HAKUOUKI
THEME - CHERRY BLOSSOMS
TOSHIZO HIJIKATA
Coming Soon!!
SOUJI OKTA
An Unexpected Hanami by Kaylin
Spring had come to Kyoto again, but it didn’t change things much for Souji Okita, captain of the Shinsengumi’s 1st Division. Punks with swords were still trying to bully people in town, the Choshu were still a thorn in the shogunate’s side, and Hijikata was still as unbending as ever. As for the first two, it was Souji’s job to stop them, which, somewhere along the line, often ended in bloodshed.
So it didn’t matter what season it was. At any time of the year, blood was still red.
He was musing about such things as he walked to his room after a patrol. He’d just gotten back to the compounds and knew that Hijikata was probably going to nag him about resting as soon as he saw him. Sure, maybe he’d still been coughing sometimes, but he was fine. If it made Mother Hen Hijikata stop nagging him, however, spending some time in his room was a small price to pay. Whether he spent that time resting or not was his own business. There were far more productive things he could do with his time, anyway. Like read the commander’s terrible haikus.
HAJIME SAITO
Coming Soon!!
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SANOSUKE HARADA
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HEISUKE TOUDOU
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CHIKAGE KAZAMA
He’s always disliked them.
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Even as he stands beneath them, blooming, beautiful; the streets lined and lit up in a vibrant pink, the sun’s light pouring through each small gap it can find - he still can't shake that feeling. The lives of cherry blossoms are fleeting; they fall at five centimeters per second, and once they reach the ground, their worth has come to an end. They lie on the ground only to be trampled over and forgotten, their beauty and significance lost after they fall from grace. And humans, humans are the same. It's said that beneath a cherry blossom tree are the bodies of humans. Maybe that explains why the lives of the blossoms, no more than ten days, are so short. They follow in the footsteps of the beings six feet under.
He doesn't like them either.
At least, not all of them.
SHINPACHI NAGAKURA
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KEISUKE SANAN
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SUSUMU YAMAZAKI
With You, There is Only Spring by Zel
Chizuru sat under cover of the weeping cherry blossom tree that stood in the backyard of their home. A flurry of cherry blossoms cascades down like snow as she watches Susumu napping with his head in her lap. She’s gently stroking his face, enjoying the comfortable silence that falls between them. He leans into her palm with a smile playing on his lips.
As a blossom falls onto Susumu’s handsome face, she remembers how much Spring means to her. A reminder of how fleeting and beautiful life is. How life is always filled with hope, loss, life and death. But more importantly how spring encapsulates the love that she carries in her heart.
HACHIROU IBA
Monastery Bells by ShoujoThoughts
Her voice echos like the monastery bells, he thinks. He is thirteen years old, and he’s heard this sound before whilst traveling with his father to Kyoto; the Gion Festival, he remembers--those joyous, cacophonous bells, and none other, do her justice.
Because she’s shouting now, standing in the backyard and shooing a bird away from his morning meal. Chizuru is only ten, he thinks, but she’s so enormously, irreverently loud. And he hopes she never changes.
Chizuru places the wriggling worm in dirt beneath a kosumosu flower. The women at home are expected to be blossoms in their own right, beautiful and sedate, but not Chizuru. Here they are children, and Kodo-sensei allows Hachiro to peruse his books in the afternoon. Chizuru welcomes him most mornings with a smile and a clumsy embrace. When Kodo goes on house calls, they’re left alone, and unlike the flowers he has known, Chizuru shows no hesitation. She calls him “Hachiro-kun,” and never stops considering, even if proprietary dictates she should.
KAZUE SOUMA
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RYOMA SAKAMOTO
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