Epilogue: Silver Scars

He wore a suit, the tie sitting awkwardly against the shirt. Despite his best efforts, official clothes just didn’t suit him. He knocked three times, clearly uneasy. In the brief moment between his last knock and the answer, he asked himself why he’d come back at all—why it had taken ten years. Was it to apologize? Or maybe he just missed having a family.

“Coming!” she said. Her voice hadn’t changed at all if not for the slight gentleness in her tone.

She opened the door; her eyes barely levelled with his shoulders. “Goodness. I literally just told you he’s not home.”

“Inori?”

His nervousness spiked as she looked up. Her eyes narrowed as if trying to remember who that face belonged to. “It’s me, Yuusuke.” He had hardly any hopes that she would remember him.

“Ten whole years,” she said, “and your face somehow managed to get even more stupid.”

Inori led Yuusuke inside, the same Yokohama apartment where they had stayed back then. Apparently, Chizuru had given them the place. She was the one to tell Yuusuke where to find them as well, and that was about as much as she’d sad.

Yuusuke sat at the table as she continued on and slammed a door open, “get up already; we have a visitor.”

Seishiro emerged from the room with a wet towel on his forehead. He was sick, but nothing too worrying. “He just wants to skip some workdays,” was how Inori put it. Exhaustion was on his face—apparent but shallow—unlike the numbing sadness of a decade ago. Now buried deep under the many years, dormant but not dead.

“Yuusuke…” his tired eyes widened.

“Seishiro.” Yuusuke gave him his hand to shake, “It’s been a long while, I suppose I have some catching up to do…” his eyes drifted to Inori’s finger—the ring hard to dismiss.

“Let us have this conversation on a walk,” she said, eyeing Seishiro. “Don’t give me the puppy eyes, the doctor said I should rest as well, remember?”

Yuusuke, who hadn’t dared to revisit Yokohama in the past ten years, found the city oddly familiar. Nostalgia took his mind on a trip back to times he wished had lasted forever; six people around the boiling pot of nabe, noise, a family. Inori answered Yuusuke’s questions one after the other. She told him about Shouta, who despite barely surviving, recovered, continued his studies and even went to university. Himawari who chose to stay with Chizuru.

The family was still there. Only broken, shattered, barely glued together by rare monthly meetings.

“Hey, Seishiro.” Yuusuke said upon noticing how silent he walked. “I have something I need to get off my chest, something I took the past decade trying to find words for.”

The three stopped walking, their silence layered above the traffic noise. Inori stood by Seishiro facing Yuusuke who continued, “It took me some time to understand but… I know you wanted to be with sensei that day.” He took a slight bow, “I’m sorry, I am sure he chose not to take you because he couldn’t put your life at risk.”

Seishiro opened his mouth as if to speak but was interrupted.

“Think about it, he never started his hunt for the seals until he met me, it must have been that he wanted me—a stranger—to help him kill Awako.” Yuusuke then raised his head, “Seishiro, Sensei loved you the most. He was proud of you; we all could tell.”

He smiled, a lot of that old deep sadness that filled his eyes washed away. “Yuusuke, thanks for reaching out again. I’m also sorry for blaming you that day.”

The sun was going down; moonlight was getting brighter. The pale god died, and its magic was gone. But it didn’t leave like it never was. It instead left silver scars, unresolved regrets and unhealed wounds marks to its absence. Turning the world with everything in it ever so slightly more incomplete.