The night air smelled different beyond the teahouse walls. Less like incense and paint, more like damp stone, rustling leaves, and the trace of river wind.
Aika had not stepped outside the Hanabira Teahouse in nearly a year. She was rarely granted the liberty. Even when she was, it was always with an escort, in daylight, on errands that ended swiftly. But tonight... she stood alone beneath the gate, in a borrowed shawl and simple hairpin, her heart pounding louder than her footsteps.
Renjiro was waiting.
Not as a patron, not behind paper screens, but beneath the old cherry tree at the bend where the canal curved like a sleeping snake.
She spotted him by the lantern he held, its glow a quiet fire beside his face.
"You came," he said.
She only nodded, too stunned to speak.
He didn't offer his arm, didn't assume to lead her. He merely turned and walked, slow enough for her to follow, through the winding paths of the older district. It was late. Kyoto was hushed, the city's pulse slowed to a flicker. The air was cool and full of ghosts, yet beside him, Aika felt none of her usual fear.
They crossed a small stone bridge where koi swam in sleep beneath dark water. Beyond it stood a closed shrine.
Renjiro stopped there.
"When I was a boy," he said, "my mother used to bring me here during the chrysanthemum festival. We'd light incense and pray. I always asked for impossible things."
Aika tilted her head.
"What sort of things?"
"That I might grow up kind. That I might love someone, and never hurt them." he replied, gazing at the shrine.
She turned her gaze to the shuttered shrine.
"And did it come true?"
He looked at her, not answering for a long while.
"I think it's only just beginning to."
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was full of trembling possibility.
They didn't stay long. Just long enough for her to feel the stone under her sandals, to smell the chrysanthemums someone had left by the gate, already wilting. Renjiro never once reached for her hand, but when he walked her back to the edge of Hanabira's district, he did something no client had ever done.
He bowed to her.
Not as a man seeking service.
But as an equal. A woman. A heart.
"Goodnight, Aika."
She watched him disappear down the fogged road before she dared turn back.
She never told the matron where she'd gone. But something changed in her afterward.
Something no rouge could hide.
Even the other girls noticed.
Weeks passed. They continued to meet in stolen minutes and candlelit rooms. Sometimes, he brought stories instead of gifts. He told her about the carpenter who whistled while carving kites, about the little girl who fed rice to stray cats outside the butcher's stall. His world was full of color.
Her world.
Until him.
Had only ever been painted on.
One night, Renjiro arrived with something folded carefully in silk.
A set of hairpins. Not gold or jeweled, but carved from white bone, shaped like plum blossoms.
"These were my sister's," he said. "She passed away last spring. She was... bright like you. I think she would've liked you."
Aika touched the pin as if it might vanish.
"I can't accept this."
"You already have," he said gently.
That night, after he left, Aika didn't weep. But she sat awake long after the lamps were dimmed, hair loose, heart open.
And in the dark, with her fingers wrapped around the plum blossom pin, she whispered the thing she had never dared before:
"Please... let this be real."