I had not seen the light of sun by day since I had lived in the mountains. I stood in the middle of the grass field at the back of the Okiya, the mountain as my backdrop, the colours painting me with reflections of green and blue. I raised a hand to the sky, squinting through my fingers, blocking out the light to look at the low hanging clouds. A clatter of steel at my feet interrupted my view, throwing the glint of the sun, scattering the light particles. I looked down to see a katana there, and looked up to Sugai.
"Why don't you practice anymore?"
I narrowed my eyes as I looked at him, not used to the harshness of the afternoon sun, but it warmed my skin and my heart all the same. At his side, he held the hilt of his own katana loosely, letting it hover in his grasp. "I heard Kitsune don't like katana."
"Who told you that? Mori?" He raised the katana, throwing the glint of sunlight into my eyes. I left the katana on the ground where he had thrown it, simply beginning to walk a circle to the opposite side of him, placing the sun behind me.
"Just whispers in the streets." I recalled a time when I stood in solitude on a smoking battlefield ripe with death from battle. Seeing the field so green before me now, the clear outline of the mountain in the distance, I considered myself rich because I had survived. I had been a vessel of happiness for those dead, however short a time it had been. And yet in contrast, I had been the cause of the ultimate destruction of the very place they lost their lives to protect. "Tell me, what becomes of one who is owned by Kitsune?"
I caught his eyes darting to the katana on the ground and back to my form. He focused on the shape of me rather than the detail, to quickly detect any movement I made. His downfall was how well I knew him. "We do not own you, Seishin." I stood my ground as he moved in slowly, continuing to circle as I simply turned in place.
"I am bound to you. Doesn't that mean I belong to you?"
"Just as much as I belong to you." Like a flash of light he moved, but I was faster still, predicting him as we danced through our charade like foreplay. I stepped aside, around him, bending to retrieve the katana on the ground in one motion. I turned and lifted my knee to push his back with my foot.
Stumbling, he clumsily swung the blade in an arch above him as he fell, turning. I shifted my weight to avoid the blade, felt the air cut with the force, but I was unafraid. Even without control, I trusted his hand to bring me no harm. "You said you came back because you are forced to bring me death. But now you'll simply agree to live out my life here with me, at this Okiya?"
He lay back relaxed upon the grass, his eyes fixed on me. He had dropped the katana where it lay. "I've seen you and Mori together. Who am I to interrupt?"
"Sugai."
An interruption with the wave of his hand, though perhaps he meant none. "I accepted the day I left you that if you lived, you lived without me. There was nothing I could do."
Complacence in his voice was palpable. Truthfully he had accepted that at some point in his absence I had the potential to love another. He had come to understand that I was no longer desperately afraid of losing him. Yet there was something else he had to know. "Sugai, I've changed but I love you the same. I love you first." I defined love by his standards. There I found myself so carelessly speaking the word like I knew what the definition was by any other.
"I quite like the sun here." A stretch with his arms overhead, his fingers combing the grass above his head. "I think you've learned what love is, Seishin, but I don't think you've learned enough to call the way you feel about Mori and I any different."
He had secrets to tell, I knew he did. Every time I felt his embrace I could hear the secrets buzzing within him, and I knew he ached to tell them. "You can decide anything you want about the way I feel."
The secrets ached to be told just as much. "Mori's entire life is enslaving a human man. She's done it with you. She got lucky."
"She didn't enslave me."
"That's why I said she got lucky." Let him talk, I told myself. It had taken years already waiting for him to do so. "Perhaps I should release my bind on you and let her have you alone. I could just disappear again until you're done with your life."
"Don't." I didn't intend to beg, but I was not above it either.
"I am here simply to be chaos. There is nothing I can do to stop it. Didn't you realize that once I was gone, things became easier for you?"
All at once, I understood. My role was to be taken advantage of. "You are the reason for Sakura's tragedy."
"And I will be the reason behind so many others."