could feel the big ones, the evil ones, but the others….the run of the mill evil spirits and the neutral spirits were a whole other story. He was no medium. He didn't want to be. Those guys were weird as fuck. Having one foot in this world and one foot in the other…that was too much even for him. Living was living, dead was dead, and Shimazaki was living even though he sometimes felt like he was dead.

But not in a dead way.

He could feel the sun on his face, the wind in his hair, the bugs in his teeth…he closed his mouth. He was still alive even though on the inside he felt kind of…cold? Like the time he took acid and teleported into that meat freezer to…to…he didn't remember. Something about taping the meat back together because life was a circle and then there had been a graveyard and….and he was pretty damn macabre these days.

Or maybe this was just a macabre place.

He sat down on the ground. Less sun on his face. Trees. They'd gotten taller since the first time Toshi had brought him here. They had been stationed near Osaka, some asset or whatever, he couldn't remember that well…that had been one hell of a mission. A short one, too. Collect the asset with minimal collateral damage, destroy the evidence, and report back to HQ. Easy…easy and short. Who was to say that they had to report back immediately? There had been time to have fun.

Macabre fun.

It had been around his birthday, which was around Halloween, which meant that the best course of action had been to drop acid and watch, or in his case listen, to whatever horror movie had been playing. Something about a ghost that called you or something. Movies without narration were hard to follow and Toshi had been in no state to narrate anything. They had been going down memory lane, so had he, but they'd always been more vocal about it.

Movie theatres were a great source of food.

They threw away entire bags, garbage bags, full of popcorn. The good buttery kind, not the crappy kind that you made in the microwave. It wasn't even stale, they just threw it away at the end of the day. Candy too, but that was always stale. When Toshi had been a kid they'd been hungry a lot of the time…longer than he'd been hungry for. He'd only been hungry until he'd been about five or six. Toshi had been hungry until they were fifteen. Parents were assholes, most people's were, but Toshi's were…what was the thing Sho was always calling people? An asshole's dickhole? Or a dickhole's asshole…that last one sounded better.

Toshi's parents had been a dickhole's asshole.

Or an asshole's dickhole. Or just dicks. Or just assholes. Or just…why were those even insults? Dicks and assholes were great. What was the worst, most useless, part of the human body? The…wait, he knew this. People had scars from…the appendix! Toshi's parents were a couple of appendixes or…or maybe…what was even more useless and worthless than an appendix.

A heart.

Yeah…he couldn't think of anything more useless than his heart. He didn't know why he even had this thing. It just caused him pain…well that and it pumped blood through his body…but it caused him a lot of pain and pain was boring. Love was pain and…uh…something poetic that made sense. Something better than his heart hurt like it was trying to kill him or die inside of him…fuck his feelings. Fuck all of his feelings and fuck fucking and fuck Toshi…well he was probably never going to do that again…he was probably never going to see them again…well, no, this wasn't forever but…but he knew them. They never wanted to see him again.

They had said so.

Despite years of loud music, gun shots, and people yelling at him he could hear just fine. They were done…he had no idea why they were done with him…well he did. The thing with Mob. Ok, yeah, it was a hell of an age gap and, ok, it was kind of weird since he'd known Mob since she'd been a kid but it wasn't like he had been into her back then. Toshi knew, they knew him, and…and they were still done with him. They were still pissed at him….he didn't like it. He wanted the old Toshi back. The one that dropped acid with him at the movies and then spent the whole time telling him about their life. The one what didn't stop even when people were shouting at them to shut up already. The one who used to climb into the dumpsters behind the movie theatre and eat garbage bags of popcorn to stay alive…

Ok, maybe not that version of Toshi.

Fuck Toshi's parents. Fuck them in the worst way possible. Fuck them in their hearts. Yeah, that was good. Fuck them in their….well they didn't have hearts anymore. Spirits didn't have actual bodies of any kind. They were just kind of…goo. Spirit goo. If you managed to touch them, not that he had done a lot of that in his life, you'd end up touching what felt like someone had taken a kitchen sponge and soaked it in congealed glue water. If you really focused them you could even feel the little bits of glitter in there…were ghosts glittery? Spirits were hard to sense and glitter was hard to sense and he wasn't even sure what glittery even meant….

Toshi would have known.

Shimazaki laid down and dug both of his hands in the dirt. Grass, squished fruit, rocks, dirt…worms too, lots of worms, but no goo. No….whatever the hell the name for what spirits were made up of was. He didn't know, he wasn't a medium, but Toshi…they would have known. Their other boyfriend, now their soul boyfriend, was a medium. He could have called them and asked them to ask him. They were probably with him right now…

Shimazaki kind of had a problem with jealousy.

Maybe from the beginning, the very beginning. When they met…no, not that night, he hadn't thought that they even liked him back then let alone loved him. Maybe it was the night with the acid that it started. The anger he'd felt on their behalf when they told him about their life. The way he felt hungry when they talked about being hungry. The way he felty boxed in when they talked about being boxed in…metaphorically, of course. They had never been locked in anywhere. Their parents often locked them out. When they had been small they used to sleep in this yard. There used to be a playhouse here, where these trees were, and Toshi would pretend that it was their house. That they lived all alone where nobody could ever hurt them. That they had a kitchen full of food that only they could eat. That they had a big, warm bed to sleep in. That they had parents who never called them crazy. Toshi was a lot of things but they weren't crazy. Kind of a bastard sometimes, really cagey about their feelings, whatever the word was for someone who liked to run away from all of their problems…even things that weren't problems at all. That was Toshi…but he still loved them.

He would never stop loving them.

He couldn't remember when it had started. It hadn't been like in the movies where there was that one moment and he just…knew. Like he got shot nonfatally with an arrow. He had just sort of started thinking about them more and more and more and then one day he had fallen in love, found he was mired in it, and then…well here he was. It had started early, though, the beginnings of his feelings. Maybe even when they said, in a packed theatre, that they were going to take the next train to Tokyo and piss on his father's grave for what the old man had done to him.

Toshi's house had been much closer.

Other people lived here now but the house would always be Toshi's. it felt like them. Their energy was everywhere. The grass, the flowers, the trees…especially these trees. He wondered if the new owners knew that the fruit trees in their backyard were made out of dead people. He wondered if they ever looked out their windows and thought about how the two trees in their yard were actually grave markers and they were put there by the kid who had suffered in every single room of that house. He wondered if they ever thought about what had happened in there. He wondered if they ever questioned why, once a year or so, someone came into their yard and pissed all over their precious fruit trees.

Well…more like once every couple of years.

That was just the nature of this business. For the past couple of years Suzuki had been pretty insistent about keeping Claw business out of Osaka. Shimazaki didn't care to know why. As long as he was having fun then he was fine…but he wasn't having fun. Stalking people wasn't fun unless he could fuck with them. Move their shit around so they thought that they were losing their minds, jumping out and scaring them, tripping them, swapping their pets around…this lady had a lot of pets…and then if Toshi had been here they could have switched the plants in her garden around…that would have been fun. This assignment would have been fifty percent less boring, at least, if Toshi had been here with him…but they weren't. He was alone.

He hated it.

Mob had told him before that she had figured out his greatest fear. It was being alone…and he kind of got it. He had been alone for so long when he'd been a kid but he was a man now. if he wanted to surround himself with people then he could. if he wanted to go and teleport right into the middle of the most crowded part of the city at the busiest time of the day then he could have. He could have…he could have done a lot of things…but it wasn't just company he wanted. It was Toshi's specific company. He needed Toshi and…and he had fucked up. Toshi thought that he'd fucked up and…and he could kind of see it. How he should have confirmed that Mob had told them. How he should have done more to make sure that Toshi was ok with it. He had hated it, after all, when Toshi had started up a relationship without telling him and….and maybe he had been trying to get some kind of revenge on them or…or something…not that he hadn't actually loved Mob, he had and still did, but…yeah. Of course Toshi wouldn't have been one hundred percent ok with this. It was weird…he didn't get why people were so weirded out about him and Mob, besides the age gap things, but…yeah. Of course Toshi was mad at him.

Even if it wasn't for the best reason he could acknowledge that he had made them mad.

But he could make it better! He could…he could do something good for them. He was here after all and…yeah, they'd be happy about this. They hadn't been out here in a while and there were two trees that needed pissing on…or spirits? Toshi had said that their spirits had passed on so did that meant that if he pissed on these trees then these spirits would end up getting pissed on in the afterlife? Or was he just pissing on trees for the sake of pissing on trees? Whatever, the mechanics of it didn't matter. Just that he did what he knew that Toshi wanted him to do.

He wondered if the new people living in Toshi's house had anything to say about this.

Not that he was going to ask them. He was just curious. They didn't matter, only Toshi mattered. Them and their feelings…whatever feelings they had towards him. There went his stupid heart again. He hated that thing and if he could have dug it out of his chest with a spoon and replaced it with a battery or a motor or…or something then he would have. The most useless part of him. Pain was so boring and boredom was so boring…sometimes it felt like he was dying he was so bored. If Toshi had been there then they would have told him that he was being ridiculous…he couldn't remember how it would have sounded….

He was beginning to forget the sound of their voice.

He felt around his pockets….he couldn't forget their voice. Their voice was the best voice that he had ever heard. Everything about it was perfect. The way it had gotten gravelly over the year from smoking, the way they always sounded pissed off even when they weren't, even the little sighed they did every so often when they read like…like their book was boring or something but they had to read it because they had already put so much of their life into it or…or whatever. He was not going to forget the sound of their voice.

That is if they ever picked up the phone.

They didn't. Their phone rang for just long enough that Shimazaki knew they had hit 'ignore'. That Was pretty much normal….it should have been but it was. They had never been one belong phone conversations, actually most of the time they told him that if he had something to say he could either text them or wait until they were together in person, and back when they lived together it made perfect sense. He had seen them every single day. They had been the first thing he saw when he woke up in the last thing he saw before he went to sleep... well not actually saw but sensed the... which was pretty much seeing for him so it all still stood. Toshi was everything to him. Toshi would always be everything to him. Toshi was…they were gone and…and….

And they liked being texted.

His screen reader never told him when he'd been left on read, an expression it had taken him way too long to figure out. Not read like the color red, which meant hot, but read like you could actually tell if someone had read your messages or not. That was a form of torture right there, one that not even Suzuki could have thought up. He didn't even want his screen reader to tell him if they had read his texts or not. At least then he could have kept up the idea that…that they were just sleeping or busy or…or anything other than so pissed off at him that they couldn't even stand the sound of his voice…that they didn't love him anymore….that he wasn't even work a text message…

Hey!

Call from Toshi heart emoji. He could have kissed his phone if that hadn't been weird, even by his standards. Toshi…he answered of course. This could have been it! This could have been them calling to tell him that they realized that, ok, the Mob thing had been a little weird but breaking up with him had been a complete and total overreaction on their part. They could have been calling to take him back. They could have been calling to tell him that they wanted him back, fuck orders, and that everything was going to be back to normal…even he wasn't high enough to believe that shit…they were probably going to tell him to go fuck himself and stop calling…

Or they were going to cough.

"Ryou! What the…what the hell do you want? Do you have any idea what time it is?" asked Toshi between coughs. They were either sick or stoned…probably stoned. God, he missed that. Toshi got so cuddly when they were stoned.

"No clue. Sunlight time?" asked Shimazaki, holding a hand up to the sky. That was definitely sunlight. There was a lot of birdsong, too, but that was normal for summertime.

"It's six thirty in the morning, Ryou. You're lucky you didn't wake me…damn it…" said Toshi

"I just wanted to hear your voice again." Said Shimazaki

"Then listen to all the recordings you made of me, and yes I know about those. I know everything about you….most things. I thought I knew….whatever…" said Toshi

"That's not nearly the same. I wanted to talk to you about…about…uh….just about whatever, I guess. I really miss that, you know? How we used to just get stoned and talk about whatever came up." Said Shimazaki

"Yeah, I miss it too…but who's fault is this, Ryou? It's not mine…actually it kind of is…and yours and…and whatever. I can't deal with this right now. Everything's going pear shaped over here. Tsuchiya tried to leave and that went over about as well as you think." Said Toshi

"She took Mukai away?" asked Shimazaki. That was…well it wasn't like she was running off to live in parts unknown. She was probably going back to the Seventh Division. Shimazaki could always try and get reassigned there and Tsuchiya…well her feelings would cool down eventually.

"She tried too…it's a mess. Mob put her foot down for once in her life…but I'm not talking to you about Mob….I'm not talking to you at all…so why did I pick up the phone?" asked Toshi. Shimazaki, for once, thought before he spoke. Mob had probably left him on read if she was even checking her messages. He had no idea if she still wanted to be anything with him or…or even if she had ever wanted to be anything with him…Toshi probably knew but he knew better than to ask them. They were pissed enough already. He knew them.

He loved them.

"Because you love me?" asked Shimazaki. He held his breath. Toshi was…they were still on the line. He could hear them breathing. Inhale, a long one, and then a pause…he held the phone close to his ear. The line hadn't gone dead…the line hadn't gone dead. The line…he heard them coughing. They were still there.

He could breathe again.

"Yeah, I guess I still do…part of me….but I'm not talking to you. I'm so mad at you. I have never been as mad at another person as I am at you and…and myself…but it's….whatever…why did you even call? If you're planning on pleading your case I don't want to hear it. You slept with Mob. I know that you don't see how wrong that is but that doesn't change what you did so…so can we just skip to the end?" asked Toshi

"I pissed on your parents for you, just thought that you should know. I mean you haven't gotten down here in a while and I figured, hey, Toshi's parents needed pissing on so one thing led to another and now their trees and maybe their spirits have piss on them." Said Shimazaki. Toshi laughed…they actually laughed. It had gotten tangled up with a cough. It was still distinctly a laugh, though…

He felt light.

He felt like he could have just…just floated away…and he could have if he had wanted to. He knew how to fly, it wasn't easy but he could do it. He wasn't flying, though, just…he could feel his heart trying to float up through his chest. Toshi was laughing. Toshi's voice…he could hear their voice…they were happy. Stoned was a kind of happy…

He hadn't heard them happy in so long.

"Ryou, I love…how thoughtful you are. You know that? You're the most thoughtful person I've ever met in my life…the most thoughtful person that I've ever been with…damn it. I have to go. I have to…I have to remember you like this or…or maybe not…I have to go now. Goodbye." Said Toshi before the line went dead. His phone had been nice enough to tell him that the call was over. Now that was being thoughtful…heh…that was…

That had been Toshi.

They still loved him. That was what mattered. They were pissed but they loved him. He should have asked them if they still wanted to be with him. He should have asked if they were broken up…he held his phone in his hand. He could have called them back or texted them. They would have just left him on read, though, they would have hit ignore, they would have…they might have picked up…but he didn't think that he had it in him to risk it. Pain was boring and he was finally done being bored. Anyway he had work to do so…yeah. His work here was done so he had to get back to his real work, the shit he was being kept alive to do…so time to get back to it.

His work here was done.