Sou kissed his unseeing master's hands, kissed the fingers, "I see the monster in your heart," murmuring, "The monster in your head, your monster," softly, "Kaiji no Lopix, kokoro no kaiji, kokoro no kaiji, kokoro no kaiji."

Silence. Lopix turned his face away slightly in the artificial light, as if thinking. Muted footsteps were coming. The council was always going to know that Sou had gone too far. How they knew did not matter. Sou's lips parted, his eyes watered and Lopix could not see.

The lock splintered and the door slammed open, dark figures outlined against the hallway. Sou stood up quickly, letting go of Lopix's fingers but it was already far too late. Lopix covered his eyes when the rod came out, covered his ears when the faithful steward had begun to scream, turned inward when the blood began to run. He didn't have the ability to process the horror of it, and when it was over, when he standing by the broken window after they'd all gone and left him, he didn't think anything about the broken body on the pavement twenty stories below. He couldn't. When he took a long cruel shard of broken glass and began to cut up his face so much the better, so that when they came back and took it away from him he was sober again, and that was the end of it.

They shaved his head instead of washing out the matted blood from the long gouges he had made, and when the hair grew back the white streak in it was wider.

It was not too long before another steward was found for him, and by then Lopix had stopped thinking about Sou and what he had said, mouthing it only sometimes, in the dark.


.Kokoro no Kaiji.

Tjobi touched his master's hair, but not for too long, brushing it out with the ivory comb, smoothing out the waves.

Lopix bowed his head in the quiet.

Sou's successor, Tjobi with no past, pulled the clumps of white hair from the comb, tossed them into the garbage, continued to brush. Ever since Lopix had showed up on the doorstep it had become the same old routine, caring for the master as if it were his only reason to live. It was. The hair kept falling out, too much of it, completely white now.

There was no council to keep him from showing too much affection, but Tjobi tried not to show it anyway, doing his duty with care but no individual passion. He put the comb down gently on the side table and went to find the scissors.

Look here you don't have to do this, a voice whispered to him, in his mind, you don't have to do this anymore.

It doesn't matter, have to do it, don't have to do it. It is my life.

Tjobi found the scissors, opened them, pressed the blade to his skin and drew it upwards slowly on the long vein.

This is your life, haughtily, maybe you should find a new life. It's been long enough now. There is no more council. There is no more coven. This is just a charade.

He shook his head as if to clear it, picked up the glass tureen, quaking only a little from thinking too much.

When he set the offering down Lopix, deposed covenmaster of a dead coven, knocked it off the table, the third time in as many days, the one languid sideswipe and then still again.

Tjobi, still bleeding, covered his face.

"Please don't do this," he whispered to his master, "I don't know how to help you."

He knelt in front of his Lopix, looked into the dispassionate expression, trained too well to reach out to touch the forbidden skin of the face, of the shoulders.

For years Lopix had been catatonic, mostly. He hardly ever spoke. He hardly ever moved. Until recently, until the last three days, he had at least gone between rooms under his own power, at least drunk Tjobi's blood, at least slept.

It was an interruption in the routine. It made Tjobi feel like he was going mad, much like he had felt before Lopix had come, after the coven had been violently dissolved, the night when the sky ripped open.

"Tell me what you want and I will get it for you. Tell me what you need. Anything."