[ tomoe has tried to pretend, in the two decades since Mikage left him, that he is the same unfeeling creature he once was; that in five hundred years serving as a shinshi, no part of him has changed. he's done a good job of pretending, too. but what comes over him here in the dark only makes clearer that he never really did shrug off that attachment at all. this is what indifference would have felt like. the sensation of sinking to the bottom of a deep, dark river, and choosing not to fight against the water.
so when someone on the same dark path asks a question that he would, in any other situation, consider audacious — he can't seem to grasp the arrogance or pride that ought to exist inherently in his nature. he can't muster the spark needed to be indignant, to bristle and snap the way he is distantly aware he would usually. he is hollowed out so thoroughly that it doesn't bother him to confess: ]
... Nothing. I was the one left behind.
[ the bitterness remains. he can taste it in his mouth. but there is also a resignation to it that he recognises from times that he spent lying on the floor in an empty shrine annex, drinking himself to oblivion. he remembers that it was always cold there, and that nothing ever changed. ]
i.
so when someone on the same dark path asks a question that he would, in any other situation, consider audacious — he can't seem to grasp the arrogance or pride that ought to exist inherently in his nature. he can't muster the spark needed to be indignant, to bristle and snap the way he is distantly aware he would usually. he is hollowed out so thoroughly that it doesn't bother him to confess: ]
... Nothing. I was the one left behind.
[ the bitterness remains. he can taste it in his mouth. but there is also a resignation to it that he recognises from times that he spent lying on the floor in an empty shrine annex, drinking himself to oblivion. he remembers that it was always cold there, and that nothing ever changed. ]
I was simply waiting.