Mirage Of Blaze Fan Fiction ❯ Fence of Names ❯ Fence of Names ( Chapter 1 )

Disclaimer: all things Mirage of Blaze belong to Kuwabara Mizuna, Cobalt Books, AnimeWorks, and numerous other legal/coporate and personal entities who are not me me. This is a fan work, produced for the entertainment of self and other fans. No profit has been made, and no challenge to copyright is intended.

He took his morning coffee, weather permitting, on the wide terrace running along the eastern side of the building. Coaxing Takaya into accompanying him during Golden Week had proven easier than he had thought. The students' leave had been extended due to the destruction wrought to the high school building during Mori's attack. That morning, Takaya was running late, showing a teenager's typical reluctance to stir out of bed before noon. Naoe turned his attention to the view, and settled himself to wait. They brewed excellent coffee here.

A folder landed on the table with a flat smack, shaking him out of his pleasant reverie. Naoe finished swallowing his coffee. Then he set the cup down, wiped his mouth, and looked from the folder to the tousle-haired teenager standing beside him.

"Good morning, Takaya-san."

The young man grimaced a little at his formality, but the gleam in his eyes kept the expression from sliding into a full scowl. Naoe came to a wary alertness. One part malice, one part pleasure... that particular mixture never boded well for his peace.

"You," Takaya announced, the grimace turning into a smirk, "aren't really the son of Naoe Sanetsuna."

Naoe reminded himself that Kagetora-sama now lived as a brash young high school student. His centuries-spanning memory lay submerged by means neither he nor Yasuda could explain, much less unlock. Besides, this wasn't the worst insult he'd borne.

A quick glance around assured him they were isolated enough on this terrace for a certain degree of candor. "I am as much the son of Naoe Sanetsuna as you are the son of Uesugi Kenshin."

"That didn't matter to you then."

Naoe jerked his head up, startled at the soft-voiced venom. Something flickered behind the boy's eyes, something hot and eternally raw, smoking like a wound left open to frosty air. A moment later, it was gone, leaving a confused Takaya blinking in the morning sunlight.

Naoe sat perfectly still. He hardly dared to breathe, half-afraid, half-longing to provoke another response. What else did Kagetora-sama have to say to him? What did he think, feel, believe, with his world filtered and distorted by the persona called Takaya?

Takaya dropped into the chair across from him, still looking dazed. Naoe made himself breathe normally, but did not yet trust himself to speak. To buy them both time to recover, Naoe opened the folder.

He found it crammed full of crooked photocopies of pages from books, what looked like Internet printouts, and two pages covered with handwritten notes. Atrocious handwriting, Naoe thought. Any worse and it might qualify as encryption.

Takaya-san stabbed a finger at the papers. "It says there that you had another name."

"In those days," Naoe said, beginning to recover himself, "a man might have many names in his life: his birth name, his adult name, a name he took at retirement or when he took holy vows, a post-humous name at his death. Sometimes, a lord granted a vassal the right to use a character of the lord's name as part of his own, as a sign of favor or a reward, as Kenshin-kou granted you his name."

Naoe fell silent. He'd once hoped for that himself. But that was before he had realized how deep Kagetora's hatred ran. He supposed there was some irony in that. Kagetora's enemies always underestimated him.

"Hold it, hold it!" Takaya held up his hands. "All that, for one person?"

"Not all, but at least a few," Naoe admitted. "This doesn't include titles, or name changes by adoption."

"Riiiight." Takaya propped his head on his hand, fixing him with a skeptical look. "I get the 'adult name' and the titles part--but your whole name changed. It's like the person you were before, the one who had that other name, was just... erased."

Naoe ran a fingertip along the rim of his coffee cup, aware that he stood at the border of an emotional minefield. Young Takaya would not look at him now. He and the others had spoken again and again of the surety of core identity. Either none of them had the words, or they were not understanding the question.

"In a sense, that man did vanish. When I married Yamatonokami's daughter, I became his son as well. He adopted me into the Naoe clan, even giving me part of his own name. I never used the name my birth-father gave me again. Yet all else remained unchanged: my beliefs and values, my loyalties--"

Which had ultimately lain with Kagetora-sama's enemies. Perhaps he should have chosen another example... Takaya scowled again and shook his head.

"How can you say that? One day, one man is your father, you have an entire family. The next, your name changes, and all of that stops. How can you just change over like that? Just stop being one man's son and give that same duty to somebody else? Somebody you barely knew?"

The coffee had gone unpleasantly tepid, but Naoe drank anyway, a transparent attempt to buy himself time. He could hear other questions below Takaya's words, the silent, accusing questions in every sharp glare Kagetora-sama had directed at him since the beginning.

How can I trust you? What's the true worth of your loyalty?

"Life, for a normal human or a Possessor, does not always offer the freedom to choose, or even offer fair and just choices. Things are as they are," he said.

Takaya gave him a weighing gaze. "Not always."

Naoe returned the stare, but Takaya's expression remained smooth and shuttered. Even the vivid eyes had gone opaque. What was spinning through that alien mind? What connections were being made? And how, after four hundred years, did Kagetora still manage to confound him?

"If he adopted you," Takaya said at last, sounding like a regular teenager once more, "didn't that make your wife your sister?"

Modern sensibilities, Naoe thought with a purely internal sigh. Did no-one understand the intricacies of marriage politics anymore?

"From a technical standpoint yes, thought it's really the bloodline that matters. But if I may remind you... you did the same, my lord."

"What?" Takaya burst up out of his chair. "Watch your mouth! I never-- Miya--!"

"I refer to your first wife, Kagetora-sama: Kagekatsu-kou's eldest sister--and he was your brother."

At the mention of Kagekatsu's name, Takaya dropped back into his chair, all of his fire quenched. Naoe's satisfaction evaporated. If any name besides 'Minako' carried the power to wound Kagetora, it was that of Uesugi Kagekatsu. Just as Kagetora's name had always sparked fire in Kagekatsu.

"I-- When I looked all this stuff up, all it said was that I--that he--that Kagetora had married a daughter of the Nagao clan." He plucked at the corners of the papers. "Her name wasn't even listed."

Naoe kept his eyes down. This discussion was turning dangerous, veering ever-closer to the volatile topic of their first lives. A life Takaya didn't remember. He'd noted Takaya's sudden stammer, the effort to distance his present identity from his past self.

Sometimes, watching Takaya's struggles with his identity was agony. They were too much like the death-throes of the original souls he'd wrested from their flesh over the centuries. And this struggle was outside, visible and audible. Inescapable. Sometimes, he wondered if there was something of the original Ougi Takaya left, fighting for his life.

Stop this. Stop it now. The body seated across from him belonged to Uesugi Kagetora now, no matter what he chose to call himself. And if something of Ougi Takaya remained... Well. He wouldn't be allowed to interfere.

"They called her 'Junjou.' I never knew the name her father gave her. She--" was my lord's sister, he almost said. But Kagekatsu had been his lord for only one life. All the rest belonged to Kagetora-sama. "She was not known to me."

"Junjou..." From the expression Takaya's face, the name was only a sound to him, another vocal relic of history. It woke nothing in him. Naoe began to breathe out, a soft sigh of relief.

"How did she die?" Takaya asked.

If the original question had been an emotional minefield, this one set him out into the free-fire zone. He did not want to answer. Already, Takaya-san had begun to dream, fragments of his long life surfacing as he slept. Yet at the same time, he had coolly "researched" his own life and death. He does not yet remember which lord I first fought for. He does not remember I was there.

"Junjou-sama... died at Samegao, the night the castle fell," Naoe said, because silence in the face of Kagetora-sama's questions was almost always the wrong answer.

Takaya considered all of this in silence. Naoe stared into his now stone-cold coffee, tension crawling up his spine. Never, in all of his lives, had he heard of a great love between Nagao-san and Kagetora-sama, but one could never judge precisely on family matters where Kagetora-sama was concerned. And so many things he had heard of Kagetora-sama had proven wrong.

Junjou had never returned, never sought out her husband's spirit. At least, not as herself.

"Nagao," Takaya-san said at last. "That was your name, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Nagao Fujikuro." The name felt strange on his tongue. It was only one of two he'd borne as a man of the Nagao. A name long dead. "Kagekatsu-kou was also born to the Nagao, as was your great father."

Takaya-san frowned, and Naoe felt a chill at his neck. He knew the danger that came when those bright eyes turned hard.

"You were born a Nago, I--I mean, Kagetora married a Nagao... does this mean we're related?"

Takaya-san sounded so outraged, as if Naoe had appeared on his doorstep and claimed any manner of filial obligations from him. Which, if I am entirely honest, is not far from the truth.

He refreshed his coffee, wishing he were the sort to read auguries in the curls of steam, or in the cloud-shapes of cream. Setting the coffee urn back down, he organized his thoughts, selecting the least damaging words he knew.

"By blood, no." Unless one counts all the blood I've shed for you. "By marriage, by alliance... perhaps we are some form of cousin."

Bad enough that Kagetora-sama viewed him as some kind of unwanted stray foisted on him. Takaya-san appeared not to remember such things--but if he began to view Naoe as a kind of relation, to impose the sort of distance one kept with older family, that might prove even worse.

"Do you have one?" Takaya asked with his trademark whiplash change in subject and mood.

Naoe glanced up. He could not resist a subtle goad. "A wife, or a cousin?"

Takaya-san scowled at him, the picture of adolescent aggravation. "Another name. You keep saying you're some kind of holy man, and you just said that one of the reasons people changed their names was because of being a priest, so I just wondered."

Word by word, Takaya-san was prying away the protective layers Naoe had set around himself. If those layers cracked too soon, if the wounded dog came slinking out before he'd made his place secure--

"Tachibana Yoshiaki is a monk," Naoe corrected. "Naoe Nobutsuna is the faithful retainer of Uesugi Kagetora--and so I shall remain." He hesitated a moment, then added, "Unless my lord wishes to give me another name?"

Takaya-san leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. Closing himself off. "Why is it every time I ask you a simple question, you answer with stuff like this? Fifty names aren't enough for you?"

Naoe allowed himself a slight smile. "The servant is always the servant," he said, almost to himself. "The lord is always the lord."

Takaya stared, then shook his head and muttered something under his breath. "Forget it. You've got a name, let's stick with that one."

"As you wish, Takaya-san. Coffee?" Naoe asked, already pouring.

"What, you're not going to lecture about it being addictive and how it'll stunt my growth?" Takaya groused.

The idea amused Naoe. "This is a manageable vice, my lord."

Takaya blinked, but took the cup from Naoe's hands. He did not bluster, or deny the name.

The warmth lingered at his fingertips long after Naoe had set his hands back on the table.

-end-

Notes:
"...as Kenshin-kou granted you his name." One of Kenshin's earlier names was Kagetora!
Junjou: I made this one up! To my knowledge, Kagetora's wife is never named.