First Time

It's after the first time that Tokaku finally lets herself say it, whispering the words into Haru's loose red hair.

"I love you."

She's been agonising about this for weeks, wondering how she was ever going to get the words out, how she could trust herself enough to promise something so impossibly big. It's worse because of how patient Haru always is with her, coaxing her along little by little as they embark on this normal life that is as alien to Tokaku as a childhood spent learning to kill is to most people.

But in the end, her heart is too full not to say it. Full the way her arms are full of Haru; full the way her body was with pleasure just moments ago.

She tests the words silently on her lips before she speaks them, hesitant, half expecting to choke or stumble. Haru has already said this to her so many times; she deserves to hear it at least once from the far from adequate ex-assassin she has chosen to share her life with. Deserves to feel the way Tokaku feels when Haru says it to her, full of warmth and happiness and wonder that somehow they both ended up escaping their Hellish destinies of death.

Tokaku doesn't choke, and she doesn't stumble. Haru stiffens for a moment when she hears the whispered avowal, breath catching, then she sighs and leans into Tokaku even further, nuzzling her of all things, and it seems so unheard of to nuzzle an Azuma that Tokaku wonders whether there might not be a written rule somewhere forbidding the practice, but she is long past caring about such proprieties.

"I love you too, Tokaku."

Of course Haru says it back to her, squeezing Tokaku just a little, bare flesh brushing against her own. She is generous, far too generous, when it comes to expressing the feelings she shouldn't even have.

They lie in silence for quite a while, in the comforting dark where all of this is slightly more manageable than it might otherwise be, and Tokaku thinks about things she hasn't ever spoken of, beginning to realise that what she's considered numbness all these years might actually have been pain she was too afraid to feel.

"You know," she says, closing her eyes, because that's the only way she can talk about this, even in the dark, "my mother never wanted me to be an assassin. It was her dying wish that my aunt take me away with her to live a normal life, and she tried. She tried."

Her voice almost breaks and she has to stop. Tokaku knows Haru is listening, but the red haired girl doesn't speak, just waits until Tokaku drags in a tearing breath and carries on.

"That's probably why I always thought of love as being an unforgiving force, delivered at the point of a sword. Because that's how my grandmother killed my aunt for trying to take me away. It was her duty, to protect the family. To secure my future as the heir of the Azuma clan. She told me she did it out of love." Tokaku's voice is bitter as winter snows.

"And because she won, I thought she must have been right about me. That I didn't deserve a life outside the bounds of that world. That there was nothing else to me but killing. I'd always thought that if I'd been worthy of it, I would have been saved. But there was no one else left who cared enough to save me, and I lived in the dark for a very long time."

Tokaku tightens her arms around Haru's waist. "Until I met you. You showed me the world of the sun that I thought was just a myth; the world that they'd wanted me to have so long ago. I still don't know what I've done to be able to live here with you. The very first time I was tested I broke and turned into my grandmother. I tried to kill you."

Saying this in the aftermath of their bodies being tangled together in love is so incongruent it hurts. What they've just shared clashes too much with Tokaku's memory of her fury and despair, her sudden inability to trust anything around her but the familiar comfort of cold steel in her hand.

She recalls sitting in the empty dorm room with shards of pain piercing her heart as it became impossible not to remember that she was an assassin and had been all along; that she'd never escaped from her destiny, never escaped from the job she had come here to do.

Kill the girl she'd been protecting all this time.

How all it had taken was a single doubt for her to turn her back on everything Haru had given her.

"The path you chose to get here wasn't the one I wanted," Haru whispers, gliding a hand across Tokaku's cheek. "But would you have made it any other way? Would you still be running from me and hating me if you hadn't done what you did?"

Tokaku releases a shuddering breath, part horror for the past and part disbelieving thanks for the feel of Haru's hands in the present. "The path I chose showed me that I was on the wrong path. But I didn't realise until I thought it was already too late."

"It's never too late, as long as you're alive." There's the glimmer of a smile in Haru's reply. "And we're both alive, Tokaku. We both made it. Besides, I knew all along you might die protecting me, and I didn't even trust you enough to tell you the truth. Of course you were angry. Of course you turned back to the only certainties you knew. Yuri and the others knew you would. They had to have Class Black play out to the bitter end."

She moves slightly, her hair tickling Tokaku's collarbone. "I know you're never going to do something like that again. So what would be served by me rejecting you? What good would it do for me to be lying here alone thinking about you and telling myself I could never touch you? What good would it do for you to be drawn back into your old world because you had nowhere else to go? Isn't this the better ending? The one where we both get to be happy? The one where I can hear you say that you love me?"

"Yes, it's better," Tokaku has to agree, her whisper fervent as a convert's. She can't wish for anything but this with Haru in her arms, doesn't want to imagine any future for herself in which she can never express her feelings to Haru again.

"About your family…It's awful, too awful that you had to go through that. But at least you found your way out, eventually. At least you know now there's more."

Haru's lips brush across hers in a soft kiss, and this, this is what Tokaku has been searching for without knowing it through all the miserable struggles of her existence. Something to make heart keep beating. A reason for her life.

Tokaku has been wrong about love. It isn't her grandmother's vengeance, and it never abandoned her when her aunt and mother died. Love has been waiting inside her all this time; the answer she's been looking for.