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The movement was familiar. This time, he had approached his target from the back rather than the front, but it was all the same. He stabbed a hole clean through Enjin now that he’s had the chance, now that they had become isolated in the midst of a fight, and he felt the way his blade pierced through deep enough to come out of the man’s front. Tamsy could not see his face, didn’t see the dawning pain, horror, realization, disbelief, betrayal, and whatever have you as it passed subtly through his features, though he was sure they did not settle on one.
“... Tamsy?” It was all he managed to say, for a brief moment.
Enjin was generally a weary man. Not weary enough around his team and their allies to spare him from a fate like this, though. For all he was shady, he liked to shoot the shit, and he liked to show off a little. It was fitting that it should cost him his life.
“Yes, Enjin?” Tamsy asked in return.
Enjin didn’t assess the situation as thoroughly as he should have, really. He looked at the blade poking out of his abdomen for a moment but he tried twisting around. Maybe he thought it would stay inside, it’d wrench the weapon out of the grip of the one that stabbed him, but it didn’t. Tamsy slipped it right out the way it came, dragging a glob of blood that splattered loudly onto the floor between them with it.
When they came face to face, he could see as that residual doubt left Enjin’s eyes. For a moment, it seemed the leader of team Akuta had held onto the hope that the person standing behind him, the person who had just shot to kill, wasn’t his coworker.
Oh, but it had been. Tamsy felt a ghoulish grin paint itself on his face. The mask dropped so very naturally.
Tokushin had taken care of the issue of Enjin’s vital instrument during his initial moment of confusion. It had wrapped it up in string and thrown it somewhere far enough away that Enjin couldn’t realistically get to it, but Enjin’s eyes still scanned to try and see where it was again. The increasingly frenzied look on his face betrayed a fool, desperate and disgusting enough to go running right after it.
Enjin turned that desperate and disgusting face onto him. Lunged for Tamsy’s weapon, the one coated with his blood. Tamsy dodged as well as he could, but he hadn’t put space between them. Enjin was still a good fighter, and it seemed like the adrenaline had shielded him from the worst of the fatigue that came with such injuries.
The scuffle was an undignified thing.
Enjin gripped the blade even though it shredded his hands and Tamsy failed to get it out of his grasp with how fast they began circling each other. The height difference worked in Enjin’s favor, and he even used his dead weight as he lost the strength to stand up to his advantage. It took Tamsy kneeing him three times and gripping frantically for further purchase before Enjin collapsed on the ground, falling backwards onto his back.
Usually he would have been more elegant about it. He may have kicked Enjin’s knees in if they had remained back to front. If it were any other time, Tokushin would have been on the table, but it just wasn’t the occasion for it. Tamsy did not want to use it to restrain Enjin, mostly because he didn’t want the marks showing up on his corpse later. They would not be unjustifiable, but they would be a pain in the ass to explain away. What he had done instead to save himself the trouble had been, in fact, a lot less elegant.
Tamsy still had a grip on one of his shoulders. He had fallen along with Enjin, caged him to the floor with his limbs. Part of his hair had fallen out of his usual bun from the force of the little scrap, it made the way he loomed over him a bit more intimate, in some distant sense. It half-caged them from the outside world. He could barely feel the atmosphere over the sound of them both breathing heavily from the exertion.
“You haven’t questioned me,” Tamsy said, after some time. “I was expecting you to. You didn’t even ask if someone was impersonating me. If this was the work of someone’s vital instrument.”
“I just knew,” Enjin replied. “I— I dunno how I didn’t know sooner. But it’s definitely you. It just turns out you’re the sort of bastard who would try to kill me.”
Tamsy laughed. “Try? I’ve succeeded. You can’t possibly think you’ll be getting any help. Nobody’s going to hear you even if you scream.”
“Try.” Enjin insisted, the emphasis on the word coming out like a hiss.
Tamsy stood up, getting off of Enjin slowly and looking down on him. He took the loose hair tie out of his hair, letting it fall fully. It felt fitting. Enjin’s eyes tracked him like they knew something. All he could do was squint back at him.
“You still haven’t questioned me at all,” he mused.
“I don’t need to,” Enjin said. “I don’t need closure or anything stupid like that. I know what I know and I don’t need to know anything else. I’ll force it out of you later if I want to.”
“Sure,” Tamsy said. “You know, I’m going to pick up your dead body so very carefully.”
Enjin craned his neck, picking his head up off the floor and making himself a bit steadier. Tamsy waited for him to make eye contact with him to continue talking.
“It won’t be delicate, few things regarding the dead are. But I’ll pick you up as tenderly as I am able to, as if I had simply failed you and not murdered you. I’ll bring you to the others. I won’t cry, but I know I’ll look frail as I present your corpse to them. They’ll pity me, tell me it was not my fault, when I tell them you got caught off guard and I was not able to save you. If I am lucky, I will get to Rudo last, and everyone else’s sorrow will hang over him and amplify his. If things go well, we’ll bond over it.”
“Rudo…?” Enjin’s attention zeroed in on that detail faster than anything else. The confidence in his voice drained, the nonchalance he projected left him.
“I’m doing this for Rudo, you know?” Tamsy told him matter-of-factly. “For his sake. For the sake of this love of mine. Even if you didn’t ask, I did want you to know that.”
He just barely managed to prop himself up on his elbow properly before he responded. “What kind of sick fuck… are you?”
“Whatever kind you want to label me as is fine. It won’t live long.” He shrugs lazily. “I want to see Rudo, his whole and complete self. Get to his core, crack the things surrounding it so it can blossom into something wonderful. So, just like I killed his father Regto, and just like I kidnapped his friend Amo, I have stabbed you, Enjin. The man who saved him from death in No Man’s Land, the person who took him under his wing— that’s bound to get to him enough by now, no?”
“You—!” The rest of Enjin’s words died in his throat, replaced by a groan as he was knocked back onto the ground. By sheer miracle, it did not give way to a scream.
Tamsy had stepped right on the wound he’d left. He’d ground the sole of his boots into it, the blood staining it and leaving a muted, faintly shiny red edge crawling up the sides. It was not sticky now, but left alone it would be soon. Tamsy grimaced at it as though it had been Enjin’s fault and Enjin’s fault alone his shoe was dirtied like that.
“You’ve been kind of annoying that way, mind you,” he started, “with all of that mentoring bullshit. Teaching him things like patience, acceptance, and crap like conflict resolution. The kind of useless stuff Rudo doesn’t need at all. I’d say you really were a good mentor or something sappy like that, but it’s been a serious pain in my ass!”
A laugh startled out of Enjin— it seemed to catch him off guard about as much as it did Tamsy. It was accompanied by its own splash of blood he almost choked on, one he coughed through.
“You’re such a shithead,” he wheezed out.
“That’s funny, coming from—”
“Rudo is a good kid.” Enjin cut him off. “He’ll definitely overcome somebody like you. You… you said it yourself. He was taught well.”
“So corny.” Tamsy’s tone gave away that he felt vaguely insulted, but he stopped grinding his heel into Enjin’s wound in the same breath. He crouched down next to him, making a move to sit down. “I really shouldn’t be arguing over something like that with a dead man.”
“Are ya afraid this ‘dead man’’s gonna prove you wrong?” Enjin quipped back.
Enjin’s hand still seemed to be wandering around, gripping blindly above his head. Looking for that damned umbrella, probably. He wasn’t going to find it. It was like looking at a cockroach squirm, half-dead, half-stomped out, twitching because that was all its useless limbs could do. The pain and the blood loss seemed to have kept Enjin down for good this time, but something stubborn about him kept his attitude now that he had found it again.
Was it some blind grab at his last scraps of dignity? It was kind of funny. Enjin wasn’t the sort of person who had any dignity to burn to begin with. Tamsy knew what that twinge in Enjin’s eyes meant, what those taut lines in his expression he couldn’t conceal were hiding.
He leaned down and laid his head on Enjin’s chest. Enjin let out a startled, garbly sort of noise but he ignored it. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to think solely about the heartbeat he had just pressed his ear next to. It was still surprisingly steady, but he could hear how it began to grow sluggish, the more it unwittingly cycled blood out of Enjin’s body and onto the floor between them. His pants were going to have such a large stain on them, when he eventually got up and had to haul Enjin’s body away. Tamsy really couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Enjin’s heart was killing him slowly.
“This is a bit silly.” He admitted that mostly to himself. It was barely a whisper. “You can pretend I’m one of those women you’re always chasing after, for now. Feel a bit of warmth for the last time. You should thank me for that kindness.”
“What, are you coming out as stupid to me too?” Enjin asked.
Tamsy laughed. “I guess you’re right. I just got caught up in the sound. I thought maybe that would be enough to shut you up for a bit, so I could listen to it.”
“You… you fucking freak,” Enjin said.
“Mm. It’s dawning on you that you won’t get up again, right? That your words were hollow.” Tamsy allowed himself to lean down and hear that heartbeat again. It continued to fade steadily.
“Rudo’s gonna beat you.” The thought sounded half-finished when Enjin uttered it, but it was all that needed to be said.
Tamsy felt the vibration of his voice. Beyond just hearing it, the sensation trailed through his entire body. It went through his head and all of the way to his core as well. It almost sent a shiver up his spine, one that he stubbornly suppressed. He guessed this was the power of the last words of a dying man. How remarkable.
Enjin’s will was something special, it was such a shame he really did have to die.
They stayed silent then. For all his bravado, it seemed Enjin really had capitulated to the grim reaper. His breathing grew hoarser and his heart gave out. It took maybe two more minutes— or more, or less. He was not counting the seconds. Enjin had died still reaching for that umbrella. Tamsy should probably go get it.
He looked at Enjin’s face one last time. When he gets up to do it, his loose hair makes it all the more private that time. A curtain cutting them off entirely from the world. He finds he dislikes that privacy.
He sat up and looked around, trying to pinpoint where Umbreaker ended up. He looked back at the corpse, leaned on it, used it as an armrest. Totally shameless.
“I guess I have to actually get up and take you to the others, huh?” He said that to the air. There really was nothing else left to do.