Disclaimer: I don't own Sengoku Basara or its characters.

A/N: My braintwin, lyrainthedark and I came up with the idea to write complementary Sengoku Basara stories. We are using 100 prompts from the Livejournal community Fanfic100.

To that end, we will write two collections of stories. Hers is called

Loved while mine is called Beloved. Our collections will feature 100 standalone drabbles/one-shots each. Each individual chapter in these collections will have a common theme/premise and prompt, with the chapter itself being our interpretation of that prompt and theme.

We will update at the same time. To properly enjoy our stories, please read both of them together!

Also, Date's Engrish is indicated in bold, and thoughts and stream of consciousness in italics.

Prompt: Beginnings

Premise: Yukimura loses an eye

Nothing.

And the next day, nothing.

And the day after, nothing.

And a week from then, nothing.

Date Masamune glared at the obscenely empty horizon with a baleful blue-grey eye, wind stinging his tear ducts and blurring his vision. Then he trudged home, flung off his armour and swords, and crawled into his futon to glare at the ceiling till exhaustion shut his eye.

But not before he had exhausted every sneering variation of the word "coward" listed in his pet dictionary. In English and Japanese.

Because really, the One-Eyed Dragon had expected the Tiger Cub of Kai to be far more mettlesome than he was proving. Masamune didn't appreciate a challenge that was thrown in his face, and retracted as soon as he turned the heat on.

A tiny sliver of perspective, wedged between Fight-Fight-Fight and Sanada-Sanada-Sanada in his brain, chose to announce its presence with an uncomfortable wriggle and distinctly pointy voice that muttered, "You went too far this time, Dokuganryu."

He shifted, rolling onto his sighted side, trapping himself in darkness as the pillow obscured his field of vision. Perhaps I did, he whispered back to the Kojuurou in his head. But what of it?

"You have ruined the boy's life," the voice poked back.

Bah. Happened to me. I dealt. He'll deal too.

"It appears that he is not, else you would have twin spears carving out your throat this moment."

Damned red coward.

The voice – though it was just a disembodied voice – rolled its eyes at him and retreated into silence.

Oi! Nothing answered. Masamune tried again, a little desperately, Oi! What're you getting at? I didn't...damn it to hell! I didn't ruin his life.

The chilly quiet in his head was a sharp accusation, a demand and a claw in his missing eye. He clapped a hand to the mangled eyelid, pressing down and rubbing to alleviate the phantom pain, wincing when the motion simply pressed his fingers into the empty space in his socket, scratching against the scarred skin within.

"Shit!" Gasping in pain, Masamune dragged himself upright and rushed to the water bowl, dunking his head in the cool liquid.

It had never hurt like that for years, the young lord of Oushuu thought, panicking. It had not hurt at all since the eye had been ripped out and the wound healed over. So why now, he wondered, water dribbling into his ears and clogging his nose as his mouth opened to release a stream of bubbles into the liquid.

Is this the price to pay for my...crime?

He pulled out of the bowl, water plastering his hair to his face, dripping down the lapels of his sleeping yukata. Impossible.

He had committed no crime. The fatalities of war were never crimes. Not on the battlefield – and that was what it had been.

A battle.

And yet...the stillness around grew warmer, angrier.

Masamune cursed and began to dress, the road to Kai etched in his mind.

Sanada Yukimura was having a quiet day.

He could not recall when he had last enjoyed the idyll of a life with days pebbling into one another, round and smooth without disruptions to disturb their tranquility.

He eyed the twin spears of his trade, stacked neatly in a corner of his room, and turned his back on them with a pained shrug.

No one had ever said that peace came without a price. Not that this was the sort of peace he had fought and lost soldiers for. This was simply a punctuation mark, a brief blockade in his otherwise frenetic life, and he was taking the experience much as he handled everything else – a lesson to be learned and carved into memory.

So far, the young tiger of Kai had managed to learn that he was capable of exuding quietude and behaving with reserved dignity. Almost like a man, he mused with a flash of fierce pride, counting the days since Sasuke had last scratched his cheek with an exasperated "My, My!" at the loudly brutal antics of Yukimura and his lord.

About ten days, the youth calculated. That was when the fire had been torn from him, torn by the rough hands of Date Masamune, who had yet to show his face and compensate Yukimura for the disgrace visited upon him. The tiger cub twitched the folds of his brown hakama to align more neatly, a little irritated at the never ending task. But it couldn't be helped, since he was unable to take more than fifteen steps in any direction before falling on his face.

The left side of his face.

The blind side.

The side that now felt the soft touch of calloused fingertips, tracing the bandage that held the wound closed.

Yukimura whirled at the caress, stumbling and keeling over into the firm arms of a blue-clad samurai.

"Date Masamune!" the startled warrior exclaimed, softly enough for his voice to not carry on the summer air. Too late, he remembered his lack of armour and weaponry, his complete helplessness with Sasuke taking a break from acting as bodyguard.

Deciding to throw caution to the winds, Yukimura gave the fury bursting in his chest free reign, driving his fist into his rival's jaw with enough force to shove him to the ground. The sudden loss of support caused him to teeter dangerously towards his left, and a second later he had crashed on top of Masamune.

Which was all very convenient, the enraged young tiger decided. This way he didn't have to worry about falling every time he made a move. The battlefield is even. So he sat up, struggling with the other man before he managed to pin him down with his legs, ignoring the curses and heaves and hapless shoves Masamune directed at him, because he was too intent on mauling the Oushuu chief.

So intent, that he failed to notice the exact moment that Masamune stopped writhing, stopped defending himself from the crushing fists that rained on his face, chest and abdomen. The exact moment when a blow from his left hand dashed his rival's head into a rock, putting him into a dead faint.

Yukimura slammed blow after blow on the inert body of the man who had taken his left eye, unable to feel anything save the pent up rage and despair and helplessness he had been bottling under a calm veneer for the past ten days, and he did not stop till Sasuke returned from his mission and hauled him off a horrifyingly brutalised Masamune.

In the end, they wound up sharing Yukimura's quarters. Takeda Shingen insisted on it with a heavy frown directed at Yukimura, no doubt in disapproval of his unrelenting beat down of a defenceless man.

To add insult to the injury, the Tiger of Kai went a step further and declared that the Dokuganryu would be tended to by none other than his assailant, effectively trapping the two young men in close proximity. Yukimura accepted the punishment with humble grace, as he had always accepted such reprimands, and set about making his rival – no, not my rival, my enemy - more comfortable as he convalesced in unconsciousness. As the days passed, the bruises mottling Masamune's flesh grew lighter and the cracks in his bones began setting, but his eyes remained shut.

Eye, Yukimura reminded himself, reaching out to poke the lid that concealed emptiness. Will mine look the same when I take off these bandages?

He thought it probably would. We shall mirror each other. The idea rose in his head from nowhere, no logical source that he could find, and he snatched his hand back from Masamune's face. Cradling it, Yukimura felt the burn of warm skin on his fingertip, the tingle of flesh that had once been raw and bloody. Curious, he wormed the same finger underneath the bandage on his face and touched his own empty eyelid.

How strange...it really does feel the same.

Emboldened by the lack of pain, Yukimura swiftly undid the white strips and unwound them from his head, feeling the brush of fresh air on his newly-healed missing left eye socket. Grabbing a spear from their slots in the wall, he blinked at his own reflection in the polished metal of its blade – the depressed left eyelid, the right wide open in amazement and grief.

I look...like him.

He didn't, not really – but something about the mutilation on their faces was the same – something he struggled in vain to pin down, despite staring at his face and Masamune's all through the night, into daybreak, when he finally fell asleep in a sprawl over his patient's chest.

Yukimura woke to an even breath stirring his hair, blowing it away from his forehead. Peering up in drowsy disorientation, he found a lone blue-grey eye looking at him steadily.

"Dokuganryu...Date Masamune," he murmured, sitting up and adjusting his haori to cover his chest decently – parading shirtless in armour was one thing, but in the familiarity of his private rooms was quite another – "You are awake."

"I'll say. What'd you do to me, try and bludgeon me to death?"

Yukimura averted his eye in shame, telling himself that he deserved the sarcasm. Whatever Masamune's reason for taking his left eye, it was done in battle and a wound sustained thus ought not to spill over into an off-the-field grudge. "I...humbly apologise for my actions, Dokuganryu. I was overset, and in my -"

"-anger and hurt you couldn't be bothered to think about honour when it was easier to just turn me into a giant slice of meat instead. I get it, kid."

Yukimura lowered his head even more, face burning in humiliation at the calm acceptance in Masamune's voice and words. Why are you being so kind? You did nothing wrong!

As if his brief coma had left him with psychic abilities, Masamune quirked a ruthless smirk at his companion. "I committed a crime, Red. Took what I shouldn't have."

"No!" Yukimura felt compelled to protest, "It was simply a casualty of a fine battle, I should have been more competent with my-"

But Masamune wasn't having it. The need to confess, to spill his biggest nightmare and most secret dream was thrashing in his chest, demanding release. Swift, gratuitous release, so that it could stand between them.

"I wanted it. I wanted you to look – like me. Be like me...look like me. Be my-my equal. You see?"

To break them...

Yukimura eyed him uncomprehendingly. "You took my eye because you felt at a disadvantage during our battles?"

Masamune gave an impatient snort. "As if! You couldn't hope to touch me on your best day and you know it, Sanada Yukimura!" Before the other could lose his temper, he rushed to add, "You look like me, you know."

And promptly snapped his mouth shut in horror at the abysmally tender tone in which those words had escaped. Shit. Shit, damn, shit, shit. Damn. Hell. Shit!

But all the swear-praying in the world couldn't prevent comprehension from dawning in the wide brown eye of Sanada Yukimura, the eye which went impossibly wide as the implications of the tone worked into his brain and told him impossible things and knocked down the iron wall of romantic denial that he had wrapped himself in to remove himself from the awkwardness of dealing with the opposite sex.

Someone, Yukimura thought, dizzy with rushing blood and a thundering sense of belonging, should have warned him about the dangers of such familiarity coming from his own gender.

Or bind them...

And yet, the young warrior reflected as he imbibed the honesty and trepidation in a face that never presented anything but supreme confidence to him, if this had been Sasuke or Maeda Keiji or any other warrior of his acquaintance, his heart would not be pounding in his throat like it planned to run out of his body and right into the pitilessly possessive hands of Date Masamune.

The only thing left to decide then, was if he would let it. He took my eye, Yukimura reminded himself, unable to look past the transgression. I have been crippled – perhaps hopelessly.

But he knew that it was an exaggeration of his fear as soon as he thought it; if Masamune could hone himself into a killing machine under the same handicap, so would he.

But he would, the young Takeda general realised with quietly burgeoning delight, need an instructor. How accommodating of the universe that one should be right beneath him, waiting for his rejection, his anger at the insult of being loved and desired by a man who had maimed him to get the point across.

Carefully meeting Date Masamune's lone, lonely eye, Sanada Yukimura aligned their faces till the line of their gazes matched with mirror-like perfection. Revelling in their mingled breath, the lightning and fire of their acknowledged selves sparking currents of battle-fury and want and need and pure, unfiltered, unshackled adoration between them, Yukimura held the other man's attention. He held it till he could see nothing but himself and the joy of knowing at last that his feelings were not unrequited reflected on Masamune's face. Just as Masamune and the completion of holding the Dokuganryu's affection was sketched on his.

And then he accepted the challenge of loving – and fighting – the greatest claimant on his life, the only claimant on his heart.

It was their beginning.

Please review, and don't forget to read Loved by lyrainthedark!