Hello there!

I don't know if you've read the end of the series but this is before that. You can sort of guess when it's around.

Have fun and I hope you enjoy it!

Disclaimer: Not mine.

Femininity

If someone had ever asked Yuya Shiina if she got tired of traveling with a whole group of nothing but men she would answer that yes she did, in fact, get very tired of traveling with only a group of men (Okuni didn't count in her eyes) and that some days it was just almost enough to make her blow up at them.

Today happened to be one of those joyous days.

Joyous days indeed…

Count back from ten… Breathe deep breaths… Find your happy place or your center or…something happy…

It was hot out, and Yuya was trudging through the street with an unreasonable amount of sake strapped to various parts of her body. She was sweaty and crabby and she was not in her most happy moods. Her yukata was falling off of her shoulders and her hair was a complete mess. Anything could make her snap.

Anything.

She was passing by a few different shops and she saw a loaf of bread that, oddly enough, made her remember that she was due to have her menstruation any day now and that she should get something to take care of that.

"Hello, Miss. Would you be interested in purchasing this fine cloth imported from China?" a nearby merchant at his stall asked her with a business smile on full blast. Yuya stopped and looked at the cloth. It was beautiful. It shined and shimmered in the sunlight and the intricate patterns of great birds in flight and flowers were stitched on there in gold.

Yuya could feel herself beginning to drool she wanted to buy it so bad. She floated over to the stall and gently rubbed a portion of it between her pointed and thumb. It was soft and slick. That decided it; she was going to buy it.

"How much?" She asked the merchant. The old man scrunched his bushy eyebrows together and looked her up and down. He crossed his arms and took a deep breath in.

"86,715 yen."

Yuya's chin dropped and the cloth slipped between her fingers. The man scowled and Yuya coughed and held up a finger to get him to wait. She reached down her shirt and brought her wallet back up; opening it to see how much money she had inside.

There was nothing there, not even a little bit of lint. Everything was gone. Yuya gulped and her world seemed to shrink down to the size of a pin point as she came to the realization that she was completely and totally broke. That's when everything that had been piling up; the stress, the fact that she was being used as a slave by the man she had captured (well, not technically but shhh!) and the hormones, exploded in the form of an aneurism exploding in a very violent and long awaited way.

Yuya vaguely recalled leaving the stall and walking back towards the inn that Kyo had chosen to stay at for that night, using her money to get the women, room, and entertainment that he wanted, and entering the room.

Not much had changed in the feasible hour that she was gone, aside from the fact that Benitora was a bit drunker than he was when she left. Yukimura was still harassing a group of women; Sasuke was still playing with his stupid toy, and Kyo was sitting across from Yukimura with another stupid cluster of women draped over him.

Kyo barely glanced at her when she walked in, he just grunted and said; "Took you fucking long enough."

Normally, Yuya would get mad and yell, but that didn't seem to cover the extent of her anger at this putrid group of males. She felt her arm twitch and she stood there. Kyo looked at her again and so did Yukimura. Actually, everyone except for the bought-and-paid-for women was looking at her now.

Probably had something to do with the killing aura that was growing around her body.

Yeah that was probably it.

Yuya felt a slightly insane giggle slip from between her lips and she dropped all of the sake bottles which crashed to the ground and broke, sending pieces of the bottle everywhere. She giggled again because she thought that it was funny for some reason.

Kyo had tightened his grip on his sword and Yukimura and Sasuke had their hands on the hilts. Benitora had actually pointed the spear right at Yuya.

"Y-Yuya-han?" He asked cautiously. Yuya swung her infuriated gaze onto him, and her eye twitched.

"What do you want now, hm? Do you want more sake? Or a new place to stay? Oh, I know how about we just buy the whole goddamn town while we're at it! As long as you guys don't have to pay no one cares." She ranted, twitching slightly. Everyone in the room relaxed as soon as they realized that she wasn't planning on killing them, yet. Benitora got up and put a hand on her shoulder.

Yuya hissed, seriously she hissed, and smacked his hand off her. "Don't touch me. I'm flat out broke, as in no money whatsoever, because you… you… pigs have to suck me dry! I worked really, really hard to get that money and now everything I had saved up is gone, gone!" She aiming the rant at everyone in the room but Benitora was getting most of it yelled in his face. "You always take my money and peep at me and drive me insane with the way you complain sometimes!" Yuya backed him against a wall and stabbed her finger into his chest, punctuating every word she said with a poke.

Then she rounded on Yukimura. "You! You and your stupid sake and women! It's like you can't go five seconds without trying to hump the next thing that moves!" Yukimura had the decency to look slightly ashamed. Sasuke was next. He actually jumped out of his seat and scuttled back against the wall, sweating profusely when she turned to him.

"You stupid brat! You and your superiority complex or whatever you have! Do you know how annoying it is to be patronized by a seven year old?" Yuya's voice was steadily rising in volume but she was nowhere near from done. The women that had been glued to Yukimura and Kyo had found random and slightly neurotic reasons to leave the room, (ex; "I have to go…um… sacrifice my shoe to the nearest…tree.")

Here is where Sasuke made the biggest mistake that anyone could ever make when a woman was in ranting mode; he interrupted her. "I'm twelve…" He mumbled under his breath, and then clamped his teeth on his lips when he got a look at Yuya's expression. She smiled mechanically and grabbed onto the back of his shirt, dragging him from the room.

The men left in the room stared at the door that Yuya and a frightened Sasuke had just left. There were the sounds of something being repeatedly smashed into a wall and something that sounded oddly like an explosion.

Yuya came back alone.

She stood there panting and pointed her finger right in Kyo's face. "And you…" Yuya said winding up the disgustingly long list that she had of offences that Kyo had committed. "You are a complete asshole to me, you send me to get your sake with my money that I earned, you push me around, you call me ugly, you've ruined Tuesdays for me, and three of my yukatas, I have been sexually harassed by you, you treat me like a pack mule, now I can never look at a panda without bursting into laughter, and I can't buy the most beautiful cloth I have ever seen in my entire life because you all wasted my money." She finished and burst into tears.

Yuya slumped onto her knees and curled over. Stupid hormones! Her hair made a shifting noise as it fell over her shoulder. She let out a strangled noise and slammed her fist into the ground, sniffing. Kyo broke the uneasy silence that had descended on the room like a plague.

"So, let me get this straight, you just yelled at us because you didn't get a piece of cloth that you wanted and because you find pandas funny?" he said slowly, like he was talking to a child. Yuya stood up quickly and huffed at him, wiping angrily at her eyes.

"Yes, that is exactly why I'm mad." She growled. Then she swayed. Yuya shook her head back and forth trying to clear it, then brought her hand up to her forehead shakily. She felt oddly hot and sticky, not just because of the heat. Benitora was talking to her now but she couldn't understand him. She looked up and noticed that the room was blurring together like a washed out painting. She stumbled back a few steps then fell onto her butt.

"I…" she began, looking directly at Kyo. "I don't feel good."

Then she turned over and barfed her guts up onto the floor next to her. When she finished with that horrifyingly embarrassing ordeal she felt a hand on her back and recognized the shocked exclamation of Benitora that sounded something like this;

"Yuya-han you're bleeding!"

Then she fainted.

When she woke up, the first thing that registered was that the inn they were at had really, really dirty ceilings. The next thing was that she was lying down, then that she wasn't alone and her lower abdomen felt like someone was ripping at her with a knife. She turned her head to the side and saw three of the four men she traveled with. She tried to sit up and fell over again in her haste.

"You shouldn't move yet." Kyo's voice said. Yuya turned her head towards the sound of his baritone and saw him leaning against the wall watching her.

"What happened?" she asked of no one in particular. The three sitting next to her shifted awkwardly and Yukimura cleared his throat.

"You, uh, got your," a cough ", cycle in combination with a bit of over work and heat stroke." He said delicately. Yuya blushed furiously when she realized she had bled in front of some of the most feared men in the entirety of Japan.

"Oh." Was all she had to say to that. Kyo grunted and pushed himself off of the wall and left the room. Yuya watched him go and looked at the others. Sasuke still looked kinda scared of her, judging by the way he used Yukimura's sleeve as a shield. "Sorry about, you know, yelling." She mumbled.

Yukimura sat up straighter and shook his head at her. "No, we're sorry. What you said was completely correct, and, to show our remorse, we got you this." When he finished him and Benitora reached behind them and pulled out the cloth that the peddler had shown her who knows how many hours ago now. Yuya gasped and ran her finger gently over the fabric. She gently removed it from their hands and placed it on her lap. Yuya continuously ran her hands over the material, loving the feel of the silk on her fingers.

"Thank you so much…" she whispered in awe. Yukimura and Benitora smiled.

"Don't thank us." Benitora said, "Kyo was the one who left and came back with it." Yuya jerked her head up to look at him in disbelief but the look on his face clearly said that he wasn't lying. Yuya smiled serenely and hugged the fabric closer, watching the place where Kyo had left, pretending that he was still there.

"Thanks." She said, knowing he could probably hear her anyway.

The owner of the inn was a happy man, a fair man, and a careful man who loved his inn dearly.

Which is the reason why anyone could hear his wails of anguish when he was wandering around to inspect his "spotless" inn and found seven head sized holes in the wall and a large chunk missing from the hallway.

"It's all the fault of those meddling kids, and their damn dog!" He shouted into the night.

Sorry for the Scooby-doo reference, I just had to do it! (86,715 yen is about 899 US dollars)

Please reveiw, thank you!