Author's Note: Written YEARS ago. Never edited.

SLAVE TO DISAPPOINTMENT

A Word of the Day Ficlet

By Kysra

It's lonely after she leaves them, each taking their own direction away from the little unit they had comprised for nearly a year. She wishes she had told them where she was headed; but how can you tell someone something like that when you don't even know yourself?

She finds herself scared a lot of the time, not that she lets it show. Instead, she cuddles Momo close as she lays upon the ground trying not to think of how Jin isn't sitting across the way and Mugen isn't sleeping nearby, his body facing away from the campfire to minimize preparation time should an intruder find camp.

During the days, she hums and sings as she walks along, always looking ahead so that she doesn't have to see the empty spots to either side, never looks back because she knows they aren't following.

She knows it shouldn't be like this – with her attached and aching for their company. None of it should have happened at all. Her father should not have left. Her mother should have lived. She shouldn't have ended her journey without satisfaction. She shouldn't have parted with her strange, twisted family.

She shouldn't have been made to watch her father die. Not like that. Not with that thin veneer of honor that mocked her as much as it comforted him. . . . Not after she realized why he had left her and Mother.

There are no tears left. She had used them up a long time ago, after her mother's death, after she had had to learn to fend for herself. She supposes, the loneliness is a good thing. She hasn't had time to think about her mother in a long time, hasn't wanted to.

Before the day she met the guys, she was just a daughter, just a girl, just a waitress; and if she had it to do over again, she'd work more on the first one. Because though she had been obedient and dutiful, she had been so consumed with anger and desperate longing for Father sometimes, that she had neglected Mother. She could have been kinder, sympathetic, a comfort. But instead she had tried to forget, to erase the man who had abandoned them from their collective memory, their home.

Then Mother had died, and Fuu realizes as she walks into another village, another temporary job, that she was as responsible for her mother's death as the illness that ravaged her. She had taken a vital piece of her mother's heart everytime she urged the older woman to forget, to give up, to stop hoping, to hate him until that heart broke under the stress and no longer had the will to live.

So perhaps the loneliness is what she deserves, just until she's paid the debt she owes to her Mother and Father and – more importantly – herself; and when she finally learns to forgive, to think of herself for what she has accomplished rather than what disappointment she has garnered, Fuu will look up one day and see her old companions once more.

Word: Apex