Chapter Thirty-One – Sweet
"Everything alright?" Sasuke found me standing where Aki had left me. "You seemed lost in thought."
"I'm fine." #spoilernotfine. But as much as I liked Sasuke, he wasn't someone I could confide in about emotional things. Generally, though, he's an easy one to redirect if you ask the right question. "How is your research going?"
"The existence of a second wormhole – or second node – has opened up a fascinating array of potential." He offered to hold the basket – something he never would have done for 'Katsu.' I gave him a look. "Sorry. Originally, I intended to stay here when the Honno-ji wormhole opens, but I have decided to travel back through so I can conduct research with more powerful telescopes."
"Aw, really?" I guess I wasn't the only person here who had some decisions to make. "I'll miss you." I'd known Sasuke longer than most people here, and I'd gotten used to running across him on my travels.
"If my calculations are correct, it should be feasible to come return via Togakushi a few months after that. Theoretically." I'd noticed that the less sure Sasuke was about his theories, the more often he pressed the bridge of his glasses. So far, his hands had stayed away from his nose. "I believe going backward in time will be possible at either location – the problem arises in the other direction, because… well… I'm still working on a few…" And there went the glasses push.
"Theories?"
"Indeed."
We slowly walked back to the castle – as much as I wanted to see Shingen, Aki's words about his attention span had left me rattled enough that I was willing to put off seeing him for a little while longer. We had shared an intense experience in the cave, but now that we were back in "everyday life" I wasn't sure where, or if, I fit into his.
"I know I'm not the most empathetic conversationalist," Sasuke said. "But clearly something happened that upset you. If you do want to talk, I can at least be an open ear and provide an impassive and nonjudgmental face."
Hm, that was true. I could talk about the job thing. "My former employer wants me to come back." I shifted the basket of pastry to my other arm – the reeds were digging into my elbow. "And to be honest, as much as I like it here, I'm not sure I'm needed. Anyone can do this." I gestured to the messages I had retrieved from the drop sites and the basket of sweets.
"Are you considering his offer?" As promised Sasuke looked and sounded completely neutral.
"The man did save my life and spent seven years teaching me how to survive in this era." Aki wasn't much of a warm fuzzy, but deep down, I knew he cared for me.
"Always an important thing – although I hope his survival lessons were less stabby than Kenshin's." Sasuke rubbed his chest and I imagined he was remembering an early lesson in swordplay. Or even this morning's lesson. "Is your former employer aware of your true origins?"
"Until I figured out about you, I hadn't mentioned it to anyone." We reached the front gates of the castle, and sure enough, another pile of messages waited for Shingen. I added them to my stack.
"Ah well, I don't know about your former boss, but it might be a good time to bring it up to your current one," Sasuke said. "Because I-"
Whatever he meant to say was interrupted by a roar from Kenshin, who came stalking around the corner, sword in hand. "Sasuke! I haven't killed you yet today!"
"Ker-vanish!" And Sasuke was gone.
"You!" Kenshin pointed Himetsuru Ichimonji at me (again). "Go visit Shingen before he makes good on his threat to leave his bed and hunt you down."
He acted as if I was avoiding the visit, as if less than two days ago, he hadn't almost decapitated me when I tried to leave my room. But it wasn't like I was going to argue with him. "Um. Ok. Thanks." I ducked under the sword. "I will do that."
Kenshin took off in the direction Sasuke had gone, sword still in the air. I guess his mother never warned him about running with pointy things.
When I arrived at the entry to Shingen's room, he already had a visitor – Chiyome. I'd never seen her out of her lair, but even in this environment, she was imposing, beautiful, and… in her own way, scarier than Kenshin. Something about her always made me feel insignificant. Perhaps because she had managed to become a powerful woman in an era when most were wives and concubines. I didn't exactly want to be her, but I did want to find a way in this world to be something more than what I was.
The two appeared deep in conference over a report, so I hung back. She said something that made him laugh, and I considered turning around and returning later. But the conversation appeared to be over anyway, for Chiyome bowed to him then turned to leave. She stopped short of the door when she saw me hovering there, and ignoring all conventions of personal space, she grabbed my chin in her sharp fingers and stared into my face. "Come see me tomorrow morning." She released me, then strolled away, without any other hint that she recognized me from prior encounters.
Tomorrow morning? What could she want with me?
But that was tomorrow. I shook off my apprehension and turned my attention to Shingen. He was propped against the wall with a pile of cushions. While he looked better than he had the last time I had seen him, he didn't look well. He was pale and that aura of energy that usually surrounded him was muted. "There you are, Devil, and my room is infinitely brighter. What took you so long?"
I held up the basket of sweets as an explanation. The odd thought that the combination of the pastry basket and my red kimono made me feel like Red Hood delivering to her grandmother crossed my mind and I laughed to myself – did that make Shingen the big bad wolf? "As promised, I have dessert for you."
"When you didn't visit, I worried that you were sicker than they told me." He looked me over from head to toe. "You are alright now, though, yes?"
It was typical of him to ask about my health when his own was so precarious. "I was not that sick. Your ally is-" a mother hen. "Overcautious. Though the bigger worry was that my illness would make yours worse." I felt bad enough being the cause of his dunking in the river and the forced overnight in a cold, damp cave.
"Seeing you would have been worth the risk," he grumbled, then held out his hand for the basket. "Well, I'm not turning down sweets."
I dropped his messages on the writing desk, brought him the basket, and-
Whump!
– again, thanks to Shingen, I ended up staring at the ceiling. Shingen had pulled me onto the futon with him… in the process nearly dumping his pastry on the floor. "Careful. It's not like you to endanger your dessert like that."
He looked down at me. "I have my favorites right here. I'll take one of these," he kissed my hand. "And one of these." He kissed my cheek. Then, resting his forehead against mine he said, "Very tasty indeed. I missed you."
He cupped his hands on my face, held me still, and kissed me again, a slow reverent exploration of my mouth that found the banked fire deep in my core and let it burn freely again. The doubts that Aki had raised turned to ash.
Then he stopped, gasping for air, before falling into a coughing fit. I rubbed his back until he caught his breath, knowing there were things worse than doubts lurking out there.
"I am better," he said, "even if that didn't sound like it."
I nodded my agreement, since I knew how bad it had been the morning in the cave. "You said you're always sick."
"To a degree." He lay down and patted the space at his side, and I curled into his embrace. "I will get worse, and then better, but not as well as before. Then I will get worse than the time before, and there will soon be a day when the worse times pile up so high that I will no longer be able to get past them."
God, what was I doing getting wrapped up in another person who was going to leave me – maybe not by choice, but it was going to happen.
"S-soon?" I buried my face against his chest and shut my eyes. I refused be the one to need comfort, not here, not when he was facing the worst. All I could do was hold on tight in the hug and breath in and out the fact that we were here now. That there was a 'now.' This now.
You can't hold on to a moment, but I did my best to seal it into my memory. I could lock inside myself the feeling of being cocooned in his arms. I could hold the warmth, the care. I could imprint in my heart how it felt to have his fingers stroke my cheek, the sensation of his lips brushing across my eyelids, the rhythm of his heart against mine.
"It won't be tomorrow, but I doubt I'll see another Spring." His large hand and the late summer sun warmed the back of my head.
We held on through another moment…
… and another, quiet and still…
… the beam of sunlight moved slowly across the room, illuminating the tiny dust particles in its path.
…then the room's shadows deepened as the sun slipped behind the castle's western wall.
As those moments crept by, I became more aware of the rattle in his throat when he breathed, a sound that refused to let me forget that a moment is finite.
Eventually, he propped his head up on his elbow and tickled my nose with a lock of my own hair. "When you came in, there was something that looked like it made you laugh. What was it?"
Message received – no more talk of serious things. My default mode is to lie. His is to distract. It's amazing we've gotten this far. But if he needed a distraction, I could do that.
"Oh." I gestured to the basket of sweets from the Teahouse. "I was thinking of a folk tale from my… village," I hedged, using the term that Sasuke always used.
"A folk tale? Which one?" He crossed his arms behind his head, clearly expecting to be entertained.
"I doubt you've heard of it," I said. Because the Brothers Grimm haven't been born yet. "Actually we call them fairy tales and they always begin and end the same way."
He rolled his hand in a 'go on' gesture.
I sat up and crossed my legs lotus style, getting ready for story-time mode. "Once upon a time, which is how all fairy tales begin, once upon a time, there was a girl who always wore a red," I paused to think of a substitute for cloak. "Haori, with a red hood." I shook out the red kimono that Mai had made for me.
He caught my hand and kissed it. "It looks lovely on you. I meant to say earlier, but I was struck dumb by the vision of radiant beauty."
I poked his arm. "You've never been struck dumb in your life. You were probably winking at and flirting with your nurses in the middle of your birth." I reclaimed my space in the story. "She was called Red Hood because of her," again, I gestured to the kimono.
"One day, Red Hood entered the forest carrying a basket of sweets," I lifted the sweets basket to the futon. "As a gift for her aged and decrepit grandmother."
"Aged and decrepit?" He frowned so hard that his eyebrows nearly met over the top of his nose. "Devil, I am not liking where this is going."
"Don't worry, you aren't venerable Grandmother in this scenario." I edged the basket closer to him.
He made noise suspiciously like Kenshin's 'hmph,' then dug into the basket. He offered me a choice of them but I shook my head. "All for you… So, Red Hood, skipping through the forest."
He interrupted yet again. "Skipping? Through a forest?"
Geez, he is not easy to tell a story to. I let out a stop-interrupting-me sigh. "It's a fairy tale, Shingen. Little girls in fairy tales skip. Sometimes they dance." And sometimes they get awakened after 100 years of sleep by the kiss of a prince, but let's not distract ourselves here. "And in the forest, she happened to meet a wolf."
"As you do in the forest in, as you called it, a fairy tale." He picked up a bun and popped it whole into his mouth.
"Right. The wolf asked her where she was going, and since Red Hood was innocent and naïve, and ok, basically stupid, she said, I'm going to bring this basket of goodies to my grandmama who is bedridden. And the wolf said, 'that's interesting, have a lovely visit,' and she went on her way."
"He let her go – just like that?" Shingen slanted a wink at me, licked red bean paste off his fingers and I ended up distracted anyway. "That's a rather uncharacteristic wolf."
I gave him my best 'library lady' look. He returned it with a heated glance. Ha! Now, who is distracted. "This particular wolf in this particular fairy tale was strategic. And sneaky. And so, he took a short cut and got to her grandmother's house first, jumped through the window, pounced on grandmother, and swallowed her whole."
Shingen paused with another pastry halfway to his mouth. "That took a dark turn. This is intended to be a story for children?"
"Hm, I think it's supposed to scare them into good behavior – good little girls don't talk to wolves in the woods, or –" I poked him again. "Tigers in the moonlight or bad things will happen."
"Oh, very good things will happen to girls who talk to tigers in the moonlight." He put his arm around me and kissed my neck in the very best of wolf, er, tiger fashion. "Is that the end?"
I shook my head. "No, the wolf put on grandmother's clothes, got into her bed, and when Red Hood showed up, the wolf pretended to be grandmother."
"Previous criticism about the intelligence of the wolf is withdrawn." Shingen reached over me to put the basket away. "I take it Red Hood didn't run screaming into the night?"
"No, she said, 'oh my, grandmama, what big eyes you have!' And the wolf said, 'the better to see you with my dear.' Then Red Hood said 'my, grandmama what big ears you have,' and the wolf said, 'the better to hear you with, my dear.'"
And here came that wicked grin. Yeah, he saw where this was going.
I continued, "My, grandmama, what big hands you have."
Shingen took my hand in his, taking a moment to measure the large span of his hand against my much smaller one. "The better to touch you with."
"My, grandmama, what big teeth you—" was all I could get out before Shingen started nibbling on the pad of my thumb.
"The better to eat you with." He jokingly nommed his way up my arm, then sat back. "Well, then what? Oh, grandmama, what a big-"
I couldn't hold in my laughter. "No, it's a children's tale!" Although, I imagined that there likely was a pornographic version out that that asked that very question (internet rule 34). "Actually she was rescued by a friendly hunter… but in this case, I'm more than happy to let the wolf win."
"No friendly hunters allowed," Shingen agreed as he grabbed me, and flopped backward, letting gravity pull us both to the bed.
Which is of course, with perfect (ly bad) timing, Yukimura came in to check on Shingen.
Don't laugh, don't laugh, I thought to myself, a task made more difficult when Shingen muttered something rude in my ear pertaining to certain activities being blocked by friendly hunters.
Feeling like I'd just been caught by my mother, I scooted off Shingen, and combed my fingers through my hair.
Yukimura got instantly blushy (I felt that way myself). "Oh. I. Sorry. You. This. What's?" He scrubbed his hands through his hair then said, "You are supposed to be resting."
I edged further away, but Shingen didn't let me get far. His attitude was all very casual, as if he always conducted conversations with his vassals while at the same time consorting with a woman in his bed. Which… maybe he did. "I am resting. Katsu brought me something to eat, and she's been entertaining me-"
Yuki looked away with another blush.
"-by telling me children's stories from her village." Shingen relaxed back against the cushion again. "Rather bloodthirsty tales – I'm not surprised you turned out so fierce, Devil."
"And I didn't even tell you the one where the friendly hunter had to cut off the girl's feet," I said. "In any case, I should let you rest, and I want some time on the archery field before the sunlight is completely gone."
I started to get up, but Shingen grabbed my hand and pulled me back. "Come back after dark then."
It seemed a little too soon after Shingen's acute illness to be planning 'after dark' activities. "To say goodnight, yes, but I agree with Yuki in that you ought to be resting."
"I will rest better if you are here. As much as it pains me to admit it, I'm not up for anything more than sleep, yet, but with you in my arms, I'm sure my dreams will be sweeter." He gave my hand a squeeze.
"I'll stop by later," was all that I would promise. But for the moment, I did need some alone time. I bowed to them both and headed for the door.
Shingen called after me. "Is that how they all end? A friendly hunter comes in and saves the day?"
I paused, half in and half out of the door. "What?"
"You said these stories all start and end the same. If the beginning is once upon a time, what's the ending?" In the fading daylight, his face was shadowed, with deep lines of exhaustion carved in his skin.
They lived happily ever after.
I pasted a smile on my face. "Foolish children learn their lesson, good triumphs over evil."