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The mountainside is thick with life: birdsong darting between the branches, the rustle of low shrubs disturbed by passing feet, and the occasional sweep of wind. It carries with it the scent of wet bark and plant life on the cusp of blooming. Ferns tangle around their ankles. Sap cling to their sleeves. And ahead of Giyuu— always ahead— is Sabito.
Sabito moves like he belongs here; like the land has shaped itself around him, not the other way around. His body weaves between the thicket of trees, ducking beneath low-hanging branches, stepping lightly across streams slick with biofilm, and never once hesitates. He doesn’t even glance back.
He doesn’t have to; Giyuu follows. He always will.
The brush whispers around his shoulders as he tries to match Sabito’s path. They are now high up on Mt. Sagiri, well above the lower ridges where the trees stand tall and uniform, and where the paths are clean and well-tread. Here, everything is tangled. Ferns spring up in unruly clusters, wet leaves are slick underfoot, and the air is thinner with the smell of earth, green rot, and distant water.
“Here,” the peach-haired boy points to an indentation in the soft loam, “it looks like the rabbit is headed east.”
Giyuu doesn’t care for the hunt, not at all in the way Sabito does. He isn't sharp-eyed and bright with purpose. His zori sandals drag more than they should and catch on roots and stray vines. The hem of his hakama are already soaked through.
He wonders if Sabito has always been good at these things.
Not just tracking— though, of course, he was good at that too— but everything else. Detecting danger, using breaths, swinging his blade, tying knots with those fast, clever fingers of his. If the boy wanted to be good at something, he just… was. Giyuu never saw his hands fumble, nor saw his steps falter. The world yields to him in a way that feels effortless.
As for Giyuu, he'd like to be that way as well.
He tries his best to mimic Sabito’s movements. He listens closely, practices swinging his katana until the hilt blisters his palms. He keeps journals full of things Sabito already knows by heart. He runs the same trails, takes the same breathless leaps across rock beds and branches.But even now, his footfalls sound much too loud. His breathing comes entirely too fast and uneven. Giyuu can’t seem to move without disrupting the environment around him. His body still feels like something half-learned, like an instrument he hadn’t tuned properly.
And although he's never said it aloud, there's a part of him that wonders if Sabito has noticed it. Did Sabito ever look over his shoulder and think: why can’t you just—
“Watch your step,” Sabito says suddenly, voice cutting through the stillness like a blade. He slows and points toward the ridge ahead. “The ground gets soft here. It'll slip out under you if you don’t keep your weight even.”
“…Thanks,” he murmurs, stepping back quickly. His cheeks bloom pink in embarrassment. “I saw it too.”
Sabito casts him a look over his shoulder. Nothing mocking or sharp. Just… a look.
“Hey,” he says, waiting now— actually waiting, not pretending to check the trail or tying off a strap to kill time. “You okay?”
“I don’t need—” Giyuu cuts himself off and exhales. “I’m fine.”
He rests his foot but feels it skid, the loose moss giving way just enough to tilt his balance. He catches himself, but only just. Giyuu's fingers shoot out to snag the nearest branch. It’s wet and moss-slick, and flakes of bark slough off into his palm as he steadies.
Sabito is already circling back. His stride is quick but measured, and his brows are pinched with worry.
“I said watch it,” he hisses, the sharpness in his tone undercut by the way he reaches out, one hand ghosting over Giyuu’s shoulder. He doesn’t touch him, instead just hovering there like he might. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“No,” Giyuu murmurs, keeping his sapphire gaze low, the word tight in his throat. “I didn’t fall, did I?”
“...Doesn’t mean you didn’t stumble.” Sabito’s fingers twitch like he wants to scold him further, but then his expression softens. He drops his hand. “You’ve gotta distribute your weight more evenly. Especially on slopes like this. Lean too hard into your lead foot and you’ll slide.”
“I know,” Giyuu says, more bitterly than intended. His face burns brighter with the shame of it. “I just...”
The silence between them isn’t immediate. It grows slow and awkward while Sabito watches him with that quietly assessing look. Giyuu doesn’t meet his eyes, instead just letting his small fists ball at his sides.
Below the ridge, a thin stream gurgles through a hollow, breaking through the hush with its low, clean rush of water against stones. It catches light between the ferns and reflects through the green curtain in front of them. Sabito gestures toward it with a nod.
The sound of water reaches them long before they can really see it— soft and whispering, the kind of sound that smooths over everything else. Giyuu follows him downhill until the brush opens into a clearing dappled with silvery light. The stream winds through it like an azure ribbon, glittering and shallow, with pale stones gleaming beneath the ripples.
Sabito crouches low, scanning the ground. “Tracks end here.”
“Do you think it crossed?” Giyuu asks, voice subdued.
“Probably.” Sabito cups water into his hands, drinks, then splashes some over his neck and collar. “The current’s not strong. It could’ve gotten past the water fairly easily.”
They both fall silent. Giyuu watches the water skim past, catching glints of his reflection between its ripples. The world hums softly; wind through branches, the distant caw of crows, the whisper of pine needles stirring.
But deep inside him, something else is stirring too. It has been for days now. Weeks. Hell, maybe even longer.
He’s tired. He’s so tired. Not in the way a long hike tires him out, or the way training wears him down to the bone. It’s deeper than that— something hollowing. Something aching and constant. Sabito hasn’t noticed. Of course he hasn’t. Because Sabito is always ahead.
“You almost have it,” Giyuu says, not meaning to speak at all, but once the words come, he can’t stop them. “The boulder. You’re close, right?”
Sabito glances at him. “Hm? Oh… yeah. I think so.”
Giyuu nods, throat tightening. “That’s good.”
Another silence settles. He doesn’t know how to fill it. His hand curls around a stone at the river’s edge, and he rolls it between his fingers like it might ground him somehow. The weight of it, the texture, the coolness.
But it doesn’t help.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get there. Not like you.”
Sabito straightens. His gingery brows crease, mouth parting slightly. “What’re you talking about?”
“I’m trying,” Giyuu says a little louder now. “I try every single day. I do everything Urokodaki-sensei says I need to improve on. I train until my hands bleed. I watch you. I copy you. And I’m still not— I’m still —” He stops. Giyuu’s voice has gone sharp at the edges, tight with something he’s not sure he knows how to name. Shame, maybe. Or envy. Perhaps even grief.
Sabito doesn’t dare to interrupt.
“I’m working twice as hard just to get half as far,” Giyuu continues, quieter now, shakier. “And even then… I feel like I’m still falling so far behind.”
The silence isn’t cold; but Giyuu hates it anyway. He hates the way it gives him room to think. To hear himself. To feel everything exposed.
“I want so badly to be like you,” he finally admits. “And I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
The peach-haired boy doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he sinks slowly into a crouch, the heels of his zori settling against the damp earth. His forearms drape across his knees, and he looks out over the stream— not to avoid Giyuu, but as if weighing the right shape of his response against the current itself.
The wind sighs through the clearing, cool against the back of Giyuu’s neck, brushing damp hair against his skin. He keeps his eyes trained on the stream, on the way the water runs over rocks and through crevices; a true marker for the flow of time.
The blue-eyed reflection stares back in pieces— fragmented, blurred, and warped.
“Giyuu,” Sabito says eventually. His voice is calm, but there’s a new tone in it: measured, careful. He’s thinking through every word, and that’s how Giyuu knows Sabito has heard something in his voice. Something raw. “You’re not doing anything wrong.”
Giyuu doesn’t answer, nor does he move. His shoulders are taut, spine straight but trembling in that awful way people do when they’re barely holding their emotions in. Something hot, ugly, and aching.
“I've... known for a while that you're a bit different than I am. I might not be able to understand what you’re going through,” Sabito says slowly, crouching beside him now, his voice low and even. “But if this is about more than slashing your boulder or hunting rabbits, you don’t have to hide it. Not from me.”
Giyuu’s eyes sting. He blinks hard.
He’s silent for a long time.
Then, in a voice barely above a whisper: “…It doesn’t feel fair.”
Sabito turns his scarred cheek slightly, trying to catch Giyuu’s face, but Giyuu ducks his chin. His bangs fall forward, shadowing his eyes. His knuckles have gone white around the stone still clutched in his tiny palm.
“I look at you and I think: what would it be like?” Giyuu whispers, “What would it be like to just exist without having to fight for it?”
The stone slips from his hand and hits the bank with a soft thud.
“You move like you were born for this. Everything you do— you don’t have to think. You don’t hesitate. You don’t wonder if the way you dress, or speak, or stand will make someone question who you are.” Giyuu says, and now the heat in his throat has reached his eyes, his chest. His fists tremble in his lap. “Every step, every movement is something I have to teach myself. And even then it doesn’t come right. My voice still sounds wrong sometimes. My gi doesn’t always sit how I want it to. I still catch my own reflection and—”
His breath cracks then. A hiccuped sound, small and humiliated. He scrubs a sleeve over his damp blue eyes but it doesn’t help. His next words are hoarse, like gravel.
“—And I think that I’ll never catch up to you. You’re already on your way to breaking your boulder. And I’m still trying to get used to standing in my own skin.”
The forest listens with him. Quiet. Constant.
Sabito shifts, and for a second, Giyuu braces— waiting for him to say something sharp, or worse, to pity him. But when Sabito speaks, his voice is gentle: “You’re right. I don’t have to think about those things. Not when I train. Not when I speak; I don’t know what that weight feels like.”
The water rushes softly beside them. Giyuu doesn’t look up, can’t. He’s not sure what he’ll see if he does.
Sabito continues, quiet but unwavering. “But I do know what it’s like to look at someone and see everything you want to be.”
Giyuu’s breath stills. His shoulders raise slightly, but he says nothing. Just waits, heart thudding in his throat.
The other boy shifts closer, not touching, but near enough that Giyuu can feel the warmth of him— steady and real and impossibly close. “My father always urged me to admire those in this world that make you want to be stronger.”
Giyuu finally looks up.
Sabito isn’t smiling. There’s nothing teasing in his voice, no usual shine of unwavering confidence. His eyes are steady, serious, and… almost unsure. Like he’s peeling something open that he’s never shown anyone before.
“I used to think that type of admiration was about physical strength. About who could hit the hardest, or run the farthest. But watching you— really watching you— put his words into perspective.”
He exhales, gaze drifting for a second toward the current, then back.
“You wake up every day and fight battles I’ve never had to fight. And you do it quietly… with this kind of discipline I can’t even wrap my head around. You keep going even when the whole world feels like it’s working against you.”
Sabito’s voice wavers, just barely. But he doesn’t stop.
“You’ve never once asked for praise. Never once asked anyone to understand what you carry. But I do. I see you. I see how much weight you carry just to exist the way you deserve to.”
Giyuu stares, his face blank with disbelief, and maybe a little fear. Sabito soldiers on anyway, his next words coming unbidden:
“Out of everyone, you’re the one I admire most in the whole world, Tomioka Giyuu.”
Wind brushes gently past the trees, soft as a whisper. The stream continues its song, oblivious to the swelling storm just barely held at bay inside Giyuu’s chest.
“I mean it,” Sabito says, quieter now. “You look at me like I’m something you’ll never be. But Giyuu, I’d give anything to have your kind of strength.”
Giyuu opens his mouth like he might argue, but no words come. Just a broken breath, one that shudders at the edge of something he’s been holding too long. His next breath stumbles. His fingers tremble in his lap. And the ache he’s carried for so long— that loud, festering thing that has curled beneath his ribs— begins to loosen. Not gone. But no longer smothering him.
Sabito watches him closely, then finally lifts a hand— slow, deliberate— and places it carefully over Giyuu’s own. Warmth spreads through the contact.
“So I don’t want you to be me,” he says, a soft smile tugging at the burn scar across his cheek. “I want you to be you. The one who fought for every step. The one who kept going when it would've been easier to stop,” his larger hand squeezes Giyuu’s. “Because that is who I believe in.”
The words settle like a stone in still water— rippling through Giyuu in echoing, unmistakable circles.
Giyuu stares at their hands. At Sabito’s calloused fingers curled lightly over his own filthy ones. It’s not just comfort he feels, but recognition. Real recognition. The kind that doesn’t come from performance, or comparison, or mimicry. The kind that sees something unspoken and still calls it worthy.
His throat tightens. The sting behind his eyes returns with sharp force.
“Even if it’s difficult?” he asks quietly. “Even if it takes me longer?”
Sabito smiles then— boyish, lopsided, fond. “Especially if it’s difficult.”
The light filtering through the trees has shifted, pale gold now, warmer. It settles over the moss and leaves like a blanket, softening the sharp edges of the clearing. The stream still murmurs beside them. The rabbit, wherever it is, is long forgotten.
And for the first time in what feels like weeks, Giyuu breathes. Really breathes.
It’s not a resolution, not yet. His doubts won’t vanish overnight. His body will still take time to fully feel like home. But here, with Sabito’s hand wrapped around his, and the forest quiet and listening, he feels something solid beneath him.
Maybe not certainty. But something.
“I’ll try,” he says, voice hoarse.
Sabito gives his hand a final squeeze before letting go. “Good. That’s all I’ve ever wanted you to do.”
Giyuu nods. His chest is still tight, but it’s no longer suffocating. The ache remains, but now it’s threaded with something new: a kind of fragile hope.
They sit in the silence for a while longer. No pressure to move. No urgency to speak.
Eventually, Sabito rocks to his feet and brushes off his hakama, the light catching in his tousled peach hair. “Still think the rabbit went east?”
Giyuu exhales something close to a laugh. “If it knows what’s good for it, it’s halfway down the mountain by now.”
Sabito’s slate eyes crinkle at the corners as he extends a hand to pull him up. “Alright. Let’s see if we can catch up to it, then.”
This time, they walk together. Not leader and follower, not ahead and behind.
Just Sabito and Giyuu.
Side by side.