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The hour hangs in that narrow space between midnight and dawn, where the sky can’t hold any colour at all. Not the deep blue of evening, nor the faint gold of morning. Only a pale, charcoal haze, as though the whole damn world is holding its breath.
Sanemi can’t sleep. The cold won’t let him.
It seeps up through the reeds of the tatami like a curse, winding itself between the narrow space between his ankles, threading along his calves, pooling in the curve of his lower back. The futon is thick but not thick enough. Blankets, layers— none of it does a damn thing. The cold still cuts persistently like the tip of a blade pressed against his neck.
Snowflakes fall outside the way they usually do in the dead of winter: slow, arrogant, as if they own the night. White little ghosts drifting past the shoji, piling themselves along the pillars of the engawa. Sanemi watches them blur the moonlight from the corner of his eye, a soft storm of white against the deep hush of midnight. Every time he blinks, another fluffy bastard joins the heap, swallowing the world whole.
Sanemi can feel their cold in every breath, sharp in his lungs, needling against his skin.
Yet here he is.
And here he is.
Giyuu sleeps, half-curled beneath the quilt he’s held onto for years now. The stupid thing is too thin for winter nights like this, but neither of them have ever bothered to replace it. Sanemi keeps meaning to; Giyuu just hums and presses in closer. Somehow always manages to gain the upper hand with that one.
His back is to the far edge of the futon, and his hair, dark and wild, spills messily across the pillow. A few stray strands curl prettily at his nape, feathering softly across his temple. Sleep eases the line of Giyuu’s jaw while those lashes— long, ridiculous things— throw faint arcs of shadow across his skin.
Sanemi exhales slowly through his nose.
He’s never been a man built for softness. Still isn’t. Even now, it irritates him with just how easy it is to be taken apart by this. By him.
After years of waking up to this occasional quiet weight beside him, that particular ache under his ribs hasn’t dulled one bit. If anything, it’s gotten worse. He knows what Giyuu’s skin tastes like, knows the image of his mouth parted the slightest bit, soft like petals, face dusted with pink; knows every tired, warm-breathed murmur that follows when they both sink into the dark together.
Yet he’s wide awake in the middle of a frozen night, staring like a goddamn fool.
Giyuu is beautiful. Unfairly, stupidly beautiful. All ink and porcelain, like a bunraku puppet, painted over with the blemishes of Sanemi’s fingerprints and bite marks.
It pisses him off how easily it pulls him under. How a single glance— just this, just the slope of Giyuu’s shoulder under the quilt— can submerge him like nothing else. Each time he stares, he’s etching every one of Giyuu’s details into the back of his skull as if memorizing a map. The slow, thrumming heartbeat against his skin. The steady rise and fall of lungs. The unguarded slack between those dark brows, ready to crease the instant he wakes.
Sanemi hoards it all, drowns himself in it, because some ugly part of him already assumes it’ll vanish some day. He wants proof in case it never comes again.
A sliver of blue cuts through the dark as Giyuu stirs. First it’s the faint curl of his fingers against the blanket, then the near-silent catch of breath, as if his body is remembering itself piece-by-piece. Sanemi can read it too easily; he knows the bastard’s movements by heart. Sleep falls from him, gradually, just like the snow piling against the shoji.
“…Sanemi?” Giyuu mumbles.
His name catches halfway, drawn out in that sluggish way he gets when his head is still stuck in a dream. Giyuu presses his nose to Sanemi’s shoulder and chases what little warmth there is as if it belongs to him.
Sanemi groans, low in his chest, meant to sound put out. It doesn’t. Comes out more like he’s already given in. “What are you doing awake? Go back to sleep.”
The only answer is the way Giyuu presses closer, tucking his face into the hollow of Sanemi’s collar. His hair is touched by the cold of the night air, strands sliding over Sanemi’s skin like silk. Lithe fingers, heavy with sleep, clutch the blanket and pull it higher as if it could stop the chill bleeding through every surface.
“M’cold,” he mumbles again, barely a whisper this time. Not a complaint, merely a fact.
“No shit,” Sanemi mutters, but his arm is already moving, curving around Giyuu’s waist, palm spread against the dip of his spine. “You’d catch your death out there.”
He drags him closer until their bodies slot together, heat gathering in the narrow space left between them. Sanemi feels it happen— the slow ease of Giyuu’s muscles, the way his shiver dulls down into something steadier, softer.
“Better?”
“Mmh.” The sound vibrates against his skin. It’s not really an answer, but Sanemi doesn’t need one. He knows what it means.
He huffs into Giyuu’s hair, the strands tickling at his jaw. “You gonna go back to bed now?”
Another hum. This one longer, a little amused, a little dazed. “Don’t know yet,” his lips brush faintly against Sanemi’s shoulder when he says it, “talk to me. I like falling asleep to your voice.”
Sanemi lets out something that should be a grumble but isn’t. It’s too quiet, too fond at the edges. He closes his eyes against the ceiling. “Tch. So demanding.”
The futon rustles as Giyuu shifts, tucking himself into Sanemi’s side like he’s done a hundred times before, like it’s instinct. His forehead presses against Sanemi’s throat, breath spilling warm and steady over his skin.
“When I was a kid,” Sanemi starts, slowly, dragging the words like they’re heavier than they should be, “I used to take these walks down to the harbour. Watch the little boats drift by in the bay after the sun began to set. I hoped one day that I would end up on one of ‘em.”
A pause. He can feel the weight of Giyuu’s attention. A silence that isn’t empty.
“I wanted to be a sailor.” Sanemi’s mouth quirks like the word tastes foreign now. “Didn’t know shit about boats though, but that didn’t matter. All I knew was I wanted to get out of Kyoubashi. Thought maybe if I had a boat, I could just take everyone with me. Go far enough that no one could bother us.”
Sanemi almost kills the thought before it grows teeth. He’s good at that— letting things rot in the back of his skull until they’re nothing but withered remains. Another scrap of memory gone sour, another useless shard of something that never saved anyone.
But then Giyuu shifts again, pressing his forehead harder into the base of Sanemi’s throat, like he’s burrowing in deeper, like the words themselves are worth holding on to. Like, perhaps, Sanemi is.
So he keeps talking. Because apparently he’s too weak to shut up when Giyuu’s eyes are on him.
“Genya used to like the stories,” he smiles, voice catching against the dark. “When ‘Ma finally got him to lie down, I’d tell him about the sea. Said there were whales out there, big as houses. Big enough to carry us all on their backs if we couldn’t get a boat. He believed me too. Said he’d ride one straight out past the horizon.” His chest shakes with something thin and broken between a scoff and a sigh. “Idiot kid.”
The hand resting at Giyuu’s back shifts higher, fingers snagging into that inky hair as if he’s bracing himself against his own words. “I thought— hell, I thought if I just got strong enough, I could make it real. Haul ‘em away. Get ‘em out. Away from the stench of booze and the yelling and the fights. Out past the towns and the rot of poverty. Away from him.”
The breath he drags in next is sharp, bitter.
“Never happened, though.” His arm, the one draped across Giyuu’s back, flexes unconsciously. “It was a stupid dream. Childish. We didn’t even have enough to feed us, let alone buy a goddamn boat.”
For a moment, there’s only the steady weight of Giyuu’s breath seeping damp against his skin. Slow, measured, like tidewater caressing the shore. Then, muffled and half-asleep but stubborn enough to stick:
“It doesn’t sound like a stupid dream to me,” he murmurs. “It sounds like you had hope.”
The word makes Sanemi’s jaw snap tight. Hope. He can taste its decay on his tongue, like mold. He wants to spit it back— tell him hope’s useless, that it never kept anyone from ending up in the dirt. But he doesn’t. Because Giyuu sounds like he means it, and Sanemi’s too worn to claw that particular fight out of him.
Giyuu breathes against him, calm, maddeningly calm. And Sanemi almost hates him for it… for making the words feel less wasted than they should be, for letting them hang in the air like they matter.
“My sister used to do yuzen.”
Sanemi’s brow creases. “...Hm?”
“Kimono painting.” The explanation hums against his throat. “She’d sketch the flowers and patterns, then lay a special paste along the silk before painting over it. It took hours. Days, sometimes.”
There’s the faintest twitch against his chest— Giyuu’s shoulders, a stifled smile maybe, though Sanemi can’t see his face from this angle. It bothers him that he wants to.
“She always had me help. Said I had steady hands.” A faint exhale, almost a laugh. “Not true. I think I ruined more pieces than I successfully made… but I was useful for washing. Dozens of us would bring the kimonos down to the river to rinse the dyes away. My hands would freeze and be stained with all kinds of colours by the time the sun set. Indigo, crimson, green. Sometimes the colours wouldn’t fade for days.”
Sanemi can picture it too easily— Giyuu with a younger, boyish face, sleeves rolled up, wrists splattered in watercolour that wouldn’t scrub clean. He doesn’t say anything. Just lets the image sit between them.
“I didn’t have any grand dreams back then,” Giyuu admits after a moment. “Nor did I think about what I wanted to do. We had to take whatever jobs we could find after our parents passed, so it’s not like we had a stable foundation to plan our future. But wherever Tsutako went, I went too. If she worked, I worked. That was our whole world.”
The quiet hums on, long enough that Sanemi thinks maybe that’s all Giyuu wanted to give. Just a scrap of color from the past, rinsed and wrung out and long since faded. But the stillness crackles once more with his soft voice.
“I liked those days,” Giyuu says, voice gentle, steady as the river he’s remembering. “Because everything felt… unshakable. As long as Tsutako was there, I felt at ease. We’d go through everything together: loss, anger, acceptance… the embarrassing parts of growing up. Puberty, periods, love, even more loss. I thought nothing could touch us. Even when we had to pack up and move to another job, or when money ran short, it didn’t matter. We still had that rhythm. Wash, rinse, hang, repeat.”
Sanemi huffs through his nose. “Sounds sickeningly domestic.”
But there isn’t much bite in it, and he knows it. He can feel the way Giyuu presses closer, the heat of him soaking stubbornly into his side. Knows this isn’t about silk or dyes or the river at all.
“It broke apart anyway,” Giyuu murmurs. His voice dips, almost inaudible. “The kind of peace you think will last forever… it never does. Something always shatters it.”
Sanemi’s throat goes tight. He doesn’t ask what happened back then; doesn’t need to. He’s heard enough between the lines to parse exactly what broke away. What bothers him is the next beat, the way Giyuu’s fingers curl faintly in the blanket as though he’s holding on to more than fabric.
Giyuu exhales slowly, like the words weigh him down.
“That’s why I'm worried that this—” he swallows, forehead pressing into the curve of Sanemi’s collarbone, voice caught between a whisper and a plea. “—could break apart the same way. Now that the Corps is gone. Now that we finally… aren’t fighting anymore.”
Sanemi’s mouth pulls tight. The first instinct is sharp, bitter, automatic. To scoff, to spit back that nothing lasts, that the world doesn’t leave anything untouched for long. But he smothers it, jaw clenched until the ache forces the words back where they belong.
Instead, he does the only thing he can manage— he reaches for the threadbare quilt, tugging it higher over Giyuu’s shoulders until it covers him fully. With a sharp exhale, he smooths the edge flat, shielding him from the frost even if it leaves his own skin bare to the cold. It isn’t comfort— Sanemi doesn’t really know how to give that— but it’s something steady, something that says without saying: I’m here.
“Let’s try not to let that happen then,” Sanemi sighs. “And if it does… then we try again. It's not like we haven’t crawled outta worse.”
His violet eyes watch the snowflakes drift across the shoji once more, that little word rattling in his head. Hope.
Huh. Maybe it isn't so bad after all.
The night presses close, snow muffling the world into silence, the cold still seeping up through the tatami reeds. And yet all Sanemi feels is the warmth bleeding stubbornly into his chest. He knows he should shove it away before it strikes too deep, before it softens him into the person he refuses to return to.
But with Giyuu nestled into the side of his chest, breath steady and trusting, Sanemi finds he doesn’t have the will to fight it. The warmth settles deep, gentle yet unyielding, and he welcomes it with arms wide open.
If peace was destined to shatter, then tonight Sanemi will hold it together by force— only so that this moment remains unbroken.