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We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.Richard Siken, Snow & Dirty Rain
It ends a draw, neither Hiruhiko’s win nor Chihiro’s loss; Chihiro still feels as though he’s lost when he’s pulled from the battlefield.
The trio of Masumi-affiliated sorcerers tasked with retrieving him help him to his feet. One of them—female, dark hair, a few years’ Chihiro’s senior—relays the protection detail’s status as well as their intent to extract him in precise, clipped words.
They fan out around him, establishing a tight, defensive crescent formation as they urge him a few paces backwards, off the battlefield and onto an intricately drawn mandala. The spirit energy imbued in the ink wafts upwards in heady streaks, prickles at Chihiro’s neck, tugs at his own innate reserves to respond. Well, what little remains of them. He’s running dry, has been for a while now.
Across the makeshift arena, walled by chunks of debris and marked by smoky craters, Hiruhiko is slowly getting to his feet. He’s bleeding profusely from an ugly rip in his eyebrow, struggles to put weight in his right foot, but when he looks down at himself it’s with flat indifference. He dusts himself off gingerly, pats a clinical hand over the gut wound currently making a gory pleat of his jacket.
Chihiro clicks his tongue; that’s today’s best work, and it’s not good enough by far.
The Hishaku sorcerer peers at him across the distance that separates them. His eyes are bright, for all that he’s blinking away blood and sweat—wide even at this distance with a kind of mirth like he knows exactly what Chihiro is thinking. “Looks like we have to table the finale for a later time,” he calls, tone jovial and warm. “Thank you for playing with me, Chihiro—I had fun.”
Chihiro grits his teeth. Breathes through the urge to rise to the implicit challenge; to deny, to disavow that on some level, somehow, they might be see eye to eye. ‘Play’ and ‘fun’ implies they’ve taken part in something more like recreational activity than a bloody fight to the death, suggests they’ve established report, rules, a desire to go toe-to-toe. It both does and doesn’t mean they’re somehow equals, and the implications of that, almost more than what’s been spoken aloud, settles heavy and corrosive in Chihiro’s stomach.
You feel it, don’t you? To the average person you’re a monster. I’m the only one who can understand you.
The Masumi drop to their knees around the mandala, feed the intricate swirls of the seal with spirit energy until it flares and spittles. Across from them Hiruhiko maintains his distance; he’s arranged himself slightly more casual, stuck a hand down a pocket at his hip. Chihiro goes rigid; it might not be over, he thinks, settling his sword hand heavily on Enten’s hilt. He refuses to as much as blink.
Hiruhiko’s lips peel back over blood-pink teeth. He tilts his head. “This was such a great way for us to meet!” he calls, equally jovial. The sentiment sounds impossibly ugly to Chihiro. “I’m so glad to have met you. Promise me you won’t hold back next time, Chihiro. I’m really looking forward to it. To getting—”
A rip-roaring current of blood rushes up a storm in Chihiro’s ears; he's thankful despite the obvious implications it has for his spatial awareness, that it drowns out the tail end of the Hishaku sorcerer’s sentiments. Chihiro doesn’t want to know. He can’t know—can’t and won’t be informed of all the ways in which his enemy might find it reasonable to think of their likeness as a basis for camaraderie. It tangles up in his throat, anger and shame flushing through him hot and red, discordant and wrong.
“Rokuhira-san. It’s time.”
The female sorcerer’s voice cuts clear through the slurry of emotions, guts his line of thought neatly. Chihiro swallows a reedy breath, claws himself back under control. He refuses to allow Hiruhiko out of his line of sight, but corrects her, “Chihiro,” and shifts on his feet to show that he’s listening.
The sorcerer plies him loose from where he stands in lieu of replying, brisk hands buffering him to cluster in the mandala’s centre. “Hold on just a bit longer,” she says once she’s satisfied with his positioning.
Chihiro bobs his head in a brief nod. A tremor of vertigo shudders through him; it blackens his periphery, makes the carnage of the battlefield briefly swimming and spotty. He grits his teeth through it, wobbling a little in the knees as he rights his weight between his feet. This is the extent of his strength right now. It’s not enough. He swallows back on his disappointment. It tastes like bile, tinged metallic and bloody. He needs to have done better.
The ground groans and quakes beneath them for the concentration of spirit energy growing between the three gates, the current so immediately potent that Chihiro feels it in his teeth. It makes him ache from bloody wound to pounding temple, the hairs at his nape standing on end for the crackle of power sparking overhead; static electricity flattening down his spine. Their surroundings start to slowly peel away. The solid underfoot collapses inwards; the landscape loses shape and contour, whatever meagre colour palette is naturally afforded rural mid-winter Japan leeching pale into naught but faint black outlines on an endless, white horizon.
Hiruhiko’s bloodied profile—the cut of his wide, bloodless smile and the insouciant lilt of his posture—is the last living thing to retain a silhouette. The very picture of karmic condemnation, if there was ever such a thing. Then the spell snaps shut its maw and swallows them whole, and they’re safe, for the moment they’re safe. It should make Chihiro feel better. It doesn’t.
It could be seconds or hours until they’re spat out on the other side of the temporospatial vortex: a painfully bright light flares out of the flat darkness, as sudden as it’d disappeared. Crushing pressure, pure density like nothing Chihiro’s ever felt, bears down viciously on him from all sides—
—and then they’re dropping out of the sky. Crashing unceremoniously down onto the dry mat of a dense forest.
Chihiro hefts his legs beneath him as he lands, takes the brunt of his weight in his palms. A blinding stab of pain cracks up his elbows, upper arms, shoulders. Hammers the length his spine. He grits his teeth against it, swallows back on the mean lurch of nausea and scrapes to his knees. If he’ll have to utilize every scrap of sheer willpower to keep on where his body fails him, it’s what he’ll do. He strains his senses, reaching blindly as far and wide as he can per knee-jerk instinct. He wills every ounce of him ready to get up, to quick-draw, to defend. The battle isn’t over, it’s just him who—
There’s nothing. No malign presences. No ill-cloaked, threatening spiritual signatures encroaching on their location. Nothing to sense or see beyond the loom of old, immense firs growing tall and thick all around them, tapering at height but grown so tight that barely any light spears through the overhead weave of thorny crowns. They’re clearly not at Senkutsuji, which means—
Chihiro swallows dry. Monochrome sparks sizzle in his periphery, black and white pangs, blood loss and fatigue and a pounding aural headache making a spectacle of it all. “Where are we?” he grits from between tight teeth. “How many enemies?”
He pauses, chews on what little air he manages to breathe in, stutters on the inhale-exhale. A broken rib or two, then; at the very least heavily bruised. “If they’ve any Datenseki-powered sorcerers still standing—”
“Rokuhira-san,” cuts in one of the sorcerers to his left. “It’s alright. We’re within Kamunabi wards. Please, you can stand down.”
He doesn’t understand. His brain feels swollen. He struggles to wrap his head around the dimensions of what and where, protection versus hostile confrontation—the enemy hot on their heels, surely—where he needs to go and take up the perimeter to hold and defend. There’s no one making contact, but it’s obvious they’re not done. They need to get to Senkutsuji. Need to make contact with Hakuri and Mr. Uruha, ensure Mr. Samura’s safety. They need to—
“Rokuhira-san,” reiterates the same sorcerer, his tone smoothly placating even though Chihiro hears it as through water. “You’ve done your part. I promise you, you’re safe to—”
“Chihiro!!”
Chihiro jolts, blinks crusting blood out of his eyelashes. Settles his palm on Enten’s hilt, heart rabbiting violently on his ribs. A full-frontal assault is uncommon lest preceded by uniform ceremony, he recites. Right. His opponent will step into view, indicate their presence and intent before engaging. It’s custom. And even if they aren’t (he can’t see, can’t trust what he’s hearing) they can’t stay here. They need to go. Chihiro needs to stand up, he needs to move.
It takes him agonizing seconds to corral his fraught senses for the rip-roar of blood in his ears, the heady thump of adrenaline in his throat, and scrape himself straight enough to start making sense of what’s happening—the frontal assault launching itself towards him at a rapid sprint. Pounding footsteps, thunk-thunk-thunk across the soft ground; the smatter of dry fir needles bending to snap. Fifteen meters; ten, seven, three. One. He blinks again, hard to stem his exhaustion, and braces for impact.
Nothing happens. Chihiro blinks again. His field of vision slowly clears.
Big, blue eyes framed by a taut brow peer at him from head-on, level with where Chihiro miraculously remains up on one knee.
“Hakuri,” he breathes.
“Chihiro,” says Hakuri, a gentle murmur. The faint light that escapes through the compact embrace of the fir crowns illuminates Hakuri’s white-blond frizz and white-black ensemble, makes him fuzzy, gossamer-soft. Not an enemy, but Hakuri.
Not-An-Enemy-But-Hakuri fits both palms to cup Chihiro’s cheeks. They’re slightly damp, smooth and warm. They’re hot, even, feverish on Chihiro’s skin and making him feel raw, like he’s skinned the points where they touch.
He leans into it; it’s not Hakuri’s fault, that he tends towards oversensitized when exhausted.
“You’re okay,” Hakuri murmurs. “You made it.”
Two flat full stops; not a question, either sentence, but statements of fact.
Chihiro’s stomach churns. Failure tastes ashen in his mouth, sour and metallic. It takes him a beat to reply, the words growing in his throat. “I didn’t beat him,” he eventually manages. It feels like admitting to defeat. Like coming clean about a particularly egregious sin he’s committed. “I couldn’t do it.”
Hakuri shakes his head. “It was a success. You held them off,” he insists. “You protected us, me and Uruha-san. Chihiro, you did it.”
One doesn’t equal the other, Chihiro thinks. He doesn’t say that, though, or anything else. Instead, he lets his sword arm go limp, allows his hand to grow lax and useless and slip from Enten’s hilt.
“You made it,” Hakuri reiterates, and for all that it feels like Chihiro made it in the wrong way—that he failed to make it in a way that matters—he doesn’t have it in him to argue. Hakuri is close enough to touch; close enough that Chihiro feels the faintest ghost of his slightly strained but even breath, damp air buffing soothingly across his upper lip. In, out. In, out.
He lets it ground him, allows it to dictate his temporary surrender. Chihiro slumps in the shoulders, shutters his eyes. He nods slightly. “Okay,” he exhales, all air and barely any shape. “Okay.”
They remain there on the forest mat for a beat, two, three. Both of them quiet, just breathing. Around them the forest, too, has lapsed silent. Unnaturally so—impossibly dense and altogether still. Chihiro feels uneasy, feels innately that he should be wary, but the sum of his injured parts are stirring in the temporary quietude. Strains against the muck of his mind, come up for air. To pick at what his subconscious has been putting aside for the duration of the day, the past few weeks; make the extent of his exhaustion, injuries, spirit fatigue stark and a bloody wound.
It slams into him, merciless and acute. Chihiro sucks in a thin, reedy breath. Feels he’s clawed his way past his limits, banged head-first into a brick wall. Stubbornness, the biting shame of swallowing defeat, blood loss and pain; the worst cocktail. He’s catalogued a gouge in his thigh, a smatter of pinhole stabs through his right forearm, a couple badly bruised, possibly broken ribs, plus a bruised shoulder. Anything else is surplus, but it’s also catching up and adding to the rest of it with more weight.
Hakuri remains in front of him, steadfast and firm to the touch. He keeps Chihiro steadied upright, warm palms a solid tether. “Breathe with me?” he encourages, but moreso a question than it is a demand. It’s still inherently Chihiro’s choice, and that. That’s something.
Chihiro swallows. A shuddering, gulping breath, holds it as best he can. Hakuri nods encouragingly. Breathes with him. Steady, long and deep and slow. In, out. In, out. The forest remains unearthly still all around them. Chihiro forces the thought aside. Instead he breathes; in, out, in and out.
He doesn’t know how long passes, when he starts to drift—the dregs of battle focus slipping through his fingers—remaining lucid only for the stark sensation of Hakuri smoothing a thumb over the tacky trail of drying blood beneath his left eye.
Hakuri. Hakuri’s low murmurs of encouragement; Hakuri telling Chihiro gently to breathe. His palms, warm and slightly damp and cupped to cradle both sides of his face.
Chihiro looks up beneath heavy lashes, weighted with fatigue and blood and dirt—sees Hakuri backdropped by the lense flare-halo of dour brightness of the forest. And feels. Something. At Hakuri being there, helping him, peering back at him, gentle eyes and his lips slightly parted. It’s—he isn’t sure he knows what he thinks. What he feels. But he does feel something. Through bone deep exhaustion and imminent danger, the fact that Hakuri is here, the fact that he’s talking Chihiro down to breathe through it all; it feels significant. Solid enough to touch, lodged in his sternum. It’s—
To Chihiro’s left, someone politely clears their throat. “Rokuhira-san, Sazanami-san. We should, ah—the safe house. It’s just across the clearing.”
Chihiro startles so bad he jerks loose of Hakuri’s grip. Hakuri’s gaze shocks wide. He heaves up on slightly unsteady feet, squeaks, “Y-yes, ma’am!” at the female Masumi sorcerer, and nearly trips over himself in his haste to obey. “Sorry!”
Chihiro would say something, feels he ought to, but the sum of his injured parts is eating into him with vicious teeth. Pierces skin and muscle, gets at his nerves and motor function. He peels himself off the forest mat slowly, unsteady but thinks he might have this. Inch by inch. He comes to a wobbly stand, turns to the trio of Masumi—
He sways on his feet. His periphery flickers.
The world cuts to black.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
He startles awake an unknown amount of hours later, pulse kicking into high gear on the side of his throat until well near chews on it. His chest and torso seize tight, he needs to get up, fight his way upwards—
—he’s pushed back flat, held immobile until he slackens.
“Breathe, kid. ‘S alright,” directs a voice to his right and above.
The voice is distantly familiar. A faint itch in Chihiro’s frontal lobe that has him wanting to dig inside his forehead, scratch at with mean nails. It’s nothing but soothing, gravelly and low, radiating nothing but good intent. That doesn’t mean he intends to listen.
He takes stock of himself, checks for leverage, discreetly feeling out both arms. His right lances with dull-sharp pain from shoulder to wrist, no matter how little he jostles it; feels heavy and clunky, nerves dull despite the pain. Not that, then. His left arm is in better condition; heavy with fatigue, but seems to be overall decent to rely on.
Chihiro shifts. Leverages his weight in the low of his back and tenses his left arm and side. He heaves upwards.
The same weight holds sturdy. It keeps him down two, three seconds, then delivers a firm shove to knock him breathless and flat on his back. Pain rockets through him.
“Oi, simmer down,” reprimands the same vaguely familiar voice. “There’s no fire. Don’t waste energy needlessly.”
The surroundings are murky, dour with nighttime. Chihiro can barely make out the silhouette of what’s holding him down; round and long, it presses diagonally across his sternum, but carefully. Strategically placed to weigh between his injured ribs and busted shoulder. Not intending to harm.
Chihiro struggles against the impulse to fight, forces controlled breath down in his sternum. He looks up. The man who’s holding it is a tapered shadow towering above his bedside. He’s splayed on a chair, long legs slightly bent to sprawl beneath the seat, but ultimately relaxed. Chihiro’s brain pings with familiarity, a light sense of vertigo.
“Mr. Samura,” he realizes.
Mr. Samura tilts his head. A sliver of light refracts in the opaque tint of his glasses. “Hey, Chihiro,” he murmurs. “It is you, this time.”
Chihiro doesn’t know what that means. “It’s me,” he agrees.
“You’re all grown up.”
“Sure,” Chihiro concedes.
Mr. Samura chuckles. It’s a warm sound, low and genuine. “It’s good to see you.”
Chihiro nods. “Is everyone okay?”
“Sure. Peachy.”
“And everything else? The mission? What about the blades, and Mr. Uruha?”
Mr. Samura is quiet for a spell before he says, “I’m gonna ease off now,” in a tone that’s loose and conversational.
Chihiro frowns at the blatant sidestepping, but isn’t given any space to point it out before Mr. Samura continues. “You got to to stay in bed, okay? You took a decent beating. Doled one out too, I don’t doubt, but you’re done now. You’ve got your new job: stay put and give yourself some time to heal up.”
Chihiro squares him with a flat stare for all of two seconds, then remembers that there’s no point to that, is there. “I’m gonna be fine,” he says instead.
Mr. Samura says nothing.
Chihiro swallows a sigh, resigns himself to his fate; he may have met Mr. Samura only briefly, and years ago at that, but Chihiro knows enough about who his dad had been—what sort of company he kept—to yield in the face of a very obvious brick wall.
In lieu of squirming for further answers he won’t get, he takes his time to look around, catalog the room they’re in. It’s spartan, wood-panelled and void of other occupants. A second futon is pushed up against Chihiro’s. A lump of fabric is folded at his feet—his coat and sweater, probably. To his left is a surgical tray and a first aid kit, slightly ajar. A lone cabinet is parked by the wall, a partition is slid near-shut in the corner; he guesses at an en-suite.
And—something is missing.
A prickle at the back of his mind that’s been there for a while now, since he woke up really, makes itself known with a jolt to the fore of his mind. His fatigue-laden brain can’t make sense of it, but it’s wrong. It’s not until he turns back to Mr. Samura—barefoot, loose-limbed, chin tipped slightly downwards—and registers that the older man is easing a cane from weighing on his chest. A cane. An extension of the hand.
Chihiro’s breath stocks in his throat. His fingers twitch at his side. Enten.
He twists his head sharply left, squints into the dour space behind the chair, between ratty pin-legs and the length of Mr. Samura’s shins. Nothing. He turns around facing right. The walls and floor are bare. He knows, logically, that his spirit energy is near-depleted, if not completely dried up for now, which means he can’t reach out and sense Enten, so not being able to see it anywhere—
Chihiro’s swallows thickly. His heart rabbits against his ribs. He needs to—
“Oy, easy now. It’s here.”
Mr. Samura nudges his foot into something along the floor directly adjacent to Chihiro’s bedside.
Chihiro hefts his right arm out despite the stab of pain it costs him. Feels along the floor despite his taped fingers.
He closes his palm over familiar intricate ridges. Enten’s hilt is cool and real to the touch. He exhales in a rough shudder of breath.
“Good. You’re good, Chihiro.”
Chihiro grips the hilt tighter, for all that his dexterity is shot to hell for now.
“Shit,” bites Mr. Samura in a tone that veers sharply from calm and reassuring, scrapes briefly into a lower, more fraught baritone. “Not that I don’t get it, but shit.”
He doesn’t say, this shouldn’t be your burden, or, this isn’t what your father would have wanted, but Chihiro hears something like either or both implied well enough via omission. He doesn’t feel like refuting. Couldn’t even if he did. He keeps rubbing a finger over Enten’s hilt silently, traces the ornate steel of the tsuba. Scores a nail down the bulk of the sheath. It’s an anchor; the best tether he’s got.
Before the silence can grow oppressive with thoughts and sentiments better left unsaid, too somber for what it started out as, Mr. Samura clears his throat. “We’re on lockdown for a few days. Best thing you can do now is rest. You’ve been going non-stop for a while.”
It’s not a question, the last bit. Chihiro says nothing in reply, but he does eventually nod sharply enough to make the pillowcase crease with it. He suspects Mr. Samura doesn’t need overt gestures, but Chihiro wasn’t raised by wolves.
“Alright,” acquiesces the swordbearer, now uncharacteristically frank with relief; momentarily vulnerable in a way Chihiro wouldn’t figure goes with the emotionally stunted, tortured samurai-archetype. “I’ll let the other one back in come morning, if it makes the here and now any easier on you.”
Hakuri’s palms cupped over his cheeks. His blue, blue gaze fixed on Chihiro’s face with pinprick-precision. You’re okay. You protected me and Mr. Uruha.
Chihiro’s heart stocks in the hollow of his throat, breath briefly lapsing. He grows immediately warm with the realization. It says neither this nor that, but it’s—he feels oddly naked, stark and physical in his relief.
A cut glance at Mr. Samura’s face yields nothing. The swordbearer just hums, features and tone oncemore schooled neutral. “Kid’s good. Restless like a dog with a buried bone out there, but I figure it’s cause you’ve been out like a light.”
He eases out of his chair. He hefts his cane in an easy hand, doesn’t use it for support or direction but only swivels it blithely as he makes his way across the room. Before he exits he pauses in the yawn of the doorway.
“Sleep, Chihiro,” he murmurs, low but with heavy emphasis. “Tomorrow is tomorrow’s problem.”
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
When Chihiro next comes to, it’s to find the room illuminated bright in a way that indicates it’s well into morning, possibly midday.
Hakuri is parked at the foot of Chihiro’s futon. He’s rolled his sleeves past his elbows and sits cross-legged, carefully petting bare fingertips over a tantō that lays unsheathed and flat over one knee. Someone has supplied him with a polishing cloth and a couple different jars, which he’s examining quietly, his breath even and his brow furrowed.
Chihiro doesn’t know Hakuri to carry a blade for a weapon, but he recognizes the ceremony of weapons maintenance for what it is: private lest you’re explicitly invited to partake.
He makes sure to stretch, flex his toes and splays a knee in a way that ought to obviously telegraph that he’s awake.
Hakuri jolts, his head snapping up. Gaze landing squarely and wide on Chihiro, his features peel loose into what can only be described as sheer, naked relief. “Chihiro!” he exclaims, and immediately makes to heave up standing.
The unsheathed tantō wobbles. Lilts outwards on his knee.
Chihiro draws a sharp breath. “Hakuri,” he stresses. His voice comes out rough, gravelly and thick with sleep. “You need to—the blade—”
Hakuri freezes. For a moment he looks caught between synapses, midway between sitting and standing. His thighs strain with how awkwardly he’s trapped all his weight, still cross-legged from the knee. He looks down, the moue of his mouth going oval with surprise.
“Oh,” he says, and clamps a hand over the hilt. He holds the short sword out from his body when he sits back down gingerly, then reaches for the sheath and slides the blade secure. He places it a safe two paces to the left.
Chihiro goes slack in the shoulders. Crisis averted—that’s good. He breathes steady a couple times, then scrapes up half-sitting.
Hakuri looks sheepishly up beneath eyelashes at him. The tips of his ears and the bridge of his nose have flushed pale pink.
Chihiro raises a mild eyebrow. “The old guys saddled you with blade maintenance, but they didn’t tell you how to handle one?”
“Ah, haha,” trips out of Hakuri haltingly. “No, I—know how to handle a sword.” He reaches behind himself, scritches a few fingers on the back of his neck. “I got distracted. Sorry.”
Chihiro shakes his head. His injured shoulder gives a distinct twinge. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m sorry.”
Hakuri blinks at him. “Oh,” he says. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“Neither do you,” replies Chihiro. He quirks a faint smile.
Hakuri ducks his head, twines his fingers on his lap. Nods briskly. When he tilts his jaw back up, he’s chewing his bottom lip. “How are you feeling?” he asks, voice soft, a little tentative.
“Like I took a beating,” Chihiro deadpans.
He takes stock of himself. Bruised, bloodied, beaten. He feels weak, but he doesn’t say that, for all that it can mean a whole many things, and most of them aren’t indicative of how he really feels. He’s alright, all things considered.
“From what the Masumi reported, it sounds like you gave at least as good as you got.”
Chihiro looks at the newcomer at the door. He might have to reevaluate his current status; he hadn’t noticed Shiba entering.
“Shiba,” he greets.
Shiba is leaned against the doorframe, hip cocked and one arm folded across his chest. He raises the other to his temple, offers Chihiro a loose salute. “Chihiro,” he says. “Well done.”
Chihiro shrugs one shoulder. “Done, at least. For now.”
It doesn’t crush down on him quite as it had in the immediate aftermath, his failure to finish off Hiruhiko doesn’t taste acidic and like bile when he considers the battle and the outcome. It still sits in his stomach, heavy and leaden, the knowledge that yesterday’s failure—Chihiro’s failure, and his alone—is very likely to feed tomorrow’s carnage.
“You got the job done,” says Shiba.
Did he? Chihiro’s not so sure.
Shiba must read the gist of his thoughts plain on his face, because he shakes his head resolutely. “Your mission was to escort and guard, not kill—if we want to argue semantics, I’m pretty sure the mission brief details that as Kamunabi agents, your first response ought to always be neutralizing, not eliminating.”
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t get a clean shot at thinning Hishaku offensive ranks and failed to take advantage,” argues Chihiro.
“The situation wasn’t ideal. Can’t blame yourself for folding if you’re set up against an unfairly stacked deck.”
Chihiro shakes his head. “It’s not an excuse.”
Shiba’s brow draws pensive and furrowed. “Chihiro—”
“Oi, Shiba—what is this, the residential recreation room?”
A dull thwap punctuates the sentence; Shiba’s jaw ticks for the force of the rap Mr. Samura serves the length of his shin with.
The man in question sidles up at Shiba’s elbow, cane still brandished at half mast between them. “Well?” he needles. “Didn’t we say the kid’s got to rest?”
Shiba raises a slim eyebrow. “He is resting.”
“Sure does sound like he’s being debriefed by a superior to me,” gruffs Mr. Samura. He jabs the cane in Chihiro’s direction. “That kind of damage requires peace of mind as well, to heal.”
Shiba pins the swordbearer with a flat stare. “You got a medical degree now, too, Samura?”
“Nah,” dismisses Mr. Samura. “I just know that no matter how you dice it, two plus two equals four.” He sticks his face close to Shiba’s. “What, you need a medical degree to gauge that he needs to do as little as possible for a few days?”
Shiba rolls his eyes. “We’re not disagreeing—anyway, it wasn’t a zoo till you ambled up just now. If there’s anyone who’s not contributing to keeping any sort of peace, it’s you.”
Mr. Samura scoffs. “I am a paragon of peacekeeping,” he says. “My mind’s eye is clear, tranquil as can be.”
“Right you are, Mr. Enlightened Samurai,” deadpans Shiba.
“Oi, who d’you think—”
Chihiro tunes them out. He looks towards Hakuri. Hakuri’s head is swivelling here and there as he tries to divvy his attention between all the people talking; he stills when Chihiro catches his gaze. He looks mildly confused, maybe a little taken aback, but he flashes him a small smile. Jerks his head a little towards the still-bickering men in the door, mimes at Chihiro whether he’s okay.
Chihiro returns the small smile. He nods. He’s never minded noise and bustle—a product of his environment, or maybe just his dad’s son—and honestly hasn’t ever seen how it could be detrimental to healing, how fast or slow his body takes to repair whatever physical damage he’s accrued this time.
“Anyway!” declares Shiba loudly. He’s got one of Mr. Samura’s hands splayed on his cheek, the crook of the man’s pinky wedged in the corner of his mouth. He looks at Chihiro. “You hungry?”
Chihiro considers it. “Yeah, a little.”
“You good to stand? Kitchen’s just outside. Hakuri, would you—”
Hakuri’s already made it to Chihiro’s side, is offering him the bend of his elbow. “I got it, Mr. Shiba,” he says seriously. He glances at Chihiro out of the corner of his eye, halts a little. “I-if you need it, that is. Help.”
Chihiro indicates his left side. “Come around. This arm’s kind of shot.”
“Oh! Sorry!” Hakuri scuttles quickly behind him.
“It’s fine, Hakuri.” Chihiro grasps his forearm. “Thanks.”
When he looks up, he sees Shiba having paused in the doorway. Chihiro raises an eyebrow in silent query.
The older man looks between him and Hakuri, seems to weigh his words. Eventually he just shakes his head. Smiles slightly. “Nothing. C’mon.”
Hakuri walks with Chihiro slowly, takes care to match the rhythm of his injured gait, the gouge in his thigh—tightly dressed now—making him awkward and limping. It’s not the worst thing in the world, Chihiro knows, but a lifetime’s worth of caring for himself and others, rather than the other way around, has him feeling some sort of way towards Hakuri being obliged to step in and assist him.
He makes sure to pitch in close and murmur his thanks once they reach the table, and he’s sunk down to sit on the closest available chair.
Hakuri ducks out from underneath his arm, looks at him with startled, wide eyes. “U-uh, it’s really nothing,” he stutters. “You don’t have to thank me, Chihiro.” He rubs a thumb across the bridge of his nose, flushes with renewed fervor.
“I want to, though,” says Chihiro earnestly, and reiterates his thanks again. Hakuri flares a brighter red and bangs his knee on the underside of the table.
Chihiro wouldn’t have thought twice about it, not really, if he didn’t choose that exact moment to glance over at Shiba. Shiba’s back is turned, but Chihiro wasn’t born yesterday, plus he knows the man well; he holds himself very, very carefully, the bulk of his shoulders overtly checked in place as he exacts precise, delicate movements to scoop out the rice cooker. He takes his time doing it, and once he’s done turns around slowly, crosses the room with overtly measured steps.
Chihiro watches him warily as he deposits plates of rice, miso soup, steamed egg and pickled radish in front of him. Shiba says nothing, carefully doesn’t meet Chihiro’s gaze despite his best attempts at eyeballing him into submission. “All in all, the mission was a success,” he says instead, once he’s rounded the table and slumped into a seat on the opposite side. “Now we’re just waiting.”
“Really?” Chihiro glances at Hakuri. “You did it?”
“I had some help,” replies Hakuri, fiddling with one of his sleeves. “One of the Masumi sorcerers—she healed me, or something? Anyway, it worked.” He looks up at Chihiro then, smiles a little and knocks a loose knuckle into the side of his own temple. “It was a bit of a transport, but yeah. I got both blades.”
Something—several somethings—loosen in Chihiro’s stomach. He smiles at Hakuri, a genuine, wondrous thing that rips loose of its larger whole—the very specific warm tangle of admiration, kinship, and affection that’s made a home of his sternum recently—to crawl up his throat, colour his words and the spaces in-between.
(He wonders absently when it became so large and distinct, the thing he understands now that he feels for Hakuri; at which point he learned, subconsciously, to distinguish its parts from its whole.)
“Well, we don’t have them right now,” corrects Shiba, knocking Chihiro back to the present.
He spears his chopsticks in the egg, glances sharply in Shiba’s direction. “Why?”
“Both blades are being audited at Kamunabi HQ,” says Mr. Samura. He’s leaned adjacent to a window at the back of the room, left knee lightly bent and foot resting against the wall. “Checked over for wards, trackers, remote spells, what have you.”
“Protocol,” huffs Shiba. “Although—it’s not the dumbest protocol they’ve got in place, considering what we’ve seen.”
“Uruha’s there to help out,” supplies Mr. Samura. He tilts his head, seems to square Chihiro with a stare in spite of his blindness. “Sounded really eager to get a chance to do his part for Chihiro-dono as soon as humanly possible. It’s been a while since he had reason to be this excited, I guess.”
Chihiro grimaces. “I wish he would drop the honorific.”
Mr. Samura hums. “He’s easy-going enough, but some things are just sacred.”
“… Whatever that means.”
“You’re a smart kid, Chihiro,” is all the swordbearer replies.
Shiba clicks his tongue. “Well, what all of it does mean is that you’ve been ordered to sit tight for a couple days. Which is just as well.” He eyeballs Chihiro’s right arm, slack and immobile at his side. “You need some time to heal. We can’t risk bringing out Char-chan, so it’s not a one and done-type situation.”
“What about the other swordbearers?” prompts Chihiro, well understanding the reasoning and logic behind staying put, but feeling the urgency of the situation—the knowledge of just how far ahead of them the Hishaku reasonably are—like a noose being slowly threaded to choke at his collar.
“There’s been no news,” replies Shiba. “And in this case, I’d say no news is good news.”
“Usually is,” agrees Mr. Samura.
Chihiro is also inclined to agree, unfortunately. He picks a slice of daikon from the pinch of his chopsticks. Chews slowly. Playing at the waiting game isn’t something he’s strictly comfortable with, nor is it familiar after three years of non-stop training, intel gathering, and hunting; neither him nor Shiba have ever made it a point to sit comfortably on the side and wait. Still, he supposes, with no small amount of dissatisfaction—the situation has changed.
“So for now, we wait,” he summarizes.
Shiba nods. “For now we wait.”
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
There’s not much to do apart from quite literally sitting or laying around, neither of which rank among Chihiro’s favorite pastimes. He feels the itch of restlessness eat into him more or less immediately, the amalgamation of boredom, pain and low churning stress heartfelt to his core, for all that he knows that he’s the very definition of useless—and ought to take advantage of it—for the coming few days.
Mr. Samura wanders off early, citing a need for quietude to reflect, urging Chihiro to consider the same for himself. Shiba lasts a couple of hours, darting in and out of the safehouse’s designated sickbay, putting valiant effort into both keeping Chihiro company and ducking his dogged attempts at pulling him into discussions about strategy, about next steps, most likely what-ifs and consider-this’s.
Chihiro supposes he ought to give him credit—it’s not until hour circa two that the older man clamps his jaw shut with finality, urges Hakuri to hesitant feet and prods him out of the room whilst remaining tight-lipped about the what and where with the exception of, training, plus a final, get some rest, ple-ease, Chihiro-kun, both spoken in a tone as achingly polite as it simmers with an undercurrent of gentle threat.
Chihiro swallows down on a sigh, reaches up with his left hand to knuckle at his eyelids, and resigns himself to breathing exercises and trying his hand anew at meditation. It’s never been his forte, but what he doesn’t work hard at he won’t improve at, so.
It’s not until sunset has crept up on the cottage that they return, the front door clicking open-and-shut on hour who-knows-which. Chihiro cracks one eye open to note the late hour; shadows have grown elongated in the corners of the room, and the gentle spray of refracted sunlight across the tatami is golden-hued and burnished.
“Chihiro!” calls Shiba’s disembodied voice from far across the house. “Delivery!”
Chihiro hefts himself up sitting, peels the covers from high on his collar to fold in his lap, and waits for dual sets of footsteps—one pair heavier and evenly balanced, one slightly uneven and lighter—to approach the doorway.
Hakuri pops up first. He’s sweaty and muddy, a little knocked about in the edges; his left cheekbone is blooming with light bruising, and both his sleeves are ripped and in various states of blood-flecked. Shiba comes up behind him, smiling brightly and looking none the worse for wear. He’s barely broken a sweat, contra Hakuri who’s still panting softly and swiping at his hairline with the back of his hand.
“Training done?” asks Chihiro.
Shiba screws up the wattage to a grin. “For today. Kid’s got talent!”
Hakuri puffs a reedy breath. He mutters, “I don’t feel very talented—mostly just got knocked around,” but he’s bright with the praise, his brow lax and the corners of his mouth kicked up in a half-smile.
“A bit too good at the whole self-deprecating-business,” stage-whispers Shiba, looking at Chihiro pointedly, “But we’ll get to that, too.”
Hakuri knots both hands in front of him and drops his chin, fastidiously studying the floor in front of him.
Chihiro rolls his eyes at the overt playacting. “Sure, we’ll work on it.”
“Great, great,” says Shiba. “I figured we’d be in agreement.”
He claps a large palm over Hakuri’s shoulder, making him jolt and wince, then turns around. He raises an easy hand and waves loosely as he disappears around the bend of the doorway. “I’m gonna head back out. You both take your time, take it easy.”
Whatever that means, thinks Chihiro, but says nothing. He looks at Hakuri. “You okay?”
Hakuri nods vigorously. “Yeah! I’m great! It’s just some scrapes.”
He crosses over to Chihiro’s bedside and sinks down to sit cross-legged next to the futon. Well there he expels a heavy breath, rubs at a spot between his eyes. “Mr. Shiba is kind of—crazy strong,” he says, a little wondrous, a little begrudgingly.
“He’s strong, yeah,” agrees Chihiro.
“Did he train you?” Hakuri peers at him curiously. A beat, two, then he abruptly flails out with his arms. “Ack! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to—of course you wouldn’t want to talk about—”
“It’s fine, Hakuri,” Chihiro cuts in, realizing where they’re headed. “You can ask. I don’t mind.”
Hakuri drops his arms. Looks startled. Chihiro notes, almost absently, the fan of his near-translucent eyelashes, his matted and sweat-striped fringe. The red slash of his bottom lip, bitten raw and chapped for the cold.
“Oh,” Hakuri affects, sounding a little thrown. “Really? Because you really don’t—you don’t have to humor me.”
“I know,” replies Chihiro. “I’m not humoring you. You don’t have to walk on eggshells around me or anything. If you want to know, I’m happy to tell you.”
“… Okay,” says Hakuri slowly. “Then—then yeah. If you want to tell me, I want to listen.”
Chihiro looks him over. “Do you want me to do that now, or do you want to take a shower first?”
Hakuri freezes. He looks down on his own lap, his scraped arms and torn sleeves, and nods slowly. “I’ll, uh, go shower.”
He slinks off to the bathroom, the tips of his ears mildly flushed. Chihiro listens to the twist of old knobs, the spray of water beating on the basin, then eases himself out of bed and limps over to the back of the room. Enten and his wakizashi are steadied against the wall, as is the tantō that someone—Chihiro suspects Shiba, though he couldn’t guess where it comes from—had seen fit to equip Hakuri with. The cleaning kit is stacked and folded on a footstool just adjacent.
Chihiro brings all of it back to the center of the room, stubbornly loading his injured right arm with both Enten and the two short swords, carrying the armful through the sharp sting of pain, if only for a childish refusal to need to double back.
He eases down on the edge of the futon, twitches with the taut stretch and twinge of his thigh. Sparing a glance downwards, he notes that what little bleeding he feels at least isn’t heavy enough to leak through the gauze.
You got lucky, Shiba declared earlier when changing the dressings, teeth pressed tight, an inch to the right and it would’ve slashed your femoral. You would’ve bled out in two, three minutes.
Chihiro grits his jaw. Lucky, indeed, he thinks darkly, before shoving the thought firmly aside.
He busies his hands with laying out the polishing cloth and uncapping two of the four jars, then unsheathes Enten. He props the katana against his knee. The remnants of the twilight sun catches on the flat of the blade, bleeds the cool steel of its harsh chrome tint, turns the pale gold of the tsuba buttery with warmth. The odd splatter of blood remains, but overall it’s decently clean. Chihiro reaches for the polishing cloth and begins wiping the blade down.
It’s soothing work; he’s always liked it, the maintenance part. As much as it’s jarring to wipe clean the remnants of a life he’s taken, he also acknowledges the necessity of it—keeping Enten in prime condition as much as keeping the bloodshed top of his mind, a stark reminder of the reason for doing what he does, the method he’s chosen to do it.
“Chihiro?”
He looks up to see Hakuri stepping out of the en-suite, barefoot and still towelling his hair. He’s dressed down to loose black joggers and a long-sleeve boatneck, both of which spill a little too long over his ankles and loose over his collar, respectively, to be anything but borrowed from Shiba.
Chihiro tips his head, indicating Hakuri’s previously occupied spot.
Hakuri retakes it, careful to fold his legs beneath himself and keep a respectful distance to the unsheathed katana.
“It’s not going to bite,” Chihiro comments mildly.
Hakuri quirks a slight smile. “I know that.”
“You want to learn how to do this properly?”
“Sure. Yeah. You want to teach me?”
“It’s good practice if you’re going to be carrying one.” Chihiro indicates the tantō. “Shiba gave it to you?”
Hakuri nods. “He figured it’d be good—he said to not just rely on Isō, that I’d be handicapping myself if I did.” He scrapes the blade up with slow, pronounced movements. Takes it slowly in hand. “I don’t want to be a burden.”
Chihiro hums. “You won’t be. But yeah, it’s true; your spirit energy reserves are limited. It’s good to learn to be multi-faceted.”
“You’re amazing, Chihiro,” says Hakuri, apropos nothing, which has Chihiro glancing up sharply. His heart stutters and skips in his chest, an odd, contradictory sensation that has him feeling simultaneously like his lungs expand large but his breath chokes.
Hakuri, unbeknownst to this, traces a thumb over the tantō’s tsuba, and continues, “I’ve seen you do such crazy things, and we haven’t even known each other that long.”
“I’ve trained a lot,” Chihiro halts out, feeling wildly out of element, unsure of how to proceed. “And it’s different. Wielding Enten. It’s not innate ability, exactly. With a bit of practice, most people would become very strong with an enchanted blade.”
Hakuri shakes his head. “No, I don’t think that’s true. I grew up among talented sorcerers; I don’t think any of the Sazanami, not my siblings, the Tō—none of them could wield Enten like you do. It’s not about strength, I don’t think, it’s—” Hakuri trails off.
When he continues, a spell later, it’s to in part reiterate something he’s told Chihiro before, which seems simultaneously like yesterday and like so long ago. “It’s so much more than that. But just the katana—it suits you.”
Chihiro smooths a bandaged palm down the flat of Enten’s blade. It’s a double-edged sword, he thinks; attempting to honor his father by walking down a path he never intended for Chihiro to know of, much less follow; wielding and utilizing a memento of his legacy in a way Chihiro knows he would never have wanted or approved him to—and to do it with attempted benevolence, in any way that’s just, for all that he uses it to exact bloody revenge—
“I don’t know if it’s in any way the right way,” he says, drumming padded nails across the tempered steel. “But it’s the only way I know how to wield it.”
When I turned eighteen, my hands were already covered in blood. And you’re the same. We’re equals.
Chihiro fists his hand despite the pain. He quells the urge to grimace. “It’s not right—” he starts. All the blood and carnage, lives taken indiscriminately. It’s true, it isn’t. However— “But I have to do it this way.”
“Something happened back there, didn’t it?” says Hakuri, more statement than question.
Chihiro sucks his teeth. “It’s nothing.” He shakes his head. Relaxes his palm forcibly. “I wasn’t strong enough, and it—there’s a lot that hangs in the balance now.”
Chihiro isn’t sure where they’re headed, what the point of what they’re talking about is—what Hakuri thinks or wants to say, when his silence draws long. Certainly he doesn’t expect Hakuri to reach out and put three gentle fingers to thread Chihiro’s own. Paused and crooked as they are just above Enten’s blade, Hakuri winds his way beneath and up around, makes careful, careful contact as Chihiro’s breath stocks in his throat.
He looks at the stitch of their now-joined hands, unblinking and temporarily shocked still. Hakuri’s fingers are longer than his own, slim and knobbly, scarred here and there but his skin soft and smooth. He’s trembling ever so slightly, bleeds stark warmth despite the solid wrap of gauze that numbs Chihiro of most acute sensation.
“Chihiro…” he murmurs, not so much calling Chihiro’s name as he breathes it—a heft of air that sounds like him, if he were in any way so soft.
It takes a bit of time, but once Chihiro dares look up—search out blue, blue eyes, a bitten jaw and determined brow—Hakuri is there. Steps up to challenge, unblinking when he meets and holds Chihiro’s gaze. He’s blushing furiously, brilliantly pink from exposed collarbone to the tips of his ears, chewing on his bottom lip with his eyes wide and his breath and shoulders checked in place. He looks like a cornered animal, looks as though he’s prepared to bolt any second—
—but he doesn’t retract his hand. Doesn’t make a move that indicates he wants to.
Chihiro swallows thickly—and shifts his palm to face upwards. Secures his fingers more firmly around Hakuri’s.
He’s not sure what he’s doing, what they’re doing, but there it is—the thing that lives in his sternum, the knot of warmth that makes itself known, stretches and grows long like a cat in a sunspot whenever Hakuri’s around. It’s easy to identify, Chihiro’s an analytical person by nature—but what he ought to do with it, that he hasn’t quite known until right about now.
“Hakuri,” Chihiro eventually ekes out in response, hoarse and stuttering. He feels warmth licking up his throat, something like static electricity zip the length of his spine.
Hakuri swallows visibly. Nods sharply, once, and says, “I want to—”
The front door bangs open-and-shut.
“Chi-hiro-kuuun!” calls Shiba from faraway. “Hakuri-kun! We’re back! You decent?”
An absolutely insane query, Chihiro thinks. Except—
“U-um,” stutters Hakuri. He blushes even redder—if possible—and moves to retract his hand.
“Careful,” Chihiro snaps, per knee-jerk reflex, and internally winces for the tone. He clears his throat, indicates the unsheathed blade below their hands for where his words fails him, desperately flailing for figurative footing and a way through the conversation as he is.
“R-right,” stutters Hakuri, tense and rigid but forcing himself looser to the point where Chihiro can carefully guide their temporarily joined palms astray of Enten’s razor-sharp orbit, remove them from the immediate risk of slicing either or both their tangled extremities to bloody ribbons.
Chihiro puffs a strained breath and gently lets Hakuri go, reaches for the katana’s sheath. His mind is churning; his sternum feels impossibly tight, far too shallow a space to be able to encompass all that he’s become suddenly, viscerally aware lives there. What does he do now? He really doesn’t know.
Hakuri, on his end, snaps his hand back to lay orderly but restless on his lap. He rearranges himself to sit a little farther away from Chihiro, knocks his gaze down to train on the flat of his thighs, and fists both hands there. He stays very still and quiet until the moment Mr. Samura stalks up in the doorway.
The swordbearer tilts his head in their direction. “Kids,” he addresses blithely.
Hakuri nods mutely, which Chihiro chalks out to mean that Hakuri, whilst incredible when it counts, isn’t immune to awfully inconvenient timing and the shock that begets such a thing.
Chihiro clears his throat, chasing the frog that appears to have taken up permanent residence there, and replies, “Mr. Samura.”
“Chihiro,” acknowledges Mr. Samura. “How are you feeling?”
“Good,” Chihiro manages. It’s true, as it so happens; for all that he’s feeling—a great many things, if he’s completely honest; running warm, his heart beating halfway up his throat—he feels—good. Even sitting among the rip-roaring of his heartbeat and the very unfamiliar churn of emotions he doesn’t know where to begin sorting out, he feels good.
“I’m good,” he reiterates.
Mr. Samura quirks a placid half-smile. “Glad to hear. How’s the appetite?”
“Fine,” Chihiro says carefully.
Mr. Samura smiles wider, doesn’t otherwise say anything.
They shuffle out to the kitchen—Hakuri lightning-quick to make it to Chihiro’s side and offer him his elbow, for all that he has a difficult time looking at him—where Shiba has begun unearthing tupperware containers from the small fridge. He glances over his shoulder when they enter, offering a white, broad smile but saying nothing.
Chihiro isn’t sure what to make of it, but he feels acutely as though he’s become less of a person and more of a koma, a piece of carved wood being rearranged this and that way on a shōgi board according to strategy.
“What?” he intones, as careful and flat as he knows how to make himself sound on command.
“Nothing, nothing,” says Shiba, and turns back to the kitchen counter.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
It’s not nothing. Whatever it is, it’s not nothing.
Chihiro feels it, as innately as he’s ever felt anything, once they’re herded back to the room—their room—after dinner, Hakuri’s arm solid and unyielding around his waist as they tread the few steps from the dining table and across the threshold, cross the short couple paces to the twin futons laid to rest in the midst of the space.
“Rest,” intones Shiba overtly seriously from the doorway, expression carefully checked flat, before he ducks out of sight.
Chihiro glares at the door as it clicks shut, the chink resounding as though with particular finality. He swallows back on a sigh, resists the urge to reach up and rub at his temple where he can feel the shadow of an impending migraine stalk about.
“Are you okay?” asks Hakuri, which forces Chihiro to focus, open his eyes—and himself—to the abject, cold reality of a situation he doesn’t know what it really is, and doesn’t have the faintest clue how to deal with.
“Yeah,” he says, swallowing dry around words which want to stock up heavy in his throat. “I’m fine.”
Hakuri nods, steps hesitantly back. For a while he lingers, gaze fixed to the floor and right hand picking doggedly at a hangnail. It’s not until the silence grows suffocating, drapes heavy and blankets them, that he eventually says, “I’m gonna get ready for bed,” and turns inwards for the bathroom.
Chihiro busies himself with cleaning up after their failed bout of maintenance; prods the jars of oil until they’re orderly stacked against the close wall, lines up Enten, his wakizashi and the tantō next to it, folds the muslin and cotton cloths to the side.
It’s not nothing, he thinks. It’s—
“Chihiro,” says Hakuri, too suddenly and too close all of a sudden—he doesn’t expect it—at Chihiro’s back.
Chihiro freezes. “Yeah?” he halts out. He gets to his feet slowly. Turns around slower still.
Hakuri hasn’t moved. He looks soft beneath the dim overhead lights in a way that makes Chihiro’s stomach clench painfully. As though all the affection and warmth situated in his chest migrates suddenly to his guts, where it takes on a new form; shape shifts into something near-molten, white hot and tangible and urgent. Hakuri’s fringe—loose and out of its characteristic tie—bends for the shell of his ear, the remainder of his hair a riot of gentle curls which frames the sharp cut of his cheekbones and the angle of his jaw. It lends a monochrome contrast to the all-black of his borrowed ensemble, the churning sea-palette of his eyes.
God, Chihiro thinks, and, it’s not nothing, as Hakuri steps up close. The line of his shoulders retains a discernible tremor, but his gaze is unwavering with fraught determination.
“Yeah?” Chihiro reiterates. Wrought from some misplaced sense of wanting to help the situation, somehow urge the conversation on, or from somewhere else—he doesn’t know. Maybe he’s reaching for an anchor, a tether of some sort. It’s a jumble between his stuttering pulse, heavy in his throat, and the placid blank—useless, just when he needs the opposite—of his thoughts.
Hakuri clears his throat. His hands are knotted at his waist, thumbs circling one another restlessly. “I—” he says, then pauses.
Chihiro’s mind is spinning restlessly. He thinks of everything, he thinks of nothing; he remembers, starkly and in bright colour: I need a samurai like you—I need you, and, does it really matter—you saved me, and, will you let me keep fighting with you—I want to keep proving the worth you saw in me back then.
“I wanted to say, back then—” begins Hakuri haltingly. He clears his throat, chews on his bottom lip, then seems to come to a silent decision. He looks up at Chihiro, mouth set with determination. “I wanted to say that you don’t have to bear anything alone anymore. I want you to lean on me—i-if you want to. I’m here. Please let me help.”
It’s them, the two of them, addressing each other with different sentiment—so much of it, so many different truths spoken with conviction—and every so often circling back to their first and one common denominator:
When it comes down to it, what Hakuri has reiterated over and over again, what Chihiro has grasped and kept in the curl of one greedy palm, returned as implicitly explicit as he can, is this:
Me and you, then as now—Hakuri and Chihiro.
Chihiro, for all that he’s injured and telegraphs across countries when he moves, takes two halting steps forward and snags aching fingers in the throat of Hakuri’s borrowed sweater to tug him close.
The kiss isn’t by any means planned, sensible, or in any way backed up by experience; it’s Chihiro’s first, and he’s sure he acts like it. Or doesn’t. He doesn’t know how to act, is the point. It doesn’t deter him from steeling the arm he now keeps tethered to Hakuri, from tugging him even closer. He swallows the shocked noise Hakuri makes, and then does his best to angle his face and relax, make himself malleable for whatever may come next.
Hakuri seizes up tight, hands coming up to clutch in the low of Chihiro’s back—
But he doesn’t pull away.
He opens up, goes slack in the shoulders and shudders violently, hinges his jaw open and kisses back with a wanton that spears Chihiro between the third and fourth rib. He isn’t quick enough to stomp out the shiver-and-gasp he manages in return, only manages to tuck it away in his throat when he tugs Hakuri even closer and swallows what comes next.
It burns, a languid lick of flame from tip to toe, starting where he attempts to fit his tongue against Hakuri’s and ending where he accidentally slicks tongue against his teeth, prodding it over his bottom incisors and gums and then, finally, against tongue.
Hakuri keens.
It goes to Chihiro’s brain immediately, a noise unearthed from somewhere deep he doesn’t understand where and couldn’t explain why it makes him prickle with shivers all over, how it causes the bottom of his guts to drop out, devolve from fiery pit to sucking, shivery black void. He clutches at Hakuri’s hip, ignoring the dagger of pain that shoots from injured shoulder to torn arm, hooking it tighter and shoving aside anything and everything that isn’t exactly this.
It’s not going to last forever—Chihiro isn’t stupid, he understands that. Still, he only pulls away once he’s forced to—when Hakuri rears back ever so slightly, spit-slick and pupils blown so wide they’re barely anything but black, and Chihiro feels light headed with lack of oxygen as much as with arousal, hot and heavy and sparking kinetic, low-thrum electric charge coursing and bubbling beneath his skin.
They stare at each other, panting heavily, for a few seconds. Hakuri shudders visibility. “I—” he begins, and trails off.
Chihiro huffs, “Yeah.” Doesn’t know what else to say.
“You—you want this?” asks Hakuri, a little hushed, like he’s awed. He’s got one hand on Chihiro’s uninjured shoulder, the other carefully tucked in the small of his back. All of his fingers are cramping, working empty air and the fabric of Chihiro’s sweater spasmodically.
“Do you want this?” Chihiro volleys back. He tilts his head, locks eyes with Hakuri. He feels the same hot-cold clench of his stomach at the sight of Hakuri’s spit-slick, red mouth; his blown-wide pupils and the bold streaks of flush high on his cheeks.
Hakuri’s mouth falls slightly ajar. “I—yes. Yes.” He nods fervently. “I, god—Chihiro.”
Chihiro quirks a small smile. Can’t and won’t quell the genuine affection that bleeds starkly into it. “Then we want the same thing.”
Hakuri’s eyes grow even wider, if possible. “So I can—I can kiss you? Again?”
Chihiro chuckles. “If you want to.”
It’s a light moment—Chihiro feels light, for his injuries and their general context—that quickly turns molten and weighted when Hakuri’s right palm comes up to cup Chihiro’s cheek, his left slotting horizontally over the back of his neck—when he pushes them close until their foreheads knock, maintaining wide-eyed, intent eye contact all through it, and intones, “Chihiro,” so seriously; says Chihiro’s name like a vow, as though in supplication. “I want everything.”
Me and you, then as now—Hakuri and Chihiro.
Chihiro kisses him again.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞