Work Text:
Something has taken root in her heart without Atsu noticing when. A feeling, a wanting, a desire, that quietly has started to bloom. It takes Jubei’s accusatory tone to shake the realization out of Atsu. She thinks nothing of defending Oyuki in the moment but later, once the others leave for the Oshima Coast and she’s alone once again in her childhood home, Atsu understands. Something’s changed for her.
It reminds Atsu of when she was learning to garden as a child. After she planted her first seeds, she would check on them every day, sometimes multiple times a day, only to be disappointed to find that the dark soil remained barren. Even when the vegetables started to sprout, they didn’t grow nearly fast enough for Atsu (always impatient, something she never grew out of). When she took her complaints to her mother, Atsu was met with a laugh.
“Atsu, my dear. Haven’t you noticed that things change the most when you’re not looking? Like that time you were supposed to be watching the rice, and we ended up eating scorched grains because you had wandered out to watch the wild horses.”
“I had only left for a minute!”
“But it only took a minute for the rice to boil over while you weren’t looking.”
Her mother was right, as always.
At first, Atsu thinks her fondness for Oyuki comes from her resemblance to her mother. That first meeting at the Red Crane Inn, Oyuki’s shamisen stops her dead in her tracks from the first notes. Atsu finds herself much too willing to go along with the stranger’s suggestions, all her usual guardedness disarmed by a husky voice and the sly upturned corner of Oyuki’s mouth. It’s as if she was charmed by the memory of her mother’s song, that mournful melody turning her once again to the daughter at her mother’s knee.
But Oyuki is not her mother. For one, Oyuki’s playing style has a certain elegance where her mother’s was more plain, as straightforward as her personality. Oyuki was difficult to read, where Atsu could always tell what was on her mother’s mind. The similarities between the two fade the more familiar Atsu becomes with her companion.
Oyuki’s confession is what dispels the idea entirely. How could she ever be deceived into thinking that this woman, the Kitsune who watched on complacently as Saito tightened the noose on her mother’s neck, could ever measure up to the woman that raised her?
It’s sickening in the moment. How could she forget that voice? Atsu, still recovering from the throes of Dojun’s poison, is left paralyzed with her rage. Her katana lays uselessly at her side.
Maybe it’s because Oyuki’s story reminds Atsu too much of her own. How else is she supposed to explain why her anger ebbs away so quickly? The orphaned innkeeper's daughter, with no one else to turn to, ends up following a man who becomes a monster. Atsu remembers the early days in the South, scrabbling just to not starve. The her back then could’ve so easily been led astray by the first person willing to lend a helping hand. Desperation, Atsu knows too well, forces you into only bad choices.
But that’s not quite right either. Atsu, from the moment she stepped foot in that old graveyard, was ready to forgive Oyuki. She didn’t understand that at the time, of course. It would mean admitting her quest for vengeance, her life’s work to bring her family peace, was backed by a conviction that was less than ironclad. But the feeling lingered at the periphery, imperceptibly slowing the swing of her blade and sapping her sword arm of its usual furor. It’s a relief to be given a logical reason to sheathe her katana– that Oyuki can help her kill the remaining Yōtei Six – rather than dwell on the growing attachment Atsu has to the former Kitsune, a woman she barely knows.
Oyuki’s story, her value as an ally – all these are convenient excuses in the end. Atsu knows that deep down, but it’s easier to pretend otherwise.
“I will never forgive the Kitsune. But the innkeeper’s daughter...I might forgive her.”
The relief on Oyuki’s face is palpable. Relief that Atsu feels equally in turn.
It’s with Oyuki that Atsu is able to feel more like the person Atsu could’ve been had she not chosen to take on the onryō’s mask. Somehow, Oyuki always knows the right word or question to ask that’s able to dispel her rage and quiet the pressing need for vengeance that seeps into every aspect of Atsu’s life. Jubei, for all his scolding, was never able to get through to Atsu like Oyuki has.
When their shamisen speak with one voice, breath for breath, under the watchful gaze of the ginkgo tree – that’s the closest Atsu’s felt to peace since the night she was left for dead, pinned to a burning tree with her father’s katana.
In the hazy future she begins to see, beyond Saito’s corpse run through by her blade, Atsu is surprised to find Oyuki at her side in every version. When had she become someone irreplaceable in her life? Atsu, who had been long accustomed to only her horse for company, finds herself missing Oyuki’s sharp wit, the squint of her fox eyes when she smiles, the way her long-fingered hands dance along the sao of her shamisen.
There’s a word for this feeling, Atsu knows that. But it’s not something she can bring herself to name. Not while she’s still the onryō.
When Oyuki offers to replant her mother’s flower garden, it’s meant as a gesture of atonement. Atsu hopes that something more might blossom there, when she’s not watching.