Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"I see dead people," Samura says, because it sounds suspiciously like a confession of guilt and not that he sees real dead people haunting him whenever he went. It was fine, back when he never took a life, and it was easier to live peacefully with the ghosts safely ignored by him. He cut his eyes out. He didn't want to see it. How a body was cut up, how he knew he took those people's lives, how the blood rained on him, or how the guts splattered everywhere, or how he kept thinking - I should run away. He can't run away. Not with Rokuhira having placed his hope in him. So he averted his eyes.

The ghosts did not disappear.

"Oh..." Rokuhira grips his hands together, sitting with them in his lap, and he gives a nod. He's not here to apologize and give his sympathies. He's the one who gave Samura the sword. Samura is the one staining it in blood.

Samura places a hand to his rough face. His touch too gentle for how he wants to pry into his scars and dig into his head - his skull - find out where his brains are and gouge them out. He'll be free. He sighs, looking upward. He knows he would do this all over again for Rokuhira. Kunishige had that charm for him. "I blinded myself... to cut out these worldly desires of mine and to..."

"Can you go back to how you're seeing dead people? You mean, like, from the - what you did for me? Is it the guilt?" It sounds unserious coming from Rokuhira, but there must be a reason he's focused on it. Rokuhira doesn't look like he thinks guilt is the answer too, because he's not going on about needing to endure through it all but he's there for Samura to cry on if he wants - yes, Samura had that talk, and no, he did not cry.

Was I that obvious?

"Don't interrupt me..." Samura grumbles and takes out a lighter. Rokuhira pokes a cigarette between his fingers for him. "Yo, Uruha, can you light this up for me? You can talk now."

"I'm going to hit you," Uruha warmly says, stepping up from behind both of them, unaffected by Samura's admission, because there's nothing to do here... but be a little good errand boy with none of Rokuhira's charms. Samura feels the lighter be yanked out of his hand, Uruha trying to burn off his eyebrows secretly, and Samura knocks his head into Uruha's hand for doing that.

"Don't annoy me!" Samura snatches Uruha's hand and tries to flip him down on his back in front of him, but Uruha has a little thing for Rokuhira here, so Uruha attempts to coolly land in front of Samura. Samura opens up his knees and closes them on Uruha's head, locking him there. He puts the unlit cigarette into his mouth, Uruha on his knees between his legs. "Well... I can see dead people."

"Samura?" Rokuhira sounds a little morbidly curious. "You don't mean..."

"Ghosts aren't real!" Uruha argues.

...

..

.

"You killed me," Uruha says, finally proving himself not to be real.

"You're not real," Samura lightly replies. "Ghosts aren't real." He didn't keep his smugness out of it.

"I thought - " Uruha pauses, and Samura's heart threatens to stop with it. "You couldn't hear ghosts?"

"Pretend I didn't reply to you," Samura says and he hangs back in his chair, trying to gaze away, when Uruha floats down and mimics the act of sitting across from him. Uruha is suspended in the vastness of darkness he can't imagine as up, down, left, right, sideway to forward, and Uruha is both close and far from him - that's the illusion a ghost makes. The other ghosts aren't helping when all of them turn their eyes on them.

"Now these guys are going to bother me all day," Samura says, sour-faced and feeling like he should be toothy with Uruha and bite him, when he's bitter and disgusted with himself all the way to the core of his issues with this. "Why did you... come to me?"

"I'm haunting you," Uruha gently says, sounding so pleasant, the darkness rings with his voice. The other ghosts don't surround them, they stop, circling around them. "Spirit energy..." He feels himself. "I lost my spirit energy, master. I lack life force, but... in place of that great ocean of my spirit, there is a canyon, deprived of my own life. Life is drawn into it, but I - but a drifting spirit - will follow the source of life, to let it be pulled into me."

"Okay," Samura says, understanding none of that. "I..." He knows.

Uruha isn't angry with him. He's not upset. All there is is pity and worry and concern more painful than any curses Uruha could have for him. Samura wishes he could let it go. All his personal attachments and desires. If he could do that and live solely on the truth he will give Iori the best future through his death, he wouldn't hear the echoes of thousands of flowery voices calling for him through the vines and how they so longingly taunt him.

"Daddy, daddy," a little girl's remains told him and she was popping with flowers from her skin. Her right eye was a hollow, which when he looked into it, felt his heart stop and his blood run cold. "My daddy is dead. Can you help me home?"

Iori doesn't need a father like him.

Then why didn't he have the Masumi set up a dad for her? Why one for Inori's place?

It's because Iori was fine when it was just her and her mother.

He has no desires to be a father.

Nor a teacher.

"I've let you go," Samura reminds him. "That day - " A dull ache in his heart. Doesn't feel like pain. It can't be pain. He swallowed up what was so hurtful about it years ago and buried it unmarked somewhere outside of his heart. It's the grip of his hand, the tension building up. Strike of a sword. The cutting force of what he took out of himself the day Uruha left him. "You left to become a warrior in your own right. There's no need to come back to me. We don't know each other."

"But master, I know your sword," Uruha helps himself to a tiny smile, like he thinks Samura has a right to see that, and he was not struck by the killing force, powered by the distance left by both of them walking their own ways. Samura can't look back at him anymore. "You haven't changed for all of those years."

"Could you stop sounding cryptic? It's just the two of us. There's no reason - "

Uruha sighs loudly, drawing his attention, and Uruha hangs back, throws his legs back up onto the table. He stretches his arms out. He points his big toe at Samura. "What do you want me to say? Because I'm not leaving you, Samura-san. I'm going to haunt you whenever you like it or not."

Samura slaps Uruha's feet off the table and Uruha looks at him, scandalous. He should just revive him from the dead to get Uruha to leave him alone.

"Mann... I'm going to have to put up with you," Uruha says, affectionately. He rolls onto his side, now in laying down in a bed position. "Do you think Kunishige-kun is here?" He makes a sappy face. "Kunniiishige-kun..." He giggles, rolling flat onto his belly, and acting like there's a pillow for him to sink his face into.

Samura should've saved him for last.

Chapter Text

Rokuhira's ghost found him. Uruha brought Rokuhira with him after leaving. Samura thought it was a moment of peace but it was the calm before the storm that is Rokuhira glaring him down. Rokuhira grabs his shoulder. Samura tries to keep his head turned away.

"You can see us. This whole time," Rokuhira dryly says and he sounds irked, he sounds every inch of the man Uruha likes, the man beneath the smiles and goofiness and silliness, and it's a man of steel with molten red eyes. "Have you forgotten my order? I demanded for you all to live, and Kamunabi approved of my decision, even if our decisions were the same in the end. If you cannot trust yourself, put your trust in me. You shouldn't have worked with Hishaku... They..."

"What should I eat today..." Samura decides to ignore all of them. None of them are here. Rokuhira grilling him should be expected, so he's fine with it, but he doesn't want the other ghosts to realize he can see and hear them. He shouldn't have told both of them about his ability to see ghosts. It wasn't powered by his guilt. It is the power of guilt itself, manifested not by showing him manifestations of those he lost, failed, and killed, but those whose deaths would naturally cause him pain, hence he never once saw the soul of an evil trash bag he killed.

"You're not fooling him," Uruha says, leaning over like the pestilence he is. He presses his forehead in to Samura's, smiling quietly, his heart pacified by witnessing Rokuhira's ghost annoying the life out of Samura - or maybe Samura just thought that out because both of them were getting on his nerves. "I told him, and you told him, and he knows."

"... It's like... I can hear their voices..." Samura mutters and he has this urge to kill them all. Not literally. Just an intrusive thought but using Tobimune is becoming a temptation.

The ghosts of Malediction have flocked around, watching him, and some of them have eyeballs cradled by flowers and vines, flowers filling their mouths like grotesque human-shaped vases, and their bodies all bulge with vines like thickened veins. One of them hovers closer, something neither Uruha and Rokuhira could sense, since as Samura puts it, they're different types of ghosts who exist on different frequencies, and Samura is unfortunate enough to see multiple frequencies even other ghosts can't perceive.

"Samura-san?" Uruha whispers, and Samura's hand twitches into white purity style hand-grip. Like an instinct. Like Samura remembers who Uruha is to him. A student of the same dojo, the only other successor besides him, and the only one who tried to stand next to Samura, all alone on his pedestal.

"You are still my hero, even if you may have done evil, or terrible acts. At your core, you're a hero," Rokuhira sobs on him, getting all tearful now, and Samura is going to die if he has to listen to any more of it. "I should not have given you Tobimune... You had to mutilate yourself to perform your duties as an enchanted blade wielder and it led you to the Hishaku. I chose someone whose heart had to left cold to move forward into my future. Can't you choose life?"

"I'll be there with you every step of the way," Uruha wistfully says, patting down Samura's head like he's a child.

Samura has it with these ghosts. He raises up Tobimune, pouring out his frustration into the ink-black feathers flooding the hideout. He summons from the depths of his heart the flames of mercy - mercy upon my soul, what did I do to deserve you, but oh I know, it was me who did it after all - and strikes Uruha through the chest with Suzaku. Uruha's ghostly visage wavers around like heat, simmering from his sword, before he pops into existence as a living, breathing person with Tobimune in his heart. Samura stabs Rokuhira in the chest too and Rokuhira pops in, alive and well.

Samura yanks out his sword and gloomily returns to staring out at the table, blissfully ignoring Uruha and Rokuhira standing there, completely stunned by this turn of events.

"YOU CAN REVIVE THE DEAD, MAASSSTTEERRR?!" Uruha lunges for him, slamming him into the ground not through anger but sheer confusion, and he shakes Samura by the shoulders. His eyes glisten with tears, which Samura can smell, and not because he can still see Uruha. "No... Did you mean for me to die...? You never showed this ability before! You... You unlocked another True Realm, another understanding of how Suzaku could be used, and it's for reviving..."

"AHH?! I'm alive?!" Rokuhira runs out of the hideout - definitely a good idea, Samura should grab him later, and does it with a little Karasu, shoving Rokuhira back inside. "Samura. I - no. I need to talk with my son! I can't let him go on like this! I don't... want him to follow me into hell. Even if it's his own path, I must..."

Samura tunes him out. "... I wonder... if I should drink chocolate milk today?"

Rokuhira jumps Samura right after that. "Samura! You..." He looks down at his hands. "I see... I'm not... truly alive." He checks over Uruha, who looks mystified, and closes in on Rokuhira, desperate and worried. "This whole time... Uruha was a living ghost. Did you transport our bodies with Karasu and 'restore' them through Suzaku?"

"Chocolate milk!" Samura yaps, trying to ignore the Malediction ghosts honing in on him, all while the other two stay clueless to his blight. He adds feathers to his back, quite rapidly at that, forming wings, and he hugs both of them with his wings. He tosses them into a new warehouse and watches the other two roll onto the floor. He helpfully uses a feather to help them onto their feet and then pins Uruha onto the wall like he's a butterfly. "You're the most dangerous to me."

"S-Samura-san?! N-not in front of others..." Uruha sounds like he would blushing because that's how embarrassed and sheepish he sounds like, and Samura dies a little on the inside when Rokuhira laughs by his ear, and it takes him a moment to realize why Uruha said that.

Uruha made Rokuhira laugh so Rokuhira's hostility was covered up by humor and in that short amount of time - Rokuhira then decks him in the face.

Samura crumples onto the ground. "I'm not... I'm not working with Hishaku, not in the way you think I am...!"

"You think we don't know that? Why are you doing this alone?" Rokuhira scolds him, angry. "You caused Uruha heartache for no reason! He cried in my arms, you know. He thought you hated him... but you just wanted to distance him from you. And I see now... What Suzaku actually does. Can you at least give me a few hours to speak with my son?"

"The real question is why your body was near perfectly preserved..." Samura mumbles, frustrated, before he stops upon feeling Uruha's eyes on his back. Samura slowly turns his head around. "I... Uruha... I... Go away. I don't need you."

"Samura-san... I see... No matter what I do... even if I became as strong as you... as long as you cared for me, you wouldn't want me around. Is it because I'm not stubborn enough? Heh..." Uruha sniffles and Samura is very sure he's acting just to distract him for Rokuhira, but it doesn't feel like a lie. His exact words. Rokuhira can go knock out Samura at this point, Samura doesn't care, but Samura just needs to say something to him.

"Uruha... I don't want to lose you... too... No... I'd rather lose you than have you die... That would be how I would lose," Samura whispers, dragging himself up onto his feet, leaning on the wall, and he cups Uruha's face. "I... love..."

Rokuhira whacks him in the head from behind.

He blacks out, not dead, but he wishes he was, then he could escape from the consequences of his own actions.

His disappointment is immeasurable.