Mugen can't touch her. He's tried—oh, has he tried—but every time he did, he found that he simply could not touch her. He'd prepare himself for it, slipping the curious girl sips of sake to get her dumb and bubbly, purposefully avoid the brothels and get off his ass long enough to get a job so he can afford shoveling enough food into her mouth to put her into a comatose-like sleep, and he'd even wait for the opportune time when the stupid ronin was out doing whatever Mugen himself certainly didn't care to know. He'd be patient about it, methodical, so nothing will get in his way when he finally collects his due, but even in her most vulnerable state—drunk and deeply asleep—he cannot touch her.
He doesn't get it, either.
Mugen was never one to feel repentance of any sort nor was he ever aware of any shames he ought to have, but to touch her feels like some kind of abominable sin even he couldn't bear to commit. To even lay the tips of his fingers on her shoulder, through her layers of clothing nonetheless, feels unthinkably grotesque to him.
When it comes down to it, when he finally decided to think about why his man-card suddenly goes kaput at the thought of an act that never once required a second thought, he realizes she somehow got too close.
Way too close.
And when people got close, which he never let people do before, he couldn't ever do anything to them because harming them would ultimately mean he would be harming himself. He has a second epiphany just seconds after and remembers the first person outside of Fuu to do the same thing to him: Sara.
Oh, he remembers Sara. He remembers her as clear as day, a groundbreaking feat for someone with such poor memory like him, and he remembers even more clearly how he felt for her. He remembers wanting her, wanting her so bad every day she was with them, and he would have done anything for her not to be the assassin she was and the assassin he ultimately had to kill to survive. He remembers how a piece of him died alongside her, alongside her confession that would allow him to continue living, and suddenly everything changed for her the same way everything changed for Fuu.
He thought he wanted Sara the way he thought he wanted Fuu, but at the end of the day he couldn't even bring himself to pick up that woman's cold body to bury her, fearing that touching her cadaver would somehow disrespect everything she ever stood for. Touching her would have disrespected her skill, her son. Her sacrifice.
And that, Mugen thinks, is why I can't fucking do this.
He stares down at that soft pink pile, the tiny snores that give away just how young she is, and he suddenly knows something. Knows something he never knew before.
She means a whole more to him now than he had expected she would and it's a lot more than he would ever admit even to himself. She means a lot, this journey means a lot—hell, even that bitch poindexter means a lot. Everything from the beginning had begun crawling under his skin and into the tender place that separated him from the heartless animal everyone thought he was.
Fuck, he thinks again. He really can't leave now, can't leave any of this, and he can no longer use fate as an excuse.
The girl stirs a little in her sleep, smacking her mouth, and Mugen thinks this must be funny to Someone out there, Someone who decided to pull this cosmic joke on him with no warning whatsoever. It pisses him off on a grand scale, but he knows he is powerless against it, powerless to even want to do anything against it.
"Figures," he says out loud to nothing in particular, "leave it to the universe to make a knight outta nothin'."
Fuu hears him even when unconscious, mumbles something about dango, then is silent.
A/N: Because to me they act like brother and sister anyway.