Chapter Text
I.
It’s the peak of the first post-war spring when Kazuha meets Kamisato Ayato again.
They’d met for the first time under similar skies—blue, nearly cloudless, and with abundant sunshine to lavish the earth—and even then, when they were children, behind their introductions was a matter of importance. As the heirs of Inazuma’s finest clans, their friendship was something like duty. What started as playtime would evolve into an alliance, if all went well—and Kazuha, well-groomed and silk-bound and newly aged past a single digit, was aware that all-going-well was the only option he and his parents could afford. It was, quite literally, almost all that they could afford.
There are new things to be discussed, now, and Kazuha doubts that Kamisato Ayato is looking to kindle a friendship lost to misfortune.
Certainly, they’d had good days. Kazuha, at least, thinks of his days with Ayato to be among the finest of his memories—they’re a montage ( they: the memories, yes, but also the two of them, who were always too fleet-footed and nimble-handed to be anything that wasn’t transitory) of shoulder bumps during history lectures; side-by-side hands sliding open the doors of a courtyard; grunts and grins over the cross of their wooden practice swords; and heaving chests, backs over tree roots, whenever they collapsed to rest beneath the shadow-spread of sakura blooms.
The premise of an alliance is, of course, long dead; the Kaedehara Clan lost everything—its fortune, all social capital, a leg-up on any latter—so that by the time that his father passed, Kazuha was an heir to nothing more than a sword.
Some fate, simultaneously so dissimilar and alike, must have befallen Ayato. The details of it all have escaped public perception, but Kazuha cannot imagine that Ayato had an easy time inheriting what was left in the wake of his parents’ deaths. At best, Kazuha knows that the Kamisato Clan was in a poor state of affairs at the time—Ayato and Ayaka’s parents died at an especially troubling time, although there never is a convenient time for death—and that the sort of pressure that the Kamisato siblings had to shoulder, seemingly overnight, must have been tremendous.
For what it’s worth, they seem to have made well of all the stress. The Kamisato Clan is flourishing, their dominance in the social-sphere as obvious as their wealth. Their well-being is observable in the courtyard of their estate alone; the guards stand in bright, polished armor, and the hedges are trimmed to perfection, and the fish in the ponds gleam with healthy, golden scales. The atmosphere lacks the sense of turmoil that many politically-involved grounds have.
“Is it to your satisfaction?”
Kazuha startles. He’d heard the approaching steps for a half-minute, but didn’t expect himself to be the destination of them—and he’d not expected Ayato to be a man of such leisurely pace.
“The courtyard,” Ayato clarifies and Kazuha, mid-bow, does not catch his smile. “Admittedly, I don’t make any instructions for its upkeep. Any and all credit is owed to our housekeeper, Thoma—I assume you’ve met him?”
“I have,” Kazuha says, standing upright again. “He has an impressive eye for detail.”
“He’s rather astute, too. When he told me he wanted to tend to the courtyard, after some
months of being here, he assured me he’d not sacrifice the original integrity of the plot. I’m not
sure how he knew of that desire of mine… I make an intentional effort to not be nostalgic.”
“But you’ll admit such a desire to me?” Kazuha wonders.
“You are, to me, the epitome of sentimentality. There would be no use in hiding that,” Ayato says, and hums in an amused, satisfied sort of way when Kazuha flushes. “If you were an instrument, I’d know how to play you just as well as I did all those years ago. That is to say that while you pose yourself to me as a stranger, I think that I know better.”
“You think I’m the same as I once was?”
“The core of you, most definitely,” Ayato says, watching Kazuha softly pinch a leaf between his fingers. “You’re still gentle.”
“In my years of roaming, the natural world has been merciful. I’ve no reason to be cruel.”
“And your words ,” Ayato purrs. “Your poetics are just the same.”
“Wandering inspires it.”
“You’d make good money, if you put pen to paper. The Yae Publishing House could use some quality material…”
“I don’t need an excessive income. Nature’s bounties provide more than enough.”
Ayato looks at Kazuha, and his eyes narrow for a moment before softening once more. He opens his mouth, and then closes it. He’d say nothing of his thoughts if Kazuha didn’t prompt him to.
“The events that befell you may have been a cruel sort of mercy. I’m sure it was painful, but politics and nobility… They would have made you a beast, dear friend.”
“How so?”
“It would have been the only way for you to survive. Kindness does not last.”
“You’ve lived through it,” Kazuha reasons. “Do you suggest that you’re monstrous?”
“I was not so soft to begin with.”
With a little laugh, Kazuha relents, and says, “Your mischief always did have a cruel edge.”
Inside, Ayato offers Kazuha a seat in his office at the estate. It’s miraculously tidy, with not a speck of dust to be found, and the few potted plants inside are placed perfectly to catch the midday sun.
“Thoma must have come through,” Ayato murmurs. “I don’t leave things so orderly.”
A servant of the house comes inside, and nearly drops the tea tray at the sight of Ayato. Kazuha observes her knuckles go white as regains her grip, and sinks into a polite bow. Without a word, she sets the tray on the desk, but falters when she goes to pour Ayato’s tea.
“My lord,” she says. “Forgive me, please. How—”
“You’ve forgotten how I take my tea,” Ayato guesses. The pot in her hand shakes. “You fear the consequences, and yet, it’s my year of absence to blame… You’re faultless.”
Ayato pinches a single cube of sugar between his fingers, and sets it into his cup. The servant pours; her hand is steady again and instinct seems to serve her, as she stops pouring a half-inch beneath the rim. Ayato gives a small praise (“Perfect,” is the murmured word), and offers his thanks when the servant finishes pouring the milk.
Kazuha places a hand over his own cup, signaling that he’ll pour it for himself. It would feel improper to be served as any kind of noble, and discomforting. He plucks a few cubes of sugar from the shallow bowl and stirs them in with a small spoon as he pours the tea.
“I became rather particular about my tea after only a few days in Liyue,” Kazuha explains, not oblivious to the way Ayato tilts his head to watch him. “Everyone there is particular about everything.”
“I’d advise you to not take your tea before Thoma. He might offer you a lecture on how so much sugar ruins the integrity of any given blend.”
“Would he?” Kazuha muses, setting the spoon aside and looking at Ayato. “I’m more inclined to believe that you’re critiquing my preference.”
“Hm. Guilty as charged,” Ayato says.
“When we got to talking, Thoma revealed himself to me as a man of little judgment. He also told me that he has something of a sweet-tooth, when he shared with me one particular story about an exceptionally bitter matcha cake once made for him… Would you happen to know anything about that incident?”
“In my defense, I’m a poor chef.”
“I see,” Kazuha says, taking a polite sip of his tea, looking over the rim of his cup to see how shamelessly Ayato is smiling. He doesn’t return the expression—admittedly, he’s perplexed by how Ayato treats this meeting as the rekindling of an old friendship. Kazuha wasn’t under the impression that he’d come here for such a purpose.
Following the end of the war that fractured the people from their god, and as the Yashiro Commissioner, Ayato had taken an interest in the condition of smaller shrines around Inazuma some weeks ago, but was unable to draw upon the stretched-thin resources from either the Commission or the Shuumatsuban. He’d drawn upon personal connections, instead; Ayaka had spoken to Thoma, who contacted General Gorou, who’d then sent some scouts around Inazuma to find one certain wanderer who, the general claimed, “has turned the valleys, plains, and mountains of Inazuma into the arteries, veins, and chambers of his very heart.”
The world had felt quite small to Ayato when he’d learned of the wanderer’s name, and to Kazuha, too, when the Resistance soldiers said that the head of the Kamisato Clan had asked for his audience and aid regarding the matter of shrines.
“I suppose business should take precedence,” Ayato says, as if reading Kazuha’s mind. “General Gorou spoke highly of you and your knowledge of Inazuma’s landscape.”
“Anyone might understand the land as I do, if they wandered for as long.”
“You’re too humble,” Ayato says. “You had a way of knowing the world in ways others could not when we were children. I imagine this has aided you over the years.”
To this point, Kazuha relents. Some matters of the world can be heard by all. Nature does not hide secrets from men, and it’s often only a matter of who chooses to listen and translate—but Kazuha cannot refute the fact that nature favors him with a particularly keen ear, and allows him to be preemptively privy to particular happenings.
“Almost always, yes,” Kazuha admits, “but the last year, it has burdened me greatly.”
“How so?”
“The climate has changed drastically. With little sunshine under the purview of the Shogun, and the nearly endless deluge, flora and fauna have suffered. Their roots drowned; their burrows flooded. Consequently, most of Inazuma sounded like a graveyard: without a chorus or melody. Throughout the war, I often felt that I was no longer quite among the living. After hearing the dead for so long, it was difficult to believe I hadn’t joined them.”
“And now?”
“I believe I’m alive. The birds tell me so, anyways, between their preening of feathers,” Kazuha says. “Where’s this business you speak of?”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Ayato says, with an apologetic bow of his head. “You understand, now, why I’m so deliberate about avoiding sentimental subjects. Nothing else makes me talk so much.”
“I’m flattered you think of me so fondly, or that you think of me at all.”
“Did you think I’d forget you?”
“The sun sets on all things, eventually.”
“These years may have only been clouds crossing over,” Ayato says, taking up Kazuha’s metaphor with ease. “The sun could still be high in the sky.”
“It is only the afternoon,” Kazuha murmurs, reaching his hand out to stretch his palm in a ray of sunlight, and Ayato laughs, the most pleased he’s been in some long and many months. “I suppose sundown is a while away, after all.”
They get to business, eventually.
“It’s not the sort of business that Lord Kamisato usually tends to,” Thoma says when Kazuha sees him next, “but his reasoning is pretty sound…”
“And yet, there’s a dam between your thoughts and your words.”
“My Lord takes on a lot of work. He’s always able to handle it all, of course, but I worry about the toll it takes on him. You know? The more of his energy he gives away, the more I wonder how much is left for himself.”
“He’ll have a fairly hands-off role in this entire affair. General Gorou will be doing a lot of the on-ground work. There’s been a lot of issues with soil on Watatsumi Island, so he already knows of a few merchants and providers who may be willing to lend a hand.”
“I hadn’t expected your initial consultation with him to spiral into such an issue,” Thoma admits, rubbing the back of his neck. “When he first inquired about shrines, I thought it would only be a matter of distributing supplies for restoration…”
When Kazuha and Ayato had gotten to talking business, the matter quickly devolved past the point of shrine upkeep. Certainly, that was a point of the issue, but not the root. The year-long shift in Inazuman weather has caused a variety of issues, many of which Kazuha had been cataloging during his wandering. The excess rainwater has leached soil of its nutrients, dendrobium is blooming to the point of being an invasive species, and the little shrines around Inazuma have started sinking into the muddy ground. These were all little issues, until they weren’t—now farmers are struggling to produce a harvest that’s up to standard, and native biodiversity is sure to struggle if dendrobium aren’t dealt with, and people now more than ever need places of prayer.
Ayato was rubbing his temples by the time Kazuha had laid bare all of these points.
“Ah, I’m probably overthinking this,” Thoma says with a sigh. “It’s necessary work, and although it doesn’t fall under the direct work of any particular Commission, it’d be given to the Yashiro Commission as soon as it gets serious… The other branches of the Tri-Commission aren’t as adept with these kinds of tasks.”
“I’ll be helping where I can, as well. I’ll keep an eye on your Lord.”
“Oh, you don’t have to, really—”
“Efforts are best achieved in tandem, are they not? It’s not only a flower that pollinates, but bees, and hummingbirds, and the wind beneath their wings, too.”
“Well, when you put it that way…”
They’ve had a come-and-go conversation over the last half-hour, little conversations wedged between pleasant stretches of quiet. The both of them speak less on impulse, and more on the ebb and flow of mild curiosity for one another—and there’s a contentment to be found in casual acquaintanceship. Throughout the war, every meeting seemed dire and needless if it did not serve a purpose. It feels now, to Kazuha, a privilege to indulge in a connection like this: inconsequential, and pursued for the simple sake of wanting companionship.
Kazuha smiles with satisfaction, and clambers up onto the low-hanging branch of the nearby tree. He finds himself, again, in the courtyard of the Kamisato Estate, waiting for Ayato’s company. When he closes his eyes he’s a child again, playing hide-and-seek, making a cradle of the high-up branches and dozing off while either of the Kamisato siblings search every eye-level nook and cranny for him. Even when they’d learned to look in the treetops, they couldn’t find him. Years later, when he lived among nature with a rich bounty above his head, this sort of concealment became a means of survival.
He rests his back against the trunk of the tree, and runs one leg along the branch beneath him while the other lazily hands off the edge. His hands fold on his stomach, bandaged fingers slotted between his bare ones.
“Have you noticed that he smells like hinoki?” Kazuha asks.
“Lord Kamisato?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t,” Thoma says. “Maybe I haven’t been around him enough.”
“I suppose the scent isn’t very strong,” Kazuha murmurs, but the earthy smell of cypress catches on the wind, though, too close and too concentrated to come from any of the vast forests on neighboring islands. “It’s certainly him, though.”
“A perfume, maybe? I don’t think he’s out in nature a lot.”
The bird returns to his nest, Kazuha wonders, opening his eyes again and turning his head to look just as Ayato strolls through the entryway of the courtyard, but did he perch elsewhere on the way home?
“This looks like trouble,” Ayato says, eyeing the pair of them. “Conspiratorial, even.”
“Certainly,” Kazuha says with a mischievous raise of his brow, sitting upright in the tree. Ayato offers him a hand to help him down, and Kazuha accepts, their palms pressing flush. A small rush of Anemo cushions his jump down; he lands lightly, and fallen sakura blossoms whirl around his calves. “You should be very afraid of the plot that myself and Thoma have hatched.”
“You’re scheming… I see. Perhaps a nice, home-cooked meal will win me your allegiance once more.”
“Absolutely not,” Thoma says. “Consider me your most loyal servant.”
“Ah. Good. In that case, would you mind bringing lunch up from the kitchens? Miss Furuta was kind enough to prepare a meal for myself and Kazuha. I’m sure there’s ample portions, if you’d like to join.”
“You’re as gracious as ever, my Lord, but duty calls. I’ve got a whole cleaning routine to get through after this,” Thoma says, trailing off and wandering away, muttering to himself about the supplies he’ll need to round up. Ayato fondly watches him go.
“I made the assumption that you have time for a meal,” Ayato says, slipping his hand from Kazuha’s only to place it on the small of his back, guiding him to a low-rise table set for them in the central engawa. “I also requested a meal based on the palate you had as a child.”
“I have ample time. My days have more than enough hours.” He sits at one end of the table, settling with his legs beneath him. Ayato, though dressed in finery rather than the casual sort of attire for such a meal, does just the same.
“And your palate?”
“There was a time that I survived on boiled tree bark. Anything prepared with care is a meal that I’m sure to enjoy.”
“You’ve shed much of your nobility.”
“I thought you’d observed as much. Does this bother you?”
“No,” Ayato says, shaking his head. “You’re more graceful without its burdens.”
Kazuha quietly receives the praise, ducking his head in acknowledgement. Though the compliment flatters him, it resonates, too. He’d always felt too clumsy with all of the responsibilities that had been stacked upon him. The robes tailored for him were always ill-fitting, as if his seamstresses thought him bigger—taller, broad-shouldered, more —than he was. All of the people he was supposed to know felt like strangers. He was taught history as if he was meant to one day be the hero on the pages, and basic economics as if he had ample coin to finance. He was undeniably small, and given so much largeness to step into. Of course he’d fumbled in all of it. It was not only cloth—bolts of silk and the purest cotton—that swallowed him whole, but his future, too, and all of the expectations.
The Kaedehara Clan was already on a path of inevitable decline when he was born. He was raised as a boy destined for nobility, anyways, like he could look at the death of his lineage and refuse it.
“Have I upset you?” Ayato asks.
“Not at all. When we were estranged, I feared that I’d never be truly known by you or your sister. At the time, you were my closest friends, and it was an acute misery to be swathed in noble facades. I never felt graceful, growing up—I felt more like a weed being mistaken for a rose.”
“I’d like to think I always knew you. You never were a rose to me, nor were you a weed.”
“What was I, then?”
“Grass.”
“Why?”
“The answer is equal parts kind and cruel.”
“That’s the duality of honesty.”
Ayato makes a noise of agreement, and gives his reasons. He explains the cruelty first— Kazuha bent to forces as soft as early spring breezes, and so often was trampled by and underfoot another, and he didn’t know how not to be picked and plucked at. It all boils down to the fact that Ayato had, for a time, seen Kazuha as a boy without a spine. He saw Kazuha as a quiet child who would bend and bend and bend for others, who gave as much as grass and got as little.
“But then you were everywhere, all of the time, trying, and I thought that if you got all of the things that you needed, you could grow to be anything: wheat, or sweetgrass, or silvergrass. You could weave yourself into anything, with enough time. I came to admire that you refused to be something that you weren’t. And I suppose I felt that there was something important about how undemanding you were—something to be learned.”
Ayato falls quiet as a servant comes to place down sweet wine between them. It’s not until she returns inside that he finishes his thoughts. “As a rose, you would have wilted, and as a weed… Well, you wouldn't have ever been one. They’re too pesky, too invasive. But you were always content with a good patch of sunlight, and showed more interest in the morning dew than you did in breakfast. I remember when the comparison to grass first struck me. You were crouched along tall grass and fell when Ayaka pushed you—all in play—and you lay there, on the ground, content to see nothing beyond the green. You looked better in grass than in silks. I imagine you still do.”
“You’re getting sentimental again,” Kazuha says, pouring a healthy portion of wine into two glasses, “noisy, warbling like a heron at dawn.”
“Well, what do you think of my answer?”
Kazuha wonders if it’s possible to explain the complexity that Ayato’s unfolded.
When the final home of his clan had been repossessed, and his parents were dead, and the last of the servants were all dismissed, he’d thought—briefly—about turning to the Kamisato Clan for shelter. He knew that they would have taken him in and sheltered him, but he knew that he’d be a burden no matter how much they’d try to hide it. Ayato and Ayaka had inherited a clan on the precipice of disaster, and to take in the son of a fallen family would only make matters worse. Even if they were on better-footing, Kazuha hadn’t spoken to either of the siblings for the better part of a year; tragedy had turned their world upside down, and they wore black for only a few days before being forced to don the armor and silks of business.
And at the root of it all, comfort was not his priority. With the Kamisato Clan, he would continue to live in the shadow of reputation and expectation. What he wanted most was freedom, and a chance at truth—and fate, both cruel and merciful, had given him both. So, he left. He left behind everything he could.
“I think your answer is quite good.”
“Quite good…” Ayato repeats. He swirls his wine, watching as it washes the sides of his glass pink. “That’s all the poet has to say?”
“Sometimes there’s no translation for the heart.”
Ayato takes a sip, and his lip curls in a sort of smile around the rim of the glass.
“Much better,” he says.
Seconds later, Thoma returns to them with lunch, and Kazuha cannot think of better timing. The way Ayato had been smiling was the promise of mischief. The tray of food, though not largely-sized, is abundantly filled with small side-dishes—warm broths, pickled vegetables, steaming rice, seasoned tofu, dried seaweed—around a plate of shrimp tempura. These are, without a doubt, all the flavors that Kazuha favored as a child, and more than Kazuha’s eaten over the last week; Ayato has gone above and beyond to assure that his taste-buds and belly will be spoiled.
At such an assortment, Kazuha almost feels guilty for believing that he’d never been seen—but he’s always had a close eye on the world, with his ear to the ground, so attuned to the great vastness of nature that he negated any chance of recognizing that he’d been looked at, seen. Then again, it wouldn’t have mattered if Kazuha paid attention; back then, Ayato watched him through the corner of his eyes, always subtle and never shameless.
Kazuha spends the next week wondering if Ayato is a rose. He’s undoubtedly pretty and certainly not without his thorns, but the similarities seem to end shortly thereafter.
He’s had ample solitude since their lunch, tasked with locating the most troublesome and invasive patches of dendrobium around the island; Narukami Island, relative to the rest of Inazuma, does not have many. There’s a fair amount of the plant blooming in the plains around Konda Village, where the ghosts of samurai haunt the land and are taken down, bleeding out the last of their bodies, by adventurers and wanderers and still-of-flesh soldiers.
His memory, which has always served him well, recalls more dendrobium around Kannazuka—particularly Nazuchi Beach, as well as the Resistance Camp and Kojou Sara’s encampment. Countless fights, small skirmishes and large battles alike, were witnessed by the earth of that island; it’s no wonder that dendrobium is most threatening there. Nonetheless, he’s diligent with his assignment, and spends a slow and leisurely week roaming the island to locate the areas where the plant blooms in excess.
When there’s no dendrobium to be observed, Kazuha turns his gaze upon all else that grows—lucious ferns, illuminated flowers, seagrass, hydrangeas—and tries to match Ayato with something. He spends longer than normal in Chinju Forest, kneeling along the edge of the small river that cuts through the trees and thinking that surely, this place suits Ayato well. For all of the quiet tucked into the murk, the tanuki offer life among the shadows, and the blue glow of flowers along the westward sprawl of the woods relieve the forest of a saturated gloom.
“Abandoned by light, but you’re needless of sunshine; darkness holds you best.”
For the better part of an hour, he strings together word after word and syllable after syllable. There are apt comparisons to be found, metaphors and likes and as’ to be put between Ayato and this forest. Both subjects share a rich sense of mystery, an ache-inspiring depth, and a separation from the rest of the world, but Kazuha hesitates, unsure if he’s pinned down Ayato well or if he knows Ayato enough to do him justice.
There’s a sense of condemnation here, with moss growing over tanuki statuettes and various shrines of ever-burning candles; the forest is like a vigil, in an eternal, post-funeral prayer, but Ayato is alive and young and there is no mourning to be done.
This forest grows into the ground, its roots stretching deep and spreading down, but Ayato has always been growing up.
II.
It’s raining when Kazuha reports back to Ayato, and the midday sun is tucked behind a thick curtain of storm clouds. He shows up to the Kamisato Estate thoroughly soaked, with his hair plastered to his face and his clothes clinging to his skin. The rain, thankfully, is warm, fat-dropped and heavy in the humidity. Lightning and thunder will crack the sky open before the world dries up again—he can smell the static.
There are two guards posted beneath the overhang of the courtyard entrance, and all other staff members have been dismissed from their post. The trees hang low in the deluge, and the stones run slick with rainwater, and this all should feel quite lonely, but Ayato waits beneath the shelter of the engawa, laughing at the state of Kazuha. Ayato’s forearms are folded, one over another, just below his chest with a thick towel hanging from them.
“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” Kazuha calls over the downpour.
“I waited almost a decade to see you again,” Ayato says when Kazuha steps onto the raised flooring, and out of the rain. He unfolds the towel and takes to drying Kazuha’s hair and Kazuha can only stand there, letting the warmth of affection crawl into him. “A few more minutes is no bother.”
“Did you truly wait?”
“I had a great many things to keep me busy, so my waiting wasn’t wasteful. I bid my time well.”
“Waiting suggests that you expected my return.”
“I did.”
Ayato unties Kazuha’s ponytail, scrunching the length of his hair with a now half-damp towel. When it’s dried enough for his liking, he wraps the towel around Kazuha’s shoulders.
“I wonder if I have any clothes that might fit you,” Ayato says, beginning to head inside.
“Would you be willing to wait a few more minutes?” Kazuha asks, and Ayato turns, his hand falling from the door. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to admire a storm like this.”
“I see.”
It is permission enough, so Kazuha lowers himself to sit, his legs hanging off from the edge of the porch and leaning back to prop himself up with the heels of his hands. The towel just barely stays draped over him. He watches, thoughtless as the rain plummets, to see leaves dip beneath the pressure of the rainfall and countless ripples over pond water. A deep inhale rewards him with the smell of sakura blooms, brought down from the southbound wind over the Shrine, and the sour-sweetness of lavender melons in peak season.
“I enjoy the sunshine more,” Kazuha says as Ayato nears, “but after so many storms backed by the fury of a goddess, this weather is quite gentle. This storm is not a raging heart.”
Ayato crouches just behind Kazuha, securing the towel around him again. He ties a loose knot with the corners of the towel, and gives a little tug to be sure it’s tied securely. His hands wander after that, casually working out small snarls in Kazuha’s wet hair and then coaxing off the pads of armor on Kazuha’s shoulder.
“This weather tormented you as a child. What’s changed?”
“I didn’t know how to manage all of the noise. The rain poured on and on, and I was helpless to ignore it. As time’s gone on, though, I’ve gotten better at subduing what I don’t wish to hear.”
Kazuha doesn’t turn to look as Ayato sits beside him, but as soon as he’s settled, Kazuha leans into him, his shoulder bumping a few inches beneath Ayato’s and his head resting against that curve of bone. He pushes up from how he sits, straightening his spine and taking the weight off of his palms to settle his hands in his lap. The gauze wrapped around his right hand is soaked through; he’ll have to replace it soon, but for now, he just worries with the bandage, picking at it with his other fingers. As always, Ayato does not make a show of staring; his gaze to observe the anxious habit is subtle, and he makes no comment. All he does is pry Kazuha’s worrying hand away, his gloved fingers wrapping around Kazuha’s until they are still—and Kazuha does not say anything, either; he just keeps Ayato’s hand on his, curling a few of his fingers to hook around Ayato’s.
They stay like that for a while, Ayato’s left hand held in Kazuha’s lap until Kazuha is clutching onto him like he’ll slip through if his grip eases. Ayato cannot feel much of his hand anymore; he tells Kazuha as much, who relents with an apology. As Kazuha lets go, he thinks of how it felt to soften the grip he’d had on Tomo’s Vision. By then, when he opened his hand, the Vision had expired, the purple long gone—but now he spreads his fingers and Ayato lets his hand rest where it is, cradled in Kazuha’s palms while he stretches the blood back into the digits.
“You must be a fine swordsman, with a grip like that.”
“At the very least, I’m better than you must remember me.”
“You were never bad with a sword,” Ayato remarks. “You just had a penchant for taking the defensive. As such, you always held your own against me.”
“Do you remain so aggressive in combat?”
“I hardly fight anymore.” Kazuha peels back the low-cut palm of Ayato’s glove. The skin is blistered and red. “I’ve been caught. Well, then… I fight a little.”
“There’s little use in deception, Ayato,” Kazuha murmurs with a sly little smile. “I can hear your heart. It beats fast with your betrayal.”
“You’d accuse me of lying?”
“I am accusing you, but the truth of your affairs is not my business, so I yield. Sometimes a sword serves justice best, and the business you’ve conducted in the shadows has brought forth dawn. I trust you.”
“Violence is far from a pretty thing, but it sows the proper seeds.”
“Seeds of peace, the blooms of prosperity…”
Ayato quietly stands, at last taking his hand from Kazuha’s. He leans out from the shelter of the rooftop, briefly looking up to assess the rainfall. He looks satisfied with the bleakness, and steps out into the courtyard. The rain soaks him through in seconds, darkening the white of his outfit and slicking his hair. Kazuha watches closely and Ayato, knowing he’s taken his attention from the rain, smiles.
Water materializes and solidifies into a blade at his hip and Ayato raises it above his head, looking at Kazuha with a gaze sharper than his sword, before swiftly cutting down and across his torso with a burst of light.
The rain in the courtyard eases. Little flowers, blooms of water, drift in the air. Small beads of rain float upwards from the peeling petals. The flowers chime before bursting, and reform within seconds. Ayato’s sword is gone; he wanders the plot of his burst, fingers toying with the blooms of Hydro around him or sending the flowers up like lanterns. Kazuha stands, and slowly walks into the field of Hydro constructs. He carefully weaves through the blooms, knowing better than to try holding them—it’s likely only Ayato who can keep them from rupturing. He dares not so much as touch them.
Ayato stills himself at the far end of his burst, letting Kazuha come to him and find him through the minefield of flowers. His hands are politely folded behind his back. He watches Kazuha with an amused sort of look; Kazuha treds the area of Ayato’s burst as if he is not the most gentle thing here, as if the blooms are more delicate and more precious than him.
“Seeds of peace, the blooms of prosperity,” Ayato says, recalling Kazuha’s last musing. Then he smiles, more fond than sad, as the flowers fade and the rain returns to a downpour. “A garden of purity.”
Inside, Thoma fusses over the both of them; he has the courage of someone of a much higher rank, scolding Ayato and Kazuha with the same sort of disappointment.
Ayato has enough gall to smile, and Thoma strikes down his arrogance in seconds.
“You’ll be out of commission for at least a week if you catch a cold,” he says, shoving a warm change of clothes into Ayato’s arms. “And Kazuha—you’re a wanderer, for crying out loud… How have you not learned your lesson?”
This is a fair point; Kazuha has gotten sick from unkind weather more times than he can count on his hands, and flushes red. He could blame Ayato for keeping him in wet clothes for so long, but he can’t, not really—it had been his inclination to stay and watch the storm; Ayato had only encouraged him to stay a while longer.
Kazuha’s given dry clothes, and Thoma dismisses the two of them to get changed. Sheepishly, he follows Ayato down the hallway and into a small room with shoji folded up at the far end—but the partition is disregarded entirely, and the two of them peel the wet clothes from their bodies as soon as Kazuha slides the door shut.
As kids, they’d seen each other naked; they ran bare-skinned into rivers and lakes and hot springs, as careless as kids should be, young enough when nudity was not unnatural.
Kazuha still does not think of nudity as something particularly scandalous. He has been caught bathing in streams, more than once, by passersby, and he’s not been taken to bed, and has not opened the pages of books that suggests the skin of his thighs or belly or back as enticing—but Ayato looks at him, and he looks at Ayato, and he understands, a little, that most other men his age consider bare bodies in ways he’s never thought to. He thinks that he’d like to be looked at longer, until Ayato knows about every freckle and scar on his body.
“When we were young, did I ever tell you that you were beautiful?”
“You didn’t.”
“Hmm.”
“Why do you ask?”
“In my youth, you were the prettiest thing I knew. Years later, you remain the standard.”
“I wasn’t under the impression that you looked at me much,” Kazuha murmurs.
“I looked at you more than I should have. I just never stared like I do now.”
“Why?”
“Why didn’t I stare?” he asks, and Kazuha nods. “You were forbidden to me, positioned to court my sister.”
“I remain forbidden.”
“I’m weaker, nowadays.”
Kazuha eyes the muscles of Ayato’s stomach, the shadowed little valleys and the strong peaks of his abdomen, and the confident rise of his chest. He sees how tall Ayato stands, held up by supple thighs and a sure spine.
“Evidence stacks against your claim. You’re as strong as mountains are tall.”
“Perhaps you’re more tempting, then. My resolve crumbles at the very thought of you.”
Kazuha looks down to his own body. He’s scrawnier than he’d like, and pale. He unfolds the yukata given to him, glad to cover himself; he’s neither proud nor ashamed of his body, but can’t quite be brought to believe that it’s the sort of thing to waiver strong wills. He’s simply grateful for his body, appreciative of all the triumphs it has allowed him. There’s nothing more he needs from it, and there’s nothing more it needs from him. He nurtures it all he can, and it serves him well in turn.
(He’s like every other star-crossed lover, tending only to the things he needs and hoping that ignoring the burn of want will be enough to extinguish it altogether.)
There’s fire in his gut, though.
(He needs nothing; he wants everything.)
Ayato pulls on his own robe.
(The finding of all romantics is that needing and wanting are, inevitably, synonymous. Love, the paramount desire, is the thing they live and die for. It’s needed because it’s wanted.)
Kazuha can’t remember the last time he needed someone other than himself.
(Maybe they survive this, though.)
Is he afraid of needing something? Or have the last of his years, lived frugally, taught him that pursuing want is greedy? Is it ungrateful for him to seek this sort of excess? Was he not already so spoiled with small and earthly pleasures?
Maybe he’d never shuddered at the hands of another, but he’s stepped into sunlight after hours of wandering in canopy shade; his skin raised with gooseflesh when the midday sun took to his skin like ink in water, running deep into him, past his skin and through his bones, the warmth seeming to seep into the marrow. And maybe a man’s mouth never coaxed much noise from him, but he’s sunk his teeth into the flesh of fruits and swiped the juice from his chin, licking it back up; he’s savored sweetness, and the salt of good meat, and licked the tang of sweat as it dripped from his own scalp. He’s bared himself for rivers and basking rocks and ferns, and the world has seen his body, and the soft run of his skin is known, is touched.
His heart, too, is known; split over the world, dropped from the beak of a gull like clams, the essence spilled on the land like waves over shorelines, the heat of his blood given back to every fire he’s ever stoked and his little secrets given to the souls of animals he’d skinned. His heart is given and thus, it’s satisfied.
When Kazuha looks at Ayato, he begins to think that his body and heart know only a fraction of all that there is. He’s never thought that he knew everything, or anything close to everything, but he’d thought he knew more than this. He didn’t think there’d be anyone (or anything) who could make him feel like he knew nothing—and yet, he knows that Ayato is capable of kiss- and touch-borne oblivion, and he knows this because of how Ayato smiles in a way that makes his heart forget half of the pain that it should know.
“What does the thought of me do to you?” Ayato asks, and for the better part of a minute, Kazuha doesn’t know what to say.
“I forget words like cities forget stars,” Kazuha says, the words viscous like honey in his mouth; he can’t get them around his tongue as well as he’d like. “The thought of you makes it hard to say much of anything.”
“Is that so? Up until now, you’ve been nothing but eloquent.”
“Up until now, I thought of you differently.”
“Ah. So that’s the difference.” Ayato has not stopped smiling. “No one can be demure forever, nor is there any need to cling to a guise of chastity.”
“I fear you’re about to tease me.”
“There’s nothing to tease you for. Sexuality, desire… It’s natural.”
Tales of two men aren’t the sort of stories either of them have been told—it is a large part of what shapes their forbidden—but Kazuha nods, trusting Ayato because his heart isn’t racing to stay ahead of any lie.
“Should we get to business?” Ayato suggests.
“I’ll be brief,” Kazuha says, nodding. They’re back in Ayato’s office, and the order of everything—the steel pens, the stacked papers, the straight-edge files—keeps Kazuha’s mind from wandering. “I’ve taken up much of your time.”
“It’s no matter.”
“Your reputation precedes you. You have a habit of isolation, and you don’t have to sacrifice your preferences for my comfort.”
Ayato hums, leaning back in his chair without argument as he lets weariness take the reins; his shoulders slump and the polite smile he wears drops, and Kazuha offers a concise summary of his findings about dendrobium on this island, and his experience with the blooms elsewhere. He gets little in the way of a response—just a little noise of acknowledgement—so Kazuha stands, reaching for a pen and paper, and puts his findings down in ink for Ayato to review when his energy allows for it. At the end of his summarizing, Kazuha leaves his tasks for the upcoming week: he’ll be tending to some of the ramshackle shrines that he knows of around the island, removing weeds and ivy and conducting minor repairs.
He leaves the paper in the center of the desk. Ayato has fallen asleep; Kazuha had unconsciously recognized this some minutes ago. During the war, he’d adopted a tendency to pay attention to people’s breathing patterns (a subconscious habit, perhaps, to keep track of life and death and those in the balance), and Ayato’s has slowed into a steady one of rest.
Kazuha quietly nudges open the door, and wanders barefoot down the hallway. It’s fairly quiet; he can hear the distant fall of a knife on a cutting board, and the sizzling of food in an oiled skillet, and an easy conversation a few rooms down. He recognizes Thoma’s voice, and follows it to the source, politely knocking at the wooden wall beside the sliding door—and the voice of a lady calls him in.
Thoma and Ayaka are in the room, sharing tea and a modest meal. Out of habit, Ayaka has her fan spread to cover some of her face, but the formality drops as soon as she recognizes him. She stares and then smiles, laughing with quiet and simple delight.
“You’re not intruding on anything,” Thoma assures him, inviting Kazuha in with a wave. “Lady Kamisato and I meet for a bit of harmless gossip when it’s raining like this. Come join us.”
“Oh, I was wondering when this would happen,” Ayaka says as Kazuha sits, thinking it’d be impolite to decline. “I hope you can forgive me for not seeking out your company sooner.”
“I’m sure you’re busy. Nothing you’ve done warrants an apology,” Kazuha assures her.
“Busy, yes, but… I have to admit, I wasn’t sure how I’d approach you after all of the years that have passed… Thoma has offered me some guidance on the matter of our reunion, although my courage still failed me in the end. I’m starting to feel grateful that you’ve happened upon me now, otherwise I might have never…”
“I would have, if you hadn’t,” Kazuha assures her. He has the sense that Ayaka frets about whether or not he would have wanted her to say hello. He’s seemingly right, hearing a sigh of relief from her.
“But you didn’t know I was here, so… What brought you here?”
“I sought Thoma, and heard him here. Ayato fell asleep in his office—”
“He what ?”
“Surely he’s not sleeping…” Ayaka says, and then she snickers. She and Ayato meet each other’s gazes and break into a fit of laughter, seeming stunned with amusement and disbelief.
“Forgive us, Kazuha, it’s just that—” Thoma’s seized by laughter again, and struggles for a moment to recollect himself.
“Oh, it’s such a peculiar thing to imagine,” Ayaka tells, flushed as though she’s seen her way through too many shots of alcohol, and acting about as delirious; Kazuha scans the table and finds damning evidence in the form of two shot glasses and a rounded bottle of sake. She sits upright again, breathing deeply to ward off another outburst. “He’ll be mortified to have fallen asleep in your presence. Were you discussing business?”
“Hardly,” Kazuha says, smiling smally. “I didn’t want to wake him…”
“Someone probably should. If he fell asleep in his chair, he’ll be aching by the time he wakes up,” Thoma says, starting to stand, but Kazuha puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Continue your merriment, please. If you point me to his quarters, I can handle the rest.”
“His room hasn’t moved since we were kids,” Ayaka says.
“I’m afraid I never visited.”
“You didn’t?” Ayaka asks. The red on her face renews. “I thought… Well, nevermind, then. It’s just down the hall, down the stairs and to the left. You’re welcome to return here once you’ve brought him to bed—we can find a room for you to wait out the rain tonight.”
Kazuha nods and stands, righting the folds and the obi of his garments, and dismisses himself with a bow of his head. When he returns to Ayato’s office, Ayato is gone from the chair, as is the note Kazuha had left on the desk. He exits the office as quickly as he’d entered, continuing down the hall and trotting down the stairs to Ayato’s room, pushing the door open with a soft push from the pads of his fingers.
The window is shut but the air of the room is fresh, scented like sweet soil and sitting easy in his lungs. It had been open not long ago, and the yukata Ayato had worn is hanging over the back of a couch, and Kazuha is not a detective put the clues read like the classic stories: he can all but see the footprints that Ayato had made from the office to the hall to the stairs to the bedroom door to the window. All the more wonderful and cliche is the little note Ayato had taken time to leave, pinched into place between the sliding glass and the windowsill. His penmanship is beautiful, smooth, flourished with elegant loops and long sweeps on the stems and roots of particular letters. Kazuha smiles as he reads:
Forgive me and my trickery—as you maintain the beauty of your youth, I’ve kept my childhood cunning, too. I listened to all you said regarding dendrobium, and wished to have heard more. I thought of letting our conversation last long enough to wander like it always does, because there are more sweet little things I’d like to tell you.
Regardless, business calls. My schedule cannot accommodate my sentimentality today.
Stay the night, if you’d like. I’d require you to stay, if I could be there—but Archons knows it would take hands and rope and chain to keep you from nature’s call. If you don’t wish to stay, I cannot force you to. I had a housemaid dry your clothes; they’re folded on the floor inside my dresser.
Return to me healthy, if you go.
Kazuha fiddles with the note, rolling a corner of the parchment between his fingers until the paper softens.
“Return to me healthy,” Kazuha reads, and his heart is in his throat, fluttering with the mild, simple, and earnest joy of having a person and a place to return to at all. He’d gone so long without this—years upon years, with some additional months stacked atop; it had been long enough that he’d forgotten how returning implies belonging, and how belonging held a sacred sort of happiness that any living creature deserves to have. Belonging is a baseline kind of contentment—birds have their tree, humans their home, foxes their burrows—and returning is a privilege that the lucky are allowed. No matter how far one flies, how far they walk or trot, where they belong is a place they can return.
When he began his wandering, he had strived for a place to belong and a place to return, but never quite achieved such a feat. Any cave he tried to settle in was found and plundered, and the little treehouses he’d attempted to build were taken over by nesting birds. He supposes that he might have achieved belonging, knowing the world so well that he did not feel like a guest by the time the war began; the ways of nature took him in and he learned to live as plants do, as wild animals do, as rocks do. He knew when to root himself, and how to find the sun, and learned when to bite instead of bark, and how to be unmoving when the worst tried to weather him down.
Maybe it was people he searched for, more than he did a place, and he forgot of the people he belonged to before he’d belonged to the world.
Did they ever renounce me? Did I ever stop belonging to them?
Them: the Kamisato Clan, the Resistance, the people of Ritou, of his hometown.
What a clever war it was, to make a man cut his own ties.
Of course he had abandoned his own belonging. The people he belonged to would have paid a horrible price for sheltering him.
He sits on Ayato’s bed, then lies, weighed down with a sweet and blameless heartache. He bundles a pillow to his chest, clutching it with his arms, sobbing into the silk until half of it runs dark with the wet of his tears. There is nothing he could have done to belong to these people any better or any sooner.
It was in his destiny to have no tethers. It was in his destiny to spend these years in solitude, and it is in his destiny to tie himself back to them, or for them to tie him back to them.
His heart had been cut from him to be put into a grave with his parents, and to fall still with Tomo, and to be struck to revelation by the lightning, and now he is getting it back, piece by piece. Ayato must have been given some cut of the organ, too; Kazuha can feel it stitching back into place and he is breathless when the pain of his chest settles to an ache, wrung dry of his tears, his chest on the verge of collapse as he calls life back into his lungs rather than out.
Tonight, Kazuha does not want to return; he only wants to belong. He sheds his clothes once more and slips beneath the covers. The silk sheets are smooth like still water, and the smell of cyprus is woven together with the threads, and the prior heat that had boiled in his gut returns to warm his whole body.
III.
He completes the upheaval of four shrines, all scattered around the plains of Konta Village, by the height of the afternoon. The sun shines straight overhead, and Kazuha permits himself rest, satisfied with the progress he’s made. Three of the four shines had been relatively easy to restore; he’d only had to tug aside ivy and uproot nefarious weeds. It was the fourth that had been of any real struggle; he spent the better part of an hour collecting stones to repair the cobblestone base, and righting the small shingles of the slanted covering.
A few farmers from the village had offered Mora for his aid; he’d declined enough times to be polite, and gave in when any more rebuttal would have been rude. His stroll to Inazuma City, then, is accompanied with the jingle of a coin purse at his hip.
Throughout the war, Kazuha sought no shelter in the city; he didn’t want to make any trouble with his possession of a Vision, and by the time Tomo had been slain, it was clear that he’d be cut down by any guard who had the chance. The bounty for him, dead or alive, was high, rewarding enough that even some everyday folk had made an attempt at his capture.
Since olive branches have started to extend from all sides, he has only toed inside the city twice. Neither visit felt particularly wonderful; he can only hope for a better result today. (One would think the hope had been long beaten from him, but he always smelled sunshine past the rainclouds, and he always heard birdsongs after the rain. Of all the things he was made vulnerable to, pessimism was not among the list. The downtrodden, he learned, are not always the defeated .)
He fills his lungs with the air of the city, fragrant with cherry blossom trees and the entwined sweet-and-savory offerings of food stalls, and alive with the one-two beat of chatter and laughter. At their posts, guards are at-ease; though their polearms are pointed to pierce the sky and their armor is shined to perfection, their grips are no longer white-knuckled and their faces are visible beneath their helmets. Citizens ease the circles they stand in, and talk louder; people are invited in and allowed to go as they please, and the benches are filled, and people meander down the cobblestone streets like slow stream water.
Things are far from how they were, but the tension of the war is many horizons behind.
He can’t help but smile. He wishes Tomo could see what his death had given Inazuma. His martyrdom has inspired the return of life—but there’s nothing mighty enough to buy back his own life. Finality was the cost of this future; a temporary sacrifice would have been no good. Death, for Inazuma’s prosperity: one eternity had to be offered for another to be ended.
Kazuha offers a merchant Mora for tri-colored dango. He and Tomo had shared two skewers; they’d bought one, at first, but Tomo insisted upon spoiling them with a second so that they could each taste all three of the flavors. Matcha had been Tomo’s favorite, so Kazuha strolls through the city while slowly eating at the first two rolls of dango, and leaves the final ball at the foot of a shrine by the edge of the road. He kneels before the shrine after placing down the skewer, and rests his palms on his thighs.
I imagine Inazuma in springtime does not compare to the fabled halls of heaven, but alas… It would be nice to wander these roads with you today. I have not forgotten your laugh, or your voice, but I’d like to hear you again anyways—I doubt how well I remember you, even if details do not entirely omit me. I already forget with which side of your mouth you bit down on wheat stalks. I forget if you kissed my cheek or my forehead. I forget if that was a memory or a dream. I think I’ve lost much of you to the haze of my reveries, Tomo. My mind and heart have been scrambling to let me have you how I once wanted you.
I’d wanted to kiss you. I’d wanted to be pulled naked into bed with you, all the bark of me pulled off and all of my branches barren so that I bloomed anew with you. I’d wanted to love you in a way friends don’t.
I just want you alive, now. Alive is the way I want you.
I’m at this shrine praying for the sun to rise in the east and set in the west, and for snow to fall in summer, and for every melon I coax from the branch to be perfectly sweet, and for you to be alive.
The prayers of a romantic—impossible; tender; and simple until they’re not.
There is more to say, but Kazuha smells cyprus in the wind, and opens his eyes to look for Ayato. He’s strolling side-by-side with a man at least a head taller, and half-a-foot broader in the shoulders, and Kazuha squints to find the detail that explains the disparity: the man has horns. It takes Kazuha a moment to recall his name; he’s caught enough conversations and peered at the news boards to learn about the oni’s reputation. He seems harmless, albeit a little disruptive.
Ayato catches Kazuha’s gaze within seconds. His head tilts, but he catches sight of the shine before Kazuha and seems to find an answer to whatever question he had. Kazuha stands up and brushes off his knees, and motions with his hands to prompt an explanation from Ayato regarding the large beetle in his hands.
“My onikabuto? She’s glorious, I know,” Ayato croons as he nears. Itto’s shoulders visibly drop. “Shuumatsuban’s Sharpest. She’s yet to lose.”
“Hey, I’m takin’ it easy on her!” Itto protests, and then he extends a large hand to Kazuha. “Don’t let Ayato twist the story. I’m the greatest beetle battler that there is, okay? I’m the Arataki Itto!”
“You’ve got quite a reputation,” Kazuha says, shaking his hand. Itto has a surprisingly mild-mannered grip—maybe he’s learned how not to crush the average human hand? Itto’s grin twists a few angles prouder, and his chest puffs out to match, straining against the leather crossed atop the muscle. “It’s nice to put a face to the name.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m a pretty humble guy, so I don’t really go on any meet-or-greet tours. Y’know how it goes.”
“Of course.”
“People are quite desperate to learn the trick of Itto’s trade,” Ayato murmurs, and Kazuha’s rather amused by how Itto proudly rests his hands on his hips, clearly yet to learn how to decipher Ayato’s smile.
“My trade. Yeah, totally. My trade, being, um…”
“Setting the record for the longest-known losing streak.”
“Hey, hey! I’m taking it easy on you! I could win if I tried! ” Kazuha politely swallows any inclination to laugh. “Next week, I’ll show you.”
“I’m sure. Now, if you’d excuse me—might I put my beetle in your care again? I’m afraid I won’t have time to tend to her again this week…”
“Sure, sure,” Itto says, smiling as Shuumatsuban’s Sharpest is entrusted into his care. His palms are steady as he takes hold of the beetle. His hands dwarf the specimen. “I’ll let you get to business.”
Ayato thanks him, and Kazuha waves farewell as Itto carries on his way.
“He’s quite the character. I always surprise myself with how much I enjoy his company,” Ayato murmurs fondly. “He makes it easy to forget the presence of the general public.”
“To your point, I’m surprised to see you here,” Kazuha admits.
“I pause around noon for a stroll, whenever I can spare the time. I usually walk a more discrete path but Itto was eager about the new beetle he’d found, and hoped to have a public victory over me.”
“How many losses has he suffered?”
“Cumulatively, I have no data. Against me, he’s suffered fifty four.”
“And you’ve had how many battles with him?”
“Fifty four,” Ayato says with a smile. With a small nod of his head, Ayato prompts them into a walk heading back the way he’d come from. “Accompany me back to the Estate, would you? You can tell me about the shrines.”
“Later,” Kazuha says, falling into step beside his old friend.
“Later?”
“I’ll tell you about the shrines later, if you’ll permit it. For now, I’d like to just be on a walk with a friend.”
“Very well.”
Ayato extends his arm between them, bent at the elbow with his forearm offered inwards—and Kazuha takes it, wrapping his hand around the crook of Ayato’s elbow and stepping in closer to his side. They walk, and say nothing; Kazuha wouldn’t be able to keep a conversation if Ayato tried. He’s busy, tangled up in thought.
Afternoons like this were expected to be the humdrum of their lives, once. The city would all be taken for granted, and the cobblestone would soften beneath their feet as they walked the same path day after day, and they’d discuss business to and from their offices, and they’d love nothing about what they love now. If life carried down the path they’d been raised to anticipate, the blue sky would not matter to them, and their shared steps would not mean anything—but Kazuha looks down to watch their steps fall into sync, Ayato slowing his larger pace to match Kazuha’s smaller stride, and he can’t help but smile. (This would have been the only thing, back then, that'd be the same as now: Ayato had always been taller.)
There would have been other joys to share, if their life went in the way they were raised to go—but there would not have been the little joys of this, and Kazuha knows better than to take kind days for granted.
“The sunshine feels different today,” Ayato says.
“It feels familiar,” Kazuha says.
And Ayato hums with agreement because somehow, they’ve lived a life in which different and familiar are almost synonyms. They were raised together in springtime sunlight, introduced when the season smiled brightest at the world, and pulled apart in bitter winter months when coughs prompted the preemptive digging of graves, put onto a path where memories were recollected more than they were made, where things changed often and familiarity became the privilege of youth.
They’re acquainted with unfamiliarity now, which is to say that they’re not used to anything. They are quick on their feet; they know to bet whatever they have on change; and that’s it, that’s all. They don’t settle down, and don’t invest much hope in what’s proclaimed to be steadfast. The inevitably of fallibility: that’s the only steadiness they believe in.
Kazuha, who woke to a new loss every day of his childhood and then placed his head on a new sort of pillow each night of his adulthood; Ayato, who had gone from one life and into another in the course of a single dusk-to-dawn darkness—how could they place any trust in the ability for things to settle? They’d never found proof that anything could last; they’ve never had evidence favoring the possibility of eternity.
Though Kazuha had fought tooth-and-nail when the time came, he thinks the Shogun would have failed, eventually, even if no war had ever started. Something would have changed.
Ayato has an office in Tenryou, above a single-floored restaurant. There’s a private staircase upstairs in a room behind the bar, the door to which blends seamlessly into the wooden panels of the wall. It’s a rather secretive affair.
“On occasion,” Ayato explains as Kazuha follows him up, “I need a place where I can work without being found.”
“You’ve given me a secret to keep.”
“I have.”
“Who else knows that you operate from here?”
“The owner of the restaurant.”
“Not Thoma or Ayaka?”
Ayato is seated at his desk, a pen in hand and a stack of papers before him, and he answers Kazuha with a smile before returning to his work. If such a look is the only answer he’ll get for such a question, Kazuha knows better than to ask why he’s been trusted—for Ayato will not answer at all. The way Ayato manages his secrets is odd; he proposes secrets exist, putting them on the table rather than going through the motions of insisting he’s an open book.
Whether this is clever or not, Kazuha’s not sure.
He wanders once around the office, observing what few things are laying around to be taken note of. There’s a couch at the edge of the room with a set of pillows and a blanket, and it measures just large enough to be comfortable for sleep. Ayato’s scent is heavy on the cushions. There’s a modest bookshelf nearby, crammed full with a variety of titles—some political, some fictional; they’re across genres and topics, poetry and prose, the romantic and the real—and Kazuha thoughtfully traces his fingers over the spines, taking note of the books that seem particularly well-loved. There is one about native Inazuman flora that’s especially worn, any and all stiffness bent out of the spine with how often it’s been cracked open and the pages soft with oil from fingertips.
Kazuha pulls the book from the shelf and crosses the room to where a large window with a thick sill is opened. He carefully perches himself atop it, leaning his back into the side of the frame and settling himself on the windowsill as he would in the crooks of a tree branch; he brings his legs up towards his chest and the back of his hands rest atop his knees, where he can hold the book.
“You don’t seem in the mood to talk business,” Ayato murmurs.
“You’re busy,” Kazuha says. He can hear the sharp cuts of Ayato’s pen on paper.
“I have time for you.”
“Then, I’d like how we are to last a little longer,” he says. “This quiet is nice.”
“Am I that bad a conversationalist?” Ayato asks. He’s teasing (and Kazuha is laughing, lightly); his lips haven’t straightened out from a smile for full minutes, now.
“Speaking with you is as easy as it always had been.”
“Alright,” Ayato says, only looking away from Kazuha when Kazuha turns to look at him—and Kazuha stares at him a while longer, feeling how his heart trembles in his chest and waiting for it to settle. “Quiet it is, Kazuha.”
He looks back to the book, thumbing through the pages until finding the entry for dendrobium. Supposedly, the poets have come to call the plant lycoris , a word of older language that translates to twilight. It’s a beautiful plant, with large petals that fall open in vibrant hues of red and fade to an almost-glowing white in the middle. From the center, slim stamens rise, straining from the plant and up to the heavens. They’re stunning, and made all the more beautiful by their legends— lycoris are said to line the pathways of departure, sowed into earth along the Sanzu River where the living cross into death. Fallen men follow these blooms to rest, and be reclaimed by the eternity of the elemental cycle, born anew when their time for reincarnation comes.
But as for those who doubt or are perplexed by “eternity,” they shall be shackled to the earth, becoming another enchantingly red flower amid the vermillion fields, the text reads.
Kazuha has never been spiritual, but he’s always been a romantic: he can’t help but hope that Tomo, survived not by body but by spirit, had found his way along the blooms and to Celestia. It must have taken him a while—Tomo had been with him, among this earth and these plains, when he had stood to resist the weight of the Shogun’s ultimate punishment—but surely Tomo’s made it by now, ascended to the higher heavens, where pain and grief and sacrifice cannot follow him, where he can look over the world that changes and moves and turns only because he’d died for it.
If Tomo remained on this earth, Kazuha would not pluck a single dendrobium until he knew which of them had bloomed in the soil of Tomo’s death; he would not uproot a single bloom until he knew which flower peeled open to show the color of Tomo’s blood. And in his daydreams, he’d find that flower and keep to it, and lay by it until he was among the soil, too; he would stay there until one bloom became two.
That’s a reverie, though.
Grief cannot chain him, and neither can love, and the world is too big for him to be held down to a single hill. He’s made peace with all that’s been lost, and been sated by the things that he has found following the wreckage. He steals a glance at Ayato, wondering if anything else that has been lost to him might be reclaimed in the coming years—but he’s not greedy. Already, he has more than enough.
“I fixed four shrines today,” Kazuha says. An hour has passed, at most. “Some village elders paid me for the kindness.”
“I imagine you’d be a very rich man, if you were paid for all your actions of goodwill.”
“I’d pay the people who were kind to me, passing the money on like the wind carries seeds.”
“Of course. How could I forget? You have no need for money,” Ayato recalls, setting down his pen and leaning back in his chair. “You’re painfully frugal.”
“It’s not painful.”
“Not to you, but to me… I counted your ribs when you dropped your clothes before me. You shivered so hard from the rain that I feared your bones would crack—and if they had, I would’ve seen the fractures through your skin. Sometimes I think frugal isn’t even the best word to describe your selfless habits. Over the last week, neglect has been the word that comes easier.”
“I don’t neglect myself; I require little.”
“You deserve much,” Ayato counters. “I look at you and all I want to do is spoil you.”
“You already have,” Kazuha says, thinking of the meals they’ve shared, of the bed he slept in, of the clothes put on his back, all under the orders of Ayato’s generosity.
“I’ve barely started.”
“You make it sound like you have a plan to pamper me.”
“I do,” Ayato says. He cleans off the nib of his pen, straightens some papers on his desk, and stands from his chair. Kazuha watches him from where he stays in the windowsill, warm in the sunlight that falls through, happy to stay and bask while Ayato walks to him. Ayato quietly sits across from Kazuha on the other side of the windowsill, with a much more formal posture—he keeps his feet on the floor of his office, and his spine straight. He’s beautiful, caught in the midday sun; his narrowed eyes gleam and his skin glows and his hair glistens like water.
“You do,” Kazuha prompts him, quiet because his mouth has run dry.
“It’s the sort of plan that might scare you off.”
“I’m not a rabbit, and you are not a wolf. Unless you plan to put a knife at my throat, I don’t think I’ll flee.”
They look each other in the eyes, melting beneath the same beam of light. The late breeze of the afternoon runs between them with the eager trills of a birdsong. For a moment, Kazuha thinks that they are children again; they are wondering about the sort of things that are allowed in this world. They are looking at each other’s mouths, trying to fathom if they’ll fit together; they are looking at each other’s hands, figuring out the touches that are permitted and the touches that aren’t. They’re boys. They have roughhoused before, gotten tangled up on the ground with their swords some feet away, pulled each other by the wrists to run towards something bright. They’re pre-man, pre-war, pre-fear; they have not grown into something sturdy, and they have not gotten anything more than a slap on the wrist for their little curiosities. They’re boys, with chests like caves and hearts like beasts.
“If I kissed you, could you stand it?” Ayato asks.
Kazuha bows his head, politely trying not to laugh.
“Your plan is to court me, then.”
“I propose romance, and you’re laughing about it. Oh, how your manners have fallen, Kaedehara Kazuha…”
“You spoke of kissing as if it’s a thing to merely be tolerated.”
“Have mercy on a flustered man.”
“Flustered? You’re as smug as a fox,” Kazuha says, looking at Ayato once more.
“Until you deny me, I really have no reason not to be.”
“What if I deny you?”
“It’d be a shame,” Ayato says, suddenly soft and fond, “but I could stand it.”
Ayato stands from the windowsill and Kazuha places the book down, turning to face Ayato. He braces his hands on the edge of the wooden sill, looking up as Ayato bends down, and if he’s to deny Ayato, he has only a moment to do so—but Ayato is breathing into those seconds, his breath warm and sweet. Arrested of his breath, abandoned by all the ways to say yes or no , Ayato looks at him closely for his answer. Kazuha strains, his arms straightening and his back arching as he tries to claim what’s been offered.
“You can stand it,” Ayato quietly croons, voice low with wonder and delight. Kazuha doesn’t know when he started trembling—was it when the sun peeked back out from behind the clouds, or when Ayato held him by his face, fingers soft on the slope of his jaw? “Do you know how long I withstood this? Having you so close, and never kissing you?”
“Years,” Kazuha says, whispering his guess.
“My whole life,” Ayato murmurs, “from the day I met you. I wanted to be the first to kiss you. I should have asked sooner.”
“You’ll be the first.”
“Are you alright with that?”
The preamble is sweet, but the moment now is ripe; any longer and the sweetness will be too much. He kisses Ayato once—it’s a single, short kiss, and he finds that it’s not enough. He gets to his feet and presses into Ayato, and Ayato lets him, stepping back as Kazuha steps in. Kazuha softly grabs him by the shoulders, on his tippy-toes to keep his lips where he wants them; Ayato holds him at the waist to keep him steady, fingertips meeting on the small of his back.
Kazuha thinks he must have fantasized about this, when it was not entirely unrealistic to hope for such a thing. There’s something familiar about how he holds onto Ayato, like his hands learned how to love from the countless reveries in which they’d done what they’re doing now.
“I’ve kissed you before,” he says against Ayato’s mouth. “In my dreams—I kissed you then.”