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Fandom: Kill la Kill

Rating: T

Characters/relationships: Ryuko Matoi/Senketsu, Ryuko and Mako, Ryuko and Satsuki, Aikuro and Inumuta make an appearance

Warnings: Strong language, probably some body horror (I'm so used to the stuff I'm writing I can't even tell where the line is anymore).

Summary:
Eight years after the end of the anime, Life Fibers are trying to rear their head one last time. Ryuko Matoi, the last independent fibered being on Earth, has been fighting them for a year and then some, funded by her sister and sometimes assisted by her friends (whenever she let them). But now, it seems, she's been finally and truly cornered... and there's only one ace left up her sleeve.

---

“Ryuko!” Satsuki storms into a little, half-destroyed shed that’s currently serving as her sister’s very temporary hideout. The first person she sees is Mako, who immediately bolts to meet her halfway, chattering away about something, but she doesn’t stop frantically looking around for her sister (and it does take a lot to make Kiryuin Satsuki frantic).

“...but then her arm kept falling off so she agreed that she needed a break and we came here but there was a looot of blood so I gave her more–”

“You gave her blood?” Satsuki repeats. That sounds worse than she expected; Ryuko doesn’t take anyone’s blood unless she literally starts seeing off into the abyss, and that has happened exactly once before. She’s still too human for that. Or was, at least, the last time they checked.

“She did,” a hoarse voice catches her attention. “Drinking it ‘s still goddamn awful.”

Her eyes finally land on Ryuko, who’s sitting down on the floor, her back against a wall. Her sorry state is a remarkable image: the wounds might’ve closed thanks to the “refill”, but her clothes are ripped all over, and everything, from the fabric to her hair and even her eyelashes a bit is covered in dried up splotches and clumps of blood. Underneath all that red she looks deadly tired, dark circles under her eyes and the familiar smirk almost a shadow of its former self, crooked to the point of resembling a pained grimace more than anything else. She does attempt a smile in greeting, but the showing of teeth makes her look like a cornered wild animal. Satsuki hates seeing her like this. Hates that she learned of the recent development so late, and from Mako of all people. Hates that Ryuko neglected asking for help till the very end, even though they were supposed to be in this together. It was supposed to be their shared burden, but go figure, knocking something into Matoi’s stubborn head is still an impossible task.

“How long have you been fighting here?” she asks. Ryuko winces, immediately looks anywhere else.

“Dunno.”

“Ryuko.” There’s steel in Satsuki’s voice now. She might’ve grown and she might’ve gone through an incredibly expensive amount of therapy sessions (something that Ryuko thoroughly neglected doing) to learn how to live normally, but that doesn’t mean that she lost her edge or her famous iron will. Ryuko bristles.

“What? I don’t know!” She huffs, her tense shoulders dropping ever so slightly. “Maybe a day,” she mutters. “Maybe a few. Didn’t pay attention.”

“...non-stop?” Satsuki finds herself whispering. Ryuko tries to melt into the wall she’s leaning on.

“Sorry, sis, couldn’t exactly ask them for a timeout,” she tries to get snarky with her, steer the discussion in the familiar land of bickering and antagonizing each other, but Satsuki is well past her years of solving problems with adversity and force. She’s now a woman who cares about people around her more than anything else, and that especially goes double for her sister. Her stupid, reckless, noble punk of a sister who’s gotten it into her head that just by the nature of her weird biology she’s supposed to protect the world alone.

The noise outside is growing stronger. There are dozens, maybe a couple hundred people out there, people who tried to make a deal with the remaining Life Fibers they could find, people falsely enticed by the legends of kamuis and Goku uniforms. Their legends. Their legacy that their parents had left them. Most of those people are mindless by now, thoroughly worn, but a few of them regained some perceived sense of self. Those are the leaders. This is the threat that Ryuko has been tirelessly eradicating all over the world for the past year and a half, but it seems it has caught up to her now.

Satsuki has seen the destruction out there as she passed. It made the old days of razing Honnouji to the ground look like child's play. And now she knows why. Because the miserable bloody mess that’s sitting in front of her has been throwing the Fibered monsters around for dozens of hours. It’s scary to think how close in power to their mother she’s become. Where Ragyo had to spend years meticulously performing surgeries on herself, fusing her body with Life Fibers, Ryuko uses the absorption powers Soichiro gave her. Where Ragyo fashioned herself a tailored masterpiece, Ryuko is a very angry, hastily stitched quilt. It gives her advantage in some areas, but otherwise she lacks the experience, the understanding of whatever she's doing, she isn’t (thankfully) guided by any Primordial voices, she doesn’t have an army of thread soldiers, she never tried to master techniques like Mind Stitching, for they disgust her. And in all those ways she isn’t getting close to Ragyo at all. Which is good, but also leaves her vulnerable despite all the power she amassed.

Satsuki’s earpiece beeps.

“What’s the situation?” she asks immediately after pressing the button.

“We’re holding the line, but it doesn’t look good out here,” Aikuro’s voice sounds back. Mikisugi was one of the first to jump on the offer when it became clear that Nudist Beach was needed again. It remains uncertain if he was that eager for an excuse to get naked or had a similar trouble with moving on. Maybe he just felt responsible for Ryuko still. That said, they lost most of the assets in the first war and hadn’t put much effort into rebuilding, foolishly considering their fight done. Now, with Kiryuin funds, they cobbled together what they could, but judging by his voice, what they could is not enough.

Why would it be? Last time all of them spent years growing their armies and building up weapons, preparing, and still it all came down to Ryuko and Senketsu in the end. Their father’s ultimate secret weapons.

“Is Ryuko alright?” He asks, as if reading her thoughts.

Ryuko grunts.

“That Mikisugi?” Upon receiving an affirmative nod, she waves her hand in front of her face. Don’t tell him, her eyes say. She’s evidently fed up with having even two of her closest people in on her situation.

“She’s adequate,” settles Satsuki.

“I’ll take your word on that.”

There’s another beep and Inumuta joins in on the line. Satsuki wasn’t able to gather all the four Devas in time, not with them being all over the place each doing their own thing. To be entirely honest, she doesn’t exactly want to put them in danger on her family’s behalf again, even if she knows they’d be there in a heartbeat. To that extent, she supposes she’s not much better than Ryuko.

Inumuta, however, can work remote. Which is both a convenience and a relief.

“I’m finished with my calculations,” he informs them and she puts him on the speaker of her phone for Ryuko to hear. “It seems, in fact, like all the remaining Fiber wearers have converged on this exact spot.”

“All of them?” Ryuko lifts a brow.

“All that we know of. I’d say they’re most likely after you specifically. Weird that they haven’t tried this strategy earlier, if you ask me.”

“They don’t strike me as very bright to begin with,” comments Satsuki coldly. Ryuko snorts.

“Right on.”

“In any case, it seems like this annoying resurgence has come to a stalemate; we are in the unique position to defeat all of them at once, but we’re lacking in… all departments, to be frank.”

“Could use a little bit more optimism here!” exclaims Mikisugi and Satsuki immediately turns the speaker off.

There’s a bit of silence, mostly interrupted by Mako nervously fidgeting.

“God, what a bother I don’t have any food on me,” she laments. “You’d definitely get stronger if you ate some extra-charged homemade stuff!”

She says it in a typical Mankanshoku fashion, but she’s right. By the looks of it, Ryuko needs food and water and tons of sleep yesterday. It hits Satsuki that in her hurry she didn’t even think about simple supplies like that. She brought an army, but no food. Guess some habits do not change.

Ryuko looks deep in thought, and her eyes grow more somber by the second. Satsuki doesn’t like it immediately, before anything is ever said.

“I should’ve brought something with me,” she says, eager to offer any distraction from whatever is brewing. “I’m sorry.”

“No!” Mako immediately perks up. “You’ve been providing all kind of medical stuff and research stuff and weapon stuff for Ryuko and the others! It should’ve been my responsibility, because my family were always the ones who fed Ryuko!”

“It’s not…” Satsuki begins.

Behind them, Ryuko places her hand above her heart and looks to the ceiling.

“Think we could pull it off again?” she asks, quietly, as if talking to herself.

Whatever answer she receives, it doesn’t make her look happier.

“Yeah. Guessed as much.” She looks at Satsuki and Mako, her stoic older sister who has already lost and suffered so much, her best more-than-friend who deserves to live and wear cute clothes, and thinks about how none of them should have this trainwreck of her to worry about, let alone die together with her in some stinky shed.

Ryuko stands up and the other two immediately quiet, snapping their attention back to her.

“I have an idea I wanna try.” She dusts off her jeans, finding any excuse not to look them in the eye. They both are watching her like hawks, seeing right through the nonchalant front, but it’s still easier to keep it up. “Last resort kinda thing.”

“And what, exactly, does that entail?” asks Satsuki. Ryuko gives her a sheepish smile.

“I’ll be honest, not entirely sure myself. Probably something incomprehensible.”

She moves to walk past them, but Satsuki keeps standing in her way. Ryuko fixes her eyes on the door.

“Trust me?” she asks.

After a beat, Satuski slowly steps aside.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she says.

Ryuko almost says ‘when do I ever?’, but Mako beats her to it:

“Of course she does! She’s Ryuko, after all!”

She stops, one foot raised above the threshold. Her fingers grip the doorframe, almost turning white, head lowers, as if under some heavy weight, or a thought, perhaps. Then finally, with a heavy sigh, she turns around and comes back.

“Here.” She takes off her sukajan, the old, torn, stitched and re-stitched thing that she held onto through everything. Her strength, her independence, her first ever armor. She drops it on Mako’s shoulders. “Hang onto it for me, okay?” She smiles, and at the same moment Mako’s smile drops.

“Ryuko…” she says, uncharacteristically quiet, but Ryuko just kisses her forehead and lets go. She stops near Satsuki, looks her in the eye. Her eyes are just the same as the day she first crossed her, Satsuki thinks. So strong and furious and determined. So goddamn sad and tired.

Ryuko hugs her. Awkwardly, briefly, with one hand, but Satsuki cherishes it nonetheless. The understanding between them is clear without words. Ryuko is going off alone again, and whatever she’s planning, neither Satsuki nor Mako can help. For they are just humans. Not even one percent of cloth.

“Be home by dinner,” she says, like she used to when they briefly lived together in their college years.

Ryuko’s eyes glint in recognition, and she hums.

“You got it, sis.”

And then she’s gone.

***

Ryuko marches back towards the battlefield with all the confidence that she does not have. She mastered this art back when she was a teenager and she still excels at it. Sure, maybe it doesn’t fool her sister or Mako, but she’ll be fine for as long as she can fool herself.

“Ryuko…”

“I know.”

His voice is a disembodied echo in her head. A bit unclear, almost staticky, but unmistakingly him. When she first heard him respond to one of her many traditional retellings of her day a couple months back, she completely lost her shit. Eight years, eight years of talking to the sky like a crazy person (by now she got used to the reputation), and the bastard has heard every word. She just wasn’t hearing him back. She, who had always been the only one who could! She would laugh if she didn’t want to cry. Well, actually, she ended up doing both.

They didn’t know how that happened, but both came to the conclusion that she probably absorbed enough fibers and evolved to unlock, well, some signal receiver ability or whatever. Even now she can see the red strand slightly glowing right above her eye, like some damn antenna.

“I don’t want you to do this,” he says softly.

She almost laughs at that.

“Well, too bad you aren’t here to stop me!”

She slows down after that, shoulders sagging, and sighs one of the heaviest sighs in her life. Fuck, she’s so damn tired.

“What else can I do, Sen?” she asks quietly. “You heard them; they can’t exactly win on their own.” Her voice drops down to almost a whisper. “And I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

There’s a pause. She can almost feel the unsaid ‘what about you getting hurt?’, but he knows better by now. Instead, she hears:

“I’m with you.”

“Thanks.”

She starts walking again, mud squelching under the soles of her combat boots. Everything inside of her churns, filling her with dread and anxiety, but more than anything she just wants it all to be over. Whatever that entails.

Best case scenario, she’ll go back to trying and failing to be a proper human, a productive member of society, a good sister or a decent friend.

At this rate she’s going to psych herself out or cry before she even gets there. Nope.

“Hey, Senketsu,” she asks in that light-hearted, casual tone of hers, as if they’re just taking a walk in a park and talking about whatever. That ought to distract her. “I’ve been meaning to ask: how do you even know what’s going on down here?”

“I see it.”

“What, from up there?” she snorts, leaning against some ruined wall and looking around for any hostiles before crossing a small clearing. “Some sharp eyes you got.”

“No, I see through yours.”

That gives her a pause.

“Through mine?”

“Yes.” Of course he doesn’t elaborate, damn his brevity.

“How’s that possible?”

He would probably shrug if he had any shoulders left. Somehow, she’s still clearly aware of him shrugging.

“I don’t know.” A pause. Then: “I can only assume. Maybe we synced so much that a part of me was literally left within you. Maybe you absorbed some of my fibers while trying to hold on to me in the sky. Maybe we’re just… us. One way or another, I’ve been aware of what’s been happening to you. Especially lately.”

“Whoa. I don’t know if that’s sweet or creepy.” She gets over another obstacle in her way. The sounds of fighting are so close she can practically feel them on her tongue. Tastes like copper.

“Creepy?” god, even now he sounds offended. Or maybe frightened. She sighs.

“It’s called a joke, Sen.”

She’s there. One last step from behind the cover and she’ll be right in the thick of it all, or rather above it, on a pile of concrete plates. There’s a familiar chirping of needle-bullets and whirring of DTRs — of course he brought them back immediately — and a deafening roar of disfigured humans, half-consumed by the parasites they wear.

“Ready?” She asks. Him? Herself? Could be either.

With a deep breath she closes her eyes and tries to ignore the way her treacherous fiber heart tries to climb up her throat.

There’s power deep inside her that’s been growing and staying entirely untapped into. However reckless her evolution seemed to many, in reality she’s been threading very lightly. The perspective of starting to spawn rainbows and see people as food rather than her own kind kept her awake at night. Quite literally — with sticky, sweaty nightmares.

But this is a dead end. Nothing to lose now.

She finds the metaphorical glittering knot inside herself and pulls, unraveling it.

Glowing energy the likes of which she only ever felt once at the very end of their fight with Ragyo starts flowing all around her, a sparkling flame of power. Her hair stands on end, lifts up at the back of her neck, glows bright red, sending crimson sparks everywhere. Her heart feels hot. Her whole body does.

There’s a noise, and, opening one eye, she can see that Mako and Satsuki followed her after all. She can’t exactly blame them — who would want to miss the grand finale? — but it would be so much easier alone. Well, two-in-one-alone. Now she immediately puts the brave face back on, hiding behind the familiar smirk.

“You know, sis, always been curious if I could pull it off,” she says, a bit breathless and sweaty from all the energy bursting within.

“Pull what off?” Satsuki can’t help but ask.

Ryuko just smirks wider, turns around and leaves the cover in one big determined step.

Her combat boot does not make a click when its heel slams into the slab, but the loud crack of concrete sure makes up for that. For the goddamn world that doesn’t know how to stop being in danger. For the people she and Senketsu fought so hard to protect the last time. For the family she had to find all on her own. For all of this to stop. Her will is not iron, her will is an explosive bomb that will kick you in the teeth if you stand in its way. It bursts off of her like a shockwave, throwing all the closest enemies away and making the rest falter. And then, as she lets it all go in a fit of unbridled rage and grief and, more importantly, final determination, the sky behind her bursts in a bright, blinding red backlight.

None of the old guard squint, too used to looking at Satsuki (and Satsuki herself — at her mother), but the rest of the battlefield responds in a collective painful growl. Ryuko smiles as wind beats at her wild hair and shredded legs of her jeans.

“Seems I really do have some of that Kiryuin blood in me after all,” she snickers, but there’s no time to joke. She has to go all the way before anyone gains their footing back.

She tenses, concentrates, digs into the depths of her fibers with her mind, looking, searching, releasing, bringing up to the surface. The fire inside her grows hotter by the second, her muscles tremble and her breath starts to hitch as if she’s running a marathon and can’t get enough air into her lungs. Power flows off of her in terrifying waves, but none of it is what she’s looking for. It’s all an excess she could’ve used to stitch herself in a monster of all monsters at any given time, but chose not to. Because she’s still human too, and that’s why she stands up for the rest of them again and again and again.

She finally finds it. It feels scalding against her inner grip. As she pulls at the threads, she can practically feel the rainbow of colors vibrating in her very cells — none of it shows up on the surface, thank fuck, but somehow she can feel it nonetheless.

The fire, discovered and disturbed, flows through her body, punches at her chest from the inside, reaches her fingertips and feels like it's trying to turn her inside out. She staggers, growling, grinding her teeth so hard some of them start to crumble at the edges. The power pulses inside her and it takes all the strength and all the spite she can muster to gather it in her hands and maintain a grip on it, wrangling it to her will. It's like she's holding the sun itself.

When she opens her eyes they feel like they are burning, but through the veil of tears she sees the field in front of her clear as ever. Every red fiber pulsing in those makeshift parodies of proper Goku uniforms, every brain tangled in a thread, every target to control.

“STOP,” she barks, and her voice alone rings out like a cannon shot, like a blast wave that hits every creature she’s looking at and makes them freeze in place. It burns so bad that she wants to scream and let go, but she can not. Not yet. “AND GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THEM.”

Slowly, reluctantly, resisting to the very end, the cursed clothes start sliding off the people wearing them, fibers untangling from their nervous systems.

“Neutralize them now, go, go, go!” Satsuki and Aikuro scream at the same time, and the remaining Beach forces move in. Needles and blades swish in the air, vacuums roar, there’s shouting and a frantic hurry, but it still takes time, time, time.

And Ryuko stands there, holding the bright white energy inside all of her, and all she can do not to give in to the agony is look up to the sky, where a bright red star shines even through the daylit sky. Somehow it gives her strength to persevere. Maybe he’s actually sending it her way. She can’t hear anything because of the deafening ringing in her ears.

And she holds it, holds it, holds it.

***

It’s over.

The air is still, and it’s all as quiet as it can be when there are dozens of disoriented people coming to their senses all over the place and fighters panting in disbelief.

It’s over.

Satsuki and Aikuro hastily attend to their troops the best they can, because people need their attention, need their leadership, need to figure out what should be done next.

The area around them is wrecked, all concrete debris and half-toppled buildings, but there seem to be no civilian casualties.

Peace reluctantly settles, although a second time over it feels even more unreal than the last.

Mako looks around and throws her hands in the air victoriously.

“Yahoo! You did it, Ryuko! I knew you could!”

But when she turns, her face falls and dread comes back instead of joy.

Ryuko coughs, and blood splatters down her chin. Sharp pain strikes through her, pierces her from inside out, her insides shuddering and practically collapsing in on themselves. It feels like every part of her where the dormant power of absorbed Shinra-Koketsu had gone through is now crumbling in its wake. Which is all of her.

“You weren’t kidding…” she wheezes, before a shiver rakes down her body and shoots through her knees, making her collapse with a pitiful yelp. Last time they messed with the Absolute Submission, Senketsu took the brunt of it all. Is this what it felt like for him? Is this what he powered through to get her back to the atmosphere, to get her a chance at life?

“Yes.” A voice echoes in her head, sad as all hell. He warned her. He warned her back at the shed. They both knew that if a 100% Life Fiber kamui in full sync fell apart, then her body didn't stand a chance. But she didn’t see much choice.

“Ryuko!” Mako is kneeling in front of her in a second. Satsuki follows immediately after. Aikuro is hot on her heels, but he freezes in place at a distance, because Mako tries to grab Ryuko’s left hand and it crumbles into nothing under her fingers.

With a screech, Mako jerks her hands away and grasps at Satsuki instead, who hugs her shoulders with one hand, not saying a word. Both of them watch, horrified, as Ryuko looks at her hand and it unravels in tiny shreds of red in front of her eyes, little by little, until the whole sleeve of her shirt hangs empty. She loses vision in one eye as it closes and the eyelid sinks a bit above the empty socket. There are fraying fibers sticking all over the place, through the rips of her jeans, in her hair, from underneath the collar of her shirt. She takes a deep, struggling breath, musters some kind of a smile, no matter how sad, no matter how fake, before looking at the people in front of her again.

Mako’s eyes are filled with tears, they're dripping down her cheeks and wet her knees, and for once she seems to be at a total loss for words, because this? Is not something a hallelujah and a good pep talk can fix. She knows that. Ryuko knows that.

Satsuki’s face is a stoic mask that mirrors Ryuko’s smile in a way. None of them want to say their goodbyes crying. Satsuki learned to hide her pain behind calmness. Ryuko — behind her bashful smirk.

Neither one is fooled.

She lost most of her family already and she’s losing the last one. There's a storm of emotions behind those eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Ryuko says, like she’s not the one barely holding together, quite literally at that. It hurts like hell, but parts of her that disappear are going peacefully numb. That peacefulness should scare her — it’s something she hadn’t felt once in her life — but it doesn’t. A certainty settles in: she’s dying. No use fretting about it.

“Think it’s better this way, no?” she says. “All Life Fibers will finally be gone… not a single creature left behind. As it should be.” It weighed on her more than she would ever admit to anyone: to be the only one. The last one left. A girl with no one ever to relate to. Alone.

But their broken faces don’t make her feel good. In fact, there are tears rolling down her cheeks, after all. Or, well, one of them, seeing as the other is covered in blood from the missing eye.

God, she hates this. Hates leaving them behind. Hates that in all these years she still missed out on so much. She doesn’t want to stop being Satsuki’s sister. She doesn’t want to stop being Mako’s friend or whatever the hell they are. She doesn’t want to go without saying goodbye to Mankanshokus, the only proper family she ever had. She used to be terrified of outliving everyone, of staying immortal and eternal, of burying everyone she loves and having to stop her own heart should she decide to quit. She used to think she would breathe a sigh of relief if something would oh so generously save her from that fate.

But there’s no relief. There’s only pain and grief. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to go. They are all still alive and there’s so much more life left to live together.

“Goddammit,” she sobs despite herself and averts her eye, not able to stand their pained faces any longer. She doesn't think Satsuki is even aware that there are tears rolling down her face too now. “I don’t want it to end like this. It's too soon, why is it always too fucking soon? I just… I thought… I wanted to go with a smile, y'know? Not… not like this,” she repeats.

There’s a bit of silence, in which she closes her eye and prays it’s over sooner than later. For all of their sakes.

“Ryuko,” pipes up the voice in her head, and before she knows it, she sits up and lifts her face up to the sky. He sounds different. Resolved. “Do you truly want to live?”

“What kind of a stupid question is that,” she whispers, baffled.

“Is she–” starts Mako.

“She is,” shushes Satsuki.

“You up for doing something incredibly reckless, then?” He sounds so incredibly serious.

A smile slowly breaks out across Ryuko’s tortured face.

“Always.”

With bated breath they watch as she struggles back up to her feet, unstable and skewed to the side.

“Sis,” she grits out. “Open up those big ol’ vacuums for me?”

The command is given before Satsuki even has time to think. Ryuko and Senketsu’s crazy plans have saved them multiple times before. Her trust in them is strong, and her desperate hope of keeping her sister for a little while longer is even stronger. Lids pop open, spilling out sparkling red fibers.

Ryuko sucks in a breath as deep as her failing lungs can manage and closes her remaining eye.

Slowly, a cloud of red threads lifts up in the air, spins in a crazy, bright swishing vortex, faster and faster, and then sinks into the shining strand of her hair with a hit, like a gigantic spear. Ryuko yelps, chokes, sways, miraculously keeps her footing. Her whole body contorts, no longer able to process the data she’s feeding it. Battling through it, a drowning man grabbing onto a straw, a straw he trusts with his whole life, Ryuko straightens up, gasping through the sparks.

Lifts her yet intact hand up to the sky.

“Jin…” her chapped lips form familiar words, a ghost of their past. “‘i…” Everything goes still and completely quiet. She closes her fist. “...ittai.”

A star above her head sparks like a little explosion and a ray of red light slams down on her, engulfing her completely.

This one is brighter, blindingly brighter than anything anyone here ever had to look at. Everyone flinches, turns away, covers their eyes. Despite being the closest, Satsuki can’t help but squint through her fingers, trying to make out anything at all.

Ryuko’s silhouette sparkles, flashes pink, then red, then white. They watch, speechless, as a new arm, all pure blackness held together by red threads, forms, lifts up the no-longer-empty sleeve, sprawls five fingers past the cuff. Her legs are getting more stable and she takes an audible clear breath. Bathed in bright red light, almost levitating inside it, the figure looks at its own hands, exhales shakily, and then suddenly hugs its own shoulders, like one would hug an old friend. Tightly, desperately, fingers softly digging into the skin, and with a visible flood of relief.

The light subsides and she is left standing there, breathing heavy, head lowered and arms still tightly wrapped around her own shoulders. Her right arm is still a human one, but the left, grown anew, is inhuman black, with familiar red nails, palm, a stripe going up the elbow and disappearing somewhere under the fabric of her clothes.

“Ryuko?” Mako is the first to ask.

The person in front of them startles and lifts their head, showing their tear-stained face. Looks at them with two eyes from under black and red hair that now has slightly more red in it. Both of those eyes are familiar for different reasons. One is dark blue, with a weird gear shape around the pupil. The other one is blood red.

“Yeah,” Ryuko says. “Still me.”

She pauses, as if listening to something, and a corner of her lips quirks in a disbelieving smile.

“Not just me, though,” she corrects herself carefully, as if surprised by her own words.

Mako cocks her head to the side in confusion, but Satsuki is quicker.

“Senketsu, I presume?” She asks, still holding way too much composure for everything that happened.

Ryuko slowly releases her grip and stretches her arms in front of her.

“Yeah,” she says somewhat absent-mindedly, wriggling her new black and red fingers. Then leans her head to the side, looking nowhere in particular, and asks out loud, evidently for their audience’s convenience: “You wanna try speaking?”

They watch as her face then goes through a series of weird grimaces and stops at a rather deadpan expression. When she speaks, the voice is still Ryukos — those are her vocal cords, after all — but the tone is clearly of someone used to speaking lower, deeper, and slower.

“Apologies,” he says, enunciating every vowel way too much, as if accustomed to a much bigger mouth. “I’m not used to. Human facial expressions. Ryuko always handled that part. Nice to meet you again, Satsuki, Mako.” He badly imitates a polite bow.

“Wow!” Mako yelps. “Senketsu is back! Like, back-back! And he’s inside Ryuko?!”

“More like we’re one and the same now,” he corrects.

“But you clearly think separately,” Satsuki points out.

“Yes. But the body we inhabit is now the same. It’s hard to say who’s wearing who anymore. On that note, it’s weird to be wearing clothes on top of us. Also– Ack, WHY is my mouth wet?! It’s weird!”

He honest-to-god whines, then emotions are suddenly back in their face, and a split second later Ryuko is laughing, wiping down a trail of drool from the corner of her month.

“It’s called spit, dummy,” she mutters. “Human mouths do that ‘cause they shouldn’t go dry. You're supposed to swallow it sometimes.” She looks over at Satsuki and Mako, and shrugs with a smile. “He says it’s disgusting.”

“Probably is, when you’re new to it,” agrees Satsuki, while Mako is suddenly all up in Ryuko’s face, grabbing both her arms.

“So we get to keep you?! Keep Ryuko?! AND even Senketsu?” She asks with a weird shrill note that comes off both as excited and somewhat hysterical, basically pressing their noses together. Ryuko’s face softens, almost guilty.

“Yeah, buddy. Looks like you get to keep us both.”

Mako sobs and buries her face in the crook of Ryuko’s neck, hugging her so tightly the other grunts. Ryuko pats her back, leaning her cheek on top of Mako’s head, and outstretches the other arm to Satsuki. Her sister grabs her hand tight, with a deep, shaky breath, and although no words are exchanged, they know everything the other wants to say.

“Are you two going to be okay like this?” Satsuki asks later, when waterworks are dying down and Mako is rubbing at her eyes, hiccuping. Ryuko shrugs.

“It’s not that different from how we were, honestly. Even better somewhat — now I don’t even have to speak out loud to talk to him. Although, I can’t exactly take him off either, so someone’s better not be annoying,” she jabs. Whatever Senketsu says back, makes her huff a small laugh.

…Suddenly, there’s a movement.

“Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me,” Aikuro whispers under his breath as all of them (except for Ryuko, who was facing them already) turn around to see a huge mass of glowing fabric approaching. Upon close inspection, the mass appears to be a few distorted mind-controlled humans smushed together in one huge ugly contraption.

“All of them in one spot, huh?” Ryuko comments flatly.

“Well, it clearly wasn’t far,” chimes in Inumuta, too offended by the unsaid accusation to even pretend like he needs a click of the button to talk. “Forgive me for not exactly adding makeshift Shinra-Koketsu coverage to my calculations.” Satsuki rolls her eyes, quietly but fondly.

“Welp, doesn’t matter,” Ryuko exclaims with renewed vigor very uncharacteristic of herself just half an hour ago, like she suddenly got almost a decade younger again. Maybe she has, in a way.

Upon trying to make a step or crack her fingers, however, she staggers, almost falls even. Her feet are moving too slow or too fast, her arms act like they can’t decide which way to move, and suddenly she's barely keeping her balance.

“What the fuck?” she snarls, trying to get her own body under control. “Yeah, I know, then why– Listen! Just–” Having clearly forgotten what she just said on the topic of not talking out loud, she huffs. “Listen, I’ve spent eight years fighting alone, okay?! Cut me some slack!”

“Oh my god,” Mako gasps. “They are… they are totally out of sync!”

“How can we be out of sync, when we’re literally…” Ryuko almost smacks herself in the face, having gesticulated too strongly. “Dammit!”

“I suppose that’s what happens when you refuse to rely on anyone for almost a decade…” Aikuro mutters.

It’s at this moment that the newly appeared monster decides to remind them that they’ve rudely stopped paying attention to it. With a loud ear-wrenching noise it grabs a pile of rocks, each the size of a small car, and chucks them at the people it can see, making the Beach soldiers scatter.

In tortuous slow motion everyone watches as one of the heavy pieces of concrete is heading straight for Mako.

They don't even have time to scream. Satsuki barely reaches for Bakuzan. Mako almost doesn’t have time to even turn around and see the danger.

Something flashes blindingly pink.

CR-RACK!

The stone breaks into a thousand pieces, flying all over and missing Mako or Satsuki by the smallest margin possible.

Everyone's gasps of terror get stuck in their throats, confused. Mako blinks.

Slowly, Ryuko — Ryuko and Senketsu straighten up and look at their smoking fist. The red accents on black, the red strands of hair, all of it starts glowing, sparkling, ringing, their hair ruffled by the wind that's not there. They look back at Mako and Ryuko’s cheeky smirk slowly crooks on their face.

“Looks like we need to think less of how we move, and more of what we both want to do.” Their eyes jump back to the threat looming ahead and winding up for another swing. “How does protecting everyone and getting rid of that thing sound, huh?” There’s a spark, a rush of wind, a low, gruff, but excited growl in between their teeth: “Sounds perfect!”

And just like that, they’re off.

In a flash of pink lightning they smash into the enemy — senjin blades bursting from the human hand, the other one forming a familiar shape of a next-stage blade (“Sweet!” Ryuko yells). The creature howls as its fibers are shred, tries to land a hit on them, but can’t, because they’re dancing around it in flashes of light, hardly bothered at all. Another slice, another hit, another thread ripped, and soon enough the enemy is barely holding together. It’s so easy, it’s so familiar. The end is in sight and for once neither of them dreads it.

Dodging another hit, they run, all but fly up a fall of a tall building next to the battlefield, push off the very highest point, turn upside down and it’s almost like they become suspended in the air for a second, free falling, wind beating at their clothes, their hair.

Ryuko breathes out and closes her eyes, lost in a brief moment where nothing exists besides the whistling in her ears and her, him, them. Her hand, his hand, their hand. Her blood, his blood, their blood rushing through their body, their chest moving in sync with each and every breath, their cells buzzing with adrenaline. Her second skin became her one and only.

“God, I missed you,” rips out from her lips in a raw, trembling confession, and she hears his hum in reply.

“I missed you,” he echoes. “And being one with you. And your heartbeat. Your sound.”

Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

“Our heartbeat now,” she whispers.

After a pause, he agrees.

“Yes. We do sound beautiful.” And then he adds, in a rare show of eagerness and curiosity he was never allowed to fully feel before: “Can’t wait to see what we can do.”

And for once, it’s not even about fighting. They get a whole life to live. They get to experiment and experience stuff outside fights and battles. Together.

“Let’s go find out then,” she says with a smile, letting her last tears fly away in the stream of upcoming air, and opens up her eyes. There’s a familiar vibration in their arms, in the weapons they created, and by now they both know what that means.

The Life Fiber monster, the last of its kind, roars at them as they spin through the air, a wild storm of black and red and pink, and it can do nothing as they rip through, yanking the last of the fabric off of it, setting people within free.

“Sen-i-Soshitsu!” they yell on the top of their lungs, or maybe it’s just Ryuko, who so endlessly hated doing this move alone.

As they land, they dig the ground up with their feet to stop, and then stay there, panting.

The last remaining fibers fly up to them and absorb into the red strands.

“Last ones ever, if we’re lucky,” Ryuko says. “Better do something fun with them.”

And then she suddenly coughs as hot steam bursts out of her nostrils and a little bit out of her mouth.

“Youwch, what the fuck?!” She groans, squatting down and holding her poor nose with her hand.

“Your body structure hardly accounts for vents. The excess heat has to go somewhere,” Senketsu informs her inside her head. Ryuko sighs.

“You just can’t not be weird, can you?”

“I thought ‘weird’ was our whole thing?” he asks with purposefully theatrical naivety.

And then she laughs. Laughs with her whole chest, laughs until there are tears in her eyes and her cheeks hurt, until her breath runs out and she can’t laugh anymore.

And then maybe some more.

***

“You’re leaving again?” Mako pouts.

“Not for long this time, I promise.” Ryuko leans on her bike. She’s wearing a new leather jacket, having finally given up on the poor sukajan (not that she gave any permission to get rid of the thing), and one would have to be blind not to see the change in her face. Not the new red strands or the blood red iris of her left eye, but the expression. She looks well. The deep lonely glint that has been haunting her eyes for her entire life is all but gone. For once Satsuki hears her say that she’ll be back soon and actually believes it.

“I just want to show this one here,” she habitually pats the place above her heart, even though that might not be the best representation of where Senketsu physically is anymore, “some places he never got to see. Hell, maybe even stop by Osaka, bet he’d like it better when it’s not burning.”

“Osaka!” Mako’s eyes immediately sparkle. “Will you…”

“...buy you the whole tourist food alley? Of course.” Mako squeals, content with that. Ryuko chuckles and looks at her sister, who also came to see her off. “I promise I’ll be back,” she says softly. “I have so much stuff I wanna do together. So many days to celebrate properly. Shit, even something mundane.”

“Everything you couldn’t do without being dressed in your Sunday best?” Satsuki teases and Ryuko sheepishly rubs her neck.

“Evidently. I am a woman of high standards, you see.”

They all laugh at that.

As Ryuko sits on her motorcycle, a deadpan expression quickly flicks across her face and Senketsu nods at them with an awkward attempt to smile. Before they know, however, it’s Ryuko again.

“Take care of each other,” Satsuki says.

“Yeah.” Ryuko revs the engine and winks at her.

“That’s the plan.”