#I'd already seen the prologue and we only had time for the first proper episode before I started my art for the night

[phoenixiancrystallist]

DAY 9

(╯°□°）╯ MOUNTAINS

Still looks like a bouquet of dicks to me. I can't win. Oh well, MOVING ON, next we're doing the foreground :D ...of the background...

[ythmir-writes]

Hey hey! Is it still okay to send in an ask for the 182 prompts? If it is, I'd really love it if you could write reincarnation with Ieyasu Tokugawa from Ikemen Sengoku (which... MC is from the modern world but like... I just really like the reincarnation trope so if it it's still okay... >...

A/N: hello! Thank you for requesting! I would just like to apologize for taking too long (youknowwhatimean) but i am here and i have written something! please refer to this post for the full explanation and some insight and just me uhhh generally rambling again so~

here it is, that reincarnation AU that turned into multichaptersevenifno one literally no one asked for this except my brain\

edit! i can’t believe it wasn’t included (again,damnyoutumblr) but hey i would just like to give my sincerest thank you for saying you love what i do! i try my best is always and i hope you continue to enjoy what i write as much as i enjoy writing them :> thankyouthankyou i really LOVE my midcin gods piece i think the suitors would all be badass gods

REINCARNATION

fandom: Ikemen Sengokucharacter: Ieyasu Tokugawa

Prologue / ??

Ieyasu Tokugawa never knows when it will happen.

He had been standing by the sink debating with Masamune about the practicality of growing their own garden on the roofdeck of their building. Masamune had reasoned for fresh produce for spells and cooking. Ieyasu had countered that it was exactly a chore none of them needed, what with the restaurant already enough work for three pairs of hands. When all of a sudden the morning light was too bright for Ieyasu’s eyes, the air too hot for his lungs to take.

He felt his knees buckle under him as he tried to stay upright; one hand gripping the ledge of the sink, the other gripping (extra tightly) the plate, and precariously placing it down so it would not shatter and cause more problems like his brain was causing problems like how he couldn’t hold it all together and Masamune was looking at him funny and he needed he needed –

I will find you!

“Ieyasu…?” Masamune sounded like he was ten feet away.

“I just need… a moment.”

Washing heavy futons and bringing them out to the veranda to dry. A wide backyard filled with nothing but clothing lines and kimonos swaying in the wind. A hat. A balloon. A blade. A burning plane crashing towards them.

Breathe.

Laughter and guffaws as people raced through abandoned castles. Fireworks by the lake. A huge birthday party like none of them had ever seen. A needle thrust into his arm. Fifteen needles. Screams.

Breathe.

I will find you I will find you I will find you.

Breathe.

First through his teeth. Then through his nose. Ieyasu may not know when his episodes will happen but he knew what he needed to do when they did: keep breathing, keep breathing. Take in gulps of air as the pain that gripped him ever so slowly began to let go.

All of a sudden, he felt weightless and realized that Masamune was carrying him, saying some gibberish Ieyasu could neither hear nor understand. He tried to make him stop, tried to tell the idiot that he was just fine, he did not need any special treatment, that this – him falling to the floor with no apparent cause or reason – was just his usual.

Ieyasu was just remembering a bit of his past lives, after all.

+

The first time he had experienced it, Ieyasu thought he had gone mad.

It had been lifetimes past, during a minor scuffle; adolescent teasing turned into a semi-serious contest of who could knock the other one out faster before the adults could intervene. He could remember the half-circle that formed around him. The jeers. The taunting. His own labored breathing and the way his nose was dribbling blood.

The way the other child spat at him and made indecent gestures towards where he should place his head and for how long. He had taken it all in stride. But the other child had spat again, this time on the names of his friends who lost and were nursing their bruises behind the line. That had not gone down so well.

Ieyasu, even when he had temporarily forgotten himself, always did have a particular kind of temper.

He had shouted something equally indecent, taking two thunderous steps to approach his opponent close enough for a punch. But just as he was about to connect his vision blurred.

The kid before him was no longer just a kid but had somehow grown into an adult. No, two adults. Three. A dozen. A hundred. A mass of bodies before him suddenly, impossibly so. And he was no longer just a child but a grown man. And he was no longer just holding out his fists but a sword that he gripped like it was his lifeline and which he swung and twirled and used like an extension of his arm.

The soldiers before him swarmed him but he fended them off, his body moving almost on its own, his steps measured and exacting to keep him upright. For how long he was fighting, he did not know, could not tell. Only that he needed to ward them off, only that he needed to buy time until –

“Ieyasu! Here!!”

Who?

“I’m coming!!”

A hand grabbing his shoulder and pulling him backwards tore him from his vision; one moment he was valiantly defending his keep, the next he was being shoved down on the ground, the screams of dying men fading to give way to the delighted screams of children having seen their first real fight.

“Get a grip, Ieyasu!” someone shouted at someone else but the slap was all his and his cheek burned for it; for a moment, he felt the same warm sensation in his chest rising up, felt the hilt of a katana in his hands where there was nothing but air and –

Another slap. Harder this time, and his vision focused on his playmate – no, a man now – holding him. A very familiar face with raven hair and red eyes. A friend. A comrade. An almost brother.

Not a soldier trying to betray him. Not a spy sneaking into his chambers and trying to kill him.

“Kotaro!” the man shouted at him, and the children around them were fleeing now and some were crying. What was he thinking making a scene surrounded by children? “No, Ieyasu!”

The name felt like a hard blow to his chest, pushing him down. Ieyasu’s vision blurred again. And he had gripped the arm holding him as memories he had never experienced flooded into his mind – memories no fifteen year old boy should have any right remembering.

Too much scenarios. Too much experience. Too much life. He writhed in agony and the hand on his shoulder both kept him down and held him up as he struggled.

It was as if someone had flipped a switch. One moment he was a boy, ignorant and innocent and powerless, wanting to prove his own worth against a world that spat on commoners, and then the next moment he was a conqueror, a ruler of clans. And he knew things; he remembered things so different and stark against his own – truer? more recent? – memories.

He felt his jaw hurt. He felt his arms and legs hurt. He felt like his entire body was being crushed under the weight and the gaze of something judging him from heavens and something else scratching the back of his skull. And all of these caused by the two differing visions he could see at the same time.

Two sets of memories that seemed to blend and mix together. Two sets of memories that fought inside his brain to be recognized as reality. Two sets of memories that hurt. Two sets of memories that made him feel hurt.

“Stay awake.” The friend he could not yet quite remember urged him. “Stay with me. It’ll pass. I’ve seen you do this before.”

Ieyasu struggled and could only barely bite down on his agony, hoping through tears that the man was right. And as he screamed through phantom pain, as he shouted and struggled and tried his damndest to make sense of things as quickly as a fifteen year old boy could, an unsettling and frightening sense of certainty slowly overcame him and told him that the set of polar opposite memories both undeniably belonged to him.

+

Ieyasu does not know if he will ever stop having these visions.

But to be honest, vision was not the proper term. It was more a recollection, a remembering of things gone by.  But if he was already being exacting, it was also not just a simple matter of recollecting either.

It was more a sensation in his skull that his brain was somehow (impossibly and impractically) shifting to accommodate unearthed memories. And more often than not, it was as if his entire body was remembering what it had gone through all at once at the same time.

Pain. Joy. Sickness. Lethargy. Uneasiness. Nausea. Fear. Elation. All his wounds and all his triumphs. All his births and all his deaths. Dreams, and nightmares. A gallimaufry of emotions and sensations. He felt them all, felt himself drowning in them; the moments in which he lost his grip on reality stretching into hours and days as he re-lived whatever it was the he had somehow remembered.

No one had any explanation as to why his body decided to remember everything else that came with his memories. Timeshifters were rare but his case even rarer. It was probably his own little curse. Or an equivalent price. A way to balance his talent.

Ieyasu did not want to look too closely for fear of what might look back. Some people might find the idea of not forgetting things to be of comfort. Ieyasu knows for certain those people have never really experienced what it was like to remember it all.

By the time he regained consciousness, Ieyasu was already on his bed. The room was quiet and dark. A cooling pack was on his forehead, his body weighed comfortably down by a thick blanket, and all his closest friends in the room, asleep and keeping vigil.

No, not all.

One was still missing. The one dearest to him. The one he would never stop looking for.

I will find you! I will find you!

We will meet again!

It was a bitter memory amongst sweet ones, a parting too abrupt. Like a cloth cut haphazardly into a thousand torn seams. Ieyasu knew as long as they were not complete, nothing would ever be the same. Not just their ultimate aim, which was altruistic, but also their everyday life, which was closer. More his.

How long has it been since he had seen her? How long since he had been able to trace the stars on her back? How many lifetimes had passed since she had last held him in her arms as he bewailed the inescapable fact that his fate had no clear end?

Too many to count. Too many to really forget.

And as he sank back down into sleep’s embrace, Ieyasu misses her all the more. He wonders to himself yet again where she could be now, and if they could find her soon. And with his last wisps of consciousness, he wishes not for the last time, that she was there with him, in the dark, with their friends, to help blunt all the pain.

24/182