Hi again, readers! We’re celebrating our 100 subscriber milestone by releasing some character-based fiction focusing on what the team gets up to when they aren’t working hard in Hirosaka. Each chapter focuses on a different pair and examines their relationships, as well as their interests and anxieties.
This chapter, Hajime and Yuzume go out for a very fancy brunch and have a really lovely time. Honest.
The House of the Porcelain Heron is one of few places in Hirosaka that’s back to a semblance of normalcy, and the reason why is apparent from the moment that Hajime and Yuzume arrive inside its doors. Almost all of the guests are wearing Imperial green, and each table heaves under the weight of the many, many dishes each one has ordered. Or at least, they would, were they not made of sturdy, exquisitely carved cedar.
The Imperials would never let this place shut down, Hajime thinks as they’re both taken to a small table near the kitchen door. Without somewhere like this to keep them in relative luxury, why even stay in Hirosaka?
He’s not complaining though. If the only way to get some real food for now is to brave a room full of Imperials, he’ll gladly do it.
It quickly becomes apparent, once the two are settled, that this is not the kind of place that lets you choose what it is you’re going to eat. The staff ask only a couple of questions to discern whether or not the yoriki have any known allergies or cultural restrictions on certain ingredients, and before Hajime can so much as ask what sake they have, they are left alone at the table, the duelist’s mouth still hanging open mid-sentence.
It’s only Yuzume’s laughing that reminds him to shut it.
“They certainly don’t beat about the bush, do they?” She chuckles, shaking her head. “I was expecting them to spend half an hour boring me to death with a long-winded tale about where they source their awabi.”
“Oh, I really hope not,” Hajime says, his voice tinged with worry. “We’re too far up-river for them to be acceptably fresh no matter where they get them from...” He makes a face as he considers it, not even bothering to hide how awful the prospect of day-old awabi is.
“You might have actually turned a little green there, darling,” comes an amused accusation from across the table.
“Can you blame me?”
But he’s smiling a little too, because he knows there’s nothing behind the teasing, and that if there’s anyone he can complain about food and drink to, it’s Yuzume, even if her palette is on par with a donkey’s. Hell, he could probably complain about anything he wanted, because to her there is nothing on this earth more satisfying than venting about something relatively niche.
(“It’s probably better than sex,” she’d said once, back when they didn’t have to rebuild a city, and he’d flatly replied “No it’s not,” as though there was nothing scandalous about the conversation at all, and after a beat they’d both laughed so hard that it actually summoned Shogo from another room, baffled at the noise.)
And she’s probably happy to keep up the complaint game, in as polite a way as they can when out in public and surrounded by their betters, but it’s likely because this room’s full of Imperials that she drops her shoulders a little and goes down a different road.
“I don’t blame you at all, dear,” she says, one side of her mouth quirking into the tiniest of smiles. Or maybe it’s both of them. Hajime can’t be sure, and doesn’t wonder about it for more than a second, because a bottle of sake is placed in front of them by a member of staff, and soon the bottle is accompanied by two cups, and those cups are being filled, and all the warmth he could see in Yuzume’s face is replaced by something else entirely.
She doesn’t love sake the way he loves food, and he’s known this for a while. Hajime savours new flavours and talks passionately about methods of preparation he’s only just discovered, and will try anything twice, because once is never enough, even for something he doesn’t quite like. But if he has to go two weeks on nothing but basic rations? It’s an annoyance, but nothing more. He doesn’t need a richer diet.
Yuzume, however, does need. He’s seen it in how she spends every morning irritated that the sun dares to shine and that people speak in volumes above a whisper; in the shadows under her eyes and the way her fingers grip into the table as she requests a cup of tea instead of drinking along with the rest of them, the way they’re gripping into the table now as she tries not to be the first one to reach for her cup and down it in one.
There are some things that they don’t talk about, and this is one of them.
But the need isn’t so great that she can’t be distracted from it, and Hajime is a master of distracting conversation. As each tiny dish of breakfast-lunch-dessert foods is placed in front of them, he tells her all about where he’s had something like it before, pairing each bite with an anecdote that either makes her laugh or snap back with something equally ridiculous from her own past. It means she drinks slowly, just like him, and no one else in the room has to be any the wiser.
It doesn’t hurt that since he has to pour for her, he can make sure she doesn’t have very much. The downside is that by the end of the meal, he’s consumed over two thirds of the bottle, and he can feel it as he leans back in his chair, sleepy satisfaction spreading over his face.
“This was a good idea,” he says, patting his stomach, and Yuzume actually grins and says ‘ha ha’ instead of laughing.
“If someone says that in a story, then it means something bad is going to happen,” she says, gesturing in no particular direction. There’s a moment of silence as they both scan the room, just drunk enough to entertain the idea of someone bursting through the doors dramatically, or a fight breaking out at another table, but nothing happens. The room remains full of very important samurai and their very important conversations, with nothing to interrupt them save the occasional call for more drink.
Their gazes fall back to one another, and Hajime swears Yuzume looks almost disappointed at the lack of sudden drama.
“Shame we’re not in a story,” he offers, and he smiles broadly. “We’ll have to just settle for having had a nice day out.”
“Oh, the horror,” she jokes, feigning scandal, and they both try to bite back laughter before they draw too much attention to themselves. The faces they make in the attempt don’t help at all - Hajime isn’t really trained for this, and Yuzume’s mask always looks so deeply anguished that whatever expression she’s making never fits anyway - so of course they look ridiculous, and can’t completely hide their amusement at that, either.
It’s rare to see her like this, Hajime realises, as he watches her deftly flick a tear from the corner of her eye. They’ve not been in Hirosaka long, but he’s seen the changes the city has had on each of his friends. New responsibilities eat away at Minoru’s time and energy, while Eiko scrambles for control to make sure that things don’t fall apart for his magistrate, and Yuzume’s friendly jabs have become downright insulting, devoid of any cleverness they might have held in Kyuden Miya.
He’s halfway through realising how nice it is to hear her laugh in earnest again when the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and his eyes widen as he feels a familiar cold overwhelm him. Everything turns black, and he feels long, sharp claws raking down his spine and across his throat. There’s hot, sour breath on his cheeks as a mocking voice laughs in his ear, close yet far away all at once, and it’s only when he realises that Yuzume has been calling his name that everything returns to normal, and the idle chatter of the inn’s guests fills the room once more.
“-hina-san?” The laughter is gone from her face, replaced by guarded concern that only half fades when Hajime blinks and shakes his head. “What’s wrong?”
“You don’t feel it?”
Understanding dawns, and she shakes her head. “... Only if I wanted to.”
Of course. Hajime’s connection to the void is more pronounced than most, but the kami stopped talking to him when he was a child, as they did with so many others. He was the only one of his siblings it had happened to, and he’d grown up watching them master their connections to the spirits, learning to protect themselves from unwanted attention. Training Yuzume must have had too, that he had never received, leaving him open to scratches and laughter and the heat of a burning city with no way to keep himself safe from whatever hid on the other side.
“What was it?” She asks, prompting him out of another period of silence where he tries to forget the feeling of nails trailing across his skin.
“I don’t know,” he says, his voice small and uncertain. He draws himself in, putting his hands on his lap to grip the fabric of his hakama out of sight. “It wasn’t like the other times… It- it feels like something’s here. Watching us. I-I… I couldn’t...”
Yuzume stares at him for a moment, expressionless, and then calls someone over to order another bottle of sake. She stays silent while she waits for it to arrive, and once it’s set between them Yuzume pours Hajime a very full cup. He doesn’t question the sudden change in etiquette, and takes it with a shaky hand.
“It’ll help,” Yuzume says softly, and he watches as she sets the bottle back down just in front of her. He’s not sure if she’s going to finish the rest off herself, or just sit there and watch him, pouring and pouring until the bottle is empty and he isn’t so afraid anymore. It seems like something she’d do.
Instead, he watches as she closes her eyes, her serene expression once again at odds with the pained creature on the left side of her face. He can’t see it, because she never makes the showy movements his siblings do when they commune, but he imagines that she’s at least making some sort of symbol with her fingers under the table - a focus, if nothing else, as she whispers her questions to the kami. It’s hard to make out the words above the din, and she barely moves her lips so as not to draw attention to what she’s doing. No matter how intently he stares, all he can make out are short snippets like ‘how long?’ and ‘how many?’ when an answer surprises her enough to forget to maintain such a low volume.
Eventually the bottle stops moving, and the sound of swirling liquid stops as Yuzume opens her eyes. She seems just as rattled as he was a few minutes ago, and she reaches for the bottle. Disappointment spreads across her face as not even a single drop lands in her cup - the kami have taken it all. Hajime looks down to see that he’s finished his, too, and smiles apologetically.
“What did they say?” He asks tentatively, cradling the cup in both hands.
“Nothing good,” she says, pursing her lips. She stares at the bottle for a little longer, then sighs, pushing her chair back. A tired smile is stuck to her face, and he doesn’t need to be a courtier to know that whatever she does next is just out of feigned politeness. “What would you say to a wander around town? If I don’t get some fresh air after all that food I might fall asleep.”
He nods, because he’s too unsettled to think of a flowery way to say yes when a gesture will do, and he rises to follow Yuzume as she pushes her chair toward the door, all polite smiles toward the staff.
The warmth from the afternoon sun does little to shake the chill from Hajime’s bones, and they carry on in silence until the House of the Porcelain Heron is completely out of sight. He wonders if she feels the cold too, or if fending it off is another thing shugenja are taught to do that he was not. Maybe she could teach him, he thinks, entertaining the thought of having some of that connection and control before another voice says, ‘as if you could be taught’.
The image shatters, and he reminds himself that he doesn’t think like that any more, but it doesn’t stop him from clenching his fists so hard that his nails start to dig into his palms.
There’s a tug on his sleeve, and Yuzume’s looking up at him again, just as concerned as she was at the inn.
“It’s alright, darling,” she says softly, soothing. “They’re tied to the inn. They won’t get you out here, I promise.”
It’s a complete misread of the situation, but Hajime’s happy to take it. Anything to focus on keeping that little voice from his past at bay.
“So you know what it was?”
She nods, then looks down at his hands. He quickly relaxes them, and it’s only then that she lets go of his sleeve to cross her wrists in her lap.
“Yokai,” she says faintly. “Several are trying to lay claim to the inn. The staff suspect something, but I don’t know if anyone else knows.”
“... Can we even do anything about that?”
Yuzume stares at her hands, and Hajime watches as she pinches at the fabric of her sleeves, needing something to hold onto.
“We could. I could,” she says, omitting a ‘maybe’ that he knows is there from the shakiness in her voice. “But not without being invited to step in, and certainly not while we’re drunk.”
She looks up at him again, trying to be reassuring, and he returns the smile. Hajime knows she needs it just as much as he does, and he doesn’t like what that implies about the strength of the yokai at the inn.
But he can worry about them later.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says, and turns in the direction of the House of the Evergreens. “Until then, we just have a really good reason to try out other places for breakfast. Lunch. Whatever this was.”
Yuzume laughs, and though it might not be as joyful as she’d sounded while they ate, some of the weight of the past few weeks seems to have lifted. Yokai be damned, Hajime thinks, his spirits lifting, because that sound was worth it.
