Chapter Text
It’s a quiet life, that of a village healer located on the outskirts of Kyo.
Makoto’s used to spending most of the day by herself, tending to her herbs or preparing poultices and salves in her small cottage. Only the locals come to see her, mothers seeking ailments for their sick children and aging elders seeking relief from their aches and pains. At worst, she treats the occasional injured farmer or metalworker. Nothing’s life threatening, the stakes are never high.
At least until now.
Without so much of a warning, the doors to her cottage fly open, heavy footsteps accompanying them. Turning, her eyes meet a wealth of blue and red.
Four men carry a makeshift stretcher, their movements heavy with exertion. Blood drips from open wounds onto the floor, their skin slick with an unhealthy sheen. Their breaths are heavy and labored, but their injuries can’t compare to the man lying on the stretcher, the movements of his chest shallow and irregular, and his blue haori stained so heavily with crimson that it’s almost unrecognizable.
Almost being the key word. She’d recognize that shade of royal blue any day, the white insignia painted across each man’s robes.
Shinsengumi.
They don’t patrol this far outside the city center, so she hasn’t personally encountered them before. But the rumors spread far, word carried on the wind from anxious housewives and frustrated ronin.
An organization full of murderers, they say. From their captains to the lowliest of recruits, no one’s innocent. Outlaws masquerading as a police force.
Rumors are just that, rumors. But rumors that heavy and pervasive must have some element of truth to them.
The men begin to lift the stretcher down, gently setting it on a bed. Up close, his wounds are even more gruesome. Beyond the capabilities of a village healer, no doubt. He needs a proper doctor, not the in-between that Makoto is.
“Wait,” she directs towards the men. “I’m not a doctor—he really needs more medical attention than I can provide. You should take him to be treated elsewhere.”
“Can’t,” one of the men says gruffly. “The entirety of the Shinsengumi was raided; nearly everyone is badly wounded, if not dead. He’s well off in comparison.” He grimaces as he stares downwards at the uneasiness with which the unconscious man’s chest heaves.
Horror wells in Makoto’s chest. If this is well off, his life fading fast before Makoto’s eyes, how injured are the others?
Makoto isn’t fond of the Bakufu nor the Shinsengumi, but she can’t abandon a man on his deathbed. She might not have sworn by the Hippocratic Oath, yet she abides by its ethics all the same.
Mustering her courage, Makoto gives a terse nod. “I understand. I’ll do my best.”
The man’s eye meets hers, his gratitude unspoken. “We’ll be leaving now, plenty of wounded still need medical attention. But miss—”
“Makoto,” she corrects him.
“Makoto-san. For all the rumors and his eccentricities, Okita’s not a bad man. He takes care of all his men—please help him. For all our sakes.”
With a slight bow, they depart silently, the door swinging shut behind them. In her hands, they leave his life.
Steeling herself, Makoto takes a deep breath, running through the basics of emergency medicine in her head, and then steps towards her patient.
Step one: assess the situation.
Quickly, Makoto catalogues his wounds. His head, while bloody, is comparatively well off. A thin cut rests across his cheek, already having clotted, and the beginnings of a heavy bruise blossom around his left eye, which is covered by a metal coin looped to a string. Despite his injuries, Makoto can’t help the stray thought that briefly crosses her mind—this Shinsengumi, this killer, she reminds herself—he’s rather attractive.
She doesn’t allow that thought to linger long though, not when she notices crimson oozing onto her bedsheets, permanently marring their color.
A deep slash runs from his left breast to his opposite hip, severe but not the most concerning as its bleeding is mostly staunched. There are higher priorities, namely, his left side, where his haori glistens with fresh blood.
Whatever wound lies beneath it must be horrid; she needs to staunch its bleeding immediately, lest he lose too much blood.
Carefully and with great effort—her patient’s heavier than he looks—Makoto manages to remove the ruined haori, placing it aside. It’s almost unrecognizable from the haori of his fellow men, too stained to clean, but there’s one notable difference: across the back in thick white letters reads: first division.
The haori, the other men’s reverence for her patient…the pieces come together as she examines his now bare torso. Scars line nearly the entire surface of his body, some fresh, and others perhaps decades old.
The man before her is a hardened warrior; a high up in the Shinsengumi, no doubt. Perhaps even a captain—the most ruthless, heartless monsters of them all, if the rumors are to be believed.
But monster or not, he’s Makoto’s patient now. And she won’t let him die in her hands.
The wound to his side is gaping, so deep that it’s almost like a chasm across his pallid skin. There’s no way it’ll heal naturally, not with its raggedness and his poor condition.
Makoto’s eyes dart around her cottage, one objective in mind. After a few seconds, she spots it, running over. A needle and a spool of thread meant for her latest sewing project, not stitching wounds closed. But helpful all the same.
Makoto runs back to where the man gasps for air and is breathing even more unsteady than before. She doesn’t have time to doubt herself, to think things through. His time is limited.
Pouring a drought of hard alcohol—whiskey, a gift from an ecstatic barkeep she once helped—onto a cloth, she brings it to the wound, careful not to stop any of his body’s natural clotting with her motions. The unconscious man weakly flinches, but Makoto pays him no mind, holding him steady.
The wound cleaned as best as she can do given the circumstances, she threads her needle, bringing it to the edge of the wound.
With a prick it goes through, and she pinches the other side closer, ignoring the blood that gushes onto her hands. One stitch after another, not a single other thought crossing her mind.
With shaky yet determined hands, she unknowingly sows the threads of fate together, intertwining their paths forever.
It’s close, but the injured Shinsengumi in her care pulls through.
Makoto wasn’t sure he would, not for some time. He had lost a significant amount of blood, and his fever had escalated until his body felt like an inferno.
She did everything she could—fresh bandages, fluids, homemade tinctures and ointments—but she’s no god. Sometimes her efforts just aren’t enough. She does all that she can, but in the end, it’s up to the individual themself to fight, to survive, to pull through.
And fight this man has.
Every scar on his body tells its own story, a tale of victory and survival. Makoto would wager that in good time, these new scars will join them, forgotten as one of many.
His fever relinquishes, and his wounds slowly heal. Stabilized, it’s just a matter of time until he wakes up.
Four days pass in her care, and then he returns to the living. Loudly.
“What the fuck are ya buncha limpdicks doin’? We gotta battle to be fightin’—” Makoto immediately runs from her bedroom to the central area of her cottage where her patient no longer rests.
He’s sitting up, struggling to shrug off the bedsheets on top of him and escape his bed. It’s clear he’s confused—it wouldn’t be the first time.
“Haw?” Taking a better look at his surroundings, his eye rapidly scanning the room, he speaks up. “Where the hell am I?”
Now’s as good a time as any to step in.
“Sir, you’re in my cottage. I’m a local healer on the outskirts of Kyo; your men brought you here after you were injured.”
“Don’t need no healers n’ doctors pokin’ at me,” he complains. His grumbling continues until he finally gets a look at Makoto, and then he promptly shuts up, his complaints lost. His good eye stares intensely at her, and Makoto can’t stop her cheeks from slightly heating up under his gaze.
“What’s a beautiful woman like ya doin’ all the way out here, helpin’ someone like me?” In an instant, his tone has completely changed. Makoto giggles a little, his antics completely transparent.
“Treating you, sir. Do you have a name?”
“Do I? I have the name,” he boasts, sitting up straighter and puffing out his bandaged chest. “Okita Soji, captain of the Shinsengumi’s first division, at yer service.”
Makoto gasps.
The rumors paint the Shinsengumi as a pack of wolves, the lot of them all heartless killers. But even worse are the rumors surrounding its strongest captain, Okita Soji.
A ruthless killer, his cruelty beyond that of the others. Bloodthirsty and hungry for battle; he’s never lost a fight. He wears the blood of his enemies proudly, never laundering his haori as a warning.
Makoto doesn’t know how true these rumors are, but regardless, every one of them portrays Okita—the man sitting in front of her, her patient, a reconciliation that her brain still struggles to process—in a terrible light.
There are indications that they might not all be true—the unwavering loyalty of his men, his flirting—but for now, she’s cautious.
“And what about ya? Bet a gorgeous woman like ya has got an even better name.” Gorgeous?
Her hair is unkept, busyness and isolation preventing her from caring, dark bags under her eyes. Her clothes are crusted with blood, as she was unable to fully cleanse them of their stains.
She doesn’t agree in the slightest, but the light in his eye makes her believe him. Makes her decide to be honest.
“Makimura. Makimura Makoto,” she says.
“It’s a good name,” he compliments her. “Hm…Makimura? Nah. Makoto? No…got it. Mako-chan,” he settles on, playing with her name.
Makoto shakes her head, albeit somewhat fondly. She doesn’t mind, not really. A nickname that cute is almost strange coming out of his mouth, but at the same time, it feels right.
“Nice to meet you, Okita-san,” she greets him in return.
“Back at ya, Mako-chan,” he winks, a failing endeavor given his missing eye. “Lemme come over and give ya a proper greetin’.” Weakly, he begins to push himself out of the bed, swinging his legs over its side.
Makoto rushes forward. He’s really in no state to be standing up, and frankly, she doesn’t know if he even can in his current state. “Wait! Don’t—”
Thud!
The instant he pushes off the bed, carrying the full extent of his body weight, he unceremoniously crumples to the ground.
“Okita-san!” Makoto rushes towards him, carefully examining him. His eye is closed, but it doesn’t appear that he’s reopened a wound, at least not yet. “Okita-san, are you okay?”
He doesn’t respond.
Makoto puts two fingers to his pulse. His heart beats steadily, his breathing regular. He’s merely unconscious.
Makoto can’t hold back her snort after she internally breathes a sigh of relief.
Outside Okita might be a feared wolf, but in her hands, he’s nothing but a puppy.
Over the next week, Okita’s strength gradually returns.
At first, he sleeps the days away, only brief periods of lucidity and wakefulness amidst hours of rest. But these periods gradually grow longer, and with them, Makoto’s understanding of Okita increases.
He lives for adrenaline, the feeling of steel clashing against steel. He has a sworn brother he’d trust with his life. He loves singing at karaoke bars, even if he’s not particularly talented—an assessment made not by himself, but Makoto, having been subjected to more than a few offkey songs—and while he doesn’t have any pets himself, there’s a stray cat that hangs out around the Shinsengumi compound that he sometimes feeds.
His words and actions paint a completely different picture from that of the rumors. They’re likely both true, in part—Makoto would be remiss to not recognize the obvious affection he has for her, dripping from every word and every action. What she sees isn’t what most see.
He’s almost formed an attachment to her, unwilling to leave despite his energy having returned. Makoto isn’t needed anymore, yet he still refuses to admit it, lame excuses rolling off his tongue.
“Okita-san,” she starts for the nth time. “There’s not much else I’m able to do for you. You should probably return to your division soon; I’m sure your men miss you,” she gently chides.
Okita snorts, throwing his head back with amusement. “Those numbskulls? Doubt it, they’re probably throwin’ a party with me gone. Can’t imagine they’re eager to have me back.”
Makoto shakes her head. “I think you’d be surprised.”
“Maybe,” Okita shrugs, ending the idea there.
Her first attempt failed, Makoto pivots. “What about your superiors?”
Okita laughs at her suggestion. “What superiors? No one’s higher up than me,” he boasts. Makoto has her doubts about the validity of his statement, and they’re confirmed when mere seconds later, for the second time in recent history, Shinsengumi burst through her front door.
Instead of a squad of men, this time it’s one very intimidating man. His face is steely, an antithesis to Okita’s, and he wears a similar blue haori to Okita. Another captain then—or perhaps someone even higher, given the surprise on Okita’s face.
“Ahem,” the stranger coughs. He looks straight at Okita, at the way he radiates energy, despite the bandages that cover his body. It’s obvious to Makoto that they share the same assessment of Okita’s health. “What was that about no superiors?”
The prideful aura around Okita fades. “Nothin’.”
“That’s what I thought. Your presence around headquarters is sorely missed, Okita-san.” There’s an underlying demand hidden in his statement: Okita’s to return. Immediately.
“Surely ya can make do without me for a bit. Still gotta rest and recover for a while longer.” He gives an incredibly fake cough. The other Shinsengumi isn’t impressed.
The stranger gives Okita a glare. Okita glances between him and Makoto, then sighs, getting up from his cot to grab his sheathed sword and haori. He heads to the door but stops before departing.
“Mako-chan?”
“Yes?”
Okita gives her a genuine smile. It reaches his eyes, a rarity given his tendency for overexaggeration. “Thank ya for takin’ care of me. Means a lot.”
“Of course, Okita-san. I’m glad you’re doing better now.”
“That’s Soji to ya!” he corrects her. “I’m gonna get ya to call me by my first name if it’s the last thing I do. Promise. ‘Til next time, Mako-chan!”
With her name on his lips, he struts out of her cottage. The other Shinsengumi hangs back and approaches her.
“For you,” he says. In his hands are ten ryo—more than she makes in an average year, given her proclivity to not ask for payment.
“I can’t,” she refuses, gently pushing his hands away. The Shinsengumi shakes his head and presses the coins into her hand so that she can’t turn them away again.
“Do what you want with them. Bury them, burn them, spend them, I do not care. But let it be known that the Shinsengumi always pay their debts. You’ve done us a great service, Makimura Makoto. Okita-san is our strongest captain, and his continued survival is of the upmost importance. We appreciate your discretion regarding his injuries in advance,” he finishes, leaving Makoto without so much as a goodbye.
Makoto’s had worse farewells, she supposes. Certainly less profitable ones.
Now alone, her cottage feels too quiet. It normally is, but she’s grown rather accustomed to Okita’s antics in the short time they spent together. Despite his occupation and the gruesome rumors that surround him, she enjoys his presence, even if his flirting can be a bit much.
But there’s no point in dwelling on it—she’s neglected the surrounding village the past few weeks, and there’s plenty of work to be done. Best if she gets to it immediately.
Still, she can’t help the lingering thoughts of Okita that plague her mind. It wouldn’t be so bad, seeing him again.
Though perhaps under better circumstances, next time.