Archive of Our Own

PROLOGUE, 1901.

Staring down at his trembling hands, he watches as the lines in his palms begin to swirl fluidly like an oil slick, lulling him into a state of brief hypnosis. Desperately, he attempts to bridge the gap of time between now and about an hour ago, yet it feels as though each time he grasps a hold of a memory, the brick disintegrates into sand, slipping through the gaps of his bloodied fingers. But what his mind fails to recall, his heart remembers—and oh, it mourns.

“How are you going to bring them back to me,” he seethes through clenched teeth, reaching down to clutch at the man’s stained collar, if only to cease the quivering in his knuckles. “How are you going to pay for what you have done?”

Despite the mortal wound in the crook of his neck, the man merely laughs. He’d accomplished what he set out to do, and if he were to die by the hands of his greatest creation, so be it. “Surely, you couldn’t have thought eternal health, life and youth came without a price?”

He does not grant the man the privilege of seeing him cry. He simply tightens his grip on the man’s collar and vents out his grief, though he knows deep down that no amount of violence can undo what has already been done. The tremors in his fingers grow stronger and stronger, threatening to crack the mantle of his fragile skin, but he does not stop—not even when the light has left the man’s eyes, not even when the mahogany of his desk is stained with a deep shade of crimson.

He feels a hand rest itself upon his shoulder, squeezing hesitantly, and only then does he remember how it feels to be in control of himself.

“My Lord, it is getting quite late. Would you like to retire for the night?”

He opens his mouth to form a reply, but he finds that his throat is far too hoarse to produce any sound, his tongue numbed with bitter blood. Had he been screaming? Is he still screaming?

He allows himself to be spoiled, just this once, gentle hands prying his jaw off from what was once the neck of a man.

As he is led down the hallway, leaving a trail of red in his wake, he begins to cry in earnest—for a family that will never return to his side, for a hellish life that he will never escape, and for the facade of a human that he has long outgrown.

But most of all, he cries with a heavy stone of guilt resting in the pit of his full stomach, for he did not even have the willpower to abstain from drinking out of that cesspool of scum.

PART ONE, 1905:
INNOCENCE.

When he had first seen the advertisement for a home tutor in the daily paper, Itaru was expecting to find himself at the doorstep of a modest home. The listing had offered food and lodging instead of pay, so he’d assumed that whoever put the advert into the paper couldn’t even afford a tutor.

Yet here he stands, on the porch of a grand manor blanketed in ivy. He squints at the ornate door knocker, clicking his tongue at the way the gold glistens in the sunlight. With its Georgian columns and trimmed hedges, the manor absolutely reeks of old money.

The wealthiest people are almost always the stingiest, Itaru thinks to himself, already forming a good idea of his new employer’s attitude. If he weren’t so eager to escape his God-awful landlord, he wouldn’t have even considered taking on the listing in the first place. But alas, beggars can't be choosers, and with his lease coming to an end, Itaru is in no position to be picky.

With a heavy heart, he grasps onto the cold metal and knocks twice.

The door opens promptly—a little too promptly, as if the man before him had already known that Itaru was there deliberating on his doorstep.

“Good afternoon, Mister Chigasaki. My name is Homare Arisugawa,” he politely greets, dipping his head in a well-practiced bow. The butler, Itaru assumes.

“Good afternoon,” Itaru replies, and Homare kindly offers to carry his bags into the manor (which he readily accepts because he’d been carrying his suitcases the entire journey here, and his shoulders are really starting to protest).

“The master of the house is currently out on a business trip. He regrets not being able to meet you in person, but Lord Chikage sends you his regards,” Homare continues as he leads Itaru up a flight of stairs. Itaru takes his time, partly because he feels winded about halfway through the climb, but mostly because he’s taken aback from the sheer amount of portraits hanging on the walls. Beloved relatives or not, how could anyone in this home feel comfortable with this many pairs of eyes on them at all times? He silently makes a note in his head not to wander around at night, in fear of accidentally frightening himself when he comes face to face with a large portrait in the dark.

Upon reaching his room, Itaru sees that Homare has already placed his bags neatly by the foot of his bed. He marvels at how spacious it is, and when Homare goes to kindly open the windows, he notices that the day curtains are made of a fine organza, one that was probably imported from Zhejiang. How unnecessarily luxurious.

“Do take your time to unpack, Mister Chigasaki,” Homare says, passing him the key to the room, “The Young Master is currently resting, so his first lesson can wait until after tea.” He leaves with a bow, but not without closing the door behind him.

Turning back to his suitcases, Itaru sighs. Homare is eerily formal, he thinks. But with nowhere else to go, Itaru plans on staying for as long as he possibly can, so he’s just going to have to get used to having a butler around… and those flights of stairs.

With the last of his suitcases unpacked, Itaru cannot help but feel a little interested in the manor. He’s never stayed in a home this large nor this grand, and a small part of him is aching to explore the floors and rooms, just to satisfy some strange curiosity that’s bubbling within him.

Quietly leaving his room, he starts to peek around the manor—not into any rooms with closed doors, of course, his mother didn’t raise a heathen—and he learns that there are far too many beds for just three residents. Of course the wealthy have everything in surplus, he complains, after seeing what was probably the fifth guest room in a row. He finally makes his way down the stairs, nearly bored to death of bedrooms, when he notices another flight of stairs leading down to the basement.

A wine cellar?

He approaches the stairs, but just as he walks down the first step, he hears a pair of footsteps from behind him.

“Mister Chigasaki, would you like to join the Young Master for afternoon tea?”

Itaru immediately turns towards the butler, slightly embarrassed at having been caught sneaking around. “O-Oh, yes, of course!”

A smiling Homare leads him into the dining parlour, where he sees a young boy sitting at the table, swinging his legs that barely touch the ground back and forth. At first sight, the boy looks nothing short of an angel, with hair like a cherub flowing from the crown of his head in loose curls. Despite being almost twice his height, Itaru almost feels intimidated approaching the boy—he definitely carries himself with a charisma rare for someone of his age.

“Young Master Sakuya, this is your new tutor, Mister Chigasaki,” Homare introduces as he gestures towards Itaru, who extends his hand in response.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Sakuya,” Itaru cheerfully says, and the boy places down his teaspoon to accept Itaru’s hand with a wide grin.

“It’s nice to meet you too, Mister Chigasaki. I look forward to learning a lot from you!” Oh thank God, the child isn’t a brat. Itaru takes a seat at the table, and thanks Homare when he fills his cup with tea. Dissolving a sugar cube into the steaming liquid, Itaru finds himself the recipient of Sakuya’s many questions.

“What will I be learning, Mister Chigasaki? How long have you been a tutor? Do you like the manor so far?”

Itaru can’t help but smile, the contagious excitement radiating from the boy coming across as endearing—almost as though he were a puppy, eager and bright-eyed. “I will be helping you with your grammar, reading, writing and spelling. I’ve been a tutor for a few years now, and I think that the manor is beautiful. Are you an avid reader, Sakuya?”

Sakuya shys away, curling into himself bashfully like the leaves of a mimosa. “Not of the classics, sir. I… I enjoy acting out scenes from playbooks.”

“All on your own?”

The boy blushes, sinking further into his seat. “It’s a little embarrassing, but yes. I do try to stick to monologues, so I’m not always having a conversation with myself.”

“Still, that’s quite impressive for your age,” Itaru hums, taking a sip of tea. “Who taught you how to read playbooks?”

“Lord Chikage did,” Sakuya says, a fond expression on his face, “He’s very clever. But also very busy. He’s always out of the country, nowadays.”

Nodding, Itaru makes note of that fact. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to encounter his presumably pompous employer very often after all. As Itaru finishes the last of his tea, he gets up from his chair, dabbing the corner of his mouth with his handkerchief.

“Right then, do lead the way to the study,” he says, before adding, “If we finish up early, I’d be more than happy to be your scene partner. You can even pick the play, if you’d like.”

It’s almost a shame that we weren’t able to perform together, Itaru thinks, as he watches Sakuya attempt to correct his spelling mistakes for the nth time. The boy practically deflates when Itaru informs him that the lesson is over, visibly disappointed both in himself for not being a fast enough learner and about the promised scene.

“Don’t feel disheartened, Sakuya,” Itaru encourages, ruffling the boy’s hair, “Think of it as motivation to work harder for our next lesson. You’ve improved a lot from just today, and I think you should feel really proud of yourself.”

Sakuya nods, with a determined look in his eyes. “Next time. Next time, I’ll get you to act with me for sure!”

Itaru returns the nod. “I’ll be looking forward to it. Have a good evening, Sakuya.”

Leaving the study, Itaru notices an unfamiliar figure standing in the gardens—could that be Lord Chikage? But wasn’t he supposed to be on a business trip? Without even realising, he finds himself walking towards the stranger, and he mentally prepares himself to potentially meet his new employer.

“Hello? I don’t believe we’ve met— My name is Itaru Chigasaki, I’m the new home tutor for Sakuya,” Itaru calls out as he approaches the man, who turns around at the sound of his voice. Something about the way he’s wearing a scarf despite the warm weather strikes Itaru as odd, but he knows better than to comment on it.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Tsumugi, the manor’s gardener.” With an apologetic smile, Tsumugi holds up his muddied, gloved hands. “I would shake your hand, but I’m covered in dirt at the moment so I’m afraid I’ll have to politely decline.”

Itaru quickly returns his arm to his side, laughing awkwardly to fill in the silence. Tsumugi returns to his work, and it’s only then that Itaru notices how beautiful the roses he’s tending to are. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen such vibrantly coloured petals, and definitely not in this shade of brilliant red. If he didn’t know better, he would’ve assumed they were strips of velvet, curling around the buds protectively. In awe, he reaches up to confirm his assumptions, only to accidentally catch his arm on a nearby thorn.

Biting back a curse, he quickly pulls away from the offending plant. His sleeve is torn—he quickly checks his stinging arm and although the cut isn’t particularly deep, blood begins to bead at the surface like a string of pearls. I’d better go take care of this if I don’t want it to stain my shirt, Itaru grumbles to himself, heading back into the manor.

He realises, then, that he doesn’t actually know where the bathrooms are. With hope that Sakuya’s still where he last left him, Itaru makes his way back to the study—and as luck would have it, the boy is still sitting at his desk, practicing his spelling with admirable zeal.

“Sakuya, would you be able to tell me where the bathrooms are?”

The boy does not respond, far too engrossed in his work. Itaru snorts, walking towards him.

“Sakuya, do you know where the bathrooms are?” he asks again, once he reaches Sakuya’s side. The boy is still uncharacteristically silent, and Itaru is just about to crouch down to check if he’d somehow fallen asleep when—

Sakuya grabs at his wrist, all of a sudden, surprising Itaru with both the speed at which he’d grasped him and the strength of his white-knuckled clutch. “Sakuya? Is everything alright?” he asks, beginning to worry because never in his many years of tutoring has a student ever behaved quite as strangely as this. He winces, the tightness of Sakuya’s hold slowly cutting off the circulation in his fingers to the point where he’s able to feel his pulse in his fingertips.

“Sakuya?” he repeats, “Please let go of me, you’re hurting me. Sakuya? Sakuya!”

A familiar, gloved hand reaches in to separate Itaru from the boy. “Mister Chigasaki,” Homare calmly speaks, as if this is nothing out of the ordinary. “I suggest you tend to your wound before it gets infected. The bathroom is the second door down the hall.”

Still reeling from shock, Itaru dumbly nods, leaving the study to go wash off the drying blood from his arm. He fills the basin about halfway with a jug and takes a washcloth from the drawers, his body moving entirely on muscle memory because his sluggish consciousness has yet to catch up. What on Earth just happened?

Looking down at his wrist, he hisses when he touches the tender skin. He’s almost certain that Sakuya’s grip will leave purplish blooms in its wake, marring his wrist with harsh, angry bruises that couldn’t be more unlike their creator. Cleaning his arm, Itaru wonders if this sort of event happens often; Homare definitely didn’t seem to think Sakuya was behaving oddly.

Walking back to his room, he sees the butler waiting for him by the doorway.

“My sincere apologies, Mister Chigasaki. Are you quite alright?”

“Yes,” Itaru says, cradling his sore wrist to his chest, “I’m fine, thank you. How’s Sakuya?”

“The Young Master isn’t feeling very well, unfortunately, so he will not be able to join you for dinner. Would you like to have your meal delivered to your room?”

“That would be wonderful, thank you.”

Itaru watches Homare head down the stairs before reaching out to open his room door—and he notices that one of his sleeve buttons has gone missing. It must’ve fallen off during the struggle earlier, Itaru guesses, heading back to the study to look for his stray button.

However, he pauses his search when he passes the walls of portraits once more. Now that he’s paying attention, he sees that the oil paintings are all of the same few individuals—some of whom he recognises, like Sakuya, but the others are completely unfamiliar. They look prim and proper, with groomed hair and expensive clothing, exactly the image of aristocracy Itaru would expect.

Itaru tries to guess which of these sticks in the mud is his mysterious employer—it definitely isn’t the one with curly hair and a soft smile, nor does he think it’s the smaller one with a fringe covering half of his face. If he had to guess, he’d pick either the old man in the center of the portrait, or the grouchy looking one with sharp eyes… Moving a few steps back in his careful observation, the sound of something small and metallic bouncing off the side of the wall catches his attention. His button!

Itaru walks over to pick it up, and he finds himself, yet again, at the stairs leading to the basement. That’s right, I never did manage to explore this area…

Treading down the stairs with careful steps, Itaru finally reaches the basement doorway. It’s locked, but the lack of dust on the door handle allows him to conclude that it’s not a neglected space. Actually, if he looks really hard at the gap between the doors, it appears as though someone had been here only recently—

“Is snooping around the residence of your employer a habit of yours?”

That voice did not sound like Homare, which can only mean…

“My apologies, L-Lord Chikage,” Itaru stammers, feeling all too similar to a deer staring down the barrel of a hunter’s rifle. “I really didn’t mean to overstep. I was looking for my button because it had fallen off my sleeve. From earlier.”

Turning around, he’s greeted with the sight of the grumpy looking man he’d seen in the portraits. And good God, those paintings did not manage to capture the strength of that death glare at all. Chikage stares down at him from the top of the staircase with crossed arms and an unamused expression, his towering frame all the more intimidating from where Itaru’s standing. Meekly, Itaru climbs his way to the top, dreading every second, and he thinks he finally understands exactly why curiosity kills the cat.

“I really am sorry,” Itaru echoes, and honestly, seeing Chikage’s glare up close is enough to scare him away from the basement for the next ten years.

“Thank you for taking care of Sakuya, Mister Chigasaki. However, please stop sticking your nose into places where it does not need to be. It is unnecessary, and not appreciated in the slightest.” Chikage’s voice is even and frosty, and Itaru has never wanted to excuse himself as badly as he does right now.

“Of course,” he quietly says, going up the stairs and into his room at a record-breaking pace. He feels like he’s about to throw up, humiliation and annoyance and fatigue suddenly crashing down onto his shoulders all at once.

Itaru hears a knock, and for a second, fears that Chikage had returned to dismiss him of his duties.

“Mister Chigasaki?” he hears instead, “I’ll be leaving your dinner on a cart by the door.”

“Yes, thank you,” Itaru replies, drenched with immense relief.

Taking his tray into his room, he half-dreads the days to come. Itaru only hopes he doesn’t have to encounter Chikage again, at least not for the next week. He’s met plenty of furious parents and downright demonic professors, but he thinks he’s never felt this terrified of anyone in his entire career.

(But as he begins to work on his lesson plans for tomorrow, his wrist twinges from his feeble attempt to write—and he fears that Chikage might not be the only person in this manor whom he’s afraid of.)

Itaru’s never been a light sleeper, but the combination of an unfamiliar environment and a deep-seated anxiety from yesterday’s events proved to be disruptive for a good night’s rest. He wakes for the second time in a span of a couple hours, and decides that he’d be better off doing some light reading instead of tossing and turning amongst sheets until morning light breaks.

Midway through his novel, however, an alarmingly shrill screech interrupts the stark silence, morphing into a desperate child’s wailing that tugs at Itaru’s heartstrings.

Sakuya?

He waits, thinking that either Homare or Chikage would show up to calm the boy down eventually, but as the minutes go by, Sakuya’s wailing only seems to get louder and louder, and Itaru’s worries grow larger and larger. Would I be overstepping as his tutor if I enter his bedroom? Is he going to give me more bruises?

Well, it’s not like he’s able to focus on his reading with all this ruckus, anyway. He might as well try and help the boy, if no one else is going to. Bruised wrist forgotten, Itaru stumbles into the hallway, and like a blind bat in a cavern he navigates, following the echoing of Sakuya’s cries right to his door.

“Sakuya? Sakuya, what’s happening?” He knocks twice just for formality, barging into his room before waiting for a response.

The boy writhes in his bed as if possessed, his eyes screwed shut and fringe matted with sweat against his forehead. Itaru pauses—he’s never encountered someone experiencing a night terror firsthand, but from the stories he’s heard and read about, he thinks it’s important that he interferes before Sakuya bites off his tongue during his fit, or worse.

“Sakuya, can you hear me?” Itaru says as he gently pats Sakuya on the arm with a calmness he didn’t even think he was capable of, “You’re alright, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re safe, you’re in your room in April Manor. It’s alright.”

Smoothing out the crease between Sakuya’s furrowed eyebrows, Itaru stays by the boy’s bedside, repeating his words again and again to a steady rhythm only he can hear. And ever so slowly, Sakuya’s shrieks begin to fizzle, the tension in his face draining out with every pat. Only when his whimpers cease does Itaru realise that he feels absolutely exhausted.

Ready to go collapse onto his bed, Itaru turns, only to see a familiar figure standing at Sakuya’s doorway.

“Lord Chikage,” he audibly gasps, a hand splayed over his chest as if to stop his heart from prancing out from his ribcage. How on Earth did he not hear him coming?

The master of the house approaches Itaru, whose skin prickles from the needles of his stare. Oh, he does not look pleased at all.

“Mister Chigasaki,” Chikage starts, and Itaru has to physically stop himself from sputtering out a train of apologies, “I understand that I’d thanked you earlier for taking care of Sakuya. In retrospect, that was my mistake.”

Itaru does not understand.

“I believe you were hired as a tutor, not a nanny, and I am certain this is not in your job description. Please learn where to draw the line. If you’re at all confused, I would be more than happy to draw it for you.”

There’s something about the way Chikage uses words of politeness and courtesy like venom-dipped knives that simply rubs Itaru the wrong way. And with his lack of sleep, he clumsily allows his emotions to cloud his better judgement, baring teeth of his own.

“You are correct, I’m no nanny. But as a matter of fact, I do believe this is included in my job description, Lord Chikage,” Itaru almost snarls, practically spitting out his employer’s title, “Because as a tutor, it’s my responsibility that my student doesn’t turn up to my lessons sleep-deprived because their good for nothing guardian doesn’t even care enough about them to help them through a nightmare!”

“M… Mister Chigasaki?”

Both Itaru and Chikage turn to face Sakuya in unison, almost comically.

It takes Sakuya a few moments to blink away the sleep from his eyes, and Itaru recognises, on his face, the exact moment he realises that Chikage has returned to the manor.

“Lord Chikage!” he squeals, leaping out of bed to wrap his arms around Chikage’s thighs and press his cheek against his abdomen. “You’re back!”

It’s almost impressive, the way Chikage instantaneously melts in Sakuya’s presence.

“Of course I’m back,” he coos, petting Sakuya’s hair and donning the most bizarre facial expression Itaru’s ever seen on him: a genuine, heartfelt smile.

Chikage herds Sakuya back to his bed like he’s a lost lamb, going so far as to tuck him in with a kiss to the forehead. “It’s late, you should go back to sleep. You don’t want to be too tired for your lessons with Mister Chigasaki now, do you?”

Alright, Itaru’s heard enough.

Turning on his heels, Itaru returns to his room without another word, his jaw clenched tightly to stop himself from saying anything he’ll regret in the morning. Annoyed doesn’t even begin to describe what he’s feeling right now, but the thought of pathetically crawling back to that scoundrel of a landlord after finally escaping makes Itaru feel like he’d just swallowed some coal.

Pulling the covers over his face, he readily welcomes sleep like an old friend, eager to bury tonight’s events alongside the hatchet he’d carelessly hurled towards Chikage’s head.

When Itaru was a child, his mother had once told him that he needs to control his impulsivity, or else one day, it can and will get the better of him. Perhaps, Itaru miserably thinks, staring at the unforgiving ceiling, today is that day.

Because as a tutor, it’s my responsibility that my student doesn’t turn up to my lessons sleep-deprived because their good for nothing guardian doesn’t even care enough about them to help them through a nightmare!

They say there’s clarity in hindsight, but oh, Itaru wishes for nothing more than to shut his eyes. If only he could sink deep into his mattress or become one with his quilt and never return to civil society ever again. Why did he say that to his employer who houses and feeds him?

Why did he say that to his employer who houses and feeds him?

Judging from the way Homare hasn’t come to inform him that Sakuya’s replacement tutor has arrived and he’s been made redundant, Itaru thinks there probably weren’t many applicants willing to tutor for otherwise no money, which definitely eases his worries a little. But just to be on the safe side, he decides to get changed. At the very least, he won’t be humiliated by being thrown onto the streets in his pyjamas.

Adjusting the cuffs of his dress shirt, Itaru glumly notes that he was right, Sakuya’s grip really did leave a dark, stinging ring of purple around his wrist. How is he going to be able to write during his lesson, if even the lightest touch makes him wince? How is he going to look Sakuya in the eyes and not flinch whenever the boy does so much as raise a hand?

Pulling his sleeve over his marred wrist, he decides that a trip outside the manor might help clear his head in time for Sakuya’s lesson. Plus, as long as he’s not under the same roof as Chikage, he’s sure he’s bound to feel a lot better.

Just as he enters the foyer, however, he encounters the Lord of the manor himself, who almost seems to have been waiting for him. Chikage pushes himself off the wall, hips-first, with a grace that momentarily enchants Itaru, and it is during this moment of weakness that Itaru pauses his hesitant steps long enough for Chikage to find an opportunity to speak to him.

“Are you heading into town, Mister Chigasaki?” Chikage asks, as if nothing had happened last night, “Would you like for me to drop you off near the markets?”

The idea of being trapped in an automobile with the one person he wants to avoid most is awful enough to unceremoniously yank him out from his daze.

“Thank you for the offer, My Lord, that’s very kind of you, but I think I’ll call for a hansom cab instead,” Itaru says, and he hopes to God that the tremble in his voice is inaudible to anyone but himself.

But just as he turns to go look for Homare to use the landline, Chikage opens the main door, and makes a show of holding it open for Itaru, punctuating his act with a gentlemanly smile.

“I understand that we may have gotten off on the wrong foot, Mister Chigasaki, but I assure you, I hold no ill intentions towards you. In fact, I would like to apologise for my behaviour yesterday by doing you this favour. Truly.”

Itaru searches his face, as if he’ll be able to read his intentions somewhere along the curves of Chikage’s philtrum. However, while he lacks skill in physiognomy he does recognise an olive branch when he sees one, and Chikage appears to be quite sincere about this. Satisfied with whatever he sees in his eyes, Itaru approaches Chikage, a nagging feeling in his stomach prompting him to meet him halfway. He never was the type to stew in anger for long.

“Alright,” he says, suddenly deeply interested in the seams of his sleeves, “I’d also like to apologise for making some… uncouth remarks about your character last night. It was well out of line.”

“No matter, Mister Chigasaki—it’s all water under the bridge now. After you?”

Closing the door behind them, Chikage escorts Itaru to the front of the manor, where Homare waits patiently with his Daimler.

He feels slightly on edge throughout the entire ride, even when Chikage graciously decides not to engage in polite conversation with him. He’s seen how easily the Lord phases between his many masks, and if he’s honest, Itaru’s not entirely sure if the one he’s wearing right now is just a throwaway to hide something nefarious that Itaru had nearly discovered last night.

He may have been half-asleep, but he definitely remembers the way Chikage had been staring at him from Sakuya’s doorway—it looked as if he was waiting to see how much Itaru knew, and depending on Itaru’s response to his presence, he would then determine the best course of action.

Whatever that look was, it had definitely set off Itaru’s fight or flight reflex. And, he thinks, stealing a glance at the side of Chikage’s perfectly sculpted mask, my gut feeling has never once proved me wrong.

As he wades through the markets, Itaru quickly learns that the town of Opalry isn’t accustomed to many visitors.

He initially assumed he’d finally be able to breathe once he’d stepped outside April Manor, but even as a nobody on the streets, he can’t seem to shed the feeling of being constantly watched. The feeling clings to him like a second skin, and feeds the tenseness in his shoulders.

Stopping at a fruit stand, Itaru pretends to examine the pomegranates on display, if only to subtly check, at the corners of his eyes, for a shadow other than his own.

“You’re not from here, are you?”

Looking up, Itaru meets the curious gaze of a young man, whose narrowed eyes remind him an awful lot of a fox. The woman next to him—his sister, perhaps?—immediately turns to smack him on the arm, chastising him for his bluntness.

“My apologies, sir, it seems that my brother has entirely forgotten his manners,” she pointedly says with a forced grin on her face, “Do forgive him.”

“He’s right,” Itaru replies, and he tries not to notice the way the other townspeople lean in to listen in on their conversation, “I am new to Opalry. Was it that obvious?”

“No, not at all! It’s just… This town is pretty small, so we don’t usually see an unfamiliar face. Will you be staying here for long, or are you just passing through?”

As more townspeople begin to gather around the fruit stand, Itaru gently places the pomegranate back down into the crate. He figures from the impromptu audience before him that he’s being observed like a new toy, prodded at and played with to see just what he’s made of. And judging from the leering eyes and judgemental faces, he’s almost certain that whatever he says next will follow him for the rest of his stay in Opalry, so he decides to go with what he knows best—the gentleman act.

“That entirely depends on my employer. Although, if all the produce in this town is of as high of a quality as the ones here, I might have to consider staying here for good,” Itaru smoothly says, even going as far to punctuate his compliment with a wink. And oh, does it work like a charm.

The stand owner practically swoons, scooping a couple of her plumpest pomegranates into a paper bag. “I assure you, sir, our fruit is the pride of Opalry! You can have some to try, if you’d like!”

Itaru delightedly accepts the gift, but not without tucking some money into her hand, warming her palm with the neatly folded bills. The approving smiles on her and her brothers’ faces tells Itaru there was some sort of test that he’d just undergone, and he’s passed with flying colours.

“Did you say, ‘your employer’? And who would that be?”

“Oh, pardon me for forgetting to introduce myself—my name is Itaru Chigasaki, and I’m a home tutor at the April Manor.”

The reaction is instantaneous. Left and right and all around, Itaru hears nothing but the highest praises for Lord Chikage and the April Manor.

The Lord of April Manor is devastatingly handsome—I hear he’s of old money! Oh, he’s such a good man for taking that poor orphan in as his ward…

It appears as though Itaru isn’t the only one with a gentleman act.

The mention of an orphan catches Itaru’s attention, though he’s not entirely surprised. Sakuya didn’t seem to resemble any of the people he’d seen in the portraits. Now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t recall seeing a portrait of Sakuya with anyone other than Chikage, either. Storing this newly acquired information at the back of his mind, Itaru excuses himself politely, flagging down a cab to return to the manor.

With his gaze on the scenery and a bag of ripe pomegranates in his lap, Itaru tries to assemble the thoughts scattered in his head about his employer.

Just who exactly is Lord Chikage? Why did he adopt Sakuya? What is he hiding?

As the cab turns into the road leading uphill to April Manor, Itaru gingerly traces the bruises on his wrist with a finger. He remembers how Sakuya had clutched onto him. It felt like his fingers were etching themselves into his skin, cornering his claustrophobic bones that shrieked as he continued to squeeze—Itaru belatedly realises that if Homare hadn’t stepped in when he did, Sakuya would’ve easily snapped his wrist in two.

He drifts into the manor like a ghost, his eyes glazed over with yesterday’s memory and his fingers methodically rubbing the purple blooms like each bruise were a bead in a rosary. With every step he takes, he sees a boy slumped over at his desk, his small yet forceful hand vibrating from the sheer force he’s using to grip onto a wrist, holding tighter and tighter and tighter and—

“Mister Chigasaki, there you a—Are you hurt? What happened?”

Snapping out of his daze, Itaru realises he’d stepped into the study; without himself knowing, his feet had taken him to the scene playing on repeat in his head.

Sakuya cranes his neck, trying to take a peek at his injured wrist. He seems to be genuinely concerned, which puzzles Itaru. Is he pretending not to know? Or does he really not remember what happened? Did Homare not tell him?

“I had a little accident on my trip this morning, but I’m alright,” Itaru lies. If he doesn’t recall his episode, Itaru fears that Sakuya mightn’t be able to handle learning that he’s the reason for Itaru’s injured wrist.

Hastily pulling down his sleeve, Itaru gestures for Sakuya to begin practising in his workbook, placing the bag of pomegranates onto his desk. It may be best for him to sweep this incident under the rug for now—he can always interrogate Homare about this later, though he’s not very optimistic about getting any actual answers out from the butler.

The lesson continues without a hitch, and just as Itaru starts to wrap up for the day, he hears a gentle knock on the study door.

“Young Master, Mister Chigasaki, lunch is ready for the both of you in the dining parlour,” Homare says.

“Alright,” Itaru replies, turning to the boy, “Good work today, Sakuya. You’re really improving, I can tell.”

Sakuya beams, and if it weren’t for the ring of bruises beneath his sleeve, he would’ve written yesterday off as nothing but a delusion. For the life of him, he cannot seem to fathom how a child as lovely as Sakuya would be capable of such violence. Was his cheerful demeanour simply the rose, and his hidden, monstrous self the thorn? Had Itaru allowed himself to be pricked, once more?

As they take their seats in the dining parlour, Itaru notices that only two placemats are on the table.

“Has Lord Chikage not returned to the manor yet?”

Homare shakes his head, lifting the cloche off from their dishes. “He returned shortly after you did, Mister Chigasaki.”

“Oh… Will he not be joining us for lunch, then?”

“The Lord has requested to have his lunch delivered to his study, as per usual,” Homare says, tucking a linen napkin into Sakuya’s lap. Itaru notices how Sakuya practically sags, the half-hearted smile on his face informing Itaru of his disappointment at the Lord’s absence. His expression disappears quickly with a shrug, as if to say, oh well, I’m used to not being important, anyway.

That alone brings Itaru to his feet. He knows he’s definitely overstepping as a tutor here, and the relationship between his student and his employer is absolutely none of his business, but Itaru would honestly rather be reprimanded for interfering than have to sit through every meal with Sakuya looking like a kicked puppy in the rain.

“Homare, would you show me the way to his study, please?”

The butler nods, before carefully setting Itaru’s dish down onto the table.

“Of course, Mister Chigasaki.”

He guides Itaru up the stairs and down the hallway, to the very last door. But just as he’s about to leave, he pauses.

“It might do you some good not to be too nosy about your employer, Mister Chigasaki,” Homare says, in an unreadable tone. He then leaves, before Itaru even has a chance to question him.

Homare’s words feel ominous, hanging in the air that suddenly feels a lot thicker than it was before—and Itaru almost hesitates—but the forlorn expression on Sakuya’s face is still fresh in his memory, and he persists.

“Excuse me, Lord Chikage? May I have a word with you?”

Itaru only enters after hearing a muffled, come in, and when he does, he almost forgets what he’d initially come here to do.

He’s stunned, staring at the endless bookshelves that have been built into the walls, with not a single window in sight. There’s probably more books in this very room than there were at the public library he used to visit, Itaru thinks, blinking dumbly at the ceiling-to-floor shelves.

“Mister Chigasaki?”

Shuffling into the study, Itaru approaches the large, mahogany desk in the center of the room. Chikage gestures for him to take a seat, but he kindly declines.

“Oh, I won’t be staying for long—I was wondering if you would like to join Sakuya and I for lunch.”

“I would love to, but,” Chikage says, looking down at the paperwork piled high on his desk, “I’m a little preoccupied. Thank you for the offer, though.”

Itaru’s not sure if he prefers seeing a fake, polite smile, instead of a glare, on Chikage’s face. If anything, the false niceties feel more threatening.

He turns to leave the study—he knows a dismissal when he hears one—but stops at the doorway, with his back turned to Chikage lest he lose his courage to speak his mind.

“I understand that I said I’ve misjudged your character, but if even I, a mere outsider, can tell from a single glance that there’s nothing Sakuya would want more than to have a meal with his beloved guardian that he adores so much—then you’re either the most clueless man to walk this Earth, or you’re truly as heartless as I thought you were.”

Shutting the study door behind him, Itaru’s resolve instantly crumbles. He doesn’t even have the fatigue to blame his actions on anymore, this was entirely him. He winces, pursing his traitorous lips all the way to his room, lunch cold and forgotten. Curse my reckless mouth! I should be grateful I’m still employed, so what am I doing?

He wallows pathetically in his room, quickly considering his other options: he could always stay at a hotel, he’s still got enough in his savings for a guest room… or he could pay his sister an unexpected visit, though her husband might turn him away… or—

No, Itaru thinks, a surge of sudden motivation energising his slack frame, I’m going to be the very best tutor in Opalry so even if they wanted to, they can’t get rid of me!

Hunched over his desk, Itaru begins to revise his lesson plans with a newfound vigor, the relentless grumbling in his stomach be damned.

I shall make myself indispensable to this manor, even if that’s the very last thing I do!

Later that evening, Itaru startles from the sudden knock on his door.

“Mister Chigasaki? Would you like to join the Young Master for dinner?”

The thought of seeing Sakuya wilt from neglect almost has Itaru asking for his meal to be delivered to his room, but he stops himself, remembering the lonely look in the boy’s eyes. He’d already deserted him during lunch—what makes him any better than Chikage if he deserts him again?

When Itaru follows Homare into the dining parlour, however, he sees that Sakuya isn’t sighing to himself—in fact, he looks like the very face of joy, with a grin so wide, it almost splits his cheeks in two. Trailing his line of sight, Itaru’s gaze then falls on the Lord of the Manor himself, Chikage, sitting at the dining table.

“Come take a seat, Mister Chigasaki!” Sakuya chirps, upon seeing his tutor, “You didn’t have any lunch, did you? You must be starving!”

Smiling hesitantly, Itaru joins them at the table, but not without caution. Chikage pays him no attention, fawning over Sakuya as he excitedly tells him about his day. As Homare places his meal before him, he notices the butler watching him carefully—he does so not out of malice, more so curiosity, which prompts Itaru to wonder: Did I have anything to do with this sudden change of routine?

Perhaps his blatant guilt tripping worked better than he’d thought it would. Pleased, Itaru lifts his spoon to his lips, and if the broth tasted even sweeter than usual, he hopes his face doesn’t give his good mood away.

“Oh, that’s right—Mister Chigasaki, you left your pomegranates in the study,” Sakuya then turns to Itaru, and if there ever was the slightest bit of doubt about whether Itaru had done the right thing by forcing Chikage to eat with them left within him, it perished. Seeing the boy virtually radiate happiness is more than enough to placate Itaru’s worries.

“I got them from the markets this morning,” he says, “They’re a couple days shy from being overripe. You can have one, if you’d like.”

Sakuya’s eyes widen. “Really? Can I really? I’ve never tasted a pomegranate before! They look so beautiful…”

“Indeed they are,” Chikage laughs, swirling his wine glass on the table in a hypnotising motion, “But I’ll warn you, Sakuya—you’ll be picking seeds from your teeth all night. I’ve never liked pomegranates. They’re far too much trouble for what they’re worth.”

And yet he sends Homare off to the study, presumably to prepare the fruit for dessert. Itaru’s starting to think there’s a strong disconnect between the words that leave Chikage’s mouth and his actions—everything about the Lord seems to be inconsistent, save for his genuine interest in Sakuya’s wellbeing.

Itaru notices the half untouched meal before Chikage, and he suddenly recalls a journal entry he’d read a while ago about a psychological condition where the affected avoids meals with others because of an intense fear of being observed while eating, and suddenly, Itaru feels like an absolute numbskull.

He’d been so focused on wiping the disappointment from Sakuya’s face, he entirely forgot to consider Chikage’s perspective. And the Lord was probably too polite to say otherwise!

“Is everything alright, Mister Chigasaki?” Chikage asks, lifting his glass to his lips.

It might do you some good not to be too nosy about your employer, Mister Chigasaki.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Itaru forces his most convincing smile onto his face, the butler’s advice ringing in his head over and over on repeat. He’s poked around enough, he thinks.

Chikage doesn’t seem to be satisfied with Itaru’s answer, but unlike Itaru, he knows when not to press further. His kindness only fuels the shame boiling in Itaru’s gut.

Homare reenters the dining parlour with the pomegranates, which have now been deseeded, ruby red arils piled high in a dish. He then places the dish in front of an eager Sakuya, who immediately scoops a heaping spoonful.

“Lord Chikage, would you like some?” Sakuya asks, holding the spoon before the man’s lips.

“Did I not just say I never liked pomegranates?” Chikage mutters, yet he eats the spoonful anyway, if only to humour Sakuya. Itaru watches in amusement as the Lord continues to grumble, hiding his smile behind fake grimaces.

Just for a little while, Itaru allows himself to forget that he was ever intimidated by Chikage and he joins Sakuya, laughing at the way the pomegranate juice leaves Chikage’s teeth stained red for half a moment.

PART TWO, 1905:
IGNORANCE.

When Itaru wakes, he finds himself breathless.

The last time he’d seen the ocean, he was about twelve. He doesn’t recall much about the family outing, the memory hazy and well-buried. And yet when he wakes, he hears the ocean well and clear like it was only yesterday, its roars and shrieks ringing ferociously in his ears. He doesn’t remember ever being frightened of the ocean, but now, lying in his bed with his arms flailed above his head, he thinks he’s never felt more afraid. Whatever he’d seen in his sleep felt like high tide and all chaos. It felt like an omen.

Shakily, he turns to light the candle by his bedside, illuminating the room with a much needed warm glow. Bit by bit, Itaru feels the tension drain out of his body, the beat of his heart returning to its usual cadence.

But as Itaru reaches over to place the extinguished matchstick onto his nightstand, he catches a shadow outside his window out of the corner of his eye.

A thief? His rational mind supplies.

Clutching the candlestick, Itaru moves towards the window with his reawakened, panicked heart in his mouth. He’s not entirely sure what he was expecting to see, but as he parts the curtains, he’s greeted with an empty windowsill. He peers below, just to check that no one had leaped from the ledge, only to spot a familiar figure in the gardens.

Tsumugi turns, almost as if he’d felt Itaru’s gaze upon his back. It strikes Itaru as odd, that a gardener would choose to tend to flowers before dawn, but something about the glassy look in Tsumugi’s eyes tells Itaru that he’s not here for the roses.

The scarf around Tsumugi’s neck flickers from a gust of wind, guiding his sight upwards, but before he’s able to meet Itaru’s eyes, Itaru quickly ducks behind the safety of his curtains. He’s not sure why he feels the need to hide, but Itaru gets the feeling that amongst the residents of April Manor lies a secret—one that an outsider like himself wouldn’t be privy to.

Pulling aside the curtain once more, Itaru sees the gardener leave the garden, rose bushes writhing helplessly in the breeze.

He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night, the phantom feeling of cold water rising in his throat far too uncomfortable to simply ignore. The candle continues to burn, pale wax slowly trickling into the brass cup below and, through it, warms the pads of Itaru’s fingers. He gazes out his window in some drowsy trance, eyelids heavy but the mind unwilling to give in, the still-fresh memory of drowning keeping him restless.

Around when morning breaks, Itaru sees the butler striding into the gardens. In his dominant hand, Homare carries a rifle—one that would cost a pretty penny, Itaru can tell. He surveys the area with a graceful expertise Itaru would’ve expected from a man like him, and within no more than ten minutes, he leaves the gardens with three lifeless hares in his clutch.

How on Earth did he manage that? Itaru marvels, returning the candlestick back to his nightstand as he gets dressed for the day. It was as if he could smell the hares before even seeing them.

Heading to the dining parlour for breakfast, Itaru’s not surprised to see Sakuya sitting at the table alone. Perhaps last night was just a fluke.

“Good morning, Mister Chigasaki,” Sakuya greets, unable to hide his pleased grin, “Thank you, for what you did. I know you were the one who managed to persuade Lord Chikage to come to dinner.”

Seating himself across Sakuya, Itaru can’t help but smile back at the boy, his cheerfulness contagious. “He didn’t need much persuading. You know how much the Lord cares for you.”

Sakuya reddens, swinging his feet bashfully as he ducks his head towards his chest. “Pardon me… I’m… not entirely accustomed to the idea of being cared for, I suppose. It’s rather nice to be reminded, every now and then.”

Itaru briefly recalls the voice he’d heard at the markets the day before, words spoken in a tone dripping with sickly sympathy. Oh, he’s such a good man for taking that poor orphan in as his ward…

His thoughts are quickly interrupted as Homare enters the parlour, arms poised as he expertly balances a tray of scones. Itaru’s reminded of the way Homare held his rifle earlier—confident, controlled and elegant.

“Out of curiosity, how long have you been a butler at the manor for, Homare?”

Homare hums, deep in thought. He places the scones down, only to busy his hands once more as he proceeds to fill Itaru’s empty teacup. “I fail to recall a time when I wasn’t.”

“It’s a difficult job, isn’t it,” Itaru jokes, reaching for a warmed scone, “I didn’t realise that hunting hares was part of a butler’s responsibilities.”

Homare’s hands still.

“Hunting hares?” Sakuya repeats, audibly upset.

Itaru’s no fool—he’s observant enough to recognise when to change the subject.

“My apologies, Sakuya, that was a figure of speech. Would you mind waiting for me at the study? I’m almost done with my meal.”

The boy breaks into a relieved smile, nodding. As Sakuya leaves to prepare for his lesson, Itaru notices an odd expression on Homare’s face.

“Mister Chigasaki,” he quietly says, “it would be wise of you not to mention what you saw this morning to Sakuya—hares are his favourite animal, as he claims they resemble the Lord of the manor, and I wouldn’t want for him to avoid his meals out of heartbreak for them.”

“Of course,” Itaru says, finishing the rest of his breakfast. Satisfied at his response, the butler excuses himself from the parlour.

If he’s honest, Itaru’s a little skeptical. A creature as endearing as a hare, resembling Chikage, of all people? Personally, he finds that he’s unable to connect such contrasting images together, but perhaps the rose-tinted view Sakuya has of the Lord begs to differ.

“You’ve worked hard, Sakuya. I think we can stop here for today,” Itaru says, slipping his reading glasses back into its leather case. “We seem to have some spare time left—do you have a scene prepared?”

The boy’s eyes absolutely gleam, and he’s ecstatic beyond words. Hurriedly, he pulls out a worn playbook from beneath his chair, the title William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night written on the cover in a faded ink. It looks well-loved, in that there are scrawls of acting notes hastily etched along the sides. Itaru half wonders whose handwriting the notes belong to.

“You can play the captain, and I’ll be Viola,” Sakuya bubbles, kindly holding the playbook open for Itaru to read off of.

The scene progresses smoothly, and he tries his best to keep up with the boy’s enthusiasm, but when Sakuya reaches a particular line, Itaru finds himself pausing.

“Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent.”

He ruminates over the sentence, and continues to do so long after finishing the scene. Try as he may, he simply cannot forget his encounter with his student. The bruise around his wrist still aches, a deep and ugly purple. As Itaru traces the remains of the boy’s unexpected violence, he thinks to himself, What are you hiding, Sakuya?

Itaru passes Chikage’s study on his way to his room, and he notices a crack between the doors, just wide enough for his helplessly curious eye to look through. Like his ward, the Lord of the manor is an enigma—he’s kind when he needs to be, stern when he has to be, but neither glove seems to fit. Neither feels like his true self.

Peering into the study, Itaru watches Chikage work. And as much as he hates to admit it, but he’s starting to understand why almost the entire town of Opalry fawns over this man. He’s only just flicking through paperwork at his desk yet he looks ethereal, even from afar.

Resuming his walk to his room, Itaru thinks that in itself may be the very reason why everyone at the markets were bewitched by him—they’ve only admired him like a raging fire in the distance, so they’ve never had the opportunity to get burnt.

He turns the corner, only to startle himself when he forgets the large family portrait hanging in the hallway to his room. Taking a moment to settle himself, Itaru gazes at the unfamiliar faces once more. Where did the rest of them go, he silently asks himself, turning the doorknob of his room door. Could Chikage have adopted Sakuya because he felt lonely?

Itaru understands the feeling. When his sister, his only other kin, had gotten married and left Itaru alone in their family home, loneliness was almost like a second skin. He couldn’t stand how empty the rooms were, couldn’t stand the fond memories ghosting around each corner. He hated it so much, he readily sold the home to the first person who offered, even if it meant he’d be in deficit—an amateur mistake, in retrospect. Since then, he’s lived the life of a nomad, travelling from one awful city to the next, meeting one awful landlord after another.

Alright, that’s enough dwelling on the past, he self-chastises, forcing his attention towards his half-finished lesson plans for next week. As suspicious as he may be, Sakuya has truly started to grow on him. Out of all the students he’s had in the past, he’s never seen anyone work as diligently as he has.

Briefly, Itaru thinks about how Sakuya’s ardour probably stems from the fact that he’d never been given the opportunity to study before. With a sliver of guilt weighing down his thoughts, Itaru sighs, and resumes his work.

When the sky begins to dim, so does his attention span, and thus Itaru decides it’s maybe time for a break. He yawns shamelessly and loudly—a habit formed from years of solitude—as he stretches his arms above his head in an attempt to straighten his tired spine, rotating his head to loosen the tight stiffness in his nape.

In doing so, he turns to look out the window, and a sense of deja vu slowly creeps up from behind him. He sees the back of Tsumugi once more, tucked amongst the rose bushes. Getting up from his chair, Itaru’s compelled to drift towards the window.

Unlike earlier, the gardener is hard at work, crouching over to water the flowers methodically. He still dons the same scarf, the tied ends of the garment flickering with every move. How Tsumugi manages to wear a scarf in this weather is still beyond him. Although, something about the way he sways each time he gets up from the ground feels off to Itaru, his gaze carrying an awfully eerie blankness with it.

Before he’s able to brush it off as just a baseless suspicion, however, Tsumugi unexpectedly releases the watering can in his hands, allowing it to tumble clumsily into the dirt. His lifeless body follows not long after.

Itaru’s limbs move, even before his mind is able to process what he’d just seen. As he scrambles down the stairs, he’s suddenly reminded of a heatstroke spell his sister had experienced, back when she was first learning how to train her waist with a corset and wore several layers of muslin to hide it. Oh, of course—it was the scarf!

Carrying him into the shade is the first priority, Itaru thinks, as he does his best attempt at hauling Tsumugi into the shadowed area of the garden. The man is absolutely drenched in sweat, his fringe matted against his forehead and his scarf soaked right through to its ends. Perhaps this might help—

When Itaru finally tugs the cloth away from the gardener’s neck, he freezes.

He’s staring, his wide eyes fixated on one particular point of Tsumugi’s neck, and yet nothing seems to be registering into his brain. He feels his jaw slacken from shock, his hands instinctively withdrawing themselves from the gardener. Whatever he’s seeing on him is something he’d never seen before, not even in any of the medical journals he’d read back in university.

It looks like he’d been mauled by an animal, time and time again in a singular spot, his skin discoloured and raised from scarring. A fresh bite wound spans across the base of his neck, beads of crimson beginning to push their way to the surface. Itaru must’ve accidentally agitated the wound, somehow. He’s seen images more gruesome than this, that’s for sure, but what disturbs Itaru the most is how the bite doesn’t appear to belong to an animal—no, the width of the bite seems very, very human.

So this is the secret everyone’s been trying to hide from me, Itaru belatedly thinks, his eyes trained on Tsumugi’s peacefully unconscious expression in horror.

Panic rises in his chest, slowly but surely, and Itaru thinks he can hear himself screaming, but he’s too lost in the image of Tsumugi’s neck to hear anything else but the unforgiving shriek of the ocean. I told you so, she seems to say as she watches Itaru drown, his body nothing but insignificant debris, carried by waters like a rag doll. I told you to run while you still could. You can’t swim, now, can you?

He clutches at his chest, and finds that he’s unable to breathe.

“Mister Chigasaki?” the ocean asks, not unkindly, but all Itaru sees is the way blood trickles from Tsumugi’s wound, staining the waters a deep red. He’s numb all over, but he thinks he feels a troubled hand hovering over his shoulder, unsure of what to do.

Wheezing, Itaru clutches at the hand desperately, silently begging for it to pull him ashore. “H-Help… I can’t br—”

As if the strings holding him up had been abruptly cut, he slackens like a masterless puppet, surrendering to the merciless waves at long last.

Itaru wakes to a familiar ceiling.

He’d been sleeping for hours, yet lethargy drags at his bones with a strength he cannot seem to overcome, the sticky feeling of disorientation clinging to his mind like cobwebs. For half a moment, Itaru wonders if he had simply dreamt of the events from earlier, but as he glances at the clock on his nightstand, he’s almost certain he couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have slept through my lessons with Sakuya, would I? I couldn’t have imagined something like that, could I?

Determined to find something more decisive, Itaru musters all of his energy to lift his heavy body from the sheets. He just needs to find something, anything, that’ll help him confirm it wasn’t all just a dream, and that he isn’t on the brink of losing his mind. Trudging around his room, he lands his gaze on the desk, his nearly-finished lesson plans for next week strewn across the cherrywood carelessly; precisely the evidence he needed. Oh thank God, I’m not actually going insane! So I really did see—

His internal cheer halts at the realisation. So he really did see the strange bite marks on Tsumugi’s neck, after all. His recollection of the bite wound is fuzzy, partly from the shock he’d experienced upon seeing it, but one thing’s for certain—whatever, or whoever, had bitten Tsumugi is no stranger to the residents of April Manor. If anything, it feels as though they’re protecting it.

A sharp knock nearly startles Itaru out of his wits.

“Mister Chigasaki? May I come in?” Homare asks from the other side of the door.

After a brief deliberation in his head, Itaru decides to let the butler in. Perhaps they’ll go easy on him if he simply pretends to not know of this monster’s existence.

“Are you feeling alright? I heard from the Lord of the manor that you had fainted in the yard,” Homare doesn’t enter into Itaru’s room, even when he steps aside, his feet planted firmly at the entrance.

“Lord Chikage knows?” Itaru’s not sure why this piece of information surprises him—one would assume his employer would be the first to learn of his incident.

The butler nods. “Of course. He was the one who had found you and carried you to your room.”

Oh. Well that was news to Itaru. Blinking at the carpet incredulously, he finds himself feeling even more confused than he was prior to fainting. If the Lord of the manor himself was aware that Itaru had discovered what was beneath Tsumugi’s scarf, why did he carry Itaru up to his room? That would’ve been the perfect opportunity to get rid of the overly nosy home tutor… unless getting rid of him isn’t his aim—

“Would you like to have dinner delivered to your room? Or would you like to join the Lord and the Young Master for dinner?” Homare interrupts his train of thoughts, smiling at him so politely, Itaru almost feels guilty for being so suspicious.

“I… I’ll join them,” he eventually says, slightly frustrated that he’s unable to pinpoint Chikage’s motive. Surely this isn’t all happening without his knowledge? Surely the Lord of April Manor wouldn’t be left in the dark?

Entering the dining parlour, he’s surprised at the doorway with a tackle that sends him stumbling a few steps backwards.

“Mister Chigasaki!” Sakuya worries at his bottom lip, his wide eyes brimming with concern, “I heard you’d fainted in the gardens after our lesson! Are you alright?”

Itaru’s expression softens. He’s finding it increasingly difficult to stay cautious when Sakuya’s the epitome of harmlessness. Ruffling the boy’s hair, Itaru breaks into his first genuine smile all day. “Yes, I’m feeling a lot better now. Thank you for worrying about me, Sakuya.”

The soft clink of glass against wood brings Itaru’s attention to Chikage, who’d been silently sipping his wine while Itaru soothed Sakuya’s fretting. He’s quickly reminded of how Chikage had apparently carried him to his bed while he was unconscious and he looks away, feeling quite embarrassed.

“You still look rather pale, Mister Chigasaki,” Chikage says, leaning back into his chair, “I suggest you take tomorrow off to fully recover.”

Itaru nods. “Thank you, My Lord. I will,” he replies.

Sakuya slowly peels himself off of his tutor, before yawning into his palms. His action doesn’t escape Chikage’s notice.

“Sakuya, you’d better head off to bed now. If I see you sneaking out of your room to study one more time, you’ll be in deep trouble, young man.”

The boy grins sheepishly, bidding Itaru goodnight before leaving the dining parlour.

“Sneaking out to study?” Itaru can’t help but ask, seating himself across Chikage. Homare enters the parlour, placing a tray of warmed soup and bread before him. He leaves just as silently as he’d arrived.

Chikage sighs disappointedly, although the proud smile on his face says otherwise. “Last night, I caught him sneaking into the study past his bedtime. He wanted to work on his spelling so that he could be quicker during lessons, leaving more time to practice scenes with you.”

Smiling fondly into his dish, Itaru hums in understanding. He did think Sakuya had been improving in his lessons far quicker than he’d expected him to, though he had no idea that he was working so hard just so that he could act with him. Dipping a torn off piece of bread into his soup, Itaru tries his best to keep his pleased expression to himself.

They fall into a tense silence, both individuals too eager to ignore the elephant in the room which resides on the base of Tsumugi’s neck.

“How have your lessons been?” Chikage offers politely, before offhandedly commenting, “It must be going well, if you have the time to spy on me while I’m working.”

Itaru nearly drops his spoon in response.

“Oh… well… I, well, I actually was wondering if you had this book that I was looking for to help with lesson plans for Sakuya,” he lies through the skin of his teeth.

With a knowing smile, Chikage plays along. “I see. You’re more than welcome to come look for it after your dinner, if you’d like. I’ll just be finalising some contracts, so feel free to browse the shelves.”

Committed to the bed he’s made for himself, Itaru forces a grin on his face and has no other choice but to lie in it. “That’s very kind of you, My Lord. I would love to.”

True to his word, Chikage leads Itaru into his study, showing him the direction of where the educational books are kept before continuing his work at his desk.

Itaru stands in awe, tracing a finger over the cloth-bound book spines. Some of these books are first edition and can no longer be found in any public library, treated more like antiques rather than mediums of knowledge. If someone were to tell Itaru that Chikage owned every book published in Opalry for the past few decades, he’d be inclined to believe it.

“I wonder if a man like him would own any romance novels,” Itaru murmurs to himself, as he continues to search through the shelves for lesson materials, filling his arms with an increasingly heavy stack.

Grammar and Vocabulary: Volume Thirteen, he reads, That might be helpful… Although I should probably start from the first.

But of course, when Itaru finally locates the book, it’s on the very top shelf—far beyond his reach. Of course.

Peering into the center of the study, Itaru sees Chikage frowning at a document he’s holding, his furrowed brows making him look even more intimidating than usual. Itaru turns back to the books without a second glance. He absolutely does not feel like interrupting his work just to ask for a ladder, and especially not when he looks borderline murderous.

Balancing the pile of books between his chest and an arm, Itaru rolls his sleeves up, preparing to reach for the high heavens. He’s on the tips of his toes, the arm carrying his books braced against the bookshelves to keep his balance, and he can almost touch it, almost—

Before he’s able to clumsily grasp at the edge of the spine, an arm stretches up from behind him, nimble fingers easily sliding the book out from its spot in the shelf.

Itaru spins around, startled, only to find himself about a hair’s breadth away from Chikage, who has the gall to casually slip Grammar and Vocabulary: Volume One onto his stack of books as if he wasn’t even the slightest bit taken aback at how close they were. Itaru can only seem to blink and stare and hold his breath.

“Take four steps to your right,” Chikage tells him with a composed face, and Itaru quickly moves aside, flustered.

“I-I’m so sorry, My Lord, I really didn’t mean to invade your personal space.”

Surprisingly, Chikage cracks into an upsettingly charming smile, shaking his head as he chuckles quietly to himself. Stunned, Itaru thinks to himself that this is probably the first time he’d ever seen the other man laugh.

“I didn’t mean it like that. You were looking for romance novels, were you not? They’re right behind you.”

Itaru flushes, holding the stack of books closer to his chest. He didn’t realise his voice had carried. Thank God I didn’t say anything too incriminating.

Stammering, he does his best to thank Chikage for lending him his books, rushing back to his room with aching arms and a heart that threatened to leap right out of his chest.

Itaru doesn’t rest well that night.

He had gone to sleep with a candle burning by his bedside, too distrustful of shadows by his window. In his dreams, he saw himself in Tsumugi’s position, standing amongst the rose bushes. He remembers spotting a hare in the distance, and as he followed it, he found himself walking deeper and deeper into a forest. For some reason, he felt this innate urge to grab the hare with his hands, felt the need to dig his thumbs into its plump flesh. Yet when he’d finally managed to catch the hare, it had screamed in warning—a horrific screech that Itaru felt couldn’t have possibly have come from any animal—before leaping up to gnaw at his neck.

When he woke, shortly after midnight, there was a suspicious lack of wax drippings in the brass cup, his candle suspiciously untouched. It was as if someone had blown it out as soon as Itaru had fallen asleep.

Perhaps he hasn’t gotten used to this new environment, but Itaru can’t seem to remember the last time he’d been able to sleep peacefully. Rubbing his eyes, he decides to spend the rest of the night reading through the books he’d borrowed from Chikage. That way, he can at least be afraid and productive.

As night breaks into dawn, Itaru finally places down the last book. Turns out, he’d borrowed some extremely useful teaching materials from Chikage. Halfway through his reading, he had crept out of bed and to his desk, annotating his lesson plans with one hand and holding open a reference book in the other.

Actually, now that he thinks about it, there was this one guidebook that had been mentioned in the references of one of the books he had borrowed that Itaru thinks would be useful for Sakuya. Glancing at the clock, he wonders if he’d be able to sneak into Chikage’s study to quickly go look for it.

Entering the hallway with feathery steps, Itaru silently celebrates when he sees that the study doors aren’t closed. Slowly, he pushes the doors open, careful not to make a sound.

As he pokes his head into the study, he sees that Chikage is still seated at his desk, although his arms are folded onto the wooden surface, cushioning his cheek. He’s fast asleep. Perfect!

Itaru grasps the opportunity with both hands, heading straight to the section Chikage had directed him to last night. It takes him a couple of minutes, but thanks to his memory of where the author’s collection was placed, he manages to successfully locate the book he’d come in looking for. Quickly taking it into his hands, Itaru quietly turns to leave the study.

When he’s just about to shut the doors, however, his gaze settles on Chikage once more.

His frame looks far too frail for him to be sleeping without a coat or a blanket on, Itaru thinks. He hesitates by the doorway, pushing his weight from one foot to the other. Should I…? Well, it’s the least I could do for him. He did lend me his books, after all.

Walking back into the study, Itaru places the book he’d borrowed onto Chikage’s desk, before taking one of the blankets he’d seen folded on the sofa and draping it across Chikage’s shoulders.

Chikage shifts at the sudden weight but his eyes remain shut, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks lightly. Itaru takes a few steps back, and sits in one of the chairs opposite him at his desk.

For someone as guarded as Chikage, seeing him relaxed and asleep is quite… breathtaking. The furrowed wrinkle between his eyebrows has disappeared, and so has the tension in his shoulders. Propping his chin in his palm, Itaru rests against Chikage’s desk and shamelessly admires Chikage’s sleeping face. It’s at this moment when Itaru realises that at some point after entering the study, he’d stopped feeling frightened. For some reason, being in the study with Chikage—of all people—makes him feel a lot safer than when he was in his room all alone.

Reaching for the book, Itaru yawns inaudibly. Perhaps I’ll do a little reading in here… I’ll be sure to leave before he wakes up…

Itaru wakes to a crick in his neck.

He groans, leaning back into the chair he’d been sleeping in as he massages his sore nape. His arms are completely numb, phantom needles pricking him from his fingers to his elbows. Stretching them out, Itaru feels oddly refreshed. Briefly, he notes to himself that that was probably the best sleep he’s had in a long while.

It suddenly hits him where in the manor he had taken his wonderful nap.

You foolish, foolish man, Itaru panics, slapping himself on his cheek again and again. I must have lost it. I must have. There’s no other explanation for it.

Thankfully, Chikage is no longer in the study, his chair neatly tucked into his desk.

(Itaru belatedly realises that the blanket around his shoulders is the very same one he’d laid over Chikage. He tries not to look too much into it.)

Carefully folding the blanket and returning it to its rightful place on the sofa, Itaru takes the book he was reading from where it was on Chikage’s desk and speedwalks his way to his room, cursing himself under his breath for the entire journey.

Oh, he feels far too embarrassed to go to the dining parlour for breakfast. What is he to do, if he were to walk into the parlour and meet the eyes of Chikage—who is also my employer, may I remind myself? What then?

Seeing that it’s his day off, Itaru thinks it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for him to head to the markets. Luckily, he manages to meet Homare just outside the foyer, who obliges his request to hire a Hansom cab without asking any questions.

It’s a little disorienting how familiar the ladies at the markets are with him. Although, that could be partly due to Itaru not being used to receiving this much attention.

“Mister Chigasaki! Good morning!” a woman calls out, and a couple others echo their greetings to him from their respective stalls. Itaru smiles, bowing his head politely, as he continues to examine the goods on sale.

“How’s tutoring at the April Manor, Mister Chigasaki?” a familiar face asks, and Itaru thinks he remembers meeting this fruit vendor the last time he had been here.

“It’s been great,” he says, and he finds that he doesn’t have to fake much of the sincerity in his next comment, “Sakuya’s a lovely and hardworking child.”

“Sakuya? Did you say Sakuya? The orphan of April Manor?”

A woman Itaru had never seen in his entire life turns to face him, with a facial expression haunted and solemn. Itaru nods slowly, watching the way the woman begins to tremble.

“You’d better stay alert, Mister Chigasaki. That child is a monster beyond your imagination,” she says, her voice no louder than a whisper, “My brother used to work at the orphanage, and he told me that child was a demon. At night, he would suck the blood of the other children while they were sleeping, and he even had a grip that was stronger than the headmaster’s! Lord Chikage did us all a favour when he locked that horrid creature up in his manor!”

Frowning, Itaru backs away from the woman. “I’m not sure what your brother has told you, but I would rather learn about my student from my own experiences, not from mere rumours. Good day to you.”

She opens her mouth to retort, but Itaru quickly excuses himself, disappearing into the crowd in an instant. Sakuya, a demon? The same Sakuya that rehearses Shakespeare in the dark when he thinks no one’s looking? The same Sakuya who had clung to his side when he’d heard Itaru was ill? He finds it honestly difficult to believe.

Out of spite, Itaru even goes out of his way to purchase a straw-filled bunny for the boy, remembering what Homare had said about hares being his favourite animal.

When he returns to the manor, he sees Sakuya in the gardens, practicing a monologue. The very sight of him balancing his playbook in one hand and gesturing with the other brings a smile to Itaru’s face.

“Sakuya,” he calls out, hiding the bunny behind his back, “Sorry to interrupt, but I have a gift for you.”

The boy practically lights up like a candle. He places the playbook down onto the grass, and sprints towards his tutor in an instant. “You do?”

Itaru pulls out the stuffed toy and the boy gasps, reaching out to pet the bunny on the head. “It’s Lord Chikage!”

“Here, you can hug him,” Itaru says, passing the toy into Sakuya’s small arms, which immediately wrap themselves around the soft bunny.

The boy nuzzles the top of the toy’s head, giggling when he feels the textured fabric tickle his nose. “I love him, Mister Chigasaki, thank you ever so much!”

After wishing him a smooth rehearsal, Itaru turns to head back to the manor. When he passes the rose bushes, he notices a familiar figure.

“Tsumugi?” Itaru asks, and he notices immediately that the gardener is missing his scarf, although the collar of his shirt is tall enough to cover the expanse of his neck. “Are you feeling better?”

He bows profusely, an apologetic expression on his face. “Yes, very much better. I’m truly sorry for worrying you. Thank you for asking.”

Itaru decides to take a shot in the dark. “That’s good to hear. I was concerned when I had seen that bite mark on your neck.”

“What bite mark?”

The look in Tsumugi’s eyes is one of genuine confusion, which frustrates Itaru to no end. He almost has to hold himself back from ripping Tsumugi’s shirt open and screaming, This! This bite mark! Right here!

He wishes he could press further, but he has the feeling it wouldn’t matter anyway. “That’s alright, Tsumugi. Do take care.”

As he enters the manor, Homare greets him with an offer for a late lunch, which Itaru readily accepts. He hadn’t eaten anything all morning, and his stomach was beginning to protest.

Sitting alone in the dining parlour, Itaru has his lunch in the company of a dozen paintings. He pauses on a portrait of Sakuya, and he momentarily hears the voice of the woman he’d run into this morning.

That child is a monster beyond your imagination, she’d said.

He instinctively moves to feel his wrist, rubbing the yellowing blossoms across his skin. A small part of him wonders if there may be some truth to the rumours about Sakuya, but a large part of him feels like he’d rather not know of it.

Returning to his room after lunch, Itaru sees the books he’d borrowed from Chikage resting innocently on the side of his desk, and he sighs. If he doesn’t return these now, the next time he sees Chikage would probably be at dinner, and Itaru thinks he’d better clear the awkward air between them before Sakuya catches a whiff of it.

Picking the stack of books up into his arms, Itaru reluctantly makes his way to Chikage’s study.

Despite the fact that the doors aren’t closed, Itaru knocks anyway. “Lord Chikage? I came to return the books I’d borrowed.”

He sees Chikage wave him in, his eyes still fixated on the documents he’s reading.

Grateful that everything seems as per usual, Itaru gladly enters the study, placing the books back where he’d gotten them from. Chikage continues to work in silence, not acknowledging Itaru’s presence, yet not really opposing it, either.

Just as Itaru’s about to leave, however, he hears the woman’s words play in his mind. He pauses, looking back at Chikage from the doorway. For some reason, Itaru has the feeling that Chikage wouldn’t avoid his questions like Tsumugi did, and with his newfound bravery, Itaru ventures forward.

“May I ask you something? About Sakuya?”

The name immediately catches Chikage’s attention. “Of course, Mister Chigasaki. What is it?”

Itaru gnaws at his bottom lip, unsure as to how to approach the situation. He decides that he’s just going to be blunt, and he hopes Chikage would at least appreciate it enough to do the same.

“There was this lady at the markets who told me about… Sakuya. About his history at the orphanage. And I just wanted to clarify with you about whether any of it was true.”

Chikage leans back into his chair, eyeing Itaru carefully. He’s wearing a poker face, which only makes Itaru feel even more nervous. “Do you believe in any of the rumours?”

“I know he’s not a demon—that, I’m certain of. I just have a lot of unanswered questions, and I just want to understand him.”

There isn’t an explicit ‘correct answer’ to the question he’d been asked, but something in Chikage’s expression tells Itaru he said the right words.

“Have a seat, Mister Chigasaki,” Chikage says, and Itaru finds himself seated in the same chair he had woken up in this morning.

Chikage’s eyes momentarily dart to the ring of yellow around Itaru’s wrist, exposed from when he was examining it earlier. He doesn’t ask where Itaru had gotten it from. He doesn’t seem like the type to ask questions which he knows the answers to.

“Sakuya is a… unique child. He sometimes has these episodes, where he can’t seem to control his strength or his emotions. He doesn’t remember any of it.”

“But he’s not a monster,” Chikage emphasises. “The townspeople aren’t fond of orphans, so the moment one of them hears a rumour about an orphan that’s out of control, they begin to spread these awful stories and all of a sudden, Sakuya’s been vilified.”

Itaru nods as he listens along. “I did feel like what I was told was exaggerated far beyond the truth.”

Chikage tilts his head, curious. “You did? How so?”

“There’s absolutely no way a child as kind as Sakuya could have any ounce of ill will in his heart,” Itaru defends emphatically, “But even so, I prefer to base my opinions of others off of my own experiences. I’ll decide for myself if I should be afraid of him, and I’m certainly not going to let some stranger that’s so afraid of anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow definition of normal decide that for me.”

He pants, realising that he was too engrossed in his speech, too caught up in his emotions, to remember to breathe in-between his words. Chikage seems to be staring at Itaru with a strange expression on his face, and Itaru feels his cheeks slowly warming up from the attention. He looks away, self-conscious.

“I’m… glad,” Chikage finally says, “I’m really glad you’re Sakuya’s tutor, Mister Chigasaki. Thank you for looking out for him.”

Itaru mumbles out a quiet you’re welcome, avoiding Chikage’s gaze all the while. He’s just about to excuse himself from the study, when he hears a quiet clink of metal against wood.

“This is a key to this study. The only other copy of it is in my possession, so if the door’s locked and I’m unavailable, you can use this to access my collection of books,” Chikage says, sliding the key towards Itaru, “Though I do hope you won’t see this as an invitation to overwork yourself. Read a romance novel, if you’d like.”

Laughing quietly, Itaru gratefully accepts his gift. “Thank you, my Lord.”

He leaves the study feeling light-headed, yet oddly bashful. Not even Homare has a copy of the key to his study, he realises. The study was once Chikage’s, but now that he’s shared it with Itaru, it’s as if the study was theirs and theirs alone.

Immediately dismissing that thought, Itaru closes his room door behind him, and if he spends the rest of the day absentmindedly fiddling with the little bronze key in the pocket of his waistcoat, well, no one has to know.

If the last few days had felt like a nightmare Itaru was unable to escape from, the next few weeks felt like a blissful dream Itaru didn’t want to ever let go of.

He’d been right—the talk he had with Chikage in the study somehow managed to trigger something within the Lord, melting the frost off of his attitude towards Itaru and leaving nothing but warm words and warm smiles behind.

(The real kind, not the forcibly polite ones he’d seen gracing Chikage’s lips—the kind of smile that actually reached his eyes, coaxing them into soft, glistening crescents.)

What started as an offhand comment about the atmosphere in Chikage’s study being more conducive for productivity slowly morphed into one night spent at Chikage’s desk, which then became two nights, three nights and four. After the first week, Chikage started shifting his ink pots and paperwork aside to make enough room for Itaru’s journals and lesson plans on his desk.

It’s nice to have some company, Itaru thinks, as he looks up from Sakuya’s grammar workbook to glance at the man sitting across him at the desk, finding the way Chikage often tended to part his lips when deep in concentration awfully endearing. If one were to think of Chikage, endearing probably wouldn’t even be one of the first thousand words they would use to describe him, yet as of lately, Itaru’s starting to think that description suits him to a tee.

“Is there something on my face?” Chikage asks without taking his eyes off of his work.

Itaru places his pen down. If he’d already been caught looking, he might as well shamelessly look.

“How exactly did a young man like yourself manage to become the head of a household like the April Manor?” Whatever happened to the rest of your family, is the question left unsaid, yet Itaru thinks Chikage has the intuition to sense it anyway.

Chikage turns to face Itaru, yet his eyes seem to be looking off into the far distance. “They left. My father had been caught in an affair with an equestrian from the travelling circus. My two brothers were so distraught, they pressured him into abandoning and leaving all his wealth to us as repentance. Funnily enough, one of them ended up marrying a trapeze artist from that very same circus the year after. I haven’t seen my other brother since, though I have heard rumours of the appearance of the circus’s ringleader, and I’ll be honest with you—I’m a little suspicious.”

Narrowing his eyes, Itaru struggles to even compose a response. That… cannot be true, can it?

“Are you lying to me?” he asks, and from the way Chikage smiles, a little too pleased with himself, Itaru gets the feeling that he is.

“Perhaps I am, perhaps I’m not. You could ask me again tomorrow, if you wish?”

This strange game between them goes on for weeks.

After a long night of working together in comfortable silence at the study, Itaru would offer the question, “How does a young man like yourself become the head of a household like the April Manor?”—of which Chikage would be more than happy to oblige, replying with some of the most unfathomable backstories, a different one each day.

“One of my ancestors had angered a sorcerer, who’d then cursed all the men in his bloodline. At the age of thirty, we’d turn into hares. My father and brothers are already in the gardens. I have about four years left.”

“If you ever find yourself near a window at night, take a look at the sky outside. The brightest star you see is where they are. I saw them float into the sky after having one too many flutes of their favourite champagne. I do hope it was worth it.”

“My family are actually still residents of the manor. They’ve just developed an innate and all-consuming fear of strangers with light-coloured hair, so that’s probably why you haven’t seen them around yet. Avoiding their fears is a talent of theirs, I suppose.”

At some point, Itaru’d stopped asking him that question to learn the truth—in the same way Sakuya looked forward to scene rehearsals with Itaru after a lesson, Itaru had started to look forward to hearing whatever elaborate lie Chikage had concocted by the end of a night. He’d never have imagined the Lord to be in possession of such a bizarrely amusing sense of humour, but now that he’s had a glimpse of it, he’s almost afraid of how much he admires and adores it.

It really does almost feel as if it were a dream. He’s finally beginning to feel at home in the manor, with a job that he wholeheartedly enjoys and an employer he’s becoming increasingly fond of. Itaru had almost forgotten the strange events he’d witnessed in his first few days of being a tutor of April Manor, but unlike him, his consciousness recalls every last detail.

He’d been complacent—he’d been sleeping too well and too peacefully for so long, that he’d forgotten how gut-wrenchingly awful it feels to experience a nightmare.

In his wretched sleep, Itaru finds himself in a very familiar forest that lies just beyond the boundary of the garden walls. He might be alone, but as he continues to walk down the forest’s dirt trail, he can feel that he isn’t.

He does what every foolish horror novel protagonist does, and quickly glances over his shoulder, just to confirm that his instincts had been correct—and oh, he’s never felt more upset to be proven right.

Stumbling over his feet in fear, Itaru realises that he’s surrounded by the haunting image of the manor’s gardener.

Tsumugi watches him with frighteningly blank eyes, and it doesn’t matter which direction Itaru turns, left, right, west, east—he’s there. And he’s watching.

It feels as if he’s coming closer and closer to Itaru with every blink that he takes, before finally materialising about a step away from him.

“You’re doomed, Mister Chigasaki,” Tsumugi whispers into his ear, caressing Itaru’s shoulder, “You did this to yourself. You let those monsters into your heart, and now they will devour it.”

And devour, he does—with a siren-like cackle, he plunges his incisors into Itaru’s neck, clenching his jaw firmly around the tutor’s flesh before he pulls.

He bleeds, and he bleeds, and he bleeds. The screams that are dragged out of Itaru’s throat carry over to reality and he wakes, petrifyingly terrified, to the sound of his own hoarse voice.

With a shaky hand, he attempts to light the candle by his bedside. But as he pushes himself upright in his bed, he sees the shadow of a familiar figure against his window curtain, which had been illuminated by the moon’s glow. That wasn’t just a dream. He’s come to find me.

Instinctively, Itaru rises from his bed to take the study key from his desk and he runs.

Slamming his room door shut behind him, Itaru sprints to the only place where he’d felt safe, the only room in the entire manor that didn’t have a single window—Chikage’s study.

His tremorous hand fails to push the key into the keyhole once, twice, three times, before he finally manages to force his way into the room. Just as quickly as he flings open the doors, Itaru closes it behind him before eventually collapsing against them, all strength in his legs dissipating like steam.

Reaching up to ensure that his neck hadn’t actually been ripped apart, Itaru pants raggedly, a familiar feeling of panic seeping deep into his skin. He feels nauseous and breathless and horrified and upset all at the same time, and he’s never felt so helpless in his entire life. He heaves, and heaves, and heaves, and heaves.

“Mister Chigasaki?” he hears Chikage ask, from the hallway. When he knocks, Itaru can feel it through the wooden doors, in the spine of his back.

Itaru desperately gasps for air, clutching at his chest with both hands. “Y-You can’t… Don’t let him in! Don’t… Don’t let him in!”

“I promise you, Mister Chigasaki, I’m alone,” Chikage says, his voice a steady anchor amongst reckless waves, “I have the key to the study with me. May I come in? I’ll lock the doors behind me. I promise.”

He feels himself fall against the ground, his cheek pressed into the rough carpet.

“Mister Chigasaki? Knock twice if you’re alright with me coming in,” Chikage presses, impatiently, and if Itaru weren’t so preoccupied with not suffocating, he would’ve caught the shrill tone of worry in the Lord’s voice.

With the last of his strength, Itaru thumps his foot against the doors two times. Almost immediately, the door swings open.

Chikage quickly locks the doors behind him, as agreed, before immediately coming to Itaru’s side. “There’s no place safer than here, you know that. Only you and I have the key to this room. There’s no one to be afraid of here.”

Nodding, Itaru squeezes his eyes shut as he tries his best to calm himself down, ignoring the way his teeth are uncontrollably chattering. He shudders involuntarily, a full-bodied movement that punches the air right out of him.

“You’re safe, I know you are,” Chikage continues, “You’ll always be safe as long as I am around, I can assure you that. No one can hurt you here.”

Little by little, Itaru slowly begins to unwind like a toy, tension leaking out of him in the form of tears.

Reaching up towards Chikage, Itaru grasps at the Lord’s arms, sobbing. He doesn’t seem to know what he’s asking for, doesn’t know how to put what he needs right now into words, but like always, Chikage understands.

Itaru feels himself being maneuvered into a sturdy chest, Chikage’s arms cradling him in. He feels like he could let himself believe each and every reassuring word Chikage had told him earlier. He feels safe.

Time passes for a while like that, Chikage’s hand gently rubbing his back until Itaru forces himself to calm down, feeling as if he’s cried enough tears for a lifetime. But even when he’d stopped crying, Chikage’s comforting did not. Itaru’s secretly grateful for that.

“Would,” Itaru begins, barely audible, “Would it be alright if I slept in this study instead of my room, for the time being?”

Humming, Chikage pats Itaru’s back in a slow rhythm, not unlike a heartbeat. His unnaturally calm reaction definitely wasn’t what Itaru had been anticipating, but then again, it feels like almost everything about Chikage seemed to subvert Itaru’s expectations. “Of course. May I ask why?”

Itaru curls further into Chikage, ashamed of what a grown man like himself was about to say. “I’m afraid of the shadows I’ve been seeing lurking around my window. I’ve tried my best to ignore it, but I just don’t think I can anymore.”

Chikage continues to soothe Itaru, but when Itaru turns towards him to gauge his reaction, he sees an uncharacteristically grim expression on his face. It’s only when Chikage feels the weight of Itaru’s stare that he softens, returning to his usual self.

“If I’m honest, I do feel rather uncomfortable about the idea of you sleeping in a room that doesn’t even have a bed—my hospitality simply won’t allow it. Would you be opposed to using the guest room next to mine, instead? I believe the window in that room is completely blocked off by a tall cabinet.”

Itaru smiles weakly. “Thank you, I would really appreciate that. I truly am sorry for causing so much trouble.”

“There’s nothing to apologise for, Mister Chigasaki,” Chikage says as he guides Itaru onto his feet, the gentle tone of his voice tapering off into something a little less welcoming, “Absolutely nothing to apologise for.”

Morning comes, after a thankfully dreamless sleep.

Perhaps the key to sleeping soundly is to have a nervous breakdown, Itaru jokes to himself as he walks down the stairs, heading towards the dining parlour for breakfast.

When he passes the foyer, however, he notices Chikage speaking to Homare with a suitcase carried in one hand. He’s wearing the exact overcoat Itaru had seen him in on the very first day they’d met—a double-breasted Chesterfield in grey tweed, lined with Italian cloth and flaunting a velvet collar. He’s never looked more worthy of his title.

“I’m going to have to leave the manor to you for now, Homare,” he says, his voice quiet and low. “I thought I’d been thorough enough in my inspection, but in my haste, I’d been careless.”

“Do tread cautiously, My Lord. Have they made their move?” the butler replies, and Itaru senses something suspicious about their conversation. He hides in a small alcove by the foyer, careful not to cast a shadow onto the marble floor.

Chikage laughs humorlessly. “They’ve made several already, all without my knowledge. I believe it’s finally my turn.”

“Very well. Would my assistance be required?”

“No,” Chikage answers, a little too quickly, “I need you to stand guard over Sakuya and Mister Chigasaki. You will not leave them unprotected. Is that clear?”

“Yes, My Lord.”

Itaru hears the front door shut, and he hurries off to the parlour as soundlessly as he possibly can. His heart beats erratically in his chest, an all-encompassing anxiety slowly but surely infiltrating his bloodstream. What did Chikage mean when he ordered Homare to ‘guard’ them both? Why did they need to be protected? Protected from what?

For the rest of the day, Itaru finds it awfully difficult to remain focused. Even during his lesson with Sakuya, he’s unable to keep his mind off of the conversation he had eavesdropped on. He felt sick from the anticipation, felt sick from waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Mister Chigasaki?” Sakuya asks, lightly tugging on Itaru’s sleeve.

Itaru flinches, only to settle into his chair once he realises it had been just Sakuya. “Oh, Sakuya! Yes, what is it?”

The boy frowns. “Are you feeling ill, Mister Chigasaki? You look rather pale.”

Shaking his head, Itaru forces his most convincing smile onto his face. “No, I’m feeling quite alright. Have you completed that exercise I—”

It was as if time had been pushed into a momentary pause, forced to a halt from the resounding and unmistakable crack of a gunshot coming from the gardens.

Gripping Sakuya’s shoulder with more strength than he’d intended, Itaru tucks a small bronze key into the boy’s hands, his own pair trembling all the while. “Sakuya. Do you know where Lord Chikage’s study is?”

Frightened, Sakuya nods.

“G-good. I want you to go up into his study, and hide underneath his desk. The doors might be locked but you can unlock them with this key. I want you to promise me that you will lock the doors behind you as soon as you get there, and you will not open them for anyone other than Homare, Lord Chikage or myself. Do you understand?”

With a brave expression, the boy takes the key, replies with a resolute I promise, and disappears into the hallway. Itaru swallows, picking up a brass candlestick. He’s almost certain the gun that had fired into the distance was Homare’s rifle, but he could never be too sure.

Hiding behind a pillar, Itaru clenches and unclenches his knuckles around his makeshift weapon nervously. If he had been wrong and the rifle actually belonged to the intruders, he would find himself at a great disadvantage running into a gunfight with a candlestick. His intuition tells him he shouldn’t enter the gardens without a plan.

Itaru peers out the window looking into the gardens, and he sees the lifeless carcass of a hare in the center of the path, lying in a pool of its own blood, with not a single figure in sight.

Deciding that locating the butler would be the best course of action, Itaru begins to look for Homare, quietly moving around the manor while trying his best not to panic.

In his search, he notices that the basement door at the bottom of the stairs near the study is wide open. Could Homare have passed out down there? Could he have been attacked?

He practically flies down the stairs, one step after the other, and it’s a genuine miracle that Itaru doesn’t trip over his own feet.

When Itaru arrives at the basement doorway, he earnestly prays that he finds Homare in a conscious state.

But as he enters the basement, the narrow brick hallway leading to a dimly lit room, Itaru feels as though nothing could have ever prepared him for this moment.

Before him, lies the dreadfully still body of one of Chikage’s brothers.

Covering his mouth to stifle his gasp, Itaru nearly falls backwards, his knees buckling at the sight of the corpse lying amongst mildewed sheets, his fringe still neatly hanging over half of his face. He doesn’t look at all like the cadavers Itaru had seen in journals—if anything, he looked incredibly well-preserved. He looked like he was simply fast asleep.

Itaru cannot help but think of all the nights he’d spent in the study, with Chikage crafting countless versions of his family history for him to listen to. Of all the constructions, however, he’d never once mentioned that he was in possession of his brother’s body.

(Would Itaru have believed him, even if he did? Was it not so outlandish of an idea that his suspiciously secretive employer may or may not have murdered his own brother?)

He still remembers the way Chikage had held him ever so carefully in the study, as if he’d been soothing a startled lamb. How could it be possible, for hands as gentle as his to also be capable of such nightmarish violence?

In his panic, he fails to hear the crisp sound of footsteps against brick.

“Oh Mister Chigasaki,” he hears Chikage speak, his voice muffled despite him being not that far behind him at all, “I really didn’t want you to have to find out this way.”

The candles are suddenly extinguished in synchrony, enveloping Itaru with a thick blanket of darkness.

In the midst of his collapse to the ground, Itaru unexpectedly recalls the last piece of advice his father had ever given him, words spoken to him right before he’d disappeared from Itaru’s life for good:

“Now remember this, Itaru—you can live your dreams, but you must never live in them, no matter how good they seem, because they’re not real. The more you convince yourself you’re content with living a lie, the more it’ll hurt when you inevitably wake up from it.”

PART THREE, 1905:
INCORRUPTIBILITY.

When Itaru next wakes, he quickly realises he’s lying on the sofa in Chikage’s study, tucked into a warm blanket that went up to his chin. Sakuya is nowhere to be seen.

“Sakuya? Sakuya, are you still here?” he whispers, receiving no response.

Frantically getting onto his feet, Itaru accidentally knocks over a stack of books on Chikage’s desk in the process. He curses himself wildly, and hopes to God he didn’t just alert Chikage that he’d regained his consciousness.

Itaru hears a knock on the doors to the study. “Mister Chigasaki, are you awake?”

“Why is the dead body of your brother lying in your basement, you sick bastard,” Itaru hisses, searching the drawers of Chikage’s desk for anything sharp he could use as a defense weapon, “Where’s Sakuya? Did you knock him out too?”

“Please calm down, Mister Chigasaki, you’re going to pass out again,” he hears Chikage say. “Sakuya is safe. I had Homare take care of him after getting rid of the intruders. Also, I did not knock you out. You fainted as soon as I spoke to you in the basement, completely unprovoked.”

Itaru finds a letter opener. It’s not the best, but it’ll do. “Does Homare know? That you’ve been hiding the corpse of your brother in your basement?”

“Homare knows everything,” Chikage answers, and from the sound of his voice, it seems as if he’s moving closer and closer towards the door, “If you’d just let me explain—”

Slamming his quivering fist onto Chikage’s desk, Itaru points the letter opener towards the doors with his other hand, even if Chikage couldn’t see him do it. “Don’t come any closer, and don’t you dare open that door.”

“I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to—I made sure to slide my key underneath the doors after I’d locked them. You’re the only one that can control who comes in, Mister Chigasaki. You’re in control here.”

Narrowing his eyes in suspicion, Itaru walks closer to see if Chikage had been lying. It’s only when he spots a small bronze key at the foot of the study doors, its shape and size identical to the one currently sitting on Chikage’s desk, that Itaru finally lowers his weapon. He bends down to pick the key up.

“How do I know that you don’t secretly own a third copy?”

He hears Chikage bark out a surprised laugh. “Well, I don’t. Whether you choose to believe me or not is entirely up to you. But I assure you, you will always be safe as long as I am around. That hasn’t changed.”

Something about the tone of Chikage’s voice makes Itaru feel inclined to believe him. Now that he thinks about it, ever since he’d given Itaru the key to the study, Chikage has never been anything but polite and kind to him. The realisation immediately dampens his temper, replacing his rage with a muted shame.

“So tell me,” he quietly says, extending his words towards Chikage like an olive branch, “How does a young man like yourself become the head of a household like the April Manor?”

The April Manor, Opalry, 1900.

Pulling his brother aside in the hallway, Chikage eyes the strange gentleman seated on the sofa of his father’s study.

“What kind of medicine did Father say we’d be injected with?” Chikage whispers, clutching onto the sleeve of his brother’s shirt.

August smiles at him kindly, soothing Chikage’s anxious hand. It works like a charm. “He called it a vaccination. It’s supposed to keep our immune systems from failing. You’ll be alright, Chikage, just hold still for ten seconds, and you’ll never fall ill ever again.”

Snorting, Chikage releases his grip on August’s shirt. “Ten seconds? I don’t think Hisoka can even stay awake for five. Would he be alright?”

Hisoka huffs, punching his brother on the arm firmly. “If staying awake for ten seconds means I can live off on only marshmallows without falling sick, I’ll do it. I’ll be alright.”

A throat clears from the doorway, and Homare gestures silently, ushering the brothers in to greet their father’s guest. Looking at the man up close, Chikage recognises him as one of the newest merchants in Opalry. He remembers accidentally overhearing the merchant bragging about his medical achievements and prowess to his father over dinner one night, throwing around claims that had sounded impossible to Chikage at the time. Even now, the idea of having a hundred percent success rate feels a little far-fetched to him.

And yet, he rolls his sleeve up anyway, because if it’s one thing Chikage couldn’t bring himself to do, it was disobeying his father.

After the merchant injected a mysterious, brilliantly violet fluid into the arms of Chikage, Hisoka, August, their father, and Homare, he had instructed them to immediately rest in their beds.

“The vaccination might come with side effects,” he’d warned, as he bids the residents of April Manor goodnight, “You will probably feel a burning sensation at first, but that is completely normal. It should go away after a few minutes.”

Pulling his quilt over his sore shoulder, Chikage curls into his bed feeling a lot drowsier than he’d been before the injection. As he slowly drifts into a deep sleep, he thinks he can hear his father’s voice in the distance, but before he’s able to decipher any of his words, he passes out cold.

When Chikage wakes, he feels like his entire body had been set aflame.

He writhes, screaming into the empty darkness of his room, throwing aside his quilt as he’s overwhelmed with an abundance of senses—he sees everything all at once, hears everything all at once, feels everything all at once. It feels like torture.

When the pain finally begins to subside, Chikage pants, staring blankly at the ceiling. Both his sheets and clothes are soaked in sweat, and he’s never felt more thirsty in his entire life. But what startles Chikage is the fact that he’s now able to see each and every crack in his ceiling—all while his own pair of glasses sit on the nightstand by his bedside.

Impressed, Chikage blinks, taking on and off his glasses just to see if there was any difference at all. (There isn’t.)

So the vaccination had worked, after all.

Just as he’s about to go flaunt his perfect vision to his brothers, his bedroom door bursts wide open, a haggard-looking Homare forcing his way into Chikage’s room. Chikage’s completely taken aback—the Homare he knew would never enter his room without knocking, let alone slam a door.

“Chikage,” Homare breathes, cradling Chikage’s head into his chest, “Thank the heavens. I… I am so grateful that you are alright.”

“What do you mean, Homare? Were my side effects far more serious compared to everyone else’s?”

The butler pulls away, and only then does Chikage realise that Homare’s in tears. But more shockingly, his eyes are coloured in a deep, vibrant crimson.

“What’s the matter with your eyes?” he asks, leaning up to stare into Homare’s face. “They’re completely red in colour.”

Examining Chikage up close, Homare furrows his eyebrows in concern. “So are yours.”

The glint of an unusually sharp canine in Homare’s mouth startles Chikage, causing him to fall back onto his bed. “Your… your teeth. They look strange. Do mine look—”

Licking his own canines out of curiosity, Chikage learns the answer to his own question. His tongue pulls away from his fang, slightly sore from having been pricked.

“That… isn’t what I came here to inform you of, Young Master,” Homare says, his facial expression conflicted between fear and anguish. “The Lord of the manor, your father, has passed away.”

Chikage inhales sharply.

“I was with him when the vaccination had taken its effect,” Homare continues, “And while he was miserably withering away, he’d confessed that he’d lied to us and damned us all. What that merchant injected into us wasn’t a vaccination, it was a serum.”

“A serum?” Chikage parrots, too shocked to form words of his own.

Homare nods. “The merchant promised your father that the serum would guarantee anyone who’d been injected with it eternal health, life and youth.”

Frowning, Chikage feels around his arm, searching for the place where the needle had pierced his flesh. He felt a raised scar, about the size of a small coin, on his shoulder. “But… why would he have passed if he’d been injected with the serum?”

“The merchant had left a note addressed to your father. It read: Thank you for volunteering your sons, butler and yourself as test subjects. Your contributions to my experiment will not go unrecognised nor unrewarded.”

Chikage seethes, clenching his fists into his sheets. His voice escapes from his lips as a whisper of disbelief. “We were test subjects?”

“I… I believe so,” Homare answers.

A realisation hits him like a trough of cold water, drenching his skin with unease. “Have you checked on August? Hisoka?”

Homare’s silence is enough to send him running.

“August?” Chikage yells, swinging open his door with much more strength than he’d anticipated, ripping the piece of wood off from its frame as if it were merely a book.

What lay before him was enough to fuel his nightmares for weeks.

He immediately felt the gloved hands of Homare over his eyes, shielding him from the sight of what once was his beloved brother. Grasping at the butler’s hands, Chikage trembles. “Is… Is that still August?”

Gently, Homare guides Chikage away from August’s bedroom. “Let us leave, Young Master. There is nothing to see here.”

The butler leads Chikage down the hallway, but the scent of burnt flesh remains deeply ingrained in his memory, branding him forever like livestock. He could never forget that stench even if he’d tried.

After seeing what had happened to August, Chikage’s almost terrified to learn of what lies behind Hisoka’s door.

“I’ll check first, this time,” Homare kindly says, as he peeks into Hisoka’s room. He gasps, immediately entering the room. “Hisoka?”

The hope in his voice instills a sense of bravery within Chikage, and he quickly follows the butler, stumbling into his brother’s room with unshed tears in his eyes. “Hisoka!”

His brother lies in his bed, looking exactly as he did before they’d all gone to sleep last night. And yet, there’s something unnatural about how still he is, his ever-fluttering eyelashes stationary, for once. Chikage peels back his eyelid, and is greeted with a blank stare.

“His pulse is weak, but steady,” Homare says, with two fingers pressed against his neck. “He’s alive… but just barely. I do not know for sure if he’ll ever wake up.”

Holding Hisoka’s head in his arms, Chikage begins to wail.

He curses himself for ever trusting his fool of a father to be thorough when researching the backgrounds of any of his acquaintances. How could he have entrusted the lives of his family to a near complete stranger?

Homare eventually has to pry Chikage’s hands off of his comatose brother, leading the last surviving heir to the April Manor to his room. His sheets have been changed, leaving no reminder of what had happened earlier.

“Please rest, Young Master,” Homare says, “You cannot spend the rest of your eternal life grieving by Hisoka’s side. Who will take over your father’s place as the head of April Manor?”

You will, Chikage thinks, miserable. I’m only twenty-two, I couldn’t possibly be the Lord of the manor. I’ve never even done any training on how to manage an aristocratic household. The only one who did was—

He had thought he already cried himself dry, but the very thought of August was enough to send him into yet another sobbing fit.

What was the point, He laments, What was the point of an eternity if he had to spend it mourning the ones who once made tomorrow worth living for?

When Chikage finishes his answer, Itaru takes a moment to absorb what he’d just heard. Unlike every other time Chikage had told him about his family, the Lord’s voice was unsteady, his words wrecked with a devastation Itaru knew all too well. He remembers the way his throat used to close at the very mention of his mother, the way he’d suddenly recall how frail her body had been when the pneumonia was at its final stages. Even now, thinking of his mother, Itaru feels a familiar pain in the depths of his chest, a wound in his heart that could never be healed, only managed.

This isn’t the kind of misery one could learn without having experienced it themself.

He swallows the lump in his throat, a mix of sympathy and guilt leaving an ultimately bitter taste at the back of his tongue—he’s suddenly reminded of all the horrid, insensitive things he’d accused Chikage of earlier, and he just wishes he would finally learn how to manage his impulsivity for once.

“I’m s—”

“If you’re going to tell me that you’re sorry, I’d rather you remain silent,” Chikage calmly says, “I don’t think you reacted in an irrational way at all, you were right to suspect me—I know I would’ve.”

Itaru keeps his mouth closed, at a temporary loss for words.

“Alright,” he then says, and he wonders what kind of expression Chikage’s wearing right now. “Can you tell me about what just happened here, at the manor? Who on Earth was Homare protecting Sakuya and I from?”

“I knew that was you in the alcove,” Chikage mutters, almost amusedly, before continuing, “Ever since word began to spread about how I’d adopted Sakuya as my ward, the manor’s been victim to bizarre attacks—I eventually learned that my family wasn’t the only group of test subjects in Opalry. I suppose the other family felt threatened by a child with the same abilities as them, leaving them no choice but to rid of the April Manor in order to establish their territory.”

Itaru hums, deep in thought. “If you knew they were coming, then why did you leave?”

The doors creak quietly from the weight of Chikage leaning against them. From the sound of it, it doesn’t seem like he’ll ever see the end of the ever-inquisitive Itaru’s questions. It appears as though he might be here for a while.

“I pretended to leave because I knew they were cowards,” he sniffs, “Cowards who would only feel confident enough to invade the manor if they knew its Lord had left it open and vulnerable.”

Barking out a laugh, Itaru almost opens the doors just to shake Chikage’s hand. “You scheming, clever bastard. And what of this family of cowards? Had they scampered off into the woods at the sight of your face, running with their tails between their legs?”

“Let’s just say they wouldn’t be running anywhere anytime soon, Mister Chigasaki.”

Itaru pretends to gasp, full theatrics even though his audience could hardly see him. “Don’t tell me. They’re in your basement, too?”

“No, no,” Chikage says, unable to keep the laughter out of his voice, “They’re buried much further down than that.”

If he’s honest, Itaru’s not entirely sure if the Lord is still joking. “You buried them?”

“Of course I did. And you better not be feeling sorry for them—they’re the ones who’ve been disrupting your beauty sleep.”

The shadows! “You mean to say there really were figures by my window at night? And you lured them to the manor because I had told you they were watching me?”

“But why,” Itaru pushes on, confusion evident in his voice and on his face, “Why would you go through all that trouble for an outsider like myself?”

“Mister Chigasaki, you are no outsider. From the moment I gave you the key to this room, you’ve been one of mine—and I always protect what is mine.”

Itaru’s never been more grateful for the doors separating them. He burns brilliantly like a flame, a heated blush travelling from the tips of his ears down to his neck. The idea of belonging had always seemed distant and unfathomable to him, a mysterious concept that would evade his desperate fingers the more he’d tried to grab a hold of it. And to think that the man across the door from him would outright declare, so fervently, that Itaru had belonged to him…

Clutching the letter opener in one hand, Chikage’s key in the other, Itaru makes the deliberate decision of placing the letter opener onto the ground.

“Don’t go fainting on me now, Mister Chigasaki,” Chikage teases, shifting against the door.

Itaru clears his throat, clenching his fist around the bronze key. He has about a million questions he wants to ask Chikage—about what he’d meant when he had said that Itaru was his, about all the glances they’d exchanged in this very study. But he finds that he’s unable to voice any of them aloud, too afraid that if he’d finally acknowledged the oasis it would disappear into thin air, leaving Itaru with a parched throat in a desolate desert.

“Can you tell me about how you met Sakuya?” He asks, instead.

As always, Chikage humours him. “About a year ago, I’d heard from Homare that amongst the townspeople, a rumour about an orphan who had immense strength, red eyes and fangs for teeth was beginning to spread. I assumed he was another one of the merchant’s test subjects, so I took him in.”

“Assumed?” Itaru questions. “So he isn’t?”

“Not entirely—his father was,” Chikage answers. “I don’t think his mother knew, because when she had swaddled her child for the first time and saw his bright, scarlet eyes, she handed him straight to the orphanage.”

Itaru frowns. “Well, I’m glad that she did, only so that he could meet you.”

Chikage laughs, a soft chuckle that warms Itaru from the inside out. “Thank you, Mister Chigasaki. That does mean a lot to me.”

They lapse into silence, though this time, it isn’t an uncomfortable one. Nor does it last for long.

“Hold on,” Itaru says, pursing his lips in deep thought, “If Sakuya has the serum in his blood, how is it that he’s still able to grow?”

“I believe it is because he is still half human. He may not be able to control his thirst in the presence of blood, but he can consume ordinary food for sustenance.”

Itaru blinks at woodgrain, only just registering one very important detail.

“His… thirst?” he echoes in disbelief.

Chikage pauses for a couple of moments. “Oh, my apologies, did I fail to mention that in exchange for eternal life, health and youth, we are only able to digest blood?”

Itaru opens his mouth to answer Chikage, only to close it shut when he finds that he has nothing to say. Faintly, he sees the image of Tsumugi’s bitten neck at the back of his mind.

“So that is what the fangs are for,” Itaru dumbly says, still processing the information. Had Chikage always had fangs, or red eyes? For someone who’s spent hours gazing at his face, surely he would remember if he had features as distinct as those?

Itaru decides that he’s just going to have to see it for himself if he wants to believe Chikage’s word.

Pushing the study doors out without warning, Itaru sees the Lord stumble back from the sudden movement, his eyes wide with surprise as if he hadn’t been expecting Itaru to ever let him in.

“Will you show me?” Itaru breathes. “I promise not to faint.”

Chikage closes his eyes for a moment.

When he opens them, Itaru sees that the irises of his eyes have transformed—from a soothing, dark colour into the most brilliant shade of red, one that could rival the garden’s most esteemed rosebuds.

Parting his lips, Chikage bares his teeth to Itaru, revealing his now unnaturally sharpened canines.

Unable to stop himself, Itaru reaches up to trail his finger across Chikage’s fang, as if to prove to a small, skeptical voice in his head that this isn’t an illusion. In his fascination, he accidentally pricks himself.

Immediately pulling away, Chikage hisses, a monstrous noise ripped from his throat that sounds as if it does not belong to him. He turns his face away from Itaru, veins strained in his neck. “Please forgive me. I do not want to hurt you. Would you mind waiting for me at my desk?”

Itaru watches the way Chikage shakes, and he wordlessly moves towards the sofa in the study.

Sinking into the plush material, Itaru inspects the papercut-sized wound on his finger. His heart beats rapidly, in his ears and in his throat. He’s always been a man of logic—he would only believe something if he sees it with his own two eyes, touches it with his own two hands. Now that he’s examined the evidence for himself, Itaru finds himself slowly believing Chikage’s story.

When Chikage returns, appearing much more like himself, Itaru decides to take a leap of faith.

“Is Tsumugi… also like you and Homare? I don’t recall you mentioning him.”

Chikage seats himself beside Itaru on the sofa, instead of across him at his desk. “No, he is not. But he’s been a gardener for the manor long before we met the merchant, so we can trust him with our secret. He’s even willing to offer his blood to us, despite being anemic.”

“He’s anemic? Wouldn’t that be dangerous for him?”

“Of course,” Chikage replies, settling further into the sofa. “Hence why we only drink from him when Homare is unable to hunt any hares.”

Itaru is silent, once more. He imagines Chikage poised over Tsumugi, drinking from the gardener’s neck greedily. For some reason, he feels strangely uncomfortable with the idea.

“What—” “Does—”

Their sentences collide at a crossroad, both men flustered in their own way.

“After you,” Chikage kindly says, gesturing for Itaru to continue.

In a small voice, Itaru mumbles out, “What would you think about drinking from me, instead?”

Chikage turns to look at Itaru, his expressionless face revealing nothing about his thoughts. Itaru stammers, scrambling to find an excuse.

“Only because I wouldn’t want anything to happen to Tsumugi, that’s all! I… If both Homare and yourself drink from him, it might be bad for his health, I think,” Itaru babbles on, staring at the carpet.

When he still hears no response from Chikage, Itaru immediately gets up from the sofa, face as red as a rose. “P-Pardon me, while I’m here, I’m going to go look for more lesson materials.”

Taking wider strides than usual, Itaru nearly slams his face into the nearest bookshelf, suddenly extremely taken by the titles he sees before him. He reads them over and over in his head to calm himself down, the words not making much sense at all. He could’ve been standing in front of a shelf of dictionaries and he wouldn’t have even realised.

“Mister Chigasaki,” he hears, yet he continues to face the shelves, feigning interest in the seventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Chikage moves closer. “Mister Chigasaki.”

He’s just about to pull a book off from the shelf when he feels himself being spun around, Chikage’s wide hand curling over the curve of his shoulder.

Startled, Itaru nearly flinches when he realises that Chikage’s face is only half a step away from his own. He involuntarily holds his breath.

“Itaru,” Chikage murmurs, his eyes ablaze. “Were you serious about that offer?”

Something in the way that Chikage gazes at him, as if he’d hung not just the moon but also each and every star in the sky, makes Itaru feel brave. Tilting his head aside, Itaru simply closes his eyes, and bares his neck.

“I trust you,” he whispers.

He feels a hand gently cradling his face, another splaying across the small of his back. Chikage’s thumb rubs at Itaru’s cheekbone absentmindedly in small circles, which only encourages Itaru into leaning further into his palm.

Chikage grazes his teeth across the expanse of his shoulder, inhaling into the crook of his neck like he’d been starved of Itaru’s scent. His breaths are uneven, ragged, and from the way his fingers dig deep into Itaru’s waist, Itaru faintly thinks that perhaps he has. He mouths lazily at Itaru’s collar bone, pressing one needy kiss after the other into Itaru’s skin.

Hitching his breath, Itaru raises his arms to clutch at the sleeves of Chikage’s dress shirt, the sensation of cold teeth followed by warm breath followed by petal-soft kiss beckoning him to crumble.

“Relax,” Chikage breathes, punctuating with a wet suckle against his skin. Itaru grasps at his arms blindly, gasping when he feels Chikage lap at his neck with his tongue. He feels like he could melt. He feels like he’s being eaten.

The hand by Itaru’s jaw slowly slips downwards, Chikage’s outstretched palm supporting the side of Itaru’s neck. “This might sting a little.”

Before Itaru can even reply, he feels a sharp prick into the base of his neck.

His fingers tightly clench around the fabric of Chikage’s shirt in response, his knuckles turning white from his grip as his jaw hangs open in an inaudible scream. The sensation is absolutely bizarre—he can feel Chikage’s fangs buried into his flesh and rationally, he understands that this is meant to hurt, but for some reason, it doesn’t.

“It feels good,” Itaru whines, arching into Chikage, “W-Why does it feel good?”

Squeezing his eyes shut, Itaru’s knees begin to buckle and he slackens into Chikage’s hold, allowing him to move Itaru’s pliant body as he so pleased. He quickly feels his back being pressed flush against the bookshelf, Chikage shifting to bracket Itaru in with his body.

But what flusters Itaru the most are the indecent-sounding slurping and licking and sucking noises that Chikage makes against his neck. He squirms in Chikage’s arms, embarrassed at how greedily Chikage was drinking from him, but even more so at how much he enjoyed it. He reaches up to gently comb his fingers through the hairs at the base of Chikage’s scalp, his breaths slow and lethargic.

When Chikage begins to slowly pull his fangs out from his neck, licking at the puncture wound hungrily, Itaru immediately grips firmly at his nape. He’s unable to stop the shuddery moan that leaves his lips, a loud and reverberant sound that interrupts their heavy breathing.

Pulling his mouth away from Itaru’s neck, Chikage looks positively debauched.

His lips are stained with the very same red he’d seen in his teeth at dinner, smears of crimson across the sides of his mouth from his lack of expertise.

Itaru watches him with a heavy-lidded stare, his cheeks flushed and his mouth open, panting into the air as he attempts to collect himself. He wants to lean up and kiss Chikage’s mouth, wants to taste his own blood on his lips.

And so he does.

Closing the distance between them, Itaru hums against Chikage’s lips, pleased. The feeling of Chikage’s tongue against his own is exquisite and he begins to understand why Chikage had been so famished, earlier. Itaru licks into Chikage’s mouth, pressing their lips together to the point where it feels as if they might actually merge.

Chikage’s hands on his hips tether him to the bookshelf, silently commanding him to heel.

In one big swoop, he carries Itaru into the air, his abdomen pressed against Chikage’s sternum, earning himself a startled yelp from the tutor. Itaru encircles Chikage’s neck with his arms, and wraps himself around Chikage like a touch-starved octopus.

He moves them both to the sofa, Itaru straddling Chikage’s thighs as he grips the top of the backrest. Itaru leans in to kiss Chikage once more—it feels like a dam within him had suddenly been broken, his desire to always have Chikage’s lips on his own outweighing any form of rationality. He wanted to spend the rest of his life kissing Chikage. He wanted to kiss him forever.

Chikage pulls back, a thin line of saliva joining their bottom lips together, and he takes the time to admire his work, trailing a finger up and down the bite wound he’d left on the pale, marble-smooth column of Itaru’s neck.

“You know, I would love to see you in a scarf,” he comments, a sly grin on his face.

Pushing Chikage to lie against the backrest, Itaru smiles back. He feels light-headed, but he thinks he’s never felt happier.

“You seem a little confused, My Lord,” Itaru mutters against Chikage’s lips, unbuttoning his waistcoat, “I believe the idea here is to see me in as little clothes as possible.”

For the first time in his entire life, when Itaru wakes, he is not alone.

Stretching his limbs out, he yawns quietly before turning over in Chikage’s bed, so that they lie together like a pair of parentheses. When he’s greeted with the sight of Chikage’s sleeping face, he instinctively smiles, reaching a hand up to tuck a stray lock of hair behind his ear. He continues to trace the curves and contours of Chikage’s face with a curious finger, ghosting across his pale skin.

The corners of Chikage’s lips pull crooked, and he gently wraps his hand around Itaru’s outstretched wrist. “The first thing you do upon waking is touch my face?”

“If I had my way, I would never stop touching it,” Itaru answers, prompting Chikage to finally open his eyes.

The Lord’s gaze drifts a little lower from Itaru’s face, settling in the crevice of his collar bone. Itaru feels him reach out to gently thumb at his bite wound, the expression on his face unexpectedly serious and thoughtful.

“Was,” Itaru begins, his voice quiet and laced with insecurity, “Was my blood almost as good as Tsumugi’s?”

Chikage breaks into an apologetic smile. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never drank from him.”

“But,” Itaru blurts out, “His neck…”

Laughing softly, Chikage rests his palm over Itaru’s jaw. “That must’ve been the work of Homare. Whenever Homare’s unable to hunt, I live off of the hare blood in our cellar.”

Itaru blinks at Chikage’s knowing smirk, feeling like he had played right into the Lord’s hands. He immediately reddens, embarrassed. “You are incorrigible.”

Stroking the side of Itaru’s flushed face, Chikage’s expression begins to shed its playfulness, his eyes glazing over with a thin film of melancholy.

“I… The first and only other time I’d drank from somebody, it had been the merchant,” he confesses, and Itaru, sensing the change in his mood, curls his fingers around Chikage’s hands in an attempt to comfort him. “For months, I had nothing but revenge on my mind. I’d searched the ends of the Earth for him, and when I finally did, I… I could not control myself.”

Chikage breathes, shakily. “I thought it would bring me peace. I thought if I made him suffer for what he had done to my family, done to me, I would finally stop wishing that it had been my body that had been burnt beyond recognition, my body that fell into an endless sleep. But all it did was remind me that I am merely a slave to this cursed serum—a bloodthirsty monster that I could no longer trust.”

“When Tsumugi had offered his blood to me, I was terrified,” he continues, “I knew that once I started drinking, I would never stop until I drain his body dry.”

“But you did,” Itaru reminds him, brushing back the fringe that had fallen over his face, “You did stop. I knew you would.”

Chikage softens, sliding his hand down to Itaru’s nape. “You are a foolish, foolish man, Itaru Chigasaki. I could not even trust myself, yet you did with your entire heart, like an absolute fool.”

“And I’m your absolute fool, so congratulations,” Itaru coos, leaning in to peck Chikage on the lips.

A soft knock on the door interrupts their conversation, and Itaru immediately shies away from Chikage’s embrace like a mimosa.

“My Lord, Mister Chigasaki, would the both of you like to join the Young Master for breakfast?” Homare asks, and even though the door, Itaru can hear the smile in his voice.

Once they’d gotten dressed, Chikage offers Itaru his arm, wearing the most frustratingly smug expression. “How do you think we should break the news to Sakuya, my love?”

Flustered, Itaru scoffs at the term of endearment, choosing to ignore the way he’s unable to keep the pleased beam off of his face.

“I have the slightest clue of what you are referring to, My Lord,” he haughtily says, adjusting the cuffs of his shirt.

(Itaru takes Chikage’s arm into his own, nevertheless.)

As soon as they enter the dining parlour, the two men find themselves tackled by the waists, a sobbing Sakuya burying his face into their shirts.

“Lord Chikage! Mister Chigasaki!” he wails, his voice smothered in their abdomens, “I am s-so relieved that you’re b-both alright! I was so a-afraid that they… That they…!”

Wrapping an assuring arm around the boy, Itaru kneels down to cradle Sakuya into his shoulder, gently patting at his back as he continues to hiccup. “Of course we’re alright, Sakuya. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Glancing up at Chikage, Itaru feels the beginnings of a grin growing steadily on his face, the corners of his own eyes prickling with tears.

“As long as Lord Chikage is around, I promise you that nothing bad will happen to either of us,” Itaru says, and this time, he finds himself truly believing it.

EPILOGUE, 1905.

That night, just as Chikage is about to put out the candle by their nightstand, Itaru rests his hand in the crook of Chikage’s arm.

“Would… would it be alright if I visited your brother?” he asks, examining Chikage’s facial expression carefully to see if he had overstepped. “I feel like when I first met him, I’d gotten off on the wrong foot. I would really like to amend my mistake.”

Smiling warmly at Itaru, Chikage reaches for his hand and takes it into his own, squeezing his palm firmly. “I think Hisoka would really appreciate that.”

Hand in hand, Chikage leads Itaru down the basement stairs, and it almost amazes him how different the brick hallway feels now. All of a sudden, the corridor that once felt suffocating and claustrophobic had transformed into a comforting walkway, welcoming Itaru with every step that he takes.

When he enters the basement, he sees that Hisoka is lying just as still as the day Itaru had first seen him, hands by his sides and his hair fanned across his pillow. Itaru seats himself on the chair by his bedside, bowing his head in greeting.

“It’s very nice to properly meet you, Hisoka,” he starts, wringing his fingers nervously, “My name is Itaru Chigasaki, and I am a tutor at the April Manor.”

Feeling Chikage’s hand reaching down to clasp his fingers into his own, Itaru smiles, relaxing his tensed shoulders.

“I do wish that we were able to meet under different circumstances, but I suppose there is not much we can really do about that,” he says, covering Chikage’s hand with his own.

“I cannot even begin to imagine how you’re feeling right now. It must be difficult, lying here in this dark room all by yourself… I came here because I wanted to thank you for keeping Chikage company all this time. I’m sure you are aware of this, but he’s a sensitive person that feels lonely very easily, as much as he denies it.”

Chikage snorts out a laugh, squeezing Itaru’s hand in response.

“You must’ve felt uneasy about leaving him alone,” Itaru continues, squeezing Chikage’s hand back, “So I just wanted to let you know that he’s not alone anymore. I’ll take care of your broody brother in your place, so you can sleep peacefully now.”

Just as quietly as he’d come in, Itaru leaves the basement, his fingers interlocked with Chikage’s.

But what either of them fail to notice is the small bead of a tear that falls from the corner of Hisoka’s eye, happily settling into the soft fabric of his pillow.

THE END.