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He visits you in your sleep one night.
"Hello!"
His voice is just as warm and loud as you remember it, sparking in your ears with a familiarity that makes your heart ache.
"It's been a while," he says. An invitation, his arms open wide—the space between them forming your shape, and before you know it, you're moving towards him on instinct.
The fabric of his uniform, surprisingly soft for such a deadly profession, presses into your cheek as you slam into him. One of his buttons collides with your cheekbone, but you don't care.
It's been so long, you want to say. Come back.
But your mouth stays frozen. There are more important things to do than to fill this precious time with words that are not large enough to tell him how you feel.
Not when he understands already.
Instead, you pull him closer, and sink into the sense of rightness that takes over.
"I wish I had been there," you confess.
Kyojuro can feel the heat of your breath against his chest, radiating through the fabric of his tunic to brush his skin. He shudders in a breath.
"It was not a pretty sight, my love."
You purse your lips. Kyojuro's doing that thing again—letting self-deprecation fall from his tongue like it's natural. It's not that he's not confident in his abilities as a hashira—he'd never go into the field if he didn't trust he could protect the people behind him. But...Kyojuro's never expressed the same faith in himself as a person, as someone worth falling for, and your heart breaks to think that the vitriol of his father got to him after all.
Your eyes slip shut as you try to imagine him, sitting on the tracks. For a while, you'd dreaded the image. But it was his last moment, and you'd promised him an entire lifetime.
The ring on your finger is cold.
You'd never taken that oath lightly.
Rengoku's always seemed most at home during the sunrise. The bright glow of light beaming across the horizon to break up the eve, the gradual rise in temperature to a precise warmth.
Never sweltering, never too much, but forever comforting.
You'd thought sunset would've suited his intensity better. But you've often felt a bit of dread at the prospect of the coming night, and if anything is the antithesis of your lover, it's that.
Hope has never found a better home than in him.
Golden eyes pass over your features, and you blink back up at him. You picture the amber of his eyes dimming, the corner of his lips stained with blood, and the kind upward lift of his mouth twisted into the rare expression of pain that you'd been lucky—and cursed—to witness.
"You're always beautiful, Kyo."
You mean it. The same way you meant your vows, the same way you mean it when you say you'd stay here with him, even though you know you can't.
Even in death, Kyojuro would be the most breathtaking thing you've ever seen.