Gentle Old Eyes

45

Zeno hums and watches as the seamstress does her work. The orange fabric slowly being created into something else.

He looks at the haori in his hands, the old haori his mother had lovingly made for him. The orange color has dulled with time along with the originally white lighting strikes looking gray, almost black at the bottom. Hinano Ryumaki had been an excellent seamstress for a woman born in the Sengoku era and living through the start of Edo period.

Even as the best fabric you could get at the time, the special water and fire proof fabric hadn't survived the treatment of time well. It was completely dark in some spots, there were holes in it and rips and tears at the sleeves and the bottom almost seemingly aesthetically fitting the lighting theme.

He had requested what he always accociates with Ouryuu Zeno, the nice diamonds shapes on the short sleeves. He had went and bought a green scarf to wrap around his neck and another for his head.

It wont look the same as Kouka, never will. But as well as he always tries to replicate his favorite look, there are always differences affected by the world he inhabits.

He remembers putting in a custom order for his jacket to look like his haori in a modern world at least twice.

Zeno looks at the scarf around his neck, pulling it to cover his mouth. His gaze wanders to the other scarf on his lap, and his fingers twitch towards the pendant. He always contemplated in each world whether to showcase the gold or not. Sometimes it attracted robbers and thieves. Sometimes it was a testament to how powerful he was, to dare walk around with something so expensive looking.

And sometimes. Just sometimes. People took it the wrong way. A sign of arrogance. And sometimes he would just not be able to explain away why and how he had the pendant in the first place.

This world though, should be fine with him having it jingle in his hair, attached to the head scarf.

"Excuse me sir?" Zeno looks up towards the seamstress who suddenly spoke up. She had stopped working on the fabric while she looked towards him nervously.

"If esteemed customer wants to, he can come back later to get his haori? Sir, you need not sit there, this will take a long time, I apologize." The woman looked distressed, probably not having told a customer before that the process of making the article of clothing will take quite a while.

"No worries no worries! Zeno has all the time in the world and since Zeno let his haori become this bad" Zeno lifted the torn and hideous looking haori up from where it laid on the table. "Zeno can't bear to go outside with it." He flashed a smile towards the woman.

The woman visibly relaxes, smiling a relieved smile before nodding along to him and going back to work.