Yes, Heshikiri snaps, clamoring to be heard. Yes, because she is the one who taught me cruelty and anger, who taught me to never forgive.
(Yes, because this is the purpose she gave me, and it never quite went away.)
The reasons drag him in like an ocean current, pulling him away from shore. They tell him that she deserves this, that he of all her blades both old and new deserves this right, and yet...
Experience. She speaks of experience as if he’s grown and this is what she’s wanted all along, as if he has twisted into a shadow that stretches the wrong way but never quite leaves. It stills him, sinking in, and claws into his throat when all the possible implications race through his mind.
“What are you talking about?” he demands--demands and not snaps, demands and not asks, demands because he shouldn’t feel much of anything regardless of her motives, and yet he still does. For Issei, it does not make him a good blade. For Nobunaga, it does.
There is a difference, and Hasebe clings to it with every desperate effort to ingrain it into his steel.
“...No, that--” Calm down, breathe; he cannot let anger drive him, even when it pulses like something thick and ugly in his veins. “...Such things don’t matter. Oda Nobunaga, I am yours no longer. What you want or have once wanted is of no importance to me.”
He says this more to remind himself than her, as if reaffirming it aloud will change anything. It doesn’t, and the words almost feel empty despite how much conviction he speaks them with. Hasebe grits his teeth, thinks almost to snap her wrists--but lets her go, ultimately, through no order of aruji’s or Nobunaga’s or anyone else’s. Simply his own.
(And that is what the Saniwa gives him--choice, even when he is still bound by duty and obligation and an innate desire to serve. Issei gives him the option of bloodshed, and especially here, in a place like Hive City, it means something.)
“You were the cruelest master I’ve ever had. There isn’t a night where I forget it.”
But the thing is, he doesn’t forget because it’s a part of him, too. It’s what he remembers when he steps onto the battlefield, what he embodies with the first draw of blood. (It’s why he can never say he quite loses himself out there, because he doesn’t. He finds himself, a part that she’d molded with her ambitions, and it never really goes away.)
“...I suppose that is why it was so easy to find you here, even in a place like this. After all you’ve done--” you, he says, because it angers him to say we, because we implies unity and he would never allow himself that when his loyalties are pledged now to the Saniwa, “--I simply never forgot.”
(But you did. About me, about what I’ve done. You did, didn’t you?)
