SYNOPSIS! what do you do when you fall in love with someone the whole world has decided isn't worth loving? if you're the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the province, apparently you do it anyway. it doesn't start with a grand declaration. it starts with pink hair and a game of hide and seek and a twelve year old who decided, completely without permission, that a boy with four eyes and four arms and a permanent scowl was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. the rest, as they say, is history. messy, complicated, wonderful history.
AUTHOR NOTE! DUN DUN DUNNNN PART 2 has arrived! heres part 1 for new comers, sorry this took so long. i had like planned it all out and then last minuted decided it might be an unpopular ending so i just re-planned and then re wrote what i had. to be honest i feel like i did my thing on this i don't know. i was thinking of maybe doing some minis here and there because i just love them so much (i grew very attached) tell me if that's something you guys would enjoy, anyways ill shut up so you can read in peace. much love! (word count *roughly* 22.6K) shes long oops
~ Now playing: FROM THE START by LAUFEY ~
808 AD, Spring, 9:43 A.M.
Pretty. Really pretty.
At least that's what you thought.
It was the last lesson of the day, poetry. Kiyoshi-sensei was out sick so her class had joined with yours, which meant the room was fuller than usual and Masaru-sensei was in one of his moods about it. The kind of mood where he read aloud from scrolls with the energy of a man who resented every single person in the room including himself.
It was a little misshapen, a bit stained like it was made by dirty hands, the tips bent where it wasn't supposed to, but it had character. It was so…him. So unbelievably and undeniably him.
A dreamy little sigh was pulled from your lips as you fiddled with the origami bunny. "Young miss, put your trash in the bin and focus!" grunted Masaru-sensei, he was standing in front of the class holding up a scroll, pausing his reading aloud to scold you. When you looked up everyone was staring,but that was the last thing on your mind at the moment. How dare he? Does he even know how much this is worth? more than the charm that hung from the cords of his robe life and dank toupee. Reluctantly, you stuff the bunny origami in your robes and join in on the lesson while you thought several things you would never say out loud because you were a well raised young woman.
Lunch was under the matsu tree, same as always.
The air was warm with a breeze moving through it and fat fluffy clouds drifting across the sky above you. Hotaru was already eating, which she had somehow started before anyone else despite being the last to sit down. Masanori was complaining about something. Ume was listening to Masanori complain while also reading, which was a skill you had always admired.
You were holding the origami bunny again.
You hadn't noticed you'd taken it back out.
"Hey." Masanori knocked your knee with his. "You good? You've been all distracted since this morning. you keep touching that horribly done origami."
You looked up slowly, dazed. then down at your hands. Then back up. Horrible? What was with people today.
"Excuse you Masanori, my Pinky—"
"I made it for her." Ume cut in smoothly, not looking up from her book. "craft project."
Masanori squinted at the origami. "It's terrible. Looks like a disfigured duck that got spat out by a pig."
"Thank you." Ume said.
You caught Ume's eye over Masanori's head. She gave you a very specific look. You gave her an apologetic one back. This was the third time this month you had nearly exposed yourself and each time Ume had caught it before it became a problem. You were slacking and you knew it and so did she. She had started calling you 'gooshy' which apparently meant you had no poker face anymore when it came to him. you couldn't even argue. she wasn't wrong.
But she also wasn't there two weeks ago when it happened. So she couldn't fully blame you.
two weeks ago.
Ume had been covering your back since she found out and you had been endlessly grateful. On this particular day she had run interference with the guards while you slipped out during music to go to the food carts near the east road. You were going to get Ryo a new treat, you had been promising yourself the fish skewers and sweet potato dumplings for weeks now and today was the day.
Except when you got there most of the stalls were closed up early and the ones that weren't were packing away fast. The old lady who ran the fish cake cart muttered at you to leave the moment she saw you, "you shouldn't be here girl, a curse has robbed ol' Hikaru, took all his paper and tipped his cart over just for the fun of it. the thing laughed and ran off. A menace i tell you. G+o on now, shoo."
you went.
Pinky Pie what have you gotten yourself into now, was your first thought as you redirected toward the meadow. you had no treats and limited time but at least you could see him.
you were slightly out of breath when you made it through the trees into the meadow and what you found there stopped you mid stride.
tufts of pink hair catching the breeze, eyebrows pinched in concentration, the tip of his tongue just barely visible between his lips, and four arms each holding a different colour of paper. he was sitting cross legged in the grass with the focused energy of someone doing something that required their full attention and had absolutely no idea anyone was watching.
you stood there for a moment and just looked at him.
he had gotten bigger these past few months. taller. something about his arms was different too, like there was actual definition there now, lean muscle that hadn't been there at thirteen. you were trying very hard not to think about this. you were failing to not think about this. the thought had kept you up half of last night, you lying on your futon in the dark staring at the ceiling and then burrying your face in your sleeve and making sounds only a very dramatic fourteen year old makes.
"Ryo." you announced your presence loudly, still breathing a little hard from running. "what are you doing? i heard you robbed an old man."
he turned around immediately, all four arms moving to shield whatever was in his lap from view. "you're not supposed to see yet." he said, scowling. "go away."
ooooh.
a surprise.
how completely, devastatingly adorable.
you sat down in your usual spot right in front of him and stared at his back with a smile on your face. you could see the tips of his ears from here. pink. the tips of his ears were pink. it was not helping your situation.
"okay." you said. "i'll wait. i love surprises."
a grunt. then silence. just the sound of paper folding.
all this focus for you. all of it just for you. you were going to have to lie down when you got home.
"okay." he said eventually, still not turning around. "i...uh." he stopped. there was a pause where you heard him exhale once. "i never made it before. i saw someone doing it at the market."
before you could say a single thing he turned around and shoved something into your hand, and in the same motion his head whipped to the side in the world's least convincing display of nonchalance.
you looked down.
a small origami rabbit sat in your palm. pink paper. he had used pink paper. a bit lopsided, one ear slightly longer than the other, the body a little squished on one side. it looked like someone had cared very much about getting it right and had also been learning how to do it while doing it.
you sat very still for a moment.
"Ryomen." you said.
"it's just paper." he said, to the meadow.
"Ryomen."
"stop saying my name like that."
"it's the most beautiful thing i've ever seen in my entire life." you said, completely sincerely.
the back of his neck went pink to match his ears. "it's lopsided." he said.
"i know." you said. "i love it."
he said nothing. he was very busy looking at a patch of grass to his left. you looked back down at the little rabbit in your palm and felt something so full it almost hurt sitting in the middle of your chest.
you had been carrying it with you every day since.
"spill it." Hotaru's burp, pulling you back to the present.
she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked between you and Ume with the calm directness that was just how Hotaru was, no build up, no softening. "the beans. we want all of them. just because we get lower marks than you two in languages and poetry and art and—" she paused, counting, "yeah, basically everything, doesn't mean we're stupid. we've noticed you two being all secretive for months now. so. spill."
she said the last part with a full mouth of stew.
you and Ume looked at each other.
"i made an origami bunny." Ume tried.
"Ume." Hotaru said flatly.
Masanori was looking between all three of you with the focused suspicion of someone who had been waiting for this conversation and was glad it was finally happening.
you looked at the origami rabbit in your hands.
then you put it carefully back in your robe.
and you folded. completely and immediately. under zero pressure really, you could have lied your way out of this easy, you had been doing it for months. but you were tired. genuinely tired of carrying it in a box and only being able to open the box with Ume. you wanted to put it down somewhere and breathe.
so you told them. all of it. every single bean out of the can. it took up the rest of lunch, your food going cold beside you because you kept forgetting to eat. Ume filled in the parts you forgot, which told you she had been waiting to tell this story for a while and had it memorised.
Masanori went through several visible phases during the telling of it. confusion, then disbelief, then something that looked like he was doing complex maths in his head, then a long moment where he stared at a fixed point on the ground processing that this was all about the ghost boy from the shed at the edge of the meadow, the one the whole town walked around without meaning to, the one whose name the priests didn't say out loud. then something that might have been the very early stages of understanding, not full understanding, just the beginning of it.
Hotaru practically melted. she pressed both hands to her cheeks and made a sound in the back of her throat that was very similar to the sounds you made alone in your room at night. she and Ume immediately began comparing your situation to their favourite romance narratives with the enthusiasm of people who had been waiting for something to apply them to.
you ate your cold food and let it happen.
after a while Masanori looked back at you. he was still a little uncertain, you could see it, the weight of everything the town said and believed sitting somewhere in his face. but he was looking at you, his actual friend, and whatever was in your face when you talked about Ryomen was apparently doing some of the convincing for you.
"okay." he said finally. "okay. so what's the plan."
Ume looked up from her romance comparison. "we were hoping you'd ask that."
the plan was simple enough. Masanori would cover the school gate on days you needed to leave early. Hotaru would handle any curious adults with her very convincing innocent expression. Ume would continue being Ume, which was already more than enough.
what none of them could fix was home.
your father had kept the guards close since the ceremony and that hadn't changed. two of them, always. thorough men. the kind who took their job seriously and didn't leave many gaps. you had gotten creative, Ume's interference, the garden gate, the window in the poetry room, but some days there was no gap and you went home without seeing him and the next day you were tired and distracted and apparently gooshy enough that Masaru-sensei felt the need to comment on it.
the day after the lunch confession you woke up to a quiet house.
your mother was asleep, one of the slower mornings. your father had left for the courts early. the maids were moving through the house doing their work and everything was calm and a little too still in the way it sometimes got when both your parents were unavailable at the same time. you got dressed, ate something small from the kitchen, and took your snacks out to the engawa that looked over the garden.
the garden in spring was genuinely lovely. the plum tree had finished but the wisteria along the far wall was going properly now, purple and heavy, and the grass was the bright green that only happens for a few weeks before summer comes and tires it out. you sat with your legs tucked under you and ate and watched a bird do something complicated on the branch of the garden pine.
the two guards were doing their round on the far side of the garden. you could see them moving at the edge of the path, slow and methodical.
you were thinking about nothing in particular when the air changed.
it wasn't a sound. it was just that shift, the one that had been happening since you were twelve, the one your body had learned to recognise before your brain caught up with it. you looked up from your snacks.
he was sitting on top of the garden wall.
just sitting there, comfortable as anything, one leg hanging over the edge, two arms resting on his knees. his pink hair was doing its usual thing. he was looking at the garden like he was simply taking in the view.
you stared at him.
"how did you get past the outer gate." you said, keeping your voice low so it didn't carry.
"there's a gap in the stone near the east corner." he said, the same volume. "been there for years. your people should fix it."
"i will absolutely not be telling them that." you said.
something moved on his face that was close to amusement. he looked at the wisteria along the far wall. "your garden is too big." he said.
"it really is." you agreed. "we don't use half of it. my mother keeps saying she wants chickens back there but my father says absolutely not."
"chickens." he said.
"she really wants them." you said. "i support her."
he looked at you then. properly looked at you, all four eyes, the direct kind. "how is she." he said. "your mother."
you looked at your snacks for a moment. "slower lately. she's sleeping more than she was a few months ago. the physician came last week and my father went very quiet afterwards which is never a good sign." you paused. "she made a joke at dinner two nights ago that made my father laugh so hard he spilled his tea, so. it's both things at the same time."
Ryomen was quiet, listening the way he listened, actually there.
"some days it's heavy." you said. "i don't really say that to people. but some days it just sits on me and i can't put it down."
"i know." he said. simple. not trying to fix it, just acknowledging it, which was somehow exactly right.
you looked up at him. "do you ever miss them." you said. "your parents. even after everything."
he thought about it for a moment, which you appreciated. he didn't just answer fast to get past the question. "sometimes." he said. "not them exactly. i don't know them well enough to miss them. just the idea of them. what it could have been." he looked at the wall beneath him. "it passes."
you nodded slowly. you sat with that for a moment, both of you quiet, the garden around you doing its gentle spring thing.
"Ryo." you said.
"hm."
"i'm glad you came."
he looked at you again. his jaw did the thing it did when he was carrying something carefully. "i was in the area." he said.
"you're never just in the area." you said. "you know exactly where the gaps in our walls are and you know where the guards are and you came anyway." you weren't saying it to make him uncomfortable, just saying it because it was true and you were done pretending it wasn't. "so i'm glad."
he looked away at the wisteria. the tips of his ears had gone pink. one of his hands, the one closest to you even though you were several feet below him, opened and closed slowly on his knee.
"the guards are about to change direction." he said after a moment.
you looked toward the far path. he was right, you could already see them starting to turn. "same time next week?" you said.
"i make no such agreements." he said, and stood up on top of the wall with an ease that was honestly a little unfair, balanced perfectly, and looked down at you for just a second longer than he needed to.
"eat the rest of your snacks." he said. "you always stop halfway through."
then he dropped down off the other side and was gone.
you sat on the engawa and looked at the wall and ate the rest of your snacks.
best afternoon of the week, easy.
808 AD, Summer, 10:26 A.M.
it started at lunch. again.
Masanori sat down under the matsu tree practically twitching. he had news. how did you know? because Masanori had three tell tale signs when he was carrying something. first came the twitching. then the sweating. then the interrupting everybody mid sentence before he eventually just crumbled and told you anyway. you had known this boy since you were eight years old. you could read him like a book.
exhibit A.
"okay so." he cut Hotaru off mid sentence about something, already leaning in like someone was going to overhear him in an open field. "you know Ryomen right."
"we know Ryomen." Ume said without looking up from her book.
"there's a new rumour."
you put your rice cake down.
"Kenji Fujimoto." Masanori said. "big house near the west road. anyway Kenji was cutting through the meadow two nights ago after dark, which first of all, stupid, but that's not the point. the point is he ran into Ryomen. and he says when he tried to go around him Ryomen's eyes went completely white and Kenji felt all the warmth leave his body at once." Masanori paused. actually paused for dramatic effect. "and then Ryomen smiled. and apparently when he smiled he had too many teeth. way too many teeth. and then." another pause. "he disappeared into the ground."
Ume choked on her water.
not the polite kind. the full body kind, the kind that had Hotaru abandoning her lunch to pat her back while Ume held up one hand to communicate she was fine while very obviously not being fine yet.
you on the other hand were trying extremely hard not to laugh because you knew, you personally knew, that Ryomen Sukuna did not disappear into the ground. Ryomen Sukuna took night walks because the days belonged to other people and Kenji Fujimoto had probably stumbled into him in the dark, panicked because he had panicked, run home, and let his imagination write the second half of the story.
too many teeth.
into the ground.
you and Ume looked at each other. you both looked away immediately.
"and that's not it." Masanori said, completely unaware of the silent conversation happening across from him. "old man Daichi from the rice stall says last month when he tried to wave Ryomen away from his cart the sky went dark. thirty seconds. just thirty seconds of complete darkness in the middle of the afternoon and then normal again."
"the sky." Hotaru said.
"went dark." Masanori confirmed.
"for thirty seconds." you said.
"thirty seconds." he said.
Hotaru looked at you. quick and quiet, the kind of look only Hotaru did, the one that saw more than it let on. you looked back at your food.
because here was the thing. it was funny. you knew it was funny and Ume knew it was funny and honestly even Hotaru's face was doing something that suggested she found Kenji Fujimoto deeply unreliable as a source. but underneath the funny part was something with edges to it. because Kenji was going to tell that story at his dinner table tonight. and his family was going to tell their friends. and by the end of the week it was going to be bigger and darker and more ridiculous and there was nothing, not a single thing, you could do about it. you couldn't say actually i know him. you couldn't say he made me an origami rabbit. you just had to sit here and eat your rice cake.
you had stopped eating your rice cake.
Hotaru picked it up and put it back in your hand without saying a word. you ate it.
"i mean obviously it's exaggerated." Masanori said, looking at you, because he did know, they all knew. "i'm just saying what's going around."
"i know." you said. "i know you are."
"Kenji Fujimoto." Hotaru said, in the tone of someone delivering a verdict. "once told everyone he saw a river dragon near the east bridge. turned out to be a very large fish."
Ume snorted. Masanori laughed. you smiled, small but real.
it helped. not all the way. but enough to finish lunch.
afternoon lessons were fine. Ume walked with you to the gate after and bumped her shoulder into yours once without saying anything. you bumped back. that was the whole conversation and it covered everything that needed to be said.
the guards took you home.
the house was warm when you got in. you could hear your mother before you saw her, her voice coming from somewhere down the corridor, and the sound of it did what it always did, loosened the thing in your chest that had been tight since lunch.
dinner was all three of you. good dinner. your mother was sharp and funny and picking fights with your father about small things purely for entertainment, which meant she was feeling good, which made everything feel better. your father pretended to lose the arguments while clearly enjoying them. you ate and watched and felt both happy and something unnamed underneath the happy.
and then your father mentioned the east garden.
completely ordinary. something about trees and wall foundations and maintenance. your mother said she had never liked the plum tree on the east side anyway, too messy, she wanted something cleaner.
"what about a sakura?" your father suggested. "something with colour."
your mother made a face. "pink." she said, the way you say the name of a food you have never been particularly fond of. "pink has never been a favourite of mine. too sweet. too much."
the conversation moved on like nothing happened. your father agreed. your mother mentioned some pale purple tree she had seen near the temple road years ago, much more elegant.
you sat there with your chopsticks in your hand and stared at your food.
pink has never been a favourite of mine. too sweet. too much.
they were talking about a tree. you knew that. a perfectly ordinary tree for the perfectly ordinary east garden. this had nothing to do with anything else.
except you were fourteen and you had spent the last two years watching a boy be called too much by an entire town that had never once actually looked at him. and today you had sat under the matsu tree and listened to people add more stories to the pile. and now you were sitting at your own dinner table listening to pink get dismissed like it was nothing and something in you that had been sitting quietly for a very long time just stood all the way up.
"PINK HAS NEVER DONE ANYONE ANY WRONG."
both your parents stopped talking.
you were standing. you had not planned to stand but here you were. chopsticks in hand. voice loud enough that the attendant near the door went very still.
"pink is a good colour." you said, with the total conviction of someone who had been thinking about this for longer than tonight. "it has feelings. it has a heart. it deserves to be appreciated and not written off just because people have decided without looking properly that it's too sweet or too much. maybe the problem is that people don't actually look. and if they did they would see that it is one of the best colours that has ever existed and i am not going to sit here and listen to it be spoken about like it's nothing."
silence.
complete silence.
your mother had both eyebrows somewhere near her hairline. your father had set his chopsticks down carefully. the attendant near the door was staring at a fixed point on the wall.
you set your chopsticks down. bowed slightly. said "excuse me" in a voice doing its best impression of composure and walked out.
you went to your room. sat on your futon. put both hands over your face.
from down the corridor, clear as anything, your mother's voice. "that child has the most passionate relationship with colours i have ever witnessed in my life. she gets her weird from you."
and then your father laughed. the big warm real kind.
you heard both things.
later, lamp low, origami bunny in your hands, you lay on your futon and stared at the ceiling.
your mother thought it was funny. you knew she did. and your father had laughed, which was something.
but you had also seen him set his chopsticks down before you finished. quiet and precise. your father was not a foolish man. you had always known that. smart men noticed things even when they filed them away for later instead of saying them out loud.
pink has never been a favourite of mine.
they were talking about a tree. you knew that.
but the good days, the ones where it felt like the world was just the meadow and the ginkgo tree and nothing else had weight to it, those weren't the whole picture. the whole picture had dinner tables in it. rumours. a town that had already made its decision. a father who loved you in a way that had started to feel like a wall being built around you one careful brick at a time.
you tucked the origami bunny under your pillow.
outside the summer night was warm and loud with insects. somewhere across town he was probably walking. empty streets. no one looking.
you hoped he was eating.
you fell asleep thinking about pink paper.
down the corridor your father sat on the edge of the bed while your mother settled in.
she was talking about something, some small funny observation from dinner, but he was only half listening.
"you've gone quiet." your mother said.
"i'm thinking." he said.
"about the tree?"
"no." he said.
she looked at him with those eyes that had always read him faster than he liked. "she's fourteen." she said. not unkindly. just a fact.
"i know how old she is." he said.
"then you know fourteen year olds have feelings about things." she said. "loud dining room standing up from the table feelings."
"it's not the feelings." he said. "it's what they're about."
your mother was quiet for a moment. "she'll be alright." she said finally. "she's ours."
your father looked at the lamp.
"yes." he said. "i'm going to make sure of it."
809 AD, Late Winter, 13:27 P.M.
talking.
he had never really been a fan.
he was more of a listener. especially when it came to her. she had this way of going on and on and on about the most random things with the energy of someone who had seventeen cups of tea for breakfast. exhausting honestly. where did she find it? he was never quite sure. last tuesday she had shown up with mochi, the strawberry kind, a wisteria flower tucked behind her ear, and had proceeded to talk for two solid hours about something that started as a complaint about her dance instructor and somehow ended up being a full lecture about the migration patterns of birds. he had not said much. he had eaten the mochi and listened and at some point noticed the flower was slightly crooked behind her ear and thought about fixing it for about three seconds.
it was nice though. the flower. pretty almost. on her specifically.
anyway.
unfamiliar footsteps were coming through the meadow.
not her. he knew her footsteps without trying to, the same way he knew the sound the shed door made in wind, just from time and proximity. these were different. lighter. whoever this was led with the wrong foot and swung their arms differently.
this wasn't his—
it wasn't her.
he looked up.
Ume.
she walked up to him with the energy of someone who had somewhere to be and had decided this was it. no hesitation. no checking if it was okay. she dropped down into the grass directly across from him, right in the spot, the specific patch of flattened grass that had been flattened by the same person sitting in it every tuesday for three years.
"that spot's taken." Ryomen said. looking at her with all four eyes. flat.
Ume looked at the spot. then at him. then back at the spot. "what do you— oh." she snickered. "ahhh i see you. your girlfriend sits there."
"she is not my anything." he said. "what do you want, girl."
"Ume." she said, moving to a different patch of grass without any particular hurry about it. "my name is Ume. and i want to talk to you." she settled herself. "so. Ryomen."
"so." he said.
"she talks about you constantly." Ume said. "like genuinely constantly. at lunch, after school, in the middle of conversations about completely unrelated things. last week Masanori was talking about his uncle's farm and somehow within four minutes it was about you. i don't even know how she did it. it was impressive actually."
Ryomen said nothing.
"you don't seem surprised." Ume said.
"i'm not." he said.
"cocky." she said.
"realistic." he said.
Ume looked at him for a second. "okay fair." she said. she picked a blade of grass and turned it over in her fingers. "we never believed it you know. the rumors. me and the others." she said it casually, like she was talking about the weather. "i always thought they were exaggerated. people in this town are dramatic, no offense."
"some taken." he said.
"she thought they were mean and stupid." Ume continued, ignoring him. "from day one. you know what she said when we were twelve and the other kids were going on about the ghost boy in the shed? she said she felt sorry for a lonely child wandering around. that's it. that's all she got from the story." Ume shook her head. "she acts like she's all bubbly and whatever but she's soft. genuinely soft. gushy all the way through." she looked at him directly. "so don't go breaking her heart or i will gut you like a fish."
Ryomen looked at her for a long moment.
"she cried on my shirt for two hours." he said. "under a sakura tree. in winter. i didn't leave."
Ume stared at him.
he looked back at the meadow.
"okay." Ume said quietly. "okay yeah." she filed that away and moved on like a professional. "alright new segment. i have questions."
"i'm not answering questions." he said.
"cool." she said. "what do you actually do all day. like genuinely. what is a typical tuesday for Ryomen Sukuna when she's not here talking your ear off."
he looked at her sideways. "why."
"because i'm doing my due diligence." she said. "she has terrible judgment when it comes to herself. somebody has to check."
"she has fine judgment." he said, slightly faster than he meant to.
Ume's mouth did something. "right." she said. "so. tuesday."
he looked at the sky. "i walk in the mornings. check the shed. get food." he paused. "fix things when they need fixing."
"fix things." Ume said. "like what."
"the roof. the wall on the south side. the well near the east road has a loose stone." he said. "things."
"so you just. wander around fixing things." Ume said.
"yes." he said.
"alone." she said.
"yes." he said.
"hm." she said.
"stop doing that." he said.
"doing what." she said innocently.
"the hm thing." he said. "you do it when you're thinking something you've decided not to say. its annoying."
Ume looked at him with a new expression. something between surprised and impressed. "she said you were perceptive." she said. "i thought she was being biased."
"she's a lot of things." he said. "biased isn't one of them."
"no." Ume agreed. "it really isn't." she looked at him properly then. the full direct look. "okay last question. and i need you to actually answer it."
"i haven't agreed to answer anything." he said.
"why her." Ume said. "out of everyone who could have walked into that shed."
the meadow was quiet for a moment.
"she looked at me." he said finally. "just looked. no verdict in it." he paused. "i didn't know that was unusual until i'd seen enough of the other kind to compare it to."
Ume didn't say anything for a moment. she just sat with that.
then she stood up and smoothed her robes and looked down at him with an expression he couldn't fully read. "you know what." she said. "you're not so bad at this friend thing, kid."
Ryomen looked up at her. "i'm not your kid." he said. "and i don't do the friend thing."
"sure." she said. "see you around Ryomen." and she turned and walked back through the meadow like she'd come, unhurried, done with exactly what she came to do.
he watched her go.
then he looked back at the meadow.
friend thing. he didn't do the friend thing. he had never done the friend thing. he didn't need the friend thing. people were exhausting and complicated and the verdict they carried around with them was more trouble than the company was worth. he had decided this a long time ago and it had served him fine.
he thought about the last hour.
Ume had sat down without asking. had called him kid. had interviewed him like he was applying for something. had threatened to gut him like a fish with a completely straight face. had made him explain himself in full sentences and somehow it had not felt like pulling teeth. she had dry humour and a calm face and she had said we never believed it like it was just a fact she was reporting and moved on without making it a whole thing which was exactly the right way to handle it.
he thought about the old man. blind eyes and patient silence and a straightforward decency that didn't require anything. the only person before her who had just let him exist without making it complicated.
and now there was her. and apparently also her friends who showed up in meadows with dumplings and interrogated him about his tuesdays.
he looked at the flattened patch of grass where she always sat.
i have friends?
the thought arrived with the particular confusion of someone discovering something that had apparently been happening without their knowledge or consent.
he sat with that for a while.
then he ate the rest of the dumplings and did not think about tuesday.
(he thought about tuesday the whole time.)
809 AD, Early Spring 18:51 P.M.
it started as a normal dinner.
that was the thing. it started completely normally. the table was set, the food was good, the lamps were lit warm and low the way they always were in the evening. your mother was having a good day which meant she was at the table and sharp and picking at your father's opinions on small things for entertainment. Ichi was there again, which had become a semi regular thing over the past few months, him showing up for meals and conversations and fitting into the space your father had clearly decided he belonged in with the ease of someone who had been told he was welcome and had believed it.
you had gotten used to Ichi. that was the honest truth of it. he was easy to be around in the way that genuinely decent people are easy to be around. he never said anything cruel. he always included you in the conversation. he had a good sense of humour, dry and quiet, the kind that landed without announcing itself. if you had met him in different circumstances, if he had just been a person and not a person your father had selected and arranged and placed at your dinner table with a specific purpose, you thought you might have actually liked him.
but he was not just a person. he was a plan. and plans made by other people for your life without asking you had stopped sitting quietly in your chest a long time ago.
so you ate your food and you were pleasant and you waited.
you were not sure what you were waiting for. you just knew it was coming.
your father put down his chopsticks.
"i have something i'd like to share with the table." he said.
your mother looked up. something in her face changed, just slightly, a tightening around the eyes, like she had heard this sentence before, or something very like it, and had not enjoyed the way it ended.
"Ichi's family and i have been in discussion." your father said, in his comfortable measured voice, the one he used when he had already decided something and was presenting it as information rather than a decision. "we feel that the time is right to formalise things. Ichi will begin courting formally. with the intention of arrangement by the end of the year."
the table went very quiet.
Ichi sat across from you with his hands folded and his pleasant face doing its best impression of calm. he glanced at you once, brief and genuine, and in that glance was something that looked almost like an apology, like he too had not been given much say in the timing of this.
your mother stood up.
not slowly. not with the elegant measured rise she usually deployed when she wanted to make a point. she stood up fast, her chair scraping back, her composure going somewhere else entirely.
"no." she said.
your father looked at her. "Hana—"
"no." she said again, louder. her voice had an edge to it that you had heard exactly twice in your life and both times it had meant something in the house was about to change. "you told me you were going to speak to her first. you told me that. i sat in that room and i listened to you tell me that you were going to give her time and speak to her and now you're sitting at this table making announcements over dinner like she's not sitting right there—"
"this is not the moment—" your father started.
"THEN WHEN IS THE MOMENT." your mother's voice cracked through the room like something breaking. "when exactly were you planning on giving our daughter a moment? after the arrangement was signed? after the ceremony? when?" she was shaking, you could see it, the particular trembling that happened when she pushed past what her body wanted to give and demanded more of it anyway. "she is fifteen years old. she is our child. not a piece on a board you move around when the timing suits you—"
"i am doing what is best for this family—"
"you are doing what is best for YOU." your mother's finger came down on the table. "what makes YOU feel safe. what makes YOU feel like everything is under control. and you are dressing it up as love because it's easier than admitting you're afraid."
the silence that followed was the loudest thing you had ever heard.
your father's face had gone very still. the kind of still that meant something had landed somewhere real and he was deciding whether to acknowledge it.
your mother looked at him for one long moment. then she picked up the vase from the centre of the table, the small ceramic one with the painted plum blossoms that had sat there for as long as you could remember, and she threw it against the wall.
it shattered.
then she walked out of the room without another word, her footsteps sharp and certain down the corridor, the sound of her getting smaller until it was gone.
nobody moved.
Ichi was looking at a fixed point on the table. you were looking at the pieces of the vase on the floor. the painted plum blossoms in fragments across the wood.
your father cleared his throat.
"i apologise for that." he said to Ichi, with the smooth composed recovery of a man who had spent his whole life knowing how to present himself in rooms. "she has strong feelings."
Ichi nodded. said nothing. he was looking at the floor too.
and then your father went back to talking. just like that. about the arrangement, about the timeline, about the families involved, like the room hadn't just had something shatter in it, like you weren't sitting three feet away completely frozen, like you weren't there at all.
you sat at that table and you went somewhere else.
your brain had left the dinner and was running without you.
this was it. this was the thing. it was happening, the thing you had been feeling approach for months like bad weather you could see on the horizon but couldn't outrun. formal courting. arrangement by the end of the year. you were fifteen. your birthday was in two days. you would be sixteen and arranged and by this time next year you would be—
ichi. you would be Ichi's.
a life you had never wanted laid out in front of you like a table your father had set without asking what you were hungry for. lessons and duties and a husband chosen for his family name and his steady manner and his completely genuine decency and it would be fine. it would probably be fine. it would be the kind of fine that looked like contentment from the outside and felt like a room with no windows from the inside and you would spend the rest of your life being fine in it.
and Ryomen.
the thought of him arrived the way it always did, without asking, right in the centre of everything.
no more tuesday afternoons. no more evening walks or garden walls or mochi on a cloth with the cloth being his but neither of you saying so. no more forty five seconds on the shrine road. no more sitting in the grass until the light went gold and neither of you wanting to be the one to say it was time to go. no more any of it. because a formal arrangement meant guards and attendants and a life that got smaller and more watched and more arranged every day until there was no gap left in it for meadows or ginkgo trees or boys who tucked hair behind your ear and then looked away fast so you couldn't see their face.
you were going to lose him.
not because he left. because they were going to build walls high enough that you couldn't reach him anymore.
okay. okay. you needed a plan. you could fake an illness, you had faked minor ailments before, nothing dramatic, just enough to buy time. or you could— no. or Ume could— no that wouldn't work either. or maybe if you spoke to Ichi directly, explained, he seemed like a reasonable person, he had looked at you like an apology during the announcement, maybe—
"my little blossom."
your father's voice. gentle. warm. the voice he used when he was being your father and not the Dainagon.
you looked up.
he was looking at you with that careful loving face, the one that had been looking at you your whole life, the one that had kissed your forehead before ceremonies and sat beside your futon and told you stories about fireflies.
"are you alright?" he said softly. "would you like some water?"
something snapped.
not loudly. not all at once. just a clean quiet snap, like a thread pulled one too many times.
"no." you said. "i would not like some water."
your father blinked. Ichi went very still across from you.
"i would like." you said, and your voice was doing something you had never heard it do before, steady and sharp and coming from somewhere below your chest, "to have been part of this conversation before it became an announcement at a dinner table."
"we can discuss—" your father started.
"we ARE discussing." you said. "right now. this is the discussion you should have had with me weeks ago." you put your chopsticks down. they made a sound on the table. "you sat in this room and you made a decision about my life. about who i will be and who i will belong to and what the rest of my years are going to look like. and you did it without asking me a single question."
"i am your father." he said. still measured. still the Dainagon voice. "it is my responsibility to—"
"to what?" you said. "to decide? to arrange? to move me around until i end up somewhere that makes you feel better?" you could feel your voice rising and you didn't stop it. "i am not something that needs to be placed, father. i am not a piece on a board. i am a person. i have thoughts and feelings and a whole life happening inside me that you keep making decisions over the top of without ever once asking what's in it."
"i know what's in it." your father said, and something in his voice had shifted, the measured quality cracking just slightly at the edges. "that is exactly why i am doing this."
"you don't know." you said. "you think you do. you have decided you do. there is a difference."
"i know that you are fifteen years old." he said, and now the crack was more visible, something harder underneath the warmth. "i know that you are headstrong and brilliant and you have your mother's eyes and her way of seeing things and i love every part of that but i also know that you are fifteen and the world is not the meadow, do you understand me? the world is not whatever happens in that meadow!"
the room went still.
you looked at him.
he looked back at you.
he had said it. not directly. not with a name. but he had said it and you both knew what he had said and the space between you felt suddenly enormous.
"the meadow." you said quietly.
your father said nothing.
"you know about the meadow." you said.
"i know a great deal more than you have given me credit for." he said. low now. careful again, but differently careful, the careful of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and was finally putting it down. "i have known for a long time. i have waited. i have been patient. i have tried to give you time and space to come to the right decision on your own because i did not want to force your hand." he leaned forward. "but you have not come to it. and i will not watch you walk off a cliff because i was too gentle to tell you it was there."
"he is not a cliff." you said.
"he is not safe." your father said. "he is not—"
"he is the best person i know." you said, and your voice broke on the last word, just slightly, just enough. "he is the most honest and real person i have ever met in my entire life and you have never once looked at him. you have looked at what the town says about him. you have looked at what he is not, what he does not have, where he does not come from. you have never looked at who he actually is."
"i don't need to look at who he is." your father said, and his voice cracked too now, properly, the warmth and the hardness breaking against each other. "i need to look at what he is to you. and what you are to him. and what this town will do to both of you if this continues. i need to look at that because you won't." his jaw was tight. his eyes were bright in a way you had never seen them. "i need to protect you. that is my job. it has always been my job. from the moment you were born it has been the only thing i have cared about getting right."
"then GET IT RIGHT." you stood up. your chair scraped back the same way your mother's had. "getting it right means asking me. it means trusting me. it means believing that maybe, maybe i am capable of knowing what is good for me and what isn't." your voice was shaking now and you didn't care. "you gave me a necklace. you told me it was a birthday gift and the whole time it was a weapon. you put it around my neck with your own hands and told me to wear it always and it was a weapon, father. against someone you had already decided to hate before you ever met him."
your father flinched.
it was small. barely visible. but you had been reading his face your whole life and you saw it.
"i took it off." you said. "the same day. i took it off and i put it at the bottom of my chest and i have not worn it since and i am not going to wear it. not for you. not for anyone." you looked at him across the table, across all the years of firefly stories and forehead kisses and warm laughs at dinner and the slow quiet growing distance of the last two years. "i love you." your voice broke again, worse this time. "i love you so much and i know you love me and i know you think you are doing the right thing. but you are not. you are doing the frightened thing. and i need you to know the difference."
the room was completely silent.
Ichi had not moved. had barely breathed.
your father sat at the head of the table and looked at you with an expression you had never seen on his face before. not anger. not the Dainagon. just a man. just your father. looking at his daughter across a table covered in the remains of a conversation that could not be untaken.
you picked up your robes.
"excuse me." you said.
and you walked out.
you made it to your room before you fell apart properly.
you sat on the floor with your back against the futon and your knees pulled up to your chest and you pressed your face into your arms and you cried, the ugly shaking kind, the kind that had been building for months and months and had finally found its way out.
after a long time you heard footsteps in the corridor.
they stopped outside your door.
they didn't come in.
after a moment they went away again.
you sat on the floor for a long time after that.
then you reached under your pillow and found the origami bunny and held it in both hands in the dark and breathed
809 AD, Spring — 810 AD, Summer
somewhere between the dinner table fight and the first day of summer, the house changed.
not all at once. not dramatically. just the way houses change when something important has been said out loud and nobody quite knows what to do with it yet. it settled into the walls and the corridors and the careful way everyone moved through the rooms, like the air itself had been rearranged and everyone was still figuring out where things were now.
your father was not cold. that would have been easier in some ways, cold you could push back against, cold had edges you could find. he was still warm. still your father. still the man who asked if you had eaten and noticed when you were tired and remembered small things you had mentioned in passing weeks ago. but there was a distance in it now that hadn't been there before, a careful measured space between the warmth and whatever was underneath it, and you both maintained that space with the unspoken agreement of people who had said too much and were not ready to say more.
he didn't mention Ryomen again.
you didn't either.
the guards however.
the guards were a whole new situation.
they had gotten serious.
you didn't know what your father had said to them after the dinner table incident but whatever it was had produced two completely different men. these were not the guards who lost you in crowds and let you slip through garden gates. these were focused, attentive, communicating with each other in small signals you couldn't decode, rotating in patterns you had spent three weeks trying to map and couldn't. Ume had tried twice to run her usual interference and both times it hadn't worked and she had come back to you with the expression of someone who had met a worthy opponent and was annoyed about it.
the window in the poetry room had been nailed shut. you didn't know how your father had found out about the window. you had your suspicions, which lived in the general direction of a household staff that had been with your family for decades and were loyal in ways that ran deeper than you had accounted for.
the garden gate had a new lock.
you stood in front of it one afternoon and looked at it for a long time.
then you went back inside.
your mother had a bad week in the middle of summer.
three physicians in five days, which was new, which meant something had changed in the way her body was doing what it was doing and the people who understood these things were trying to figure out what. your father barely slept. you could see it in him, the particular thinning that happened when he was running on worry instead of rest, and underneath all the distance and the careful space and the guards and the locked gate he was just a man who was terrified of losing his wife and you were just a girl who was terrified of the same thing.
you sat with her one afternoon when the physicians had gone. she was having a slow day, the slow kind, the kind where even talking took more than she had. you didn't talk. you just sat with her the way your father sat with her, just being there, because sometimes that was the whole thing.
she reached out at some point and took your hand.
you held on.
neither of you said anything.
you thought about how unfair it was that the world kept asking you to choose. between your family and your freedom. between your father's love and your own life. between staying in this house that was yours and had always been yours and running toward the person who had become as much yours as any of it. you thought about how you shouldn't have to choose. how nobody should have to choose. how the fact that you were being asked to was not something you had caused or deserved.
you held your mother's hand and looked at the garden through the screen door and didn't say any of it.
late summer
he came to the garden wall on a tuesday evening.
you didn't know he was going to. you were on the engawa eating something small you had taken from the kitchen, the guards were doing their far round, the evening was warm and going gold, and then the air changed and you looked up and there he was.
he looked different.
not dramatically. just. more. like the months since you had properly seen him had done something to the lines of him, filled things in, made him more present somehow. he sat on the wall with his usual impossible ease and looked at the garden and did not explain how he had gotten past the new outer gate which had a lock that had defeated you completely.
"how." you said.
"the lock is cheap." he said. "your father should spend more."
you looked at him. he looked at the wisteria. it had gone leggy in the heat, sprawling further along the wall than it was supposed to, purple and insistent.
"i've missed you." you said. you were done being careful about saying things.
he was quiet for a moment. "i know." he said.
"that's not the same as saying it back." you said.
another moment. longer. "i know that too." he said. and then, to the wisteria, to the garden, to somewhere just slightly away from you, "it's been too quiet."
you looked at him.
"the meadow." he said. "it's been too quiet."
you understood what he was saying. you had always understood what he was saying even when he said it sideways.
"i'm working on it." you said.
"i know." he said.
you sat in the warm evening and talked, quieter than usual, both of you aware of the guards in a way you hadn't had to be in the early days. shorter sentences. longer silences. but the silences were the good kind, full rather than empty, the kind you had built together over four years of tuesday afternoons.
he left before the guards came back.
you sat on the engawa after and held the warmth of it carefully, the way you held all of it now, more carefully than before because there was less of it and what there was mattered more.
autumn
the visits were short. sometimes very short. ten minutes at the wall, twenty if the guards were slow on their round. once he managed to stay for almost an hour and you talked until the dark came properly and you could barely see his face and neither of you wanted to be the one to say it was time.
he was different in these visits. you noticed it gradually, the way you noticed things about him, which was slowly and then all at once. he was more open. not dramatically, not in a way he would probably acknowledge if you pointed it out, but you had four years of comparison to measure against and the difference was visible. he asked you things. real questions, not just responses to what you said, actual questions about what you thought and how you were and what was happening inside the house that he couldn't see from the wall.
he asked about your mother a lot.
he asked about your father once, carefully, and you had told him the truth which was that your father was exhausted and frightened and doing everything wrong for all the right reasons and you still loved him and it was still complicated and Ryomen had listened and said nothing and that had been exactly right.
one evening in autumn he had arrived at the wall with something wrapped in cloth and dropped it over the side into the garden without comment. you had found it after he left. persimmons, the good sweet kind that only came for a few weeks in autumn. your favourite. you had eaten one sitting on the engawa in the dark and thought about how he had remembered that, filed it away somewhere in that head of his that noticed everything and said nothing, and gone out of his way to bring them.
you had cried a little. just a little.
winter into spring
the physicians came more regularly.
your father started leaving earlier and coming home later and when he was home he was present in that way that meant he was physically there and mentally somewhere else entirely, doing the maths on something that didn't have a good answer. you had stopped trying to breach the distance between you. not because you had given up but because you understood, in the way you understood most things about people you loved, that he needed to come to it himself. pushing wouldn't get you there. you had pushed at the dinner table and it had cost both of you something that was still healing.
so you waited.
you helped with your mother when you could. you sat with her in the afternoons. you learned which days were which kind and adjusted accordingly and you tried not to think too hard about the fact that the physician's face had been doing something different lately when he came out of her room.
the guard situation did not improve.
Ume had essentially given up on interference and moved to a support role which mostly consisted of her showing up at school with snacks and updates about Masanori and Hotaru and making you laugh on the days when laughing felt difficult. Masanori had started leaving food at the school gate on days he knew you couldn't get out which had made you cry in a completely different way, the warm kind, the kind that came from being known by people who showed up for you.
Ryomen came to the wall when he could.
sometimes that was once a week. sometimes it was less. sometimes you sat on the engawa and the air didn't change and you went back inside and tried not to let the missing of it sit too heavy.
but when he came he stayed as long as he could. and every time he came he was a little more there, a little less armoured, a little more willing to sit in the space between you without filling it with distance. one evening in late winter he had sat on the wall and talked for almost two hours, not about anything in particular, just talking, the way you had always talked at the ginkgo tree except now it went both ways, him saying things without waiting to be asked, offering pieces of himself like he had decided you had earned them and was settling a debt.
you hadn't said anything about it.
butterfly rule.
even now. even after everything. some things you still had to pretend not to see or they'd fly away.
and then it was spring.
your birthday soon.
the house was warm with it, your mother had insisted on plans despite the physician's opinions, your father had arranged things with the particular focused energy of a man who needed something to go right. there would be food and music and people and your mother in her best robes doing what she always did in public which was making everyone in the room stand up a little straighter without knowing why.
it should have felt like something to look forward to.
you sat on the engawa on the evening before the evening before your birthday and looked at the garden wall and thought about how much had changed since you were twelve years old and the world was just a game of hide and seek and a shed at the edge of a meadow and a boy with pink hair who had never expected anyone to follow him out of it.
the air changed.
you looked up.
he was on the wall.
he looked at you and you looked at him and neither of you said anything for a moment.
"three days." you said.
"i know." he said.
"are you going to wish me a happy birthday." you said.
he looked at the garden. "probably not." he said.
"typical." you said.
something moved on his face. the soft fast thing. except lately it was staying a little longer before he covered it. like the covering was getting harder. like something in him had decided the covering was less important than it used to be.
"i'll bring you something." he said. to the wisteria.
"you don't have to—" you started.
"i know i don't have to." he said. and he looked at you when he said it, all four eyes, direct and steady. "that's kind of my whole thing with you."
your own words. from years ago. sitting in the frost. back in his voice now like he had been holding them somewhere and had decided tonight was when they came back.
you looked at him.
he looked at you.
the garden sat between you, warm and spring green, the wisteria starting its thing again along the wall, purple and insistent and completely unbothered.
"same time tuesday." you said softly.
he looked away.
"i make no such agreements." he said.
you smiled.
the guards were coming back around. you could hear them. he heard them too, you knew because he shifted slightly on the wall, preparing to go.
"Ryomen." you said.
he looked at you one more time.
"it's going to be okay." you said. you weren't sure you believed it completely. but you said it the way you said most things you needed to be true, with the particular conviction of someone who had decided to believe it until it was.
he looked at you for a long moment.
"yeah." he said quietly. like he was deciding to believe it too.
then he dropped off the wall and was gone.
you sat on the engawa until the guards came back and then you went inside and went to bed and lay in the dark holding the origami bunny and thinking about tomorrow and the day after and everything that came after that.
three days until your birthday.
three days.
810 AD, Spring, 10:09 A.M. PRESENT DAY
Sixteen, furious at the world and absolutely no one's sweetheart- Sukuna was, to put it plainly, a bear waiting to be poked. The abandonment issues and the judgment he caught for the way he looked didn't help matters either.
That's exactly why your father never understood your obsession with the little freak. The boy was poor and- well. four eyes. four arms. your father shuddered just thinking about it. no daughter of a Dainagon would so much as glance at something like that, let alone lose sleep over it.
So, what does any loving and overprotective father do? He gets his men to discreetly execute the boy. obviously.
One cool night when the sun had long set and moon sat high and mighty- your father, an elegant noble man who loved you very dearly, picked up his pen and jotted instructions down on a paper.
He'd keep you safe. he always has, your pretty little head was too full of butterflies and fuji petals to know any better.
In two days, my daughter's birthday will be held. You, my most trusted soldiers, will go and capture Ryomen Sukuna. Do not return without success.
dispose of the body properly and quietly.
Spread believable rumors to justify the boy's disappearance.
destroy the shed in the meadow.
he read it over once. folded it with the precise unhurried movements of a man who had made his decision and was done deliberating. he stood, dusted his robes, and handed it to his head attendant with a single nod.
the attendant bowed and left.
your father stood in his office alone for a moment. looked at his desk. at the lamp that had burned low while he wrote. at the window where the spring morning was doing its cheerful unbothered thing outside.
then he straightened his collar and went to start his day.
the consultation had started at nine.
you were standing in the middle of your room in your under robes while Miu, the seamstress your father had been using since before you were born, circled you slowly with fabric swatches and the focused expression of a woman who took her work very seriously. she had been talking for the better part of an hour about silhouettes and seasonal colours and what was appropriate for a sixteen year old birthday celebration versus what was appropriate for the formal events that would follow, and you had been nodding at all the right moments while hearing approximately none of it.
the ache behind your ribs had been there since you woke up. not a new ache. a familiar one, the kind that had moved in sometime around last autumn and had been paying very consistent rent ever since. it sat there while Miu talked about sleeve lengths and it sat there while you looked at the fabric swatches and it sat there while you tried to remember the last time you had looked forward to something like this, a new robe, a celebration, the whole event of being dressed and admired and presented, and couldn't.
you used to love these. you remembered loving these. standing here while Miu talked and the colours were spread out and the whole thing felt like something exciting was coming. that version of you felt very far away this morning.
"the deep plum would complement your colouring beautifully." Miu was saying, holding a swatch up near your face. "or if you wanted something softer for the occasion, the blush—"
the door creaked.
you looked up.
Ichi stood in the doorway. he had that look on his face, the uncomfortable apologetic one he got when he knew he was somewhere that was going to be received badly and had come anyway because he didn't have a choice. Miu froze mid sentence. you looked at him with the particular expression you had developed over the past several months for his appearances, pleasant on the surface, pointed underneath.
"what a surprise." you said. "i wasn't aware this was a shared appointment."
Ichi opened his mouth. closed it. opened it again.
and then, for the first time in all the months of him being quietly decent and endlessly patient in rooms where he was not entirely welcome, something shifted in his face.
"your father requested i attend." he said. not apologetic this time. direct. clipped. the words of someone who had been holding something for a long time and had decided to put it down. "i didn't get a choice in any of this either." he said. "you're not the only one losing someone because our fathers think we are chess pieces."
the room was very quiet.
Miu had gone completely still, a swatch of blush fabric suspended in one hand, eyes moving between the two of you with the careful expression of a professional who had witnessed family drama before and knew better than to engage with it.
Ichi took a breath. pressed his lips together. composed himself back into the person he usually was, measured and pleasant, like he had opened a door and then thought better of it and closed it again. he sat down in the chair near the window without waiting to be invited and looked at Miu. "i apologise for interrupting." he said. "please continue."
Miu continued. less enthusiastically now.
you stood in the middle of the room and let her drape fabric against your shoulder and thought about what Ichi had just said. losing someone. he had said losing someone. which meant there was someone. which meant Ichi, who you had spent months resenting as a symbol of everything your father was doing to your life, was also a person with a life your fathers had been rearranging without consulting him. which meant he had been sitting at your dinner table all these months being decent and genuine and quietly patient while also carrying something you hadn't once thought to ask about.
you looked at him sideways.
he was looking out the window. his jaw was set. his hands were folded in his lap with the careful stillness of someone keeping themselves composed by choice.
you thought about all the things you had said in rooms with him. all the pointed pleasantries. all the times you had made it clear without saying it directly that his presence was an inconvenience. you had never been cruel. you had been too well raised for cruel. but you had not been kind either.
you were still thinking about this when the sound came from the corridor.
a wretching cough. then a pause. then your mother's voice, low and steady, saying your name through the door.
your mother was already walking away from the door when you came out. you followed her down the corridor to her room, the one that had started smelling permanently of the physician's medicines and the particular incense the attendants burned to cover it. she moved slowly today. not the slow of a bad day, the slow of someone who had something to say and was choosing the right moment for it.
she sat on the edge of her futon and patted the space beside her.
you sat.
she reached under the low table beside her and produced a box. lacquered wood, old, the kind of old that meant it had been somewhere for a long time. she set it on your lap and looked at you.
"your father." she said, "is a hypocrite. a stupid, handsome, strong willed hypocrite."
you giggled despite yourself. the giggle came out of nowhere and surprised you both.
your mother looked satisfied. she reached over and opened the box.
inside, packed carefully, were dried flowers. hundreds of them, small and aromatic, their colour faded to a soft brown gold but their scent still present, something warm and green underneath the dryness. you looked at them and then at your mother.
"do you know what these are?" she said.
"flowers." you said. "old ones."
your mother nodded. she scooped a handful up slowly, careful with them, and brought them to her face and breathed them in. the spring light was coming through the screen behind her and it caught her in that particular way it sometimes did, making her look less like someone who had physicians visiting three times a week and more like herself, the version of herself that had always seemed to take up more space than her body should allow.
"the first gift i ever got from a boy." she said.
you stared at her. "father?"
"your father." she confirmed. a small smile, private, not for you exactly, more like a thing she was remembering that you were being allowed to see. "my best friend was with his friend. we used to all go to the stream together. when those two would wander off on their own your father would carry me on his back and walk along the flower bushes at the edge of the water." she looked at the flowers in her palm. "i would pick the blossoms and set them in his hair before we moved on to the next bush. he never once told me to stop."
"mother." you said.
"hm."
"that is the most romantic thing i have ever heard in my entire life."
she laughed. a real one, the kind that came from somewhere light. and you laughed too and for a moment it was just the two of you on the futon being ridiculous about dried flowers and a boy who had let someone put blossoms in his hair because he was in love and didn't know what else to do about it.
and then the ache came back.
worse than usual. like the laughing had moved something and now the thing that had been sitting quietly had shifted and was pressing against places it hadn't reached before. you looked at the flowers in the box in your lap and felt it rising and couldn't stop it.
"why is he doing this to me." your voice came out smaller than you meant it to. "why can't he be like that. like he was then. you chose each other. nobody arranged you. nobody put you at a dinner table and made an announcement." you looked up at her. "i want a choice too. i just want a choice."
your mother looked at you.
then she opened her arms.
you folded into them before you finished deciding to, your face going into her shoulder, her arms coming around you, and you cried. the full kind. the kind that had your shoulders shaking and your breath going uneven and all the months of it coming out at once, the guards and the locked gate and the short visits and the distance at the dinner table and Ichi at the window saying you're not the only one and Ryomen on the wall saying it's going to be okay in a voice that was trying to believe it.
your mother held you and didn't tell you to stop and didn't say it was fine when it wasn't.
after a while, when the worst of it had passed and you were just sitting in the aftermath of it, she spoke.
"i am very sick." she said. simply. directly. the way she said things she had decided to stop softening. "sicker than we have been telling you. the treatments have been doing very little for a long time now."
you went still in her arms.
"two weeks ago the physician told us there is a cure." she said. "a real one. but it would require more money and more time than we have easily available. your father is working on it." a pause. "he is terrified. not just of losing me. of losing you too. he feels everything slipping and he is grabbing at things and not all of the things he is grabbing at are the right ones." she smoothed your hair back from your face, slow and gentle, the way she always had. "i have tried to talk to him. i keep trying. but he is deep in it right now and the fear is louder than the sense." she looked at you, direct and clear. "so if you want your freedom. if you want him to see you properly. then it is in your hands to make him."
you sat with all of it.
the sickness, worse than you knew, the physicians three times a week suddenly making a different kind of sense. the cure, existing, real, possible but not certain. your father grabbing at things, at you, at arrangements and guards and letters written in the middle of the night, trying to hold on to everything at once with hands that weren't big enough for all of it.
you thought about a man carrying a girl on his back along flower bushes at the edge of a stream. letting her put blossoms in his hair. becoming, somehow, the man who had sat in his office last night and written something down on a piece of paper with careful measured brushstrokes.
you thought about how much distance there was between those two people. how much fear it took to travel that far from yourself.
you looked at the dried flowers in the box.
"okay." you said quietly. "okay."
your mother looked at you.
"i'm going to figure it out." you said. you weren't sure exactly what that meant yet. but you said it the way you said things you needed to be true, with the particular conviction of someone who had decided to believe it until it was.
your mother looked at you for a long moment. then she did something she hadn't done in a while. she smiled. not the small private one from the flowers. the full one, the one that had always made rooms stand up straighter without knowing why.
"i know you will." she said. "you are mine after all."
you sat with her for a long time after that.
the spring morning continued outside, warm and bright and completely unbothered, the way spring mornings always are.
810 AD, Spring, 12:34 A.M.
kaze ni chiru, hana no yume...
he stopped dead.
stood completely frozen in the middle of the meadow with his arrow half drawn and his mouth still open from the last note like an absolute fool.
he had been singing. OUT LOUD. to nobody. to the trees. to the bird he was supposed to be hunting who was now staring at him from the base of the cedar with what felt like judgment.
he stood there for one long humiliating moment.
she had been humming that stupid song two weeks ago on the garden wall. just humming it softly to herself like she wasn't in the process of completely rewiring his brain without his knowledge or consent, and now apparently it lived in his head permanently, taking up space alongside everything else she had installed there without asking, coming out of his mouth in the middle of meadows when he was supposed to be concentrating.
he was going to have some very serious words with her about this.
he reset. found the bird again, small and brown and magnificently unaware of how close it was to becoming lunch. he steadied his breathing. drew the arrow back. fixed his eye right on it—
and then something felt wrong.
not a sound. nothing he could see or point to or explain. just a shift in the air, the cold certain kind that skipped his brain entirely and went straight to his gut and screamed at him to MOVE—
he dropped.
all four arms hit the ground at once and the spear buried itself into the cedar tree so hard the bark split and exploded outward and rained down across the back of his skull and somewhere above him the bird lost its entire mind and shot into the sky screaming.
Ryomen rolled. came up onto his feet with his dagger already drawn.
five of them.
good gear. really good gear. not the rattling cheap equipment of the town watch, this was proper armour, the expensive kind, the kind that said someone with serious money had given very specific instructions to very serious people. they spread out around him immediately, smooth and coordinated and utterly silent, the practiced formation of men who had worked together before and had been briefed on exactly what they were dealing with.
they looked at him.
he looked back.
sixteen years old. no training to speak of. and absolutely no intention of dying in his own meadow today.
he pulled his dagger and the first one came.
fast! really fast! Ryomen let him come, waited until the absolute last second, stepped inside the reach and used two arms to knock the blade wide and two to drive the man into the ground with everything he had. the impact rattled up through his bones and the man stayed down, which was good, because the second and third were already moving and they had clearly taken notes on what just happened to their friend, splitting wide to come from different angles at the same time—
and it worked.
he caught the second one across the jaw with an elbow, felt the crack of it land satisfyingly, but the third came through his guard completely and the blade caught him across the ribs and the burn was immediate and vicious and mean and he hissed through his teeth and spun away and caught a fist across his cheekbone from the fourth man that he did not see coming at all and the world went white and sideways and loud for one very bad second.
he hit the ground.
hard.
the grass rushed up and he tasted copper and everything spun and for one genuinely horrible moment his body was asking him very sincerely if maybe they should just stay down here for a bit. and then the fifth man was coming and Ryomen shoved himself up off the ground through what could only be described as pure unadulterated spite and got his feet under him and kept going.
it was not clean. there was nothing impressive or controlled about any of it. it was loud and desperate and ugly, grunting and scrambling and hitting the ground twice more and getting up twice more because the alternative was considerably worse than the pain of getting up. his side was bleeding properly now, soaking warm and dark through his robe. his shoulder had been wrenched in a direction it was never designed to go and was filing a formal complaint about it. there was a ringing in his left ear from the fist to his cheek that suggested it had done more damage than just sting.
but he was Ryomen Sukuna.
and Ryomen Sukuna had been surviving things that should have finished him since he was six years old standing next to a blind old man watching his parents' cart disappear down a road. he had four arms and sixteen years of stubborn that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with never once having had the option of giving up.
when it was finally, messily, exhaustingly over, he put his back against the cedar tree and let himself slide all the way down it until he was sitting in the grass.
he sat there and breathed. great heaving lungfuls of spring air that tasted like blood and dirt and the very specific relief of still being alive to complain about it.
his side throbbed. his shoulder screamed. his cheek was already swelling like it had opinions about what had just happened and wanted to make them known. his hands were shaking slightly which he noticed and filed away to think about never.
he looked at his meadow.
his shed with the crooked door and the twice patched roof. his ginkgo tree. the fire pit he had built himself. the flattened patch of grass in front of it where someone had been sitting across from him every tuesday for four years without ever once being asked to.
someone had sent those men here.
someone with money and specific instructions and the particular kind of desperation that makes people do things that can't be taken back.
and she didn't know.
he was certain she didn't know because if she knew she would have come running in her house robes in the dark before any of this happened, doing something completely unhinged that would have made everything infinitely more complicated, and he would have been furious about it. but she wasn't here. which meant she was somewhere in that house right now, totally unaware, probably talking someone's ear off about something completely unrelated to the fact that her world had just changed this morning without her permission.
he needed to get to her.
a thought arrived. warm and wanting, the kind he didn't usually let get far enough to look at properly.
they could go. just leave. pack nothing, or nearly nothing, and disappear somewhere no one knew either of their names. he knew how to survive on very little. had been doing exactly that his whole life. and she was so much tougher than anyone who looked at her would ever guess. he had four years of very specific evidence to support that.
he sat with it.
then he thought about her mother. the slow mornings and the physicians with their careful faces coming and going. he thought about Ume showing up in his meadow with dumplings and the most unbothered gaze he had ever seen. he thought about food left quietly at school gates. he thought about her, specifically, in rooms full of people who loved her, laughing at something her parents had said, sitting with her mother on slow afternoons just being there because being there was the whole thing.
and then he thought about the shelter he would build. badly. because he had never built one in his life. and the winter that would follow. and her, who had been raised in a house with actual physicians and seamstresses and a father who imported things from distant villages, trying to eat whatever scraggly thing he managed to catch.
he looked at where the bird had been.
still there. same spot. same patch of ground. pecking away completely unbothered by the entire last twenty minutes as if none of it had happened.
he wanted to give her better than a badly built shelter and a hungry winter. he wanted to give her the best thing he could figure out how to build. he didn't know exactly what that looked like yet or how long it was going to take him. but he knew he wanted to try and he knew he couldn't do it from somewhere else.
he pressed one hand against his bleeding side. picked his dagger up off the grass with another. looked at the bird.
reset his stance. drew the arrow back.
i wonder if she likes bird.
the thought arrived completely soft and unguarded, slipping through every single one of his filters without asking, and he let it sit there for exactly one warm second.
then he let the arrow
your father was directing the servants on the birthday decorations.
he moved through the main hall with the focused energy of a man who had found a task and was going to do it correctly, pointing and adjusting and redirecting, a lantern two feet to the left, a knot retied, a table repositioned three inches. the servants moved around him efficiently and you sat on the step at the edge of the hall and watched him and tried to get inside his head.
what was he thinking right now? what was his next move? what would it actually take to make him see you, not the version of you he had constructed and arranged and decided on, but the actual you, the one sitting on this step watching him and trying to figure out how to reach him?
you had been trying to figure that out for two years and you were running out of time.
one of the servants caught the edge of a hanging decoration on his sleeve while climbing down from a stool and the whole thing came down on top of him in an enormous cascade of fabric and a sound like a small indoor disaster. the man stood in the middle of the wreckage looking mortified and your father—
your father clapped both hands over his mouth.
his whole face changed! the Dainagon face, the careful controlled composed one he wore like a second skin, cracked completely open, and underneath it was something younger, his shoulders shaking with the effort of not laughing, eyes bright and wet with it, the laugh coming through anyway muffled and helpless and completely real. he waved at the poor man frantically to say it was fine, it was fine, he wasn't in trouble, while clearly barely holding himself together.
you stared at him.
you thought about dried flowers in a lacquered box. a young man carrying a girl on his back along the edge of a stream, letting her put blossoms in his hair because he was young and in love and didn't know what else to do about it. your mother's voice. he is scared. he is getting desperate. if you want your freedom it is in your hands to make him see.
he had to meet Ryomen.
that was it! that was the whole plan! simple, clean, obvious. not through guards and gates and letters written at night. actually meet him. look at him. talk to him. see the real one, the one who made origami rabbits out of pink paper and noticed when you stopped eating halfway through your snacks and came to garden walls in the evening because the meadow was too quiet.
the only hard parts were finding a way to get to Ryomen, convincing Ryomen to agree, and then getting both of them in a room together without anyone dying.
so basically. everything was the hard part.
you looked at the guards. both of them had been sent on errands over an hour ago and hadn't come back.
you looked at your father, still occupied and cheerfully embarrassed about it, helping the servant gather the fallen decoration with a composure he was clearly struggling to maintain.
you stood up from the step very quietly.
you walked out of the hall.
and then once you were outside and around the corner and out of anyone's sightline you ran.
the meadow was warm and bright and smelled like spring and Ryomen was crouched by the fire pit with two rocks in his hands, and on a rack above the unlit wood was a plucked bird that you were making a very active and sincere effort not to look at directly.
he looked up when he heard you coming, slightly out of breath from running across town in your house robes, and you dropped down in front of him and looked at him. something was different about the way he was sitting but you couldn't quite— actually never mind, you had something important to say.
"Pinky." you said. "i need your help."
he looked at you. blinked once. went back to the rocks. "okay." he said. "what do i need to do."
you paused. "that's it?? you're not even going to ask what kind of help first?"
"i'll ask while you talk." sparks off the rocks. small and determined. "what do i need to do."
"i want you to meet my father." you said.
the rocks stopped.
he looked up at you very slowly with the expression of someone checking if they had heard correctly and hoping they hadn't.
"your father." he said.
"yes." you said. "i know, i know how it sounds, just listen. he doesn't know you! he knows the version of you the town invented and the version he built on top of that out of fear and rumors and none of it is actually you. but if he just met you, actually met you, talked to you, i really genuinely believe—"
"how." he said. "how would i even get close enough to the man to have a conversation? your house has guards and a gate and a lock your father specifically paid money for." he tilted his head at you. "did you think this through, woman."
"i think through things constantly." you said.
"how long this time." he said.
you paused. "twenty minutes."
he stared at you.
"it's a really solid twenty minutes!" you said. "listen. the guards are both gone right now, my father is busy with the decorations, if we move fast—"
"sneak me in." he said slowly. "into your father's house. the man who has spent two years trying to keep me away from you."
"he just needs to see that he's wrong about you." you said. "and the only way that happens is if he actually sees you. not the ghost boy. not whatever the town has been saying. you. and i know it's a risk, i know it's probably the most terrifying thing i've ever asked—"
"i'm not terrified." he said immediately.
"i know." you said. "wrong word. i know. what i'm saying is i know it's a lot to ask. but Ryomen." you looked at him steadily. "if we don't do something nothing changes. ever. the guards don't go away. the distance between me and my father doesn't go away. Ichi doesn't go away. nothing changes unless we change it." you paused. "and i think you're the thing that could change it. i think if he met you he would understand. i think he's not a bad man, he's just a scared one, and scared men can still change their minds if you give them something real to look at."
Ryomen looked at you for a long moment. the sparks from the rocks had landed in the wood and the fire was catching now, small and orange and spreading carefully through the kindling, crackling to life in the spring morning air.
you scooted back from the heat instinctively and looked up at him.
"and if he doesn't." Ryomen said. "change his mind."
"then we tried." you said. "and we figure out what's next from there. but i need to try. i can't keep doing this." you said it quietly. all the performance gone out of it. just the truth. "i can't keep living in two halves. half here and half there and never fully in either place. i'm so tired Ryomen."
he held your gaze.
then he looked at the fire.
"fine." he said.
"really?!" you said.
"you said trust you." flat. simple. completely certain. "i trust you." he set the rocks down. "give me a minute." he stood. "wait here."
he turned and jogged toward the tree line and disappeared between the cedars.
you sat by the fire and waited.
you were trying very hard not to look at the bird on the rack.
(you stared at it the entire time)
after a while his footsteps came back through the grass and you looked up and—
he was holding flowers.
a bouquet. or the closest approximation of a bouquet that could be assembled by someone who had been in a significant hurry and had also never made a bouquet before in their entire life. the stems were all wildly different lengths. several of the outer leaves were bruised and bent from being grabbed too fast. one of them was facing the completely wrong direction and didn't seem to know it.
but the flowers themselves were something else entirely! a lily shape, gorgeous and unusual, blue at the outer petals fading to a soft pink at the centre, a silky almost luminous texture that caught the spring light and held it. they were extraordinary. they looked like something out of a dream or a painting or a story someone was trying to tell you.
you stared at them.
"for your mother." he said, not quite meeting your eyes. "i was out this morning and i saw them near the tree line and something just— i don't know. they caught my eye and they made me think of her for some reason." he held them out with the slightly awkward energy of someone who had decided to do something and was following through on it regardless of how it felt to stand there doing it. "i thought she might like them."
you looked at the flowers.
then at him.
then at the flowers again.
the tears came without any warning whatsoever.
"Ryomen." your voice was completely wrecked.
"don't." he said immediately.
"i'm not doing anything—"
"your face is doing something." he said. "stop."
you launched yourself at him.
arms around his waist, face directly into his chest, the flowers getting significantly squashed in the collision and neither of you addressing that. he made a sound that was not entirely prepared for the impact and then all four of his arms came around you and he held on properly, all of him, and you stood in the spring meadow in the warm morning air and just breathed.
"thank you." you said into his chest. muffled. genuine. completely meant. "for the flowers. and for trusting me. and for just. being you. specifically you."
he said nothing. but his arms got tighter.
after a moment he said "we should go before someone notices you're gone."
"yes." you agreed, and neither of you moved for another few seconds.
then you did.
the outer gate Ryomen opened in approximately three seconds using nothing but his hands and what appeared to be an insultingly casual assessment of the lock, and you decided firmly that you were not going to ask about that.
getting over the inner garden wall was considerably less elegant. he made a step with two of his hands and boosted you up and you discovered that the top of the wall was significantly less comfortable than it had always looked from below.
"my guards have been gone all morning." you said, hauling yourself over with what little dignity remained. "both of them at the same time. that never happens. it's strange."
Ryomen made a sound below you. not quite a response. not quite not a response either.
"do you think my father sent them somewhere specific?" you said.
"probably." he said. and then he was up and over the wall in one single fluid motion that made your entire effort look considerably worse than it had already looked.
you grabbed the old blanket from the engawa, the one that had lived there through every season for as long as you could remember, and wrapped it around his shoulders and pulled it up as far as it would go. he stood there and submitted to this process with the expression of someone enduring something they have agreed to and are committed to seeing through.
"this is humiliating." he said.
"you look like a very tall servant!" you said encouragingly.
"i look like a person inside a blanket." he said.
"walk like you belong here." you said. "confident. purposeful."
"i am always confident and purposeful." he said.
"then this should be completely easy." you said. "come on. eyes forward. don't make eye contact with anyone."
you moved through the garden, into the back corridor, past the kitchen where someone was making noise and not looking, around the corner, heading toward the main hall—
"dear."
you stopped so fast you almost fell over.
your mother was standing in the corridor in her day robes with a cup of something warm between her hands, looking at you with the mild curious expression of someone who has not yet decided what they are looking at. her eyes moved from your face to the large blanket wrapped shape standing directly beside you.
"who is that." she said. "you know you're not supposed to hug the servants."
from somewhere inside the blanket came a sound. a short, choked, completely involuntary sound. the sound of someone finding something extremely funny against their absolute will.
you elbowed him as hard as you could.
your mother stepped forward and grabbed the blanket and pulled it off. "you are not allowed in our qua—"
she stumbled backwards.
her hand flew up to cover her mouth as she found herself face to face with four scarlet eyes, dark lashed and vivid, set in a face framed by pink hair that was doing its usual gravity defying thing, four arms now visible in the spring light, and the particular weight in the air around him that you had learned to recognise when you were twelve years old in a shed.
"is that." she said. her voice had gone very strange. "is that an angel?!" her hand pressed harder over her mouth. "oh my gosh. am i. this cannot be— i thought i had so much more time—"
"mother." you said, extremely confused on multiple levels, firstly how did she not sense his energy, secondly why is she calling him an angle, weird.... "how are you not— this is Ryomen. Ryomen Sukuna. mother. this is him."
your mother blinked. stared. took one long slow assessing look at the boy in front of her from top to bottom and back again with the thoroughness of a woman who had been reading rooms her entire life. then she let out a very slow breath. "phew." she said quietly. barely audible. "so it's not my time yet."
she collected herself with impressive speed. the composure came back like a curtain being drawn. she straightened up and took one step forward and then another and looked at Ryomen the way she looked at things she was making up her mind about. which was completely and without apology.
"so." she said. "this is the boy."
Ryomen cleared his throat. he reached behind his back and produced the flowers, slightly rearranged from the earlier collision but still luminous and extraordinary, and held them out toward her with a bow that was a little shaky and a lot genuine. "it is a pleasure to meet you ma'am." he said carefully. "these are for you."
your mother's eyes dropped to the flowers.
they went very wide.
something moved across her face. deep and sudden and old, the kind of recognition that lives in the body before the mind catches up to it. she reached out slowly and ran her finger over the pettle and released a shaky exhale, her lips parted and she lifted her eyes back to Ryomen's face and opened her mouth to say something—
"YOU BROUGHT THAT DEMON INTO MY HOUSE! NEAR MY WIFE?"
the voice came from the end of the corridor like a thunderclap and everyone in the hallway went completely still.
you moved first. "father—"
but he was already coming, long fast strides, the controlled fury of a man who had reached the absolute limit of his patience, and before you could get yourself between them his hand was on Ryomen's shoulder and he was wrenching him around.
"Sanetomo." your mother's voice came out sharp and clear and carrying every ounce of the authority she had been deploying her entire life. "stop. look at what he is holding. look at what he brought for me." she held the flowers up between all of them. "let go of that boy. and thank him."
your father's grip didn't release. but it stopped tightening.
his eyes went to the flowers.
the fury on his face did something complicated. shifted. moved sideways to make room for something else. confusion first, sharp and genuine. then something underneath the confusion that was harder to name. his eyes moved from the flowers to Ryomen's face and back to the flowers and the grip on Ryomen's shoulder loosened without him seeming to make the decision to loosen it.
"you." he said. all the thunder had gone out of his voice completely. "where did you get those."
"the meadow." Ryomen said. steady. unhurried. "near the tree line. i found them this morning. i don't know why but they made me think of her." a brief glance at your mother. "i thought she would want them."
your father stared at the flowers for a long moment.
then he grabbed Ryomen by the shoulder again. differently this time. and started moving.
"FATHER!" you stepped forward fast.
your mother's arm came around you. gentle. completely immovable.
"mother let me—"
"no." she said softly.
"he's going to—"
"no." softer still. and she pulled you back against her chest.
you watched your father march Ryomen down the corridor and around the corner and out of sight. you stood in your mother's arms with your heart doing something absolutely terrible in your chest and your eyes already burning.
"mother." your voice cracked right down the middle.
"i know." she said. her arms tightened around you. "i know."
the room smelled sterile and clean the way rooms smell when their purpose is serious. a mahogany desk dominated the centre of it, tools and instruments arranged on shelves with the precision of someone who valued order above most things, a narrow bed pushed against the far wall, a lamp burning in the corner despite the morning light coming through the screen.
an old man sat behind the desk who looked up when the door opened and went completely still when he saw what came through it.
your father pushed Ryomen into the chair across from the desk and looked at the physician. "is that the—" the old man started, eyes already going wide.
"yes." your father said. then to Ryomen, "hold up your hands,boy. show him what you have ."
Ryomen held up his hands. all four of them.
the physician stood so fast his chair scraped back and came around the desk and leaned in close, eyes moving over Ryomen's hands with the intense scrutiny of a man who did not believe what he was seeing
your father let him look for exactly long enough.
then he stepped forward and brought his fist down on the desk so hard everything on it jumped.
the old man stumbled back against the wall.
"you told me." your father's voice was dangerously controlled. the kind of controlled that meant the control was working very hard. "that these flowers were only found near Mount Asama. you told me local sourcing was completely impossible. you told me that was the reason for the cost." he took one step closer and the physician pressed himself further back against the shelves. "you lied to me. you took my money. you sat in this room and you told me there was nothing closer while my wife got sicker and your pockets got heavier." his jaw was so tight it looked painful. "i trusted you with her life."
the physician was stammering. actually trembling, words dissolving before they formed into anything coherent, hands up in a gesture that was half explanation and half protection. hid eyes darted to the bouqet and the boy holding it and a cold shiver ran down his old man spine.
Ryomen was smiling.
not a small smile. not a polite one. a full wide open ear to ear smile, the kind you had genuinely never seen on his face in four years of knowing him, watching your father take the physician apart with the focused satisfaction of someone watching something be done exactly right.
"there are more patches." he said, into the middle of everything, completely calm. "in the meadow. along the whole tree line. i walked past them this morning when i got firewood. there are more than you could possibly need."
the room went absolutely silent.
your father turned from the physician and looked at Ryomen.
Ryomen looked back at him.
the physician made a very small sound in the corner.
your father turned back to him.
what followed did not need to be described in detail except to say that it was not brief and it was not quiet and when it was finally over, when the gurgled whimpers and gasps for air ceased, your father straightened up, picked up a cloth from the desk, and began wiping his knuckles with measured unhurried calm.
he looked over at Ryomen.
Ryomen was studying the physician's swollen face with the focused interest of a scholar examining something genuinely fascinating. then his eyes moved, all four of them, slowly, deliberately, up to your father's face.
"will you do that to me now?" he said. quiet. direct. not afraid. just asking.
the room held its breath.
something happened to Sanetomo's face.
it moved through him slowly, whatever it was, arriving in waves. the fury had burned itself completely out and what was underneath it was something older and more tired and more human than anything he had shown in this room today. he looked at the boy in the chair. this boy. pink hair and four eyes and arms built from years of surviving alone and a face that was so young it knocked something loose in his chest.
he thought about what he would do if someone had done this to his daughter. grabbed her. dragged her. raised a fist in front of her eyes. what he would do to that person.
he knew exactly what he would do.
his eyes were wet. that surprised him. he honestly couldn't remember the last time.
his body moved before his mind gave it permission. down, slowly, until his knees hit the floor in front of the chair. in front of this boy. he reached over and took the flowers gently from Ryomen's hands and set them on the desk. then he took those hands, the two closest to him, both of them, into his own.
Ryomen went completely still.
the only person who had ever held his hands was her. this was different in every way and also, unexpectedly, warm. and the hands holding his were smooth and soft in the way that hands are when they have been cared for, and they smelled like agarwood, rich and grounding. he sat with it and let it be what it was.
"i hate you." your father said. his voice was low and unsteady in a way it almost never allowed itself to be. "i want you to know that. i have hated the idea of you for two years. every single time i thought about you i felt something i am not proud of at all." he looked at their joined hands. "but i hate myself more right now. i sent men to that meadow. i wrote it down and sealed it and i told myself i was protecting her and somewhere underneath all of that i knew. i knew it wasn't only that."
he stopped. breathed.
"she was my baby girl." he said. "she used to chase fireflies for an entire hour and come running to find me just to show me before she let them go. i don't know when she stopped coming to find me. i think i stopped being someone she could come to. and i watched it happen and i didn't know how to stop it and i made it worse instead."
a drop of water landed on their joined hands.
Ryomen looked up.
he had never seen a man cry before. not like this. not a man like this, a man whose presence filled every room he entered, sitting on the floor in front of him with wet eyes and a face that had come completely undone.
"she doesn't hate you." Ryomen said.
your father looked at him.
"she talks about you." Ryomen said. "even when she's angry at you she talks about you. she told me about the fireflies." a pause. "she still lets ladybugs crawl up her fingers. i've seen her do it."
your father closed his eyes for a moment. just a moment.
"i don't think it will go back to the way it was." he said quietly. "and i feel this ache. every time i breathe it feels like something tearing slowly. and all i can think is i'm sorry. i know it isn't enough. this morning i wanted you dead and now i'm on my knees saying sorry like a child and i don't know what to do with that."
Ryomen sat with this for a moment.
then he slipped one hand free.
he reached over, slowly, and patted your father's shoulder. once. twice. the most genuinely awkward pat in the history of human comfort, the pat of someone who had never done this before in their life and was doing it anyway because it seemed like the right thing and he had decided to do the right thing.
your father looked at him.
Ryomen looked at the floor. "you look like her." he said. "your eyebrows. the shape of your eyes. the curve of your cheekbones." a pause. "you also talk a lot."
your father made a sound. startled and wet and completely undignified. an actual laugh.
"her mother says the exact same thing." he said, wiping his face with the back of his hand. "she says we have a talent for going on and on about things." a small pause. "i think being able to put words to what you feel is one of the greatest gifts a person can have. not everyone can."
Ryomen looked up at that.
something moved carefully across his face. wanting and cautious and trying not to show either.
"could you teach me." he said.
your father blinked. "i beg your pardon?"
"could you teach me." Ryomen said again, steadier this time. and then, before the silence could stretch long enough for the answer to become no, "why did you react like that about the flowers? your wife also looked shocked when i gave them to her. i thought flowers were just gifts."
your father looked at him for a moment. something that was almost amusement moved through the exhaustion on his face. "you walked into my house." he said carefully. "and gave my wife flowers."
"yes." Ryomen said.
"boy." your father said. "are you trying to court my wife?"
Ryomen stared at him with all four eyes.
"i'm joking." your father said. and then, quieter, the amusement fading into something more serious and more tired, "those flowers. i used to find them for her when we were very young. before everything. before this house and this title and all of it." he looked at the bouquet on the desk. "i have been trying to find them for two years. the physician told me they could only be sourced from very far away and that the cost was the cost because of how rare they were locally." he looked at Ryomen steadily. "my wife is very sick. there is a cure. but the ingredient has been, apparently, impossible to get hold of nearby." his jaw tightened slightly. "so i have been working myself into the ground trying to pay for something that has been growing in my meadow this whole time. and the man sitting in that corner has known it."
Ryomen was quiet.
"every late night." your father said. "every argument. every decision i have made this past year and the year before that that i am not proud of. i made all of it from a place of absolute terror. i felt like i was losing everything at the same time and i was grabbing at whatever i could reach and not thinking clearly about what i was reaching for or whether i had any right to it." he paused. "i grabbed at her. i put her in a smaller and smaller space because i thought if i could just control the variables i could keep her safe. and all i did was push her further away and make everything worse and i could see it happening and i could not stop myself."
he looked at the flowers on the desk for a long moment.
"and then you walked in." he said quietly. "with those. from my meadow. all this time."
the room was very still.
Ryomen looked at the floor. then at the flowers. then back at your father.
"could you still teach me." he said. "even after all of it."
your father looked at him for a long moment. at this boy. this sixteen year old boy with calloused hands and pink hair and four eyes that were looking at him with something in them that was not fear and not anger and not any of the things he had expected.
"yes." he said. like the word had surprised him by coming out. "i think i could."
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ
the knock at the door was soft but urgent.
"come in." Sanetomo said, not looking up from where he was still sitting on the floor, which in retrospect was probably something he should have done something about before saying that.
the attendant who came through the door took one look at the state of the room, at the physician in the corner and the boy with four eyes sitting in the chair and the Dainagon on the floor, and to his enormous credit did not say a single word about any of it. he bowed, deeply, and when he straightened his face was the colour of old ash.
"my lord." he said. "i apologise for the interruption. it's the meadow. the one at the edge of town." he paused. "it's on fire, my lord. the council is convening. they're asking for you."
Sanetomo's head came up.
"what?!" he was on his feet before the word finished leaving his mouth. "the meadow— how, when did—" and then he stopped.
his eyes found the flowers on the desk.
he stared at them for exactly one second.
and then he ran.
not walked. not moved briskly. ran, out of the room, past the attendant, down the corridor, his robes flying behind him, the sound of his footsteps disappearing fast down the hall and out toward the garden.
Ryomen sat in the chair and watched him go.
then something arrived in his chest like a stone dropping into still water.
the fire.
he had left the fire going. small and careful and orange in the spring morning air, crackling under the rack with the bird on it, completely unattended. and the spring grass around the meadow was dry from the last weeks of warm weather and the wind had been coming in from the east all morning and he had been so focused on getting to her that he hadn't—
oh no.
oh no no no.
he was out of the chair and through the door before the thought finished forming.
you had been sitting against the corridor wall outside the physician's office for what felt like a very long time, your knees pulled up, your face doing the things your face did after it had been crying for a while and hadn't quite stopped yet, when the door burst open and Ryomen came through it at speed.
you scrambled to your feet. "Ryo! you're alive, oh thank—"
"the meadow's on fire." he said, already moving past you.
you stared at his back. "what?!"
but he was already at the end of the corridor, already at the garden, already gone.
you stood there for exactly one second watching the space where he had been.
then you watched him clear the garden wall in one single motion that was almost too fast to follow properly, and then he was over and gone and the wall was just a wall again and the spring evening was just a spring evening and somewhere across town a meadow was burning.
the smoke reached him before the fire did.
thick and grey and wrong, rising above the rooftops in a column that he could see from three streets away, and he ran faster, pushing through the early evening foot traffic that was starting to fill the roads, past stalls and carts and people stopping to point and stare, past the shrine gate and down toward the edge of town where the houses got sparse and the road gave way to the path through the grass—
or what had been grass.
he stopped at the edge of the meadow and looked at it.
a good chunk of it was already gone. the fire had moved fast with the wind behind it, eating through the dry spring grass in sweeping orange lines, and the smoke was thick and low and the air tasted like ash and heat. there was already a crowd gathered at the edge, townspeople standing and watching with their hands over their mouths, and pushing through the middle of them, shoving past people who were twice his size without appearing to notice or care, was Sanetomo.
Ryomen watched him push through the crowd.
for a nobleman. for a Dainagon. for a man whose entire existence was built around composure and position and the careful maintenance of dignity in all circumstances. he was shoving through a crowd of commoners in the middle of a burning meadow and he was not stopping for anyone.
he didn't hesitate at the edge of the fire either.
he went straight in through the burning bushes, smoke swirling around him, and dropped to his knees in a patch of grass near the tree line and started pulling.
Ryomen watched him for a moment.
then he went in after him.
the heat was significant up close, the kind that pressed against your face and made your eyes water immediately. the grass crackled and hissed around them and somewhere to the left a branch came down in a shower of sparks. Sanetomo was pulling flowers out of the ground with both hands, frantic, thorough, getting the roots and the dirt with them, his chest heaving from the smoke and the effort, face red, eyes streaming.
"you need to get out of here!" Ryomen called over the noise of the fire. "the trees are going to come down soon!"
Sanetomo did not look up.
continued pulling.
Ryomen looked at the treeline. at the shed, which was fully alight now, the old wood going fast and bright, the flames licking up the crooked door and the twice patched roof and all of it. the ginkgo tree had caught too, the one he had leaned against for four years while someone sat in the flattened grass in front of it and talked and talked and talked. it was burning orange and gold against the blue spring sky and the sight of it did something strange in his chest that he stood with for a moment.
why wasn't he sad?
he waited for it. the devastation. the desperate need to run in and save it the way Sanetomo was trying to save the flowers. this had been his home for ten years. every memory he had of not being completely alone had happened in this meadow. the old man had lived and died here. she had sat in that grass every tuesday and Thursday for four years and left rice cakes between them and refused to leave no matter how many times he hadn't asked her to stay.
he watched the shed burn.
and felt something that was closer to relief than grief. like watching something that had been heavy for a very long time finally being put down.
would the old man enjoy watching it go? he thought he might. the old man had been practical about most things.
a sharp cracking sound came from somewhere above and to the left.
"we have to go!" Ryomen grabbed Sanetomo's arm with two hands. "now! come on—"
Sanetomo fought him. actually fought him, trying to pull his arm back, still reaching for the flowers with his free hand, and Ryomen had to use two more arms to get a proper grip and haul, and then the cracking sound came again, louder and final, and the tree trunk came down directly in front of them in an explosion of sparks and burning wood and Sanetomo lurched forward toward it—
Ryomen pulled him back hard.
they stumbled away from the heat together and Sanetomo immediately tried to go back. tried to push Ryomen's arms off him, tried to get back to the flowers on the other side of the fallen trunk, scrabbling and desperate in a way that had completely abandoned all composure.
"there are more!" Ryomen said, pulling him back again. "i promise you there are more patches, i'll find them, but you are going to get yourself killed and they still need you! she still needs you! come on!"
Sanetomo stopped fighting.
not all at once. in stages, like something going out. the frantic energy leaving him slowly until he was just a man being hauled through a burning meadow, still clutching a handful of damaged flowers in one hand, coughing hard into the smoke. Ryomen got him moving and kept him moving, away from the fire and toward the tree line where the air was cleaner, and Sanetomo let himself be moved, and somewhere in the noise of the burning Ryomen heard him crying. not quietly. the kind that comes from somewhere deep and has nothing left to hide.
great. two of them now.
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ
you came running across the meadow at a speed rivaling Usain Bolts.
you saw the smoke first. then the fire. then the crowd at the edge of it. then, through the crowd, two figures coming out of the burning grass toward the tree line, one of them being hauled by four arms and stumbling and not walking straight, and the other one—
"FATHER!" you pushed through the crowd without caring who you were pushing. "RYO!"
you crashed down onto the grass next to your father before you'd finished deciding to, both arms around him, face into his shoulder. he was coughing and his robes were singed at the edges and his face was streaked with smoke and he was still holding, somehow, a handful of flowers in one hand that were damaged but intact.
you held on and cried and he held on back and you could feel him shaking slightly.
"mother told me." you said into his shoulder. "she told me everything. daddy i'm sorry. i should have known. i should have been there to help more. there has to be more of those flowers, Ryo said there are more patches, we can—"
your father's hand came up and smoothed your hair back. slow and careful, the way he had since you were three years old.
"i have so much to say to you." he said. his voice was wrecked and quiet and more honest than you had heard it in two years. "so much to apologise for. and some of it i can never make up for and i know that." a pause. just breathing. "you are my whole heart. and your mother is my very soul. my baby. my little girl." another pause. "i should have never doubted your ability. never. and this boy—" he stopped. "he saved my life today. in more ways than either of us know yet."
you pulled back and looked at him. then you looked at Ryomen.
who turned and walked away into the dark of the tree line without a word.
you watched him go. the smoke and the dark swallowing him up until he was gone. you didn't call after him. somehow you knew not to.
"his name is Ryomen." you said quietly, still watching the tree line. "Ryomen Sukuna." a pause. "i knew if you met him, you'd love him like i do."
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ
the forest was dark and quiet away from the fire.
he moved through it by instinct more than sight, the smoke thinner here, the air cleaner, his lungs grateful for it. behind him the orange glow of the burning meadow flickered between the trunks and the cracking of it carried through the trees but it was distant now, manageable.
he slowed.
stopped.
stood still in the dark forest and let something move through him that he didn't have a name for yet. the shed was gone. the ginkgo tree was gone. ten years of the only home he had ever had, burning down to nothing behind him while a man he had met this morning wept over it in the grass.
her father. who had wanted him dead at breakfast. who had sat on the floor of a physician's office and held his hands and cried and said i hate you and i hate myself more in the same breath. who had run into a burning meadow for flowers because the woman he loved was dying and he would burn with everything else before he let that happen.
Ryomen stood in the dark forest and thought about that.
then something pulled.
not a sound. not a sight. just that feeling, the same one from this morning when he had spotted the flowers by the tree line before his brain had finished telling him to look, like a compass needle finding north and the rest of him just following.
he moved toward it.
there. blue in the dark, catching what little light came through the canopy, a whole patch of them growing undisturbed between the roots of two old cedars, petals like silk, blue fading to pink at the centre.
he knelt down.
pulled them out carefully this time. roots and dirt and everything, the way you pull something you intend to keep. one by one, all four hands working, filling up with them until he couldn't hold any more.
i saved someone...curses dont save people
the thought arrived quietly and he sat with it in the dark for a moment.
then he got up and ran back.
Sanetomo was sitting up by the time Ryomen came back through the tree line, the coughing better, some composure returning in patches, the fire at the edge of the meadow still going but slower now, running out of things to eat. you were beside him, and when Ryomen dropped down and spread the flowers out between all of them you made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob and it was the best sound he had heard all day.
the fire crept closer by degrees and eventually the three of you got up and moved, back through the thinning crowd, back through the streets of the town in the dimming golden light light, smoke still rising behind you, and somewhere on the way back through the market district Ryomen stopped at an unattended cart and took a basket off it.
"Ryo!" you said immediately.
"if they didn't want their things taken they shouldn't leave their cart unattended." he said, already setting the flowers down into the basket one by one with more care than was strictly necessary for someone who was simultaneously justifying theft.
your father made a sound. tired and cracked and genuine. a laugh.
he put his hand on your shoulder. then he looked at both of you, his daughter and the boy with the pink hair and the stolen basket with flowers inside, standing in the middle of a market street in the spring evening with smoke still in their hair and absolutely nowhere else to be.
"come on then, kiddos." he said. "let's go home."
ugh they are literally my babies.
can you keep a secret? i wasnt gonna tell, but like oh what the heck, the original ending was the father dying and then like reader is devastated obvi and she cant bare the very thought of Sukuna and that's when he gets all evil and there was this whole long part where hes a yearner and searching for her and he burns the villages he doesnt find her in and then one day he goes to sit under a sukura tree after destroying lives and what not and he sees a tomb stone. readers name is on it. buried under a sukura tree and he just knows its you. and hes falling to his knees when he notices a tomb stone next to yours with Ichi's name on it. and you can put two and two together. but i thought let me be happy and kind so here we are. but i do feel that it was the right choice cause i was crying just thinking about writing all that
NOTE: The Anthony Bridgerton and Kate Sharma dynamic has taken its hold on me and I’m afraid it’s never going to let go 😟 I wrote this in like a daze, theirs definitely parts that make no sense lol
The harbor of King’s Landing had reeked completely of salt and tar and heat.
You hated it at once.
Ships strained against their anchors as the waves slapped lazily against their painted hulls. Dockhands called back and forth across the pier in their crude Westerosi accents, their words harsh and alien.
Tyrosh had been a place of color: bright walls, perfumed markets, musicians playing in the streets.
King’s Landing was heavier in comparison.
Next to you, your older sister adjusted the silver clasp on her cloak, her chin held high with pride.
“Remember,” Keira whispered without looking at you, “we are guests of the royal court now. Do try not to look as if you'd rather leap back onto the ship.”
“I might,” you muttered.
Keira gave you a quick look.
“You will behave sister.”
You let out a sigh.
“Yes, sister.”
Behind you, your father was talking to the officials waiting at the docks. They wore cloaks with the three heads of the dragon of House Targaryen emblazoned on their fabric.
All of this, weeks at sea, the stifling formality—had been leading up to something incredibly important.
Keira’s betrothal to the young heir, prince Valarr Targaryen.
You looked over at the Red Keep rising above the city. This prince.
You knew little about him. Only whispers from merchants and envoys, dark chestnut hair, inherited from his dornish blood. The Targaryen shone through the silver streak in his hair, one eye of sapphire blue and the other of brown, he was the eldest son of the king’s heir.
A future king he’d be, Keira was clearly thrilled with the arrangement.
You were curious is all.
—
The Red Keep was far grander up close.
Polished marble floors sparkled like water under candlelight, and servants moved silently through the halls like ghosts.
You walked slightly behind your sister as servants escorted you through the castle. From behind you could tell Keira’s posture was flawless.
Your curiosity had gotten the better of you.
Dragons and old wars adorned the walls as tapestries. One showed a silver-haired warrior riding a dragon through a burning sky.
Westeros had a great fondness for legends.
At the doors to the receiving hall, the servants halted. “Prince Valarr awaits.”
Your sister breathed sharply, and her face lit with excitement.
You attempted not to grin.
Inside, the room was warm with firelight. And there he stood.
Prince Valarr Targaryen.
You recognized him at once.
Tall and broad-shouldered with his rumoured hair that fell loose around his collar, catching the flickering torchlight.
But it was his face that caught you. It carried a emotions as if he had spent his entire life perfecting every single one.
His violet eyes scanned the room to Keira.
Then, briefly, you.
It was only a moment. But something in the look had seemed searching.
Your father stepped forward to greet him. "My prince. It is an honor."
Valarr nodded his head in polite response. "The honor is mine."
His voice was deeper than you expected. His eyes returned to Keira. "My lady Keira."
Your sister curtsied beautifully, she bowed but even then you could see the slight reddening of her cheek. "My prince."
You stepped back a pace or so, comfortable with being unseen.
The prince and your sister had begun talking politely, about their journey, about Tyrosh, about court.
You listened with half an ear.
Until. “You must be her sister.”
You looked up. Valarr's eyes were fixed on you now.
Your heart skipped an odd, unexpected beat.
You curtsied hastily. “I am.”
“And your name?” You told him.
There was something in his eyes, something that flickered and disappeared at once.
“Welcome to King's Landing.”
You smiled graciously. “Thank you, my prince.”
He nodded his head and turned back to Keira at once.
And yet you had the feeling he had been examining you too close to be casual formalities.
—
That evening, there was a grand welcoming feast. Music filled the great hall, and courtiers glittered in their silks and jewels.
You sat beside your sister at the high table. And your sister, Keira, looked as radiant as the brightest star in the night sky.
Prince Valarr sat across from your sister. He talked to her often, politely attentive one he was.
It looked as though it were all perfect.
You should have felt relieved. But you felt a sense of observation.
Of him.
There was something restrained in him. Some kind of tension beneath his polished demeanor. Like a bowstring drawn.
When courtiers laughed boisterously around him, he smiled faintly, rarely joined in.
But when your sister spoke, he listened.
Duty it must.
It was a word you knew well.
You were halfway through your goblet of wine when suddenly, his gaze rose.
He kept it a second longer than he needed to. Then shifted his gaze.
And your stomach flipped annoyingly.
Ridiculous. You barely knew the man.
And he was to marry your sister.
—
The following morning, you managed to escape the castle. The gardens of the Red Keep were located on the cliff overlooking Blackwater Bay.
At least the air smelled clean here.
You strolled through the roses and the well-trimmed hedges. Until the sound of hoofbeats echoed through the garden.
You turned your head.
Prince Valarr rode into the garden on a black horse. He slowed his pace when he saw you.
Of course. Of course it would be him.
You curtsied politely.“My prince.”
Prince Valarr dismounted his horse. “I did not expect to find anyone here this early.”
“I could say the same.”
He smiled faintly. “Escaping the court?”
You hesitated. “Something like that.”
Prince Valarr looked at you with a sympathetic expression.“It is understandable.”
For a moment, you and the prince did not say anything.
The sea wind blew through the prince’s pale hair. He looked tired, not physically, but maybe emotionally.
“Does King’s Landing disappoint you?”
You blinked. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to my lady.”
You sighed. “It is just very different from Tyrosh.”
“How so?”
“It lacks the color.”
He laughed softly. “You are not wrong.”
Silence.
Then. “Riding?”
“Yes.”
His eyebrows went up. “Most ladies are frightened of mounts, much less ride them.”
“Most ladies are boring.”
This made him laugh.
You became aware that you were enjoying the conversation far too well. This was the man your sister was to marry.
You stood up a little straighter. “My sister has spoken very highly of you.”
His face changed immediately. Back to normal.
“I am glad.”
There was a pause. “You will make her happy,” you said politely.
His face changed again. This time to something you couldn’t quite tell.
“I will do my duty.”
His words were very practiced and he didn't seem to be happy.
You frowned.
But before you could say anything, a servant was approaching from the path. “My prince. The council awaits him.”
Valarr nodded. “Thank you.”
He turned back to you. “Enjoy the gardens my lady.”
“And you, your council meetings.”
He smiled. Then he mounted his horse and rode off.
You stood there and watched him go, your bosom uncomfortably tight within the cages of your bodice.
—
Over the course of the following weeks, you saw him often.
Always with Keira.
Always proper.
Always distant.
But still, there were moments between you two. A look across the hall, a talk during a hunt, asking your opinion instead of your sister’s, a dance with his hand brushing against yours for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.
Nothing improper. Nothing anyone else would notice.
But enough to make your heart behave foolishly. You tried to tell yourself it didn’t mean anything.
It had to mean nothing, he was promised to your dear Keira.
—
Things changed, and it happened during a hunt.
Your party rode deep into the kingswood, hawks circling above.
You loved riding, loved the freedom of it all.
At one point the group had spread out in pursuit of a deer. Your horse leapt over a log—
And landed badly.
You hadn't even time to take breath before being flung to the dirt. Pain flashed through your ankle.
“Seven hells,” you hissed, hands instantly holding onto your leg.
Hooves pounded the earth nearby. And the next thing you knew, Valarr appeared out of the trees.
He dismounted at once. “Are you hurt?”
“I will live."
He crouched down beside you to examine your ankle. His hands were warm and steady.
“You should not try to stand yet.”
“I wasn't exactly planning to my prince.”
Valarr's brow furrowed. “You always answer like that?”
“Only when princes gives me orders.”
Valarr's lips curled up in a ghost of a smile.
But his face sobered quickly. “I will carry you back.”
“That is unnecessary.”
“It is not.”
Before you could say anything else, he picked you up, quite effortlessly.
You caught your breath. You were suddenly very aware of how close you were, Valarr’s heartbeat under your hand.
The leather and pine scent of his armor.
Valarr's eyes flickered down to meet yours. For a moment something happened.
Something dangerous. And then he looked away.
Neither of your two said anything during the ride back. But something had changed.
—
The court of King’s Landing had a way of making everything feel like a performance. Every smile meant something, every conversation was measured, it was disgusting.
You learned that quickly in the weeks following the hunt. Especially when those looks came from Valarr himself.
At first, you told yourself you imagined it. The slight hesitation when he greeted you in the mornings.
The way his eyes flickered toward you when someone else spoke.
The way his voice changed, albeit barely, when he addressed you rather than your sister.
It had to mean nothing.
Because your sister, Keira, was painfully glowing with anticipation.
Her betrothal to the prince would be announced soon. The court buzzed with whispers already. A Tyroshi alliance was valuable, and a prince needed a wife worthy of the throne he might one day inherit.
Keira fit the role perfectly. She was beautiful, clever, and poised. Everything a princess should be.
You were the sister who came with her.
And that was how things were meant to remain. Oh how you wished that was how they remained.
—
The first real problem arose during a riding lesson.
Keira had expressed interest in learning the Westerosi style of hunting before the wedding, and naturally the prince offered to guide her.
You had no intention of joining them.
Until Keira insisted.
“You must come sister,” she said that morning as servants braided her hair. “You ride far better than I do. If I embarrass myself before my future husband, at least you can distract him.”
“That seems like a terrible plan Kiera.”
“Please.”
You sighed. “You are relentless.”
“Yes it is one of my many charms.” Kiera laughed, hooking her arm with yours.
—
The training yard smelled of hay and leather when you arrived. Several horses waited in the courtyard.
Valarr stood beside them, speaking with a stablehand. When he noticed you approaching beside Keira, his posture stiffened slightly.
He bowed politely. “My lady Keira.”
Then his gaze shifted. “And my lady.”
You dipped your head. “My prince.”
Something unreadable flickered across his expression before he turned back to your sister. “I chose a gentle mare for you, she is well accustomed to riders, she will be amiable to most things.”
Keira beamed. “How thoughtful my prince.”
—
The lesson began well enough.
Valarr explained the hunting techniques used by Westerosi nobles, how to track deer through the kingswood, how to follow the movement of birds overhead, how to guide a horse at full gallop.
Keira listened attentively, but riding had never been her strength.
Within half an hour she looked exhausted.
Meanwhile, you had already circled the yard twice out of sheer restlessness.
“You ride as if the horse were your own,” he said, as you passed him.
“It is.”
He looked up. “That is not the same as owning it.”
“Maybe not in Westeros.” Your horse drew closer.
For a moment, you and the prince rode side by side. Keira had fallen back a bit.
“You have a good seat,” the prince said.
“I learned to ride along the cliffs of Tyrosh.”
“I would like to see that one day.”
The words came out easily, too easily.
The realization had both of you taken aback.
Valarr cleared his throat. “I mean-”
“I know what you mean.” Your words were softer.
“Maybe one day you will.” He clenched his jaw.
For a moment, you and the prince were silent. Then Keira shouted across the yard.
“Valarr! How do I keep the horse from turning like this?”
He turned away, he had a duty to uphold.
You suddenly felt sad, you didn’t know why, you didn’t know why you were sad, you didn’t know why you were disappointed.
But you were.
You were disappointed.
—
Court life resumed its rhythm, all the feasts, council meetings, music in the evenings.
And always the subtle tension whenever you and Valarr found yourselves in the same room.
You tried to avoid him when possible.
But apparently the castle wasn’t large enough for that.
And sometimes… Sometimes he seemed to be avoiding you too.
Until the night of the moonlight ball.
—
The great hall of the Red Keep glittered with candles. Nobles from across the realm had gathered for the celebration. Musicians played lively songs while couples filled the dance floor.
You stood near the edge of the hall with a goblet of wine, watching the crowd.
Keira was dancing with Valarr, they made a striking pair.
Targaryen blood beside Tyroshi gold.
They moved gracefully together, her laughter bright and easy. Anyone watching would think they were perfectly suited.
Your chest tightened strangely.
“Jealous?”
You nearly spilled your wine.
Turning quickly, you found Valarr’s cousin leaning beside the pillar. Prince Daeron Targaryen smirked knowingly.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been staring at them for five minutes.”
“I have not.”
“Four minutes, then.”
You scowled. “I was simply observing my sister.”
“Of course.” His grin widened.
Daeron was far too perceptive for your liking. You’d heard he was nothing but a pathetic drunk. Lugging about the walls of the keep and occasionally the streets of silk.
Before you could respond, the music ended. Applause filled the hall.
Keira curtsied gracefully to Valarr. Then she turned toward you.
“Sister! Come dance.”
You froze.
“Oh, no-”
But she was already pulling you toward the floor. Valarr looked surprised.
The musicians began a new song. And suddenly you found yourself standing across from him.
Your heart pounded. “This is incredibly unnecessary,” you muttered.
“Agreed,” he replied quietly.
Neither of you moved for a moment.
Then the dance began.
His hand took yours, warm.
The choreography forced you close… then apart… then close again. Each step heightened the awareness between you.
“You should be dancing with my sister,” you whispered.
“I was.”
“Then why are you here?”
His jaw tightened.
“You know why.”
Your breath caught.
“No,” you said softly. “I don’t.”
He leaned slightly closer as the dance turned. His voice dropped. “Yes, you do.”
The words sent a shiver down your spine. The music ended far too soon.
You pulled your hand away quickly. “This must stop.”
His eyes flashed. “Nothing has begun my lady.”
“Exactly.”
You turned and walked away before your resolve could falter.
—
Later that night you escaped to the castle gardens again. The moon hung low over the bay, casting silver light across the paths.
Your mind refused to settle, the dance replayed over and over.
His voice.
His touch.
His confession that wasn’t quite a confession.
Footsteps sounded behind you, you knew who it was before turning.
Valarr stopped a few paces away.
“You should not follow me, my prince.”
“You left rather abruptly.”
“I thought that was the point.”
Silence settled between you, the ocean wind stirred the trees.
“You were right earlier,” he said quietly.
You frowned. “About what?”
“This must stop.”
Your chest tightened. “Then stop it.”
“I am trying.”
You laughed softly. “That’s not very convincing.”
His expression darkened. “You think this is amusing?”
“No.” Your voice softened. “I think it’s impossible.”
The words hung between you. Valarr stepped closer.
Too close.
“You are my future wife’s sister,” he said, each word deliberate.
“Yes.”
“I will marry her.”
“I know.”
“Then why,” he asked quietly, “do you look at me like that?”
Your heart hammered painfully. “How do I look at you?”
“Like you wish things were different.”
Your breath caught. “You’re imagining things, you must be tired from the festivities.”
His hand clenched slightly at his side. “I wish I were.”
For a moment the distance between you felt electric. One step closer and everything would change.
You forced yourself to step back. “We should go inside.”
“Yes.”
Neither of you moved. Then finally he turned away first, his duty winning once again.
But not without cost.
—
Later that night, lying awake in your chamber, you stared at the ceiling, your thoughts spun endlessly.
Because deep down you knew the truth.
This wasn’t harmless, nor was it fleeting. This was something far more dangerous.
And if you weren’t careful, you might both fall into a fire neither of you could escape.
—
The trouble with forbidden feelings was not that they appeared suddenly.
It was that they grew quietly.
Until one day you realized they had already taken root in places they had no right to exist.
You again tried to avoid Valarr Targaryen after the moonlight ball. Truly, you did.
For several days you remained mostly in your chambers or accompanied your sister during visits with the ladies of King’s Landing. You laughed politely when expected, spoke when spoken to, and behaved exactly as a proper noble daughter should.
But the Red Keep was a maze of stone corridors and chance encounters.
And the gods seemed intent on testing your restraint.
The first time you saw him again was at breakfast in the great hall.
You arrived late, hoping to slip quietly into a seat beside your sister. Instead, the moment you stepped through the doors, his gaze lifted.
Straight to you.
Your stomach tightened.
He looked tired.
Dark shadows rested beneath his eyes, and his expression was more guarded than usual.
Keira noticed nothing. She smiled brightly as you sat beside her. “You missed the morning council discussion,” she said cheerfully.
“I cannot imagine the tragedy.”
“It was dreadfully dull,” she admitted. “But Valarr says the hunting party tomorrow will be more entertaining.”
You froze.
“Hunting party?”
“Yes. Half the court is going.”
Your sister leaned closer.
“And you must come.”
You opened your mouth to protest.
But across the table Valarr was watching you again.
So intensely that your heart betrayed you with a single, traitorous beat.
—
The kingswood stretched endlessly beneath the autumn sky. Horses thundered along forest paths as nobles scattered across the hills, hawks soaring overhead.
You tried to focus on the hunt. Tried to ignore the fact that Valarr rode somewhere behind you.
Tried to ignore the way your awareness sharpened every time you heard his horse nearby.
Keira rode slightly ahead with a group of ladies.
Which left you, unfortunately, beside Lord Martyn Rowan.
He had been speaking for the better part of twenty minutes.
“And of course the orchards of Goldengrove produce the finest apples in the Reach,” he continued proudly.
“I will remember that,” you said politely.
“My lady you must visit someday.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Nonsense! My mother would adore you.”
You nodded vaguely, he was kind enough, but painfully enthusiastic.
Your horse slowed near a clearing. Hoofbeats approached from behind. You didn’t need to turn to know who it was.
Valarr.
His horse moved beside yours. “My lady.”
“Your grace.”
Lord Rowan looked delighted.
“Prince Valarr! We were just discussing the orchards of Goldengrove.”
Valarr’s gaze flickered briefly to you. “Were you?”
“Yes,” Rowan continued eagerly. “I was inviting her to visit.”
Your breath caught. Valarr’s expression hardened almost imperceptibly. “How generous.” His tone was perfectly polite. But you heard the steel beneath it.
Rowan, oblivious, continued happily. “Perhaps once the prince’s wedding celebrations conclude-”
Valarr cut him off. “The lady may have other obligations.”
You glanced sharply at him.
Rowan blinked.
“Of course, of course. I merely thought-”
“The hunt continues west,” Valarr said calmly. “A stag was sighted there.”
The dismissal was subtle but painfully clear.
Rowan hesitated before bowing his head slightly. “Then I shall ride ahead.”
He spurred his horse forward. Leaving you alone with the prince.
Silence settled between you.
“You are being rude. It’s unbecoming of a prince,” you said eventually.
Valarr kept his gaze forward. “I was not.”
“He was being friendly.”
“He was clearly courting you.”
Your heart skipped. “That is none of your concern.”
Finally, he looked at you, and there it was, the crack in his composure.
“I disagree.”
“Why?”
The question slipped out before you could stop it.
His jaw tightened. “You know why.”
“No,” you said softly. “I don’t.”
For a long moment, neither of you spoke. Wind rustled through the trees above.
Then a distant rumble of thunder echoed across the forest.
You glanced toward the darkening sky. “That storm came quickly.”
Valarr followed your gaze. “We should return to the others.”
But the woods had grown strangely quiet. Another thunderclap rolled across the hills.
Rain began falling moments later, pouring. Your horse shifted nervously beneath you.
“The trail is flooded,” you said, looking back the way you came.
Valarr scanned the trees. “There’s an old hunting cabin nearby.”
“How do you know that?”
“I hunted here as a boy.”
Lightning split the sky.
Your horse reared slightly.
“Fine,” you muttered. “Lead the way.”
—
The cabin was small but sturdy. Rain battered the roof as you both hurried inside.
You were soaked within seconds. Water dripped from your cloak onto the wooden floor.
Valarr shut the door behind you, and the storm roared outside.
Although inside the silence was deafening. You stood near the window, arms wrapped around yourself.
“This is unfortunate.”
“Yes.” His voice sounded strained.
You glanced back.
He stood near the door, clearly trying to maintain distance.
As though the few steps between you were somehow dangerous.
“You should remove the cloak,” he said stiffly. “You’ll freeze.”
“I am not so fragile a cloak will harm me.”
“That was not my implication.”
You sighed and removed it anyway. Your dress clung damply to your skin.
Valarr looked away immediately. Which somehow made things worse.
“You can look you know,” you said dryly. “I will not be offended.”
“I would rather not.” His voice sounded tight.
The storm intensified outside, the lightning flashed again.
Your nerves felt stretched thin. “You dislike me very much today,” you observed quietly.
He laughed once, a humorless sound.
“You think that is what this is?”
“I think you’ve been short with me since the hunt began.”
“And you have been encouraging Lord Rowan.”
You stared at him. “I was being polite.”
“You were smiling, you never do that.”
“Gods forbid.”
His composure snapped slightly. “You know what you were doing.”
“And what exactly was that?”
“Making me-”
He stopped abruptly.
Your pulse quickened. “Making you what?” You were whispering now.
The storm roared louder.
Valarr ran a hand through his damp hair, pacing once across the small room.
“I should not have followed you here.”
“You didn’t.”
“I mean this situation.”
His gaze met yours again, if his gaze could burn you’d be lit by now.
“You make it very difficult to remember my duty.”
Your breath caught. “You’re marrying my sister. Do not forget.”
“I am painfully aware.”
“Then perhaps you should stop looking at me like that.”
His voice dropped dangerously low. “And how exactly do I look at you?”
You hesitated, because saying it aloud would make it real.
But he stepped closer.
One step.
Then another.
Until the distance between you vanished.
Your heartbeat thundered.
“You look at me,” you whispered, “as though you wish I were her.”
His expression changed instantly. “No.”
The word came out rough. “Never that.”
“Then what?”
His hand clenched at his side. “Do not ask questions you already know the answer to.”
“But I don’t.”
Lightning illuminated the room.
For a split second, you saw exactly how close you were standing.
Close enough to feel the warmth of him.
Close enough to ruin everything.
Valarr’s voice softened. “Every moment I spend near you is a mistake.”
Your throat tightened. “Then leave.”
“I cannot.”
“Why?”
His eyes closed briefly. As though the truth physically hurt.
“Because when you look at me,” he said quietly, “I forget who I’m supposed to be.”
The words hung between you.
You should have stepped back.
You should have ended it there.
Instead you whispered,
“Valarr…” His name on your lips broke something inside him.
He stepped forward. Just enough that your breaths mingled.
For one dangerous moment you both leaned closer. The air between you felt electric. All it would take was one more second.
One more inch.
One kiss, and everything would burn.
Then thunder cracked violently overhead. The spell shattered.
Valarr stepped back abruptly. His expression was raw with restraint. “This cannot happen.”
You nodded slowly. “I know.”
Neither of you moved for a long time, the storm eventually softened, rain faded to a quiet patter.
—
The night before the betrothal ceremony felt wrong.
The halls of the Red Keep were alive with celebration. Nobles toasted the coming union between Valarr Targaryen and your sister, Keira of Tyrosh.
Musicians played loudly and wine flowed freely.
You spent the entire evening trying not to look at the prince. Trying not to think about how tomorrow everything would be decided.
You had avoided him carefully since your conversation in the storm.
But tonight, it was impossible.
Because Valarr was drinking. He rarely drank.
Yet tonight goblet after goblet disappeared from his hand.
The princes of the realm laughed loudly beside him, clapping his shoulders, celebrating his coming marriage.
But there was something wrong in the way he smiled.
You left the feast early.
You could not watch any longer.
—
The Red Keep quieted as the night deepened. Servants extinguished candles. Courtiers retired to their chambers.
You moved through the dim corridors in a borrowed shawl, unable to sleep.
The castle had many hidden passages, old stone walkways built generations ago for servants and spies.
You had discovered several in your wandering.
Tonight, you walked them simply to escape your thoughts.
Until you heard your name.
Soft, and hoarse. Barely more than a whisper.
You froze.
The voice came again.
Your name.
You followed the sound through the narrow passage until it ended at a hidden door.
Beyond it, Prince Valarr’s chambers.
Your heart pounded as you slipped inside. The room smelled faintly of wine and smoke.
Valarr sat half-collapsed on the edge of his bed, his silver hair loose, his shirt half-open at the collar.
A goblet lay tipped on the floor beside him. He looked up slowly when the door opened.
His violet eyes were unfocused. “…You came.”
Your breath caught.
“My prince-”
“Don’t,” he murmured. “Not tonight.”
He tried to stand.
Failed.
You rushed forward instinctively. “Careful.”
He leaned heavily against you, unsteady. “You shouldn’t have drunk so much.”
“Perhaps,” he said softly. “But it was the only way I could survive this night.”
Your chest tightened painfully. You guided him back onto the bed.
He watched you with a strange, dazed intensity. “I shouldn’t be here,” you whispered.
“I called for you.”
“You called my name in a daze.”
“Because you’re always there.”
Your throat burned.
Valarr reached for your hand clumsily, gripping it like a lifeline. “Stay.”
“I cannot.”
“Stay.” His voice broke slightly. “We could marry the Valyrian way.”
Your breath caught. “You are drunk.”
“I’m honest.” His grip tightened weakly.
“In old Valyria, a man married the woman he loved.” He pulled your hand closer to his chest.
“We could leave tomorrow. Before the ceremony. My dragon would take us anywhere.”
You brushed his hair gently from his face. “You do not have a dragon.”
“Then I’d steal one.”
Despite everything, a soft laugh escaped you. “You are impossible.”
“And you love me.”
The words fell between you quietly. He looked so vulnerable. So unlike the composed prince the court knew.
His voice softened again. “Stay.”
“Again, I cannot.”
“Please.” He sounded almost like a little boy now.
You leaned down gently. Pressed a soft kiss to his forehead. “Sleep, Valarr.”
His fingers tightened briefly around yours. Then slowly relaxed as sleep finally claimed him.
You stayed until his breathing steadied.
Then slipped silently back into the passages.
Your heart breaking with every step.
—
Morning came far too soon. You expected to avoid him again. But fate had other plans.
The hallway outside the library was empty when you turned the corner, and froze.
Valarr stood there.
Waiting.
He looked terrible, his skin pale, his hair loosely tied back. But his eyes, his eyes were clear.
“Good morning,” he said quietly.
You tried to steady your voice. “My prince.”
“Don’t.” The word was sharp. “Not today.”
Before you could react. He dropped to his knees.
Your breath left your lungs entirely.In his hand, a ring.
Heavy gold bearing the dragon sigil of House Targaryen.
“My family’s ring,” he said hoarsely.
“Valarr-”
“I am done pretending.”His voice shook with raw emotion. “I cannot marry your sister.”
“Please don't do this”
“I love you.”
The words hit you like a blow. He clenched the ring tightly, tight enough to make the tip of his fingers turn red.
“I will speak to my father. To my grandsire. To the entire court if I must.” His voice grew desperate.
“You are still a noblewoman of Tyrosh. This match would still strengthen the alliance. I will convince them.”
Tears burned your eyes.
“Valarr-”
“I will do anything,” he whispered.
His hand clutched the fabric of your dress.
“Just say yes.”
Your heart shattered.
Because you loved him.
Gods, you loved him.
But. “Keira.”
His expression faltered.
“She loves you.”
He shook his head. “She believes she does.”
“And if she does?” you asked softly.
“If she wakes tomorrow and realizes the man she was meant to marry chose her sister instead?”
Your voice broke. “I cannot do that to her.”
Valarr closed his eyes, he was now biting his lip, brows furrowed, panic flickering across his face.
“I know.”
Silence stretched painfully.
Then slowly, he nodded.
“I understand.”
He stood slowly.
But before stepping away, he reached for his sword.
The blade slid free with a quiet ring.
Your eyes widened. “What are you doing?”
Valarr raised the sword solemnly. “I swear this on my honor.”
His violet eyes burned with fierce determination. “If your sister gives us her blessing to wed…”
He lowered the blade toward the floor. “…you must marry me.”
Your heart pounded. “Valarr-”
“Swear it.”His voice was steady now.
You hesitated.
Then whispered, “I swear.”
He sheathed the sword slowly. The decision hung heavy in the air.
Neither of you spoke again for the rest of the day.
—
That night you slept uneasily. Until soft footsteps woke you. You sat up as the door creaked open.
Keira stood there.
Wrapped in a light shawl over her sleepwear.
Your heart dropped. “Sister?”
She stepped inside quietly, closing the door behind her.
“Valarr told me everything.”
Your stomach twisted painfully. “I never meant-”
She held up a hand gently. “I know.”
Silence lingered between you. You expected anger, betrayal even, tears, anything.
Instead, she smiled softly.
“As much as I should hate you…I cannot.”
Your eyes filled with tears.
“We are sisters,” she said simply. “And I know you.”
She moved to sit on the edge of your bed. “I did fall for him,” she admitted.
Your heart twisted. “But watching you both…I realized something.”
She laughed quietly.
“It was never really my story.”
You stared at her.
“Besides…”
A playful spark returned to her eyes.
“That lord from the hunt? The one who kept inviting you to visit his orchards?”
“Lord Rowan?”
“Yes.”
She smiled shyly. “He’s actually quite charming.”
You blinked in disbelief.
“He laughs at my jokes.”
“Well that’s rare.”
She nudged you.
“And he is very handsome.”
Your chest loosened with relief.
“And kind.”
She leaned against you gently. “I think he might make me happy.”
Tears slipped down your cheeks. Keira wiped them away softly.
“May I sleep here tonight?”
You laughed weakly. “Like when we were girls?”
“Exactly like that.” She curled beside you beneath the blankets.
Your arms wrapped around each other instinctively.
Just like the nights when you were children dreaming of castles and husbands.
Both of you cried quietly, but they were soft tears.
Healing ones.
And eventually you fell asleep in each other’s embrace.
—
The following days were chaos.
Plans changed.
Messengers rode between noble houses. The court buzzed with scandal and excitement.
But somehow everything fell into place. And when you passed Valarr in the halls, his eyes burned with quiet happiness.
You rarely had time alone, except at night.
Through the hidden passage between your chambers.
There, in the quiet darkness of the castle walls, you found each other again.
Whispered laughter, and stolen kisses.
And the promise of a future neither of you had dared hope for, a future born from fire.
