Togame has a smile, in the dark, that makes her a monster. Shichika has seen it, in the moments when he pretends to sleep, eyes slit within the shadows that fall free from the moon. Togame is rarely caught in its grip, but when she is, her eyes are averted from the sky and her hands clench as though she can hear someone scream.
Shichika wonders what it's like to be as clever as her, to have multiple schemes whispering in her head. He wonders if they talk to her in a language of familiarity, something similar to the way his body flows into each and every sequence of the moves his father spent two decades teaching him. For the longest time, he supposes, they have been her only friends. And then, months later, after watching her eyes gleam as she bickers with Princess Hitei, he is forced to amend his opinion. It claws at him, this knowledge, that she has managed to hide things from even herself.
He dreams of Nanami pulling plants up by the roots, squeezing them dry in place of human throats.
'Shichika,' she tells him, with a look of pity upon her face, 'they need to be brittle enough to make the fire crackle.' And then her hand moves to push her hair behind her ear, in a gesture he has not seen in months...and now never will again.
He reaches for her but she breaks, torn apart by the wind as it ravages the hollow husks of what he now recognises to be weeds.
In contrast, he never dreams of Togame except during the daytime, in the spaces between walking and half-dozing as he imagines her shape falling into his side. He always feels it, the crisp lines of expensive fabric and criss-crossed ribbons sliding over his skin like a curtain or perhaps an umbrella, as her arms coil round his neck, her mouth becoming a tight trap which opens, just enough to whisper: 'I fell for you too.'
The bullets thud into his chest making blood blossom there and Togame lets out a scream, the kind that Shichika believes she had once reserved for her father on the day his head rolled across the floor. But this time, there is no trace of ebony in her hair for her grief to dye white.
Emonzaemon sways and falls, half-on his knees in a rush of blood that spills from his sides like a fountain. Shichika has no gun but his hands dig in deep, in thin, even slides, cutting through ribs and muscles in a way that he would frown at, had his opponent been any other. His blood paints the path behind him, Togame standing in his shadow as the sun sets, though not enough to conceal the red that now runs through her robes. They flutter and drag against the weight of the stains, coming to pool out beneath his shoulders as he sways into her shocked, grasping hands. She falls with him, too weak to even offer the support a large stick could have given.
He had acted, but perhaps not fast enough.
She holds him as he lies weakly in the shadows, her tiny lap barely a seat for his giant head. Her hands shift in his hair and it is a bliss to him, to die for her and watch the sun waver in the sky.
'I'm sorry,' he tells her. 'I rusted too soon. I can't help fulfil your ambitions anymore.'
She bites through her lip so hard, that her blood falls down onto her face.
'Don't.' He makes a sluggish movement to brush it aside, to smear it away from her lip. Such a blemish, of such a scarlet hue, does not belong anywhere near her face. 'It is a sword's job to break so that their master does not.'
Her eyes hold a madness; they swirl with the bite of purple, one of them giving way to the cross that has dogged her, resulted in the name she ending up choosing in order to stop her old one from killing her.
He smiles weakly. 'I still thinks it sparkles in a kinda pretty way, you know. That eye.'
'You were a person too,' she whispers fiercely, ignoring the compliment. 'I thought you had realised such a thing by now...you changed so much!'
'Yes,' he says gravely, 'I changed enough to know that these words I am speaking now are important. My last words, never to be repeated or listened to again, by anyone other than you. You taught me that. I came here because I fell for you, even before I understood what falling for you meant. All I knew for certain was that it meant I would die for you, happily. But now I've changed enough to know that I can still do it and feel sad about it too.'
He sighs. 'I looked forward to it, you see. To watching you draw maps, to tickling you, to seeing you get...unreasonably jealous over things I still can't understand. It would have been...a huge hassle...such...a hassle.'
He breathes. But it's hard, like when his legs turned to stone in the snow, back before he knew what it was to be cold. ' I wanted to know if you...fell for me too. You could...give me an answer...but by then...I'd have already been...torn to pieces.'
He does not hear the words she whispers to him, nor feel the press of her breath, as she leans in close, close enough to touch, for his blood to mix in with her hair.
But he dies, feeling happy all the same.