[Sabigiyuu]
The Funerals in Summer | Chapter 4: Captured Pieces (持駒) is now up! 🦊
In shogi, captured pieces don’t die. They wait on the sidelines until someone drops them back onto the board—fighting for a new side, serving a new purpose. This chapter is about that: about being picked up, placed somewhere, and learning whether you’ll stay.
Some breadcrumbs for you:
- Giyuu introduces himself twice in this chapter. Once as a lie. Once as the truth. The order matters.
- There’s a folding screen in this chapter. It was meant to be a pair. Someone only took one. I’m not emotionally okay about this.
- The Tōmanjū count is now at 5. It has officially appeared more times than some characters.
- One boy invents a communication system using shogi coordinates just to talk to another boy he thinks he’ll never see again. And then immediately tells him his real name.
The name he’s been hiding from everyone.
On their first meeting:
What fascinates me about writing Sabito and Giyuu’s first encounter is how differently they cope with loss. Sabito is silent, contained, his grief compressed into something hard and useful—a blade. Giyuu is also silent, but his silence is made of shame, of drowning, of not knowing how to surface.
And yet.
Sabito has spent months refusing to connect with anyone. Giyuu takes one look at him and thinks: *I need to feed this person immediately.* He has no sword, no skills, nothing to offer—except half a Tōmanjū and a clumsy, desperate wish to be useful.
Sabito’s walls are ice. Giyuu walks up to them with a Tōmanjū and somehow doesn’t notice they’re supposed to keep people out.
There’s something almost absurd about it—the boy who can’t chop firewood, offering his only sweet to the boy who looks like he was born holding a sword.
But maybe that’s exactly why it works. Sabito has met plenty of people who respect his strength. Sabito has met plenty of people who respect his strength. He hasn’t met anyone who looked at him—wounded, voiceless, untouchable—and thought,“ He should have something sweet.”
That’s not romance. That’s not even friendship yet. It’s just two broken boys, each carrying something the other lacks, brushing past each other in the dark—and deciding, without quite meaning to, not to look away.
The line that lives in my head rent-free：
A lie had carved the hollow. A life would have to fill it.
🔗 [Link to AO3]
https://archiveofourown.org/works/73306981/chapters/203557541
