pomegranate ink | y. okkotsu

xxviii

a/n: y'all...toji is TOO POPULAR for me to feel confident writing him 😭 if he's ooc i'm sorry this is the only chapter he's in so i am afraid you all will just have to deal with it.

He was there again. Every day, she made a point to look and see if he was, and without fail, she always found him in some or another odd place. She didn't really understand what he was ever doing, exactly, nor what business he had in the area, but she supposed it was a popular enough place that she could not find any suspicion in his presence.

It was more like a game for her than anything, trying to spot him, to pick him out of the crowd. Today, he was sitting on the edge of a fountain, flicking through a magazine too fast to actually be reading any of it. Almost as soon as she had noticed him, he tossed the magazine aside and got up, stretching like a cat and leaving the magazine behind to slide into the clear waters of the fountain.

She noticed it was one of the ones that had her face on the cover. It was definitely a coincidence — after all, nowadays more magazines had her face on them than not — but for some reason, she found herself flattered anyways.

There wasn't much she could say about the man; it wasn't as if she knew him or anything. He had dark hair. He generally wore casual clothing. He had an imposing presence but also a knack for slipping into the shadows, vanishing without a trace despite how much attention he naturally should've demanded. That was about it.

Sometimes, it felt like she was the only one who could even saw him. Everyone else's eyes slid right over him, no matter where he was, and more than once she wondered if he was as much a figment of her imagination as those strange monsters she sometimes saw creeping about. Well, if that was the case, then he was the best hallucination her mind had ever conjured up, and she'd not complain about them quite as much if more of them resembled him instead of the grotesque, twisted beings that haunted her daily anew.

Unlike those other things, she actually even liked seeing him. On days when work was entirely too much and she'd have to go home alone and sit in her empty apartment and cry as she tried to eat dinner, those few seconds of admiring the man were the closest thing to real human connection she got. The man didn't demand anything from her. He didn't talk to her or ask for her autograph or shamelessly try to touch her. It didn't matter to him that she was a famous model. He didn't even know she existed, and she found comfort in that kind of anonymity. She was just a passerby to him, as he was to her.

"Oh, hey. Just so you know," her manager said as she zipped up her coat and pulled on her shoes, "you should probably cut back on the calories. If you gain much more weight, it'll be hard for you to get new jobs."

She glanced at the portly man out of the corner of her eye, weighing the merits of telling him to follow his own advice before deciding it wouldn't be worth it.

"No one else has said anything," she said. The manager shrugged.

"It's your own livelihood on the line," he said. "But fine. Do as you please. It hardly matters to me."

"You'll never have another client as lucrative as me, so I'd say it does matter to you," she said. He made a face at her but did not respond — likely he could not think of any sort of rebuttal. She sighed. "Alright. I'll be careful."

"Good," he said. "You're fine to walk alone again?"

"Yes, it's okay," she said, though more because she knew the manager did not have the time to drive her than anything. Her apartment wasn't far enough to warrant hiring a driver for the short trip, and even though she was so famous, it would be fine as long as she kept her hood up and her head ducked. It was nice outside, too, with nothing more than a slight evening chill in the air, so all in all she didn't mind.