…

I’m swaying… there’s rattling. Men shouting, about blood, about my heart…. but I start to feel apart from it.

It’s an empty void… no hallway this time. But I walk, pulled by… something.

Slowly, things start to materialize around me. Streets… I’m in Mibu.

There are the gates to my parents house. Open… with the Shinsengumi flag waving beside it.

My parents are standing outside. With my grandmother.

I start to cry. Even though it was ending… I didn’t know if I was ready for this. I know the date in their world. We got… nearly a year. Almost to the day.

A troupe of Shinsengumi come by, into the gates.

“Ohh! Is Yagi-san cooking for us tonight?” I hear as they pass by.

I don’t go any closer, but there’s a force, pulling me.

My grandmother calls out, “you’ve done enough, Hide-chan. Come rest with us, now.”

My mother puts up her hand. “She’s too young, okaasan. Too much to live for.”

My father makes a grunting noise. “Don’t tell me it’s that Saitou-san…”

She shakes her head. “If you’re ready we’re here. If not… ” she looks at me, “you have to decide. You can’t stay inbetween the land of the living and dead, even if you don’t think you were ever -real- enough. You were real. You have value, and meaning.”

“I’ll be alone, if I go back,” I say, falling to the ground.

“Being alone… now is that worth dying for, daughter?” My mother steps closer.

Then, suddenly, there’s a crack of thunder, and a great shake moves through the world.

And pain, real pain… what I’ve felt before, or anytime…. pales…

“No… no…” I look around. “NO.”

My mother’s face tells me …. confirms for me. She shakes her head.

“NO.”

“Hide – come here or -“

I feel what was maybe solid ground beneath my feet…. images, flash. Of Yamakawa, coming, claiming his body, taking him back to Aizu, where she gets to be the widow, to enjoy a lifetime of luxuriating in the grief that she doesn’t deserve. Of curating his image, turning him away from himself and into the man she wanted, the man -they- wanted. Where I never got to see him… Taking my daughters away, afraid of her reach. But the emptiness consumes me. Those girls I saw in the visions come true. The girls who hate their parents – the one who wouldn’t live for them, and the one who lost it all.

“Hide, stop – stop – you still need to live…”

I shake my head. “No. There’s… nothing for me left. The judgement was made. If he has no hope for me… then I have none. I… I… I’m sorry.” I’m going to the place that I always told him that I’d go to find him.

After all, who are the damned, if not those for whom all hope is lost?

And then darkness comes.

(OOC – End for Hide)