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How fleeting anything beautiful is.
The maple leaves that cling onto their branches as winter starts to exhale its frost into the landscape. They all fall onto the ground at the end of autumn, no matter how much they try. When humans step on them, cracks run across their coloured bodies and are long forgotten.
His sister who was at the peak of health, yet it declined abruptly months after he left for Edo. She’s undergone countless treatments and swallowed thousands of pills. But she still left even before she had a single grey streak in her pale brown hair.
Sougo doesn’t see anything as beautiful anymore. A pair of dirt-tinted glasses he wears to view the world. Everything is shit and ugly, especially you. He makes sure he smears more mud on his dirt-tinted glasses when he looks at you.
You're just supposed to be a housekeeper who happened to take up the job opening at the Shinsengumi for the summer holiday. (Matsudaira finally decided someone needed to clean after a whole army of his men, especially with all the tamakin* lurking around.)
It's all good until Sougo bumps into you with a tray of cold soba. The soba spills all over your apron, bits of the soup staining your shirt.
With a deadpan voice, he comments, “You should keep your eyes on the path in front, mx housekeeper. Now you have to pay for another bowl of soba for me.”
You admit you weren’t paying too much attention to your surroundings and only focusing on cleaning. But the monotone of his voice ticks you off.
Pursing your lips, you attempt to be careful not to let anything too sharp out of your mouth. “I’m so sorry, I was just too focused on trying to make this place clean.”
He doesn’t break eye contact with you for a few seconds and you think he’s already going to send in a request to fire you. Instead, he holds out an open palm. You raise an eyebrow at him and it prompts him to brush his thumb against his fingertips as he mouths “money”. Scoffing under your breath, you shove your hand into your pocket and give him whatever change you have. You don’t check if it’s enough and storm off.
(It wasn't.)
Aside from cleaning, you help some of the men tidy their rooms if they request it. Your job scope does not include any of the men’s rooms because Kondo said that the men should all be responsible for their own spaces. But you don’t mind the extra work since you often finish the required tasks early.
It is all good until Sougo asks you to clean his room with a bunch of insults.
“Are you a pushover? You’re not paid to clean my room but you do it when I ask you anyway?”
You narrow your eyes at him before you turn back to wipe the shelf with a cloth. “I’m trying to be generous to a slob who has a dusty space for a room.”
He clenches his jaw because you’re right with all the layers of dust on the sliding doors and shelves.
“Generosity? Don’t kid with me, I know there won’t be any more of such shit as more time passes. You’ll laze around or leave for home early before you’re dismissed eventually.”
How wrong you prove him to be.
You help him to replace the yellowed and slightly tattered paper over his sliding door. You help Hijikata sweep up the ashes lying around in his room. You stash some different flavoured bread in Yamazaki’s cupboard so he doesn’t have to snack on anpan even on his off days. All with their permission, of course.
When they thank you in their ways, you give Sougo a look that says “how’s that, you sadistic bitch?”
Sougo snickers at you when Hijikata passes you a bowl of ramen with a mountain of mayo as thanks, filled with amusement. You force the whole bowl of ramen down your throat because you’re worried the demon vice-chief of the Shinsengumi was going to punish you for rejecting his gift.
He laughs at your face that’s gradually turning green and pokes at your queasy stomach.
(Not long later, you suppose you get the last laugh. You throw up all over him and you smirk at him while you wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, albeit weakly.)
As time passes, the amount of tasks for you reduces and you’re finding it hard not to laze around. Whenever you see Sougo within your view, you wipe over the top of an already clean table a second time. The second time, you do it a little more slowly too.
When you lie in their backyard to admire the azure blue sky, Sougo’s voice bounces around the walls of your mind. Lazing around, are you?
It makes you immediately jump up to find something to do. You spit a 'tch' out of your mouth, frustrated at how you're letting a mere captain influence your actions.
Eventually, you find yourself peeking through the windows of their dojo and watching them train. You pick up a branch and try to imitate whatever you see being taught. Engrossed in your new “skill”, you forget to be on the lookout for the super sadist. The one time you forget to check if you’re within his line of sight, Sougo catches you.
“Slacking off, are you? Or are you practising some “special” sword techniques to swat a fly that intrudes into our compound?”
You drop the branch, fumbling for an excuse.
“I’m already done with my work today. Besides, I could use some self-defence skills with a stick.”
He mocks you, “Please, [name]. What kind of world do you think we live in? Look, your footwork is already all wrong. You can’t just stand with your feet shoulder apart, you need to have your dominant foot forward too.”
The two of you have an impromptu session behind the dojo, him correcting your posture first. You can tell midway he decides to go spartan on you because you think he’s already asked you to swing this stupid branch 50 times. After possibly the 100th time, you start swinging the branch at him.
As he dodges your strikes, he comments, “You’re already as good as me when I was 7.”
“Is that a compliment?”
He just scoffs and tells you to think what you like to think. Right after that, he whacks your side with the wooden sword he pulls from his hip and you tumble to the ground.
(He grins as he watches you clutch your side, face contorted with pain. You swear you will defeat him one day. Perhaps you will since you start showing up to the dojo to train and you’re improving fast.)
Towards the end of summer, you start helping out in the kitchen too. On a particular day, you head out to the market to help the canteen chefs replenish their stocks. Hijikata asks you to help him get a bottle of mayonnaise from the supermarket.
A bunch of ruffians bump into you as you’re carrying bags of food back. You hear the eggs crack in one of the bags that dropped. They stare daggers at you, but you glare back at them. The guy with a red afro, who you suppose is the leader, stomps up to you. His face hovering right in front of yours.
“Hey, apologise.”
“Why? You should apologise.”
He barks out a laugh, “What a feisty kid! You wanna die or something?”
You’re about to open your mouth when a hand grabs the red afro man’s face. Whoever's behind you shoves the man away from you, causing the ruffian to pinch his nose in agony. A monotonous voice replies, “Sorry, this housekeeper is a fucking cockroach, hanging around dirty corners. I don’t think it’s a good idea to put your face so close to them.”
Sougo pulls you backwards, your back colliding with his chest. He raises his unsheathed sword and points the metal tip between the afro man’s eyes. His voice comes out low, a snarl of a vicious dog.
“Leave.”
They turn tail and run. You hop out of his grasp, fanning your burning face.
You mutter thanks as Sougo picks up the bags you’ve dropped. Sougo tilts his body towards you, his free hand cupped around his ear. “What’s that? I couldn’t hear you?”
It’s your turn to scoff and you walk forward without replying to him. On the way back, the back of your hand bumps into his way too many times.
(Sougo doesn’t see non-samurai talk back often. Maybe you’re secretly one.)
With you, Sougo forgets for a while he’s not allowed to see anything as beautiful. That’s his fatal mistake.
He only remembers he shouldn't when he sees your body leaning limply on the wall behind you, head hanging forward. It only slaps him in the face when he sees streaks of red all over your body as if the perpetrator took your body for a canvas and your blood for paint. A sickening halo of crimson starts to pool on the ground beneath you. He notices you holding a metal rod with a splotch of blood on its edge.
Sougo hears swords being unsheathed behind him. He immediately identifies them as remnants of a malicious yakuza that the Shinsengumi attempted to wipe out months ago. They start making threats that Sougo knows are empty. He makes easy work of them, unaware of the beast that his enemies see in his eyes. As he cuts them down, he notices that one of the opponents already has a bleeding wound on his head.
An amused laugh spills out of his lips.
The moment the last opponent falls to their knees, he rushes to your side. Your pulse is weak and your breathing is shallow. His breathing starts becoming erratic. He pulls out his phone. It's out of battery.
He peels off his jacket and drapes it around you. Following that, he lifts you up his back. He ignores the cuts and gashes that scream when he stands up. He piggy-backs you out of the abandoned warehouse and towards the nearest hospital.
Fuck this shit, he should have made sure his metaphorical shit-filled glasses rested securely on the bridge of his nose. Hell, he should have gotten goggles instead.
Anything mesmerising isn’t for him to keep.
His white shirt feels paper-thin today. He feels the fabric with your blood plaster onto his back.
He curses under his breath, “For fucks sake, [name]. You’re supposed to be a cockroach. If a meteorite didn’t wipe you out, this wouldn’t kill you.”
Sougo thinks he heard a weak hum in your chest.
“Stay with me, idiot. This is an order from the Captain of the 1st Division of the Shinsengumi.”
(You’re not even one of his men.)
Even with your face right beside his ear, he strains to hear your inhales and exhales. It’s hard to hear with his feet that drag themselves across the concrete.
“Is it that hard for you to stay? Did you have a death wish you told no one about?”
Unconsciously, he grits his teeth. Why did his phone have to run out of battery right at this crucial time? He should have charged it this morning. It’s your fault. It’s always because you charge it for him but you weren’t there to charge it this morning.
He feels like he’s clutching his sister’s hand beside her death bed again.
“Stay.”
It comes out like a whimper of an abandoned puppy. He hates how pathetic he sounds, but it doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no one left to listen to him. You’re slowly moving further from his grasp.
“I will.”
Your words almost get carried away by the wind. There’s a sudden push in the muscles of his legs and every part of him goes into overdrive.
He makes it to the hospital in time. You almost don’t make it, but you make it. By your bedside, his hands wish to hold yours. But there’s no urgency, no desperation for him to clutch onto your hand like he’s trying to keep your life in his grasp.
After that, he makes sure he puts on a pair of dirt-smeared glasses.
(Sometimes, when he’s feeling less of a coward, he’ll look at you through the gaps between the smears. Sometimes, he’ll remember you’re a cockroach and that you’ll show up yourself on the surface of his glasses.)