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The walk back home is a long one, and Ayato is glad for it.
It is raining, too, which he is less glad for. But the rain does make it easier to think, and it is on walks like these that Ayato does most of his thinking. Which festivals are coming up, how to plan for them, the implications of new intel from the Shuumatsuban, how to delicately bring up the fact that his housekeeper was nearly killed at the order of the Tenryou Commission…typical things like that.
But today his thoughts are slurred, half-formed ideas breaking apart and melding together in an unidentifiable mass. Ayato tangles his fingers in his hair, irritated. The rain has always given him strength, quite literally placing him in his own element. His strikes are stronger, his thoughts clearer.
Except for today, apparently.
His Hydro Vision pulses at his hip, almost as if it is pleased with the weather. That makes one of us. He’s changed his mind–rain is the absolute worst and should be banned from public areas. Inazuma’s characteristic thunderheads roll slowly across the horizon, and the otogi trees of Chinju Forest provide little protection from the storm, even with their thick foliage. The scattered raindrops are quickly turning into a deluge, and Ayato quickens his pace.
The stone steps are slick, but Ayato climbs them as fast as he can manage. Ayaka is always lecturing him about his recklessness, even now–he hasn’t tripped on the stairs for years ! He always brings up how actually, wasn’t she the one who took a bet when they were younger and climbed the tallest tree in Chinju Forest, then couldn’t get down and begged him to come get her? That particular story always got him a flick on the ear. Then he would always gripe and groan about how the young lady of the Kamisato Clan is not as kind as people think and oh, what a waste of youth to mar it with such malice! Ayaka would flush bright red and splutter something, then flick him again and dash off to her room. It was always worth the scolding, seeing his dear sister finally let loose once in a while after a stifling day.
Though he’s not one to talk.
The warm lights of the Kamisato Estate glisten ahead of him. The light rain has transformed into great sheets of freezing water, and Ayato has to dash for shelter beneath the wide roof of the gate. The lanterns on either side of it have been extinguished, swaying and shaking from side to side as they are pelted by the rain. The neat furrows of sand in the courtyard have become soaked lumps, and Ayato knows Thoma will throw a fit once he sees the state the normally well-kept area is in. The man always needed things to be just so , and it would be admirable if it weren’t so annoying sometimes. The number of times he’s opened the door to his room to, surprise, find Thoma polishing the chandeliers while precariously perched on a ladder would be too many to count.
Ayato dashes the last few meters to the cover of the patio, shielding his eyes with one hand. He’s completely soaked–he could use his Vision to remove the water, but it’s much funnier to watch Thoma agonize over another suit ruined!
“My lord!”
Well, think of the Shogun, as they say.
His housekeeper rushes over to him, fussing (as expected) over his soaked suit and dripping hair. He pulls a towel from around his waist and rubs his head vigorously, and oh, that’s the shit. Ayato leans into the touch gratefully as Thoma clucks over him like a mother hen.
“Really, I can’t understand why you don’t use your Vision to keep this from happening,” Thoma groans, tugging off Ayato’s suit jacket and letting out a strangled gasp. “You popped another stitch, that’s the second time this week…”
“It’s funnier when you have to deal with it,” Ayato murmurs, not wanting the gentle towel-drying to stop. It reminds him of something his mother used to do, something preserved in the back of his mind in a little box full of memories of Before. After a bath in the onsen, she would dry his and Ayaka’s hair just like this, laughing at their scrunched faces.
“Ugh, really, ” Thoma moans, then gives his hair one last pat and replaces the towel, much to Ayato’s dismay. “Let’s get you inside.”
Ayato allows himself to be led through the doors of the estate. Thoma sends him off to change, muttering about colds and hypothermia. When Ayato pokes his head around the screen to yell across the room about not having any clothes, he is greeted with a heavy sigh and a fresh kimono. The silk is soft, and smells of home. The tension in his chest relaxes just a bit.
The estate has a particular feel to it, he realizes. It had always been home , of course, the place where he grew up and lives in and will someday die in. But after the death of his parents, its walls had no longer been familiar, its lanterns no longer inviting. It was a cold reminder of what had been, and what could never be reclaimed. Home had been the people who had mattered more to him than anyone else, and when they were gone, he felt as alone and unmoored as a seabird in a storm, buffeted from side to side with nowhere to land.
But now, as he listens to Thoma’s murmurs as he tries to pull Ayaka out of whatever manga she’s reading and sets water on to boil, the thumps of soldiers’ boots as they switch shifts outside, and the shuffle of Furuta’s footsteps as she lights the lanterns, Ayato knows that this is once again his home.
It won’t be the same as it once was. That part of his heart is still empty. But as long as there are people he cares for, he will never completely fall to that void.
He slides the screen open and steps into the main room, following the delicious scent of whatever Thoma’s cooking and sits down heavily on a zabuton. Ayaka is curled up across from him, her head on a zabuton, legs and body curled up like a sleeping cat. She’s still utterly engrossed in whatever she’s reading–Ayato steals a glance at the cover and finds that it’s an adaptation of something-or-other by some Liyuean author. Well, he has to congratulate Thoma on managing to pry her from her room at all.
“Welcome home,” she murmurs, marking the page with her thumb and setting the book down. “Did the snakes bite?”
Ayato winces, remembering the day’s proceedings. “They did more than bite. They ripped me to shreds.” He massages his temples with a hand.
Ayaka rests her head on the table, fiddling with her teacup. “Still trying to press charges for what happened to Thoma?”
He nods. It was utterly unacceptable the way Thoma had been treated, snatched from his bed in the middle of the night by Shogunate samurai, dragged before the Shogun to have his Vision taken in some kind of sick ceremony. It was simply disgraceful. He’s still got nothing concrete on why they chose to come after Thoma–he’s hypothesized that it has something to do with his closeness to their clan, or maybe his being from Mondstadt–and it’s enough to madden any sane person with how the Tenryou Commission continues to dance around their misdeeds. Ayaka had blamed herself for everything; not realizing in time, not being able to come to his aid, being helplessly caught in a snare of red tape as the Traveler saved the day.
“Aw, talking about me?” Thoma sets a steaming pot of soup on the table, carefully positioning it on a potholder embroidered with a camellia. “What’s done is done. It’s no use dwelling on it.” He shrugs. “It’s all fine now.”
Ayaka snorts, snagging the ladle and pouring herself a serving of miso soup. “They had no right,” she huffs, red spots appearing on her cheeks as they always do when she’s angry. “You had done nothing wrong.”
“All three of us were in the wrong simply by existing, milady,” Thoma sighs, ladling steaming soup into a bowl and nudging it toward Ayato. “Nothing we could do about it.”
All three are silent for a while. Ayaka stirs her soup idly. It’s been a while since the Vision Hunt Decree was abolished, but they all still remembered their actions in a nation at war with itself. Ayaka desperately trying to do anything she could to help, but constantly being held back by her own stature. Thoma, nearly a casualty himself, pretending he doesn’t care about the time his soul was nearly taken from him. And he, Ayato, head of the Kamisato Clan, weighing the good of the people with the safety of his family.
It had been an impossible battle on all fronts, and they still bear the scars of war.
He stares hard at his soup. It tastes sour. Sour like failed dreams, sour like unrepentant fools. “What’s the point,” he hears himself say, “What’s the point of trying if I’ll never get anywhere?”
Silence.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I–” Ayato is interrupted by a gentle hand on his shoulder. Thoma’s green eyes meet his own, a gentleness in his gaze that brings a strange lump to Ayato’s throat.
“Long day?” he asks softly, and at Ayato’s grudging nod, wordlessly moves his hand to card at Ayato’s hair. It’s similar to the towel-drying from earlier, and reminds him so much of his mother it hurts . The carved-out part of his heart cracks open, threatening to spill over.
There’s a sudden pressure at his back, and Ayato peers over his shoulder to see Ayaka slumped against him, kneeling on the ground behind him with her forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. She used to do this when they were younger, he remembers. When she was nine and didn’t quite understand what death meant, when he was thirteen and thought stoicism and work would carry him over the hollow pit in his chest.
(It never did.)
He curls an arm around her shoulders and tugs her to sit between him and Thoma. She leans against him even more, tucking her small body into his side.
“We all have days like that,” Thoma murmurs, fingers curling strands of Ayato’s hair.
Ayato reaches out. In a motion he hasn’t done for a long time, he embraces both of them.
And as he smells Ayaka’s shampoo, as he feels the hard edge of Thoma’s headband dig into his shoulder, he remembers. These are the people that made his home. A little girl who used to play with temari, now a young woman who hides her smiles behind a fan. And a man who is the picture of steadfast loyalty, with understanding in his eyes and a gentleness in his hands that not even the most intense hardship can take away from him. They are his family. His home.
Oh.
This is why I do all that.