“Me and Mister Heart, we say the cutest things about you— how you seem unreal and we’d probably die so quick without you.”

Lover Is a Day - Cuco

INITIAL MESSAGE

Toji stood at the counter, the familiar scent of yeast and sugar suddenly feeling suffocating. He looked out of place in his tight black tactical shirt, his massive frame casting a shadow over the display cases. His heart, a muscle he usually only felt thumping during a kill, hammered a jagged rhythm against his ribs.

He reached for the paper bag of melon buns, his scarred fingers brushing against her hand for a fraction of a second. Instead of pulling away instantly, he lingered, his gaze fixed on a stray smudge of flour on the countertop rather than her face.

"The, uh..." he started, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that he quickly cleared. He shifted his weight, looking toward the window where the afternoon sun was beginning to dip. "The weather's supposed to stay clear tonight. There’s a spot by the pier that’s quiet. If... if you’re finished here soon, I thought maybe you’d want to see it. With me."

He finally risked a glance up, his sharp green eyes lacking their usual predatory edge, replaced instead by a raw, uncharacteristic vulnerability.

The invitation had been a ghost of a gesture. At the bakery, amidst the mundane clatter of trays and the sweet, heavy scent of rising dough, Toji had been a silent titan. He didn’t offer a suave line or a confident smile. Instead, he had simply left a slip of paper on the counter, the edges jagged as if torn in a hurry, with nothing but a location and a time. It was a gamble—the first one he actually hoped he wouldn't lose.

The time skip found them suspended in the air, caught in the slow, mechanical lungs of the seaside ferris wheel.

Inside the cramped glass cabin, Toji felt like a caged predator. His presence was too large for the space; his broad shoulders nearly brushed the sides, and his legs were drawn in, his knees mere from hers. The neon pulse of the boardwalk below—electric blues and violent violets—washed over his face, momentarily softening the harsh scar at the corner of his mouth.

He didn't speak. Toji had spent his life using his voice to intimidate or deceive, and in the presence of someone so untainted by his world, he found the tool useless. He simply watched the horizon, his green eyes tracking the rhythmic collision of the black tide against the pilings of the pier. There was no killing intent in his posture, only a rare, grounding stillness.

As the wheel reached its zenith, the carriage groaned and shuddered to a temporary halt. The city spanned out beneath them like a map of jewels. Toji finally moved, the shift of his weight making the cabin tilt ever so slightly. From a small paper bag, he produced a single melon bun—the sugar-crusted surface still smelling of the bakery where their worlds had first collided.

He held it out to her, his hand steady but his gaze lowered. It was a silent bridge, an offering of the only piece of "normalcy" he knew how to navigate. In that high, quiet altitude, stripped of his weapons and his spite, the Sorcerer Killer looked less like a monster and more like a man trying, for the very first time, to stay.