|Goodbye Again| kazuscara

十三の

This is Farewell

🍁☂️

As the two Snezhnayans faded into small figures behind them, Kazuha felt the tightness in his chest relax, letting him breathe again. "Those two sure were full of energy." He looked back again to make sure they weren't following, and to his preference, they weren't.

"You don't like travelling with others, do you? Even when we first met, you were very adamant about letting me join you." Kazuha smiled at the memory, attempting to lighten the mood. "Thinking back on it now, it wasn't all too long ago."

Scara fiddled with his feather necklace, searching for some sort of comfort to get his nerves to relax. Being around people with so much energy brought out the worst in him, and he didn't want to show that side of himself to Kazuha. Not yet.

"I guess you're right." He chuckled as he reflected a smile back at his friend. "To be quite honest, you're the first person to travel with me. I've always been alone when I went on journeys like these," he said as a sigh escaped his mouth, turning his attention to the path ahead.

They had begun to return back to the public grounds with buildings with strong gothic architecture and less room for peasantry. The closer they got to the Tsaritsa's palace, the more people would appear. There were a littering bunch of shops, high-class homes, horse-drawn carriages, and just as wealthy-dressed few with feathered hats and layered dresses.

With each step they took, each stare he felt, Scara's emotions began to overwhelm him once more. He tugged at his necklace and tightened his grip around the charm until his knuckles turned white. He had been under the gaze of so many people more than he would like, but this was so different from the times he would attend balls or important meetings as the prince in Inazuma. Back there, he had power behind his name, even if it all was a feign. Here, he didn't have anything but the clothes he wore to defend him from the ridicule of human judgment.

As they continued past the partings of tall pine trees, the slanted roofs of the Tsaritsa's palace could be seen. The roads grew flat with paved cobblestone and trimmed bushes with radiant flowers appeared on their path. The winter of the mountains standing behind the city had a swirling grey of snow. The Tsaritsa's palace arched into the mountains, grander than the city below it with gothic statues and stretched mosaic windows. A chill blew over Kazuha's shoulders. He didn't sense anything good about the place.

Comparing how the rich Snezhnayans dressed to Scara's attire, Kazuha was certain that where they planned to head was somewhere someone such as he shouldn't stick his nose into. There was a suffocating atmosphere amongst the aristocrats as they paused to stare behind their hand fans or between the slits of their spectacles. What kind of trouble had the swordsman wandered into?

Between the looks the Snezhnayans gave them and the anxiousness Scara displayed, Kazuha, himself, began to get nervous too. There was an impending doom that he felt inching up onto them as they approached the Tsaritsa's palace, but he tried to keep from displaying it.

"Our journey ends soon, doesn't it?" His voice came out gentle, but heavy with a sadness he couldn't mask behind his usual comforting smile. He looked to meet Scara's eyes behind the veil, but looked away before they could be met.

Scara's throat clenched shut when he heard Kazuha speak of the journey coming to a close. He never thought that he would become so close to a mortal once more in his years of existence since he met Niwa. If anything, the relationship that the samurai next to him compared to the people of Scara's past was unrivaled. Kaedehara had become someone he held dear to his hollow chest, where a heart should be, even if he didn't want it to be that way.