18; touken ranbu; i think we can last another year

[portaldice]

i think we can last another year | r for mature themes (smoking, abuse, violence, suicide, death)
ichigo/tsurumaru/uguisumaru
3.1k words
oneshot
written for the grasshoppers. c: ao3 mirror available here.

One of them is a thief, another is a murderer, and the last goes several rounds with death to no remarkable incident. They could have given up ages ago, but they always make it another year, if only to spend one week with each other again.

(Post-game Modern AU)



i think we can last another year

The next time Tsurumaru wakes up on the sidewalk, he doesn’t think that maybe they’re doing it wrong, because that’s what he’s been thinking for the past seventeen times and it hasn’t changed a damned thing. Instead he rolls onto his back and lets the sun burn into his eyes, thinks about the last time he had actually slept in some place that didn’t leave him in bruises, wonders when either Uguisumaru or Ichigo will find him again as he falls back to sleep.

Once the war ends, the saniwa asks them all, return to being a sword or stay here?

“To think they used to call you royal,” Uguisumaru says, as Ichigo skulks up to them with his hood up and his hands in his pockets. How he’s managed to hold onto his old jacket, Uguisumaru has no idea, but Uguisumaru had traded in his old clothes for a secondhand shirt and a ratty parka and he doesn’t regret his decision at all. “So what’d you do for the past year?”

Ichigo always interprets this as ‘so how were your siblings this year’, because he does nothing with his time but check on them all anyway. “Honebami graduated,” he replies, wordlessly moving to drape Tsurumaru’s other arm over his shoulder. “Yagen followed him into Tsukuba University. Akita was finally adopted; he told me over the phone that he’s going to Kaisei Academy.”

“A private boys’ school, right?” They begin the long trek up the stairs to Uguisumaru’s tiny apartment, a hole in the wall some eighteen floors above ground. Tsurumaru’s dead weight seems even lighter than it had been the last time the three of them had seen each other, which Uguisumaru didn’t think was even possible. “Must be a rich family.”

“Maybe,” is all Ichigo says on the matter. Tsurumaru’s feet drag, clanging on the metal stairs. “Ah, Midare gave me a loaf of bread again.”

Uguisumaru has to look at him. “Did he find out?”

“I don’t think so,” Ichigo answers, resolutely looking up. Light hits his face, setting his cheekbones into sharp relief, and Uguisumaru thinks that Midare probably figured it out on his own.

“So who found me this time,” Tsurumaru says, once he’s eaten a single slice of raisin loaf. Ichigo gestures at Uguisumaru, Uguisumaru raises his hand, and Tsurumaru crawls out of bed to sit on the floor with them. He thinks he’ll be lenient with himself this time and aim his kiss for the general area of Uguisumaru’s face, but he misses like he always does and buries his face in Uguisumaru’s shoulder instead.

The strong pulse beating there makes Tsurumaru feel sick. He talks without meaning to. “The last house I broke into ran out.”

“Please don’t tell me you burnt it down,” Ichigo responds, trying to hand him another piece of bread.

“I did that several times already.” Tsurumaru pushes it away and closes his eyes; he feels full, and it’s always nice to fall asleep. “I’m still alive, so it obviously doesn’t work.”

Ichigo presses his lips into a line. “That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s never going to work,” Uguisumaru interjects, nudging Tsurumaru off. Tsurumaru sits up with a whine but Uguisumaru’s not having any of it. “Stop trying to kill yourself.”

The tang of half-digested yeast rises in Tsurumaru’s throat, and he realizes out loud, “Crap, I broke my no-eating record.” He lets himself dissolve into a boneless mass, and Ichigo pulls him up into a half-sit, half-sprawl as he talks. “Now I’ll have to do that all over again. How long did I go without food this time? How much did I miss?”

“Two years,” Uguisumaru answers, just as Ichigo says, “Six days.” Tsurumaru decides that it doesn’t really matter anyway as he falls asleep there, the parts of him that keep him alive on Ichigo’s lap, and the parts of him that keep him in motion loosely curled around Uguisumaru like searching roots.

Tsurumaru doesn’t need to break into this house because he finds the key under a pot of dead herbs.

Every inch of the place smells like neglect. Piles of unwashed plates cover the counter, bills are scattered on a table, and there isn’t a single picture or souvenir; a lived-in place with no signs of life. The stillness of it all reminds Tsurumaru of a coffin, but he can’t sleep here because it’s not the right one; Tsurumaru decides he’ll only ever return to use the bathroom.

After a shower, he heads for the balcony, and the heavy wind seeps into his damp hair. Darkness stretches from one end of the horizon to the other, and Tsurumaru looks down to find streets that manage to look even darker. As he leans past the railing, he opens his arms and breathes, but every inch of it all smells like neglect, and as he falls he tries to remember if he told anyone where to find him.

They lie on the gravel of the parking lot by Uguisumaru’s workplace and stare at the sky. Everywhere they go, there’s nothing to see in the landscape but melting buildings and faint stars swallowed by city light.

“Do you think sword heaven exists,” Tsurumaru begins after a long silence.

Ichigo immediately rolls Tsurumaru onto his side, facing away from him, because the feverish words mean Tsurumaru is about to puke or faint or both. “I don’t think there’s a heaven for objects.”

“But there are objects in heaven,” Tsurumaru says, arguing no point at all. “Do you think there’s a sword Jesus?”

This time, Ichigo doesn’t humor him. “He probably returned to being a sword when he could,” is what he answers.

Tsurumaru coughs out a chuckle. “Smart guy.” He rolls onto his other side and his head ends up on Ichigo’s outstretched arm. Ichigo scoots closer to press his nose into Tsurumaru’s hair; maybe he’ll kiss him some other time.

This time, as they wait, Tsurumaru stays awake, his tiny breaths puffing out on Ichigo’s shoulder. Ichigo is glad for this moment, the small reminder that Tsurumaru is still actually alive next to him. It isn’t until Uguisumaru comes to feed them with some chicken he’d filched from the kitchen that Tsurumaru retches.

“You don’t have to,” Ichigo tells Hirano over payphone.

“Not when you went through all that trouble to find my number,” Hirano answers with a laugh. For a strange, weightless moment, Ichigo realizes he can’t imagine the mirth on Hirano’s face, and he doesn’t want to think that maybe he can’t remember Hirano’s face at all. “Please give me a moment, I’ll just feed the dogs and then go right away. Where would you like to meet?”

Train ticket fees come to Ichigo’s mind, but he discards the thought easily. “As long as it’s safe for you, then anywhere is fine.”

They end up in a fast food restaurant close to a station Ichigo’s never been to before. It’s not particularly crowded, and Hirano isn’t hard to find; not many people have eyes that glint like metal in the right light.

Even from afar, Hirano looks older now, face less round and shoulders broader. He waves Ichigo over with a smile, and then they talk like nothing’s happened at all, over sandwiches that have too many flavors and fizzy drinks Hirano says he’s come to love.

It’s only when Ichigo bids Hirano goodbye at the station that he lets the relief in him overflow; Hirano, too, is here, but the world hasn’t left him behind, and for that he covers his eyes and thinks that maybe he’ll last another year.

“You have a lighter?” Tsurumaru says, while they aimlessly walk the streets.

Uguisumaru takes it out for them to see. The tarnished metal shines unevenly in the light, and he flicks open the lid in demonstration, sparks a small flame. “Got one just in case,” he says, thoughts not lingering on what that case may be. “I don’t smoke, so I rarely use it.”

Tsurumaru digs into his coat pocket and procures a small carton box. “I have cigarettes.”

Ichigo, walking a step ahead, stops in his tracks to look at him.

“I just found them! I don’t smoke either.” Tsurumaru raises his palms and laughs. “Kind of want to try, though. Just once.”

So they huddle together beneath a streetlamp, and Tsurumaru passes around the cigarettes. Uguisumaru lights his easily and watches Tsurumaru figure out how to hold it, but Ichigo places the stick expertly between in his lips. Tsurumaru quickly does the same.

Uguisumaru then nearly gapes when Ichigo moves, bumping the end of his cigarette against Uguisumaru’s. Their faces stay like that for a long moment, mere centimeters apart, until Ichigo’s cigarette comes alive with a ring of embers.

“Where did you,” Tsurumaru begins, once Ichigo draws away to return to a proper sit. His cigarette drops from the corner of his mouth to the floor. “You smoke?”

Ichigo breathes in, holds briefly, exhales. The smoke leaves his lips in a soft thread. “I just watch, honestly.” He scrunches his nose. “This is my first time smoking, and I think it’ll be my last.”

Uguisumaru, having blinked away his shock, finally remembers to breathe in as well. The rasp of the smoke threatens to leave his throat in tatters, and Tsurumaru laughs when he immediately coughs out a cloud.

“How do you stand this?” Uguisumaru asks, rubbing slow circles onto his chest. “I just breathed in normally, am I supposed to do something else?”

“I wouldn’t call it a matter of doing something.” Ichigo stares at the stick in his hands, inhaling the ambient smoke as his cigarette burns itself into nothing. “It’s more… I just breathe in and accept it.”

Uguisumaru’s on the way to his five to nine shift at the café when he suddenly finds himself slumped against the closed shutter of a random store. Thunder rings into his skull, and the lingering waves of it leave shreds of coherency in its wake.

“You’re here again?” Laughter like walls, closing in from all around him. “Well, that’s what they say about pretty boys. All looks and no-”

The steel in him sings to life and he thinks, how simple it would be to grab this throat, leave fatal wounds with a simple gesture of his fingers. But he looks up at the shadow eclipsing him, finds a life much shorter and weaker than his, and decides that, just once, in the middle of this busy city, he can mute out all the world’s senseless noise and rest.

When he opens his eyes again, he has nothing on his person but welts and a shirt. He holds on tight to the smell of tea lingering in his dreams and reaches for his pants to check for his wallet, but of course it’s no longer there.

Every year, they meet up somewhere in the city and hang out for one week.

They only pretend to take turns deciding on the meet-up point because Tsurumaru never follows it. Half the time he doesn’t show up because he’s dead somewhere, and Uguisumaru and Ichigo have to forget the pre-arranged location so they can revive him where there’s no one to wonder why a corpse is breathing again.

So it’s a miracle that they’re all conscious enough this year to make it to the rail yard, which was Uguisumaru’s idea-and it’s not just any rail yard, because Ichigo’s willing to wager than it was the quietest one Uguisumaru could find, which also happens to make it the farthest from civilization, if the ticket in Ichigo’s pocket and the long distance he had to trek are anything to go by.

He heads for the car with a shadow flittering about inside. It’s Tsurumaru, walking along the train’s length, with his arms stretched to his side like he’s trying very hard to balance-and that might actually be true, considering his bandaged eye, and the consistent limp in his step. Ichigo’s just grateful Tsurumaru’s wounds are dressed this time.

“I thought you said you already tried burning,” Ichigo says, when he realizes that the brand of red peeking out from beneath Tsurumaru’s shirt collar is familiar to him.

“Practice makes perfect,” Tsurumaru responds, turning around and heading the way he came. He laughs. “And I jumped afterwards this time, so it’s different.”

Ichigo follows him as he walks to the passenger car at the end, and in the distance, there’s a figure seated on a passenger bench; Uguisumaru, if it wasn’t obvious enough, hinted further by the bottle of iced tea half-full at his feet. For a moment Ichigo feels like he has something to say, but sunset shines into the cabin, scattering on the broken windows, and when the light turns Tsurumaru’s hair into feathers and Uguisumaru’s eyes into clear stones, Ichigo realizes there’s no number for the distance he’s willing to walk if it means seeing them again.

Tsurumaru empties another bottle of pills in his mouth, and for a moment he has to reassure himself that no, this isn’t eating. Still, he lets the capsules sit on his tongue, contemplating their flavors as he turns on the tap to the bath. Pills are among the few things he can taste and keep down in his stomach; scathingly dry on his throat, good for the body, and just slightly bitter.

While the tub fills, Tsurumaru digs around the bathroom cabinet some more. The medicine bottles, he knows by heart, have all already run out. Shaving cream, toothpaste, not his goals; floral scented oils, just not his thing.

He finds an unopened bottle of bath salt, fine and powder white, and entertains the thought of getting his color back as he dumps all of it into the water. Just as he was hoping, the white doesn’t fade, even when the tub is already full. Tsurumaru closes the tap and briefly dips an arm in to stir the water.

Then, clothes and all, he sits in the tub. Legs curled up and arms crossed over his chest, Tsurumaru lets himself sink.

Ichigo walks down the hallway to Namazuo’s apartment and hears a scream.

Muffled, from somewhere behind him-a dreadful thrill runs through his veins. He follows the sound and his body falls into its old motions unbidden, center close to the ground, muscles limber. Then a cut-off yell from a door left ajar, and Ichigo can almost remember the weight of his blade again, but his thoughts derail when he finds a room that smells of filth; the sting of alcohol, the heavy fog of corruption, and that unholy fire, burning in the wrong colors, the corrupted time they fought to restore.

There, by the window of the apartment, a creature made of the worst bones.

A boy cowers in its shadow, trembling knees pressed back against the bed. His arms are raised to shield his bloodied face, but nothing is reflected in those unfeeling eyes-nothing to protect him but the ribcage crossed over his heart, and Ichigo knows very well; even with that, people can break on their own with no force at all-

The creature lands a blow to the boy’s side, and he crumples to the floor, screams dwindling into nothing. “Why,” he gasps, crawling to the door, thin fingers finding purchase on nothing. His head lolls to the side, and his gaze finds Ichigo in the doorway, but he repeats, eyes closing, why?

Ichigo storms in.

“Get the fuck out,” the monster yells. it grabs Ichigo’s shoulder with an inhuman roar, but in that brief moment it pulls back to strike, Ichigo can only feel the press of its fingers; warm, and human. Everything melts into focus, like dirty buildings and a prismatic sunset and the wrong colors.

Why?

Suddenly a bottle is in Ichigo’s hand, and he’s swinging, pieces of glass exploding all around him in a brilliant rain. Then warm, warm all over his hands, buried into a neck, and again in a stomach, again, again-

Uguisumaru staggers home with two full cans of gasoline. Despite his dislocated shoulder, they don’t feel heavy at all, but Uguisumaru’s not sure if it’s because he’s a sword or if he should be thankful for the flight singing in his marrows.

After he drenches his apartment, he lies on his bed for a long time. He tries to will three hearts’ worth of warmth into his open palms, and even with half his ribs probably broken and his right eye going blind, the sensation, impossible to forget, soothes him. Then he fetches the lighter.

Ichigo stares at his palms. (In a few days, he’ll realize that there’s something worse than nightmares about burns, and it’s nightmares about blood spilled by the very people he once fought to protect.)

Submerged, Tsurumaru closes his eyes and pretends that he’s a blade being quenched. Something in him burns, but the water shields him from cracks, and he lets it fill each of his existing gaps; in his stomach, between his fingers, his breaths. It doesn’t reach everything, like the hollows in his bones, but it’s alright.

He stays there for a long time, feeling like he’s being forged anew.

On the beach, they set up a pile of dried driftwood and unread flyers. Uguisumaru burns the paper with a click of his lighter, and then they’re sitting around a campfire after a few minutes.

Tsurumaru procures a thin, long box from his pocket to no reaction; Ichigo only watches, still nibbling on his bread, and Uguisumaru doesn’t even tear his eyes from the sea. It’s tempting to be indignant, but the obvious reason is that they don’t know what’s inside the box, and Tsurumaru is glad to rectify that issue.

“Can I borrow your lighter?” Tsurumaru asks, tapping Uguisumaru’s shoulder.

Uguisumaru raises a skeptical brow at him.

“Please don’t,” Ichigo says.

Tsurumaru shrugs at them both and pulls a metal stick from the box. “Then you leave me with no choice,” he says, as he stabs the thicker end of the stick into the fire.

Uguisumaru’s deadpan gaze immediately becomes alarmed. Then the stick erupts with sparks, and his shoulders jolt at the same time Ichigo exclaims, “Oh, these are…!”

“Yeah, I got them because I thought they’d explode.” Tsurumaru hands him the sparkler. Ichigo gives him a look before trying to pass it to Uguisumaru, who stares intently but shakes his head. “You don’t need to inhale the sparks this time, so don’t worry,” Tsurumaru adds. “It’s way better than smoking.”

At that, Uguisumaru slants him a half-smile and takes it. “I’m fairly certain you didn’t even light your cigarette.”

“Wh-”

“So,” Ichigo interjects, agilely sidestepping the topic. “I thought these were only used during special occasions, like festivals or new year’s celebrations?”

Tsurumaru scatters the rest of the box’s fourteen sticks on the sand next to him. “But we all made it again!” Ichigo moves to take one, but his hand pauses when Tsurumaru scoops up more than half of them in one go. “Can’t this be a special occasion?”

Eyeing the unlit sparklers in Tsurumaru’s hand, Ichigo starts to murmur a warning, but Tsurumaru manages to stuff a stick into his fingers when Uguisumaru reaches for another two.

Eight sticks posed over the fire, Tsurumaru says, “Now, on your count!”

“Mine?” Ichigo sighs, but the sound is only affectionate. “One-”

Uguisumaru stabs his sparkles into the fire, and Tsurumaru follows suit with a yelp. Before any of them can get another word in, the campfire explodes with little sparks, and a laugh bursts from Ichigo’s throat as if it had been waiting there for a long time.

Tsurumaru then waves his sparklers in Ichigo’s face, prompting Ichigo to light his own stick. When Tsurumaru tries to do it to Uguisumaru as well, Uguisumaru parries it away, and they spend a while drawing their own shooting stars into the nearby sky.

Finally, their sparklers die out. They light the last three together.

“So what did you do this year?” Tsurumaru begins, as they watch the last sparks crawl up the sticks and closer to their fingers. Though he asks, he knows the answers will always be the same, and the question unimportant anyway-he just wants to hear them again, the living detritus of his past, and If the continued warmth means anything then Tsurumaru’s sure that’s what they’re here for, too.

“Can I just say that I’m surprised,” Tsurumaru says, for the first time in several years, once the fire is dead and they’re lying on the beach with their feet caught in the rushing tide. “Normally I’m the one burning myself.”

“Sorry,” Uguisumaru says, but he’s not really. He’s the one with his hood up this time because the burns haven’t yet healed, but the blisters are familiar on his skin, like warm, permanent bubbles. “Oh, I don’t have an apartment anymore.”

Ichigo sighs at them, a tremulous note in his smile. His hands, once again, are hidden away in his jacket, but Tsurumaru and Uguisumaru each take one of Ichigo’s pockets, stuffing their own hands inside to hold onto him.

This year, they meet up at the bridge.

Ichigo is surprised to find that Tsurumaru’s the first one there, seated on the sidewalk with his arms on his knees. Tsurumaru’s clothes are sopping wet, but Ichigo doesn’t need to wonder why anymore, and he rests his elbows on the railing so he can inhale the sea. Tsurumaru presses his face into Ichigo’s leg.

Uguisumaru arrives next, an old sweatshirt draped in his arms. He holds it above Tsurumaru’s head and Ichigo kneels to guide the pieces of Tsurumaru into the right holes. Once everything’s in place, Uguisumaru pulls them both to their feet, and they head for nowhere at all.

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thanks to sani for telling me about this wonderful song which happens to be named Raison d'Etre, hint hint.

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