#when chrome crashed and ate my first draft of this drabble

[yeahgen]

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Nikkari Aoe reveals a secret to Yagen Toushirou.

If there’s one battle he’s never stopped fighting, it’s the war against dust.

Whenever Yagen Toushirou comes home from a long sortie or expedition, a fine layer of it has already settled over his room and things in the citadel. He used to share a bedroom with his brothers, but after his experiments and studies grew more elaborate, the Saniwa had given him his own quarters in the compound. It’s a modest sized room, but crammed full of everything from books to dried plants and a working lab table complete with running water in the sink. His brothers frequent it when he’s home, but hardly enter when he’s away.

When Yagen opens his eyes one morning to see more dust motes floating past his vision, he’s not surprised. He is, however, confused by the fact that he’s lying on the tatami in his lab coat and glasses, no futon in sight. Whatever battle they fought this time must have taken more out of him than he thought if he simply changed into his internal affairs clothes and knocked out on the floor.

Soft sunlight filters through the paper screens of the wooden sliding doors. Judging from the temperature, it should still be early morning. With nothing else to do, Yagen digs into his closet for supplies and gets to his usual Back from Travel routine: cleaning. By the time he’s done, the birds are singing in the garden and he’s almost sweating from the heat. Oddly enough, everywhere else is quiet, a peaceful serenity rarely found at home. The rest of the Awataguchi would usually be up by now and making a racket in the house, so a curious Yagen finds himself opening the door to peek into the hallways.

They’re empty save for a lone green-haired figure walking further down the hall.

‘Nikkari!’ Yagen calls after him.

Nikkari Aoe doesn’t respond immediately. Instead, he pauses to tilt his head to one side, then turn slowly on his heel to fix the tantou with a questioning look. “…Yagen?”

‘Yo.’ Yagen nods back. ‘Have you seen my brothers around?’

Nikkari seems to take another moment to absorb his words. Then he shakes his head. “Ah, I think…they’re assisting the Saniwa this morning.”

‘Oh? Do they need any more help?’ Running the citadel is a full time job, so it’s natural for the General to call on his brothers for help. Yagen still hasn’t eaten breakfast, but feels energetic enough to hold off on food until lunch.

“No.” Nikkari replies simply. Then he blinks, and breaks into his usual languid smile. “You just got back from sortie, didn’t you? You should go rest.”

The sudden care is surprising, but not unexpected. Yagen’s expression warms before he shakes his head. ‘Thanks, but if that’s the case, I’ll work on a few of my experiments in here. Tell the General I’ll be around if they need me.’

He shoots Nikkari a final grin before withdrawing into his room. The rest of the morning passes in a whirl. He finishes testing three different formulas for a new fertilizer, studies up on medicine, and decides to skip lunch in the dining hall in favor of quick meals he’s stowed away in his drawers instead. It’s not often that Yagen gets so much personal work done in a single day, but fortune favors him this time and he doesn’t get a single knock on his door even when night falls.

It’s rare, but he secretly appreciates it. Finding time for your self is always hard when you’ve got a house full of tantou to look after. Deciding to push his luck just a little further, Yagen picks the thickest book from his pile and reads late into the night until he falls asleep with it resting on his chest.

–

The next morning, he wakes up to more dust in the air.

Again? Yagen wrinkles his brow and sits up. The book on his chest slides down to rest on the ground. He looks around him and–once more, the room is covered in a fine coating of the stuff.

But I just dusted yesterday… 

With a sigh, Yagen resigns himself to grabbing his tidying supplies again. Maybe he could ask the General for a less sunny room…

It takes him less time to clean up today than yesterday, so Yagen decides to pay a visit to his brothers when he’s done. As he shuts his doors behind him, he runs into Nikkari in the hallway again.

“Good morning, Yagen.” This time, the wakizashi greets him first.

‘Morning,’ Yagen nods back. ‘Are my brothers still busy, Nikkari?’ They’d been quiet this morning, too.

“Mm. They’ve all been working hard. Meanwhile, the General’s given orders not to disturb you,” Nikkari smiled back pleasantly.

‘Oh?’ Yagen’s brows arch up. ‘Is that why nobody came to find me yesterday?’ I thought I was just lucky, but if those were the General’s orders…

Nikkari nods. “Did you have an enjoyable day?”

‘I managed to finish a lot of work,’ Yagen admits. ‘But I can’t stay in my room forever, so I’ll visit them today.’

“A change of pace isn’t a bad idea,” Nikkari says noncommittally, but Yagen only looks askance at him. “What is it?” the waki asks after the staring stretches on.

‘Are you trying a change of pace, too?’ Yagen half jokes. ‘You haven’t…’ Made a double entendre at all since we’ve started talking.

“Laughter is good,” Nikkari seems to read his mind. “But it’s not bad to be serious on occasion.”

Yagen’s about to reply when he catches a tuft of white hair out of the corner of his vision. His head whips towards the end of the hall, where a figure’s gone to dart quickly behind the wall. Nikkari notices him even sooner, because he’s already striding down the hall to confront their unexpected visitor.

Gokotai? Yagen chases after Nikkari to make sure, but he’s barely made it to the end of the corridor when his head spins. A wave of dizziness forces him to hold onto the wall as he faintly hears Nikkari’s voice speaking.

“What are you doing here?”

“N-Nikkari-san, I…” Gokotai’s unmistakable stutter hangs in the air.

“Didn’t the Saniwa give you all orders?”

“I..y-yes, but..! Nikkari-san, I…”

Don’t talk to him like that, Yagen finds himself thinking. You can’t. You’ll only make him more nervous. 

But a vise seems to be squeezing itself around his chest, and before Yagen can speak, the work goes black around him.

–

He wakes up back in his room, the interior lit by a single lamp on the floor. It’s nighttime now, and this time he’s actually lying in his futon. As Yagen turns his head towards the light, he sees Nikkari sitting by its side.

‘…what happened?’ Yagen asks first.

“You lost consciousness,” Nikkari replies. “I sent Gokotai away and then brought you back here.”

‘Really? How…’ Yagen pauses to test his forehead. It’s cool. His pulse readings seem normal, too. ‘I don’t feel sick.’

“It’s probably just exhaustion,” Nikkari says helpfully. “A good night’s rest should help with that.”

‘No, this is different.’ That bout of dizziness had attacked him without any explanation. But in the middle of protesting, Yagen suddenly remembers something more important. ‘And the next time you talk to Gokotai, be gentler. He gets anxious when he’s feeling under pressure.’

Nikkari’s face softens. “I’ll do that, then.”

‘Appreciated.’ Yagen props himself up by his elbows. ‘Now, tell me what’s really going on.’

At his words, Nikkari’s expression shifts. For a second, the wakizashi almost looks lost. By the next, he’s smiling again. 

“How about I tell you a story instead? If you can guess the secret at the end, you’ll understand everything.”

Yagen arches his brows, but nods for Nikkari to go on. The wakizashi launches into the folktale of a beautiful servant girl named Okiku. In the story, she refuses the advances of her samurai master, who then tricks her into believing that she loses one of the family’s 10 precious delft plates. She counts the plates desperately, but could only get nine total plates every single time. Her master offers to ignore the loss if she agreed to be his lover, but she still refuses. In a fury, he throws her down a well to her death. But her ghost lives on and spends the rest of its days counting endlessly up to nine, searching always for the missing 10th plate.

‘I didn’t expect you to share one of your ghost stories,’ Yagen remarks when Nikkari is done. ‘Did you want me to make sure it wasn’t too scary for the other tantou?’

“Yagen.” Nikkari’s voice is low. “Have you discovered the secret?”

‘There’s not much mystery to begin with,’ Yagen protests. ‘She was mistreated while she lived, so she carried the grudge with her after death.’

“Most ghosts don’t come back without a reason,” Nikkari continues. “Even rarer are the yureī that bind themselves to a specific location or situation.”

‘I can see that,’ Yagen nods. ‘Okiku thought she lost her plate, so she spent her days haunting the well where she’d died while looking for the last one. That desire bound her to the living world, right?’

“So then,” Nikkari begins slowly. “What binds you to ours, Yagen Toushirou?”

Yagen’s head whips up at the question as his heart gives a sudden jolt. ‘…what?’

“What have you left undone?” Nikkari asks next. “What is stopping you from moving on when the rest of you is already gone?”

‘That’s a joke done in poor taste.’ Yagen sits straighter, trying to bite back the rising venom in his words. He didn’t have a body when he was first summoned to the citadel because his real one had been burnt and lost centuries ago. Like Horikawa, like Hotarumaru, he accepted the blade that the Saniwa had found or forged in its place to be reborn as the missing Yagen Toushirou. ‘Stop going around in circles, Nikkari. Just–’

“You’re dead.” Nikkari cuts in flatly. Yagen blinks.

‘What are you talking about?’

“They brought your weapon back with the last sortie team,” Nikkari says tersely. “There was a crack in the blade. Master tried to repair it, but it didn’t work, and you broke into pieces two days ago.”

Two days ago…? ‘No.’ Yagen shakes his head. ‘I was just talking to you yesterday!’ 

“Yes,” Nikkari says. “So I told our master and made your hallway off-limits. Ishikirimaru sealed it just in case you felt like wandering. Fortunately, none of your brothers were there that morning. They were all busy sending off your pieces in the forge.”

‘Aren’t you taking this prank a little too far?’ Yagen feels himself bristling. Fooling around with him was one thing, but bringing in his brothers like that was almost cruel. Was that why Gokotai had been walking by today? Because he wanted to see if the rumors were true? If his brother was dead?

The wakizashi only stares at him. For one brief, crazed second, Yagen thinks he sees a red eye glowing behind the screen of hair covering his face. He has the urge to reach out and brush back those bangs and demand between the two of them who’s the real specter.

“You’re getting emotional,” Nikkari observes flatly. “It’s only going to get worse. Without strong ties to the human world, ghosts would never–”

‘Shut up,’ Yagen snaps back. Shut up shutupshUTUP. ‘We’re swords. We don’t–’

“Where is your weapon, Yagen Toushirou?”

Yagen pauses. His tantou. Right. Where had he left it? When he wasn’t fighting, he always put it somewhere safe. There was a shelf in his room that–

Yagen reaches for the empty spot and gets a handful of dust. No, not even that, because the faint layer of grime never shifts beneath his fingertips. He looks at his hand, disbelieving, and sees the faint pattern of the futon through a semi-transparent palm.

How…?

He reaches for his desk next, the one he’d spent hours on wiping clean with a cotton cloth. It’s still as dusty as the first morning he woke up, the coating refusing to change beneath his fingers. The notes he thought he’d taken yesterday are missing, with the only stack of written papers being the one he’d left behind before he went to fight.

‘…I see.’

‘So that’s how it is.’

The spirit of Yagen Toushirou rises to its feet and stands with its hands in both pockets. There’s a self-mocking grin on its face, that of a pretty, pale-faced boy with soft violet eyes and straight black hair. Despite its short stature, it stands tall and straight, looking quietly down at the wakizashi still sitting on his knees.

“You look calmer.” Nikkari Aoe remarks. “Have you figured it out?” The ties keeping you back.

‘Yeah. Maybe.’ the spirit shrugs and turns its head to look at its desk. ‘There were experiments I didn’t get to finish and books I wanted to read. I couldn’t serve the General until the end. And…my brothers. I don’t think I ever got to say goodbye.’

“No, you were gone by the time they brought you home.”

‘Can I say goodbye to them now?’ its question hangs in the air, heavy.

“…I wouldn’t recommend it.”

‘I thought as much.’ the spirit takes a step back, its feet making no depressions in the tatami. ‘You know, you could have told me all of this on the first day. It’d save me from acting like an idiot.’

“I decided that you’d enjoy a breather.” Nikkari finally manages a small smile of his own and stands up. “You had fun, didn’t you?”

‘Mm, I did.’ The admission comes easily. ‘It was…peaceful.’

Nikkari Aoe unsheathes the wakizashi at his side and holds it out before him. “I’m glad to hear that.”

The spirit eyes his sword impassively. ‘There’s just one thing.’

“Go on.”

‘This morning, with Gokotai…’ it hesitates. ‘If he saw me, can you tell him not to worry? And that I’ll be back again soon enough.’ The next Yagen Toushirou forged by the General might not have any of his memories, but it’d still be him. As long as Gokotai could understand that, things would be fine.

“Of course.” Nikkari nods and raises his weapon. The spirit’s face relaxes, and it makes no resistance when the cold edge of the steel slices through its ghostly form and scatters it to pieces.

–

“I’m s-sorry, N-Nikkari-san,” Gokotai is clutching onto the waki’s shiroshouzoku as the taller sword leads them away from the hallway, tears pooling at the edge of his eyes. “I o-only wanted to see Y-Yagen-nii’s room o-once, because I…because I m-missed him.”

“I know, but our master gave orders for a reason,” Nikkari chides gently. When he notices how Gokotai seems to shrink back at his words, he ruffles the tantou’s hair and adds, “There’s no harm done, so you don’t have to feel bad.”

Gokotai nods. Then he tenses up and asks, “B-But Nikkari-san, what was t-that back there?”

“What did you see?” Nikkari asks instead.

“I…I d-don’t know,” Gokotai suppresses a shudder. “S-something big and…and d-dark. It was s..scary. Did one of the enemies s-sneak into our citadel a-after…after Yagen-nii–”

“That would never happen,” Nikkari cuts him off smoothly. “The Saniwa’s defenses make that impossible.”

“T-then what was it?” Gokotai asks in a hushed whisper. “I-it looked like it was t-talking to you, Nikkari-san. Or maybe even ready to e-eat you!”

“It was nothing,” Nikkari reassures the tantou. “Only a batch of lingering regrets.”

–

And now the spirit is gone and the citadel freed, even if his blade had to strike down a child once again. Nikkari Aoe re-sheathes his sword and looks around the empty room, taking in the neat table, clear floors, and meticulously organized bookshelf with a pensive air.

Minutes later, Ishikirimaru opens the sliding door and steps inside, haraigushi in hand. “Ah, Nikkari!”

The wakizashi turns to face him with his characteristic smile. “Oh, Ishikirimaru? Looking for me at this time of night?”

“I thought I sensed something go off with the charms I set around this place, so I came to check.” the ootachi glances around the room before he brightens. “Hm? The energy I felt from yesterday is gone. So it’s passed on, has it?”

Nikkari only nods. “The rest will be up to you.”

“Ah yes, I’ll have to purify this place for certain…” And as Ishikirimaru readies himself for an incantation, Nikkari excuses himself to step into the hallway. He is no divine sword, even if he can exorcise spirits of his own. Inevitably, they rest easier under Ishikirimaru’s care. As living to lived, as humans to ghosts, as fire-wrought steel melts in flames once again, the dead come to whisper him their final farewell.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.