#kuro2018

@kuroganeweek Day 3.

When Kurogane looks at the kid and the princess, he wonders if he was ever that... small.  

(It’s a silly question — of course he was.  He didn’t enter the world a full-grown man, even if he did lose his idyllic childhood far earlier than he should have.  But wasn’t that the case for all of them on this journey, no matter how hard they tried to hide it?)

Sometimes he forgets. The kid and princess both possess fierce determination that rivals his own, and they are sometimes wise beyond their years.  They’ve surmounted trials that most people never have to deal with their entire lives.  Their presence feels so large that it’s easy to forget that they’re still so very young; these are two people, fighting desperately for their lives and their love before they’re even adults.  

It isn’t fair.

(Life rarely is. He’d spit on hitsuzen if it was a tangible thing.)

@kuroganeweek​ Day 1

In Yama, Kurogane’s eyes are the wrong colour.  

So are the wizard’s, and he remembers their mutual shock once they have the time to notice such a small but significant change.  It’s disconcerting to look into black irises that he knows should be a brilliant blue.  He wonders if the other man feels similarly perturbed when looking at him, or if he thinks the black suits him just fine.

Both of them wear black now, but Kurogane loses more of his red and exchanges it for blue.  It doesn’t feel right.  When he thinks of blue, he thinks of skies that seem infinite when they aren’t, he thinks of water that slips through fingers, he thinks of deceit and falsehoods.  Blue is the wizard’s colour, not his.

Kurogane is red. Fires devouring Suwa and childhood with heartless ease. Rage consuming him inside out with the same unrelenting ferocity.  Blood of a dead mother in his arms, blood dripping down a father’s severed arm, blood painted across the blade of an early inheritance, blood on his hands, always, always.

He and the wizard paint the battlefield with his colours, trapped in an endless cycle of war and violence while the moon looms watchfully in the sky. They fight, night after night, entering a war clad in false blues for a false allegiance, and returning to their tents with sanguine weariness.  Months pass and he wonders if they’ll ever be free of bloodshed, or if this is the result of his own choices which led to Tomoyo sending him away.  

@kuroganeweek Day 2.

You lost something else important to you over the years — slowly and slowly, with each stroke of the sword, with each spilling of blood and ended life, carving a vital part of you away until it is forgotten and discarded.  You don't believe in waste or frivolity, so you remove what you find lacking in yourself with the precision of a surgeon, becoming a man honed for lethality and no room for doubt.  You leave behind a boy that climbs trees to retrieve his mother's scarf, a boy who yearns to protect his home side by side with his father; he has no place here in your future full of demons and assassins and single-minded duty.