Chapter Text
Night settled around them with a patience that felt almost cruel. The fire had burned down to a low, steady glow, its embers breathing softly, as though even the flames were exhausted. Trinity slept upright where she sat, her head tipped forward, chin nearly touching her chest, her breath shallow but even. She had not meant to fall asleep. Yukimura could see that much. Sleep had claimed her the way a wave claims a drowning body, without permission, without ceremony.
Johnny sat opposite her, one boot stretched toward the fire, the other bent beneath him. He poked at the coals with a stick more out of habit than purpose. The crackle of the wood filled the long spaces of silence left behind when words refused to come easily.
Yukimura watched the fire, though he did not truly see it. His attention kept drifting back to Trinity, to the way her hands were still clenched even in sleep, fingers curled as though gripping something invisible. Pain, perhaps. Or resolve. Or fear. In his experience, those things often wore the same face.
Johnny broke the silence at last, his voice low, pitched carefully so as not to wake her. “Do you believe her?”
Yukimura did not answer at once. He shifted slightly where he sat, the movement sending a dull ache through his calf. The wound had been bound well enough, though the tightness reminded him with every heartbeat that he was still flesh, still fallible. “She does not strike me as one who lies,” he said finally.
Johnny snorted softly. “Most noble ladies don’t know how.”
“That is not a jest worthy of the matter,” Yukimura replied. His tone was even, but there was an edge to it now, something sharpened by fatigue.
Johnny lifted his hands in mock surrender. “All right. All right. I’m just sayin’. If it’s true, then she’s dragged us into something bigger than a bar fight and a botched escape.”
“If it is true,” Yukimura said, “then her brother is dying.”
Johnny leaned back on his hands, staring up at the sky. The stars were sharp tonight, hard pinpricks of light scattered across blackness. “So? We’ve all lost someone.”
The words landed heavier than Johnny seemed to intend. He shifted, rolling his shoulders, as though trying to shake something loose. “I have. I’m sure you have too.”
Yukimura’s jaw tightened. He did not look at Johnny, did not trust himself to do so. “And before you lost someone,” Johnny continued, his voice taking on that familiar teasing lilt, “you probably became your… what is it… tight-ass self.”
“Stop,” Yukimura said sharply.
Johnny grinned in the firelight. “Touchy. What was it? A lover? A woman you left behind back in—”
“My father,” Yukimura said.
The word cut cleanly through the air between them.
Johnny’s grin faded. The stick in his hand paused mid-motion, its tip glowing red. “Ah,” he said, quieter now.
“He died in battle,” Yukimura continued, before Johnny could fill the silence with something careless. “Killed by firearms. By the sort of weapons you carry so proudly.”
His gaze flicked, unbidden, to the revolver at Johnny’s hip. Cursed metal, he thought, feeling the familiar twist of bitterness coil in his chest.
Johnny followed his look and bristled. “Hey now. Not all guns are the same. That one?” He tapped the grip lightly. “My pa gave me that. It’s done nothing but serve and protect.”
“I find it curious,” Yukimura said, voice cool, “that a man who cloaks himself in jest grows solemn when metal is questioned.”
Johnny huffed a humorless laugh. “You ain’t wrong there.” He stared at the fire again. “Yeah. My father’s the one I lost. So what? That’s life, ain’t it. Son of a bitch of a thing, but it keeps movin’ whether you like it or not.”
Yukimura studied him then, really studied him. The slouch, the careless posture, the way humor was wielded like armor. He recognized it now for what it was. Not indifference. Deflection.
Two sides of a single coin, he thought. Where Johnny laughed, Yukimura had learned to bow his head and endure. Where Johnny filled silence with noise, Yukimura had learned to let silence hollow him out.
His gaze drifted back to Trinity.
She slept fitfully, shifting once, a faint sound escaping her throat. Yukimura wondered what ghosts troubled her rest. A dying brother, she had said. A cure across an ocean. He had assumed, once, that noblewomen measured their lives by husbands and children, by reputation and inheritance. Trinity had already defied more of those assumptions than he cared to count.
To him, his father had been everything.
His earliest memory was not of warmth or safety, but of waiting. Waiting beneath the eaves of a brothel while rain soaked the ground into mud. His mother’s voice drifted through thin paper walls, laughter pitched too high, too practiced. He remembered picking through refuse with small, trembling hands, searching for scraps that might quiet the gnawing ache in his stomach.
He remembered the smell of the yūkaku. Perfume and rot intertwined so closely they became indistinguishable. And then, later, he remembered his mother hanging, her feet not quite touching the floor, the world tilted and wrong.
After that came his father.
Not blood, not lineage, but choice.
A man who had looked at a filthy, feral child and seen something worth shaping. He had lifted Yukimura from the gutter, set him on a path paved with discipline and steel. He had given him a name, a purpose. In his presence, the chaos of Yukimura’s early life had finally taken form, hard and unyielding as the blade he was taught to wield.
And when that man died, Yukimura lost more than a parent. He lost the reason he endured.
He looked again at Trinity, sleeping upright by the dying fire. Was her brother the same? The singular thread holding her life together? The one voice that had ever truly listened?
Perhaps, Yukimura thought, they were all chasing ghosts across this unforgiving land.
The fire crackled softly. Johnny shifted closer to it, quieter now, his irreverence dampened by the weight of things unspoken. Trinity slept on, unaware that in her exhaustion she had laid bare a truth neither of the men beside her could ignore.
And Yukimura sat between past and present, duty and doubt, feeling the first tremors of something dangerous stir beneath the discipline he had spent a lifetime perfecting.
The night deepened, pressing close around the small circle of firelight as though listening. Trinity shifted again in her sleep, her brow furrowing, lips parting on a breath that trembled before settling. Johnny glanced at her, then away, as if the sight unsettled him more than he cared to admit.
Yukimura remained still, his hands resting loosely on his knees. He had long mastered the art of stillness. In the dōjō, stillness had been obedience. In battle, it had been survival. Tonight, it was something else entirely. A holding pattern. A restraint stretched thin.
Johnny cleared his throat. “She said there’s a cure,” he muttered, voice pitched low. “You believe that part too?”
Yukimura considered the question carefully. “I believe she believes it.”
Johnny exhaled through his nose. “That’s a dangerous sort of truth.”
“Yes,” Yukimura agreed. “It is.”
They fell quiet again. The fire popped, a spark leaping upward before vanishing into the dark. Somewhere beyond the circle of light, insects sang without pause, indifferent to human grief.
Yukimura’s thoughts drifted, unmoored, slipping back across oceans and years.
His mother’s face was difficult to recall clearly. Time had blurred her features, softened them into impressions rather than certainties. He remembered the curve of her neck, thin and strained. The way her hands trembled when she thought he was not looking. The way she would press her forehead to his when the night grew too loud, whispering apologies he had never understood.
She had not been cruel. That, perhaps, was what made her absence ache more sharply. She had simply been… worn down. A life measured in coin and compliance had hollowed her until there was nothing left to give.
He remembered rain dripping from the eaves, cold water seeping through thin fabric, his small body shivering as he waited. He remembered hunger as a constant companion, gnawing and persistent. He remembered learning early not to cry. Tears changed nothing.
The morning he found her, the world had tilted. The yūkaku was too quiet, the air heavy and wrong. Adults shouted, feet thundered past him, but no one stopped to shield his eyes. No one thought to spare him the sight.
After that came the man who would become his father.
He had not arrived with kindness. He had arrived with scrutiny. A hard gaze that weighed and measured. He had asked Yukimura no questions about his grief. Instead, he had asked whether the boy could stand.
Yukimura had stood.
That was the beginning.
Training had been relentless. Pain had been a teacher, discipline a language. His father’s approval had been rare, but when it came, it was absolute. A nod. A single word. Enough to anchor a life.
In that structure, Yukimura had learned how to exist. He had learned that purpose could be forged, even if love could not.
When his father fell, struck down amid smoke and thunder, something inside Yukimura fractured. He had carried the body himself. He had bowed. He had not cried. Samurai did not cry.
But something vital had been severed all the same.
Johnny shifted, drawing Yukimura back to the present. “You ever think,” he said quietly, “that we’re all just runnin’ from somethin’?”
Yukimura glanced at him. The firelight carved Johnny’s face into sharper lines than daylight ever revealed. Beneath the humor and bravado, there was a man worn thin by losses he refused to name.
“Running implies escape,” Yukimura said. “I think most people merely circle their pain.”
Johnny chuckled softly. “Hell of a way to put it.”
They lapsed into silence again, but it was no longer the same silence as before. It carried weight now, shared and acknowledged.
Trinity stirred once more, a faint sound escaping her lips. Yukimura watched her carefully. Even in sleep, her hands sought purchase against the earth, as though bracing herself against some unseen force. He wondered how many nights she had spent awake, calculating, planning, convincing herself that crossing an ocean alone had been a reasonable choice.
He wondered how close she was to breaking.
The fire burned lower still, embers pulsing like a slow, weary heart. Johnny wrapped his arms around his knees, gaze fixed on the ground.
“If that brother of hers is anything like what you had,” Johnny said at last, almost reluctantly, “I get why she came.”
Yukimura did not respond immediately. He looked once more at Trinity, at the woman who had defied expectations and oceans alike.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “So do I.”