Chapter Text
1635
Nothing has interested Nobunaga since Ieyasu died. It’s by no means a romantic sentiment: she’d valued him as a loyal retainer and general, but no more. His death is just one more opening in an inexorable void, everything Nobunaga knows swallowed up by it. On the day Ieyasu died, Nobunaga abandoned the streets of Kyoto for the hills, and would’ve wandered further if it weren’t for her unseen tethers.
Nothing has interested Nobunaga like this samurai spinning deadly circles beneath the trees. A thousand fractals of silver flash in her hands, reflecting the light of the sun and the snow. Her sandals wear a pattern in the frost down to the nettle-clothed earth. Her breath emerges in colorless bursts, and is eaten up by the empty sky. Nobunaga, watching hidden from behind a tree, feels her body lighten for the first time in decades. For a moment, she’s not Oda Nobunaga; she’s Oda Kippoushi, peering out from the treeline at the girls by the river, their bodies and the sparkle of the sun off the water seared into her mind.
The samurai works through another measured turn. Her eyes are the warm gold of gilded skulls and jasmine tea. She watches everything from the placement of her hands to the rise of her blade. Nobunaga, enraptured, so used to being ignored, forgets for a moment where she is.
(No, not quite. Nobunaga, a strategist, has always been mindful of the weather. She’s even more wary of snow. The truth is, Nobunaga wants to be seen.)
Bright eyes catch the outline of Nobunaga’s body, racing along it like a flame. The sword is drawn back, tight against the samurai’s shoulders, ready to strike.
“Who are you?” Even the samurai’s voice is controlled. Nobunaga recognizes the sound of a lower register being forced through. “Why are you here?”
“Hey, relax.” Nobunaga steps out of cover, palms held placatingly outward. Her katana bangs against her side, metal-tipped sheath tapping her greaves. She sees the samurai’s brows knit with confusion. Of course- the form Nobunaga’s chosen to take isn’t traditional by any means. “We’re not at war anymore.”
“You could still be an assassin, or a spy.” The samurai’s gaze locks on to Nobunaga’s hat. Nobunaga imagines, in that moment, what her eyes might look like up close. Full, the five petals of the Oda crest blossoming out from shrunken pupils. Beautiful, for so many reasons. A vision Nobunaga hasn’t seen in so long, and can barely hold together a dream of. “You’re an Oda,” she says, blade lowering slightly.
“That I am!” Nobunaga answers.
“I didn’t know they trained their daughters, too.” The samurai lets her sword arm sink back to her side, though she keeps her weapon out. Nobunaga admires her wariness. In the age that Nobunaga’s left behind, she might have made a fine retainer. “Or are you here to practice in secret like me?”
“Why would you need to hide?” Nobunaga gestures at the other woman’s garb, kimono and neatly tied hakama, a ribbon holding back her hair. “You’re obviously of the warrior class.”
“But women aren’t supposed to fight, isn’t that right?”
“That’s true,” Nobunaga laughs, genuine mirth rumbling in an undercurrent through her voice. She would know; she’d lost a brother and more to such a way of thinking. It’s of him she thinks of, and of a wife sent to kill her, and of a warlord she’d once dreaded and respected that she wishes she’d had the chance to meet on the battlefield, to see if she was truly like Nobunaga. “There are many things women shouldn’t be doing.”
“Like practicing their swordsmanship.”
“Like being so poorly dressed in the winter!” Nobunaga steps forward, shedding her coat, holding it out in a single irreverent hand. “If you’re going to be out here for so long, then take this. It’d be a shame if someone as beautiful caught your death of cold!”
“What about you?” the samurai inches closer to Nobunaga, almost as if she expects Nobunaga to spring some sort of trap. “Won’t you be cold, then?”
“Nope,” Nobunaga grins and tugs at her inner layer, a Western-style button-up shirt. “This is way warmer than it looks.”
Of course, she’s lying. Coat or not, Nobunaga would still be warm. She can’t recall a time since Honnouji that she hasn’t been warm.
“How will you get it back, then?”
“Do you come here often?” The samurai nods, accepting Nobunaga’s coat with a careful curling of her fingers. “Then the next time we meet, you can give it back to me. But if you want to keep it until spring, that’s fine, too!”
“If you’re certain.” The samurai hefts the coat in her hands, seemingly testing for something. Perhaps weight, perhaps texture. “If you want it back sooner, come by my family’s household. I’m from the Okita.”
“Okita, huh?” Nobunaga rolls the name around in her mouth, much like Okita had handled her coat. “I’ll remember that. For now, I’ll leave you to your training. You looked like you were pretty into it.”
Okita sheathes her katana, nodding. She threads her arms into Nobunaga’s coat, one at a time, pausing as it settles over her. Then, she doesn’t move. Nobunaga doesn’t either, wondering if the surge of her fire runs through the clothes that hung from her body as much as her blood. Okita’s cheeks fill with pink, and she fumbles with the buttons. The upturned collar only provides so much protection from Nobunaga’s stare. She doesn’t tell Nobunaga to leave, she doesn’t draw her weapon. Uncertain fingers thread each button through its opposite hole. When she’s done is when Nobunaga turns to leave, the cadence of her feet meeting the snowy hillside matching the rapid thumping of her heart. She wonders if Okita’s heart might sound the same as hers. She wonders, if it does, whether it’s sounded that way since Nobunaga stumbled upon her, and what it might mean if it hasn’t.
1636
When the weather doesn’t promise storms, Okita stays in the hills until twilight, taking advantage of all the sunlight she can get. Nobunaga doesn’t mind this. Okita doesn’t know that she has no home to return to. Okita doesn’t know that this is Nobunaga’s home, all of Kyoto is, and that her offers to accompany Okita home at night are just rare trips into the city, liveliness taken in measured breaths to remind Nobunaga of where and who she is.
Nobunaga sits on a tree stump, watching Okita practice. They spar, sometimes, but not today. Okita insists on reviewing her form, and Nobunaga is content to linger. She picks at the frost on the ground and makes shapes of the snow with her hands, but what Okita doesn’t know (what Nobunaga thinks she doesn’t know) is that she’s always watching. She loves the blur of sunlight in Okita’s hair. She loves the thrill of sidelong glances turning, just barely, into open stares that can hardly pass for impartial observation. She loves the way Okita’s hair falls loose of the ribbon holding it up with the sway of her body and the wind rattling bare branches.
When Okita is done, she sheathes her katana and wipes her sweat with the backs of her bracers. She hands Nobunaga’s coat back, and with a nod, they’re descending down the hillside. Sometimes they talk, but sometimes, there’s rare moments of perfect quiet, their footsteps crunching into freshly fallen snow. In these times, Nobunaga wonders why they walk so close together. Shoulder to shoulder, they could be breathing the same air. If the night catches them before they’re fully back to the rivers, Okita’s hand finds Nobunaga’s pocket, but just one. More would be an imposition. More would treading dangerous ground.
Usually, if they haven’t begun talking already, they’ll find some thread of conversation on the bridges approaching the city. Something about the lights on the river, or Okita’s form, or if Nobunaga will be fine walking home by herself. (She will be, she always reassures Okita. At some point, Nobunaga had stopped wondering whether Okita was asking out of courtesy.)
They part at the corner closest to Okita’s house with nothing more than a nod and a final meeting of eyes. Every time, Nobunaga asks herself what Okita might see. Her eyes are red, the color of fire and festivals. Even in the height of the summer heat, Nobunaga’s never changed her coat for anything else, but she’s seen Okita without her hakama. That’s what she thinks of when she sees Okita train; Okita twisting under her, the fabric of her kimono parted just enough for Nobunaga to see her gleaming skin, pale like the sunrise catching the tops of snow-capped hills.
Nobunaga knows she shouldn’t be thinking of Okita in such a way, but it can’t be helped. Spirit or not, she was mortal, once; she’s still human at heart. She dreams of Okita’s lips, her hands, of teeth disrupting the always-even passage of Okita’s breath. She keeps those thoughts to herself, but she can’t keep them from her eyes.
If Okita ever sees anything, if she knows, she never lets on that she does. She parts from Nobunaga with a formal bow and a smile. Nobunaga sees her kimono’s long sleeves slide forward and drape over her hands, and answers Okita with a fond smile of her own. Nobunaga doesn’t see Okita’s hands shaking beneath the fabric, the smile collapsing behind Nobunaga’s back, the full moon reflected in dark pupils drawn wide to take in Nobunaga’s departing shadow.
1637
The wind shifts, and neither Okita nor Nobunaga pay any notice until sleet is bearing down on them from above, pelting Nobunaga’s coat as she holds it out over both their shoulders. Okita guards her face with one arm, and Nobunaga leads her by the other. Familiar paths turn treacherous under the darkness of storm clouds and blinding curtains of ice.
Through the blizzard and the trees, Okita can’t be sure if her eyes are playing tricks on her. Nobunaga’s hand is firm in hers, warm and tangible, not like the inconsistent haze of grey shifting constantly in front of her. It’s the storm, it has to be, something like snow-blindness for blizzards.
But when they make it down to the stone paths, when there’s enough clear air to make out more than an outline, Nobunaga is still indistinct. She’s there, red cape and black uniform, but undefined. It’s as if the gods have smeared the night with another inky brushstroke, blotting Nobunaga into the storm.
Nobunaga gets pulled to a stop under a tree with broad branches. Okita’s hands clench tight around her shoulders; her eyes burn with the light of the unseen sun, and Nobunaga is certain she knows.
But what Okita says instead is, “Oda, what’s happening?”
“Ah, well-” It isn’t like Nobunaga to hesitate, but how does one begin to explain this? You don’t, Nobunaga realizes, you just have to do it. She supposes she’ll start with her name, if only so she might hear Okita speak it into the storm once before she goes. “What if I told you that Oda Nobunaga never really died?”
“So?” Okita says. Living in Kyoto, you hear all sorts of stories about the city. One of them goes like this: on the night when Honnouji burned, they never found Nobunaga’s body. Supposedly, Nobunaga escaped. Supposedly, Nobunaga will return one day to Japan, bringing fire and death. Or, that’s how the stories go. If anyone could’ve found a way to escape the grasp of death, it would be the Demon King.
“What if I told you you’re looking at her?” Nobunaga’s smile flashes beneath the flurries, her grin seemingly the only solid part of her.
Okita doesn’t move. Tellingly, she doesn’t move her hands off Nobunaga, either. “You’re Nobunaga?” she repeats, and Nobunaga’s body comes alive like she’s being remade in Honnouji all over again. The way Okita says her name is nothing like Nobunaga would’ve thought. She’d projected a little too much of her time into her imagining; Okita treats her name as any other, wavering between curiosity and doubt. It’s spoken into and swept up by the howling storm, but the echoes of it find refuge in Nobunaga’s chest. There’s no reverence, but there’s no fear, either, and Nobunaga can see Okita trying to weigh out the truth of Nobunaga’s words, as if it’s something so easily measured. “How?”
“The truth is, I died in Honnouji. It got so hot that I was burned up, down to the very bones. But you can’t burn away a soul, can you?” Nobunaga laughs, as loud and wild as the wind whipping through her hair. “But even though it couldn’t be helped, I wasn’t really happy with how I died, so I came back as a spirit of the fire that killed me.”
“And now you’re stuck like this.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No, not quite.” Nobunaga spreads her arms out wide on either side of her. The wind whips cyclones of snow and air beneath them; with her cloak flapping behind her, she could be a firebird rising up from the forest floor, she could be smoke and cinders spiraling skyward into a violent sky. “Now I get to see the results of what I’ve done. I get to live until whatever’s keeping me here is taken care of. I like it, personally.”
“And what would it take for you to move on?” Okita asks. “Don’t tell me you need someone to light Honnouji on fire again.”
“Oh, you think that might be it?” Nobunaga says. “If I ever get bored of living like this, perhaps I’ll give it a try.”
“No wonder you’ve always tagged along with me ever since that first time.” Okita laughs, a shakiness to her voice audible even with the surrounding clatter of branches and the distant groaning of deadwood. “I’m the most interesting thing to happen to you in- how long? Fifty years?”
“Something like that,” agrees Nobunaga. “But I wouldn’t say that’s the only reason.”
In life, Oda Nobunaga was hardly open with her feelings; in death, nothing’s changed. This is the most directly she’ll ever speak to Okita regarding them; anything more would be far too forward, and any less an act of cowardice. It reminds Nobunaga of a Noh play in some ways, only in those the spirit would be someone close from Okita’s past, perhaps a sibling or a lover. Nobunaga had never once considered that, if Okita might already have someone.
Okita still doesn’t let go of Nobunaga’s shoulders. She might be afraid to, Nobunaga realizes. She might think that the moment she does, Nobunaga will twist into a thousand spiraling snowflakes and vanish into the night.
The truth is, Okita had been afraid for an entirely different reason. Her life has been one of irregularity: she steals away into the woods to practice with a sword she shouldn’t touch; she has traded prospects of marriage and romance for Nobunaga’s chatty company and the crispness of the hills. The idea of a storm-wracked sky opening up to take Nobunaga from her is not entirely out of the question.
“So?” Nobunaga prompts Okita. Becoming a spirit has changed nothing. She’s still impatient; she’s still the Demon King. This is why she speaks, to remind Okita of that fact. “Now you know who I am. Does that scare you, Okita?”
Nobunaga leers up at Okita and finds no such fear in her eyes. “You could never scare me,” Okita murmurs.
“What a bold thing to say.” Nobunaga stands on her tiptoes, bringing herself up to Okita’s eye level. Okita holds her gaze steady, hardly blinking. With the swell of the storm around them, she might not even be breathing. “Is there a reason you find yourself so attached to the Demon King?”
“Do I need one?” Okita is so close. Nobunaga can make out the details of the ice crystals nesting in her bangs, their edges slowly crumbling away. A fleeting current of air tousles her bangs, and Nobunaga feels something sputter inside her, a fluttering of flame or a missed heartbeat.
Okita’s far too close. Yes, Nobunaga wants to say. You need a reason, or a love of bloody battles, or a death wish to be this close to the Demon King. You need a reason to remind you why you’re here when, as inevitable as the shifting of the tides, you’re burned by her fire.
“Do you?” Nobunaga counters. She won’t give Okita a direct answer. Her time has passed; the decisions to be made in this world should be made by the living.
“I already have one.” Okita’s fingers tighten around her shoulders. The wind gusts, and Nobunaga doesn’t know if it’s a reflection she sees, or if a bit of herself really dances behind Okita’s eyes. It might not be wrong to think that Okita’s been lonely, too. Only a certain kind of person comes up to the hills to practice bladework, woman or not.
“Will you tell me?” Nobunaga leans in, and that’s the closest she dares to come. The rest must be Okita. Nobunaga has had her time; she remembers the countless pleasures of the flesh, everything a body could crave. These memories are what she offers to Okita. She is a spirit, experience incarnate, and it would only be fitting that here, at Kyoto’s outer bounds, is where she gives it all to Okita.
If Okita so chooses.
Okita glances away. There’s little to consider. Their surroundings are all bare bark and silver-studded darkness. What she’s looking at is a reprieve from the intense red of Nobunaga’s eyes. What she can’t see is how red she is herself, high along her cheekbones and down her neck, a flush that might be born of the storm as much as anything else.
When she looks back, it’s to move in. Her numbed hands fumble clumsily in the lapels of Nobunaga’s coat. She doesn’t know what to do, Nobunaga realizes. All of Okita’s focus has been put into the sword, her escape, so much that she’d never practiced much of anything else.
A pair of trembling lips ghosts over Nobunaga’s, and that’s enough. Nobunaga closes the distance between them with a quick step, sweeping Okita up into her arms. Just briefly, she feels the chill lingering on Okita’s skin. Nobunaga herself doesn’t feel the cold, but it finds her here, the sharp sting of winter cutting through her like a blade. Then it’s gone, chased away by Honnouji’s fires and the mellow heat of Okita’s lips. Snow whirls into the gaps between their mouths and melts into sweet nothingness. Nobunaga’s hand glides along Okita’s hair. It’s softer than she imagined it to be, and damp with melted snow.
Okita, though taller, shudders under Nobunaga. Maybe it’s different for her, a human kissing a spirit. The Noh plays never mention it- only what it’s like to feel, how one moves on. As expressive as those masks are, they can never know the thrill of hot breath thrumming over reddened cheeks or the pounding coursing through her like blood rushing in her veins.
They shouldn’t stay still for much longer. Nobunaga can only do so much to ward off the cold, and the lights of the city aren’t far, already peeking like stars through the tangle of trees. But here, before they’ve crossed the bridge back to Kyoto, it seems as though anything could happen. This is a forest where a spirit can find and fall for a human, so why not something more?
Nobunaga pushes gently, and Okita finds her back resting against a tall, imposing tree. Larger than life, not like the Demon King. Not like Nobunaga, who presses herself so tightly against Okita that it feels like Okita’s own heart might tear itself from her chest with how frantically it beats against Nobunaga’s. Nobunaga closes her eyes and imagines not just breathing into Okita, but sinking into her, becoming a part of her just as she is a part of Kyoto. She cranes her head into the side of Okita’s neck, drinking in her honeyed scent, and thinks that perhaps this existence of hers might not be such a curse after all.
There are soldiers mustering outside Kyoto’s main gate, and Okita arrives at the foot of the hills in full armor. With her helmet and chestplate in place, there’s no way to distinguish Okita from the hundreds of other samurai gathering to march south to Shimabara. Nobunaga will always know it’s Okita, though. She knows Okita by the sunlight caught and woven into her hair and the hues of changing leaves tucked into her eyes.
“The shogun’s calling us to go subdue a rebellion,” Okita says to her. “Some peasants who’ve taken a liking to that strange Western religion. I’ll be back before summer.”
“Time for all your practice to pay off, huh?” Nobunaga tugs at the face guard covering Okita’s mouth, sliding it neatly beneath her chin. “You’d better hurry back, you hear me? I can forgive you if you miss New Year’s, but not if you ditch me to watch the cherry blossoms myself.”
“I’ll come home as soon as I can, okay?” Okita spreads her arms, staggering back as Nobunaga thumps against her chestplate. It’ll never cease to be amusing to them both, how the most feared warlord in all of Japan can fit so snugly into such a delicate embrace. A tilt of Nobunaga’s chin brings their lips together.
They kiss ardently, anxiously. They kiss until the sun is a swimming haze in the sky and Okita’s cheeks are red enough that not even her faceplate can hide all of it.
Nobunaga says to her, “Be careful.” She puts Okita’s faceplate back up and pulls away with the ease of a thousand partings. “I’ll be expecting you.”
“Try not to set the city on fire while I’m gone?”
“I won’t,” Nobunaga laughs. “I promise!”
She stands on the far side of the river and waves until Okita has crossed the bridge. She moves out onto the creaking wood and stares at the streets until she can no longer tell which one Okita had disappeared down.
What Okita could never know is that this parting is a first for Nobunaga, too. Her farewells have always been, I’ll meet you on the battlefield; Don’t come back until you’ve won for me. Her retainers were capable, and Okita equally so, but their absences didn’t leave her with an ache in her chest that not even her fire can reach.
Not until long after Okita is gone does it finally click: it’s not the Demon King who Okita had fallen for. It’s not the Demon King who longs for Okita’s return, but Oda Nobunaga.
1638
The hills are coated in silver, the roads paved a with perfect grey mirror of the shifting clouds above. A thousand or more men march home to Kyoto in a serpentine column stretching far beyond what Nobunaga can see from her vantage point. So many men returning home to wives and families, and one woman hidden among them.
Nobunaga drops clumsily from her perch in the treetops and runs for the bridges.
The bodies of the living line the streets. The bodies of the dead travel down between their neat rows in wooden boxes, carried by those closest to them. They might be childhood friends, or secret lovers, or simply the closest man on the field to see the encoffined die.
Atop the coffins, tied in place, are swords. There will be empty boxes; there will be none without a sword. It’s the closest to a condolence that will ever be spoken of a samurai. There is no dishonor in a death on the battlefield, but those deaths leave gaps that can be filled, and never truly mended. Nobunaga knows of this from her years of endless fighting and so many of her men cut down in battle. She wonders if it might have looked like this in the province of Kai after she was done with Nagashino. She herself wouldn’t know: her father had been cremated, and as if fate itself had written her death, she’d been burned to ashes and thrown carelessly over Kyoto by the summer winds.
Nobunaga scrambles up the support struts of a nearby building, squinting out over the marching samurai. She’ll be able to see better from here, and more easily seen. That’s what she wants- for Okita to notice her, and should someone else spot her first, Nobunaga can easily lose them in the streets she’s come to know so well. She’ll be another youkai tale murmured around drinks and flickering fires on nights like these, when the cold fingers of winter grip a man’s heart tightly enough to make him believe in the unthinkable.
A flash of red through a gap in the marchers draws Nobunaga’s eye. Her hands still grip tight around the wooden column, but her stomach feels as though it’s plummeted those ten feet down, knocked the wind out of her.
She would know the red of Okita’s scabbard anywhere. She’s seen it dance at Okita’s side through storms of petals and ice, of lightning and crisp leaves. She’s seen it catch the rising and the setting sun, gleaming alongside Okita’s smile and the whisper of the wind in her hair.
The samurai carrying Okita’s box hold it higher than the others. It’s not intentional; they might not even realize that they’re doing it. It’s simply lighter, though whether it means the box is empty, Nobunaga can’t know. What she’s sure of: that what she’d joked about in life has followed her beyond that; the fate of those who get too close to the Demon King.
Nobunaga wrests her eyes away, the world spinning around her. Don’t think of pale skin and bloodied lips. Don’t think of eyes covered by the lifeless sheen of hammered gold with no firelight dancing in it. Think of Okita as she lived, of cherry blossoms caught on her ribbon. Remember the moonlight on her lips, the perfect warmth of her mouth, the shiver of her hakama as Nobunaga’s hand slips beneath it.
Nobunaga sees the samurai break away from the formation, turning down a side path. They’re from the same district, Nobunaga realizes. That’s how they know where to go, even if they don’t know who they’re bringing that box to.
(As much as she wishes to, Nobunaga could never be the one it was meant for. Spirits are the ones who should be mourned for, not the ones mourning the dead.)
Nobunaga does not need to see where the box will go. She knows it will travel up to a house whose gates she will never enter. She will cross the bridges and ascend into the snow-capped hills, find the highest place she can and sit there, neither her proximity to the open sky nor the title of Demon King of the Sixth Heaven bringing her any closer to Okita. She will linger there long after the snow is melted and cherry blossoms sweep the valley, and will not descend until the next year’s storms blanket the hillsides with the quiet of the grave, caught up to Nobunaga at last.