Title: Romanticide
Characters/Pairing: Subaru/Seishirou
Genre: Angst
Rating: G
Warnings: spoilers for vol. 16-17
Word Count: 276
Summary: Subaru's perspective on Seishirou's Wish.

This was all he had left of the man he loved: a thin steel cylinder, with a single golden-brown eye floating in blood.

Was it strange that, in some indirect way, he'd come to own both Seishirou's eyes? Because Seishirou wouldn't let anyone else touch him, he had stepped in the path of Yuuya's mother's knife those nine years ago, and now, from beyond his own sakura-strewn grave he sought to remove the blinding scar Fuuma had left. It was, maybe, the closest Seishirou would ever have come to an apology.

"If you take this, you'll inherit the role of the Sakurazukamori."

Subaru reached out for the canister. It was burning hot to the touch, as if the dead assassain's life energy swelled within its walls. And he breathed, dreaming of a blessed year...

When he ate the eye, the coldness startled him; Seishirou had always said he'd never been able to feel anything, but Subaru didn't think that he meant that physically as well. That single eye burned in his head, like the times Seishirou snuck up on him and covered his eyes with hands that were blisteringly warm against his skin and whispered, Guess who.

"I knew it was you," Subaru murmured. "Every time." He could hear the Tree rustle, all the way from Ueno park.

When he looked in the late sakurazukamori's garden pond, his gaze was green and tawny gold. They'd always had a strange relationship; was it irony, then, that at the end of it all, Seishirou was dead and Subaru owned the windows to his very soul?