raised on the edge of the devil's backbone

// and if i was the only thing you couldn't bear to lose,
i'd set fire to the wood, just so you wouldn't have to bury me too //

He remains silent, lips forming a tight line at what Hotaru says. Part of him agrees, because they had assumed he had – had come to ask him, to see what had happened, but it hadn’t been enough. Ronin had stayed, though, had remained through his anxieties and fears, had held him when he’d sobbed in the dream, had pushed back when he’d said that six year old boy with a mouth full of blackberries had deserved everything that came to him. In time, of course, because Sunjata still believes it.

The warmth of her at his side draws him out of it a fraction, that space in his mind he draws to, brought back as she says he can’t get a foothold here, and that’s where Sunjata’s frown deepens, pulling hard at the corner of his lips. “He has already.” He’s made a name for himself, a business partner it seemed, and yet? Well, he hadn’t been honest with her with the broken wing. It’s that wing that droops, that his head turns to when she tells him they need to hunker down, that Shaju won’t appear and hurt him again.

“I didn’t… Tell anyone. I told Melita just before coming up here. It wasn’t my wing getting caught in vines that had broken it.” He peers at the mess, at the apex of the wing with the claw that just recently started to bend the correct way thanks to the binding. “He broke it. He left a body for me to find in the Slagveld, pinned to the wall by his wings.” He tears his gaze away from the broken wing to the notebook back at the center, reaching for it to pull out a few of the pieces of paper. The first is the note that had been left with the body, tinged with red, scrawled in Korofi in handwriting so similar to Sunjata’s own. And following it, the flyers spread around town describing ‘not my governor’.

He slides them to her and waits, staring at the black book he'd carefully kept his notes in.

SUNJATA