Shichika stalls too long. He doesn't mean to, but he's caught by the flicker of his sister's fingers in the candlelight, the way she stands shrouded by a dress that drags over her kneecaps, and he is struck by the thought of never seeing her again. She's so obviously asking to die; it's all in the way she swings her arm to let the long lines of Togame's hair touch the air, watching passively as they spill round and down into an oil-riddled fiery streak on the floor.

But still. Angry as he is by the insult, he doesn't want to choose, between what's left of his family, cursed though it may be, and the love he's chosen for himself.

Either way he waits too long, an idle second passing them by as the Buddha decides to watch. With an impatient flick of her hand, Nanami's hand flies out. He turns round, far, far too late, the anguished cry stuck fast in his throat. His eyes catch the spurt of blood, just in time to watch Togame's head fall to the floor.

Shichika presses the bodies into the dirt, the bodies of the two people who'd meant the world to him. More, even. Nanami looks as though she sleeps, a thin smile, resting on her lips. It's ghastly, to see her look happier in death than she ever was in life, her only blemish being the jagged hole in her chest. Beneath his hands her organs poke out at random intervals like sticks in a bag, her bones barely jutting through skin. Shichika had been too rough, brutal even, in claiming her life, though his love for her still caused tears to drip onto her face. But. Togame's death was not something he could easily forgive.

Togame herself, still feels the harder of the two to bury. It feels wrong, somehow, that she's left such a hole inside him, one that stretches with a pain unequal to the twenty four years he'd spent with Nanami. Perhaps it's more proof that he's been made wrong, a human weapon, instead of just a human.

Having Togame as his wielder has changed him, made his heart flicker and unsteady with doubt. He can feel it making his fingers shake, as they comb through the shorn hair of the head on his lap, an alien sensation that leaves his hands wanting more, unused to the length that usually kept them occupied for hours. It's the last thing he places into her grave, jostling it into position against her severed neck.

'I'm sorry,' he tells her. 'I fell for you, but in the end, I couldn't do anything to prevent you from being cut down by another sword.'

At the very least, it was what Nanami had wanted to be considered as in the end.

Shichika trudges dully through the city, the silent steps of Emonzaemon by his side, keeping perfect pace with his dull feet. The man had watched over him, only offering an idle comment or two about which flowers would be suitable as Shichika rolled rocks out for tombstones. But now he leads him to the princess, the one woman that could cause Togame to spit like a cat. Shichika barely has any curiosity left to wonder what kind of person she is.

She isn't what he's expecting. Her hair is long and blonde and speaks of foreign blood. She appraises him like a predator, both so much colder and jovial then when Togame first uttered appraisals about his body.

'Hmm...the strategian had taste for the slender, buff ones did she? Unsurprising. She had such terrible taste for an old woman. Or perhaps it was simply, a young woman's taste? Either way, I deny them both.'

She flicks her fan closed and Shichika believes her. The gleam in her eyes is not sexual, not the way it had sometimes been with Togame. It is speculative.

'Why did you want to see me?'

Shichika forces himself to concentrate; to ignore the scream of his senses as they try to drag his attention to the strange black objects that lying resting on a stand behind her.

'I have no obligation to follow Togame's orders now that she is dead. I am a sword and should wait for the next hand to pick me up. But I'm also human and I can't let things rest the way they are now. Togame had so much left unfinished and I failed her. I want to see what happens to the rest of the swords.'

She smiles, a deliberate flicker of hunger passing over her face. Almost like she wants him to see, to think himself caught. Toagme had warned him about things like this.

'People, especially clever ones, will want to trap you with lies, make you serve their own interests,' she had told him. 'You can tell, by how openly they stare at you, how much they want you to think that you're necessary to them, needed, in fact. It makes you want to do your best for them, work twice as hard. And of course, that makes you even easier to manipulate.' Then she had grinned, peering at him slyly from over her shoulder. 'Even I'm not immune from the thrill of such a game.'

'That's cruel,' he had protested, though with no real heat. 'I fell for you months ago. There's no way I could resist.'

She had smiled, reached out to push at him with a small punch, much gentler than usual. She had been in a good mood, food in her belly and beauty laid out on the path in front of them, twirls of grass and flowers hanging heavy on the ground. But of course, she had given him no real answer.

Selfish to the last. And he had fallen for her even harder because of it.

But he holds no such admiration for Hitei. She stands differently, hides her speech behind certain phrases, denial littering her sentences. Togame had always found different ways to hide, her embarrassment a constant shield. He has only her memory now. That, and his determination not to fall into the princess' snare.

She sends him out to a lake, one without water. Instead the banks are filled to the brim with junk, metal poles and chipped ornaments, all things that have lost their function and now their homes. Just like him. He feels a strange sort of pity for them, watching them gleam and glint under the sun, their battered colours speaking of scratches and rough treatment as they shift beneath his fingers.

It's odd. He doesn't remember experiencing the same sort of curiosity that had often made Togame stop and stare, curling her fingers against her chin. But now he is experiencing such a strong urge to touch, such a compulsion to feel, that he wants to...

But then he remembers. Togame is gone and so are her waiting strands of hair, always so soft beneath his questing fingers.

Shichika runs a careless thumb along the outside ridge of a clay plate and sighs, before tossing it away. He doesn't even turn round to see it shatter.

When Biyorigō finds him, he does not stop to observe. He charges forward, trusting in his own arms to react faster and with more certainty than the steel-lined ones of his enemy. He is not disappointed.

The doll cracks and lets out a clank of distress as he expels it from him with the same force that nearly buried an island underwater when he faced off against Hakuhei Sabi. After the dust clears, he walks up to it to see the jagged lines running through its crumpled frame. After a few seconds, it lets out a creak and splits apart, falling into fractured pieces like weakened eggshell. Curiously, shinning discs of metal spill out from between the cracks like sand. Shichika watches them, seeing them spin and fall, their barbed edges rising in clumps, little half-squares that rise before falling down to bite similar-sized chunks of space from within their shape. He doesn't understand the meaning of the pattern, nor the way they should fit together like puzzle pieces. To him it is alien, inhuman. Something to make him shiver.
Odd, how he never thought that there could be something to make him feel that way.

'Still,' he says, 'you're better off than me. You, at least, broke doing your duty. I've already failed mine.'

The princess is furious. Shichika watches with an abstract sense of curiosity as she rages and spits, her face scrunched like some sort of angry, savage dog.

'You never told me not to break the sword,' he states simply. 'Only to retrieve it.'

Hitei rearranges herself, drawing her fan back against her face with a snap. It does not, Shichika notices, completely hide the remaining pink in her face.

'No,' she says stoutly. 'I did not give you such an instruction. But I deny you the right to purposefully misconstrue my meaning! I told you to continue retrieving the swords in the same manner as you did before, the way that woman told you to!'

'But Togame isn't here,' Shichika explains patiently. 'Even if I wanted to, I couldn't collect the swords the same way I did before. She's dead; I have no obligation to listen to her requests to protect the swords anymore.'

Shichika pauses, watching the pink flare of the roses that swirl around the lines of Hitei's home. They ripple outwards in a way that reminds him of the cherry blossoms and the other flowers Togame would sometimes spare a cursory glance for. He wishes now, that he had never seen the way the pink blooms around him drew a pleased light to Hitei's eyes. It reminds him that he never stopped to ask Togame which flower she liked best.

Hitei, meanwhile, seems to pull herself together. She retreats behind her fan, spreading it out in a crested wave that ripples before her eyes; passive but never idle.

'I thought you wanted to see what happened to the swords yourself?' she asks. 'Or have you become like me, a person who denies their words?'

Shichika smiles.

'Ah,' he says. 'It seems, that despite what I thought, I'm no good at waiting.'

Hitei's eyes narrow.

'You wish to be an active participant instead of a passive one? Ha! I will deny both roles. You may be an important player, but I will turn my eyes away, if I must.'

Shichika smiles. It feels like such a tiresome thing, to stretch his mouth wide and make his cheeks billow out into something soft and relaxed.

'You do that,' he says. 'It's a hassle, but I'm going to do what I want, too. Even if I get torn to pieces.'

It's not sure why Hitei lets him go, why she doesn't urge Emonzaemon to chase him down with those strange black things that call and coo to him from behind her shoulder. He's almost half-way sure that those are another of Shiki's deviant collection. But he does nothing.

He waits. He has no money, but then that was something he only found value in after he met Togame. Before then, he had no trouble getting food. So he turns his hand back to hunting, crafting traps out of low-lying branches and digging deep pits to entomb small animals within. He waits outside the city and poaches on the deer that wander past, weaving hats and baskets out of whatever reed and straw the wind blows in. He feels a little pleased by the result; it seems that the lessons his sister left him with have not grown stagnant and cold by his time with Togame.

And slowly, but surely, the swords come together, ready to be offered to the Shogunate. All remaining eleven, that is.

Shichika idly feeds a stray plume of grass through his lips and waits.

Emonzaemon comes to him four months later, coated in blood. In his arms, Shichika makes out the twisted shape of Princess Hitei, her head artfully turned away from him and into the crook of her servant's shoulder. She lies still, her sleek shape splashed out into a curve of lines that remains Shichika of the way Togame used to arrange ink into elegant letters.

Strangely enough, he finds himself wondering where her fan is. Her fan however, is nowhere to be seen.

Emonzaemon looks at him, half his face still hidden away behind a blood-soaked mask.

'Help me,' he manages.

Shichika gets to his hands and knees and starts to dig.

Afterwards, after Shichika has helped Emonzaemon find the pinkest flowers they can manage, they sit and stare at each other.

'Regrettable,' Emonzaemon bites out, and Shichika perks up, hearing the cold rage seeping beneath the steady tone. 'Truly regrettable. The Maniwa stole my face, and now they have stolen the one person I wanted to die for.'

Shichika turns his head away, his eyes landing on the small boulder rolled into rest upon the line of Hitei's body, now a few feet under the earth. He feels a pang of sympathy.

'Yes,' he says. 'It's hard when you the only thing you wanted to live for is gone.'

Emonzaemon doesn't lean forward. But Shichika is still left with the impression that he is being peered at, rather closely.

'The Maniwa stole the swords, all of them,' the masked man says finally. 'But they have not left the city, not yet. There are too many for them to hold, all at once.' He sighs. 'It was the tenth, that gave me trouble. A man, who was not a man, who could see through me and tell how empty I was inside. And I could do nothing but listen. I spent days digging around for something that acted more as a ornament than as a sword. It could not cut a thing.' His lips thin. 'And all that, while they were busy cutting her.'

Shichika doesn't care about details. 'I'm sorry,' he says instead. 'You didn't even get to hear her last words.'

Emonzaemon turns his head in acknowledgement. 'In that way we are similar,' he says. 'Your sister did not even allow Togame that honour even.'

Shichika grimaces at the memory.

'You have no reason to help me,' says Emonzaemon. 'But still...'

'I'll join you,' says Shichika steadily. 'Togame gave her life for these...' he stops, oddly surprised that he wants to hiss out 'things' instead of 'swords.' 'She gave up her life. I don't mind giving up my own in return.'

There are three Maniwa left. Shichika twitches when he sees that one is still a child. Emonzaemon shows no such compulsion and lunges forward, jagged stars of steel launching from his person in fine lines like miniature torpedoes. The boy avoids them well enough. And his rather jerky evasion (what little enough there is of it, is covered by a thin woman, who wears purple like an adornment. Shichika's heart does not stutter. But he thinks ah, of course. Togame liked purple, didn't she? Perhaps I should have looked for flowers of that colour for her.

He whirls away before Hōō Maniwa can decapitate him.

'A surprise, the man says, his charisma suddenly leaking away to something cold and metallic. It brushes along Shichika's spine like ice. 'Truly. I thought my old friend would go for me first.'

Shichika tilts his head to the side and then spring forward into a neat kick that would, if it lands, divide Hōō's torso from his waist. 'Who says he isn't? You care about the rest of your clan, right? Who'll protect them if the main twelve are gone?'

Hōō laughs as he makes a circular, snake-like twist that ducks beneath Shichika's oncoming heel. 'You sound like a human. I thought you were meant to act as a sword and nothing more?'

'I can act like one,' says Shichika grimly. 'But I owe it to my wielder, to sometimes be something more.'

He brings his palms together and, like a fish, dives through the air, all jerky, mammal-like movement vanishing as his speed swells into something incredible. Maniwa Hōō bites back a scream and is blown back, red ripping across his chest as Emonzaemon makes a sudden turn, diving back to impale his old adversary through the neck. Hōō slants to one side and lands heavily, coughing out a mouthful of blood like a pellet as he does so. Shichika can't help but watch it run down the wooden wall opposite with a grim satisfaction.

'Thank you,' he says to Emonzaemon. 'Even though I wounded him, he managed to dodge most of the blow.'

Emonzaemon tilts his head to the side. 'It's a little petty of me, but I almost wish I had grazed his face.'

They turn back to see the other two members of the trope have vanished.

Emonzaemon sniffs. 'Smart woman. I respect her loyalty to the cause.'

Hōō, from his slumped over form on the floor, rattles out a laugh, spewing more red as he hacks up his throat.

'The Maniwa...have won..' he manages before heaving out a small gust of air. Then he lies still.

'They have the swords,' says Emonzaemon slowly. 'We must-'

'The child,' Shichika says quietly, suddenly remembering Konayuki Itezora and the brightness of her smile. 'How old is he?'

Emonzaemon turns to him slowly. And raises his arms.

Shichika smiles. But the sensation, the way it feels as it pulls on his muscles, does not feel pleasant.

'A pity,' says Emonzaemon quietly. 'If our masters had lived, this probably would have happened anyway. But I never thought I would fight over differences in morals. Such a waste.'

At least, thinks Shichika, he does not criticise me by calling me a sword.

'You're welcome to think of it however you want,' he says calmly, 'but by the time you'll have reached a conclusion, you'll have already have been torn to pieces.'

Shichika wins, of course. And Emonzaemon dies. Unlike Hōō he chooses not to leave any words behind. Shichika wonders why that is for a moment, before heaving out a tired shrug. Perhaps Emonzaemon simply felt as though there was nobody in this world who he wanted to leave anything to. At least, not anymore.

There isn't anyone to bandage up his wounds. Perhaps he'll bleed out. Or perhaps he'll wake up a few hours later, tired but alive. But it'll be an awfully big hassle if that happens.

'Sorry Togame,' he manages. 'I'm a bit lost without any orders to follow. I did try though.'

He watches the sun fall from the sky. It occurs to him then that the Shogunate, the one Togame served and wasted her life for, might still be alive. But as it is now, he really doesn't have the energy to check.

'Cheerio,' he mutters, feeling something like a smile twisting his lips. And then, with that last thought, the world goes dark.