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i.
When Kazuha first meets Tomo, he is eight years old and has just fallen into the estate pond.
They still have the estate, back then: a sprawling villa of tea rooms and tatami floors, gardens filled with gingko trees and blooms of a thousand shapes and sizes. Kazuha spends his days studying, dreaming of the gardens, sneaking into them whenever his tutor falls asleep or the nanny loses sight of him. Today is one of those days that makes everyone in the house wants to nap, the afternoon air filled with the kind of heat that makes clothes cling to skin.
“Kazuha,” his father’s voice rumbles. It’s still strong back then, loud and commanding, even when muffled underneath the water. He speaks with some concern, mostly exasperation. “What are you doing?”
“I slipped, Father,” Kazuha says sheepishly as he clambers out, too embarrassed to say that he didn’t think Father was home and was trying to catch one of the koi swimming in the pond. His clothes are completely soaked, his hair still dripping as he rises to his feet. Once he’s regained his bearings, his gaze flits curiously from his father to the unfamiliar child standing next to him. The boy looks slightly older than Kazuha, taller, with a mischievous streak in his purple eyes.
“This is Tomo,” his father says, gesturing to the boy. No last name, Kazuha notes, so not from one of the great houses. A new employee of the house, perhaps, but his father has never bothered to introduce anyone before today. Kazuha doesn’t have enough experience to know what this means, but the next words out of his father’s mouth are clear: “He will be your bodyguard.”
Tomo bows, a stiffly formal move that looks strange on his lanky frame. “Pleased to meet you, young master,” he says, his vowels slightly drawn out in an unfamiliar accent.
Kazuha blinks. He wasn’t aware that he needed a bodyguard, let alone one scarcely a few years older than him. Even if someone attacked the estate, wouldn’t one of the many guards stationed around the perimeter take care of them? And even if they didn’t, what could Tomo be capable of that Kazuha isn’t?
He doesn’t bother voicing the thoughts, old enough at this point to understand that his father won’t bother giving him straight answers to any questions that contain even a flicker of defiance.
“Um,” Kazuha says, unsure what to say. His father is looking at him expectantly, and he can feel sweat clinging to his palms, or perhaps it’s just the pond water, still not dry in the humidity of the summer. “I’ll be in your care.” Tomo still has his head bowed, so he adds—“You can raise your head now.”
Tomo lifts his head cautiously. Kazuha’s father crosses his arms, but doesn’t say anything to correct him. Kazuha doesn’t know at that point that his father has little idea what to do properly either; that Tomo is in fact a kind of risk, an investment for the future that Kazuha doesn’t yet know will come to pass.
At the moment, Kazuha is just happy he’s done something right. He tries out a smile, a timid, hesitant one—he just wants Tomo to be comfortable, wants Tomo to think of home the way he does, a place he wants to return to. That he won’t leave from.
In return, Tomo flashes Kazuha a smile he will come to know very well in the coming years in all its shapes and forms—a gentle thing, a tiny bit crooked, warm and sun-bright.
Kazuha still treads carefully around Tomo, after that. He doesn’t really have experience interacting with other children—none of the other great houses have heirs around his age, and his father would rather he spend his days studying, playing by himself, than interacting with the rabble. Except Tomo, it seems.
“Am I the master, or are you, young master?” Tomo jokes with him one evening when Kazuha offers him an extra half of his dessert from supper: soft, delicious daifuku, mochi wrapped around sweet red bean paste. He’s been meaning to do it on previous days, but with his sweet tooth, he eats his dessert too quickly as soon as he’s finished his meal. Today’s dessert, daifuku, is his favorite, so it’s only logical that Tomo would enjoy it the most as well. As a result, he’d finally had enough self-control to leave a bit as a sort of gift—another expression of welcome, of home. But when he looks at Tomo’s plate, Tomo still has all his dessert left, completely untouched.
“It’s yours,” Tomo says when he notices Kazuha stealing a glance at his plate. “It’s your favorite, isn’t it?”
Kazuha looks at him in surprise. Tomo grins at him crookedly, and deftly uses his chopsticks to transfer both of his daifuku from his own plate to Kazuha’s.
“You’ve been hanging around the kitchen all day,” Tomo says, “and you looked so excited when dinner came out today.” He grins again. “You’re quite easy to read, young master.”
Kazuha looks down at the three daifuku on his plate, feeling blood rushing to his cheeks. He’s always been called reserved, stoic; his father praised him for it, and no one else has really cared to read his thoughts and moods. Being known is a strange feeling, but with Tomo smiling next to him, extra dessert heaped on his plate—it fills him with something warm, a feeling both foreign and lovely.
“Thank you,” he mumbles. He picks up one of the mochi and nibbles at it, chewing on it happily. Tomo’s face looks fond as he watches him, smiling gently all the while. Kazuha feels a bit embarrassed, and so he takes one of the remaining daifuku and plops it unceremoniously onto Tomo’s plate.
“For you,” he says. He hopes he says it firmly, stubbornly, so that Tomo will eat it. Tomo looks like he’s about to protest, but he takes one look at Kazuha’s face—as stern as he can look with his soft features around daifuku-stuffed chipmunk cheeks—and lets out a chuckle.
“All right,” Tomo says. He eats the daifuku all at once, nothing like the petite little bites Kazuha has been taught to take, but there’s no one to scold them, and he looks like he enjoys it—and isn’t that what matters?
The servants clear the dinner dishes from the room. Kazuha’s father is out today, busy on some important business like he usually is, so it’s just the two of them left with nothing but time ahead of them. Kazuha isn’t sure what he wants to do tonight—perhaps he’ll spend an evening in the gardens, or maybe he’ll sit in his room in candlelight, working his way through the latest collection of haiku his tutor has left him.
“Young master,” Tomo says after the servants have left, grinning a smile Kazuha will learn to associate with possibly-bad-ideas, “want to go fishing for koi?”
When they first meet Kujou Sara, both Kazuha and Tomo are knee-deep in the estate pond.
To be more accurate, a few minutes before they meet her, Kazuha and Tomo are busy fishing for koi. Over the course of many evenings spent splashing around in the gardens, they’ve perfected the art, a sharp darting into the water just a fraction of an inch to the side of where they actually see the koi. They put the koi back in the pond after, of course, but it’s still fun to see which one of them is better—Kazuha is faster, his movements more compact, but Tomo is more precise, missing less often.
“Young master, where are you?” the harried nanny calls out as she runs through the gardens. Kazuha and Tomo perk up, quickly scrambling out of the pond before she catches them in it. “Young master! Tomo!”
“We’re here,” Kazuha calls out, hoping a bit foolishly that she won’t take note of the wet fringes of their pants and their discarded footwear. “Is something the matter?”
“We have a visitor! The Kujou clan is here to pay their respects!” the nanny says as she finally emerges into the vicinity of the pond. She fusses over their damp clothes, their general disarray, and sends them into their rooms to change as quickly as they can.
Once they finish, she tells them to follow her as she leads them across the estate into the main room, where Kazuha’s father receives and entertains his most important visitors—a room Kazuha has been in only once, in a hazy memory he barely remembers of a stern-faced woman. Kazuha exchanges a curious glance with Tomo, who simply shrugs.
They emerge into the room to see the head of the Kujou clan standing with a stranger, a young girl about his age or younger, short dark hair framing a stern face. She looks shy, a little scared, and Kazuha feels a bit of kinship with her—he knows, too, what it’s like visiting the other great houses, standing in front of people who wield true power, searching for approval, finding only the scarcest of crumbs.
“Ah, here he is,” Kazuha’s father says magnanimously as they enter. His face is a little red, his smile broad, and Kazuha knows that he has been drinking. “My son.”
Kazuha kneels in front of their visitors respectfully, acutely aware of Tomo slipping into the shadowy corners of the room, too unimportant to be worth an introduction. “Kaedehara Kazuha,” he says.
The girl steps forward, stumbling a bit, and then she bows back. “Kujou Sara,” she says in a firm voice. It isn’t shaky at all. Kazuha is impressed. He wasn’t aware that the Kujou clan had an heir around his age, certainly not one with such poise and presence—he was under the impression that they did not have an heir at all.
He and Tomo find out later, ears pressed against the thin walls of the main room, that she isn’t their heir exactly—she’s adopted, a gift bequeathed to the family by the Archon herself. To some it would certainly seem that way, a gift, but Kazuha wonders about the girl he’d seen: shoulders a little hunched, a little heavy, footsteps unsure—and the burden she carries, to prove her worth.
He does not envy her.
Sara, to her credit, doesn’t ever let on that anything might be bothering her.
She visits a few more times after that, for meals and polite dinner conversations. They even take her out to the pond a few times, teach her how they catch the koi, a technique she masters with almost alarming speed. Sometimes they even make their way to the Kujou estate and sneak in through the hedges, bringing with them sweets pilfered from the Kaedehara kitchens for impromptu picnics at the Kujou gardens.
Sara is shy, reserved—kind of like Kazuha in those respects, but she’s much more serious where Kazuha is simply indifferent. They still get her to crack a laugh a few times, like when Tomo manages a particularly humorous retelling of their latest hijinks.
Most of the time, though, they see her at the dojo sparring with her master.
She’s a fearsome sight at the dojo, a quick learner of the Kujou clan’s flashy, quick martial arts. She has all the grace of Kazuha’s attacks, his same quick efficiency, no motion wasted, but strikes as lethally, as precisely as Tomo does. It’s terrifying to watch her with a sword, and somehow even more impressive seeing her with a bow, the ease and confidence with which she looses the bowstring, arrow meeting target after target. She’s always there when they are, working tirelessly toward some goal Kazuha can’t see.
“Blessed by Baal, that one is,” Kazuha’s master says one day with a shake of his head. There’s something reverent in his tone, but fearful too— though if the fear is of Sara or for her, Kazuha can’t tell. Kazuha likes his master—he’s a bit on the older side, but he moves deceptively quick for his age. He’s the one who taught Kazuha the familiar bladework of the Kaedehara clan, graceful, rapid movements culminating in a flurry of strikes. Tomo learns it too, but he never quite grasps it with the ease that Kazuha does, making up for what he lacks in grace with sheer power.
“As long as I can protect you,” Tomo always says with a lazy grin as he lounges against the wall, even when their master looks disappointed at his results.
“I can protect myself,” Kazuha always grumbles back, and Tomo bows, half-serious, half-mocking.
“Whatever the young master says,” he replies. But Kazuha notices the way Tomo’s eyes track the others around the dojo, always on the alert for any stray slashes, daggers slipping from a clumsy grip.
Nothing ever happens—the closest any of them get to danger is Tomo nearly challenging Sara to a match before Kazuha convinces him otherwise—but Kazuha is reassured by it, all the same.
It never really dawns on Kazuha why he must have a bodyguard until some years down the line.
His life is fairly uneventful up until then—his father continues to spend time away from home while he flits between the dojo and his studies. Tomo follows him like a shadow—they don’t fish in the koi pond anymore, but they do spar sometimes in the gardens in the evening, or trek up Mount Takao to see the stars and pick the ripest blackberries for an evening snack, the juice staining their hands as they gaze up at the cosmos above. Kazuha always feels small in those moments, looking up at the vastness of the sky, and some part of that is comforting—that he doesn’t need to be anyone, no Kaedehara, just Kazuha.
But it’s on one of these evenings that they’re ambushed by ronin on the way back down the mountain. Tomo immediately hefts a smoke bomb, something Kazuha didn’t realize he carried.
“Run!” Tomo hisses, and grabs his hand. Kazuha only has a split second to react before the world around him disappears behind a veil of smoke. The hand holding his is large, and warm, and as he’s pulled along, Kazuha can smell the scent of Tomo that he’s following—clean, fresh, like sunshine in spring.
They finally emerge from the forest into a clearing, and Kazuha can sense that the ronin that were after them before are no longer around. But when he looks up at Tomo, he’s bleeding profusely from a gash across his nose.
Kazuha’s heart drops, cold anxiety coiling in the pit of his stomach. Tomo—injured, for him. Part of him tells himself he’s being stupid, that that’s the whole point of a bodyguard, but some other part of him feels a wild desperation seeing Tomo wounded, even if it’s for his sake—Tomo, who has always been with him, who has always been protecting him, even if it’s in ways he never recognized or appreciated.
Tomo grimaces as he takes out ointment and bandages from his pack. He prepares a medicinal compress and placed it in Kazuha’s hands. His hands are warm, so warm—so alive, still, and Kazuha feels his racing mind start to slow down.
“I’ll be fine, young master,” Tomo says with a smile as he guides Kazuha’s hands up to his face. Kazuha presses the compress against the wound as he’s been taught to before, and feels his breathing slowly return to normal. It’s nice like this—it grounds him to feel like he’s helping, to know that he’s actually doing something to keep Tomo alive and here with him. Upon further inspection, the wound isn’t too deep—it did bleed quite a bit, and it might leave a scar, but Tomo was never truly in any danger.
Kazuha bandages him after the bleeding has stopped, feeling like an absolute fool to have been so worried. The anxiety is mostly gone now, but there’s still a lingering fear that it leaves behind—that one day Tomo might in fact be mortally injured, for his sake or otherwise, and then—what?
He doesn’t want to think about it. As he puts the bandages back into the pack, Tomo places his hands around his. Kazuha looks up to see him with a rare serious expression.
“Thank you, young master,” Tomo says quietly.
“You were injured for my sake,” Kazuha replies, flustered by his uncharacteristic seriousness, the hands that envelop his like he’s something beautiful and fragile. “It was the least I could do.”
The other thing that happens as the years pass is that parts of the estate begin falling into disrepair, portions of the garden withering as if in winter’s cold. In retrospect, Kazuha understands the signs for what they are, but in the moment he doesn’t, not really. He knows one of the gardeners has left, and the guards outside the estate have thinned, and even his tutor comes on less days than before. He and Tomo sneak out to Sara’s, and she turns them away, shooing them out of the gardens without so much as a second look.
(In retrospect, he was a fool—though he can read nature, the whims of the air, it’s the winds of fate that end up slipping his notice.)
ii.
Kazuha is only fifteen when his father dies and the world comes crumbling down around him.
It’s not so much his father’s death that affects him; he was never close to his father to begin with, and his father was never affectionate, never quite present, choosing instead to leave his upbringing to his tutors and his master. But the announcement comes as a shock anyway, him and Tomo gathered into the master room alongside all the employees as the head maid delivers the news with an impassive face. The circumstances of his father’s death are a mystery—sudden illness, some whisper, or political intrigue.
Kazuha sits alone in his room after meeting with the head maid personally, going over the numbers, the will, staring at his hands. He feels—nothing. Numbness. He may not have been close to his father, but his father was still the last family he had. He’s not a sentimental person, but there’s still something about it—being left alone, being left behind that makes his chest constrict with a dull sort of ache.
“Young master?” a voice asks, as the side door of his room slides open and Tomo quietly makes his way into the room. Kazuha realizes he’s not alone, not really, if Tomo is still here, but then he remembers—Tomo, too, is just a member of their estate, another member of the wealth that he now knows has vanished—had vanished a while ago, if he’s honest with himself.
Soon, he really will be alone.
“When are you leaving?” Kazuha asks, forcing his voice to remain steady. He doesn’t turn to look at Tomo, instead bringing his knees up to his chest as he sits on the ground. He wants to make himself as small, as unobtrusive as he can in this moment—maybe if he does it enough he can vanish entirely, and then he won’t have to deal with whatever happens next, the inevitable separations, the goodbyes. The loneliness.
“Young master, what are you talking about?” Tomo asks. Kazuha senses him taking a seat on the tatami next to him.
“Your master is dead,” Kazuha mumbles.
“Young master, my master was never your father,” Tomo says. Kazuha opens his eyes and lifts his head to see Tomo leaning against the wall, gazing at him with something unfathomable in his eyes. It makes Kazuha’s breath catch in his throat, Tomo’s silent admission—that what Tomo can be is in Kazuha’s hands now.
Can he be selfish? Can he ask him to stay?
“Then you can be free,” Kazuha says, burying his head back in his arms, curling further in on himself.
There’s a beat of silence that stretches into a longer pause. Tomo doesn’t leave the room, but Kazuha feels his shoulders drop, though he was unaware that they were tense to begin with. It’s a relief to have an answer from the one person he really, truly cares to have around, even if it’s not the answer he wants. Partings are inevitable, separation is just a fact of life.
It is a human thing, to leave.
“Young master, lift your head,” Tomo says, voice grave. Kazuha raises his head to see Tomo still looking at him with an earnest expression, eyes determined and serious. He looks like he’d made a decision a long time ago, long before Kazuha asked him to make it. That such a decision was—has always been—an inevitability.
“I want to stay by your side,” Tomo says quietly. “Is that not enough?”
Kazuha blinks, shocked. As the answer sets in, he clenches the fabric of his haori in his fists, willing the sudden burst of tears filling his eyes to not fall. Of course it’s enough, he wants to say—it’s more than enough, it means the world.
Instead he buries his face into Tomo’s chest, who holds him with a tenderness that Kazuha doesn’t feel he could ever deserve, and cries.
(When the sun rises the next morning, Tomo finds a violet vision left on his pillow.)
They leave the estate late that evening, taking with them nothing but the barest necessities, medicine and bandages, some spare clothing, preserved foods from the pantry. There are still some guards milling around the property who bow and say “Young master” to Kazuha as he passes, but he dismisses them as he sees them, knowing they have nothing in their coffers to pay them and no place for them to call home.
Before they leave the capital entirely, they stop by the Kujou estate. They sneak in through the hedges—it’s a bit harder now that they’re taller, grown, but Kazuha still remembers how to navigate the winding mazes of the outer garden to Sara’s room. The Kujou estate has grown, expanded over the years, tacking on more rooms, more gardens filled with luxurious fountains, and some of the paths are blocked, some of them curving differently. They make it in the end.
“Sara!” he whispers. Sara’s face appears at the window, looking peeved, but she opens it just a crack when she sees them.
Tomo, ever the opportunist, grabs the edge of the window and shoves it open, leaping inside the room.
“Sorry, Sara,” he says with a cheeky grin. She just crosses her arm and shakes her head as Kazuha clambers in after Tomo, brushing leaves and twigs off his clothes.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Sara says after they’re seated on the floor with leftovers from the Kujou clan’s supper, requested by Sara from the head maid. Always so proper. Kazuha bows his head.
“Thank you,” he says. There’s not much else to be said, and they lapse into a solemn sort of silence. Kazuha wonders if Sara knows the other parts of their situation, the empty coffers, the strings his father had spent much of Kazuha’s life pulling to hide the fact that the Kaedehara clan had reached the end of being a great house decades ago.
“What will you do now?” Sara asks once they’ve finished eating. So she does know. Kazuha shrugs.
“There will always be a place for samurai,” he says. “We’ll become ronin, work odd jobs. Survive.”
Sara frowns. Tomo looks like he wants to protest as well, but he stays silent. Kazuha can imagine what he wants to say—it’s hardly proper for a young master of a noble house to do work, that he should leave those kinds of things to Tomo—and he’s grateful that Tomo has accepted that he wants to have some kind of control over the future that he gets to live. He doesn’t want to live a pampered life, not anymore.
“You can stay the night,” Sara says, finally. “Just make sure you’re gone before morning.”
Kazuha nods as he swallows another piece of steamed fish.
“Thank you,” he says. He still has his manners, after all. Sara shakes her head, gives them a cautious smile.
“That’s what friends do, right?” Friends. She says it so hesitantly, like the words feel foreign in her mouth, like they don’t quite fit right. Almost like the question isn’t even rhetorical.
Kazuha smiles. “Right.”
They leave the next morning as promised.
It’s a rough start, figuring out life on the road. Kazuha and Tomo spent some time in the kitchens growing up, but that was mostly to steal food from the pantry or small bites of food for an early dinner snack. Learning to cook is somewhat of an ordeal, though Tomo munches cheerily through anything Kazuha cooks, charred or otherwise. No food goes wasted in those early months which bleed into years, as they gain their footing, get better at traveling, finding commissions, learning the necessary information to stay alive as ronin. But it’s a learning process—they still suffer wounds that leave Tomo fussing over Kazuha for days on end vice versa, faded scars crisscrossing their bodies.
They meet friendly people on their travels—a fisherman who teaches them how to fish a bit more efficiently than their own tried-and-true koi-fishing technique, an old lady who teaches them how to cook her late husband’s favorite foods in exchange for fixing a small hole in the shingles of her roof. Tomo even adopts a cat, a stray kitten with white fur who he names Tama.
But they meet others as well, a leering man at a tavern that doesn’t leave until Tomo places a protective arm around Kazuha’s waist, pulling him close; another ronin who cheats them out of their proper commission fee and nearly steals everything else from them too.
Tomo teaches him a lesson, of course. At least leave these things to me, young master, Kazuha remembers him saying. He still calls Kazuha Young master, even after all this time, and Kazuha decides that things need to change the next time they set up camp in the Inazuman wilderness.
“Tomo,” he says, seriously. Tomo looks up from the fire, the skewered fish they have cooking over it.
“Yes, young master?” Tomo asks. He’s always so earnest when he answers, always smiling. Kazuha wonders if he’s truly happy, traveling with him like this, with no real home, no real goal in sight. He puts the thought away.
“Call me Kazuha,” Kazuha replies. He’s not prepared for the way Tomo’s eyes widen in surprise, cheeks pinking—or maybe that’s just the glow the fire casts over his face as it leaps upward. He thought it’d be an easy thing—it’s just a name, after all, another word, and that Tomo would agree to it with the same easy smile he agrees to everything else.
“Young master, that’s hardly proper,” Tomo protests.
“I’m not the young master of a household anymore,” Kazuha shakes his head. “There is no need to call me such a thing.”
Tomo frowns, pursing his lips, almost like a pout.
“Tomo, please,” Kazuha says. At this point getting Tomo to say his name is less about feeling less awkward and more about his own stubbornness, seeing if he can get Tomo to actually do it.
Tomo opens his mouth hesitantly. “Kazu… ha,” he says, reverent, like a prayer, and Kazuha feels the tips of his ears heating up.
Oh.
“Okay, maybe—“
“Kazuha,” Tomo says again. This time he buries his face into his hands with a groan.
“It’s okay, Tomo,” Kazuha says, laughing gently, partly to stave off his own awkwardness, partly at Tomo and how adorable he’s being. “You don’t have to call me that. It’s fine.”
Tomo lifts his head up with a grateful smile. “I’ll keep working at it, Kazu—young master,” he promises. Kazuha smiles back, secretly relieved, fighting to steady his hammering heart.
Something changes, soon after that—not between them, but with Inazuma.
The countryside turns into a hushed, secretive place, doors slammed shut to them when they try to find a place to stay for the night, or even borrow a pot or a pan to make dinner. Commission fees are shoved in their hands through a tiny crack in the door where before there would be profuse thanks, or at least a smile or two, a tidbit of juicy gossip.
There are whispers on the wind of a darker future, one filled with lightning and storm.
Only one person is willing to take them in, a wizened, grumpy old man whose house smells of old fish and chili peppers.
“I ain’t afraid of no decree,” he says to them around the dinner table, spitting tobacco onto the dirt floor. “I’m old now. If they want to kill me, they can take me.”
“What is this decree you speak of?” Kazuha ventures cautiously. Tomo slouches in his chair on the other side of the table, but Kazuha knows this appearance is deceptive—he’s on high alert, especially with all that’s been going on recently.
“The Vision Hunt Decree,” the old man grumbles as he spoons himself another bowlful of stew. “If you got a vision, you give it up to the Shogun or they kill you for it. If you know someone with a vision, you turn ‘em in, if you’re a good citizen.” He chortles at that, a wheezing kind of laugh, and gestures to Kazuha’s vision, which glows prominently in the darkness of the night. “You’re lucky I ain’t, young man.”
Kazuha frowns and tucks the vision into his pocket. No wonder people have been so antisocial, recently—protection against anybody finding out they have a vision, or otherwise protecting themselves from having to go through the moral dilemma of turning someone else in to the Shogun.
He sense Tomo placing a hand on the hilt of his katana, on edge. Kazuha meets his eyes from across the table and shakes his head. No use antagonizing someone who’s shown them kindness, who finally told them what’s going on. The old man seems unaware of the exchange going on between them, slurping noisily at his bowl of soup, smacking his lips loudly.
They end up not staying the night, ill at ease. Tomo is jumpier than usual, keeping one hand on his katana at all times. They find a clearing to rest in for the night, and unroll their bedrolls.
Kazuha dreams, that night. Not a dream, a nightmare—of the Shogun, faceless, descending from a storm cloud and ripping Tomo’s vision from his body. Stabbing it through, shattering it. Tomo’s body arcs in pain, Kazuha scrambling, running, trying to get to him, but he can’t, he can’t, and something in him shatters too, a pain like he’s never felt before, a severing, like part of his soul has been taken from him.
He wakes up sitting up, screaming, Tomo holding onto him for dear life, trying to calm him down.
“Young master,” Tomo is whispering, over and over, petting his back gently, his other thumb rubbing circles into the small of Kazuha’s back. “I’m here. It’s okay. I’m here.”
Kazuha melts into his welcome warmth, into the gentleness that surrounds him, despite the clammy sweat that sticks to his skin, and falls back asleep.
Tomo doesn’t mention anything the next day, but something has changed, this time between them. Kazuha has never felt fear so keenly as he felt in that dream, the thought of Tomo’s vision being torn away from him; of Tomo, being put through that suffering, because of him.
Why? He knows, but he’s afraid that if he says it, if he thinks it into existence, something between them will be damaged irreparably. Tomo—Tomo is his friend, someone who has always been there for him, and Kazuha values his presence immeasurably. He hopes, selfishly perhaps, that they can stay like this forever.
But Tomo holds him at a distance after that, a physical one. When they brush hands on accident while preparing dinner, Tomo moves to the other side of the campfire to continue chopping vegetables, and fumbles as he drops a piece of carrot into the dirt.
They bump fingers again when Kazuha reaches out to pick up the carrot from the dirt, and Tomo nearly jumps backwards in his haste to get away from Kazuha.
“Tomo,” Kazuha says quietly. “Is something the matter?”
Tomo was never good at hiding his feelings; he’s always worn his heart on his sleeve, a dangerous thing, but it’s one of the things Kazuha finds so lovely about him. But right now—
“I’m fine,” Tomo smiles, a hesitant, guarded thing. “Just tired.”
Kazuha can tell he’s lying, but he lets him be.
Unfortunately, the nightmares continue.
During the day, they trek through the countryside, completing commissions as before, hiding their visions, keeping a wide berth from anyone that might pass them on the roads. Kazuha is terrified that the next person they speak to will be the one who turns them in, will be the one who brings his nightmares into reality. His own vision, he doesn’t want to lose. But Tomo—he could not stand it if Tomo is injured on his behalf, if his vision is lost to the depths simply because he stayed, with Kazuha, with someone who doesn’t deserve him.
Each night, Tomo’s vision is ripped from his grasp as Kazuha can do nothing but watch, purple lightning crackling as Tomo screams in agony.
He tries to stop sleeping, for a time. But then he starts to fall behind during the day, starts to nod off during dinner, slips and nicks his finger while cooking. Tomo bandages it silently, finally touching him, but the moment passes too quickly.
Kazuha reaches out, grasping Tomo’s hand.
“Tomo,” he says. “What is wrong?”
“Nothing—“
“It’s not nothing,” Kazuha feels his own heart hammering. It feels like they’re on the cusp of something; that if he questions Tomo any further, they’ll free-fall into something they won’t be able to recover from. “What is it?”
“I—“ Tomo's face crumbles, and he looks away. “I touched you, young master. That night. I held you in my arms.”
“I was having a nightmare,” Kazuha replies. “You helped me.”
Tomo shakes his head. “I held you, and I wanted more.” His voice comes out strangled, like it costs him so much effort to say the things he wants to say. “I am simply your servant. I should know my place, but I overstepped.”
Kazuha is so relieved he could cry.
“Tomo,” he says, as gently as he can. “You have never been just my servant.”
Tomo turns around, looking back at him. His eyes are wide, his lips slightly parted in surprise.
“Tomo,” Kazuha says, again. “Will you hold me again tonight?”
iii.
Tomo wakes up early the next morning. Next to him, Kazuha is sleeping soundly, peacefully, like he hasn’t in days. Tomo had been awakened all the past nights, Kazuha twisting and turning and crying out in his sleep, and Tomo feels relief knowing that Kazuha can sleep well again. As he looks down on Kazuha’s gentle face, Tomo feels a surge of affection rising up in his chest. Kazuha, beautiful, fragile, brave Kazuha, who cares so much for Tomo. Who deserves the world.
“I want to give you the life you deserve,” Tomo whispers. He tucks the blankets over Kazuha’s sleeping form, and slips out into the dawn.
It isn’t difficult getting to the Tenshukaku, nor is it hard to get an audience with the Shogun as soon as he flashes his vision, purple and glowing.
The Shogun looks amused as she looks down at him from her throne. The room is plainer than Tomo expected, mostly traditional, accented here and there with banners and draperies of purple and gold. The Shogun herself looks rather plain, too—utterly human, besides the way her face is beautiful like porcelain, but the cold sort of beauty that lacks any warmth.
“How brave of you,” she says, tone cold. As if she were mocking him, if someone like her were capable of understanding such a human thing. “I’ll make you a deal. If you can defeat my champion, I will allow you to keep your vision and your life.”
“Not just mine.” Tomo corrects her. There isn’t much point if it’s just him. His life is not his, has never been, and he prefers it that way. “Mine and someone else’s.”
“Yours and one other person of your choice’s,” the Shogun waves dismissively. “Yes, that.”
“And if I lose?” Tomo thinks he knows the answer, but might as well ask.
The Shogun laughs delicately. “Well, isn’t that obvious?” She leans forward, eyes suddenly glimmering with something lighting-sharp. It’s the most emotion he’s seen from her, and it makes him shiver, the inhumanness of it. “Your life and vision will be forfeit, to be inlaid upon the statue of the thousand-eyed god.”
This is his only chance to give Kazuha the life that he deserves—to free him from the fear that plagues him so, so that he can find the life he wants to live for.
Kazuha has always been home, to Tomo, and Tomo wants to make the world a better place for him.
“I accept.”
The Shogun’s champion turns out to be Kujou Sara.
“Little Sara, all grown up,” Tomo says. They circle each other warily around the courtyard, once, twice. Sara doesn’t bother with a reply, choosing instead to simply glare. Tomo stifles a laugh. She looks just like she did when they were younger, when she’d get upset, like that one time he’d dared her to eat a plum from the tree in the Kujou clan’s backyard, purple and sour and not-quite-ripe.
Sara takes the first leap, flashing forward in a streak of blinding purple. Tomo parries, sparks shooting out of his blade, but the strike still pushes him back. Sara has only gotten stronger since the last time he’s seen her; more skilled, more lethal. Perhaps there is only one ending left for him today.
“Ingrate,” Sara hisses as she unleashes a storm of attacks. “You would use those powers in your defiance?” A feint left, a slash. “You insult Her Majesty.”
“She didn’t tell me not to,” Tomo replies lightly, parrying once, twice, three times. “Besides, it would be a little one-sided if you did and I didn’t, wouldn’t it?”
Sara doesn’t deign to reply, choosing instead to redouble her efforts. They continue this way for a few moments, hacking, slashing. Sara manages to nick his arm a few times, just shallow cuts, and in return Tomo manages to cut off a lock of jet-black hair.
“Why do this? Why don’t you just give up?” Sara asks, slashing savagely forward. Tomo dances backwards, barely dodging. He’s tiring; he can’t keep this up much longer. Sara was always the best of the three of them. But for a moment, he sees a flicker of doubt in her face, a chink in her armor. She was always so talented, always so skilled, but above all, Tomo has always seen her as a lonely person. The next words she says surprise him. “We have a place for you,” she says. It’s an offer that seems to cost her much effort; an act of mercy, an olive branch. From Sara, it is nothing short of a miracle. “You could keep your vision and your life.”
“You know why,” Tomo replies, wiping blood from his cheek. He isn’t here for miracles, not for himself. Some part of him recognizes what Sara is doing for him, appreciates it even—but there are more important things.
A shadow flickers across Sara’s face. “It’s always about him, isn’t it?” she asks quietly. There’s something there, a bitterness, a hurt. A childhood, lost to the flow of time, and a girl they had left behind.
The answer is simple. Tomo feels no need to lie. “For me, it always has been.”
Of course, the winner of the duel is something of an inevitability.
Tomo finds himself pinned to the ground, sword knocked out of his hand. But Sara doesn’t look triumphant above him; she looks fearful, even as she shoves her blade against her throat, digging into his skin.
“Yield,” she hisses. “Yield now, and she won’t—“
“A valiant fight,” the Shogun says, making her way down from her throne at the top of the courtyard. With every step, the ground cracks, shoots out purple sparks, a grandiose display fitting for an Archon. “But my dear Sara, don’t you think it’s gone on long enough?”
The expression on Sara’s face is clouded as she gets back onto her feet, sheathing her sword. Tomo turns his head to the side and spits out a mouthful of blood. He struggles to prop himself up on his elbows, and then, slowly, he rises unsteadily to his feet.
He doesn’t have the chance to say anything. In front of his eyes, the air darkens, takes on a violent tang, the smell of ozone, the moment before a storm. There’s a crackling in his ears, a humming, a buzzing in his veins, static arcing along his skin.
I’m going to die, Tomo suddenly thinks. It’s a sobering realization. But he finds that he feels no dread, not really—just a few regrets, a few apologies he has yet to make. To Sara, for the burden he has added onto what she already has to carry. To Kazuha, for being yet another person to leave him behind. For not being able to protect him until the end.
The Shogun draws her sword.
I’m sorry, Tomo mouths to Sara, who is staring at him with an impassive face. Her eyes widen, just slightly, and he closes his. If only Kazuha were also here, so that he could apologize, so that he could hold him one last time.
There is a flash of purple, vivid starbursts exploding in front of his eyes, and then—
Kazuha races up the steps of the Tenshukaku as fast as he can. A cloud is gathering at the top, a consolidation of nearly limitless power. Even from the staircase, he can feel the electricity arcing across his skin, making his hairs stand on end. This is true power that humans like him can only dream of, the might of one who has ascended to Celestia—an Archon.
He uses a burst of Anemo to push him faster up the stairs, and enters the Tenshukaku just in time to see a blinding flash, a single blade of light cleaving its way through the darkness. It strikes a primal fear into him, and somehow he just knows—this is the pinnacle of Electro might in Teyvat, pure and limitless power condensed into one targeted attack.
It’s a sensory overload, the scene he witnesses after the Musou no Hitotachi. Tomo’s outstretched body, falling to the ground. Sara standing at the Archon’s side. The soft clink of an empty vision as it tumbles against the cobblestones, settling at Kazuha’s feet.
He moves without thinking to pick up the vision, and he almost drops it when it burns his hand. But he can’t drop it, not when he suddenly realizes whose it is, what it was granted for, everything that Tomo means to him. Kazuha looks around frantically, but everyone is still staring up at the Shogun, floating in the sky, hair frayed out, eyes white and glowing, radiating a cold and vicious might. The only person who meets his eyes is Sara, who looks shocked to see him. But quickly her eyes dart around the courtyard, seeing the same scene he does. Slowly, imperceptibly, she nods, and then looks away.
The signal is clear. He’s not stupid. He cannot face the Shogun himself, and trying to carry Tomo’s body with him down the slope will only guarantee his capture. Gripping the vision firmly in his hand, even as it burns him, the embers of its life slowly flickering out—
He runs.
iv.
Sara meets him one last time in a tavern on the edges of the town at the foot of the Tenshukaku. She doesn’t have her tengu mask, nor is she dressed in her usual attire, but rather a simple top and pants and a hood over her short hair.
“I didn’t think you’d want to meet with me,” she says by way of greeting. They sit together at a table at the fringes of the room, half-shaded in darkness. To anyone else, they’re just another pair of travelers taking shelter from the night.
“I don’t,” Kazuha says simply. It’s the truth. He prides himself on his self-control, but when he sees Sara’s face, something flares inside of him, red-hot and violent. When he thinks about what she did to him. To them. In her bending to the Shogun, she had become complicit to her crimes; in her acceptance of the battle, she had sliced their ties—tenuous at this point, but a fragile, precious thing that Kazuha had hoped she would remember—into nothing at all.
“He loved you, you know,” Sara says, after it’s clear Kazuha has no intentions to elaborate on his answer. “He did it all for you. His final words, his last thoughts—they were all about you.”
Kazuha doesn’t reply. He knows. He has always known the extent of Tomo’s love for him, so deep he could drown himself in it. So deep that he had.
Sara slides a pouch across the table. It’s simple and plain, made of soft purple silk tied with a length of ribbon.
“Shrine Maiden Yae oversaw his cremation personally,” she says softly. The candlelight flickers over her downcast expression, and Kazuha is shocked to see the faintest shadow of tears gathering at the fringes of her eyes.
He’s not sure what possesses him to say it, to blurt out the true question he’d been meaning to ask since he took those steps up the Tenshukaku, saw Sara at the right-hand of the Archon, sword in her hand—perhaps it is those tears, the barest sign Sara’s ever shown him of the regrets, the burdens she carries.
“Why?” he asks. A simple question. He hopes the answer can be simple. He hopes it can be something he can understand, so that the knot of hatred that lies cold and solid under his ribcage can loosen into something more like understanding. He does not want to forgive her—he would not forgive anyone who took Tomo away from him—but at the very least, he wants to know that she had a reason.
Something in Sara’s face hardens, calcifies. A calm settles over her features, the brief flash of sincerity, of vulnerability, slipping away in an instant. Kazuha finds that he pities her, in this moment, knowing what it takes for such a mask to slide on so easily.
“It doesn’t matter,” she replies, turning away from him. He can’t see her face or the expression she is making—would it be of grief? Regret? Or would it just be the mask again, solemn, stoic, unfathomable? “I did what I did, and I don’t need to justify myself to you.”
Before Sara takes her leave, she at least gives him a name, a place to go. “Watatsumi Island,” she says. “I’ve heard there is a resistance there.”
She leaves first, slipping out of the tavern in the cover of night. Back to the Tenshukaku, back to her role as a vision hunter, as a tool of the Shogun. Neither of them said it, but Kazuha knows—after today, they are enemies. The next time Sara sees him, there will be no mercy.
Kazuha leaves shortly after, ashes gripped in one hand, empty vision in the other. It feels strange, leaving alone. But he isn’t alone, not really.
“Watch over me, Tomo,” he whispers, and sets forth on a new beginning.