A/N: Day 3, "Fates Intertwine"
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"You could be a great god: the kind that could make people happy."
Yato had spent years without anyone acknowledging his right to exist. The years became decades, then centuries. To the other gods he crossed paths with, his long life was an oddity at best, unforgivable at worst.
Sometimes, he couldn't remember why he bothered. Life stretched on and on, but with nothing to live for. People multiplied, roads grew in size and number, shrines were built and burned, but nothing really changed. One war became another, until he wondered how people deceived themselves into calling anything "peace." The trail of blood before his eyes was unbroken. When he laughed, it was only at the idea that there was anything in the humanity that had created him worth saving. Still, he lived.
He almost longed for the days when he had found purpose in killing, and wished he had changed as little as the world itself. But Sakura had changed him: just a bit, but enough. Enough to want—though maybe not believe in—someone who could bring meaning back to his existence, and that half-remembered feeling of warmth back to his heart. So he went on, absurdly, as if pretending to hope would make it real.
Then, one day, it was. He hadn't thought about it until Ebisu said it directly: that it was alright for Yato to have lived, and to keep living. That it was something a proper god would do. When he'd heard that, what surprised him most was how unsurprised he was; when he later told Yukine he wanted to be a god of fortune, it was more of a formality than a revelation. Because one day, without even realizing it, he had stopped trying to convince himself he had a reason for being, and started believing it.
On that day, a human girl had lifted him up, skin burning with blight. She had carried him to Kofuku's house, and cried and screamed so that, even through the haze of pain, he heard her every word. Neither had he missed her coming back with Kazuma, and he knew she knew how dangerous that had been.
Yato hadn't been willing to let Yukine go, not for anything—he understood the kid more than anyone had ever bothered to understand him—and he had seen from the start that it could mean the end of his long, long life. So be it, he'd thought. He'd had enough of that selfish existence: of being a god but feeling so powerless. But Hiyori had been there. She had saved them both, and when she threw her arms around them and sobbed "I'm so glad you're alright," he realized for the first time that she had done it because she cared about them.
Since that moment, he had gained so much. Yukine, the unique and irreplaceable regalia he had spent centuries searching for. Kazuma, Kofuku, and Daikoku, who had been there for him the whole time, even though he had been too foolish to see it. And Hiyori, well, she saved him more times than he could count (from himself as well as others) and gave him everything he'd ever wanted, plus some things he hadn't known he needed. With her, he began to move forward again, and remember what he'd once forgotten.
Contrary to popular belief (which he encouraged, more often than not), Yato wasn't an idiot. He knew there would be no forgiveness or atonement for what he had done. The idea that good and evil somehow balance out had always been a human contrivance: a convenient psychological trick to lessen the weight of guilt and drive away fears that the world might just be arbitrary after all. But Yato was a god, and he would bear the weight of the past in exchange for the promise of the future. If he now had a chance to become someone she would be proud of, he wouldn't wish to change even one step of the path that brought him here.
This was the fate that had lead him to her.
