[Memories pour in upon Hakkai with painful, vivid clarity, and tension locks his muscles where he stands, hand outstretched and fingers pointed at the very tail of the character he had drawn to name her.
It's only the tension that keeps him upright and unmoving as he feels the full brutality of her death. Bile bites his throat and sours the back of his tongue. He's no stranger to cruelty and violence, no stranger to pain, nor to the darkness that comes as a respite from pain at last, but this --
(was this what she felt?)
-- this is almost more than he can bear. Fabric settles in airy folds at his feet as Ayumu solidifies into her shinki form, and Hakkai has to force himself out of his rigid stillness, and stoop, with infinite care, to lift her from the cobbled path.
His hands flinch reflexively back from the fabric at first. They're too bloodstained to touch her, too filthy to be allowed to stain someone who. No. He cuts himself off before the reflex of disgust spirals into a cowardly retreat, and forces himself to pick her up gently and hold up the garment she has become. It's a dark blue kimono, the sleeves cut like a young woman's, the fabric good-quality but not too fine for everyday wear.
It helps to focus on the banal. He has to force his face out of rigid stillness, too, into a polite smile as he surveys her new form.]
It seems you'll be my armor. Can you see yourself?
[He'd been able to, in some forms; not fully, but enough to get a rough idea of his shape and function, and sometimes he'd even been able to move independently of his god.]
no subject
It's only the tension that keeps him upright and unmoving as he feels the full brutality of her death. Bile bites his throat and sours the back of his tongue. He's no stranger to cruelty and violence, no stranger to pain, nor to the darkness that comes as a respite from pain at last, but this --
(was this what she felt?)
-- this is almost more than he can bear. Fabric settles in airy folds at his feet as Ayumu solidifies into her shinki form, and Hakkai has to force himself out of his rigid stillness, and stoop, with infinite care, to lift her from the cobbled path.
His hands flinch reflexively back from the fabric at first. They're too bloodstained to touch her, too filthy to be allowed to stain someone who. No. He cuts himself off before the reflex of disgust spirals into a cowardly retreat, and forces himself to pick her up gently and hold up the garment she has become. It's a dark blue kimono, the sleeves cut like a young woman's, the fabric good-quality but not too fine for everyday wear.
It helps to focus on the banal. He has to force his face out of rigid stillness, too, into a polite smile as he surveys her new form.]
It seems you'll be my armor. Can you see yourself?
[He'd been able to, in some forms; not fully, but enough to get a rough idea of his shape and function, and sometimes he'd even been able to move independently of his god.]