Chapter Text
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i. (in which a story is worth corrupting)
He’s been here before.
It’s been years since he left the citadel. It’s been years since he’d been given the acorn resting heavy in his pocket, and even longer since the first alternate history had sprung into existence: a castle draped in fog, guarded by souls that should have been dead. A wrinkle in the fabric of the universe. He remembers the first time he set foot in that tangled world, the way he’d visited and destroyed without knowing why it had appeared or who had created it.
The Historical Revisionists’ latest strategy, they always assumed.
The second history, he initially never saw, instead receiving the reports of one Hachisuka Kotetsu, a mere few hours before he left the citadel (his last act as secretary) — reports of a mansion within a minefield under a moonless sky, mysteriously burning to the ground as the unit returned home.
It is equipped with this memory and the promise to write home that Yamanbagiri finds himself in Edo again, engulfed in flames.
I’d hoped to see you again, in a history we make ourselves.
This is his own doing; the thought burns into his mind like the heat that blooms around him, warm and languid as the flint slips from his grip, clatters against the floorboards. The flames begin small, fanned into much larger tongues that creep along the path he’s laid towards the pile of Retrograde Army corpses at his back. Like tales of old and the great fires of history, the flames will catch fast and spread fast, eating away at paper and bones alike — soon there will be nothing left to remember.
This story isn’t strong enough to remember. This fire of Edo (unaccounted for in countless histories) will burn until the threads of time break and the world is abandoned. Until he forgets. This timeline, like the others, is at the mercy of his memories of Mikazuki Munechika.
That same Mikazuki, he knows, who is waiting to be guided home.
Yamanbagiri retrieves the flint with shaking hands and tucks it away against the acorn in his pocket, as he steps over the stray skull of a tantou, back towards the mountain of skeletons, surveying it for any remaining signs of life. He’s met with nothing but ash-smeared bones and threadbare rags.
The Retrograde Army had followed him here; they’d followed him to Jurakutei, too. They had every reason to — a dream is a playground to them; an alternate history is just as interesting as it is to the Time Government. It must have been a surprise, then, not to find another knot forming in the timeline, but merely Yamanbagiri Kunihiro, far beyond the jurisdiction of the citadel, and far beyond the century in which he belonged.
His journey started out simple enough, determined to save Mikazuki — and now it has become so much more than that.
I just wanted to be stronger.
This is the thought that is the most intense, swallowing him as the flames suddenly flare around him; they’ve reached the pile of bodies and begun to eat away at what remains of the skeletons before him. Something in Yamanbagiri’s chest pinches, and he covers his nose with the hem of his cloak against the smell, as if some thought possesses him to continue observing instead of moving away. And isn’t this how he felt all along, every second of this journey: his body ill-fitting to his consciousness, his words blown away into the breeze — like the very sight of history burning before his eyes.
You weren’t meant to die here, Yamanbagiri murmurs to the remnants of a tachi as it slumps under the advancing flames; Surely you were something else in another time.
Almost on instinct, he dashes a hand across his cheek and blinks away the sting at his eyes. The smoke is worse. He doesn’t have much longer to stay.
He digs a crumpled letter out of his pocket, the last of its kind (every sword who has left the citadel has written these, but it is only the last of his). He holds it over the flames, over the crumbling pile of Retrograde bodies, watching the edges of the paper curl, until his arm drops.
Yamanbagiri, too, is something else, in another version of this story, where the murky tales of yamanba are all that he has to contend with. Where Mikazuki Munechika is waiting in the courtyard to see him return, having slayed a yamanba in his own right, or perhaps simply learned to be at peace with his ghosts.
The Retrograde Army is nothing but ghosts, though a different kind — vengeful spirits and stories that were lost to the depths of time, melted together and forged into something entirely new. The tachi he looks upon now must be no different, crumbling to dust under the flames. The bones of its hand are locked tight around its sword; he can see the fractures lacing the steel.
This is not Mikazuki Munechika. Mikazuki is not here, Yamanbagiri reminds himself as he has countless times before, and yet he reaches for the body in front of him; his fingers curl around the tachi’s bony wrist, and he immediately cries out, reflexively letting go. His hand comes away burned and black; the acrid smell of burning flesh creeps through the air. Something twists in his gut as the tachi’s eyes open.
Yamanbagiri recoils in alarm, jerking back as the body spasms and crashes to the ground — ribs ablaze, and its eyes are the same: golden moons, crescents on fire. It doesn’t stop there, writhing its way towards him with a rale in its chest, a shattered web of white across its skin, rippling through the rags on its body in a faint sayagata pattern.
“You are…broken.” The first words that leave Yamanbagiri’s mouth are a halting mess. Broken, but still alive. Because he’s seen this before, hasn’t he? A skeleton draped in silvery white, with eyes that are still burning , a tachi clinging to the last thread of life. Its skin is cracked just below its eye, flickering when the low growl bubbles out from its throat.
Yamanbagiri stops. The tachi does too, contorting with pain etched into its face as the fire crawls just a bit further.
“Broken…?” The word is barely there, disbelieving.
This sword is broken, left to burn in the last minutes of this abandoned world, its tale no longer necessary for time to march on. And in another version of this story, Yamanbagiri has made peace with his ghosts and knows to leave a skeleton in its grave.
The tachi breathes, writhes. “Broken…Not.”
Yamanbagiri’s heart breaks.
The saniwa will hear of Yamanbagiri’s actions in the abandoned world soon enough, when the Fourth unit tells her of the new strand of time that has looped around itself and begun to tighten, like a noose around his neck. She will hear the story of the fire and the mysterious exterminations of the Retrograde Army. Maybe she will even know that it’s him.
Yamanbagiri wonders if this is how Mikazuki felt, when faced with a chimera of stories he had lived a thousand times before — the chance to be an anomaly.
The golden eyes of the tachi flicker. Yamanbagiri feels like he is looking into the eyes of Mikazuki for the first time in years.
These tales aren’t found in any history book; they differ from my memories. But my story is not over.
He grabs the tachi by the wrist again, ignoring the pain that shoots up his arm.
Yamanbagiri flees Edo when the flames threaten to eat him alive, when the elegant mansion’s beams begin to crack under the weight of the timeline collapsing in on itself. He flees to the first place in time he can think of, the shattered tachi still breathing in his arms.
I’ve seen the moon again, Mikazuki Munechika. It’s beautiful.
A familiar flash of white rips through the air as the sky crumbles.
His hope will be his undoing. These histories don’t exist within any timeline; they shouldn’t exist at all.
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ii. (in which we corrupt each other)
He’s been here before.
The wind roaring in Yamanbagiri’s ears has long since become static noise, the mist an icy film against his cheek. His breath clouds as the temperature drops, his surroundings dissolving into the fog around him, and the lull of ocean waves suddenly seems to drown out everything else. It’s been a long time since he’s heard the ocean; it’s been years since he’s seen this day, but the rhythm is the same, relentless and overwhelming.
He’s been here before, and he will be here again — this is the end of every version of this story.
He stumbles towards the sound of the waves, blind in the fog, and promptly almost falls off the edge of the path, skidding to a stop along the rocks as he stares into the nothingness yawning before him. It doesn’t get any easier to hear the ocean, even as he remembers what he’s searching for: the telltale white glow of Mikazuki Munechika’s slowly disintegrating body. He remembers a little faster each time. He falls apart a little faster each time.
It doesn’t take him long to find the moon, gleaming softly in the wide expanse of sand between him and the sea. He knows where the path down to the beach will be; he wastes little time finding it and making his way down.
A tugging feeling at the bottom of his gut tells him that his old self has arrived in this undefined era, in the dark fog not far down the beach. He doesn’t have much time. He approaches the waning moon, the dying moon, who meets his smouldering eyes with an expression so broken it could only be described as fond.
“How many times have you seen this happen, now?” Mikazuki recognises; Mikazuki remembers.
“Enough.” Yamanbagiri’s voice is hoarse, coated in smoke and he’s sure he is too. The burns from the fire stretch across his skin, wounds from unrestrained battles eating away at his body. His cloak hangs from his shoulder in tatters, the hem blackened and bloody.
The old man’s eyes crinkle at the edges; his smile is thin and skeletal. Perhaps they are not so different from each other, after all. “You are afraid, my sooty sun.”
“I want to go back with you. Come back with me.”
Mikazuki’s gaze sweeps his body once, his eyes glassy, almost tearlike. His white robes glimmer, as if struck by sunlight through the fog, and for a moment he is the moon, waxing. For a moment, he looks like he is alive. “This is not us, Yamanbagiri Kunihiro. We are not the same as we were. You know this as well as I do.”
I do. “I finally found you again.” And isn’t there something he says, in every single iteration of the loop, to every moon and star hanging in the sky, to every slowly corrupting body before him — “Isn’t there anything we could have done for you?”
“You will find me, again.” The moon’s back is turned, the white of his robes glistening as he begins to fade into the fog. Yamanbagiri tries to follow, but one step forward tells him that his old self is there, searching frantically for Mikazuki and drawing ever closer, and he sinks to the ground, watching as the moon lifts a hand in farewell.
“Wait...” His voice feels impossibly small.
“Until we meet again, Yamanbagiri Kunihiro.”
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iii. (in which corruption is the only way that this story ends)
He returns to the cliffs in tears, climbing back up the path and retreating under an overhang, where the tachi waits for him.
The shelter is usually just an indent at the top of the cliffs with nothing inside but a lingering pile of embers for warmth, where he stays every time he passes through. This time, the tachi is there.
The tachi, at this point, is little more than a pair of glowing eyes within a rusty conglomerate of armour and burn wounds. It doesn’t speak; it never has, not since the last night in Edo, but a rattling noise echoes in the cavity in its chest as it crawls towards him through the sand, its armour scraping against the floor.
“I’m back,” Yamanbagiri whispers softly, and the tachi tilts its head, as if to say, Welcome home.
It’s far from home. Yamanbagiri slumps to the ground next to the tachi, the cool sand leeching the heat from his bones, his cloak draped in a dusty arc over his back, and he gazes into the softly fading glow of the embers in the firepit. He lets the distant sounds of the ocean wash over him like rain.
He hasn’t told the tachi about Mikazuki, yet. It’s not as if he hasn’t tried, in the days following their escape from Edo — such a story, in detail, would take an eternity to tell. And the tachi, to be fair, has never asked — not that it can, but Yamanbagiri finds some comfort in the fact that it has never asked why Yamanbagiri chose to save it from the burning flames, nor why they came here , to the place beyond time where every timeline leads.
(Why Yamanbagiri has been here a thousand times before.)
He cries. He cries until he can’t cry anymore, and the sand is still cold beneath him. Through all of it, the tachi remains.
“Someone I love abandoned me here,” Yamanbagiri finally whispers into the gloom. His breath hitches; he swallows down the sob caught in his throat. “At first we thought he betrayed us. That he was trying to change history, and then that he tried to run. But that wasn’t what he was trying to do at all.”
The tachi, predictably, doesn’t say anything.
I still believe in him. That’s what he wants to tell the tachi, what he hopes the tachi understands.
“One day, I will find him.”
A growl rises from the tachi’s throat, and a faint glow emits from the crack in its chest — a similar one flares from the crack in its sword. It leans over Yamanbagiri, barely more than skin and bones, but somehow, for a moment, the shadow looming over Yamanbagiri makes him feel a little bit warmer.
The grit of sand is rough against his papery skin, and the whistle of the wind outside the mouth of the cave is still shrill in his ears. Yamanbagiri’s fingers curl into the sand as he risks a glance upward, gazing into a pair of golden eyes he’s sure he’s seen a million times before. (From the moon or from his enemies, though, he isn’t so sure at all.)
Bones suddenly slide over Yamanbagiri’s cheek not unlike calloused fingers, brushing a strand of hair away from an open wound, leaving streaks of dirt in their wake.
The sand beneath Yamanbagiri shifts as he sits up, catching the tachi’s hand and pulling it away from him. A breath rattles in his chest, his sigh echoing in the tiny space.
“Do you understand? Why I saved you.”
The tachi growls uncertainly, back hunched like a wounded dog as it shies away from him. It slips out of Yamanbagiri’s grasp, and his hands come away from the tachi’s skin covered in white, papery ash.
Yamanbagiri doesn’t say anything, just stares. He doesn’t have to say anything, because he’s seen it before. In truth, he doesn’t quite understand what possessed him to save the already dying tachi, beyond a faint flash of recognition in those golden eyes.
I hope to protect the history we made together.
“It’s okay, never mind,” he finds himself whispering, “You don’t have to.”
They both know , though.
Deep down, Yamanbagiri thinks, Mikazuki would have done the same if it were him corrupted under white ash — that he would have dragged him from the flames, and brought him to a safe haven. Or so he hopes.
The smell of rain is fresh in the air, piercing through the salt like a storm is just around the corner. The first drops begin to fall outside as Yamanbagiri retrieves the letter to his master from his dwindling belongings. It’s soft from the wrinkles and singed at the edges, discoloured from the heat of the Edo fire.
“I forgot I was supposed to send this.”
Yamanbagiri spares a glance over his shoulder as he kneels in front of the pitiful pile of embers. The tachi is watching him with its head tilted once again, its eyes the same warm gold that he’s seen a million times before, as if it knows the contents of the letter without ever having read them.
“I’m supposed to let my master know I’m alright,” Yamanbagiri explains, reaching up to tug at the fraying hood over his head. “Do you think I should tell her about you?”
The tachi rattles slightly, and Yamanbagiri thinks it almost sounds like a laugh.
They watch together as Yamanbagiri drops the letter into the embers. The edges catch slowly at first, and then the rest, until what remains is blackened ash.
Yamanbagiri is the first to move, once nothing remains of the letter, wiping his hands on the hem of his cloak.
“You know, I wish I could stay. Here, in this history.”
In some ways, his words feel like Mikazuki’s in his mouth — ever-loving, but always wistful, and never an answer.
The tachi lets out a small breath, akin to a sigh in the blueing afternoon light, and instead raises a clawed hand to point at the entrance to the cave. Yamanbagiri glances up, listening to the slowly intensifying patter of the rain outside. He understands.
“I won’t leave yet. We’ll let this day pass first.”
The tachi’s growl is softer this time, almost like a cat’s purr. Slowly, Yamanbagiri kneels in front of the tachi and gently takes hold of its wrist.
“But I will remember you. I promise.”
(The night is filled with the sounds of waves and soft moonlight, as two bodies watch the ocean through the rain.)
As dawn creeps over the ocean, a wave of gold setting the sand alight, Yamanbagiri sets off down the beach, away from the cliffs, towards the sun.
A pile of bones sits perched atop the cliff face, eyes ablaze, watching over him; Yamanbagiri’s goodbye echoing in the sound of the ocean:
Your history is as beautiful as the moon’s reflection on the water. In a place where my story dies, yours will continue on.
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iv. (in which my dreams are corrupted)
It’s like the minefield all over again: a living labyrinth of a town, riddled with traps set by the Second unit. There are more unfamiliar faces this time around, though he still knows that this second unit is his second unit. He knows the boyish grin of the gun-wielding captain, for instance, or the particular brand of chaos that is the white crane. It was his duty as secretary to tell them apart from other iterations, after all; he still feels as if he has known them for years. And yet, something feels different, just as it has every time he encounters his old friends.
The white crane is aware of his presence. Not that it’s specifically him under the rags and decaying flesh, but the way the crane dodges and parries when they cross blades is all too reminiscent of the way they would spar back home — there’s a glint in his eye. The crane understands.
Time marches on. The second unit disposes of the Retrograde Army presence in this timeline much as the previous instances, in Edo and in Jurakutei before. The story of Sakamoto Ryouma is twisted beyond repair, and then broken even further, until what remains of the timeline is held together simply by threads.
These threads, he knows now, are the strongest of the stories in this world. Oda Nobunaga, Date Masamune, Kuroda Kanbei, Ashikaga Yoshiteru — these are the stories he has seen with his own eyes. And he knows that there are many more.
(Mikazuki, he hopes, is biding his time in one of them.)
There’s an uchigatana who escapes the blood-soaked blade of Hizen Tadahiro on the final day, one who tries to flee back to the Retrograde Army’s front lines, with smoke rising from its wounds, skin curling like paper off of its body, and half of a shattered sword clinging to life. Yamanbagiri finds it halfway there, in a back alley slumped against a pile of wood and rubbish.
“You are…broken.” The words no longer feel strange on his tongue; instead, they feel familiar. He’s seen so many broken swords before.
The broken uchigatana makes a rattling noise from deep within its chest, bones writhing with energy — a faint white flame crawls across its skin, and it looks up at him with blue energy rippling through its eyes. Yamanbagiri knows this gaze well. It’s far too much like his own, but as he steps forward to take a closer look, he halts, almost stumbling over the shattered blade.
He glances at the uchigatana, who still grips the handle of its sword like its life depends on it. Its second hand is clamped over the side of its eye, over wounds, or perhaps just over its own face. Yamanbagiri understands; he used to do the same thing, when faced with his own insecurities, his own fears.
Something like pity flashes in Yamanbagiri’s eyes. Recognition, maybe. “You could have been so much more.”
The broken uchigatana doesn’t meet Yamanbagiri’s eyes. Maybe it can’t. Yamanbagiri reaches out slowly to touch the remnants of the blade.
“Were you searching for something, too?”
The uchigatana bares its teeth, the blue light in its eyes flickering into what Yamanbagiri might imagine is a smile. Those eyes are so empty; his answer is right in front of him.
This is me, in another version of this story.
Yamanbagiri takes a slow breath and draws his sword —
I am not like you. I will never forget that night, the reflection of the moon on the water. I will never abandon the moon.
(The saniwa will soon receive a final letter, from the flames of Tosa — an apology, a goodbye:
The legends of men are transient, ambiguous things. Our stories diverge here.
There are flickers of a new timeline, buried beyond a passage of darkness.)
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v. (in which i continue on)
He’s been here before.
His breath rattles in time with the wind whispering through the seagrass. He plants the acorn at the top of the cliffs by the sea.
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