The Space Between Friend and Foe

Warnings for language, adult themes, and references to wartime violence. This story is a WIP.

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Alight

Kyuuzou stepped through the doorway of the café with circumspection. Tucked away at the end of an alley with a corrugated aluminum roof and a cracked stoop laden with graffiti, the building looked as though its leaning walls would collapse like a deck of cards given a strong enough wind. As his eyes adjusted to the candlelight, however, he was surprised to discover how deceiving the shoddy exterior was. Inside, the wooden floor shone with regular care, its lean planks stretching the length of the establishment. That, too surprised him, for it went much further back than he would've thought and included second-level balcony seating, all of which was full. The thick wooden tables and chairs, built tall in the manner of foreign fashion, were handsome in the hazy glow of chandelier candles. His eye followed the slant of the high ceiling's sturdy beams, appreciating the architectural aesthetic.



The café was around the corner from the gambling house where he had been so rudely interrupted the night before. After everything had been settled and the guards had put down their bows and retreated, Hyogo had suggested meeting at the café the next evening. "I'll try to be there an hour after nightfall, but it all depends on how soon His Excellency gives me leave. If you find yourself waiting too long, then leave and come back. But I will meet you, I promise." Hyogo had touched him on the shoulder, giving it a lingering squeeze, trailing his fingers down Kyuuzou's arm as he turned and left. And Kyuuzou could only stare after him in shock. Those pretty, painted eyes, the moonlight in Hyogo's face--all day as Kyuuzou traveled through the city, these details haunted him, partly because they were in such stark contrast to the last time he saw the samurai.



Kyuuzou stood at Hyogo's side. Hyogo's face, ashen with shame, made Kyuuzou's stomach twist into knots. He rubbed his own bald head, wiped away the blood still seeping from the careless cut the barber made at the nape of his neck. Hyogo caught a lock of hair that fell into his lap, tried to hide it, but the barber snatched it out of his hands and threw it in the fire. "You like having lice?" the barber muttered, and shoved Hyogo's shoulder, ushering him out of the seat for the next soldier to sit for the same treatment. Afterward, Kyuuzou took Hyogo away from the camp, where he could come undone with dignity. Several weeks of dysentery had taken their toll on his comrade, and Hyogo, ailing in both body and spirit, retched at the base of a tree. "My cousins, my uncles, my grandfather, his grandfather--all the samurai of my house have always kept long hair, always." Hyogo squeezed his eyes shut, covered his face with a hand as his voice broke. "My father...my father would die if he saw me like this." Kyuuzou put his arm across Hyogo's back, holding him close as he sobbed, and said gently, "It's a good thing, then, that he's already dead."



Over four years ago that had been, and he recalled that day in his memory with disturbing clarity. As he found a table in the corner and sat down, he absently fingered the scar at the base of his skull, just to double check that it was still there.



Kyuuzou wasn't waiting more than half an hour before Hyogo strolled up to the table. Smiling enigmatically but with no words of greeting, Hyogo took off his coat and put it on the back of the chair. "I'm going to need alcohol for this," he said as he sat down, gesturing for a server, and Kyuuzou heard the edge in his words, saw it in his movements. "Warm sake for both of us, please," Hyogo told the young man who came to the table. "And a small cup of imo-jochu on the side, straight up."



The server raised his eyebrows. "The sweet potato shochu...without water, it's very strong, samurai-sama."



"Yes," Hyogo said, looking at the man over his glasses. "Exactly."



Hyogo produced a box from his coat pocket, pulled out a thin brown cigarette and lit it. Kyuuzou noted the leather gloves, the fine silk kimono, the thick hoop earrings of silver. Hyogo's hair, streaming over his shoulders once again, glistened with oil and manicure, especially where his topknot caught the light. Life in Kougakyo had apparently been very good to his friend.



"So," Hyogo said, sitting back and resting his elbows on the arms of the chair. "Where have you been, Kyuuzou-dono?"



"All over." Kyuuzou let his gaze roam over the other tables, keeping an eye on things, avoiding the question.



Hyogo cocked an eyebrow, blew out a long exhale of smoke from one side of his mouth. "From the look of you, I'd say you've been on the move quite a while."



Kyuuzou nodded once, though he smiled inwardly at the implication in Hyogo's tone: You look like shit, Kyuuzou-dono. And he knew that he did. His hair was always mussed around his face these days, and it was clean only because the sento was so close to his inn. He had been meaning to fix the thumb-sized hole in the left armpit of his haori, and both sleeves were fraying at the wrists. Part of him wanted to explain, I just couldn't stop moving. I just couldn't--can't--rest. I've literally run myself ragged.



He chose to change the subject instead. "And you?" Kyuuzou tapped his index finger on the table. "What happened after that morning? After the retreat?"



With the enemy less than an hour away, the men were fleeing into the woods in the hope of reaching one of the suggested rendezvous points. They had heard very early in the morning that their comrades were surrendering on the front lines to the east, but that would not save any of them now. Kyuuzou had no expectations of living to see noon.



"Are you certain you won't come with us?" Hyogo asked him once more, in spite of the fact that Kyuuzou saw his own resignation reflected in Hyogo's sunken eyes. "I still think going south is the safer route."



Kyuuzou touched Hyogo's arm, feeling how the bones of his elbow protruded in a way they didn't before, and didn't have the heart to say what he was thinking, that he hoped the soldiers killed his friend before the dysentery did. At least then he would die with honor, as someone of Hyogo's heritage and training deserved.



"Get to the southern rendezvous point," Kyuuzou said. "I will meet you there as soon as I can."



And there, in the middle of the scrambling men and the fearful shouting and the chaos, Hyogo, with the unsightly stubble all over his head, with lips as pale as a corpse, smiled with the warmth of a sultry summer night. "No, you won't," Hyogo said calmly.



Kyuuzou pulled Hyogo to him, embracing him one last time as a fellow warrior and trusted companion. They were losing time, but it didn't matter. They stood like that for what must have been several minutes, unwilling to let go.



"I love you, Kyuuzou-dono," Hyogo whispered into the crook of his neck, and Kyuuzou stopped breathing.



Hyogo always did have a sleekness to his manner, a marble confidence that greatly intimidated other men, only now it was worse, magnified by the power of make-up and expensive clothing. The yellow-tinted lenses and the black lipstick and the cigarette smoke masked everything that Hyogo might be thinking.



His silence, however, was a small giveaway of his reticence. Kyuuzou's question hung in the air, but Hyogo only looked on him, took a long drag on his cigarette, and the drinks arrived just as it seemed he might speak. "Thank you," Hyogo said to the server, in a much gentler tone than he used to place the order, and Kyuuzou realized that it had probably been as long for Hyogo as it had been for him since he talked about the war in any detail. He was suddenly very grateful for the sake there in front of them.



Hyogo let his cigarette dangle in his lips while he pulled off his gloves, revealing hands of urban fashion, his nails groomed and painted black to match his lipstick. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, and took the cigarette between his fingers once again. "Most of them died, you know." He said it casually, as if trying to soften the impact of the information. "Ryuu, Fumiki, Bunmei..."



"Yuuto?"



"Yuuto, too."



"What about Tensui? He went south with you, didn't he?"



Hyogo cast his eyes downward as he sipped his sake. "You do know that they firebombed the forest to the south, yes?"



Kyuuzou nodded, remembering moving, moving fast, northward, keeping low and to the trees. The forest there was very similar to home, all the games of hide-and-seek played as a boy now serving to his advantage. That path to the southern rendezvous point meant death, he was sure of it. To the north, he stood a slim chance of escape, especially on his own as he was. When he was roughly five miles from camp, he stopped in his tracks; the ground underfoot trembled, and he knew what that rumble in the distance meant. The grief cut so deeply, it made his legs shake and give out. Kami-sama, let it be fast, let them be right in the middle of it and never know what hit them. That was the last time he spoke to the divine in any capacity. It was as though he used up the majority of words allotted to him in life in that moment, because that's when he stopped speaking in general, unless spoken to, the need for words diminished, destroyed in an instant.



Hyogo tapped his cigarette on the lip of the ashtray. "Tensui and I were on the edge of those explosions. I had surgery a few weeks after that, so you can hardly see the scars on my arm and leg anymore--there's a patch on my right foot that's still kind of ugly. But Tensui was burned beyond saving. He died in my arms about an hour later."



Hyogo took a healthy, though graceful, swallow of his imo-jochu then, and Kyuuzou held out his hand, silently asking to have some as well. Hyogo bowed his head and handed the cup over.



"But you know, that actually saved my life," Hyogo said as Kyuuzou savored the strong liquor. "Reinforcements sent our way braved the fire and smoke to save the few of us who made it. Had I not been there on the ground with Tensui, I might never have been found and left to shit myself to death in the woods."



Kyuuzou handed back the cup of imo-jochu. "And what are you doing now?"



"I'm yojimbo to His Excellency, Ayamaro, the magistrate of the city."



Kyuuzou raised his eyebrows. "How long have you been doing that?"



"Going on three years now." Hyogo stamped out his cigarette. "After the rescue, I was laid up in a hospital for a couple of months. With the war over, my whole family dead, and no money, no nothing--I really didn't know what the hell to do with myself."



None of us did, Kyuuzou thought to himself.



"I wandered a bit and was generally useless, like half these poor fools you see on the streets in Kougakyo, and eventually heard about the job opening here in the city. Ayamaro was putting out a call to samurai to compete for the position as his bodyguard." Hyogo sighed and shook his head. "Things were so bad at that point, Kyuuzou. I just couldn't believe that, there I was, a veteran of the Great War, finally nursed back to health, and for what? So that I would have to steal wet clothes from somebody's clothesline? So that I would be desperate enough to kill pigeons in the alley for food?" His voice had been rising in volume, and Kyuuzou saw when Hyogo realized it because his friend sat back in his chair and clasped his fingers. When he spoke, his tone was calm and even again.



"I simply decided, then and there, that the job with Ayamaro was mine. When I arrived in Kougakyo, Ayamaro had arranged a tournament of sorts at the palace. I killed seven men that day, and His Excellency offered me the job before the tournament was even finished."



"You like this job?"



Hyogo shrugged, and drained the last of his sake. "It's fair compensation for how little energy is usually required of me. Only recently have I run into any problems. The other bodyguard, Shouya--he was killed about six months ago, during one of the samurai shakedowns."



"For certain: there's unrest on the way in this city," Kyuuzou mused, looking over his shoulder around the café.



When he turned back, Hyogo's face was alight, his expression wolfish in its intensity. Kyuuzou couldn't believe that, after all this time, that look could still unnerve him. The only difference was that Hyogo had an electric glow in his eyes now, having come to the city and integrated, become a fundamental part of it. He no longer embodied the golden glow of the lantern on the tent floor in the early morning; he was the stark white light of the lamppost on the city street late at night.



Hyogo gestured toward Kyuuzou's sake cup. "Are you finished?" When Kyuuzou nodded, Hyogo downed his imo-jochu, stood up and put his coat on. "Good. Let's go get you a new coat."



"What?"



Hyogo smiled, baring white teeth through black lips, which didn't put Kyuuzou at ease at all. "You plan to go before Ayamaro like that, wearing that crappy haori?"



Kyuuzou blinked, and didn't move.



Hyogo tilted his head impatiently and sat down again. "Think about it. My guess is that your pockets are very close to being empty. It couldn't be more perfect--you need a job, and I really could use a second bodyguard to help me with Ayamaro. You and I both know you're infinitely more qualified than any of these bullshit ronin vying for the job. All I need to do is speak with him. My reference will carry a lot of weight."



When Kyuzo remained silent, Hyogo spread his arms, saying, "What else are you going to do, Kyuuzou-dono? Wander forever? Hit every gambling house you find? When's the last time you ate a decent meal? Had a good night's sleep? Got laid, for crying out loud? Tell me: when was the last time you actually cared about living?"



In spite of himself, Kyuuzou couldn't keep eye contact with his friend, who was as perceptive and persuasive as ever. He glanced around the room again, at nothing in particular, at the quiet, well-behaved crowd around them. He rather liked this classy café, hidden away at the end of the alley. He was comfortable in his room at the inn in the pleasure quarter. He had enjoyed three days of walking the city streets, uncertain of what was going to happen next. It wasn't that he was fond of Kougakyo exactly, but he had to admit, he was tired, and liked the thought of being in one place for a change. Kyuuzou couldn't argue; this was a decent opportunity.



Hyogo's annoyed sigh brought Kyuuzou's attention back. "Even if you decide to pass on the job, look at you--you need a new coat. That piece of shit is hanging on you by a thread. I don't want to look at it anymore." Hyogo stood up again, leaving money on the table. "Come on. It's my treat."



"That isn't necessary."



"Oh, shut up already." Hyogo chuckled, looking at him sidelong, sensuously, as he did the night before. Something in that look made Kyuuzou pulse, though it went against his better judgment to even consider giving in to the flirtatious samurai. Looking inwardly, he discovered a dim connection to that old resentment of being repeatedly passed over, the unanswered questions of Why? Why never him? Why the looks but never the invitation?



I love you, Kyuuzou-dono.



Kyuuzou had never visited that statement again, given that it had been said when they were certain death was only an hour away and so it didn't matter. For all he knew, Hyogo had said it as one friend to another, and that thought should have left him content. As he followed Hyogo out of the café, eyeing the long sand-colored coat and the shiny onyx hair, he worked to banish the memory back to the place in his brain where things went carefully forgotten.



And yet, when Hyogo glanced at him over his shoulder, the street light glinting on his glasses and the hint of a grin at the corners of his mouth, Kyuuzou couldn't help but wonder if Hyogo would still have said that if he had known he would live to see the end of the day.