nothing but a beautiful echo of death:

god, @echosdeath is ruthless. does she say this to all her business partners too? good afternoon, thanks for meeting with me. by the way, you seem mentally unstable! “‘not entirely insane’...” akiyama repeats it back to her, visibly pouting harder as she plucks the magazine off his face. “see, the ‘not entirely’ part somehow makes it worse. if you’d just called me insane outright, i could’ve worked with that. but this?” he presses a hand to his chest. “this feels targeted.”

for once, he doesn’t smile. the hill breathes around them in wet, dying sounds: grass hissing beneath the wind, water below shuddering beneath streaks of molten sunset. and shams sits among it all too composed, too still, a body posed after the fact — carefully arranged, almost reverent in its bleakness. kaeya stares at her too long. long enough for the silence around her to thicken, to turn oppressive. almost-corporeal, a hand made of nothing and everything. it drapes itself over his exposed throat and tightens.

he has seen this before — in a reflection that used to answer him. because for a time, they were mirrors; though neither of them would have called it that.

she has always been achingly alive to him. bright in ways that felt almost cruel in their effortless existence, warm in ways he learned too early to stop reaching for. too bright to imitate, too warm to make sense of anymore. that was the symmetry: her light, his absence. two distortions pressed against the same pane of glass. but they weren’t mirrors anymore, not really. something had shifted in the glass between them. altered in what it allowed them to see. he looked at her and saw not himself, but what he used to be before the ending took root. and she looked at him and saw only what came after. he had already become his ending. she was still inside hers. a process that has not yet decided what it will leave behind. and that made her worse than him.

she sits before him, aware, enduring, and the exhaustion in her doesn’t feel like fatigue so much as erosion — an ongoing undoing, as if what’s inside her is sanding her down into something else. a parasite learning the shape of her bones. it takes what it can and replaces it as it goes. she looks like she is being taken apart without ever fully becoming gone. and it does not stop.

her old self tried to claw its way out of her throat, but nothing more than a pathetic twitch came out. she raises a brow at him now. she teetered dangerously on a knife edge between insanity and mortality, stuck in an infinite loop. the pen has long fallen from her own grip, something else seemed to be holding it now. her gaze falls to the ground, before she lets out a small laugh, head falling between her hands. ❝    it matters to me. you should get that.    ❞   not for the reasons one may think of, but he knows this already. there's no need to speak on it anymore, for she knew he could tell early on. shams' mark on this world was her light, in every sense and every form. her grace was the change she wished to see in the smiles of her people and the lightheartedness of their hearts. now nothing is the same. as if she is some deity now, god of a god. as goes without saying, they’re all following suit: meaning bowed heads and quiet prayers, a brief greeting if any,  nothing but the utmost respect whenever they’re graced with her presence, fickle as she is. it sickens her. this is not her mark on this world. and she wishes to change how things have turned now, but she cannot find it in herself. how many times ought she to do so? how many times will her soul let her? she looks at him again. ❝    it matters to me. or, at least it did.    ❞   

and there it is again: the sharp pain in her mind anytime she begins to return to her real self. like a blade digging deeper into her back anytime she feels the need to use her voice. she lets out a quiet groan at the hurt. whatever is taking over seems to be the talon against her throat. it cracks her ribs open, tears out her heart, sees the way the blood trails down her arm, warm and knowing and wretched. there is a cruel catharsis found in the way it stains her skin with their existence, the way each confession in her head speaks with every beat and pulse. it's quite haunting. she is not herself anymore, and who knows how long it will take her until she drifts apart for good? will kaeya look at her the same way he does so now? she used to enjoy their turn of conversations, but too much has happened now. she watches his expression, an absence in her gaze, maybe a tenderness somewhere beneath it all. even at the thought, there's something that echoes in the emptiness in her chest, something that chooses to beat, still. she clicks her tongue. she can barely tell if the next words that fall from her mouth are hers or whatever wants to take over. still, she speaks them, aware of the cost.

“are y’sure?” she takes a bite of kaki-pi. because of matsugane, his clan, and yaeko’s girl, she’s come to know yagami too. over twenty years, she’s watched him stumble, rebuild himself, and keep going anyway. much like she has with @echosdeath. “i mean, tābō’s quite the charmer... and not exactly subtle. neither are you.” and if either of them had the courage to confront what was already obvious—- to themselves, let alone each other—- it would’ve saved them—- and everyone else—- a lot of trouble. “it’s kinda cute. embarrassin’, but cute.” and if they had eyes, too, maybe it wouldn’t have taken this long. so much for perceptive types.

she exhales softly. taps her manicured nails on the table. “and the way ya talk about him...” a laugh. “honestly, i’m startin’ t’wonder which one of ya’s actually foolin’ themselves worse.” her eyes crinkle deviously, pausing her tapping to point at shams. “like yer face... it does this... thing whenever he comes up. y’know? real annoyin’. makes it hard t’take ya seriously.” when shams makes an expression opposite of what she’s describing and sinks her head onto the counter, chizuru smiles to herself. cards fingers through dark waves of her daughter’s hair, listening to the bar’s music. [what about this dream again, i wonder? is there still love to be found? in the moment our hands touch, all the feelings i’ve held back rise up...] “no, but really, listen.” she often hears stories about other people in love, people falling out of it, or people simply talking about it, what with her bar attracting the hopeless romantics, hopeful fools and every cynic in-between. “ya don’t survive what we survived without gettin’ good at buryin’ things.” it’s been years since she’s let herself call anything love. that’s what she thinks, at least. maybe if the fates were kind, her boys down in sōtenbori—- and yasuko, too, if she were alive—- would poke and prod at her the same way she’s doing with shams now. ...two outta three, anyway.

she lets out a sigh. there's a look on the other's face, one she knows too well, but she can already feel her mind drifting. anyone who loves her is bound to have expectations. they’ll expect her to smile, want her to bare all that she is. they’ll expect her to give all that she is, and they’ll get angry when what she is is lacking.  she believes this without question. relationships are built on give and take.  if she isn't willing to give, they’ll call her greedy. if she isn't willing to take, they’ll call her heartless. if she tells them she can’t do either, that she doesn't want to, they’ll call her what she is, which is splintered, rendered out of use.  it's not enough to pretend to enjoy it— not enough to half - heartedly give and never receive. she recalls the contempt of a ruined relationship: when she's left with overripe fruit and no way to savor them, no way to do anything but let them splatter on the ground. love, to her, is like that. it's what she's always believed, but when she sits here now, as she has a hundred times before, she imagines a world where he wouldn't expect so from her. yagami is kind, after all, a bright star shining across the water.