He is six when his mother first tells him this story. She talks of choices and destiny, of things that stretch and tangle yet never break. The skin of his forearm is covered in bruises from a tumble down the sand dunes earlier, but his eyes are wide with excitement and his heart latches on to every word.
It's a decade later when he runs into her, the girl who speaks to water, the enemy princess with hair the same color as the flames lapping at his sword.
A week passes before he meets her again. They clash as opposing elements are wont to do, and he successfully drives her away this time—or at least he thinks he does—until evening comes and his dreams are filled with images of red hair and strings of gold pearls on a butterfly hairpin.
"Let me guess. That's a cockroach."
"No."
"A grasshopper."
"Alibaba-chan."
"Lobster? Scorpion? Centipede? Spider?"
"Alibaba-chan! It's a butterfly!"
"A what?"
"A butterfly! A crimson swallowtail butterfly!"
He stares. There's no way on earth that thing bears any resemblance to those fragile winged creatures.
"Well," he says, "maybe the paint doesn't like you."
Roughly three-fourths of a year has elapsed since the rebellion when he begins to hallucinate.
He sees lines and lines and red, red lines in the squiggles of color on stretched silk. He can't fathom why even with all the colors in the world at her disposal, she always uses too much red that it's blinding. She mixes every shade with it, frames every outline with it, and it is too strong, too wild and jolts his mind every time.
She asks him to paint camels.
He complies, of course. He dabs patches of yellow and orange for the desert, but the camels don't show up and they both end up drawing flowers. When they're done scrubbing excess muck from their fingers, her canvas is just a few brush strokes away from solid pink and his is bordered with velvet.
"Something's missing," he muses.
"Hmm...needs more red, I guess?"
"Yeah," he agrees, but there's no more of her favorite color.
"Hey, why don't we cut off your hair and stick it there? Bet we can make something cool out of it! I'll get the shears—"
"Alibaba-chan! Don't you dare!"
He considers himself a good swordsman. In the span of a few months, he has learned almost everything Master Sharkkan has to teach him. Performing a full body equip, however, is a different matter. When he summons the flames, there are oranges and traces of yellow but mostly red because he's still too weak to bring out his metal vessel's full potential.
Even she could do it better, he laments. What's wrong with me?
And then he sees her crying and he doesn't think she's weak and resolves not to think of himself as weak since it turns out they're equally sappy crybabies whose skill with the sword is paralleled only by their dire inability to listen to a romance without blushing from head to toe.
"That's what you've been up to all morning?
"Yes. Since there's no guzheng here, and there wasn't much else to do."
"So, you play the guzheng, huh?"
"Mmm-hm. I've been practicing since I was nine."
"And you're good at it?"
"I—"
There it is again, that crimson flush all over. Red, red, red.
"Okay. If ever visit Kou, will you play for me?"
They look at the set of butterfly knots lying before them, the fruit of an afternoon's work. Somehow, Aladdin's request for decorations for Yamuraiha's latest project turned into a competition to see who could make the most knots in one hour.
He never finds out who the winner is. Morgiana declares it a tie, but he doubts she ever bothered to keep count.
"I'm sorry," is all she says when Aladdin comments on the abundance of manservants in the empire. She says nothing more until the seaglass windows of the palace are within sight, and nothing else afterward, but the sharp wrinkles on her brow and the unfocused look marring the brilliance of her eyes are a year's worth of apologies.
Sorry because Kou destroyed your home and once upon a time I would have helped wreck it down too. And you should hate me but you can't even do that because you're too nice for your own good. Sorry because I couldn't stop my brothers, sorry for being part of this, sorry because I couldn't do anything.
He doesn't forgive her because he doesn't need to; he may hate her country and all it stands for, yet he has never had any reason to hate Kougyoku. His eyes are fixed on some weed of a tree that sprung up in the worst of locations, a tree that isn't a mulberry or a peach, and, despite its clusters of flowers and finely patterned leaves, has quite frankly become an eyesore. The only use he knows for this plant is to keep pests away from a fresh harvest, a trick he picked up during his stint as a cart-driver for a corrupt wine merchant.
He hasn't seen Budel in ages. He hasn't visited Balbadd either.
His last memories of the desert involve leading a rebellion and losing his best friend. The rest are a haphazard sequence of events he would rather reminisce in the presence of gray hair and grandchildren; he was a street kid, orphaned, sent to the palace, an exiled prince, then a prince of thieves. He's walked the path a fugitive with nothing of his own except the sword his father entrusted to him and the afterimage of betrayal burned into every ceiling at night. And now he is a certified dungeon conqueror and metal vessel user. Who also, by the way, overthrew the monarchy, got apprenticed to one of Sindria's eight generals, befriended a magi, slapped his brother on the face, taught a princess to make flower bracelets, and yada yada. Lots of stuff.
A smile is on his lips before he realizes, all because of a tree that doesn't even belong in this orchard.
"See those?" He points to the splash of lilac surrounded by tiny green fruit. "They're poisonous," he mumbles, leaning close to the deformed chinaberry branch jutting from the corner. "It doesn't mean they're not beautiful."
He sees it in the rips of banana leaf reproduced on his flaking palm.
He sees it in the flecks in her eyes, burnished copper reflecting on her irises.
His imagination has gone wild, and it's bizarre, it's crazy, it's wrong.
Winning makes you do weird things, he complains to no one in particular, still high on the thrill of saving the world. Because out of all the questions she could ask, it's "Do you know how to charm a snake?" in a voice curious enough to make him relive the life-sapping tentacles that alighted on his torso less than twenty-four hours ago.
A pause. A very long pause.
"Not really. But I bet I could figure it out."
The next part is where he gets killed in battle.
No, the next part is where Kougyoku's oldest brother orders him to get married. And then he gets killed.
He dies.
He dies and he thinks, Sorry, maybe not in this lifetime, fate never intended for me to have kids and a family. Besides, she's probably a goner too.
Well, believe it or not, he gets another lifetime.
Lifetime number two: his mental faculties have upgraded so he has 75 times as many hours to trace imaginary scribbles on the leaves of record books. Some are straight, most are curved loops, and a few suspiciously resemble butterflies.
"Why do you have two handkerchiefs, Alibaba-chan?"
"It's...a habit." So the next time you cry I'll have something better to offer than snot-doused cloth.
He's been doing it for so long that it no longer strikes him as ridiculous that emergency supplies consist of one spare handkerchief so Kougyoku won't smudge the colors on her face with her fingers-since that, according to Her Majesty the Empress's Most Important Royal Adviser, Interim Prime Minister, and Head of Internal Affairs (also known as Ka Koubun), is a national disaster.
He sees it everywhere now, in all the ways that don't make sense. He hears it when she laughs to the tales of his time spent as a tiny yellow saguaro. And when she leans closer to point out a certain phrase on the weekly report, he catches a whiff of more than perfume.
He tries to tune it out, to not think of what he thinks when he sees all these families together, all these lives connected by something weightier than jade rings. He goes running when he spots the silky mane of butterfly-looped hair that could very well be hers, except they aren't the same shade, and he knows this the way he knows fanalis red is not Kougyoku red; truth be told there's no such shade as fanalis red, and the actual color of Kougyoku's hair varies the slightest bit according to the time of day. He wonders why he even manages to notice these things — as if the herculean task of sorting out the tangles of international politics isn't enough to cause his century-old brain rukh to fizzle out for good.
It takes another battle for him to finally understand. In their darkest hour, she drops her weapon and begs for his life. It hits him then that what binds them isn't the tainted chains of the rukh at all. No, it's a color weaving through her flimsy grasp of conscious thought, twisting like an anomaly and he snaps. Try as he might, he can't ignore it. And he doesn't want to, not anymore.
Truth dawns on him, clear as Phoenix's healing glow; he's not the same man he was before his soul departed, it's a different lifetime and if the path he'll take is not the one he thought it would be, then so be it. All the tangles of the past can sort themselves.
For the briefest moment, he wonders if that promise of arranged marriage still stands.
Took you long enough, nature teases him. Or maybe it's just Aladdin's knowing wink.
He tells her a lot of things afterward. Brave things. Silly things. A page of two of badly composed poetry.
He opens his journal and writes, In this story, we are everything. We are the wind and the waves and the salt that binds together. We are the penguins flopping in the oasis. We are the lions of the farthest north.
He's acquainted with these sights because the world he belongs to is changing. It's getting too hot and too cold and he's not exactly fond of the crazy weather extremes of this post-magi era. Someone asks what time of the year it is; she says "haru" and he says "fuyu" and they both don't know who's right and hey, he never used to bother with the passing of seasons anyway.
And then it's autumn and they're surrounded by bronze and amber and topaz and garnet. The fire trees are in bloom and the trees are on fire and Koumei suggests repainting the southern section of the palace with a new coat of scarlet.
And—
"No way! I am never ever ever going to wear red again because the last time I was standing by the doorway, someone thought there was a doll's face hanging on the wall!"
He shakes his head.
Because now it's everywhere...in the fading brilliance of sunset, in the sinewy waves remembering the shore. There's too much red in her life that it's redundant, but then she shares it with him, and between them it goes from absolutely crazy to just right.
''There is a cord that binds - a red string, and through the ups and downs of a lifetime, it may stretch and tangle, but never, ever break."