Title: Trailing Dust and Trailing Sleeves
Summary: Not quite a sequel to Frost. Suzu's lost days.
Trailing dust. One. Two. Three…He counted the brushstrokes. Left hand pinching the sleeve. Right hand fingers curved. Eleven. And then the dust billowed as he turned the page.
The crackle of leaves on the empty street. Ghosts floated by him in silk and printed cotton and hempen cloth coarse like a fisherman's empty net. But they couldn't touch him.
One…two…
Copper rattled against dry bone, dulled in wrapped cloth. It almost sounded like clay. It almost looked like a monk's.
Someone left a scrap of rice. Crumbling like maggots into the hollow.
Musty with decay. He tasted ash, and tangled his fingers in his scarf. It never had color before, but now it was grimed, dull as dirt.
He no longer dreamed, because he no longer slept. It kept the ice away from his vision, fleeting frost clinging to the edge of a black hakama. And sometimes, when he narrowed his eyes, he could almost see that stranger, waiting in empty doorways. Sometimes cold as a porcelain doll, sometimes splattered with blood.
That secret smile.
The rice drew flies, buzzing lazy, hot.
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It was a bad dream. He woke up gasping, on a silken bed. Even his breaths were muffled, choked in scented oil and sickly honeyed beeswax from dead candles.
It was a bad dream. He looked around himself, dizzy and faint. Raising his hand, he could feel his ribs, sharp as sticks against the palm of his hand. The concave of his stomach.
His brother's sword. The only thing he had left, and it was gone. He couldn't remember where it went.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't breathe.
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His breath choked in his lungs, as if he was underwater. It was too hot. The dust settled like flies, swarming on him, pinning him down. He fought to escape, and when his hands made contact, he dug his fingers in, drawing blood, teeth gnashing and tearing.
Pain rattled him to his senses, and for a brief instant he saw men, women…a multitude around him. Servants in discreet clothing, a lord in his finery, the woven pattern of tatami against his cheek, the turn of the ceiling as the beams came into focus, the titters and hushed silence and the men that held him down.
It was a party.
There was blood.
It slipped away from him like a loosened thread, twisting and falling, twisting and falling.
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He hurt all over, but he was used to that. He stared at the ceiling, until it became filled with cats.
Tiny feet pressed against his ribcage, light and tentative, and then pressing harder and harder, until he could barely stand it. Claws kneaded against his bare flesh, slicing and gouging.
His mouth opened, but there was no sound, not even when the air moved out past his lips.
His vision filled with blood and the skull.
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He counted the passing of the time on his back. Sometimes on his stomach.
One time when he woke, the knife was right there, and he reached for it. It was in his hand, blade cold as ice, grip worn with time and he pressed his cheek against it, drawing a faint line of blood against his jaw. Kissing it, he remembered the lost sword. The lost life. Too much.
It was in his hand, and he could have done something, but he didn't.
Precious hesitation. His master would have scolded him for the lost seconds.
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He followed the clean scent of snow.
A season had passed. He could smell it through the cracks of the door and like a feral animal he burrowed at it, loosening the wood, splinters cracking off against his manicured nails.
Just a corner. That's all he needed, and he could smell the wind, bright and pure, ice cutting through the decay and the incense and the poisonous flower that slowed him down, suffocated him.
He took another breath, and the world crystallized around him so concretely that he nearly cracked from the effort of holding it together.
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Trailing sleeves. His hands moved through the patterns ingrained by functional muscle memory, though he savored the movement, brain reptilian, insectile.
Fold and fold, pinch and twist, and he tied the hakama neatly.
He took up the knife and studied it. The skull reflected in it shone silver, then black.
He hacked off long strands of hair, leaving wisps to dust white on the black spring-soaked earth like slivers of ice.
It was cold inside. He could feel it.
He pressed his hand against his chest, and knew that if he snapped through the twigs of his ribs, he would only find frost, crumbling to snow.
Author's notes: The name Yoshida has 11 brushstrokes in calligraphy. Thanks to RubyD for the preread. It's been a long time since I've seen the Peacemaker anime/one volume of manga, so please forgive me for any inaccuracies. This roughly falls in the time between Suzu going batshit crazy and the time he goes and kills that guy who was keeping him as his catamite.