Work Text:
Doma’s first night of freedom was dark and silent.
As constant as the moon gates’ glow had been for the past twenty-seven years, it was impossible to anticipate the depths of shadow that would creep over the land without them. Torches had never been necessary because the blue-green light of magitek was as constant and radiant as a second sun, beating back the evening and ensuring the imperials would never need to fear a savage’s dagger in the back while traversing the evening dim. Hien himself could not recall them ever having been gone for more than an hour or two at a time, disabled only temporarily to let ships pass through or for necessary repairs. They were as constant as the swish of his mother’s needle through silk, or his father’s steady gaze, or Gosetsu’s booming laugh. All gone, now.
The Enclave was all that remained of Doma as it once was. The survivors who would call it their new home had little but shared freely, and when people began to realize for the very first time that they would need to light the way themselves, those with the means distributed their supplies equally while others rummaged through abandoned homes for torches, lanterns, and firewood. Bit by bit, warm flame began to twinkle against the night and shadows danced upon the stillness of wartime rubble.
Tired and penniless though they all were, the camaraderie and care on display put Hien’s heart at ease. His people had looked to him for comfort and surety in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, bowing before him and recognizing him as their king while he spoke of the future and hope, but now it was they who returned the favor, their strength and unity a balm for the fears that smothered his relief in an icy blanket of uncertainty. Doma would rise again in time. Until morning light, they needed only to bask in some well-deserved peace and recover from the day's events where possible.
Not all could be afforded such luxuries. The healers and medics still fought to save lives. Many of those who had survived without meaningful injury slumped into their sleep rolls and slumbered heavily as the dead, worn to collapse by their efforts. The few whose blood yet sang with anxious energy huddled together and speculated quietly on the future to come: whether Garlemald would retaliate, whether this was all merely a temporary reprieve. Their victory seemed sound in theory, but was that truly the case? Not one could say for certain.
Hien lingered with them for hours, until the night had begun to go silent and then, when he was able, he took advantage of the shadows and slipped out towards the docks. He had not been granted a solitary moment alone since the previous night, when he’d lain awake staring at the stone overhead, aching ridiculously over things that no longer mattered. It all seemed like idiocy now—Bram had been reduced to the foolish distraction he had always been, the potential for his affection divested of all meaning by the open wound of grief.
He still spared a glance his way as he moved past, watching him gaze listlessly into the night sky where he sat alone beside his tent. As if sensing him, Bram’s gaze dropped and locked with his own, but neither of them moved to join the other. Hien cursed the frantic surge in his pulse and continued on his way.
Even in the pitch black shadows of night, the moon and stars were enough to illuminate what remained of the palace. Hien walked to the very end of the pier, then sat down on the edge, watching as water poured and poured in an endless waterfall from the castle walls. It was a portrait of absolute ruin—a complete loss of Doma’s tangible history. His gambit had paid off, but at great personal cost. Much and more which could never be replaced was now lost to them forever.
He had been doing so well not to think of it. Now that he was alone, the crushing weight of all that had transpired earlier that day bore down upon him like the weight of the castle itself on Gosetsu’s back, held aloft just long enough to permit them escape.
‘Tis not this old frame cannot bear.
Hien raised one fist and pounded the ground beside him forcefully enough to bloody his knuckles. The sparkling pain of it grounded him, drawing him away from the nexus of grief which beckoned like a cliff’s precipice, urging him to step forward, forward, forward again. How bitter an outcome that the very thing Gosetsu had fought for his entire adult life should be denied to him in his final moments. He would never know Doma’s freedom. He would never share a toast to victory, nor serve as his guiding force in the decisions to come. Hien had now been robbed of yet another person he held dear, left to manage a kingdom with naught but the memory of what he’d been taught.
Selfishly, he was sick to death of managing so much alone.
He punched the ground again. And again. And again, until his split knuckles dripped blood. A child’s tantrum, senseless and destructive. Behavior unbecoming of a king. He glanced behind him, hoping ridiculously that someone had seen—that they were a single breath from insisting he stop—but the docks were empty.
Hien breathed deeply and watched the water glimmer. His hand throbbed with every heartbeat.
There was a period immediately following his father’s death that he struggled to recall, as though the bulk of it had been wiped from his mind entirely. Cirina explained that much of it was due to the medicines he’d been given: his wounds had become infected and a terrible fever had taken him, abating and then resurging for nearly two weeks. Between the restlessness wrought by pain and the discomfort of his illness, keeping him sedated was the best they could do to grant him any meaningful relief. What resulted was a haze of tossing and turning, alternating between blistering heat and frigid cold, and a seemingly endless string of dark and terrible dreams in which he’d watched his father die again and again. Though he remembered little of his waking hours, he bore the terrible certainty that he’d spent much of his convalescence screaming and wailing to the kami, half-insane with grief.
He had asked much of Cirina when his senses returned to him, but he had never dared to ask after that. He could not bear to face what he had done while his inhibitions slumbered.
A piece of him longed for that same sedation and plausible deniability now. It would be preferable to simply slip away and let his subconscious mind take care of the bloodletting. Instead, the grief currently dogging his heels was the same sharp, aching hollow that had accompanied the loss of his mother. Tender as a bruise, inescapable through all but patience. A tongue running over a bitten cheek again and again and again.
A terrible guilt ate away at him, reminding him that he ought to be celebrating. He had accomplished the very thing he’d always said he’d do, from the time he first recognized that Doma would be better served by his father than by the cruel and careless hand of the imperial viceroy. He stood tall as a boy of eight summers and declared that one day, he and Father would defeat the imperials and lead Doma to liberation. Yet how could that victory not ring hollow, when no one to whom he’d made the promise remained? His grief was a repugnant and despicable thing: a thief.
Hien rubbed a thumb across his split knuckles and flaked away a bit of dried blood. Selfishness had ever been his primary vice—the force that drove him to long for what he could not have and focus his attention where it was not meant to go. He failed in this area alone time and time again, and while it was permissible here in the dark of night, by morning he knew he needed to stow away the proof of his weakness, temper his emotions, and focus anew on his people. They had to be his meaning and his purpose. They yet lived and required guidance.
A helpless laugh escaped his throat, bitter and broken, as loneliness swelled.
“I had thought to leave you to a moment’s rest,” a familiar voice said. “But t’would seem my company would not go amiss.”
Hien awkwardly cleared his throat and laid a hand over his bloody knuckles as Yugiri took a seat on the pier beside him, her movements silent as a midnight whisper. Embarrassed though he was, a mounting tension in his chest seemed to loosen at her arrival. His oldest and dearest friend yet remained.
“It is welcome,” Hien assured her. “As it has always been.”
For a split second, they were ten again, reuniting in the bamboo grove on the far edge of Monzen. Yugiri had used a stick to scratch numbered squares for an unfamiliar game into the dirt and expectantly handed him a small stone.
“Ishikeri,” she explained. Hop scotch. He had never heard of it and when he said as much, she looked at him like he had grown a second head. “What kind of games do you play here on the surface, then?”
“None,” Hien confessed with a hopeless shrug. “The soldiers do not like it.”
She looked at him with a similar expression now, once again lamenting all that he had lost to the empire—all that they had lost, in the decade since her exile from Sui-no-Sato. Yugiri was no stranger to his father, nor Gosetsu. She had seen the palace as it once was and knew what it meant to sacrifice it in order to ensure their victory. Their pain was shared.
“I always imagined this would go differently,” she said. Her tail curled around her and she spoke thoughtfully. “I suppose I believed him unsinkable. That he would be the last among us to die.”
Hien snorted softly, remembering a thousand incidents which would have felled a lesser man. “It was an unfortunate moment to cast the die on his ninth life."
A joke in poor taste, perhaps, but it drew a wry smile to Yugiri's face all the same. Her eyes flickered down and he realized he'd been absently rubbing the back of his hand, testing the soreness of it.
"You're bleeding."
He flexed his fingers, wincing slightly at the pull of torn skin over his knuckles. “We cannot retrieve his body.”
“One day, when the water empties,” she promised softly.
It would take years. By then, there was no guarantee anything would remain. With no body as proof, it almost felt as though the loss wasn’t real. He’d seen his mother’s pale and delicate form—felt her cold hands. The stink and viscera of his father’s demise yet haunted his dreams. But Gosetsu’s death was only an idea. There were clues enough, certainly—enough detail to form an obvious narrative for what transpired in the moments after they left—but no proof.
“Do you suppose there’s any chance—” Hien nearly stopped himself before deciding to posit the ridiculous idea anyway. “Stranger things have happened. What if, by the will of the kami, he escaped?”
“It would be dishonest to say I have not hoped for the same,” Yugiri confessed, “but even if the castle’s collapse did not take him, the bullet wound…” She shook her head and course-corrected. “I would not frown upon a miracle should one see fit to occur.”
The reminder that they need not hold out hope was unnecessary. With every day that passed, his fate would become more and more certain.
“I suppose you’re right.”
Hien kept testing the wounds on his knuckles, poking and prodding at the spreading redness. The pain ached almost sweetly—a mirror to so many things of late. A rush of air escaped his lungs, half born of bitter amusement and half born of frustration.
He did not want to think of Bram. He did not want to ache for his company. But no matter how hard he tried, his presence crept in at the edges of his mind like a festering rot. It had not occurred to him how dearly he'd come to value his companionship until it was taken away. He had not been absent, of course. They'd worked together in all matters concerning the liberation without pause. It was merely in the dark of night, when all went still, that his distance seemingly echoed for malms.
Devoid of any additional meaning—with no regard for the moment they'd shared in his room or the perplexing aftermath—he ached for the comfort of simply knowing he was there. His distance now was the more brutal rejection by far.
"There is naught to be done about it," he said, and upon hearing the words spoken aloud realized they acted as a balm for all.
Gosetsu was dead. Bram would maintain his distance. The palace would remain destroyed. He would never hear his father's voice again.
But Doma was free. The moon gates no longer glowed. And though darkness had fallen over the Enclave, the sun would soon rise again.
As if sensing his need for something approaching comfort, Yugiri scooted slightly nearer and rested her head gently against his shoulder. They were not the sort to hug or offer words of wisdom to each other—their friendship had ever rested its laurels on wordless understanding. Hien sighed softly and rested his own head against hers, then wrapped his arm snugly around her shoulders.
"This is what we fought for." A reminder to them both. "Six moons from now, when the Enclave bustles and the imperials have not returned—when we've given Gosetsu his funerary rites and the night is not so dark… That is when it will feel like victory."
Yugiri pulled away again, as quickly as she arrived, but her heart seemed lighter for the brief contact. "We will do all we can to make him proud."
Hien nodded and thought not of the man lying at the bottom of the river, nor the one wincing with pain as blood spread across his dogi. Instead, he recalled the grizzled roegadyn samurai who had taught him to fight. Who had called him Shun and cleaned the criss-crossed scar upon his brow with sake, before urging him to face his father boldly. Who had accepted him for precisely the person he was and encouraged him to mold a future which would suit his own dreams: not in opposition to Doma's, but as a complement to it. Who'd promised that it was possible, when all seemed to point to the contrary.
For the first time all day, Hien smiled—if only faintly.