tender prey
by bloodletter

tender prey

bloodletter

Summary

In the early days of the Russo-Japanese War, a disciplinary episode results in Sugimoto Saichi being transferred from the 1st to the 7th Division. It doesn't take long to figure out that Russian gunfire might pose him less danger than the tangled web of a unit in which he's ended up.

Notes

My friend October read this whole fic over and is largely responsible for its existence as anything more than an outline in my notes app. Ruth also read the first two chapters when they were much messier and gave me really helpful structural pointers. Thank you!

Caveat about canon compliance + anachronism: Historical and canon accuracy was attempted up to a point, but I played fast and loose with certain details, especially wrt geography and the passage of time. This story was outlined around GK 180. I've progressed with it mostly as planned, though certain canon events have impacted my characterization takes and framing. The drafts of the last few chapters were completed around GK 204 and don’t take into account anything after that.

Caveat about content warnings: if you've for some reason clicked this fic but aren't familiar with the source material, the Canon-Typical Violence/Graphic Depictions of Violence warning is meant to be taken seriously! This story features different kinds of physical and emotional violence (though no sexual violence), including but not limited to a) in war and b) in interpersonal relationships. There's a fair amount of gore and descriptions of blood and injury, but I mostly want to warn for the fact the central shipping relationships are bound up in this as well, and the story features an unclear line drawn between consensual kink and nonconsensual acts of physical violence. It's not anything vastly out of the realm of where the manga itself goes, but I wouldn't feel conscientious if I didn't warn for it, and it's hard to describe succinctly in tags. Carry on.

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 16701268.

Chapter 1

Notes

My friend October read this whole fic over and is largely responsible for its existence as anything more than an outline in my notes app. Ruth also read the first two chapters when they were much messier and gave me really helpful structural pointers. Thank you!

Caveat about canon compliance + anachronism: Historical and canon accuracy was attempted up to a point, but I played fast and loose with certain details, especially wrt geography and the passage of time. This story was outlined around GK 180. I've progressed with it mostly as planned, though certain canon events have impacted my characterization takes and framing. The drafts of the last few chapters were completed around GK 204 and don’t take into account anything after that.

Caveat about content warnings: if you've for some reason clicked this fic but aren't familiar with the source material, the Canon-Typical Violence/Graphic Depictions of Violence warning is meant to be taken seriously! This story features different kinds of physical and emotional violence (though no sexual violence), including but not limited to a) in war and b) in interpersonal relationships. There's a fair amount of gore and descriptions of blood and injury, but I mostly want to warn for the fact the central shipping relationships are bound up in this as well, and the story features an unclear line drawn between consensual kink and nonconsensual acts of physical violence. It's not anything vastly out of the realm of where the manga itself goes, but I wouldn't feel conscientious if I didn't warn for it, and it's hard to describe succinctly in tags. Carry on.

Of the journey, there wasn’t much to tell. It was a few days across land and sea before they arrived in the depot of the 14th Infantry Brigade. As luck would have it, a Hokkaido-bound convoy was already scheduled to depart from Tokyo no more than a day after Sugimoto Saichi was handed a notice of divisional transfer, and so he had been bundled up and sent north alongside crates of weapons hot off the Koishikawa assembly line before the ink finished drying on the page.

He knew what he’d done to set it in motion: he could still feel his fist cracking against the bridge of his First Lieutenant’s nose. What Sugimoto couldn’t understand was why he’d been given away to the 7th Division instead of court-martialled or demoted proper. Sure, it was punishment enough to be exiled to a frozen wasteland staffed by a bunch of hardasses who thought they were the only division of the army who'd ever marched just because they'd spent the last couple years fixing bridges a stone's throw away from Russia, but it still felt like he’d gotten off cheap.

He’d been relieved of his rifle before boarding the convoy, with new gear to be supplied when they reached his new platoon, or so he was told. Probably just didn’t trust him not to go nuts and take off before his package delivery slip was signed for on the other side. He wasn’t a prisoner, in theory, but he definitely wasn’t free. That was the army for you. Considering the circumstances, it was the best he could hope for.

The guys driving the convoy had let Sugimoto hitch a ride up from Hakodate on the back of one of the supply wagons, and when he stepped down into the dusty yard at Asahikawa part of him still expected to be greeted with a tribunal. All there was in terms of a welcoming party was a supply officer overseeing the receipt of the goods, who, upon seeing him, said, “Private First Class Sugimoto?”

Sugimoto nodded.

“First Lieutenant Tsurumi is expecting you. You’re to report to the 27th immediately.” The man turned back to his invoices, and Sugimoto spent only a second longer squinting around the depot before he made his way into the complex. All the garrisons looked the same. The air was cooler against his face than he was used to, drier, too. He made his way through the storage sheds and mess halls and past the parade grounds, where a hundred-odd infantrymen were practicing bayonet thrusts under the glare of an unseasonably warm sun. It felt like a place from a dream, familiar yet strange.

It was that way all the way up to the door to the officer’s wing, which he’d never before had reason to enter. He hesitated for a moment and took a breath, but if there was any way out of the situation besides a forward march he hadn’t figured it out, and so Sugimoto made his way through the entrance and down the hall until he reached the 1LT placard on the wall. A man stood guard outside, and after collecting Sugimoto’s name and rank, he knocked on the door. He was beckoned in by a muffled voice. Sugimoto dug his nails into his palm, grit his teeth, and stepped forward to face the man who now held his leash.

First Lieutenant Tsurumi was tall, wiry, wolfish in expression and carefully groomed in appearance. Straight eyebrows overlooked dark and glittering eyes, and his moustache was what could only be described as fashionable. His uniform was exactly the same as Sugimoto's First Lieutenant back with the 1st, but the presence was something else entirely. Tsurumi glanced up from his desk and tilted his head, blinked, slowly, like he didn't have anything better to do, and said, “Private First Class Sugimoto?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sit, please. Make yourself comfortable.” He did as he was bid, and his hand went to his chest to pull his rifle off by the sling-strap before he remembered he still hadn’t been provided with a new gun. When he turned back, he saw that Tsurumi was watching him with full attention, his papers pushed aside. “This day is turning out well indeed. A shipment of new guns, and better yet, a new man to wield them. I trust your voyage was speedy. I know these things sometimes get delayed, especially as the weather starts to turn, but I'd hate to hear your travel was anything less than efficient.”

“Nothing to complain about,” Sugimoto said, shrugging one shoulder as he sat. He'd never sat opposite a superior officer one-on-one like this, and however friendly Tsurumi appeared to be, Sugimoto felt like at any moment Tsurumi was about to reveal there was a test underway that Sugimoto had already failed.

He hardly had time to nod along before Tsurumi breezed into his next sentence: “Private First Class Sugimoto, do you know why you haven't been demoted and kept around for whenever the officers of the 1st needed a fall man?”

Sugimoto’s heartbeat picked up like he was being chased, but he kept his face blank. “I was told another lieutenant had a gap in his unit that I could fill.”

“Well, that much is true. The 7th Division has always been kept overstrength.” Tsurumi clucked his tongue. “But in your case, especially, I found myself rather moved. I don’t blame you for feeling bitter about this whole business. The army has a way of casting one aside like an old sheet of paper. And, in your case, I can empathize.” Sugimoto blinked; Tsurumi smiled and went on: “Nothing sets me off like weak leadership.”

Sugimoto opened his mouth, but before he could try and come up with a response Tsurumi got up, leant out the door to murmur something to the man standing guard outside, and then turned back to Sugimoto.

“Well it's not all bad news, for you. I've just heard from the Tokyo garrison that the 1st is going to receive deployment orders by next week. The 7th exists to defend the home islands, of course, so we'll remain here unless things get very dire. If we're lucky, we'll make it through the war without ever seeing the front at all. There's less glory in it, of course, but I've never been very fond of sea travel.” Sugimoto waited a few seconds before letting out a rough version of the laugh he was pretty sure he was supposed to be giving in response to what was probably a joke. Tsurumi continued to fix him with his benevolent, unblinking stare, like the world’s softest pin about to enter the abdomen of a butterfly.

“I won't bore you with my conversation much longer. I'm sure you'll figure everything out quickly enough, but things work a little differently up here. Hokkaido operates by its own rules, in certain respects. But I won't keep you from settling in any further. It's been a long journey, and I'm sure you're exhausted.” Just as he said it, the door opened and a man came through, different from the one who'd been waiting outside when Sugimoto had come in. Sugimoto wondered how much of their conversation had been audible from outside—with his luck, probably everything.

The new arrival was about half-a-hand shorter and a bit slighter than Sugimoto himself, a couple years older, with three bands on the wrist and a flat sort of coldness around the eyes. The guy nodded at Tsurumi, and then stood at attention with a bored look on his face, not looking at Sugimoto at all, and that, more than anything, set the gnawing irritation that had been stewing inside his gut all day into a blaze of anger. It felt good to have a target, at least. This guy was only one rank above him, anyway. Just a foot soldier like the rest of them.

Tsurumi moved back to his desk and said, “Superior Private Ogata, here, will show you around the garrison. It will mostly be familiar to you, I'm sure, but perhaps he can begin to introduce you to your new comrades?”

Ogata glanced over at Sugimoto for the first time. Sugimoto clenched his jaw involuntarily and held his gaze. “Yes, sir,” he affirmed, with the bare minimum of courtesy.

“Dismissed, both of you.” Ogata nodded and walked out towards the door, leaving Sugimoto to follow in his wake out into the hallway. Ogata had a face Sugimoto instinctively didn’t like, not that he had to see much of it; Ogata didn't spare him so much as a look the whole way out of the officers' wing. He had a good walk, though, Sugimoto would give him that. He had to widen his stride just to keep up.

About a minute went by where Ogata said nothing, until Sugimoto, getting tired of the silence, asked, “Is he always like that?”

Ogata glanced at him before turning his gaze back to the way ahead. “Like what.” His voice was low for such a small man.

“I don't know. Animated. My old lieutenant couldn't do anything without looking like he’d rather be at dinner.”

“That’s interesting. I would’ve expected more from the 1st Division.”

Oh, so it was going to be like that. Sugimoto rolled his eyes, but before he could say anything more they exited the building and came out into the courtyard. It was laid out exactly the same as the one he'd come from, like a country home, with the cherry tree in the yard and the buildings all fanning around it. What gave it away were the residual patches of dirty snow built up around the edges, all ground up with gravel and bearing the rough texture of having been melted down during the day and re-frozen at night for weeks. The buildings couldn’t have been more than five years standing, but the place didn't look like it had ever been nice. Built to last against rough weather, more like.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t see any gear on you, so unless you plan on using judo on the Russians you should get outfitted.”

Sugimoto felt his blood rising again, and he bit back an explanation of how he’d had to hand over his supplies on the other side before he remembered he didn’t owe this guy shit. He was barely a superior.

Ogata apparently assumed that Sugimoto could figure out which buildings were which, because he didn’t play tour guide with much enthusiasm. That was fine by Sugimoto. If he’d had to listen to this guy talk to him like some recruit he probably would have lost it again and really been sent packing this time. As they passed the parade ground, however, Ogata cleared his throat. “The sergeant over there by the range is Tsukishima. He and Lieutenant Tsurumi have been in the same squad since the war with China. The corporal on his left is Tamai.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s fine. Big on dress code, so make sure you cut your nails.”

Sugimoto muttered, “Who doesn’t cut their nails?”

Ogata shrugged. “I don’t know how they do things in the 1st.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

They were about to scale the armoury steps when Sugimoto spotted a figure in an officer’s summer whites coming out of one of the buildings in the distance. “Who’s that?”

Ogata glanced in the direction in which Sugimoto pointed, and an odd look crossed his face, like a cloud passing over the sun. “The Second Lieutenant. Hanazawa.”

“He looks young.”

“He is,” Ogata answered, and then pushed through the doors. Sugimoto glanced back at Hanazawa and then followed Ogata inside.

Ogata was running a hand over the one of the rifles on the racks. “These must be the new shipment that you came up with. I hope they’ve fixed the bolt problems, but I doubt it.”

“What bolt problems?”

“Haven’t you ever cleaned one of these properly?” The expression of low-level condescension that Sugimoto assumed was Ogata’s resting state transformed then into open contempt. “No, of course you haven’t.” Ogata decided him worthy to touch them, at least, because he picked the rifle up off the rack and handed it to Sugimoto stock-first. A quick glance-over confirmed it was one of the fresh manufactures, just out of the crates that had come up with him. There was no separation in the stockwood yet, nor notches in the steel. The thing was elegant, smooth, and deadly, and when he slung it over his chest, the familiar weight against his back was the closest thing he’d come all day to a comfort.

-

Summer slid into being with brush fires and heat waves sending mirages across the parade grounds at mid-day. Hokkaido was drier than Tokyo, and Sugimoto’s cuticles started to crack and peel. Most of his days were taken up by the same army routines as always: drills, inspections, and work-projects, which ranged from helping farmers fix their fences to loading up shipping containers of arms to be sent to the front. All that had been a lot more tolerable when Toraji was there by his side to crack dumb jokes.

The 7th was a real surly bunch, between the creepy twins with the same ugly nose, the huge guy with the Akita accent who looked at Sugimoto like he was dirt on his shoe, and Superior Private Ogata and his weird, dead eyes. They came from all over. There weren’t enough guys from Hokkaido to fill the Hokkaido division, so they pulled the dregs from around the country.

Rifle drilling was, as always, both boring and difficult. That particular morning there was still enough of a chill in the air to make Sugimoto’s fingers clumsy, not that he’d ever been much of a shot. He pushed through his turn at the range by imagining the targets were painted with the faces of the Nikaidous, though he still only hit them where he was supposed to about half of the time.

As he headed back to the group, he saw everyone standing by looking over to the other side of the range. Someone on his left muttered, “Oh, here we go,” with a sour expression, and Sugimoto turned to see Ogata step up to the mark.

He had to have bribed his recruiting officer, because Sugimoto would’ve put money down that Ogata was barely clearing the height requirement of the army physical. The Type 30 made him look even smaller when he was standing still, but the way he moved with it was the kind of confidence that couldn't be faked. No flashy trick reloads or anything like that, just a fluidity in the way he got into position. Ogata did a weird thing with his arm where he braced the gun on the crook of his elbow at an angle that looked uncomfortable to hold, but he held the barrel perfectly steady.

He hit each of the target dummies dead centre in the chest; by the time he'd moved down the line to the 300-meter mark he was being a show-off about it, switching between the chests and heads. Sugimoto’s drill sergeant in Tokyo, the one who'd shown him how to hold a rifle for the first time, couldn't have won a bet against Ogata if he'd trained for ten years just for the contest. It was infuriating. You could see the smugness on his face, even mostly blocked off as it was by the buttstock. When he finished his turn at the mark, no one was talking, but no one was smiling, either.

Ogata shouldered his gun and returned to the drill-line to no fanfare, and eventually the muttered conversation resumed among those waiting to take their next rounds.

Sugimoto remembered one of the few chummy conversations he’d had around the barracks since he’d got here: Ogata had been stalking imperiously around the room, and Mishima had leaned over, murmured to him, a twinkle in his eye, “Oh, the yamaneko’s on the prowl today.”

“What?”

“Haven’t you heard? The child of a wildcat is a wildcat, too.”

Maybe that was why, when Sugimoto’s name was called up for the next round of drills and the guy behind him had to shove him forward with a hand between the shoulderblades, he caught himself staring at Ogata sidelong and had to blink himself back to alertness.

-

Out back behind the barracks kitchen was the best spot to get away from everyone who wanted to talk or engage in all those army pissing contests that are only fun when you're in your first 6-months of enlistment and the whole thing still seems like a really long day at school that hasn't ended yet. He could sit on the step out at the rear, and as long as he didn't beg the cooks for anything they didn't mind him sitting there. The smells were nice, familiar, even if the food was just standard-issue mess dinner. Fresh rice smelled the same everywhere. It didn't matter if you were in cold, shitty Hokkaido with a bunch of guys who were further up their lieutenant’s ass than he’d thought physically possible. As if that would really help any of them when the time came for some men to do the dying and for others to stay behind the lines.

After a while, when it became clear this was going to be his usual spot, one of the cooks started giving Sugimoto onigiri now and then, out of leftovers, mostly, with a severe expression that told him better than words ever could both never to tell anyone about this and not to get too used to the cushy treatment, which could be retracted at any time. So that wasn't so bad. He never managed to get that far with the cooks at the 1st. The rest of these guys must be even worse than they seemed if Sugimoto was coming across as friendly.

Umeko had always made good onigiri, ever since they were kids. He and Toraji used to fight over it, like they did everything. This stuff was fine, good, even, but it wasn’t the same.

He'd while away the time between dinner and lights-out by sitting on the back step there, reading magazines if he’d managed to trade for them, looking at the stars otherwise. It was a lot brighter, out here; he could admit that much. The Tokyo lights could drown out most everything, but Asahikawa was still such an up-and-coming town, and the barracks were far enough outside the main city that you could see even the smaller of the stars, not just the big ones. As the summer slid into fall, meteor showers rained down through the sky. It was more shooting stars than he'd ever known existed.

A comet's tail is what he was looking at, with a few stray grains of rice stuck to his back teeth, when he sensed the approach of someone who walked without a cook's bustle. It was a purposeful but quiet tread. Nothing you ever wanted to coming up from behind you. Sugimoto didn't turn around. He wanted to make the other guy tip his hand first.

He had to wait a couple minutes, but eventually the visitor broke the silence. “So is this where you go to jerk off?” It was Ogata, of course; he could have guessed as much. Always lurking around the corner.

“Not yet, but thanks for the idea.” Sugimoto fished the last bits of rice out from his molars with his little finger. “Did you get sent to come get me, or are you just hard up for conversation?”

Ogata ignored the question and leant against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. “So what did you do?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your transfer. You must’ve done something to get sent out here.” The guy's eyes were too damn weird. Sugimoto wasn't sure whether it was that he didn't blink enough, or if it was the way they were always a little bit lidded, like he was bored or half-asleep, or just how dark they were, like you couldn't make out the pupil from the retina even in the light of midday. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

“What, you want me to believe you haven’t heard? I know word gets around about this kind of shit.”

“Maybe I’m just curious what didn’t make it onto the record.”

“So you can run back and tell Tsurumi? No thanks.”

“Whatever you say, Private First Class Sugimoto.” Ogata studied something on the ground, seemingly indifferent. “Was it over a girl?”

“No. Well—no. Not exactly.”

“So it was about a girl.”

Sugimoto let his head tilt back against the wall behind him and rolled the words around in his mouth a little before he spoke. “Look. My old First Lieutenant had a thing for this delivery girl who’d come by the barracks sometimes to drop things off. She was young, and you could tell she didn’t like it, but what’s she gonna do? And he wouldn’t leave her alone. It pissed me off, so I told him to quit it and got put on latrines, and after a couple rounds of that I got tired of it and hit him hard enough he wouldn’t be thinking about anything else for a little while.”

Ogata slid down the side of the building to squat on the ground just out of Sugimoto’s reach. “That was stupid of you.”

“Never said it wasn’t.” Sugimoto turned and looked Ogata in the eye. “I’d do it again, though.”

He wasn’t sure what kind of a reaction he expected, but Ogata just inclined his head to the side a little and said, “I believe it. What would it take, this time?”

“I don’t know. What does First Lieutenant Tsurumi get up to behind closed doors? He can’t really think the dear-leader act is convincing. Officers are all the same when it gets down to it.”

“And what is that?”

“They like to be in charge of people who can’t tell them ‘no’.” Maybe it was the topic of conversation, or the darkness around them, which made it easier to speak even of the difficult things, but Sugimoto found himself asking before he could stop himself, “So what's the deal with you and the Second Lieutenant?”

“If you're asking, then you think you know, don't you?”

“I guess so. I'd rather hear it from you, though.”

“Why does it matter?”

“I don't know; it’s weird that they'd put you in the same unit. Seems like a chain of command problem waiting to happen.”

“Clearly either no one noticed or no one cared.”

“Did you know each other? Before?”

“I never met him before he got his commission.”

“But you knew about him.”

“I knew he existed. I joined the army when he was still at the Academy.”

“Do you think he's a good commander?”

“He hasn't had to do much in the way of commanding.” Sugimoto found himself chuckling lowly at that before he realized he was doing it. He was annoyed at himself for giving Ogata that much, even, but no way to take it back now, and anyway Ogata was going on; unusually talkative, now, for once. “But he’s the perfect flagbearer in every way.”

Sugimoto squinted through the dusk, then, at the way Ogata’s voice sounded—dark and sour, like vinegar. He couldn’t make anything out from his face. He opened his mouth to ask something along the lines of the fuck does that mean, when you say it like that, but the last sound of the night rung out in the distance—lights-out, all men to the dormitories—and Ogata was back on his feet before Sugimoto got the chance.

“You’d better hurry, Private First Class Sugimoto. I’d hate for us to miss an inspection on your behalf.”

“I would’ve already been back, if you hadn’t kept me here,” he muttered, but Ogata had turned his back on him, and there was nothing to do except try and fast-walk past him to the barracks and hope they wouldn’t be seen coming back from a dark corner together. God knows that wasn’t a rumour he needed to get started, on top of everything else.

Chapter 2

Insects of all kinds hummed and fluttered through the late summer night, and a few hours into guard duty Ogata managed to catch a moth in his fist. This time of year the bugs were drowsy and frantic to mate before the cold started to roll in, so they got careless. Ogata only had to wait a few minutes with his left hand open, his right resting on the leather strap across his chest just in case a threat did pose itself, before a large brown moth landed on the surface of his palm. He crushed it beneath his fingers instinctively, and when he opened his hand back up the creature didn't look so delicate anymore. No longer a papery form built for flight, just a sticky mess on his skin, still weakly twitching.

Not much later, a shadow flickered near the treeline on the edge of his vision, Ogata swung his rifle down off his shoulder, but as soon as he did he made out the moving shape: a hare, which promptly darted back into the darkness. He sighed. Russian invasion would at least make evening watch shifts less dull.

Footsteps came towards him. At first he assumed it was Komiya, who had the post next to his, coming Ogata's way to stretch his legs, but when Ogata glanced over at the figure walking along the inside of the parapet he saw that the man was too tall and broad in the shoulders. His first instinct was to think it was Private First Class Sugimoto, maybe having gotten desperate enough for company to ask Ogata to play cards with him or do something else inane, before Ogata caught sight of the sabre at the man’s waist. As he came nearer, Ogata could make out the second lieutenant’s twists on his sleeves. He turned his gaze back to the woods.

When Yuusaku came within speaking distance, Ogata saluted with all requisite respect but said nothing, waiting for his brother to make the first move, which he did before long, of course. Yuusaku was, in all things, an open book.

“Excuse me.” Yuusaku bit his lip. Always nervous around him—before, it was to impress, and now… “I can see that you’re on watch, but—would you like to take a walk outside the grounds?”

Soldiers were limited to the barracks at night, in most circumstances, but with an officer regulations got so much more pliable. Ogata waited for a few, long seconds, his tongue poised against his back teeth, before he smiled and answered, “Of course, sir.”

Asahikawa was inland, so the patrols the garrison maintained were as much against enterprising bandits as foreign troops washing up on the shore. They still went through the motions, had men on guard throughout the night, but it wasn’t so dire that any lone footsoldier pulled away from his post by one of his superior officers would be much missed. No one blinked an eye as they made their way through the gates and into the night beyond. Yuusaku waited until they were out of earshot from the men at their posts, and then begun, “Elder brother—”

Maybe one day he’d get the message: they weren't family anywhere other than behind closed doors, if that. “I told you, there’s no need to call me that.”

“There’s no one around,” Yuusaku replied, something almost plaintive in his tone. Ogata squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them.

“I just don’t want you to develop the habit. For the sake of your reputation.”

Yuusaku murmured, “I know,” with some resignation, and then cleared his throat and moved on. “Well, what I wanted to speak with you about—what I mean to say is that I must apologize. About what happened, at the…” Would he be able to say it? No, even the word was too much for him. Ogata’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he could make out that Yuusaku nervously licked his lips before he resumed speaking. “I’m sorry, again. I didn’t mean to insult you. I know you were only trying to be—welcoming. It’s just…”

“I understand, sir.” Ogata smiled, again, for Yuusaku’s sake. It was dark, so Yuusaku might not be able to see, but just in case he did. He batted around in his mind the thought of putting his hand on Yuusaku’s forearm for a moment, to show no offense was taken, that they could put the whole thing behind them, but he did not.

“Perhaps on the next day of leave we could—do something else. I didn’t want to make you think I was angry. I know it’s common, that a lot of the men do it, and you had no way of knowing... It’s just that, well, that I was so happy to spend time with you. I still would be. So if you’d still let me take you out someplace, I heard at the Officer’s Club that there’s a new Western-style restaurant in the business quarter that’s worth visiting.”

He had told Tsurumi he would manage to get them what they wanted from Yuusaku, but playing house, together, in public—somewhere in the distance came the mournful cry of an owl. “Don’t you think it’s in your best interest we don’t let ourselves be seen together too often?”

Yuusaku laughed, but it wasn’t his usual carefree one. This was self-deprecating, soft, and sorrowful. As if a man—a boy like him had known suffering. “I think people are more understanding than you might think. After all, if it’s not causing any problems for anyone, what does it matter to them? I think they’d be happy for us. Family is the most important thing, even if it comes along in ways we don’t expect.”

Ogata was vaguely aware that his heartbeat was racing under the pulse-point in his neck. “I don’t think our father would approve of his son wasting the career he’d been given because he couldn’t control his sentimentality. Sir.” He could make out a soft sound, anguished, almost, from deep in Yuusaku’s throat. Ogata was grateful, for a moment, that Yuusaku was tall and their eyes were not level. He didn’t know what he’d do, faced with that innocent face in pain. “Unless there was anything else you’d like to speak with me about, I’m supposed to be on watch. This is a time of war.”

Even as he said it, he felt the need to walk it back. He told Tsurumi he’d bring Yuusaku back around, and he would, it was just that he hadn’t yet figured out the approach, and when Yuusaku insisted on being so infuriating it was hard to think straight—but it was too late now. Yuusaku nodded. “Of course. I won’t keep you any longer. But yes—the First Lieutenant wants you to report in at shift-change.” His voice still sounded stricken, but he didn’t ask Ogata for anything more, and when they turned back to head for the gates Yuusaku walked several paces ahead, as an officer ought to.

The rest of his evening’s shift passed uneventfully, but Ogata’s heartbeat didn’t return to normal even after Yuusaku retreated to the officers’ wing. It only picked up further as, later, Ogata made his way there himself. There was something about the well-treaded path to Tsurumi’s lair that made one feel as though they were committing an infraction, especially when his summons came after dark.

Tsurumi ushered him inside with typical poised distraction and let the door click shut behind Ogata’s back. He had to suppress the smile that itched to play across his mouth. So it would be that sort of a conversation.

Tsurumi poured them both tea while Ogata sat at attention on the tatami. “Are you familiar with Port Arthur?” His voice was warm enough to fill a person up on that, and little else.

“It's the only port in the Russian Far East that doesn't freeze in winter, isn't it?”

“Correct. We fought there in the war with China, as well. It was chaos. I was just a second lieutenant then. My first commission! And we had to pick up the pieces of that mess. It’s never fun to clean up after someone else's party.” Tsurumi took another sip of tea. “Well, that’s where most of the fighting is going on now. It’s amusing to think I might come back to it, like an old friend.”

Ogata had been annoyed, at the time, to have missed that war by a few years. He'd put his name on the volunteer rolls as soon as he turned seventeen, and it wasn't long before he was called up to the docket. The 1st, the Tokyo division, pulled most of the Kanto recruits, but when his deployment notice came through during basic training it was listed as 7th: Asahikawa, Hokkaido. It was trading in one parochial town for another, colder one, but he'd gone, all the same. It was his father's division. He'd thought, for that reason, it was the one he'd never be assigned to in a hundred years.

When Ogata had met his commanding officer for the first time, he’d felt as though Tsurumi's eyes were boring right through him. There hadn't been anyone like that back where Ogata had come from, anyone so capable of holding his attention. Six years later, Tsurumi had begun to make a habit of calling Ogata into his office for conferences Ogata was sure weren’t held according to protocol and talking to him in that resonant baritone about anything under the sun. He had called him Hyakunosuke, in private, a few times. Once, in passing, he brushed Ogata's cheek with his knuckles, in the mockery of a strike or a caress.

How did the saying go—if the soldiers are brothers-in-arms, the junior officers are doting mothers and the senior officers kindly fathers? Ogata saw through him. He always had.

Across from him, Tsurumi went on. “If we were winning the way we'd like to be, none of us would leave Hokkaido ‘til the war was over. If we're coming in to reinforce them, which I suspect we will be soon, it means they can't finish it on their own.”

“Right.”

They’d been at it for years, running drills in the wilderness and talking a lot of bullshit around the mess hall about what it’d be like if the Russians washed up on shore tomorrow. Overseas deployment never seemed like much more than a fantasy—for most of them, at any rate. Ogata had always been intrigued by the possibilities offered by field promotions.

“This war isn't going to last forever. It will be quick, whether we win or lose. We've about an even chance at winning, at best. There are reservists, but they're reservists, and there's little else to fall back on. We made our strike, and surprised them, but since then, things have been…” A smile toyed around his mouth. “Let's just say it's a gift that the Russians are not known for their organization. Or their adroitness at catching spies.” Tsurumi swished his cup of tea just so much that the liquid came up to the rim but didn’t spill over. Ogata’s palms were sweating against the top of his thighs, and he felt the weight of Tsurumi’s gaze on him like a physical thing.

He was taken aback by what Tsurumi said next. “What is your impression of Private First Class Sugimoto?”

Ogata blinked. “He seems like a dangerous enough character.”

“That goes without saying, no? Considering the circumstances.” Tsurumi’s fingertip circled around the outer rim of his cup. “The question would be, is it dangerous in a way that works for us?”

“Works for us how?”

“There’s always a need for men of resolve, if it can be channeled properly. Do you get the sense the men like him?”

“He's not particularly friendly, and I don't think he cares to try.”

“I've seen him talking to you.”

“I'm one of the ones he feels like he can be rude to, and he likes that.”

Tsurumi smiled, at that. “That's almost charming.”

Ogata hesitated for a moment before asking, bluntly, “Why did you bring him up here, sir? He seems like a liability.”

“The First Lieutenant he attacked is a first-class idiot, and I'd hate to see a man left to the tender mercies of the General Staff for doing what anyone who’s ever met him has dreamt of.”

“But to send for him, all the way from Tokyo…”

“I don't know if there is anything more to it. You'll forgive an old man his whims, won't you?” One of Tsurumi's eyebrows was crooked, as if inviting Ogata to call him on his bluff, but he knew well enough by now that, with Tsurumi, direct inquiry got one nowhere.

“He's brutal with a bayonet,” Ogata said, without being entirely sure why.

“Is he, now?” Tsurumi drained the last of his tea, and the cords of his throat rippled against the collar of his jacket. “You know, the things are a vice. I don't know how many times I've said we shouldn't produce so many of them. They breed bad habits. Every farm boy who ever daydreamed about being a samurai wants to live by the blade, but that’s not the world we live in, anymore. The army of the future won’t see the whites of its opponent's eyes unless it wishes to.” Tsurumi looked over Ogata, then, his glance heavy, appraising. “If you ever figure out how to teach what you do, be sure to tell me, won't you?”

Oh, but he thought he was slick. “Of course, sir.”

“That will be all, Ogata. But, as much as you can, will you keep an eye on Sugimoto for me? I’m anxious to know how he adjusts.”

“And the Second Lieutenant?”

“What about him?” A smile twisted at the corner of Tsurumi's mouth, below his whiskers. “I hate to ask too much of you, but he is your brother, is he not?”

Ogata was about to make for the door when Tsurumi reached out a hand and laid it on Ogata’s shoulder. He rubbed across Ogata’s collarbone with his thumb twice, and then the touch was gone as soon as it had come. Ogata immediately missed the weight of it. He wished, not for the first time, that Tsurumi were as free with his more dubious affections as rumour made him out to be. He gave out just enough for his men to develop a taste for it, and no more.

-

The summer came short and hard in the midst of an unseasonably cold year. The months slid by full of pollen and training and bad news from the front which trickled down from the officers to the soldiers slowly but inexorably. Tsurumi didn’t call for him again after the time they shared tea, but Ogata knew him well enough to read into the set of his brows and how closely Tsukishima hovered in his wake, so when deployment was announced at morning muster and a collective intake of breath went through the rows and columns, Ogata just blinked.

After that, things really started to move. They were leaving the base behind with a skeleton crew of reservists to man things until their return. He had lived at the Asahikawa barracks for the extent of his adult life. It wasn’t much to miss, just utilitarian structures to shelter them from the elements, but there was going to be more of that, where they were headed, and less comfortable quarters besides.

Much like the place he’d left behind, a farmhouse in a corner of Ibaraki no one could place on a map, he would not miss the barracks after leaving it. There was only the road ahead and the iron hull that would carry them to the other side, where the real business of war would begin. None of this play-acting, soon enough. No more firing cannons at locusts.

The officers turned a blind eye to whatever went on right before sailing out, of course. A certain measure of leniency was unavoidable. All that restless energy had to evacuate somewhere, and better the brothel than the barracks themselves; as long as no one got too drunk to ship out the next morning, it didn't matter much. They had a long sailing ahead of them.

Not everyone left. Tanigaki stayed behind, brooding in his bunk, all ludicrous expanses of him hunched over and scowling. Ogata didn’t know if he’d ever seen him do anything that could be described as enjoyment. More interestingly, Sugimoto, too, was nowhere to be seen when the throng filtered out towards town with the bare minimum of solemnity in their gaits. Ogata glanced around the courtyard, and then made his way to the back of the kitchens.

His step was light. Anticipation settled throughout him, replacing his marrow with something lighter than air.

Sure enough, his quarry was exactly where he expected him. Sugimoto was laying on his back on the grass behind the kitchens, looking up at the skies, once more, though they were covered tonight and the air was crisper than it had been yet that year. Nothing to see in the sky, and little light to speak of. Ogata could only make out his outline, but the man was hard to mistake for anyone else. There was a coiled promise in his limbs, even when he was at rest.

This time, Ogata didn’t have to wait for Sugimoto to acknowledge him. “You're not going with them?”

“The last time ended quite embarrassingly. I'm sure you can imagine.” Tsurumi's gentle look of disapproval, Yuusaku's awkward squirming, the acrid tang of failure on the tongue—he looked askance at Sugimoto through lowered eyelids. “I'd rather not repeat it.”

Sugimoto sat up on his elbows, glanced at him, clearly curious, but only nodded.

Ogata sat, legs askew, on the ground a stone’s throw away from Sugimoto. Not looking directly at him, but close enough to see his face. “I'd go along if you went, though. If you're anything close to as red-blooded as you seem, I'm sure you can get up to your own share of mischief.”

A faint pinkish blush crept up from beneath Sugimoto's collar, and he coughed. “I'm not really that kind of guy.”

“To tell you the truth, I'm not really the type, either. There are other things I'd rather do.”

Sugimoto glanced at him, then, nakedly, brows creased. “You…”

Ogata let his head tilt to the side. “What is it, Sugimoto? Do you want me to spell it out for you?”

“No, I understand.”

“Do you?”

Sugimoto’s tongue darted out to wet his bottom lip. Ogata made no effort to hide the way his eyes followed it, and Sugimoto turned away from him, just a little, his posture shifting inwards, shy. He didn’t speak for about a minute, and Ogata was toying with whether it was worth it to push his luck further when Sugimoto muttered, “I don’t want to get on that ship.”

“Are you deserting, then? This would be a good time. They wouldn’t start looking for you for a little while.”

Sugimoto looked at him sidelong, then, all playfulness gone. “Watch your mouth.”

“I don’t think you could make it very far on foot. We can do a practice run, if you like. I’ll get my rifle, and you can scale the fence and start running. I promise I won’t shoot you anywhere you’ll miss.”

“Do you want me to kick your ass? Is that why you came to find me? Because I’ll do it. I don’t think you’re much of a match for me.”

“I don’t know, Sugimoto. You couldn’t have hit that Lieutenant very hard if you’re still a free man.”

He was looking over at Sugimoto when it happened, but even so, Sugimoto was moving almost before Ogata’s eyes could register it was happening. Sugimoto rolled, hit him in the gut with the back of a fist, just hard enough to wind him, and then cast a leg over Ogata, seized his wrists in his hands.

The sudden feeling of a warm body in the cold night air was as surprising a sensation as the pain. The sky spun above his head. Sugimoto sat astride him, and his weight pressed Ogata into the dirt by the hips. Ogata had to crane his neck up to prevent the back of his head from being ground into the earth. He wriggled, just to test Sugimoto's hold, but it didn't get him much of anywhere. Sugimoto wasn't a large man, about middling height, but his frame was heavy with muscle and the way he moved within his skin left no confusion: this was a man who knew the limits of his form, had tested it, and wasn't afraid to gamble on his own strength. Sugimoto leaned down, close enough that Ogata could see the whites of his eyes in the darkness, and said, “I know what you’re doing.”

Ogata’s heartbeat sped up within his chest. Maybe he’d underestimated Sugimoto, after all; perhaps the evening was about to get interesting. “And what’s that?”

“I'm not stupid. You don't want to get shipped out and you're trying to get me to send you home on medical.”

Ogata hacked out a laugh, then, though the pressure of Sugimoto on him left him starved for air. “You really are stupid, aren't you?”

“Oh, yeah?”

He strained against Sugimoto’s arm across his windpipe, just to get closer to his face, and narrowed his eyes. “You think I've been in the army for six years just so I can duck out the second things start to get exciting?”

Sugimoto’s lip curled. “Put a guy like you in real danger and you wouldn't know what to do with yourself.”

“Is that so, Sugimoto?” Ogata pushed against him, then—he managed to jerk one of his thumbs down into a pressure point in Sugimoto's wrist and, in the mere seconds of loosened grip it bought him, managed to reach out for Sugimoto's upper arm and push him over by the shoulder. They tumbled over each other, and for a moment it seemed as though Sugimoto would get him back in the same position he'd been in before, but Ogata got Sugimoto in the stomach with an elbow and then got his hands around Sugimoto’s throat. He had to press all his weight against Sugimoto's abdomen to keep that coiled strength down. Sugimoto's eyes flashed golden and feral in the near-dark. They both gasped for breath. Sugimoto narrowed his eyes, arched his hips beneath him, and then laughed.

“Or maybe you just wanted to piss me off enough that'd we do this.” Sugimoto swallowed, deliberately. His panting exhales were visible in the air, and the flexing of his tendons under Ogata's hands was exquisite. Ogata tightened his grasp just a little, and Sugimoto tipped his chin back. It might have looked to an observer like a gesture of surrender, but in reality it was something Ogata wasn't quite sure how to interpret. Defiance, perhaps, but less hot-blooded than he'd have expected from everything Sugimoto had shown of himself up to now. His eyes were full of anger, yes, but cold as blue flame. Unwavering. Asking what Ogata was willing to risk to keep this going. “Is this what gets you off, then? No wonder you didn't tag along, I bet you have to pay through the nose to get the girls to do this. Not to mention the lack of—”

Ogata backhanded Sugimoto across the face, lazily, and Sugimoto snarled. Before he could keep talking, Ogata murmured, “I'm not the only one with open-minded tastes, here,” and rocked down against Sugimoto's hips.

Sugimoto stiffened. It was the first time Ogata thought he’d been able to catch the man off guard. And over this, of all the predictable things. Sugimoto’s brows furrowed. “This your idea of a restful night?” He would grant Sugimoto this; he managed to keep an impressively self-righteous look on his face even caught with his cock hard.

“That depends what comes next.”

He thought Sugimoto was finally letting go of the pretense and grinding up against him, and for a moment he could have been, but then, before Ogata had a chance to understand what was happening, he was whirling over and crashing down onto his back. His head smacked against the ground and something heavy pressed into his chest; after a moment he realized it was a knee. When he blinked and took stock, he was pretty sure Sugimoto had summoned enough core strength to toss Ogata him off himself and onto the ground in one fluid movement with just his hips. Before, things had been starting to get fun, but this—his body felt like it would vibrate to the touch. His breath came ragged. Regretfully, Sugimoto didn't get back down to the same level, just stood up and planted his boot-heel against Ogata's sternum.

Ogata blinked away the blurriness in his vision and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. Snot and saliva and a hint of blood came along with it; not too much, just enough to testify to an evening’s recreation. “I hope you have a good explanation for that bruise, tomorrow.”

Sugimoto did smile, then, and dug his heel in a little harder. His shoulders and chest blotted out the sky above him. Ogata could still make out the way his chest rose and fell with exertion. “Oh, I’ll just tell them I fought a wildcat in the alley.” Sugimoto did withdraw his boot, then, stepping quickly out of arm’s reach. The look on his face was grim, thrillingly so. Tsurumi’s instincts, as usual, had been good.

Ogata considered getting back to his feet and giving chase, once more, but the set of Sugimoto’s jaw made him suspect all he’d get was a broken nose, so he just sat up on his haunches and spat onto the ground next to him.

“We ship out at first light.”

“I know.”

“Don’t be late,” he rasped, but Sugimoto had already turned around. He left his back vulnerable, a broader target than Ogata could hope for, but nothing in his stance showed either fear or any indication of having heard him.

Chapter 3

It had become increasingly obvious that the kid wasn’t going to make it through the night.

Darkness had already fallen around them, bringing with it an end to the day’s battles, as much as they ever ended. Sugimoto had carried him back behind their lines, slung over his shoulder; he was some kid from Osaka he was pretty sure was named Sousuke. They’d been next to each other when it came time to run a charge against the Russian fortifications, and following the familiar crack of a Mosin-Nagant the guy crumpled to the ground with all the ceremony of a sack falling off a cart. Sugimoto side-stepped his body to avoid being crushed under his weight and tensed his grip on his stock just in time to meet the Russian pushing toward him blade for blade. The man was huge, a brute, but Sugimoto grit his back teeth together and hooked the hilt-edge of his own bayonet around the rifle’s barrel. His body moved of its own accord in a twist he'd done hundreds of times by now, and the man's gun was tossed aside. Sugimoto dug his back heel into the ground, swung the bayonet back around, and ripped through layers of canvas and wool to get at the soft parts beneath.

The man fell forward, and in his hurry not to be buried beneath six feet of dead Russian Sugimoto stepped into the path of a bullet flying from the lines up ahead. It caught him in the join of his neck and shoulder, tearing through skin and muscle, and he heard a scream of pain ring out, his own, even as he had no awareness of opening his mouth.

It was then he noticed the kid who’d fallen beside him was stirring, still, and had enough fight left in him to push himself up onto his hands and knees. They’d been at it for a month or two, now, long enough for Sugimoto to realize you only survived if, on the battlefield, you thought about yourself and you only. But that kid had only been shot once, same as Sugimoto had, and something possessed him to pick him up by the underarms and haul him back to safety.

Well, it was a good thing Sugimoto hadn’t taken any more hits on the way back, because his stupid random act of kindness wasn’t going to mean much. The kid was getting paler by the minute.

Someone, a medic, had set him up on some kind of makeshift pallet, and at some point an audience had gathered. Maybe this kid was everyone’s best friend or something; Sugimoto hadn’t gotten any fonder of wasting time with this crew since they’d landed, so he didn’t really know. Around his bed they crowded, a handful of them—as if tons of them hadn’t fallen already, to much less fanfare—and there didn’t seem to be anything they could do but stand around and watch him go.

Sugimoto, for his part, felt like he had to see the thing through. It was his fault the kid was bleeding out here instead of in no man’s land, so he hung to the side and watched the rest of them watch the sorry scene, aware all the while of the bullet wound throbbing in his neck.

Second Lieutenant Hanazawa knelt by the kid’s side and held one of his hands between his own. For all that Sugimoto had never seen Hanazawa draw blood in a fight, he wasn’t queasy at the sight of it. The wound had hit the boy in the gut, and blood dribbled out onto his uniform, slowed by the cold but still leaking steadily, but Hanazawa leaned over him with none of the fear you sometimes saw in weak men, as if a wound were a contagious disease. The rest of them—the rest of them stood around like birds waiting for a worm to surface, Sugimoto among them. Maybe they were keeping the kid a little less cold. Blocking the harshest of the wind. Or maybe they were just looking for confirmation they themselves were better off, no matter how cold they were or how bitter their own wounds ached. Reassurance drawn from the misfortunes of another didn’t hurt anyone, not really.

Softly, in an undertone, Hanazawa murmured to the boy. Most of it was unintelligible, but the boy was blinking at an unnatural pace and clinging to his every word with an expression of rapt attention beyond agony. His body leaned off the ground as much as it was still able to, like getting as close as he could to Hanazawa would heal him, somehow. Sugimoto could see every exhale of breath that came out of his mouth as it froze in the air. Weak, and getting weaker. Hanazawa coughed, and said, louder, this time, “They say that all of the soldiers who die in battle become kami whom the Emperor will worship at Yasukuni. You’ll have to greet him for us when you see him there.”

At some point, Ogata had appeared next to Sugimoto’s shoulder, and at Hanazawa’s words a muscle in Ogata's jaw twitched.

He didn’t hold on for much longer, after that. Hanazawa helped a few of the other privates carry the body away to the place where the bodies went. The rest of them dispersed back to their dinners and carefully-doled-out alcohol rations. There wasn’t much left to look forward to besides cards and a long night of injured moans and murmured conversation, followed by a restless morning, and with it, frost over the puddles of day-old rain.

A medic had come over and patched him up at some point, but his neck still throbbed, so Sugimoto packed a spare bandage with chunks of snow. Ogata watched him with a dark gleam in his eye. “How many times is that going to happen before it sticks?”

“Didn't realize you were so concerned about me.” Sugimoto felt a shock go through his back teeth when the cold cloth met his raw skin, but he didn't flinch. Not in front of Ogata, if he could help it.

“I’m not. Just curious.”

The corner of Sugimoto’s mouth lifted in a crooked smile without any mirth in it. “Didn’t you hear? I’m immortal.”

“Did you come up with that yourself?”

“Nah. It was one of the guys in the field hospital. Said I’d been in and out more times than he came in for his shifts.” He twisted his neck from side to side, testing how stiff his shoulders were going to be in the morning. The cold press was taking the edge off, but it was going to be a bitch to wake up to tomorrow no matter what. “It is a stupid nickname, though.”

“At least you know it.” Ogata shouldered his gun, gave Sugimoto’s neck one more long look, and then turned away, calling back over his shoulder, “No one’s immortal, Sugimoto. Just lucky. And no one’s lucky forever.”

-

Sugimoto wandered the ramparts, holding the cold press against his neck and ignoring the feeling of the the snow melting through the bandage onto his fingers, until a passing officer told him in no uncertain terms he’d better report back to his regiment or get drawn up for tardiness. The temporary barracks they’d set up in the trench barely kept out the freezing winds. Once he got there, he pulled the top of his bedroll over his face, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to drown out the sound of the Nikaidous murmuring to each other when they thought people couldn’t hear.

His whole body hurt. His toes hadn’t been dry in weeks. His nose felt like it would fall off his face if he had to be cold much longer. He pushed his hands under his own shirt and held his palms flat against his stomach to try and warm up his fingers. He wanted something hot to eat, with good broth, the kind of thing that filled you up from the inside. He lit up the house because no one else would dare to get close to it.

It needed to be done. It was his duty; he was the only one left of them. The Sugimoto house was old, and it went up easier than a bonfire in summer. The flames crackled and roared, warming his cheeks, and Sugimoto couldn't remember the last time he’d felt so warm. The fire soared up past the rafters, into a blue sky, smoke clouds swirling, and at first he thought it was the sound of the blaze, but the noise kept rising, high, piercing—the blood froze in his veins as he realized it was the sound of screams. His brother and sister were shrieking. That was the sound of his mother’s wails, and under it all his father's groans of pain and terror—he’d checked the bodies as best he could, he was so certain they were dead—Sugimoto leapt through the open doorway and gritted his teeth, pushed past a falling beam that shot sparks that landed in his clothes and burned holes right through his skin everywhere they touched. He did this to them, and now he had to get them out, but he couldn't see anything because the smoke was clogging his vision and flooding his lungs. All he could do was follow the sounds of their agony, but it was a maze, not the childhood home he thought he knew at all, and he couldn't even find the door he’d come through. He was going to die here, they were all going to die here because he killed them—

“Wake up,” growled a familiar voice in his ear, just an undertone, words intended only for him, and Sugimoto's eyes flew open. He was cold from his own sweat, and Ogata's face was very near his; he squinted at him, pulled one of Sugimoto's eyelids down, and then leaned back, took his hand away from Sugimoto’s shoulder. Sugimoto wasn't awake enough to stop himself from reaching out for the hand, pulling it back down where it came from, before he realized what he was doing and dropped it like a hot coal. Even in the blackness of night, he could make out Ogata's eyes, wide and unblinking. He felt, rather than saw, Ogata's breath crystallize in the cold air, and it brushed against Sugimoto's cheek. He swallowed.

“Tsukishima's going to be on your ass if you keep that up,” Ogata muttered, and then turned back to his own bedroll. Sugimoto opened his mouth, as if to explain himself, then closed it.

He tried one more time to swallow around the lump in his throat, pulled his coat around himself, and then burrowed further into himself. The surface of his pack, which he was using as a makeshift pillow, was covered in something between dew and cold sweat. Everything around them was dark. If only to keep his dream at bay, his mind wouldn’t let go of the feeling of Ogata's breath against his face until he fell back into a fitful sleep. He needed the morning to come around so he could go out and fight again, was the last thing in his mind before he fell off. It was impossible trying to sleep when he wasn’t half-dead.

-

They had shipped out for the front in September, just as the autumn chill begun to fall upon Asahikawa. They moved out for the coast in convoys with their boots shining and uniforms in good order and packed themselves tightly into the belly of the ship like cartridges in a magazine. There were people on the shore to wave them off, but no one any of them knew. They had no attachment to any of the people there; they were confined to the barracks in their off-time, for the most part, and so the women who waved them off from the shore were nothing more than a reminder of the sort of basic comfort they wouldn't see for a while.

Port Arthur was the worst place on earth. Sweating humid one day, freezing cold another, with the gulls crying and the crows cawing and the goddamn Russian Maxim guns rattling his back teeth even from far away. The hillside was clawed with trenches dug and abandoned, some moved on from, some fallen back from, and it was strewn with the blown-out bits of things, people, half-buried under rubble. There wasn’t a breath to be taken without smoke and ash.

The brass had cooled on the overhead charges, for once, and so Sugimoto was tending to some of his equipment under a merciless yet not warm midday sun when Ogata came up to him. “Pass me a stripper clip.”

“What?”

“You’re not using it, are you?”

Sugimoto couldn’t think of anything to say to that, because it was true, and he dug around in an ammo pouch for one that he tossed, not especially gently, in the direction of Ogata’s face. Ogata was able to catch it, annoyingly, and he reloaded without having to look at what he was doing at all, which pissed Sugimoto off even more. Ogata turned away from him, stepped up onto the boards, aimed over the ridge, and cracked a shot. Sugimoto didn’t need to ask if he’d hit anyone. You could read it on his smug face.

“We’ve been going about this so stupidly,” Ogata muttered, and Sugimoto glanced back at him.

“How else would you?”

“Don't let anyone through basic training unless they can shoot well, and only send the bare minimum over the hill. They can't hit you if you don't come out. Just wait until they get bored, and then they'll come on their own.”

“What, so everyone should just be like you?”

“I’m going to make it through this war alive. I can’t speak for anyone else.”

“You sound pretty confident about that.”

"You're just insulted because you’re a poor shot," Ogata said, looking him up and down like a schoolmaster, and Sugimoto clenched his fist.

"Yeah, and I've kicked your ass before, haven't I? Didn't matter much then, did it?" With no little effort, he turned back to his boot, where he was trying to rub oil into one of the seams with a fingernail. He wasn’t sure if it actually helped keep out the dampness, but it couldn’t hurt. “Why do you care, anyway? You like feeling better than the rest of us.”

“Bad tactics are bad tactics. If we get pushed back any further and lose the siege, I'd rather not entrust my life to Russian mercy.”

Sugimoto nodded, reluctantly. When it became obvious Ogata wasn’t going to get anything else out of him, he moved on down the line, no doubt looking for another vantage point from which to look out for Russian heads to surface from the other side, like worms after the rain.

Toraji never wanted to talk about tactics. It felt like an eternity since Sugimoto last talked to someone who actually knew how to shoot the shit.

Sugimoto was preparing to get himself back to the makeshift headquarters when he noticed another familiar face walking towards him: the Second Lieutenant. Hanazawa smiled. “Sugimoto! I’m on my way back to camp, would you walk with me?”

Requests from officers couldn’t actually be turned down, but at least this one wasn’t too objectionable, on the surface at least. Sugimoto made his way back alongside Hanazawa, who had a brisk, athletic way of moving to him. Sugimoto was willing to bet he’d grown up practicing kendo, just like he had himself, though Hanazawa probably also knew how to use a real sword, too, before he ever got to the officer’s academy.

Hanazawa didn’t waste time beating around the bush. “Did you know him?”

It took Sugimoto a second to register who Hanazawa was talking about, and then— “No.”

“And you still stopped for him?”

“Look. I was on my way back to the trench anyway. I practically tripped over him.”

Close up, it was obvious he had to be about Sugimoto’s own age. He didn’t look like Ogata at all, except for the eyes, though Hanazawa’s were warm instead of cold. “I just wanted to let you know your bravery hasn’t gone unnoticed. Not many would do what you did out there.”

“Can’t blame them. Everyone’s just trying to make it through with their own skins.”

“Of course. But what separates us from animals, if not being able to care for each other?” Hanazawa stopped and clapped Sugimoto on the shoulder, just for a second, all manly commendation. “You’re a good man, Sugimoto. We can all see that.”

No animals ever killed each other like this, he thought, but didn’t say. Hanazawa had lead them over the hill more times than he could count. He held that kid’s hand as he died. If he were just some armchair officer, Sugimoto would really not be able to stand it, but he wasn’t a coward. Just some guy who hadn’t realized that heroes didn’t exist outside of fairy tales.

Well, wait long enough and he’d figure it out, though Sugimoto didn’t want to think about what it’d take. Things were already bad enough; it felt like a bad omen to think about them getting any worse.

They parted ways when they reached their destination. Tsukishima was giving a report to Tsurumi over by the command tent. It was a fair distance away, so he couldn’t be sure, but Sugimoto thought Tsurumi’s eyes met his own, for a moment, before the lieutenant’s gaze moved on.

-

He woke up in the night from another weird dream, this time of being chased by wolves through the snow, to an empty bedroll beside him. It shouldn't have unnerved him as immediately as it did, but Ogata was only tolerable as long as he stayed predictable.

He let his head fall back and watched the room around him come into clarity as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Ogata didn’t return until the beginnings of dawn light seeping in through the cracks had travelled across to where Sugimoto was sleeping. By the time Ogata entered and got back into bed, you could almost make out the features of his face.

It ate away at him all day. He found himself staring at Ogata during morning muster, until Ogata glanced over and caught him at it and Sugimoto had to pretend he’d been squinting at something behind him. What the hell was he doing in the middle of the night? Did he think, because his brother was the Second Lieutenant, that he could get away with whatever he wanted? No, that didn’t pan out. Sugimoto hardly saw them together, and whenever Ogata talked about his brother he seemed… nasty. More than usual. If he was trying to suck up for special treatment, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

That afternoon they were tasked with fortifying the embankments, two to a team, hauling around boards and hammers. He ended up with Ogata, again, because luck was never on his side. Normally it wouldn’t have been so bad, because Ogata at least didn’t talk much, which wasn't something he could say for everyone in the division. The sun crept across the sky through a heavy film of clouds. As they worked, they migrated further down the trench out into freshly dug areas Sugimoto hadn’t entered before, where the channel began to bend away from the tide. Down here, even Noma and Okada’s hammering from a little ways away sounded like it came to them through the inside of a seashell. Louder were the gulls, the roar of waves, and the distant thuds of artillery firing somewhere on the other side of the bay.

Sugimoto hauled the boards and Ogata did the nailing. It was mindless work, the kind of labour a body could do without much thought, just like working in the fields back home. Maybe he was so bored his brain wasn’t working straight, and that’s why Sugimoto started the whole thing. He passed Ogata another piece of wood and tried to sound disinterested: “Where were you the other night?”

Ogata glanced at him sidelong but kept at his task, speaking around the nail he held between his teeth. “What are you talking about?”

“You were gone for, what, half an hour? Just before dawn. And don’t play dumb, we both know I’m not lying.”

“Are you accusing me of being a Russian spy? I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, Sugimoto, but I thought you trusted me a little more than that.”

Sugimoto fumbled with the next board he handed him. Ogata was so goddamn annoying. “I don’t know what you were doing and I don’t really care. You’re just not as clever as you think you are.”

Ogata lined the board up in its place and then turned around to face Sugimoto. “I would say the same, but I don’t know if even you think you’re clever.”

It would be great to just hit Ogata again and get out of his system, but something like that was loud enough to draw someone over for sure even if they were a ways off. He set the rest of the boards down on the ground next to him and crowded Ogata against the side of the embankment. He planted a hand on the wall over Ogata’s shoulder. The rough grain of the fresh wood sent splinters into his palm, but Sugimoto just ground his back teeth and leaned in closer, trying in vain to scour Ogata’s eyes for evidence of what was going on inside his head. As usual, there was nothing going on there he liked. “How much longer are you going to keep doing this before you get yourself in trouble you can’t shoot your way out of?”

Ogata looked entirely unfazed. He tilted his head to the side enough for it to brush Sugimoto’s wrist. “I don’t know, Sugimoto. How much longer are you going to keep this up? You know what Noma and Okada are going to think if they come around the corner?”

Sugimoto licked his bottom lip, on reflex. His mouth felt dry. “Gonna have to help me out, here. I'm stupid, you have to spell it out.”

Ogata placed a hand on Sugimoto's sternum. Stationary, not inquisitive, yet, but something he couldn't ignore. Sugimoto knew he really ought to push it away, and yet—“I’m saying we can stand here talking and get caught, or you can let me suck you off and then go back to pretending you don't know what you've been doing all this time.”

Sugimoto tried to play it cool, but he was pretty sure his eyebrows shot up his head like they'd come unattached from his face. “You want to—”

Ogata blinked at him, and wasn’t he talented, huh, how many guys could make you want to deck them so hard with just their eyelids? “Don't tell me you don't know what that is, Sugimoto. I don't care if you're that kind of guy or not, you've made it that far—haven't you?”

“Of course I have,” Sugimoto lied, and pushed blithely forth into the next thing to say. “We're going to get in so much shit.”

“I'd hate to get in trouble for something I haven't done.” Ogata's hand was moving south, now, slipping under Sugimoto's jacket buttons to his shirt and then his stomach. The frigid fingers on his belly made Sugimoto gasp under his breath, though he tried to make sure it was quiet. You’d think he’d have gotten used to the cold by now. “This kind of thing happens all the time. And they can't do anything about it if we don't get caught.”

“Well, if you've made up your mind,” Sugimoto replied, and it came out rougher than he'd thought. His own voice sounded sandpapered.

A row of birds—it was impossible to tell crow from gull at this distance—rested on the barricades not far from where the two of them stood. A creeping feeling slid down Sugimoto's spine at the thought any living thing would witness what was about to happen. As if they’d care.

There was no one human around. It couldn't be actually, literally true, but it felt true, just for that moment. Ogata was looking at him with his blank stare. There was something about that stare that made his skin crawl, like Ogata had already looked through him and picked up everything he needed to know, like he’d measured Sugimoto up and found him wanting in something. Sugimoto was seized by a surge of remembrance: he'd watched Ogata shoot a Russian in the head across the field from 400 yards without leaving the trench. No one else Sugimoto knew could make that kind of shot. Ogata had just slung his rifle down by the swing strap, lined up, and fired, and the look in his eye had been exactly the same as it was now.

They stood close enough together he could make out the pores on Ogata's skin. This close, Sugimoto had to tip his head down to look Ogata in the eye, but it didn’t make him feel like the one with the upper hand. Ogata stood up on his tiptoes and pressed against him. Sugimoto could feel his smile against his skin before Ogata licked a stripe up the side of his neck and begun to unfasten the clasps of his trousers with quick fingers.

“Be quiet, now,” Ogata rumbled into his ear, and then he was crouching down to waist-height, pulling Sugimoto out of his underclothes and gnawing away at the inside corner of his hip. Sugimoto's eyes flew open. It was the weirdest thing he'd ever seen, Ogata kneeling in front of him with something that could only be described as hunger on his face and Sugimoto's cock in his hand, and his body was reacting even if his mind was still screaming to get out of there while he still could and pretend none of this ever happened. No, as far as some parts of him were concerned, he liked it, way too much.

It started out hot and wet and just got hotter and wetter. Maybe part of that was how cold it was outside, it was hard to tell. Ogata’s mouth was slippery, his lips swollen, it was so fucked up, Sugimoto hadn’t realized he could even look like that—and what the hell was Sugimoto even doing, here, because he sure wasn’t doing anything to stop it. It was all fucked up, everything about it. It made no sense and he wanted more of it, more of everything, from the way his blood ran under his skin like it was going to burst to the rightness of stubble scratching across his inner thigh.

Ogata, damn him, didn’t have the decency to look away, which would let Sugimoto pretend they weren’t exactly who they were doing exactly what they were; instead, he maintained eye contact, hardly blinking, his eyes watering a little at the corners.

“Shit,” Sugimoto whispered, and then bit down on his own fist. This was not supposed to happen but he saw it coming anyway, and it didn’t feel bad, felt way too good, actually, he just had no idea how anything was supposed to go back to normal after this. He’d be lining up for morning inspections and one of the officers, Sergeant Tsukishima or, goddamnit, Second Lieutenant Hanazawa with his guileless look and pursed lips would stop in front of Sugimoto like they could smell it on him and then everyone would know what they’d done, that he’d screwed around, been fraternizing, and not just with anyone but Ogata, who was somewhere between a discipline case and an officers’ pet: the worst of both worlds. That’s how to prove that transferring him into the unit instead of letting himself get demoted and thrown into the meat grinder with the rest of the 1st was a good idea, alright.

He wished he could say that it wasn’t what he’d wanted, that he hadn’t been goading Ogata into it, but Ogata was right. The two of them had been circlng around each other like this since they met. The back of his mind filed away, well, now you know he follows through on his threats, but most of him was too busy trying not to come his brains out immediately and make it even more obvious that he’d been lying when he said he’d done this before.

Ogata was mean about it, too, show-offy, doing things he didn’t need to, and he wouldn’t stop looking at him, and Sugimoto grabbed at his shoulder, tried to push him off, whispering under his breath, “Stop it, I’m going to—I can’t—” and Ogata just laughed at him like it was funny without taking his mouth off him, so it sent vibrations up Sugimoto’s spine, enough to make his toes curl.

It was all over pretty quickly after that. They had places to be; they were going to be missed soon, and Sugimoto watched Ogata spit come out on the ground next to him with way more flourish than he needed to. He wracked his brain for what to do next, but the thoughts were sliding around inside his head. Ogata was jerking himself with his trousers barely undone, like he couldn’t take the time to push them off properly, and Sugimoto was torn between offering to help and not wanting to get made fun of for not knowing how these things were supposed to go. Besides, the world around him still felt like it was spinning. It was enough of an effort to stay standing up without swaying.

He wasn’t sure how much longer it took before Ogata stood up, too, looking mostly like he hadn’t just sucked somebody off in the dirt and then got off to it. Ogata stuck out his hand, and Sugimoto just stared at it. There was no way he wanted Sugimoto to hold it, he could figure out that much. Ogata blinked at him like he thought Sugimoto was an idiot, but what was new, and said, “We’ve got the rest of those to get through, and I’m hungry. Come on.”

“Oh, right,” Sugimoto said, and shook his head once before bending down to pick up the rest of the boards so they could get back to work. It was easy to pretend nothing had happened as long as he didn’t look Ogata in the eye.

They made their slow way down the embankment until the trench ran up against a dead end. The sun was midday-high, and as they made their way back to the mess tent they passed Noma and Okada, who were still hammering away. Sugimoto got a cordial nod from Okada, and neither of them spared he nor Ogata anything he’d call a suspicious look as they walked past, but he still felt an uneasy shiver run down his spine. If Ogata was concerned about it, he didn’t show it, but Sugimoto was realizing more strongly than ever not to trust what Ogata did or did not show on his face.

Chapter 4

On the evening of November 3rd, to celebrate the emperor’s birthday, the whole army took a break from fighting. For all the slapdash decorating and frantic revelry, it was hard not to notice, with the 7th all amassed together in one place, how much thinner their numbers had gotten. There was music—Tsurumi apologized in front of the unit for not being able to play for them, for want of a piano—and the cooks had offered everyone a rare liquor allowance to go along with dinner. Ogata had declined; he always felt Tsurumi’s perpetually sober presence hovering over his shoulder at times like these. The night was going to get colder, too, and it wasn’t worth the risk.

Sugimoto, on the other hand, had clearly taken up the offered sake. His face was flushed, his cap had slid off his head to sit at a jauntier angle than regulation demanded, and he had taken his rations and sat next to Ogata without any of the usual show of how much he just had to, there hadn’t been any other choice. It was amusing, like some booze was all it took for him to admit he thought they were friends, or something. He was chattier than usual, too, talking right over the bizarre skit some of the guys from one of the other platoons were putting on atop the makeshift stage that had been put up in the middle of the mess area. “The bacon’s not bad, but I'm so sick of the rest of it.” Sugimoto stabbed a piece of salt-fish without much enthusiasm. “I think I'm getting sores in my mouth just from eating the same thing every day. I’m having dreams about soba.” He glanced over at Ogata. “If you could eat whatever you wanted right now, what would it be?”

Ogata’s hand stopped in the middle of sifting through the last of his own food. “Anglerfish hotpot,” he replied, after a moment. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Sugimoto cocked his head, still chewing on a lump of tinned daikon despite his complaints. “Oh. I don’t know if I’ve ever had it. Do they eat it a lot in Ibaraki?”

Ogata felt a flash of annoyance. He didn't make a habit of talking about his upbringing, and he didn't like the idea of Sugimoto thinking he knew him. “Oh, all the time. Too much, actually.” Ogata swallowed what was left in his mouth, then scooped up the last of the rice in his mess tin. “But if you go too long without it, you start to miss it again.”

“Huh.” He’d said too much. Sugimoto was looking at him with consideration in his gaze. Thankfully, before Sugimoto could ask him any more annoying questions another supply officer came around distributing bottles of Kirin, and Sugimoto took one.

“Should you be drinking with a hole in your chest?”

“If the bullet didn’t get me, you think beer is going to?” Sugimoto paused with the bottle halfway to his mouth and a gleam in the back of his eyes. “You wanna see it?”

“Is it as deep as the last one?”

Sugimoto smiled, and every carnivorous point of his teeth became visible. “Deeper.” Sugimoto set down his beer on the crate they were using as a table. He stripped out of his jacket, down to his shirtsleeves, which he began to unbutton as well, from the belly-button upwards—Ogata couldn't tear his eyes away from the shifting of tendons under the skin. Even considering what they’d been getting up to, he didn’t get many opportunities to see Sugimoto without clothes on. There was an impressive amount of muscle packed onto what was not an especially large frame: the footprint of years of judo and kendo and fighting like a prize hound. He didn't bother trying to look contrite when Sugimoto glanced up at him and caught his gaze, just let his eyes track across Sugimoto's chest once more, brazenly.

“Which one is it?”

Sugimoto was looking at Ogata with his mouth parted, his cheeks red and his brows furrowed, but he gestured between his pectorals with fingers still stiff and bandaged over the knuckles. “Here.”

It was a bad one. The hole was covered with gauze, but Ogata could tell from the mottled bruising around the area just how hard Sugimoto’s body was fighting to patch itself back together. It should’ve, by all logic, gone straight through and fractured one of his lungs, but from the look of things the bullet had just stopped partway into his flesh.

Ogata leaned back. “I think the last one was deeper.”

The dark circles under his eyes crinkled, and something crooked but close to a smile twisted at the corner of Sugimoto’s mouth.

The performances had finally ended a few minutes earlier, but a hush only now settled over the room. Ogata looked at the stage to see Yuusaku standing up in front of the men. He glanced over at Sugimoto and muttered, “Put your shirt back on.”

This happened every year on the occasion. The officers all took their turn making a show out of apologizing for their failings. Yuusaku was the most junior officer in the division, so he took his place first.

Next to him, Sugimoto buttoned his uniform jacket back up and grumbled invectives under his breath. On the other side of the room, Yuusaku looked unusually grave, and as his gaze darted around the room, making eye contact with everyone watching and listening, Ogata looked away before he could reach him. He didn’t need those earnest eyes staring him down plaintively in the middle of what was just another farce not much different from the nonsense that had come before it.

Nothing Yuusaku had to apologize for was even worth the effort. He had been late to distribute some mail from home to those who got that kind of thing. He had been short with several men about the state of their rifles, or so he claimed; whatever he’d said to them, Ogata would bet he hadn’t been short enough. All of it so inconsequential in the face of a war they were by no means winning and orders from on high that were insane.

As Yuusaku continued to make his apologies, Ogata let his gaze drift around the room. The faces of the rest of the soldiers he could see were drawn from lack of sleep, but they all gave Yuusaku their full attention. Fallen for the sweet face and so-called noble bloodline like chumps. All but one. Next to him, Sugimoto was watching the whole thing with his brows drawn. Whatever amiability the booze had brought him was gone, now. He looked like he was a hair away from storming out of the room and ending the war with his bare hands, all on his own. Back to his usual self.

-

The following day, half the platoon was hung over, which wouldn’t have been so much of a problem if they weren’t immediately to resume their assault on the fortification looming between their lines and the city. Ogata was at his usual position, peering over the edge of the embankment, rifle in hand, when Tsurumi made his way over to him. Ogata didn’t need to look over to know who it was. He could recognize that tread just from the sound of hobnails on wood.

“How are we faring out there today? I think your eyes are better than mine.”

“Badly.” He’d told Tsurumi he had to stop sending for him after hours, because if Sugimoto were able to figure out something was going on it must be pretty obvious. Apparently Tsurumi took this to mean he should interrupt Ogata while he was on lookout. “Direct assault at close range is getting us nowhere. We’ve been here for less than half the time of any of the other units and our casualties are already just as bad. We’re being wasted on this.”

“I couldn’t agree more, Ogata. You’ve always had a good head for tactics. Unfortunately, each of us has his master to serve. I am not the one drawing up the battle plans, and it’s on all of us if I don’t follow suit. I wouldn’t bring you all down with me.” Tsurumi took his hands out of his mittens to rub them together for a moment before putting them back in. “Would you believe Lieutenant Colonel Yodogawa doesn’t know how to read topographic maps? Quite a weakness for the man commanding a siege campaign, wouldn’t you say?”

Ogata glanced at him sidelong before looking back out over the plain. “How is he coming up with the orders, then?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” To onlookers, this must be an entirely normal conversation between a platoon commander and one of his senior privates. Nothing unusual, unless the wind carried their words along with it. “Speaking of orders, I saw your father recently.”

“Oh?” The hair on the back of his neck stood up, though it could’ve been the icy draught coming in from the bay. He looked down at his hands for a moment and cycled the bolt hard enough to send the empty shell flying.

“He didn’t stay on the front lines long, of course. That would be risky for a Lieutenant General. In any case, he seems in good health.”

What did Tsurumi want him to say to that? And how much longer will we let him keep his good health, sir? Tsurumi would never just come out and say the thing he was after. He’d just spin a bunch of half-truths and make Ogata draw the conclusions himself. Thankfully, Tsurumi didn’t wait for a response before he moved on. Just testing him, then. Watching for a reaction. Seeing if the old, reliable wounds still bled. “Do you remember what I told you about a while back about the prisoner in Abashiri?”

Ogata blinked. “The one who stole the Ainu gold?”

“Yes, I thought you would. How much do you remember?”

“He’s been tattooing other convicts with the key to the gold’s location, but the tattoos are in code. The guards can’t make sense of it.”

Tsurumi nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that business recently. If one man could do all that without leaving his single-cell, the fact these are the orders we’re being given by the supposed best and brightest the General Staff has to offer… it makes one wonder how things could go, were circumstances different.”

Something flickered on the horizon; Ogata squinted down the irons and fired at the shape in the distance, which fell with the tell-tale slump of a man. When he lowered the barrel, Tsurumi was looking at him with naked appreciation. Before Ogata could savour the feeling, however, Tsurumi added, “We may have underestimated Yuusaku. The men all seem taken with him.”

“So you’re saying we should leave him alive?”

Tsurumi’s eyes cast across the waste ahead of them, darting over the corpses and abandoned fortifications like a vulture deciding where to land. “It’s really too bad we’re limited to having officers bear the flag. Yuusaku isn’t the only man we have who’s capable of leading the men into battle. He’s not even the only one whom bullets don’t seem to keep down. But such is the way of the world, isn’t it, Ogata?”

“What, Sugimoto?”

“You don’t think he has it in him?”

Well, Sugimoto wasn’t a virgin anymore, but Tsurumi didn’t need to know that. “I don’t think he could take an oath to the emperor with a straight face.”

“There are other kinds of oaths, and other causes. The emperor is just an idea. That’s why we needed him for this modern age. He’s an idea that can be shaped to one’s needs, whatever they might be.”

If Tsurumi wanted to take Sugimoto under his wing, he could do the legwork himself. “I suppose.” Ogata lined up his next shot and fired at something near the horizon—400 metres off, according to the ladder—but he heard the resulting clang of metal on metal and knew he’d missed. He ought to be more careful, or else he’d give away his position. Tsurumi was distracting.

It flashed through his mind in an instant: Tsurumi standing close to Sugimoto, just like this, and whispering into his ear. Sugimoto wouldn’t go for it, at least not at first, but Tsurumi had his ways. The thought filled him with an abstract sort of anger he didn’t feel so much as notice and then push aside.

“You should probably move on, sir. Unless there’s anything else you needed to discuss.”

“No, Ogata, I don’t think there’s anything. Unless you’ve got something new to report.”

Something in his voice—Ogata looked at Tsurumi out of the corner of his eye and their gazes met. Tsurumi’s eyes were dark and glittering. He knew, then. Or he suspected. But what else had he expected? He’d told Ogata to keep an eye on Sugimoto. It wasn’t like Tsurumi had any room to judge. It was his method, after all.

-

Ogata never found out whether Yodogawa learned to read topographic maps or if someone else’s intervention ought to get the credit, but it wasn’t long before word came down from the brass that instead of any more haphazard rushes into the abyss, the siege objective had shifted to the seizure of 203 Meter Hill.

It was two hills, really, connected by a saddle-shaped ridge. From its peak you could see right into the city and any eleven-inch guns could hit the harbour. You didn’t have to be a sniper to see the advantage of high ground, but they’d spent months and more losses than they could afford squabbling over a handful of yards at a time, here and there.

Ogata drew his cloak around himself tighter and scanned the field. The noise of artillery was loud enough to drown out almost anything else: the cries and groans of soldiers, their own or the others, all flattened into a dull roar. Bayonets affixed, the battalions were charging as far as the eye could see. Ogata had been ordered to go over the edge but to remain out of close range, unlike the rest of them. Tsurumi had enough sense not to waste him in the direct assaults, though Ogata had wondered whether he was kept in the trench more often than not because of his aim or because of his father. Not out of any of Hanazawa’s own concern, of course, but because Tsurumi liked to keep as many pieces as possible on the board.

Crows whirled overhead. Yuusaku, flag in hand, stood as black and tall against the curdled-milk sky as the silhouette of a tree atop a hill. Next to Yuusaku was Sugimoto, unmistakable, like a whirlwind. He fought like a creature, firing less than he just bludgeoned anyone who came close to him. Ogata wouldn’t be surprised if half the time he just forgot the gun was loaded. He was limping. Ogata wasn't sure what to make of the fact he could recognize that from such a distance. A Russian surged up from Sugimoto's rear, bayonet at the ready: Ogata squinted down the irons and shot the man’s head. Not because Sugimoto needed the help, but in an effort to make him notice how close he’d come. Sugimoto turned his head just enough to see the man go down, and then stepped over the bodies he himself had taken down seconds earlier. Bullets flew from Mosin-Nagants, but today, not one touched him, not that it had made much of a difference any of the times they had. It made his trigger finger itch; sometimes Ogata couldn’t help feeling like Sugimoto was sent here as a test for him. Like Tsurumi’s newfound appreciation for Yuusaku, it felt like a dare.

Yuusaku himself was now too far away to see, but the banner he held fluttered high and proud above the crash of bodies, though the real sun in the sky was covered in ash and had been for days. The emperor himself had bestowed each flag to its unit. Whatever the damage they took, they remained, only to be replaced upon being lost. Yuusaku’s hands had touched the emperor’s, indirectly. The emperor hadn’t come out to the front, had he, so how godly could he be—but Yuusaku held himself with such conviction you could almost believe he had been touched by something bigger than himself, some force passed down and unbroken and as old as the world. You could almost believe it.

Bullets didn’t seem to touch him. At least not yet. This is what Tsurumi didn’t see: Sugimoto wasn’t charmed like that. They hit him. He just didn’t go down.

It continued. Another charge, and then another, and another, like the sea throwing itself upon the shore to be broken and then return once more.

There were enough makeshift embankments he didn’t need to expose himself too often, but it was still far from an ideal position, because shooting over their own men to get at the Russians was a pain in the ass and hardly any of the vantage points he had to choose from were high enough for his liking. Ogata had killed ten Russians since the morning began, at the most modest estimate; a handful of those were headshots, beautiful, clean and near-instantaneous. The enemy lines had finally fallen back behind the trenches, and the battlefield was almost—not quite—silent, though his eardrums were more than a little blown.

He’d tucked himself behind a pile of rubble as the sun sank and the day whiled itself to a close. A crevice between a few of the rocks was just wide enough to fit the barrel through and peer down the irons. It was serving him fairly well; he’d have to remember it for the future. Dusk fell and vision degraded, but from his hiding place he could still see partway up the saddle of 203. He was waiting for one more Russian to make his way around into firing range before he’d creep back to his own trench when he spotted a familiar figure in the corner of his vision, hobbling towards the overhang behind which Ogata crouched. Ogata leaned back from the sights. He could have been said to be unrecognizable from the injuries, but Ogata would have known him anywhere. It was the way he moved, with a ranginess to him that suggested strength, and his eyes: wild, rabid.

Ogata pulled his rifle free of the nook and turned around in time for Sugimoto to slump, still on his feet, but barely, against the rock wall next to him. Sugimoto's face was covered in sweat and mud, with fresh blood from the gash across his nose and cheek streaming down his face and dripping off his chin.

“You should clean that.”

Sugimoto shrugged a shoulder, grimacing.

They were overdue to fall back behind the lines, but there was no real hurry. Men got waylaid all the time. He was helping a fellow soldier in peril, after all. This part of the battlefield was near-deserted. If Sugimoto hadn’t found a safe place to rest, here, with him, who knew what would have happened to him. So-called-immortality aside, night was on its way, and Sugimoto looked dazed from the head wound.

Ogata reached out a sooty hand and ran his thumb across Sugimoto's cheek and nose, just under the wound. Sugimoto's eyes were still cloudy, but he maintained Ogata's gaze and barely flinched. When Ogata retrieved his hand to lick the blood off his thumb, all Sugimoto did was shake his head.

Ogata encircled Sugimoto's wrist with his fingers and raised it closer to his own face. Sugimoto narrowed his eyes and watched him warily, but didn't move his hand away. It was covered in blood, too, and Ogata turned it, slowly, so he could examine it front and back, and then looked up to meet Sugimoto's gaze. “Is this yours?”

Sugimoto shook his head. “Mostly? No.”

Ogata nodded, but didn't let go of his wrist. Maxim guns fired away close enough to be hideously, teeth-rattlingly loud, but the embankment provided enough cover neither of them needed to worry for the immediate future. He tugged Sugimoto’s hand a little closer still, experimentally. Sugimoto didn't break eye contact or pull his hand away, even when Ogata brought Sugimoto’s fingers up to his mouth.

He licked Sugimoto's trigger finger, just once, to see what he'd do. Sugimoto's brows twisted, but he didn't say anything, even when Ogata took the rest of the finger into his mouth, sucked it somewhere halfway to clean. The texture of Sugimoto's skin was as rough-hewn and pleasant as ever, and the taste of drying blood was thick and metallic over his tongue. Sugimoto’s other hand was lying limp by his side, and when Ogata reached out for that one Sugimoto didn’t pull away either, so where he stood on all this was pretty clear. He licked the blood off the other hand, too, all the while with Sugimoto’s eyes on him, wide and a little shocked but looking at Ogata like there was nowhere else he’d rather be. When Ogata finished, he let go of Sugimoto's wrist and said, “You should go to medical. They'll admit you, everyone knows who you are. And that one on your face looks pretty bad.”

“You gonna lick that clean, too?” The words sounded low and harsh and not like much of a joke, even if it was meant to be one.

“Maybe if you ask nicely.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass,” Sugimoto replied, but his tongue darted out to lick the corner of his mouth, anyway, so Ogata didn’t pay too much attention to his words. Sugimoto was the kind of guy whose mouth would say one thing when his body said another.

They had places to be, however, and as they made their way back to the lines, darting from cover to cover in case any enterprising Russian scouts were still roaming around after dusk, Sugimoto couldn’t seem to keep to a straight line. He stumbled over his own feet a couple of times before Ogata turned to him and slung Sugimoto’s arm over his shoulders.

“What—”

“You’re going to get us both shot if you keep making noise like that.”

“Let go of me, I’m fine,” Sugimoto said, but by the limp way he leaned his weight on Ogata it was clear he was in worse condition than he’d admit. Concussed, probably. It was surprising it had taken this long for him to start showing signs of the beatings he’d gotten used to taking. The scars didn’t count; he didn’t seem to pay attention to them unless they were pointed out.

They made it back behind safe lines eventually, though practically carrying Sugimoto meant Ogata’s progress was slow at best. The steam baths were still being banked, though most of the others who had made it back had already bathed. They stripped as they did near every morning and night, huddling around the huge clay jars propped up in the earth. Sugimoto managed to get his filthy uniform off on his own, so Ogata was spared having to undress him like an invalid. Sugimoto was running his hands over his face, up and down, grinding the heels of his palm over the new gashes; he could have been washing them out, but the way he was doing it looked painful. It was the way someone rubbed their face to wake up on a groggy morning.

It was too dark to see much, but as Ogata washed himself off he glanced up and down Sugimoto’s frame. When he was small, Ogata had this daydream about ducks. He used to think about all the ducks he shot and imagine what it’d be like to one day find a duck that had another duck inside of it, right where its stomach should be: exactly the same as the first duck, just smaller. The idea was equal parts revolting and comforting. Looking over Sugimoto, he felt a similar curiosity; he wanted to pry him apart, to look inside him and find out what he was hiding. In the near-dark, Sugimoto’s scars looked dark against his skin, like new wounds, and even the old ones looked like they could have still been bleeding.

Chapter 5

They’d put up embankments of snow to protect them from the wind, but you couldn't sleep against them or your heart would stop in the night. Instead, they all huddled together like rats in the cramped space in the middle of the trench.

Some childish part of Sugimoto wanted someone to stroke his forehead. It wasn’t long enough for it anymore, since he had it regulation short, but he wanted to feel fingers running through his hair. They could murmur to him in a voice almost too quiet to hear. The words themselves didn't matter, just that they were being said. Sugimoto couldn't imagine Ogata ever in a thousand years doing something like that, but he was the one asleep next to him, the one who’d last had his hands on him, so Sugimoto had to imagine it for a second before he cast the thought aside. It showed just how bone-tired he was, to have come up with something so stupid.

He shifted over onto his side and had to suppress a start. Ogata was awake, too, and watching him, eyes half-lidded but alert. Sugimoto felt a shiver run down his spine, the source of which he wasn't sure of. Ogata reached across the space between them and pressed a thumb, through Sugimoto’s clothes, against the bruise forming on Sugimoto's clavicle. Even though the mark was covered up by Sugimoto’s shirt, Ogata managed to find the exact spot where it had been left. He pushed at it hard enough for Sugimoto to remember, flesh-memory style, how he got it. Sugimoto collected so many flesh wounds these days that he didn't notice the bruises, but this was different. Ogata kneaded away at it with his thumb like he was trying to darken the imprint. There were dozens of other men sleeping around them, or pretending to sleep; no one seemed to be paying them any mind. They weren’t even doing anything against regs, but Sugimoto had to struggle not to glance around to make sure they weren't being watched.

Eventually he brushed away Ogata’s hand and turned back over onto his side to look at the trench wall. They were still close enough together he could feel the line of Ogata’s body against his back, which at least provided some kind of warmth. Eventually the snuffling sound of the rest of the sleepers around him lulled Sugimoto into something approaching rest.

-

In the morning none of it could’ve ever happened, for all the acknowledgement either of them paid it. They all rose with the bugle call, brushed their teeth, changed into clean uniforms, and prepared to die. Sugimoto wanted to shake all of them who went to their deaths thinking about sacrifice, to tell them they couldn’t afford to think about anything larger than themselves. That none of this meant anything, no matter what the officers told them. The least they should be doing is going to their deaths feeling alright with it.

As for the battle itself, the details bled together. The days weren’t really separate from each other. They followed the same pattern, and all his memories of it were kind of—flattened. It was always cold. Guys died in front of his face every day. There wasn't much use recounting the specifics. It was as if everything that he saw engraved itself on the back of his skull forever, and at the same time as if it all went into a box in the back of his mind from which it would never emerge.

The trench rushes were the same every day, just like the blurred faces of the Russians atop the hill. It was like a children's game: stack the blocks up, knock them down, and stack them back up again. The orders went days without changing. Just days upon days of running over the mound and trying not to trip over all the bodies still out there from days before, hearing the whizzing of the heavier Russian bullets through the air and the thudding as their paths were blocked by flesh. He grit his back teeth together, put each of his feet in front of the other, and when it came time to face one of the bastards himself, his thrusts never faltered.

The 1st Division was on the other end of the line, and Sugimoto kept an eye out for Toraji's familiar form, but he never saw it. He hoped that meant he was either being smart and keeping himself a small target or he'd been shipped back home on some kind of medical discharge that wouldn't keep him from working once he'd had time to heal. Sugimoto wondered if he'd seen Toraji and not recognized him, but that seemed impossible. Toraji would have the same kind of dumb, sweet face as ever, he was sure. Sugimoto would be the one who'd changed. If either of them wasn't going to be recognized, it was him.

They bathed as often as they could, but Sugimoto couldn't remember the last time he'd felt clean. It’d been that way for a long time, though. He'd carried something fatal inside him all the way from Tokyo, the same thing that killed the rest of his family, incubating in his chest. Try as it might, it just couldn't kill him. It was why he had to run from Umeko, couldn't hold her safe to his chest forever, as he'd like to, because it was him she needed to be protected from. He couldn't see it, but he knew it was there, the virus dormant but alive. He'd hoped, when he'd dropped the match and lit the house from the ground up, it would all be burnt away, but he was starting to think he could have walked through the fire himself and come out with nothing to show for it but his worst scars yet.

During their off-times, those of them who had made it back slinked around the billets in the trench, not making eye contact, like they’d all seen something no one wanted to have to testify to and so they’d agreed not to acknowledge each other. Most everyone, at least. Ogata was the same as ever: unpleasant, but reliably so.

The hidden blessing of the cold was that it made it hard to smell the dead. Not much compensation, but it was something. They couldn’t make it out onto the battlefield just to collect them, not with the Russian guns rattling away at all hours, and even the ones close enough to pick up were too many to burn. They’d deal with it when it came time, but for now, they just tried not to think about it.

It was hard to imagine he had ever been anywhere else. This place felt like all there was. A stream in summer, flowers, sweet-smelling things and nights that were truly quiet; it seemed like the daydream of a stupid kid who wouldn’t grow up.

-

He and Ogata—

This is how Sugimoto got the bruise: three days into the battle for the hill, he woke in the night to an empty bedroll next to him and Ogata nowhere to be seen. He lay in place for a while, staring up at the night sky above, but Ogata didn’t come creeping back. No one else around him looked to be awake. Sugimoto sat up straight, the hairs on his arms standing up, waited a minute or two, and then put his boots on and crept between the rest of the sleepers out into the night.

As he picked his way through the main channel of the trench, he tried to talk himself down, to convince himself that Ogata had just gotten up to piss in the night. There was no reason why Sugimoto should know where he was all the time. He was still drowsy with poor sleep. His feet felt like they moved of their own will. If he was stopped by an officer, he didn’t have any story to tell to explain himself; but luck was on his side, tonight, because he didn’t pass any guards on his way out to the sparsely-guarded rear area of the trenches. He was starting to wake up enough to realize just how stupid of an idea it was to wander around just in hopes he’d run into Ogata so Sugimoto could demand to know—what? Why he was missing? Why he thought he could get away with whatever he wanted?—when Sugimoto blinked and made out two figures up ahead, weaving their way through the dugouts: one tall, in an officer's greatcoat, and the other slight, his outline muddled by a rain cloak but recognizable still.

Sugimoto hesitated for a moment before continuing forward. Some part of his brain that was still thinking straight told him to head back, that Hanazawa was an officer and whatever he wanted with Ogata wasn’t worth the effort of finding out. He pushed on.

Sound travelled far on a clear night like this. He heard Hanazawa murmur, “What was that important conversation you wanted to have with me? It will be dawn soon. We’ll be in a lot of trouble if the platoon commander finds us.”

Ogata replied, but his voice was harder to make out, so Sugimoto stepped closer, but he must have stepped wrong, because a rock went flying from his boot to skip along the rubble. He cursed under his breath. Hanazawa turned, and recognition ignited across his face. Sugimoto didn’t even have time to pretend he was doing anything else besides following them before Hanazawa called out, “—Sugimoto? What are you doing?”

The game was up now. He stepped towards them, cleared his throat, and decided he’d dug himself in this deep already and he might as well commit. “Sorry, sir. Sergeant Tsukishima noticed Ogata was gone and sent me to look for him. Didn’t realize he was with you.” Ogata’s eyes narrowed.

As soon as he said it, Sugimoto was sure he’d be called on his bluff, as poorly thought-out as it was, but instead of pressing for details shock spread across Hanazawa’s face, though he already looked blanched enough. “Of course. Thank you, Sugimoto.” The fact he’d bought it—

Weirder and weirder. They made their way back to the billets, a silent trio, and the hair didn’t come down from where it stood up on the back of Sugimoto’s neck. He tried to imagine what Hanazawa would look like if he was angry, but it was a hard picture to come up with. If anything, Hanazawa was acting like Sugimoto had caught him out in bad behaviour. When they reached the makeshift officers’ barracks, Sugimoto expected Hanazawa to drag them in front of Tsurumi, but he just ordered them in an urgent undertone to report back to Tsukishima without delay, and excused himself.

Sugimoto watched the door to the tent shut behind him. They were alone, the two of them. He jerked his head to the side and Ogata followed him back out into the trench, out of earshot, in case Hanazawa were still on the other side of the thin canvas wall. As soon as they were far enough away, Sugimoto muttered, “I lied about Tsukishima.”

“That’s very obvious.”

Sugimoto stopped in his tracks and looked over at Ogata, who kept walking towards the dugouts from which they’d come. This was all a mistake, every time he and Ogata ended up alone together, but he couldn’t think of any moment out of the many where he could have headed it off at the pass. Sugimoto began to fast-walk enough to catch up to him, and hissed, “What were you doing out there?”

“The Second Lieutenant needed to consult my opinion on something important. Too important for the likes of you to know about, so don’t ask.”

“That's not what he made it sound like. He made it sound like your idea. And he was worried about getting caught, too.”

Ogata turned his head and looked Sugimoto full in the face. “What do you think it sounded like, then, Sugimoto the Immortal?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“It's what everyone calls you now. I thought you liked it.” Ogata looked closer to truly angry than Sugimoto had ever seen him. Most of the time he gave off a sort of unfocused malice. This—this had a target, and Sugimoto was oddly relieved to feel it directed at himself. So you do feel something, huh.

“Well, you always say it like... hey, stop changing the subject.” Even his own voice lacked vitriol. He sounded tired. His face ached from the scars that were only now starting to form. They were still scabbed over, and it hurt to speak.

“You changed it yourself.” There was a tightness to Ogata's neck and jaw whenever Hanazawa was around, and it hadn’t vanished yet. Ogata's face didn't give away much—did it ever?—but there was a nasty light in the back of his eyes.

Sugimoto still didn’t quite feel awake. Everything was a little blurry, and he couldn’t help thinking about what had happened the last time they were alone like this. The last few times. The memory of that night he'd gotten his face slashed, and what had happened when Ogata saw his wound, flooded through his mind, and he had to try and blink the flush away. From the way Ogata was regarding him, he wasn't sure he'd been successful. Something dark and keen unwound in the pit of his gut like a snake sighting prey. “Is he really your brother?”

“What do you think?”

“You don’t really look alike. Doesn't seem like you like him much, either.”

“Would you, if you were me?”

“Shit, I don't know.” And, because it was the middle of the night, the stars were covered, and there was no one around to hear him but Ogata, who seemed like a bottomless well you could throw secrets into without hearing them hit the water, he said, “My brothers are dead.”

Ogata's eyebrows arched, just a little. “Really.”

“I burned them. And my sister, and my parents. I burned down the whole house.”

Something close to a smile spread across Ogata's face. “You're quite a guy, Sugimoto.”

They were already risking way too much sneaking around like this; they were going to get in shit as soon as someone noticed they were missing. Might as well go for broke.

Ogata was watching him way too closely, like he knew exactly what Sugimoto wanted but would make him ask for it. Well, two could play at that game. Sugimoto didn’t want what Ogata would give him, anyhow—he wanted—

Sugimoto pushed down the rest of his common sense and laid the flat of his hand over Ogata’s mouth before leaning down to press his own lips to Ogata’s neck. He felt the quick, hot press of tongue against his palm, there and then gone, and for some reason Sugimoto thought it was actually a reflexive action of surprise, not one of those things Ogata did just to be unpleasant. Maybe it was the late hour making him charitable.

There was a rash on Ogata’s neck in the same spot as Sugimoto had one, where their damp shirt-collars rubbed up against skin day in and day out. He kept mouthing down past the stubble growing under Ogata’s jaw, the kind only found in the true middle of the night. When he unbuttoned Ogata’s collar and followed the path of the bead of sweat that rolled down the side of Ogata’s neck to his collarbone, he reached surprisingly soft skin. Weird, to think of any part of Ogata as soft. Sugimoto ran his tongue over the pale skin at the hollow of his clavicle and gnawed on Ogata’s collarbone, which got him a hiss and fingers clawing at Sugimoto’s own shirt-buttons, but he let it be, for now, and went back to Ogata’s neck. Might as well admit it: he was kissing him. Only fools tried to lie to themselves. It felt good, even as Ogata’s hands pushed up under Sugimoto’s shirt and his nails dug into his stomach, leaving raw tracks behind them. It was obvious he was trying to goad Sugimoto into something harsher. Sugimoto couldn’t give it to him, not now.

He made his way down Ogata’s chest. Each rib had been brought up close to the skin from victuals and hard marching. His skin was nearly scarless, besides old ones long since faded, the kind anyone who grew up working outside would bear. Nothing like what Sugimoto had collected. Ogata rarely left the trench. Didn’t need to. Sugimoto wasn’t born with that kind of eye, or patience, and their skins kept the score.

He knelt at Ogata’s feet, cautious, knowing it was probably written across his face that he’d never done this before, never even really thought about it until—recently. It was hard to get away from everything, the whole unit living in each other’s pockets as they were, so they hadn’t gotten up to much, but it was enough to figure out patterns. Sugimoto glanced up to see Ogata’s face was flushed and his brows were drawn in the middle, as if he wasn’t quite sure what was going on either, though if Sugimoto had learned anything since all this had started it was that Ogata would get on his knees at very little provocation. It was like the filthiness of it got him off as much as anything else. Like he could degrade himself faster and more thoroughly than anyone else could try. In all that time, Sugimoto had never reciprocated at this—it’d never seemed possible, Ogata tended to take what he wanted from him and then move on—but he needed to do something that wasn’t for his own survival. Taking care of someone, the only way he could think of, right now: he needed it so bad he thought he might be sick. Chasing some proof his body was capable of something other than weathering pain, or causing it.

Ogata’s hands ran across Sugimoto’s shoulders to grasp his neck, and for a second Sugimoto almost ducked away, thinking he was going to try choking him again, like back in Asahikawa, when Ogata had first started picking scraps of a different kind—but no, the grip stayed loose. Instead of cutting off his air, Ogata dug his thumb over the bullet hole in the side of Sugimoto’s neck, the wound mostly faded but still red and angry, and Sugimoto rushed to press his face against Ogata’s hip to hide the flash of pain. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t felt already a hundred times over, but here, when they were already on the edge of something Sugimoto didn’t know how to put a name to, letting Ogata have that—letting him see Sugimoto feeling something involuntary at his hands—felt like something Sugimoto couldn’t afford.

Be that as it may, Sugimoto was here, now, and he had a task at hand. He unbuttoned the trouser front, reached in, took a moment to reckon with the fact that he liked the feeling of Ogata’s cock in his hand, of all the fucking things—

He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, and then leaned in. The shape of it in his mouth was odd, not bad, just more—present than he'd expected. Spreading his lips hurt where the scar tissue was still forming from the slash down his face, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. He tried to work his mouth over him, to mimic the motions of what Ogata did when he went down on him, but Ogata was always so quick about it, not like he was afraid of getting caught but like he had to prove how efficient he could be. There was no way Sugimoto could do that, and he didn't really want to, anyway, so he gave up on trying to take it down very far, instead just licking around the underside, trying to map his way. Figure out his bearings.

He glanced up at Ogata, just to see what he was doing, expecting nothing but the usual blank stare, but Ogata had covered the lower half of his face with a hand. As if he was afraid of giving something away. His brows were lifted higher than Sugimoto had ever seen them. His eyes were blown, pupils expanded to their outer limits. He looked gutted. Ogata's other hand still rested on the crook of Sugimoto's shoulder, and his notched fingernails dug into his skin, pulling him closer, and it hit Sugimoto somewhere inside his chest: Ogata actually wanted him. Not just as an exercise, a test of his skills, to see if he could or as something to pass the time; Ogata was looking at him with the kind of hunger that couldn’t be faked. Sugimoto wasn't sure he knew that, before. He wasn't a friend, couldn't be trusted, was at best someone he’d want at his back in a fight, and Sugimoto wanted to fuck him, would get to, if he was lucky, before the war ended, and if he’d got to know him at all Sugimoto would bet that Ogata wanted that too, and so everyone would get what they wanted and how the hell that had happened Sugimoto had no idea.

He squeezed his eyes shut and went back to work. All other sounds were drowned out by the rush of blood within his own head. He wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping his teeth out of the way, but Ogata was letting out quiet, hitching breaths he muffled with his own hand, so he didn’t think Ogata really minded. Sugimoto was stroking the inside of his thigh, petting at him a little, fussing. Come on, now. I can’t keep this up forever.

He pulled away for a second, out of breath, rested his forehead against Ogata's leg and heard his own gasps gone a little raspy through a throat that had never met this kind of treatment before. His whole body was firing away, vibrating with it, and he didn't know where exactly they were headed except that they were getting there, together, and fast.

It wasn’t much of a decision. He wanted something neither of them could take back. To stake a claim on some territory. It was like some cage inside him had been pried open and something feral let out never to be shoved back in again. He wanted handprints on his skin hard enough to leave marks. He wanted the two of them to collide so hard they’d ricochet off each other and go flying. He surged to his feet, grabbed blindly at Ogata’s shoulders, and brought their mouths together. Ogata’s lips froze under his own. Sugimoto kept jerking him off with his right hand, but his left went to the back of Ogata’s neck, pulling him in closer towards him. Sugimoto hadn’t closed his eyes, and Ogata hadn’t either; they stared each other down amid the imitation of a kiss, neither really breathing, until Sugimoto shut his eyes, ran his tongue across Ogata’s bottom lip, and bit down into it.

That was the trick, in the end. Maybe Ogata just didn’t like to have to crane his neck up, because it was still sloppy and felt like a fight, but he let Sugimoto kiss him, his back against the wall and hands fisting in Sugimoto’s shirt-collar. Even kissed him back, after a fashion, with a lot of teeth involved. Sugimoto heard Ogata’s cap clatter to the floor and was pretty sure he had knocked it off with his own forehead. Their tongues brushed against each other’s, and it was almost hot enough to startle him. It felt like the dirtiest thing they’d ever done. His chin was wet with saliva and precome and he wondered what he tasted like, if Ogata was tasting himself on his mouth.

Sugimoto took his hands away for a moment to shove Ogata up the wall by his hips so his feet were barely touching the floor and then ground his knee between Ogata’s thighs, hard, and that did it, show was over. Ogata finished onto Sugimoto’s leg, panting, like it had been chased out of him. Sugimoto didn’t last much longer, just unbuttoned his trousers enough to jerk himself off, his forehead pressed against the place Ogata’s shoulder met his neck. He felt the muscles in his thighs twitch, he squeezed his eyes shut so hard he saw lights flash across the back of his lids like bursts of mortar, and he was mumbling something foul and incoherent against Ogata’s collarbone and hoping he was too far gone to notice. Ogata turned his face towards him, leaned down, and then bit down on Sugimoto’s collarbone and sucked at the mark it left behind like he was trying to get the venom out of a sting.

When he pulled away, Ogata’s head lolled back against the wall, mouth ajar, still breathing heavily, with a darker flush across his face than Sugimoto could ever remember seeing. His eyes were half-open, but they followed Sugimoto’s every move. Without taking the time to think twice, Sugimoto raised his own hand to his face and licked the come, both of theirs, off his fingers. His palm, next, ‘til all the evidence was hidden. Ogata’s eyes were all the way open, now, and he looked at him in a way that was more unsettling than any of the times he’d threatened Sugimoto directly. He looked like he’d just realized something, and Sugimoto had better catch up.

Sugimoto wiped the leftover dampness on his shirt and then buttoned both of them up, his trousers first, then Ogata’s, and bent down to pick Ogata’s cap from where it’d fallen on the floor. He placed it on Ogata’s head and took a step back. Ogata blinked, and when his eyes opened they were as shuttered as ever, like someone had blown out a lantern.

-

The severe dressing-down from Tsukishima that Sugimoto expected never came. Hanazawa was such a goody-two-shoes that it meant he must never have snitched, which confirmed that whatever he had been doing out there with Ogata wasn’t in the books. Sugimoto wondered if Tsurumi knew. Were they sneaking out behind his back, or on his orders? Hard to say. Ever since he’d landed in Hokkaido, he’d gotten the sense there was something weird going on with the division, not just the usual squabbling for glory between rich pencil-pushers with sabres.

Only a few days later, they took the hill. After that, everything fell into place quite quickly, and they marched through the gates of Port Arthur at half the strength they’d arrived. Each man was an ant in an uneven row of them.

Most of the people of the city, and definitely all the ones with money, had left by train as soon as it became clear the tides were turning against them. The city was nearly empty but for the dogs left behind by their owners. Nice ones, mostly, who recognized human touch but were getting hungrier by the hour and more likely to get mean. They would follow you around for hours if you let them, turning over and rolling in the dirt, showing their bellies. There was one, a big dopey fellow with drowsy eyes, who must’ve looked at Sugimoto and seen a sucker, because he trailed Sugimoto for a whole day until Sugimoto caved in and gave him some salt-fish from his pack.

As he was crouched next to it, watching it eat, a voice came from behind him: “Private First Class Sugimoto: can I have a word?”

He didn’t need to look up to know whose it was. Sugimoto’s heartbeat picked up like he was about to make another charge over the edge of the hill. Had Hanazawa figured out Sugimoto’s lie, and how to leverage it? He wasn’t sure what Hanazawa could want from him, but there was always something. Sugimoto knew that well enough, and yet he knew by now that Hanazawa wasn’t like the rest of them.

Hanazawa knelt by Sugimoto’s side and held out his hand to let the dog sniff him. He must have smelled good, because it liked him right away. It snuffled against Sugimoto’s leg and moved to stand in between them, so they could each pet one of his sides. Crafty thing.

“I wanted to feed them, too, but I didn’t want to look like I was wasting resources. I’m glad someone is taking care of them.”

“I didn’t have enough to give to any of the other ones. Probably shouldn’t have even fed this guy, not when I can’t take him with us.”

“I’m sure he’ll never forget you for it.”

“Do you know when we head back out, sir?”

“As soon as the repairs to the railcars are finished. Then it’s north to Mukden.” Hanazawa scratched the dog under the chin, and its eyes slipped closed. “Can I ask you something personal, Sugimoto?”

Sugimoto froze. Was this going to be it, then? The soft touch, before the hammer came down? “What is it, sir?”

“I can’t help but notice that—that you’ve made friends with Ogata since you came to the division.”

Sugimoto opened his mouth to insist that they weren’t friends before he realized that might do him more harm than good. “I guess you could say that.”

Hanazawa apparently didn’t notice his hesitation, because he turned to Sugimoto to fix him with his wide eyes. “I know that he doesn’t particularly like me. I’ve tried to be friendly, but I think I’ve been doing it all wrong. I want to get to know him better, and I thought you’d have a better sense of him than I would.”

This was such an unexpected turn of events that Sugimoto had to cough to buy himself a few more seconds. He considered asking, plain and simple, what the two of them were doing at the dugouts at night if they weren’t on good terms, but he was wary. He also considered blurting out that their friendship was based on some pretty specific grounds and he didn’t think the details would help Hanazawa out any. He tore his eyes away from Hanazawa’s and focused on the dog’s fur passing between his fingers: dirty, but still soft, not yet matted. “To be honest, I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t really set out to get to know him. And anyway, I think he’s the type you have to wait around for and let them come to you.”

“I don’t know if we have as much in common as you do,” Hanazawa replied in a tone that was close to petulant. Sugimoto wondered, wildly, if the rich boy was jealous of him.

“Ask him to tell you about marksmanship, I’m sure he’d love it.”

“Really? Oh, that’s great, Sugimoto. I knew you would have something to suggest. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.” He’d meant it as a joke, but next to him Hanazawa had actually brightened a little.

“Don’t worry about it. I hope it works out.” He patted the dog on the haunches for what he hoped would be the last time and left it with Hanazawa. The next morning the sun rose pink in the sky, and Sugimoto found that the dog had slept on the doorstep of the makeshift billet the regiment had put together, just waiting for him to come out.

They settled in for a few days’ respite in real beds and took stock of what they’d lost and gained. They buried the Russian dead and cremated their own. Clouds of human smoke filled the air, preferable to the gunpowder discharge but just as stifling. Through it all, Ogata was a hard man to find. He’d been in a mood ever since the night Sugimoto had interrupted him and Hanazawa. It wasn’t that Sugimoto wanted his attention, or anything like that—to tell the truth, it was a bit of a relief not to feel the weight of his attention quite so strongly. It just made him a little suspicious. He’d gotten used to Ogata batting at him like a cat with a piece of string. After they entered the city, however, Sugimoto saw him more often from a distance than up close. He still felt like he was being watched. Paranoia, maybe, but he couldn’t help glancing around as if something was going to jump out at him from behind a pile of rubble or the corner of a building.

Even though they’d won the siege, the attitude of the officers was grim. Even Hanazawa had lost much of his cheer. All he could find in himself to hope for was that, wherever they went, it wouldn’t involve too much marching.

He woke one sleepless morning with puffy eyes and a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He hadn’t wanted to have to resort to this, but he couldn’t get the thought out of his mind, and so as soon as he had the chance Sugimoto made his way over to Tsurumi’s makeshift office. It was set up inside of a ransacked Russian telegraph office. When he entered, Tsurumi was turned away, looking out the window into the courtyard beneath; when he saw Sugimoto, he gave one of those deep smiles that had made Sugimoto instantly distrust him. These days, he felt something else about it. He still didn’t like Tsurumi, but the man had held his head high while leading a dwindling unit into the fray, day after day without the cracks showing. A lesser man would have started to look ashamed of the amount of his unit’s blood on his hands, but Tsurumi had continued to hold himself like he knew exactly what they ought to be doing, even while they were dying in droves. It wasn’t easy, that. Up close, though, you could see what it’d cost him. He was still a handsome man, but he’d lost weight; he was much gaunter now, and he hadn’t had much fat in his face to lose.

“Sir, can I ask a favour?”

Tsurumi’s brows lifted, and he inclined his head indulgently. “Of course. If anyone has earned it, it’s you.”

“I have a friend. We grew up together. He was with me in my unit of the 1st. I just want to know—”

“Whether he made it through hell alive?” Tsurumi smiled, again, and it showed no teeth. “Just give me a name, and I’ll see what I can do.”

After he wrote down Toraji’s information on a piece of paper and placed it in Tsurumi’s hand, Sugimoto wavered for a moment more. He wasn’t a snitch, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the mass of images swirling around inside his head, which he couldn’t sort out and all seemed to fold back into Hanazawa’s pale face looking guilty in the near-darkness.

He asked Tsurumi nothing, and left. It wasn’t until the sun was low in the sky that Sugimoto realized the dog was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 6

The city of Port Arthur itself was largely intact. As sieges go, it had not been particularly destructive. Until they took 203 Hill, they hadn’t been able to position any artillery to fire on the city effectively, so the shape of the city was more or less the same as it must have been six months ago. Some buildings had been razed, of course—here and there were piles of blasted stone and charred beams where houses had stood—but compared to the fields outside of the city walls, now a wasteland, Port Arthur was well-preserved and empty, like a dollhouse.

Compared to the battlefield, the city was a sniper’s dream. There was all the cover and elevated vantage points Ogata could want. Of course, he didn’t need them, because there were no more Russians to shoot, but assessing the terrain was a mental exercise he’d taken up long ago, before he’d even joined the army.

Ogata sat cross-legged on the roof of a building on a street corner and watched Sugimoto and Yuusaku kneel in the dirt. They were letting a mangy-looking dog sniff their hands. They were facing away from him and their heads were bowed together in conversation, though they were too far away for Ogata to overhear what was said. From the distance, he could just barely make out the short, soft hairs that tapered off down the nape of their necks. In the space between their hair and their collars was bare skin, completely unprotected.

Ogata pulled his rifle down by the strap, nestled it in the crook of his elbow, and peered down the sights, first aiming at one, and then the other. Another exercise. He couldn’t keep it up for long, though, as a few seconds later Sugimoto stood up to leave. Ogata noticed that his calves were wrapped up in puttees that were, for once, pristine; he must have gotten fresh bandages put on that morning. He hadn’t yet had to wade through mud, or blood.

Even after Sugimoto turned the corner, Yuusaku remained where he knelt. The dog looked happy to stay behind with its new master, forsaking the previous one in a heartbeat. The sunlight was on the wane, and night’s chill was already beginning to settle. The scene below was bathed in a golden glow. Yuusaku’s shadow across the ground was very long. For a moment Ogata thought, he’s alone now, I could just—before the sound of approaching voices from the street below him reached his ears and he slung the rifle across his back. It was only an idle thought, anyway. The report would carry too far, and they weren’t to be firing inside the city now that it was under surrender. Someone would notice.

-

If nothing else, the chance to go back to sleeping indoors for a while was welcome. After a week, however, Ogata was impatient for the 7th Division to receive marching orders and move on. Between long hours taking inventory of the city’s resources and performing the last rites for the dead with mechanical efficiency, there was time for celebrating, of a sort—at night stages would go up out of wood pallets, someone would make music, and clouds of cigarette smoke rose above them to mingle with the fog rolling in off the port. Rather than jubilance, it all had the frantic edge of a prison-yard just before a riot. He’d never enjoyed the company of the rest of the unit enough to spend much time drinking and wasting time with them unless it was a way to get at something he wanted, but it was the middle of winter and the nights were long.

He could have sought out Sugimoto, dragged him into some abandoned house while everyone else was busy, but the last time they’d snuck off together things had gotten—out of hand. Sugimoto had acted so odd, like he thought this was something it wasn’t, and it made Ogata want to keep him at bay for a little while. Until Sugimoto remembered who they were, and what this was about. It hadn’t been—bad, but thinking about it set Ogata’s teeth on edge. For now, all the regiments of the 7th were billeted in the same area, and it was easy enough to stay clear of him when they were two men of thousands, even if their numbers had been winnowed down to less than half of what they’d been when they’d landed.

He had wanted to test him, before, but Sugimoto had ruined it. There hadn’t been another chance. He’d dreamt about the way Yuusaku’s fingers would have shaken as he took the bayonet from Ogata’s hand. Ogata would likely have had to guide Yuusaku through the motions of it. He would have held the prisoner’s head back, to make it easy for him. Anyone could slit a bare neck, even a virgin. But they had been interrupted, and ever since Ogata had felt like he’d been pushed off balance and couldn’t get back on his feet. It was unfinished business he wasn’t sure how to resume, until Yuusaku solved the problem by coming to him.

Yuusaku found him on the steps of a blown-out hotel overlooking the square that the 7th had overtaken as its temporary base of operations. Ogata had drunk more than he should have, because it was offered and he was bored, and he blamed the alcohol in his blood for how he didn’t notice his brother’s approach until he was very close.

Ogata could read the exact moment of indecision where Yuusaku’s mouth had to choose between Ani-sama and Superior Private Ogata. In the end, he settled on neither. Yuusaku sat on a step below him, so their heads were level. “How did you learn to shoot so well?”

“Practice.” Yuusaku had left enough space in between them they weren’t in danger of touching, but Ogata still drew his arms in closer to his chest.

Yuusaku laughed, quiet and self-deprecating. “I could practice for a long time and never shoot like you do. You must have a secret. Or there must be a story behind it. Who taught you?”

“There’s no story. My family had a rifle, and I picked it up young.”

“Well, we’re all grateful for it.” Yuusaku glanced down at his crossed ankles and then back up to Ogata. The corners of his eyes crinkled as if to shield themselves from the light, even though night was well and truly fallen. He chewed at his bottom lip. “I’m going to write to Father to tell him about our victory at 203 Hill. I want to tell him what a credit to the unit you are.”

A freezing wind was blowing in from over the bay. Inside his veins, Ogata’s blood felt like ice. “And what will you tell him that you’ve done?”

“What?”

“If you write to him and tell him about how many men I’ve killed, can you say the same for yourself?”

Yuusaku’s eyes shone wetly. “I don’t understand.”

“If our father wanted to hear about the things I’ve done, he would ask. Do you think you’re being kind?” Yuusaku looked away, and Ogata leaned closer to him. He placed a hand down on the stair to steady himself, and his fingernails ground into the stone. “You want to feel like you have no part in any of this. Have you killed anyone since you arrived? Anyone at all?”

“I carry the flag, I can’t…”

“Can’t what? Sully yourself like the rest of us?”

What Yuusaku said next he almost whispered. His voice came out raw and weak. “Father told me not to. He said I alone mustn’t kill anybody.”

“What?” Blood was rushing past his ears so loudly he mistook it at first for the waves in the harbour on the other side of the city wall.

Yuusaku reached out and grabbed Ogata’s hand from where it was clenched on the stair. He held it between each of his own, Ogata’s bare palm between his gloves. Before Ogata could pull it away or ask what Yuusaku thought he was doing, Yuusaku leaned closer and wrapped his arms around him.

Their knees knocked together. Over Yuusaku’s shoulder Ogata could see the moon rise. Its surface looked as ravaged by shell craters as the fields outside. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever been touched like this before. If he had, it was a long time ago. Yuusaku was trembling. The warmth was cloying, and Ogata wanted to move Yuusaku away, to shove him back and ask what he thought he was doing, but his feet were fixed to the stone below them.

Yuusaku truly whispered now, softly, tenderly, his words brushing over the side of Ogata’s face. Like whatever he had to say was something secret and important. “I wish I could be the brother that you wanted. But I’m glad that we met.”

He was such a fool. Ogata had never wanted a brother at all. That he existed was the problem.

When he finally pulled himself away, he left Yuusaku behind on the steps without a second look. Other drunken stragglers were still picking crooked pathways back to the makeshift barracks, so no one noticed that Ogata’s face was flushed and his own tread was unsteady. He stared up at the ceiling, which swayed with every breath he took, and refused to glance over at the place where, several beds over, Sugimoto also lay awake. Ogata could feel Sugimoto watching him until he was taken by sleep without dreams.

-

Their time in Port Arthur came to an end quickly. They had won a battle, at great cost, but the war was not yet over. Once the rail lines out of the city were in working order, the regiments of the 7th Division were loaded into transport trains and sent north, towards Mukden, where they were to reinforce the men already entrenched there in anticipation of a major conflict. They had been crammed in together just as tightly on the ships that had brought them over the ocean, but being inside rail cars gave the particular feeling of being a piece of livestock headed to the butcher’s.

Sugimoto seemed his usual self, any residual hesitance or suspicion having apparently faded back into his usual clumsy animosity, because he sat on the bench next to Ogata before the first hour of the journey had even passed. Time crawled by. No one was in much of a mood to pass the time. Eventually they cracked some of the windows open to let the car ventilate. Outside was freezing, but it was preferable to breathing in the stale air. Sugimoto stood and leaned his head and shoulders out with his elbows braced on the frame to keep him from tipping over and falling. There was enough room next to him for Ogata to peer out, as well, and watch the fields pass them by. Sugimoto only glanced in his direction and then turned his gaze back to the Manchurian countryside.

“Doesn’t even look like there’s a war on out here,” Sugimoto muttered. With their heads out the window, the wind whipped their words away from the others in the car. It was as much privacy as they were likely to get for days.

Ogata pulled his hood in tighter to preserve some meagre heat. “Getting homesick, are you?”

Sugimoto’s collar rippled in the breeze. The air whipping past them was cold enough Ogata was already starting to lose feeling in his extremities. Sugimoto tucked his chin into the top of his coat until all Ogata could see were his eyes and his furrowed brows, and though Ogata knew Sugimoto had heard him, Sugimoto didn’t answer. Ogata turned to face him fully and asked, “Were you a conscript, Sugimoto?”

Sugimoto blinked, like he wasn’t sure what he was being asked, before he shook his head. “No, I enlisted.”

“I thought so. How much longer is your service term?”

“Another year or so.” Sugimoto looked at him properly now, both of their torsos twisted so they could talk face to face without losing balance where they stood on the bench inside the car. Now that Sugimoto’s face was so close Ogata was reminded of their last conversation, and he regretted not leaving Sugimoto to do his sightseeing alone. There was just so little else to do, and there was no way to pull out now that didn’t make him lose ground, so Ogata let his curiosity carry him further.

“Are you going to stay in the army?” A bird flew along next to them, trying to keep pace with the train. It was managing it, for now, but surely it couldn’t keep it up for long.

Sugimoto glanced back out at the trees passing them by. “I don’t know. There was a girl..."

A sour taste flooded through Ogata’s mouth. “So you’re going back to Tokyo to marry your sweetheart? How cute.”

Sugimoto glared at him. The gashes on his face were almost totally healed. His face looked better with the scars than it had before. “No. She married someone else. I don’t even know if I’ll go back. It depends on some things.” Sugimoto made a cch-sound from his back teeth. “I don't know why I'm telling you this. What about you? This can’t be your first term. You gonna stay on until—what, you die? Tsukishima’s life look that good to you?”

“What are you going to do after you get out, then? You’re too good of a killer, Sugimoto.” Sugimoto’s eyes flashed darkly at him. Good. “I don’t think Tsurumi will let you go, anyway. He’s got big plans for after the war, when the 7th goes back to Hokkaido, and he likes you too much.”

“What kinds of plans?”

A rock dislodged by the wheels flew up towards them faster than a bullet, faster than Ogata could move out of the way, but it just missed them by inches and clanged against the side of the train next to Sugimoto’s face. Sugimoto’s eyes had followed its path, and he never even flinched. Perhaps that was the reason Ogata told him what he did; he thought, not for the first time, that he could use a man like that, depending on how things went.

“I don’t know everything. Just bits and pieces. We were running some scouting missions before things with Russia started heating up. There’s a bunch of gold hidden away in Hokkaido, and the only person who knows how to get at it is locked up in Abashiri prison. Tsurumi knows more than he’s telling, but it has to do with a map. They’ve tattooed it on a group of prisoners—I don’t know how, it must be in some kind of code or else the guards would have figured it out by now. But to get at the gold you need all the prisoners.”

“How are you supposed to do that if they’re all in prison?”

Ogata shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe Tsurumi plans to send someone in there to photograph them? I don’t know. I don’t even know if the tattoos are finished or if he’s still going.”

“This sounds like a bunch of bullshit.”

“Maybe some of the story is a smokescreen to keep information from leaking out of the regiment. But do you think Tsurumi would snoop around over some wives’ tale? You know him better than that. He’s many things, but not stupid.”

Sugimoto’s knuckles were white where he gripped the rim of the window to keep himself upright. “What did you mean, when you said he likes me too much to let me go? My service term isn’t up to him.”

“How do you think you got sent up here, Sugimoto? Have you ever heard of a Private First Class being reassigned to the other side of the country before?” Sugimoto frowned. It looked like he really hadn’t thought it through all the way. Hopeless. If Ogata weren’t around, Tsurumi would sink his claws into him without a doubt.

Together, on the other hand—between the two of them it was hard to imagine who could stand in their way. And when the time came for Ogata to make his way alone, it would be up to him to test how immortal Sugimoto really was. He could think of no more fitting end for their acquaintance.

Sugimoto looked like he wanted to dispute it, like Ogata was making it up, or something, but he must have seen something in his face, because instead he just shook his head and said, “Come on, I’m getting cold. Let’s shut this back up.”

-

On the morning of the first charge of the Battle of Mukden that the 7th Division was a part of, Tsurumi delivered their orders from horseback. “I’m sure you are all wondering what more I can possibly ask of you. I’m afraid I must continue to demand too much.”

Standing by Tsurumi’s side, Yuusaku was turned out impeccably: his uniform was spotless and his face grave. Seeing him on his own, you’d think he was a wet-behind-the-ears academy cadet about to sit for a portrait rather than an officer who’d lead almost as many men to their deaths as Ogata had ever shot. The flag in his hands was not yet unfurled, but its edges rippled queasily in the wind.

“The generals’ orders are nothing that will surprise you. We’re to conduct a direct assault on the Russian lines ahead.” Tsurumi’s horse tossed its head, trying in vain to swat away the gathering flies landing on its face. Even from the ground below, Ogata could see that Tsurumi’s eyes were full of fire. He looked like a monster from a bedtime story meant to frighten children. “My orders are for as many of you as possible to return alive. We don’t need any more martyrs. I’ve had my fill of the noble dead. I want you to fight like demons, and then come back. Crawl, if you must.”

The battle for Mukden was not like the siege at Port Arthur had been. Though there were fortifications already set up, the heat of the battle lasted only five long days. More like one day drawn out across several sunrises and sunsets; it raged on day and night, with the howitzers rattling through the small hours of the morning and night raids being made across the lines, from both sides. He barely slept, but Ogata had made up his mind. It was only a matter of time. He had only to wait for the right moment, and he knew how to wait.

They gained ground, they lost it, they gained it again. There were black flies on everything, more than you could hope to shake off. It made shooting a pain in the ass. The body’s instinct to brush them away was severe, but Ogata had dealt with worse. He did, however, feel a flash of annoyance. He shouldn’t have waited. What had held him back? 203 was just as much of a tempest, but the air was better, the shots easier to take. He had wanted to test Yuusaku, to be sure of it, but now that he was on the precipice this outcome seemed inevitable.

He could make out Tsurumi up ahead, still on his horse, directing men forward with a naked sword. He was normally a good rider but the horse was shying badly, refusing to take any steps further. The reins were held tight, like Tsurumi was trying to stop himself from being bucked off.

Ogata blinked the sweat away from his eyes, rested his cheek against the stock, and tried to focus on nothing but the feeling of the wood grain against his face. He let his eyelids droop a little, relaxing his gaze; they would flicker into focus if anything moved. He just had to trust his instincts. Eye fatigue came when you strained them too hard, thought about it too much, and then before you knew it you'd given your position to the enemy by firing at every stray bird that flew past the sights. No, he kept breathing in through his nostrils, out through his mouth, trying to slow his breathing enough to count the time between heartbeats.

Yuusaku was the easiest man on the battlefield to spot. He was at the centre of a maelstrom of bodies and bayonets and bloodsprays. Sugimoto was next to him on the slight hill they’d taken; Ogata could make him out just by the way he moved. It wasn’t Sugimoto’s time yet. He would have to be careful.

There was a story as to how Ogata had learned to shoot so well. He'd practiced on his grandfather's rifle over days and nights in the field behind the farmhouse. Ammunition was too expensive to waste, so he only shot to kill. He would lie on his stomach in the grass until even the mice would run over his legs. It took years of that, or perching in the branches of trees watching people come and go on the dirt road below, for him to learn the secret: the shots came through in the place between pulses. It was the stillest a finger could ever get. Every time he got distracted or nervous, even for a moment, his pulse would quicken and the interval became too short. Eventually, he learned how to slow his breathing, slow down everything, until there was nothing but to wait for the ironsights to find their home.

Now, amidst the dust and smoke and thudding of shells just past their lines, Ogata leant against the dovetail groove where the pieces of stockwood met and kept his breath even despite the bad air, suppressing the whisperings of a cough, until there was nothing more to be felt but the gentleness of knowing he would be the one to pull the cord on his brother’s life. This moment was just for the two of them, alone together for the last time.

Yuusaku's wide shoulders were a perfect target, but Ogata never liked to shoot for the chest if he could avoid it. The 6.5mm-calibre cartridges in the Type 30s didn't have enough stopping power to ensure it'd go all the way through. He only shot the chest if he knew he could make it to the heart.

If possible, the head was better. Cleaner. More obvious upon entry and exit where the shot had landed. The cascade of matter through the air, the sway, and then the fall of the body to the ground; he would know how it'd gone before he'd had time to cock the next shot.

Spirals of crows circled overhead, laughing to each other at the men below. Black wings against a cloudy sky.

Yuusaku moved without hesitation, graceful, long-limbed, and even at such a distance Ogata could make out the neat line of his profile. There was nothing to protect that body from the world. He never even drew his sword. Yuusaku was a fool. He was already dead, a corpse still walking, confusing the world with his refusal to lay down and die like he ought to. Purity meant nothing. The only reason he was still alive was because it was for Ogata to do this. Him, and no one else.

He had already considered the angle, the distance, the wind, and adjusted his aim accordingly. If you could shoot a bird out of the sky in flight, a man was simple. They were so much slower, wider, less at home in their element. A man—

Ogata squeezed the trigger with the ball of his finger. Straight back, to avoid any side-to-side motion. At the same moment, another shell landed not far away, and a cloud of dust particles rose up from the ground. Somewhere to his left, men were screaming in pain.

He waited for the report and the familiar kickback, but nothing came. The gun failed to fire. The shot simply didn't come. That was a known flaw with the Type 30s: along with the finicky interior mechanisms of the bolt, it was one of the main defects of what was otherwise a very good rifle. But Ogata maintained his gun to perfection; this kind of thing didn’t happen to him. He pulled back on the hook and sighted down the barrel one more time, looking for his target. He clenched his jaw.

In the thick clouds of dust that whirled around them it was hard to make out one silhouette from another. There were men running back to their respective lines, both theirs and the Russians’, and whatever the colour of their uniforms they moved with frightened quickness, like rabbits. Eventually the wind bore the smoke back away from the scene, and Ogata found the flag and its bearer. He squinted. He fired.

Ogata’s bullet hit Yuusaku in the head, but the angle was—off, or at least it looked that way from a distance. Yuusaku’s knees folded out beneath him, but not before he turned in Ogata’s direction and cast a glance back over his shoulder. His eyes snagged against Ogata’s like cloth on barbed wire. It couldn’t have been more than a second, but it felt like the longest moment of Ogata’s life. Yuusaku swayed, a burst of blood bloomed through the air around him, and one of his hands landed on the shoulder of the closest person to him—Sugimoto—instinctively, as if to break his fall. The body’s last attempt to save itself, not yet knowing the damage had been done.

Ogata lowered his rifle. In a moment he would cycle the bolt and choose another target, a Russian somewhere along the horizon. But not yet. This moment was his. He felt very empty. The satisfaction would come later—it always did, in time. His hands were shaking. Two hundred yards away, Yuusaku’s body had fallen limp into Sugimoto’s arms.

He couldn’t have guessed how much time passed between seeing his brother fall and seeing his body brought back to safety. He shot about a dozen Russian men who were trying to overtake a Japanese gun emplacement. At one point, as he leaned out from behind his cover, a bullet whipped close enough to his face for Ogata to feel its heat against his cheek.

The dust and smoke that rose thick in the air and was whipped around by the wind were to blame for why it took him so long to realize what he was seeing, but eventually it was too clear to be mistaken. Ogata was too familiar with Sugimoto's gait, the way he occupied his body; even when Sugimoto was hunched over under the weight of a burden, it was impossible to see him as any other. Ogata blinked through the sweat on his brow. Sugimoto was coming back from the skirmish zone amidst the thudding of shells and bullets, limbs, and dislodged earth. Yuusaku was slung over his back. They were both covered in Yuusaku’s blood. Abstractly, Ogata noted the stab of jealousy that ran through him at the sight of it on Sugimoto’s skin. The flag was nowhere in sight.

Ogata watched from fifty paces away as a field medic rushed over to the two of them as if there was anything to be done. There were nowhere close to enough nurses for the amount of wounded, but being the legal son of a Lieutenant General once again had its privileges.

Ogata wasn’t sure how much time passed between seeing Yuusaku’s body borne back and the next moment of respite, because another round of shells erupted very close by. He was drawn once more into providing cover fire as other men of the unit scrambled towards safety. It might have been hours. He was drawn further and further away from the place he’d last seen him, until it was fully dark out and there wasn’t a living man left in sight.

When he finally made it back to what was, when he last saw it, a functional temporary command post, he was confronted with blown-over tents and a shellshocked group of stragglers taking shelter around a barrel fire behind one of the embankments still standing. Sugimoto was among the survivors, of course. He was still covered in blood. Ogata glanced around, but the medics had taken Yuusaku’s body away somewhere out of sight.

Sugimoto nodded at him. His eyes looked glazed over and dull. Ogata had to cough to clear his lungs of smoke before he could ask, “What happened here?”

Sugimoto murmured in an undertone, “Shells. They got Tsurumi. Tsukishima’s hurt bad, too.” That sent a chill down Ogata’s spine, one he wasn’t sure he could remember experiencing. Anyone else, sure, but Tsurumi— “Last I heard they were still alive, but pretty fucked up. But they think they might make it. All of them.”

“All of them?”

“Hanazawa looks rough, but the last time I saw him he was still breathing.”

The chill spread over his whole body, and Ogata stopped rubbing his hands together over the fire. “What?”

“The shot that got him was pretty bad, but he could pull through.”

He wanted to laugh. He didn’t. Sugimoto was looking at him balefully, watching how he’d react. Ogata didn’t speak for minutes. The minutes turned into dozens of minutes, until the fire inside the barrel was dying and the rest of them trickled away somewhere else and Sugimoto tugged on Ogata’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get some sleep. We’re gonna need it.”

Chapter 7

It felt like an eternity while it was happening, but in terms of actual time spent the battle at Mukden was only a blip in Sugimoto’s life. They fought for a week, more or less. It was a mess of long days and sleepless nights, living off of dried fish and hard biscuits and sips of brackish water. On what was maybe the fifth day of continuous combat, Sugimoto saw a guy who’d bunked across from him at Asahikawa fall over and pass out on his feet from fatigue. When it ended they once more marched into a city, but even more than at Port Arthur, there was nothing even close to jubilance. The 27th Regiment of the 7th Division, in particular, was a ragged bunch, with its First and Second Lieutenants and its chief Sergeant all on stretchers. The unit entered Mukden like the twitching body of a headless snake.

The following days crawled by, in comparison. The first one, no one in the unit did anything but sleep like the dead on the dirt floor of what used to be a house. The next day, Corporal Tamai made them turn out in proper uniform at morning muster and dispensed some temporary orders to go dig around the battlefield for supplies. They would come back around for a second pass later, when the usual command structure was back in place and they knew what they ought to be doing, to gather up the dead and look for identifiers to be sent home to families. This was just to make ends meet for the time being. They had to eat somehow, and ammo was in short supply, too. The tricky thing was to avoid the mines that still lay buried in no man’s land—Sugimoto watched a guy from the 1st get blown up right in front of him that way days after the battle was won. It wasn’t anyone he recognized.

It was tiring, bending over and rooting through the pockets of the corpses to look for unused rations and other flotsam. The motions of it were more like sowing seeds than fighting. No adrenaline to make it any easier, just slow, backbreaking toil, with your burden getting heavier as you went instead of lighter.

Ogata stuck fairly close to him as they went. He kept his hood up, so Sugimoto couldn’t see much of his face unless Ogata turned around to look right at him.

Sugimoto felt like he should ask—something. What, exactly, he had no idea. Any expression of concern would get Ogata sneering in his face, and Sugimoto didn’t really feel the need to extend it, anyway. But it was clear that, whether he would admit it or not, Ogata was rattled. He’d been acting odd since 203 Hill, but ever since Sugimoto had delivered the news that his brother had been shot, Ogata had seemed constantly distracted.

They’d been at it long enough for the sun to start creeping downwards when Sugimoto ventured, “Have you seen the Second Lieutenant?”

“Why would I have seen him?”

“I know visits are limited, but I thought you might have been let in anyway.” Sugimoto ran the back of his hand across his brow to clear some of the sweat and dust.

Ogata nudged a Russian soldier’s jacket open with the toe of his boot. “I haven’t. Why do you ask? Has there been any change?”

“No, but I heard he still might turn around.”

“From a wound like that? They’re just giving a soft answer.”

Sugimoto shrugged. “That's what they're saying. I bet you could shoot me in the head right now and it wouldn't keep me down, either.”

“You’re different from him, though.” Ogata crouched down to rifle through the pockets of one of the corpses by his feet. A Japanese lance-corporal, by the uniform. Ogata unhooked a nearly-full ammo pouch from the man’s belt and tossed it up for Sugimoto to catch, which his arm did without his having to think about it. Before Sugimoto could ask what he meant, Ogata added, with his eyes still on the ground, “What did he look like?”

Sugimoto frowned. “What do you mean?”

“When he was shot, did you see his face?”

Sugimoto had. Hanazawa had looked almost serene. Like he’d expected it, or had a moment to prepare himself, which was more than most of them got. Sugimoto hadn’t caught Hanazawa as he fell because he’d wanted a commendation or anything else out of it. In a moment like that there was no time to think about how the guy who just got shot in front of you was a general’s kid. It was just a reflex. If he thought of anything, it was the way Hanazawa had looked when a stray dog had nuzzled his hand: like he was happy to be alive, and the world was offering him a gift.

The funny thing was that Hanazawa was more willing to die for honour and love of country than any of them. Maybe Sugimoto had robbed him of that. Now Hanazawa was mouldering in a field hospital bed somewhere with a bullet lodged in his brain that would never come out, even if he woke. Maybe letting him fall and have his noble death would’ve been the merciful thing to do.

“No,” he said, “he was looking the other way.”

-

They weren’t free. That wasn't how the army worked, even when things were half-fallen apart. But for a few minutes at a time, in the setting sun, with the blade’s edge of spring passing over his face on the breeze, Sugimoto felt closer to it than he had in a long while.

When it came to shaving, they could go for a few days without any officers coming down on them for it, but it was pushing into weeks and Sugimoto was starting to look a stranger to himself when he caught his reflection in the surfaces of puddles. His head was the main thing; he still never got any more than wispy bits of nothing on his face. Between the scars and the ratty grown-out crew cut, he looked like a distant cousin his parents would’ve warned him to stay away from. They usually all sheared their own heads at the same time, passing around water in bowls, but seeing as most of the 7th’s command were still bedridden such routines of protocol had fallen by the wayside.

When Sugimoto was younger, his mother had trimmed his hair with scissors every few months. It was straight when he was little, but as he got older it grew in curlier and more unruly and she’d scold him about it as if it was his fault it came in like that. He used to try to get out of it for as long as he could because she’d pull too hard, but when Sugimoto looked back on it he thought she probably just didn’t know her own strength.

Ogata squinted at his reflection in a woman’s tiny compact mirror someone in the unit had salvaged. He pulled at the skin of his face to get the surface smooth enough to bring the razor across cleanly. All this to keep up the outline of his fussy little beard.

Sugimoto had finished shaving earlier, and he sat on an empty crate holding a cup of tea between his palms, balanced on his knee. The steam rose up and landed on his newly smooth face to condense there like droplets of warm breath. “I wonder if we’re going to get some young buck officer assigned to replace Tsurumi.”

Ogata didn’t turn his head, but Sugimoto could see his eyes flick over to him. “Tsurumi won’t be replaced. You can bet on that.”

“Why not? From the sounds of things, he got hit pretty bad.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Wait and see, Sugimoto. He may surprise you.” Ogata gave his cheek one last stroke with the razor blade and then rinsed it, wiped it dry, and tucked it back in a pocket. He turned to where Sugimoto sat and said, “Pass me your gun.”

Sugimoto’s brows twisted together. He hadn’t made it this far by being trusting, especially of people who ought not to be trusted, but there were tons of guys around them and Ogata had had many better opportunities to attack him, if for some reason he wanted to do so. After a moment, Sugimoto handed it to him stock-first. Ogata turned the rifle over in his hands, looked at it from all sides, and then clucked his tongue. “You ought to take better care of your things, Sugimoto.”

“It passed inspection. Sorry it doesn’t meet yours.”

Ogata didn’t reply. Instead, he rummaged through the pockets of the utility belt on his waist to retrieve the standard-issue gun maintenance kit they all carried. He crouched on the ground by Sugimoto’s feet. More smoothly than Sugimoto could’ve managed on his best day, he removed the bolt from its chamber and disassembled it, all the fiddly little interior workings lined up on his thigh in a row as not to lose any. Sugimoto tried not to let his interest show on his face as Ogata cleaned the pieces with oil and cloth and put them back together with nimble fingers.

It was too damn creepy, seeing Ogata act nice. He kept waiting for Ogata to ask him for a favour or something, but Ogata never did. When he finished, Ogata passed Sugimoto his gun back. “Maybe you’ll remember you can fire it now and again, instead of just bludgeoning people.”

Sugimoto almost began a retort when he spotted Sergeant Tsukishima limping over to them against the backdrop of the setting sun. Tsukishima had only gotten off bed rest that morning for the shrapnel wound he’d taken when he and Tsurumi were shelled. He still looked like the kind of man nothing but a moving train could push over, but he’d lost enough weight during his recovery for his uniform to hang a little loose around the collar. He nodded at them both, and then said, “The First Lieutenant wants to speak with you.” Ogata shifted as if about to get to his feet when Tsukishima added, “Private First Class Sugimoto, that is.”

Sugimoto’s eyebrows lifted. “He’s awake?”

Tsukishima nodded. The dark circles under his eyes were even more pronounced than they had been before. “Has been for about a day now. Still on bed rest, but not for long. Even so, it’s best we hurry. He’s in and out.”

Unease curled in his chest, but there was nothing to do but follow Tsukishima away. Sugimoto could feel Ogata’s eyes on the back of his head as he went.

-

Tsurumi always stood out in a crowd. Sugimoto didn’t like him, never had, but Tsurumi knew what he was doing, which is more than Sugimoto could say for some officers he had served under. Tsurumi had held his head high even leading a skeleton crew of a unit into hell, day after day. And look where it’d got him.

The first thing he noticed when he was ushered into Tsurumi’s tent was the gauze. From within layers of bandages, Tsurumi’s eyes could only be seen by the way they reflected the dim light. The room smelled like antiseptic and that heavy, sweet smell of a place where dying had been done. Tsurumi was sitting up on his own, however, though it was taking a toll on him. He was clutching the edge of the folding desk by his bedside with a white-knuckled hand. When he spoke, his speech was slower than Sugimoto was used to from him. Morphine, probably. If it was morphine, Tsurumi was holding himself together well: when he spoke, it was lucid.

“Sugimoto, is that you?”

“Yes.” Sugimoto came closer into the room and stepped into the pool of light cast by the bedside oil lamp. He took his cap off. It felt like the kind of thing to do at someone’s bedside, deathbed or not. He was at a loss for what to say, but Tsurumi seemed content to wait for him, so Sugimoto coughed into his sleeve and added, “I’m surprised to see you up so soon, sir. That blast looked bad.”

Tsurumi tilted his head a little. “Oh, I’m not so badly off. I’m missing a part of my frontal lobe, and I’ve been told I’ll be surprised by the state of my face when they unwrap me, but I’m content with my lot, all things considered. You well know, Sugimoto, that a scar can settle in quite dashingly, given time to heal.”

Sugimoto took a seat on the mat next to the cot. It was then he noticed Tsurumi’s sabre was leaning against the wall of the tent. The sword had been left out of its sheath. The blade was so nicked it looked like a saw. A threat, or maybe just a reminder.

Tsurumi took in a laboured breath. “I’ll get to the point, as I don’t want to keep you long. Did you see what happened when Second Lieutenant Hanazawa was shot? You must have, if you were so close by.”

Why did everyone keep asking about him? Over the last six months Sugimoto had seen more guys shot, or shot them himself, than he could count. What was so different about Hanazawa, that Sugimoto was supposed to have something to say about it?

Sugimoto shrugged a shoulder. “There was a lot going on around us. He got unlucky. With the flag, he’s a perfect target.”

“Is it true that you helped bring him back to safety?”

“Yes.”

“Your bravery is truly commendable. We knew that already, of course, but it bears repeating.” Tsurumi smoothed a crease out of the blankets spread across his knees. “In honour of your service, I’d like to give you a promotion. No one in the unit could deserve it more than you. It will have to wait until we’re back on home soil, which I suspect will be shortly. Once we land, there will be a chance to set our house in order. It would be my pleasure to see you raised to Superior Private Sugimoto.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sugimoto replied mechanically, but his mind was whirling. What Ogata had said on the train ride from Port Arthur came back to him. I don’t think Tsurumi will let you go, anyway. He likes you too much.

At the time, it had been easy not to think it was anything more than Ogata trying to fuck with his head, but, as if reading his mind, Tsurumi remarked, “Superior Private Ogata has had quite a lot to say about you.”

Sugimoto’s heartbeat sped up in his chest. “He has?”

He thought he saw the corners of Tsurumi’s eyes crinkle. “Oh, certainly. I like to keep up with what’s going on with the troops, and he’s been very forthcoming.”

“Is that right.” Wasn’t that a kick in the teeth.

“I asked him to help me make sure you adjusted to life in the 7th, and I’m glad it seems to have been a success.” Sugimoto had suspected as much when he first arrived at Asahikawa, but to hear it spelled out so plainly—it shouldn’t have felt like a betrayal, but it did. As if smelling blood, Tsurumi seized upon Sugimoto’s confusion to go on: “I remember when I first heard about what happened to your family, when I wrote to your former superiors. Is it true that you volunteered for service after they’d passed away?”

“Yes.” Sugimoto clenched the fabric of his trousers over his knees to try and keep his composure.

“Do you regret it?”

Sugimoto was silent for long seconds before replying, “I don’t know what else I would’ve done.”

“When the war is over and you finish your term, what do you have to go home to, Sugimoto?”

Sugimoto said nothing, and Tsurumi smiled. He reached out a spindly hand to grasp Sugimoto’s shoulder. His grip was strong enough for Sugimoto to really take note, even though Tsurumi’s fingers were like skin and bone. “You don’t have to tell me now. Perhaps it’s just something to think on. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get my bandages changed, and you’ll pardon me if I’m still somewhat shy.”

-

By the time he returned from the medical tents to the 7th’s billets, lights-out had already been called. It was March now, no longer midwinter, but the nights were still damn cold. Sugimoto burrowed the bottom of his face into his coat and covered his ears with his hands to try and keep the numbness from setting in. It wasn’t much use; he felt shot through with a cold fire. What kind, he couldn’t exactly place, but the hours slid by one after another and he didn’t feel any less like he was going to burn up.

Eventually, he reached over the scant inches between them and nudged Ogata’s calf with his foot. When Ogata’s eyes flew open, Sugimoto silently got to his feet and made his way outside, where he waited just past the doorway. After a few minutes had gone by, Ogata joined him.

They didn’t go far; Sugimoto wasn’t sure what the night patrols were like here. As soon as he spotted a shadowy overhang on the side of a storage shed, he fisted a hand in Ogata’s cloak and pulled him inside the patch of darkness. Ogata laughed under his breath and raised his own hands to clutch at Sugimoto’s upper arms. What he said, however, wasn’t what Sugimoto expected at all.

“How did Tsurumi look?”

Sugimoto blinked. The cold fire was still running through him; it was a good part anger, he realized. “No idea. He’s all wrapped up, so probably bad.”

“So what did he want you for, anyway?” Ogata’s tongue flitted out to lick his bottom lip.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I told you he liked you. You should watch out around him.”

His fist tightened in the cloak, drawing it tighter around Ogata’s neck. “Is that what you do?”

“What?”

“You watch out around him? You want me to believe he tells every private in the unit about his secret gold plans?”

Ogata looked like he was about to laugh out loud. “Are you jealous?”

Sugimoto took the bait, even as he knew that’s what it was: “Have you ever slept with him?”

“You are jealous. No, Private First Class Sugimoto, I think you pay too much attention to latrine rumours.” The feigned ease of Ogata’s words was offset by the rigid grip of his fingers on Sugimoto’s sleeve.

“I don’t give a shit if you have.” Sugimoto surprised himself as he said it by finding that it was true. “But don’t pretend I don’t know you’re on different terms with him than the rest of us.”

“Is this why you dragged me out here? To interrogate me? I was hoping it was because you wanted to fuck.”

“You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?” The venom of Sugimoto’s words was undercut by the fact that his heartbeat was quickening just from being huddled together so close in the darkness.

Ogata exhaled, put-upon. “Come on. Let’s get what we came for and then go back to our beds and sleep, for once.”

“I sleep fine,” Sugimoto said, but he was already shifting away from suspicion into feeling keen. His dick was getting used to this, which was maybe the worst thing to happen to him since they'd got here. He was tired, too; tired of fighting, tired of laying awake or gasping through bad dreams. It was easier to surrender to the things he wanted, even if he knew they’d do him no good.

“I hear you at night.” Ogata narrowed his eyes and smirked in his nasty, mirthless way. “You don't sleep much at all.”

Oh, so he wanted it that way. Maybe another time, but not tonight. Even so, this was the Ogata he knew: mean and hungry. He found himself glad for it, if only because it felt like solid ground. Sugimoto leaned in closer, so he could see the exhilarated flicker of Ogata’s eyelids when he growled, “Are you going to keep talking all night, or are you going to follow through?”

“I'm a man of my word,” Ogata murmured, “Don't worry about that.”

Sugimoto was running hot. His body thought it knew what it was in for. Desire was like hunger, but hunger he knew how to manage. It was familiar. A reminder he was still alive. But just to be wanting all the time, like this, made him feel like he was going insane. He’d grown up scoffing at all the people in folktales who did crazy things for love or lust. Duty he understood, but this—instead of working it out of his system, he’d just tricked himself into thinking he could have it all the time. He couldn’t muster up the energy to feel ashamed about it. It was just need, like he needed water and a couple hours to shut his eyes at night.

There wasn’t enough room for them both in their hiding place to begin with, so they had to slot their legs together, more crowded than teeth in a mouth. Sugimoto wondered briefly if it would always be like this with them: never enough time to do the things the most luridly ambitious parts of his mind dreamt up at night. Ogata still lurched between forcefulness and passivity—he’d be knocking their knees together one moment and then backing off the next, making Sugimoto chase him. Sugimoto wondered, too, if Ogata’s constant running hot and cold came from a lack of experience. Not in the mechanics of it, but everything else. The frequency. The way that every time they came apart, Ogata had to know he’d given another little piece of himself away. Maybe Sugimoto was wrong and he’d had all kinds of steady things before, but he didn’t think so. Sometimes Ogata looked at him like a greedy little boy trying to get his hands on something he’d never had but knew he wanted bad.

They had to be quick about it. Sugimoto unbuttoned Ogata’s trousers only as far as he needed to get inside. Ogata didn’t even bother, just shoved his hand down past Sugimoto’s waistband. Taking anything off was a luxury they didn’t have. It was too bad; Ogata was small and not built for close-quarters fighting, but he was sturdy and well-muscled in a way that, even though it felt good pressed up close, was nice to look at, too, when Sugimoto got the chance to see it.

They ended up taking each other in one grip, their fingers laced together while Ogata’s incisors chewed away at Sugimoto’s bottom lip in a way that would stick around the next day. In payback, Sugimoto dug the fingernails of his spare hand into the tender flesh at the corner of Ogata’s thigh and hip; for his trouble he got an angry hiss and a shove of Ogata’s chest against his own.

When they were positioned like this, Sugimoto could hurt him really badly, if he wanted to. Every vulnerable place Ogata had was exposed. Sugimoto would’ve been able to overpower him any day of the week. He wasn’t surprised by the matter-of-fact way his mind offered these observations up, but by the hot rasp the thought of it pulled out of his gut.

Neither of them lasted long. A flash in the pan too confident to be called fumbling. Afterwards, when they cleaned themselves off and slunk away, leaving a few minutes’ interval between their re-entrances for plausible deniability’s sake, he tried not to think about the image that had been in his mind when he came: Ogata, below him, beaten and bloodied and eyes glinting wildly.

It felt like someone’s victory, but not his, and doubly so when Ogata was proven right: even when they made their way back, Sugimoto didn’t sleep a bit.

-

“I had it made out of enamel. What do you think, does it suit me?”

The whole of the 27th had been called to the makeshift headquarters Tsurumi had established not long after he’d called Sugimoto to his bedside. A hundred and fifty-odd men crammed into one tiny room to watch their commanding officer unfurl himself from his cocoon and don a plate that covered almost half of his face. Not all, by any stretch of the imagination; everything between Tsurumi’s eyes and nose was pure scar tissue, not quite finished healing. It hurt just to look at.

Tsurumi himself was utterly unselfconscious. He glanced around the whole room, letting his men see his battle scars from every angle. Before Mukden, Tsurumi had started to look haggard. Now he was alight with a strange current that animated his limbs and his face as he spoke. Sugimoto couldn’t tell if he’d always been so expressive, or if every gesture just looked bigger now that his face was monstrous.

“Now that I’ve taken all that off, it feels so much easier to speak freely. I have news from central command. The war is coming to a close, and I know we have been waiting to hear if further deployments were ahead. Well, I have just been informed that I may tell you, officially, that the 7th is being recalled to Hokkaido.”

Everyone had always listened when he spoke—he had that quality, and whatever else the 7th was like, it didn’t have a discipline problem—but now it was as if a ritual was taking place. Sugimoto could have heard a pin drop.

“It has been a difficult war. No division has fought more bravely, or more deserved a long peace. However, the time for vigilance is not over. As we prepare to return home, I would encourage you not to forget what you’ve seen here, and what we were asked to do.”

As if anyone could. Sugimoto glanced around; everyone seemed transfixed by the sight of Tsurumi, so familiar yet so changed. On Sugimoto’s left side, Tanigaki’s mouth was drawn in a firm line. The air hummed with energy barely contained. Sugimoto looked in the other direction, and on the other side of the room Ogata caught his gaze. Instead of awe, his eyes seemed to say, told you so.

-

Some of the guys had told ghost stories on the transport ship on the way to the front, all those months ago. There wasn’t any more of that on the way back, or any singing. A couple of them gambled at cards for cigarettes, but Sugimoto didn’t feel compelled to join. He’d never been a very good liar. He did watch, though, as the players dealt and squabbled over their hands and the peacocks on the cigarette cases preened their feathers, even as the cheap mass-produced ink had smudged on the surface of the cardboard.

It was cramped, of course, in the belly of the ship, and Ogata sat next to him with his knees splayed outwards. The sides of their thighs were pressed against each other. There were two dozen men in earshot, and no one would think twice of it, but the casual touch felt like an incitement, like a slow-burning coal hidden in a fire you thought you had put out.

Every time they came into contact they went in with a little more knowledge of each other, but none of it ever added up to anything that made sense. There wasn’t much to do on board, and it was dark belowdecks, and Sugimoto had been thinking weird thoughts about holding Ogata down by the scruff of the neck and seeing how long it’d take to get him to stop thrashing and lean into it. Everything was a struggle one way or another with him, and the physical kind was easier, more satisfying. Sugimoto preferred it to the strange half-conversations and denials. He wanted Ogata on his back on the floor of someplace, or in a bed, even, imagine that. Sugimoto’s imagination failed him in the finer details, but he wanted sounds they wouldn’t have to muffle. It was the first time he realized he’d started, at some point down the line, to imagine living a different sort of life than this. No uniforms, and no fucking with their mouths covered and backs to the wall.

It was kind of exciting, the idea of the two of them, out of here, even as it seemed unrealistic. Wherever here was—Sugimoto didn’t mean Manchuria, or not just that, because when they got back to Hokkaido it would be more of the same, being cooped up at Asahikawa like a bunch of farm animals. Maybe Ogata would lighten up a bit, if there weren’t orders involved and superior officers breathing down their necks. Sugimoto wasn’t so stupid as to think he’d ever be pleasant, but anyone would become more tolerable out in the open air without a bunch of rich guys telling them what to do.

If he was smart, he would’ve shaken sense back into himself, but the fantasy stuck around for Sugimoto to poke at from time to time. Three days at sea could feel very long indeed.

Chapter 8

To walk one-on-one with an enlisted man in broad daylight invited the glances of everyone around them, so Tsurumi must have been feeling bold, but Tsurumi had definitely been bold as of late. There were small scouting parties going out every day or so to see to tasks no one else was quite sure of, and Ogata himself had been part of a group assigned to do a complete inventory of the Asahikawa garrison’s armoury that he would’ve bet money hadn’t been approved by the brass. What was a little overfamiliarity with a superior private in comparison to that?

He’d approached Ogata as Ogata made his way back from the parade grounds in the late afternoon, looking as serene as was possible now that his features were fixed in a permanent state of faint shock. Ever since the bandages had come off and the scars were revealed, Tsurumi’s eyes looked perpetually wide with surprise. The healed tissue was tight around the eyelids. It had to be painful, but whenever pressed about it Tsurumi acted as if the damage to his head and face was only a mild inconvenience.

Tsurumi waved him over with a gloved hand and called, “Come with me, will you, Ogata? You’re excused from drills for the rest of the afternoon. I’ve already spoken to Corporal Tamai about it.”

Ogata’s skin prickled faintly in a mixture of anticipation and apprehension, but he followed, of course. He’d thought Tsurumi had tired of giving him off-the-record orders, but perhaps not. Ogata thought they would just walk for the sake of it, as a pretext for whatever oblique instructions Tsurumi was going to dispense to him next, but Tsurumi steered them through the buildings of the compound at too brisk a pace for that. The First Lieutenant clearly had a destination in mind, but Ogata didn’t realize what it was until Tsurumi stroked his moustache contemplatively and asked, “Have you been in to see your brother’s condition for yourself yet?”

A icy bolt of dread shot through his stomach. “Not yet.” He would not be paying any well-wishing visits to the Second Lieutenant if he could help it. The thought of standing across from him in that hospital room—he remembered, for a moment, the shift of Yuusaku’s head as he had looked back over his shoulder at Mukden, the light of familiarity that had flashed through his eyes—it’d been too dark and far away for Ogata to see what had happened to Yuusaku, really, besides the stream of blood across his face, dripping off his chin, and the sight of him turning as if in recognition before falling down.

“Really? Well, now you’ll get your chance.” If Tsurumi could tell the impact his words had on Ogata, he wasn’t showing it; he just continued to stroll towards the infirmary ward with his coattails fluttering in the chill breeze and a vague smile on his lips. Ogata kept his eyes on the horizon until they neared the entrance to the building. Faint traces of sunset, orange and lilac, stained the edges of the sky. As they neared the door, they came face to face with two men who had just exited: one was tall, young, dark, and fresh-faced, in the neatly-pressed attire of an officer cadet. Walking beside him was a shorter man with thick whiskers and the ornate uniform of a high-ranking officer. Just as Ogata squinted to make out the insignia, Tsurumi stopped in his tracks, bowed deeply, and said, “Lieutenant General Hanazawa! Pardon me, sir. I won’t keep you long.”

Ogata had only ever seen his father in photographs, at least within memory. Yuuskau’s height must have come from his mother; Hanazawa senior was physically unimpressive. He nodded distractedly, his face grave. “Of course, Tsurumi.”

Though the weather was warming, Tsurumi hadn’t yet switched out of his winter uniform; from the angle at which Ogata stood, most of Tsurumi’s face was obscured between the headplate and his high fur collar. “Were you and Cadet Koito with the Second Lieutenant?”

Hanazawa’s face was expressionless. “Yes, we were.”

Tsurumi reached out and laid a hand on the back of Ogata’s collar. Too familiar by half, even without the singular fingertip that, out of view of the others, stroked the nape of Ogata’s neck, where regulation crew cut faded into bare skin. “I was just accompanying Superior Private Ogata to see him, myself. Has there been any change?”

His father shook his head slowly, his eyes travelling down the length of Tsurumi’s arm to reach Ogata’s face. They had the same eyes. Hanazawa looked at him for no more than a few seconds before turning back to Tsurumi. “Not that they can see.”

Nothing in his father’s expression showed that he recognized Ogata at all, but there was no way he could not. Had his father ever touched him before? Did old man Hanazawa hold his firstborn son? It was worse to think he had, and still cast Ogata and his mother aside when a better son came along, than to think his father had been indifferent from the start.

“Ah. Well, the division will continue to hope for his recovery. We won’t disturb you any longer, sir.” Tsurumi bowed again, every inch the respectful subordinate, and lead Ogata inside the infirmary building.

Neither of them said a word as they made their way past cots of war wounded into a side corridor. Ogata’s limbs followed Tsurumi’s path automatically, but his mind was still on the other side of the door. He thought Tsurumi might have been humming under his breath a piece of music that sounded familiar, maybe a piece he’d played on the piano for the division some years back.

They passed countless nurses and men on crutches before Tsurumi led him inside a small room. There was a vase of fresh sunflowers on the bedside table. Two chairs had been set up so visitors could sit next to the cot and still look at the patient. Ogata took one when Tsurumi offered it to him. There was, indeed, someone lying in the cot, but he didn’t look at them; he kept his gaze on the patch of sky visible through the small window.

Tsurumi dispensed with appropriate observation of rank early on, as was his custom when they were alone. “Your father must be quite the actor. Not only can he look you in the face and pretend he doesn’t know who you are, he can look at me as if he isn’t responsible for the deaths of half my men.”

Ogata made a noncommittal sound from the back of his throat. Next to him, in the other chair, Tsurumi took off his gloves and folded them in his lap. “Some information has been fed to a group of men from another company regarding Noppera-bou’s convicts. They have reason to believe there will never be a better time to attempt to break them out. They will move within a fortnight. Noppera-bou himself cannot be moved, but this is the best chance we’ll get to seize hold of the gold map without the interference of the prison guards. That is, if there are no surprises.” Tsurumi glanced away from Ogata’s face and looked towards the cot. “They say he’s stable, but what happens next is anyone’s guess. Koito Otonoshin will replace Yuusaku as Acting Second Lieutenant, notwithstanding a sudden turnaround. He still hasn’t formally graduated from the Army Academy, but we can push that along without much trouble. His father is a trusted friend and ally. I have faith that his son will prove similarly loyal.” Great: another spoiled brat, this time from Tsurumi’s inner circle.

Tsurumi went on. “Of course, Yuusaku may still recover. It’s looking more unlikely by the day, but it would be an injustice to throw over those who have given the most so quickly, just because of the wounds they’ve sustained.” Ah. Now Ogata understood—Tsurumi was worried that, were Yuusaku put out to pasture, Central would start nosing around about his own condition. It was fun to watch Tsurumi pushed onto the back foot.

Tsurumi was watching Ogata’s face for a reaction. When he got nothing up to his liking, he commented, “You seem to be handling it well.”

“Sir?”

“Your brother is in a coma after being shot in action. I can’t imagine what you’re feeling.”

“It’s a loss to the unit,” Ogata ventured, unsure of where exactly Tsurumi was going, “but not the only one we’ve had.”

“Indeed,” said Tsurumi, bowing his head with all the necessary gravitas. The light from the window gleamed on the surface of the headplate. “And they all died with honour and will be remembered as heroes, yes. But still, your complicated relationship aside, it must come as quite a shock.”

Ogata had to bite his tongue not to come out with it and remind Tsurumi that there’d been a time they’d baldly discussed ways to efficiently dispatch Yuusaku, but Tsurumi never said or did anything without a purpose, so he bid his time. “I’m not sure how to feel about it, sir.”

Yuusaku should be dead. He wasn't meant to live this long. There was something so wrong about it. Ogata had thought he needed to see for himself before he could truly believe he was still alive, but now that he had the chance he was realizing he didn’t want to see Yuusaku at all. If Yuusaku woke up—

“From what I hear, you were even on the field when it happened. In eyeshot. Did you see it?”

A row of goosebumps rose on Ogata’s upper arms, but he kept his breathing steady. Just like lying in wait for a shot. “I saw him fall, but I didn’t see where the shot came from.”

“That’s too bad. I’d have loved to know exactly how it happened. Flag-bearers have a high mortality rate, of course, so maybe I should have expected it, but Yuusaku had this quality to him—well, you would know better than anyone. I suppose there are just some things we’ll never know.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Of course, we did talk about how it might indeed have been easier to move forward without him, hadn’t we? In some ways I think that’s still true. If you don’t mind my saying so.” Tsurumi still looked casual as ever, but Ogata felt an itch in his palms, an anticipation for whatever was happening to happen, for the latent threat to come out in the open and so it could be dealt with.

“I don’t mind. It’s true. He was a liability.”

“You see, Ogata, this is how I know you’re going to go far; your ability to judge a situation objectively is exceptional.”

“Thank you, sir.” Once upon a time, not so very long ago, he would've bought Tsurumi's line without question. Now the workings behind the maneuvers were so obvious he didn't know how he'd ever been taken in.

Tsurumi nudged Ogata’s foot with his own, too deliberately to be an accident. The pressure caught Ogata off-guard for a moment, sending a warm rush through his chest, and he almost leaned into it before he took stock of it for what it was: an unsubtle ploy. Tsurumi was back to playing the benevolent patriarch with one hand and the seducer with the other, like a pair of shadow-puppets. Well, too little too late. If he’d done this even a year ago he would’ve had Ogata eating out of the palm of his hand, but though patience was one of Ogata’s strengths, he couldn’t wait forever for something that might never come. There were other men in the world. Some, in fact, who were giving more than Tsurumi ever had without Ogata having to do much at all to earn it.

“There are a few matters that demand my attention first, but come, hmm, two weeks from now, would you join me in taking a trip to the other side of town? You could pay a call on your father while we’re in the neighborhood. I think we would both find it worth our while.” The toe of Tsurumi’s boot ran up the inside of Ogata’s ankle, resting over the bone there for a moment before dropping away.

“I’d be honoured.” So it had come time for that. He did allow himself a small smile at the thought of it, but the stale air and smell of flowers was pressing in on him from all sides. He was running out of places to fix his gaze so he didn’t have see Yuusaku breathe.

“Was there anything else, sir? I should report back.”

“Oh, no, that’s alright. Thank you for humouring me.” Ogata got to his feet; Tsurumi stayed seated. Tsurumi almost let him escape, but sure enough, before Ogata could close the door behind him, Tsurumi called back: “Hyakunosuke.” Ogata froze. Before he had the chance to turn around, Tsurumi continued, “I don’t mind that you did it, but I did tell you not to. So next time, make it count.”

-

The garrison at Asahikawa hadn’t changed in the time they were away, but it took longer than Ogata expected for it to once again feel familiar. Spring was on its way, but it hadn’t yet settled, and the soil was still frozen underfoot most mornings. He’d spent years here at the shooting range and make-work projects, and then they went to war and got the chance to do what they’d been practicing for; to come back and go back to running drills seemed impossible, yet there they were.

Not that everything was the same. From the first day they set foot back in headquarters, the change in energy from how things used to be was palpable. None among them seemed interested in celebrating their hard-won victory. On the contrary, some days it felt like the war hadn’t been won.

Tsurumi had always loved the sound of his own voice, but around the mess hall he started to deliver speech after speech in bits and pieces to the captive audience of hungry men. Never a whole monologue, just a few sentences here and there as everyone waited for their food: “The Colonel is coming by for an inspection of the base in a few days, so everyone should be on their best behaviour. I’m tempted to ask him where he was at 203 Hill, when we were shielding ourselves from bullets with the bodies of our own comrades? Pardon the unappetizing dinner conversation, but it must be said. I know these sentiments are shared by many of you. I hear the mutters, and I can’t blame you a bit.”

Ogata always knew Tsurumi had ambitions that went beyond the scope of his station, but it was amusing how little time it’d taken him to start to show his true face. The atmosphere whenever he got like this was always hushed, rapturous. The rest of the division hung on his every word, with a few exceptions. Corporal Tamai always had his eyes on the ground. Next to Ogata on the mess hall bench, Sugimoto’s thigh was always tight with tension, like he was ready to run.

-

After the poison Ogata fed her began to take hold, his mother had laid under blankets on the floor of the family home as she rotted away. His grandparents had fussed over her helplessly until they sent him to go fetch the doctor, though they couldn’t afford it. He’d walked all the way into town as slowly as he could, dragging his feet in the dirt, kicking at stones. He didn’t want to see her face. It didn’t upset him. It just wasn’t something he wanted to see.

The barracks he’d spent six years sleeping in looked the same as they had the day they had left for the coast, but half the beds were empty, now. Even so, the room was louder than it had been before. Across the aisle from him, Ogata watched Tanigaki toss back and forth as sleep eluded him also.

Had Tsurumi taken him to Yuusaku’s bedside to say he would cover it all up if Ogata were to return and finish him off? That would be impressive work, even for the First Lieutenant. Was it a taunt, then, reminding Ogata of his failure in order to keep him humble, or was Tsurumi motivated by some other, more inscrutable aim?

He tried to imagine himself standing over Yuusaku’s bedside and seeing his brother turn to him. Try as he might, even in his mind he couldn't make out what could possibly be behind Yuusaku’s eyes. Admonition, or lack of recognition, or forgiveness: he couldn't decide which would be worse. It would be better for everyone if Yuusaku never woke up, anyway. His brother wasn't like Tsurumi, he couldn't take being broken and make it work for him. He didn't have that ruthless nature. He should have been snuffed out the first time.

He saw it play out behind his eyelids with all the clarity and mutant logic of a dream: Tsurumi standing over Yuusaku's bedside, asking him in that honeyed tone what had happened to him, and Yuusaku turning to him, pointing a finger that reached all the way out and touched Ogata despite his not even being in the room—

He couldn’t kill him. Neither could he leave him alive. Ogata got up and crept out of the room, making sure that Sugimoto was truly asleep before he left the barracks. He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

It truly wasn’t hard to get into the infirmary after hours. They chained up the main doors, but all it took to bypass the lock on the back door was a few minutes’ jiggling with a needle.

Ogata spent a good few minutes crouched just inside the doorframe, where he tugged his stiff boots off so the sound of hobnails on the hard surface of the floor wouldn’t draw any unwanted attention. As he did so, his eyes begun to acclimatize to the darkness. The windows were all covered, so there was practically no light to speak of. Before long, he begun to make out shapes: cabinets, tables, shelving units, and rows of cots, almost all full. He waited for a sound of any kind to come out of the darkness, anything to indicate he’d woken any sleepers or alerted a night-nurse. Nothing came. Slowly, as though tracking prey, he got to his feet and padded noiselessly down the corridor with his boots hanging between the finger and thumb of one hand. His other hand rested on the hilt of his bayonet at his waist.

It wasn’t hard to retrace the steps Tsurumi had taken earlier. Yuusaku was tucked away from the other sick and injured in his own room. Ogata had to wonder if he’d been put there from the start by virtue of his status as an officer, or if their father took the credit for that piece of luxury. Had Lieutenant General Hanazawa had his son moved somewhere private so the rest of the rabble couldn’t see him when he came to visit, when he was at his weakest with grief for his beloved son?

Whatever the reason for Yuusaku’s seclusion, it made things easier for Ogata. The door to Yuusaku’s room wasn’t even locked. It slid open soundlessly at a gentle prod of his fingertips. Despite everything, Ogata still half-expected Yuusaku to turn around and face him looking whole and healthy, just smudged around the edges from a long rest. Needless to say, Yuusaku did not. He lay there, looking for all the world like a corpse if it weren’t for the barely-there rise and fall of his chest.

The place smelled like alcohol and piss and blood. The air was dry and stifling. It was no place for someone pure. Someone like that had no place in this world, least of all hovering between life and death in an empty room in a barren place like this. Ogata would be doing him a kindness by finishing what he’d started—not that kindness was why he’d come here. He took a step closer to the cot and let the door slide closed behind him.

Only a few petals had yet fallen from the sunflowers on the bedside table.

Ogata had brought his bayonet with him, but now that he stood in front of Yuusaku it was clear that he wouldn’t do. Even if he took the time to clean up the blood, someone would no doubt look over the body and see the wound, no matter how tidily he went about it. This wasn’t like it’d been with his mother; there was no way he could get poison into Yuusaku in a way people wouldn’t notice, even if he had any, which he didn’t. That kind of thing required forethought. Ogata hadn’t had the chance to think through what he’d come here to do before he did it. It was a question of acting or going out of his mind, and he had chosen to act.

He leaned over the cot, careful not to make a sound. Yuusaku lay on his back. The crown of his head was wound in gauze, as Tsurumi’s had been, but his face was exposed. It was pale and unlined, a little skinnier than it used to be, his cheekbones and nose looking harsh against thin cheeks. His head was turned towards the covered window, blocking Ogata’s view of the place where he knew the entry wound lay beneath the bandages. For all he could get at it it might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. Though, if Yuusaku were really comatose, Ogata could surely turn his head, peel aside the wrappings just enough to get a look at the wound—Ogata reached out a hand, but before his fingers even touched flesh, as soon as he came close enough to feel the warmth of Yuusaku’s face, Yuusaku’s eyelashes fluttered as if he was about to wake. It took all his willpower not to jump backwards. He did, however, pull his hand back.

No use waiting around any longer. He ought to just do it and have it done with. Ogata took hold of the corner of one of the pillows under Yuusaku’s head and carefully begun to pull it free. This was the kind of sleep people didn’t wake from, so he didn’t truly need to be so careful, but looking at Yuusaku it was hard not to think he was just lying there dreaming and would sit up as soon as he was disturbed. It was still better to go about things deliberately.

After long seconds, the pillow slid out into Ogata’s grasp and Yuusaku’s head fell back on the mattress with a soft thud. His hair fanned out against the off-white linen, the contrast stark enough to make out even in the darkness.

The first time, when he’d shot Yuusaku, he’d felt many things, anticipation among them. Now he just wanted it to come to an end. His limbs were alight with a dull tingling, like they were full of pins and needles. He brought the pillow down over Yuusaku’s face, but didn’t press it yet, just rested it there. He glanced back at the vase of flowers on the bedside table. They were already drooping from the lack of light. Had soon-to-be-Second-Lieutenant Koito brought them, or another visitor, or had it been their father?

He steadied himself and begun to press the pillow down. He heard the heavy sounds of his own breath in his ears. The seconds crawled by. He thought he saw the fingers of one of Yuusaku’s hands twitch overtop of the sheets. It had to be done now, hadn’t it? It was hard to know. Ogata pulled the pillow away to check when he heard a clattering sound in the distance and then footsteps. Two pairs, and voices approaching. He shoved the pillow back under Yuusaku’s head and considered for a moment whether he should hide under the cot, should they come in to check on Yuusaku as part of nightly rounds, before he stepped onto the bedside table, using all his care not to knock over the vase, and unhooked the window latch. If he’d been much bigger he wouldn’t have fit, but he was able to throw his boots down onto the earth and then pull himself up and out of the frame. He cast Yuusaku one last look back over his shoulder before dropping down in a vain attempt to see whether he’d been successful but, of course, Yuusaku looked like he was sleeping just the same.

-

One of the upsides of Tsurumi’s increasingly brazen coup-in-the-making was that it was easier than ever to find opportunities for off-the-record talks of all kinds. For example: when Ogata approached the Lance-Corporal in charge of a group checking artillery pieces over for damage and said, “I was sent for Private First Class Sugimoto. First Lieutenant Tsurumi’s orders,” the Lance-Corporal only gave Ogata a brief suspicious glance before he nodded and let Ogata pull Sugimoto away.

As the two of them walked away in the other direction, back towards the main buildings, Sugimoto muttered, “Again? What does he need me for?”

“He doesn’t. I do. Come on, we don’t have all day.”

There was an outbuilding just off of the army hospital where, among other things, the infirmary had previously been storing all the extra cots. Luckily for the two of them, all of those were currently in use, and so the shed was roomier inside than it used to be. Not that it’d stopped anyone before; the screws holding the latch on were loose enough they could be removed without much trouble, and so it was a well-worn spot in the division for encounters of all kinds. Ogata had gotten fucked by a visiting cavalry officer in there when he was still just a first-class private. That wasn’t what he wanted Sugimoto for now, but it would serve them just as well. Ogata quickly glanced around them to make sure they weren’t being watched, and then opened up the door and pulled Sugimoto inside by the wrist.

“Has this been here the whole time?” Sugimoto squinted around the darkness as Ogata shut the door behind them.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about this place, Sugimoto.”

“Alright, what’s this about? You better have a pretty good reason to have pulled that shit with the Lance-Corporal.”

“I needed to talk to you about something.”

Sugimoto had a keen look in his eye. “Spit it out, then. I know you’re up to something, so you might as well say it.”

Ogata leaned against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. “Do you believe me now? I said Tsurumi had big plans. You really think any of this stuff he’s got us doing has been approved by Central Command, what with how he’s been talking?”

“What are you saying?”

“What do you think all the weird orders have been about? They've already begun mobilizing supply trains out of here, towards Otaru. My bet is he's going to lead a raid on the armoury soon. Read between the lines a little, Sugimoto. We're running out of time.”

Sugimoto crouched down, his hands hanging down loosely by the wrists between his legs for a moment before he reached up to take his cap off and scratch at the short hairs across his scalp. “Okay, so Tsurumi’s up to something. I’m supposed to trust you’re telling the truth about all this?”

After a moment, Ogata sat down across from him, cross-legged. “I’m not on Tsurumi’s orders, if that’s what you mean.” Ogata glanced at him. Sugimoto was frowning, his gaze fixed on nothing. He looked far away. Ogata leaned in closer and placed a hand on Sugimoto’s knee. “I've been with the First Lieutenant long enough to know how he thinks. I told you, remember, back on the train? Tsurumi's holding us all hostage here. If he really is trying for a coup, he knows he can't pull it off with only the men who would agree to it. It's suicide to go up against the government like that. He’s too delusional to realize he can't win, even if he gets the gold, and so we'll all go down with him as traitors unless we leave, and soon.”

He expected more protestations, but Sugimoto just tilted his head, regarded Ogata, and then started to laugh, just a dry sort of chuckle under his breath. “Okay, so we leave. And then what?”

“We beat him to it. We could be halfway to Otaru before they notice we’ve gone.” Ogata slid a knee in between Sugimoto’s legs. The room was windowless and drafty, and Sugimoto was warm.

Sugimoto glanced up at his face and made a noise in the back of his throat, and Ogata didn’t touch him any more, waiting for Sugimoto to make a move, as Ogata knew he would. He was so predictable. Just as he thought, one of Sugimoto’s hands landed on the small of his back and pulled Ogata closer in, so they were pressed together chest to chest.

He hadn’t had this in mind when he’d pulled Sugimoto aside this afternoon, but they were alone and wouldn’t be missed for a while yet. It could work to Ogata’s advantage, too, to keep Sugimoto distracted and well fed. Tsurumi had been a better teacher to him than the man might have intended.

Ogata would remain in control. Sugimoto was a simple man, easily led. The circumstances weren’t ideal, but if Ogata acted quickly, he could still come out of this mess with something to show for it. Sugimoto would like it, so just this once Ogata would go along with it—he curled a hand around the back of Sugimoto’s neck and brought him in closer to his own face. Sweetness to make the medicine go down easier; he could afford that.

“What do you say, Sugimoto the Immortal? Do you want to stay here and play Tsurumi’s mad dog, or do you want to be free?”

Sugimoto didn’t say anything, but he pulled Ogata in by a hand clasped in the collar of Ogata’s shirt. He’d guessed correctly. Sugimoto wanted to be kissed. The tension and suspicion in his frame melted away after half a minute of it. His hands grasped at Ogata’s waist for a little while until Sugimoto wrenched him down by the elbow. Ogata was sprawled on his back in the scant floorspace and Sugimoto crawled over top of him to kneel between Ogata’s legs, eyes wide and victorious.

Whatever he might say or believe about himself, Sugimoto liked causing Ogata pain. Ogata liked it too, so that was fine. He’d looked at Sugimoto for the first time, months ago, and seen something he recognized. They were cards drawn from the same deck.

Before long Sugimoto was grinding his hips against Ogata’s thigh impatiently, fumbling through Ogata’s clothes, pulling layers out of the way. This was all familiar by now, and fine, but he didn’t know the next time they’d get the chance, so when Sugimoto moved down to Ogata’s waist with a determined set of the brows, Ogata lifted his hips to help him get his trousers off and said, “You can fuck me, you know. If that’s what that look on your face is about.”

Sugimoto flushed. “Okay. I—yeah.”

“You have gun oil, don’t you? Just use that.” Sugimoto reached for Ogata’s belt, and Ogata sat up on his hands in indignation. “Not mine, yours.”

“I might still change my mind,” Sugimoto muttered, and he pushed Ogata back onto the floor with a hand on the chest while he fumbled for his own oil canister with the other.

He took to it well. Didn’t waste too much time getting him ready; just enough, and even that was pretty good. He had long fingers and strong hands. Sugimoto was the same while fucking as he was on the battlefield: frantic, looking for the exit, his movements sure and his strength enough to take what it liked. He liked to bite down, to take a chunk out of whatever flesh was put in front of him. He had a mouth made for rending. The feeling of his hips wedging Ogata’s thighs apart was insistently present, more solid than a rock face—it was better than he'd even imagined, all the times he'd imagined this. It was too dark to see much. Sugimoto's fists bunched in the heavy canvas that he'd pushed up around Ogata's chest.

The sound of Sugimoto's breath came in sharp, warm puffs next to Ogata’s ear. It felt like Sugimoto was reaching up inside him and clawing at something Ogata hadn’t known was there. Sugimoto thrust against him hard enough Ogata bit down on his own tongue, and his mouth filled with blood. He wanted to laugh, felt like he had to, like the suffocating feeling in his chest was going to spill out somehow, but the closest he got was a low, rough gasping in time with the way Sugimoto moved against him.

Sugimoto's eyes didn't leave his. It was the gaze of two predators measuring each other up at the boundary between their territories. Sugimoto's tongue kept flicking out to wet his lip; Ogata didn't think he even knew he was doing it. Colour rose high in his cheeks, blushing across his face and over his scars. Three slashes, it'd been, and one right across the mouth. Sugimoto was lucky he hadn’t lost any teeth.

If Ogata killed Sugimoto he wouldn’t want it to be like all the others. He’d want to be nearby, and in the light, not the darkness, so Ogata could see his brains spray out behind him. Sugimoto deserved a death as wild as the man was in life. In the light, so Sugimoto would know—Ogata would make sure he knew who pulled the trigger: he’d look him in the eye and get him in the centre of his forehead like a fairground trick-shot.

Although, if he found the right opening, got him in a moment of weakness, he could get a blade around Sugimoto’s neck and slice it right through. Sugimoto looked good with blood on him, it didn’t matter whose it was. Hand-to-hand combat was never Ogata’s style, but he’d want to be close enough to watch the life fade from Sugimoto’s eyes. To feel the way he’d struggle and thrash and go limp. To dip his fingers into the wound as the blood spattered out of Sugimoto’s jugular in the seconds before his heart stopped beating completely. Ogata could catch him as he fell, hold his cheek, feel Sugimoto’s blood seep into his own clothes to cover his skin, like Sugimoto had when Yuusaku—

Ogata shook his head, trying to clear it, and scratched his nails down Sugimoto’s back. Hopefully it’d draw blood. If Sugimoto got the message, he’d get serious and do something that would hurt, hopefully bad enough to stop Ogata’s mind from running any further towards things it didn’t do him any use to think about.

It didn’t work: Sugimoto just leaned up on his elbows and looked down at Ogata with furrowed brows. “Settle down.”

Ogata remembered with a jolt the dream he’d had the night before, where Yuusaku sleepwalked all the way to the barracks and loomed overtop of Ogata as he slept until Ogata woke to the feeling of blood dripping from Yuusaku’s wound down into his mouth, enough for him to choke on. Ogata shut his eyes so he didn’t have to look at Sugimoto’s face. He pushed himself up just enough to bite into a tendon in the side of Sugimoto’s neck, and then muttered against his skin, “Roll me over.”

“What?”

Ogata cleared his throat, dry from exertion, and said, “Turn me around.”

Sugimoto pulled back for a second, just long enough to scan Ogata’s face as if he expected some kind of trick, before he seized Ogata by the shoulders and manhandled him into a position face-down, ass-up. Ogata laughed under his breath, and for his trouble Sugimoto pushed all the way back in in one rough stroke. Ogata braced his forehead on his forearms until those gave out, too, and he steadied himself with his forehead resting on the ground. The floor was cold against his cheek. His breath came chafed and raw.

They fucked at a blistering pace after that. Sugimoto’s hands were curled around Ogata’s shoulders, so close to his neck that if he just reached out a little further he could cut off Ogata’s air entirely. Sugimoto was capable of it. On the battlefield Ogata had seen him twist a man’s neck between his palms until it snapped. That wouldn’t be such a terrible way to go. Ogata had never choked a man to death, but he could imagine what it would sound like: harsh splutters and ugly gasps, like the sound of drowning without the water to muffle it. Once he started, Sugimoto wouldn’t stop. He wasn’t one to let go of his prey.

Sugimoto slid the hand gripping Ogata’s left shoulder across to his bicep, then further down the length of Ogata’s arm to his hand, where Sugimoto enveloped the back of Ogata’s hand in the palm of his own before lacing their fingers together. He dug his jagged fingernails into Ogata’s skin like he was trying to carve new lines there. An unfamiliar feeling twisted through him; Ogata wanted to tear his hand away at the same time as he wanted to hold on tighter. Sugimoto’s breathing quickened, his thrusts faltering, and he started to pull out, probably trying to be polite, or something, but Ogata reached back with his free hand and pulled Sugimoto back in by the haunches. Sugimoto let out a strained sound and mumbled something incoherent against the base of Ogata’s neck that trailed off into nothingness as his movements slowed.

Ogata kept rocking back against him, his hips chasing the softening pressure. Sugimoto pushed Ogata down so he was prone against the ground, and then followed him, flattening his chest against Ogata’s back as he reached around to seize hold of Ogata’s cock and tugged so hard it hurt. That was right. He’d gotten the message, in the end. When Ogata came, it hurt too, the intensity of it. His vision whited out at the edges, and he was vaguely aware his limbs were being pushed and pulled around again, even though it was over. After a few moments, he blinked and noticed he was no longer lying on the hard floor, but that Sugimoto had sat up to lean against the wall and maneuvered Ogata’s head onto his lap.

He couldn’t fall asleep here, however warm the thigh against which his cheek rested. He would get up and right himself as soon as the muscles in his legs stopped trembling. Ogata’s collar was unbuttoned, and the hand that cupped the back of his neck slid down just far enough to drum its fingertips against his bare collarbone.

“Did you get what you needed out of me, then?”

At that, Ogata opened one eye and glanced up. Sugimoto was looking down at him, his skin still a little flushed from effort. His jacket was unbuttoned enough Ogata could watch the bones of his ribcage shift beneath his flesh as he breathed. Despite the scars there and across his face, which had ceased to be red and were now a faded, dusty pink, Sugimoto looked like he had when they first met. Prickly but a little shy, like a gangly boy not yet grown into his shape.

Ogata bit back the impulse to say he didn’t need anything from anyone, least of all Sugimoto. It wouldn’t serve his aims to try and distance himself now. Even so, he hadn’t needed this; it was convenience, nothing more. Just wanting to linger didn’t mean anything. It was animal instinct. Sugimoto was the clingy one. Instead, Ogata ignored the question and let his eyes slide closed for a minute. Their absences would be noticed before long, and he had a lot of work to do and only about a fortnight to do it. But for a moment more, he let the warmth from the body under his soak into his bones.

In an ideal world, Ogata could’ve waited it out until the time was right. Maybe he would’ve been able to feel around for any other malcontents they could bring into the fold to take the fall for them if needed. There was still a lot he didn’t know. But if they seized the right moment, they could catch up to the prisoners before they had the chance to disperse too widely. If they did that, he and Sugimoto could manage without the rest of Tsurumi’s intel. They could make it on their own. They were capable. The gold would be theirs—and when Sugimoto stopped being useful, Ogata could take care of him, too.

No funeral had been called for Yuusaku, so he must remain in stasis, sleeping away in his hospital bed. Ogata couldn’t stay here much longer under the shadow of that. If Yuusaku couldn’t be killed, one of them had to go, one way or another.

Chapter 9

Notes

Content warning: all the usual morbid subject matter plus a Tsurumi-typical torture scene (think Nikaidou's ear or dango sticks) involving hand/nail injury in the first section. It's not described in extreme detail, but it is there, and if you want to skip it, scroll until the first scene break.

“Did you see Koito’s face during all that?”

That was one of the Nikaidous. Sugimoto still hadn’t figured out how to tell between Kouhei and Youhei. Didn’t really matter which was which when they acted exactly the same. Across the table from them, Sugimoto cast a blurry thought for how odd it must be to have a shadow that followed you everywhere and went along with every one of your dumb schemes, and to whether you ever got sick of them, or just accepted them as part of life, part of yourself.

Next to Sugimoto, Ogata let out a dark chuckle. Hearing him laugh at all, let alone in the presence of others, was rare enough Sugimoto blinked at the sound. “He looked like he was going to come his pants right there.”

Alongside some other guys from the barracks, they were working their way through a lukewarm bottle of cheap sake someone had won in a game of cards. The all that Nikaidou mentioned was the events of that morning’s muster. Tsurumi had pulled some fingernails off an attempted deserter amidst the spring sunshine, explaining that, though deserters were often shot during wartime, a good man was too precious to waste. Nails, after all, would grow back before long.

The kid was a Private First-Class, like Sugimoto had been until recently. No one Sugimoto knew well—he still hadn’t gotten to know many of these guys past their names and an idea of whom you did or didn’t want to get stuck with on work detail. Besides Ogata, of course. Sugimoto didn’t think a day had gone by in almost a year where they hadn’t seen each other. More than most married couples could say.

This guy, though—he’d been real sloppy about it. Embarrassing for aspiring deserters everywhere. He’d been on evening watch duty the night before and tried to sneak out the main gate until he got spotted by one of the other scouts down the line. He probably hadn’t even planned it out, just talked himself into it over the course of a long and lonely shift alone in the dark. As a result, they all had to watch Tsurumi have his fun. It wouldn’t have been so surprising were they still back in the trenches. Worse things befell a wartime coward. But they were home, the war was won, on paper at least, and Tsurumi was twirling a pair of pliers between his fingers with his other hand on the scruff of a private’s neck. Nikaidou was referring to how Second Lieutenant Koito had stood close by with a hand on his pommel and a glazed expression of such open arousal Sugimoto almost felt embarrassed for him.

He hadn’t gone for them all; Tsurumi left the thumb and index finger intact on both hands. The guy held up well, to his credit; he didn’t scream, just let out some muffled grunts and retched into the dirt a bit.

Tsurumi had talked throughout it all, of course. “Is it fair for any one of us to let our comrades in arms fight for the world we deserve while he takes the easy way out?” There went a nail. “Tell me. Do you think that’s fair?”

“No sir,” the man gasped.

“Are you sorry for what you’ve done to them? Will you beg for their forgiveness?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I—I was selfish. I—ahhk.” There went the next finger over.

“Will you ever do something so cowardly again?”

“No, First Lieutenant Tsurumi, sir, I’ll be your man for as long as you need—”

Tsurumi let him down then, but not as harshly as he could have. He steadied the man’s elbow with the touch of a gloved hand. When it looked as though he’d be able to stand on his own, Tsurumi clapped his hands together and said, “Now—breakfast?”

That was half a day ago, but this was the first Sugimoto had heard anyone else talk about it. The most surprising thing about it was how little time it took for people to settle back into what passed in the division for normalcy. There was some shock in the air, definitely, or maybe just uncertainty; uneasy mutters, at the least, but everyone still managed to eat breakfast before heading out to carry out the demands of the day. For all Sugimoto knew, things were just the same in the 1st right now. Maybe the war really was that bad, and every unit had to get used to watching their First Lieutenants forgo dishonourable discharges for torture before the clock struck nine.

Sugimoto was reaching for what was left of the bottle when Tanigaki, who hardly ever said anything in the way of casual conversation, gestured at his sleeve. “Congratulations, Sugimoto. You earned it.”

“Oh,” Sugimoto replied, ducking his head and rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. “Thanks.”

As promised, they weren’t back at Asahikawa long before Sugimoto turned in his uniforms for a new set, identical but for the condition—new and starchy—and the added band around the wrist. He and Ogata matched, now, a fact that Ogata didn’t like and so Sugimoto made sure to bring up as often as possible (“I don’t have to call you ‘sir’ anymore, didn’t you hear?”—“As if you ever did.”).

He wasn’t the only recent promotion around the garrison, of course. Second Lieutenant Koito lost the “Acting” part of his title not long after he arrived at the barracks with trunks of god-knows-what in tow that some second-class privates had to help move in off the carriage he’d come in on.

It wasn’t quite right to say Sugimoto had liked Hanazawa. It was more accurate to say he hadn’t disliked him. In another life, where they had different ranks and different family trees, they could’ve been friends. As it was, Sugimoto didn’t miss him much, just felt bad that Hanazawa was laid up the way that he was and hoped he’d wake up and get let out of here so he could get honourably discharged, go back to wherever it was he grew up, marry some nice girl, and not have to live up to the legacy of his father any longer.

At least, that was the case until Second Lieutenant Koito took up his post. After that, Sugimoto would’ve given a lot to get Hanazawa back, even if he was only going to be around a little longer himself. Two weeks around Koito was two weeks too many.

Koito was vain, preening, slavishly besotted with Tsurumi, and completely clueless about the very men he’d been appointed to lead. Even if Sugimoto hadn’t known that Koito was fresh out of the academy and younger than most of the unit, he could’ve figured it out from the way he acted. He wandered around after Tsukishima, deferring to the sergeant for everything until it came time to pull rank, which he did with relish.

Though Ogata could hardly have been said to be on good terms with anyone, most of the guys had gotten used to him through long-term exposure. It helped that Ogata wasn’t exactly insubordinate; he paid technical respect to rank and expected the same from the poor souls under him, even if the flatness of his tone always made his own deference sound less than sincere. This was why Sugimoto was surprised when Ogata began pushing his luck with Koito right away. It wasn’t two days before Ogata was mocking Koito’s accent within his full earshot, for which he got put on hard labour shifts for days. Sugimoto was lucky to have gotten off easy himself, since he’d definitely laughed. He wasn’t sure where Ogata’s immediate vitriol towards a man he’d never met had come from, but couldn’t exactly say it was misplaced.

Under the surface of the table, Sugimoto could feel the warmth of Ogata’s leg next to his own. Ogata was letting his guard down a little, probably from the alcohol. Sugimoto usually didn’t see him drink even if he had the opportunity, but he figured this was Ogata putting in effort to blend in with the rest of the crowd. What it was doing was making him handsy. Sober, Ogata wasn’t affectionate by anyone’s standards. He hadn’t drunk all that much tonight, as far as Sugimoto had seen, but when no one was looking at them Ogata took advantage of the dimness of their surroundings to run a hand up under the back of Sugimoto’s jacket. Sugimoto expected to get pinched or scratched, one of those things Ogata did just to get some attention of any kind, even punishment, but after it happened a few times without any quick-to-follow pain it seemed like Ogata just wanted to touch him for touching’s sake.

-

The two of them had stolen away after dinner earlier that night, before they joined the others for drinks. Sugimoto’s pockets were full of extra anpan he’d stolen off the cook’s cart. Ogata trailed behind him as they crept out back to the spot behind the kitchens that Sugimoto had gotten fond of before they’d shipped out. They sat next to each other on the back step; Sugimoto worked his way through the leftovers while Ogata sketched a shape in the dirt with the tip of a twig.

Sugimoto nudged the corner of the drawing with the tip of his boot and spoke around a mouthful of bread: “Is that supposed to be Hokkaido? It looks like shit.”

“And you think you could do better? I’d like to see it. Here, go ahead, Sugimoto the Artist.” Ogata jabbed Sugimoto in the ribs with the twig before dropping it on the ground. Sugimoto picked it up and, after his own attempt to replicate what maps of the island he’d seen turned out looking more like the outline of a dog, threw the stick over the nearby fence.

The day had been warm and clear, the evening’s chill only just beginning to set in. Ogata was tucked inside his cloak, which was buttoned up to the chin to keep out the cold air, but he kept the hood down so Sugimoto could see his face. “It’ll be confusion when we start to head out. Tsurumi will have more on his mind than keeping track of two privates when he’s busy moving the whole platoon out of the garrison to Otaru on false pretences.”

“Why Otaru, anyway? If he’s already got Lieutenant Colonel Yodogawa under his thumb, why not stay here?”

“Noppera-bou told the convicts to make for Otaru once they get out. Tsurumi’s got some guys from one of the other platoons lined up to take the fall—they should be springing the prisoners with the tattoos before long. Either they’re successful and they bring them to Otaru for Tsurumi to collect, or they get overtaken and the prisoners head for Otaru anyway. Whatever happens, there are only so many roads into the city. If we move out on our own faster than the whole division can, we can intercept at least enough of them to put ourselves in a strong position to figure out the rest of the map.” Ogata pointed at one of the squiggles he’d drawn in his map. “To move that many men and supply trains, the platoon is going to take the main road. We can cut through on some of the footpaths through the woods and make better time.”

He coughed, and turned to Ogata. “So what do we need to get done that we haven’t yet?”

“We need supplies—extra rations, so at meals you should start pocketing food that’ll keep—and not to give it away that we’re planning anything.”

“How much time do you think we’ve got?”

“Twelve days, or about that.” Ogata’s words were muffled a little by a crashing sound from the kitchen behind them, like pans crashing to the floor, followed by loud cursing.

“What makes you so sure?”

“I’ve got my sources.”

“Seems like it might be harder to get away when the whole division’s on the move. Everyone will be on high alert. I think we could do it sooner than that, even if that kid couldn’t manage it.”

“No. Trust me, we should leave when the division’s already mobilizing.” Ogata was staring at the map in the dirt with a distracted look in his eye, until he blinked and looked up to scrutinize Sugimoto. “So what will you do with your half?”

“What, of the gold?” Sugimoto leaned against the support beam at his back and tilted his head to the side. “I haven’t decided.”

“Haven’t decided, or don’t know?”

“Why, what do you want it for, then? You already get ammo from the quartermaster. I don’t know what else you’d spend money on.” That earned him a glare, which was good. It was the kind of reaction he'd been looking for. Ogata was pretty predictable, once you got to know him, but prodding at him hadn’t gotten any less fun. “Are you going to build yourself a castle so you can hole up and never see anyone ever again?”

“I’ve got some ideas.”

“But you won’t tell me? Come on.” He poked Ogata in the side with a finger, like Ogata had jabbed him with the stick, but not as hard. “What, do you think I’m going to spill it to the rest of these idiots?”

“Immortal or not, I don’t want Tsurumi finding out everything about me if he interrogates you and you break.”

“Yeah, yeah, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Ogata looked down his nose. Impressive, considering he was shorter than Sugimoto and they were sitting on the same stair. “Please tell me you’re not just planning on going back to Tokyo to give it all to your married sweetheart.”

“Figured you wouldn’t be into that. I wouldn’t give it to her, anyway; I’d give it to her and her husband. They’ve got a kid they want to put through university.” He hadn’t really thought about it in so many words, but now that Sugimoto said it, he was surprised by how right it sounded.

Ogata didn’t look satisfied. He turned his chest towards Sugimoto and crossed his right ankle over his other thigh. “And then what would you do?”

“Try to live a normal life, I guess.”

“Rogue division or not, we’re about to desert the army, you realize? You'll be a wanted man forever, unless you create a new identity and find some kind of work you can do where they won't ask many questions. Unless you want to work in a herring fishery until your body falls apart, there's not much left to do.” Ogata's eyes were alight with a queer glow to them that made it hard to look away.

“So what, then? Ride off into the sunset with you and... rob banks?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ogata muttered, but he glanced back out into the trees lining the horizon.

Sugimoto savoured that for a second—it was as close to a confession as he figured he’d ever get. He rolled his neck from side to side, letting the sore bones crack. “So who else have you told about all this?”

Ogata blinked, and the moment was gone. “Everyone who knows becomes a weak link. We don't need anyone else. We can travel faster just the two of us.”

“I had to ask. No way for me to know I was your first choice.” He’d guessed, but he’d wanted to make Ogata say it. “How long do you think it’s going to take him to realize we’ve gone?” There wasn’t any need to specify which he Sugimoto meant.

Ogata rarely smiled and it was usually creepy when he did, but at the thought of Tsurumi catching on to them he did give Sugimoto an off-kilter look of something approaching normal amusement. “He’s a busy man. Long enough for us to get halfway to the next prefecture, if we time it properly.”

“He’ll skin us alive if he catches up to us, huh?”

“Cut off each of our noses and feed them to the other, probably,” said Ogata with genuine glee in his voice. His smile was wider now and back to creepy—not that it stopped Sugimoto’s own face from responding in kind with a grin that curled around his mouth.

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

The sun was only just beginning to dip beyond the tree-line, and Ogata’s face was half-cast over with shadow. “Has Tsurumi been calling for you again?”

“Not since we got back.”

“If he starts making requests of you, be careful how far you play along.”

Yeah, no shit. “Not like we’ll be here much longer anyway, is it?”

“It might not be big. He likes to ask for favours.”

“What, he’s going to make me jerk him off or something?”

“Not physically.” Ogata’s smile faded a little. “One time he put me up to demonstrating at the range for a bunch of officers from Tokyo who were touring the base, like a trained monkey.”

Ogata spoke about his past so rarely that even this small of an admission took Sugimoto aback. Even if Tsurumi directed his skin-crawling pull onto anyone it suited him, it was still clear that Ogata had different history with him than most. There was a certain edge to the bitterness in his voice when he spoke about him. It was more emotion than he showed about almost anything else, besides his brother, and that was a different kind, though just as opaque. “That doesn’t sound so bad. I thought you’d have had fun.”

“I could live without having to listen to a bunch of my father’s friends talk about how impressive it is that such a marksman could have come up out of basic training instead of the army academy.” Ogata took his cap off and spun it around his index finger before letting it fall to the ground. “That, and I hate wasting ammo on targets that don’t bleed.”

“Huh.” Sugimoto uncrossed his legs and let one of his knees push loosely against Ogata’s own. “Well, soon neither of us will have to play tricks anymore.”

“No.” The corner of Ogata’s mouth hitched up again. “Assuming you don’t blow it for us before we get away, of course.”

Sugimoto leaned in closer to crowd Ogata against the post behind his back. “Do you talk to all the guys you go ‘absent without leave’ with like that, or is it just me?”

Ogata didn’t say anything, just blinked at him, apparently content to wait it out, but Sugimoto could tell he liked where Sugimoto was heading. He wanted to hold Ogata loosely by the throat and suck on his tongue a little. He thought about it for a second and decided there was nothing stopping him, so he did. Ogata let out a deep, purring sound of satisfaction from within his chest. Greedy hands with slim, blunt fingers roamed across Sugimoto’s chest. His mouth tasted familiar.

He could hear the bang of swinging doors and the patter of cooks’ voices from the other side of the wall. Someone could come out at any moment to pour out a bucket of waste-water, or just to tell them to get lost. They couldn’t screw out here, shouldn’t even be doing this in the first place—the map in the dirt by their feet was sketchy enough. Sugimoto let the concern run through him like water and then pulled back a little, the tips of his ears burning, though he didn’t take his hand away from where it cupped the side of Ogata’s neck.

Over Ogata’s shoulder, the setting sun was a warm and violent orange smear across the sky. Ogata looked giddy up close. Maybe it was just the angle, but his eyes looked like they were lit up from behind. Sugimoto looked away from his face, feeling his own neck heat up, and he scuffed up the makeshift map with the side of his shoe until there was nothing behind but dirt.

-

The parade grounds the following day were swarming with activity like the inside of a wasp’s nest. On one half of the yard were drills, while on the other a repair station had been set up for the wagons that were going to carry a platoon’s worth of dry goods halfway across the island. Tsurumi was crafty, all right: he hadn’t given them much of any time to rest since the war ended. It had been one thing after another. If they’d had some time to lie around in the sun and see their families back home, the idea of throwing it all in with their First Lieutenant’s quest for glorious revenge might’ve stopped seeming so appealing to most of them. But they’d been run nearly into the ground since they got back on this project or another, and subjected to cryptic (and, lately, completely transparent—three days earlier: “Is this the fate the strongest unit in the army, who raised the flag atop 203 Hill at the cost of half its strength, deserves? Is this what you were promised?”) monologues without so much as a chance to catch their breath.

Once again, Ogata’s intuition about Tsurumi proved to be good. Sugimoto was fixing up one of the empty shooting ranges, replacing shot-through targets with fresh ones, when he felt a prickle on the back of his neck: he turned around and there he was, the man himself, looming like a bird of prey. Tsurumi smiled genially, his eyes widening a little further, as if he’d just happened to end up behind Sugimoto on a casual stroll around the garrison instead of doing any of the things he no doubt had to take care of before leading a unit of soldiers into treason by the end of the month.

“You’re just the man I hoped to find. Far be it from me to disturb you, but walk with me, will you?”

There was no way to avoid it: he followed Tsurumi along the footpath towards the officer’s wing. He hadn’t been back there since the day he’d first arrived, fresh off the boat from Honshu. If this was the leadup to Tsurumi revealing that the gig was up and he knew what they were planning, Sugimoto wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or more concerned about the fact it was going to take place out of sight from the rest of the men. Tsurumi lead him to that very same room with the 1LT placard next to the door behind which Sugimoto had first met him, and held the door open for him: “Come in, Sugimoto. Make yourself comfortable.”

Like hell he would. Even so, there wasn’t anything to do but follow as Tsurumi bid him. An array of desserts lay on the table in the centre of the room, still in their packaging: a selection of daifuku that looked more expensive than most things Sugimoto had eaten in his life. Officer he might be, but Sugimoto also knew that First Lieutenants didn’t get paid that much, in the grand scale of things. That Tsurumi might be on the receiving end of gifts from rich friends wasn’t much of a surprise, but it still irked him.

They knelt opposite each other on either side of the low table, on the same level, like a family at supper. Tsurumi seemed like the type who liked that, who wanted to maintain the illusion of equality between them even in circumstances that rendered it obviously false.

“Do you like mochi, Sugimoto?”

“I haven’t had much of it, sir.”

Tsurumi passed him one of the pieces, small, white, perfectly round and coated in a fine layer of starch. His eyes watched Sugimoto’s hand as he raised the mochi to his mouth and bit down.

“I’m not sure whether you know this, Sugimoto, but the First Lieutenant you had in the 1st wanted to see you thrown out with a dishonourable discharge.” Between the sudden burst of sweetness in his mouth and Tsurumi’s lack of preamble, it took effort for Sugimoto not to give a start. He kept it together well, he thought, just glancing up at Tsurumi’s face with an expression he was pretty sure passed for unfazed. “You would’ve been left without options in the world besides day-labour and begging on the street. I have a few friends in other divisions, however, and when I heard about the situation I knew there had to be more than what I’d been told. I looked at your record—your prior commendations speak for themselves. I knew the sort of man you were before I met you. Too smart and too principled to go along with weakness and corruption, aren’t you? I bargained a second chance for you based on that instinct, and you haven’t given me reason to regret it.”

Even if he hadn’t heard what Ogata had to say about Tsurumi, Sugimoto didn’t think he would ever have been taken in when the man laid it on so damn thick. He’d say whatever he thought you needed to hear to keep his hold on you. Sugimoto’s mind was still racing, on high alert in case this turned sour, which is probably why he started wondering, not for the first time but in more detail than ever before, what Tsurumi would be willing to do to reel him in. Ogata never would give a straight answer, any of the times Sugimoto had prompted it, about whether or not he and Tsurumi ever fucked. Sugimoto couldn’t tell if it was because Ogata didn’t want to give credence to the rumours about him that circulated through the unit, or because he didn’t want to admit it hadn’t happened even though he wanted it. Whatever Ogata’s reasoning, it definitely wasn’t out of respect for Sugimoto’s feelings. Not that Sugimoto would’ve been angry to find out it had happened—or, not angry with Ogata, at least.

How many times had Tsurumi talked to Ogata in just the position Sugimoto found himself in now? Did it go further? He shot an involuntary glance at the desk on the other side of the room. A variety of lewd scenes flashed across the surface of his mind, more unsettling than they were titillating, and he had to struggle to keep his face neutral when Tsurumi went on.

“I need men who won’t shrink from danger. Who can be trusted with the dirtiest and most difficult of work. You have that grit in you. And more than that, you can inspire others to do the same. How many units have an immortal man?” Tsurumi leaned across the table on his elbows so there was not much air between them. “I’ll let you in on a few things in confidence, if I may.”

Sugimoto swallowed through a dry throat. “Of course, sir.”

“Have you noticed anything odd in the behaviour of any of the men since we returned to Hokkaido?”

“Odd how, sir?”

“I may as well speak plainly. I’ve been Ogata’s superior officer for years now. I’d like to think I’ve come to know him quite well.” Yeah, I bet you have. “I’ve never seen him warm to one of his brothers in arms like he has to you. Not even to his brother in blood.”

“Guess I’m lucky that way.”

“I’d be cautious, if I were you, about taking Ogata too highly at his word. He’s an exceptional soldier, but he’s always been a bit of a special case. You’ll notice I haven’t promoted him any higher. I have some reservations about his loyalty, and I’m not sure he should be put in the position of squad leader. This is just between us, of course.”

“Why not, sir?”

Tsurumi straightened the corner of the box of confectionery on the table before looking back up at Sugimoto’s face. “Knowing him as you do, I’ve been hesitant to bring it up, but...”

“Sir?”

“Sugimoto, I don’t believe it was a Russian bullet that hit Second Lieutenant Hanazawa.”

“Then what was it.”

With his chin propped in one hand, Tsurumi sent Sugimoto a look of deep sympathy. “You know he could make the shot, even if no one else could.”

Sugimoto saw behind his eyelids another vision of Tsurumi and Ogata together, this time of Tsurumi standing around with a bunch of top brass who watched Ogata hit bullseyes on the range while talking about what they thought they’d get for lunch. His mouth flooded with the taste of bile. “Why would he do that?”

“Come now, Sugimoto. There’s no need for pretence when it’s just the two of us. Ogata never liked his brother. A little fraternal jealousy would be more than expected, given the situation, but it was clear that it went beyond that. Do you think it sounds so unlikely?”

“If you think it’s him, why hasn’t he been court-martialled?”

“I haven’t done anything because I’m still not certain. Lieutenant General Hanazawa is too powerful to risk shaming in public over a false alarm, and an accusation like this—I have no proof, anyhow. Not yet. Which leads me to you.” Tsurumi leaned in quite close. His eyes were hard for Sugimoto to tear his gaze away from. “Are you sure, absolutely sure, that you didn’t see from which direction the shot came?”

“I didn’t see anything. It’s like I told you before. I just caught him when he started to fall down.”

“Very well. I’m sorry to ask this much of you, and to startle you with something so distasteful. This isn’t to leave this room until I have proof, you understand.” Tsurumi was now near enough to him Sugimoto could feel his breath against his own face. “And if you can, try not to let on to Ogata that he’s under suspicion. If he still feels like he can trust you, perhaps that’s the way we’ll get the proof we need.”

Of all the emotions he could be feeling, somehow the clearest one Sugimoto could make out was anger on Ogata’s behalf that Tsurumi would try and rope Sugimoto into spying on him. When he asked this kind of thing of the rest of them, did it work?

Tsurumi gestured at the platter in front of them, where one piece of mochi lay untouched amidst the empty paper wrappings of the others. “Do you mind if I take the last?” Sugimoto shook his head, and Tsurumi popped it in his mouth whole. When he finished chewing, he dusted the last of the powdered sugar off his fingertips and pronounced, “Ah, there’s just nothing like it on the front, is there?”

Just when Sugimoto was expecting to finally be dismissed, Tsurumi’s face fell, a change so graceful it looked like a tree shedding its leaves. “Oh, Saichi: there is another reason I needed to speak to you.” Was this it, then—the iron fist emerging from the velvet glove? Tsurumi set his laced fingers down on the top of his desk. “Back at Port Arthur, you put in a request for me to look into an old comrade of yours from the 1st Division.”

A mixture of fear and hope— “You’ve heard back, sir?”

“Yes.” Tsurumi took a long pause to smooth down his moustache and look out the window before he turned back to Sugimoto’s face. It told him everything he needed to know. “He lost his life at Mukden, like so many others.”

“Oh.” Something fell out of the pit of his stomach. “Did they find a body?”

“Yes—well, of a sort. His finger bones have been sent back to his family in Tokyo.”

Sugimoto said nothing. The lingering taste of sugar on his tongue made him want to gag. Tsurumi glanced at his own hands for a few long, tasteful seconds before he looked back up. “I didn’t hear back myself until yesterday, and I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to tell you sooner. If there’s anything I can do for you—”

“May I be excused, sir?”

Tsurumi didn’t chide him for his insubordination, just inclined his head. “Of course. Just—please remember, Sugimoto, that your friend’s wife is a widow now. His child fatherless. And what did they get? That’s all I think of, these days. How many others there are in the same circumstances. Now, you’re free to go, though please know my door is always open.”

-

Sugimoto picked his way back to the shooting gallery from the officer’s wing with his head more fogged over than a bay in winter. Tsurumi hadn’t told him to go back to his previous task, but he wasn’t sure what else to do with himself and thought if he stood still for more than a second he might go insane. He stepped through the sandbags and resumed straightening the boards, replacing the painted torsos with newer ones not yet riddled with shot.

He wanted dried persimmons. It wasn’t the first time he’d had the craving, but right now he thought he’d rather have them than anything else in the world. Even if he went back home right now, he wouldn’t get any; they were out of season. Knowing didn’t stop him from longing for them, though.

He’d never trusted Ogata. Not about the things that mattered, anyway. He wasn’t sure how it was possible to lose faith that you didn’t have, but that was the situation. It would’ve been easier if he could’ve just said to himself that Ogata would never do something like that, but he knew almost nothing about Ogata’s life before they met besides what he picked up from 7th Division chatter. Even without it, enough time spent together shows you the meat of a person. What there was to them when they thought no one was looking. Sugimoto thought he had a pretty good handle on Ogata—better than almost anyone else had, at any rate—and what his gut told him was that Ogata was capable of a lot.

Ogata had warned him, hadn’t he? He told Sugimoto something like this would happen. Sugimoto thought it was just as likely that Tsurumi had made this all up as anything else. It’s the kind of thing he’d do—but what did Sugimoto have to go on for that but Ogata’s word, even if his instincts agreed?

Ogata was out on work detail, which he hated that he knew without having to think about it. He was packing up boxes of ammo from the armoury into crates that would be labelled as animal feed and shipped to Otaru, and wouldn’t be off until late. Good thing, too. Sugimoto thought if he saw him he might wring Ogata’s neck, for keeps this time. He thought he might kiss him some more before he did, though, because he hadn’t sweat that fever out yet and he’d regret it otherwise, and that thought made him angrier than anything else.

Sugimoto stood up and rested a hand on the small of his back, where the muscles were starting to seize up from bending down and righting himself. A thin layer of clouds covered the sky: not enough to rain, just enough to put a grey cast over everything. Sure, it wasn’t Port Arthur—there weren’t piles of bodies frozen into mounds everywhere he looked—but the Asahikawa garrison really was ugly. He hadn’t quite realized it until now, but even though he still thought Ogata’s scheme was dumb at best and suicidal at worst, it was something, and he’d gotten used to the idea that they were getting out of here. The thought of backing out now and coming along for Tsurumi’s jaunt to Otaru—Ogata might try to kill him for real if he changed his mind, but Sugimoto wasn’t too worried about that. It was the thought of staying that he couldn’t stomach.

He’d dug himself in this deep, and if he didn’t trust Ogata he trusted Tsurumi even less. He wished there was a way to shake the truth out of Ogata, to know whether or not his whole life was just a series of bad circumstances Tsurumi was now putting to work. Whether or not Ogata had done what Tsurumi was implying, Sugimoto couldn’t imagine asking him about it directly would get him anywhere good. In the end he’d rather gamble on the devil he knew than the one he could only guess at, especially since the former seemed to want things it wasn’t much trouble for Sugimoto to provide.

He looked out at the dull grounds in front of him, searching for any splash of colour in the flowering weeds that were springing up with the season in the corners of grassy areas. He couldn’t stay, but he couldn’t go home, either. Maybe never again. He didn’t really have one, anyway. Hadn’t for a long time.

Some guys were singing a ways off, if you could call a work-chant music. It was too far away for him to see which of the crews across the garrison yard it was coming from, so it sounded almost like the wind had when it whistled through the trenches at night, like the disembodied moans of some spirit, restless and wild.

Toraji was dead too, huh? And Umeko a widow. He wasn’t surprised, exactly—it made sense, of course it would work out like that—but he felt shot through with emptiness where he would’ve preferred rage.

Sugimoto pushed the knuckles of his clenched fist against his forehead until he was pretty sure it’d leave behind a bruise. He felt an absent need to do something. To right the wrong, as if that was possible. But what could he do? This was the kind of thing that happened. People died because he couldn’t protect them, and he kept on living.

He wished he could’ve he’d have brought Umeko Toraji’s remains himself—whatever they had left of him. He would’ve held her grief inside him if she decided to pour it out. He didn’t have anything to say that could make any of it better, but he still wished he could bring her something, anything that would make up, in some way, for his not being there to keep an eye out for Toraji, a gift that would take care of her even if he couldn’t—

Oh, he thought, and then, Ogata won’t like that.

He’d reached the end of the range. Behind him was a row of new, clean targets, ready for the next round of shooters to come through and riddle them with holes.

-

Sleep hadn’t gotten any easier since they got back to Asahikawa, not for Sugimoto at least. He drifted in fits and starts. The group Ogata was with didn’t come back from work detail until dinner was almost over, so Sugimoto didn’t get a chance to so much as look him in the face before it was lights out and they were shuffled into the barracks. His dreams weren’t anything horrific, this time, instead just some soft visions of things that felt like memories even though they weren’t. In the dream he was walking through the fields back home with someone beside him, though when he turned his head he couldn’t make out who it was. The grass stalks brushed his calves, and next to him he felt someone male, whose smell was familiar but face and shape were fuzzy. It could’ve been Toraji, or one of his brothers. Could’ve been Ogata. Whoever it was, Sugimoto woke up alone with a lump in his throat.

The previous day felt like a bad dream. The upside of barracks life was that it was regular, regimented, designed not to leave anyone much time for thought. It meant he would go a few hours at a time without remembering anything that had happened the day before. He went through the motions of things, Ogata still occupied differently from himself—this time Sugimoto was pretty sure he was supervising some second-class privates practice their bayonet thrusts, which meant he was no doubt having a better time terrorizing them than Sugimoto was likely to have all week.

He was on his way to the armoury to help with the work there when he heard his name called in a tone that was never welcome: “Sugimoto!” He stopped in his tracks, not yet turning around. Every nerve in his body was on alert. Is this how it would pan out, then? Caught before they’d even gotten anywhere? Koito’s voice came calling out again—“Superior Private Sugimoto!”

Sugimoto swore under his breath, flexed the fingers of his right hand, and turned on his heel. Koito’s expression wasn’t what he’d expected; he didn’t look angry, per se, but something in his gaze told Sugimoto this wasn’t a typical summons. Koito’s hair was out of place, like he’d forgotten to finger-comb it back into place after running most of the way here, which was unusual for him. His eyebrows were furrowed so deeply he looked comical, though it was hard to take much levity from it when Koito was storming towards him with his sword swinging from his hip.

He cleared his throat and tried to look relaxed. “Sir?”

“Come with me at once.”

“What is it?”

He expected a nasty chuckle and Oh, you well know, but what he got was:

“Yuu—Second Lieutenant Hanazawa has woken up. He won’t talk to anyone until he sees you.”

Thankfully, Koito didn’t feel the need to escort Sugimoto to the infirmary himself. Sugimoto walked there with his brows furrowed and a queasy mix of dread and something paler than happiness churning in his stomach. Once he entered the doors to the building, it took no time at all to figure out where he needed to go. Sure, the place was still full of other soldiers convalescing, but the flow of bodies through the halls moved with particular purpose towards one, small room just off the main corridor.

When Sugimoto entered the room, a severe-looking nurse by the patient’s bedside turned to him with a formidable glare, but before she could tell him to leave, the man in the cot leaned towards him unsteadily and said, “Sugimoto? Is that you?”

Sugimoto coughed, suddenly bashful for reasons he didn’t understand. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

Hanazawa turned to the nurse. “I’d like to speak to Private First Class Sugimoto alone, please.” The nurse frowned but excused herself nonetheless.

Sugimoto wasn't sure whether he ought to sit or stand. What were you supposed to do when an officer called you to his bedside in a way that didn't feel like any other time you reported for duty? After Mukden, Tsurumi had pulled Sugimoto into the shadows of his recovery tent and talked about promotions and scars. Now, the light of day seeped through the window, and Hanazawa's demeanor was the furthest thing from a superior about to impart Sugimoto with a lesson. He had never looked smaller. His posture was almost nervous, as though he was the one being called upon to answer for himself.

“Thank you for coming.” Hanazawa’s eyes landed on Sugimoto’s wrists, and his brows lifted. “Congratulations on your promotion, as well.”

The comment was so bizarrely normal Sugimoto almost had to shake his head. In their methods, Tsurumi and Hanazawa weren’t so far apart; they were both eloquent in a well-bred way and good at retaining small details from every conversation which they pulled out later on to show you how much they cared. It didn’t feel like a trick when Hanazawa pulled it off, though. More like genuine interest.

“Thank you.”

“I can’t believe how much time has passed. I must have missed so much.” Hanazawa's skin was sallow, his cheeks sunken. He really didn’t look much like Ogata at all. He had a pretty face, even close-to-emaciated like he was. Pale skin was stretched over bone, like a ghost or a death mask.

“Sugimoto. You were there on the hill, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. I was.”

“Ah. I thought you were there, but I wasn’t sure whether I dreamt it.”

“N-no, it was real.” Hanazawa’s body had been heavy. He hadn't expected him to ever make it, really. Sugimoto hadn't known that until he was proven wrong.

“The flag—did we lose it?”

“Yeah. We lost it, sir.” He couldn’t bring himself to say You lost it, and neither could Sugimoto own up to it himself—it’d been enough of a task to get them both back to safety. The flag had been the least of his problems.

Hanazawa looked miserable. Sugimoto felt as though he ought to reach out and touch him, somewhere, offer him some kind of comfort, but he couldn’t help but feel like if he laid a hand on Hanazawa it’d pass right through him. Hanazawa spared him the decision: his hand shot out and clasped Sugimoto’s. His fingers were so thin they looked as if they’d snap like twigs if Sugimoto pulled his hand out of his grasp. Tsurumi had said all they’d sent back to Umeko were the bones of Toraji’s fingers. Not much of a consolation, but better than nothing.

Hanazawa was probably going to be sent home to his family, alive and mostly whole, but Sugimoto couldn’t decide whether he thought his bigshot general father would be happy about it. His son was alive; anyone would be grateful. On the other hand, he might not ever go on to follow any further in his father’s footsteps, and they already had an example of what Hanazawa Koujirou did with sons that failed to be what he wanted.

When he opened his mouth next, Hanazawa Yuusaku’s tone was like you’d use to ask about the state of an ailing relative, as though he wasn't one himself. “Ogata—my elder brother—is he—well?”

“Ogata?” His pulse was high in his throat. He hadn't taken the empty seat by Hanazawa's bedside, but now Sugimoto wished he had, if only to have armrests to grip onto. "Yeah, he's... the same as always."

Sugimoto remembered kneeling with Hanazawa in the dirt and making friends with an animal halfway between feral and pet. Hanazawa knew that he and Ogata were—Hanazawa had used the word “friends”, even if the reality was murkier. He’d called for him, out of anyone, and asked about Ogata. It was enough to puncture the dams Sugimoto had shored up to keep back his unease.

Hanazawa blinked a few times, eyes fixed on Sugimoto’s face, his mouth ajar but no sound coming out of it. A thin line of fluid trickled from below the bandages covering his head, running down his temple into his overgrown hairline. Sugimoto felt a perverse desire to see the wound. Did it look like Tsurumi’s, the skin burnt to a crisp and bright red? Tsurumi had been hit by a mortar blast, though. A single shot to the head got Hanazawa. After a few long seconds Hanazawa seemed to pull himself together; he let Sugimoto's wrist go, twisted his fingers together over the bedcovers, and murmured, "Good. That's good."

“What is it?” Sugimoto swallowed, weighed his words for a moment, and then muttered, “Did—do you remember—was he—”

He hadn’t been entirely honest with either Ogata or Tsurumi when they’d asked if he saw the shot. He hadn’t seen the direction it’d come from, but he had seen Hanazawa turn his head around in the few seconds before being hit and collapsing. He had thought it was something more... intangible: a parting glance in the direction of the sea, a farewell to those waiting for him back home, but now that Sugimoto thought about it the only family he knew that Hanazawa had were in Manchuria themselves. One just a few hundred yards away, within the range of ladder sights.

No: it didn’t do any good to think about it any further. That was what Tsurumi had to be counting on, after all. The timing was too good. Even if Tsurumi didn’t have any doubts about their loyalty, he was too smart not to notice they kept slipping off on their own. He was an intelligence officer, for crying out loud.

But still—

“You'll have to forgive me, Sugimoto, but I don't follow.”

He might be in for it now, but Sugimoto leaned in closer. “I won’t tell anyone. The First Lieutenant won’t hear about it. If there’s something you want to tell me.”

Hanazawa’s eyes widened then, and he blinked, drawing Sugimoto's attention for a moment to his distractingly long eyelashes. “I don’t remember a thing.”

“You don’t have to defend anyone, you know.” Sugimoto wasn't sure who he was talking to: Hanazawa or himself.

Hanazawa gave him a small, crooked, apologetic smile and drew the bedclothes a little higher up his chest. “Pardon me, Sugimoto, but I'm not sure what you're talking about. I’m sorry, but I'm very tired. Thank you for coming to see me, but could you—I’d like to see the nurse, please.”

No way around that. On his way out, Sugimoto turned to look behind him. Hanazawa was craning his neck up to look out the small window in the corner of the room, which was angled so you couldn't see anything outside but the passage of clouds across the sky. Sugimoto couldn't make out his eyes.

Chapter 10

Notes

This is the first half of what is really just one chapter, but I've split it for ease of reading + formatting (hence the increase in projected chapter numbers). Stay tuned for more Ogatatimes later this week (??!)

Yuusaku’s headplate was smaller than Tsurumi’s. It was set off to the side, overtop the entry wound Ogata had given him. He would’ve preferred it dead between the eyes or through the back of the skull—through the back would’ve been best. But it hadn’t happened that way, and now Yuusaku’s forehead was criss-crossed by leather straps holding a headplate in place above his right eyebrow.

He left the garrison in uniform, no longer in a hospital gown, though where he was going he wouldn’t need it. Word among the ranks was that Yuusaku was going back to their father’s house to finish recuperating on an extended leave of absence. It was unclear whether he would ever return. Tsurumi wouldn’t want him back, of course, now that he had Koito under his thumb, but Ogata wasn’t sure to what extent Tsurumi was willing to act to ensure Yuusaku stay out of his way, or whether he would count on Yuusaku’s brush with death to be enough of a disincentive on its own.

The men had lined up to see Yuusaku off as he made his way out of the infirmary to a waiting carriage. He was walking on his own, though out of bed it was obvious how much weight he’d lost and his steps were slow and unsteady. A medical officer walked by his side, not quite helping him, but clearly ready to pick him up should he collapse. Lucky for Yuusaku, his help wasn’t necessary. He picked his way across the parade grounds, nodding and waving with a tired smile, until he passed Ogata in the crowd.

Ogata was standing behind another private, only visible over the man’s shoulder, but it was enough. For the second time, their eyes met across the distance. For the second time, Ogata didn’t have to wonder if Yuusaku had seen him. Yuusaku’s chin lifted a little higher when he saw Ogata, so there was no mistake. His eyes were clear and full of resignation. Ogata had never been looked at that way by anyone—not Tsurumi, not Sugimoto. Yuusaku’s face was free of anger where his gaze should have been full of it, and yet so cold.

Ogata understood then more clearly than he could have if Yuusaku spoke it in words that they had nothing more to say to each other. He had said everything he wanted to with a bullet, and Yuusaku had kept his secret. Still a fool, even now. An attempt at revenge would have been preferable. Ogata wouldn’t have gone willingly, but he would’ve understood it. He had no use for mercy, Yuusaku’s or anyone else’s.

Yuusaku turned away from him, towards the waiting carriage. Ogata looked away before the door had even shut behind him.

-

Later that evening, the First Lieutenant called Ogata to his office by night. The dark walk to the officer’s wing was almost nostalgic. He didn’t get these kinds of summons much anymore, since he’d told Tsurumi none too subtly he needed to learn how to call less attention to them both back at Port Arthur. But time was running thin, and Tsurumi was no doubt feeling like he had better things to do with his time than invent excuses to get Ogata alone and out of sight. There was a time Ogata hadn’t minded if the others noticed, even if it gave them cause to add to the list of unsavoury epithets he’d accumulated over the years. It didn’t bother him much. Everyone wanted a piece of Tsurumi’s attention; Ogata, at least, sometimes got it. These days, though, the idea of word getting around among the troops was more trouble than it was worth.

Tsurumi’s office was unchanged from how it had looked before deployment. Upon entering the room Ogata felt, for a moment, the familiar thrill of anticipation he always had upon coming when Tsurumi had called him. That residual, childish feeling seemed to linger in the room, dripping off the walls. Years of heeding Tsurumi’s summons and wondering if this would be the night Tsurumi would look at him and decide he’d earned it, earned his touch—it wasn’t easily left behind, even as, tonight, Ogata sat across from him with more curiosity than longing.

“I’ll make sure you have everything you need with you when you arrive. The white robes, the tanto, all the necessary things. I managed to acquire a floor plan of the house, as well—make sure you commit it to memory.” Tsurumi pushed a few sheets of paper towards Ogata across the surface of the desk.

Ogata picked them up and glanced over. All the entrances and exits were neatly labelled, as was the servants’ wing, his father’s office, and his private quarters. Interesting—Tsurumi must have bribed it out of some servant. He really was an excellent intelligence officer.

Meanwhile, Tsurumi went on: “I’m sure you have many of your own ideas about how things should go, and I trust your judgement. We should assume your brother may be on the premises, though he’s bound for the ancestral home in Kagoshima within the fortnight. It may complicate things, but we can proceed how we would have were he still incapacitated. If you run into him and have to dispatch him as well, make it look natural. Shock can do terrible things to an already-weakened constitution.”

Ogata turned the sketches of his father’s house around in his mind. He could imagine it: wide and spacious, full of imported furniture and framed photographs of Yuusaku, whole and smiling and stupid and loved. “I’ll be careful.”

“Did Yuusaku ever give you any idea as to your father’s favourite dish? A last meal is part of the process, as you’re probably aware.”

Ogata could have made anglerfish nabe in his sleep. He rarely cooked, having been in the army for as long as he’d been out of his grandparents’ house, but he’d watched his mother prepare it hundreds of times. “Yes. I know exactly what he would choose.”

“Excellent. Shall I leave that up to you to take care of, then?”

“Yes.” Broth. Flesh of the fish and some extra liver. Enoki mushrooms; omit the shiitake. Cabbage, tofu, long onion, and the rest, whatever could be found.

Tsurumi nodded. He had his face propped up in one of his palms, and he drummed his fingertips against his cheek. “You’ll be his kaishakunin! How fitting. And what an exemplary second you’ll be.”

Ogata gave Tsurumi only a crooked smile in response, though it wasn’t one he had to force. The thought was a warm one. Even so, he had to be careful not to give Tsurumi too much ground. Any words he might say Tsurumi could pluck out of the air and make dance for him. Better to keep as much to himself as possible, volunteer little, confirm and deny as needed.

Tsurumi, at least, didn’t seem concerned about Ogata’s reticence. He reached out with a single long finger and tapped the house plans where they rested on the desk in front of Ogata, and went on. “Your father’s house is here in Asahikawa, of course, but I’ve given it some thought and decided that, in order to deflect suspicion, we won’t make a move until the relocation of the unit to Otaru has gone through successfully. We’ll come back for a quick visit, just the two of us. Off the books, of course.”

It took effort for Ogata not to let his irritation show. The last time they’d talked about it, over Yuusaku’s bedside, he’d been led to believe all this would be taken care of before the division left Asahikawa. The scheme with Sugimoto assumed that Ogata would have settled all his debts before they struck out on their own. Was it a choice between revenge or escape, then? A series of potential changes to the plan ran through Ogata’s mind, while across from him Tsurumi had picked up a fountain pen and stack of writing paper.

“The last thing, of course, is your father’s last words.” Tsurumi’s pen hovered over a blank sheet. “I’ll compose a suicide note; we need to make sure he takes responsibility for his failings in the campaign in a way that still allows public opinion within the military to turn on the men of the 7th Division. I’d also like to leave a few letters behind; perhaps you could help me with those?”

“What kind of letters, sir?”

“Oh, to friends and close associates. It’s an opportunity to decide how his legacy persists. Whatever he did in life is almost secondary in importance to how he’s remembered in death, and you, as his eldest son, ought to have a hand in shaping that.”

“Will we mention Yuusaku?”

“It would be hard not to, don’t you think?”

Ogata’s trigger finger itched. He’d thought shooting Yuusaku would set things to rights, but nothing about that had gone as planned, and here he remained, the anticipation building under his skin unabated. He wanted the clarity of the easy transition from life to death—even if there was a little squirming in between—, the knowledge that what would happen was happening because of him, in a sequence he could control. If he couldn’t get that with Yuusaku, he could at least orphan the both of them.

How would Yuusaku feel without his father’s love, when he was just as alone in the world as Ogata had always been? It was the least Yuusaku deserved. He hadn’t earned his blessing, so why should he be allowed to keep it?

“I don’t care what the rest of the letter says. I don’t know him well enough to know what he’d write. But if you mention Yuusaku, you should say that he preserved the honour of his utter fool of a father.”

Tsurumi looked at him hard and long, smiling almost fondly, before he put nib to paper. The movement of his hand across the page was elegant, his script completely passable for an upper-class gentleman. It made Ogata vaguely infuriated.

When he at last set aside his pen, Tsurumi cast a glance towards the clock on the wall. “You’ll have to forgive me for keeping you so late. You don’t mind staying a little longer, do you? Until we’re quite satisfied with how we’ve left things.”

Like the collaboration itself, this was amusing. Did it suit Tsurumi to pretend they were partners, now? Their relationship had never been more than superior and subordinate, for all the secret meetings and gestures towards apprenticeship. Ogata wasn’t deluded enough to believe he was anything more than a pawn to him, or that, whatever Tsurumi said or implied, Ogata would ever be anything else in his eyes.

Tsurumi got to his feet and began to pace, hands folded behind his back. Ogata remained standing in front of the desk as he had been before. “We’ve served together a long time, haven’t we? You’ve always been an exceptional soldier I’ve been proud to have under me.”

It took effort for Ogata not to physically roll his eyes, even though Tsurumi couldn’t see his face. “You’re not a bad leader yourself, sir.”

“I would hate for you to feel as though your hard work and loyalty have gone unnoticed.” Tsurumi had migrated in a slow arc around the room; he now approached Ogata, who turned around to face him a little too late. By the time Ogata was looking Tsurumi’s way, Tsurumi had him boxed in against the desk. He could move quietly when it suited him.

Tsurumi extended his right hand to rest his fingertips against the surface of the desk as if to steady himself, almost close enough to touch; as it was, all Ogata felt was the brush of Tsurumi’s sleeve against his hip. “Of course not, sir.”

“You’re one of the best and brightest the division has.” Tsurumi took another half-step closer to him and Ogata took the hint; he shifted back onto the balls of his feet, which allowed him to prop himself up to sit on the edge of the desk. Tsurumi waited for him to get comfortable in his perch before stepping into the space between Ogata’s knees. “I can’t tell you how much I look forward to what we’ll accomplish together.”

“Anything I can do, sir,” Ogata replied, testing the way the words felt on this tongue. Not too long ago Ogata would’ve crawled on his knees for this. It wasn’t as if he didn’t want it now, but Ogata couldn’t see past the strings attached in the way he once would have. It turned his mouth bitter.

If Tsurumi noticed that Ogata was less than swooning at his attentions, he didn’t let on. He smoothed his hands over the front of Ogata’s jacket as if preparing him for inspection, and then leaned in closer.

“You’ve been waiting for this a long time, haven’t you, Hyakunosuke?” Tsurumi ghosted his way down the side of Ogata’s neck, the hair of his whiskers scratching against his skin. Ogata thought he felt a hint of teeth along the skin overtop his jugular vein; he wondered whether Tsurumi was foolhardy enough to bite down and leave him with a visible mark, and felt distaste at the thought. “You’ve earned some special treatment, don’t you think?”

He used to look at Tsurumi and wonder whether there were any times he wasn’t commanding. At night, in the dark, was he just as flesh-and-bone as any other, or was he like an automaton that never grew rusty or needed sleep? The image was easier to keep up before Ogata had seen him like this. Lust made all men the same. Their hunger made them weak.

As for Tsurumi’s babble, Ogata would play along to a point, but Tsurumi couldn’t make him respond, at least not at this stage of the proceedings. Thankfully Tsurumi seemed to expect the lack of verbal response. That, or he was content just to talk them both to orgasm or die trying. A hand slid up under his shirt, up and across his belly to his ribs. Despite his skepticism, Ogata’s pulse jumped at the touch.

Tsurumi’s hands were smooth and oddly cold. They roved across Ogata’s skin without lingering on any specific place, like Tsurumi was searching for imperfections, manufacturing flaws. It was the same way Ogata would stroke the stock of a gun he was handling for the first time. The detachment was intoxicating, in a way. He wasn’t even a person in Tsurumi’s evaluatory eye, just a weapon, a piece on a shogi board. No need for Ogata to come up with genuine responses where there were none, like some men wanted to hear; spontaneity had nothing to do with this. Tsurumi wanted nothing more than for Ogata to play the part he’d been given, and now that his role had shifted into the desperate recipient of Tsurumi’s attentions, all he needed to do was let himself be seduced according to the script.

How, exactly, would this go? Would Tsurumi want him on his hands and knees like a yoked animal, or would he pull Ogata into his lap and make him call him Father before he’d give Ogata so much as a hand on his dick? He knew Tsurumi too well to think there was a chance he could avoid being made to talk. Could he get away with, “Oh, like that, First Lieutenant,” spoken emotionlessly enough for Tsurumi to understand it as the jab it was? Likely not. Tsurumi would put him through his paces.

The right-angle edge of the polished wood under his ass was uncomfortable enough to steady him some. The desk was thick and well-made and didn’t creak under his weight, even when Tsurumi leaned forward even further, their chests touching through clothing, making Ogata tilt himself further back.

Tsurumi had never been so close to him before. He could smell Tsurumi’s aftershave and whatever it was he put into his hair, and feel the erection pressing through his trousers, as if it weren’t obvious already just how much this was getting to him. Ogata almost laughed. He used to lie awake imagining what it would take for Tsurumi to be satisfied enough with Ogata’s performance to finally stop teasing and give him what he wanted, and this is what it took. It was hardly about him at all. He was the means to an end, and it was the end that had Tsurumi in his current state. Ogata turned his head to the side, theoretically giving Tsurumi more access to his neck but in fact twisting his face away from Tsurumi’s vision.

It wouldn’t be worth it, Ogata thought, and then reassessed. For the first time since he could remember, Ogata had something Tsurumi wanted and didn’t yet have, and he was less than compelled by the prospect of giving it up.

Tsurumi’s other hand crept over Ogata’s knee and across the length of his thigh. It would be so easy to lay back and succumb to Tsurumi’s will. Tsurumi would, he was sure, know exactly how to make him come so hard he’d want to hurt something. But even so, Tsurumi offered nothing without a price, especially not this. Just before Tsurumi reached Ogata’s crotch, Ogata laid his hand on Tsurumi’s forearm firmly enough to halt his progress. Not one to miss a trick, Tsurumi paused his movement there but continued to mouth at Ogata’s neck until Ogata cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m feeling quite tired.”

Tsurumi pulled back just far enough to scan Ogata’s face. Ogata thought it was the most confused and least commanding he’d ever seen him, at least for the half-second before Tsurumi cleared his expression back into equanimity. The evidence of Tsurumi’s uncertainty sent more heat through Ogata’s gut than any touch he’d yet given him.

“Of course, Private. Are you feeling well?” Tsurumi’s mouth was set quizzically. Ogata blinked, slowly, giving him nothing in his face to work from.

“It’s just been a long day, sir,” Ogata inched forward so he could drop off of the desk and to his feet, and Tsurumi swept back to give him room. Tsurumi immediately turned away from him and idly straightened his papers. As if Ogata couldn’t still see the evidence in his pants that the nonchalance was an act.

Ogata headed for the door and glanced back at the sound of Tsurumi’s voice as he was almost at the door. “Thank you for meeting me at such a late hour, Ogata.” Tsurumi was still standing, but had turned back around to face Ogata’s retreat. His eyes twinkled with inky curiosity.

On his way back to the barracks from the officer’s wing, Ogata passed by a couple privates standing in a huddled half-circle, slacking off on their evening watch shifts. The lit ends of cigarettes moved with their hands as they talked. In the pale glow he could see their eyes track him as he went. Murmurs just short of audible sprung up in his wake. He folded up the copy of the floor plan of his father’s house until it was a tiny, flattened square, and tucked it in his breast pocket. He would take what he could salvage from his time in Tsurumi’s tutelage. He wouldn’t miss him. And, as parting gifts went, it was the best he’d ever been given.

He smiled to himself and wondered whether Sugimoto was still awake.

-

Sugimoto was awake, but not in the barracks where Ogata could find him; he was out on watch duty, and Ogata fell asleep before he returned.

The next day passed without much incident. They were both too busy to talk until their evening visit to the baths. On the way out of the bathhouse, Ogata tugged Sugimoto by the elbow into the narrow passageway between two outbuildings. Sugimoto went, but when Ogata turned around to face him once they were out of sight, he knew from the look on Sugimoto's face that what was coming next wasn't going to be an easy sell.

“Have you got all your things packed?”

Sugimoto and Ogata had spent most of the week preparing their exit. Underneath the slats of the stairs behind the kitchens they hollowed out a compartment where they kept the spare ammo they ferreted away during exercises and the slower-to-rot food they smuggled out of the mess hall at mealtimes. Sugimoto wasn’t much of an actor, and it was clear that the closer they got to the day of the departure to Otaru the more agitated he became. He had always been sullen. It was likely that only Ogata had gotten close enough to him to realize this was more than the usual level of irritability. He was keeping his distance even from Ogata, not talking to him about anything but logistics or similar. Though it didn’t necessarily mean anything, it was enough to make Ogata wary.

“Of course I do. I'm ready. Are you?”

Ogata nodded tersely, scanning around them to make sure they weren't being watched. The chatter of various men passing to and from the baths and the barracks drifted through the night air, but none of it was out of the ordinary, and no one seemed to be coming for them in the dark corner they'd hidden away in. “I think we should make a change to the plan.”

Sugimoto crossed his arms over his chest and took a cue from Ogata, glancing around the field of vision. “What kind of a change?”

“I don't think we should go straight towards Otaru.” Ogata glanced at Sugimoto's face, still turned away from him. “I think we should loiter around Asahikawa for a few days. Just to make sure we don't cross paths with the division while they're on the way to Otaru.”

“I thought we were going through the woods, rather than the roads. How are they going to cross paths with us? And how does that put us in a position to beat the division to the convicts, if we let them get a head start?”

“We can still move faster than an entire division on the march can. We'll make up the time.”

“Why are you only bringing this up now?” Ogata opened his mouth to reply, but Sugimoto cut him off. He had turned back to him at last, and his eyes were cold. “What are you planning? I'm not stupid, you know.”

Ogata tilted his head to the side. “What are you talking about?”

Sugimoto fisted a hand in the back of Ogata’ collar. He pulled Ogata until he was wedged between Sugimoto’s chest and the wall. Ogata first assumed that Sugimoto had finally shaken off his sulk, but the set of his jaw told Ogata a different story. They weren’t really very far apart in height, but Sugimoto could make it count when he wanted to.

“I saw your brother. Right after he woke up. He called for me.”

Ogata’s throat threatened to close up, but he forced his voice to remain steady. “And what does that have to do with anything? What did he say? Was he able to string a full sentence together? I've heard a long time out of consciousness can leave a man scrambled.”

“If there’s something you’re not telling me, I want you to know that I—” Sugimoto cut himself off like he was biting his own tongue.

The first time he ever made Sugimoto come, Ogata had knelt in the dirt and put Sugimoto’s cock in his mouth while artillery fired in the distance. That encounter had started much the same as this, though Sugimoto’s anger had been duller, more diffuse. Back then, Ogata hadn’t thought his anger anything other than amusing. Anger was easy to work with. Men liked to show dominance when they were pissed off, which meant they’d respond exactly how he wanted them to, one way or another. He didn’t find Sugimoto amusing now. Ogata clucked his tongue. “Hmm? You might as well spit it out.”

Sugimoto looked like a bull moments away from charging. Droplets of water dripped off of the tip of his nose and onto Ogata’s shirt. “Just because I—we… I haven’t forgotten what you’re like, you know.”

“What am I like, Sugimoto?” Ogata's patience was growing thin. He placed his hand over Sugimoto's where it was fisted in his collar and dug his nails into Sugimoto's skin.

“Untrustworthy.”

If this had been any other circumstance, Ogata wouldn't have minded coming up against Sugimoto like this. It was familiar territory. But time was running thin, and there had been too many unexpected changes of plan already. Ogata couldn't afford Sugimoto to start surprising him, too. He'd picked a poor time to start thinking for himself. “A bit late to think about that now. If I wanted to sell you out to Tsurumi, there are easier ways.”

“Should I be afraid of what you’re going to do one day when you get bored?”

“Yes. But I’m afraid of you, too. I don’t have any doubt you’d run me through if you thought you had to. You’re not someone it pays to cross.”

“Fucking hell.”

“Doesn’t change anything, so I don’t know why it matters.” Ogata curled his hand around Sugimoto’s forearm. “We’ve come too far to have second thoughts now, don’t you think?”

“All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t get too comfortable. I’ve got my eye on you, and if I think—if you give me any reason not to trust you, you’ll regret it.”

“Very generous, but I think I’ll take my chances. We’ll keep each other on our toes, how about that?”

Sugimoto’s lip curled. “You piss me off more than anyone sometimes.”

“You can tell yourself anything you like if you still get what you want, isn’t that right?” Ogata laid his free hand over the spot on Sugimoto’s chest where he still remembered the shape of a bullet wound, though it was long since fully healed. “But I know who you are. I know what you are.”

Sugimoto’s grasp on him didn’t falter, but his gaze dropped away for a moment and his mouth moved without sound coming out, like his body wasn’t ready to speak whatever it was he had to say. Coming towards them from around the corner were the echoes of voices, laughing, jostling at each other, three or maybe four of them. Ogata prodded the scar under Sugimoto’s shirt and hoped it twinged before letting his hands fall free. Sugimoto let him go a half-second later, stepping back into what passed for an appropriate amount of personal space. The voices and footsteps rose and then ebbed as they passed them by without looking at their meagre hiding place.

Before Sugimoto could walk back out into the fading sunlight, Ogata hissed, “Stay if you want, but I’m leaving. You can have Tsurumi, if you want to be a pet so bad.”

Sugimoto didn’t look back at him, but Ogata thought he could make out the tightening of his shoulder blades beneath his shirt.

-

The morning of the raid on the armoury of the Asahikawa garrison dawned like any other. The sky was overcast, the kind of weather that made you sweat under your clothes and squint despite the absence of real sunlight.

The men of the 27th had been awake since before sunrise. They had turned in early the night before, after dinner. The other three regiments were operating on their regular schedule. Ogata was with a crew wheeling empty supply wagons from the depot to the armoury loading bays when the first glow begun to creep over the horizon.

During the time on the front, Ogata got used to the quickness with which the body could shift into battle. The change came over near-imperceptibly, though after feeling it himself one could learn to identify it on others. Perhaps it was a change in their smell that only the sleeping, animalian part of the mind could detect. Nothing on their bodies visibly changed, but something like an electrical current passed through the air. For most of them, it took the sound of shell-fire to bring it upon them. Ogata had been dwelling in it for the better part of a week. Every corner he turned he half-expected an ambush.

Ogata was part of the crew transferring crates of ammunition from the storage rooms of the armoury to the loading bay. Even as part of a coordinated effort and without any of the actual hazards of wartime transport, it was nothing short of back-breaking.

As he set down a crate in the yard, Ogata looked up and saw Sugimoto, who was with a couple other guys wheeling some wagons towards the main road. They hadn't hitched up the horses yet. Raiding an armoury was one thing and stables another; the guns weren't any more likely to go off if they smelled fear in the air.

Nothing remained of the supply cache under the stairs. All there was left to be done was to wait for the right opportunity to make the break for it.

The men of the other regiments were largely absent; the parade grounds were much emptier than usual, though the amount of noise and activity was more than you'd usually see on a day where the 27th was joined by the 26th and 28th Regiments, with whom they shared the garrison. To Ogata's understanding, Tsurumi had arranged it so the other regiments were both on a field training expedition a few days out of Asahikawa. Tsurumi had leverage against Lt. Col. Yodogawa for all those wartime slip-ups, but it was still much easier to pull off an illegal seizure of arms from the rest of the 7th if there was no chance of delusionally heroic non-coms getting inspired to try and stop them

Ogata met Sugimoto's eye as they passed each other. Sugimoto looked somber, rooted, like he was ready to parry a strike. Not so much so that anyone looking at him would notice, especially considering the tension in the air as they prepared to commit treason and steal property of the emperor, but Ogata knew him well enough to recognize it. Before Sugimoto could follow the others he'd come over with, who had already started to walk back to the depot to wheel over the next caravan, Ogata called, “Sugimoto. Come here, we need another hand in the armoury.”

The corner of Sugimoto's mouth twitched upwards, and he nodded. One of the other privates Sugimoto had been with shot them a backwards glance, but otherwise Ogata wasn't questioned. Sugimoto walked over to him and Ogata made his way back into the building, counted to thirty under his breath, and then looked back out the door to make sure Sugimoto's crew were far enough away they weren't going to turn and look back at them. The armoury men had already moved everything that was easily accessible from the front of the and had made it to the back of the store-rooms, to the older supplies that had been there since before the war, so they had a minute or two until the next load came back, though they had probably already noticed Ogata's absence.

“You think now is the time to go for it?” Sugimoto muttered, eyes scanning the courtyard, where 150-odd men were packing up most of the evidence the 27th had ever been stationed at Asahikawa to begin with.

Ogata kept his gaze on the hallway further into the armoury building, ears trained for the heavy footsteps of men carrying rolled-up bundles of rifles. “I don't know that we'll get a better chance. They've already gotten most of it loaded up. They'll start preparing to march soon.”

“If someone spots us and you get shot, don't count on me to carry you.”

“I’m honoured you value me so much.”

“Just try not to look suspicious. Come on. Let's go. Walk in a straight line and no one will look at us twice.”

Sugimoto stepped out of the armoury building first, and then Ogata after him, walking in quick time with their heads down, like they were on their way to deliver a message to someone on the other end of the trench and they had no choice but to cut through no man's land. Ogata scanned the parade ground reflexively for Tsurumi's presence, but he couldn't make him out anywhere in his field of vision. Tsukishima was, likewise, nowhere to be seen. If Ogata had to guess, they were inside the officer's wing overseeing the move of the contents of Tsurumi's office, making sure none of Tsurumi's toys and secrets were left behind where they could fall into unwanted hands. Koito was about 100 metres off, in the opposite direction from where Sugimoto and Ogata were walking, and he was facing away from them.

The main gates of the garrison were open, to allow for the supply caravans to come and go as needed. It was peacetime now, anyway, for everyone but Tsurumi's unit, at least. There wasn't much to fear, even if two privates on foot could slip out, too, among all those wagons of cargo.

No one said anything to either of them until they stepped out of the gates. About a dozen men stood outside, but thankfully they were distracted. One of the waterproof tarpaulins had slid off one of the waiting transport vehicles and they struggled to re-affix it. Only one, a second-class private Ogata barely recognized, was acting as a sentry, and his eyes passed over them without much suspicion before he turned back to look at the road ahead. From the gates it was a straight shot of about 50 metres into the woods that pressed up close to the garrison walls on one side, but 50 metres was more than enough distance within which to get shot in the back, and running would attract more attention than walking would.

Ogata felt Sugimoto's eyes glance over and land on his face. He didn't turn to look back at him, instead walking up to the soldier on guard duty.

“Corporal Tamai needs you at the parade ground. All of you.”

The sentry shifted in place, his brows twisting. “But Corporal Tamai put us on duty here.”

“We’ll take over from you. Unless it takes ten of you to tie down some raincovers, it almost looks like you’re trying to get out of doing any work.”

Some of the men exchanged glances. One of them, another superior private like themselves, let go of the lashes holding down the tarp and hopped down from the wagon bed to the ground. He took a couple steps toward Ogata, brows furrowed. “What does he need us for on the parade ground?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to find him for you so we can compare orders, or would you rather do as you’re told and stop wasting all of our time?”

“Watch your mouth. Your brother isn’t around to protect you anymore, and I’m sure a busy man like Lieutenant General Hanazawa has too much to do to step in when you get the shit kicked out of you.”

Before Ogata could respond, Sugimoto took a step forward into the space between Ogata and the other man. When he spoke, his voice was low and dangerously calm. “We don’t have time for this. We already told you that orders have changed. If you still want to fight, let’s get on with it. I’ve got places to be.”

The man gave Sugimoto a long, hard look. Ogata was almost about to pull his rifle down off his shoulder and try to pick off as many of them as he could before they had time to react when the man spat out a gob of saliva on the ground next to him and gestured to the others. “Come on. Let’s go see what Tamai wants.”

As he passed Ogata by, he sent Ogata a dirty look that was probably meant to say he would pay for this when Sugimoto wasn’t around, or something equally pathetic. Whatever revenge fantasies he was spinning out inside his head were going to be disappointed. The whole group of them made their way back into the garrison; once they were about 30 paces away from the gate and their backs were turned, Sugimoto tugged on Ogata’s forearm and muttered, “Let’s go. Before they figure out we’re full of shit.”

They started out for the treeline at a brisk walk, Sugimoto in front, Ogata half a pace behind. After about 20 metres it became a jog, and when they closed in on it, when they were close enough Ogata could see the individual needles on the trees, they broke into a run. The blood rushed through his ears so loudly it would’ve been hard to hear if they were being chased.

As they reached the treeline, Sugimoto craned his neck back to look at the garrison they were leaving. Ogata spared a glance over his own shoulder; nothing looked amiss, but still, at that distance he felt nothing but an overwhelming need to be rid of it already.

Ogata pressed the flat of his hand against Sugimoto’s back and pushed him toward the trees. “Go. Go!”

Sugimoto went.

Chapter 11

Notes

Once again, these chapters are getting out of hand word-count-wise, and so this fic's existence continues to be dragged out. Next update will be the last one though, I swear!!!!

Content warning for vague allusions to bad/sketchy past sexual encounters as well as for consensual rough sex that is badly negotiated and not safe or sane in an IRL sense but still enjoyed by its participants (a Sugimoto/Ogata-typical content warning, if you will).

Growing up, Ogata went into the woods around his grandparents’ house to hunt. It was the best place to find game, but the lines of sight were poor, and it was easy to take down prey at a distance and not be able to find where it landed. Once he lost a piece of fowl that way; he’d stayed out looking for where it had fallen until his eyes could barely make out the looming shapes of the trees around him. He never found it. A waste of shot, and of time. He was supposed to be back before dark, but he’d already figured out that if he told his grandparents he’d gotten lost on the way back home, they wouldn’t ask any more questions.

Sugimoto was from Tokyo, so it was hard to imagine he’d ever been in these types of deep woods before, let alone as darkness was falling, but even so, he lead the way. Neither of them really knew where they were going. For tonight, the aim was to get deep enough into the foothills of the mountains that it wouldn’t be worth Tsurumi’s while to track them down. At least not today. Tsurumi had worked too hard for his window of opportunity to withdraw the troops from under Yodogawa’s nose to jeopardize it for the sake of the two of them. No doubt Tsurumi would send men after them eventually—Ogata was worth too much to him not to try and collect—but by the time the sun neared the horizon without any evidence of the 7th on their trail, they had covered enough ground to be reasonably sure they would make it through the night.

It was slow going, considering they couldn’t walk in a straight line through thick forest. They followed deer footpaths part of the way, but they lost countless minutes stepping over fallen trees and looping around thickets. Thankfully, they were still low enough in the foothills not to have to contend with snow.

After a few hours, Sugimoto stopped in his tracks and turned to Ogata. “Have you heard anything that makes you think we’re being followed?”

“Not that I can tell.” Ogata tilted his head to the side and regarded Sugimoto through the dappled sunshine-and-shadow patterns of leaves on his face. They overlaid his features like a second set of scars. “What would you do if they caught up to us?”

“What do you mean?”

Ogata’s pulse skittered through his neck, and he clutched at the sling strap across his chest with one hand. “Do you have it in you to fire on your former comrades?”

Sugimoto was silent for a few long seconds before he turned away from Ogata and kept walking through the trees ahead of them. “I’m not a nice enough guy to let myself get shot if I can avoid it, no matter who’s doing the shooting.”

Ogata followed him a half-step behind, eyes fixed on the back of Sugimoto’s neck. He had to walk more quickly to keep up with Sugimoto’s longer stride. “What if it’s someone you know? What if the Nikaidous come after us, or Tanigaki?”

“What’s the point in talking about it?” Sugimoto’s voice was low and cold. “If it comes down to it, I won’t hesitate. I remember that much from the war.”

Evening came quicker under tree cover. The sun sent shafts of dying light through the underbrush, creating a second undergrowth of shadows, and after another hour or so of slow travel through the pines, Sugimoto turned back to him.

“We might as well stop here. Maybe you can see better than I can in the dark, but I’d rather not break my neck.”

They couldn’t make a fire without sending the 7th a smoke signal. The weather had been fine that day, but Hokkaido was only warm at night in the peak of summer. Unlike in the trenches, they could slip in close to each other without having to watch their backs.

Only the canvas of Ogata’s raincloak spread out on the hard ground cushioned them from the faintly soggy earth. Even so, he’d had worse. Here there were no rotting bodies, no rats the size of hares; sleep would come easy. Ogata sat cross-legged, ignoring the soreness setting into his thighs.

Perhaps when they got closer to Otaru they could find some hunter’s lodge left empty for the season where they could set up a base of operations: somewhere to sleep outside of the rain and haul back convicts when they found them. If the lodge wasn’t empty, Ogata could make it empty, so long as Sugimoto wouldn’t make a fuss.

“You’re from Ibaraki, right?” Sugimoto laid back with his head on his pack and his legs crossed at the knee. In what remained of the waning sunlight, he cleaned his fingernails with the point of his bayonet.

Ogata glanced at him before turning back to the hardtack he’d retrieved from a pocket. Sugimoto had brought it up once before, even though Ogata had never mentioned it himself. It grated at him. “Who told you that?”

“I met a few guys from that prefecture in the 1st Division,” Sugimoto said. “You’ve still got the accent.”

Tsurumi had said the same thing once, a long time ago; one of his barbs disguised as an innocent observation, as he was fond of doing. After that, Ogata had tried to lose it, and he wasn’t pleased to hear he hadn’t been successful.

“I grew up in Ibaraki,” Ogata replied. “But I was born in Tokyo.”

“Like me, then.”

Hardly. If Sugimoto came into the world with a madam as a midwife, Ogata would have been shocked. Ogata folded the remaining half of the biscuit up and put it away. “What does where we’re from have to do with anything?”

“Just seems funny to me that I don’t know much about you, even after all this.”

“It’s for the best, isn’t it? That way we can’t give each other up so easily.”

“I guess. I don’t know what anyone could get out of us knowing stuff like this about each other, though. Not everything is some big secret.”

“I thought you didn’t trust me. Why do you want to exchange life stories?”

“I don’t trust you.” Sugimoto slid his bayonet back into its sheath and rolled over onto his side, looking up at Ogata with his jaw resting in an upturned hand. “But I’m here, aren’t I?”

Ogata eyed him, sprawled out on the ground, his body held loose. Sugimoto’s legs were crossed at the ankles and his shirt had ridden up past his waistband to reveal a strip of skin striped with scars. He looked almost more dangerous at rest than he did in a fighting stance. He was never complacent. Ogata’s gaze traveled up Sugimoto’s chest and over his arm, where the cloth was drawn tight across his bicep. When he made it to Sugimoto’s head, he was met by a smug look he wanted to make disappear.

“We made it, huh.” The last dregs of sunlight played across the planes of Sugimoto’s face, adding dimensions to it Ogata couldn’t remember seeing before.

“We can celebrate once we’ve made it to Otaru in one piece,” Ogata replied.

“Yeah, whatever. I can tell you’re pleased.”

Ogata tilted his head back to look up at the sky. No stars were yet visible, but they would be soon; the sky was cloudless. He turned back to Sugimoto, who was watching him with an infuriating half-smile on his face, like he thought he knew something Ogata didn’t. Ogata leaned over to push the heel of his hand down over Sugimoto’s crotch, a bit too hard to be pleasurable.

Sugimoto only lifted an eyebrow and placed his free hand on the inside of Ogata’s thigh, stroked it up his trouser seam and then down again to rest above Ogata’s knee. He kept it there, just shy of where Ogata could get anything out of it, the weight and warmth feeling like a promise. Sugimoto bit his lip and said, in a lower, rough-handled tone, “What do you want?”

Ogata lifted his hips up and against Sugimoto’s hand. “You must be dumber than I thought.”

Sugimoto’s expression didn’t change. Sometimes he was a hair-trigger, others it was like nothing Ogata could do would get a rise out of him, and it wasn’t always easy to tell the moods apart. “Just figured now that we don’t have to make curfew we should take advantage of it.”

He really was so stupid. Inside his mouth, Ogata ran his tongue along the backs of his teeth, and he began kneading Sugimoto through the wool of his trousers with the heel of his hand. Sugimoto’s mouth curved in a strange little smile that was gone as quick as it’d come. He still lay on his side with one bent knee propped up in the air and watched Ogata through heavy-lidded eyes. He looked so sure of himself, so sure he would get his, that Ogata almost wanted to change his mind, roll over, and leave Sugimoto to take care of himself, but it would be a shallow victory.

“I’m going to suck your dick. Is that what you wanted to hear?” His own voice was strangely hoarse, but audible.

Sugimoto looked like he was going to laugh for a second, but his face cleared when he replied, “Yeah, sure. That’s something.”

Once he got Sugimoto’s clothes and boots out of the way—Sugimoto shimmied his hips to help him but mostly got in the way, jerking the cloth out of Ogata’s grasp—Ogata knelt between his spread legs. Suimoto was bare from the waist down; Ogata moved in closer and rubbed his cheek against the side of his dick, nosing at it. He intended to take his time, even as the sun was setting around them. When it came to Sugimoto’s body, Ogata knew the lay of the land. Sunlight or darkness didn’t matter much.

Sugimoto's dick was already wet at the tip, and Ogata knew it wouldn’t be long before it was slippery in his hand and against his face. He wanted to taste it, wanted to hold it in his mouth until he memorized its shape, until Sugimoto ceased to be strong any longer. Ogata wanted him to offer up his soft underbelly. Distantly, he registered that he hadn’t blown someone while lying horizontal in years. He looked up at Sugimoto from beneath lowered eyelids as Ogata bent his neck and swallowed him down. A wide hand landed softly on the back of his head. Sugimoto cursed under his breath.

Sugimoto's sweat tasted better than good. Enough for Ogata's dick to stir from that alone. Sugimoto’s cock wasn’t big, but it had a soft, plummy head and a slight curve and was easy to take in all the way to the back of his throat. His throat convulsed instinctively, but he didn’t pull off. Usually, Sugimoto was quiet, but maybe that had just been concern over being caught, because now he muttered strings of nonsense, nothing Ogata could make out besides yes, yeah, oh—, his eyes dark and lacquered over with want.

He kept trying to curl in on himself and Ogata kept having to bear down weight on his abdomen. Beneath Ogata's splayed fingers was soft muscle and almost-hairless skin, boyish and masculine at once. Every time Ogata leaned forward, Sugimoto's cock hit his palate and he suppressed the urge to gag. There had been times in the past he hadn't bothered, when he'd let his body try its best to expel the foreign object jammed down his throat just because it always provoked some kind of reaction—disgust, often, or that condescending appreciation shown by men who thought they were doing him a favour by letting him handle their unimpressive dicks for them. He kept himself in check now, didn't want to risk Sugimoto pulling out and offering him concern. He could already see the way Sugimoto’s eyebrows would twist in disapproval. He didn't want it to stop, didn't want Sugimoto to get a chance to recover his self-control and stop his feverish praise or the roaming of his hands over Ogata's face and shoulders.

Sugimoto's cock was hot to the touch with his quick-pumping immortal blood. Ogata's left hand pressed flat against Sugimoto's stomach overtop of several scars criss-crossing his navel, holding him in place so Ogata could have him how he liked. He wanted to feel every vibration, every sucked-in breath. He'd seen Sugimoto bear up without wincing under injuries that would have a lesser man fainting, but here he almost whined, the valleys and ridges of his hipbones twisting as he pushed up further into Ogata's mouth. The muscles in his abdomen flexed beneath the surface of his skin as he tried to hold himself back from thrusting up into Ogata's throat and choking him from the inside. Ogata pulled away for a moment and looked up at him while he slid his tongue through the dribbles of precome leaking down the side of Sugimoto’s cock. His face was wild and alive in the near-dark. Brutal everywhere but here.

Ogata's knees were damp from pressing into the moss. Every time he lowered his head Sugimoto's knees knocked against his ribs. His own body was close to unconsciousness from the long march through the woods and his currently stifled breathing, but he backed off as Sugimoto's gasps got more frantic. He didn't want Sugimoto to come yet, wanted to linger on this precipice longer, settle into the taste of Sugimoto's slickness sliding against his tongue and Ogata's name in Sugimoto's mouth. Right now, Sugimoto wanted him so badly he couldn't try to hide it. Tsurumi would never have done it like this; he would never have given Ogata what he wanted just because he wanted it. Sugimoto's fingers grasped on nothing, curling behind Ogata’s ear as if trying to pull on hair that wasn’t there, and Ogata could hear him swallow thickly, trying to master himself.

When Sugimoto started squirming under him, furtive and trembling like he did when he got close, Ogata didn’t have any desire to let go.

His mouth was already feeling pleasantly full when two of Sugimoto’s fingers landed on his cheek, stroking along his skin until his fingertips brushed up against where Ogata’s lips were sealed around his cock. Ogata kept looking at him, unblinking, his tongue moving across a vein. When Sugimoto pressed the pads of his fingers at the corner of Ogata’s mouth they slid right in. Sugimoto’s eyes were shrouded over, hazy, and he murmured, “Yeah, you like that, don’t you. Thought you would.”

He pushed his digits in further so they rested next to his dick inside of Ogata’s mouth. It stretched Ogata’s jaw out to accommodate them. A challenge, the threat of soreness if they stayed that way for long. Ogata grazed a knuckle with one of his incisors.

“Fuck, you look—”

Ogata hated swallowing, but he swallowed for Sugimoto then. He even kept from choking or grimacing, much. He kept Sugimoto in his mouth until he’d gone soft and Ogata had licked him clean, until he was just holding him inside, to keep him warm. Sugimoto slid his fingers free first and then pushed Ogata back by a firm press of the shoulder, mumbling, “Stop it, it’s too sensitive.” As soon as Ogata let him slip out of his mouth he didn’t know why he’d felt the need. He rested his forehead on Sugimoto’s thigh for a moment, taking in breath after heavy breath, trying to restore his heart rate before he had to look Sugimoto in the eye.

Sugimoto’s other hand hadn’t left the side of Ogata’s head. When Ogata finally lifted his eyes, Sugimoto kept staring at him, still lying back on the ground with a stupid look on his face. “What do you want? Have you ever... there’s got to be something you want to do.”

Moving out from between Sugimoto’s legs to kneel on the grass next to him, Ogata crept upwards until their chests were level. Sugimoto didn’t move away, and when Ogata picked up one of Sugimoto’s wrists and brought it up to his neck, Sugimoto neither pressed down nor pulled back. “Why don’t you choke me like you hate me? Like you really want to kill me.”

It was an idle thought. He wanted to know what Sugimoto would do—what kind of names Sugimoto would call him, and what look would be on his face. For a moment, Sugimoto gave him nothing but a creased brow. He was silent, almost thoughtful. Languid with satisfaction. Ogata worked his teeth into the inside of his cheek, just on the inside of painful, waiting.

“Why?”

Feigned confusion wasn’t very convincing from someone who had pulled Ogata round by the collar only days earlier. “I think you’d like it—wouldn’t you? Seeing me half dead. You could fuck me like that, while I flop around.”

A shadow passed over Sugimoto’s face, yet he was looking at Ogata more intently than before. “Why would I want to do that?”

Ogata could feel his own vocal cords vibrate against Sugimoto’s palm. “I want it. Don’t say no because you’re scared of hurting me. I don’t care about that.”

“I know you don’t. That’s what I don’t like.”

Sugimoto didn’t constrict his grip, just let his hand linger there while he looked at Ogata like he was waiting for some kind of a sign. Ogata could give him struggle, if that was what Sugimoto needed to get on with it—he considered jabbing the points of his fingers up into Sugimoto’s eyes to watch him wince and see what kind of hard lesson he’d get in return, but he let the thought simmer.

Ogata didn’t feel the usual curiosity that would spur him to push things along quicker. Something in Sugimoto’s bearing told him to bide his time. There had been others before who had tried to give him what he’d paid for, men much bigger than Sugimoto, though he’d never found any who didn’t balk when they figured out how much he liked to take it, or how much more he could handle than they could give. With Sugimoto—Ogata read his decision in his face before he even moved. A twitch in his fingers, maybe, or the brushfire light in his eyes. He pushed Ogata down onto his back, still not choking him, just resting his left hand on his throat like a tease. He rolled over to straddle Ogata’s lower thighs, his free hand planted on the ground by Ogata’s head, and raked Ogata’s body over, his face heated. “Come on, jerk off. You’ve already got wood. Show me. I want to see.”

Ogata could’ve refused just for the sake of it, to see if Sugimoto’s patience would run out, but he was hard, and when he reached down Sugimoto, true to his nature, at last tightened his grip.

Sugimoto’s hold cut off some, but not all of his air; not enough to induce unconsciousness, but enough to keep him from thinking clearly. Ogata unfastened his trousers, slowly, waiting to see what it would take to get Sugimoto to crack and give it to him in earnest. “Are you going to make me get myself off? I know you don’t have much experience, but I thought you’d picked up a few things.”

“Watch your mouth.” Sugimoto’s eyes pressed into Ogata just as heavily as the hand around his throat. He wasn’t making any indications he was going to do anything but watch, so Ogata tipped his head back and began lazily stroking himself. Sugimoto kept to his word: when Ogata started jerking off, he responded with real force.

When Sugimoto’s hand pushed up past the hem of his cuff the patchwork of scars on his forearm became visible, like erosion marks on the sea-rocks, just as permanent a proof of the violence of nature. Ogata didn't know how much time had passed since they'd first laid down. The moon had risen and its pale light was all Ogata could see by. The feeling ebbed and flowed—Sugimoto’s grip wound tighter and then released, not at a steady pace but intermittent, so Ogata couldn’t steel himself for it. Stones dug into his back from the ground below.

It felt like the half-dead hours in the middle of the night. In the hush of the darkened forest, the high-pitched sounds that involuntarily escaped Ogata’s windpipe were deafening. Dizziness settled in. His extremities seemed further away than usual, numb. Ogata felt as enclosed by Sugimoto’s body heat as if he were a little boy again and falling asleep in front of the hearth. Sugimoto was close in on him on all sides, his unforgiving weight bearing down around him, but the only points of skin-on-skin contact were at Sugimoto’s hands. He held himself upright by the strength of his thighs so as not to put his whole body weight on Ogata’s windpipe. If the exertion was hard on him, he didn’t show it. Sugimoto was hardly the first man to look at him like he wanted to chew on his bones, but the way he watched Ogata stroke himself was unfamiliar. Sugimoto was hardly blinking, as if he couldn’t afford to relent his attention for a moment. Like Ogata was a real threat, even like this. Sugimoto looked as rapt as he did hungry.

Sugimoto loosened his hold just long enough for Ogata to heave in a breath through his burning throat. It had taken enough punishment already that night, and was now taking worse. Ogata's body was softened and warm, like clay worked over between a potter's hands. When Ogata spoke, it was ragged, and he could see his own breath condense in the air. “Admit it, Sugimoto. You lied the first time, right? I’m the only one you’ve ever had.”

Ogata meant it as a provocation, but Sugimoto didn’t look angry so much as embarrassed. He gave Ogata’s cheek two crisp, sweet slaps and replied, “Fine, alright, you wanna hear me say it? You’re the only one.”

As if trying to prove a point, Sugimoto pushed Ogata’s hand away and replaced it with his own. The angle of his wrist was as loose and easy as his grip was tight. He’d learned his way around Ogata’s dick pretty quickly for having started out a virgin. A killer famous across the whole Manchurian front, and Ogata was the only one who knew Sugimoto the Immortal liked to give eager little handjobs and moaned high-pitched and soft when he came.

Sugimoto stripped his cock, hard, while his other hand tightened around Ogata’s neck. Ogata let his eyes drift closed; with them open he felt like Sugimoto was flaying him alive, seeing inside of him. He wondered how long it would take for Sugimoto to get it up again; he wanted to push Sugimoto back so he laid on the ground and Ogata could ride him until they both fell apart. Until Sugimoto had bruised his guts, and there was nothing left of him Sugimoto hadn’t left with a mark.

Ogata opened his eyes back up to find them blurry. On instinct, he blinked frantically, wetly, trying to clear his vision, and a series of fat tears rolled down his cheeks. A physiological reaction. It was so foreign a feeling it took him a moment to identify that he was crying. The more aware of it he became the more he hated it and wanted it to stop, but the quicker his breathing hitched the faster they fell. He wanted to shove Sugimoto away; at the same time, if Sugimoto stopped looking at him or touching him for even a second he might cease to exist.

If they kept this up, made a habit of it, would he be able to train his body out of it? Would he learn how to take it without any show of effort, of weakness? He thought about kneeling behind the army office back home a few days after he put his name on the volunteer rolls, gagging on the recruitment officer’s dick, not willing to admit defeat or let his inexperience show. He’d wanted to be good at it, wanted the balding little man to go back to his wife after Ogata shipped out to basic training and think about how much better Ogata had been. He thought about the nights that were to come, now that there was nothing keeping them from having this all the time: what Sugimoto would do to him, what he would do to Sugimoto. The thrill of bedding down in each other’s jaws.

“Should I stop?” Sugimoto asked gruffly. His fingertips were petting at Ogata’s neck, over his adam’s apple and the ridges of his throat, caressing the bruises that were no doubt already forming. Sugimoto’s other hand dragged along his cock, still, and the tightening in Ogata’s abdomen had only barely abated with the loss of constriction around his neck. Ogata’s mouth had fallen open at some point; he sucked in shallow gasps. Both of his hands clutched at Sugimoto’s forearms, though not to pull him away, only clutching him closer. Ogata wondered if Sugimoto would be disappointed if he came like this, or if it was what he wanted and so Ogata should try to hold out to spite him. It was then he remembered that Sugimoto had asked him a question.

“Again.”

Sugimoto, mouth hanging slightly ajar, gave him what he wanted.

Ringing in his ears. Sugimoto’s hand on his throat, so fucking tight it could crush him, and then loose again, rubbing at his skin like he was trying to undo the damage he himself had caused. He kept going back to the bruises, rubbing the pads of his thumbs over the marks they had left. Slow movement of his palm over the head of Ogata’s dick. All of Sugimoto’s impressive teeth gleaming white and pointed in the darkness. The inside of Ogata’s mind a tug-of-war between survival instincts to fight Sugimoto off and the aching desire to succumb and float. Nothing existed but the pressure of Sugimoto’s hands around him. He was erased and blissfully empty of anything—empty and so full he might burst, but held. Fastened to the earth, even if as nothing more than a nameless thing that Sugimoto could touch.

He thought about nothing until he spent in Sugimoto’s palm.

While he lay there, Sugimoto tucked Ogata’s shirt back in. The clouds had lifted. Above them, the night was starry. Bright enough Ogata could’ve shot, had he needed to. The air was already coming down with an evening chill, sharper up there than it was below in Asahikawa proper, and when Sugimoto lay down himself, pressed up to Ogata’s side, Ogata slid his own hands beneath the cotton of Sugimoto’s shirt and up his belly to warm them. They were still numb from lack of airflow, but wouldn’t stay that way for long. Sugimoto’s stomach muscles shifted from the coldness of Ogata’s hands. His mouth was set in a funny little line, and he watched Ogata through sharp but drowsy eyes.

Eventually Sugimoto tugged Ogata up against his body so his back rested along Sugimoto’s chest. Their legs slotted together as they curled inwards on themselves like small children. As unconsciousness washed over him, Ogata was aware of the fingernails of one of Sugimoto’s hands scratching across his prickly scalp, overdue for a touch-up shave it would never get.

-

He sat across from Tsurumi in the smoking lounge of the Asahikawa Officer’s Club. It was a room Ogata had only ever glimpsed through a crack in the door while running some errand or other on Tsurumi’s command, but it was unmistakable. The tables around them bore half-full bottles of sake and glasses of imported whiskey and wine. Cigarette butts and cigars smouldered in ashtrays and the hands of the faceless men around them, all engrossed in their own conversations, though all they sounded like to Ogata’s ears were dull murmurs. For all anyone was paying attention to them, they could be the only people in the room.

Tsurumi faced him like an equal and spoke like they were already in the middle of a conversation. “The most important thing to do is to keep an eye on Hijikata Toshizou.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You remember your history lessons, don’t you?”

Ogata tried to reply but found he couldn’t speak; his mouth felt like it was full of cotton balls. Tsurumi’s smile widened so that Ogata could see all of his teeth. “You’ve always been a good pupil.”

Ogata glanced outside the window and saw not the Asahikawa street scene he expected but the woods, so closely pressed in around them that the branches of the trees were bent and gnarled against the glass pane. He looked back across the table and nearly flinched. Tsurumi was gone. In his place was Yuusaku, eyes open and glassy while his head dripped blood. It flowed slowly, like tar. Ogata tried to get up, but his muscles wouldn’t respond. Yuusaku smiled, too, with his mouth closed, and then said, “Better not oversleep. The woods aren’t safe, even for a wildcat like you.”

His eyes flew open. It was still the middle of the night; there wasn’t so much as a hint of sunlight creeping across the sky above. The stars winked through the lattice of branches and thin wisps of cloud. He felt a slight layer of dew forming on his clothes and skin.

Behind Ogata, Sugimoto was a wall of warmth. His breath condensed on the back of Ogata’s neck. They were surrounded by coldness and damp and the smell of pine sap.

Sugimoto stirred and jerked in his sleep, restless, plagued by nightmares. He’d always been like that, even in the barracks, before they sailed for the front in the first place. Ogata had noticed it then and taken it as a sign of weakness—Ogata had never been bothered by dreams. Most of the time he didn’t have any. He slept until he woke, and nothing could be said of the time in between. It was only recently he’d started to sweat through visions himself: Yuusaku, mostly, some nights mangled and suffering, some whole and terribly serene, still others skeletal and ravenous, out for blood.

Sugimoto clung to him like a drowning man to a raft. Stifled little whimpers crept out of his throat to land on Ogata’s neck. Dog-in-pain sounds. The cold tip of his nose pressed against the skin just below Ogata’s hairline. One of Sugimoto’s hands had crept beneath Ogata’s jacket and shirt to rest against his stomach, leeching off his warmth like Ogata had earlier. Sugimoto’s fingernails dug into Ogata’s skin hard enough to leave marks. Normally Ogata would’ve liked that, but right now it was keeping him from falling back asleep.

It took him too long to fall back under. They had all slept in the snow at Port Arthur, but instead of the omnipresent noise of an entrenchment during siege, they were now surrounded by silence. It crawled under his skin. As he was finally beginning to slip off, he realized that when Yuusaku had spoken to him in the dream, it was Sugimoto’s voice that had come out.

A few hours later, the morning dawned cloudy and humid. He was woken for good by the feeling of fat droplets of spring rain falling on his face. Ogata opened his eyes, blinked back into consciousness, and took inventory of his body; twisting his neck even a little made him wince. His thighs and calves ached from the long hours spent moving crates and even longer hours fleeing through the underbrush. His throat ached on the inside from the force of desperate breaths and on the outside from the bruises covering the flesh.

Sugimoto, still wrapped around him, started to stir. Slowly, cautiously, as not to wake him further, Ogata reached into his breast pocket and withdrew the folded-up floor plan to his father’s house. Though he’d poured over it well enough to know it off of the top of his head, if he had to, he’d rather not lose it to something as small as the changeable Hokkaido weather.

Before he could tuck it into one of the leather pouches at his waist, Sugimoto’s voice rumbled against the back of his neck, “What is that?”

Ogata's fingers closed on the folded paper reflexively. Hopefully Sugimoto was too dense to take notice of the gesture. “Something I don't want to get wet.”

Sugimoto’s voice was still rough with sleep, but Ogata didn’t think that was the only reason he sounded a shade menacing when he replied, “Oh, so you want to keep secrets now?”

“It has nothing to do with you.”

“That's not an answer.”

Sugimoto's fingers curled next to Ogata's hip. For a moment, Ogata thought he was about to make a move for the map. If Sugimoto tried to overpower him there wasn't much Ogata could do about it, but maybe he could roll away and get him in the gut with an elbow—though, even if Sugimoto got a hold of it, he might not be able to see the floor plan for what it was. It weren't as if Tsurumi had labelled it Hanazawa's estate, after all. But still, if Sugimoto was already suspicious—

Sugimoto curled his hand in on itself and then peeled himself off from Ogata's back to be replaced with cool, damp air. He withdrew his hands from around Ogata’s waist and rolled away from him before getting to his feet.

“I'm going to look around for water.”

Ogata watched him go. His hand strayed to the butt of his rifle, instinctively, where it lay on the ground by his head. He sat up and drew it into his lap, but didn’t raise it. A prickle ran down the back of his neck a half-second before Sugimoto turned back to pierce him with a long glance over his shoulder. Shoot him now, went part of his mind, you can’t miss. The morning light glinted in Sugimoto’s eyes. Ogata’s index finger slid inside the trigger guard.

When Sugimoto turned away from Ogata and continued onward into the trees, Ogata let him go.

Chapter 12

Notes

Content note: this chapter involves graphic physical violence between the main ship, including significant hand injury. It's pretty on-par with what these two get up to in canon, but I thought it merited a warning.

He’d hoped water would be hard to find; he wanted a walk to clear his head, to put some distance between himself and what he’d left behind. Luck wasn’t on his side. though, and in an unwanted blessing it wasn’t long before Sugimoto came across a frigid and slow-moving stream a little higher up in the hills. It tasted sweet, better than anything they had to drink down at the garrison; it tasted like it ought to be shared. Ogata wasn't with him, though, and Sugimoto didn't know him to ever enjoy simple pleasures, so he lingered for a moment at the stream’s edge, hands on his hips, and stared into the patterns of rushing water as if they could show him just how deep of trouble he'd gotten himself into.

Was this it, then: how it felt to wake up a free man—not to have any places to be or superiors to report to that would distract him from the hovering dread?

They’d gotten out; that was the hard part, the part where they’d needed each other to pull it off. Now, there was nothing stopping either of them from going it alone. Even so, Sugimoto wasn’t sure if he wanted to. Ogata seemed to know a lot more than he did about the gold plan, and he suspected there were more than a few catches Ogata hadn’t yet seen fit to warn him of. Sugimoto barely knew where they were going. To Otaru, yeah—simple on paper, but he hadn't been in the 7th long enough to have a good sense of Hokkaido’s terrain, let alone how they were supposed to go about finding the convicts. Who knew how much of what Ogata had already told him about the plan to come was even true, anyhow. Maybe Tsurumi hadn’t confided in him anything worth knowing about the gold—though the interest Tsurumi had always seemed to take in Ogata suggested otherwise.

He sank into a crouch and let the current play over his hand. It only hurt for the first few minutes before the flesh numbed. They were a few months away yet from the first swim of the year, back home. He’d heard, on the way up from Tokyo, that Asahikawa was the coldest city in Japan, but even Tokyo would be too cold for swimming this time of year. When it warmed up, later in the spring, the kids of his hometown would run along the bank and push each other in. He was the first of the neighborhood boys to brave it, most years, when everyone else was still cowed by the temperature.

The Sugimotos never had any problems having children, did they? A big lot of them, all sturdy troublemakers. Nice kids, though. Not going to have to worry about growing old without being taken care of, not them—

They hadn’t ever slept together, just slept, until the night before. Funny, how little time it took to get used to something like that.

Sugimoto half-expected Ogata to be gone when he came back. Maybe he was hoping for it, wanting to be kept from having to shake the truth out of him.

When he did make his way back to the clearing they’d slept in, the pit of Sugimoto’s stomach iced over. Ogata was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t glad to be proven right. Ogata had left, and now he was alone. That made some things simpler and others much more complicated.

He spent a few long seconds letting the skin on the back of his neck prickle and cracking his knuckles, before he jerked at the sound of a familiar voice: “That was quick.”

Sugimoto whipped his head around and blinked twice before looking up. Amidst overhead foliage in the trees dangled the ends of a pair of gaitered army boots.

“What the hell are you doing up there?”

“You can see most of the way across the ridge from up here.” Ogata’s feet vanished into the leaves and branches for a few seconds and then reappeared, followed by his calves and thighs and the rest, as he made his methodical way down the branches, binoculars hanging around his neck.

Sugimoto’s heart skipped a little in his chest at the sight of him. Dismay and excitement, both. What was a little longer, to keep going on with his head buried in the snow? It wasn’t as though he’d only started now.

Back to the water: they didn’t have time to wash their clothes, because it was still too risky to start a fire and the light rain hadn’t stopped coming down around them. A day of walking soaking wet was more likely to cause them trouble than having to put up with uniforms that were a bit sweaty and dusty from the day before but otherwise serviceable. During the war, they’d worn them until they were falling apart at the seams. They could, however, fill their canteens with water and then wash themselves in the slight pool where the stream was deepest. It was snow and glacial melt too cold to stay submerged in for long, but who knew how long it would be before they would get another chance to bathe.

They’d seen each other naked before, of course, but never when they were completely alone. In the humdrum weeks at Mukden, after the battle, the whole hundred-odd men of the regiment who weren’t holed up in medical tents had spent an afternoon fishing in a creek not far from their makeshift billets in the city. After getting bored of angling for the scanty river fish, they’d washed their ruined uniforms and swam. That water hadn’t been warm, either, seeing as it was Manchuria in March, but they were always cold back then; they got inured to it, as much as one could. Crowded together like they were then, you could get away with a fair bit; he hadn’t bothered trying to stop himself from stealing sideways glances at the droplets of water running down Ogata’s chest, or observing the way the temperature turned his already pale skin almost grey-blue in the harsh sunlight of early spring.

The novelty of not having to pretend not to stare hadn’t yet worn off. Now, Ogata was turned away from him—he was still edgy, as though not letting Sugimoto get a good look at his face would keep his secrets safe. It was a little kid's logic, like he thought his eyes really could reveal the contents of whatever passed for his soul. Sugimoto watched him, openly, as Ogata bent down to scrub at his legs—despite deposits of softness around his stomach and hips, the muscles were close enough to the skin to be seen as they shifted with movement, running through his back and down his thighs, taut, pale, and unscarred—and his mind performed a dispassionate calculus of how easy Ogata would be to kill. With his bare hands like this, no weapon, it would be a sharp twist of the neck. Sugimoto had done it before to other men: crush his windpipe, break his spine, over and done with. As if feeling the weight of Sugimoto’s thoughts, Ogata straightened up, and Sugimoto saw last night’s bruising around his neck, a ring of mottled tones of purple and brown. A chill ran through him, like a winter draught in an empty house.

Ogata glanced back at him, then; not so frightened of a met gaze after all. He looked over his shoulder at Sugimoto with capricious eyes, like he was enjoying himself watching a piece of gutted vermin squirm to the last. When he remembered the things he’d said and done after the sun had fallen, Sugimoto felt something between guilt and embarrassment, but Ogata didn’t seem any worse for wear. He did massage his throat when Sugimoto looked his way, but the look in his eye was sly, so Sugimoto didn’t pay the bruises much mind. A poor close-quarters fighter or no, Ogata was sturdy. He could take what Sugimoto doled out.

He’d looked almost pretty like that, slapped around and satisfied. Sugimoto had never in his life wanted so badly both to hurt someone and to nurse them well afterwards. How far could Sugimoto have taken it? Would Ogata have kept it up the further it went, with all his malice and restlessness melting away the closer Sugimoto dragged him to real danger, the kind of violence they couldn’t take back, or would his animal instincts have kicked in after a point?

He couldn’t stop himself from hooking an arm around Ogata’s ribcage and pressing them together front-to-back, like they had been while they slept. They wasted some time like that, predictably. He sucked bitemarks into Ogata’s shoulder and earlobe while he rubbed against his ass, frotting between his cheeks urgently until he spilled across his lower back. Ogata’s hand reached back around to grasp at Sugimoto’s dick, but Sugimoto pulled away from him, crouched down, and turned Ogata around with hands on his thighs. Sugimoto’s face was hot, but he jerked Ogata off furiously for as long as it took for Ogata to come over his lips and lower jaw—not long at all. When he wiped himself off with the back of his hand, Sugimoto couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from lifting.

It had been stupid any of the times they’d fucked; that wasn’t new. There had never been a time when Sugimoto could have thought things through with a cool head and decided that letting Ogata get in close was the best plan of action; there were only ever counterarguments. Nevermind that they were always the wrong ones. Early on, he’d worried that Ogata would talk about Sugimoto to the other soldiers the way they all talked about Ogata behind his back. If that had happened, no one said as much to Sugimoto, so he didn’t really care. Later, he’d wondered if Ogata was in it for some other reason besides the fucking, if he was only doing it to get something out of him. That might not have been completely wrong, but even though there was still too much about Ogata that Sugimoto didn’t know, it seemed unlikely that Ogata was faking his interest, whatever he’d reported back about him at one time or another to Tsurumi. Now Sugimoto knew he shouldn’t go for it because every time Ogata was out of sight, all Sugimoto could think about was Hanazawa—on the battlefield, in the hospital bed, hobbling out of the garrison.

The problem was that every time Ogata was in front of him, the carnivorous part of his mind took over. Touch him, it said, he’ll let you. He wants it too. When he’d dreamed of being with Umeko, he’d thought of the way her hand would feel between his own palms, of the softness of her cheek, of what it would be like to lay his head on her chest in the dark and hear her heart beating. If his thoughts strayed from chasteness, they were a warm and confusing blur in his head. He wanted to hold her, to feel her, to make her smile or gasp. For them to belong to each other, in every way. It had never been like this, where he couldn’t pass Ogata by without wanting to pull off his clothes and crush him against the nearest flat surface. Sometimes when he let his mind wander, he’d imagine pushing into Ogata so hard Ogata just splintered into pieces.

He was waiting for what felt like the right time, but Sugimoto was beginning to suspect that the question—naked as a newborn: what happened to your brother, and how much should I hate you for it?—would never slide into the light of its own accord. It would need to be forced out, insistently, loudly, and quite likely with blood.

All the same, they were out of the water and dressed well before high noon.

-

From above the ridge, the whole valley was visible. The forests and farmlands were cut through with taut threads of road, and Asahikawa sat dark and ugly as a bruise in the hollow of it. The long, squat structures of army and industry were dotted through with dwellings large and small, though from a distance they all looked insignificant.

Sugimoto remembered hearing, just after his enlistment, about the troop of soldiers who had been put to traversing the Hakkoda mountains in January. Two hundred men slowly freezing in peacetime; it took weeks to find the bodies. Give him a quick death, when it finally came for him; a bayonet to the throat, or a bullet to the brain. He felt a flicker of gratitude that it was well into late spring, but still hoped they would spend no more time than necessary in the woods.

Ogata paused near Sugimoto’s elbow. “We should keep moving.”

“Doesn’t look like there’s a way down the crag from here.”

“We’ll skirt the edge of it. We should continue the way we’re headed until we reach the river. The riverbank will take us into town so we don’t have to follow the road.” Ogata drew his cloak more tightly around himself.

Along the way, they passed broken twigs and growths of underbrush that looked crushed to Sugimoto’s eye, though he wasn’t used to the woods. It was impossible to tell if they were left by themselves the previous day, when they had moved with more haste than caution, by bad weather, or by something else.

After a long stretch of silence, Ogata muttered, “I think we’re being followed.”

Sugimoto looked at him sidelong. “What did you see?”

“Nothing, but I’ve done it myself enough to have a sense for when I’m being tracked.” Sugimoto hadn’t noticed anything, but the air did have a bad cast to it. There wasn’t anything as obvious as the head-and-shoulders silhouette of a human being through the trees that he could point to, just a ticklish feeling on the back of his neck, like the run-and-hide! instinct he got in the trenches before the first claps of incoming shells could be heard.

They were far enough out now that any men Tsurumi sent after them would have a hard time returning to the regiment, since they were on the move west. Maybe it was a creature of the forest: the spirit of one of the long-dead wolves, here to haunt them. More likely, the product of light, weak sleep, bad dreams, and little trust in one another.

“You sound excited about it,” he replied, and Ogata sent him a slanted look out of the corners of his eyes.

Pursuers or no, they continued making their way down the hill the same way they had before. With every step they took closer to the valley, the more pressing Sugimoto’s fight-or-flight feeling became. He wasn’t afraid of Tsurumi, or afraid of death, but he only remained alive because of that animal part of him that knew when to run and when to stand his ground. Maybe now they’d just be running all of the time, and he ought to get used to it.

He might have felt more reluctance about deserting if he had any family left to shame, but as it was, the other Sugimotos would at least be spared having to keep face under the weight of village gossip about their good-for-nothing coward son. He had nothing to lose—nothing that was really his, anyway. Even the other kids he grew up with might not ever learn that he ran. Who knew whether Tsurumi would ever report their desertions to Central Command. For all his former schoolhouse classmates knew, Sugimoto could vanish from their lives with as much finality as if he’d really died, whether of consumption with his parents and siblings or from some slow-bleeding wound on Manchurian shores. He didn’t mind much if he never went back there. It wasn’t much to miss. When all this was done, he would pay Umeko a visit like a thief in the night to deliver her share of the gold. If he did it properly, she wouldn’t need to see him at all.

After that, his mind stalled. Ogata was right when he’d said, back at Asahikawa, that after deserting there wasn’t much they could do with their lives. Sugimoto couldn’t think past it; it was like a pane of glass too dark to see through. What drove Ogata—spite, ambition, or necessity? Sugimoto couldn’t imagine him wealthy or sedentary. If Sugimoto knew him at all, Ogata was a roaming predator more interested in the hunt than the carcass left behind.

If Sugimoto made one last trip back to Kanto to settle his debt, would Ogata come with him? An instinctual warning, as sudden as the kick of a tapped knee, coursed through him at the thought: Ogata must be kept away from Umeko. It was good that Sugimoto hadn’t even told Ogata her name.

At the same time, he wondered if he could persuade Ogata to take him where he’d come from. Knowing it was somewhere in Ibaraki didn’t give Sugimoto any better a picture of the kind of place that could have produced such a person, or the kind of family. General Hanazawa’s mistress—would she be waiting for them by the door, looking out at the road for her son to come home? He tried to dream up her face by taking a sidelong glance at Ogata and scrubbing away everything of Second Lieutenant Hanazawa in his features. He was left with pale skin, a delicate nose, and a quietly heavy presence. Not much to go off of, but Sugimoto was sure she was a beautiful woman. It made his chest hurt to imagine.

He broke the silence: “So we get there, and then what?”

Ogata shot him a pitying look. “I told you already. I need to visit Asahikawa proper before we head for Otaru. It’ll take a few hours at most. You don’t even need to come; you can go pawn some gear and see if you can get us some more food and ammunition.”

“What is there back in Asahikawa you couldn’t take care of before we left?”

“I have a contact in town I want to meet before we get too far away. He knows things about the gold.”

“A contact? Who the hell is your contact?” He thought back to that morning, when he’d caught Ogata handling a piece of paper when he thought Sugimoto was asleep. Sugimoto hadn’t taken a good look at it before Ogata’d gotten wise and hid it away. Another man, and Sugimoto wouldn’t have thought much of it, but he would bet a lot Ogata wasn’t pouring over letters from a girl back home. Sugimoto had toyed with ripping it out of his hand, but it was the early morning and he’d still felt drowsy and charitable from the warmth of Ogata’s back against his chest, despite the bad dreams that had plagued him in the night. If he had tore it from him, he would’ve crossed a line that couldn’t be retreated back over. Perhaps it was time for that, but he’d let it go. “Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”

“I told you. The less information you know, the safer we’ll both be.”

“I’m risking a lot to stick this out with you. I won’t keep it up if you don’t start showing me some respect.” Thoughts slid through his mind on tracks, like railcars; he shifted tack, shooting Ogata a glance out of the corner of his eye as his feet kept winding their way along the narrow path down the ridge. “Remind me, again, what’s going to happen when we start to track down the convicts?”

“Well, we’ll have to use the first few we find for information. Some of them must know something about how to crack the code, or be able to lead us to the others.”

He sounded very relaxed about torturing dangerous criminals. Did he really think it would be that easy, or was he just downplaying his own uncertainty? His tone struck Sugimoto as oddly and clumsily placating: a token of slantways contrition, offered like the body of a small animal left on a doorstep, and just as disconcerting a gift.

“Tsurumi told you all this?”

“Most of it. Other things from others, here and there. Kikuta used to like to talk, back before Tsurumi sent him away. Lot of use it did him.”

Sugimoto nodded, his mind circling around Ogata’s words in sluggish laps. He licked his bottom lip, hesitating, but wasn’t able to stifle his curiosity. “How old were you when Tsurumi…”

The corner of Ogata’s mouth lifted. “When Tsurumi what? Spit it out.” He looked inordinately pleased that Sugimoto was asking him, enough to make Sugimoto’s stomach churn.

“When he started telling you things he didn’t give out over the mess hall.”

Ogata kept his eyes fixed ahead, but his lips were pursed with satisfaction. “Hard to say. I guess not long after I enlisted.”

It was really too bad that leaving meant he’d probably never get to kill Tsurumi, but who knew what the future held. There was still time. “Did you…” Sugimoto rolled his next words around in his head while he watched the side of Ogata’s face. Did you enjoy it? Did you care about him, or at least care what he thought of you?

“You look like you’ve given it some thought. Do you like thinking about it, or does it bother you?”

It was easy to imagine him younger and a bit less hardened and not willing to hide his gloating over being, for once, in some way chosen, even though there was no way it would’ve won him any good will. Sugimoto remembered hearing it passed around as a joke, before the war: Haven’t you heard? The child of a wildcat is a wildcat, too. It had bothered him at the time. Remembering it now, he felt a surge of hatred for the whole lot of them. Let Tsurumi eat them alive.

There wasn’t anyone in the whole rotten regiment he would’ve picked first. Not even Hanazawa. There it was—something he couldn’t speak out loud, to Ogata least of all. Sugimoto wished he hadn’t even thought it. Now he had to go around knowing it about himself, and it wasn’t the kind of knowledge he needed. That kind of knowledge only made the hard things harder.

Sugimoto stared for a few more seconds, then blinked and looked away. “I just don’t know how much I should trust what he’s told you.”

That made Ogata sour. He turned his head away, and stepped over the fallen log in front of him with more petulance than grace. “Let’s say I know him well enough to figure out when he’s lying.”

Ogata wasn’t half as clever as he thought he was. Sugimoto didn’t mind that; he was easier to handle that way. It did make him dangerous, though. He wasn’t sensible enough to be trusted to hold to his patterns.

“Did Tsurumi really tell you anything? Maybe you won’t give anything up because you don’t know anything more than I do. Maybe I would’ve been better off ratting you out.”

“What?” Ogata didn’t sound playful anymore. He had enough common sense to tell when he was in trouble, at least.

“Do you think you’re the only one Tsurumi ever talked to?”

“Who, you? Did he tell you how amazing you are, Sugimoto, and how much he wants to see you rise up to serve by his side? You’re not the only one. You’re not special.”

“I don’t mean about me. He said some really interesting things about you before we left.”

Ogata’s shoulders were set, a little; he was on edge. “Come out with it, then. Tell me.”

He felt electric, full of some sort of cold charge that needed a way out. He felt like touching kindling to a flame just to watch it go up. Every step he took down the slope, his rifle beat a familiar rhythm against his spine. The path had narrowed, too close to walk side-by-side, so Ogata took the lead, walking ahead of him with his back turned, vulnerable. Across Ogata’s back rested his gun: field stripped every night, its wood was notched from heavy wear but spotless. Was this the same gun that—a row of goosebumps ran up Sugimoto’s forearm, under his sleeve. “Do you know why I joined the army? My family all caught tuberculosis. I was the only one who didn’t get sick.”

Ogata cast a suspicious glance behind him. “Why did you lie to me?”

Sugimoto stopped walking and lashed out a hand to clutch Ogata by the shoulder, holding him in place. Ogata stilled, but didn’t turn around. Sugimoto stared at the back of his neck like he was trying to burn a hole there. “What? I never lied about that. Where’d you get that idea?”

Ogata shifted around to face him and shook off Sugimoto’s hand before he took a few slow steps backwards. He had a hand on his sling strap, the fingers curled around the leather’s edge but not tightened—yet. It was hard for Sugimoto to take his eyes away from Ogata’s hand, though he’d seen it many times before; it was a tic Ogata had, to grip the thing for comfort the same way some people crossed their arms over their chests. After a few moments, Sugimoto dragged his gaze back up to Ogata’s face, where he was being watched in return, and Ogata’s lip curled. “Don’t play dumb. You said you burned your family alive.”

“I said I burned them. They were already dead.” Sugimoto’s blood felt thick inside his veins, like the slurry of partly-melted snow. “I hadn’t killed anyone before the war.”

Ogata blinked slowly, his expression all familiar condescension. “Well, you’ve killed more than enough now. Spare me the virgin routine.”

“What about you, then. Had you?”

Ogata’s mouth twisted, amused. “Did Tsurumi tell you I had? It’s the job of an intelligence officer to make up stories.”

“Don’t waste my time. Answer.” Nagging at him, something between thought and memory: how hard Ogata was to threaten when he liked to be hurt. It wasn't a problem Sugimoto saw a way out of, not when Ogata was too volatile to be reasoned with when he'd been backed into a corner. It was tricky, too, when Sugimoto never liked Ogata more than when he was breathless, pink-cheeked and splotchy, smarting, thrilled, and greedy, blinking slow and looking about ready to lay his cheek on down in Sugimoto's palm. Ogata wasn't the kind to be kept, but every now and then Sugimoto would push him far enough he could almost trick himself into believing it, for as long as the warm aftermath lasted.

“What if I had? Would you turn me in so I could rot with Noppera-Bou in prison—you, of all people? Would it make you feel better about all the lives you’ve taken?”

“What about your brother?”

“Yuusaku?” His nostrils flared. “What does he have to do with anything?”

“What happened to him?” His thoughts and movements felt slow, like he was wading through mud and weighed down by the ballast of everything he probably shouldn’t have said, everything he had yet to say, and a few things that were too tender and confusing to put words to, even inside his own head.

“You saw what happened to him, didn’t you? You were there. You got a promotion out of it.”

“It was a hell of a shot. Could have come from anywhere. I don’t know where you were.”

Ogata’s hand on his sling strap had tightened. Sugimoto brought it up in the first place because he wanted to get somewhere, hadn’t he? Only problem was, he still didn’t know where they were going, but it was too late to stop.

“What, did Tsurumi tell you I tried to kill him? That would be convenient for him, wouldn’t it. If it were true.”

“Can you look me in the face and say you didn’t do it?”

He tilted his head to look Sugimoto in the eye. “I didn’t shoot him. Why would I?”

Sugimoto blinked a few times, his brows furrowed deeper. Ogata’s expression flickered with something akin to hope before Sugimoto‘s lip curled. “You’re a bad liar. I thought Tsurumi would’ve at least taught you that much.”

Ogata tipped his chin back, keeping fixed eye contact. His face was empty of remorse, or shame; empty of anything at all. “Why does it matter? He’s alive, and hopefully neither of us will ever see him again. And if I hadn’t done it, Tsurumi would’ve arranged for something worse.”

“Bullshit.”

“He's better off to Tsurumi dead. Tsurumi asked me to do it, once, before he changed his mind, and then he wanted me to finish the job.”

“You're full of it.”

They reached for their rifles at the same time, holding them loosely but readied, not aimed anywhere in particular but pointed in the other’s direction; somewhere between a threat and an action. Ogata’s eyes were gleaming like the sparks let off by a fire grown out of control. “Go ask him, then, and see what he says to try and change your mind. He'd feed you to wild animals if he thought it'd get him closer to the gold.”

“You want to try it? You think you can be the one that’ll kill Sugimoto the Immortal?”

“Who else?” Ogata braced the rifle against his shoulder in a stance Sugimoto had seen hundreds of times. Not just playing around, then. Fine. If Ogata shot him in the head or the heart, would there be a moment in between the shot and the pain, where Sugimoto didn’t yet feel the impact? For all he knew, he was about to be shot at any second. He didn’t dread it, exactly. Sure felt like they’d started to draw blood already; might as well make it true. It would be easier to respond to than this, where it felt like neither of them were speaking the same language. He wanted to thrash Ogata and be done with it, as though that would fix things in a simple equation of pain weathered and wounds received until Ogata had paid off his debt.

Sugimoto ran his tongue along his bottom lip and took one step closer to Ogata and then another, twigs crunching softly underfoot. “Hurry up and do it, then. But if you can’t do the job on the first try, you’re never going to get another chance. You son of a bitch, come on. It’s the only thing you’re good at. Stop making me wait.” He crooked his neck to the side. “Unless you’re holding off because you know you can’t do it. He’s still alive, isn’t he? What makes you think you could make it count for me?”

Ogata was dogshit in a hand-to-hand fight, but with the length of a rifle barrel between them he was more than a fair opponent. He’d already looked scornful, but now his eyes frosted over. So this was what it took to get him spitting mad. Before Ogata could reply Sugimoto went on: “See, what I don’t get is why you just didn’t let things lie. You were already planning to leave by then. You told me about the gold on the train, before we even got to Mukden. If you hated him so much, all you had to do was bide your time a little longer, and then you’d never have to see him again.”

“Why do you care, Sugimoto? I don’t understand what it has to do with you at all. Don’t tell me you fell for his terrible speeches and noble bloodline like all the others.”

“He’s your brother.”

“Our father doesn’t think so. Why should I?”

Sugimoto’s frown deepened, impossibly, further. “I don’t give a shit about him. Your brother—he came to me and asked me how he could become your friend, did you know that? And then he tried to protect you even after you—tried to kill him, you stupid asshole. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Protect your family, not hurt them.”

“Every Russian you or I killed had a family too. Why is it different for someone like him?” He was nearly snarling, face contorted into ugliness by indignation. And to think people, Sugimoto included, had thought him apathetic. This had always been below the surface; it wasn’t a surprise to see it uncovered, but the closeness of it still took Sugimoto aback, like the sight of viscera spilling out of the guts of a fish even when you pushed the knife-point into its belly for just that purpose.

There was an ache inside him that was acting up, a gaping wound he’d been walking off for long enough to know it wasn’t going to heal. “Because he loved you.”

He saw it run across Ogata’s face the moment before it happened. Of everything Sugimoto had said or done, he’d never seen Ogata more angry than he was then. It was like he was afraid of corruption or infection, in reverse; like it would seep into his skin and change him if he let himself get close to the idea of love.

Ogata pulled the trigger. Sugimoto was in motion before Ogata’s finger touched the metal, so instead of his heart, the bullet struck Sugimoto in the side. It hurt like hell. He didn’t stop moving, crashing into Ogata like a raging, wounded animal before Ogata had a chance to cycle the chamber for the next shot. Sugimoto had one thought in his mind: he wouldn't die like this, on some godforsaken hill, far from where he was born, after the war had ended, at the hands of someone he’d never trusted but been betrayed by, anyhow, in none of the ways he’d thought to be afraid of. Sugimoto held his own gun with one hand and with the other tore the rifle out from Ogata’s hands, tossed it into the woods as hard as he could, hardly paying attention to where it went, and toppled Ogata to the forest floor.

Sugimoto straddled his chest and pressed his head into the earth by a knee over the throat. It must have hurt like a bitch, the force of bone and muscle over fresh bruises, but he didn’t let up. His side was on fire where he’d been shot, but he let it fade into background noise. Wasn’t the first time. Ogata tried to speak, but it came out a garbled whine. Sugimoto shouldered his own rifle and went to pull his bayonet out of its sheath, but before he could manage it Ogata got one of his hands free and socked a punch into Sugimoto’s bullet wound. In the moment Sugimoto spent reflexively seized over, Ogata went for his own bayonet where it hung from his waist.

It wasn’t a conscious action, just a move of self-defense. As Ogata pulled his hand up and towards Sugimoto’s gut, bayonet held between his fingers, Sugimoto caught him mid-swing with his own. He pierced through the heel of Ogata’s palm, just under the hilt of the bayonet he held, straight through to the other side of the hand. Ogata gasped, low and keening. Ogata’s bayonet clattered from his hand, and Sugimoto picked it up, his own being still lodged in Ogata’s hand. He knew pulling it out meant blood loss, potentially fatal, so he let it rest where it was, impaling Ogata through the palm. Blood seeped out everywhere around it, staining them both.

He could cut him open without much trouble. Sugimoto rolled the thought around his mind idly. He could angle his bayonet so it would slide up and into the soft part of the stomach, below Ogata’s ribs, so no bones would get in the way. It was so easy. Sugimoto had done it dozens of times. The Hokkaido wilderness was the perfect place to kill a man. He’d never be found out, and who would care? Whatever family Ogata had left in Ibaraki wouldn’t come up looking for him in this forsaken place, if they looked for him at all. The trees around them had witnessed worse than this over the centuries, surely. They couldn’t be the first pair of animals to be at each other’s throats in these woods.

“That’ll heal over. Not going to shoot for a while, though. You’re lucky I’m feeling generous and didn’t take any of your fingers.”

Ogata knocked his head back against the ground; one of his boots kicked out and back, his heel dragging in the dirt. A good effort, considering, but not nearly enough to shake Sugimoto off. Looking at him twist beneath him, Sugimoto’s throat felt like it was closing up. Ogata was holding up well under the pain, and Sugimoto felt fond over that. Angry, too; the cold kind, that shrunk all his thoughts down to what needed to be done, and how best to do it. Most of all, a rueful sort of pity—you sad bastard, you really got yourself into this, didn’t you?

Ogata’s throat thrummed visibly with the exertion of breathing, like the pain was a parasite straining to break out through the skin. Sugimoto had the bayonet he’d taken from Ogata pressed up against Ogata’s neck, tiny crimson dribbles of Ogata’s blood welling up where the tip had lightly pierced skin. He thought about getting at more of it—slitting Ogata’s throat right then and watching him bleed out in the dirt. Up close, he could see Ogata’s adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. If Sugimoto killed him, he realized, he’d have to hold Ogata until the end. He couldn’t imagine it going any other way.

Sugimoto tightened his grip on the hilt, lowered his head further, and ran his tongue over Ogata’s parted lips, his panting mouth. Leaving him wet with spit, glistening. Ogata used a little of what was left of his strength to snarl, showing Sugimoto his teeth. In response, Sugimoto laughed under his breath and rose up just enough Ogata couldn’t rear up and bite Sugimoto’s lips, or anywhere else he might turn his mind to.

He lifted his bayonet up from Ogata’s neck, cautiously. “Try and go for your gun and I’ll tear your arm right off so you can never shoot again.” Ogata’s eyes were fixed to the blade as it came up to stroke the side of his face.

Sugimoto had thought himself a nice guy, once. A long time ago, now, wasn’t it. Ogata squirmed under him like he had several times before: a million years ago, in another life, Ogata had goaded him into fighting in the dirt behind the Asahikawa barracks kitchen. Sugimoto had been broadsided, then, by how much he liked the feeling of having Ogata pinned and straining. His taste for it hadn’t gone away yet, and he didn’t have it in him to think of himself as a sick fuck for appreciating it now. Ogata never seemed more human than during moments like this. His lack of feeling was undercut by struggle or desire, and rolling them into one just made things simpler.

Sugimoto grabbed Ogata’s jaw in a white-knuckled grip with his free hand. “Hold still. I mean it.” When Ogata tried, unsuccessfully, to whip his head away, Sugimoto grunted, and shifted his knee back over Ogata’s throat to keep him in place. “Everything’s gotta be hard with you, doesn’t it? Always gotta make it difficult.”

With the hilt of the bayonet held between his fourth and fifth fingers, he fumbled for Ogata’s breast pocket, unbuttoning the flap with index finger and thumb and reaching inside until his fingers met the crinkle of paper.

He pulled out a slightly battered copy of something that looked at first glance to be a map. On second glance he could tell the lines didn’t show anything but the walls and doors of what looked like a building, rather than streets and alleyways like he’d assumed. There were a few sparse, cryptic notes around the edges, that looked like they were written in some kind of code or shorthand, and between the fire in Sugimoto’s side from the bullet wound and the irregular but forceful squirming of Ogata’s torso under him he didn’t feel like taking the time to puzzle it out.

“What is this? Must be important, if you didn’t want me to see it.”

“It’s a map of the Lieutenant General’s house. Tsurumi gave it to me, so I could help him out by killing my father.” His speech was roughened by pain, but he still managed to imbue his voice with acidic glee.

“Not broken it off with Tsurumi after all, then?”

“I’m not going to do it for him. He’s just the means to the end. Are you going to call me a monster for that? Is my father’s life precious to you, too?”

The paper crushed into a ball in Sugimoto’s fist. “That’s what you wanted to do in Asahikawa. There’s no contact. You just wanted me to kill time while you—”

“Do I disgust you? I guess you think you’re different. You only kill men whose names you don’t know. Well, you’re wrong, Sugimoto. You’re just like me. There’s something missing inside you. Maybe it used to be there, but it’s gone now.”

He let the map fall to the ground, and took the hilt of Ogata’s bayonet into his hand in a better grip. “Are you trying to egg me into proving you wrong?”

“Maybe you should.” Ogata blinked rapidly, like he was trying to stay conscious, and stared at Sugimoto with what felt like all the vile force he had in him. Sugimoto’s knee shifted over to rest on Ogata’s shoulder, so Ogata could rasp through his abused throat: “Do you think you’re being kind by not slitting my throat and having done with it? I might as well off myself. You might as well jerk off all over me and then finish what you’ve started.”

Sugimoto furrowed his brows and leaned closer over him. “Don’t be sick, it’s not going to help you.”

It would be so easy to do it, was the thing, but Hanazawa had kept Ogata’s secret, so he must have wanted Ogata to live. Wouldn’t be right, really, for Sugimoto to make that call for him. At the same time, he couldn’t just let Ogata go. Had to make him pay, somehow, for Sugimoto’s own sake.

“You’re gonna have to go into town to find a doctor to treat this. Maybe a vet, someone who won’t talk. Should keep you busy for a few days.” Sugimoto let go of Ogata’s jaw with his left hand, his right still holding Ogata’s own bayonet against his cheek. His left hand moved to the hilt of his own bayonet, which was still pierced through Ogata’s hand, impaling him to the earth. He pushed it in a bit further, wiggling it, worsening the wound. Ogata’s eyes rolled back in his head, and his body undulated beneath him like a wave, convulsing more than trying to fight him off. “I’ll get a head start, and then if you make it and still want to kill me, or want me to kill you, come and find me. We can settle the debt.”

He let go of the hilt of his bayonet and left it stuck in Ogata’s hand. Let him keep it, for now. Something to remember him by. Before he got to his feet, Sugimoto pressed his lips to Ogata’s sweat-slick forehead. Just once, so he wouldn’t lie awake at night thinking about how he’d never done it. That was the kind of thing that would eat him up. It was just a few seconds, but in that time, with his mouth on Ogata’s skin, he felt like they’d never been closer together, like through the two of them flowed the same blood. Free men now, of a sort, but tethered together, even when apart.

Sugimoto sat up, the end of Ogata’s bayonet now pointed loosely at Ogata’s heart, just in case he decided to try his luck. He looked down at him, and wondered at how it was Ogata had yet managed not to scream. He lay there, silent, jaw clenched from pain and looking ready to vomit, but his eyes were wide, accusing, full of wonder and desperation and fixed on Sugimoto’s face.

There was a long moment when Sugimoto leaned back on his heels and took his full weight off of Ogata's chest, but still rested his knee there. He dug it in harder, for emphasis. “Don't try anything, now. I won't hesitate. You know me.” Ogata emitted a pained sound, like he was trying to speak, but the best he could do was whine through his teeth and then spit a gob of bloody saliva onto the ground next to him. He must have bitten his tongue.

The moment was gone as soon as Sugimoto stood up. He fastened Ogata’s bayonet to the nozzle of his gun, and held it in relaxed but ready arms. He could hear the sound of his own footsteps retreating backward, slowly, the walk of someone who was trying to keep a rifle steady while moving. He didn’t know why he was doing it; he didn’t trust himself to shoot Ogata somewhere non-lethal if Ogata pulled up the strength to get up and rush him. He bore down on Ogata with his mind, willing him not to push himself up on his hands and knees, to give in and let Sugimoto leave without any more of a fight. Willing him to do it, too. To show him he hadn’t given up yet.

When he reached the underbrush, Sugimoto paused. Ogata had himself propped up on his free hand, and had half-managed to crane his neck up to look at Sugimoto’s retreat. You idiot, Sugimoto thought. You ought to learn. He wasn’t sure which of them he was addressing. One more thought, similarly foolish: he hoped Ogata had gotten a glimpse of him.

He licked his bottom lip. Split. Bleeding. Sweet with the phantom taste of a kiss.

“You know where I’m going. I’ll see you there, you hear?”