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He remembered when it all started.
When he was a boy, Saizo dreamt of a lonely village hidden in the trees. He could still remember the caws of the crows that flew all around, and he could almost smell the metallic stench of blood that never seemed to stop filling the air.
“That’s a silly dream, even for you,” Yuki had told him almost exasperatedly, running her fingers through Hotaru’s hair in his sleep. “You’ll get over it when you wake up tomorrow.”
He supposed she was right. Dreams never really made sense anyway. This one shouldn’t have been any different.
(Still, he didn’t miss the slight, almost unnoticeable twitch in her ever-present smile when he mentioned the word “village.”)
After shooting one last glance at his older sister, he went back to sleep that night.
This time he dreamt of a cherry blossom tree in full bloom, with its pink petals cascading all around him. Someone else was there too, and Saizo felt an indescribable urge to reach out for them. Their back was turned to him, and something in Saizo knew that he just had to see that person’s face if he wanted any respite—
But the moment he stretched his hand out, he woke up to the empty ceiling of his bedroom, all the petals from the cherry blossom tree gone, and a surging emptiness in him.
(He never told anyone about his dreams after that night.)
“I won’t deny your novels are fantastic, Mr. Kirigakure,” Saizo’s editor advised, leafing through the pages of his latest manuscript. “I just think they need a more…quixotic touch, you know? I mean, they’re sexy, for sure, but there’s just something so cynical about them.”
“Maybe that’s just my style.”
“True. But I think you should try branching out a bit more—maybe try expanding your genre a bit to something more romantic?”
(Saizo had to bite back the urge to scoff.)
His editor bade him goodbye not long after, leaving Saizo alone with his thoughts. He pored through his manuscript with a sigh.
It wasn’t like he never wrote anything romantic before. In fact, to no one’s knowledge, he had a half-finished manuscript of a tale he’d saved, hidden deep within the recesses of his files. No one would be able to open that story even if they destroyed his computer.
He had written that story before making his big debut as a novelist. In retrospect, it was relatively mushy compared to the risqué writing he did now, but he could never bring himself to finish it, much less publish it.
The story was a pathetic cliché, really—it was about a pair of star-crossed lovers who were destined never to be together, no matter how much they tried. Halfway through writing the damn thing, he couldn’t think of what to write after the climax—the part when the man promises his lady he’d always come back to her. Every scenario he came up with just ended up frustrating him even more. In the end, he never bothered touching the story again.
Despite them being his own creation, he thought the lovers were absolute fools, always trying to fight against the inevitable.
(And yet, he couldn’t shake off the strange, almost sad déjà vu he felt when he first wrote that manuscript.)
Saizo never wrote during rainy days. There was something about the rain he couldn’t bring himself to like.
Maybe it was the way it turned everything dreary and heavy, or maybe the way it tried to wash away everything, both the good and the bad. Either way, Saizo hated it.
He remembered having one of the worst nightmares on a rainy day in his childhood. He had been sleeping in his room, and the storm that raged outside was a particularly terrible one—so much so that the storm found its way into his dreams.
He wore the same black-clad clothing the shadows from the trees wore, and he was covered in blood. Blood that wasn’t his.
His hand held a blade that somehow found itself buried deep into a torso. Saizo tried to get a good look at who his hands had slain, but he was only met with that same, anonymous figure from before.
Slowly, they turned to face him. For the first time in all his dreams, they smiled at him.
The rain poured hard on them both and tried to wash away the blood on his hands, as if trying to erase his sins. But Saizo knew better.
(People’s sins didn’t go away that easily.)
He woke up to his sister shaking him hard. There was an uncharacteristic look of worry on her normally smug face, and he could see little Hotaru beside her, nervously fiddling with his scarf. Apparently, Hotaru had called Yuki because he heard his older brother thrashing violently in his sleep.
“It’s the village dream again, isn’t it?” Yuki asked Saizo, gripping his shoulders tightly.
Saizo said nothing to his older sister, choosing to stare at the wall behind her. Then, as if possessed by a ghost, he spoke.
“…Dango. I want dango.”
Neither Yuki nor Hotaru, for the life of them, could figure out what made their brother request for something so arbitrary and out-of-place at that point in time, but they obliged him anyway. Saizo rarely asked for anything, after all.
Since then, rainy days at the Kirigakure household were spent with dango.
“You look like a dead fish, Saizo,” Yukimura commented, pouring more sake into their glasses.
“Thank you for the appreciated, and very much unsolicited comment, dear.”
Saizo had been dragged—unwillingly, if he might add—by his lifelong friend to go out and take a breather from writing. In true Yukimura fashion, the younger man was getting redder and redder by the moment while Saizo barely took a sip from his glass.
“I’m being serious here! You seem so down in the dumps lately.” If someone normally so slow on the uptake like Yukimura could notice it, then something was definitely wrong.
“My face is always like this,” said Saizo, trying very hard to ignore his friend’s scrutinizing gaze.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m sure as hell you don’t wanna talk about it, but at least try to let yourself be a little happy, you know?”
That hit him hard.
Yukimura had backed Saizo into a corner of momentary speechlessness, and the dummy didn’t even realize it.
“What, did you steal that line from one of my books?” Saizo asked his friend teasingly, trying to cover up his sentimentality.
“N—no! Of course not!”
Saizo bit back a chuckle. It was always fun to tease Yukimura, and as strange as it sounded, seeing him so flustered felt so natural—like it ran in Saizo’s blood to mess with the younger man. He’d never admit it to anyone for as long as he lived, but Saizo saw their banter as one of the few things that made him feel at home somehow.
“Well, I’d best be off,” Saizo announced, placing some money on the bar counter.
“You’re leaving early again?”
“Duty calls and all that. By the way, red looks good on you, little lord.” Saizo gestured to his friend’s jacket.
Thankfully for him, Yukimura wasn’t completely sober, so Saizo gave him an expression akin to fondness. Hopefully, he wouldn’t remember any of this by tomorrow.
“Little…lord?”
For a moment, Yukimura was confused, but before Saizo could even see Yukimura’s expression change to recognition, Saizo was already out of the bar, a big smile on his usual poker face.
He sometimes woke up at the middle of the night, the phantom pains of his nightmares still lingering on his skin.
He’d dream of dying by the hands of the black-clad shadows that crept in the trees. Some nights, he saw the moon look down on him in pity as he fell off cliffs and rooftops. Other nights, it’d be poisoned arrows on his back, coming from the bow of a man with an equally poisoned smile.
And yet, every one of them ended with that same, mystery figure from his childhood dreams crying. Crying for him.
No one ever cried for him, and he didn’t think anyone ever would. Half of him wanted to tell them to stop wasting their tears on him—that he wasn’t worthy of their tears and he never would be. The other half, however, wanted to wipe them away and take on all their pain for himself.
“Dear, oh dear,” he’d say. “You’d be silly to waste those on me.” But he felt a wistful sort of happiness nonetheless.
In the mornings, he’d wake up, cheeks wet with the tears he could never shed for himself.
Yukimura had invited him to come all the way to Kyoto to watch one of his one judo competitions. Pretending he had nothing better to do, Saizo accepted the invitation with feigned apathy. The little lord would probably be all smiles if he saw Saizo waving at him from the audience—not that Saizo minded, of course. He needed the change of pace.
Hell, maybe Kyoto would give him the inspiration he needed.
The competition wasn’t going to be till the next day, so Saizo decided to kill time and take in the scenery for a bit. Somehow, he found himself wandering all the way to Maruyama Park. What possessed him to come to such a crowded place at the beginning of spring, he didn’t know. At the very least, the cherry blossoms looked immaculately beautiful.
He made his way through the crowd to the enormous weeping cherry tree that lay at the center of the park. The tree brought back flashes of a nostalgic something at the back of his mind, and all of a sudden, the tree from his dreams and the tree before him didn’t seem so different anymore.
He was so mesmerized by the tree that he almost didn’t notice someone about to trip in front him. Much to his own surprise, he found himself moving to catch them before thinking. He never even realized he could move as quickly as he did, and he could feel a strange muscle memory taking over his senses, screaming at him as if he were made to do this.
The stranger who had nearly fallen—a woman—looked up at her savior.
He was sure he’d never seen her before, but something about her was tugging at the back of his mind. Maybe it was her overall candid demeanor. Or the way she nervously bit her lip, anticipating a retort. Or the way her eyes seemed to shine with a sincerity he could never hope to have. Or maybe it was her sheepish expression (which, for some reason, he felt so tempted to tease).
“Sorry about that. Guess I didn’t notice where I was going.”
“Don’t worry, you’re fine.” His poker face was back on as quickly as it disappeared.
“That’s good,” she sighed. “Well, uh, could you…maybe let me go now?”
It didn’t even occur to him that she was still nestled in his arms, snuggled against his chest. He had to inwardly berate himself because holding her—a stranger he swore he never met—felt…right.
“This tree’s really one-of-a-kind, huh?” she commented, catching one of the falling petals.
“…Is that right?” Small talk wasn’t exactly his forte, but he found himself indulging her anyway.
“Yeah…there’s something about it that seems so nostalgic somehow.”
Saizo turned to look at her. There was an unspeakable sadness in her eyes that seemed to resonate within him.
“I feel like I’m supposed to be here, but I don’t know why. I just—“
A teardrop fell, then another, until her vision was completely blurred with tears.
“Oh, listen to me,” she chuckled bitterly, “Babbling on to someone I just met, and about some nonsense, too—“
“I feel the same way, little lady.”
The words slipped past his mouth without him even realizing it, but something deep in his blood, in his being, knew it wasn’t the first time he had uttered those words.
She whipped her head to face him, her confusion slowly morphing into teary-eyed enlightenment. The world around them slowed down to a pause, and all he could see was her; he saw the little lady he left behind long ago, and he saw the little lady he would always come back to, no matter what.
“You—you’re here…” she breathed. He gently wiped the tears down her cheeks—tears he knew she must have shed waiting for him over the centuries.
“I’m home, little lady.”
She smiled at him, and for the first time in a long, long time, everything was as it should be. Maybe this time, he’d finally be able to complete the half-finished story he’d kept hidden for so long.
“Welcome home, Saizo.”