(I'm working on some later chapters aaand basically a lot more effort is going into this story than I ever meant it to get, so, long story short I'm going back and editing/lengthening some of these earlier chapters. There is also a new chapter. Thanks)

The three figures walked as they often had: in silence. Jin's silence was of the ever-indiscernibly contemplative variety, as per usual. Also as usual, Mugen's silence was more of the devil-may-care, couldn't give a shit enough to say anything breed. And then there was Fuu, who had been opening her mouth and taking deep breaths every couple minutes, before closing it again. As usual, it was clear there was something she wanted to say.

However, this time she held her silence. They trudged on through the dirt.

. . .

The Lion, the Lamb, and the Lesson

. . .

The unspoken weight that hung over them like a darkened cloud was the impending fork in the road, one that would be both metaphorical and physical. They'd mutually agreed it was time to part ways. There had been no teary goodbyes, not even from Fuu.

Not for the first time, Jin examined Fuu from his place in the rear. He had expected her to cry and yet she hadn't. He feared that perhaps she had used up all her tears on her two companions already. His eyes fell on Mugen, who sauntered with one hand on his sword handle halfway between Jin and Fuu. The rogue pirate had fallen back into his characteristically lax swagger, but it was clear in the way his steps were shorter, more staccato, that he was still harboring a hidden injury. If his subtle limp wasn't enough, Fuu's constant worried glances at his torso gave it away. Every third glance or so her anxious eyes would roam further back toward Jin, then she would flush and look forward when she caught his eye.

They stopped at a brook when they came across it, deciding to take the opportunity for a late lunch. Mugen yanked off his geta and thrust his feet into the water with a disgustingly satisfied sigh.

"Gross, Mugen, you're getting your nasty feet in the drinking water!" These were the first words she'd spoken in hours.

Mugen answered by bending over and dunking his head in the shallow water, then rising with a flourish and shaking off like a wet dog. She screeched her displeasure and he sneered like a madman. As for Jin, he counted himself lucky to be far enough from the water's edge that he escaped involvement. Would this be the last time Jin would witness his two closest friends arguing like children? Interestingly enough, he couldn't imagine it was so.

The road was long ang no one was quite sure how far ahead the fork lay. It could be an hour off still or just around the corner. Because of this the apprehension was palpable, languid and sticky like the summer humidity.

"Mugen, stop it."

"Stop what?" he barked.

"Scratching like that! It took me two weeks to get those wounds to close up properly, so stop trying to undo my work."

Jin couldn't see Mugen's face from back here but he knew him well enough to know he would be scowling.

Barely a moment ticked by before Fuu peered at him again and stopped in her tracks. "Mugen, cut it out already!"

"I ain't fuckin scratching!" But even as he spoke to her he continued picking at the skin on the palm of his hand. He was glaring, but almost immediately Fuu's expression changed from one of anger to one of fear. Mugen stopped walking too then, leaving Jin with no choice but to pause as well or else walk straight into his back. "It's just a splinter," Mugen grumbled. "God damn. Don't get yourself all worked up."

Fuu perked up at that. "Oh, is that all?"

"Yeah, so quit yer-what are you doing?" Fuu advanced on him, pulling the chopsticks from her hair as she went, allowing the strands to scatter to her shoulders. "Leave it alone." He stepped back from her, nearly into Jin, but she grabbed his hand and yanked it toward her face.

"Shut up and let me help you. Moron."

"Hn?" Whatever insult he was about to throw back at her was lost in his curiosity as Fuu bent over his hand. Despite himself, he allowed her to spread it palm-up and he leered at her chopsticks as as she stuck her tongue out in concentration. There was a moment of hesitation while she surveyed the three gruesome and still healing wounds where the mad brother's weapon had pierced his hand through. With painstaking ginger caution she brought the tips of her chopsticks to his skin.

Mugen growled his disapproval, but made no move to act on it.

"Dang, it's really in there. This is gonna take a sec. Hold your horses, okay?"

Mugen chose this moment to turn his withering glare on Jin. A lesser man would have cowed under the threat in Mugen's ice cold eyes. The puff to his lip, the set in his jaw, his manic eyes open slightly too wide. The look said plainly: say anything at all and I will gut you like a fish.

"Almost got it," Fuu crowed. The intense concentration she was expending on the task seemed excessive, and incredibly, she'd gotten the better of Mugen with it. His long limbs were now slack as he waited mildly for her to find what she was looking for.

Jin folded his own arms into his sleeves as Mugen swore and Fuu apologized for pinching too close to his healing skin with her chopsticks. The scene was surreal, to be quite honest. It was like watching a lamb pluck a thorn from the paw of a lion. Try as he might, he couldn't picture Mugen sitting still for this at the beginning of their journey. Nor could he entertain the notion that back then Fuu might've offered her help to Mugen for such a trivial matter... Grave injuries were one thing. This was another.

Later on when Jin thought of the two of them, far down the winding road, it was always this scene that he recalled, this one last oddly serene juxtaposition of tempered wilderness and dynamic grace that stood as their faces in his memory. Fuu bent raptly over Mugen's palm, and he looking down at her with thinly veiled curiosity. Something was very clear in that moment, at least to Jin, and he remembered the corners of his mouth lifting up in amusement at the incredulous realization. Perhaps it was only by slight degrees, but this Mugen was different than the one who'd once helped burn down a tea house.

So. She had changed him too, then.

When the fork at last presented itself, the anticlimax of the moment was stifling. Jin could only gather from the shared attitude of his two companions that they, all three of them, believed they would meet again.

He didn't look back when they parted. Nor did Fuu or Mugen, as he would have known if he'd turned to check.

In fact he felt at peace with their parting, if strangely dissatisfied. Why? He could only guess. He had not hoped to find enlightenment on this journey, in holding his end of Fuu's bargain, or to learn something—yet he felt he had. He thought again on that bright island day: the cliffside, when had had found something to give his life for. There in that moment had been the lesson. But now, as the companions each walked their separate paths, the distance between them opening up like three yawning chasms, that glimpse of meaning ebbed away from Jin and into the canyon. Like a slippery fish it eluded his grasp and disappeared once more in the current.

He thought it over as he traveled alone for the first time in more than a year. His purpose had been served. In the end he'd done the honorable thing. No one could argue he hadn't fulfilled all that duty had required of him. His late master would have been proud to see it. Shouldn't Jin be satisfied? Yet the nights grew rainy and the rain began to bleed the days together and Jin felt no satisfaction.

In his heart he knew that he no longer lived for honor, nor duty, nor recognition.

Perhaps it was a different reason that drove Jin to follow Fuu on her quest, Jin began to consider over the months. Though through most of their travels he contented himself believing he acted on his sense of duty, was it possible all he truly sought was reason itself? Reason to swing his sword, like he'd felt every day he trained in the dojo long ago. That familiar comfort of working toward a goal. In the past it had never much mattered to him what the goal was, as long as there was something to strive for. Thus was the case with Fuu's request. It didn't matter what her goal. She had one, so Jin followed.

In his entire lifetime he would never guess how close he had fallen to Mugen in that respect. Dig as deep as you want and you'd still find the two swordsmen were as different as night and day: while Jin retained all that cold tradition of the past, Mugen thrived on the unpredictability of the present. While Jin's personal ethical code ensured he would follow after Fuu, Mugen had no such thing. Jin couldn't pretend he'd never been curious as to the once-pirate's reasons for tagging along on this errant quest. The most Fuu had ever dragged out of Mugen was that he went along with it because "It just worked out that way." Sometimes Jin wondered dryly whether he'd agreed to follow Fuu simply because he had been bored that day. It certainly seemed like something he was capable of.

Of course, Jin would never find out exactly how close he had been to the mark. Or exactly how far.

One thing he would find soon enough, though, and that was the elusive fish he'd been searching for. The lesson.

If you called Jin and being of the past and Mugen of the present, then Fuu was of the future. Perhaps in the way a nearsighted man does not realize the trees have leaves until he is gifted a pair of glasses, Fuu had provided her two companions with a service they did not know they needed.

Direction.

This was the real reason, the only reason, the two men followed Fuu that day from the charred remains of the teahouse into the countryside, though they each had their own name for it. "Duty." "Boredom." Or if you asked Fuu, "A promise." But all it boiled down to was a tuning of broken compasses. She'd given these two men something to walk toward. The effects would change the course of their entire lives; now that the two of them had tasted direction on their tongues, they would never be fully content with directionlessness again. And not a one of them would have guessed which direction they were walking in that day when they set out from the teahouse in search of a samurai who smelled of sunflowers, or that day they set off in three separate directions from a lonely split in a road in the woods. Nor would they have guessed how their paths would converge once again, away down the road. There would be twists and turns but they would converge.

The first time the trio neared the ocean together, Mugen told Jin and Fuu in passing that all streams led back to the sea. For some reason they both remembered his words. Maybe this was why not one of the three looked back when they parted ways.