The apartment learned his habits before he did.
Cup on the left, blade case parallel to the table's edge, notes stacked by topics that didn't touch—ethics, drills, exam logistics—like neighbors who waved across a fence and avoided borrowing sugar. Aki's scarf on the back of the chair nearest the window. The porcelain bowl under the sill, a strip of pale on the floor where the sun remembered to arrive and the shadow chose to keep its distance.
Renya rose before light divided the room into opinions. Breath went where it should, slow and deep, the spine a string of beads threaded on purpose. He raised his hand; a ribbon of darkness gathered without instruction, glossy and thin, the Veil remembering its cue.
"Again," he said, to the air, to the body, to the second thing that listened.
The sword moved. Not a performance, not austerity. Work. The shadow followed each cut like disciplined silk, a trained animal that didn't bark at miracles anymore.
Stop there, the new part of him suggested—no words, precisely. More like a tilt in attention, a hand on the elbow of a thought. The ribbon thickened half a hair, then stilled.
Renya smiled without showing it to his face. "You're learning."
The shadow remained obediently uninteresting.
He finished a sequence and let the blade rest across his palms, palms across his knees. The apartment, pleased to be predictable, returned to its routine. Pipes hummed once in gratitude. Outside, delivery scooters rehearsed for an audience of pigeons.
Aki shuffled in, hair declaring independence. "You talk to yourself now," she said, pouring tea.
"I talk to what answers," he said.
"That's worse," she decided, handing him a mug.
They drank in a silence that held its spoon upright. She watched him watching the floor. He watched her pretending not to worry.
A message blinked on his phone: Commission Media Office—Interview Thursday confirmed. Another: Mentoring Seminar—Ambiguity in Field Response. A third, from Minori: a photo of a cat with one paw dramatically over its face and the caption artistic despair.
He typed valid and set the phone down.
Aki tapped the porcelain bowl with the spoon's handle. "What would happen if I put a flower in there?"
"It would wither. It would also be pretty while doing it."
She made a face because he had refused to be poetic correctly. "You're strange."
"I'm familiar," he said, which was a different defense.
She slipped the scarf around her neck and left with the determined stagger of a student who hadn't slept enough but had decided to perform optimism anyway. The door clicked. The apartment exhaled.
He closed his eyes and followed breath into the hallway between two kinds of power.
It had started as a sensation, months ago—like standing too close to a humming transformer, except the transformer was inside the chest and preferred silence. Now it had texture, not just presence. The quirk current passed along neat rails he had polished with practice; the cultivation flame moved like a tide taught to respect the moon; between them, thin threads of something else began to stitch.
He reached toward those threads and they reached back; he pulled and they pulled in return.
Not a voice. Not exactly. An intention that sounded like listen without needing sound.
He let it exist, unchallenged. That was the experiment: stop naming, and see what insists on keeping its name.
The shadow lifted a corner against the wall and became a shade darker than the air around it, then gentled. A bird landed on the windowsill and decided the sill was enough of a tree for now. Somewhere above the ceiling, a neighbor watched a show with the volume low; laugh track muffled; canned joy trying its best.
You're doing it on your own, he thought.
It agreed. The agreement wasn't words; it was an alignment of attention.
"I asked you not to," he said, quietly.
The shadow thinned, as if ashamed. It wasn't. Shame required a self that wanted to be seen as something else. This thing only wanted to be useful.
"Then learn the difference," he added. "Useful isn't the same as uninvited."
The dark along the baseboard settled with the patience of fabric. He stood, washed the mug, placed it upside down on the rack, and left for school.
In class, words behaved. Time didn't. The lecture went over policy around civilian intervention, the board filling with arrows that said notify, defer, support. Renya wrote them down because writing is what makes a system think you understand it. Minori passed a folded note across two rows that said metaphor quota and a doodle of an umbrella holding up a person instead of the other way around. He drew a small square in return and labeled it room for truth. She rolled her eyes to acknowledge receipt of his crimes.
At lunch, a boy with a fresh haircut and the optimism of someone whose life had not yet told him most stories end in paperwork asked for a selfie. Renya stood still, ignored the camera, and let the moment document itself.
"That was boring," the boy said, satisfied.
"Thank you," Renya said.
After the bell, he cut through the courtyard and found Shinsou leaning against an iron fence like punctuation—comma, not period. The other boy's gaze was polite and unwelcome, the way intelligent focus always is before you know what it wants.
"You did the underpass," Shinsou said.
He didn't ask. He didn't congratulate. He used the verb like a tool.
"The underpass had some help," Renya said.
"You're building a version of yourself people can grade," Shinsou observed.
"Exams require rubrics," Renya said.
"True." A pause. "Yours is more interesting than mine."
"Interesting can be a trap," Renya said, and meant it as advice.
Shinsou's mouth tilted. "Everything worth doing is."
They let the conversation end there, both satisfied enough to pretend they weren't.
At the dojo, the master watched Renya warm up and then watched him not warm up—meaning, he watched where the quirk ended and something else began.
"You separated the threads," the old man remarked, not asking.
"Pulling without breaking," Renya said.
"Good. Remember sewing is not stabbing."
"I try to be succinct," Renya said, and earned a cough that might have been laughter.
They worked through a pattern that required more patience than pace. In the third exchange, the master stepped into a gap that wasn't there and tapped Renya's shoulder twice with two fingers.
"You were listening to the wrong thing," he said.
"The right thing was loud," Renya replied.
"Loud isn't true," the master said, and reset their stance. "Again."
They reset. The shadow kept to the geometry he'd taught it, obedient as a school uniform. The master drifted right; Renya's blade followed, not quick, not slow, exact. A small nod: not praise, but acknowledgment that practice had briefly remembered its purpose.
After, the master poured tea and held the cup until steam stopped arguing. "You'll be asked to speak in public soon," he said. "Say less than you think and more than they expect. It confuses people. Confused people are briefly honest."
"Practical pedagogy," Renya said.
"Old man tricks," the master corrected. "Use them before you become one."
Two blocks from the apartment gate, the world performed a small test without witnesses.
A toddler stumbled at the edge of a curb. A parent—new at the job—lunged. Two bags slid, one open, a rain of groceries training for chaos. A bottle rolled, glass thin. The shadow lifted along the pavement and aligned itself between bottle and edge, a gentle rail that made trajectory behave—a correction almost too subtle to name.
"Careful," the parent said, breathless in triplicate. The toddler laughed at the word, the way uninjured children do. The bottle found rest at Renya's foot.
He stared at the quiet line the shadow had made without asking.
"Stop," he said, whisper soft, and the line erased itself as if ashamed to be seen.
He bent, returned the bottle, received a nod that belonged to the part of the city that still believed in neighbors, then walked away with his jaw clenched and his pulse climbing to a rhythm not part of any training regimen.
At the apartment stairs, he sat. Only when the wave receded did he trust himself to turn the key.
Aki looked up from the couch with the alertness of a small animal pretending it was not one. "You okay?"
"I argued with a curb," he said.
"Did you win?"
"The jury finds for the sidewalk."
She smiled because it cost less than other answers. "You're scaring me a little," she said finally. "Not because of what you do. Because I can tell when you don't do it on purpose."
He considered lying and then considered being efficient.
"It's learning me," he said. "I'm learning it back."
"That sounds like a cult and a marriage," she said, making humor do the job of bravery.
"Both are arrangements about ownership," he said.
She set the notebook down. "Promise me something."
"Yes," he said, before she named it.
"Don't let it choose me," she said. "If something has to be decided. Don't let it decide me."
He looked at her for a count that would have been longer if he were cruel. "Agreed," he said. "I choose you."
The relief hurt to watch. She stood abruptly as if embarrassed to be visible and attacked the kettle. He held the porcelain bowl in both hands as if it might remember the temperature of vows.
The Commission waited two days before making him speak for cameras.
A polite room with too much white; a friendly interviewer with a voice trained to sound like a friend you trusted with receipts. The shadow sat very still, narrow at his heels.
"What inspired you to pursue hero work?" the interviewer asked, smile dialed to comfortable.
"Rent," he said, because he had said he would say it. "And keeping someone safe."
"Your sister," the interviewer supplied, with the mercy of not asking Aki's name.
"Yes," he said.
"And your quirk—limitations?"
"Light is a limit," he said. "Assumptions are another."
"Which assumption?"
"That darkness is always hiding something," he said, and let the silence after the line do his work for him.
The interviewer's smile widened by two teeth. "You sound composed."
"I'm practiced," he said.
"Same thing?"
"Not always," he said, and watched the producer behind the glass nod, pleased to have found material that could be cut into the shape of sincerity.
When it was over, Kurobane met him in the hallway with two paper cups that claimed to be coffee and tasted like experience. "You did it without lying," he said.
"I omitted strategically," Renya corrected.
"Same thing," Kurobane said, echoing the interviewer on purpose. "How's the… arrangement."
It was interesting that he didn't say shadow or quirk. Arrangement implied terms.
"Negotiated," Renya said.
"Terms stable?"
"For now."
Kurobane studied the line where floor met wall. "If it ever chooses for you," he said, "call me before it makes the second choice."
Renya lifted an eyebrow. "Why the second?"
"The first proves a point," Kurobane said. "The second declares a policy."
They stood with their paper cups like two men in a painting about civility. People passed. No one asked them to be quieter because their quiet had the weight of permission.
"Why are you helping me," Renya asked.
"I'm not," Kurobane said. "I'm helping the future complain less."
"That's still help," Renya said.
"It's still selfish," Kurobane countered, and the small smile he allowed himself said he trusted Renya to appreciate the economy of that truth.
Night returned with its usual competence. He stocked shelves, let the register approve survival, nodded at customers who needed someone to be a person who approved of them existing. Between transactions, the shadow learned the rhythm of the camera's blind spot and then forgot it again on purpose.
A man turned a corner too fast and bumped a display; cans leaned into collapse with the enthusiasm of bad ideas. The shadow skimmed along the lowest shelf, caught the first wobble, passed the correction up like a rumor that turned out to be useful. The display righted itself with the indignation of a cat pretending it had meant to jump that way.
The man blinked, grateful and unobservant. "Weird luck," he said, and bought gum, and left.
Renya wiped the counter and found his own breath a fraction shorter.
"Stop it," he said quietly. "You save when I say save. Not when you're bored."
The darkness thickened in protest—a child arguing with bedtime. He let it sulk for three heartbeats, then pressed two fingers to the edge of the counter and drew a small square in the air no one else could see.
"This is where you live," he said. "When I'm at work. When she's home. When we are visible. You expand when called, not before."
The shadow pressed itself into the square like water accepting a bowl. It didn't like it. He didn't ask it to.
A customer back near the magazines cleared his throat as if to return ownership of the room. Renya rang him up, said the correct amount of thank you, and returned to the square. The shadow stayed there, obedient and coiled.
"Good," he said.
The charm in his pocket hummed once—the resonance of a tracker a block away, then nothing. He exhaled through his nose. Whoever watched was learning patience too.
Sleep was a country with borders he had negotiated and visas he couldn't falsify. He went there late and arrived early, which made time an accomplice and a thief. When dream tried to interfere, discipline refused entry. Images became lists; lists became stillness.
On the second night after the interview, he dreamt anyway. Not images: arrangements.
A room with no walls. A circle drawn by absence. In the circle: him. Around the circle: the second thing, which was also him, which was not. It pressed once, like a hand against glass.
He pressed back.
When he woke, his palms were open, empty, uncut. The porcelain bowl reflected a ceiling that belonged to no one and held its peace.
He dressed without sound. The blade case found his hand the way honest tools do when they live where you leave them. The Veil came on with a little reluctance, like clothes after a bath.
At the window, the city practiced morning in layers—lighting signs that didn't need light, opening shutters that preferred being closed, reminding pigeons of gravity. He watched until seeing became a choice.
"I'll keep you small," he said, to the thing that agreed and disagreed on alternating beats. "Not forever. Long enough to pass the doors that prefer me that way."
The shadow made a sound like paper being folded—almost, not quite—and rested.
The mentoring seminar on "Ambiguity in Field Response" met in a room that doubled as a storage closet for chairs. The facilitator was a hero who had once been louder, now quieter, a person whose power did not photograph well and whose career had therefore been honest.
"When in doubt," she said, "choose the choice that leaves tomorrow intact. Bravery pays worse than forethought."
A hand shot up. The boy with the geometric haircut. "What about when forethought looks like cowardice on camera?"
"Pause the camera," she said. "Or learn the art of looking brave while doing the safe thing."
Renya respected the candor. He wrote pause camera and below it make safety beautiful.
After the seminar, Kurobane didn't appear. A simple absence; no message. Evidence that sometimes the watcher allowed the watched to breathe without supervision. Or evidence that he trusted the ropes Renya had braided.
The rest of the day wore its usual face. The old woman on the corner bought milk because there had been no milk; the weather ignored forecasts because that's what it does when it remembers its personality; Aki texted a photo of a perfectly coiled scarf and wrote practice makes fabric because she had been spending too much time with someone who infected sentences.
He answered true and returned the emoji he pretended not to understand.
Evening again. He set the practice blade down after the last drill and stood by the window while the street learned where its lights lived. The shadow satisfied itself with being obedient long enough to forget how much it disliked the word.
Aki came out with wet hair and a towel crown, eyes half-lidded and honest. "You look like you're waiting for a jury," she said.
"I'm balancing the budget," he said.
"You're not funny," she told him.
"Correct."
She considered, then stepped beside him so their reflections shared the same pane of glass. "When you stand like this, you look… almost ordinary," she said.
"Almost is a good place to live," he said. "People don't knock as much."
"I like almost," she said. "It's honest about being temporary."
The shadow at their feet adjusted to accommodate her shape without being asked. It made room as if she had possessed it first. He looked down; it lay flat, polite, very slightly brighter where her toes pressed.
"Thank you," Aki said to the floor, because she was the kind of person who thanked things that made room.
"You're encouraging it," he murmured.
"I'm practicing," she said, and yawned, and drifted to bed as if the world owed her softness and had decided to pay.
He watched the door close with its tidy click. He watched the reflection until his own shape blurred. He let the echo of his breath be the only sound that had an alibi.
"Tomorrow," he said into the quiet, "we test the square again. We test what you do when I ignore you. We test what you don't do when you're bored."
The shadow accepted the schedule. It was learning the pleasure of passing tests.
He put the room away: cup on the left, case parallel to the edge, notes stacked by topics that didn't touch. The porcelain bowl under the sill, the pale strip beside it, the space it left for a flower Aki would not put there.
Lights off. Door closed. The city outside kept rehearsing. Between the mask and the mirror, a boy and the thing he carried agreed to sleep without promises.
The apartment remembered where everything belonged and pretended not to worry about what would happen when something decided to move first.