The Cicada and the Dragon Part IV for Arysthaeniru!
Title: The Cicada and the Dragon Part IV
Author: quelleperedhil
Recipient: arysthaeniru
Pairing/Characters: Yanagi Renji/Atobe Keigo, Yukimura Seiichi/Ryoma Echizen, Ryuuzaki Sakuno, Tachibana An, Oshitari Yuushi, Tezuka Kunimitsu, Niou Masaharu, and many more.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, but for the most part, not particularly graphic.
Disclaimer: The Prince of Tennis belongs to Konomi-sensei.
Summary: Some bickering, with magic, and a side of dragons.
The flames licked at her body, yet she wasn’t burning. Terrified, Sakuno panted against An’s hair as the moments, minutes or hours, passed. The ground beneath them rumbled with such force that she thought the whole castle might come down on top of them. She had thrown herself over the Princess to protect her with the strength of her dragon-born body.
When Sakuno dared to open her eyes, she saw that the flames had disappeared. “An-chan…” she whispered. “Are you all right?”
To Sakuno’s relief, An drew her into a hug. “I’m just fine,” she said. “Thank you.” The embrace succeeded in melting Sakuno. She lingered and clung, snuffling at An’s shoulder as the ground shook beneath them, quite beyond distress.
“What about him?” An said, looking over Sakuno’s shoulder at Mukahi.
Slowly, they stood together. An kneeled to take the redhead’s pulse. Though they had been fighting vigorously not too long ago, she said with relief, “He’s alive. Just knocked out, I think.”
“Thank goodness,” Sakuno said. Her gaze shifted from Mukahi to the broken shards of what used to be the orb. Now, it looked like ordinary glass. Voice thick with fear, she asked, “What’s happening…?”
An looped an arm in with Sakuno. Even as the ground trembled, An’s grip held firm. “I don’t know,” An said. “But we have to warn someone.”
“We can try to find Renji,” Sakuno said, reaching for the only solution she knew, since Tezuka wasn’t around to ask.
“It’s useless…” Mukahi coughed and failed to rise. “There’s no one to wield the power. They can’t be controlled.”
“Who can’t be controlled?” An demanded to know. Mukahi, half-conscious, didn’t respond. They shook him together and he stirred for just another moment. “Who?!” An said repeated.
Mukahi’s lashes fluttered and his mouth twisted. He wanted to respond, but he hadn’t the strength. “Hyoutei…reserve forces,” he managed and conked out completely.
“We have to get him somewhere safe,” An said.
Sakuno nodded, “Right.” As if he weighed nothing whatsoever, she lifted up the Hyoutei soldier and flung him over her shoulder. An stared and Sakuno blushed, “What?”
“Nothing,” she grinned. It was sunlight in the quivering darkness. “I just always forget that you can do that.”
Together they ran back the way they came. Hoping that Mukahi would be safe there, they left him in Oshitari’s sitting room. As they passed the rank archways that led to the prison cells, An and Sakuno ran faster, hand and hand, past the hollering captives.
At least, until Sakuno tripped on a bit of elevated stone and fell flat on her face.
“Sakuno-chan! Are you all right?” An stopped to check her out.
Sakuno groaned; she didn’t appreciate the earth vibrating against her nose. The whole world was opening up and underground was the last place that she wanted to be. Why did these things keep happening to her? As she picked herself slowly up off of the ground, she spotted something; just behind An’s ear, Niou was sticking out his tongue and turning up his eyelids at them.
“Niou-san!” she shouted, euphoric at the sliver of hope. An swiveled her head to behold the same sight.
The girls got up together and entered the corridor. The jeers of other prisoners were nothing to the sight of Niou and Yanagi, in adjacent cells, one waiting patiently and the other, propped against the wall and fighting for breath.
“Ladies,” Niou bowed. “Welcome to the end of the world.”
“You know what’s happening?!”
“Haven’t the foggiest. Dataman?”
Yanagi was silent. Niou reached a foot through the bars to prod Yanagi awake.
“Renji,” Sakuno said softly. The bars of the cell rattled with the tremors of the earth, but she refused to be intimidated, not now, not while there was hope of escaping this situation alive with An.
“Hmm,” Yanagi frowned, as if he just noticed the massive earthquake.
“Renji, we need you to pay attention,” Sakuno insisted. “Renji.”
Niou, quite inexplicably, ignored the fuss and closed his eyes. Perhaps he was ready to give up, but Sakuno wasn’t.
-
An enormous skeleton loomed behind Atobe Keigo, King of Hyoutei, but he could not turn around for the three he fought at his front. Hiyoshi rushed for his King’s back; Yukimura beat him there. One mighty strike of Yukimura’s rapier severed the skeleton’s spine, forcing its top half to swing down and ajar like the most foul snapped branch.
Not that this stopped the carcass from fighting. The thing made to stab Yukimura in the foot. Before it could do so, Atobe swung his broadsword toward the ground, sending the corpse careening back to whence it came.
“I told you to run,” Atobe said breathlessly, back to Yukimura’s.
The King of United Rikkai grinned. “And miss this party?”
Yagyuu neatly skewered two corpses together on an icicle; with a powerful kick to that makeshift sword, Sanada scattered the bones. “It would be rude, after you took such trouble to draft up the invitation,” the gentleman said.
“Hn,” Sanada added, and brought down a rain of cartilage with one protective blow. On his other side, Kabaji was extremely impressive with his twin-axe massacre; the dead collected and reassembled at their feet.
“I assure you, these nightmares did not RVSP to this party,” Oshitari tripped a corpse on its way to behead Yagyuu and redirected it to its own kin. After a brief, confused, and very dead tussle, that fight was sent back down the chasm by a solid whack of the Hyoutei counselor’s spear.
“What poor manners.”
“We should dispose of them posthaste.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Yagyuu and Oshitari fought side by side, ridding their space of the undesirable party crashers. Yagyuu’s efficient, close quarters knifework combined well with the wide range of Oshitari’s spear. They defended systematically, with Yagyuu’s quick, aggressive strikes cutting down their opponents and Oshitari keeping the rest at bay long enough for him to do so.
The two kingdoms and their respective armies kept death at bay on the river. For hours they battled, exhausted but determined against the endless tide. Arrows were ineffective, but Hyoutei’s catapults rained fury down onto the frozen battlefield. Their strategy and execution was flawless, but every skeleton they didn’t decimate completely crawled back up the crevasse, eager for a taste of life. The beings didn’t care what life. They only longed to destroy everything that lived.
Yukimura had never known any situation so hopeless. He refused to die here like this. He refused to let anyone he cared about die here like this, not even Atobe, not even the troops of Hyoutei, who had impressed him with their determination. No matter what fatigue plagued his body, as long as he had the strength to stand, he would fight with every breath.
“Yukimura!” Kirihara shrieked.
Lurching around to confirm his ears, Yukimura beheld Kirihara and the rest of his army, Rikkai crests and Shitenhouji helmets yellow in the darkness. He heard his name called again from farther downriver and spotted Marui and his tell-tale shock of pink hair riding toward him with Akutagawa and his troops from the border. Reinforcements had arrived; their dawn would come.
-
“Yanagi-san!”
“Renji…”
“Hnn…” Yanagi stirred and attempted to open his eyes. A few moments later, his brain recalled that he could no longer do so. “Yes?”
It was strange. Sakuno sounded so distant. He tried to calculate her exact distance, but found that he couldn’t sense her presence, or feel much at all, for that matter. There was only the cold, the cold settled deep in his bones. Only his memory informed him that he was somewhere in Hyoutei’s dungeons, waiting to die.
Though perhaps some small, crazy, illogical part of him had thought that he might survive somehow. That he’d wake up and argue with Yukimura at breakfast, spar with Sanada, and smack Kirihara upside the head when he failed to read a map correctly. That maybe he would have the opportunity to behold Sakuno and fully thank her. The tiniest, narrowest possibility that he could watch the colors cross Atobe’s infuriated face ticked down to zero. Those irrational hopes were distracting. Just because there was no tomorrow for him didn’t mean that the future was out of reach for anyone else. He forced his floating mind into the present.
“Renji…Renji can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said, finding his voice. “Tell me, what did you find?”
“We….we set off the magic,” Sakuno cried, panicked. “I don’t know…it was a ball. A big glass ball.”
“It was filled with fire,” An supplied desperately.
“We knocked it over. I knocked it over. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I-”
“I had hoped that you’d stop apologizing to me by now,” Yanagi said, weakly lifting his hand in the direction of her voice. Faintly, he felt her warmth. She must have grasped it.
Finding the courage to continue, Sakuno said, “It broke when I knocked it over. The ground caught fire. Everything was fire but we didn’t burn…”
Yanagi frowned, considering the possibilities.
“And everything started to shake.”
Right, the shaking - though only very loose strings tied Yanagi to his own body, he could still feel the malignant tremors.
“The orb that you saw is a magical storage device. It contained the life energy from the burning fields that we saw,” Yanagi said.
“So…it’s Hyoutei’s magic, shaking the castle?”
The pieces were connecting slowly in Yanagi’s mind, too slowly for his own liking. All of the literature he consumed on such matters suggested that it wasn’t quite so simple; magic required channeling, or the life force would return simply to the earth. If the stored magic were simply released, they would not feel the result.
“Yes and no. Wild magic would have taken on the form of its destruction and actually killed you. This magic went to a purpose; that orb must have been spelled, waiting for someone to wield it.”
“What purpose?” An implored.
“And who?!”
Yanagi remained silent, turning over the facts, new, old, and foreseen like glimmering slabs of river stone.
“Hiroshi is here,” Niou explained. That fact fell to Yanagi’s pile with a resounding clack.
“You were awake?” An said, puzzled.
“Just shooting the breeze with a friend,” Niou said, acidly.
Yanagi reached for the information in his grasp and vocally turned that last bit of stone, “What does he see?”
Niou channeled Yagyuu’s voice and answered word for word, “We fight an army of Hyoutei’s dead on the river Fortuna. The corpses are attacking indiscriminately.”
In his mind’s eye, he stood on the bank of the frozen river with Yukimura, with Atobe, with the two armies become one. Yanagi stared at the vast, multi-colored display of details, events, characters, and uncategorizable important nothings cast carelessly on the shore. Except it wasn’t careless. It was fate. All of the players, all of the pieces, all of the bits and pieces of information from the last century culminated in this setting, creating the stage for his final battle.
Yukimura, Ryoma. Atobe. Him. Her, Fortune, Her, Fortuna. Fortune to cauterize. Burn. Burn and heal. Luck, Sakuno. The cycle of Greed. Fortune to bear a Kingdom’s despair. The gauntlet. He knew about the gauntlet and he knew who had to wear it, but that was not enough of an answer…
As he divined the truth from the known, a battle carried on behind him. A battle he could only imagine because he was in no shape to fight. He imagined the colors and flags of United Rikkai and Hyoutei haphazardly knitted into each other, for who could care about Kingdom when death waged war on them all? This was no longer about power. No longer about greed.
Greed. Cauterize the cycle of greed.
The first greed of the dragon-born. What had been the punishment?
The evidence was all around him. What misery had they wrecked to burn away? Yanagi understood. He had pulled all the pieces, all the players here for a reason. The elements collided precisely where they had for a reason. He understood the next step of the prophecy.
“Niou,” Yanagi ordered. “I need you to lead Sakuno to the Hyoutei treasury and get her to the river. Can you do this?”
“Sure thing,” Niou said. Yanagi wondered if those would be the last words he ever heard of Niou Masaharu.
“What’s in the treasury?” Sakuno said, not understanding.
“You must wear the gauntlet and get to the river.”
“Get to the river to do what?”
“In the middle of the fighting?!” An protested.
Yanagi nodded once. “Release the power that only you have.”
“Release my…You…you knew. That I was a dragon-born.”
“From the start, yes,” Yanagi admitted, breathing deeply. His connection to reality grew ever tenuous.
“And you haven’t…I…I might have used my fire on…”
“Tezuka rightly forbid you to do so, yes?”
“Mmm…” she agreed, and desperately added. “But for you…”
“No, fortune does not belong only to me,” Yanagi insisted. “To have met you and come this far was luck enough for this man.”
“What about you?” Sakuno sobbed. Yanagi could tell that she was crying - sweet girl. “Renji, I don’t know what to do.”
Imploring his lips to smile one last time, he said, “You know what happens after the cicada comes from the ground, don’t you?”
Sakuno whimpered. As usual, she understood and didn’t understand all at the same time. Yanagi preferred it that way.
“Now, do as I say. Control the gauntlet’s power with your own and melt away the horror that has come upon this land….” Yanagi rasped. “Niou will lead the way. Princess…you will have to switch with him…”
The girls gasped; Yanagi assumed that Niou had worked his magic to trade places and faces. His ears followed their footsteps and his thoughts wished them success.
“…How…” An asked him with Niou’s voice. He could barely hear her.
“Unfortunately, Princess,” Yanagi’s very soul quieted. “I do not…have the breath to tell that story…”
“Yanagi-kun!”
It was enough, enough to have won his small part of this battle. When nothingness came upon him, Yanagi welcomed it.
-
The only fortunate thing about emptying the castle of soldiers was that it left none to guard the treasury. Any other time, Sakuno might have admired the piles of gold, silver, and endless multi-colored, many-faced gems, but right now she made a beeline for the terrifying object; having witnessed its awful power firsthand, she recognized its pull as she drew nearer. Even among the chaos, among the stench of death, the dragon relic had a distinct signature.
Why did Yanagi think that she could resist it? Her element was fortune, but really, it seemed that she only attracted bad luck.
Niou ran silently beside her; she had never noticed before, but somehow, he didn’t have any footsteps.
But that wasn’t important. Not with the gauntlet in her sights. She stopped short and stared at it on the dais. It was still beyond her how Yanagi, though not dragon-born, managed to carry something so horrible and oppressive.
She walked to it slowly, fearfully. A laugh from Niou, now himself again, stopped her in her tracks. Infuriated, she turned around to glare at him.
“What part of this is funny?!” she shouted. Normally she would never raise her voice to anyone, especially not a soldier of a different country, but all the pressure on her narrow shoulders had to explode somewhere.
“Nothing,” Niou grinned, twirling his rat-tail around his finger. Being in the depths of a crumbling castle didn’t seem to bother him whatsoever. “It’s just that I haven’t seen anyone so scared to meet a relative since I introduced Hiroshi to my mom.”
Sakuno’s anger crumbled, confusion taking its place. “Relative…”
“That’s what a relic is, right? Dragon-bones? Scales? Whatever.”
She had never really considered that. Then again, she didn’t want to associate personally with something that had wrecked so much destruction. But was that not the history of her kind? Using their ancestry to sate their greed?
Was…was that not the very history that Yanagi was asking her to repair?
The relic was not just a source of power; it was a connection to something long lost. When she resumed her approach, she did so with confidence. She armed herself with the warm memories of those who had protected her: her grandmother, Oishi, Kawamura, Tezuka, An, Tomoka, Renji…
Fixing the gauntlet on her tiny arm, she said, “I’m going to set you free.”
Niou grinned. “It looks terrible on you.”
With a huff, she said, “I don’t care.”
“Suit yourself,” Niou picked up one of Atobe’s several dozen crowns and placed it on his own head. “Now let’s get out of here.”
-
“The dawn is coming,” Tezuka said, disturbingly calm for a man dangling thousands of feet above the ground.
Echizen responded with a groan, “Lose weight.” His dark green wings beat heavily to get them closer to Hyoutei, which was masked by thick, dark clouds. Would they even be able to see the sun when it decided to rise?
“I suppose I shouldn’t have thought so highly of your strength,” Tezuka said simply.
Tezuka felt Echizen’s arms tighten around him. Good. Though Tezuka didn’t really think lowly of Echizen’s quite considerable strength, he found that goading the young man fed his determination. “I haven’t dropped you yet,” the smaller dragon-born remarked.
And it was impressive that he hadn’t, not that Tezuka would ever say as much. Echizen was doing what he had to do.
“Even if you did, I promise that I would live long enough to tell your husband.”
“Hn.”
“Are you worried about him?”
“That asshole isn’t so easy to kill.”
Nonetheless, Echizen flew impossibly faster, cutting straight through a turbulent cloud. For a long moment, Tezuka thought Echizen had, in fact, dropped him. The wind had simply pushed them so hard that it felt like they were falling. This was his domain, not Echizen’s. Thrusting out a hand, Tezuka willed the wind in the other direction to lift the younger man’s wings and spur them forward.
“…I was handling it,” Echizen said.
“Of course you were,” said Tezuka, looking down on the ghastly conflict below. It was worse than he thought.
Closing his eyes, Tezuka mentally recited a prayer for his ward’s fortune.
-
Armed with double blades, Niou charged onto the fray. Sakuno watched his knives carve a way for them through the mottled, disgusting corpses that were too terrifying to have even entered her wildest dreams. She followed Niou around the fresh, mingled dead of Rikkai and Hyoutei, kicking bones as she ran aimlessly. She didn’t know where Niou was going, but followed him because she had nowhere else to go.
Control the gauntlet’s power with your own and melt away the horror that has come upon this land, Yanagi’s words echoed through her head. If these undead soldiers weren’t the worst thing to happen to this land, she didn’t know what. But did fire really have the power to end them?
She screamed and ducked a carcass’ wild swing. In doing so, she stumbled and slid along the ice. The arm not protected by the gauntlet burned, scraped roughly over the jagged ice. It seemed impossible that ice could hold up the weight of armies, but ice was more sure than ground. Even the frozen cascade of daggers overhead, the Great Falls, had been frozen for the last hundred years.
Melt away the horror…
Melt. Her fire had the power to melt. The walking dead were perverted and wrong, but a symptom to a much greater problem. The land itself, since the death of her revered ancestor, refused to sustain them all. Only the greedy could survive in this world.
“I’ll set you free…” she whispered, fingers clawing at the ice. “I’ll warm the earth as you once did. End this fighting here and now.”
The gauntlet, as if on fire itself, burned with heartening warmth.
The very moment she stood, four corpses ran to her at full power, their empty maws hung open in a permanent scream. Within seconds, they were crushed into the solid ground under the feet of Tooyama Kintarou. “You won’t hurt the pretty lady!” he hollered, yanking her up and throwing her onward.
Propelled forward by his strength, her feet bit down on the river. She ran forward, eyes fixed on the frozen waterfall, thrice as tall as Hyoutei’s tallest tower and wider than the entire castle.
“Sakuno-chan!”
On her left, Shiraishi stared at her in great surprise. Surely, his eyes were fixed on the gauntlet. Before she could even ask his help, the King surged forward, clearing a path with a series of blows she could barely follow. He winked at her as she ran past, and she did her utmost to not visualize him naked.
Only by the power of her friends did she work her way into the thick of the fighting. Akutagawa and Marui pushed her through, Yuuji and Koharu did some strange attempt to distract the corpses while Zaizen bopped them back into the ravine, and the familiar faces of every guard she encountered shielded her from harm
Sakuno was relieved to find Niou again. She called out to him, because he was the only one who knew of her mission. But that one moment was too long to pause.
“Seigaku’s Ryuuzaki Sakuno, ahn?” she whirled around to see King Atobe holding the blows of four different skeletons that would’ve dashed her to bits. “Back to the keep. Nothing will touch you while I still stand.”
Shaking her head vigorously, she said, “I must get to the Great Falls.”
Perplexed, Atobe continued to fight. “It’s not safe. Tezuka would be furious if I let his ward come to harm.”
Squaring her jaw, she countered, “Kunimitsu would be furious if you kept me from my duty.”
Somewhere in his state of shock, Atobe had the presence of mind to note her accessory. Niou took advantage of that distraction to pinch his bottom. Atobe’s yelp of affront managed to be louder than the screams of the dead.
“Keep her safe then,” he said to Atobe, and shoved them forward. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly, prompting the soldiers of Rikkai to form a wall behind them. The last Sakuno saw of him, he barreled into the impressive Oshitari and Yagyuu combination with the strangest war cry she had ever heard.
“To me!” Yukimura shouted, preparing his wall of men for a charge.
Sakuno wondered what monsters these soldiers had to be, to fight this ferociously all through the night. But it was no longer night. The dawn came to greet them, and reflected harshly on Sakuno from the thousands of frozen bayonets pointing down at her from on high.
She left Atobe behind. Alone, he took out whatever sorry skeleton managed to creep past Yukimura’s wall of death. The two Kings would not permit any interruption. Whatever she had to do, she only had now to do it. All of her friends were fighting for everything good left in the world, and now it was her turn.
“Together, Sumire,” she placed her opposite hand on the gauntlet, threw her head back, and screamed. She screamed with every ounce of love and fear, with every emotion that she ever had, until passion roiled up inside and released instinctively from her heart in a magnificent wave of fire. The ice shook and softened, first fracturing and crying in small streams. Then, almost all at once, the waters joined together to rebel against her. Through the fear she might be crushed, the knowledge that the ground softening beneath her would cave, she fed the fire with her fervent devotion. She roared through the strange grip that brought her feet up into the air until all her heart went empty.
“Not bad, pigtails.”
Sakuno rolled her head back to see Ryoma, wings unfurled and holding her aloft before a wall of water.
Wall of water?!
More urgently, she looked down to see something almost as impossible as what she had just done. Tezuka Kunimitsu, holding up the world on the wind. Wind pushed out from his hands to hold and morph the giant and growing sphere of boiling water from the falls. Men ran before the sight, leaving the corpses to be reburied and blistered.
“Kunimitsu!” she screamed, but no sound emerged. Despite her hoarse screaming, Ryoma climbed higher in the sky. She looked down on Tezuka and the tons of water held up by his strength, exposing the cliff behind it. The last thing she saw before he let go were Atobe and Yukimura running for Tezuka. When the world of water gave way, it swept them along with it.
Sakuno clung to Ryoma and cried.
“It’s not done yet,” he promised.
-
The Night of the Dead would surely go down in the legend as one of the greatest battles of its time. That was not the reason that Fuji was so sore to have missed it. All the same, he didn’t have to take part to witness the shifting of the ages, what that historical event that he had prompted along triggered. Boiling water from the Great Falls pushed through, eating away at the river of ice. The powerful stream pushed on from Hyoutei, warming the waters out into the rest of the continent. Fuji saw all the evidence of this on his way to the former ice capital; it was too soon to tell what the full effect would be, but already, the world seemed warmer for it.
“Well, this marks the first of an occasion,” Fuji said, much later, when he had been seated in the healing rooms.
“And what’s that?” An asked, grinning at him. She had Kippei’s smile. Since that smile was safe, Fuji supposed that the citizens of Hyoutei could keep their hands.
“The first time that anyone was glad to see Ryoma catchphrase proven right,” Seigaku’s adviser smiled from his chair next to Tezuka’s bed. Ward and guardian slept side by side, restoring their energy with rest.
“Shut up,” Ryoma grumbled, throwing a sweat-soaked towel at Fuji. Exhausted, he curled closer to Yukimura, who had been passing in and out of consciousness for the last few hours. As such, the relieved Echizen was more interested in guarding his healing sleep than responding to Fuji’s barbs.
However, no one had been happier than Kabaji Munehiro when Atobe popped his stubborn, silvery head above the water. Fuji had arrived just in time to see the man howl and leap into the warm river. Sanada followed him and the three Kings were dragged safely ashore, in varying states of awareness.
Atobe had even been energetic enough to smack Oshitari when his counselor thanked the gods for making his King so full of hot air that he floated, despite his weight. For some reason, this made Fuji miss Kippei all the more. His dear husband had stayed behind to keep watch over both Seigaku and Fudomine.
Only Fuji noticed when King Atobe, who was certainly battered, but not down and out, covertly slipped from the healing rooms. Fuji smiled to himself and informed the healers that he had absolutely no idea where the King had gone.
-
Shrouded in a cloak of dark velvet, Atobe walked through his crumbling castle. The damages from the attack and the earthquake had been severe. Large chunks of limestone had tumbled to the ground, smashing through homes and leaving gaping holes in his Keep. A tower had collapsed in its entirety; fortunately, there were few casualties from the wreckage. Most of his population had the good sense to take refuge in the castle’s foundation, which held up surprisingly well. The restored falls and flowing river, now soothingly audible from his castle, had actually done more damage. Water and dirt seeped through the cracks in the rock, muddying his dungeon.
Well, it was appropriately uncomfortable and terrifying for a dungeon. All the same, his architects would have to ensure they wouldn’t all be done in by a bit of mud. A bit of mud and heat. Even after all of that, the river maintained the temperature of bathwater. Steam from the river licked at the air, claiming all of its particles and leaving none for Atobe to keep his name as the Ice King. If he had no actual ice to back him up, he would just have to support that claim entirely with character.
Standing before the fallen Yanagi’s cell, Atobe released his cloak at the neck, letting flow down his back in waves and into the mud. Atobe wasn’t sure whether to blame Yanagi for the devastation or to thank him for the fact that he still had a castle at all. But that was irrelevant - it was certainly Yanagi who made this new age of warmth and potential possible.
He entered the puddle of Yanagi’s cell and knelt at his side to feel for a pulse. The barest flutter pulsed to his finger.
“You had better not waste this,” he said to the blind, deaf, and dying Yanagi.
Atobe bowed his head close to Yanagi, such that they were nearly nose and nose, and pursed his lips into a round, delicate shape. Unlike Sakuno’s great roar, Atobe exhaled a small, life giving breath. The beautiful flames of translucent blue passed through Atobe’s parted lips to ignite Yanagi almost immediately. Pleased and awed by his own power, Atobe watched the fire spread over the counselor for a beautiful, elegant death.
“Rise, Yanagi Renji,” Atobe said, as he did so himself. “And take responsibility for what you have done.”
With that, Atobe turned and left the dungeon. United Rikkai would have no angle whatsoever to consider Hyoutei in their debt.
-
“Are you sure that there’s actually something here?” Echizen said tersely. Though his wings had not quite recovered from the massive strain of cross-kingdom travel, here he was flying the half-infirm Sakuno and Tezuka to the falls.
“I saw it…I’m not sure what. An opening, in the moment the ice gave way to water.”
“Not much longer,” Tezuka assured him. And that was a damn good thing, because if he had to hold up the weight of two dragon-born much farther, they would all tumble into the bathwater.
“Good, otherwise, you’re in for another swim.”
“Your husband fought off hundreds of undead but you can’t bear the weight of two people?”
Echizen pushed his lips together in irritation. If anything, he was more irritated when Sakuno patted him and said, “You’re doing a great job.”
Now it was Tezuka’s turn. Harnessing the wind to his hand, he diverted the path of the water at one point, parting the pounding flow to either side like liquid curtains. Echizen flew straight through. Just as Sakuno described, there was a cave.
“Watch there be more dead things,” Echizen said, dropping his two burdens lightly.
But there were no dead things. Just a giant, inexplicable circle of old twigs.
“This was Sumire’s nest, many years ago,” Tezuka said, processing the information before him.
The one to actually step into the enormous nest was Sakuno. The twigs and hay, hard from a thousand years of ice, crunched under her feet. What she saw in the deepest pit of the nest blew her eyes out wide with surprise.
“A…a…a….” she stuttered, unable to speak until Tezuka put a hand on her shoulder.
“After so long, it may not be alive,” Tezuka said.
But it also might be. “I promised…” Sakuno spoke softly. “I promised that I would set her free.” Wary, she crossed the small distance between her and the enormous egg. It was as tall as she was and three times as wide. She swallowed thickly and dared to lay a hand on their legacy.
Tezuka and Echizen stared, transfixed.
“It’s…warm,” Sakuno said, voice thick with relief.
While Echizen grinned, excited, concern polluted Tezuka’s joy.
“We must inform the Kings,” he said.
Sakuno shook her head and held the egg possessively. She was, after all, a dragon-born. “Would it not start another war, Kunimitsu?”
Tezuka shook his head. “If Seigaku had not kept quite so many secrets, perhaps we might have figured this out a long time ago.”
“We could just make a giant omelet,” Echizen said. Sakuno shouted and clung to the egg tighter. Tezuka fixed Echizen with a raised brow. “I’m kidding. You know I hate fried eggs.”
“The waterfall will keep it warm for now,” Tezuka sighed. “Now that all of the Kings have come to, we’ll call a meeting.”
-
Ryoma crawled into bed with Yukimura.
“Did you have fun?” Yukimura said, winding his fingers a little viciously in Echizen’s hair. “Carrying everyone around the world except for me.”
Groaning, Ryoma said, “You had the exciting job, fighting an army of undead and getting crushed under a million tons of bathwater. Yet you still stink, how is that?”
Yukimura gave him a noogie for that comment. The vigorous scalp rubbing ceased with the knock on the door. Yukimura looked up, expecting Tezuka to call him for the council they mentioned, but instead he gasped, “Renji.”
Yanagi smiled that little grin of his and bowed. When he unfolded, his narrow eyes were open and ever so amused.
“Renji…” Yukimura repeated. “You….your hair looks terrible.”
“I don’t know, the bowl cut might grow on me,” Yanagi said, taking a seat by Yukimura’s bed.
“So Atobe did it after all,” the knot in Yukimura’s stomach unwound. He had never known such deep reaching relief.
“That would be my inference,” Yanagi said. “I woke up alone.”
“How do you feel?”
“Relieved, more than anything else.”
“Don’t be so surprised,” Sanada entered the room, hands reaching over the chair to land on Yanagi’s shoulders. “Your plans have brought about seemingly impossible victories before.”
Smiling serenely at his friend, Yanagi said, “This victory is not mine, or even Rikkai’s. After all, it’s been in the works for a thousand years. Many things had to happen that I could not have possibly predicted.”
Chuckling, Yukimura said, “Just be satisfied, Renji.”
But Yanagi was looking beyond Yukimura, to the shy Sakuno waiting in the entrance of the healing rooms. “I am,” he said, directly to her. “I’m an incredibly lucky man.”
“We all are,” Yukimura agreed.
-
The council of the dragon egg was a long and loud event. They sat together in Hyoutei’s largest receiving room, which somehow maintained its dignity despite the random rubble and shards of glass. The staff had even managed to put together a decent lunch, which shifted everyone in better spirits to stop blaming each other for what had happened.
“All Kingdoms are equally to blame,” Tezuka said, “Equal in greed and equal in credit.”
There were a few who protested this assessment. Yanagi spoke to support Tezuka, “I agree. We must conclude this to move forward to the true purpose of this council.”
Yanagi gestured toward Sakuno, who sat quietly between Tezuka and Princess An. Her eyes went wide with shock, so surprised that she was asked to speak that she let out an undignified little sound. Politely ignoring this, Yanagi continued, “Please tell us what you found, my Lady.”
Sakuno gulped and stood, nervous until she took a real look around at all of the people who defended her with their lives on the frozen river. Shiraishi winked, Niou made a horrible face, and An looked up at her with pride. She felt that strength, and peered to Yanagi once more for reassurance. Breathing deep she attempted, “We…Kunimitsu…King Tezuka and Ry-Echizen…looked behind the Great Falls.”
She paused, half incredulous that they were actually listening to her.
“And?” Atobe drawled from the head of the table, prompting her forward. Even his gaze was not one of contempt, but almost amusement.
Continuing, she blurted out, “It was a nest. Sumire’s nest. She left an egg.”
Shiraishi said, “Surely it is dead by now.”
Oshitari hummed and said, “Not necessarily. Dragon eggs are said to be thick as stone with no predictable hatching time. It may have waited out the ice.”
“Then surely, alive or dead, it belongs to Hyoutei,” Atobe said. “It was found on our lands.”
“Can you really say that, after your army of the dead nearly killed us all?”
“My army of the dead? You heard the account from Princess An. We did not launch this army, merely prepared it as a backup for your unreasonable campaign against Hyoutei.”
“According to the most ancient maps,” Yanagi said, interrupting the argument. “The Great Falls and the cliffs above used to belong to no country, just the dragons.”
Atobe hmphed. Though the King did not seem to appreciate the contested claim on his land, he hadn’t exactly been able to do anything with the cliffs and frozen falls either. “The territory of the river immediately beneath the falls is unquestionably Hyoutei.” His terrifying glare dared anyone to say otherwise. No one did.
Only Tezuka dared follow that comment, “I propose that the dragon egg travel among our kingdoms in the care of someone without country. That way, if it should hatch, it will know a home amongst all of us.”
The Kings were silent for a long moment, considering this.
“I am in favor,” Yukimura said. Otherwise, he had no legitimate claim to the egg.
“Be awed by my generosity,” Atobe waved his agreement.
Shiraishi nodded, “We would be happy to welcome the egg and its party to Shitenhouji, but who can bear it?”
“There is one I would nominate,” Tezuka said, “But first.”
Before the council, he rose and faced Sakuno, who still stood, quivering anxiously about the fate of the egg she had come to see as hers.
When Tezuka spoke again, it was with the booming, royal tone he reserved for battle. “Ryuuzaki Sakuno.”
She startled, straightening under his address. “Y-yes.”
“I hereby disown you as my ward,” there were a few gasps of surprise. “You now have no rights to my lineage and my home is no longer yours. I revoke your passports and any money that I have safeguarded in your name will be transferred immediately.”
Silence overcame the boisterous council room. Tears flooded Sakuno’s eyes. Her small hands shook. Unable to hold back her emotions, she surged forward and wrapped her arms around Tezuka to bury her crying face in his jerkin. “Thank you,” she spoke quietly, only to him. “Thank you, Kunimitsu. For everything.”
Tezuka’s hand settled atop her head. The uncontestable nomination didn’t even have to be voiced. Not one King protested the lady’s reward.
-
Several important things weighed on Yanagi’s mind as he left the council room. It took some time to pry the joyous Kirihara from his side, but once he did so, he employed his long, healthy legs to catch up with Seigaku’s Fuji.
“Fuji-san,” he spoke. The counselor slowed his pace, expecting Yanagi to catch up and walk with him, which he did.
“I rarely go by that name anymore. You may call me Syuusuke,” he said with an eerie sort of smile.
That smile almost answered Yanagi’s question for him. Though Fuji had been the one to spur the war on Hyoutei, he did not seem particularly disappointed for the relatively peaceful conclusion. With his newfound strength amplifying his ability to calculate odds and possibilities, he could tell that Fuji, however off his expressions might seem, was not lying in his joy.
“When you advised Seiichi to attack Hyoutei’s western gate, did you know all of this was going to happen?”
Fuji opened his eyes. The corners of his lips tightened into a sharper, almost predatory smile. “I wonder.”
As if that were an answer, and it was perhaps enough of one for Yanagi, Fuji turned on his heel and walked back in the direction they had come from.
Fuji had walked him to the mouth of the dungeons. Curiosity bid him to continue to the elegant door of Oshitari’s chambers. Yanagi stared at them, half in thought, half still thrilled that he could take in all of the castle’s design with his own two eyes.
The message Fuji sent had been perfectly clear and confirmed an inkling of his. Yanagi knocked. An inexplicable series of sound and voices bubbled up from beyond the door, but it opened moments later nonetheless.
“Yanagi-kun,” Oshitari grinned and invited him in, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“A question.”
“Very well. Ask,” Oshitari said. The counselor was queerly dressed in that he was barely dressed. He wore only a hastily thrown on robe and his neck bore many signs of pleasurable injury. Interesting.
“Despite Shishido’s presence in Fudomine, then Seigaku, Atobe did not see Fuji’s betrayal of the peace treaty,” surely, if Atobe knew of the violation, it would have come up in the council.
Smirking slightly, Oshitari tilted his head. There was more.
Yanagi narrowed his eyes on Hyoutei’s wiley counselor. Perhaps all counselors were made alike in nature. “During the contest with Kabaji-kun…you knew that it was Niou and not me on the battlefield.”
“The things a man does for the sake of peace,” Oshitari’s smirk evolved into a wolfish thing. Where there had been nothing, Niou flickered in from behind and wrapped his arms around Oshitari’s waist. As Niou’s tongue tasted the juncture between the counselor’s neck and shoulder, Oshitari purred, “Oh the dirty things.”
“Oshitari-kun,” Yagyuu’s voice carried from the bedroom. “I’m afraid we’re still not done with you.”
Apparently, Niou had taken all of the words about Hyoutei’s dungeons to heart.
Yanagi smiled. “Thank you. I’ll see myself out.”
-
Atobe decided that there was such thing as too many Kings in the castle, even when that castle belonged to him. The whirlwind of events left him feeling bereft; whether it was the full night of war, the loss of his fire, or the sensation of being so close to it - Yanagi - again in the council room, he didn’t know.
Whatever his dilemma, Excidium always saw him through. When he entered the haphazardly repaired stables, he was shocked and outraged to find Yanagi petting his beloved horse and spoiling him with sugar cubes, of all things.
“Your horse is bribable after all,” Yanagi informed him with a quiet, serene expression.
Though he was supposed to be cold as ice, the rage boiling up in him was anything but. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, controlling his tone.
Yanagi, unaffected by his anger, soothed his fingers through the horse’s mane. Excidium seemed to like that - traitor.
“You never announced the results of the contest,” Yanagi informed him. “If I have earned the right to try and court you.”
Frigidly, Atobe folded his arms and retorted, “You got what you came for, Yanagi. My generosity only extends so far.”
Yanagi approached Atobe, eyes open. They were narrow, brown, and perfectly ordinary but for the blazing warmth and gratitude that filled them. “Then let me take responsibility,” he said. “For all the good and ill that I have done.”
Even if Atobe’s back were not against the pole, he wouldn’t have moved. He wouldn’t have backed down a single inch. Nor did he move forward to the kindling heat that beckoned him closer.
Yanagi moved for him, nearer and nearer in small, measurable increments. Atobe did not pull away when the counselor’s long fingers cupped his cheek, or when he stepped into the spot of hay he occupied. The smell of fresh tea wafted from the breath they shared. Though Yanagi had bent so far and brought their faces ever so close, he refrained from realizing the kiss.
That was Atobe’s choice to make.
“Rikkai idiot,” Atobe breathed, heating the scant air between them. He captured Yanagi’s vest and said, “You can try.” Then, he tugged Yanagi down that final nine percent to reclaim his fire.
Omake: Three Years Later
Sakuno laughed as she plummeted hundreds of feet. Tomoka clung to her back and shrieked joyously. Lucky the dragon seemed equally pleased to be landing in Seigaku too, but he expressed it with a roar and a theatrical show of fire.
“Lucky!” she scolded as they touched down before the gates of Seigaku. “Be careful. We can’t start a forest fire here. Kunimitsu isn’t quite as forgiving as Shiraishi.” The enormous dragon thumped his tail and averted his large, violet eyes. Sakuno knew that Lucky always took criticism personally. She patted him gently on the side. After all, it was the first time either of them had been to any of their homes in quite awhile. They were thoroughly occupied, searching their thawing continent for any other existing dragon eggs. Though they hadn’t found anything yet, Sakuno hadn’t given up hope.
“Are you here for the tournament?” a guard asked her. If he were asking her that, he had to be new.
“Just visiting,” she explained. “Um, are you new to the guard?”
“Yes!” the guard straightened his back to assume what he must’ve thought an impressive pose. “I’m Minami Kentarou.”
Another guard rushed to Sakuno’s other side and posed in the same manner. “I’m Higashikata Masami.”
“Very nice to meet the both of you,” she said, hoping that they would let her pass through. They promised An that they would meet her for lunch.
Tomoka, however, had other ideas. She bounded right up to them and said, “What’s this about a tournament? Any need for cheerleaders?”
“Ah, yes, the tournament!” Minami said.
“It’s going to be a wonderful event.”
“Everyone is going to be there.”
“And if everyone is there, can they really resist mauling each other?”
“Haha, probably not. That’s a great one, Masami!”
“I thought so, Kentarou.”
Lucky’s massive eyes followed the pair of them back and forth, but neither guard seemed to notice or care. Sakuno stopped their praise of each other. “Wait. So the kingdoms are fighting?” A knot of worry tightened in her gut.
“Oh yes,” Higashikata nodded.
“Just this morning, King Yukimura and King Atobe were threatening to destroy each other. Echizen suggested that he could take both of them in one blow. And well…King Tezuka, he’s not very long-winded.”
“Wow, Kentarou. You really do get more amusing every day!”
“Only because I spend my days with you!”
Sakuno did not wait for the two guards to check her new passport. After all, she had a world war to prevent. She sprinted past, giant dragon friend galloping on beside her. Seigaku had been her home long enough that she knew exactly how to get to the training fields.
Though she wasn’t quite able to believe her eyes when she got there. The King of United Rikkai and the King of Hyoutei faced off against each other. But instead of swords, they held weird flat nets, and instead of on a battlefield, they stood meters away from each other on a well-lined area.
“I’m going to destroy you this time, Yukimura! Nothing gets past my insight,” Atobe said, hitting a tiny ball over the short net dividing their field territories.
“As if you stand a chance against Rikkai. I will strip you of your senses,” Yukimura smirked, striking the ball at Atobe when it came his way.
Sakuno stood, breathless and confused as she watched the pair of them. “What is this?” she implored to Ryoma.
Sipping lazily from his purple beverage, the Prince Consort looked over at her and shrugged, “Fun.”
“…Fun. You guys are really fighting like this for fun?”
“There are only so many ways you can do the same thing and keep life interesting,” Yanagi said, jotting something down in a notebook as Lucky nosed at his hair. “Thanks to you, I’ve just thought of another. I think I’ll call it monopoly.”
Sakuno sighed and collapsed on the bench next to Yanagi to watch the match. She supposed that it would be boring for peace to look any other way.
-End
Author: quelleperedhil
Recipient: arysthaeniru
Pairing/Characters: Yanagi Renji/Atobe Keigo, Yukimura Seiichi/Ryoma Echizen, Ryuuzaki Sakuno, Tachibana An, Oshitari Yuushi, Tezuka Kunimitsu, Niou Masaharu, and many more.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, but for the most part, not particularly graphic.
Disclaimer: The Prince of Tennis belongs to Konomi-sensei.
Summary: Some bickering, with magic, and a side of dragons.
The flames licked at her body, yet she wasn’t burning. Terrified, Sakuno panted against An’s hair as the moments, minutes or hours, passed. The ground beneath them rumbled with such force that she thought the whole castle might come down on top of them. She had thrown herself over the Princess to protect her with the strength of her dragon-born body.
When Sakuno dared to open her eyes, she saw that the flames had disappeared. “An-chan…” she whispered. “Are you all right?”
To Sakuno’s relief, An drew her into a hug. “I’m just fine,” she said. “Thank you.” The embrace succeeded in melting Sakuno. She lingered and clung, snuffling at An’s shoulder as the ground shook beneath them, quite beyond distress.
“What about him?” An said, looking over Sakuno’s shoulder at Mukahi.
Slowly, they stood together. An kneeled to take the redhead’s pulse. Though they had been fighting vigorously not too long ago, she said with relief, “He’s alive. Just knocked out, I think.”
“Thank goodness,” Sakuno said. Her gaze shifted from Mukahi to the broken shards of what used to be the orb. Now, it looked like ordinary glass. Voice thick with fear, she asked, “What’s happening…?”
An looped an arm in with Sakuno. Even as the ground trembled, An’s grip held firm. “I don’t know,” An said. “But we have to warn someone.”
“We can try to find Renji,” Sakuno said, reaching for the only solution she knew, since Tezuka wasn’t around to ask.
“It’s useless…” Mukahi coughed and failed to rise. “There’s no one to wield the power. They can’t be controlled.”
“Who can’t be controlled?” An demanded to know. Mukahi, half-conscious, didn’t respond. They shook him together and he stirred for just another moment. “Who?!” An said repeated.
Mukahi’s lashes fluttered and his mouth twisted. He wanted to respond, but he hadn’t the strength. “Hyoutei…reserve forces,” he managed and conked out completely.
“We have to get him somewhere safe,” An said.
Sakuno nodded, “Right.” As if he weighed nothing whatsoever, she lifted up the Hyoutei soldier and flung him over her shoulder. An stared and Sakuno blushed, “What?”
“Nothing,” she grinned. It was sunlight in the quivering darkness. “I just always forget that you can do that.”
Together they ran back the way they came. Hoping that Mukahi would be safe there, they left him in Oshitari’s sitting room. As they passed the rank archways that led to the prison cells, An and Sakuno ran faster, hand and hand, past the hollering captives.
At least, until Sakuno tripped on a bit of elevated stone and fell flat on her face.
“Sakuno-chan! Are you all right?” An stopped to check her out.
Sakuno groaned; she didn’t appreciate the earth vibrating against her nose. The whole world was opening up and underground was the last place that she wanted to be. Why did these things keep happening to her? As she picked herself slowly up off of the ground, she spotted something; just behind An’s ear, Niou was sticking out his tongue and turning up his eyelids at them.
“Niou-san!” she shouted, euphoric at the sliver of hope. An swiveled her head to behold the same sight.
The girls got up together and entered the corridor. The jeers of other prisoners were nothing to the sight of Niou and Yanagi, in adjacent cells, one waiting patiently and the other, propped against the wall and fighting for breath.
“Ladies,” Niou bowed. “Welcome to the end of the world.”
“You know what’s happening?!”
“Haven’t the foggiest. Dataman?”
Yanagi was silent. Niou reached a foot through the bars to prod Yanagi awake.
“Renji,” Sakuno said softly. The bars of the cell rattled with the tremors of the earth, but she refused to be intimidated, not now, not while there was hope of escaping this situation alive with An.
“Hmm,” Yanagi frowned, as if he just noticed the massive earthquake.
“Renji, we need you to pay attention,” Sakuno insisted. “Renji.”
Niou, quite inexplicably, ignored the fuss and closed his eyes. Perhaps he was ready to give up, but Sakuno wasn’t.
-
An enormous skeleton loomed behind Atobe Keigo, King of Hyoutei, but he could not turn around for the three he fought at his front. Hiyoshi rushed for his King’s back; Yukimura beat him there. One mighty strike of Yukimura’s rapier severed the skeleton’s spine, forcing its top half to swing down and ajar like the most foul snapped branch.
Not that this stopped the carcass from fighting. The thing made to stab Yukimura in the foot. Before it could do so, Atobe swung his broadsword toward the ground, sending the corpse careening back to whence it came.
“I told you to run,” Atobe said breathlessly, back to Yukimura’s.
The King of United Rikkai grinned. “And miss this party?”
Yagyuu neatly skewered two corpses together on an icicle; with a powerful kick to that makeshift sword, Sanada scattered the bones. “It would be rude, after you took such trouble to draft up the invitation,” the gentleman said.
“Hn,” Sanada added, and brought down a rain of cartilage with one protective blow. On his other side, Kabaji was extremely impressive with his twin-axe massacre; the dead collected and reassembled at their feet.
“I assure you, these nightmares did not RVSP to this party,” Oshitari tripped a corpse on its way to behead Yagyuu and redirected it to its own kin. After a brief, confused, and very dead tussle, that fight was sent back down the chasm by a solid whack of the Hyoutei counselor’s spear.
“What poor manners.”
“We should dispose of them posthaste.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Yagyuu and Oshitari fought side by side, ridding their space of the undesirable party crashers. Yagyuu’s efficient, close quarters knifework combined well with the wide range of Oshitari’s spear. They defended systematically, with Yagyuu’s quick, aggressive strikes cutting down their opponents and Oshitari keeping the rest at bay long enough for him to do so.
The two kingdoms and their respective armies kept death at bay on the river. For hours they battled, exhausted but determined against the endless tide. Arrows were ineffective, but Hyoutei’s catapults rained fury down onto the frozen battlefield. Their strategy and execution was flawless, but every skeleton they didn’t decimate completely crawled back up the crevasse, eager for a taste of life. The beings didn’t care what life. They only longed to destroy everything that lived.
Yukimura had never known any situation so hopeless. He refused to die here like this. He refused to let anyone he cared about die here like this, not even Atobe, not even the troops of Hyoutei, who had impressed him with their determination. No matter what fatigue plagued his body, as long as he had the strength to stand, he would fight with every breath.
“Yukimura!” Kirihara shrieked.
Lurching around to confirm his ears, Yukimura beheld Kirihara and the rest of his army, Rikkai crests and Shitenhouji helmets yellow in the darkness. He heard his name called again from farther downriver and spotted Marui and his tell-tale shock of pink hair riding toward him with Akutagawa and his troops from the border. Reinforcements had arrived; their dawn would come.
-
“Yanagi-san!”
“Renji…”
“Hnn…” Yanagi stirred and attempted to open his eyes. A few moments later, his brain recalled that he could no longer do so. “Yes?”
It was strange. Sakuno sounded so distant. He tried to calculate her exact distance, but found that he couldn’t sense her presence, or feel much at all, for that matter. There was only the cold, the cold settled deep in his bones. Only his memory informed him that he was somewhere in Hyoutei’s dungeons, waiting to die.
Though perhaps some small, crazy, illogical part of him had thought that he might survive somehow. That he’d wake up and argue with Yukimura at breakfast, spar with Sanada, and smack Kirihara upside the head when he failed to read a map correctly. That maybe he would have the opportunity to behold Sakuno and fully thank her. The tiniest, narrowest possibility that he could watch the colors cross Atobe’s infuriated face ticked down to zero. Those irrational hopes were distracting. Just because there was no tomorrow for him didn’t mean that the future was out of reach for anyone else. He forced his floating mind into the present.
“Renji…Renji can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said, finding his voice. “Tell me, what did you find?”
“We….we set off the magic,” Sakuno cried, panicked. “I don’t know…it was a ball. A big glass ball.”
“It was filled with fire,” An supplied desperately.
“We knocked it over. I knocked it over. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I-”
“I had hoped that you’d stop apologizing to me by now,” Yanagi said, weakly lifting his hand in the direction of her voice. Faintly, he felt her warmth. She must have grasped it.
Finding the courage to continue, Sakuno said, “It broke when I knocked it over. The ground caught fire. Everything was fire but we didn’t burn…”
Yanagi frowned, considering the possibilities.
“And everything started to shake.”
Right, the shaking - though only very loose strings tied Yanagi to his own body, he could still feel the malignant tremors.
“The orb that you saw is a magical storage device. It contained the life energy from the burning fields that we saw,” Yanagi said.
“So…it’s Hyoutei’s magic, shaking the castle?”
The pieces were connecting slowly in Yanagi’s mind, too slowly for his own liking. All of the literature he consumed on such matters suggested that it wasn’t quite so simple; magic required channeling, or the life force would return simply to the earth. If the stored magic were simply released, they would not feel the result.
“Yes and no. Wild magic would have taken on the form of its destruction and actually killed you. This magic went to a purpose; that orb must have been spelled, waiting for someone to wield it.”
“What purpose?” An implored.
“And who?!”
Yanagi remained silent, turning over the facts, new, old, and foreseen like glimmering slabs of river stone.
“Hiroshi is here,” Niou explained. That fact fell to Yanagi’s pile with a resounding clack.
“You were awake?” An said, puzzled.
“Just shooting the breeze with a friend,” Niou said, acidly.
Yanagi reached for the information in his grasp and vocally turned that last bit of stone, “What does he see?”
Niou channeled Yagyuu’s voice and answered word for word, “We fight an army of Hyoutei’s dead on the river Fortuna. The corpses are attacking indiscriminately.”
In his mind’s eye, he stood on the bank of the frozen river with Yukimura, with Atobe, with the two armies become one. Yanagi stared at the vast, multi-colored display of details, events, characters, and uncategorizable important nothings cast carelessly on the shore. Except it wasn’t careless. It was fate. All of the players, all of the pieces, all of the bits and pieces of information from the last century culminated in this setting, creating the stage for his final battle.
Yukimura, Ryoma. Atobe. Him. Her, Fortune, Her, Fortuna. Fortune to cauterize. Burn. Burn and heal. Luck, Sakuno. The cycle of Greed. Fortune to bear a Kingdom’s despair. The gauntlet. He knew about the gauntlet and he knew who had to wear it, but that was not enough of an answer…
As he divined the truth from the known, a battle carried on behind him. A battle he could only imagine because he was in no shape to fight. He imagined the colors and flags of United Rikkai and Hyoutei haphazardly knitted into each other, for who could care about Kingdom when death waged war on them all? This was no longer about power. No longer about greed.
Greed. Cauterize the cycle of greed.
The first greed of the dragon-born. What had been the punishment?
The evidence was all around him. What misery had they wrecked to burn away? Yanagi understood. He had pulled all the pieces, all the players here for a reason. The elements collided precisely where they had for a reason. He understood the next step of the prophecy.
“Niou,” Yanagi ordered. “I need you to lead Sakuno to the Hyoutei treasury and get her to the river. Can you do this?”
“Sure thing,” Niou said. Yanagi wondered if those would be the last words he ever heard of Niou Masaharu.
“What’s in the treasury?” Sakuno said, not understanding.
“You must wear the gauntlet and get to the river.”
“Get to the river to do what?”
“In the middle of the fighting?!” An protested.
Yanagi nodded once. “Release the power that only you have.”
“Release my…You…you knew. That I was a dragon-born.”
“From the start, yes,” Yanagi admitted, breathing deeply. His connection to reality grew ever tenuous.
“And you haven’t…I…I might have used my fire on…”
“Tezuka rightly forbid you to do so, yes?”
“Mmm…” she agreed, and desperately added. “But for you…”
“No, fortune does not belong only to me,” Yanagi insisted. “To have met you and come this far was luck enough for this man.”
“What about you?” Sakuno sobbed. Yanagi could tell that she was crying - sweet girl. “Renji, I don’t know what to do.”
Imploring his lips to smile one last time, he said, “You know what happens after the cicada comes from the ground, don’t you?”
Sakuno whimpered. As usual, she understood and didn’t understand all at the same time. Yanagi preferred it that way.
“Now, do as I say. Control the gauntlet’s power with your own and melt away the horror that has come upon this land….” Yanagi rasped. “Niou will lead the way. Princess…you will have to switch with him…”
The girls gasped; Yanagi assumed that Niou had worked his magic to trade places and faces. His ears followed their footsteps and his thoughts wished them success.
“…How…” An asked him with Niou’s voice. He could barely hear her.
“Unfortunately, Princess,” Yanagi’s very soul quieted. “I do not…have the breath to tell that story…”
“Yanagi-kun!”
It was enough, enough to have won his small part of this battle. When nothingness came upon him, Yanagi welcomed it.
-
The only fortunate thing about emptying the castle of soldiers was that it left none to guard the treasury. Any other time, Sakuno might have admired the piles of gold, silver, and endless multi-colored, many-faced gems, but right now she made a beeline for the terrifying object; having witnessed its awful power firsthand, she recognized its pull as she drew nearer. Even among the chaos, among the stench of death, the dragon relic had a distinct signature.
Why did Yanagi think that she could resist it? Her element was fortune, but really, it seemed that she only attracted bad luck.
Niou ran silently beside her; she had never noticed before, but somehow, he didn’t have any footsteps.
But that wasn’t important. Not with the gauntlet in her sights. She stopped short and stared at it on the dais. It was still beyond her how Yanagi, though not dragon-born, managed to carry something so horrible and oppressive.
She walked to it slowly, fearfully. A laugh from Niou, now himself again, stopped her in her tracks. Infuriated, she turned around to glare at him.
“What part of this is funny?!” she shouted. Normally she would never raise her voice to anyone, especially not a soldier of a different country, but all the pressure on her narrow shoulders had to explode somewhere.
“Nothing,” Niou grinned, twirling his rat-tail around his finger. Being in the depths of a crumbling castle didn’t seem to bother him whatsoever. “It’s just that I haven’t seen anyone so scared to meet a relative since I introduced Hiroshi to my mom.”
Sakuno’s anger crumbled, confusion taking its place. “Relative…”
“That’s what a relic is, right? Dragon-bones? Scales? Whatever.”
She had never really considered that. Then again, she didn’t want to associate personally with something that had wrecked so much destruction. But was that not the history of her kind? Using their ancestry to sate their greed?
Was…was that not the very history that Yanagi was asking her to repair?
The relic was not just a source of power; it was a connection to something long lost. When she resumed her approach, she did so with confidence. She armed herself with the warm memories of those who had protected her: her grandmother, Oishi, Kawamura, Tezuka, An, Tomoka, Renji…
Fixing the gauntlet on her tiny arm, she said, “I’m going to set you free.”
Niou grinned. “It looks terrible on you.”
With a huff, she said, “I don’t care.”
“Suit yourself,” Niou picked up one of Atobe’s several dozen crowns and placed it on his own head. “Now let’s get out of here.”
-
“The dawn is coming,” Tezuka said, disturbingly calm for a man dangling thousands of feet above the ground.
Echizen responded with a groan, “Lose weight.” His dark green wings beat heavily to get them closer to Hyoutei, which was masked by thick, dark clouds. Would they even be able to see the sun when it decided to rise?
“I suppose I shouldn’t have thought so highly of your strength,” Tezuka said simply.
Tezuka felt Echizen’s arms tighten around him. Good. Though Tezuka didn’t really think lowly of Echizen’s quite considerable strength, he found that goading the young man fed his determination. “I haven’t dropped you yet,” the smaller dragon-born remarked.
And it was impressive that he hadn’t, not that Tezuka would ever say as much. Echizen was doing what he had to do.
“Even if you did, I promise that I would live long enough to tell your husband.”
“Hn.”
“Are you worried about him?”
“That asshole isn’t so easy to kill.”
Nonetheless, Echizen flew impossibly faster, cutting straight through a turbulent cloud. For a long moment, Tezuka thought Echizen had, in fact, dropped him. The wind had simply pushed them so hard that it felt like they were falling. This was his domain, not Echizen’s. Thrusting out a hand, Tezuka willed the wind in the other direction to lift the younger man’s wings and spur them forward.
“…I was handling it,” Echizen said.
“Of course you were,” said Tezuka, looking down on the ghastly conflict below. It was worse than he thought.
Closing his eyes, Tezuka mentally recited a prayer for his ward’s fortune.
-
Armed with double blades, Niou charged onto the fray. Sakuno watched his knives carve a way for them through the mottled, disgusting corpses that were too terrifying to have even entered her wildest dreams. She followed Niou around the fresh, mingled dead of Rikkai and Hyoutei, kicking bones as she ran aimlessly. She didn’t know where Niou was going, but followed him because she had nowhere else to go.
Control the gauntlet’s power with your own and melt away the horror that has come upon this land, Yanagi’s words echoed through her head. If these undead soldiers weren’t the worst thing to happen to this land, she didn’t know what. But did fire really have the power to end them?
She screamed and ducked a carcass’ wild swing. In doing so, she stumbled and slid along the ice. The arm not protected by the gauntlet burned, scraped roughly over the jagged ice. It seemed impossible that ice could hold up the weight of armies, but ice was more sure than ground. Even the frozen cascade of daggers overhead, the Great Falls, had been frozen for the last hundred years.
Melt away the horror…
Melt. Her fire had the power to melt. The walking dead were perverted and wrong, but a symptom to a much greater problem. The land itself, since the death of her revered ancestor, refused to sustain them all. Only the greedy could survive in this world.
“I’ll set you free…” she whispered, fingers clawing at the ice. “I’ll warm the earth as you once did. End this fighting here and now.”
The gauntlet, as if on fire itself, burned with heartening warmth.
The very moment she stood, four corpses ran to her at full power, their empty maws hung open in a permanent scream. Within seconds, they were crushed into the solid ground under the feet of Tooyama Kintarou. “You won’t hurt the pretty lady!” he hollered, yanking her up and throwing her onward.
Propelled forward by his strength, her feet bit down on the river. She ran forward, eyes fixed on the frozen waterfall, thrice as tall as Hyoutei’s tallest tower and wider than the entire castle.
“Sakuno-chan!”
On her left, Shiraishi stared at her in great surprise. Surely, his eyes were fixed on the gauntlet. Before she could even ask his help, the King surged forward, clearing a path with a series of blows she could barely follow. He winked at her as she ran past, and she did her utmost to not visualize him naked.
Only by the power of her friends did she work her way into the thick of the fighting. Akutagawa and Marui pushed her through, Yuuji and Koharu did some strange attempt to distract the corpses while Zaizen bopped them back into the ravine, and the familiar faces of every guard she encountered shielded her from harm
Sakuno was relieved to find Niou again. She called out to him, because he was the only one who knew of her mission. But that one moment was too long to pause.
“Seigaku’s Ryuuzaki Sakuno, ahn?” she whirled around to see King Atobe holding the blows of four different skeletons that would’ve dashed her to bits. “Back to the keep. Nothing will touch you while I still stand.”
Shaking her head vigorously, she said, “I must get to the Great Falls.”
Perplexed, Atobe continued to fight. “It’s not safe. Tezuka would be furious if I let his ward come to harm.”
Squaring her jaw, she countered, “Kunimitsu would be furious if you kept me from my duty.”
Somewhere in his state of shock, Atobe had the presence of mind to note her accessory. Niou took advantage of that distraction to pinch his bottom. Atobe’s yelp of affront managed to be louder than the screams of the dead.
“Keep her safe then,” he said to Atobe, and shoved them forward. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly, prompting the soldiers of Rikkai to form a wall behind them. The last Sakuno saw of him, he barreled into the impressive Oshitari and Yagyuu combination with the strangest war cry she had ever heard.
“To me!” Yukimura shouted, preparing his wall of men for a charge.
Sakuno wondered what monsters these soldiers had to be, to fight this ferociously all through the night. But it was no longer night. The dawn came to greet them, and reflected harshly on Sakuno from the thousands of frozen bayonets pointing down at her from on high.
She left Atobe behind. Alone, he took out whatever sorry skeleton managed to creep past Yukimura’s wall of death. The two Kings would not permit any interruption. Whatever she had to do, she only had now to do it. All of her friends were fighting for everything good left in the world, and now it was her turn.
“Together, Sumire,” she placed her opposite hand on the gauntlet, threw her head back, and screamed. She screamed with every ounce of love and fear, with every emotion that she ever had, until passion roiled up inside and released instinctively from her heart in a magnificent wave of fire. The ice shook and softened, first fracturing and crying in small streams. Then, almost all at once, the waters joined together to rebel against her. Through the fear she might be crushed, the knowledge that the ground softening beneath her would cave, she fed the fire with her fervent devotion. She roared through the strange grip that brought her feet up into the air until all her heart went empty.
“Not bad, pigtails.”
Sakuno rolled her head back to see Ryoma, wings unfurled and holding her aloft before a wall of water.
Wall of water?!
More urgently, she looked down to see something almost as impossible as what she had just done. Tezuka Kunimitsu, holding up the world on the wind. Wind pushed out from his hands to hold and morph the giant and growing sphere of boiling water from the falls. Men ran before the sight, leaving the corpses to be reburied and blistered.
“Kunimitsu!” she screamed, but no sound emerged. Despite her hoarse screaming, Ryoma climbed higher in the sky. She looked down on Tezuka and the tons of water held up by his strength, exposing the cliff behind it. The last thing she saw before he let go were Atobe and Yukimura running for Tezuka. When the world of water gave way, it swept them along with it.
Sakuno clung to Ryoma and cried.
“It’s not done yet,” he promised.
-
The Night of the Dead would surely go down in the legend as one of the greatest battles of its time. That was not the reason that Fuji was so sore to have missed it. All the same, he didn’t have to take part to witness the shifting of the ages, what that historical event that he had prompted along triggered. Boiling water from the Great Falls pushed through, eating away at the river of ice. The powerful stream pushed on from Hyoutei, warming the waters out into the rest of the continent. Fuji saw all the evidence of this on his way to the former ice capital; it was too soon to tell what the full effect would be, but already, the world seemed warmer for it.
“Well, this marks the first of an occasion,” Fuji said, much later, when he had been seated in the healing rooms.
“And what’s that?” An asked, grinning at him. She had Kippei’s smile. Since that smile was safe, Fuji supposed that the citizens of Hyoutei could keep their hands.
“The first time that anyone was glad to see Ryoma catchphrase proven right,” Seigaku’s adviser smiled from his chair next to Tezuka’s bed. Ward and guardian slept side by side, restoring their energy with rest.
“Shut up,” Ryoma grumbled, throwing a sweat-soaked towel at Fuji. Exhausted, he curled closer to Yukimura, who had been passing in and out of consciousness for the last few hours. As such, the relieved Echizen was more interested in guarding his healing sleep than responding to Fuji’s barbs.
However, no one had been happier than Kabaji Munehiro when Atobe popped his stubborn, silvery head above the water. Fuji had arrived just in time to see the man howl and leap into the warm river. Sanada followed him and the three Kings were dragged safely ashore, in varying states of awareness.
Atobe had even been energetic enough to smack Oshitari when his counselor thanked the gods for making his King so full of hot air that he floated, despite his weight. For some reason, this made Fuji miss Kippei all the more. His dear husband had stayed behind to keep watch over both Seigaku and Fudomine.
Only Fuji noticed when King Atobe, who was certainly battered, but not down and out, covertly slipped from the healing rooms. Fuji smiled to himself and informed the healers that he had absolutely no idea where the King had gone.
-
Shrouded in a cloak of dark velvet, Atobe walked through his crumbling castle. The damages from the attack and the earthquake had been severe. Large chunks of limestone had tumbled to the ground, smashing through homes and leaving gaping holes in his Keep. A tower had collapsed in its entirety; fortunately, there were few casualties from the wreckage. Most of his population had the good sense to take refuge in the castle’s foundation, which held up surprisingly well. The restored falls and flowing river, now soothingly audible from his castle, had actually done more damage. Water and dirt seeped through the cracks in the rock, muddying his dungeon.
Well, it was appropriately uncomfortable and terrifying for a dungeon. All the same, his architects would have to ensure they wouldn’t all be done in by a bit of mud. A bit of mud and heat. Even after all of that, the river maintained the temperature of bathwater. Steam from the river licked at the air, claiming all of its particles and leaving none for Atobe to keep his name as the Ice King. If he had no actual ice to back him up, he would just have to support that claim entirely with character.
Standing before the fallen Yanagi’s cell, Atobe released his cloak at the neck, letting flow down his back in waves and into the mud. Atobe wasn’t sure whether to blame Yanagi for the devastation or to thank him for the fact that he still had a castle at all. But that was irrelevant - it was certainly Yanagi who made this new age of warmth and potential possible.
He entered the puddle of Yanagi’s cell and knelt at his side to feel for a pulse. The barest flutter pulsed to his finger.
“You had better not waste this,” he said to the blind, deaf, and dying Yanagi.
Atobe bowed his head close to Yanagi, such that they were nearly nose and nose, and pursed his lips into a round, delicate shape. Unlike Sakuno’s great roar, Atobe exhaled a small, life giving breath. The beautiful flames of translucent blue passed through Atobe’s parted lips to ignite Yanagi almost immediately. Pleased and awed by his own power, Atobe watched the fire spread over the counselor for a beautiful, elegant death.
“Rise, Yanagi Renji,” Atobe said, as he did so himself. “And take responsibility for what you have done.”
With that, Atobe turned and left the dungeon. United Rikkai would have no angle whatsoever to consider Hyoutei in their debt.
-
“Are you sure that there’s actually something here?” Echizen said tersely. Though his wings had not quite recovered from the massive strain of cross-kingdom travel, here he was flying the half-infirm Sakuno and Tezuka to the falls.
“I saw it…I’m not sure what. An opening, in the moment the ice gave way to water.”
“Not much longer,” Tezuka assured him. And that was a damn good thing, because if he had to hold up the weight of two dragon-born much farther, they would all tumble into the bathwater.
“Good, otherwise, you’re in for another swim.”
“Your husband fought off hundreds of undead but you can’t bear the weight of two people?”
Echizen pushed his lips together in irritation. If anything, he was more irritated when Sakuno patted him and said, “You’re doing a great job.”
Now it was Tezuka’s turn. Harnessing the wind to his hand, he diverted the path of the water at one point, parting the pounding flow to either side like liquid curtains. Echizen flew straight through. Just as Sakuno described, there was a cave.
“Watch there be more dead things,” Echizen said, dropping his two burdens lightly.
But there were no dead things. Just a giant, inexplicable circle of old twigs.
“This was Sumire’s nest, many years ago,” Tezuka said, processing the information before him.
The one to actually step into the enormous nest was Sakuno. The twigs and hay, hard from a thousand years of ice, crunched under her feet. What she saw in the deepest pit of the nest blew her eyes out wide with surprise.
“A…a…a….” she stuttered, unable to speak until Tezuka put a hand on her shoulder.
“After so long, it may not be alive,” Tezuka said.
But it also might be. “I promised…” Sakuno spoke softly. “I promised that I would set her free.” Wary, she crossed the small distance between her and the enormous egg. It was as tall as she was and three times as wide. She swallowed thickly and dared to lay a hand on their legacy.
Tezuka and Echizen stared, transfixed.
“It’s…warm,” Sakuno said, voice thick with relief.
While Echizen grinned, excited, concern polluted Tezuka’s joy.
“We must inform the Kings,” he said.
Sakuno shook her head and held the egg possessively. She was, after all, a dragon-born. “Would it not start another war, Kunimitsu?”
Tezuka shook his head. “If Seigaku had not kept quite so many secrets, perhaps we might have figured this out a long time ago.”
“We could just make a giant omelet,” Echizen said. Sakuno shouted and clung to the egg tighter. Tezuka fixed Echizen with a raised brow. “I’m kidding. You know I hate fried eggs.”
“The waterfall will keep it warm for now,” Tezuka sighed. “Now that all of the Kings have come to, we’ll call a meeting.”
-
Ryoma crawled into bed with Yukimura.
“Did you have fun?” Yukimura said, winding his fingers a little viciously in Echizen’s hair. “Carrying everyone around the world except for me.”
Groaning, Ryoma said, “You had the exciting job, fighting an army of undead and getting crushed under a million tons of bathwater. Yet you still stink, how is that?”
Yukimura gave him a noogie for that comment. The vigorous scalp rubbing ceased with the knock on the door. Yukimura looked up, expecting Tezuka to call him for the council they mentioned, but instead he gasped, “Renji.”
Yanagi smiled that little grin of his and bowed. When he unfolded, his narrow eyes were open and ever so amused.
“Renji…” Yukimura repeated. “You….your hair looks terrible.”
“I don’t know, the bowl cut might grow on me,” Yanagi said, taking a seat by Yukimura’s bed.
“So Atobe did it after all,” the knot in Yukimura’s stomach unwound. He had never known such deep reaching relief.
“That would be my inference,” Yanagi said. “I woke up alone.”
“How do you feel?”
“Relieved, more than anything else.”
“Don’t be so surprised,” Sanada entered the room, hands reaching over the chair to land on Yanagi’s shoulders. “Your plans have brought about seemingly impossible victories before.”
Smiling serenely at his friend, Yanagi said, “This victory is not mine, or even Rikkai’s. After all, it’s been in the works for a thousand years. Many things had to happen that I could not have possibly predicted.”
Chuckling, Yukimura said, “Just be satisfied, Renji.”
But Yanagi was looking beyond Yukimura, to the shy Sakuno waiting in the entrance of the healing rooms. “I am,” he said, directly to her. “I’m an incredibly lucky man.”
“We all are,” Yukimura agreed.
-
The council of the dragon egg was a long and loud event. They sat together in Hyoutei’s largest receiving room, which somehow maintained its dignity despite the random rubble and shards of glass. The staff had even managed to put together a decent lunch, which shifted everyone in better spirits to stop blaming each other for what had happened.
“All Kingdoms are equally to blame,” Tezuka said, “Equal in greed and equal in credit.”
There were a few who protested this assessment. Yanagi spoke to support Tezuka, “I agree. We must conclude this to move forward to the true purpose of this council.”
Yanagi gestured toward Sakuno, who sat quietly between Tezuka and Princess An. Her eyes went wide with shock, so surprised that she was asked to speak that she let out an undignified little sound. Politely ignoring this, Yanagi continued, “Please tell us what you found, my Lady.”
Sakuno gulped and stood, nervous until she took a real look around at all of the people who defended her with their lives on the frozen river. Shiraishi winked, Niou made a horrible face, and An looked up at her with pride. She felt that strength, and peered to Yanagi once more for reassurance. Breathing deep she attempted, “We…Kunimitsu…King Tezuka and Ry-Echizen…looked behind the Great Falls.”
She paused, half incredulous that they were actually listening to her.
“And?” Atobe drawled from the head of the table, prompting her forward. Even his gaze was not one of contempt, but almost amusement.
Continuing, she blurted out, “It was a nest. Sumire’s nest. She left an egg.”
Shiraishi said, “Surely it is dead by now.”
Oshitari hummed and said, “Not necessarily. Dragon eggs are said to be thick as stone with no predictable hatching time. It may have waited out the ice.”
“Then surely, alive or dead, it belongs to Hyoutei,” Atobe said. “It was found on our lands.”
“Can you really say that, after your army of the dead nearly killed us all?”
“My army of the dead? You heard the account from Princess An. We did not launch this army, merely prepared it as a backup for your unreasonable campaign against Hyoutei.”
“According to the most ancient maps,” Yanagi said, interrupting the argument. “The Great Falls and the cliffs above used to belong to no country, just the dragons.”
Atobe hmphed. Though the King did not seem to appreciate the contested claim on his land, he hadn’t exactly been able to do anything with the cliffs and frozen falls either. “The territory of the river immediately beneath the falls is unquestionably Hyoutei.” His terrifying glare dared anyone to say otherwise. No one did.
Only Tezuka dared follow that comment, “I propose that the dragon egg travel among our kingdoms in the care of someone without country. That way, if it should hatch, it will know a home amongst all of us.”
The Kings were silent for a long moment, considering this.
“I am in favor,” Yukimura said. Otherwise, he had no legitimate claim to the egg.
“Be awed by my generosity,” Atobe waved his agreement.
Shiraishi nodded, “We would be happy to welcome the egg and its party to Shitenhouji, but who can bear it?”
“There is one I would nominate,” Tezuka said, “But first.”
Before the council, he rose and faced Sakuno, who still stood, quivering anxiously about the fate of the egg she had come to see as hers.
When Tezuka spoke again, it was with the booming, royal tone he reserved for battle. “Ryuuzaki Sakuno.”
She startled, straightening under his address. “Y-yes.”
“I hereby disown you as my ward,” there were a few gasps of surprise. “You now have no rights to my lineage and my home is no longer yours. I revoke your passports and any money that I have safeguarded in your name will be transferred immediately.”
Silence overcame the boisterous council room. Tears flooded Sakuno’s eyes. Her small hands shook. Unable to hold back her emotions, she surged forward and wrapped her arms around Tezuka to bury her crying face in his jerkin. “Thank you,” she spoke quietly, only to him. “Thank you, Kunimitsu. For everything.”
Tezuka’s hand settled atop her head. The uncontestable nomination didn’t even have to be voiced. Not one King protested the lady’s reward.
-
Several important things weighed on Yanagi’s mind as he left the council room. It took some time to pry the joyous Kirihara from his side, but once he did so, he employed his long, healthy legs to catch up with Seigaku’s Fuji.
“Fuji-san,” he spoke. The counselor slowed his pace, expecting Yanagi to catch up and walk with him, which he did.
“I rarely go by that name anymore. You may call me Syuusuke,” he said with an eerie sort of smile.
That smile almost answered Yanagi’s question for him. Though Fuji had been the one to spur the war on Hyoutei, he did not seem particularly disappointed for the relatively peaceful conclusion. With his newfound strength amplifying his ability to calculate odds and possibilities, he could tell that Fuji, however off his expressions might seem, was not lying in his joy.
“When you advised Seiichi to attack Hyoutei’s western gate, did you know all of this was going to happen?”
Fuji opened his eyes. The corners of his lips tightened into a sharper, almost predatory smile. “I wonder.”
As if that were an answer, and it was perhaps enough of one for Yanagi, Fuji turned on his heel and walked back in the direction they had come from.
Fuji had walked him to the mouth of the dungeons. Curiosity bid him to continue to the elegant door of Oshitari’s chambers. Yanagi stared at them, half in thought, half still thrilled that he could take in all of the castle’s design with his own two eyes.
The message Fuji sent had been perfectly clear and confirmed an inkling of his. Yanagi knocked. An inexplicable series of sound and voices bubbled up from beyond the door, but it opened moments later nonetheless.
“Yanagi-kun,” Oshitari grinned and invited him in, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“A question.”
“Very well. Ask,” Oshitari said. The counselor was queerly dressed in that he was barely dressed. He wore only a hastily thrown on robe and his neck bore many signs of pleasurable injury. Interesting.
“Despite Shishido’s presence in Fudomine, then Seigaku, Atobe did not see Fuji’s betrayal of the peace treaty,” surely, if Atobe knew of the violation, it would have come up in the council.
Smirking slightly, Oshitari tilted his head. There was more.
Yanagi narrowed his eyes on Hyoutei’s wiley counselor. Perhaps all counselors were made alike in nature. “During the contest with Kabaji-kun…you knew that it was Niou and not me on the battlefield.”
“The things a man does for the sake of peace,” Oshitari’s smirk evolved into a wolfish thing. Where there had been nothing, Niou flickered in from behind and wrapped his arms around Oshitari’s waist. As Niou’s tongue tasted the juncture between the counselor’s neck and shoulder, Oshitari purred, “Oh the dirty things.”
“Oshitari-kun,” Yagyuu’s voice carried from the bedroom. “I’m afraid we’re still not done with you.”
Apparently, Niou had taken all of the words about Hyoutei’s dungeons to heart.
Yanagi smiled. “Thank you. I’ll see myself out.”
-
Atobe decided that there was such thing as too many Kings in the castle, even when that castle belonged to him. The whirlwind of events left him feeling bereft; whether it was the full night of war, the loss of his fire, or the sensation of being so close to it - Yanagi - again in the council room, he didn’t know.
Whatever his dilemma, Excidium always saw him through. When he entered the haphazardly repaired stables, he was shocked and outraged to find Yanagi petting his beloved horse and spoiling him with sugar cubes, of all things.
“Your horse is bribable after all,” Yanagi informed him with a quiet, serene expression.
Though he was supposed to be cold as ice, the rage boiling up in him was anything but. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, controlling his tone.
Yanagi, unaffected by his anger, soothed his fingers through the horse’s mane. Excidium seemed to like that - traitor.
“You never announced the results of the contest,” Yanagi informed him. “If I have earned the right to try and court you.”
Frigidly, Atobe folded his arms and retorted, “You got what you came for, Yanagi. My generosity only extends so far.”
Yanagi approached Atobe, eyes open. They were narrow, brown, and perfectly ordinary but for the blazing warmth and gratitude that filled them. “Then let me take responsibility,” he said. “For all the good and ill that I have done.”
Even if Atobe’s back were not against the pole, he wouldn’t have moved. He wouldn’t have backed down a single inch. Nor did he move forward to the kindling heat that beckoned him closer.
Yanagi moved for him, nearer and nearer in small, measurable increments. Atobe did not pull away when the counselor’s long fingers cupped his cheek, or when he stepped into the spot of hay he occupied. The smell of fresh tea wafted from the breath they shared. Though Yanagi had bent so far and brought their faces ever so close, he refrained from realizing the kiss.
That was Atobe’s choice to make.
“Rikkai idiot,” Atobe breathed, heating the scant air between them. He captured Yanagi’s vest and said, “You can try.” Then, he tugged Yanagi down that final nine percent to reclaim his fire.
Omake: Three Years Later
Sakuno laughed as she plummeted hundreds of feet. Tomoka clung to her back and shrieked joyously. Lucky the dragon seemed equally pleased to be landing in Seigaku too, but he expressed it with a roar and a theatrical show of fire.
“Lucky!” she scolded as they touched down before the gates of Seigaku. “Be careful. We can’t start a forest fire here. Kunimitsu isn’t quite as forgiving as Shiraishi.” The enormous dragon thumped his tail and averted his large, violet eyes. Sakuno knew that Lucky always took criticism personally. She patted him gently on the side. After all, it was the first time either of them had been to any of their homes in quite awhile. They were thoroughly occupied, searching their thawing continent for any other existing dragon eggs. Though they hadn’t found anything yet, Sakuno hadn’t given up hope.
“Are you here for the tournament?” a guard asked her. If he were asking her that, he had to be new.
“Just visiting,” she explained. “Um, are you new to the guard?”
“Yes!” the guard straightened his back to assume what he must’ve thought an impressive pose. “I’m Minami Kentarou.”
Another guard rushed to Sakuno’s other side and posed in the same manner. “I’m Higashikata Masami.”
“Very nice to meet the both of you,” she said, hoping that they would let her pass through. They promised An that they would meet her for lunch.
Tomoka, however, had other ideas. She bounded right up to them and said, “What’s this about a tournament? Any need for cheerleaders?”
“Ah, yes, the tournament!” Minami said.
“It’s going to be a wonderful event.”
“Everyone is going to be there.”
“And if everyone is there, can they really resist mauling each other?”
“Haha, probably not. That’s a great one, Masami!”
“I thought so, Kentarou.”
Lucky’s massive eyes followed the pair of them back and forth, but neither guard seemed to notice or care. Sakuno stopped their praise of each other. “Wait. So the kingdoms are fighting?” A knot of worry tightened in her gut.
“Oh yes,” Higashikata nodded.
“Just this morning, King Yukimura and King Atobe were threatening to destroy each other. Echizen suggested that he could take both of them in one blow. And well…King Tezuka, he’s not very long-winded.”
“Wow, Kentarou. You really do get more amusing every day!”
“Only because I spend my days with you!”
Sakuno did not wait for the two guards to check her new passport. After all, she had a world war to prevent. She sprinted past, giant dragon friend galloping on beside her. Seigaku had been her home long enough that she knew exactly how to get to the training fields.
Though she wasn’t quite able to believe her eyes when she got there. The King of United Rikkai and the King of Hyoutei faced off against each other. But instead of swords, they held weird flat nets, and instead of on a battlefield, they stood meters away from each other on a well-lined area.
“I’m going to destroy you this time, Yukimura! Nothing gets past my insight,” Atobe said, hitting a tiny ball over the short net dividing their field territories.
“As if you stand a chance against Rikkai. I will strip you of your senses,” Yukimura smirked, striking the ball at Atobe when it came his way.
Sakuno stood, breathless and confused as she watched the pair of them. “What is this?” she implored to Ryoma.
Sipping lazily from his purple beverage, the Prince Consort looked over at her and shrugged, “Fun.”
“…Fun. You guys are really fighting like this for fun?”
“There are only so many ways you can do the same thing and keep life interesting,” Yanagi said, jotting something down in a notebook as Lucky nosed at his hair. “Thanks to you, I’ve just thought of another. I think I’ll call it monopoly.”
Sakuno sighed and collapsed on the bench next to Yanagi to watch the match. She supposed that it would be boring for peace to look any other way.
-End