JE-united surprise fic for xdestroying 1/9
Gift fic for xdestroying
Title: Even The Smallest Light
Pairing: Sakurai Sho/Matsumoto Jun
Rating: R
Warnings: !!! Death of minor characters, amnesia/memory loss, PTSD/trauma, angst !!!
Summary: There’s a hefty reward offered for proof that any members of the family survived that night at Sakura House. Nino and Jun are determined to claim that reward, but first they have to find someone they can pass off, a doppelganger they can train in the royal ways. And then they meet Yoshimoto Koya.
Notes: For xdestroying. I wanted to write you a mystery or a criminal AU and somehow it changed into this-an AU based on Anastasia/the Romanov family. There are no talking bats or zombie Rasputins in this, sorry. I am also really sorry for the deaths of minor characters in this story-if you know Anastasia’s story, then you’ll know why it’s here. Warnings aside, I promise it’s not non-stop angst (but the pairing IS Sakumoto so…). The title comes from the very inspirational Rolling Days: Let's escape into the dark / And show how powerful even the smallest light can be.
-then-
The boots crunch in the snow.
The boots crunch in the snow.
The boots crunch in the snow.
It’s cold but there’s fire. It’s cold but there’s fire. It’s gone, it’s gone. All of it’s gone. All he knows is that it’s gone. He’s on fire. He feels like he’s on fire. He’s leaving fire in the snow. Follow the fire, they’ll follow it wherever they go. A bad plan. A terrible plan. It’s all such a terrible plan. This was it? This was it? This was the plan? He’s leaving fire in the snow.
“Don’t,” he hears, gruff and demanding. Insisting. Ordering. How dare he give the orders! “Don’t. Stay here. Stay with me, don’t go.”
The boots will leave tracks. They’ll come anyway. They’ll come anyway. The man had no boots for him. Boots for himself, but no boots for him. This was the plan? This couldn’t have been the plan.
“Other side. My other side. I’m sorry.”
He’s shifted. He’s jostled. He can’t walk on his own, and the man is tiring from the hauling of him. He’s all fire and dead weight. He’s leaving fire in the snow. The boots start to crunch again, but where there’s fire in him, it’s now pressed against the man’s body. With each step, his fire bumps against the man with the boots only for himself.
The fire grows and before he can scream, the man’s hand is covering his mouth. Again. Again. He has to swallow the screams down. He wants them out, he needs them out, he’s full to bursting with the need to let the screams out, but this man, again and again, this man makes him swallow the screams.
“I’m sorry!” the man says. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. We’re almost…almost…”
The boots crunch in the snow. The boots crunch in the snow. He cries, from the fire, from before the fire, from things he can’t unsee, and the droplets freeze in the corners of his eyes. He can hardly keep them open. The boots crunch in the snow.
“There will be help. There will be help,” the man promises him. He says more words, many more words that ought to mean something, many more words that ought to bring hope, but the fire is spreading. The fire is spilling from him, and he fears that he’ll be empty before they reach where the help is.
“Stay with me. Stay with me, don’t go. You can’t go.”
Stop ordering me around, he wants to scream, but the words are trapped. So he knows his only way to protest is to disobey. The man with the boots for himself and no boots for him, it’s this man’s wish that he stays. He spills fire, the boots leave prints. They’ll find them. They’ll find them anyway, what does it matter? It’s the man’s wish that he stays, so he does what makes sense. The opposite makes sense. How dare this man give the orders! He gives in to the pain, he gives in to the things he can’t unsee. He gives in to the fire and the swallowed screams and he doesn’t stay.
He goes.
-now-
Gyoranzaka Home for Boys
Takanawa, Workers’ Republic of Minato
It always took him hours to attend to the snows. They were half a mile from the main road, through a forest that had been thinned like the threads on an old sweater. It was Kitagawa’s army that camped a mile away from Takanawa town proper, out by the boys’ home, back then. They’d approached the capital, Keio, from the north, but they waited out a winter here. An army of that size, they took and took. Firewood, materials for troop barracks, they took from the forest to build and wait it out.
“It never used to be that bad,” Headmaster Joshima always said when the first snows spread from the mountains behind them to blanket the foothills near Takanawa, the boys’ home a mile away. “But without the forest, it’s harder.”
Without the forest, the wind blew harder. It didn’t have so many trees to contend with, so many trees to collide with. The wicked, full-powered wind made the drifts near the Gyoranzaka Home for Boys rise to a foot tall, two feet tall. They didn’t have the petrol budget for a mechanical plow. It was on him to clear it all away. Him and his shovel. The boys helped, but they never lasted long. They diligently cleared their playground with shovels and brooms, skidding their marbles around on the patches of ice that dotted the courtyard as soon as the ground was visible again. The path from the building to the road, that was on him. The boys didn’t help with work that didn’t directly affect them, and he couldn’t begrudge them that. Marbles were serious business at Gyoranzaka, pockets stuffed to the brim with them when the meal bell clanged and they had to go back inside.
The shovel scraped the path, the hard-packed dirt turning the pure white into a dulled, speckled gray, and he lifted. If he got lost enough in the shoveling, he could forget the pain in his shoulder that flared with every dump of snow to his left, off the path and out of the way. If he got lost in the shoveling, his head could clear. It was a job he liked, even as it pained him. Even as it exhausted him. Even when the wind whipped through the half-gone forest, pushing a dusting of snow back onto the path that he’d already cleared behind him. He liked the jobs where he could forget and just do. The path to the road was clear or it was not clear, and there was nothing complicated about it.
It was nearly sunset when it was clear, which meant that the man in the truck from town could come in the morning. The truck from town brought them food, whatever donations had been gathered and whatever else had been ordered from the home’s government-assisted budget. It was lean times, Headmaster Joshima always said, but when hadn’t it been lean times? The lean times were just getting leaner. The staff was on one third portions so that the boys might at least get by on half. There was no meat unless Koya was sent to put out a trap for rabbits, but they’d gone almost a month ago, the rabbits. Too cold.
He trudged back through the snow, dragging his shovel behind him and feeling the throb in his shoulder. It made his fingers twinge, shake. Sometimes he lost feeling in them and not because of the cold. No, he had good gloves, a pair of Headmaster Joshima’s that he’d given to Koya especially for winter. “You need these more than me.”
His shed was behind the building, nothing more than a half-assed wooden lean-to with a door that always stuck, especially in the winter cold. But some of the boys had built it ages ago, boys who had hoped to be apprenticed to a carpenter in town. Headmaster Joshima couldn’t bear to see it torn down and rebuilt. The boys who had hoped to be apprenticed to a carpenter in town had been drafted, and not a one had returned to the Gyoranzaka Home for Boys. Orphans, they made for easy choices in a draft. And there had been so many, many wars.
Koya yanked the door open, wincing at the continued ache in his shoulder, throughout his entire body, and he put his shovel back. He closed it up, the chain and padlock keeping it locked up tight as he pocketed the heavy iron key once more. He sighed, hurrying to the staff entrance and leaving his boots in the entryway, switching to the thick-soled winter slippers worn indoors by everyone from the headmaster to the youngest boy at this time of year. The staff dining room was empty. To save on heating costs, everyone ate in the main hall with the boys now. But there was a note on the table.
Yoshimoto-san, please come to my office when you are finished with the snow.
He took off his heavy gloves, the gift from Headmaster Joshima, as well as the thinner pair of gloves he wore under them to provide extra protection from blisters. His pale fingers brushed against the note, against the smear of ink that left a smudge on “snow.” He’d be eating late tonight, if he’d screwed up again.
He went to his room first, depositing his overcoat, his ugly red scarf (a donation from some knitting widow in town that the boys had all ridiculed and rejected and given to him instead), his wool hat. He had no mirror in his room, settling for running a hand through his hair and hoping that the smell of his sweat-soaked body wouldn’t offend the headmaster too much.
He knocked on the door, hearing Headmaster Joshima’s kind and soft-spoken voice bid him to enter. He bowed his head the moment he was in the door. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long, Headmaster. There was a lot of snow today.”
“No, no, Yoshimoto-san, it’s okay.” The Headmaster’s office was always cold. The dormitories and classrooms were somewhat insulated, heated with wood-burning stoves, but staff offices were not. Joshima was sitting as usual behind his oak desk, pulling his spectacles from his face and laying them down. He was bundled up from head to toe, his hands poking from the sleeves of his overcoat like a shy turtle peeking its head from its shell.
Koya took a seat and saw how tired the Headmaster looked. Koya knew the man was maybe only ten years older than him, but his was a heavy burden. Gyoranzaka was currently home to 247 boys, though they really only had the space and budget for 125. And still he took them in, boys orphaned from the wars or boys whose parents had had one child too many, too many mouths to feed. In exchange for government support, whichever government it was that currently controlled Minato, places like Gyoranzaka were the first called upon to fill ranks. Foot soldiers. Cannon fodder.
It had been peaceful, lately, since General Higashiyama had come to power. His network of secret police, informants, they were rotten to the core, but somehow things got done. Funding came to the boys’ home on schedule, even though the amounts dwindled from month to month. Lean times. Joshima had been hopeful that some of this year’s “graduates” would be able to join a trade in Takanawa or maybe in the capital. The boys were forced to leave at 18, to make their own way. Most years, they were drafted into the ranks of whichever general’s army held Keio. Maybe those turning 18 this year would get a taste of what a normal life could be. Not that Yoshimoto Koya knew what that was like, aside from the books he was allowed to read from Gyoranzaka’s small, moldy library collection.
Headmaster Joshima was looking at him with such sadness. There was pity in his face often, and Koya really didn’t like it. He never had and was mostly glad that his work kept him outside, away from those looks. “Yoshimoto-san, I have some bad news today.”
“Oh?” He’d done it again, he thought bitterly. How far would they move his room? In his first months, they’d housed him near the staff dorms. Hell, they’d even given him a bunkmate to start. But his nightmares had put an end to that. An end to the bunkmate and an end to the staff dorms. After almost thirteen years here, thirteen long years of shoveling snow and pulling weeds, they still kept him in an old closet under the main stairwell at night. Could they hear his screams, his nightmares, even from there?
“We’ve just received this month’s government allotment,” Joshima said. “With winter and the recent intake from town…”
Koya gripped the arms of his chair, quaking in rage. They shouldn’t have taken those boys. Those last four sickly boys from the closing orphanage in town. Their medicine cost too much. It was unfair to spend more on them when so many other boys needed food, a warm bed.
“With all of that, the rest of the staff and I have come to the conclusion that we no longer need a dedicated groundskeeper.”
Koya’s mouth went dry. “Sir,” he muttered quietly. “Sir, it’s…it’s January, sir…”
Joshima reached a hand out across the desk, but Koya wouldn’t take it. “I cannot give up anything more. I cannot. The older boys can attend to the snow. And to the repairs.”
“Sir, you can’t turn me away,” Koya whispered. Thirteen years he’d been loyal. He’d learned it all as best he could, the fixing of things, from a handyman in town. Without Gyoranzaka, he had nothing. He had nobody. Or if he did, he couldn’t remember. And they were turning him out so suddenly? What costs did he incur that were suddenly too much of a burden now? He worked for his place under the stairwell, which he kept clean and neat. He worked for his meals, even as he gladly ate less than he should so that the boys might grow stronger. He worked for the pain cream that came in from town with the truck, that he used as sparingly as he could so he could make it last longer even when he ached.
Was it the pain cream? Was it too costly? Or was it the nightmares? Did he scare the boys?
“I’m sorry, Yoshimoto-san. I’ve kept you as long as I could. You know I have done everything in my power…”
Every year he’d been on the chopping block, but Joshima had said no. Yoshimoto Koya served this country, he always argued. Are we to turn him away? Is this how we thank those who sacrifice themselves to protect us? It seemed that Joshima’s ability to protect him had run its course.
“You can stay through the end of the week. With your skills, you might find work in town. You have been a real help here for so many years.”
“Then why? I’ll eat less. I’ll give up on my pain cream…”
Joshima shut his eyes. “The space under the stairwell. We might fit two, three boys there. Young ones. The overcrowding in the dorms is becoming a burden.”
“I would share. You know I would willingly share.”
“I know you would, but they would not be comfortable with you,” Joshima admitted quietly. “I am sorry, Yoshimoto-san, I must be firm in my decision. In lieu of full severance pay, I can negotiate with a friend of mine who works for the railway. If you’d rather not try your luck in Takanawa, he can get you to Keio. There are always opportunities in the capital.”
There were always lines for rice in the capital, Koya had been told. Where would he go, where would he stay? The nightmares that plagued him for as long as he could remember, that clung to his brain and wouldn’t let go, parasitic agonies that woke him in a cold sweat at least once a week, if not more. The snow, the snow, the pain of it. The images that never quite made sense. They woke him, and he screamed. He screamed until his throat was raw, until someone came and pounded on the stairs above him to wake him, to shut him up. With his nightmares, no decent boarding house would keep him very long.
The scarring near his left shoulder, front and back, it would pain him for the rest of his days. One of his first memories, one of the things that always stuck with him, was the doctor telling him so. It had been a bullet wound, in through the front and clean out through the back. It had torn his flesh up and since he hadn’t gotten to a hospital quickly enough, it had festered. The infection, the fever…the first week in that hospital was something Koya couldn’t remember well. But at least he remembered it had happened.
Anything before that, though, was a problem. He’d been brought to the soldiers’ hospital, Kamezuka Hospital, outside Gunma Town, with his wound. He’d also lost two toes on his right foot to frostbite. Even this many years later Koya walked with a sort of limping gait, often resorting to stuffing his boot with a mound of wool to take their place, to help him walk when he tired of the boys’ teasing imitations. Yoshimoto Koya was the name on his intake forms, so he supposed that was his name, though he couldn’t answer the questions of where he was from, his military rank, how he’d been wounded, why he hadn’t been given basic treatment at the front lines, and whose army he’d served in. The hospital had patched up his wounds, but they’d never managed to fix his head.
The wound, even with the infection, hadn’t been enough to really induce amnesia. The doctors had concluded that he’d seen something in the trenches, something horrible enough for his mind to lock it away, to make him forget. The nightmares that poked through, waking him in the middle of the night unable to breathe, it was his memories trying to come back, but somehow he couldn’t unlock the puzzle. All these years later, Koya wondered what horrors he’d seen that had left him this way. But then, after a nightmare, Koya didn’t really want to know what had made him this way. Would he ever be whole? He mostly doubted it.
He’d come to depend on Headmaster Joshima’s kindness. When Kamezuka Hospital couldn’t justify treating him any longer (or probably because they couldn’t actually fix what was broken with him), he’d found his way to the Gyoranzaka Home for Boys. He’d survived by doing odd jobs and accepting the indignity that was being a grown man and sleeping on a bedroll under a stairwell. His age upon reaching Kamezuka Hospital had been registered as 18 (something he couldn’t prove or disprove), and here he was now, nearly 34 years old with no family, no friends. Nobody had ever come to the hospital or the boys’ home looking for Yoshimoto Koya, to fill in the blanks, to tell him who he was.
“Maybe you were an aristocrat,” one of the staff members, Tsumabuki-san, always teased him. “Since you can read and play as good as you do.”
Apparently Yoshimoto Koya, though he’d arrived in the hospital in the garb of a common soldier, had been an educated young man. Koya devoured any book, anything with words that was placed in front of him. One time he’d gotten halfway through a book written in a foreign language before realizing it wasn’t his seemingly native tongue. He’d been taught that language, but when? By whom? He’d discovered a talent for music, occasionally playing the out of tune old piano during some of the boys’ singing performances to sucker donors into sending the home more money. He’d found that out when he was halfway through a song, his fingers flying over the keys, having barely registered sitting down on the piano bench and getting started.
“The last thing anyone in this country should want to be,” another staff member, Ariyoshi-san, had teased, “is an aristocrat.”
An aristocrat. A common soldier. A groundskeeper with a limp and perpetual bags under his eyes. Yoshimoto Koya knew only his life at Gyoranzaka Home for Boys. A new start, it ought to have frightened him. Work in Takanawa, that ought to be his aim. But he had been to town, and he knew their stares. He knew their whispers. It was the dead of winter, and he knew that there’d be no real work in town until rice planting come spring. With his bad shoulder, he’d be a risky hire anyhow.
He cleared his throat, knowing when he wasn’t wanted or needed. “Headmaster, your offer regarding Keio is very generous. I would be pleased to accept.”
-
Takamatsu Residence Block 9
Keio, Workers’ Republic of Minato
There were whispers that the new blocks going up, the potential blocks 17-20 in Takamatsu, were going to have lifts. They could build them taller, that was the main reasoning behind it. More floors, more apartments. Space in Keio had been hard to come by even in the old days, but since the genesis of the republic, more and more people came to the capital in search of something better. He was fairly certain nobody ever found that something better. But once they got here, there was no going back. Men, women, children, crowded into each new set of blocks that went up.
The row houses and simple tenements Jun remembered from childhood had been bulldozed in favor of the blocks. Neighborhoods that used to house a thousand now bore the burden of ten thousand. Hastily done concrete slabs, five or six uniform floors. Shoddy workmanship left the buildings easily shaken and cracked from small earthquakes. The builders never put in a lot of effort since they were often contracted by the government, which changed hands so often that work orders might get lost in the shuffle. Getting things done quickly, when there was still someone to cut the check, that was the way of things now. When the “big one” struck someday, the loss of life would be catastrophic.
The good thing about the lifts, Jun figured, was that the value of his own apartment would remain unchanged. Apartments in the blocks with the lifts would go for a premium, and rents in their block would probably remain manageable. Nino complained day in, day out about having to climb the five flights of steps to the apartment they shared, but the yen saved from being at the top floor of a block without lifts was something he valued even more than Jun did.
Two children from the third floor came flying down the steps, a brother and sister in coats missing half their buttons. “Fish Man!” they howled when they went by. “Ew, gross, it’s Fish Man!”
Jun smirked, continuing his slow trudge upward. “You’re more than just a Fish Man,” Nino often argued, when he sat hunched over the low table, squinting in candlelight. “You’re Fish and Oil Man.”
Whatever his moniker, Jun had employment and that was more than many people had. He’d driven the sputtering delivery truck for Ohno Fishmongers for more than a decade now, and if that meant he came home smelling like exhaust and halibut, then so be it. Although he didn’t particularly like the smell either.
He fumbled in his pocket for the key, twisting it in the lock and stepping into their apartment. They were on the top floor of Block 9, housed between an elderly couple whose apartment always stunk of boiled cabbage and a widow with four screaming mouths to feed. It wasn’t ideal, but it wouldn’t be for much longer.
He hoped.
He unlaced his boots, sighing. It had been a long day. He started deliveries just before sunrise and only finished in the middle of the afternoon, having hauled orders off the truck and into shops and restaurants all over the capital. His roommate, however, did not have a fixed schedule. He went out whenever he felt like making money, and if his other “services” were needed, he usually opted to meet clients in the crowded marketplace down the road, moving among the other shoppers so government operatives would be unlikely to overhear his conversation.
“I’m home,” he announced, leaving the boots in the corner and tugging off his wool coat. In summer he was able to wear lighter cotton clothing to work, but in the dead of winter, wool was the only option and the smell of his work clung to it and wouldn’t let go. The small closet in the genkan was reserved for Jun’s coat and gloves and hat, a stopgap measure to keep the whole apartment from stinking of fish. And oil.
“Welcome home,” came the thin, sing-song voice of his roommate. Ninomiya Kazunari was Jun’s age, the pair of them having both arrived at thirty-two years that summer. But where Jun was broad and strong, having spent the last ten years hauling heavy crates of fish from one end of Keio to another, his roommate was small and jittery, a sly fellow with sharp, intelligent eyes who’d been in survival mode for many more years than Jun.
Jun all but collapsed onto the floor, putting his glasses on the table top and tugging on the kotatsu’s blanket to cover half of himself. Nino, firmly ensconced beneath the blanket on the opposite side, looked cozy and content. “I’ve got an idea.”
“I wanna sleep,” Jun grumbled in reply. Lately when Nino had ideas, it meant the two of them bundling up and walking many futile miles, until Nino complained about his boots pinching his toes.
“Sleep when you’re dead,” Nino chided him, pushing aside the newspapers that he had cluttering up the table. “Strategy change.”
Jun shut his eyes. “Again?”
“We’ve been going about this the wrong way entirely,” Nino said, tapping the table with a few of his stubby little fingers. “It’s a scientific fact that women are the smarter sex, right?”
“Not a scientist,” Jun grumbled. “Dunno. Probably.” They certainly took a lot of stupid risks together, he and Nino.
“So then why are we still pursuing the Princess tack?”
“Because you wanna sleep with all the candidates,” Jun said bluntly, hearing Nino’s snort of laughter.
“Ah, that’s right,” Nino responded. “But even I have to admit that the temporary pleasures of the audition process have not brought about long-term results. I think we have to switch to men.”
Jun sighed.
“This does add some complications,” Nino admitted. “Visas for a husband and a wife are less likely to raise eyebrows. Three men traveling together might be trickier. But think of the possibilities it opens. We don’t have as many limits. A Princess Eriko with manners and a specific look, that’s a tricky business. Change to men and we’ve got two age groups to look for. Doubling our chances of success.”
At the mention of Princess Eriko, Jun winced. But he let Nino keep blathering on. Sometimes he was able to fall asleep while Nino was talking, and Nino was eventually able to take the hint that he was on his own that day. It was the fifteenth anniversary this year, and in their New Year’s Day address a few weeks earlier, the sentimental King and Queen of Chiba had upped the reward money if someone arrived with legitimate proof before the year was up. Were they just going to drop the matter entirely after the New Year? Nobody knew, but Nino had convinced himself that this year was their year.
This was the year he and Jun were going to pull off the scam of the century.
Fifteen years ago, when Jun was seventeen, the royal family - King Hiroki, Queen Kanako, and their three children - had been murdered. Jun knew the date better than most. Even before most of the Loyalists had been executed, the rumors had been swirling. Rumors that the children might have survived. It was the Crown Princess most had been rooting for, simply because she was the safest bet. The Sakurai family had had an heir and a spare, so the girl was no threat. And how could soldiers gun down a sweet, innocent teenage girl in cold blood?
The same way they’d gunned down her parents, Jun knew. The same way they’d gunned down her older brother and younger brother, their bodies dumped like trash in an open, unmarked grave. They were dead, of that Jun was certain, but Nino wasn’t terribly concerned with facts, even the truth Jun had seen with his own eyes. The rumors had grown so pervasive that the royal family of the neighboring Kingdom of Chiba had spent the last several years offering a monetary reward for proof that any members of the Sakurai family had survived. The Queen of Chiba was Queen Kanako’s sister, so whichever regime ruled Minato indulged the royal family’s hopeful plea to avoid drawing Chiba out of their neutral status. And by now, fifteen years gone, nobody in Minato really cared if they’d survived or not.
For the last several months, Jun had helped Nino to hunt down their own Princess Eriko. She’d have been twenty-eight this year, and Keio was not the easiest place to search. Many women of twenty-eight were married, had borne children. There was no talking those women into sneaking out of the country, slipping into Chiba and proclaiming themselves the long lost Princess of Minato.
That mostly left poor women, down on their luck women. It irritated Jun, accompanying Nino to factories and eyeballing the women who came out after a long, back-breaking shift. Many of them probably longed to escape, but none of them fit the “Princess” profile. Rough, callused hands. Malnourished bodies, dead eyes from hours on the assembly line. Nino had sampled his share of Keio’s women in his search for a willing participant in the scheme, but no amount of coaching was going to get any of these women to a Princess Eriko status any time soon.
It was almost February, so they technically had through the end of the year to train someone and make their way to Chiba, but Nino was stir-crazy. Since General Higashiyama had taken power, petty crime was being punished with a harshness that would have made King Hiroki blush. Nino had run a pickpocketing racket out of Tamachi Station for years, but when one of his boys had been executed on the spot, a man’s wallet still in hand, he’d closed up shop abruptly before any more of his kids met a similar fate.
That meant he had fallen back on his other job, forging work permits and travel visas. It meant sitting alone in the apartment for hours, imitating signatures and seals. Nino was a criminal, had been since before he and Jun had met, and yet Jun didn’t care. One of Nino’s forgeries meant new possibilities. A worker laid off from one factory could obtain employment in another without having to be on a government wait list for months, could feed his family. Whoever ruled Minato, those were the real criminals, Jun knew.
One of the children in the apartment next door started sobbing, and Jun knew he wasn’t going to enjoy the simple pleasures of an afternoon nap. He sat up slowly, running a hand through his hair. Nino grinned at the messy mop of black on top of Jun’s head. Nino preferred to keep his closely cropped, but Jun had been a soldier and would never keep his hair so short again.
He put his glasses back on, yawning. “Okay, sensei,” Jun said, seeing a completed stack of work permits under Nino’s inkwell. “Where do you propose we start looking for Prince Ryota?”
“Aim higher, Jun-kun,” Nino said. “All the boys Ryota’s age are probably trapped in the army. We need to go for the big prize.”
Jun felt his stomach twist in knots. Eriko…somehow it had always been more palatable when it was Eriko.
Nino leaned forward, smiling gleefully like a cat presenting a dead mouse to his master. “We’re going to train ourselves a Crown Prince Sho.”
-then-
Noribetsu Ryokan
Gunma Town, Kingdom of Minato
He paces the floor again and again. He can’t sit still, not as the minutes tick by and nobody comes. She had pressed the pouch of coins into his hand and kissed him on both cheeks. She’d held his face in her hands, her eyes firm and determined.
“You take this, Jun. You take this and it should be enough to get you to the border.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” he’d whined.
“I have to take a different way. We can’t all go together,” she had said. “We will meet again, I promise.”
She’s trusting him with this, but he doesn’t want to go. He has enough money to get them to a train, sure, but won’t they be suspicious? She hasn’t thought this through, but it’s all come about so suddenly, he supposes she didn’t have time to think logically about it.
But she also said that a soldier would be bringing him before midnight, and it’s long past. The ryokan is quiet, and Gunma Town has gone to bed. It’s probably suspicious to keep the lantern lit, but she told him to do it. “Leave a light so the lieutenant will know where to bring him.”
It’s such a bad plan.
Jun stops pacing about twenty minutes later when he hears the clomping of horses on cobblestones. Even from his room in the rear of the ryokan, a large courtyard separating him from the main road, he can already hear the shouting. His heart starts to pound in his chest. Horses, at this hour? It can only be the guards from Sakura House. Something’s gone wrong. They’ve come to Gunma Town, so something has gone wrong.
They sound close, and he hears boots pounding in the corridor a few minutes later. He ought to go to sleep, pretend to just be another person sleeping, but they’ll know him on sight. The guards will see him here and know that he’s part of the deception. She told him to stay, to wait, but it’s clear that something has gone wrong. In seconds he’s dressed in the dark cloak she found for him, tying his boots. He puts his heavy pack onto his shoulders. It’s heavy only because he’s carrying clothing and a few days’ rations for himself and for the Crown Prince. He considers dumping the extra but decides not to.
He extinguishes the lantern, his whole body trembling as he hears people in the ryokan start to scream. He sneaks out into the hall, seeing a handful of guards heading down a separate corridor. Jun hurries, exiting through the stable where he’d tied up Yama. The horse is the only one in here for the night, and she’s extremely agitated when Jun enters, tries to pull her from her stall. He’s never been good with animals.
“Ssh, be quiet, you stupid horse,” Jun hisses, the pack weighing him down. There’s no time to saddle her up, but if they find Yama in the stable they’ll think that Sho is here in the ryokan. They were supposed to ride her together, on their great escape to whatever town with a train station would get them to the border. “Yama, come on!”
He opens the stable door and before he can give the horse a smack on the rump, she’s racing out of the stable and out into the night.
“Damn it! Yama!”
When Jun gets out into the street, Sho’s beloved horse is long gone and the guards from Sakura House, General Kitagawa’s appointed jailers, are putting shops and houses in the Gunma Town market square to the torch. Jun’s eyes widen. They’re not just looking for Sho. They’re trying to smoke him out of hiding, and if they have to burn down civilian residences to do it, they will.
“No,” Jun murmurs, hearing screams as soldiers start breaking into houses, setting more on fire. “No, they can’t do this.”
“Sakurai Sho!” says one of the guards, rifle in hand and out before him in an aggressive stance. “Sakurai Sho, you will show yourself! If any of you are harboring Sakurai Sho, you will be arrested!”
If the guards are in Gunma Town, then who is watching the family at Sakura House? Jun nearly drops the pack when he realizes. There’s no need to watch the family if the family’s already been killed.
It was mere hours ago that she pressed the pouch of coins in his hand and told him to wait. That the soldier who would be coming was a Loyalist and would bring Sho to the ryokan. He listened because he’d do anything for her. Anything she ever asked, even if it was stupid like this plan.
But if the family’s already been killed, if all of this has been for nothing…
“Mother,” he whispers, tears pricking his eyes.
It takes everything he has not to scream as he races through the streets of Gunma Town, buildings already collapsing in heaps of burning timber. He has to get back. He has to get back there. He hears gunshots behind him, but he doesn’t slow down, even with the pack on his back.
It’s twenty minutes on horseback from Sakura House to Gunma Town, but that sort of speed is not possible now. His boots carry him through the snow as he stays off the main road. Nobody’s following him yet. But Gunma Town is burning, he’s lost Yama, and she promised that they would meet again.
She promised!
-now-
Mita Palace
Keio, Workers’ Republic of Minato
He’d left his third boarding house that week, and this time it wasn’t because of the nightmares. He’d been in a big room, a long row of bunked beds, and someone had waited until he was asleep to try and see if he had any money to steal. The joke was on that guy, since Koya had taken the Keio train ride instead of a payout from Headmaster Joshima. He had little more than the clothes on his back and a handful of coins.
Coins that, given the inflation rate in Keio and across most of the country, meant he had enough for two more hot meals, maybe three and that was it. Koya hadn’t really had to think much about money in the last several years. He’d never been paid in money, but in food and shelter and pain cream. Now those coins were the difference between starvation and one more day’s survival in a capital city that didn’t want him.
Headmaster Joshima, entrenched as he was in a backwater like Takanawa, didn’t really know how things worked in Keio. Almost all factory jobs required a work permit. In a country ostensibly called a “Workers’ Republic,” the workers had very little under their control. Industry, manufacturing, these jobs went to people who put in their applications months in advance, or to those who knew a guy that knew a guy who could move him up a list.
Outside of the big factories, the large companies that kept the country humming no matter who was in charge, there were small businesses, but Koya hadn’t found anything that could match his qualifications so far. The clearing of snow was a civil servant position, another government list he couldn’t get on since he didn’t really have an identity card. He had only the intake form from the hospital that identified him as Yoshimoto Koya, and the tattered paper had been folded again and again over the years. He had a recommendation letter from Headmaster Joshima, too, but his name and position meant nothing in the capital. All groundskeeper work at big companies and buildings of the capital would run a check on him, and he couldn’t verify a single thing.
Maybe he should have stayed in Takanawa, endured their judgment and pity. He’d spent the last week on his feet seeking employment in the bitter cold, the boot on his right foot jammed tight with newsprint and cotton to slightly adjust his gait, but still, a job recruiter could see a man who was less than perfect the moment he walked in the door. The limp he tried so hard to hide, the stiff way he kept his left arm against his side when he walked to avoid moving his shoulder more than necessary. Koya knew he’d work hard in any job, but nobody was willing to give him a chance. And it wasn’t like anyone was looking to hire someone who could both shovel the sidewalk and play a piano sonata by ear.
Instead of looking for another boarding house and parting with his remaining coins, he’d returned to a spot that he’d passed a day earlier. Mita Palace had housed Minato’s royal family in the years before the Glorious Revolt, and standing there at the gate, Koya had felt the strangest sensation pass through him. It had been a grand old place once, though now it had been stripped down of anything valuable. Even the window glass and shutters had been torn away. He didn’t know which army he’d served in before getting shot. Maybe his odd feelings were letting him know that he’d fought for the Loyalist cause. There’d still been a cause those first few years before most of the Loyalists had been executed.
An old woman carrying her daily allotment from one of the food lines had stood beside him, pointing a gnarled finger at the building. They gutted the place, she’d explained like some tour guide, just after the revolt. With the family dead, General Kitagawa had ordered the furniture destroyed until one of his advisors told him to make a profit from it. Paintings and sculptures had been sold to museums in other countries. The Queen’s jewels financed the General’s eventual military campaigns against the other hopeful upstarts that plunged Minato into civil war for years.
The place was finally due to be torn down within the month, the old woman had explained. It had sat here for fifteen years, emptied and stripped of everything that had made it wondrous. It now housed several dozen homeless, who lit fires in the old fireplaces, who pissed and shat in what had once been royal bedchambers. “It’ll be a new set of residence blocks,” the woman said. “Mita’s too far from the center of town to be worth turning into government offices.”
Koya entered through the open gate in the back by the servants’ entrance. He wasn’t quite sure why he knew that was what it was, but maybe the old woman had mentioned it the other day. He had trouble focusing sometimes, and staring at Mita Palace had given him a headache. Probably because one family had kept all this grandeur to themselves. No wonder they’d been overthrown.
There weren’t as many people inside as Koya had anticipated, walking through the barren kitchens and into what might have been a grand dining room. Maybe with the impending destruction of the building, most people had sought shelter elsewhere. The carpets had been ripped up haphazardly, patches of it still tacked to the floor, while a chandelier sat by its lonesome in a corner, shards of glass ringing it. Each room he passed through stunk more than the one that had come before it, the ground littered with rat droppings, spoiled food, flyers for political rallies a decade old.
He avoided the stairwells leading up to the second floor, presuming that the bedchambers and other private rooms had already been claimed by the homeless and other squatters who had taken over the palace. His job hunt would continue, but at least for now he could stretch his coins for a few more days. He found himself in a large reception hall, or maybe it had been a ballroom. It wasn’t like Koya had ever attended something fancy like that. The doors had been torn off the hinges, leaving the room open and undefended.
Some of the windows remained, though one corner of the room was home to a mound of snow, torn curtains fluttering in the bitter winter wind coming through the shattered glass. His boots thumped across the tiled floor, crunching on garbage. He couldn’t help looking up, seeing that the ceilings were elaborately painted. Even in the dim remaining sunlight of the January afternoon, Koya could see the pathetic reminders of a bygone era. A watery landscape, fat green lotus leaves spread across the surface. It might have been beautiful, once.
There was a raised platform at the opposite end of the room. The king’s throne had been here, his brain informed him, though Koya again was unsure why he knew this. This knowledge was something like his piano, maybe. Something he’d learned in the time he couldn’t remember. There were dark scrapes on the floor here, so perhaps the throne had been tugged away, moved and sold or destroyed.
Koya crouched down, his gloved fingers moving along the dark scratches gouged into the floor. Suddenly his head throbbed and he felt dizzy, almost toppling back onto his ass. He’d been walking all day, and he needed to rest. This room was too empty, and even in his heavy coat he’d probably freeze if he slept in here at night, exposed to the elements. He got to his feet and passed through a creaking door at the rear of the reception hall.
The parlor beyond had clearly housed several people recently, since the smell of sweat and piss still lingered prominently. Koya shuddered a bit, not liking his options. He’d lived in a small space for many years, but he’d kept things clean. But the parlor had a door that closed and no windows. He wouldn’t freeze to death in here. He dropped his small satchel in a corner, the one that fortunately had not been used as a latrine. The floor was hard, but someone had left behind a makeshift pallet of cardboard that would cushion him a little.
He sat down heavily, rifling through his satchel to find the small onigiri wrapped in newspaper that had been the breakfast provided that morning at the boarding house. He’d gone the whole day, saving it, and the bottle he carried around was still half full with water from the boarding house tap. Even in his bag it was half frozen, and he tapped it against the floor again and again to try and encourage the ice to melt. Koya was used to meager meals, but this one seemed even sadder than most. He needed to find employment and soon.
Even as he ate, his headache persisted. He shut his eyes, leaning his forehead against his knee. It had been building and building, ever since he’d entered the palace. Koya didn’t believe in things like curses, though if any place in Minato was cursed, Mita Palace probably was. How many walls had he passed by that day that had been graffitied with words like “Death to the monarchy” or “Let the people rise up”? Maybe those angry feelings had seeped into the walls, the rage permeating the air the same as human waste.
“It hurts,” he mumbled, his voice sounding pathetically small in the abandoned room.
He wasn’t sure when or how he managed to fall asleep, but this time when the nightmare came, nobody was there to interrupt or wake him. He woke, body trembling and cold, his throat aching from the screams he must have let out. He didn’t remember the nightmares well, just images usually. Flashes. This one had been so vivid though. In this one, he’d been in the reception hall, the ballroom, whatever it was. He’d been playing a piano in the center of the hall, the room crowded from one end to the other with people in fancy dress. When he’d finished, the floor had opened up, swallowing him and the piano both as the crowd erupted into vigorous applause.
Part Two
Title: Even The Smallest Light
Pairing: Sakurai Sho/Matsumoto Jun
Rating: R
Warnings: !!! Death of minor characters, amnesia/memory loss, PTSD/trauma, angst !!!
Summary: There’s a hefty reward offered for proof that any members of the family survived that night at Sakura House. Nino and Jun are determined to claim that reward, but first they have to find someone they can pass off, a doppelganger they can train in the royal ways. And then they meet Yoshimoto Koya.
Notes: For xdestroying. I wanted to write you a mystery or a criminal AU and somehow it changed into this-an AU based on Anastasia/the Romanov family. There are no talking bats or zombie Rasputins in this, sorry. I am also really sorry for the deaths of minor characters in this story-if you know Anastasia’s story, then you’ll know why it’s here. Warnings aside, I promise it’s not non-stop angst (but the pairing IS Sakumoto so…). The title comes from the very inspirational Rolling Days: Let's escape into the dark / And show how powerful even the smallest light can be.
-then-
The boots crunch in the snow.
The boots crunch in the snow.
The boots crunch in the snow.
It’s cold but there’s fire. It’s cold but there’s fire. It’s gone, it’s gone. All of it’s gone. All he knows is that it’s gone. He’s on fire. He feels like he’s on fire. He’s leaving fire in the snow. Follow the fire, they’ll follow it wherever they go. A bad plan. A terrible plan. It’s all such a terrible plan. This was it? This was it? This was the plan? He’s leaving fire in the snow.
“Don’t,” he hears, gruff and demanding. Insisting. Ordering. How dare he give the orders! “Don’t. Stay here. Stay with me, don’t go.”
The boots will leave tracks. They’ll come anyway. They’ll come anyway. The man had no boots for him. Boots for himself, but no boots for him. This was the plan? This couldn’t have been the plan.
“Other side. My other side. I’m sorry.”
He’s shifted. He’s jostled. He can’t walk on his own, and the man is tiring from the hauling of him. He’s all fire and dead weight. He’s leaving fire in the snow. The boots start to crunch again, but where there’s fire in him, it’s now pressed against the man’s body. With each step, his fire bumps against the man with the boots only for himself.
The fire grows and before he can scream, the man’s hand is covering his mouth. Again. Again. He has to swallow the screams down. He wants them out, he needs them out, he’s full to bursting with the need to let the screams out, but this man, again and again, this man makes him swallow the screams.
“I’m sorry!” the man says. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. We’re almost…almost…”
The boots crunch in the snow. The boots crunch in the snow. He cries, from the fire, from before the fire, from things he can’t unsee, and the droplets freeze in the corners of his eyes. He can hardly keep them open. The boots crunch in the snow.
“There will be help. There will be help,” the man promises him. He says more words, many more words that ought to mean something, many more words that ought to bring hope, but the fire is spreading. The fire is spilling from him, and he fears that he’ll be empty before they reach where the help is.
“Stay with me. Stay with me, don’t go. You can’t go.”
Stop ordering me around, he wants to scream, but the words are trapped. So he knows his only way to protest is to disobey. The man with the boots for himself and no boots for him, it’s this man’s wish that he stays. He spills fire, the boots leave prints. They’ll find them. They’ll find them anyway, what does it matter? It’s the man’s wish that he stays, so he does what makes sense. The opposite makes sense. How dare this man give the orders! He gives in to the pain, he gives in to the things he can’t unsee. He gives in to the fire and the swallowed screams and he doesn’t stay.
He goes.
-now-
Gyoranzaka Home for Boys
Takanawa, Workers’ Republic of Minato
It always took him hours to attend to the snows. They were half a mile from the main road, through a forest that had been thinned like the threads on an old sweater. It was Kitagawa’s army that camped a mile away from Takanawa town proper, out by the boys’ home, back then. They’d approached the capital, Keio, from the north, but they waited out a winter here. An army of that size, they took and took. Firewood, materials for troop barracks, they took from the forest to build and wait it out.
“It never used to be that bad,” Headmaster Joshima always said when the first snows spread from the mountains behind them to blanket the foothills near Takanawa, the boys’ home a mile away. “But without the forest, it’s harder.”
Without the forest, the wind blew harder. It didn’t have so many trees to contend with, so many trees to collide with. The wicked, full-powered wind made the drifts near the Gyoranzaka Home for Boys rise to a foot tall, two feet tall. They didn’t have the petrol budget for a mechanical plow. It was on him to clear it all away. Him and his shovel. The boys helped, but they never lasted long. They diligently cleared their playground with shovels and brooms, skidding their marbles around on the patches of ice that dotted the courtyard as soon as the ground was visible again. The path from the building to the road, that was on him. The boys didn’t help with work that didn’t directly affect them, and he couldn’t begrudge them that. Marbles were serious business at Gyoranzaka, pockets stuffed to the brim with them when the meal bell clanged and they had to go back inside.
The shovel scraped the path, the hard-packed dirt turning the pure white into a dulled, speckled gray, and he lifted. If he got lost enough in the shoveling, he could forget the pain in his shoulder that flared with every dump of snow to his left, off the path and out of the way. If he got lost in the shoveling, his head could clear. It was a job he liked, even as it pained him. Even as it exhausted him. Even when the wind whipped through the half-gone forest, pushing a dusting of snow back onto the path that he’d already cleared behind him. He liked the jobs where he could forget and just do. The path to the road was clear or it was not clear, and there was nothing complicated about it.
It was nearly sunset when it was clear, which meant that the man in the truck from town could come in the morning. The truck from town brought them food, whatever donations had been gathered and whatever else had been ordered from the home’s government-assisted budget. It was lean times, Headmaster Joshima always said, but when hadn’t it been lean times? The lean times were just getting leaner. The staff was on one third portions so that the boys might at least get by on half. There was no meat unless Koya was sent to put out a trap for rabbits, but they’d gone almost a month ago, the rabbits. Too cold.
He trudged back through the snow, dragging his shovel behind him and feeling the throb in his shoulder. It made his fingers twinge, shake. Sometimes he lost feeling in them and not because of the cold. No, he had good gloves, a pair of Headmaster Joshima’s that he’d given to Koya especially for winter. “You need these more than me.”
His shed was behind the building, nothing more than a half-assed wooden lean-to with a door that always stuck, especially in the winter cold. But some of the boys had built it ages ago, boys who had hoped to be apprenticed to a carpenter in town. Headmaster Joshima couldn’t bear to see it torn down and rebuilt. The boys who had hoped to be apprenticed to a carpenter in town had been drafted, and not a one had returned to the Gyoranzaka Home for Boys. Orphans, they made for easy choices in a draft. And there had been so many, many wars.
Koya yanked the door open, wincing at the continued ache in his shoulder, throughout his entire body, and he put his shovel back. He closed it up, the chain and padlock keeping it locked up tight as he pocketed the heavy iron key once more. He sighed, hurrying to the staff entrance and leaving his boots in the entryway, switching to the thick-soled winter slippers worn indoors by everyone from the headmaster to the youngest boy at this time of year. The staff dining room was empty. To save on heating costs, everyone ate in the main hall with the boys now. But there was a note on the table.
Yoshimoto-san, please come to my office when you are finished with the snow.
He took off his heavy gloves, the gift from Headmaster Joshima, as well as the thinner pair of gloves he wore under them to provide extra protection from blisters. His pale fingers brushed against the note, against the smear of ink that left a smudge on “snow.” He’d be eating late tonight, if he’d screwed up again.
He went to his room first, depositing his overcoat, his ugly red scarf (a donation from some knitting widow in town that the boys had all ridiculed and rejected and given to him instead), his wool hat. He had no mirror in his room, settling for running a hand through his hair and hoping that the smell of his sweat-soaked body wouldn’t offend the headmaster too much.
He knocked on the door, hearing Headmaster Joshima’s kind and soft-spoken voice bid him to enter. He bowed his head the moment he was in the door. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long, Headmaster. There was a lot of snow today.”
“No, no, Yoshimoto-san, it’s okay.” The Headmaster’s office was always cold. The dormitories and classrooms were somewhat insulated, heated with wood-burning stoves, but staff offices were not. Joshima was sitting as usual behind his oak desk, pulling his spectacles from his face and laying them down. He was bundled up from head to toe, his hands poking from the sleeves of his overcoat like a shy turtle peeking its head from its shell.
Koya took a seat and saw how tired the Headmaster looked. Koya knew the man was maybe only ten years older than him, but his was a heavy burden. Gyoranzaka was currently home to 247 boys, though they really only had the space and budget for 125. And still he took them in, boys orphaned from the wars or boys whose parents had had one child too many, too many mouths to feed. In exchange for government support, whichever government it was that currently controlled Minato, places like Gyoranzaka were the first called upon to fill ranks. Foot soldiers. Cannon fodder.
It had been peaceful, lately, since General Higashiyama had come to power. His network of secret police, informants, they were rotten to the core, but somehow things got done. Funding came to the boys’ home on schedule, even though the amounts dwindled from month to month. Lean times. Joshima had been hopeful that some of this year’s “graduates” would be able to join a trade in Takanawa or maybe in the capital. The boys were forced to leave at 18, to make their own way. Most years, they were drafted into the ranks of whichever general’s army held Keio. Maybe those turning 18 this year would get a taste of what a normal life could be. Not that Yoshimoto Koya knew what that was like, aside from the books he was allowed to read from Gyoranzaka’s small, moldy library collection.
Headmaster Joshima was looking at him with such sadness. There was pity in his face often, and Koya really didn’t like it. He never had and was mostly glad that his work kept him outside, away from those looks. “Yoshimoto-san, I have some bad news today.”
“Oh?” He’d done it again, he thought bitterly. How far would they move his room? In his first months, they’d housed him near the staff dorms. Hell, they’d even given him a bunkmate to start. But his nightmares had put an end to that. An end to the bunkmate and an end to the staff dorms. After almost thirteen years here, thirteen long years of shoveling snow and pulling weeds, they still kept him in an old closet under the main stairwell at night. Could they hear his screams, his nightmares, even from there?
“We’ve just received this month’s government allotment,” Joshima said. “With winter and the recent intake from town…”
Koya gripped the arms of his chair, quaking in rage. They shouldn’t have taken those boys. Those last four sickly boys from the closing orphanage in town. Their medicine cost too much. It was unfair to spend more on them when so many other boys needed food, a warm bed.
“With all of that, the rest of the staff and I have come to the conclusion that we no longer need a dedicated groundskeeper.”
Koya’s mouth went dry. “Sir,” he muttered quietly. “Sir, it’s…it’s January, sir…”
Joshima reached a hand out across the desk, but Koya wouldn’t take it. “I cannot give up anything more. I cannot. The older boys can attend to the snow. And to the repairs.”
“Sir, you can’t turn me away,” Koya whispered. Thirteen years he’d been loyal. He’d learned it all as best he could, the fixing of things, from a handyman in town. Without Gyoranzaka, he had nothing. He had nobody. Or if he did, he couldn’t remember. And they were turning him out so suddenly? What costs did he incur that were suddenly too much of a burden now? He worked for his place under the stairwell, which he kept clean and neat. He worked for his meals, even as he gladly ate less than he should so that the boys might grow stronger. He worked for the pain cream that came in from town with the truck, that he used as sparingly as he could so he could make it last longer even when he ached.
Was it the pain cream? Was it too costly? Or was it the nightmares? Did he scare the boys?
“I’m sorry, Yoshimoto-san. I’ve kept you as long as I could. You know I have done everything in my power…”
Every year he’d been on the chopping block, but Joshima had said no. Yoshimoto Koya served this country, he always argued. Are we to turn him away? Is this how we thank those who sacrifice themselves to protect us? It seemed that Joshima’s ability to protect him had run its course.
“You can stay through the end of the week. With your skills, you might find work in town. You have been a real help here for so many years.”
“Then why? I’ll eat less. I’ll give up on my pain cream…”
Joshima shut his eyes. “The space under the stairwell. We might fit two, three boys there. Young ones. The overcrowding in the dorms is becoming a burden.”
“I would share. You know I would willingly share.”
“I know you would, but they would not be comfortable with you,” Joshima admitted quietly. “I am sorry, Yoshimoto-san, I must be firm in my decision. In lieu of full severance pay, I can negotiate with a friend of mine who works for the railway. If you’d rather not try your luck in Takanawa, he can get you to Keio. There are always opportunities in the capital.”
There were always lines for rice in the capital, Koya had been told. Where would he go, where would he stay? The nightmares that plagued him for as long as he could remember, that clung to his brain and wouldn’t let go, parasitic agonies that woke him in a cold sweat at least once a week, if not more. The snow, the snow, the pain of it. The images that never quite made sense. They woke him, and he screamed. He screamed until his throat was raw, until someone came and pounded on the stairs above him to wake him, to shut him up. With his nightmares, no decent boarding house would keep him very long.
The scarring near his left shoulder, front and back, it would pain him for the rest of his days. One of his first memories, one of the things that always stuck with him, was the doctor telling him so. It had been a bullet wound, in through the front and clean out through the back. It had torn his flesh up and since he hadn’t gotten to a hospital quickly enough, it had festered. The infection, the fever…the first week in that hospital was something Koya couldn’t remember well. But at least he remembered it had happened.
Anything before that, though, was a problem. He’d been brought to the soldiers’ hospital, Kamezuka Hospital, outside Gunma Town, with his wound. He’d also lost two toes on his right foot to frostbite. Even this many years later Koya walked with a sort of limping gait, often resorting to stuffing his boot with a mound of wool to take their place, to help him walk when he tired of the boys’ teasing imitations. Yoshimoto Koya was the name on his intake forms, so he supposed that was his name, though he couldn’t answer the questions of where he was from, his military rank, how he’d been wounded, why he hadn’t been given basic treatment at the front lines, and whose army he’d served in. The hospital had patched up his wounds, but they’d never managed to fix his head.
The wound, even with the infection, hadn’t been enough to really induce amnesia. The doctors had concluded that he’d seen something in the trenches, something horrible enough for his mind to lock it away, to make him forget. The nightmares that poked through, waking him in the middle of the night unable to breathe, it was his memories trying to come back, but somehow he couldn’t unlock the puzzle. All these years later, Koya wondered what horrors he’d seen that had left him this way. But then, after a nightmare, Koya didn’t really want to know what had made him this way. Would he ever be whole? He mostly doubted it.
He’d come to depend on Headmaster Joshima’s kindness. When Kamezuka Hospital couldn’t justify treating him any longer (or probably because they couldn’t actually fix what was broken with him), he’d found his way to the Gyoranzaka Home for Boys. He’d survived by doing odd jobs and accepting the indignity that was being a grown man and sleeping on a bedroll under a stairwell. His age upon reaching Kamezuka Hospital had been registered as 18 (something he couldn’t prove or disprove), and here he was now, nearly 34 years old with no family, no friends. Nobody had ever come to the hospital or the boys’ home looking for Yoshimoto Koya, to fill in the blanks, to tell him who he was.
“Maybe you were an aristocrat,” one of the staff members, Tsumabuki-san, always teased him. “Since you can read and play as good as you do.”
Apparently Yoshimoto Koya, though he’d arrived in the hospital in the garb of a common soldier, had been an educated young man. Koya devoured any book, anything with words that was placed in front of him. One time he’d gotten halfway through a book written in a foreign language before realizing it wasn’t his seemingly native tongue. He’d been taught that language, but when? By whom? He’d discovered a talent for music, occasionally playing the out of tune old piano during some of the boys’ singing performances to sucker donors into sending the home more money. He’d found that out when he was halfway through a song, his fingers flying over the keys, having barely registered sitting down on the piano bench and getting started.
“The last thing anyone in this country should want to be,” another staff member, Ariyoshi-san, had teased, “is an aristocrat.”
An aristocrat. A common soldier. A groundskeeper with a limp and perpetual bags under his eyes. Yoshimoto Koya knew only his life at Gyoranzaka Home for Boys. A new start, it ought to have frightened him. Work in Takanawa, that ought to be his aim. But he had been to town, and he knew their stares. He knew their whispers. It was the dead of winter, and he knew that there’d be no real work in town until rice planting come spring. With his bad shoulder, he’d be a risky hire anyhow.
He cleared his throat, knowing when he wasn’t wanted or needed. “Headmaster, your offer regarding Keio is very generous. I would be pleased to accept.”
-
Takamatsu Residence Block 9
Keio, Workers’ Republic of Minato
There were whispers that the new blocks going up, the potential blocks 17-20 in Takamatsu, were going to have lifts. They could build them taller, that was the main reasoning behind it. More floors, more apartments. Space in Keio had been hard to come by even in the old days, but since the genesis of the republic, more and more people came to the capital in search of something better. He was fairly certain nobody ever found that something better. But once they got here, there was no going back. Men, women, children, crowded into each new set of blocks that went up.
The row houses and simple tenements Jun remembered from childhood had been bulldozed in favor of the blocks. Neighborhoods that used to house a thousand now bore the burden of ten thousand. Hastily done concrete slabs, five or six uniform floors. Shoddy workmanship left the buildings easily shaken and cracked from small earthquakes. The builders never put in a lot of effort since they were often contracted by the government, which changed hands so often that work orders might get lost in the shuffle. Getting things done quickly, when there was still someone to cut the check, that was the way of things now. When the “big one” struck someday, the loss of life would be catastrophic.
The good thing about the lifts, Jun figured, was that the value of his own apartment would remain unchanged. Apartments in the blocks with the lifts would go for a premium, and rents in their block would probably remain manageable. Nino complained day in, day out about having to climb the five flights of steps to the apartment they shared, but the yen saved from being at the top floor of a block without lifts was something he valued even more than Jun did.
Two children from the third floor came flying down the steps, a brother and sister in coats missing half their buttons. “Fish Man!” they howled when they went by. “Ew, gross, it’s Fish Man!”
Jun smirked, continuing his slow trudge upward. “You’re more than just a Fish Man,” Nino often argued, when he sat hunched over the low table, squinting in candlelight. “You’re Fish and Oil Man.”
Whatever his moniker, Jun had employment and that was more than many people had. He’d driven the sputtering delivery truck for Ohno Fishmongers for more than a decade now, and if that meant he came home smelling like exhaust and halibut, then so be it. Although he didn’t particularly like the smell either.
He fumbled in his pocket for the key, twisting it in the lock and stepping into their apartment. They were on the top floor of Block 9, housed between an elderly couple whose apartment always stunk of boiled cabbage and a widow with four screaming mouths to feed. It wasn’t ideal, but it wouldn’t be for much longer.
He hoped.
He unlaced his boots, sighing. It had been a long day. He started deliveries just before sunrise and only finished in the middle of the afternoon, having hauled orders off the truck and into shops and restaurants all over the capital. His roommate, however, did not have a fixed schedule. He went out whenever he felt like making money, and if his other “services” were needed, he usually opted to meet clients in the crowded marketplace down the road, moving among the other shoppers so government operatives would be unlikely to overhear his conversation.
“I’m home,” he announced, leaving the boots in the corner and tugging off his wool coat. In summer he was able to wear lighter cotton clothing to work, but in the dead of winter, wool was the only option and the smell of his work clung to it and wouldn’t let go. The small closet in the genkan was reserved for Jun’s coat and gloves and hat, a stopgap measure to keep the whole apartment from stinking of fish. And oil.
“Welcome home,” came the thin, sing-song voice of his roommate. Ninomiya Kazunari was Jun’s age, the pair of them having both arrived at thirty-two years that summer. But where Jun was broad and strong, having spent the last ten years hauling heavy crates of fish from one end of Keio to another, his roommate was small and jittery, a sly fellow with sharp, intelligent eyes who’d been in survival mode for many more years than Jun.
Jun all but collapsed onto the floor, putting his glasses on the table top and tugging on the kotatsu’s blanket to cover half of himself. Nino, firmly ensconced beneath the blanket on the opposite side, looked cozy and content. “I’ve got an idea.”
“I wanna sleep,” Jun grumbled in reply. Lately when Nino had ideas, it meant the two of them bundling up and walking many futile miles, until Nino complained about his boots pinching his toes.
“Sleep when you’re dead,” Nino chided him, pushing aside the newspapers that he had cluttering up the table. “Strategy change.”
Jun shut his eyes. “Again?”
“We’ve been going about this the wrong way entirely,” Nino said, tapping the table with a few of his stubby little fingers. “It’s a scientific fact that women are the smarter sex, right?”
“Not a scientist,” Jun grumbled. “Dunno. Probably.” They certainly took a lot of stupid risks together, he and Nino.
“So then why are we still pursuing the Princess tack?”
“Because you wanna sleep with all the candidates,” Jun said bluntly, hearing Nino’s snort of laughter.
“Ah, that’s right,” Nino responded. “But even I have to admit that the temporary pleasures of the audition process have not brought about long-term results. I think we have to switch to men.”
Jun sighed.
“This does add some complications,” Nino admitted. “Visas for a husband and a wife are less likely to raise eyebrows. Three men traveling together might be trickier. But think of the possibilities it opens. We don’t have as many limits. A Princess Eriko with manners and a specific look, that’s a tricky business. Change to men and we’ve got two age groups to look for. Doubling our chances of success.”
At the mention of Princess Eriko, Jun winced. But he let Nino keep blathering on. Sometimes he was able to fall asleep while Nino was talking, and Nino was eventually able to take the hint that he was on his own that day. It was the fifteenth anniversary this year, and in their New Year’s Day address a few weeks earlier, the sentimental King and Queen of Chiba had upped the reward money if someone arrived with legitimate proof before the year was up. Were they just going to drop the matter entirely after the New Year? Nobody knew, but Nino had convinced himself that this year was their year.
This was the year he and Jun were going to pull off the scam of the century.
Fifteen years ago, when Jun was seventeen, the royal family - King Hiroki, Queen Kanako, and their three children - had been murdered. Jun knew the date better than most. Even before most of the Loyalists had been executed, the rumors had been swirling. Rumors that the children might have survived. It was the Crown Princess most had been rooting for, simply because she was the safest bet. The Sakurai family had had an heir and a spare, so the girl was no threat. And how could soldiers gun down a sweet, innocent teenage girl in cold blood?
The same way they’d gunned down her parents, Jun knew. The same way they’d gunned down her older brother and younger brother, their bodies dumped like trash in an open, unmarked grave. They were dead, of that Jun was certain, but Nino wasn’t terribly concerned with facts, even the truth Jun had seen with his own eyes. The rumors had grown so pervasive that the royal family of the neighboring Kingdom of Chiba had spent the last several years offering a monetary reward for proof that any members of the Sakurai family had survived. The Queen of Chiba was Queen Kanako’s sister, so whichever regime ruled Minato indulged the royal family’s hopeful plea to avoid drawing Chiba out of their neutral status. And by now, fifteen years gone, nobody in Minato really cared if they’d survived or not.
For the last several months, Jun had helped Nino to hunt down their own Princess Eriko. She’d have been twenty-eight this year, and Keio was not the easiest place to search. Many women of twenty-eight were married, had borne children. There was no talking those women into sneaking out of the country, slipping into Chiba and proclaiming themselves the long lost Princess of Minato.
That mostly left poor women, down on their luck women. It irritated Jun, accompanying Nino to factories and eyeballing the women who came out after a long, back-breaking shift. Many of them probably longed to escape, but none of them fit the “Princess” profile. Rough, callused hands. Malnourished bodies, dead eyes from hours on the assembly line. Nino had sampled his share of Keio’s women in his search for a willing participant in the scheme, but no amount of coaching was going to get any of these women to a Princess Eriko status any time soon.
It was almost February, so they technically had through the end of the year to train someone and make their way to Chiba, but Nino was stir-crazy. Since General Higashiyama had taken power, petty crime was being punished with a harshness that would have made King Hiroki blush. Nino had run a pickpocketing racket out of Tamachi Station for years, but when one of his boys had been executed on the spot, a man’s wallet still in hand, he’d closed up shop abruptly before any more of his kids met a similar fate.
That meant he had fallen back on his other job, forging work permits and travel visas. It meant sitting alone in the apartment for hours, imitating signatures and seals. Nino was a criminal, had been since before he and Jun had met, and yet Jun didn’t care. One of Nino’s forgeries meant new possibilities. A worker laid off from one factory could obtain employment in another without having to be on a government wait list for months, could feed his family. Whoever ruled Minato, those were the real criminals, Jun knew.
One of the children in the apartment next door started sobbing, and Jun knew he wasn’t going to enjoy the simple pleasures of an afternoon nap. He sat up slowly, running a hand through his hair. Nino grinned at the messy mop of black on top of Jun’s head. Nino preferred to keep his closely cropped, but Jun had been a soldier and would never keep his hair so short again.
He put his glasses back on, yawning. “Okay, sensei,” Jun said, seeing a completed stack of work permits under Nino’s inkwell. “Where do you propose we start looking for Prince Ryota?”
“Aim higher, Jun-kun,” Nino said. “All the boys Ryota’s age are probably trapped in the army. We need to go for the big prize.”
Jun felt his stomach twist in knots. Eriko…somehow it had always been more palatable when it was Eriko.
Nino leaned forward, smiling gleefully like a cat presenting a dead mouse to his master. “We’re going to train ourselves a Crown Prince Sho.”
-then-
Noribetsu Ryokan
Gunma Town, Kingdom of Minato
He paces the floor again and again. He can’t sit still, not as the minutes tick by and nobody comes. She had pressed the pouch of coins into his hand and kissed him on both cheeks. She’d held his face in her hands, her eyes firm and determined.
“You take this, Jun. You take this and it should be enough to get you to the border.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” he’d whined.
“I have to take a different way. We can’t all go together,” she had said. “We will meet again, I promise.”
She’s trusting him with this, but he doesn’t want to go. He has enough money to get them to a train, sure, but won’t they be suspicious? She hasn’t thought this through, but it’s all come about so suddenly, he supposes she didn’t have time to think logically about it.
But she also said that a soldier would be bringing him before midnight, and it’s long past. The ryokan is quiet, and Gunma Town has gone to bed. It’s probably suspicious to keep the lantern lit, but she told him to do it. “Leave a light so the lieutenant will know where to bring him.”
It’s such a bad plan.
Jun stops pacing about twenty minutes later when he hears the clomping of horses on cobblestones. Even from his room in the rear of the ryokan, a large courtyard separating him from the main road, he can already hear the shouting. His heart starts to pound in his chest. Horses, at this hour? It can only be the guards from Sakura House. Something’s gone wrong. They’ve come to Gunma Town, so something has gone wrong.
They sound close, and he hears boots pounding in the corridor a few minutes later. He ought to go to sleep, pretend to just be another person sleeping, but they’ll know him on sight. The guards will see him here and know that he’s part of the deception. She told him to stay, to wait, but it’s clear that something has gone wrong. In seconds he’s dressed in the dark cloak she found for him, tying his boots. He puts his heavy pack onto his shoulders. It’s heavy only because he’s carrying clothing and a few days’ rations for himself and for the Crown Prince. He considers dumping the extra but decides not to.
He extinguishes the lantern, his whole body trembling as he hears people in the ryokan start to scream. He sneaks out into the hall, seeing a handful of guards heading down a separate corridor. Jun hurries, exiting through the stable where he’d tied up Yama. The horse is the only one in here for the night, and she’s extremely agitated when Jun enters, tries to pull her from her stall. He’s never been good with animals.
“Ssh, be quiet, you stupid horse,” Jun hisses, the pack weighing him down. There’s no time to saddle her up, but if they find Yama in the stable they’ll think that Sho is here in the ryokan. They were supposed to ride her together, on their great escape to whatever town with a train station would get them to the border. “Yama, come on!”
He opens the stable door and before he can give the horse a smack on the rump, she’s racing out of the stable and out into the night.
“Damn it! Yama!”
When Jun gets out into the street, Sho’s beloved horse is long gone and the guards from Sakura House, General Kitagawa’s appointed jailers, are putting shops and houses in the Gunma Town market square to the torch. Jun’s eyes widen. They’re not just looking for Sho. They’re trying to smoke him out of hiding, and if they have to burn down civilian residences to do it, they will.
“No,” Jun murmurs, hearing screams as soldiers start breaking into houses, setting more on fire. “No, they can’t do this.”
“Sakurai Sho!” says one of the guards, rifle in hand and out before him in an aggressive stance. “Sakurai Sho, you will show yourself! If any of you are harboring Sakurai Sho, you will be arrested!”
If the guards are in Gunma Town, then who is watching the family at Sakura House? Jun nearly drops the pack when he realizes. There’s no need to watch the family if the family’s already been killed.
It was mere hours ago that she pressed the pouch of coins in his hand and told him to wait. That the soldier who would be coming was a Loyalist and would bring Sho to the ryokan. He listened because he’d do anything for her. Anything she ever asked, even if it was stupid like this plan.
But if the family’s already been killed, if all of this has been for nothing…
“Mother,” he whispers, tears pricking his eyes.
It takes everything he has not to scream as he races through the streets of Gunma Town, buildings already collapsing in heaps of burning timber. He has to get back. He has to get back there. He hears gunshots behind him, but he doesn’t slow down, even with the pack on his back.
It’s twenty minutes on horseback from Sakura House to Gunma Town, but that sort of speed is not possible now. His boots carry him through the snow as he stays off the main road. Nobody’s following him yet. But Gunma Town is burning, he’s lost Yama, and she promised that they would meet again.
She promised!
-now-
Mita Palace
Keio, Workers’ Republic of Minato
He’d left his third boarding house that week, and this time it wasn’t because of the nightmares. He’d been in a big room, a long row of bunked beds, and someone had waited until he was asleep to try and see if he had any money to steal. The joke was on that guy, since Koya had taken the Keio train ride instead of a payout from Headmaster Joshima. He had little more than the clothes on his back and a handful of coins.
Coins that, given the inflation rate in Keio and across most of the country, meant he had enough for two more hot meals, maybe three and that was it. Koya hadn’t really had to think much about money in the last several years. He’d never been paid in money, but in food and shelter and pain cream. Now those coins were the difference between starvation and one more day’s survival in a capital city that didn’t want him.
Headmaster Joshima, entrenched as he was in a backwater like Takanawa, didn’t really know how things worked in Keio. Almost all factory jobs required a work permit. In a country ostensibly called a “Workers’ Republic,” the workers had very little under their control. Industry, manufacturing, these jobs went to people who put in their applications months in advance, or to those who knew a guy that knew a guy who could move him up a list.
Outside of the big factories, the large companies that kept the country humming no matter who was in charge, there were small businesses, but Koya hadn’t found anything that could match his qualifications so far. The clearing of snow was a civil servant position, another government list he couldn’t get on since he didn’t really have an identity card. He had only the intake form from the hospital that identified him as Yoshimoto Koya, and the tattered paper had been folded again and again over the years. He had a recommendation letter from Headmaster Joshima, too, but his name and position meant nothing in the capital. All groundskeeper work at big companies and buildings of the capital would run a check on him, and he couldn’t verify a single thing.
Maybe he should have stayed in Takanawa, endured their judgment and pity. He’d spent the last week on his feet seeking employment in the bitter cold, the boot on his right foot jammed tight with newsprint and cotton to slightly adjust his gait, but still, a job recruiter could see a man who was less than perfect the moment he walked in the door. The limp he tried so hard to hide, the stiff way he kept his left arm against his side when he walked to avoid moving his shoulder more than necessary. Koya knew he’d work hard in any job, but nobody was willing to give him a chance. And it wasn’t like anyone was looking to hire someone who could both shovel the sidewalk and play a piano sonata by ear.
Instead of looking for another boarding house and parting with his remaining coins, he’d returned to a spot that he’d passed a day earlier. Mita Palace had housed Minato’s royal family in the years before the Glorious Revolt, and standing there at the gate, Koya had felt the strangest sensation pass through him. It had been a grand old place once, though now it had been stripped down of anything valuable. Even the window glass and shutters had been torn away. He didn’t know which army he’d served in before getting shot. Maybe his odd feelings were letting him know that he’d fought for the Loyalist cause. There’d still been a cause those first few years before most of the Loyalists had been executed.
An old woman carrying her daily allotment from one of the food lines had stood beside him, pointing a gnarled finger at the building. They gutted the place, she’d explained like some tour guide, just after the revolt. With the family dead, General Kitagawa had ordered the furniture destroyed until one of his advisors told him to make a profit from it. Paintings and sculptures had been sold to museums in other countries. The Queen’s jewels financed the General’s eventual military campaigns against the other hopeful upstarts that plunged Minato into civil war for years.
The place was finally due to be torn down within the month, the old woman had explained. It had sat here for fifteen years, emptied and stripped of everything that had made it wondrous. It now housed several dozen homeless, who lit fires in the old fireplaces, who pissed and shat in what had once been royal bedchambers. “It’ll be a new set of residence blocks,” the woman said. “Mita’s too far from the center of town to be worth turning into government offices.”
Koya entered through the open gate in the back by the servants’ entrance. He wasn’t quite sure why he knew that was what it was, but maybe the old woman had mentioned it the other day. He had trouble focusing sometimes, and staring at Mita Palace had given him a headache. Probably because one family had kept all this grandeur to themselves. No wonder they’d been overthrown.
There weren’t as many people inside as Koya had anticipated, walking through the barren kitchens and into what might have been a grand dining room. Maybe with the impending destruction of the building, most people had sought shelter elsewhere. The carpets had been ripped up haphazardly, patches of it still tacked to the floor, while a chandelier sat by its lonesome in a corner, shards of glass ringing it. Each room he passed through stunk more than the one that had come before it, the ground littered with rat droppings, spoiled food, flyers for political rallies a decade old.
He avoided the stairwells leading up to the second floor, presuming that the bedchambers and other private rooms had already been claimed by the homeless and other squatters who had taken over the palace. His job hunt would continue, but at least for now he could stretch his coins for a few more days. He found himself in a large reception hall, or maybe it had been a ballroom. It wasn’t like Koya had ever attended something fancy like that. The doors had been torn off the hinges, leaving the room open and undefended.
Some of the windows remained, though one corner of the room was home to a mound of snow, torn curtains fluttering in the bitter winter wind coming through the shattered glass. His boots thumped across the tiled floor, crunching on garbage. He couldn’t help looking up, seeing that the ceilings were elaborately painted. Even in the dim remaining sunlight of the January afternoon, Koya could see the pathetic reminders of a bygone era. A watery landscape, fat green lotus leaves spread across the surface. It might have been beautiful, once.
There was a raised platform at the opposite end of the room. The king’s throne had been here, his brain informed him, though Koya again was unsure why he knew this. This knowledge was something like his piano, maybe. Something he’d learned in the time he couldn’t remember. There were dark scrapes on the floor here, so perhaps the throne had been tugged away, moved and sold or destroyed.
Koya crouched down, his gloved fingers moving along the dark scratches gouged into the floor. Suddenly his head throbbed and he felt dizzy, almost toppling back onto his ass. He’d been walking all day, and he needed to rest. This room was too empty, and even in his heavy coat he’d probably freeze if he slept in here at night, exposed to the elements. He got to his feet and passed through a creaking door at the rear of the reception hall.
The parlor beyond had clearly housed several people recently, since the smell of sweat and piss still lingered prominently. Koya shuddered a bit, not liking his options. He’d lived in a small space for many years, but he’d kept things clean. But the parlor had a door that closed and no windows. He wouldn’t freeze to death in here. He dropped his small satchel in a corner, the one that fortunately had not been used as a latrine. The floor was hard, but someone had left behind a makeshift pallet of cardboard that would cushion him a little.
He sat down heavily, rifling through his satchel to find the small onigiri wrapped in newspaper that had been the breakfast provided that morning at the boarding house. He’d gone the whole day, saving it, and the bottle he carried around was still half full with water from the boarding house tap. Even in his bag it was half frozen, and he tapped it against the floor again and again to try and encourage the ice to melt. Koya was used to meager meals, but this one seemed even sadder than most. He needed to find employment and soon.
Even as he ate, his headache persisted. He shut his eyes, leaning his forehead against his knee. It had been building and building, ever since he’d entered the palace. Koya didn’t believe in things like curses, though if any place in Minato was cursed, Mita Palace probably was. How many walls had he passed by that day that had been graffitied with words like “Death to the monarchy” or “Let the people rise up”? Maybe those angry feelings had seeped into the walls, the rage permeating the air the same as human waste.
“It hurts,” he mumbled, his voice sounding pathetically small in the abandoned room.
He wasn’t sure when or how he managed to fall asleep, but this time when the nightmare came, nobody was there to interrupt or wake him. He woke, body trembling and cold, his throat aching from the screams he must have let out. He didn’t remember the nightmares well, just images usually. Flashes. This one had been so vivid though. In this one, he’d been in the reception hall, the ballroom, whatever it was. He’d been playing a piano in the center of the hall, the room crowded from one end to the other with people in fancy dress. When he’d finished, the floor had opened up, swallowing him and the piano both as the crowd erupted into vigorous applause.
Part Two