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Delilah has a ghost in her shadow. It was one of the first things Baiken noticed about her, when she actually put in the effort to pay attention. Ghost was the only proper word for it, because it hung off the girl like a rusty chain, bending her back and making her drag her feet.
It wasn’t her first meeting with ghosts, she had a few nasty memories of one particularly unlucky bastard that had ghosts like most people had lice. Ghosts flaked off him like dandruff, floating in the air as he breathed them back in. Those ghosts were, and here her mind plucked out a memory from a childhood storybook, kagare, unclean, impure spirits, tainted by spite and anger. Twisting bones and stringy hair and centipedes. Crawling and grinding and hateful.
Delilah’s ghost wasn’t like that, not at all. It was a weight around the shoulders, but the sort of weight you got from an old, well used rain coat. It dragged the feet, but like shoes that were two sizes too big, because you got them from someone else as a gift.
Delilah spoke about her brother. She spoke about him a lot. About how he played chess (Delilah would swear up and down that he cheated), what sort of food he liked and which he didn’t (the complete opposite of Delilah’s taste, which meant he had none), how loudly he snored (much louder than Delilah no matter what Baiken snickered to the contrary), about…everything.
She and her brother had been “asleep” for a very, very long while. Delilah had only woken up recently, had only found out she was all alone in the world recently, had only decided that she didn’t want to burn the world down until she was satisfied recently.
She had a hole to fill. A hole Baiken knew very, very well. The sort of hole that got bigger if you didn’t tend to it. A hole in the bottom of your gut you needed to fill with noise, with information and nonsense because if you don’t do that the hole would take everything else you had instead.
Baiken had only just started filling that gaping void recently herself, with the unsolicited and unstoppable help of Anji Mito. She knew that hole needed attending. So she listened.
And as she listened…she noticed. Noticed crossed out eyes looking up from Delilah’s shadow. Looking at her. Looking suspicious.
If Baiken was being honest, and she was rarely anything but, it was starting to piss her off.
Delilah never brought up the ghost, never directly, but sometimes…sometimes she would stare off in the distance. Towards the mountains where a pile of metal rusted quietly in the snow. Sometimes her eyes would flicker to her feet briefly, fleetingly, like she was trying to sneak it past Baiken.
But still, Baiken could feel it staring. Burning holes in her back as the two of them traveled, stabbing the back of her head as she sat Delilah down for food. She suffered this kind of prodding from only one other person, and that was only because Anji had gotten very good at dodging.
She had done her own fair share of judging herself, she didn’t need some nosy ghost poking its head into her business, making calls about what she could and couldn’t do, about who she could and couldn’t keep safe and happy.
Family, she pondered distantly to herself one day around a mouthful of smoke, wonder what that’s like.
She didn’t know any prayers, or any incantations of banishment, and even if she did she figurers this little specter wouldn’t be so easily pushed away. She was never one for letting things rot when she could just cut them off, she had a feeling this was one thing she couldn’t cut. No, something that she shouldn’t.
So she decided, one day as Delilah spoke quietly and at length about a trick her brother pulled on her, that she would deal with it differently. Just this once. Just for Delilah.
She waited for it. Waited for days to pass and for the moon to fill. She waited for Delilah to be tired, that rare sort of bone deep exhaustion that could actually pull her into a proper sleep. Usually Delilah slept light, something about wanting to keep up with Baiken, who went from Asleep to Ready to Murder without needing to pass through any intermediate phase. But sometimes her body would helpfully remind her that she was, in fact, a scrawny twelve-year-old girl, and she would flop on her futon without the slightest hint of grace.
And when that happened, she snored loud enough to saw through concrete. She slept the sleep of saints, meaning the kind of sleep only Armageddon, or a perfectly cooked bowl of rice, would be able to shake her out of.
Baiken settled herself heavily next to Delilah, her back pressed to an old, burnt tree. They had found an old battlefield, covered in scorch marks and deep gouges in the earth. Baiken had led them here on purpose, telling Delilah it was a shortcut. And it was, but that’s not the reason they were here. The dead called out to each other in places like this, the air was thinner in places like this. Thin enough to walk through, thin enough to see through.
She lit her pipe, and breathed out a plume of whirling smoke up into the light of the full moon.
She waited.
And waited.
And waited.
She dragged in another cloud of silver smoke into her lungs as she attempted to remember an old prayer her mother would use on stormy nights, when something began pulling itself out of Delilah’s shadow.
It moved like metal, gears and pulleys grinding against each other as it lurched out of the dark. It had changed little since the last time Baiken had seen it; the same segmented limbs ending in big, mace like palms. The large spherical “head” clicking and shaking in jerking, clockwise motions as its cross eyes peered sightlessly at her. And the rectangle body in the middle, framed by every other feature of the thing as if it were an afterthought.
The metal was flaking off, chunks missing in the expanse and revealing something too red to be rust. Baiken didn’t look too closely. Instead she focused on the simple body of the machine, and remembered what Delilah’s brother was called by everyone except Delilah, Bedman. As a false name it wasn’t any more ridiculous than That Man, and if nothing else it was straightforward.
The body was only a “bed” in the most minimal way possible, in that it was a rectangle big enough for a human body to be placed upon it, and whose surface was smooth enough not to cause injury just by laying on it.
It was uncomfortable just to look at though, in an almost clinical way. Baiken had slept on worse things by far, but the thought that someone had built that thing for a very specific person, for a very specific child, made her lip curl in snarl.
(“His name was Romeo.” Delilah had said one especially cold night, cold enough that she had to bury her face in Baiken’s chest as they sat as close as possible to the bonfire. “Only I ever called him that though, the rest of them didn’t. He never told his name to anyone else…did he?”)
“You and I need to talk.” She said finally, as the figure fully emerged from Delilah’s shadow, looming above her with what seemed like barely held patience. “Settle down you rusty piece of shit,” she admonished with no real heat in her voice, “Delilah hasn’t had a proper sleep in weeks, wake her up and it’ll end well for neither of us.”
The head swiveled a complete 180 degrees to look at the still sleeping girl, she was drooling. One of the massive hands moved towards her, and Baiken had to stamp hard on the instinctive response of lopping it off when it touched her shoulder. Two fingers the size of most people’s forearms gently gripped the blanket that had slid down and pulled it back up to the line of Delilah’s neck.
Baiken’s hand stopped strangling her sword pommel, but it didn’t let go either. “Look at me, I’d like to get this conversation done with sooner rather than later.” The large head swiveled back fast enough that it surprised Baiken she didn’t hear anything snap, “you’ve been eyeballing me for a while now, and whatever it is you’re seeing, I’d like for you to stop.”
She hated being polite, she was piss poor at it. But the thing in front of her wasn’t an enemy, so she couldn’t just go for the standard approach of just cutting into it until it stopped being a problem. Not right away, at least.
The bedframe lumbered towards her, the sound of creaking and bending metal cutting through the air as it approached. what. plan?
The words weren’t spoken so much as they were carved into the side of her head with an ice pick, from the inside, it made her eye twitch. “The plan is like I told her back in the snow, I’ll walk with her, to where she wants to go.”
The head creaked and angled itself in a way that might have been meant to represent doubt, monster? when?
“That ain’t where she wants to go,” she gritted her teeth to try and stay calm, “now is it?”
The creaking and grinding of gears rose in pitch, the hands became saws, the ribs circling the body sprouted spikes. None of the weapons went near her, but they didn’t need to. what. want?
“To go see fireworks.” Baiken spoke calmly, putting her pipe between her lips for another quick puff, “and walk through the woods, and ride horses, eat hamburgers…all sorts.” She leveled a piercing glare at the machine, “but you should already know all that, considering how long you’ve been poking your head in.”
The creaking ceased all at once. The “face” on the head didn’t have enough moving parts for any actual expressions, but something about the way it stood seemed to radiate uncertainty.
“…more than anything, she just wants to tell someone about her brother.” She chuckled a bit bitterly, “he was a bit of an ass, in case you never met him.”
The head clicked a few notched left, affecting the look of a dog looking sideways at something it didn’t understand. The saws on its hands spun a few times, haltingly, like it was shaking off rust or unsure of what to do with its…for lack of a better word, hands.
After a few more moments of halting clicking, it got closer. It didn’t move closer, between one blink and the next it was just much closer to Baiken without a single sound. Baiken didn’t flinch, didn’t draw her sword. It would take more than that.
The creaking returned. revenge?
“No.”
she. WANTS.
“Because she didn’t know what else she could want.” Baiken hissed through her teeth, suddenly feeling a pressure behind her eyepatch, “she had a bucket of ice water poured over her head out of nowhere, and then she had to deal with the fact that she was alone, what kind of head space do you think she was in, huh?”
A part of her, small and petty and bloody, thought about this as the machine backed off with its large head bowed. She thought about little Delilah, scrambling through dirt for what remained of her home and her family.
That part of her rotated that image in her mind, and found so many reflections it made her want to punch Anji out for being a smart ass. That part of her nearly convinced her to hiss She was all alone, and whose fault was that? But she bit it back, because even her steel clad stomach could only handle so much acid.
“I promised her.” She said after finally getting her roiling gut under control, “I promised her to be by her side, so long as she would have me be there.” She reached out and poked the machine between its cross “eyes”, it didn’t flinch. “You are here for much the same reason, right?”
A click to the left, two to the right. protect. A full revolution. safe. happy.
“Glad to see we’re on the same page there.” She grumbled, putting her hand back on her sword, fingers relaxed. “But unless shit really hits the fan again anytime soon, I’m all the protection she needs.”
A click to the left, sharper than the ones before. weak.
Silence as heavy as an anvil passed between them, if any departed warriors had wandered close they would have surely beat a hasty retreat.
Baiken flicked her pipe to toss the burning remains of her Tabaco aside before she put it back in the folds of her kimono, her face a stone mask, her fingers tight around her sword handle. “Fucking excuse me?”
Spikes. Spikes and chains and saws and teeth and teeth and TEETH. All around her, constricting her every movement, blocking any avenue of escape or counter attack. The head is inches away from her face, its expressionless façade looms above like an owl sizing up a mouse. weak. The icepick dug harder, attempting to make a trench deep impression. WEAK.
Anyone else would have folded, probably. Anyone else, who had a functioning sense of self preservation, or no experience with monsters or death or ghosts, would have given up right there. That was probably what the Bedframe was expecting, what it was programed to expect, because that’s how Romeo expected things to go. How things needed to go.
Not for the first time, but blessedly the last, he was wrong. Because Baiken was not anyone else, she did not fold or shrink back in fear. Instead, the Bedframe had one of its saw hands lopped off, most of the spikes had gotten ripped apart, and the tip of the cutting edge of a cold sword that stank with century old blood was gently tapping between its eyes.
Baiken’s sleeve was in tatters, her forearm covered in small, barely bleeding scratches. Quietly, wordlessly, she pushed against the head with just a bit more force. Not enough to even scratch it, but just enough to send the message that it needed to move.
The spikes melted into shadow, the saw that had been removed reformed into a proper hand. There was space between them again. It didn’t retreat any further than to where the blade had pushed it, but the tension in the air seemed to hold it in place as effectively as iron chains.
A humorless smirk carved itself onto Baiken’s stony features. “Weak, am I?” She poked the head with her sword again, making a hollow sound, like a metal drum. “You would know, wouldn’t you? From our little scuffle in the snow?” The smirk flaked off as she glared. “Right, that one, when I was hungry, tired, freaked out, surprised, and didn’t know what you were.”
A single, gentle click to the right.
“And what you are.”
Another click, it echoed between them.
“But I didn’t call you out here so we can have a pissing contest over who gets to be the overprotective monster hiding in the closet.” She withdraws her sword, sheathing it slowly and deliberately so the sound of metal sliding across lacquer cuts through the air. “I know why you’re here, still here, and I called you here to make sure that you do.”
The head rotated slowly to look at the sleeping form of Delilah again. The girl was still deep asleep, the two monsters watching her completely powerless in the face of her snoring. Protect.
That word wasn’t carved, but placed on the ground between the two. Baiken’s hand left her sword handle and landed on her knee. “Yeah, that’s right.” She waited until the head turned back to her, though something told her seeing wasn’t something the machine actually did, but it made it easier to focus on it. “I’m not telling you to stop, because a girl like that deserves all the protection the world can offer her, after everything she went through.” She took a deep breath, “what I am telling you, is that you will have to stop, someday.”
Something metallic whined and bent out of sight. No.
“You came to her because her brother did the proper thing, and made sure she was safe.” Baiken plowed through, determined to make sure her message was as clear as possible. “And then, in the snow, she told you enough.” She waited a second for the machine to move, it didn’t. “But here you are, still, even though you’re also all the way back there, rusting quietly where nobody can bother you.” Another moment, nothing. “You know why?”
The machine was a statue, Baiken suspected that if she looked hard enough she’d see moss.
“Because she’s clinging.” Baiken sighed quietly, “and who the hell could blame her? She’s clinging to the memories, to the past, to the tears and joy and everything she had before she woke up, and an attachment like that makes ghosts.”
Delilah snorted, they both froze silent. The girl mumbled something unintelligible, before she snuggled more deeply into her futon.
“…you’re barely even that.” Baiken muttered quietly, once she was sure Delilah wouldn’t stir awake. “An echo of a shadow of a ghost, the fact you still have all this power to cling on this fiercely…not bad, honestly.” She sighed again, taking off her eye-patch to rub her scar with the flat of her hand. “But it won’t last, you know that, right?”
Silence.
“It won’t even depend on you, it’ll just…stop.” Baiken looked up at the stars, figuring she’s almost had enough of looking at ghosts for one night. “One day, she’ll stop talking about her brother as much, she’ll stop looking back, stop regretting, stop clinging.” The stump of her right arm pulsed, she ignored it. “When that day comes, you better recognize it, and when she looks down, you better be gone.” She returned her gaze to the machine, who hadn’t moved. “For your sake, his sake, and hers.”
The machine hadn’t moved throughout her speech at all, but now the shadows rested differently on it. It seemed sharper, harder.
“Not happy about it? Good, means you get it, means you understand.” Sharper, harder, but the machine still stayed where it was. Baiken felt her softer side, rusty from lack of use, give her abdomen a poke. “Fine, let me make it easier than…make it fair.” She made herself more comfortable against the stump of the tree, not looking at the machine. “If you leave when you need to, if don’t cling when she lets go…I’ll do the same.”
Silence, and then a click. Baiken didn’t see to which direction, she was beginning to think it didn’t matter.
“One day, she’ll be strong enough to stand on her own two feet.” She spoke into the cold night air, her voice bouncing off stones and trees. “She’ll be able to look at the world herself, want to understand it by herself, and when that day comes…she’ll tell me so, tell me she’s independent, strong, capable…” Her words petered out as she let out a yawn, Delilah hadn’t stirred, but her breathing had gotten softer. “…and she’ll ask me to leave.”
The machine bowed itself lower to the ground, parts of the rusty hull had begun melting into shadow.
“…and if you don’t cling, I won’t either.” She closed her eye and breathed deeply through her nose. “Deal?”
She didn’t watch it vanish back into Delilah’s shadow, but she heard the sound of earth moving, leaves rustling. The wind blew through her long hair, taking with it something heavy and tired.
Deal.
No other ghost bothered her until morning. They knew better.
-_-_-
Delilah woke up first, she shook Baiken until she opened her eye to look at her, “bring up your arm, please.”
Without thinking, she did so. The scratches had scabbed over, a few droplets of blood staining the ground under it. Wordlessly, Delilah bandaged her regardless, tearing away the tattered remains of her sleeve as she did. She clicked her tongue, “we’ll get it fixed in the next town.”
Baiken nodded, “sure.”
Delilah finished putting on the bandage, gave it a once over, and nodded. She got up to their bag, and pulled out two rice balls, giving one to Baiken. “It-“ She started haltingly, working the word in her mouth. “Itade…”
“Itadekimasu.” Baiken finished, sounding out each syllable and hiding her smirk with a large bite of the rice ball. Delilah picked up and applied new information very quickly, but she had to have a solid footing in it first. Japanese was proving to be a mite more mired than she what was used to learning. It was cute.
Delilah mumbled an echo with rice in her mouth, a few stray grains sticking to her lips.
They spent the next ten minutes like that, slowly working through their breakfast in comfortable silence. Delilah finished first, wiping her mouth and looking at Baiken’s arm from the corner of her eye, her expression as flat as it usually was. “…the bandages,” she started, voice quiet, “they aren’t too tight?”
Baiken finished her rice ball quickly, wiping her hand on her kimono as she swallowed, and then reached over to put her hand on Delilah’s head, ruffling her hair gently. “Did it just like I taught ya, good work.”
She kept her hand on Delilah’s head until the girl reached out and poked it. Baiken removed her hand and then took her pipe out, putting more Tabaco in before lighting it, and waited for the next, inevitable question.
It never came, instead Delilah fidgeted. Pulling lightly at her fingers. She did that when she had a thought she had no idea what to do with. Baiken was considering giving her something to busy herself with so she wouldn’t hurt herself, but then Delilah turned to look directly at her. “My brother talked a lot.”
Baiken blinked, her brain having to put in extra effort to change rails to make the right response, “that right?”
“Yeah,” Delilah said with a put upon huff, “a real chatterbox, if he could say something in five words you’d get fifty before you got him to shut up.” Her voice carried the universal annoyance of knowing someone from the day you were born and having no say on whether or not you wanted to know them. She made it sound warm. “There was info dumping, and then there was dealing with my brother when he had an opinion on something.”
Baiken chuckled, actively avoiding having to acknowledge the past tense by doing so, “sounds like a handful.”
“You bet!” Delilah shouted, her expression changing minutely. Baiken learned that Delilah was expressive as anyone else, she just never saw the point of making it easier for everyone else to be able to see them. Baiken never minded putting some hard work in. “Used to push back by saying that he’d run out of words one day, flinging them around like that,” she rolled her eyes subtly, “and then he’d give me some lecture on how oh that’s not how that works and we’d go back and forth, yelling at each other for nothing…”
Delilah’s words grew quiet, the rest of her tirade fading away slowly. Baiken waited.
And waited.
And waited.
“…do you think he still had something to say?” Delilah muttered finally, her eyes sinking to the ground, at the shadows near her feet, “when he…?”
She could never say the word. Not unless she was too angry to think about it. About what it meant.
Baiken breathed deep, and let it out slowly. “Yeah, probably.” She knew Delilah was tougher than she appeared, but Baiken still tried to keep the brutality of her honesty under tight control whenever possible. “People always have more to say, especially when…”
Curse this girl, Baiken thought with a bit of exasperation, words vanish when she looks like that.
Delilah didn’t press, simply kept her head down and fidgeted with her fingers, “do you think he was…afraid?”
Images of the machine, both real and ghost, came to her. Burnt, twisted metal. Cracked and peeling and red. She nodded curtly, “yeah.”
“…did…do you think he had any regrets?”
“Everyone does.” Baiken answered, almost automatically, “if you don’t have regrets, you aren’t alive.” She reached out and pried open Delilah’s fingers, rubbing the red lines she’d given herself. “No shame in that, wishing you could have done this or that, just means your human.”
Delilah watched Baiken rub their fingers together, she grabbed hold of the samurai’s index finger like it was an anchor. “…Chaos.” The name dripped out of her like acid. “He was the one who pushed my brother to…” She shook her head and kept going, “but he wasn’t the one who…” Again, the word refused to touch the air. “I-I don’t know who.”
This conversation was heading somewhere dangerous, Baiken could feel it. But hauling the girl by the back of her shirt had some disastrous results the last time she tried it. So instead she simply walked along with her, inching closer to the cliff edge. “Do you know where?”
“Illyria.” The answer came out instantly, like it was on constant replay in her head. “It was where I woke up, where I found…what was left.”
Little girl, screaming and crying as she dug through dirt, finding nothing and no one. Baiken moved her hand so she held Delilah’s smaller one in the palm, grabbing as strongly as she could without it hurting. “Illyria, right, in that case…” She took a deep breath to brace for whatever turn this could take, “I might know someone who could give us a clue.”
Delilah finally looked up. She wasn’t crying, but her face was wet.
“If you want to go there.” Baiken added quietly, remembering her promise. “Do you want to?”
Delilah sniffed quietly, used her free hand to wipe her face with an oversized sleeve. She spent a few worrying seconds being quiet before she answered, “…should I? Go there, I mean?”
Every single individual atom of Baiken chorused the word NO with enough force to shatter a five-inch thick concrete wall. But she remembered that night around the fire, looking at the empty spot where a crying child was a second before, and simply repeated, “do you want to go there?”
Delilah was quiet again, which made Baiken heart sink. But eventually she wiped her face again, gave Baiken’s hand one last squeeze, and let go. Baiken, remembering the deal, did the same. “What I want to do…” She said, getting up and dusting off her dress, moving to pack her futon, “is to get out of this place…seriously sis, why sleep in a place this creepy?”
“Don’t call me that.” Baiken barked on reflex, getting up herself and reaching for her cloth sack, the futon not having left it at all. “And this place was where we were when you told me you were too tired to keep going.” Which was true enough, Baiken didn’t need to tell Delilah she had walked them around more than needed to make sure that was the case. “Didn’t hear you complain when you flopped like a dead fish yesterday.”
“Sis.”
“Though I did hear you snoring like a sawmill right after.”
“Sis.”
“Barely got a wink in!”
Delilah bumped into Baiken’s side with her large and lumpy backpack as the samurai cackled.
They walked in silence for a while, long enough for the forest to swallow the battlefield behind them. Long enough for the trees to open up to a flat plain of grass, with the next city on the horizon.
Delilah was holding onto Baiken’s obi, the samurai’s hand occupied with keeping her sack from falling off her shoulder. She was looking straight ahead at the path, but directed her words at Baiken, “you really know people in Illyria?”
“That surprising to you?”
A polite shrug, “I just thought Mr. Mito was the one who knew people, and you were the one who stabbed them.”
Baiken scoffed, “Anji ain’t got a monopoly on knowing people, fuck’s sake.” She thought it best to not tell Delilah the people she knew in Illyria were also people Anji very much knew, but she knew one of them before he did so it still counted. “Besides, you know I do more than stab people.”
“Yeah.” Baiken could imagine Delilah’s mouth twitch at the corners, her version of a tooth-filled grin. “Like slashing them, or shouting at them.” She nodded sagely, “yeah sis, you do plenty.”
Baiken reached out and ruffled Delilah’s hair roughly, “don’t call me that, freakin’ smartass brat.” Once she felt her pride suitably avenged she relented, reaching down to take Delilah’s hand without thinking.
The girl kept walking, but actually looked at her and Baiken’s fingers gently knotted together. It looked like old, gnarled tree branches attempting to shield a wilting clover from harsh winds.
Baiken made an effort not to bring attention to their hands, feeling that pulling away would send the absolutely last message she’d ever wish to give the girl.
They were silent again for a while, hands still intertwined. Delilah broke it again, voice barely audible, “…if we find the one who…if we find them in Illyria…”
Baiken felt Delilah’s fingers clench and unclench a few times, and decided to make things easier, “if we do go there, and we do find them…whatever happens is up to you.”
Delilah bit her lower lip, and gripped Baiken’s hands a bit tighter.
“Your brother is gone.” Baiken spoke softly, eyes forward but fingers steady. “Whatever direction your life takes is up to you, only the living get to decide how they live.” She rubbed her thumb over the back of Delilah’s hand a few times, “you’re alive…your brother isn’t.”
And neither am I, not really. But she doesn’t say that, because this conversation was meant to make Delilah feel better, that was the whole damn point wasn’t it?
“…is clinging so bad?” Baiken barely heard her, Delilah speaking as if her words would shatter the air. “Is holding on to him so wrong?”
Baiken stopped walking, and finally looked at Delilah. She wasn’t crying, and her face wasn’t wet. But still, the air around them felt fragile. Baiken shook her head, “No, clinging isn’t a bad thing.” She hardened her stare and her voice just a bit, just a little, just so it was clear. “So long as you know when to stop.”
Delilah held her gaze for a very, very long time. Most people don’t last this long against Baiken’s piercing stare. Luckily, Delilah wasn’t most people. “When did you stop clinging then?” The words were harsh, covered in very familiar spikes.
Baiken shrugged, “some things, too soon. Others…I’ll get back to you.” She leveled a gentle, humorless smile at the girl, “this is something you’ll have to play by ear kid, sorry.”
Delilah’s gaze crumbled a little, “what if I get it wrong?” The worry in her voice was small but solid, and growing. “What if I do it too late?” She looked down at her shadow, “…or too soon?”
“Then you’ll regret it.” Baiken answer simply, bluntly. She smirked when the girl shot her eyes back up to look, “…but that’ll just mean your human.”
Delilah blinked at her a few times, before she mirrored her smirk. It curved a bit sadly on her face, and hung limply, but there it was. Baiken squeezed Delilah’s fingers again, at a bit of a loss of what to do now, and Delilah showed her some pity by squeezing back and looking back on the road.
As they started walking towards the city again, Delilah spoke up one more time, “…am I talking too much? About my brother I mean.” If Baiken had looked closely, she might have seen a blush. “Maybe being a chatterbox runs in the family…”
Baiken barked out a laugh, “nah, you’re fine.” She shook her head with a chuckle, “keep going, compared to Anji, you don’t even rate.”
Delilah scoffed, which turned into a cackle, which somehow stumbled its way to becoming a full-fledged laugh.
Baiken sneaked a peak at the shadow, she didn’t feel the pinprick of a judging stare. Though she suspected that had more to do with Delilah laughing than any of her more meager accomplishments.
Delilah picked up the pace as she laughed a bit more loudly, the sound clumsy and halting, and she dragged Baiken behind her. She walked forward towards the city, towards the future, towards whatever she might choose to do, with a laugh and a heart a bit lighter today than it was the day before.
The three of them, Delilah and her two ghosts, walked forward together.
Hand in hand in hand.