Chapter Text
Tsukasa Tenma liked to think that he did his job well.
He would go on whatever mission the king ordered him to, finish all of the paperwork he had to, and wouldn’t complain when he was assigned to menial tasks by his subordinates.
Like the one he was doing now.
He sighs as he trudges through the streets of the kingdom — it’s daytime, and puffy clouds meander through the bright blue sky as people bustle about, energetic from the sweet spring air and receding winter cold. He spots a few knights on patrol, marching up and down with their swords at their hips, and feel a pang of jealousy run through, if only for a second.
As the second-in-command of the Royal Knights, he’d expected a little more out of his work; something that could bring him glory, make him a hero. He wants something that will spread his name throughout the lands, something that will make Saki proud. He wants to be seen, wants to be known.
Instead, he’s relegated to deskwork and maintenance on supplies used for training. If he’s lucky, he gets to go and catch a petty criminal, much like the “Demon of the Coast” that has been causing a headache for the nobles recently; jumping onto ships and demanding they allow him on land (without a any identification whatsoever), denying arrest, fighting soldiers and having his boat be parked right in the way of the usual routes for merchant ships.
So overall, more of a neighbourhood nuisance than anything serious, yet even still, they sent the second-in-command of the Royal Knights to do it. Tsukasa knows that the nobles have little respect for him, considering his commoner background, but even so, this feels a bit excessive.
As he reaches the pier, the fishermen raise their hands in greeting, welcoming him with warm smiles on their faces. He supposes that’s the one nice part about being sent to do a bunch of menial tasks around town; he’s well known by the locals, and they always give him some treats to take home to Saki when he’s finished the job.
“Oh! Mr. Tenma! What an honour to see you!”
“Thank you so much for chasing off that shark last time, we’ve finally been able to catch more fish!”
Tsukasa laughs, basking in the praise. “Thank you all, but it’s nothing big— I’m just doing my job after all!”
One of the older fisherman sighs, “Even then, you’re the only one of those uptight knights who even bothers to help us common folk.”
A pang shoots through Tsukasa hearing that. He knows firsthand what it’s like to be a commoner in the midst of nobles. He feels a bit of guilt run through him for wanting to do something else, when he’s really the only one here for these people.
“So what brings you here today?” Someone asks, and it snaps him out of his thoughts.
“Ah… Just here to deal with the Demon of the Coast.”
The fishermen go silent at that, an uncomfortable silence settling through the crowd. “U-uhm, is something the matter?”
“Well… It’s just that they’ve sent so many knights already,” one of them says.
“Every single one of them came back completely beaten up, I guess that’s why they sent you here.”
Right. It could be that they were confident in his abilities; He is a very skilled swordfighter, if he must say, but it’s more likely that they brought him here just to get him beaten up.
Well then, he’ll show them!
Tsukasa Tenma, second-in-commander of the Royal Knights, would arrest this scoundrel.
“Yes indeed! Fear not, I shall deal with this ruffian in no time!”
The fishermen all seem to relax with his confidence, even as a little seed of doubt begins to bloom in his chest. Even if they’d only sent rookie knights to deal with the criminal, the fact that they could take on multiple knights who’d been trained with seemingly no effort… this could not be just your everyday troublemaker.
But if that were true, perhaps this would finally make those uptight nobles respect him! Perhaps he’d even be sent to the front lines!
“Would any of you happen to know how to reach the demon?”
Another round of silence, followed by a hesitant hand going into the air.
“I-I can take you to him, but only part of the way.”
Tsukasa pales, suddenly regretting his decision to wear his best armour today. “P-part of the way?”
The fisherman— who looks only to be about fifteen — nods. “He has some strange defense mechanism set up around his boat. If won’t let anything bigger than a small raft through.”
“Well. D-do you have a small raft perhaps?”
He shakes his head no, “All of our rafts got taken when the other soldiers used them. You’ll have to swim there.”
About an hour and a lot of unbuckling leather straps later, Tsukasa stands in nothing but his tunic and trousers, facing what looks to be something out of a horror story. There is water shooting out of the ocean in what seems to be some kind of deadly fountain blockade. Whirpools litter all the rest of the empty space he can see, and he wonders, briefly, which part of this counted as a ‘nuisance’. Then again, the nobles probably weren’t trying to swim through that deathtrap; it probably looked like some fancy water decor from afar.
“This is as far as I can take you,” the fisherman says, and Tsukasa prays to Miku and clutches the necklace around his neck in a deathgrip. He’s had it since he was young, and it’s always brought him luck and comfort whenever he needed it.
He remembers, vaguely, a pair of yellow eyes, slits in the middle, wet with tears as they placed the necklace around him. The smell of the sea mixed with something floral, but it’s a memory from long ago, and the only thing that remains is a leather band beaded with seaglass of various shades of blue and purple. There’s a scale right in the middle, a dark black that shines an iridescent purple whenever he turns it in the light.
Tsukasa takes as deep of a breath as he can, and he makes sure to savour it, before jumping into the freezing water, ready to swim towards his impending doom.
Somehow, by the powers of god or some other force, Tsukasa makes it through the absolutely horrible trap of water. Gasping for breath and fighting against the currents that pull him every single direction, trying to get a grip on the slippery wood of the boat, he bemoans his fate and swears to argue harder next time they try to get him to do something that he really isn’t supposed to.
He manages to dig his fingers in-between a beam and the hull of the boat, and he pulls himself up, shivering as the air hits his drenched skin. His sword is still fastened around his waist, how he managed to get here with that weighing him down truly confounds him, and he really hopes that he criminal deactivates them after he’s arrested, because doing all of that again but now with another person to get through it really makes Tsukasa consider just letting the whirlpool take him.
But he has to do it! He is a knight! He should never back down from a challenge.
With that said, Tsukasa lets out a yell, bringing his feet up to stand on the beam, and finally hooking the tips of his fingers to the top of the boat. He’s about to pull himself up, when a pair of curious, cat-like eyes peek over the edge, crinkling with amusement as they watch Tsukasa from above.
“My my, you knights sure don’t give up, do you?” He says, voice low and honey-smooth. Tsukasa shivers, from the cold.
“S-s-stop this n-n-nonsense this instance!” Tsukasa yells, teeth chattering as a gust of wind blows past him. “I-I-I am T-Tsukasa T-T-T-Tenma! Of the— AAGHH!” He screams as a pair of hands wrap themselves around his wrists, they feel warm against his cold and clammy skin, and his stomach burns as it’s dragged over the rim of the boat.
“Oh dear, you’re completely soaked,” the man says, and up close, Tsukasa notes that he’s got a sadistic smile spread right across his face. His hair is coloured a light purple, with seemingly fluorescent turquoise strips running down the middle and side of his face. He’s wearing a loose cream blouse that’s unfastened near the chest, and baggy pants that looked like they were way too big on him, held up by a single belt with a variety of contraptions attached to it. In his hands is a strange silver object that seemed to be made from two thin pipes, bent near the end where the man was holding it. “Did you swim all the way here?”
Tsukasa coughs, trying his best not to shiver as he pulls out his sword with shaking hands. “M-m-maybe I did! D-d-does that not fill y-you with fear?”
He’s sure he would’ve sounded much more threatening if the sword he was holding wasn’t threatening to fall out of his hands with how much he was shaking, and if his teeth weren’t chattering so hard it made it hard to talk. And also, maybe if he had been standing up, instead of crumpled on the floor like a baby deer that had just been born.
“I’m quivering in my boots as we speak,” the man says, baring a set of white teeth. His canines are unusually defined, and Tsukasa, again, feels himself get a little distracted. “Mmmm… this won’t do,” he says all of a sudden, and he places an index finger under Tsukasa’s chin, tilting it up so that Tsukasa is forced to look into his gaze.
“W-what are you—” suddenly, starting from his toes, Tsukasa feels warmth spread through him. It’s as if all of the water in his clothing was being pulled out at once, and he notices a ball of water forming in the man’s other hand.
“There, now we can have a proper conversation,” he smiles before flinging the ball of water into one of the giant water pillars, and Tsukasa tries not to shiver at the force of it, cutting a hole through the pillar. The man leans closer, and he smells a little bit of the sea and it’s making Tsukasa dizzy. “My name is Kamishiro Rui, and I would like to enter your kingdom, please.”
The request baffles Tsukasa, and after a moment of speechlessness, he clears his throat. “We can’t just let you in with no idea of who you are—”
“I’m a merchant from a far-away kingdom, here to sell my wares!” Rui pouts, but it’s completely unconvincing and Tsukasa feels suspicion creep up his spine.
“Well, you still need your papers. What if you’re a criminal from another country? We can’t just let you walk free if you’re not an innocent man.”
Rui sighs, leaning back and putting his hands on his hips. “Is that so?” He says, face a lot colder than before, “then I suppose I’ll just have to do the same as I did to every other soldier who made their way here.”
There’s only the click of the strange contraption to warn Tsukasa before he pushes himself out of the way, rolling across the deck as something splashes behind him. He looks back in horror, only to notice that the deck was terribly singed where he was just sitting.
“It’s a shame that I’ll have to send you back so soon,” Rui says, lifting up his weapon and closing one eye as he takes aim, “and after all of that work I put into drying you off, too.”
BOOM.
Tsukasa slides his sword out of its scabbard, blocking the projectile. He cringes with the force of it, but years of training makes him strong enough to push back against it. He steps forward with a shout, surprising the purple-haired man as he swings his sword, using the wind to make his movements even faster.
To his surprise, though, the man responds just as fast, raising his strange-pipe weapon that has now turned into a thin, warped sword, to block his attack. A cushion of water absorbs the force of his blow, and Tsukasa’s eye’s widen as a hand comes to cover his face, pushing him down to the ground.
“I’ve asked politely all this time, but all you people do is send attack after attack to me,” Rui hisses, eyes glowing with anger, “I simply want to be let on land, what part of that do you—”
Tsukasa grunts as he hooks his leg around Rui’s, flipping them so that his sword presses against Rui’s neck. “Surrender,” he says, panting with exertion.
He expects Rui to drop his weapon in defeat, but what happens instead is the flash of a dagger as it whips past his ear. Tsukasa barely manages to dodge in time, and it still catches on the necklace around his neck, straining against the worn leather band. “No—” he gasps, watching in what seems like slow motion as the blade of the dagger slices through the band, sending the beautiful beads of sea glass scattering everywhere.
Tsukasa’s eyes scan the deck of the ship widely for the scale in the centre, but no matter how he looks, he can’t spot its comforting glow. The beads of mixed blue and purple sparkle in the sun, and panicked, Tsukasa counts each one.
One, two, three… there’s supposed to be six. Where’s the sixth one? Where’s the scale?
He misses the way Rui’s eyes widen, expression softening in shock. The way those yellow orbs snap onto his face with newfound scrutiny, how the heartbeat under his hands quickens. Too distracted by the horror of losing something so valuable to him, he misses the gasp underneath him, misses the barely-there whisper of his name, filled with something warm and soft and incredulous.
When Tsukasa looks back, blazing with fury, it’s to Rui, who’s dropped his dagger, a look of complete and utter awe painted across his features. It’s a far cry from the cat-like smile he had when Tsukasa had first boarded the ship, and even farther from the cold fury he’d had during their fight. Rui’s eyes glitter with an emotion that Tsukasa can’t seem to place, and when he smiles, he thinks his breath must’ve stopped for a moment with how beautifully those lips stretched; how the corners of his eyes crinkled, and how a hand came up to cup his face, the touch gentler than anything he’s felt in his entire life.
Tsukasa notices rather belatedly that both of them have tears streaming down their faces. He hadn’t even noticed, but even as the drops land against Rui’s cheeks, his expression doesn’t change. Rui’s lips part, and with a voice that sounds rather breathless, he says,
“I surrender.”