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Kozuki Hiyori is the daughter of a samurai, and she takes pride in that. There's meaning in that. But she hasn't been Kozuki Hiyori in a long time. Today, like the day before, and the years before that, she is the oiran Komurasaki. Behind Komurasaki’s mask, she can hate.
Denjiro protects her as much as he can, she knows. But Komurasaki has seen some of the worst of the world, and she is strong enough to carry it. She is strong enough to smile demurely while paraded around the Flower Capital, while shown off at banquets and while entertaining these filthy little men. Two more years, she reminds herself on her worst days. Just two more years, and things should change.
Except: something changes sooner.
Eighteen years after her father's death, Komurasaki meets the son of Kaidou, sitting in the main hall like any other patron, giggling girls around him because for all that he is a demon he pays generously.
When she sees him there, something deep inside her boils in her anger. How dare he come here with his curved horns, and -- she falters, dumbstruck by the audacity of this-- a purple and white nio-daisuki upon his back, just like her father's. How dare he.
Even as anger bubbles, burning hot, in her chest, she keeps her face smooth and her smile small and sweet on her painted lips as she pours him a drink. Another girl is hanging off his arm, and he talks with her as casually as if they were best friends. He has never been here before.
When he thanks Komurasaki for the drink, it is brightly and with a smile full of teeth. He asks the girl on his arm about her favorite foods and songs, talking loudly over the noise of the room. He is far from the only patron here, and the room is filled with music, and with the voices of foolish men and giggling women. Komurasaki sees one of her regular patrons across the hall, takes the out for what it is, and tells herself she is not fleeing when she excuses herself to move to his side. At least she understands the slime in his smile.
It is weeks before she has to engage with the son of Kaidou again, but the distance does not stop Komurasaki from hearing about him. The girls who work below her speak well of him, according to the kamuro, in a way she rarely hears. It's different from the talk of wealthy clients who are worth the work even if only for the money and gifts they bring with them, though Kaidou's son doesn't seem to skimp in that regard. Hiyori does not like what they say about him.
They say he's kind.
Nearly two months after their first meeting, the son of Kaidou seeks out her companionship. She isn't sure whether to be disgusted or to be afraid that he's found out who she really is, and is here to kill or threaten her. But he is Kaidou's son, and so she cannot refuse.
Behind closed doors, all he asks of her is to talk, and to play him a couple of short songs. He never raises his voice except in almost-childish excitement, and demands little. If he were anyone else, she would think more of her clients should be like this. Though he does drink enough to almost make Komurasaki worry for their finances, and yet hardly seems drunk by the end of the night. Perhaps it was his size. Perhaps it was the monster's blood in his veins.
He leaves with a smile and a cheerful "goodnight". Once the door was closed, she throws a ceramic vase from her nightstand hard onto the ground, barely seeing the shards explode across the tatami mats in her furious grief.
(Later, she picks the pieces up carefully, ashamed of her lapse in control, taking the time to collect every single shard and not to cut herself once. For now, she watches them glitter, chest heaving, refusing to cry. How dare he.)
Komurasaki gets used to the anger as time goes on and the son of Kaidou continues to visit her. It collects, supressed behind her ribs, as he continues exactly as the other girls say he is. He always wears that nio-daisuki, and before long he tells Komurasaki about his admiration of Kozuki Oden. Not that he needs to -- practically all of Wano knows how Kaidou's son declared his wish to be like Oden eighteen years ago, not backing down in the face of his father's anger. The cuffs on his wrists are a testament to it in and of themselves.
She doesn't know what to think of it. How dare he, Hiyori keeps thinking. But as time goes on, she gets to know more and more of him through no wish of her own. Even as her hatred of Kaidou builds, the anger that had bubbled in her throat like bile at the sight of Yamato has subsided with time.
Yamato brags about his fights with Kaidou. Laughs when he mentions how he almost lost an arm to the bastard once, but there is something in his voice behind the laughter. He does not talk about the chains on his wrists. She does not ask. She doesn't think she could bear to ask.
Above all else, his favorite topic is her own father, who gave him drive, who gave him purpose. Hiyori thinks she's glad that someone so openly admires her father. She just hates that it's Kaidou's son. As genuine he seems to be, she could never trust him.
But he makes himself so hard to hate.
If there is anything about him she can know for certain is true, it is that he carries Oden's logbook with him, always. He calls it his treasure. Treats it like a treasure, holds it reverantly and reads with shining eyes that have regarded these words hundreds of times over and yet still find meaning in them.
Kaidou's son reads her father's words to her, and for all the acting skills she's developed these past years, she cannot stop the tears that come when he describes her and her brother's births. Oden had loved his wife and children so, so much.
Yamato is startled by her tears, sits up from the lounge he'd relaxed into beside her and takes her face in his hands gently and without hesitation, asks her what's wrong. She shakes her head, unable to tell him and ruin what she and Denjiro had spent so long building, and he thumbs away her tears with calloused hands.
"I cried, too," he says. "Though I didn't expect anyone else to be as moved by Oden's story as me!" He laughs, and seems not to think much more of her reaction.
Your father took this from me, she thinks even as she leans into his warm arm. It's his fault I don't have this love anymore, that my country is not free, that my people suffer. And she remembers, that the two of us suffer.
She takes a deep breath, and forces her limbs to relax.
No matter how honest, how kind Yamato seems to be, Komurasaki can never trust him wholeheartedly. He comes to her, sometimes hurting and exhausted, sometimes bright and energetic, and she plays for him, talks with him, lets him press sweet kisses to her neck, his hands so unbelievably gentle. But she does not forget herself like he does. Even now, he sleeps with his head in her lap, hand splayed out over the outermost layer of smooth silk over her thigh.
There is a small blade kept in the inner seam of one of her sleeves. She holds it millimeters above his throat with steady hands while he breathes evenly in his dreaming.
It would be so easy to kill you now, she thinks. You trust me too much.
But she sighs, and returns the blade to her sleeve after another long moment deliberation, observing the shine of his horns against her kimono, and his long, pale eyelashes. She never has managed to go through with it.
Komurasaki is hardly the daughter of a samurai. Komurasaki is an entertainer, a celebrity, a figure of wealth and sexuality and something to be desired. And Hiyori... Hiyori is tired. Another year, she tells herself, and then, just a few months. Then what? Then Wano will be freed, she hopes. She has to hope.
It's nearly midnight when there's a knock on the sliding door that opens up to her own private garden. Hiyori is sitting with her head in her arms against the low table, nursing a persistent headache and the exhaustion of years. She knows it's Yamato before he speaks.
The garden is beautiful. She'd filled it with flowers only those close to her mother knew she'd loved, and then with blossoms in shades of pink and orange that remind her of her father and brother. A private piece of home, for her alone. Toko takes such good care of it.
"You may enter," Hiyori says in Komurasaki's imperious tone, not bothering to fix her hair, and Yamato slides open the door, and steps in quietly. She looks up to greet him, and then stops.
Yamato looks like he lost a fight with a...well. With a monster, she supposes, realizing. He grins sheepishly at her when blood drips from a row of jagged cuts across his arm onto the pale tatami flooring, and she stands immediately.
"Stay there," Komurasaki says, and goes to retrieve her first aid supplies. What happened to you, she does not ask. She has a pretty good idea.
How did her life come to this, she wonders, sitting him down beside the table so she can actually reach his injuries. He takes care of plenty by himself, cleaning and applying bandages where he can reach even as she tends to his face. There's a nasty gash just above his eye that's all but sealed shut with blood, and as she carefully wipes it clean he stills to watch her.
It should have have been unsettling. It isn't. Hiyori sets down the damp cloth, sits, and takes out a needle to stitch up a particularly bad slice on his arm. The row of them, she thinks, were likely made by his father's kanabo. But she won't ask.
He doesn't wince when she starts to sew up his arm, though he does grit his teeth. Neither of them have been talking. Downstairs, there is drinking and dancing and girls playing samisen, and outside the frogs in her garden pond sing under clouds of cosmos blossoms. The sounds are muted by walls and by distance, and despite the pain Yamato surely feels, Komurasaki's room is calm.
"You're beautiful," Yamato says right after she thinks this, shattering the quiet. The needle in her hand nearly slips. But Komurasaki has better self control than that, and so the way it presses into the tender skin around the wound is on purpose. This isn't the first time he's said it, but there is something unimaginably soft in his voice now. Hiyori doesn't look up at him. She can't.
"So I've heard," Komurasaki says instead, after a beat of silence.
"I'm sorry."
"For?"
"Making you uncomfortable."
"Being told I'm beautiful is nothing new," she tells him, arching one perfectly powdered eyebrow as she finishes the row of stitches. "It would take more than a common compliment to make me uncomfortable."
"Then what was it?"
Because your father is the reason mine is gone, and because he is killing my country, she thinks, no matter how much you distance yourself from him, no matter how fond I am of your laugh. Because you've gotten to see more of Kozuki Hiyori than anyone else, and that's dangerous. Because you can't know that, or I endanger everything.
Because it's dangerous.
This is dangerous.
Before she is the woman Yamato knows, she is Kozuki Oden's daughter, and Wano's fate sits heavy on the curve of her spine. So she keeps her hands steady, and she does not take another risk.
"It's nothing," Komurasaki says, and ties the last bandage firm.
When she stands to put away the first-aid kit it is her, for once, who towers above him. She feels his red-gold eyes follow her as she pulls away from him. He does not push it.
Yamato stays the night in her room, as he often does, but he doesn't sleep. Most nights, she watches his breathing even out, and she lets him have his rest. This time, he sits up against the wall, not quite touching her. She learned how to mimic sleep long ago, and so she waits, listening to the muted sounds of life outside and telling herself she isn't concerned. He never rests. He just spends the night watching the moon through her little window, rubbing absently at the skin left raw and red by the shackles on his wrists.
This is the last time he visits her here.
After everything, after his shackles are ripped off, and Komurasaki dies, and her brother returns, and Kaidou falls, and Wano is saved, she sees him again.
It is, Hiyori learns, something of a Straw Hat Pirate tradition to throw a party after winning a big fight. Wano in its entirety celebrates with them. The air is alive with singing, with flowers, with dancing, and Wano is free. Hiyori is free. She spends the night dancing and talking with her brother. He's swept away by some Straw Hats not even two hours into the celebration, but she has no shortage of loved ones to catch up with, and she knows he will be returned to her soon this time. Even as night becomes morning, she is smiling, and it is not painted on.
The sky is turning gray with the promise of a new day when he finds her. She senses him before even he reaches her, and so she does not fight it when she is swept up off her feet into familiar arms. He's laughing.
Yamato spins her around once, twice, before setting her down with the care of someone used to being bigger and stronger than those around him. Her hands remain in his even as he pulls back. She's not used to standing beside him without Komurasaki's tall geta to give her some advantage. Even covered in bandages, he's smiling so brightly that for a moment she almost forgets all the times she considered slitting his throat while he slept. Caught up in it all, she smiles back.
"You aren't dead," he marvels. His hair glows in the firelight, his golden eyes and earrings sparkle, and it is distracting.
"Never was," she affirms. "Although Komurasaki is."
He's hurt worse than she's ever seen him, which is a feat, but there are no shackles on his wrist. It's been twenty long years, but Wano is finally free, and so are the two of them, against all odds.
There's no way he doesn't know who she is by now. He must have seen her with Momonosuke, must have heard it from any of the dozens of people who can finally know who she really is. She'd seen him with both her brother and Roronoa Zoro and from those two alone she doubts he hasn't heard.
The first rays of sunlight spill over the horizon. The most beautiful sky she's ever seen paints Yamato's hair iridescent and behind him, her country glitters in it's new beginning. There's something bubbling behind her ribcage. She thinks, for the first time that she can remember, that this is what joy feels like.