even the winter sky was bright then (1/2) [unfinished]
a/n: an old ennofuta fhq fic that i deleted off ao3. i'm re-posting it here to have a resting place for it. i’ll also be sharing the next chapter that i never got around to publishing & extra worldbuilding tidbits or scenes that i planned later in the story.
trigger warnings for violence, blood, death (no major character death), and injuries
part 1 ! (you are here) wc3896 part 2 !
KENJI
**
“This is not what I had in mind when you asked me to escort you ‘across the way’!” Kenji shouts, pitting his weight against the man who had a hold of his arm. He throws him off and spins on him, bringing his sword down upon his unprotected chest. The blade slashes through his thin plainclothes with ease. The man releases a hoarse shout, dagger falling from his grasp, the rest of him falling down to one knee.
The cut was too shallow, at a poor angle; the stunned man recovers himself and makes a lunge for the weapon, but Kenji rushes there first, trapping it beneath a foot, grunting as the man knocks a fist into the back of his knee to unbalance him. He buckles but doesn’t fall, harshly kicking the dagger backwards. It spins out of reach, disappearing into the high grasses. Kenji watches desperation wash over his attacker’s face, quickly chased by fear. He scrambles backwards, his chest bleeding freely now.
Kenji gives him only a second of reprieve before advancing on him and thrusting steel through his breast, watching the whites grow around his eyes and the ugly grimace of his mouth.
“Run away now?” Kenji challenges, jerking the blade deeper. The other’s shaking arm begins to rise up.
Kenji doesn’t let him get far. He yanks the sword out. The man thuds to the ground, gurgling in his throes.
Kenji whirls around.
Ennoshita’s response, if he even bothered to give one, is lost in the noise of a scuffle.
Two remaining assailants are bearing down on him, one grasping a short sword and the other wielding a sinister looking dagger similar to the one belonging to the man he just killed. The dry forest litter crunches beneath their boots as they approach Ennoshita in a two-man pincer movement, and Kenji curses to see that his escort is completely unarmed and quickly becoming pinched.
He hadn’t bothered to ask or check what the man had beneath his gray cloak, assuming h im to be as plain as the rest of the small village he was passing through. His cloak is parted now, legs bent and arms raised in a position better suited to brawls than a sword fight, and there is not a single visible weapon strapped to him. Presumably nothing concealed either, for this would be the time to use it.
Ennoshita’s head swivels back and forth between his attackers, then over his shoulder at Kenji.
“Fuck,” Kenji curses, tightening the grip on his hilt while marching ahead. He had ventured a distance away while dispatching his foe. Too far to offer any support by the time the duo launches an attack.
The one with the short sword lunges forward with a broad swing, making Ennoshita leap away to evade it. It places him straight into the smaller range of the other’s dagger. Such a simple trap, but Ennoshita falls right into it. How could he let himself be cornered so easily? He turns a fraction too slow to avoid the dagger that flies toward him, glinting in the moonlight. Ennoshita’s arm shoots up to block the strike but Kenji sees that it’s adorned with only a long glove, likely made of the same cheap black leather that the rest of his jerkin was fashioned from.
Kenji’s still not close enough when he watches the dagger’s point tear into Ennoshita’s flesh and slice away red with blood once, twice, stabbing down again a beat later. The attacker is moving viciously, intent on bullying his way to a murder. Even in the dim lighting Kenji can see the white snarl of his teeth.
Whatever happens next is obscured from view as Ennoshita turns his back, his cape flaring out in an arc. What can only be called a blood curdling yell rents the air, an animal noise that freezes Kenji’s blood even in the midst of a battle, but when Ennoshita turns around his hands are just as bare as before and Futakuchi doesn’t know what in the world just happened to the man now slumped lifeless in the dirt. The remaining attacker looks just as quelled, staring down at his felled partner in horror.
“Behind you!” Ennoshita shouts.
Kenji realizes a second too late that the warning is meant for him.
Pain lances up his side, right beneath the ribs, right between the gaps of his armor. A shout drags free from his throat. Someone is suddenly behind him, close enough to feel their body heat against his back and puffs of breath against his neck. They twist the knife lodged in his side with enough ferocity to make him see stars.
“Shit,” Kenji rasps, wrenching away. His attacker lets him. The knife stays stuck in his side. He sees wisps of black shadows clinging to the air, dissipating like a mist.
A rogue.
He continues to wheel around. No one’s there. Just thin, inky shadows. They’re cloaking. It’s not a tactic he’s overly fond of. The night is dim enough without the extra smokescreen obscuring his surroundings.
His sword is useless like this, too slow to block a quick strike that he can’t see coming. He carries no shield. How had Ennoshita descried the rogue’s position? A good cloaking completely hides a person’s scent, sound, and movement. Kenji can’t sense a thing and his fighting instincts are anything but dull.
The second knife is thrown from his left flank, impossibly fast. Kenji only has time to turn his shoulder to it, gritting his teeth as the steel cleaves through his armor and sinks into flesh. The angle— But again, when he wheels in the direction the knife was thrown from there are only mist-like shadows hanging in the air. He looks down. Trampled grass. Too faint footsteps. He can’t track anything. At this rate he’ll become target practice.
It continues like that for one more knife, thankfully glanced off his armor rather than through it, when an idea finally comes to him. He raises his sword arm and rushes toward the still dissipating mist with a gusto, swinging wildly with an affected amount of panic and leaving his back completely unguarded. Those earlier footsteps in the grass were evenly dispersed and close together – an easygoing walking pace, suggesting the rogue is taking their time circling around him. At a slow pace like that…
Now.
He spins around, flooded with success when he catches the rogue jump back in shock. The shadows smell acrid up close, like smoke and old ashes. He can see her trying to pull them around her again. Kenji drops his sword and rushes forward.
“Cowards always go for the back, don’t they?” He says, grabbing her hood in hand to drag her to him. It’s pulled from her head, she attempting to worm out of her cape altogether, but he takes her by the hair and cranes her neck back. She bucks and struggles against his grasp but doesn’t say a word, not even when Kenji’s hand tugs a knife free from her pouch and slices it across her neck.
Kenji drops the knife when he's done, looking around for any more attackers. He's greeted with silence.
Ennoshita walks nearer.
“The last one?” Kenji asks.
“He ran.”
“You let him?”
Ennoshita stares at him for a moment, then at the three bodies scattered on the ground, and finally at small pool of blood weeping from the rogue’s neck. He says nothing more.
It’s too late to give chase. Kenji finds that he doesn’t care enough to try. He picks up his sword and sheathes it. His breathing breaks around the motion, reminding him of his injuries, the two knives still protruding from him like twin thorns, and then his vision swims for a worrying moment. When it clears Ennoshita is staring at him again.
“Are you--”
“Fine,” Kenji cuts in, forcing his legs to move. “Let’s get away from this area before someone happens on it. I’ve had enough surprises for one day. You?”
Ennoshita looks like he’s not sure what Kenji’s question means, asking quietly, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” Kenji deadpans, turning on heel. “Maybe to see a doctor.”
He trudges off the path and into the forest, swatting a ticklish cobweb from his cheek. Through the distant trees he can see the looming walls of Crow punching into the night, but the sight disappears as the forest grows thicker around him. He’s not paying the closes attention to where he’s going other than away from the main road where they had been attacked. He recalls passing a village along the way. His breathing is becoming frayed and audible over the snap and crunch of their footsteps, Ennoshita’s a small distance behind his. He tries to temper it into something quieter and breaks out into a sweat instead. His hands are beginning to feel cold and when he shakes them they feel numb too, prickling his skin with a needling sensation.
They walk in silence. At least there’s that. Kenji’s confident there’s no one pursuing them. The one who ran must have done so without the intention of coming back.
A twisted root grabs at his ankle, causing him to loose his footing. He falls with less grace than he’d like against a tree, twisting at the last moment to avoid aggravating his injured shoulder. It doesn’t exactly work. The collision is jarring, making his eyes wince shut, and he slouches against the tall trunk with a groan.
Hurried footsteps come to a pause, and then a hand on his arm. “Futakuchi? Are you with me?”
Kenji rolls his eyes but does manage to drag his gaze up, up to Ennoshita’s heavy black eyes and the bright marking blazing on his forehead between them, close to the scalp where his overgrown bangs previously obscured it. The strange tattoo is arresting for both its location and its brightness of color. Two short lines are shaped into the letter V, slightly raised like a healed scar, but done so precisely that it must have been intentionally put there. The symbol’s meaning is lost to him, but the mark’s pure white color is unnaturally vibrant.
Ennoshita’s face seems to default to clean and austere, but his shoulders are tilted attentively toward Kenji and his expression holds such an openness to it that it gives him pause.
Something’s definitely wrong with his body.
He remembers that Ennoshita might want a verbal answer.
“…Are you medically licensed?” He asks.
“No.”
“Are you medically trained?”
“Not exactly, and probably not as much as you’d like, but I do know what I’m doing. I can help you heal. Trust me.”
Kenji scoffs and moves to straighten up, steeling himself to the pain that ripples through him. It is deeply aggravating but he’s managed more with worse. He’s usually closer to fellow soldiers after being cut down, but he has lived with worse before, and he refuses to be done in by such a low attack. “You led me straight into an ambush led by petty criminals and a rogue. I apologize if I have a hard time of doing that now.”
Ennoshita wavers for a moment, a crease folding itself between his brow, but a moment later a stern hand takes Kenji’s shoulder and pushes him back against the rough tree trunk, makes him sit down. “I didn’t know about the ambush.”
Kenji feels the tug of his fastenings coming loose, and then the cuirass itself lifts off his shoulders and over his head, clattering to the ground with less delicacy than he cares for, but the removal of the metal breastplate and backplate lifts a gratifying measure of confinement from his body, making it easier to settle against the tree at his back.
“You knew you could use some extra protection or else you wouldn’t have approached me in the first place with the casual excuse that we were both going the same way,” Kenji grunts, applying more pressure to his wound. “You knew you could find yourself in some sort of danger, even if you weren’t sure of the sort.”
“There is always trouble on the main road if you’re travelling alone. Thieves, rogues, ransomers, boredom…” He sounds entirely too calm. “Isn’t it normal for travelers to want some company?”
“Really! And the group we met only happened to know your name and whereabouts? Two went after you and only one came for me.”
“The rogue came for you too,” Ennoshita adds, looking away evasively.
“What?”
“…She was behind me at first. Waiting for an opening, I think, or just watching. I wasn’t sure. But then I felt her leave after you got rid of your man.”
Kenji’s mouth twists. “Forget the rogue. Out of the two of us which one looks like the greater threat?” Kenji throws a hand toward his armor, his sword, Ennoshita’s drab clothing. “If they were normal crooks targeting random travelers they wouldn’t have bothered with you so much. You look common. They would have sent one from the start, not two or three. Are you going to stop fucking with me soon?”
They stare at each other for a heated moment, saying nothing. Ennoshita gives in first. His hands curl into tight fists atop his thighs, the first clear sign of agitation that Kenji has seen yet.
“…I can’t say that none of that isn’t true, but I’m also telling the truth when I say I didn’t intentionally draw you into a trap. The way you speak makes me think you have some status somewhere, but I don’t know who you are so I have no reason to have you harmed or killed. No one put me up to anything either. I saw that you had good armor and a good sword and thought we could walk the road together, that’s all. We’re a far way from town. Let me help you? Rogues sometimes lace their knives with poison.”
Bullshit, he wants to say, but the adrenaline from the skirmish is quickly draining away, leaving Kenji chilled and too aware of his still bleeding wound. He thinks that first knife may have struck something important, the lucky bastard, and the talk of poisoning sends a reluctant shiver through his bones.
This man says he’s a healer. Then fine, so be it, Kenji will let him pay back at least this much for all the trouble he’s gone through so far, and when he’s feeling better he’ll shake him down for more.
Kenji eases back. “Give me your tinctures or whatever and let’s be on with it.”
Ennoshita nods and tears off his gloves. One is bloodied; the arm that had been stabbed. He hardly flinches through its removal. His hands look clean. They’re trembling so gently that Kenji nearly misses it. Kenji expects him to reach for that pouch strapped to across his torso. Water to wash out the wounds, a needle, thread, some salve, a bandage—
Ennoshita pulls the first knife from his shoulder. Kenji bites back a curse.
“I have to take these out first. I need to get your armor off for this,” Ennoshita says as if Kenji doesn’t know it already. He steels himself for the removal of the knife from his flank, deeper than the one that had been in his shoulder, and swallows down a noise before it can escape.
Ennoshita wipes the knife in the grass and inspects it.
“No hurry,” Kenji mutters.
Ennoshita drops the knife.
Any other comments stick fast in Kenji’s throat when Ennoshita shifts closer and puts the whole of his palm against his chest. His fingertips rest close to Kenji’s clavicle and one digit dips into the shallow valley between them where his shirt neck hangs low and loose, making Kenji suddenly aware of his own pulse beating close beneath his skin. Ennoshita’s hand is large and warm, gathering all of his attention – a hand as warm as the high noon sun baking rays straight into his chest, like a little beacon of heat pressed right through shirt and flesh. He feels his pulse flutter. Whatever warmth spared from that hand pressed against his chest flares into his cheeks. He blushes. His breath becomes frayed again and his fingers grasp at the ground, nails gripping tightly and blunting themselves on the stony dirt.
It is only after Kenji squints his eyes open – when they closed he cannot recall – that he realizes the silvery light awashing his face is not only moonlight now, but the shimmering crack and hiss of magick. They dance halos about Ennoshita’s head. The small specks are small and bright, and Ennoshita’s eyes are bright with them as if there were little crescent moons in his pupils raying out light. His lips are slightly parted. The hand on Kenji’s chest is aglow.
That is what burns him up, Kenji realizes with a quickened heartbeat, and he thinks hard and loud to himself, The magicks, not the touch itself. Not the touch itself.
Then, belatedly, the pieces fall into place.
“You’re a mage,” Kenji rasps through the pain lancing and abating through his side, pulsing in strange waves. He can’t seem to stop talking. His mouth often runs away from him. Shaping out words distracts him from the hot blood seeping from his body. “A white one. Fuck’s sake, I thought you were an apothecary.”
The pain ebbs away so abruptly that Kenji moans in relief. Ennoshita says nothing at all, his only reaction a twitch of the mouth paired with a downward cast of his eyes. He wrenches Kenji’s hand away from where it was creeping toward his wound with a roughness that makes him grunt. Every fiber in his body screams at him to apply pressure to the area, not to let up on it and let him bleed.
“You also told me that you were from House Crow.” Whether that was a lie or the truth, Kenji is certain of one thing. “The Crows only throw black.”
It is their trademark and their charm, a house that favored only black magick in its users where in the past they had been a bright cauldron for the most promising mages of all shades… But something must have happened, an event that has yet to come to light, a mysterious blot that a hundred tales try to fill, each more fantastical than the last – because for generations now not a single white magick user or mage has been born or trained inside its walls. It’s a well-known fact. The Crows are jeered as the Flightless Crows in streets throughout the realms, including the ones Kenji grew up on: A house cursed to trudge through the darker, eldritch things and fated to lie with the demons lurking under one’s bed instead of escaping them.
“Are you listening to me?” Kenji presses when Ennoshita remains unresponsive. He feels his anger building and welcomes the distraction.
“I am,” Ennoshita replies after a pause. His voice is still so damn calm. “I know I owe you that much. I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’ll tell you more about it later, I promise. Now be still.” Ennoshita hisses, settling his long cloak around him. One hand is still against Kenji’s chest. He reaches around to press the other to Kenji’s back, both pressing his sternum and pushing against his spine until Kenji grows compressed and a tremble, nervous at the viscous stuff that’s being poured into him. He’s always found magicks creepy. He’s never felt it as quite so tangible before, and only now realizes that the mages who tended to him before usually brushed their fingertips across his flesh to mend, shimmered the air above a bruise to heal it, or cast stuff from meters away. Never had it felt invasive; alien. But the things touching him now are thick and strong and it’s all he can do but drag in a breath, a gasp of sharp night air that suddenly seems to cut his throat rather than soothe it.
His shoulders hunch forward, instinctively curling in to fend off the scalding hotness twisting inside of him, quick and silver-tongued, licking at his heart with a burn and a squeeze, trickling up his spine, and then sparking to the tips of his ribs like static on a wire to surround the utter vitality of him. It hurts, it burns more than the flesh wounds alone, and Kenji sucks air like a man breaking the surface of churning waters, resisting the urge to grab Ennoshita’s wrist and wrench the offending hand away. And, by the gods, he’s hot straight down to his fingertips and toes! He feels bloated with some foreign substance. Someone’s poured molten metals into his veins and pumped it through his very system and it’s scraping him up from the inside out, shaking the air straight from his lungs.
He pants harshly. How much time has passed? Five minutes? Two?
Pain flares sharply in his injured side. Kenji’s hand flies out to clutch at the pressure ripping through his torso, but Ennoshita slaps it away with unexpected harshness and Kenji’s too weak to combat the action. He’s appalled; his strength is gone.
He begins to realize he may have made a grave mistake. He knows shit about magick and here he is, offering up his body to the hands of a stranger he met beneath the awning of a drafty inn. Yet even his panic crashes over him sluggishly, foggily, as if something else is pushing it too far down to let it overcome him.
His body is tight with keen discomfort. An ache settles deep in his bones, so unlike the surface pain of a cut or bruise. It is that untouchable brand of hurt coming from within as from sickness or disease, overriding the body and the senses.
And then it abruptly ceases.
Ennoshita’s hand leaves his back. Ennoshita’s hand leaves his front. Kenji merely crumples against it again as he inhales, shuddery and desperate. A wave of nausea churns through him and a sheen of sweat breaks onto his skin as he attempts to gag and swallow the sensation down. Ennoshita holds his palm firmly against him, supporting him as he catches his breath, but something in his gaze has become tight and closed off.
“Gods,” Kenji whispers, “What did you do to me?”
Ennoshita’s eyes are dark again, the sparks gone. “You’re tired. Go to sleep.”
He feels drugged. Pain laps thinly at his body. A headache gnaws at his temples, similarly threatening. He tries to push himself off the tree and leave but stumbles, feeling all the more shame for it.
Work, you, he berates his traitor limbs. Was this a trap after all? He shuts his eyes and turns inward, all concentration focused on the simple act of breathing. He recites a simple mantra in his mind. You are fine. It helps a little, enabling him to push other discomforts away, to batter them beneath his loud thoughts. You are fine, you are fine. A minute and you’ll stand up and walk away. Go back to town. Find Aone. Get that stare from him. Laugh about it all later.
Yet even his thoughts are spiraling away, turning gray at the corners, slipping from his grasp as swiftly as his consciousness.
But then there’s only black.
