Work Text:
When you’ve been a ghost long enough, it’s easy to forget that there are certain limits to the body. Not like death, not necessarily — Hanako knows death. He’s witnessed it, caused it, lived it long enough where death is something like an old friend or a familiar chain around his neck. But spending fifty or so years being able to float and phase through people makes it’s hard to consider the weight of the flesh he misses so much, the downsides to a body still trying to keep you afloat.
There’s no forgetting it here, backed to a cliff in Number 6’s boundary with the clinging memory of villagers slashing and shoving to get to Nene. He has her tucked behind him, safe, for now — but her hand clutched in his is clammy and cold, and there’s a wince in her face and a stumble in her step that makes alarm bells ring in his ears. They drugged her, he knows; did they hit her, too?
Nene is only human, and Hanako is only one ghost. The villagers push and shove, knocking Hanako’s knife to the ground; he makes a strained noise in his throat and waits for it to reappear in his hand or his gut or wherever it feels like spawning today. A few in the horde take the opportunity to grab at him; he phases in and out, evading, cold pulsing through him with each change until his throat and teeth ache with it.
And in his distraction, one of the masked strangers reaches past him and grabs Nene by the hair.
She’s clumsy and injured and so very, very human. Her assailant — a woman, maybe, with a mask like a ghoul — knees her in the gut, and when she keels over, tightens her hold in Nene’s hair and yanks.
Hanako reaches for Nene immediately with an alarmed shout of her name, full of more sudden, intense fury than he’s felt in his life and afterlife combined. But it leaves his back open, his own defense unattended to — and before he can even think of anything but Nene, protecting Nene, saving Nene, someone’s elbow strikes the back of his head.
His ears ring and the salty-metal tang of blood stains the inside of his mouth; he coughs it out immediately, clapping a hand over his lips. The ringing and pain only add to the rising bloodlust, though, and the panic; he kicks out blindly and manages to nail the fucker in the knee with a satisfying crack, the bone fracturing under his superhuman strength, before he’s scrambling forward to Nene.
The woman has her on her hands and knees at the very edge of the cliff — not past the gate but just beside it, like she’d tried to force Nene through again and once again the gate had rejected her. Her foot is pressing down on Nene’s shoulder with such force that Nene can’t keep her face out of the dirt, clearly trying to literally kick her off the edge and to her death.
Hanako’s seal slips and peels at the edges with the force of his rage; he’s going to kill her. Forget damnation or salvation — there is only Nene’s hands clasped over her gut, her head on the ground, her collarbone cracking and breaking under the weight of something she never should have had to face.
He’ll reach her; he has to reach her. They’ve been in dire straits before, the two of them; Nene’s been in danger, been afraid, and Hanako has always saved her. She trusts him to save her. He has to save her.
The woman’s foot raises, and Nene’s face raises with it. She’s covered in dirt, parted only by trails of tears and snot; there’s a nasty bruise forming over her cheek, and though he can’t quite tell from here, it looks like her lip is split. She sees Hanako, then, just a short distance away, almost there, fighting his way through the mob at breakneck speed, and even the bloodcurdling anger on his face can't curb the relief that breaks over her, bright and vibrant, like she isn’t in pain at all.
Nene shifts slightly up to her knees to better face him — and the woman standing over her kicks her so hard in the gut that she topples backwards. Hanako gets one more flash of her wide, shocked eyes, still locked on him, before she tumbles over the cliff.
“Yashiro!” he screams, so loud his throat feels like it’s ripping in two; he leaps up and over, using a villager’s masked face as a jumping board to reach her — and dives right in after her.
There is only a moment to bask in the relief of having her in his arms again before he realizes: they’re still falling. Fast, faster than any mortal could manage, he shifts Nene under one arm like a piece of cargo, the other shooting up for some, any, hold. His flesh breaks and tears against the rough cuts of rocks, but he can’t dematerialize, not now, not with his material form being the only thing between Nene and certain death. They slow somewhat with the friction but not enough, and Hanako is already panicking trying to come up with another, any other plan when his hand finally grabs solid hold on a single, crumbling handful of rock.
This relief, too, doesn't last long. He doesn’t care about the pain, doesn't even wince at the blood dripping from his ruined hand to soak his sleeve; all that’s on his mind is what next, what now, what can I do?
There is a limit to mortal bodies. Under his arm, Nene is heavy, quietly sniffling, her breaths shaky and laborious and audibly painful. His heart aches, anger and preemptive grief making his hands tremble — so he stops that, shuts that grief down before it can make him lose control or lose hold of the cliff. There’s no need to mourn; he doesn’t need to mourn; he’s going to fix this. They’re going to be fine, and he’s going to get them out of this, and once they’re safe he’ll patch her up and play this off and it will be fine; it will be like nothing ever happened. He can fix this.
“Hanako-kun?” Nene asks, voice so sad and small and full of so much pain it nearly breaks his newfound resolution in two.
He can’t talk to her right now; he just can’t. “Hi, Yashiro,” he breathes, forcing a grimace of a grin onto his face, stubbornly not looking at her. “Had me worried for a second there.”
A silence falls between them, leaving only the crashing of the waves below and the shouting of the villagers above. That works just fine for Hanako; he could use the concentration, mind racing, whirling, already running on fumes in between the pain jumping up his arm and the ear-splitting ringing from his earlier hit to the head.
He could partially dematerialize, just enough to float, to catch Nene in his arms and whirl their way out, into safety — but he’s kidding himself; he doesn't have the strength leftover. This isn’t a “grin and bear it” sort of situation, if he rushes into that, hare-brained and reckless, he’ll doom them both, send them immediately tumbling down with no hope for rescue. That isn’t an option.
He could try to manually climb their way up. He can hardly feel his damaged fingers anymore, but if Nene could cling onto his back, just for a little while, he would have both hands. That, too, immediately falls through: Nene isn’t strong enough to hold onto him right now; she would fall, and then all of this would be meaningless; and anyway, what would they do when they got to the top, the angry mob still waiting?
Panic surges up his throat again like a cough; without realizing, he clutches Nene tighter, and she cries out in pain. Automatically, he flinches away, lets go — only for a moment, but enough for Nene to drop substantially, reaching and clawing for him until he remembers himself and takes hold of her hand.
It’s hard to say for certain, but Hanako doesn't think he’s been this in pain or disoriented since he died, not even when Kou’s bastard of an older brother beat him black and blue. His head aches terribly, all his thoughts dropping out of the air as soon as he thinks them, slippery and impossible to hold onto. Can ghosts have concussions? He must have a concussion. That must be what’s happening.
“Hanako-kun,” Nene says again, so quiet he can scarcely hear her at all; and in his distraction, he turns his head, forgetting that he’s been trying not to look at her.
Nene’s eyes are glittery with tears, her face swollen and discolored like he’s never seen it before, a big ugly welt blooming vibrant on her cheekbone. There’s still dusty earth on her skin and in her hair, blood dripping from her busted up lip and down her chin to stain her collar. And more than that, even all of that, is the expression on her face: full of such abject despair and lovely grace that it takes his breath away, has him sucking a breath into lungs that need it no longer.
“We’re not getting out of this, are we?” she asks, wobbly and soft, trying so visibly to be brave that it makes his heart break all over again.
“Don’t,” he hisses, tightening his hold on her hand; and then, backpedaling when she flinches, “Yashiro, don’t — don’t say that; of course we’re getting out of this. I’m going to get you out of this.”
Because if he doesn’t, if he doesn’t find a solution or an escape before his strength dries up — Nene will die. This isn’t pessimism, it’s fact: no human could survive that fall. Those waves crashing in booming white-water on those pointed rocks, the immeasurable distance between them and the surface — no kannagi before has lived through it, and Nene certainly won’t be the exception.
Hanako doesn't know what will happen to him if he falls. It is a shinigami’s boundary; maybe he’ll disappear, his soul demolished along with any chance of forgiveness or salvation. Worse, maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll wake up somewhere else in this hell of a boundary with hardly a scratch on him, clutching Nene’s cooling corpse, or a few strands of her silvery hair, or a scrap of the robes they forced her into.
“Listen, Hanako-kun,” Nene says, once again breaking him from his racing thoughts. Her voice is breaking with an ache she should have never have known, that he should have shielded her from — could have, if he’d only been better, stronger, quicker. “There’s… there’s something I want to tell — ”
“Yashiro,” Hanako breathes, voice laced so thoroughly with desperation that he chokes on it. “You’re not — don’t talk like — ”
A miserable hiccup of a sob bubbles from Nene’s throat, her face red with strain and emotion. “Hanako-kun,” she whispers, “you need to let go.”
He jerks so violently that his hold on the cliff shifts, rock breaking and turning to dust under his hand. “No!” he bites with such visceral horror it makes him feel sick. “No, that… That’s…”
Ridiculous. Unthinkable. The only option. The taste of his own blood is thick in his mouth, coppery under his tongue; when he swallows, it slides rough down his throat. For maybe the first time, Nene is being the pragmatic one between them; purely in terms of survival, there’s no way for the two of them to get out of this, but there is a way for Hanako to get out of it. If he did what she asked — abandoned her, let her go — he could probably gather the energy to float only himself to the top of the cliff, phase himself intangible until the villagers leave him be, the kannagi already dead. There would be a chance for him, born from the sacrifice of her.
His hand tightens around hers until it’s crushing, painful, until the tips of his fingers turn white. “No.”
Nene — wonderful, brave, incredible Nene, one of a kind in everything she does and outstanding for her ability to believe — croaks out with as much steel as tears in her voice, “There’s no other way.”
She lets go of his hand.
Hanako scrambles to hold on, knuckles aching with the strain as he holds up someone who won’t hold him back. “You can’t,” he gasps, the white noise of panic crackling and fusing with the painful ache in his head. He doesn't care what she thinks of him anymore, if she thinks he’s cool or impressive or ineffable; she can’t do this. He won’t let her.
Her hand slips another inch from his, then another; no matter how tightly he holds, he can’t keep her from slipping. His other arm, now fully numb, aches to reach for her; his fingers dig deeper into the rock, uncaring of the damage to his semi-corporeal flesh, unwilling to let go.
“Don’t do this to me,” he begs, turning the whole intensity of his love and want and force of feelings upon her, shouting it through the shaky focus of his eyes, uncaring about keeping up appearances or keeping her calm or keeping her at an arm’s length so she’ll be easier to let go one day. He won’t let her go; he can’t. “Don’t — you can’t. Yashiro — don’t leave me.”
She’s only fifteen; she could’ve had a whole life ahead of her. She wanted a first love and an exciting college life and a whole new season’s crop to grow; she wants to live.
Hanako had a plan, almost fully realized, to give that to her.
One of Nene’s eyes is beginning to swell shut; even so, she smiles at him, beatific and graceful and something like divine. “I’m sorry, Hanako-kun,” she whispers, and then her hand slips wholly from his, sending her diving into the waves below, long hair blowing about her like a painting of tragedy.
Without any second thoughts, any hesitation, Hanako drops right in after her.
There are a few seconds of near peace as he gathers her in his arms, safe and protected just like he’s longed to since they first got into his mess. There’s salt in the air, salt in his mouth — whether it’s tears or sea water, he doesn't know. Nene might be crying just as much as he is, might be cursing him out, calling him an idiot, but she clings to him just as strongly, the weight of their injuries forgotten as they hang onto each other with no reservations. He’ll never let her go.
In those last few moments before they hit the water, maybe he whispers a few words, a confession he’s always wanted to tell and never meant to; maybe she does.
They fall. White-crested and impassive, the sea surges up to meet them.