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There are times when Zeno’s presence is just a little too familiar.
Of course, Jae-ha is used to the sense of déjà vu he gets along with the sense of the other dragons; feeling as though they’re all one big, happy family made of sunshine and rainbows is all part of the job description, after all. Kija and Shin-ah had always been, even from the moment they met, oddly familiar and nostalgic – but Zeno was… different.
Finding out that he was the Ouryuu, the Ouryuu, gave him a reason. If there had only ever been one Ouryuu, then of course his dragon blood would recognize him the most. Still, as time wore on and their travel continued, it continued to eat at him. It was more than just Zeno’s blood that called to his memory when they first met, he decides. He chews on that thought a while, watching the blonde out of the corner of his eye.
Now that he’s watching, he realizes with a start that Kija is watching too. Kija, and… well, Shin-ah is always watching, Shin-ah is always watching everyone and everything, but this isn’t quite the same thing. Shin-ah watches Zeno with almost the same expression on his lips as when he watches Yona – like something out of legend has reached out and touched him. Kija watches Zeno with the air of one trying to figure something out.
For the most part, Zeno is content to walk in silence. If he notices them, he says nothing about it, and that suits Jae-ha just fine. Jae-ha is content to wait in silence, too. He wants to figure out exactly what he’s feeling, and thinking, and definitely not saying, before anyone starts asking questions. He tries to understand why Zeno is so familiar, but the blood feelings keep getting in the way of his memory, and he hates it. He knows Zeno is watching him back, too – every time he gets too near with too thoughtful of an expression, suddenly there is an excuse for the ‘boy’ to be elsewhere.
He gets a chuckle out of that, to himself – hard to break the habit of thinking of Zeno as a boy, as the youngest of them, however much he’s the oldest.
Of course, like all things in Jae-ha’s life, this plan is also torn apart at the hands of others. Namely, the huge, white claw of Hakuryuu Kija, as one day, as they are setting up camp and Zeno is kneeling by the fire, Kija kneels down next to him and blurts out, “You! It was you!”
Zeno looks up at him with an expression that is too calculated to be genuinely confused. “Zeno? What was Zeno?” he asks, and Jae-ha’s eyes narrow. What was Zeno, indeed?
“Sixteen years ago,” Kija says, and Jae-ha notices Yona’s eyes dift over to them. “There was… I can barely remember it. There was a traveler… someone who spoke to me at the lake. When the villagers arrived, he… you… left.”
Zeno smiles that smile of his, where it’s almost only with his eyes, a barely-perceptible upturning of the mouth. It’s the smile he smiles when he’s at his most secretive – it’s Ouryuu’ s smile, plain and simple, not Zeno’s. Kija, heartened by the expression as Jae-ha is wary of it, continues in earnest.
“No, I know it was you, it had to have been. It was the day the red star showed up in the sky, sixt…” Kija pauses, as though something has just suddenly now crossed his mind, and his eyes are drawn to the puzzled lavender gaze of their princess-king. “Sixteen years ago. A red star… you were there. You told me it was important. I remember, now.”
Zeno is still smiling that smile and Jae-ha hangs back, the wheels in his mind turning. Sixteen years ago, when their Yona was born. Zeno’s eyes are on him, now, and they aren’t smiling anymore; a chill runs down his spine.
“A yellow dragon,” says Shin-ah, quietly, and Zeno smiles his own smile, this time, but it’s the smile he smiles when he doesn’t want anyone to realize he doesn’t want to be smiling. Something inside Jae-ha clicks.
Then something in Jae-ha begins to simmer.
“Did you visit all of us?” Kija asks, excitedly, and Yona is smiling, and Hak’s eyebrow is raised, and Zeno is pointedly not looking at Jae-ha when he nods.
“Ah, but, that is a story for some other time,” Zeno says, moving to tend to the fire. “Zeno went to see his new brothers and to tell them that Hiryuu was coming, but that was a long time ago and Hiryuu is here, now, in the form of the miss.”
Wise of him to bring Jae-ha’s attention to Yona, standing there with a smile and a confused look. She moves forward to help with the chores of setting up camp, makes some small talk with Zeno, but Jae-ha isn’t paying attention. He won’t confront Ouryuu in front of Yona – he won’t lay those scars bare in anything but private. But private… private is hard to find in this camp full of what Yoon calls rare beasts. Everyone is making camp, and then everyone is eating, talking and laughing and mingling, and if Jae-ha is more silent than usual, no one seems to notice.
He wonders about that – if no one truly notices – because sometimes he can feel someone watching him, not the familiar gaze of Shin-ah looking out for everyone but something else. It doesn’t surprise him , then, when night falls, and everyone else has supposedly gone into the tents to rest, and he hears soft steps on the grass behind him, small and light like their owner. He doesn’t turn his head away from the stars, doesn’t stop the motions of bow against strings. He knows who this is. He knows who’s waiting for him to speak, but he can’t. It’s as though something is binding him, like chains around his neck.
Let him wait, he thinks to himself. Let him wait the way he let me wait.
“Ryokuryuu."
Somehow the voice is the key that unlocks the spell that’s fallen around him. He looks up, eyes hot, and sees in Zeno’s gaze the heavy weight of guilt.
“Ouryuu,” he says back. He sees Zeno flinch; for all Zeno never uses their names, he seems to dislike his own title. Jae-ha takes a perverse kind of satisfaction in that.
“Ryokuryuu is angry,” Zeno says, sitting down next to Jae-ha and folding his arms around his legs. “Ryokuryuu knows that Zeno saw. Knows that Zeno…” He pauses, swallows. “…that I left you,” he finishes. The pronoun takes Jae-ha by surprise, a litte – Zeno never uses two things, other peoples’ names and his own pronouns – but it doesn’t throw him off.
“The cloak,” he says simply. “Two weeks after the red star ascended the sky, a cloak was left over me. I thought it was the old man in a fit of uncharacteristic kindness. But I remember the feeling of yellow at the back of my mind for days after – and the old man telling me not to worry about the demons in my head.”
“Ah, so he called Zeno a demon, then,” says the Ouryuu, with his Ouryuu smile of guilt and self-loathing and Jae-ha wonders for a moment if it’s an act. He’s tired of wondering if the people he trusts are going to betray him.
“Are you sorry?” he asks bluntly, and Zeno flinches.
There is a long moment of silence. The two sit, unmoving, Jae-ha staring at Zeno, Zeno staring at the dirt, and sixteen years of misery lay between them like a field of daggers. Zeno’s hand absently rubs one wrist, and Jae-ha feels his scars, in that same place, itch. Neither one speaks for a long moment.
“Are you sorry?” Jae-ha repeats, and Zeno nods. “Then why didn’t you…” Jae-ha’s throat is suddenly tight, and he has to swallow. “Then why didn’t you save me?” he asks, and it comes out as a hoarse whisper, because Zeno isn’t some cute kid anymore. He isn’t the youngest, to be protected from truths and uncertainties. He’s immortal. Ageless. Unknowable.
Jae-ha is surprised, somehow, to see that he is also sad.
“There are many things that Zeno could not do,” he says, evasively. Jae-ha starts to say something, but it’s obvious that Zeno sees that his answer won’t do. He reaches out to catch Jae-ha’s wrists and looks him dead in the eyes. “I know that it’s an excuse,” he says, softly. “I know that I could have, should have, done more. I told myself – these hands cannot break iron chains. I thought to myself, the boy’s predecessor will have to bear his burdens. I thought, these villagers are fools if they think they can chain a green dragon. I was right – but I was wrong.” He dropped his eyes. “I thought, I couldn’t take care of a young boy on the road, and, if I save this one, then I will have betrayed the other, who I could not have defended.” He swallows. “I was a coward. There was a way I could have broken every chain. I could have stolen and starved and scrounged. I cannot die – but you could have, and I trusted Hiryuu to save you when I couldn’t lift a finger myself.”
He drops Jae-ha’s wrists and stares at his hands, and Jae-ha wonders if he is imagining a way he could have broken Jae-ha’s chains,w ith hands covered in golden scales that would gleam dully in the moonlight but had blazed like fire in the sun.
Something twists in Jae-ha’s stomach. Once again, instead of immortal Ouryuu, he sees Zeno as seventeen and frightened. How old is this boy, really? He has to wonder that to himself. Zeno doesn’t age, after all – he hasn’t grown in two thousand years. He has grown wiser, learned more, but how much has he really grown up? How much of the eternal child act is really just an act?
How old had Zeno been, when circumstance – warring nations, Hiryuu – forced him to be an adult far beyond his time?
Jae-ha isn’t sure he can totally forgive Zeno for leaving him behind, but he isn’t sure he can blame him for it either. He has felt the strain of having to grow up before he was ready. He matured under Gi-gan’s care, but – if he had never run…
He thinks of Garou and the man’s childlike tantrums. The comparison is uncomfortable; Zeno is a much better person than Garou ever was. And still.
He sighs, and reaches out a hand to lightly thump Zeno on the head.
“Well,” he says, “if you’re sorry, I suppose that’s a good enough start. You came eventually, didn’t you? Late, as always. Be more punctual, old man.”
Zeno stares in surprise, then chuckles.
“Jae-ha really is like him,” he says, almost to himself. “Angry about every small little thing, until it comes to the big things. Don’t lock your heart away too tightly, Jae-ha. I think the others need your strength. If you want to be angry with me, don’t keep it inside.”
It’s Jae-ha’s turn to stare, but before he can formulate a reply, Zeno is gone.