Title: Kawata
Pairings: Seishirou/Subaru Subaru/Kamui (although slightly more K+S..)
SDA...
Notes: Couple of quick things, first the title. The Kawata were (and in many cases still are) the lowest rung on the Japanese class system formed in the Tokugawa period. To put it briefly, they are people who's professions deal with death and blood. Undertakers, butchers, people who worked with animal hides, and for a period hunters... you get the point. They were considered impure according to Shintoism because of their work and thus were/are strongly prejudiced against. They are also called Burakumin and Eta (more of a slur), but they refer to themselves as "Kawata" and I believe that translates to "Leather worker". Kawata historically were not allowed to even live inside the village, they were always isolated, only fit to associate with each other useless in business . Somehow... I've always thought this was a fitting title for Seishirou.

Second, I've written this story in a non-linear narrative style. Which mean rather than proceeding beginning --- middle ---- end the time line jumps back and forth between different parts of the past. Flashbacks, flashback in flashbacks... you get the drift. And although this does tend to make the story more difficult to read, it gives me a lot more flexibility with the style (hey I was reading Silko for class when I started writing this... deal ). Concisely there are three periods of Subaru's life playing out at the same time 1) post TB conflict with Seishirou... 2) experiences with Kamui before the narrator meets them.. and 3) experiences after the narrator.

Lastly, this is an AU Xish fic, which means... everything in TB happened, but X's story will never occur.

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Subaru told me, as I heard his account for the first time, that it was best to let the story flourish in fiction. "Hold people to the facts," he said. "And the story will never change."

"History's interpretation changes with age and the shifts in power, fiction is timeless. Fiction is something untouchable and unconscious. You learn better from the fairy tales you heard as a child then you do from the experiences of people in the past."
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The wind swept through his hair, blowing glossy black strands into the air until they danced in a soft romantic swaying motion. He closed his eyes, inhaling the breeze and tasting the scent of blood in his nostrils.

He glanced at his watch, as if it could tell him that nine years had past since the sakura petals had been carried on this wind.

"You're late," he murmured

"Am I?" was the amused response. A low foggy voice that could either have come from that wind or his head, he wasn't sure. "Were you expecting me?"

"For nine years, you're nine years late."

A mist of smoke mated quickly with the other scents in the air, nullifying them. It was a dry, decaying smell of cigarettes that muted the air, canceling out the lively scent of bloody sakura. It also made Subaru's nerves twitch, when was the last time he had a cigarette? He'd been trying to quit for months.

"Point taken," Seishirou smiled. He looked ... bored.

In the distance a baby made a needy cry and Subaru's hand clenched up at a sound that he had hoped would be too far away to hear.

But it appeared he could never put enough distance between himself and the Sakurazukamori.

"The 14th Sumeragi head I presume?" Seishirou asked. Taking a drag from his cigarette because it didn't matter to either one of them who the child was.

"No, there will never be a 14th," Subaru said. "She's just my daughter."

"Oh?" he mocked injury. "It thought you were saving yourself for me Subaru-kun."

Subaru frowned, but said nothing.

"Her name is Hokuto isn't it?"

"Okaru," Subaru corrected.

Seishirou seemed slightly disappointed at being wrong, but brushed it off quickly. In truth Subaru's first thought had been to name his daughter Hokuto, but it struck him later as bad idea. He shouldn't mix his loved ones together, else resign his daughter over to the same fate or worse doom her to be an ill-suited replacement for his sister. No, his child should be given her own name. His child should not become entrapped as Subaru had been, she should be free.

"I'm sure she's a beautiful child, very cute ... like her father," Seishirou grinned.

Subaru hated that grin, the way the edge of Seishirou's canine teeth grazed the back of his lower lip forced him to remember that Seishirou crimes were not done out of passion, but out of nature. He frowned, passion he could have understood. To be a natural born killer on the other hand...

"Oh you have nothing to worry about Subaru-kun, I love beautiful things. But she does sound like a most uninteresting child, doesn't have the power to be follow in your footsteps hmm?"

For one brilliant flash of irony, Subaru smiled at those choice of words. Thank God for some blessings. "There will be no 14th, because one will not be needed."

The words were understood as he knew only Seishirou could understand them. The Sumeragi and the Sakurazuka, the embodiments of good and evil, had been balancing each other for centuries. The blackness of yin permanently entangled in the whiteness of yang. Forces of the strongest marriage, a marriage that no human ritual or ceremony could rival.

And there would be no Sakurazukamori after Seishirou. It wasn't so much a choice he had made as it was a detail he had never gotten around to thinking through.

Regardless, without the Sakurazukamori the Sumeragi were just ancient relics of Japan's powerful magic. There was always work to be done, always people with spiritual troubles to call upon an onmyouji , but without a Sakurazukamori was there any reason to have a head? The strong spiritual guidance was the counteract the only ones who had enough power to defy their ancient laws about the magickal arts. When they were no longer there to fight, what was the point?

Seishirou smiled sadly, an emotion that appeared sincere to Subaru... although he had never been able to tell with Seishirou. "Does Okaru-chan know her 'tosan's not coming back?"

"Iie, she's young enough to forget."

Seishirou's eyes narrowed slightly, he smirked again, "or will you make her forget?"

They had spent far too much time of this topic, Subaru realized with irritation. "Why are you here?"

With a graceful smile Seishirou waved his hand aloofly, almost as if brushing away a nuisance. "Maybe I'm here to kill you and your family."

Subaru surprised even himself when he laughed at the prospect. "I doubt that, you wouldn't have let me know you were coming then. You're approaching presence wouldn't have woken me in the night with anticipation like my life was finally beginning. That this ... was only a warm up..."

"My how poetic you are Subaru-kun."
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"The warm times are coming," Subaru murmured as he raised his mug to his lips and drank the warm bitter tea Rocky had prepared. The slight winged boy was really quite clumsy in enclosed spaces. Despite all his grace and agility in flight, he simply could not make tea without knocking over things.

"Ah, it's spring time Subaru-dono," I replied quietly. No cup of tea was offered to me, Rocky snorted at the idea.

That creature was usually snappish on this night. Stubborn and stumbling around like some wounded animal, his black dragonlike wings folded neatly on his back ... twitching nervously.

Rocky picked up Subaru's eggshell colored coat from where it had been haphazardly discarded. He folded it neatly over the back of the armchair and flinched with guilt as the speckles of brown dried blood came into view.

His wings twitched nervously, wanting desperately to retract back into their blanket of human skin.

Had he the space to, he would have paced. Instead he settled on that jacket, folding it and refolding it as if neatness could erase the injury he felt responsible for.

My glance shifted across the room to the winged abomination and wondered why Subaru didn't say something to ease the boy's ridiculous sense of guilt.

"Aa.. no I didn't mean that," Subaru gave me a look I later realized of his version of a smile, although at the time I didn't recognize it as such. It was so faded and worn that except for the small feeling of warmth I felt, I barely recognized the change in his features. He changed the subject quickly, "What exactly is it you do?"

"I record stories," I answered quickly, far too accustomed to this question. Everyone wants to know why I ask him about his life. Everyone wonders about what make his life worth recording, let alone listening to. But not Subaru, Subaru seemed to accept this answer without even a flutter of confusion.

"Is it him or me you want?"

The question startled me, so abrupt and clear. Although it was not entirely unreasonable either. For a man who had spent his entire life being owned by one force or another, it was a desperate but necessary question.

"Both of you," I answered, adding quickly. "Normally I wouldn't ask this of one of my sources, we reflect on our own lives the best, but..."

"You can't have it otherwise," Subaru observed, slightly amused. After years of being owned ... he had just a tiny part of something else that he owned. As much as he might of hated it.

I didn't understand why Rocky was being so damn obsessive about the incident. Battles, even small scale scruffs like the one that had past that night, always had injury of some kind. the stab wound in Subaru's arm was deep enough to cause the man to flinch when he moved it, but quite insignificant as wounds go. At my young age, I had seen much worse.

Still the boy had insisted on bandaging Subaru's arm, nearly throwing a fit at the mere idea of Subaru tending to the wound himself. It was much easier, Rocky reasoned, for him to do it since he would be able to use both hands.

This much was true and the boy was granted the luxury to fuss.

And fuss he did, I remember thinking with no small amount of annoyance.

"Oh I can have it, ghost stories and fables... but not the truth."

Rocky twitched again and approached timidly. He settled himself down next to Subaru on the couch and curled up like an animal, laying on his side with one sleek black wing folded on his back, his legs curled up close to his chest and his second wing wrapped lazily around his shoulder like a blanket.

Subaru moved his hand and ruffled the boy's smoky gray hair reassuringly before he nodded to my statement. "That's true I suppose, although..."

He grinned for real this time.

"You'll only create more ghost stories and fables. Because you can't catch the truth. The truth always changes."

I was puzzled by this, and I wonder sometimes if I still am. "It changes? The truth, the facts?"

"No," Subaru admitted. "But their context does... and that can change the entire story can't it? When you try to cut off a piece of something as alive as a human consciousness-- the thoughts and situations that made a person act--... try to freeze it in story, you create pressure between the outside world interpreting the story and the time and place where the story occurs. When the pressure becomes to great it can reshape it's container..."

Subaru ran the tip of his finger over the hard bony ridge of Rocky's extended wing. Rocky shivered under the touch. "You may end up with an entirely different story years from now."

"I willing to take that risk, I feel this is a story where the need to be told outweighs any cultural threats."

"Ah, but maybe I'm not..." Subaru regarded quietly.

"And afraid I don't understand you at all Subaru-dono."

"Of course you don't," Rocky grumbled.

I had thought the boy was asleep.

"Hush now," Subaru soothed with a ghost of a gentle smile sliding across his lips. "I'm saying that, this story is of great importance to me..."

"Well it is your story after all."

"And maybe I want to make sure that it's original meaning is always preserved. The moral inclinations of the people sway. Who knows, perhaps one day people will say that I deserved all the hardship that came my way? You want to make me a hero in your factual fairy tale ... never accounting for whether or not everyone will see me as the hero of this grand story.

"Still ... it's probably a story that needs to be told."

"If only for yourself," I agreed quietly.
Okay so yeah the was evilly short