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ONE
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four
She only brings her winter things. She might wish, come summer, that she hadn’t, but the lighter the clothes, the easier they are to replace – summer clothes will cost her less if it comes to that. Space is limited, and Maki has to bring only the things she will want most if they’re missing.
Besides, the idea that she’ll make it to summer without finding a place where she has all of the things she needs is too much to think about. It is easiest to pretend that she’s only being practical and shove the heaviest clothes she owns down to make more room in the western-style suitcase her parents had given her, thinking it would hold her wedding clothes.
The valise is old and the leather Is scuffed – an older cousin’s unwanted castoff – and Maki would have refused it on principle if not for the need for it. But she finds a little satisfaction in packing all of the wrong things into a suitcase someone else had tried to throw away.
And into it she crams only the the essentials: her heaviest clothes, a pair of boots, extra pairs of woolen socks. An envelope of money, a bento, an old but barely-worn obi that used to be Mai’s, a book Yuuta had given her when they were younger and an elderly neighbor had given him its price for a couple of odd jobs. At the very bottom, a card-sized photograph of the man in San Francisco who sent for her, its eyes poked through with the tip of a hairpin in a moment of rage – a reminder of the reasons Maki is leaving. Only the things she’s sure she can’t live without.
She closes the suitcase and casts one last look around the only place she has ever slept before she snaps the latch closed, knowing that she might have little time to make her escape once she does if anybody is around to hear the sound.
Not that it is a suspicious sound, necessarily, but if anybody is made aware of Maki’s presence, if they see her leave her room, it is going to be more difficult to slip away without being asked all of the least-convenient questions.
No time to waste – she buttons the red wool coat her mother had given her the money for in a rare moment of indulgence, takes the handle of her suitcase, peeks around the corner to make sure that the hallway is empty, and runs.
Her oldest and most broken-down boots wait for her at the door, placed there earlier to make sure that she wouldn’t have to delay in finding them, and she tugs them on with the ease that a stiffer, newer pair wouldn’t allow. She’d thought of that, too – she’s gotten used to having to think of everything – and left them laced, just in case, not wanting to waste a single second on her shoes when so much could go wrong.
Nothing does, though. For once in her life, it looks as if Zenin Maki might actually be lucky.
There is a light coating of fresh snow on the ground, and she doesn’t have time to make sure her footsteps can’t be followed, but she’ll have to live with that. Nobody is going to know where she went once her trail goes cold at the train station, either, and, with a scarf pulled high up over her mouth, Maki doesn’t think anyone there will remember her well enough to give testimony. Some risk is unavoidable.
It just has to be worth It.
She’s breathing heavily by the time she reaches the station, her cheeks red beneath her falling-down scarf, and a a little fresh snow dusts her coat and settles in her hair. She hadn’t thought that it would snow, but it feels lucky, somehow, that it has. And when she sees Yuuta waiting for her beneath an awning, she smiles.
“You made it,” he tells her, smiling shyly, when she reaches him, and presses a ticket into her hand. His touch lingers a second too long, and Maki, for once, doesn’t pull away.
“I told you the shoes would be important.”
He laughs, light and full and free, and they head for the platform – “makes me wonder why I doubted you.”
It’ll be ten minutes now until the next train north, and they will be on their way. The thought they’ve made it out is heady enough to feel drunk on, tantalizingly easy to crow about when the danger hasn’t passed – but they’ve come so far, and they are so, so close, that it’s hard not to.
“Yuuta-kun,” Maki says, sweeter than she likes to me, “aren’t I a genius?”
He reaches for her hand and squeezes it, and it is pleasant to think that Maki no longe really cares what he means by that.
“Of course you are,” he tells her, and when she looks up to meet his eyes, they are full of fondness. “But I already knew that.”
**
one
This is the only day of the year that Maki will ever be dressed up like a lady and paraded around as if she matters to someone, and she rather wishes she could lower the number to none at all.
It’s supposed to be an honor to stroll aimlessly or sit here in seiza for hours, dressed up like a lady someone ought to want to take off her parents’ hands, but she can think of few things she would feel less honored by. Ostensibly, the Sakura are supposed to be the object of everyone’s attention, but in truth, it is the marriageable girls of a rival clan who attract just as much.
Maki does what she can not to lower her eyes like a proper lady when she can tell that somebody is looking at her. It’s the only resistance she can mount, and besides, they tend to look away the moment they realize that the women they’re examining are examining the back. Makes them uncomfortable.
Maki has found that she quite likes making men uncomfortable, so it is singularly perturbing when she meets the gaze of a passing man dead-on and he smiles.
He doesn’t speak, only smiles, and they both keep walking. Mai tugs on her sleeve, but Maki ignores that, too, pretending to be too engrossed in her surroundings to have thought anything of either gesture. Most people don’t really notice, anyway, when a woman wears a vacant expression, or pretends not to notice an advance. Many seem to think it suits them.
Maki truly does hate hanami season.
“That one was better-looking than the last few,” Mai whispers after enough time has elapsed that Maki cannot possibly pretend to ignore her any longer.
“I don’t care.”
“He liked you.”
“Mai,” she says coolly, “I don’t care.”
She doubts that Mai does, either. Maki pretends that her head is perpetually elsewhere, but Mai’s really is; at court she is known for composing amusing tales and little else. The thought of her being concerned with the eligible bachelors her sister is ignoring is laughable at best, and she probably only mentioned that man because she had wanted to see something entertaining happen. Mai is like that – a glutton for amusement. Men think it’s charming. Maki finds it both unimpressive and irritating.
Surely someone with such a way with words has something in her brain besides ways to nudge people into doing amusing things she’ll be able to recount to the palace ladies later.
“One day you’ll have to,” Mai says, then snickers. “Your reputation can’t afford the title of ‘old maid.’”
Maki quite likes the thought of being an old maid, actually. She’d leave, of course, maybe shave her head and roam the countryside impersonating a wandering mendicant, or pretend to be a boy and hire herself out to work in someone’s stables or smithy or something like that. Maybe live alone somewhere, gathering food, hunting for wild game. Options aplenty. Aspirational, all of them, but Maki thinks she is just close enough to snapping that all of them sound both appetizing and attainable. But Mai would laugh uncontrollably if she told her any of that, and probably relate it to her ladies like the grandest of jokes.
Her pride won’t allow that kind of indignity.
“I think,” she says drily, “that I can work something out.”
Mai does not believe that to begin with, but she believes it far less after a flustered maid skitters into the room on silent feet the next morning with something in her hands and tells Maki that a messenger from the Gojo Estate was here, and that he asked at the gate of the women’s quarters if somebody might take a message to the lady who had been wearing green and walking with her sister yesterday. The maid had known that meant Maki. Mai preens, convinced that she was right to point out the man’s evident interest in her sister and its potential for interesting developments.
The poem is terribly unoriginal – something insipid about an ephemeral chance meeting under the ephemeral blossoms that absolutely any man at that party could have and probably would have written to an attractive girl he saw for more than three seconds – but it is well-composed.
It is signed ‘Okkotsu Yuuta,’ and naturally, Maki decides that she hates him.
**
three
The day of the assembly, Maki is in the annex room.
Maki is always in the annex room when important things happen, whether gatherings of the family to hear proclamations or marriage negotiations or meetings with other clans. The maid who brings her meals tells her that it is only for her protection that she’s kept away – that her special gift is the reason for her seclusion – but that doesn’t make her feel differently about the fact that strange things are happening somewhere else and she is back here in a dark, dusty room, alone.
It's not fair. Even Mai is there, and Mai doesn’t have any gift at all.
When Maki was too young to know what she would one day be capable of, her parents had taken her along just as they did her sister. There had been no reason to keep a daughter who would one day be marriageable away from the people who might spread favorable rumors when she came of age if they had seen her even as a child, so she and Mai had gone and sat among the crowds of strangers just as the adults did. It used to be thrilling, even though the assemblies themselves were dull, just to be there.
And now, Maki is shut away whenever anything is happening, and the only thing she can do during the long hours of her confinement is run her hands through the dogs’ thick fur and hope that time is passing faster than it feels like it is.
She talks to them sometimes, even though it doesn’t feel any better to have talked when the person on the other end can’t respond. She tells them about her training, and about how she worries that her parents might stop it at any time. She tells them that Mai had shown her the kimono her parents had had made for her so that they could show her off when the clans gathered at their estate, and how envious she is, even though she doesn’t like fussy clothes, just because Mai is ungifted and therefore not important enough to be hidden away. She tells them about the things Naoya says to her when nobody is around to cuff his ears for speaking that way to the Zenins’ little prize.
But then she remembers that they aren’t real dogs, and that if they come from her, they must be as lonely as she is, and it only makes her sadder.
Maybe if she were better at fighting with her dogs, Maki thinks, she could tear down the doors and barge into the assembly hall and no one would be able to tell her that she had to go back to her solitary confinement. If the Ten Shadows were all that her family says they are, she wouldn’t ever have to let them put her away when visitors came. But they do, so they must be lying.
Her mother always says that it is because a user of the Ten Shadows cannot be allowed to be coveted by somebody who might induce her to marry out of the bloodline and give her gift to the children of another clan, and many others insist it’s for her protection, but Maki knows how convenient an excuse that is.
They just don’t want her.
They wish the Ten Shadows had been given to somebody else, and they are ashamed for anybody to know that the one who wields them is a cursed twin and a failure and a girl. And she can’t think about that without wanting to nuzzle her face into the white dog’s coat and bite her lip so that she won’t cry.
Later, she will wonder how the cursed technique that had created her only childhood friends could be a source of such deep loneliness at the same time.
**
two
There is something novel about the frightened eyes that peer over at Maki as the fiancé she has never met takes the smallest of the three sakazuki in his shaky hands and lifts it to his lips. She thinks he ought to be focusing on keeping his trembling fingers steady enough that he doesn’t drop it, but his eyes remain on her until he sets the dish down, and then after, and Maki finds that unnerving.
He's not supposed to be curious, and It Irritates her In the glances she steals of his face that curiosity becomes him. It also irritates her that she knows enough to be aware that he is not as harmless as he appears.
The heir to the Gojo Clan has a kind face, a little fishlike in a way Maki wishes was uglier than it is. He smiles timidly at her even though everybody sort of expects him to scowl, and he’s nervous – it’s more disarming than she had expected, seeing Okkotsu Yuuta nervous. She doesn’t think men with as much power to command the world around them to shape itself to their whims ought to look so nervous.
If he is nervous to take Maki as his wife, it probably means he has more sense than she had thought he would.
Theirs is a strategic marriage, meant to join rival clans who’d decided it would be more advantageous to try to profit off of their nemeses than to annihilate them, and Maki knows that the heads of both their clans probably think this is a terribly clever plan. Okkotsu is the bastard child of a Gojo nobody remembers, but with power like his, nobody cares; Zenin Maki is only relevant because her father is high-ranking. Unwilling to give her more marriageable sister away in a political deal, the Zenins had been the ones to propose the match: a powerful pretender, a useless daughter, and the prevention of total destruction.
How conventional, she had thought when they had told her. How terribly conventional.
They think they’re clever, all of them, but she doesn’t mean to do a single thing of value by marrying this man, and if Yuuta is as sycophantic as he looks, he’s going to have to swallow his filiality and live with that.
If she were any more inclined to sympathy, she would pity him. But maybe, if he knows what he’s getting himself into, that won’t be necessary.
**
five
There is something wrong with the transfer student.
This is the most obvious observation Maki could possibly make, but nevertheless: there is something wrong with the transfer student. There is something dark and heavy about his bearing and his cursed energy and the way his feet fall like they’re made of lead with every step he takes, but when she looks at his face, all she sees is terror.
There is something wrong with Okkotsu Yuuta, and it takes her little time to figure out what it is.
(Everything, she decides. It’s everything.)
She can’t say why he gets under her skin, really, except that all men with the gifts not given to her do at least a little. It’s not that she’s bothered by the sluggish pulse of his cursed energy the way she knows Inumaki is; she isn’t really sensitive to those things. And it’s not even the pathetic way he shuffles his feet and stoops his shoulders when he walks. It’s not the bitter thought that a boy as gifted as Okkotsu, whose path forwards will inevitably be so straight, should never, ever be insecure.
After a while, Maki concedes to herself that the thing she does not like about him is the vague and unshakeable sense that she’s seen him somewhere before.
(And all the other things. She can dislike someone for as many reasons as there are hairs on her head and it won’t change a thing because what matters is the reason, the one thing she just can’t stomach –
She’s seen Okkotsu Yuuta before. It’s going to make her crazy trying to figure out where.)
She can’t have, but each time she has no choice but to look at him, and each time her feathers are ruffled by the way her fondness for him won’t stop growing, it pricks at her – she has to have seen this boy somewhere. There’s something uncannily familiar about his voice and the way that he moves, about his shy smile and easy blush.
But those are the kinds of things she would not recognize because she’d seen them in a passing stranger. And sometimes, sitting in class and trying not to look at Yuuta, Maki lets her mind drift away from the lecture and ask, instead, not where she has seen Yuuta, but how she knows him so well.
**
TWO
**
three
1826
“You’re not scared, are you?”
Yuuta doesn’t raise his head from between his knees, but he shakes it. He doesn’t want to admit it any more than he wants to be comforted. But a large, warm hand on his head informs him that his performance wasn’t convincing.
“It’ll be alright,” Satoru says quietly, ruffling his cousin’s unkempt hair. Yuuta briefly looks up at him, but his wide smile only makes him want to look away again. It rings so false in a moment like this. “After all, you’re…”
He leaves off there, and Yuuta knows he has no choice to finish the sentence. “The strongest.”
“And I’m not so bad, either,” he says, forcing a smirk for Yuuta’s sake, “so why should you be?”
Yuuta knows he doesn’t like saying those things. For all that the word prodigy gets tossed around when people talk about him, it is not The Strongest, and Satoru has always hated being second. He wishes that he would stop forcing himself to put up that front and admit that he wishes he had Yuuta’s gifts, because Yuuta does, too.
Satoru would never hide in the cellar where they keep the winter provisions and curl in on himself, making himself small – not even if someone had just tried to kill him. Maybe especially not if someone had just tried to kill him. Satoru is older and smarter and stronger in every way but technique. Satoru would be worthy of the Six Eyes.
Yuuta has never been sure about anything but the fact that he isn’t.
“Yuuta-kun,” Gojo asks, keeping his voice down, “what’s wrong?”
He shakes his head vehemently and squeezes his eyes shut tight so neither tears nor evidence of his fear will escape. Satoru, blessedly, says nothing.
He probably knows that his younger cousin is a coward, hiding in the cellar like a child, and that even though he is one, he has no right to be. The Six Eyes is given only once every handful of generations; it would be unthinkable for that gift to be squandered, and if using it well means forgetting that he is only ten years old and barely knows what to do with it, then he has no other choice. It may give him a million privileges, but hiding and forcing his family into such an uproar that Satoru had been pulled from his studies and sent to go find him is not one of them.
This assassin was not the first and will not be the last, and even if it were all right to do, hiding will not always be a choice he has. And he knows that Satoru is thinking those things, too.
He will tell anyone who asks that he hates the thought of wasting his gifts on cowardice, because that is what he’s supposed to say, but if he ever answered honestly, he would say that the only thing he really fears is the disapproval of the only member of his whole clan who had known exactly where he would hide out after an attempt on his life.
Satoru should’ve been what Yuuta is, but he’s not, and Yuuta can’t bear the thought of having gotten what Satoru wanted and still letting him down.
**
two
1487
Maki – he has to start thinking of her that way, Maki instead of ‘the Zenin girl’ like everyone has been saying all this time – has not changed. She comes to his room like they expect, which half-surprises him, but she is wearing her wedding clothes and a scowl, and neither differ from the ones earlier by so much as a loosened tie.
This is not what Yuuta had hoped for, having decided that his wife was very beautiful several hours ago, and having begun to hope that she would not hold his clan’s actions against him for the rest of their lives together.
But instead of saying that, he silently bows his head and lets her in.
“I’m not going to do it,” she says, brushing past the doors with the heavy silk of her skirts in her hands for ease of movement. “I’m not allying anyone with anyone.”
“All right,” Yuuta says quietly, thinking that he might not really mind that as much as she seems to think he will.
“So if you expect me to play at being a diplomat, you can know right now that I won’t.” In a whirl of skirts and a huff, she sits beside the low wooden table he uses to write his letters. “And I’m not sorry.”
She’s strong-willed. He’d known that, but he had not thought – indeed, he’s never met a woman who was – that she would be so blunt. It makes him want to laugh; he probably would if he didn’t think that it would insult her. “I don’t even think you could play at being a diplomat,” he says, an attempt at matching her candor.
She looks almost impressed. “I couldn’t, could I?”
“And I certainly wouldn’t expect you to want to do well at something you were forced into against your will.” He looks down at her, eyes softening – “I wouldn’t have taken you if they hadn’t forced my hand, too.”
Her face scrunches into a scowl, but he can see the relief in her eyes well enough to know that it’s an act. “What, am I that repulsive?”
He pauses for a moment to consider what might befall him if he answered that question honestly, then says, “no, that wasn’t what I meant.”
She deflates like she’d been looking for a reason to light into him, then her shoulders round. “Oh.”
“I only meant I’d never have taken a wife who didn’t have a say in whether or not I could have her.”
Her eyes narrow suspiciously. For a moment, she doesn’t say anything, and he shakily continues.
“I’d never ask you to do what they say,” he says, “but I think I would like it if we could at least be friends.”
“I can’t say I’ve ever had many of those.”
He laughs, sheepish, and sits across the table from her. “Neither have I.”
At eye-level, he can see the changes in Maki’s face since they began to speak: the easing of the lines of tension in her face, the smile that is trying to tug at her lips, and his chest tightens, because she is beautiful and willful and he can see that no matter how hard she is trying not to, she likes him. And it is a wonderful thing, being liked by somebody determined not to. He is tentative, but he reaches across the table and touches Maki’s hand, but she doesn’t back away.
He wants to be sorry that it was Maki they chose to bind to him, but he can’t be.
“Let’s be useless together,” he tells her, smiling, and she can no longer stop herself from smiling back.
It’s a novel concept; neither of them has had someone with whom to share a secret in longer than they like. But it is a secret that binds them in something other than name, and they are friends, the kind who perhaps know they will be lovers in due time but do not, for fear of spoiling the thing, ever say so.
They are married in December, and it is in April, after the last of the Sakura have fallen, that he tells her he no longer thinks he is only her friend, and she lets him peel back the layers of her daytime kimono, and neither of them can any longer remember that they are lovers now only because they were forced to be husband and wife.
**
one
1149
“Good luck.”
With those parting words, Fushiguro gets up to leave, and Yuuta, not nearly finished yet, stands to follow. “Wait, Fushiguro-dono-“
“If it’s Maki,” he interrupts, glancing back over his shoulder as he walks away, “I don’t think anybody can help you.”
Yuuta, undeterred, jogs after him, falling into step beside Fushiguro when he catches up. “Why is that?”
“I already told you,” he says archly. “I can’t do anything.”
“But why?”
He pinches the bridge of his nose, his ordinarily blank expression shifting into the haughty one which seems to be one of the few in his repertoire. “Maki-dono is determined not to marry.”
Yuuta stops, breathless, and his voice comes out deflated – “oh.”
“Her parents are in fits trying to be rid of her,” he goes on, “but haven’t been able to find anybody who wants her after she ran away from the first.”
Yuuta blinks a couple of times. “Ran away.”
“A high-ranking Kamo three times her age.”
No wonder, Yuuta can’t help but think. “And they couldn’t find her?”
“Not for three months.” Fushiguro sighs as if eminently put-upon. “At which point she came back only because her would-be husband had died of old age.”
For a single woman of aristocratic breeding to have been able to survive alone and remain undetected for three months, no doubt with the entire might of two great clans searching for her, is more impressive than Yuuta thinks Fushiguro would like him to admit. He clearly has no fondness for his cousin – but then, he has no fondness for anything under the Zenin banner.
“Rather impressive,” he still says, because credit is due.
“Perhaps.”
“And what did she do after that?”
“She had a sister at court,” Fushiguro tells him. “A twin. She’d lately come into favor there, so she was granted permission to take her sister in.”
A luckier break than anyone could have imagined. “Even after a scandal like that?”
“Mai-dono has a way with words,” Fushiguro says drily. “She managed to make her sister sound amusing enough that her mistress’ interest was piqued.”
“I…can’t say I’ve ever heard a story quite like hers, in fairness,” Yuuta comments.
“Only because the Consort Mai-dono serves is such a glutton for amusement.” It is clear what Megumi thinks of this. “She likes curiosities.”
“And Maki-dono is a curiosity,” Yuuta guesses.
“And determined not to marry.”
“Could she perhaps be-“
“Okkotsu-dono,” Fushiguro sighs, “if you think that there is any chance of your persuading my cousin to be pursued, you clearly don’t know her well enough to succeed.”
**
four
1904
By the time the last of four trains reaches Akita, it is nighttime, and snowing. The paths are dimly lit, if at all, and Yuuta looks out from the window as they pull into the station and thinks that it might be impossible to find somewhere to stay when they can barely see even now, with the lights of the station for visibility. But Maki had insisted upon Akita –somewhere in the north, populated but obscure enough that they wouldn’t easily be found – and if they don’t, they might freeze. It is a risk he has no choice but to take.
Not if he wants his Maki to be free.
And she looks it, at least. She walks fast enough to outpace Yuuta in moments, even though she’s a head shorter, and she grabs his arm to turn down a narrow street as if she already knows that she’ll find what she’s looking for there. Her valise hits his thigh as it swings, but Maki barely seems to notice, tugging him along by the hand, and he remembers – Maki loves to travel. She loves new places and the excitement of aloneness; too closely supervised to experience much of either for most of her life, they are things she treasures. And she really does look free, here in a place nobody knows her name.
It's bittersweet to think that Maki would’ve sailed off to San Francisco without a question if she were alone, but she hasn’t. She’s here, seemingly as far from home as she would’ve been across the sea, because when asked to do it for a husband she did not ask for, an adventure starts to take on the cast of an imprisonment.
“Maki-chan,” he asks after a few moments of purposeful but unproductive walking, “do you know where you’re going?”
She tsks. “Of course I do.”
“Maki-chan, I know you’re lying.”
“Don’t call me that.”
He sighs. Of all the fights to pick right now. “If we keep wandering all night, we’re both going to freeze.”
“There has to be somewhere to stay around here,” she says stubbornly, scanning the signs of the shuttered businesses along the street for something useful. “And this is the most populated area, so if we’re going to find something, this is the best chance we have.”
By the time this really does prove to be the best chance they have, they have been wandering for thirty minutes, and Yuuta thinks that his toes are going to snap off from the cold if he tries to bend them. But, nevertheless, Maki succeeds in dragging him along until they reach a warmly-lit building that purports to be a western-style inn, and he wilts with relief at the warmth inside.
He's so relieved and suddenly so tired that he barely overhears Maki tell the owner, a plump, cheerful woman his mother’s age, that she and her husband are passing through town on the way to see family in Hakodate. Nevertheless, he does, and when she hands them the keys to a room on the second floor, Yuuta gives Maki a questioning look.
“She looked like the kind of old codger who wouldn’t rent a room to a pair of lovers,” she says, hardly needing to add that unless they pretended to be married or siblings it would be likely everyone they encountered would come to that conclusion.
It’s obvious, but still a funny thought. He and Maki would never use that name to describe what they are to each other, but neither would they use siblings or friends. It’s really more like something thwarted into friendship by the lack of hope of its ever being allowed to become something more, but that is far too much context to have to give to strangers. And, for the sake of escape, it is easier to pretend Maki is not a runaway bride but a settled and perfectly happy one.
He's grateful that she said that after a few moments to think, because it means that they can share a bed like they did when they were children before anyone thought better of it, and because he would rather be Maki’s husband than a childhood friend doomed never to rise above his station in Maki’s life by his birth on the lowest branch of a family whose once-considerable fortune is in decline.
He's thought about it before, having Maki for his own, and it is not a bad thought.
“Well,” he says once they reach the room assigned to them, “Marriage it is, then.”
She rolls her eyes, ever-fond, and lays one of her hands on his arm – Maki is good at that, telling him how much more she wants from him without saying so – as the other turns the key in the lock, and as soon as it opens, she gestures for him to drop both their valises at the door and turns to face him.
“Yuuta-kun,” she says, a little giddy with the rush of having made it here, “we did it.”
“I suppose we did.” He smiles, trying to look debonair but probably ending up closer to lopsided, then lifts her hand to his lips and kisses it like the men always do in the foreign movies they used to see back home. “Okkotsu-san.”
She rolls her eyes again, but he can see her cheeks redden even in the dim light, and he laughs.
“This was only to get her to give us a room,” Maki huffs. “So don’t go getting ideas.”
“Maki-chan,” he laughs, gently tugging at the collar of her coat from behind, “the only ideas I have are ones you gave me.”
She turns, arms crossed. “And when did I give you the idea that you could start acting like my husband?”
“Well, I inferred-“
“You inferred wrong.” She thumps his chest with her balled fist and then turns again, flopping down onto the futon with immense pathos. “So infer something else.”
He laughs, knowing that these little spats are Maki’s way of telling him she likes his company, and doesn’t really believe her – he knows her too well for that.
But he doesn’t know her well enough, apparently, to guess that she might crawl across to his futon and press a hesitant kiss to his lips before she sleeps that first night away.
**
zero
2017
Summer in Morocco is stifling; it requires an immense exertion of willpower just to pretend that it is not for long enough not to go crazy thinking about it. But there’s no one to complain about it to, either, so the best he can do is let his mind wander.
There are plenty of things it could wander to: how absurd it is that his life looks so vastly different now than it did only a year ago, and the unfamiliar sounds and smells of Marrakech in July. But mostly, it wanders to Maki, and he never really sees the need to make it get back on-course.
Maki is more pleasant to think about than the heat, at least. She texts him at all hours of the night, during times he knows she’s in class and when she thinks he won’t bother to check and learn that it’s three in the morning in Japan already, and even though her replies are characteristically terse, they make him smile.
But it isn’t just that she’s beautiful and resilient and makes him laugh; no. The thing that he can’t stop circling back to with Maki is the fact that he could swear that he’s known someone exactly like her before, but he doesn’t know who, or when.
Something about Maki is so intimately familiar even after only a few months that he knows there must be an answer, but he can’t figure out what it is, and sometimes, when he is trying to drift off on nights when the heat is so oppressive that he kicks off his covers, he falls asleep to the puzzle of Zenin Maki and where exactly he knows her from.
-
THREE
-
two
“Maki.”
Maki wants to believe that she is too sensible to feel anything for the way somebody says her name, but she is not, and when she looks over at Yuuta she’s smiling, ever-so-slightly. “What is it?”
He is laying on the futon opposite hers, and when she looks at him, he’s smiling, too. Of course he is.
“Nothing,” he says quietly, closing his hand over hers. “I just wanted to look at you.”
“Really, Yuuta?”
“What?” he laughs, playfully pressing his finger to the tip of her nose. “I did.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“I know,” he says, pleased. “But you like how I say your name.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You do.”
“Don’t.”
“Well, I’m telling the truth,” he says. “I just wanted to look at you.”
“Congratulations, then.” Maki only tries to look annoyed. “Are you happy now?”
“Am I?”
A crease forms between her brows. “You’re doing the thing again.”
“What thing?”
“The one where you deflect by saying something vague.”
“Am I?” he says, on purpose this time.
“You exhaust me,” she says crossly, turning to her other side and pulling the covers up over her head. It is childish, but Maki thinks she should be allowed to be childish sometimes. “I’m going to sleep.”
Yuuta doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t really believe that means he’s resting his case. A few moments later she feels a weight disrupt her futon – indeed he’s not.
“Maki,” he murmurs, dipping his head to whisper into her ear. “We should share tonight.”
She ignores him, as her reputation requires her to.
“Maki.”
Still nothing. She knows he likes when he can indulge her in little things like this – a favorite meal, a bit of teasing – and she’s more than happy to let him.
“I’m sleeping with you tonight,” he tells her, lifting the comforter, and even though she wants to pretend she doesn’t want him there, she’s pleased enough to move to the cold side of the mat to make space for him.
“First you want to look,” Maki says once he’s settled in and wrapped himself around her, “and now you want to sleep in my futon?”
“Of course,” he says, as if this is the most natural turn of events in the world.
“I’ll allow it,” she says gruffly. “You’re warm.”
Sometimes she feels like she’s betraying someone by letting him be so close to her, but she’s never found herself wishing him away, either. She wants to resent him for having been forced on her, but he does enough of that for two by himself; she wants to be put-out by his tenderness and irritated that she wants him, but she isn’t.
Maybe she is in love. Maybe there are worse things she could be.
“Maki,” he whispers, and she does not – could not – miss how he cradles her hip with his hand and gives it a lazy stroke with his thumb when she shivers at his voice in her ear.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know how long the alliance is going to hold.”
“Not long,” she says, closing her eyes. “I’m sure of that.”
“My uncle has been talking lately about countermeasures.” His breath ghosts her ear, but there is nothing of the sweetness of intentionality in it. “He thinks it won’t be long.”
“Yuuta,” she says, frustrated and unsure why. “I know that.”
“If your family and my family-“
“We’ll run,” she says.
“But Maki,” he sighs, “we would be the first ones they came for.”
“Then we’ll have to outrun them.”
She suspects Yuuta doesn’t want to spoil the moment by protesting that he doesn’t think they even can.
“Of course,” he says after a terse moment.
He’s probably right about her family and the collapse of the alliance and all the rest of it. If there is one constant in this world, it is that one: that everything falls apart, and the most beautiful things are always shot full of arrows first. But she’s never concerned herself with what her family is doing, and she refuses to start now.
“We’re hard to kill,” she says. “Both of us.”
“I know, Maki.”
She turns and kisses him and tries to forget.
**
four
They leave Akita to the well wishes of an innkeeper who truly has no idea who she’s been lodging, and in a fit of uncontrollable laughter, because they’ve talked at length about what that woman would say if she knew that the newlyweds she’d been so happy to host were a woman running from her overseas deployment as the wife of a stranger and the boy who has loved her since childhood. They are in high spirits, in other words, and feeling rather invincible, and by the time they reach Aomori they feel rather invincible.
March is just beginning now, late enough that some of the snow has begun to melt, but still, Yuuta complains of the cold. Maki always laughs, because Yuuta has never been the hardy type, and because she barely feels the cold at all – but then, that might have more to do with the fact that she feels like she’s forever walking on air than any real tolerance she has.
But it is something she thinks she cannot help – she is out, for once, and alone, and free, and she can’t think of anything more intoxicating than that. And there is Yuuta, and sometimes she kisses him like the women in the movies who have always seemed bolder than anyone Maki has been allowed to be before, and she thinks he likes it.
She likes it, too, being free to do things like that, and like reading novels and traveling alone with a man and winning her passage in a game of go with a seedy man who’d been sitting at a brazier just outside the station.
Well. Maybe that one had been an imprudent risk, but Maki is tired of caring about what is prudent and what is not, and besides, the look on Yuuta’s face when she had won had been worth his weight in gold. He had not seemed to know whether to be afraid or impressed, and that, Maki thinks, is the best way to be seen by a man for a modern woman looking to be taken seriously.
She knows she is probably naïve, but she doesn’t care, and neither does she care that the naivete will swiftly be beaten out of her as she learns to live a life her family did not lay out for her. A modern woman lives by experience, she thinks. She can stomach a few hard blows in service of the goal of liberation.
What she doesn’t know is if Yuuta can.
“It’s not that cold,” she says reproachfully, though half-playful, when Yuuta begins to cough. It is an ugly cough indeed, ragged and hacking, but Yuuta was always a sickly child – a fitting companion indeed for the failure of the Zenin clan –and she never really worried about his childhood illnesses when they seemed so frequent as to bely notice.
“No, nothing like that,” he says, smiling, because Yuuta is too gracious not to smile. “I probably just caught something on the train.”
She frowns. That sounds like the kind of thing Yuuta would say if he knew there were something much more profoundly wrong with him than a common cold, but she doesn’t ask, because clearly he isn’t going to say anything more, and she’ll accept that. Nevertheless, it is with a certain recklessness that she savors the long, languid kiss she gives him when they are finally alone again, put up in a little hotel run by yet another elderly woman who thinks they’ve just been married.
They are supposed to be bound for Hakodate on the morning train four days later, but four days later Yuuta is bent double, coughing so violently that all Maki can think to do is hold his shoulders steady, and when he forgets to hide his handkerchief from her, she notices the places where it’s spotted with red.
It’s cold this time of year, after all, and Okkotsu Yuuta never has been the hardy type.
**
three
She sees him for the first time at the only clan assembly she is every allowed to attend, and the thing she remembers most vividly afterwards is the color of his eyes. Well, not the color, really; plenty of people have blue eyes. It’s more the otherworldly sheen of them: plenty of people are said to have eyes like sapphires, too, but few of them are as deep a blue as Okkotsu Yuuta’s, and fewer still – maybe none – are so iridescent. When Maki first sees his eyes, they disturb her.
They disturb her more when she gets close enough to see that they are a mirror image to the aching sadness she has taught herself to bury.
Everybody knows Okkotsu Yuuta’s name. He is a just distantly related enough to the Gojo clan for them to claim him, but had he not inherited the Six Eyes when the main family hadn’t seen the birth of a wielder in three hundred years, they probably wouldn’t have cared to. He is talked about in whispers and everybody knows what he could do to somebody who displeased him. Even Maki, hidden away as she is, knows of the young Six Eyes.
She did not know before she saw him that he was her age, or that his eyes were such an eerie blue, and that he was as sad and sunken as she didn’t want to admit she was.
They are kept away from each other as much as they can – mostly her family’s doing – but briefly, he manages to find a moment that Maki is unsupervised and greet her with a sad smile so heavy that, despite his best efforts, it almost sags into a frown.
She will always remember that smile, too, and the way it barely passed for a smile at all. She remembers how much she had been surprised by his softspokenness, and how long it had taken her after to stop thinking about him.
Maki is strong enough at eighteen that no one can keep her hidden away anymore, and the next time the clans assemble, three years after the first, she forces her way into the attending crowd to the protesting cries of half her clan and searches for a pair of eyes like lit sapphires until she finds him, and this time, the smile that greets her is hardly even sad.
Okkotsu Yuuta is kind, and lonely, and he cares little more than she does that their families would be quick to separate them if they knew that they were always together when they snuck away from meetings. And Maki, who has never had a good thing to her name in all her life, thinks that it is the gravest of all possible injustices that they are natural enemies.
He tells her as much the day they are walking beneath the plum blossoms on a spring morning that feels like a leftover from winter, away from the noise and chaos of the three great clans’ triennial assembly, and she looks at the ground and says she agrees.
Maki is not the sort of person who gives much thought to matters of the heart, and she never would with a man whom she might well one day be forced to fight to the death. Relations between their families are always frigid, but lately it has seemed as if they’re a single degree away from total collapse. But even so when they are twenty-four, Yuuta tells her that he would be hers if he could, and she thinks that might be an even greater injustice: that her natural-born enemy would be so easy to love.
**
one
Mai had read the first letter to the ladies.
Maki hadn’t cared enough to stop her, to be fair, nor do the letters have enough sentimental value to warrant it, but it still stings a little to see Mai running after every courier in sight and intercepting this Okkotsu’s maddeningly persistent letters before she can. She had learned of a story, after all, and stories are her currency; her position depends on the duplicity it takes to cultivate and tend to the best ones. That her renegade sister would be courted by such an illustrious man is a shock that the Consort and her other serving-ladies find delightful, and Mai knows enough to know that Maki is not truly attached to the man. Perhaps she’d have tact if she was.
In truth, Maki pilfers the letters from her sister’s things when she gets the chance and smooths them out and rereads them – for research, she tells herself. For the construction of battle tactics. She never writes back, but she can’t let her sister keep them – of that she is certain.
(Writing back, though – why would she? She doesn’t even know this man who saw her once and now so passionately exclaims that she is a creature of unearthly beauty or whatever it is that the men are saying nowadays.)
She can’t deny that Okkotsu knows how to spin a pretty phrase; he’s talented that way, it seems. Talented, according to the ladies at court who had been more inclined to swoon when his letters were read than the rest, in countless ways – in the martial arts, in poetry, in diplomacy. All that and yet he’d never had a woman anyone knew of. All that, and he had stooped to devoting himself to the writing of elaborate letters and exquisite poetry to a woman he had only barely met.
To the women who listen when Mai reads her letters aloud (Mai, forever a child, knowing her place in court relies upon it, who might care but probably doesn’t), it is an irresistible tale, and more than one have tried their hand at penning replies in Maki’s name.
To her sole credit, that offense is the one blow to her sister’s dignity that she will not allow.
Maki has always hated this place, full as it is of coquettish women with nothing better to do than simper and fawn and mess about with the lives of those with real responsibilities as if it is a game, and she hates it more with each letter her sister intercepts and reads. There is no substance here, no real desire for anything except suitable matches and the Consort’s favor and the fulfillment of girlish fantasies rendered more girlish by the petty things the court ladies are willing to stoop to in order to get them fulfilled. And Mai’s latest affront is simply more than she can take.
The night before the last of Okkotsu Yuuta’s letters arrives, Maki packs her plainest clothes and the things she needs most into a bundle, provisions herself from the kitchens, and leaves.
The next letter that Okkotsu Yuuta sends will be returned with the news that Zenin Maki has died, and by the time he receives it, she will be off to the mountains, far-off from anyone who might be able to convey the truth to her would-be suitor.
(But, of course, Maki does not know that. One consumed with trying to remember the wild berries she had found were safe to eat the last time she had resorted to such drastic measures rarely has time to think about such things.)
**
zero
There is a new rule, one that says that Yuuta is no longer bound to the Sendai Colony he had been deposited in at the start, and the first thing he thinks when it is read is that he has to find Maki.
He probably shouldn’t. It’s not prudent, thinking first of Maki – it’s not good strategy. He should want to find the colony with the highest concentration of his allies, join up, and make a plan. But that is not what he finds himself feeling inclined to do.
The insistence of the thought is like a heartbeat: find Maki, find Maki, find Maki.
In the midst of chaos, find Maki. All he wants: find Maki. All he’s wanted. He will always find Maki.
He will always find Maki.
He found her the first time because a car had hit a girl and a girl had cursed a boy and that boy had been found by a man who had been the one to find Maki first and he found her again because she had been waiting right where he had left her, only different. And there is something so uncannily familiar about the idea that finding Maki is the natural course of Okkotsu Yuuta’s life that he stops, and he uses a second he does not have to think, and it hits him – of course.
Of course he will always find Maki.
His memories are those of a promising young man who had grown old and ashamed of his stupidity because the girl to whom he wished he could apologize was dead, and of a man who was not supposed to love a woman mired in unexpected grief. They are of the world through six eyes, and of the feeling of coughing his lungs raw, and they are all different, but the same.
In all of them – in every one – he finds Maki.
Sometimes he loses her, sometimes he is the one lost – but no life he has ever lived (and it feels oddly right to admit there have been many) has ever let him die without finding Maki.
No wonder it happened the way it did.
No wonder he feels the things he does, that burning resolve to search all of Japan for a single girl when, for strategy’s sake, any of a dozen people would do just fine.
Okkotsu Yuuta is wired to find Zenin Maki, and he’s not going to let this be the one time he doesn’t.
**
FOUR
**
two
No one has ever told Maki very much about any of her family’s goings-on, but she knows her household’s moods well enough after twenty-two years there that when it is time, she knows.
It is inevitable, she tries to tell herself, and the way of the world: clans go to war at the fall of a single feather to the earth. No alliance is truly steady and no political marriage can guarantee anything but bloodshed when the bonds of shared interest are broken. For hundreds of years, this has been so, and it will not change simply because Okkotsu Maki loves her husband. It is not negotiable that she must prepare for the day that her marriage becomes a target and an abomination.
And they have plans, and counterplans, and all of the pieces in place. A sympathetic cousin of Yuuta’s abandons his country estate and lets them hide, letting it be known that he has vacated the place so that no one will have much reason to come there. They have done what they can to save each other by the time the Zenins lay siege to their rivals.
But the best-laid plans cannot account for the fact that Maki’s luck has only been good once in her life, and she has a feeling she cannot shake that this will not be the end of their troubles.
They’re careful, keeping to a well-concealed cellar in the nighttime so that even in their sleep they won’t easily be found by anyone who comes looking, but the place reminds Maki of her childhood confinements, and she seeks every chance she can get to breathe the clean air of the upstairs where nothing smells of musty earth. Others, a fit of paranoia seizes her, and she thinks with fervor that this must be her last night alive.
It's the dreams she has, maybe, born of her intimate knowledge of all of the things the Zenins do to those they oppose –ones she wakes from panting or in tears, the kind that wake Yuuta, too. It’s the building fear born of her lack of knowledge of what is happening outside. It’s a desperation to live and a dogged belief that she will die, and when those dark moods cloud her vision, there is no hope of staying hidden in the tomblike cellar that might be her salvation.
Yuuta always knows when she drags him up into the light and her uncut nails scratch at his skin as she undresses him that Maki has had a premonition, and it is all he can do to touch her with the compassion she would not accept aloud and to kiss her with the sweetness she would scoff at if he tried to put it into words.
He probably hates the sound of her ragged, shallow breathing when she lays on his bare chest and tries to remind herself by his heartbeat that nothing she’s been certain of has come to pass yet, but he never says so. Maki loves and hates him for that – loves him for his tenderness, hates the thought that he sees things in herself that she would rather bury. But still, even though she knows he must hate those things, he looks at her as he always has when he is in bed with her, and she is grateful for that.
Gratitude is a safe thing to dwell on – it will not drive her to a panic, it will not make her dwell on her desperation to avoid a fate of which she’s certain.
She thinks of the last time she had been safe in her Yuuta’s arms and the reassurances he had whispered into her slick skin when she leaves the cellar for water and feels cold metal and white-hot pain through her chest, and when she jerks around after it is gone to find a distant cousin wiping the blood from the blade of a dagger.
She ought to be angry at herself for having been blindsided and for having been so careless as to be here at the wrong time, but the pain leaves no room for those things, nor for the fight she could put up if she had had a second to prepare. She looks down and watches color bloom against her white summer kimono and thinks, dazed with the loss of so much blood, that she is the stupidest woman who’s ever lived.
But no wound can drain the fight from Okkotsu Maki: before she collapses, she remembers the cellar, and she does not call for him.
**
three
They are telling Maki to kill the Six Eyes, just like she knew they would.
It’s a ridiculous thing to ask. Maki may be the most proficient user of the Ten Shadows in a dozen generations, but even she is confident in nothing except that she hasn’t unlocked all it can do yet; Yuuta has advantages she doesn’t thinks he could ever overcome, and she’s said so. She can do nothing against a man who cannot be touched. They don’t listen, of course, but Maki makes clear that to do their bidding would be to die, and then she would be even more useless than they already think she is for refusing to march to their orders.
And then there is the fact that Maki is nothing if not petty, and she doesn’t want to.
She doesn’t want to fight him. She doesn’t want to kill him or anything close. If she could choose her course, the two of them would wipe her clan off the map together and live alone on its sprawling estate, alone together and entirely unbothered. But, that being an option, she settles for excuse-making.
And then he comes to her and tells her that his clan knows what hers is planning, and that he has been given reciprocal orders.
It is a blow to Maki’s pride to accept the only plan they can formulate, but in the end, she knows that she has no choice. It is better, at least, to give in and let her dignity be tarnished than to be dead, and to die knowing that Yuuta is dead, and so on the planned day, Okkotsu Yuuta tells his clan that the wielder of the Ten Shadows and the sister who had tried to protect her are dead.
It is that same day that Maki and Mai ride out for the furthest reaches they can reach before they are caught, and the day after that Yuuta, ostensibly at the hands of the vengeful Zenin clan, disappears.
There is no peace in knowing that someone might uncover their ruse, and that even if Yuuta is alive she’s still parted from him, but it is best this way, knowing that she neither had to kill him nor to die at his hand.
Besides, she has Mai here, and the people in the rural towns they drift through seem all too happy to shower the twins with the things they need to survive in exchange for their ability to quietly and discreetly resolve unexplained happenings. So long as there are curses to be exorcised, the woman who answers now to Yuka has a livelihood, and so long as no one wants rumors of a haunting attached to their names, she will not be caught.
It is a perfectly elegant system until the sultry July afternoon on which she remembers that a journey of two years for anyone else might take somebody with Okkotsu’s ability mere seconds.
She’s in town when she sees him, buying rice, and her first thought is to leave, because they had only separated for fear of the danger of being seen together. But before she can turn and leave like she knows she should, he is tugging at her sleeve, and offers to carry her rice, and the look on his face is so gentle and sad that she no longer finds herself wanting to do what she should, and so she does not.
She takes him home, and asks Mai for a third portion of dinner, and when night falls, she moves her futon and tugs him into the second room of their little house for sleep, side by side, the way she suspects they have both wanted to for longer than they’d admit.
They are up half the night talking before Maki, unthinking, places her flat palm against Yuuta’s chest, wondering idly if his heartbeat is racing, and he presses his hand tightly over hers, and she learns that it is.
He leaves the next morning with a smile sadder than the one he had arrived with, and Maki knows that he is telling her it is best to believe she might never see him again.
It is for the best, really; the risk that someone might learn what they did if he is seen with a woman matching her description is too great. They make the prudent choice in taking their leave of each other with the understanding that that choice is never to be undone. But still, it aches, and it is because of that ache that Maki does not ask him where he’s settled when he comes to her that night.
He might have stayed with the Gojo Clan. He might have annihilated her family the way she wanted to before she died to them. Or maybe he settled somewhere else entirely, and Maki will never know – for the best, of course. If she knew, even if she never acted, she would waste her life away trying to find a time and a way to get to him, and that is the sort of thing Zenin Maki cannot afford.
She’s Yuka now, straight-backed and unsung shaman to the people of whatever rural northern towns need something taken care of quietly, and the girl whose name and power were illustrious died four years ago. This hardnosed life is all she has, and she is too stubborn or perhaps just too prideful not to make do with it.
Seasons change, but life cannot and will not stop to mourn, and when April comes, and Mai places a squalling infant in her arms, she has no way to tell him. And she makes her peace with that – that her baby’s eyes are a duller blue than Yuuta’s, and that she is glad to keep him a secret, her little piece of what she’s lost.
**
one
They tell her to stop at the house of a man in this area who’s been said to host mendicants and travelers on his estate, and when she does, she finds herself surprised when the master of the house sees her in his doorway and stops to look at her.
It isn’t often that well-dressed people stop to look at Maki, but this one does.
He’s wearing clothes that are plain but well-made, and the flecks of gray in his hair speak to a long and healthful life – the kind Maki wryly doubts she’ll have after spending so much of it foraging and wandering. Then again, she thinks, maybe it toughened her up. She’s no beauty, worn down to sinew by the rigors of her life since she left the lap of luxury, but she can survive about anything by now.
This man, she thinks charitably, looks sturdy only because he’s been given everything he needs not to be fragile, but that’s perfectly all right.
For a woman who’s spent most of her life from place to place, though, a place like this to rest is all she could ask for. It is not opulent, but it’s spacious, clean, and warm, and everything is well-made; she half-wonders what compelled its owner to be so charitable with his house. Not to mention how unusual it is for a man of his station to let his rooms to women traveling alone. She can’t complain, though, and she supposes that means she can’t complain when a maid comes to ask that she come out and speak with the master of the house, either.
“I thought I had seen you somewhere before,” he tells her, and she tries her best to look as clueless as she feels about where that might have been.
Maybe she has seen this man before – she can’t say she really remembers. And nothing that she learns sounds familiar: that he had married a woman named Rika, who is dead, and loved her dearly; that they had two sons, nearly grown; that he had been an official of some importance before she had passed and he had retreated to the countryside to take a smaller post and the space to grieve. Nothing that Maki has ever heard before. And he doesn’t seem to recognize her story of the twenty years she has been foraging and pretending to be a pilgrim in order to be fed when she’s fed-up with bark and berries and wild game.
So, she concludes, it must have been a wrong hunch he had, until he mentions, in passing, a girl in his youth who had died.
Maki pauses.
“I’m afraid I was a fool at that age,” he says, smiling remorsefully, “and I thought after seeing her once that she was the love of my life.”
Maki blinks at him, not least because she has never in her life known a man who would talk about these things so openly.
“I can’t even remember how many letters I must have sent, but I never received a single reply,” he says, trying to sound lighthearted when he clearly feels anything but. “I’ve always wished that I had known to take that for the hint it was.”
“She was probably annoyed,” Maki offers, figuring her rough clothes and aspect make bluntness more appropriate than it ordinarily would be.
“I’m sure she was.” He laughs, taking a sip of his tea. “From what I hear, she was willful, and I…”
He trails off.
“I was never gifted with tact,” he says, “and especially not when I was young.”
“Neither was I,” she says. “Clearly.”
“I daresay you weren’t.” He doesn’t seem to mean this as an insult, which pleases her. “But after I met Rika and I realized how little I had really felt for that poor girl, I…I don’t know. I suppose I was ashamed.” He sets his teacup aside. “And there was little I could do about it now that she’d died.”
“How’d she die?” Maki asks, leaning an elbow impolitely on the edge of the table.
“I…never did learn.”
“Huh.”
“Though I always did think it was suspicious,” he says, shaking his head fondly. “For all that I never understood her, I knew even then that Maki was too stubborn of a girl to have died so conveniently.”
Maki’s heart stutters, and he probably knows why from the paleness of her face.
“Yes,” she says faintly. “I think she probably is.”
**
four
When she wakes, sweat clings to Maki’s skin, and she opens her eyes to the blank walls of a room she doesn’t recognize with a sense of urgency she can’t place.
Her body feels sluggish, like her blood is moving too slowly, and when she tries to move her limbs, they’re heavy. Her head swims, and when she tries to lift it, she feels like she’s been drained of every ounce of her strength; it is only the coming of a nurse that keeps her from trying and trying until she collapses back into a fitful, feverish sleep.
Her words to Maki seem disembodied, as if somebody else is hearing them, but her foggy brain begins to piece things back together anyway in fragments – stumbling through the snow with Yuuta’s weight heavy on her arm, the beginnings of a cough that had lingered past its welcome, and then the same rawness in her throat that she feels now when she tries to swallow.
Yuuta was sick. That was why she’d brought him here – because Yuuta was sick. That’s why she’s here. She can be sure of that. But why is she-
“You probably infected each other,” the nurse says, her voice clipped. “You’re lucky that-“
Her voice cuts out like the song of a scratched record on the phonograph Maki’s mother had bought last year. She knows what that means more than the nurse does.
She had thought he’d get better, the way he always does, and she’d thought nothing of sharing a cup of tea and darting coquettish looks in his direction when she sipped from the same part of the rim as he had for an indirect kiss. Not even real kisses had seemed too dangerous if she hadn’t let herself think about them, and she certainly hadn’t given any thought to the countless times she had slept close enough for him to breathe on her, and let him cough in her direction.
And if Maki is so sick she can’t think straight…
The nurse says something shrill that she doesn’t hear, and tries to push her back down onto the cot, but Maki is too determined to let that or her weakness stop her, and she swings her legs down off the bed. Her vision swims and her legs stumble, but she walks what feels like miles until her vision clears and she finds him, and…
And he is coughing.
He isn’t thrashing in his fever-sleep like Maki had been, and when she stumbles to her knees beside his cot and presses a hand to his forehead, it feels cool. But there is no question of his being weaker even than she is, and even though it is probably futile, the sick lying with the sick, she lays herself beside him on his cot and wraps her sluggish arms around him.
Yuuta feels so much frailer in her arms than he did barely five days ago, when they had arrived. If Maki were thinking clearly enough to feel anything but relief at having him in her arms again, she would worry at that.
Later, when the fever breaks and they tell her to leave, she refuses.
Later, when he coughs weakly and tells Maki in a wheezy, dying gasp that he loves her, she realizes that she ought to give up.
Later, when he stops breathing altogether, she is too stunned to cry.
Later, when she is well and whole and they tell her she is lucky to be alive and recovered and they recommend a sanitarium where the uninfected will never have to see her again, she makes for the docks and uses the last of what she has to book passage to Hakodate.
She is lucky to be alive, they tell her, but Yuuta is gone, and her once-strong body now feels barely average after the ordeal that it’s been through, and there is nothing left for her here or anywhere else – so she sets off, and when she reaches the goldfields, she finds her way.
There are things they need here – dry goods, passage booked, claims settled. Plenty with which a woman who wants to forget her losses can keep herself busy, and soon, they all know her – Maki-san, all of them call her, a hearty woman of unknown origins, and a reliable source of just about everything. It’s rough work in a rough land, bitterly cold and utterly uncushioned, but she finds that it suits her, and that it restores a little of her strength with every year she has to survive. No one here would know or care that she had once been sick, or even believe it, really – consumption is not the kind of sickness that a woman like Maki-san might ever contract.
They’d be wrong, she thinks, only because she had loved a man who was delicate and gentle in all the ways that she was not, but these people would not understand Yuuta, so she never mentions him.
He lives on only in the picture she keeps on the mantelpiece in the house that functions as storefront and office alike –Maki, young and fresh in a wool coat ten years out of style, and Yuuta, looking down at her with all the hope in the world. If she was asked, she would call it a wedding portrait.
The beauty of this place is that no one wants or needs to know that it is not.
**
zero
They are standing, half-delirious with exhaustion, over a corpse with its head split open, when Maki finally thinks she understands why Okkotsu Yuuta has always seemed so familiar. It is, all in all, a place so odd for a revelation that it’s almost comical.
Of course, she thinks, panting, and looks over at him. Of course I knew him.
He has been a foolish suitor turned friend, and a widower, and the father of a child (a child, Maki thinks, half-horrified with the implications) he did not know he had fathered, and someone without a name for what he was who had been lost too soon. He’s been a lover, a confidant; he’s found her, or she’s found him. They have never killed a brain, but they have faked their deaths. They have never made it this far, but they have had plenty of almosts to their names.
And it is painfully obvious when she looks at him now.
Of course she knew Okkotsu Yuuta. He has always, no matter what the cause, been something to her.
“Yuuta,” she pants, faint and bleeding in seven places at very minimum, “I think you gave me tuberculosis once.”
He looks over at her and then promptly looks as if the movement gave him whiplash, which, considering the state of him, it probably did. “You remember that?”
“You remember that?”
Neither of them knows quiet what to do with this, but at least – this time, for once – they will still be alive tomorrow to find out.
**
EPILOGUE
**
2028
Yuuta always wakes with the sun through the slats in the blinds, but not Maki; it is not uncommon for her to find him watching the last moments of her sleep before something – never the sun – wakes her too.
She likes to tease him for that.
“Yuuta-kun,” she grouses, opening her eyes to find his already open, “you’re creepy.”
“Why?”
She frowns. “Watching people sleep is creepy.”
“Not if they’re my wife.”
Maki’s frown deepens into a pout. “Still weird.”
“How?”
“Sleepin’s private.”
“We share a bed, Maki-chan.”
She would dispute this if she could, but, given that she can’t, she settles for an even more petulant pout.
“Morning, grumpy,” he says fondly, kissing the tip of her nose.
She doesn’t want to smile, but she does. It’s sort of hard not to smile when it is morning, and a day off, and Yuuta is smiling at her and the day might hold absolutely anything except work.
So maybe sometimes she falls prey to a little of her husband’s cheerfulness. Sue her.
“Morning,” she says, careful not to sound too fond. “I guess.”
Much as she wishes she could stop herself from smiling, she hardly sees the point anymore – not after all of the time she spent not knowing him at all, or losing him and trying to forget how much she wished she could wake up like this just once. Maki has been many people, but only one who has had Okkotso Yuuta and kept him, who did not have to live beneath the shadow of belief that one day soon she might wake up and realize he wasn’t next to her anymore.
Life is never certain, but it is easy, in the moments it is warmest, to believe that it will stay this way, all lazy mornings and gentle teasing. And Maki, for all the walls around her heart, finds that she wants to.
It is not in every life, after all, that she keeps what she finds.