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The last of Sara’s troops disappear on the horizon, retreating to a hill far in the distance. The encampment for General Kojou’s forces lays some miles beyond—it did when Kazuha was here last, at least, but the landscape here has changed and the climate has worsened. He does not trust his memory to serve him as well as he would like, and figures that it is time to stop hoping to ever see Inazuma return to what it was.
The better part of a year has passed since he was last here. The thunder is deeper than he thought possible, and the lightning strikes so fierce and so often that he imagines the sky will be scarred by the time the Shogun’s rule is dismantled. The waves ride higher on the shorelines; Baal’s merciless storms whip the sea into a frenzy, the crests mounting ever upwards, encroaching the already-slim and endangered shores of Nazuchi. How long before this beach is entirely lost to the water?
It’s not a matter he can afford to concern himself with quite yet. More pressing topics are on the table for discussion; Kazuha quietly listens as Kokomi and Beidou reach an agreement for an extended contract of mercenary aid from the Crux. Gorou, satisfied with the help, leaves with Lumine to assess injuries among the surviving soldiers. There are a few more who will die—the smell of blood is too strong for a happy outcome—but Kazuha says nothing. People know when they are facing their own mortality; people know when they are laying in their deathbed.
At the very least, this is a beautiful place to die. The fog has lifted enough to see the line of the horizon. One would only need to stare down the miles and miles of sea to remember that the rest of the world does not live in eternal storm, and they might recall that there was a time when Inazuma too had its fair share of sunlight.
Kazuha retreats some dozens of yards down the shoreline. The Resistance was in desperate need of this victory, so much so that it only allows them to catch their breath, now. If they did not win this, the Resistance would have likely met its end. Relative to the war, this victory looks less like winning and more like holding on.
He crouches down, lightly pinching the soft petals of a dendrobium beneath his fingers. This, too, will be an issue come the end of this war. These flowers will overrun the ecosystem. Enough blood will be shed to cover every surface of this nation with their blooms.
“Do you need time to yourself?”
“General Gorou,” Kazuha says, looking over his shoulder. “There’s a lot to catch up on.”
“Don’t call me that,” Gorou asks, stepping back to give Kazuha the space to stand again. “Not when we’re alone, anyways.”
“Gorou,” he says, trying again, “my old friend.”
“That’s better.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Just conversation.”
The remains of a wrecked ship lies a short distance away. With a small nod of his head, Kazuha proposes a walk in that direction. Whatever conversation Gorou seeks, Kazuha does not know how to start—he and Gorou were close, once, in a way Kazuha does not know how to explain or describe. Are we still, or have miles of waves and these yawning months estranged us? When he left Inazuma all those months ago, he could only think of who he would one day return to; he pondered how many graves he would have to visit, and how many relationships would be wilted.
“I told you that the Resistance would always have your back,” Gorou says. So it is this kind of conversation, then, Kazuha thinks. The hard kind. “You didn’t need to run. We would have protected you.”
“You would have died for me. By the time the Shogun herself set her sights on me…” How to properly convey the severity of his actions, he wonders? The bounty on his head once he fled the scene of Tomo’s slaughter was impossibly, unfathomably high, so large and promising of luxury that Kazuha does not doubt the sort of violence it could coax a person to enact. “I can’t let anyone wager their life to save mine. Surely harboring me in the Resistance camp would come to such a moment where one might consider their life lesser than mine, and fall on a blade meant for myself.”
“Then you could have said something,” Gorou says. “You left without a word. You fell asleep with us, but we woke without you, and I was devastated. You were—you are my truest friend, and I loved you in a way I’ve never loved anyone else, and you left without a goodbye. I didn’t know what happened, so I mourned you, Kazuha. I only half-believed you were not a ghost today on the battlefield.”
Everything Gorou tells him, he knows. He knew . And it’s on the verge of eating him alive, but he can’t afford to feed the guilt or let it fester.
As soon as the light left Tomo’s Vision, Kazuha saw his fate split into two horrible paths. One path was not any less painful than the other, only different, and Kazuha has always let his heart guide him, blind as it may be, because it is a well-intentioned thing. He wants to be nothing if not good-willed, so when a path forward seemed to promise the death of the people he held dear, he could not walk it, no matter what path that forced him on instead.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I never thought myself a selfish person,” Kazuha says quietly, feeling so ashamed that he can’t look at Gorou even though he’d like to. “Perhaps I’m not, even after my choice to leave that night—but avoiding my goodbye to you was selfish. It was easier for me to think that by not saying farewell, I’d be allowed to return to you.”
He knows he is talking circles and it’s like he’s learned nothing, because he can see this conversation ending in a way he does not like, and he frets reaching such an end. Bitter, wasted, too melancholy, too entrenched. He can see this conversation being their farewell, avoidable if Kazuha had only said goodbye that long-ago evening. And of course, there are other possible conclusions—sweeter and sofer ones, dream-like, the foundation of his many reveries—but he does not expect Gorou to allow any of them. If Gorou feels too betrayed to love him any longer, Kazuha will not blame him.
“I regret not saying goodbye, but if running from you in a way that did not let you follow me at all helped you stay alive, I would choose it again and again. Even if my leaving has started the end of us, I would do it again,” Kazuha says. They reach the wreckage; he cuts to the chase. The sky opens, rain coming down in sheets. “Because the Resistance needs you alive more than it needs the two of us happy.”
More than it needs the two of us in love.
Wordlessly, the two of them climb into the wreckage to shelter from the rain; they haul themselves onto the splintered floor of the lower-deck and crawl back as far as they can, into the shadows, where the downpour cannot reach them. They settle close to one another, shoulders pressed into each other as they lean against the wall.
“Most nights, I dream about a version of us that is not framed by war,” Kazuha admits. Gorou’s tail rests between them, the tip of it laying on Kazuha’s thigh. Kazuha reaches out and strokes the tawny fur. “Our circumstance has ruined us, hasn’t it?”
“The war, you mean?” Gorou asks. Despite the yearning ache between them, his tail thumps, trembling in a soft and suppressed wag. “Horrible as it is, the war led me to you. And it led you back to me, didn’t it?”
“I returned for a lot of reasons. I returned because I was meant to. Everything in nature has a purpose, and has something it must do—and fighting this war is mine.”
Kazuha waits a moment before listing out his remaining reasons. He has returned because he could not live his life knowing he gave up, or he would live out his years in despair if he did not know what had happened to his friends; he returned because he can smell rainwater purified of static charge on some far, far away cloudbank; and he returned because Tomo would’ve died in vain if he didn’t. He returned because he missed his favorite basking rock, and he likes the glow of the Chinju Forest.
There is one final, delicate reason. He considers not saying it—but isn’t not saying what he should have said the reason why he’s having this conversation?
“I returned because of you, too; yes.” He folds his hands in his lap, pinching the unraveling end of the gauze on his hand: a nervous tick, a betrayal of the neutral expression he keeps so easily. “All my decisions are based on war, but… By choosing to fight the war, I also got to choose you, and us.”
His courage falls flat where intimacy lies, so he eyes Gorou’s tail without touching it again, thinks to hold Gorou’s hand without actually acting upon it, wishes to crawl into Gorou’s lap without indulging it. He’s used to this: him and Gorou being a fantasy, an imagined sequence.
“But I’ve conditioned myself to think that choosing us means losing something else. Something as big as the war,” he murmurs, leaning his head against the wall and closing his eyes. “Though I had you once, somehow, and that is enough.”
“How do you want me?” Gorou asks, as direct in conversation as he is in combat.
As adept with his emotions as Kazuha is, he feels like he’s fumbling with his heart in his hands, now. Why? What shame is there in the sun loving another star instead of the moon? Is it even shame he feels, or just fear?
He never wants to be someone who fears love, though. Love is behind everything he’s done and everything he’s tried to do, and his is trying to fix this. There is something between him and Gorou that is wilted but not in a state of irreversible decline; spring blooms from the dead of winter, so long as there are seeds.
And they had planted something, right? For the months before Kazuha was too much of a wanted man, they had tended to that seed and nurtured it, just enough so that it grew roots to endure the hardship it now has. Are they not ardent enough to help it blossom, now? Is it such a bad or fearful thing to so much as try?
“If being the closest of friends is what you’d like, you can have that—but I have always had affections for you,” Kazuha says, opening his eyes to stare out from the broken hull of the ship and gaze upon the bruised sky beyond. This should feel like an admission, but it doesn’t. Gorou surely knows why he once caught Kazuha staring at him so often, or why Kazuha stood closer to him than anyone else. This is only putting words to a truth that has been witnessed a thousand times before.
He has seen enough storms for several lifetimes so he turns his head to look at Gorou in the brief illuminations of lightning. He’s just as Kazuha remembered—cherub-cheeked and sky-eyed and earnest. He is gentle, still. Alive, with light in his eyes even after everything, and Kazuha can only think to stare because Gorou is something of a miracle, some impossible joy that lingers in morning sunlight and in the quiet after thunder.
“I only need you to know, should the coming days grow darker.”
“Thank you.”
“We don’t need to do anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“We don’t have to be anything,” Kazuha says. “If our emotions misalign—”
“They don’t.”
“—or if you don’t want the distraction of romance in a war; if you don’t want us to be a liability.” It’s a miserable thing to say, especially as Kazuha’s gaze drops from Gorou’s eyes to his parted lips. It’s hard to let Gorou say no to this, but it’s only fair. We’ll end poorly, anyways, won’t we? Again, and again, they won’t be allowed to prioritize themselves—there is a war outside of this, a world outside of them, and thus, there are consequences for selfish choices. “Sometimes flowers aren’t meant to bloom in their first season.”
“And if I request otherwise? If I ask you to love me how you’d like?”
“I’ll do what you ask of me. I’ll be your friend, or your lover, or your soldier. You just have to tell me.”
“I want you to be all three,” Gorou breathes, and Kazuha can hear his heart.
Kazuha cannot say with certainty that death is what awaits them, but he has come to expect this. As he looks at Gorou, moving slowly—as if unsure—to straddle his thighs, he thinks that anticipating his end makes this easier. If this is the only moment of sweetness that he and Gorou are allowed, he will take it; if this is all the tenderness that the world has reserved for them, he will not complain.
There is a place for us, he thinks, kissing Gorou softly as a haiku weaves itself together, where we are as we once were, in the grave of love.
If the war deals only cruelty to them from here on out, so be it.
Men are buried side-by-side every day.