Chapter Text
I.
“I’ve never seen so many birds in one place.”
“Birds? Is that what you see?”
“Am I wrong?”
“Hmm. No. I suppose you’re not. In any case, the trick is standing still.”
Iwaizumi places his sword point-first onto the ground, resting, but not quite relaxed. He stares at the stranger. Sunlight shifts through the foliage above them, peeking through the vegetation that had sprung up over the years amidst the castle ruins. A stray shaft, warm against the back of his neck, turns Iwaizumi’s dark hair almost brown, his face silhouetted by flickering shadow.
The birds perch all around them, occasionally fluttering to alight atop the other man. Feathers rustle, wingtips brushing against Iwaizumi. Something about them seems off: he can’t seem to focus on any one of them clearly. The sheen of their feathers have an inky, metallic quality to them such that he tastes uneasiness at the back of his throat just looking at them. And yet he feels the weight of one on his shoulder, claws scrabbling for purchase on his spaulder. It feels warm, and heavy.
Too heavy.
He looks back at the stranger, and realises it isn’t a stranger at all.
“What’s wrong with the birds?” he asks, a little sharply.
“Nothing’s wrong with them. You just… wouldn’t have seen them before, that’s all.”
Iwaizumi frowns, disliking such an obtuse answer. He asks, “Is it really you? Last time I checked, you weren’t… whatever it is you are now.”
A grin splits the other’s face, and the familiarity of the expression makes Iwaizumi tense even more. Birds flutter around them, a whirlwind of wings. Iwaizumi gets no other answer, and now he can sense something else that’s not quite hearing, something on the edge of his hearing. His unease rises, like static against the edge of his consciousness.
“What kind of birds are they?” the other man is asking.
“What?”
“I said, what kind of birds do you see?”
Iwaizumi turns his head, and looks into a beady black eye. “Crows. Why?”
“No reason. I can’t say I’m surprised.”
As Iwaizumi frowns at him, he raises his head for the first time, and smiles. And in the split second before then and the end Iwaizumi thinks that there’s something wrong not with the birds, but with the man himself-- an insubstantiality, a wavering of his very existence--
The birds vanish into silence. They take the world with them.
II.
For a moment, the ringing of cicadas comes to halt. Something crackles in the air, like lightning during a storm, the taste of ozone in the atmosphere. The dissonance at the edges of perception bounces around wildly like the chords of a dying piano, its keys striking empty notes. Falling out of tune and striving for beauty and passion, but falling short, so short.
III.
The earth shakes, interrupting their fight. It’s the largest tremor that’s hit the land since the battle for the Blue Keep began, and Iwaizumi has to drive his sword into the wooden floor to keep his footing. Across from him, the demon king barely shifts, appearing entirely unsurprised by the sudden quake. He merely plants his feet apart for balance, smiling all the while.
“And how,” he says sweetly, “do you think this is going to end?”
Iwaizumi blinks sweat away from his eyes. The gash on his head will need stitches, and he can’t feel his left leg since Oikawa had hit it with a curse. His right pauldron, along with the rerebrace, had been torn off. The breastplate he wore was cracked. Parts of the floor are slippery with his blood and there’s an ache both in his bones and in his ribs, but the greatsword he grips is steady in his hands, and he’s still standing.
So is Oikawa, though by all appearances he looks to be in far better shape than Iwaizumi is in. So far he’s avoided every single one of Iwaizumi’s direct hits, and they both know why: he’s a glass cannon. Still, his finery is in ribbons, his staff is irreparably broken, and from the increasing number of wounds Iwaizumi’s been able to inflict on him for the past twenty minutes he knows that Oikawa’s just about run dry on healing spells.
They’ve been locked in battle for most of the night, not necessarily with each other. The distant clash of battle emanating from the city is still audible, if muted. The last time Iwaizumi had looked at the capitol, much of it was in flames. The thought of the place he called home set ablaze, its familiar streets awash with screams sends fresh pangs through him, and he grits his teeth.
He looks across the room at the source of all his heartbreak, and not for the first time, Iwaizumi tells him. “Give up, Oikawa. You know your cause is lost.”
“So you think,” the king scoffs. “Just goes to show what you really know.”
“We’ve driven you from the Keep,” Iwaizumi says bluntly. “Fukuroudani, Nekoma, and Karasuno will have taken the city once we’re through here.”
“You say that like they’re not part of this kingdom.”
Iwaizumi keeps his gauntleted hands from trembling, but his voice is no less sharp. “Open your eyes. You’re holding onto the last remnants of your rule, only here because you have nowhere else to go.”
“I am here because I wanted to talk to you, Iwaizumi. Alone.” To Iwaizumi’s consternation, the thrum of magic surrounding Oikawa starts to dissipate. He spreads one arm in a sweeping motion. “Can’t we do that? We could always do that, here.”
They’re in the hall of the summer palace, up near the cliffs by the seaside, away from the Keep. A quiet place, where even now Iwaizumi sees shadows of childhood memories flit away at the corners of his vision. The ceiling is slanted now, rafters still whole but with slats of the roof gone to let in shafts of moonlight. He looks back to the interior, to what he and Oikawa are standing amongst, and sees that the room is filled with broken things.
The demon king follows his gaze and sighs, crouching down to pick up a lute that looks as if it has been run over by a boar, which then came back for a second run. And maybe even a third. Amongst the wreckage was a myriad of other instruments. Anything that had strings were been cut, anything wooden smashed in. Music sheets are scattered everywhere.
But the centerpiece of the room is a grand piano. The once-glossy black of it now caked with dust and the surface scratched and scored far too many times. The lid cracked, keys missing, pedals snapped off.
“Ah, this is a travesty, isn’t it?” Oikawa says, looking around at the rest of the room. “Doesn’t this break your heart?”
At the same time, Iwaizumi says, “Don’t tell me you broke all these instruments.”
Oikawa shakes his head. “Not I,” he says.
“Then who?”
The king completely ignores the question, the fractured lute still in his hands. He looks down at it, then puts it back on the floor, next to a flute with all its keys broken off. There is no piano bench but he walks over to it and stands instead, placing both hands on the keys. His movements are careful and deliberate. Not as if he is afraid that the whole thing will fall apart at any second, but more as if he is touching something sacred and precious.
He hums under his breath. That same tune that he always hums. Then his fingers slip across the keys, echoing that song.
Iwaizumi asks bitterly, sarcastically, “Don’t you know any other melody?”
Oikawa ends the song on a chord and holds it. “No,” he says. “No other songs.”
Something in his voice makes Iwaizumi pause. “That can’t be true,” he says unbelievingly. “You used to practice more than you breathe.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Oikawa says. His back is turned to Iwaizumi now, the chord still fading in the air. “I can’t hear it. Not anymore.”
“What? Are you selectively deaf now?” Iwaizumi asks. He looks down at his own feet. He is standing behind a pair of violins, the strings snapped and the bows as well.
“I can’t hear it,” Oikawa repeats, levelly.
The piano has gone silent now, even though Oikawa’s fingers are still on the keys. He takes them off, slowly. Iwaizumi thinks he senses reluctance.
Then Oikawa stands up straight and clasps his hands together. He tilts his head back, but Iwaizumi cannot see what he is looking at.
But he thinks that maybe there are things that hurt more than death and that maybe there are things that hurt more than lost friends. So, love. Does it all come back to love? The romanticisation of emotion and the search for more; more passion, more infinite, the more than this and more than this can ever give. And he thinks that you give things up with every step of the way. The little things and the big ones, the things that perhaps are not yours to give away.
But more than that, he thinks that when your steps have brought you across not decades, but centuries and millennia, you will always lose more than you gain. Until all you have is the last thing and when that goes, you will go with it. Your last step sinking into the ash and dust that has consumed all else. Starting from within.
Then nothing. Not hollowness and not emptiness. Then nothing.
“There’s nothing to see here,” Oikawa says, abrupt. Interrupting the silence and bringing Iwaizumi out of his thoughts. “Iwaizumi, I--”
Iwaizumi isn’t listening. The dawning realisation of what Oikawa meant had turned him cold.
“You gave up your music.” he whispers. “There was nothing left to consume, so you let go of the last thing that made you human.”
The eyes that look back at him remain as red as they ever were. “You’re the one who left. I gave up you.”
Iwaizumi looks at his friend, his king, his love, and sees a stranger. Furious, he retorts just as coldly, “And you think that absolves you of all responsibility? Don’t put this on me. Don’t you dare.”
Oikawa’s voice grows ever softer, a warning sign. “I just want to talk.”
“There’s nothing left to say.”
The demon king looks at him then, something in his crimson eyes that Iwaizumi doesn’t bother to fathom out. He thinks he has more to say. Maybe something about gratitude, maybe something about friendship, maybe something about how there must be a reason behind every meeting and every lost love. But he cannot think of anything solid and real, nothing that either of them would understand.
The things he wants to say too deep to ever be conveyed through words. Once he would have hoped that such things could be conveyed after death, intangible except in salvation, but now he knows death is nothing more than an end. And nothing lies beyond it.
So he keeps the things he wants to say to himself. Knowing full well that he will never have a chance to try and convey them to Oikawa again, not with the deal he had cut with Shiratorizawa to bring the king to them and not with all the time and luck in the world. Things are coming to an end and Iwaizumi knows that their roles in each other’s lives are among such things. So he knows that his only chance has passed and slipped him by and all he has done is watch it go. But there was nothing more he could do, and nothing more he will do.
This the end, come and gone so easily.
Oikawa bows his head, moonlight reflecting off his horns. Iwaizumi watches him, eyes dry. When their gazes meet again, Oikawa’s hands are full of black fire.
“Very well.” he whispers. “I won’t waste my breath then.”
He straightens up, his voice rising. “I will not be brought before Ushijima like some common prisoner,” he calls, stepping away from the piano. “Nor do I intend to relinquish what I’ve fought for. That leaves only two choices for you, Iwaizumi. Stand down, or die.”
Which means that there is no choice at all.
Iwaizumi raises his sword, one last time. Light reflected off the burnished steel, the power imbued within it generations before giving it a cold blue tint. The terrible irony that he is about to cut Oikawa down with the royal family’s own heirloom is not lost on him, but he puts such matters out of his thoughts.
Oikawa watches the keen edge glint, some of his blood already on the blade from their fight before. Out of the corner of his eye, Iwaizumi sees that the black fire has spread up down his hands to the floor. Lines of black crawling along the wall beside Iwaizumi. He turns towards the wall, and reaches out with one hand to touch one of the lines, utterly unafraid of heat. There is none.
“You underestimate me.” Iwaizumi says as Oikawa’s red eyes widen in shock. Then he closes in.
IV.
This an ending for one and a start for another. This always a bittersweet moment. This always a continuation of what has passed before.
And as the silence rushes upon the nothingness he stands in its onslaught and whispers to himself,
and before the dark there was the cold,
and before the cold there was a last shred of warmth,
and in a last shred of warmth some hope for a future,
and in that hope for a future the memory of a past,
and he thought to himself that if we do not make our own paths then we will never make it to anything at all and in the end all death will be like this, like this,
no heaven for any man,
no god to stop our falls,
and nothing that will not end in darkness and silence.
And he raises his hands and he salutes the end and he says,
in the last moments of his waking life he made into the infinite that which could not forgive him and that from which he deserved no forgiveness. but as his eyes shut and the last breath was stolen from his lungs he thought that maybe once he remembered things like light and things like love and maybe once he remembered how to even believe in such fragile things. how to fight for them and how to lay his life down for them. but he knows that it all slipped through his fingers like time and sand and that in the end he was not enough and could never be enough, and that the world turned away from him and never looked back.
And he bows to the silence and the crush of despair.
And then the fire.
And then the furor.
V.
Oikawa flings something at Iwaizumi, fist opening to let go of it. He is even faster than before and Iwaizumi is caught unawares, the spelling hitting him in the shoulder and arm and bursting into fire upon impact.
Iwaizumi chokes back a scream and drops to the floor, hitting it with his burned shoulder, putting the fire out before it can consume the rest of him. By that time Oikawa has already hurtled over Iwaizumi and up the stairs, hand clutched over a slash Iwaizumi had opened in his side. But not fast enough.
Iwaizumi rolls onto his front, brings his legs underneath him, and springs, lunging and catching Oikawa’s legs and causing him to trip and fall.
They fight like they’d always fought in their childhood, except this time on opposite sides. They were always careful to conceal their real identities during their escapades from the palace, which sometimes meant that they were targets for the lowborn. The brawls between them and some of the streetgangs were a common business around the lowtown streets, pursuing each other all around the alleyways, toppling weapons and baskets and sometimes goats in the chase.
An affair of teeth and spitting snarls and nails. And knives and needles and elbows. Iwaizumi now burdened by the screaming burn on his left shoulder and arm, the skin shrieking in agony at every jolt and point of contact. Oikawa fights dirtier than Iwaizumi remembers, scraping the edge of his own dagger along Iwaizumi’s burned arm.
Then Iwaizumi grabs Oikawa by the hair, slams his skull back into the wall, and forces him onto his back while he is stunned.
But another blaze. Iwaizumi looks up. The lines along the walls have burst into fire. No heat, still, but it distracts Iwaizumi just long enough for Oikawa to throw him off.
Oikawa gets to his feet, and takes a few steps up the stairs. He watches Iwaizumi carefully.
“You fucker,” Iwaizumi growls, grabbing his burnt arm.
Oikawa loosens his wrist by spinning the dagger, then advances. Iwaizumi gets to his feet, backing away. The blade is shorter, much more maneuverable than his own weapon in this narrow staircase. If he tries to lunge at Oikawa then all Oikawa has to do now is swing blindly.
But Iwaizumi will not run. Not from him.
VI.
There are no sounds for the rest of the fight. The whole thing must have lasted no more than seven minutes.
Faster than lightning, Iwaizumi smears his hand full of his own blood and jams his fingers into Oikawa’s eyes. Oikawa dodges, but the blood flecks into his eyes anyway, blinding him temporarily as Iwaizumi blinks and wipes the blood out of his own face.
Then he grabs the knife that Oikawa’s grip had loosened on and slams it into Oikawa’s arm, slicing through his bicep and pinning him to the floor by his sleeve.
Fights in small spaces never turn out for the best, not for anyone, and not for God. That was why, Iwaizumi thinks -- no, this, this is why they were given the desert.
Nothing hurt as much when you looked around and realized how alone you were. And how alone you always would be, no matter how many people you could see.
But in the end, what stops Oikawa from destroying them all that day is Iwaizumi managing to keep Oikawa’s black fires from consuming him long enough to identify the point of entry to Oikawa’s torso, and diving in, blade first. What blinds Iwaizumi is not the sun but Oikawa’s blood.
VII.
What Iwaizumi remembers is this: the first time someone introduced Oikawa to magic, he singed his fingers. Iwaizumi had tried to pull him away, convinced that the spell was a deathtrap in disguise.
But Oikawa had pushed him away, shaken his head, and tried to light another one.
What dazzled Oikawa that day, Iwaizumi knows, was not the fire itself, but the bright flare of power the moment before.
Oikawa had never smiled much, in those early days. He started smiling again after that.
VIII.
Something is wrong.
Iwaizumi looks at the hole he’d made in Oikawa’s torso, and sees his sword sinking into something inky and black. He coughs, and blood sprays from his own lips.
Oikawa’s eyes are wide and red in the moonlight. “Hajime,” he begins to say, and Iwaizumi coughs again.
He looks down at himself, and sees the greatsword passing through his own body in the same place where he’d run Oikawa through. Still in a state of shock, he pulls the blade out of the demon king and watches as the blackness around Oikawa’s wound fade away, leaving behind nothing except torn clothing around whole, unbroken skin.
“You tried to kill me,” Oikawa whispers as Iwaizumi drops the sword from numb fingers. His eyes still wide. “You… you would have run me through without a second thought. You did.”
As Iwaizumi falls, struggling to unclasp his breastplate, Oikawa yanks the knife pinning his arm and hurls it away. He crawls over to Iwaizumi, who finds that every lungful of breath he takes is laced with blood, more of it gushing out of the open wound he’d somehow put in himself.
“Oikawa, what did you…”
“It was a last resort,” Oikawa says. “It was for Ushijima.”
Iwaizumi’s vision is starting to blur around the edges, but he forces himself to look into Oikawa’s direction. “I don’t understand.”
The king leans over him, cradling his face in his hands. “Whatever hurt done unto me is directed back at the one who inflicts it.” This close, Iwaizumi can’t mishear the hoarseness growing in his voice. “I knew Shiratorizawa were outside the city. I knew they were coming. I knew I would have never bested Ushijima, not after they’d sent you in first.”
Something wet drips onto Iwaizumi’s face, then another. But Oikawa’s voice never cracks.
“He was meant to go for the kill. Not you.”
Iwaizumi tries to call up on his anger, all his bitterness, all his fury and heartbreak and resentment that had plagued him for the past years, but he finds nothing now that he’s coming to terms with the simple fact that he’s at the end of the path, that he has no more left to give. He can no longer feel anything below his neck, and the coldness was spreading ever faster. “I see.”
He raises his hand and tries to find Oikawa’s face with it before his vision goes completely dark. Oikawa helps him, his palm covering Iwaizumi’s fingers.
“That’s a dirty trick, Tooru,” Iwaizumi makes himself say through numb lips. “Ushijima would have cut your head from your shoulders.”
“And beheaded himself when he did. I would have died happy then.”
Despite himself, despite everything, Iwaizumi laughs, humourless and tired. “I would never have let him touch you. I keep my promises, Tooru. Well, I try to.”
He couldn’t save Oikawa from himself, after all. And now he’s at the clearing at the end of the road. He’d always thought Oikawa would be by his side when he did, but like so many other things, it seems he would be wrong about this one too.
“I always said I’d fall on my own sword for you, didn’t I?” he breathes, and Oikawa laughs.
“You were right, you know,” Iwaizumi continues. “It’s not so much that some things last forever, but more that some things can’t be fixed.” He can still smell the smoke on the air, but like his sight, even that is fading quickly.
“Or forgotten,” Oikawa says.
Iwaizumi wishes he could look at Oikawa for the last time, wants to watch him to see if there is anything resembling bitterness or grief in the man. He is sure that both are present, but if they are, Iwaizumi cannot sense them at all. Oikawa is crying, but at this point Iwaizumi does not presume that they are tears of regret.
What Iwaizumi remembers then are not the memories he has of the demon king but the memories he has not destroyed of Tooru.
He remembers sitting with Oikawa in the central plaza of Aoba Jousai with the sun beating bright and vicious down on them. The air thick with the heat and the sounds of summer. Smell of overripe fruit in the air, but freshened by the water of the fountain behind them. Crashing down. They were so small back then, and the fountain had seemed like a waterfall.
They sat there together in silence and they watched other children play, meet friends, make friends. And leave, they always left in the end. Iwaizumi had tugged at Oikawa’s sleeve but Oikawa only set his mouth into a hard line and pulled away. After this happened enough times, Iwaizumi stopped trying to coax Oikawa away and sat there contentedly by his friend’s side.
In the late afternoon Oikawa dozed off and fell asleep against Iwaizumi’s shoulder. He sat there until it became pitch-black and the guards came out looking for them. Later he tried to explain how afraid of moving he was, and how grave a sin it seemed to him to wake Oikawa up.
But what Iwaizumi did not say was this: that he was afraid, so afraid of trying to awake Oikawa only to discover that he would not stir.
He can’t feel Oikawa’s face under his palm anymore, can’t feel the blood leaking sluggishly out of his dying body, can’t feel anything at all.
“Hajime?” Oikawa asks. He sounds very close.
Iwaizumi says nothing. He doesn’t have enough air in his lungs to do so, but he tries. He always did. Except now even his focus is being lost to the darkness, his thoughts wandering and fragmented and out of everything he wants to say to Oikawa the only thing he manages to chase down is this.
“I missed you,” he tries to tell him, and knows nothing else after that.
IX.
Oikawa has nothing.
He carries Iwaizumi’s body out of the building with him, divesting it of all its useless armour and exiting through the gardens out onto the cliffs. He takes his family’s sword. Out in the night air, he looks at the skyline of Aoba Jousai and searches out the spire but it is too far away and it is too much, even for him.
Then, to nothing, he says, “This is it, isn’t it?”
He looks at the Blue Keep. People were killing each other for it, for the chance to right all the wrongs. Oikawa looks down at Iwaizumi’s punctured chest and thinks that all the lives in the world could not bring Oikawa’s dead back. Not when the dead encompassed so much more than just his knight.
The rain stops as suddenly as it had begun. At dawn, the city block begins to burn.
X.
In the deafening silence Oikawa closes his eyes and leans his head against Iwaizumi’s shoulder and runs his fingers through Iwaizumi’s hair, over and over again. He says nothing to the dead.
This silence never comfort enough but all that the world has to offer.
XI.
You are not here. This is not you. This is a dream and this is a nightmare and this is nothing but the god damn truth.
But you are not here.
I know where you are and I know what you are and I know who you are. You are in hell and I was a cold-hearted bastard and you were never mine to love.
I do not know why you are.
You are locked in a prison deep under the sea where the weight of the world crushes and drowns you every time you wake. So you do not wake. So you have gone to sleep. So you walk in your dreams and your nightmares as you will never walk in life again, and so you walk to me, here, in this nowhere place, in this adolescent never-to-be but so-vivid too-vivid piece of pretty fantasy. So you come into my arms again and so I take you in once more and this time, you say, it will be different.
No, I say. It could never be. Because you are cold in my arms and your eyes are sightless and I know that you are not here. You are not here and you never will be. You left me behind and I left you for dead and you left me for eternity.
This is all I have, you say, and you will take this from me too.
You will not let me go.
And I remember your words, from so long ago: You will not love me. You will not. You cannot. But I laughed in your face and against your fear and I kissed you instead, and I loved you in spite of it all, and you, I love you, I think you broke, I think you shattered into shards of glass, so precious and so fragile, I think you believed I would put you together again, and I know you were so, terribly wrong.
And I know you are not here.
I think that I do not know if this is my dream or yours but that is only something I tell myself. Because I know you no longer dream in anything but darkness and your nightmares are things beyond reckoning and never, never, never would you let me hold you again.
Not in life, and not in death, and not in dreams.
Now I know why you are.
You will never walk in life again.
This is all I have. You, and you, and the memory of your warmth. Your skin translucent under my touch, my fingers lighting every vessel of blood that ran through your body until they neared your heart and then it all went cold and opaque and you, you turned away from me. You dared. You dared to be something I could never have. You dared to be something I did not deserve.
This is all I have. Time and winter and sea and you.
XII.
The greatsword points itself at Ushijima as soon as the man arrives on the scene. The blade glints as it hangs off the ground to Oikawa's right, suspended by nothing but the will of his magic. The watchmen fan out behind him, cutting off Oikawa’s escape routes. There’s a low murmur as they catch sight of Iwaizumi’s lifeless body on the flagstones, and one of the company's healers makes a move as if to rush forwards. Ushijima looks at the king, a question in his eyes.
Oikawa gives a curt nod and the man approaches along with one of his lighthaired healers. Oikawa watches the healer grit his teeth at the open wound, watches him confirm that Iwaizumi really is gone. He watches Ushijima himself reach out with soft fingers to close Iwaizumi’s eyes, gentler than Oikawa had ever expected. When he looks up at Oikawa again, his eyes are dark with an emotion Oikawa had never seen in them before.
The demon king says, “You’ve had your look. Now get away from him.” His voice is as smooth as it had ever been.
Ushijima unclasps his cloak and draws it over Iwaizumi, covering his face. Without looking away from Oikawa he makes a gesture with one hand that has another one of his men hurrying forwards to help the healer pick the body up. Oikawa bristles, stepping forwards, and such is the look on his face that that alone halts the man in his tracks. The healer backs away as well.
Slowly, Ushijima stands. Oikawa stares at him, all his grief and sorrow tucked away where it cannot touch him.
“You sent him after me,” he says into the silence. “And now he’s gone.”
“We could never have turned him against you if you hadn’t already done so yourself. You know that.”
“Don’t,” Oikawa hisses, the wind rising around him as he gave way to his fury. Black fire begins to stream from his hands, dancing along the blade still pointed at the commander of the watchmen. “Don’t you ever presume to have known him, or me.”
He had expected Ushijima to step down. To his surprise and further rage, Ushijima responds in kind, speaking for the first time in Oikawa’s memory with something verging close to anger.
“I know true loyalty when I see it. He refused to cooperate until I promised him I’d let him try to talk you down. He had faith in you, up until the very end.”
Red was clouding the corners of Oikawa’s vision. How dare he. How dare he. Oikawa had thought his well of magic had run dry, having thoroughly depleted himself during the last fight, but now he’s starting to hear the whirlwind of wings. Deafening in his head.
Ushijima is still speaking. “Such misplaced faith.” he presses on, unafraid of Oikawa’s obvious hostility, and now even Oikawa in his disbelief can hear the undertone of regret in Ushijima’s steady voice.“His loyalty was wasted on you.”
The commander folds his hands behind his back and looks up. Between him and the demon king, the body of Iwaizumi lay motionless.
“He wanted this,” Oikawa says, finding his voice. “He never told you want he wanted, did he?”
“Iwaizumi?” Ushijima asks. His voice is cold. “He wanted you to stop killing the land.”
The demon king says, “Here is what he wanted: an ending.”
Something shifts, then. Something breaks. Far away the sound of screaming and the sound of waves and the sound of birdsong. All too high up in the sky.
Oikawa drops the sword, smile gone, eyes wide and face blank. The expression of something that might have once been human but lost all of that long ago.
His eyes are on Ushijima. His question for the commander and the commander alone. When he speaks, his voice is quiet but sharp, cutting through the deafening static of a dying world.
“And just who do you think you are?”
XIII.
I can’t be here forever, he said.
You have no choice, she replied. Neither of us do.
There’s always a choice, he said. Pacing in a circle. His steps tracing a path worn out after weeks and months and years and decades and centuries. Always the same path, always the same circle. There’s always a choice.
You’ve tried, she told him. I’ve tried. God, we’ve both tried. And we are both still here.
But it won’t be forever, he’d said. Speaking with a terrible viciousness in his voice that already spoke of the end. So early and so soon.
That day she marked as his funeral. He was already dead. Killed by his own words and by his own rotting heart.
And after that he was merely lost; a dead man lost on the side of the road, looking for the gates to hell and finding nothing, and nothing, and nothing.
XIV.
This the time of answers and this the time of truth.
Both of them having the aeon-old habit of only arriving at the end of things. When they cease to matter, and when they cease to hurt.
XV.
When it was over and done with, the greatsword lay on the stones, cracked in two. Lifeless, no longer shimmering with unheld power. Its blade as rusted and dull, as if time had never been lost on it.
The body of the knight was gone.
XVI.
He was born in the thunder and the rain and the darkness of the end. Marked from the beginning but not by man and not by god and not by anything he would ever know. He tried to kill his king for the sake of a dream and lost that dream in the sacrifice.
His nightmares were things of immortality and infinity. But without his dreams he had nothing else and so he held out his hand and he took his nightmares by the throat and devoured them whole and he did not look back.
And how do you know this is here?
How do you know this is real?
You feel and you see and you hear but you do not know, you do not know, and maybe the black unconsciousness of sleep is the reality and the rest of it the dream.
XVII.
Elsewhere. In a universe untouched, in a country called Japan, in a field near a school called Aoba Jousai, Iwaizumi Hajime opened his eyes.