Samurai Champloo Fan Fiction ❯ Rescue Remix ❯ Chapter 4

4.

 

Well, fuck if they weren't having a philosophical discussion about what they liked in a woman.

 

More accurately, Jin was grilling Mugen about his preferences and why he had them, probably with some larger, ulterior motive that he should be aware of, but which wasn't nearly as interesting as talking about Yatsuha's tits and thigh muscles. The conversation had started when he'd commented that the latter were more interesting than the former.

 

“Her breasts were not all that large,” Jin observed from further down the slope. They climbed steadily toward the village, Jin correcting Mugen's course as he went, since his legs were in better shape and he'd taken the lead.

 

“Yeah, they're not nearly as big as that bitch's who drugged and robbed us.”

 

“I thought large breasts were what you looked for in a woman. And you showed considerable interest in her at the time.” Mugen would've had to be deaf to not catch the bite in that remark.

 

“Nah, if fucking is all we're gonna do, all she's gotta be is willing.”

 

“But Yatsuha was also beautiful,” he pressed, breath puffing softly as he grabbed hold of a sapling to pull himself up the hill.

 

Mugen stepped up onto a fallen tree trunk. “Yatsuha is fucking good at what she does.” He turned a loose flip off the trunk and landed in a small flurry of leaves and dirt. “And so was Sara. They're different from other women. They got backbone and muscle.” They were also different from Fuu, and yet...

 

“So, perhaps it's not so much their form as their function.” Jin sounded immensely satisfied with himself.

 

“Uh- yeah, sure. Maybe.”

 

“You don't admire women for their beauty; you admire them for what they can do. If you wish to sleep with a woman, then she is generically attractive - attractive enough for sex. If she has the strength to kill you, she becomes infinitely more interesting. An assassin like Sara is excellent at her craft and that's what you like.”

 

He figured that was true, and because they were having such a grand old time philosophizing on the finer points of admiring and fucking women, and because they were both just punchy enough after four days of travel, most of which were spent hiking up the face of a mountain with a still-weak samurai in tow, Mugen thought he'd volunteer a bit more - since Jin was asking, and Mugen had never really been handed the opportunity to talk about it before.

 

“Yeah, I never got that whole 'beauty' thing - like art and landscapes and shit.” He slashed at some undergrowth with his sword. “You and Fuu used to look at the ocean or a mountain or even a row of houses and say shit like, 'Oh, isn't that picturesque?' or 'How pretty!' and I never fucking saw anything.”

 

“For the record, I never said either of those things.”

 

“Kiss my ass, four-eyes,” he grumped, not bothering to correct the epithet when he remembered that Jin didn't have his glasses anymore. “I mean, the two'a you looked at art stands and galleries and shit and if you'd had the money, you woulda bought the paintings she liked.”

 

“I can't say I'm surprised you don't appreciate art or natural beauty,” Jin sniped, and Mugen rolled his eyes, knowing a cover-up when he heard one.

 

“Please, that shit's pointless. It serves no purpose I can see. Since when has somethin' pretty ever fed you or saved your life?” There may have been a time in his past, years and years ago, when he appreciated the lushness of the island - how it was dense and green and bursting with life. But finding the island beautiful had gotten him nowhere, and admiring something or someone for their beauty was similarly useless.

 

He supposed he could make a further connection between admiration and function - specifically involving the tussle he'd started the night before with the samurai, a tussle which ended in a blow job for both of them. He made the connection silently and let the conversation lag, internally dancing around the question of what it was about Fuu, about her function or her essence, that tugged him back and forth across the country following her and then searching for her, pissing him off to the brink of violence and nearly crippling him with the intensity of the memories they shared. Her Fuu-ness was vital and it kicked his ass when she wasn't around, when he'd just managed to forget about her for a few days straight. He swore she was useless and still he admired her and couldn't put her out of his head.

 

He figured the few things he liked about himself also had to do with function. He loved his own violence because it was something that was only his, something he controlled. It was freedom to him. His body was his to manipulate, to throw into motion. To strike someone with the intention of killing them was the perfect moment of self-determination, beyond which there was no turning back. He'd grown to appreciate the smell of body-temperature blood, the way the smell burned his sinuses and the back of his throat. He liked the way it felt sliding smooth and warm between his fingers. He liked how it dried and flaked away and stained his skin darker. Violence and blood and stinging sinuses meant he was being himself. Just like the sound of a rumbling stomach and small feet in the dust was Fuu, and the bite of steel and the sound of harsh breathing was Jin.

 

*

They smelled it before they saw it, both looking up to see the smoke. It rose lazily into the sky - not a new fire, but a smoldering day-old fire. They were a day late.

 

Jin would blame himself, and Mugen would blame him, too, when they finally saw the village burning behind its solid walls.

 

The front gate hung off its track, broken, the ground trampled with footprints headed into the village. They could see smoldering roofs that had not yet collapsed over the wall, and the air smell liked char.

 

“Dammit,” Jin hissed, voice tense and quiet.

 

“Yeah,” Mugen echoed.

 

Jin abruptly turned away and headed deeper into the woods, biting out a terse, “We can't go through the front gate. I know a way in.”

 

Mugen tried to snort the smell of burning things from his nose and followed. Walking, he listened for the sounds of fighting and it was either a testament to the thickness of the wall, or the village really was already dead, because he couldn't hear a thing. His geta clacked softly over sticks and leaves and Jin's sandals made even less noise and that was all he heard. Even the birds in the trees were silent.

 

They followed the perimeter of the wall from a distance and Mugen had to give whoever had been in charge here credit. The wall was solid the whole way around and protected by another barrier a few paces out - one made of fallen trees, bramble bushes and piles of dead, prickly limbs. The villagers clearly hadn't wanted anyone coming in they didn't expressly invite. Didn't keep them from coming in the front door, however, if their numbers were high enough.

 

Jin went straight to a big, old gnarled tree like he'd been up it a dozen times, tracing the lines of the branches with narrowed eyes and looking more determined than Mugen had ever seen him.

 

“You make it inside there, last time you were here?” He'd been itching to ask Jin what was different about her, what was the same, what she'd said, whether she had his comb in her hair or the beads around her wrist, but he hadn't voiced any of those questions, and Jin hadn't volunteered anything. Now seemed like a good time.

 

Jin shook his head, no. “There wasn't time for that.”

 

“Did you see'er?”

 

He hesitated and then nodded.

 

“She see you?”

 

He shook his head. “No.” And that part, Mugen guessed, had been the killer. “Bounty hunter families from all over Honshu were right behind us. I couldn't get in.”

 

Mugen kicked off his geta and reached for the first branch. “This'll be one hell of a reunion, then,” he grunted.

 

“She may not wish to come,” Jin said quickly. Mugen blinked at him from under the arm he'd stretched up. Jin held himself stiff and tall, and Mugen looked away again the second their eyes met.

 

“Hell, she may not even be here,” he said before hoisting himself up into the tree. He climbed quickly, making it to the low-hanging branch that ran closest to the wall by the time he heard Jin's clothes scraping on the bark below him. He glanced down and then frowned in surprise when he saw the easy way Jin levered himself from one branch to the next, holding himself against the trunk with his knees in the gaps between limbs. Jin looked up to meet his stare, twitching a bit of sweaty hair out of his face.

 

“I did this every day when I was a boy,” he said by way of explanation.

 

Mugen immediately snorted his disinterest and shuffled out along the branch, keeping his eyes on the wall. “Yeah, so did I. And I bet for a whole bunch'a entirely different reasons.”

 

“I'm sure,” Jin murmured below him.

 

*

They sat side by side on the wall, looking down into the village - what was left of the rows of smoldering houses - and at the sizable garden at their feet, which had remained largely untouched. They surmised that whoever had wiped out the people living here wanted to come back for its food supply.

 

Mugen kicked off from the wall and landed amongst neat rows of green onions. He grabbed a large ripe tomato from a row over and tossed another one to Jin when he landed a few paces away. Jin took the fruit and looked from one row of vegetables to the next, and Mugen suddenly knew who this garden had belonged to. He imagined that Jin had looked at Fuu much the same way he was looking at the garden - which was a little odd, since they were only vegetables - in that short time before they'd split up, but he would never know because it had been dark then.

 

“This is Fuu's garden,” Jin said, quite unnecessarily.

 

“Yeah, I figured,” Mugen mumbled around a mouthful of tomato.

 

“I don't think we should split up,” Jin said. “To look for her,” he added, when Mugen gave him a sharp look.

 

He shrugged. “Whatever; let's just go.”

 

They stepped carefully through the rows of lettuce and beans and set off into the village. It wasn't very large and with most of the houses burned down, there was very little cover. As they walked, they came upon patrols of men all wearing the colors of a yakuza gang that neither recognized. And many of the bodies they found were wearing the colors of a different gang. Just before Mugen killed the last of one of the patrols, he got the names 'Katsuki' and 'Fujiwara' and the words 'blood feud.' He scowled as he cleaned his sword.

 

“How the fuck did she get herself involved with yakuza?”

 

Jin gave a short shrug. “The boy protected her with the strength of his family. It was a wise decision to stay with them at the time. The information my partner received said nothing about a blood feud, however.”

 

“Think they knew who she really was?”

 

“I don't know. The boy called her Suzume.”

 

The memory of when he gave her that name played a prominent role in many of his more detailed dreams. He liked remembering when he was awake, too.

 

“Come on. I hear more of them.”

 

Mugen turned to follow Jin down a side avenue between two piles of burning lumber and they'd maybe taken twenty steps, when suddenly there she was. Simple as walking toward her and she was there again, with them. But Mugen stopped cold and so did Jin, and they watched her from several houses away. Her back was to them, but they could see that she was taking in the destruction of her home, arms wrapped around her ribs, fingers dug into the cloth of her shirt. Her peasant clothes were still tied snugly around her waist but the sleeve covering her left arm was ripped and her shoulder badly burned, from what looked like something falling on her. Then she turned around and saw them and her face was the same, round and sharp all at the same time, but darker than he remembered. To him, it felt like she'd wandered off for a day or two and they'd just found her. Any second, she would yell at them for trying to get rid of her, and “have you forgotten your promise?”

 

But that time was over, long over, he realized when she bent down to pick up a walking stick and she moved differently than she did when they'd traveled together. She hadn't wandered off for a day. She took a few steps toward them and Mugen saw that the stick had blood stains running down the lower half and over the piece of metal nailed to the bottom.

 

Mugen liked her hair. It was short and stood up in wild tufts, much of it bleached lighter by the sun. He wanted to touch it, stick his fingers in it and tug on it. All the things about her that were familiar - her twig arms, the point of her chin, her tight little ass - tugged at his gut, and everything that was new made him want to touch and push and taste until he understood.

 

She was walking toward them quickly now and Jin looked like he might actually smile, but then Mugen recognized the fierce expression on her face and, a second later, what she was doing with that walking stick, and because he saw that part second instead of first, she had already slid her bare feet into a low fighting stance, swung the stick in the kind of whistling arc that indicated she'd been practicing, and swept his feet right out from under him. He landed with a thump and it was either a sign of her physical weakness or the careful control of the hit that the air didn't forcibly leave his lungs. Then he felt the butt of the stick press hard against his breast bone and he looked up to see her staring down at him with fiercest, angriest, and at once, most vulnerable expression he'd ever seen on her.

 

He remembered his promise, and it looked like she did, too. “Well, shit,” he muttered, reaching up to wrap his hand around the walking stick.

 

Fuu glared down at him. “Yeah.” Then she angled the stick between her underarm and her body, holding it steady against his chest, and drawing her pink tonto, twisted around to aim it at Jin's throat. Jin didn't flinch, but his sharp eyes glanced back and forth between the blade and the girl who held it, waiting.

 

And it felt like a new contract between the three of them - one that would be basically impossible to get out of.

 

When the three of them seemed to come to a silent understanding about what all this meant, Jin reached a tentative hand for her arm. “Fuu,” he said, and at the sound of his voice, she sucked in a long shaky breath. “Fuu, your shoulder needs-” Her hand started shaking then and she dropped the knife, pulling her stick off Mugen's chest and leaning on it to reach down and offer him a hand up.

 

He ignored the offer and got to his feet on his own, eying her warily, wondering what new sort of creature this was. She stood between them now, cradling her left arm to her chest. “They burnt down my house,” she finally said. “Where I was hiding. And part of it fell on me. I went to my hospital, and they'd burned that too, so I couldn't fix my arm. They killed the girl who tried to help me with it, and before they did, they hurt her. They r-”

 

She cut herself off when Jin put a hand on her uninjured shoulder, and slowly, like she had to remember that she could, she turned her face toward him and rested her head against his chest. His hand slid to her back and he bent his head over her. “Did they hurt you, as well?” he asked, and Mugen looked away, his gut sinking. He wasn't good at avenging people because he wasn't comfortable with the idea of caring for someone enough to kill for them.

 

Or, more likely, he revised, he didn't want to feel someone else's pain enough so that he would need to kill for them. He had already killed to protect Fuu, but this would be something else entirely.

 

Then she shook her head and straightened her back. “No, they didn't. I knocked'em out before they could.” She scrubbed a dirty hand across her eyes and looked up at them both, and in a flash of uncharacteristic empathy, Mugen understood what she wanted. Fuu wanted them to be proud of her. She wanted them to recognize who she had become while they were apart.

 

He sheathed his blade and then scratched a hand through his hair before reaching for her. He touched her hair first, burying his fingers in it and tilting her head back a little. She let him do it, rolling her shoulders under his touch. “You're pretty good with that big stick, huh?” And she may as well have purred at that.

 

Her mouth twitched into a small smile. “Good enough to get your on your back in a fair fight,” she said.

 

He shrugged dismissively. “Wasn't a fair fight, far as I could tell.”

 

She snorted and ducked out from under his hand. “Please. You wouldn't know 'fair' if it jumped up and bit you on your bony ass. Trust me; that was fair. That was beyond fair; that was-” It'd looked for a second like she'd pulled herself together, but then her voice broke and the tears started to flood and, despite her shoulder, she threw her arms around Mugen's neck and wrapped her legs around his hips, gripping him with her bony knees. He stumbled back a step when she kissed him - sticking her tongue in his mouth and sort of half-moaning, half-sobbing against his lips. He wrapped one arm the whole way around her, pressing her against his chest, and with the other, he grabbed her ass, holding her up. He felt her heart beating against his ribs and kissed her back, watching Jin over her shoulder and trying to communicate how smug he felt through eye contact alone.

 

She wriggled against him, and he felt her tears on his face; then she loosened one arm from around his neck and twisted back to reach for Jin, holding her hand out to him until he took it and let her pull him close. She felt like a big kid in Mugen's arms with her legs wrapped around him and her weight hanging on his hip and shoulders, but when Jin gripped both of her arms and pressed his mouth to the back of her neck, kissing and blowing softly on her skin until she shivered and twitched against his chest, the strange innocence of the situation became something else.

 

“I knew you would come back,” she whispered to both of them. “I never stopped expecting you to show up when I needed you to.”

 

Jin's fingers were sliding and pressing against her skin in a quiet, but unmistakably possessive pattern. Mugen had felt similar touches the night before and he'd squirmed and grumbled at the time, but he remembered the feel of his spine arching off the ground and his shoulders stretching like a cat's, and he remembered it feeling really really good. Jin had never denied that this was what he'd been looking for - all three of them together like this - but it was still strange to Mugen to experience it so openly. He felt like even though they still had all their cloths on, they were only a step away from the terrifying intimacy they'd shared just before they split up.

 

So he dropped her like she'd burned him, and she just managed to stay on her feet with Jin's hand at her elbow. He took a step back and, by reflex, he put his hand on the hilt of his sword, wrestling with the urge to bolt back down the mountain. Jin and Fuu watched warily but patiently, as if they knew how hard it was for him to get his feet to stay in one spot - in this case, wherever the two of them went.

 

Because that was the new contract, like it or not, even though they hadn't said anything.

 

“Come on,” he finally managed, convincing himself he could at least help them get out of the village. “Let's get the fuck outta here.”

 

Jin nodded sharply, but kept an eye on Mugen's posture and the severity of his scowl. “Agreed. Renshu should be here to meet us at the wall to aid our escape. We should-”

 

“No, wait!” Fuu interrupted, straightening and looking around like she was trying to find a scent trail, looking a bit like her squirrel pet, which, thankfully, had yet to make an appearance. “I have to find Jun! I have to tell him that-”

 

“Who the fuck is Jun?” Mugen snapped. “We ain't got time for side trips.”

 

Fuu turned a tight-lipped frown on him. “He's my good friend. He went to fight the Katsuki gang because he's the leader of the Fujiwara, and he has to know.” She started walking, bending to pick up her stick and thumping it purposefully on the ground as she went. Jin fell into step a pace behind her and Mugen drew his sword in an aggressive arc, kicking up a small cloud of ash. “He has to know that the shogunate is here,too,” she said to Jin, and, quick as a flicker of lantern light, he looked over his shoulder, dark eyes meeting Mugen's and darting forward again. “They're in Katsuki colors, but they're shogunate alright.”

 

“You're certain?” Jin asked, and Mugen snarled quietly at just easily the samurai had slid back into the role of trusted bodyguard.

 

“Oh, I'm certain,” she said with another thump of her walking stick. “The Katsuki would never have been able to pull off this kind of attack, not when we'd reclaimed the old Fujiwara town and recruited so many new fighters. They had government help for sure.”

 

“Do you have evidence of their involvement?” Jin's voice was getting hard to hear as they got further ahead of him. Still Mugen stayed where he was, stubbornly stuck on what he was signing up for by following them, stubbornly stepping around exactly what it meant that he'd already come this far. Maybe he hadn't expected to be able to find her. Maybe he'd thought to just keep wandering under the pretense of eventually hooking up with his old traveling buddies.

 

“Boy, do I!” she said, thrilled to pieces with herself. And he snorted a short laugh at the sound of an excited Fuu. “I whacked this one guy over the head with my stick and he fell like a rock and he was wearing shogunate-issue underwear! Can you believe it? I mean, if you're gonna support a yakuza coup, at least remember to tell your agents to change their fundoshi before they go on the job. Jeez.”

 

They disappeared around a corner and Mugen started after them.

 

*

It wasn't pretty, what they found. Fuu was crying the second she saw the kid's body; and Mugen wondered yet again at her ability to turn on the waterworks. The kid wasn't done yet, but he was getting there, Mugen judged from where he and Jin stood a short distance away. Fuu knelt down beside him and put one hand on the kid's forehead, smoothing away sweat and dirt and hair. She'd done this for many people over the past year by the look of it. Despite her tears, her hands were steady, the other reaching down to cover the kid's where he held in his insides. That hand was dark with blood in a matter of seconds.

 

“Hey, what'd you do this time?” she asked, voice light and only a little shaky. Beside him, Jin's expression was pinched, drawn down in sympathy.

 

“This the guy?” Mugen murmured.

 

Jin nodded. “We met when I was here previously.”

 

“I'm sorry, Suzume,” the kid said, voice already weak. “I was on my way home to you. Why'd you come out? It's not safe out here. The Katsuki are-”

 

Fuu gave a sharp shrug and a pained laugh, cutting him off. “They burned down our house, Jun. I had to run with Chie.”

 

Mugen didn't know whether to be irked that the kid was using the name he'd given to Fuu, or whether to feel smug that the poor guy didn't even know her real name.

 

“Is she okay?”

 

Fuu nodded. “She's fine. She's in the garden. I'll find her and bring her home once I get you fixed up.”

 

Mugen didn't like the kid's looks. He was small and boyish with smooth skin and pretty fingers. He had a lot of hair coming out of a ruined topknot, and the kind of face that would age slowly. He had to be just about Fuu's age, if not a year or so younger.

 

“Don't be foolish, Suzume.” She didn't flinch at his sharp tone. “This fight ends it. The Fujiwara are finished, and there's no more home for you to go to.” They were looking at each other with enough honesty and affection and trust to make Mugen want do something really rude and inappropriate to ruin the moment. He picked his nose and glared. “And good riddance,” the boy said. “I never wanted any of their baggage. I just wanted... I wanted-”

 

Here it comes, Mugen thought. The kid was looking up at her with wide, adoring eyes, half of him in the living world, half of him moved onto the dead, and he was all the more courageous because he was on his way out.

 

But Fuu beat him to it, leaning down close to him and saying in that rushed, determined voice, “Ask me to marry you. You're the leader; if you say we're married, then I'm your wife.” It was abrupt and awkward, like she could be sometimes when she had something she really wanted to say. “Chie and I will take your name and the Fujiwara will live.”

 

He shook his head and took a shuddering breath. “I wouldn't want to curse you with it. Stay just Suzume and Chie. And go with them.” He tilted his head towards where Mugen and Jin stood and Fuu turned to give them watery smiles.

 

“They're the ones I told you about, Jun. I went on my journey with them, traveled all over Honshu and had adventures. I got kidnapped so many times, you wouldn't believe it and- and this- this time is all my fault. This happened because of me, and who I am, and who they are,” she said, gesturing at them with a bloody hand.

 

He reached up to touch her, grabbing her arm. “The Katsuki were going to move again. We knew they would. How could it be your fault?”

 

She sniffed and hung her head. “There were shogunate men among the Katsuki, Jun, and they were looking for me.”

 

“Suzume-”

 

“That's not even my name!” she shouted.

 

It was official. Mugen had to feel bad for the kid, then. He looked up at Fuu with eyes that were young and finally frightened in the face of what he knew was right ahead of him. “Then who are you?”

 

“I'm Kasumi Fuu,” she said. “I'm Fuu. That's my real name. And that's Mugen and Jin, and you're so much nicer than either of them. You don't laugh at me or call me names or treat me like a little kid, or-” She made a small noise of distress and leaned down, kissing the kid full on the mouth. She lifted his head off the ground, cradling the back of his neck and his hand briefly tightened in her sleeve. It looked like the first time they'd done it, and both Mugen and Jin looked away. When Mugen lifted his eyes again, the kid was dead.

 

*

He stubbornly refused to help gather enough unburned planks and beams to burn the kid's body. He would have refused to help dig the grave, too, but Fuu had immediately rejected that offer from Jin. “There's not enough time,” she'd said. “The Katsuki will come through here again, looking for survivors. But he should stay with his village. He worked hard enough to get back here.”

 

So he stood off to the side while Jin and Fuu gathered shingles and boards and whatever they could find, laying it all on top of an already smoldering house. He watched and sulked a bit and wondered where the hell this sharp, sad little person had come from and when exactly she'd arrived. This one wasn't worried about food or baths or food or samurai who stunk. She had stronger back and shoulder muscles - he'd felt them.

 

He figured this other Fuu had come out right around the time this strange little girl with wild hair had shown up and demanded to be carried around on her hip. She'd come out of nowhere, silent as a ghost, but Fuu, bent over a pile of burning beams, trying to kick them into something resembling a pyre, had straightened and turned to greet her as she drew near. She bent down and swung the child up onto her hip, holding the girl's head close against her shoulder. She spoke quietly to the little girl and Mugen couldn't hear what she said, but he didn't see the girl's mouth move in reply. When she turned to look at Mugen, her eyes were flat and dark with an adult understanding of grief. She looked about four or five.

 

“You get busy the day we split, girlie? Didn't think you'd spread your legs quite so quick,” he sneered and Fuu's eyes narrowed. She set the kid on her feet and put her hands on her hips.

 

“How do you know she's not yours, wiseass?”

 

His insides froze in a moment of sweat-inducing fear, but then he did some quick calculating on his fingers. “Wait. I didn't even know you four years ago.”

 

She raised an eyebrow. “Right. And, believe it or not, I haven't been concealing a mute daughter in my yukata since I was 13. So try and get some oxygen to your brain before you open your mouth, ya bonehead.”

 

“Yeah, but she's still yours, right?” he said stubbornly. Biology or not, kids were kids and mothers were mothers.

 

Fuu put her hand on the girl's head and tried to smooth down her hair. “Her name's Chie, and she was Jun's brother's lover's daughter. They're all dead now, though. So... we're together, I guess.”

 

Mugen, feeling more helpless than usual, turned to Jin, who was dragging some shingles across the road. “This kid? You could have mentioned.”

 

Jin shrugged and dropped the shingles onto Fuu's pile. “She was someone I thought you should meet for yourself.” Fuu looked between them as Jin knelt in front of the girl and stiffly handed her a white flower to throw on the dead kid's pyre. He looked up at Fuu and said apologetically. “I was a part of the bounty hunter raid on the village not long ago, and I saw you in your garden with Chie.”

 

Fuu shrugged and took the flower when the girl wouldn't reach for it herself. “Which bounty hunter raid; there were so many I lost count.” She handed the flower to the girl. “This family was held together by tragedy and all I did was bring them more of it. I should never have stayed, but I didn't want to be totally alone. I didn't know how to take care of Chie by myself.” Her brow trembled a little and it looked like she might cry again. “All these people are dead because I stayed here.”

 

Like a good bodyguard, Jin rose to his feet and rested his hand on her shoulder. “Do not blame yourself for the dishonorable behavior of others.”

 

“Hell, I'd blame'er.” Mugen offered, running his toes through a pile of cold ash. “Even if they were in the middle of some lame-ass feud or whatever. If you brought this on'em, go 'head and feel guilty.” He tilted his chin up in defiance as she turned to glare at him. “If you'd left months ago, maybe that other gang wouldn't have had the numbers to pull off this kind of attack. Maybe they'd all still be alive.”

 

She looked away. “I know- I- I should have left, but-”

 

He took a few steps toward her, arms crossed over his chest. “But what, you figured you'd get out on the road again and the entire fucking long arm of the law would squash you like a bug because the shogunate doesn't know when to quit and leave us the fuck alone?”

 

She opened her mouth and nothing came out. She looked to Jin but he was glaring at Mugen. “I- guess that-”

 

She was backing up now as he got closer. “You're probly right on both counts, which means, in case you're too thick to figure it out on your own, that there was nothing you could have done.”

 

Jin's glare lightened, and tears welled up in her eyes again.

 

He was right in her face now and she leaned back as he spoke. “But what you should really be thinkin' about, girlie, is why the fuck you decided it would be a good idea to split up in the first place!”

 

Jin's eyebrows shot up and Fuu just stared at him, tears abruptly forgotten and drying on her cheeks. Mugen hated what they were doing and he hated what he'd just said even more, so he threw a venomous “fuck this,” in their direction and walked away.

 

He'd had no idea how this was supposed to go, but whatever this was, whatever was happening now, wasn't what he'd anticipated or wanted or even thought possible. Mugen needed change and motion and the feeling that he was in control of where he was headed, even if he was drifting, but he felt like he was standing on rocks covered with seaweed every time he looked at her. He and Jin had spent the time they were apart doing what they were good at. Fuu had just plain moved on.

 

He was relieved when he walked right into a patrol of six Katsuki making the rounds and looking pleased with themselves.

 

“Wh'sup?” he called, lacing his fingers together on top of his head, already feeling a little better. This was just what he needed. The men predictably stopped and bristled, drawing their blades and shouting, “Who are you?” and “What do you think you're doing here?”

 

Mugen didn't bother to answer but beckoned with both hands, idly shifting his weight from side to side as they drew close. He fell forward into a sloppy handstand and smacked his feet hard against the sword arm of one of the gang members, forcing him to drop his blade. Then he rolled into a somersault and snatched it up, pulling the man right down onto it before letting them both drop. He grabbed another by the sleeve and slammed the heel of his hand into the man's chest. Then he ducked under a large walking stick as it whistled over his head, opening his mouth to yell at Fuu to be more careful. He closed it when he recognized the staff as Renshu's.

 

He scrambled out of the way as the big man barreled into the four remaining Katsuki, mowing them down with wide sweeps of the staff. Mugen got to his feet and brushed off his knees, grumbling about unwanted assistance. Then, with two Katsuki remaining, Renshu rested his stick on the ground as though finished and watched the men's growing confusion with a satisfied grin.

 

“What the hell are you doin'?” Mugen snapped, stepping forward to finish them off, drawing his sword and- “The fuck?” He leaped back as the two bodies, now corpses, thudded to the ground, pierced through by two arrows apiece. He spun around, seeking out the archer, finding him perched on a still in-tact roof a fair distance off. He rested his bow on his foot and stared at Mugen with an intensity that was visible from even that distance.

 

“Who is that?” Mugen asked, forgetting profanity as he shivered in the dry heat of the burnt village. His gut squirmed as he watched the archer and he jumped when Renshu spoke.

 

“That's my new friend. Found'im lurking in the woods when I got here a few days ahead of you two. Can stick a wasp to a tree branch from... Well, I haven't tested from how far yet. I just know, from that distance, he's real precise.”

 

He heard Fuu and Jin round the corner, heard Fuu's voice raised, calling for him to come back so that they could leave the village. He turned and saw Jin's hand raised in greeting as he spotted Renshu. Fuu had her walking stick in one hand, and Chie on her hip. Blood suddenly pounding in his head and all the hairs on his arms standing straight up, he whirled to find the archer, arrow already knocked, bow drawn, fingers poised by his ear to release-

 

“Go!” he shouted, a fraction of a second before the arrow punched straight through Jin's middle, knocking him off his feet and shoving him backwards. He landed in an unmoving pile of dark clothes and hair. Fuu shouted and dropped the girl to her feet, stepping in front of her and looking frantically for where the shot had come from.

 

Mugen choked on a curse and took a running step forward before the 'twang' of the bow sounded again and he froze as Fuu staggered back, dropping her walking stick and reaching down to break her fall, one hand wrapped around the arrow sticking out of her. When she hit, she didn't make a sound and she didn't move. Mugen threw his body into action before his head had time to come to any sort of conclusion about what had just happened and he whirled, even as he felt four distinct pinpricks in his back and shoulders. He spun the whole way around, coming face to face a dart gun and a sober Renshu. He swung his sword in a wild arc, but Renshu easily avoided it, stepping back and watching Mugen stagger as the drug took effect.

 

There hadn't been enough time - any time - Mugen thought as his knees hit the ground and he sat back on his heels. So many portions of his life had stretched on tortuously long, but there still wasn't enough time, not when this shit happened to them - seemed to keep happening.

 

He realized Renshu was talking to him and that he'd dropped his blade and that his head was hanging down, chin on his chest. So he forced his head up and forced himself to listen.

 

“Sorry about this,” Renshu was saying. “It's just that you have a reputation for movin' around like a crazy person and bein' awful hard to pin down.”

 

He blinked - or momentarily blacked out - and suddenly the archer was only a few paces in front of him, drawing back his bow for a final shot. And even though there hadn't been enough time, Mugen grinned because he wasn't the type to have regrets.