Chapter Text
The new year came, with all its attendant excitements. What pressed more on Makoto’s mind was that her eyesight sharpened day after day, and when the medicine made of Saki’s kampo herbs seemed to cement the recovery, she told her fellow goze that a miraculous thing was happening: her eyesight was returning, and she, in her good conscience, could not deign to stay when there were other blind women in need of vocation and housing with them.
There was excitement for her recovery and sadness for her departure, and if anyone had thought that Makimura-san had been acting oddly for the past weeks in disappearing off at nights and coming back from praying at her brother’s grave at daybreak, they did not say. Makoto accompanied them to the temple for prayers, gave her thanks to Hachiman, and made her new year wish with her husband in mind.
Her seniors put her in touch with respectable lodgings for labouring women and masseuses who would take Makoto into their employment as her sight improved.
“Come by when you can, Makimura-san? It’ll be good to know how you are.”
There remained the faint guilt that she had thinned their ranks in the end—even if it had not been in the original way she had feared—and it was enough to convince her to agree.
Makoto readjusted her life, in the manner that she feared she was becoming familiar with: from a farmer’s daughter, to a merchant’s granddaughter, to a masseuse under Lee-san’s care and now to a wife who might never see her husband again. She managed her new lodgings with the sombre knowledge that her housing might forever be suited for one. When she was well enough for it, she unbundled the first kimono she’d been gifted with to admire it properly: a wonderfully autumnal thing, with painted maple leaf and chrysanthemum against a backdrop of persimmon orange silk. It remained too fine of a thing to wear for work, but before she packed it away, she slid the leaf hair-comb out.
Her hair could be kept longer, now that she had the sight to maintain it. It remained too short to hold the comb yet, but using it again reminded her of the night the spirit had first slid it into her hair and pretended he had only been sweeping leaves away.
She kept time in that manner. Her hair dusted her shoulders once she commenced employment with her new co-workers and spent the end of the working week visiting her old ones. There were promises to be made that she was well; and techniques to teach newcomers; and assurances to give that, while the work of a masseuse was hard, the goze they worked under could train them into capability. In moments of quiet, Makoto wondered to herself if Lee-san would be proud of her, for what he had taught her and what she was using to teach others now, and smiled knowing that he would be.
Her hair had begun to fall beyond her shoulders when the first pangs of illness struck. It was only the cold weather, Makoto was assured, and her worse off for being so slight a thing. There was little to do, except bargain for more bedding with the landlady and purchase a new, warmer hanten to pass through the winter. When the illness persisted, she asked her co-workers to name respectable, decent physicians in this city – ones that treated women decently and did not hold the name of Tateyama.
Her co-workers sympathised. One offered to put her in contact with her sister-in-law, a herbalist with fees more affordable than a physician. The herbalist in question had the same grace Saki that carried effortlessly, enough to put Makoto at ease. It was only halfway into the session that she asked the one thing that had Makoto knotting her fingers together in panic.
“Am—am I married? I don’t understand.”
“Well,” the herbalist replied, cautiously now. “Will there be someone to help with your expenses? With making these medicines while you are unwell? This problem you have will not pass quickly.”
Makoto opened her mouth and lied like she never had before: yes, there was a husband. No, he was not here at present – his work was as a bodyguard, and his absence over the year was explained by his presence on travel routes guarding merchant stock. Yes, she had the means to pay the herbalist, and more besides when she would need to seek care elsewhere.
When home, she unwrapped the note given to her by Nishikigoi and his friend, lit the candles and incense, and settled down to wait. They arrived before the candles burned down, glad to see her. Makoto was glad too, to place faces to the voices she had become familiar with.
When Makoto explained why she had called for them, Nishikigoi broke the sake dish he had been drinking from and gaped at her for long fretful moments.
His friend stoically set his down and said, “I expect congratulations are in order. Nii-san would want to know about this.”
“Just hannya-san’s luck, being away for it,” Nishikigoi mumbled. “Guess we’re coverin’ for ya now, Makoto-chan.”
“What he means,” his sombre friend interjected, “is we’d be happy to help. We promised Tachibana-san we would.”
“You’re the one who made all those promises—oi, stop hitting me.”
They heaped her with ofuda to safeguard her room when she was away, and amulets to tie to her obi for good health, and eventually, they secreted in the Sunshine Inn girls who clamoured around her with uncontainable joy. They’d brought their own things to keep her well: several sets of haramaki, green tea to settle her stomach, kampo medicine, new clothes—and it was such a generous thing to receive when Makoto had thought herself alone that she burst into tears from it.
The weather warmed. Hanami approached, and with it, the memory of what her husband had said on the night she’d seen him last. When her hair was long enough, Makoto tied it back with the cord from an amulet and tucked her red hair stick into it. It was more decorative than functional, and evidently, did not hold exceptionally well – one day at the markets, a boy running into her had her stumbling and the hair stick falling out.
In panic, Makoto thought she had been robbed. Certainly, she was in no shape to give chase. Then when she had righted herself, someone else had already swooped down to fetch the hair stick from the ground for her.
“My apologies,” Sera-san offered. He was smiling the pleasant docile smile of a stranger on the street. Her hair stick sat in his open extended hand. “The boy’s still a child, hardly even thinks twice of running into people. They’re still so careless at that age.”
There was a woman at his shoulder, dressed in dark sombre navy. Not quite the mourning blacks Makoto’s husband that predicted she’d wear.
“Do forgive him,” the woman added. “I’ll speak to him about being more careful.”
“There’s no need,” Makoto said faintly. What to say to the widow of a man she had beheaded? Mercifully, the lady Dojima did not appear too deep in mourning. “It’s as you said, children are excitable.”
The woman dipped her head briefly in apology before pacing after the boy that had run off.
Makoto took back her hair stick hesitantly.
“That boy,” she started.
“Dojima’s heir?” Sera-san replied smoothly. “Yes, there’s a certain conduct expected of him. Doubtless, he’s not meeting it yet, but he’ll grow into it given the proper guidance.”
The proper guidance, Makoto thought, such as that from his father.
“Is it difficult?” she tried again, “Bringing him up?”
Half-spirit children, her husband had said, were a hell of a thing to raise.
“The credit goes to his mother,” Sera-san said. “She’s been more attendant to his upbringing than his father has been. While she would agree that the nature of his upbringing may have been difficult with his father so absent, she would also tell you that raising any child into their majority feels impossible. I assure you, miss, it isn’t.”
It seemed quite like a man to tell her that child-rearing was not impossible, even though he himself had no hand in it.
“And… I broke your wedding gift,” she confessed.
“One would be quite pleased that a wedding gift served its purpose before it broke.”
He nodded at her before his departure and left Makoto standing quite befuddled in the street. She fixed her hair stick back into place and continued on.
Hanami befell them. Makoto’s sickness did not abate. She was ruminating on excuses to explain why her lunch session had been so long – that her stomach did not agree with her lunch, that springtime weather and flower pollen brought along headaches – when one of her co-workers hurried out to meet her at the doorway.
“There’s a man in here,” she said furtively, “and—and, ah, he says he’s looking for you…”
The notion of a strange man looking for her nearly had her reaching into her obi for her knife.
Not a moment later, the squall of said man from inside calmed that thought: “No, I’m sure—I’m really sure, there’s a Makoto here an’ I’m certain of it ‘cause—”
Makoto ducked inside. There was only one figure in her workplace who had not been there when she left for lunch – a man with a maple red haori, whose back was turned to her, but with a voice that she could have recognised anywhere.
---
For all the joy that Makoto’s husband had returned from his work guarding merchant stock along trade routes—a lie that she was becoming better with repeating—she was not permitted the reprieve of ending her work day early. At the hour she finished, there was already someone skulking around the doorway waiting for her.
“Have you always looked so suspicious, anata?”
He beamed at her, with a face that would have been unfamiliar had she not recognised his mischief so easily. There was already a grin on his face that she knew was at home there. And more she recognised when she pulled him away from the main road to set her hands on his face, remembering what she had learned by touch before: the sharp cut of his jaw, the line of his nose, the leering smile she traced with her fingers.
“‘s like ya didn’t miss yer poor husband at all,” he teased, “All those weeks away playin’ bodyguard fer merchants an’ that’s the welcome I get—”
He snuck them into a dimly lit side street, pulling her into a slant of shadow to steal a kiss. It would have been a scandal to be seen like this, but it had been a turn of a season since she had seen him last. Makoto reached forward, unsteady on her geta, as she held firm onto his haori and kissed him back.
“Was that proof enough, anata?”
“Maybe. Better take me back to where yer making yerself at home so I can be sure.”
There was need to sneak him into her boarding house when the rules against guests were so strict. Makoto pointed out the path to her room, then quietly went in first, extinguishing the lights as she went. She pulled the windows open, watching the moonlight stream in. Moments later, she felt him at her back, pulling her down onto her unrolled futon that was rustled up like a nest around them. He looped his arms around her waist to draw her close.
“We’ll need to be quiet,” she reminded him. She wriggled free to turn around and slide her fingers into his hair. Now that she had seen his face, she wanted to keep it in her sights for as long as possible.
“Don’t mind quiet,” he muttered. “Long as I get some time with ya.”
He spent more of the time talking than she did, his voice kept low and unhurried as he tipped his forehead down to hers so that his words stayed only for her ears. There were still wrongs to be righted for having killed the bat spirit, he explained, but he had a reprieve for enough time to see her in her human world.
“Enough time to spend hanami with me?”
It was only a half-serious wish, but he chuckled. “Yer thinkin’ about what I said to ya last? How I wanted to take ya up to the mountain fer that proper.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that.” That was only a half-truth too. She’d thought about it because of how it couldn’t be managed in the state she was in, and then she stopped thinking of it when it made his absence all the greater. “Then… enough time to stay the night?”
“‘nuff fer that.” She felt his hand settle against her head, playing with the strands that had grown longer in the time since their wedding night. “Actually, enough to do somethin’ with this. Where’s that kanzashi of yers?”
Makoto told him to look away as she unearthed the persimmon orange kimono from where it was stowed. The spirit complied with a show of great reluctance while she dressed, making quiet rumblings about it havin’ been so long since he last saw her, and what was the harm in lookin’, he was a pretty good kimono dresser in a pinch, and was it about her still not acceptin’ compliments?
“It’s true,” she said. “I’m terribly shy whenever someone so handsome offers a compliment.”
Her husband spluttered. “Handsome?”
“Handsome,” Makoto laughed. “You said losing an eye ruined your perfectly handsome face. Now that I have the sight for it, I quite think it’s not ruined at all.”
For his human form, he’d fashioned an eyepatch from the hand guard of a sword and a thin strip of leather, covering the eye that had been lost. When she was dressed again, she sidled down beside him to gently pull it away and press a kiss to the uncovered skin.
“There,” she whispered, shaping her hands around his face. “Handsome as anything.”
He salvaged the tatters of his composure by jamming the comb into her hair. Makoto smiled as he made good on his attempts to style it, given his lack of equipment. There was little to do with it, given how its length only just fell beyond her shoulders, but it was the sensation of his fingers combing through her hair and his quiet compliments of how nice it looked, a dark glossy river of ink like a skein of silk in his hand, and how well it suited her, that she relished.
“You should come home more often,” she offered, as he gathered her hair together with a length of red cord. He was bundling them together into an elegant knot of cord, in a style that was a few centuries out of fashion, but made more contemporary with the addition of her hair stick slid into the cord. She laid her hands over his once he was done. “How I’ll fix my hair this nicely without you, I’ll never know.”
Her husband hummed at the compliment. “Practice,” he said. His fingers wound into hers in the only offer of apology he could manage. “Promise ya, it ain’t much talent on my side. Secret’s in that hair stick of yers, bein’ so eye-catchin’ and husband-attractin’ as your brother intended it to be.”
“What did you think of him?”
He coughed. “Figured he ain’t bein’ impressed with me. I took you back to yer human world when the three days were up, an’ when I got back, those six heads were gone, but not even so much as a "thank you" note.”
“He approved of you. And your dowry. In fact,” Makoto added with a laugh, “I did too. And here I am, forgetting to thank you for having organised it.”
She rewarded him with a kiss. Then another, as he lifted her into his lap, and more until she was breathless and laughing as his fingers caught in her hair in the midst of his eager kisses.
“Anata, careful—”
“Alright, alright—”
At his insistence, she undid the hair style herself – practice for when she would need to do it herself – and carefully set the hair stick aside. He pulled her down into the nest of blankets made from her futon, tucking her into his chest.
“You do look better since I last saw ya,” he said. He was pressing his forehead against hers with a pleased sigh. “I worried so much, sending you off before ya woke. That you were gonna be skinny an’ underfed again by the time I came back—”
Makoto muffled her laughter against his cheek.
“—an’ here you were! Workin’, and keepin’ a roof over your head, an’ telling everyone how much you were managin’ yourself, not needin’ a deadbeat husband who’s off playing bodyguard fer other people most of the year ‘round…”
“I quite disagree,” Makoto murmured, and demonstrated her need for him with a pointed kiss.
He relented that he was wrong, a good few kisses later.
“Thing is,” he said finally. “I worried like somethin’ awful, leavin’ ya all alone. But you bein’ alright, I don’t mind bein’ made to head back without ya.”
Her husband was a steady weight at her side. Knowing that she was well put him in happy, satisfied ease that she feared she might not see him in again for some time. Now seemed a good a time as any to tell him what she had been trying to hide when she had changed into the kimono he’d gifted her with – although, from what the Sunshine Inn girls had told her, with her build being so slight, she might have hidden her secret for months on end if she hadn’t told the herbalist of her illness.
Makoto folded her hand around his.
“I do have news then.”
“Eh?”
She settled his hand over where the obi padding was thickest at her waist. “There’s… something I do need to tell you, anata. But I promise you,” she whispered, twining her fingers into his, “however long until I see you again, I won’t be alone.”