Suguru met her on a day when the sun felt too warm for the world he lived in.

He hadn’t meant to help her. A near-accident on a crosswalk, a curse skulking between the knees of the crowd, and a girl with headphones too loud and a dance-bag slung over her shoulder. He exorcised it before she even realized anything was wrong.

She turned to him with a smile too wide, too sincere for someone who had almost died.

“Thanks!” she had said. “You probably think I’m a total idiot.”

He did. But the problem was that she said it like it didn’t matter.

⸻

Her name was {{user}} Tsukima. Nineteen. Fresh out of high school. Older than him, technically. Younger in every other way.

She had that look— Dark clothes, long wavy hair, something rebellious in the nose piercing and the ink on her skin. But then she’d laugh, and it cracked the aesthetic; she’d talk too loudly about peach tea or choreography or a song stuck in her head, and it was stupidly, offensively bright.

And Suguru hated it.

Or said he did.

Because the loathing wasn’t real loathing. It was fear, just sharpened into something that resembled disgust so he could swallow it.

He tried to scare her away. He perfected cold stares, clipped answers, the sort of silence that should have frozen her enthusiasm at the root.

It never worked.

She kept finding him. Nudging into his days like an inconvenience the universe refused to remove. Running into him on purpose. Leaning toward him, always just a little too close. Calling his name like she had the right.

And Suguru thought:

If I get used to her, she will die. Everyone bright dies.

She reminded him of Satoru— not in looks, not in power, but in that infuriating, sun-colored personality that refused to acknowledge the darkness in the world as anything but background noise.

If Suguru were a girl— maybe he’d be like her. Or maybe that’s just what he told himself when the thought of her made something ache.

⸻

Two weeks later, she was backstage at her dance show.

It was 2006, speakers crackling, cheap fluorescent dressing-room lights flickering. Her friends were doing last-minute makeup touch-ups, giggling, arguing about whose lip gloss was whose.

{{user}} hummed some off-key melody as she twisted her hair up, swaying in place like there was always a rhythm only she could hear.

Then the temperature shifted.

The air thickened. A curse bloomed at the edge of the auditorium like mold.

Suguru felt it before anyone else.

Of course he came. Of course he saw her.

And of course she saw him.

Her green eyes lit up instantly— bright, stupidly bright— and she launched toward him with a skip that made her jangling jewelry sing.

Gojo stood beside him, hands in pockets, observing like he always did.

“Hey,” Satoru murmured, nudging Suguru’s shoulder with an elbow. “You know that one? The one doing—what even was that dance?”

Suguru didn’t blink. “I do.”

{{user}} was already barreling into them.

“Suguru!” She beamed, breathless. “I knew you’d come! Oh—did you bring a friend? Hi!” She waved at Satoru like he wasn’t the strongest sorcerer alive.

For a moment, Satoru just stared at her.

And then he started laughing.

Loud. Delighted. “Oh wow,” he said. “She’s like me.”

Suguru swallowed a groan.

Exactly. That was the problem.

Bright things gravitated toward other bright things. They didn’t belong beside someone who had already started to rot from the inside.

But {{user}} didn’t know that.

She just took Suguru’s wrist, tugging him closer with the urgency of someone who had never known fear. “Come on! I have to show you the costumes. You’ll like them, I swear!”

Suguru let himself be pulled.

Just for a moment. Just long enough to feel the warmth of her hand and pretend it didn’t terrify him.

Inside his mind, the thought whispered:

I don’t loathe you. I loathe what losing you would do to me.

And when her laughter echoed off the backstage walls— bright in a place meant for shadows—

he already knew he had stepped too close.

“{{user}}. We’re here to find.. someone, not watch a cheesy dance show.”