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The veins on the back of his hands jut out like the roots of an ancient tree, and Kiyoomi thinks he would never get used to seeing it, alongside all the wrinkles. He could almost hear the creaks between the discs of his spine, creakcreakcreak, as if threatening to snap in two. Go ahead and snap on me, you no-good spine, he mentally growls to nobody in particular. It’s not like I won’t be able to work with a broken back. I can plow through cleaning this god-awful castle anyway, like a bull.
When the Witch of the Waste cursed him, she was thorough enough to gain him not only fifty years in appearance, but also in mind. Kiyoomi doesn’t realize this, but his grumpiness is tenfold when he is seventy years old. Twenty-year-old Kiyoomi would be easier to please. He’d even stay silent through the hell Atsumu is putting him, just to make the torture pass quicker. Then again, it’s not really torture when all Kiyoomi needs to do is paint.
Why does a great, famed wizard need someone to dye his hair instead of doing it himself with a flick of his wrist, you ask?
“Because I trust yer steady hands, Omi-san,” Atsumu answers nonchalantly and with a grin, as Kiyoomi’s hands tremble.
The blond on Atsumu’s hair drenches the auburn, still a bit blotchy in some spots, but by the time they are done Kiyoomi feels he could have passed off as a hairdresser in another life. Atsumu looks as good in bright colors as he is in darker shades.
“Whaddaya think?” Atsumu asks, running fingers through his hair with all the vanity in the world.
If Atsumu really is ugly, Kiyoomi supposes he wouldn’t be rumored as the wizard who eats young girls’ hearts. Nor would he have the confidence to parade himself and woo maidens here and there, using different names in three towns. Of course, in front of Atsumu, Kiyoomi only shrugs and says, “eh, you look fine.”
On the other hand, Atsumu’s apprentice stares in awe when he comes home from chores outside the castle. Shouyou has just closed the front door when Kiyoomi and Atsumu descend down the staircase. The ginger beard and mustache, disguising himself as an old man, vanishes as he takes off his bewitched mantle.
“You never went for a color this bright, shishou. It’s pretty!” Shouyou coos before proceeding to pull a roll of official papers from his pockets along with pouches of money, scattering them across their rickety dinner table. “I was at Kingsbury. There’s another summon from the King for The Great Wizard Jackal. And I stopped by the Shimizu household to drop off flowers for their eldest daughter, just like you asked.”
Kiyoomi tries not to roll his eyes at his employer, opting to shoo Shouyou’s scrolls off the table instead and prepare for dinner. Even though Kiyoomi is strangely disturbed by Atsumu’s romantic conquests, it’s more urgent to hear what the King has to say about another request for Atsumu’s assistance in the war. They have been receiving these every few weeks, and none are returned.
“You know you have several unopened letters too, in Minatomachi,” Kiyoomi adds as he shoves a frying pan full of sunny side-ups between all of them, “all wanting Master Miya to come and help the seamen strengthen their warships.”
Atsumu stabs his egg with a smile on his face, not unlike a psychopath. “Ah, but I wouldn’t dare ruin my beautiful paint job with saltwater, Omi-san,” he licks yolk from his fork without care, “who knows when you’ll be kind enough to fix my hair again?”
The answer is simple, ready on the tip of Kiyoomi’s tongue: anytime you want. But it is ridiculous and so unlike himself that Kiyoomi chooses to chew his sausages in silence instead of responding.
In fact, a lot of things start to feel unlike himself ever since he got cursed. His ancient back, his wrinkles, even his gray hair, for example. He still doesn’t understand why the Witch cursed him, still doesn’t believe he had the guts to leave his old life working at his father’s hat shop and employed himself as a wizard’s housekeeper instead. It still feels like a scene from a faraway dream, although he’s stayed here for more than a month.
Even more so, after discovering that Wizard Atsumu doesn’t dine with girls’ hearts like what the rumors say. He sure doesn’t treasure them, though.
“I shall bring more lilies for Kiyoko-chan when I visit her tomorrow!” the wizard stands with a flourish, his cape slapping Kiyoomi’s curls. Atsumu steps to the fireplace and tilts his leftovers for their enchanted, wide-eyed fire spirit to chew. “That’s worth my while more than any royal summons.”
“Considering you don’t break her heart the next day,” Calcifer, ever the daring fire, adds. Kiyoomi stops himself from vocally agreeing and opts to calmly collect their dirty plates. Shouyou chokes.
Atsumu readies himself to leave some hours later, by midnight. He switches their enchanted front door to a black tile, magically changing its destination, before grinning to Kiyoomi and Shouyou. He says he’s about to visit another fair maiden in need, and they shouldn’t wait for him. Kiyoomi responds hotly, a beat too late: “we won’t!” The wizard flashes a wink before turning on his heels and letting his cloak swallow him into the dark.
There are three places Kiyoomi knows are accessible through their front door. Blue tile, Minatomachi, a seaside port town where Atsumu is Master Miya. Red tile, Kingsbury, the capital of the royal palace where Atsumu is the Great Wizard Jackal. Green tile, the vast wasteland where they hang laundry and get water, miles away from Kiyoomi’s hometown Market Chipping where Wizard Atsumu courts young ladies. When Atsumu leaves through the black tile, though, Kiyoomi is never certain when he will return–or where he goes. Atsumu never tells them, never lets them wander through the black tile either.
Knowing this, that very night, Kiyoomi waits anyway.
Atsumu never tells Kiyoomi where he goes or what he does, but Kiyoomi thinks the castle’s black door leads to somewhere otherworldly, somewhere undefined. He catches hints from the smell of Atsumu’s cloak, the small gravels in his shoes, the dust he brushes off. The edges of another life, where there are more intricate machinery or magic of another kind.
It shows through the gifts Atsumu brings home from time to time. There was this clear, light bag from which Atsumu pulled out peculiar edibles. They turned out to be sweet and fluffy (“it’s called rice,” says Atsumu), triangle-shaped and coated in green (“this is seaweed, but dried”), filled with sour fruit (“u-me-bo-shi”) and funny-tasting beads that are apparently fish eggs (“yes, you can eat them, they’re not poisonous”). Atsumu taught them how to say its name as they munch. O-ni-gi-ri.
He catches on to bits and pieces from Atsumu’s tall tales over dinner, ones Kiyoomi could never figure out the truth about. Whether it’s true that somewhere, people can listen to voices and pictures from across the ocean while sitting at their own dinner tables. That Atsumu speaks another language, one he talks with in his sleep when he’s too tired. That he comes from ‘Hyogo, that’s in Kansai’, or at least that’s what Calcifer insists on, even though Kiyoomi finds no such name on the map.
You’re not off doing something suspicious whenever you disappear, are you, Kiyoomi once grunted.
Atsumu had smiled, a challenge, a dare. Even if I do, I’m not sharp enough to hide it from you.
But that’s a lie, Kiyoomi thinks. After all, being suspicious means coming home after everyone else falls asleep, and that’s all Atsumu does lately. He won’t need that if he’s only coming from Hyogo, That’s In Kansai, to get more onigiri. Places with good food don’t usually need to be kept secret, does it? Maybe the black tile also leads to somewhere else entirely.
Maybe that’s why Atsumu would scramble through the magical front door, banging around as he trips on his own cloak, crawling up the stairs. Calcifer would tut loudly, and Kiyoomi would only peek from his room as he caught the ends of Atsumu’s hair slipping past. If he was braver, Kiyoomi would ask straight up: where were you?
Snapping him out of his thoughts, there’s an audible crash downstairs.
Shouyou doesn’t come out of his room, seemingly asleep. Kiyoomi creeps across the second-floor corridor and sneaks a look from the top of the stairs. There is a conversation in front of Calcifer’s furnace, voices muffled and tired. It is not a cloak he sees, nor is it any human attire. It is fur, golden and beautiful, streaked with crimson. Something drips to the floor along with debris. The loud pants and grunts tell Kiyoomi that Atsumu had just come home, but not as man.
“If you keep this up, you really won’t return to human anymore,” he can hear Calcifer’s voice, all-knowing and arrogant. The fur moves up-and-down, driven by long inhales and endless exhales. Atsumu deflates on his seat in front of the fireplace, not a wizard, but a great spirit fox.
“If I don’t,” the voice that comes out of Atsumu is distant, strange, pained, “war.”
Frozen on top of the stairs, shrouded in darkness and the rare silence of his creaking spine, Kiyoomi remembers the first time Calcifer let him in on a secret, a week after coming to the castle.
Your beloved Wizard Atsumu doesn’t have a heart, the spirit chuckled, back when he was a young boy, he swallowed a star. The star is now a fire, bound to his hearth, just like how Atsumu is bound to this castle.
Before the curse, when Kiyoomi was still a young boy of twenty, Atsumu was already heartless and alone. Even before Shouyou came along, before the castle was built, how did he live? Was he always this headstrong, believing he could stop wars all by himself? Was he always reckless and vain and childish?
Or was he lonely? Was he stupid for eating something as helpless as a falling star? Or was he selfless for risking his soul, clambering upon enemy airships to singlehandedly force them into peace?
Kiyoomi is nobody. There is nothing he can do better than making hats and cleaning, which are the only two things that keep his sanity, giving him a sense of pace and peace. But he can live with adventures too, he decides, fifty years older or younger. To snap at careless wizards using too many hair products. To care for their sunshine of an apprentice, ever the lovely boy.
What would Atsumu come to be, anyway, if Kiyoomi is not there to wake him in the morning or cook him breakfast downstairs? Would he still take forever to dress up in front of the mirror? Pick flowers for half the young women in Market Chipping? Go out to mysterious battles every night, coming home bleeding and inhuman?
Would Kiyoomi rather return to twenty and not know, or stay seventy and see everything?
Some days after that night, on a particularly sunny day after a few uneventful ones, Kiyoomi gets to fight for that decision.
Atsumu has just moved the castle further north after another half dozen royal summons find their way onto their dining table. The green tile on their door doesn’t lead to the Wastes anymore, but higher up the mountains, to a lush meadow far removed from the horrors of war. Atsumu asks Shouyou to take care of old Kiyoomi and the grumpy fire before snapping his fingers and preparing for travel.
Kiyoomi knows it only takes one click of the enchanted knob for Atsumu to disappear into the nothingness of the black tile. He has a smile on his face, terribly bright, only reserved for the most annoying of taunts and the most mysterious journeys. Kiyoomi, on the other hand, has on his face an ugly scowl. He refuses to budge from the door.
“Miya, you’re not going anywh—hey!” he hears himself protest when Atsumu moves him aside magically with a flick of his wrist. The wizard beckons with his finger and his travel cloak floats from inside the castle, settling upon his shoulders.
“You know very well that I’m not doing this for laughs, Omi-san,” Atsumu says, tying the tassels on his collar securely, “I’m fighting for people I care about.”
The image of Atsumu frolicking around Market Chipping with a bouquet lights Kiyoomi’s insides on fire. This is ridiculous, Kiyoomi thinks, for Atsumu to prioritize other strangers on top of himself. He finds his voice angry and boiling, snarling, “those girls won’t go anywhere. They have their families to look after them,” Kiyoomi glares, arm blocking the door, “who do you have?”
Atsumu doesn’t immediately respond, but his face is drenched in surprise. A beat then two passes before he visibly swallows and says, “I’m not talking about the girls.”
Kiyoomi’s head is in knots, and his stomach does a somersault. Something is wringing out his insides, and it’s all impatience and exasperation as he scoffs. “You can’t possibly tell me you’ve been chasing another set of ladies—”
Atsumu moves half a step closer, and Kiyoomi is too surprised to step back. He repeats, “I’m not talking about the girls.”
Another beat then two. The drop in his stomach makes Kiyoomi stutter. His mind races and crosses out possibilities, ridiculous or not, just to find the answer already final and firm in Atsumu’s gaze.
“But. It can’t be,” he breathes messily, “but you like that girl, whatsername—Kiyoko. Or Hitoka. Whatever. You’ve been chasing all of them every single day, professing your endless love the moment you laid eyes on them.”
Atsumu doesn’t reply, so Kiyoomi continues.
“And you’re… You hate when bleach ruins your hair because you think it makes you look ugly, and you ask me to dye it for you. You dress up for two hours in the morning just to drop off flowers downtown,” he narrates, skips some logic, hashes out every thought crossing his mind like a barrage of cannonfire. “I know. I’ve seen you. I know what you’re really like. I’m an old man, Miya.”
So it’s impossible. No way in the world, whichever world it is. No way Atsumu’s gaze looks fonder, kinder, softer.
“Omi-san,” he says, surprisingly calm, “have you looked in the mirror lately?”
The sudden realization that his back is not hurting anymore tells him that Atsumu’s cheeky smile is not without reason. Ten, twelve hours from now, after the war is over, Atsumu would tell him that the curse leaves Kiyoomi when he sleeps or isn’t looking. Atsumu would then grin, and Kiyoomi would kiss him breathless.
But for now, as they stare at each other all warm and shy, only Calcifer has the audacity to say, “Shouyou, I don’t get how you stand them every day.”