The Gift of the Magi
- Thread starter MangaDex
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- Jan 26, 2018
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Too sweet
Well bitter-sweet
Well bitter-sweet
Member
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- Dec 9, 2018
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I cried, oh God if I cried.
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- Jan 18, 2018
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The flashbacks, the world-building, the heartbreakingly relatable journey of letting go and living on... oh god, this manga is so, SO good! I'm so glad I powered on to read this even with my aversion to tragedy tags. This hit really close to home.
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- Apr 15, 2019
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What a feels trip. I seem to remember my long ago passed away friend because of this. Hopefully you're vibing there up in heaven homie.
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It was a good jouney 😭
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Wow I loved this manga. The ml is so selfless🤧🤧
[Mount Mitama Observatory, Tokyo Prefecture, November 14th, 2028, 2:43 AM]
The wind at the summit smelled of crushed pine needles and the sharp, metallic tang of impending frost. Daichi Shiki, thirty-seven years old now, adjusted the collar of his heavy wool coat, his breath pluming in white, ragged clouds. The cold seeped through the thick soles of his boots, but he didn't move from his position by the rusted guardrail. Behind him, the dome of the observatory sat silent, a pale monolith against the sprawling, ink-black canvas of the night sky.
He held a worn, leather-bound notebook in his left hand, the pages soft from years of turning. In his right, he gripped nothing. The space where the meteorite once rested against his palm was merely an ache now, a phantom weight he carried everywhere. He tilted his head back, his glasses sliding slightly down the bridge of his nose, and stared at the constellation Cygnus. There, burning with a steady, defiant brilliance, was the supernova. Akari.
It had been thirteen years since the accident. Eight years since the frantic, destructive storm of 'gifts' that had nearly killed him. Eight years since he had given her the only gift he had left: immortality in the annals of human history.
He thought: I kept my promise. Even if you hate me for it, I made sure they'll never forget.
Up in the sterile, marble-floored halls of Tengoku, the silence was broken by a sound that hadn't occurred in a millennia.
Ding.
The massive, golden counter above the Bank of Destiny didn't just tick over. It shuddered. The numbers blurred, spinning with a dizzying, frantic speed until they locked into place with a sound like a vault door slamming shut.
[ 1,000,000,000,000 G ]
Akari Hokazono knelt on the cloud-floor, her white dress immaculate, her hands pressed flat against the cool mist. She hadn't moved from that spot in what felt like an eternity, watching the numbers climb. At first, it was a slow trickle—a mention in an astronomy journal, a whisper in a university lecture. Then, the supernova was officially christened. The textbooks were printed. Documentaries were filmed. Every time a child pointed to the sky and said her name, a coin fell.
Angelos fluttered down, hovering two feet above her bowed head, the halo mechanism humming faintly.
"Akari-sama," the entity droned, devoid of its usual chipper cadence. "The threshold has been breached. One trillion G. The cost for physical manifestation on the terrestrial plane has been met in full."
Akari raised her head slowly. Her dark eyes, usually bright and expressive, were wide, reflecting the impossible string of zeroes. She looked down at her hands.
"He did it," she whispered, her voice cracking. "He actually did it. He made me a star."
"Will you execute the purchase?" Angelos asked.
Akari didn't hesitate. She didn't look at the screen. She simply slammed her palm against the glowing 'ACTIVATE' rune that materialized before her. "Yes. Now. Send me back."
The deduction wasn't a shower of coins. It was a vacuum. The 1,000,000,000,000 G vanished instantly, plunging her account to absolute zero. The marble pillars around her fractured, the light warping, bending inward as reality itself tore open to accommodate the transaction.
She thought: I'm coming, Daichi. I'm finally coming back.
Back on Mount Mitama, Daichi flinched.
The air pressure dropped so violently his ears popped. The ambient hum of the mountain insects abruptly ceased, leaving a void of utter silence. The sharp scent of pine was obliterated, replaced instantly by the overwhelming smell of ozone and ionized air, like the split-second before a catastrophic lightning strike.
He stumbled backward, his boots crunching loudly against the loose gravel. The space ten feet in front of him began to distort. It wasn't a meteor this time. There was no fire, no screaming descent from the heavens. It was a tear in the fabric of the night. A vertical seam of blinding, iridescent light sliced open the darkness, hovering mere inches above the dirt path.
Daichi dropped his notebook. It hit the ground with a soft thud. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, painful rhythm.
From the tear, a foot emerged. A simple, white flat shoe, stepping delicately onto the frosted dirt.
Then, a leg. A hem of a white dress, fluttering in a wind that wasn't there.
The light collapsed inward with a sharp crack, winking out of existence and leaving behind a silhouette illuminated only by the starlight.
Daichi stood paralyzed, his breath caught in his throat. He stared, unblinking, as the figure resolved into focus.
She was exactly as she had been. Her dark hair, cut straight across her shoulders, framed a face that hadn't aged a single day. Her cheeks were flushed, her chest heaving as she drew in her first lungful of actual, freezing mountain air in over a decade. The white dress she wore was thin, entirely unsuited for the November chill, clinging to the soft curves of her waist and hips.
Akari stood there, solid. Real. She wasn't glowing. She wasn't a phantom. She was casting a shadow on the gravel beneath her.
She looked at him. At the lines around his eyes, the broader set of his shoulders, the stubble along his jawline. A tremor worked its way through her small frame.
"You..." her voice was small, raspy, carrying perfectly across the ten feet of distance. "...You absolute idiot."
Daichi's knees buckled. He fell forward, catching himself on his hands, the sharp gravel biting into his palms. He couldn't speak. His throat felt swollen, choked with a decade of grief suddenly colliding with impossible reality.
Akari didn't wait. She crossed the distance in a blur of motion. She dropped to her knees right in front of him, the rough stones tearing at her thin dress. She reached out, her hands trembling violently, and grabbed the lapels of his heavy coat.
Her grip was tight. Her knuckles turned white.
"Do you have any idea," she sobbed, burying her face into his chest, "how long it takes to accrue a trillion yen from people just looking at the sky?"
Daichi let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. He brought his arms up, slow and hesitant, terrified his hands would pass right through her. But when his palms pressed against her back, he felt the solid ridge of her spine. He felt the heat radiating off her skin. He felt the frantic, rhythmic beating of her heart against his own ribs.
He crushed her against him, burying his face into her hair. She smelled like she always had—like cherry blossoms and the faint, sweet scent of old paper. He wrapped his arms entirely around her, lifting her slightly off the ground, anchoring her to the earth, anchoring her to him. They stayed there on the cold dirt, holding each other so tightly there wasn't a millimeter of space between them.
[Mount Mitama Observatory, Tokyo Prefecture, November 14th, 2028, 2:45 AM]
The wind howled across the summit, a sharp, biting hshhhhhhh that tore through the sparse trees, but Daichi heard none of it. His entire universe had violently contracted to the span of his own arms.
Akari was clutching him with a desperate, frantic strength, her fingers twisted so tightly into the wool of his sweater beneath his open coat that her knuckles bruised white against his chest. She was trembling. Not just a faint quiver, but deep, violent shudders that racked her entire body.
Daichi pulled back, just an inch—terrified the friction of the movement might shatter the illusion—to frame her face in his large, gloved hands. He pulled the thick leather off with his teeth, spitting the gloves onto the dirt, needing skin-on-skin contact to prove his mind hadn't finally snapped.
His bare, calloused thumbs brushed over her cheekbones. She was freezing. Her skin was like polished marble left out in the snow, shockingly cold to the touch.
"You're freezing," Daichi choked out, his voice cracking, thick with unshed tears. "Akari, you're freezing."
He thought: I'm hallucinating. I have to be completely out of my mind. But if I am, I swear to God I will never wake up.
"I—I f-forgot," Akari stammered, her teeth chattering together with a rapid clack-clack-clack. She blinked, thick tears welling in her eyes and spilling over, hot and real, tracking through the dust on her cheeks. "I forgot what gravity felt like. It's so heavy, Daichi. Everything is so heavy... and c-cold."
She thought: It hurts. The air hurts my lungs, the rocks hurt my knees, but his hands... his hands are the warmest things in the universe.
Daichi didn't hesitate. He shrugged out of his heavy, fleece-lined winter coat in one fluid motion, the fabric swishing heavily in the night air. He draped it around her shoulders. It swallowed her completely, the hem falling past her knees, the wide shoulders drowning her small frame. He pulled the lapels tight across her chest, burying her in his residual body heat and the scent of his cologne.
He looked at her, really looked at her, as he bundled her up. The contrast struck him like a physical blow to the sternum. He was thirty-seven. He had lines branching out from the corners of his eyes, a permanent furrow between his brows from years of squinting through lenses and mourning. His hair was thinning slightly at the temples.
But Akari... Akari was flawlessly, painfully nineteen. Time had completely bypassed her. She looked up at him from inside the oversized collar of his coat, her dark, starry eyes wide with a mixture of awe and residual panic.
"You got old," she whispered, a watery, breathless giggle escaping her pale lips. She reached a hand out from the folds of the coat, her small, icy fingers brushing against the rough stubble on his jaw. "You're an old man now, Daichi-kun."
"Thirteen years," Daichi rasped, turning his face to press a desperate, lingering kiss into the palm of her frozen hand. His lips moved against her skin as he spoke. "You made me wait thirteen goddamn years, you stupid, wonderful girl."
"I was b-busy," Akari fired back, her lower lip trembling as she smiled. "Do you know what the exchange rate on a t-trillion yen is up there? I had to wait for every single astronomy nerd on the planet to buy your book."
Daichi let out a jagged sob, wrapping his arms around her bundled form once more. He squeezed her tight, burying his face in the crook of her neck, inhaling the intoxicating, impossible scent of her. He slid his hands down to her waist, gripping the solid curve of her hips through the layers of the coat, and hauled her to her feet.
She swayed against him, her legs buckling slightly as her muscles, unused for over a decade, protested the sudden demand of gravity. Daichi caught her weight effortlessly, pressing her flush against his side. He wrapped one thick arm securely around her waist, supporting her completely.
"We need to get you inside," Daichi said, his tone shifting, a fierce, protective urgency bleeding into his voice. He looked toward the observatory dome, fifty yards away. "Uncle Kouichi has the space heaters running in the lounge. You need to get warm before you catch hypothermia on your first night back."
Akari leaned her head heavily against his chest, her ear resting right over his racing heart. She nodded, her hands fisting into the fabric of his shirt. Daichi held her impossibly close, his boots grinding into the gravel as he guided them both forward, stepping out of the cold darkness and moving toward the warm, yellow light spilling from the observatory's lower windows.
The wind at the summit smelled of crushed pine needles and the sharp, metallic tang of impending frost. Daichi Shiki, thirty-seven years old now, adjusted the collar of his heavy wool coat, his breath pluming in white, ragged clouds. The cold seeped through the thick soles of his boots, but he didn't move from his position by the rusted guardrail. Behind him, the dome of the observatory sat silent, a pale monolith against the sprawling, ink-black canvas of the night sky.
He held a worn, leather-bound notebook in his left hand, the pages soft from years of turning. In his right, he gripped nothing. The space where the meteorite once rested against his palm was merely an ache now, a phantom weight he carried everywhere. He tilted his head back, his glasses sliding slightly down the bridge of his nose, and stared at the constellation Cygnus. There, burning with a steady, defiant brilliance, was the supernova. Akari.
It had been thirteen years since the accident. Eight years since the frantic, destructive storm of 'gifts' that had nearly killed him. Eight years since he had given her the only gift he had left: immortality in the annals of human history.
He thought: I kept my promise. Even if you hate me for it, I made sure they'll never forget.
Up in the sterile, marble-floored halls of Tengoku, the silence was broken by a sound that hadn't occurred in a millennia.
Ding.
The massive, golden counter above the Bank of Destiny didn't just tick over. It shuddered. The numbers blurred, spinning with a dizzying, frantic speed until they locked into place with a sound like a vault door slamming shut.
[ 1,000,000,000,000 G ]
Akari Hokazono knelt on the cloud-floor, her white dress immaculate, her hands pressed flat against the cool mist. She hadn't moved from that spot in what felt like an eternity, watching the numbers climb. At first, it was a slow trickle—a mention in an astronomy journal, a whisper in a university lecture. Then, the supernova was officially christened. The textbooks were printed. Documentaries were filmed. Every time a child pointed to the sky and said her name, a coin fell.
Angelos fluttered down, hovering two feet above her bowed head, the halo mechanism humming faintly.
"Akari-sama," the entity droned, devoid of its usual chipper cadence. "The threshold has been breached. One trillion G. The cost for physical manifestation on the terrestrial plane has been met in full."
Akari raised her head slowly. Her dark eyes, usually bright and expressive, were wide, reflecting the impossible string of zeroes. She looked down at her hands.
"He did it," she whispered, her voice cracking. "He actually did it. He made me a star."
"Will you execute the purchase?" Angelos asked.
Akari didn't hesitate. She didn't look at the screen. She simply slammed her palm against the glowing 'ACTIVATE' rune that materialized before her. "Yes. Now. Send me back."
The deduction wasn't a shower of coins. It was a vacuum. The 1,000,000,000,000 G vanished instantly, plunging her account to absolute zero. The marble pillars around her fractured, the light warping, bending inward as reality itself tore open to accommodate the transaction.
She thought: I'm coming, Daichi. I'm finally coming back.
Back on Mount Mitama, Daichi flinched.
The air pressure dropped so violently his ears popped. The ambient hum of the mountain insects abruptly ceased, leaving a void of utter silence. The sharp scent of pine was obliterated, replaced instantly by the overwhelming smell of ozone and ionized air, like the split-second before a catastrophic lightning strike.
He stumbled backward, his boots crunching loudly against the loose gravel. The space ten feet in front of him began to distort. It wasn't a meteor this time. There was no fire, no screaming descent from the heavens. It was a tear in the fabric of the night. A vertical seam of blinding, iridescent light sliced open the darkness, hovering mere inches above the dirt path.
Daichi dropped his notebook. It hit the ground with a soft thud. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, painful rhythm.
From the tear, a foot emerged. A simple, white flat shoe, stepping delicately onto the frosted dirt.
Then, a leg. A hem of a white dress, fluttering in a wind that wasn't there.
The light collapsed inward with a sharp crack, winking out of existence and leaving behind a silhouette illuminated only by the starlight.
Daichi stood paralyzed, his breath caught in his throat. He stared, unblinking, as the figure resolved into focus.
She was exactly as she had been. Her dark hair, cut straight across her shoulders, framed a face that hadn't aged a single day. Her cheeks were flushed, her chest heaving as she drew in her first lungful of actual, freezing mountain air in over a decade. The white dress she wore was thin, entirely unsuited for the November chill, clinging to the soft curves of her waist and hips.
Akari stood there, solid. Real. She wasn't glowing. She wasn't a phantom. She was casting a shadow on the gravel beneath her.
She looked at him. At the lines around his eyes, the broader set of his shoulders, the stubble along his jawline. A tremor worked its way through her small frame.
"You..." her voice was small, raspy, carrying perfectly across the ten feet of distance. "...You absolute idiot."
Daichi's knees buckled. He fell forward, catching himself on his hands, the sharp gravel biting into his palms. He couldn't speak. His throat felt swollen, choked with a decade of grief suddenly colliding with impossible reality.
Akari didn't wait. She crossed the distance in a blur of motion. She dropped to her knees right in front of him, the rough stones tearing at her thin dress. She reached out, her hands trembling violently, and grabbed the lapels of his heavy coat.
Her grip was tight. Her knuckles turned white.
"Do you have any idea," she sobbed, burying her face into his chest, "how long it takes to accrue a trillion yen from people just looking at the sky?"
Daichi let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. He brought his arms up, slow and hesitant, terrified his hands would pass right through her. But when his palms pressed against her back, he felt the solid ridge of her spine. He felt the heat radiating off her skin. He felt the frantic, rhythmic beating of her heart against his own ribs.
He crushed her against him, burying his face into her hair. She smelled like she always had—like cherry blossoms and the faint, sweet scent of old paper. He wrapped his arms entirely around her, lifting her slightly off the ground, anchoring her to the earth, anchoring her to him. They stayed there on the cold dirt, holding each other so tightly there wasn't a millimeter of space between them.
[Mount Mitama Observatory, Tokyo Prefecture, November 14th, 2028, 2:45 AM]
The wind howled across the summit, a sharp, biting hshhhhhhh that tore through the sparse trees, but Daichi heard none of it. His entire universe had violently contracted to the span of his own arms.
Akari was clutching him with a desperate, frantic strength, her fingers twisted so tightly into the wool of his sweater beneath his open coat that her knuckles bruised white against his chest. She was trembling. Not just a faint quiver, but deep, violent shudders that racked her entire body.
Daichi pulled back, just an inch—terrified the friction of the movement might shatter the illusion—to frame her face in his large, gloved hands. He pulled the thick leather off with his teeth, spitting the gloves onto the dirt, needing skin-on-skin contact to prove his mind hadn't finally snapped.
His bare, calloused thumbs brushed over her cheekbones. She was freezing. Her skin was like polished marble left out in the snow, shockingly cold to the touch.
"You're freezing," Daichi choked out, his voice cracking, thick with unshed tears. "Akari, you're freezing."
He thought: I'm hallucinating. I have to be completely out of my mind. But if I am, I swear to God I will never wake up.
"I—I f-forgot," Akari stammered, her teeth chattering together with a rapid clack-clack-clack. She blinked, thick tears welling in her eyes and spilling over, hot and real, tracking through the dust on her cheeks. "I forgot what gravity felt like. It's so heavy, Daichi. Everything is so heavy... and c-cold."
She thought: It hurts. The air hurts my lungs, the rocks hurt my knees, but his hands... his hands are the warmest things in the universe.
Daichi didn't hesitate. He shrugged out of his heavy, fleece-lined winter coat in one fluid motion, the fabric swishing heavily in the night air. He draped it around her shoulders. It swallowed her completely, the hem falling past her knees, the wide shoulders drowning her small frame. He pulled the lapels tight across her chest, burying her in his residual body heat and the scent of his cologne.
He looked at her, really looked at her, as he bundled her up. The contrast struck him like a physical blow to the sternum. He was thirty-seven. He had lines branching out from the corners of his eyes, a permanent furrow between his brows from years of squinting through lenses and mourning. His hair was thinning slightly at the temples.
But Akari... Akari was flawlessly, painfully nineteen. Time had completely bypassed her. She looked up at him from inside the oversized collar of his coat, her dark, starry eyes wide with a mixture of awe and residual panic.
"You got old," she whispered, a watery, breathless giggle escaping her pale lips. She reached a hand out from the folds of the coat, her small, icy fingers brushing against the rough stubble on his jaw. "You're an old man now, Daichi-kun."
"Thirteen years," Daichi rasped, turning his face to press a desperate, lingering kiss into the palm of her frozen hand. His lips moved against her skin as he spoke. "You made me wait thirteen goddamn years, you stupid, wonderful girl."
"I was b-busy," Akari fired back, her lower lip trembling as she smiled. "Do you know what the exchange rate on a t-trillion yen is up there? I had to wait for every single astronomy nerd on the planet to buy your book."
Daichi let out a jagged sob, wrapping his arms around her bundled form once more. He squeezed her tight, burying his face in the crook of her neck, inhaling the intoxicating, impossible scent of her. He slid his hands down to her waist, gripping the solid curve of her hips through the layers of the coat, and hauled her to her feet.
She swayed against him, her legs buckling slightly as her muscles, unused for over a decade, protested the sudden demand of gravity. Daichi caught her weight effortlessly, pressing her flush against his side. He wrapped one thick arm securely around her waist, supporting her completely.
"We need to get you inside," Daichi said, his tone shifting, a fierce, protective urgency bleeding into his voice. He looked toward the observatory dome, fifty yards away. "Uncle Kouichi has the space heaters running in the lounge. You need to get warm before you catch hypothermia on your first night back."
Akari leaned her head heavily against his chest, her ear resting right over his racing heart. She nodded, her hands fisting into the fabric of his shirt. Daichi held her impossibly close, his boots grinding into the gravel as he guided them both forward, stepping out of the cold darkness and moving toward the warm, yellow light spilling from the observatory's lower windows.
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