Samurai Champloo Fan Fiction ❯ Nenju ❯ XXVIII. Along this road ( Chapter 28 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Disclaimer: I don’t own Samurai Champloo or any of its affiliated characters, which belong to Manglobe/Shimoigusa Champloos. Neither do I own the haiku of Matsuo Basho (translation by R.H. Blyth, this chapter).


Nenju


The warehouse was pleasant enough; it was Jin who was turning out to be the pain in her ass.

Stupid ronin — him and his logic. Pfft. When had that ever done anything?

“Did you know he came back to the brothel in Yokohama to rescue me?” she asked. “O-suzu told me.”

“Hn.”

“He did. Not you, him.”

“Was this before or after you and I were at the gambling hall?”

“Oh! Don’t even — “

”I could, perhaps, have gone back to the brothel after that to rescue you?“

”You? Not funny. I had to break a vase over the head of a pervert to escape, you jerk!”

“. . . a pervert?”

“He was so obviously a pervert — he said he liked my face!”

“I see.”

“That didn’t come out right, but — “ Fuu flailed for an appropriate thing to say. He poked me in my squirrel! sounded unbelievably crazy, but she let it go with some reluctance. Maybe if she phrased it differently —

” . . . ah. Still, very admirable that he came to rescue you,” Jin allowed. “It would have been very impressive if you’d been there, I’m sure.”
She gave up and stuck her tongue out at him. Childish, but satisfying.

“I saw that.”

“ . . . nnngrhh. Where did he wander off to, anyway?” Fuu asked.

“It’s likely that he decided to explore the building,” the ronin said. “Or that he’s outside.”

“He didn’t say anything to you, either?”

“Ah.”

“He hasn’t changed all that much, has he?” She shook her head, smiling despite her irritation.

“He’s still as proud as he was,” the ronin commented. “Perhaps more.”

She considered — Mugen had always had more than his share of pride, so how Jin thought he could tell —

“It’s no kindness to him to do this.”

Ah, crap. Fuu made a face. They were back to that again, were they?

Jin made a sound, sharp and disapproving. “Did you tell him?” he asked, making her want to put her hands around his throat and just squeeze. It wasn’t fair, that he could go from being that way to being the loyal friend who’d carried her zori inside his kimono, and back, sometimes even within the space of a heartbeat. “Does he know why?”

She counted to ten in her head, then said, “No. I couldn’t.”

“It will be the worst possible thing for him to find out, especially now. He is too proud for that, you know that,” he told her. “It will end badly.”

“You’re wrong. I’ll make it work.” Tired, she rubbed her eyes.

“Fuu. If I — “

”Don’t,” she said, though whether to him or herself, she didn’t know. The silk whispered against its cotton wrapping as she shifted her weight against it. “He’s a good man.”

“Ah.” He sounded unconvinced.

She changed the subject. “Tell me a story, Jin.”

“Of course.”

“I want to know. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

The ronin did not answer; she heard a rustle as he moved, so softly that if she’d taken a breath she would’ve missed it.

“Tell me,” Fuu said. “I need you to be ugly.”

This time, there was no mistaking the quiet sigh. “The worst? There are so many things I’ve done of which I’m ashamed,” he told her, in a voice gone slow and thoughtful. “Shishou died at my hands, and I broke my promise to Master Niwa. I robbed Mugen of Mukuro’s death. I . . . failed to protect you. Those are all things of which I am ashamed.”

“But none of those were your fault.”

“No,” he said. “They were. Every time, I acted without thinking. When Shishou made that request of me — I should’ve known he would not have done that without being forced.”

“You didn’t fail to protect me, though,” she pointed out. “I tricked you and Mugen into leaving.”

Jin snorted. “Fuu,” he said in that tone he usually reserved for statements like the sun rises in the east, or fishing is a life or death struggle between man and fish. “It’s not difficult to predict what you will do.”

She raised her eyebrows. “That’s not what you said.”

“Hn? When was this?”

“When — “ Her face reddened. Right after Mugen beat you, she thought. “Just after we left Maria’s house.”

“No, I said I only ever understood half of what you said,” he corrected. “Not what you do. That’s different.”

“So why — “ Fuu said, wishing the words back immediately. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you know?”

“Ah.” Jin paused, then said, “You told me once that without duty, this world would be a dark place — I should have known it would be him; but I saw only what I wanted to see. Foolish.”
She heard a mix of calm and regret in his voice, and a horrible acceptance that he would of course have come second to the Ryukyuan; her stomach twisted into a tight knot. “Oh, Jin,” Fuu said, lamely. He sounded so defeated —

“I underestimated you, and for that I am sorry.”

She rolled onto her side abruptly to face toward him, her kimono pulling tight under her arms in protest at the too-quick movement. “Don’t be. You don’t have to apologize for anything to me. Ever.”

“Hn.”

“Are we friends, again?”

There was a brief huff of wry amusement, then: “Did we stop?”

She smiled, propping her cheek on her hand. “In that case, can I braid your hair?”

“No.”

“Come on. Friends do that.”

“Not this one.”

“You let me on Ikitsuki . . . “

”Fuu, I didn’t let you. I was unconscious — you didn’t really, did you?”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“Ah.” His face was hidden from her by the darkness of the room, but she thought she glimpsed a quick smile. “I never answered your question, did I?”

“Hm?”

“The worst thing I’ve ever done.”

“Jin — “ She winced. “I shouldn’t have asked you that. You don’t have to tell me.”

Jin made a noncommittal sound. “If I told anyone, it would be you. I . . . think I would like to,” he said. “It’s been some time since there was someone to tell.”

“Oh.”

“You saw him, you know.”
She frowned, confused. They hadn’t seen anyone who knew him on the way to Ikitsuki — did he mean the twins? The only other people who’d known him before the journey had been the ones from his dojo, and he’d killed all of them that they’d met —

“You asked me then who he was, and I told you he was like my little brother. Do you know what I meant by that?” His voice was steady.

“He was from your dojo?”

“He was one of the students there, yes, but he was my little brother in shudo. Do you know what that is?”

Fuu shook her head. “No.”

“Hn.” He nodded. “It’s not surprising. Your father would’ve hardly mentioned it to you if he’d been in Edo, and you had no brothers. It was customary at the dojo for a man — usually one of the older students, though Mariya-dono indulged himself once or twice while I was there — to take one of the boys for pleasure; the two become brothers in shudo. I believe this also happens at other dojo, though I don’t know this for certain. I only ever studied at Gojuu Hall and the Mujuu.”

“Oh.” The boy in the mountains — she had a vague memory of dark eyes and hair almost as light as hers. He’d been beautiful, she remembered —

“I was sixteen when it began, and it lasted until just before I left the dojo. Yukimaru was very different, then. He was . . . charming, I suppose: he was interested in everything. I used to tell him that ‘why’ was obviously his favorite word,” he told her.

She bit her lip. Jin’s voice had softened, talking about the boy; she could almost taste bitter bile at the back of her throat. It was stupid and idiotic and she was jealous, even though she’d made it quite clear to Jin that he was free to be with anyone, much less a dead boy who’d tried to kill the ronin the last time he’d seen him. She was better off not being with someone who so clearly preferred overly pretty crazy boys, Fuu told herself with a sniff.

Right?

Right.

Also, now that she thought about it, the boy’s languid dark eyes had almost certainly owed some of their allure to cosmetics — Jin was talking again; hastily, she pushed that thought to the back of her mind. “He even listened well,” the ronin told her. “That was . . . very attractive.”

“Mm,” she agreed.

“He was happy at the beginning. I was as well, I think. It was very flattering that he had an interest in me.”

“So you weren’t — ?” she asked. “You weren’t interested first?”

“Ah. It was unusual for any of the other students to have much to do with me. For the most part, I practiced on my own, or with one of the masters. Yukimaru was the opposite — he was quite popular with the other boys. He could have had anyone to be his older brother, really, perhaps even Mariya-dono; but he wanted me.”

“What happened?”

Jin let out a long breath. “When I was seventeen, the Mujuu began having difficulties. It was never the most prosperous of dojo — the sword of no-mind is demanding — but there were even fewer students, and we lost more with every break. Mariya-dono was very concerned, especially after he made the decision to name an heir.”

“Why?”

“He’d chosen someone who was unknown outside of the dojo, who was still a student there; by the time he’d become the headmaster, he’d already made a name for himself as the Thousand-Man Killer, and there were many people anxious to send their sons to be trained by someone so skilled. With a new headmaster that no one had ever heard of, the Mujuu would lose even more students.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Ah.” He nodded. “I am the only master of the Mujuu, now. It will die with me, unless I can find someone to teach. For some time, I thought of Mugen, but it’s impossible. If he was younger, perhaps — but we were talking of Yuki.

“When the dojo began losing students, it became necessary for me to keep as much of that from him as I could; he was never very good at keeping a secret from the other students. He knew me well enough by then to know I was keeping something from him, and that it involved Mariya-dono — however, instead of realizing that it was the dojo’s well-being, he believed I was unfaithful to him.”

“That’s so stupid. You wouldn’t do anything like that,” she told him strongly. “Ever.”

“Mm.” The ronin gave her a fleeting smile. “He never could believe that there wasn’t someone I preferred — even so, I kept it a secret. By the time Mariya-dono came to me with the shogunate’s offer to keep the dojo as a training ground, Yukimaru would not have believed me, and when Shishou was found dead and I had gone missing . . . “

”But none of that was your fault. If you’d told him, more students would have left. You didn’t have a choice.”

“Didn’t I?” Jin asked. “If I’d told him from the beginning, he might have understood. As it was, I knew he would try to find me and I knew that when he did, he would die. I killed Yukimaru years before he died at my hands, all because of what I’d failed to do.

“That is the worst thing I have ever done,” he finished. “And I’ve talked long enough. Get some sleep, Fuu.”


She was wakened before dawn by the soft sound of water dripping onto the floor.

Fuu opened her eyes slowly; she’d been dreaming something about the dead boy, and for a moment she saw him, carefully drawing his sword — she blinked, realizing it was Mugen, wiping down the longsword. He looked up as he set it alongside the scabbard, alerted by the change in her breathing. “Hey,” he said quietly, before coming to crouch next to her makeshift pallet and peering into her face.

She reached up to touch his hair — it was damp, the long strands sticky with what felt like saltwater. “Where did you go?” she asked, sleepily. “Jouji said — “

”Out.” Mugen pulled her hand away gently. “Go back to sleep.”

“You’re wet.” She sat up. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

Ignoring him, Fuu touched her fingertips to the cloth of his haori; it was wetter still, the cold, sodden fabric clinging to him. “Why — “ she stopped.

Jin was awake, she knew. He’d probably been awake before she was; she could feel the weight of his presence across the room, the air thick with the I-told-you-so that he’d never say out loud to her but which they both would hear. I will make this work, she told him silently. I will.

“Here,” she said to Mugen instead, her voice barely audible. He sucked in a breath as her hands grasped the edge of his gi, but let her slip it off his shoulders; neither did he protest when she tugged the haori over his head. She got up and draped the wet clothing over one of the crates to dry, before taking the cotton cover from one of the bolts of silk and using that to towel him off.

He sat on the edge of the pallet, letting her fuss over him without a word, and she bit her lip. However he’d come to be this way in Deshima, it would have to wait until morning; only if there was something seriously wrong would he allow this, she thought, dismissing any idea of unrolling his sleeping mat for him. Jouji’d said a week, but they still couldn’t afford for any of them to become ill.

“All right. Come on, you.” Fuu pushed and prodded at him until he was on his side, then climbed onto the pallet herself. She lay down behind him. The skin of his arms had prickled with cold; she spooned around him, rubbing his arms briskly to warm him a little, before settling with her arm over his waist. Maybe that would do it, she thought. He was so cold —

They lay there stiffly. Mugen had frozen into place the moment they’d come into contact — Fuu sincerely hoped he was going to start breathing again; could he actually die from holding his breath like that? There was no possible way that could be good, even if it didn’t kill him — and she was rapidly discovering something about trying to sleep this close to someone that, despite her time in the brothel, she hadn’t understood before.

This . . . was actually sort of uncomfortable.

The arm she’d draped over his waist wasn’t too bad, but the size difference between them meant that her upper arm either had to rest on his ribs and leave her forearm hanging weirdly out from his chest, or that her forearm could rest against his waist and allow her hand to dangle with the fingers dangerously close to the front of his chopped-off hakama.

Um.

Her other arm was a more pressing problem, however. At the moment, she was lying on it, leading to a very disturbing numbness and an unhappy shoulder; if she stayed like that, her arm would probably fall off in the morning, and both of them would make that ‘oh, Fuu’ face she hadn’t seen much since the days when they’d thought she hadn’t known the name of the sunflower samurai, followed by some head shaking.

Slowly, Fuu eased her arm out from underneath, electing to slide it backward, rather than forward where it would be mashed flat between them; the arm rewarded her with a rush of sensation in her fingertips and wrist like being stabbed repeatedly with a sharp tanto. It felt better — having feeling return to her hand was a very good thing — but now that her arm was no longer underneath her, she’d sunk a handsbreadth lower behind him, resulting in her nose being flattened to the side against his hard shoulder blades and the hand canted out over his waist being yanked back.

Well, crap.

Obviously, the idiots who’d come up with the songs and stories she’d heard about handsome samurai and whores (and it was best to nip that particular thought in the bud, she decided) hadn’t known the first thing about how to manage the mechanics of lying on a semi-squashy surface with another person; the next time she heard some goze wittering on about two people lying clasped together, she was going to go up and kick the musician in the shins.
She made a dissatisfied grunt. There had to be a better way of going about this; people slept together all the time, for crying out loud. Maybe — once she settled the problem of what to do with the arm she’d been lying on, the other would fall into place.

Hmm.

Thinking, Fuu squirmed away from his back a moment. He made a faint ‘mmrhm’ of protest at having the warmth at his back move away, but stopped when she pillowed her cheek on the still-tingling arm, now crooked underneath her head. That seemed to work very well; she was comfortable, and the position allowed her to cuddle closely against him while still allowing secondary comforts, like breathing. Very encouraging, she cheered mentally. Good girl, Fuu! Only one more arm to go!

The main difficulty seemed to be that, if she put her arm over his, he was just that much broader than she was, and her arm flopped around stupidly. If she could only — aha. She snaked the arm she’d been keeping around him under his; her elbow rested directly under his ribs, and her hand now lay against his chest.

It was pleasant, really — he was warming up, and it was soothing to feel the steady thump of his heart. Now that he was dry, too, the smell of him was a low languorous tickle in her nose: there was salt water, and the musky scent of his skin. There was something about it that prickled at the edge of her consciousness, but she couldn’t quite pin it down; maybe in the morning — ? She was too tired to think about it now.

Slowly, his hand closed over hers, and she relaxed as his breathing evened out in sleep.

It would work.

“Ah. Did it work?” Jinpachi set down his inkstone before looking up at his visitor.

“I think so. She’s said nothing to me, but she’s suspected for some time that he had a connection to you.” The slight man raised his eyebrows, smiling gently. “It’s a shame. He did serve the shogun well — just not in the way he thought he was.”

“What did you do with him?”

“Our mother made sure Daigoro was buried according to the Christian rites,” Matthew said. “Probably . . . not what he would have liked, but he was hardly able to complain.”

The ninja chuckled. “Please, sit. I always enjoy seeing you. Your message said that you’d met Kasumi’s daughter — your brother told me as much, but he knew nothing.”

“No, he wouldn’t have. But we did meet her, and the two yojimbo are still traveling with her. They’re strong — I’d be unwilling to bet against either of them, but they have some weaknesses; the foreigner’s temper gets the best of him with very little encouragement, and the ronin — “ the Christian shrugged. “Two potential weaknesses, there: the girl, and he’s a thinker. A hint of false information would be dangerous for him, rather than anything complete — he’d come up with a more convincing way to complete the puzzle on his own.”

“I see. Do you know where they intended to go?”

“Nagasaki, but after that — “ Matthew shook his head. “Couldn’t say. Can’t be Ikitsuki, or the ronin wouldn’t have let her talk about it. Nagasaki makes more sense if they intend to leave the country, so that’s my guess. They haven’t been in contact with any of the Christians other than the foreign ones on Deshima, but . . . it’s hard to tell what happened there. They were seen going in to see the Europeans, but then they came out again; very puzzling. The one from the Ryukyus was seen earlier with a woman, but the other two were nowhere to be seen.”

“A woman?”

“Not a foreigner. Pretty, I heard; wearing a gold or orange kimono. They were arguing, according to the man who saw them — he left after the Ryukyuan tried choking her. Not one of the finer moments in bushido, for my source.”

“Well.” Jinpachi tapped a thoughtful finger against his chin. “They left Deshima and disappeared. How very interesting.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Matthew replied with perfect equanimity. “One could be forgiven for thinking that somehow the two things were related. I can see about a way into Deshima, if you’d like?”

“Thank you, but don’t trouble yourself. It’s already been done.” Jinpachi’s eyes twinkled merrily. “Even the smallest firefly can light a dark corner.”

The Christian laughed. “I’ll borrow that, if you don’t mind. Mother will like the sentiment, especially if I don’t tell her where it came from.” He got to his feet and yawned. “These early mornings — I came in with your cook’s boys, looking for work. Wonder if I found any?”

“How very terrifying, once you discovered who we were. Luckily, you made it out without anyone realizing you were a Christian.”

“Yes, how lucky.” Matthew stretched, the bones of his neck popping pleasurably. “Before I forget, do you want me to find out who the woman was?”

“No,” Jinpachi told him. “I have some idea.”