Valencia smelled like sugar and smoke.
Lanterns hung in fat garlands from one end of the old quarter to the other, bobbing when the night breathed. A guitarist tuned on a crate. A drummer tested a rhythm with his knuckles on a trash can lid. Somewhere a fryer hissed like rain. Children sprinted past with sparklers, drawing shaky crowns in the air until a parent shouted, "¡Cuidado!"(careful) and they laughed and ran faster.
Novva squeezed Kurai's wrist as they stepped into the square. "Okay," she said, eyes bright. "No sulking. Not tonight."
"I'm not sulking," Kurai said, absolutely sulking.
She leaned close, voice wicked-soft. "You're scowling like the lanterns owe you money."
He didn't answer, but his mouth twitched. It was the tiniest crack in the shell.
They were swallowed by the crowd. A stall selling buñuelos threw sugar into the air like confetti. Another stacked paper cones with roasted almonds that clicked softly when shaken. A woman with a tray of small plastic cups shouted, "¡Horchata, fresquita!" and a man balancing a charcoal grill on bicycle wheels called out the day's saints and the day's meats with equal reverence.
A ring-toss game glittered like a trap. Bottles stood tight in rows, throats gleaming green under the lights. Novva stopped so suddenly Kurai almost ran into her.
"Oh no," he said. "No."
"Oh yes," she said, already paying. "These are rigged to keep me humble."
She lined up her first ring with the seriousness of a surgeon and released. It bounced with joy off five necks before landing on nothing. The second ring somehow managed to hit the frame of the booth, the awning, and a stranger's hat. The third died laughing at her feet.
The booth owner tried to hide his smile and failed. "Lo siento,"(I'm sorry) he said, not sorry at all.
Kurai picked up a ring, weighed it, didn't bother pretending he cared. He tipped his wrist. The ring flew, kissed a bottle, and went to sleep around its neck like that had been the plan all along.
The crowd gave a small cheer. The booth owner clapped once. "Un campeón," he declared, and from a wall of prizes handed Kurai the most ridiculous thing he could reach: a stuffed white rabbit with floppy ears and a lopsided grin.
Kurai stared at it, offended. "What am I supposed to do with this?"
Novva took it and shoved it into his arms. "Carry your son with dignity."
"It's smiling at me."
"That's called joy, Kurai. Try it."
He glanced at her, deadpan. "Teach me."
Her laugh was bright and surprise-soft. "Working on it."
They drifted, rabbit in tow. A little girl pointed and whispered to her mother, "El chico del conejo," and the mother whispered back, "Sí, pero no señales"(yes, but don't point) and then pointed anyway.
They ate like thieves who finally had time to savor the loot. Paper boats of patatas bravas with sauce that bit back. Thin slices of grilled squid, lemon bleeding over them. Churros dusted with sugar until they looked like ropes rolled in snow. Kurai burned his tongue on the first bite and tried to pretend he didn't. Novva saw and grinned so hard she had to look away to stop herself from laughing in his face.
"Drink," she ordered, shoving a plastic cup into his hand. Deep red, cold, with ice clinking like tiny bells.
He sniffed it. "What is it?"
"Tinto de verano. Summer in a cup." She raised her own. "To not dying, at least tonight."
"Very inspiring," he said, but touched his cup to hers and took a cautious sip. Citrus slapped the sweetness into place. The cold went straight to the back of his throat. His eyebrows jumped a little on their own.
"See?" she said. "Not cyanide."
He made a face like he was trying not to smile. "Debatable."
They stopped at a shooting gallery with a rusty pellet rifle and tin ducks rattling along a track. The man running it looked like he'd been disappointed by men with something to prove for thirty years straight.
Kurai lifted the rifle, sighted with one eye, and sent four ducks spinning as if he'd flipped a secret switch. The man did not smile, but he handed over a tiny plastic crown on a headband. Novva put it on, cocked to the side like a joke.
"How do I look?" she asked.
"Like trouble," he said.
"Good."
They let a street magician pull them into a circle of gawkers. The magician was thin and theatrical, with sleeves he kept saying were empty while they very clearly were not. He asked for a volunteer "with an honest face." The crowd laughed when he pointed at Kurai.
"I don't have an honest face," Kurai said.
"That's what makes it honest," the magician replied, and placed a plain coin in Kurai's palm. "Close your hand."
Kurai closed it.
"Don't squeeze. Don't crush my coin, guapo. Okay. Now open."
The coin was gone. In its place was a folded slip of paper. The paper unfurled with a snap. Inside: a tiny rabbit drawn in three lines and a sentence in quick ink -Smile once tonight, it won't kill you-. The crowd ooohed as if they'd seen something impossible. Kurai stared at the paper, then at the magician, expression unreadable.
"MagiK" the magician said, and winked at Novva.
They wandered past a stall where an old woman painted flowers on cheeks. Novva sat without asking, closed her eyes, and let the woman draw a starburst at the corner of her left eye. She turned her head for Kurai, proud. Citrusy glitter caught the lantern light like someone had trapped a sun in her skin.
"Pretty?" she said.
He looked a beat too long. "Yes."
A trio of teenage boys tried to out-clap the dancer on stage and failed in grand style. A baby on a father's shoulders bounced like a puppet and squealed when fireworks tested a low boom behind the cathedral. An old couple danced together as if they'd invented the song, his hand on her back steady, her fingers drumming time against his shoulder blade. Kurai watched them with a peculiar care, like he was studying a technique he wasn't sure his body could learn.
They found a table wedged against a wall, half a view of the stage and half a view of a tangle of electrical cords that were bravely pretending to be safe. A server plunked down two more drinks without asking; when Novva glanced up in surprise, the server nodded at the rabbit and said, "On the house, for Señor Conejo."
"Señor Conejo," Novva repeated solemnly, patting the plush. "He's famous now."
Kurai rested the rabbit on his thigh, one ear tucked under his palm so it wouldn't fall. He pretended not to notice he was doing that. Novva noticed and filed the image away in the part of her mind that collected proofs he was still human.
A trio of old men at the next table argued softly about football and fate.
"Valencia will lose," said one, eating olives with mathematical precision.
"They will win," said another, loudly wrong.
"They will do both," said the third, a philosopher with wine teeth. "In our hearts they will win. In reality they will lose. This is life."
Novva tilted her head toward them. "He's you," she whispered.
"I'm not that loud," Kurai whispered back.
"You are that dramatic."
He took a drink to avoid smiling. It didn't work. He smiled anyway. It was small and quick and only for her.
They finished the food and went hunting for more laughter. A fortune-teller had set up a tent out of two sheets and a will to be believed. She wore too many rings and the grin of someone who loved her own show. Novva dragged Kurai in by the sleeve. The fortune-teller grabbed both their hands with warm, dry fingers.
"Your future," she said, closing her eyes to listen to something neither of them could hear, "is… stubborn."
"That's not a fortune, that's my name," Novva said.
The woman squeezed Novva's hand. "You have a mouth that will save your life and almost cost it."
"Also my name," Novva said, delighted.
The fortune-teller turned to Kurai and went quiet in a way that made the noise outside sound louder. Her thumbs pressed gently against the insides of his wrists. "You have a wound that looks like a door," she murmured. "You keep trying to walk through it."
Kurai's eyes flicked up. "What's on the other side?"
"Nothing you can get to by walking," she said, and then her grin came back like a curtain closing. "Also, you will win something silly tonight and pretend you hate it. You will fail."
"Too late," Novva said, hugging the rabbit against Kurai's ribs. "He already loves his son."
They escaped before the fortune-teller could charge them for being right.
They got temporary tattoos from a bored art student. Novva chose a lightning bolt for her wrist. Kurai let the student draw a thin black line along the base of his thumb, almost invisible. "Minimalism," the student declared. "Strong choice."
They wrote wishes on strips of red paper and tied them to a wall of strings. Novva wrote quickly and didn't show him. Kurai held the pen too long. In the end he wrote one word, simple as a cut: ENOUGH. He tied it high and watched it flutter until it disappeared into the noise.
A street photographer popped a bulb in their faces and gave them a tiny, developing square. The picture swam into focus slowly: Novva, crown crooked, grinning as if she'd stolen something wonderful; Kurai half-turned toward her, mid-eye-roll, failing to hide a smile; the rabbit between them, smug. Novva slid the photo into the rabbit's ear like a secret pouch.
By the time the band on the main stage built a circle for dancing, the square felt like a living thing. Claps cracked like fireworks. Heels smacked wood. Novva didn't ask this time; she took his hand and pulled him into the circle like a dare. He tried; he really did. He landed a beat late, then a beat early, then exactly on time for one miraculous measure before careening off again.
"Relax your shoulders," Novva said, laughing. "They're trying to climb your ears."
"They like the view," he said, equally breathless. He missed a step and almost tripped over a grandmother who tap-danced her way around him like smoke. She winked. He barked a laugh so sudden he startled himself.
"There it is," Novva said, triumphant. "I knew you had one."
"Just one," he warned. "Don't get greedy."
"Too late," she said, and spun.
They danced until the band slid into something slow and sticky-sweet. The circle loosened into pairs. Kurai stood awkward and very tall. Novva stepped close and put her hand on his chest, right over the place his heart made its decision. He didn't run. He let her hand stay. The next laugh snuck up and ambushed him when a drunk man shouted, "¡Beso!" at a completely different couple and fell over his own feet.
They moved to the edge of the square for air. Firecrackers began in earnest now, popping and thudding with that particular Valencian love of noise that is more religion than hobby. The first real firework streaked and burst above the cathedral like a painted wound opening into gold. The crowd tilted its face up as one.
Kurai didn't look up at first. He looked sideways, at Novva's profile lit in stuttered color, the stubborn jaw, the quick mouth, the eyes that insisted the world answer to them even if it never would. He looked at the old couple still moving together as if gravity were a rumor. He looked at four teenagers trying and failing to look cool while measuring their courage to hold hands. He looked at a little boy on his father's shoulders who pointed at the sky and shouted, "¡Más!" with a hunger that made the air tremble.
He looked up then.
Gold burned and went out. Blue flared and then was gone. The black space between bursts felt like a held breath. Without meaning to, he breathed with it. In. Out. In. Out. His shoulders fell. The line of his mouth softened. He laughed again, quietly this time, to himself, like a private apology to joy.
Novva heard it anyway and leaned her head briefly against his shoulder. "Better," she said.
"Temporary," he said, but there was no bite to it.
"Everything is," she said. "That's why we make noise."
They stood through two songs' worth of sky-bloom. When the finale hit, a waterfall of white embers that turned the square into day for a heartbeat, Kurai flinched, then smiled at himself for flinching. He and Novva clapped with everyone else, not because the sky needed it, but because they did.
As the smoke thinned, a brass band marched in from nowhere and tore the square into a grin. A man with a drum bigger than his torso slammed the beat like he was fighting for their lives. A woman with a trumpet stabbed high notes through the night. Strangers linked arms with strangers. Novak grabbed Kurai's sleeve and yelled over the chaos, "Do you ever wonder..."
"What?"
"Why people build nights like this when mornings still come?"
He looked at her, cheeks warm from the wine and the effort and the laughing. He raised his voice to meet hers. "You want the truth?"
"Always."
He lifted the rabbit by one ear and deadpanned, "Research."
She barked a laugh, loud and sudden. "Try again."
He sobered like dropping a mask on a table. "Maybe to forget," he said. "For a while. To pretend the bad parts are… small? Or far away?"
"You're asking that while holding a stuffed rabbit and sugar on your face," she said, wiping his cheek with her thumb and showing him the glittering residue like evidence. "You already know the answer, Kurai."
He tilted his head. "Do I?"
She leaned in, close enough that her breath brushed his mouth. "We don't pretend the bad parts don't exist. We just refuse to let them eat everything."
He stared at her for a heartbeat too long. Then a kid ran between them yelling "¡Perdón!" and the moment broke into laughter again.
They got ice cream because it felt aggressively wrong not to. Kurai chose vanilla because he didn't want to choose anything at all and still somehow wanted to be eating ice cream. Novva chose lemon and then stole bites of his. He pretended not to see her spoon coming. When she dripped a line of lemon down her wrist, he caught it with his thumb without thinking and licked it without thinking more. They both went still for a fraction of a second. Then someone nearby dropped a tray and the sound broke the surface tension; they laughed at themselves and kept moving.
A stray cat with one ear sat on a windowsill and regarded them as if auditing their joy for tax purposes. Novva meowed at it. The cat blinked and looked away, unimpressed. "He's your people," she told Kurai. "Moody and judgmental."
"I'm getting along fine with Señor Conejo," he said, holding the rabbit up to greet the cat. The cat yawned and turned its head. "Exactly," he added.
A tall man selling paper fans fanned them both generously until Novva bought one painted with a night sky. She flicked it open and waved it in front of Kurai's face. "There," she said. "You look less like you're overheating internally."
"I am always overheating internally," he said.
"Therapy," she said, pointing at the fan. "Five euros."
By the time the square began to quiet, the night had poured itself into both of them. They were warm and loose and a little unsteady, not from the wine alone but from the permission of joy. Kurai's guard was down far enough that you could see the person under the soldier, the one who had laughed as a boy once and then forgotten how.
They took the long way home on purpose, pointedly ignoring the shortest alleys as if obeying them would end the night too soon. They crossed a small bridge where the river held the lanterns like trapped stars and the breeze finally lifted the sweat from their necks.
Novva stopped and leaned on the stone rail. Kurai stood beside her and let the quiet sit. For a full minute they said nothing at all, and it wasn't awkward. It was the kind of silence that belonged to people who had earned it together.
He was the one who broke it, because he always was. "Do you ever… feel guilty for enjoying this?" he asked, voice low. "Like there's a score you're not paying?"
She didn't look at him. "Sometimes."
"And you do it anyway."
She turned then. Her eyes were clear in the dark. "Especially then."
He nodded slowly, like he was accepting a truth he still didn't fully understand. "I can't tell if nights like this make the rest easier or harder."
"Both," she said. "That's how you know it's real."
He huffed something that might have been a laugh or a surrender. The smile faded as quickly as it came, like a wave that didn't quite reach the shore.
The next words slipped out of him without warning, the way they do when the world has been too kind and your guard gets lazy. "What if I don't know how to keep any of it?" he said. "The good things. What if they just fall through me?"
Novva turned fully, her back against the rail now, her body facing his. "Then you catch the next thing," she said. "And the next. And sometimes you drop them on purpose because your hands are full of knives."
He almost smiled. "I'm good with knives."
"I've noticed." She reached up and flicked his crown of stubbornness with one finger like she was tipping a literal hat off his head. "Put the knives down for a second."
He did, and because he'd put them down, the next part came fast. The words that were waiting in him like a storm found a crack and poured through. Not a speech. Not a lecture. Just a handful of true things in a row, leaving bruises on their way out.
"I don't know what I'm doing," he said quietly. "Not here. Not anywhere. I keep thinking revenge is a map but all it gives me is a direction and a cliff. I keep counting the people I couldn't save and it feels like I'm made of that number. I keep hearing a clock that doesn't belong to anything I can see. And I'm tired, Novva. I am so—"
He didn't even see her move. Her fingers slid into his hair. Her mouth found his. It wasn't delicate and it wasn't rough. It was the exact pressure needed to stop a spiral.
For a heartbeat he didn't move. His mind threw up all the usual reasons to resist: discipline, fear, habit; and then, because the night had taught him at least one lesson, he let them pass. He kissed her back, steady, not grabbing, not taking, just answering. His hand found her waist and stayed there like an anchor. The city went on making noise without them, somebody laughed too loud, a bottle cracked somewhere, a cyclist rang a bell like a punchline, but on the bridge it was only this.
She pulled back with her forehead against his. "Just for tonight," she whispered. "Don't fix anything. Don't break anything. Be with me."
His eyes were closed. "I don't know how."
Her smile ghosted across his mouth. "I do."
They walked the last streets in a hush, fingers laced without comment. The apartment door stuck the way it always did; he bumped it with his hip while she laughed at herself for trying the wrong key first. Inside, the small room felt full in a way that didn't crowd. He set the rabbit on the table. It watched them with its terrible little grin like a witness.
Novva reached up and straightened the tiny plastic crown on her head, a ridiculous gesture that made the night friendlier. "Are you still counting?" she asked.
He didn't pretend not to understand. He didn't lie. "Less."
"Good." She stepped forward and the rest of it unspooled on its own, without ceremony, without explanations. The door clicked shut. The city outside finally started to run out of noise. Two people inside learned how to make a new kind of quiet together.
Later...how much later didn't matter, Kurai lay with his eyes open and didn't catalog exits or threats or routes. He listened to Novva breathing. He listened to the building settling like an old animal finding a comfortable shape. He listened to the part of himself that had laughed more times tonight than in the last year and found that it didn't accuse him of anything. It just sat there, warm and tired and real.
In the morning, the square would be a mess. Ash on the stones, paper in the gutters, chords drooping, confetti stuck in the cracks, a broken ring under a table leg, a fortune-teller reusing her best lines with new names. The lanterns would be just bulbs again, and the smell of sugar would be swept away by the smell of bleach.
But tonight, they had glowed.
He turned his head. Novva slept with one hand curled near her mouth. He thought, without panic, I don't know if this is right. He thought, without dread, But it felt needed.
He closed his eyes.
And the last drop of realization before sleeping kicked. "Even in this blank darkness I still can't imagine her face anymore."