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Part One: The Incident in the Garden of Ten Thousand Petals
The problem with Jinshi, Maomao had long decided, was that he was entirely too beautiful for his own good… and entirely too aware of it.
She watched him now from across the imperial herb garden, his silky hair catching the afternoon light like something conjured from a painter’s fever dream, his obsidian eyes scanning the rows of medicinal plants with an expression of polite interest that she knew, after years of proximity, was entirely manufactured.
He didn’t care about herbs. He cared about watching her care about herbs, which was an entirely different and more aggravating thing.
“You’re doing it again,” she grumbled without looking up from the dried ghost mushroom she was grinding between pestle and mortar.
“Doing what?” His voice was the auditory equivalent of warm honey, which she also found aggravating.
“Standing there looking decorative while pretending to be useful.”
Jinshi descended the stone steps toward her with the fluid grace of someone who had been trained since birth to make every movement seem effortless.
He crouched beside her workstation, close enough that she could smell the faint cedarwood of his outer robes. “I brought you lunch.”
“You had Master Gaoshun bring me lunch. That’s different.”
“The intent was mine.”
“The effort was his.”
He smiled, and even after everything, after years of working in his household, after learning piece by piece the architecture of the man beneath the performance…
…That smile still did something inconvenient to her pulse that she refused to examine clinically because she already knew the diagnosis and found it unhelpful.
“Maomao…” His tone shifted, not the honeyed public voice but the real one… quieter, more careful, shaped around her name like it meant something specific.
“…Come and look at this.”
She set down her pestle. That tone, she had learned, was worth following.
He had moved to the far eastern corner of the garden where the oldest trees grew—gnarled apricot trees that had been there since before either of them were born. Their roots sunk deep into the palace earth.
Between two of the largest trunks, the air was doing something wrong.
That was the only way Maomao could describe it.
Wrong.
It shimmered, not the way heat shimmer moved—lazy and horizontal—but vertically, deeply, like the surface of a pond disturbed from below.
Colors moved through it that she did not have names for.
The light beyond the shimmer was the same afternoon gold as the light on her side of it, but the shadows fell at different angles.
And through the distortion she could see the herb garden continuing, except the rows were arranged differently.
The Pavilion in the distance was a different color—red where theirs was white—and standing in the middle of the impossible gap between one world and another were two people looking back at them with expressions of identical bewilderment.
Maomao’s first coherent thought was, “So that’s what I look like from the outside.”
The woman on the other side of the shimmer was her height, her build, her particular shade of dark hair coiled in an elaborate style that Maomao had never had occasion or patience to attempt.
She wore formal Empress’s robes in deep burgundy and gold that fit her with the ease of long familiarity…
…She was staring at Maomao with wide amber eyes that Maomao recognized as her own making the same analytical, slightly alarmed assessment.
The man beside her was Jinshi.
Except not.
He was Jinshi the way a formal portrait was Jinshi—the same bone structure, the same impossible silky hair…
…But something had settled differently in his face, a gravity that came from different years and different weight.
He wore the dragon robes—not the informal clothes of a noble’s household—the formal regalia of an Emperor.
He held himself with an authority that Jinshi—her Jinshi, she thought, then immediately took issue with the possessive—held in potential but had never, in her presence, fully deployed.
The four of them stared at each other across the luminous gap between worlds.
Then all four of them, simultaneously, exclaimed, “What the…?!?”
Part Two: The Protocol of Impossible Situations
There was, Maomao reflected, no established protocol for meeting yourself.
There was protocol for everything else in the Imperial Court.
Protocol for greetings, for dining, for the precise angle at which one bowed to persons of various ranks, for the management of illness and the management of gossip and the management of succession crises.
Shit!
But for this—for standing in a Pavilion across a table from a woman wearing your face and a man wearing the face of the person you were currently not-quite-admitting you loved—the protocol was notably absent.
The shimmer had, apparently, permitted them to step through.
Or rather, the woman on the other side had stepped through first, cautiously?
One slippered foot testing the ground the way Maomao tested unfamiliar compounds—small dose first, observe effects.
Then the man, his hand resting at her elbow in what was clearly an unconscious gesture of long partnership.
They had introduced themselves with the careful formality of people buying time to think.
“I am Zuigetsu,” the Emperor introduced himself, with a slight incline of his head that acknowledged Jinshi’s rank while making clear the deference was a courtesy rather than a necessity. “And this is my Empress, Lamao.”
“I am Jinshi,” Jinshi replied, and the effort it cost him not to reach for one of his performances was visible, at least to Maomao, in the slight tightening around his eyes. “And she is Maomao. My… my… apothecary.”
The word ‘my’ sat in the air with its usual complicated weight.
Lamao’s eyes moved between them with an expression Maomao recognized.
It was the expression she wore when she had gathered sufficient data to form a hypothesis and was now testing it against observable evidence.
Whatever the hell the hypothesis was, it seemed to confirm itself.
As the corner of Lamao’s mouth curved upward in a smile that was simultaneously unfamiliar in its elegance and uncomfortably familiar in its underlying wryness.
“Your apothecary, sir?” Lamao repeated.
“Yes, milady” Maomao confirmed flatly.
For fuck’s sake, she could hear what the question under the words was, and she was not prepared to answer it with witnesses.
Zuigetsu was looking at Jinshi the way people sometimes looked at their own reflection when they had not expected to encounter a mirror—with a kind of vertiginous recognition that was not entirely comfortable.
Jinshi, for his part, was looking at Zuigetsu with an expression that Maomao categorized as the particular alertness of someone who had just been handed a puzzle with no obvious entry point.
They were, she supposed, objectively the same person.
Same origin, same blood, same fundamental architecture of soul.
But they had been shaped by different circumstances.
Jinshi growing up in the shadow of an Empire he served, Zuigetsu growing up to become its center.
Ah!
The same clay, different kilns.
“How long does the passage remain open?” Maomao asked. Well, someone had to be practical.
Zuigetsu turned to her with a look that made her feel briefly, disconcertingly, like she was being seen.
“We don’t know. It’s appeared twice before in our world’s records. The last time was four hundred years ago. It remained for three days.”
“Three days?” Jinshi repeated.
“Three days,” Zuigetsu confirmed.
Three days in another world, with themselves.
Maomao looked at her hands, then at Lamao’s hands—same ink stain on the same left middle finger, she noticed, and felt the profound strangeness of it settle into her chest like a swallowed stone.
Part Three: Conversations Between Mirrors
By the second evening, they had sorted themselves, as people do, into the pairings that made a certain kind of structural sense.
Zuigetsu and Jinshi walked the outer garden together in the long blue twilight.
Maomao watched them from the Pavilion window—two versions of the same man pacing the same ground, and even from this distance the difference between them was legible in every gesture.
Jinshi moved with the contained energy of someone who was always, partially, performing.
Zuigetsu moved like someone who had been so thoroughly watched for so long that he had found, somewhere on the other side of it, a bedrock stillness.
“He worries about you,” Lamao voiced beside her, not looking up from the compound she was mixing.
Gods! There was something deeply strange about watching your own hands work with your own tools and produce the same movements you would have made, slightly differently inflected.
“The way he watches you. It’s the same whether he’s doing it or not doing it, visible or not visible.”
“He’s observant,” Maomao responded, “It’s a professional habit.”
Lamao made a sound that was not quite a laugh, “I said that. For years. I said it was professional.”
Maomao didn’t answer.
Outside, she could see Jinshi gesture at something—one of his real gestures, not the performance—and Zuigetsu nod with the slow recognition of someone who remembered thinking that exact thought.
“What was it like?” Maomao asked Lamao, “When you stopped saying that?”
Lamao was quiet for a moment, grinding something with patient circular strokes.
“Terrifying,” she answered finally, “And then not.”
“That’s not very specific.”
“No.” Lamao looked up, and meeting her own eyes was still a strange experience—like looking into a pond that gave back a slightly different sky.
“But you’re already specific enough, I think. You already know exactly what it is. You’re just deciding whether to let yourself know that you know.”
This was, Maomao thought, the particular torture of talking to yourself—the absence of the comfortable gap between what you understood and what you were willing to say aloud.
“He was noble in your world too?” she asked, redirecting.
“Yes. Similar position to your Emperor. Served the Court.”
Lamao set down her pestle and turned fully to face her.
“The difference was that in our world, the Emperor—Zuigetsu’s predecessor—died without a clear succession. There was a period of considerable political complexity.”
A delicate pause.
“Zuigetsu was the solution. He didn’t have a choice in being Emperor any more than either of us had a choice in being who we are. And I didn’t have a choice in…”
She stopped, “Well. That’s not true. I did have a choice. I made it.”
“Was it the right one?” Maomao wondered.
Lamao smiled, and it was warm in a way that Maomao’s smiles, she suspected, were not usually warm—there was something earned about it, something that had gone through fire and come out different.
“Ask me anything about medicine, toxicology, Court politics, poison identification, or the seventeen different ways a noble can try to have you quietly removed from your position, and I can give you a precise answer.”
She picked up her pestle again.
“Ask me if the person I chose to bind my life to was the right one, and I’ll tell you that ‘right’ is not a useful diagnostic category. I’ll tell you that I would do it again. That’s a different kind of answer, but I think it’s more honest.”
Through the window, Zuigetsu said something, and Jinshi laughed—a real one, startled out of him, unguarded.
For a moment, the two men were wholly themselves, not performance and not gravity but just two people who understood each other with unusual completeness.
Maomao watched her own hands move to the windowsill and rest there, and did not examine what she felt.
Part Four: The Weight of Other Names
“It’s strange,” Jinshi chuckled, “Talking to myself.”
He and Zuigetsu had settled on the garden stones beside the apricot trees, the shimmer behind them glowing faintly in the evening dark.
Zuigetsu had produced, from somewhere in his imperial robes, a small flask of something that turned out to be surprisingly good plum wine.
And they were passing it between them with the comfortable informality of men who had established—within a few hours—a trust based on the irrefutable logic of shared identity.
“Strange,” Zuigetsu agreed, “but useful.”
“There are things I’ve never said aloud because there was no one to say them to who would understand without requiring explanation.”
“…And I understand without requiring explanation,” Jinshi finished.
“You understand and require explanation,” Zuigetsu corrected, with a slight smile, “You’re further behind than I was. But yes.”
Jinshi was quiet, turning the flask in his hands. “She doesn’t know.”
“She knows.”
“She’s chosen not to…”
“She’s chosen not to act on it,” Zuigetsu said patiently.
“…Which is different. Maomao—your Maomao—is one of the most perceptive people I have ever encountered, in this world or apparently in yours. She does not not-know things. She decides how much knowing she’s willing to deploy at any given moment.”
“That’s a diplomatic way of saying she’s been avoiding the subject.”
“So have you, Jinshi.”
Jinshi had no answer to that, which was itself an answer.
The shimmer pulsed softly behind them, casting its strange light across the garden stones.
Zuigetsu looked at it with the particular expression of a man who had learned, through long experience, to acknowledge things he could not fully explain.
“Can I ask you something?” Jinshi whispered.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“How did you…” He stopped.
Tried again, “When you became Emperor. When everything changed. How did you…”
Another stop.
The question was too much for the ordinary architecture of speech.
“She stayed,” Jinshi said finally, “Even through all of that. She stayed.”
Zuigetsu was quiet for a long moment. The plum wine caught the shimmer’s light.
“She stayed,” he agreed, “Because she had already decided to. Long before I knew she’d decided. Lamao makes her choices the way she approaches a compound—carefully, thoroughly, having already considered every possible reaction and side effect. By the time she acts on a decision, she’s been living with it for years.”
Jinshi thought about this. He thought about Maomao standing in his herb garden with her sleeves rolled up and ink on her hands, her expression of total absorption in whatever she was doing…
…And the way she sometimes looked up and found him watching and looked away too quickly…
…The way she never looked away when it was actually important—when it was a question of safety or truth or something that required her to be fully present.
She looked away from the soft things.
She looked straight at the difficult ones.
“I don’t know how to…” he started.
“You already know how,” Zuigetsu smiled.
“That’s the part that makes it hard. If you didn’t know how, you could put it off indefinitely. But you know exactly what it would look like to be honest, and the knowledge of that specific thing is what’s been making it difficult.”
Jinshi looked at his counterpart—at the years on him, the particular quality of settled peace that he recognized as something he wanted and couldn’t quite name.
He felt, with unexpected force, the distance between where he was and where he might go.
“Did you regret it?” Jinshi asked, “The choice. The cost of it.”
Zuigetsu took the flask back, drank, handed it back.
“The cost was real. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t. There were things we couldn’t have, limitations neither of us had chosen, complications that required patience and ingenuity and sometimes genuine sacrifice.”
A pause.
“But you’re asking the wrong question. You’re asking about the cost of choosing. You should be asking about the cost of not choosing. I know what that looked like too. I lived it for long enough.”
The shimmer pulsed again. Somewhere in the Pavilion behind them, light moved through a window, and the shadows of two women moved across it…
…The same woman, twice, in different configurations of the same life.
“She won’t make it easy for you,” Zuigetsu commented.
“I know.”
“She’ll argue.”
“I know.”
“She’ll produce seventeen logical reasons why it’s inadvisable.”
“Probably more,” Jinshi softly laughed, “She’s thorough.”
Zuigetsu smiled—a real one, stripped of all ceremony, “Yes. She is.”
Part Five: What Lamao Told Her
On the third morning, they had run out of pretexts.
The shimmer was still there. It would not be there tomorrow.
Maomao could feel the weight of the closing hours in the quality of the light, in the way her counterpart moved around the workstation with the careful attention of someone committing things to memory.
“Tell me about the beginning,” Maomao demanded, “Not the outcome. The beginning.”
Lamao did not pretend not to understand. “He gave me a tangerine,” she grinned.
Maomao stared, “Huh? A tangerine.”
“I know. It’s not an impressive origin story. I was hungry. He noticed. He gave me a tangerine without making a production of it, without performing generosity, without asking for gratitude. He just—gave me a tangerine.”
She then laughed softly, “I was suspicious of it for an entire week. I looked up whether tangerines could be vectors for covert poison delivery. They can’t, in case you’re wondering.”
“I know,” Maomao stated, “I’ve checked.”
They looked at each other.
“I know you’ve checked,” Lamao told her.
“I was being thorough, milady.”
“We’re always thorough, Maomao… about everything except the one thing we can’t bring ourselves to examine directly.”
She sat down, folding her formal empress’s robes around her with practiced ease.
“The beginning was a hundred small things that individually meant nothing. Or that I told myself meant nothing. He remembered which compounds I was running low on before I mentioned it. He made sure I had good light for my work. He learned enough basic toxicology to have meaningful conversations about it, which is… uhm, honestly, if you know how few people bother…”
“It’s not nothing,” Maomao retorted quietly.
“It’s not nothing,” Lamao confirmed, “I kept filing these observations away under ‘professionally considerate employer’ for much longer than was intellectually defensible. And eventually I had to admit that my filing system had been corrupted by something I didn’t want to name.”
Maomao was quiet after that.
She could hear Jinshi and Zuigetsu in the garden—the rise and fall of two voices that were the same voice, having some conversation she couldn’t quite hear.
“He’s not going to hurt you,” Lamao added, very gently.
“I know that’s the thing under everything. The fear that something you let yourself want will be used as leverage. That care will become obligation and obligation will become…”
She stopped.
“I know. I had the same fear. Ours is a world—both our worlds—where what you love is what you’re vulnerable to.”
“That’s not a small concern,” Maomao purred.
“No. It isn’t. I’m not dismissing it.” Lamao leaned forward slightly.
“But there are people who use what you love against you, and there are people who understand that what you love is a trust, not a weapon. And the work—the actual difficult work—is learning to tell the difference. Not from fear. From evidence.”
She paused, “What does your evidence say, Maomao?”
Maomao thought about Jinshi sitting beside her while she worked through a difficult compound, not talking, just present.
She thought about him intervening, quietly and effectively, every time court politics threatened to become personally dangerous to her.
She thought about the way he argued with her—genuinely argued, engaged with her logic instead of dismissing it, pushed back when he thought she was wrong and conceded when she demonstrated she wasn’t.
She thought about the precious oz bezoar he had given her—three years ago—and how she had checked the entire supply chain of its delivery and found nothing, and filed it under professionally considerate employer and hadn’t looked at it again.
“I know what my evidence says,” Maomao replied at last.
“I know you know,” Lamao affirmed.
Part Six: The Last Evening
They ate dinner together, the four of them, in the Pavilion with the shimmer visible through the open doors, pulsing quietly in the evening dark.
The conversation had moved, over the hours of their shared time, through layers.
They had spoken about medicine—Lamao’s approaches to certain compounds differed from Maomao’s in ways that were both recognizable and surprising, shaped by different resources and different problems, and comparing methodologies was the most comfortable thing they did—the place where all four of them could settle into ordinariness.
Zuigetsu knew more practical pharmacology than Jinshi, having been tutored by Lamao for years, and Jinshi found this simultaneously humbling and extremely motivating in a way he did not fully examine.
They had spoken about politics—cautiously, recognizing that their worlds’ specific configurations were different enough to make direct comparison risky, but the underlying architecture of power was recognizable across the divide.
Then, there were strategies Zuigetsu had developed that Jinshi found illuminating, and Court dynamics that Lamao had navigated that gave Maomao’s own instincts a certain retrospective confirmation.
And they had spoken, carefully, about other things.
Not everything.
Some things didn’t require words, and some words did not require their specific context to be understood.
Maomao and Lamao had sat together for a long time in the afternoon, not always speaking, and Maomao had felt something shift—not a decision, exactly, but the decision’s prerequisite—a willingness to let herself know what she already knew.
Now, as dinner wound down and the shimmer’s light deepened toward its final hours, the four of them sat in a quiet that wasn’t uncomfortable.
“Tomorrow morning,” Zuigetsu said with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who had learned that the management of endings was better than the avoidance of them.
“The records indicate the passage closes at dawn.”
“Then we should sleep,” Lamao proposed.
She looked at Maomao with a smile that carried years in it.
“…And perhaps have conversations that are long overdue.”
Jinshi looked at Maomao. Maomao looked at the table.
Then, with the deliberateness of someone performing a clinical intervention on themselves, she looked up.
“Walk with me,” she requested.
Jinshi’s expression did several things in quick succession, all of which she catalogued with the professional attention she brought to any significant observation.
Surprise. Relief.
The particular quality of trying not to show that the surprise and relief were as significant as they were.
“Yes,” he nodded, “Let’s walk.”
Zuigetsu and Lamao watched them go with the carefully neutral expressions of people exercising heroic restraint.
The moment Maomao and Jinshi were through the Pavilion door, Lamao rested her chin in her hand and looked at her husband.
“She made it,” Lamao hummed.
Zuigetsu had already produced a small purse from his robes.
He set it on the table with the resigned grace of a man who had known he was going to lose the bet.
“You said she’d take longer.”
“I said she’d take longer to make the first move. I also said once she decided, she’d move like a physician treating a critical patient—efficiently and without dithering.”
Lamao accepted the purse with the tranquility of a person who had correctly predicted human behavior. “I know myself, sir.”
Part Seven: The Garden Under Stars
The apricot trees were silver and shadow, and the shimmer between them gave off a light that was like moonlight’s stranger cousin—present, soft, and from somewhere else.
Maomao stood in front of it with her hands folded in front of her, and Jinshi stood beside her, and neither of them spoke for long enough that the silence became its own kind of speech.
“I should tell you something, Master Jinshi.”
“You can tell me anything, Maomao.”
“I know.”
She looked at the shimmer. In its light, she could see colors that did not exist in ordinary vision—something her physician’s mind noted with interest and her poet’s instinct, small and usually suppressed, found beautiful.
“I have been…” She stopped.
Started differently, “You know how I approach an unknown compound.”
He looked at her. “Carefully. With full attention to possible reactions.”
“Yes. And sometimes I encounter a compound that my existing frameworks don’t adequately explain. And when that happens, I have two choices. I can spend indefinitely attempting to fit it into a framework that was designed for other things, or I can accept that I need a new framework.”
She paused, then, “I’ve been spending a very long time attempting to fit something into an existing framework.”
Jinshi was very still. The stillness of someone who has been waiting for something specific and has now heard its opening notes.
Maomao carefully continued, “I am not good at things I can’t analyze my way out of. I’m not good at the things that don’t have logical endpoints. I’m not good at…”
She stopped again, “…What Lady Lamao said is that I already know what my evidence says. And she’s right. I’ve known for a while. I’ve been being deliberately obstructive with myself.”
“Maomao…”
“I’m getting there,” she concluded, with a flash of the irritability that was, he had always known, her truest form of affection—the complete absence of performance.
“The thing about evidence is that at some point you have to act on it. Otherwise it’s just information with no function, and I have…”
She turned to look at him, finally, and he was looking at her with the expression that she had spent years deciding was professionally concerned and now—without the buffer of that useful fiction—could see clearly for what it was.
“I have no interest in information with no function, sir.”
“No,” he agreed, “You never have.”
“So…” She unfolded her hands. Looked at them. Looked at him.
“There. That’s what I needed to say. I’m still not…”
A breath.
“I’m still not good at the things I can’t analyze my way out of. I’m going to be difficult about it. I’m going to argue.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to produce logical objections on a semi-regular basis.”
“I know.”
“I…” She stopped, because he had taken her hands in both of his, the way he sometimes steadied a compound vessel when she was working with something unstable, with a certainty and a gentleness that were not contradictions.
“Maomao… Please, I’ve always known.”
The shimmer pulsed between the apricot trees, light from somewhere else illuminating this one specific garden, this one specific moment.
In the Pavilion behind them, two people who understood exactly what was happening were very carefully looking at other things.
“Thank you, sir…” she shyly smiled, which was not the most eloquent thing she had ever done, but she was a physician, not a poet, and it was honest.
“For what?”
“For waiting,” she swallowed, “For not…”
She searched for the word. “…For not pushing. For letting me take the long way.”
He looked at her with the real face, the one under the performances, and it was—she observed this with the precise attention she gave to everything—a face that had been waiting for a long time and had waited with patience not because it was easy but because she was worth the patience.
“You’ve always taken the long way,” he murmured, “You get there faster than anyone else and you take the longest route. It’s one of the things about you.”
“Is it a problem, sir?”
“No, Maomao. It’s just you.”
Epilogue: Dawn
The shimmer closed at dawn, as the records had promised.
They stood at the edge of it—all four of them—in the grey-blue light before sunrise, and watched the strange luminescence fold inward…
…The colors that had no names drawing back into whatever space they came from, the apricot trees returning to ordinary shadows on ordinary ground.
Lamao looked at Maomao for a long moment. Two versions of the same face, differently marked by different years.
“The compound for the winter cough,” Lamao said, “The ratio of…”
“Increase the chrysanthemum by a third,” Maomao finished, “I know. I’ve been trying to make it work with the standard ratio for two years.”
“It’s the variation in harvest quality. Adjust seasonally.”
“Obviously.” A pause. “Thank you.”
“Obviously,” Lamao echoed, and smiled.
Zuigetsu and Jinshi had been standing slightly apart, finishing some conversation in low voices.
As the shimmer drew to its final breath, Zuigetsu turned to face his counterpart fully.
“One thing, Jinshi” he said.
“Yes.”
“She’s going to be right more often than you. When she tells you something you don’t want to hear, she is almost certainly correct. Accept this early. It saves time.”
Jinshi thought about this. Thought about all the times Maomao had said something he hadn’t wanted to hear and had subsequently been correct about.
“I already know that,” he nodded.
“I know you know it, Jinshi. I’m suggesting you act on it consistently rather than just in retrospect.”
“Is that what you do?”
Zuigetsu smiled, and for a moment the years fell away from his face and he looked like the person he had been before the weight of Empire, the person underneath all the accumulated gravity.
“I try,” he admitted, “I’m still working on it.”
The last of the shimmer folded away. The apricot trees were still and ordinary.
The garden held only four people’s worth of early morning, and the birds were beginning their first tentative sentences in the branches overhead.
Maomao stood beside Jinshi in the ordinary light, and the world was the world—one world, her world, strange and medically interesting and politically treacherous and full of problems that required careful analysis.
She thought about evidence, about frameworks, about the specific compound she had been failing to categorize for years, and about what Lamao had mentioned of the cost of not choosing.
Jinshi’s hand found hers, as it had the night before, with the same certainty and the same gentleness.
She let it.
The sun came up over the Palace walls, the apricot trees bloomed quietly in the warmth of it.
The herb garden began to release its morning scents—green and medicinal and sharp.
Maomao stood in the middle of all her ordinary extraordinary life and thought, “Well. All right, then. Evidence accepted. New framework.”
—
Somewhere else—some other morning, some other garden, some other configuration of the same people—the Empress Lamao looked at her Emperor across the breakfast table and found him already watching her.
She said, without looking up from her compound analysis, “You’re doing it again, sir.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me.”
“Guilty,” Zuigetsu laughed, without the slightest effort to stop.