Samurai Champloo Fan Fiction ❯ Nenju ❯ XXXI. It is deep autumn ( Chapter 31 )

[ 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).

A/N: Fangirl Dutch alert! Vliegende Draeck translates roughly to ‘flying dragon’, with great emphasis on the rough; Dutch isn’t one of my languages. (Although I am fluent in nerd.)

Nenju


Yatsuha yawned and scratched her shoulder indolently, before reaching to brush her fingertips over the three parallel scars on his cheek. “I keep meaning to ask you about these and forgetting,” she said.

“Eh?” He opened his eyes fully, making an effort to wake up from the pleasant stupor he’d been in since they’d collapsed into a sweaty pile of limbs on the threadbare futon. “Got ‘em last time I was here.”

“Here?” She grinned, gesturing toward the center of the inn’s tiny room, the tatami strewn with clothing. “Funny, I don’t remember doing that to you.”

Mugen chuckled. “Dumb broad. They’d be on my back, if it was you.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, reaching down to cup his ass and squeezing it for emphasis. “Funny, I thought your back was farther up . . . “ she told him, with an air of mock gravity. “Really. What happened?”

He shrugged. “There were these three brothers, Satsuma han, taking a sugar ship from Ryukyu to Kagoshima — I was part of a crew that hit the ship its first night out. I didn’t kill ‘em, but they got pretty messed up; the han blamed them for losing the ship, so they came looking for me,” he said. “The crazy one got my face.”

“And this one?” Yatsuha cupped her palm against his side.

“That was the brother who couldn’t walk any more.”

She laughed. “A man who couldn’t walk got you? Did he wait until you were sleeping?”

He snorted. “He shot me — you don’t need to walk to be able to use gunpowder.”

“Really?” Yatsuha slid lower to look at the puckered scar with interest, tracing the edges of the shiny skin. “It looks a little like someone ran you through, but the shape isn’t right for that . . . what about this one?” She placed an open-mouthed kiss on the thin silvery line that stretched diagonally from his ribs down to the bony ridge of his hip on the opposite side. “This looks like this came from something with a blade — a long knife, maybe.”

“Uh.” Mugen swallowed. “That . . . yeah. Blind assassin.” His eyelids drooped heavily as his hips jerked against her. Yes yes yes —

“Blind?” She looked up, interested, her eyebrows drawn together in puzzlement as she smiled. “I’ve heard about people like that. How did he fight?”

He raised his head: wasn’t she — aw, shit. “She. One of yours.”

“One of mine?”

“Government hired her.”

“Mm.” She laced her hands together across his bare stomach and rested her chin on them. “I never met anyone like that, but it’s possible. There was a man my father knew that used to train assassins — I think he had a student who was a woman, but I don’t know if she was blind.”

Abandoning all hope of anything further happening, Mugen sighed and idly caught a lock of her hair in his fingers. He’d liked the pretty musician: she’d been strong, the kind of strong that didn’t take shit from anyone and wasn’t going to back down from any man, tanner or shogun. He would have gone with Sara willingly if Fuu had asked him, instead of Jin, and very probably he would have been dead instead of alive.

She’d been a lot like the woman whose futon he was in now, he realized.

“So why aren’t you trying to kill me?” he asked, winding her glossy hair around his hand.

“You think I’m not?”

“Figured you’d be more direct about it than this.”

Yatsuha made a face, before blowing on his stomach to make the line of fine hair leading from his navel flutter. “I’m supposed to,” she said. “I said I’d kill you if I saw you. If I was Hankichi, I’d have my knife out right now.”

“You were Hankichi, you wouldn’t be here,” he commented, giving her hair a light tug. “So, what then? You’re not gonna do it?”

“I’ll have to try to, at some point. But I wanted this first,” she said, her hand tracing lazy circles over his skin. “I did promise.”
“Mm.” Mugen grinned at her — the afternoon was beginning to look up, after all — before flipping her onto her back neatly, his hand still caught in her hair. “So tell me more about what you wanted.”

“I was thinking.” She drew her foot over the long plane of his thigh.

“Uh-oh.”

“Your name means ‘endless’ . . . “

”Yeah?”

“I really don’t see it, myself.”

“Hell of a time to complain,” he said, raising himself on an elbow to eye her coldly. “And that ain’t — “

”No, not that,” she corrected, then sighed in an exaggerated fashion. “I suppose, I’d be distracted too . . . but it’d be nice to have something that wasn’t a quickie.” Yatsuha gave him a sly glance.

His grin widened. Oh. “Ah,” he said. “Maybe we can work something out.”


The moon was low in the evening sky by the time he left, an agreeable tiredness all through his bones. With any luck, Jouji would have brought something to eat by the time he got in, and he’d talked Yatsuha into giving up the rice powder; he was going to sleep like the dead tonight — as far as hiding places went, Nagasaki wasn’t the worst place to have one.

He waited until the guard changed shifts, then made his way across the water as twilight deepened into night. They’d built Deshima to keep people out, but hadn’t taken highly determined pirates into consideration; he scaled the wall quietly, landing behind the row of warehouses.

The ronin’s soft voice came out of the dark. “You came back.”

“Yeah,” Mugen said, irritated. “Think I wouldn’t?”

“Hn.” Jin walked up to him. “What you do is your own business unless it causes difficulties. He’s here.”

“Who, Jouji?”
The ronin shook his head. “The man with the ship.”


The first thing that Mugen noticed about the man with the ship was that he was drunk, with the ease of a long familiarity with the bottle; his eyes were bloodshot, the whites surrounding the faded brown irises gone a pale yellow with age and sake. “So you’re the one we were waiting for,” the man said, before turning to Jouji, who was fiddling with the box he’d used to bring them food. “Late, and a pirate to boot. You keep strange company these days, chief factor.”

Mugen ‘s eyebrows drew together; the man looked like he wouldn’t survive a voyage, much less captain a ship.“Who the hell are you?”

“Henrik Maurits, of the Vliegende Draeck,” the man said. “The chief factor tells me the young lady and your quiet friend will be guests on my ship — I might agree to you too if he talks me into it, so don’t push me, boy.”

“How about — “ The Ryukyuan hissed, as Jin jabbed him in the side with the hilt of his wakizashi; Mugen gave the ronin a vicious glare. Someday, asshole, I am gonna stick that girl-sized sword right up your —

Jin snorted. You can try.

The drunk man eyed them both skeptically, not missing any part of their wordless exchange, but let it go. “I take it all of you wish to leave here?”

Mugen frowned, as Fuu looked at him without answering. What, did she still doubt him? “Yeah. All of us are going.”

“Fine.” Maurits nodded to himself. “Where?”

“Batavia,” Mugen answered.

“Or Ryukyu,” Jin added, ignoring the look the Ryukyuan was giving him. “There is some question as to which is more suitable.”

The man shrugged. “I sail for Batavia, but Ryukyu is on the way there.”

Fuu spoke at last, from where she had been sitting quietly next to Jouji. “You’ve been to Ryukyu? What’s it like?”

Maurits’ eyes lingered on Mugen with some amusement before answering. “Islands. A little different than this, but it depends on how far south you go. The islands in the north may be a poor choice for someone leaving from Nagasaki to go there; the southern islands are warmer.”
The Ryukyuan gave him a grudging nod, and he continued. “Batavia’s different. For one, there are more people. There are some Japanese — Christians, for the most part, but we mix very rarely with them — “ The man hesitated, then went on. “Many Dutch. There were some English, but none these days — other ships, the prince and his court. All the world comes through Batavia.”

“How far away is it?” Jin asked.

The man shook his head. “Not far. About a week to the northern Ryukyuan islands, a month or two to Batavia. I made the voyage once from Deshima to Batavia in three weeks, but there was typhoon at my back.”

Mugen scratched himself thoughtfully. If he wasn’t lying through his teeth, a week’s time to Ryukyu meant either that the man’s ship was a fast sailer, or that the captain himself knew what he was doing. If he had the balls to try and outrun a typhoon, chances were good it was probably a little of both.

“Are there snakes in Batavia?” Fuu’s eyes were wide.

The European nodded cheerfully. “Some are bigger than you, I believe,” he told her. “Our physician there is a devoted natural philosopher, who has made quite a pet out of a fine fat fellow who comes up to his sitting room window — Vlaminck feeds him on whole goats, though, so I suspect it’s cupboard love. There are always stories of the ones upcountry being twice as long as your friend the samurai is tall, but I believe very little of what I hear.”

She drew a deep breath, grimacing. “Ryukyu,” she told them.

“Oi. Since when did — “

”I. Am. Going. To. Ryukyu,” she enunciated slowly. “If you want to go to the place with the snakes, that’s fine.”

“There are snakes in Ryukyu too, you dumb broad,” Mugen ground out. “There are snakes everywhere.” He glared at the girl, who gave him an equally poisonous look in return; even the Europeans were pushing Ryukyu, what the hell was —

“Batavia may be a poor choice for many reasons,” Jouji interrupted. “Henrik, must they decide this minute?”

The man shook his head. “Not if they will decide between the two. We sail in the same direction, no matter what.”

“Good.” Jouji looked relieved.


“What the hell is the matter with you?” Mugen snapped.

Jin had taken himself off to meditate or do his kata or something as soon as the Europeans had left; he’d given Mugen a speculative look, before excusing himself to Fuu, who had only nodded impatiently. She hadn’t moved since telling Jouji and the other man good night, sitting as if she was waiting for someone.

Fuu looked up at him, the moon’s light enough for him to see that she looked neither angry nor upset. “I’m an idiot,” she said. “I feel like I’m the last one to figure out how stupid I am.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be. She was going to tell him off, he knew. There might be some tears, maybe some shouting. She was remarkably calm, though, wearing what he thought of as her dice roller’s face — when she looked like that, he thought, she was less readable than the ronin. Another one of those things samurai — hell, everyone in the whole damn country, he amended — did that he’d never figure out.

Instead, she sat with her hands resting open in her lap. “Do you even like her?”

Mugen frowned. Did he? It hadn’t occurred to him that it was possible. Yatsuha was a capable fighter, and he liked the way the muscles in her back moved when she stretched, but like her -?

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.” He lowered himself to the floor alongside her. “Probably not.”

“So why do you go?”

He dug in his ear thoughtfully, then: “The first time I went to sea was maybe thirteen, fourteen years ago. D’you remember I told you about that old guy in Ryukyu, knew my dad?”

Fuu nodded.

“He had a boat, used to go raid towns on the mainland. He was how I knew Mukuro and Kohza — Mukuro started out on raids with Wen, before he decided he could do better on his own.

“Anyway, I wasn’t big enough to raise sails or do any of the work yet, so there wasn’t much I could do. Wen started me off taking soundings — that’s when you take a rope and tie one end to a weight; you know how long the rope is, so when you swing the weight over the side and feel it touch bottom, you can tell how deep the water is. If you know that, you can keep from gutting the boat, because for every rock you see there’s another one you don’t,” Mugen said, before falling silent.

He hadn’t thought of that in years — that particular job hadn’t lasted long, once the old man had realized how quickly the scrawny boy picked things up: Wen had shown him once how the tiller worked, and from then on the task of steering automatically fell to Mugen, up until the time when he’d been sucked into the weasel’s gang.

He closed his eyes. The heavy warmth of the warehouse was almost the same as the warmth of Ryukyu on a summer evening, like a damp, heavy blanket. The smells were wrong — here, there was the dustiness of an unlived-in building (though even that was blending strangely with the lingering smell of the food Jouji had brought them) and the exotic scent of the things that had come from the end of the world.

In Ryukyu, even the air was green; standing on the deck of Wen’s boat, he’d always been able to smell the land before seeing it, sugarcane and ripe mangoes and sago forests, all lush and alive.

“I don’t understand,” Fuu said.

“Sometimes you don’t know what’s gonna happen,” he told her, slowly. “Maybe . . . maybe what you have to do is be as ready as you can, and then you gotta know it ain’t always enough.”

She exhaled a long, frustrated breath. “I can’t do this.”

“Yeah.” Maybe it would have been possible, back in that teahouse in Edo, when they were just a criminal and a clumsy waitress; but not any more. There had been too many miles, both for him and for her to ever see each other as more than what they were. “‘M sorry,” he said, cold filling his stomach. He thought that maybe it wasn’t too late, maybe he could call back his words, maybe it could go back to the way it had been and he would belong somewhere and this horrible sick hollowness would go —

“I wanted it to work, I really did,”she said thickly, and he saw she was fighting not to cry. “It would be all right, because it was you and even if you spit in the flowers and picked your nose first thing in the morning, you always came for me.” She scrubbed at her face with the back of her hand.

Tentatively, he reached out to touch her hair. She was still lovely, even with bloodshot eyes and sniffling, and he knew that for the rest of his life, he would never see her again as anything but beautiful; he knew, too, that for the rest of his life, he could never think of her as anything more or anything less than what she was. “You gonna be okay?”

Fuu blew her nose noisily on a piece of crumpled paper. “I guess,” she said and gave him a watery smile. “Maybe I’ll run off with Jouji.”

“Yeah?” He tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “You’d have the ugliest kids ever.”

She began to laugh, little hiccups as she looked up at him. “You are such a jerk.”

“‘M serious. They’d be huge, and have this weird thing with squirrels and wasabi — “

”Will you just shut up?”

The corner of his mouth went up. “Back in Motomachi — “

She wadded the paper up into a tight ball, her eyes on what she was doing.

“You said I was your family, me and Jin,” he said. “If you don’t . . . “ he trailed off awkwardly; he’d have rather faced an angry mob armed only with a handful of acorns than ask, but he wanted to know. If she was going to hate him, he wanted to know.

Slowly, she shook her head. “You’re my family, no matter what. You and Jin, for the rest of my life.”

Mugen nodded; there was a burning behind his eyes, what the hell — his mouth set in a tight line. “Yeah. I . . . should go find fish face,” he told her. “There’s that thing.”

“Yeah.”

The ronin was sitting seiza, his feet tucked neatly under his knees, a discreet distance away — or as much of one as the confines of the building permitted — when Mugen found him.

“You meditating?” The Ryukyuan scratched the back of his leg with his other foot, standing like an untidy, ill-tempered crane.

“If I say yes, will you go away?” Jin answered, his eyes still closed.

“Nope.”

“Hn.”

Mu gen squatted comfortably on his heels, giving the air a voluptuous sniff; whatever Jouji had in those crates with the weird circular stamp, it smelled expensive. “You didn’t think that would actually work, didja?”

The ronin opened his eyes for that, irises gone the flat black of river stones in the low light as he chuckled. “No.”

The Ryukyuan gave a short huff of amusement.

“You spoke to Fuu.”

“Yeah.”

The ronin studied his face. “I see.”

Mugen gave him a sidelong look. “Thought you’d be happy.”

“Shishou would have said that it’s a hollow victory to win simply because another has lost,” Jin told him cryptically.

“Hah?” That . . . made no sense, Mugen decided.

“Ah,” Jin said. “What’s done is done. We have other things to discuss.”

“Henrik Maurits?” The name was odd, rolling in his mouth like a bite of yakimanju.

The ronin nodded. “I know very little about the sea,” Jin admitted. “Can we trust him?”

“Yeah.” Mugen rubbed his nose between his fingers. “Gotta think Jouji didn’t get here ‘cause he’s stupid. And someone who can sail from where they’re from to here — he’s real good or real lucky, one of the two,” he said. “Either way, he’ll get us where we’re going, even if he’s an asshole.”

“Ryukyu.”

Mugen shook his head. “It’s a bad idea,” he warned.

The ronin raised his eyebrows. “The European might agree with you, but I doubt Fuu will see Ryukyu as a poor choice.”

“Fuu ain’t ever been further south than here.”

“Mm. That other place . . . “ Jin made an impatient sound. “There is something we haven’t been told. Jouji was too eager to keep us away from there; why?”

“A lot of people who don’t tell us enough.” Mugen bit at a thumbnail. “Could be we need to start asking the right questions.”

“Could be,” the ronin agreed.