>>5961122>>5961154>>5961161>>5961185>>5961233>>5961275>>5961317>>5961344>>5961345>>5961435>>5961440>>5961556>>5961889>>5961902>>5962330>>5963605>>5963686You feel like you’re being watched. A bead of sweat forms on your temple. You imagine what awaits you during the ritual.
A taste of death.
There was nothing for you but death.
Not death in the dreadful sense, but… Some part of you knew that your connection with this world was weak. You imagine the paralytic dream you might experience, touching the line between life and death as the channel closes. The blessed hands of your sister embracing you. Shigure would laugh and take you by the shoulder back into his parlor for tea. You could join Hihari and share a moment of understanding and forgiveness as you put mortal concerns behind you. You imagine what the purity of the beyond would feel like to your maimed soul, water flowing into a parched basin, soaking that dry earth with the water of love and forgiveness and purity. Greedily.
You’d finally be able to see your sister. You’d hold her, and finally see the face of someone whose life was worth so much that her loss drove your mother insane, willing to do anything to bring her back.
And you imagined the agony of it being ripped away as you awoke, your tunnel of love and light closing back into the pitch blackness of darkness and confusion, and for what? To walk again in this world of suffering. Could you take it?
You haven’t belonged in this world for a long time. Some part of you knew that, pulsing through your veins from the marrow of your bones. You ached to return where you belonged.
Could you feel that love without giving in? To just let it be fucking done with, to avoid the mean savagery you knew awaited you? Every footstep you took brought you closer to some nameless torment. The suffering would never be done with, and you would be its instrument. You got a taste of it with Hihari. It would happen again. And again. And again. And it wouldn’t always be a clean, perfectly justifiable kill like with him. Sometimes it would just be senseless.
And even by some miracle you could feel the peace at the edge of oblivion and turn away from it, what then? The ache would just grow worse, and you’d have to cope with it all the harder. There are some sensations you just shouldn’t feel until your duty was done with, and it would NEVER be done while you still drew breath.
And you still do draw breath.
You can’t look at the shrine maiden. You attempt to say something, but ultimately you just give her a thumbs down, hanging your head as you walk away. One foot in front of the other.
