Hakuren elbowed the assassin for his comment, and Anju laughed again, just as sharp as before. He sat up again and flung an arm around Hakuren’s shoulders.

“Besides, I’ve got you little monsters to keep a track of, don’t I?”

“I’m not a kid, Anju!”

“Yeah, yeah.” he ruffled the prince’s hair affectionately. “You’ve been a menace since you could crawl, and you continue to be.”

“You like me being a menace, though.”

He didn’t agree aloud, but Hakuren had known Anju long enough to see the devilish amusement in his eyes. Anju could hardly reprimand him half the time, since he himself was a troublemaker to the nth degree. Once or twice he’d even heard his father muttering about having four children instead of three. Though, now--

“Thinking about your soon to be youngest sibling?”

Hakuren’s ears flushed, though he wasn’t sure why he felt embarrassed. Anju had been able to read him like an open book since he was a child, and it was no secret within the palace that his mother was pregnant again. He ducked his head anyway, fiddling with his sash absently.

“Yeah.” he admitted sheepishly. “I’m excited, y’know, but also... I mean, I’m gonna be a lot older than them, and what if it’s a boy? They’ll look up to me, right? God what if it’s another girl? I can’t have two little sisters, that’s too many dress-up games--”

“Hakuren,” Anju interrupted, amused. “You had this same meltdown before Hakuei was born. You remember what happened?”

“Dad had to bodily drag me away from the nursery? Cause I wanted to spend all day playing with her?”

Anju’s smile was the same smirk he gave people when he knew he’d entrapped them, but his eyes were warmer. It made Hakuren’s stomach twist into funny knots, and he leaned subconsciously into his guard. Anju’s arm curled a little more tightly around his shoulders.

“Boy or girl, you’re going to love whatever little blue eyed bundle of Ren gets put in your arms in a few months’ time.” he reassured. “And I’m gonna be around.”

“Thought you said you weren’t father material?” Hakuren teased. Anju grinned wide.

“Oh, I’m not. But someone, someone who happens to be your father, the Emperor, has decided that it’s about time me and mine come crawlin’ out of the shadows.”

Hakuren was immediately alert, sitting upright and staring at Anju wide-eyed. Anju and the rest of the Kuroshi, out in the open? Existence no longer hidden, names no longer coded, for all to see? Could it be?

“He says I’m gonna be this kid’s teacher, right from the get go. So I’ll be around a lot more from now on.” Anju cocked an eyebrow. “Think that’ll help?”

                                                                                    She never knew him when he was all bright, when there was nothing but white rukh and he shone with the light of a freshly born sun. Once, she imagined, he’d held a similar untainted purity to Aladdin when they had first met. A glittering star field in his eyes and the dreams of a child in his heart.

But it has been a long, long time since he shone that brightly, and she never knew him like that.

Others did though. Hinahoho will reminisce when he’s drunk enough of the days when he knew a boy of all but fourteen with the determination of a fifty man army and the wit of an alley cat. Drakon, if you catch him in the right mood at the right moment, will tell stories of a boy with dreams so impossibly lofty you couldn’t help but dream with him and follow in his stead.

Even Ja’far has tales to tell, of foolish bravery and endless sacrifice in the name of his dreams. And in the end, every time, they smile and tell you that he has achieved it all because here now stands the country he sought to build. Here is his triumph.

And yet, if you’re looking closely, into their eyes in the half light of fading dusk, you’ll see even for a moment the tinge of sadness, of worry, of fear, that will cross their faces. For a split second their words will seem hollow and they will seem far away, and then they will come back to themselves and it will be like it never happened.

But just for a moment.

Ame wonders sometimes if the glimmering path that so many follow, that leads them to Sinbad, is not as seamlessly golden as it once was. Where feet had trodden on flaked gold, did they now instead merely walk a mirror, reflecting burning firelight? He still shone, but it was not the sparkle of a distant star, more the flickering white light of a flame so hot the sight alone may blind you.

Many would say that were better, but Ame was not so sure.

Time changes all people. Through experiences we grow and evolve, no one is ever as pure in the end as they were to begin with. Some never have a chance, like Judal. Some cling, desperately, to the innocence they once had until finally they cast it away, aware they can never regain it, like Hakuryuu. Some are pure of heart, but not as light as they once had been, like Alibaba, like Aladdin. Some accept that they can never be as they were, and can only be as they will become, like her.

She wonders sometimes when he began to give in, when he began to allow his stars to be consumed by the emptiness of space. If she asked, Ame thinks Sinbad will tell her that he has merely gifted his stars away. To his subjects, to his people, to his dreams.

She met him, and his stars still shone around him. Not as bright, not as many, somehow dulled from radiance to a mere glitter but they were there.

Now she sees him and there are no stars. There are torchlights in the darkness, and they begin to flicker out behind you the closer you roam.

As close as she’s gotten, Ame wonders how to traverse the void that stretches behind her, and if she dares get any closer, what will come when the final torch snuffs out.

It’s hard to say if he can tell that she is aware of the change in him, because he acts as if there’s nothing different at all. He kisses her just the same, first lifting her peony locks to his lips and then carrying the gesture to her mouth, hidden in shrouded corners of the palace and beneath the shade of courtyard trees. His hands find the same places on her body to linger or hold, and he courts her just as he has since she turned sixteen, with luxurious words and promises that tell of things that most wouldn’t dare to dream.

They don’t seem any emptier now, but when he promises her a throne and all the comforts she could desire, she begins to wonder how he expects to come upon them.

Once she had almost been taken in, like the others, by his golden path that led to a promised land. Not because he offered her riches, power, a home in his kingdom. Because it had been him, and she had thought, for a time, that maybe she could learn to live in such bright floodlights, if they remained side by side. If she woke beside him every morning and went to sleep in his arms, then perhaps they could share this gilded way that he walked.

But Ame had never known him when he was bright, when he was more than candles lit with white flames in a slowly covering darkness. She had blinked her eyes and seen the true nature of the things he offered, the path he walked now, and though she wondered how it had once been…

                                                                               “Well done, Sinbad. Another awe-inspiring performance.”

Rashid smiled at his young pupil as he wiped sweat off his brow, casting a look over his shoulder at the arena he’d just left. Sinbad flashed him one of his winning grins, pleased with himself as usual, then looked back to the arena a second time. The king cocked a brow.

It wasn’t unusual for Sinbad to want to return to the stage for an encore. He’d grown to love people’s praise and attention, and even young as he was he could already command their gazes with precision and grace. This time however, there was something wistful in his expression that had not been there before.

“Something on your mind, Sinbad?”

His shoulders jumped with surprise, whirling around as if he’d just been caught doing something he shouldn’t. He relaxed, though, smiling again, this time sheepishly.

“Yes but it’s nothing important.” he assured lightly.

“You certainly seem to be distracted by it. Tell me?”

“Aah, it’s nothing to do with being a merchant—You’d probably laugh if I said it.”

Rashid tilted his head, now more curious than ever. He did not ask again, but Sinbad read his expression well enough. He chuckled, sounding embarrassed, and a pink tint rose on his cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun he’d just been out in.

“Truthfully… The past few performances, there’s been someone in the crowd. A girl… She’s got the loveliest hair I’d ever seen, it’s like flowers! And she always pays such close attention to my tale…”

Sinbad laughed again, clapping a hand to the back of his head to muss his own hair.

“Really, I think I’ve fallen for her a little bit! She smiles whenever we look at each other and I almost lost my place in the story today. That kind of distraction probably isn’t a good thing, neh?”

The young merchant’s chortles were meant to offset his embarrassment, but his expression fell when his teacher didn’t respond. He had expected some sort of assurance that, yes, he was being a bit foolish with his feelings, but instead the king had a far off look in his eye.

Rashid’s mind drifted to olive skin and dark hair falling down the curve of a woman’s back. A laugh he could have listened to for hours, and eyes of bright, sunshine yellow. It had been years since he’d held her, or even seen her face, but he could still remember how it had felt to link their fingers together and tell her he loved her. He could still taste the regret of losing her in the back of his mouth.

“…Well, what are you doing here, Sinbad?”

“Eh?”

The king smiled, crossing his arms and giving his student a lightly disapproving look.

“Go after her. You’ve just finished, so she’s probably still in the crowd getting ready to leave. If you hurry, you’ll catch her before she goes.”

Sinbad blinked, clearly startled.

“M-Master do you really think I should—?” he stammered, only to be stopped by a single nod from his teacher.

“Even if it’s just fleeting, it’s worse to go on letting your heart wonder how things would be different if you had acted. You’re young, and living with that sort of regret will only occur to you far later in life. Go, talk to her, Sinbad.”

For a moment, the young man just stood stunned, then he bounced up to his full height and bowed.

“I will! Thank you, Master, I’ll meet with you later!”

He was up and gone by the time the last words left his mouth, darting back out into the arena and towards the stands. Rashid watched him go with a bemused smile, already expecting not to see his pupil until the next day. He had a feeling he’d be indisposed.

To his right, his guard tilted his head forward slightly.

“…My lord, that was some very lenient advice.” he noted quietly. “Did it have anything to do with…?”

Rashid smiled, and his guard fell silent.

                                                                                                                    She dreams of yearning, an unquenchable desire for the open air over the roaring sea. It is an ingrained ache in her bones, weathering away at her heart in time with the waves lapping at the rock beds, grinding them down to smoot, deadly slickness. She smells salt and tastes the crispness of morning. She always dreams of this fathomless desire for the sea.

Ame is awake and thinks nothing of the ocean besides its openness, its dangerous mystery, its possibilities for travel. Which route will take her where quickest and where is most convenient to make port. She can remember her dreams, the lust for the roiling waves like a physical hunger in her belly, but it is a distant fog compared to reality. She thinks nothing of it.

When she first opens her eyes, she sees stars stretched above her in a swath of glittering, unfiltered light. She is dreaming, and in this dream she knows a few things that seem somehow relevant without relevance at all. She is almost eighteen, she fell asleep in the room that still does not feel quite like it is hers in the imperial palace of the Kou Empire. Her name is Ame, the smell of peaches makes her want to cry, and she cannot think of anything but the cruelty of her own mind as she stares at the stars overhead.

Unlike the stars in her reality, these don’t mock her with their distance, they don’t laugh at her inability to reach them. They simply are, like they were before, and some part of her hates that worse.

She sits up slowly, her palms beneath her and her eyes overhead before she tears them free of the night sky and looks around. There is a ship. A boat. It’s barely more than a tub and a sail, no planks to act as seats and just the two oars for rowing, resting on the bottom and crusted with salt. She notices the boat, and she notices the rocking of the waves. All around there is ocean, and nothing else.

But there is a presence. Ame looks to her side, and there beside her in the boat is a figure, curled up as they rest, lulled by the sea. They come awake slowly, shifting and squirming as they do until thick lashes part to reveal sleepy eyes that look up at her.

She knows those eyes, but she can’t place where.

The boy, for it is a boy she realizes, smiles at the sight of her. He lifts himself, almost the same way she has, leaning himself against one arm and covering his mouth with the other as he yawns.

“You’re awake.” he notes, and again she cannot place how she knows him. “That’s the first time you’ve woken up.”

Ame blinks. She doesn’t know what he means, but the boy just smiles and she somehow knows that he knows that. It doesn’t seem to bother him.

He lays back against his elbows and looks up at the sky, his head tilted back and his impossibly long hair splayed about underneath him. She watches him rather than the sky, fearful that if she looks again, she’ll see the stars laughing at her.

“So where are you headed?” the boy asks her after a long silence. Ame considers the answer, then replies;

“Where are you?”

The boy laughs. His laughter is crisp and clear like the first birdcall at dawn. He emanates childish joy. It touches a part of her she locked away, where it could not come between her and reality. But this is a dream, and she lets herself feel the twinkling mirth of youth for the first time in years.

“Adventure.” he answers her. “To see the world.”

“That’s a dangerous place to be headed.” she tells him.

He laughs again. “That’s what makes it fun.”

The following day, Ame thinks about the boy in the boat. Not with any intention, it’s a thought that comes to her in passing, like a gull song on the breeze. She can remember a time when she thought the same as him, to leave with no destination but the world itself and find whatever stories lay ahead. It seemed so long ago.

She wonders briefly, as her hand script a signature to the end of a document she passes to an official, if the boy will find the same thing she did. That not all adventures end in happily ever afters, and not all stories are good ones. That even when you are victorious, you can sometimes still lose.

She looks at the stars before she retires that night, and they mock her, taunting her with reminders of how far from her reach they are. How much she’s failed. She shuts her curtains and prays not to dream.

Ame dreams despite her prayers, that night and many nights after. The boy in her dream grows steadily, she sees it through the lens of someone’s blinking eyes. One night he is young enough she hardly knows him, dressed in foreign garb she doesn’t recognize, and the next she has a look in his eye she recognizes. A distant memory she knows before he even speaks.

“I will build a country.” he tells her that night, sitting on a ship, a proper ship, with her standing not far from him. “I hope you’ll see it one day. It’s going to be a glorious place.”

When Ame wakes, she lays in bed and stares at the canopy above her until a servant knocks at her door and inquires if she is well. The emperor is asking. She tells the woman to inform Hakuryuu she’ll be at his side presently and rises, but she is faintly distracted throughout the day.

Ame turns eighteen with little fanfare, a twisted melancholy in her stomach when some vicious part of her reminds her that he was this age when they met. She doesn’t sleep, she hasn’t truly slept in the prior weeks, and stares at the stars.

Hakuryuu finds her. He tells her gently not to punish herself, his hand ghosting through her hair. He doesn’t mention that she’s letting it grow, and she pretends like he doesn’t settle beside her and watch the sky until dawn, just like her.

When she finally dreamed again, the Sinbad that greeted her was not a boy, but a young man. He had grown tall and lean with shoulders broader than his hips and eyes that smoldered with unparalleled thirst for the horizon. He stared out at it, even as she stepped up to the ship’s bow to meet him.

“I’ve seen things,” he spoke, more to the wind than to her. “Done things, now. Gone amazing places. Gods you can’t even imagine it all—“

He turns and he smiles. There’s still so much youth to it, it’s bright and full of life and it makes her heart cry. She has seen his smile, just two months ago as they passed one another in the halls as he departed a meeting. It held none of the life this boy had.

“I wish you had seen it with me.” he said, stepping from the prow of the ship and reaching his hands out for hers. “You’ve been gone such a long time. I thought I’d never dream of you again.”

She lets him take her hands, looking down at how even now his palms are so much bigger than hers. His skin is tanned with sun and weathered with sea, where hers is pale as milk and pocked with callouses. He can’t be much younger than her, but she feels old and worn beside him.

“One shouldn’t be reliant on dreams.” she tells him softly, refusing to meet his eye.

He tilts her chin with his knuckle and she lets him. His smile makes her chest burst with the warmth of the sun and when he leans in and kisses her, her body flares.

“Without dreams, what do people have?” he asks her, and she can still remember each fissure in his chapped lips where they pressed to hers. “Dreams are hope.”

Ame dreams of him. She dreams of him and of the ocean and of ships and she can never fathom why. The yearning for the ocean never follows her into her waking hours. The days pass and she wishes no more for a ship than she does for an end to her workload, she is content in the company she keeps and misses only the presence she has lost. It has nothing to do with him, so why does he plague her?

She asks this of herself one morning, lying in bed woken from another dream of him. He looked worn from a fight, but glowing with pride and he kissed her with a feverish passion when he saw her. They talked and he told her of the places he’d been and the things he’d seen, and though she didn’t understand he told her that no queen’s kiss could compare to being there with her.

For the first time she wakes with a pain in her heart, and in her frustration she scowls at her canopy.

“What is the purpose of these dreams?” she asks to the empty dawn. To no one. “What are you trying to prove? I know I’ve lost my innocence, I know my youth was wasted before its time. What does that have to do with him? Why torment me with a man I can’t even bare to trust?”

Nothing answered her, she hadn’t expected it to, and she snarled before she rose for the day.

The dreams come more frequently as days creep by, drawing her closer and closer to the age of nineteen. She dreams of him in blurs sometimes, not interactions but almost memories. Sequences of events she cannot place but she would know anywhere at a glance.

She dreams of him only once among these blurs. He sits in darkness and there is no rocking waves beneath their feet. Walking on land in her dream feels uncertain, but he is sitting there unmoving and she has to go to him, she knows she does.

When she reaches him she finds him battered and bruised, a broken shell and little else. She touches his cheek and he does not respond until at last he tilts his head and looks at her with lifeless eyes. It hurts to see him like this. It terrifies her. More even than the man she knows in reality, this version of him is the one to inspire true and primal fear.

He touches her hand and holds her palm weakly against his cheek. He says nothing, but she stands there until the morning sun wakes her, touching him.

When she dreams of him again, he has changed. He doesn’t seem terribly much older, maybe just a year or two, but he is different the he was. The innocence is gone from his eyes, replaced by a terrible hunger she doesn’t know. It seeks for destruction. It seeks for power. There are scars where his injuries were, a bruise around his throat where an iron collar had rested.

He grips her with hands too powerful for his years, digging bruises into her flesh.

“Let me take you away.” he pleads with her, though it sounds almost like he means to demand it of her. “Let me take you from whatever is hurting you. I see it in your eyes, I always have. Something’s wounded you so deeply you can hardly bear to suffer it. You need to be free, you need to be safe. Let me help you, gods, please.”

Ame isn’t sure what to say or how to respond, his words startle and frighten her too much for that. He doesn’t wait for her to answer, sweeps an arm around her waist and pulls her tight against him.

“I’ll take you anywhere, show you anything.” his arm sweeps out, gesturing across the wide horizon. “I’ll build you a palace with a hundred rooms, plant an orchard with a thousand trees. If I have to carry water up a mountain on my back every morning and every night, I’ll do it. Just tell me where, and I’ll make it so.”

She finds her voice, hands pressed to his chest and gripping into the fabric of his vest. It feels more worn. It feels like it’s fraying.

“I… I exist in a reality that is different from yours.” she tells him. “There are years between us. Decades.”

For a moment, he is confused, and then comprehension dawns in Sinbad’s eyes. She expects him to pull away but instead he draws her into a vicious kiss that bruises his mouth more than it feels like affection.

“Then I’ll wait for you.” he promises her, sounding just the edges of desperate. “I’ll wait decades. I’ll find you one day.”

“You can’t.”

“I will.”

Ame wakes and there are no bruises on her, but she can still feel the ache from where he touched her. It’s unsettling, the change in him, it worries her. But she’s seen the man he becomes, and that turns the discomfort into fear.

She is barely months from nineteen and she begins to suspect her dreams are the fault of Al-Thamen.

They’re gone, everyone says, even her mind tells her so, but she believes that as much as she believes world is at peace. Arba is gone, they promise her, and she almost laugh. Evil things don’t just curl up and die, even if they deserve to.

As dreams pass, Sinbad gets better. The hunger in his eyes never fades, but the newly ravenous beast in him seems sated enough that it no longer displays its aggression outwardly. His kisses are gentle again, his grip on her firm but caring. He doesn’t talk of his adventures much anymore, but he makes up for it with his mouth on her skin, and she never pries.

He compares her eyes to the depths of the ocean and her skin to unblemished pearls. She thinks of him like the rolling sands of undiscovered beaches with eyes like the scorching sun hanging low in the sky. Somewhere in the middle there is a storm between them that brings the depths to the surface and the sun against the waves, and she begins to wake up missing his body heat.

She dreams almost nightly, but the days she lives cost the man in her mind years. He grows, from her peer to her senior in just a few short weeks, and each time she sees him he has changed. There is no more talk of the life he lives outside their dream world. Not the things he goes through or the places he’s been. She sees in his eyes the dwindling sparks of the adventurer she first met and her heart breaks for him, because she knows how it is to live that death.

They meet, again and again, and each and every time he holds her tighter as morning comes. He kisses her harder when their eyes meet. He begs her to come to him and let them run away from everything and she holds him like that will be a comfort. But he lives years and she lives days and nothing can prevent the madness that must unravel in him.

He looks familiar, one night. Dressed in robes much the same as she first met him, his body grown tall and broad, features sharpened to the handsome visage of the king she met so many years ago. But between this night and the last they met years have passed, at least two for him, and he hoists her into his arms and kisses her until she can’t breathe.

Ame tries to remember that these dreams must be the doing of an outside force. Time and fate and all things in between cannot play this much of a cruel joke on her, not when she’s suffered already as she has. But he kisses her and murmurs against her mouth how he missed her and she cannot stop herself from burying her hands in his hair and kissing back.

“When will I meet you, my love?” he begs to know, his mouth never more than a breath from hers. “I ache for you. In every moment, in every breath. Gods know I try to fill the void where you should be but it’s never enough.”

She kisses him and he leans into her with a noise so primal and needy it shakes her to her bones. She clings to him, drawing herself as close against him as she can and he holds her there, neither of them concerned for the marks they’re bruising into one another’s skin.

“I told you not to depend on dreams.” she tells him, though the words are lost against his mouth.

“Yet here I am, craving to dream more than ever. I have lived decades with you in my soul, I cannot live without even a breath of you much longer…”

It was years ago for her, but for him the day they meet is not far away. Ame wonders, not for the first time, what the point of these dreams might be. She can remember meeting Sinbad, he treated her no differently than anyone else.

But she was younger then, her mind tells her. Younger than the self now wrapped in his arms. Did he not recognize her then or, if he did, did he realize that their time had not yet come?

Or perhaps this was as she suspected, all an elaborate ruse of Al-Thamen.

“Soon.” she promises him. “Soon, I promise.”

She doesn’t dream of him again.

Ame drifts through her days the same as she did before the dreams of him, the same as when she dreamt of him, the same as she does now. Outwardly, she appears unaffected by the plague that ailed her. Did anyone notice? Probably not.

She wonders what made her dreams halt. Was it that she realized their true nature, a trick from the enemy? Was it that before they could meet again, on the deck of some unnamed ship, he had crossed paths with her younger self? Or perhaps the dreams had been just dreams and all answers were wrong.

Who knew.

Time passes. Days turn to months and she turns nineteen. The emperor is smiling again, he’s seemed happier the last few months. A weight is slowly lifting off of him, and she can feel the same within herself. Perhaps they will begin to mend eventually, maybe they will move on.

The peach tree in the courtyard will never be allowed to die, by maybe they’ll be able to sit beneath it without feeling the desire to cry to the moon the unfairness of the world.

Sinbad comes to the empire shortly after her birthday. Hakuryuu tells her it’s something to do with trade routes and she needn’t be present, and she makes herself scarce. She isn’t sure why. If the dreams were just dreams, then they mean nothing. If they were tricks of the enemy, they mean the same. But if they were real, some melding of time and fate itself, then she is frightened. So she hides.

Fate is unkind to her, it always has been. They cross path in the courtyards, he flanked by two unfamiliar vassals and she carrying scrolls. He turns his head to greet her and for the first time in almost two years he casts his eyes over her.

He recognizes her instantly, and she can see it in his eyes. He knows her hair, long enough to brush her shoulders, her eyes like endless oceans, the way she holds herself and the shape of her figure. He knows her down to his soul and the recognition ripples through her in one fearful wave.

She greets him swiftly, sharply, and then she is gone, twisting down the unseen paths hidden by the gardens and disappearing into the palace’s countless halls.

But this is a man who crossed deserts and oceans, drowned empires and kingdoms, lived by the light of a dream for decades and she can no more evade him than she could in her sleep. He finds her, traps her on a balcony she pretends to have come to of her own volition and she looks to the stars.

It’s been two years but they still taunt her. They take joy in how she pleads with them for answers.

“How much faith do you have in dreams, Ame?”

She’s heard her name from him before, but not since the dreams. They had never bothered with names in their world of ships and oceans, she had known him, and he hadn’t needed to know her. To hear her name in his voice sends a ripple of emotion through her she feigns to not know. He can tell.

“I think it’s foolish to believe them anything more than they are.” she says to the sky.

“And what are they?”

“Figments. Fantasies.”

“No.”

He says it with finality, his strides carrying him across the space between them. She can feel his presence without ever looking from the sky, but as he approaches she swerves around to face him with her back to the banister. He stops before her, taller than ever and with eyes alight with familiar fire.

There is defiance in her as she stares back, and perhaps a lick of rage. It doesn’t deter him, he reaches for her anyway.

“Dreams are hope, my love, I’ve told you that before.”

Ame lets him touch her, she begs her skin to be unfamiliar with him as it ought to be. But her body knows his roughened hands and pressing fingertips, how his palm fits over her cheek and against her hip. He is as familiar as the sun in the sky, and some part of her is still the deepest reaches of the sea.

“This isn’t a dream.” she tells him sharply, even as he presses in closer to her. “This is reality. Even you must understand that.”

“I understand how I’ve waited. How I’ve pined.”

He kisses her but she turns her head at the last moment, unable to allow herself that fleeting pleasure. Fervent kisses press to the corner of her mouth and the curve of her jay instead, careful fingers brushing aside her silky hair.

“It was such painful pleasure to watch you grow. In moments I wasn’t sure if it was truly you.” he murmurs against her skin, his kisses hot and suddenly she is icy. “You were so small, my love, I feared I would break you with even the lightest touches if I had dared.”

Ame tilts her head away and he falls upon her neck, hands pulling her in against his front. She leaves her hands on the banister, her body arched.

“I withered as I waited. So many times I thought I lost you, to battle, to enemies, to other hearts.”

Her mind flickers to certain faces. She feels him scowl against her neck.

“Dreams and reality cannot become one.” Ame tells him, even as his teeth begin to worry a mark against her pulse. “What has been years for you has been months for me. There is a disconnect.”

Sinbad chuckles, throaty and deep, against her ear before kissing it lightly.

“And you can tell me you felt nothing in those months? Nothing at all? After how I professed myself to you again and again throughout my years? How I laid with you and promised you everything the world could offer? Some part of you loved me enough to cling to me in those moments, my love, and that part is mine.”

“Damnit Sinbad there’s more to it than that and you know it!” Ame snarls, all bare teeth and viciousness.

He pulls back and stares down at her. His eyes are aflame, the beast inside him no longer ravenous but starved. In that moment, Ame knew without doubt that whatever had forced those dreams to transpire, they had been very much real. For the thing that had bruised her in the past now stood before her, wild with hunger left unsated, but constantly tempted.

The thing it hungered most for was her, and she had only just recognized it.

“You think they were simple dreams, even as I stand before you now?”

“Yes.”

“You think they were created, perhaps even under my instruction, to ensnare you by your enemies?”

“Yes.”

“You think they are real, and even still you doubt what they mean?”

“Yes.”

He growls like a deranged wild thing and charges forward, kissing her hard enough she tastes blood. He overpowers her easily, they both knew that he would, and presses her back against the railing until she’s almost leaned back over it.

The kiss is not one sided. He is all teeth and tongue and desperate hunger and she reacts with the composure of someone resigned to their fate. She can tell that he hates it, but that’s half the reason she does it.

A thousand things stand in their way. His kingdom and her empire, his motives and her emperor, his actions and what they’ve cost her. She almost misses the half a year she spent in his kingdom, a girl of just fifteen who hadn’t known how dark a path she’d begun to walk. He had been so kind then.

But he had known this day was coming, and she bit his tongue to punish him for it.

It didn’t stop him. His mouth trailed wet kisses down to her throat again, sounds of nearly obscene pleasure escaping between his teeth as he devoured her skin. She tilted her head back, baring her throat and looking up at the sky. She thought of the dreams and the first night she’d had them, she thought of the yearning for the ocean and the rocking of ships. She thought of closing the curtains and of watching the stars till dawn.

She thought of Judal.

His name sent pain through her like fire and a thousand knives. She might have made a sound, she might have flinched, but before she could worry if she had done either Sinbad was pressing kisses across her face and cupping the curve of her cheek in one hand.

“You’re hurt, my love.” he murmured. “You ache down to your soul.”

“I’m healing.” she told him, reaching for his hand.

“You could heal faster. We could. Together.”

“The world isn’t as simple as our dreams. There’s more to it than ships and open horizons. Actions have consequences, reactions mean regret.”

The king finally pulled away from her, fixing their eyes together so that gold and obsidian clashed. Neither of them faltered, neither of them looked away.

“Are you saying that despite everything, you cannot look past what I’ve done? Even knowing what we could have, what we could be?”

“Could you?” she stares back at him hard. “Knowing who I am and what I’ve done. The things that have made you look at me with hatred. Can you really overlook those for the sake of dreams?”

Sinbad wavers. It is just for a moment, just a flicker in his eyes, but she sees it and she knows she has found the crack in his armor, so she widens it.

“I have watched you change. The boy I met and the man who I am looking at now are unrecognizable. The person who I dreamed for has all but disappeared.”

She pulls his hand from her cheek, but presses her mouth to his knuckles, kissing each, slow and soft.

“Perhaps,” she spoke against his skin. “We’ve been given a chance. A sign. Something so important that time was not a factor fate could wait upon. But even so, we cannot afford to go forward blindly.”

His fingertips touch her lips and she kisses those at well, feeling how he shivers from the touch.

“Show me that there is still the man in you that I dreamed for,” Ame says. “And maybe then.”

Sinbad’s fingers trace her lips, petal soft but shivering with the need to grip and claim and bruise.

“And if he is dead?” he asks in little more than a whisper.

Ame leans up on her toes but he still must bend for her to reach him. She kisses him, slow and soft like she used to under the stars on the deck of nameless ships, where the ocean waves rocked them to sleep. He quivers, kissing back as tenderly as he can, and it’s almost the same.

“Then I will wait for you. I will wait decades. I will find you again.”

“Perhaps you can’t.”

Ame smiles.

                                                         The night air was still and silent, interrupted only by the occasional far off birdsong or chirrup of a passing cricket. There was no breeze and instead a faint humidity hung in the air, enough to make the rough blanket covering him uncomfortable. Hakuryuu watched the stars winking to life in the sky far above him and the moon begin its slow passage across the inkiness of the night, but sleep had yet to grace him with its presence.

Wholly, this didn’t surprise him. He had not rested easy in months, and he knew it would be many months more until he did. The weight of thought rested belligerent and heavy on his mind, pressing down on the pillars of his psyche with all of its force. If even one crack appeared in his supports, he would crumble, and this time he was unsure if he would be able to find the strength to reset himself.

But Hakuryuu would count his blessings where he could for now. His own night was appearing sleepless, however a quick glance to his right proved that his companion was resting easily for the first time in a long while. She would never admit it, least of all to him, but he knew it had been just as long since Ame had slept easy as it had been for him.

That he could even look to his side and see her was something else that Hakuryuu chose to view as an undeserved blessing. Through everything, every choice he had made and the aftermath of what followed both good and bad, Ame had been unshakeable. Even when he himself had tried to sabotage her faith in him, she had simply looked him in the eye and refused to budge.

Hakuryuu stared up at the sky a few moments longer, then sighed under his breath and turned himself over, resting on his side and fully facing the sleeping girl beside him. It felt like in the quiet moments, his thoughts were always straying to her these days. Not for any particular purpose, oftentimes just in passing, but it was impossible to deny that she occupied his mind almost as often as any other thought did.

She slept with the peace of a child, but Hakuryuu knew that if he so much as shifted the pattern of his breathing too harshly, she would wake again. She had slept lightly as long as he’d known her, but these days it was worse.

They never spoke of it, but there were deep wounds in both of them that they refused to let the other see. It just made them more obvious, but their pride wouldn’t allow for anything else. In Hakuryuu’s case, it was equal parts pride as well it was shame.

At the time, all he’d thought of was himself. His plans, his failures, his faults, his flaws, his failings. It had all seemed like such a brilliant course of action that when it had come crashing down around him, one piece after another, he hadn’t known how to cope. He just kept on moving as if his world were not coming apart and the seams, and it had not been until much later that he’d even thought of how it might affect anyone else.

It was worse that she didn’t blame him. He had come close to apologizing, once. After all was said and done, his coronation, the peace talks, he had had a moment to breathe and everything had come hurtling at him at once in a moment of retrospect. The words had almost left his mouth, but all she’d done was smile at him and in her eyes he saw that she just knew.

And she didn’t find him at fault. Not even for a moment.

The knowledge that after all he’d cost her she still chose to stand proudly at his side and support him was utterly humbling. She could have turned her back on him and never regretted it, but she had chosen to stand firm, even against his own self-sabotaging ways.

Hakuryuu lifted himself onto one elbow, looking down over his companion thoughtfully. She had turned her head to the side facing him an hour ago, but been still besides that. Her body was relaxed beneath the thing blanket covering her, but he could still read the faintest signs of tension in her limbs. Even as she rested, she was ready to spring to action at the slightest notice and as much as it was admirable, it was also saddening.

He longed for a time and place where Ame would not need to remain so very vigilant. Somewhere she could sleep deeply and as long as she pleased, completely unwound and without fear. This was meant to be a time and peace and yet, here he was, dragging her back into the depths of the shadows she had finally escaped from. She came willingly with him, but that wasn’t the point.

Not for the first time, Hakuryuu forcibly shook himself of negative thoughts, casting his eyes up to observe the young woman’s sleeping face instead.

When he had first met her, Ame’s face had still held a childish roundness to it around the edges, especially her cheeks and eyes. They had been fuller, the last trimmings of youth clinging to her, though her eyes betrayed the way her life had aged her. She had looked as much a child as any of them, but beneath those dark irises was a sea of intelligence and emotion.

In the following years she’d begun to fill out somewhat, growing the last few inches she was meant to and developing a more womanly figure. The thinness of her childhood had disappeared into the lithe build of a warrior meant for speed and precision, all slender curves and sleek limbs. She had never grown particularly tall, and he was sure she had only another inch in her at most, but she made up for her size in sheer presence.

Over the last few months the last bit of childhood had faded from her face, leaving her with her features brought into a sharper relief. Her mouth looked fuller now, and her dark eyes carried a faintly mysterious slant set above sloping cheekbones that drew your eyes right back down to the soft pink of her lips. When she smiled it brought pretty creases to the edges of her mouth, and any time she looked down her lashes brushed her cheeks as soft as snowflakes.

She had always been pretty enough, as lovely as any other girl might be, but womanhood was bringing upon her a kind of elegance that he could not entirely put his finger on. It wasn’t quite a commonplace beauty, her features not classically glamorous, but there was something to her that caught one’s eye and made it difficult to look away.

There was one thing to her that had not changed though; the feathered bangs that covered the right side of her face. Though the length had grown both longer and shorter, they were ever present. Of course, he knew what lay beneath them and now years after wondering, he knew why it was she hid it. He had seen it, in the flurry of battle or movement, the turn of her head or the whims of the wind.

Hakuryuu hesitated only once his hand was already raised, palm hovered halfways between himself and Ame. He was loathe to even risk waking her, and if he did he would scorn himself into a stupor for it. But in a moment of whim he would blame on his own weariness, he tossed the worry away and finished the gesture he had started.

Her hair was soft against his fingers, slipping easily across her cheek and behind her ear where he tucked it, leaving only a few wayward locks to hang against her pale face. Seeing both halves of her was odd, in a way, but it made a pleasant spark of joy light in his chest that he hadn’t felt in a very long time.

Like this, her maturing features were even more obvious, and for a moment Hakuryuu just drank them in. Ame had the kind of skin that belonged beneath the moonlight to accentuate its paleness and the kind of lashes that could bewitch a man with a single flutter. It was a skill she had either not yet learned or never put into practice, but Hakuryuu found his mind wandering to what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of such a look.

Pleasant, he decided. Maybe dangerously so.

His hand drifted back to his own side, resisting the urge to trace his fingertips along the scar his eyes were wandering over. It was nothing like his own, an almost unremarkable sliver of discolored skin that curved from her forehead down to her jaw. If he wasn’t looking directly at it, he almost didn’t even notice it. But it was the memories behind the thing that drove Ame to keep it covered, not the physical damage.

It…bothered him. Not the scar itself, he was hardly one to throw stones in that particular glass house but the knowledge that at some point, she had suffered. All people did, at one time or another, but it disturbed him to think that once she had suffered so significantly that to this day it marked her, physically and spiritually.

Ame was a quiet force of nature that was often taken entirely for granted. People acknowledged her power, her intelligence, but when it came to her as a being it felt as though people fell short. He was just as guilty of it as anyone else, he could pretend no differently. Ame had lived through much more than anyone knew, or would ever give her credit.

Once more, Hakuryuu was brought back to the thought that amidst that hardship, he had been a culprit. He had created more burdens for her to bare, more scars for her to cover, and more fathomless depths to be added to her impossibly dark eyes. It was not as if he’d ever had any particular drive not to make her suffer, but in the wake of it all, he found himself repulsed by it.

The more and more and more that people heaped on Ame, the heavier the burden she carried became. She was strong, more than strong enough to carry it all and strong enough to break and push herself back to stand again. But there was only so much one person could take, and she was beginning to reach limits she wouldn’t even admit to. He wasn’t sure how he could tell, he just knew.

A frown passed over Hakuryuu’s face, hardening his expression into the piercing kind of look that he often wore. One more, his hand rose, but this time he fearlessly brushed his fingers to the curve of the Alhars’ cheek. His thumb dragged along the smooth skin of her scar for a drawn out moment, and the contact sent sparks of something along his arm.

“I won’t let you be hurt.” he murmured. “Not again. Never again.”

The oath came from somewhere unnamable deep in his chest, and it hung in the air with the fine mist of perspiration brought by the humidity. There was nothing he was trying to prove in saying it, the words had simply come to him and he had spoken them. It was the first words he’d spoken freely and without thought in a long time.

Hakuryuu settled back on his side, head resting against the ground. He took one last risk, opening his fingers and resting his bare palm against her cheek. The contact was warm and reassuring and he allowed himself to linger, tracing his eyes over her sleeping face. Ame sighed, low and sweet, and the fear she might wake and find him with his hand on her did not even cross his mind.

                                                                Hakuryuu Ren was an impressive man. That was not to say that the man sitting down the long, mahogany conference table from him was at all unimpressive, mind you. Isamu Yashimura was tall by Japanese standards, and broad shouldered, with a sharp jawline and old eyes that were never not glaring it seemed like. He had a salt and pepper mustache to match his slicked back hair and his suits were always impeccable. He just wasn’t as impressive as Hakuryuu Ren.

Hakuryuu Ren was at least a decade and a half his junior, perhaps more he wasn’t actually sure, but the man held himself with the grace and power of an emperor. His long, dark hair was loose around his shoulders and his suit was so crisp and clean it may as well be on a mannequin. He certainly looked like one, expression drawn and eyes focused, pale and unmoving like a porcelain doll.

They were both men of status, men of power, but compared to this man Isamu may as well have been a street urchin, and he knew this. It was what kept his glowering eyes from holding any wrath or heat, and his usual dangerous tones civil and calm.

“Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice, Ren-dono.” Yashimura said, inclining his head slightly to the younger man. The honorific tasted bitter on his tongue, but he knew his place too well to try and use anything less.

“This matter is a deep concern to me. I wish it put to rest swiftly.”

His voice was blue fire, chilled as the north on sight but with enough heat to melt flesh from bone. Yashimura had to resist the urge to shudder, a feeling he hadn’t had to contain since he was a very young child. Not five minutes into their meeting and he could already understand the vast difference in power between himself and this man.

“As do I, Ren-dono.” he assured. “Please do not think I take this situation lightly.”

“I would hope not.”

It went unspoken, but Yashimura could tell that Hakuryuu Ren did not take very well to accusations. A silence stretched between them, neither man one for words and neither willing to be the one to use their extensive vocabularies and waste breath.

Of course, Yashimura was the one to speak.

“There are very few things,” he began, choosing his words with the most extreme caution. “That I would claim to take offense from in regards to you, Ren-dono. However, an offense against my son is an offense against me.”

He paused here, but if the gaze he was receiving were anything to go on, he wasn’t going to get a response. If human beings could be frozen to death by a look alone, Hakuryuu Ren would possess the necessary eyes.

“Your children attacked my son. You are aware of this, correct?”

“I am.”

The response is clipped, and Yashimura feels a tick of annoyance in his brow he almost verbalizes, but halts when the younger man speaks again.

“Akikoryuu.” Hakuryuu Ren says sharply, voice raised in volume only. “Fuyuryuu.”

One of the two double doors to the conference room slides open noiseless, and there is the pattering of feet as two figures cross the floor and swoop around opposite sides of the table to stand on either side of their father’s chair.

For a moment, Yashimura is taken aback.

The Ren children were not often seen in public, nor at social events. If they were, they were only mentioned by those who had seen them and very rarely described, mostly out of respect to their father.

When his son described the Ren siblings, words such as “monsters” and “little devils” were used. He expected wild eyed children with piercings and bad attitudes, visual smears to their pristine father’s name. But the children he is faced with are nothing less than the same examples of impeccable grace as their father.

They are dressed identically, though he knows that one is male and one is female, he cannot tell which is one or the other. Their faces are the same, as are their eyes (and he almost shivers again at the sight of them. One black, and one a familiar frozen blue.) and their dark hair is equally long. They stand with their hands folded behind their straight backs, impassive as their father and just as delicate in appearance.

These are hardly the vicious creatures of his son’s regaling. They look like dolls.

Hakuryuu Ren turns his eyes to each of the twins in turn, first one then the other, and though none of them are looking at one another both children look to opposite sides as if avoiding their father’s gaze.

“Is this true?” he asks, and Yashimura wants to ask how he expects either one to know what he’s talking about.

“We did fight,” one says.

“Yes.” agrees the other.

As unnerved as he is, Yashimura narrows his eyes at this admission. It is a serious offense, even from the Ren children themselves, for there to be fighting amongst the families. Hakuryuu Ren may be the overhanging emperor of them all, but that did not change that there were certain laws to which he must abide.

“Why.”

Though it’s meant to be a question, the way he says it makes it sound like a statement. The young leader is not requesting an answer, he is demanding one of his children.

Yashimura glares briefly at the both of them. Yes, why, he wants to ask, but has a feeling that repeating the other man’s words will not carry well.

In unison, the twin’s eyes flick up and for a second, there are mismatched eyes staring at him like twin fractions of an icy void. He feels it chill him to the bone, but by the time he has the thought to try and say something about it, they are looking away again.

The twins speak in the same voice this time.

“He said mama was a street whore.”

The color drained from Yashimura’s face almost as fast as the temperature seemed to drop in the room. All at once Hakuryuu Ren was sitting up straighter, his posture was tighter, shoulders tensed and eyes so cold Yashimura could actually feel the frostbite setting in. The enormous conference room shrunk to the size of a pillbox and all at once the powerful Yakuza boss felt very, very, very small.

All three sets of Ren eyes were on him, staring him down in a way that awoke a primal fear in him that told him to flee and hide himself beneath some dark rock in a crevice of the world he’d never have to see these fearsome figures again.

Hakuryuu Ren did not speak. If he did, Yashimura had a notion that the coldest of artic winds would leave his lips with his razor sharp words.

“I… I was not aware of this…” he said, which was the truth, though that mattered very little. “My son claimed he was attacked unprovoked…”

“We don’t start trouble.” one twin said.

Hakuryuu Ren lifted one well-manicured hand, reaching out and adjusting the twin to his right’s collar, just a fraction. It seemed less like a necessary measure and more like a personal comfort. A man adjusting his grip on a gun to keep from outright pulling the trigger.

“How old is your son, Yashimura-san?” he asked, still so deceptively calm.

But the question sent a flash of fear through Yashimura like nothing else. Though there was no threat, no hint of anger in the words, he was a man who understood the underlying meaning behind them. He was not being asked how old his son was out of politeness or even a desire to know.

Hakuryuu Ren wanted to know how to punish his child for his grievances, and if he was old enough to pay for them in full.

“Fifteen, Ren-dono…” he answered. “He’s just fifteen.”

Just a very stupid child with no idea the ramifications his actions could have, on himself or his family. Yashimura prayed that was enough.

The twin on the left put a hand on their father’s on the arm of his chair, and he turned his hand over to hold the smaller one. His thumb stroked the back of his child’s palm.

“I would suggest,” he said, as the second twin took a step back and closer to his chair. “That you leave, Yashimura-san, and return home to your son.”

Yashimura rose from his seat, straightening his tie without question. His mouth was almost too dry to speak.

“And,” Hakuryuu Ren continued. “I would implore you to educate the boy.” Or else.

“Yes, of course, Ren-dono, I am incredibly sorry to have disturbed you.”

Yashimura bowed low and turned, quickly exiting the conference room with his heart in his throat and his whole being screaming for him to run. He couldn’t even muster the necessary anger to go home and scream at his fool of a son, too frightened, too astonished he’d exited the room with his life.