Chapter Text
The sun rose over Tosa, casting its warm light over the rolling hills and up the walls of Kochi Castle and onto the veranda at the castle’s summit, where it fell across the corpse that lay prone on the floor. The still-warm body was swathed in a bright orange haori whose sleeves were lavishly adorned with peonies and winding vines in threads of gleaming gold. Its head lay a short distance away, connected to its trunk only by the pool of blood that had spilled from its neck to seep slowly into the floorboards.
There were four witnesses to the murder, arranged around the killer and his victim like the points of a compass: three looming over the scene with their blades at their hips and their haori stirring softly in the cold winter breeze, one crouched on the floor in a daze with a gunshot wound dripping slowly down his back, all staring at the tableau as if spellbound.
The killer himself stood before the corpse, still gripping his katana in both hands with his victim’s blood dripping along the blade’s length. A ruddy mess was splashed over the sleeves of his sky-blue haori and sprayed up his chest and down his hakama, mingling with the trails that seeped from the holes punched through his right shoulder and left flank and right leg. The man examined his work for a moment; his injured leg shook; his breath shook with it. The blade fell from his hands and he sank to the floor after it, first to his knees and then onto his side, coming to rest with his cheek against the boards a few centimetres from the edge of the crimson pool.
It took a second for his companions to act, transfixed as they’d been by the sight, but Okita Soji was the first to snap out of it. He stomped across the room, muttering a series of shit-shit-shits under his breath, and kicked the orange-clad corpse unceremoniously aside to focus on the still-living man who lay next to it. He knelt down next to his comrade and grabbed him by his uninjured shoulder to wrench him around onto his back, then seized two fistfuls of the big idiot’s blood-sodden haori and gave him a shake.
“What the fuck were ya thinkin’, takin’ that bastard on point-blank?” Okita demanded.
“C’mon, Soji — don’t manhandle the guy on top of everythin’ else,” Nagakura Shinpachi said reproachfully, but though he stepped forward and leaned in over the spectacle, he didn’t move to stop it.
The man whose name was Sakamoto Ryoma but who still stubbornly insisted that Okita call him Saito Hajime smiled wanly as he flopped back-and-forth in his companion’s rough grip. “I could ask you the same thing, nii-san,” he said after Okita was done shaking him. “You fought a cannon, and here you are.”
“Can’t kill me with one of those,” Okita explained. He let go of Saito’s collar and peeled the man’s haori open to reveal a spot on his flank where a deep red patch was spreading far too rapidly over his kimono’s grey diamonds. He let his palm rest against the sticky warmth for a second, then pulled it back and added, matter-of-factly and with hardly a tremor in his voice, “It’d be cheatin’.”
“Oh,” Saito said. He closed his eyes and wiped his sleeve across his face to clean away a stray spatter of blood. Beneath it, his skin was pale — far paler than it ought to have been in the dawn’s golden light, a sheet of blank canvas stretched thin over all his delicate arteries and veins. He took another breath. “That’s good. I’m glad, Soji,” he murmured, stumbling in slow motion over each word.
Okita flicked his eye up to Nagakura. At some point, the man had stepped back and turned his head to look politely out over the hills. Nearby, Hijikata Toshizo was kneeling down next to the sixth actor in their drama: the man with the young-looking face and the grey-streaked hair and the little wound recently punched into his back. They were speaking quietly about something, their voices a low buzz in Okita’s ears. That man — Takechi Hanpeita, Okita noted, and the mere acknowledgement left him grinding his teeth until pain shot through his jaw and up into his head — constituted another problem that he felt compelled to address. Ideally by burying a sword to the hilt in his back next to the bullet-hole and kicking him face-down into the Kagami River. But Takechi didn’t seem inclined to dash away from his comeuppance any time soon, and there were more immediately pressing matters. Okita returned his attention to Saito.
“Soji,” Saito continued, “I didn’t think I’d have the chance to tell you I—”
Okita grabbed a handful of the Third Captain’s bangs and gave them a sharp yank, cutting him off and startling him into opening his eyes again. “Shut it,” he snapped. He leaned in to bring his lips flush with Saito’s ear and whispered, “I didn’t die and you ain’t dyin’ either, so don’t ya dare jinx it by startin’ in on that last-words horse-shit.”
Saito laughed one of his warm little laughs. He lifted an arm and draped it over Okita’s back; his thumb traced a subtle but reassuring circle over one of the knobs of Okita’s spine. “I just need to lie down for a bit. I already died at the Omi Inn, nii-san. I can’t die again.”
That was Sakamoto, ya stupid bastard, Okita wanted to say. “That’s right,” he said instead.
He stayed crouched over Saito with his cheek resting against his ear, unthinking, feeling the familiar weight of his arm and the gentle touch of his fingers. After a moment, the weight shifted and Saito’s arm grew slack; it slipped from Okita’s back and fell to the floor with a dull thump even as Saito’s breath continued to wash in waves against the side of his head.
“I can help,” Takechi’s voice cut in from behind him.
Okita pulled himself up off Saito’s chest and turned his head to regard Inoue Genzaburo’s killer over his shoulder, narrowing his eye.
“I can find you a safe-house,” Takechi added. “I’m not that badly off. I’ll find a way to take care of this—” He gestured to Yamauchi Yodo’s head, then waved his hand over the rest of the daimyo’s crumpled body. “—and then I’ll bring a doctor to you.” He cast an almost plaintive gaze over the men around him. “I know the value of all the blood I’ve spilled. This is the least I can do.”
Okita lowered a hand to his katana’s scabbard and ran his thumb around the blade’s tsuba as he considered the offer and longed to reject it. What was one more headless body on the floor? He didn’t need to look to Nagakura to know that he shared the sentiment; he could feel it radiating from his brother.
“Very well,” Hijikata agreed, settling the matter for them.
“No,” Saito rasped, kicking everything up all over again. He raised himself up on his elbows despite the pain that flared in his eyes at the motion. “We need to leave.”
“You need to rest, Saito-kun,” Hijikata protested.
“Takechi,” Saito said, not bothering to look at his superior and ignoring his admonition, “Whatever it is you need to do, you know it won’t help to have the Shinsengumi here while you do it. Give us safe passage when we leave. That’s all I ask.” That small handful of words left him visibly drained; he lowered himself back to the floor and rolled his head over to regard Okita again. “I have a farm near Fushimi. Take me home.”
Takechi rose to his feet and took a step toward Saito. “You are home, Ryoma,” he said, spreading his arms demonstratively. “Let me help. This is my atonement.”
When Saito and the other captains had looked upon Tosa from the deck of their little sailboat, the entire area around Kochi Castle had seemed like a fortress unto itself: a single mass of high barricades built with beams thick as tree-trunks and covered with burning torches. It was hard to imagine the castle town as it must have been when Saito had arrived and fled one year earlier; all the quaint little houses and storefronts he’d described had been smashed to pieces, reduced to heaps of rubble and charred stakes, piled all the way down to the riverbank and jutting up toward the smoky sky. In his mind’s eye, Okita saw Saito gazing upon the wreckage of his home again, and the last tenuous threads of his self-restraint snapped. He leapt to his feet and stomped across the room and swung his right hook directly into Takechi’s left cheek. The man stood and allowed it to happen, then crumpled to the floor with the blow.
“Don’t you dare say that name, ya bastard!” Okita roared as he tore his katana from its scabbard. He felt Hijikata’s steady hand on his shoulder; he shook it violently away, then raised his blade high above his head with his trembling fists clamped around its hilt. “Ya stole it and stained it — with Gen-san’s blood and with everyone else’s! And don’t pretend like ya know what any of it was worth, ya stupid goddamn dog, ’cause ya didn’t even know what your master was tryin’ to buy with it!”
Takechi rolled onto his back and lay there, staring up at his looming aggressor, unmoving apart from the heaving of his chest. There was still time; Okita knew that Nagakura would happily stand by and watch him plunge his sword down, and that Hijikata wouldn’t be happy about it but wouldn’t take any further steps to stop him, either. He could pin the murderer to the floorboards, making sure to slip the blade in just right so that its point missed every soft bit whose puncturing would bring him to a too-quick end. He could twist the steel around and watch the man squirm as it churned his insides to a crimson soup and his life ebbed slowly out of him. He could dip the sleeves of his haori in the mess and carry the garment back to Kyoto to lay upon the one he’d left draped limply over a simple grave beneath the old tree in Mibu-dera’s courtyard. Something burned behind his eye.
Behind them, Saito lay in a slowly expanding pool of his own blood and said nothing, but Okita could feel the man’s eyes on his back — watching and waiting, always so inexplicably trusting.
Okita spat on the ground next to Takechi’s face as he put up his blade. “For some reason, Hajime-chan still thinks you’re his brother, and unlike you, I ain’t in the business of tearin’ families apart,” he said. In the end, though, Okita wasn’t quite as big a man as Saito was: as soon as he finished speaking, he raised his foot and stomped down on Takechi’s shoulder so that the wound on his back slammed against the floor, then watched with cold satisfaction as the man writhed beneath his grubby sandal.
“Safe passage,” Takechi hissed through his teeth, clamping down on the pained groan that rattled in the back of his throat as Okita ground his heel in. “You have my word.”
Okita let himself teeter on the knife’s edge between mercy and satisfaction for a second longer, then withdrew his foot. “We’re leavin’,” he said roughly. “I couldn’t care less what ya plan on doin’ with your worthless life when we’re gone, but if we ever see each other again, ya better hope it’s in hell, ’cause otherwise I’m gonna make that seem like the more pleasant option.”
There was nothing left to say after that. Judging that none of his men planned to do anything stupid after all, Hijikata picked Saito’s katana up off the floor, cleaned its edge on his own sleeve, and motioned to Nagakura with his free hand as he turned and headed for the stairs. Despite Saito’s mumbled half-awake protests, Nagakura picked him up and slung him over his shoulder like a big bloody sack of rice and followed on the Vice-Commander’s heels. Okita stood with his arms hanging impotently at his sides, sifting aimlessly through thoughts that sat like so many fine chips of bone in an ashen bed.
As the others made their way to the stairs, the former leader of the Tosa Loyalist Party scooted across the floor and busied himself with peeling the bright orange haori from the daimyo’s blood-soaked chest; Okita lingered on the landing to watch him. Takechi merely sat on his knees, looked up, met Okita’s eye, and looked back down to his work. At least he was smart enough not to apologize for anything. Okita glared at him for a heartbeat, his upper lip curled over his teeth in a snarl, one dog to another, then turned and followed his companions down the steps.
Okita got the sense — grudgingly — that Saito’s sworn brother intended to be true to his word, but there was hardly any time for him to follow through on it when the last remnants of the Shinsengumi left Kochi Castle. It seemed, instead, that something had changed at some point between their arrival in Tosa the night before and their departure that morning. The men slowly wound their way back down from the castle to the riverfront, retracing their steps through the barricades’ funnels and around the piles of debris, and though a few soldiers stood listlessly on the ramparts or sat tending their wounds, they merely turned their heads to watch the intruders pass. The battle was over, and perhaps Takechi had sent a runner to tell his men as much when he’d seen Saito storming the castle’s summit. In retrospect, Okita realized, it had been a foregone conclusion when Takechi had told his brother to come find him in Tosa.
In any case, the captains had left their boat at an abandoned dock in a secluded spot some distance away from the castle town, and they returned to it to find that everything was still intact. The soldiers whom they’d left to stand watch had passed an uneventful night taking turns napping in the cabin near the vessel’s stern. One of them waved to the group from his post at the bow, then dropped his hand abruptly to his sword’s hilt and craned his neck with a shout of alarm as a sudden scuffle erupted from the bushes behind the captains’ backs.
Okita whipped around with his own blade half drawn, then relaxed when he saw the source of the noise. An exhausted errand-runner was bearing down on them with a large cloth-wrapped bundle tucked under his arm and his free hand raised, unarmed and palm-out.
“The daimyo sends his regards,” the man said between huffs. “And also some supplies.” He proffered the bundle.
“…Yamauchi Yodo?” Okita asked him as he accepted the package against his better judgement.
“Who else would I be talking about, sir?” the runner replied with a carefully blank expression. He held Okita’s gaze for a second, then turned to leave.
Okita stood in the muddy roadway next to the dock and watched him go, clutching the bundle, thinking again about the efficiency with which Takechi had stripped the haori from his former lord’s back. “So that’s another name for the guy’s collection, eh…?” he said, a little awed at the audacity of it all.
Hijikata strode up next to him and leaned in close. “We discussed the matter briefly, back at the castle, and the news will reach Kyoto before long,” he murmured. “As you’re well aware, Takechi Hanpeita was executed several months ago for his role in the murder of Yoshida Toyo, as well as the part he played in various other Tosa Loyalist Party plots. It seems that some of his remaining comrades wrested control of Tosa away from Lord Yamauchi and attempted to stage a coup that would have seen the emperor himself deposed.”
Okita chewed sullenly on Hijikata’s words.
“The daimyo appears to have had a change of heart about a good many things,” Hijikata continued. “I believe once he’s called everything off, he intends to seclude himself for some time to consider how he plans to move forward.”
The anger that Okita felt at Takechi’s continued existence was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that the man would outlive himself. Someday, Yamauchi Yodo would step back out into a world where his face had grown fuzzy in others’ minds along with that of his dead underling. There would come a time when he’d hear Takechi Hanpeita’s name spat with contempt from his new subordinates’ mouths. There was, at least, a kind of justice in that.
“Guess it’s all over, then,” Okita observed.
“Here in Tosa, at least,” Hijikata agreed. “There is one last thing, though.” He gestured to the inert lump that still lay slung over one of Nagakura’s burly shoulders. “Let’s get Saito-kun home.”
In short order, Nagakura hauled Saito onto the boat and into the cabin, then deposited him on a pile of blankets. With that done, he stepped out to help the other men work the rigging and push the vessel out onto the river to begin the journey home. Okita thus found himself sitting in the cabin next to Saito with Takechi’s parting gift still clasped in his hands, watching the man’s chest as it slowly rose and fell and his blood began to crust up into a dark red mess all over his rumpled clothing. Outside, Nagakura was shouting orders at the soldiers. The boat creaked around them.
Okita watched Saito for a little longer, then opened the bundle. A small clay pot sat inside, nestled in a thick pile of clean bandages. Gingerly, Okita picked the pot up out of its packaging, lifted its lid a crack, and raised it to his nose. Its contents smelled vaguely herbal: some kind of ointment, he realized. He set the pot aside and unwrapped some of the bandages and shook them out. As he’d expected, a note fell out of the folds, its characters smudged in the writer’s haste to pack everything away. He picked it up, ready to scoff contemptuously at the contents.
I know I needn’t ask you, but all the same: please look after Saito Hajime, the note said.
“I’ll do what I want,” Okita said to the note, then crumpled it up and stuffed it into his sleeve. He turned to Saito and nudged his uninjured shoulder. “Oi, Hajime-chan. We gotta do somethin’ ’bout all those holes our ol’ buddy Yamauchi punched through ya.”
Saito stirred beneath his touch. “Give me some sake and let me sleep through it, then,” he complained with his eyes screwed shut and a furrow dug deep into his brow.
“Ain’t nothin’ to drink but water, and I don’t think there’s gonna be any sleepin’ through this,” Okita said dryly. “If the bullets didn’t bite too deep, I’m gonna pry ’em out. If they did, you’re stuck with ’em, but I’m still gonna get ya patched up so the rot don’t set in. Lemme get the lay of the land first.”
Saito made a gravelly noise in the back of his throat that sounded like permission, so Okita bent down over him and started with what seemed like the least of his problems. Saito had been able to stand and walk a few paces before he’d crumpled to the floor, which was a good sign for his leg. When Okita pushed his bloodstained hakama up over the wound, the spot appeared only to have been lightly bitten; the original Yamauchi Yodo was not, apparently, much of a sharpshooter. The harder part came next: he raised Saito up off the blankets and slid an arm around the man’s back beneath his haori to brace him while he stripped the garment away. He eyed Saito’s shoulder apprehensively, noting the mess of blood that had spread across the breast of his kimono and seeped all the way down to his hakama’s ties. Saito gritted his teeth and breathed out a series of strained grunts as Okita peeled the kimono and the underlying nagajuban from his chest and the sticky fabric tugged at his wounds.
As Okita had suspected, the hole in Saito’s side wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. The bullet had ripped into his flank and then punched through the back of his kimono and haori. It was probably stuck in a post somewhere up on Kochi Castle’s veranda, and given that Saito was still alive, it seemed likely that it hadn’t hit any important organs on its way out. The wound in Saito’s right shoulder was another story: that bullet hadn’t passed through, but was instead lodged near the joint, just beneath his clavicle, not too deep but in a position that would almost certainly hamper Saito’s movements if he left it sitting there.
Okita probed the area around the hole with his thumb, trying not to tug at it too much as he wiped a smear of blood from Saito’s chest. “That’s gotta go,” he decided.
“You know what you’re doing,” Saito said, his tone somewhat lacking in confidence.
Okita was no stranger to gore; he’d inflicted enough violence on his fellow men in the past that the sight of far worse wounds had ceased to faze him. Still, he rarely found himself tending seriously to anyone in the aftermath of a clash, let alone someone he cared about. Nagakura never left a fight with more than cuts and scrapes, and Inoue had seemed immortal until he wasn’t.
“’Course I know what I’m doin’,” he lied. “Used to patch Shinpa-chan up all the time when he’d get himself knocked around.”
“I’m in good hands, then.”
“Nothin’ but the best,” Okita agreed. “Ya want the worst part first, or should I save it?” he asked, trying to sound casual about it.
“Get it over with,” Saito said without hesitation. “If it’s bad enough, it’ll knock me out.”
Okita nodded in approval. At first, he considered dealing with the problem with his wakizashi as he did with so many things, but common sense quickly won out. He stood up and stepped out of the cabin to borrow a little knife from one of the soldiers, who passed the blade over with a pale expression that indicated he knew exactly what was going to happen. He returned to the cabin and stripped off his haori so as not to dangle his sleeves in his work, then eyed Saito; Saito eyed him back with a look that was as knowing as the one that the soldier had given him but significantly more ashen.
“This ain’t how I want your blood on my haori,” Okita said as he set the garment aside, speaking with a levity that he knew rang entirely false.
“No,” Saito agreed, humouring him. He gazed up at Okita with his soft brown eyes. “Thank you,” he added.
“You ain’t gonna be thankin’ me in a second,” Okita said. He knelt down and twisted some of the bandages together into a short, thick strip and passed them to Saito. “Stick this in your mouth so ya don’t bite nothin’ off, then start thinkin’ ’bout somethin’ that ain’t this.” He waited for Saito to clamp his teeth down on the fabric, then bent down, laid a hand firmly on his shoulder next to the wound, and set about prying the bullet out.
The lump of lead hadn’t shattered Saito’s collarbone on its way in, but the extraction was still a delicate job, and one that entailed a degree of pain for which neither man had wholly prepared himself. As Okita dug the knife in, Saito kicked his uninjured leg and reached up with his left hand to grab the arm that held the blade, reflexively pulling the source of his pain away and squeezing hard enough that Okita felt his bones creak in protest. Okita kept Saito’s shoulder pinned to the floor with one hand and clamped his other one around the man’s wrist and pried it away with a muttered order to stay still for fuck’s sake, Hajime-chan, or it’s gonna hurt worse. Somehow, Saito managed to comply: he let both of his arms fall to his sides and balled his hands up into shaking fists. He clenched his teeth and howled around the knot of fabric stuffed between them as Okita dug into his shoulder with his fingers and his knife and blood poured fresh from the wound.
It took hardly any time at all for Okita to finish the job, but each second seemed to stretch out into an hour as Saito shook beneath him with his eyes clamped shut and tears streaming through the cracks. With every loud, laboured breath that Saito heaved out through his nose and every agonized moan that he breathed out into the cloth, waves of nausea washed through Okita’s guts and threatened to bubble up into his throat. He swallowed it down, teeming with self-reproach on top of everything else; the Shinsengumi’s newest and greenest recruits were less pathetically squeamish. Mercifully, however, the ordeal ended exactly as Saito had predicted: just as Okita managed to fish the bullet out, he felt Saito go slack beneath his hands, having passed out from the pain. He set the bullet aside and did his best to wipe the wound clear of grit and debris, then smeared some of Takechi’s ointment over it and bandaged it up with one of the cloth strips, wrapping the fabric in awkward loops around Saito’s chest and over his shoulder.
With that done, the rest was simple enough: Saito remained unconscious while Okita cleaned and bound the wounds in his flank and leg, and his silence made the work much easier to bear. When he was finished, Okita mopped his sweating forehead with his haori before giving Saito’s soaked brow the same treatment. He pulled the damp, mangled strip of bandages from Saito’s mouth, then sat back with his legs splayed out and one foot brushing up against the man’s right ankle, breathing heavily despite the slightness of his labours, barely thinking.
After some time, when it became obvious to the rest of the crew that the bloody business was finished, Okita heard two sets of footsteps approach the cabin’s door and pause tentatively in front of it. “Come in, already,” he said wearily.
The door slid open and Hijikata and Nagakura stepped in. Nagakura widened his eyes at Okita, at which point it occurred to him that he made even more of a sight than usual: bare-chested and flecked with blood up to his elbows, surrounded by stained scraps of cloth with a bloody dagger lying by his side, his palms dyed red and his fingers smeared with sticky ointment.
“He’s okay, I think,” Okita said, gesturing to Saito. He was still lying on his back with his chest rising and falling slowly; the furrow in his brow looked a little shallower than it had during the worst of Okita’s operation. Okita paused and felt the rocking of the boat beneath him — a motion that had escaped his attention earlier. “We’re off, then,” he noted.
Hijikata nodded. “Downriver, and then up the coast,” he said. He took a seat across from Okita while Nagakura sat down nearby. “We might stop in Muroto before we round the cape — only for a couple of hours, and just to pick up some supplies. We’re running low on everything after the trip over. Even with that stop, we’ll be a few days at most.” He said it almost apologetically, as though he anticipated that Okita would object to even a minute of wasted time when they had Saito’s wishes to fulfill.
“Sure, that’s fine,” Okita said, as if he were in charge of their itinerary. Under normal circumstances he might, in fact, have stormed out onto the deck to yell at the wind to blow harder and usher the boat along faster, and with the right kind of harassment, the islands and the sea might well have shifted themselves around into a more convenient configuration. At the moment, though, the sleepless excitement of the last twenty-four hours was finally catching up to him; he thought it wouldn’t be so bad to lay his head down next to Saito’s and doze for the entirety of the journey and then some. “When we get to Kyoto…” he started.
“You’ll take Saito back to this farm of his, naturally,” Hijikata finished for him. “I assume you know where it is.”
“Haw?” Okita said.
Nagakura scoffed. “Still think you’re pullin’ one over on everybody, eh? Your room’s right next to mine in the barracks.”
Okita cocked his head back and pulled his lips up into a wry smile that he almost felt in his heart. “And what kinda degenerate just sits there listenin’ in?” he demanded. Before Nagakura could follow up with any further description of whatever noises he’d heard or thought he’d heard through the wall that separated their cells, Okita continued: “But what I mean is he ain’t ever let on that he had a house. Far as I knew, the guy was barely makin’ the rent on his place in Fushimi.”
“Well,” Hijikata said, “When we land in Kyoto, Saito can point you in the right direction.”
If he makes it that far, ran the unspoken qualification, hanging uncomfortably in the air around the trio.
“And you?” Okita prompted him.
“I hardly think Saito-kun needs an entire entourage,” Hijikata replied. “I’ll see you off, and then I’ll carry on as I always have. We were appointed to keep the peace in Kyoto, and nothing about that order has changed.” He turned to Nagakura. “I hope I can count on the Second Captain to join me.”
None of them had wholly expected to leave Tosa alive, but if Nagakura was surprised at the invitation to return to business as usual, he didn’t register the feeling in any visible or audible way. He nodded once with a quick dip of his jaw. “Gonna be tough with just the two of us, but ya know I’m your man, Vice-Commander.” He paused thoughtfully. “Maybe we oughta be callin’ ya Commander at this point…?”
“No,” Hijikata said immediately. “Kondo Isami is our leader in death as in life — it’s his vision we’ve always followed, and I’ll always be his Vice-Commander. When we return to Mibu, I’ll sweep the floor in the hall and I’ll set his zabuton out next to my own as I always have.”
Okita glanced at the self-proclaimed Vice-Commander in perpetuum. His features were frozen in their usual cold mask, and he’d spoken decisively but dispassionately, as if it had been perfectly normal to set the empty zabuton out during the Commander’s long self-imposed exile in Gion, as if it would be equally normal to maintain the ritual when he acknowledged that the man’s knees would never touch the cushion again. Okita knew very little about Hijikata’s life before his enlistment in the Roshigumi, but he did know that the Vice-Commander had spent long days training alongside Kondo in some backwater dojo. He’d never asked Hijikata to elaborate — he hadn’t particularly cared at the time, especially when asking him might have invited him to regale his men with more of the poetry he’d composed there — and he supposed that the opportunity had passed.
“We’ll fill the ranks again,” Hijikata continued. “New captains. Fresh soldiers. I doubt the ronin in Kyoto will stop agitating just because some of them have gotten what they wanted with the end of the House of Tokugawa’s rule. There will always be work to do.”
“I’ll come pitch in,” Okita volunteered, responding unhesitatingly to the implicit question behind the Vice-Commander’s declaration. He eyed Saito. Dark red spots were beginning to bloom on the bandages wrapped over his shoulder and around his side. “And I’m sure Hajime-chan’ll be down to keep on keepin’ the peace back home, too, once he’s all healed up. Didn’t exactly seem keen on stayin’ behind to do it in Tosa.”
Hijikata’s mask slipped for a second; a look of relief flashed briefly over his features, as though he’d expected that his few remaining men might scatter to the winds without the Commander there to gather everyone in Mibu and hold them all together with his inexplicable but forceful charm. “I would be grateful,” he said.
In a small act of kindness, Hijikata and Nagakura allowed Okita to rest in the cabin for a spell and didn’t so much as intimate that he might pitch in with anything out on the deck. He thus found himself lying next to Saito with his back against the bare floorboards and his haori bundled-up beneath his neck as a makeshift cushion, too mindful of his companion’s discomfort to do anything further to mitigate his own. Although he had imagined himself dozing away the long hours between Kochi and Kyoto, he found that all the wordless impulses buzzing around in his head made that project difficult. He slept fitfully for a few hours or a few minutes, then sat up and reached out to feel Saito’s forehead and judged it maybe slightly hotter than it was meant to be but not alarmingly so. He slept a little longer, then got up again and placed two fingers softly against Saito’s neck to feel the gentle, reassuring thump-thump of his pulse, then perhaps accidentally pressed down a bit harder than he’d intended and waited for Saito to sit bolt upright and scold him.
Saito said nothing and didn’t so much as shift in his sleep. His arms still lay at his sides, but his fists had uncurled to reveal the angry red crescents left by his nails in his palms. His hair had spilled out of his bun to lie plastered to his temples, fanned out around his head, and curled up over the collar of his kimono, all stringy with old oil and sweat. The carefully groomed strip of his beard was beginning to fuzz out across his chin and up along his jawline, and above it, his mouth hung open slightly, revealing a hint of his front teeth and the little gap between them.
Okita stood up and paced a circle around the cabin, then returned to Saito’s side. He crouched down and examined the man’s shoulder and nearly peeled off all the bandages to probe the wound further for shrapnel or dirt or whatever invisible and incomprehensible stuff it was that made some men’s injuries heal wrong or not at all. He thought better of it and pulled a blanket up over the bandages to keep them out of sight and mind. He turned away and picked the lone bullet up off the floor and rolled it between his fingers and let the crusted blood flake away to land on his hakama, then tucked the bullet into his sleeve for safe-keeping like some kind of charm. He lay on the floor again with his haori folded up beneath his head, and he watched as the sunlight seeping through the cracks in the cabin’s door slowly faded into dusk’s soft glow.
Eventually, he got up and slid the door open and shoved Nagakura into his spot to take his own shut-eye shift, then clambered up onto the cabin’s roof. He looked for a minute for a reason to harangue the soldiers; finding nothing, he sat there with his back to the setting sun and watched the unfamiliar coast gliding by in a long line of rocky beaches and skinny trees with barren limbs rattling in the same wind that blew the boat steadily along. They did, in fact, stop briefly in Muroto, but the rest of the journey passed uneventfully: days slid into nights and slid back into days again. Okita alternated between watching Saito and watching the shoreline. When he did the latter, Nagakura sometimes came over to sit quietly next to him while Hijikata paced up and down the boat’s short deck.
For his part, Saito mostly spent his time sleeping, only rousing himself occasionally to take a sip of water or chew on a mouthful or two of rice or salted fish. He was weak and listless, and when he sat up, he tried and failed to hide the pain it caused him to bend his trunk or shift his shoulder. Still, the ghastly pallor that had fallen over his features gradually warmed into something more closely resembling his usual sun-baked tones; he was lucid and he’d stopped bleeding through his bandages and the cabin where he lay smelled of stale air and sweat but somehow, miraculously, not of decay. Eventually, Okita found it safe to think explicitly about death again, and to be grateful that it had only cupped its cold hands around Saito’s heart for a little while before deciding to leave the man be.
The captains’ vessel gradually bobbed its way into Osaka Bay — Sure would be nice, someday, not to be sick as a dog in Osaka, Saito noted sleepily when Okita came into the cabin to announce their arrival — and a day or so later, Fushimi’s familiar waterfront slid into view. Saito insisted that he was perfectly fine to walk; to his credit, he fastened his blades to his hakama and stood up without any assistance, and he managed to drag himself several paces out of the cabin before the reality of his situation asserted itself and he teetered forward and caught himself on the gunwale with two shaking hands. Nagakura hauled him the rest of the way off the boat and eyed Okita’s leaner frame skeptically before shrugging and handing Saito over.
“Just for a bit,” Saito said apologetically. “There’s a ferry. And when we get upriver, it’s not far to the house from there, either.”
“You ain’t that heavy,” Okita scoffed, bowing beneath a weight that hadn’t diminished noticeably despite Saito’s meagre diet over the last several days. He shuffled around to face Hijikata and Nagakura. “Won’t be long,” he said.
“Rest and be well,” Hijikata said. “There’s no sense in rushing back, either of you, if you’re ill or distracted.”
The Vice-Commander stood next to Nagakura with his hands folded into his sleeves, somehow both staring at Okita as he spoke and looking directly through him to some indeterminate point beyond the other side of the river. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes, and a few additional strands of hair had fallen limply around his temples to join the single lock that he normally permitted to hang there. Okita had been too preoccupied during his own restless nights to mark whether the Vice-Commander had bothered to lay his head down for any significant length of time during their travels or, for that matter, since the night of the great fire.
Okita wrenched his eye away from Hijikata’s face and locked gazes with Nagakura for a few heartbeats instead. Take care of Toshi-chan, will ya? ran his silent request.
Nagakura received the message and nodded. “See ya up in Mibu, then,” he said.
Saito directed Okita to a ferryman who sat idly in his boat some distance west along the waterfront. The man recognized Saito right away and looked alarmed to see him in his weak, wilting state, but he obviously knew enough about the man to refrain from asking too many questions about how he’d ended up in it. He ushered the two of them into his boat, launched them out onto the water, and refused to accept the string of mon that Okita proffered for their passage.
The ferryman rowed them along against the Uji River’s current. Fushimi’s markets and warehouses thinned out and finally gave way to the countryside: wide fields and thick copses, all blasted by winter into shades of yellow and brown, rolling out beneath a sky studded with clouds that looked heavy with the promise of snow. Farmhouses appeared on the horizon, some standing alone and others gathered in village clusters, and Okita imagined that each little home might be Saito’s. He let Saito slump against his shoulder and pictured the man wandering through the wide fields and bending over to harvest wheat or millet or beans with the sun smiling down on him, then watched as each house and every field slid past and disappeared behind his back.
Eventually, they came to a stop where the river flowed around a bend in a broad valley that lay between two hills. Afternoon was beginning to fade into evening; the water was shot through with traces of bronze and gold, some patches reflected from the sky, others spilling forth from the lantern that the ferryman had lit and left hanging from a pole at the boat’s stern. Half a dozen or so houses stood along the water, each one of them surrounded by a shoulder-high fence that didn’t quite hide the warm light that glowed behind a set of paper-paneled windows. Beyond the homes stretched a series of terraced rice fields, empty for the winter but soon to be hand-planted again for the next year’s cycle.
Saito allowed Okita to help him out of the boat and onto the riverbank, then gestured to one of the farmhouses. “That one’s mine,” he explained.
They hobbled together along the narrow dirt pathway that led up from the river to the house. Two inviting-looking lanterns with red paper screens hung from posts on either side of its open gate, but otherwise it didn’t seem much different from the other homes that surrounded it: small and squat, thatch-roofed, white-walled, lightly weather-worn. The empty branches of a spindly looking sakura tree jutted up above the line of the fence. Okita thought he heard chickens clucking in the yard.
Still, it was Saito’s, which meant it was something. “You were holdin’ out on me!” Okita exclaimed.
Saito seemed to take the accusation seriously; he hummed out a low, thoughtful sound. “It’s a completely different life out here. I didn’t think about sharing it with anyone until I thought I might not see it again, and then…” He paused to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, still bracing himself with his uninjured arm slung heavily over Okita’s shoulders, trying not to let his companion see the way he winced with every step. “…I wished I’d had a chance to cook a meal for you, with everything pulled fresh from the garden.”
There was a small part of Okita that was still disgustingly soft despite his best efforts. He felt it melting in the warmth of Saito’s proclamation, and he did his best to ignore it. “You can cook?” he demanded incredulously.
“I’m very good at it,” Saito said with the casual immodesty of someone who probably was.
Okita shook him just a little. “You were holdin’ out on me with that, too!”
“Let’s make up for lost time, then, nii-san.”
Okita melted even further and elected not to bother covering the feeling up with anything. He gave Saito’s arm a squeeze and continued to support him as they shuffled slowly up the path and through the gate.