#anyway i'm gonna write something short and schmoopy for the extra credit entry now

[blackestnight]

26: parting ways

Prompt: When pigs fly

Word count: 1631

Set mid-Stormblood, shortly before the assault on Doma Castle. Fair warning, if you really like Hien, this might not be the fic for you.

Hanami confronts an uncomfortable what-if.

Hanami kept her head down while she traced her path through Monzen’s burned-out shell to the glittering riverside. She almost hadn’t recognized it, when Gosetsu had first led her over the hillside to hunt for abandoned weapons and scrap metal—the elegant sprawl of rooftops and arched lines of fences that lived in the faded sections of her memory torn to pieces, replaced with hollow footprints where homes had once stood, torn down to foundations pockmarked by Garlean bullets.

She had confined her search to the ruins of the barracks, because it was large and a likely place for findings, and because if she wandered through the old residential neighborhoods and found whatever remained of the house that had been hers she thought she might vomit on its threshold.

The crumbled walls were easier to pass by when she thought of them only as hiding spots for lumbering, half-broken Kiyofusa, or for slithering Magatsu. The road under her boots was cracked and half-reclaimed by dirt and weeds, but it still led her straight and steady to the edge of the One River, where Hien stood waiting. He had his back to her, his hands on his hips as he watched the silhouette of the castle—marred as it was by the arches and spires of Imperial industry—but the broken road crunched under Hanami’s feet, and she made no effort to silence herself.

“Thank you for joining me, my friend,” he said, jovial even with the high set of his shoulders.

She stopped several paces away, her own arms stiff at her side, and bowed deep at the waist, slow with unfamiliarity. What forms she’d learned as a child had long since been buried in the countryside. “My lord,” she said, her words still directed at the ground. Her hair blocked the periphery of her vision, hiding the tracks of patrolling machina.

A crunch of movement ahead—Hien turning, she supposed. “Enough of that,” he said, easy, light, assured. “Rise. I would rather keep your company as a friend than a subject.”

She stood as he bid, flicking her head just enough to toss her hair behind her shoulders. Easier without her pauldrons. She floundered for something to occupy her hands, settled for folding them at the small of her back, embracing the thick line where her blade fell over her hips. She met Hien’s eyes for a moment—grave, his stance tall, regal in the way she’d noticed he never really lost—and directed her gaze back to the water lapping at the grass behind him.

“Daito-san said you wished to speak to me,” she muttered. Her mama might have scolded her for it. We speak clearly when we speak to our king, she’d said, all those years ago, her finger under the point of Hanami’s chin to remind her how to hold herself. We should never waste Lord Kaien’s time with mumbling. Do you understand?

Hien, here and now, seemed to have no trouble hearing her, for he chuckled. “So formal! It is nothing so grave as you make it sound—Gosetsu was having one of his fits of reminiscence, and it occured to me that I have never heard you speak of the Doma of our childhood, or what you have seen since then.”

Not their childhood, she might have said, if she were anything resembling a friend. If he were capable of being anything other than her king. Instead she said, “Apologies, my lord. I was very young when the Empire invaded. I do not remember much.” Impossible, really, to tell if what remained to her was true memory or hopeful fantasy, stitched together from the scraps of stories her mothers and Aki had told her. Threadbare and patchwork next to the rich tapestries Gosetsu liked to weave when he was too far into the sake.

“A shame—though not unexpected.” Hien shuffled, shifted back to look over the castle again. “I admit, I do find some amusement in reconciling the Eorzeans’ Warrior of Light with what Gosetsu remembers of you.”

Hanami flicked her head up just enough to seek out the Imperial banners hanging over the castle walls. She had to close her eyes, briefly, against the blinding glitter of the setting sun on the water. The spitting image of your mother, Gosetsu had said, his roar filling the Rising Stones to its corners. Somehow he hadn’t seemed any smaller than the hulking mountainous shadow from her earliest memories. “I was glad to see him well,” Hanami said. It was mostly true, even.

(Whatever she had been, whatever family she had come from—many of her countrymen were too young to remember, and the rest were kind enough not to remind her. It would have been cruel, she thought, for them to reminisce about the mothers she had left, about the history she had never had the chance to live. Better to turn to her for the present, as a shield, a guide, a trailblazer in this new land they would have to make into a home, the one she had barely begun to claw a place into herself. The youngest of the refugees called her Hanami, like the Scions did, informal to the point of rudeness, not that she had been able to muster the energy to care. The elders, the ones who remembered, said Hagane like the name was as heavy as it felt, now. Weighty with apology for the lack of shoulders left to bear it.)

Gosetsu had thought her dead. She doesn’t doubt that Hien would have, too, if he’d thought of her at all. Death would have been kinder than the knife-drive of Gosetsu’s words, turned to Yugiri—We must answer our Lord’s summons. Doma calls us home.

Turned toward Yugiri, and his broad back to Hanami, because whatever name she’d been born to, she had given that power up. Shed it like a cloak falling from sloped shoulders, abandoned when she had fled into Yanxia’s morning mists. Maybe earlier, when her mothers had bundled her and her brothers out of Monzen, all those years ago.

Hien shifted, tipped his head in a clear beckon. “My father spoke of you, on occasion, as did my mother. They both wondered after the wellbeing of your mothers.” Hanami stepped forward when he motioned again, a gesture of his hand calling her closer to the water, nearer to his side so he could lean in. A mockery of a confidant. “Don’t tell Gosetsu,” he added, “but I think of all my father’s retainers, your mother was one of his favorites. He told me she could charm a smile from a stone.”

She could, probably. Her mama was nearly always smiling, laughing, dancing across the bounds of propriety to jostle other people into laughing along. She smiled with her tongue pressed to the backs of her teeth, when she was joyful. Bits of blue poking through the gaps. When Shomi’s smile was perfect and polite, that was a bad sign. That was the smile Hanami remembered from when her mama had laid her katana across her lap, reverent, and oiled the blade while she spoke of chasing Imperial scouts across the countryside and cutting their hearts from their chests.

Shomi was kind. Friendly, Hanami remembered, with Lord Kaien, because she had earned the privilege, born from the familiarity of a childhood spent trailing at the ankles of the same adults, for lack of immediate family to raise her. Loyal, up until the day she left her sword and her king to take her wife and children and escape the looming shadows of war.

(A half-remembered argument, overheard from around the strange corners of the farmhouse Hanami had grown into: I will not let the Empire make orphans of my children. I will have them know the faces of their mothers before we leave them.)

Hien watched her, and Hanami watched the water, turned away from the force of his eyes. Kaien, her mama had said, had forgiven her flight, had heard a mother’s plea with the heart of an almost-father and let her go. Hien, she knew, was under no such obligation of mercy. Hanami had not earned the privilege of insolence, and if he decided to take her dedication to Eorzea as disloyalty to Doma…

Hanami was almost sure that Lyse was the only one of the Scions who understood why she couldn’t meet Hien’s eye. There were few things more dangerous than a king scorned.

“Do you have any memories of my parents?” Hien asked, when Hanami found no response that didn’t taste like ashes on her tongue. “Of your life here, before the fall?”

She swallowed and watched the blazing sun, dipping low past the towering outline of the castle, stranded across the river, burning points of light and searing swathes of shadows into her eyes. Just like the tattered oil-paper outlines of her memory.

“Lord Kaien was a kind man,” she said, because it was the thing to say, because her mothers remembered it. “My brothers and I would chase each other around the Hall of the Four Pillars sometimes while my mama stodd guard. He did not seem to mind. Lady Mina thanked us for chasing mischievous spirits away with our noise.”

Half-remembered, or false memory constructed from retellings. But they were the closest things she had to offer. An obeisance.

“I wonder,” Hien said, his smile audible, pleased with her offering. “If the Garleans had not come, would you and I have made such fast friends as our forebears?”

My friend, he said, with that same genial voice that he used on the battlefield, when she had toppled the khagan for him to raise his army. When he had named her champion, claimed her sword like it was his right. Which, she supposed, it was.

“Maybe,” she said, dust-mouthed.

#ffxivwrite2020 #final fantasy xiv #oc: hanami hagane #and a bonus tag so this DOESN'T show up in the tag for #hien rijin #hanami is just a bundle of messy feelings at any given time on any given topic #but that goes double for things pertaining to hien and pre-conquest doma #anyway i'm gonna write something short and schmoopy for the extra credit entry now #writing - mine