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“...-t to bring us souvenirs!”
“It’s not a vacation he’s going on, Brother!”
“Oh? Is that so?”
“Brother, he’s g-”
The excitement of the fellow inhabitants of the citadel becomes a distant buzz in the air, as the world suddenly starts turning and warping around him. Wrapped in the embrace of the golden lights, the last thing Kashuu Kiyomitsu sees is the deep brown tints of Master’s hair and the warmth of her eyes.
For what he knows about the task waiting ahead, it surely won’t take longer than four days. Four days in the twisted, magical realm they all call present - but no one knows how many of them in the past, where they, the swords really lived.
Yasusada was away for four days; yet his recollections he shakily whispered into the darkness of the midsummer night told about years of traveling to find his purpose. Some others spoke about mere days, like Izuminokami or Horikawa, reliving only the last days of Hijikata’s life before death claimed him as his own.
There’s no way he could change history, a little voice in the back of his conscious tells him. There’s no way he could prevent what happened to him, but maybe, just maybe find a way to understand what Okita-kun went through in those minutes-
There are two sides of a coin, afterall.
Shaking his head, Kashuu wonders - Master is so tiny, surrounded by all those big guys. Four days is a short amount of time, yet… Will she be alright?
Will he be alright?
The quiet buzz of magic holds no answers, he finds it, it only embraces him as the world he knows all too well disappears from in front of him.
Blinking out the last rays of the blinding lights, Kashuu finds himself on the ground, the stars of the night sky above twinkling like millions of tiny fireflies. His surroundings start to take shape slowly as he sits up, realizing he’s near to an inn when the voices of people filter through the haziness of his mind.
Getting up on his feet, Kashuu looks around the alleyway the time machine spat him out at, “really, Master? Couldn’t you be just a little kinder?”
“… the places I can go are limited anyway. So, I decided to drop in on the Shinsengumi, the place where my old master was at…”
Following around the Shinsengumi proves to be harder than Kashuu initially imagined it. It’s a whole lot different than when he was just that, a piece of metal by Okita-kun’s side, when the blood of his enemies was still dripping from the tip of his blade.
They never stay still for too long, for there’s always something to go after. Ambushes and assaults, nostalgic familiarity from the past. It’s like hunting for the Kebiishi, a little voice tells Kashuu, as he snags a horse from a nearby farmhouse. He can barely see the blue of the haori Okita-kun dons from the distance – he has to hurry up, losing the sight of his old master is unacceptable.
Somewhere, Kashuu thinks, somewhere he can understand why Yasusada was – and maybe still is – obsessed with him.
Okita-kun is just captivating like that.
With the sun high on the sky, Kashuu urges his horse to run faster towards the vague direction of Ikedaya, towards the unavoidable fate that awaits him once again.
“… kind of strange, for the ‘old’ me to be so close to… me. I keep thinking ‘oh, he’s going to get chipped soon…’; even though it’s me, it still feels as if it’s someone else. I wonder why.”
Time is an unfaithful mistress.
It burns you, it drowns you, it locks you in a shed at a whim, forgetting about you for the rest of the days that come and pass.
It breaks you with a smile, its giggle mixing with your screams of agony in an otherworldly cacophony.
That, he knows all too well.
In the moment when he sees how the tip of the sword breaks off, as if triggered, a memory awakens in Kashuu’s subconscious, dragging itself to remembrance with sharp jabs of pain on its wake.
The face of Mikazuki Munechika appears and goes, but his voice rings in Kashuu’s ears when he falls to the ground, an echo he cannot seem to stop.
“The love of Master… A thing we were never meant to wish for. Tools like us, mere toys in the hands of fate and fortune. Arch and reach all you want, Kashuu Kiyomitsu, what you are desperate for shall not ever be yours.”
Proving Mikazuki’s words wrong has been something Kashuu swore to achieve.
In the fleeting seconds of consciousness, Kashuu wonders about home, and how this home has ceased meaning “with Yasusada, by Okita-kun’s side”, and started morphing into “where Master and everyone else waits for me to return.”
Forcing himself to stand once again, he approaches the broken blade in the empty corridor; the sounds of battle mere buzz in the background. Betrayal-tinted despair running along the blood in his veins, Kashuu clenches his fists and flees the building, running until he hears nothing but the crickets singing into the emptiness of the late-night forest.
Looking back for one last time, Kashuu presses his lips together, tightly, before muttering, “it was not a betrayal. Okita-kun did not betray me there.”
With tears tickling down his face, Kashuu turns around and walks away, steps small, shoulders shaking. The sky soon lights up with the familiar colors of Master’s magic, and despite the pain that weighs on his heart, crumbling and shattering under the pressure, Kashuu finds himself smiling as the world darkens and he’s being taken away – for the last time before he can see Master’s kind smile and warm eyes follow every step he takes.
“…what I can do now, that is important. History will not change; it cannot be changed. But I can, so that you’ll love me even more than you do now. Wait for me. For I shall soon become your number one…”