Chapter Text
It wasn’t supposed to go like this. But that is the first mistake, that assumption. That is what Fukami Ritsu has learned: there is always a cause and effect.
.
“You’ve made some mistake,” she had said six months ago, when the government agency contacted her. “I am a scientist.”
“Yes,” the man in the gray suit had replied, surveying her with disinterested eyes. “And while time travel might still sound like it belongs to the realm of science fiction to the average citizen, it has long since moved from fiction into reality for those in the know. Surely someone with a scientific training like yourself, Professor Fukami, would be open toward these ideas…?” The man tapped at his notepad, tracing a line with one finger. “Oh, pardon me, I see here your background is in sociology.”
It was remarkable how these suits could convey their utter condescension without any change in tone. “Social science is no different any other science,” Ritsu said, with the insistence that everyone in the field affected, sooner or later. The man thumbed through the notepad in his hand, seeming to find it much more fascinating than the present conversation. “And time travel is not the issue here,” she continued. “If you have approached me in order to recruit me as, as a Saniwa--” just speaking the word left her feeling childishly embarrassed, as if she was about to make a public speech about how the sun revolved around the earth. “You are suggesting that magic exists. You are suggesting that I am capable of it.”
“You and very few others in the world, Professor Fukami. We have been very careful in our assessments. The data is not wrong.”
“So, what, am I just supposed to know what to do? To bring inanimate objects to life?” Ritsu watched the man for a reaction to her standoffish words, but there were none. It was almost disappointing. She expected to be reprimanded, even threatened—a government that was perpetually running out of funding for research but always had enough for war was one that obviously did not have the best interests of society at heart. But the man merely continued perusing the notebook, spoke without looking up at her.
“Not bring them to life, precisely. They are tsukumogami, the spirits of objects that have attained life and awareness by existing for so long in the world. Your ability is required to give them a human form that will allow them to utilize their power fully in battle.”
“This still sounds like nonsense to me.”
“You will believe it when you see it for yourself, Professor Fukami. Perhaps you will realize how profound your power is then, when you have summoned the forces you are to command.” For the first time the man’s face showed a trace of emotion, a thin smile that was neither judgmental nor cruel, but knowing. “We had our own doubts, giving such important duties to civilians and amateurs, but there is no choice when something so vast as history itself is at stake. We have made no mistake in finding you, believe that much. There are those who can coax the currents of the world around them, who wrap probability around their fingers, who subtly distort the rules of cause and effect. Perhaps you remember many times in your past when things seemed too good to be true, when the course of your life seemed to lift you up to impossible heights and set you down gently on your feet. That is the nature of those who can do magic. We have studied the history of your life, Professor. That is how we found you.”
“If that is true—” something cold and bright flared up in her then, like bitterness but also something else, just as she had felt on that day. “If I can change my own life, from things that were supposed to happen to things that did—that is what you’re saying, right? If I can do that much, then why did something like that happen to me?”
The man closed the notepad in a clean and abrupt motion. “Pack everything that you want to bring with you, but travel light. We’ll see you at the station in three days.”
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A few weeks later, the visit itself had become a distant memory. The citadel with its golden afternoons, the rolling green fields, the ponds with their mirrorlike surfaces broken by a whisper of a breeze or a falling flower, had been a welcome change after all from the gray city skylines. Soon Ritsu was forgetting to remind herself of the things she left at home undone, the fight for tenure track and the studies yet to be completed, the book that was supposedly being translated into five languages. The publisher wanted to call it The Lord of the Flies Effect. That was too sensationalistic for her tastes; she wanted something more old-blood academic, from the days when you could kill something and put your name on it. The age of exploration had also been the age of nomenclature. These days, well, you were lucky if you could get a dimple on an asteroid’s ass named after you.
She had wanted to call it The Fukami Effect, the book and the thing described in it, which had raised no shortage of eyebrows among colleagues and editors. So went the gossip in the halls: did she really want to name something like that after herself? –Well, you know, someone who gets assistant professorship before they’re thirty, and she’s never going to marry by the looks of it…someone like that, they either care about nothing but their reputation, or their reputation is the one thing they don’t care about at all. And so went the reply unspoken in her head: talk all you want, I don’t see you being the one to change the world.
Changing the world was what they did now, that or the act of protecting it from change, but in a way so monumentally different that nothing like it had ever happened before, in all the folds and eddies of space-time. She liked to say these kinds of things to confuse Mutsunokami Yoshiyuki: if progress was the greater good, right, and progressive thought was always on the leading edge of history—then which side were they on now? What they were fighting for, was it an act of preservation of the old or advancement of the new? Maybe it was both, and they were allowing the new to have advanced by preserving the order of the old around it, like capturing a shadow suggestive of motion imminent, in the blurred sepia of an old photograph. The future in past tense.
Ritsu let the phrases lock around each other like a puzzle box, and Yoshiyuki would screw up his face and laugh, maybe run a hand through his already messy hair. “Hey, no matter how big an idea, you oughtta explain it in terms that everyone can understand.” That man had taught him that, she presumed. That man, centuries dead but vibrant and alive in him, because that was what you believed in this walk of life, that as long as your ideas lived you did too, that every moment you spent discovering, debating, defining was a moment in which you truly lived, burned yourself onto the retina of the universe. The closest she would get the meeting Sakamoto Ryouma was in speaking with this young man with his laughter like the sea meeting the earth. She wondered too, whether centuries after her own era, someone with a similar gift as herself would pick up something she had cherished—a pen, a book—and be able to summon her ghost.
She did not speak to Yoshiyuki about these ideas, because he was much more interested in the real and the possible than the purely hypothetical. When there were no more duties for the day, she would tell him sometimes of the changes that had happened in the world since he had last been out in it, all the centuries and centuries worth of stories for him to marvel at, to cause him wonder or joy or pain. When they were out in battle she could feel that they were equals, comrades in arms. But not in moments like this. Not when she spooled knowledge out to him like a golden thread. The possession of knowledge was a power almost greater than the very act of giving him life.
That had been the easy part. It had been just like how the government lackey said: she had believed it in an instant, when she felt the power coalescing between her hands, flowing forth like light made music, evoking memory and form and speech out of cold inert steel. And if that much was true, that much was true, then everything else—
He had been so happy to see her, so she had smiled back.
.
Weeks later, now, and a dozen more swords have joined their company, the citadel growing more full every day, echoing with footsteps and conversations and children’s laughter. The fields are tended with care, the gardens lush, the horses sleek and the equipment sparkling. Their little group does not feel like a company of soldiers, because even though her heart still pounds every time they set out to battle, they have always been victorious, have usually won with such ease and swiftness that they now spend most of their time back at the citadel getting to know each other, and not at war. Even the more skeptical of the swords—Tsurumaru Kuninaga who had claimed it was such a surprise that the commanding officer was a little lady, Ookurikara with his attitude not unlike those of students who invariably failed her class, Kasen Kanesada who she really, truly could not understand at all—they have grown to trust her as a leader, to relax around her when she did not have to lead. Respect, though, is still a little too much to ask for.
It will not always be so easy, she tells herself, the enemy is just testing the waters for now, they will show their true strength soon. But part of her wonders whether their victories are more than coincidence. If she had been chosen for an ability to manipulate probability, then victory will always smile on them, and even insurmountable odds will seem like nothing more than a joke. They will all feel safer, if that is indeed true. But if that is true, then everything else, everything else—
Fukami Ritsu does not have nightmares. She observes her own dreams quietly, no matter what catastrophes may occur in them, and tells herself: you are dreaming, it is because you thought about this or were worried about that, see, it’s nothing, you are dreaming, you are dreaming.
Yagen asks her whether she hasn’t been sleeping well. Yagen calls her General, which she is not used to hearing, but admittedly it pleases her just a bit. She thanks him for his concern and accepts the herbal tea he makes, which he says will help her get to sleep. It is dubious whether a tantou can have any real medical knowledge, even if he wears glasses and dresses himself in a labcoat. She has teased him about this before: it’s against safety protocol to wear shorts with a labcoat, but then again they aren’t in an experimental wet lab. He had nodded, all seriousness and half understanding. Everyone here is absolutely ridiculous and absolutely endearing. (Focus on that.)
At night she stands outside and inhales the air warm with the memory of the day, the rich scent of earth and grass and flowers, the fields wide and fertile under the waning moon. The mountains are distant silhouettes against the deepening blue of the sky. She thinks without meaning to that this place is hers to compose, a microcosm and utopia hers alone, and feels the sense of newness and potential as real as an ache in her limbs. (Tread lightly.)
Utopia, because the place she has left behind is dystopia—how could it not be, with its bureaucracies and inane rules? This is a place that she will build, and the hope that will be engendered here, transcending the very conventionalities of what it means for a soul to be human, for history to be real, the whole of cause and effect itself—surely it will radiate from this place, cast a freshness like morning light onto the entire history of the world. (Be careful. Be careful.)
Everything is in order here, at the citadel. Everyone has their role; there are rotations and shifts for every duty to be done, whether for fieldwork or cleaning, training or horsekeeping, routine expeditions or kitchen duty for the few who know what the hell they are doing. The swords complain about having to work sometimes, but it is all good-natured and no one has really shirked their duties. It is Yoshiyuki, though, who asks. “Why is it so important to have so many rules?”
“Rules are especially important when no one is watching,” she replies.
“But you are watching,” he says.
And who is watching me? She does not say that part, suspects that for all her life the answer has been the same. The swords know that she is someone very learned and clever, that she has written a book. Some of the younger ones have asked her to read it to them, but she says that she left it at home. Will she at least tell them what it’s about? No, no—she shakes her head, smiles in a way that is almost secretive. It is not important, not something good children need to know.
She dreams of Ryuhei that night, Ryuhei alive with his sun-kissed skin and laughing eyes, forever twenty-five, forever hers. They are in each other’s arms and he says that he loves her, says it so many times that her echoed replies can never hope to outnumber his. She kisses him and tastes blood in her mouth.
You are dreaming, she tells herself. You are dreaming, and you know why.
“I am called Heshikiri Hasebe,” the new sword says. “What may I do for you?”