Chapter Text
Sanemi tried to be angry. He couldn’t do it. There was just nothing left to hate.
He’d burned himself out, like a raging fire that used up all the fuel at once. All that was left now was a pile of cooling charcoal and a couple of feeble, flickering embers. Now he had no protection against the cold concave feeling that encompassed his whole body. He had no choice but to face it.
Genya didn’t have a grave and somehow that made it all the worse. It felt like there was nowhere Sanemi could go to properly mourn him. He had his sword and his gun (which he was still sort of perplexed about, to be honest—if Genya could gain powers from eating demons, what the hell did he need a gun for?) but he had no other belongings. He had no pictures, no letters…
No letters.
Fuck.
Sanemi squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to stop tears from escaping. There were letters. Genya had sent letters after he’d joined the Corps. Sanemi just hadn’t fucking opened them. He’d burned them.
At the time, he thought it was for the best. He’d known that if he’d read the letters he would be too tempted to respond. It would have made it harder to push Genya away, and Genya was better off without him.
But it didn’t make a difference. Genya hadn’t listened. He’d followed him anyway, and was killed because of it. So Sanemi had made his baby brother think he hated him for nothing.
He tiredly rubbed at his face. Genya told him he wanted him to be happy. He wanted him to live. Sanemi was still trying to figure out how the hell he was supposed to live with himself after failing to protect his last remaining family member, let alone be happy.
It would have been easier if Genya could have just hated him. He should have, after everything Sanemi had done. But Genya believed in him all the way to the end. Genya was too sweet, too forgiving for his own good.
(“My nii-chan…is…the nicest…person…in the world.”)
The worst part was, Sanemi didn’t know what he would do if he got a second chance.
Trying to keep him away hadn’t protected him, but Sanemi couldn’t think of another alternative than to let Genya follow in his footsteps without a fight. Genya would live with him at the Wind Estate. He wouldn’t think Sanemi hated him. But he would still die.
He would still die, Sanemi would still fail to protect him, so in the end, what difference did it make?
The truth was, it didn’t. Especially since thinking about it was pointless anyway; Sanemi would never get a second chance. Genya was gone for good.
Sanemi looked at his hands, remembering the way he’d desperately tried to cling onto Genya like that would stop him from crumbling, pleading with him to stay alive until all that was left of him were the ashes that stuck to Sanemi’s blood-covered fingertips.
And there was nothing he could do.
And there was nowhere he could go.
And there was no way that could change.
And Sanemi wanted to die.
Once, shortly after he woke up after the final battle, Sanemi had gone as far as to click the safety off of Genya’s gun and press the end of the barrel to his temple. It would be so easy, he thought. All he had to do was pull the trigger, and everything would be over.
But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. For whatever reason, a reason Sanemi didn’t think he’d ever understand, the universe wanted him to live. He’d been on the brink of death, and against all odds, he’d still survived. More importantly, Genya wanted him to live. Sanemi imagined Genya up in heaven, watching Sanemi shooting his brains out with his weapon…
“Shit,” he’d muttered to himself, switching the safety back on and putting the gun back in the box he kept it in. “It would’ve been so fucking messed up to die that way. What the hell was I thinking?”
No, he couldn’t die yet. (Especially not like that. Geez.) But he didn’t know what else to do other than wait around for death to take him on its own.
His family was gone. His friends were all gone. He had nothing left, so what more was there to do anyw-
I need to visit Kyojuro’s grave.
Sanemi stopped. The thought had come out of nowhere. He hadn’t even been thinking about Kyojuro—to be honest, the last Flame Hashira hadn’t graced his thoughts for a while. So much had happened since then that Kyojuro’s death felt like ages ago, although Sanemi knew it had only been about six months. Still, Sanemi hadn’t paid respects since the funeral. Maybe that would make him feel better, he considered, albeit skeptically. He had nowhere to go for Genya, but this might give him the illusion of closure, even if not for what he really wanted it for. At the very least, it was something to do other than sulking around in his house all day. He’d go in the morning.
No. I need to visit Kyojuro’s grave now.
Before he could even process what he was doing, Sanemi was pulling on a haori and sliding on a pair of shoes. Kyojuro’s grave wasn’t far. He was buried on the master’s property, along with many other Flame Hashira before him. Sanemi could easily walk there from here.
Or…run. Yeah, he supposed he could run too. But…why? Why was he running? Why did it feel like such an emergency?
It didn’t matter, all he knew was that he needed to get there right that second.
He didn’t stop running until he’d reached the burial grounds, at which point he slowed his pace when he caught sight of the lantern lit right at Kyojuro’s gravestone. There was somebody already there.
It was the middle of the night; why would anyone else be visiting Kyojuro’s grave?
As he got closer, the person’s voice, soft but shaky, became clearer, as did his flame-tipped hair.
It was Kyojuro’s little brother.
“I don’t know what to do,” he was saying. Sanemi stood still. “Father has gotten better. He drinks a lot less and he’s been trying to get his life back on track. But I still feel like…” he trailed off. “You told me things would get better, and they have. But I don’t feel better. It doesn’t feel like anything’s changed at all. I don’t think the problem was Father. I think it’s me.”
Sanemi swallowed thickly. He should leave. He didn’t know why he even came here in the first place, and this was not something he should be listening to. He should give Senjuro some privacy. But he told his feet to move and they stayed glued on the ground.
“When you were still here I could feel okay sometimes, but now that you’re gone, I feel the same no matter what I do, and I just…I just don’t see the point in trying anymore. That’s why I…” Senjuro paused. He continued, in a voice so quiet Sanemi had to strain to hear, “would you be mad at me if I joined you?”
Sanemi tensed up ever so slightly. Was Senjuro implying he was considering suicide?
He tried to convince himself that he didn’t care. It didn’t really affect him if someone else’s little brother wanted to kill himself, did it? It was none of his business. Sanemi had never even had a single conversation with the kid. Well, Kyojuro had tried to introduce them once, if that counted. Sanemi couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said but it couldn’t have been anything very nice, because it made Senjuro cry. That was the angriest Sanemi had ever seen Kyojuro in his entire life. All Kyojuro had done was give him a dark glare and then proceed to pretend that Sanemi didn’t exist for a week, but for someone as friendly as Kyojuro it was enough for Sanemi to get the picture: if he ever made Senjuro cry again, Kyojuro would murder him in cold blood.
Sanemi tried to imagine if it had happened the other way around. What if he’d introduced Genya to Kyojuro and Kyojuro had said something that made Genya upset? Would Sanemi be as angry? He had no idea. Although, it was mostly just because Sanemi didn’t think Kyojuro could hurt anyone’s feelings if he tried.
Actually, if Kyojuro had upset Genya, Sanemi would have killed him on the spot only because he would have immediately assumed it was a demon impersonating Kyojuro. In fact, if Kyojuro ever interacted with Genya, it would most likely be Kyojuro who would get angry with Sanemi, not the other way around. He would probably say something to the effect of, ‘I’m confiscating your sibling, Sanemi, until you learn how to be a good older brother.’
“I know how I’ll do it.” Sanemi was snapped back into the present when Senjuro spoke again. “I’m prepared. If nothing stops me, I’ll do it in two days.”
Sanemi drew in a sharp breath. Oh. Senjuro wasn’t just thinking about suicide. He already had plans. That…changed things a little bit. He had plans, and now Sanemi knew he had plans, and so if Sanemi ignored this and Senjuro actually killed himself, it would make Sanemi partially responsible.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, Aniue,” Senjuro continued quietly. “But if you can, I guess I’m asking for a sign. That I shouldn’t go through with it, because things are actually going to change. That there’s a point to me staying alive.”
Sanemi sighed. He picked up a rock from the ground and chucked it at Senjuro’s head. There. How was that for a sign?
Senjuro yelped, hand flying to the back of his head over the spot where the rock had hit him, and whirled around to look for where it had come from. His eyes widened when he saw Sanemi, and he frantically scrambled to his feet, breath notably quickening. “H-how…how long have you been here?”
Sanemi crossed his arms. “Just for a minute. I wasn’t even trying to be quiet, you’re just really unobservant.”
Senjuro grappled for words. “Y-you weren’t…you weren’t supposed to h-hear that,” he managed to get out. “That was…for…my brother.”
“Sorry I intruded on your mental breakdown,” Sanemi said bluntly. “I was gonna leave but I was a little distracted by the fact that it sounded like you were asking your dead brother for permission to kill yourself.”
Senjuro flinched. He sniffled and finally pulled his hand away from his head. To Sanemi’s dread, it was covered in blood.
“Oh, shit,” Sanemi said, uncrossing his arms. “I didn’t think I hit you that hard.”
“It’s okay,” said Senjuro, which Sanemi thought was a weird thing to say about somebody throwing a rock at your head and cutting it open.
“Is your head okay?” Sanemi asked.
“I guess,” said Senjuro, which Sanemi thought was a weird thing to say about the status of your head that had just gotten cut open.
Senjuro sniffed again and wiped the blood off his hand onto his pants. He didn’t say anything else, just stared down at his feet like a kid getting scolded. Sanemi wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to do here. Senjuro was obviously expecting him to say something else, but he hadn’t thought that far ahead. This sort of thing was not exactly Sanemi’s forte.
It…it used to be though, right? He used to have siblings. He would have known what to say back then if one of them was going through something like this, but he racked his brain and still drew a blank. Senjuro reached up to touch his head once more with a wince. Right. A more pressing matter was probably the wound Sanemi had just inflicted on him. That would be easier to deal with. A memory invaded Sanemi’s mind, one he hadn’t thought about in years. His father had slammed Teiko’s head against the wall, before Sanemi could stop him. Afterwards Sanemi had apologized profusely that he hadn’t been fast enough, and his little sister had told him it wasn’t his fault, as he sat her down and pressed a wet washcloth to the wound.
Sanemi approached him. “Can I take a look at it to see how bad it is?”
Senjuro simply stared at him for a moment before he finally nodded, removing his hand. Sanemi parted Senjuro’s hair to examine the cut. It was hard to see with only the light of the lantern, but he could at least tell that it was relatively small. Sanemi had certainly seen much worse. “I think you’ll be fine, kid, it’s not that deep. But why don’t you come back to my house with me and I can clean it up.”
Senjuro took a step backwards. “No, I’ll be okay,” he mumbled.
“How about you come back to my house with me so we can talk about what you were telling Kyojuro?” Sanemi tried. Was that too direct? It…probably was. Senjuro wasn’t going to agree to an intervention, especially from a guy whose only two interactions with him were making him cry and inflicting a head wound on him.
More tears. Senjuro shook his head, refusing to meet Sanemi’s eyes. “I-it’s nothing.”
“Really? Didn’t sound like nothing. What kind of preparations did you make, exactly?”
“It’s nothing!” Senjuro cried, which caught Sanemi off-guard. All of the sudden the kid seemed angry, and he wiped the tears away from his face before continuing, “You had no right to hear any of that anyway! It’s none of your business!” So he had a backbone after all, at least a little bit.
“You’re right, I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping on you,” Sanemi said. “But I did, and now it is my business. Because if I drop it and you really do go off and kill yourself…” he angrily jabbed Senjuro in the chest with each accented word, “That’s your blood on my hands. And I’m not gonna be responsible for any more dead kids.”
“I didn’t really mean it,” Senjuro said weakly. It was a blatant lie and they both knew it.
Sanemi sighed deeply. He knew he was probably the last person who should be trying to talk some sense into this kid, especially about this, but it wasn’t exactly as if he could just let the actively suicidal baby brother of one of his friends go back home to his extremely dysfunctional home life where he had the means and every intention of ending his life. Sanemi had no choice but to at least try.
“I’m going home now,” Senjuro muttered, and he started to walk away.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Sanemi said. He grabbed Senjuro’s arm and dragged him in the opposite direction. “You think I’m stupid or something? I know what you’re gonna do if I let you leave. No, you’re coming home with me and we’re gonna have a talk.”
Senjuro wouldn’t quit staring at him. He sat at the table holding a wet washcloth Sanemi had given him to his head. He had a rigid frame and an almost petrified expression, like he still thought he was in trouble, even as he watched Sanemi brew and pour him tea, which Sanemi thought was an obvious way of saying ‘for the love of god, relax, I’m done throwing rocks at you.’ Senjuro’s gaze briefly fell to the tea Sanemi had set on the table in front of him. He didn’t drink it, he just fiddled with the cup and slowly spun it around.
“Do you not want it?” Sanemi asked.
“...It’s hot.”
“...Then blow on it.”
Senjuro did no such thing, but he did stop spinning the cup around.
Sanemi leaned back against the wall. This kid was impossible to talk to. He wondered how much sitting in awkward silence it would take to get Senjuro to say anything, and decided they would be there all night if Sanemi didn’t start talking. He didn’t bother easing into the subject.
“What did you mean when you said you’d made preparations?”
Senjuro grimaced and finally looked away, staring down at his tea. “Can we not talk about that?”
“Literally the only reason I brought you here is to talk about it,” Sanemi reminded him impatiently. “Do you have a plan?”
Hesitantly, Senjuro nodded. “Yes.”
“What is it?”
Senjuro squirmed uncomfortably under Sanemi’s glare. “I…do I have to tell you? I don’t want to,” he whispered.
Sanemi stared at him incredulously. “Yes, you have to tell me!” he spat, with a vigor that made Senjuro flinch. “I don’t care if you don’t want to. You’re not getting out of this. We can either do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Senjuro’s eyes flashed with fear. “What’s the hard way?” he asked.
Judging by the way things were going, Sanemi thought they were already doing it the hard way. He narrowed his eyes and said through clenched teeth, “You don’t wanna know.”
Using fear tactics and threatening the kid were probably not the best choice here, Sanemi admitted to himself, but it was the only way he knew how to get information out of people if they wouldn’t give it to him right away.
Senjuro looked out the window at the tree branches for a long moment. He took a deep breath. “I have a nichirin sword,” Senjuro said evenly. “It never changed color. It represents my failure to become a demon slayer and my failure to live up to my family’s name.”
Sanemi’s interrogation face faltered for a moment. All of the sudden, he remembered what he’d said to Senjuro that made him cry the time Kyojuro tried to introduce them.
“So you’re the failure of the family, huh? You trained under two Flame Hashiras and you still couldn’t get your stupid blade to change color?” Why the hell had he said that? What the hell did he gain from saying that other than making a not-yet-even-thirteen-year-old kid cry?
Senjuro’s face had gone pale and his eyes had welled up with tears, and he’d looked back at his brother like he was silently asking if Sanemi was right. Kyojuro had cupped Senjuro’s face in his hands and thumbed away his tears and assured him over and over that Sanemi didn’t mean it, that he was just a jerk for no reason, that Senjuro was not a failure and that Kyojuro would be proud of him no matter what and that some people were just not meant to be swordsmen and there wasn’t any shame in that at all. Kyojuro had pulled his brother to his chest in a tight hug and glared at Sanemi with a darkness that seemed foreign on his usually ever-smiling face.
Sanemi tried to remember what was going through his head when he watched this unfold, but he couldn’t.
“I bought a ticket for a train traveling the same route the Mugen Train did,” Senjuro continued, snapping Sanemi out of his thoughts. “I will get off at the site of the Mugen Train crash, and commit seppuku there. I already have a letter written to my father explaining myself.”
Sanemi gaped at him, then took a minute to compose himself, pacing back and forth running his hands through his hair. “Oh my god, Senjuro,” he muttered. “Do you seriously not see how messed up that is? Why the fucking Mugen Train?”
“Because…” Senjuro hesitated. “If I hadn’t failed to become a Demon Slayer, things could have gone differently. I might have been there to protect my brother. I could have died instead of him. I should have died instead of him.” To Senjuro’s shock, Sanemi started to laugh.
“Geez, you’re really not thinking straight,” he snickered. “You don’t actually think Kyojuro would have let that happen, do you? Do you seriously think Kyojuro would have let you sacrifice yourself for him?”
“You don’t get it,” Senjuro whispered, which, to be honest, really pissed Sanemi off. “And I’ve already made up my mind anyway.”
Sanemi abruptly stopped laughing. “Woah, woah, woah, woah, hold on,” he said, expression hardening. “You asked for a sign not to do it, and you got one. You’re not seriously telling me you’re still gonna go through with it.”
“But it didn’t count,” Senjuro said.
Sanemi threw his arms up in absolute disbelief. What the hell? He almost gave the kid a damn concussion, how was that not good enough? “So getting wacked in the back of the head with a rock didn’t do it for you?” he demanded. “Want me to throw another one? ‘Cause I fucking will!”
“But it wasn’t my brother,” Senjuro informed him. “That was just you.”
“What, did you think Kyojuro’s ghost was gonna show up and throw rocks at you instead? What kind of sign were you expecting anyway?”
Senjuro didn’t reply.
Sanemi sighed, dragging a hand down his face. “Look kid,” he said. “I’m not kidding. Will you listen for one second? I think I was the sign from your brother.” He didn’t used to believe in this kind of thing. He used to think that when you died you were dead and that was it. But his own near-death experience had…not exactly changed his mind, but made him…a little more open to the possibility, at least. The idea that Kyojuro had somehow, from beyond the grave, had instilled such a sense of urgency in him to get him to catch Senjuro at the right time seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t think of any other explanation. “I’ve never wanted to go visit Kyojuro’s grave in the middle of the night before. I just all of the sudden got this feeling that I had to be there, like it couldn’t wait. Maybe that was Kyojuro. Maybe he wanted me there to stop you.”
Senjuro didn’t reply. He still wouldn’t look at Sanemi, even though he wouldn’t take his eyes off of him before Sanemi started talking. Sanemi wondered if the whole Rengoku family just got the concept of eye-contact backwards, because he remembered that Kyojuro didn’t usually look at people when they were talking to him either.
“Hey, brat.” Senjuro violently flinched when Sanemi called him that, so Sanemi amended, “Hey. Kid. Look at me when I’m talking to you. Do you not know how conversations work?”
Senjuro still didn’t look at him. There were tears beading up in his eyes again that threatened to fall.
“Senjuro,” Sanemi tried.
“You weren’t supposed to hear me. I was talking to my brother,” Senjuro whispered.
Sanemi groaned. He was back to that? Did he even listen to a word Sanemi just said? “I know! You’ve told me that four times now! It doesn’t matter! Do you think repeating yourself over and over is going to change anything?” Honestly. Was this kid just stupid, or what?
Senjuro sniffed, and Sanemi resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Was he seriously crying again?
“Listen, I get it, okay? I’ve thought about offing myself too. And I can’t tell you for certain that things are gonna get better, or that there’s a point to continuing on like this, because I don’t fucking know. And I don’t know if I was Kyojuro’s sign or if I just wanted to run to a burial ground at midnight for the hell of it; maybe he didn’t hear you, I don’t know . All I know…” he grabbed Senjuro’s chin and forced him to look at him. Senjuro could ignore everything else Sanemi said, but this he had to have drilled into his head somehow. “All I know is that you were his entire goddamn world, Senjuro. So don’t you dare go and try to convince yourself that he would ever be okay with this. I know you know damn well that if he were here and he found out you were even thinking about hurting yourself, it would fucking destroy him.”
There was a moment of silence.
Then, the dam broke.
Senjuro burst into tears. He shoved Sanemi away from him so violently he knocked over the cup of tea and he barely spared it a glance.
“But…he’s… not! He’s not here!” he screamed. The washcloth was carelessly chucked across the room as Senjuro collapsed in a heap on the ground. “That’s…the whole… problem! He’s n-not here, he’s gone, a-a-and I…don’t…know…what…to…do!” He frantically gasped for breath between each word, gripping at his hair, so wrought with grief and despair he couldn’t figure out what to do with himself.
It was then that it occurred to Sanemi that Senjuro hadn’t really cried at Kyojuro’s funeral. He’d teared up, but he wasn’t the sobbing mess that Mitsuri was, hadn’t even cried as much as Tengen. Shinjuro hadn’t even shown up until it was nearly over. He’d informed everyone, in between chugs of sake, that there was no point in mourning such a talentless swordsman, that Kyojuro’s death meant nothing and that he was better off that way anyway. It was Kagaya who’d put a stop to his drunken ramblings and pulled him off to the side to, somehow, try and talk some semblance of sense into him.
He’d at least calmed down, but his opinion hadn’t changed. Shinjuro had roughly grabbed Senjuro by the ear and told him in a slurred voice, “We’re going home. You’d better quit that pathetic sniveling, Senjuro, I already told you your useless failure of a brother doesn’t deserve any tears. Don’t make me keep repeating myself.”
By then Sanemi couldn’t stand to be there any longer because of how much Shinjuro reminded him of his own father, so he hadn’t caught what happened next. But surely somebody had stopped the kid from being taken home by that delirious drunkard, right? At least, someone must have gone to check in on him later and make sure he was okay, because his father was so obviously unequipped to take care of him.
Had Senjuro ever cried for his brother at all? Or was the only outlet he ever allowed his grief to take in the form of those barely-contained tears, as he constantly fought to keep it together, in fear of being admonished?
Sanemi wanted to ask about Shinjuro—Senjuro had said he was getting better and didn’t drink as much, but how much better was he really?—but he realized that now wasn’t the time.
Back when he still saw in color, Sanemi would have wrapped Senjuro in a hug and held onto him until he was done crying, but now he was frozen in place as he listened to Senjuro’s sobbing—which really, could be better described as screaming.
Though his limbs felt weak, Sanemi stood up and quietly cleaned up the tea spill on the table, and picked up the washcloth from the floor, throwing it over the side of the sink.
When that was done, he sat down on the floor across from Senjuro and waited silently as the kid cried his heart out.
He shouldn’t try and comfort him anyway, he reasoned, because that might give the impression that he wanted him to stop crying. No, Senjuro needed this. Sanemi would just wait until he was done, however long that would take.
Apparently, it was a long time. By the time Senjuro’s sobs tapered off, Sanemi had grown drowsy, and he couldn’t imagine how exhausted Senjuro must be.
Wordlessly, Sanemi threw a handkerchief at him, which did much less damage than the rock from earlier. “Thanks,” Senjuro mumbled. He blew his nose.
They sat in silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” said Senjuro.
“Probably for all the wrong things,” Sanemi said.
Senjuro didn’t seem to know how to react to that.
“I don’t care that you cried on my floor,” Sanemi clarified. “I am a little pissed that I made you tea and all you did with it was knock it over and make me clean it up.”
That wasn’t exactly a lie, but he wasn’t being completely serious either. Although Senjuro looked guilty enough about it that Sanemi regretted saying it anyway.
He tried to come up with some way to comfort him. The best he could do was, “Hey. I was kidding. Don’t look so depressed.”
Senjuro nodded. He still looked depressed.
“Actually what I meant was that you should be apologizing for thinking about killing yourself. Because I’m sure now you realize how fucking stupid that is and you’re not going to do it,” Sanemi said carefully. “Right?”
Senjuro pulled his knees up to his chest. “I don’t know,” he whispered.
Sanemi wanted to bang his head against the wall. “Where do you have your ticket? Do you have it on you?”
“Um. Yeah,” he mumbled.
Sanemi held his hand out. “Hand it over.”
“What?”
“I said, hand it over.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re not going on any trains anyway.”
Senjuro slowly took the ticket out of his pocket and stared at it, holding it tightly. “I-”
Sanemi ripped it out of his hands and tore it to shreds.
“Wh-” Senjuro gaped at him like he was surprised or something. “Hey!”
“I fucking told you,” Sanemi spat. “Let it go, Senjuro, you’re done with this. I also want your sword. And your damn suicide note, for that matter, I’m gonna rip that up too. You don’t happen to have that with you, do you?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll go and get them tomorrow,” Sanemi informed him.
“What do you mean ‘we’?”
Sanemi stood up like the conversation was already over. “You’re staying here for the night.”
“What?” Senjuro looked horrified; Sanemi was slightly offended. Geez, he didn’t think it was that bad. “Why?”
“You’re exhausted and your house is at least a twenty-minute walk away,” Sanemi pointed out. “I have a guest bedroom.” It had literally never been used before. “So you can sleep there.”
Senjuro didn’t move from his spot on the floor.
“Or you could sleep on the kitchen floor if you prefer,” Sanemi deadpanned. He poured the rest of the tea down the sink—which was a waste. But he didn’t like that kind of tea anyway; he honestly couldn’t really blame Senjuro for knocking it over—and washed the teapot out.
“Why do you care?” Senjuro said.
Sanemi set the teapot on the drying rack and exhaled slowly. “Because I’ve just about had it with dead brothers,” he muttered, drying his hands off on the dish towel. “So I’m gonna keep you alive whether you like it or not.”