[ugetsu] Madness Smiled
Title: Madness Smiled
ID: Ugetsu
Word Count: around 7,500
Rating/Warnings: PG13 for brief mentions of masturbation and child prostitution, descriptions of disease, Christian allegory
Characters/Pairings: G/Ugetsu, Knuckle, Giotto, Daemon Spade, OFC
Theme Challenge: Yes
When they were children, filthy little urchins always covered in mud, they used to do errands for the mother superior of the local abbey in exchange for a few coins and a cake each and jug of almond wine to share. They’d bring her and the sisters milk from Giovanni with the farm down the road and paper and ink from Luigi who had the only print shop in town and sometimes Giovanni and Luigi would give them little trinkets and food too. The mother superior taught them how to read and write, just the basics because she was a busy woman, but that left them smarter and with more options than the other less fortunate children living in the streets. Sometimes Giovanni would let them sleep in his stables, and they would curl up in the hay or sit beneath a tree in his brother Roberto’s orchard and they would share their almond wine and talk about the future and how rich they were going to be and how they would help the other urchins and never forget where they came from.
The mother superior was a sturdy woman with thick charcoal hair and wrinkled skin. Her hands were dry like paper when she patted their cheeks or curled their fingers around a quill. Her eyes were dark like a proper skipping stone at the bottom of a stream. She was wise like the wizards in the fairytales that Luigi told them and then made them promise never to repeat to the mother superior because they were pagan and she wouldn’t approve.
G was eleven years old when she sent Giotto on an errand alone and turned those dark eyes on him. “I think it is time you know who you are, Gerardo, you poor, wretched thing. You were born in this abbey,” she told him, her voice dry and crackling like a fire. “Do you remember anything of your mother?”
He answered, ‘nothing’, because it was the truth. He could not even remember the color of her hair or how it had felt to be held in her arms. For as long as he could remember, he had lived in and out of this abbey, where the sisters showed him little kindness and only Giotto truly loved him.
“That is because your mother died, Gerardo. She was a weak and sickly thing, so young and still impressionable, only fifteen. It took all of her strength to carry you and the birth killed her.”
Tears welled up in his eyes, but he didn’t let them fall. There was a dark shadow that followed him everywhere, he’d seen it. Perhaps this was its cause.
“Good, strong boy,” the mother superior approved of the clench of his jaw against the tears. “You have a stigma, you know this?”
G nodded, thinking of the shadow.
“Your mother was going to be a sister in this abbey. She was the third daughter of a poor man. She was the most beautiful girl in Italy, but her father could not afford a dowry for her so she would never marry.”
“Then how did she come to be with child?” G settled cross legged on the floor at the mother’s feet, his cheeks as ruddy as the red of his hair with the effort to keep his emotions down.
The mother’s smile was sad and yet fond for the child staring earnestly up at her. She was a strong old woman; she had seen everything, including the birth of a half demon child in her own abbey. “What do you know of your father, child?”
Again G said ‘nothing’. He had a sister named Fia, who lived in a grand house with her mother who was not G’s mother and a man who owned many ships, who looked nothing like either of them, but who G thought might be his father, for how else could Fia insist they were siblings? But the man never acknowledged G and kept his distance from Fia, leaving her and her mother in that big house alone more often than he was ever there. Sometimes Fia convinced the servants to let Giotto and G sleep in a real bed in their quarters, but Fia did not like Giotto so it was not often.
“You should have been drowned or exposed the very second you took your first breath,” the mother said, and it was like a stinging slap to the face. G reeled back, shocked at the old woman’s harsh words. “Your father is not a shipping magnate with a wandering eye, little one. He is not your sister’s father either, though the lady of that great house would make him believe it. But that lady is not what she seems.” The mother stroked his cheek, where a path of crimson flames had danced over his brow and down his neck for as long as he could remember. Her touch burned, but quicker than such an old woman should move she had grasped his wrist and he could not pull back. “I could not bring myself to kill you, though you are cursed and meant for evil. Little Lucia had the face of an angel and a heart as big as heaven. It was not her fault what befell her. She was tempted, just like Eve.”
“What are you saying to me?” The little boy sobbed as he finally wrenched his arm free and let the tears stream down his face. His shadow grew larger, darker, the edges of it bleeding out of the room and into the hall.
“I thought I could raise you to be something better, to know love and be loyal. Lucia gave her life for you and I could not undo that. You must tell me that you will strive to be like that poor child; that you will spurn the attributes given to you by your father. Tell me, Gerardo or I will have spared you in vain!”
“How can I? How can I when I do not know who he is? Who is my father?” Gerardo curled in on himself on the dirt floor and cried, the shadow enveloping him like a blanket.
There was an infirmary in the abbey and G refused to ever go near it. There were more shadows there, shadows that looked like people and watched him with wicked smiles and tried to touch him when he got too near. Shadows that no one else, not even Giotto to whom G told all of his secrets, could see. It was there that he felt his mind drawn now, as the tremors left him and his sobs turned to sniffles. He could see no image clearly, but he knew deep within himself, as he had known many times before by the sudden ache in his heart and the ensuing and welcome peace, that someone had just died. He turned his tear-stained face to the mother superior, the markings on his body throbbing in time with his heartbeat.
“The traveler who was robbed and left broken by the side of the road three days ago has passed,” he whispered, still unsure how he could know such a thing.
The mother superior knelt down beside him, carefully throwing the wooden cross that she wore about her neck over her shoulder so that it did not touch his skin, and she allowed him to curl up in her arms, something only Giotto and Fia had ever done. “You are not a normal little boy, Gerardo Di Diavalo. You are Lucifer’s child and Death will follow you wherever you go, but you are good like your mother was good, and you will be better than your birthright. This I know.”
…
Beneath the balconies of the wealthy, disease raged, unseen by the naked eye until it erupted across the skin in boils and rash, or leaked from the lungs in rivulets of blood. In the gutters, in the streets, in the homes, the dead lay untended for fear of contagion. For fear of Disease, the mistress of Death, she that takes without mercy, she that is inescapable, even to those who dare believe that they might deceive her. There are very few who may look upon her face without fear, who are immune to all of her weapons simply by design of birth. Those poor, wretched souls, cursed to walk in their own, special purgatory, halfway between Heaven and Hell. Demons, they are called, demon children born to facilitate Death, born with too much knowledge and no advice on how to proceed with it.
Disease has many daughters as Death has many sons, and Madness is her most persistent, her most unruly, the most heartless of a kind that have no hearts.
In the heart of Palermo, in Sicily, one house was lit, like a fire burned inside its walls. The windows were left open in some perverse mockery of Death and out on the balcony, a man waited as if for some unseen companion. He watched the revelers, but he did not engage, despite the mask that hid his features. His vibrant red eyes, like rubies in the snow, could not be kept secret by velvet alone. His dress matched his hair: a crimson overcoat of smooth silk that reflected the light of the moon like a fresh bled pool of blood, starched white shirt, black pants, black boots; a dark shadow in a swirling, rainbow cacophony.
The man turned his back to the dancers and the drinkers and gazed out over the street below.
“Quite the fete your man has thrown.”
The man paid little attention to his new guest, instead focusing on pinching a bit of tobacco from a tin he’d retrieved from his coat pocket. Only once he’d rolled and re-rolled his cigarette several times, to the point of neurotic perfectionism, did he tilt his head to regard his companion, not even needing the sloping line of her profile to know her identity. She was a softer and more elegant version of himself.
“Quite.”
“So stoic. Not in the right mind for a celebration at all.”
“Should I be?” It was a question that didn’t expect an honest answer.
“One would expect a demon to feel at home in a den of sin such as this,” came a deeper voice, lightly mocking.
“Oh, the priest! Wonderful!” The lady, as such that she was, feigned a curtsy, the newly arrived priest, a bow, a joke to all of them, but not to the man with the cigarette. “You take everything too seriously, Gerardo. You are so concerned with life that you miss the most important parts.”
The man exhaled a cloud of smoke into the night air, foul with the scent of death, and turned to face his companions. He directed his speech to the priest, ignoring the lady and her concerns.
“Should you be out in this air, Father Knuckle? Your kind is not immune.
The priest smiled, unfazed. “It is not in my nature to worry about circumstances that are out of my control. Were my death impending, I trust you would let me know.” The priest’s smile twitched into a smirk, a tell of his true feelings on the matter. He wore no mask, held no cup.
“Of course,” said the man. “You would see me dancing with the other guests if I had the knowledge that you were next to die. Pest that you are, it would delight me.” He spoke dryly, mouth turned down in a grimace, but he was not taken seriously. He hardly ever was.
“Oh, he lies! Gerardo, you fiend.” The lady grasped at the priest’s elbow with a gloved hand, overly dramatic.
Knuckle patted her hand in mock consolation and shook his head with a knowing press of his lips, turned up at the corners. He made sure to keep the arm she had grasped bent at the elbow, the wrist around which his rosary was wrapped held at an angle away from her. “G tries so desperately to resemble an iceberg in his temperament, but he forgets that I see him truly.”
“Of course I do not forget,” said G, tossing the smoking end of his cigarette from the balcony. “That is the very reason I consider you a pest. Normal humans are tolerable, but you I must be honest with. It pains me.” He stuck a thumb beneath his mask to quell an itch over his cheekbone. His arm hid the blood red markings that branded his face for a brief moment.
“It is my little brother who is the pest, I think.”
“Oh, I do not think that to be true. He is a good man, a pathetic demon, but a good man.”
The priest and the woman tipped their heads together to share a laugh that G was not invited to be a part of. It irritated him.
“You are worse than the priest, Fia. I despise you.”
“You do not.”
“I do. Truly, you are the bane of my existence.”
Her eyes widened in mock hurt and she pressed herself even tighter against the priest’s side. “What a beast! To speak to a lady in such a way, and your own beloved sister! He wounds me.” Knuckle was the only one amused by her antics, but it was he that she was performing for.
G groaned and reached back into his coat for his tobacco tin. “You are no lady, Fia. And would you leave the priest alone? He is a holy man, not a stable boy for you to charm.”
Her chest heaved when she sighed, though he knew she wore no corset- that she considered them a fashionable form of torture that nothing in Hell could compare to. Her expression sobered and she released the priest’s arm, making a show of smoothing invisible wrinkles from the crimson folds of her dress. She was beautiful in the same eerie, unearthly way that G was handsome. When she smiled it was sharper than a blade, and when she sulked, as she was currently doing, it was as if the rain would come to accompany her. She adjusted her mask so that it sat properly upon her aquiline nose, the edges of it curling into points over her rose-red hair like the devil’s horns imagined by Renaissance painters. But the mask could not hide her unnaturally red eyes, a matching pair to her brother’s.
“Forgive me for caring for my own flesh and blood. I suppose if you will not let me play with this one, then I shall make do with your precious swordsman. I find him exotic.”
“You will not.” The surge of anger coiling in his chest was not that of a rational man, but it surged hot through his veins as he grabbed her wrist and held it tight. She lowered her lashes in an expression he knew well. She judged him regularly and it left him singed inside.
She needed only flick her wrist to break free of his grasp, every bit as powerful as he. “It is not as if you will ever make your feelings known to him.”
“Fia, I beg you, hold your tongue.”
She followed his gaze to the open balcony doors and the priest standing, still amused, behind her.
“I find that it is redundant to condemn a demon for sinning.” The smile on Knuckle’s face enraged G more than anything said had managed so far, but he felt impotent against the teasing.
“There is not a soul here that can be bothered by something so trivial tonight. They are all too besotted with drink and misplaced joy to care that you might prefer the practices of the ancients,” Fia said imperiously. Her favorite of the seven sins was lust and she held little care for customs designed to prevent it. “I am sure your swordsman is familiar with such practices. The Orient is a land of many interesting traditions, as you must know, brother. Their demons are far more frightening than we are.”
“You are both pests. I find your company to be comparable to having my eyes plucked out with hot pokers.”
Fia rolled her eyes and cupped his chin in one deceivingly delicate hand. “You are too gruesome for even my tastes. I wished only to encourage you to enjoy yourself, Gerardo, but I find myself believing that it is an impossible task. I take my leave of you now, and do not worry. I will leave your swordsman alone.”
“Of course it is too much to ask that you leave these festivities entirely.”
Fia smirked at him as she gathered her skirts. “Of course.” She blew a kiss to Knuckle as she passed through the doors into a blue room, standing out like a rose petal in a bowl of water.
“And you will not leave me be either, I presume.”
Knuckle stepped forward and crossed his arms atop the balcony railing, staring wistfully into the night sky as if it held the answers to his questions. “Not yet. I have no business inside.”
“You could enjoy yourself like the rest of them.”
The priest cocked his head to observe G with one raised eyebrow. “While you waste the night out here, punishing yourself with your own thoughts? That is absurd.”
“As if your lot is truly any better than the cults of Jupiter, with your robes and your rituals. Your Eucharist. They sacrificed animals and you repeatedly pretend to sacrifice your savior. Denying yourself is just masochism.”
“Better than a minion of Pluto,” Knuckle shrugged, unperturbed. G snarled but the priest remained unfazed. “But enough of these petty insults. You are pensive for a reason. Do you intend to share your thoughts?”
“I had not.”
Knuckle gave him a hard look that spoke volumes of the determined patience he had gained in his few short years in the cloth. “G.”
“You are infuriating,” G huffed, exasperated.
“It is a gift.” Knuckle’s smile returned, smaller than before, but understanding just the same. “G, if this is something regarding the family, then you must speak your mind.”
“Even if you are the only one who can understand?”
Knuckle pushed back from the railing, straightening his arms. “The others would be able to understand if you told them the truth of what you are. Giotto would understand. He cannot see what I see nor what you see, but he will believe you as he always has.”
G stared out over the balcony, at the street below. He could see a fog curling around the edges of the buildings, built so closely together that there was barely space enough for a breath between them. The fog was dark and it roiled like an angry lake, like no natural fog that any normal human would recognize. But no normal human could see this particular fog, covering the ground like a funeral shroud, not even the priest. He followed it with his eyes only, until it became something almost solid, the sheer train of a woman’s dress and the veil over her hair, black like the night, like mourning- Death’s mistress. She glanced back at him only once, but he could not see her face. He imagined that she disdained him.
“Knuckle,” he spoke quietly, aware that even though the priest could see the truth of many things, he was still only mortal. Knuckle’s expression sobered dramatically, surprised and dismayed to hear G refer to him by anything other than a mockery of his calling. “Have you felt that the air has been tense as of late? It crackles on the air like lightning.”
There was no humor left in Knuckle’s expression as he watched G intently. “Consumption?”
G shook his head, loose wisps of hair falling from its plait. Knuckle visibly relaxed, but the dark look in G’s eyes had him tensing again. “Do you believe that there could be something worse?”
Knuckle crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes troubled though he strived to keep his face blank. “If you tell me that I should, then I will.”
G turned to the doors, second smoldering bit of paper and tobacco crushed against the ground with one twist of his heel. The swaying sea of bodies before him was like one large gyrating mass with too many limbs. There stood Giotto, holding court like the humblest of kings, a benevolent smile on his cherubic face. Giotto’s smile was the physical and external representation of everything that he was- warm, welcoming, strong, good. G loved him wholly, and Giotto knew. They were brothers, not from birth but from life spent clawing their way up from the gutters. Cozart stood beside him, smile just as wide, just as bright, as if there was no darkness to threaten them or the ones they loved. Two youths with brilliant hearts and even greater plans; they did not deserve the evils in their paths, but they were strong enough to face them.
“I am no clairvoyant.”
“What do you know, G?”
“Nothing! I know nothing. It is not as if I can ask my sire what his plans for one pack of mere mortals might be. Lucifer is not the type to coddle his offspring.” The color had risen in his cheeks, hidden by the mask but still hot against his skin.
The priest said nothing, but frowned and waited, accustomed to his comrade’s frustration. G sighed and looked back out upon the crowd. His eye caught the light creating a halo around one guest, the sea of bodies parting before him like sea before Moses. G’s breath caught, sharp in his chest at the sight. He loved Giotto wholly, like the family he was not gifted with at birth, and the priest like his sister, pests that they were, but they were the only ones who knew the truth of his nature and did not shun him for it. But this man, the swordsman, was something entirely different, foreign and painful in its sharp heat. G released his breath in one long, slow exhale.
“It is Daemon Spade.”
“The magician.”
“The bastard. A shadow follows him. It gains its figure more each day.”
“What?” The priest’s shock was clear to G, but his face would look carefully impassive to any passersby, or anyone approaching.
“I cannot know yet, but I will know soon. Whichever of my kind it is, it will mean pain in our futures… Our immediate futures.”
“But Giotto trusts him.”
“He must. Your Lord knows I tried to stop him from inviting Spade into this family, but Giotto will do what he wants.”
“Then perhaps we should get some enjoyment out of this night.” Knuckle allowed a brief flash of teeth and grasped G’s elbow. “I am going to pray.”
“Praying will do no good.”
“It will do me good.” Knuckle looked away, at the crowd and seemed, for the first time, to notice the swordsman approaching. “You are a better man that many humans I have encountered. Do not deny yourself happiness forever.”
G shook his arm free of the priest’s grasp with a scoff. “Should we not be arguing about who may claim possession of his immortal soul? I am quite certain you, more than anyone, should not be encouraging me in such endeavors.”
It warmed G’s heart despite his attempts at seeming harsh and off-putting, to see the priest’s cutting grin again. “Well, I have attempted to save him from his heathen ways but he has, quite politely, rebuffed me every time. I would make a terrible missionary.”
“You are by far too lazy.”
Knuckle smirked and took a step toward the doors. “Goodnight, my friend.”
…
They were barely more than boys when the news came that the United States had forced the little island in the east - Japan- to open her doors to the world, and, giddy with the idea of adventure, they decided they must go. They caught the eye of a ship captain, after spending most of their days at the docks trying to find odd jobs. They were still small, but they were quick and they could fit into tight spaces where the grown men couldn’t reach. They wanted to see the mysterious Orient, the men with long hair and big swords and wooden shoes, and the ladies with white faces. When the ship docked in Kyoto, they were disappointed to see so many of the Japanese wearing the same clothes they wore, but there were still some dressed in flowing kimonos, most notably the beautiful white-faced women with their elaborate hairstyles and their coy smiles. They wandered the city with their eyes wide, struggling to communicate past the language barrier, but G had a talent beyond that of seeing suffering and pestilence everywhere he turned.
They walked through the streets, keeping close to each other and catching only snippets of conversation, but G had listened to the sailors on the ship and was listening then, and he very quickly, quicker than should have been possible, began to understand what he was hearing. He had never been anywhere outside of Sicily, but he had spent enough time around the docks to encounter foreign sailors and listen to their foreign words. But a few hours of English or French or Spanish, with their words that already sounded so much like his own, were not enough to prepare him for this, for vocalizations that more closely resembled the sound of a sword reverberating through the air than any speech G had ever known. It was heady and thrilling and a little frightening.
When they grew tired and their feet began to drag against the ground, they came upon a beautiful building that reminded G of the ruined temples of the ancient gods, but these walls were intact, painted red and gold. It was a holy shrine, certainly, but of no religion that G understood. Giotto wanted to enter the shrine, entranced by the elegance of it, but G could see the two snarling foxes that guarded the gate. They ignored Giotto, who had already taken several steps toward the shrine itself before he noticed that G had not followed. To Giotto the foxes were made of stone, but to G they were alive and they did not appreciate his presence.
He hesitated, unwilling to cross the threshold, frustrated at what he was. G stared at the ground and seethed, hands fisted at his sides until one of the foxes spoke. While he had not been looking they had transformed into humanoid beings, still with the faces of their animal counterparts. The female one watched him and spoke softly, though sternly.
“We know what you are, little one. This is no place for you.
”
“Go away from this holy place, demon-child, for you are not welcome.” The male’s voice was deeper and resonated in G’s mind. He would have opened his mouth to speak, to retort, but he had no words. There was nothing to refute.
“G!” Giotto called out to him, confused, and all G could do was shrug and shake his head, full of anger and with no outlet. The foxes watched him pensively, safely assuming he posed no real threat.
“I cannot pass,” he said softly, repressing the tears that strove to fall from his eyes with all of his might. He could not bear to see the sympathy in Giotto’s eyes.
“But you are welcome in the abbey back home.”
“Because I was born in the abbey, I am welcome there. I am not welcome here.” When he looked up the foxes had returned to stone and Giotto was walking back, a small smile on his face.
“It is alright, G. We will find somewhere else to rest.” He reached out a hand to place on G’s shoulder but before it could land, G was roughly shoved from behind. All of his anger rose to the surface, staining his skin red, and he whirled around, spitting insults in rapid Japanese.
“Oi, you bastard! Blind bat! Are your eyes in the back of…” His rant trailed off when he came face to face with a pair of wide, blue eyes, full of panic.
“I am so sorry! Please forgive me!”
G had been jostled by, not a man, but another boy, slightly taller than himself but nearly the same age. His skin was the color of roasted almonds and his hair was as black as a squid’s ink, hanging in impossibly shiny strands over his shoulders. G had to step back to make room for the boy’s incessant bowing as he apologized, and he noticed that he held a flute clutched in his fingers.
“Alright, alright. Please cease. Please.” The boy’s smile was bright when he felt he had been forgiven, and it made G’s stomach flip in a way he had never before experienced. He felt himself blushing and ducked his head to hide it. This boy was as beautiful as any woman G had ever seen, and he wished to be out of his presence immediately. He tried to reach for Giotto’s arm, to guide him back in the direction of the ships, but Giotto resisted.
The Japanese boy seemed pleasantly confused, smile still in place and still too bright for G’s rapidly beating heart. “I am Asari Ugetsu,” he said, his voice just as soft as his hair looked to be.
“Giotto, let us go,” G begged, his voice hoarse.
Giotto tugged his arm away, smiling back at the boy and placing his hand flat against his chest. “My name is Giotto. This,” he said, gesturing to G, “is G.”
Asari Ugetsu could not have understood every word that Giotto spoke, but he clearly grasped the message. He looked at G and his eyes sparkled, making G scowl. “Giotto and G. I am pleased to meet you.”
It only went downhill from there where G was concerned. He wanted to go back to the ship even though they had the full night for themselves, he didn’t care as long as he was far away from this boy who made him feel so strangely, but Giotto had a look in his eyes that G recognized all too well. Giotto always wanted to make new friends and experience new things and G always let him have his way. Ugetsu took them to a tea house, G having to translate a language he shouldn’t have been able to understand the entire way. G only opened his mouth to pass words along between the other two boys, but Ugetsu barely took his eyes off of him. He was certain he knew why, because he was odd looking, because of the markings on his face, but it seemed that Ugetsu was too polite to ask.
They had tea that G wasn’t sure he liked and opium, which unfortunately he did. Ugetsu played his flute for them and watched G through half-lidded eyes as he played. G couldn’t bear the tight feeling in his chest, like his heart was expanding beneath his ribcage, and he stormed from the tea house into a night glittering with stars and flaming paper lanterns. He felt out of place and alone and something indescribable toward Ugetsu, and he suddenly, violently, missed the abbey and the mother superior.
Giotto found him only moments later, sitting beside a fountain and staring at the moon, Ugetsu trailing behind him, looking unsure and sorrowful. It was not as if Giotto could know what G was feeling, but somehow he always seemed to and he always understood. Ugetsu spent the rest of the night showing them the city and telling them the stories of his homeland. G saw shadows in the night unlike anything he’d seen in Sicily. Shadows that were not humanoid at all, but instead strange amalgamations of dragons and lions and birds, and things that G had only heard of in fairy tales. He kept these things to himself, just as he kept silent about the way Ugetsu’s increasingly furtive looks made his heart flutter strangely.
They had to go back to the ship when the sun was just rising, staining the world around them pink, but before they left, they walked Ugetsu back to the tea house, slowly and a little sadly. Giotto promised through G, that theirs was a friendship that would last forever, always the idealist. He hugged Ugetsu tightly and then bowed to him like was proper, tears in his smiling eyes. G hesitated for the second time that day, chewing his lip and willing himself to speak without losing his voice and courage. It was unnecessary though. He thrust a tiny scrap of paper, onto which he has scrawled the name and location of the abbey, into Ugetsu’s hands at the same time Ugetsu leaned forward and pressed his lips against G’s. It was hard and a little jarring, but it was the best thing that G had ever felt, his lips pressed sharply against his teeth, the sweet smell of jasmine on Ugetsu’s skin.
…
G stared hard at Knuckle’s retreating back. Tensions were high. He knew he wasn’t the only one who felt it, that Daemon Spade was becoming lost to them, little by little. He was a spark in the dry, brittle fields of summer, a raging inferno just waiting to be ignited. G could see it better than everyone else, but it was obvious either way. Daemon’s shadow grew daily just like G’s expanded and shrunk with each morning. G had the advantage of being able to see his own curse, to gauge his sins by its size. He learned early that it was safer to keep people at an arm’s length, too late to keep Giotto out, too weak to keep the priest away, but the swordsman… G had several years after violence became a daily part of their lives, after they met Cozart and G started carrying a pistol in the waistband of his trousers, to forget about Asari Ugetsu with practiced self-denial. As he grew, he understood his cursed birth better and better, and he realized just how easily his mere presence could cause pain.
Fia’s parents were both dead, driven mad, murder suicide. G knew that it had really been a double murder, but Fia was good at covering her tracks. Fia was G’s flesh and blood but her moral compass didn’t strive so hard to point due north as his did. She did not lament what she was and she inherited the great house and the ships and she gave the house to Giotto, for his cause. She gave the house to Giotto for her brother, but obviously maudlin acts of love such as that didn’t suit her. They were a dark pair, and G couldn’t blame Fia for what she had done, not with the way his body sang every time he pulled the trigger of his pistol and felt the tear of soft flesh beneath his bullet. He strove to be good but he was only so strong, so he pushed the others away, but some of them were too foolhardy to go.
“G.” Ugetsu’s smile felt like a knife to his chest, a sharp want for something he had denied himself, and would continue to deny himself, despite whatever encouragement his sister and the priest had left him with. Ugetsu was good, too good, like Giotto. They didn’t belong in this class war they were fighting.
Every day G woke sweating, terrified that he would see Death come for any of his family, but Ugetsu, sweet Ugetsu, G was certain he would lose his mind, that the demon would finally win out over the human heart inside his chest and the world would suffer for his loss. He loved Ugetsu with every fiber of his being, not in the way he loved Giotto or Fia or even appreciated the priest, but fiercer. He feared letting Ugetsu in because he knew that love would consume his Halfling soul like a fire.
He turned away, took steps to leave the balcony and Ugetsu behind without ever acknowledging him, but through the billowing curtains, he caught sight of Daemon Spade, late to the party, the terrible twist of anger in his face his only mask. Bitter resentment radiated from him in thick and foul waves, repelling party-goers who could not see it but could feel his malicious intent even through their drunken hazes. G and Fia were not the only demons in the room, though Daemon was not born to his curse. Suddenly every single thing G had withheld from himself, every bit of love, every moment of happiness he had sworn he didn’t deserve, felt like a bleeding wound. He had suffered in a Hell of his own making and he suddenly wondered if it had indeed all been worth it, if their little kingdom came crumbling down at this very moment, would his suffering have been worth it when he ended up in his father’s realm anyway?
“G, please. Do not ignore me. I thought when I arrived here, years ago, that you would be happy to see me. I thought from your letters that you might love me as I did you. Please just tell me what changed, G, and I will leave you be. I will fight at your side and nothing more, if you just tell me the truth.” Ugetsu’s Italian was slow and unpolished but it was as melodic as his flute, his words as heart wrenching as the notes that flowed from his lips.
G had never told anyone, not even Giotto, of that kiss behind the tea shop, of the way his heart pounded when he thought of the Japanese boy, of the way his fingers felt curled around himself when he imagined them to be Ugetsu’s. He showed Giotto the letters that he received, but he read them aloud so that he might skip the parts that waxed poetic about the fiery shade of his hair and the perfect curve of his lips. He’d been shocked and secretly delighted but outwardly dismayed to see Ugetsu in Sicily, come at Giotto’s bidding, but not for Giotto. The way his eyes had locked onto G’s had told him everything he needed to know. Ugetsu had come for him just as he’d become ready to forget.
But now it all seemed foolish. He’d been hard-headed, denied himself because he thought he could save Ugetsu in the process, but it seemed that he was only hurting them both. The pain in Ugetsu’s expression when he finally turned to face it was like a hard blow. Killing was something bred into him, physical pain easy to see and easy to stop, but emotional pain was something else entirely. It could be kept bottled up for years with no one the wiser or it could be expressed in a typhoid of emotion, like G had no doubt Daemon would be soon to do. Ugetsu was a kind and passive man. He only fought when he was given no other choice and even then he did his very best not to kill, not like G, of whom death was a part. Not a person at the party could understand the turmoil inside of Giotto’s closest friend, not even Giotto who had been by his side for as long as they both could remember, but Ugetsu tried and it caused him equal pain to be rebuffed at every turn.
“You would not profess to love me if you truly knew what I am,” G whispered, almost hoping the noise of the ball would overpower his words, but he was not so lucky. Ugetsu’s face hardened, but even closed-off he was still beautiful, like a marble statue.
“I do not wish you to tell me how I feel. You are a man, a good man, and I have never felt for anyone what I feel for you.”
G, as a boy, had been prone to expression. He had been brash and angry, blaming the world for his curse and his inability to control it. G, as a man, had calmed, become hard. He locked his feelings away inside himself, his own burden to bear. A younger G would have thrown himself into Ugetsu’s arms and reveled in the happiness he would find there, but they were not children anymore, to steal kisses behind tea houses at dawn. He allowed his walls to break just enough, though, and reached out a hand to brush his knuckles against Ugetsu’s smooth cheek.
“I am hardly a man. My birth alone killed my mother, my father I have never met, but every instant of every day I fight his influence.”
Ugetsu’s eyes glittered, the reflection of the light against his irises like the stars. He brought his own hand up to capture G’s, caging G’s fingers with his own. Ugetsu had never seemed weak to G, but nevertheless he had always done whatever he could to spare the other man from the cruelties of the world. Perhaps he had been wrong to.
“Your opinion of me is very low, it seems.” Ugetsu’s voice was sorrowful, but his grip remained strong.
“No, it is the opposite. To me, you sit high on a pedestal, like a prince. Everything I’ve done, every life I’ve taken has been with the thought that it is a life that you will not have to take. I want to protect you. If I lost you, I would go mad.”
There was something in Ugetsu’s eyes, knowledge that G had never allowed himself the attention to see. Ugetsu turned his head to place a kiss to G’s wrist, letting his eyes fall closed.
“Mad like Daemon Spade has become?” Ugetsu whispered his question against G’s skin, opening his eyes just enough to watch G’s reaction.
G stepped back, shocked, but he did not pull his hand from Ugetsu’s grasp. “How could you know?”
“I see more than you believe of me. I have experienced my own hardships. I was born a noble Samurai, but I spent my youth playing the flute for merchants and foreigners. It was only by the grace of my mother that I was spared from prostitution. I was a warrior with no war to fight. Here I am useful. Here I mean something. I can see Daemon Spade’s madness because I can feel it in myself. I am spurned every day by the man I love. That is more than enough to drive a man to madness. That you say it is because you are unworthy is a travesty.”
G’s heart beat violently in his chest, as it always did when he was near Ugetsu, but this time he did not wish to escape the feelings that washed over him. “I wished to protect you,” he whispered, his voice broken.
“I do not wish to be protected. I cannot reach you from this pedestal onto which you have placed me. What kind of a life is one lived in fear?”
Ugetsu let G’s fingers fall from his grasp and G immediately slid his hand around to cup Ugetsu’s neck and pull him forward. “I have been foolish.”
“Yes.”
“For every moment that you have loved me, I have loved you twofold. I swear it.”
Ugetsu shook his head. “Impossible.”
When their lips brushed, it was magnetic. It sent chills down G’s spine, but he did not pull away. It was magnificent, the way Ugetsu felt against him, the way he fit into the curve of Ugetsu’s spine as he bent down to be at height with G. G knew that fate existed, had seen her with his own eyes, but he had never known that Fate had plans for him outside of being a dealer of death. But this was clearly Fate’s doing, this perfect melding of two separate bodies.
When they broke apart, Ugetsu was smiling and with a touch to his own lips, G found that he was smiling as well.
“Shall we retire?” Ugetsu asked him, expression bright once again. G could only nod, still hesitant despite everything. He could still feel the world they had created crumbling around them, but it had become clear, the world would crumble whether he found peace with it or not. Better to have some happiness than none at all.
They left the balcony, couples parting before them as they moved through the party. G did not see Fia or Knuckle among the guests they passed, but for one moment he found himself with a clear path to Daemon Spade and the fully formed shadow behind him. Daemon Spade did not acknowledge him, but the woman behind him did. Madness smiled at the Devil’s child, her claws sunk deeply into Daemon Spade, never to let go until Death took him from her grasp.
- Gerardo, as a name, means “Brave” and “Spear” so “brave with a spear” or “brave spear holder”
- Fia, as a name, means “Flame”. Fia, in this story, is meant as an incarnation of Bianchi.
- For several hundred years Japan employed a “closed country” policy called “Sakoku”. Their culture remained what we consider Medieval today even as the rest of the world was industrializing. They traded only with the Dutch and only in one port. In the beginning of the latter half of the 19th century, Commodore Perry of the U.S. navy forced Japan to open more ports to more countries than just the Dutch. Until this time, under “Sakoku” interactions between Japanese and foreigners were strictly monitored and punishments for violating this policy were severe. After the ports were forced open the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had been in power until this time, was viewed negatively by the general populace for allowing the foreigners in and lost power. After this, a period of rapid industrialization began in Japan, known as the Meiji Restoration. Japan’s rigid, Shinto based social structure fell apart and the warrior class, the samurai, lost their power as well. Areas of busy cities were designated as “Pleasure Quarters” and offered entertainment for the foreigners as well as the Japanese. Samurai were expected to stay out of the pleasure quarters, but many young samurai girls and boys were forced into prostitution to pay their families’ debts.
- This fic is meant to take place during the early years of the restoration, when Japan was only beginning to change.
- Finally, this fic was inspired by and makes loose allusions to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”.
ID: Ugetsu
Word Count: around 7,500
Rating/Warnings: PG13 for brief mentions of masturbation and child prostitution, descriptions of disease, Christian allegory
Characters/Pairings: G/Ugetsu, Knuckle, Giotto, Daemon Spade, OFC
Theme Challenge: Yes
When they were children, filthy little urchins always covered in mud, they used to do errands for the mother superior of the local abbey in exchange for a few coins and a cake each and jug of almond wine to share. They’d bring her and the sisters milk from Giovanni with the farm down the road and paper and ink from Luigi who had the only print shop in town and sometimes Giovanni and Luigi would give them little trinkets and food too. The mother superior taught them how to read and write, just the basics because she was a busy woman, but that left them smarter and with more options than the other less fortunate children living in the streets. Sometimes Giovanni would let them sleep in his stables, and they would curl up in the hay or sit beneath a tree in his brother Roberto’s orchard and they would share their almond wine and talk about the future and how rich they were going to be and how they would help the other urchins and never forget where they came from.
The mother superior was a sturdy woman with thick charcoal hair and wrinkled skin. Her hands were dry like paper when she patted their cheeks or curled their fingers around a quill. Her eyes were dark like a proper skipping stone at the bottom of a stream. She was wise like the wizards in the fairytales that Luigi told them and then made them promise never to repeat to the mother superior because they were pagan and she wouldn’t approve.
G was eleven years old when she sent Giotto on an errand alone and turned those dark eyes on him. “I think it is time you know who you are, Gerardo, you poor, wretched thing. You were born in this abbey,” she told him, her voice dry and crackling like a fire. “Do you remember anything of your mother?”
He answered, ‘nothing’, because it was the truth. He could not even remember the color of her hair or how it had felt to be held in her arms. For as long as he could remember, he had lived in and out of this abbey, where the sisters showed him little kindness and only Giotto truly loved him.
“That is because your mother died, Gerardo. She was a weak and sickly thing, so young and still impressionable, only fifteen. It took all of her strength to carry you and the birth killed her.”
Tears welled up in his eyes, but he didn’t let them fall. There was a dark shadow that followed him everywhere, he’d seen it. Perhaps this was its cause.
“Good, strong boy,” the mother superior approved of the clench of his jaw against the tears. “You have a stigma, you know this?”
G nodded, thinking of the shadow.
“Your mother was going to be a sister in this abbey. She was the third daughter of a poor man. She was the most beautiful girl in Italy, but her father could not afford a dowry for her so she would never marry.”
“Then how did she come to be with child?” G settled cross legged on the floor at the mother’s feet, his cheeks as ruddy as the red of his hair with the effort to keep his emotions down.
The mother’s smile was sad and yet fond for the child staring earnestly up at her. She was a strong old woman; she had seen everything, including the birth of a half demon child in her own abbey. “What do you know of your father, child?”
Again G said ‘nothing’. He had a sister named Fia, who lived in a grand house with her mother who was not G’s mother and a man who owned many ships, who looked nothing like either of them, but who G thought might be his father, for how else could Fia insist they were siblings? But the man never acknowledged G and kept his distance from Fia, leaving her and her mother in that big house alone more often than he was ever there. Sometimes Fia convinced the servants to let Giotto and G sleep in a real bed in their quarters, but Fia did not like Giotto so it was not often.
“You should have been drowned or exposed the very second you took your first breath,” the mother said, and it was like a stinging slap to the face. G reeled back, shocked at the old woman’s harsh words. “Your father is not a shipping magnate with a wandering eye, little one. He is not your sister’s father either, though the lady of that great house would make him believe it. But that lady is not what she seems.” The mother stroked his cheek, where a path of crimson flames had danced over his brow and down his neck for as long as he could remember. Her touch burned, but quicker than such an old woman should move she had grasped his wrist and he could not pull back. “I could not bring myself to kill you, though you are cursed and meant for evil. Little Lucia had the face of an angel and a heart as big as heaven. It was not her fault what befell her. She was tempted, just like Eve.”
“What are you saying to me?” The little boy sobbed as he finally wrenched his arm free and let the tears stream down his face. His shadow grew larger, darker, the edges of it bleeding out of the room and into the hall.
“I thought I could raise you to be something better, to know love and be loyal. Lucia gave her life for you and I could not undo that. You must tell me that you will strive to be like that poor child; that you will spurn the attributes given to you by your father. Tell me, Gerardo or I will have spared you in vain!”
“How can I? How can I when I do not know who he is? Who is my father?” Gerardo curled in on himself on the dirt floor and cried, the shadow enveloping him like a blanket.
There was an infirmary in the abbey and G refused to ever go near it. There were more shadows there, shadows that looked like people and watched him with wicked smiles and tried to touch him when he got too near. Shadows that no one else, not even Giotto to whom G told all of his secrets, could see. It was there that he felt his mind drawn now, as the tremors left him and his sobs turned to sniffles. He could see no image clearly, but he knew deep within himself, as he had known many times before by the sudden ache in his heart and the ensuing and welcome peace, that someone had just died. He turned his tear-stained face to the mother superior, the markings on his body throbbing in time with his heartbeat.
“The traveler who was robbed and left broken by the side of the road three days ago has passed,” he whispered, still unsure how he could know such a thing.
The mother superior knelt down beside him, carefully throwing the wooden cross that she wore about her neck over her shoulder so that it did not touch his skin, and she allowed him to curl up in her arms, something only Giotto and Fia had ever done. “You are not a normal little boy, Gerardo Di Diavalo. You are Lucifer’s child and Death will follow you wherever you go, but you are good like your mother was good, and you will be better than your birthright. This I know.”
…
Beneath the balconies of the wealthy, disease raged, unseen by the naked eye until it erupted across the skin in boils and rash, or leaked from the lungs in rivulets of blood. In the gutters, in the streets, in the homes, the dead lay untended for fear of contagion. For fear of Disease, the mistress of Death, she that takes without mercy, she that is inescapable, even to those who dare believe that they might deceive her. There are very few who may look upon her face without fear, who are immune to all of her weapons simply by design of birth. Those poor, wretched souls, cursed to walk in their own, special purgatory, halfway between Heaven and Hell. Demons, they are called, demon children born to facilitate Death, born with too much knowledge and no advice on how to proceed with it.
Disease has many daughters as Death has many sons, and Madness is her most persistent, her most unruly, the most heartless of a kind that have no hearts.
In the heart of Palermo, in Sicily, one house was lit, like a fire burned inside its walls. The windows were left open in some perverse mockery of Death and out on the balcony, a man waited as if for some unseen companion. He watched the revelers, but he did not engage, despite the mask that hid his features. His vibrant red eyes, like rubies in the snow, could not be kept secret by velvet alone. His dress matched his hair: a crimson overcoat of smooth silk that reflected the light of the moon like a fresh bled pool of blood, starched white shirt, black pants, black boots; a dark shadow in a swirling, rainbow cacophony.
The man turned his back to the dancers and the drinkers and gazed out over the street below.
“Quite the fete your man has thrown.”
The man paid little attention to his new guest, instead focusing on pinching a bit of tobacco from a tin he’d retrieved from his coat pocket. Only once he’d rolled and re-rolled his cigarette several times, to the point of neurotic perfectionism, did he tilt his head to regard his companion, not even needing the sloping line of her profile to know her identity. She was a softer and more elegant version of himself.
“Quite.”
“So stoic. Not in the right mind for a celebration at all.”
“Should I be?” It was a question that didn’t expect an honest answer.
“One would expect a demon to feel at home in a den of sin such as this,” came a deeper voice, lightly mocking.
“Oh, the priest! Wonderful!” The lady, as such that she was, feigned a curtsy, the newly arrived priest, a bow, a joke to all of them, but not to the man with the cigarette. “You take everything too seriously, Gerardo. You are so concerned with life that you miss the most important parts.”
The man exhaled a cloud of smoke into the night air, foul with the scent of death, and turned to face his companions. He directed his speech to the priest, ignoring the lady and her concerns.
“Should you be out in this air, Father Knuckle? Your kind is not immune.
The priest smiled, unfazed. “It is not in my nature to worry about circumstances that are out of my control. Were my death impending, I trust you would let me know.” The priest’s smile twitched into a smirk, a tell of his true feelings on the matter. He wore no mask, held no cup.
“Of course,” said the man. “You would see me dancing with the other guests if I had the knowledge that you were next to die. Pest that you are, it would delight me.” He spoke dryly, mouth turned down in a grimace, but he was not taken seriously. He hardly ever was.
“Oh, he lies! Gerardo, you fiend.” The lady grasped at the priest’s elbow with a gloved hand, overly dramatic.
Knuckle patted her hand in mock consolation and shook his head with a knowing press of his lips, turned up at the corners. He made sure to keep the arm she had grasped bent at the elbow, the wrist around which his rosary was wrapped held at an angle away from her. “G tries so desperately to resemble an iceberg in his temperament, but he forgets that I see him truly.”
“Of course I do not forget,” said G, tossing the smoking end of his cigarette from the balcony. “That is the very reason I consider you a pest. Normal humans are tolerable, but you I must be honest with. It pains me.” He stuck a thumb beneath his mask to quell an itch over his cheekbone. His arm hid the blood red markings that branded his face for a brief moment.
“It is my little brother who is the pest, I think.”
“Oh, I do not think that to be true. He is a good man, a pathetic demon, but a good man.”
The priest and the woman tipped their heads together to share a laugh that G was not invited to be a part of. It irritated him.
“You are worse than the priest, Fia. I despise you.”
“You do not.”
“I do. Truly, you are the bane of my existence.”
Her eyes widened in mock hurt and she pressed herself even tighter against the priest’s side. “What a beast! To speak to a lady in such a way, and your own beloved sister! He wounds me.” Knuckle was the only one amused by her antics, but it was he that she was performing for.
G groaned and reached back into his coat for his tobacco tin. “You are no lady, Fia. And would you leave the priest alone? He is a holy man, not a stable boy for you to charm.”
Her chest heaved when she sighed, though he knew she wore no corset- that she considered them a fashionable form of torture that nothing in Hell could compare to. Her expression sobered and she released the priest’s arm, making a show of smoothing invisible wrinkles from the crimson folds of her dress. She was beautiful in the same eerie, unearthly way that G was handsome. When she smiled it was sharper than a blade, and when she sulked, as she was currently doing, it was as if the rain would come to accompany her. She adjusted her mask so that it sat properly upon her aquiline nose, the edges of it curling into points over her rose-red hair like the devil’s horns imagined by Renaissance painters. But the mask could not hide her unnaturally red eyes, a matching pair to her brother’s.
“Forgive me for caring for my own flesh and blood. I suppose if you will not let me play with this one, then I shall make do with your precious swordsman. I find him exotic.”
“You will not.” The surge of anger coiling in his chest was not that of a rational man, but it surged hot through his veins as he grabbed her wrist and held it tight. She lowered her lashes in an expression he knew well. She judged him regularly and it left him singed inside.
She needed only flick her wrist to break free of his grasp, every bit as powerful as he. “It is not as if you will ever make your feelings known to him.”
“Fia, I beg you, hold your tongue.”
She followed his gaze to the open balcony doors and the priest standing, still amused, behind her.
“I find that it is redundant to condemn a demon for sinning.” The smile on Knuckle’s face enraged G more than anything said had managed so far, but he felt impotent against the teasing.
“There is not a soul here that can be bothered by something so trivial tonight. They are all too besotted with drink and misplaced joy to care that you might prefer the practices of the ancients,” Fia said imperiously. Her favorite of the seven sins was lust and she held little care for customs designed to prevent it. “I am sure your swordsman is familiar with such practices. The Orient is a land of many interesting traditions, as you must know, brother. Their demons are far more frightening than we are.”
“You are both pests. I find your company to be comparable to having my eyes plucked out with hot pokers.”
Fia rolled her eyes and cupped his chin in one deceivingly delicate hand. “You are too gruesome for even my tastes. I wished only to encourage you to enjoy yourself, Gerardo, but I find myself believing that it is an impossible task. I take my leave of you now, and do not worry. I will leave your swordsman alone.”
“Of course it is too much to ask that you leave these festivities entirely.”
Fia smirked at him as she gathered her skirts. “Of course.” She blew a kiss to Knuckle as she passed through the doors into a blue room, standing out like a rose petal in a bowl of water.
“And you will not leave me be either, I presume.”
Knuckle stepped forward and crossed his arms atop the balcony railing, staring wistfully into the night sky as if it held the answers to his questions. “Not yet. I have no business inside.”
“You could enjoy yourself like the rest of them.”
The priest cocked his head to observe G with one raised eyebrow. “While you waste the night out here, punishing yourself with your own thoughts? That is absurd.”
“As if your lot is truly any better than the cults of Jupiter, with your robes and your rituals. Your Eucharist. They sacrificed animals and you repeatedly pretend to sacrifice your savior. Denying yourself is just masochism.”
“Better than a minion of Pluto,” Knuckle shrugged, unperturbed. G snarled but the priest remained unfazed. “But enough of these petty insults. You are pensive for a reason. Do you intend to share your thoughts?”
“I had not.”
Knuckle gave him a hard look that spoke volumes of the determined patience he had gained in his few short years in the cloth. “G.”
“You are infuriating,” G huffed, exasperated.
“It is a gift.” Knuckle’s smile returned, smaller than before, but understanding just the same. “G, if this is something regarding the family, then you must speak your mind.”
“Even if you are the only one who can understand?”
Knuckle pushed back from the railing, straightening his arms. “The others would be able to understand if you told them the truth of what you are. Giotto would understand. He cannot see what I see nor what you see, but he will believe you as he always has.”
G stared out over the balcony, at the street below. He could see a fog curling around the edges of the buildings, built so closely together that there was barely space enough for a breath between them. The fog was dark and it roiled like an angry lake, like no natural fog that any normal human would recognize. But no normal human could see this particular fog, covering the ground like a funeral shroud, not even the priest. He followed it with his eyes only, until it became something almost solid, the sheer train of a woman’s dress and the veil over her hair, black like the night, like mourning- Death’s mistress. She glanced back at him only once, but he could not see her face. He imagined that she disdained him.
“Knuckle,” he spoke quietly, aware that even though the priest could see the truth of many things, he was still only mortal. Knuckle’s expression sobered dramatically, surprised and dismayed to hear G refer to him by anything other than a mockery of his calling. “Have you felt that the air has been tense as of late? It crackles on the air like lightning.”
There was no humor left in Knuckle’s expression as he watched G intently. “Consumption?”
G shook his head, loose wisps of hair falling from its plait. Knuckle visibly relaxed, but the dark look in G’s eyes had him tensing again. “Do you believe that there could be something worse?”
Knuckle crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes troubled though he strived to keep his face blank. “If you tell me that I should, then I will.”
G turned to the doors, second smoldering bit of paper and tobacco crushed against the ground with one twist of his heel. The swaying sea of bodies before him was like one large gyrating mass with too many limbs. There stood Giotto, holding court like the humblest of kings, a benevolent smile on his cherubic face. Giotto’s smile was the physical and external representation of everything that he was- warm, welcoming, strong, good. G loved him wholly, and Giotto knew. They were brothers, not from birth but from life spent clawing their way up from the gutters. Cozart stood beside him, smile just as wide, just as bright, as if there was no darkness to threaten them or the ones they loved. Two youths with brilliant hearts and even greater plans; they did not deserve the evils in their paths, but they were strong enough to face them.
“I am no clairvoyant.”
“What do you know, G?”
“Nothing! I know nothing. It is not as if I can ask my sire what his plans for one pack of mere mortals might be. Lucifer is not the type to coddle his offspring.” The color had risen in his cheeks, hidden by the mask but still hot against his skin.
The priest said nothing, but frowned and waited, accustomed to his comrade’s frustration. G sighed and looked back out upon the crowd. His eye caught the light creating a halo around one guest, the sea of bodies parting before him like sea before Moses. G’s breath caught, sharp in his chest at the sight. He loved Giotto wholly, like the family he was not gifted with at birth, and the priest like his sister, pests that they were, but they were the only ones who knew the truth of his nature and did not shun him for it. But this man, the swordsman, was something entirely different, foreign and painful in its sharp heat. G released his breath in one long, slow exhale.
“It is Daemon Spade.”
“The magician.”
“The bastard. A shadow follows him. It gains its figure more each day.”
“What?” The priest’s shock was clear to G, but his face would look carefully impassive to any passersby, or anyone approaching.
“I cannot know yet, but I will know soon. Whichever of my kind it is, it will mean pain in our futures… Our immediate futures.”
“But Giotto trusts him.”
“He must. Your Lord knows I tried to stop him from inviting Spade into this family, but Giotto will do what he wants.”
“Then perhaps we should get some enjoyment out of this night.” Knuckle allowed a brief flash of teeth and grasped G’s elbow. “I am going to pray.”
“Praying will do no good.”
“It will do me good.” Knuckle looked away, at the crowd and seemed, for the first time, to notice the swordsman approaching. “You are a better man that many humans I have encountered. Do not deny yourself happiness forever.”
G shook his arm free of the priest’s grasp with a scoff. “Should we not be arguing about who may claim possession of his immortal soul? I am quite certain you, more than anyone, should not be encouraging me in such endeavors.”
It warmed G’s heart despite his attempts at seeming harsh and off-putting, to see the priest’s cutting grin again. “Well, I have attempted to save him from his heathen ways but he has, quite politely, rebuffed me every time. I would make a terrible missionary.”
“You are by far too lazy.”
Knuckle smirked and took a step toward the doors. “Goodnight, my friend.”
…
They were barely more than boys when the news came that the United States had forced the little island in the east - Japan- to open her doors to the world, and, giddy with the idea of adventure, they decided they must go. They caught the eye of a ship captain, after spending most of their days at the docks trying to find odd jobs. They were still small, but they were quick and they could fit into tight spaces where the grown men couldn’t reach. They wanted to see the mysterious Orient, the men with long hair and big swords and wooden shoes, and the ladies with white faces. When the ship docked in Kyoto, they were disappointed to see so many of the Japanese wearing the same clothes they wore, but there were still some dressed in flowing kimonos, most notably the beautiful white-faced women with their elaborate hairstyles and their coy smiles. They wandered the city with their eyes wide, struggling to communicate past the language barrier, but G had a talent beyond that of seeing suffering and pestilence everywhere he turned.
They walked through the streets, keeping close to each other and catching only snippets of conversation, but G had listened to the sailors on the ship and was listening then, and he very quickly, quicker than should have been possible, began to understand what he was hearing. He had never been anywhere outside of Sicily, but he had spent enough time around the docks to encounter foreign sailors and listen to their foreign words. But a few hours of English or French or Spanish, with their words that already sounded so much like his own, were not enough to prepare him for this, for vocalizations that more closely resembled the sound of a sword reverberating through the air than any speech G had ever known. It was heady and thrilling and a little frightening.
When they grew tired and their feet began to drag against the ground, they came upon a beautiful building that reminded G of the ruined temples of the ancient gods, but these walls were intact, painted red and gold. It was a holy shrine, certainly, but of no religion that G understood. Giotto wanted to enter the shrine, entranced by the elegance of it, but G could see the two snarling foxes that guarded the gate. They ignored Giotto, who had already taken several steps toward the shrine itself before he noticed that G had not followed. To Giotto the foxes were made of stone, but to G they were alive and they did not appreciate his presence.
He hesitated, unwilling to cross the threshold, frustrated at what he was. G stared at the ground and seethed, hands fisted at his sides until one of the foxes spoke. While he had not been looking they had transformed into humanoid beings, still with the faces of their animal counterparts. The female one watched him and spoke softly, though sternly.
“We know what you are, little one. This is no place for you.
”
“Go away from this holy place, demon-child, for you are not welcome.” The male’s voice was deeper and resonated in G’s mind. He would have opened his mouth to speak, to retort, but he had no words. There was nothing to refute.
“G!” Giotto called out to him, confused, and all G could do was shrug and shake his head, full of anger and with no outlet. The foxes watched him pensively, safely assuming he posed no real threat.
“I cannot pass,” he said softly, repressing the tears that strove to fall from his eyes with all of his might. He could not bear to see the sympathy in Giotto’s eyes.
“But you are welcome in the abbey back home.”
“Because I was born in the abbey, I am welcome there. I am not welcome here.” When he looked up the foxes had returned to stone and Giotto was walking back, a small smile on his face.
“It is alright, G. We will find somewhere else to rest.” He reached out a hand to place on G’s shoulder but before it could land, G was roughly shoved from behind. All of his anger rose to the surface, staining his skin red, and he whirled around, spitting insults in rapid Japanese.
“Oi, you bastard! Blind bat! Are your eyes in the back of…” His rant trailed off when he came face to face with a pair of wide, blue eyes, full of panic.
“I am so sorry! Please forgive me!”
G had been jostled by, not a man, but another boy, slightly taller than himself but nearly the same age. His skin was the color of roasted almonds and his hair was as black as a squid’s ink, hanging in impossibly shiny strands over his shoulders. G had to step back to make room for the boy’s incessant bowing as he apologized, and he noticed that he held a flute clutched in his fingers.
“Alright, alright. Please cease. Please.” The boy’s smile was bright when he felt he had been forgiven, and it made G’s stomach flip in a way he had never before experienced. He felt himself blushing and ducked his head to hide it. This boy was as beautiful as any woman G had ever seen, and he wished to be out of his presence immediately. He tried to reach for Giotto’s arm, to guide him back in the direction of the ships, but Giotto resisted.
The Japanese boy seemed pleasantly confused, smile still in place and still too bright for G’s rapidly beating heart. “I am Asari Ugetsu,” he said, his voice just as soft as his hair looked to be.
“Giotto, let us go,” G begged, his voice hoarse.
Giotto tugged his arm away, smiling back at the boy and placing his hand flat against his chest. “My name is Giotto. This,” he said, gesturing to G, “is G.”
Asari Ugetsu could not have understood every word that Giotto spoke, but he clearly grasped the message. He looked at G and his eyes sparkled, making G scowl. “Giotto and G. I am pleased to meet you.”
It only went downhill from there where G was concerned. He wanted to go back to the ship even though they had the full night for themselves, he didn’t care as long as he was far away from this boy who made him feel so strangely, but Giotto had a look in his eyes that G recognized all too well. Giotto always wanted to make new friends and experience new things and G always let him have his way. Ugetsu took them to a tea house, G having to translate a language he shouldn’t have been able to understand the entire way. G only opened his mouth to pass words along between the other two boys, but Ugetsu barely took his eyes off of him. He was certain he knew why, because he was odd looking, because of the markings on his face, but it seemed that Ugetsu was too polite to ask.
They had tea that G wasn’t sure he liked and opium, which unfortunately he did. Ugetsu played his flute for them and watched G through half-lidded eyes as he played. G couldn’t bear the tight feeling in his chest, like his heart was expanding beneath his ribcage, and he stormed from the tea house into a night glittering with stars and flaming paper lanterns. He felt out of place and alone and something indescribable toward Ugetsu, and he suddenly, violently, missed the abbey and the mother superior.
Giotto found him only moments later, sitting beside a fountain and staring at the moon, Ugetsu trailing behind him, looking unsure and sorrowful. It was not as if Giotto could know what G was feeling, but somehow he always seemed to and he always understood. Ugetsu spent the rest of the night showing them the city and telling them the stories of his homeland. G saw shadows in the night unlike anything he’d seen in Sicily. Shadows that were not humanoid at all, but instead strange amalgamations of dragons and lions and birds, and things that G had only heard of in fairy tales. He kept these things to himself, just as he kept silent about the way Ugetsu’s increasingly furtive looks made his heart flutter strangely.
They had to go back to the ship when the sun was just rising, staining the world around them pink, but before they left, they walked Ugetsu back to the tea house, slowly and a little sadly. Giotto promised through G, that theirs was a friendship that would last forever, always the idealist. He hugged Ugetsu tightly and then bowed to him like was proper, tears in his smiling eyes. G hesitated for the second time that day, chewing his lip and willing himself to speak without losing his voice and courage. It was unnecessary though. He thrust a tiny scrap of paper, onto which he has scrawled the name and location of the abbey, into Ugetsu’s hands at the same time Ugetsu leaned forward and pressed his lips against G’s. It was hard and a little jarring, but it was the best thing that G had ever felt, his lips pressed sharply against his teeth, the sweet smell of jasmine on Ugetsu’s skin.
…
G stared hard at Knuckle’s retreating back. Tensions were high. He knew he wasn’t the only one who felt it, that Daemon Spade was becoming lost to them, little by little. He was a spark in the dry, brittle fields of summer, a raging inferno just waiting to be ignited. G could see it better than everyone else, but it was obvious either way. Daemon’s shadow grew daily just like G’s expanded and shrunk with each morning. G had the advantage of being able to see his own curse, to gauge his sins by its size. He learned early that it was safer to keep people at an arm’s length, too late to keep Giotto out, too weak to keep the priest away, but the swordsman… G had several years after violence became a daily part of their lives, after they met Cozart and G started carrying a pistol in the waistband of his trousers, to forget about Asari Ugetsu with practiced self-denial. As he grew, he understood his cursed birth better and better, and he realized just how easily his mere presence could cause pain.
Fia’s parents were both dead, driven mad, murder suicide. G knew that it had really been a double murder, but Fia was good at covering her tracks. Fia was G’s flesh and blood but her moral compass didn’t strive so hard to point due north as his did. She did not lament what she was and she inherited the great house and the ships and she gave the house to Giotto, for his cause. She gave the house to Giotto for her brother, but obviously maudlin acts of love such as that didn’t suit her. They were a dark pair, and G couldn’t blame Fia for what she had done, not with the way his body sang every time he pulled the trigger of his pistol and felt the tear of soft flesh beneath his bullet. He strove to be good but he was only so strong, so he pushed the others away, but some of them were too foolhardy to go.
“G.” Ugetsu’s smile felt like a knife to his chest, a sharp want for something he had denied himself, and would continue to deny himself, despite whatever encouragement his sister and the priest had left him with. Ugetsu was good, too good, like Giotto. They didn’t belong in this class war they were fighting.
Every day G woke sweating, terrified that he would see Death come for any of his family, but Ugetsu, sweet Ugetsu, G was certain he would lose his mind, that the demon would finally win out over the human heart inside his chest and the world would suffer for his loss. He loved Ugetsu with every fiber of his being, not in the way he loved Giotto or Fia or even appreciated the priest, but fiercer. He feared letting Ugetsu in because he knew that love would consume his Halfling soul like a fire.
He turned away, took steps to leave the balcony and Ugetsu behind without ever acknowledging him, but through the billowing curtains, he caught sight of Daemon Spade, late to the party, the terrible twist of anger in his face his only mask. Bitter resentment radiated from him in thick and foul waves, repelling party-goers who could not see it but could feel his malicious intent even through their drunken hazes. G and Fia were not the only demons in the room, though Daemon was not born to his curse. Suddenly every single thing G had withheld from himself, every bit of love, every moment of happiness he had sworn he didn’t deserve, felt like a bleeding wound. He had suffered in a Hell of his own making and he suddenly wondered if it had indeed all been worth it, if their little kingdom came crumbling down at this very moment, would his suffering have been worth it when he ended up in his father’s realm anyway?
“G, please. Do not ignore me. I thought when I arrived here, years ago, that you would be happy to see me. I thought from your letters that you might love me as I did you. Please just tell me what changed, G, and I will leave you be. I will fight at your side and nothing more, if you just tell me the truth.” Ugetsu’s Italian was slow and unpolished but it was as melodic as his flute, his words as heart wrenching as the notes that flowed from his lips.
G had never told anyone, not even Giotto, of that kiss behind the tea shop, of the way his heart pounded when he thought of the Japanese boy, of the way his fingers felt curled around himself when he imagined them to be Ugetsu’s. He showed Giotto the letters that he received, but he read them aloud so that he might skip the parts that waxed poetic about the fiery shade of his hair and the perfect curve of his lips. He’d been shocked and secretly delighted but outwardly dismayed to see Ugetsu in Sicily, come at Giotto’s bidding, but not for Giotto. The way his eyes had locked onto G’s had told him everything he needed to know. Ugetsu had come for him just as he’d become ready to forget.
But now it all seemed foolish. He’d been hard-headed, denied himself because he thought he could save Ugetsu in the process, but it seemed that he was only hurting them both. The pain in Ugetsu’s expression when he finally turned to face it was like a hard blow. Killing was something bred into him, physical pain easy to see and easy to stop, but emotional pain was something else entirely. It could be kept bottled up for years with no one the wiser or it could be expressed in a typhoid of emotion, like G had no doubt Daemon would be soon to do. Ugetsu was a kind and passive man. He only fought when he was given no other choice and even then he did his very best not to kill, not like G, of whom death was a part. Not a person at the party could understand the turmoil inside of Giotto’s closest friend, not even Giotto who had been by his side for as long as they both could remember, but Ugetsu tried and it caused him equal pain to be rebuffed at every turn.
“You would not profess to love me if you truly knew what I am,” G whispered, almost hoping the noise of the ball would overpower his words, but he was not so lucky. Ugetsu’s face hardened, but even closed-off he was still beautiful, like a marble statue.
“I do not wish you to tell me how I feel. You are a man, a good man, and I have never felt for anyone what I feel for you.”
G, as a boy, had been prone to expression. He had been brash and angry, blaming the world for his curse and his inability to control it. G, as a man, had calmed, become hard. He locked his feelings away inside himself, his own burden to bear. A younger G would have thrown himself into Ugetsu’s arms and reveled in the happiness he would find there, but they were not children anymore, to steal kisses behind tea houses at dawn. He allowed his walls to break just enough, though, and reached out a hand to brush his knuckles against Ugetsu’s smooth cheek.
“I am hardly a man. My birth alone killed my mother, my father I have never met, but every instant of every day I fight his influence.”
Ugetsu’s eyes glittered, the reflection of the light against his irises like the stars. He brought his own hand up to capture G’s, caging G’s fingers with his own. Ugetsu had never seemed weak to G, but nevertheless he had always done whatever he could to spare the other man from the cruelties of the world. Perhaps he had been wrong to.
“Your opinion of me is very low, it seems.” Ugetsu’s voice was sorrowful, but his grip remained strong.
“No, it is the opposite. To me, you sit high on a pedestal, like a prince. Everything I’ve done, every life I’ve taken has been with the thought that it is a life that you will not have to take. I want to protect you. If I lost you, I would go mad.”
There was something in Ugetsu’s eyes, knowledge that G had never allowed himself the attention to see. Ugetsu turned his head to place a kiss to G’s wrist, letting his eyes fall closed.
“Mad like Daemon Spade has become?” Ugetsu whispered his question against G’s skin, opening his eyes just enough to watch G’s reaction.
G stepped back, shocked, but he did not pull his hand from Ugetsu’s grasp. “How could you know?”
“I see more than you believe of me. I have experienced my own hardships. I was born a noble Samurai, but I spent my youth playing the flute for merchants and foreigners. It was only by the grace of my mother that I was spared from prostitution. I was a warrior with no war to fight. Here I am useful. Here I mean something. I can see Daemon Spade’s madness because I can feel it in myself. I am spurned every day by the man I love. That is more than enough to drive a man to madness. That you say it is because you are unworthy is a travesty.”
G’s heart beat violently in his chest, as it always did when he was near Ugetsu, but this time he did not wish to escape the feelings that washed over him. “I wished to protect you,” he whispered, his voice broken.
“I do not wish to be protected. I cannot reach you from this pedestal onto which you have placed me. What kind of a life is one lived in fear?”
Ugetsu let G’s fingers fall from his grasp and G immediately slid his hand around to cup Ugetsu’s neck and pull him forward. “I have been foolish.”
“Yes.”
“For every moment that you have loved me, I have loved you twofold. I swear it.”
Ugetsu shook his head. “Impossible.”
When their lips brushed, it was magnetic. It sent chills down G’s spine, but he did not pull away. It was magnificent, the way Ugetsu felt against him, the way he fit into the curve of Ugetsu’s spine as he bent down to be at height with G. G knew that fate existed, had seen her with his own eyes, but he had never known that Fate had plans for him outside of being a dealer of death. But this was clearly Fate’s doing, this perfect melding of two separate bodies.
When they broke apart, Ugetsu was smiling and with a touch to his own lips, G found that he was smiling as well.
“Shall we retire?” Ugetsu asked him, expression bright once again. G could only nod, still hesitant despite everything. He could still feel the world they had created crumbling around them, but it had become clear, the world would crumble whether he found peace with it or not. Better to have some happiness than none at all.
They left the balcony, couples parting before them as they moved through the party. G did not see Fia or Knuckle among the guests they passed, but for one moment he found himself with a clear path to Daemon Spade and the fully formed shadow behind him. Daemon Spade did not acknowledge him, but the woman behind him did. Madness smiled at the Devil’s child, her claws sunk deeply into Daemon Spade, never to let go until Death took him from her grasp.
- Gerardo, as a name, means “Brave” and “Spear” so “brave with a spear” or “brave spear holder”
- Fia, as a name, means “Flame”. Fia, in this story, is meant as an incarnation of Bianchi.
- For several hundred years Japan employed a “closed country” policy called “Sakoku”. Their culture remained what we consider Medieval today even as the rest of the world was industrializing. They traded only with the Dutch and only in one port. In the beginning of the latter half of the 19th century, Commodore Perry of the U.S. navy forced Japan to open more ports to more countries than just the Dutch. Until this time, under “Sakoku” interactions between Japanese and foreigners were strictly monitored and punishments for violating this policy were severe. After the ports were forced open the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had been in power until this time, was viewed negatively by the general populace for allowing the foreigners in and lost power. After this, a period of rapid industrialization began in Japan, known as the Meiji Restoration. Japan’s rigid, Shinto based social structure fell apart and the warrior class, the samurai, lost their power as well. Areas of busy cities were designated as “Pleasure Quarters” and offered entertainment for the foreigners as well as the Japanese. Samurai were expected to stay out of the pleasure quarters, but many young samurai girls and boys were forced into prostitution to pay their families’ debts.
- This fic is meant to take place during the early years of the restoration, when Japan was only beginning to change.
- Finally, this fic was inspired by and makes loose allusions to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”.