Last one. I procrastinated too much, lol.
Disclaimer: whatever you do, don't go through the yoshida shouyou tag on tumblr. death by feeels.
Thanks to - SORACHI HIDEAKI - the master
Eyes of Wolves
- 31 -
.: MAY, ONE MONTH AGO :.
Without ever realizing, she meandered closer and closer to the shade of his umbrella on their long, languid walks. Their charge, Seita, was a frolicking colt from stall to stall, market to market. The space shops gained new novelty; even Zenshi's new predilection for imitating her accent lightheartedly did not deter Tsukuyo from a small smile.
"The weather's good," she noted.
"Ever since the storm passed," he agreed.
.: AUGUST, PRESENT :.
"Wait." Umibouzu grasped his wrist, pulling the paper closer to the black-light. "She must've left another location."
"This was it, was it not?" replied Zenshi.
"Yes, but that doesn't mean the end of the chain." The bald Yato flipped the paper, flapping it flat. "There."
The UV light illuminated glowing, luminescent lavender writing. In familiar block characters and neat lines, Mei had written one last thing on the back of her letter.
August 8th, Greater Edo Transit Metro. Southwestern station one outside Kabukichou. Take the 8AM train to the Shibuya Regret Hall. Wait.
"How pleasant," Zenshi said dryly. "Another adventure."
"Well, what were you expecting, Blue? To be done with this?" Umibouzu cast him a pitying glance, for he knew, and Zenshi knew, that they were both entrenched too deep to back out, even if one had never intended to become so involved in the first place.
.: THREE YEARS AGO :.
Mei stumbles on the taciturn lieutenant in one of the top deck observatories, glass-paned rooms almost designed solely for luxury. They are occasionally used to host prestigious guests of higher ranks, such as their foolish admiral or some Harusame higher echelon delegate.
Now, however, the room is dark, unlit except by the eerie glow of a few nearby moons reflecting their respective suns. Zenshi sits cross-legged by the window, his long limbs folded beneath himself with such precarious grace that Mei wonders how her giraffe of a friend manages to look so poised all the time.
Her hand reaches to flick the lights on, but he notices her presence and gestures her away from the switch. She plods over to him, settling down in the same pose to gaze at the same distant nothingness.
"No asteroid belts here," she quips lightly. Her voice echoes through the empty room, startlingly loud.
"No," he concurs, never once peeling his eyes away from the window. She wonders what he sees in his cerulean eyes.
"I've got orange roots coming back in. Look," Mei prompts, patting her head. Her bleached blonde hair has, in fact, grown out a little bit — a few longer locks brush barely past her ears — and the vibrant tangerine of her natural color has reemerged. She plans to cut it soon, probably this week, but finds the combination of white and orange to be amusing. She'll keep it for a while.
Her attempts to draw his attention away from outer space, however, are in vain. Her three more fruitless coaxes are explicitly ignored.
"Okay, what are you looking at?" She leans amiably into his shoulder. As expected, he neither pushes her away nor gives in. "There's nothing out there."
Mei adopts a few teasing nicknames for her favorite lieutenant, but the sigh that escapes his lips is like a wisp of cold breeze that tickles her skin. She wonders if he has actually been thinking that whole time. Maybe he, too, needed a moment to just empty all mundane thoughts and beguile himself with delusions of freedom.
Suddenly, he speaks. And, of course, the first words out of his mouth are impetuously grating. Not in the way that Tabs is, not braggart or loud, but instead sardonic and so wry that she could twist the sarcasm out of a towel made of his essence.
"Asteroid belt."
"You're kidding me, aren't you?" Mei leaps to her feet. "There is nothing, absolutely nothing out there!"
Zenshi points upward.
To both Mei's dismay and wonder, she realizes that the windows aren't simply floor to ceiling, but encompass the roof as well. Almost like a transparent dome to the skies, the roof morphs into a grand planetarium, the stars cordial in their charismatic twinkles.
And, rather absurdly, there is, in fact, an asteroid belt above them.
"It's the same as the one from earlier," Zenshi informs her, still seated. "We've been following it."
She can't argue with that, and seeing as she's currently occupied with their strange positioning, Mei falls to silence.
"Is it above us and we're below it, or are we actually above it and upside down, but it's below us?" she suddenly bursts out, after a minute or two. "We could be on its left and tilted sideways and we'd never know."
"Try sitting here and imagining every perspective."
"Is that what you've been doing?"
He shrugs, making a noncommittal noise to no one in particular. There, suspended in the blanket of space, they are both inside and out, moving forward, back, left, right, up, and down, all at once.
.: AUGUST, PRESENT :.
"Odds or evens?" beseeched a lilting, feminine voice. "It's your choice."
Instantaneously, Umibouzu swabbed a match from his pocket and set the letter afire. Zenshi, on the other hand, did not move, struggling to locate the source of the echoing voice, which bounced about the darkened street dissonantly.
"Odd," he called, hoping to draw an answer.
"Wrong, it was even." Kada materialized out of thin air, her blue hair first precipitating from the darkness before her body followed. A troop of four Shinra warriors flanked her sides.
"Kada," Umibouzu addressed flatly, hand fisted around his umbrella handle.
"This is lovely," sang the woman, "absolutely lovely."
Her tone insinuated friendly conversation, a nostalgic reunion; her face, on the other hand, exuded eminent scorn.
"Come to kill me?"
"How sharp of you," Kada very nearly purred. Zenshi felt his fellow Yato bristling beside him, decidedly uncomfortable. But the universe's strongest was not one to be enervated by Kada's efficacious voice. "But no, we are not."
Suddenly, Kada's body flickered, her image breaking mechanically. Zenshi realized why he couldn't locate her voice or sense her full presence — it was a hologram. The Shinra beside her were also holograms, disrupted as they ran out of film and shuddered to a halt.
Umibouzu quickly tracked the receding light, finding a small camera box with burnt out wires. "She set this up," he said gruffly, frowning. Zenshi spied a marking on the holographic generator that made him disagree.
"No," he protested. "Here."
His finger traced a Harusame crest, along the bottom ridge of the projector.
"Harusame? Kada was a division leader, I know, but what—" Umibouzu's eyes widened and he paused, deep in thought. "She was jailed, wasn't she? The one news story way back when was about her, wasn't it?"
"For siphoning money from the Harusame reserves," affirmed Zenshi. He tried his best to keep up with news on Earth, even if it meant watching the bizarre weather lady on channel 9 and flipping relentlessly through Hinowa's countless channels for the right space broadcasts. The one that constantly played in his division ship's second cabin was the one that relayed all the sex, scandal, and corruption in intergalactic pirate work.
"Then who put the hit on me?" The older Yato was concerned, then, his voice reflecting the dissension and anxiety within him. "I'm only a freelancer, a threat to no one. Kada wanted to eliminate me as the strongest man, but others typically seek me…"
Zenshi pulled his finger away from the little hologram programmer, as if repulsed by its ink-black rim and Harusame symbol. He knew exactly who had put the hit on Umibouzu. That person was well aware of the fact that no one he hired would be able to take out the veteran Yato.
And that person was Harusame's new admiral.
Kamui.
.: MAY, ONE MONTH AGO :.
She brought it up one day, out of the blue, that he never really called her by name. Somehow, he managed to catch her attention or simply rely on her keen intuition and attention.
"I could say the same of you to me," he countered with such blatant straightforwardness that she slipped into one of her signature glares.
"Zen," she drawled with mock enthusiasm.
"Tsukki," he returned, putting so much emphasis on the end syllable that he sounded like he was hacking on saliva.
"No," she protested, "that's just weird."
"You want me to call you darlin', instead?" He was witty and quick, as usual, and his manifold arsenal of playful attacks against her accent was the new entertainment.
"When do I say darlin'," snorted Tsukuyo, folding her arms. "Liar."
"I just do my studyin' of people, honey," he cajoled with as much molasses-sweet sarcasm in his voice. She was inexplicably enraptured by the satirical little smirk on his face, but at the same time she grappled the seminal urge to smack him up the back of the head, hard.
"I don't say that."
He lapsed into typical silence, and she glared some more.
.: AUGUST, PRESENT :.
He hadn't slept much that night, haunted by what sounded like explosions and hoards of people in the distance. His keen ears had chased any hope of catching sleep before morning away, soaked in the night's damp warmth and echoing booms.
"The humans are at it again," Umibouzu muttered. His vague statement could have been an inappropriate innuendo or a disparaging statement. Zenshi left it at the latter, leaning against the headboard of the hotel bed he currently sat in. Umibouzu had forced him to take it, his vaguely paternal instincts insisting on the younger companion's comfort, he himself residing in the pull-out couch by the window.
Zenshi, from his slanted vantage point, watched the city's lights flicker on here and there, from the Shogun's palace to the districts to the Central Terminal and back.
When sleep finally came to claim him, he worried he was hallucinating.
It was as if gigantic, glowing spaceships were descending on the Bakufu center, waving demise in their faces.
.: THIRTEEN YEARS AGO :.
"He looks just like you," twitters a rather large, plump lady with skin like orange peels and four eyes adorning her human-esque head. "What a darling."
"He gets his soft face from his mother," Linter offers.
"Oh no, he's as handsome as his father."
The cooing and the praising make him sick, and Zenshi has to fight the urge to recoil from the probing hands on his cheeks and through his hair. He's had enough of grimy foreign Amanto swiping their oily fingers over him, touching his arms and blubbering nonsense about how he's just like his father.
He employs a child's strategies the best he can.
"Dad," he entreats in the politest voice he can muster, "I'm really hungry."
"Hush, Zenshi. You're fourteen, you can deal with it."
When he was younger, it had worked quite well. Now, as his shoulders begin to fill out and his voice drops from its innocent, childish melody to that of a struggling, growing boy, Zenshi cannot recreate the pitiful image he once sought shelter in.
"What a gem," cries another woman. Zenshi is one hundred percent done with foreign duchesses. "He looks just like you."
There is never a word to him, only to his father.
He pretends he's not bothered.
.: AUGUST, PRESENT :.
"All right, Blue, we're here." Had Shibuya Regret Hall retained more of its opening glory and less of its ironically ashamed name, Umibouzu probably would have appraised it with a more appreciative glance. However, he stalked through the station and waited at the end of the platform, as somewhat suggested.
"Okay, Bud, don't move."
Zenshi whipped around, but a hand clamped down solidly on his shoulder. Umibouzu's umbrella came out so quickly that Zenshi's natural instinct to dodge wrenched him from the hands of the third person.
The crowd from the train had died down, leaving only a few morning commuters at the opposite end. Umibouzu, ever cautious of civilians, angled his parasol's ammunition so that no one besides his target would become involved.
"Hands up," growled the older Yato.
"No wait," Zenshi said, clasping a hand on the bald father before he could shoot. At the same time, the third man put up his hands and began to speak.
"Three seven three," he said. "Hold up."
"You know him?" Umibouzu asked, regarding their third member with unease. He noticed right away the umbrella alongside the man, the dark cloak, and the eastern styled Yato clothing.
"I do." Zenshi approached. "Abuto."
"Well, I am honored that you remember my name, bud." Abuto cracked a sardonic grin. "But we've gotta get moving."
.: -YOSHIWARA- AUGUST, LAST NIGHT :.
I'm one hundred percent aware that I'm breaking a law. If it pleases you, then cut me down as my punishment. If it isn't enough for a blade to take my arms...Then take a leg or my head as you see fit. However, everyone has granted me...One more chance to honor the promise we exchanged that night. The promised string that connects our souls...no matter what blade you use on it, will never be severed.
There was a full moon that night, illuminating a pool of faded green grass and the ghost of a sakura tree. Curious eyes peeked around corners as the elderly man made his way to the ring of moonlight. But in their eyes, he was hardly aged at all — instead, a young man extended his hand, the promised bond wrapped around his pinky finger gleaming delicately in the ephemeral reflection of the moon, reaching for hers.
"You won't go this time, will you?" she murmured, letting her hand descend into his.
"No, I won't," he reassured her, gently taking her into his arms.
Gleaming in the light, the soft rosy sakura fluttered lightly into the sky.
.: MAY, ONE MONTH AGO :.
Tsukuyo touched his hand, her fingers brushing his so slightly that at first he didn't notice.
"Look," she whispered, pointing at the sky. There was a funny constellation shining above Yoshiwara, and if he tilted his head just enough, it looked like a deformed rabbit. Tsukuyo turned, evaluating the way he yawned his head back and let his gaze slide over the night sky with languorous ease. "It's peaceful, ain't it?"
"It's beautiful," he murmured in response.
They sat there then, legs dangling off the edge of a building, living and breathing the same stars and skies and times.
If you chose COURTESAN OF THE NATION ARC (or Courtesan Turns the Tables)
then you were CORRECT!
cue bad timeline noise hear
whAT I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER MY BAD WRITING
HUEHUEHUEHUE
g'night