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The sea makes for a beautiful sight at daybreak, the crimson of the rising sun bleeding into the mercurial tides. So long as he keeps his eyes shut to the blood-red waters, so long as he loses himself in the feeling of the sand under his curled toes, the cold breeze on his face, the scent of salt in the air and the sound of waves lapping at the shores in his ears, Asuma can almost forget that it had once swallowed his mother's life whole. Can almost be willing to forgive.
As for whom he is meant to forgive: the sea, his father, his brother? His mother? Asuma can't quite tell. All his losses seem to have amalgamated into a single, messy clump over the past few days, the past few years, the last decade; all his griefs bleeding and tangling in one another until he no longer had the strength to tell them apart.
Beside him, he feels Asagiri’s form shift, an almost imperceptible fluttering of a thousand beating wings. “Someone approaches,” the tsugai warns, and even though that might as well be a guarantee of an enemy attack given their clan’s current standing, his eyelids feel almost reluctant as they flutter open.
“Yo,” the not-assailant cheerfully greets. Asuma turns around to see Gab pointing over her shoulder at the footprints Asuma had left behind in the sand while skipping over to him. “You’re leaving behind a trail, y’know. Straight from the car to the guy. Even a lowly grunt like me can tell you that's a great way to get yourself killed.”
“Good morning to you as well, Gab, Gabriel and Gabriel,” Asuma sighs wearily, his breath condensing into white mist in the morning’s chill. He turns back to resume his silent seaside vigil, and Gab's steps come to a stop a few steps further away than he does, where the waves reach far enough to lap at his ankles, seafoam clinging to his bare feet as they recede and being washed away as they rise, saltspray permanently staining the hem of his kimono. It makes sense for her to keep her distance, still clad in her leather shoes as she is – although sand will wreck them almost just as much as seawater will, the thick soled combat boots that Asuma knows she is so fond of because they add an extra three inches to her height.
Once again, he sighs: ever since childhood they always had been in such a rush to hurry and grow up, her and Asa both; that was roughly half the reason Asa left the manor. (The other half, of course, was that they had become incapable of keeping her safe in the wake of Father's death.) Asuma remembers them barely grazing his elbows in height and briefly considers reminding Gab of this; he remembers being not yet level with his uncle's hip the day he had vowed revenge in his mind. “It isn't as though you aren't leaving a trail yourself, either,” is all he says in the end.
“Well, I ain’t as high up on anybody’s hitlist as the clan heir who ditched his guard to sneak out to some remote beach in the middle of nowhere. Not to mention,” Gab mimes her usual gobbling gesture, Gabriel chomping their maws in perfect harmony with it, “I didn't come here unarmed, unlike a certain someone else.”
“I do apologise for making you worry,” Asuma replies, unable to stop the weariness permeating into his very being from slipping into his voice. “It must have been rough.”
“I wasn't the one worrying, it was Natsuki and the rest of the bunch,” Gab spits out, and the words she leaves unspoken – You aren't the one I'm worried about – echo just as loudly in Asuma's ears as her silence does. His gaze softens, shoulders drooping almost inconspicuously. “Just be grateful that Sensei hasn't found out yet.”
“I'm sorry,” he repeats, making Gab bristle, but before she can interrupt; “I shouldn't have come here on Hagure-sensei’s dime, I know. Rather than wandering around abandoned shores with the foolish hope of stumbling upon him, I should search for Jin properly instead. And yet, my feet keep bringing me here, to this place.”
“It is pretty stupid,” she agrees. “...It ain't even like this is the shore Asa would've left from.”
Nor is it the shore where Asuma's mother was found, and most probably, not the one she disappeared from either. And although this might have been the shore where the Scavengers had once been found washed up upon, Jin too, is just as little likely to wind up on the coastline here as well. And yet…
“And yet the sea that parts us from our loved ones is all the same.”
Over his shoulder, he can see Gab casting him an odd look – almost considerate – but doesn't elaborate: It is not the same kind of parting nor the same kind of love, but for all the differences of their grief, the sea has never changed; there are no words to encompass this feeling.
“I guess it is,” she muses, walking over to his side with shoes abandoned in the sand and leggings rolled up to her knees, and she stands as tall as his shoulders now. An ambient silence washes over them with the sound of the crashing tides.
“There must be some tsugai that watch over the sea, right?” Gab says, ending the quiet spell. From somewhere out in the open ocean, the winds carry the crying of the gulls. “Like Sayuu-sama and Higashimura, or Oshira-sama?”
“There are,” Asuma affirms. “Plenty of them, in fact: You'll have to refer to Father and Jin’s studies for the exact details, but – ”
“No need,” Gab interrupts. Closing her eyes to the horizon before her, she claps her hands thrice in prayer before opening them and nodding firmly to herself. “ ‘kay, all done.”
Asuma believes that his guess of what she prayed for is fairly accurate, and fondness blooms in his heart at her clumsy attempt at a prayer – certainly, he has never seen her participate in one back at the mansion.
“A prayer's a prayer,” Gab cheerfully declares. “It has gotta carry over.”
The sun has risen beyond the horizon in its entirety, a red orb that warms them to the bones. The salty breeze has picked up in speed, it pushes Gab’s braids over her shoulders, ruffles through her hoodie and his haori; the sea at their feet has picked up in strength, the push and pull of the tides more incessant, as though seeking to drag them into the depths.
With Gab beside him, Asuma reconsiders his own musings about forgiveness: is it his father that they are supposed to forgive for dying, or Jin for disappearing, or Asa and his mother for leaving – the sea for allowing their sundering, accommodating it into its unfathomable self?
Asuma watches as Gabriel disappears under the waves, churning up sand as they swim, and in the murkiness they appear so fishlike that it is terribly easy to imagine the maws to be Makoto floating around instead, caught up in a dust cloud and ready to emerge with Jin and Ai by his side. But of course it is Gabriel that emerges instead out of the water with a seashell, fragile calcium carbonate held delicately by the jaws that Asuma had once personally seen hewing the Mountain Gods. They drop it straight into Gab’s open palm, the shell still intact if a little worn out.
“Just something that I thought Asa might've liked,” she growls out in response to the weight of his questioning gaze. “Like I said, it's all very stupid.”
Asuma's lips twitch into a smile – though not one too wide, far too many people have been calling it off-putting, and he is no longer in a position to not worry about his image – and, “Why don't you keep it on you?” he suggests. “You can give it to her when she comes back from Okinawa.”
“Oh yeah,” Gab scoffs. “When.”
“Of course. Didn't you hear what our clan head said?” he quips. “The Kagemori mansion will always be a home that both of you will be able to return to.”
This earns him a glare and yet another scoff. Gab shrugs her shoulders. “Whatever.”
She slips it into her pocket nonetheless to the delighted clicking of Gabriels’ jaws, and Asuma can no longer hold back his expression, or the little chuckle that escapes him.
“Seriously, fuck off, baldie!” Gab snaps, shivering violently. “Ugh, the sea is too damn cold in the morning for this,” she complains, storming out of the water while rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “You coming back home, or what?”
Perhaps, he thinks, watching the way Gab's hand curls around the seashell in her pocket into a protective fist, that it is themselves that they need to forgive. And with the sea such a terribly beautiful sight before them, he thinks that he might even be willing to begin.
“Let’s go back to my car,” Asuma says, pulling out the keys from his pocket as he follows Gab. “How did you even get here in the first place – ”
“Wait, Asuma.” Asagiri implores, and the two humans freeze in place. “I detect another presence on this shore – a tsugai’s. It is very far, right at the periphery of my senses, but…”
Asuma and Gab exchange frantic looks with each other, their eyes fever-bright with hope – and it is most likely a foolish hope, it is probably stupid of them to believe that Jin and Ai and Makoto await them at the other end of this, to assume that the sea would be so forgiving as to bring them home, and yet…
“Let's go,” Gab announces, and Asuma sharply nods.
And yet the two of them break into a mad dash along the shoreline, leaving behind their footprints in the sand for the waves to wash away as they chase after Asagiri and Gabriel.