Re:

Chapter Three: Re: Connecting

Characters/Pairing: Kojuurou and Masamune, eventual Kojuurou/Masamune
Rating: PG
Words: 2709
Summary: Kojuurou and Masamune find each other again. Four hundred years late.

Memories are like tangled knots, crossing over each other and tangling into a ball of string. They can't be untied, for there's no end, no beginning – one leads to another, the second to third, the third to fourth. Slowly, hands can only try to sieve through the threads, pushing some away to uncover the ones at the very bottom, to find at least something to grasp onto and tug on it. Tug-pull-tug until the rest shows themselves, poking shy heads above the mass with tiny waving fingers to lead outwards, as if out of the Labyrinth itself.

And yet the exit can never be found. He can only stumble forward, following that string until he feels like he's .net/story/story_edit_?storyid=5879884ning and has to stop to breathe.

This is the string he has uncovered:

Hikaru remembers deaths.

He remembers his own death, suddenly, with the clarity as if it happened mere seconds before. He had died, by his own blade as it pierced through his own skin, cutting through it and feeling himself almost entirely drowned by the red-hot pain that overwhelms him entirely. Yet he still feels the cold of the sword against his neck, and the sudden sense of complete blankness. That feeling of death, of disappearance, of the emptiness of feeling. As if nothing exists any longer.

Death is as familiar to him as the weight of a sword in his hand; as the scrape of the rough hilt against the calluses of his skin. He had not experienced either but he knows them nonetheless, the knowledge sinking into his mind like each inhale of cool air seeping into his lungs, and Hikaru mourns the deaths that he has both witnessed and has not seen. Things he remembers the feel and smell and sound and sight of, yet has never experienced.

(the fire the smiles the battle and that one frozen second when he had jumped in but it's far too late, and there was blood everywhere, far worse than in a battlefield because this was his Lord's blood, Masamune's blood and—)

-x-

Matsuda Tohru.

Hikaru can't help but blink, lips parting as though to say that it's not true, to tell his Lord to stop joking, because his name is Date Masamune- isn't it? But though Hikaru knows Masamune to be Masamune, he knows that 'Tohru' is the name that the world will know him by. Just like 'Hikaru' is the name that the world knows him by.

And yet- what a common name for a man who is far from common. Hikaru feels laughter bubbling at the back of his throat because of just how wrong that name is for a man like Masamune, a man who is far from quiet and who is made to conquer the world. For his Lord, this is too plain a name.

The irony does not escape him. That they seem to have not changed, and yet the names that they have here are so terribly different. Masamune had always declared himself to be Date Masamune, as the One-Eyed Dragon, names that he had been given and which he accepted as his due just as Kojuurou had always seen himself to be his Right Eye, as Kojuurou. Those were their names, words and letters that they had claimed and made into their own.

Here, they are given ill-fitting labels that they can't change; that the world had given them a long time ago, despite their wishes.

"Suzuki Hikaru," he says, reaching out and squeezing his Lord's hand, hard. The skin of Masamune's hand is soft, without the usual hard calluses he had a lifetime ago; calluses bred from constantly holding, training and fighting with his swords.

"Please take care of me."

It's strange, to think that he doesn't fit this body, this name. That he is an entirely different person than he had been a month and a moment ago. Even more strangely...

He wants to be Kojuurou far more than he wants to be Hikaru.

-x-

"Where are you headed? I'll go with you," Tohru stands up, sitting back onto the chair and pulling Kojuurou back up. Kojuurou stands at the same moment as Tohru tugs, the momentum pushing him gently onto the seat.

They still move together in perfect tandem. Tohru can't help but grin at that, bumping shoulders with Kojuurou.

"I'm going home," Kojuurou says, letting his hands fall to his lap even as he bumps him back. "I'm afraid that my life so far has been dreadfully boring without you, Masamune-sama."

Tohru snorts, shrugging as he crosses his arms, leaning back against the chair. "Then I'll just have to make it interesting for you again. Easy enough."

And Tohru can still see, easy as anything, the darkness in Kojuurou's eyes, as if he's being haunted. Kojuurou has always been stupid this way, dwelling too much on the past when all Tohru—all Masamune—wants to do is to live fully in the present and charge forward to the future. He can change those, and he can't change the past.

"I'll be deeply thankful," Kojuurou says, and there's a dry note in his voice that makes Tohru grin at the familiarity of it. He reaches out and punches Kojuurou in the shoulder. Kojuurou catches his hand and shakes his head, continuing, "My apartment is only a few stops away, but... weren't you already headed elsewhere?"

Shrugging, Tohru pulls his hand out of Kojuurou's grasp, waving it entirely casually. "On my way to cram school, but it doesn't matter. Nothing I can't skip again. No problem. I'd rather follow you home."

Out of the corner of Tohru's eyes, he sees the a few of the girls on the opposite aisle widen their eyes, then turn around and giggle amongst themselves. He rolls his eyes. Women. They used to be much simpler four hundred years ago – they didn't come near him because he was 'scary', and he left all the arrangements for marriage to Kojuurou and the clan elders to deal with. He was too busy trying to conquer Japan to think about settling down to have a wife and children.

Date Masamune didn't marry, in the end. Dying far too soon will do that to a person, he supposes, but he has no regrets.

"If that is the attitude you have with your studies, Tohru-san, then perhaps I should tutor you to make sure that you do well," Kojuurou's voice cuts through Tohru's thoughts, and he shakes his head, bumping against the older man again.

"You mean that? I'm a troublesome student, Kojuurou," Tohru's grin widens even further, and strangely enough the girls' giggles rise in volume as well. He ignores them.

"I know," Kojuurou says, a small, wistful smile at the edge of his lips. "I may be four hundred years older, my Lord, but I'm sure that I can keep up with you still."

"You've got a deal. Learning from you beats the hell out of going to cram school." Kojuurou is far more interesting, for one thing. For another...Masamune had learnt everything worth learning from him, and Kojuurou has always been the one person who knows precisely how to make him learn and the make sure the lessons aren't boring.

"Please take care of me, Suzuki-sensei."

Kojuurou ducks his head down, laughing more than a little sheepishly, "I will do my best to be worthy of that honourific. But I am not yet a teacher, Masamune-sama- so for now, 'Kojuurou' will have to do."

"Too stiff. You taught me all I know, unless your skills have dulled in four hundred years?"

Kojuurou raises an eyebrow, obviously not taking up the bait.

"You'll just have to see it for yourself, Masamune-sama."

-x-

Historians have said that the tomb of Date Masamune is one of the best-made in Japan. It is not a large one – Masamune had not managed to conquer many provinces and expand his territory as much as he could have in his short twenty-two years of living – but it is certainly sizeable, larger than the majority of minor warlords'.

For he wasn't anywhere near 'minor'. Not to Kojuurou; not to his people.

Masamune deserved nothing but the best, and though everyone knew that such a move might drain the Date coffers, no one spoke a single word against giving the best tomb that they could afford. Masamune was a great leader, loved and respected by the men. They had always fought so hard for him and been entirely willing to die for him because his very presence had always been an inspiration for them.

His people loved him. There had been no shortage for funds, because even the peasants had tried to contribute all they could. Kojuurou hadn't even needed to ask – they simply gave all they could.

But Yoshihime did not contribute a single cent, and Kojuurou did not ask her to. Masamune's life would be celebrated and the loss of it mourned by the people who loved him and who still loves him even after he died. If his mother chose to still hold her grudge against him even after his death, she would not even be allowed into the tomb, much less given a chance to hold a stake in it.

Shigezane, chosen to be the next Date Lord by Kojuurou himself as the highest ranked who had the Date blood in his veins, will make sure of that. The boy had tried to resist the position at first, citing Kojuurou to be the best choice for he knows Masamune the best, and he knows the Date the best.

But a Right Eye cannot survive without a One-Eyed Dragon. Kojuurou was not alive any longer; he had died with Masamune in that one instance when he didn't manage to jump in to save him. Now he lived only as a remnant, to take care of Masamune's affairs and to make sure that his Lord had a proper place to rest after his last great battle.

(Kojuurou does not know this, but Hikaru does:

After Kojuurou's own death, Shigezane had buried him˴ in the tomb together with Masamune, saying that a Dragon and his Right Eye should never be parted, even in death.

The Date troops were in the end conquered by the Sanada, and joined their new masters to side with Ishida Mitsunari in the fight against the Tokugawa in Sekigahara. When Tokugawa rose triumphant in the battle, Date Shigezane's lands were stripped to merely ten thousand koku, mere pittance compared to what Masamune could have, would have, and should have achieved.

Hikaru also knows this:

It was- is his fault. Kojuurou should have died that day.

Not Masamune.)

-x-

Tohru can't help but laugh again at that, feeling the sound gather at the base of his throat, bubbling outwards. There's something terribly natural about laughing this way with Kojuurou as they sit with each other, shoulder against shoulder, swaying slightly as their skin brushing with every gentle jerk of the train as it moves. With anyone else, Tohru will have already been glaring, warning them away because he hates being touched; has hated it even since he remembers being Masamune. Has hated it all simply because it reminds him that he's in this world, in this too-crowded world where a dragon can't even spread his wings properly.

Masamune was used to wide open fields; used to seeing the skies when he looked upwards – the sky that he always promises himself that he will conquer. But Tohru grew up in the world where the skies have long been conquered by too-tall buildings, when all the open fields in the world haves been taken over by blocks and blocks of concrete. He has grown up knowing that there's no place that he can make his own, no territory that he can conquer.

From birth he has been confined within boxes, wings taped down and clipped, claws covered and fangs muzzled. There is no longer a place for a conqueror, and Masamune has been one for as long as he can remember – first conquering the disease that took his eye, then his family, then the whole of Oushuu before moving fast downwards until half of the north of Japan is for him to take – yet in this world he has to bow his head down and pretend that he is not a dragon.

Tohru has been giving up on Masamune for a long time. He knows that is who he wishes badly to be. He knows that is who he's meant to be. Yet he's four hundred years too late and died far too early. There is no one who knows about Masamune; who will not call Tohru insane for remembering that one life with such clarity.

But Kojuurou is here, and he remembers. There are so many discrepancies between Suzuki Hikaru and Masamune's Right Eye, but Tohru knows that though Kojuurou's face is now unadorned by a scar and his own eyepatch is no longer a tsuba, they are still the same people.

They have to be. If not, Kojuurou wouldn't have called that name so breathily, so desperately, as if his soul and sanity was hung upon those syllables.

And Tohru can't help but reach out again, poking Kojuurou's cheek, trying to shake the obvious sorrow in the older man's eyes. He doesn't know what Kojuurou is thinking about and he doesn't want to know, because it's not important. Kojuurou is probably thinking of the past, and Tohru has forcibly stopped himself from thinking of the same thing years ago.

Because he can never return to that age; neither of them can. He will always have to sign his name as 'Matsuda Tohru' instead of 'Date Masamune'. Yet he thinks that it doesn't matter, at this point, because he will never forget Masamune, especially not that now he has Kojuurou here, a constant reminder. A voice that always calls him by that name.

"Come on, Kojuurou. Don't give me that face," and his gaze is fierce upon the older man as he grips onto Kojuurou's chin, pulling him forward so their eyes are inches from each other.

Kojuurou sighs, his hand closing around Masamune's wrist. There's still that look, but it's hidden now, as if shoved to the back of Kojuurou's head and an almost-sincere smile used to cover it. "I'm sorry, my Lord – my mind had wandered."

Tohru snorts, crossing his arms and leaning against the glass pane beside his seat. "Told you to not think about the past already. I'm here now. So make full use of it."

That smile broadens and Kojuurou ducks his head, laughing quietly. There is something terribly genuine in that sound, and Tohru thinks—ah, he hasn't lost his touch even after so long. He can still read Kojuurou better than anyone else. Not as well as Kojuurou can read him, but that's already a given.

"I intend to, Masamune-sama," Kojuurou says, and bumps his shoulder lightly against Tohru's.

-x-

Kojuurou remembers the weight of Masamune's body in his arms. The stiffness, the way Masamune's weight sank completely onto him in a way that would never happen if he was alive, because his Lord was always far too prideful to ever depend on him so completely.

He could hear the cries of the men behind him, the quiet, broken little sounds of grown warriors trying to stifle their sobs. Kojuurou wanted to tell them to grieve all they wanted, to forget pride and propriety and dignity and wail for the best leader they had ever had, that they would ever have.

Yet he couldn't grieve so loudly and openly either. The weight of it crushed down on him, pressing against his throat and strangling his lungs and he couldn't even breathe properly now, much less weep. It was a grief so strong that Kojuurou had no way to express it, no way to even know it, for it had him so entirely in his thrall that he had no way of thinking of an escape.

In fact, he couldn't even think at all. He was so numb that his emotions seemed to have slaughtered themselves, and all he knew was the weight of the corpse in his arms.

His Lord.

Masamune was dead.

TBC