title: over the sharp edge of earth
summary: and the pine was so gentle, it cried with me. — Aoi, Sanemi, and the left-unsaid.
raw word count: 645
notes: implied Genya/Aoi, budding Sanemi/Aoi if you squint. I'm definitely squinting. Oops.

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They bury him on the mountain, under a tree so heavy the flowers almost kiss the tombstone. It's lovely, really; all that fragrance in the air, the way the light catches the wisteria when the sun lowers itself into the cradle of the slopes. It shouldn't make her as angry as it does.

It shouldn't.

"Stupid man," she hisses, touching her hands to the soil patched over his empty urn, still soft from the dig, still uprooted, threaded through with stray seedlings of young grass. "Stupid boy. You couldn't even die right, could you? Asshole."

There was no body to burn. No bones, no blood. Whatever soot had been left over when he'd crumbled had been lost to Nakime's fortress; in the end the eaten ate the eater, as is the law of life.

"Asshole," she says, again, hiccups the word through heavy sobs. "Asshole!" At least with Shinobu she'd known, she'd made her peace with it ahead of time.

"You're an ugly crier," Sanemi observes, carefully monotonous, and she's too tired to even flinch at the suddenness of his voice. She lifts her eyes to his, wide August-blue and angry, and hurt, and inconsolable in a way that begs you to do something, anything about the loss. Wide August-blue and defiant, regardless.

He hands her a tattered handkerchief. Seats himself at her right side. Then, awkwardly, with an apprehension she's never known him to possess, or let himself be possessed by: "I didn't know you two were…you know."

It almost makes her smile. Almost.

"We weren't," she says, voice muffled by the fabric. She wipes at her eyes a little unsteadily. "I didn't think it'd do anyone any good to tell him. Not until Muzan was dead, anyway, and now…"

She lets the wind take the rests of her words, mouth twisting into an awful, bitter line.

Sanemi nods, slow and heavy, as if submerged in a thick water. He understands more about that than he cares to admit. "And now it still wouldn't do anyone any good."

He stares at the letters carved into the granite for a long time, so long that Aoi's sobs die down to a loose string of hiccups, so long she cries herself clean out of tears and the world grows dark around them, cool with autumn night.

"I prayed, you know," he says at last, and she turns those wide eyes his way, makes him want to bite his tongue at the wounded rawness of her. He swallows hard. "I prayed. But whatever gods there are, they're cunts, and they didn't listen. Didn't want to listen. They took my little brother even though he's all I had left. Even though I begged. I begged." He says it so hotly it feels like the air'll give and burst. "I begged."

The hand she clasps around his is cold as a corpse and just as tentative. He upturns his palm in the loose hold, clasps her fingers in his instead. She's summer, winter — and it's late, and they are both so worn and so, so lost."We should go," he says, because there's nothing she could say to fill the coming silence.

Nothing he could, for that matter.

Aoi lets him pull her to her feet, shroud her in his haori, impossibly warm with the shape of his body, its fever-heat. Lets him lead her down the winding pathway, down the crooked streets, down into the belly of the night, all the while thinking of how strange it is, to mourn the casualties of a war few even know used to exist.

Sanemi clasps her hand a little tighter, and this, too, is strange — how they're shells of themselves, how they've clattered and somehow broken in the same place. How he understands.

She holds him a little tighter, too, lets herself breathe from the bottom of the lungs.

He understands.

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fin.