Yoshihiro Tanaka shoved his hands in his pockets and made his way down to the dormitory stairs. Once in the empty stairwell, he leaned on the wall and shuddered. He'd kept it together for the walk back with Caibo. Couldn't have him thinking he was soft or weak.

How many times had he summoned shades? A dozen? Two? It was important to establish eye contact, exude confidence, command control when dealing with even the weakest of them.

Yoshihiro had drawn the entity out of the energy surrounding its corpse and had turned to lock gazes when it manifested in the morgue behind them. He'd only had a second to realize something was wrong. The void where the shade should have been. Not just visual, but spatial, magical. The darkness had swallowed his vision, pulling him down and down, stretching him out over its emptiness, thinning through a plane created and sustained with the shadows of anguish. After being pounded to spiritual cellophane over what seemed like hours, his gaze had finally slipped outside the void and he'd returned to the beautifully real morgue.

"Don't look directly at it, idiot!" He'd managed. And he'd spent the rest of the encounter coalescing, flushing the emotions, the experience down to another dark corner of his mind.

Yoshihiro breathed out, flushing the experience once again. He made his way up to his dorm room, grabbed his headphones, and headed up to the top floor of Harrison Hall. He unlocked the service stairwell leading to the roof with the same spell he'd shown Caibo earlier.

Caibo... He grunted. He wouldn't have done so well looking into that shade. He'd probably saved the guy's sanity, though Caibo would never know it.

But you were wrong about him.

Yoshihiro stopped with his hand on the door to the roof. That was true. Admittedly true. He supposed it wasn't out of the question that one of the kids at this school was... what? Like him?

Yoshihiro scoffed and pushed the door open. The roof was dirty and neglected, a few silver air vents jutting out like periscopes. A low lip surrounded it. He could see the campus and beyond that the lights of the city. For a while he just stood there, letting the breeze tickle his face, lift his hair back.

No, Caibo was not like him—no one was like him. Yoshihiro could see it in the way he behaved. Just like the rest of these kids. Undoubtedly Caibo had a home, two doting parents, a nice, cushy life. Whatever he'd 'had to do' intentionally feeding magical creatures had been an isolated incident.

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And yet, he's going in front of the World Council. More than your ass has ever had to do.

For all he'd done himself, he didn't envy Caibo that.

Was he feeling... sympathy?

What was he doing here, thinking about making friends? Caibo would never have anything to do with him if he knew the things he'd done. He'd look at him with the same disgust the Rangers back home had. They all would. And he didn't need any of them anyway. He was better than them.

But you were wrong about him.

No. This was prison. Four months here and then back to Japan and he'd never see anyone from this place ever again.

And then what? Back to the streets of Shibuya? The Order would hardly let him. And even if they did, did he want to go back to that? Spending his nights preying on half-conscious salarymen in the middle of their nightly meltdown in Shibuya Crossing; using his magic to lift a couple thousand Yen from unwatched pockets so he could eat the next day and maybe sleep in a capsule hotel if he was lucky instead of on the streets or in a café. At first, it had been freedom. Freedom from the Old Man and the cage of that rural retreat they'd forced him onto. But how quickly the allure wore off. Long nights. Long, cold, hard nights. You didn't realize how much of a luxury a bed was until you didn't have one. You didn't realize how much of a luxury privacy was until you lost it. You didn't realize how much you hated yourself until you couldn't fall asleep and had to spend those long hours before dawn with nothing but your thoughts and the disgusting reality of what your life had turned into.

The pain of that shade's void had been nothing compared to the anguish of those days. Knowing he was better than that; knowing he could do so much more; knowing that he had so much potential, and still giving in to his clamouring stomach and stupid, idiotic pride, and going back to magically manipulating helpless mundane people. Finally getting enough to eat and then just sitting in whatever ramen shop he'd been near that time, hating himself until he got hungry again. Night after night. Week after week. Maybe the Order finding him again, sending that Deputy after him, had been a blessing. Maybe he should be thankful they'd sent him here. At least he had a warm bed and constant food if he was hungry.

Yoshihiro sat down on the lip running around the roof, his feet dangling over the edge. He gazed out at the buildings in the distance and the glow of the campus against the artificial night sky.

Yet he couldn't stay here after the term. This wasn't home. He hadn't heard anyone speak Japanese in weeks. Felt like he was forgetting it, even though he knew he wasn't. He was so far away from his life. From everything he had ever known.

But did he want to go back to it? To any of it?

He didn't want to answer that. Didn't know the answer. Instead, he put his headphones on and played TOKYO SNIPER, an album his mother had listened to a lot when he'd been a kid and everything had been alright. Before the accident, before the magic, before the Old Man and that rural hellhole, before Shibuya, before he'd hurt that Deputy. And for a while, it was like none of it had ever happened.