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The morning held a hush—clouds stretched thin across the sky, soft light caught in dew-slick leaves.
The garden had begun to take shape, not with the symmetry of soldiers’ drills, but like something grown from a breath, a vision unfurling slowly from the fingertips of people who had chosen not to run anymore. To let their exhausted bodies fall to this grounds and hope it will not reject what they are.
Kuai Liang knelt by the edge of the plot, sleeves rolled and hands already dark with soil. Beside him, Tomas crouched low, eyes narrowed in concentration, crumbling dry loam between his fingers to test its readiness. The air smelled of clay, and deeper – something faintly green: the ghost of mint and mugwort.
“Here?” Tomas asked, gesturing to a bare patch of turned soil.
Kuai leaned in, pressing the earth. “Too shallow,” he said. “The roots won’t anchor. Try there—beneath the stones. It keeps the heat through the cold.”
Tomas nodded, wiping a streak of sweat from his temple with the back of his wrist.
He reached for the small bundle in his satchel. Seeds. Chinese names of the plants have never really replaced in his mind the ones he has learned as a child, ones passed down through whispers and meals and vanished homes: šalvěj, meduňka, pelyněk—sage, lemon balm, wormwood. Tomas placed each one carefully, his breath slowing.
“We can use these for tinctures,” Tomas murmured, his voice quiet, as if the plants might be listening. “To help sleep. Or pain.”
Kuai turned the soil carefully. “And for your stomach. You forget to eat when you're not reminded.”
“I remember,” Tomas lied gently, brushing a beetle off a seedling. “I always remember when you bring something warm.”
Kuai gave him a warm look and smiled.
“And some for tea, when winter comes.”
Tomas watched him for a long moment. “You’re already thinking of winter?”
Kuai didn’t look up. “I always think ahead.”
He reached for a pot of dried nettle roots and began to arrange them in a loose semicircle. The leaves would sting, yes—but they would also heal, fortify, protect. It was a good plant for warriors. A boundary, not a wall.
“We’ll need calendula,” Kuai said. “It repairs damaged ground. And it keeps the insects away from the tender ones.”
There was a silence between them then—soft, warm, but threaded with something uneasy. Tomas’s hand hovered above the soil for a moment longer than necessary, as if afraid to press the seeds in.
“They might not take root still,” he said, suddenly. “If the soil’s too poor. Or if I’ve planted them wrong. Or if the frost comes early.”
“They will,” Kuai answered, with the calm that lived in his bones. “We’ll cover them when the nights grow cold.”
Tomas let out a long breath and sat back on his heels. The breath didn’t come easy—it never did, not when he paused long enough to feel the edges of time pressing in.
“It’s just… sometimes I think, everything we built will disappear. Again,” he said, voice lower now, head bowed. “Like it’s all held together only by motion. And the moment we stop or just turn away…”
Kuai reached across the newly dug furrows and touched Tomas’s hand—dirty, scraped, calloused. Warm. Real.
“It’s held together by love,” he said. “Not motion. Not force.”
Tomas’s throat moved with the effort of swallowing. He didn’t answer.
They worked in silence again—planting basil for clarity, lavender for rest, chamomile for nights when the body won’t soften. Tomas made a space for thyme, and Kuai laid down a corner of red shiso—bitter and cleansing. Every plant a promise: to soothe, to nourish, to protect.
Between tasks, Kuai watched him closely. Not just today, but lately. The way Tomas’s breath would catch when clouds passed too quickly overhead. The way he worked past his own limits, hands tightening with every repetition. As if there was something chasing him still.
When they broke for water, Kuai passed him a clay cup without a word and let Tomas drink it down in one long pull. Finally he leaned back on his elbows, head tipped toward the trees. His face was flushed, but his eyes were distant, counting some worry he hadn’t yet voiced.
“We could build a trellis there,” Tomas said, pointing to the southern edge. “For beans. Maybe squash later.”
“We will.”
“And a pond, maybe. With frogs. So the children have something to catch.”
“There will be time.”
Tomas nodded, distracted.
Kuai shifted closer, resting a steady hand on the curve of Tomas’s spine.
“Breathe, Tomas.”
“I am.”
“No. You’re bracing.”
Tomas turned to look at him then, something like apology flashing behind his tired eyes.
“I don’t know how to stop,” he whispered. “I’m always waiting for them to to come.”
Kuai didn’t respond right away. He only looked at the garden—at the black earth freshly shaped by their hands. The beds laid like a map of healing. A quiet resistance. A new order.
“Maybe they will,” Kuai said, voice low. “But we will meet them together. And we protect our home.”
Tomas leaned against him, just for a moment. The weight of him was real. He hadn’t always let himself be real.
“I want to believe that,” Tomas said.
“You've planted your belief,” Kuai murmured. “Here. With your hands.”
And so they kept working. They planted lemongrass by the fence for wind, yarrow near the entrance for resilience. They buried crushed eggshells into the roots of the willow sapling they’d chosen for the center—though it was still small, its limbs thin as whispers.
Kuai ran his fingers over one trailing branch and felt something stir—like memory.
“Tomorrow we’ll mulch it,” he said. “And dig channels for the runoff.”
Tomas nodded, brow furrowed.
“We’ll make a place for resting,” Kuai added softly. “Under the tree. A bench, maybe.”
Kuai reached over, placing a hand on the back of his neck. Warm. Grounded. Present.
Tomas smiled again, but it was different now. Something watery trembled behind it.
“It’ll take time to grow.”
“So will we,” Kuai answered
The light was already shifting. Not fading, but deepening—pouring itself sideways through the young, waving branches, gilding them in threads of green and gold. Insects hummed in the grass. The earth exhaled its scent of crushed leaves, crushed hours.
And Kuai Liang remained still.
Tomas had gone quiet in his lap, wholly surrendered to sleep, his breath shallow but steady, like a child dreaming under warm blankets. One hand curled against Kuai’s knee, slack and soil-stained, his fingers twitching from time to time as if he were still sowing seeds even in dreams.
Kuai let his gaze travel the length of that body—his, and not his. One he had known so well – every wound he had mended, deep or hollow, always him before the healers – but also one that felt like he had never touched it before as they embraced as lovers for the first time. As they finally let their love bloom away from Lin Kuei frozen ground.
He thought with about all the times he didn't dare to touch him like this with sorrow in his chest. And with dread – of every time Tomas could have been torn from him—by sensless duty, by silence or by death.
And still, they have found their way to each other. Like willow's roots to the water. Willow. Vrba in Tomas’s snappy, barbarian, beautiful language.
Vrbada.
The name had etched in Kuai’s mind the moment he’d learned it. A name born from a tree. A word from a world Tomas no longer remembered well and yet carried in the rhythm of his breath, in the softness of his stubbornness, in the way he never stopped tending to others, even when it hurt him.
Willow.
He looked up into the branches.
Not yet weeping, this tree. Still young, still raw at the edges. But the promise of it was there—the long leaves beginning to stretch like fingers into sky, the trunk leaning slightly as if bowing toward water that wasn’t there yet.
The willow. It is a friend to grief. A keeper of sorrows. A mourner’s tree, but never just mourning. Always movement. Always grace.
In Chinese medicine, its bark heals pain. In its roots, there is a quiet strength. It drinks deep, survives floods. It bends beneath the weight of snow but does not shatter. A tree that remembers the storm and sings anyway.
And here, in Japan, it is the tree of ghosts. Of women waiting. Of gentle hauntings. But also of protection, hidden power, enduring love.
Yes, Kuai thought, it was the right name.
The perfect name.
He looked down again.
Tomas had shifted slightly in his sleep, his face turned toward Kuai’s belly, breath warm through the fabric. There were faint dark circles under his eyes, but his brow was smooth now, untroubled. The tension had gone out of him completely, as if some knot inside had been momentarily loosened by rest, by touch.
Kuai reached down and touched the edge of his jaw with the back of his knuckles. Lightly. Reverently. He wanted to memorize him like this. Soft. Safe. Home.
So many nights, Kuai had dreamed of this. Not of battle, not of vengeance, not of glory. But of silence. A patch of land. The scent of crushed basil and warm loam. The ache in his shoulders after planting rows of scallions. The weight of Tomas against him, not from collapse or despair, but from peace.
Peace. What a delicate, difficult thing.
He’d never trusted it before. But Tomas did. Tomas believed in it so fiercely he tried to grow it with his hands. He poured water into the ground and waited for gentleness to bloom.
And somehow, Kuai had begun to believe too.
He leaned back into the trunk of the willow, eyes half-lidded, letting its presence hold them both. The tree was young, yes—but already it bent toward them, as if it had chosen to grow here for this exact reason.
To shelter.
To remember.
To listen.
And if it was listening now, Kuai hoped it could hear the quiet love blooming in his chest—slow, steady, vast.
This garden was not just a garden. This tree, not just a tree.