Chapter 14: Buried
The monsoon arrived not with a whisper, but with a declaration. It started as a oppressive stillness, the air so thick it was difficult to breathe. Then, a distant groan of thunder. The sky bruised from the west, a great, purple-black shadow swallowing the sun.
Jay was in the courtyard when the first fat drops fell, smacking the dry stone like thrown pebbles. He’d been drilling with a wooden practice sword, his movements a fluid, punishing dance against an invisible opponent. He stopped mid-strike, chest heaving, and looked up as the deluge began in earnest. Within seconds, he was soaked, his shirt plastered to his shoulders, his short hair dripping.
From the verandah, Emily watched him. He didn’t run for cover. He stood there, head tilted back, eyes closed, letting the rain scour him. It was a strange, almost pagan sight—the soldier offering himself to the storm. A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature skittered down her spine.
He finally turned, water streaming from his chin, and saw her. For a long moment, they just looked at each other through the grey curtain of rain. The world narrowed to the space between them, drumming with a million liquid beats.
Then he walked towards her, his boots splashing through the rapidly forming puddles. He stopped at the edge of the verandah, the downpour cascading off the roof just beyond his toes. He was close enough that she could see the individual drops caught in his eyelashes.
“It’s early,” he said, his voice rough from exertion.
“The seasons are confused,” she replied, her own voice sounding thin. She clutched a dry towel she’d been holding for no reason.
He took it from her with a nod of thanks, scrubbing it over his head and face. The motion was vigorous, practical. When he lowered it, his hair stood in dark spikes. He looked younger. The scar was a stark, wet line.
“Kaito was excited,” he said, draping the damp towel over the rail. “Said the sky was angry.”
“He likes drama.”
“Comes by it honestly.”
The offhand remark about Ren’s temperament hung in the air, a shared, uncomfortable history. Jay didn’t flinch from it. He’d started doing that lately—mentioning Ren casually, like he was just another fact of their lives, not the silent crater at the center of it all.
“You’ll catch cold,” Emily said, turning to go inside, needing to break the intensity of his proximity.
“I don’t get colds.”
She paused, her back to him. The rain roared on the roof. “Everyone gets colds.”
“Not me. Not since the northern campaigns. You adapt.” He stepped up onto the verandah, the wood creaking under his weight. He stood behind her, so close she could feel the cool, rain-charged air radiating from his body. “Or you die.”
She turned slowly. He was right there. Water droplets fell from his sleeves onto the floorboards. His eyes, usually so guarded, were open, watching her with a disconcerting directness. The air between them crackled, charged like the sky.
“Why do you do that?” she asked quietly.
“Do what?”
“Mention the war. The fighting. Like it’s something ordinary.”
“It was.” He shrugged, a slight lift of his wet shoulders. “For three years, it was the most ordinary thing in the world. More ordinary than… this.” He gestured vaguely at the house, the garden, her.
‘This.’ The fragile, fraught peace she’d murdered for. The silence stretched, filled only by the relentless rain.
“Do you miss it?” The question surprised her.
He considered it. “I miss the clarity. An enemy is in front of you. Your friends are beside you. The objective is clear. It’s simple. Brutal, but simple.” His gaze held hers. “This is not simple.”
Before she could respond, a clatter came from the kitchen, followed by Kaito’s triumphant shout. “I got it!”
They broke apart, the spell shattered. Emily took a steadying breath, the moment dissolving into the mundane reality of a child chasing a runaway cup.
That evening, the power went out. One moment the solitary electric light in the main room was buzzing softly, the next it died with a sigh, plunging the house into a thick, velvety darkness broken only by the flicker of the stove’s embers.
Kenji muttered about ancient fuses and went to find candles. Emily heard Sora fuss in the next room. She moved towards the sound, her hands out in front of her in the unfamiliar dark.
“I have her.”
Jay’s voice came from the doorway to the children’s room, calm and close. A match rasped, flared, and his face bloomed in the sudden orange light as he lit a lamp. He was already holding Sora, who had quieted, her wide eyes reflecting the flame. He looked… comfortable. The scar, the soldier’s stance, all softened by the small, trusting weight in his arms.
“She’s not afraid of the dark,” he observed, his voice low.
“She doesn’t know she should be yet,” Emily said, watching as he adjusted his hold, Sora’s head tucking against his neck.
“Maybe she’s right.” He looked at Emily over the lamp’s glow. The shadows hollowed his cheeks, made his eyes look like deep pools. “Maybe we’re the ones who get it wrong.”
Kenji returned with a handful of stumpy candles, their light wobbling and small. They ate a cold supper by the makeshift glow, the storm raging outside, sealing them in their little island of light. Kaito thought it was an adventure. He begged Jay for a story.
“I don’t know any good stories,” Jay said, picking at his rice.
“A war story!” Kaito pleaded.
Jay’s eyes flicked to Emily, then back to the boy. “War stories aren’t for children.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not about heroes. They’re about being tired. And cold. And scared.”
Kaito frowned, unsatisfied. “Weren’t you ever brave?”
Jay was silent for a long moment. The candlelight danced in his eyes. “Once,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “I pulled a friend from a burning wagon. He was bigger than me. I don’t know how I did it. I just… did it. It wasn’t bravery. It was just… the next thing that had to be done.”
Emily’s throat tightened. She thought of the physician, galloping through the night. Just the next thing that had to be done.
Later, with the children asleep, the house felt cavernous. The wind howled around the eaves, finding every crevice. Emily sat with a book she couldn’t read, the candlelight too weak. Jay stood by the sliding door to the garden, watching the rain sheet across the blackness.
“It’ll flood the lower paddies,” he said.
“We need the water.”
“Not this much all at once. It washes the good soil away.”
A practical conversation. Lifelines tossed across the quiet.
He turned from the door. “Do you remember,” he said, his voice oddly tentative, “the night of the magistrate’s banquet? Before… everything.”
Her heart stuttered. “I remember.”
“You wore a blue obi. The color of a twilight sky.” He took a step into the room. “I’d brought you something. A silly thing.”
“The badger.” The word was a whisper.
“You still have it.” It wasn’t a question.
She nodded, unable to speak. He’d seen it, of course. The new one he’d carved sat on the shelf. The old one, chipped and worn, was hidden in a lacquer box in her room.
“I saw it,” he said. “In your room, the day I mended the shelf by the window. It was in that box with your hair combs.” He took another step. The candle guttered, stretching his shadow tall against the wall. “Why did you keep it?”
Every lie she had built, every justification, every careful brick in the wall of her survival, felt flimsy in that moment. The rain screamed outside, a mirror to the turmoil inside her.
“I kept it,” she said, the truth torn from her, “because it was the last thing anyone ever gave me that asked for nothing in return.”
He went utterly still. The admission hung in the air, fragile and devastating. It was about more than the carving. It was about him. It was about the before.
He crossed the final distance between them in two strides. He didn’t touch her. He just stood there, close enough that she could see the pulse beating in his throat, could smell the scent of rain and worn cotton and him.
“Emily,” he breathed, her name a prayer on his lips.
The past eight years collapsed. The marriage, the children, the death, the poison—all of it evaporated in the sheer, magnetic force of his proximity. This was the boy from the riverbank, the one whose laugh came easily, the one whose gift was given with clumsy, genuine hands. This was the man who had carved a phoenix from ruin, who rode through the night for a child not his own, who stood guard over a life built on his brother’s grave.
Her secret was a rotten seed inside her, threatening to split her open. But in that dark, roaring room, she wanted nothing more than to lean forward and close the gap. To feel if his mouth still remembered the shape of a smile meant only for her.
A tremendous crack of thunder shook the house, followed by the sound of something heavy sliding and crashing in the garden. They jerked apart, the moment shattered.
Jay’s soldier’s instinct snapped back into place. “A tree,” he said, already moving towards the door. “Stay here.”
He slid the door open and vanished into the slashing rain, swallowed by the darkness.
Emily stood alone in the quivering candlelight, her hands pressed to her mouth. Her whole body trembled. It wasn’t from fear of the storm.
Outside, in the raging dark, she heard the solid, rhythmic thwack of an axe. He was clearing the fallen branch. Each blow was a sharp, definitive punctuation mark.
He was doing the next thing that had to be done.
She slowly lowered her hands. The chill of the night air he’d let in curled around her. She walked to the shelf and picked up the new wooden badger he had carved. It was smooth, perfect, unblemished. A replacement. A revision of history.
She placed it back carefully. Then she went to her room and opened the lacquer box. The old, chipped badger lay nestled in silk. She took it out, running her thumb over the rough, familiar groove his younger self had made. This was the truth. Imperfect, damaged, kept in the dark.
The axe blows stopped. She heard his boots on the verandah, the slide of the door, the drip of water on the floorboards as he came back inside.
She stood in the doorway of her room, the old badger hidden in her fist behind her back. He stood at the other end of the hall, dripping, his chest rising and falling with the effort.
They looked at each other across the dim expanse. The storm raged on, but inside, a new, more dangerous quiet had begun.
“It’s clear,” he said, his voice rough with exhaustion.
“Thank you,” she replied.
He gave a single, curt nod, then turned towards his small room. He paused, one hand on the doorframe. He didn’t look back. “Goodnight, Emily.”
She waited until his door slid shut. Then she looked down at the token in her hand, the first and only gift given freely. It felt like a key to a lock that no longer existed. Or perhaps, a lock that was just now beginning to turn.
The silence after his door closed was a living thing. It pulsed in the empty hallway, filled only by the fading patter of rain on the roof. Emily’s fingers tightened around the chipped wood until it dug into her palm. She slowly placed the old badger back in its box, the click of the lid a final, soft sound. She blew out her candle and lay in the dark, listening to the heavy, distant rhythm of the axe blows start again from somewhere in the storm-lashed garden. They continued long into the night, a metronome for her tangled thoughts.
Morning dawned clean and washed, the world steaming under a fierce sun. The garden was a wreck of broken branches and scattered leaves. Mud coated the pristine flagstones.
Jay was already outside, sleeves rolled past his elbows, hauling a thick limb of the fallen pine towards a growing pile. The physical labor was a language he understood. Kenji worked silently beside him, both men moving in a wordless tandem that excluded speech.
Emily brought them chilled barley tea. Jay took the cup with a mud-streaked hand, his fingers brushing hers. A static jump. His eyes met hers, then flicked away to the mud.
“The koi pond is overflowing,” Kenji said, sipping his tea. “The white one with the black spot is missing.”
A childish panic, sharp and sudden, clawed at Emily’s throat. That was Sora’s favorite. She’d named it Cloud. “Missing?”
“Probably swam into the reeds when the water rose,” Jay said, his voice calm. “I’ll check after this.”
But the look he gave her was steady, a silent assurance. I will find it. I will fix this. She felt utterly transparent.
Kaito raced outside, his shoes immediately caked in muck. “Did the sky break?”
“Just tidying up,” Jay said, and something in his tone made it sound like an adventure, not a chore. “Want to help stack the smaller sticks?”
They worked through the morning. The estate slowly regained its order. By noon, the branch pile was neat, the worst of the mud swept away. Jay found Cloud the koi stranded in a puddle by the herb garden, flipping wearily. He gently scooped it into a bucket and returned it to the settled pond.
“See?” he said to Sora, who was watching from Emily’s hip. “Just an adventure.”
Sora pointed a chubby finger at the fish, then at Jay, and babbled something decisive.
Lunch was quiet, the exhaustion plain on everyone’s faces. As Emily cleared the dishes, she noticed the fine screen door to the verandah was torn where the falling branch had snagged it.
“I’ll patch that this afternoon,” Jay said, following her gaze. “The insects will get in otherwise.”
“I can ask Kenji.”
“I’m already dirty.” He stood, gathering his own dishes. “It’s a five-minute job.”
It wasn’t. He was meticulous, removing the torn screen, cutting a new patch with a sharp knife, stitching it in place with near-invisible fine wire. Emily sat on the edge of the verandah with a mending basket, pretending to work on a tear in Kaito’s trousers. She watched his hands, the focused patience in them.
“You’re good at that,” she said, finally.
“A lot of waiting in the army. You learn to fix your own gear.” He didn’t look up. “Or you go without.”
“What did you go without?” The question slipped out.
He paused, the wire held between his fingers. “Sleep, mostly. Certainty. The illusion of safety.” He resumed his work. “Comfortable chairs.”
She almost smiled. “A great tragedy.”
“You have no idea.” This time he did glance up, a brief, dry flash in his eyes. “The things I’d have done for a chair that didn’t feel like a rock.”
It was so mundane, so unexpectedly human. It undid a knot in her chest she hadn’t named. She looked down at the fabric in her hands. “You kept the badger.”
His hands stilled completely. The garden was very quiet. “You kept it first.”
“I didn’t think you’d remember it.”
“I remember everything about that night.” His voice was low, stripped of all soldierly gruffness. “The way the lantern light caught the sequins on your hairpin. The smell of the azaleas by the gate. The exact sound of your voice when you said ‘thank you.’ It was the last good night. Before everything got… complicated.”
The word was absurdly small for what followed. The confession, the bargain, the marriage, the poison. Emily’s needle slipped, pricking her thumb. A single bead of blood welled. She didn’t move.
“Jay…” she began, but had no words to follow.
“You don’t have to say anything.” He finished a twist of wire, snipped the end. “I’m not asking for anything. I just… I remember.”
He stood, examining his repair. The patch was seamless. “There. That should hold.”
He began packing his tools away. The moment was over, retreated behind a wall of practical action. But he had left a door ajar in that wall. He had remembered.
Over the next few days, a new rhythm emerged, softer at the edges. He started joining them for the evening, not just hovering on the periphery. He helped Kaito with his reading, his large finger moving patiently under the characters. He let Sora tug on his boots until she toppled over, giggling.
One afternoon, he returned from the village with a small paper parcel. He handed it to Kaito without ceremony. “For you.”
Inside was a river stone, perfectly flat and smooth. On it, Jay had used a fine-tipped brush and black ink to paint a tiny, fierce badger, standing on its hind legs. It was whimsical. It was nothing a general should have time for.
“It’s a friend for the wooden one,” Jay said, as Kaito stared in wonder.
“You painted this?” Emily asked, her voice faint.
“The camp artist taught me. For passing the time.” He shrugged, but she saw the careful way he watched Kaito’s reaction.
“It’s the best thing,” Kaito breathed, clutching the stone to his chest.
Later, after the children were asleep, Emily found him on the verandah. The cicadas were a loud, vibrating curtain of sound.
“That was kind,” she said, leaning against the post beside him.
“It’s a rock.”
“You painted it.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I wanted him to have something from me. Something that wasn’t about mending walls or drilling with sticks. Something… pointless. Just because.”
Just because. Like the original badger. The words hung between them, full of hope and terrible risk.
“Jay,” she said again, his name easier now. “What are we doing?”
He looked out at the dark garden. “I’m keeping a promise. You’re raising your children. We’re… tidying up after a storm.”
“That’s all?”
He turned his head towards her. In the moonlight, his face was all angles and shadow. “What do you want it to be?”
It was the question she had asked herself every night for months. The question that had driven her to a desperate, final act. She had wanted security. She had wanted her family safe. She had, in some hidden, shameful part of herself, wanted him. To have all of it seemed like a greedy, impossible fantasy.
Yet here he was. Asking.
“I don’t know what I’m allowed to want,” she whispered, the most honest thing she’d said in eight years.
The air between them charged, tighter than before the storm. He shifted, just slightly, his shoulder now almost touching hers. She could feel the heat coming off him.
“Forget what’s allowed,” he said, his voice a rough scrape. “What do you want, Emily?”
Before she could answer—before she could even think—a sharp crack echoed from the direction of the front gate. Not thunder. Wood splitting.
Jay was moving before the sound faded, a hand going to the place where his sword would usually hang. He was unarmed. He moved towards the front path, putting himself between the house and the noise.
Emily followed, her heart hammering. Kenji emerged from his room, a heavy walking stick in his hand.
At the front gate, one of the heavy wooden banners bearing the Tanaka mon lay splintered on the ground. It hadn’t fallen. It had been shattered. A large, smooth river stone sat amid the debris, a malicious parody of the gift he’d just given.
Jay picked up the stone. He turned it over. There were no words, no message. Just the violent, deliberate act.
He looked past the broken gate, into the deep darkness of the road beyond. His face hardened into the expression of the general, all softness from moments before sealed away.
“Kenji,” he said, his voice cold and clear. “Bar this gate after I’m out. Don’t open it for anyone until sunrise.”
“Where are you going?” Emily’s voice was sharp with fear.
“To take a walk.” He pocketed the stone. His eyes met hers, and in them she saw the boy who pulled friends from burning wagons, the man who fixed screens and painted rocks. “To remind someone that this house isn’t alone anymore.”
He stepped through the ruined gate and disappeared into the night. Emily listened to his footsteps fade, then to the heavy, final sound of the bar sliding into place behind him. The lock had turned, but now something from the outside was trying to break the door down.