Bloodied Dahlias | Miya Osamu

[IX] Larkspur

Family stuff. It hadn't been too far removed from the truth, he supposed.

In fact, it could have even passed for the truth so long as you squinted a bit and looked at it from a precise 37 degree angle. Specific, perhaps, but you really had to line up all the parts for it to make sense, because he hadn't exactly been lying when he had told Tsubasa's executives that he had family matters to attend to earlier. It wasn't truly a lie because the Miyas had been working for Inarizaki as the Emperor's watchdogs for generations, with it being as much as a family tradition as it was a family business.

Well, guess it is a lie for Miyano, I guess, Osamu thought as he pushed his car door shut. Bah, identities. He clicked the button on his key, the sounds of the familiar double honk and the subtle click of the locks engaging echoed against the walls as he walked toward the elevator situated at the edge of the underground parking lot.

The Miya clan traced its lineage back to the Meiji era, with each generation bestowed by an uncanny affinity for pairs. Odd and even; day and night; sun and moon; light and shadow. Twins had always blessed the household, and it was always the firstborns in the ruling family who would go on to inherit the Miya name, with all others inheriting the names of the branch families. Infallible and as if dictated by nature itself, there was little credited to coincidence and more to fate, for the pattern had never once skipped a generation, so much so that the right of succession in the family had circumvented the norm and had fallen upon two pairs of shoulders and never just the one. Two heads to bear the weight of the collars choking the necks of the watchdogs — two lives forever indebted to servitude to the Emperor, and by extension, Inarizaki.

Perhaps it was unorthodox to the norm, but ascension to the main house had never been about riches nor glory to the members of the Miya clan. No, the Miya name had represented pride and honor more than anything else: becoming the heads of the clan meant becoming the guardian deities of the imperial family and their nation. Becoming chained to the Emperor's service meant becoming anchored to the fate of sacrificing one's life to save the nation. And what better death would there be than to die in service of the people? In the eyes of the Miya clan, that, alone, was both the most honorable way to live one's life and the most honorable to end it.

Not that Osamu really believed in that bullshit, though. He punched the button on the wall, calling the elevator down to the parking lot floor.

Not after experiencing that fucked up sense of honor — that foolish sense of worthless pride — for himself. All this just to watch it all crumble away at your last breath. His fists tightened at the thought. He may be the current head of the Miya clan, but no amount of such naively human notions of pride could be worth the cost. It could be nothing else save for fucked up, and even more so in the current day because it was thanks to those fucked up succession laws that had left the Miya mantle all but desecrated following the death of his uncle — his father's own twin brother.

A traffic accident nearly three decades ago. An 'accident', allegedly. An 'accident' that had ripped the power out of the surviving head's hands, for the head of the clan must always be a pair of twins and never just the one. There were no singulars, no exceptions, because in the rule-abiding Miya clan, if the laws had not been stated explicitly, then no circumstances could be acquiesced.

Osamu had never met his uncle, with the man having passed shortly following his birth, but he had bore witness to the tithe it had taken from his father. It had nearly all but escaped the confines of Osamu's memory these days, but a sliver of a glimpse of the the main family's house still remained in its crypts from the one time his father had brought the twins along for a visit during the clan's general meeting. A glimpse of the empty pair of seats at the front of the meeting hall, his father sitting just adjacent to the seats of honor, surrounded by the leaders of the branch families along the length of the intricately carved patterned sliding panes. Osamu recalled a pair of hands — wrinkled and sun-spotted with age — that had reached out for Osamu's head, the then young boy blinking in surprise when the hands turned out to be gentle and controlled, the calluses of their fingers just ghosting the tips of his hair as the elderly man patted his head, his face twisted in an expression void of anything save for sorrow. His grandfather, his father had later introduced to him that day. The Miya clan's head of two generations past.