Work Text:
“I loved you,” Toshiro says, softly, after everything is said and done; and perhaps this is a test of sorts, but perhaps it’s just the alcohol speaking, and he never did like it much, it always makes him think of his father, “when I was a child, and a little beyond that, too.”
Maizuru presses her lips to a thin line, hovering in her movement where she was taking his drink out of his hand; seems to consider it for a long moment, something like guilt on her face, and—if this is not again, the alcohol, something like futile, naive hope; though he should be over all of that already, should he not?—longing, maybe; says, at last, slowly, so slowly, sentence hacked up in little pieces that scrape over his bones: “I think, if it had been you, young master, it would have been fine; if I’d been younger, if your father…”
She’s crying, he realized belatedly; realizes, belatedly, too, that he’s cupping her face, that she looks just as surprised as he is when he wipes at the single tear with his thumb, perhaps at the fact she’s crying, perhaps at him touching her after all these years (intimately, in a way, like that one and only night they’d spent together before he found out about her and his father, the very first woman of his dreams, the woman who’s more his mother than his mother is, unraveled in front of him, cupping his face, smiling); and the words spill out of him before he can hold them back like he usually does everything: “Forgive me, I did not mean to make you cry; I just—no, I’m sorry, please forget it, it’s nothing.”