the dry months
the dry months
samurai/edo universe
pg13, 2314 wc
in the summer we fight amidst the empty mountains.
join/watch
a/n: this fic was podficced by the incredibly awesome becquinho, over here.
1. The sun burns them as they fight in the fields. Yamashita will remember this one for days, every man he kills etched into the lines of his hands. The dirt won’t come out from under his nails until he breaks them against the katana hilt, and the wound on his shoulder will scar and heal over an older one underneath it.
Akanishi cleans his sword on the ground afterwards, and smokes a cigarette. It’s the latest habit that he’s picked up, this one from Dutch sailors when they were at the ports last month. For him it’s a nervous thing, needing anything up to a whole packet to ground him after a fight. If there aren’t enough at hand he’ll roll his own, but he prefers them packaged and foreign, tasting of someplace that isn’t here.
‘I’ll get the payment tomorrow,’ he says, blowing a smoke ring to feign a nonchalance that is running out by the day. Yamashita doesn’t miss the way Akanishi never looks at the ones he’s killed, how the muscles of his shoulders bunch together. His body knows how to kill, but Akanishi’s still young, inside. The two of them are employed as bodyguards for Nishikido Ryo, the son of the local lord. Today he lends them to a neighbouring lord as mercenaries. It isn’t a livelihood that’s going to last, Yamashita knows, but it’s the most they can have right now.
He slings his katana across his back and takes Akanishi’s cigarette for a single drag to stop his hands from shaking. He doesn’t look back when he follows Akanishi onto the road. Behind them the empty field screams with the sound of cicadas. Yamashita keeps walking.
2. Between them, Akanishi is more scared of dying. Yamashita takes everything as it comes, but Akanishi thinks too much. Akanishi dreams at night, beside Yamashita. Their katanas are within reach and more often than not Akanishi will wake up holding it to his chest. ‘Bad dreams?’ Yamashita will ask, watching as Akanishi places the katana back on the tatami mat or the dirt, wherever they’ve spent the night. Akanishi will shudder and nod, drawing a hand over his mouth like that can make the memory of them go away better than time can.
Yamashita doesn’t dream.
3. When he kisses Akanishi, both of them taste like tobacco and adrenalin, bodies fired on a mixture of the two. Akanishi holds Yamashita like his nightmares are at their backs and Yamashita’s the only one that can save them. It’s something they both want to believe in.
On the second night of the journey to the coast as Nishikido’s bodyguards, they’re attacked by bandits. Eventually the bandits retreat, but a stray arrow punches through Akanishi’s armour and between his ribs. When Yamashita undoes his armour he’s so fucking scared of what he’ll find, but Akanishi’s still breathing, coughing out a laugh when he sees the blood on Yamashita’s hands.
The wound is shallow.
4. Akanishi is afraid of dying. Yamashita is afraid for Akanishi.
5. At the port of Nagasaki Nishikido leaves them to their own devices whilst he settles some business with the ship captains. Akanishi flirts with pretty Dutch girls, impressing them with his scars and katana, but Yamashita knows better to think that Akanishi is okay. Akanishi carries bravado on his shoulders, wears it like armour, wears it even when he’s with Yamashita.
The ocean is beautiful from the wharves. When Yamashita looks at the horizon, it’s with the same need that he looks at Akanishi. We all need something to wish for, to move forward. Yamashita’s anchored and longing for more.
That evening at the ryokan Akanishi cuts Yamashita’s hair with his knife. When he goes outside to throw the hair away, Yamashita can tell by his footfalls that he’s still hurting, though the bandages are getting cleaner by the day. His own wound has become a strip of soft white, stretched over the curve of his shoulder. Akanishi comes back and kneels beside Yamashita, mouth fitting against the scar as he runs a hand through his cropped hair. He says quietly, ‘Yamashita?’
‘Yeah?’
Akanishi breathes out, hot against Yamashita’s skin. ‘Nothing,’ he says.
6. Nishikido brings them vodka, an import. ‘For prior services,’ he says.
None of them can read the characters on the bottle, and it’s sharper than anything they’ve had before. Akanishi is sick afterwards, Yamashita holding his hair as he throws up. It’s the first time in weeks that Akanishi sleeps soundly, katana close by but untouched in the morning. The sunlight filters through the shoji screens, throwing boxes of white over him. Yamashita’s head hurts, but he feels at ease. Inside the room the air is thick and heavy, lying still between the walls. Across from Yamashita is a bowl of ripe peaches, pink and rounded. He peels and eats one slowly, letting Akanishi sleep.
From here, over the sound of the rest of the ryokan waking, Yamashita can just hear the wharves. He wonders what sailing feels like, how ships survive storms, how far they go. The ships he saw docked yesterday came halfway across the world, but Yamashita has no idea just how big the world is. Akanishi stirs, rolls over, hands loose and open. The katana lies forgotten.
Yamashita wants more than this but it’s enough for now. It’s the most he can have, Akanishi by his side, even if there isn’t anything left for them in this country. One day Akanishi will want to leave and all Yamashita can do is follow.
7. The night before they leave, Nishikido hires a third ronin. ‘Met him in the local tea house,’ he says.
Outside, in the grove of bamboo and trees that fringes the south end of the ryokan’s garden, the darkness is smothering. The sun had set hours early, leaving the afternoon heat hanging behind. It’s too hot, but Yamashita itches for his armour anyway.
Nishikido says, ‘I’ll introduce you tomorrow.’ He touches a grey branch of a willow. ‘He’s a poet,’ he adds.
Akanishi pulls out a packet of cigarettes. Nishikido says sharply, ‘Don’t you dare.’ Nishikido’s brother had died from lung cancer six months earlier, choked dead from the smoke and nicotine.
Yamashita watches Akanishi light the cigarette. It’s more to piss Nishikido off than anything else, Yamashita knows. Akanishi doesn’t flinch as Nishikido snatches the cigarette from his mouth and grinds it out on the ground. ‘Don’t try me,’ Nishikido hisses, sibilant.
Standing shoulder by shoulder, Yamashita and Akanishi watch Nishikido walk away. ‘Asshole,’ Akanishi says. He strikes another match, and when he blows the flame out, it blackens his fingers.
If Yamashita listens hard, he can hear the sea, even from here. He remembers how Akanishi had kissed Nishikido once, burning with sake, and how neither remembered by morning, and how Yamashita didn’t want to remind them. He listens, and remembers, and remembers.
8. Kamenashi Kazuya writes poetry. His hands are beautiful as he writes. He does not smoke.
Yamashita thinks of the ocean.
9. Kamenashi doesn’t say much at first. He’s almost shy, preferring to retreat to his calligraphy notebooks whenever they stop for a break or make camp. Akanishi laughs at Kamenashi behind his back, but Yamashita, for reasons that he can only guess at, kisses him in a grove of bamboo when only five minutes earlier he’d been by the campfire and laughing with Akanishi. It’s impulsive and dirty and everything that Yamashita wants right now.
Two nights later, it’s Yamashita who is mending armour by the campfire, cleaning his katana. It’s another hot night, the stars hanging heavy in the sky. Nishikido had chosen a small clearing to stop for the night, hemmed by river willows so old that they blot out the surrounding landscape. Yamashita is smoking a cigarette he has pilfered from Akanishi, rich and thick with smoke. It’s almost burned down to the filter, only good for another minute or two. He can only guess at what Akanishi’s doing with Kamenashi, wherever they are right now. Cutting the rotten hide cords of his armour, he looks up to see Nishikido, watching him work from the other side of the fire.
Yamashita throws the frayed hide into the flames. Nishikido smiles as Yamashita begins threading in new cord. ‘It’s a beautiful night,’ he says.
10. They see Kamenashi fight for the first time when they’re halfway home. It’s midday. They’re somewhere between worlds, and Yamashita can feel time mounting higher, tide-like, knee-deep and rising. They’d passed the rice fields just this morning, and have stopped for a reprieve on a mountain pass. The cliffs here are sheer, and Yamashita watches Kamenashi sketching the nearest. ‘Have you ever been here?’ he asks.
Kamenashi shrugs, not pausing. A vine crawls down his page, heavy with ink. ‘All places are the same to me.’
A crunch of loose gravel. Akanishi stoops down to their level, proffering three red persimmons. ‘Here.’ His hands are always dirty but everything’s like that, nowadays. Yamashita’s almost gotten used to it.
They’re eating, Yamashita finishing first and licking his sticky fingers, when the first arrows start flying. One strikes Kamenashi’s shoulder plate, but he turns into the impact and the arrow glances off. Still tasting fruit in his mouth, Yamashita draws his katana.
11. Kamenashi fights like it could mean less to him. He kills more than Akanishi and Yamashita together, and afterwards as Akanishi is on his knees, retching over the side of the path, Yamashita holds his hair from his face and looks to Kamenashi. From here he can see ink, melted into the blood between his fingers. Kamenashi rolls one of the brigands over with his boot to face dead eyes to the sky. Yamashita swallows, dry, and turns away.
12. Trying to hold onto Akanishi and Kamenashi is like trying to hold onto river water. They run from Yamashita’s fingers. When he raises his fingers to his mouth he tastes nicotine, ink. They are all murderers, Kamenashi and Nishikido and Akanishi and Yamashita. Yamashita’s katana once had a name but he has forgotten it now. He cleans it with sand, and looks at his hands afterwards. His fingernails are cracked and broken, with half-moons of encrusted black. The palms are rough, and a scar runs from the ball of his left thumb to the base of the index finger from when Akanishi had accidentally cut him when sparring.
Yamashita rolls his shoulder. It doesn’t hurt anymore, and neither does Akanishi’s arrow wound. They used to compare scars, when they were new, but now there are too many. Here, back at the only home they have known, Akanishi jokes around more than usual. Yet Yamashita catches him by the lake, throwing rocks at the water. Through the branches of a willow he can read Akanishi’s lips. I am brave, Akanishi mouths, and a rock hits the lake. I am brave, Akanishi screams, and Yamashita knows that he doesn’t believe it, will never believe it.
13. Yamashita turns twenty-three. Nishikido says nothing, gives him nothing. Kamenashi paints a willow across his shoulder blades and lefavesfingerprints like bruised tattoos on his skin. Akanishi punches Yamashita, harder than normal. Yamashita sleeps between them, and halfway through the night one of them kisses him, and in the dark he can only guess who. They taste the same these days, Akanishi and Kamenashi.
14. Kamenashi fits in like he’s something they’d been missing all this time. They fight with each other more now that he’s here, but it’s their brand of love. They fight for it, fight for each other. When Yamashita’s katana breaks one night, it’s Kamenashi who kills the man who broke it and Akanishi the one who cleans the wound. Nishikido pays them. The money is cold in Yamashita’s hands. When he touches Kamenashi’s cheek, Akanishi’s hand, both are even colder.
15. Yamashita had tried opium, once, when he and Akanishi had made a detour into Omiya last winter. There’d been more snow than they’d had in years, too thick to keep walking. In Omiya they’d ended up in a motel, humid and densely warm after the cold outside. It had turned out to be the front for an opium den, not much of one, just a collection of mismatched furniture, wallpaper stained dirty by the smoke. In the next room was an eatery, late night voices seeping through the walls to settle as background noise in the cramped den. Pale haze shimmered under the low-ceiling, blurring the dim oil lamps until they were just blots of sun white.
Yamashita and Akanishi had shared a pipe, money being hard to come by in those days, especially if you were a ronin. Heady with fumes, Yamashita’d sucked the pipe dry, Akanishi asleep against his shoulder. It’d been the worst and best night they’d spent in months, opium making them too dizzy and tired to think. It hung around in their systems for hours after they’d left Omiya, heavy and bitter, and all Yamashita wanted was an exit. After the narrow, filthy streets of the city, he craved the open, needed new landscapes.
It’s the same with Kamenashi. Civilisation doesn’t treat Yamashita badly but it tastes shit and he’s just too tired for it. Kamenashi is something new, tundra and sea storms after summer. Yamashita walks with Akanishi against one shoulder and Kamenashi by the other. When Yamashita finds the thin desiccated husk of a cicada, he shows it to them. ‘I once wrote a story about a man, and cicadas, and mountains,’ Kamenashi says.
They are down by the river, collecting fresh water. Akanishi’s mouth is wet, his eyes dry. He throws a stone into the running current. Yamashita’s throat is parched. Dust settles around their feet. ‘Tell me.’
Kamenashi smiles. His bottom lip is cracked and red. ‘That story,’ he says, ‘I forgot long ago.’
samurai/edo universe
pg13, 2314 wc
in the summer we fight amidst the empty mountains.
join/watch
a/n: this fic was podficced by the incredibly awesome becquinho, over here.
1. The sun burns them as they fight in the fields. Yamashita will remember this one for days, every man he kills etched into the lines of his hands. The dirt won’t come out from under his nails until he breaks them against the katana hilt, and the wound on his shoulder will scar and heal over an older one underneath it.
Akanishi cleans his sword on the ground afterwards, and smokes a cigarette. It’s the latest habit that he’s picked up, this one from Dutch sailors when they were at the ports last month. For him it’s a nervous thing, needing anything up to a whole packet to ground him after a fight. If there aren’t enough at hand he’ll roll his own, but he prefers them packaged and foreign, tasting of someplace that isn’t here.
‘I’ll get the payment tomorrow,’ he says, blowing a smoke ring to feign a nonchalance that is running out by the day. Yamashita doesn’t miss the way Akanishi never looks at the ones he’s killed, how the muscles of his shoulders bunch together. His body knows how to kill, but Akanishi’s still young, inside. The two of them are employed as bodyguards for Nishikido Ryo, the son of the local lord. Today he lends them to a neighbouring lord as mercenaries. It isn’t a livelihood that’s going to last, Yamashita knows, but it’s the most they can have right now.
He slings his katana across his back and takes Akanishi’s cigarette for a single drag to stop his hands from shaking. He doesn’t look back when he follows Akanishi onto the road. Behind them the empty field screams with the sound of cicadas. Yamashita keeps walking.
2. Between them, Akanishi is more scared of dying. Yamashita takes everything as it comes, but Akanishi thinks too much. Akanishi dreams at night, beside Yamashita. Their katanas are within reach and more often than not Akanishi will wake up holding it to his chest. ‘Bad dreams?’ Yamashita will ask, watching as Akanishi places the katana back on the tatami mat or the dirt, wherever they’ve spent the night. Akanishi will shudder and nod, drawing a hand over his mouth like that can make the memory of them go away better than time can.
Yamashita doesn’t dream.
3. When he kisses Akanishi, both of them taste like tobacco and adrenalin, bodies fired on a mixture of the two. Akanishi holds Yamashita like his nightmares are at their backs and Yamashita’s the only one that can save them. It’s something they both want to believe in.
On the second night of the journey to the coast as Nishikido’s bodyguards, they’re attacked by bandits. Eventually the bandits retreat, but a stray arrow punches through Akanishi’s armour and between his ribs. When Yamashita undoes his armour he’s so fucking scared of what he’ll find, but Akanishi’s still breathing, coughing out a laugh when he sees the blood on Yamashita’s hands.
The wound is shallow.
4. Akanishi is afraid of dying. Yamashita is afraid for Akanishi.
5. At the port of Nagasaki Nishikido leaves them to their own devices whilst he settles some business with the ship captains. Akanishi flirts with pretty Dutch girls, impressing them with his scars and katana, but Yamashita knows better to think that Akanishi is okay. Akanishi carries bravado on his shoulders, wears it like armour, wears it even when he’s with Yamashita.
The ocean is beautiful from the wharves. When Yamashita looks at the horizon, it’s with the same need that he looks at Akanishi. We all need something to wish for, to move forward. Yamashita’s anchored and longing for more.
That evening at the ryokan Akanishi cuts Yamashita’s hair with his knife. When he goes outside to throw the hair away, Yamashita can tell by his footfalls that he’s still hurting, though the bandages are getting cleaner by the day. His own wound has become a strip of soft white, stretched over the curve of his shoulder. Akanishi comes back and kneels beside Yamashita, mouth fitting against the scar as he runs a hand through his cropped hair. He says quietly, ‘Yamashita?’
‘Yeah?’
Akanishi breathes out, hot against Yamashita’s skin. ‘Nothing,’ he says.
6. Nishikido brings them vodka, an import. ‘For prior services,’ he says.
None of them can read the characters on the bottle, and it’s sharper than anything they’ve had before. Akanishi is sick afterwards, Yamashita holding his hair as he throws up. It’s the first time in weeks that Akanishi sleeps soundly, katana close by but untouched in the morning. The sunlight filters through the shoji screens, throwing boxes of white over him. Yamashita’s head hurts, but he feels at ease. Inside the room the air is thick and heavy, lying still between the walls. Across from Yamashita is a bowl of ripe peaches, pink and rounded. He peels and eats one slowly, letting Akanishi sleep.
From here, over the sound of the rest of the ryokan waking, Yamashita can just hear the wharves. He wonders what sailing feels like, how ships survive storms, how far they go. The ships he saw docked yesterday came halfway across the world, but Yamashita has no idea just how big the world is. Akanishi stirs, rolls over, hands loose and open. The katana lies forgotten.
Yamashita wants more than this but it’s enough for now. It’s the most he can have, Akanishi by his side, even if there isn’t anything left for them in this country. One day Akanishi will want to leave and all Yamashita can do is follow.
7. The night before they leave, Nishikido hires a third ronin. ‘Met him in the local tea house,’ he says.
Outside, in the grove of bamboo and trees that fringes the south end of the ryokan’s garden, the darkness is smothering. The sun had set hours early, leaving the afternoon heat hanging behind. It’s too hot, but Yamashita itches for his armour anyway.
Nishikido says, ‘I’ll introduce you tomorrow.’ He touches a grey branch of a willow. ‘He’s a poet,’ he adds.
Akanishi pulls out a packet of cigarettes. Nishikido says sharply, ‘Don’t you dare.’ Nishikido’s brother had died from lung cancer six months earlier, choked dead from the smoke and nicotine.
Yamashita watches Akanishi light the cigarette. It’s more to piss Nishikido off than anything else, Yamashita knows. Akanishi doesn’t flinch as Nishikido snatches the cigarette from his mouth and grinds it out on the ground. ‘Don’t try me,’ Nishikido hisses, sibilant.
Standing shoulder by shoulder, Yamashita and Akanishi watch Nishikido walk away. ‘Asshole,’ Akanishi says. He strikes another match, and when he blows the flame out, it blackens his fingers.
If Yamashita listens hard, he can hear the sea, even from here. He remembers how Akanishi had kissed Nishikido once, burning with sake, and how neither remembered by morning, and how Yamashita didn’t want to remind them. He listens, and remembers, and remembers.
8. Kamenashi Kazuya writes poetry. His hands are beautiful as he writes. He does not smoke.
Yamashita thinks of the ocean.
9. Kamenashi doesn’t say much at first. He’s almost shy, preferring to retreat to his calligraphy notebooks whenever they stop for a break or make camp. Akanishi laughs at Kamenashi behind his back, but Yamashita, for reasons that he can only guess at, kisses him in a grove of bamboo when only five minutes earlier he’d been by the campfire and laughing with Akanishi. It’s impulsive and dirty and everything that Yamashita wants right now.
Two nights later, it’s Yamashita who is mending armour by the campfire, cleaning his katana. It’s another hot night, the stars hanging heavy in the sky. Nishikido had chosen a small clearing to stop for the night, hemmed by river willows so old that they blot out the surrounding landscape. Yamashita is smoking a cigarette he has pilfered from Akanishi, rich and thick with smoke. It’s almost burned down to the filter, only good for another minute or two. He can only guess at what Akanishi’s doing with Kamenashi, wherever they are right now. Cutting the rotten hide cords of his armour, he looks up to see Nishikido, watching him work from the other side of the fire.
Yamashita throws the frayed hide into the flames. Nishikido smiles as Yamashita begins threading in new cord. ‘It’s a beautiful night,’ he says.
10. They see Kamenashi fight for the first time when they’re halfway home. It’s midday. They’re somewhere between worlds, and Yamashita can feel time mounting higher, tide-like, knee-deep and rising. They’d passed the rice fields just this morning, and have stopped for a reprieve on a mountain pass. The cliffs here are sheer, and Yamashita watches Kamenashi sketching the nearest. ‘Have you ever been here?’ he asks.
Kamenashi shrugs, not pausing. A vine crawls down his page, heavy with ink. ‘All places are the same to me.’
A crunch of loose gravel. Akanishi stoops down to their level, proffering three red persimmons. ‘Here.’ His hands are always dirty but everything’s like that, nowadays. Yamashita’s almost gotten used to it.
They’re eating, Yamashita finishing first and licking his sticky fingers, when the first arrows start flying. One strikes Kamenashi’s shoulder plate, but he turns into the impact and the arrow glances off. Still tasting fruit in his mouth, Yamashita draws his katana.
11. Kamenashi fights like it could mean less to him. He kills more than Akanishi and Yamashita together, and afterwards as Akanishi is on his knees, retching over the side of the path, Yamashita holds his hair from his face and looks to Kamenashi. From here he can see ink, melted into the blood between his fingers. Kamenashi rolls one of the brigands over with his boot to face dead eyes to the sky. Yamashita swallows, dry, and turns away.
12. Trying to hold onto Akanishi and Kamenashi is like trying to hold onto river water. They run from Yamashita’s fingers. When he raises his fingers to his mouth he tastes nicotine, ink. They are all murderers, Kamenashi and Nishikido and Akanishi and Yamashita. Yamashita’s katana once had a name but he has forgotten it now. He cleans it with sand, and looks at his hands afterwards. His fingernails are cracked and broken, with half-moons of encrusted black. The palms are rough, and a scar runs from the ball of his left thumb to the base of the index finger from when Akanishi had accidentally cut him when sparring.
Yamashita rolls his shoulder. It doesn’t hurt anymore, and neither does Akanishi’s arrow wound. They used to compare scars, when they were new, but now there are too many. Here, back at the only home they have known, Akanishi jokes around more than usual. Yet Yamashita catches him by the lake, throwing rocks at the water. Through the branches of a willow he can read Akanishi’s lips. I am brave, Akanishi mouths, and a rock hits the lake. I am brave, Akanishi screams, and Yamashita knows that he doesn’t believe it, will never believe it.
13. Yamashita turns twenty-three. Nishikido says nothing, gives him nothing. Kamenashi paints a willow across his shoulder blades and lefavesfingerprints like bruised tattoos on his skin. Akanishi punches Yamashita, harder than normal. Yamashita sleeps between them, and halfway through the night one of them kisses him, and in the dark he can only guess who. They taste the same these days, Akanishi and Kamenashi.
14. Kamenashi fits in like he’s something they’d been missing all this time. They fight with each other more now that he’s here, but it’s their brand of love. They fight for it, fight for each other. When Yamashita’s katana breaks one night, it’s Kamenashi who kills the man who broke it and Akanishi the one who cleans the wound. Nishikido pays them. The money is cold in Yamashita’s hands. When he touches Kamenashi’s cheek, Akanishi’s hand, both are even colder.
15. Yamashita had tried opium, once, when he and Akanishi had made a detour into Omiya last winter. There’d been more snow than they’d had in years, too thick to keep walking. In Omiya they’d ended up in a motel, humid and densely warm after the cold outside. It had turned out to be the front for an opium den, not much of one, just a collection of mismatched furniture, wallpaper stained dirty by the smoke. In the next room was an eatery, late night voices seeping through the walls to settle as background noise in the cramped den. Pale haze shimmered under the low-ceiling, blurring the dim oil lamps until they were just blots of sun white.
Yamashita and Akanishi had shared a pipe, money being hard to come by in those days, especially if you were a ronin. Heady with fumes, Yamashita’d sucked the pipe dry, Akanishi asleep against his shoulder. It’d been the worst and best night they’d spent in months, opium making them too dizzy and tired to think. It hung around in their systems for hours after they’d left Omiya, heavy and bitter, and all Yamashita wanted was an exit. After the narrow, filthy streets of the city, he craved the open, needed new landscapes.
It’s the same with Kamenashi. Civilisation doesn’t treat Yamashita badly but it tastes shit and he’s just too tired for it. Kamenashi is something new, tundra and sea storms after summer. Yamashita walks with Akanishi against one shoulder and Kamenashi by the other. When Yamashita finds the thin desiccated husk of a cicada, he shows it to them. ‘I once wrote a story about a man, and cicadas, and mountains,’ Kamenashi says.
They are down by the river, collecting fresh water. Akanishi’s mouth is wet, his eyes dry. He throws a stone into the running current. Yamashita’s throat is parched. Dust settles around their feet. ‘Tell me.’
Kamenashi smiles. His bottom lip is cracked and red. ‘That story,’ he says, ‘I forgot long ago.’