It shouldn't be so easy to breathe.
This is the first thought that enters Maki's head in some time. She'd been conscious, sure, as she dragged her body from the Shrine of Judgement to her dormitory. But as she stands, firm and unshaking (years of training mean that she'd hardly tremor in a magnitude 10 earthquake), she wonders why she doesn't feel heavy, like she's suffocating or like her heart is in her throat.
It had been an intoxicatingly awful feeling, watching Kaito step forward to face his execution. In that moment, she couldn't stop the repulsive flood of tears and snot as they'd coursed down her face in waves. She shook uncontrollably, a lump the size of a cantaloupe forming in the back of her throat, blocking off her airways in the same way she imagined a garotte might feel (she'd never been on the receiving end). She'd tried to breathe, tense and calloused hands yearning to claw at her throat as she tried to suck in air that wouldn't come.
But now, she can breathe just fine. How fucked is that?
She's unspeakably disgusted with herself, with the fact that her heartbeat has slowed to its usual resting rate as she collapses onto her bed. She wants to suffocate herself with her pillow when she finds herself inspecting her nails with almost-boredom when sleep fails to come. She's about ready to slit her own throat with her trusty knife when it crosses her mind that she hasn't touched herself in a while, and that it might help her get her mind off things. Imagine her disgust when her stupid, sleepless brain takes the last thought and runs with it. Her mind and her hands begin to wander in cacophonous duet.
She's no stranger to going long periods of time without getting off. The tightly-packed beds in the orphanage hardly lent themselves to privacy, and Maki herself had never been good about keeping quiet when orgasm hit. The start of her training, in spite of a change in the mechanism, hadn't changed the outcome: training for twenty hours a day meant that sleep came quickly (so did Maki, in the fleeting moments of free time she had, which were few and far between). On the bright side, she'd learned to do it discreetly - turns out training to resist torture means a good deal more willpower when it came to stifling her moans.
Maki's toes curl as she increases the speed of her movements, drawing herself closer to the edge. Her twintails flail spastically as she shimmies herself into a reclined position, not missing a beat in the rhythm she's established beneath her inky skirt. She feels the powerful muscles in her abdomen contract as a luminescent glow begins to bubble in the pit of her stomach.
"Kaito…" she whispers as her body jolts, wracked with waves of perverse pleasure as she tumbles over the sheer cliff face. At the very least, this feels somewhat right, though she knows it's so very wrong to moan the name of a dead man. Yes, it somehow feels right to have his given name roll off her tongue, but she'd never called him that; that's how she understands that none of this is real. Disgusted, she casts aside her soiled undergarments and lets herself slide down her sweat-soaked sheets into her original recumbent position.
For a while, she gazes at the ceiling. After they'd watched Kaito's theatrical execution, she'd had this silly thought: maybe she'd look up at the obsidian ceiling and see it twinkle like rhinestones in some sort of cheesy, contrived tribute to the Luminary of the Stars. She, of all people, should have known better than to expect as much, but she also knows that true love is meant to make you see crazy things and think even crazier ones. Of course, the ceiling is black, as black or blacker than every night before. Love, she reasons, must affect a master assassin differently than your average teenage girl.
Still, love is love, and Maki thinks it's kind of fucked that the air in her room is cool and breathable. When sleep finally comes, she's disgusted that she dreams sensual dreams of a nameless, faceless man, whose name could be anything in the world but Momota Kaito.