All the world's a stage
Subaru stares at the blood welling over his palms, spilling through his fingers, suddenly cold and distant with shock. It wasn't supposed to go like this. It wasn't... it's not... it...
"Seishirou-san," he chokes--
--HOKUTO! he screamed, but it was too late; the bodice of her dress was torn, soaked in red, the knife that should have been a stage prop buried in her chest, and she slumped limply in Seishirou's arm, painting him the colour of murder.
Subaru had seen it in her eyes; she had known the knife was real, and yet she'd still let Seishirou stab her with it.
Seishirou knew, of course. He'd planned it; not even Subaru could deny that much, when Seishirou stood there smirking with cruel and vicious victory--
--Seishirou's lips are crimson and sticky with blood. So much blood, everywhere, and Subaru can't understand how this happened. He'd been so sure, the last time they were on stage together and Seishirou's character had pulled a knife on Subaru's, that this was it; that finally Subaru was to meet his end like Hokuto, like her death was a prelude to the finale of his relationship with Seishirou; but the show went on, as they must, and Subaru lived. The knife was a prop, as it should have been. Subaru had assumed Seishirou had bored of him so much it wasn't even worth the trouble of killing him.
Yet now... now...
Somehow it was Subaru whose prop had been switched for a weapon, with him none the wiser until he had stabbed Seishirou through the heart as Seishirou had done to his sister.
"Subaru-kun," Seishirou murmurs against his ear, gurgled and gasping but still impossibly amused--
--"Did you truly believe me?" Seishirou said, cruel with condescension. "We're actors, Subaru-kun; surely you must know what it means to play a role."
Subaru felt his eyes tear up, blinking rapidly in a futile attempt to clear his gaze. "But... do you really feel nothing for me, Seishirou-san? After everything you've said...?"
Seishirou laughed. "Words, words, mere words," he mocked. "All the world's a stage, Subaru-kun, and all the men and women merely players. Shouldn't you know that by now?"
And Subaru remembered the first time they'd met, how Seishirou had smiled and said, let's play a game, Subaru-kun, but he hadn't known until now what that meant, hadn't seen until now the truth that Hokuto had tried to warn him of.
Hokuto was the kind of actor who developed every role out of a facet of her own personality, grown and exaggerated to make a whole new existence. Subaru had always been more comfortable backstage, only driven to acting by the pressure of expectation and family dynasty, but when he acted, he thought about what the character must think and feel, and tried his best to understand them.
Seishirou, he finally understood, was the kind of person who assumed emotions and identities like slipping on a cloak, shifting sands and masks and mirrors that concealed everything while making you believe that what you saw was real. Hokuto had joked sometimes that Seishirou was a sociopath, so good at acting because it was his natural state of being. Joked? No; a warning disguised as a joke, that Subaru had been too blind to understand.
Seishirou had never really loved him, was not even capable of loving him, Subaru realised, his heart breaking into a million pieces--
--"Who could refrain, that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?" Seishirou murmurs, and Subaru flinches back, because even now, Seishirou mocks him, speaking of love through the mouth of Macbeth.
Seishirou stops him, though, marking his cheek with a surprisingly gentle bloody hand-print.
"I'll follow thee and make a heaven of hell," he says. "To die upon the hand I love so well."
And Subaru's breath catches, because he can't believe it, he can't, and yet there is no denying the truth of Seishirou dying in his arms by his own free will.
"No," he sobs, heedless of the harsh stage lights, of the screaming panic of the people around them realising this is no mere pretense, "No!"
-- but it is too late; exit stage left; Subaru is and was and forever will be alone.