Sagara held himself very still, savoring the few peaceful moments he yet had before dawn. No one else was awake yet, but he was accustomed to these early mornings. The first sixteen years of his life had, after all, been spent working his father’s little plot of farmland. Eventually, it had flourished, but the long hours – rising as soon as the sky to the east stained gray with the first rays of sunlight – had been burned into him.

He drew a deep breath of cold morning air. Sometime during the pre-dawn hours, the snow had stopped at last, and he was filled with the musky smell of damp earth and water-swollen pine. Idly, Sagara thought that he had dreamed last night, of something he had never dreamt before. He tilted his chin back a little, trying to recall… and then a drop of lingering moisture slid from one of the cedar boughs above his head to splash against the bridge of his nose.

Sagara blinked once, startled, and then he was laughing softly to himself, low in his chest. The drop of water rolled over the hollow below his eye, tracing the piercing line of his cheekbone downward. It collected in the corner of his mouth, and he tasted the sharpness of minerals.

That boy back in Kyoto, he had dreamed of him, hadn’t he? Sagara frowned a little; those blue eyes hadn’t been so strange that they could have stayed with him for the past two months. Maybe he was just haunted. The boy was a phantom, after all, or he might as well have been for the way he had slid so easily in and out of existence, the way he had spoken, softly but with so much purpose.

He should have been intimidated. The boy had wanted to intimidate him… but for some reason, all that venom had faded into the background, like the sound of rain outside a dry room will disappear if ignored for long enough.

Sighing quietly, Sagara shook his head. He couldn’t trust himself in these early hours, when he was the only thing conscious save a few birds, and even they were still groggy. Phantoms, indeed. He must have been the most gullible, easy-to-please son of a bitch in the whole damn country.

"You’re up early, Captain."

Sagara started a little; he must have been further away than he had thought if he hadn’t been alerted by footfalls on fresh snow. He collected his wits quickly, and reached for the coat he had hung in the branches of a cedar tree the night before. "Not so early," he said, shrugging into the heavy red material. "I haven’t been awake long."

"It’s not even light yet." Ichiro Daisuke, Sagara’s lieutenant, circled slowly around in front of him, cocking a hand on his left hip. He was yet young – only a few years Sagara’s senior – but the scars that crossed his body spoke volumes of the role he had played in the revolution. There was respect here, as well as the sort of trust Sagara would have liked to give freely, but knew he should not.

"But it is nice, don’t you think?" Sagara smiled mysteriously, and turned away a little, buttoning his coat.

"Maybe." Ichiro was just humoring him, not even attempting sincerity. "But… not as nice as eight hours of uninterrupted sleep would be."

"Such a baby," Sagara teased lightly. He ran a hand back through his hair, flattening it neatly against the nape of his neck. "But… we are near Kyoto again, so you just might get your wish."

"I felt so welcome last time."

Sagara lowered his eyes a bit, but it only took a moment for him to recover his smile. "It wasn’t so bad. I thought they were really warming up to us."

"What gave you that idea?" Ichiro chucked softly.

He didn’t answer immediately. He knew the man was only was only joking with him, was only needling, but his words had hit against something that was more sensitive than Sagara would have cared to admit. His thoughts turned briefly to the boy, who had been so abrupt in his dismissal of them. Cold as ice. "Lieutenant?" Sagara turned to face him once more, sliding a hand idly over the rough bark of the cedar tree. His eyebrow arched faintly, inquisitive. "Do you believe in ghosts?"

"Believe in them?" Ichiro shook his head, his eyes darkening a little. "Haven’t we both seen our fair share of ghosts, Sagara?"

The captain shivered a little, in spite of himself. "I… I suppose maybe we have," he said softly, "but that’s not quite what I meant." He drew a deep breath, for composure. It sounded foolish, now that he said it aloud, but that moment in the hallway when pale gaze had met pale gaze, icy blue on placid gray – he couldn’t leave it alone.

He tried again. "I mean, do you think that there are such things as spirits that are so angry, or discontent, or miserable that not even death can put them at peace?"

"Sagara?" Ichiro’s brow knit in confusion, his lips drew downward into a stern frown. "What’s this about?"

"I’m not quite sure," he admitted amidst a quiet sigh. "Maybe just something I dreamed."

Ichiro watched him closely for a moment, as though he expected something in Sagara’s expression to betray his true intent. At last, he shook his head once more. "No. No, I don’t. I think… we have enough to worry about without malcontent spirits wandering around giving us even more trouble."

Nodding faintly, Sagara went back to arranging the gear he had forgotten a moment ago. He tugged his gloves firmly into place. "I suppose… you’re probably right about that much," he sighed.

He was prepared to leave it there; he could have let the whole matter fade into insignificance then, but Ichiro moved a bit closer, tilting his head to catch Sagara’s downcast eyes. "My son," he said quietly.

"Hmm?" Sagara looked up, one glove lingering, forgotten, half on his fingers and half off.

"I haven’t seen him in seven years," he continued without raising his voice much. "I used to write letters to him all he time, when the fighting was at its worst, even though… I knew they’d never make it back to him. Want to know what I used to say to him, Sagara?"

"I…" Sagara hesitated a moment. Ichiro’s words sounded too much like a lecture, and he hadn’t come here for that. But the man’s eyes were dark, and they flashed intently, and before he could think better of it, he was saying, "I do."

Ichiro nodded, just once, slightly. "I told him that everything I had suffered… I would gladly suffer it all again, if it meant he would never have to. Captain…" He leaned forward intently, so abruptly that Sagara wondered how he would maintain equilibrium, and he caught one of the man’s hands in his own to steady him. "The only way you’ll become a ghost, is if you needlessly allow yourself to stop living."

It was absurd, ridiculously absurd advice, but at least it meant that Ichiro didn’t understand his true intentions. That might prove difficult to explain. Sagara bit down a smirk, and turned his eyes upward. "Thank you," he said softly. "I’ll remember that you said that."

And then Ichiro looked away, and the tension between them broke cleanly, like a twig from a pine branch. He laughed a little, disarmingly. "You’re still young, Sagara. You’re an idealist, and that’s why you fight this battle so well."

Sagara drew back a step; with room between them now to breathe, he remembered the glove that still hung broken-limbed off his fingertips. He flexed his knuckles until it slid into place. "I’m not sure if that’s a compliment," he admitted.

"Maybe it isn’t." Ichiro shrugged. "Maybe it’s… just the truth."

Sagara bent to retrieve his swords from where they leaned against the tree trunk. He clicked one a few inches out of the sheath, enough to inspect the blade, before buckling it into place at his hip. He glanced up. "And that’s all I’ve ever asked for, from any of you."

* * *

It felt like he had been awake for hours. This early in the morning – in the strange hollow between full dark and true light – time always progressed strangely. Behind closed screens, the rest of the inn’s patrons slept on, but Aoshi’s passage down the halls from the practice yard, where a slow procession of forms had barely warmed him against the morning chill, was stealthy and without discordance.

Sometimes, if he concentrated hard enough, he could hear muffled noises through the walls: a cough, a sigh of breath, the rustle of someone turning in his sleep… This pre-dawn voyeurism was his guilty pleasure, even though the very concept of pleasure was a little strange to him, something that had never quite seemed to fit.

He was no longer a child, but it seemed adulthood had crept up on him; he had never felt conscious of an actual shift. Only now, the boys who had been infants when he had been an infant, who had been children when he had been a child, were no longer alone when they walked in the street. Pretty, frail women – like small birds – seemed perpetually at their elbows, across from them in the little restaurants that lined Kyoto’s sidewalks.

Something had changed while he had been absent in the capital, but he knew better than to blame it on the city. A revolution could never be stopped, after all. Not once it had been set in motion. That was what he had learned during his time in Edo.

Yet still, he thought sometimes that it would only take the slightest effort to be jealous of these boys and their birds, but then he realized that it was an effort he could never make. His life had not been his own in a long time. He had broken it willingly into pieces, and divided the shards amongst the few men and women who remained to follow him.

Aoshi sighed soundlessly as he slipped into his room to drop off his kodachi. He hated being without the weapon, even in such a familiar setting, but things weren’t like they had been before, and it wouldn’t do if one of the patrons saw him carrying a blade.

He leaned the kodachi in the corner, and hesitated a moment, staring at it. He should have kept it in the cabinet, or tucked in his mattress, should have concealed it, but… no, he wasn’t ashamed of this, not of what he had done. He began to turn away, but a voice from the door halted him, mid-step. He flinched, imperceptibly; only one person could have crept up on him.

"I know you’re not just going to leave that there," Okina said, bracing once hand against the doorframe.

Aoshi tilted his chin back a little, and still he didn’t turn completely to face the man. "I’m not going to cower before these men," he said evenly.

Okina snorted soft laughter. "No one’s asking you to. There’s no shame in being cautious, you know."

"I’m not a child anymore," Aoshi said shortly, but he snatched up the blade all the same, and thrust it into the little cabinet in the corner. "So don’t treat me like one."

"And you don’t have to prove anything to us, so stop acting as though we’re strangers." Okina turned to go, deliberately, and Aoshi glanced over his shoulder. He hadn’t known the matter was at an end. "Breakfast is ready whenever you are, by the way," the elder man said casually, and then he vanished.

Aoshi sighed, and crossed the room to tug the screen shut behind him. Back in these walls, he felt perpetually as though he was being watched. Just a bit of unfounded paranoia, but still it irritated him, and he couldn’t let his composure falter.

Not like… it was faltering now. He could feel it, in the slight tension around his eyes, the unusual tilt of his lips: frustration. If Okina - if the best of them - didn’t understand what troubled him, then what hope did he have of finding understanding at all?

It was a thousand little things, all stacked against him. The uniform he was no longer able to wear in public, the blade he had to hide… and soldiers. Soldiers of the new government had stayed here, had slept here, in his home. The blow that had dealt to his pride had hurt more than any injury he had received on the battlefield.

Why had he spent all that time in the capital, away from everything familiar? Why had he suffered betrayal, shame, if, in the end, it had all amounted to nothing? He had lost so many men… only to end up right back where he had begun, enduring the same dull domestic bliss he had all those years ago.

The others – the ones who were older than him – they said there was nothing he could have done, that the same fate would have befallen any of them, had they been in his position. But… he wasn’t just any one of them; he was the best. He should have turned out the best results.

When he turned a little, Aoshi caught a glimpse of his face in the small mirror that hung near the doorway. He looked pale.

Furiously, he shook his head to clear away the last of his lingering uncertainty, or, rather, to drive it deep inside once more. That was where it belonged, after all, a place where no one else could know of its existence.

He looked once more into the glass, and he was satisfied by the expression his features held; it was calm. Only when he was certain, did he slip out into the hallway, following the path Okina had taken a moment ago.