Shards.
Broken shards of glass line the walkway to Hatori Sohma's whisper amongst themselves constantly on that particular topic: He's a neat, orderly man, a doctor. Why doesn't he clean those dangerous, sharp pieces up, why won't he just let one of them do it for him? They wouldn't mind; Hatori is one of their favorite Juunishi. He's polite, respectable, appears to be some form of sane, and still shows loyalty to Akito. Not like his cousins, Hatsuharu or Yuki, or even his own best friend, of them acknowledge the obvious reason. They don't even really think of it whenever the subject comes up because it doesn't make sense to them, doesn't appear to have any type of reasoning behind it - the incident with Kana, as it is so delicately referred to in the main house, can't be the reason, because it's been so long. Juunishi aren't really meant to love anyone but their god, Juunishi are people too, just human like the rest of us, and humans tend to defeat reason in the most unusual Hatori leaves those broken shards of glass there in defiance, some of them even from the vase that left him half-blind and took away the woman he realized a long time ago that their relationship was shattered along with that vase, some of the pieces sticking with him, others flying into dark corners, and still others were broken off into such tiny bits that they could never be found again, no matter how hard he looked, no matter how hard the maids tried to get each piece of glass out of that of the other Juunishi have already recognized his reasoning, but they don't discuss it. They're more in tune to the doctor's feelings than anyone else, and would never betray one of their own by turning those feelings into useless, meaningless gossip, no matter how tempting it may be at broken shards? They hold his life and sanity together.
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Written over a year ago for a friend.