Chapter Text
“You, there!” For better or for worse, Zeno turns his head. “I knew it. You are the Yellow Dragon.”
The boy is no more than twelve. His black school uniform appears clean and starched. A sleek car rumbles behind him on the street, its driver obscured behind tinted glass. He has followed Zeno to this dead-end alley, eyes alight in piercing color, calling out a name he hasn’t heard spoken aloud in lifetimes.
“Well?” His voice is nothing like hers. It runs high, impatient; how wanting, even now, as he meets his Ouryuu for the first time and doesn’t even think to smile. “Don’t tell me you don’t know me. I’ll have none of that. You’re mine, then? Aren’t you?”
Life is not meant to persist this long. The body isn’t built for it. Zeno holds grief like accumulated wax at the foot of a candle, when there is so much that it overflows. Heaven may not intend to be cruel, despite their selfish, guileless love, narrow-hearted as a child’s. His memory falters, but the emotions remain the same. All those he once held in his arms, his arms have out-lasted. His only remaining purpose is to be their walking gravestone, one that crumbles with every step forward.
Or so he thought.
The child has a scowl fitted on his mouth. Zeno will soon learn that that is where it lives. This does nothing to detract from the hair, which is red like the daybreak or red like wildfire or red like Zeno is on the inside. Heaven may not intend to be cruel, yet here stands Hiryuu in his third reincarnation. It has only taken another two thousand years.
“Yes, little lad,” he replies. The grin comes easily. “Zeno is all yours.”
The hike in population over the last hundred years makes Zeno’s old dynasty seem like a paltry stageplay. They were running around with numbers thinking that was the end of it all, when fifty-thousand soldiers could fit in a stadium downtown with room to spare. Even with this many people around, Zeno finds himself lodged between a predictable crowd. Who else, after all this time?
Zeno toys with the piling on his sweater vest. Its color matches the one Hakuryuu wears. Hiryuu has forged his papers for this high school affair, a modern novelty to Zeno. In it, he is seventeen years old and in his second year of schooling. People believe it.
Hakuryuu is the eldest boy, stiff as a board and as talkative as one, too. He wears vision-correcting glasses over his prominent nose bridge. Though reserved, he’s the least biddable among them. On the other hand, Ryokuryuu bounces off the walls. He’s an energetic, go-with-the-flow type. He thinks that all of this is a game. This summer he’s leading his baseball team to Koshien, the most important game of all.
Seiryuu’s a girl. Zeno supposes warriors have been girls before, few and far between. This Seiryuu is perpetually heavy-eyed; it’s nothing short of a miracle that she gets around in one piece. She sleeps on trains, in classrooms. The markings on her face are barely present, nothing but a faint birthmark. Her beautiful eyes, when awake, are clear as diamonds and open to the world.
He doesn’t hate them, but has no more space left inside of him.
They’ve gathered in a sterile conference room. Outside pink clouds rake over a purpling sunset, the red sun and its winking outline ready to fade from existence. The building is a few levels higher than that of the surrounding buildings, and the boy stares out of these floor-to-ceiling windows, hands folded behind his back. The boy, it seems, has great love for grandeur. He’s still in his own uniform, a middle school gakuran, now a bit wrinkled at the elbows.
“What exactly is the end goal here?” Hakuryuu takes the lead. When it comes down to it, they are a no-nonsense bunch.
They stew in the responding silence, heavy with the dramatics. Discounting his own amusement, Zeno can see it puts the others on edge. The boy steps away from the window glass to face them.
Hiryuu is the youngest in the room. He’s still got baby fat high in his cheeks. That scowl is present again, his usual state of dissatisfaction. But he isn’t cold, not like this skyscraper or the home he’s been raised in. Zeno has lived long enough to tell that kind of thing. He’s a good boy, on the inside.
“I wish to rule the world.”
Oh, gods.
The boy-king is an acquired taste. One needs a substantial amount before his flavoring becomes palatable. Not to say the first and second Hiryuu didn’t have their unique ways of driving Zeno to wit’s end. This little Hiryuu goes about everything with a panache of ignorance on top of his entitlement. He doesn’t understand how much he can be at times, how his zeal can be maddening to those less equipped. He turns to Zeno when the others have had their fill. It isn’t as if he has any other options.
“I’ll do this without him,” the boy declares into Zeno’s pillow, most of it muffled. “I don’t need him!”
“Without Hakuryuu? But that’s not in the little lad’s plan, is it?”
“It doesn’t matter! He hates me anyway!”
The TV is on mute. On the screen is one of those variety programs with dancing girls in big, frilly skirts. It’s late at night, at least for a child as young as him. He just learned that the Yellow Dragon omitted sleep most nights and has now taken advantage, to Zeno’s consternation.
The boy calms down in time. He watches the girls do a coordinated hop-and-slide and sniffles occasionally. He’s thinking beyond Zeno’s dinky one-room apartment, thoughts faraway. The boy’s pajamas, which he arrived in, are embroidered with his initials in the Latin alphabet; not ‘RD’ or ‘H’ but the name his parents gave him, what they still call him now. He doesn’t like to talk about them, even if it’s their money with which he speaks the loudest.
“Hakuryuu is only upset,” Zeno treads lightly. “It’s a hard transition for some. He wants to live his own life. It’s normal for boys his age.”
“You don’t,” grumbles the boy. “You have no life. You do what I say and don’t care about anything.”
Zeno is speechless for once. He recovers quickly, pushing down the urge to laugh and laugh. “Zeno cares, little lad!”
“Liar,” he replies. He leaves it at that and decides on another means of attack. The boy looks at Zeno, straight in the eyes, and asks, “Were you never going to tell me about her?”
Zeno’s grin dips. “Her?”
“The other me!” he cries. “I see her in my dreams. Sometimes I see the one from before, too, but I like her better. She’s nice to me. I told Mother I’d have liked a sister—just a sister, though, not a brother. But Mother said she hated childbirth and that I was lucky to have even been born. She asks about you.”
“Little lad’s mother does?”
“No! Agh!” He throws his arms in the air, flops back down to the extra futon laid out for him. Facing away, the boy pulls his pillow to his chest. Whatever face he makes, Zeno doesn’t see. “I want someone to ask after me, too.”
The boy falls asleep and his small snores quickly fill the room. The TV performers, having finished the finale, start waving goodbye at the off-screen audience. Zeno smiles over the rapid beating of his heart, this undying heart. What a fool he’s been. He decides, at that moment, to let it all in.
Surprising no one, they have yet to conquer the world. The entire process is a touch more mundane than anticipated: Hiryuu enthralls massive crowds, deceives important people, cheats at the table of politics. Any backstabbing or blackmailing are said to be done only to achieve respectable goals, and there’s no reason not to take that at face value because Zeno hadn’t been wrong; Hiryuu is a good boy, even if he’s no longer as young anymore. At the end of the day, whether or not Zeno believes in the plan, he believes in him. For Hiryuu, to rule the world is to ensure its success, along with the people in it. Most of them, anyway. They try very hard not to kill anyone, upstanding citizens they are.
He’s still never tamed that scowl, though.
As the years pass, the dragon warrior abilities weave in and out of usage. In general, his new brothers have less of a need for their powered abilities than their predecessors. There’s been dirty work here and there, sure; Zeno’s been on the receiving end of plenty of gunshot wounds at this point, which he prefers over arrowhead marks only by a hair. But the others have their own ways of getting by in the modern age: Hakuryuu wears leather gloves, being the best at hand-to-hand, and Seiryuu’s one hell of a sniper. Non-fatal shots, of course. Ryokuryuu has this obsession with falling from helicopters, but that’s more to feed his adrenaline addiction, a habit he’s satiating by getting married next spring.
Time changes them, even Ouryuu. He’s four thousand years old, old enough for things to start to slip away from him, if he let it. Somehow he doesn’t have time to feel outside of himself, not when half of his waking hours are spent talking Hiryuu out of hypothetical and literal ledges. No other reincarnation has infuriated him this much, regardless of the small sample pool. He calls him ‘little miss’ once during a heated exchange and Ryokuryuu still hasn’t let him live it down.
The boy had stopped dreaming about past reincarnations a long time ago. He doesn’t ask for stories, not directly, though he listens in when Zeno allows himself to reminisce, always in the middle of some mission or the other, when stakes are high enough to remind Zeno of a familiar time.
That day in the conference room, at their first gathering, Hakuryuu had questioned the boy’s objective. What is all of this for? Why do you need this so badly? Zeno had stayed silent, watching, observing. His initial shock abided and he found himself titillated at the thought of purpose again, of becoming something other than a living ghost of memories.
The boy had been peering out again through the large windows, gaze set on the horizon. A few errant curls tumbled over his forehead, into his eyes. Zeno saw his profile transform into an expression he’s seen before on faces he once longed to dream about.
“There’s no way for me to reasonably explain my calling.” He stepped closer to the glass, following a flock of black-grey birds as they migrated north. They flew so far in the distance that they were like one being, a giant mass made of hundreds of moving parts. “I feel it is something I must do.”
Zeno once held grief like softened wax at the foot of a candle, overflowing from its tray. The worst of it is hardened at the bottom, flaky and layered, but at the top the wick still burns brighter than anything, even the break of dawn. He can take all that falls. So, really, he doesn’t hate them. Far, far from it.