Work Text:
In the aftermath, he finds it.
His body feels like it could give out at any moment—aching everywhere in one breath and yet totally numb the next, Munakata limps past tired bricks and crumbling rubble when he sees it—and comes to a sudden halt.
It is small, out of the way and by no means does it block his path—indeed, his vision is thin enough now that he could have easily missed it—yet the air grows heavy and constricting around him, and a wave of rock-solid nausea comes over him as his single eye looks down upon a devotion he does not deserve.
Unceremoniously left on the ground in a puddle of grime and its own filth, it lies open, cold, and abandoned. Slowly—as if to offer it respect, somehow—Munakata lowers himself to a crouch before it.
It is a hand, he sees. He could recognise this one’s features anywhere: strong and well-built, knuckles protruding and thick with calluses that tell the stories of a thousand fights. Stories that had been treasured, he recalls—talented and proud and regal. Stories that demanded respect of anyone and everyone, without discrimination.
...Stories ripped tendon from tendon by the very man who created them. Why?
Why, he asks again, and the silence is suffocating.
Munakata looks more closely at the hand, then—it’s been cut off below the wrist, where bone is solid and a clean cut in between is impossible, and the two halves of his wristband rest by its side.
He sawed through his own bone, Munakata thinks, and I didn’t hear a thing.
It’s a few moments later that he finds the knife, thrown to the side and caked in congealing blood—
...and it’s not at all strong enough to cut through bone. A weight drops in his stomach.
It’s a conclusion he doesn’t want to draw. Indeed, he can hardly bear to consider it—but the shards of bone he sees then, scattered and dyed red in the pool around it, seem to affirm his fears.
Sakakura had broken his arm. He’d snapped it to get through.
A retch—Munakata’s stomach heaves—yet his throat remains dry, stomach hollow and starved from the trials here. Back hunched over, his eye is forced shut—as if he could bring people back to life by simply ignoring the reality of it. Or perhaps forget they ever existed at all.
If only it were that easy.
Munakata takes the time to breathe—the air in his nostrils thick with the stench of dead blood—and after just long enough to delude himself he opens his eye once more, imagines attached to the hand before him an arm, a body, a chest that rises and falls with the breaths of a living being.
“...Sakakura—”
But a hand is all that remains there. Foolish.
Sakakura is not here, Munakata reminds himself. And he knows exactly why. He forces himself to examine the hand once more.
He doesn’t deserve this.
This one hand alone, he sees, carries in its palm more love than Munakata has ever allowed himself to admit—and it wrenches out from his heart in that moment each and every feeling he’s pushed into dormancy over the years, relentless and unforgiving and all at once—
Is this how Sakakura has felt all these years?
(And all at once his vision is clouded and damp, and he wishes he could forget these feelings for good.)
This is the devotion Sakakura has always promised him, over and over and over, without question nor hesitation. A devotion Munakata had refused to believe in, accused and abandoned—a devotion that dropped its pride and severed its talent irrevocably in a heartbeat just to be useful, one last time…!
...A devotion that continued on in pained wheezes and smears of blood even after being left for dead.
And Munakata was too late. Too late to realise, too late to atone.
He’d ran, yes, but not before he walked—attempted composure and a false sense of dignity keeping him from the power room for just seconds, seconds too long—and Munakata realises he’s been failing Sakakura all this time.
Munakata’s hand reaches out for just a moment, the tips of his fingers no more than a whisper against its knuckles—Sakakura’s knuckles—and his head drops down, then, for he does not deserve to feel a thing.
“...Juzo.” he says, “I’m sorry.”