Work Text:
one
There’s nothing more beautiful than the halls of Akatsuka, they say, whispered amongst the graveyard tapestries of warrior kings. Hundreds of hearts lie housed under its roof, so vast it seemed the world itself is restrained beneath those domed murals, held up by trunks of marble with grooves wide enough to contain the fist of a small child.
Karamatsu spreads out his fingers against the cool stone as an infant, marking each one for his own. As a child, he crawls up the silver chairs and slides down seas of billowing velvet. There’s not a step across the floor he doesn’t take, slipping along in his decorated robes. His eyes take in all the light melting through endless glass, and they sparkle with wealth and privilege, bright enough to burn. Everything he touches turns to gold; the whims of a prince ruling over the laws of common sense. On his first morning out of the womb, he reaches up to Osomatsu, grasps his cheek tenderly as any gentleman of the court.
“He knows his brother already,” the nurses coo, but Osomatsu knows better the sort of selfish desire bred into princes. And he holds out his own hand, stretches it across Karamatsu’s tiny skull. His palm alone is large enough to suffocate, the pads of his fingers hovering over Karamatsu’s dark eyes.
Osomatsu never scouts the palace in search of souls to conquer. He has, from the moment Karamatsu is born, already decided which treasure he wants.
By the time Karamatsu is old enough to question the servants’ attention to his needs, Osomatsu has found several hundred answers and six-thousand reasons why further questions are meaningless.
“King’s orders,” he says, a smile borne of secret knowledge, and Karamatsu cocks his head to the side, not understanding.
“I’m not the king, though,” he argues, proof of his immaturity.
“You will be,” Osomatsu promises. What’s in a name, anyway? When Osomatsu takes the throne, Karamatsu will have his sceptre, and his people, and his heart. He'll have the whole kingdom, all because he looked at Osomatsu that day, years ago, and claimed him in full. “Trust me.”
The king’s orders are absolute.
“Then why?”
Fists clenched, head down. Four digits of a year burnt into the enormous tapestry in in north wing, filling the blank space under their father’s name. It isn’t the first time Karamatsu’s reaction has been more in line with the peasants who fill the streets with their sorrow than the nobles with their empty condolences. Karamatsu’s eyes are red and watery, his voice hoarse from the strangled cries he sobbed into Osomatsu’s nightgown that morning.
Osomatsu steps in and reaches out, the way he’s only ever treated one person. Covers Karamatsu’s eyes with hands cold as ice, rests there to still the trembling in his fingers. There’s blood on his teeth from his father’s chalice, a sickness in his stomach from the fearful sip he had taken in secret. He can’t feel anything when he licks himself clean. "Everything will be fine," he enunciates carefully, tongue thick and numb.
Everything will be fine, he tells himself, two months later, the blood of a nobleman pooling across the polished grounds. The council watch on with equal amounts spite and terror, but few of them are skilled with a blade, and those that are have had theirs confiscated outside. The smiles they summon as they leave are so different from Karamatsu’s - far less beautiful - and it’s this that gives him the strength to smile back over the roil of his gut. He feels too much now that he shouldn't, his gut lurching over as he takes in the quivering hum of fear around him.
It’s better this way, Osomatsu thinks, as a girl he had attended classes with stumbles in her curtsy. She’s pretty, startlingly so, but she hadn’t held his hand for comfort when the funeral cart came for his father. His fractured ribs couldn't blame her for their misfortune - she wasn't the one who had crooned at their prey on their first hunting expedition, words so painful Osomatsu had slipped off his steed.
Really, there had never been a choice to make. He sees Karamatsu that night at dinner, waxing poetic about his tutor, and Osomatsu forgets completely about the pungent stink of blood coming from their steak, the ease with which his knife cuts through the flesh.
"I'll give you one last chance to speak before the execution."
Blades only get sharper over the years. The guillotine is made for men without the courage to swing a sword themselves. It won’t hesitate over his shoulder, won’t struggle to slice through the bone (he hopes). He wonders whether he’ll still feel the pain. His chest is already hollow, his heart spilling over at the sight of Karamatsu here before him at last. “I missed you so much.” His tongue betrays him now, the words slipping out before he can reign them in. He can’t see Karamatsu clearly, that face he had once mapped every inch of. “Your nii-chan was so lonely.”
The stilted rhythm of shaking breath. Is Karamatsu crying? He would be.
“You were so kind and stupid when you were a kid.” He can almost hear Karamatsu again, hands splayed out over a crushed grasshopper as if he can will it back to life. King’s orders, Karamatsu had begged, and Osomatsu had searched through the night for its twin so he could breathe it back to life when Karamatsu woke. His empty-headed brother had accepted the gift with foolish trust, then promptly forgotten the entire incident. This is a presumption - Karamatsu had never brought up a similar subject again. “I always tried to protect you,” Osomatsu says. Perhaps Karamatsu had learnt the truth about lifespans from the tutor Osomatsu had hired. Perhaps he had remained innocent right until their father’s death.
At the very least, something had stopped him from asking the same favour for their father, turned his please into why. Osomatsu would never be able to tell him, but it seems Karamatsu doesn't need his answers anymore, regardless.
“Since when did you become so big and strong?” he wonders. He laughs, bitterly, to think that he’s missed this transformation, too. He’s already missed so much over the past year, alone in the castle without Karamatsu’s gentle hands to hold in his weaker hours, and he will miss far more after this.
He had wanted to see Karamatsu happy, travelling the world like he had always spoken about. Spreading his wings in a world where Osomatsu didn’t have to worry about the very guards he had posted outside his brother’s room. Osomatsu doesn’t care much for stories of the afterlife; all he knows is the relief he had felt each time a traitor was slain, knowing that there was one less enemy hiding in wait for them. Death, to him, is permanent.
It's better this way. He doesn't regret his actions - whatever the cost, Karamatsu is alive.
“Thank goodness you can live on.”
Karamatsu looks more at home in unwashed cloth and the grime of the city than he ever had in artificial blue, shut away so far from the skies he longed to explore. It's been a year since he had let go of Osomatsu's hand for good - perhaps it's time for Osomatsu to stop holding it out. So as long as Karamatsu continues to grow, Osomatsu has no cause to worry, not for whatever brief eternity lies between him and the guillotine. If he could give one final order…
“Stay strong, Karamatsu.”
Karamatsu shuts his eyes. You’re not the king anymore.
two
The royal butcher has to employ three extra hands to keep up with the princeling’s carnivorous appetite; were it necessary, Osomatsu would have written a library of texts specifying how exactly Karamatsu likes his meat. Fortunately for the kitchen staff, their lord is broad-minded in his tastes, swallowing down his meals with the brightest of smiles. He’s a messy eater, too enthusiastic to be proper, and when he looks up from his plate there is invariably a stream of juice running down to his chin.
Their kitchen is a slaughterhouse, a conveyor belt of rotting bones, but no-one would know it from the bright shine in Karamatsu’s eyes. The royal hunting trips, once famed for their vicious kills, soon stop being profitable when Karamatsu starts putting food pellets into his rifles, waving banners of love instead of the regular hunting flags. With Osomatsu’s permission, they replace the hunting horn with a foreign lute of some kind; Karamatsu sings ballads the whole way into the woods and out again, and the next day Osomatsu’s abdomen is as sore as his thighs.
Karamatsu only learns the value of blood when he’s watching his comrades bleed out on the battlefield. They’re short on medical supplies, and Ichimatsu can only do so much with the scraps of cloth they do have. The revolutionary army is by and large an assembly of common folk; their sponsors among the nobles are tight with their offerings, for reasons Karamatsu can’t comprehend, and he has never dealt with this much need before.
In the castle, he had never lacked for anything. Osomatsu had a talent for predicting his whims before he even put voice to them, and nothing was an impossible request. Once, Karamatsu had pleaded for the life of a grasshopper, and had his wish granted the very next morning. But Osomatsu had walked around like death itself that day, stumbling on his way to the throne room, and Karamatsu had sworn to never again make an unreasonable request of him.
Now, hunger grips him by the throat, endless screams for peace, for wealth, for justice, for that man to stay conscious and stop bleeding all over the grass, damn it, don't you dare die on me. He would bare his veins for his brothers-in-arms in a heartbeat, but the thought of a successful transfusions is laughable with the tools they have. Not for the first time, Karamatsu is confronted by how much of himself he has to give, and how little he can.
Unable to ask for their father back, he had asked for a reason.
For lack of a reason, he had asked to help.
Forbidden to help, he had asked for knowledge.
Given knowledge, he had regretted ever asking anything at all.
Karamatsu shakes his head at the wave of confusion that runs through him whenever he thinks about the tyrant king. Osomatsu had never been one to ponder the whys in any great detail, so sure of himself the only answer he ever needed was I am the king.
Once, Karamatsu had thought that was something to long for. He had never wanted to be king himself, per se, but he had wanted, so badly, to see his brother as he ruled, to see him in his royal attire with sceptre in hand. He had been proud to imagine Osomatsu ruling over the land, confident that this would be the Golden Age of their line.
The first time he had picked up the papers scattered around the garden, he had thought them a prank in poor taste. He had shown them to Osomatsu later, raved passionately about the crude nature of contemporary comedy. Osomatsu had smiled, laughed along with him, and taken the papers away to be incinerated in the furnace. That was the end of the joke.
But the papers kept on printing. The letters never stopped coming. And the more Karamatsu read about the execution of a man who had served closely with his father, about the beating of a girl who had dared spit on Osomatsu in the streets, the less he felt he knew, about the world, the palace, his own flesh and blood.
About Osomatsu.
Blood runs thicker than water, his tutor had told him, tracing the lines of their family tree down the tapestry. “You were born with the right to rule.”
Then Osomatsu too, Karamatsu had inferred. The stories told him a ruler should be kind and just; the papers told him a ruler should be fair and equitable. His heart told him Osomatsu was a hero, but the papers told him that Osomatsu was cruel, and the stories that villains are masters of disguise.
Surely, Karamatsu had thought, villains have no right to rule. He believes that through the long campaign, through the rumours of corruption in their sponsors and the deception of their first leaders. He tells himself to believe when they lead Osomatsu to his cell, a rope around his neck and a shirt tied fast around his wrists. He tells himself that justice is righteousness, and that this must be both.
But when he sees Osomatsu the night before the execution, traces the bruises under his eyes and around his torso, Karamatsu couldn’t care less about justice.
“You brought this on yourself,” he tells Osomatsu’s sleeping figure. His voice is too weak to be his, too anguished to come from the leader of the revolution. He repeats the words like a prayer, over and over, until the blockage in his throat dissolves and he can finally breathe again. “I told you – ”
He told himself not to care.
“Just tell me why.”
It’s nothing more than a whisper, but it betrays him still, because for all his bravado, he still loves Osomatsu as fiercely as he had when they were children.
“Tell me why,” he begs. Perhaps then he can finally cut this tie that threatens to wring his heart at night.
Or perhaps, the traitor in him whispers, it won’t be too late.
three
“I still love you, Karamatsu.”
Osomatsu’s final public speech is laughable in its contents. It's full of the wrong sort of confessions, laced with all the wrong emotions. There’s nothing about the suffering of the people, or acknowledgement of the innocent who have perished during Osomatsu’s reign. There’s no apology, nor an offering to make amends, and Karamatsu is stupid, stupid for even hoping.
He pushes his way through the crowd, furious. He can feel their eyes on him, apprehensive, perhaps even pitying. To be the brother to this kind of king –
It makes him sick.
Osomatsu stretches his arms out against the curtains. He’s but a shadow in the sunlight, a darkness waiting to be extinguished. He smiles when he sees Karamatsu move, licking his lips, and if Karamatsu didn’t know better he would swear Osomatsu was nervous. “If you’ll just come back to me, I’ll accept you.”
Any hesitation Karamatsu has is extinguished by Osomatsu’s words. Osomatsu has been telling him the same thing for months, but this is the most forthright he has ever been. His solicitations have lost their complexity over time and rejection. Come back.
And to what?
To a home-turned-prison?
To hallways deaf to the cries of its people?
To a meeting chamber that doubles as an execution room in broad daylight?
To a brother who demands trust, yet speaks only lies?
Osomatsu’s supporters have been draining away by the hour, sensing the turn of the tides. The nobles have mostly rallied around Karamatsu, deriving courage from his example to openly defy Osomatsu.
He takes a deep breath and looks straight at the man upon whom his entire world had once rested. This kingdom, too, had once been in Osomatsu’s hands, and the result had been poverty, corruption, war. Now, the people have risen up in defence of their livelihoods; the nobles have fought back for their rights. Osomatsu has no advisors by his side anymore, the bare minimum of guards necessary to ensure his safety at this speech. They’re so close to their goal.
“You should know you’re not in the position to say that.”
four
Time heals all wounds.
Osomatsu murmurs this to Karamatsu in the aftermath of their father’s passing. Karamatsu barely hears it, screaming at the heavens, at the fates, at Osomatsu, even, for not doing more somehow. In time, when he can smile without wavering, when he can walk the halls without staining his path with tears, he starts to understand.
Then he sees Osomatsu’s blade come down across the neck of an innocent, just as the rumours have said, and the stillness of the body is in stark contrast to the woman Karamatsu had known, the lively nursemaid who had attended to him for years.
He learns, too late, that death is a wound too deep for any healer.
five
People are never who they say they are.
Osomatsu never tells him, but Karamatsu learns this anyway.
(and the one thing he didn't)
His brother leaves nothing behind in the hollow rooms; Karamatsu scours the torn sheets for clues as to where things changed, but the acrid taste of smoke eats at his throat, the once-radiant room darkening to black as the palace burns. He has barely enough time to wrap his handkerchief around his mouth and escape the flames. Outside, the people cry revolution, their victory cheer sending chills through the hearts of the nobles who had supported them for a time. There have been whispers already on the morning of this first peace, talk of unacceptable boldness amongst the peasants.
The noblemen wield words with greater facility than he. In the early days of the campaign, he had allowed those promises to pierce his heart, used them as the cornerstone of his plans. Now, he’s seen his people through nights that seemed endless, waiting for supplies to arrive. He’s witnessed loyalties come and go like the tides, allies fade like water into the air. Two of the dukes will hold court tomorrow to discuss the growing tension; the merchant who had seized Osomatsu will be the guest of honour at an open celebration. It’s no secret that both events will have similar agendas – the people have been brazen since their victory, the rumour mills seeding thoughts of true independence from nobility. They hadn’t needed a thousand horses to overtake a tyrant; their strength of will had carried them through flocks of spears with weathered hide and wood for shields.
And the court speaks of Osomatsu with blatant disrespect now that the threat of his sword has vanished. They call him a coward, a hindrance, a brat, and the populace are worth less to them than their feathered hats and long coats. One man proposes running them through in the marketplace to make a statement – he is met with raucous laughter and whoops of amusement, as if the colour of a person’s robes matter more than the strength of their minds, the tenacity with which they grasp a life far harsher to them than Karamatsu can ever imagine. The original leaders of the resistance are still at large, the whereabouts of a thousand silver pieces still unknown. They leave in their wake at least twelve dead bodies, men with families and children and lovers; men who had dared defend the supplies while the rest had slept unawares. He had abandoned Osomatsu over less, Karamatsu thinks, fingers twisting around the hem of his robe.
His heart still aches at the thought of Osomatsu’s tear-stained face at the very end. He had been smiling, though Karamatsu can’t fathom the reason why, and his final words had been nothing but kind. Regardless of his other crimes, he had played the good brother to the bitter end. The tyrant king is gone, but Karamatsu still sees disorder and dissatisfaction, still tenses when he sleeps. For the first time in a long while, he wonders whether these have more to do with humanity as a whole than Osomatsu personally.
Karamatsu doesn’t plan to take the throne. The people love him, the captive prince, the noble who sacrificed his birthright to join his people. They revel in his tragic narrative - he's a hero in their eyes, but Karamatsu sees the faces of the men he killed, men with families, and children, and lovers. The books tell him heroes have a duty to slay the villains; he had never understood that it would still make him a murderer.
The nobles wish him to succeed as well, though their motives are far less innocent. Duke Yowai wants his daughter seated on the throne without her suffering the repercussions of political decisions as a single queen would, while others seem to think Karamatsu too stupid to defy them.
Karamatsu is tired. He’s tired of the fights, the speeches, the anger that clouds every campsite. He’s spent over a year being furious at one person, and he can barely summon the energy to run from this burning castle, the blazing carpets he had curled his toes into before he could walk. He considers staying, here where he and Osomatsu had built up dreams bigger than their childish vocabularies, where the halls are so large they encircle a world free from violence and politics.
In the end, it's Osomatsu's words that urge him on. Stay strong, Karamatsu. Osomatsu's presence still binds shackles on Karamatsu's feet, forcing him onwards to the door and his people. There's so much that only he can do now, caught between the peerage and the populace. This kingdom is his now, and Karamatsu will not lead it to ruin as Osomatsu had. He had promised them, fresh off the sting of betrayal, that he would help bring them justice, and a gentleman never goes back on his words. He casts one last lingering glance around the sinking room, still searching foolishly for his answers.
It's futile. Osomatsu was never disciplined enough to keep a diary, too careless to keep valuables in his own possession. If there are papers, hidden in the library where Karamatsu hasn't the time to look, he doesn’t find them. If there is a detailed record of Karamatsu’s wishes, scripted neatly in an empty checklist, it burns to ash like the polished wood it sits on. If there is a letter written that holds the answers to all the questions Karamatsu had ever asked and more, it is never sent, because Osomatsu had hoped to keep Karamatsu blind to the taste of betrayal right until his eyes closed for the final time. Whatever secrets Osomatsu had kept, he takes them with him to the grave.
(A poisoned chalice, held up to withered lips.)
(A drop of nightshade, knocked from the hand of a nursemaid.)
(A towering wall, unable to keep out the words of a misinformed crowd.)
(A lonely tyrant, sleeping in a different room.)
Then again, Osomatsu owned few possessions. He only ever wanted one thing – perhaps it’s not so surprising, after all, that it’s the only trace of himself he leaves behind.
OPTIONAL SORT-OF EPILOGUE SCENE BELOW IDK
-
the only ever after that mattered
Karamatsu wakes up. For a brief moment, a streak of colour flashes before his eyes, static images of a world he's never known. There’s a man in tattered clothes who looks like Ichimatsu, a small boy like Todomatsu who dies defending a friend with a wide open smile. There’s a librarian with a thin downturned mouth who burns with the books he holds close to his heart; Choromatsu, his brain supplies, before he’s whisked away to Osomatsu, standing regal and proud in his coronation robes, a gleaming sceptre in his hands and a blinding smile on his lips.
Then the scene fades, and Karamatsu looks at Osomatsu sleeping peacefully on his lap, warm and soft. Wounded once more by societal expectations, weary of the responsibility that comes with being the eldest. He takes Osomatsu’s hand, raises it to his lips just briefly.
“This time, I’ll stay with you.”
And Osomatsu’s hand squeezes his, just once.
I’ll hold you to that.