Chapter Text
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“Your new retainers are… not what I expected,” Jii says diplomatically.
Takeru just cuts his eyes at the old man. They’re about what he expected— barely qualified with modern sensibilities and none of them want to be here, except maybe that Ryuunosuke guy, and he’s annoying and pompous enough to make Jii look vulgar by comparison. If he turns out to be just as long-winded, Takeru may just walk into the ocean and be done with it.
“I told you summoning them was a bad idea,” he says. “We should send them away. They don’t want to be here anyway. Even Ryuunosuke would likely prefer to return to his Kabuki plays.”
“We cannot send them away, Tono,” Jii protests. “You need them. You cannot fight the Gedoushou alone any longer. If you were to be killed—”
“Then everything we’ve worked for would be ruined, I know,” Takeru says. He’s suddenly very tired. Bad enough this had to happen before the princess was ready, but he couldn’t even keep his word and do things on his own the way he’d intended.
Why couldn’t Doukoku have waited to come back until the princess had mastered the sealing mojikara? Then he could have handed the title back to her and disappeared— gone off to make a life for himself that didn’t involve being a samurai.
Maybe find Genta and—
—he stops that train of thought before he can finish it. Genta is gone, and he’s unlikely to see him again. The loss of the Ika Origami will forever be a stain on his tenure as lord, but honestly it’s for the best. If he doesn’t want his so-called retainers who were trained for this their entire life to fight at his side, surely that means that he shouldn’t want Genta, either?
“And what happens when they find out the truth? I can’t ask them to put their lives on the line for me, Jii. They don’t even want to be here.”
“Ryuunosuke seems to.”
“That’s even worse!”
Takeru stares down at his lap. How can he make Jii understand? As long as he can remember, Jii has acted as though the lie they’ve been living is the truth. But he at least chose to put his devotion onto the little boy he’d been saddled with— he’d chosen the lie for himself and let it be real to him. But Ryuunosuke— he thinks Takeru is someone else, someone important, someone that he’s sworn to fight next to. What happens when he learns the truth? That he’s risking his life for a shadow, a fake, a man whose only claim to importance is that he was particularly gifted at mojikara as a boy?
If anything happens to Ryuunosuke because Takeru wasn’t strong enough— how is he supposed to live with himself?
“Tono.” Jii kneels in front of him. “We do this out of necessity. You cannot fight alone, not without risking your life and the lives of those you protect. Your retainers will fight with you. In time you will come to rely on each other.”
He looks so imploring. Takeru turns away, sprawling on the platform rather than acknowledge him. He knows he’s being a brat, but it’s the only defense he has.
“Chiaki will miss his graduation,” he says instead. Chiaki had been complaining about that at dinner; his graduation is in a few days, apparently, which means that he won’t be able to attend. Ryuunosuke had scolded him over it, saying that what he was doing was far more important than something so trivial, and Takeru was genuinely worried that Chiaki was about to commit murder.
“I left in the middle of a performance,” Ryuunosuke had said proudly, which Takeru supposes explained his clothes when he first showed up. “We’ve all agreed to make sacrifices for our duty.”
“Let it go, Ryuunosuke,” Takeru had said, only to earn himself a lot of obsequious bowing and apologizing from Ryuunosuke and a murderous look of his own from Chiaki.
“I doubt the young man had much a future ahead of him,” Jii assures him, as if that’s even close to being the part that matters. “Being a samurai may be a blessing for one with his prospects.”
Takeru rolls his eyes, and gets up to walk out. He’s thinking that he might go get some water, or maybe a midnight snack, but at the end of the hallway he turns to go outside instead. Maybe a few katas will clear his head.
Unfortunately, when he reaches the training ground, he finds it already occupied: Chiaki is sitting on the veranda staring out into the night. Before Takeru can decide whether to approach to turn back, Chiaki notices him, and turns such a hateful look on him that he feels it in his middle.
“It’s not like I asked for this either, you know,” he says suddenly. It’s a mistake, he knows it is, but can feel how much Chiaki resents him and— there’s something about being hated for this that he can’t handle. “And I meant it. I don’t care if you think of me as lord or whatever. But I’ve got a job to do, and I expect you to do it with me, or leave.”
“Whatever,” Chiaki says, some of the fight but none of the defiance going out of him as he turns his attention back to staring off into the distance. Frustration rises in Takeru’s blood. He feels a strange urge to hit Chiaki— not as a samurai or a lord but just as a man, a man with bad blood with the man in front of him.
He wonders how Chiaki would respond to knowing that he is just a man. When the truth eventually emerges, will Chiaki be more or less angry that he’s been duped?
More, most likely. Chiaki already hates him as a lord— no doubt he will feel that even more strongly that everything he gave up was for a nobody.
“Good night, Chiaki,” Takeru says rather than give voice to any of this, and turns to go. He dimly hears Chiaki’s irritated ‘tch’, and then he’s inside again, Chiaki forgotten to the night.
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