Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The room wakes before the court does, the paper doors still closed, the corridors still hushed, the palace’s breath not yet drawn in. Meguru kneels on tatami, sleeves tied back, grinding the ink stick in slow circles. The sound is small, a soft rain inside a stone well. It steadies him. It reminds him that everything begins as water and patience.

He was born in a house where hands stained black were proof of having eaten. His family painted for the court the way farmers bent for rice. Repetitively, reverently, backs aching while the sky went on not knowing their names. A low-status artisan line. Sign your skill, never your self. Paint faces that rule you. Bow to them twice. Once with your spine, once with your brush.

Meguru did both, easily. Even he was loud in a way that made elders click their tongues (not rude, just… elsewhere), peculiar in a way that made apprentices glance at him from the corners of their eyes (why does he stare at empty air like that?), and always caught halfway inside a dream. The masters said he painted like a priest praying. The courtiers said he painted like a spy listening through walls. The commoners, when they saw the rare work that dripped into the streets—copies, ephemera, festival scrolls—said it looked like the faces could breathe. They didn’t, but they felt like they could, which is what people meant when they said he was renowned for capturing emotion, as if emotion were a bird he could trap in silk and press flat without killing it.

He never disputed the compliment. He never accepted it, either. He simply kept painting, and in each iris, each line of a wrist, each shadow cupped beneath a mouth—he reached for what couldn’t be owned.

He was sixteen the first time he saw General Itoshi Rin.

No—saw is wrong. There are words for seeing a mountain, a sword, a storm rolling along the ridgeline. There are words for recognizing a person who will rearrange your interior as if knocking down a wall and letting weather in. Whatever he did in that instant during the procession, it wasn’t seeing. It was being seen back by something that didn’t even look at him.

The procession moved like a river braided with steel. Banners, lacquered armor, the war-bright drums, the gasp of the crowd when the Unyielding Blade himself crossed the palace gate. Meguru stood at the boundary of permitted presence, holding a rolled commission list against his chest like a shield. Rin’s horse stepped past. His helmet’s crest caught the winter light and broke it. His face was unreadable, carved clean, too young to hold that much silence without bleeding from the seams.

It was over.

Meguru didn’t decide. He didn’t choose. His heart simply learned a new position and stayed. Ah, he thought, in the way ink says ah to water when it spreads, so that is where I belong. Behind a canvas, behind a fold of paper, behind a lifetime of unsaid things. Near, if not allowed near. Close, if only through color. Seen, if only through the act of seeing.

After the procession, he painted a chrysanthemum with too many petals, and each petal was a blade angled just so it wouldn’t cut the center. He shredded it before anyone could notice.

He was assigned because talent is rarely kind to the person it chooses to paint General Rin’s official portraits before and after each campaign. The first time they told him, he nodded, bowed, accepted the silk, the stamps, the blessings, the weight. Then he went to the inkstone and ground the stick until his hand trembled. He would be allowed to look. Directly. Legally. Professionally. He could memorize the way the general’s jaw tightened when he listened, the way a vein surfaced at the temple when he reined anger back into cold, the way grief didn’t show at all—except in the eyes, and only if you understood where to stand to catch the reflection of it.

Too lowly to speak directly. Too smitten to look away.

So he painted.

He learned the general’s face the way the fisherman learn the coast: tide-line first, then the long patience of inlets. He learned the tilt of Rin’s head when dismissing praise. He learned the difference between the stillness of command and the stillness of doubt. He learned that there was always a fraction of distance between Rin and the world, as if he were a blade resting in a scabbard that did not quite fit. Meguru did not call it loneliness. He had no right to name something that belonged to another man. He called it space I cannot cross.

When courtiers came to inspect the first portrait—Rin facing three-quarters, armor lacquered like a black lake in moonlight, mouth straight, eyes emptier than victory should allow, they murmured, “Lifelike,” and, “Stern,” and, “The nation will sleep well seeing this.” No one asked why the horizon behind him was not the palace garden but a fog-thick morning that could be any battlefield, any coast, any mountain pass. No one asked why the clouds looked like smoke learning to forget the sound of screaming. No one asked, because the painting was correct, and correctness is the palace’s preferred mercy.

“He captures emotion,” his master said, without looking long enough to find any. Meguru bowed. He said nothing. His throat was a brush clogged with pigment. He chewed rice to remember what earth felt like.

After each sitting, he stored the leftover light in small, secret sketches. The angle of a wrist ungloved. The softening of the eyes when the general dismissed his men and allowed, for three breaths, to be just a person standing on two tired legs. The scar beneath the hairline, barely visible unless the winter sun struck it sideways. These he did not show anyone. These were his string of prayer beads: touch, count, repeat. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you.

He began to dream in palette. Vermilion for the warning drums. Indigo for the bruise beneath the ribs. Gold leaf for the lie the court press into the margins of every decree. Ink, always ink, for the things that cannot be undone even when you drown them.

He did not speak to Rin. He did not try. What would he say—that the general’s silence taught him how to paint rain without using blue? That he understood the shape of devotion carved into someone else’s back? That each portrait was a letter he had no address for? That love, discovered at seventeen in the middle of a procession, had quietly chosen to become his life’s most disciplined act?

He painted. He waited for wars to end and begin again. He watched the second son of the imperial family become a myth before he became a man—sixteen, general; eighteen, war hero; ageless, if you measured age by softness and found none.

Meguru’s masters grew older. Apprentices came and went. His family’s name never climbed the ladder, but nobles whispered it when they wanted a face that would outlast them. He learned to survive in the palace without leaving fingerprints. He learned that reverence is a kind of hunger that looks polite. He learned that blurry love can exist in the narrow between—between canvas and subject, between duty and desire, between what you may touch and what you must only learn by light.

And on certain nights, when the corridor lanterns burned low and the snow made the world soundless, he would sit alone with his brushes and try to paint something he had never seen but always felt: the moment before a sword is unsheathed, when purpose still thinks it has a choice.

He would fail, every time.

But failure, too, is an anchor. It kept him near the one thing he could not claim. It taught him how to keep living in the distance between longing and language. It taught him how to render a man without piercing him, how to confess without saying a word.

It taught him how to wait.

.

.

The general returned at dusk.

The whole palace tilted with it, not visibly, not to the untrained courtier’s eye, but Meguru felt it. Like how a painting shifts when he add just one wrong line: the weight rearranged. The atmosphere leaned into itself. The corridors grew quieter not from fear, but from expectation. It was the silence before a storm ends, not the relief of peace, but the ache of what it left behind.

Rin had returned victorious, again. The whispers filtered down through the layers of lacquered protocol: the border was secured, the rebellion crushed, the rivers dyed red for three nights. The Unyielding Blade hadn’t lost a single officer. He never did.

Meguru didn’t go to see the procession this time. He didn’t need to. He had already painted it before, its echo lived in the folds of his sleeves and the bristles of his oldest brush.

Instead, he waited where he always did. In the small studio tucked behind the southern wing, with rice paper breathing against the windows and a shallow bowl of persimmons untouched beside him.

The summons came with the usual formality, a scroll tied in gold thread, the Emperor’s seal stamped in cinnabar. A commission for His Majesty’s new official portrait, to commemorate the fifth year of his reign.

Meguru bowed when the messenger handed it to him, and only when the doors slid shut did he dare let out the breath in his chest.

The Emperor.

He had never painted him before. Only seen him from afar, always behind veils of ceremony and the rigid mask of rule. They said he had been sickly as a child, that his bones were glass, that his blood betrayed him if he walked too far or stood too long. They said the court hid it, called it spiritual affliction when he collapsed. 

But most of all, they said this, The general did not fight for the country. He fought for him.

They said that General Rin had killed for his brother so many times that even the gods had begun to look away. That he burned cities not out of cruelty but out of fear—that if he was not useful enough, ruthless enough, they would cast him aside. And that the Emperor let him.

Meguru did not know what was truth. He only knew what lived in Rin’s eyes each time he returned. Exhaustion sharpened into discipline, grief disguised as loyalty, a kind of emptiness that had forgotten how to ask for anything.

He prepared for the portrait with slow hands.

The Emperor was beautiful. That much was undeniable. He had the kind of face the palace sculptors feared, too perfect, too symmetrical, difficult to capture without making it seem cold. But Meguru knew how to paint beauty that did not ask to be loved. He painted it with distance, with restraint, with the kind of reverence that asked for nothing in return.

The sitting took place in the Chrysanthemum Hall.

Itoshi Sae wore white and gold. His hair was bound in the imperial style, long and heavy down his back. His hands rested on a lacquered armrest shaped like twin dragons coiling beneath a flowering tree. His expression never changed, not once—not even when a servant dropped a scroll, not even when thunder cracked in the far sky.

Meguru painted with all the care of a man laying out a funeral robe.

And then he felt it. That weight. That gaze.

Like steel brushing against silk. Not touching, never touching—but felt. The air grew taut. His brush hovered just a fraction too long over the curve of the Emperor’s mouth.

He didn’t look up. He didn’t dare. But the awareness pulled at him, strong and silent and undeniable.

The General was there.

Armor shed, still in travel garb. A single streak of dust across one cheek. A leather bandage wound around one hand. His hair was unbound, long and damp from the rain. He looked like a storm that had not yet decided to leave.

And he was smiling.

Meguru’s breath caught.

It wasn’t a real smile. Not the kind given freely. It was something softer, smaller, private. The kind of smile one gives not to the artist, but to the image.

Rin was looking at his brother’s face on the canvas.

And for a moment, something in him eased. Something in the way his shoulders held tension, in the way his mouth usually pressed flat.

Meguru didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He simply stood there, brush still clutched like a forgotten truth, and watched the general watch the Emperor.

His spine prickled. Not fear. Something stranger. Like frost brushing through a warm room.

“Tell me,” Rin said quietly, not enough for anyone other than them to hear. “What do you see?”

The brush hovered over silk. Meguru opened his mouth. Closed it. Spoke anyway.

“I see… someone looking back, but only because he knows he’s alone.” Meguru wanted to punch himself after said those things..

"I mean..." He swallowed. “The Emperor is loved by many. But I think… he only waits for one person to return. And he waits in silence, so that no one hears him ask.”

The General said nothing.

Meguru, trembling faintly, dared to turn. Only halfway. His cheek still dipped in deference, shoulder still angled down, as though he expected to be struck for overstepping. But enough to meet Rin’s gaze.

If only for a breath.

What he saw there startled him.

Not anger. Not the cold steel of command. Not even that bored indifference Meguru had grown used to seeing from across the grand hall, where his easel stood against the wall and his brush moved like silence.

But something quieter. Something that hurt. Something that looked back at him like a wound.

Rin’s eyes drifted back to the canvas.

The portrait of Sae was still incomplete. The emperor’s robe was only half-formed, the gold thread a ghost of shine under diluted paint. But the face that sharp, high-boned, untouchable had softened around the mouth. A curve, almost imperceptible unless you knew where to look. Not quite joy. Not mockery. Something else.

A smile.

Meguru hadn’t meant to add it. His hand moved the way his heart did, without permission. The general’s voice, when it came, startled him more than his silence ever had.

“You made him smile.”

Meguru felt the warmth rise to his ears, crawling across his cheeks. “Only a little,” he mumbled.

There was a long pause, filled only by the distant sounds of the court. Boots echoing through the stone corridors, the low whistle of wind beyond the balcony.

“What’s your name?”

Meguru blinked.

It was the first time the general had asked.

Not back when Meguru had painted him—when the court had declared Rin needed a portrait before his next campaign. Not when Meguru stood for hours capturing the angles of his jaw, the curve of his mouth held firm in command, the blue of his eyes that always looked past him. Not even when their eyes met, once, as Meguru packed up his tools and bowed.

Then, Rin had simply nodded, dismissing him like a shadow on the floor.

But now—now, with the Emperor on the canvas—

Now he asked.

“Bachira… Meguru,” Meguru said, voice softer than the wind. His brush still hovered above the paint, though his fingers had gone still.

Rin hummed, as if testing the name in his mouth. As if it surprised him it had taken this long to ask.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard it,” Rin said quietly.

Meguru’s lips parted. “I’ve been painting in the court for three years.”

“I know,” Rin said.

And that was somehow worse.

That he knew, and still never asked. That he saw him, but never looked. That Meguru had painted the general with all the reverence of a devoted scribe, each line like prayer and still remained nameless.

Rin’s gaze returned once more to the portrait. His voice was distant. Not cold, just far away. “Keep the smile,” he said.

Meguru nodded once. “I will.”

Later that night, alone in his studio, Meguru painted Rin from memory.

He painted him in profile. Bareheaded, unarmored, rain still dripping from his hair, eyes half-shadowed beneath tired lids. In the background, faintly, barely there, he painted the outline of the Emperor silhouette—framed like a distant moon Rin would never touch again.

And in the corner, in golden ink too fine for any official to read, he wrote. "You smile for him like it still means something. I will remember it when you forget how."

He hung the painting behind a curtain. Said nothing. Slept with ink still staining his fingertips, heart full of a truth he could only tell through someone else's gaze.

.

.

In the scrolls, his family’s surname did not trail the weight of a known clan. No banner, no crest, no ancestral shrine within palace walls. Just the brush. Just the line. His grandfather drew festival banners; his mother painted fans; his uncles stitched thread into screens that nobles called “charming” and walked past. No tutors came to teach poetry, no courtiers visited to offer schooling for merit. The palace used their hands, not their minds. And hands do not need a name.

Still, his mother gave him one: Meguru—to wander, to turn, to come full circle.

She laughed when she said it. “You were born with your fingers curled like you were already holding a brush. You’ll make a path with ink, even if no one teaches you the road.”

He remembered her laughter more than her face. The gentle rasp of it, like leaves scraping in the wind. She never told him about his father. Meguru learned early not to ask. He learned that being a boy without a father made you strange. That when you didn’t bear a man’s name, other children wouldn’t play with you—not because they hated you, but because the court taught them not to see you at all.

Meguru’s mother used to say that they were the closest thing to gods that peasants could become. “Because gods create,” she told him, cupping his ink-stained face. “And so do we.”

She loved watching him draw. Even when he smeared soot across the floors or forgot to eat because he was too focused on getting the curve of a fox spirit’s paw just right. She never stopped him. Never called him strange, even when the neighbors did. Because Meguru—loud, curious, wide-eyed Meguru—drew things no one else saw.

Like the monster.

A large one, shaggy and strange, with teeth like temple tiles and eyes like summer dusk. It wasn’t frightening—not to him. It was kind. It would curl beside him when no one in the village wanted to play with the weird boy who spoke to shadows. It would listen when he talked, fetch imaginary stones from imaginary rivers, guard him from nightmares. Meguru never had a father, and the other children called him cursed for it. They mimicked the way he talked. They mocked the way he looked at clouds and trees like they had something to say.

But the monster never laughed at him. Never asked why he was so strange. Never demanded that he change.

“It’s okay to be a monster,” his mother would whisper, brushing his hair back as he fell asleep, arms wrapped around his own sketches. “As long as you’re kind. Even if you’re not beautiful like royalty… you’re real. That matters more.”

He believed her. He believed in the monster. Believed that kindness could take any shape, even an ugly one. Especially an ugly one.

But monsters belong to children, and children don’t stay children forever.

His mother passed in the second spring after his apprenticeship began—lungs turned to paper, voice thinned to a whisper. She died while he was away sketching lantern designs for a minister’s daughter’s wedding. When he returned, the house was too quiet.

And the monster was gone.

No goodbye. No explanation. Just absence. As if it had been tethered to her heartbeat. As if it was the other half of his soul and when she left, so did it.

He didn’t cry. Not then. Just stared at the empty room, the unused brush, the half-finished sketch she had been working on. A plum blossom missing its stem.

He drew it in himself, and never stopped drawing after that.

The day after painting the Emperor, Meguru asked for leave. The palace granted it, with the usual suspicion they gave anyone who didn’t want to be watched.

He walked out past the last guard post, carrying his inks wrapped in cloth and his brushes tucked behind his ears like feathers. He didn’t need much. Just space. Just quiet. Just trees.

The forest near the southern edge of the capital wasn’t sacred, but it felt like it had once been. Moss swallowed the ground like a memory trying to protect itself. Cicadas sang like drunk poets. Light dripped through the canopy in slivers so thin they looked like they could cut.

Meguru found the same place he used to draw as a child. A flat stone near a half-dead camellia tree. He sat. He stretched. He mixed ink. His hand moved before he could think.

Not faces. Not now. Not duty.

He drew a monster.

Not the one from his childhood—not exactly. But something like it. Fangs, yes, and thick limbs. But also soft eyes. A tail shaped like a hook. A body built for shielding, not attacking.

It looked like it had been waiting to be remembered.

Meguru tilted his head, smiled softly, and whispered, “I missed you.”

He didn’t expect a reply. The forest was quiet, except for the birds and the far-off flap of wings—

Wait. Not wings.

Cloth. Boots.

The quiet broke.

Meguru froze as a shadow fell over the page. He turned, slowly, heart leaping like brush bristle in water.

And there he was again.

General Rin.

No armor this time. No officials. No banner-bearers. Just him, a single black robe draped over travel-worn clothes, hands behind his back, face unreadable as always.

Meguru scrambled to stand, ink pot tipping slightly, brush still in hand. He bowed, low, too quickly.

“General,” he breathed.

Rin said nothing at first. Just looked down. At the monster. At the drawing.

His eyes lingered longer than they ever had before.

“You used to draw things like that?” Rin asked. His voice was low. Not unkind.

Meguru nodded, still bowed. “Yes, my lord.”

Silence.

Rin stepped closer. His boots crunched old leaves.

“Why stop?”

Meguru swallowed. “It… left.”

More silence. And then, in a voice almost too quiet. “Did you ever find anything worth drawing again?”

Meguru lifted his gaze just enough to see Rin looking at the page without with judgment. 

He smiled, just a little. The kind that wasn’t for courtiers or canvases. Just for the moment.

“I did,” Meguru said.

They stayed like that for a while. Meguru with ink still drying on his fingers, the drawing of the monster half-finished beneath his knees, and General Rin standing beside him as if the forest had always been part of his command.

It was strange, how silence didn’t press between them like it did in the palace. Here, among trees and leaves and memory, it simply existed. Not heavy, not cold. Just… there.

Then, Rin said something unexpected.

“I want a commission.”

Meguru looked up sharply.

Rin’s eyes didn’t waver. “Not official. Just for me.”

“…Of what, my lord?”

There was a pause. A brief pull of wind through the branches. “The Emperor.”

Meguru’s heart nearly stopped.

“I—I’ve already finished His Majesty’s portrait,” he said carefully, quickly. “It’s being reviewed—”

“Not that one.”

Rin stepped forward now. His gaze was direct, dark with something Meguru couldn’t read. Not authority. Not anger.

Longing, maybe. Regret. Something old and fraying.

“I want your version. Not the palace’s.”

Meguru blinked. “With what source?”

“None,” Rin said. “No ceremony. No robes. Just… from memory. Anything you remember. Anything you see.”

He knelt beside him then, unbothered by the dirt, the leaves, the wildness of the world beyond their roles. He looked at Meguru not like a subject, but like someone who had seen something Rin couldn’t reach anymore.

“Quickly. Please.”

The word startled Meguru most of all. Please.

His mouth opened. Then closed. And then, his hands moved.

The paper he unrolled was old, meant for practice. It would yellow with time. No silk. No gilding.

He ground the ink again, slower this time, trying to brush away the trembling in his wrist.

He didn’t know what he was doing, he truly didn’t. Only that when he thought of the Emperor, not as he appeared on golden thrones or beneath courtly light, but in that moment, that fleeting moment when the general had smiled at the portrait, something strange had filled his chest.

Not reverence. Not awe. Something softer. Something almost painful.

He didn’t see majesty. He didn’t see divinity.

He saw a boy. So that’s what he painted.

Not the regal figure the court expected. Not the curated grandeur of their divine sovereign. No sketching. No careful framing. Just swift, certain strokes, ink and breath and the sound of his own heart bleeding through the brush. The figure that emerged was slight. Even fragile.

A child’s body, hunched inward, as though trying not to be noticed. Thin arms wrapped around his knees. Shoulders curled like a secret. His robe was gone. His crown, his dragons, his embroidered silks—all gone. Only a pale undergarment clung to his frame, the kind attendants dressed sick children in during cold nights.

His face came last, though Meguru didn’t plan it that way. He never did. The brush simply moved. As though it remembered something before he did.

The eyes came first.

Large. Watching. Waiting.

Not hollow but full in the worst way. Full of things never said. Full of yearning. Full of fear that looked too much like stillness. Full of hope that had been shaped, reshaped, and bent into something obedient.

He drew him sitting not on a throne, but on a temple step. A quiet place. An in-between. No guards. No symbols. No candles. Only space around him, vast and bare.

But the boy wasn’t completely still.

His head had turned, slightly. Just a little. Toward something. Toward someone.

And that was the part Meguru couldn’t explain.

He hadn’t meant to paint that hadn’t meant to tilt the chin, curve the line of the mouth. But the boy’s lips softened at the corner, just barely, as if he’d spotted someone familiar. Someone who didn’t bow. Someone who belonged.

When Meguru finally put the brush down, his breath escaped him in a slow, shaky exhale. His chest ached.

The figure on the page looked nothing like an emperor.

It looked like a boy trying so hard to be a blessing… he’d forgotten how to be loved.

Meguru stared at it. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

He’d ruined it.

This wasn’t what they asked for. This wasn’t what the court had commissioned. And it certainly wasn’t what the general would want to see. It wasn’t dignified. It wasn’t safe.

It was… true.

And that made it dangerous.

He didn’t know why he had drawn it that way. Maybe it was the way the Emperor’s gaze had passed over the room during his visit—like someone waiting for permission to exist. Maybe it was the way silence clung to him like perfume. Maybe it was the moment before the general smiled at the canvas, when the room had gone quiet and something real had shivered through the air.

Maybe Meguru was tired of painting lies and calling them likenesses.

His hand moved without thinking.

He pressed the edge of his sleeve to the bottom corner of the paper, ready to smear the image into a black stain, to destroy it before someone else did.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. His voice cracked. “I can’t—I shouldn’t have—”

“Let me see.”

Rin’s voice, behind him.

Meguru froze. His breath caught. He couldn’t let him see it. Not this. Not that version of his brother. The Emperor was a blessing, a god-walks-in-golden-skin, not a boy with  eyes like unanswered prayers. What if Rin thought he was mocking him? What if—

“Meguru.”

His name.

He had never heard the general say it before. Not even once. It landed in the space between them like a thread made visible by light.

Slowly, without turning, Meguru moved his hand away from the paper.

The portrait fluttered in the breeze.

Rin stepped forward. Silence.

Meguru waited for the sound of dismissal, of cold anger. The rustle of sleeves turning away.

Instead, a breath. Soft. Sharp. Like someone remembering how to feel after years of forgetting.

“…That’s him.” The voice didn’t snap. It cut.

Meguru shook his head. “No—it’s not. He’s—he’s the Emperor. This is just a boy. He’s not supposed to look like—He’s not supposed to look lonely.”

“He was always lonely.”

That silenced him.

Rin’s voice didn’t tremble. But it was thick. Full.

“He was sick. Hidden. Groomed like a flower in a glass box. They called it sacred. But he looked out from that box every day, wondering why I got to run while he was kept still.”

He knelt lower, touched the edge of the paper—but not the boy. Not the heart of it.

“I killed for him. Because I didn’t know how else to give him freedom. I thought—if I made the world safe enough, maybe he’d come outside.”

Meguru watched him. The general. The blade. The myth.

And for the first time, he saw a man.

Not a weapon. Not a shadow beside a throne.

A brother. A boy who tried, and and still tried, to protect someone too sacred to touch.

“I shouldn’t keep it,” Rin said softly. “It’s not mine to own. But I’m glad you saw him. The real one.”

Meguru lowered his head.

It stayed there, between them.

A child who wasn’t supposed to exist. A truth that was never supposed to be painted. A gaze that still, even now, looked toward someone who never stopped trying to reach him.

And Meguru, the painter without a clan, without a father, without his monster anymore—realized that some things weren’t meant to be beautiful or approved.

Some things were just meant to be seen.

They begin meeting more often now.

By accident, mostly. Or what felt like accident, though Meguru suspected the court has no room for coincidence. A turn around the garden path. A detour through the library. An empty corridor echoing with steps too familiar to be mistaken. Sometimes there are words. Sometimes only glances. Once, Rin nodded at him as if they shared a secret, and Meguru had to press his hand to his chest to calm the stammer in his ribs.

He told himself not to read into it. Rin was back from the barrack but not untouched. The war lingered in the way he walked—in the stiff lines of his posture, the way his eyes dart like he was still waited for arrows. The palace celebrate peace, but the war had not truly ended. Not for Rin. Not for anyone who knew what was lost.

And yet.

Sometimes, Rin stopped beside him in the peach orchard, and they shared silence that didn't ache. Sometimes Meguru brought ink-stained hands to his sleeves too late, and Rin noticed—but said nothing. Once, Rin asked if he still paints. Meguru couldn’t speak for a breath, then nodded.

"Good," Rin said.

Just that. But it stayed in Meguru’s chest for days.

He shouldn’t feel hope. He told himself that every morning. The court is not a place for dreams. Rin is not a man made for softness. This is not a love that can live in the light.

But still—Still, Meguru found himself waiting. For the war to truly end. For the blood to stop being remembered on every wall. For Rin to rest. For something gentle to be possible again.

Not a future. Meguru didn't dare wish for that.

Only… permission.

He thought about loving Rin properly—not quietly, not fearfully. Even if it were one-sided. Even if it never becomes anything more. He just wanted the space to feel it without guilt. Without the sound of swords echoing in the distance. Without being afraid it will be taken from him the moment it begins.

He wanted to love Rin the way he paints sometimes: slowly. Reverently. With everything in him.

But love like that did not belong in palaces. It did not wear robes or titles. It cannot be hung on the walls of a cold hall.

So Meguru held it close. Like a smudge of ink he refuses to wipe away.

A quiet, loyal thing. Unseen. Unnamed.

But always there.

And Rin never asked him why he always seemed to be where Meguru was. And Meguru never asks him to stay.

But sometimes, just sometimes, he caught Rin watched him the way one watched a memory they aren’t ready to speak aloud.

And for now, that was enough. Not peace. Not yet. But maybe the beginning of it.

It is autumn when they spoke properly again.

The forest behind the palace has turned to fire. The trees are dressed in reds and umbers, their leaves drifting down like old blessings. Wind moved through the branches in soft, sweept hushes—like the forest has learned to whisper.

Meguru was already there when Rin arrives.

He sat on a flat stone near the stream, a brush tucked behind one ear and a few ink stains on his sleeves. He was not painting today—just thinking. Watched the water slide around smooth rocks like the world has time to be gentle again.

He heard the footsteps before he saw him.

He didn't turn.

Some part of him knew Rin would come.

Rin stepped into the clearing with the same controlled grace he always carried quiet, contained, like even the earth beneath him waits for his approval. For a moment he only stood there, hands behind his back, gaze fixed on the forest ahead.

Then he sat. Not beside Meguru, but near enough. Close enough that the silence between them feels shared.

Meguru didn't speak. He’s learned not to. Words can ruin the kind of quiet that feels like breath.

“You’re always here,” Rin said at last, his voice lower than Meguru remembered. Hoarse from the borderlands, maybe. Or maybe from things that had never been said aloud.

“I like the trees,” Meguru replied lightly, plucked a leaf from the ground. “They don’t talk about weddings or grain taxes.”

Rin huffed—almost a sound of agreement.

“Or politics,” Meguru added. “Or people who shouldn’t fall in love.”

It slip out too fast. Not a confession. But it lingers in the air with the same weight. Like a dropped brush, still wet.

He teared the leaf in half, pretended it never happened. “They’re simple,” he said instead. “Trees, I mean. You give them sun and water and they just… do their best.”

Rin didn't respond, but Meguru heard it—the faintest sound. A breath, caught at the edge of something that once might had been laughter.

When Meguru dared to look sideways, the light cuts through the branches and caught in Rin’s eyes.

And there it was.

The fire.

Low, but steady. Burning clean. The same fire that’s always been there.

For the Emperor.

Always for the Emperor.

Meguru’s chest aches, not from surprise but from knowing. He had always known. Even back when Rin asked him to draw Sae—not himself, never himself. Even then, Meguru felt it, pulsing in the silence like something sacred.

“You still look at him that way,” he murmured.

Rin turned his head, and Meguru met his gaze for real this time.

“Like he’s the reason the world is worth fixing,” Meguru added. “Like he’s the center of the flame.”

Rin didn't correct him. Didn't deny it.

And Meguru didn't ask for more.

He dropped the torn leaf into the stream and watched it spin in slow, lopsided circles.

“That’s okay,” he said. “It’s not a bad reason.”

He didn't say I wish it was me. He doesn’t say I would’ve stayed. He didn't say You could look at me like that, too, if you only—

He says none of it.

Instead, he did what he always does when the air gets too heavy.

“Do you think squirrels vote?” Meguru asked suddenly. “Like, for who gets the best tree?”

Rin blinked. His expression didn't change, but his body shifted like he’s been nudged somewhere he wasn’t expecting to go.

“They probably cheat,” Meguru continued, pressed his lips together in mock seriousness. “I saw one hoarding plums last week. Tyrant behavior.”

Rin exhaled, and it was quiet—but it was there. A thin smile. Not wide. Not long.

But real.

A flicker of warmth across a face trained not to feel.

Meguru stared at it a second too long. His own smile falters at the edges.

He didn't dare to hope. He knew what lives in Rin’s eyes. That kind of devotion wasn't something a person can compete with. It was belong to history. To crowns and blood and wars that never end.

Bu he saw it. He made it.

Even if it was just a brief warmth in the cold. Even if it disappeared tomorrow.

It was there.

And that’s enough for now.

A smile. A stream. And the chance to sat beside someone you would had loved, if only the world were different.

.

.

The first snow of the year falls like whispered across the palace eaves. Meguru, wrapped in his modest robe of hemp and cotton, hunches over a canvas as the flurries catch in his uncombed hair. The color of snow on him is soft. Like ash. Like memory.

He hasn’t seen the General in weeks.

And it was not just that Rin was at war again—lead a campaign in the east where the border tenses like a drawn bow—it’s the silence that follows. A silence not even war can justify.

Meguru heard things. He always did.

He painted with his ears as much as his eyes, and the palace is a grand hall of fluttering fans and fluttering lies. Sound travels like perfume through the corridors—delicate, perfumed, impossible to trace.

He heard it whispered behind lacquered screens, passed between the soft rustle of silk-sleeved sleeves and the hush of sandaled feet on polished floors.

“The wedding will be in early spring.”

“She’s the Prime Minister’s daughter, of course. She’s been raised for this.”

“It’s all been arranged. The General is gone—so who else could protest?”

Meguru pretended not to listen, but the words settled under his skin like dust. Fine, invisible. Impossible to shake off.

The Emperor hasn’t been seen in public for moons. His absence was wrapped in metaphors, spoken of with poetry and pity: a wind that weakens, a fire that flickers, a moon behind a cloud.

But Meguru didn't felt poetry. He felt absence. Heavy. Cold.

But Meguru remembers the truth of it.

Or rather—the other truth.

The version that still lies rolled beneath his bed, wrapped in worn cloth and bound with string. A secret. A sin.

Because when his brush had moved, it had not followed instruction. It had not painted the Emperor as the court demanded—a god-child, carved from jade and moonlight. It had drawn the boy as Meguru saw him.

Or perhaps… as Rin saw him.

Not the boy-emperor with jade rings on every finger, with robes like stormclouds and a crown shaped like a flame.

But a child. Small. Curled at the center of a throne too large for his body. His limbs awkward, his spine bowed like a branch bent under snow. Drenched in light—not majestic, but drowning. The face he painted was not divine. It was waiting.

Waiting for what, Meguru still didn’t know. Someone to reach him, maybe. Someone to see past the silk and the silver.

He remembered how his brush had trembled. How his fingers had ached from holding in the truth. How shame had clung to his back, heavy and warm. The image poured from him like water from a cracked vessel—too fast, too unfiltered. Not an offering. Not even a likeness. Just a feeling.

He couldn’t explain it. He still can’t.

And so the second painting—the real one—remains hidden beneath his bed. He hasn’t dared to look at it since.

That winter, Meguru kept himself busy. Buried, even.

The court demanded hundreds of images. Portraits for the Festival of the Last Snow. Blessings for the rice rites. Paintings to commemorate the imperial engagement. Faces smiling in ornate robes, with eyes that do not look. Art for ritual, not for truth.

He painted them all with steady hands and a quiet heart.

He didn't draw Rin anymore.

He told himself it was because of the war. Because generals doesn't sit for portraits with blood still drying on their cloaks. Because Rin was somewhere far beyond the capital—at the border, or perhaps even beyond it. His sword drawn. His silence unbroken.

But something in Meguru shifts at night, when the palace sleeps.

Something under his ribs. Unsettled. Unnamed. Unfinished.

He misses him. Not as a subject. Not as a general.

He misses the silence Rin gave him—the kind that didn’t ask for anything but let him exist anyway. That heavy, watchful stillness that made Meguru feel known.

Not as a painter. Not as a court boy.

Just… as Meguru.

In the peach orchard where he sometimes escaped, Meguru heard the gossip again. This time, louder. Sharper. Less careful.

“They’re marrying him off now because Itoshi Rin’s not here to cut off the Prime Minister’s head.”

“Better to wed the Emperor quick. Before the General does something bad.”

“You think he’d go that far?”

“For his brother?” A scoff. “He’d burn the court.”

Meguru held his breath.

The voices fade behind the trees, but the words linger. Curling in the cold air, clinging to his skin.

He remembered the way Rin once asked him for that painting—not of himself, but of Sae.

“Anything,” he’d said. “Anything you remember. Just… draw him.”

There had been no ceremony in Rin’s voice. No imperial command. Just something raw, spoken like a man reaching through memory for something already gone.

Why had Rin wanted it? Why hadn’t he explained?

Meguru had drawn that lonely child, and feared what he’d done. Feared the truth of it. Feared that something in him had overstepped—seen too deeply, cared too much.

But now… now he wonders.

He wonders if that’s exactly what Rin saw too.

Not a god. Not an emperor. Just a boy with no one left.

A boy sitting on a throne too big for him. A boy bowed under ceremonial weight. A boy Rin had once tried to protect.

And now Rin is far away, lost to the war-torn borders. And the Emperor—fragile, silent Sae—is to be married off like a pawn no longer worth guarding.

Meguru, with paint-stained fingers and snow caught in his sleeves, felt something in his chest begin to split. Just a little. Like an old seam unraveling. Like thread snapping under tension it was never meant to hold.

He wondered, not for the first time, if love can survive in a place like this. If it can exist between the painted smile and the lacquered lie. Between a general with blood on his hands and a painter with ghosts in his brush. Between brothers separated by duty and betrayal, and a kingdom that feeds on silence.

He wondered if perhaps The General had loved too hard and that was his curse. And The Emperor, perhaps, not at all and that was his protection.

.

The corridors of the palace stretched long in winter, echoing with a silence that bit sharper than snow. Meguru had long grown used to moving like a shadow. His footsteps made no sound across lacquered floors; his head bowed in habitual deference to portraits and gold-leafed walls that had seen centuries of power bloom and rot.

He had forgotten a ream of fine rice paper earlier that day—just one bundle of unblemished sheets meant for the New Year’s scrolls, and his master had sent him with a sigh, not unkind, to fetch it from the back of the logistics hall.

It was late. The court had mostly retired. The only noise was the hiss of wind through winter-barren gardens.

The argument wasn’t loud at first. It bled through the thin screen doors, quiet at first, like a strained conversation between nobles.

“—you will not decide for me.”

The voice rasped, hollow, thin and cracking sent a chill through Meguru's bones. It was the Emperor.

The Emperor?

The same Emperor who never spoke above a whisper in court, whose eyes were unreadable, whose pale face was always turned slightly away, shielded by ceremonial sleeves. Meguru had painted him. He had watched him. But never—not once—had he heard him like this.

He froze, one foot just past the archway. The light behind the screen door flickered as shadows moved.

“You speak as though you have years left to defy me,” the Prime Minister’s voice replied, deep and amused in that cruel way nobles learned to master. “Your brother isn’t here to play soldier and scare me off. The court must live on.”

There was a pause. Something knocked like a fist against wood?

A sharp cough followed. And then again. Violent, choking.

Meguru's hands tightened around the scroll case he carried. He shouldn't be here. If he were caught, he’d lose his post. But the coughing—he remembered it. It had stained the Emperor’s sleeves during his last sitting, barely hidden under layers of makeup and silk. They all ignored it, because it was easier.

“Do you think Rin would let this happen?” the Emperor finally wheezed, each word laced with pain. “Do you think I want a daughter of yours in my bed just because you’ve waited for my lungs to give out?”

“Rin,” the Prime Minister hissed, “is halfway across the empire, bleeding for your name like the fool he’s always been. If he knew what was good for him, he’d let himself die there.”

“Say that again,” the Emperor spat, not like a ruler, but like a brother.

There was silence.

Even Meguru, half-hidden behind the screen of a lantern-lit post, held his breath.

Then a softer, almost mocking voice. “You care for him too much. He was meant to be your blade. But you’ve let him become your leash.”

Another cough, more ragged now. A struggle to breathe. Meguru heard something drop—ceramic? A teacup?

The Prime Minister continued, undeterred. “This court needs heirs. A wedding brings peace. Rin brings fear. You think the people want to be ruled by a dying boy with a dog for a brother?”

“Better than a coward with a pen for a sword,” Sae said hoarsely. “You think yourself a man of the court, but all you’ve ever done is hide behind paper and marriage proposals.”

There was the sound of approaching footsteps. Meguru panicked. He darted backward into the shadows, hands clutched to his chest, scroll case pressing into his ribs. A servant turned the corner—a younger boy, carrying medicine. They exchanged a look. The boy didn’t speak. He merely bowed his head and passed on, disappearing into the Emperor’s room.

Meguru stayed hidden, heart hammering. His chest ached from what he heard—not just from the words, but from how they were spoken. Sae’s voice wasn’t that of a divine ruler or distant symbol.

It was the voice of someone fighting to be human. Someone being cornered by his own cage.

The boy Meguru had drawn—the one without robes or gold, the one with sunken eyes and a hollow mouth—hadn't been a mistake. It hadn’t been imagination.

That was the truth.

A child made to wear a crown too large for him. A sickly body struggling beneath silk. And somewhere, in a battlefield lit by snow and fire, his brother fighting blindly to protect a boy who wasn’t allowed to be seen as vulnerable.

That night, Meguru didn’t return to his room. He sat in the garden until dawn, sketching the silhouette of a man kneeling before a paper throne, blood blooming across his hands—not from battle, but from the force of holding everything together.

He didn’t draw the Prime Minister. He didn’t need to.

That face had long ago been painted into the court itself. Beautiful. Dangerous.

And nothing like the kind monster Meguru once called his friend in the forest.

.

.

The snow didn’t melt on the bodies anymore.

It used to, back when the war was still new, when blades clashed beneath blooming cherry trees and the dead still looked surprised, as if they hadn’t expected to die so far from home. Back then, the blood had been warm enough to melt the frost. Crimson rivulets would stretch like veins through the untouched white, painting the ground as if the earth itself had been wounded.

But now… now the corpses froze with their mouths open.

Rin stood at the edge of the ridge, his gaze cast down toward the broken remains of the enemy formation. What was left of it. They had burned their banners mid-battle, torn the symbols from their armor and fled into the woods with their faces covered. Cowards, perhaps. Or survivors. He no longer knew the difference. He no longer cared.

The wind howled through the pines, carrying with it the scent of scorched fabric and iron. His armor that scratched and fractured hung heavily on him, the left pauldron split where a halberd had struck true. A thin cut traced the edge of his jaw, shallow but pulsing. He hadn’t bothered to dress it. There was no point. The dead didn’t care for bandages.

Behind him, his men stood silent.

No one cheered. No one lifted their blades in victory. Some knelt in the snow, gripping their sides or pressing bloodied cloth to their wounds. Others simply sat, eyes glazed, staring at the smoke rising from the village down below. A village that had held fast until morning. Until Rin had given the final order.

Now it was gone. A pile of ash and fire.

No songs. No sake. No joy. Only the hiss of wind and the quiet, uneven sounds of breathing, those who could still breathe. And beyond that, the crackle of fire consuming the last shreds of resistance, licking at timbers and banners alike, turning everything to dust.

Another enemy stronghold erased from the map. Another place that would never be rebuilt.

Rin’s fingers curled around the hilt of his blade. His knuckles were numb. Whether from cold or guilt, he couldn’t tell anymore.

He had made this choice. He had asked for this.

It had started as duty, protecting the only person he had ever truly loved. The kindest brother. Rin could still remember his brother’s hands, small and pale, guiding his trembling fingers to the brush when they were children. His smile was soft, crooked in a way that made Rin ache. Even when Sae had been sick, especially then, he was good. Too good. Too sick for the throne but too confident to rule alone.

So Rin had become his sword. His shield. His teeth and claws.

And now he was a monster in steel.

He raised his head to the sky, but the heavens were empty. No sun. No gods. Just grey clouds dragging across the horizon like torn silk.

He could hear the voices still. The dying cries. The children. The pleas in a language he barely understood. It didn’t matter what they said. Their eyes were always the same.

How many villages? How many lives?

His men would say this was a victory. The court would say the emperor was safe. That the borders held. That General Itoshi had triumphed once again in the name of the empire.

But Rin knew the truth.

This wasn’t triumph. This was a wound that would never heal.

His boots crunched over the ice as he turned away from the cliff, back toward his men—his ghosts in iron and blood. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled. Or maybe it was just the wind.

They would march again tomorrow. They always did.

But tonight, Rin let himself feel the weight of it. All of it. The weight of blood, and loss, and the terrible, unrelenting love that had driven him to this edge.

He wondered if Sae saw what Rin had become, if he truly understood what his little brother had done for him would he still smile the same way?

Would he still call him kind? Or would he look away? The cold sank deeper into his bones.

And Rin stood there, motionless in the snow, while the bodies froze around him.

He had said yes to the campaign not because the Empire needed it. Not because the people cried for war, or the border villages demanded vengeance. No. He’d agreed to it because the court had grown too loud. Because weakness had a scent in the capital, and it clung to Sae like a second skin.

They called it strategy. Expansion. They draped it in silk words and promises of honor. But Rin knew what it was. A show. A threat. A warning.

He remembered the Prime Minister’s face in court that morning, sharp eyes beneath lacquered brows, mouth twisted into a smile so measured it became cruelty. “A rabid dog dressed in fine robes,” he’d said once, not knowing Rin had heard it. Or maybe he had.

Maybe it was meant for him.

Rin had stood silent in the hall, hands clasped behind his back, while the court murmured like insects beneath the gilded throne. Some too afraid to speak of the Emperor's frailty, others eager to fill the silence with ambition. They spoke of provinces like they were tiles in a game. Of people like numbers. Of generals like weapons they could polish and point.

And in the center of it, Sae.

Sae, with fingers ink-stained from imperial reports he still read himself. Sae, who rarely spoke during meetings unless he had to. Who sat straighter when Rin entered, but never smiled—not anymore. Not in front of them. Not where it could be twisted.

When Rin left the palace that day, he found him waiting in the side corridor. Not in royal robes, just the soft indigo winter layers that always clung to him like dust and snow. The scent of crushed leaves and incense clung to Sae’s collar—an old remedy, maybe. Rin could smell it even now, on the battlefield. Could feel it on the ghost of Sae's breath as his brother pulled him into a rare, desperate embrace.

"You don’t have to do this," Sae had murmured, voice low, soft, and hoarse. There had been a tremor in it. Or maybe Rin imagined that, too. "I don’t want you to bleed anymore."

And Rin, foolish, young, trembling inside his armor even then, had said, “I’ll give them so much blood they won’t look at yours."

His voice hadn’t cracked when he said it. He had made sure of that. Because kindness made you vulnerable in court, and weakness was a crack the whole palace would crawl into. He didn’t care what they called him—a weapon, a dog, a shadow—but they wouldn’t call Sae weak. Never again.

So he went to war. And he bled. And bled.

Until it no longer meant anything.

Now, the snow didn’t melt on the dead anymore. His armor creaked when he moved. His soldiers no longer asked for songs or letters home. They just waited—for the next order, the next enemy camp, the next time the blood would run too fast and the names would be too many to remember.

Rin stood alone on the cliff, wind cutting past his throat like a second blade, and wondered what Sae looked like now.

Whether he still lit the lanterns in his own room. Whether he still walked barefoot in the mornings. Whether the rumors were true—about wedding preparations, about veils sewn in silence while the Emperor coughed behind gold-paneled doors.

He clenched his teeth until his jaw ached.

They would do it while he was away. While he was painted in the blood of strangers.

Because they knew Rin would never allow it if he were home.

Because they feared him more than they feared the gods.

And perhaps they should. But now… now he wondered.

How much blood was too much?

Because it wasn’t just enemies he buried anymore. It wasn’t just those who raised a sword against him. The battlefield didn’t distinguish between justice and vengeance, between duty and obsession. It swallowed everything. Everyone.

He had buried comrades too.

The boy who had trained beside him since they were barely more than children—bright-eyed, always smiling too wide, always the first to volunteer and the last to leave a wounded friend behind. They had once shared dumplings under a plum tree, laughing until their stomachs hurt. That boy had died clutching a banner in the snow, mouth open like he still had something to say.

The girl who braided her hair with red cords and spoke of marrying her village sweetheart once her service ended. She had traded her wedding kimono dreams for steel armor, her poems for arrows. The last thing she had said to Rin was, “I trust you’ll win, General.” And she had smiled like the spring hadn’t died.

The quiet scout with crooked teeth and sharp eyes, who had once confessed—over a shared cup of tea in the rain—that Rin’s eyes reminded him of winter stars. That same scout had been found beside a creek, throat cut clean. Rin had ordered a pyre built for him, even when time was short and the wind too fierce.

Gone. All of them.

Not by chance. Not by the gods.

By his hand. His campaign. His war.

And what did Rin see now, when he closed his eyes?

Not their faces. Not the enemy banners. Not even the fire, though it still crackled in his dreams like it had a right to be there.

Just Sae.

His brother. The only one he had ever chased without question. The boy who had once sat beside him in a sun-warmed courtyard, stringing beads into charms for their mother’s shrine. The boy who had kissed Rin’s scraped knees, wiped his tears, taught him how to pray, how to hold chopsticks properly, how to endure. The boy who was now a man, too thin, too pale. Saying too little.

Coughing too much.

The kindest boy in the world, Rin thought. The one person who had ever made him feel like he wasn’t just a sword dressed in flesh. The one who had held Rin’s hand through grief, through exile, through doubt, like it was a rope keeping him from the sea.

And Rin, like a fool, had clung to it.

Still clung to it.

Still lived by it.

He’d kill for that kindness.

He had killed for it.

And now, with another mountain soaked in red, another valley gone silent beneath the snow, he wondered—

Had he saved Sae?

Or had he only damned himself?

A soft crunch behind him. One of his captains.

“General,” the man said, voice low and careful, breath misting in the cold, “orders?”

Rin didn’t answer right away.

He stood still, boots buried in snow that used to be grass. Looked out at the valley—bare and burnt. What had once been a farming village now reduced to bones and cinders.

Then he looked up at the sky. Still snowing. Still cold. Like the heavens were indifferent to all this ruin.

And inside him. Nothing but red, and love, and silence.

“…Bury the dead,” Rin said finally. His voice cracked. He didn’t clear it.

“Ours and theirs?”

“Yes.”

“…Understood.”

The man bowed and left, his footprints quickly swallowed by fresh snow.

And Rin stood there, alone again.

A shadow with a sword. A man with no home except grief. He didn’t move, even as the cold reached into his bones. Even as his cut bled fresh onto his collar.

He just stared at the horizon. Wishing he could remember what it felt like to win without guilt. Or love without war. Or live without having to choose between the two.

.

.

Meguru didn’t understand when the whispers changed.

At first, they had been like soft wind—brushing through the painted halls and polished screens of the imperial palace, half-curious, half-reverent. A quiet awe whenever the second prince’s name was spoken. The general who never lost. The one who turned the tides of war with frozen eyes and crimson blades. There were even poems, once. Songs, though somber. Children recited his victories like old myths, their voices lilting through the corridors like birdsong.

Victory was still sweet, back then. Rin was still a name spoken with pride.

But now—now the wind howled.

The first time he truly heard it was when he went to fetch ink from the logistics wing, a quiet errand meant to break up the silence of his studio. It was cold in the palace that morning, the frost clinging to paper screens and the tips of his sleeves. His breath curled in the air like calligraphy strokes.

He was passing by the southern corridor when he heard it.

"Another win," someone whispered, hushed but sharp. “Another province lost to fire, another village reduced to ash. His sword burns brighter than the sun. You can see it glowing red on the snow.”

Meguru slowed.

"Not even the enemy weeps as loud as the ground he walks on," another muttered, this one older—an advisor, perhaps, or a court official. “And the crows follow him like a shadow.”

He stopped completely then, tucked behind the half-open screen that framed the map room. Scrolls cradled in his arms, forgotten. The weight of them suddenly so small compared to the weight pressing into his chest.

They weren’t whispering praise anymore.

They were whispering fear.

And not just fear of the war, or of the bloodshed it brought. No—fear of the man himself. Of the general they once lauded in delicate brushstrokes and gold leaf. Fear of the second prince.

The wind was shifting. The whole palace could feel it.

Meguru began to notice it in other places too. The way courtiers stopped mentioning Rin’s name in full, referring to him only as the general.

And the whispers grew bolder.

“They say he no longer waits for orders.”

“They say the enemy surrendered but he advanced anyway.”

“They say he no longer writes back to the capital, save for casualty counts.”

“They say he’ll march straight home and sit on the throne himself.”

Meguru didn’t know where it started—who planted such poison. Maybe it had been deliberate. Maybe it had grown on its own, like mold in damp corners no one bothered to clean. But what chilled him most was that the Imperial Court did nothing to stop it. No public reprimand. No reassurances. No truth to replace the rumor.

The silence was an answer in itself.

Soon, the whispers turned darker, more treacherous.

“He’ll dethrone his own brother.”

“He’ll behead His Majesty before the bells of spring.”

“He’s more befitting to rule. But he’ll ruin us.”

And always—always the same thread of dread laced between their words.

The Prime Minister will protect us. The Prime Minister must act. We must marry the Emperor quickly, secure the line. Before the beast returns. Before the younger prince reaches the gates and takes what he should not have.

Meguru sat curled in his studio that night, the whispers still echoing like ink refusing to dry. His brush hovered uselessly over parchment. He couldn’t paint.

Not when they feared Rin.

Not when they spoke of him like a monster waiting in the snow.

He remembered Rin’s eyes. The winter in them, yes—but also the ache. The love that bled out quiet, the way he always turned toward kindness like a man chasing a fading sun. He remembered painting him with trembling hands, trying to catch that impossible mixture of brutality and sorrow, steel and longing.

That was not a tyrant.

But in this palace, truth rarely mattered more than perception.

And perception was turning sharp as blades.

Meguru curled tighter under his winter cloak, ink on his fingers, fear in his throat.

He didn’t know who started the rumors. Or why the Imperial court let them breathe.

But they spread like ink in water, soft at first, then staining everything.

That General Rin, second son of the divine line, was no longer a shield for the Empire but a blade turned inward. That the blood on his hands was not for protection anymore, but ambition. That his silence was not grief but planning.

That if the Emperor’s cough grew worse, if his sleep grew longer then Rin might not mourn him at all.

That maybe, he never would.

Meguru didn’t believe it.

Not really. Not with the way Rin had looked at the Emperor that one time Meguru had seen them together, like he was staring at the last piece of warmth in the world. Not with the way Rin never smiled, except when he his brother’s potrait.

Still. The walls whispered.

And the Prime Minister walked taller, colder. With a hand never far from the scrolls of succession and another on the hilt of policy.

"The Emperor must marry," one of the elders said, behind closed doors.

"Before the snow melts," another agreed.

"And before the second prince comes home."

.

.

The commission came like all the others, delivered at dawn, sealed with red wax bearing the imperial crest, pressed into Meguru’s hands by a courier who bowed too low and left too quickly. The scroll was smooth and scented faintly with plum blossom, like all imperial documents were. Decorative. Formal. Sterile.

He had known what it would be before he even opened it. There had been whispers for weeks. A marriage. An engagement. Something to restore calm to a court fraying at the seams.

Another portrait. Another moment in history. But this time The Engagement of the Emperor and His Chosen Bride.

Meguru’s hands trembled when he unrolled the scroll. Not from fear, he’d long since trained that response out of his fingers. But from something slower. Colder. A creeping chill that had followed every imperial order these days, threading through the ink and paper, curling like frost along the edges of his studio.

He didn’t need to ask who had chosen the bride. The emperor chose nothing these days.

Still, he accepted the commission. Like he always did. He packed his brushes. His finest inkstone. The special silk canvas used for state portraits. And he dressed carefully, his court painter’s robe crisp with starch, his hair bound low, his wrists bare as a sign of deference.

The ceremony chamber was just as he remembered: wide, sunlit, choked with gold leaf and dragon motifs, draped in quiet tension. Ministers stood in clusters, eyes sharp behind painted veils. Attendants glided like shadows, whispering names and titles in low voices.

The bride was already seated when he arrived.

She was young. Too young. Beautiful, in a delicate, breakable way like a blossom caught between seasons, not quite frostbitten, not quite ready to bloom. She bowed to him with the small, graceful dip of someone well-trained but not yet comfortable. Her robes were heavy with embroidery. Her smile was small. Sincere, maybe. Or hopeful. Or both.

But it wasn’t her that stopped Meguru in his tracks.

It was the emperor.

He sat beside her like an artifact left on display. Dressed in robes so ornate they looked suffocating. His hair had been oiled and tied back, his posture impeccable. Hands folded precisely in his lap. Shoulders square. Chin lifted. Every line of his body drawn from the imperial manuals Meguru had once been forced to memorize when he first became a court painter.

And yet Meguru had never seen someone look so dead while breathing.

Not lifeless like the soldiers he had painted, pale and still beneath white cloth. Not distant like the nobles who barely acknowledged him. But hollow. As if something had carved out the person who once lived inside that body and replaced it with protocol.

His eyes didn’t move. Not toward his bride. Not toward the painter. Not toward the advisors flanking the side of the room with their steely eyes and murmured assessments. The emperor looked forward but Meguru had the sudden, sinking feeling he was seeing nothing at all.

When the emperor finally blinked, it was slow. Detached. Unaware. And Meguru felt his brush hand begin to tremble.

He dipped it into the ink anyway.

He tried to calm himself. Ground himself in ritual. This was no different than painting spring blossoms. Or a minister’s daughter. Or the portrait he once painted of the second prince laughing beneath a maple tree—his eyes bright, his smile crooked and sharp, his uniform dusted with dirt and war.

But this?

This was like painting a corpse that hadn’t realized it had died.

He looked back at the emperor. The way his lips were pale. The slight twitch in his fingertips, visible only because Meguru was trained to see. The way his smile never touched his eyes, not once. The way he recoiled, almost imperceptibly, when the bride’s hand brushed his sleeve in accidental contact.

Meguru wondered what the girl saw. If she noticed it too. If she had been told to ignore it. If she’d been chosen precisely because she wouldn’t.

He moved his brush with care. Ink on silk. Lines on paper. Pretending it mattered. Pretending this wasn’t what it clearly was.

Because what he was painting wasn’t a celebration.

It was a ritual burial.

The emperor was a shell. A vessel. A puppet dressed in royal red and bound in obligation. Trained to smile, to nod, to sign treaties and offer blessings. But something inside him had long since collapsed. Meguru could see it, clear as fire under ice. Could feel it in the stillness of the air, in the quiet way the advisors watched, in the way the attendants flinched whenever the emperor shifted.

Meguru painted. That was his job. His gift. His curse.

But today, every stroke of ink felt like sealing something away. Not capturing history but burying it. Not commemorating joy but memorializing a tragedy no one was allowed to name. And he who had once painted stars into the second prince’s gaze, who once believed in light even in war realized he was now painting a funeral.

A beautiful one.

An imperial one.

But a funeral, still.

He lowered his brush and bowed his head.

And wondered, with quiet dread, how many more portraits they would ask him to paint before the empire collapsed beneath the weight of its silence.

.

.

The snow had begun to fall again.

Soft, soundless flakes drifted over the crimson stains smeared across General Rin’s armor, dried blood and ash, war clinging to him like a second skin. He did not flinch as the cold kissed the open cut beneath his eye, or as the weight of exhaustion pressed into his bones like frost seeping into stone.

He had returned from the battlefield a day early after he heard the rumors, riding through the frozen night, leading no parade. No horns sounded for his arrival. No ministers bowed. The palace loomed before him like a temple carved from ice.

And standing in front of its gates were the Imperial guards.

Their spears crossed before him. Unmoving. Wordless.

Rin’s horse snorted in protest, sensing the tension. Rin didn’t blink. He could still hear the cries of the wounded behind him. The battlefield hadn’t faded. And now, here, at the threshold of what was supposed to be home, he met another wall.

“Step aside,” he said, voice hoarse, low. It wasn’t a command. Not yet.

The guards did not move.

Rin stared at them. Their faces were unreadable beneath polished helms, but their hands were tense around their spears.

He looked past them, through the open gates, toward the main hall. He saw the familiar rise of the imperial steps, the great lacquered doors swung wide, and beyond that—

Sae.

Seated upon the throne.

Not in their childhood garden. Not in the shared quiet of their old quarters. Not beside him, nor ahead of him. But above him now, surrounded by robes and ritual and cold-lipped ministers wrapped in ceremonial garb. At Sae’s side stood the prime minister, ancient and regal, holding a scroll open with both hands like it was scripture.

“Sae-niichan,” Rin said, barely more than breath. The name fell from his mouth like a prayer and a curse.

The guards still did not move.

His hands curled into fists, arms heavy from the sword he had just sheathed not long ago. Every muscle in him begged to fight, but there was nothing to swing at here. No enemy charging at him. Just rows of brothers in arms who now called him traitor by silence alone.

It wasn’t until the prime minister began to speak that Rin truly understood.

“By decree of His Imperial Majesty,” the prime minister’s voice rang out, clear and cold through the snowfall, “Second Prince Itoshi Rin is hereby stripped of all military command and titles. For inciting unrest, for overreaching authority, for posing threat to national harmony—”

Rin’s heart stopped.

“—he is to be detained until further judgment, and if proven guilty by celestial alignment, executed at dawn.”

The wind howled. The snow kept falling.

And Rin did not move.

He couldn’t—not because of the decree, nor the guards, nor the weight of war on his shoulders.

But because of Sae.

Because his brother sat on the throne like a doll dressed in brocade. Still. Silent. His face unreadable, gaze glassy. A man carved out of duty.

Rin stepped forward once.

And Sae didn’t even look at him.

That, more than anything, made something inside Rin splinter.

He could have fought the guards. Could have broken ranks and stormed the steps like he had stormed enemy fortresses a hundred times before. But what did it matter, if Sae—his brother, his reason—didn’t even blink?

The last time he’d seen Sae, he had still smiled.

Tiredly. Rarely. But there had still been a glimmer of him—something human, something soft, hidden beneath layers of protocol. Rin remembered his hands, still calloused from swordplay despite the imperial oils. His voice, always sharp, but capable of warmth when no one else was listening.

But now—now, Sae looked like a corpse propped up in gold.

And Rin… Rin could only stare.

In the corner of the hall, hidden behind folded screens, a group of servants and court scribes stood watching. Among them was Meguru.

He had dropped the scroll he’d been holding the moment he saw Rin at the gates. His hand flew to his mouth, as if to catch the sob that nearly escaped. But the sound still clawed at his throat. His shoulders shook as he bit down against it, chest tightening with every breath.

He hadn’t seen Rin in months—not since the last hurried letter from the frontlines, where ink ran wild over the parchment as if written mid-battle. He had painted Rin’s victories. Had painted Rin’s fire, his fury, his impossible eyes. He had watched the ministers hang those portraits like trophies.

And now they were going to throw him away.

Meguru could feel it, in the way no one bowed to the general. In the way the guards’ hands didn’t tremble, not even a little. In the way the prime minister didn’t hesitate as he rolled the decree back up, as if justice had been done.

The silence in the hall pressed down like a weight.

Still, Rin did not look away from Sae.

And Sae—Sae didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.

The snow clung to Rin’s lashes now. His lips parted, then closed again. A thousand words unsaid, a thousand years of loyalty undone in a single moment.

“I fought for you,” he whispered, more to himself than to anyone.

The prime minister gestured.

The guards closed in.

Rin didn’t resist.

Meguru gasped silently, tears breaking free even as he bowed his head to hide them. His hands gripped the fabric of his sleeves so tightly they shook.

He watched as Rin, bloodstained and brilliant and broken, was led away from the palace steps like a criminal.

And Sae who had once laughed beside his brother under plum blossoms sat still as stone on the throne.

The snow did not stop falling.

And Meguru thought, as the gates closed, that he had just witnessed the death of something far more sacred than a prince.

He had watched love die.

And no one in the empire mourned it but him.

The snow had not stopped falling since morning.

Fat, pale flakes drifted from the sky like ash, clinging to cloaks, to lashes, to the rough stone beneath Rin’s knees.  He knelt alone at the center, bound by ropes that dug into his wrists. His armor was torn, scorched, still dark with dried blood, hung loose on his shoulders.

“Treason,” the Prime Minister had said, reading from a curled scroll with the Emperor’s seal. “A threat to the stability of the realm. The general has forsaken imperial command.”

Rin hadn’t spoken. His voice was dust. His fists clenched, the ropes pulling tighter. He looked past the guards, past the banners, up to the raised platform above the square.

There, seated beneath the imperial canopy, was Sae.

His brother.

Clad in white robes, untouched by the cold. Crown heavy on his brow. He looked smaller now—smaller than Rin remembered. The way a statue looked smaller the closer you stood. His eyes were dull, glassy. His posture perfect.

A puppet. Far too poisoned 

He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Not even as Rin was dragged forward, forced to kneel where all could see. Not even as the Prime Minister raised his voice for the crowd, declaring justice. Order. Peace. The Emperor’s will.

Meguru stood at the edge of the steps, hidden behind the fold of silk where the servants waited. He gripped the edge of his sleeves so hard his knuckles turned white, lips trembling. He wasn’t supposed to be here. No painter was. But Meguru had begged. Pleaded. He didn’t know what he thought he could do, but he knew he had to see.

He had to see Rin.

Even if Rin couldn’t see him.

Even if Rin’s head never lifted, eyes never met his.

He had to witness.

Because someone had to remember.

The executioner stepped forward. The snow thickened.

The world was so quiet.

Rin exhaled slowly. His breath came out in a pale cloud, then disappeared.

He didn't look at the crowd. Didn't look at the sky.

He looked at Sae.

And something inside him cracked, one last time.

It wasn’t the decree that hurt. It wasn’t the accusation, nor the blade. It was the way Sae looked back at him—and didn’t see him.

The boy who used to run barefoot in summer rain.

The boy who once pulled Rin from a river when he couldn’t swim.

The brother who smiled like sunlight, who snuck him sweets from the kitchen, who held his hand under festival fireworks.

Gone.

And maybe Rin should have known.

Maybe he should have stayed. Fought for Sae from the inside. Held his hand tighter when their parents died. Protected him when the court leaned in with its poison-tipped fangs. Maybe it was cowardice that had sent him to the frontlines, telling himself he was serving the empire—when truly, he couldn’t bear to watch Sae rot from within.

“I’m sorry,” Rin whispered. The wind took the words away. “I should’ve stayed. I should’ve fought harder.”

He didn’t know if Sae heard. If he could still hear anything at all.

But in his final moment, Rin didn’t wish for revenge. Not for salvation, nor justice. He wished for something gentler. Smaller. Something that might’ve saved them long ago.

He wished for another life.

A quiet one. Where two brothers could grow up in a home untouched by gold or blood. Where love wasn’t currency. Where power meant nothing, and silence never stole what bloomed freely between them.

He wished for a world where Sae could be loved—not for his crown, not for his name, but for his heart. Where Rin could laugh without guilt. Smile without breaking. Breathe without weight.

A house. A garden. A family. Not built on duty. Not forged by war.

He wished for someone who would love Sae like he deserved. Someone who would hold him when he was tired. Someone who would see past the throne and touch the boy beneath it.

He wished for someone who would love Rin, even when he failed. Even when he ran.

Just two people, loved. Not as weapons. Not as tools. Just as they were.

He closed his eyes.

And in the darkness, he saw it—brighter than firelight, clearer than any battlefield.

Two boys, barefoot in a field of flowers. One with hair like flame, the other like night. Laughing. Shouting. Racing the wind.

Their hands met in the sunlight. Their voices echoed across the hills.

Happy. Free.

No palace. No war. Just them.

Rin smiled.

The blade fell. Everyone gasped. Snow beneath him turn red.

Meguru did not scream. He couldn’t.

His hands flew to his mouth as his knees gave out, his whole body shaking with the force of a grief too sharp to make sound. A sob caught in his throat like a knife, breath stuttering in short, broken bursts as the snow swallowed the square in silence.

No one else moved. No one dared.

The Emperor did not flinch. Only turned his head—just slightly.

And Meguru saw it.

For a single, fleeting second, past the crown and the cold and the cruelty—he saw a boy. Not a ruler. Not a tyrant. Just a boy who had once had a brother.

Then the moment vanished.

The guards bowed. The decree was sealed. The scroll burned. And the name Itoshi Rin was never spoken in court again.

But Meguru remembered.

He always would.

Even when his hands trembled too much to paint. Even when his portraits grew colder, emptier, void of the warmth that once made them sing. Even when his name faded from memory, just another court painter lost to time. 

He would remember.

The man who dared to love his brother more than the crown. The man who smiled like he didn’t belong in this world. The man who whispered apologies into the wind, hoping they might reach the one he couldn’t save.

.

.

When the empire betrayed General Rin, there were no trumpets to mark his fall.

No temple bells to honor the man who carved peace from chaos, who bled so the imperial banners could fly clean and white over scorched provinces. There was no mourning. No shrine. No day of silence.

Except for one. Meguru refused to let Rin vanish.

He did not weep in the open. No tears to water the court floor, no grand defiance. He had no power for such things. But in the quiet, in the shadows where forgotten servants passed, he painted.

He painted Rin a hundred times over.

Sometimes in armor, snow in his hair. Sometimes in softer robes, eyes lowered like he might be listening. Sometimes he painted only his hands—those calloused, roughened fingers that had brushed blood from Meguru’s cheek once when he’d fallen in the hall. Other times, he only painted his back, as he remembered it best, walking away from the palace, always walking away.

He hid the paintings beneath floorboards, behind sliding screens, in unused storerooms and the pages of scrolls. No one noticed. No one cared. The court had forgotten Rin with startling ease, like he had been a fever dream now cured.

Only Meguru whispered, “I remember you,” each time he picked up the brush. “I always will.”

The emperor no longer ruled.

He remained in his chambers, pale as wax, lying on silken futons like a doll left out in the snow. His robes remained pristine only because attendants changed them twice a day. His hair, once carefully styled, fell limp around his face. The emperor did not speak anymore unless prompted. And even then, it was usually nonsense. Or nothing at all.

Sometimes, Meguru passed by and heard him muttering. Sometimes screaming.

Other days, there was only silence, like the soul inside had frozen and wouldn’t thaw.

The Prime Minister sat in court now. His nephews and cousins filled the military ranks, now that Rin’s faction had been eliminated. Everything in the palace gleamed and glittered like gold leaf on the outside. But Meguru knew.

This was a mausoleum.

He watched the emperor with a quiet ache. Sae blinked at the ceiling like he didn’t know what world he was in. When Meguru knelt by his side and offered him a sketch of plum blossoms, Sae only stared through him.

The palace had fallen into something worse than silence. Not mourning. Not prayer. Just indifference. The emperor no longer held court. The prime minister now ruled with his family seated high like rot in a golden tree. No one visited the western wing, where the emperor’s chambers lay. Too haunted. Too empty. Or too disturbing.

But Meguru still did.

He still brought warm rice porridge and fresh ink. Still wiped the windows when frost crept in. Still changed the linens, carefully folding the old ones and replacing them with soft cotton warmed by sun. Still coaxed Sae to speak—on the days when Sae curled into himself like a child, knees pulled to chest beneath imperial silk, whispering fragments of dreams that made no sense.

There were days when Sae flinched at his reflection.

As if the face in the mirror wasn’t his own. As if the skin belonged to someone else, someone long dead. As if he still heard Rin screaming in the snow.

And on those days, Meguru would sit beside him without asking permission. He would brush Sae’s hair with a gentle hand, untangling knots as if each strand could carry pain away. As if the poison could be combed out. As if madness could be quieted by the rhythm of care.

He would whisper, over and over, so soft that sometimes even he didn’t hear himself. “I remember him too.”

But Meguru couldn’t paint anymore. Not publicly.

He had refused every new commission. Declined with bowed head, with hands folded, with polite lies about fatigue or illness. The truth was simpler. He couldn’t raise a brush without seeing Rin’s face—framed by snow, touched by red frost. Couldn’t hold a line steady without remembering how Rin’s eyes had softened, finally, at the end. How they had looked at him, not as a soldier or as a court dog, but just as Meguru.

The sound still lived in his bones: the crack of steel, the thud of justice wrapped in cruelty. The way his scream never quite left his throat. The way his sob broke in silence—raw, unformed.

No one wanted to hear Rin’s name anymore. Even Sae had stopped saying it aloud.

But Meguru remembered. And that was enough.

Months passed and the court did not care about the Emperor still. Not truly.

They sent offerings during seasonal rites out of habit. Lacquered trays of plum wine. Perfumed silks still folded in ceremonial creases. Dancers with bells at their ankles bowed before an empty throne while the Prime Minister offered rehearsed blessings in Sae’s name.

The Emperor never attended. He had not spoken a full sentence in months. The western wing of the palace was all but forgotten. No one walked there but servants. No sound echoed from within except the soft thud of pacing feet, the faint rattle of porcelain, the eerie murmur of breath.

It was like drowning in memory. And no one stopped Meguru from entering. Why would they?

He wasn’t a threat. A painter with no title. No lineage. No allies. No ambitions. No voice in court. No name worth remembering.

He was just another pair of hands.

Hands to brew calming tea. Hands to fetch herbs from the apothecary when Sae refused to eat. Hands to clean the black ink that stained the floor after another inkwell shattered against the wall.

Too much poison ran through Sae’s blood—old, slow, deliberate. The kind that didn’t kill the body but emptied the mind. It rotted his memory, his voice, his will.

But Meguru stayed. Like a ghost beside a ghost.

He stayed because he remembered.

And because someone had to.

Hands to hold Sae when the tremors came. No one saw him.

No one cared.

Except one day, someone did notice.

The Prime Minister had never liked Meguru. Not from the beginning. Too soft-spoken to be easily controlled. Too present. Too alive in the cold palace of an emperor they all quietly expected to stay dead inside.

The painter had no power. No name. No family. But he had presence, and that was dangerous enough.

And when a young attendant from the eastern hall—ambitious, sharp-eyed, desperate to climb—whispered that the court painter had once been seen weeping in the snow after General Rin’s execution, the Prime Minister’s interest sharpened.

Curious.

Curious enough to ask questions. Curious enough to follow. Curious enough to order a quiet search.

Just to be sure.

Meguru wasn’t in his quarters when they came.

He was with Sae, as he always was. Kneeling beside the Emperor’s couch, spooning warm rice porridge slowly past lips that barely moved. Singing old lullabies under his breath—fragments of childhood songs, too soft and too broken for memory to hold properly. The tune wandered, notes faltering with grief he didn’t show.

Sae did not speak that day. He barely blinked. But he opened his mouth when Meguru lifted the spoon. That was something.

When Meguru returned to his tiny room in the outer quarters, the door was already open.

He stopped in the threshold.

The air was still.

And then he saw it.

His sketches, scattered across the floor like autumn leaves—torn parchment, broken charcoal sticks, shattered pigment jars bleeding color onto the wood. And in the center of the mess, unmistakable and unhidden now: his secret.

Hundreds of portraits of Rin.

Laid bare.

Some were unfinished—just the curve of a cheekbone, the shadow of a collar. Some were masterfully rendered, detailed with aching precision: the slight furrow in Rin’s brow, the way his mouth twitched when he was lost in thought, the exact tilt of his shoulders when he stood with his hands behind his back.

Others were imagined.

Rin by a riverbank, head tilted back to the sky. Rin under a canopy of autumn trees, hair catching golden light. Rin without armor, without burden—smiling.

Smiling like he had before the war.

Every version Meguru remembered. Every version Meguru missed.

They were all taken.

By evening, he was dragged before the court.

He did not resist.

He didn’t scream or fight. His wrists were bound with rope, not chains—he wasn’t dangerous enough for iron. They led him into the marble hall like a servant summoned to answer for a broken plate.

The chamber was colder than usual. Or perhaps Meguru simply felt colder.

The Prime Minister stood at the dais, resplendent in gold-trimmed robes, his expression a masterwork of condescension.

He didn’t raise his voice.

He didn’t need to.

A smile curled at his mouth as he turned to the assembled nobles.

"A traitor," he said, voice smooth and echoing off the marble pillars. "A seditionist attempting to resurrect a criminal through paint—and worse, attempting to feed that propaganda to His Majesty’s fragile mind.”

The courtiers gasped in unison, too trained not to.

The Prime Minister let the silence stretch.

“Look at this obsession. This madness. Hundreds of images of a condemned man. A general who defied imperial command, whose blade turned not only on our enemies, but on our traditions, our future. And this painter—this boy—dares to immortalize him? What is this, if not treason?"

Meguru said nothing.

He looked past the Prime Minister, past the nobles, past the guards. His gaze stopped on the only person who mattered.

Sae.

The Emperor sat slightly elevated, dressed in ceremonial white. His posture perfect. His long hair brushed and pinned with pearl combs. Eyes distant. Hollow.

They called it grace.

But Meguru saw resignation.

Sae’s hands lay folded in his lap. His mouth was slack. His pupils didn’t seem to focus.

He looked like a painting himself—unfinished.

“Your Majesty,” the Prime Minister said with theatrical reverence, gesturing toward Meguru with one arm and toward the seized drawings with the other. “We will burn the paintings. And this man, if you allow it.”

The words hung in the air like incense smoke.

No one spoke.

No one moved.

The only sound was the soft crackle of the braziers, flames dancing in silver bowls along the walls.

And then the Emperor blinked.

His lips parted, just a little. A breath escaped him. A sliver of movement. A flicker of something ancient behind his eyes.

And for the smallest moment—for a heartbeat—

Meguru believed he would speak.

He believed that Sae would lift his head and remember.
Remember Rin. Remember the boy with paint-stained fingers who stayed. Remember everything.

But Sae only looked down.

His lashes lowered. His mouth closed again. His hands remained still.

And that was all it took. The sentence was passed. Meguru closed his eyes.

He did not cry.

Not when they dragged him back through the cold halls. Not when the court turned their gazes away from him, as if shame were contagious. Not even when the Prime Minister’s steward ordered his hands bound tighter, his cell locked in silence.

He had painted the truth. And truth, in this palace, was always a crime.

But still—

Still, as they pulled him away, Meguru tilted his head up. Just a little.

He thought of Rin. Rin with blood on his cheek and fire behind his eyes. Rin's smiles, in chrysanthemum hall, that forest, before the blade came down. Rin standing alone in the snow, waiting for no one.

He had remembered. And Meguru would, too.

No matter what they burned.

That night, Meguru waited in his cell with his hands shaking. Not from fear. But from the cold absence that now lived in him. The guards had called him delusional. Said Rin was a ghost no one wanted. Said the emperor had forgotten him long ago.

But Meguru hadn't.

They had taken every painting. Every sketch, every memory he had clawed back from silence. Every line of Rin’s mouth, every tilt of his head, every impossible softness he had hidden in ink and paper. Burned. Ashes now. As if Rin had never lived. 

Meguru curled forward with a quiet, dry sound that wasn’t crying, but too human to be silence. Then he did something simple, something desperate: he bit down on his own sleeve and tore a piece free with his teeth. The fabric ripped, jagged and wet with spit. He pressed it to the ground, smoothed it flat with his trembling fingers.

Then, without pause, he lifted his right hand to his mouth and bit.

Hard. His teeth broke skin. Blood welled fast, thick and red, dripping to his palm like ink.

He didn’t flinch. With one finger—his own blood still warm on the tip—he began to draw.

The lines were shaky. He had no brush, no charcoal, no guidance but memory. But Meguru didn’t need perfection. He needed truth. He needed to see Rin again. To remember. To carve him into the world one last time before it all ended.

A sharp jaw. Long lashes. Hair windblown. Eyes like dusk. He started with the eyes. Always the eyes. He remembered the exact shade of them when Rin looked at him—not the general, not the weapon, but Rin. The boy who had once touched his hair like it was the most fragile thing he’d ever seen. The boy who had turned, in the end, not to Sae, not to the court, but to him.

He kept painting.

His blood smeared too fast. It dried too quickly. He bit another finger. He used his palm. He pressed his own skin to the cloth when the tips of his fingers became too numb. There was no pain. Only urgency. Only the quiet panic of memory slipping away.

He didn’t think about death.

Didn’t think about the guards or the flames waiting above.

He just didn’t want to forget.

Didn’t want Rin to disappear with the rest of him.

So he painted until the world blurred. Until his body swayed and the cloth was stained dark. Until Rin’s face stared back at him from the stone floor—not perfect, not whole, but real.

Meguru looked at it and whispered, lips cracked, “There you are.”

And for the first time in days, he smiled.

When the door creaked open just before dawn, Meguru thought it was his executioner. He didn’t lift his head, just curled tighter around the cloth on the floor—still damp, still stained with the last of his blood. He had nothing left to give. No more fight. No more paint.

But it wasn’t the guards. It wasn’t fire or the sharp bark of orders.

It was Sae.

He stepped in quietly, wearing no crown, no ceremonial armor. Just a dark cloak dusted with frost and knuckles so pale they looked carved from bone. For a moment, Meguru couldn’t speak.

Sae’s gaze flickered once, and he said, hoarse and quick, “Get up.”

Meguru blinked. “What—”

“Now.”

There was no time for questions.

They ran. Sae pulled him through the narrow service tunnels under the palace, where the walls breathed cold and the air smelled of old stone and secrets. They slipped past slumbering guards, past courtyards sealed in snow, past the mausoleum garden where the trees still remembered spring, roots curled around forgotten names.

Sae never looked back. Not once.

Even when Meguru tripped. Even when his breath came ragged and his body screamed. Sae dragged him forward with a strength Meguru didn’t know he still had.

It wasn’t until they reached the edge of the forest—just beyond the crumbling outer wall, where the sky was bleeding pink with morning—that Meguru finally grabbed his wrist.

“Why?” he panted. “Why now?”

Sae didn’t turn to him. He stared out at the horizon like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

“I remembered his face today,” he said. His voice cracked. “Because of your painting.”

Meguru didn’t ask whose. He didn’t have to.

Sae pressed something into his palm—soft, thin, worn at the edges. A folded piece of parchment. Meguru opened it with trembling fingers.

Rin. A portrait, one of the first Meguru had ever painted. Clumsy, tender, young. Eyes that looked straight through him. The sketch he thought he had lost years ago.

“The only one I could steal,” Sae said, and now he did look at Meguru. Just once. Just long enough to be real. “Run. And don’t come back.”

Meguru’s hands clenched. “But—”

“I’m not coming with you.”

“No.” Meguru’s voice broke. “You can’t stay here. They’ll—”

“I’m already dead,” Sae said. Calm. Final. “But you’re not. So go. Live.”

Meguru shook his head, tears stinging his eyes, but Sae stepped back into the shadows of the trees.

“Remember him for me,” he said.

And then he was gone.

The sketch trembled in Meguru’s hands. He held it to his chest like a prayer, then turned.

And ran.

He ran until his lungs burned and his vision blurred. Until the palace was a speck swallowed by trees and ash. He ran with the rain washing the dirt from his face, with the sketch clutched to his chest like a second heart.

The forest greeted him like a second heartbeat, its dark branches outstretched like arms. Rain had returned. A quiet drizzle this time. It kissed the bruises on his face, mingled with the sweat dripping from his temple, soaked the thin fabric of his robes until they clung to his body like grief. His hands gripped tightly the only thing that mattered: a rolled painting, bound with trembling fingers, hidden beneath his coat. The last portrait. The final one Sae had kept hidden away, one Meguru never thought he’d see again.

Rin. Smiling, almost.

He didn’t have time to wonder if it was mercy or madness that led Sae to give it to him.

But then the soldiers were close. Their hounds barked like thunder. And Meguru wasn’t a fighter—just a painter. Just a servant. Just someone who had loved too deeply and remembered too stubbornly. But apparently, that was enough to be called traitor now.

Meguru didn’t resist. He just ran.

Arrows sang behind him, sharp whistles in the wind. One grazed his cheek. Another thudded into a tree beside him. The third he felt it, the cruel sting, buried deep into his shoulder. His breath caught in his throat as he stumbled forward, lightheaded, the forest spinning.

He couldn’t stop. Couldn’t.

He pressed the portrait tighter to his chest and forced his legs to keep moving.

Then the cliff came.

He didn’t see it until too late until the earth crumbled beneath his feet, and he slipped with a cry that was half agony, half release. The fall felt endless. Rain rushing past him. Wind shrieking like ghosts. The world tipped upside down and everything blurred—until he struck the ground.

Or, rather, the flowers.

The field had always been a myth. The one from his childhood stories—the hidden valley where the forgotten slept. The one place the capital couldn’t touch. He landed among gold and white blooms, their petals blooming even in the cold, as if death had never known their names.

Meguru lay still.

Blood soaked the grass. His vision dimmed at the edges. The arrow still jutted from his back like a flag. But his fingers refused to let go of the painting. Even now.

He blinked through the haze of pain. Forced his eyes open one last time.

Rin stared back at him.

Not the real Rin—not anymore. Just paint and brush, frozen on canvas. But still, those eyes. That quiet sorrow. That hidden kindness. That unspoken longing they never had the time, the right, the lives to name.

Meguru smiled.

“I want to love you properly in the next life.”

His trembling hand lifted, fingertips brushing against the painted cheek as if it could warm him.

“Every piece of you… that I ever or never paint…”

The rain began to fall again, gentler this time. Like the sky didn’t want to hurt anymore. Like it was mourning too.

“I hope you love others too… and me too…” A soft laugh escaped him, cracked and barely there. “And a life like that… it’s not that bad, is it…?”

He closed his eyes.

And the wind quieted.

The flower field once bright with color, now muted by dusk and rain and seemed to lean toward him, petals brushing his limbs like lullabies. Bees didn’t hum, but the silence was warm, not empty. The earth received him tenderly, not like a grave, but a cradle.

The blood washed away slowly, absorbed by roots and rain, but the love stayed. It soaked into the ground like promise. Like memory. Like prayer.

No one found his body. No one came looking.

The lowly painter and and the General had been forgotten by the court, but not by the world.

The wind remembered their name. The flowers curled around him in bloom each spring. The trees grew taller beside his bones.

Still watching. Still waiting.

Still loved.