Never-Ending Betelgeuse
It’s a long story, so I want to take my time. (Chapter 425). | @kagumo-zine fic for The Man and The Moon Zine | AO3 |
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
When Sakumo wakes up, he is not alone in his house.
By instinct, his hand is on his tantō before his feet even hit the ground. His eyes are still adjusting to the morning light as he treads silently toward the kitchen. The scent is somehow woody, ambrosial, and medicinal all at once, but barely there, in the way a summons would be before they first travel to their contract. He might not have noticed it at all were it not for the humming.
There is a steady, low hum, drifting out from deeper in his home. It is neither meditative nor melodic. More so, it sounds to Sakumo like the buzzing of bees or the inexplicable plaints of the forest which set the deer on edge.
It is all the more perplexing when he sees the source of the noise. The mouth of the most lovely woman he has ever seen, standing barefoot and seemingly unarmed in the middle of his home, who pauses her strange song to bite one of the red onions he had harvested this season as if it were an apple.
She takes no note of Sakumo entering the kitchen. He is standing directly in front of her, his sword half-raised, still in his bedclothes, so she can’t possibly be ignorant of his presence. Still, her focus is on the onion. He gets the feeling he’s being ignored.
“Excuse me,” says Sakumo, clearing his throat. “But those are my onions.”
She finally looks at him. And with a smile that knocks the wind out of Sakumo, matter-of-factly informs him, “I ate them.”
“Er, why?”
His intruder considers the question. Glancing upward in reflection, she decides, “Hunger.”
Sakumo laughs, finally lowering his tantō. He supposes that’s as good an answer as any other. “If you’re hungry, I can make you something,” he offers.
She smiles more widely, and Sakumo thinks this must’ve been the correct answer. Her hair, both silver and purple, sways as instantaneously she moves from several metres away to right in front of his nose. By the speed of the movement, he’s not sure he would’ve been able to reach her with his tantō if he’d tried.
“I am Kaguya,” she says, so close he’s almost cross-eyed trying to meet her gaze. From this distance, it is clear that her eyes are not just glassy, as he’d thought, but lacking any pupils. Her height is also a surprise, unimposing as she’d seemed in his kitchen.
“Hatake Sakumo,” he replies, stepping back so that he has enough room to bow.
“Sakumo,” she repeats, like a song.
“So, what do you like to eat besides onions?”
--
The next time he sees Kaguya, his fingers are buried deep in the snow amongst his cabbages.
It is tedious work, moving through the layers of slush and straw that cover his vegetables. The other villagers of his skillset would be using their chakra and tools to complete this task. Yet Sakumo’s ancestors also grew their own crops, and while he’s not above breaking tradition, there is something to the value of what can be done by hand. So he digs.
When Sakumo collects his last cabbage a few hours later, he finds a pair of familiar white eyes looking at him intently through the bed of straw. Just like before, he can perceive what’s in front of him perfectly fine with his own eyes, but all of the instincts and extrasensory abilities he has honed since he was a child are suspiciously silent. It is as if the person in front of him is no different than the water and earth beneath him, or the trees on the far side of his field.
He brushes the straw away from a set of eyes and his fingers graze a warm cheek. “You’re not a scarecrow, are you?”
“Aino said I am a woman,” replies his companion. As she speaks, Sakumo feels the wind shift. It is the only warning he gets before all the snow covering his land melts. Kaguya glides upwards and lands seated on top of the straw bed, as if lying beneath half a metre of sleet is something she does every day.
“You look a little different than most women I know,” Sakumo admits, both artless and appreciative.
In the six months that have passed since she spent three days following him around his farmland, Kaguya has gained a pair of horns on either side of her head, and a third eye closed in what appears strikingly close to a wink.
“What do you think I am?”
Beautiful, Sakumo wants to say, but it feels terribly forward. So instead he says, pink-cheeked and smiling, “Tall.”
“Thank you.”
This time around, she stays longer. It is a full month that Kaguya spends with him. The weather is frigid enough that his skills are more needed in his village than outside of it, and he is grateful for the company.
Kaguya speaks of Aino again, and two people she describes only as “the young ones.” She never says what land or clan she belongs to, but among chakra users that is a common way to avoid bloodshed. Yet he knows she is something, be it samurai, shinobi or spirit. He can tell from the way she replies to thoughts he has not spoken aloud, how she sees the most minute changes in his posture, or how she dances around his sword as he practices his Iaidō. Though that third eye of hers never opens, Sakumo is certain if it did, he would have no way of stopping her.
As it is, Kaguya is only kind to him, curious and forthright in her behaviour. She has no qualms about leaning over Sakumo to grab his hair for his attention or prodding his cheeks when he grins. She calls him breathtakingly human once, and Sakumo blushes for the whole afternoon. He resolves himself to ask if she will stay with him for the spring.
However just as suddenly as she appears, when the first flowers emerge from the ground, Kaguya is gone.
--
Kaguya appears again at the other end of his sword mid-battle.
As with the winter having called upon him to tend to his crops to shore up the agricultural needs of his neighbours, the summer calls upon Sakumo to utilize his most innate skill: fighting.
While his village is not so entrenched in the framework of clans as other followers of ninshū, it is not above skirmishes of land, law and loyalty. The former is what has been troubling them these days. Naturally, Sakumo recognizes that collectives arise where there is free access to water, ore, and arable soil. His people are unfortunate enough to have all three. It is a driving force for desperation in the surrounding areas.
It is why each battle makes Sakumo’s tantō a little heavier in his hand. He wonders if this fight is easier for the shinobi, who have the privilege of only seeing as much of his comrades’ faces as are visible through their armoured masks.
Though his opponents’ usage of chakra is different than his, Sakumo is quick to adapt, and even quicker to cut them down. Shinobi techniques rely on having time to gather energy, and Sakumo’s blade is no different from his own hand to him. The fight is unbalanced. It is this thought that accompanies Sakumo as he strikes at a shinobi who set fire to a half-dozen fields yesterday, belonging to civilians and samurai alike.
His opponent cannot block him. He can feel it slipping between the plates of the other man’s armour. He knows where it will land.
His tantō stops right before it makes contact with his opponent’s heart.
Kaguya’s eyes are closed, but her fingers are gripping the edge of Sakumo’s weapon as if it were one of his wooden dummy swords. Her fingers dig into the neck of the shinobi, stealing his breath. Sakumo’s own breath stops.
“There will be no more fighting,” Kaguya says and opens all three of her eyes.
A flash of light blinds Sakumo temporarily, and he finds his head crashing into the dirt as the earth beneath them moves, more suddenly than he ever thought possible. Though his eyes are squeezed shut, he is certain that debris has filled the air, and he is once again grateful for his mask.
When the world stops again, Sakumo feels a hand brushing dust off his face. “I have solved it,” he hears, in that familiar lilting voice.
It becomes clear as Sakumo blinks and sits up, that the solution before him is the mountain range that has arisen in the middle of what was flatlands moments ago. In the height of summer, they are capped with snow and extend as far as his eyes can see. In fact, he would wager it borders his whole village. The shinobi is nowhere in sight.
“Thank you,” Sakumo says, finally looking back at Kaguya. “But there may still be battles to come.”
Kaguya moves suddenly, and for a moment he expects her to crouch down. Instead, he finds himself being floated upwards by an invisible force so that they are at eye level. “You do not want to fight,” she notes.
The smile on Kaguya’s face flips his stomach in time with the hovering of his body. Sakumo nods. She leans forward and holds his face in her hands. “Then we are the same. I am glad.”
--
They see each other more frequently from then on.
Though Kaguya’s actions have done enough to protect their village from immediate threats, ninshū has always meant more to Sakumo and his comrades than mere combat. So he trains himself, growing stronger and faster to make his naturally low reserves of energy more efficient in their use.
But this time, Kaguya stays and watches. More than that, she shares her techniques with him. He learns from watching her move that he could never hope to match her in speed or strength, even when he suspects she’s using a mere fraction of her power. However, while too skilled to be a match as a sparring partner, she is an eager teacher. She advises him on how to move beyond changing the shape of his chakra to transform its nature.
She beams at him when he first moulds his chakra into the shape of earth and makes a miniature version of her snow-covered mountains. She laughs when he tries to light a candle and blows off his left eyebrow. He kisses her the first time he uses chakra to close his own wound.
He is not bold enough to presume that it is him alone keeping her here, but regardless, he is grateful. He is thankful for the days they spend running him ragged on his fields, and for the days they spend laying underneath the shade of a tree, watching her converse with the nearby rabbits.
Today, Kaguya’s usual leporine conversation seems to have turned into a quarrel. Kaguya and the white-and-brown rabbit glower at each other for a few minutes before Sakumo asks, “What’s the matter?”
“She coddles her kit,” Kaguya says disapprovingly. Before Sakumo can ask what she means, the rabbit freezes abruptly, and a ball of fur with shining red eyes pops out from beneath the creature. “He is old enough to live on his own.”
“Maybe he’s helping her by staying nearby,” Sakumo suggests. “Sometimes it can be difficult for parents to let go.”
Kaguya flops down onto the grass beside him, and the mother rabbit relaxes and mimics her, staring at them with what Sakumo can only imagine is a haughty expression among rabbits. “Parents must ensure their offspring are strong enough to survive.”
“Do you want to have a child?” Sakumo asks thoughtfully. Unbidden, he sees himself chasing a child with his hair and Kaguya’s eyes around these fields. He imagines himself teaching them to hold a sword, and her teaching them to tap into their chakra.
Lost in those thoughts as he is, Kaguya’s clear voice startles him in her reply. “I had two.” She pauses as if reconsidering. “Three. One is me.”
“Three... children?” Sakumo repeats.
Kaguya purses her lips, and her third eye narrows. He knows by now that this expression means she is translating what he’s said into a language more familiar to her than the one they share. After a moment, her face relaxes and she replies, “They are adults.”
Sakumo has always had the sense that Kaguya is a little older than him. Though his eyes have more lines around them than hers do, and his hair is more gray than her silver, that is less a product of age than being his father’s son. Kaguya, for all that she looks unmarked by the passage of time, speaks as though she’s lived through more battles than anyone in his lifetime. By now, he has learned her clan name, Ōtsutsuki, and knows that history books claim that the name has died out. He decides it doesn’t matter.
“I’d like to meet them someday,” Sakumo says, taking hold of her hand. “Have you ever married?”
Kaguya sits up and covers his hands with her own. Her fingers are warm and gentle, but when she speaks, her tone is stern. “Explain,” she demands.
With a sheepish chuckle, Sakumo turns his palm over and strokes Kaguya’s hand soothingly. Certainly, there is no blame to be laid for the frustration. He has been struggling just as much with shinobi techniques as she has been with the customs of samurai. “Well, usually marriage involves two individuals promising to live together permanently. Sometimes it’s recorded in writing as well.”
Sanguinely, Kaguya observes, “You are married to your summons.”
“No, no!” Sakumo says, dropping their interlocked hands to wave his own fervently. In protest, one strand of Kaguya’s hair reaches towards him and tugs Sakumo’s neck so that they are closer together, and places his hand on her cheek. He laughs, settling his fingers at her jaw. “Different kind of contract. I’ve never been married. It’s... building a future with someone. I’ve always hoped if I married someone, we’d be together for a long time.”
Kaguya’s grip on his wrist and neck grows looser, and soon she is close enough that they are nose-to-nose. “We will marry,” declares Kaguya plainly.
“Oh!” Sakumo’s heart stutters in his chest, which is unsurprising given how much blood is flooding his cheeks. “Yes, I’d like that.”
Her white eyes constrict in a way that he knows means she is looking behind him. Enthusiastically, she adds, “We will make a child.”
Sakumo clears his throat. “I haven’t—Well, I know—Ah...”
Kaguya smiles widely. “I will show you.”
--
As it turns out, Kaguya’s definition of a child is a bit different than Sakumo’s.
Notwithstanding the variations in how exactly children are brought into the world in his knowledge versus Kaguya’s revelations—the butterfly and worm are certainly a surprise, but he supposes the birds and bees have been mentioned—the form the child takes, a shining purple egg that Kaguya ties into a sling for him to carry, is also a new discovery.
“The baby,” Kaguya explains that first day, tapping the shell fondly.
Like Kaguya’s earlier visits, Sakumo suspects that the baby will follow their own schedule, so the egg is his constant companion for the months that follow. It sits with him in the kitchen as he cooks. It lays against his chest as he reads. It rolls behind him in his fields and scares off the birds that approach his crops, and earns the egg the nickname, “Kakashi.”
Although Kaguya is never gone for more than a day at a time during these months, Sakumo can see the changes in his wife’s face whenever she steps away from their home. Each time she appears from beyond the mountain, her face grows more weary. Time etches itself into her expression. Still, her tenderness towards Sakumo and Kakashi does not diminish.
It is why there is not a shred of doubt in his Sakumo’s heart when Kaguya returns home one night doing something he’s never seen her do previously: Running on foot.
He rises from the engawa, making sure Kakashi is strapped securely to his body before he rushes across the grass, barefoot, to meet Kaguya halfway. “What happened?” he asks, pulling her into his arms.
“I put them all to sleep,” Kaguya tells him, pressing closer. “And now they will put me to sleep.”
“Why?” Sakumo asks. Even he is not sure what he is asking.
Her grip on the two of them grows stronger. “The nursery will not hold without my help. When I am done, I can restore peace.”
As if in response to these words, the egg pips and five of the tiniest fingers Sakumo has ever seen reach out over the sling to grab onto a lock of Kaguya’s hair. “I don’t think the baby’s ready for you to leave.”
“No one can stay,” Kaguya says, placing her hand over Kakashi’s. She leans down to press her lips to those fingers and then disentangles them. “You and Kakashi will go too.”
“Where?” he asks.
“When,” she corrects, and splits the world open.
Kaguya’s third eye is wide and glassy, and when he follows her line of sight, Sakumo does not see the fields in front of his home, but instead a heavily forested area, with carved stone faces in the distance. He has never known so many buildings to be so close together, let alone in the shapes and sizes of these. A new bright, shining sphere lights up the sky so that the stars pale in comparison. Kaguya has cut the fabric of the air into something entirely new.
“We will see each other again,” Kaguya promises, pushing him forward.
When Sakumo wakes up, he has a child in his arms and the moon smiling down upon him.
29 notes
·
View notes