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WHEN KUJŌ SARA SEES SANGONOMIYA KOKOMI, SHE ONLY SEES A GAMBLER. She gambles her life as she charges in the front lines of the battles, she gambles her people’s lives as she continues to fight against the laws of the Shogun, she gambles her soldier’s lives as she sends them to war. She gambles and gambles, and she does it well. But Sara does not like gambling. She has never tried it nor does she ever want to. It is not in her nature to gamble. She stands beside the Shogun for she knows it is right, for she believes in her Archon above all else, for they are the dominating force in Inazuma, for there will never come a day when she will not walk away from the Raiden Shogun. When Kujō Sara sees Sangonomiya Kokomi, she only sees a gambler. The most skillful and the most stubborn of all gamblers.
Every time Sara sees Sangonomiya Kokomi, she thinks: What will you gamble today? She stares at her—pastels of blue against pastels of pink, her eyes as unreadable as Sara last gazed upon them. Sangonomiya Kokomi smiles and it reaches those annoying eyes but even then, Sara does not read them. It is not that she does not want to or that she does has better things to do, it is simply that she cannot. Gambler, gambler, what will you gamble today? But the war is over. The hunt for the visions ended long ago with the golden-haired traveller’s arrival. There are little things to be gambled on, no soldiers to be sent to war, no people to be sacrificed, no leaders to face off against.
Sangonomiya Kokomi’s land will always be foreign to Sara. She is a tengu before she is anything else. They are not meant for the seas but in the skies and the mountains whereas her—her, the pale-haired and iridescent-eyed dawn upon dusk—Sara has never wanted anything like her. She does not remind her of home or even the comforting scent of trees and whatnot. Sango—Kokomi, just unreadable, wispy Kokomi, is of the sea, born of the sea, created by and for the sea. The tengu do not crave the sea. The tengu do not crave the land. The tengu are of the skies and mountains so what does that make Sara? Beside Kokomi, in these silken sheets, what is she? But she was never that, was she? Sara may have been born in the mountains and the skies but she was swept away so strongly by the wind and in the arms of the Shogun did she fall, cradled by the violently violet colours of the Vision she was granted with. So this craving, this unnatural attraction, it only makes sense, does it not? The tengu do not crave the sea but Sara is not always a tengu.
Gambler, gambler, what will you gamble today?
With skilled hands, Kokomi’s hair shifts and twirls, a manifesto of a ribbon crowning her head. Their eyes meet from their mirror. Sara does not like things she knows little of and Kokomi stands first upon those things. She is torn between being frustrated or being overwhelmed with curiosity. Gambler, Sara accuses her silently. Gamblers always have such unreadable eyes, the steelest of all eyes. But Kokomi never wears a poker-face, just an elegant and polite one. Everything is a multi-stepped dance when it comes to her.
“Were you calling for me?”
Sara blinks. Kokomi has fully faced her, her hair fixed and her appearance perfected with not a single ounce of strand out of place. Maybe that is why Sara feels so strongly for Kokomi too. She is never dishevelled even in the most tiresome of days, even when she is strewn across the bed naked as the day she was born and took her first breath. She has her moments, of course. Moments where she shakes and tilts her head downward, overthinks the speeches she had prepared beforehand and looks to the seas for the reassurance she cannot find in herself but she is always pristine and immaculate; it is almost like Sara is not even touching nor is she affecting Kokomi, like Sara is just a wandering tengu peering curiously into the sea—that has never happened before. A tengu willing to fly so close to where they cannot spread their wings.
But this, this has happened before: an encounter with a tengu and a gambler. All the young children know it and Sara grew up to be who she is listening to that story, a warning to young and arrogant tengu who think themselves smarter and better than others. She may be less of a tengu than most but she knows and knows because long, long ago there lived a gambler in a town. One night he lost all the money in gambling. On his way back, he heard someone calling in a loud voice, as he was coming home in despair. He looked around. That was a Tengu on a tall pine tree.—Sara barely notices it when she gazes out the windows of Kokomi’s room. There are no pine trees here, unfortunately.
It just puts more emphasis on how different their worlds are.
“Sara,” there is a hand on her cheek, a softness that is barely there. Kokomi feels like a ghost tickling her skin, her voice so melodic it sounds like it is coming from heavens and skies away. What a comely ghost she appears to be. “You’re leaving again.”
Sara snaps away from her thoughts. “I’m not,” she grows confused.
“I know. But your mind is. You’re drifting away again,” gambler, gambler, are you a loser tonight too? Kokomi’s thumb presses against Sara’s forehead, pushing its creases away. I wondered who was calling me. You're Tengu, aren't you? I've never been a loser! “You’ll get wrinkles like that.”
Sara likes these moments before they become their titles. Kokomi is never not ready, of course, never not elegant and ‘shrewd’, as some call her. But sometimes, she sees Kokomi’s hands shake under her picture-perfect smiles and sometimes, Kokomi sees the way Sara’s face turns red in frustration when she believes she has failed in something. Sara likes to watch Kokomi pull her hair together in those unique styles, not one she sees often in her own land. And Kokomi once admitted that she likes to watch as she puts together the layers of her robes. Today, they face each other, Kokomi’s hands on her face. This is not who they are supposed to be. How did the skies even love the sea when they are so far away? Oh—oh, they meet in the horizons, do they not? And when the rain pours, the skies weep for the seas. And when lightning strikes upon the surface of it all, Sara wonders what it means.
“I was thinking of a story,” Sara admits as gently as she can. She is never one for this kind of delicate care but Kokomi pulls her insides out and craves for all the things Sara never knew she could give. “It’s about a gambler and a tengu. The gambler tricks the tengu and steals from him eventually.”
Kokomi sits beside her, her weight sinking into the futon. Their plain white robes are slouched along their skin. They look nothing like they usually are. “So I’m the gambler and you’re the tengu, is that it?” Sara feels her face turn flush with colour. “Do you think I’ll trick you and steal from you?”
She has nothing to steal from Sara. If anything, Sara is more likely to steal from Kokomi—if the Shogun asked, how easily will Sara take Kokomi’s Vision? If the Shogun asked, how easily will Sara fly away from this land? If anything, Kokomi does not need to steal anything from Sara. If anything, Sara is willing to give everything to Kokomi. Maybe she just has that tendency, a tendency to be guided by the brightest light she sees. She is still a bird at the end of the day, bristling and flying under the sun.
(It feels sinful: speaking Kokomi’s name as she prays to the Raiden Shogun. And yet, she sins, sins, and sins.)
“No,” that’s not it, Sara leaves behind the rest of her answer. There is more to the story than just a tengu and a gambler and the gambler stealing from the tengu. “The gambler doesn’t just steal things from the tengu. The tengu—he asks the gambler what he’s most afraid of out of nowhere. And the gambler lies and says he’s afraid of manju buns; the gambler asks the tengu in turn what he’s afraid of the most and the tengu answers honestly.”
By the way, Gambler. What in the world are you afraid of most? What is Kokomi most afraid of? Kokomi worries about nothing but her land, her people, and her land, and her people. Sara is no better. But Kokomi’s responsibility and burden is far greater than Sara’s will ever be; whereas Kokomi’s greatest fear will always concern her people, what is Sara’s? Her instinct is to say it is something related to the Shogun because it is the right thing to do, the right thing to say, but here she is, in the same room with the enemy-not-enemy, sitting so intimately close to one another, hands tangled, hair a mess after sharing a bed, and exposing herself in such a naked and shameful way.
“Well, what are you most afraid of?” Kokomi’s hair pours as she tilts her head, eyes as unreadable as ever, gaze as piercing as ever, and voice as soft as ever. Sara feels Kokomi cut her open, those eyes slicing through her flesh. She wonders if she can see the way her heart pounds angrily against her bones.
She does not answer Kokomi. Like a bird aflight, she leans in, craving the sea as no tengu has ever had, overwhelmed with the urge to taint the priestess with the dark of her feathers. Kokomi is cold and she almost shudders as their skins mingle and dance and oh, oh, oh—Sara craves and craves. She craves and craves Kokomi, just unreadable, wispy Kokomi, born of the sea, created by and for the sea. The tengu do not crave the sea. The tengu do not crave the land. The tengu are of the skies and mountains so what does that make Sara? This craving, this unnatural attraction, it only makes sense, does it not? The tengu do not crave the sea but Sara is not always a tengu.
It only makes sense that in this land that is not her own, in this room that will always smell akin to the sea and never the thunderous storms she has grown to call her home, in the privacy of these sinful kisses that is unbecoming of their status, in this bed of silk they share, Sara confesses: you.
It only makes sense that she lets herself be robbed in broad daylight by Sangonomiya Kokomi, the tengu’s gentle-eyed gambler.
END NOTES
- the tale mentioned by sara is “tengu’s goard” (天狗の瓢箪, tengu no hyōtan); it ends with the gambler using the tengu’s fear on the tengu and the tengu flies away, leaving a gourd that can summon anything and everything. the gambler keeps the gourd for himself.