The afterlife has no seasons, and the dead do not age. Then Seto Kaiba decides that the three thousand years Atem spent sealed in the Puzzle were downtime, and downtime is not counted. Sixteen years lived. Add the years since. Light them.
So the candles begin, one more each year, always the same instruction and the same hand closing over Atem's at the sixteenth. Cake prototypes get compared, wax formulations improved, coffee brewed with water hauled in from another world. In a place with no weather and no change, five years pass, and neither of them names what that is. In the sixth year, a decree from the gods arrives on ordinary paper, at the bottom of the approval stack. Atem is permitted to refuse.
This is a translation of an original work on Pixiv.
Original Title: 22才の別れ
Original Author: 葉人(@Hathor_yuki)
Personal site: https://prideshipping.sakura.ne.jp
Incense was being burned, offerings carried in, and the footsteps of the priests came more often than usual, restless somehow. Cloth was wound around the pillars of the corridors, and everywhere, decorations were going up.
That morning, too, Seto had come. He arrives by breaking through the boundary between dimensions. Everyone seemed to have grown used to the sound of it; no one was startled anymore.
"What is the commotion."
Seto said it without lifting his eyes from his tablet. Doing the work of the living world at a desk in the afterlife was standard operation for Seto Kaiba.
"It's my birthday, apparently. Though in fact, once you're dead, you stop getting any older."
Seto's hand stopped.
He looked up, and looked at Atem.
"When did you die."
"Sixteen."
"The sealing."
"Three thousand years or so."
"Your memory of that time."
"None."
Seto set the tablet down and folded his arms. Atem knew this gesture — the one he made at work, when the numbers did not add up.
"So the time without consciousness was time not in operation. The same as a device that has stopped."
"A device."
"The correct handling is to exclude the three thousand years as downtime. Add the years since you came out of the Puzzle to the years here."
Seto stood up.
"How old do you turn this year?"
"……Who does."
"You do."
"Seventeen, apparently."
Having heard only that, Seto started walking toward the device.
The plan had been for him to return to the living world before he was caught up in the rites.
The day of the rites.
On the night the banquet had ended, the priests had withdrawn, and the palace had gone quiet, the boundary was broken.
Seto was carrying nothing.
No documents, no tablet, no case. It was the first time Atem had seen this man empty-handed.
"Did you come to celebrate, then."
"Do you want to be celebrated."
Seto sat down on the couch and let his back rest against it.
"If you're going to celebrate me, I'll be glad to take it. It doesn't happen often."
"You are an eccentric. Fine. I will make seventeen the year you begin."
He did not go so far as to say begin what, but Atem understood. And then Atem noticed that his own heart had gone faster than the drums of the rites.
That night, the man stayed until morning.
For all that he wore a face like nothing had begun, it was the night everything began.
There are no four seasons in the afterlife, naturally.
The word spring, Atem knew only to the extent of the time he had existed before coming here. He knew the green that came after the flooding three thousand years ago; the cherry blossoms of the living world were the same.
Green is born here as well. But in a place without seasons, neither the colour nor the temperature ever changes. It had felt to him as though there were no seasons at all.
After the rites for eighteen, Seto brought in a cake.
That year, for the first time, candles were lined up in front of him that were his own.
"Light them. Up to sixteen."
"……Sixteen?"
"That is the number of years you used alone."
Atem set the flame to them. From the first to the sixteenth. One by one, a flame stood up on the years of three thousand years ago.
At the sixteenth, Seto took the hand that held the taper.
And then the seventeenth was lit.
"That is for last year."
And after it, the eighteenth as well.
"That is for this year."
The words were few, but what year the seventeenth was, was burning there on the cake.
From the year it began, they light them together. Atem looked up at the man beside him and smiled a little.
That year's cake was too sweet for either of their palates. Seto took one mouthful and said, "There is room for improvement," but Atem ate two slices.
From that year, the boundary became something that existed in name only.
Seto came carrying a mountain of work, and did the work of the living world at the desk.
Atem did the work of the afterlife in the throne room. They worked in separate rooms, and only at night were they in the same place.
Inefficient, Seto complained. Even so, he did not come any less often.
Atem took to brewing coffee. It was something Seto had brought in, machine and all.
Atem was not especially particular about it, but Seto said that brewing it with the water of the afterlife changed the taste, and so he hauled in the water he insisted on as well.
The priests, it seems, went on believing to the very end that the black liquid set on the King's desk was a kind of offering.
In the year of the nineteenth candle, for some reason the boxes had increased to two.
"The prototypes are out. Compare them."
Whether he had bought the company or invested in it, it would be something of that order. Atem knew how strong Seto's particularities ran.
And having eaten both, Atem answered that he preferred the dark one. Seto said the white.
No conclusion was reached, but preference in taste is that sort of thing.
In the year of the twentieth candle, after the flames were lit, for some reason Seto would not let him put them out.
"Leave them until they burn down."
"They'll melt."
"I am taking a measurement."
"Of what."
What he was measuring, it turned out, was how many minutes twenty candles took to burn all the way down. And the man really was timing it.
With the sweet scent of the cake and the smell of burning wick mixed together, Atem waited.
Seto finished measuring, entered the figures into the tablet in his hand, and then said:
"Next year I will have wax prepared that lasts longer than this."
To change the formulation of the wax, for a number that increases by only one a year. Once it went this far, there was nothing to do but give up and accept that being unable to leave a thing alone was simply this man's specification.
Atem laughed out loud. It was the first time he had laughed like that, he thought, since coming to the afterlife.
In the year of the twenty-first candle, Atem asked.
"Kaiba. What do you think spring is."
Across the desk, beyond the wavering flames, Seto was quiet for a moment. He did not look like a man composing a dictionary-definition sort of answer. Atem was not asking for one, either.
"……Something one does not notice until it is over."
"Oh? Speaking from experience?"
"Speaking generally."
Twenty-one flames wavered, and there were two cakes as always, and the coffee had been brewed with water from the living world, and a coat hung over the back of a chair.
In a place without seasons, there was, unmistakably, a season.
If it was to be given a name, there was only the one.
The spring was long.
So long that Atem had forgotten to measure its length.
That the time, the span, in which one can go on without measuring is what is called happiness — he would come to know that only when the time came to measure again.
The word came as official business.
The will of the gods arrives in the guise of ordinary documents. In the papers in his hands it was set down as an adjustment to the circulation of souls. The throne of the Underworld to pass to the next reign; the soul of the present King to the wheel.
The road of reincarnation was slipped in at the very bottom of the stack awaiting his approval, on the same paper as every other document.
Atem read it over several times.
He was permitted to refuse, it said. It was not an order, but one road among those ahead. The options were open, it said.
From that night, Atem began to think.
If he were reincarnated, he could age. A birthday would come, and one by one, a year at a time, without anyone having to count for him, the number would simply increase. To be born, to grow, to grow old.
The hands stopped at sixteen would move.
To say he had not wanted it would be a lie.
He could not go back to when he had not known he wanted it. He had not been able to since the night the seventeenth flame was lit.
——But his memory.
Atem stopped his hand at his work and looked at the desk in the corner of the room. The place Seto sat every time he stayed. It was empty now.
The conjecture that this man was the reincarnation of Priest Seto was, in all likelihood, not far wrong.
Three thousand years ago, the cousin who had fought beside him and to whom he had entrusted what came after. That soul now gazed at a tablet before his eyes, counted candles, and told him to compare prototype cakes.
But he remembered nothing.
Not the priest's name, not the rules of the palace, not the words entrusted to him. That soul had left all of its memory somewhere behind. And it had not noticed.
No — it was not that he had not noticed. He did not have it, so of course he had not.
Five years sitting beside him, watching all that time — so Atem knew. Everything about Seto was the answer.
He could wish for it to remain.
But there was no one anywhere in this palace who had ever been reincarnated. And even if there were, perhaps they would not remember.
The only case he knew of was one, and that one case did not remember.
So, surely, it would vanish.
Atem put the document back on the stack for approval. Not at the bottom, but on top.
And then he noticed that he had not once considered the road of refusal.
There was a choice in which he remained on the throne and went on stacking the yearly flames, twenty-three, twenty-four — and he had not reached toward it.
The road set before him was far too bright.
So bright that the absence of that man at the end of it had grown difficult to make out, like a shadow.
No — he had made it out.
He had made it out, and Atem left his fingers stretched toward the bright thing in front of him.
That he had clung to it was something he could put into words within himself only much later. At this point he still believed he was choosing.
The signs of the rites filled the palace, incense was burned, cloth was wound around the pillars. It was that day, the sixth of them.
The boundary was broken, and Seto came in carrying a box. This year's cake was from a new shop in the living world, he said. Whether he had bought it out or invested in it again, Atem did not ask, as ever.
On the desk, the candles were lined up.
Atem watched Seto's hands undo the wrapping.
Long fingers stood twenty-two candles in place. The intervals were equal. The candles that man set out were always evenly spaced. They had been from the first year. Methodically, they were aligned as though measured.
Atem noticed that he was trying to commit it to memory.
The movement of the fingers. The colour of the wax. The number of shadows falling on the table. The sweet scent of a cake from the living world. Outside the window, the colourless sky.
What good will remembering do, he did not think. If he thought, his hands would stop. And then this man would notice.
He never, ever lets an anomaly past him.
"Light them. Up to sixteen."
Six years, and the words had not changed.
Atem carried the flame across. The first. His father's hand. The second. His nurse's song. The colour of the sand, the smell of the river, the voices of the priests, the weight of the throne. It was the same span of years he traced every year, and yet this year alone, each single flame was long. It only feels long, Atem told himself. The speed at which the flames burn has been optimised. It is the same as last year.
The sixteenth.
On the year of his death, a flame stood up.
A hand came to rest on the hand that held the taper.
The seventeenth was lit.
"Every one of them is a measured value of yours."
Seto says something like that every year. The words differ a little each time, but the meaning does not change. Not one flame among them is wasted, and the downtime is not counted. The years you have lived are all here.
Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.
And then the twenty-second was lit.
Twenty-two flames wavered on the cake.
Six years that should never have existed. Five years counted with Seto.
"They are all here."
This, too, was what Atem said every year. His voice came out as it always did. It should have.
But Seto looked up.
Lit by the flames, the blue eyes looked at Atem.
"……What is it."
"Nothing."
Atem smiled.
"I only thought it was beautiful."
Seto said nothing and returned his gaze to the flames.
Until the twenty-two flames burned all the way down, they stayed there side by side. A little longer than in other years, it seemed.
Which of them had made it longer remained unknown.
That day was not any particular day.
There were no rites, no incense burned, and the cloth on the pillars stayed put away. The boundary was broken, and Seto came in. The tablet, the attaché case, and the time of the living world. He took his desk in standard operation and picked up the tablet.
Atem waited for that standard operation to come round once.
Today was the only day he could say it. He waited for the timing.
"Kaiba."
"What is it."
"The next flame will not be lit."
The hand working the tablet stopped.
Seto did not look up. He kept his eyes on the tablet and did not move. And so Atem knew. This man was, right now, inferring the meaning of the words. Every interpretation under which the condition of the next flame not being lit could hold.
And at the same time, he was discarding them in order, from the easiest first. Atem had watched him all this time, so he knew.
At last, Seto opened his mouth.
"……Reincarnation."
What was left was only the correct answer.
"Yes."
"When."
"Soon."
Seto set the tablet down. The sound of it was the same as always, quiet. Terrifyingly as always.
"The King."
"The throne passes to the next reign. The handover is finished."
"Your memory."
The words did not come at once. This question alone he could not answer straight away, prepared for it though he was.
"It will vanish, I expect. ……The one case is sitting in front of me."
Seto blinked. Whether he believed it or not, he seemed to understand that it was himself being spoken of. Neither of them said anything about the priest on the stone tablet. They did not have to; it made no difference. Three thousand years of forgetting was there as the evidence.
"I did try wishing it would remain."
Atem said it. His voice was quiet.
For five years, he had gone on lighting flames.
"But I've never been able to ask an answer of anyone who has been reincarnated. The only case I know of was one. And that one case, remembering nothing, was counting my years for me."
Seto said nothing.
Atem knew he was not searching for grounds to argue. This man goes silent when the outcome cannot be moved.
"The number stops at twenty-two."
Atem went on.
"It ends with what you counted for me. Past that——"
"Past that is outside my jurisdiction, is it."
Seto's voice was low and level. Only the voice. Something in the shape of anger was strung tight beneath the calm. Atem took it, and did not look away.
"Today is the only day I can say it."
Because until today he had not been able to. Come tomorrow, if he were held again in those hot arms, he would surely not be able to.
Silence fell.
Outside the windows of the afterlife was a colourless night sky. It had never changed.
"Kaiba."
Atem stood up.
"Stay as you are. Do not change."
Having said it, he saw the shape of the words. The one who forgets, asking the one who is forgotten not to change. There is no wish more selfish than that. Even so, because he wanted him to stay as he was, there were no other words.
Seto looked at Atem for a long time. Not lit by any flame, with nothing between them, straight on.
Then he opened his mouth.
"To hell with that."
Atem's eyes went wide.
Seto gathered his things, stood, and started walking toward the boundary. His step was as always.
To Atem, following to see him off, the rest was delivered over his shoulder.
"Staying as you are only holds until twenty-two. If you want the number to go higher——"
Seto broke off there once, kissed him lightly, and went on.
"——then you have no choice but to change."
The time of the living world drew back out of the room.
In the quiet room, Atem looked at the drawer where the candles were put away.
He had wanted the years.
That he had learned he wanted them was the fault of what was in this drawer.
He knew he would not be able to keep it.
He knew, and he turned it over again. The movement of the fingers. The colour of the wax. The equal intervals. The blue eyes. The voice that said, to hell with that. The taste of the last kiss.
It would vanish. Even so, until the moment it did, he could hold it.
That was the whole of the luggage permitted to the one who leaves.
That child liked fire.
Only in front of a flame did the child go quiet. On the night of the birthday, when the mother stood the small candles up, the child would climb up onto the chair and wait, watching hard.
"Can I light it?"
Fire is dangerous, so the mother lit them. In front of the fifth, the child reached out a hand.
"From here, together."
The mother laughed, put the flame into the child's small hand, and laid her own hand over it from above. The fifth was lit.
Last year had been the same, and the year before that. Which candle it started from was different every year, but ever since the child had learned to speak, the reaching out and the "From here, together" had not changed.
No one had taught it. Asked about it, the child says it does not know. It does not know, but it wants to do it that way, the child would say, eyes still on the flames.
This year, five flames wavered.
Before blowing the flames out, the child always leaves a little time.
It had the look of counting something.
Outside the window, the night flowed past. The lights of the town, the sound of a distant car, someone's footsteps. Whether somewhere in the world, on this same night, there was someone still adding to a number. Whether there was someone still changing.
Such things, the child does not know.
In one breath, the flames were blown out.
Inspired by "22-sai no Wakare" ("Farewell at Twenty-Two"), a 1975 Japanese folk song by Ise Shozo, in which a woman leaves at twenty-two after five springs together. The song is not quoted here — only the shape of it: five springs, and a number that stops.
Translated with AI assistance, reviewed by the author. The original Japanese is the definitive text.
