[ To not know from Seishirou's vantage strikes him still. His palm is cool and dry on the lighter; he thought he would sweat more, his heartrate climbing.

Would things be different if he wielded the ability to administer death with the edge of a knife than the whisper of a prayer? Primitive, holy weapons. He suspects it might. Subaru has been apprehensive in considering it — there has been no room to. It matters. It's always mattered. He's thought it into the ground, peeling back back the sheer connective tissues of his love's cadaver with his fingernails, picking through the fibers in search of what he might have missed. Or worse, recognized. ]

It might not have mattered if you never had to see it. [ He pockets the lighter by the smoke's ambient shield. ] It matters now.

[ However they've come by it, both decisions fractured by an external force they are, for once, not entirely privy to.

Purgatory, gray and shivering its disruption, its wrong and newborn indecision. ]

It might only matter now. Is it still you?