Note: In which Spitfire's still dead, Agito's learned a few things and Kazu has unresolved tension with everybody. Consider this your warning for rust, verbiage, incoherent loose ends, and completely gratuitous speculation. Because a warning in advance totally makes those errors fair game.

This was originally one scene, but the build-up to it got vastly out of hand and I needed the practice. Yeah, believe me, I know. Kudos if you spot it without going blind.

Oh, and of course, I make no claims of owning Air Gear or anything to do with it.

He doesn't mean to burn the building down.

He stumbles out of the lab with sparks on his heels an hour before reinforcements are due. Tears out of it, practically, hauling the last goon behind him. He throws the guy onto the sidewalk—feels a brief and guilty flush of relief when a groan splits the empty night. At least, Kazu thinks, there's that much. Like that much's any kind of big comfort now.

The lot's empty, weeds and crushed cans the only witnesses, and still Kazu's braced and tense and fighting for steadiness, shaking like the world hasn't slowed. In the safer dark, he takes a brief tally and wishes he hadn't. Head: dizzy. Bones: feeling more than kind of leaden. Shoulders, stomach, arms, elbows, sides, knees, calves: individually disinheriting each other. Exhaust burns—heavy in his legs, in the Regalia warm beneath his soles, as if he's still fifteen and this his first run. It's hard to tell where things separate: history and heartbeat, bones and Regalia. Every thud of his pulse seems to keep time against him: sixth time, sixth failure, sixth loss. The kind of words to scorch through his veins in an old fury, and even anger sounds too heavy to carry along when all he wants to is tear out of the lot and go flying.

More than that, he just wants it to shut up for a minute: all the bits of uncertainty inside his own head, the doubts that dog his shadow by electric light, the chorus that says you're too tired and who the fuck even knows if you're going in the right direction, who says you're going to find him and what good is it even if you do and— Shut up, Kazu thinks, shut the hell up, and kickstarts into a run, like he stands a chance of burning out his own thoughts.

He's around the building before he recognizes that he's circling. When he looks back, a thin scorch trails in his wake. The smoke wafts, pressing and tugging at the bricking like a sad ghost. It won't even smoulder for long. If he leaves it, in a moment the building will fade into the background again, a raggedy unfinished ghost in an empty Tokyo lot. In daylight, it'd be a slump of bricks and half-finished rafters. Nothing remarkable. That's all it's really ever been—and the error catches in his throat hard enough to choke.

Again, he thinks. Sparks flare up with a kick, and Kazu bolts through them.

Flames weave in his wake, old trivia rising with them as if out of the smoke. The human body burns to ash at a thousand degrees Celsius. Most industrial glass only needs half that. Twisting, Kazu slashes fire through each window. Lets them pour through, whirl and wind the openings. Drag the night in. Light catches on ceiling tiles, eats into the floor until the building floods bright.

He doesn't know when the flame settles into its own—he never knows, feeds it too much and sees it snarl every time with more than he needs. But it feels like a handful of heartbeats at most before he's stumbling back from the ringed blaze, blinking as it snaps higher with every breath and careless stroke of wind. Shadows empty out of the night as the storm roars awake.

Hands on his knees, Kazu pulls in breaths shudder by shudder. He swallows. Ash greases his mouth, charred slick-sour. His wheels stutter, and he nearly stumbles on shrapnel.

"Mind your fucking balance," a voice says. Too near to be more than a shadow. Too sharp to be anything close.

He does jump, then—fights every instinct to kick another scythe of flame in its direction. By the time that much has registered, recognition prickles his skin. His throat's dry, and he freezes, because if he moves too fast and lets this moment blur by—

"Idiot," the apparition says, sounding pretty bitchy for something out of his imagination. "I could carve a hole in your throat here before you blinked. Fuck, you'd deserve that."

"Agito," Kazu says, like it's the only word he knows. Language finds its way to him again out of the gaping abyss into which all his dignity's vanished, and with it come priorities, reminding him about little things like time and place and the fresh waves of crack teams probably zooming towards the area as they speak. "C'mon," he twists towards the street, just barely remembering to wait. "We've gotta get out of here, they've got backup coming any second—"

Agito only looks at him like he's gone a little stupid, more disappointing with every word. "Did you use your fucking brains for fuel back there? Of course they're coming. You -lit a government-sanctioned lab property on fire."

His dignity returns with a flare. "No, really?" Kazu begins, but more questions trip off of his tongue before he can get going. Forget passing back into time, he feels like he's skipped a reel's worth of frames in a movie. It doesn't make any sense. "Wait, how'd you even find me?"

"Same way every other fucking moron's been doing it. Take a wild guess." Abruptly, Agito catches hold of Kazu's collar—and it's not such a long reach now, though his long fingers close and pull like claws with the same careless assurance. He yanks once, just enough to tilt Kazu off-balance, then lets go; in a heartbeat, he's past him and well onto the roads, the same slicing economy of movement. "And hurry up already. Fuck, is this cutting into your vacation time?"

Is he insane? Staying together breaks every refugee's principle—they're going to get caught, Kazu thinks, and hates the little flash of familiarity that aches for it. "Forget that. Look, we've got to split. I'll meet you—"

"Shut up." There's no grace in the threat—not now. For a moment, they only look at each other, narrow-eyed against blank—and the shock catches at him when he realizes that Agito is actually waiting for his answer. "I picked up some news," he says. "You've got one chance to listen."

He takes off. After a moment, Kazu follows to keeps his pace.

It's early yet—probably the safest Tokyo's ever going to be for their kinds of running now. They take the scarcer roads and hit a main junction in too little time for Kazu's taste. He's out of breath and staggering to keep up and still it doesn't feel like enough. Nothing even close to far, or the kind of high they need. Agito's turned from him when he glances over to check, though.

At least one of them, Kazu thinks with reflexive guilt, should be looking out to make sure they aren't being followed. Instead, it's Agito he can't stop looking at. Agito grown out of his miniature graces and into something less safe than ever before. An eyepatch sealed to brow and skin with gauze and old tape, his ragged hair longer and the color darkening in age—there are a thousand little differences that might mean nothing or everything, and Kazu files them away one after another as they run, a series of little observations that he can't seem to quell. All new and brittle edges.

He's lengthened his stride; Agito doesn't run quick and low along the ground anymore, but he's kept the old slip-up of last-minute motion. If his reflexes weren't half as good, he'd be catching on things constantly, tripping over himself to keep up with the spin of the world. His clothes hang hollow on his frame. He wears them the way a knife might, and that thought's crazy enough to twitch at Kazu's mouth in spite of everything. Maybe it's a good thing that Agito's not looking in his direction after all.

They find a stairwell into the subway tunnel without incident. "This way," Agito says, and they hop the turnstiles the same way they always did on their way down to the trains, and for a moment Kazu figures he could be fifteen again, turning a corner and looking to find—

"Fuck, who kicked your sense of direction out of your head? Here."

They ride the train in silence.

It's an older part of the city that Agito drags him to: tall apartment buildings looming over neighborhood houses that squat, fat as huts, in clusters. The tang of brick and old wood is almost palpable. He barely recognizes any of the streets. Not that it's really a surprise. Even after he'd started A-T, Kazu always picked the sleek steel towers for his runs. Fire struck easier off of metal than damp stone, and somehow he'd always craved the heights and possibility of sparks more than he had the rough paths.

Agito, though, clearly knows his way around; they take two blocks in straight fashion before they hit a dilapidated building and head around back to the parking lot. There, Kazu waits with his hands in his pockets, feeling more than a little crazily delinquent as Agito kicks down the fire escape ladder.

The noise shakes the dark, and Kazu can't stop himself from glancing around. "Uh," he says. "Is that okay…?"

It's the first time that Agito's glanced at him in well over an hour, and his skin prickles with it. Which is stupid—it's never been Agito's eye that gave people trouble. He's really starting to wonder if he didn't pick up some kind of mind virus or fever from the smoke. Maybe that was the kind of thing they'd been experimenting with in there, because none of this makes sense. "Fuck," he says, sounding as unimpressed as Kazu feels with himself. "Don't pussy out over this. There's nobody else in the building."

Kazu suffers brief visions of Agito tearing through apartments to root people out before Agito catches onto what's going through his head. He rolls his eyes as he climbs.

"WIND used to have five properties commandeered for keeping low." His voice drifts down, as unconcerned as if he were talking it over tea. "They had to give a few up in the last few years, but they're still listed in government files until Kaito sells them. They're not allowed to use them, but neither's anybody else."

"That's great," Kazu says. "And nobody even tries to squat in these 'cause, what…"

He glances up just in time for Agito to show his teeth.

"Great," Kazu says again. "I feel really safe right now."

He climbs.

The inside of the building isn't as bad. Not that this part should surprise him either. Akito's always liked things neat, and he thinks that he can almost see traces of that touch in the arrangement of the bare rooms. Though this is a little less straightened than he remembers of Ikki's old quarters in the brief interim where Akito'd taken over. He tells himself that old memories are easier to handle if he tangles them in present things; they're understandable, then, only brief absences, and that's all right.

"Thanks," he says, a little awkwardly, as he shuts the screen door behind them.

Already heading into a hallway, Agito doesn't even bother to turn. "What?"

"I don't know, for letting me in? It's not too safe for us to stick together, right?"

But he's glad of the company anyway—he can't help it. The reaction feels like something tattooed into his mind, set and hollow as hope for change. He palms the nape of his neck, clasps his shoulder and follllows. The news would have to be something pretty big for Agito to come find him—Agito, who's never depended on anybody and only seems to have gotten worse over time if he's been living here for this long.

"I didn't do it to get a thank you."

"Oh, yeah, I know that." Kazu makes a face. "It's—nice, though."

"Nice," Agito repeats, sounding like he's pronouncing a foreign thing from a language etched out of sheer stupidity. He tilts his head, turns; Kazu follows his glance around to the scratched floors and bare walls. Their eyes meet.

"What's the news, anyway?" he says abruptly.

"Eight minutes."

"What?"

"Figured it'd take you fifteen, getting from the door back to that," Agito says. He's turned away again—and from that angle, Kazu can't decipher a single thing in voice or face to tell him what's going on. He wants to move closer, but something keeps him back. "Like I should be surprised anymore. You're pretty desperate these days, aren't you?"

Kazu frowns. "What're you talking about?"

"Four times," Agito says, "in nine months."

He freezes in place.

He's never had a handle on strategy, not really. What he knows is the way people tick, cheap shortcuts that every human instinct seals into place, and he's always taken advantage of the patterns that surface out of their meshed behavior to build a place for himself. What he's never known is how to deal with emergencies, that moment between fight or flight when the choice is only his.

"How'd you know?" he blurts.

"Fuck, you can't be serious." The statement seems to gain viciousness with speed, inertia tearing. "You got caught. Don't think you're fooling anybody for a second. Fuck, anybody with half a brain would've spotted the pattern after the first two times."

Kazu swallows. "Is that all you wanted to say to me?"

And the last of the civility seems to drain out of the atmosphere as Agito turns towards him. He's angry after all, every fiber of him tense.

"Think about how I know that." he bites out. "We didn't split up to make the hunt more fun for them, moron. You're getting attention from a thousand corners at once. If you want to be hunted, that's fine, but if you keep fucking up their plans while you're at it, they're gonna want more from you than just the Regalia when they finally get to you."

"So, what, is this a warning or something?" His mouth feels a little like it's running ahead without thoughts to power it, and it doesn't seem to matter—words are tumbling over each other and Agito expression doesn't change. "Didn't know you went in for those."

"A warning," Agito repeats. He seems to be doing a lot of that, recollecting himself. His face holds its blankness for all of a moment. Then, in an instant, it splits into a sharp white grin—empty even of the hunting malice he might have shown once. It's open murder pronounced in teeth and shadows. "Fuck that," he says. "You had your chance to run. If you can't figure out how to lay low on your own, I can help you."

He doesn't even have to think about it—Kazu finds his wheels sliding him backwards. Like the floor's tilted, maybe, or possibly even the Regalia's scared of Agito's expression. His mind's blaring memories of nature programmes, things his sister used to put on in the background while she cooked. But sharks didn't take their prey back to their lairs to kill them, right? The thought comes to him with a little hysteria, as does his cracking voice. "Uh," he says. "Agito—"

But Agito's already across the room.

In retrospect, he figures about fifteen minutes later, it's kind of shameful how fast he surrenders. He blames it on Agito's unholy aura, something the years have apparently only honed.

It's not technically a confiscation of the Regalia. Even Agito wouldn't go so far. But, between getting drilled through a wall and taking off his shoes in somebody else's apartment, the option that enabled survival past five minutes didn't seem quite so bad.

All the same, his toes curl against the floor as he sits. It's been a while since he's had to sit with anybody. After a moment it occurs to him that he can't even put a number to how long he's been running. By now it feels like something more natural than flight. If he can't have the sky, at least he has this much.

Agito, at least, seems well-stocked for information, and willing to provide it now that he's been turned away from the possibility of a kill. Kazu doesn't know where he gets it, but frankly he isn't about to question it. It's been long enough since he's had a chance to go back to his teams, and after all this time, he knows better than to test his welcome.

"Don't zone out on me, beanpole," Agito says. He leans an elbow on the table and gestures. A little jolt hits him at the familiarity, even, of the words—and it has to be kind of sad if he's getting nostalgic over insults. "You're the one who wanted the status update."

"Yeah," Kazu says, a little tired. "Yeah, I know." He cards fingers through his hair—feels the wary shock in that gesture, too. He kind of misses his hat at times like these. There was something reassuring about having that much familiarity to hand. "As long as everybody's okay—"

"Weren't you listening? We're as close to balanced as we're going to get in a state like this. For now."

"I know," he says again—then darts a look in Agito's direction. "What about—"

"No."

The cut-off startles him. "I meant—"

"I know what you meant. I don't have any news on him."

"Not even rumors?" Kazu says. "They still talk about him on the street—you've gotta have heard something."

The glance that Agito spares him's barely a fragment of attention and chilled, deliberate contempt. "Fuck," he spits, and the word grits between his teeth less like the kind of casual punctuative use Agito usually puts it to, and more like a genuine curse. "What," he says, softly, "makes you think I've been looking?"

It takes a sheer, sharp moment for the words to catch up to him. All at once, the world comes together and Kazu's jolting to his feet, bracing over the table, pushing into Agito's space with a sharp aggravation that only registers, hazily, at the back of his mind as dangerous. "Fuck this," he snarls. "Fuck all of this—pretending. What the hell is your problem?"

Agito doesn't move an inch. "What," he says, and there's a kind of light in his eye that Kazu knows he doesn't like: reflecting an unseen flame. "With everything happening, is this what you want to pick a fight over? Fuck, you want me to be sentimental about this? What good's his corpse going to do us?"

The words lurch in his ears. Kazu resists the urge to knock something over. He's had a long stretch of months to get used to the idea that violence should be able to solve everything; it's a little disconcerting to be trapped in a narrow space with somebody who can solve it better than he can. "He's not dead."

"Sure, he's hanging out in space and watching us stumble around for kicks. He's that kind of asshole."

Kazu slams a fist against the table—barely feels the sting as he curls the fingers in. The ache's easier to handle than trying to argue logic with somebody who knows all the facts, who's read them differently all along. "So maybe Minami's got him somewhere—we never figured out what that bastard was up to at the last minute! Something like the Regalia's got to be fucking complicated to figure out, and if Ikki's the only one who can handle it—it'd make sense to keep him around, now that Sora's dead!" He sputters a little, but words find their way to his tongue; they boil out of him like they've been waiting forever, a thousand little conspiracies that he barely has to think about to process. "You think a bastard like Minami would go down without noise?"

Still, Agito hasn't moved an inch—like he's lost his temper and never found it again, like Kazu's yelling at a statue and not a shark who, two years ago, would have jammed his teeth down his throat for lesser offenses. "Fuck, I think he'd do it just to piss off the rest of the world and keep us distracted." He lifts his eyes. He isn't shaking; there's nothing in him to betray feeling at all. "Like we're doing right now. Sit the fuck down, beanpole."

But Kazu doesn't. Too shaken for stillness, maybe, for anything but noise and rage. "If Ikki's—gone," he says, and even that much sticks in his throat. "What's the government so big on? The whole deal depends on—"

"Somebody knowing where his corpse is." Agito's grin cracks thin as ice breaking. "Fuck, the Sky Regalia was trapped in Trophaeum Tower for years—even knowing that only a King-level rider could handle it, did you see that stop any teams from trying to get to it? This is even easier. They don't have to get past an elite team and into a gravity-locked chamber. All they have to do is dig up the rotten corpse."

"Shut up," Kazu bites out, and regrets it as Agito's eye flashes to the challenge; the one thing that a predator recognizes as sacred is first blood.

"Forgot how to listen to the truth?" he remarks. There's open mockery in his tone now. "One way or another, that fucking crow's dead as dust, or as good as."

That one doesn't even deserve an answer, but Kazu gives it anyway. "No," he says. "You want to see him." He's rewarded with the brief stillness of Agito's contemptuous gestures, a heartbeat's worth of hesitation that gives away more than any word.

"Fuck, what makes you think anybody cares if he's alive anymore?" Even the laughter doesn't ring quite true. "After all these years? I'm surprised nobody's sold out yet. Guess with the way we've been hiding they're having a hard time scraping enough to sell."

Kazu leans down—because he can, because he wants to—just to look at him. Wonders how long Agito's fed this particular vein of bitterness. It occurs to him fleetingly that anybody who trusts this much in betrayal might be using it towards their own ends—but if he's going to get taken in, he'd rather do it here than on the street. Better to die lying down, at last, like the dog he is. "You really think," he says. He has to swallow to fit the words. "Buccha, Onigiri—?"

"Don't be fucking naïve." Agito gestures. The question, apparently, bores him. "We're not the only ones with Regalia."

It's been long enough that Kazu has to recite the names out loud. "Thunder," he says. "And the Pledge with Tool Toul To."

"They picked up Nue as soon as Sora went down and they realized that they might need Kings on their side. The only reason Tool Toul To got to keep their Regalia's because half the Storm Riders'd break out a riot in the streets if the King-level riders couldn't get their Tunings anymore. The Rumble and Gem Regalias're still getting passed around. They're only going to be safe for as long as nobody untrustworthy gets them."

"Nobody's gonna hand them over," Kazu says.

Agito doesn't even bother mocking that one. "We're living like this because one idiot couldn't see when he bit off more than he could swallow," he says, and Kazu stills. "I hate the bastard for that. Imagine what somebody who was never in Kogarasumaru would feel for him."

Kazu doesn't answer.

"We've been lucky so far," Agito says. He isn't even bothering to push Kazu back. "Government dogs need permission before they can go off leash. Once they get to that, it doesn't matter how we hide."

There's an oddity in the way he pronounces things that catches Kazu's attention. He leans forward. "You really are scared, huh? That he's dead."

That gets Agito's attention faster than if he'd knocked the table over, or cut sparks into it. In the old days, maybe, he would've roughed him up a little. But this new Agito doesn't even bother to get up out of his seat. All the same, Kazu feels the focus curve over his head like a sickle. "I don't," Agito says quietly, "want to hear those words out of your fucking mouth. You, the biggest coward out of all of us." He's glaring without loathing or interest, brittle and bright-eyed under fluorescence. "Being scared yourself doesn't mean everybody who gets near you's about to share your feelings."

It's a condemnation, but it's nothing new, nothing he hasn't heard before, nothing with the reckless venom he'd held so easily once. Even his voice sounds faded. Without quite knowing what he's doing, Kazu reaches out. Agito's hand snaps up, as if he really hadn't expected that intrusion, but it's too late.

The eyepatch comes off in Kazu's hand.

It's probably the first moment since Agito found him that he's at a loss for words, language twisting to a halt as the impression seals an image in his mind, threads itself through to all the little gestures that hadn't pieced together when he'd seen them: Agito, holding back in the grassy lot; Agito letting the fire go; Agito catching at his shirt, pulling his wrist, standing as if he's ever known what it's like to be alone.

Agito tilts his head, and the shadows slide from his face to leave his eyes bright and loathing gold. Both of them.

He starts to speak—fumbles one word after another. Before he can make it far enough, Agito's up and snatching the eyepatch from his hand, so quick that his nails drag pinscratches across Kazu's half-curled palm.

"Don't bother," he says, low, and there's a wealth more contempt in the words than anything he's said all evening. "As if your fucking voice's ever been of use to anybody."

He turns away as Kazu stares after him.

It's not anything he meant to inherit. He's still pretty sure it wasn't even about him.

Kogarasumaru got a few challenges after Ikki disappeared. Took them on within the same day, every time. The rest of them barely had to set foot on the field, not when the loss was new and Agito was routing and scarring every idiot who came up against them like each of their Roads was some kind of personal insult. Their opponents blur into silhouettes in his memory, but Agito's all slices of motion whenever he thinks of it, clear and lingering. In the wake of failure, he hunted like a nightmare: hooks twisting out on ribbons, the air caged thick with slices, bodies tumbling like some kind of morbid, unchancy shower.

That wasn't the only remarkable feature of the matches, though. People started to find Kazu while he was lingering at the sidelines—innumerably different. Dark-haired and bright, scarred and lined and tattooed-but scorched, always. He remembers the smoke, remembers their furred black jackets. Remembers, more often than not, the way they'd looked at him: hope in sly shots, as if a breath might knock the light out. They didn't care about duty or anything, they said. They just wanted to talk. They'd ask him about anything they could think of—about his day, about matches, about territory and etiquette and negotiations, and if there was anything he thought that Spitfire might've told them if he could?

It wasn't like he could've told them to leave. Not with what they were looking for.

In all his thoughts about the Flame Road, Kazu had never actually given a whole lot of thought about the teams that Spitfire was leaving behind. It'd seemed to belong to Kokuen more than him—Kokuen was the one who knew their names, their habits, the paths they wound to their separate lives. Anything he could offer them paled compared to that. Invisibility, cement scorched black and a couple of sparks—anybody could pull that.

But they'd kept coming, day after day. He learned their names over time, cigarette brands to get depending on what you liked, the classes they were taking, the time somebody'd switched Kokuen's hair gel with jello, the impossibility of keeping the damn jackets clean.

And then one day, they'd come to him on the day of a match to represent the team. Just this once, they said.

Please.

He has a lot of time to think things over in the coming days. Agito comes and goes from the apartment as he pleases, going who the hell knows where—it's none of his business, he knows, largely because he knows Agito doesn't want it to be. Sometime in his wake, though, Kazu remembers that there're still other problems to check.

"Fuck." Agito says when he's asked. Self-conscious, Kazu feels oddly, awkwardly transparent, and maybe asking him to check for news of the local teams hadn't been the best idea.. His eyes hold Kazu's briefly before they flick away, disdainful. "Thought you'd quit your pining years ago."

"Shut up." Kazu makes a face, and mutters "shut up," again, like repeating might drill some convincing into it. "I'm not pining, all right?"

What he doesn't expect is for Agito to stride over. He swaggers into his space, and all of Kazu's fine-tuned experience in forestalling the flight part of his fight-or-flight instincts flash out of his mind as his back hits the table. Among all the facts he's learned about Agito, Kazu knows: he only circles this close if he wants to make a show of it—of how sure he is that there's no chance of damage. It's something he's only ever done when he's angry, and what the hell does anger have to do with a status report on the local Storm Rider teams?

"You have a choice, beanpole," Agito drawls, like he has any excuse to be angry. "Learn some fucking plausibility or give it up. That team's got nothing to do with you."

The unnerving thing about Agito is how fucking quiet he's gotten—old gestures that would have deserved contempt and a rage see only silence now, disdain delivered in shadowed glances and a roll of a shoulder that couldn't give less of a fuck what Kazu does. Kazu feels his expression go blank for all of a moment—it's the last thing, after all, that he might have expected Agito to actually hit back with.

"What?"

"Isn't that what this is about? An idiot beanpole's found himself something to beanstalk. They let you lead them for a couple months years ago and you got attached."

"Maybe it is," Kazu manages, evenly. "So what?"

"Only King-level riders wear Regalia," Agito says. "It really never touched your tiny brain why he'd give it to a kid just kicking up sparks? Fuck, it had nothing to do with your worth. The only teams in history before us ever composed of more than one King were Sleeping Forest—and Genesis."

His mind's firing words, synapses to light matches, but no thought emerges. "So," Kazu says, slower than ever, "what?"

"So," Agito repeats, loathing. His mouth bends in a sneer. "Did you forget who we were taking on? If the rest of the Storm Rider teams thought that Sora'd already won, what would've stopped them from bowing down once Sleeping Forest burned? Fuck, you saw how close they were to listening to him anyway at the end." He's too close—when did he get this close? His nails bite into Kazu's elbow, holding him fast; his eyes are hollow, gold and bright. Now that he knows, he can see it: there's nothing left of Akito in them, and the look gouges at him. "There's only one reason he needed you to hold the Regalia," Agito says. There's no pleasure in the explanation, no malice; he's biting out every word. "You were the fastest kid on Kogarasumaru. That was it. You looked like you could hold the title. That's all he needed from you. As long as the team looked real, we could buy time to train more. Throw together a real chance to take Sora down." His laughter snaps the air. "Fuck. That answer enough for you?"

Kazu jerks, stumbles backwards and nearly falls as the table grates away. Agito's hold on him slips and in a heartbeat he's across the room, hands sinking against the windowsill and still staring.

Agito hasn't looked away.

"Explains everything, doesn't it?" he says. "He didn't see anything in you but time. Fuck, not that the rest of his Road did a lot better. If he actually cared about keeping standards for the Regalia's successor, he'd have let them burn with him. Would've given us one less liability to worry about."

"The hell are you saying,"

"You heard me," says Agito. "I won't waste my time repeating shit for you."

"Then—" he fumbles for words, for anything that he can form into a coherent chain and drag out from between his teeth, but he's run out of words, suddenly: fuel burned up, hollow in his throat and hollow throughout. The wheels sink, heavy against his feet. "Do you think I should just give them up and let them be destroyed or what? Is that what you're trying to say?"

"Fucking beanpole," Agito mutters. Not a step betrays him as he darts across the room, too. Kazu catches his wrist before his fingers can hook into shirt and drag down, and Agito's eye flashes to his grip like it's a personal offense. They share a glare. "Listen, nobody's asking you to think. Only a blind naïve idiot would believe somebody like you'd melt down the Regalia. Not after you've been running with it all these years. Even if you passed them over to them, do you seriously think everybody on that side agrees that they should be destroyed?" He shoves Kazu, knuckles digging into the space above his heart. "We're everybody's fucking leverage now. Face it."

For a long moment, Kazu does nothing but look at him. Half-surprised as always at the lightness of bone, as if Agito's more hunting bird than shark. As if his wrist could snap out of flight in an instant.

Then he twists and punches Agito in the face.

"Shit. Agito, I'm sorr—"

"If you finish that sentence I'll cut your teeth out of your mouth and use them to redecorate this heap. Fuck, just because you're a baby doesn't mean everybody else has to be."

"You know you're bleeding on your jacket, right?"

Agito snorts. "It was fading anyway."

Kazu pauses. "Uh, you know," he says, like this is the kind of fact that might elude anybody, "nobody actually substitutes blood for clothes dye."

"Enough of it works. Shut the hell up. It's a scratch."

"You fell three stories from a damn window!"

"And? Did you see me fall on my face out there?"

"Look, I'll do whatever you want." His cheek already feels as if it's thickening, but Kazu glares all the same—glares a message that if Agito is up for round two, he'll take the match gladly. Take it and light it on fire to toss it back at him. "I'll leave you alone for the next four days. Just let me check it."

Agito eyes him. Then his fingers go up to his jacket—with only the barest stutter to tell him how much they must hurt, actually, to give him away like that. And he knows that if he'd left it, if he hadn't pushed, Agito might have forced the duty on him eventually. They know better, both of them, than to leave wounds open. It's the nature of distance that's left them out of sync: Kazu dragging too hard until Agito tears and falls.

Once upon a time, these would have been his cuts and bruises, and Agito would have had no sympathy at all. It's strange to think of Agito overcompensating for mercy.

But Agito doesn't hold still. Instead, he yanks off his jacket, gloves, shirt, tosses each item to a side, where they pool together in abandonment. Suddenly he's stripped to skin and jeans, tugging off his belt, and Kazu makes what he processes as an extremely weird noise. It's not like he hasn't seen Agito shirtless before, but Agito's stride is too quick, faster than the brain can process even without treck intervention, and he can't seem to catch up with what's actually going on. "Agito, what—"

He doesn't have to finish the question; Agito doesn't even look in his direction. He arrows right past without a word. The door slams shut before the echo of Kazu's voice finishes resounding. Staring at the board, Kazu swallows against his knotted throat and the bruise flushing in his cheek.

Inside the bathroom, the shower starts to run.

It takes Kazu a few minutes to pull himself away to go look for medical supplies.

It takes some time before the door slams open again. Agito slinks back into the room in jeans and nothing else, hair plastered to his bones as if tattooed into place. By then, Kazu's already cleaned up the glass and settled into place by an unbroken window; he beckons him down where he's got the gauze in hand.

Agito heads over, looking sour as a wet cat. He drops without a word before Kazu's knees, offering his back.

With careful fingers, Kazu traces the air above the skin. The warmth that echoes from his skin is palpable. Light tumbling through the blinds drag harsher reds out of the cuts, but they don't look too bad. The gashes aren't deep, but they cross each other in an obscene net, scars on scars, and he can't tell which of them came from falling out of the window and which merely broke older wounds. Agito's walking fit to break, always has been—only his own self control's kept him out of it.

"For fuck's sake," he hears—a little of the usual viciousness's drained out of Agito's voice, but there's still something dangerously promising about it. "Get a move on before I find you other things to bandage."

"Yeah, yeah." The earlier fight's taken too much out of him to bother with the rise of temper again. Kazu strips down the bitter fire that surges automatically at the lazy poison in Agito's voice. Instead, he busies himself. Cuts the first piece of gauze, folds it and presses it against skin. A finger pins it down while he tapes the edges into place.

It's nothing that Agito wouldn't have been able to do for himself—but there's always been one surefire way to get to Agito, and that's through efficiency. He works in silence, aware that Agito's just barely breathing while he waits. The oldest and thinnest scars have faded to unexpected rough patches and white lines; he remembers seeing them in starker colors years ago. But he's thinner now; his shoulder blades stark beneath the skin like wing-bones broken off, and he moves like something unaccustomed to only walking. In shadow, with his head turned, it's hard to remember that Agito's only half himself, nothing at all close enough to touch.

"Quit that."

"What?"

Agito's voice is rough; he can feel little echoes of the words hollow in his fingertips. "You're thinking, and you're shit at it. I don't need your idiotic thoughts in the same space. You can start that again after I go."

Kazu doesn't stop, lets that voice roll over him in a wave. It feels like some surreal vision of the old days—though Agito would have never stooped to let any of them touch him, not then. "People do think without permission, you know," he says. "Kind of the human thing."

"Self-pity isn't a valid cognitive process, idiot."

Which doesn't even deserve an answer, not really.

He holds his thoughts until he's taped most of the scratches down—wouldn't want Agito to get an excuse to squirm out of it, as he's been known to do in the face of emotional content. He has it in the back of his mind that it's a shitty idea to bring it up at all—but it wouldn't be the first time.

"You held back on me," he says.

By now, they're learning balance again. He can hear Agito rolling his eyes as he shifts away. Standing up, he reaches under an arm to run a hand across the bandages. His hands are thin and scratch-worn, but there's a grace in the shape of the bones, the way the tips curl as they touch gauze. Kazu watches him, ready to bite out a warning if he starts poking around—he's learned some decent bandaging over the years, and like hell is he letting Agito mess up his handiwork.

It occurs to him, as those scars vanish underneath a shirt, that Agito's had a long time fighting on his own.

The process ends in a moment. Kazu drags his eyes away, looks at his feet and tries not to think about where that thought is taking him.

Over his head, he hears Agito snort. "The last thing I need's another corpse to tow around," he says. "You're oversized, beanpole. Carry your own fucking weight."

He heads towards the door. But he stops at the frame, glancing back.

"Eight days," he adds, and slams it shut.

The facts come to him as easily at Agito's table as they always have, as clear and incomprehensible as the day the news first struck them all. Takeuchi Sora was dead. Minami Itsuki was missing in action—suspected of conspiracy with Minami Rinta. The separate Regalias each possessed a piece of the cipher needed to decode the Sky Regalia. To deconstruct and reconstruct it, too.

The rest muddles a little, a blur of battles and desperation and dawning realization. He managed to keep Spitfire's teams for four months before it became too hard to hold them together while the government was looking. Kokuen's team only had to disassociate themselves with the Flame Regalia and they'd be safe. The other two—there wasn't even the slightest chance they'd looked to anyone but him. They had to be disbanded entirely.

He couldn't have asked them to fight and fly and die and cage themselves for him. Not when he wasn't offering anything—not faith or a plan or even the chance of a sky. All he had was the hope that maybe, if they kept their heads down for long enough, the sky would come back—but there was nothing in that of glory.

If it were Spifire, he knew, a miracle might've come out of genius and circumstance. But Spitfire was long ashes, and they'd hated his heir for that.

He'd deserved it.

"Kazu-kun," Spitfire's voice says, and it's all gentleness, more than he deserves or expects and he remembers, suddenly, that he's left the phone open while it was running a report on his recent statistics. Starting, he has to fumble to catch the little screen before he drops it, and when he glances down, he catches the eyes on screen gazing back at him with perfect, steady interest.

The look cuts through him in an instant—knots in his leaden bones until it seems too heavy, all at once, to sit, let alone to breathe.

He hits the table, hard—remembers after a moment that Agito's trying to sleep in another room. Wonders with a fatalistic kind of interest if this is still the kind of thing Agito kills for. "Sorry," he manages out loud, and only gets that far before the rest of the words spike in his throat. He bites his lip, then goes on. "Sorry, I missed that last part. Think you could say it again?"

The AI recognizes no deception. "Kazu-kun," the program says again, with the same open, attentive smile it's held for years.

He sinks against the desk and presses a hand against his eyes. Feels the words sticking to the roof of his mouth, shame at the mere thought of begging pardon from a data ghost.

I'm sorry, he tries anyway, I'm so goddamn sorry. But he doesn't have the voice, and it wouldn't know how to process the words.

It takes him two weeks to get the pattern of Agito's disappearances down. Finally, on a day when he knows Agito'll be back by the next morning at the earliest, he leaves the apartment. Opens the kitchen window and slides out, using inertia to break the flight down. He walks the rest of the way, pulls his hood over his head and slips into the crowd like just another gangling teenager with nowhere to go on a weekend.

There's only four of them waiting for him at the meeting point they set up, but that makes sense. Any more would attract attention. According to the laws, A-Ts aren't any more illegal than they've ever been, but with the crackdown on Regalias, a lot of Riders have split off into normal little gangs for the advantage it gives them. Not everybody's got the talent for Trecks, and they're in precious demand these days.

So they tell him, anyway.

With the way he broke the teams, he knows, he's lucky that anybody showed up at all. It's not something they think to say, but he keeps it in mind anyway.

Still, they're eager to tell him everything, practically stumbling over the words until their voices blur into each other, like a hasty little chorus. They're young—and that's a seriously weird thought to have when he's pretty sure that they're fourteen or fifteen. As they pass him their reports and their gossip spills through the air, he recognizes the type with a distant shock.

Two boys with shoulders pushed high and their hands in their pockets, the shock-haired girl a step ahead of the smallest in the group, comfortable in her own space. They look like any of the matchstick students out on a weekend trip. But Kazu recognizes the way people piece themselves together, and he can see it: the casual guarded way the boys stand at either end, the girl's slight stiff attention, ready to throw herself down to give the rest the second's distraction to scatter, if she has to.

He asks for news about everything, same as he always does. They tell him what they can and give him paper reports to back them up when they have them: smudged prints, maps scrawled on the backs of old homework assignments, notes with movements written in the margins. He takes every bit of it and reads and asks questions until the pattern emerges—until it becomes clear to him what these movements mean, and the only way to hold them.

At the interview, he tugs at a lock of hair, realizes he's doing it and cuts it out again. It's getting really hard not to miss that hat. "You think you guys can get a message out for me?" he says.

The girl's quick to laugh—head cocking and the flick of a wrist. "Name the place and time," she says. "Anywhere, anytime. We're the fastest—"

"Third, actually—"

"Well, if you're counting Hokuto—"

"Shut up, guys. For you, we'll get it anywhere before tonight."

Kazu claps a hand to the back of his head. Fifteen, he thinks, and the number seems important somehow, impossibly in love with the sheer flight, and so far off from anything he understands now. When he gives them the directions, though, he's careful not to hesitate; he can't, not if he wants them to take his cue. It's a risk just asking—but if the information's right, this is the best way this can play out.

They agree, and going over the plan after that only takes a few minutes. One of the boys, though, stops as they're packing up. "Are you sure? I mean." He rubs his palms together, a restless reflex. "About telling—"

"Yeah," Kazu says. He doesn't need to hear more than that. "I'm sure." He looks over the last of the papers again, then folds them and tucks them inside his jacket for later. "Thanks for today," he adds, and he's courteous because he has to be. This isn't his right any more than it is their duty; that they come to him at all is enough.

Atop the crate, the girl flashes him a grin, wide and wickedly red. The idea doesn't seem to disturb her, at least. "Don't mention it. No—I mean it, really don't. I hear it's bad luck to go spreading news nowadays."

Instantly the boys hanging back try to elbow her at once, and fail as she sidesteps both. Kazu wants to laugh. Doesn't. Instead, after another moment, he nods and turns away, heading towards the street.

"Hey," one says, behind him. They're all staring when he looks back, matching owl eyes in silence. The speaker, in particular, seems to be having trouble getting the rest of his words out. At last, the girl digs an elbow into his side, which seems to dislodge his words.

He says, "We're waiting on ya, boss!"

Kazu stops short. Swallows, tasting coal. No words he could offer would possibly match that: the promise unspoken. That they'll wait. That, in spite of everything, they think there could be anything left worth waiting for.

"Fuck," he says. Hears the echo in his own filter-burned voice and flinches from that too as he turns towards the street. He doesn't wait to catch their reactions—doesn't think he wants to. "Don't call me that."

In the end it was Agito, he remembers, who decided that they needed to split up. But then, that was Agito's way—making the decisions nobody else wanted to acknowledge. He didn't lead them—there was no question of anybody leading in Ikki's absence, kind of the same way there'd be no efforts to tape paper to the air if somebody tore down the sky. They knew what the real thing was; they knew what counted.

It was enough that he was willing to say he'd leave.

One by one, they vanished after him: Emily into American protection for national security's sake, Buccha with Yayoi somewhere into the mountains around his father's monastery. Onigiri stayed on as the open representative of Kogarasumaru—what it had been and would be, still, if they rose out of ashes. Kazu'd been last to vanish, clinging hard to the possibility that Ikki would surface at the last minute the way he always had, the latest and most brutal bastard boss in the world.

He doesn't wonder what would've happened if Agito'd never left. If he'd suggested that they fight, maybe. If there was anything he could've done. It'd be too futile to bother. Everyone's oceans away from each other now, or close enough, cut off from any common element but air. Kazu's seen what he needs to; he knows better than to think that'll win him anything but a long fall.

The attack still takes him by surprise.

Part of him processes the motion as soon as he drops through the glass, registering danger before he even knows why. He falls flat, rolls and sweeps to wheels and stand again before he recognizes the sweep and the bladed arc that curved past him to blast a streak into the counters. Air hard enough to slice, to shatter, to sunder time for flight. In a flash, Kazu sweeps to the side, uses the momentum to kick a wall of air towards it. A clap bursts like an exhale, leaving no mark on its surroundings. He turns to Agito, who has his arms folded—he doesn't look like he's sent off a flare at all, which says something about how far he's advanced, if he can toss off Fangs with barely any momentum. His eyepatch is off today—both eyes trained to track every motion Kazu makes.

"Thought I told you to lay low."

"Agito," Kazu spits, a little breathless, "what the fuck."

"That's my line." Agito pushes away from the wall but doesn't approach, and Kazu's mind helpfully reminds him that the Fang requires some distance to run in order to fire. He can't let his guard down, not yet. "Fuck, if I'd known that was a suicide run all those weeks ago, I would've saved some rope and hung you with the rest of those idiots."

"Yeah," Kazu says. "Yeah, you've got a lot of room to talk about suicide runs."

He's talking too much, as usual, and Agito's not dim enough to let it pass. His eyes narrow. "The fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"Where do you think I've been getting my news from? So much for laying low—the reason the government's on hyper-alert right now's got nothing to do with me! You took out an active base!"

Alone, his mind reminds him, and flips open the folders with which he'd been presented: sketches of cracked walls, newspaper clippings about buildings split with crevices, a photograph of machines crushed in a tangle of wire and weld. It pages through the information against the Fang Agito'd sent against him, coming in, and a thousand other pieces are coming together: why Agito doesn't bother to leave scars now, the sudden boost in power. If Lind and Akito both bequeathed their strength to him and he trained on his own—it shouldn't be a surprise at all that Agito's been left alone for this long. He doesn't need to carve a single inch of human skin of he can just, apparently, carve land into an islet and drown it.

"They've got more," Agito says, bored.

He grits his teeth. It doesn't take much thought—he doesn't have much leeway to think at all, and he doesn't bother. Kazu cuts across the room, catches a fistful of Agito's shirt and shakes him. "Yeah," he bites out into that remote face. "I know. Shit, weren't you the one talking about how we couldn't afford to fight 'em or something? Whose attention are you trying to get?"

He's just fast enough for that, apparently—spots the flash of surprise before Agito's brows snap together. "Get your fucking hands off me," he says, and the quieter words prickle along his skin.

"You're the one who dragged me into whatever you're up to," Kazu says. "You want me lying low? Maybe you could try making some sense first!"

He reads the moments of calculation flickering across Agito's face, etchings clear as gashes, promises of bloodshed, and recognizes the decision a moment before Agito kicks upward, the Fang Regalia knifing for his leg. Kazu twists his hand in his shirt and yanks, tipping his balance as he drags himself out of the way.

It's fast and bloody, motion barely present to be seen before it transforms into slashing winds, air that Kazu can twist into fire to toss back at him. In the background, he can hear the walls cracking, lights shifting as flame twists and singes and starts to catch. He whips around hard, spinning a vast pillar of flame to launch—

-only to stop, because Agito isn't moving. He's standing stock still in the middle of the room with his hands fisted at his sides, almost as if he's waiting—as if he wants to be caught. As if there's something in this that might be worth holding on for. Kazu tries to bank the fire, but it's already roaring forward, spinning like a cyclone.

It vanishes against a thousand little shining Fangs in the air: a cage spun for protection. Barred in the darkness, Agito lifts his head.

"My turn," he says to the silence.

A chancy blast of air slams Kazu against the counter, full-force—and beneath the screaming of a thousand bruises creaking to life, he knows, without a word, that Agito's holding back. He's struggling to regain his balance when Agito picks him up like it's no effort at all—and it probably isn't. Slack in his grip, Kazu thinks hazily of old gods—of the way the Kings had looked when they'd first started on the Road and physics had seemed impossibly solid. Agito's always been the one furthest ahead of any of them. Some things never did change.

"Fuck, like you've ever had a problem listening to shit orders before," Agito says. He's barely breathing any more heavily. "Give it up, idiot."

Kazu flashes him a red and ragged smile. He licks blood off his teeth, coughs into laughter. "You're not the boss of me," he says, gasps as Agito throws him to the ground. His feet scrabble to find purchase up, but Agito lands securely on his stomach, knocking the breath out of him.

"You're pathetic," he says, conversationally. A hand pushes against Kazu's chest to keep him down. "Look around. We've been doing nothing for the past two years. How hard's it really to let go?"

That question catches him short. For a moment, Kazu stares blankly, trying to form an answer that won't come off as sentimental—something that might be understood in the language of bites and crushing things. "I can't," he says—hates himself a little for how helpless the words sound. His voice cracks. But there's no other confession to make. "I just can't."

Agito snorts again. He fists a hand in Kazu's shirt, drags at it with an intent that's less violent than closing distance, and this is starting to feel familiar. He feels his own eyes start wide—sees Agito fix on them in the same way that he registers all nearby movement. Sees, too, the little twist to his mouth that could be distaste, annoyance—any number of things, and one more.

"Shut up," he mutters. "Shit. You're still too fucking tall." He slides a hand back; his nails prick Kazu's neck and Kazu yields and sits up to meet him halfway. He braces against the ground as Agito kisses him—flinches only a little as teeth deliberately scrape his lip. Tastes salt, iron stinging, before he loses it again to Agito's mouth, bruising on his.

His signal that it's over comes when Agito shoves him back down. Kazu nearly bangs his head against the floorboards; an elbow braces his weight as he sits up. "What," he pants. "What the fuck was that?"

"I could still kill you," Agito says, narrow and dark, in a tone which says exactly how much he doesn't want to talk about this, "if you want that option more."

It occurs to Kazu that this is possibly the most fucking messed-up system for displacement that he has ever known, and he's lying on the floor, a little breathless, staring blankly at Agito sitting on top of him. This mental image of his own gaping like a fish pulls a wince out of what little scraps remain of his dignity. He leans up, touches his fingers to the corner of his mouth and makes a face when it comes away red. "I know you know you're not actually trying to kill me," he says, canting his head. "I just wish you knew that I know that you know."

"Fuck," Agito mutters, looking vastly unimpressed. "It's a cut. I remember days when you bitched less about those." He leans in, and Kazu stops, aware of his own tongue at the corner of his mouth, seeing that Agito's gaze isn't fixed anywhere so high as his eyes.

He swallows. "I wasn't bitching less," he starts—then glares. "Hey, I wasn't even bitching. You just didn't stick around to hear what I had to say."

"Can't help that your skin hasn't toughened up any since."

"Are you seriously blaming me for bleeding?"

"Hey, beanpole," Agito says, and somehow his fist's curling again in Kazu's shirt. He grins, all laziness and teeth, and leans down. "Shut up."

He isn't gentle this time either.

It's Agito who comes back with news of Buccha's latest hideout, and Kazu who decides that it's safe enough to visit. It's a week before he clears out again to a fresh hideout—circumstances don't get much safer than that. Three days later, they make their way up the mountain, splitting from the tourists' road at a key point to head up an overgrown path.

The temple emerges out of the undergrowth before long. Agito quickens his stride, and Kazu sees why as he catches up.

"Agito-san!" Yayoi's hands flutter as she appears from the stone door. He strides past her and she follows. Her fingers graze his shoulder as she catches up, skimming the curve of bone in a gesture of old habit in recognising the feel of bandage beneath cloth. There's a few more things Kazu sees, too: the way Agito slows his steps until she's keeping his pace, how he isn't quite looking but must know where she's standing if he's making room for her on the staircase. Remembers the days when she'd been just Nakayama, those boiling summer days in the school courtyard, Agito drowsing on a ledge while Kazu and Onigiri had taught her how to hold a fist.

"Kazu," somebody says from beside him, and he tilts his head up—and up still further before he registers Buccha, so giant that he nearly slips from vision. Catching each other's eye, recognizing the absurdity of how unfamiliar the familiarity is, they share a laugh.

He follows Buccha into the temple. Yayoi and Agito have vanished already somewhere into the upper levels. Stuff between a Tuner and a King's private enough that Kazu knows better, even, than to ask if she has the supplies. Whatever else Nakamura's been, she'd never be the one to hold them back.

"How's Agito?" Buccha says, and Kazu stops himself from saying something very severe about mindreading powers acquired from Buddhism.

He flicks a hand. "How do you think? Bastard, same as always."

"Well, it's good that you're staying with the real thing and not a lab-tuned robot," Buccha says diplomatically, and they catch each other's eyes and share a laugh. Almost too loud, because the most ridiculous possibility is the one that could all too easily be true. It wouldn't be the first time Minami turned robots onto them.

He follows Buccha from one stone room into another; the temple looks well-kept, without a single trace of trash or greenery. The smell of broth strikes him as he touches the threshold.

Catching his eye, Buccha rumbles a laugh. "Don't tell Agito," he says. "It's meatless."

It's easy from there to settle at a table, a bowl apiece, rib at each other over news and old memories; there's no sound in the temple but their laughter. For a moment, this could be a visit like any other—Buccha a monk in training, maybe. Whatever he'd meant to be before the sky had caught him up in it. But those aren't thoughts to have right now.

"Hey," he says eventually around a mouthful, "that was an awesome plan. And even if it wasn't, we're way past that level now!"

"You think so?"

"Sure," Kazu says. "Age, maturity, I hear that stuff turns into a package deal."

"I don't know," Buccha remarks. "Burning down three labs looking for crows doesn't sound much like maturity."

Kazu chokes on his noodles. "The hell," he says, after he's finished sucking down broth and what little there remains of his pride, and just barely manages not to say four, actually. "Does everybody know about that?"

"Tool Toul To got us the news a week ago," Buccha says. "I guessed it had to be you."

"C'mon, Buccha, spirituality doesn't bring you psychic super-powers."

In vengeance, Buccha swipes a tangle of noodles from his bowl before Kazu can even lift his chopsticks to defend it. "Don't be a bastard," he says mildly after his jaws finish working. He glances from his bowl. "We all needed him, especially towards the end. You remember," he adds, like it's just memory and not coal and bruise and quiet self-loathing wrapped under ribs. Buccha seems to recognize it, though. His tone gentles. "But it was different for you, wasn't it?"

"It—"

Sometimes, Kazu thinks, he could stand to hate this a little—that everything can find him while his guard's down when it comes to this. He can't even finish the thought. He'd wanted to believe that they'd all needed him just as badly: the boy who'd swept the dust out of their paths, who'd told them that there was sky to be had and how to claw their way up. Somewhere along the way, though, he's learned to recognize it—the dearth of reports about Onigiri's hold on Kogarasumaru, Agito's knife-edged voice, the contained blankness with which Buccha's watching him.

He cants his head back, hangs his laced hands on the top of his head and leaves the bowl to rest. The broth seems a little tasteless, suddenly. Questions spin in his mind—but there's only one that really needs asking. "You really think he's gone?" he asks, and isn't surprised, for once, when the words crawl out of his throat, low and sick with the possibility. It's a show of weakness that Agito would tear at once, he knows. But it's not Agito he's talking to now.

"It's not about what I think," Buccha says, which is as big a non-answer as he's ever offered. "But Kazu, we have to think about the way things are looking. We can't put everything on hold in case he comes back for us."

"Fuck." He bites the word out, practically a snarl. Picking up Agito's bad habits, he guesses, but the violence coils, warm in his throat, a knot and building storm as intimate as if it's always been his own." If it were one of us," Kazu manages, feeling a little drunk on the sheer anger of the words. "If it were one of us, he'd never have stopped looking."

Buccha says, "He wouldn't have needed this long to find us."

And that's true, too. Of course it's true. As big a bastard as he'd been about it, Ikki'd had a streak of fortune on his side a mile wide—the kind held by gods and heroes in myths. But the rest of them have never been anything like that. They're mountains and ants and merest humans, crawling for the possibility of hope. The kind of luck that gets them isn't enough to buy them any kind of better fate.

Buccha nudges the bowl towards him. "I don't know what happened to him," he says, slow and ponderous. "I won't pretend that I've thought about it. Maybe he's still out there. But I've seen enough from him over the years to know—this isn't the kind of thing he'd be proud of. Waiting on him, fighting for Kings. That was never his Road."

The words take a moment to sink in. His head jerks up, viciously quick. "You think we should give up the Regalias."

"I've thought about it," Buccha allows. "You have them now—do you think it's made your flight any easier?"

By reflex, Kazu presses his feet together. Feels the weight under his heels, the promise of heat only a cut away.

"Well," Buccha says, after a moment. "I'm in the mountains. I don't hear much. But I know about fear. The governments see the pieces we have and the key they still haven't found in two years—they have to be scared for themselves. If we gave them a chance, opened talks, let them know what we can offer—it's possible they'd listen."

"Yeah?" Kazu's hands are tight against his knees. "And what about everything they've done? Think they'll say sorry about that too? Everybody whose flight they stripped away?"

"They aren't the ones keeping people from flying now," Buccha says quietly. He doesn't sound offended by Kazu's sudden flare. "We are. They'll do what they have to, for the majority. We aren't part of it."

"Is that what you really think?"

Buccha shrugs—movement, in his case, clear as words: the mountainous shift of shoulders and arms in vast neutrality. He was a monster at school, but in this house it looks only natural: a giant in simple robes, moving with the absent, quickness common to birds. No matter what he says, he hasn't forgotten that much.

"I think," he says, "the question we should be asking in that case is: what are we doing that's so deserving of that kind of sacrifice from so many people?"

He's up before Kazu can answer him, clearing away the bowls to stow them in a half-filled bucket. Kazu hears the sound of clay clinking as he watches the table, the unquiet shadows. It occurs to him to wonder, for once, what it must be like for Buccha when his guests are gone—with a girl who learns by silence and a world empty of anything but stone and sky.

"You came a long way, Kazu," Buccha says from the corner, breaking his thought. "I trust your judgment. If you want more time to look, you can take it. I don't need to go back to the world so much that I'd betray my friends to get there." His little eyes are quiet, grave. "But it's an important thought to remember: this time isn't coming without price. You, of all people, should understand."

"So the coffee pig's going to fat inside his head on top of everywhere else," Agito says as they wait for a train. It'd come off vicious, except Kazu knows that he'd say the exact same thing even if Buccha were there. Louder, even. Maybe. He eyes Kazu as if Kazu's some kind of wire who might go live. "Are you going to sulk over that too?"

"Someday," Kazu says to a station pillar, "I'm going to get friends that don't actually think I'm some kind of whining robot."

"That's a fucking pointless dream," Agito says. "You break down too much to qualify." In the wake of their departure, he's humming-precise in his movements. Even if he hasn't kicked his treck-wheels out, the crowd opens around him to offer a wide berth, because the world recognizes a predator when he passes through their waters. It seems such a waste to spend it on the nervous, shuffling wait of trains, people jammed up against each other and not even the faintest trace of clear air. Kazu glances around the station, breathes and exhales the same exhaust, and thinks, what the fuck are we even doing here?

He catches Agito's eye. "Hey," he says. When Agito's head jerks, he thumbs towards the exit. In an instant, Agito's eyes narrow, but Kazu forges on. "It's dark—it's the weekend, so a bunch of Storm Rider teams will be out anyway. We've been laying low separately—they're only gonna be on the lookout for lone riders without gangs."

"It has been three months since you got caught," Agito remarks. "Desperate for another round?"

"Don't worry. If they come after me, I'll throw myself at 'em. Give you enough time to get away."

"Fuck that. When I take off, I won't need you to give me anything."

But they're halfway up the steps and out of the tunnels when Agito passes him this line, and Kazu knows better than to think that it means anything. They take the steps three by three, staggering up to open air. How long has it been since they'd gone flying just to fly? He can't imagine that Agito, who lives by practicality and basic demands, would've thought of it. A flicker in his chest opens into aching, a knot he can't begin to parse or cut away. They head down through street lights with their heads down, through the chattering roar of weekend crowds, until they find an alleyway that seems to open into a promise of roofs and level grounds. Kazu bends to unlock his brakes, and when he looks up, Agito's already waiting.

"Last one back—" Kazu starts, just out of habit. He stops when Agito flashes him a grin, all teeth, bright as savagery. For a moment, the darkness swallows all their shadows, and they could both be fifteen again, tossing off challenges at the world.

"Fucking beanpole," he says. "Didn't I say not to get ahead of yourself?"

He takes off without waiting for another word, dragging up the wall in a flash like the earth slicing open—Kazu heads after him and hits roof-level around the same time that he does. They don't coordinate. They never have. Instead, Kazu orients through the tangle of streets, heading downtown. There's barely any familiarity in this—the catch of breaths, the snag of fire from steel and glass as he twists to hit another level. And there's always another, flight coming to him in endless corners and jumps.

Agito, always the direct one, is already jumps ahead of him.

They ride the dark and for a moment the possibility of being caught diminishes to the brink of mattering less than ever. It's only the night, after all, and the idea of mapping the sky's as absurd as it's ever been.

They're laughing as they touch down on railings one following the other. Jump down onto a balcony, sharing razor grins. Lazily, Agito hooks fingers through his belt loops as Kazu turns towards him, and Kazu's feeling good enough to let himself slide close. He leans down and tangles a hand in Agito's hair for the moment that this'll last, this breaking of boundaries where Agito'll let himself be touched without consequence, and everything's simple enough as heat and night cutting clarity through everything they haven't spoken of—not yet.

If he knows anything about the way they're running by now, it's that this can't be trusted to last. Agito's like the knife, Simca told him once when he'd stayed with her, that the soldier left behind. Not because he'll turn against them, but because it's all he knows how to be. Changing him's never been a possibility—not when they need him so badly the way he is. Once upon a time, it would have mattered to make him. But he's here, and of all the things the flame can bend to do, spinning time backwards isn't one of them.

"You're thinking again," Agito says, lazy, with the kind of disapproval that somebody else might use to say, you've dropped trousers again, what the fuck. Before Kazu can form any kind of coherent retort to this, Agito digs into his shirt collar and yanks him down.

It's more than enough.

They wake to the sounds of sirens.

Kazu registers them an instant before a bright pain flashes in his side. He rolls from the bed at the same time as Agito does, though Agito has the advantage of not having been kicked in the side first. Agito's a hissing mess of curses, sputtering into his clothes as he scrambles for his trecks. Kazu, meanwhile, winces through the initial pains shooting up his spine and shambles towards the window, grabbing his A-Ts on the way.

"Idiot," Agito snaps. "Get your thin head down, beanpole."

"Yeah, no complaints here," Kazu wheezes, smoothing his ribs. "You know, saying something works just fine, right?"

"You're going to whine now?I know a raid when I hear it, fuck. We're—"

He stops, short, listening to the tirade streaming through the megaphone outside. Kazu can all but see the ice crawling over his skin as the realization dawns.

"WIND," Kazu finishes, before the thought makes itself whole. Outside, Kaito's voice keeps blasting sheer obscenity—but he seems to have fallen off of the radar as Agito whirls. Maybe it would've taken somebody else a little while to put the pieces together, but Agito knows him well—better than anybody close right now, Kazu imagines. The thought aches a little, but he shoves it down. Kazu doesn't even have to admit anything. Agito can read the signs, put the clues together: the way Kazu had come back to the apartment all those weeks ago with more information than he should have had. How, in spite of everything, he probably still had the resources to do something about it.

In an instant, Agito's fingers are hooked into the laces of his Regalia. "You've got five seconds," he bites out, but Kazu overrides him.

"Look," he says, and now that he has the chance to say it, the words tumble over themselves, each faster than the last. He's pretty sure he had better ideas than this—he had some kind of plan. Never mind that now. "I don't know if Ikki's still out there or not—but there's got to be something to find. That's the whole point of this mess. And no matter what happened, we're still his goddamn team—we've got to be closer to the truth than anybody else."

"Is that what you were thinking?" Agito's laugh comes more savage than ever. "You know what the choices are."

"It's not just down to fighting it out or surrendering," Kazu snaps back, and he's so close that Agito could claw his heart out if he wanted to. It's Agito—he suspects that the thought is rising in priority as they speak. He keeps close anyway, and Agito doesn't back from him, doesn't slide into the Regalia or push him away. "You don't want to take 'em on," he says, quiet. "Do you seriously want to keep running for the rest of your life?"

Agito only looks at him, watches him watching back, and they stand still for a moment.

"It's not just me or you anymore," Kazu says, the words quick, more desperate than he means them to be—and maybe they had the wrong idea after all, splitting up. Their greatest skill's never been standing alone against enemies. They should have known better than that. "If we can find the Sky Regalia, we won't be just leverage. They're gonna have to deal with us. On our level."

Outside, the blaring dies, leaving a lull as they stare at each other. "So tell me that's really your reason for looking," Agito says, low and contemptuous. His breaths are roughening—and for the first time Kazu wonders if he's misjudged him, after all. If this is, in fact, the betrayal that Agito won't forgive him for. He holds his eyes, searches them, but finds no sign. "Tell me you're not holding out hope like a fucking idiot."

"Maybe," Kazu says, and gives up on safety. "But I'm pretty sure you're not that far off from me."

WIND hasn't started storming the building yet—but then, Kazu hadn't really expected them to. Agito knows better than to make connections that might turn against him. No matter how big a bastard Kaito is to him, he probably keeps track enough of WIND properties to know what's in the reported building—to give them a chance to run. Of course he gets that much, too.

Kazu steps back, stands against the blinds, feeling the backlight warm against his skin.

In a moment, Agito's body straightens from a killing tension. He turns to shrug into his shirt, then picks up his jacket as if that's all he's ever meant to do. "Fuck," he says, pulling on each sleeve, and spares a narrow glance over his shoulder. "We haven't got time for this. I'll kill you later."

A smile curves his mouth almost on its own, bright as daylight, utterly helpless. "Figured that," Kazu says. He pulls the blinds. Sunlight streams through the open window. Over the rolling police alerts, he tastes the faintest curl of wind. He remembers the signs.

Nothing's all right. Nothing's the same.

But it's a good day to fly.