four
Senketsu does not think much on time and dates, and he thinks that she does not herself, but when there comes to be a chill in the air, and he makes himself heavier for her sake, and the skies linger a long while on an endless gray, she always takes care to remember one particular day.
The first year, she wakes early and does not bring him with her. He thinks it odd, of course; for so long, he has grown accustomed to beginning with a gentle brush against him and a weary good morning. For Senketsu to open his eyes and see that she is not where she should be, collapsed just beneath him, is, you see, quite unnerving in its abnormality. The sound of her snores has gone, and there is not even a trace of the sweet melody of her heart.
Nothing could have happened, he tells himself, because he surely would have noticed if anything had, but still a kind of emptiness fills Senketsu at this strange and unusual situation, no matter how silly he considers himself for it. Where is the reek of her morning breath, he wonders, and where is her disheveled hair, and what has become of her tired voice pulling him free from his slumber? He thinks to move on his own accord, and he is fiercely prepared to discover what has become of her all on his own, but any anxieties building up inside him very much melt away when he takes note of the quiet humming emanating from just outside the room.
Senketsu would recognize that voice anywhere. The sound is fierce and gentle all at once, timid but strong, and Senketsu realizes that there is still a great darkness around him, and there are still a great many snores that are not hers, and he understands, all at once, that she has simply woken early.
It is only when the sun falls over him in dim streaks that she returns. Her hands are firmly behind her back and her lips upturned, though only slightly, forming a shy sort of smile that he knows to mean that she has not left him this morning without reason.
Her eyes meet his, and she says, in scarcely a whisper because her family is sleeping, "I'm sorry for leavin' ya." She's still clad in her too-small pajamas, and Senketsu sees that she has not so much as combed her hair. The strands stick out in many directions, but she does not seem to pay her unruly appearance any mind.
"I jus' didn't wanna wake you," she goes on, "'cause it's early, but I didn't know when else ta…."
A blush comes over her cheeks, the color nearly as bright as the hairs stuck to her forehead, and Senketsu holds back the smuggest sort of laugh. Whatever she has been up to this morning, she certainly does not want to admit that she has been touched by it.
She says, "I know you probably ain't keepin' track, but I met you a year ago today, and since I don't know when Dad made you, I was thinkin' that…."
She brings her hands out in front of her, revealing what Senketsu understands to be a lopsided chocolate cake set upon one of Mrs. Mankanshoku's nicest plates. A single candle rests in the center, decorated with twirling blue and red stripes, its flame dancing in the hazy light of dawn.
"I was thinkin'," Ryuko repeats, smiling at him very bashfully, "that today could be your birthday."
Senketsu does not quite know what to say to such a thing. He stares and stares. Frosting is splattered all about the plate, and the whole concoction looks as though it would crumble if anyone were to touch it. The creation is ugly in every sense of the word.
But in all his tiny life, there are few moments where Senketsu has felt so loved.
"You made this for me?" he asks. He feels tears coming to his eyes, and they soon start falling all across his fabric and down the wardrobe and to the wooden floors. It is not easy to speak in such a state, of course, but still Senketsu tries, his words hardly more than incomprehensible blubbering as he cries out, far too loudly for this hour, "Thank you, Ryuko!"
The embarrassment that spreads across Ryuko's face is more than enough to assure Senketsu that she has understood his meaning. She pulls the cake closer to her body and takes a step back.
"There's no need to be cryin'!" she says. Her own voice is now a bit more than a whisper, and her family stirs around them, and she quiets herself as she adds, "You'll get the cake all soggy!"
She focuses her eyes on the sad little thing.
"I know it's not much," she laments, "but I…."
"I love it, Ryuko," Senketsu tells her, and these words are true, but still she asks him if it's really so with such vulnerability that Senketsu wishes at once to be with her.
When he answers yes with a great earnestness and sincerity, she brings the cake closer to his face now free of tears, and she says, "Humans like to make a wish when they blow out the candles," and then she smiles very playfully at him as she continues on, "But you're not supposed to say what ya wish for, or else it ain't gonna come true!"
Senketsu cannot help but ask if wishes made upon birthday candles ever come true, to which Ryuko sighs very hard at him.
"Have a little fun," she says, and so Senketsu does as she tells him, and he considers a wish, and he speaks this wish silently to the candle flame, knowing that he can think of nothing he wants more.
Senketsu does not inform Ryuko of his wish as he blows out the candle and tiny plumes of smoke fill the room. Ryuko smiles quite pleasantly at him afterwards, and Senketsu smiles back at her, in a way that only he can, and he says, "I would love to eat the cake, Ryuko, but…."
"I know," says Ryuko, "but I'll eat it, and then you can get to taste it in my blood!"
"But you should really lay off…" Senketsu starts to tell her, just as she licks the chocolate right off the candle and jams the wax into her mouth, but he stops himself. He looks closely at the crooked, falling-over little cake, and there is no shame in celebrating his birthday with a treat such as this, he thinks, how could there be, when this whole affair seems to have brought Ryuko as much happiness as a croquette dinner with her family?
But such a thought only brings a sense of great remorse to the little Kamui, and he sighs mournfully, filled with regret.
"Ryuko," he says, finally addressing the girl who has been frowning his way as though she is more than prepared to berate him should he dare launch into any sort of lecture concerning the topic of sweets for breakfast. He cannot look her way, and he quiets himself more than he has all morning as he asks, "Why is it that you would want to celebrate this day at all?"
All remnants of smoke are long gone from Senketsu's striped blue-and-red birthday candle. He can hardly keep his voice steady.
"Why," he tries, his words hardly even audible any longer, "why would you ever want to remember?"
Senketsu does all he can to avoid thinking on the day that he had first laid eyes on her, but still the memories come over him in an unforgiving flood. Her screams fill his mind, as do her disgust and hatred and scorn, and Senketsu soon finds that he cannot bear to look at the crumbling cake just as he cannot bear to look at the woman whom he loves more than anything and anyone in the entire universe.
He looks to the floor instead. The sun no longer seems to wish to shine, and there are no more streaks of light upon the wooden planks. A dark cloud has no doubt come over the sky, and rain is surely soon to follow.
Senketsu sighs once more, and he speaks so quietly now that he is not entirely sure that he even speaks out loud at all as he says, "There is nothing worth celebrating in today."
But Ryuko shakes her head. Senketsu does not have to look to know that she does so. He can hear the rustle, rustle of her pajamas as her hair brushes against the collar, and he can picture the movement in his mind.
"You were shitty to me at first," she says. "And what you did wasn't okay."
She pauses. Senketsu dares not look at her and so continues to look to the floor. It is covered in shadows, and the overwhelming guilt that has taken a hold of him does not let him even begin to realize that there are no longer any sounds of snores or rustling from her family. There is silence all around them, so palpable and tangible that Senketsu hardly dares to breathe.
"But," Ryuko says, and Senketsu is sure that she removes the candle from her mouth because she speaks much more clearly as she tells him, with the unbridled, fiery passion that he knows more than he knows himself rests within her but rarely lets itself show in times such as these, "if I hadn't met you that day, I don't know what I woulda done."
Ryuko pauses again, as though struggling to come up with the right words to say. Senketsu does not look, but he imagines her fiddling with the sleeves of her pajamas, or fumbling with her hands, because these are the things she does when she is nervous and with him, and then she tells him, "What you did today ain't worth celebrating, but you are, Senketsu."
It is only at this moment that Senketsu dares look to her, and when he does, he sees that she is smiling at him in such a way that he thinks he could use another birthday candle to wish his wish another time over. He feels his tears come over him again, and he thanks Ryuko much too loudly as these tears fall to the ground, and Ryuko scolds him again and pulls the cake away before saying, "I hope it's not selfish of me, thinkin' of your life only beginning when we…."
She does not finish, but she does not have to, and Senketsu says, "My life did only begin when I met you."
At these words, Ryuko's family claps their hands at the whole scene, and Ryuko becomes very flustered at the fact that they had been watching all along, but their happy smiles and cheers make her flustered feelings quite short lived, and she and Senketsu soon come together, as they always do, his skin becoming hers and her heartbeat filling him as though it is his own.
Even Senketsu can agree that chocolate cake would indeed be the best breakfast to have on a day such as this one, and so they come before the table with Ryuko's creation and eat it as though it is truly a proper meal to begin a day with. Only Mataro is crass enough to say a thing about Ryuko's under-mixed eggs and the bit of baking soda that might not have been blended well enough, either, and when Senketsu tastes the cake in Ryuko's blood, he hardly keeps himself from crying once more.
Five more birthdays pass between the two of them before another chilly, gray day where colored leaves have spent their time making dark masses on the ground arrives with a cake from Ryuko topped with four lopsided candles.
Her cake-making skills have not improved much over the years, though she has tried many different varieties of cake. This one seems to be some sort of banana cream, and it is bright and yellow and white and joyous even when the weather outside is not.
"Happy birthday," she says, as she has grown used to over all their time together, and she places the cake on the rickety table that she had purchased herself, and Senketsu knows that she has decided, as has become tradition, to eat this cake for breakfast.
He makes her what he thinks to be a cheerful outfit for the occasion, covering himself in frills and folds and ribbons, but Ryuko laughs at his attempts and says, "No, no, no, just be you, Senketsu, 'cause today I'm celebrating you."
Senketsu does not quite know what Ryuko means by this because he can be any outfit anyone could ever desire, and he is not so sure what he himself truly is anymore. But he tries his hardest to bring a genuine smile to Ryuko's face and so fulfills her request the best he can, changing his body into a pleated skirt and long sleeves that she always pushes up and a pretty pink neckerchief that falls to her belly that he no longer covers. He makes a shiny black belt and little pouches that she once used to hold her tiny Scissor, and he even makes the eyepatch that he had worn what seems so many years ago now.
Ryuko becomes very quiet at the sight of him in such a state. She seems at first upset, and Senketsu feels a pang when she says, "I'm too old to be wearin' sailor uniforms, you know," but then she sort of smiles and fiddles with his tie and his collar as she had once done, and she tells him, "And you're too old to be sailor uniforms, but you still pull it off way better than you should," and Senketsu knows that she is not truly upset at him, and he manages a laugh of his own.
"I'm only four years old, you know," he says, looking to the candles that appear as though they could tumble off the cake any moment. "Am I even old enough to be a sailor uniform at all?"
Ryuko brushes his eye, the way she always does when she feels particularly proud of him. Senketsu no longer flinches at her touch in times such as these, and he gazes right into her eyes as she tells him, "Physically you may be four, but mentally, you're way older than me. You're like, Satsuki-old."
"But Satsuki is hardly older than you," Senketsu says, very matter-of-fact.
Ryuko laughs. "Well, maybe you're not that old, anyway."
Her smile falls away, and she focuses a particular amount on the four candles spitting smoke into the air, as though it is only now that she truly sees them at all. "Did you know, Senketsu," she says, running her hand over his collar in a manner that Senketsu knows to mean that she does not realize she is touching him, "that today would be your Golden Birthday?"
Senketsu does not particularly know what to say, and so he is silent a moment, and Ryuko takes to fiddling with the glove that Senketsu has never changed about himself, still as bright and red as it was the day he was born, until finally Senketsu answers, "No, I do not know what such a thing is, Ryuko."
"Well," Ryuko says, pulling her hands off him, "you're turning four today, on the fourth of October. That's what a Golden Birthday is."
She does not look his way. Senketsu stares at the candles, too.
"I see," he says.
"Can you believe we've known each other so long?" Ryuko asks. "Four years!"
Senketsu can tell from the sound of her voice that this isn't a minuscule amount of time to her at all, and he says, "It does not feel like it has been that long."
Ryuko's voice becomes very quiet. "It doesn't feel like it's been that long at all."
"My body seems to think it's not that long, either," she adds. This she says a bit more exuberantly, and Senketsu thinks it must be because it is his birthday and she wouldn't want to be in a dour mood on such a day as that, and so she goes on, perhaps accordingly, "Satsuki got a big growth spurt when she was twenty, you know, and that still hasn't happened to me! I still fit you like this just like I did when I was seventeen!"
"You've always been something of a late bloomer," Senketsu tells her. He says this in his smug, I-know-more-than-you voice, to which Ryuko crosses her arms and leans back on the bottom two legs of her chair, just as she knows Senketsu doesn't like.
"Says the guy who's just turning four today!" she protests.
"Physically four," Senketsu corrects her, echoing her words, and Ryuko falls back on her chair and tells him right back, "And still mentally too young to know anything about my blooming… ness!"
"Now, I don't need to be very old at all to understand that," Senketsu says, and Ryuko pouts at him as though she is truly seventeen again, and she argues, "Well, you don't look very old at all, now do ya?"
Senketsu might pout at her himself, just a little bit, at such an accusation. But then he dedicates himself to becoming something very grandmotherly, making his body a great expanse of pastel colors filled with lace and so much fabric that not a hint of Ryuko's skin even seems to show, and he says, "Well, how about this?"
Ryuko breaks out into laughter so boisterous that she has to steady herself on the edge of the table. "Well," she says, between heaving breaths, "now ya just look like a little kid trying to be a grown-up!"
Senketsu frowns, in a way that only he can, the cloth that forms his face perhaps a tinge pinker than it was only moments before, but he manages to concentrate just enough to shift his body into something more usual for the two of them, giving himself a longer skirt than he had in his teenage years, though with shorter sleeves, and Ryuko very suddenly feels much more comfortable against him than she has since they had first sat down together at this table.
"Now you seem just right," Ryuko says, and her words bring a great warmth to Senketsu, even though it is the time of year where there is a constant chill in the air that brings Ryuko to adorn him with scarves and jackets whenever she so much as steps outdoors.
Neither says anything for a moment, and both stare a long while at the four candles on the crooked, lopsided cake. The sun had not decided to come out today to celebrate Senketsu's birthday, and there is a certain darkness to the space around them, even though, had it just been a season before, this morning would have been as bright as the color of Ryuko's cake.
Senketsu feels as though he is coated in shadows as he asks, trying to be light but failing very much, "Do you think it says something about me, that my Golden Birthday falls on such an unlucky number such as four?"
"Don't be silly," Ryuko says, and she does not seem at all amused.
They do not speak any more on the subject, and when Ryuko eats the cake, and Senketsu tastes it in her blood, he hardly keeps himself from crying. There have been four years and four cakes but only one wish, and perhaps he has never wished for this wish to come true more than he does now.
Dozens more birthdays pass between Ryuko and Senketsu, but never does Ryuko get the growth spurt she wanted, and she spends a great many mornings sighing before her bathroom mirror.
She dates and breaks up, loves and loses, cries and laughs, and Senketsu stays with her through all of it, becoming anything she would like him to be and anything he would like himself to be—except, that is, what they would both like to be more than anything.
"I can't," he says, when Ryuko inquires, and she nods her head in a resigned understanding.
On the day that Senketsu is greeted with a less-lopsided cake and a happy birthday that sounds even less joyous than it had the year before, Senketsu looks to the fourteen candles that seem ready to tumble off the frosting no matter how much more stable Ryuko had learned to make her baked goods, and for the first time, he wishes a new wish.
It only takes until that very afternoon for his wish to seem to come true. A frantic Iori and Inumuta come to the door not long after Ryuko and Senketsu return from work, and they say, "Come with us," and the two of them can do little but follow. Iori and Inumuta lead the way to the lab that they had built together, and they sit Ryuko down on a rolling gray chair, and they reveal that there is a way, you know, to rid your body of them.
Ryuko does not say anything.
Senketsu does.
He asks, "Will it hurt? Will the effects be immediate?"
Iori tries to be reassuring. "No," he says, "it will not hurt."
Inumuta tries to be honest. "It will probably hurt," he says.
But both Iori and Inumuta look to each other and agree that it will not take long for the drug to do its work, and so Senketsu says, without giving this whole situation another thought at all, "You should take it, Ryuko."
But Ryuko does not seem so ready, and she does not seem at all convinced. She fiddles with Senketsu's glove, her fingers running over the fabric as though she intends to reassure him, though they both understand that she is the one truly in need of reassurance.
"If I take it," she says, "I'll be a normal human again?"
She speaks the word again in such a manner that Senketsu recognizes to mean that she has never actually viewed herself as a normal human at all.
"Yes," says Iori. "Your body will be as it should."
"As it should," Ryuko repeats. She scoffs, crossing her arms. "And what about Senketsu, huh?" she asks. "If Senketsu takes it, what'll happen to him?"
The looks that Iori and Inumuta give each other say everything, but still Inumuta speaks. "Well, he'll die, of course," he says. "Senketsu isn't like you—"
Ryuko does not let him finish. "He's the only one like me," she says. She stands from her spot, her heart beating so quickly that Senketsu very nearly fears, no matter how nonsensically, that it will give out on her.
But it does not, of course, and Inumuta stands, too. "Wait, Ryuko," he says. "You have to understand that—"
Again, Ryuko does not let him finish. Her voice is trembling, but the anger and venom of her words are clear.
"If you don't have a bullshit magic drug for Senketsu," she says, "then you don't have a magic bullshit drug for me."
Everyone tries to reason with her. Iori blocks the door. Senketsu says that he doesn't need any drug. Inumuta speaks of how much had been dedicated to this research.
"It would make everyone happy," he says, "if you would just take it."
But Ryuko will not listen
"If you don't have a bullshit magic drug for Senketsu," she says, once more, "then you don't have a bullshit magic drug for me."
Eventually, Senketsu loses track of birthdays. Cold autumn mornings that should be greeted with a tilted cake and a smile pass by without any of it, and he begins to fear the days that he'll have to take on a form that he has not yet and never wishes to be.
On the day that there should be a cake with twenty-four candles, Senketsu sneaks away from Ryuko in the very early hours of the morning and dials a number that he has never before dialed, and especially not at such a terrible time.
"This better be important," says the voice on the phone, and Senketsu tries very hard not to think of how this voice no longer sounds like the voice of a man in his twenties.
Senketsu swallows before he speaks.
"It is important," he insists. He continues on as quietly as he can muster.
"It's about Ryuko."
No more words are needed, but more are spoken anyway, and the two come upon an agreement that brings Iori to the door at an hour when nobody should be up and about, let alone coming to people's doors.
But no matter the time, Iori looks very much awake when Senketsu meets with him. The man smiles kindly, graying hair falling into his eyes as he leans down and hands Senketsu a small container.
"You're doing the right thing," Iori assures the Kamui, but Senketsu never feels as heavy as he does in that moment, looking to this man's nice wrinkled smile and holding what he knows carries within it the power to change what Ryuko does not wish to be changed but should wish to be changed
"All it takes is one," says Iori, and Senketsu stares at the tiny, minuscule capsule long after Iori leaves. It is nothing, he thinks, but it is everything that Ryuko needs.
But no matter how much Senketsu thinks to drop the capsule into Ryuko's Calpis, or slip it into her rice, or place it on her tongue while she slumbers, he cannot bring himself to follow through.
Ryuko holds Senketsu so close when she sleeps, and once, he hears her say what she said what seems so long ago now, when she had crossed her arms and willingly left a happy life behind her.
Four days after Senketsu's twenty-fourth birthday, he wakes a great deal earlier than he would on any other ordinary day. There's a chill to the air in the apartment, because Ryuko does not wish to spend the money on heating just yet, she says, and outside the window, Senketsu sees nothing but darkness that he knows will soon fade to gray with the rising of the sun. Old, soggy leaves rest on their windowsill and against the panes, and he looks on these ugly reminders of autumn as he slips away from her.
Ryuko shivers at the absence of his touch. Senketsu does not look to her face as he wraps her in a blanket that cannot hold her as he does, and he pretends that he does not hear her soft cry of longing.
He comes to the kitchen and leaves the capsule where there should still be the falling-over remnants of a cake waiting to be eaten for yet another indulgent breakfast. If Ryuko had still thought his birthday something worth celebrating, Senketsu thinks, then perhaps she would have made a vanilla cake with strawberry frosting, or perhaps a chocolate cake topped with fudge.
Once, what seems an eternity ago now, he remembers that she had decided that a cheesecake was much more interesting. Her creation had a crust made from cookies, but the cream cheese had been spoiled, and she spent a great many days sick. That cake became nothing more than a splatter against a garbage bag before long.
The memory leaves Senketsu just as the darkness does outside. Perhaps the capsule before him should be nothing but a stain against a garbage bag as well. Ryuko will never take it. Senketsu wonders if she would even consider it, if he said all the right words. He wonders if she ever has.
It does not take long for Ryuko to notice Senketsu's absence. She comes to the kitchen table where he has left the tiny capsule in plain sight, her footsteps loud and pattering, as though begging him to look her way.
But Senketsu does not, and he cannot, and she stops behind him, so close that her warm breath brushes against his collar.
"I'm freezing," she says, and Senketsu can no longer ignore that he had not heard the rustling of the blanket that he had left behind as she had come his way.
Ryuko does not lean in any closer. "You know I ain't payin' for heating yet, right?" she asks.
Senketsu sighs.
"Sorry," he tells her. "Sorry."
He shuts his eyes. She moves away, to the other side of the table, right where the capsule sits.
On a sunny day, Senketsu imagines that the tiny thing would be shining in the early morning light. On a sunny day, Senketsu imagines that it would seem to sparkle.
But it is not sunny. It is dark and dreary, cloudy and murky, and when Ryuko sits across from him, the capsule does not appear to be a glimmering beacon.
It appears dull and ordinary.
Ryuko takes the capsule and holds it between her fingers. "You think it tastes like shit?" she asks. "Because I bet it tastes like shit."
Her attention is not on the drug, however. She looks directly to him, her gaze study, unwavering.
"Of course you knew I had it," Senketsu says.
"You're a terrible liar," she answers. "And you can't keep a secret. Not to save your life."
She puts the capsule down. She could crush it in her fingers, reduce it to nothing but powder and dust in only a moment. But the little drug hits the hard surface of the table with a quiet click, rolling left and right before it finally steadies itself and is still.
"What would you have done, if I had made you take it?" Senketsu asks.
Ryuko's eyes still do not leave him, not for a long moment. But then she shakes her head, laughing, and she comes to her feet with a horrible screech of her chair. The hazy light drenches her exposed skin, and for the first time all morning, Senketsu sees her nakedness.
"Are ya gonna keep running yer mouth at me," she says, "or are you gonna get your ass over here and give me some boob support?"
Sixty-four days before Senketsu's fortieth birthday, he becomes that which he had never wished to be.
The two of them sit before what's left. Ryuko says that it's not fair. She says that it wasn't supposed to be this soon. She says how dare you, how dare you, how dare you.
But nobody answers. There is no tired, reassuring smile now, telling the both of them that everything will be all right. There is no one to say that it's merely a simple surgery, nothing more. There is no one insisting that they ought not worry, that it's not going to be the end, not yet, I swear it.
Ryuko only manages to look just before they leave. She says what she has said to him with every anxious brush against his fabric and every frenzied beat of her heart. She says what she has held deep inside her ever since she first took hold of her phone and the news washed over her like a relentless flood.
"Sis," she says, "what the hell am I supposed to do now? What the hell am I supposed to do when… when…."
She shakes her head. Tears fall, but she does not cry out.
The air is filled with the scent of incense and flowers and fruit.
On Senketsu's fortieth birthday, the skies are not gray and dark and murky.
Bright, clear sunlight falls through the windows when Senketsu awakes to find that Ryuko has gone.
"How did you…" he starts to say, but it is at this moment that Ryuko steps into the room, her arms behind her back and a bashful smile on her face as though she is eighteen again.
"I'm magical, you know?" she says. "And a magician never tells her tricks!"
"Magical," Senketsu repeats. He does not see the humor in the situation.
"Of course," says Ryuko. "Just as magical as you."
She brings her hands out in front of her, revealing what may very well be her ugliest cake yet. It's as falling over and lopsided as always, with frosting and bits of chocolate cookie spattered and smeared all along the plate on which it sits. Forty candles rest haphazardly on the crumpled surface, looking near ready to set the entire concoction on fire, and Ryuko's smile only grows at Senketsu's utter bewilderment.
"Happy birthday, Senketsu," she says.
Senketsu does not quite know what to say.
Ryuko places the cake down on the bed and sits beside him. "I know it's been a while," she says. "I bet you still think that there's nothing worth celebrating in today."
Senketsu cannot look at any of it. Not at the cake, and not at her face.
"There is not," he tells her.
"But you're wrong," Ryuko says. She sighs very deeply, and Senketsu hears her hands curl around the crumpled sheets beneath them. "After… Satsuki died, I realized something, you know?" Ryuko pauses. She swallows down the tears that Senketsu has only ever been able to brush away but never stop.
"I realized that this fucking sucks," she says. She laughs, the kind that is pained and miserable and sad. "I realized that this shit's… so unfair. I could be the best damn person in the whole world, and I could wish and wish and wish 'til I'm even bluer than the damn ocean, but some things just ain't possible. Some things are never gonna be possible."
Her grip on the sheets loosens with a gentle rustle, rustle of fabric, but still Senketsu does not look her way. He shuts his eyes, the guilt he has felt for all these years twisting and curling inside him.
He says, "But it could have been possible, Ryuko. It could still be possible, if you would only—"
Ryuko does not let him finish. "No," she says. "It ain't possible. Because all this shit that I had to go through—and all this shit that I'm gonna keep going through, over and over again—is the loneliest fucking shit in the whole goddamn universe. And I realized that I could never, ever live with myself if I left you to handle it all alone."
She can hardly speak any longer. Her voice has become choked up, wounded, but still there is a great power in her words as she declares, "I could never, ever be happy if I made you suffer all by yourself."
Senketsu opens his eyes. She is smiling and crying and naked and beautiful, and she says, "If this is how things have to be, I wouldn't want to go through it with anyone but you."
Ryuko pushes the hideous birthday cake his way.
"So," she says, "you got a wish for today, or what?"
A/N: Intended as a celebration of the OVA's fourth anniversary, having originally been released on September 3, 2014.