Author's note: Again, this fic contains references to physical abuse, torture, and rape. This chapter also includes implications of mental insanity. Do not read if these things disturb or offend you.
Oushuu is a province with many beautiful things. The trees, the rivers, the farms. It's spring, just heading into summer, and the crops are growing well already. It promises to be a good harvest, and now that the time of war is behind the country, everyone looks forward to the new season and the new time.
The people are happy under their lord, young as he may be, and they prosper and grow underneath his eye. They are happy, peaceful, and above all... completely oblivious to the goings on under the castle. In a cellar, in a hatch, there is a set of stairs that leads to a room that none would ever thought would be used in Masamune's lifetime.
In his cell, far removed from the life of the fields and the sun, Yukimura has no idea how much time has passed. He probably never will.
All he knows is that the darkness, the stifling heat, and oppressive loneliness of his captivity is occasionally broken up by the arrival of the man he once deemed his most esteemed rival. Date Masamune, the fierce warlord of the north, who once made Yukimura's heart jump at every sight of him.
Now, Yukimura's heart jumps for a different reason.
It is anger, shame, and indignation. At the knowledge that Masamune will not deal him the mercy strike to end their rivalry and his life. That he's forced to swallow food more readily now, Masamune waiting sometimes for agonisingly long times in too-small cell, using everything he can stomach to 'persuade' Yukimura into doing what he wants. That when all else fails and Masamune is angry, Yukimura's forced and taken until one of them loses that particular battle, until Yukimura is left so raw that he can't feel anything but that burning sensation and numbness, until he can't even think except for those words that are repeated so harshly into his ear. He doesn't cry, he tries not to scream, he refuses to let him win over him even with something as simple as those base, instinctive acts.
Again and again and again.
Each time he vists, he brings more pain and shame and anger to Yukimura. And each time, Yukimura feels no fear. In his mind (what little may remain of it), there is nothing to fear from this man once known as his rival. Even the humiliation that he endures time and time again, in so many different forms, is not frightening, it is angering.
Those times are easy.
It is the darkness, the lack of knowing, that Yukimura finds himself fearing. When he's left to his injuries and his wounds and the cracks he can feel forming in his mind, and there's nothing to let him know that he still lives but the pain he feels with each movement. He doesn't know when he dreams and when he wakes, save for that pain. Pain is nothing new to him. He lived and thrived on pain, because it was his glorious lord Takeda Shingen's greatest lesson.
The mental pain of being beaten, of being used and treated as something less than living, is new. Every day, Yukimura adjusts a little more to the pain of his raw back, or to the pain in his wrists from the chains cutting into them, or to that feeling (that shameful feeling he hates more than anything because this is something he has never experienced before) between his legs every time Masamune leaves his cell.
It pushes and taps and beats against the cracks already forming in his mind each time Date Masamune visits him, and sometimes Yukimura imagines he can hear an audible shatter in his ears, alongside voices he knows cannot be there.
Takeda Shingen, long dead, expressing his disapproval that Yukimura has allowed himself to be captured in such a way. How weak he is. How stupid he is. 'I taught you about strategy,' Shingen berates him. 'I taught you how to be strong. And this is how you end up. I am disappointed.' And Yukimura tries not to cry, because he knows this isn't real, even if perhaps his lord is just across the Sanzu River saying those very words.
Sarutobi Sasuke, whom Yukimura witnessed being slayed before his very eyes. 'Danna, I told you to run!' Sasuke's form says, though Yukimura is not sure how he can speak with his head nearly-severed by a soldier's sword. 'If you hadn't charged back into battle like that, my death wouldn't have been in vain.' He points out, and Yukimura knows that even this spectral, imaginary version of Sasuke was as right as ever and he agrees and asks forgiveness and another chance.
Slowly but surely, Sanada Yukimura is going insane.
He hears voices.
Yukimura is pulled away from a conversation with his son - his son's head, the last he had seen of him before he'd been dragged away from the battlefield, and the six coins of the Sanada crest are still around that severed neck somehow - by that uncomfortable sound of voices. Squirming into a sitting position, Yukimura stares at the door and waits for it to open.
Though he braces himself each time, the sudden flood of light against his face and into his eyes always makes him wince and turn away. There are... two figures in the light, he realises as his eyes adjust painfully. Two...? Had Date-dono brought an accomplice, now?
"--smells terrible," he hears one of the men muttered in distaste, almost gagging at the smell of filth wafting from the door.
"Then cover your mouth," the other replies in an irritated, dry tone and Yukimura recognizes those voices now. They are different than the ones he hears daily, hourly, and he's apprehensive now (a new feeling). What could Maeda Keiji and Katakura Kojuurou want with him?
His throat is raw, sore, and dry but he manages to speak. "Katakura-dono. Maeda-dono. I, Yukimura, welcome you."
"Save your words," is Katakura's reply. He steps into the cell, and Yukimura hears the smooth sound of a sword being drawn. His heart leaps. Could he finally find release after so long? To think, that the Right Eye of the Dragon would be defying his lord's orders in such a way - twisted as they may have become under the strain of shame and Yukimura's defiance - but it is true, that the man is always looking out for the best interests of his lord. Surely the man that Date-dono becomes each time he visits Yukimura is not the type of man that Katakura wants him to be.
But Yukimura's heart falls just as quickly when he sees Maeda Keiji grab the other man's wrist. "You can't kill him! Look at him."
"It is for that reason, Maeda, that we must set him free." A mercy killing, then. Dishonourable, but for what he has become, it is the best that Yukimura could hope for... a thought that makes him laugh. Where once before he had been prepared to fall in battle, his fate hangs between these two men. How odd the world could be, sometimes!
"No," Maeda Keiji is a pacifist, Yukimura remembers suddenly. Even on the rare times the man had fought on the battlefield, he had never inflicted mortal wounds. This makes Yukimura angry all over again. "We can help him. I'm not letting you..."
Yukimura drowns their words out as he pulls at his chains and his wounds cry out in protest. They're arguing over his fate, as though his life is in their hands. It is offensive to his very being!
"I, Yukimura, am not afraid to die." Yukimura says and while he's afraid at first that it may be too quiet for the men to hear, they both turn to look at him. Or at least, they both look at what's left of him.
"Migime," Maeda Keiji speaks in a strange tone. "This isn't..."
He is cut off by a flash of the sword and Yukimura's sudden scream of surprised pain.
Katakura Kojuurou has cut off Yukimura's arm. The broken one, that had always hung useless at his side and served as nothing more than dead weight and reminder of his shame. Whimpering at pain he hadn't felt since the day it was broken, Yukimura curls into himself, flinching away from even Maeda Keiji's frantic-but-gentle touch as the man tries to staunch the flow of blood, wrapping a length of rag tightly around what's left.
The sword is put away.
"Leave that behind, then." Katakura Kojuurou is even more cruel than his lord. "Get him out of here and then let him die. Just get him far away from Oushuu and my lord. I will see if he accepts that... offering. " He has the key to the chains that still bond Yukimura's right arm, and Yukimura feels the weight of them lift away.
Pain seeps into the cracks of his mind like smoke, leaving a red haze that soon pulls him into a blessed and cool darkness.
A darkness, that unlike his long weeks in his cell, is blessedly quiet.
Coolness turns into warmth, a natural and soft warmth Yukimura hasn't expected in what seems like forever. Confused, he tries to open his eyes. While of course he had never seen the River, he had always imagined that it would never be this warm! It feels like... the sun.
It is the sun.
Yukimura feels the warmth of the sun on his skin and over his face. It burns slightly on exposed wounds, but as he wakes up a little more, he realises that he's been dressed in something slightly more respectable than rags. His skin is clean, though still covered in bruises and cuts, and perhaps mostly surprisingly at all, there is another, greater, harder heat against his back. Yukimura tries to shift around to see.
"You're awake," he hears a voice very close to his ear.
Maeda Keiji, then. Was he, perhaps, delivering Yukimura to his rightful place? Yukimura attempts to speak, but his mouth and throat are full of cotton. He coughs, instead.
Maeda Keiji makes him drink.
"We're out of Oushuu," the man supplies helpfully as Yukimura finds himself gulping mouthfuls of water down from a waterskin. He needs the water in order to clear his throat and mouth so he can speak, so he can yell and request to be allowed to die like a warrior. "I washed you in a stream, so hopefully you won't smell so badly anymore. You still look terrible." Maeda Keiji continues to babble on as Yukimura gathers his bearings.
They're on a horse - Matsukaze. Yukimura remembers hearing stories about Keiji's magnificent horse - and Yukimura is strapped into the saddle. Keiji continues to speak as Yukimura wakes fully. He'd travelled to Oushuu to deliver documents ("You know, it's very boring being trapped in one place all the time" he says, and Yukimura thinks that the man has no idea what he's talking about.), and while Masamune had been reluctant to see him, they'd eventually gotten him drunk and to sleep. It was then that Keiji had followed Katakura Kojuurou down into a hidden cellar and they'd found Yukimura. "I couldn't let him kill you, not like that. He's given you to me to take care." Keiji finishes, and Yukimura feels as though his throat is wet enough to speak.
"Maeda-dono, grant me what I am owed as a warrior." Is Yukimura's first sentence to the other man. Though he can't see Maeda-dono's face, Yukimura can feel a slight shift in the tension of his body, as though he's becoming angry. Yukimura welcomes his anger; he doubts it would be anything like the anger he has felt in the past weeks (months?).
"You're not a warrior anymore," Keiji simply points out in a flat tone, and though Yukimura opens his mouth to argue, he has to agree that the man is right. Sanada Yukimura is not a warrior any longer. He is less than whole, in more ways than one.
He doesn't even have his fee for the river ferry.
From Maeda Keiji, Yukimura learns that they have long left the province of Oushuu. Katakura Kojuurou will attempt to delay the release of Date's forces for as long as he can. They are heading toward Echigo, where Uesugi Kenshin lives and whom Keiji still serves.
Yukimura feels ashamed. His lord's rival would see him in such a state! Were his legs not so atrophied from the long confinement, his body not so off-balanced by the loss on one side, he might have tried to slip away in those few moments the man wasn't looking.
But Maeda-dono is steadfast in his convictions. In just a few days time, Yukimura is handed off to servants of the Uesugi warlord for greater care than Keiji can give him on the road. Yukimura, despite his pride and stubbornness, begs and pleads for them not to allow Uesugi Kenshin to see him.
Kenshin sends Kasuga instead.
"Kasuga-dono," Yukimura says with the greatest regret when she bows before him. "I, Yukimura, regret to inform you that your fiancé Sasuke has passed away."
Though she looks briefly angry, Kasuga-dono accepts the news, even if she bites her lip bloody.
They ask him to stay - no, they make him stay. "Kenshin-sama says that he knows Takeda-dono would do the same had I fallen into the hands of the enemy," Kasuga finally persuades Yukimura, and though he wishes they would give him the respect he found himself desperately craving, he finally caves in at the mention of his lord. Surely, surely Uesugi Kenshin, the man who understood Takeda Shingen like no other, was doing the right thing.
For the first time since that battle so long ago, Yukimura allows himself to truly feel hope.
It's a fragile, tiny hope that builds with his strength. While Uesugi Kenshin himself never visits - at Yukimura's frantic request, because after all, this man was his lord's fated rival, and Yukimura is no longer worthy of being seen by him - he sends others to ascertain Yukimura's progress and health. He finally eats, when Kasuga pleads with him ("My... my fiancée would want you to eat and I want you to as well" she says with an angry flush), and Maeda Keiji helps him gather strength in his legs and his remaining arm.
But as he gains something, he loses something.
Yukimura is not allowed time to himself. He is watched constantly, something that he finds tedious and annoying. It's as though they don't trust him, a fact that infuriates him almost as much as his treatment at the hands of his rival! It isn't as though Yukimura is ever really alone after all, because he still has the spectres of those he's disappointed watching over him. And while he doesn't talk to them while others are around, he feels their presence as often as he does of those living.
"You're seeing things," Maeda Keiji says in an uneasy voice when Yukimura lets slip that Oyakata-sama had told him that he was doing well in 'training' (this mockery of training they push him to do).
If Yukimura is seeing things, than how he is to know what's real? He keeps this thought to himself. To himself and to the spirits he whispers to late at night when it's just him and his candlelight. He can no longer bear to be alone in the darkness, and screams and fights when the lights go out without a lamp. No one says a word, even when he throws a guard through the wall and hits another one light night during a storm when the fierce wind knocks all the lights out.
It is a humiliating life.
Yukimura may be free, he may be clean and fed and respected and even liked here, but he is humiliated. He is already dead, in his mind, his life as warrior having ended the moment his arm snapped under the pressure of the enemy attack. For these people to keep him alive is invalidating and insulting everything that Yukimura has worked for and believed in.
But he quietly endures it for now, because he doesn't even have the fee for the river ferry.
This thought occurs to him one night when one of his guards drops a single sen when he's giving change to another. The man doesn't even notice, but Yukimura picks it up and offers it to him, out of habit. It's very dishonest to keep money that doesn't belong to you. The guard seems pleased.
"Don't worry about it, Sanada-dono. Keep it yourself, if you want." Yukimura accepts this after a moment, and later asks Maeda Keiji for a piece of leather to fashion it into a necklace. They make it a bracelet, instead, tying it around his remaining wrist. It's terribly impractical, but Yukimura forces himself to allow it.
For now.
As the season heads into autumn, Yukimura is almost at full strength again - almost, because with the loss of his arm he will never be completely full again. The phantom limb aches sometimes, when he's trying to sleep at night and the skies are threatening to rain.
It's these nights that he finds himself getting out of bed and working himself into a dizzying sweat. He's hot and he's tired and achy , but it's better than dwelling on the loss of his limb. When he's able to focus on the strokes of the bamboo sword and not the remainder of his arm that's in a sling at his side, it's almost as though the past few months have been a dream. It helps.
Once he's worked himself himself to near exhaustion, he finds it easy to slip into sleep near dawn. They don't force him to keep to a schedule. He wishes they would.
Yukimura quickly finds that he hates pity more than he hated the treatment at the hands of Date Masamune.
It's pity in their eyes as they help him dress and bathe, as Maeda Keiji helps him regain the strength in his body, as Kasuga sits with him at meals so he remembers to eat. As one of the women helping him dress touches him in the wrong way, and he pulls away from her hands. As he stays awake at night and hears the murmurs of his guards over his own quiet discussions with the dead.
But while he may hate their pity, the gentle way that they treat him which is so unfitting for a warrior such as he, he swallows his bile and his anger and pretends as though nothing is wrong, though they all know that everything is.
His bracelet slowly has another coin and then another and another added onto it, because while Yukimura cannot bring himself to ask for the coins he so desperately wants, they are sometimes found or given to him.
Yukimura has five coins around his wrist when Date Masamune comes for him again.
They've kept his whereabouts a secret, he knows. For both his own safety and for theirs, and for his pride and legend. If people were to know that Sanada Yukimura was alive, had been held captive, and now lived the rest of his life as a cripple, they would laugh! They would laugh at how weak that the general of the Takeda had become, and he would be mocked for years to come.
So he's been given a tiny home in the back of the Uesugi estate, where Kasuga and Keiji come and go freely, and he learns that the Sanada are no more and the Takeda are long gone and that the general of the army, Sanada Yukimura had given his life in a spectacular way on the battlefield, as it should have been.
But Date Masamune is not a stupid man. Brash, arrogant, and perhaps sometimes illogical, but not stupid.
It begins as a letter. Polite but to the point.
'Return him to me.'
"I am not an object to be bargained for." Yukimura says indignantly when he's told. Kasuga and Keiji have both come to see him that night, and the other man sleeps in Yukimura's room for a change. Kasuga stands guard outside.
"... either way," Keiji says, and Yukimura bristles. "You can't go back there, whether willingly or not."
Yukimura would like to tell him that is not his decision to make, that it is not his life or lack thereof to control, but in the back of his mind, Sasuke agrees that the Dokuganryuu can rot, and he goes quiet.
And though Maeda Keiji's proximity is a comforting thought, it doesn't stop Yukimura from receiving his own visitors. Takeda Shingen tells Yukimura that he must not be captured again, no matter the cost. Were he not dead, he says, he might have tried to work with Kenshin to ensure Yukimura's survival.
'But my lord,' Yukimura says as respectfully as possible into his pillow, so as to muffle the words from the ears of the living. He knows Shingen can still hear him either way. 'You are dead. So I, Yukimura, will not fail you.'
The letters continue over the next few weeks. Even from his remote location in the back of the estate, Yukimura knows that Uesugi Kenshin is preparing for war. He may be a god of war, but there is nothing to be waged over. Certainly not Yukimura!
Yukimura would rather die.