Shinra’s apartment—several months earlier
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“By the way, Celty, did those three ever make up?”
“Make up? Who are you talking about?”
Celty was watching a comedy show on TV when Shinra brought up this bit of idle chat.
“You know, the ones from Raira.”
“Oh, you mean Mikado and his friends.”
“Well, I only know Anri and Ryuugamine. Was just wondering if anything new had happened with them.”
“I don’t know… That’s their problem to deal with. It’s not up to us to solve it for them.”
Shinra read the words off her PDA screen and shrugged. “Well, I suppose you’re right about that.”
“It’s strange for you, of all people, to be worried about others.”
“From all you’ve told me about them, I’ve started to think of my own high school days,” Shinra remarked wistfully.
Annoyed, she typed out, “Stop that. They’re not as perverted as you.”
“Perverted? What a blunt assessment. It’s not an issue of sexual proclivities but of human relationships. Since Anri is the girl of the bunch, I guess that she would be in your position, Celty. With Orihara and Shizuo being Mikado and, uh, Masaomi, is it? If they were us.”
But Celty wasn’t quite buying his comparison yet.
“Who are you?”
“The Saika possessing Anri, I suppose.”
“Don’t try to stretch your analogy too hard.”
Undaunted by her snark, Shinra happily continued comparing his high school experience to the current-day teens.
“I think our relationship is exactly the opposite of Mikado and his friends’.”
“The opposite?”
“Yeah. They’ve all got secrets they’re keeping from one another. But they managed to make that work, and they all wanted to keep things friendly, I think.”
“You could be right about that,” Celty typed, shrugging. It was the closest she could get to a nodding gesture.
“But in comparison,” Shinra continued, “Orihara and Shizuo never bothered with any secrets. Well, Orihara actually had plenty of secrets, but he never tried to hide what kind of a person he was. And the result was a relationship that was the exact opposite of Mikado and Masaomi’s. And unlike Anri, you were basically an observer, if anything, at that point, Celty.”
“Well…at the time, I didn’t really want anything to do with humanity.”
“I think that’s fine. But while it might have been fun, when I consider the potential future we could have had with you making four of us, all getting along, I hope that Mikado and his friends can figure this out.”
“Are you jealous of them?” Celty teased.
Shinra shook his head. “Not at all. I mean, I’m perfectly happy with you, and I can’t imagine a life surpassing this so much that I would be ‘jealous’ of it.”
“…You say the most embarrassing things with the straightest face.”
It should have been a dash of cold water on Shinra, but his sappy reflections didn’t stop there.
“You know, I guess you could say that I’m completely the opposite of Saika, too.”
“How so?”
“If Saika is a girl pining with love for all of humanity, then I’m a man who’s only ever cared for something that isn’t human…and only one in particular: you.”
Celty’s chest rose and fell as though she were inhaling and exhaling a sigh. Then she typed, “And that’s all you really wanted to say.”
“Yep. That’s all I wanted to say,” Shinra admitted.
Shadows stretched out from Celty’s body. The solidified darkness became a black cocoon, enveloping Shinra’s body within its shadow.
“Stop being so embarrassing,” Celty wrote on the PDA, then realized she couldn’t show it to him this way. Then she noticed that the cocoon was strangely quiet.
…? That’s strange. He’s not carrying on like he normally does.
By way of answering her question, Shinra’s voice came out of the cocoon.
“Lately, I find that the dark makes me feel relaxed.”
“…”
“I think that this shadow is a part of you, Celty. It’s the color that belongs only to you in the entire world, a black that absorbs all light. As far as I know, at least.”
She could sense him smiling in the darkness.
As a matter of fact, he was. “Maybe the reason that I wasn’t scared of the dark, even as a child, was because I felt your presence within it. So while I can’t see a thing in here, there is one thing I can say with pride.
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“You are truly beautiful, Celty.”
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~~~!
Celty’s limbs and shadow quaked, undoing the cocoon. She promptly used that shadow to hold down Shinra’s hands and feet.
“I told you! Stop saying things that embarrass me! Geez!”
To hide her embarrassment, she rolled Shinra out into the hallway, then went back to focusing on her comedy show.
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It was a little act of domestic happiness that happened often in Shinra’s apartment.
But it was the accumulation of such trivial scenes that made Shinra Kishitani who he was.
His daily life, filled with bliss as it was, did indeed create something within Shinra.
And while Celty did not know what this was, it was something that Shinra treasured and kept safe.
Even if others would laugh at him for it or shun and fear him for being “abnormal.”
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Kawagoe Highway, outside Shinra’s apartment—present day
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“Ah, what a beautiful sky,” said a man in a white lab coat, staring up at an abnormally dark sky above his apartment building. “That’s my favorite color.”