Chapter Text
Kyojuro’s mother tells him about soul threads when he is six years old.
“Every living creature has one,” his mother says. “It’s what allows you to feel, whether it be happiness, sadness, anger, or any other emotion you can think of. And it’s what also connects you to your soulmate.”
“How?” Kyojuro had asked, wide-eyed with curiosity.
“When you are older, you will begin to feel your soulmate’s emotions through the soul thread,” she replies, smiling. “You will be able to feel it when she is happy. When she is sad. She will be able to feel the same from you. Just like your father and I.”
Later on, after his mother pulls the blankets up to his chin and tucks him in with a kiss to the forehead, Kyojuro stares up at the darkening ceiling as the sun slips from the sky and wonders if his soulmate can feel him right now.
If his soulmate experiences all of his emotions, then Kyojuro wants to be happy for them. So they won’t have to experience the heat of anger, the cold of sadness, the sting of hurt. But he also knows that he won’t mind bearing their anger, their sadness, their hurt.
He falls asleep with a smile on his face.
***
When Kyojuro is ten years old, his mother turns from gentle, stern words and soft hands into a cold grave.
Don’t cry, Kyojuro, he tells himself, even as Senjuro hugs his legs and wails. You don’t want to make them feel sad either.
But even though he doesn’t cry, loss carves a deep, unignorable ache into Kyojuro’s chest, and he knows that even if doesn’t shed tears his grief will still be palpable. It’s a wonderful, terrifying, incomprehensible thought that somewhere out there, his soulmate feels the exact ache.
***
The first time Kyojuro feels emotion traveling through the thread, he’s so shocked by the suddenness and intensity that he nearly drops his sword.
For years, he had waited and anticipated. Fifteen now, and the only thing he has felt from the other end has been absence. Once, he had asked his father back in the earlier days when Shinjuro still maintained some of his temper when he spoke to Kyojuro.
“Some people don’t have soulmates,” his father replied. “Some people feel it later. Don’t worry yourself over something so pointless, Kyojuro.”
Pointless? Kyojuro wanted to ask. He had looked at the sake bottles, accumulating from one to innumerable after his mother’s death. Would something pointless do this to you? He wonders if his father would think it better to have never had a soulmate. If this grief is becoming too high a price to pay for love.
Now, though, as Kyojuro keels over his knees and gasps for breath, the first thing that comes to mind is that he does have a soulmate.
It’s only a few moments after the initial feeling that he puts a finger to the emotion curling deep inside his chest: fury. It gathers like storm clouds in the most humid of summers, thunder breaking through silence, sudden and violent and all-encompassing. Rage spreads through his veins for a reason Kyojuro doesn’t know, even though he’s never felt such anger in his life. For a split second, his mind is overrun with violence and Kyojuro doesn’t even have the capacity to feel or think about anything else. His vision blurs. His ears ring. His fists ache to break, to hurt, to kill—
As quickly as it came, it also leaves.
Kyojuro hunches over on the grass, too shaken to pick up his fallen sword. His lungs struggle to draw air back into them, mind reeling. He can still feel the emotion coursing through him, down to the very tips of his fingertips, a phantom that lingers when the material sensation has already dissipated.
Such—rage. What happened? Are you alright?
Who are you?
His vision clears until Kyojuro is staring down at his clenched fists. His exhale shudders and he belatedly comes to the realization that he’s stopped using Total Concentration Breathing. Slowly, he unfurls his hands until his fingers rest flat against the grass.
For years, he had imagined and dreamed of what it would be like—experiencing his soulmate’s emotions for the first time through the soul thread, becoming aware of their presence at last.
It must be happy just like his parents, Kyojuro had assumed. Feeling someone else’s joy like his own, what was once absence filled to the brim with someone else on the other side. It must feel like sitting by a warm hearth in the winter, like first buds unfurling under a season-long coat of snow, like the sun spilling over skin as the skies clear.
He hadn’t expected it to feel so much like dying.
***
The presence of his soulmate is intermittent.
Kyojuro doesn’t feel a single thing at the end of the thread for an entire year, and the possibilities are terrifying. As the days pass with nothing, he fears that something has happened to the person on the other side of the thread. He fears the first emotion he has ever felt from them will also be the last.
He doesn’t tell anyone about what he had felt that one early morning. Time trickles past until Kyojuro becomes more and more convinced that perhaps he had been wrong after all. Perhaps that all-encompassing anger had been nothing more than a figment of his imagination.
He finally feels the soul thread pulse to life again one night, summer heat from the day still heavy in his room.
There had been fireworks earlier that evening. He had taken Senjuro down towards the town to watch. Now, his brother is asleep in his room, and Kyojuro is supposed to rest before his next mission that he’s traveling for come daybreak.
In the distance, the fireworks are still crackling, faint but audible. A breeze sifts through the sliver in the window. It’s far too hot for any blankets, so Kyojuro lays on the futon dressed in a thin yukata as he tosses and turns from the heat.
It starts off as an ache this time, nothing like the abruptness of the first time Kyojuro had felt his soulmate’s emotion. Gradually, the feeling builds in his chest until it blossoms from a mere tightness to the near-inability to breathe.
Kyojuro blinks. Something warm tracks down the side of his face. He lifts a hand to his cheeks to find his fingers come away wet with tears.
Time bleeds and blurs. Kyojuro has no idea how long it is that he lies there, filled to the brim with this hollow, imprecise grief. It feels like forever that the tie through the soul thread finally severs and the sadness ebbs.
Slowly, Kyojuro unfurls his fists. He hadn’t even realized how hard he had been clenching them until he sees the crescents imprinted on his palms by his nails.
The finality of absence rings louder than the snap and crackle of fireworks in the distance. Kyojuro dries his tears and wonders if his soulmate is doing the same.
***
With frequency comes the anger again.
Time and time again, emotion pulses through the thread. Sporadic moments; sometimes lasting a few seconds, other times drawn out for what feels close to eternity. It’s still rare, but it often comes upon Kyojuro so suddenly that it takes all of his willpower to ignore the feeling and not act upon a rage that doesn’t even belong to him in the first place.
He wonders if his soulmate feels him through the bond as well. Abnormal as the thread is, if Kyojuro can feel something, so must they. Then he wonders what they must be possibly facing when all Kyojuro can feel from them is unending anger, all underscored by that sparse touch of grief that only shows itself in the oddest of times.
The questions that clutter at him, unanswered, lose their intensity as time passes. Kyojuro can hardly hope to understand his soulmate like this, so he sets it down and picks up more important things. Another year passes. Two. Demon slaying takes up far too much of his time to care for other matters, and only more so when Kyojuro finally becomes a Hashira.
He stops hoarding each touch of the bond close to his heart and lets the instances bleed together. He suffocates down any reaction when he feels that now-familiar fury. The violence behind the emotion washes away the rose-tint left by childhood until Kyojuro finally comes to the understanding that perhaps one doesn’t have to lose their soulmate for the bond to feel so war-torn.
He smiles as often as he can because his mother had told him to, and because some six-year-old part of him perhaps still holds the childish notion that somehow, somewhere, his soulmate can tell.
***
“SOUTHWEST,” Kaname says, perched on Kyojuro’s shoulder. “DEMON SOUTHWEST. CAW.”
Kyojuro narrows his eyes. A town lies southwest; it makes sense that a demon has chosen it as its haunt.
The August heat is a bit stifling despite the thinner fabric of the Corps’ summer uniform. Kyojuro strokes his fingers over Kaname’s feathers a few times before his crow takes off from his shoulder, circling close overhead.
He nears the town in a few minutes. There’s a festival tonight so the streets are bustling and bright with celebration. The red and yellow that decorates the streets is visible even from the top of the hill, and as Kyojuro draws closer, he hears the chatter of people.
The demon’s presence coils around the town like a snake in tall grass, ready to strike the unsuspecting passerby. It’s hard to pinpoint, so Kyojuro heads towards the town in hopes of getting a better grasp on its location.
A faint whistle sounds, followed by a crackle. Colors, resplendent and innumerous, splashes across the sky in patterns of sparks.
He reaches the edge of the busiest street. Most of the crowd is staring up at the sky as the fireworks continue, an undertone of cheerful chattering weaving through the streets.
The demon feels a bit more prominent now. Kyojuro breathes in, scanning his surroundings.
Another breath, except the next exhale trembles as it passes his lips.
Just like the last time, it settles over him in a haze, a feeling bone-deep and achingly familiar, yet too foggy to place a finger on entirely. It’s grief and it’s longing and it’s regret and it’s guilt, all mixed together to form one cacophonic pulse.
Shoulders brush against Kyojuro’s as the crowd moves past him. A whistle and another crackle, followed closely by another. None of it seems to register. Faces blur, noise deafens, until Kyojuro is alone in the crowd. Alone with this bottomless sorrow, because the person on the other side of the thread seems as unreachable as they were the very first time Kyojuro felt them.
Where are you? Kyojuro thinks, and though he’s long resigned himself to the pointlessness of the question, he also wonders, Who are you?
As the emotion slowly ebbs, Kyojuro lifts a hand to his chest. Through the layer of his uniform, he can feel the tumble of his heart, a steady beat underneath his fingertips. His surroundings sharpen back into focus.
Another deep breath in, and this time, the exhale is uninterrupted. Kyojuro lowers his arm and focuses his attention onto the demon as he makes his way down the crowded streets.
The fireworks have begun to simmer down. A few stragglers continue to light up, but the bulk of them have been released into the sky already. Kyojuro recalls that the first time he’d felt the grief traveling through the thread had also been in the summer, right after he had taken Senjuro out to see the fireworks. Is there something about this time of the year?
Someone’s shoulder bumps against Kyojuro with surprising force, jostling Kyojuro enough to make him stumble.
Kyojuro turns around. “I am sorry!” he says over the chatter, scanning the crowd for the person he had just crashed into. “I was not paying attention to where I was going!”
He’s met with a pair of wide eyes, blinking at him owlishly.
Black hair and brown eyes, framed with lashes so light that they could be white. The man looks no older than Kyojuro, dressed in a simple gray yukata that appears to have been tied rather hastily. For a few seconds, he does nothing but stare at Kyojuro.
“It’s alright,” he says at last, voice all silk-and-honey. A smile tugs at the corner of his lips. “I should have been more careful too.”
Kyojuro mirrors the smile. The demon’s presence is fainter now—he should probably backtrack in order to find it elsewhere if it’s not mingling within the crowds. Still, the man holds Kyojuro’s gaze and doesn’t seem to be making a move to leave, so it feels rather impolite to turn around and go without another word.
Kyojuro opens his mouth to speak, but the stranger beats him to it. “Is that a sword?” he asks, gesturing towards Kyojuro’s side.
Touching his fingers to the hilt, Kyojuro nods. “It is!”
A pause. The questions typically vary from what is it for to why do you have one or something along the same vein.
“Are you a swordsman?” the man asks instead.
“I am!” Kyojuro replies, a bit taken aback that he hadn’t been met with the typical amount of skepticism. Most people are usually at least a little bit surprised by the fact that he carries around a sword.
The response is a low hum, pleasant and unhurried. The man bends down and retrieves something from the ground. Belatedly, Kyojuro recognizes the wisteria-scented sachet that Kocho had given him a few weeks ago. It must have fallen out of his pocket when the two of them bumped into each other.
“You dropped this?” he asks, holding it up to show Kyojuro.
Kyojuro nods again.
The man extends his arm out, the sachet resting on his palm like an offering. “May I ask for your name?”
“You have many questions!” Kyojuro says, finding himself already smiling involuntarily. He doesn’t mind it. If he hadn’t been mid-mission, he would’ve liked to stop and talk. “My name is Rengoku Kyojuro. What is yours?”
“Akaza,” comes the response. “Here.”
He places the sachet back in Kyojuro’s hands, fingers brushing over Kyojuro’s skin for a moment that is long enough to linger yet too short to fully register. Then Akaza draws back, arms dropping loosely to his side. Under the firelight of the streets, the warm brown of his eyes appears gold.
“I won’t hold you here for longer, Kyojuro.” Akaza is the one to break the silence although he does not break their gaze. “You seem to be in a rush to get somewhere, after all.”
Kyojuro blinks. The demon. He had forgotten for a few moments. He should very much be in a rush.
“It’s alright!” he reassures. “I do have to go, but it was nice meeting you, Akaza-san.”
Akaza smiles at him. Kyojuro tucks the wisteria sachet back into his pocket before heading in the direction opposite of the flow of the crowd.
He swears that he still feels Akaza’s brief touch lingering on his hands, his gaze pinned to Kyojuro’s back. But when Kyojuro finally gives into the temptation to turn around and look one more time, Akaza has already disappeared.
***
Kyojuro finds the demon at the edge of the town, holding a terrified woman by three of six spindly limbs. By all accounts, this one appears a monster: despite the colorful, expensive kimono the demon is dressed in, her face is a mess of jagged marks, too ruined to maintain even a semblance of human likeness. The pretty cloth is torn with holes made to accommodate for the demon’s extra arms.
“How lovely you are,” the demon hisses at the woman, who seems to be too frightened to even move. She traces a clawed finger over the woman’s face, coming to rest right above her eyes. “I’ll fix that for you soon enough.”
Kyojuro draws his sword. Neither the demon nor the woman seems to have noticed him, but the latter seems to finally have snapped out of the petrified fear because she starts to sob a stream of incoherent pleas.
First Form: Unknowing Fire.
The air sings sharply as Kyojuro slices through two of the demon’s six limbs, enough to extract the victim from her grasp. He can feel her still trembling as Kyojuro carefully sets her down on the ground. Her fingers grasp briefly at Kyojuro’s haori before she finally lets go, a wild-eyed gaze fixed upon the demon behind them.
“Don’t worry!” Kyojuro tells her, turning his attention back to the demon. “You’re safe now!”
Flesh regenerates with a wet sound, the two limbs that Kyojuro had taken off slowly reforming. The only feature that is still recognizable on the demon’s face is the gaping maw, full of rows upon rows of jagged teeth. She bares a snarl at Kyojuro.
“A slayer?” she spits, gravelly and hoarse and disgusted. “How impolite of you to interfere with my meal.”
She’s barely finished her sentence before lashing out at Kyojuro. Kyojuro intercepts a limb before it can reach him, then swings his blade towards her neck. He manages to draw a thin line across her throat, but the demon recoils back before he can fully slash her neck.
“Hashira,” the demon realizes, taking a step away from Kyojuro. “You’re—”
She breaks off with a soft gasp as his sword cuts cleanly across her neck.
The body of the demon disintegrates first, crumbling into nothingness before it even touches the ground. The head of the demon is slower to go. Flesh to dust, Kyojuro watches as the mauled features shift into something more human. It’s easier to see her expression like this when it had been impossible to discern before.
“You promised me,” the demon whispers. She’s looking at Kyojuro, though she must have mistaken him for somebody else because she begins to weep. “You promised you would stay even if I were no longer beautiful…”
A breath of wind, a touch of ash. The rest of her words are taken by the breeze until the only thing left of the demon is a dimming golden coil where her body had laid.
Kyojuro has seen the soul threads of demons after their death in various shapes and lengths, but all in a state of disrepair. This demon is no different. The string is short and frayed, a darkened yellow that looks like rusted gold. The ends are even darker as if they had been burnt. Just like every other demon, the thread is too broken to hope to connect to another’s. What’s left behind is an ugly apparition of what should have been.
A few seconds later it, too, fades until there is nothing left but the once-beautiful kimono the demon had fitted on her body. It’s covered with far too much tears and blood to be salvaged.
Kyojuro exhales slowly, calming himself before he turns around to face the woman he had saved. She’s clutching her clothing in tightened fists, looking rather shell-shocked now that the worst of it has come and gone.
“You’re safe now!” Kyojuro says again, drawing closer. He sheathes his sword as he kneels down in front of her. “My name is Rengoku Kyojuro. Would you like me to walk you home?”
Two stiff nods. Kyojuro offers her a hand and she finally lets go of her sleeves to grasp onto his fingers.
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
“No,” the woman whispers in a small voice. She hiccups. “Th-thank you, Rengoku-san.”
They make their way down the hill and towards the town once more. Kyojuro matches his pace with her, although she seems to be in a hurry to get home because her steps speed up once she finds her stride. She remains silent, perhaps too shaken to strike up any conversation or simply too exhausted. Either way, Kyojuro lets her grip his hand with her own and doesn’t complain about the bruising force she uses.
The sound of the festival’s chatter is beginning to travel through the air when he realizes acutely that they are not alone. It is a sudden thing—between an inhale and an exhale, there is suddenly a stifling pressure in the air that hadn’t been there a mere moment before.
A demon. Close by, and judging by the way Kyojuro’s body instinctively characterizes it as a threat, it must be stronger than the one he had just dealt with.
He touches the woman lightly on the shoulder. “Will you be able to return to the town alone?” he asks, giving her a reassuring smile. “I suddenly remembered that there is something I must attend to immediately, but the path back home will be safe!”
The woman’s eyes flit around nervously as she worries her bottom lip. “Is something wrong?”
“You don’t need to be concerned!” Kyojuro says. “Here.” He takes out the wisteria sachet from his pocket and offers it to her. “This is a charm from a friend of mine. It will keep you safe!”
She accepts it with trembling hands before closing her fingers over Kyojuro’s. “Take care of yourself, Rengoku-san,” the woman whispers. Then she turns and hurries down the path, towards the warm glow of festivities that are still going on in the village.
Slowly, Kyojuro draws his sword, keeping himself aware of all his surroundings. He can’t quite tell where the demon is precisely, but it’s by no means hiding its presence. Demonic aura shrouds the trees like a heavy miasma, making Kyojuro’s heartbeat pick up as every one of his instincts tells him to run. He feels like a bird being hunted by a cat.
“Come out,” Kyojuro says shortly.
The leaves above him rustle with the night breeze. His heart pumps quickly in his chest, comforted by the familiar grip of his sword in his palms.
A twig snaps. Kyojuro whirls around, but the action must have been intentional, because he sees a pair of glowing golden eyes blinking languidly at him from the treeline.
Kyojuro slashes at the demon without wasting another breath.
It evades the blow with chilling ease. Faster than Kyojuro can blink, the demon has moved aside and the only thing Kyojuro’s blade catches are leaves and branches. When he turns around again, the demon has moved to stand on the path. Five sword lengths away, Kyojuro estimates tensely.
“It was rather sweet of you to send her away, Kyojuro,” the demon drawls. He smiles, fangs flashing bone-white in the illumination of the moon. “Now we can talk, just the two of us.”
The voice registers before the familiarity of the features do. Hand outstretched, Kocho’s wisteria sachet resting on his fingertips as he offers it back to Kyojuro. May I ask for your name?
(Akaza, he says, eyes crinkling into crescents of a pleasant smile when Kyojuro says the name back to him.)
He’s no longer dressed in the messily-tied yukata from the town, but instead a pair of loose white pants and an open haori. Dark lines ink around the demon’s features in symmetrical patterns, trailing down from his throat and over his arms and chest. There is nothing human about his appearance anymore. He is all too-sharp teeth, too-bright eyes, too-wide smile.
Kyojuro tightens his grip on his hilt. The demon had spoken to him and even touched him briefly in the town while masking his presence perfectly. He must be strong.
Sure enough, Akaza blinks again, unhurried. When he opens his eyes again, the slitted pupil has been overwritten by harsh lines of kanji.
Upper Moon Three.
Kyojuro has the brief thought that the Hashira rarely run into Upper Moons, but when they do, none have survived the encounter. Kocho’s older sister was the last Hashira to. The brutality of her death was no secret within the Corps.
But that’s irrelevant information to focus on now. Kyojuro works on steadying his breathing, ensuring that his lungs reach full capacity during each inhale.
“What do you want?” Kyojuro asks. Akaza makes no move to attack him yet. Instead, he lingers in the same spot, stance relaxed and arms hanging loosely at his side. Deceptively friendly, amusement coloring the curl at the corner of his eyes as he evaluates Kyojuro with a tilted head.
“Do you know what your fighting spirit looks like, Kyojuro?” Akaza asks after a few moments. When Kyojuro gives no response, he smiles indulgently. “I saw you immediately, set apart from hundreds of people. Everyone was so gray compared to you. You truly are special.”
The town. There can be no good reason that Akaza had been in the town disguised as a human. How many people had the demon killed right under his nose? How many cooling bodies are there right now, all because of Kyojuro’s negligence?
“I don’t know what you are talking about!” Kyojuro says. “What were you doing in the town?”
Akaza takes a step towards Kyojuro. “Are you a Hashira? You seem strong enough to be.”
“Answer my question, Kyojuro replies tersely. Leaves rustle overhead again, stirred by the breeze. The air is charged thick with anticipation of the demon’s next move, counting down seconds before the tension finally snaps and Akaza decides to break this temporary stalemate. Kyojuro just hopes that they’re far enough from the town when they finally fight that no one there will be hurt.
“Don’t look so concerned, Kyojuro.” The demon laughs, cruelty behind the carelessness. “They’re not even worth your worry.”
Another step closer. Kyojuro holds his ground even though instinct tells him to shrink away. Awash with the moonlight, Akaza’s features are all shadow and angle save for the inhuman color gleaming from his eyes. He is so near that Kyojuro can count each stroke of the cursed kanji and trace the cracks spider-webbing across the demon’s blue sclera.
“How many did you kill?” Kyojuro presses.
“Will that make a difference to you?”
“Yes.”
“It shouldn’t,” Akaza says. “Don’t think about them now, Kyojuro.”
His tone softens at Kyojuro’s name, infused with familiarity that Kyojuro does not want. Familiarity that Akaza does not deserve to speak with, because it’s been so long that anyone has said his name like that and Kyojuro won’t stand for hearing it coming from the lips of a demon.
Kyojuro slashes his blade at the demon’s neck.
Akaza reacts with ease as if he had been long-expecting Kyojuro’s attack. With one nimble movement, he redirects the swing aside with minimal effort and throws a punch towards Kyojuro’s left side.
The oppressive tension shatters, Kyojuro’s heart quickening to the beat of the fight in an instance. His mind clears effectively of useless thoughts until he focuses on nothing but what is happening in the moment, and what each next step should be. A mix of instinct and practice keeps him away from Akaza’s blows, even if the strength behind each is nothing short of monstrous.
One of Akaza’s punches grazes past his face. Behind him, there is a thunderous crack as the force splinters one of the tree trunks cleanly. Canopy meets undergrowth as the entire thing creaks and topples.
Third Form: Blazing Universe.
The demon’s limbs regenerate a split second after Kyojuro cuts them off. Akaza lets out a laugh as he dances out of reach. He moves in sharp bursts of power and speed, the rhythm of the fight entirely dictated by his unpredictability.
“Kyojuro,” Akaza calls, near-maniacal excitement coloring the voice that Kyojuro had once found pleasant. “As I predicted, your swordsmanship is refined! You would be perfect as a demon!”
Kyojuro narrows his eyes and swings at him again, this time with all of the strength he can muster. The only thing he manages to do is draw a thread of crimson over Akaza’s chest that opens and closes faster than the blink of an eye.
“I won’t become a demon!” he says sharply. “You must be insane to even ask and think I would agree!”
“Think about it, Kyojuro.” Akaza draws in too-close, enough that Kyojuro can hear the soft exhale that passes through his lips, a jarring antithesis to the brutality behind each blow. His gaze drags over Kyojuro fiery and icy all at once. “Don’t you feel it as well? We could fight together like this for the rest of eternity, and neither of us would ever injure or tire! You’re already—” Another redirected slash. Kyojuro fills his lungs to the brim and presses on, “—so close to perfection, but you’ll never be able to reach it in a mortal body.”
“I do not want your sort of perfection!” Kyojuro tells him. “Becoming a demon would go against everything I believe in!”
“Ah,” Akaza laughs, the sound careless in its entirety. “And what do you believe in, Kyojuro?”
There are many demons he’s fought before that have been difficult, but none measure even remotely close to Upper Moon Three. Akaza’s strength is incomparable to theirs; even now, Kyojuro is convinced that the demon is holding back, drawing this fight out for whatever twisted reason.
“Your definition of strength is built on others’ weakness and pain,” Kyojuro replies. Swing, slash. Parry, redirect. Every time he thinks he’s finally adjusted to Akaza’s pace, the demon changes his speed and pattern. “There is no perfection in that!”
Akaza’s lips twist into a sneer. “What are the lives of a few weaklings in the face of ultimate power?”
Something scorches Kyojuro’s chest, a mix of fury and frustration. “Every single life you have scorned was precious to someone once, demon,” he snaps. “Who are you to take and kill as you please simply because you have strength?”
Akaza seems to have had enough of trying to convince Kyojuro, not as though he had been doing a particularly exemplary job in the first place. His next swing is much harder than the last, speed picking up until Kyojuro is forced to rely on intuition rather than sight.
“So foolish, Kyojuro,” Akaza says, right by his ear. Kyojuro whirls around and sweeps his sword in a wide arc, except Akaza has already disappeared. “But it would be such a shame to kill someone like you.”
“I don’t feel the same reservations as you!”
Time presses on, flat and slow yet too fast all at once. Metal rings abrasively. Akaza’s voice threads through the discordant sounds, silk-and-honey, Kyojuro’s name repeated as if they’ve known each other for a lifetime.
Become a demon, Kyojuro.
Fight with me for eternity, Kyojuro.
Kyojuro isn’t sure how long they’ve been fighting when Akaza finally draws blood—this is nowhere close to an eternity, and he finds exhaustion already turning his limbs heavy and his breaths shallow. The forest surrounding them is fast-approaching a state of disrepair. Tree trunks toppled over onto the dirt, leaves and branches creaking in protest at the violence.
If there’s one thing Akaza is correct on, it is the fact that Kyojuro is a human, and he will inevitably tire. Every attempt to decapitate the demon has been unsuccessful, and this time, he is one second too slow and Akaza’s fist connects with his chest.
A sickening crunch. Kyojuro stumbles, agony blinding his vision for a few precious seconds before he coughs out a mouthful of blood.
In a show of faux consideration, Akaza steps backwards like he’s allowing Kyojuro the luxury of catching his breath. The world slows back into a standstill around them, surroundings settling in piece by piece. The air: biting. The inside of his mouth: metal and rust. Akaza’s eyes: gold on shattered glass, appraising Kyojuro with an unreadable expression on his face.
Kyojuro takes a slow breath, wincing at the way his chest burns with liquid pain that spreads down to the tip of his fingers.
He needs to keep Akaza from the village. He needs to kill the demon. He needs to push this until the sun is up, but it is hours away, and Kyojuro is already injured while his enemy’s body carries no remembrance of any wound Kyojuro had inflicted.
“Kyojuro,” Akaza says.
Kyojuro spits out a mouthful of blood. “My name is not yours to use with such familiarity.”
As if he hadn’t heard Kyojuro at all, Akaza continues. “You can’t hope to fight on for much longer with these injuries. Your ribs are broken.”
“Do not think for a moment that will convince me to become a demon!”
Akaza exhales, a faint hint of frustration crossing his features. Such an expression is disconcerting on him, so Kyojuro fixes his breathing back into Total Concentration before closing the distance again, aiming for Akaza’s neck.
The force of a punch tears open the fabric of his sleeves and draws a deep gash into Kyojuro’s arm. Across his cheek. Kyojuro loses count of each of his injuries. Fool’s gold. Deceptively bright, marred by strong lines of ink. Bone-white fangs. He can do nothing but focus on Akaza, putting aside every possibility of how this night may end, even if Kyojuro knows deep down that he might not be able to see the sunrise.
He’s tiring. Lead has replaced the blood in Kyojuro’s veins, and each breath is harder than the last. Akaza presses on, his voice faraway apart from the intonations of Kyojuro’s name that is spoken with quicksilver lightness. One more minute, Kyojuro tells himself. Another second. He just needs to press on, to stay on his feet, to anticipate the next move—
There is a loud crack as Akaza’s fist meets Kyojuro’s sword, and he isn’t strong enough to redirect the blow. Kyojuro’s back slams into the rough bark of a tree, vision blackening for precious seconds. He nearly loses his grip on his sword, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if he had held onto it properly—Akaza is faster than him, arm drawn back in a punch, and Kyojuro is too dazed and injured to move away in time.
Some ache buried deeper than the broken ribs pulses in Kyojuro’s chest. His thoughts circle to Senjuro, to his father, to the people of the village he had meant to protect. The soul thread feels stretched taut and fragile between his broken bones. Whoever it was on that other side, with all their anger and grief and pain, Kyojuro would never be able to meet them. He thinks he must owe them an apology, and wonders if they would ever be able to feel it.
Akaza’s eyes widen. Kyojuro braces himself for the blow.
The only thing he feels is the butterfly-brush of wind, inexplicably gentle.
Akaza has halted a hairbreadth away from Kyojuro. His eyes trail over Kyojuro’s face, searching. For a moment that spans like eternity, neither of them move or speak. Kyojuro can feel the harsh fingerprints of wood against his back, of the heat of Akaza’s body almost touching his. There is nowhere to go. His arms ache too much to swing, and his fingers won’t obey his mind’s command.
“Are you going to kill me,” Kyojuro finally says, when this silence has become too much, too oppressive.
Akaza blinks. The confusion drains from his features as he relaxes, fangs gleaming in a smile.
Unhurriedly, he lifts a hand to Kyojuro’s face, fingertips ghosting over with an infinitesimal distance. Then there is a sudden sting as Akaza drags his thumb over a cut he had left on Kyojuro’s cheekbone, smudging the blood further.
“Not today, Kyojuro,” Akaza drawls at last. Kyojuro’s heart beats with a rhythm that screams too-close, too-close, too-close. He needs to move but he can’t. “It would be too much of a shame, so see to it that you don’t die on me before we meet again.”
Faster than Kyojuro can blink, Akaza has turned heel and disappeared into the forest, past the glade of destroyed trees.
The wind whispers with the ghost of a voice still repeating Kyojuro’s name. Night air bites in sharp nips, accentuating the pain of his injuries that have finally turned acute once more.
Painstakingly, Kyojuro lowers himself to the ground, his body crying out in protest. He tries to unclench his fingers from the sword’s hilt only to find that he’s gripping it so tightly he can’t remember how to let go.
Upper Moon Three. Upper Moon Three had nearly killed him, but for some reason, left him here—heavily injured, yet alive.
The thought leaves a taste more bitter than the blood in Kyojuro’s mouth, even as relief soothes over at the same time.
Kyojuro tilts his head back. A black shadow circles in the sky and draws closer. Kaname’s call shatters the silence.
Beyond his crow, the moon looks down, a lonely light. A little like the color of Akaza’s eyes.