Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Tomioka Giyuu is thirteen years-old when he wakes up, alive. 

He is alive, in the sense that his heart still beats. His lungs still twitch. His throat still whistles with air.

He is alive, in the sense that he is still here, in this room. Sea level. Above ground.

(In the sense that he is still here — 

When Sabito is not.) 

The room has been dark since the day before the last. All light decided to flee the moment Giyuu opened his eye, exactly one week after he’d stepped foot upon a blooming Mount Fujikasane. Today, he half expects whatever cruel gods are out there to begin laughing in celebratory joy.

For today, the world is short at least several fewer demons.

It’s a good thing.

It should be a good thing.

Because residing in the earth is one more child than there had been, just seven days ago.

The evidence of his absence lays in the tattered yukata sitting only one stone’s throw away from the bed.

Staring into the blank space once occupied with a boy no bigger than he, yet somehow entire eternities larger than life —

Giyuu thinks that was hardly a fair price to pay.

So he ignores it. The pain pulsing in his scar-sewn head. The twinges in his joints with every shift.

He pushes himself up on his elbows and heaves himself to the edge of the futon, where a tray of food has frozen on the floor.

It goes untouched.

He reaches forward instead. Knocks past medicine bowls and flickering lanterns and healing salves that can only do so much. 

He goes, forward, forward, forward — 

Until finally, his fingers brush worn cotton.

It takes a moment for his working eye to adjust. Staticky blobs shift and dance on the edges of his peripheral. But then he sees it.

Blood.

Crusted over. Blackened.

Tar on sun-kissed sage.

The decision is instinctual: like the mechanical scrape of lungs filling without forethought, the animal beat of a heart thrashing when no one remains to ask it to. Familiar shapes blur into madness, in and out, in and out, as he picks it up. Gentle, undeserving. As if his very fists were the ones that had shattered Sabito’s skull.

The stains have set in by now. So will have the rot, wherever it is he lies now. In the dirt, in the trees, smeared over cold stones and streams.

It will take years to get him out. 

Tsutako had taken just as long.

(Tsutako is still not gone yet.) 

((Tsutako is dead.))

There’s twine between his fingers. It’s meant to put bodies back together. Giyuu knows this. It’s what holds his eye inside his skull, cautionary lines staving off his own inevitable decay. 

But still, unbearably, unfathomably, he is alive.

In the sense that his fingers still prick scarlet when he pierces them with a needle.

In the sense that infection still threatens its way through his bloodstream.

In the sense that are now two fewer people in this world when it should’ve been just him only him always him why not him. 

Giyuu is thirteen.  

Without question or reason. 

So he picks up that thread meant to enclose organs within the jail cells they pretend can be bodies —

And begins to stitch together two lives instead. 

The day his sister tells him she is in love, they’re standing in the sea.

But they don’t talk about the wedding or the man who makes Tsutako shy like bluebells. Not yet.

They stare into the ocean instead.

It’s different from the old brook back home, winding through peridot woods. Most days, when it was warm enough, they’d sit by their river to watch tadpoles slip between their toes. Giyuu, often dubbed the less-than-sane one between the two of them, would quickly grow bored of the watching and plop himself right in the middle instead. 

Currents and clouds of baby frogs would push and shove rudely around him — never hard enough to sweep him off his feet, but curmudgeonly at his intrusion all the same.  

He hesitates to do so with the sea.

The waves are harsher. Less forgiving. 

Turmoil churns in the currents nipping at his clothes, while seagulls tear through skies burgeoning with storm.

And in their passing shadow, all Giyuu can do is pray today isn’t the day he buries salt in his lungs.

“But salt is heavier than fresh water, you know? You will never be heavier than the ocean. It’s impossible.”

Tsutako trails her hands through the cresting waves. She doesn’t mind the wetness of her sleeves or the briny spray flecking her mouth. She just grins at him, moon-eyed and bright, chipped-tooth smile from the time she fell chasing him through the brook, splitting her chin on the stones. He still feels bad about that.

“What if,” Giyuu asks, “I’m the only exception?”

It’s just a hypothetical to start a debate. 

Tsutako tells him, many times over, that the world can’t possibly end in all the ways he bets it will. They’ve stopped arguing about whether the earth spins round the sun or the sun around the earth centuries ago, after all. That means the yellow thing in the sky will rise the next day, and all the next days after that, and he’ll feel it on his skin again, every time it does.

But still. Giyuu has never quite shaken his streak for catastrophe.

Sometimes, he likes to shove it all into one place like coats and skeletons in the back of a closet — the dread whispering down the back of his neck. He piles it haphazardly into the place all his nightmares come true: deadly lull, no noise. No arteries to bring blue blood or breath to lungs.

It’s a place that, should he enter, he’ll never return. Not whole, anyway.

A place not even the light can reach —

Only the distant seabird, crying that there’s nowhere to go but down.

“Well, that’s fine. You know, Giyuu, they invented a new medical technique some years ago to save people who’ve drowned.”

It’s Tsutako, really, who never lets him run astray.

Just as he begins to wonder a little too far, she pulls him back with steady fingers around his wrist. She taps reminders of his pulse into his skin, and lets him sit in the middle of that babbling brook — even when she cuts her chin and claims he’ll catch colds. She knows it’s only a reminder, after all, a temporary memento. A nudge in the side to prove he’s still with the world, and the world with him.

Giyuu does not wander into the churning tides today.

Ocean-wet fingers begin trailing through the waterfall of his hair instead, as his sister claims, “You just have to pinch their nose shut and breathe through their mouth.”

“You made that up,” he accuses, as she begins to deftly twist black tresses into a braid to match hers. “That’s not possible.”

“It is! They’ve proven it!” Tsutako insists. “You breathe for them, pump their heart for them, and do it as many times as it takes. Some people come back in the end.”

But dead is dead, Giyuu thinks, like that spot beyond the horizon where pulses end and eyes go dark. Dead is dead, like their mother and father, who didn’t go remembered by both their children, only the first one.

Yet, Tsutako glares down at him, valiantly. He can tell she believes it, she really does. She’ll argue until they both outgrow their clothes and their heads bloom white if she has to.

Giyuu knows he can’t outlast her. 

So he just narrows his eyes instead.

“You told me before that seashells make those sounds because they’ve heard whales sing,” he says.

Tsutako pinches the tip of his ear.

“Well, because that’s true.”

“No way. Shells aren’t alive. They don’t have ears.”

“There are many ways to listen to the world.”

“You talk like an old man sometimes.”

At that, Tsutako throws her head back in a brazen laugh. 

Most times, she’s as softspoken in her joy as she is loudmouthed with her adoration. On rarer occasions, she’s like this: screaming her elation over the sound of the waves, evidence of glee that could never vanish, even if all the seas in the world went dry as bones.

Giyuu likes all the times.

(But he likes these times the best.)

When her laughter dies down, Tsutako reaches up and wipes a tear from her eye, yanking him close into the canyon of her side. 

“I promise you,” she says softly, “these three things are always true.”

She tucks his unruly bangs behind his ear, holding them down even when the wind just pushes them right back once more.

“One. If you do sink out there, I will always go out to look for you.”

The crescents of her nails press over his nose, where his first freckles have just begun to bloom.

“Two,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how much I like Minoru. Your sister will always have loved you first.”

Of course, Giyuu thinks. You didn’t have to tell me that.

Tsutako makes up facts about whales and spins myths about resurrecting the drowned and occasionally fibs about where their parents really went — though she only did the latter when Giyuu was too young to think that life could even have an end. She lies about both important and unimportant things, the apocalyptic and the asinine —

But she would not lie about this. 

Her leaving, her changing, her unerring devotion.

Still, Giyuu stares out at the horizon. The knot he didn’t know was tied up in his throat slowly undoes itself, as he reminds himself.

There is no water in his lungs. They don’t hopscotch event horizons today.

His first breath taken is sweet as it must taste for all the sodden souls the seas throw up in Tsutako’s tales.

“I know,” he forces out, watching seagulls dart in alabaster blurs through the clouds. “But you can like him more than me.”

“Silly,” Tsutako clicks her tongue. “It’s a different kind of like. One day, you’ll understand.”

Together, they watch the birds fly, farther away than their eyes can reach. Nothing has changed just yet.

His sister is in love. And Giyuu loves her stories.

So he asks her, quiet and curious, as the wind guides gentle fingers through the dark swirl of her hair —

“What’s the third thing, then?”

The thing is, Tsutako liked to brag about her brother. She liked shouldering the judgement, wrestling off the rude whispers like they were oil and she was water. She liked tipping her chin up too high, too proudly for such a freshly orphaned girl, and calling that strange boy her brother anyway. 

Yes, she’d say, that was her little brother. Easy-bruiser, soft-bellied, heart-sick baby brother. Who outran the town’s meanest kids and whom trouble had made its favorite friend. Who whispered of creatures at night and slept in riverbeds and came home dripping like the little monster she loved anyhow — thank you very much, sir, that’s him right there!

Giyuu doesn’t realize what that looks like until he’s eight.

Stalls smoke and goods dwindle as they stroll down the market aisles together. Apparently, according to Tsutako, this is the best time to snag things merchants hankering to go home are desperate to sell. 

Hand tucked safely in hers, Giyuu casts his gaze around the lengthening tangerine shadows. He counts the legs striding to and fro, the creaking baskets full of suppers yet to be made, the stray dogs sniffing for scraps.

All the while, Tsutako’s thumb rubs circles into his knuckles as she hums.

“Nee-san,” he mumbles. “Are we going home soon?”

“You want your salmon daikon, don’t you? You’re not gonna whine if I change plans?” Tsutako says cheerily. 

Giyuu scrunches his nose, burrowing deeper into his collar.  

When he doesn’t answer, she declares, “Just a couple more things, then!” 

It’s the time of year when things start getting bad again. The black-eyed midnight arrives sooner and sooner these days, just as vindictive as the previous season. Colors slip like sand through his fingers, and he can’t pay much attention anything save the dread prickling down his spine. 

“Giyuu,” Tsutako says once.

She isn’t stern. She’s never stern with him. 

On the days when the sun can’t find him, she only pushes and shoves mountains until light can shamefully meander its way home, sorry for the detour.

That’s why he doesn’t get so much as a courtesy warning before the world lurches, and she’s hoisting him up.

Giyuu lets out a yelp.

“Now you can’t run away!” Tsutako shouts as he begins to squirm and jerk. 

“Nee-san, put me down!”

“Nope.” 

“It’s too heavy!” 

Their basket is promptly dropped into his flailing hands.

“You’re growing up. Soon, you’ll be too big to let me do this to you,” she says softly, adjusting her hold to hug him close like the sack of very embarrassed potatoes he is. “Soon, you’ll get tired of your big sister, won’t ya?”  

What the…

“No!” he bursts out, bristling that she’d even suggest such a thing.

“Mhmm? Really?” 

There are only a few things Giyuu knows to be true in this world.

One. His parents are gone, and he will never remember them.

Two. Monsters aren’t real, and he will fear them anyway. 

Three — 

Others far older and harder than him will say he’s only known her for eight short years, and that isn’t very much at all.

But a lifetime is a lifetime, no matter how brief. 

And in this lifetime, his sister is the first good thing he’s ever known. 

(He is certain that she will be the last.)

The smile curving her lips tell him she knows this already. 

The teasing glint of her ocean eyes whispers, I just wanna hear you say it.

Fine. Easy enough.

“No,” he sniffs in offense, accentuating it with a tiny kick to her hip. “Never.”

“But maybe you’ll get big enough someday that you can carry me around, then. How about that?” 

Giyuu rests his head against her shoulder in lieu of an answer, toying with the handle of their woven basket. Tsutako smells good, like jasmine and honeyed Junes. 

Like all the nicest things he’ll look back on, once he’s grown big and strong enough to heft her up like this too. 

“Ah, here it is.” His sister eventually pauses, rummaging around her pockets. “I’ll take two of the biggest daikon, please.”

A huff sounds, almost incredulous. 

Clothes rustle as the merchant begins placing the vegetables into Tsutako’s awaiting hands. 

“You know,” the elder says, “he’s too old to be believing in those ghost stories.”

Tsutako doesn’t stiffen in the face of the thinly veiled barb. 

She cuts right through it, graceful as breathing. 

“So what if they’re fake or not?” she exclaims. “I would protect him anyway!”

Then Giyuu feels her cheek bump against his. Rapidly forming laugh lines crinkle delicately against the corner of his own eye, as she says, fond —

“I just can’t save him from that lousy head of his.”

The merchant comments nothing else, only flashing a meek tooth-gapped smile and accepting the money Tsutako offers. She drops the vegetables into Giyuu’s basket with a whispered, “Thank you,” as he wriggles to be let down.

She relents, but only after scrubbing her knuckles furiously into his skull. 

So much for saving his head.

Every now and then, their path home comes alight. Seeing-eye stars touch down in the forest, amber flecks of lightning humming with the thunderous beat of gossamer wings.

The last fireflies of the season float lazily through the evening air. Clouds of aureate dust hover above the wind-swept grass, blinking in and out as the reedy blades swoon then ripple.

“Ah, they’re out tonight,” Tsutako says brightly. Giyuu’s already skipping ahead, basket dropped, arms outstretched. He goes in too fast — no method or plan. He never quite manages to snag them.

His sister lets out a tinkling windchime of a laugh. 

Soft hands wrestle him into stillness, before scampering down his arms and cupping his own.

“Do it like this, silly,” she murmurs.

One sun-bug winks, another fades out. Somewhere beyond the black mountain hedges, the North Stare shines down on them.

Beneath its moonlit gleam, a lone firefly finally chances a fall. 

The creature wriggles about in the center of Giyuu’s palm, its little legs far too fragile for him to feel. But whenever it blinks, their fingers glow red with running blood. The spaces between their bones shine gold.

Tsutako presses the curve of her grin into his head, and he knows it’s luck that brings them here, in this moment. Three hearts, scintillating among the last of August’s lights.

And he knows too, like he knows three other things, that tonight, nothing bad is coming their way.

Because tonight, his sister is with him. 

The world shines kindly upon her, a gentle clementine glow befitting of the best thing it’s ever given him. Next year, the cosmos will return. And when they do, they’ll capture a few more uncrushed stars in their hands, just to stare a little while longer.

Their house, just steps beyond them, is far too big for them alone. No fireflies or parents remain to fill up jars.

Yet, when Tsutako is around, even empty air feels warm anyway.

(“Hmm… three. Think of me like the waves,” Tsutako tells him that day by the cliffs. Foam kisses the bare bulbs of her ankles, salty wind drawing pearly tears from her eyes. 

“How come?” Giyuu asks. 

“Even if I go away for a while,” she just promises with her chipped-tooth grin, “I will always return to you.”)

It turns out, Tsutako loved to love her brother. Yes, she’d proclaim, even the hair clogging the comb whenever she bullied it across his head, even the scratches staining her knuckles after breaking up another fight he hadn’t meant to start. She loved the glance over her shoulder, the looking both ways, the pudgy-turned-knobby hands clutching her sleeve. 

She loved wringing the clothes, stitching the wounds, snatching the globs of light in their yard just to catch reflections in his timid ocean eyes. She loved it all. Even the sicknesses, the sleepless nights, the arguments smoothed over with time. That last part was the easiest. They could never inflict in each other wounds so ragged they couldn’t be filled. Whether it took the entire Pacific or a mere creek didn’t matter. Tsutako could wait. She loved to be patient that way. 

Giyuu doesn’t realize what it means to be loved by Tomioka Tsutako until he is twelve.

Tonight, his sister is down the hall, her shadow a blue blot stretching over the floorboards. Beside her is another shape. A man whose work-toughened hands engulf hers so entirely and tenderly. 

“My little brother never knew his parents, not like I did,” she tells him softly. “When they fell ill and passed, I became his mom. His dad. And his sister.”

Minoru brings their entwined fingers up to his mouth. Presses a kiss over the hills of her scraped knuckles. 

Tsutako dips her head shyly, ears blooming red. 

Her hair, falling over her face, is barely held together by that stubborn red ribbon. 

“But,” she confesses, “I would like to be your wife, too.”

Giyuu finds her later that night when sleep evades him at every corner. There’s a heaviness in his stomach that comes from something he’s not sure he wants to name. He sits on the edge of her bed, because while he hasn’t hit his growth spurt just yet, the futon has grown too small for two bodies anyway.

Tsutako looks up at him groggily, rubbing fatigue from the corner of her mouth. 

When her vision clears, and she sees him, she brightens with a smile. Like she always does.

“You don’t have to be everything for me,” he whispers, because he thinks he needs to tell her this, even if it means that things will change. Maybe it’s time they did. “You can just be my nee-san.”

Tsutako’s eyes widen in the cerulean dark.

“Oh, Giyuu.” 

He doesn’t reach for her.

But her hands cup his face anyway, thumbs tracing over stubborn baby fat, fading black eyes, freckles faded in the winter. 

And in that moment, he thinks he realizes, just as one realizes water cannot linger in skin like sunlight, as fireflies cannot live inside of glass jars, as mothers and fathers will one day vanish into the dirt, exactly what it means, to —

Giyuu doesn’t understand, truly, what it means to be loved by Tomioka Tsutako, until he turns thirteen.

Tonight, there is a monster in the living room.

And his older sister, his kind, gentle, soon-to-be-married older sister, is clutching a knife in her hand. 

With her other, she is shoving him into a closet.

“You have to listen to me, okay? Don’t speak and don’t leave, no matter what you hear,” she whispers as Giyuu begins to struggle against her. 

“Don’t go.” He begs in a pitch he didn’t even know was possible. “Please, don’t go.” 

A loud screech tears through the night. 

Tsutako’s body jolts. 

In her distraction, Giyuu reaches forward, clutching her wrist. Sobs hiccup through his chest.

“You can’t go out there,” he pleads, again, again, again, as her gaze darts between him and the half-open door. “Don’t, Tsutako. You’ll — please don’t leave me.” 

Another roar. 

Something wet glistens in Tsutako’s eye. 

She smiles just once. 

Chipped teeth snag in her lip.

“Remember what I told you, okay?” she breathes. “It’ll be alright.” 

Giyuu doesn’t know what she means by that, and he can’t ask.

The last thing he remembers is the aborted sob dimpling her chin, the force of her hand ripping his off hers, the utter terror in her eyes —

Before she shuts the door and turns the key.

(Some tides recede too far to return. They go far, far away, to a place not even the light years can reach.)

Guts froth and pool at his feet. Driftwood ribs pierce shorelines of torn skin. 

He sinks to his knees. Feels the heft of spilt blood and intestine in his clothes. Feels, as he erodes. Every part of him that slips between his fingers. What the waters swallow, they never relinquish whole.

And so Tsutako washes ashore in red. 

And so Giyuu can only scream.

“My sister it’s my sister she’s hurt —” please god help me — “there was something in our house you must have heard it —” you must have heard her screaming — “don’t do this Tsutako Tsutako please —” he can barely peel the clothes off her shoulders there are no shoulders left — “please god —” the sun is shining — “heaven help me —” there are ashes on the floor — “please just help her help her help —”

“What the hell have you done?”

Unfamiliar eyes glare down at him. Giyuu stares into irises as cold as steel. 

Sobs tumble forth as he staggers to his knees. 

Blood and vomit taint his mouth. 

“Please,” he whispers brokenly to the people at his door. “Help her.”

“Only a monster could have done this,” they say. 

And they are all 

looking

at

him.

They say he took that knife in her hands to her chest. Plunged it so deep into sternum that bone split in two. Deep enough to tear up the roots of her arteries, wildflower white of her ribs. Each one of them a crescent moon, laid on the ground, petals for a wedding night that never came.

They say there was red gloss on her lips, matching crimson on his own.  

They say he had to have eaten her heart.

(Blood in his mouth when he tried, only once, to blow life back into her, the way she swore he could.)

((The air had gurgled straight through unstitched lungs.))

So he plays the part. 

He stumbles through the town, wailing like a phantom. Older hands cuff over his own, dragging him to some place that is supposed to fix him. But how is anything fixable when Tsutako drips from his sleeves, pours between his fingers? She’s skull shards in his hair and fragments in the ground and water between his hands. She is burial soil black between his nails, gone to sleep where forest stars lie, and he knows it’s forever now, because he is not a kid who needed to be lied to about his parents anymore, because he knows now that dead is dead is not coming back.

So he stumbles, until he runs.

He runs, until he blisters.

He blisters, until he bleeds.

He bleeds, until he falls.

Giyuu collapses at what feels like the edge of the world, feet torn black and blue. It’s cold, so cold. White all around. When did it start snowing? He can’t feel his limbs. Can’t feel the breath in his lungs. 

Air scrapes through splitting muscle and tissue to rust in the back of his throat.

It’s coming down faster now. 

He can’t see two feet in front of him. 

Buried in a swelling snowbank, Giyuu can only stare up at the ceiling of the sky. 

Ice shatters all around him, pearlescent and soft. It lands on his nose, his cheeks, his heaving chest. 

Where am I?

The moment the question arises, it’s futile.

It does not matter. 

Because there are three things Giyuu knows to be true in this world. 

One. His parents are gone.

Two. Monsters are real. 

Three. Tomioka Tsutako was everything — 

Mother. Father. Sister.

Savior.

Dead.

Not coming back.

Not coming back.

Not coming back.

Tomorrow, the sun will emerge to a crumpled body laying somewhere in the mountains. Or, it will simply snow forever, and he’ll disappear until the next spring unearths him. 

He doesn’t care, he thinks, as he lets his eyes close at last.

Let them take him too.

He doesn’t register, until far too late, the feeling of hands on his bare arms. Fingers hardened with years of ache, yet just small enough to clasp around his wrists, pulling him up. 

Giyuu does not remember the beginning of his life. Does not remember the woman who cradled him or the man who named him.

But he’s certainly tried to imagine its end. 

Maybe it’ll be something like a flash of light. Something like crimson resting easy over his eyelids. Soft as the velvet blush of the neighborhood stray’s ears. He imagines he’s simply fallen asleep beneath a bed of marigold stars. In a second, the wind will sing, the door will open, and someone will come out to get him.

Any moment now.

They’ll call his name, summon him forth with a laugh. When he slumbers through all their messages and good-natured pokes, they’ll eventually relent and scoop him into their arms anyway, just as he was hoping they would. They will bring him all the way home, through those patches of forest fairies and fantasies, and they’ll lay him to rest in the bed they always shared, back when they were still small enough to fit.

Most of all, he imagines, they will be gentle. So gentle.

So as to not disturb something as fleeting as childhood.

Giyuu opens his eyes to a blank ceiling.

In the northern corner of the room, a cobweb hangs limply, too cottony and far up to reach. When the shape of a doorway swims into view, he can make out the thin vestiges of what can only be one long hallway, stretching somewhere beyond the glaring eye of wood cleaved in two.

He blinks.

Light streams in, not through the shingles of a forested roof, but from a split in the wall.

Besides the pile of spare futons tucked into one forlorn corner, the room he’s in is barren. Unfurnished and undecorated, about as ready to be packed up and abandoned as a failing inn’s. Its only occupants are him and the concerning lack of spiders and the dust motes, fluttering amok with every breath searing through his lungs.

Okay.

So he supposes he is not dead.

He can register a bump somewhere in the attic of his chest, reverberating down the column of his spine. He knows it’s a harbinger of life as much as it is an intruder begging to escape. A one-two-three reminder that his existence has not in fact ended; it remains here, drenched in sweat, swathed in who-knows-how-many blankets and sheets.

But he does not feel it.

No relief. No exaltation.

Why?

One-two-three.

Don’t speak.

One-two-three.

Don’t leave.

One-two-three.

No matter what you hear.

Giyuu manages to tip his head over.

And he sees it.

The monster crouched in the corner of the room. 

Balanced on bony haunches, it hangs knobbly wrists loose over bare, scraped knees. Wide, shoddy impressions of eyes stare back at him in the dark, as unnerving as they are unblinking.

Its face is split by a deep scar across its right cheek.

Giyuu stares at the creature for a long, tremulous moment, muscles suddenly as stiff as death. He can hear the telltale hitch in his own breathing. One tiny hiccup amidst ringing silence.

Then —

Screaming. Shrieking.

No matter what you hear —

Blood gurgling even without a pulse. Oceans, cradled in his hands.

A fevered funeral in his brain.

Sensations tumble upon him. Reminders beaten into him like a ceaseless elegy. The tides retreat when something deadly is coming, and even tsunamis will come crawling or crashing back when homesick, but not this one.

Because Tsutako is dead.

Tsutako is dead.

His sister is dead.

Giyuu lurches up in a flash. The blankets that had been piled onto him tangle between his legs as he scrambles away, tearing the sheets, flattening his back to the wall. Something has kicked down the attic door of his chest now, and someone else is gasping for air, and he doesn’t know where the hell he is or what’s going to happen to him or if it even matters, because —

“Woah! Hey!” 

The creature in the corner bolts upright.

Small, yet scratched hands reach up and shove its face to the side.

“Easy,” a human voice commands. “Easy!”

In the place of a chiseled snout and stubby fangs are eyes like mountain lilies.

They meet his own across the room as hair pink as peaches, shorn and messy, tumbles down the boy’s shoulders. He’s clad in a strange checkered yukata, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, smeared in dirt and melted snow. 

No crimson. No harm.

On the other side of his face, a deep trench runs from the lobe of his ear to the corner of his mouth.

His mouth —

Which curves into a starling smile.

“My name is Sabito,” the boy eventually says, when Giyuu only stares. “What should I call you?”

He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know.

Once, he might have said, he could call him a brother. There was a time before even that, when he could have called him a son. Both would have been true, a day and a decade ago.

What do you call the last left of anything?

Giyuu was somebody’s son.

That wasn’t real anymore. Hadn’t been for a long time. That was alright.

Because he is — no —

He was — yes, that was the word now —

He was someone’s brother.

But someone has left a gaping chasm in the floor of his ribs, and he feels the rush of free fall like a promise where he teeters on the precipice of it. He wishes, more than anything, that he could leap after her, all the way down, but he has this dreadful feeling, deep in his gut, that that’s not what he’s supposed to do anymore. If that won’t fly, then he can only hope the journey she took to that place he cannot follow had only lasted for an instant, that it had ended before she even realized it had begun. But that wasn’t true, was it? He’d seen her all over the place, everything everywhere, in the living room, in the kitchen, even snaking down the engawa and leaking into the forest floor. It had taken him hours to let go of her body, a poor excuse of a body, parts too scattered to grow stiff without life left to harbor, and it had taken him hours longer to gather enough of the bits to lay her in the ground. Most of her at least. Just not where their parents slept. There was too little of her left for a trek that far. 

So.

She had to have felt it. 

She had to have tasted the blood, suffered the agony, succumbed to the terror. 

And where was Giyuu that whole time?

Standing at the edge. Curled up in the closet. 

(Waiting, like a coward, for someone else’s beck and call.)

Tsutako was everything. She was his mother and his father and his sister and sun in sky and snow against sea. 

What is he in her wake?

Not a son, not a brother, certainly not a savior.

He is the final holder of a family name with no family. 

He just —

He no longer belongs to anyone. 

A tear falls down his face. Then two. Then thousands more.

Giyuu can only sit still and shake apart, as the boy slowly crawls toward him. The pink tissue holding his cheek shut stretches and folds when he smiles again, undeterred.

Just as the first sob breaks through, Giyuu feels a hand rest on his own.

Fingers, hardened with years of ache, yet just small enough to clasp around his wrist, press into him. Twin heartbeats thunder through his body as he crumbles, wild horses without destination, a treacherous thump-thump-thumping reminder —

Even canyons remain, long after their guiding rivers have run dry.

There used to be three things Giyuu thought were certain in this world.

Now, he learns.

He learns, rather quickly, just how much larger than life Sabito can be. Despite being the same age, he is bigger, louder, brighter in every which way. He somehow enjoys talking to Giyuu, even when Giyuu finds no will to respond. No matter — he tells him about the creatures on this side of the peak, the birds which prefer the thinness of the air, the rabbits that dance in the underbrush during the first week of spring. He tells him which rivers bubble and flow, and which ones roar and scream. He tells him of a lake tucked within a meadow of lilies, where the water is opal-blue like none other he’s ever seen. 

Somewhere between the ramblings on his latest catches and the blister on his palm that popped the day before, Giyuu also learns —

Sabito is a student.

His master is a stern man named Urokodaki Sakonji. He was apparently once a great warrior, who now rests in the kinder pockets of Mount Sagiri, awaiting the next unfortunate soul or sinner to stumble their way through his doors.

Giyuu learns that he is the fourteenth to do so.

He learns that makes Sabito the thirteenth.

He learns the thirteenth was the one who had found him on the mountain that night. Who scooped him up over his shoulders and sprinted his way back to the cabin he calls his home, yelling for his teacher to help him, he’s dying, I don’t know him, just save him. 

Then, he learns he had been dead asleep for a week.

So he learns Tsutako has been dead — not asleep, just dead — for a week. 

He learns it had taken Sabito’s hands, and then his warrior-teacher’s, to pry Giyuu’s cold fingers from the rumpled fabric of the kimono that had become her funeral shroud. 

(He learns that even without a corpse to belong to, it had begun smelling like one anyway.)

((He learns Sabito had scrubbed at it for hours until the water finally ran clear.))

So Giyuu begins to rewrite the scripture to which he’d unknowingly become so faithful. 

One. He can go four days without eating before he collapses.

Two. His hands are too soft to wield a deadly weapon.

And three.

There is an ache in his soul and a hole in the floor that people older and wiser than him call grief. It is a chronic condition for which there is no salve or ointment. It is a senseless creature. It is a life sentence.

It takes what little reason Giyuu has amassed and crosses it right out. It lets loose in angry scribbles before ripping up the whole thing, snarling at him to start over from zero. He’ll just have to learn how to live with it the hard way. 

So, he learns.

He starts from scratch.

And when he finally learns what he had always suspected was true — 

That there really is an underworld which comes alive at night —

There really are creatures called demons who feast on human flesh —

And there really does exist a mythic army of slayers who chase them into the rising dawn before they can shred apart older sisters who lock their baby brothers inside their bedrooms —

Giyuu sprints outside the cabin into the forest.

Sabito’s calls after him go ignored. 

He doesn’t get far before his knees buckle. Dead thorns and gnarled roots dig into his legs as he can only glare up at the sky. 

The North Star stares back down at him, unmoved.

Giyuu throws up into his hands.

Another thing he learns —

Every night, he returns.

He’s back in that closet. Shoulder jammed against the door. Thump-thump-thumping to get out. 

Splinters dig into his skin when something finally gives. Pain ricochets up his knees when he tumbles out broken doors in a sprawling heap.

Time slows, thick and heavy, as he then crawls to his feet and stumbles down the wretched hallway.

When he gets there, she is already gone. 

But sometimes —

Sometimes, he finds Tsutako just before she leaves. 

Sometimes, he can see the blood writhing through her veins, as too-sharp teeth rip into her limp ragdoll body. Sometimes, he can spy the telltale twitch of her hand as it thuds to the ground, fingers reaching for mothers that just aren’t there anymore. 

Other times, she speaks to him. Garbled, strained, but still undeniably Tsutako, as she tells him to run. Begs him to join her. Commands him not to look.

Dares him not to look away.

Most times, if she isn’t already dead, she’s staring right back at him. A ghostly smile might rest upon her face, dangling morose forgiveness just beyond his nose. Other days, an agonal howl sits frozen and helpless in the gaping vestiges of her throat.

(The only thing that never changes —

He always, always comes back empty.)

Sabito wakes him up. 

He has taken to sleeping in the same room as him, though Giyuu doesn’t know why he even bothers. Nobody in their right mind wants to put up with this much. Giyuu will thrash in the bed, call after people only he knows existed once, then he will jerk awake with a scream dying in his throat as palms shake his shoulders and a voice, husky with interrupted sleep, rasps in his ear.

“Easy,” Sabito will say, the same way he had when they first met. But Giyuu will hardly ever hear him, whether he’s fighting for air or wishing he wouldn’t or crying because he does, and Sabito will only push him around again, sometimes even slap his cheeks. Like touch alone can close wounds running trenches-deep. Like this awful stranger sullying his home is worth trying anyway.

“Stop it,” he will say when Giyuu inevitably does not listen. “Just breathe, okay?”

It becomes normalcy. Routine.

But one night, Tsutako grabs his hand.

She yanks him close, close enough he can taste the sour tang of blood and rotting flesh on his own tongue. 

And she asks, only once. 

“Why did you do this to me?” 

Sabito can’t pull him out that night.

Arms too big to belong to a thirteen year-old boy wrap around Giyuu instead, gently prying him from the tangled blankets and sheets. He’s crying, throat hoarse, metal on his tongue, and it’s all his fault he’s sorry he’s sorry he’s so fucking sorry he’s so tired he shouldn’t be here he shouldn’t be here he shouldn’t be here he should be dead —

“Hush, boy,” a gruff voice murmurs. “Take a breath. You won’t serve anyone like this.”

Somewhere, somehow, it’s begun to rain. 

He hears it, pitter-pattering against the creaky rooftop. Still, he does not move. No matter what he hears. She told him to do that much. 

He does not, cannot, will never leave this place.

Even when he hears the clatter of a mask dropping to the floor beside him.

Even when he feels the brush of chapped lips against his sweat-sticky forehead. 

“You are too little for sorrow like this,” the man murmurs solemnly. “But I can’t let you leave now. I can only help you to be strong. Strong enough to stay alive.”

Gnarled hands card through his hair. Giyuu’s own reach up, clutching onto gentle blue and rolling clouds. 

“I wouldn’t ask you children of this if I could help it. But I shamelessly will.” 

His head is tilted up until he meets war-worn eyes. 

Urokodaki doesn’t smile at him, nor does he cry with him. 

“You must survive.” 

He only brushes back his damp bangs, the same way she used to, lips twitching ruefully as he commands —

“That is the only thing you can do now.” 

Giyuu wants to throw him aside. Wants to bash his head right into that kind, unassuming face. How dare he ask him that? Where was this great warrior who slayed a thousand demons when his sister was screaming? Where were his disciples, his allies, his masters? 

How could they pick and choose, so quickly, whether he lived or she died?

But —

He feels it. Every moment. Every day. Every second, when his heart breaks.

Was Giyuu not there, too?

He begins to weep, loud and raw and ugly. All the while, his fingers dig into this non-savior’s robes, rough enough to ruin.  

And standing in the unlit corner of the room, back pressed to the wall like a little ghost —

Sabito can only watch.

(There are three things he knows are indisputably, irrevocably true.)

((I was there.

I did nothing. 

I did not save her.))

There is a river upon Sagiri which Sabito claims is the loudest on this side of the country.

It growls in the early days of spring when ice peels like scabs, and shouts loud and bright in summer’s depths when its last stitches finally fall away.

It’s the dangerous one. The loudest and deadliest.

There is no reason whatsoever for Giyuu to seek it out.  

But after Urokodaki yanked him from her clutches that night, Tsutako does not speak to him anymore. The dreams are no longer so exotic or exciting. Embellishments shed, old hand-me-downs, until all that remain are his memories — putrid and pure.

He no longer bumps into stray tables or errant cobwebs floating in the wrong place. No longer opens doors that weren’t supposed to be opened. Sorry about the disturbance, the creaking house moans every night Giyuu returns. Every inch of her that had sprayed on the walls, every shard of gray matter that had blown through the cabinets, I put it all back how you liked it.

Algal sorrow blooms in the stagnant waters of his veins. 

His heart lays so still it’s grown bed sores. 

And today —

Today is the day Giyuu thinks he will go to that river.

Sheets drift from his withering body as he crawls out the graveyard he made a bed. Painstakingly, he begins prying the borrowed yukata off his shoulders. Shivers wrack his clumsy arms where stray drafts collide with bare skin, as he folds up the clothes that aren’t his. He takes a moment to trace over the origami creases left behind by Urokodaki’s former children in silent thanks. 

Then, he straightens out the sheets. Tucks in the corners and brushes off the dust. Pats down the pillow and smooths out any evidence he was ever there.

When the bedroom is all neat and tidy, Giyuu turns to the heap of red at his side.

Tsutako’s kimono is worn from violence — too much blood and too much scrubbing. Gone is the silken softness of new beginnings. In its place is fabric as rough as the dirt in which she lays.

Giyuu tugs it on anyway. Puts his arms through sleeves that swallow him whole. Folds it once, twice, thrice around his body. Closes his eyes and pretends, for a moment, empty air can replace touch too.

No coat, no scarves, no weapons. 

Giyuu takes nothing else with him when he pads to the front door and pushes it open.

Outside, trees and blizzards alike tower in standstill. Ivory hills stretch and stretch and stretch until they disappear into the end of a hungry horizon. 

Blood is slow to leak into the tips of his fingers, unused to movement as it is. With every breath of mountain air, he feels the pulsing reminder of life, intrusive and inept, stir behind the gates of his ribcage.

The only sign of anything alive at all is the single crow perched upon the roof.

Giyuu ignores its piercing eye as he goes.

The clouds are as bright as the pearly grounds beneath them, so thick and impenetrable they’re nearly blinding. Every so often, the mad dash of a passing bird or leaping squirrel sends another flurry of white tumbling down. 

It’s silent. So silent he thinks, if he tried hard enough, he might be able to make out the timp-tamp of Sabito’s figure dashing down the other side of the peak.  

Giyuu should have asked him for the proper directions. Should have asked him for the right landmarks and guiding arrows to look for.

He is sure Sabito would have given them. 

As it is, he has no idea where he’s going. 

Only that he’s going.

He doesn’t know how long he’s spent out there, just walking. Snow has soaked clean through his socks, and Giyuu pushes on with breaths frosting between his teeth. For some reason, there’s an ache pulsing deep in his right elbow. He thinks he remembers Sabito mentioning that arm once, somewhere between one training debrief and the next. It was the arm he could have lost where frost had made a dwelling out of his body, the first time.

Gradually, the land begins to slope. Divots appear in the ground, as if etched by hand. A low hum hisses in the distance.

His ears pop, his exhalations thin, and his arm has not withered off.

He gathers the lint of snow and ghosts in his pockets as he follows that rattlesnake of a promise down, down, down —

Until, finally, he sees it. 

Thousand year-old waters, slithering through earth.

Sheets of ice coat its winding trail, blown apart just as quickly as they can gather upon the roar of untamed currents. Cobalt blues and broken indigos rip through the terrain, an open laceration for which there is no hope of mending. There is no ocean around, not this high in Sagiri’s peaks, but he can see the telltale backs of riptides raking over upturned stone and carcass anyway.

Perhaps he should be feeling a bit more wonder right now. Or even fear might have sufficed. A sense of floor-shaking awe, to stand in the presence of such ancient things. 

He had only the drizzle of Sabito’s words to go on, but the boy was never one to exaggerate. These waters were here long before him, and they will remain long after.

How strange.

He just doesn’t feel much of anything at all.

Only bitter cold.

Good.

Giyuu’s first step upon the water is tenuous. He wavers and shakes like a fawn, grasping uselessly for balance until his knees finally smack it with a thud. Pain lances through him for only a mere instant, more remnants of instinct than calls for self-preservation.

The ice does not split. Only a layer as thin as his thumb is long separates him from a slow, watery death.

So he lies down, cheek to ground.

Snow gathers upon him like the dust of untouched shelves. Arterial pulses echo through reedy bones as he trails one hand through the river’s throbbing heart.

Quickly, his fingertips threaten to blister in the relentless stream. The skin on his face begins to burn.

He wonders how those waters would feel inside his lungs. 

(That old brook back home had always frozen solid in the winters. Had always sheltered the koi pitter-pattering beneath husks of hoarfrost. He tries to remember other things about it too. How light danced in it when the summer slanted just right. How the shallows around their ankles had so thoughtlessly promised eternity.)

((But memories disappear under memories.

His sister’s embrace has gone cold and loose around him, like clothes too big.))

Giyuu peels himself away like rotting sutures. He turns to lay on his back instead.

Cold seeps into the base of his skull and twinges in the seashell of his ear. Should someone put their face up to his just then, he wonders if they’d hear the rustle of nameless oceans within him too. All those calls with no responses. Whalesongs to no known recipient.

Screams in the house for no saviors. 

Don’t leave, no matter what you hear.

Here, there is nothing but the water.

Water in the undertow galloping beneath ice. Water in the rivers of light cantering through balding trees. 

Water, which Tsutako used to say was the one thing that would always carry him, no matter how heavy he became.

What a beautiful liar she was. He’d known it had always sounded too good to be true.

Because someday, the ice will warm with fury.

Someday, it will splinter and cave beneath him anyway.

And when it finally does, he will plunge in deep without second thought or terror.

(He’s taken just as many lessons in sinking as Sabito has with the sword. He doesn’t know how to swim, but he knows why people would want to drown.)

((If today is the day the unthinkable finally happens —

He thinks it would be quite alright.))

At some point, the shadows begin to slant and change. They crawl slowly across the forest floor even in the absence of visible light, inching their way over the stillness of his hip, the newfound stagnance of his legs. 

When he glances down, he sees his nails have grown opal-blue. 

That’s too bad. He’s never seen the lake Sabito spoke of so reverently, and he doesn’t think he ever will. But he can admit it’s a nice color indeed.

Thump-thump-thump.

Beneath him, Tsutako’s kimono has grown wet, strangely warm at his back. Like he’s been bleeding out for hours and just hadn’t noticed.

Thump-thump-thump.

The sound comes slower now, almost hesitant. 

Giyuu stopped shivering a while ago.

Thump-thump-thump.

He closes his eyes.

He wants to sleep. 

Thump-thump —

Caw!

A second thud sounds just behind him, much louder and clearer than before. 

Dully, Giyuu wonders if it’s a demon, come to get him. They’re real, after all. He knows what they can do. He’s even seen it. 

Something lands by his head with a throaty cry.

A hard and sharp point begins poking at the corner of his cheek.

He promptly dismisses that fantasy. 

It’s the obsidian blot of a crow pecking at his frozen ear which swims in the corner of his blackening vision.

And up above, tiny pinprick pupils glare down at him in a blur of familiar, disappointed crimson.

“What are you doing to yourself,” Urokodaki asks, so quietly Giyuu isn’t sure he’s meant to hear or answer.

He opens his mouth sluggishly to try anyway. 

No words come. No surprise there.

The former Hashira doesn’t wait for excuse or explanation. He leans down, one rough hand grasping his shoulder hard enough to bruise. He hauls him up only halfway, letting him dangle uselessly midair until Giyuu finally musters the will to plant his feet down on his own.

Hairline fractures dart out beneath his insolence. But ice doesn’t break. 

He is not so heavy yet. 

Not today.

Okay, Giyuu thinks, as Urokodaki leads him away to begin that long trek back. He’ll wait.

He’ll wait until one day, he’s finally too burdensome to bear.

(The sun had shone the morning after. 

It’s one thing the nightmares never quite remember to get right.)

Sometimes, on the few-and-far-between days he can bear to drag himself out of bed, Giyuu creeps to the window to watch Sabito in the yard.

The line of the boy’s shoulders is strong, heaving when he huffs in another breath and dives beneath Urokodaki’s encroaching fist. The old man pushes hard: kicks his stomach and flings him to the ground. Even grabs him by the ebony blade to hurl him through the nearby trees. 

Still, Sabito is all adolescent grace. The shorn waves of his peach-hued hair ripple in the breeze of his own body as he ducks and punches and rolls, all checkered yellow and bruised indigo. He summons water out of thin air with just a flick of his blade, drenching the world in rainstorms when there never existed a drought to begin with. 

Breath of Water, is what Sabito had so proudly called it. Supposedly the simplest of the breathing styles, yet the hardest to master. 

Urokodaki was the last one who had.

Giyuu sees challenge in the gleam of Sabito’s mountain lily eyes, conviction in the pink flush of exertion coloring his cheeks. Whenever his strikes don’t land, his face scrunches up with a strangely childish frustration —

As if he’s been denied a toy, rather than a killing blow.

(Still, Giyuu doesn’t doubt it at all. 

Sabito is a maelstrom walking and talking in the shape of a boy.)

((Sabito might be able to refashion entire rivers, the oldest and worst of them all, as long as he just willed it so.))

Eventually, the spar ends. Urokodaki is not easy, but he is not unkind.

He crosses his arms and says something gruff while Sabito wipes at his skin, bright with sweat. Whatever it is, he takes it in stride. He nods and shakes himself off, flicks a drop of blood off his chin where his nose had started bleeding, then rapidly disappears in a blur of jade down the frontside. 

Giyuu always slips away before Urokodaki can turn back toward the window. 

He has a feeling the swordsman knows he’s there, anyway.

Urokodaki is not easy. 

But he is not cruel.

He slips between the space of the half-open door one night to crouch down at Giyuu’s bedside. Leathery hands pick up his own, thumbs prying open index and middle and ring. His pinky goes last —

Lingering in a promise around the wood of a newly carved blade. 

Near reverent, Urokodaki closes each of Giyuu’s fingers around the hilt. 

But he does nothing else. 

Doesn’t incite violence or throw him through the walls or impale him through the gut. 

“Decide on your own,” is the only thing he tells him, voice unwavering despite the decades aging it out. “I will not make you.”

Why? Why me? 

What can I do? 

What can I possibly do now that you couldn’t? 

Questions race unbidden through his mind, as instantaneous as snow squalls. Only one manages to claw its way through the attic door. 

“That day. How did you find me?” 

His own voice is a ghost scraping through his throat, hollow enough to startle even himself.

But Urokodaki shows no indication of fright. 

“Sorrow, like bodies,” is all he says, weary with an unpracticed sort of compassion, “has a smell.”

Urokodaki Sakonji is not cruel. Not easy. Not unkind.  

He is not a father either. He does not share Sabito’s peach hair, neither does he possess his kitsune eyes. Does not have anything to pass down but Breath and blade. 

The only children he has were somebody else’s first.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe Sabito could have been anybody’s once, at all.

Footsteps scamper over the windowsill to land on the ground with a thump. Evening gales howl outside for only a moment, before nails squeak against glass to usher the wayward panes shut. 

Sabito does that sometimes — crawls in through the window like an intruder. Something about practicing his stealth, or just not wanting Urokodaki to scold him. He isn’t particularly good at the latter just yet.

Beneath the threadbare refuge of quiet, Giyuu mimes sleep. 

When Sabito pauses in his sneaking-around, he knows he’s failed spectacularly at it.

“Hey,” comes the whispered hiss. “Are you awake?”

Something rustles in the back of the room, before the same footfalls pad over to his side. The futon scrunches beneath a familiar weight — not the burden of wordlessness, but the mass of a boy with far too much life too hold. Giyuu’s body stiffens with anticipation, an instinct he’s unknowingly stumbled upon the longer he stays with Sabito and his cultivator. Any moment now, Sabito will put a hand on his elbow, fingers wrapping too-tight around the knob of his bone. Maybe he’ll give him a good shake, just to test how long Giyuu is willing to play dead (long enough). Maybe he’ll be content to simply touch him once, just enough to make sure he doesn’t pass right through (he still might).

Tonight, neither happens.

Sabito’s roughened fingertips press into him for only a second, sticky and solid, before he lets go with a hum.

“I have something for you,” he states plainly.

Giyuu opens his eyes. His gaze flicks first to his bedside, where he’s haphazardly shoved Urokodaki’s blade beneath the mattress. 

He then glances back at Sabito. 

Sabito, whose nails have begun tapping against something in his hands. 

Gingerly, Giyuu begins to push himself up. Blankets puddle around him as he obligingly crawls toward Sabito, pausing just a few feet away. He always tries to leave enough space between them for a quick escape. 

It’s a rule Sabito has never bothered obeying. 

The boy scoots and shoves his way over the moment Giyuu so much as shifts, inching closer and closer and closer until their thighs are just a breath shy of colliding. 

Across the sleepy dark, mountain lily eyes meet his own. It’s a staring contest that neither of them declared was a contest.

Only a sliver of lantern light manages to crawl its way into Sabito’s irises, igniting him just enough that Giyuu can spot the waver in his pupils, the way they dilate and blacken as he searches for something in him. 

Perhaps he’s looking for the other end of all the conversations he’s thrown out but never got back. 

Far more likely, he’s looking for confirmation that he’s more than just a ghost, haunting a room that is not his bedroom.  

Giyuu feels his fingers tighten around the unspooled blankets. Fraying threads crimp beneath his jaggedly bitten nails. 

He looks away first. 

Because he always looks away first.

He casts his eye to an easier place to look at — not Sabito’s soft foxface, but the tips of his ears poking out the fuzzy rind of his hair.  

He clings onto that buoy, spill of color, amidst a roiling sea. 

“Um.”

Sabito roughly clears his throat, scratching at his neck. 

“I made this. For you.”

Something is then shoved clumsily into his arms. 

For once, Sabito’s hands don’t linger. They dart away the moment their mission is completed, as he jumps back, staring vehemently into space. 

A tick jumps in the corner of his jaw where it’s never ticked before. 

He’s — 

Oh. 

Giyuu frowns. 

He’s nervous, for some reason. 

Giyuu just doesn’t understand why. 

Not even Urokodaki’s killing blows or the prospect of a demon’s can make that boy flinch.

But the only other thing in the bedroom, Giyuu finds, as he checks the closet, the door, then finally the thing nestled in his hands —

Is the blank face of a kitsune.

Someone else had obviously chipped away at the wood, bit by bit, until it obediently curved into the shoddy outline of a cheek, the uneven bridge of a tiny nose. Tiny tributaries run down the hill of one round jaw. Little nicks and scars betray the clumsy slips of blade and hand. 

It’s painfully handmade.

And it’s beautiful. 

“I can’t save you from your own head, but —” 

Sabito shifts, scratching at his ear again. The skin there lights up with rosy blush, as he dumps words he couldn’t have possibly known he’d borrowed right in the middle of Giyuu’s crumbling escape plans. 

“— but it’s just for safekeeping, anyway.”

It turns out, then, that Sabito did not come from nowhere.

It turns out, he is every inch like Urokodaki Sakonji.

He doesn’t hold his nose when the stench of Giyuu’s heartache grows too sour, and he doesn’t retreat, even when the rabid animal of his grief tries to score matching scars into his other cheek.

Sabito doesn’t even know who it is that Giyuu calls out for, night after night after night. 

And yet —

And yet —

Giyuu inhales tremulously. Blinks and feels something slip down his cheek. 

He’s sure Sabito is sick and tired of seeing him cry all the damn time, so he hastily turns his face away and smothers the rest into his sleeve before they can fall.

When he looks back, Sabito’s already smiling. 

The curve of his mouth glows like fireworks and new years’ promises, brighter than any lightning strike or firefly.

Even when he once again shrouds his face behind a matching mask, even when only his two eyes gleam back at him in the dark —

He’s still there.

A single light left in the blue. 

“Good night,” Sabito says, hushed.

That night, Giyuu does not manage to fall asleep.

He can only clutch Sabito’s gift close to his chest as the boy in question dozes beside him, mechanically counting the thump-thump-thumping of his heart in the dark. When he traces his fingers over the curve of the mask, brushes a pinky over the slits of its — his — eyes, he imagines, in the silence, he can hear the steady drip-drop of Sabito’s pulse too. Soft, like snow beneath boots, like relieved sighs.

Giyuu does not sleep that night.

But he does not scream either.

(Where Urokodaki goes, Sabito follows. When he dons that red tengu mask, Sabito slips on his own. When the cultivator slashes through entire forests, Sabito plucks splinters out between his teeth. 

But when Urokodaki’s shoulders sink at another moon risen, another day passed, another body resurfaced — 

Sabito never bows.

If there is one thing he has not received or nabbed from Urokodaki Sakonji while he hadn’t been looking, it’s his innocence. 

Innocent, in the sense that no kitsune or god or friend could ever scrub away the remnants of someone else’s first and greatest sorrow.)

((Innocent, in the sense that he tries anyhow.))

There are three things he knows to be true.

One. Monsters are real, and so are ghosts.  

Two. She will not be brought back, and he will not be made to. 

And three —

Sabito is in the middle of dodging one of Urokodaki’s near-fatal strikes when Giyuu slips out onto the porch.

His presence isn’t noticed until Sabito’s turned all the way back around, sword crashing down in a swift slash. 

It would have sliced through Urokodaki’s jugular, had he not glanced up just then.

The hit falls short. 

Doesn’t come at all.

In his distraction, Sabito hardly even registers the scolding he gets, something about could-have-died and lucky-it-wasn’t-real. He only straightens up and runs an unrepentant hand through his hair. 

And when Giyuu looks back at him, his borrowed blade clutched clumsily and, without a doubt, incorrectly between his own fingers —

Sabito breaks out into the widest grin.

I will not make you, Urokodaki had told him.

So he doesn’t.

Giyuu is the one who slips Sabito’s mask over his own face. He is the one whose breath mists over his nose, warm and newly obstinate. 

Teacher and student stare back at him, only one of them elated. 

And Giyuu is the one who steps off the engawa, into the melting snow.

“You’re moving too slowly. You’re leaving all your blind spots wide open. Don’t think for a second a demon won’t see them before you do.” 

“You’re charging in too fast without even an inkling of a plan. You will only burden your comrades like that.”

“You’re not breathing. Your breath is your most critical weapon. If you have nothing else, you still have your breath.”

“You’re hesitating too much.”

“You’re too weak.”

“You’re soft.”

He practices, day in and day out. He chases Sabito down Sagiri, rampaging past weeping willows and deadened branches, picking splinters from the hills of his cheeks until he learns how to duck in proper time. He swings his sword through the chests of flailing dummies until the rinds of his palms blister and burst, until he learns how to grip blades even through bloodshed. He plunges deep into ice-cold rivers, hoists the pummeling rage of entire cascades upon his shoulders, holds his breath and lets it go and holds it again until waters heed his command like hauntings crawling home.

He sets fire to the roof of his mouth.

And he keeps going.

“Again.” 

Urokodaki sidesteps his swing and flings him into to the ground. 

“Again.” 

Giyuu yells and unleashes a torrent of ice, only barely skimming the hem of Urokodaki’s sleeve.

“Again.”

He races forward, and Urokodaki twists him by the arm, and the world is upside down, and —

(“You’re holding your sword too stiffly,” Sabito tells him, idly dabbing away the broken scabs on his knuckles. “Keep doing that and one day it’ll break.”)

— Giyuu begs, in a whisper, heaping pile of limb and bone. 

“Tell me how to get better.”

Urokodaki hauls him up halfway. He waits, patiently, until Giyuu begrudgingly rearranges his aching legs to do the rest himself. 

Then, and only then, does he answer.

“Get up.”

Bears prowl, falcons sleep, and foxes hiss. The mountains come alive, and in their flitting shadows they hunt hares and slip daggers through the scaley bellies of trout. But the first time Giyuu has to gut a wild boar —

— intestines worm and flop over his sandals, spurt with putrid slime and indigestion, getting everywhere, on his legs, on driftwood ribs, on wildflower white —

— vomit is coursing up his throat, between his teeth, behind his tongue, because he smells it again, that unmistakeable odor of pierced skin and unshed waste and rent flesh and death —

— and the bones had sliced so easily, like butter marrow, like origami paper —

— he wonders if it is always this easy to rip open bodies, in life or death — 

— if it was her ribs, her guts, her chest, her heart, her head —

— and Sabito wraps a hand around his trembling wrist —

— lowering the dripping blade. 

“Are you okay?” he asks. 

Giyuu doesn’t throw up.

But it’s a near thing.

It’s easier to watch Sabito slit their throats.

Giyuu knows what Urokodaki would say to that. Too soft. Too weak. You’ll never slay demons if you can’t even kill a rabbit. It’s not malice if it’s the truth, even when he kicks Giyuu down while saying it. 

Bearing it means nothing if you can’t give it.

But Sabito sees when his dagger wavers. 

Everyone has to bear it. 

He nudges him aside and frees the writhing body from the net. 

You’re not the only one. 

And in a blink, it’s over. 

Sabito turns back to him with a grin, holding up the rabbit by its hind legs like a prize. Mahogany fluid drips steadily from the cave in its throat, pomegranate seeds on the forest floor. 

“Come on, there’s another trap downhill,” he says briskly, tossing Giyuu the body before gathering up his sacks and swords. “You can practice on that one.” 

He’s quick to leave. Giyuu is quicker to follow.

The winter is finally beginning to relinquish its hold on the land. White gives way to the fallen hair of willow trees, while emerald tufts of just-growing grass peek through slick expanses of ice. Puddles dew on Sagiri’s softening cheeks like sweat.

This early in the morning, the air is still chilly enough to bite. But the sun has just begun to glow through the leafless canopies. Whenever its glare recedes beneath another passing cloud, Giyuu can spot them —

Gnarled branches, pinking with bloom.

Patches of light glob through buds and twigs to dance across the expanse of Sabito’s shoulders, skittering down the beaten trail of his back. His yukata ripples gracefully with each stride, elegant even without the urgency of combat. Not even the intrusion of adolescence can trip him up as he dodges fallen logs and leaps over mossy stone.

Giyuu passes the time, counting the gentle fog of his breaths as they puff before wind-chapped lips.

He’s reached the hundredth and twelfth when Sabito suddenly comes to a stop.

Giyuu nearly crashes into him.

“Ha. Knew it.”

Lavender eyes squint back at him as Sabito glances over his shoulder. The corner of his mouth raises in a smirk.

“You really are like a duckling,” he says.

…Duckling?

Heat instinctively rushes to Giyuu’s cheeks, as he stares back at the boy, wide-eyed like he’s been caught slacking. Which — he supposes he was.

Sabito doesn’t chide him like Urokodaki would have.

His shoulders only shake with a soft chuckle.

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not at the next trap.” He gestures around them with the arm not holding his hunting knife. “We’re going in the wrong direction.”

Oh.

Giyuu glances around, actually taking in the scenery. Not the distant pop and hiss of cracking ice or the tilting sway of winter oak. There are no telltale marks etched into the passing trees, no humanoid tracks trodden into the mulch.

They must be halfway down Sagiri by now.

But they’re the only ones here, now and ever.

Embarrassment instantly sweats down the back of his neck, slicking baby hairs flat to his nape. Giyuu feels his cheeks and ears grow hotter than they already were.

What kind of hunter does that make of him, if he can’t even distinguish between frontside and back?

He knows what Urokodaki would say.

He thinks he knows what Sabito would —

“Anyway,” the boy whistles, either willfully ignoring his redness or genuinely not catching it, “I noticed a while ago, but thought I’d just test ya.”

His gaze falls on the rabbit still dangling off Giyuu’s hip, blood splatter gone dry on his leg. It had long run empty on their trek down.

His eyes soften.

“Alright, duckling,” he chirps. “Let’s go.”

Sabito is a spring gale brushing past him without second glance. Wildflower wind and promises of days as tender as the peaches of his hair.

Giyuu runs to catch up.

He butts and bullies his way forward until they’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder. The side of Sabito’s face that isn’t scarred twitches in readily muted greeting.

And here, loyally at his left, it’s easier to trudge along the mean forest floor. Easier to tolerate the dead thing thump-thump-thumping along his thigh and inside his ribs. Easier to do it, when Sabito’s face comes alight with the faintest of freckles in the late winter sun. All the flimsy shadows his lashes cast over the apples of his cheeks. All the tiny bangs that sway in his own turbulence.

All the littlest, lightest scars that aren’t that scar, dotting his face as acne and sore spots do at their age.

It’s easy, that’s why.

That’s why he doesn’t realize he’s spoken until he feels the aftermath scrape through his throat.

“Giyuu,” he mumbles. “That’s — you can — you should call me Giyuu.” 

Two things happen in quick succession. 

Sabito’s eyes widen, almost comically so.

And he trips.

“Ouch!” 

Immediately, Giyuu drops down beside him. The rabbit bends awkwardly in the curve of his knee as he darts forward, steadying hands outstretched —

Only to stop short.

Sabito points up at him from his hopeless sprawl on the ground. His finger hovers just inches from Giyuu’s own nose.

“You —” 

For once, Sabito is speechless. 

Then —

He begins to laugh. 

He laughs hard enough he has to double over and clutch his stomach. When that can’t staunch the wounded sound in his belly, he just throws his head back and cackles. Tears bead at the corners of his eyes, as the hand not holding himself together flies out to punch Giyuu square in the shoulder.

It’s a nice sound.

It’s a really nice sound.

“What?” is all Giyuu manages to mutter, blushing furiously. 

Sabito just keeps giggling and giggling until the reedy birdsong dies in his throat. 

When it does, he wipes at his face, blinking hard and sighing loudly.

“Oh. Oh, man. Giyuu,” he just says breathlessly. “I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you say actual words to me.”

So maybe it’s the echoing ring of Sabito’s boyish mirth that makes it easy. Maybe it’s the weight of sunlight and salvation on his face that makes it easy.

Maybe it’s just the fact that the days aren’t so short anymore. That he’s nearly grown used to the rough brush of the funeral shrouding his arms. That he’s a little clumsy with the sword but can take a punch just as well now.

(Or maybe, it’s only the sheer ridiculousness of it all.)

((That Sabito has never known Giyuu before he started weeping.))

Whatever it is, Giyuu just can’t help it.

His lips part on an exhale. His shoulders shake.

The laugh that tumbles out of him is a sorry, newborn thing. 

Sabito falls still anyway. 

Giyuu hiccups on the sound, a feeble keen, before slapping a hand over his mouth. He tears at the errant noise with punishing vengeance until it yields, pushes and shoves and crushes until his tongue blossoms cherry-red. Until iron floods the canals of his teeth, until it slinks back into the dark corner it dared to crawl from.

“Hey, hey,” comes someone soft. “Don’t do that.” 

Sabito reaches forward, prying his fingers away from his face. 

The indents of his own canines leave crimson holes in his knuckles. 

When callused thumbs brush carefully over the ragged wounds, Giyuu has to resist the impulse to duck away. He’s sure he’s a sight for sore eyes right then. Vermilion smeared all over his mouth. Terrorizer of his own involuntary joy.

The mangled remnants of something-that-wasn’t-sadness, dangling lifeless between his teeth.

Sabito doesn’t swear at him or reel away in disgust, like the other kids of that town would have. Doesn’t curl his lip or brandish a weapon to put him down either. 

He only wipes a bead of scarlet from Giyuu’s chin, eyebrows twitching with amusement gone forlorn. 

“Stupid Giyuu,” he says, the shape of his name resting easy in his mouth. “You can laugh too.”

He can’t. 

He shouldn’t.

Giyuu knows he’s trespassing, transgressing, intruding upon the one bright place he swore to himself he would never go again.

Yet, Sabito dabs at his face with the sleeve of his yukata, grinning at him knowingly, even when his own clothes stain red.

And Giyuu, lips smeared with rubies, crumbs of skin on his cheeks, messy eater of anything that might be misconstrued for one second as happiness —

Giyuu smiles back, anyhow.

Something has broken inside him.

No, it isn’t the irrevocable or the unforgiveable, even when they do sleep in the guest rooms and leave messes in the kitchen.

It’s something softer. Almost kinder.

Something that lets him toddle after Sabito, shamelessly, in the way that has him laughing and calling him a duckling even when he finally knows his name. Something that lets him paste himself dutifully to Sabito’s side, left or right, scarred or whole, memorizing the winding river of his arm, the valley of his elbow, the hilly bends of his scraped knees.

Something that renders his world only as tall as the boy in his arms, only as wide as the rivulets of his opal-blue veins. 

Whatever it is that threads him and Sabito together doesn’t arrive carefully. Their devotion comes as foolhardy and fast as the inking of a bruise. Giyuu has no idea when the contusion had arrived, only that it’s there now, blushing purple between his shoulders, the left side of his ribs, the vessels weaving together his haphazard heart.

He doesn’t know when Sabito had managed to knock down the rest of his defenses, or when exactly he could’ve rendered the evidence of his adoration so indisputably into his flesh —

Only now, Giyuu can’t stop pressing on it. 

He checks habitually, with every dawn, that it hasn’t left in the middle of the night. Prays obsessively, with each day, that it won’t go yellow around the edges. 

(Sabito is an injury he has no idea when he’d gotten.

The first good grief he’s ever known.)

((By the time he finally noticed, Giyuu had already hanged the rest of his life right around him.))

So when Sabito, relieved to finally have a sparring partner his own age, brutally tackles him into the ground yet again —

When the playfight for their lives devolves into petty hands yanking at hair —

Giyuu lets himself fall into defeat. 

Sabito hovers over him, sunrise locks cascading over his face, and leers playfully back at him. Sweat rolls in tiny dollops down his temples as he wrestles Giyuu’s arms into stillness, one knee digging too hard into his hip. That’s okay. Leave another bruise. Leave a thousand marks like dreams. 

And when Giyuu feels it, that thump-thump-thumping, this time not of wishful death, but of laughter locked in his throat, begging to taste mountain air too —

He lets it fly. 

No blood, no bite. 

His mouth, free of red, parts only in a crescent-moon smile.

Sabito stares back at him like he stole the full thing anyway. 

Sabito is the ache in his elbow, the splinter in his thumb, the bend of his palm where blade becomes arm.

He is the red seeping between the cracks of his knuckles when he splits it on another unyielding face, another unremarkable day.

“Don’t cry,” Sabito tells him in the moments the mist returns to his eyes. “Are you always gonna cry when things get hard?”

The blisters at the base of his fingers have popped, again. No improvements or changes, again. Just hours upon hours of slashing through dummies and wood, pretending splinters are enough to replace ash and blood.

“What do you want me to do?” Sabito asks once, teasing, though not derisive. “Kiss it better?”

He shakes his head, fingers closing uselessly around empty air, but Sabito’s made up his mind anyway. He dips his head low, until shaggy locks tickle the hem of his wrist.

Giyuu flinches when he feels the outline of his mouth brush over torn skin.

“Stop that, Sabito,” he commands helplessly, but Sabito doesn’t listen. He never does. Not even when crimson smears over his lips too, red and bitter and ironic.

The sweat dewed on his fingertips stings when it drips into open wounds, and Sabito’s lashes beat like butterfly wings over the crook of Giyuu’s thumb — bent from the first time he broke it on an upswing and never set it back right.

“Sabito,” Giyuu warns again, but it’s no use.

The boy sticks his tongue out and blows, hard.

The shout that escapes him takes off running down the hall before he can reel it back. Giyuu squeaks and flails, Sabito grinning with bloody teeth, unwavering even as his foot nails him between the soft plushness of his ribs. Giggles bubble up in him, involuntary and sore with newness, but Giyuu can’t stop. Not when Sabito keeps smooshing his mouth to the bend of his wrist.

Not when the world, for a moment, weighs only as harshly as the boy shoving him into the floor.

(Sabito is the flinch of leaves beneath the setting sun. The red blush of skin struck with light. The kinds of things faiths can only dream about.

Later that night, Giyuu whispers to him, in fervent prayer and worship —

“Can you teach me?”

“…Mm?”

“How to hold it properly.”

It takes a moment before understanding comes.

When it finally does, the boy who so quickly became everything else only gives one slow smirk, moonrise in the dark.

Then, he knocks Giyuu upside his mask.

“Ow. Why’d you do that?”

“Silly Giyuu,” Sabito says through a yawn, and he is as ceaseless as seven seas —

As instant as flash floods, when he promises —

“You already can.”)

“Again.” 

Rain flattens his hair to his skull as Giyuu skids over mud and grime. Muck sprays up his shins and calves as he positions himself, readying his sword. Killing intent with a blade that can’t even leave a paper cut.

Between one lightning strike and another —

He sees his opening.

Giyuu doesn’t hesitate before attacking.

For a second, when he darts forward, rain ghosts and bends in whispers over ebony daggers. Striking tide, flowing dance. Forms ricochet through muscle memory and natural law as he becomes maelstrom midair, a whirlpool without a leash.

Then, his knee slams into Urokodaki’s masked temple.

Rope comes loose. Red goes flying. 

In its wake —

His sword presses snug to the crook of his teacher’s neck.

Thunder blooms, followed quickly by the blinding white of a sky cleaving apart. Somewhere on the engawa, Sabito’s begun to cheer.

Giyuu can only stare, wide-eyed, into his teacher’s rain-slick face. 

Water drips off the wings of his graying brows, the slope of his crooked nose. A bruise is already beginning to shadow the dip of his cheek.

An instinctive apology shoves its way through Giyuu’s parted mouth. It tumbles clumsily to the ground between them, unheard between one thunderclap and the next.

But it doesn’t matter. 

War-torn fingers reach out. They sweep Giyuu’s storm-drenched hair away from his eyes, carefully tucking them over the cusp of his ear.  

“No time for gloating,” is all Urokodaki says in the stunned silence, almost proud. “Again.”

Again, they leap over treetops, careen between dummies, swing swords into guts but never kill.

Again, feet go blue and nails rip red and blisters bloom in orchards across the valleys of too-young palms.

Again, childhood returns only in fleeting passes, whenever Sabito grazes his shoulder or bruises his ribs or slaps him in the midst of his own jubilance — 

— reminder of that thump-thump-thumping in his soul — 

— a pulse that has not stopped yet —

— even when he’d wished —

so vehemently, so desperately.

They get up.

Again and again and again —

— and he visits, again, and again, and again.

But tonight, the house is empty. No shattered windows or upturned chairs or fireflies nestled in the meadow. No demon. No carnage. No body.

The walls are as intact as the flesh still holding them together.

Because tonight, there is no house at all.

Tonight, Tsutako stands at the edge of the world instead.

Her midnight hair flows thick and loose from its braid. Crimson cloth ripples like flags and surrender amidst briny winds. The tan slip of her calf reveals itself only briefly, before retreating just as hastily as the tides nosing up the cliff. 

Tsutako does not turn. 

Not when Giyuu begs.

Not when he shouts. 

Not even when he begins to cry.

“Nee-san,” he pleads. “What are you doing out there? Come back.”

Calls with no answer. 

Hands vanished beneath the heft of her wedding robe, eyes fixed on the horizon until sea is her and she is sea, Tsutako is the only person who speaks for a listener.

She asks it without looking. But Giyuu feels the salt-sting derision even half a lifetime away. 

“Giyuu,” she says. “Would all this really have made a difference?” 

Giyuu awakens on the last day of winter with seaglass streaming down his cheeks.

Beside him, Sabito snores peacefully through the gentle dawn.

Sagiri comes alive in the spring.

He’s never seen anything quite like it before, not even in his former village. Back in that janky, graying junkyard, only the woods behind their home would shed their snowy coats to sing with winter’s end.

But here, birds chirp and rabbits flee. Underbrush rattle more often than not with furry bodies and hissing snakes, while brooks begin whispering beneath the braided leaves of their greening willows.

The koi return last, puttering through their currents. They whisper back, how they’ve missed that old dance.

Giyuu doesn’t go to the tributaries.

He goes to the river.

Frost no longer tames its animal roar. Its last floats of snow have vanished, and in their place, frothing waters beat stone and skeleton into shapes so new nobody’s bothered even naming them yet.

Giyuu stands once again at the precipice of drowning, its oldest and earliest lessons stirring in lungs that are anything but waterlogged. 

In return, the river grows more furious than ever. As if to scorn him right in the face — this wretched soul, returning unclaimed, uninvited, unrepentant. It tears the contours of his face apart in flurries of liquid light. Eats away the sour blot of his reflection until he’s nothing but dust and dissolution.

It doesn’t mean much, really.

He’s never looked much like her. Doesn’t need watery vengeance to spit on that particular wound. Even the most distant townspeople had known that fact, at least, before they were taken by harsher rumors. 

Before the monstrous whispers and steely eyes came, it went like this —

On the outskirts of their nameless old town, there lived two orphans. Alike only in the shade of their eyes and the black of their hair.

But he was prickly everywhere she was silk. Cumbersome everywhere she was grace. Too quiet where she was boisterous, too soft-bellied where she was tough and had to be.

Giyuu has nothing to go by, but contradiction.

Faceless mother, vanished father.

Dead sister, living brother.

The tip of his borrowed blade hisses through the currents. Remnants of aging afternoons slither their way up the sharpened edge, before collapsing back into place.

Would all this really have made a difference?

If his hands had been stronger that night. If he’d known how to wield a blade in ten forms, even the merciful one. If he could roll with the punches and take kicks to the gut and slice through sternum and stomach, paper cranes and paper bodies all the same when torn apart in the end.

If Giyuu had known what he knows how, three things and counting, could he have stopped it? Barred the door of that demon’s exit, slashed through the pulse of its vermin throat?

He can skin the pelt from the back of a hare and cut through the neck of a buck, but he knows exactly what Tsutako would say if she knew of the blood he just can’t quite scrub from his fingernails.

What difference would it make —

To take lives if he can’t save them?

Wishful thinking draws him closer, closer, closer — until he blinks, and he’s elbows-deep into siren song and myth.

And in the galloping springs, her image is gone. It was never even there. Only the knife of her words. The curve of her downturned brow. Always sharpened to draw blood.

Always so stern.

Dreams layer upon one another, sediment and detritus over the softest and slowest-rotting bodies. They don’t fossilize or preserve, but there is no need to. 

Because he cannot save her.

No. 

That chance passed long ago.

He can only scoop up the malformed body of his own sorrow instead. Can only fish that joyless thief out the waters and hold it tight. She has gone off somewhere beyond the horizon to a place only she may find, so Giyuu is left to nurse the sore, breathing monster in his arms instead.

Pudgy hands break the riverwaters and grip onto his shoulders like sanctity.

So he holds that wriggling heap of flesh until it wears itself out. 

Even when its claws draw blood. 

Even when it writhes and wails.

Because orphans must hold other orphans, until misery begets misery. Until something finally gives.

Until thaw finally cascades down the peaks and rivers run between his ribs.

Until someone is once again calling out his name —

— “Giyuu!” —

And it’s still not Tsutako.

Never Tsutako.

Tsutako will never call for him again.

He objectively, factually, realizes this. He realizes it with every footstep taken by someone who is not her, every sunrise he witnesses without her, every breath he takes which she can no longer. He knows, he knows, he knows she’s gone, not even six feet under, because he’d been weeping too hard to dig that far.

He knows.

And still —

It comes, all over again.

It finds him with a spring she will never see and arrives holding joy she can never share. It toddles after the clumsy path of his footsteps, arms laden with memory thick enough to choke.

When life lingers at the threshold of the door, wondering when is best to slip away unnoticed, it tells it to stay a while.

(Because Giyuu, here, it explains with a mocking promise of a smile, still has all the rest of it left.)

“Giyuu?” Sabito says again when he doesn’t answer.

He just doesn’t know.

Doesn’t know what to do with all this lack.

All he can do is shove that sodden monster between his sleeves, clamp down on its blue mouth before it can make a sound, and whisper a command he hopes to gods he doesn’t believe in that it’ll follow —

Don’t speak. Don’t leave.

((No matter what you hear.))

Giyuu turns just as Sabito hops over a trail of mossy stones.

Traces of dried mud freckle his bare shins where he’s rolled up his baggy hakama. Daylight haloes his peach-fuzz hair in filaments of gold, crawling then dripping down the hills of his shoulders as he sticks out his arms for balance.

“Thank the gods you’re here,” Sabito groans when Giyuu just looks on, wordlessly. “Sensei is killing me.”

He doesn’t wait before he begins to strip off his yukata. Giyuu watches his unruly head disappear beneath the heavy folds, before a blur of green and yellow is flying right at his face.

Fumbling to catch it before it can smack him the nose — his eyes still water as it does — he can only stare, confused.

Sabito grins back at him, blinding as starlight through leaves, then sheds his undershirt.

Beyond the few moles dotting his shoulders, a single scratch runs through the tip of his elbow. A few lines dart across the valleys of his ribs, one circular mark starring the mound of his hip. He’s an awkward mix of bony and chubby, whatever childhood he has left lingering in the soft pockets of his body.

Rosy heat waxes in Giyuu’s own cheeks, as Sabito finally leans over to shuck off his zori.

When he steps into the water, he barely even flinches. Doesn’t waver or stagger his way into a watery grave all the way at the bottom of Sagiri’s face.

The waves only ruck up his knees, foam splashing the knobs of his joints when he dips his hands into the currents. 

Droplets dangle off the ends of his hair and meander between the ravines of his fingers, taking the long stroll past the ridge of his collarbone as he cups his palms to his face. 

It’s not jealousy which stirs in Giyuu as he watches.

He doesn’t envy the way Sabito cuts through the world, nor does he resent the ease with which he swats away his burdens like they’re mere bloodsuckers on his knee. 

It’s just —

It’s just that Giyuu keeps finding himself on the other end of things.

Sabito, slashing through the soft throat of that river with the blade of his body, when Giyuu can only dream of tempting water into his lungs. 

(Sabito, wearing his strength like a badge on his cheek.)

((Giyuu, wringing out those ever-damp funerary sleeves.))

Sundrops wink in and out whenever the willows sway. Shadows dance over the bare skin of his knees. 

When Sabito finishes washing himself, he heaves in a deep breath, stretching his arms this way and that. His nose scrunches with the effort, mouth twisting into something between a frown and yawn.

Then, he splashes his way upstream, back to Giyuu’s perch on the rocks.

A few droplets of water land on him as Sabito gives himself a shake, probably a little too aggressively, before plopping down with a sigh. 

The drenched ends of his hair curl with moisture and springtime, darkened to a rare shade of burgundy as he reaches up to wring them out.

And in the quiet, he begins to hum. 

It’s an unfamiliar tune, resting easy in the base of his throat — a lilting five-note melody he imagines weary travelers and fraying hunters would sing through too-long nights, just to keep sane.

Giyuu closes his eyes in the undulating hills of that sound.

“Did you know,” Sabito says, almost like a secret, “that this is the season when the salmon return?”

Somewhere above, a distant crow screeches. Giyuu wonders if it’s Urokodaki’s, come to find his wayward boys.

“This river is too harsh for them to come up all this way, though. So they have to go up the smaller ones by the ocean.”

Giyuu makes a soft noise to show he’s listening. Even as he eyes the sunlight racing down Sabito’s sandy back. Even as his fingers tighten around despondent hands.

They’re close enough that their knees could knock into one another, that he can almost taste the heat rippling off Sabito’s shoulders.

If only he would just let go of that miscreant in his lap.

If only he could let go of anything at all.

Yet, Sabito waits. Strangely patient.

He waits for Giyuu to wander his way back home, and by the time their gazes finally meet again in the middle, fields of hydrangea have grown deep in his irises. First blooms, early solstices.

Gentle awakenings.

“Wanna catch some?” Sabito asks.

It’s a strange thing, the world. It doesn’t bat an eye, even when it loses its rabbits and children to hunting daggers and sins incarnate. 

It sits right next to him, beautiful as rustling leaves and scintillating suns. Unmoved and unjudging, even when he harbors putrid, stinking creatures in the nooks of someone else’s sleeves —

And Giyuu can’t help but wonder if this is what the drowning see, too, when they take that final, killing breath.

(He hopes it is.)

((And he hopes, even harder, that someone like Sabito might stand there.

Waiting at the end of it.))

“Okay,” Giyuu finds himself saying, but he doesn’t move.

Sabito doesn’t either.

He only gazes at him steadily, not frowning, but not smiling either.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks.

Sabito always does that — asks him the hard things. What to call him by, what dark things scurry through his brain when no one’s looking. There are so many things he could say but doesn’t know how. He’s thinking about time, how it’s slipped out the back without even saying goodbye. He’s thinking about the crow, how it only knows to return when someone else calls.  

And he’s thinking about Tsutako, about Sabito, about all the contradiction. Sabito everywhere, Tsutako nowhere. Joyous Sabito, dead Tsutako. And he doesn’t know what to make of it, whether it’s kinder to be the last of anything, or to walk the world in twos but no more or less than that. He certainly doesn’t know where to put that mourning creature in his arms, except shove it back into that closet of his chest, the gates of his ribs, swallow lock and key because he cannot injure it anymore.

It’s been three months since he left Tsutako beneath the earth for the rest of his life. 

Soon enough, June will come, but it won’t smell of jasmine or honeyed days the way it used to. 

His hands are not so soft anymore, and spring on Mount Sagiri is beautiful, and so is Sabito when he catches the setting sun in his hair, and — 

And Giyuu is always, always everything that Tsutako isn’t. 

So she is everything, and he is nothing, and she is his sister, and he is not a brother, and she is dead, and he is here. And if there’s only one thing he should agree with her on, it isn’t the shade of their hair or the hue of their eyes or the syllables of their dwindling family name. It’s that she is dead and he ought to have followed too, one and the same in the very end, in the only way that mattered, same eyes, same hair, same name, same fate, and —

I miss her, he thinks. 

I miss her. 

I miss her. 

I miss her. 

“Who?” Sabito asks softly. 

Giyuu looks down at the grief in his arms. The outline of its beady little eyes, the humdrum storm of its shapeless head. 

Whalesong sorrow glistens in his palms like tears cradled mid-flight, and he thinks they might be his own. Algal bloom where he’s laid still for far too long. 

“My sister,” he whispers. 

Sabito hums that five-note tune again, soothing softness to his wrenching breaths. 

“Okay,” he says, simple. “Tell me about her on the way?” 

Giyuu closes his eyes, lowers his chin to his chest. 

“Why?” 

Sabito’s fingers then close around his own. Thumb over broken thumb, gooey flesh tracing the fossils of old teeth marks. 

Their sodden skin presses together, like falls crashing into falls, like creeks dashing into open seas. 

And for a moment, just one moment, it’s nearly indiscernible —

Where the sadness ends and the river begins.

“I would like to know her,” Sabito insists, squeezing Giyuu’s hand in his. And he can’t know this part, because it’s impossible to piece together everything Tomioka Tsutako was through the fragmented nightmares that slip through his throat on the days he loses control. 

But maybe, probably, inevitably, Sabito understands. 

Because he says, wholehearted and kind anyway —

“I want to know the person who saved my friend.” 

So it goes like this.

Giyuu lets him pull him to his feet. Holds Sabito with one hand and takes his desolation in the other.

Spring blues cradle them gently, their twin bodies casting three shadows, as he’s led down to plush curtains of willow and juniper.

Daylight skips like stones across the stream by the sea, waters bright with blurs of maroon and silver. Scale and muscle fight valiantly against time’s one-way tides, flashes of iridescence dodging the encroaching shadows of Sabito’s hands as he once again parts the shallows between his palms.

So it goes like this.

Giyuu tells him what he can remember, everything that was real and had existed once. Orphan with a voice too loud and proud to honor her loss. Orphan that didn’t act like an orphan, because she was not the last of anything, not really. Orphan who was an older sister, after all. Older sister, who loved being an older sister. Mother, father, sister. Would’ve-been-wife. 

He can picture it all. Red of the bow she always wore in her hair. Blue of the hour before sunrise in her eyes. Gold of the fireflies she caught standing still. 

Pink of the blush in her cheeks when she fell in love.  

“Did you know,” Sabito interjects, “salmon remember the exact river where they were born?”

Hands too small and callused for what little years they’ve lived snatch a fish midair. White undershirts stick peach to damp shoulders, as the boy in the checkered yukata gives its wriggling neck one merciful snap.

“They know when and where to go,” he says, holding up the limp, flopping body, “even when no one calls.” 

She always used to call him back, just like their mother used to call her, memories that never reached him but had once been true all the same. She would stand on the porch with a hand on her hip, too-young voice ringing loud through the woods, and it didn’t matter if Giyuu was right there in front of her or on the other end of the brook, because — 

“The journey back is so hard that their bodies wither and weaken,” the world tells him. “But they do it anyway, even when they know they won’t make it back.” 

And by the time Tsutako was to marry the man she had fallen in love with, tomorrow was a promise that had already been broken — 

And she had known all this. 

She had to have known. 

And still, she had locked him in that bedroom closet anyway. Giyuu still feels the splinters in his fingers from breaking down the door, the scales on his skin as hordes ripple past his legs, intrepid and idiotic and inevitable all at once.

He just can’t understand. 

They were going to die anyway. 

Didn’t they know how foolish it was, to sacrifice oneself for some thing they would never live to see? 

Maybe it would come late. 

Maybe it would never come at all.

What a waste, he can only think.

What a complete and utter waste.

And still, they go and go and go, head and heartfirst —

— with a gentle hand squeezing his own, because — 

“Because when they die, and the water buries them,” Sabito says, “that’s when the river comes alive again.” 

For the first time in a long time, Giyuu sits at a full table for supper.

The futon is warm against his thighs as the bowl is placed in front of him. The smell of fresh salmon daikon is strange, at once familiar and foreign. 

Tsutako was always heavy-handed with her seasoning, just because Giyuu liked it that way. A little too much soy sauce, slip-of-the-hand of sake. The bowl before him smells just a touch too bland, too ordinary. But maybe that’s how it was always supposed to be: correct and proper. 

It’s not the same. It’s just not right. 

What-once-was crumbles between his teeth with too-little salt and too-much sugar, childhood a mere impression of something for which nobody left instructions on how to make. Nooses tighten around Giyuu’s throat, unforgiving, and his eyes are burning again, always, never not.

Yet, Sabito’s socked foot presses insistently into his shin. 

When Giyuu looks up, he and Urokodaki are already gazing back at him, knowing.

“Eat, my boy,” Urokodaki says. “Even when you lose everything, you still must eat.”

The tear that slips down his cheek comes without warning. 

It lands in the middle of the still-steaming bowl, a tiny drop amidst a vast sea. 

Sabito only scoots in, closer and closer, until their shoulders touch. He refuses to budge, carrying out his solemn duty with proper posture and molten smiles. 

So Giyuu picks up his chopsticks, a sob crackling in his throat, lightning snapping his lungs.

He begins to eat.

Later that night, Sabito tells him his dreams too.

Not just the nightmares that had shuddered through his own body, recollections of his mother’s throat torn out and his father’s voice cut off with the rest of his head. No, not that. He tells him about his premonitions of future glory days. Of donning the black uniform of the Corps with passion and pride, of wielding a sword to protect the weak and hopeless. He tells him of his dreams to scale the ranks of slayers just as he had scaled Sagiri, to replace silver buttons with burnt gold emblems, to stand a great Hashira, where Urokodaki once stood. To do his master and father proud. 

Used-to-be-brother and used-to-be-son sit together beneath a canopy of sprawling stars. Belly full and heart heavy, Giyuu finds himself reaching out to Sabito in a lousy imitation of solace. He traces the tip of his finger over the graceless scar on his cheek, lets his hand wander down the length of his arm until it finds home in the center of his palm. 

He could do it. He would be great, Giyuu thinks to himself, as he watches the moon of Sabito’s face glow beneath the night. He would be strong. He would be selfless. He would be kind.

He would be mine.

He knows it to be true: wherever Sabito strays, Giyuu will follow. There is no one else now, to whom he’d swear himself this wholly and instinctually. In the sakura haze of Sabito’s blue-sky dreams, he would be Giyuu’s in every which way the universe allows.

But Giyuu is terrified. 

Terrified, because he’s not strong enough, not like Sabito is and always will be. Terrified, because something catastrophic has already come his way, and it could very well come again.

Terrified, because Sabito is so brave, so beautiful, beneath the stars, that one day, Giyuu might just stop paying attention anyway. He may no longer succumb to the sodden creature tugging on his hand, and he might even forget the sorry look on its face when they stare down the other amid still water. 

Because one day, Sabito might rewrite him so entirely that he finally neglects the monster under the bed. 

One day, it might grow its legs and take its first steps and slip out the back, quiet and unannounced, and he will be left none-the-wiser, happy and happier and happiest until suddenly, he realizes —

He can’t quite recall the curve of her smile anymore.

The possibility chills him to the core. 

But tonight, it’s still here, warm-blooded and alive and quiet as a forest yet to burn. It curls up in the barely there space left between them, muddying the waters of their bodies, and listens to Sabito’s dreams.

And Sabito lays beside Giyuu in the plush spring grass and lets him hold his hand. Lets him touch his face and poke his freckles, because they’re closer and prettier than any constellations ever could be.

“What, duckling?” he asks, the lilac of his irises turned obsidian-black in the dark.

Giyuu just tightens his hand, shakes his head, and counts. 

“Nothing,” he whispers back.

(Urokodaki rouses them early one morning, deep in the bowels of the summer, when the afternoons are the longest they’ll ever get before the next year arrives.

He takes them to a place so high up in the peaks that not even the scent of wilting jasmine or buzz of honeybees can follow.

Giyuu trudges dutifully after Sabito. His hair has grown longer since the spring. It trickles past the tectonic blades of his shoulders now, faultlines and landslides shifting beneath the white of his haori.

Their teacher brings them to a clearing, shielded with trees shriveling at the spine.

His crow lets out a single caw, and for some reason, it sounds strangely forlorn.

“There is a final test one must undergo before they are accepted into the Corps,” Urokodaki tells them, somber. “But before I send you there, there is one more thing you must do for me first.”)

Somewhere deep in the hollows of Sagiri’s slanting collarbones is not a river, but a meadow of lilies. 

It’s the place Sabito had told him about what feels like lifetimes ago. A shade of blue found nowhere else on earth. A pond filled with kaleidoscope bloom so thick not even bunnies could drown in it.

Beneath the sleepy afternoon, it glows like the back of dragonfly wings. Flowers float over its iridescent surface, their alabaster petals curling inward with the incoming chill. Pummeling into its depths is the giant waterfall Urokodaki has kicked them off of several times.

Violence does not follow them here today.

There are no sentry crows and no red tengu masks.

Just Sabito, the fiery autumn afternoon, and his inane conviction that today was the day he would finally teach Giyuu how to swim.

“Come on,” Sabito is teasing, tossing his yukata and zori to the side. “How’re you gonna kill demons if you can’t even swim?”

“I won’t be swimming to the demons,” Giyuu sniffs.

“What’ll you do when they throw you into the ocean? Why do you think Sensei tosses us off all those cliffs?” Sabito slips off the hand-carved mask dutifully strapped to his temple, adding it to the growing pile of clothes at the bank. “Don’t look so scared. I told you I’ll teach you — it’s easy.”

The kitsune stands guard over their worn, precious things, as he then dives right into the fields.

Giyuu clutches onto the mottled surface of his own foxface, fingers twitching anxiously against the red tangle of rope. He can hardly make out the peach blur of Sabito’s head beneath all those other colors, clogging the surface like spilt paint and oil, snuffing out the light before it can even dream of parting those waters.

One. 

Two. 

Three. 

Four. 

Five…

Sabito finally emerges when he reaches ten, spewing water from his mouth.

One maroon brow ticks up when he sees Giyuu, still dressed, still hovering, still stubbornly right in place.

“Just because we use Breath of Water doesn’t mean we’re supposed to do it. Underwater,” Giyuu blurts out before his teeth can bare in another well-meaning jab.

“Giyuu,” is all Sabito says. “Get the hell in here.”

What if I can’t?

See, there’s this strange, irking feeling spidering down the length of his back lately, that their days are already halfway out the door. Catastrophe whispers in his ear late in the night and taps him on the shoulder, points a crooked finger to the gorges far below. Warns him against going there. Swears it’s that place from which he’ll never return. The place where he packed all his fears and worries and dread, so putrid and toxic it had killed off any life that might’ve remained in those waters.

That place of still seas and fatal calm. 

That place where lilies can’t flower and crows can’t call and Sabito can’t float.

“Giyuu, come on. Please?”

But he hears his name again. Summoned forth with that deep yet strangely tender timbre of a child no bigger than he.

And Sabito is no siren, nor is he a demon hunter just yet. He isn’t even a man like he claims to be.

Here, he is simply a boy bobbing among the currents, with lily pads in his hair and moles on his shoulders.

“I promise I’ll catch you, yeah?” 

The choice, really, isn’t so much of a choice at all.

Giyuu sheds Tsutako’s kimono carefully, folds it up with the rest of his childish paranoia and doomsday darlings, and wades into the meadow.

It’s frigid. Freezing enough to punch the breath from his chest and send goosebumps scrambling up his flesh.

“You will get used to it!” Sabito says cheerily, splashing his way over. “Take my hand.”

Their fingers knot like cherry stems and hangmen’s nooses. Giyuu holds on tight, probably too tightly, but Sabito neither winces nor complains.

He only starts swimming backward.

Silt billows beneath Giyuu’s feet the farther out he wanders, clouding the crystalline waters. They’re so clear, he can’t tell what’s right beneath him or fathoms down below.

Sabito’s thumb taps patiently against the bend of his wrist all the while.

“Ready?” he grins when Giyuu’s finally up to his elbows in the deep.

He only has the time to sputter, “What?” before Sabito is yanking, lakebed stirring beneath their wayward feet —

And before he can even catch a breath, he’s already free falling —

(“Cut the boulder in half,” Urokodaki commands. 

There is something awfully sad in the string of his shoulders as he speaks. Giyuu doesn’t know if his eyes water behind that crimson mask, but he won’t hazard a guess. 

“If you succeed,” their teacher promises, “I will let you go.”)

— the moment he foolishly cries out, water is swallowing his head, flooding the shipwreck of his open mouth.

Sabito’s hand, which never left his, slots right into the outline of his ribs.

Giyuu shatters the surface with a rude gasp. He’s too busy coughing wetly to really register the feeling of Sabito’s arms circled around him, holding him up and close.

“Easy, easy,” he’s saying, voice trembling like he’s holding back a laugh. Damn him. “Just kick your legs like me. You’re alright.”

Heart pounding in his temples, feet swaying uselessly over nothing, Giyuu hopes his terror and indignance is shining bright on his face.

But Sabito just grins. Just holds him, and watches him.

Belligerence doesn’t settle in the slope of his brow, which curves under an odd, careless softness he surely would’ve taken care to smear away on any other day. It’s a gentle look, soft like afternoon light and lily petals just before they shrivel. Tender and maybe a little foolish, fool enough to think the single year they’ve known one another could somehow make up for a decade without —

And Giyuu does — damn it if he’s being gullible —

He does believe it.

“Maybe I should’ve taught you how to hold your breath first,” Sabito says, breathless.

Scowling back at the boy who had saved his life then so unequivocably become the rest of it, Giyuu retorts, “I know how to hold my breath.”

“Really, now?”

“Uh huh.”

Sabito’s brow arches with his smirk.

“Prove it.”

Giyuu has only a second to taste the air in the back of his throat before Sabito pushes him down again.

For an instant, the entire world quiets. 

Bubbles plume from his parted lips, and water hurries to fill all the blank spaces of his body — the gaps between sunstruck fingers, the winding crest of his ear.

Then comes the roar.

The scream of the water as they hurtle down like stones to a place they were never meant to be.

And for some strange reason, when Giyuu does finally dare to crack open his eyes, tilt his face toward a streak of light he cannot feel —

For some reason, he thinks —

It’s beautiful down below.

Yes, his lungs sting. Yes, his stomach lurches.

But up above, lily canopies shine like spilt stars and diamonds. 

Red veins spiral down the tangled braids of their stems, as the sun glimmers through flesh wounds and early wilt. It’s metropolis of lighthouses whose emerald eyes rest upon their heads — kindly, like mothers bidding good night, like sisters calling orphans home. Vows, made in mercy and mayhem, that even if they sink, they will not sink unseen or unknown.

Giyuu feels this, in the currents whispering words from long ago. Forget your drowning lessons.

He feels this, in the brush of Sabito’s hand against his. You are not heavier than this world.

Sabito, Sabito, Sabito. 

Fizzled-out stars frame his face, shining in the instant the meadows part perfectly and sunglow strikes him dead in the eyes. The world is beautiful, but Sabito is even moreso. Beautiful, when he holds, punches, shoves him down, but never with intent to kill. Beautiful, when his fingers glide against his fingers, lacing then locking then loving. 

They’re two motes of sand, perched on the inner ear of a seashell. 

Not yet pearls or warriors or anything grandiose at all.

And in this moment, whether they’ll drown or dawn doesn’t matter.

As long as they’re together. 

Giyuu knows this, too, because he can read it, taste it, feel it in the curve of Sabito’s pinky around his own, a promise big enough to make up for all the childhood they’d spent missing each other —

That he’ll haul him back no matter where he goes, doldrums or the dark. 

So he does.

Sabito’s hand tightens to summon him home once more. 

With one strong kick, he’s heaving them back into stained glass skies. 

Air smolders in the back of his throat as Giyuu inhales greedy mouthfuls of it, half-coughing, half-sputtering. The back of his nose burns furiously where the lakewater had gotten in anyway — so much for holding his breath. 

Beside him, Sabito doesn’t look much better. He’s bobbing up and down, shaking his head vigorously, as if to dislodge water from his ear. Mist haloes him in a fine golden shower, carried his way only in the palms of the last summer gales that overstayed their welcome.

With his hair flattened to his skull, he looks so different. Smaller, even. No more frizz or flyaways. Just a stray lily pad slipping off his temple where his mask would have sat. 

“Okay,” he says roughly when he finally catches his breath. “I think you proved it.”

The waning day skates over waters swaying with their disturbance. Sorrow has not left its dutiful perch by the shore.

In Sabito’s wake, Giyuu floats —

As their two kitsune faces stare back, grinning yet barren, bleached beneath the sun.

(There’s a coil of rope — red like warnings, like turn back now — tied round the center of the boulder. It’s thicker than his forearm, held together by dead-end knots twice the size of his fist. 

It would be simple to cut through that knot. So simple.

But that’s not what Urokodaki is asking. 

He is demanding the impossible. 

The trees above his head shed their dead and split ends, too fast, too desperate. Giyuu swallows and runs his fingertip along the newly sharpened edge, just to check, like the last fifty times he’s already checked. He pulls away to watch red well up through the hairline split in his skin.

Sabito would know what to do, he thinks. Sabito knows how to swim, how to hunt, how to kill. Of course he would know how to do this too.

But, Giyuu knows too, as he lifts his blade —

This is the one thing they must do alone.)

“Are you scared?” 

Sabito isn’t usually one to agitate, but Giyuu can forecast the tension like misfortune in the lines of his palms, as he touches over every blister popped and every scab stubbornly clinging on.

That’s another tough question, he could respond. What answer should he pick today? The future dangling like butcher knives over their heads? The uncertainty of success when they’ve only ever played with wooden dummies and foxes? 

Or the fact that there were twelve others before them, that they still don’t know the names or fates of?

Giyuu knows, really, Sabito is asking about only one thing.

A fresh welt glistens red on the rind of his palm, between the crook of his index and middle fingers. He’s probably been picking at it again. It’s one of those bad habits of his he’s never bothered correcting, only because Urokodaki never saw enough of it to scold. 

Giyuu reaches out for the roll of bandages anyway, pressing his thumb admonishingly into serrated lifelines, and begins to wrap him up. 

All the while, Sabito’s gaze on him never wavers.

“We’ll do it together. You know that, right?” he says, a long minute later. “We will pass together.”

“Mm,” Giyuu mumbles. 

“I’ve seen you improve,” Sabito continues. “I had a year’s headstart, and here you are.” 

He means to argue, he really does. 

When he isn’t choking himself on the fumes, he’s coasting off the few embers left of Tsutako’s own willing immolation, hoping the incessant burning will take him the rest of his way when his body inevitably fails. 

Maybe it really is a fluke. Not so much budding skill or hard work —

Just pure, dumb luck that has brought him to this point anyway. East winds that coincidentally picked up the right spark. 

Perfect storms that just happened to stoke, not snuff. 

“You’ll be Hashira,” is all Giyuu says. Not an answer, but a promise.

Sabito’s hand twitches in his. Their pinkies brush as he turns it over, disgruntled with his avoidance, but answering in a steady vow all the same —

“And you’ll be mine.”

(Days end. Light shortens. The sun no longer reaches so far as the season shifts. 

What doesn’t change is that damn rock.

Giyuu’s arms shake when he lifts the sword for the hundredth time that day. His panting breaths dissipate before him in wobbly clouds. His right knee aches from the last time he hadn’t managed to land on his feet, and he hasn’t heard anything but the disturbance of his own pulse for weeks. 

The katana groans as it trembles in his blistering hands. He’s gripping the blade too tightly, he knows this. 

Sabito warned him from the very beginning: this is how he breaks.

That at least makes one thing broken, Giyuu thinks vindictively, rushing forward once more.)

((He gets the feeling he’s being watched, sometimes. 

But whenever he turns, there’s nothing and no one there. Only him, and the one thing he’s been asked of, yet so stubbornly fails to do.

The air gets colder, still.))

Sometimes he doesn’t make his way back to the cabin at all. Sometimes he goes to sleep right there on the forest floor, among the hollow shells of fireflies and leaf litter.

The last few stragglers of the season settle on his body where he kneels then curls up into the ground. They dwindle as time goes by, which is the only way he knows any time goes by at all. 

Whatever tiny blots of light remain emerge from their shallow graves, blinking like wayward souls and warning signs. Lightning will land on his knees and perch on the bends of his fingers, while a lonely owl cries somewhere in the distance.

Giyuu will fall asleep to the sound of its steady coo, and it’ll always be a gamble — whether he returns to that dilapidated house, or that crumbling cliff by the sea. 

Either way, it’s the same old ending, over and over again. His sister at the cliffs, his sister falling off the cliffs. 

His sister on the ground and then his sister in the ground.

It’s the only dream that comes anymore. He can’t recall the last time he slept without it.  

He doesn’t recall the last time he awoke with tears on his face either. Doesn’t know when he’d left that habit behind, crumpled up and tossed it into the same place he discarded his softened kid-fingers and naivety.

Sometimes, he rises to the feeling of someone touching his cheek anyway. Warm palm, fully formed. A monster under the bed who’s grown its hands. 

A mere trick of the light.

(The first time he sees her, she’s hidden behind a shock-white foxface. 

He catches the ivory flash out the corner of his eye on another failed downswing, and for a second, he wonders if he’s finally well and truly lost it. He can’t have gone that long without eating or drinking. Four days is the maximum for the former, though lately, he has been pushing it.

Yet even when he blinks, rubs his eyes, shakes his head —

She’s still there. 

A girl, even smaller than he is, wearing a dark vest and yukata of wildflowers. Mounds of ebony hair scruff down her shoulders, unkempt yet soft. A sword drapes from her hip, almost too big for her body.

Cerulean blossoms dot the rosy cheeks of her mask, as she lifts one bony hand to slip it up. 

So Giyuu falls still, katana hanging uselessly at his side. 

She looks nothing like his sister when she was young.

For one moment, the instinct of her name burns on his tongue anyway.)

Sabito yells at him only once.

Giyuu doesn’t quite remember what he said or why he said it. Maybe it was the frustration writhing like worms beneath his ribs that did the talking. Maybe it was the sunless yet snowless day which coaxed out his confession.

Or maybe it was just the truth, finding its way out eventually. Because it always did.

Whatever the reason, Sabito didn’t want to hear it.

One moment, Giyuu is sitting on the same log they always sit on to catch their breaths or shovel rice balls down their throats.

The next, he’s on the ground, pain ricocheting through his cheek.

He’s taken worse hits from the boy. Elbows to the ribs that left him black and blue, knees to the side that had him wheezing for hours. He’s even lost hair to Sabito’s joking wrath, on the rare occasion he decides the fight isn’t going well enough in his favor not to play dirty and yank on his ponytail.

Giyuu shakily raises a hand to his stinging face, mouth parted in a gasp that never comes.

Embarrassingly enough, he feels his eyes begin to water.

“Don’t you ever say that!” Sabito’s shouting, fists clenched so tight bone might just peek through. “Don’t you ever spout that crap in front of me again!”

The furious twist of his frown blurs every time another tear pools on Giyuu’s lashline.

“Sabito…” he whispers.

“Your sister was getting married the next day, but she chose to save you from that demon. Do you understand that? The last choice she made was to love you. Are you really going to spit in her face and say she wasted that?”

He’s taken far worse hits from Sabito.

This, he thinks, is the worst one.

Every drop of rage Sabito has ever wielded against the imaginary throat of a demon, every ounce of frustration he’s ever taken out on a dummy, is now turned toward Giyuu.  

“If you ever say you wish you’d died again, we’re done.”

Sabito swears, heavens as his witness —

“I won’t be your friend anymore.”

It’s unfamiliar. Unforgiving.

It’s also almost a little funny.

Save the day they met, Giyuu has never feared Sabito. Not once.

Even now, when he cradles the place where his palm just collided with his face, Giyuu feels no dread or indignation. Just acceptance.

He knows he means it, after all.

The air bristling over their shoulders is frigid enough to freeze if they let it, Sabito will crumble this thing between them in an instant to prove a point, and it will be a year soon.

A year, since Tsutako —

(He was used to the fact only hours and days and months ago, wasn’t he? This perpetual and implicit rule by which he governed this new life of his now. 

If he knew three things in this world, the first one was always, always, always, going to be that Tsutako was — )

((He was used to it only seconds ago.))

(((He is not used to it anymore.)))

Dead leaves crunch before him. Blue-blot shadows darken the red of his eyelids.

He feels the cool brush of a haori sleeve press against his cheek, carefully mapping out the trails his tears have unwittingly carved.

“Look at me, Giyuu.”

He opens his eyes to meet Sabito’s. As quickly as his ire had come, he’s smothered it clean now.

“You remember what Sensei said,” he urges.

The only remnants of anger linger in the softening embers of his gaze, the wildfire ash of that voice, as he lifts another hand to cradle his reddening cheek.

“You can’t die. She left you your life. Your future.”

His mouth curves in an unsorry smile, as he then holds out his palm.

“You have to carry on living.”

Giyuu can only stare blearily up at him, at the crossroads he’s stumbled into.

The choice shouldn’t be easy. He knows his loyalties should lie with unnamed graves and the red of sleeves not even a million suns can bleach. He should be madder about the slap, because it still hurts. He should be used to it by now, because it always will.

But it is. Somehow, it is easy.

He would make it even unmoored, undone, unused to the world a thousand times more. 

Should he ever face his own end, dither and dally between his own survival and snuffing-out —

As long as he sees in the distance that beloved meadow of mountain lilies, he thinks he would make it all the same.

He will reach forward.

He will take Sabito’s hand.

(The first time he sees her, she does nothing but stare back. The second time he sees her, she’s sitting on the top of the boulder, legs crossed primly, sword untouched in her lap.

The third time she shows up unannounced, Giyuu decides to speak.

“What is your name?” he asks.

Her too-young, too-bright face breaks into a placid smile, as if she’d been waiting for his notice. Her dream-glazed eyes are the green of skies just before windstorms strike.

Yet, when she speaks, her voice is nothing deadly. Only soft and sweet like springwater.

“I am Makomo.”)

The first snow arrives too soon and too delicate. Wind-shattered ice settles in the line of Sabito’s untamed curls, turning the tip of his nose cherry-red, as they tilt their heads up to catch pearly dust on their tongues.

“Did you cut it yet?”

Giyuu keeps his voice quiet, because anything louder than a breath would constitute a disturbance. This carefully constructed moment, teetering on the knife’s edge of stillness that should not exist, would fall apart, and they’d remember that of all the places in this world, this is the last place they should be.

Sabito does not answer, only picking his nails and humming quietly. It’s the same snow-drenched tune again, the five lilting notes he still hasn’t asked him about. 

“You’ve done it, haven’t you?” Giyuu murmurs again in the knowing silence.

Fresh bandages cover Sabito’s swordhand now, pinpricked with tiny crimson blots. Gauze and injuries that Giyuu did not put there.

Still, that stubborn, stubborn boy refuses to yield. 

He only slumps over, cheek to his shoulder. Where they press together, the last shreds of summertime they’ve unknowingly stolen flicker alive in the shelter of their flesh.

“There’s two of us, aren’t there?” Sabito grumbles, eons later, when the hills bloom bone-white. “I’m waiting for you.”

(The sword is beginning to fall apart.

That’s what Makomo kindly points out to him as she dances around the edge of the clearing, though Giyuu could have put that together just as fine himself. Infinitesimal cracks dance along the once lethal edge of the blade. The biggest crack of the bunch pierces its way through the pupil of his eye when he holds it up to check.

“It won’t last much longer,” the girl sighs from behind him. “What will you do now?”

Her little hand trails up the length of the fracturing katana, skittering its way up crumbling steel to tap once on his knuckles.

“You’ve trained well in the motions. You remember everything Urokodaki-sensei taught you. Your body knows what it needs to do.”

Another tap, right against his chest. Knock-knock-knocking with his pulse.

“The problem,” Makomo says, and she’s cold, so cold, “is this thing inside.”)

When they tire of treading water that one autumn day, Sabito decides to take him behind the falls instead.

The climb up the cliff is treacherous. One moment’s distraction could send him falling off those slippery holds to plummet far, far down. Giyuu’s fingers tremble with the knowledge of certain doom as he painstakingly pulls himself up anyway.

At the very least, Sabito is right below him.

Or so he shouts, his voice barely managing to ring above the cascades roaring inches beyond their backs.

They only stop when they finally reach the gaping maw of a cave, jutting deep between Sagiri’s craggy teeth.

Giyuu clambers up clumsily, sprawling in a trembling heap of soaked limbs and exhaustion.

Dazedly blinking suds out of his eyes, he stares up at the blurry form of Sabito as he hops then crouches down beside him — far more gracefully than he ever could.

“What’d you bring me here for?” Giyuu summons the strength to yell.

Sabito shouts back, “I like this place! I found it a while ago, before you came around!”

That, he can imagine. Sabito, even younger and shorter, a little rounder in his cheeks, slinging himself through the water and yanking himself up that cliff. Knowing no one would catch him if he fell. 

Knowing he wouldn’t anyway.

One soaked hand reaches out to flick him in the forehead, gathering the fraying threads of his attention.

“I come here every time I want some peace and quiet!”

Sabito beams sardonically at the irony Giyuu doesn’t need to point out. He points it out anyway.

“It’s not very quiet.”

“But isn’t the view pretty?”

The stone beneath their heaving bodies is cold and damp. The sun cannot reach them this far down Sagiri’s hollow throat, and they’re just one step away from snapping their necks on the ravine below.

But what little light manages to slip through the cacophany shimmers and shatters into a million colors. Kaleidoscopic dreams ignite the gentle pinch of Sabito’s eyes as he smiles, so big, and so bright. The type of grin that cuts his eyes into crescent moons, wrinkles his nose like origami folds, unburies the single dimple hiding in his unscarred cheek.

Yes, he supposes the view is pretty.

Drenched through, sweaty and messy, aching a good ache deep in his bones — Giyuu thinks it’s the most beautiful he’s ever been.

His sister had mentioned, once upon a time, that she had fallen in love. 

To this day, Giyuu still has no idea what she meant. What legendary flutters of the heart plagued her at night, or what butterflies in the stomach she swallowed by the morning.

All Giyuu knows is that Sabito is here, Sabito is beautiful, and Sabito is his best and only friend. In the sense that the gorges yawning beneath them are deadly, and the future barreling toward them will only come ever-undeterred.

In the sense that he was always going to happen to him anyway.

The Final Selection is looming ahead, if and only if they make it there first. Giyuu’s hands ache from the sword, but his heart aches even worse at the thought of Sabito going at it alone: coming here alone, climbing up alone, falling down alone. Sabito, alone.

He wants to do it, too. He wants to fill the pockets loneliness had nibbled out of Sabito’s soul while he hadn’t noticed. He wants to shoo out the moths and cobwebs that had gathered in those cavities without his permission. He wants to yank Sabito back from his nightmares before the floods burst through the lining of his lungs.

Most of all, he wants to save Sabito right back.

So he starts here.

He crawls forward to where Sabito lingers at the edge of the cave, brushing his fingers through the torrents, enchanted by those sirenic calls of high places. Giyuu fists one hand in his sopping sleeve, and when Sabito doesn’t startle, he inches forward to wrap his arms around his waist. He presses his face into his back and counts the drizzle of his pulse beneath his cheek, the steady rise-and-fall of his stomach beneath his palms.

Sabito’s hands drift from the flumes.

They come to rest over Giyuu’s. Intertwined. So slippery and so frigid. And so alive.

(”What is the problem, then?”

He tries to pry, but Makomo has fallen silent. She offers no more riddles or advice. No more chiding words that he isn’t breathing like Urokodaki taught him to, no more sweet-spoken complaints that he’s holding his sword too tightly like Sabito scolded him for.

“How do I fix it?”

Snow is blowing through the empty trees, harder than before. The cold nips at Giyuu’s shoulders where Tsutako’s kimono slips. Somehow, none of it lands on Makomo, even where she stands, dead center in the clearing. 

She doesn’t even shiver.

“Why,” Giyuu asks one more time, when she just blinks sleepily back at him, “are you helping me?”)

That same day, Sabito takes Giyuu by the hand and locks their fingers together, so tight and vicious Giyuu cannot tell if the pulse skipping through his body is even his anymore.

“Let’s jump,” Sabito tells him. “Better than climbing back down. We have to get back somehow.”

“We might miss,” answers catastrophe.

“We might even die,” promises disaster.

“I still can’t swim like you,” is all Giyuu says, even when he knows, hand over heart and hand in his own —

The decision has already been made.

(There is something wrong in his heart, Makomo says. Not with, but in. It still does all the things it’s supposed to do: beats and pumps and leaks. It’s something else that’s creaking then bursting through atria and chambers and veins, demanding his attention, commanding his presence. And it’s hard, so hard, to find his way out from it, because it won’t budge and it certainly won’t shrink, not with Constant Breathing or passing time. So what is there to do if it won’t move and he won’t leave? If it won’t pack its things and go, how could he make any use of it at all?

“Well, whatever you do, you need to decide before you raise that sword again,” Makomo says. “It won’t last another.”)

“Maybe you should let me go first then,” Sabito suggests without meaning it. “I’ll just catch you when you come.” 

(“Decide, now. If it’ll drive you or destroy you.

If you’ll sink or swim.”)

But the decision has already been made. He made it that autumn day, on the top of the world.

“I’m going with you,” Giyuu swears.

And Sabito just answers, steady, “So just stay afloat. With me.”

Their twin heartbeats thunder through their veins, unbroken, even if they split their skulls on the stones below.

“That’s good enough.”

It lasts for only a split second.

One moment he’s standing steady. In the next, he’s at the bottom of the world. 

Schools of bubbles burst around their fallen-star bodies. They’ve plunged so far down they could skim the doldrums with their toes. 

But there, too, is that split in the sky. A ribbon of rippling lily light. 

Something beyond that heavenly roof which calls for the rising comet of their hands, which scrubs drowning lessons clean from memory, warding off those botched and fatal landings, shrieking, get up, get up, get up —

And when he slashes back through the surface, he thinks he feels something shatter. 

Maybe the thousand cuts the cascades left on his cheeks. 

Maybe just the air in his lungs —

But Giyuu is still alive, still kicking, still there, when he opens his eyes, blinded by that white winter light, and —

“Would it really have made a difference?”

Tsutako stands once again by the cliffside, wind-blown, sea-stained. One shattered spine away. 

Somewhere since the last memory, the wind has tugged her ribbon loose. Her hair spills in thick waves down her back now, obscuring the thin crescent of her face.

She isn’t angry this day. Not even scornful.

Only wearily curious.

“No,” Giyuu whispers. He can’t take his eyes off her. He can’t approach her. He can’t save her.

He can only stand, with sword in bleeding hand and tears in rasping throat, and tell her —

“But I want it to.”

For one long moment, she remains quiet, deep in thought. No chipped teeth. No windchime laughter.

No curses or berating or ire.

She says only one more thing, half-chiding and half-earnest. It’s nothing like what used to be, but strangely familiar nonetheless.

“Then get up.”

The day he cuts through the boulder is like any other day.

Winds don’t blow, and snow doesn’t fall. The sun appears only in blips and instances, before the clouds draw their curtains across its face once more. 

Giyuu stares down at the shattered remnants of his blade, shards of steel violently strewn across the forest floor, and thinks, that’ll take a long time to clean.

Then, he looks up. 

Splitting down the heart of the boulder is open air. A clean rupture. A lethal blow. 

Chest heaving, sweat dripping, Giyuu feels a disbelieving laugh bubble up in his throat. He whirls around, for a second, his elation fogging the wintry landscape before him —

And that sweet, strange girl is still standing there. Staring back at him, smiling.

“Well, Giyuu,” she whispers, almost sad. “Make sure you win.”

…How do you know my name?

“Makomo,” is what Giyuu actually says. “What happened to you?”

But she is already gone.

Mount Fujikasane is eerily beautiful.

Rustling wisteria fields whisper in a place no wind is brave enough to blow. The thick, cloying scent of undisturbed pollen and sap is nearly stifling, itching the back of his throat, dewing the corners of his eyes. 

Craggy black peaks glow beneath the scant lanternlight — 

As thirteen other shadows join his and Sabito’s beneath the towering gates. 

For a moment, all Giyuu can hear is the clink of too-large swords slipping around their sheaths, the endless shuffle of nervous feet grinding against gravel.

Sabito, of course, is the only one who doesn’t fidget.

He holds his head up high, katana hanging proudly at his side. He does not twitch or wipe his palms against his haori. He does not bite at his nails or fiddle with the twine coiled around his neck. 

He does not blink, even when the two young children emerge from the shadows and begin to speak.

Urokodaki gives them their final gifts the hour before they leave: two perfectly smooth, perfectly carved kitsune faces. One with a scar hemming its right cheek, another with ghostly reds dotting its eyes. 

They’re elegant, far more than the shoddy reproduction Sabito had attempted months ago, no doubt in anticipation for this day. 

Giyuu’s throat tightens as he holds his own to his chest, tracing over the piercing powder-blue of his irises, the timid swirl of his midnight brows. 

“These are warding masks,” Urokodaki says, as he ties the rope around their heads. “Wear them to the mountain, and don’t take them off.”

Worn fingers linger over the deadknot behind Giyuu’s skull. He thinks he feels them beginning to shake.

“They will protect you from harm.”

The same ivory paint, he realizes, had powdered Makomo’s foxface too.

Sabito takes his off only once. 

The other children are beginning to shuffle in. 

But he does not follow. Not yet.

One little hand reaches up to push his face aside. Their gazes catch amid air that smells far too sweet to shroud corpses. 

He’s a sundrop among sleepy violets, a schism where the heavens spill right through.

And for a moment, Sabito just smiles. 

(“Giyuu. Sabito,” Urokodaki calls after them. When they turn, he’s standing at the front of that hut that has since become home, crow fluttering dutifully by his side.)

They’re at the edge of the cliff once more, staring down the lengths they still have to go. 

Mindless of the disgusting sweat slicking his palm, uncomplaining of the violence with which Giyuu will inevitably cling onto him, Sabito reaches out and takes his hand anyway.

((“Come back alive,” their teacher commands in a whisper they hardly hear. “Just come back.”))

Giyuu squeezes his hand, too hard.

Sabito squeezes right back.

Just come back.

And so they leap.

Urokodaki keeps his secrets hidden well. Pins his emotions like moths behind a brilliant red mask, shoves them in hollow trees to catch maggots with the spring. 

He keeps his paints hidden well, too. 

Probably because he’d learned, over the years, that nosy children like Sabito would break into them the first chance they got.

He’s proven right, of course, when Sabito sneaks into their shared bedroom one night. 

This time, he doesn’t break in through the window. 

He just slinks his way down the hall, elbowing his way through a slit in the door. 

Arms filled to the brim with wooden jars threatening to topple, his silhouette wobbles precariously. Two paintbrushes splinter between his teeth as he hisses a garbled version of Giyuu’s name — once, then twice, when he doesn’t immediately rouse.

“Huh?” Giyuu mumbles, rubbing thwarted sleep from his eyes. “Sabito, what’re you doing?”

He then spits out the brushes. Nudges one of them over with his foot until it hits Giyuu’s bent knee.

“C’mon,” he commands, gesturing vaguely at him with one shoulder. “Bring me your thing.”

“…My thing?”

“The thing I gave you. Your mask. Give it.”

He then dumps the jars across their bedspread with near manic glee, excitement trembling in the curve of his chin.

“We’re gonna color them,” he declares.

Giyuu blinks.

“How’d you even find these?”

“Giyuu,” Sabito says as he begins unscrewing the jars, tossing the caps to the side. “What kind of demon slayer would I be if I couldn’t sniff out a few paints? The old man raised me too well to not.”

Splashes of cherry and peach swim like koi down his arms where the hues had already spilled during the treacherous journey over. Tiny pots spanning the rainbow overflow and drip onto the sheets: pale plums and brilliant mustards and fathomless blues. 

“Maybe this is the real test,” Sabito continues, dusting off his palms. “See if we can find and break into his secret stash. Now where is it? Hand it over.”

There was a time, early last winter, when Giyuu could only fall asleep if he had Sabito’s gift in his arms. He’d drift into dreams to the sensation of breath dewing on the tip of his nose, his face shrouded entirely behind carved wood and sanded splinters. 

The kitsune never chased away the nightmares, of course, especially not then —

But it could be pretty damn convincing.

Sabito’s mask is even sloppier than his own. It was his very first, after all. A misshapen, asymmetrical face, marked with the kind of carelessness that can only come once, with novelty.

Giyuu holds it reverently, when Sabito places it in his waiting palms.

“Make mine pretty, wouldya?” he asks with a grin.

That’s a tall order, Giyuu wants to warn him. He still can’t swim, not really, not even with Sabito coaxing him along. He can only thrash his legs wildly enough not to sink. He certainly won’t be able to paint either. His hands, for once, are better suited for winding bandages or wielding swords. 

But Sabito’s already dipping his brush into the jars, brazen and determined. 

He dabs sapphire back into the hollow of Giyuu’s eyes, breathes sakura life into the wooden panels of his mouth. Swirls in the obsidian dots of his brows, the dark reeds of his lashes, the faintest hints of burgundy on his cheeks.

The attempt is as clumsy as his skills carving wood.

Giyuu wouldn’t trade it for anything else.

Light spills in through cracks in the screen. The same angle and shade as the first time Giyuu had awoken in this very room, disoriented, feverish, anguished.

Back then, Sabito had hidden himself away in the corner. Not to stalk, just to watch over this strange, weeping boy he’d found in the snow. 

It had been harder than anything to get up, to breathe, to say something other than an echo of a scream. Giyuu hadn’t paid any attention to the way his hair frizzed gold around the scruff, or the way his ears could glow like cherries beneath the sun.

But he happily pays his dues now. 

He drinks it all in, greedy and shameless, how Sabito sticks his tongue out in quiet concentration. How his forehead divots when a color isn’t to his liking. How he frowns each time his brush begins to slip. 

How he devotes himself in entirety to anything and everything, a fight for their lives or a night wasting paint and time.

It’s difficult to replicate everything Sabito is with his own clumsy hands. Hard, to imagine the shadowy blues dancing down the jut of his chin. Harder, to match the shade of those meadows blooming in his lily-loved iris.

Hardest, to capture every star that had ever come to rest in his cheeks. 

He just can’t quite get the colors right. The red blush is a little too bloody, his tangerine freckles a tad too dark.

So he relents altogether. 

He traces the tip of his brush over the messy scrawl of a wooden scar, and fills the trenches with pinks and blues and spring instead.

In their silent concentration, knee against knee, ankle over ankle, Sabito begins to hum.

The mirroring wound twitches on his cheek whenever he sings, swallowing the dimples beneath his skin. 

Giyuu glances down at the swirly mess coloring Sabito’s mask, then back up at the real thing. 

He does it twice over, before he dares to speak.

“I never asked where it came from.”

“Mm?”

Sabito taps his brush against another pot. Chews on his lip and dabs some teal into Giyuu’s foxface.

“Your — scar.”

The window creaks quietly.

But no one else in the world is awake. 

“…Ah.”

Sabito holds up his mask, squinting. 

“I was surprised you never asked sooner,” is all he says, closing one eye and then the next. 

His gaze roams between the foxface and Giyuu’s, pensive as he compares the two. 

“My mother gave it to me.”

Sorry, Giyuu thinks of answering. Say that again?

It feels almost like a mistake. An impulsive mishap of words, strung together in a sentence that should neither exist nor make sense. 

But Sabito does not say it again. 

He does not have to say anything else at all. 

Not when he says it like that —

Flippant. Matter-of-fact. Like he too knew only three things to be true in the world, and this was one of them.

I have no parents. I have no siblings. 

I have a scar from my mother.

“What?” Giyuu feels his heart plummet right into freefall, as he whispers, strained, “I thought you — you said —”

“It’s weird, right? I mean, it was only an accident. But I always thought I was going to have to deal with her forever.”

Sabito shrugs it off, but there’s a newfound stiffness lining his shoulders now. He’s rigid, in the way he always gets when he senses he’s about to lose in a spar or squabble.

“Well,” he huffs, “that demon got her anyway.” 

Their twin masks sit on the bedspread now, forgotten. Paints stain the sheets, closer to blood than beauty in the flickering lanternlight. 

Giyuu crawls over spilt oil and shattered hearts, tentative. He stops only when their bones won’t let him press any closer.

Sabito just stares back at him.

He does not move, even when Giyuu reaches out, even when wet fingers smear streaks of indigo and gold onto his cheeks. 

Giyuu holds him between his palms, all that forlorn tension and tightness, and he wonders, painfully, how it had looked when it happened. How the violent carmine must have painted Sabito’s face. How long his molars must have poked through until the skin knit shut again. 

How long ago was it? Had it grown as Sabito did? Stretched with the length of his arms and coil of his spine? 

Was it only a year old?

Did it still ache like it happened yesterday?

There were times Giyuu had quietly theorized, of course. Maybe it’d come from a wild animal. Or a particularly vicious tree branch. He’d always noticed the scar was unclean — as if done in a frenzy. He’s sure Sabito would have fibbed about it, had he asked the same thing even half a year ago. He would’ve puffed out his chest and claimed he’d fought a bear and lived to tell the tale, and he’d do the same to any demon that tried it with him too. 

Now, Sabito only tells the truth.

And now, Giyuu only feels sick.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Sabito says quietly, as if to console him, of all people —

And somehow, Giyuu still doesn’t want to believe him. 

Because it can’t be true. 

Giyuu knows there’s a whistling sound that comes not from a draft in the house or a ghost in the window, but from the air that blows through the fathomless absence etched into his soul. He hears that sound, that reminder that he has losses to count, every day, whenever the world dies down and stills with the crickets. When they drift into sleep. When Sabito doesn’t laugh. 

He hears it like a fatal ringing in his ears, an echo of the sea, a whalesong for which there remains no recipient.

He wonders, tears in his lashes, break in his heart, if Sabito hears that whistle too.  

(He wonders how much of the boy before him is left over from people Giyuu never met.) 

((How much of himself, stowed away and frightened, Sabito had stumbled upon all on his own.))

“What’re you gonna do about it now? Kiss it better?” 

Sabito grows defensive the longer Giyuu is silent, hands spasming in his lap like he’s itching to shove him away.

But Giyuu knows he would never hurt him. Not in a way that mattered. 

Not even now, when he might want to.

The bruises he accumulates like tree rings on his own body only tell the story of Sabito’s strength.

(((And what a beautiful story it is.)))

So Giyuu pitches forward, instead. He doesn’t stick out his tongue and blow, not like Sabito would have.

He only flutters his mouth along the trench of his cheek, mapping out the ragged terrain of it. With every brush of his lips against hardened skin, Sabito’s breath gusts hotly over his cheek, shaking with salt-sting and sorrow.

“Do you think it was horrible, that I was glad when she died? It took her whole head off, but for a second, I was happy. Is something wrong with me?” Words spill out of him now, vibrating against his bones, faster and faster with every passing syllable. “You cried for months over your sister, and I didn’t even shed a single tear. I was sad about my father. But she made me too, didn’t she? She made me too.”

“No, Sabito. You’re good. You are good,” Giyuu mumbles. This much, he knows is true. “You’re the best.”

Pearls bead at Sabito’s lashes now, and he blinks harshly, scrubbing an irate fist over his face.

“I don’t want to cry,” he insists, chin dimpling and mouth frowning. “Not over this.”

“But you can cry.”

Giyuu pulls away but doesn’t stray. He only traces his thumbs over Sabito’s rapidly dampening cheeks, catching each raindrop before it can fall.

“You see me cry all the time,” he reminds him.

“That’s because — you’re —”

“Sabito,” Giyuu says. “Silly Sabito. You can still cry too.”

And when he finally does, silently, and secretly, Giyuu tries to smoosh away the tears too. 

He chases them valiantly with his mouth, only to pause when the bitter oil of paint smudges against his teeth and tongue. Airy sobs turn into wet giggles as he turns to spit it out — drenched joy, but still, brilliant joy — and Giyuu thinks he’d swallow all these pots and poison and throw them back up a thosuand times more if only to make Sabito laugh again, just like that.

As it is, he can only catch Sabito’s hands before he tries to cover his eyes again. Life stains the gaps bridging them, endless colors smearing and melting as Giyuu leads their intertwined fingers to his own face.

They abandon their masks and mission altogether. 

They take to coloring one another instead. 

Buttercup of Sabito’s sodden joy. Carmine of his childish blush. Lilac of the stars glittering in his irises, tangerine of his hair sticking to his teary mouth. 

Pink of his childhood wound, like cherry blossoms, like fraying carnations, as Giyuu traces the shooting star of his courage. 

He heard somewhere — from Tsutako, maybe — that you’re supposed to make a wish when you see one. 

He doesn’t know if she was lying about that too.

But foolishly, he wishes anyway. 

Wishes away Sabito’s pain. Wishes time would leave them alone. Wishes Urokodaki won’t get too mad when he finds half his paint supply missing.

Wishes there was something more to this. Something like forever. 

A pocket of time beyond the cutthroat horizon where he can stay by Sabito’s side for as long as he’ll have him. 

Slayer or Hashira or nothing at all. 

Just Sabito and Giyuu, Giyuu and Sabito. He wishes, he wishes, he just wishes —

— he wishes it would stop.

Something spills hot between his quivering fingers, blinding him to half the world, red of his eye, red of his hands, red of his lungs he can hardly fill with air. There’s so much of it, so much red, so much blood on Tsutako’s robes again, he’s somehow surprised by it even now. How can a body have this much blood?

Footsteps pound through the underbrush in a hurry.

Someone grasps his shoulders, hoisting him up.

It’s Sabito, he sees, breath rushing out his chest. 

Or at least, it’s Sabito’s foxface.

Giyuu’s own lays shattered on the ground, cleaved into pieces. So much for luck. He can’t make out the shape of Sabito’s eyes or the twist of his mouth or the pinch between his brows, not like this. He can only latch onto that telltale mark on his cheek like true North, always there, whether slashed through ivory or flesh.

“Giyuu,” Sabito says, or maybe he’s been saying that for a while. “Giyuu, listen to me. It’s going to be alright. Put pressure on it, yeah? Don’t let up.”

All the while, his thumbs smooth gentle circles into Giyuu’s arms. A moment of lull, fleeting second of calm.

Then, Sabito turns to the side. 

There’s a kid beside him who’s staring fearfully up at them. He had been with Giyuu when the first demon attacked. 

He had been with them, too, when Sabito slashed right through it.

“You,” he points. “What should I call you?”

The kid blinks owlishly, sweat dripping into his collar.

“M-Murata,” he breathes.

“Murata. Take care of him, okay?” Sabito commands, before he begins to stand.

No. No no no no no. 

With strength he isn’t sure he should have, Giyuu surges forward and snatches Sabito’s hand. 

Immediately, their skin smears. Crimson taints life and heartlines.

He’s getting dizzy.

So, so dizzy.

“Sabito, please don’t go,” he begs shakily, and he thinks he’s already said this before, to someone else, long ago. “Don’t leave. I can — I can still do it. Just — don’t go away, Sabito, please.”

He can’t see Sabito’s face, he can’t see his face, why can’t he see that face.

But he feels the small hand that covers his own.

It squeezes only once, sweat-sticky and blood-slick —

Before prying Giyuu’s fingers off, one by one.

“Don’t follow me, duckling,” Sabito says, soft. “I’ll be right back.”

With that, he begins to run. 

Giyuu thinks he cries out when he goes. Thinks he tries to get up and chase after him, too. 

Arms lock around his body before he can move — child holding back child, orphan saving orphan. 

As he struggles against those hands, the world around him rapidly begins to blur and tilt.

And for one moment, he sees it. Sabito’s kid-face tucked away, safe, behind a willow-carved sky of blues and pinks and clementines. His scar is not the red of toughened skin or the elegant beige of a proper imitation, but a streak of gold dashing through the dreamy clouds of his cheeks. 

Giyuu really wants to call after him, one more time. 

But it’s getting so hard to breathe. He just can’t hold himself up anymore. 

Someone that isn’t Sabito yells out his name, once —

Before he tips over and sees nothing else.

Fifteen children scale the mountain. 

Fourteen come down.

They call it the miracle year.

The first time Giyuu finds out, he screams.

He screams, or he thinks he does. 

He doesn’t quite remember anymore. 

Only the taste of metal in his throat, and the acrid sting of tears spilling from an eye that should not exist.

The second time he finds out, he says nothing at all. He’s picking up the only shreds of his yukata that were left, and he’s thinking about how hard it must have been to pry off petrified skin.

The third time he finds out, he’s limping his way back down the mountainside. 

Fujikasane makes no noise, only offering in return a trembling crow pecking at his ear, cawing out meager summons home.

He finds out the fourth time when Urokodaki sees him return alone. He finds out the fifth time when the man collapses and hauls him close. 

He finds out the hundredth time in wept apologies and prayers to gods that don’t exist, you’re here you’re still here at least you’re still here.

He finds out when the crows nudge the bloodstained side of his clothes, not scavenging, but drawn to carrion all the same.

He finds out when he sees that mask beneath the pillow. Right where they left it.  

He finds out with every stumble, every waver, every instinctive look over his shoulder. He finds out when pain pulses through the creaking hinge of his eyelid, when he shatters yet another sword over his hands, when he goes his fifth then sixth then seventh day without eating. He finds out as if he’s lost a limb, as if he’s severed his hearing, as if gravity itself were left reeling in his wake. 

He finds out when that whistle comes again late in the night, louder than before, taking the shape of forlorn words and empty bedrooms and emptier hearts —

Weren’t there two of you?

Every cut oozing in his palms, every splinter between his teeth, every stitch in his body, every breath hitched, every meal rejected, every movement made, every thumb broken, every nightmare dreamt, every day gone by —

Natural law asks, confused, where did the other one go?

So he finds out. Over and over and over and over and over again, because how many times, how many more times will it take to finally get it through your fucking head —

Sabito is dead.

Sabito is dead.

Sabito is dead.

Sabito is dead.

Sabito is dead.

He is to set off north, to a village where eleven have disappeared without a trace. 

It will take two days to get there. Three, if the storm curdling in those clouds decides to slip out earlier. There is no telling how many more will vanish in those forty to seventy hours alone. 

So Giyuu leaves Urokodaki Sakonji with a bandage over bleeding eye and a kasugai crow perched on his shoulder. His oversized uniform and newly sewn haroi sag on his body, the hem of mismatched lives dangling past his knees and knuckles. 

Sagiri is quiet as it watches him go. Foxes weep, lilies wilt, and graves won’t dig themselves. The trees rustle, as if to whisper, who will scale those peaks now? 

He does not look back at neither mountain nor master, but he feels the mournful gust of wind brush the back of his neck anyway.

Don’t follow me. 

A parting breath for which there are no words anymore. 

No matter what you hear.

The night he does it, it’s snowing.

Sweat streaks cold across his neck as Giyuu lowers his blade. He watches silently as the demon writhes on the ground headless. Its snapping jaws part with one last scream, probably a curse, one last-ditch attempt at skewering him with its barbed tongue if not claws —

Then, nothing.

The forest falls silent. 

The only evidence there was a battle at all lies in the echo of a plaintive cry, swallowed by the trees. 

Tipping his head back, Giyuu watches ash drift up, up, up into the air. His breath clouds and constellates before him, as frigid air settles back into the old haunts of his body. 

He should be careful, he knows that. The last time he’d gone away with no intention of returning, his arm had shriveled, and his lips had bloomed black and blue.

Still, he slumps over.

He curls up beside the indent in the snowbank where the first demon he killed once laid, snarled, then fought. Sludge soaks deep into patchwork haori and wounds, seeping beneath newfound tears in his uniform to graze bare skin. 

The blood on his sword is beginning to crust over black, even if it hadn’t come from a human. Kanzaburo flies in aimless circles among a deadened canopy, blacker blot against blackest sky. The storm has come now, and it’s getting too dark to see. 

He stays anyway. 

Urokodaki occasionally writes to him. He’ll send his aging crow to track him down across the country with thin scrolls tied to its leathery leg asking how Giyuu is doing. If he’s feeding himself and getting enough sleep, because the last time, he forgot. If his eye aches in the winter rain, because wounds like those tend to do that.

The letters go unanswered. 

Sometimes, if it gets cold enough, they go into the dwindling fire too. He tries not to feel bad about it — the shunning or the scorching.

Better if his teacher forgets about him too.

Heads fall at his feet. They roll, crumble, blow apart like dandelions in the wind. It’s as if he’s making up for lost time and chances. For what happened on that wisteria-shrouded mountain, only a few days or months or years ago. 

Giyuu kills another. 

Maybe it’s been decades already.

It doesn’t matter, the sound of a blade severing vertebrae. It doesn’t matter, the acidic taste of bloodspray in the mouth. The act comes easy now. Second-nature. Muscle memory. 

Sitting in the lavender shade of a sagging wisteria house, belt sinking between his teeth, he threads a needle through the new gash in his side.

The nuisance of dodging in time.

That part doesn’t matter much either.

Birthdays pass. So do death days. Ranks pile like bones beneath him as he keeps killing. 

There’s just nothing else to do. 

He shoves his head above that swelling water, and he stays afloat.

Giyuu’s shadow is a lonesome creature stretching blue between scattered trees. The opal divots of his footprints, crunching through sun crust and mush, are the only signs of life flitting through fields of russet white. 

This is going to be a tough one. That much, he could discern from Kanzaburo’s warbled ramblings the day before. A remote town far from aid. No witnesses or survivors. Just those unfortunate enough to stumble upon the entrails scattered through the woods.

The worst of them were the children. Their tiny doll hands, unattached to arms. 

Eyeballs, rolling out the sockets like marbles.

Giyuu makes his way through sludge and ice, one hand resting dutifully on his scabbard. The other brushes aside the frostbitten branches before him. 

It’s a rare day when the sun deigns to shine over snow. His exhales stain the air before him in mist and dew. He idly thinks that if the gurgled descriptions of mangled corpses, no older than he, haven’t turned his stomach by now, then he doesn’t know what the hell else will. 

(Twigs snap, one after another, beneath his careless touch. Fragments crunch like bones beneath his feet.)

((All the bodies blooming upon Fujikasane were no older either.))

The heart of the village, when he finally reaches it, is far more ghost than town. Most of the buildings have already gone dark and dull, windows shuttered tight to ward off more than just the chill. 

Death lays thick over the place — empty udon stands and darkened shop windows and murder in the back of the throat. The lone inn standing between two streets, and the loss tainting his tonsils like stones. 

Giyuu takes pause, casting one glance toward the lowering sun. 

Something painful scuttles through the corridor of his left eye. The way it always does when he can’t feel the sun, which is forever. Today, it’s worse than usual, a lethargic pulse starting high in his cheek then ricocheting somewhere deep beneath his temple. 

It seems he’s down on luck on all sorts of ends today. 

Reconnaissance is out of the question when he hasn’t seen a single soul since he began trudging through the main street, and there’s no telling how long it’ll take before the demon decides to strike again. It could be tonight. It could be in the next several.

Placidly, he hopes it’s not tonight.

His eye twitches, and he inhales deeply. 

It won’t be a good night tonight.

Giyuu pushes his way inside the inn, a single bell jingling to herald his entrance.

It’s just as desolate inside as it looks on the outside. A lone woman sits behind the counter, her frail, sagging face framed with graying wisps of hair. She looks halfway to dozing, malformed dreams darting away at the jolt of his intrusion.

Shadowed eyes blink blearily, then stare back at him. 

They widen when he doesn’t disappear with the adjusting light.

“— Oh!” 

The innkeeper scrambles to her feet, straightening her collar with trembling hands.

“I’m so sorry for my manners, dear,” she says hastily. “I really wasn’t expecting anyone to come in today. It’s been — well —” 

“It’s alright,” Giyuu finds himself saying. 

He sees the moment her stare drifts down to the blade by his side. 

Most people who see it just end up averting their gazes. Not their problem, they’ll think to themselves as they inch their way around a wider berth. 

Sometimes, Giyuu does get the point-blank glares. The confusion and the quickening of paces. Those are the times he tries to pass himself off as an overenthusiastic kenjutsu student, just without the enthusiasm.

Most times, that doesn’t work. 

But this innkeeper just stares. Doesn’t question and doesn’t evade. Something unreadable trembles in corners of her eyes as they meander the length of his sword, and all Giyuu can do is let the fabric of his haori fall before his thigh. 

It’s too late to play pretend, he knows. 

He hopes it will be sufficient, anyway. 

“I just need a place to stay for the night,” he says, quiet. “Will that be alright?” 

The moment passes as quickly as it came. 

The old innkeeper blinks again, shakes her head once as if to dislodge a nagging thought, and perks up. 

“Of course,” she answers. “We have many rooms open.” 

Wobbling her way around the counter, she reaches out toward him. Warm, wrinkled hands clasp around his own, where Giyuu feels the metal ridges of a key press into his palm.

Knobbly fingers bend his own into an approximation of a fist, but they don’t let go. He stiffens when he realizes she won’t. 

Because she’s staring at him with that look again.

Lips trembling in that thin, ghostly smile. 

“Stay as long as you’d like, my boy,” she says softly.

His fingers twitch, and his palm starts to sweat. 

Pulse fluttering in his palm, he nearly has to wrench his wrist away. 

“Thank you,” he says, minutes and eons too late. “But that won’t be necessary.”

He doesn’t plan on staying long, after all. It’s the same deal as it has always been. He’ll either do his job and get out in no time, or he’ll be laid down for the rest of eternity — 

His incessant heart, finally where it belongs, in a nameless grave.

Giyuu has learned, over years, to keep the door unlocked. It doesn’t matter what new monsters or miseries might slip in unnoticed. The worst one had already gotten inside, the night before a wedding day some two and a half years ago. Any stragglers after that were simply incomparable. 

So the rest come in, and don’t go back out. They tear their way through the floorboards of his ribs and peel back the wallpaper of his eye and unscrew the flickering lightbulb in his pupil just to watch it spark and fray. They leave him far messier than they found him — wet floors, broken china. Ghosts stuck on the table-corner of time, but never intruders. 

Intruders are only intruders if they don’t deserve to be there.

Tonight, Giyuu lies curled up on a sad lump of a futon, one hand clamped over his face. Sensation can’t reach him in the scars anymore — not by a long shot — but he can sense the dull give of his fingernails anyway. 

That’s how he knows he’s digging in far too deep. 

Outside, the gentlest squall rattles glass, oily with fingerprints and half-hearted cleaning. Cold seeps in through cracks in the window, as unforgiving as the storm that had found him that night the frost had nearly claimed him.

He wonders if he should try to sleep tonight. He wonders if he should gouge his damn eye out. 

He doesn’t think he’d feel much different either way.

(If he ripped that beating thing inside of him clean out —

He doubts he’d even be able to tell it was gone.)

Tucked away in the corner of the room is Kanzaburo, snoring quietly. He’s burrowed deep into his own feathers, more resembling a ball of black fluff than a proper crow. Even through one bleary eye, Giyuu can tell he is shivering.

That won’t do.

Many things haven’t worked out in his favor tonight. 

This can’t be one of them either. 

He’s grown rather fond of that frail old bird in their two-year tenure together, for all his indecipherable chittering.

Though, he supposes it wouldn’t matter, whether he adored him or pitied him or hated his tiny little aging guts.

He’d still be Giyuu’s anyway.

The seven-step crawl over feels like the longest journey he’s ever taken. His body protests with a wave of motion sickness so strong he nearly bites through his tongue. 

Head bowed low, as if that might stave off the empty bile roiling in his stomach, Giyuu can only blindly root around in the dark.

He’s in the middle of wrapping his haori around Kanzaburo’s trembling form when —

Knock. Knock. Knock.

His hand shoots to his sword first.

The chiding voice that is not his own comes second.

Stupid Giyuu, it murmurs, too fond and too imaginary. Demons don’t knock.

Sweat beads at the back of his neck, as his knuckles glow white around the hilt. 

He thinks he can feel his heart, stammering between his teeth and temples. 

“Hello?” he whispers. 

A beat of silence.

Then, a frail voice.

“I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, dear. See, we don’t have many guests as of late, so I couldn’t help but notice you haven’t left your room since you came, and — well, I wasn’t sure you’d eaten supper.”

Arduously, Giyuu begins to pry his fingers off his blade.

His pinky lingers on the very edge, curled around cold nichirin.

“I’m alright,” he forces out. “Thank you.” 

“...May I come in anyway? It’s still hot.” 

He closes his eyes, bites back another muted wince when pain flares again in his left temple. At this rate, he’s not confident that whatever the lady has to offer wouldn’t just come right back up. And if he does end up hurling all over her, he’ll simply have to up and leave, find somewhere else to pass the night. 

Maybe he’ll make it as far as the front steps before collapsing into the snow. Maybe he’ll lie there until he becomes fodder for the worms.

Maybe the demon will come for him first. 

(Maybe he could do one last good thing for this village, before he goes.)

Keys jingle from outside. The lock clicks softly.

When the door creaks open, the old innkeeper pops her head in first. 

She hefts a tray with a steaming bowl in her hands, and when Giyuu breathes in next, he can register the faint scent of fresh miso and rice.

“My, it’s cold in here,” she mutters as she wobbles her way over. “Would you like any extra blankets?” 

Kanzaburo has stopped shivering now. He’s the only one in the room who will be sleeping tonight. 

So Giyuu says again, with a shrug, “It’s alright.” 

Her eyes crease with years-old mirth.

“I get the feeling you say that quite often, young man,” she remarks.

He snaps his mouth shut.

Setting down the tray with a soft sigh, she begins to lower herself to her knees. Giyuu automatically reaches out to steady her as she sinks to the ground, hands hovering as her mouth parts on a soft whistle.

“Don’t worry about me, boy.” She waves him off. “Please, eat.” 

It’s a simple and light meal, the kind that anyone would reasonably feed the sick. The bowl is filled with cloudy broth, dotted with a few cubes of tofu and nori. The rice on the side is piled into a neat mound, still glistening with steam.

His stomach turns at the sight.

Fingers digging harshly into his thighs, he dips his head in a stilted bow.

“Thank you for the meal,” he manages. 

She only shakes her head knowingly. 

“You can thank me after you’ve eaten,” she insists.

Giyuu doesn’t understand why she’s even bothering. He might be the only soul staining this empty inn this late at night, but that should not matter.

He is merely a stranger, passing through this village of ghosts.

Gods willing, once he’s done here, it will flourish with life once more. Children will play in the streets without fearing teeth in their flesh, and parents will take down the boards pinning their windows shut. Nobody will ever know what transpired or what was even here — only that the bad has passed, as it always eventually does.

And Giyuu will hope, with whatever remains in this black hole he calls a chest, that neither he nor horror will ever return to haunt this place again.

His sister would know what to do, he thinks.

His sister had never meant for this to happen, he knows.

And then, he wishes —

He wishes she had never come up in the first place.

But pain loosens his tongue on cold nights like this. It roots around the boarded-up ghost towns and bedroom closets behind his sternum until it runs out of the skeletons he holds so dear. 

When it does, it begins to unbury whatever niceties remain too. Drags the dwindling good he houses out beneath its unforgiving incandescence, for the maggots and flies to infest them too. 

Tsutako was his best and kindest part, he thinks bitterly, as he reaches out. 

He hopes it scalds.

(Because she always was the most tolerable thing about him.)

The old innkeeper watches him with an odd relief in her weary gaze, as he lifts the bowl to his lips. 

When the broth doesn’t immediately surge back up, he chances a larger sip. 

Once he’s drained it halfway, he sets it back down and lowers his gaze. Wipes lingering salt off his lips with a twitch of his mouth.

“Thank you,” he rasps.

Again, she shakes her head.

“Forgive me for intruding, my child. I have lived in this town all my life, and I have seen many people pass through. People, as have monsters. Yet, I only know this, because —”

Chin trembling, eyes gleaming, she takes a haggard breath. 

The window panes rattle as the wind picks up its howling.

And when the inn begins shaking like it might just finally topple over —

“My only son once wore a uniform and sword like yours, you see.”

Something thuds in the attic of his heart. 

The beat skips over itself, broken. 

“I never asked him what it meant, though I had my suspicions,” the innkeeper confesses. “One day, he left home and did not come back. The letters stopped just as suddenly. That was years ago now.” 

Her eyes mist, and her voice begins to shake, horrible.

“I just — I suppose I just never knew it was a soldier’s uniform.” 

Oh.

That explains the looks, then. The misplaced kindness. The soup on the floor.

She sees in him a ghost long gone.

It’s not unusual. The time Giyuu has spent in the Corps now is about the same amount of time it takes the average hunter to die. He’s an anomaly, he knows this. Perhaps the luckiest bastard there is. For it goes one of two ways for slayers —

Either there is nothing left to return, or no one left to return to.

Gnarled hands reach out to his, holding him tight. They both know how most stories end.

“Oh, you’re so young,” she says brokenly, almost angrily. “Why are you always children? Why are you always so young?”

Pain loosens his tongue. Pulls apart his control. It visits and revisits the same way sunlight streaks through empty seas — it gets everything and everywhere. 

And just as he knows the shadows it casts will be forever and long, Giyuu knows he ought to push her away too. He isn’t her son, because her son is either a deserter or dead, and he still is not. No, he leaves behind a trail of dilapidated bodies like footprints and evidence, marking the poor misfortune which has kept him alive all this time. The corpses that can’t crumble to ash in the sun, he houses six feet beneath white chrysanthemum childhood. Each and every day they’re dragged back to shore, bloated and blistering and broken, he buries them again, twice as deep.

His nails will always be stained in funeral soil.

“How old are you?” the innkeeper asks. 

Her hands are so gentle on his. He doesn’t pull away. 

He doesn’t think he could even if he tried.

“Fifteen,” Giyuu whispers. 

“You must be so tired,” she says, just as soft. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” 

He says nothing else.

It’s enough.

The soup goes cold and forgotten as she sighs, pulling him forward. 

And, just for tonight, Giyuu lets himself fall. Lets her press his forehead to her quivering shoulder.

Lets her rest a hand over the jagged curls of his hair. 

“I’m sorry, sweet boy,” she keeps saying, as if in prayer. “I’m so sorry.”

Something warm trickles down Giyuu’s cheek as he closes his eyes, falling into the corner of his lips. 

It’s not blood, or sweat.

It only tastes of the sea. 

That first night, he sleeps.

He dreams of smiles blurred around the edges, of eyes like mountain lilies. Of a hand brushing across his cheek with fingers stained with color and life, leaking beneath skin. 

Then, when that gentle apparition leaves, he dreams of blood as light as water. 

Of grief, not yet so immovable, nowhere near as wide. 

The second night, a shriek pierces the still air. 

And Giyuu bolts.

It isn’t one of the fabled twelve. He’s certain they wouldn’t send someone like him after one alone anyway.

Even reeking of metal and rot, telltale kanji don’t mark its glowing irises. 

If he fails tonight, they might.

“Oh? What’s this,” a voice dripping with blood garbles. “Are the Corps accepting damaged goods now?”

Snow explodes in his wake as Giyuu races forward.

The warmth is what hits him first. Then the familiar, bitter tang.

Drops of obsidian blood land in the corner of his mouth as nichirin shreds through flesh.

The moment he feels his fingers close around the still-pulsing warmth of a hand no bigger than his, Giyuu jumps.

A demonic bellow shakes deadened trees. Stray twigs and icicles shake then snap against his body as he weaves his way through wintry woods. He pays no mind to the new nicks or tears or the pounding of the chase. 

Only the feeling of wind whipping his cheeks —

And the trembling fingers grasping onto him for dear life.

Giyuu slows only when he comes across a divot in the ground, hidden by barren thickets and fallen logs. 

There is no time. It will have to do.

“Stay hidden,” he manages to command as another angered shriek pierces the night like collapsing glaciers. “Run if you must.”

The girl he’s not-so-gracefully plopped into the earth whimpers and cowers, but nods.

He doesn’t wait for anything else.

It’s a gamble at this point. Either the demon is hungry enough to still go for the child, or it’s pissed off enough to go after Giyuu. He’s fought enough of them by now to know, generally, how it goes.

So he wagers it all on the latter, and takes off.

Only moments later, he hears more than feels the telltale whistle of displaced air.

Giyuu whips around just in time to slice through the tree trunk hurtling at his face. Pine dust and frost flutters down around him.

Standing before him, the demon is whole again. Its scaley shoulders rise and fall with growling breaths. 

Whatever he’d managed to slice off minutes ago has already grown back, good as new.

“You’re not the first to try, you know,” it snarls.

Leveling his sword again, Giyuu’s breath mists before him in a hiss.

“I’ve eaten many brats like you,” the demon continues, indifferent. “Though you look the least lively of them all.”

He hates it. 

Hates when they talk. Hates when they grin. 

Hates when they gloat and brag and taunt, as if he gives a single damn. 

He doesn’t.

“Water Breathing, Tenth Form,” Giyuu says. “Constant Flux.”

Blood sprays in geysers across his face.

Just as quickly, the wound scabs over.

So he throws everything he knows at it. Every form and favor he can think of. He knows his movements are off today. A little more jagged, a little less graceful. 

Yesterday it had been penance.

Tonight, it’s life or death. 

Between dodging claws and gnashing teeth, he manages to wish, for a single fleeting second, that he’d accepted more salve from the healers the last time he’d dragged himself through their doors.

“What’s wrong, brat?” the demon taunts as Giyuu grits his teeth and unleashes another series of attacks, parrying his blade each and every time. “Bit off more than you could chew?”

He slices off a hand.

It grows right back.

Takes off half that neck.

Is thrown into the trees.

Crack!

The demon tears up another trunk, roots and all.

This time, when it comes hurtling toward him —

Kanzaburo lets out a warning screech.

Giyuu, rolling through the snow and back onto his feet, blinks. He’d left him asleep at that inn. He shouldn’t be out here. Why the hell is Kanzaburo here?

Then, a fist is colliding with his stomach.

Then, he’s being thrown through the air.

Wood implodes behind his back as he ricochets through evergreens. Air shrieks past his ear, screaming and screaming and screaming until he finally slams against stone, and —

He feels when his bones shatter.

Pain explodes through him, hot and searing. Tears instinctively spring to his eyes as Giyuu claws at the strangling hand around his chest, mouth parted in a choked gasp.

The world rabidly tilts beneath him, this way and that, as four then two then five monsters stalk toward him. 

“Scared? Hurting? Helpless?” one serpentine voice booms. “Good. Tastes better that way.”

Iron lines the seams of Giyuu’s mouth, dripping down his throat. Warmth trickles down his face, blotting out that same old eye. He needs to breathe. He can’t fucking breathe. One or several of his ribs are broken — he feels the tissues flaying with every trembling hitch of his chest. 

But someone taught him once how to use his breath, didn’t they? 

Someone taught him that even when he had nothing, he still had his breath.

He has to. 

He has to have it. 

Because —

There’s a girl a ways away. Frightened. Young. Depending on him, of all people.

And he thinks that means he is not allowed to die just yet.

Scared? the demon had crooned.

No.

Hurting? 

Everywhere.

Helpless?

Always. Always. Always so damn helpless.

With one hand clutching his side, the other digging white into the rock behind him, Giyuu staggers to his feet.

He can’t see out of one side, not with the curtain of blood cascading down his face. He couldn’t really see well out of that side in the first place, so it doesn’t matter. He closes the eye and keeps it shut. He’s still got a working one left. 

Surprise flickers, for the briefest moment, through slit pupils.

Then comes famine. 

“Goodness, you’re a tough one.” Its leathery lip curls with disdain and drool. “I’m going to have fun with you.”

Had he known, when that foxfaced boy picked up the last blade he would ever wield, what was awaiting? Did any of them know, really? No more rosy eyes or white-cloud dreams. Only a place beyond the horizon where souls rest and cannot leave.

Giyuu was eight, perhaps even younger, when he first dreamt it: those lifeless doldrums where winds did not blow and waters could not dance. A place where sky is sea and sea is sky. Where nothing comes and no one goes.

He was twelve when he realized it was no figment of his imagination after all.

He was thirteen when he found out the only place it lay was past the horizon of his heart.

And now, he is fifteen — 

When he finally understands what it is he’s supposed to do about it.

So he lifts his sword once more. Raises blade, point blank, to carotid and jugular. 

Even drenched in his own blood, his hands remain steady.

Dead calm.

This time, when the demon lunges for him, he’s ready. He meets it, strike for strike. Claw for blade. An eye for an eye.

Giyuu shreds through each one of its attacks with ease. His legs are droves of mist cascading down mountain peaks, his swordhand the roaring river gutting the earth. He is faster than he’s ever been before, even when he had two working eyes and lungs.

Even when he’d breathed through an unbroken heart.

The force of his retaliation sends the demon panting and skidding through a giant plume of snow. 

“What is this?” 

Pupils dilate then contract in turn. It wheezes out a bloodsoaked growl.

“I’ve eaten countless of you Water Breathers. Never have I seen this before.”

Its eyes sharpen, as it rights itself. Its smile has completely disappeared.

“What are you?”

Giyuu straightens, reaches up, wipes his bloody blade upon his shoulder. 

When he can make out the glint of navy metal once more, he surges forward for the last time. 

A pair of crossed wrists block the downswing of his katana. Nichirin slices halfway through bone, but no further.

“You’re not a Hashira, aren’t you? I know the difference. Tasted it too!” it keeps babbling, manic. “White-button brat. You’re just a pathetic stand-in!” 

Someone giggles, racing past him in a blur. Footprints part the snow, a winding pair of which only one set returns.  

You’ll be Hashira.

Fury crackles through bullethole lungs. 

And you’ll be mine.

Anguish spills like milk and marrow.

“Enough!” Giyuu shouts, the command bloodied and mangled. He doesn’t know to whom he’s begging, or who moves first.

All he knows is that he can’t do it again, whatever he’d just done. Not right now. His arms are trembling, his muscles ache with exertion and agony. It’s only because of his Constant Breathing that he hasn’t completely collapsed altogether.

He can only do what he does next best.

Endure.

Giyuu had seen it — the lightening of the sky, the telltale blue streaking across the distant mountains — before he’d been thrown through half the forest. 

Sunrise is coming. 

They both know it. 

The demon’s growing sloppy, furious. 

Pride wars with self-preservation as it slashes across Giyuu’s chest, loses its arms, snaps fangs around thin air. 

Frustrated howls ring through the woods to no avail, and Giyuu spares no more words or mercy for its affliction.

When the first light finally bursts through stained-glass canopies, it drops and bolts.

Giyuu doesn’t think.

He throws his sword.

It misses its nape, like he knew it would. 

So he impales it against the last tree standing instead.

Angered shrieks dissolve into pained wails, awful like metal against metal. Talons curl around the katana as smoking arms ready to tug it out, but Giyuu is already there. 

He shoves both hands over the hilt. 

Bark splinters beneath the force of it, and for a second, he wonders if his blade will too.

“What are you doing?!”

Wild yellow eyes meet his. Puffs of winter air scald his face. He is close enough he can nearly taste it, all those bodies left to rot between its teeth. 

“Kill me if you’re going to kill me, coward!” the demon screams. “Cut my head off! Do it like a real man!”

Spittle lands in his hair. Curses graze his cheeks. 

Giyuu closes his eyes just as skin begins to rupture. 

“Please,” someone hisses, “let it go, just let it go —”

The stench of ash hits his nose, and just as quickly, whatever rage was left in the monster dissolves entirely into tormented sobs. 

“It wasn’t my fault! They made me like this! I wanted to live! I just wanted to live!” 

Giyuu holds it down with silence. Lowers his head and pins the horrid creature, like a bug with a broken wing.

He’s heard these stories, over and over and over again. 

The ending never changes. Not his, nor theirs. Too few walk out the mountains alive. 

Certainly not children.

“You — you’re no better!”

Something soft, like dust, floats past his face. He feels claws fist in his sleeves, scoring twin lacerations down his arms. One last desperate attempt not to fall alone.

“You’re no better. You’re no better,” is all it can repeat, loud and then strained and then an amalgamating echo of itself, as the last tendons stringing it together finally snap apart.

You’re no better.

Somewhere far away, a bird begins to sing.

Warmth creeps over the back of his neck.

Giyuu collapses against the tree, breaths stuttering out an iron-drenched mouth. 

Plip. 

Plip. 

Plip. 

Field of carnations bloom beneath him. 

He watches the petals unfurl numbly.

“Giyuu!”

Wings flap and feathers rustle as Kanzaburo descends upon him. Sharp claws dig into his trembling shoulders as he pulls at his hair, pecks at his cheeks.

“Giyuu!” he caws again, throaty and far too loud. “Stay alive! Giyuu!”

He doesn’t bother correcting him that he is not dead. Not yet. 

He only leans his forehead into the butt of his sword, letting the solid weight of it pierce his aching skull. 

Plip. 

Plip. 

Plip. 

“Are you…okay? Sir?”

A softer voice, this time. 

Not Kanzaburo.

Giyuu picks himself back up like a ragdoll: maneuvering one arm first, then uncrooking a leg, unfurling his spine last. He immediately wishes he hadn’t done that last part, when his entire chest and back pulses like they’ve been kicked in. 

He supposes they were. 

Still, he yanks the sword out the tree in one smooth motion. Tucking it into the crook of his elbow, he slides it slowly across his uniform. Black blood soaks into black cloth.

When he turns around to meet the little girl’s gaze, she’s already drifted closer. She must be younger than him by a few years. Her round face is smudged with ash and dust, scraped up only at the jaw. 

Her eyes shine with unshed tears, lips trembling with the threat of a relieved sob — 

Though when she reaches out her hands, it’s only with a strange sort of reverence.

It’s misplaced at best. It makes his skin crawl.

Giyuu swallows his admonishments and denials. Tastes bitter copper in the divots of his teeth. Swishes it around and spits it back out.

“It’s alright now,” is what he tells her, ragged and worn and only halfway untrue. “Let’s go home.”

The innkeeper is not there by the time he returns.  

Giyuu lingers only as long as it takes to bind himself with bandages and wipe the blood from his body. But even as he measures his movements, spending no more than utterly necessary, every breath still aches. Sharp pulses thud excruciatingly through him as bones creak and marrow leaks.

But it’ll just have to do.

Kanzaburo is happy to settle on his shoulder, nibbling on a piece of hair as Giyuu slowly meanders his way downstairs. 

Outside, nobody else has arisen. Nobody even knows what happened.

He leaves behind the key and every coin he has left on the counter as he goes. 

Heads roll. Suns rise. Ashes fly. 

And Giyuu, stumbling and sinking to his knees when the agony in his chest finally overtakes him —

Giyuu is no better.

A crow shrieks somewhere high above. 

Metal fills his mouth as someone hefts him up on their back. 

That’s strange. He doesn’t remember calling for anyone. Maybe Giyuu’s grown too cold again.

He tends to do that.

If he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine it. For a second, the hands beneath his knees might just be the same scar-studded fingers that had once squeezed between his own. The ones that slotted right into his ribs like they were created in his empty space. The ones which told him with a promise round his pinky, to just pinch his nose and jump. 

Telling him, Let me go first.

Telling him, I’ll catch you when you come.

So Giyuu falls.

There’s a girl in the Butterfly Mansion just a few years younger than him. Her kid-face is full and bright like the moon. She tells him off whenever she catches him trying to drag himself out the recovery ward. 

“This is getting quite old now,” she chirps the third or fourth time she corrals him back into bed, rope clutched in too-delicate hands. “You’re wasting my time here.”

Kocho Shinobu is just as keen as her master swordswoman of an older sister, only with glass syringes and restraints and pills. The latter of which she threatens to crush and spill into his saline as she deadknots him to the edge of the bed. 

“This isn’t necessary,” Giyuu says out loud for the first time since he’d woken up in the infirmary, almost weeks ago now. 

Shinobu doesn’t smile, but she still squints beady eyes at him like she means to. 

“Then stop acting like a child, Tomioka-san,” she says snappily, before pushing away from him with a huff. “Good night.” 

It’s still morning. And he’s older than her.

He doesn’t point out this obvious discrepancy, only resigning himself to the sight of Kanzaburo hopping across his torso to his arm. He noses at the rope bound around his wrists, pecking at it only a few times before quickly growing bored of it too. 

Giyuu closes his eyes tightly with a sigh.

He doesn’t know why he’d thought the old crow would help.

Shattered bones take months to heal, months of time slayers don’t have to spare. Pierced lungs, even longer. 

With each passing day, his hair grows and his back aches. Dead skin cells slough off with every change of bandages as his body slowly, reluctantly knits itself back together. He detests it, the feeling of scars creeping like light over his skin. Immobility means he can’t stave it off. Stagnance means he can’t escape. 

Stillness lets him think.

How the sun-drenched yellow in his yukata is already paling with the passing days. How his sister had grown out her hair just as long as his is now, the year she fell in love. 

(How the gap between mended bones and festering wounds only widens, the longer he languishes.)

((How he is mostly, nearly, completely empty chasm now.))

The first day he’s cleared to leave, Giyuu makes a beeline for the creek flowing just behind the estate. 

He grips a handful of his hair and takes his sword to his head. He hacks away, away, away at it, rabidly and wrathfully and damn near fatally —

Until he can feel the breeze on his spine again. 

In the rippling reflection of the brook, midnight strands fall only down to his shoulders. Framed between unruly bangs and hastily shorn locks, whatever might’ve remained of her face is long gone.

Giyuu idly watches tufts and chunks of dead ends drift away as he lowers his katana. 

He wishes, sometimes, most times, that he could follow.

He leaves the infirmary for good with a fresh new ribcage, bad haircut, and two jars of ointment for his pain — courtesy of Shinobu, who had arched a sardonic brow when he’d quietly asked.

Though in retrospect, maybe that was just about the haircut.

Giyuu unscrews one jar and rubs a fingerful against his eye, gently shooing Kanzaburo’s encroaching beak away before he can snag a poisonous mouthful. Candytuft coolness immediately settles over scar and skin, skittering its way down his cheekbone then jaw. It cows the throb into a dull, occasional ache. Eternally there. Just not enough to bother.

Nobody else comes asking after him. 

So he picks a direction, and follows.

Killing time in the dull hours before he’s shuffled off the rack for yet another assignment is an old routine by now. They’re vagabonds, him and Kanzaburo, wandering past abandoned shrines and crooked wisteria houses and thawing tributaries. 

Yet, as he watches his kasugai crow carve dutiful circles through the stratosphere, he can’t help but wonder how many worlds still linger in the crags of his little head. There certainly must’ve been other masters, before he’d been saddled with Giyuu. He is longer-lived than most kasugai or slayers ever get to be.

Still, Kanzaburo calls. 

And still, Kanzaburo flies. 

It’s fitting, in a way. They’re two anomalies, bound by dirtied fate. Stuck together until the day their luck finally decides to run out on them too.

(He hopes, selfishly, when misfortune finally does come calling —

He’ll be the first one to go with it.)

“Kanzaburo,” he whistles softly, holding up his arm.

It takes a second for the crow to register his voice, before he’s squawking and flapping around frantically. 

He lands on Giyuu’s forearm in a flurry of caws, talons snagging his haori far too gently to ever tear.

“Giyuu. Giyuu. Giyuu,” Kanzaburo warbles inanely, as he reaches into his pocket and digs out a handful of sunflower seeds.

The days are growing long again. Winter is crawling away. He tries not to think too hard about how much time he’d wasted addling in that recovery bed. Three months, after all, is a quarter of a year. 

It sounds far worse when he puts it that way.

Lavender clouds skip over mossy stones then crawl up swelling creek beds, blips of momentary darkness that fade just as quickly as they come. Wooden panels groan beneath his feet as Giyuu trudges over an old rusting bridge, dodging gaps where the unlucky souls before him had already plunged through.

Tattered charms and fortunes remain tied to its trembling posts, surrendering to the gales in useless flutters. 

Giyuu doesn’t read through the wishes. 

He only pauses, long enough for the sun to finally duck behind the horizon. 

The mountains in the faraway distance no longer blush so furiously red. An endless road precedes him, winding toward their gentle foothills, tempting him to places he cannot name. 

Led by nothing but a swathe of alpenglow and stars, Giyuu pushes onward. 

Kanzaburo quickly grows tired of flying so aimlessly. He tucks himself within the folds of his haori instead, gnarled feet resting against his knuckles. 

They’re only halfway through the night when he sees the flames.

An orange patch of land glows in the distance, flickering brighter with every passing second. Denial comes first. Giyuu tells himself it must be another one of those mountain villages. A stray mining town or a sword forgery, blinking morse code through the dark.

It could even be just that — a wildfire. Natural disasters do still happen, as silly and inconsequential as they seem now.

Then the wind comes. 

A gust ripples through his hair, too hot for even early spring. 

And he tastes it. 

The unmistakable burn of ashen flesh. 

His chest still aches where his ribcage has just sealed itself. His legs still strain from the effort of dragging all those dead bodies around. 

“Kanzaburo,” he commands anyway, lifting his arm. “Call for backup. Come back to me.” 

Only when his crow has flown free does Giyuu unsheathe his sword and run. 

The scene, when he gets there, is a mess.

Flames roar high enough to smear the ceiling of the sky in sickening orange. Embers dance their way up the blackened skeletons of what used to be buildings and life, smoke billowing in thick columns through rancid air. 

Every now and then, the groan of another collapsing structure shakes the earth. 

And where the fire parts, two slayers lay sprawled on the ground.

Both look worse for wear. 

The one with twin scars on his cheek is cradling his leg, blisters bubbling where half his uniform was scalded away. Sweat streaks through the grime on his face, as his mouth twists in a muted groan.

The boy beside him, meanwhile, oozes blood from several cuts on his body. There are the typical occupational hazards — the serrated remnants of slashing claws or ragged imprints of barbed teeth.

But there is also the precision. Cuts made far too straight and steady. 

Contusions that could only come from the unfeeling edge of a blade.

Giyuu tracks the ragged tears in the boy’s torso and the lengthy trails of crimson flooding the ground. 

There are no corpses or bodies.

The only bloodshed on the ground leads back to the slayer — 

Who is already staring back at him.

Giyuu wonders, for a moment, if it’s worth asking about. 

The minute shift in air and atmosphere, as something comes barreling at his back, decides for him.

In a single blur, nichirin shreds through flesh.

The head falls to his feet with a heavy thump, jaw unhinged mid-bite. Already, it begins crumbling, neck to eye, ashes joining the flames roaring only steps away.

“Oh,” the dark-haired boy says, breathless. “You’re not a Hashira.”

He isn’t sure why this is the second time someone deigned to point it out to him.  

Giyuu shoves the sting beneath swelling floorboards before it can unsheathe its teeth and bite.

“No,” he agrees. “I am a kinoe, and you’re injured. Stay back.” 

Wiping his dripping blade over his hip, he prepares to turn.

He barely gets a few steps out when he hears the second voice shout.

“Wait!”

A bloody hand clenches around his sleeve.

Someone else’s fingerprints taint sage and sun with red.

Instantly, something nooses around his throat at the sight, the stench. The sight of gore on that side of his haori, always again, always forever.

Giyuu instinctively tries to shove him off.

But the slayer with the strangely ivory hair does not budge. 

He only holds on tighter, knuckles whitening with the force of his grip.

“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” the boy snaps. “There were more of them before you came. It’s the fire. They’re sustained by the flames, but it’s getting out of control. It’s —”

His jaw clenches, hard. Old scars mar the contours of his round cheeks, unfading beside the broil of fresh scrapes and burns.

“— It’s just the two of us,” the slayer finishes, embittered, like he’s pissed to admit it. “We can’t put it out ourselves.”

Then —

“We called for help.”

But he is not a Hashira.

Giyuu sighs inwardly, before finally reaching up.

He digs his nails into the slayer’s hand, harder and harder, until he finally lets go with a hiss.

“You’re bleeding,” he says. 

The boy’s downy brows twist, as his knuckles tighten around his katana.

“It’s nothing. We only killed the others because of this —” He gestures toward his cuts, and Giyuu isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean, but he knows that the longer they loiter here, the more time they’re wasting.

“You’re wounded,” he cuts him off again, firmer this time. “You won’t help.”

Steely irritation flashes in the flint purple of his eyes.

Not purple like mountain lilies, Giyuu thinks for a dizzying second.

Just an entire fire-stained sky.

But before that scarred mouth can open again with another argument, Giyuu is already shoving him back, harsh enough that he nearly trips over the crumpled form of his friend. To the sound of an indignant shout, he turns and runs.

He’ll just end this quickly. It’s not his assignment, but there’s no telling when backup might arrive. 

And there’s only so much of this village left to burn.

The flames have only grown taller in their lapse of attention. Hellish slashes of wind cling to his skin, curling the ends of his hair, heat dense and muddy enough to swim in. Not a single trace of winter lingers in the sinking town. 

In the distance, he can spot the hulking shadows of monsters, skittering over groaning rooftops.

Giyuu blinks sweat out of his eyes just as the second demon descends in a shrill scream.

Third Form: Flowing Dance.

Blood burns when it splatters thick across his face. Ash curdles in his mouth, so sooty he could choke on it.

Sixth Form: Whirlpool.

Flames hiss and singe as he carves out maelstroms and muscle alike. Sea foam froths then dissipates after only an instant, leaving behind trails of steam — pure white among such suffocating gray.

Tenth Form: Constant Flux.

Conjured tides heed his command to cover the land.

He doesn’t flood the town.

Just bleeds enough to set the dead adrift.

And just as the final inferno shoots for him, the highest and hottest it’s ever been, flames taking the shape of searing eyes, fatal teeth, killing hands —

Giyuu thinks, it may not work.

In the quarter of a year he’d spent wasting away at the headquarters, he’d never once bothered trying it again. He occasionally entertained the idea on days of exceptional boredom, but had never picked up his sword to replicate it.

For all he knows, it could have been a fluke.

A flash flood of a miracle he’d somehow invoked on the cusp of what would’ve been a timely, if not inconvenient, end.

His breath simmers. His heart stills. 

For a moment, not a single thing moves. Not even the haunted houses.

Only the whistling displacement of air, etching out his careful whisper —

“Water Breathing, Eleventh Form: Dead Calm.”

In a blink, it’s over.

The stench of burning blood fades like a bad dream, disappearing beneath the varnish of one clear, sapphire sky. 

Rivers go stillborn, and so do their seven seas. Clouds part like marbles rolled as sunlight eeks its way over the doldrums. 

And for that singular second, Giyuu can see them —

Every shipwreck and scavenged body, littering the bottom of that dull, dead sea.

Then that’s it. 

One glimpse, one memory —

And they’re gone.

Something wet falls upon his cheek, rolling off the curve of his chin and sizzling into the barren land beneath his feet. One, then another, then another. 

Giyuu looks up just as the rains stumble in, hours too late. The storm pounds heavy over charred roads and crumbled childhoods, sending smoke sputtering into steam. 

Through the torrential downpour, he thinks he can make out a blot of black, hurtling toward him. Desperate caws ring over the hissing silence, as familiar blur of feathers crashes back into his side, squawking and pecking. 

“Giyuu! Help has arrived! Giyuu!” 

His haori weighs like the dead on his shoulders, clinging cold to his spine. The rains carry the tang of metal and ash when they leak into his mouth. 

The next breath that comes snags brutally on a reluctant corner of his lungs.

Giyuu bites back the wince it tears out of him, hard enough to draw blood.

What a joke.

Rainwater soaks into his tabi as he agonizingly turns and trudges back to the pair of slayers. 

“Have you already sent for kakushi?” he asks as soon as he’s within earshot.

The burned slayer only gawks at him, jaw agape. His hands hang loose around his shin, like he’s forgotten he was even hurt there.

“Y-Yes,” he breathes out. 

His work here is finished then. He should leave.

Something stills him anyway.

Even with the sudden deluge cleansing the blackened foothills, red still leaks steadily into the ground. Cherry tributaries swirl in downy filaments, until they gather in makeshift puddles.

Giyuu painstakingly follows them all the way back to their source —

To the boy who glares like kintsugi.

“What?” 

His voice was so sharp and commanding only moments ago.

He has fallen quiet now. 

“What?” the kid repeats, louder. 

Giyuu works the words around in his mouth, curling his tongue over their bitter pulp. 

“Whatever you’re doing, stop,” he mutters. “It won’t work if you haven’t even mastered the fundamentals.”

Beside him, his friend blanches white. 

Cuts fold and tear as the kid, no older than himself, bristles and jumps to his feet.

“You think you know anything about me?” 

He sees it. He does. The guts and the anger that never flickers out. Not even under torrents furious enough to lift the seas. 

Giyuu knows, because he stands close enough to scald —

Catastrophe has already come for this boy too. 

He recognizes it, in the snowfall dusting the hills of his knuckles even when he isn’t brandishing a blade, in the eternity of scar-lines stitching together the cautionary tale of his body. 

The boy glares like kintsugi, after all. 

But he has paid in blood, not gold. 

(Someone or something else had made sure of that ages before Giyuu ever came along.)

“I know you hold your sword too tightly,” is all he says. “It will break one day.” 

Fists clench. Teeth grind in a scoff. 

The slayer just stares at him in disbelief, like he’s torn between punching him in the face or passing a hand through him to check if this phantom nuisance before him even exists. 

Giyuu doesn’t stick around long enough to let him find out.

He merely dips his head in a facsimile of nod, turning aside. Wipes his sword in the bend of his elbow and tucks it back by his hip. 

When he into his pocket, his fingers curl around the jar of salve Shinobu had given him. 

Two would’ve lasted him maybe half a year. One certainly won’t even get him through a couple measly months. 

He knows the scarred boy would only refuse it at best, perhaps throw it out at worst.

So he leans down to tuck it into the slack palms of his companion instead. 

And he speaks his final words to a pair of soldiers who, should misfortune come to claim its dues at last, he might never see again —

“You will need this.”

Rain envelopes him in brutal curtains as he picks a direction, any direction, and follows. 

This time, he tracks the scent of smoke, unerring and unending. Not even the eight scattered winds could tear this firestorm apart, because it’s the one that burns inside of him, befouling the seams of his heart, the tar-black of his soul. 

(Someone told him once that sorrow, like bodies, had a smell.)

((Giyuu knows he reeks of it.))

The day the summon arrives, the first thing Giyuu does is contemplate what would happen if he ignored it. Maybe he would be thrown out the Corps for insubordination, the first slayer in history to be fired instead of killed. Maybe his petty insolence would hardly make a difference at all. Maybe he could just lie, sorry I missed your memo, Kanzaburo mistook it for seeds, you know how he can be, and they’d nod solemnly and move on to the next man who had slain a hundred and twelve demons.

As it is, Giyuu opts for none of those. He does not know why.

The Demon Slayer Corps Headquarters are beautiful in the way childhoods should be left: untouched. 

Giyuu can count on only a few fingers the amount of times he’s been here. In all those times, he has never strayed further than the confines of the Butterfly Mansion, most times hobbling on broken limbs before he was wrangled and tied down once again. 

Now, he kneels alone, swathed in shadow, before a man not much older than him. 

The Master gazes upon him with clouding irises and a kind smile. His hands remain hidden behind his sleeves, clasped in the center of his lap, as he bows his head in return. 

Sleek black hair cascades to his chin. It does nothing to hide the burgundy rashes crawling their patient way down his skin. 

“Giyuu.” His voice washes him ashore, first breath back in sodden lungs, first light upon sore eyes. “It is so wonderful to finally meet you.” 

He closes his eyes. 

“Thank you, Oyakata-sama,” he murmurs. 

“I have a feeling,” says the Master, “you might know what I have called you here for.” 

Of course he does. 

There is no other reason why he, Tomioka Giyuu, would be here, blemishing the courtyard of the man who commanded it all. Dynasties topple, demons spawn, and despots shuffle in and out. But there has always been a Water Hashira, for every century the Corps have existed. 

There was Urokodaki Sakonji. There were others before him. 

And there will be others after.

Others who came along and extinguished the demons haunting lilac mountains, who safeguarded lives before they could ever dare to fray.

Others, who are not Giyuu.

(There was Urokodaki Sakonji. 

There were others before him.)

((And once, there was even somebody who would have been best.))

It’s been — how long, now? Just a handful of months ago, he turned sixteen.

Yet he still walks off-balance. Even after three years. Three years, time that most slayers rarely get. Three years, to grow older than he was or ever would be again. He is a bruise he’d gotten without asking, an injury he’d sustained without vanishing, and once upon a time, Giyuu had wished he never would. 

So, wish granted. The heavens listened. Now he’s a chronic limp, an off gait, a phantom pain thudding somewhere in the recesses of his heart. He is a full bodyache, he is burial soil beneath the nails, and he is — 

Oh, that’s right. He’s doing it again, he’s finding out again, was is the word now —

He was everything, and he was everywhere, and he even was once here. 

But whatever he was no longer exists. No more freefalls into the lake. No more foxes chased down the hills. No more stars in the sky and no more paints in the mouth and no more hands in his. The only thing he is is is anymore, is — 

He is dead.

(Now that’s the word, indeed.)

((He is always and forever and only going to be fucking dead.))

Giyuu tenses when he feels a hand touch his shoulder. 

The Master speaks nothing of his disrespect. 

He only rubs his thumb in one circle, slow and purposeful. 

“You have undergone unimagineable pain, my child,” he murmurs. “I do not ask this of you simply because you are the best or the strongest. Do you know why I ask?”

Giyuu does not answer. The Master does not let go.

“I ask because I see what courage it must take, to still rise with every sun, to carry on with every day, in the face of such unbearable loss. It is this bravery which our Corps needs, which I need. And it is this heart that I have found in you.” 

You’re wrong, he wants to say. Somebody has fooled you. 

He has never been brave. He has only ever waited on the sidelines. 

He has only ever been saved. 

Had the Master been anyone else, he likes to think he would have spat this out. Some childish, vindictive part of him, after all, had expected — maybe even hoped — for somebody cruel. Somebody who sat atop jade thrones with barbarity carved into the elegant lines of an ailing body. It would have been so easy to scorn him, then. So simple, to refuse the titles placed at his feet, to slash clean through the spineless being kneeling in the dirt. Whatever it was that the Corps were demanding of him now, Giyuu would have gladly rejected it without a single look back.

But Ubayashiki Kagaya commits no such acts. 

He does not sit upon jade. 

He does not gleefully send for death. 

He does not even point and laugh. 

He only touches him, this stain on his men, this blight on his honor — 

And he smiles, soft as light. 

“The waters you face are indeed wide, Giyuu,” he tells him. “But not so insurmountable. My only wish is for you to someday see it.” 

In the final hour before daybreak, the gold looks more like bronze.

Giyuu brushes a trembling hand over the front of the new jacket as he slips it on. It’s nearly ritualistic now, the way fabric glides cool and slick over his skin, the way the cuffs ensnare his wrists as he slides them through. He pushes each button into its proper place, lingering only long enough to trace a nail over copper insignia. 

After he smooths out any stray wrinkles that have disrupted the surface, he loops the ivory belt back around his waist. Ties back his hair with a single ribbon. Hooks his sword over his hip where it belongs.

In the mirror, he does not recognize himself. 

Raven hair. Blue irises. Long face.  

Scar-eyed stranger in a uniform that does not fit. 

He should have been the one on the floor of that house at the beginning of thirteen, and he should have been the one shattered in the trees and rocks and wisteria at the end of it. 

But that couldn’t be right.

Someone else had told him, centuries ago, that the last decision his sister ever made was to love him. 

That same someone had told him, too, it was a choice that she had not made in vain. He’d even yelled at him about it, slapped him around for ever daring to believe otherwise.

Well.

Giyuu thinks it was bullshit.

Because Sabito — 

Reckless Sabito, selfless Sabito, lifeless Sabito — 

was wrong. 

Sabito wasted what little currency he had left, and he paid the ultimate price for it. 

Maybe Giyuu should have kicked some sense into him too. Because hitting him had been so damn effective, hadn’t it? Oh, how he has lived. He’s lived cowering beneath the awnings of the greatest evergreens, lived digging fingernails into broken eye and face, lived making a living dragging the dead and bloated out to sea. 

He lets this life sit on the windowsill, in the back of the closet, underneath the bed — abandoned, unwatered, collecting dust.

But it’s there, isn’t it?

Here he stands now — stolen clothes, stolen breaths, stolen time. Thief. Liar. Imposter. 

Hashira.

Giyuu turns away from the mirror and picks up the folded mass of his haori where it had been sitting atop his bag. 

He runs his fingers over the split in color and breath. 

In the rugged faultlines where two lives meet only ever in theory, he feels it. That blue presence beneath his arm, toddling after him in sopping steps. It has grown with him over the years. It can walk without stumbling now.

It’s beginning to learn how to speak.

It whispers, neither serpentine nor malicious, still biting all the same —

They would have loved each other. 

But the evidence of their never-meeting drapes heavy over his shoulders, hanging down past his knees. 

(Would-haves sit too big on him.)

((He wonders when he’ll finally grow into it.))

Kanzaburo begins to fidget on his arm, agitated with their stagnance. Giyuu runs a finger over his wobbly head in silent apology, before bending down to retrieve the last of his things. It isn’t much, just a sack with the bare necessities. Oil for his sword, rope for tourniquets, matches for fire. 

He takes it in one hand, holds sorrow in the other. 

He picks a direction. 

He follows.