Work Text:
Lately Tsurumaru Kuninaga had been wondering whether he really had no way of surprising Mikazuki Munechika, none at all.
Simply popping up behind him and shouting did not do the trick. Mikazuki had just laughed the few times Tsurumaru tried it, the same gentle imperturbable laugh that seemed to apply to every occasion. “Hahaha, you have a lot of energy, don’t you?” So then he had to step up his measures. Mikazuki made an easy target by his habit of sitting on the porch in the sun every afternoon—like an old man, Tsurumaru thought, and even if he was hardly younger himself, he wasn’t ready to be considered an old man yet. And maybe that was why he felt compelled to shake up Mikazuki’s life, to stir some noise and color into it, prove that even those most set in their ways could change.
The first time he tiptoed up behind Mikazuki and clapped both hands on his shoulders, the other just laughed again and invited him to sit down and have a cup of tea. The third or fourth time—and third or fourth cup of tea later—Tsurumaru decided more extreme tactics were needed. When he had gotten within what he deemed optimal surprising range, Tsurumaru sprang forward, threw both arms around Mikazuki from behind, and shouted, “Gotcha!”
“Hahaha, you really like to touch people, don’t you?”
Not being one to concede defeat, Tsurumaru replied in a tone of blithe agreement, “Yes.”
Mikazuki tried to turn his head to look at him. There were golden crescents in the irises of his eyes, like little smiling curves of amusement. “Why, then, aren’t you going to continue?” He had laid one black-gloved hand over Tsurumaru’s hand, and they were still so close together that a few strands of Tsurumaru’s silver hair trailed over in it sharp contrast. The crescent moon was not just the crescent moon, he thought in a half-confused way, realized now why he had liked Mikazuki’s name since the first time he had heard it. The image of the crescent moon was also the invocation of the entire night sky against which it was set, that whole landscape dark and fathomless and easy to get lost in, but gentle too, reassuring in its vastness and so full of stars.
.
The younger swords called them two shameless old men. Mikazuki’s shamelessness was something inherent to him, in the way he would sit up languidly rubbing his eyes in the morning and say with the most pleasant of smiles that he wasn’t good at dressing himself, won’t someone do it for him? Not to be outdone, Tsurumaru would tie ridiculous and lavish ribbons onto the back of his clothing, attach sprigs of flowers and red strings and little trinkets that had questionable meaning in the secret language of lovers. Mikazuki would go about his day with his usual oblivious good cheer, occasionally followed by children who pointed and giggled. And at the end of the day—or sooner than that, if the whim struck them—with the garments removed by the only one who had known how to put them on, Tsurumaru would ask Mikazuki how he liked the surprise this time. Mikazuki would laugh (“Hahaha, what is it this time? I’ve never seen this before”) and then everything else would be forgotten.
When it was very quiet in the small hours of the night, when even the crescents in Mikazuki’s eyes had disappeared into sleep, Tsurumaru would catch himself thinking that this was not so bad after all—this predictable ending to an unsurprising day. The constellations would trace their slow migration in the sky outside, and sometimes he even trusted himself to sleep as well.
“You had a nightmare,” Mikazuki said to him in the morning. He woke in a tangle of confusion, the light seeping in between his eyelids. Mikazuki was smiling at him gently, looking slightly concerned and also slightly comical, with one eye swollen shut.
“What—”
“You punched me in the face when I tried to wake you. Hahaha, I have to say that was surprising. You said—no, never mind. It’s all right now. Let’s dress simply for today, shall we?”
He did not have to be reminded of what he must have said. The dream was one he had had many times: the crack of light fracturing the darkness, shaking the foundations of the world itself, and he had not yet possessed the voice to cry out: no, don’t take me, please, please leave me be.
.
“Do you never get bored?”
Tsurumaru asked this on the rare rainy afternoon, when even Mikazuki did not have it in his head to sit outside. It struck him as odd—surprising, even—that he had known the other for so long without thinking of bringing this topic up until now. Perhaps boredom had just been far from his mind when they were in each other’s company. But he realized that he did not understand Mikazuki very much after all.
“Bored?” Mikazuki laughed, put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “I can’t say that I know what that feels like.”
“Just the thought of staying in the same place for so long makes my heart want to wilt and die,” Tsurumaru said, with a lightness in his voice that he hoped would be enough to indicate that he did not mean to insult the experience of the other.
“But the changes of the seasons, even the change of night to day and night again, are very lovely to observe, even if you stay in the same place. I would wait for the sliver of the moon to appear out of the darkness of the sky, to grow full, and then wane into a crescent again. And of course I had met no shortage of people. Even those who only looked at me for a few moments, I would try to guess at what sort of story they lived, what they were like behind their eyes. I had many memories, and would always be adding more. Of course I could not be bored.”
Mikazuki’s voice was gentle yet serious in a way that Tsurumaru had never heard before, and he supposed that this was something Mikazuki considered important, important especially for him to know. He had believed in the meaning of those words once, he realized now. During the slow years at Fushimi Fujimori shrine, he had been content to watch the leaves fall, then the snow, then the flowers in spring. He had grown accustomed to the quiet, the diffuse fragrance of incense in the air, the occasional friendly glance or word the only small surprises he would need. It would not have mattered if nothing ever changed. But everything did, everything always did.
“Not all memories are good,” he said.
“I know that,” Mikazuki said, “but they are a part of what you are, like the pattern on your blade. Who is to say that the sunshine in the morning doesn’t feel all the sweeter, because we have known what it was like to survive the darkness? I have witnessed many terrible things, too,” he added softly, laying a hand on Tsurumaru’s arm. “I have seen many people come and go, as you have.”
“But you never mention them.”
“Look at me, Tsurumaru.”
There was a subtle and insistent magnetism in Mikazuki’s voice, as if he was trying to pull him away from something. But Tsurumaru could not assent, would not surrender. “The moon might always be able to grow whole again,” he said, “but the feathers of a crane will again never be fully white, once they are stained in blood.” He stood up, walked outside with the determination of someone who did not know it was raining, hoped and expected to be drenched through. But the rain stopped as soon as he stepped out from under the eaves, and he stood there looking up for a while, blinking at the brightness showing through the torn-up clouds in the sky.
.
Lately there had been unrest among the other swords, especially those who had realized that in the war they were fighting, victory meant dooming their former masters to their fates. There were whispered suggestions that no amount of fear or doubt could suppress: if we let the enemy win—just one battle, just this one—if we went over to the other side, what would happen? Surely if it’s just one little thing…
The Saniwa made it a point to address these whispers at their dinner one night. “I understand how you might feel,” he said. “I sympathize. But that is the most I can do. I am not asking you to fight for something so abstract as the idea of truth, of history. But the smallest change can have the most immense, unintended sequences. If we allow a single instance of history to change, countless people might die or never be born. The younger ones among you might never be created. The world as we know it might even be rendered uninhabitable by wars no one has heard of, weapons that no one in this history has dared to use. Think of this before you act.”
The final announcement he did not make himself, but had let the poet read it for him, in that voice that never seemed to have flourish in it, whether the topic was that of artistry or blood.
Anyone caught trying to defect must be killed.
“I wonder who the first one will be,” Tsurumaru said to Mikazuki later, only half as a jest. “They’d better surprise me.”
“I don’t think anyone will try it,” Mikazuki replied. It was a warm and cloudless night, and the pond in the courtyard reflected countless stars, the mirror of the surface only occasionally interrupted by the falling of a petal. “We do not, after all, stray from what we are made for. And even those of us who have suffered—especially those of us who have suffered—we understand what it is to accept a new set of circumstances and go on.”
“I don’t know if I agree with that.”
“Did you catch yourself wanting to kill Hojo or Koudeki, for taking you from where you felt you belonged? Would you have run then, if you had been able? Or did you realize that you could not hate them, not anyone whose life had been intertwined with your own?” Tsurumaru only realized that his right hand was gripping the hilt of the blade at his side tightly when Mikazuki paused in speaking, studied his face and spoke again in a softer tone. “I’m sorry, I did not mean to hurt you. But I had asked myself much the same questions when I was taken out of the flames of Eiroku. There were no answers to arrive at, even after hundreds upon hundreds of years. And well, hahaha, I’m just an old man now, so I try not to think about it too much. You and I both, we’re too old to be caught up in this, to feel the kind of hot-blooded rage and intense sadness that are the privilege of the young.”
“Perhaps that’s true,” Tsurumaru said, let himself be led around the garden as they walked, Mikazuki holding his arm reassuringly with the usual shameless smile restored to his face. “A long time ago, I’d thought…if I could not be happy with what I knew and remembered, with who I was as a result of all that, I would surprise myself by becoming someone different entirely. And I was happy. I was happy to be here, and happy to meet you.”
Mikazuki studied him, his eyes like the reflection of twin moons in luminous blue water. “Are you telling the truth?”
“When did you learn to be so serious, old man? I’d better not let you sleep tonight.”
Late in the night, when he lay awake next to a Mikazuki who was sleeping very soundly after all, Tsurumaru recalled something he had heard the other say once, on some hazy early morning when Tsurumaru himself had been just waking from the rare night of blessed and dreamless slumber.
Are we very alike, I wonder? Mikazuki’s fingers had trailed over his hair, tapped his head lightly, and he had continued to feign sleep. I had been hoping for a very long time to meet someone like you. Or someone like me. I had been hoping that I am not the only one who is like this, in this world.
He had thought for a long time, fruitlessly, on what those words meant. Now he was remembering all of Mikazuki’s gentle gestures toward him, his ridiculous laughter, the way he always seemed to be pulling Tsurumaru away from the shadowy places where his thoughts should not linger. It was true that Mikazuki was very kind, kinder than anyone he had ever known. But there was also something in him that was out of reach, the very same quality that had frustrated Tsurumaru when he realized that this person could not be surprised. Mikazuki had lived so long that he had forgotten the meaning of loneliness, and sorrow had become to him just another color of the passing seasons. There were others like Taroutachi who claimed to be divine instruments, but Mikazuki seemed the closest to him now of becoming something otherworldly, the moon set in the celestial dark, the constant changing of its face disguising the fact that it would never change, not at all. Human influence was next to nothing to him. But he still had that vestige of sentimental yearning he had learned from his companions, or maybe it was an inherent need to everything that lived, now that he had been given life. He still had it, as sincere as a child, that hazy desire to find someone of his own kind.
I would have liked to become that, to you. And I was telling the truth when I said that I was very happy.
But I am sorry. Everything ends.
He rose without a sound, without disturbing the sleeping figure next to him. in the darkness he found his white coat, his boots, his blade. It would have to be tonight, while the warning was fresh in everyone’s memory, when it would be assumed that they were all too anxious or afraid to try anything. No one would be on alert.
It was a simple thing, really. It had surprised even himself, his inability to let this go.
Are you surprised to see me? he had asked the Saniwa when he arrived in this place, and the other had said, No, but I am surprised by what you have told me. I had not thought the grave-robbing story was real. It’s written in the books that it was just hearsay. So much time has passed, I suppose mistakes do get made in the telling. Everyone who has studied that time assumes—I am sorry, I suppose this is difficult for you to hear—but everyone assumes that Adachi Sadayasu had lived for another good forty years.
Such a little thing, that. Such an absurdity that he couldn’t even feel angry about it. His first day in a new life and he had been greeted with a surprise like this—it was almost impressive. No, he was angry after all. At least the other swords who had suffered the losses of their masters had those incidents memorialized forever in texts and novels and countless other things. Even if they could not escape from these reminders, at least the sorrow of it—the glory of it would be forever known. At least their pain was acknowledged as something real.
Even Mikazuki had that: the rains of May, the night of fire, the garden of a hundred swords. Mikazuki would be surprised at last, waking up alone tomorrow. Would he be disappointed or sad, or just laugh? Tsurumaru shook his head, cleared away those thoughts. He had reached his own chambers by now, still tiptoe-quiet, and he did a quick look around for anything else he might need to bring on his journey. No, he would travel light and fast, a crane dancing over the reeds. By the time anyone thought to look for him he would be long gone.
Such a little thing, and it wasn’t even changing history, in the strictest sense—it was just changing things back to the way they were already known.
He did not allow himself to think of how things could go wrong, of what terrible deeds he might become responsible for. None of those possibilities seemed real to him for the moment. There was just this one thing, this one most pressing little thing in the world, and maybe he had the temperament of a young man after all. He left the house quickly and quietly, went through the garden under the cover of the flowering trees. There was a moon rising behind the branches, and he did not look to see what shape it was. He had almost made it past the gates when someone stepped in front of him.
The other was dressed in full armor, and Tsurumaru had no idea how he had managed that so quickly, supposed that he knew how to do it himself after all. He was no longer used to seeing him like this: sharp and elegant, without any trinkets or flowers weighing him down, poised and deadly and as lovely as he ever had been. He supposed that he was glad of it. A wind passed through the trees above them, shook loose blossoms that rained from the branches.
“It seems that I was the one who surprised you,” Mikazuki Munechika said, and Tsurumaru thought there was something about his smile that was finally sad.
2.16.2015