fic | tsubaki

[rukongainotsubaki]

TSUBAKI




The man who called himself Koshaku, it was not his given name, prince is a title, Marguerite had reminded him, the first time he had taken her to bed, found her walking the streets of the 60th district of Rukongai, the first of the outer districts where no one wore sandals.

Marguerite didn’t wear sandals either, have no illusions, in that aspect she was no exception to the rule, it has ruined her feet to this day, her soles are coarse like unprocessed leather. Yet, her kimono had been decent – as well as stolen – and she had caught Koshaku’s eyes, because she was tall and foreign-looking, and because she, in the span of an hour, hung off the arm of three different men.

It was the kind of efficiency that the man with the title for a name liked. They had both signed the contract within the day. And at night, he had taken her to his pleasure house in the third district, where his other girls lived, and he had taken her to bed and Marguerite had whispered against his lips, no nobility live in these parts. That was how she knew, Koshaku was not his true name, that he was called something else by someone else, possibly by the woman he went home to whenever he left the brothel, if he had anyone.

He had ten women here. Marguerite would be the eleventh, she was superfluous, she was told by the others, but soon she was also the one making the most profit. Surely, that had to make up for the room she occupied.

Many times over.


~*~


They didn’t like her for her fan dances or her abilities on the koto or the shamisen, seeing as she didn’t have any, but Marguerite acted as foreign as she looked, only emphasised by her kimono (more expensive in quality now, Koshaku’s money dressing her) with their floral designs and bright colours.

Marguerite laughed raucously, she didn’t hide it behind a prim hand, she ate with the men and she teased them without much regard for propriety or status. What did such things matter to her? Fucking her, they all looked the same.

As time went by, enough men had known her, that her reputation would spread all the way into Seireitei. Koshaku would let seated Shinigami into her chambers, that grew in size to accommodate such important guests, and suddenly there were nobility in the slums. Certainly, they left again when they were done, but they came, they came back and all across Soul Society, they would whisper about the Camellia of Rukongai. Soon it was the only name they knew her by, Tsubaki.

When Marguerite pronounced it herself, it sounded just as foreign as she looked and acted, but even so she was complimented on her grasp of the language that she had no alternative to anymore. Once, in another life, perhaps. She dreamed of wearing different garments, sometimes.

Now, this was all she knew.


~*~


The only issue I take with you, Koshaku would always say, as the healer left her room once more, are those lungs of yours.

Marguerite would answer him, faint of breath and with an unattractive dribble of blood on her fingers that oh, don’t worry, they are the only issue I take with myself, too, Koshaku-sama. She would try to laugh and fail and collapse into a coughing fit, so Koshaku laughed in her stead, scornfully, and didn’t send any men to see her for the next three days.

The cough had been with her since her arrival, like a curse that clung to her across time and space. In the beginning, it had been manageable and easy to cover up, it was the only thing she hid behind her hands, those huffs of breath. Still, as the months and years passed, her lungs seemingly dissolved and disintegrated, and the blood she spat looked darker and darker and the days that went in between her visits, during her bouts of sickness, grew more and more numerous. It was three days, then it was five, a week, two.

She always regained her strength eventually, but the time it required grew longer and tedious and boring and in her mind, Marguerite had already bidden goodbye to all of it.

It was the only way to stay grateful for it, when she – never as inevitably as one could hope – returned. Laughing more loudly, eating more hungrily, managing to insult some cousin three times removed on the Shihouin family tree without him calling for any other action than Marguerite sucking his cock.

Seeing as she wore shoes now, and she was free to run in them, that was worth sucking cock for, she had decided from the very beginning.

As long as that cock adored her and didn’t call her Tsubaki.


~*~


Because Marguerite was not her title, and her title was not her name, and she would give herself to no man who wasn’t willing to embarrass himself by mispronouncing the only thing that she had arrived with.

That was truly hers.