Chapter Text
His earliest memory was of holding his brother Hideaki on the day of his birth.
In his mind’s eye he could clearly see their father with a protective hand braced under Hideaki’s neck to support him while Tommy peered down at his brother’s wrinkled face. His older brother Masaru had been standing at his shoulder fussing with Hideaki’s blanket because he seemed too delicate to touch outright.
Yasuo, the oldest, had been with their mother, stood to her right with a hand on the high back of her chair. Both their spines had seemed hewn out of iron, then and always.
Even then, Tommy knew he wanted to be like them more than he wanted to be whimsical and sweet like their father. He had tried to stand taller, had tried to have firmer roots growing through the bottoms of his feet. To emulate them.
Hideaki yawned then, powerfully enough that his whole body seemed to register it as a sneeze. His tiny arms flailed free of their shroud, and Masaru had caught his tiny waving fist with two fingers. It was the most careful Tommy could ever remember seeing him.
“He’s strong!” he’d said, waving his hand so Hideaki waved with him.
Later, when it was only the boys left alone in the nursery with their slumbering baby brother, Yasuo said, “I remember when you two were this big. I was so afraid I would accidentally hurt you.”
“Did we sleep all the time, too?” Masaru asked, spying through the bars on Hideaki’s crib.
“All the time,” Yasuo confirmed. “Fat sleepy babies.”
“Fat!” Masaru squawked, forgetting to be quiet. He slapped little hands over his own mouth. “Oops.”
Baby Hideaki didn’t fuss. His mouth worked aimlessly in sleep, chasing words in his dreams that he wouldn’t be able to tell them for years to come.
Yasuo put his hand in Tommy’s hair so he would look the long way up at him. “What do you think, Tomi-bō?”
He pointed at Hideaki’s pinched face, twitching after dreams they couldn’t see. “He looks like a monkey.”
Hideaki did wake then, but he didn’t cry. He merely blinked his big eyes up at Yasuo, seemingly fascinated by their brother’s booming laugh.
—
Yasuo learned how to hold them without breaking their bones at twelve, and fittingly, Tommy was in the twelfth year of his own life when he repaid him that kindness. It was a hardship he shared with Masaru and their mother, carrying the bones of their father, Yasuo, and his wife from the ashes into funereal urns.
Feet first, then torsos, then skulls so they wouldn’t be buried upside down. Their femurs were the biggest pieces, the most recognizable, and Tommy never forgot the weight of them. Never forgot how it was the greatest respect he could pay to those he loved most in the world, to care for them beyond the moment that they could care for themselves.
And so they’d buried their smiling, winsome father, their serious, noble-hearted brother, and Yasuo’s young wife. Gone too soon, too abruptly. All three of them with more yet they might have seen and done.
Together with them, they buried an unborn child, and Tommy knew from speaking with her that Mieko longed for a girl to spoil. The pain of that life, so wished after, snuffed out before it could even begin, turned like a screw in his throat.
He loved Mieko dearly, owing both to the content of her character and the simple fact that he had always wanted a sister.
She was kind and treated Tommy like she would an adult, barring her habit of ruffling his hair, and she could beat anyone, even Kenta, at logic and puzzle games. She would have made a wonderful mother.
In the wake of their passing, Tommy devoted himself to his studies.
He learned all that he could, read every text at his disposal, fought harder, and practiced his language skills at every opportunity. Not just English, but German, passable Spanish and Italian, and a variant of Sign Language used in America.
He was committed to honing his skills, but he didn’t think he would need them for years to come. There was still his mother after Grandmother, and following her, it would be Masaru’s responsibility.
There was still time, he had thought. Always, he thought he would have more time.
—
Hard Master flipped Masaru hard onto his back, to a smattering of laughter from the onlookers watching and far more enthusiastic cheering from Hideaki.
Undeterred, Masaru charged again, only to be caught and vaulted back onto the mats. For all his bluster, Masaru wouldn’t give up. He wheeled up onto his feet, already listing sideways when he charged Hard Master for another doomed attempt.
He was met with Hard Master’s palm smacking him in the center of his forehead, holding him in place while he swung feebly.
Hideaki crowed laughing, his own bumps and bruises momentarily forgotten. Tommy had soreness of his own to contend with, but he couldn’t stop himself from laughing either. Masaru shouted in wordless frustration. He stopped swinging wildly with his arms, but Hard Master was still holding him by the top of his head.
Balefully, Masaru yelled, “Hard Master!”
“You have the use of more than just your hands, Masaru-san,” he said calmly.
Masaru deflated, beet red and visibly enraged. He jumped into the hand cradling his skull, wrapping his legs around Hard Master’s arm to force him to either loosen his hold or let himself be vaulted over with the momentum. Hard Master picked the latter, but Masaru wasn’t permitted to celebrate it as a victory as he was promptly flattened and subdued.
It seemed a perfunctory and rudimentary thing for Hard Master to nudge his heel just under Masaru’s chin. Tommy could see there was no great pressure to it, or Masaru would have tapped out immediately.
Instead, he continued to steam and swear.
Hard Master still had his hand on Masaru’s head and ruffled his hair. Not even winded, he said, “That was good, but not what I meant.”
Masaru flailed, a fly caught on sticky paper. Hard Master wouldn’t budge.
“It’s not a hard lesson to learn,” Hideaki muttered, careful not to be overhead. “What’s the big deal? Humility’s the easy part.”
“Tell that to your pig-headed brother,” Tommy scoffed.
“Shut up, both of you!” Masaru growled, straining.
“Masaru-san,” Hard Master chided. “You know how to get out of this.”
“Fuck you!”
“Ooh,” Hideaki said, hushed and surprised.
Tommy was surprised, too. But more than that, he was offended. He stood to his feet and bowed his head. “Venerated Hard Master, please accept my apology on my brother’s behalf. He is an imbecile.”
“I’m next in line to inherit!” Masaru shrieked. “Before you!”
Grinding his teeth, Tommy said, “Hard Master, I meekly request that you turn this lesson over to me.”
Hard Master shrugged, patted Masaru on the head, and uncoiled from the hold. “Go easy on him.”
“Yeah, Tomi-san, go easy,” Masaru mocked, still too angry to separate his embarrassment from his temper.
Tommy helped him to his feet, and with their hands still locked together, met his brother’s eyes evenly. He told him, “Only a powerless man feels the need to raise his fists and his voice,” and hooked his foot behind Masaru’s ankle to drop him hard on his ass. Rather than him fall, as he wanted, he held his brother fast by the hand, “when he should raise his words instead.”
Masaru glowered. He looked mollified, for him.
“Apologize.”
He held his ire for the span of a few deep breaths he made forced himself to take and mumbled, “Sorry.”
Tommy didn’t release him.
Groaning, Masaru said, “Forgive me, Hard Master. I lost my temper.”
“No harm done,” he replied, aloof, not appearing to notice any such grievance had occurred.
Tommy felt it all the more keenly for his blandly unassuming expression. Masaru yanked his hand away and stalked off without waiting to be dismissed. Tommy’s jaw ached from clenching it so tightly.
“He will grow out of it,” Hard Master said, looking critically at Hideaki’s tentative high five before thawing and slapping his hand. “Well done today, Hideaki-san, but you should not gloat when something that is easy for you proves to be difficult for someone else. It is ungenerous.”
Suitably chastened, he said, “Oh, okay. Sorry, Hard Master.”
“Mmhmm.” He cracked a smile and cuffed Hideaki’s ear. “All right, dismissed. Go.”
Hideaki didn’t waste any time at all. He dashed off in a seemingly random direction, full of energy still in spite of their long hours spent training. Tommy felt a rush of fondness for his brother’s exuberance. Hard Master saw that fondness on his face.
“He has been making considerable progress. You are right to be proud of him.” Hard Master clapped him on the arm, a small smile on his face. He must have seen the slight faltering in Tommy’s expression because he squeezed Tommy’s shoulder. “Masaru-san is quick to anger and embarrasses easily. This is a volatile combination for our purposes, but he will learn in time to temper himself.”
“Still, he should not speak to anyone the way he spoke to you. I am sorry.”
“And I am telling you there’s been no harm done. Not to me.”
Tommy groaned inwardly at the unspoken implication. He knew his brother would be heated for a while yet and didn’t want to be the next recipient of his rage.
Hard Master noticed that, too, and looked sympathetic, in that jocular way of his. “Go easy on him.”
—
He found Masaru high up in a sprawling, moss-covered fir tree. Tommy placed his hand on the wide trunk and called out to him, “May I come up?”
Masaru didn’t answer, the silence decidedly sullen. Tommy climbed up and picked a sturdy branch at level with Masaru, about a meter between them. They sat in silence for a long time, overseeing their quiet home from atop a green fortress. Even the birds were placid this time of day. They were alone with the leaves rustling in the cool springtime breeze. The sunlight through the trees was a soft peony yellow.
“I remember when Yasuo brought us up here to watch the storms roll in from the West.”
“Hideaki was a baby still,” Masaru said, already looking out in that direction. “Yasuo-san was sitting here. You and I were sitting there.”
He pointed, and the memory filled Tommy’s mind. Yasuo had hoisted them up onto a higher branch so they could have the better view. Tommy scratched his head, abruptly itchy at what he remembered next.
“You put a beetle in my hair.”
“Musashi,” he said somberly of the kuwagata mushi. “He was a good beetle.”
Tommy shook his head, scowling involuntarily. “I fell from this tree, and you are thinking of a beetle.”
Masaru snorted. “You caught yourself!” he said, and his gaze drifted into the middle distance. He folded his arms tightly in front of his chest, mumbling, “Is Hard Master very angry?”
“Have you ever known him to get angry?”
“No… doesn’t it ever get on your nerves? Nothing bothers him. He’s so calm all the time. You could push him off a building and he wouldn’t react except to catch himself at the last moment.”
“Were you hoping to get a rise out of him?” Tommy asked carefully.
“No! I don’t know. I wasn’t hoping for anything. I just hate it. What do I give a fuck about propriety—”
“Masaru-san,” Tommy complained.
“What do I care about propriety!”
“It is not propriety he is trying to teach you.”
“I know,” he groaned. “I’m meant to use my words before I jump to using my fists. I know.”
“If you know, then why do you dig in with your heels and fight the lesson?”
“Because it’s a charade. What will having a cool head win me in a fight? If someone’s trying to do me harm, or you or Grandma or Hideaki, what am I meant to do? Ask them nicely to reconsider? Lie through my teeth so people will act against their true nature and tell me what I want to hear?”
“It is not an exercise in equivocation. It is mindfulness. Understanding that anyone, even your enemy, could turn the tide in your life for the better, if you let them. You cannot hope to know them when you meet them, if you assume they are not worthy of your respect or even your patience.”
Masaru paused to consider that, and in the ensuing silence, Tommy studied the bright green moss furring the tree bark. A swallowtail butterfly touched down near his hand, and he went still, not wanting to disturb it. He wondered at the classification. It wasn’t often he saw them with wings so black, though they were tipped a snow white at the lower quadrants.
“Look at you using honey to catch to butterflies.”
“And you, using vinegar to catch stag beetles,” Tommy quipped, looking down at the faint tickle in his knuckles where the butterfly was inspecting the crosshatches in his skin.
“You have to name him now.” At Tommy’s questioning glance, he persisted. “Look at the size and coloring. He’s a boy.”
Tommy admired the deep black and the seamless, natural gradient in the butterfly’s wings. It reminded him of Yasuo in one of his sweeping black overcoats and Tommy, always smaller, following after him all in white.
“Yasuo then,” he said, and as if the butterfly had been waiting for a cue, it flew away.
“Sometimes I think he was supposed to be your twin, and not me,” Masaru said, like a secret, watching the black butterfly carve out a path toward the sun. “You are just like him. I’ve said that before. Usually to hurt you, but I don’t know why. It’s no misfortune to be like someone so good. He continues through you. Lives on. Him and Mother both.”
It was the true tell for Tommy that Masaru recognized he had done badly by Hard Master. He often took to dwelling on old hurts rather than addressing his more immediate missteps.
“I would be different if I could choose to be,” Masaru mumbled.
There was such bitterness in his voice that Tommy’s heart lurched in his chest. He climbed down off his branch and crossed to sit next to his brother, looping a skinny arm around bony shoulders. They were seventeen. Mere children.
“So would I,” Tommy admitted.
Masaru gave him a dark look, like he thought Tommy was making fun. “You? The Golden Boy?”
“Yasuo was the golden one.”
“He was the true heir,” Masaru muttered dejectedly, shoulders slumped beneath the weight of expectations he felt he could never possibly meet.
“Mother was the true heir,” Tommy said, quiet.
Masaru’s face crumpled. “It’s not fair, Tommy.” He had started to cry but looked far too mortified to acknowledge it, even to dash his tears away. His voice came out strangled. “It is so much to live up to.”
Tommy hugged him fiercely. His throat ached, tears of his own threatening. He knew this pressure well.
“Hard Master really isn’t angry?” he asked, finally rubbing at his face.
“No, Masaru.” A flush of shame hit Tommy in the center of his chest. “Neither am I.”
“You were,” he said, starting to laugh, though the sound of it was patchy and limned with tears. “I saw your face. You wanted to dump me on my ass.”
He tipped his head, caught. “Yes.”
Palms pressed to his eyes, Masaru sighed, “But you didn’t, right? That’s the difference.”
“Maybe.” Tommy gave him a sideways look and said, dryly, “It was a very close thing.”
Masaru’s laugh was louder this time, stronger. It made Tommy smile to hear it. He gripped Masaru’s shoulder, giving him a shake.
“I would have you just as you are, beetles and all.”
That got him a snort, but he didn’t object to Tommy’s arm around him. Different as they were, every great once in a while the stars aligned and it was like they shared the same easily bruised heart.
—
It wasn’t true.
Tommy didn’t feel it when Masaru died. He was nine thousand kilometers away in London recruiting their new head of security when he got the call. It was only then that he felt like half his heart had compressed to pulp inside his chest.
A duel over affronted honor had killed his older brother. Senseless, Grandmother had told him, but Tommy knew just how it would have burned brightly in Masaru like a need unfulfilled.
He knew the call of it, wild and irrepressible, because his brother had been wild and irrepressible for all of his life. Tommy knew. It would not have felt senseless to Masaru. It would have felt all-encompassing. He wouldn’t have been afraid. He wouldn’t have felt any pain.
It was what Tommy told himself, to avoid the truth at the heart of the matter. That he had told Masaru to stay home for this trip. That he had been the one to tell him he needn’t aspire to leadership if he couldn’t find the interest for it. That he had promised to step up if that proved to be the case. Because everyone had known Masaru was too undisciplined for rules and too impatient for bureaucracy. Because the calling on their mother’s life and on Yasuo’s life had skipped Masaru. Everyone knew it.
But Tommy often felt like it had skipped him, too.
—
Following Masaru’s cremation ceremony, he and Kenta stood alone together before the Arashikage family grave. He was twenty and Kenta was well into manhood at thirty-three. Hideaki had gone to bed long ago, and Tommy was guiltily grateful for it. Keeping his head about him when his little brother could not stop his tears or the wounded sounds escaping from his throat was the hardest thing he had ever had to do.
The shadows thrown off the pagoda cast Kenta in darkness, but Tommy’s face was white in the moonlight.
“And so the third son becomes the eldest,” Kenta said softly, placing his hand on Tommy’s shoulder.
It was a grim reality. His whole life had been centered around becoming a tool of leadership one day, but this was not how he wanted to meet his succession. He did not want to bury both of his parents, all but one of his brothers, a sister by marriage, and the little niece or nephew who never was. He felt that his life had been cursed, for surely nothing else could explain the tragedy he had known from such a young age.
His eyes were sore and swollen from crying. His face and throat ached.
He had no words for Kenta. No platitudes left when he had fought tooth and nail against his own grief to be a comfort to his one living brother and their grandmother. When he had gone to such lengths to rid the pain from his broken heart where no one else would see it. He didn’t have anything left in the way of composure. It was all numbness in him now. Emptiness and bitterness. A great, tangible feeling of being utterly and incurably alone.
Kenta switched to English and said, “You know, it will be you or me, after Grandmother.”
That was true enough. Kenta was an only child to Grandmother’s only living son. Had the custom not been for mothers to yield to daughters, the responsibility might have been Kenta’s by rights, but it was Tommy’s. The weight of it all felt insurmountable.
“Unless young Hideaki-san will contest his claim,” Kenta continued.
“No,” Tommy said, shaking himself.
He knew Hideaki would not lead just as he had known Masaru never would. It was too much in his heart that his life should be his own, and while perhaps he may have felt the same uncertainty and fear Tommy did at being thrust into the line of command, it was not a prospect that enervated Tommy as it did for his younger brother.
“Hideaki would have a family,” Tommy said, unthinkingly, merely because his heart was running over with all that he felt, and in spite of the pain he had known today, he wanted to protect his brother’s happiness. “He will, when he is ready.”
“Why can he not have both? What is is they say in America?” Kenta took his hand away from Tommy’s shoulder to gesture with them. His eyes caught the starlight and gleamed in the dark. “Have your cake and eat it, too?”
Tommy could still remember sifting through Mieko’s ashes looking for a child. He had been distraught beyond words that he could find no trace of the little life she was so happy to carry inside her. The incinerator had burned all evidence of it. A life so loved, even if only in dreams, completely obliterated. Erased from the face of the earth.
He would not have that for his baby brother, and still, he understood that it was not his choice to make. Not yet.
“I suppose we are lucky Masaru-san did not leave us with any illegitimate heirs to pick through,” Kenta said, a murmured quality to his voice like he was thinking aloud.
The thought of it terrified Tommy.
A little life he would feel helplessly bound to protect in the same vein that he could lay no claim to them. As often as Masaru liked to joke about women as though they were conquests and nothing else, it was incredible they hadn’t met with any claims of fatherless children, existing or soon-to-exist. He supposed that was lucky, in the sense that Kenta meant it.
But Tommy couldn’t dispossess himself of the feeling that he would have fiercely adored any child of his brother’s blood. It would have been a piece of him, enduring beyond death and fire.
The way Masaru had told him once that Yasuo, and even their mother, lived on in Tommy.
He touched his hand to the cool stone before him and said, slowly, picking as carefully through his words as he had picked through cinders for his brothers’ hyoid bones at twelve and then again for Masuo, “If you are ever to bury me here, Kenta-san, will you remember this night? Will you remember the heron calling and the gekkabijin blooming in the dark?”
Kenta slung his arm around Tommy’s shoulders and reverted back to Japanese. He said, “Always such a romantic, Tomi-san. You sound just like your father.”
But Tommy was not his father. He would never take a wife or have children. It would be too much a target on his back, as much as it would be for them, just like it always had been.
This seeming curse on his life. He could not bear it.
—
It decided him on his course. Some months after the funeral, when Masaru’s loss felt less apocalyptic in his chest, Tommy scheduled an appointment with a urologist. He told no one what he intended to do. It was no one’s business but his own.
The doctor working with him was kind, informative. He took great care to let Tommy know what all the procedure entailed and how he would feel at different stages in his recovery.
There was no pain. He didn’t feel any different.
He called for a driver to come and get him once it was over, expecting a discreet ride home so he could get back to Arashikage in peace and chase his rest, but it was not meant to be. None of their footmen came to get him. He knew straight away based on the sharp and showy slash of the town car arcing to a stop at the curb where he stood. There was American rock music playing loudly through the rolled down windows. Hideaki could be seen through the window drumming his hands on the steering wheel.
Tommy opened the passenger side door already frowning. “What are you doing?”
“Tomi-san,” he chirped, never once pausing in his music making. He was following the song on the radio. “Fancy meeting you here. Hop in!”
“You and I both know you are not old enough to drive,” he said flatly, giving Hideaki a disapproving look that worked on him nine times out of ten.
Hideaki pouted and folded his arms over his chest, looking exactly fifteen.
“Hideaki.”
He scowled but stayed right where he was. Tommy might have been grateful for this being the one time out of ten when his brother wouldn’t be told what to do, given the circumstances, but he didn’t like to give ground on rules that could get them both in trouble.
“I’ll drive slowly,” Hideaki promised, sensing by Tommy’s hesitation that he was already most of the way towards getting his way.
That wasn’t likely, but Tommy got in on the passenger’s side anyway. He wasn’t sore yet, owing to the anesthesia, but he could feel the makings of a headache brewing behind his eyes. He loved his brother, but sometimes, when he behaved just like Masaru, Tommy didn’t know whether to be heartbroken or annoyed. Both, probably. Masaru often warranted both.
They swung out onto the street. Hideaki alternated mumbling along with the song on the radio and chattering inanely about his day.
If he noticed that Tommy was more reticent that usual, he did not see fit to remark on it. After more than half their drive had transpired in this fashion, when they were left with another ten minutes on the road before Arashikage’s gates would appear, Hideaki shifted in his seat and looked at him from the corner of his eye.
“So, you’re not sick, are you?” he asked. There was such an effort made toward desultoriness in his tone that it betrayed the well-hidden note of fear beneath it.
Tommy looked across the center console at him, feeling the years and losses between them. Remembering their mother sick and languishing in her death bed, dying slowly and inexorably every day while they watched on.
“No, Hideaki.”
He made no attempt to mask the gravity in his answer, and Hideaki, hearing it, glanced over at him, caught out. His eyes became glassy, his lower lip wobbling for not even a full breath before he caught it in his teeth.
“You’re okay?”
“I am in good health,” Tommy promised.
“Why did you come out to the city to see a doctor then? We have doctors at home,” he said, mulish, working himself into a state now that he had confirmation Tommy wasn’t hiding a diagnosis to match the one that put their mother in her grave. “We have the best doctors at home. There’s no reason to go sneaking around.”
Hideaki wiped angrily at his face. Tommy switched the radio off, all the better to appreciate his guilt.
“Hideaki, pull over.”
“I’m fine.”
“Please pull over.” Jolted in his seat by the sudden braking, Tommy jerked into his seatbelt and bit back a grunt. He rubbed at his chest. “I had a vasectomy.”
That earned him a bewildered sideways glance, his brother’s angry tears briefly forgotten. “What for?”
Tommy rolled his eyes. “So that I will not produce heirs, illegitimate or otherwise.”
“But you’ve never even had a girlfriend,” Hideaki said, and he was still more confused than anything else.
“Thank you. I had forgotten.”
“No, I meant — do you have one now? Is that why?” He sat with the question and put together the pieces for himself. “Is this because of Masaru-san?”
“What if it is?”
“You are so dramatic,” he complained, dashing at the last of the salt in his eyes. “How can you be just like him but also nothing like him at all?”
“Twins,” Tommy muttered, his usual explanation if he ever had to speak for himself and Masaru as a set. “And you are the one being dramatic.”
“Well, he was my brother, too.”
“I know he was. I’m sorry to have worried you, but you can see that I’m fine. There is no cause for you to be concerned.”
Hideaki frowned. “Does Grandmother know?”
“No,” he answered with finality such that could not be misunderstood.
“Fine, but don’t expect me to go and follow your lead.”
“I didn’t intend for you to find out,” Tommy reminded him. “I have done this of my own volition. No one forced my hand. No one will force yours.”
“Well, what are you gonna do next?” Hideaki asked, uncertainty lining his voice.
“My immediate plans include sleeping.”
“And then?”
“That is the full list,” Tommy said, knowing what Hideaki was asking and firmly ignoring it.
The truth was, he didn’t know what he wanted to do next. He hadn’t let himself think much farther than solving the problem directly in front of him. Hideaki must have heard that a more direct answer would not be coming because he put the car in drive and didn’t ask again. By the time they were behind Arashikage’s gates, Tommy wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and sleep the rest of the day away.
He tried to get some distance from Hideaki while he was returning the car keys to the mechanic on shift, but his little brother would not be put off.
“Could you still, someday?” he asked, jogging to catch up. “If you changed your mind?”
Tommy didn’t seek to clarify what Hideaki was asking him. He knew well enough. “If I changed my mind.”
“Why do you say it like that? You might,” Hideaki said, walking in step with Tommy. Quieter, he said, “I think you’d be a good dad.”
That stopped Tommy at the door to his rooms. His voice came out sharper than he intended. “Don’t, Hideaki.”
“I barely remember our father, or Yasuo,” he persisted. “And Masaru was the oldest of the three of us, technically, but you were the one who taught me to read and made sure I learned how to tie my shoes. You stayed with me when my nightmares got bad, and when Mother was sick. When she died.”
He paused, swallowed hard, and opened the door when Tommy didn’t move to do it. When they were guaranteed their privacy, Hideaki said, “Any kid would be lucky to have you for a dad. I was. Masaru, too, though he never would’ve said it.”
Hideaki strode across to the windows to draw the blinds, and since he gave Tommy his back, there was no need for Tommy to conceal the havoc his emotions wreaked on his face. Comfortable shadows yawned to envelop him, and in the soft dark he became keenly aware of the pins and needles pricking at him below his abdomen. He was tired.
“Come lay down, drama queen.”
“You are the one who stole a car to intercept me at my appointment,” Tommy told him without any heat behind his words.
“Can’t steal it if I own it, can I?” Hideaki countered, and his typical cheer was back, easy and unforced. “Loophole.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m covering for you with Grandmother when she asks why you’re sleeping at two in the afternoon.” Hideaki threw back the blanket on his bed and gestured impatiently for Tommy to climb in. “You have a migraine. All right?”
“You’ve given me a migraine,” Tommy snarked, but did as he was told.
Hideaki stuck his tongue out at him and went rooting around in the middling dark, checking drawers and even the closet for something Tommy couldn’t have guessed at. He was still fumbling in the dark when Tommy drifted off.
An hour or so later when he blinked awake in the dark he realized what Hideaki had been looking for.
The shirt folded up under his arm was their mother’s, a beautifully woven garment of silk he had kept in the back of his wardrobe since her passing and that he didn’t think anyone had known about. It hardly even smelled like her anymore, but the barest tinge of her jasmine perfume lingered. Not quite the same as Grandmother’s, but close. Mild in fragrance but heavy with memory.
Tommy turned his face into it and went back to sleep.
—
Regardless of his efforts to keep the weight of a someday kingdom squarely on his own shoulders, Tommy did not fault Hideaki for loving freely and wholly. It was his way. And for his own part, Hideaki learned not to question Tommy’s leanings toward asceticism. It was the reason he didn’t immediately understand Hideaki’s badly concealed winks when he came back from the airstrip with their first ever envoy from the Joes.
He had gone to pick her up personally when her plane landed, happy for the excuse to drive since he was finally of age. The gesture was on the gauche side of things, but Hideaki was ebullient and young, and he had the type of personality that led to everyone he met wanting to humor him.
Scarlett O’Hara had a serious but curious face, features carved of marble, and a spine hewn of iron. There was something hungry about her. Ambition, Tommy decided. He liked her right away, and a little bit more when, upon meeting Grandmother for the first time, she bowed deeply and said, “I am honored and grateful for your hospitality. I will do all I can to earn it.”
Her Japanese was decorous and slightly wooden, but her pronunciation was perfect. She must have practiced tirelessly just for this meeting.
She proved him right a moment later, adding, “That’s as far as I got on the way here.”
Tommy huffed a laugh. Hideaki grinned at him. Even afterwards, when Hideaki caught up with Tommy once he had seen Scarlett to her rooms, Tommy didn’t suspect him.
“She’s really something, Tommy,” he said, bright-eyed and earnest. “You’re going to love her.”
Willing to indulge his little brother if he had a crush, Tommy said, “Is that right?”
Hideaki nodded, bouncing on his heels. They were of an age, Hideaki and Scarlett. It would have made sense if he liked her, and they had been alone together on the drive back from the airstrip. Clearly she had made an impression on him.
“You should ask to sit with her at dinner. You’ll have so much to talk about.”
Seeing as her training with Hard Master would begin the next day, Tommy suspected that was true. Distracted thinking on it, he hummed noncommittally in response. Hard Master frequently trained outsiders to Arashikage.
It wasn’t particularly momentous in itself, but the first session often spoke magnitudes of a candidate’s potential. He wondered how Scarlett would fare.
“Are you listening?”
“Hmm? No, what is it?”
Hideaki rolled his eyes, but he was smiling still. “I said, she’s pretty. Don’t you think?”
Tommy still didn’t get it. He nodded vaguely. “I suppose?”
It was in his best interest that he didn’t see it. Scarlett was there on assignment as the youngest and most promising the Joes could offer, and he would have looked foolish and uncouth if it had even crossed his mind to look at her as anything but an ally.
Later, he forgave Hideaki for his assumptions, but that first night at dinner when he had no inkling of his brother’s ability to see so far into the future, he was perfectly oblivious.
He took his place next to Scarlett and made polite inquiries about her trip. Whether the flight had been a good one, if she liked Japan, whether she meant to continue her language studies. Her answers: only a little turbulence, very much, and yes, respectively.
“I think we’ll be working together very closely going forward,” she said, in the same clinical, diplomatic tone he had been using. “The Joes and Arashikage, that is.”
“I think so, too.”
She tipped her head. “Your brother said it was you that campaigned for this experiment to happen.”
“I am next in line to lead our clan, after our grandmother. It is my belief that our future lies in expansion. Joining our ways with those of the new world. To usher in the next thousand years.”
“Bold,” Scarlett said, something in her face changing, as if she saw something new in him that she hadn’t before, and its unveiling had brought to life something stored away remotely inside her. She smiled small, blue eyes bright with kinship. “I like it.”
Warmer, he said, “Thank you.”
The following day when her training with Hard Master began, he knew straight away that she was special, and that this was only the beginning of what would be a truly incredible career.
It wasn’t that she was that gifted of a fighter — although she was. She held her own remarkably well.
The thing that impressed him most when watching her had nothing to do with the alacrity of her movements or her style that was ingenious and electric to watch, but it had everything to do with that hunger he had seen in her at their first meeting. She was happy to learn, and she soaked up every lesson as it was presented to her. Always she was thinking, and always she arrived at a better, more efficient solution than the one Hard Master had prepared for her to find.
Her mind was sharp, her focus nonpareil, and Tommy liked her a great deal.
He didn’t dwell on it. She was a guest in his home, and the beating heart of a tentative alliance he could not afford to compromise.
It was enough for him that she flourished, and to say that she did was an understatement. She excelled at everything they put in front of her. Even her Japanese, which hadn’t been much more than ornamental to begin with, became fluid and suffused with her personality the more that she used it, and she did insist on using it.
He was proud of her progress. She really was something, as Hideaki had said.
—
“Are you going to ask her out or what?” Hideaki asked, impatient after five of her six months with them had gone by and Tommy had not, as he put it, pulled his head out of his ass. “She likes you! What are you waiting for?”
“Hideaki,” he warned, hushing him.
Matching his tone, he said, “Tomisaburô.”
Tommy rolled his eyes and took great care to explain, as patiently as he could, “I am not going to ask her out. That is not why she’s here.”
“It’s not why you asked her here!” Hideaki said, gesturing brazenly with the edamame at the end of his chopsticks and splattering soy sauce and rice vinegar on the table. They had come out to the city for dinner, and the distance from Arashikage made him freer in his speech. “You have to take life by the horns!”
“You’re young,” Tommy began, but Hideaki cut him off.
“You’re only five years older than me. You aren’t so wise.”
“I don’t claim to be wise. I have responsibilities. So does Scarlett, and more to the point, Hideaki, there is a whole world left to her outside Arashikage’s walls.”
Hideaki blinked at him, momentarily thrown.
In his startled silence, Tommy heard his mistake and flushed. He went to correct himself, but Hideaki beat him to it.
“You like her.”
“You picked up on that already,” Tommy said, drawing a line through the condensation in his water glass to distract himself.
“No, but you really like her. Tommy, why don’t you say something? Before she leaves.”
His heart beat quickly and clumsily behind his sternum. He shook his head, frustrated at the conflict in himself. “I can’t,” he said, almost too quietly to be heard in the full, noisy restaurant.
Hideaki frowned and put down the edamame he had been waving around. He sighed gustily.
“I must ask you not to say anything to her,” Tommy began again. “This last month of her studies will be a critical time for her. She must finish strong. I will not send her home to her superiors with anything less than glowing commendation, and the fair, honest marks to prove it.”
The look on Hideaki’s face then was a cross between puzzlement and reluctant admiration. “You know, Tommy, you don’t give yourself enough credit.”
Their server brought out their food. When he left, Tommy cleared his throat.
“What do you mean by that? I don’t give myself enough credit for what?”
“That big heart of yours,” Hideaki said without giving much thought to how it would fill Tommy’s heart like a cup running over to hear it. “You’re kinder than you think you are.”
—
Scarlett’s last day in Arashikage, he walked with her one final time through the garden. Her studies had concluded, and she had said her goodbyes to everyone but him. He had kept a tight lid on his feelings, knowing that her well-earned reputation could fast become precarious if he didn’t.
“That was a fast six months,” she said, her American accent hugging certain Japanese vowels in a way he had always found very charming.
“Yes,” he said. “You have made very good use of it.”
She smiled small. “You’ll keep in touch, right?”
He considered her. He knew she was not the type for empty platitudes, so he responded in kind, respecting that facet of her character. “I will, if you want me to.”
“I do.”
Tommy tipped his head. “Then I am at your service.”
“Don’t say it like it’s another one of your princely duties,” she teased, switching over to English, all the better to poke fun at him.
“How should I say it?”
“Like you’ll miss me if you don’t,” she joked, and a patch of sunlight caught in her smile.
Too honest, he said, “I will miss you regardless.”
She stopped walking, and so did he. It was a tangible thing then, the unspoken truth hanging between them. He knew without any doubt that she could see all of him in that moment, and more, that she liked what she saw as much as he liked what he saw when he looked at her.
He remembered Hideaki’s urging that life had to be taken by the horns, and he wanted that. For Scarlett. For a life to begin for her, and for every amazing thing she would make of it, to fall into place.
“I know incredible things are waiting for you,” he told her, holding out his hand. “You only have to decide that you want them.”
Scarlett considered his hand. He was surprised when she hugged him instead.
“Thank you, Tommy,” she murmured into his neck.
He held her back. “And thank you, for your friendship.”
She laughed, and he couldn’t see her face or the shape of her mouth. If she was smiling or trying her hardest to remain neutral, as he was. Her eyes were bright when she pulled away. She touched his cheek, searching his face. He saw her eyes dip down to his lips and looked to hers, saw them part.
Maybe she leaned in first, or maybe they moved at the same time. Her lips were soft under his. She smelled like cedar and vanilla.
“Write to me,” she whispered, pulling away only far enough to speak.
“Yes,” he whispered back, breathless, “I will.”
Her smile bloomed against his cheek. She pinched his chin with her thumb and said, “That’s how I wanted you to say it.”
He laughed, pressing his forehead to hers. They held each other, quiet for a spell.
When it was time for her to go, she said, “I’ll keep an ear out for you, Tomisaburô,” and it had the weight of a promise.
She looked back once, and he held up his hand in a wave, smiling because she was smiling. Because he knew in his heart that he had done right by her. That he had given her the absolute most that he could offer. A future, a career she wanted, and above all, his respect. They were all things she deserved and that he wanted her to have, and she had earned them, besides.
It was enough for him to know that she was happy.
—
The following summer, while Scarlett regaled Tommy with her letters and the occasional phone call, Hideaki found someone of his own to love. Her name was Catalina, and he had met her backpacking in Thailand, while brokering trade on behalf of Arashikage.
Tommy didn’t fault him for it. He never judged any of his brothers for loving freely and openly, and Catalina was his brother’s equal in all things. She was peace when he was in chaos, and fire when he was weak. Her smile could probably have tempted the Goddess to bless Arashikage with a companion jewel harnessing the moon’s mysterious tranquility, and she was easy to love.
It was no surprise to him when Catalina pulled him aside one day, cheeks splotchy, to tell him, “Your brother asked me to marry him! Did he tell you?”
“He did not,” he answered gamely enough, and holding his elbow out for her to walk with him.
“Oops.” She put her arm behind his back so that his arm fell naturally across her shoulders. “I thought he would have told you first.”
“He has been more nervous as of late. I thought you must have been the reason. What did you tell him?”
“I said yes,” she said matter-of-factly, but he could hear the reservation in her voice.
“And I thought you would,” he answered, just as matter-of-factly.
“It’s only…”
More flippantly than he felt, he said, “The Arashikage Curse.”
“You aren’t cursed.” She leaned into him as they walked. “A curse could not have yielded two men as good as you and your brother. But he worries. I know he does.”
“That is my doing. I have put fear into his heart when I should have been teaching him to be brave.”
“You have taught him to be brave, Tommy, and loving and generous. I only wonder if we are ready for what it could mean.”
Cremation urns, Tommy thought. Fragments of skeletons amid heaps of ash.
“Tommy,” she murmured, seeing his face, and whatever pain he had neglect to hide there. Her hazel eyes were wide and stricken, her face noticeably paler. “I’m sorry.”
“You owe me no apology.” He tightened his arm to bring her close and pressed his chin to her hair. “You love my brother, and I know he loves you. Whatever you must do to be happy, I will support you. The both of you.”
“I never had a brother,” Catalina said tentatively, smiling up at him.
He dropped his arm back to her shoulders. “I had a sister-in-law, once.”
Catalina watched him, sincerely inquisitive and sweet. “What was she like?”
“Whip-smart. A humanitarian, even when no one was looking.” He thought about it. “I think I wanted to marry her myself.”
She laughed. “How old were you?”
“I must have been six years old,” he recalled, chuckling. He didn’t want to remember them as they had died, so he thought a little while more on how they had lived. “Ah, yes,” he added ruminatively, “I gave her a bushel of sumire and asked her to run away with me.”
“Your first proposal of marriage,” Catalina gasped, grinning at the audacious silliness of children, no doubt. “What did she say?”
“She told him to save his love for when he was older, so that he would know it to be true,” Hideaki said, stepping onto the path with them and wrapping his arm around Tommy’s other side. “Masaru said you cried for a week.”
“I didn’t cry,” Tommy protested, and added, weakly, “not for a week.”
Catalina muffled her laugh with her hand. She looked from him to Hideaki. “I told him,” she said.
“Oh,” Hideaki said, brightening for only a moment before the happiness froze into shock on his face. “You told him you’re pregnant?”
Tommy tripped over his feet. “You’re what?”
—
In the end it was not Tommy’s idea for them to leave Arashikage. It was Grandmother’s. Not that Hideaki abdicate completely, but that they run away and elope, mindful of how it would look, how every component of their plan would look like a desperate escape outside the sanctity of their rules.
Tommy knew before the plan had come together that he would do anything in his power to keep them safe. Up to and including and escorting them out of his life, apparently, but he could not be bitter about it.
He had made a promise in his heart the day Hideaki came into the world and Tommy held him for the first time. He would protect his little brother.
It was a promise he intended to keep.
—
They embraced as they always had. Arms held tight and lungs sapped of room to breathe, faces tucked down into each other’s shoulders. He was overwhelmed still from the impromptu wedding ceremony. Blind Master had officiated; Tommy, Grandmother, and Hard Master had served as witnesses.
It was beautiful, even if it had been a hasty affair.
“Arashikage will always be your home. We will always be your family,” he whispered, trying to be strong. Trying to be the father they both needed.
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.”
Hideaki was crying, and that meant Tommy could not allow himself to follow suit. It would only make the ache sharper. Would only make this goodbye that much harder to bear.
“Your life is your own, Hideaki,” Tommy told him, relying on Grandmother’s wisdom to guide him along. “Live it.”
But he did cry when it was Catalina’s turn. She did not require him to be made of stone to feel capable in her own right, and it gave him the freedom to be weak.
“Take care of him,” he pleaded, holding her hands in both of his.
She kissed the tears on his cheek. “I will, I promise. Thank you, Tommy.”
It was the last time Tommy would see either of them in person for nine years, but he hadn’t known it then.
—
He went home alone, despondent, but deeply happy, in spite of his sadness, that one of his family was safe. That Hideaki was free to choose for himself, even if it meant Tommy had diminished his mother’s line. He was the last remaining to ascend to power, before Kenta.
Tommy celebrated the certainty of his ascension with alcohol. Copious amounts of it.
“Well, well,” said a voice behind him, and Tommy knew without looking that it was Hard Master. “Who knew weddings put you in a melancholic mood. Your Grandmother will send me after you with a stick all morning if she learns you have been carrying on like this.”
And because Hard Master didn’t know yet what happened — because no one knew, but someone had to know first, after Tommy — he said, in as simple terms as drunkenness commanded, “Hideaki and Catalina are gone.”
Hard Master, to his credit, did not sound the alarm. He knew Tommy’s moods well enough and merely sat with him. It was some minutes of perfect quiet between them.
“I helped them leave,” Tommy continued in Japanese, when it became clear to him that Hard Master would not ask.
“I thought you might, when the time came.”
Tommy breathed in deep, feeling like the breath in his lungs had all been converted to fumes. His voice was broken glass in his throat. “I have buried everyone I love.”
“I know,” Hard Master said quietly, on a sigh. “I know, Tomi-san.”
Remembering himself, allowing Hard Master’s steady calm to permeate his frantic energy, he suffered a bolt of migraine pain to bow his head and said, “Forgive me.”
With unadorned sincerity, Hard Master replied, “You have never offended me.”
“I speak as a brother without brothers, when I know you had to bury them, too.”
“Masaru-san, I think, did not have much love for me,” Hard Master said, smiling. “He was too headstrong to ever like to be anyone’s student.”
“A gift from our mother,” Tommy said, rueful, and with a hint of well-loved pride he could never scrub from his voice when speaking of her. “She was the happiest for twins. Fate smiled on her to have us turn out so closely in her image. If she had only lived to see it.”
“She saw you. She was proud of you. Your father, too.”
“Do you think they would be still, if they knew I smuggled their last son into hiding?”
“You are their last son. It stands to reason they would understand the choices you have made, you and Hideaki-san both. It is not irresponsible to guard what you love with the weapons you have at hand.”
“It is not cowardice to run?” Tommy asked.
“The day he brought me here to train under the old master, your brother told me that what is behind you, at one time was in front of you. The only way to move forward, he said, is to accept that walking towards one thing inevitably means walking away from something else.” Hard Master smiled. He was quick to give those away, though they were not often this warm or half as soft. “I felt like I was running away once, too, Tomi-san. But it brought me here. And you can see I am not running.”
Tommy nodded. He could see the wisdom in that. The truth in it.
And he could remember the day Hard Master came to Arashikage so clearly. He had been a child himself then, not even eighteen, but a prodigious martial artist even so. Yasuo had been the one to find and bring him. The two of them had been like brothers, closer at times than Tommy had ever felt with anyone. With a gap of twelve years between them Tommy had only ever felt like a nuisance, despite his brother’s enduring patience and humility.
In those days, Hard Master had carried himself in a similar manner, like he could not believe where he was or that he could possibly belong.
The days after they buried Yasuo, he had thrown himself into his studies, working tirelessly to deserve the home he had been promised, and his work had paid off. He became Hard Master three years ahead of schedule.
“I loved your brother well,” Hard Master said, still comfortably in Japanese, though he had hardly spoken it all those years ago. “Everyone did. You must not let it weigh on you that you have had to make this decision. Your grandmother will understand.”
Tommy was too drunk to react properly, so he let himself be too honest by saying, “She will not be surprised when it comes to light.”
“If it is not too bold to say, Tomi-san,” Hard Master said, easily taking the empty bottle from Tommy’s loose, clumsy fingers. “I doubt anyone will be. You Arashikage have never been the subtle kind.”
“It was good of my brother to choose you, Hard Master,” Tommy said, starting to cry again. If he hadn’t been drunk, he would’ve heard how handily he had demonstrated Hard Master’s point, but he was drunk, and so he only cried for missing his brother, even knowing he had done the right thing. Even knowing he had trapped himself here to guarantee Hideaki’s freedom.
He didn’t notice the shape of his thoughts. It didn’t strike him that this was not even the first time he had allowed himself to be truthful about the albatross his birthright had become.
“Maybe we have been left behind to take care of each other, hmm?”
“Then are we brothers?” Tommy asked, wiping at his face in obvious anguish. He always felt so foolish when he drank. Knowing he tended toward theatrics, more so than usual, normally kept him from indulging this particular vice beyond a few drinks, but his brother was gone. All of his brothers were gone.
“You have already nipped at my heels these fifteen years Arashikage has been my home. Let us say then that we always have been.”
“Good. Good.”
“Come and let’s get you to bed then, little brother.”
Tommy had gone such a long time being no one’s little brother that he cried again at being addressed so. Hard Master tutted, drew him up under his arm, and walked them back to Tommy’s room.
—
In the morning, he woke to Grandmother sitting at his bedside. Her hand was in his hair.
“Has the news broken?” he asked her without getting up.
“An hour ago.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
Her hand ruffled his hair, not a ripple left behind by his mother but the original stone transforming the water’s surface. “Your heart is with your brother today. Maybe it will not return to you for some time.”
“I’m sorry, Grandmother.”
“No, I am sorry. You have known great suffering, and there is no reward in it except what you know in your heart to be true.”
Tommy sat up and didn’t shy away from her hand on his cheek, even when the tears threatened to fall anew. “He is safe.”
“And Catalina and their child.”
Without meeting her eyes, he said, quietly, “If Hideaki had wanted to lead…”
“But he does not, and neither did Masaru. Your mother would have been a good leader, and Yasuo would have been a good leader, but it falls to you to decide which way your own heart leans. Toward yourself, or toward your people.”
Shame uncurled in Tommy’s chest. He felt flayed open, and his voice broke in his throat. “I know I am called to be the head of this clan,” he started to say.
“You are called to live a life all your own, Tomisaburô. This family, this place, we are all we have in this world, and we are strongest together. You are heavy now because you carry your grief alone, but you are not alone.”
Her words, normally a balm to him, did little to soothe him, but he tried to hear the wisdom in them anyway. He tried to believe in the things she believed.
But he wasn’t given long before Kenta’s attempt on his life.