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The problem is with time travel is that after you’re done, you go back to your own time. You don’t have time to recover. You don’t have time to heal. Time is the game you play with, but in the end, you are the one who doesn’t have enough.
---
Yasusada breathes, and then the entire world slips out from underneath him.
Flaming wood and the screaming people they still housed inside disappear completely, replaced by grass that feels like ice. He opens his eyes-- didn’t realize when he shut them in the first place-- and notices that the sky is at least blue this time.
“Twelve seconds,” he manages to say, and that is how long the last fight lasted. He gets up and powers through the searing pain in his right leg, but he does not ignore it. That injury is a reminder that a few seconds is enough to get killed, if he isn’t careful. Everything he has been through has taught him to be careful, but he is far more human than he likes to be, therefore liable to such rookie mistakes.
This time, the entire battlefield smells of cold air that burns his nose. Yasusada doesn’t even know how he still has a sense of smell in the first place, but he never got used to it before, sure as hell won’t get used to it now. At least, this place smells infinitely nicer than the previous one, though any difference now will be gone once the fighting starts. He identifies the area as the Echizen province, and then he gets to work. There is no time to waste.
He gathers the remains of his squad, and they flicker back to life, gathering the powers of those who have died and will die. Yasusada thinks they look like burning hitodama, then he realizes that’s basically what they are.
---
He knows exactly what to do.
Everything is second nature to him, like it was to Okita. Sometimes, training just seems to extremely boring, the same parries here, the same faces every day, burning up from the sun while fighting in the day-- freezing in the night, because swords are horrible company and winters are cold--
Yasusada is a sword, and yes, he knows exactly what to do when he goes to fight. When the enemy feints left, he stabs left. When they take a new formation, he adapts to it. It’s simple, all the training is so simple, it’s all second nature to him when he feels like his heart is going to beat out of his chest, someone got decapitated, there’s blood all over, how is he even alive, pure luck, he shouldn’t have done that, he shouldn’t have stepped there, where the fuck is everyone else, and after those few seconds of terror which he is already so used to, he’s sleeping with one eye open with his hand gripping the hilt of his sword so tightly his fingernails pierce his palm. After centuries of not even having a corporeal body, his breathing sounds so unbearably loud, until he closes his eyes and there is silence.
He is always on edge, constantly vigilant because it is what he was taught to do, what everyone is taught to do. When the tantous sing around him, he doesn’t even try to pretend he’s listening, staring ahead and tuning them out to hear for the enemy instead. When the boss squad is defeated and everyone cheers, he just gives them a fake smile, a smile Kashuu would find unbearably familiar. When he steps back into the Citadel, he is quiet, and his heart is just as dead as his last master.
And then he sees his friends, people he recognizes, and for a moment everything seems fine. Horikawa puts a bowl of food in front of him. Nagasone laughs from the other end of the table. Kanesada yells about his hair falling into the porridge, and Kashuu pulls up the chair next to Yasusada before slinging an arm around his shoulder. For that one moment Yasusada feels absolutely amazed by the fact that the saniwa has somehow brought them all together. That they can even see each other, hold each other, and then he remembers.
He remembers what they are here for, and every sword broken in combat. He remembers people who have lost brothers, mentors, everything to them, and Yasusada looks around the table, laughter once again muted to his ears.
The real fighting starts once Yasusada leaves the battlefield, because no one ever trained him to relax.
---
It turns out that the time Yasusada ended up deporting himself to is just a little while before the Honnouji incident. There is no battle here, or at least not anymore, and he needs to go further in the past if he wants to run into the Retrograding Army.
The useless human armor he wears on himself as a disguise has already been torn away from constant use. He flings it onto the ground, heaving some sort of sigh before at least being thankful that this blue fire is not actually fire. Just the burning recesses of some soul left behind. His soul, maybe. If he ever had one. Probably did. Nevermind.
Before he can rush back into combat, he needs another disguise. Yasusada spares a second to look back at the shattered comrades which follow him, dragging their bodies along with one arm. They’ll fix themselves eventually. This is a battlefield, after all-- they have plenty of souls to gorge themselves on. They’re all made of bones and fire, not flesh, so no injury is permanent. As long as Yasusada’s still alive to get them all out in a hasty time-travel retreat, anyway.
It soon begins to smell of rotten meat, and Yasusada stops himself from retching like a child, because this is a smell he should be used to-- but he spent centuries as a sword, not as a human, and only a small time as… this. Perhaps it isn’t all that great that the blue fire isn’t actually fire, because then he might grow desensitized to the scent of death, of burnt bodies and decomposed flesh.
In the end, he continues hopping along, injury in his leg sealing up as he enters the scene of a battle. These are corpses, alright, buzzing with flies and festering with greenish mold on skin. He heads for a body around his size, a boy who hasn’t even grown a beard on his face, and Yasusada swallows down both the smell and the memory of someone else who died too young.
He reaches for the dead boy’s armor and yanks. The metal has ended up sticking to the bloated corpse, purge acid and all, with the cold weather not helping in the least. When Yasusada pulls at the armor, he also tears open the boy’s belly. Nevermind the disgusting liquid that pools at Yasusada’s feet, that’s hardly the most terrible thing. He finally grimaces when rotting organs swarming with maggots stare back at him.
Yasusada simply tears whatever skin he can away and wears the armor immediately. He can’t afford to be picky.
---
The first time someone realized something was off was two days after Yasusada was brought into the Citadel.
One of the tantous, Akita, had been in his squad and thought they were close. They were, in a way, but then Akita tries to spook Yasusada from behind while they were both doing chores.
It takes three different people and almost two whole minutes to get Yasusada’s hands off Akita’s neck after he slammed the boy to the wall, eyes wide, breathing so loud it could rock the foundations of the Citadel-- he remembers Kanesada pulling his hair back and yelling what the hell is wrong with you. That’s when Yasusada realizes Akita is crying.
Yasusada isn’t the only one like this, of course. Souza can’t cook, can barely even step near the kitchen, because the scent of burning along brings him back to the Great Meireki Fire and his feet simply command him to run. Yoshiyuki yells at anyone who doesn’t lock the Citadel door after they enter, don’t you know anything about security, what if someone caught you off-guard, and he seethes with some kind of paranoia his old master wished he had.
Even Kashuu-- actually, especially Kashuu. He can deal with minor scrapes and bruises, of course, but the moment things actually start to hurt there are two stages to what happens next. The first stage is the anger, the fury to everything around him, to the enemy, to his own teammates, to himself at his shame of even getting to this state-- and then he crashes down from that emotional high completely. His hands start shaking and he grabs his chest as if he’s having a heart attack. The fear is so thick in there that he doesn’t even realize his heart is beating a million miles per minute because he just can’t hear it. His voice becomes soft-- there is only so much you can rasp out when you can barely breathe-- and he hisses, ...If I'm this worn out... I won't be loved…
Once things start to hurt, Kashuu is right back there, right back to centuries ago where his head was sliced through and he was thrown away. Yasusada is no different, and they were never that different, not really. Yasusada hears a cough and his mind zaps back to halfway across the country into a nineteenth century hospital which had no cure for tuberculosis, or he hears the charging horses and he’s right back at Toba-Fushimi where Okita fought on anyway and people died all around him.
He still sleeps with one eye open, or he just doesn’t sleep at all, because it is more dangerous to sleep in a bed compared to a battlefield. People know where you live when you’re at home, but everything is free rein once you’re out in the open. He can’t sleep with his sword in his hands, not after Nagasone tried to wake him up and ended up nearly stabbed through the chest for his efforts, and so falling asleep is the most terrifying moment of all.
Perhaps it is a good-- no, it is not a good thing that Kashuu is afflicted with some of the same fears Yasusada has. It’s not something Yasusada would wish on his worst enemy, and he doesn’t really have worst enemies, only flashing faces in battle that barely last for a second. But in any case, Kashuu has been in the Citadel for longer than anyone else, and he knows a little better than the rest about what to do.
Kashuu ends up staying in Yasusada’s room, even though there’s enough space for everyone to have their own. He boards up the windows, making sure no one can look inside, and so Yasusada won’t wake up horrified by the idea that someone can just see exactly where he is from the outside. He pulls the bedsheets down so they don’t cover Yasusada’s face, and he won’t start thinking someone is strangling him. He somehow deals with all the bothersome things he’s never had to see Okita struggle with, because by then he was already dead.
“Yamato no Kami Yasusada,” Kashuu slurs almost mockingly, patting Yasusada on the back as he tries to rock himself to sleep. “Not easy to handle.”
Yasusada feels some sense of shame wash over him, until Kashuu continues. “But a good sword,” he says, making sure Yasusada can see him when he strokes his hair so he won’t think Kashuu is a foreign intruder.
It takes a while for Yasusada to realize what Kashuu is trying to do. He falls asleep to the touches of someone signalling you are okay here, the Citadel is safe, no one will try to kill you. And no one can fall horribly sick, not in this era where almost all diseases are eradicated, through antibiotics and protein folding and what the hell, he doesn’t care, only their human bodies fall sick anyway.
After Kashuu begins to help him sleep, falling asleep is the easiest thing Yasusada can do, and he doesn’t know when he begins looking forward to it, but he does. In his sleep, within dreams which may or may not be wistful but always end when morning break through, he thinks that maybe he can get over everything.
But then the saniwa sends him to the past, and he’s back at square one.
---
He ends up getting over the stench of death soon enough. There are more important things to do. Besides, if he smells like absolute hell, all the more people will not look at him.
It won’t take much effort to find the Retrograding Army. Once Yasusada had transcended time itself, he could easily detect every single ripple in the fabric of this universe, and he could technically trace the Retrograding Army back to its roots. But no, he’s not strong enough to face that yet. And neither is the Swords Army, though he’s sure they’ll at least try if they knew, and that’s why he cannot let them know.
He’ll wait, live out every single chronological event following the saniwa and the Citadel he crisply remembers until he reaches the point where the Swords Army might just stand a chance. He will have to be patient-- powerful as he may be, he is not omnipotent, and he can’t tell which trip back or forth in time is the one that does the Retrograding Army in. Time travel is a tough business, and at least he no longer needs to sleep, or drink, or eat, or anything like that.
It has, technically, only been just over an hour since his last fight. But Yasusada closes his eyes and tracks down the next sortie the saniwa is sending back in time. Not the other saniwas, no-- he needs to listen closely, see everything he can possibly see, that’s it, that’s the one, that’s a voice he remembers.
Yasusada turns around to look at the Kebiishi he commands, and then he covers his face in that oversized helmet which smells of a rotting scalp.
---
Sometimes, Yasusada ends up being jolted awake by nightmares before the sunlight can wake him up. Human bodies are troublesome, especially their hands and how much mayhem they can wreck, when adrenaline wracks him entirely and he reaches out for--
But whatever he feels, from murderous rage to sudden coldness, dissipates fairly quickly when Kashuu rubs his face against his neck and hugs him closer in his sleep. Yasusada doesn’t know when the hell they started sleeping right next to each other, but seeing that is stops the both of them from screaming and waking the rest of the Citadel up, it works.
It gets a little easier to act like a ‘normal person’, after some time. Of course, whenever his fingers grip onto the hilt of even a training sword, the fight in him sings to life and everyone becomes a threat, but-- in any case, it’s easy enough to say it’s Okita Souji’s mannerisms simply rubbing off onto him, and not many think on that answer long enough to wonder why Kashuu doesn’t have that same problem.
The enemies they face now are not nearly as dangerous as the ones from before. They can pick them off easily, if they plan in advance. But of course, to think that perhaps the war itself will be easy is a horribly misguided idea, and Yasusada doesn’t know where he got that damn thought except that perhaps he should have listened more closely to his dreams.
Kashuu fears being thrown away, but he has never truly been in any real danger of breaking. But the enemy gets more difficult to face once they begin fighting in battles from before they were even created, and one thing leads to another, they continue onto the boss node because for some godawful reason he’s not listening to his own fear and Yasusada wonders if that’s his fault, the same way that Kashuu made him forget his own--
He does not break, does not snap in half and die on the spot, but he goes flying back behind the front lines and Kashuu is bleeding all over. He didn’t die on the spot in Ikedaya either, and perhaps it would have been better if he did. As in, if he just died.
Because there is something horrible about Yasusada having to hold Kashuu close, cradling his sword and not even bothering to restrain him when his fingers tear at Yasusada’s clothes in anguish because he’s so weak that it doesn’t even matter. There is also something horrible about not being able to say everything will be alright because Yasusada doesn’t know if it will actually be alright, and he does not want to make a promise he cannot keep, not enough collection of words to haunt him forever.
When the saniwa says he can be fixed, that is something beyond relief, and for a moment a sword can even believe in a higher power at this intervention-- but Yasusada is more down to earth than that, and he understands perfectly when the saniwa warns them. Kashuu is alive now, but if they had cut a little deeper-- if there had been just a little more force--
Kashuu is fixed, by the time night falls, but Yasusada doesn’t sleep. He holds Kashuu’s fingers close to his face, thinking about everything that’s happened, everything they’ve had to go through and did they really have to go through them? Kashuu can’t sleep either, his eyes keep flickering towards Yasusada’s, and there stare at each other before squeezing their eyelids shut in some vain attempt to fall asleep again.
It takes a while before Kashuu finally grabs Yasusada, in a fit of feelings consisting of I almost died and I have to tell you, I don’t want any regrets, Yasusada, I lo--
But Yasusada’s eyes simply fly open in panic before he tears Kashuu’s hand away and breaks his fingers.
Perhaps it was Kashuu’s fault at first for forgetting about Yasusada’s own fears, but nothing can justify what Yasusada does next. Yasusada jams his left hand on top of Kashuu’s mouth, muffling his screams while his right hand continues gripping Kashuu’s wrist. He pins down Kashuu’s other hand with his knee and brings his broken fingers closer.
Yasusada’s mouth goes over Kashuu’s fingers, and then he bites the base of each one with his teeth, before snapping them off at the bone. He lets them fall onto Kashuu’s horrified face, blood and marrow gushing onto the mattress to the beat of Kashuu’s heart, he’s writhing in agony under Yasusada, but Yasusada doesn’t stop--
---
“They’re still not strong enough to continue.”
They’ve sortied to Atsukashiyama a few times before, yes, which is how Yasusada can pick up on their trail a lot more easily. He follows the route of the Sword Army and the Retrograding Army alike, though they always intersect at the end. Whenever they comes here, it’s always those swords like Uguisumaru, Kousetsu, Shokudaikiri, Taroutachi-- but no, Yasusada knows who goes back in time. He can tell. They all feel different.
Kashuu is in the team this time. Normally, he’d leave this to any other Kebiishi unit, but for this one squad, for this one person, he will track them over aeons.
Honestly, being a Kebiishi is hardly that different from being a Retrograding Army unit-- sword gets distorted, start burning with fire or lightning or whatever, that sort of thing. All that remains different is their ultimate motive. After attempting to change the past (there are some who say they succeeded, but of course, Yasusada cannot verify such a thing), what color they burn only shows the color of their soul. A soul of regret seems to cling onto sentience a bit more easily, as if in an attempt to right what they have done wrong. Thus, there are only so many sentient Retrograding Army units-- quite a few more Kebiishi ones.
Yasusada wonders who the rest of the sentient ones are, sometimes, and if they’re similar or different to him. But then he realizes it doesn’t really matter.
It’s not like he can choose to go back.
---
“You can’t fight now,” Yasusada states, and his heart is back to feeling as dead as it did when he first arrived. “Don’t even try to stop me.”
Eight fingers lie scattered across the floor, and Kashuu has receded from crying to simply whimpering. Yasusada picks only one of them up, Kashuu’s left ring finger, and holds it in his hand.
He’s left Kashuu’s pinkies behind, at least.
“The saniwa can re-attach them,” Yasusada decides to say. “But they can’t grow them back easily. I wanted to keep all your fingers so you wouldn’t be able to fight for a while. I don’t think that would help, though.”
Yasusada doesn’t sound distressed in the least, even though his entire body is numb with shock and he wonders exactly what the hell he thinks he’s doing. But Kashuu doesn’t fight back, simply tries to get past the pain, both physical and mental. Yasusada pockets Kashuu’s finger. He feels horribly disgusted with himself in a way that only sentimental people who pretend they aren’t sentimental understand.
Kashuu only speaks up when Yasusada grabs his sword body. “Where are you going?” His voice breaks midway, and Yasusada pretends not to notice.
“I’m going to save Okita,” Yasusada answers.
Kashuu immediately jolts into life, and that only makes everything harder than it already is. He reaches for his sword, before remembering the stinging pain, but then he forgets it again because there is something more urgent happening-- “Are you crazy? No! You’re not going anywhere! Yasusada, you--”
“Nothing will change if no one does anything about it,” Yasusada snaps. “Nothing will change if we keep going on like this. No one will change the past, yes, but we’ll just keep going back and back into battle until we die. And you’ll just die, again. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If the saniwa gave us human bodies and human feelings, then I’ll use to it become something more than just a weapon, and you can’t stop me.”
(That's right. Yasusada keeps dreaming of things that have happened. They won't need to happen again. Not under his watch.)
Yasusada doesn’t know when he ended up grabbing Kashuu’s wrists again, but he flinches horribly under Yasusada’s grip. For good reason, of course, but Yasusada doesn’t falter.
“I’m not going out of desperation,” Yasusada decides to say, even though he’s pretty sure that’s a lie. “I have a plan in mind. Of course, if you still remember this event after I leave, I probably won’t have succeeded. But just wait for me. I’ll save more than just Okita.”
Kashuu shivers. Or rather, he trembles like a shaking leaf, and he doesn’t stop. “You idiot,” he manages to say, and Yasusada smiles.
His mouth is covered in blood and his smile is terrifying, but he smiles anyway.
“Promise me you’ll, like, come back in one piece.”
“I thought you would hate me a little more after I bit your fingers off.”
”I hate you,” Kashuu hisses, and Yasusada realizes the opposite of love is not hate. “Who said I didn’t?”
The wounds where Kashuu’s fingers were are still bleeding, and Yasusada knows this will probably hurt more than it’ll help, but-- he takes his hand off one of Kashuu’s wrists to wrap his pinky around Kashuu’s.
“I promise.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Yasusada lets go of Kashuu. In the most convoluted and horrible way of saying I love you, he replies:
“Take my finger if I lie.” Then, Yasusada grabs his sword, before heading for the saniwa’s room.
---
Yasusada realizes, with some sort of vague regret, that Kashuu has nine fingers when he appears. Was he wrong about the saniwa being able to grow back parts? Or did Kashuu just ask not to have it returned?
In any case, whatever remained of Kashuu’s ring finger deteriorated to bone ages ago, skin sloughing off like mud. But Yasusada does not hope to die, not yet, because he has technically not broken his promise.
Kashuu is not the squad captain, but he is still the saniwa’s first, and the most experienced of them all. Yasusada has taken special care that his team matches Kashuu’s level. They are only as strong as the strongest opponent they face. They will never destroy Kashuu.
Damn whoever else might be in the way, though.
That’s why Yasusada cuts through the Retrograding Army with such vigor. His Kebiishi squad have the perk of a sentient captain, and the Retrograding Army is easy enough to beat when using their own powers against them, slicing them right in half, so on so forth. Yasusada never really aims to defeat the Swords Army squad, but it does prove a point whenever he does.
There’s just one thing. He cannot die. He will not die. Even if they slice him into three different pieces, somehow, he will be stronger than the rest. Whatever corruption that has overtaken Yasusada in his attempt to change the past has turned him into a yari, which works for him, since it displaces his current identity even farther from his old one.
When Kashuu fights the Retrograding Army, there is just a minor chance they will kill him, especially in a place like Atsukashiyama, where they send their best soldiers. But if Yasusada fights him, he will not die. He will simply guide Kashuu along, perhaps beating the living shit out of him and sending him back. As long as Yasusada lives, Kashuu will not die.
Yasusada pulls the helmet over his face. Obviously, he can’t let anyone recognize him. Best case scenario, they let him go from shock. Worst case scenario, they take him as prisoner, and through whatever magic the saniwa uses, he won’t be able to escape.
Shishiou, acting as the captain, is the one who spots them all first-- blazing souls of blue fire. “What are they doing here again?! Quickly, get into Right Echelon formation!”
Kashuu darts next to Shishiou. He grips his sword. His fingers are painted red with nail polish, not blood. As usual, there are only nine.
He’s always been too good at hiding his feelings towards everything, Yasusada muses, and Kashuu takes a stance.
“I’ll have to fight you guys again?” Kashuu sighs. “Well-- this time, I’m serious!”
The fight lasts fifteen seconds. Yasusada stops counting once he opens his eyes up to the next random time he’s retreated to. It is raining, and if there’s anything he can be grateful for, he'll be grateful for a chance to wash the smell out of his clothes.
He gets up-- no injury to his leg this time, or shoulders, or--
Yasusada cringes when he clenches his fist.
He looks at his hands, and realizes Kashuu smashed off one of his fingers.