28 - Hidekazu
Masanori piled the bodies in the yard behind the shrine and dug their graves. His shovel was unable to penetrate more than an inch of the earth at a time, and yet he carried on anyway. For a while, Hidekazu observed—despite being capable of easing Masanori's burden—because he was lost in trying to decipher Masanori's unusual behaviour.
He had let Ichika locate the bodies beneath the snow, but now she was banished to the steps of the shrine to sob on her lonesome. Part of Hidekazu enjoyed watching Masanori struggle with the frozen ground, and the emotion-filled gasps that occasionally broke the rhythmic scrape of metal. It seemed right, somehow, for him to experience that sharp edge to breathing that came with loss, the breathing that suffocating Hidekazu in the days after S
