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The green heart on Atsushi's stupid bracelet is shattered and dark, splintered by Dark Aurite's penultimate attack. En can't stand to look at it, but there's nothing, here, that he wants to see.
There's blood on his gloves, on the white and the blue of his uniform, vivid and sickening. En has never seen so much blood, never understood how much there was in a single body. He doesn't want to understand now. There's a gaping emptiness in his chest, and a pit at his feet—at his bent knees, where he kneels on the roof—that deepens with Atsushi's every heartbeat.
En has listened to that heartbeat at night. He's fallen asleep to the sound of it, the feel of it, and now when Atsushi dies it will be the cause.
En wants to hold him closer, but he doesn't want to hurt him.
"En-chan," Atsushi murmurs, barely audible. "You can't."
En stares down at him. They understand each other, always. He knows what Atsushi means. The ground under him crumbles; the pit widens.
"Please," Atsushi gasps. Around them, the Battle Lovers are silent, and Caerula Adamas are outside the sphere of En's universe. They could be doing anything. They could be bringing the city down around them all. En doesn't care.
Atsushi looks up into En's face, and his expression changes. "I'm sorry."
"Don't," En blurts out. His voice is hoarse almost to the point of being unusable. "Don't apologize."
"Sorry," Atsushi manages again, and then, of all things, he laughs. It jars his shoulder, and the wound in his stomach that won't have time to kill him, and En watches as the blood spills more quickly.
"Stop," En says sharply. It's hard to talk through the constriction in his throat, but he manages. It's important.
"Sor—" En glares, and Atsushi breaks off. "En-chan." His voice is getting fainter. En feels sick. "I love you," he manages, though speaking is clearly difficult. "Don't cry."
Is he crying? It doesn't matter. "Don't tell me what to do." Atsushi smiles, soft, even as his eyes start to go glassy with shock. "I love you," En says, while Atsushi can still hear him, and then he watches.
He doesn't know when Atsushi stops breathing. He doesn't know how long he sits there afterwards. The pit has swallowed him, and he thinks he might never move again.
"Yufuin-senpai."
It takes him a couple of seconds, but he looks up. Ryuu is kneeling in front of him, ignoring the blood soaking into his uniform, now, too. There are tears on his cheeks, and this time, when they come to En's eyes, he feels them.
Ryuu reaches out to Atsushi. "Can I...?" En nods, unable to find words, and Ryuu slides Atsushi's glasses off and shuts his eyes. En watches Atsushi's face. He should have done that. He should have remembered. From somewhere beyond them, he can hear Yumoto sobbing quietly.
As gently as he can, he lays Atsushi down on the roof, arranging his limbs into something that might be peaceful, if not for the blood and the gut wound. He stands.
"Yufuin-senpai?"
He holds a hand over the place where his heart used to be, and his scepter comes. His love stick. Atsushi hates... Atsushi hated that name. Out of all of them, he knew the most English. En looks across the roof to where Kusatsu stood, the last time En was aware of him. He's still there now. He's staring. He doesn't seem to have moved at all. Good.
Arima and Gero start to move between them, but Kusatsu steps out in front of the two of them, dragging his gaze away from Atsushi's body. He doesn't meet En's eyes, but looks at his arm and its scepter. His eyes are green again, and the makeup is gone.
En points the scepter.
"Kinshirou—!"
"Aurite-sa—!"
En attacks, not Gero and Arima, but the roof beneath their feet. He has never felt more in love with Atsushi than he does now, and the water responds, carving a hole through the top two floors of the building. They jump to the belltower; En blasts that too. As they fall out of sight beyond the building, he turns back to Kusatsu, who's now standing inches from another hole in the roof and who doesn't seem to have so much as blinked. Unopposed, En aims his scepter again at Kusatsu's heart.
En-chan. You can't. Please.
But Atsushi is gone. He'll never be disappointed in En again. The end of his scepter starts to glow.
"Wait, no!"
Yumoto's voice. Yumoto's face, in front of him, tear-streaked and terrified. The glow dies.
"Move." It's the first he's spoken since; En realizes this when his voice almost doesn't work. It comes out as little more than a whisper.
"No. En-chan-senpai—"
"Don't." He finds enough of his voice to snap at Yumoto. Yumoto flinches, perhaps realizing what he's done, and that would almost be impressive, under other circumstances. "Don't say that. Don't call me that."
"En-senpai. Don't. Please." Behind him, Kusatsu watches, pale and empty-eyed.
"Move, Yumoto."
"En-senpai, please." There are tears in Yumoto's eyes again. En doesn't care. "He didn't want you to."
Trust Yumoto to only understand what people say when En least wants him to.
"He won't know."
The tears spill over, and maybe normally En would feel guilty. "Then honor his memory."
En lowers the scepter, just a fraction of an inch.
"Yufuin-senpai." Io doesn't step between En and Kusatsu, but he comes to stand beside his clubmates. He's been crying too. For some reason, this is dimly surprising to En. "Look at him." He glances at Kusatsu. "He wants you to do it. It would be a mercy."
En follows his glance. Kusatsu is paler than before, and En wouldn't have thought that possible. But Io... Io is right. He wants to die. He killed— En can't even finish the thought. And now, now he realizes the magnitude, the enormity of his mistake, and he doesn't want to have to suffer for it.
En turns away.
The last thing he sees of Kusatsu is the cracking of his hollow, dead expression; he doesn't wait to see what lies beneath.