Note: I don't know when they developed either cohesion or sequence. But… I think it's fair warning so given that reading the ones before them would greatly help matters. Maybe towards the end – if I do reach their end – I shall try to put them in one single narrative. Hmmm…

-

Euthydemus

- of logical fallacies.

" Look, don't bother – don't. I can't read a word." Subaru has a tutor for French, one for German, and a cohort of grammatical aides in first, second, third editions. Still, the languages elude him, mouth curling strangely and muddling an intense starvation in anonymity, then isolation. Mourir. Sterben.

Wordlessly, Seishirou dishevels the post he has brought, the shirt stained with stamp, his discourse of autonomy and disinterest. He voices instead, all in pretty foreign words, "I love you", and beats Subaru within an inch of being a near broken semi-vowel amidst strong consonants. "Damn you, you make no sense."

-

Protagoras

- the scholastic attainment of virtue.

The reconciliation of Seishirou's private affairs and academic distinction occurs only discretely, and only on paper, with stiff calligraphy and awkward penetrations of black on white and no red ambition, not ever.

And Subaru is never Subaru, but a collection of hysterics, typical and absurd and unscholarly righteous; the furies catch him just the once, with alphabet soup of mud and blood and bones on ofuda white, and suddenly the dance is en pointe: alone in Seishirou's apartment, hunting for that paper, ripping like the stitches on Hokuto's clothing, because, "You're not a vet! They thought you -- you're nothing!"

-

Gorgias

- coercion versus elimination

Their wager is scrupulously flexible, and set in the stone of their characters: a bas-relief of an old god fading, taking bruises for offering, wanton sex for vestigial gesture. This theology abandons them to some moral expenditure, and on his part Subaru tires of explanations.

Then the day comes when he must force Kamui's return among the living, breaking criminal wards of an absent psyche and luring some puzzle piece of will. The outcome drains him, and Seishirou's fixation with styling him a whore while petting his hair brings out the best in his eyes: witch hunt and pagan death.

-

Meno

- on anamnesis.

The reminder: " Kamui."

"Whose?" Tokyo: all coin and tears, all rape and kill, all strained opportunity. Streetlights bicker, because the world's made of the Sakurazukamori and everyone else, two primordial sins, two imperatives, two sets of contrasting dynamics; one walks against him, one on him, none with. Subaru can't keep up.

Tripping breaks his chase, burning cement and blurred vision; he picks himself up, nine years on rewind: clinics and cat's hiss, pink bled pink and hot summers, mille-feuilles cigarettes smoked for Tokyo's Ending, and Seishirou's two steps and eye lost before him.

And you have to keep moving.