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The scent of blood clings to Rui as he walks the path home. By now, he has developed something of a professional relationship with the smell—familiar enough that he can guess, roughly, how much of it is his before he reaches the gate of the jinya. Tonight's guess is: more than usual, but less than alarming.
Rui muses, somewhere around the second courtyard and with a certain fondness he wouldn’t name, that Tsukasa will probably think otherwise.
He's at his desk when Rui slides the door open, arm distantly throbbing at the movement, and the room is quiet, save for the steady flicker of the lantern and the sound of brush on paper. Tsukasa does not look up immediately, though Rui has long since learned not to mistake that for a lack of awareness. He allows himself the smallest smile. It is a familiar routine, after all.
His lord's gaze remains on the documents before him for only another moment before it shifts to him, sharp and knowing. The warmth of the room does little to soften the inevitable scrutiny that follows.
“You’re injured.”
Rui glances down at his arm, where a fresh gash paints his forearm, darkening the material of his sleeve. Ah. So that’s what that was.
“So it appears,” he observes.
Tsukasa clicks his tongue. “Sit.”
Rui sits, mostly because arguing further would mean giving up the show, and the show is, without question, worth staying for.
Tsukasa is already up, crossing the room to Rui like he has a thousand times before. He grabs Rui by the wrist, turns his arm over like he's inspecting produce at a market, and makes a small, strangled noise at what he finds there. “This needed treatment, Rui! Hours ago! What on Earth were you doing?”
A silly question. “I was finishing the job you sent me to do.”
“I sent you to deliver a message.”
“There was a block in the road.”
Tsukasa closes his eyes, praying for patience to no god in particular, before rising to his feet to collect his medical supplies with a certain practiced ease that suggested this was not by any means the first time his retainer has returned in such a state. Rui watches, allowing himself the smallest smile for this as well.
When he returns, he fusses over the basin for a moment, dips and wrings the cloth out with more force than strictly required, and kneels in front of Rui, jaw set in that distinctly tight way that means he is Very Seriously Displeased and would like for the man in front of him to know it.
Tsukasa presses the cloth to the wound with a sharpness that makes Rui hiss, more out of theater than genuine complaint, and Tsukasa immediately, predictably, guiltily softens his grip like he's been caught kicking a puppy. “That's... sorry. Here. Better?”
“Much.”
It isn't, particularly. Rui doesn't correct him.
“You were meant to be back before dark,” Tsukasa continues, peeling the sleeve back further, exposing the full, jagged length of the cut. His mouth thins. “How do you always manage to run into trouble doing the most mundane of tasks?”
“It's a gift, it seems.”
Rui says it purely to watch what happens to Tsukasa's face—that singular twitch at the corner of his mouth, half amusement and half stubborn refusal to show amusement, like laughing now would be conceding some crucial point in an argument taking place only to him. It truly never disappoints.
The glare Tsukasa ends up rewarding him with would send lesser men scrambling. Rui, however, merely tilts his head, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips. “A poor jest, perhaps.”
“Your jests are always poor,” Tsukasa mutters, going on to grumble something about insufferable and reckless under his breath that Rui chooses, generously, not to hear.
Tsukasa's hands work quick and steady despite the muttering, despite the huffing, despite the theatrical amount of displeasure radiating off him. This, too, is something Rui has come to grow fluent in.
It's an interesting thing, he's decided, this particular contradiction of his: the rougher the scolding, the more careful the hands underneath it. Rui has never once mentioned this observation aloud. He suspects that if he did, Tsukasa would simply deny it, loudly, while doing something to prove it true in the same breath.
Tsukasa ties off the last of the bandage with a sharp, decisive tug, then sits back on his heels, arms crossing over his chest.
“Next time," he says, "don't be an idiot.”
“Yes, my lord.” Rui murmurs, lowering his gaze to hide the smile that's already halfway to his mouth, though he doesn't try very hard. His chest swells with a quiet, selfish satisfaction.
To be scolded like this, to have his wounds dressed by hands he would, with very little provocation, unmake the entire world for—it is almost enough to make the entire evening worth the trouble.
...No, it is enough. Everything was, if it came from Tsukasa.
—
The village, at some point, had stopped smelling like one. Now it smells of struck flint, char, and something beneath the char that Rui refuses to think about. He sits against the edge of a fence—which used to enclose a small patch of farmland—with a dead man's sword held tightly in one fist, his hands apparently not yet caught up on the reality of the fight being over.
He is not crying. This distantly strikes him as something worth noting. He files it away with the position of the sun, the direction of the smoke, the tremble of his fingers. Most people would be crying. A person would be crying right now.
Voices, eventually. Horses. A dozen retainers spilling into the yard in traveling colors that clash harshly with the scenery, and behind them, moving faster than any of them, a boy with golden hair who cannot be much older than Rui himself.
(Even worn from the trail, the quality of his garments is obvious. Such fine, deliberate silk wouldn’t belong to someone who answers to others, Rui concludes.)
The boy stops at the edge of the yard. Looks around. Goes, very briefly, the color of old rice paper.
Then he sees Rui, and something happens to his face that Rui has no name for.
“You're alive,” the boy cuts through the silence, speaking the way someone would deliver wonderful news to a room.
“Very astute.”
“You're—how many were there? How many did you...”
He trails off, and Rui does not answer. Somewhere behind the boy, one of the retainers looks away altogether, apparently unable to hold the sight of him for long. Rui watches this happen and feels nothing about it. He has, by now, gotten quite good at feeling nothing about things like that.
The boy in the dusty robes does not look away. If anything, he leans in.
“Alone?” he continues, seeming not to mind Rui ignoring his previous question. “Truly? You...” He gestures vaguely at Rui's very obvious lack of armor, training, or any sensible reason to have survived the afternoon. “That's—” and then, “do you have any idea how—” He cuts himself off, visibly wrestling his own enthusiasm back into something resembling composure, and fails almost immediately. “You’re remarkable,” is what he settles on.
This, Rui does not know how to answer.
“Honestly!” The boy suddenly looks offended by something, now looking at Rui as though he is a problem requiring his immediate attention. “I arrive to find the sole survivor of a battle, and this is the state in which I find him receiving me, sitting in the dirt... Come, get up—” He reaches out on instinct, then seems to think better of hauling a total stranger to his feet by the sleeve without so much as a proper introduction first.
Instead, the boy drops into a crouch, heedless of the ash and dirt. He is close enough now that Rui could, with minimal effort, end his likely very promising career on the spot. He does not appear to have considered this possibility even briefly. “What's your name?”
“Does it matter?”
"Enormously. I intend to use it a great deal."
Rui gives it to him anyway, mostly out of morbid curiosity.
“Rui,” the boy repeats, like he's testing the shape of it in his mouth, then breaks into a grin far too bright for the setting. “Good. You may call me Tenma Tsukasa! And please, don't bother with anything more formal than that for now,” he says, apparently unbothered that he is, in fact, the young lord that this entire retinue answers to, and that most people do not introduce themselves to a stranger covered in someone else's blood with quite this much cheer.
“Come with me.”
What? Rui blinks. “You don't know anything about me.”
“I know you held this yard and lived to be extremely rude about it afterward.” The boy—Tsukasa—holds out his hand again, streaked with dirt and far too confident—clearly, he’s never once considered that the answer might be no. "Come with me. I would very much like to see what you do next.”
Rui stares at the offered hand for a long moment.
It hadn't occurred to him, until just now, that there was meant to be anything after this. If asked an hour ago, he'd have said that this was simply where the day stopped, and where he stopped along with it, more or less.
He finds that he isn't especially heartbroken at the thought. He isn't much of anything about it. But the boy in front of him is looking at him like there's a great deal left to happen, and it is such an unfamiliar thing, being looked at like that, that Rui isn't sure what to say.
“You'll change your mind,” he tries.
“I doubt it,” Tsukasa says, "but you're welcome to prove me wrong. Come, get up!”
Rui doesn’t entirely believe him. He takes his hand anyway.
—
“You've gone somewhere,” Tsukasa says, a few years and one very different injury later, now winding fresh linen around Rui's forearm with the ease of someone who has had far too much practice in doing so. “Where to, this time?”
“Nowhere interesting.”
“You get a very specific face when you're lying to me. Did you know that?”
Does he? “I do not have a face.”
“You have several!” Tsukasa ties off the bandage, and for a moment doesn't quite let go of it, thumb resting against the linen a beat longer than strictly necessary before he seems to catch himself and sits back, brisk again. “Well. Do try to come back in one piece next time. I'm running low on clean linen and lower on patience.”
He doesn't push further than that. He rarely does, these days. Content, it seems, to let Rui keep whatever he isn't ready to hand over, so long as he keeps returning.
—
By the time a full season has turned over since taking him in, Tsukasa has noticed quite a few things about Rui.
For one, Rui has become exactly what he set out to be: indispensable. He's the first through any door that hasn't been cleared, the last to lower his guard, the one who walks the full perimeter of wherever Tsukasa sleeps before he'll permit himself to do the same. Nobody in the household doubts, by this point, that he would put himself between Tsukasa and any threat without a second's hesitation.
(Tsukasa, for his part, has taken to informing his advisors that he knew as much from the very first afternoon. "I told you he was remarkable!" he boasts, at least once a week. It is, arguably, among the best things he’s ever gotten to be right about.)
Along with this, Tsukasa has learned to recognize exactly when Rui decides that he's overstayed his welcome.
He's clever about it, infuriatingly so. Sit with him past the point conversation requires and he'll remember, with suspicious convenience, some errand that simply cannot wait until morning! Perhaps a sword to clean, a different door to check, some small, blameless task standing between himself and whatever was about to be asked of him... Tsukasa has started keeping a mental tally of them purely so that he can recognize the next one faster than the last.
It isn't that he's unkind, by any means! Or even particularly guarded in the ways guardedness usually presents itself. He does what’s asked of him (never halfway, Tsukasa notes.) He enjoys conversation (after a fashion—dry and indirect and easy to miss if you aren't looking for it.) It's simply that the moment something threatens to become anything more, some sort of well-drilled instinct in him opts for the nearest exit.
Tsukasa notices, the way he finds he notices most things about Rui: slowly, and then all at once, and then with a low, helpless frustration he doesn't entirely know what to do with.
It happens plainly enough, the evening it finally becomes something he can actually put a name to. He's had an exhausting day, by his standards. A vassal has been petitioning for more men than Tsukasa can actually spare, and he was quite sure that there was no polite way left to keep saying no.
And, honestly, is it so very much to ask, after such a day, for someone to simply keep him company instead of hovering by the door like he's still waiting for further orders?
“Sit with me,” Tsukasa urges, patting the cushion beside him without looking up.
Rui hesitates, and Tsukasa knows exactly what comes next.
“I should check the east gate before the watch changes.”
Predictable! “The watch changed an hour ago.”
“Then I should check that it did.”
“Rui.”
“It’ll only take a moment.”
And then he's gone, and Tsukasa is left sitting alone feeling mildly wounded in a room that held exactly the company he wanted for all of five minutes before losing it to a gate that, as far as he's aware, has never once needed checking twice.
That's the last of it, Tsukasa decides, scowling at the closed door. He is, officially and as of this exact moment, done.
“Come to the festival with me tomorrow.” He says it out of nowhere days later, bright and sudden and with none of the argument that's clearly been simmering in him for weeks attached to it at all. “Beside me, for once! That’s an order.”
—
Tsukasa turns up at his door the next evening looking entirely too pleased with himself. Arguing, Rui figures, seems like more effort than it's worth.
The festival road, when they reach it, is strung end to end with red and gold lanterns, noisy enough that no silence stands a chance of taking root, which Rui suspects is precisely why Tsukasa chose it.
Stalls crowd both sides of the street: red bean cakes, painted masks, a fortune-teller drawing far too long a line for how obviously (at least from where Rui is standing) she's making it up as she goes.
Tsukasa insists on stopping at nearly all of them, buys a number of things he clearly doesn't need, then goes on to spend the better part of ten minutes trying to scoop a goldfish out of a shallow tub with a paper net that gives out halfway through. He doesn't seem to mind losing to the surrounding children so much as he minds losing an audience.
Tsukasa narrates the entire evening in a running commentary that requires no actual replies, and Rui walks beside him throughout, as instructed, keeping one hand resting on the hilt of his sword.
They find a spot near the riverbank just as the first firework goes up.
It isn't much—a single burst of gold unraveling against the dark—but Tsukasa tips his face up to it like it's the only thing that has ever happened in the history of the world, mouth falling open, wholly unguarded, and Rui finds that he himself isn't watching the sky at all.
The gold catches along the matching strands of his hair, in his eyes, scatters across the radiant line of his smile, and for one long, foolish moment Rui forgets to look away. Rui forgets, completely, that there was a sky worth competing for his attention in the first place.
It is, he thinks distantly, an extremely inconvenient time to notice quite how much he likes this specific face.
“You're not even watching,” Tsukasa says without looking away from the next burst of color, sounding delighted rather than accusing.
“I am.”
At that, Tsukasa turns, catches him mid-stare, and for a moment neither of them says anything at all. The fireworks carry on without them, lighting and fading and lighting again, and Rui, caught utterly red-handed, finds he doesn't especially want to explain his way out of it.
“Tell me what you want,” Tsukasa suddenly asks, quieter now.
Rui opens his mouth, and despite his best efforts, nothing comes out.
It isn't that he doesn't know. That would almost be a mercy—a gap to be filled in later, at his leisure, with no inherent cost to leaving it empty a while longer. It's that some part of him, worn smooth by habit, seems to have stopped treating the question as one that applies to him.
Stopped...
What a strange thing. He can't recall ever consciously doing so. There was not a moment he could point to, no particular day on which the question had ceased to belong to him. It had merely become something he moved around without thinking, the way a door passed by often enough eventually just becomes another section of the wall.
The silence stretches half a beat too long, and Rui, snapped out of his train of thought by the realization, finds that it's mortifying being caught this empty-handed by someone who is looking at him so expectant of his answer.
“I should check the perimeter,” he says, hastily, already turning.
Tsukasa's hand closes around his wrist before he gets a step.
...Ah.
...
...Rui could pull free. They both know it—he's slipped tighter grips than this one, walked away from worse.
He doesn't. For a long moment, he stands there instead, caught, feeling absurdly and thoroughly caught in more ways than the obvious one.
Tsukasa doesn't look triumphant about it. He looks, if anything, faintly nervous, which is the last thing Rui expected. "That's what I thought," he murmurs, softer, the last of the fireworks catching gold in his eyes as he says it, and slides his hand down from wrist to fingers instead of releasing it entirely, lacing them loosely together.
Oh. “You...” Rui’s jaw works, trying to form words in spite of the distracting warmth. “You do not owe me this,” he chooses.
“No,” Tsukasa agrees, squeezing once. “That's rather the entire point I've been making, if you'd been listening.”
—
The wound is dressed, and for a long moment neither of them moves.
There was a time—Rui can feel the shape of it still, somewhere under his ribs, stubborn, coiled—when this would already be over. He'd have found the door, or the perimeter, or some small, convenient task waiting to interrupt this moment before it could turn into anything more. He'd spent a great deal of his life being extremely good at not staying a moment longer than necessary.
He stays exactly where he is.
Tsukasa, of course, notices this and doesn't say anything about it. He only keeps his hand where it is, thumb resting against the linen, and lets the moment last exactly as long as Rui is willing to let it.
“You're not leaving,” he says eventually, careful, testing.
“No.”
“No sudden, urgent errand?”
“I appear to be fresh out.”
Something helpless and delighted crosses Tsukasa's whole face, an expression he has never once learned to hide even when it would clearly serve him better to. “Good,” he says, simple as anything, like it costs him nothing at all to say it. “Stay, then.”
Rui doesn't answer that directly. He merely turns his hand over beneath Tsukasa's instead, unhurried, until it isn't Tsukasa holding on so much as the two of them, simply, holding on.
Tsukasa's breath catches slightly at that; Rui, watching it happen, selfishly decides that he could get used to being the reason for that particular sound.
Outside, the last of the day's ash has already been swept from the veranda, and the lantern inside holds its light a moment longer.
Rui lets his fingers close slowly around Tsukasa's, perhaps the way a hand might finally close around the handle of a door spent years walking past without trying. Somewhere behind them both, a boy with ash on his knees once held out exactly this. He never did let go.