Someday Never Came
A single pair of sandals at the door.
Rows of books and scrolls neatly lined up on the shelves.
Her father's favorite tea leaves sitting on the kitchen counter untouched.
They all continue to remind her that he's been gone for weeks.
Their home was a modest size. But in his absence it becomes too spacious, too cold, too quiet. Chizuru could silently bear that in the wait for his letters, in her continuous efforts to maintain their home just the way he remembered it before he left. But when several more weeks passed by and his letters slowly trickled away into pure silence, it's then that the loneliness finally sinks in and takes hold of her.
Before recklessly charging into the unfamiliar streets of Kyoto on her own, before cowering from red-eyed demons and their equally dripping red swords, she'd already been afraid.
Some money-hungry tyrant is keeping her father prisoner.
Some incurable, terrible, foreign disease has pinned him down to his bed and is draining his hourglass away.
Or worst, some dangerous ronin — the kind she had been warned to stay away from — has murdered him, leaving his corpse to rot on the streets.
Chizuru had always been one to worry herself over the most terrible possibilities she could think of when it came to the people she loved.
But even when she's held a prisoner herself, she never stopped thinking about him.
Someday, somehow, they could still go back to those peaceful days before… before all of this.
And even though there were murderers and would-be kidnappers all around her, it was that thin, fragile hope that kept her going.
In the beginning, there were only two things that she could trust — the fact that her father was somewhere out there alive and the promise that she will be killed if she was deemed a threat to the Shinsengumi, no matter what her gender was.
She didn't know what to think of them.
They were supposedly men who could cut down one of their own. They could cut down even demons…. while some of them seemed demon-like as well. But even they needed to eat and sleep. Even they were capable of smiling and laughing and bleeding just like everyone else.
The days when she hid away in her room were slowly becoming a distant past, but she still didn't feel like one of them. The taboo subjects, the thin eggshells she had to avoid, they didn't feel like home.
Home was sitting out on a porch on a chilly spring night, sitting side by side and sharing a pot of warm of tea together. It was naming the plants in their backyard and getting a pat on the head for every medical use she could list off the top of her head. Home was a man with a warm heart, a kind smile, and rough, overworked hands that would give her simple birthday gifts — like the red tie in her hair or a floral-patterned handkerchief — girlish things to make up for his inability to fill in the shoes of a mother. Then the shared smiles and silent thanks you for being born.
And yet today would be the first birthday she'd spend with not her father, but with a silent guard at her door.
It hit her hard then, seeped deeply into her skin like the pouring rain, that it has truly been a year since he has gone missing.
It's been a year since she ran all the way over to this city with just the clothes on her back, worrying that maybe he had died.
It's been a year and there's still no sign of him anywhere.
She looked upwards towards the cloudy skies and let the rain drip down her cheeks and chin. And perhaps it was the cold, but her fingers and her shoulders were shaking and shivering.
Saitou said nothing, as usual, and for once she's grateful.
The next day she had somehow made it back to her futon, warm and tucked in.
"Thank you," she quietly told him later during their patrol through through the streets.
He was silent, but she smiled all the same.
She didn't know when or how it happened, simply that it had. But she started thinking… perhaps a semblance of those peaceful days have come back into her life.
Suddenly, Sannan's on the floor clutching at his head, hair bleeding of color and eyes glaring red. There's a vial on the floor at his knees and an accusation that her father had created this monstrosity on his lips.
Suddenly, nothing makes sense anymore.
One of the things she feared was the components to her father's… creation. A volatile substance that could deconstruct a man from the inside— catabolize the logic and the ego that constitutes his identity and erode the dreams and the moral fibers of his heart, all so that something resembling a living creature is injected into that empty shell.
Something like that couldn't possibly come from the realm of humans, she had thought once. But they were soon blown away by hellfire and gunshots. Still… the words that she had heard once from Kazama, words she had tried so desperately to deny, would occasionally taunt her in the back of her mind.
Power to crush a man's bones with one's bare fists and speed faster than the wind, they were things she had to see to believe. But the way that even the deepest of wounds would seal themselves up in the matter of hours… that was something she knew all too well.
Could it be… that her father had already calculated the formulas to his terrible creation long before his departure to Kyoto?
Could it be… that one of the components to the ochimizu was her own blood…?
For a while, she couldn't look Sannan or Heisuke in the eyes without feeling directly responsible for the curses that ruined their lives.
Much, much later, when the Shinsengumi she knew broke into fragments and scattered in the wind, she'd leave Saitou's side and return home to investigate any clues for a cure. She'd learn that that is not the case. Relief gives away to the hollow worthlessness that settles in. She was not the cause of their misfortune. But at the same time, there was nothing else Koudou's daughter could offer to help them. All she could do was watch them from afar and do her best not to get in the way.
Useless…
There was a rumor that he was working with the enemy.
The man who cared for his patients with a careful tenderness… the man who would sternly scold her whenever she made a misstep… was working with those people…? Even with all of the terrible things he was responsible for, at the very least, she wanted to believe that it was never of his own free will.
When a person has become absent in her life for so long, it was easy to fictionalize him, to build myths under his name. It was easy to paint him over in all sorts of colors in a misguided attempt to mentally recreate his presence, to preserve whatever that was left of him in her memories.
Because as it was, another birthday has passed and he was still not here.
She has slowly gotten used to the fact.
Slowly, she began to wonder if he was even looking for her.
If he ever did at all.
News of her whereabouts shouldn't be that difficult to reach him. Not where the Shinsengumi was involved. It certainly never deterred Kazama and his kin.
Her father's face was slowing blurring. His voice an echo in her ears. He's becoming more and more of a ghost and despite all of her chasing he's nowhere in sight.
Slowly, she started to believe he had abandoned her.
Part of her was desperately hoping that her father's actions were the result of a spell some malevolent magician has cursed him with. The other part is resigned, that the kind man in her memories was simply a magician's illusion.
When Osen tells her about the demon blood running in her veins, she's not surprised.
Not really.
She's always known she wasn't… normal… the moment her father sealed her lips with the promise of keeping it all a secret. She just didn't want to acknowledge the lonely truth… didn't want to admit to herself that she's the monster in those stories told to children. The same as Kazama's group. The same as the ones who had hurt the men she had grown to see as a second home. As if she could somehow bend that reality and turn denials into a truth.
But now she was older.
Now she has to accept this unconditionally and put it behind her. She could barely keep up her weight as it was to allow something like this to bring her down even more. There were too many other things to do, too many fights to worry about.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, she must've forgotten how to pretend to be human, because she couldn't find it in herself to cry anymore.
Distantly, Chizuru wondered just how many more secrets he was keeping from her.