Takeshi had fallen asleep in his chair, chin tilted toward the ceiling as if listening for a sound only he could hear. A stub of graphite rested between two fingers that had gone slack; a thread of his map hung from the pin he'd meant to place. The prosthetic lay on the bench beside him, quiet and open, the forearm panel set aside like a lid waiting for a jar. He snored once - soft, surprised - then settled.
Raizen eased the door closed behind him.
The Underworks' night wasn't a real night, but it did a good imitation. Pipes hushed to a lower hum. Distant trams keened like uncertain birds; somewhere, water argued with stone and lost. Raizen let those sounds be his shadow and slipped through them, down a corridor that dead-ended and then didn't, past a hatch that only opened if you pushed at the spot no one pushed.
He came out in a room that had forgotten its name. It might once have been a storeroom for tram parts. A thick pillar reigned the room. The rough floor was clean only in a circle where feet had paced a hundred times, in front of the it. A single lamp sat high on a pipe - dim, but it was enough.
He wrapped his fists in torn cloth, pulled it tight with his teeth, and started to work.
Jab - snap, not shove. Cross - hip first. He chased the pad with combinations Kori had burned into him until the names burned out of them and they were only motion. His breath came in quick papers he signed without reading. Blood began to stipple the cloth at the knuckle, then thread through it. He kept going.
"Again."
He didn't say it out loud. He didn't have to. The word was a rail his body ran on.
The lamp buzzed. His shoulder ached and he told it to be quiet. His mind tried to hand him pictures - Hikari at the Maw, the barrel's dark ring against her temple, his mother's voice breaking on his name - and he refused them, one after another, until there were no pictures left and only the rhythm of hands, feet, breath, the way the world narrows to the next inch done correctly.
He didn't hear the door open.
Hikari leaned in the frame, small in the lamp's circle, smaller still in the Underworks' miles. She watched him miss a breath and catch it on the next. She watched the way his shoulders squared against nothing anyone else could see. She watched the cloth on his knuckles take on the color of poppies.
At first, she just stood there. Watching him. Observing him. Flinching every single time he seemed to hurt his knuckles.
Then, she walked to him without announcing her steps.
He was too focused to feel her presence. His interrupted breath was the only sound in the room. Preparing a hit that would have made Kori smile and nod, he pulled his hand back.
Hikari stepped into his ring and slid her arms around him from behind.
The next punch never landed. His fist halted an inch from the pillar and just remained in the air, suspended. For a moment his whole body didn't know what to be. He stood caught between motion and stillness, breathing like he had run uphill and gotten there without meaning to.
Hikari's forehead rested between his shoulder blades. Her warm cheek found the seam of his shirt. He had not noticed how cold the room was until then. She didn't say "you're scaring me!". She didn't say "don't break yourself!". She didn't say any of the things that would have made him put his armor back on.
"Please, Raizen. Rest" she whispered.
It wasn't a command. It was a quieter place she offered him.
His hands fell to his sides. The tremor left them only after it had left his jaw and his shoulders and the set of his back. She stayed where she was, holding him the way a harbor holds a hull, not to trap it but to let it stop.
"You're bleeding," she added after a long time, which was her way of saying I care without risking that he'd dodge.
He looked at his hands properly. Cloth cut through with rust-dark blooms. Skin scruffed raw at two knuckles, scabbed over and opened again.
"Yeah" he said, with a laugh that couldn't figure out how to be a laugh. "but it's a price I'm willing to pay."
She let him go, but only enough to reach for his wrist. He didn't pull away. She took his hand like a small fragile animal and turned it. The lamp said everything the lamp ever said about the truth of cuts.
"You saved me," she finally let the words be words. "Earlier."
"I don't know…" he admitted. It felt like confessing something to a rock. "I didn't feel like… me."
"You felt like someone who didn't want to let me die," she affirmed simply. "That's enough."
He leaned his back on the pillar and slid down until he sat. The floor was colder down there. He didn't mind. She folded beside him and laid her head on his shoulder. Her hair was a curtain between him and the world. They stayed that way. A silent moment of pure understanding. His eyes fell shut without permission.
Takeshi, still in his chair, had not moved except for the minuscule shift of a man who has dreamt of standing and did not. His hand had found the map pin again in sleep; it stuck to his finger like a harmless needle.
The forge woke at a different hour than everyone else. Obi was there waiting for it, arms full of intentions. He shouldered the doors wide and the smell of old ash and steel ran out to meet him like a dog that loved him for the wrong reasons. He flicked the light switches one by one, hoping that the lightbulbs won't blow up. Workbenches covered in the kind of order that only looks like chaos to other people. He dragged a long table to the center of the room, wiped it with a rag that had not deserved retirement, and slapped a chalk line down its length.
"Right," he told the empty air, which knew better than to answer. "We're building miracles."
He lined hammers by weight and temper across the bench: round, straight, a rubber one even he didn't know how it got there. From a good-looking cabinet (the only good looking cabinet in the whole smithy) he brought two bars of steel that were not like the others - clean, straight, shiny, with the ring of good ore when he tapped them with a knuckle. "Sing for me," he said to each, and each replied with a promise.
On the far table he cleared a space and laid out high-quality black leather for grips he grabbed the night before. They were stacked in shades from storm to sand - linen for underwraps, silver pins, copper in thin sheets for collars and caps.
He unrolled a huge sheet of paper and sketched without hesitating.
For Hikari: He paused. His pencil made circles without lines for a minute, like it was remembering a word it had known as a child.
Staff? Spear?
He let out a cheeky grin. "You know what? I'm going to do both!"
Time flew by as Obi was designing an abomination of a weapon, but still useful, practical and beautiful at the same time. Staff at one end and a blade at the other.
Then, for Raizen: a twin pair of blades that favored speed over show - straight spine, perfect balance. No spikes, no dragon heads, no lies. A tool that wanted to go where his shoulders said and didn't argue. The sphere would live in the cores, not at the hilt - he wanted the cut to carry the song, not the hand.
The blueprints took more and more shape, as his mind was actively flooded with stupid – or purely genius ideas. He kept both.
Then he ran into a little big problem. The luminite was one, and the blades were two.
He made a very… Obi-like decision. He was going to perfectly split the Luminite gem.
Without blowing his shop up.