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It was very late at night where even a pair of tsugai would prefer to choose the warmth and safety of home. Hana sleepily punched her phone, silencing the alarm and then she groaned. Under her breath, she cursed the Bandits for their tendencies to dump bodies at ungodly hours of the day.
Hana wasn’t a stranger to waking up early. Back in school, club practices usually started before the morning assembly—she used to be out on the field before seven, already happily running and wide awake. However, doing sports and burying dead bodies were two very different things.
As she brushed her hair, Hana realized she wasn’t the only one awake. Faint rustling came from the living room. She glanced at her phone. It was just barely past 2 am. Huh. Is that Yuru? Few days ago he told her that early morning before dawn was the golden hour for hunting, he’s used to be awake and already deep in the forest when the sun rise.
She pulled on her jacket and sling bag, then patted Kodetsu and Jiro—who had taken over her space on the bed—before stepping out of her room. Heading into the living room, she found Dera slumped at the dining table.
“Isn’t it way too late for coffee?”
Dera didn’t look up immediately. One hand stayed wrapped around the mug, and the other idly fiddling with a gun.
“It’s not coffee,” he replied.
Hana stepped closer, peering over his shoulder. Steam curled faintly from the cup.
“…Tea?”
He gave soft grunt in response.
She frowned. “Since when do you drink tea at two in the morning?”
“Since I can’t afford alcohol. Ran out of fund after adopting two ki—ow! And my wife abuses me.”
“You ran out of money because all that gambling you did!”
“I’ll win next time for su—ouch stop hitting me.” He grinned, making a great show rubbing his shoulder where Hana had punched him.
“No next time! Argh, I can’t believe I agreed to this marriage,” Hana shook her head as she dropped into the seat beside him. “Gimme that,” she took his mug and took a slow sip. It was not coffee, beverage that she used to drink, but the tea warmth her from the inside, and helped her to shake off some traces of sleep.
“These leaves are fresh,”
“Yup,” He nodded. “Ken took Yuru to a supermarket after dinner, when you were on the phone with the Bandits.”
She hummed, not looking at him. Then she rested her head in her hands, elbows on the table.
“Nervous?”
Hana knew what he meant.
“Nah obviously not,” she shrugged, her face still half-hidden between her palms. “It’s not my first day seeing a corpse.”
Silence came. But Hana knew that Dera was still there, sitting beside her, whether his eyes were staring on the TV he’d just bought or drifting toward the pile of arrows Yuru had made that currently stacked neatly by the window, she can feel his presence looming beside her.
The presence that as weeks living together in the same roof, became familiar for her, and, oddly, comforting.
Hana could hear the sound of the clock ticking.
She knew that she was supposed to go up and out of the door by now. The drive to her mountain would take quite some time, and there was still work waiting; digging the grave, laying the body—bodies, as she recalled the message from the Bandits, about the failed attack on God knows what that resulted in more than one casualty. And she needed to finish and make it back, hopefully before the sunrise.
Despite her association with the Bandits, Hana very much preferred to stay out of the loop as much as she could, unless it became unavoidable. Like this time, she didn’t know exactly what kind of brawl the Bandits had stumbled into that caused death. What she’s certain though, that this time her son, Yuru, was safe from the hands of those opportunistic ghouls, and she was grateful for that.
Hana took a deep breath.
She should’ve moved by now. But instead, she found herself lingering, sitting beside a man that she was sure, had likely killed more people than she had ever buried. The same man who, just few hours ago, had looked at her with such strong emotions in his eyes when she told him that she had to wake up super early to do her job.
Hana exhaled softly.
She stayed there for a while, soaking on the silence and—she could not deny it anymore—comfort of the house.
After a moment, she felt Dera reached over and took the mug from in front of her. He took a sip before setting it back down near her hand, where she could feel the warmth of the mug.
“You’re going to be late,” Dera murmured. He already dropped the playfulness in his voice, and his voice sounds rougher than usual in the quiet of the 2 am air.
“I know,” Hana whispered into her palm, making no move. “The ground is going to be hard tonight. It’s cold and hasn’t rained in months.”
Dera lets out a low chuckle. “Better than mud. Mud clings and makes everything heavier.” He nudged the mug toward her again. “Drink the rest. It’s better for your nerves than the caffeine you usually choke down.”
Hana finally lifted her head, her eyes looking down on the half-full mug. Ujicha from Kyoto—the name of the tea finally surfaced in her mind. Her mom used to drink various kind of tea, and that made her secretly familiar with variants of tea. Yet, since the day of her mother’s funeral and the day she decided to continue her mother’s work, her brain unconsciously trying to forget little details of her.
She sipped the tea. Yeah, she can remember the crisp autumn air from the mountain, when mother pouring this tea from her thermos into Hana’s paper cup after a long day of work, and plead Hana to never get involved with the village.
“Dera-san?”
“Hm?”
“Why are you still sitting here?” She turned her gaze to him, catching the way the light caught the edge of his jaw. She could notice faint shadow of stubble that he usually would shave away in the morning. “You could be sleeping. You could be ignoring me. You could be… doing anything else.”
Dera leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight. He picked up the gun he’d been fiddling with, checking the slide.
“Am I wrong for being a doting husband for my wif—if you roll your eyes like that, it’d be stuck in your skull.”
Hana just stared at him.
“Well, Yuru is a barbarian, and Ken is, well, he is a Tadera, but he’s not exactly immersed in our world yet. Someone has to make sure you don’t walk out that door looking like you’re heading to your own funeral instead of someone else’s.”
Hana stared at him. “What you are saying literally don’t make any sense.”
Because it did not.
She had known him through this cursed line of work for years, and the name of the Tadera family had been familiar to her for as long as she could remember. Based on her mother’s service as the gravedigger and now her own experience working alongside a Tadera—this Ryu Tadera sitting beside her—their relationship had always been strictly by-the-job, bound by a shared loyalty to the village.
Well…
During their long years of service together, there had been plenty of shared moments that made Hana trust Dera far more than anyone else who worked for the village.
That was why she had agreed to drop everything in her life, lied to her friends—normal friends who had nothing to do with the village—and join him in this fake marriage.Sure, she did it to protect Yuru—the twins deserved better in this life than to fall in the hands of opportunistic ghouls. But if it anyone else had asked her this—fake marriage—to protect Yuru, she would have refused.
She wouldn’t go so far as to say that Dera is special to her—nah no he’s not Jason Statham—but she could not describe what they were, either. The senior and junior dynamic only existed because he was older and had been in the business longer. Sometimes she got information from him, or jobs to bury a body, making him sort of her boss. But he wasn’t really her boss; in this organization, outside of the president, everyone was practically equal.
And because he had known her for so long, and knew exactly what she was capable of, it just didn’t make sense that he was worrying about her now.
She sipped the tea, emptying the mug. “Be so for real, Dera-san.”
He chuckled, and Hana could swear she saw the tips of his ears turn slightly red. “If I say I’m worried, you’ll punch me.”
Hana rolled her eyes. “No, I’ll just dig another grave for you.”
It really was hard to believe that he was worried about her. From the very first time she put the dirt into the hollow grave without her mother present, she knew that working for the village meant ones must be mentally strong—heck, she had buried enough of bodies to fill half a city hall. For a normal civilian, the sight of a dead body would stop them in their tracks. But no one who with ties to the village was normal—and she was no exception.
Hana had trained her heart to be numb doing this job. Do the work. Follow your logic and instinct. Do not question things you shouldn’t know.
And so far, she had survived, living as peaceful as she could in the circumstances.
She eyed him, and whispered, “Why?”
Because, yes, why?
Dera laughed hard, and Hana had to kick his foot under the table to keep him from waking the boys.
“Why are you laughing, you big dummy?” she hissed. “The boys are asleep, you’ll wake them.”
“It’s because,” he tried so hard to stifle his laugh, “I mean,” he cleared his throat, “Why is it so hard to convince you that I, indeed, worry about you?”
Hana raised one of her eyebrows, “Because I am doing my job as usual, and this is not my first rodeo? There’s nothing to be worry about.”
“Oh, Hana-chan.” Dera shook his head, grabbed the empty mug, and he walks to the kitchen counter. “Ever realized that, our line of work is inherently dangerous?”
He did not have to remind her. “My clients are cold and can’t even lift a finger.”
“And precisely, the ones that made them dead are directly in contact with you.”
Hana looked at him smiling softly, as he poured more hot tea into the mug. “My mother did this for decades,” she countered, “and she’s fine.” And Hana forcefully pushed down the memory of her mother, pleading with her to stay away from this line of work.
Dera turned back around, the mug steaming once more as he set it right in front of her. He didn’t sit back down, he leaned against the counter and crossed his arms.
“It was different time, and your mother was lucky, Hana. Or maybe she was just better at pretending she wasn’t looking over her shoulder all the time, especially in front of her daughter,” he said quietly. “Moreover, the Bandits aren’t just bandits anymore. Right now they’re desperate. Very desperate. The twins are down the mountain, one in the hands of the Kagemori, and the other one is currently unknown for them. They are desperate to get their hands on Yuru, and desperate people will do anything—like turning the grave digger into a grave.”
Hana stared at the steam curled from the mug. “They will never do that to me. I am an important asset, and my family has been in service to the Higashi village for decades.”
He raised one eyebrow. “I never thought Hana Danno is a naïve person.”
“I am not,” she snapped, “Stupid, sure, for agreeing into this marriage, sheltering a traitor—”
“There.”
“Huh?”
“You said it yourself. Me, I am a traitor,” Dera said. “The president has definitely stamped traitor on my files by now. Me, a Tadera, whose family alongside the Danno, has served the village for decades as their retainer. You know that once they see my ass, they’ll immediately snipe me for hiding Yuru away. It doesn’t matter how many years we, or our parents or our grandparents, gave to the village. We aren’t the exception, Hana.”
Hana bit the inside of her cheek. She wanted to argue, but she knew he was right. Obviously she realized that now the prophesied twins had been born, the power plays were in the move again. Just as she could not define what she and Dera were to each other, she also couldn’t find the words to answer him now.
Instead, she pressed the mug to her lips, and took a slow sip.
Dera stepped away from the counter and rummaged through the fridge. Walking over to the desk, he sat again in the chair beside her, and slid something.
Hana looked down. “Ice cream?”
He shrugged, opening his own package. “Ice cream’s good for stress,” he said.
Hana stared down at the frozen treat. Ice cream. Right.
She opened the package and scooped up a small spoonful, letting the sweetness coat her tongue as she watched him out of the corner of her eye. Dera looked entirely too relaxed—but she knew he wasn’t. Twice now, she had caught him stealing glances at her from the corner of his eyes, doing the exact same thing she was.
That was the thing about Ryu Tadera.
He had this infuriating ability to be incredibly dangerous and strong, and yet entirely considerate and caring at the same time. It had always been like this in the years she’d known him. He knew what she was capable of and never doubted her, even if it meant dragging her into dangerous jobs—like this marriage. But then he’d turn around, look at her with his stupid, soft smiles, and completely reassure her with his presence.
As time ticked away, Hana finished the ice cream and took a sip of her tea—what a stark contrast between the hot liquid and the cold ice—and she tried to ignore the realities of her life right now. Yup, this arrangement with Dera, this marriage, was inherently dangerous, and she could get killed at any moment. But life or death did not seem to matter as much as her brain trying to decode what was happening between them.
If she admitted, even just to herself, that Dera’s worry mattered to her… If she admitted that his presence had become something more than just a tactical move to safe Yuru and the future…
No, she could not define what they were.
As much as she pressed her brain to think—and searched her heart for any flicker of a familiar feeling—the answer simply would not surface.
Comrades? No, that wasn’t right. Sure, by definition, comrade was someone you shared difficult, dangerous activities with.
But a mere comrade didn’t show up at her door unannounced on random afternoons, whining until she made him her famous onigiri. A mere comrade wouldn’t sit on the floor of her bathroom for two hours way past midnight, fixing her leaky plumbing. A mere comrade wasn’t the person she called just because she wanted to try a new restaurant in Ebisu. Oh, a mere comrade would not pick him up from the racecourse and let him crash at her house just because he was too depressed after a bad loss.
There were so many other thing—that were random, planned, or entirely unplanned, that they had done over the years, none of which could ever be classified as work.
They had crossed those professional boundaries years ago, blurring the lines without ever acknowledging it.
That was why, when Dera called her that day, to please pick him up from the mountain, and he showed up with one of the prophesied twins, Hana did not back down.
Trusted companion… Yes, the years they were working together made Hana trust him more than anything.
Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t realized how long they had both been sitting in silence.
“I never thought of you as a vanilla guy,” Hana said, finally breaking the silence as Dera walked back to the fridge and to grab another package of ice cream.
He chuckled. “Well, if you talk to the ladies I was with, they’d be disagr—hey!”
“Talking about exes with your wife is cheap work,” she said, having just kicked him under the table.
Dera peeled the lid off his second ice cream. “I’ll have you know I am a gentleman of the highest caliber, Hana-chan,” he said.
“Not when Jason Statham exist.”
“Don’t compare me to that violent old man.”
“You are—oh please, don’t look at me with your bare face like that. I still am in shock seeing you without beard.” Hana shook her head.
“Oh, so you liked me that way?” Dera grinned. “Sorry, the Statham look is not available for this mission. But my dear queen, I’ll have you know that I know some delightful ways of using ice cream for—stop kicking me,” he giggled, catching himself as Hana grinned back, her foot striking his shin under the table.
She rested her chin on her hand, using the other hand to push the empty container aside. “It’s weird, tho, seeing you like this,” Hana said, her voice losing its teasing edge. She cleared her throat. “Thank you… for worrying about me. I do understand the gravity of our situation—at least, I hope I do. Being a gravedigger, the cleaner…”
Her voice trailed off. After a moment of silence, she spoke again, her voice barely a whisper. “Did you know my mom forbid me from taking this job?” her voice was barely heard in the night.
Beside her, he nodded. “I had my suspicions.”
Hana laughed softly. “When my mother died, I couldn’t just forgo her lifelong service. My inheritance, in a way. So I took over the job… and Kodetsu and Jiro.” She took a soft breath, and took a sip of a now warm tea. Then she continued. “I feel like you understand what I feel, given that you also inherited this job.”
“She was a smart woman, your mom.” Dera replied. “She knew that once the dirt gets under your fingernails, it never really washes out.” He stood up, the chair scraping softly against the floorboards. He picked their empty ice cream packages and tossed them into the trash, then reached for the half-full mug. As he took it from her hands, his fingers brushed against hers.
His skin was warm, Hana noticed.
“But we don’t always get what we want,” he added, then drinking the tea from the mug. “We just deal what we could. Right now, you gotta deal with a handsome, worried husband, and a mountain of corpses that’s waiting for you.”
Hana looked at her phone. 2:49 AM. Crap. The clock was a relentless enemy. Hana was pretty much preferred to still sit there, and had the much needed conversation with Dera. Turned out, she really did need it. Reassurance, perhaps.
Or just a conversation with him.
“You know,” Hana said, while using the front camera on her phone as a mirror, “the other day, Yuru told me this, death strikes where fear makes us vulnerable.” She adjusted the collar of her jacket. “Sure, I can't have the peaceful life that I wanted anymore, now that I—no, us, you and me, Dera-san…” She let out a soft laugh though there was no humor in it. “And I’m pretty sure that in the weeks and months to come, there’ll be more altercations, whether with the Kagemori or the Higashi village.”
She lowered the phone slightly, her reflection dim in the dark screen.
“But yeah, Yuru’s right. We can’t just live in fear and run forever,” she continued. “It will open the door for more destruction—for death.” Hana hesitated for a brief second before adding, quieter this time, “And… I’m happy and glad you’re the one here with me.”
She looked over at him.
Dera was standing beside the counter with the mug still in his hand. Normally, he would have grinned by now. Teased her. Said something outrageous just to make her roll her eyes and kick him again.
But this time he didn’t, he just stared at her.
Just when Hana almost regretted speaking at all, the corner of his mouth slowly lifted upward, settling into a genuine, soft smile—the smile that actually reached his eyes and completely lacked his usual smug and punchable bravado.
He set the mug down on the counter. “That’s my queen,” he finally said. The words should’ve sounded like a teasing, but it was surprisingly earnest.
He didn’t make a move to close the distance between them, nor did Hana. That had never been their way, to be honest. But even without that, Hana could feel it, that something between them had shifted—or maybe it had been shifting for years, and only now were they finally standing still long enough to notice it.
As Hana walked to the entryway and grabbed her keys from the hook, a strange realization came to her mind.
Maybe the reason she could never define what they were was because it was a veil—it was beyond every title of relationship.
They had long crossed the boundaries of allies, of comrades, of friends… and perhaps even lovers was too small a word for whatever this was. Because this thing between them, had been built slowly, through years of being together through grief and blood and trust and domestic moments that no one else ever saw. It was a bond forged by understanding each other at their ugliest, and still choosing to stay.
Behind her, Hana heard the soft creak of floorboards. Dera walked over to the entryway, and stopping just beside her.
“You got everything?” he asked.
Hana glanced down to her sling bag. Keys. Phone. Gloves. Incense.
“Yeah.”
“Weapon?”
Hana saw her knuckle brass peek out from beneath the incense package. “Yup.”
“Take this too,” he reached out, offering her the gun he’d been fiddling with all night. “I know you don’t usually take Kodetsu and Jiro up the mountain with you, so you should at least bring this.”
Hana accepted the firearm. She raised an eyebrow at him, curious. “Should I bring them instead, if it makes you feel better?”
He shrugged, a smile—the same smile like before—softening his face. “Nah, let them sleep. They worked hard this evening guiding and guarding Yuru and Ken on their shopping.” His eyes met hers, his voice dropping to a serious note. “I know you are capable of keeping yourself safe, but call me immediately if things go sideways, okay?”
Hana nodded, and a playful smile gracing her face, “Of course. That’s what husbands and wives do, right?”