The first thing anyone noticed about Okkotsu Yuta was the pressure. Not the boy himself—slight, hunched, with dark circles under his eyes that spoke of sleepless nights—but the invisible weight that accompanied him everywhere. His cursed energy didn't announce itself with Gojo's crystalline brilliance or Arata's heated pulse. Instead, it was like standing too close to the ocean during a storm: vast, cold, and utterly indifferent to human frailty.
Arata felt it the moment Yuta entered the classroom for the first time, three days after Gojo had collected him from whatever hole he'd been hiding in. The air itself seemed to contract, growing thick and difficult to breathe. Across the room, Maki's jaw tightened, her knuckles whitening around her pen. Even Panda shifted uncomfortably in his oversized seat.
"Everyone," Gojo announced with forced cheerfulness, one hand on Yuta's shoulder—the only person seemingly unaffected by the oppressive aura. "This is Okkotsu Yuta. He'll be joining your class. Play nice."
Yuta's head dipped lower, if that were possible. "I'm... I'm sorry," he whispered, though for what, he didn't specify. His hands were clasped in front of him, trembling slightly. On his right ring finger, a simple band caught the light.
"Great introduction," Maki muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Really inspiring."
Gojo's smile didn't waver, but something sharp flickered in his eyes. "Maki. A word?"
The tension in the room tripled.
What followed was two weeks of increasingly strained coexistence. Yuta sat at the back of every classroom, as far from the others as possible. During lectures on curse theory and jujutsu history, he took meticulous notes but never volunteered answers, even when directly called upon. His responses came in barely audible whispers that forced instructors to move closer, which inevitably made the cursed energy pressure worse.
"The manifestation of curses from negative emotions was first documented in the Heian period," Yuta murmured during one history lesson, after Ijichi had asked him a direct question three times. "They... they fed on fear and suffering. Created by it."
The irony wasn't lost on anyone. Yuta was a walking example of his own answer—his cursed energy a monument to grief and love twisted into something monstrous.
But it was the practical sessions where things truly fell apart.
The training grounds behind Tokyo Jujutsu High were designed to withstand extraordinary abuse. Reinforced barriers layered upon barriers, constructed over decades by some of the finest barrier specialists in Japan. They could contain Special Grade curses for hours, withstand building-leveling attacks, and automatically repair minor damage.
Yuta destroyed one in his second week.
It wasn't intentional. It never was. Kusakabe had organized a simple exercise: basic hand-to-hand combat, no cursed techniques, just fundamental blocks and strikes. Yuta had been paired with Inumaki, the safest choice given Inumaki's ability to verbally command a situation to de-escalate.
For five minutes, it went reasonably well. Yuta's movements were clumsy, untrained, but he was trying. Inumaki moved with practiced patience, demonstrating a block, waiting for Yuta to mirror it. "Salmon," he encouraged. Good.
Then Yuta stumbled. His foot caught on uneven ground, and he fell backward, hard. The impact wasn't significant—barely enough to knock the wind out of him—but the fear that flashed across his face was visceral and immediate.
The cursed energy that erupted from him wasn't directed. It was pure, undiluted panic given form.
Arata, watching from thirty feet away, felt it like a physical blow. The air turned frigid and hostile. Reality itself seemed to shudder, rejecting the intrusion of something fundamentally wrong. And then, for just a moment, he saw her.
Rika.
Not fully manifested, not the towering monstrosity he'd heard whispered about, but enough. A massive, skeletal arm, easily twenty feet long, erupted from behind Yuta's prone form. It was corpse-pale, wrapped in what might have been cloth or rotting flesh, and it radiated malevolence so concentrated that several first-year students in the observation area immediately vomited.
The arm slammed down, not attacking anything specific, just existing with such force that the ground cratered. Cracks spiderwebbed through the reinforced concrete. The barrier shimmered, held for three seconds, then shattered like glass, fragments of compressed, cursed energy raining down as harmless sparks.
"STOP!" Inumaki's cursed speech cut through the chaos, powered by genuine urgency. "KELP!"
The arm vanished. Yuta lay curled in the crater, both hands covering his face, shoulders shaking with sobs. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he chanted, the words running together. "I didn't mean to, I'm sorry, please, I'm so sorry—"
Kusakabe stood at the edge of the crater, one hand on his katana, expression carefully neutral. Behind him, Nanami arrived at a sprint, having felt the disturbance from inside the building. The two instructors exchanged a long look.
"Everyone else, dismissed for today," Kusakabe announced. "Panda, Inumaki, take Okkotsu to the infirmary. Make sure he's not injured."
As the students filed away, Arata caught Maki's expression. It wasn't fear—Maki didn't do fear. It was something colder. Calculation, mixed with barely suppressed fury.
That night, in the common area, she finally exploded.
"This is insane!" Maki slammed her hand against the table hard enough to make their tea cups jump. Arata, Panda, and Inumaki looked up from their various activities. "That kid is a walking disaster! He can't control anything, he can't function without nearly killing everyone in a hundred-meter radius, and Gojo thinks throwing him in with us is somehow helping?"
"He's scared," Panda offered diplomatically. "Give him time—"
"Time? TIME?" Maki's voice rose. "We don't have time! There are real threats out there, curses that won't pause while Okkotsu has a panic attack! If we're sent on a mission with him, we're dead. Not because of the curse we're hunting, but because he'll accidentally crush us with his emotional support Special Grade ghost!"
Inumaki made a soft sound. "Tuna mayo."
"Don't you 'tuna mayo' me," Maki snapped, though her tone softened slightly. "You were right there. You saw what almost happened. If you hadn't commanded her to stop—"
"But he did," Panda interjected. "And Rika listened. That's progress, isn't it?"
Arata had been silent throughout the exchange, rolling a small sphere of hardened blood between his fingers—a nervous habit he'd developed. The blood construct caught the light, deep crimson and unnaturally smooth.
"What do you think?" Maki turned on him suddenly. "You've been quiet."
He let the blood sphere dissolve, reabsorbing it through his palm. The slight tingle of his own cursed energy returning was familiar, almost comforting. "I think," he said carefully, "that he's terrifying. And I think he knows it, which might be worse."
Maki's eyes narrowed. "Explain."
"Fear compounds fear," Arata continued, choosing his words with precision. "He's afraid of hurting people, which makes him anxious. The anxiety makes Rika's manifestations more unstable. The unstable manifestations make him more afraid. It's a cycle." He paused. "I also think that if he ever gets control of that power, even partially, he'd be the strongest person in this school. Including Gojo."
The silence that followed was heavy.
"That's exactly the problem," Maki said finally, but some of the heat had left her voice. "Someone with that much power should have earned it. Should have trained for it, bled for it, and proven they can handle the responsibility. But Okkotsu? He was just born with it. Born with a curse and a dead girlfriend and enough cursed energy to level Tokyo, and now we're all supposed to just... what? Hope he figures it out before he accidentally kills us?"
"Salmon roe," Inumaki said quietly.
Arata understood the subtext. It's not fair. But it's reality.
Maki stood abruptly, grabbing her polearm from where it leaned against the wall. "I'm going to train. Someone needs to actually work for their strength around here."
After she left, Panda sighed. "She'll come around. Maki always does."
"Will she?" Arata asked. "Or will Yuta break first?"
Neither of them had an answer.
The next morning, Maki cornered Yuta after breakfast.
"Okkotsu. Training ground three. Now."
Yuta looked up from his barely-touched food, eyes wide with apprehension. "I... I don't think—"
"I don't care what you think. Move."
Arata, finishing his own meal, watched them go. Panda caught his eye and shrugged. "Should we...?"
"Probably."
They followed at a distance.
Training ground three was the smallest of the facilities, designed for individual practice rather than group exercises. When Arata and Panda arrived, Maki already had Yuta in the center of the space, a simple wooden training sword in the boy's shaking hands.
"Lesson one," Maki announced, circling him like a predator. "You're weak."
Yuta's shoulders hunched. "I know—"
"No. You don't know. Because if you knew, you'd be doing something about it." She stopped in front of him. "That thing inside you? Rika? She's a crutch. You rely on her for everything—protection, offense, even basic self-confidence. What happens when she's not there? Or worse, what happens when she manifests and you can't control her?"
"I... I don't..."
"Exactly. You don't." Maki's voice was harsh, but not cruel. "So here's what's going to happen. You're going to learn to fight without her. Basic combat, hand-to-hand, and weapons work. You're going to build actual strength in that pathetic body of yours. Because right now? You're not a jujutsu sorcerer. You're just a kid with a powerful curse attached to him, and there's a difference."
Yuta's grip tightened on the training sword. For the first time since arriving, something other than fear flickered across his face. Not anger, exactly. More like desperate hope.
"Can you... Do you really think you can help me?"
"I think," Maki said, "that anyone can learn to fight if they're willing to bleed for it. Question is, are you?"
Yuta looked down at the sword in his hands, then back up at Maki. "Yes. I don't want to hurt anyone else. I don't want to be afraid anymore. So yes. Please teach me."
"Then we start with conditioning. Drop and give me twenty push-ups."
"Um... okay..."
Yuta dropped to the ground and managed exactly four push-ups before his arms gave out.
Maki closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "This is going to take a while."
From their vantage point, Panda nudged Arata. "She's actually doing it. Teaching him."
"She needs the control," Arata observed. "Needs to feel like she can shape something, influence something. After everything with her clan, with the arranged marriage..." He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to.
What followed over the next three weeks was a transformation born of pure stubbornness on both sides.
Maki drove Yuta relentlessly. Five in the morning runs around the campus perimeter—Yuta would stumble back covered in sweat, sometimes vomiting from exertion, but he always showed up the next morning. Basic calisthenics until muscle failure. Sword forms repeated hundreds of times until his hands bled and his shoulders screamed.
"Your stance is garbage. Again."
"This grip is all wrong. What did I tell you about thumb placement?"
"If you drop that sword one more time because you're 'tired,' I'm going to hit you with it."
True to her word, she did hit him. Not hard enough to cause real injury—Maki had precise control—but enough to sting, enough to remind him that pain was temporary but lessons were permanent.
Slowly, incrementally, Yuta improved.
His push-ups went from four to ten to twenty. His runs became less labored. The sword stayed in his hands longer during drills. And crucially, as his body strengthened, as he found confidence in his own physical capabilities, Rika's manifestations became less frequent.
Arata watched these sessions when he could, between his own training with Kusakabe and Nanami. There was something almost scientific about Maki's approach—she'd identified that Yuta's fear stemmed from helplessness, and she was systematically removing that helplessness by giving him concrete skills he could rely on.
One afternoon, after a particularly brutal sparring session where Yuta had actually managed to land a hit on Maki (she'd let him, but he didn't need to know that), Arata approached as Yuta was catching his breath.
"You're improving," Arata said.
Yuta looked up, startled. They'd barely spoken since his arrival. "Oh. Um. Thank you? I'm trying. Maki-san is really... intense."
"She is. But she's also right." Arata sat down nearby, far enough to give Yuta space but close enough to talk. "About building your own strength. Not relying only on raw power."
Yuta's hand drifted to the ring on his finger, an unconscious gesture. "Rika... she's not just power. She's... she was someone I loved. Someone I promised to protect. And I failed. So now she protects me, but I can't control it, and people get hurt, and—" His voice cracked. "I don't know how to make it right."
Arata was quiet for a moment, considering his words carefully. "Can I show you something?"
At Yuta's hesitant nod, Arata held out his hand, palm up. He focused, and a thin stream of blood emerged from his palm, coiling in the air. It hardened into a small, intricate sculpture—a bird mid-flight, no larger than his thumb, every feather detailed.
"This is Sanguine Genesis. Blood manipulation. It's my inherited technique." The blood bird dissolved and flowed back into his hand. "When I first started training, all I could make were shapeless blobs. Couldn't maintain solid constructs for more than a few seconds. It took months of practice, thousands of failed attempts before I could do something like that."
He paused, meeting Yuta's eyes. "The point is, control isn't about suppressing power. It's about understanding it, working with it, and making it part of you rather than something that just happens to you. Rika is part of you now, whether you want her to be or not. So maybe instead of being afraid of her, you need to... I don't know. Acknowledge her? Accept that this is your reality and work within it?"
Yuta was silent, processing. Then, quietly: "How do you deal with it? When your power scares you?"
The question caught Arata off guard. He thought about Crimson Erosion, about the nightmarish potential of blood that could dissolve flesh and bone, about the sleepless nights wondering if he'd lose control and hurt someone he cared about.
"I make rules," he admitted. "Boundaries. I never use more power than I absolutely need. I train until the basics are so ingrained that I could do them unconsciously. And I accept that fear is useful—it keeps me careful." He stood, brushing dust from his uniform. "But I don't let it paralyze me. Because being paralyzed by fear? That's when mistakes happen."
As he walked away, he heard Yuta whisper, "Thank you."
While Yuta struggled under Maki's tutelage, Arata's own training intensified to brutal levels.
Kusakabe had identified what he called "the Kamo weakness"—a tendency to rely on cursed technique versatility at the expense of fundamental combat efficiency. "You have twenty different ways to attack," Kusakabe explained during one session, "but in a real fight, you only have time for two, maybe three techniques. The enemy won't wait while you decide between Crimson Arc and Blood Edge. You need instinct, not options."
So they drilled instinct.
"Footwork!" Kusakabe would shout, coming at Arata with his katana in a blinding series of strikes. "Flow with your Flowing Red Scale, don't fight against it! Your enhanced speed is meaningless if your positioning is garbage!"
Arata learned to integrate his techniques seamlessly with movement. Flowing Red Scale became not just a speed boost but a rhythm, a pulse that dictated the tempo of combat. He'd accelerate into range, deploy Minazuki from his blood for a strike, then flow back out before counterattack, all in a heartbeat.
His sessions with Nanami focused on efficiency and precision.
"Wasted movement is wasted life," Nanami stated, adjusting his glasses. "Every calorie burned, every second of elevated heart rate, every drop of blood used—all limited resources. Your technique is particularly resource-intensive. Show me your Crimson Arc."
Arata formed the bow, nocked an arrow, and fired at a target fifty meters away. Dead center hit.
"Acceptable accuracy. Unacceptable process. You took four seconds to form that bow. In a real fight, you'd be dead three times over." Nanami walked closer. "Your blood is already flowing through your body. Use that. Don't draw new blood for every technique—manipulate what's already in circulation. Feel the difference?"
What followed were hundreds of repetitions, reshaping muscle memory. Draw and fire. Draw and fire. Faster, cleaner, more efficient. Arata's fingers began to bleed from the constant motion, but he didn't stop. Pain was temporary. Improvement was permanent.
Nanami also introduced tactical thinking beyond pure technique.
"You're fighting a curse with regeneration abilities. Crimson Arc arrows, while powerful, won't put it down permanently. What do you do?"
"Destroy the core? Continuous assault to prevent regeneration?"
"Both waste resources. Better answer: Control the battlefield. Use Blood Mist to obscure vision and mask your position. Deploy Crimson Thread to restrict movement. Force the curse into a kill zone where you can deploy maximum force with minimum expenditure. Combat isn't about fairness or flashy techniques. It's about creating situations where the enemy cannot win."
These lessons sank deep. Arata began approaching fights like puzzles—identifying win conditions, recognizing when to commit resources and when to conserve, understanding that sometimes the best attack was positioning for the next attack.
His spars with Maki evolved into something almost artistic.
They'd meet before dawn, when the training grounds were empty and the mist still clung to the grass. No words, just the acknowledgment of readiness, and then they'd begin.
Maki came at him like a storm—her polearm a blur of steel, every movement optimized from years of compensating for her lack of cursed energy with pure skill. Arata responded with his own controlled chaos—Flowing Red Scale keeping him just ahead of her strikes, Blood Edge extending Minazuki's reach at unexpected angles, Crimson Thread deployed not to trap but to force her movement into predictable patterns.
They learned each other's rhythms. Maki discovered that Arata had a slight tell before using Crimson Arc—a fractional shift in his shoulder as he prepared to draw blood. Arata noticed that Maki's horizontal sweeps, while devastatingly fast, left a brief opening on her left side if timed perfectly.
After one particularly intense session, both breathing hard, weapons lowered, Maki spoke first.
"You're getting better."
"So are you," Arata replied, dispersing the blood he'd been about to use for a follow-up attack.
"We're still stuck with this engagement." Not a question.
"Yeah."
"I hate it."
"I know."
"But I don't hate training with you."
Arata looked at her, surprised. Maki's expression was carefully neutral, but there was something in her eyes—acknowledgment, maybe respect.
"I don't hate it either," he admitted.
They left it at that. Some things didn't need more words.
Late at night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, Arata continued his secret experiments with Crimson Erosion.
He'd requisitioned a small, heavily warded training room in the basement level—officially for "supplementary technique refinement," with Nanami's approval. What he was actually doing was far more dangerous.
The first successful controlled application took him eleven days.
Arata would draw a small amount of blood, usually from his palm, and focus his cursed energy in ways that felt fundamentally wrong. Reverse Cursed Technique created life, healed wounds, and restored what was broken. What he was attempting was the opposite—an inversion that didn't create but destroyed, that broke molecular bonds and introduced entropy at the fundamental level.
The sensation was nauseating. His cursed energy had to flow backward, had to reject its natural healing properties and become something hostile. Every time he attempted it, his body rebelled—nausea, dizziness, splitting headaches.
But gradually, he found the pattern.
On the eleventh night, he placed a small piece of concrete on the floor, drew blood from his thumb, and let three drops fall onto the surface. He focused, twisted his cursed energy into that reverse pattern, and watched as the concrete beneath the blood began to smoke. Faint at first, then more visible, the surface eroding like acid had been poured on it. In ten seconds, there was a small hole eaten through the concrete.
Arata immediately sat down, breathing hard, vision swimming. The technique had drained him significantly—far more than equivalent uses of his other abilities. It was as if Crimson Erosion consumed not just cursed energy but vitality itself, burning his life force as fuel for destruction.
He documented everything in an encrypted journal: the sensation of the energy flow, the approximate cursed energy cost, the rate of erosion, a nd the physical toll. This wasn't power he could use casually. This was a last resort, a trump card that demanded a price he might not always be able to pay.
Over subsequent nights, he refined the technique marginally. He discovered he could control the rate of erosion to some degree—slower but more energy-efficient, or faster but rapidly draining. He tested it on different materials: wood dissolved faster than concrete, metal was most resistant but still eventually corroded, and organic matter (he used fallen leaves) broke down almost instantly.
The implications terrified him.
During one experiment, his control slipped. The erosion spread faster than intended, eating a hole the size of his fist through the concrete before he could stop it. Arata spent the next hour reinforcing the wards and repairing the damage with carefully deployed blood constructs, his heart hammering with the realization of how catastrophically wrong this could go.
He thought about Yuta, about Rika's uncontrolled manifestations. At least Yuta's power came from something external, something he could theoretically separate from. Crimson Erosion was Arata's own cursed energy, his own blood, turned into a weapon that could just as easily destroy him as his enemies.
The memory of Gojo's words haunted him: "Look into yourself to create something more."
Was this what Gojo meant? Power purchased with his own life force? Or was there something deeper, some understanding of Reverse Cursed Technique that would unlock Crimson Erosion's full potential without the crippling cost?
He didn't know. All he knew was that when the next crisis came—and it would come, the tension in the air promised that—he needed every weapon at his disposal.
Even the ones that scared him.
Six weeks after Yuta's arrival, something shifted.
It happened during a group training exercise. Kusakabe had organized a simulated mission: the students would work together to exorcise a semi-Grade 1 curse that had been captured and contained specifically for training purposes. Real danger, real stakes, but with instructors ready to intervene if things went catastrophically wrong.
The curse was a twisted thing, vaguely humanoid but with too many joints in all the wrong places, its skin a mottled gray-green. It shrieked when released into the training ground, immediately lunging for the nearest target—Panda.
"Formation alpha!" Maki shouted, moving without hesitation.
They'd drilled formations endlessly. Alpha meant ranged specialists—Arata and Inumaki—providing support while close-combat specialists—Maki and Panda—engaged directly. Yuta, as the unknown variable, was supposed to stay back and only engage if necessary.
The fight went well initially. Panda absorbed the curse's initial assault, his reinforced body taking hits that would have shattered bone. Maki flanked, her polearm finding gaps in the curse's defenses. Inumaki used his cursed speech sparingly—"Don't move!"—freezing the curse for critical seconds that Maki exploited ruthlessly.
Arata supported from range, Crimson Arc arrows pinning limbs and creating openings. His blood arrows didn't have the raw power to destroy the curse outright, but they forced it to defend, disrupted its rhythm, and gave Maki and Panda room to work.
Then the curse did something unexpected.
It split.
One moment, there was a single entity; the next, there were three smaller versions, each moving with disturbing speed and coordination. One charged Panda, another engaged Maki, and the third—the third broke formation and sprinted directly at Inumaki.
"BLAST AWAY!" Inumaki commanded, but the curse was already too close, its momentum too great. It crashed into him, both of them tumbling across the ground.
Arata moved instantly, Flowing Red Scale boosting his speed as he closed the distance. But he was too far, would arrive seconds too late—
Yuta was closer.
For a moment, the boy stood frozen, terror clear on his face. The curse was about to tear into Inumaki, claws raised—
"No," Yuta whispered. Then, louder, with surprising firmness: "No. Not him."
The air pressure changed.
But this time, it was different. Rika's cursed energy manifested, but it wasn't the wild, uncontrolled surge they'd come to expect. It was focused. Deliberate.
A single skeletal arm emerged, but it moved with precision. It grabbed the curse's torso, fingers closing like a cage, and simply held it. Immobilized. Not crushing, not tearing, just containing.
Yuta stepped forward, the training sword Maki had given him held in both hands. His stance was imperfect but recognizable—one of the basic forms Maki had drilled into him endlessly.
He swung.
The blade, empowered by channeled cursed energy through Rika's connection, cleaved the smaller curse in half. It dissolved into nothingness.
Rika's arm retracted. Yuta stood there, breathing hard, looking at his own hands with something like wonder.
"I... I controlled it. I actually—"
"OKKOTSU, LEFT!" Maki's shout cut through his amazement.
Another of the split curses was charging. This time, Yuta didn't freeze. He turned, set his stance, and called on Rika again. The skeletal arm manifested, swatted the curse down, and Yuta delivered another empowered strike.
The third curse tried to flee. Panda caught it.
In the aftermath, as the instructors dismissed the session and began their evaluation, the students gathered.
"Not bad, Okkotsu," Maki said, and coming from her, it was high praise. "Your form still needs work, but you actually fought instead of panicking."
"I couldn't have done it without your training," Yuta replied, and he meant it. "Thank you. Really. Thank you for not giving up on me."
Something passed between them—acknowledgment, perhaps the beginning of actual friendship.
Panda clapped Yuta on the shoulder. "See? Told you it would click eventually."
"Salmon!" Inumaki agreed enthusiastically.
Arata watched the exchange, feeling an odd mix of emotions. Relief that Yuta was progressing. Concern that even controlled, Rika's power was so vast it made his own abilities feel inadequate. And underneath it all, a growing conviction that they were all being prepared for something specific, something approaching.
That night, Gojo called them all to his office.
His expression was grave, the usual playfulness completely absent. "I've been called away on assignment. Extended duration, possibly weeks. Kusakabe and Nanami will continue your training in my absence."
"What kind of assignment?" Maki asked bluntly.
"The kind I can't discuss." Gojo's eyes, even behind his blindfold, seemed to carry weight. "But listen to me, all of you. What you've been learning, the way you've been pushed—it's not arbitrary. Threats are emerging that we're only beginning to understand. The balance of jujutsu society is shifting."
He paused, seeming to consider his next words carefully.
"Yuta. Your progress has been remarkable. Keep working with Maki. Learn to trust Rika as a partner, not just a curse."
"Maki, Arata. Your combat synchronization is becoming exceptional. Nurture that. You're stronger together than apart, whether you want to admit it or not."
"Panda, Inumaki. You're the glue holding this group together. Don't underestimate the value of that."
He stood, preparing to leave. "One more thing. You've all felt the tension, the way the higher-ups have been acting. Trust your instincts. Trust each other. And if things go wrong while I'm gone—" His voice hardened. "—survive. Whatever it takes. Understand?"
They all nodded, though none of them truly understood what they were agreeing to.
After Gojo left, the five of them sat in uncomfortable silence.
"Well," Panda finally said, "that was ominous."
"Salmon cod roe," Inumaki agreed. Very ominous.
"We keep training," Maki stated. "Whatever's coming, we face it strong."
"Together," Yuta added quietly. Then, more firmly: "We face it together. Right?"
Arata looked at each of them—Yuta, still learning but no longer helpless; Maki, sharp and unyielding; Panda and Inumaki, steady and dependable. His classmates. His team.
His friends, though he'd never quite admitted it aloud.
"Together," he agreed.
Outside, storm clouds gathered on the horizon, and the first drops of rain began to fall.