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An umbrella had been the beginning of everything.
He lets them take the lead — he does this every fateful time without a case of failure, and Mizuki always appears enraptured when they grasp his gelid palms in their lukewarm ones. They’re not searing, not frigid, benevolently balanced in the equilibrium of being an exile and a human. A hiemal night, snow falling outside the cathedral, and Mafuyu hooks a finger behind the knot of their blindfold; unfurls it, lets it descend. Ebony, against the ivory landscape. A ballroom, without music; only two isolated dancers.
The exact details have become blurry, but he thinks they met in the rain. That’s why they had required something to shelter them from the cascade — weather that spoke of the sky’s tears, descending onto those who would shoulder it like a burden. Mizuki’s got an expression that tells Mafuyu they’re looking for something that never comes to fruition, something they had been denied long ago. An unanswered doorstep, an agonizing echo of silence.
“Mizuki,” he mutters without malice, with the name they had given him as a greeting when they’d encountered each other days or years ago. Mafuyu can’t remember everything, his memories blurring into a haze, but Mizuki is the only person who has ever stared at his sword without being intimidated by its brandished glint, who has been alienated by society, and even if Mafuyu is not an outcast, adored by commoners and sovereigns alike, he knows he is mutated at heart. Mizuki shares the same sentiment, too — what are they doing, right this instant? The simple act of trusting him was a penalty on its own.
To bare yourself, your entire soul, to someone who is scarily similar to you, presenting it raw and unabashed in all its glory, is like dying. Mafuyu could make their jovial facade shatter, has exactly enough power to do it; and that, in turn, is the worst death.
He knows this, because they tell him everything. Mizuki resembles a phantom in their mannerisms and yet, they are like a river beneath the colossal expanse of a mountain. Tranquil and serene for the most part, but infuriatingly intangible if you were to reach out an outstretched hand and touch them. They always manage to escape Mafuyu’s presence unless they’re the one who seeks for him first, a hand resting on the pelage of his calvary before his attention’s fixated on them for the rest of the night. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll use everything you’ve said against you?”
“No,” Mizuki smiles. It’s one of their apathetic, forged ones — he is perceptive enough to tell them apart — Mafuyu wonders what had happened, for Mizuki to be damaged enough to alternate between two smiles at the blink of an eye, around him or not. “I’ll say more about myself, okay?” Here, on an outstretched hand: “Graveyards are my favourite place.” He knows why. They never cease to claim they’ve killed their youthful, adolescent self.
Blood on their hands, a dagger biting into pliable flesh, burgundy and aubergine and hickory petals lining the casket in a pattern arranged for pleasant beauty — this doesn’t unnerve Mafuyu, because he is the weapon of his nation, and he will live and die, just as that: a weapon, built from the debris of the person he once was. Bloodstains might wash away with water’s soothing caress, but they linger even after they’ve vanished with time, permeating his skin, cursing his rottenness. He’s got his own blood on his hands. Mafuyu’s coffin tells the same story as Mizuki’s; except his tomb features an eternally asleep girl instead of a boy, buried with a painless, merciful passing. He killed himself before he killed anybody else.
“Why aren’t you scared?” he inquires. “Why are you telling me this?”
There’s a moment of silence, then a laugh, a resplendent and radiant thing. “My mannequins don’t speak to me, do they?”
No, Mafuyu thinks. They don’t talk. Of course they don’t.
He is the only one who will speak to them, and he fears he will simultaneously be the one who will leave them shattered.