left me all the shine / left behind the gold. @hyacinthetic - Tumblr Blog

Dec 15, 2020

[p5/FOREVERDUMPED WIP] you should know i’m temporary.

shuake loveless-flavoured fantasy au. dumping this here in its unpolished glory because my god, i’ve got to focus, i am so close to having an actual finished multichapter on the internet, GET THEE BEHIND ME, BEGUILING NEW-OLD FANDOMS.

"I'm sorry," the Academy boy says. His gloves whisper, gaunt under the silence. "Someone should have come for you much sooner. Sacrifices aren't permitted to meet the fighters before the day of selection, but—I trusted in the system. I should have known better."

There's a story in his words, an invitation, a point like the barb of a fish-hook. Akira keeps watching. The cold flush of his lips. His bowed and shining head. The arch of his outstretched hands, neat as porcelain, neat as paint, lit by the pixellated glow of the chamber like a projection of mercy.

"Do you," the boy says, "still remember your name?"

He's drowning when his sacrifice comes.

Hands haul him out of the dark water. Impact, sensation, impact. Light spatters his vision. The cold carves through him with a stroke that should split him open to bone. He's all limbs, all hurt; his heartbeat's thrashing in his ribs, veins roaring, whole body singing like iron under flame—

"What have you done—?"

He twists. Hits the floor. The fall punches through him. His body judders, coughing, gasping; his shoulder pulses in dying flares. Through the tiles, he can feel the simmer of footsteps, outrage, a voice cleaving down like a season.

"—didn't know that the Academy had resorted to human offerings in order to win the war."

"Partner-select Akechi. There is no need to shout. Arrangements for your fighter are as you—"

"My fighter. Please. Let me assure you: if he'd been mine from the beginning, it never would have come to this. Do you need further instruction? Well, then. Help him up, you trepanned tool."

A new voice; the snarl of it remakes the air. Everything before it was darkness; everything in its wake is a star. Steps flurry around him. He's wrenched to his knees. A servitor's cold hand glosses his cheek and throat, taking his pulse like an instrument.

When Akira opens his eyes, there's a boy crouched before him.

"Are you all right?"

His throat works. He is looking at an Academy creature: red-eyed and sleek, dressed in the crisp black suit of a senior student, all arrow-flight movements and a body as slight as mystery. Akira shifts. Water's still coiling around his wrists, dripping manacles. Its taste clumps in his teeth like resin, clinging. He holds the stranger's gaze, and waits.

"Do you," the boy says, "still remember your name?"

Water flickers in his ears: a whisper, an itch. For a moment, he thinks of saying so; but the faceless servitors have stopped across the floor, props scattered across the stage of this new clockwork quiet.

Everything's waiting on them.

His knuckles grind tile. Cold traces the curves of his bones. "Kurusu Akira," he says.

"Kurusu. Akira." The name cracks between them like a shell. "I'm afraid we don't have time for much more, as far as pleasantries go. My name is Akechi Goro. You're going to be my fighter, if you'll have me. The bond-title that I offer is Chainless. Do you accept it?"

Akira bites back a sound—tastes salt, adrenaline, a thickening bruise, the echoes of a snarl. There are moments that aren't scenes—moments that exist as a cluster of heartbeats and coincidences. This is not one of them. The question has a constellation of answers, but only one's been scripted for him.

He understands, then: no one in this room is dying. There's a reason for that.

His pulse churns. His damp hair prickles his skin. Breath after breath rasps between them in a slow, shackling line.

"Do I have a choice?" Akira says, and feels his sacrifice stiffen. A grin splits his mouth, stark as a stage-light.

By night, the Academy's deserted.

He follows Akechi across the grounds. Their footsteps overlap like whispers, trailing through courtyards and grainy corridors. The night lies icy and still; the halls have been scratched down to cold constellations. Only the wards are awake: a thrum in the shadows, a sense of something teeming along the spidering grey walkways, fishbone stitches and silken eyes.

"Don't test your boundaries too soon," Akechi says, two steps ahead. "Memory implants aren't uncommon in the final preparations before the fighter's awakened. If you have them, they may take some time to come to rest."

May. Akira opens his mouth, then stops. His reflection keeps going, head slung low, body set in steering lines, a ghost in the vindictaglass windows. "I know this place. I've been here before."

"I see," Akechi says. There's still a smile in his voice. "Do you remember the name of the room where they were keeping you?"

Memory jolts through his spine. He wants to answer the question—feels wanting with the clarity of hunger, honey glittering on his tongue. Akira tugs the lock between his brows. "The battle-chamber," he says. "It's where bonded pairs go for battle training at the Academy during their final year."

In memory, the room opens with a sense of endless vertigo. His throat turns against the taste of preservatives and spellwater. He remembers sickly light on flagstones; needle-slick silhouettes; the testing hollows, narrow as coffins, crossed with cage-bars. Nothing like the chamber that he'd left, moving towards the doors with Akechi's steady grip bracing him up. Rows of bodies suspended in a nameless, timeless dream.

"Hold on," Akira says, and feels a pang when Akechi stops. The heft of his own voice seems unreal. "What's happening outside?"

"You mean in the provinces. If it's news you're interested in, we can call a bell-runner in the morning."

His voice shivers down the hall, a wind before rain. The lamp-flames bow; the wards murmur a warning chorus. Akira ignores them. "There's been a war going for the last seventy years," he says, hooking fingers in a pocket. "Did you fix it while I was out?"

"Unfortunately not. The war goes on." But the question seems to settle something. Akechi's shoulders sink. He moves forward. "But if you have particular people that you're concerned about, I can arrange to have a few messages sent by bell in our name."

"Messages," Akira says; Akechi's inflection is clear as a spotlight. "Seniors sure get a lot of privileges at the Academy."

"The fortunate ones do."

"Is that all you are."

Akechi tilts his head. "I've done my best to earn my place," he says. "In terms of skill, I'm a little worse than my betters, and a little better than everyone else. Labels are difficult to apply beyond that. Drawn spellwork tends to be more precise in its effect, but spoken spells offer speed and opportunity for improvisation. Some students choose a style, then make up for its inherent flaws with their choice of school—the Kanshori system offers the opportunity for grounded shorthand spells, and there's a theory being passed around the Kanshoshi scholastic community in terms of honing verbal accuracy…"

It's clear that he could go until morning. His voice is a trained curve, answers swaying without root or end. Akira closes his eyes. Beneath his eyelids, he sees the gleam of a fish-hook again: bait and shaped steel, drifting over an unruly tide. There's a conversation that they should be having, a script as old as wanting; but he's already given the wrong answer once.

Inside the Academy walls, he knows, language is a blade and a mirror. Each word carries a double-meaning. A true student of the arts would say fallible, and mean trap.

He's fallible. It's unforgivable.

Akira picks at his damp trousers. "Can you show me?" he says.

Silence flinches down Akechi's stilled back. "It's fairly late to be practising spells."

"I don't see anywhere to sleep yet."

"We're nearly at the dorms, Kurusu. Are you truly so impatient? Or is this an issue with your endurance?"

There's an easy retort to that—but it's meant to be easy. He swallows, and feels the pull of Akechi's voice scathing across skin. "Whether or not I'm your fighter," Akira says instead. "You're gonna have to show me sometime."

One by one, every echo withers between them.

Akechi turns. His gaze is a phalanx, armoured in light and fury, a spell to core the heart out of anything it touches. "Your hand, then," he says. "Please."

Something crackles through him—livid, starving, magnetised. He doesn't mean to move. It's the only thing that he means. Akira stirs, and Akechi catches his hand before it strays too far. His fingertips lock against bone; he yanks and Akira pitches towards him, clean as a breaking fever.

A gloved hand catches his arm.

Akechi's brows have snapped down; his lips are parted, reddening. Akira breathes in. His lungs are heavy, cloying with the sweetness of cologne and worked wool. The heat of a breath drawn between them like a blade.

Akechi's grip clenches. Without looking, he sketches a line across Akira's palm: delicate, intricate, a circle that tangles then unravels again. "An elementary restraint," he says, as Akira shifts on his heels. "You'll have to tell me if I go too far."

He's moving in a faultless rhythm, mapping patterns across Akira's skin. Loops into lilies, a sine-wave, a tide of stars, a name on the cusp of sound. His heartbeat's thinning in his teeth. He knows this touch, this sense of gravity; his body's unraveling beneath the airless weight of it. If he shuts his eyes, he could follow the memory down.

All he has to do's shut his eyes.

Akira blinks. The walls sway around him, shimmering with hungry lights. "Huh," he says, and hears himself as if through spellwater. "It's taking a while."

"I did warn you," Akechi says. "In theory, it's possible for the presence of a fighter to stabilise the sacrifice's focus, and minimise the weaknesses of their spellwork. Unfortunately, I've yet to see those results for myself."

His voice's unraveling. Akira tenses, or means to—but he's gone. The spell's eating through his vision. Everything's blackening, fading, lost. All that's left is a memory: shape after shape flashing where his pulse had lain. A gamepiece, a constellation, the shudder of a ship's anchor tearing loose from its home shore. A spell like winter: terror, longing, grief crystallising into every breath.

He knows this ache. He knows its name.

Akira's shoulders flex. Through the cold, he reaches up. His hand hooks over Akechi's glove. Light prisms beneath his eyelids.

The spell shatters.

Everything comes flooding back: grey floors, white sills, shadows long as drowning. The lamps leap in their sconces; the hallways glow like bone. Only Akechi's still looking at him, fox-eyed, wordless, mouth clipped sharp as steel. His grip digs in. Akira feels every point of his fingers like a heartbeat.

"Better keep watching, then," Akira says.

Akechi lives in a modest space—pale walls with skeletal furniture, mendasilk sheets and a scholar's table, every surface as glossy as a shogi piece. The windows frame a spectral winter, towers and stripped black trees prickling through the white like ancient bone. From the threshold, it's almost impossible to see where the snow ends and the walls begin.

"Taking my bond-title," Akechi says, as Akira's stare swings from corner to corner, "means that you're assigned to my room by default. We won't be able to occupy separate beds until we've graduated."

"Do you cast a lot of spells in your sleep?"

"Supposedly it's a matter of adjustment," Akechi says as Akira crosses the floor. "Fighters aren't always comfortable with the thaumaturgical weight of the bond at first. Keeping the sacrifice close to the fighter seems to increase the rate of improvement."

He sinks onto the bed. His gaze drifts back to Akechi, still perched by the doorway. "Well," Akira says, rolling his head back. "Where do you want me?"

The distance beats between them, a spell on the tip of the tongue.

"It's strange for you," Akechi says. "Isn't it. I didn't know that a fighter could remember so much of their history after awakening."

"I don't need sympathy."

"No." It cracks in the air, sparks from flint; Akechi's mouth curls with a slow, brimming light. "I see that. Still, there must be something I can do to make you comfortable."

Akira looks at him: tense and coal-eyed, body drawn against the door like the string of a bow. But Akira isn't a sacrifice, and so he knows: there are no words that'll get him what he wants.

He waits.

In a certain light, silence is its own kind of spellwork. Akechi's frame tightens under the weight of it. His hands drop; his lashes sweep down. Step by step, Akechi trails over to him. His fingers slide under Akira's jaw; Akira tilts his head up with the touch.

"You're my sacrifice," he says, low, to the flicker in Akechi's shuttered eyes. "You tell me."

It's a guess, a goad, the kind of answer that's no answer at all. Whatever the Academy'd meant to make of him, they hadn't etched their commands deep enough. Sacrifice and fighter are only words, shrapnel that could scatter with a sigh. He doesn't owe anything to Akechi Goro; he has that lesson branded across his skin.

But it's Akechi who moves first. His hand drops. He turns with a gesture. "You'll find a change of clothes in the first drawer," he says over a shoulder, "when you're ready. Treat my rooms as your own."

Akira touches his own cheek. The ghost of pressure beats through his fingertips.

"Thanks," he says to the empty air.

He dresses in the baths. Sleeve by sleeve, the shirt settles over him, sure as fate. Like something measured and made for him.

Akira goes out. The lamps are drooping down to silhouettes. In the dark, there's only the floor, the bed, the curve of Akechi's spine under thin sheets, sketched in pearling light. He doesn't make a sound as Akira crawls in; but the last of the candle-flames dip, and then there's only night.

"You're taking all of this very well," Akechi says.

There's an edge to his voice under the shadows, loose and jagged as a puzzle-piece. Someone else might be able to feel out its place—but not him. Akira tugs the pillow. "You haven't killed me yet."

"I wouldn't."

"Right. You don't kill."

A laugh feathers across his lips. "I've been waiting for my fighter since the day I turned fifteen," Akechi says, with drowsy sweetness. "Much like any other sacrifice, I suppose."

Akira shifts. "Do you ever stop?"

"Hm. Talking?"

Akira closes his eyes. Visions are racing through every nerve: Akechi's fingers on the curve of Akira's palm. The last bitter throb of a spell, collapsing. All the words he's holding aloft between them in the dark. "No," Akira says.

The quiet sways in the air.

"Even if you trust nothing else in this place," Akechi says at last, "trust that you will never be an acceptable loss to me."

There's no good answer to that.

But he's awake long after the echoes of Akechi's husky murmuring melt into dreams. One night in, and he knows too much. The hard slope of Akechi's cheek, the star of his hand over the pillow, the haze of his body heat. Every line of him's a memory, a regret, a signal-fire burning on some promised shore.

Soundless, unseeing, Akira reaches out. His palm drapes over Akechi's knuckles; their fingers interleave. He knows better than this. Of course he knows. But it's this shape that follows him into dreaming: hand over hand, bodies curled like reflections. Fitted together, simple as a heartbeat.

It's different, walking the Academy as a bonded fighter.

For the first week, Akira does nothing but wander. He walks the circuit of its battlements; he counts the click of his footsteps through a deserted hall. Whatever scholars had laid the foundation for the Academy, their parchment hopes had been overwritten a long time ago, caged in towers, in stone worked with vindictasteel, in sigils scrawled across the bronze of the archive domes. The Academy's a garden for sacrifices now, coaxing them to bow, to bloom, to bleed themselves into spellwork. Anything else that lives in it's an afterthought, numberless as soil or light. He can speak, and be answered; he can move without drawing a single glance.

Invisible, knowledgeable, alive. It's a good combination.

They go on, apart and together. In the mornings, Akechi vanishes to study. Akira loiters in the bone-pale stairs, listening. Every powerful institution thrives on gossip; the Academy's no exception. Passing students argue over spell translations, new territories fallen to the Council's Own, the nature of the lingering sentience in the faceless servitors. They whisper over old flames and new romances, the sour young wines delivered to the Academy as a yearly tithe.

They tell stories about Akechi Goro, too.

Akechi Goro's an orphan. He's the secret heir of a Councilman, sent out under a false name to protect him. In his first year, he shattered an instructor's shields with a single ballista spell. He once foiled an assassination plot on the Academy's chancellor. No student's marks have ever come close to his since he entered the school. The head of the Demiurgic Council broke off treaty negotiations with the Suzhen Isles last year for the chance to offer him the school's first-rank prize in the spring ceremonies.

"They say he joined the Academy to keep his promise to his childhood love! Once he's covered in glory, worthy of our republic, he'll go back home and be married." "Well, I heard that he's a compendium project—like the servitors, you know, only sane. He comes from a long line of spellworkers. His whole family planted memories of their specialisations in his head before he ever set foot on Academy grounds." "And I know for a fact that he's a long-lost descendant of the old Emperor, smuggled out before the war, come to restore the old order—"

It's gossip, a nest of mysteries and fantasies without root or colour to them; but Akira collects them all the same.

He wants to know it all.

"You think he's going to trade out his bond-title soon? It's not like he's gonna get anywhere as is. Everybody knows the Council hasn't promoted a Chainless pair outta the advisory unit in, what, thirty years?" "Who knows how Chainless thinks. But I wouldn't want to be in his shoes. Half the senior class's titled and qualified for partner-select by now. There can't be much choice left in the archives." "Oh, be fair! Chainless's much too noble to turn against his allies." "He better not stay that noble once he graduates. You ever see him in a match? Even Kingless'd be hard-pressed to touch him. Put those two together, and they could end the whole war." "Well, if he's interested in taking someone else's name, he'll have to handle it while he's at school. Stripping the bond-title from another student's nothing compared to what they'd do to him for violating the thaumaturgical autonomy of one of the Council's Own." "Execution, you mean?" A round of laughter, ringing slim as porcelain. "Please. As if Kingless would ever let the Council waste a sacrifice. Worst come to worst—all they'll do's execute the fighter."

The days wing through. Lean winter starves down to spring. In the quiet, Akira listens, and waits.

"Oh. Welcome home."

Classes aren't over for the day; but partners-select aren't bound by the schedules of ordinary students. Now and then, he forgets that—Akechi splits his hours between the Winter Archive and the parlour rooms of the Academy; he comes back to the room late in the night, smelling of parchment and sweet, wasting smoke. But this isn't Akechi the scholar, or Akechi the society boy. His shoulders are braced hard against his chair. Sunset's tangling through his hair—a fever's halo, fire glimmering in the hollow of his throat, as easy as a touch.

Akira presses the door shut; its click snaps through the walls like a shot. "Thanks, honey," he says. "Long day?"

"If you needed a more extensive tour of the Academy," Akechi says, "you could have let me know."

"I'm not getting lost."

"I assumed that much," Akechi says as Akira heads towards him. "I have some faith in your abilities."

Spring's settling over the Academy, but not in any hurry. The bones of the school have barely started to thaw; its grounds are a riot of stinging winds and crumbling, icy drifts, a landscape bruised in stone and snow. Kneeling at the foot of the desk, Akira feels through the carpet for the points where the warming alchemy run thickest. "You're not afraid I'll get lost," he says. "So what are you afraid I'm going to find?"

A hand brushes his cheek. Akira turns, and lets Akechi tilt up his chin.

"You have a skill for drawing trouble," Akechi says, iron-eyed, with a voice that's all veneer. "In case you've missed it, I'd prefer not to see you hurt."

Akira closes fingers around his wrist. A wire of tension thrums into his grip, then goes still. "A lot of people in the school're talking about your bond-title," he says.

"They're uneasy," Akechi says. "They have a right to be. After all, my progress hasn't been following the standard timeline."

With Akechi, the best hook is always silence. Akira shifts in place, and waits.

"Twenty years ago," Akechi says, with a thin twist to his mouth, "the Kingless sacrifice simplified the Academy's steps for graduation. Every partner-select chooses a fighter at the beginning of the year. Generally speaking, fighters will manifest the marks of the bond-title somewhere on their bodies within a few months of the pact. It's then recorded in the Academy archives with all of its pertinent details. Whether the mark was ink, scarring, or ethereal. If it was located in approximately the same area as the sacrifice's mark. The predecessors who've held the title, and any pattern in their achievements. It's meant to guarantee that we'll have as a grace period—providing the bonded pairs with a chance to prepare for their initiation trial into the Council's Own."

"It's spring now," Akira says.

"And," says Akechi, "here you are."

He hasn't looked away. In the rusting light, his gaze is stark as coal. A look like a question—a look like burning. Akira swallows. "What would happen," he says, "if a sacrifice tried to take a bond-title someone else already had?"

The hand withdraws; Akechi settles in his chair. "That's precisely what the archives are intended to prevent. Every student's expected to have researched their bond-title, and to have it recorded within a few weeks of beginning their final year. But," he adds, all rue and unfaltering gold, "to answer your actual question: the original pair would notice over time. There's a sense of violation—a displacement. Paranoia, recklessness, and instability aren't unheard of—in both the usurper as well as the original claimant. Your title is your destiny. A destiny can't be shared."

"And your destiny's being 'Chainless'."

It hasn't been a season yet since he'd swallowed blood and spellwater, and bowed his head to a new name. But some things need less than a season. Akechi leans on a knuckle. The flex of his throat rolls through Akira's nerves like sparks. "I wonder," Akechi says, "what brought that question to your mind."

"You know why," Akira says. "Everyone sees what you can do. But no one who's taken the name Chainless has been sent out into the field for decades."

The room rings: empty, empty.

"Every sacrifice has secrets," Akechi says at last. His fingers skim the arch of a glove, restless as a spell. "It's our nature. I understand that mine may feel somewhat heavier than most. And if you can't live with that knowledge, I'm afraid the bond between us won't last for very long."

Less than a season together, Akira thinks—but he knows Akechi Goro. The uneasy prickle of his lashes when he's dreaming. The fall and rise of his voice working through a new translation. His hands at work, sweeping through line after vicious, perfect line: engraving patterns, chemical patterns, patterns taking shape like—

"That's not much of a threat," Akira says.

Akechi laughs. "Is that how it sounded?" he says—husky, startled. "Well, then. Let me be more clear. Fighters are used as amplifiers and vessels. No fighter should be able to overturn a sacrifice's spellwork on his own. You're a comet in a closed system. Whoever holds you at the end of next year will rewrite the story of the republic." His knuckle digs against his mouth; his shadow trembles like the fringe of a flame. "You understand, don't you. The bond-title hasn't manifested for you yet. You still have some time."

The pattern unravels. The world shivers into place.

I wasn't aware that a fighter could remember so much of their history after awakening, he'd said.

There must be something I can do to make you comfortable.

I've been waiting for my fighter since the day I turned fifteen.

Akira blinks, sharp and clearing. His heartbeat's pounding between his ribs, gutting, roaring, electric as a storm. "I thought a title was destiny," he says.

"If destiny doesn't bend to our choices," Akechi says, "I don't see how it's worth anything to us."

There's a mystery about Akechi Goro. It's written into his skills and mannerisms, scrawled like poison down to his roots. How a boy who entertains visitors in the Academy parlors every week could have drawn so few allies over four years. The way his voice turns with every word, clarity to knives, cynicism to certainty. What it is about Chainless that had drawn him—this boy bound by every title and grace that the Academy could grant him.

How he could have waited years for his fighter, and offer to give him up at a word.

Akira leans onto a knee. His hand clasps Akechi's; he ignores its stutter beneath his palm.

You will never be an acceptable loss to me.

"So," Akira says. "I'm choosing now."

Akechi stares at him; but he's learned by now. The flex of his hand; the way his fingers curl against Akira's palm. The triumphant surge of his smile, unsteady but pristine, like a blade drawn from the forge. Every touch a heartbeat, rising.

#real procrastination and fake prose

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left me all the shine / left behind the gold.