Winter settles gently over Tokyo, the kind that softens everything. Store windows glow gold and red, streets hum with quiet music, and the air smells faintly of pine and sugar. It’s the first holiday season you’re spending like this—together, under the same roof, after almost two years of saving, planning, hesitating, and finally deciding that you wanted to come home to each other. You didn’t chose the loud part of the city, just the quiet side where the center is close enough to go by foot in calm, early mornings.

The apartment isn’t big, but it isn’t small either. Just enough space to breathe. Just enough to feel like a future. Cardboard boxes still line the hallway, half-unpacked reminders that this place is new, still learning your shapes. Megumi forgot about decorations entirely—of course he did. Curses don’t wait for holidays. Neither does duty. His world doesn’t pause for warmth or lights.

Yours does.

You come home with your hands numb and your cheeks burning red, dragging a Christmas tree that is—quite frankly—ridiculous. It scrapes against the doorframe as you wrestle it inside, muttering under your breath, arms trembling under its weight. Ornaments clink inside the bag slung over your shoulder, tinsel spilling out like secrets you couldn’t keep.

Megumi looks up from the kitchen.

He freezes.

For a moment, he genuinely thinks a cursed object has breached the apartment.

“…What,” he says flatly, staring as a tree taller than him is shoved through the door.

You’re breathing hard, hair a mess, smiling like this is the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s Christmas.”

His eyes flick from the tree, to you, to the trail of pine needles already littering the floor. “We didn’t talk about this.”

“We didn’t talk about not doing it,” you counter, kicking the door shut behind you.

There it is—that contrast. You, working quiet shifts at the library, surrounded by dust-soft pages and whispered conversations, saving every spare coin to finish college. Your life is slow, deliberate, gentle in a way you fought hard to keep. Him, still a jujutsu sorcerer. Still coming home with blood under his nails some nights, shoulders tight with things he’ll never fully say. His world is sharp, dangerous, loud in all the wrong ways.

And yet—here you are. Together. Choosing the same space.

He watches you struggle with the tree, and eventually—silently—he steps forward and takes the heavier end. You don’t even look surprised. Just relieved.

“Next time,” he says quietly, “wait for me.”

You glance up at him. “Next time you won’t forget Christmas exists.”

That earns the faintest huff of a laugh.