I always thought sharp would be enough.
Sharp opens doors. Sharp keeps choices small and obedient. Sharp looks like truth because it cuts. I wore that like a habit. I measured days by what fell when my hand closed and called it strength.
It was not. It was hollow dressed as useful.
I can laugh at that now - low, at my own expense. I confused a finished noise with a finished life.
The room has learned to be quiet. Black walls. Red lines. Purple dust where smiles pretended to be faces. The pistol lies open on the floor like a hand that has stopped asking. Plates in my arm ease by degrees.
Under the ribs a line burns, then cools, then burns again. A thin violet sits on the edge and refuses to run. My legs feel like the floor has set its hands there. None of it surprises me. I have watched endings from the wrong side of them long enough not to be shocked by my own.
Revenge is a small animal. It eats one thing very carefully. If you feed it long enough, it learns your voice better than your child does. It keeps you walking when sleep is deserved. It makes any door look correct as long as pain waits behind it. It wears whatever name it must to be let in. It shivers in warm rooms because it does not know where to lie down. I fed it. I taught it tricks. It followed me here and did what it always wanted to do.
There was a time I thought that made me honest. At least I did not pretend. At least I did not dress hatred in better clothes. That is another easy lie sharp sells. You can be honest and still be wrong. You can be relentless and still be small.
There are people I see as clearly as if they were here in the red glow.
A boy with a center that refuses to trade kindness for power. Anger that would rather break its own teeth than bite the wrong thing. He will stand where he is and protect. He will hate that it is slow. He will do it anyway. When the city calls him soft, he will keep going. When victory is quiet and no one claps, he will keep going. He will fail better until failure has nowhere to live near him, and only perfection can replace that space. 6I just know that.
A girl who did not ask to be forged and learned to be careful anyway. Silence that hides mercy, not emptiness. She will be fast and still say no when it counts. She will learn the line between careful and afraid and stand on the right side of it. Those eyes finally allowed water and did not drown. That is a more difficult victory than any I ever finished.
I should have told them these things first. I wrote instead. Ink holds steadier than my voice. Paper does not mind when the truth arrives out of order. If I could loosen one knot with my hands while I still have them, it would be the one I tied between love and silence.
One more thing I did not learn soon enough.
Raizen, Hikari. Do not let your hands decide a life is cheap just because it is in reach. If you can win without taking a life, do that. Cut the rope, not the throat. Break the weapon, not the one holding it. Every death costs the one who deals it. It takes pieces you do not get back, even when you are right, even when no one sees.
Spare more than I did. Leave room in the world for someone to change. If you must end a life, let it be rare, honest, and without pride. Do not celebrate it. Do not make it a story you tell to feel taller. Carry the living forward instead. Write fewer names on the floor. Let mercy be the habit that outlives you.
There are fights you can finish with your hands open. Learn to see them. There are enemies you can turn into people again. Try before you cut. I believed sharp was strength. I was wrong. Strength is knowing how not to use it.
Names rise and settle. Louissa, who can seat a storm at the table and make it speak softly. Obi, who turns noise into shape and pretends not to care if anyone sees. Kori, old friend. Precise as a decision finally made. If there is a family written in chalk under this city, these are the letters around the edges. Chalk does not last. That is not an argument against writing. It is a reason to keep moving forward.
I wanted to drag a line through the floor and tell everyone to step across. Now I understand lines are not erased by speeches. They are worn away by feet going back and forth until the paint gives up. If the seam I opened closes behind me, someone else will still find another door because the habit has been made. That was not me. That was them, and those with them, and the old city under the new one refusing to disappear.
Goals. I spent years mistaking endings for aims. Win. Leave. Repeat. Close the account and call it purpose. Aims may be ladders we keep moving up on. Draw one high, then place another above it. If I did one thing right today, it is this - I pulled teeth from a jaw that liked to bite. The hall behind me will be less hungry for whoever comes after. I just hope that will be enough. Speaking of hope…
Hope used to feel like a trick for people who did not know how to count bodies. Then I watched a copy of the city under its own bones and call it shelter. Then I watched forgetting move in like a parasite. After that, I watched two children walk into the worst of it and insist on being themselves. Hope survived that. So I will say it plain.
Hope is not a story you tell yourself to sleep. Hope is a hand that finds yours in the dark and does not let go even when it is tired. Hope is a match that somehow stays dry. Hope is the small light you cup with both palms while the wind laughs at you, and still you walk. Hope is the will to keep the world lit, one corner at a time, until the dark runs out of corners.
I did not understand forgiveness. I thought it was surrender. I thought it meant asking the world to be kind to what did not deserve it. I thought it excused what should not be excused.
I was wrong.
Forgiveness is not a pardon for the past. It is a way to live through it. It is how a wound gets its border back so it does not flood every room you enter. It is the key that unlocks your ankle from the chain you welded yourself. It does not forget. It refuses to be owned.
I do not forgive the masks for what they did to mine. I buried them. Forgiveness is not for them. It is for the living. It is for a boy who will be asked to trade his heart for power and will need a reason to refuse. It is for a girl who will be told caution is weakness and will need to remember that care is another kind of blade. It is for the shape of me that taught by accident, so he can be let go. It is for the part that did not know better until now.
If they can forgive me, I'll be grateful beyond words. If they cannot, I still want them to keep walking. Forgiveness does not have to open a door for you to leave a room. Sometimes it is enough to feel the handle give. Sometimes it is enough to decide the chain is not yours anymore.
The poison moves like a tide. Warm and painful inside, cold and unnoticed outside. The arm hums once - a stubborn machine refusing to abandon its job - then agrees to rest. The room breathes the way a beast goes quiet after it has finished being a beast.
I am not afraid. I have mistaken silence for safety before. It's not that.
This is… What finishing something, something big, something that we call... A life.
There are things I want for them that I never thought to want for myself.
I want the boy to see the day he does not have to choose between being good and being strong. I want someone to say his name from another room and mean it kindly. I want him to find a door he does not have to check twice. I want him to hold a weight and feel it lift not because he threw it, but because others reached in and took their share.
I want the girl to learn that speed is not the only way to arrive. I want someone stubborn to stand beside her when she decides to be careful and not mistake it for fear. I want her to find a place where her silence is not read as a threat to survive, but as a choice to listen before she speaks. I want her to discover that she can keep the blade and still set it down.
I want them to build something that does not need a name to be real. I want their shadows to be taller than their enemies. I want their laughter to arrive in rooms where people had forgotten what it sounded like. I want the world to have fewer corners for the dark to hide in, and I want to have been a small reason why.
I have been called many things. Killer. Ghost. Strongest in the Underworks. None of those had room for laughter. None had room for being called father and not choking on the word. The name that matters is smaller and heavier. A man who finally understood where strength sits when the noise stops.
If anyone asks me now what hope is, I don't have to search.
Hope is a light that waits when you are late.
A room that remembers your name.
It's a city under a city refusing to forget itself.
Hope is two stubborn children who will keep the world lit.
I did not need to tell them that. They are already doing it.
There is a kind of peace people do not talk about because it does not sell songs or stories. It is not loud. It is not clean. It is not the victory men try to hold up and make immortal. It is the quiet that arrives when you put your last tool down and the job is truly finished in your hands. It is the breath you do not realize you have been holding for years. It is the moment your shoulders forget how to live up by your ears. It is the way the room looks the same and is not the same.
I feel that now. It sits in the spaces between the red lines. It hides in the places the black turns to shadow. It rests in the purple dust that was a smile a minute ago. It makes this floor feel like something other than a place built to swallow footsteps. It makes me think of a door that opens on the first try and does not stick.
I know where I am going. I am not embarrassed to say it. I used to laugh at men who said they were ready. Ready is for plans. I have no plan. I have only a path, and for once it is not a straight one, I chose because I feared curves. It is the bend that brings you home.
If this is the last thing I learn, I am thankful. If the last thing I give is a corridor less hungry for the people I love, I am thankful. If the last face I see is the one I made for myself and it is not the mask they tried to nail to me, I am thankful.
I can feel the shape of their names in my mouth. They fit without choking. That is a gift. I did not expect it this late.
The light in my arm answers with one more pulse. Not a demand. A farewell. It has been stubborn company. It has done its job. We both have.
Breath goes out and comes back and goes out again, less and less. The floor holds. The room stays quiet.
If I could leave one thing folded on the table for them to find, it would not be a weapon. It would be this: the decision to forgive without forgetting. The choice to build without needing to be seen. The habit of aiming higher than you expect and then higher again. The refusal to let the world talk you out of being kind.
I have carried sharp far enough.
The purple keeps its small argument. I let it. Behind my eyes, the ribbon at last holds. Steps take the last two stairs at once. The lantern I thought had gone out was only waiting with its back to the wind.
The last thing can do is smile.
Finding his own selfish peace…
The light inside Takeshi finally went out.